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A random thought for the weirdos still hanging out in the old open thread so we can argue about stupid shit:
It is apparently a “thing” that the PornHub comment section is unusually supportive. It occurs to me that there might be a recipe for the perfect community there, since by and large anybody commenting there is self-awareness of the fact that everybody knows what they are doing there, and there is going to be a general assumption both of maleness and romantic failure.
More, there is a thread of connection in many of the comments I see about the comments, that people reach out for help and get it. Which suggests a recruitment method for the community – helping somebody through a particularly dark time in their life by reaching out and saying “We care about you”, who then joins them, and respects what it is they are doing, and why, and continues it.
I might be reading too much into a limited data set, but it a fascinating thought to me, and leaves me wondering whether the social technology there can be leveraged, or if it is too specific to the circumstances involved.
Your description here reminds me a lot of what I saw to be going on on 4chan about a dozen years ago back when I used to spend time there. I’ve never found any community, online or offline, that was as loving and welcoming to anyone and everyone as 4chan was, and my suspicion was that it was exactly the kind of phenomenon you’re theorizing about Pornhub.
I’m not sure there are any insights to be gained from 4chan to see if this could be leveraged to something useful. 4chan did end up giving birth to some neat works of fiction, like the porn visual novel Katawa Shoujo, but other than things like that, I can’t think of anything useful that came out of it.
Not saying this is an ineffective tactic, but this is a tactic popular with cults, which is probably worth keeping in mind considering the optics the rationalist movement sometimes generates.
Mainstream religions do this as well, though not usually from a conscious recruitment strategy so much as a belief that it’s the right thing to do. But I suppose that at some levels of analysis, there’s no real difference between those two.
Orthogonal to the idea of gun control:
Maybe the problem with regard to school shootings is the school system itself. Maybe the problem is anti-bullying initiatives that punish students for standing up to bullies. Maybe the problem is an authoritarian arrangement in which students have little recourse against unjust teachers. Maybe the problem is inherent in shoving human beings into the square hole of the education system; keep quiet, don’t talk, don’t act out, don’t move, don’t think, just do what you are told when you are told to do it.
Maybe some humans just get mangled in the machinery, not fitting into what it is doing to them. Some commit suicide. Some commit suicide in a more notorious way.
So is the US education system orders of magnitude worse than everywhere else’s?
No. I’d say Asia’s is worse than ours, but their culture is one in which suicide is the obvious choice.
Ours, with it’s celebration of outlaws and antiheroes, is one in which killing people for infamy is at least a strongly visible option, made even more visible by media attention paid to such shooters.
So the problem isn’t school system, it’s schools system plus culture of aggression.
Sure.
If you think the relatively small number of dead teens from school shootings is morally relevant in a way that the relatively large number of teens dead from suicide aren’t.
Then yeah.
If, on the other hand, you regard the teen deaths by suicide as morally relevant, then the “culture of aggression” becomes pretty clearly irrelevant; a school shooting killing ten teens makes the news, but the thousand teens who commit suicide without taking other people out with them are the bigger social problem.
That they both result from suicidal ideation, expressed differently, suggests that the problem is better resolved at the “suicide” level rather than the “homicide” level, particularly given how vanishingly rare the latter problem is.
Do you have a source on the thousands of dead Asian schoolchildren point?
Randy M –
No. I can prove it relatively trivially by pointing out that China alone has ~50 million teenage boys, and that any suicide rate among them greater than 2 / 100,000 results in more than a thousand teen fatalities. (Suicide rates are somewhat higher than that.)
Which is to say, it isn’t reasonably in question, because “thousands” is quite low for Asia, relative to the population. I would hazard a guess the number might be closer to the tens of thousands, but that would require more work than I care to put in
I might be totally off-base, but I thought you were trying to compare X = ‘number of teen deaths by suicide and mass shooting in Asia’ to Y = ‘number of teen deaths by suicide and mass shootings in America’.
Looking back, I’m now not sure you were arguing this. Were you?
Oh, no, I wasn’t.
Suicidal ideation is linked to mass shootings; a common theory is that mass shooting is a form of murder-suicide in which the victims are either targets, or stand-ins for an abstract target (society), who are perceived to have been part of a system of oppression.
So correcting the suicide problem in this country might correct the mass murder problem.
The Asia connection came up because I was suggesting that they have the same sort of issues with their educational systems – worse, maybe – but cultural elements encourage suicide itself rather than mass murder.
Well, I know how to multiply. I know the population in China is very high. But to demonstrate your point you need to give the rates of suicide in school age children in Asia, not just assume it.
As of 1999, the Chinese teen suicide rate was 4 per 100,000.
As of 2000 the U.S. teen suicide rate was 8 per 100,000.
Source.
The latest from my Facebook feed:
“A white liberal arguing that a white supremacist should be allowed to speak hatred is promoting white supremacy. Full stop.”
This reminds me of something I wonder when I read Enlightenment deist/atheist philosophers, who make truth claims contemporary members of their tribe would disavow. Fallacy of the excluded middle may be a fallacy, but how much does that matter if the middle is not a live option in your society?
Le Maistre Chat, do you ever go to the Portland meetups? If yes, next time ask for yodelyak–I’d enjoy talking about this problem with another Portlander in person. If no, well, why not?
I am at risk of missing the next one because I don’t know when it is. I’d be happy to ask for you when I make it. 🙂
Oh, I see it’ll be the second Sunday of next month at an undisclosed location.
I’m generally not too big on going to in-person meetups from online spaces, but I should probably make an effort to get to one of these. Plus, it’ll give me a reason to get off my ass and go into the city on a weekend, which I generally don’t do.
I’ve read summaries of but never looked seriously into the arguments Jews use against the idea that Jesus was the messiah. What are these arguments exactly, and where are they rooted? Which of them come from the Torah rather than from the Talmud or other extra-Torahic sources?
Isn’t this something where the burden is on those who argue affirmatively?
Part of the underlying structure of Judaism is that we are waiting for the messiah. If you accept that the messiah has come, you’re changing the basic idea of the religion. Sure enough, those that did so no longer consider themselves to be Jewish.
Wikipedia lists seventeen Jews who claimed to have been the Messiah and who are notable enough to have their own wikipedia pages. At least sixteen of these must have been false, so with p>0.94 any arbitrary but notable Messiah claimant is not the Messiah.
That puts the ball solidly in Jesus’s court. Sadly, he’ll probably leave the arguing to his followers, because if he showed up to present his “I am the Messiah” argument in person that would be pretty much a slam-dunk.
“Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore. For all men both great and small shall know the Lord.”
Does that sound like the last two millennia to you?
This is sketchy, but I think part of it is that Jesus isn’t a good match for the prophecies, which are of a successful ruler.
Also, I think all the prophecies are in the prophets, who aren’t in the Torah, they’re the int Tanakh which includes the prophets and the writings and are part of the religion, but they aren’t as important as the Torah, which is the five books of Moses.
So I typed [Jewish arguments] into google, and it autocompleted with [against Christianity].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism%27s_view_of_Jesus
Speaking very vaguely, Jews of the time probably would have reacted to the claims that this guy was the messiah with disbelief. The Jewish messiah was supposed to be (note: for everything in this post, I’m recalling stuff I learned the best part of a decade ago, so, maybe a bit muddled/fuzzy) either some kind of kingly figure who would kick the foreign imperial occupiers out and create a new (and better than ever!) Jewish kingdom (“Make Judaea Great Again” sort of deal) or some kind of super-teacher who would perfectly explain the scriptures.
The Christian claim, that the messiah was sent to suffer and die for the sake of humanity (this is really compressing down Christian theology, and even early on there were debates over how exactly this worked, to the point that each gospel has a different picture of who Jesus was and what it was exactly he did, but bear with me), would have made very little sense to Jews of the time, because being humiliated, tortured, and painfully executed by the foreign imperial occupier was not part of the plan. The Christian claim (that his messianic status was predicated on what happened to him) is itself probably a reaction to their leader having that happen to him – they needed to make it part of the plan.
Additionally, an interesting question is, did Jesus himself (the historical figure – I think that it’s not implausible that the guy himself existed; nothing in the most stripped-down account of his life – think Mark without supernatural stuff, with hyperbole dialed down – is implausible) say he was the messiah? The argument against this is the “Messianic secret” in Mark (earliest of the 4 gospels, almost certainly) – Jesus keeps trying to hide his identity as the messiah. One explanation was that he had never said he was the Messiah, and the way he acts in Mark is an attempt by later Christians to obfuscate that. Personally, I think it’s plausible that he did call himself the messiah – as @John Schilling notes, messianic claimaints are not thin on the ground.
Some evidence that there’s a cultural aspect to mass shootings: acid attacks are somewhat common in a number of other countries, but not in the US.
This doesn’t mean I have strong theories about how to change cultures to prevent either acid attacks or mass shootings.
Steven Pinker suggests the media stop talking about the identities of mass shooters. I think this is a good idea.
I’m a bit skeptical that having the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal quit the field and leave the matter to the partisans on Facebook and Twitter is going to improve the situation somehow.
Facebook has something that it explicitly calls a “news feed”, and ought to be considered a part of the “media” for this (and almost every other) purpose. Arguably Twitter as well, and since they do have explicit rules against promoting violence, it is not out of the question that identifying mass shooters by name should be construed as “promotion”.
I mean, none of this is going to happen any time soon (p >0.95), and I hope everyone understands that. And that includes gun control. But if we are going to talk about hypothetical approaches that aren’t completely ridiculous, Twitter and Facebook changing their TOS to not allow naming of mass murderers is at least as plausible as Congress passing a law saying “we’re taking away all the AR-15s”. And probably more plausible than the New York Times and CNN agreeing to the no-names policy. WSJ might go along with it.
The thing about it is they agree to not name rape victims. I’ve never quite wrapped my head around why this wouldn’t be an extension of that policy.
I mean, obviously the government can’t compel this, but I’m not sure why they don’t voluntarily do it. It’s not even not publicizing the incident, so they can still have their “it bleeds, it leads,” just don’t give the guy the satisfaction of knowing his name will be splashed across every news channel in America for the next few weeks.
@CatCube
They don’t voluntarily do it, because if they don’t name the perpetrator they can’t get more clicks from low quality articles psychoanalyzing them. They’d still get “it bleeds, it leads” but that’s probably a few days of clicks lost compared to endless bullshit pretending to know the human mind.
Also, without naming them, how are we supposed to know the single most important thing about them (which political candidate they supported in the most recent Presidential election)
In the case of TV news, many of the networks also have sports divisions which have a long-standing practice of refusing to show nitwit spectators who run onto the field to get attention. So there’s some precedent.
I think this debate’s acrimonious enough without bringing shit like this into it.
@quanta413
Ehhh, I distrust explanations where “The people I disagree with are monsters.” Your reasoning doesn’t have a lot of daylight between it and “The media likes school shootings because it drives ratings up!” Just as I find it eye-rolling when people on the left say that right-wingers don’t care about dead kids so that’s why we’re against gun control, I’m reluctant to start with these kinds of explanations.
I’d be more interested in hearing what their actual, stated reasons are. Maybe there’s a systemic reason that they can’t coordinate, or they really have a good reason for why they think it won’t work. Maybe they have reasons for those that are bad! But I’m not interested in declaring that they’re all vile deviants and divining what I think their “true” motivations are by psychoanalysis that doesn’t even bother to talk to the subject.
@Nornagest
You’d think so, but the partisan tabloids run that angle really hard. IMO this was not a troll point by Matt M, but a genuinely serious point.
I mean seriously, look at media coverage of any mass shooting. It’s almost the very first thing that gets reported, sometimes even before the name.
@CatCube
I’m not claiming that many individuals have these actual thoughts or that if you replaced journalists with other people anything would change. The opposite actually. The journalism market will tend to reward sites that behave this way. So you can feel free to blame the readers if you like. Markets can have ugly outcomes.
I wouldn’t call journalists monsters for following the incentives their readers give them. Just imperfect like the rest of us.
Sometimes the obvious boring explanation is correct even if horrifying.
All the more reason for us not to.
@quanta413
I’m less interested in hearing “what the journalism market” wants, and am more interested in what specific journalists believe. If it’s “Well, that’s a good idea, but pointless for me to do because CNN/Fox News/MSNBC will just publish his name anyway,” that’s interesting information, and I’d like to hear how they managed to coordinate not publishing rape victim names and why that won’t work here.
It would also be interesting to hear, “How dare you suggest we’re the problem?!”
My prior here is that the media (or large numbers of individuals within it) don’t recognize their own culpability. However, couldn’t they say the same thing about me and my staunch support for the Second Amendment?
But handwaving about “the market” is uninteresting without knowing what individual market participants believe.
The thing stopping them from publishing rape victim names isn’t some sort of grand bargain – it’s that their own viewers would rebel in outrage and feminist organizations would lead boycotts against them. It’s entirely self-motivated. “No coordination” is required.
And the opposite is true of mass shootings. The media and their political allies use the shootings to push a specific political agenda. A rape victim’s personal information doesn’t help them push a relevant agenda, but a mass shooter’s certainly does (unless it’s a muslim or a left-winger shooting up a Republican baseball practice in which case it drops out of the news pretty darn quick).
So in the last case, the left-wing media didn’t even spend a few weeks spouting variations on “I told you so” and “Served them right”? That … surprises me, for some reason.
Maybe they need better acid control.
Any thoughts on whether Botnik is actually computer-generated or a hoax? Because I was just reading its Star Trek: The Next Generation thing and wondered if it’s too funny to be true.
Relevant to Scott’s interests:
Wesley Crusher: Here sir is a serotonin-coordinating sensor you could use to get bored all the time.
That’s hilarious, I don’t care who you are:
The Holodeck becomes intensely Hawaiian. Security bears enter.
My understanding is that it’s a hybrid approach: a computer generates a few sentences, and then humans select the ones they like.
More evidence that neural networks can be very funny, with curation: The neural network has weird ideas about what humans like to eat
Ten sequences. Find the missing elements.
1. Aluminum, Silicon, ???, Sulfur, Chlorine
2. British Columbia, Alberta, ???, Manitoba, Ontario
3. 73, 79, ???, 89, 97
4. Leviticus, Numbers, ???, Joshua, Judges
5. Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, ???, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron
6. John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, ???, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler
7. Cambrian, Ordovician, ???, Devonian, Carboniferous
8. Master and Commander, Post Captain, ???, The Mauritius Campaign, Desolation Island
9. China, India, ???, Indonesia, Brazil
10. Utah, Omaha, ???, Gold, Sword
2. Saskatchewan
3. 85
6. Martin Van Buren
9. United States
1. Cubfcubehf
7. Fvyhevna
8. UZF Fhecevfr
10. Whab
Anwers in ROT13:
1. cubfcubehf
2. Fnfxngpurjna
3. rvtugl-guerr
4. Qrhgrebabzl
5. Pncgnva Nzrevpn: Gur Jvagre Fbyqvre
6. Znegva Ina Ohera
7. Fvyhevna
8. UZF Fhecevfr
9. Havgrq Fgngrf
10. Whab
#9, ah yes, of course.
1. crevbqvp gnoyr, ebj guerr
2. pnanqvna cebivaprf, fbhgurea gvre, yrsg gb evtug
3. cevzr ahzoref
4. obbxf bs ovoyr, ynfg svir bs svefg frira
5. V qba’g pner
6. yvar guerr bs “Wnzrf X. Cbyx” ol GZOT
7. crevbq svir bs gur cnyrbmbvp ren – nycunorgvp beqre zvtug unir orra zber qvssvphyg
8. V yvxrq gur zbivr ohg qba’g pner nobhg gur obbxf
9. oevvp? – V qvqa’g ernyvmr gung vaqbarfvn jnf abj vapyhqrq
10. abeznaql ynaqvatf, gunaxf tbbtyr
This was much easier than I expected it to be when first glancing at #10.
I’m not sure if we’ve hit exactly three days yet – but I feel like things will be more civilized if I post this now, in the dying embers of a hidden OT, than tomorrow at the start of a fresh one.
I’m looking for a steelman by someone who favors gun control to address the following concerns:
1. It seems to me that in the aftermath of most mass shootings, lots of people call for “common sense gun control.” If pushed, they are often even prepared to name specific legislation they would favor. Universal background checks. Closing the “gun show loophole.” Restricting access to the “mentally ill.” And so on. But it occurs to me that in the overwhelming majority of mass shootings, all of these such measures would not have had any sort of effect on the outcome. None of those things would have stopped the most recent shooting. None of them would have stopped Las Vegas, or Elliot Rodger, or Columbine. I would like to ask – are there specific gun control measures being proposed that actually would have stopped this specific mass shooting?
2. One measure comes to my mind – a complete and total ban of all semiautomatic firearms. However, it also seems to me that whenever anyone who opposes gun control says anything that might indicate they believe proponents of gun control would favor this – they are loudly shouted down as paranoid and delusional. “Relax, Mr. Tinfoil hat, NOBODY WANTS TO TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY, we just want to make it harder for criminals and the mentally ill to get them.” But mass shootings do not seem to be carried out by criminals, or the “mentally ill” (unless you define “mentally ill” so broadly as to include about 1/3 of the total US population). So my question is – Is a complete and total ban of semiautomatic weapons “on the table” for discussion here – or isn’t it?
First: I’m pretty sure that by the numbers, if you take the “4 people shot” standard (that’s as close to an official definition as there is, right?), most mass shootings are committed by criminals with handguns – the median mass shooting by that definition is a drug deal gone wrong or whatever, and someone pulls out a gun and shoots four other guys. However, that just sort of gets folded in the public imagination into “gang violence” or whatever – this is a situation where the central example is not the median case. To most people “mass shooting” is “guy with AR-15.”
However, if we’re talking about “guy with AR-15”, I would say, compare Canada to the US. The Montreal Massacre, in which a guy who thought feminists had ruined his life killed 14 women, led to new firearms restrictions.
Canada’s firearms restrictions are fairly onerous compared to the US. You need a license to get anything, I’m pretty sure; there’s fairly small magazine limits on semiautomatic weapons, getting “restricted” weapons (which includes AR-15 variety weapons – a bit silly, since it includes .22 varieties, but Lepine/Gharbi used a Mini-14, which I believe is not restricted) requires a special license where you need to prove it’s for sports competition, historical-interest collecting, or a job. Storing and transporting guns is heavily regulated, and getting a license to carry one pretty much requires being an armoured truck driver or something of that sort. I think all firearms are registered also. It’s probably more difficult to get a .22 here than an AR-15 in the US, at least from what I’ve read.
We don’t have anywhere near the sort of “guy with AR-15” mass murders the US does; not even relative to population. Is this because of gun control? I don’t know – it doesn’t seem we had a proportionate rate before the new restrictions came in; we might have had more onerous restrictions than the US before that point, though. I’m not sure what the various differences that would account for the disparity would be. Gun ownership in Canada doesn’t appear to be threatened, despite restrictions that would never fly in the US.
I’m not sure what you mean by “on the table” – it’s unlikely to happen, it’s unlikely to really do much (there’s already so many weapons out there), and it probably wouldn’t be necessary – Canada has no such law.
In the years since the Montreal Massacre, I count 17 mass shootings with a two-digit death toll in the United states, of which eight used military-style semiautomatic rifles. Based on relative population, we would expect to have seen 1.8 shootings with 10+ dead and with 0.9 using military rifles, since 1989.
Instead, wikipedia gives two mass shootings with 9 dead and one with 8. So, less than the United States, but I don’t think to a statistically significant level and I wouldn’t use language like “anywhere near”.
But that’s double-digit vs. single-digit; I imagine the American numbers are bigger if you count high single digit. Set the cutoff at 5 dead, let’s say.
Why would we want to do that?
The relevant metric is “shootings that people want to talk about”, e.g. by breaking the three-day moratorium here. Those are the shootings that maybe shape culture or motivate legislation, in ways that enumerated statistics don’t.
I’d like to set the cutoff at “made the front page of the New York Times the next day”, but that’s a hard number to track down. But the median five-dead shooting is a local gang skirmish that only makes the local news, whereas shootings with 10+ dead almost always bleed enough to lead. And are more likely to fit the usual narrative of “disturbed loner with AR-15 goes on killing spree”.
According to Wikipedia:
Based on the Wikipedia list for Canada (which is for massacres, not shootings; I’m excluding the ones that don’t seem to have involved guns) between ’67 and ’17 there have been (with the same criteria – 4+ dead including perpetrator) 14 with an average of 7. Cut out the gang-related ones and it’s 12 with an average of 7.
I don’t know if 12 vs 146 is a statistically significant difference, given that our population is about 1/10 the US (at this point in time; in 1967 it was also about 1/10). I’m not sure what the numbers are like if mixed-weapon attacks are excluded. So, you might be right, that Canada does not have statistically fewer mass shootings. We might be less likely to do them, and they might be on average less lethal. I’ll retract my statement that we’re not anywhere near the US.
However: We haven’t had a two-digit-dead mass shooting since the Montreal Massacre. The US has had at least 17 in that time – the top 20 deadliest shootings appear to start at 10; presumably they’d count ties. All of the massacres deadlier than the Montreal Massacre appear to have taken place between the 17th-19th centuries, and seem mostly/entirely to have involved conflicts between settlers and Aboriginals, and weren’t single-perpetrator, except for one case where a guy firebombed a bar for not letting him in.
So, there’s a possibly-insignificant difference in number and death count, but the US has vastly more double-digit death toll ones.
Wait, did you just “cut out the gang-related ones” for Canada and not the US?
I mean, it doesn’t make a huge difference in the outcome, but WTF?
The citation in the Wikipedia article leads to a Washington Post article, which states:
I should have mentioned that.
If we cut out shootings that took place exclusively in private homes, and robberies that went awry, the Canadian numbers get lower, although it’s debatable in a couple cases (eg, do the Dale Nelson killings count as taking place exclusively in a private residence? He killed some people in one house, other people in another, and killed another person somewhere else).
1. While its unlikely that an individual gun regulation would stop a mass shooting, in aggregate they can influence the gun culture of a given area. For example, if you were to introduce the gun laws of Alaska (essentially no restrictions) to Japan (high restrictions), you would not likely see Japan immediately switch to having Alaska-level gun deaths. This is because Japan has a culture that is unfamiliar with guns, people don’t go hunting or to shooting ranges, or carry guns as part of their job. And this culture has been cultivated by the laws of their government. It would take years, and perhaps generations, for a gun culture to develop, even if guns were legal.
Likewise, introducing Japan-style gun laws to Alaska would not result in an immediate near-elimination of gun deaths. But what it would do is start shaping the culture. And even though the process may take generations, it would likely result in a decreased gun deaths. Its the little things that add up- no concealed carry, lengthy mandatory training, instant R-rating for guns in movies, highly regulated sale and production, that chip away at the acceptability of guns in society.
2. I’ve never heard someone do the “we don’t want to take your guns away” bit in regards to semiautomatic weapons. Usually I hear it in reference to hunting or small self-defense weapons. Its all a spectrum of course, and I’m sure you could find a Leftist doing that sort of dance if you looked.
But most Leftists I know are in favor of gun bans, semiautomatic or not, and aren’t shy about it.
Or quite possibly a civil war, and those are usually associated with a major increase in gun deaths. Along with IED deaths and the like.
Laws don’t get to shape culture if the culture won’t let you enforce the laws. See also prohibition, the 55 mph speed limit, etc. So you’re maybe going to want to find less intrusive ways of reshaping culture. Particularly if the law you want to enforce is guaranteed to lead to repeated conflict between people with guns on both sides.
I mean, there could be a civil war over not banning guns too. The Left is furious right now. The status-quo, and the laws that support it, is not necessarily the conflict-averting path.
But anyway, I don’t think that “better do what we want, otherwise we will kill you all” is a particularly healthy counter-argument (to anything, gun-related or not). If civil war for not getting your way is on the table, then we have deeper societal rot at play than just guns.
I don’t understand this argument. Speed limits and drug laws do shape culture. Things can actually be banned, it’s possible. You can’t buy Salvia at the local grocery anymore. While some people still drag race down the highway, that activity is noticeably lowered where the police are present. While there will always be law-breakers, it’s not like the law doesn’t suppress antisocial activity.
You’re angry that it’s possible to get a gun and shoot people with it, so you… get some guns and shoot people? Yeah, that makes sense.
“We did it! We beat those damn dirty gun-clingers! We…”
[looks down at smoking gun in hands]
“Oh… Oh no…”
The Left has been furious after every mass shooting since 1990. Congress hasn’t passed any substantive gun control legislation since, yet there hasn’t been a civil war over it. The one time we did have a national ban on AR-15 style “assault weapons”, after a massacre in 1989, Congress waited ten years, said “meh”, and let the law expire. That didn’t trigger a civil war either.
So I’m thinking the possibility of a civil war instigated by the Left over a lack of gun control, is an extremely low probability. The possibility of a civil war instigated by the Left over something else, is a different but not unrelated matter.
Certainly not to the people who are likely to be killed. But since you bring it up, “better do what we say or we’ll say you are in league with the mass murderers” isn’t a terribly healthy argument either.
And that’s half the argument your friends on the left are raising, at least as seen from the right. The other half is, essentially, “We insist that you should be left defenseless against enemies that the government has proven unable to defend you against. Most of whom are from voting blocks who support our party in the government. And please ignore our friends in the black masks swinging bicycle locks”
There’s no way you can raise arguments like this and not have the debate colored by the obvious question of who is going to be shooting whom when it is all over.
@dndnrsn
@Nornagest
Why do we ban kidnapping, while at the same time involuntarily locking away people who kidnap?
Why do we let the police run red lights to chase after people who…run red lights?
Why was the U.K. mad at Hitler for invading Poland, when the U.K. would turn around and invade Germany in response? Hypocrites much??
(Hint: Its about long-term gains vs. short-term losses)
Agreed. But I also think that, realistically, a civil war from the Right in response to Japan-style gun control is a very low probability. There will be a lot of anger sure, and definitely some occupations and gun-waving. But when the rubber hits the road, people won’t want to throw away their happy lives over an ideology. They will lay down their weapons, just like (most) of the Bundy’s group did.
If you have the power to stop a murder, and you choose not to, the question does start to bubble to the surface. There could be legitimate reasons for not doing so (banning cars for instance, which kill lots of people, would cause the economy to collapse). What is the utilitarian counter-argument for maintaining access to guns? Is there evidence that banning guns increases the homicide/suicide rate? Or home burglaries, or rape? Maybe I’m in an ideological bubble and missing it.
And if you propose to take guns away from tens of millions of people who don’t want to give them up, the question of civil war “does start to bubble to the surface”.
Yet somehow it’s only one of these questions that is “unhealthy”. The one that says, as a matter of fact, policy X might lead to a bloody civil war, is unhealthy. The one that says, as a matter of moral judgment, your tribe gets to call the other tribe mass murderers, is perfectly OK because it “bubbles”.
I reject both your moral authority to impose such labels, and your claim to have any clue as to what will prevent vs. cause lots of extra deaths.
Yes, yes, you’re very clever. I’m pretty sure the concept of law has something to do with it, too. But leaving that aside, the last civil war we had killed nearly a million people out of a population of 31 million — two and a half to three percent of the population. And the country was a lot smaller then; an equally bloody war now would kill about nine million people. Your long-term gains need to be pretty fucking impressive.
Has there ever been, anywhere on the planet, a civil war that originated from a gun control measure?
Yes, and that is my point: neither the Left nor Right have a particularly strong incentive to start a civil war.
But at the same time, neither side could be accused of hypocrisy if they started a war to advance their interests. If the Right wanted to start a civil war over gun control, my argument wouldn’t be that they are self-defeating in doing so. I mean, they could win, after all.
A rather famous one, yes, though we prefer to call it a revolution.
There were, of course, other grievances between the two parties in that conflict, which makes it totally different than the present US situation in which there are no grievances except over gun control. But if you do have the makings of a violent conflict, arguing about who should have all the guns is a great way to trigger it.
“Our tribe can take whatever it wants, because your tribe would suffer too much if you went to war over it”, is actually a pretty strong incentive to start a war. Particularly if the first thing the other tribe wants is a monopoly on the tools for war.
If the Right insists on holding society hostage, and threatening to initiate a civil war if it doesn’t get its way, is that really an argument that we need to appease them more?
Like I was hinting at earlier, if you are a hair-trigger away from going Rambo against your fellow citizens, for the purposes of undermining a law that would otherwise save lives, then the argument isn’t really about guns anymore. The rot goes deeper.
Your argument is “gun control won’t work, because right-wing militias would kill anyone who implemented it”.
I appreciate the frankness, at least.
(But I still think its all bluster)
“X won’t work” and “X is politically infeasible” are two different things, and “some group feels so strongly about X that they’d literally start a war over it” is an example of the latter, not the former.
You’ve left out the hint of “I want to kill lefties. Just give me an excuse.”
Not cool, skef.
Neither of those things are cases of culture being downstream from the law. There is still very much a demand for Salvia, and people still very much enjoy drag racing when police are not present. Neither law has changed the culture in any appreciable way, as far as I can see.
Reading a few more of your comments in this thread, it seems like everything I disagree with you about on this topic stems from this utterly baffling (to me, at least) concept of culture being downstream from law. I’m sure there might be a FEW examples of of culture being downstream from law, but for the life of me I can’t think of any.
I find that interesting, and it almost makes me wonder if this difference of perception might be at the root of an awful lot of disagreements between the right and the left in general, on other issues. That’s only a seed of an idea, though, and I’ll need to put a lot more thought into it.
I may have been unclear on my position, so I want to clarify it. It isn’t that culture is necessarily downstream from law. Culture affects the law, and the law affects the culture. They are both “downstream” and “upstream” from each other.
If it feels like I’m constantly arguing about how important the law is, it’s because a common libertarian refrain here is “if there is a problem with the culture, then it can’t be solved by the law, because the two spheres are wholly separate.”
This is a rather baffling position to me, because of course culture can be drastically shaped by the law. Throughout history, languages and religions have been variously banned or mandated, with the resulting cultural shifts. Professions are created (IP law, military, police), cities are zoned, entire nations can be displaced or genocided. The criminalization of drugs has drastically altered the culture around them- presidents don’t openly smoke opium anymore, though they might take prescription pain pills.
If someone says:
“It doesn’t matter if you want x, its against the law”
Then I will demonstrate how the law can be shaped by culture.
Or alternatively, if someone says:
“It doesn’t matter what the law is, culture will be x”
Then I will demonstrate how culture can be shaped by the law.
Thinking in an upstream/downstream binary is a failure mode.
It starts with the obvious point that legal restrictions on firearms ownership are more effective against law abiding people than against criminals. The next step, for me, is that the less able law abiding people are to protect themselves the more dependent they are on the police for protection, and the more dependent they are on the police protection the less willing they will be to restrict the powers of the police.
Very likely. There has been a lively debate for quite a long time set off by the Lott and Mustard article offering statistical evidence that laws permitting concealed carry of handguns reduced the rate of confrontational crimes, with some scholars supporting and others rejecting the conclusion. The argument is made–whether correct I don’t know enough to judge–that burglaries of houses where the owners are likely to be home are more common in countries with less firearms ownership.
It’s a politically loaded topic so figuring out what research to trust is hard–I gave up on following the statistical arguments on concealed carry years ago when they got beyond my level of statistical expertise. But doesn’t it seem inherently plausible that making it harder for people to defend themselves would tend to increase things such as rape and home burglaries, and that the effect of legal restrictions would be asymmetrical–stronger on the law abiding?
I’ll concede that a situation where guns are “available”, yet illegal to law-abiding citizens to use, is the worst of both worlds. I agree that a gun control measure that criminalizes gun possession, while not drastically eliminating tangible gun availability could increase deaths and crime (although I still contend that the downsteam cultural effects of de-normalizing gun use could decrease this in the long run).
The home-bugulary argument is interesting, and would be a strong pro-gun utilitarian argument if the data ever clarifies.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the guns are creating a countering effect to offset this: A weapon that can be used to defend, can also be used to attack. If it’s easier to defend against rape if you have a gun, it’s also easier to rape if you have a gun. I know not all things are symmetrical, and the data will likely show that one of these outweighs the other, but it’s at least something to consider.
Rape victims are a lot more likely to be physically weaker than the rapist rather than vice versa; not just because women are physically weaker, but because rapists get to choose their targets. So the gun will disproportionately help the victim.
Lott also specifically highlights that the benefits from concealed carry also carry positive externalities.
If a potential rapist knows that there is a 10% chance his victim might be armed, he is less likely to rape. But he doesn’t know who is armed and who isn’t. The fact that some people choose to arm themselves also benefits those who do not.
It’s something that has been considered, analyzed, and quantified.
Unless the rapist is also a necrophile, it isn’t actually easy to rape someone with a gun. Which is why, according to the DOJ, only 3% of rapists use guns, and using guns increases the rapist’s chance of success by only 3% over using no weapons at all. By comparison, the use of weapons(*) in self-defense results results in an absolute ~22% reduction in the chance of rape (compared to other self-protection strategies) and a ~5% reduction in the probability of serious injury other than rape.
You are right that there is an asymmetry. In rape, and indeed in most common crimes, the criminal fails to complete his objective if he efficiently kills his victim. The victim, by comparison, succeeds by efficiently killing her attacker. Given a nearly-instant means of efficient killing, uniform distribution of this means tilts the advantage strongly in favor of the victims in most cases.
(*) Guns and knives combined; there was insufficient data on guns alone. At raping distance, there’s little difference between the two.
This power asymmetry would work backwards in case of burglaries, however. Since a burglar is often stealing from a place with multiple people, he would be outpowered, if not for his weapon.
The 2005 justice department report you provided showed only a single instance of a rape victim defending themselves using a gun (page 40). To say that this has been “quantified” is a gross overstatement. Even if we were to extrapolate from this, that leaves us with a situation where 3% of rapists use guns, and (1/733) 0.14% of rape victims are defending themselves using guns.
The hypothesis of “gun proliferation decreases rape” is only supported by this data is you assume that 99.86% of rapists would have raped with or without the gun.
You’re ignoring the difference between “rape victim” and “rape target”. I’d guess that a very small percentage of rape victims tried to defend themselves with guns and failed. If the gun prevents the rape, then there’s no rape victim. And it’s probably pretty hard to tell the difference between potential rape victims saved by guns, and potential mugging victims saved by guns.
This is not correct. The 2005 study explicitly includes people who successfully defended against rape as “rape victims”.
I can’t speak for the 1990 study, because I don’t have JSTOR access. I would be interested to see what percentage of rape victims fought back using a gun, hopefully its higher than 0.14%.
EDIT: And I know its meaningless, but in the single instance of a rape victim defending themselves using a gun in the 2005 study, they were unsuccessful at doing so.
Burglars in places where firearms ownership is common, are empirically observed to mostly steal from places with no people, and most of the common burglary-prevention tips hinge around making your home look like there might be someone in it.
That does not address the question of whether gun availability in a society decreases total burglaries.
With or without gun availability, burglars would rather steal from empty places.
It doesn’t. Even John Lott concedes that while concealed carry leads to lower violent crime, a lot of criminals substitute property crime, which tends to rise.
Whether that’s better or worse is a matter of subjective opinion, but I suspect most people would rather have their house burglarized when they aren’t home, than when they are…
Yeah, if we start by talking about mass murderers, segue into violent rape, and end with “but maybe if we do it your way some extra people will get their windows broken and some of their stuff taken”, that seems like a pretty clear win to me.
Only in those cases where they could tell that rape was attempted. As I pointed out, it’s rather difficult to tell a rape thwarted by a gun from a mugging thwarted by a gun. The attacker is either dead or running away before they could tell if he was after her or her purse. So they don’t show up in the study. Other weapons could come to hand after it became obvious what was going on, and they made a big difference in the probability of the rape actually occurring. If fighting back at all helps, then having a good weapon not helping is frankly incredible.
They also didn’t fire the gun, which makes me think that it was unloaded or the attacker took it away quickly. In either case, I’d expect that the base rate of rape targets having guns is higher than 0.14%, which makes me think the guns are doing something.
A point discussed in Chapter 20 of my Price Theory. The passage starts “Suppose one little old lady in ten carries a gun.”
@John Schilling
You haven’t shown that the prevalence of guns decreases homicide, rape, or burglary. The rape study suggested the opposite of what you claimed it did, if it suggested anything at all.
Question for all: Hypothetically, if there was solid evidence that an increase in gun availability in society increased violent crime, would you support severely reducing gun availability?
If the answer is “no”, then I feel like we are debating about the wrong thing here. If you aren’t actually motivated by utilitarian reasoning, its hard to take your utilitarian advice in good-faith.
No.
My support for allowing firearms to be available is to serve as a last bulwark for the citizens to resist government tyranny. I consider this a far greater existential threat than individual criminality. I am significantly more afraid of the government than I am of mass shooters.
My position is analogous to but different from Matt’s.
I don’t think guns are important as a protection against a tyrannical government. I think they are important as a way of reducing the willingness of people to put up with a tyrannical government.
If the populace is disarmed and the police are not, the populace is dependent on the police for protection from criminals–more if the criminals are armed, but even if they don’t have guns but are capable of beating up the random victim. The more dependent people feel on the police, the less willing they will be to support restrictions on what the police can do–whether that means surveillance, no-knock raids by SWAT teams, civil forfeiture, or whatever.
If disarming the populace reduced violent crime so much that people didn’t worry about it at all the argument would not hold, but I don’t think that is likely.
@Guy:
I don’t think it is illegitimate, in trying to persuade someone else of a conclusion, to use arguments that appeal to his values even if those are not the arguments that persuade you of that conclusion.
David and Matt,
You bring up solid points, that I am somewhat sympathetic to. I’ll have to chew on this.
Oh, certainly, I don’t think anyone is trying to argue that laws can’t have SOME effect on culture. I know I’m not, at any rate.
I’m not trying to make an argument here at all, honestly, though it might be an interesting one to have at some point. I’m just making an observation. I mean, I’ve always known, at least in the back of my mind, generalities along the lines of “socialists mean well, but just don’t understand how their top-down utopian policies are destined to fail,” but I don’t think it ever really STRUCK me just how many disagreements are rooted in this disagreement over just how much people legitimately believe that laws such as, say, banning sugary drinks will actually change peoples’ behavior, until this conversation. I felt it was interesting enough to point out, and wanted to make a note of it, to make sure I gave it more thought later.
That said, (at the risk of opening up a whole new can of worms) it still strikes me that every example you’ve brought up (drag racing, selling salvia over the counter, criminalization of drugs in general) has at BEST resulted in driving the culture underground and possibly even entrenched it more fully by driving up the demand. The failings of the drug war are well documented, and there is a thriving underground street racing scene, which is ingrained in the popular psyche to the point where probably the the most popular non-superhero action movie franchise right now is centered around it.
I suppose you’re right that genocide is a pretty effective method of eliminating a culture, but I don’t think it’s really fair to equate that to “passing a law.”
But yeah, “culture is never downstream from law” isn’t exactly the best way to describe what I’m talking about.
That’s a very theoretical argument. I’m not seeing much of that in my disarmed country. And if people are more dependent on police, why wouldn’t that just mean better police — more presence. faster response times — rather than more fascistic police.
Which country is that? Is it one of the ones where the police come and knock on your door if you post something unkind towards muslims on twitter?
Absolutely. But they don’t shoot you. or take your stuff.
Its worth pointing out that in the U.S., the subcultures that are the most armed, are actually the subcultures most likely to support the police (speaking from anecdote). Lot of overlap between NRA/2nd Amendment and “Blue Line” bumper stickers.
I know that there are a hundred external variables that are probably a better explanation for this correlation. But its still worth considering, that perhaps gun ownership (having the power of life or death over others) might breed a more authoritarian worldview.
Gun culture tends to look favorably on state and local law enforcement, less so on the federal variety. This is because state and local law enforcement is mostly a part of gun culture – something to remember if you’re planning to send the police out to round up all the AR-15s. But in this context, it means the police are part of “us”, united against the “them” that is violent crime and terrorism and whatnot. They are on the front lines while we are the reserves, but it’s still one team.
If you give them the power of life and death over us, asking us to trust that they will use it against our enemies rather than against us, assuring us that this can’t happen because it would be strictly against the rules (that they alone are in charge of enforcing), then notice where the “us” vs “them” line has shifted.
If we don’t want the police to be a “them”, and for the police to see ordinary citizens as “them”, then we really need to minimize the special powers and privileges of the police. And the right to keep and bear arms is too big to go unnoticed when we’re drawing that line.
Your hypothesis, if I am understanding you, is that unarmed societies will have more killings by police, while heavily armed ones will have less. This is due to the increased “us/them” divide in unarmed societies between police and citizens.
The U.S. has the highest amount of guns per capita in the world. And, while I’m sure there are dependencies, the firepower which the average American is allowed to carry is comparable to that which an average street cop carries.
This suggests that, if your hypothesis is true, the U.S. should have a very low police killing rate- one of the lowest in the world, perhaps, due to having the most readily-available firearms. I’ve not looked for data on this, but I suspect the U.S. ranks closer to the top in police killings, rather than closer to the bottom.
The most obvious explanation for this is that the police are more fearful, and quicker to pull the trigger, against an armed populace. Giving the citizens guns doesn’t maker police view the public as an “us”- it makes the police view the public as an even more threatening enemy.
Guy –
I have no hard data, but I have
goodstrong priors that most people who kill police aren’t legally allowed to have guns.[Edited for linguistic clarity]
And the argument, just to make sure I’m following it, is that giving guns to convicted violent felons would cause the killing rate to go down?
Color me skeptical.
Guy –
The point being, the “gun culture” people don’t have the same level of problems with police, and are, from my anecdotal observations, generally friends with them. Arguing that the police are already against them is somewhat flawed in this regard; the police are them.
@John,
I would hope that part of the ultimate goal, if any such project were to ever be carried out, would be to get rid of the need for police to routinely carry guns.
New Zealand police don’t carry handguns. That’s one of the reasons I’d be opposed to any significant liberalization of our gun laws; I don’t want them to have a reason to do so. I believe there’s a rifle in each vehicle, but I don’t think those are significantly different to the sort that ordinary citizens are able to obtain, if properly licensed.
(We do have specialized armed offenders squads, of course. Not sure whether they get any special privileges. And we have an army of sorts, who definitely do, but that’s true of the US army as well.)
@Thegnskald
I think it can be simultaneously true that 1. Gun owners are on average more supportive of police than non-gun owners and 2. Police are more likely to shoot people in a society with heavy gun ownership.
This is because the extent to which police sympathize with gun owners is often less significant than other factors (race, in particular) that override that sympathy.
In addition, there is still a significant portion of gun owners who don’t support the police. So even if (for example) 90% of gun owners support the police, and 10% of gun owners are against the police, the police are going to be on edge, knowing that 1/10 gun owners they approach is against them.
Imagine two societies:
Society 1 has with 100 people, where 50 people like you, 50 people hate you, and none of posses the means to kill you.
Society 2 has 100 people, 99 of whom absolutely adore you, and 1 hates you and posses the means to kill you.
I would think that society 2 would be the more frightening society to live in, and would put you on edge.
Guy –
I don’t think guns have much to do with police violence; AFAICT, police are way more terrified of melee weapons than guns. (Which makes sense, if you have ever seen pictures of the aftermath, as melee weapon attacks are viscerally horrifying in a way gunshot wounds generally are not, and most attacks on police do not involve guns.)
@Guy in TN
How does that work out in Switzerland, where basically every able-bodied man has a gun? Lots of police shootings there?
I think you’re making a strategic equivocation between “gun owners,” which is the positive-sounding meme for the millions of responsible adults with legally purchased firearms used for hunting, target shooting and self-defense, and the sorts of people who have guns that the cops wind up shooting. Those tend to be the underclass who have illegally obtained firearms they use as part of their other illegal enterprises, like selling drugs.
The “us” in the context of “gun owners and police” is not “everyone who has a gun in their possession.” When I have been stopped by a rural police office for speeding or something, I’ve told him about the gun in my glove box, he took it out, admired it, and we shot the shit about guns and shooting for 20 minutes before he wrote me my ticket. Pretty sure we were an “us.”
The US does not have a “gun violence problem.” It has an “inner city crime problem.”
There’s also Option 3: America is a big country which includes many societies.
Picture gun culture. (Are you picturing red culture? You’re probably picturing red culture).
Now, picture the places where all those prominent police shootings you’ve heard of have happened. (Are you picturing the inner city? You’re probably not picturing red culture.)
These are not the same societies.
Well, Mexico is by law an unarmed society and Switzerland is by law an armed society; I can’t easily find data on the number of police shootings in either nation, but I’m going to guess it’s roughly “lots” and “none”, respectively.
You are confusing armed societies with armed criminals, when criminals are very nearly the enemies of society by definition. You seem to be assuming that criminal shootings (and the subsequent shootings of criminals) are the result of some random citizen of an armed society, some defecting member of “gun culture”, deciding to up and shoot someone.
There can be some overlap between gun culture and armed criminals. The family in Appalachia whose vocations and avocations are mining, farming, hunting, fishing, shooting, and running the meth lab that recently replaced grandpappy’s old prohibition-era still, are both gun culture and armed criminals. But mostly, these are two separate populations.
If you’ve got a large armed-criminal population, you’ve got lots of shootings – including lots of shootings by police. Whether you’ve also got an armed society with a gun culture (US) or not (Mexico). If you don’t have a large armed-criminal population, then you probably don’t have lots of shootings, even if you do have an armed society with a gun culture (Switzerland).
As an American, I’m stuck with lots of armed criminals for the foreseeable future. But I’d much rather have America’s police, largely drawn from and aligned with America’s gun culture, than Mexico’s. And I think I’d rather have Switzerland’s police than e.g. Germany’s or France’s, but it’s probably a smaller difference and our European commenters may have more expertise than I.
Also, how about that world peace?
As with most disarmament proposals, the only sensible answers are “you go first”, or “how do we verifiably implement this across all relevant parties simultaneously?” So if the plan is to disarm the citizens, and then hope that this causes the criminals to give up their guns, and then maybe we disarm the police, then no.
Are those 50 people all quadruple amputees, or something?
Seriously, killing people isn’t that hard from a technical perspective. The main thing that prevents people from doing it more often are psychological barriers. Fear of failure and fear of reprisal are also issues, but much less so than the simple fact that, whether it’s innate or instilled by society, we’d just rather not kill each other. I would feel MUCH safer in a society in which only one person was willing and able to overcome that psychological barrier than a society in which 50 people were, even if that one person had a much, much more efficient means of killing me than any one of the 50 in the other society. The fact that he also has 99 people working against him works in my favor, too.
That’s kind of a tangent, though, which I couldn’t ignore because addressing unrealistic thought experiments is like catnip ’round these parts.
The main thing I wanted to say is that I think you’re misunderstanding John Schilling’s point re: the police being part of gun culture.
He’s not saying “heavily armed societies, in general, will have fewer problems with the police” on a meta level. He’s making a note, specifically, about America’s gun culture. The only meta level point he’s trying to make is that “it’s better for the police to be part of Us rather than part of Them.” The overlap between the police and American gun culture is one way that is accomplished, which might not work everywhere, but explains why the most heavily armed locations in America are also the ones with the fewest shootings by cop.
Basically, no, of course arming violent felons is not going to result in fewer violent confrontations with cops, in and of itself. Having felons hang out at the same shooting range every weekend as the cops, and taking firearm training programs given by those cops, and swapping stories about their favorite guns and/or arguing over their favorite caliber with cops, on the other hand, will do a pretty good job of reducing those confrontations. (So will any number of other things, as long as they integrate them as a single tribe, of course, but like I said, we’re not talking generalities here, we’re talking about a specific, existing culture, that many police in America are already a part of.)
It’s why any concealed carry class will tell you to say “I have a concealed carry permit, and am currently carrying,” rather than “I have a gun,” or something similar. You’re conveying the same technical information, but at the same time signaling that you observe the same cultural shiboleths as the cop.
John Schilling (and others) –
I suggest looking into a video called “Surviving Edged Weapons”. It is a police training video which will pretty much put everything into place.
They won’t get rid of their guns if criminals get rid of theirs. If you got rid of all the guns, there are still lunatics who will shiv police in the face with a switchblade lighter.
(I blame the drug war, but YMMV)
I’m not sure if this was a response to me or to someone else in the thread. If to me, “killings by police” is only one of the possible outcome variables relevant to my hypothesis. The broader claim is that such societies will be more willing to grant powers to the police.
As usual, there is the problem that we don’t have controlled experiments, so have to worry about other variables. I would expect a society that was more violent for other reasons to have both more gun ownership by potential victims and more police shootings.
Or, for just the highlights, watch the RedLetterMedia guys watch “Surviving Edged Weapons.” It was horrifying and hilarious. I felt terrible for laughing at it, but I couldn’t stop.
@Conrad
Switzerland comes in at 18th in guns per capita, so the comparison isn’t quite apples to oranges. But the more important difference is that Switzerland doesn’t have concealed carry (for all practical purposes), meaning that the chances of the police encountering someone with a gun is significantly lower. And if police anxiety is what is making the difference, encountering guns in the flesh is a lot more relevant to this than them simply knowing that there’s a lot of them locked away in houses.
Like I said, it’s class, race, and culture,-not the absence of guns- that is doing the work in creating the “other”, who are the main victims of police violence. Giving people who the police view as an “other” guns will not transform those people into an “us” with the police. The police will instead view them as an even more dangerous “other”.
Conrad –
Yep. It is the perfect video to explain why police are paranoid. ETA: Forgot my point. It is fascinating to watch people’s political opinions change after watching it.
(Personally, I think the paranoia is dialed up a bit too high, and that training videos like that result in more violence overall. But it is a very understandable paranoia, and I doubt the makers of the training video intended it to increase police violence, so… thanks, Moloch.)
Not just the police, but government in general. Having an armed populace to prevent tyranny doesn’t mean “1776 shall commence again!!!!” It means in the back of their minds the politicians know there are some things they cannot do because the populace is armed. It’s a backstop against tyranny.
And for those who still say that’s silly and “nobody needs an assault rifle for self-defense,” tell that to this shopkeeper during the Ferguson riots or the Tactical Rooftop Koreans during the LA riots. As long as there are riots and looting in America, handguns and shotguns alone aren’t going to cut it.
But it’s not “police anxiety.” It’s criminal malice. The cops aren’t jumping at their own shadows. The problem is we have violent gangbangers and crackheads who will shoot and stab their own mothers.
It doesn’t have many guns in the home, either·.
@Conrad Honcho
If the only kind of tyranny that gun owners care about is the tyranny of confiscating guns then this logic is rather circular.
Didn’t you and I just recently have a discussion about the surveillance state? Why didn’t our high rate of gun ownership prevent that from happening?
Is there some empirical metric we could use to distinguish between these two hypotheses?
Brad –
Sure. Do CCP holders get shot more or less often by police than average non-CCP holders?
And we can’t even limit it in this case to non-criminal CCP holders, which we would normally do because CCP requires you to be a non-criminal, because criminals are an important reference class of comparison for cultural reasons.
How do you figure gun owners only care about the gun seizure mode of tyranny? The same type of people who scream SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED are the same types of people who mock other countries for their “hate speech” laws and who scream about government confiscation of their tax dollars.
And you’ll notice I’m strongly for the 2nd amendment and strongly against the surveillance state. I’m certainly not alone. There are several other pro-gun posters on SSC. Are any of them fans of the surveillance state?
And these days it seems to me the Democrats/left are the ones waving pennants for the Deep State. Indicate they’re plotting against Trump and all of a sudden Dems love them some FBI, NSA, and mass surveillance of US citizens.
It wasn’t prevented because they did it in secret. As for fixing it, well as the saying goes, “there are four boxes to use in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.” We’re still on soap and ballot pretty much.
TBH, after the Snowden revelations I thought The Big Topic of the 2016 elections was going to be government surveillance, but with the media circus we got instead it wasn’t an issue at all.
@Thegnskald
Maybe I’m missing something, but I fail to see how that will tell us if police are overly paranoid or really are in constant danger. I’d think something along the lines of injury/death rates (from assault, not e.g. car accidents) would be a better indicator.
@Conrad Honcho
The point is the only time we hear about the ammo box is when it comes to even the mildest proposed increase in gun control laws. Gun owners may disproportionately mock hate speech laws (but not flag protection laws), but that doesn’t ever seem to translate to darkly hinting about civil wars the way gun control and only gun control do.
I guess the closest counterexample is something like Waco, which involved child custody, but that was a very long time ago now.
Brad –
It isn’t the amount of danger, it is the amount of perceived danger.
Seriously. Watch Surviving Edged Weapons. Or the review if it.
A lot of things may fall into place.
This is just your own selective memory. It is said about all sorts of government malfeasance and corruption. Also, general leftist malfeasance and violence. Every time there’s a leftist riot (like after the election, Antifa) or race riot, every conservative blog will have comments about “haha, they burn down their own cities because they know if they came to our red neighborhoods they’d get shot.” I’ve made those same comments on this blog.
So, I guess I’m suggesting you pay better attention to thinly(?) veiled threats of right-wing violence…?
If there’s a big difference between actual danger and perceived danger then that’s just another way of saying that paranoia on the part of police is the problem. That means we either need different personal, people that aren’t as subject to paranoia, or different training or both.
N.B. Your review link is broken and I don’t ever watch video.
Can you point out some prominent voices on the right darkly hinting about civil war and second amendment solutions in response to the Snowden revelations? Selective memory is certainly a possibility.
Comparing first-world nations to developing countries doesn’t tell us anything. I mean, Yemen has the 3rd highest guns per capita, and how is that place faring?
I’m lost here- you start out by saying that Mexico is an unarmed society, and now you are saying that Mexico has a large armed-criminal population? If it has a large armed criminal population, then its not an un-armed society, and the resulting killings by police are to be expected.
“We don’t want to take your guns away” won’t, and shouldn’t, reassure anyone unless it’s in regards to the guns people actually have. (Most small self-defense weapons are semi-automatic.)
It’s a silly argument and Democrats should stop making it. I don’t know why they are so often afraid to actually articulate a worldview and follow through with it.
It’s symptomatic, I think, of the belief that “real America” is conservative and liberals are outsiders, and therefore you must constantly be vigilant to appease “real America” (despite the numbers looking more like 50/50 in practice).
It’s probably related to the fact that a lot of Democrats are also gun owners. And most people’s beliefs aren’t linked to the effect of guns on the homicide rate. Almost all murders are handguns, but that gets very little coverage except when there’s a rare murder spree with a rifle.
The number of Americans who actually want to ban all guns is not a majority (my high end estimate is 28% from the poll I’m about to link which has a question about banning handguns) even if the number who want gun laws to be stricter is a majority (60%). And the number of people who want to ban handguns has decreased drastically over time. See this gallup historical report http://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx
Back in 1959, 60% of Americans polled wanted to ban handguns except for police and other authorized persons. That was down to 50% in 1965 and has since cratered to 28%.
Interesting link, thanks for posting it. I wonder what the explanation is for people in the mid-20th century being gun-averse.
One under-explored facet of this, I think, is how the emphasis politicians give issues can push opinion. Trump, for example: Was he the result of sweeping changes in the way Republicans viewed immigration, or is the change in immigration opinions the result of him? While politicians can reflect the views of the people, I think the degree in which the people reflect the views of politicians is under-appreciated.
If Dems made a full-throated defense of gun control: “We’re going to take away their guns, and make the NRA pay for it!”, I think we’d see those numbers change.
Instead, we have the weak “no one is going to take guns away, come on guys don’t be silly”, and the public becomes ambivalent on the matter.
You know why the Assault Weapons Ban wasn’t renewed? Because it resulted in a bloodbath of the figurative sort, of anti-gun Congresspeople being voted out of office. There are a lot of people strongly anti-immigration (or at least anti-illegal-immigration) right now. There are a lot of people strongly pro-gun. These people will vote single-issue. The people on the other side of those issues will not vote single issue. So the most likely results of the Democrats adopting such a policy as a whole are
1) Party revolt, with many Democrats in contested areas repudiating it
2) Fewer Democrats in office.
@Guy in TN
I don’t think you appreciate how far in the minority your position is. Most democrats really don’t want to ban all guns although politicians would likely change their minds if voters did. And like The Nybbler says, currently if democratic politicians made a lot of noise about it, they’d either be replaced by more gun-friendly democrats or Republicans would do better.
Gun control was famously used to try to keep African-Americans unarmed so it was easier to keep them down, so my guess is that’s probably somewhat related to opinion in the 50s. Have you read “This Nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed” By Charles Cobb?
Mostly the Sixties and early Seventies, I think — there was an earlier wave associated with Thirties mob violence, but the modern gun-control movement essentially got started with laws intended to defang the Black Panthers in California. At the time, they liked to openly carry weapons matching or exceeding the firepower the cops had, which made a lot of people nervous given how a lot of their rhetoric, then as now, was about resistance to police violence. Some of their associated militant groups actually did try to start a shooting war with the police, although I don’t think the Panthers themselves ever did.
On the other hand, a much earlier law was aimed at banning repeating pistols other than “Army and Navy revolvers” — meaning a few specific expensive, high-quality models intended for military use. The idea was to price out the restive poor, although I don’t know how much the lawmakers were concerned with race as such.
It seems too easy to me, to point to the 1994 U.S. legislative elections as evidence that gun control is politically non-viable.
I still think you are underestimating the degree in which culture can be downstream from politics. If Bernie Sanders released a campaign ad saying that a nationwide gun ban was one of his core policy positions, you would see support for gun control spike upward IMO.
If only those pesky politicians would stop listening to their constituents!
If you could give some evidence for your claim, I would find that helpful. In the last 50 years, things have moved rather the opposite direction from how you’d like even as the media has gotten more shrill and mass shootings have become national news. And this against a backdrop where the government managed to violate all sorts of other rights because “we have to protect you from terrorism”.
Making noises about gun control may be helpful for getting elected in some places. Making serious motions towards blanket banning something that even in states like CA, 1/5 of the population own or even among groups with lower ownership like African-Americans, 1/4 own? Sounds like political suicide for most politicians to me.
Politicians follow voters. Voters don’t follow politicians.
EDIT: Well, voters and well connected lobbies.
Guy –
From my perspective, hoplophobia is the odd man out.
Guns advantage the physically weak. Full stop.
If five guys decide to beat up one, and all are unarmed, the one doesn’t have much recourse. If all six people have guns, suddenly the proposition looks ugly for the five.
There is this really weird tendency for people to think guns create bad force equations. No. Guns level the playing field, putting a handicapped woman in a wheelchair on more equal footing with the two hundred pound dude. They aren’t a full fix for bad force equations, but they do at least alleviate the issue.
I regard replacing armed civilians with more police the way vegans view butchers; you aren’t removing the violence necessary to deal with violence, you are outsourcing it. Which is to say, violence is a necessary function of society.
Which is one thing, but there is a heavy degree of overlap between “society doesn’t need guns” and “police shouldn’t use violence”, which turns the entire enterprise into a farce; it isn’t a strategy for dealing with societal problems, it is just hoping the societal problems go away. Which, as demonstrated by knife-crime-island, doesn’t work.
Guns are power. Which means that the people you want to have guns are those who don’t want to use them.
I mean, there are societies where neither the police nor the citizens carry guns. It’s possible to create such a place. And it reduces the social problems it seeks to reduce. Namely: death by homicide, suicide, and the police.
How many deaths by knives are there in the UK? How many police beat people to death with batons? I don’t understand what your example seeks to show.
This is why the use of guns needs to be tempered by some form of democratic consent (i.e., the military, under a democratic government), in the same way that we temper the use of bombs, chemical weapons, and tanks.
Right, because, as the case of Brian Deneke demonstrates, democracy works perfectly to ensure violence is only used against acceptable targets, where “acceptable” means “people we don’t like”.
(Also, votes don’t pull triggers. You’ve just hand-waved away the problem of agency in violence.)
And, incidentally, the fact that you know what knife-crime-island refers to IS my point. Violence didn’t stop being a problem; it may, with a great deal of uncertainty, have gotten worse, in a nation which historically didn’t have a lot to begin with. Guns are not the problem, and as long as police have reason to fear being stabbed in the face, they aren’t going to stop shooting people who they think are going to try stabbing them in the face.
A majoritarian democracy requires at least >50% levels of dislike before violence can be used. Which is a lot better than non-democracy, which requires only a single person.
They lower the baseline, too. Its like saying “never mind that everyone’s poor, everyone’s equally poor”.
Lower what baseline?
Because the areas with the most guns don’t have the most homicides.
Bluntly, my impression is that you would support gun control even if it raised the homicide rate, so long as the number of homicides using guns went down. You seem to treat gun crime as uniquely bad.
Public safety
The US has a high rate of gun ownership, and a high rate of homicide.
He’s clearly talking about the areas within the US. Quit being obtuse, unless you want us to start bringing up Mexico’s homicide rate again.
Public safety?
I feel a lot safer in an armed society than an unarmed one. There is no substantive evidence either way; the studies on gun control are a wash when you don’t treat “gun crime” as uniquely bad, as you seem to.
Because the thing is, if I get murdered, I am not more murdered if it was a gun rather than a knife (or a baseball bat).
And there is variation within the US, which is the proper reference class for finding out what would happen in the US with gun control. And guess which way the correlation runs? (Hint: Gun ownership rates don’t correlate with homicide.)
Clearly. it’s just that he shouldn’t have been.
There is strong evidence if you use the evidence yo should be using.
Non gun owning counties don’t have huge levels of non-gun crime. The UK had less knife crime than the US during he so-called knife crime epidemic.
They do internationally.
The right data being whatever data agrees with the conclusion you have already reached, as aptly demonstrated by you rejecting any data that doesn’t.
No thanks.
You might as well suggest A Clockwork Orangeing them all. It is about as practical and as likely to happen as Japan-style gun laws in Alaska.
Tomorrow’s OT is likely be a CW-free OT…which will make it equally hard to address that issue.
As a total aside: if I pointed to pictures of two firearms, and said one was a semi-automotic and one was not a semi-automatic, would you be able to tell me which was which?
Look at Item 1 in this picture from Wiki, and compare it to the picture in my post below.
Comparison item 2: this picture from Wiki.
[ Edited to add, in ROT13: Vgrz 1 vf n Ehtre Nzrevpna Evsyr, naq vf abg frzv-nhgbzngvp. Vgrz 2 vf n Ehtre 10-22, naq vf frzv-nhgbzngvp. ]
Well, as someone not knowledgeable about guns, gur oynpx bar unf jung ybbxf gb zr xvaq bs yvxr n obyg, fb V’yy thrff gur oynpx bar vf obyg npgvba naq gur jbbq tenva bar vf frzv-nhgbzngvp.
Gur Ehtre Nzrevpna Evsyr vf n obyg-npgvba pragresver evsyr, zbfgyl hfrq sbe uhagvat qrre be bgure zrqvhz-fvmrq gb ynetr tnzr. Gur Ehtre 10/22 vf n frzvnhgbzngvp evzsver evsyr, hfrq sbe gnetrg fubbgvat, cyvaxvat, be fubbgvat navznyf gur fvmr bs enoovgf be fdhveeryf.
V’ir unaqyrq obgu thaf, gubhtu, fb guvf vf rnfl zbqr sbe zr. Vs lbh tnir zr cvpgherf bs gjb thaf V’q arire frra naq nfxrq zr juvpu bar jnf n frzvnhgbzngvp, V’q fgneg ol ybbxvat sbe n obyg unaqyr.
It was clear to me(Gur punetvat unaqyr bs n obyg-npgvba evsyr vf qvfgvapgvir). If you wanted to be even more confusing you could add this one to the mix.
Doesn’t seem any more confusing, for the same reason I was apparently right about the original pair.
I had the same thought.
Yes. Pick some hard ones.
OK.
https://www.heckler-koch.com/typo3temp/_processed_/csm_MP5A3_re_6691b1ed48.png
https://s3.amazonaws.com/hkusa/20160518182059/SP5K-RIGHT-REVISED-MAY-11-2016-WEB.jpg
Am I missing something? Gur sver fryrpgbef ner ivfvoyr.
Obgu ner frzv-nhgbzngvp, nygubhtu gur svefg vf nyfb shyy-nhgb.
Yeah, unless the selector switches are lying. If they are, that’s pretty tricky.
I did just have a thought about this; given the kind of people who engage in mass shootings, is it obvious that banning guns based on cosmetic features wouldn’t have any effect? Is it really inconceivable that those kind of people might be slightly less likely to carry out their crazy mass shooting plan if they wouldn’t get to look as cool (or at least think they look cool) doing it, so that banning black, military-looking semi-automatics but permitting wood-grain semi-automatics that look like a hunter would use them might actually be of benefit, even if there’s no difference in performance between the two?
Such discussions are pretty much always “civilized” here, but I find it highly unlikely that they will be productive enough to be worth the bother even if it didn’t require breaking a group norm at the outset.
I’m afraid I haven’t kept up with the gun control proposals currently on the table. But from my unusual position as a leftist who thinks that my fellow leftists are a little overenthusiastic about this issue, I think I can nonetheless offer a steelman leftist position. Fully automatic weapons are extremely difficult to acquire legally in the U.S., and they are virtually never used in crime, so it seems that making fully automatic weapons illegal has succeeded in preventing their use (surely a submachine gun would have been more effective for many of the mass shooters, and some of them would have gone that way if they had been able to acquire such weapons). At least some of the proposals currently on the table seem to aim to carry the goal of the fully automatic weapon limits further; that is, to further reduce the availability of weapons that allow people to fire large amounts of shots in small amounts of time. Semi-automatic weapons with large magazines are better at this than, say, bolt-action weapons, revolvers, or semi-automatic weapons with small magazines, though the difference isn’t as great and line isn’t as clear and sharp as with fully automatic vs. not. But, for example, the laws which seek to limit magazine capacity for semi-automatic weapons do not seem to me to be inherently hopelessly misguided in the way that, e.g., the oft-mocked definitions of “assault weapons” that include irrelevancies like folding stocks and bayonet attachments are.
Of course, lower capacity magazines would not have stopped this attack, just slowed it down slightly. From what I’ve read, the attack lasted nearly 20 minutes, and the shooter carried more ammunition than he used.
Lower capacity magazines would have caused him to take more time to reload, but we can presume he had to reload a few times already, and none of these were used as an opportunity for someone to disarm or otherwise stop him.
How long does it take to switch magazines? 5 seconds? If we assume he’s firing one round every five seconds, that means he has to reload once every 2.5 minutes with a 30 round magazine. With a 10 round magazine, he would have to reload a little less than once a minute. At 5 seconds per reload, over the course of a 20 minute shooting, that increases his needed reloads from 8 to 20, with total reload time increasing from 40 seconds to 100 seconds, meaning one minute is saved. He killed 17 people in 20 minutes, approximately one person per minute. So, in this particular case, reducing magazine size from 30 to 10 can be assumed to have saved about one life.
Is this what people have in mind when they say “CONGRESS CAN STOP THIS NOW IF THEY CHOOSE TO ACT!!!”
Well, one less death would have been an improvement, and
sounds like obvious hyperbole to me. You wanted an example of something effective the leftists could be aiming for short of taking away everybody’s semi-autos; seems like I’ve provided a candidate for that.
I forgot to respond to this part. I think it’s possible, but unlikely, that most shooters would prefer fully automatic weapons.
It’s worth keeping in mind that police forces and militaries around the world, in a wide variety of circumstances and situations, very rarely issue fully automatic weapons as standard equipment. They are only used in very specific situations, typically the defense of a choke-point. Standard issue for US infantry is an AR-15 with a 3-round-burst mode, is it not?
I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that many mass shooters would prefer fully automatic weapons, given their limitations.
My guess is that most shooters would prefer full-auto for the sheer drama of it. But it’s not clear whether– as you say, given their limitations– they’d claim more victims as a result.
Worth noting that Baruch Goldstein was armed with an assault rifle capable of fully-automatic fire, but chose to use rapid, aimed semi-automatic fire during his attack. I recall at the time at least one major media outlet expressing shock that the military had been training soldiers in this extra-deadly technique for causing pointless carnage.
Woo Bum-Kon in Korea and Tian Mingjian in China also used selective-fire rifles and I believe chose semi-automatic fire but am less certain on that front.
Submachine guns are best used with short bursts of automatic fire to compensate for the limited effect of their pistol cartridges, and the limited recoil of firing pistol ammunition from a heavy shoulder weapon makes this practical. But submachine guns have mostly fallen out of favor, and with good reason. With assault rifles, it is unusual for anything but the first shot fired with each pull of the trigger to actually hit anyone. The main purpose of the fully automatic mode is the psychological drama – whose effects, on both sides, can be of real military importance even if it doesn’t kill anyone.
And yes, the exotic technique of “aiming” does make firearms “extra-deadly”. We should encourage spree killers to not do that.
Allow me to propose a “common sense compromise”
1. All semiautomatic weapons are now banned
2. All fully automatic weapons are now legal
No, not really, at least not with assault rifles.
Doctrine varies between countries, but for the most part the emphasis is on using dedicated light machine guns, and squad automatic weapons for suppressing fire. Sure, M4s, and AKs can be pressed into that role, especially if you have a whole squad of them on hand, but the limitations of a relatively light closed bolt infantry rifle mean it’s hard generate sustained automatic fire. If you’re using an assault rifle for suppressive fire at any significant range you should be using it on semi auto, with full auto reserved for emergencies, when you are trying hold off the enemy, and a proper support weapon is not available.
So, other than using your rifle as a poor man’s SAW, why full auto?
There are a few select situations. One is close quarters battle; if you are going room to room, and fighting at distances measured in feet, then getting a lot of bullets into the bad guys in as short a time as possible can mean the difference between life and death. Others scenarios would be things that you might otherwise use a grenade for; clearing out bunkers, and fighting positions, getting at people behind concealment, where you don’t have a line of sight, and can’t take aimed shots. And of course ambushes; if you, and your buddies can conceal your selfs in a position where you have a clear line of fire to a place where you know a large group of the enemy are going to come through, then switching your weapons to fuck-you-buddy mode, and filling that area with a whole bunch of nastiness is a good way to kill a lot of people before they can get to cover.
School shooting tend to be close quarters affairs, almost by definition, and it seems to me that hosing bullets onto an unsuspecting crowd of people is exactly the kind of thing that a mass shooter would want to do.
So I suspect that submachine guns, and assault rifles would incredibly useful to the average Eric Harris wannabe.
Submachine guns are poor against body armor, which seems to explain part of their lack of popularity for military use (poor range is another defect from a military perspective). Spraying extra poorly aimed bullets around is undesirable in a police context due to the risk of collateral damage, which a spree shooter is more likely to view as an advantage than a defect. The military also expects to encounter long fights, and often repeated fights, so not wasting ammunition is more of a concern to the military than to a spree shooter.
A spree shooter has to carry all of his ammunition on his person, probably in a way such that it can be concealed by a trenchcoat or whatever. “Unlimited ammo” isn’t a cheat code that he enjoys, either.
But the spree shooter doesn’t have to hike with it for ten miles, or make sure he still has enough ammo for the next fight and the fight after that if circumstances go that way.
@Matt M: so a solution compatible with the Constitution would be to ban trenchcoats.
Ban nontransparent clothes, then EVERYONE wins (except ugly people).
Approximately all actual spree shooters have carried less than the US army standard combat load (210 rounds) for an assault rifle. The only exceptions I could easily find are Anders Brevik and Stephen Paddock. Paddock of course was holed up in a hotel room, and Breivik’s 300 rounds is probably on par with what soldiers actually carry when they are expecting a fight.
Also, assault rifles tend to overheat and jam if you fire 100+ rounds through them on full automatic without taking substantial (several minute) breaks to let them cool down.
@John Schilling
There is a guy that does ‘meltdown’ videos where he keeps shooting full-auto guns until they fail. Here is the video of a cheap AR-15. It made 440 rounds before it melted. He also tested a high-quality AR-15, which took over 800 rounds before it failed.
So it definitely seems possible to do 200-300 rounds without having to take significant breaks, especially if you don’t care about the condition of the gun afterwards.
@Le Maistre Chat
You may be joking, but a lot of public schools actually did ban trench coats in the wake of Columbine.
@Jaskologist: That so doesn’t surprise me.
Having fired an MP-5SD, I think a submachine gun — that is, a light fully-automatic rifle firing pistol ammunition — would have been much less effective than a semi-auto AR-15. For one thing, it fires pistol ammo. For another, it tends to climb, so a lot of shots would have been fired into the air. I’m sure one can learn to control this, but training to fire full auto is going to be expensive. And it’s still firing pistol ammo.
(note that the second issue doesn’t apply to Vegas, with the shooter firing into a crowd from above)
The single best thing for fewer shootings is if they weren’t reported on as breaking news and important headlines outside communities where they happen. If we all read about shootings only in our local communities, and once in a while policy-minded folks read about the total number of gun deaths, by type, in the country, we wouldn’t be trying to have a therapy session/make-sense-of-senseless-violence conversation/sober-policy-discussion all at the same time, on the internet of all places, and being re-traumatized/radicalized/alienated when it doesn’t work.
There is a copy-cat element to this problem. I don’t know what the best policy solutions are. I usually favor better mental healthcare, more meaningful lives for young people, sober-minded gun policies like bars on those convicted of some kinds of domestic violence from purchasing guns while restraining orders are in effect, bans on semi-automatics with large magazines, closing gun show loopholes, etc. I also favor making it easy for for national guardsmen and retired state police to get concealed carry permits. I also don’t really think this stuff is the main problem–the main problem is young people with few narratives for meaning, schools that feel like well-meaning prisons, etc.
I think I could go line by line here, but don’t really feel like it. All I will say is that I 100% agree that media obsession with these things leads to a copycat effect, and the core problem here is “young men who feel completely alienated from society and want to lash out and have been taught that shooting up a school is the thing that alienated young men do when they lash out.”
Taking your second paragraph, I think if you looked at each of your gun-related proposals, you’d find that they either already exist, or do not apply, at all, to the vast majority of school shooters.
So far, it looks like we agree, apparently violently. All the things I listed are all gun proposals that I think might do something at the margin, but wouldn’t so much solve the problem as slightly lessen the severity of specific shootings. E.g., Gabby Giffords’ shooter was brought down when he reloaded, and he did have a high-magazine gun that IIRC would have been covered by Brady if that had been renewed, so there’s a good chance there might have been a few fewer fatalities there if gun control were less lax/loophole ridden. As I see it, the fact that specific gun control suggestions either wouldn’t do much or are already in place is a grudging concession that gun control reduces gun deaths somewhat, and is worthwhile if it’s worth the political/regulatory costs.
Re: political achievability, if I felt like making myself a spokesman for fewer gun deaths, I’d probably focus on gun safety (accidental kid deaths are so friggin tragic and so friggin’ preventable) and on mental health, because IMHO those are the places where there’s big gains available. I don’t really feel I’m expected to know a bunch of stuff about bump stocks and whether this-or-that specific shooting used a bayonet mount or what have you. I don’t *care*. What the heck, let’s ban lead ammo for hunting also, because let’s keep lead out of our wild places. I care about that about as much or more than I care about gun control.
On the subject of school shootings, what I really care about is the fact that we make these into huge, nationally newsworthy events that spark ongoing acrimonious gun-control / mental health / etc controversies, and at the same time we’re not paying attention to the young people in our own communities, but steadily barraging them with a narrative for getting attention.
When I find a good discussion about school violence, I often suggest that one concrete change I would like to see is for school districts to have their own district-resource-attorney, elected by the voters of the school district, or hired by the school board. By way of analogy to school resource officers–who work every day from an office at the school(s) they serve, and who are consequently mostly friends with teachers and kids, not other cops, and hence take a cooperative attitude toward their work (if things are going well) where they spend as much or more time making friends with students and working to keep them out of trouble in the first place… that’s better. One example I’ll point at is that when my school resource officer made an arrest for selling cigarettes, the attorney who’d end up with prosecuting authority over that case was (in my home town) something of a specialist (or so I was led to believe, at one point, as a sharp kid whose coping technique after his dad died was to readily recruit friends with 35-year-old fatherly men). He was pretty good at discerning which kids could be re-routed to being good kids with a good scare that their perfect lives could get screwed up (let ’em spend a night in jail near real criminals with really screwed up lives, that’ll put a good scare into a kid from a good family), and which kids were already convinced their broken lives would never heal, and viewed poverty, involuntary celibacy, and a checkered relationship with law enforcement as mostly inevitable… those kids, the trick was to show them real friendship and a better direction their lives could go.
A school district’s attorney would, in my view, wield prosecutorial discretion over cases that happened on school grounds or directly relate to helping the schools function as communities where learning is valued, meaningful work is done, and recognition is earned via achievement–not least because once the office existed, the district attorney would be stoked to unload bit-stuff that related to schools (and could end up with the attorney dealing with angry parents) on a specialist. Of course the d.a.’s office would keep discretion over big cases like murders or arsons or rapes. It turns out a lot of communities *do* have things like this, under the heading “community prosecuting” but I think it’s hit and miss, across the country, and usually not tied-in to school districts… but there’s no one-size-fits-most solution.
The main reason I think the reform is needed relates to how many counties are too big, such that the electoral check on the D.A. only works to make the D.A. pay attention to the attitudes of rich folks in the suburbs and/or high-profile child-murder Casey Anthony type cases. School districts already have attorneys (mostly for things like navigating angry parents with special needs kids, or with kids who’ve been bullied, or with tort claims.
This is already a thing.
You know, I was pretty sure it was a thing–I hadn’t meant to suggest that everything I listed was not already in place, jeez guys. I just meant that line of things I generally support to be an indication that I’m not an unreasonable opponent of gun control, but also (e.g.) see some gun promotion policies (like concealed carry for those with sufficient gov’t training) as worthwhile, because the problem of gun violence is not one that is solved with a ‘pro-gun’ or ‘anti-gun’ attitude, it requires thinking.
I did read your link, and I didn’t have many expectations, so I wasn’t much surprised at what I found. I was a little surprised that “offensive touching” was the standard for misdemeanor domestic violence… but after a moment’s thought, I’m not sure what else it would have been.
Yeah, I guess in hindsight I read too much into your comment. I’m just tired of people pounding the table and demanding “X” as part of “sensible gun control,” not knowing that “X” is already the law! The level of ignorance can be astonishing.
Start with the moderate gun control and if that doesn’t work, keep going until it does. The way we talk about guns is insane, like mass shootings being an inevitability, even though no other first world country suffers to the same extent we do. If guns has nothing to do with it, then what exactly is the problem and what is the specific legislation in mind to deal with it?
The problem is a great many people living in economic and social despair, and a news media that promises to give them 15
minutesdays of fame if they kill enough people.There is no legislative solution. There are many ways for the legislature to make the problem worse, and if you insist on playing “Something must be done! This is something, therefore this must be done!”, then your legislature will make things worse.
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Why is America so different? Is there something about our economy that causes more mass shootings? Is there something about our “social despair” that is noticeably different than other Western countries? Someone a few weeks ago showed a study that they used to defend the notion that America is not different in regards to mass shootings. But looking at the data, the difference is insane. America had something like 183 mass shootings in the time period. The next highest was six, with the vast majority being somewhere between zero and two. Combine this with the fatalism being politically convenient, I don’t believe anyone who says that nothing can be done. It’s just a way of ignoring the issue. At the very least, come up with plausible ideas that don’t involve gun control.
So what is the standard for a new law? Sometimes we notice bad things, the legislature makes a law and it works out for the better. Sometimes it doesn’t. Does that mean the government has to be paralyzed because we don’t know with 100% certainty that some law will do good? It’s not like we’re just throwing random darts on the board to come up with solutions. There are plausible reasons for believing it will work to at least some degree. So why are we not allowed to even contemplate following this course of action?
Don’t release names, pictures, or identifying features of the perpetrators. Get the TV news channels to play along if possible. Legally requiring them to is probably out of the question for First Amendment reasons, but it might be feasible if the perpetrators are minors. Apply whatever we’ve got in place to fight ISIS recruitment videos on YouTube.
More generally, try to put the brakes on outrage culture. Mass shootings are a rounding error of a rounding error and pushing massive cultural changes to stop them is probably not justified in itself, but the culture that incentivizes them is the same culture that fuels a lot of other bad things.
Might be a good idea to do something about our horribly screwed-up educational system, too. Once again this isn’t something we should do just to stop school shootings, but we’d probably see fewer of them if our high schools didn’t feel and function like minimum-security prisons.
Start promoting the idea in mass media that using two handguns and shooting them sideways is the best way to kill a lot of people? Won’t reduce mass shootings, might reduce the death toll.
Get the FBI to spend more time investigating tips about mass shooters. No point in having a Stasi-like see-something say-something surveillance state if you’re not actually going to do something.
Fight crime, shoot back; ensure there are armed and responsible adults wherever a mass shooting may take place.
None of these, unfortunately, are particularly practical. Getting the media to show only less-effective ways of killing people is a massive coordination problem. The false-positive rate of FBI tips probably makes it impractical to investigate a reasonable fraction of them in a timely manner. Armed security is expensive and having teachers do double-duty is a large burden. But if there were an simple, obvious and practical solution, someone would have implemented it by now.
Gun control that’s less than a near-total ban with confiscation isn’t going to do it. Also, probably approximately nothing could stop someone with as few warning signs, as many resources, and as much committment as the Vegas shooter; fortunately there’s few like that.
Yes, I think the over-the -top reaction of the media to every shooting is the main reason shootings continue to happen. The media is the main perpetrator of mass shootings. I wish this could become a bigger meme in the public discussion, although it is obvious that the media itself would like to quash such thoughts. The outrage about guns is a phony issue.
“Here are some far out ideas that even I don’t think will work” is scarcely better.
I think it’s fairly obvious that the fifteen-minutes-of-fame thing is a major piece of the puzzle. The bit where we ask TV news nicely and they stop cackling like hyenas from atop their giant pile of clicks is admittedly a stretch, but only because we have an amendment saying we can’t make them do it. Much like another amendment I could name. There might be another approach to the same basic goal that’d work; I only thought about it for five minutes.
If we can actually pull it off, I expect the right kind of education reform would reduce the number of school shootings by 50% or better, but those are only a minority of mass shootings these days. Still think it’s a good idea, but mainly for other reasons.
With any luck the Islamist-motivated subset will fall off on its own now that ISIS is more or less ineffective, but it’ll probably take a while and I can’t rule out other Islamist groups using the same tactics.
@Nornagest: There’s the rub, aye?
If ISIS has been neutered such that practically no Sunni Muslim believes it’s the caliphate, there’s unlikely to be more than a brief pause in Western Islamic terrorism. We had home-grown Islamists taking up arms for the much more modest goals of al-Qaeda (“Hey believers, let’s bankrupt the USSR with a guerrilla war in Afghanistan, then bankrupt the other Satan too, so they don’t have the global military reach to stop our children from building a caliphate”).
Unless you’re thinking there’s a psychological ratchet effect, such that once there’s been a caliphate preaching millenialism, Western Muslims won’t take up arms for anything less?
Yes there isn’t a legal solution to this issue, but I think it would help immensely if the media at least felt GUILTY about this. As it is, the concept is so far outside the Overton window that I don’t even see it as a topic of discussion. That’s why I’d like it to become more of a meme. Right now the media thinks of themselves a saints for bringing up the outrage of each shooting to a peak to focus on the gun issue, and don’t seem to realize the outrage itself is causing most of the problem. I think the media would greatly tone it down if they got enough pushback that they were the problem.
Virginia Tech shooter was dual wielding and he held the high score for awhile.
(trigger warning: self-harm)
As for the media, yes, I think the media coverage gives these people ideas and incentives. Teen suicide is contagious, so it’s kind of nice that media outlets generally don’t give sensational coverage to teen suicides. If they did, in order to “have a national discussion about teen suicide,” it would probably result in more dead kids.
Definitely one of the things that’s different about America is that Columbine happened here first. If it happened in Germany, and the German media made the perpetrators as notorious as the American media made Klebold and Harris, I wouldn’t be shocked if more disaffected Germans were school shooters. And no, Brevik is not a counter-example, as his spree was not senseless like school shootings but purposefully politically motivated.
https://www.thetrace.org/2018/02/florida-school-shooting-teacher-lockdown/
And yet, despite the obviously irrational administrator with the resignation letter described in this quote, every other line in that article describes a situation which would be improved by allowing teachers to carry concealed.
Seriously, keeping screwdrivers, chair legs, and scissors as weapons of opportunity, when you could have something more effective? Opining that you’re fish in a barrel, locked into an inescapable choke point, when that same choke point ALSO allows you to set up a perfect ambush, provided you’re armed with something better than scissors?
The line about stolen phones doesn’t make it any better. Phones get stolen because they get left in desk drawers, not because students mug their teachers for them. And even if students WERE mugging their teachers, you know what would come in handy in a mugging? A gun.
The entire “your gun is more likely to be used against you” narrative is pure BS. That narrative exists because of cases such as an abusive household, where one person buys a gun for defense, and the abuser takes the gun out of wherever it’s stored and uses it against the person who bought it originally, not because of situations where the shooter actually took it off the victim’s person. Such scenarios are possible, of course, but they’re vanishingly rare, and only take place because the victim is unwilling to pull the trigger first. You’re not going to just pickpocket a gun out of a good holster without the owner noticing, much less a good retention holster.
But all that is beside the point. The fact of the matter is, if I were a teacher conducting an active shooter drill, I would MUCH rather tell my students to hide and take cover where possible, while I position myself to shoot an attacker, than try to instruct 8 year olds on how best to employ scissors as a weapon.
Or suicide. The way the anti-gun people twist the stats on that one is the claim that you or a family member are X times more likely to die from a gun in your home than to shoot an intruder…because 20,000 people kill themselves with guns. They try to make it sound like the gun itself is so dangerous that it’s likely to jump out of your nightstand and murder you at any second, or that the criminal is going to grab it before you can and kill you. It’s just a scare tactic. If they presented the details behind the numbers one would just say “oh. Well so long as I’m not suicidal and store my gun safely it’s fine.”
The “gun debate” is barely worth having, because I do not think it is waged in good faith at all. Practically every statistic you get from the anti-gun side is lying with statistics, from counting suicides and justified shootings by police or citizens acting in self defense among all the scary “gun deaths” that prove there’s armed maniacs running around mowing people down to counting among the “18 school shootings that have happened in 2018 so far” a guy who killed himself at an abandoned school. This is not good faith. At this point you might as well just scream “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!” and turn off the TV.
All that said, if you or someone you know is suicidal and has access to a gun, it’s very important to remove that gun from their presence. Consensually and diplomatically, of course, but it just takes one bad night and easy access.
Well, yeah, of course any anti-gun statistic is going to involve SOMEBODY trying to claim suicides. I was just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, here. :op
That isn’t an argument.
If teachers don’t go along with “arm teachers”, what are you going to do…force them?
Or as situation which would be improved by removing the root cause.
And the rest of the post is. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
Of course not. Mandating that teachers be armed has NEVER been the central example of the “arm teachers” argument. The argument has always been that if some teachers do wish to take that responsibility, we should not make it illegal for them to do so.
For example, Aaron Feis, the assistant coach who shielded several students with his body during this latest shooting, was also a volunteer security guard at the school. Considering that he volunteered for that position, don’t you think it’s likely that he also might have volunteered to carry a gun, if it were legal for him to do so? And considering that he had both the time and foreknowledge of the location of the attacker to put himself between the attacker and the students, doesn’t that also imply he might have had time to fire on the attacker before he was hit?
It’s true that there are some proposals in favor of mandating armed guards in schools, but that’s not nearly as widely held a position and runs into issues of funding, which might be better spent on other school programs. But that’s a very different position from mandating that every teacher be armed. There are also proposals to pay for firearms training for teachers, but again, this is not the same as mandating that teachers be armed. Obviously it’s a big responsibility, and teachers have plenty of responsibilities on their plate without forcing another onto them. Everyone I know of who is in favor of armed teachers agrees with this. But the one thing they all do agree with is that teachers should be allowed to be armed, if they wish to be.
The article you posted is one example of a single teacher who doesn’t want to be armed, who gives very spurious, self-contradictory reasons for making that decision. And that’s his/her prerogative. But I know plenty of teachers who would love to be able to protect themselves and their classes from a potential mass shooter. That’s their prerogative, too.
There’s a lot to unpack in this statement.
First, you seem to be under the impression that there’s only a single “root cause.” If you try to solve this problem by only ever fixing one thing, you’re doomed to failure.
Second, even if I assume you’re willing to accept there are multiple causes, you seem to be under the impression that the presence of guns is the most important one. This seems unreasonable to me for a variety of reasons, most notably the fact that there were plenty of guns in America 30+ years ago but these events were significantly less common, so something else must have changed, the fact that we have a much more sensationalistic media than we did back then, which plasters the killer’s face everywhere months, and the fact that the killers mostly all have a similar psychological profile, one which is hopeless and desperate to make a mark on the world, perfectly suited to craving the sort of attention the aforementioned sensationalistic media gives them, and which our mental health system is woefully unprepared to deal with. I could go into more detail about my feelings on all these causes, but considering that this entire thread is about making the argument over whether or not guns are the primary cause of these incidents, that seems a little beside the point here.
Third, even if we assume that guns are the primary cause, what do you propose we do then? I’ve conceded on multiple occasions that, theoretically, a blanket ban on firearms, combined with a strict confiscation program and a massive push by law enforcement to eliminate black market firearms (to include strict border controls) has at least some chance to improve some of the various gun related problems in America. Do you really think that such a program is practical, either politically or technically? The sheer amount of money and bloodshed this program would waste is staggering to imagine, and any lesser program would accomplish less than nothing.
Removing guns from America might solve some problems, but you’re not going to be able to do it. The current situation, on the other hand, in which the guns are present but law-abiding citizens are prevented from carrying them to protect themselves, is the worst of both worlds.
Gun homicide in general was still very high.
Or maybe they believe what you believe
..that guns facilitate suicide.
I’m not even sure that teachers should be allowed to be armed in defiance of the wishes of administrators.
But the administrators should be allowed to, if they wish, let some teachers, that they explicitly approve, arm themselves. Let them make that judgment call based on their own knowledge. If the principal doesn’t want anyone armed, okay, they are the ones who will face the music either way.
Then they could say it? Instead the anti-gunners always lump suicides in with “gun violence” and do not break down the numbers. I’m pretty sure they do this because if they broke down the numbers then normal, non-suicidal people would be less afraid of guns, and fear, not reason, is the goal.
Except this isn’t really true
https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-mass-public-shootings-in-the-us-and-europe/
If you look at the data, you’ll see how using the “rate” of mass shootings is incredibly misleading. They assume that mass shootings increase with population. For most things, like homicide rate or whatever, this works fine. But the correlation for mass shootings is incredibly weak. Most countries, whether they have one million people or 100 million people, have under 3 shootings, and the variation has little to do with population. So in cases like Norway, they take its one shooting back in 2011, extrapolate it out assuming that it would increase linearly with population and suddenly arrive at the conclusion that Norway has a higher “mass shooting rate” than the United States. Also, that case happened to be extremely deadly so that works further against Norway, which doesn’t tell us anything about the frequency of the events happening.
I think the assertion that it has nothing to do at all with population size is patently absurd. That the statistical correlation is weak due to relatively low numbers, is not the same thing as saying that size is irrelevant.
This is all just to say that sweeping conclusions drawn from sparse data sets can’t be relied on. The best way to act on that would be to avoid drawing sweeping conclusions from sparse data sets.
Absurd or not, it’s in the data. Norway had one shooting. I think the United Kingdom, with a population about 13 times the size of Norway, also had one shooting. Do you think that if Norway had the same size as the UK, its mass shooting rate would be higher? In which case, why do you think that its own rate would be so much higher? Is Norway just a violent place? Or do you think the problem comes from extrapolating from a small sample size? Why do you those countries with higher rates have generally small populations? Do small population sizes for countries cause more mass shootings? That’s much more absurd than what I said.
Paul Zrimsek’s point is well taken. If you want to say that the numbers are too small for extrapolation, then that applies just as much to the theory that the US has more shootings as to the theory that it doesn’t.
If the United Kingdom were as violent as the United States, we would expect it to have had approximately two mass shootings with 10+ dead in the past decade. That there was instead one such shooting incident, is probably of no statistical significance but may indicate that the United Kingdom is modestly less prone to such attacks – not an order of magnitude less likely or anything indicating a qualitative difference.
If Norway were as violent as the United States, we would expect it to have had 0.15 such shootings in the past decade, or maybe 0.08 if it were as violent as we might naively calculate the UK to be.
That Norway had a single mass shooting in the past decade says absolutely nothing about Norway, except maybe that it’s not Yemen. There are lots of countries that we would expect to have 0.1-0.2 mass shootings per decade; pointing one of the few that did and saying either “what’s wrong with that country?” or “what’s wrong with your stupid theory that didn’t predict/explain this?”, is pure mathematical illiteracy.
Normalize for population and include statistical error bars, or you are not bringing reason or understanding to the problem.
@John
I have no idea how you are coming up with your numbers. The US population is five times that of the UK. The US had 183 mass shootings. If the Uk had the same rate of mass shootings it would 36.6 shootings. That’s a big difference.
There’s no law of logic that says you have adjust for population. Doing so when there is very little correlation with population size is just as misleading as saying that there are 5.9 popes per square mile. If you believe that adjusting for population is always right, it commits you to beliefs that have no rational basis, like small countries being more prone to mass shootings while no other data indicates this.
@To everyone
So do you all think that small countries are, by their very nature, more likely to have mass shootings than large countries? If that’s true, why don’t homicide statistics have this feature?
I went to Wikipedia and looked at their lists of rampage killings. There are separate categories for familicides, workplace killings, sectarian killings, school massacres, and other rampage killings which do not fit into those categories.
I calculated annual totals for Europe and for the US, from 1990 until the present day, for each of these categories as well as a total number of rampage killings. Then, I looked up the populations of Europe and the US, and calculated rates per billion persons for each of those categories in each of those years. I calculated the average yearly per-billion rate of rampage killings, for each category and for the totals. Then, I calculated 95% confidence intervals for those means.
Here are my results :
Familicide
US : 1.542 – 4.015
Europe : 0.246 – 0.981
Workplace
US : 0.294 – 1.807
Europe : (-0.034) – 0.224
Sectarian
US : 0.075 – 1.681
Europe : 0.166 – 0.771
School
US : 0.790 – 2.466
Europe : 0.039 – 0.526
Other
US : 3.318 – 6.563
Europe : 0.993 – 2.212
Total
US : 9.043 – 13.508
Europe : 2.155 – 3.969
The only set of confidence intervals that did overlap was sectarian shootings, and there was a strong trend toward these being more frequent in the US. Every other category of rampage killings was more frequent in the US.
Edit : yes, I know, not exactly precisely the same thing.
@rahien.din
First, thanks for list. Not an insignificant amount of work.
Second, I need more detail about procedure to compare. Like what’s your denominator for populations? Also, assuming normal distribution of the means to calculate confidence intervals? The wikipedia lists put Russia in Europe which I probably wouldn’t have done but let’s leave it alone.
If I take the list and sum the number of incidents and divide by 27 (number of years) and by 300 million (rough U.S. population), I get 5 per billion. That’s within your range for the category you called “other”. But if I add up the total number of deaths I get ~44 per billion which is far too large to be any of the numbers you gave.
I get similar results for the list for Europe. I use a denominator of 740 million for the population of Europe including Russia. If I count incidents I get 2 per billion which is in your range for “other”. If I count casualties I get ~15 per billion.
So I assume you are counting incidents, but I get one number in the middle of the range you gave and one almost at the top. I assume we are using different population denominators, but there could be other discrepancies.
Different data set, but another guys makes the same point I’ve been making.
@rahien.din
The funny thing is that using his very own data, the US has more mass shootings. If you compare the US to Europe as a whole, then the US has twice the frequency of mass shootings. It’s only by disaggregating the data does the US appear to be in the middle.
But apparently the author might be a fraud, in which case, his data in general is suspect.
The US has not had 183 mass shootings with 10+ dead. I think I have been very explicit every time I have brought this up that I am talking about mass shootings with 10+ dead. That is how I get my numbers, and I believe they are correct by that definition.
I also believe that this definition much better represents the phenomenon that people are talking about here, and that it is much easier to independently verify across nations.
For your claim of 183 mass shootings in the US, A: what is the time period, B: what is the definition of “mass shooting” being used, C: what is your source, and D: what is the source that gives the number of “mass shootings” for the UK by the same definition? Shootings of 10+ people I believe will be reliably tabulated in e.g. wikipedia.
@quanta413,
My data come from these lists :
Familicides (Americas)
Familicides (Europe)
Workplace (all)
Religious, political, or racial (All)
School (All)
Rampage killers not of the other categories (Americas)
Rampage killers not of the other categories (Europe)
My denominator is the population of region in question, for that calendar year.
One error I made : I had not included Russia. In retrospect this is dumb. With Russia included, the only conclusion that changed is that the category of incidence of workplace killings now has overlapping confidence intervals, but with a trend for those killings being more frequent in the US.
One thing that is debatable : I had initially used a normal distribution to calculate confidence intervals. Given the data, I should maybe use student’s t. I reran everything with student’s t, and no conclusions changed, but I left it that way.
I had only examined the incidence of mass shootings, rather than fatalities or casualties. But, it would be easy for me to add those numbers too.
Here are my results. The first confidence interval in each set is incidence of rampages, the second is fatalities per rampage normed to population, the third is casualties per rampage normed to population. Bold indicates the higher of non-overlapping confidence intervals. Italics indicates the higher of overlapping confidence intervals that trend a certain way (at least by my inspection).
Familicide
U.S : 1.5 – 4.1 | 10.4 – 27.6 | 10.7 – 29.5
Europe : 0.3 – 1.1 | 1.5 – 6.8 | 1.5 – 7.5
Workplace
U.S : 0.3 – 1.8 | 1.3 – 13.4 | 1.8 – 21.8
Europe : (0) – 0.3 | (-0.2) – 1.7 | (-0.3) – 3.3
Sectarian
U.S : 0 – 1.7 | (-2.9) – 22.9 | (-15.5) – 121.9
Europe : 0.2 – 0.8 | 1.4 – 23.4 | (-4.5) – 116.9
School
U.S : 0.8 – 2.5 | 4.8 – 27.4 | 14.6 – 56.2
Europe : 0 – 0.5 | 0.4 – 6.1 | 0.1 – 10.1
Other
U.S : 3.2 – 6.6 | 18.8 – 65.2 | 11.1 – 254.5
Europe : 1.2 – 2.8 | 9 – 19.5 | 17.5 – 53.3
Total
U.S : 8.9 – 13.6 | 67 – 121.8 | 123.3 – 383.3
Europe : 2.5 – 4.8 | 21.3 – 48.3 | 31.8 – 173.5
ETA : minor clarification in data sources, initially forgot the italics
Wrong Species,
A very important point.
Is it though?
Although the second amendment does provide an upper floor on what sort of gun laws are permitted at the federal level, by in large, a lot of the “tinkering around the edges” gun laws are enforced at the state level.
If you tried to normalize for nation size by say, disagrregating every state – how would that compare to Europe? I’d guess that there would be some American states at the very top, and some near the bottom, and that the correlation of placement would not reflect the strictness of gun laws in the various states. At least, my perception is not that California has significantly fewer mass shootings than Texas.
Matt M,
It is. It does matter how you segment the data and what means you calculate, in order to answer the question.
Say we wanted to compare Chicago, IL, to Richmond, VA, in order to determine which has the higher murder rate. If we compare one city to another as wholes, Chicago has a higher murder rate. That seems valid, even though Chicago is bigger than Richmond.
If we compare Chicago to the various neighborhoods within Richmond, certain Richmond neighborhoods will have higher murder rates than Chicago as a whole. That seems invalid. Wrong Species is claiming that Lott (in cassander’s article) had made this invalid move.
If we compare all the neighborhoods in Chicago to all the neighborhoods in Richmond, we have then made it more complicated to answer our initial question. There is now an additional necessary step whereby we calculate the centers-of-mass for the murder rates of Chicago’s and Richmond’s neighborhoods, and then compare those centers-of-mass, so that we can make a valid comparison that do not violate logic by inappropriately comparing means-of-means. One would have to provide a very good reason for adding that extra step, especially if this extra step resulted in some significant change.
It’s the same thing with your suggestion that the US data be de-aggregated into data for each US state, then to be compared to the data for each European nation.
The whole thing is a bait and switch (not a motte-and-bailey, just a regular one):
is the bait
is the switch.
Suppose the US really does have a twice-as-high rate of relevant shootings as the first world average. Now suppose the US institutes some measure, measure X, which reduces this rate of shootings by 50%. Is anyone (aside from statisticians and a few rationalists) going to notice? No, because we take each incident on its own as an indictment of the situation. The Onion will still be running that same “bait” headline after every incident, and everyone pushing measures W, Y, and Z will continue to push for measures W, Y, and Z, while the X people will be pushing for measure 2X.
I’ve gotten in the habit (on another forum, not here) – of simply re-posting the link to that Onion article, without commentary, any time a mass-murder in a non-US country makes the national news.
I’m not suggesting anything – I’m asking. Which jurisdictions are most relevant?
Comparing the US to the EU, and each state to each member nation both seem like they would make sense.
And my theory is that yeah, comparing the US to EU leads to the US looking bad, but disaggregating would tell a much different story. I’m not sure which of those stories is “better.” Both are probably relevant. The high-level story might suggest “Yes, this is a national problem, traceable to the second amendment.” While the low-level story might suggest something like “Tinkering around with magazine sizes is pointless and has no effect – the only real option is repealing the second amendment and taking all guns away.”
Which is useful data to have. If the only difference maker is “Do we take everyone’s guns or don’t we?” then that’s the argument we need to be having – not this “better mental health! lower magazine sizes! gun show loophole!” nonsense…
@rahien.din
Not actually relevant to argument at hand but
This appears to be giving confidence intervals that occasionally go negative. My instinct is that any procedure that has this result is having its assumptions violated so you’d have to do something more complicated. A bootstrapping procedure would work without making many assumptions about the true process generating the distribution. Not worth the work though.
@John
If the definition of mass shooting doesn’t include Elliot Rodger, then it has no place in the debate.
@Nybbler
The Onion article was just snark. In my actual argument, I never said that it literally never happens in other European countries, which is obviously false.
Is anyone (aside from statisticians and a few rationalists) going to notice?
If we go from a mass shooting twice a year to every couple of years, people are going to notice.
@Matt M
Let’s say we have an idyllic village that is generally peaceful with a population of 100 people. Over a 50 year period, they have had one murder. I make the claim that it’s actually more dangerous than the most dangerous places today. Adjusted for population, the murder rate is 10,000 per 100,000, 200 times the rate of Venezuela. Would you feel more safe in the village or downtown Baltimore?
And again, I should I point out that we’re using the data of a man who is known to have ethical issues, so there’s very strong reason to distrust it.
Matt M,
I see what you’re saying. And I agree that the larger picture doesn’t generate the actionable conclusions that we need – whether the correct action is “leave everything the way it is,” “beat our guns into plowshares,” or something in between. I think you’re right that the next step is tocreate a genuine hypothesis about causes. That hypothesis would tell you how to segment the data, and would help justify the techniques you used thereafter.
But I worry when you state your theory so. The hypothesis can not be “the data will look different when disaggregated.” You’d run a significant danger of making an invalid comparison. Utterly crazy shit can happen when you segment data. Even if you find something correct, you’ll be hard-pressed to reject the null hypothesis of “this is an artifact of bad statistical technique,” or worse, you’ll be accused of p-hacking.
Everyone on each side needs to be unimpeachable in their statistics. I favor a greater degree of gun control, but if I’m wrong, I want to have zero wiggle room when presented the truth.
(Take this as a compliment : I’m not 100% certain what you favor!)
quanta413,
I agree, we know that the actual number can’t possibly be negative. And I agree with you that (at least from my standpoint) it’s not worth the effort to correct them to more “real” numbers.
Absent that correction, I interpret those data as : the variance of those data and their low mean prevent us from distinguishing that mean from zero by this technique. That interpretation seems valid and useful. It also seems plausible that whether a bootstrapping procedure would effectively reduce the variance, or, effectively raise the mean, or both, it would not eliminate many of those differences. But correct me where I am wrong.
@Wrong:
I will respond that if the definition of mass shooting does include Troy Blake or Charles Gilleo, then it also has no place in the debate. “Mass shooting” as commonly used is an ill-defined term that has a very fuzzy boundary, but those two (among many others on the list) aren’t it.
If you want a statistical comparison across nations, which is what I was addressing, then any consistent and rigorous definition will do so long as it mostly encompasses the kind of killings most people refer to as “mass shootings”. It doesn’t have to be exhaustive.
If you want an exhaustive list of what are commonly understood to be mass shootings, you are going to have to spend literally days pouring through lists of hundreds of shooting incidents in the US and around the world, and then defending your categorization of marginal cases from people who disagree with you. And you’ll have to do it yourself, because the subject is too enmeshed in the culture war to trust anyone who volunteers to do it for you.
And if you want to talk about all shootings with 4+ dead, then you are referring to something different than what most people who use the term “mass shooting” are talking about and you should use a different term. And you are looking for a different set of solutions, because e.g. armed robbery gone bad isn’t going to be stopped by gun control or improved mental health care or by denying the criminal his fifteen minutes of fame. And you are doing it in the wrong place, because this discussion is an ill-timed response to a very very atypical example of a 4+ casualty shooting.
@John
When people say that we are worried about gun control, they have certain incidents in mind. Not counting those incidents is a rhetorical sleight of hand. On the one hand, we want something that includes these incidents otherwise, we aren’t addressing their concerns. Not only that but the fewer data points you have, the more likely the remaining data is going to be noise. I could arbitrarily decide that mass shootings only include those with more than 50 deaths but that wouldn’t be meaningful. But on the other hand, we obviously don’t want to include things like gang shootings. So it has to be somewhere in between.
But none of that is actually pertinent to the discussion at hand. From all the data I’ve seen, Europe has fewer mass shootings than the US, even based on the data from a shady guy who’s biased against the conclusion. Where is the data that compares the US with Europe as a whole and concludes that America doesn’t have more mass shootings?
Counting other incidents that aren’t what people have in mind, is also rhetorical sleight of hand. And when you say that the United States has had “183 mass shootings” in some ill-defined time period, that is what you are doing.
Or would you care to provide a list of all 183 alleged mass shootings, and defend each and every one of them as being among the “certain incidents” that people have in mind?
This has been linked before,and shot down (sorry) before as well.
I don’t understand why you think successfully banning firearms equates to successfully banning killing. Why won’t people who want to cause mass death just resort to car attacks or gas or bombs (both perfectly easy to figure out how to make if you care enough to actually do it; the recipe for ANFO is literally the name of the compound?)
Heck, with people saying “make media spread memes that will reduce mass murderer’s lethality,” I suspect the “guns are the appropriate tool for mass killing” message is already succeeding at that. Ramming a stolen semi truck or heavy construction equipment (both of which are rarely secured properly) into a building is probably going to be a lot more effective in terms of harm to people per incident. Look at the Killdozer guy.
I don’t know why people always say this. No one is making the argument that banning guns will immediately eliminate all killing. The argument is that it will reduce the total number of killings. The easier it is to kill someone, the more likely it is to happen. You can see this in suicide statistics, where gun control not only lowers the rate of suicide by gun, but it also reduces the general rate of suicide.
Where no good argument supports a claim, bad arguments are used.
Make a comparison to medicine. It’s broadly true that if you
cure one disease, people will die of something else, but it’s no motivation not to cure diseases one by one.
If people start using machetes instead of guns, you can ban machetes.
Very, very few people are killed with “assault rifle” style weapons. Blunt weapons – stereotypically, baseball bats –
are used in more killings – nearly twice as many.
So maybe instead of banning rifles, or machetes, we should ban baseball bats – we could eliminate 400 deaths per year!
Or maybe murder is more complex a problem than the weapon used.
So my question is – Is a complete and total ban of semiautomatic weapons “on the table” for discussion here – or isn’t it?
The way I’m seeing the issue framed by the local people (Portlanders) in my Facebook feed is “F*** your Second Amendment rights.” They want to ban all gun ownership, because other First World countries do and it’s evil that the Constitution matters when kids are getting killed.
But we’re talking about a Berniebro bubble: I doubt that it’ll be on the table nationally. If Hillary Clinton had won, I’d give better than even odds that she’d be solemnly handwaving at “common sense gun control” rather than proposing any legislation that’d have trouble at the Supreme Court.
Yes, bubbles everyone , but “BernieBro” is rather dismissive, isn’t it?
Agreed, it probably won’t be on the table nationally, ever. But here’s my speculative bubble…
Australia is the often cited example of a western country that had relatively permissive gun ownership (if not US level), had mass shootings, and their society reached a point with said ‘enough’ – just over 20 years ago, without much objection (certainly nothing about new civil wars!). Conventional wisdom is that it has ‘worked’.
Having lived in both for long periods of time, I think the cultural similarities between Australia and, no not the whole U.S., but California in particular, are just huge. Far far closer than the UK. Only Canada might come close, but I think on the whole more divergent. The populations are even similar (well, within factor of 2). So I absolutely can imagine California having it’s “Australia 1996” moment, complete with the lack of major dissent – if it weren’t for that 2nd amendment.
How about a national agreement, leading to a constitutional change, that let states go their own way on gun control?
The best I can find is that Australia’s gun ownership before and after gun buybacks is comparable (7% before to 5% after) to the lowest gun ownership of all 50 states (Delaware at 5.2%). But by the time we move up a whopping 2 positions to New York the rate is at 10.3%. And California is tied with Nebraska at 19.8%.
I don’t think Australia is culturally comparable on this issue even to most of the least gun happy states.
I’ve seen the compliance rate with the Australian law variously reported between 20% and 33%. A similar success here would, I believe, reduce ownership rates to about what they were in the early 1990s. Don’t expect miracles!
The nice thing about trying it in California only is that they’ll be able to blame their failure on Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon.
One of the best pieces I’ve seen on the disconnect between sides on this was written by Ken White at Popehat.com:
https://www.popehat.com/2015/12/07/talking-productively-about-guns/
The whole article is worth reading, but his discussion of why the seeming lack of caring about terminology from the gun control side deserves special mention:
“Me”: Honestly, you are right, and I was being naive; sorry. But it’s a fact that a whole lot of people died last year from dog XXX attacks (to fit the narrative, I’d say Rottweiler, except it’s not true), and hardly any from all of these [… long list] breeds. Is there no way to draw a line the mitigates the harm, and still give most of the benefits of dog ownership to almost everyone?
“You”: Absolutely not. First, slippery slope. And second, no clear lines, I’ll find a horrible stories involving quite a few of your supposedly safe breeds. Let’s talk when you have an unambiguous line in the sand to propose – although if you understand what I’ve said you’ll realize there never can be one.
“Me”: I notice that there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of appetite, in much of the country, to loosen restrictions on owning pure-bred wolves.
“You:” So what. And you talk funny; what is this word “mitigates” anyway? But back to business, I’ll dissect (I mean discuss) your suggestion rationally when you can come up with a crisp proposal of the breed line you want to draw.
In the analogy, the guy has no idea what traits dog XXX actually has or how they are connected to attacks on people. Why should we expect him to know what he’s talking about when he says that a whole lot of people died from dog XXX?
I’m not entirely sure what your point is here. Is “You” supposed to sound like he’s arguing in bad faith? Unfortunately it’s “Me” who has poor facts or a bad analogy.
But what the left/media is going on about now is “assault weapons” or AR-15s. Except rifles are used in extremely few shootings, mass or otherwise. Your typical “mass shooter” is a gangbanger with a Hi-Point (cheap handgun maker) shooting up the competition in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, etc.
So, no there is no way to draw a line that includes semi-auto handguns while still giving the benefit of gun ownership to almost everyone, because almost everyone who has a handgun for self defense is using a semi-auto handgun.
Also, the whole “you can’t hunt with an AR-15” thing is silly. Lots of people hunt with AR-15s. Or pest control. I know of a guy with a farm who has to clear out wild hogs all the time. They breed like crazy, so there’s no bag limit. My brother-in-law and my nephews go to his farm about once a year with an AR, drive around, shoot as many hogs as they can see, and drag one back to butcher.
Here is an idea already in use in several states that probably would have prevented this particular incident and might merit wider adoption, though I worry that the due-process considerations the author insists upon might get lost in all the shouting.
Precisely. In practice such orders would be mostly used as weapons in domestic disputes of various sorts. They would essentially all be granted ex parte, they’d come up with some reason to make it permanent every time, e.g. “respondent continued to possess weapons in violation of GVRO”, even when GVRO was ex parte. Or “respondent was angry when we came to take his guns”. And even if one was beaten or expired, the guns would somehow not be returned. Having been the subject of such an order (even if lifted) would be used (like certain ex parte mental health committments) to disqualify the person from buying more guns. And you’d still have mass shootings.
That’s not what happened in the first year of the CA system. Do you have a time frame in which you predict that the CA system will degenerate to that?
Well that 72 hours for a hearing thing is right out the window; California provides for a 21-day order before a hearing. There’s already a bill to expand the California law to “add employers, co-workers, high school and college staff, and mental health workers to the list of individuals who can seek a restraining order.” Law enforcement can already request an order on their own.
There were 86 orders in California, 10 of which were extended to 1 year. I have not found information on what most of those orders were, or if the guns were indeed returned.
Which spouse, parent, sibling, or cohabitant of this shooter thought he was an imminent danger to others?
What evidence do we have that depriving him of his guns “temporarily” would have caused him to reconsider his plan, or would have stopped him permanently?
Possibly none; the tip that the FBI blew off came from “an adult close to Cruz”. By all accounts, everyone who knew the guy was scared, though you never know how much store to set by these after-the-fact declarations.
Even stopping him temporarily would have been an improvement. At least you’ve got a shot at making it permanent.
I’m posting tangential to your questions, but you’ve already got a lot of responses to your post already.
I would like to see more organized, mandatory, training. And laws pertaining to storage and access.
I’d like to see the training at the local (county) level by the county sheriffs. This would include everything from basic training to how to work together to identify and stop the actual wrongdoer without harming innocents and other do-gooders with guns (e.g. how you should react if a hypothetical gunman throws out some smoke bombs and starts shooting from concealment at a gun show, or if said hypothetical gunman claims to be a good guy).
I’d like to see this training mandatory for everyone who has purchased a gun – maybe on the order of one mandatory training day per year. They could be slightly compensated (ala jury duty compensation). This would also give each sheriff a list of trained people to call up under posse comitatus when the need arises.
Training and proper storage, regardless of gun control, would help in the prevention of those gun-related deaths which are accidents or suicides. It would also help enable lawful gun owners to actually halt mass casualty events. It might also help a few messed up people feel more positively connected to their neighbors.
I mean this with no offense, but of all the things I hear recommended, this one seems the craziest.
How would mandatory training have improved this situation? By making the shooter better at using his guns?
Storage and access? The kid stored his gun in a locked safe.
You’re talking about accidents and suicides… that has nothing to do with the outrage that ensues following mass shootings.
If you think mass shootings are all the media and the left talk about when talking about guns, you aren’t paying attention.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/31/kids-accidentally-shot-people-5-times-a-week-this-year-on-average/?utm_term=.3dd3f7da5866
I said that my post was tangential!
No, but I do think that the left and the media use mass shootings as justification to promote their other agendas vis-a-vis gun control.
This is exactly the sort of “politicizing a tragedy” that I think is indefensible, BTW. I have no major qualm of, in the wake of a tragedy, proposing solutions that would be directly applicable to preventing that type of tragedy from happening again. But I have a major problem with using a tragedy to misdirect people towards supporting policy suggestions that seem vaguely similar but actually have nothing to do with the tragedy that just happened.
To use a tribal-flipped example, advocating for “increased training requirements to prevent accidents and suicides” immediately in the wake of a school shooting is akin to “Some Saudis just committed an act of domestic terrorism, therefore we must invade Iraq to prevent it from happening again!” It’s rank emotional manipulation that we should wholly reject – not as members of any particular tribe – but as rationalists and rationalist adjacent people.
Edit: I don’t mean to be personal here. I concede that you admitted your answer was tangential, and therefore, I do not accuse you individually of exploiting people’s emotions in the wake of a tragedy.
I agree with your post. In this particular case, the increased training requirements is a partial rebuttal to the frequent right-wing claim that arming more people would nip these active-shooter tragedies in the bud. There’s no reason to think that armed people, without specific active-shooter training, will make the situation better.
Hmm, not sure I agree with this part. I’m not aware of any high-profile incidents of a civilian trying to stop a mass shooter with a gun, but “making the situation worse” due to poor training or whatever (although it’s certainly plausible, as the police often seem to shoot innocent people when in pursuit of criminals).
Suicides I basically dismiss as unpreventable. If someone wants to kill themselves, they’ll find a way (personally, I’m not convinced this is a problem at all, although I have some odd/unpopular views on suicide).
Accidents tend to be of the “children, left unsupervised, getting their hands on guns” scenario. In which case “training” might work, although I think the relevant training is more of the “parents teach kids that guns are very serious things and not toys” variety than the “parents take a mandatory government class on how to shoot a firearm” variety.
I haven’t heard of any such proposition – but something like “If you want to keep a gun in your house, your children are required to take a gun safety course” might make a meaningful difference – although it probably isn’t politically feasible.
Not yet, no. This is the NRA talking point, though. And if it eventually happens I’d rather it work well.
One sad case I read about was a three year old girl reaching for a snack in a cupboard, knocking a stored handgun to the ground (that she couldn’t see), which shot her in the stomach, killing her.
Kids will get into things.
Another, recent, case was a training accident while the father was distracted answering a phone call.
Except that the current recommendation is that if you can’t get everyone clear of or locked down from an active shooter, even unarmed resistance by completely untrained people will make the situation better. Run. Hide. Fight. And with good reason – actual spree killers usually break off their attack when they face any significant resistance, going into “run, hide die” mode.
If the fear is that “untrained” civilians will cause mass carnage by shooting at each other and/or firing wildly into the crowd, that basically never happens. Shootings of innocent bystanders by armed citizens are extremely rare, less likely even than shootings of innocent bystanders by policemen.
ETA: That last isn’t an indictment of policemen, who face a more complicated threat environment. If a civilian has reason to shoot at someone, it will be really bloody obvious who the bad guy is.
I hope so. And I hope it’s also obvious to everyone else around.
The fact that the recent Florida shooter used smoke bombs makes me somewhat leery.
Volokh has a list of possible mass shootings stopped by armed non-police-officers here.
#1, #2, #5, #6, and #8 seem rather convincing.
#3, #4, and #7 leave open the possibility of the gunman having shot the specific people he intended to already. #9 and #10 it’s possible the shooting was over.
#5 the gunman never opened fire, but I’m not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who kicks in a door while carrying a shotgun.
#6 involved a trained responder (a Marine)
So by the strictest of criteria from Volokh’s list, three active shooter incidents stopped by an armed but not trained civilian. I’d say that’s reason to think armed people will make things better.
@John Schilling
I know that “fight” is the last stage there, but I don’t know how much the people who wrote it expect that it’ll make the situation better. It’s only not likely to make the situation worse, and hey, maybe the horse will sing.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that you should fight if backed into a corner; the advice is good*. However, successfully fighting back against an armed killer when you’re unarmed (or using improvised weapons) is a really low-probability-of-success strategy, and that’s why it should be done as an absolute last resort**.
* I mean, if that ever happens to me, I’m planning to fight if I can’t escape or hide (I work for a government agency that occasionally is embroiled in controversy, so the probability is still really, really small, but slightly larger than for most offices). The problem is, that’s easy to say when I’m sitting in my chair in front of my computer, like most Internet Tough Guys™. So I hope that I’ll live up to my standards, but won’t really know unless it happens.
@The Nybbler
Thanks for the list.
In all of these circumstances a key point is that there was exactly one firearmed good guy who took action. I think it’s plausible that even had there been more firearmed good guys in, eg, the bar situation, that the rest wouldn’t have responded after the first did, thus unintentional escalation is unlikely.
I still think training is likely to be worthwhile even in incidences such as this. I could be wrong though, as training seems to have helped the Florida killer be as deadly as he was. Mandatory training might increase the number of armed and trained good guys, but it is also likely to increase the number of trained bad guys.
In the case of school shootings, I almost wonder if “fight” should be #1?
When the shooter opens the classroom, what might happen if every student stood up and charged him at once? Some would surely be shot and killed. But if we’re talking 10-20 people, odds are someone is going to get to him and disarm him.
It occurs to me that this might very well be a superior outcome to “hide under the desk and hope he doesn’t care to shoot you as he methodically walks by and shoots everyone, then goes to the next classroom and does the same thing.”
Also, I mean, yeah, easy for me to say, right. I’m sure in that situation I wouldn’t have the balls to charge a guy with loaded weapons either, even if it was “for the greater good”
During the Texas Tower shooting, an unknown but large number of armed citizens returned fire. This had the effect of driving the mass murder to cover, ending the part of the incident where innocent people were gunned down, and involved zero incidents of armed citizens shooting innocent bystanders and/or each other.
@Matt M
The “run, hide, fight” paradigm from the video is a little deceptive if you break it down to those three words alone; they’re mostly just a useful mnemonic to help you remember the training.
What they’re calling “hide” is to turn off the lights in the room, silence your cell phone (to include turning off “vibrate”!), lock or barricade the door, and get under the desk. The guy is likely to just try the knob, or take a quick glance in, and if he either can’t get it open in a second or two, or his glance into the room reveals only darkness and he hears no people, he’s probably just going to move along. Time is his enemy and he’s probably not going to try to breach a locked or barricaded door, nor conduct an extensive search without hearing or seeing people in the room.
Your situation, where the active shooter is in the room and methodically searching under desks, is probably in the “fight” category.
So do you have a rational, non-emotional solution or do you just want to maintain the status quo?
PS preventing suicides isn’t like invading Iraq, because preventing suicides is good.
I believe that if concealed carry is allowed in school zones that the best case scenario is you will have more Vegas’s and Texas tower shootings, and other shootings from concealment.
I don’t believe it will stop the number of mass shootings, though it might decrease the number of casualties in some thanks to the increased potential for concealment of victims, and increase the casualties in others thanks to the increased difficulty in taking out the shooter.
Eh, this is one that’s really not true. Not all suicides are truly determined to kill themselves. They might have been having ideation for a long time, but it’s usually a “moment of weakness,” combined with having the means available. There are about 20,000 suicides by gun each year in the US. If you could snap your fingers and make all guns in the US disappear, that number would fall dramatically, because an awful lot of men, denied the fast and reliable way of ending it would instead find a way to go right on living. They would not instead switch to pills or jumping off roofs or banging their heads against the pavement.
In Britain, people used to suicide by gas ovens, but once the technology changed to make it more difficult, lots of people just stopped killing themselves.
Some people switched from gas to something else, but a third of people just say “meh” and went on living. A similar thing would happen with guns.
That said, of course, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED, cold dead hands, etc.
People can change their minds.
Better than what ? In the absence of stringent controls,
you are not arming the good guys selectively, you are just making it easy for good and bad guy alike to get hold of a gun. The US has thousands of gun homicides a year, so a few preventions is a drop in the ocean.
Two things:
First, the list we’re talking about is specifically about mass shootings, and we’re talking about concealed carry as a potential solution to those. “Better,” in this case, means “more likely to stop a mass shooting before more people are killed.” Bringing the total number of gun homicides into the equation is beside the point; whether or not concealed carry helps with that is an entirely different debate, without any clear conclusion, but at the very least it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t make things worse.
Second concealed carry laws don’t make it easier for anyone, good guy or bad, to get hold of a gun. It just makes it easier for them to carry the guns they’ve already obtained, something which is incredibly easy for anyone to break the law on, simply due to the nature of concealment. For all I know, you might even be right that it should be more difficult for people to purchase guns; I don’t agree with you, but there’s certainly a reasonable debate to be had about it. But once the guns are out there, making it illegal to carry them only benefits the bad guys.
The point is that legal restrictions disarm the good guys selectively, since they are the ones more likely to obey the law. Removing such restrictions arms the good guys selectively because the bad guys are already armed.
That puzzles me. Are there really no cases where someone panicked, or lost their temper, and started shooting unnecessarily?
Everyone knows that .
Timescales make a difference.
As do the right. The obvious response to a school shooting with a legal weapon is to ban weapon sales to teens, but the pro gun side have sidelined that in favour of their existing agenda to extend concealed carry.
Have they? The NRA’s official response to the age limit issue has been a resounding “eh, whatever,” Florida Republicans seem to be well on their way to passing an age limit increase, Trump has repeatedly stated that he’s open to anything, and I pointed it out in this very thread as an example of a policy which, while it probably wouldn’t have stopped any other mass shootings, might very well have prevented this one.
Telling people that they shouldn’t IGNORE an important component of any real comprehensive solution to the problem, which has an actual chance to succeed, is not the same as actively opposing other peoples’ solutions. The gun control measures that get active vociferous opposition are the ones which won’t make any appreciable difference (which, admittedly, is almost all of them) and ones that call for blanket bans on just about everything. It’s true that there’s SOME opposition to the age limit increase, but it’s hardly widespread, and is mostly an artifact of the (well deserved) sense among gun rights advocates that their opponents are not arguing in good faith.
You don’t know that arming teachers will succeed. But it’s part of your pre-existing agenda.
ie, *their* pre-existing agenda is bad, yours is fine.
Your argument was that the pro-gun side sidelined discussion of banning the sale of rifles to teens, in favor of their pre-existing agenda. As the part of my post that you conveniently ignored clearly pointed out, they did no such thing, and in fact have been doing the exact opposite.
People get killed in accidents too. But training is pretty toothless without the ability to refuse someone a license at the end.
Training is, for the purpose at hand, useless. With or without the ability to refuse someone a license at the end, so what are you planning to do with those teeth?
maybe you could argue that point.
The answer to your first question, of course, is no. Laws are not magic spells.
IE, laws do not prevent specific instances of crimes. When I press on the accelerator pedal in my car, the law does not physically prevent my car from exceeding the speed limit. For a very pertinent example, the act of killing another citizen is very tightly regulated. It’s only permissible in extreme circumstances, and then, only de facto. The clear, unambiguous, and uncontroversial law against murder did not prevent these murders. Laws do not prevent specific instances of crimes.
Laws do not prevent specific instances of crimes – everyone gets that laws do not prevent specific instances of crimes. Sheesh. But laws do have effects.
For instance, the National Firearms Act part 26 U.S.C. 5845, 27 CFR 479, which classifies the M203 as a destructive device. You or I can buy an M203, training rounds, and live grenade rounds. If we wanted to get good at shooting grenades, we could legally accomplish that. It would be really difficult and expensive, and we would subject ourselves to lots of paperwork and governmental scrutiny, but it would be legal. I’m sure there are tons of people who would enjoy shooting 40mm grenades at the range on a Saturday afternoon, and if restrictions were relaxed, more people could enjoy that legitimate pastime – kind of like how you can go fire a 50 caliber machine gun at certain gun ranges. I sure would. That genuinely sounds like fun. I will pony up so we can buy a junk car to blow to smithereens. But, under the current regime, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
It is my very plausible guess that if one could buy an M203 and a box of 40mm grenades for 500 bucks at the gun show, and if there were grenade-launcher clubs who practiced with each other at their grenade-launcher ranges, a shooter such as Stephen Paddock might be enabled to sling one under his rifle and wield live ammo with proficiency. These shooters aren’t trying to field-test their AR-15’s, eschewing all the more lethal options out of principle. They’re trying to maximize their kills. One of them would have blown the shit out of a crowd of civilians by now if it was at all feasible.
So I am extremely happy that the laws regarding destructive devices are so very onerous. I prefer the world in which mass shooters only have AR-15’s to the world in which they have M203’s, too. Yeah, granted : it is still possible for a very determined nutjob to explode a Baptist congregation with a grenade launcher. But that is extremely unlikely. And to me, it seems that the only reason why is the law that makes it hard for a civilian to own, maintain, and train on a barrel-slung grenade launcher.
So this legal framework is effective. I think we should apply it more broadly.
I don’t want people to stop enjoying guns (the Australians certainly enjoy theirs!) or stop being able to use them proficiently (the Swiss sure can!). I just want these mass shootings to be very unlikely. And to answer your second question, that necessarily means I want it to be harder for everyone to get, keep, and fire guns. Maybe not as hard as it is to get an M203 and its munitions. But meaningfully harder than it currently is. That seems to be what works, here and elsewhere. And not because ink on paper somehow magically halts the violent outbursts of the criminally insane.
There’s no way Paddock could have hit anything with an M203 at that range. MAYBE because of his elevation he might have been able to hit the very outside edge of the concert, but even that’s pushing it.
To attempt to recap the discussion here – I feel like I’ve heard three general themes of answers:
1. Reduced magazine size. While my estimates suggest that the overall effect of this would be very low, I concede that it would provide some marginal benefit in terms of either forcing shooters to spend more time reloading (and less time shooting) and/or allowing additional opportunities for someone to forcibly stop the shooter when they are distracted with reloading. And when the metric we’re using is “lives saved” I’ll concede that even small effects are, in fact, better than nothing.
2. Ban all semiautomatic weapons. I do not accept “assault weapons” as a legitimate category as nobody seems to be able to properly define it (here, or anywhere else). A complete ban on all semiautomatic weapons might serve to make them as rare as fully automatic weapons, grenade launchers, or other things that are wholly banned as of today. This would make shooters less effective as well (although it’s not as if you can’t fire a bolt-action rifle fairly quickly with some reasonable amount of training). That said, I think this is completely and totally unfeasible both politically, and constitutionally. It’s also rarely argued for in the mainstream, because it pretty much does look and feel like “Yes – we are coming to take your guns away.”
3. A “mixed basket” of various “minor reforms.” I’m somewhat sympathetic to the argument of “no one individual law would make a difference – but five small changes together might.” In theory, this can definitely happen in some situations. I’m very skeptical it applies here though, as, when people start naming the things that would be in the basket, most of them either already exist, or do not seem remotely relevant to the typical media-outrage mass shooting.
*4. Cultural changes unrelated to gun-control. I count this as a separate category because this was a question about gun control specifically. I agree that this is probably the best option. I may prepare an effort post on my own theory to answer the question of “Why does this happen here and not Canada IF NOT gun control?” I’m pretty sure I have an answer, which at a high level is “culture” and at a more detailed level is “Five different elements of culture that don’t seem huge on their own, but combine to create a prime environment for this sort of thing to happen (similar to the logic of #3 above). I may post this in the next CW-allowed OT, assuming I get around to actually writing it.
As for what is mainstream- Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist at the New York Times, ran a column titled “Repeal The Second Amendment“, after Las Vegas, and doubled down on it with a second column after this shooting in Florida.
But I think both of you are underestimating the extent to which repealing the 2nd is necessary for banning semiautomatics. There’s no reason that DC. vs. Heller can’t be revisited, or even explicitly overruled by a future Supreme Court (the recent Obergefell v. Hodges decision regarding gay marriage for example, was an explicit over-ruling of a previous Supreme Court decision).
Sure the Supreme Court can technically validate any law. But in this case, it would just kick off a massive power struggle at the federal level because nothings less than federal level ban is going to satisfy people who want to ban semiautos. The U.S. is too geographically connected and has no internal interstate border control, so nothing less would work well unless you want to leave criminals just as well armed as now.
And currently the power struggle still favors the pro-gun side since only ~30% of Americans even affirmatively want to restrict just handguns (see history of polls over time I linked earlier).
The idea is to overrule DC. vs. Heller, paving the way for instituting a federal ban. Of course there will be a “power struggle”, that is just politics as usual. My point is that none of this requires repealing the 2nd Amendment.
Of course, this involves changing society’s attitudes towards guns, otherwise they aren’t going to vote for politicians to enact such laws. This isn’t a problem unique to my solution- has anyone else in this thread proposed “the solution is to just poll the majority of people and do whatever they vote for”? No? Changing hearts and minds is like, the whole deal here.
If you are looking for the answer to “how do we get people to the point where they support a federal gun ban?”, the answer is to gradually erode gun culture from every angle. That’s why the small things matter.
It’s not:
Restrict guns-> less guns -> less deaths
Its:
Restrict guns -> erodes gun culture (less gun familiarity, less glorification) -> less guns -> less deaths
Eroding gun culture can involve social shaming, ostracism (can employers discriminate against gun owners?), treating guns in advertising like porn, outlawing open carry, having social media ban photos of guns, ect.
Well if you put it that way, how could red tribe possibly say no?
“We’re not trying to take your guns! All we want is to destroy your culture!”
@Matt M: “Uh, yes, we know. Now go away.”
That’s the dirty secret though, no? The problem is, at its core, gun culture. Which is primarily cultivated by the Red Tribe.
Optimistically, since the Red Tribe was somehow able to reconcile with gay marriage, then perhaps they can change their minds about this too. Culture is malleable.
Pessimistically, no change will occur until a demographic wave crushes the Red Tribe into electoral oblivion, rendering their opinion on the situation irrelevant.
Perhaps speaking only for myself, I don’t think of it that way at all.
I think that gun culture is a genuine and legitimate part of American culture. We shouldn’t get rid of it.
But gun culture in its current form is helping the worst among us to slaughter the most vulnerable among us. I want gun culture to incorporate a larger measure of responsibility for ensuring that gun violence is made less likely. Gun culture is not eroded or destroyed by that – gun culture is validated, ennobled, strengthened, and codified.
Consider licensing requirements for driving a car. If these didn’t exist, we’d have more dangerous roads. If drivers refused to do their part in (or accept any responsibility for) preventing roadway deaths, driving culture would be weakened. If children were allowed to buy liquor, and occasionally drank themselves into the hospital, drinking culture would be weakened. If people could buy and ingest any medication without restriction, people would misdiagnose themselves and occasionally would put themselves in peril, and medical culture would be weakened.
I mean, I would really enjoy sport shooting. I’ve shot .22, black powder, shotgun, pistol, and I liked all of them. My sister moved to Texas and learned to shoot an AR-15 and that sounds like a lot of fun. But I feel there is a genuine problem, and I can’t in good conscience be part of it. I would probably join the gun culture if it didn’t feel like abetting a crime.
By telling each and every gun owner, “You must never be allowed to own the sort of weapon that ordinary policemen carry in their squad cars, because if you were to have such a weapon that might ‘enable’ a mass shooting”?
That is what essentially all of the relevant proposals on the table amount to, and I do not consider myself ennobled.
The Swiss model looks promising:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/15/europe-had-school-shootings-too-then-they-did-something-about-it/
John Schilling,
I honestly don’t know what specific policies should be enacted, and that’s not the move I’m making. As a person who does not own or shoot guns, I’m not the one whose actions can help this problem.
You say you don’t feel ennobled. Of course you don’t. You aren’t doing anything. You’re just letting things be done to you. What could be less ennobling than that?
As a person who neither owns nor shoots guns, I can’t ennoble gun culture. Only gun owners can accomplish that.
In what way is “gun culture” doing this? Did a gun club instructor knowingly teach these killers to shoot? What can an actual member of the “gun culture” to help or hinder these shooters? How is Norman Nimrod, who goes out with his Bushmaster to bag deer every season, responsible for mass shootings? How are target shooting clubs who kill a whole lot of paper and nothing more, responsible? How are instructors in firearms self defense responsible?
Guy in TN wants to destroy the gun culture(s) so he can get rid of the guns entirely; I understand that though I vehemently (if not violently) disagree. I’m not sure what you’re asking.
If you don’t know what specific polices should be enacted, but you are insisting that there are policies to be enacted, then you are implicitly supporting whatever is being proposed by the people who do bring specifics to the table. You are the person shouting “Something must be done!”
If you don’t know, specifically, what is to be done, then have the humility to accept that maybe everything that should be done has already been done.
Who do you imagine is doing anything to me?
Gun control advocates and their allies are trying to do things to me and my culture, but we are not “letting” them do so and so far have been fairly effective in using the soap box and ballot box to stop them. I don’t see that changing any time soon.
The Nybbler,
Consider opiates. They are powerful, useful compounds, but also easily abused. Misuse of opiates harms people, their families, and their communities. All of that is true despite the fact that much of opiate use is directed by responsible physicians, treating their patients compassionately and legitimately.
Now a hypothetical : imagine that opiates were unrestricted, in terms of their availability and their use. Their use would be widespread, and normalized, and constitute an industry. And their ill effects would be far more widespread, too. Someone might then propose we restrict their use to medical prescription, and that those who prescribe them legitimately would be subject to licensure and oversight.
Imagine, then, physicians rising up in opposition to these regulations. Asking why should they be subject to any restriction, when they had never done anything wrong, and only ever used opiates legitimately? Who was the government to meddle in sacred medical practice, especially to solve an unrelated issue with deeper roots? What right could be more fundamental than choosing the substances you eat?
They would very obviously be dead wrong. Their efforts would only serve to entrench the problem, and to bind them to it.
I see the situation with guns as isomorphic : there is a legitimately useful but easily misused thing, and those who would use it legitimately are thus subject to a system that overall decreases their misuse. To the degree that they oppose the system, they abet misuse, and erode the legitimacy of their own use.
Myself, I maintain a DEA license and I follow the law. I’m very glad for that system – it validates and codifies my access to these useful compounds, it keeps me from having to ally with criminals in order to treat my patients effectively, and it helps keep my community safe.
Let’s cut the bullshit. It’s not like the feeling isn’t mutual. No need for the faux outrage.
When large numbers of people are asked why they supported Donald Trump say “political correctness” it means exactly “we want to destroy your culture”. More specifically you, Matt M, have a very large number of posts every open thread endlessly attacking blue tribe culture. It sure reads to me like you want to destroy it.
John Schilling,
Identifying a problem does not mean I uncritically support any proposed solution.
And my central claim is that the solution must be undertaken by gun owners, not despite them. We need you.
Not knowing the solution does not imply that there is no solution.
Brad,
Not useful. No one cares. Turn loose of your pearls and cut it out.
So in this counterfactual over a hundred million people are using opiates responsibly, many as part of some sort of drug culture, tens of thousands (annually) are killing themselves with them, and roughly ten thousand are somehow killing others with them, and you would want to restrict them to use by prescription? That’s not asking the drug culture to do something about the deaths, that’s asking the drug culture to cease to exist.
(And we already have that situation with another drug, though the numbers are slightly less favorable. Alcohol, of course.)
The link had a tiny section on Switzerland. I am very curious what you think looks promising, because there were only two things it sadi Switzerland does: 1) Somehow the authorities knwo who might commit crimes and their guns get taken away, and 2) Switzerland has mandatory health insurance so supposedly the mentally ill can be “fixed.” The second item is just silly in my opinion. The first one sounds like something the US already does, since the authorities do deny guns to various categories already.
Really, it sounds like Switzerland doesn’t have mass shootings because it is a much more insular society than the US and so the neighbors (and authorities) are more likely to know when you are a nut-so mass shooter type. That does not sound like a possible solution for the US.
I won’t deny that.
But I will say that I don’t, for a second, expect that you’ll just shut up and go along with it. Nor have I tried to mask my feelings and desires under the false pretense of “common sense compromise.” Or hide behind dead children as a pretense for something I would have wanted all along anyway.
@rahien.din
Your argument goes the opposite way for me, although that’s not surprising since I’m not convinced banning opiates is a great policy either. I’m with Nybbler.
The only way gun control could drop deaths from homicide that steeply would be for guns to be as tightly controlled as opiates meaning almost no one would be allowed to have them. This would kill gun culture very, very dead. It doesn’t make any sense for anyone who is part of gun culture to join in that. That’s basically Guy in TN’s position which is perfectly consistent but isn’t going to find any allies who have guns.
On the other hand, if the goal is to mostly to stop rampage shooters, the death tolls you’ve calculated are on the order of .1-1 per million per year. If the government wanted to restrict opiates because that was the death toll due to them, I’d think the drug war was even more insane than it already is. 40 deaths per billion per year is a laughably bad reason to engage in massive social engineering. There are lower hanging fruit than that that would restrict less freedoms.
@Guy in TN
You are conveniently ignoring that it’s not just Red Tribe who own guns. 1/4 of African Americans own guns. African Americans vote 90-something percent democrat. And homicides per capita aren’t most concentrated in rural Iowa or Wyoming. They’re high in the South though and in some major cities. There may be a cultural component causing murders that is strong, but it’s not the culture you’re thinking of.
Reminds me of a media interview with Ice T that did not go the way the interviewer was expecting, like, at all…
@Mark V Anderson
3) The majority of Swiss gun owners go through mandatory training once every year (as well as during conscription).
This applies to the most recent shooting in the US, it’s just that the standard for taking any action is much more stringent in the US. And mental health checks likely would have caught the Sandy Hook shooter.
Correcting a thought before…
Well, there’s overlap between “gun culture” and say “borderer culture” or “Watch this! Hold my beer” culture or “black power” culture. But those things are all still different. Some gun subcultures don’t contribute much to violence (Utah Mormons) and others do (drug gangs).
Nybbler et al,
“Not a problem, certainly not my problem, and anyway you’re asking way too much because you [an extreme proposal is put into rahien.din’s mouth]” is the exact reason why this problem persists.
But I acknowledge this impasse. It’s been good talking with you about this issue and I’ve learned some things.
@rahien.din
Ok, let’s back up because I may have misunderstood. You’ve given highly varying signals from my point of view; you say you don’t necessarily want to ban guns but you’ve been pretty vague overall. But your last analogy was to opiate prescription. I can’t get an opiate prescription except through someone who has at least 8 years of (additional) schooling, and even then it’s temporary. On top of that getting opiates is a rule-in thing not rule-out (compare to alcohol or a drivers license; you can’t practically be refused those things unless you fulfill certain criteria). I could be in terrible pain and a doctor could still refuse me an opiate prescription if my only symptom was terrible pain (or he could function as a pill mill and dash that prescription off on nothing but my solemn word; it could go bad in a lot of ways). I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take from a comparison of guns to opiates besides guns being almost illegal.
Like, maybe you intended something more akin to the requirements for a driver’s license or an insurance requirement? You mentioned something vaguely like this earlier but did not elaborate, and your later analogy with opiates was further towards the extreme. I suspect this would have little effect on rampage shootings, but it might lower accidental shootings or suicides. It might be possible to get a vague idea if that is true from other countries. For accidents, you’d have to calculate accidents per gun owner (or usage?) to make sure the effect was from gun owners behaving more safely, and not just from the number of guns decreasing.
EDIT: Maybe a somewhat rude question, but under what moral theory are gun owners morally culpable for the behavior of other gun owners? Homicide definitely doesn’t fulfill the normal criteria that might imply a contractual obligation to be insured or something like that. If you want to talk about accidents, then yes, but that’s pretty far afield from the main thrust all these threads have been about so I’d like to know if we’re switching topics.
Do I somehow have less moral culpability about gun violence because I have no gun?
@quanta413
I admit I was too hasty in pinning gun culture entirely on the Red Tribe. I was wrong to do so. And you are right, that Black and Hispanic culture is grappling with a serious gun culture of their own.
A while back I attended a city council meeting (San Jose) which discussed a proposed ordinance to require anyone who owned firearms to keep them either in a locked case or with a trigger lock when he was out of the house. Lots of people testified in favor. They listed very terrible things that happened due to guns–none of which, as best I could tell, would be prevented by the ordinance.
My conclusion was that this was the equivalent of the right wing approach to Roe v. Wade. A state can’t make abortion illegal but it can make it inconvenient and thus reduce it. San Jose could not make it illegal to own firearms but it could make it a little more costly and inconvenient. Doing so would mean fewer people choosing to own firearms, slightly weakening gun culture.
@quanta413
The moral theory of harping the good and the need for guns, but whispering the safety of guns.
This isn’t actually the case, but the right-wing gun message seems to be more about the last clause of the second amendment than about how to actually be a responsible gun owner. (They will say that so-and-so wasn’t a responsible gun owner after an event, but I’ve rarely seen them go into detail as to what makes a person a responsible gun owner – usually they say what specifically so-and-so did wrong in that particular event. The few times I’ve seen a full responsibility diatribe it has been preaching to the choir.)
This should be reversed, ala the black box warnings on cigarettes.
I dunno, purely anecdotal, but IME, gun nuts are far more fanatical about gun safety than rookies and amateurs.
Ever go to a range and see someone run and scream at someone else? It’s almost certainly a rookie, treating the gun flippantly, while the rangemaster comes by to get in their face about never pointing at anything they don’t intend to kill, ensuring the safety is on, etc.
Gun nuts take gun safety seriously, and they do see it as an obligation to behave responsibly to reflect well on gun owners in general. Concealed carry holders are among the most law abiding groups of citizens you can possibly distinguish. Has a single recent mass shooter been an NRA member?
To do what? My central problem is that you demand action without any specifics. I literally do not know what you want us to do, except “make it go away”. And we can’t actually do that.
Also, why must the solution be undertaken by gun owners? Owning a tool used for a particular purpose does not give one the means or the responsibility to police everyone else who owns the same tool for a different purpose.
But, OK, it is now more clear than ever that Russia used computers and political discussion on the internet to disrupt the 2016 electoral campaign in the United States. While not as spectacularly bloody as a mass shooting in the short term, it is likely to cause more damage in the long run.
So by your logic, the solution must be undertaken by computer owners and internet users, as such. You own a computer, you use the internet – for political discussion, even – so this is your problem. We need you to solve it for us. What are you doing to solve this problem for us, or should we maybe start talking about banning political discussion on the internet?
Look, over there, a woman who uses vicodin to manage pain from a severe injury. Clearly it is on people like her to solve the opioid abuse problem in the United States – she owns and uses opioids, after all. Right?
Not right, not even close. I reject your claim that a mass murderer purchasing a gun for the immediate and sole purpose of mass murder is sufficient to make him a part of my culture, and I reject your claim that my owning a gun makes me responsible for stopping mass murderers except possibly insofar as I might feel obligated to shoot them if I see them try to commit mass murder in one of the places you’ll let me have a gun. If you have any other specific ideas of what gun owners might do to help, we can discuss those.
But you’re going to have to come up with specifics, not “make it go away”.
Seconded. I’ve never seen a situation where you have members of the general public handing guns that didn’t start with a safety briefing. If you and your friends who you know are competent go down to the range, you may not do that, but it’s very much a part of gun culture.
The last time I was around weapons in a demonstration setting (with the guns unloaded) it was painfully obvious who’d shot before and who hadn’t. (And this was off California, so there were a lot of the later.) A few people (me among them) kept the muzzle in a safe direction, finger off the trigger, etc. Most were a lot more casual.
@Matt M and Bean
I agree with you with regards to those who are really into guns, hence my “preaching to the choir” comment. But how many gun owners are “gun nuts” of this sort? How many people who buy guns go through a huge lecture beforehand? How much of the popular messaging is focused on gun safety versus the right to bear arms (with gun safety not mentioned, or mentioned in passing in a generic sense)?
I don’t know. I’ve only fired a weapon a few times (young with my father’s hands wrapped around mine, JROTC, and a paint gun), and have never owned one.
I do recall one of my father’s friends saying that if you ever do draw a gun on someone to shoot to kill, not shoot to wound or shoot to warn.
@anonymousskimmer
Pretty much anywhere people go to shoot guns with other people, safety is stressed. This is because nobody wants to get accidentally shot by a n00b (or anyone else). The right to keep and bear arms is only a big thing among certain subgroups.
But it’s really irrelevant to discussions of mass murder. Stuff like keeping your finger off the trigger, keeping the barrel pointed in a safe direction, etc, is all irrelevant to someone who is deliberately killing people.
@ The Nybbler
It’s not irrelevant for those armed citizens who would use their weapons to take out the killer. This is one of the selling points of the 2nd amendment and concealed carry reciprocity.
And it’s not irrelevant to the slightly greater number of yearly deaths due to accident.
@anonymousskimmer
Anywhere anything identifiable as “gun culture” is practiced, you have an emphasis on safety. (In fact, it would probably be the one unifying feature of the various American gun cultures.) The only time you’re not likely to get at least a quick “keep your fingers off the trigger until you’re ready to fire and your guns pointed in a safe direction” spiel is if everyone involved knows everyone else and knows that they know and follow the rules. Any organized shooting has clear and enforced rules. Any unorganized shooting by non-idiots follows the same rules. And the people who have concealed carry permits definitely follow them. Most accidental shooting deaths are from idiots who don’t follow the rules, probably because they were drunk. Or kids who don’t know better.
I get what you’re saying.
I was thinking of “gun culture” as what the rest of society is seeing (e.g. the marketing by the NRA), not what those whose friends group are gun owners are seeing.
Preventing gun control.
It’s also worth pointing out that the central example of “what gun owners think must be undertaken to solve the problem” (eliminating gun-free zones and expanding concealed carry) is dismissed out of hand, with no attempt to even acknowledge it as a potential solution even if it’s packaged alongside other, more traditional, gun control measures.
Gun people aren’t just suggesting this because we’re selfish and want to carry our toys around. We legitimately believe it is the best way to address the problem without a draconian, ineffective, and most likely bloody gun confiscation plan.
That’s because “more guns” looks like dousing a fire with gasoline.
@anonymousskimmer
What marketing are you talking about? Practically half the mission of the NRA is education and safety training. Everyone wants safe use of firearms. Who are the people against gun safety, or who don’t take gun safety seriously?
I’ve been shooting my whole life, and have heard the rules (treat every gun as if it’s loaded; never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot; never shoot at anything you don’t intend to kill, etc) more times than I can count. I’ve taken many people shooting for their first times and drilled the rules into them myself. I’ve never been to a shooting range where anyone was behaving unsafely. Because everyone is watching everyone else. Shooting ranges are very polite places. Everyone talks to everyone else to make sure the range is safe when changing out targets or whatever. No one puts up with any unsafe behavior, and will calmly and politely explain to someone if they’re doing something wrong.
Every gun store I’ve ever been in advertises safety training, and has safety literature, and handles the weapons properly for customers and shows them how to properly handle them also. Every gun I’ve ever purchased (all of which have been lost in tragic boating accidents since, unfortunately) came with an instruction manual that started with big, bold red warnings about safe operation.
Absolutely no one who’s part of “gun culture” is not Serious About Safety.
The shootings people are worried about do not come from “gun culture” people (i.e., the millions of legal firearm owners). The shootings come from criminals and nutjobs who are so disaffected they don’t believe in anything anymore. They certainly don’t identify with “gun culture.” I’m not sure they even identify as human anymore.
——-
Also, I keep seeing people on twitter and the news screaming about campaign contributions to Republican congressmen from the NRA. This seems like a real failure to model to me. It’s not the tiny, monied special interest group that wants gun rights protected. It’s the gun owners. Ted Cruz is not against new gun control laws because the NRA kicked him a few thousands dollars last campaign.
This isn’t like “Big Pharma” or something where a monied special interest group might be wielding outsized influence on particular legislation against the wishes of the populace (assuming the populace were even informed on the issues). Republican congressmen are doing what Republican voters want with regards to gun control (nothing), and almost certainly what aligns with their own opinions and values as well.
It’s just weird for the left/media to be accusing Republicans of being “bought off by the NRA” when no, I don’t think there’s any amount of money you could give Ted Cruz to turn him in to a gun grabber.
So are all NRA campaign contributions wasted? Or are some pols more easy to sway?
You can act in favour of something at the local level, and against it at the global level.
I’m saying not all campaign contributions are about buying politicians. Some are about helping people who already share your views get elected.
Look at the paltry amounts of support individual candidates receive from the NRA.
Do you think if you crowdfunded ~$80,000 to give to or spend on behalf of Ted Cruz he’d switch his votes? He’d be all “screw hopes and prayers ban assault murder guns NOW!?”
No. The left acts as though the default position on guns is anti or neutral, and so the only way a senator could possibly vote pro-gun is because they’re bought off by a few grand from the NRA. No. How one feels about constitutional rights to self-defense is one of those core value things that exist, at least among the right (even among our slimy politicians). The NRA is giving a relatively small amount to people who already support their same goals.
And I contrast this with lobbying efforts for, say, extensions on pharmaceutical patents. These are not things the public is aware of, or anyone really has strong opinions about, and so yes perhaps lobbyists can buy a favor here or there to sway otherwise neutral congressmen to their side.
These are different animals. Start telling me about how shady pharma lobbyists are buying votes for regulations that are pro-industry and not in the interests of patients/consumers and maybe I’ll get angry. But when the Guardian is “exposing” how much money the NRA spends electing pro-gun congressmen I say “that sounds great, I hope they continue doing that on my behalf, to protect my constitutional rights as a gun owner and citizen. I should probably send another donation check to the NRA.”
If you abolished the pharmaceutical lobby and congressmen just decided pharma regulations based on what their constituents believe is in their best interests, their votes would probably change. If you abolished the NRA, Republicans wouldn’t change their votes.
Put another way, if NARAL were nuked from orbit tomorrow, would pro-choice women stop wanting abortion rights protected, and would elected Democrats stop protecting them?
So every penny the NRA spends is wasted, and no one changes their mind? May I remind you that the president has over the last few days wavered between the anti gun proposal of banning bump stocks , and the pro gun proposal of arming teachers?
So you’re saying America should model its society after lobsters?!?
Seriously, did you even read Conrad Honcho’s response to the exact question you just asked, about whether or not the money the NRA gives politicians is wasted?
The money helps politicians who agree with them get elected that’s the exact opposite of wasteful.
And are you really trying to argue that NRA funding is the reason Trump endorsed both of those positions? He came out in favor of arming teachers BEFORE he came out against bump stocks. Did the NRA take money away from him in the interim, or something? Isn’t it possible that he might believe that both positions solve a problem, despite one being “pro-gun” and one being “anti-gun?”
NARAL spends $10,000 to help elect a pro-abortion democrat to the Senate. It did not change that senator’s mind about abortion (since they were already pro-abortion). Did they waste their money?
Do you think the only reason anyone votes pro-abortion or anti-abortion is money? Is that how you decided your political opinions? Who’s paying you? It’s not Putin is it?
How are those related? They’re two different proposals. It’s not like you have to do one or the other. You could do both, neither, one but not the other.
I think allowing teachers to arm might be worthwhile in dissuading attacks. I’m not sure how great they’d be at actually stopping a mass shooter, but the thought “there are probably armed people at this school” may be enough to dissuade someone contemplating a school shooting, or at least switch targets.
Bump stocks I’m kind of ambivalent about. I think it’s silly to be worried about those when no one even knew what they were until the Vegas shooting happened. Actually, when that shooting happened and everybody on the news and internet was saying “he had a full auto gun! Listen to it!” I was saying “no, that’s a bump stock. Or maybe a crank. Fast but too irregular for full auto.” Nobody else knew what these were because no one had ever used one for a nefarious purpose before, and now people want to ban them. Because one guy misused one once? Ehhhhh. That seems more like an emotional kneejerk response to me. Also, lol they don’t know about hand cranks yet.
On the other hand, bump stocks don’t really serve any purpose other than having fun at the range. They’re too inaccurate to use for anything else (besides spraying a crowd, I guess).
On the gripping hand, the left seems to think banning bump stocks is a Big Deal. So how about a compromise, we’ll trade a ban on bump stocks for either the ability for teachers and school officials to arm themselves if they desire, or national concealed carry reciprocity. Deal?
My uninformed impression is that the intended definition is “weapons designed for killing multiple people”, or perhaps just “weapons designed for killing people” depending on who you’re talking to. (I make no claim as to whether or not that’s a useful definition.)
(It baffles me that people apparently need to be able to kill in order to feel safe; I know the US crime rate is bad, but is it really that bad?)
Not as bad as I suspect you are imagining. And we’d like to keep it that way without giving a blank check to our police.
But you are right that the debate is specifically about tools designed for killing people, and will not be resolved with a compromise about target rifles and duck-hunting shotguns.
As much as I hate to admit it, because I am very much against new gun control measures, I believe that raising the age limit to buy rifles in Florida to 21 would have prevented this incident.
The killer very clearly wished he owned a handgun, but he didn’t, because in Florida you need to be 21 to do so, and instead he amassed a collection of airsoft guns, and one real rifle. There are a LOT of situations in which this wouldn’t have made a difference, and the killer could have just gotten their weapon in another way, but I don’t think this kid could have. He was a white (whatever his last name might be) boy from an affluent suburb without much of a demand for black market guns, so he would have been laughed out of anyplace he might have been able to acquire a stolen gun, yet despite his rich neighborhood, he, himself, was an orphan with few resources. He MIGHT have stolen a gun himself, but I don’t think whoever he was living with since his parents’ death had one, the way Adam Lanza’s mother did. I think, in this one instance, a higher age limit would have made a difference.
And while I wouldn’t vote for it on its own, I can stomach the idea well enough that I wouldn’t mind too much if one got tacked onto a concealed carry reciprocity bill, or de-regulating suppressors. Whether they’re legally considered adults or not, our society does NOT consider 18 year olds as full adults, nor does it prepare them to be treated as such by 18.
I also have some sympathy for the “ban and confiscate all semi-automatics” argument, because despite vehemently disagreeing with it on a personal level, understanding how impossible it would be to pull off on a political level, and expecting it to end in a literal bloodbath putting any of these mass shooting incidents to shame if anyone actually did try to pull it off, at least it’s intellectually honest, and would make mass shootings much harder to pull off if it actually were done successfully.
That said, while it would have at least SOME impact, unlike most other gun control proposals, I think that its proponents are vastly overestimating how much of an impact it would have. It would also need to be “all semi-automatics, period,” not just “all semi-automatic rifles.” (which, admittedly, is a more sensible category than the hodgepodge of cosmetic features they’re currently trying to ban, but it still wouldn’t cut it.) With the exception of Vegas, the Pulse, and San Bernardino, every spree shooting in America that I can think of would have been every bit as effective if the killer had just used pistols, bolt-action rifles, and/or shotguns, and semi-automatic rifles were used primarily only because of their popularity. In this shooting and Sandy Hook, the shots were taken either at a medium range where disarming the shooter would have been difficult, or through a broken out window, and at most he engaged single classes, where he wasn’t so massively outnumbered as to make rushing him while reloading an efficient tactic and controlled the single point of entry, so he couldn’t be flanked. These are all situations where the increased capacity of an AR-style rifle won’t make much of a difference. Even at the Aurora shooting, the killer’s AR jammed because of the silly aftermarket drum mag he was trying to use, and most of the actual deaths were from his pistols and shotgun. All the other high profile spree killings that I can think of WERE carried out with only pistols or shotguns. Frankly, shooting fish in a barrel doesn’t take very high end equipment.
Vegas, San Bernardino, and the Pulse are different stories, of course. San Bernardino and the Pulse both took place in locations were rushing the the attacker to disarm him WOULD have been a viable tactic. Vegas, on the other hand, while I would argue that well-aimed shots with hunting rifles could have theoretically produced even more fatalities, he obviously wouldn’t have caused as many injuries, or as much sheer chaos and carnage, which was his primary objective, without the weapons he used. However, in all three of those cases, the killers were not just resource-starved teenagers, and were very well prepared for their attacks. They all could, and would, have acquired their weapons by other means, as attacks in places like Paris, which do have strict gun control, prove to my satisfaction. So any attempt to stop attacks like those by banning semi-automatics would require a COMPLETE removal of semi-automatic firearms from society, and as I pointed out above, that would be a rather bloody affair.
Another potential control that I would hate personally, but which might be effective to some extent, is strictly controlling the purchase of ammunition. It runs into the same “but what about the black market” issues as banning guns, but in the interest of fairness, I suppose I should point that one out too, since I haven’t seen anyone discussing it in this thread.
This is a very good post.
Likewise, I would not vote for any of those proposals, but it would at least be intellectually honest if those ideas were the topics of debate.
https://medium.com/@nettlefish/tidbits-from-a-pseudo-medieval-kitchen-5-things-i-learn-from-a-medieval-catering-collective-8019b4ddc79 I didn’t realize vegan almond “cheese” was medieval.
This isn’t specific enough for a prediction, but how close are AIs to inventing games that people like? Not close at all, I should think.
This might be interesting because it’s well short of taking over the world (though getting good at inventing addictive games might be disturbingly close to taking over the world), but it’s really hard. After all, a large majority of adults can drive, but very few can invent a popular game.
Vague things about the challenge: How much do people have to like the game? How independent of human help does the AI need to be? How different does it need to be from other games?
DeepMind apparently now has a generic system for developing expertise in perfect-information board games*. So they could presumably start testing new combinations of boards, pieces, and rules, possibly modified from previous combinations with a genetic algorithm.
I think it’s plausible that the playing quality of such games will be reflected in the time it takes the expertise to converge and the variation in games played at the expert level. (For example, are there any moves the first player can make that tend to determine the game outcome in their favor, as long as they don’t make a mistake?)
One possible and interesting area of exploration are games with asymmetric rules but balanced outcomes. The starting-points of players in Go and Chess, and the rules that govern moves, are very close to symmetric. But presumably the space of possible games includes those with quite different pieces and governing rules but that are still competitive for both players. I think people would be interested in such games if they were invented, and DeepMind is in a position to explore that space now.
(This is assuming that much of the interest in Go and Chess actually has to do with their characteristics of play, rather than their cultural associations.)
*Perhaps it can be extended to games with chance — I’m leaving those out because I don’t know offhand.
The asymmetric game family of fox[es] and [blank] comes to mind, which I don’t think many people in my area play. But perhaps they’re unpopular because they’re deficient in balance, or more interesting versions could be developed with the aid of some kind of balance-oracle.
Over the years the amount of feminist blogs I’ve been following has dropped while the reactionary stuff has increased, leaving me with a skewed reading list. I need good blogs that are to the left of SSC for my RSS feed. Anything goes, feminism, communism, SJW, boring leftists.
Amptoons.
Metafilter. This is a cool links discussion blog, but it definitely runs left politically.
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/ Daily link collection, is left when political
Sample feminist link from there
What reactionary blogs are you reading?
Opening to your sample link:
Jeez, straight to the misandry.
At least it’s not all bad:
Jesus, I read the entire piece and she actually thinks that it is morally just to protect abusers (or used to), while she also believes that driving people into self-mutilation and self-hatred is not oppressive. Even writing that latter story is morally wrong, because she pushed a comment intended for consumption by a small audience into a national spotlight.
I think this is her ultimate thesis.
—
So much of romantic engagement for men boils down to “I am willing to be repeatedly rejected.” It isn’t entirely that men are fragile infants who can’t cope with their emotions. It’s that, when you get blown off for the umpteenth time, you just have to blow it off right back. You can’t let it get to you or you’re toast.
Success in that environment either involves growing emotionally, or, Goodharting down to blunderous “Just go for it” style obtusity. The good get better, the weird get weirder. It’s easy to imagine a normally-distributed trait emerging, with the mode somewhere between “I’ll ask her even though I’m nervous” and “Devil-may-care,” with tails of “I’ll snivel my way into bed, and if women reject me it’s their fault for being bitches” and “grab ’em by the pussy.”
I find it hard to believe that that someone who propounds that “Women — and I’m sorry to have to break this to you — are not put on this earth to make men feel better about how inherently awful they are” is really all that interested in the well-being of men.
The lament “that it is not practically or economically possible to simply send half the species to a landfill,” so the author instead informs men to “Suck it up and let go” is about as informative as anything else in that diatribe.
If that’s what passes as “sympathy” toward men in feminist circles, I simply cannot figure out why many men seem unconvinced by the pitch.
Yeah… that’s weird.
I sometimes wonder if all of this stuff is a complete communication breakdown.
I don’t know any men who would say “Oh… he’s a repeat rapist but we don’t want to ruin his life.”
I suppose it depends on what definition of “rape” is being used.
It’s like being constantly lectured by an alcoholic on the evils of alcohol, when you only ever have a couple of drinks at Christmas.
Aapje, for what it’s worth, I only skimmed the sample feminist piece.
To some extent, I posted it because I was angry at your “standard victim narrative” reply to the piece about women writing.
You’ve since walked back some of what you said.
In individual households, either spouse might be overreaching.
Among the people I know, there are some households where the husband is bringing in most of the money, and some where it’s the wife, whether temporarily or in general. Now that I think about it, in one where the wife is bringing in most of the money, *she* isn’t getting adequate credit for it, which may say something about how the male role is viewed as well as the treatment of actual men.
Sure, part of the gender roles is that men and women get less credit for the things they do that are not part of their gender role.
My objection is that there is a bias to far, far more often note how women get impacted by this, than men & to put the onus for fixing this on men (both if it impacts women and when it impacts men).
The story was about writers and AFAIK, most writers earn fairly little money, even some fairly ‘famous’ ones. For example, Nick Stephenson argues here that only 150 ‘Big 5’ writers that earn more than $10k a year. That is 1/5th of the median household income.
For gender role reasons, I would expect female writers to earn less than male writers on average, so it seems quite plausible that most the people that the Krista Ball talked to are in fact not earning very much, including the people whom she respects greatly in her field.
Aapje, another piece of the situation is that most writers have day jobs, and it isn’t necessary to neglect everything else to be a writer, even a professional writer.
My bet is that most writers are writing for something like 5 to 10 hours per week, though I’d like to have actual numbers.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Sure, but they have day jobs because it’s one of these industries where many people want to create and the demand doesn’t really support that, but people do it anyway. Such industries have low wages because people are willing to accept low income for their work.
This makes it into a hobby or a semi-professional occupation for many people, at which point it deserves the same consideration as other hobbies or semi-professional occupations, rather than the same consideration as a job that pays all/most of the bills.
Aapje, the original discussion was about women and LGBT from maybe a generation ago whose partners wouldn’t let them write, and the group spanned from hobby writers to people who were making money at it.
Thank you, I subscribed to all except Alas/Amptoons, which I used to read a couple years back until it inspired in me a disdain for political cartoonists of all stripes.
As for what reactionary blogs I read, looking at my feed the only one with recent posts is anepigone DOT blogspot.com.
Could try “JoeMyGod” for a prolific gay-rights/gay-scene blog, written by a bear who lived through the AIDS epidemic back when it was killing so many gay men and Reagan wasn’t talking about it.
Could try climateprogress (now americanprogress/climate or something, but search “climate progress” should get you there)… ignore stuff not written by Joe Romm. He’s disciplined and cogent; others there, IDK.
Popehat is a neoliberal/neoconservative, whose focus is on free speech/civil society/limited government & etc.
Hmm. Looking at this list, I apparently don’t read much SJW stuff either.
Thanks, I’ll look them up. Never thought of Popehat as a leftist blog, I know the host is a leftie but he is so consistent about sticking to law commentary that it is hard to tell.
Is there some ancient language with a large body of discovered texts which are going unread and uncatalogued for lack of people who can read the language? I don’t mean texts in languages that we cannot read. I mean texts in languages where the available body of work completely overwhelms the available scholars.
I think this is true for all ancient languages in the middle east, where the dry conditions are good for preservation. Clay tablets are particularly long lived. There are tons of Sumerian and Akkadian tablets, but they are assumed to be boring accounting. I’ve never heard quite the same thing about ancient Egypt. Hellenistic Egypt has lots of unexamined Greek manuscripts. There are lots of people who read ancient Greek, but it’s not worth their time, since sampling suggests that they are largely duplicates. Eliminating duplicates would be a good task for a computer.
That can’t be the whole story. Nicholas Sims-Williams told me once via e-mail that there are still Manichaean Sogdian, Uighur, etc. manuscripts in the Berlin archives which nobody has even read yet. Which, considering how ridiculously small the extant corpus is in Manichaean Sogdian, can’t just be scholars thinking “Meh they’re probably duplicates or something…”
Question folks: drunkposting SSC via iPhone? I know not if this is kosher and require consultation. At current time: half past Pilsner whoch**** my phone tried to correct to Plantagenet*** two hands required to hold a biscuit (American biscuit, Deiseach, it’s a savory baked perfection the likes of are only constructed in the American South*, baby). Please advise. I shall abide by your recommendations, which I await with bated breath and scant presumed decorum, ah, iambic’lly.
Cheers!
* This is the true-est definition of “biscuit” I’ll fight you
*** Iswearit’strue**
** Out of order I acknowledge this is have a daiquiri
**** Left the “whoch” in, ‘tis greater accuracy for your Bayesian updates notthatyouneeded’em*****
***** Still out of order, said the cactus person. Eternal love, saith the cactus person******
****** There are only cactus persons
*looks at own drink and spits out contents of mouth*
I’d do the “gazes at bottle for a moment and then pours it out” thing except it’d mess up my floor.
Maybe IRC or discord would be a more prudent option.
This is mildly amusing, but I’m guessing that another Plantagenet or two and it will cease to be so. As a result, I’d recommend no more.
If’n I wring a “mildly amusing” out of Protagoras (despite having substituted “saith” for the vastly more prosodic “spake”) I consider this an evening well-spent and whiskey well-drunk. As the saying goes, un Plantagenet dans la main vaut deux dans le brousse.
That’s not actually a question, or even a sentence, but I’d say the answer is “no.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green-yellow/523521/
The question of whether a tennis ball is yellow or green can be surprisingly fraught, but there may be a correlation with what color a person thinks The Dress is. Survey fodder?
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/172437/And-dont-even-get-me-started-on-alligators#7321583
Freaking heretics. It is obviously yellow, albeit with the slightest tinge of green.
The color of a tennis ball is so obviously green to me…
However, stepping back a bit and comparing to, say, yellow highlighters, I’m going to guess this is an artifact of how I learned color groupings.
(Also I like Nornagest’s answer.)
I’m gonna go with “chartreuse”.
Neon yellow. Or generationally, dayglo yellow.
Or possibly tennis-ball colored, considering nothing else (with the exception of small areas of black light posters) is the same color.
According to one web-site, a tennis ball has the color 0xC6ED2C. But that notation only makes sense to people who use RGB values in that format…
I don’t know quite what to call it, though my initial reaction is yellow. Against some backgrounds, it looks green.
It’s close to a color that I’ve seen used on safety-vests. It is less common than blaze-orange for such uses. I’ve noticed that approximately-tennis-ball-color vests are more visible under low-light conditions than blaze-orange. Thus, that color is favored by bicyclists and joggers for twilight/night-time conditions.
Something LadyJane just said in the “Even More Search Terms” thread gave me an excuse to start a new subthread here:
The constant use of rationalist jargon can make discussions inaccessible to non-rationalists. Often unnecessarily so, since a lot of rationalist terminology is basically just reinventing the wheel anyway.
A while back (a year or so, I think?), I asked if there was interest in an SSC jargon file. Glossary. Dictionary. Something like that. The point is to give newcomers a shortcut to learning terms like “Moloch” or “red tribe” or even terms from other fields used a lot here, like “utility monster”. ISTR I got a little interest.
I haven’t done a whole lot with that project, but I’ve done some – every so often, I comb an SSC thread for terms that look likely, and add them to a list. It’s of decent size now: roughly 40 terms, despite my being rather picky. Maybe it’s time to push that string a little more.
One blocker is deciding where best to host it. I could put it in an OT and link back to it every so often; I could finally get around to making a Reddit account and post it there; I could put it on wikia, and deal with ad spam; twist my arm (would probably take a lot), and I register a new site. None of these sounds ideal. I don’t know of a good answer.
Then there’s the matter of content. I’d prefer public write access to fill it faster, but I’d also prefer quality in the first seed of terms. Meanwhile, I probably need more terms. Which sounds like the perfect time for LadyJane and anyone else to propose terms to add.
Thoughts?
Part of the fun of posting here was learning the jargon, slowly, through contextual cues.
Simply reading a glossary would be, like, cheating!!!
The “motte & bailey” is one that comes up a lot that people get confused about. A surprisingly large number of people don’t know what a “strawman” is, let alone a “steelman.” “Ideological turing test,” “priors,” “attractor,” “statistical predictor,” “affective death spiral,” “halo effect,” “cognitive bias” (remember most people define “bias” as the set racism/sexism/etc… are in,) maybe explain set theory a little bit…
As someone who has read SSC a fair bit and LW not at all, some of these don’t show up on SSC much — specifically “attractor” and “affective death spiral” (I actually don’t know what the latter means… will look it up). So if we’re being picky and/or SSC-specific those might not warrant including.
The rest are great suggestions though!
I definitely remember people mentioning attractors vs. categories. I wish people talked about affective death spirals etc… more, the “how societies fail” stuff was the best part of the Sequences.
Ants.
HEY SCOTT… oh wait, yelling doesn’t work that way on the Internet.
Engre musta Loca
Tabularon veris contora
Belial grovinshe Moloch
Scott Alexander, I summon thee!
Could we get a glossary page hosted here and linked somewhere at the top of the page, assuming somebody else compiles it for you?
Yes that would be good. Not just phrases as toast engineer lists, but also acronyms. I have been reading SSC for several years, but it seems pretty frequent that I see an exchange with many people using acronyms or abbreviations that I just don’t get. I remember this happened with “incel.” I don’t remember how I finally figured out it meant involuntary celibate, but everyone commenting seemed to get it. So yes a glossary would be great, and a method of adding new ones too.
The LW Jargon File might be a good start.
Random thought:
The Doors song “People Are Strange” has the line “Women seem wicked / When you’re unwanted”.
I was unaware this was not a strictly modern phenomenon. Color me amused.
Who’d have thought Jim Morrison was a Nice Guy™?
Great bit of alliteration, by the way.
I’m not making the source public, I’m just sharing this because I want it seen by people who I expect to be as horrified as I am.
“I read the article and I get the point. However, as a healthcare researcher I think there are valid reasons for using this definition because it is simple and easy to apply. If you are making a comparison then what’s critical is using the same definition for all of your groupings and if we are arguing whether this case or that case counts then it is difficult to get that consistency.”
I think I need a little more context to know what I am supposed to be horrified by.
The three day limit is in play– I’ll give context when it’s over.
That kind of gave it away.
Would this involve a WaPo article denouncing a definition?
Yes.
In that case I am equally horrified by the attempt to hide a blatant and clearly intentional example of the noncentral fallacy behind a cloak of claimed academic rigor.
Sounds normal to me. In many cases, we have the choice between (1) a “good” definition that we would find hard to get data to make, or that would be ambiguous some of the time and (2) an “OK” definition that we can easily get all the time, and is unambiguous, but wrong some part of the time.
Almost every time, we use the consistent, easy to get definition because it’s consistent. (Birth certificate sex prior to concerns about falsified birth certificates rather than measured testosterone levels, self-identified race when dealing with race rather than DNA-based.)
Consistent definitions are fine, and critical to research. The problem comes when the label you apply to a definition, stripped of the specific context of the research, is misleading to the public.
And we shouldn’t fool ourselves that this is always unintentional.
Let’s say I’m doing research on criminal behavior by amputees. I have a category for “theft of property by persons missing one or both upper limbs”. I probably should not call this “unarmed robbery” in my press release.
In this case, it’s about very few events and there’s public information about them. It’s not so hard to clean things up.
Like the drunk looking for his car keys under the lamp-post (though he did not drop them there) because that’s where he can see?
I’ve heard that when sane people (reporters, people doing experiments) go into mental institutions as inmates, the fellow inmates recognize them as sane, and the psychiatrists never do. Is this at all true?
Sounds like This Experiment.
Thank you. If only I had remembered”thud” I could have tracked it down myself.
I saw about as much. There was definitely a sense that patients were aware that some people were in because someone wanted them to disappear for a while, while staff and especially the doctors didn’t seem to get that memo.
I don’t think Nellie Bly reported this.
She might be an outlier because so little variation of behavior and social contact was permitted.
Question to yall: I’m high functioning autistic. I’ve heard a bit about Sulforaphane potentially being useful as a way to lessen Autism symptoms. I’ve tried to read the original study, but i just kinda get. bleh, when reading studies.
I think this is the original study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4217462/
Apparently this one is a follow up study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5672987/
I’m really bad at reading studies. What I’m wondering is: are these studies good? If it does indeed work as an autism treatment, does it work for both low-functioning and high functioning autistism? Or just the former? If they do work, is the cost-benefits worth it? And lastly, is there some way to actually use the findings?
The second study is not independent of the former, but is merely a follow-up for the same experiment. As such, we only really have a single experiment, which automatically should make us wary of trusting the outcome too much, even though the average improvement seems substantial. 2/3 of the participants continued who got the actual treatment decided to continue using it, which shows that the majority thinks that the cost/benefit is worth it.
There were relatively few participants, mostly adolescents, with moderate to severe autism. So these are presumably not high functioning or in any case, we cannot say that the treatment will work for high functioning autism.
The second paper notes that 5 more studies are being done, inspired by this one. One of these should already have been finished and presumably the wait is for the paper. The others will take more time, where the results probably don’t become available before 2019. None of these seem to look at the effect on people with high functioning autism.
There are no known adverse effects of taking sulforaphane supplements and they are low toxicity. They also seem to be pretty commonly used already, with no reports of serious issues. So I would judge the risks to be fairly low.
Supplements with sulforaphane are commercially available (as ‘broccoli sprouts extract’), so you should have access to these supplements. However, the paper notes that they tested commercial supplements and found that some supplements have the precursor to sulforaphane instead, the biologically inactive glucoraphanin. They advised the participants of the study about which commercial supplements they could use, that did have sufficient sulforaphane.
If you want to try the supplements, you could try contacting the people who did the study and ask them which supplements they recommend and at what dose. If so, I would explicitly state that you are going to take the supplements anyway, even if they don’t help you, which should put them in the position where helping you is the most ethical choice.
Finally, sulforaphane is heat-sensitive and reactive, so store the supplements somewhere cool and keep the lid on the bottle.
Thanks. I’ll work on my depression as thats the best thing i can do for now. I’ll probably look into the other studies in june.
(ps i’ve read the comments for a while and your comments/thoughts strike me as reasonable, considerate, and overall high quality. 1+)
As one of the most vociferous ‘I would never go to yoga just to meet women’ voices in that thread a few weeks ago, I’d just like to let you all know that I’m making plans to go to a yoga class next week, and, erm, not solely because of my abiding interest in yoga. What changed? I got invited by an attractive woman. I’m not sure whether she’s into me; if she is, the upside is clear, but even if she isn’t, being there with her helps me over that ‘who is this weirdo outsider trying to infiltrate our ranks?’ hump.
What, did you think I had principles or something?
That seems fundamentally different, since you are not treating yoga as a way to meet girls, but rather, you accepted an invitation to hang out with a woman you like, where that invitation just happens to be to a female-dominated activity.
If you are more or just as likely to go to a male-dominated activity that you are just as interested in as yoga, after being invited to it by a an attractive woman, then you are not in any way unprincipled.
There are no principles in a fox hole!
Hey, keep the furry stuff to tumblr!
Wow.
Either she’s really into you or you’re already ridiculously friendzoned and have no chance. I suggest making a move quickly. After Yoga, ask her out on a real date and make sure to use the phrase “go out” to eliminate any ambiguity.
Honestly, I suspect any girl who invites me to Yoga does not have me in the Friendzone, but in the Gay BFF zone.
How is that not the same zone?
Friendzone = she does not see you as a sexual being and never will
Gayzone = she knows you’re a sexual being and really wants to watch you makeout with your boyfriend.
Supposedly, women who watch porn relatively often watch gay porn (anecdotal evidence, though). This is interesting because men are regularly chastised for fetishizing lesbians.
Alternatively, one could imagine it to be a benefit to heterosexual women to have a man to study without the danger/tension/necessary boundaries/etc caused by having the man be heterosexual.
It’s a funny situation.
I overstated it slightly by saying ‘invited’. It’s more that I expressed interest in coming along and she was enthusiastic about it. Also, she’s up for coming back to my place (very nearby) afterwards ‘for tea’. (Maybe this is the British equivalent of going back to one’s apartment ‘for coffee’.)
We made the yoga plans when we were out having a couple of drinks last night, which wasn’t officially demarcated as a ‘date’ but in the event did feel quite date-y.
She knows I like her, because I kissed her when we were hanging out a year ago. Although there were some indicators of interest before this, in retrospect I think it was a bit clumsy and premature, and it didn’t lead to anything then. But she seems more open and flirty again now. So I can’t quite tell.
Using ‘go out’ is a good idea.
We shall see.
Congrats on the imminent sexy times you’re about to have.
Yes this does not sound “funny” at all. She is into you (especially given your past mutual history). At the very least, I would say she’s putting out enough signals that you should have no qualms about making a (respectful) move on her.
Only funny insofar as I’d previously written it off since my previous advance was declined. But I guess things change–maybe her situation has changed, or it just took her a while to come around and realise what a hunk I am, or whatever. But yes, I agree that the signs are good.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst (which is that you have a nice friend to do yoga with and maybe she introduces you to other nice friends in the future).
Not necessarily. When I started going to yoga, I invited basically everyone I knew to go with me at one time or another, regardless of whether I was romantically interested or not. Although I am a guy, so the situation may not be exactly analogous.
Amy Chua of World on Fire and Tiger Mom fame has a new book coming out soon. Political Tribes: Group Instict and the Fate of Nations. It sounds like something up SSC’s alley:
The only review I can find requires registration. Hopefully there will be more in the near future.
I would argue that many have a tendency to ignore how their political desires are heavily shaped by what helps them personally, rather than society as a whole. The result is that they see opposition to their political beliefs not merely as a clash of interests, but as a clash between altruism and selfishness or even as a clash between good and evil.
The result is that compromise becomes unconscionable, because a positive sum compromise is deemed impossible. So any concession is seen as leading to a worse overall outcome with no redeeming qualities.
This becomes especially potent with identity politics based on an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy, because it rules out the possibility of a win-win scenario. The theory is that the oppressors have been fully in charge, so they already have got everything they could get through political means, while the oppressed had practically no power, so they have nothing beyond what the oppressors didn’t care about or couldn’t avoid granting them. Such a belief rules out making a deal where both groups come out ahead, since the oppressed have nothing to offer to the oppressors. So the oppressors must give up part of what they have with nothing in return.
Of course, most people in the group(s) that are called oppressors tend to not agree with this and see it as a straight up attack on their well-being. This is especially true for the ‘oppressors’ who have are not especially well off. These people tend to get especially angry when they see people from the oppressed groups with far better prospects than them get aid based on their skin color or gender. To them, it is racism/sexism to judge a person to be in need of help merely for their skin color or gender, rather than need.
Identity politics based on race, gender and such also makes for fairly immutable groups, which harms empathy and sympathy. If I grow up poor and with poor people around me, I or people I know who are poor may become better off and thereby gain an understanding of middle class life. If I grow up black and with black people around me, neither I or them are going to stop being black. So it is easier for poor people to have empathy and sympathy with the middle class or vice versa, than for black people to have empathy and sympathy with white people or vice versa.
God damnit, can’t people just make the legitimate claim that many people crave group belonging, and leave it at that. Why must it always be an absolute?!
Are there any studies that actually look at the strength and prevalence of the group-belonging instincts in people?
Because “Humans are typically tribal. Most of us feel a need to belong to groups” isn’t nearly as good writing? Quality of writing tends to be an important consideration when publishing a book.
I think the normal way to read that sentence is not as an absolutist statement (“every human that has ever lived has felt a strong compulsion to belong to a group”) but as a firm statement about the vast majority of humans.
But is it true of the vast majority of humans, or only of those who are most noticeable?
Not the criticism you made previously, which is what I was responding to.
That said, I think there’s pretty good evidence that the vast majority of people prefer to have social ties to other humans. The idea of “friends” is usually viewed positively. I expect the book would cover the topic though, and I don’t personally care enough about the issue to desire debating it any detail.
Second paragraph of my original response.
But do “social ties” equate to “group belonging” in a tribal sense (which is the sense Amy Chua is using it – “ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based.”) for most people? Or is this only the loud ones?
How many of the so-called tribe merely feel intimidated into going along (or don’t even realize that they’re part of the tribe), and would welcome a less ‘tribal’ connection to their neighbors?
Fair enough that you don’t want to debate this, it is my hill to die on, not yours.
I’m a quant at a systematic hedge fund. We have an automated system that trades stocks and tries to buy stocks that are going to go up and short the ones that are going to go down. I and a bunch of other people work together to make that system better.
There isn’t really a typical day but some activities include:
Coming up with money-making ideas – some combination of reading academic papers, looking over our existing ideas and code and trying to think of things that could be done better, looking at new data sources, talking with people, staring at the ceiling and waiting for inspiration to strike. This is the most fun part of the job and is unfortunately only a small fraction of the time.
Developing ideas – this is the majority of the time. Write code (python), debug code, test code. Change the code and see how the results change and then think about what the changed results imply, and then iterate…
Selling ideas to the rest of the team – discuss everything above with my boss and other relevant team members; show them statistics and pretty graphs; answer their questions; research the answers to the questions I don’t already know the answer to; incorporate suggestions into the code; often this ends with me getting kicked back to the “developing ideas” step.
Giving feedback to other people on their ideas – listen to them selling me their ideas and try to think about what might be improved. If I have a suggestion, try to convince the group that it’s a worthwhile one.
Debugging production issues – figure out why the system is doing something unexpected. This can be anything. Sometimes it’s obvious what to fix – a data vendor sent data in an unexpected format and everything crashes. Sometimes it’s not obvious at all what to do, or even if anything needs to be done at all, because the system is complex and its behavior is hard to understand. Subsystem A traded three times as much as usual today, is there something wrong or is this actually correct behavior? We lost a lot of money in one particular market today, was it just bad luck or is there something that needs to be fixed? This sort of thing often does not end with a satisfying answer.
to a remarkable degree, this. I’m in charge of a team of data analysts who keep track of a variety of types of information about aircraft. I no longer have regular line responsibilities, so my days consist of supervising the people that do (dealing with problems that they run into that need elevation and assigning tasks that need assigning), doing QA on their work (usually by putting their work into excel and then looking for problems), tweaking the tools we use to enter, store, and analyze data (built in excel and access) , turning the data they enter into a variety of higher level analytical products (making charts in excel and writing about them), and arguing with other departments and higher about resources and how to do things better. The exact mix varies a great deal from day to day.
I’m a structural engineer working for the US Government on mostly dam projects. The last era of major dam construction ended in the late ’70s-early ’80s, so we’re primarily maintaining existing infrastructure and doing incremental improvements.
The incremental improvements are small compared to the original dams, but still pretty big in an absolute sense. I’m working on several projects in the $10mm to $100mm range, primarily for improving anadromous fish passage.
The maintenance falls into two broad camps: inspecting existing facilities, and designing fixes for problems that have been identified.
Due to the breadth of what I do, a “typical” day can vary quite a bit, but the modal day consists of:
08:00-11:30 Working at my desk or going to meetings
11:30-12:30 Pinochle game over lunch
12:30-17:00 Working at my desk or going to meetings
Some days (sometimes up to several a month) I’ll go out to a project site to do a site visit for ongoing construction, or to do a punch list. Other visits are to go on an inspection as one of the technical experts, where sometimes I get to go into a manbasket and dangle like a fish on a hook. A third reason for site visits is to meet with Project operations personnel and to wrap our heads around the current condition of our facilities to ensure that our designs for upgrades or for maintenance will actually work.
When I’m working at my desk, I’m typically doing the following:
Writing a report about an inspection, or to document a design decision;
Reading as-builts or previous reports to help me understand the design of existing infrastructure;
Writing or reading and responding to e-mails from other team members to coordinate design decisions;
Reviewing contractor submittals for ongoing construction;
Doing calculations or finite element models (actual design work);
Either creating and editing drawings and 3D models, or reviewing the work of a technician for the drawings in a construction contract;
Writing and reviewing specifications (the written part of a construction contract);
For meetings, it’s mostly just interfacing with other members of a Project Delivery Team so each engineering and technical division knows what everyone else is doing.
I’m an insurance agent working in a call center in the Medicare Supplement division of an insurance company. As such, I take a lot of phone calls, and since we don’t get nearly enough sales calls to justify having a bunch of agents doing nothing but selling, I also take service and claims calls on existing policies, plus I can process claims when the phones are quiet.
Sales calls – often involve explaining Medicare and/or our policies, or if they’re ready to enroll I read them all the enrollment legalese and enter their personal information into our enrollment system. We also do Part D drug plans, which is a bit more complicated and often involves taking a list of the caller’s medications and entering them into the Medicare.gov cost estimator to see what plan would be most cost-effective, and then explaining the results.
Service and claims calls – billing changes, address updates, figuring out if we paid a claim, if necessary we can fax proof of payment to the provider, if we didn’t pay explaining why not, etc.
Processing claims – Medicare Supplement claims tend to be fairly easy since we just follow whatever Medicare did and pay the patient cost-sharing they left (or just a part of it, depending on what plan the person bought). Most of the claims I’d be assigned just need someone to make sure we were sent proper proof of Medicare payment, it’s not a duplicate of something we paid already, and the computer didn’t do anything stupid.
Relevant to the “crypto postmortem,” Gavin Andresen (one of the early bitcoin developers) on why many early adopters of bitcoin aren’t as wealthy as you’d expect.
I’m interested in thinking about the question in a more general way–a “why it’s always harder than it seems to strike it rich” curve. I describe it as a “curve” in part because of my own experience making a decent amount of money in crypto, yet also not becoming fabulously wealthy, despite having been interested in bitcoin earlyish-on (though I did not yet know about LessWrong back then)–and this experience felt to me sort of like chasing a curve that accelerated roughly in time with my willingness and ability to do so (maybe this is totally obvious and 101-level for people who study e.g. entrepreneurship, but it threw it into sharper relief for me).
The curve you had to stay ahead of to accumulate large sums of bitcoin at a low price seems to have been something like this:
2009: just use your cpu or know somebody into bitcoin
2010-2011: buy a fancy graphics card or buy some bitcoin off someone who mined them or knew a guy
2012-present: need a specialized miner (ASIC), can also start buying on line with fiat, but not super easy and increasingly expensive…and so on.
In other words, there’s a curve of knowledge and willingness/ability to invest time/energy/money you have to stay ahead of to really strike it rich; what defines the curve is the fact that when the opportunity is really cheap, you have to do a lot of work to understand and take advantage of it, and, to some extent, be lucky just to even know it exists (and of course choose correctly among the many possible next-big-things that exist at any given time). The less work needed to get in on the idea, the more favorably-positioned, economically, you need to be, to take advantage of it in a big way (as e.g. Peter Thiel is trying to do recently, to the tune of hundreds of millions).
I would guess there is a similar curve with most stories of crazy success, like:
ground floor of Facebook: be Mark Zuckerberg or be classmates at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg
2nd floor of Facebook: have the money and foresight to be an early investor in Facebook
3rd floor of Facebook: be lucky or insightful enough to start working at Facebook in early days
4th floor of Facebook: be the person who happened to serve coffee at Facebook in the early days…
At each stage there are a few people who are just really lucky, but also many who are probably kicking themselves (“Mark asked me if I wanted to help him with his new social website thing and I thought it was silly!”). In fact, even cases that make you want to kick yourself in retrospect for passing up “easy money” really demanded you be well ahead of the curve in knowledge and/or resources to exploit it… and then, as Gavin mentions, it’s always hard to get fabulous returns while simultaneously taking a low-risk approach: the prudent approach to seeing your magic internet money skyrocket in value is to turn a chunk of it into something less volatile each time it does that… yet doing so may prevent you riding that particular rocket to the moon.
As for my own personal, future calibration take-away: it’s always harder than it seems to strike it rich, and going all-in on very speculative ideas is still probably a bad idea; however, the big opportunities almost by definition come at a time when you see something others don’t see yet, but which you think they can’t miss, given enough time. When you do see such a thing, it’s worth overcoming the trivial inconvenience to make a significant (but not more than you can afford to lose) investment. Of course, this kind of thinking also caused me to buy a bunch of gold and silver as inflation hedges years ago and that one hasn’t worked out so well, but in the alternate universe where gold and silver took off and bitcoin went to 0 I’d be kicking myself for wasting time and money on bitcoin, so I can’t say I’m that annoyed at past-me.
Any other thoughts on better calibrating ability to see and take advantage of next-big-things in a responsible way?
I’m an actuary, working in a company in a strategy/forecasting (finance) role. (AKA: I don’t work with audited financials–I used to, I don’t work with pricing or anything else that will be filed with a regulator, and I don’t work for a consulting firm.)
On a typical day, I do some combination of four things:
1) Modify one of the large spreadsheets I manage to forecast something. What if we spent $X million on something that wasn’t a balance sheet, but paid $X+Y after Z years? What if we sold a low-risk asset and bought a high-risk asset yielding $X more? What would happen to our required capital (RBC)? What would happen to our reported capital? What would happen to other financial items we care about?
2) Build a new spreadsheet to model something in detail. This can be anywhere on the complexity scale from “I’ll build it myself this morning” to “I’ll work with a team of 3 to build it over the next quarter.” What if we sold X and bought Y? What would happen to volatility? What would we expect to get for X? And can we get some information about item N, which none of our current systems show in the detail we want.
3) Try to get information about some proposal so I can model it. This may be talking face to face, talking on the phone, or emailing. This is something I’m exceptionally good at, since I like talking to people more than typical for an actuary.
4) Try to explain something I modeled, or one of my models. This can be anything from a 1-graph email to a multi-week collaborative project to build a 50-slide powerpoint deck.
It’s hard to offer a typical day in my job, because there’s so much variability. This week, I’m doing a rehearsal for mission support, which means about 6-7 inconveniently-timed hours sitting on console at a mission control center with a bunch of other people who are (pretending to) operate a spacecraft by remote control, watching and being ready to shout “No, you fool!” if someone is about to do something that would wreck the propulsion system. Well, OK, our procedures are a bit more formal and don’t include the word “fool”, but that’s the gist of it.
Other regular daily activities include:
Meetings, in person (preferred) or by teleconference where we talk about some problem that has befallen or might in the future befall a spacecraft, and come up with a plan to identify and fix the root cause.
Performing research or analysis as per the above, usually privately and in front of a computer. This is usually quite interesting.
Examining design or production records to ensure that various “how to make sure obvious things don’t go wrong with your spacecraft” standards have been fully complied with. This is boring.
Writing memos, reports, and (sigh) powerpoint decks documenting all of the above, and in the case of powerpoint decks delivering the briefing to senior management.
And since there’s more of this than I can handle myself, delegating most of it to my subordinates and monitoring their progress; in the case of the junior engineers providing training and mentoring.
A modest amount of paperwork, mandatory training, and other bureaucracy.
Less common activities but they can occupy weeks at a time:
Developing conceptual designs for spacecraft propulsion systems (often as part of complete spacecraft) to most efficiently and reliably meet newly-identified mission requirements. That’s the job I wanted to do full time since I was about ten, but alas it can’t really be anyone’s full-time job at present.
Doing site visits to evaluate someone else’s production facilities and/or observe test activities. Locations can range from Commerce (boring) to Kobe or Dublin (not boring)
Supervising the loading of highly toxic and corrosive propellants into satellites (only been poisoned once so far, and only a little bit)
Long-term internal research and development projects
Was the sexual revolution a good thing?
In most societies we know of, most women were reluctant to have sexual intercourse outside of marriage, engagement, or the equivalent. One result was that, for most men, marriage was the most practical way of obtaining sex. Over the past seventy years or so that system has broken down, at least in part due to the availability of reliable contraception. On net, are the consequences good or bad?
The obvious good consequence is a much greater availability of the pleasure of sex for unmarried men and women. A possible good consequence is better marital choices, since people are no longer pushed into marriage by their desire for sex.
Possible bad consequences include less stable marriages, both because (conjecture) the function of intercourse as producing pair bonds is weaker when the individuals have had intercourse with many partners and because leaving a marriage no longer means being much less able to obtain sex. They may also include an increase in the birth of children to unmarried mothers (the opposite of the effect that legal abortion and better contraception were predicted to produce). One explanation (Akerlof and Yellin) is that women who want children are no longer in a position to insist on a long term commitment in exchange for sex, since they are in competition with other women who want sex but don’t want children–and good contraception lets them separate the two.
I expect there are other consequences, good and bad, as well. The question I’m putting up for discussion is what they are and what is the sign of the net effect of the change.
To the extent that the sexual revolution reduced the shaming of adults for engaging in (or even thinking about engaging in) consensual, mutually enjoyable activities, I would say that’s a plus from a libertarian perspective, no?
Right, but the sexual revolution also reduced the shaming of adults for engaging in breach of contract, whether explicit (“’till death do us part”) or implicit (“of course I’ll still respect you in the morning”). Since those contracts appear to play an important role in human social interaction and shame was the principle mechanism of enforcement, that’s a negative from the libertarian perspective.
And yes, I know that ethical polyamorists etc often say that people should be ashamed of breaking such contracts, but when it comes to actually delivering the shame I think the social conservatives were far more effective than the libertines in general.
Does it count as a breach of contract if no one expects anyone else to take the words literally?
“No one”.
Yeah, we’ve had the discussion here before about how “no one” expects anyone to take marriage vows seriously. Survey says: wrong.
Breaches of trust involving casual sex are also a real thing, albeit obscured by the insistence in some quarters that all sex is either Positive or Rape.
If people actually thought of marriage in this way, they would treat it a lot differently. The person asking for the divorce would automatically be considered at fault and any split in assets would be heavily against them. As far as I know, the laws don’t do that. “Til death is part” is in there for historical, sentimental reasons, not because we expect someone to be in a loveless marriage to satisfy a contract. If we took off that bit in the wedding vows, do you think people would suddenly change their attitude on divorce?
I mean, there exists a sizable proportion of the population who are unpleased with the laws, if not an influential enough group to change them. I’d predict that once the second order effects start being felt, a lot of the rest will follow suit.
At this point marriage still happens because people take ’til death to us part’ somewhat seriously. As people (Men in this case) realize that the words are actually meaningless, and the only part that is still binding are the legal support obligations, the whole proposition becomes less and less attractive.
What we’re starting to see now is that women are in a weird situation wherein their reach exceeds their grasp, as they have lost the ability to make a commitment strong enough that they cannot trivially break it.
I’m sure our resident economists can expound upon what happens in business environments wherein parties know that the other can break contracts with impunity.
So, serious question: If we take “Til death do us part” out of the vows, which of the remaining parts make the concept worthwhile to you?
@Barely matters, I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I got married, I wasn’t thinking of it as some kind of deal that needed a contract.
@Harry Maurice Johnston
Oh yes, likewise. Which is almost word for word what I tell my girlfriend when she starts pushing towards marriage in the first place.
So I’m asking honestly and non rhetorically here. If marriage isn’t a contract, what is it? Specifically, what benefits does it have over just not doing it and telling all your friends and family that you’re an item?
Without things like ‘commitment to the long term, even in bad times’ to promote stability in rough patches and provide a stable environment for co raising children, I don’t see a whole lot of value. Further, the hit of asset equalization might be tolerable as a consequence of an unexpected and (ideally) rare breakdown, but to whoever is earning more it’s pure negative. If that shifts from ‘apparent black swan’ to ‘expected eventuality’ it changes the risk matrix significantly. So what are we still gaining here as opposed to technical bachelorhood with long term nonmarriage relationships?
@Barely matters
Well, yes, if everything is transactional then a contract which mandates ongoing transactions between parties is a negative.
But we are also beings with feelings and ideals. Accentuating those feelings and living in accord with those ideals provides a payoff too.
@anonymousskimmer
That payoff turns into into the reverse if the feelings end and people turn transactional. And they do.
Of course, you can argue that people emotionally need some romantic illusion, but then why should that romantic illusion be a contract with legal consequences? If anything, such a thing detracts from the romance.
Why not just have a ceremony where you do a personalized ritual with your family and friends? At least then the thing is truly special.
Why did people swear to the gods? Mingle their blood?
A sense of security and external permanency can be comforting.
People are not gooses and ganders. There’s room for all preferences.
@anonymousskimmer
Well yeah, but I can have feelings perfectly well outside of a marriage, and if the words are known to be historical nonsense (As some posters here are saying) then I don’t see what ideals are served by going through with the ceremony and resulting legal entanglement.
I’m all for making it less transactional, but from this angle it looks like the historical artifacts of the hollowed out institution *are* the transactional parts. I’d be happiest of all if the default was entirely nontransactional: “All property belongs to whoever bought it, either party is free to walk at any time without penalty, thus we know that we are together because we want to be, and we intend to stay this way as long as we both are happy as a unit.” But at that point it doesn’t sound much like marriage as I understand it.
I’m seriously looking for a solid argument for the merits here because I want to be convinced. This is a recurring stumbling block for me and I’d like to understand what people see in the process that I don’t. Coming around to seeing marriage as a good idea would make my relationships somewhat smoother and more in line with societal norms. Thus far, all I’ve really seen from asking (In this context and others) are extremely vague motions towards feelings, and attacks of status to ‘man up’. So I appreciate anyone who can try to put together a solid defense of marriage in the modern world.
It’s traditional; people like ceremony; and it expresses a greater degree of commitment than just living together does. It may be largely symbolic, but symbols matter.
This is impossible to account after a while. If it doesn’t become impossible to account, then either one party has no assertive backbone, or you have a relationship I really don’t understand.
Marriage isn’t for everyone. If it’s not for you, just be honest about it and don’t sweat it.
If marriage isn’t a contract, what is it? Specifically, what benefits does it have over just not doing it and telling all your friends and family that you’re an item?
If you aren’t married, and therefore economically linked, each partner has to worry about preserving their own individual “market value” as opposed to thinking about the good of the family unit.
There are times when one partner or the other needs to sacrifice for the family. If there is no formal legal link between the two of you then this is a big risk for the person who is doing the sacrificing. Think of a woman taking a hit to her career to raise children, for example; it’s much easier for a woman to accept that loss if she knows that she has a right to her husband’s income.
Hey, I appreciate you guys taking runs at answering this. Thanks.
Yeah, that’s my default plan unless I come across a really convincing reason that makes it seem like a good idea.
@Barely Matters:
Some thoughts from someone who considered the rationales you listed in some detail, found them to be quite persuasive, but is nonetheless legally married:
1. Social approval can be important. My spouse and I operate in social circles where unmarried partners living together is frowned upon. My spouse’s family in particular has strong feelings about this (e.g. we stayed in separate rooms, even when engaged, when visiting them).
Even outside of family / community ties, it’s a helpful signal in general. When I tell a prospective employer that I want to work in “City X” because my spouse has a job lined up there, that carries more weight than if we were not married.
2. Personal feelings also matter. I don’t particularly care about “marriage” as a legal status (and I occasionally felt sad that we’d be facing a marriage penalty on our federal income taxes, at least before the recent tax reform). My spouse cares quite a bit.
3. To a degree, the legal ties are part of why the symbolic ties have power. If we could divorce and part ways as easily as if we were only dating, some of that signaling value would be lost. Costly signals express better information.
4. The financial risks were also minimal for us — we have extremely similar (high) projected earning trajectories as well as similar spending habits. Commingling finances offers substantial risk mitigation without really changing either of our expected personal wealth.
All that said, my spouse is amazing, and I am very happy to be married. Still, if my partner got hit by a truck in ten years and I met someone new after an appropriate mourning time, I seriously doubt that I would get legally married again, in large measure because of concerns about protecting financial assets.
I think whether getting married makes sense depends a great deal on balancing the positive aspects in terms of community approval (and personal happiness) with the ensuing financial and personal risks, especially if you’re having kids. In the modern social and legal context, I certainly wouldn’t advocate as a general proposition for everyone (although most of the people I know who are highly accomplished, stable individuals, and dating someone are either married or appear to conceptualize their long-term relationships as moving toward marriage, which is informative to at least some degree).
I do find the idea that no one really takes the “until death do us part” language seriously to be kind of odd. Obviously neither of us intends to stay in our marriage if circumstances change dramatically, such as the other person becoming abusive, but a significant reason that we got married was because we were expressing a firm commitment to stay together until one of us died. If everyone in our social circles understood that marriage was just “extra serious dating,” I’d have probably pushed the tax-optimization angle a little harder.
@Barely Matters
I didn’t say marriage was nonsense. I said the “tip death do us part” is. It’s a commitment that you can’t just up and leave the person on a whim, which is especially important if you have kids. But that’s a completely different expectation that someone staying married for the rest of their life because of five words.
We need to distinguish between a relationship that does or likely will result in children and one that won’t.
Here’s a legal philosophy puzzle:
Suppose there’s an investment banker making $1.5MM a year and a doctor making $350k a year that have a child together out of wedlock. The investment banker has no interest in having anything to do with the child. Why does the court order child support? What and whose interests are being furthered?
The standard answer is the interests of the child. But nail that down, from society’s point of view even with not one penny from the father, that child isn’t in any need. I would suggest instead that the answer comes from someplace a lot more Conservative. It’s about the state setting out a norm and regulating the behavior of the father. It’s akin to the justification behind the notion of unjust enrichment (which creates a quasi-contract) and is equally if not more about fairness as between the parents as it is about fairness between the father and the child.
All of which is to say, that you can view the status quo as once there’s a child involved there essentially *is* a marriage and it’s the kind of old school marriage that you can’t get out of no matter what. Albeit only for about 25 years, not until death. Further, there’s no way to prenup or postnup around the terms of this implied marriage.
So I guess part of the answer to your question is: if there’s going to be kids involved and you are get this quasi-marriage anyway, the zero point from which to analyze marriage vs non-marriage is different from one where you are just lovers living together.
And yet people in essentially every culture on Earth for most of recorded history have chosen to say those words instead of “until the children are grown”. They may not always live up to it, and they may have the foresight to leave an escape option. But there’s a vast demand for strong lifetime commitments, and of course a vast demand for brief, casual liasons. The demand for seven-ish year or “until the children are grown” partnerships is a much more recent and shallow thing.
@Alphonse
Hey, thanks for the detailed take. That helps clarify things a lot. None of those points really apply to me (No intention of having kids, no specific family objections to living in sin, and my partner earns a lot less than I do), but I can see that they could apply to some people. I’ll have to make a point of dating wealthier women in the future.
@ Wrong Species
Sorry, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth there! I was pointing to the ’til death do us part’ bit as my main contention here. I think that asset equalization can make some sense as a resolution to an unexpected and rare failure, but if it’s the anticipated end of the arrangement I think it’s absurd. I can see no reason whatsoever that society should design a body of law that says “People entering into temporary pairings should expect that at the end of each relationship, whichever spouse earns less is entitled to the difference between theirs and their partner’s assets.”. If one is worried that women will be disadvantaged by interrupting their careers to have kids, a norm that women negotiate childcare balance with their partners and choose their actions accordingly seems in all respects better.
@Brad
I think lot of the legal theory and philosophy is well above my pay grade, but it sounds like you’ve got a good point that the system doesn’t really behave as one would expect given the surface justification. I’m interested if you have any ideas as to where to look to build a stronger knowledge base here, even though I’m not in much of a position to act on the information or advocate for change either way. Thanks.
@Brad
That may play a role, but I think that the logical consequence of a system where the child support is reduced when the non-caring partner earns little, is that the courts will increase it when that person earns a lot.
Furthermore, rich people tend to spend a lot on their children, so if the child support is not that high, the children may have to leave their very expensive school and such. The children are generally considered blameless and there is thus a desire to not upset their lives too much.
So I don’t think that it is necessary for there to have to be a desire to regulate/punish the father*, to explain the child support rules.
* Although I would argue that it requires an indifference to the father’s needs.
@Barely matters
I’d love to help but while I could point to a bunch of books about legal philosophy generally, I’m not familiar with anything on the philosophy of family law specifically. This is sort of my own pet theory.
@Aapje
American family law is absolutely littered with complex multi-factor tests. An “has become accustomed to” standard could easily have been in there, but it isn’t. Nor are there any attempts on the parts of family law to insure that child support is actually spent in any particular way. Once paid it is the property of the custodial spouse.
Stepping back, there’s no rule that says that rich parents that aren’t divorced have to spend any particular of money on their children so long as their treatment doesn’t amount to neglect.
I don’t think it is possible to square American child support doctrines with a premise that it is all and only about the needs of the child(ren).
The classic article applying that to marriage is “Marriage, Divorce, and Quasi Rents; Or, “I Gave Him the Best Years of My Life”” by Lloyd Cohen.
I have a discussion of the reasons for long term contracts, with the application to marriage, mainly in the context of explaining why the contract has become less long term than it used to be, in Chapter 21 of Price Theory. The relevant discussion starts at the subhead “What and Why Is Marriage?”
@DavidFriedman
I find Cohen’s argument very interesting, because it seems to explain the changes rather well.
If female desirability goes down relative to male desirability by age, then women are incentivized to relatively early lock down the man with the best prospects and/or qualities who will have her, by marrying him, as long as marriage is hard to exit. The longer she waits, the more of her most desirable years are lost, like tears in rain, making a long term contract with her a worse deal. Historically, women wedded fairly young.
With no-fault divorce, this logic has been upended, because now a woman who commits early to an equally desirable husband, is going to have a far more desirable husband some decades hence. So the husband is then incentivized to divorce and ‘trade up’ to a younger woman. So this strategy is disincentivized in an age of easy divorce.
The best outcome can then theoretically be achieved by judging the potential of men and finding a man that has good prospects, but not so good that he will want a divorce. However, this only works as a strategy when it is possible to judge male potential well, which is probably not the case.
As I argued as a comment on the Luna post, female desirability as a more casual partner is generally higher than their desirability as someone to have a child with. This enables an alternative strategy where the woman chooses to date relatively casually until male desirability is peaking and only then finds a man to have a child with.
Of course, this is bounded by the decline in female fertility, which forces women to change their focus to finding a suitable father if they want children, around age 30 or so.
A consequence of this strategy is that it decreases the incentives for men who are far better prospects for fatherhood than for casual dating, as they lose out on casual relationships with women during their most desirable years.
It makes sense that these men, who are disproportionately impacted by the societal changes, become upset, not just at the bargain that they are being offering (which consists of giving the best they can offer during their life in return for less than the best that their partner can offer during her life), but also in the mechanism that society has to compensate women when they are divorced after having already spent their desirable years with a man.
When women only start a family after their most desirable years have passed, such compensation seems unjust if it gets demanded from a man who only entered the relationship when both partners were already bringing the same amount to the table (a balance that will shift in more in favor of the woman over time, so overall she will already be better off).
PS. It’s rather amazing that no matter what interesting theories I learn about relationships/dating, it pretty much always makes me more sad.
@Aapje
Agreed on all counts, with additional caveats.
One thing that jumps out at me in this piece and David Friedman’s is the assumption that the nature of the demand for a husband’s services remains constant over the course of a marriage, which clashes with what I’ve observed from peers. With age a woman’s market value declines, but once she has secured children and an obligate bankroll the nature of her demand seems to become focused on the children, frequently leaving the husband as an afterthought or even a nuisance. David Friedman even jokes about this in Price Theory in his phrasing of “the burden of putting up with a husband”.
As it’s been pointed out,
For the next month or so, I still live in an area where the odds heavily favour women’s power, and the optimal move for women locally seems to be to get married, have a couple kids, divorce after a few years to secure children, cash, and freedom, then then return to the short term liaison market and leverage the lack of need for commitment to pair with with higher status men than their previous husband.
Secondly, while I agree with the argument that women’s best strategy is generally to lock down an ascendant man at the height of her power, and thus society and family law feel obligated to legally facilitate the process, I feel this argument is self defeating.
If the woman’s value is expected to decline over time and a man’s is expected to rise, a man should avoid entering into an exclusive and long term contract entirely, unless this is literally his only option (Which seems to have been the point historically). If a man wishes to have children, then the optimal play seems to be to hold out and screen casual partners as young as is legally allowable and ethically conscionable until the moment he is ready (Which also seems to be the theme historically) in order to maximize those ‘best years’. We already know this, but would experience significant pushback if we admitted to pursuing this strategy.
Women under 35 and most of society seem to be in utter denial about the existence of The Wall, to the point where I’d be an asshole if I even acknowledged it in polite society. I had been under the impression that the idea is to make marriage look more attractive by assuaging male concerns that the sex kitten he is hooking up with now will see her sexual interest dry up not long after the rings are exchanged and degenerate into a nagging harpy. No, it’s cool, that’s a myth. Just buy the ring.
Arguing that a woman must be entitled to a share of her husband’s income because her ‘best years’ are rare and to be privileged clearly states the expectation of looming decline and makes it impossible to ignore. The whole process only seems to make sense if one does their best not to think about it.
To Aapje’s PS:
If my BATNA weren’t “continue dating women decades my junior until I eventually go out in a motorcycle, parachute, or light aircraft collision, ideally well into my 70’s” I’d be sadder for having thought about it too. I think Skimmer’s right and I’m just not marriage material.
The best prospect is to find a man who isn’t judging transactionally. These men exist, so why not go for one of them?
Women (and men) are better conversational partners as they age. Is that not important to the likes of people on SSC?
They definitely do, and they’re the ones I’m talking about as the ones who jump in without thinking. I’m just not sold that trying to convince people to enter into binding legal contacts without thinking about them transactionally is respecting their wellbeing.
This is the kind of bargaining I expect from used car salesmen and shady mortgage brokers who tell you “Don’t worry about it! It’s just 6% and it’ll be rolled right into your monthly payment so you won’t even notice! Don’t think about it, it’s all just legal boilerplate. Just sign here, here, and initial here.”.
Sorry salesdude, I can do just enough basic math to multiply 6% by a large number and know this is arrangement isn’t in my best interest.
So sure they exist, but how many of them are there and in which direction is that number moving over time? What do we predict will happen when/if it becomes common knowledge that marriage isn’t necessarily expected to be long term anymore, and likely will cost them dearly? We’re not there yet, but it’s starting.
As for conversation… one can do that freely with whomever they like anyway, so I’m not sure why it makes sense to sacrifice salary and sexual access for one designated conversation partner.
Bringing this back around to David Friedman’s original question, the heart of this seems to be that everything that used to be women’s sphere of the marriage duties is now on offer from other sources for free to cheap. I consider my own sexual autonomy and the proceeds from my exorbitant work hours to be more valuable than regular sex and companionship that I can find easily outside of marriage, and domestic services that I can secure from a weekly housekeeping visit. Laundry is a half hour affair, and I own a 30$ slow cooker that can batch inexpensive, healthy, and good tasting meals for a week inside of an hour on sunday.
So breaking up the cartel of social norms that made sure I was unable to find, if not sex (through prostitutes), and if not companionship (through good friends), *sexual companionship* anywhere but marriage, has significantly undermined women’s bargaining position to anyone but impulse buyers.
I wonder if the next step is for women to start having to earn like men in order to make themselves financially safe to marry.
I disagree with almost everything you’ve said, but yes to this. Men should think carefully before marrying women with much lower earnings potential than themselves. And vice-versa. It’s not a hard rule, but money is a big deal and life is easier if both partners contribute vaguely equally in the long term. Divorce also hurts less if neither partner depends on the others income. How close together the numbers need to be depends on income and each partners desire for money; the person who wants money more will ideally earn more money. The husband spending all his time making money and wife spending all her time raising children (or the reverse) seems like a less stable set up than it would have been when divorce was hard.
@Barely matters
Yeah, okay. The type of person you describe seems like they would be bad husband material anyway. Only women who are looking for a fling (or prostitutes) would be desirous in having sex, or spending time, with such a person. This elides the vast majority of women, just as the man you described is other than the vast majority of men (I think). So yeah, that person shouldn’t get married, and should be honest about what they are.
It is not just “women’s bargaining position” which is negligible to such a man, it is also that kind of man’s bargaining position which is negligible to most women. But there are enough people around, including deluded younger women and prostitutes, that such a man won’t find it impossible to have flings and friends. Just as there are enough younger men around (~1% of men last I read) who are attracted to much older women, that single senior citizen women won’t find it impossible to have a fling or friend.
There have always, always been playboys, and the women who find them attractive. Those playboys and those women have almost always been tolerated by society, sometimes even fondly (their behavior is even tolerated by the Christian bible, as long as adultery doesn’t happen). Don’t sweat it. Marriage isn’t for you, at least at this point in your life.
Many people are actively attracted to an indefinite long-term relationship. This is part of the benefit to them, not a cost.
@quanta413
It’s cool, I endorse everything you’re saying here. A shift towards the norm being two economically contributing partners rather than an earner and a dependent suits me just fine as well.
@anonymousskimmer
I’m interested, but I’m not sure I understand quite who you mean when you say:
Did you mean the kind of man who jumps into contracts without thinking of them transactionally, or the description of myself specifically as being of low marriage value? (To which I should preface that it’s absolutely cool if you mean me, I really don’t take it personally). I’m trying to understand which parts you think make a man of lower value to women, such that they would be uninterested in spending time or sleeping with him.
In my experience, failing to place much value in domestic partnerships hasn’t proven to be much of a hindrance. And credit where it’s due, younger women aren’t bad company, deluded or otherwise.
I meant you. 🙂
I’d written it up generically before recalling that you were talking about yourself and not a hypothetical person.
Fair game!
I’m inclined to agree that I’m not a very good marriage candidate. We both know I’m a total dirtbag, and I’m pretty open about it with my partners too, but for some reason they seem to want to stick around, move in, and build a life together. So I guess I wish I had as much faith in their ability to make sound choices as you do!
I think the most likely outcome is that they stick around for 6 or 7 years thinking I’ll eventually cave, before getting frustrated and wandering off complaining that I took the best years of their life. I really wish there were a better way that didn’t involve ‘just give her half your portfolio’.
Anyway, I appreciate you taking the time to talk candidly here.
@Barely matters
I’m working on an effort post for the next CW OT, which will address this, but also how men can improve their prospects in the new situation. Both genders can do things to better fit within the new paradigm.
@quanta413
What seems to happen now (at least in America, less so in my country) is that a subset of women go full out for their career, until they decide to have children and then they fairly drastically u-turn into traditionalism/motherhood. This seems optimal for them from a transactional point of view in a low trust situation, if they want to end up with the best man, as women stay independent until it becomes advantageous to have the man provide, while the woman puts much of her effort into her children.
It does seem extremely shitty for men who are not seen as good prospects in those independent years, because they get to play a role that is mostly as bad as the traditional provider status in how much sacrifices the man has to make and how his needs become subservient to his wife’s and children’s, except with less benefits.
The downside to women is that this early career-oriented period is often quite shitty for them (as it often was/is quite shitty for men). I think that the u-turn to traditionalism/motherhood can be seen as a mid-life crisis of sorts, similar to how career-oriented men also regularly have a midlife-crisis when they realize that they’ve been doing things that they don’t enjoy.
Although, the women in my country seem to generally choose a smarter path, where they just optimize to have a fun, casual youth (where they work part-time straight out of college) and then hope to find a provider husband. This means they give up on a harsh competition with other women over the best man, but collectively doing that might be the best solution for them.
@anonymousskimmer
That is the best solution from a selfish, abusive point of view, yes…if those men actually exist in sufficient numbers and they don’t misjudge guys like Barely matters.
However, there are a limited number of men that are so foolish and who are good in other ways, especially at the top end and at more advanced age, so this will leave many of the most intelligent/achieving women proclaiming: where did the good men go?
You also get delusional articles like this, where it’s claimed to all be the fault of men that they shun these almost perfect women and that they are unwilling to put a lot of effort in. No understanding at all that these men have probably seen and/or had to endure the transactional decisions that women made when the odds were in women’s favor and that they are not going to be suckers who don’t take advantage when the winds change. Selfish behavior that takes full advantage of the edge you have, simply doesn’t tend to result in altruistic behavior in others when the tables turn. If the selfish behavior is unintentional/not recognized by the people who are taking advantage, that doesn’t make the other side hurt less, it just makes the backlash a surprise.
Money quotes from the article:
“According to Jo Hemmings, a behavioural psychologist and dating coach, there are an estimated seven new women for every man on the dating scene in the 40-55 age group, so availability is clearly a big issue.”
“‘You’ve got to make the choice to be that one woman in seven. It’s tough but possible.’”
And the other 6?
My social needs are low and they seem to be lower for the average man than for the average woman.
It’s actually these delusions about what men should favor (which then just happens to be the things that are actually better for women to provide than men’s actual needs), that result in the misconception that women are providing more to men than they actually are. This in turn legitimizes selfish behavior that prevents equitable deals from happening as much as they could happen.
Looking forward to it!
I can certainly see the social value of a good, stable marriage. It’s much harder to see the value of a crappy marriage, that is, an unbreachable contract that both parties would prefer to breach.
Maybe lifetime unbreachable contracts made by horny teens and 20 somethings are a bad idea?
On the other hand, norms against divorce almost certainly contribute to having stable marriages. If both parties go in with the understanding that they have basically no choice but to make this work, they’re a lot more likely to push through the rough spots than people who think that divorce is normal.
Societies that enforced lifetime unbreachable(*) contracts made by horny teens and 20 somethings, created all the great empires of history. Landed men on the moon. Enacted the civil rights act. And created the prototype of the internet we are having this discussion on. Societies that have decided to dispense with such contracts, brag about achievements that mostly seem to involve how much sex is going on and in what novel permutations. And elect multiply-divorced presidents.
Maybe tearing down that fence was a bad idea.
* Modulo adultery, abuse, and abandonment
https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-Poverty-Since-1820.png
I’d say we’d got some accomplishments since 1970.
Those accomplishments almost entirely belong to countries with “old” marriage norms by western standards (mostly China and India, but other places too) and not to the rich high divorce societies (U.S., Europe) on other continents.
Not entirely. Those poverty reductions are largely a result of trade. It would not have happened without no-fault divorce societies’ cooperation and wealth. The growth of which has been substantial since 1970.
Didn’t both Rome and the early Islamic caliphate have easy divorce, at least for men?
That’s a overstatement. The Romans had divorce, and quite a bit of it, sometimes purely for personal advantage. The Islamic Empire at its height had divorce which was famously easy to initiate for men. So did the Han Chinese, although there you needed reasons, but one of them was not getting along with relatives, which is a hole you can sail a junk through.
Obviously, this whole thing is silly.
But the no-fault divorce countries had similar growth rates before and after no-fault divorce.
Clearly, the correct argument for no-fault divorce civilizations is that no-fault divorce is how we beat the communists.
If China’s contribution to China not being massively poor any more was to go and make about twenty trillion dollars worth of useful stuff, of sufficient quality that Western consumers are willing to buy it but at a fraction of the price, and the Western contribution was to buy all the stuff they were going to buy anyway but buy it cheaper from China, then I think we’re on reasonably solid ground on giving 90% of the credit to the people who don’t have an ethic of no-fault divorce.
As for Rome and the Islamic Caliphate, the existence of dowry as a hefty security deposit made divorce rather less than “easy” for anyone who wasn’t filthy stinking rich. Of course, most of the stories that are fun/interesting to read are the ones about the filthy stinking rich people (who are divorcing their starter wives to marry an even richer bride), so there’s a bit of reporting bias there.
http://newyork.china-consulate.org/eng/lsqz/laws/t42222.htm
I guess all progress stopped in 2003, and since then the only thing China has to be proud of is the novel permutations of sexual partners that its people engage in.
Obviously there’s a time lag. As the Chinese divorce rate increases and their divorce laws become less strict, they too will eventually be able to defeat the largest and most powerful communist nation as the U.S. once did…
Am I doing this right?
EDIT: My extremely crude estimate for 2014, would be that the U.S. divorce rate is something like 3/7 and the Chinese one is about 2/10 from this data. So China’s got to double their divorce rate to attain true greatness. But I could be off an order of magnitude here.
@John Schilling
We’ve replaced the dowry with the divorce court, but the risk is still there.
@bean
And it’s important to recognize that the life-skills such adaptations provide are a positive, and often even a necessity, outside of the marriage itself.
I remain skeptical of the view that no-fault divorce was a fundamental change to the nature of marriage. Before no-fault, it was increasingly common to divorce on fictitious grounds – i.e., a contrived “extramarital affair” with both spouses’ knowledge, arranged so one could catch the other in the act and file for divorce on grounds of adultery. The primary argument for no-fault was that if this was going to happen anyway, the legal system might as well recognize what was really going on and end these elaborate farces.
To me the bigger change, from a legal perspective at least, was the abolition of coverture.
The important change is cultural rather than legal, with divorce becoming a thing that people aren’t ashamed of or shamed for. But that’s not a thing that you can point to a date on a calendar and say “this is when it happened”. In a democracy, at least, you can point to the passage of legislation reflecting the cultural change and saying “this is probably sort of in the middle of when it was happening”.
Two more relevant data points would be the TV sitcoms Maude (1972) and One Day at a Time (1975), both of which were considered somewhat controversial at the time for featuring divorced women as protagonists but which became reliable top-10 ratings winners. Prior to that, the reality series Divorce Court (1957-1969) was based largely on identifying and shaming the villainous spouse of the pair.
I’d say the sexual revolution was definitely a bad thing; it accomplished very few of the stated goals while damaging a lot of useful institutions. I think the previous systems did a better job of getting more people to make choices that they were more satisfied long-term.
I’m not sure, though, that it was as revolutionary as it is portrayed; the post-WW2 era was a remarkably non-promiscuous time, not typical of 1700-1950.
Sounds like an interesting paper abstract.
Overwhelmingly negative from what I can see. Satan almost certainly involved.
@DavidFriedman
I think that you are making a mistake by always comparing marriage to non-marriage, rather than being single to being in a long term relationship (LTR). Changing norms means that many people now live in an LTR that is identical to marriage relationships in most ways, especially when it comes to sex.
Post-sexual revolution ‘unmarried’ is a different group to pre-revolution ‘unmarried.’ Unfortunately, many studies compare married to unmarried, where it would make more sense to either compare single to those in an LTR or to separate out three groups: single, married LTR or unmarried LTR.
On average, yes. However, I suspect that some groups actually became worse off.
This is the trade-off of meritocracy/free trade/etc in general: it enables those who have certain qualities to really leverage those to great effect, but it also means that those who lack those qualities are more prone to be out-competed. So you tend to get more extreme difference between what people get in life, unless this is countered. For the job market, you can do various kinds of wealth redistribution for those who have a problem competing. We can’t/shouldn’t redistribute actual coitus, but I do think that we are now doing a partial redistribution of the sex experience in the form of porn.
Furthermore, along with the sexual revolution we also normalized the use of sex toys for women, which gave women part of the pleasure of sex without having to find a man to assist. In general, the sexual revolution benefited people who have trouble attracting a sex partner by removing the ban on and by improving the experience of masturbation.
I’m pretty sure that this not the case for many men who comment here. If you are bad at wooing and/or don’t have traits that make wooing easy (like superior looks or extroversion), then obtaining sex outside of an LTR is much harder.
In general, studies find that truly single people (not those who are cohabitating) are the least satisfied with their sex life. I also expect a strong disparity among truly single people, with a relatively small percentage of ‘players’ and a relatively large percentage of people who have sex very infrequently or not at all. People in an LTR probably tend to have far less deviation from the average.
Is this a sensible question? The sexual revolution was pretty much inevitable when fairly reliable birth control was developed & birth control was a huge boon. Medical advances resulted in far more pregnancies ending with a living mother & child and more children living a long life, so birth control was crucial to prevent a Malthusian scenario.
I think we may be thinking of different things when talking about the “sexual revolution.” Here’s my thinking:
Contraception was widely available, and widely used, by 1950; all those families with four children, the youngest of whom was born when the wife was under 30, are good evidence for its widespread use and effectiveness. What didn’t exist was a form of contraception that (1) enabled delayed child-bearing (2) was highly reliable (3)did not require attention shortly before intercourse. (The three common forms as far as I can tell were condoms, diaphragms, and surgical sterilization.)
What changed between 1960 and 1975 was mostly about marriage norms and single motherhood. What it led to was marriages that were happier on average, but many fewer of them–with the remainder being replaced by various weaker forms of commitment or not replaced. So there are many more (something like 10x as many) children growing up with only one parent, and the average adult is much less likely to have a stable relationship that they can plan around long-term. I don’t see the general upside. Yes, there were some terrible, unhappy, abusive marriages; there are still terrible, unhappy, abusive relationships–they just aren’t marriages. Marriage used to be sufficiently important that people put up with a lot; now they leave, and generally end up just about as unhappy as if they’d stayed.
Presumably, a bunch of people abusive/unpleasant people now only make themselves unhappy, rather than a spouse & child.
I don’t know if the upsides outweigh the downsides. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
That’s an assumption I disagree with: I think now in most cases they make their girlfriend unhappy, rather than their wife.
This Gallup survey shows that the decline in marriage is not compensated by an increase in cohabitation for young people. It goes entirely into people who live alone.
For somewhat older people, 30-39, their data shows that about 2/3rds of drop in marriage can be attributed to cohabitation increasing and 1/3rd to more people living alone. So there we also have more people living alone.
And my guess–just a guess with no data–is that the 30-39 year olds living alone are no more likely to be unpleasant than the ones who are cohabiting. So whatever proportion of people were unpleasant partners then, 2/3 of them are still partnered, 1/3 aren’t. But, on the flip side, the pleasant ones aren’t making a partner happy.
I would be very surprised indeed if the single people did not have a higher rate of less desirable traits, because that would mean that there is no agreement at all by those who select a partner on what traits are desirable.
That seems rather obviously false. Pretty people are more desirable on the whole. Higher earning men are more desirable. Women who don’t yet have children are more desirable. People who aren’t mean drunks are more desirable. Etc.
Desirability would only fail to reflect the chance of being in a relationship if the more desirable would increase their demands for a partner at least as much as their own desirability, but, while we expect some increase, such a strong correlation seems unlikely.
I sort of agree but would say that living with a partner today, while sort of like an old-fashioned marriage in some ways, nevertheless implies a much lower level of commitment than marriage did then and does now.
I’m also not sure that contraception makes social acceptance of premarital sex inevitable, but it sure makes it a lot harder to avoid in the absence of widely shared, strong, probably religious values. For example, I know a few conservative couples who supposedly waited until marriage and got married quite young by today’s standards, and it mostly seems to have worked out pretty well for them. It is not impossible to imagine a world in which their values are the norm rather than the exception, though it probably implies a lot of other big social changes to imagine it working.
Sure, but that still means that cohabitation and marriage of today are far more similar to each other than to being single. Marriage is harder to exit, but primarily because people tend to marry when they want children and it’s the presence of children that really makes divorce difficult. Unmarried people who have children and split up also have that difficulty.
I just wrote a bit elsewhere on the problem with unrealistic expectations.
I do agree that it is plausible that far more people would decide to marry young with a more realistic world view. On the other hand, young people are not known for being very realistic/wise & in much of history, society had to be quite forceful to get the vast majority of young people to conform.
You will always have a group of youths who are so desirable that they are the winners in a very sexually permissive society & these are automatically going to have the strongest influence on youth culture (because the same traits that make people want to have sex with them, also makes people want to be friends with them).
Arguably, we should be telling many people: with your face & other traits, you better have low expectations and marry ASAP to another person with low desirability. Holding out for Christiano Ronaldo/Miranda Kerr is just going to mean that you will end up with a choice from a smaller and smaller pool, who are not going to be better than what you can pick now.
living with a partner today…implies a much lower level of commitment than marriage did then
I’d add that even marriage today implies a lower commitment to stability than marriage did then; it probably implies a higher commitment to faithfulness, though. (Anecdata; talking to people who were married in the 1950s, it seems that a fair number of spouses of both genders were more likely to tolerate an affair by their spouse than is the case now.)
Sure, but that higher commitment was often not based on making an attempt at an objective decision, but a consequence of a societal taboo on separation. So this could mean that people would often stick with relationships that overall were negative sum, which is not good.
In the modern environment, people do try to make that decision based a mix of the overall impact (which is why many stay together when the children are young, despite wanting to separate) and the impact to themselves, which in itself seems the most reasonable way to operate.
The issue is more that there is a lack of good information, as well as the harmful influence of (temporary) emotion & infatuations, causing bad decisions to be made. However, bad decisions are made in both directions, so it’s not a given that going back to the earlier model would reduce the error rates.
@Aapje
Much harder than what?
I’d also point out that what an LTR is has changed. Once upon a time, the expectation might be marriage, or at least, engagement. Now you go out on three or four dates, text in between, and bam, people file that under “LTR” in their heads.
Much harder than getting your partner to have sex with you.
As for your second point, let’s draw the line at cohabitation.
I think that’s a pretty high standard. I would say, a year plus.
Dunno about that. The impression I get is that lots of young men have difficulty attracting a partner because all the women are sleeping with a small amount of very promiscuous, very attractive men. Presumably in a society where sex was only accepted inside marriage, we’d expect a much larger proportion to get regular sex, because each person would only be having sex with one partner* and so we wouldn’t get the phenomenon of a small number of people enjoying almost all the sexual partners.
* Leaving aside affairs, prostitution, etc., for simplicity’s sake.
How do you get this impression? There’s a decent number of middle-attractiveness guys who do well with women, or well enough. They might not be constantly picking up women in bars, or whatever. The high-percentile-attractiveness-etc guys are not taking all the women; there’s still plenty of women for guys who are in the middle range, for LTRs or casual sex or whatever. There is no phenomenon of a small number of guys getting almost all the women – that’s a gross exaggeration.
The guys at the top get more sexual partners than the guys below them, usually, but this isn’t a new thing. In traditional patriarchal societies of the sort where there’s polygyny, rich old men do take a huge share of the women, leaving guys at the bottom with nothing. This isn’t a creation of the sexual revolution; it’s better today for Joe Schmoe than it has been in a lot of societies.
I think the issue is more a combination of, overall, messaging that one’s worth is heavily tied to one’s ability to attract partners (esp. for men), and on the one hand, messaging to women leading them to believe they have all the time in the world (it’s become moderately taboo to recognize that women’s fertility declines earlier and more than men’s) and on the other hand, various different forms of messaging to young men that leave them rather clueless as to what women are actually attracted to.
Anecdata: Back when I was doing online dating, I didn’t have a hard time getting dates or relationships; I could have been having more sex if I’d wanted to, probably. Either I’m very attractive (flattering, but probably incorrect) or your impression is incorrect.
My impression is based on statistics showing that on dating websites the top 5% or so of men get something like 80% of messages. Granted, that might not reflect the situation in face-to-face interactions, but I still suspect that most men would get more sex if they paired off with a wife than under the current situation.
I don’t think polygamous societies are really relevant here; if we’re asking “Was the sexual revolution a good thing, on balance?” the relevant comparison would surely be the western world just before the sexual revolution (i.e., the 1950s), not ancient Egypt or wherever.
But is getting messages the measurement? Getting one’s messages returned, setting up dates, getting future dates/having casual sex/whatever seems to be the measurement.
There’s a difference between “I can’t get any dates because those blasted chads are taking all the women” and “I am not so hot that women throw themselves at me.”
Was getting a girlfriend or wife easier for unattractive, uncharming, etc guys in the 50s than it is now? Because the Redpill/adjacent narrative in which the sexual revolution let the most attractive guys have sex with all the women, who then no longer want relationships or whatever with average guys – I don’t think that’s accurate. Life has never been a picnic for below-average people, but a guy who’s average is not frozen out of the ability to find a woman roughly in his league by the hottest guys.
I think what’s going on isn’t that the most attractive men are getting all the women, or even all the fairly attractive women. This might be happening in some social circles.
What might be going on is that the least attractive 10% or 20% of men (guessing at the numbers) have no chance at attracting any woman, or see themselves in that situation.
Not even just the least attractive, but also those with bad social skills.
Ultimately, men usually have to woo, which is more difficult than to be wooed.
I was including skill at wooing as part of being attractive.
Something I’ve been thinking about, is that the sexual revolution “stalled” – we’re in a weird twilight zone between what the utopians in the 60s wanted, and what existed before that.
What the most utopian utopians appear to have wanted was true sexual freedom – informed consent for everyone, no jealousy, free love, etc. The lesser version of this focused on informed consent and not being hung up about sex – people should be able to talk about it, it should be initiated through mutual consent instead of one party (in a male-female pairing, almost always the man) escalating things under the assumption that the absence of no is a yes.
The situation now is one where people are more willing to have sex than they were prior to the middle 20th century. More willing to have sex within a relationship, and outside of a relationship. However, communicating clearly about it has not increased to the same level. The script is still that the guy initiates. Many people – male and female – think that seeking affirmative consent, etc, is weird. A lot of people don’t seem happy with the current way things are.
Whether what the utopians wanted is possible is an open question. It might be impossible, for reasons biological, it might be so hard to change due to social reasons to be effectively impossible, or some combination.
Caveat: the degree to which the sexual revolution made premarital sex more common is sometimes overstated – but it was less common in the past than it is today. Antibiotics reduced the effects of disease, the increasing availability of the pill reduced the risk of pregnancy, and society changed along with that. Anyone who tells you that people were having sex in the same patterns then as they were today is full of crap. Not the case. However, anybody who says that people were chaste before the pill showed up are full of crap too.
My impression of the early sexual revolution is that many/most of the people involved didn’t think anybody would say no – that is, they thought the only reason people weren’t having sex with anybody who wanted to have sex with them was weird cultural hang-ups about sex.
The structure of modern consent looks like an ad-hoc fix on top of that system, rather than something that was built into it from the beginning
ETA:
Thinking about it, this attitude has been half-universalized. There are a lot of people out there who think not wanting to have sex with someone is an aggressive attitude, a denial of their humanity (like at least a subset of the earlier free love people, it is like refusing to shake someone’s hand). But it has become distorted and contextualized, so that it is only aggressive under specific circumstances.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, we have school dances where people are not allowed to decline requests to dance, because of inclusivity and hurt feelings.
I keep wondering how strong individualist feminism can coincide with the general collectivist-minded left-wing narrative. How far away are we from “everyone belongs to everyone else” ala Brave New World?
The identitarian left is slowly shattering as these kinds of issues become more and more prominent.
Like the idea that it is wrong and bigoted not to have sex with trans people.
At a certain point, I just want to sit back and watch. It is fascinating.
@Thegnskald
That was a thing; you are correct. One of the complaints in second-wave feminism past a certain point was about a sort of what I guess today we’d call “woke misogyny” in the peace-and-free-love circles. I might be reading more recent sex-positive attitudes back in time.
It is an interesting perspective; what if they are right? What if social attitudes towards sex are the only reason people say “No”?
It is kind of a moot point, I guess, as even if it is the case, I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Certainly I have little interest in adopting those kinds of sexual mores; social interaction is oppressive enough without adding that much expected work on top of it.
If sex was as consequence-free as shaking hands usually is, it could become like shaking hands. You’re not going to shake someone’s hand if you really don’t like them, or if they’re covered in sewage, or whatever. For various reasons, I think this is unlikely.
One way of looking at the question is to start by asking why intercourse is superior to masturbation, given that the latter option is conveniently available without all the search costs and potential problems of the former.
I think one part of the answer is that someone’s willingness to sleep with you signals something good about you. Another part is that sexual intercourse has emotional concomitants–“make love” is both a euphemism and an exaggerated description of a real phenomenon. Both of those are reasons why having intercourse with anyone who wants it doesn’t work.
@Thegnskald
This got me thinking more, and I think you have something here. “Free love” in all its permutations generally seems to benefit men, or at least some men, more than women. The men who are complaining in today’s system are, by and large, the men who aren’t getting laid. The guys who are getting laid seem pretty happy; there’s maybe a tinge of fear for some of them that wasn’t there before, but that’s a recent development. In comparison, women unhappy with the current system vary widely in their specifics and complaints.
What if affirmative consent, all that, is just an attempt to make more female-friendly a system that disadvantages women, at least sexually? The old way of doing things was extremely stifling for women in multiple ways, not just sexually. If the push for affirmative consent, the thinkpieces where women complain that their hookups were disrespectful and unkind, all that, is trying to put brakes on a sexual system that advantages men, or some men, over women…
Let’s put it another way: what if instead of stopping to slut-shame women, society had started slut-shaming men?
Do they? I thought they all map pretty reasonably to “Men want more sex and less commitment than I would prefer”
I have a little trouble with this, because an environment in which men aren’t slut-shamed is kind of alien to me.
This may get back to the “I grew up in a rural, conservative area”, but the few men who slept around were not well thought-of.
And this still seems to be the case; society still seems to frown pretty heavily on men sleeping around. We don’t call them sluts, exactly, but the negative affect is still there.
The weird thing is that everybody seems to think that everybody else likes men for sleeping around. Maybe this is still a bubble thing? But the closest thing I actually see to approving of men sleeping around is virgin-shaming, which is more like “There is a societal ideal for the amount of sex a man has and the number of partners he has had that is greater than X and less than Y”, where the equivalent Y for women is lower. Which I guess could look like society being more restrictive of women’s sexuality, if the only direction of restrictiveness you care about is viewing the upper limit of acceptability.
But going back to the bubble thing – in which the conservative culture I grew up in frowned on male promiscuity – I have a vague “Aha” building in my head about one of the culture clashes: Maybe cosmopolitan culture is, in fact, accepting of male promiscuity.
Maybe this is like the “racism” thing above. Maybe cosmopolitan culture is sexist in this way.
In which case, the even more restrictive mores in rural culture would look worse – if you are only looking at the sexism your own culture engages in. Because they are more restrictive of women’s sexuality – but, and this is, I think the critical thing that is missed, they are also restrictive of men’s sexuality.
“fuckboi” is not exactly a term of endearment
I think men gain status by demonstrating that they are capable of sleeping with high-status women as often as they’d like (and of course, the surest way to demonstrate capability of something is to actually do it). Guys who get a lot of sex by approaching low status women, getting them drunk, and never calling back are not thought of very well – no. But, as you point out, these guys still enjoy significantly more status than virgins…
I do think young men who sleep around get respect for it from their non-religious peers, at least, in ways young women do not. I think older men (say, >30) have some disdain for their peers who continue to act juvenile. In no case, of course, is unintentional virtue respected in this sphere.
Leaving aside complaints concerning harassment and assault, which concern behaviour that is either criminal or at a minimum extremely sketchy (the guy who looks for drunk girls who wouldn’t say yes if they were sober may or may not be breaking the law depending on the jurisdiction, but he is 100% a shitty person) there tend to be a few different streams.
There’s the one you mention. That one is tied up with what DavidFriedman mentioned above: a woman holding out for commitment of some sort is in a considerably worse bargaining position, so to speak, than she used to be. It’s a bad situation, and I feel sympathy, in the same way I feel sympathy for people who lost manufacturing jobs due to labour being cheaper elsewhere.
There’s “the guys I have casual sex with are jerks” – not a claim of assault, but a claim that the guys are disrespectful, not hugely concerned with consent, don’t particularly care about the woman’s pleasure, etc. There’s something here – a lot of men are like that (I think it’s an inevitable result of “# of women bedded” being the main measurement of masculinity for many men today – say that five times fast) but it’s a complaint I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for – because the obvious solution is to only have sex with people after you’ve gotten a gauge on their character. Which, of course, generally means not having casual sex, or at least not having sex with people you don’t know. It’s also a complaint that’s rather clueless about the fact that the major way to stop these guys being shitty is to stop having sex with shitty guys. They’re not gonna change out of the goodness of their hearts. Boycotts work.
There’s “I’m out of my 20s; where did all the guys go?!?” too but that one’s not really about sex.
With regard to social judgment of men who sleep around: there’s always been some judgment of cads, but it’s never been to the same degree as judgment of promiscuous women, and it’s of a different kind.
People might disapprove of a guy who sleeps with a lot of women, but they’re judging him for something he does. In contrast, the judgment of a promiscuous woman is that she is letting something be done to her too easily. It casts her in the position of a morally disreputable victim, somewhat pathetic.
I thought that meant “guy you’re sleeping with but whom you don’t respect”, not “guy who sleeps around a lot”? Sort of the equivalent of calling your girlfriend “my bitch”, but without the class connotations.
I always thought it was a bit of a combination. It’s a guy you’re sleeping with but don’t expect to be in a relationship with – often because he sleeps around and you don’t think he has any intention of wanting a relationship with you.
In re slut-shaming men:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/7vhldu/she_wrote_it_but_revisiting_joanna_russ_how_to/?limit=500
Among other things, this is about romance not getting respect as a genre, presumably because it’s something women like. I’m not arguing with the claim, but it may be relevant that porn gets even less respect.
I recommend the initial essay, though what I read of the comments didn’t seem to add a tremendous amount.
Looking into the history of what art gets respect and what doesn’t, and how it shifts, is probably worth some time.
My tentative theory is that anything people really like, especially if it’s relatively new, will be despised.
@Nancy Lebovitz
That seems like one of these standard victim narratives based on cherry picked evidence to support a preconceived narrative.
Right now, fiction is mainly read by women and seems the most respected genre, while non-fiction, which is more often read by men, is not seen as ‘high culture.’ SF is even more male-dominated and probably gets the least respect. It seems practically impossible for a SF novel to win a ‘normal’ literature reward. The more female fantasy & YA genre seems to get more respect (Harry Potter & Game of Thrones, for example, get broad recognition).
—
Also, parts of that narrative are just maddening in their lack of empathy with men:
Let me guess, the partner is actually earning real money, while the writer is not (the statistics suggest that most authors earn very little). In that case, is the partner wrong to regard the writing as a hobby that does not excuse the writer from making a contribution to the household that is somewhat on par with the money that the partner brings in?
Not only does the writer not answer this question, she doesn’t even ask it, which I consider strong evidence of anti-male bias. There is no attempt to see the situation from the other perspective. It’s just: men have obligations, women have rights. That is not equality, that is a demand for benevolent sexism.
PS. Also, the sexism is offensive: “Yet, we’re all human and we live in this culture where it’s still okay to insult female-for-female gaze.” Apparently, women may write things that men may not. Bye, bye, equality of opportunity.
PS2. On second thought, this is probably not why you posted that link, but it pissed me off 🙂
Aapje, there are at least a couple of possible scenarios for the having time/permission to write issue.
One is the writer wanting to not do much for the household.
Another is the non-writer demanding the writer’s attention whenever the writer seems to be settling down to write.
I think it completes the Victorian Reversal, as I like to call it. Women are now allowed to be as slutty as they want, but guys still have to be perfect gentlemen. So yeah, it’s trying to advantage women.
@Aapje
Sorry this got really long. Summary — you’re claims about which genres are respected do not match my experience/impressions (which I elaborate below). Can you explain/elaborate your thought?
>Right now, fiction is mainly read by women and seems the most respected genre, while non-fiction, which is more often read by men, is not seen as ‘high culture.’ SF is even more male-dominated and probably gets the least respect.
How are you measuring/judging respect? I’m not sure what a good way is that lets us compare, but my impression is that non-fiction and sci-fi get MORE respect than other types of fiction (romance? mystery? YA? not sure what clear other genres people point to). Obviously these are broad and heterogeneous categories but when I try to think of “central” examples [sorry these are probably all UK/American]:
“Serious Literature” that wins the Pullitzer or Nobel or whatever prize — I think Donna Tart is in this category but I don’t read Serous Literatute so can’t name any other living authors (some older ones would be the ones my English Major friends write papers on — James Joyce, Henry James, Daphne Du Maurier off the top of my head). These ones obviously get a lot of respect, they’re the focus of the academy. I think you also age into this category — Dickens was probably not in this category when he was published (if Serious Literature was even a thing in the sense I’m thinking of back then) but I think he is now?
— Non fiction — I’m thinking John McPhee and Eric Larson b/c they’ve been recommended to me, but its obviously a large and heterogeneous category. I can’t think of any examples that wouldn’t get respect though, at least from the general public (historians/anthropologists/most other academics might look down on you for reading Jared Diamond but the average reader will think you’r smart).
— Sci Fi and Fantasy — at the “high respect” end you get really prestigious authors, like I think George RR Martin and John Scalzi get a lot of respect and the average person would judge you well for reading their books. At the low end there’s “pulp”, but I’m only familiar with that as a historical term and don’t know who modern “pulp” authors are. Authors that I’ve been mildly embarrassed to read include Eric Flint — mostly because the writing style feels unpolished to me and my friends and family are tired of me talking about the Thirty Years War 😛
— Mystery and thrillers? Well Dan Brown gets no respect, but I think some others do — definitely Stephen King does (and Amazon puts his stuff in “Mystery and Suspense”.) I don’t think people would judge you negatively for reading James Patterson or Sue Grafton on the train? Also DEFINITELY a category were authors can age into respect — Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie are definitely respected these days.
Romance — I read so little romance that I’m not sure what a good non-central example is. I don’t think anyone judged me for reading Outlander, but that much more SciFi/Historical Fiction/Adventure than maybe the typical romance? plus a guy might catch more flak for it (too bad, its a fun book).
YA — definitely you’d get the least respect reading these as an adult. (Which is an attitude I’d like to push back on but I’m trying to describe what I observe not what I want.) I think YA romance most of all, although hard to disentangle that from the Internet Phenomenon of Twilight.
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Also, to the extent that respect is influenced by popularity, sci fi and fantasy are The Most Popular going by box office and movie adaption attention. Even if I’m not sure how marvel fits in, Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, etc. are some of the most talked about media right now. And in books — hard for me to measure because I read a lot of SF&F and talk to people about what I read — but internet discussions are definitely dominated by SF&F — again GoT, Brandon Sanderson, John Scalzi, …)
======================
I’m sure what I’ve described is heavily American-skewed, so if opinions are drastically different in Europe let me know 😛 (Also heavily book and nerd-skewed, b/c I get these impressions from talking to book-reading friends and the Books subreddit, but I’m not sure how to disentangle that — why should readers care what non-readers think about books? How can they even have coherent or useful opinions separate from copying readers’ opinions?)
@AnonYEMous
And yet, that isn’t what’s happening. While there certainly is a school of thought that would like for women to be able to do whatever they want without risk of hurt feelings, let alone actual risk… It isn’t the case. Nowhere near. The message the actual men of the variety who do the feelings-hurting, and of the variety that do the actual assaulting, are getting, seems to be more “don’t get caught” than “this is how to behave.”
Is there even a norm right now?
@Nancy Lebovitz
Yet the writer doesn’t distinguish between reasons or notes that there can be any legitimate reasons at all. There is merely a demand that the man should be “in charge of the dishwasher, dogs, and kids” aka the entire household.
I fundamentally believe that only a demand for quid-pro-quo can be reasonable and there is zero indication that this is desired.
I also have trouble believing that in modern times so many men would be so demanding. Given the rest of her piece, my assumption is that the unreasonableness is at her end.
@quaelegit
I was using the standard of looking at the top end of the categories. Obviously any category is going to have a lot of disrespected books.
The top end of fiction get respect as Art. The top end of fiction gets respect as a technical job well done, with perhaps an exception here and there that is considered Art. But most of the top tier non-fiction seems to garner less respect and less enduring fame.
Anyway, this is just my impression. My point was mainly that I just don’t see some patriarchal system where all the works written by women or more often read by women get far less respect, while the works written by men or read more by men are all more respected.
I see a persecution complex, not reason.
“However, Russ uses an example that rings modern. Marie Curie’s biographer, her daughter Eve, wrote how Marie and Pierre did their scientific work, but Marie also did the cleaning, shopping, cooking, and child care. Perhaps the most common interaction I have had with female authors (and gay male authors) of a certain age is how to get their male partners to “let” them write. How exactly, Krista, do you convince your husband to let you have uninterrupted writing time, whereby he is in charge of the dishwasher, dogs, and kids?
It is such a fundamentally frustrating question because it has come from all kinds of writers. From twitter fandom theory writers to multi-published Big 5 authors, and boils down to, “How do you get your husband to respect your writing time?” It’s a question I have always been unable to properly answer, as I don’t know how to get one’s husband to respect you, your passions, and your pursuits.”
Aapje, here’s a chunk of the text.
Note that the author says things have gotten better on this front. Also note that the issue seems to have existed no matter whether the writing was bringing in money.
I somewhat misremembered it– I thought the issue was more like wife starts to write, husband says “Come watch television with me”, but that wasn’t it.
Do you believe that the partner who brings in less money shouldn’t be allowed to have any immersive hobbies?
If the woman does bring in more money (this isn’t the default, but it isn’t rare either) should her husband be willing to guard her writing time?
““in charge of the dishwasher, dogs, and kids” aka the entire household.”
I think the idea was that the husband should be the go-to person while the wife has her writing time, but not all the time.
@Nancy Lebovitz
What is frustrating to me is that a key part of ‘patriarchy’ is the idea that men have a primary duty to earn the household income, which effectively means that men are pressured into sacrificing more pleasant career choices or more pleasant number of hours spent at their job.
Her complaint that there are expectations on women to run the household is the other side of the gender norms coin: the way in which women are or were pressured to do what the gender norm considers to be the duty of their gender.
Ultimately, it doesn’t work when no one earns an income and when no one does the work to run the household, so some sacrifice is needed. In just about every relationship there is going to be an adversarial component, where each person wants the other to sacrifice more and they themselves want to sacrifice less.
This can result in conflict. There is no obvious reason why we should assume that the balance that is favored by the man is closer to reasonable than what is favored by the woman, or vice versa. It’s especially unreasonable to assume that there is no validity to what the man favors at all.
Of course, in feminism, it is often taken as axiomatic that what the man favors is less reasonable and that the societally favored balance disfavors women on the whole. However, I reject treating these as axioms.
Hi I wrote this post about (bad) incentives and would like to link it here — https://medium.com/@stefanklaus/rat-problem-3b3564e23195
The specifics part makes it difficult, especially since work flow and work projects change on any given day. But, I have some time, so I can describe some work-flow.
My first job was an Audit Compliance Specialist at a major pharmacy. The basic business problem is that Pharmacy Benefit Managers (which are a middle-man between insurance companies and pharmacies) have contract language which allows them to audit a certain % of prescriptions filled at any given pharmacy, and someone has to provide them a copy of the prescription. The Audit Compliance Specialist fills this role. They provide documentation for the prescription and handle disputes with the PBM (Pharmacy Benefit Manager).
There are subsets of audits within this, and each PBM has a slightly different process.
Desktop Audits: This was where I started. PBMs would send excel spreadsheets 3 times a week. There would be a column for prescription number, pharmacy NPI (basically an ID number for a pharmacy), date of service, quantity dispensed, day supply (how long a medication was expected to last), drug name, and maybe some additional fields depending on the insurance company.
Typical volume varied. Say, maybe 30-60 prescriptions per spreadsheet. I would handle maybe 3-4 insurance companies, so say 90-120 prescriptions per week.
We needed to save a master list of ALL audits. So all this information would be copy-pasted into another spreadsheet for that particular PBM.
You would access the scanned hard-copy of the prescription in our system, record the directions (like, take 1 pill twice a day), fill out the spreadsheet, and send it back to the PBM.
In cases where an actual copy of a prescription was requested, we would have to print out all prescriptions and fax them to the PBM. We could’ve emailed them, except that our office refused to support Print to PDF functions, and our only scanner was something someone brought in from home (not a commercial scanner).
Typically, we would be audited because of unusual days supply for a given quantity of medication. For example, an extended release blood pressure medication is typically given 1 per day. If you submitted 90 pills with a Days Supply of 30, this would be audited.
My favorite remains the Nuvaring. This is a birth control medication. It’s an actual ring that releases the BC medication, and is inserted exactly where you guess it would be. If you dispense 3 nuvarings to a woman, you need to submit it as a three-month supply, not a one-month supply. Presumably, this woman does NOT have three vaginas.
So, the PBM Auditor would review what we sent to them, and send back their corrected Quantities and Days Supply. What happens then? Well, since you want more details….either we rebill the claim, or the PBM rebills adjusts the claim, on their end.
We rebill the claim via the usual electronic adjudication system. Basically, all modern pharmacies have a live electronic feed with each major PBM. This means that you go into a pharmacy, you get your prescription, and it’s already billed and cleared at Point of Sale. However, you can typically only bill within a certain number of days. So if the PBM audits something that was dispensed a year ago, well, I can’t rebill that, and the PBM auditor needs to perform an adjustment on their end.
We would then take the results of the audit, and go back to that Master List I previously mentioned. Periodically, we would take all these Master Lists, and upload them all into a Master Access Database, which would contain all the details of all audits for that year.
THEN, someone has to manually go through that Database, and enter the audit findings into the Accounts Receivable system. This is because Accounts Receivable will see a reversed claim and will start illegal Collections activity. The Audit team is empowered to perform a limited number of journal entries that will allow them to clear this balance so A/R will never see it.
As previously mentioned, the typical audit was because the pharmacy dispensed something with a ridiculous Day Supply, typically a 3 month supply of drugs billed as a 1 month supply (either out of ignorance or to minimize patient co-pays).
Other typical issues:
-Incorrect prescription forms: certain payers will only allow certain kinds of prescriptions. Famously, Medco initially only allowed hand-written prescriptions, while the entire industry was transitioning over to Electronic Prescriptions. This meant every prescription Medco audited that was an Electronic Prescription was automatically reversed.
-Incorrect Brand-Generic Substitution: Whether or not you can get the brand or generic of a medication, and how much you have to pay for it, varies on how the Doctor wrote it, and what state you are in. For instance, Texas Medicaid required doctors to write “Brand Medically Necessary” on a prescription, to bill them for the brand medication. Note that this also meant Electronic Prescriptions were effectively useless, because the Doctor cannot hand-write on an Electronic Prescription. It also meant that if a Doctor wrote “Brand Necessary” or “Brand Only” or “No Generic” or anything like that, the prescription effectively allowed substitution of generics, and Texas would only pay for the generic.
-Incorrect Doctor ID: This became more an issue as the ACA rolled out. Obamacare tightened up a number of rules for Medicare, which required pharmacies to list a valid NPI for each prescription filled. This meant no more using a Veterinarian’s doctor ID to give insulin to a person, or using a speech therapist’s ID to prescribe amphetamines to a 90 year old woman.
The incorrect Doctor IDs produced MASSIVE amounts of paper-work. Again, while we theoretically were allowed to email prescriptions, in practice we could not due to the lack of resources. Typically, PBMs would audit something like 10,000 prescriptions every few weeks. This meant printing out the copies of 10,000 prescriptions. We would then have to organize them for faxes….you can’t actually send 10,000 pages on a fax at once. It jams up bandwith, and it’s likely you will have some papers stick together.
So we would organize them into, say, 80 page increments. We would then count out each page, for each pile, so we knew how many pages were in each pile.
We would then fax each pile. After it finished sending, we would get a confirmation letter indicating how many pages had successfully sent. If there was ANY variance (like, we knew there were 81 pages in the pile, and only 80 sent, perhaps because 2 pages were stuck together), we would resend the entire pile.
I really, really, really fucking hated Doctor ID audits.
Next, I’ll talk a bit more about the A/R side….
I hated Audit, and eventually transferred into the Accounts Receivable side of this business. I’ve already commented on A/R elsewhere, but the business function is pretty simple: a business bills another business for services rendered. Payment is typically given later (30 days being typical). A/R keeps track of what is owed, makes sure the money is paid, and follows-up with people who haven’t paid their bills.
We don’t strong-arm. In business-to-business (B2B) transactions, we really want to preserve the business relationship. So it’s not hard-core collections. Specific collections companies typically handle those, and we sell the balances to them if we feel we cannot collect.
I’ve talked about A/R elsewhere, but there are a couple things to note specifically for pharmacy A/R:
1. Cash Application is much simpler. Pharmacy has a standardized file called an 835. This file is imported into the receivable systems and automatically matches payments. There are always some errors, but you’re talking 98%+ match rates.
2. Because of the volume of transactions, there are a LOT of billing errors. Like, if you go into a pharmacy, and buy something, the pharmacy might accidentally send 3 or 4 different transactions. These all get loaded into the A/R system. Someone needs to eliminate these errors before we can collect anything.
3. Based on the above, there are certain errors that are regularly repeated, so can be removed systematically.
4. And based on the above, there are obviously some novel errors that need to be manually investigated.
Because of the volume of repetitive manual work, a team in India was supposed to Own the accounts. State-Side teams were merely supposed to oversee and provide guidance. In practice….yeah….not so much…my future goals involve staying away from outsourced teams as much as possible.
So, to understand the workflow here, I also need to explain the basic systems we used:
We worked primarily in an A/R system and a Business Intelligence System. The A/R system would essentially be a GUI where you could enter in information like RX and NPI number to pull up specific prescriptions. Each fill would have its own transaction. You would then be able to see all the payment for that prescription and see if there is any sort of balance remaining.
The Business Intelligence (BI) was built on top of the A/R system. While the A/R system was pretty limited, you could write a bunch of SQL queries in the BI to pull in a ton of information. This is important, because if you are reviewing MILLIONS of prescriptions, you need to be able to pull in a LOT of data, and you need to be able to filter that data.
Typically you would then take the BI data dump and manipulate in Excel to analyze and extract any information you needed.
Okay, so workflow. We operated a monthly schedule.
Beginning of Month Activities:
1. Reports on large swings: remember how I said sometimes a prescription gets entered multiple times? Each entry is reported as revenue. So imagine you are filling some absurdly expensive medication, like Truvada (an anti-HIV retro-viral). These typically cost like 5k a month. If you enter that 10 times on accident, it will be reported as $50,000 in revenue. When this is reversed, the pharmacy and financial operations see a HUGE drop in revenue.
We write SQL queries to allow us to see ALL adjustments above a certain threshold, and report why these adjustments were made to financial operations. These reports generally in an Excel format. Typically, it’ll be something like “RX 123456 from NPI 012346789- Date of Fill 12/1/2017. 10 billings entered. 9 billings reversed.”
We then pull in all billing changes under this threshold and summarize at the Store level. Any CUMULATIVE amount above a certain threshold is then investigated and reported on as well.
2. Variance investigation. The AR system and the actual company books are NOT on the same servers. For one, this is an audit violation: auditors will only allow a certain number of people to perform entries on the actual company books. Two, the sheer volume of people working on the AR system and sheer volume of transactions means it would lock out everyone else from doing entries.
These systems are housed separately and interface a certain number of times per month. Sometimes, changes in the billing system are not reflected in the actual company books. Using our Truvada example, we will reduce the billing by $45,000. However, the company books will still show a full $50,000.
The people in charge of the company books will send us a report on the first day of the month showing where variances are. Again, this is in an Excel sheet. The sheet would show the cumulative billing adjustment on the month on the company books vs. what is in the A/R system, along with the total variance is.
We would then go into BI, pull in all the billing adjustments, and summarize by date and time. We would look to see where the interface failed. Sometimes, it wasn’t a timing issue, but a NPI issue….like a certain store is in our A/R system, but the combination of specific NPIs and adjustment codes would cause an automatic failure, so the transaction wouldn’t go through to the main company books.
Once we found the specific prescription billing adjustments causing the problem, we would compile them into a spreadsheet, and send them back the General Accountant. The General Accountant would make a journal entry to balance the books and keep the prescription records as audit backup.
3. Cash Flow projection. We need to project cash flow for the month. This is so Treasury knows what the cash situation is on any given day and makes sure we preserve working capital and cash reserves.
This is done via Excel (again! Excel makes the world go round!) We typically maintain a separate tab for each PBM and extrapolate payments. We will have a row for each check number, showing the expected amount, and expected cycle. So, it’ll say “February 16th/$20 million/January 1-January 15.” This means I am expecting the PBM to pay us on Feb 16th, I expect the payment to be about $20 million, and I am expecting it to pay for claims submitted between January 1 and January 15.”
This is pretty simple because most PBMs paid in regular cycles. Payment extrapolation was not based on billing, but prior payments…IE, if they paid $15 million 2 weeks ago, I expect them to pay $15 million today. We could, theoretically, pull all the billings and come up with a more correct forecast, but it would take MUCH longer. We don’t have reports that show all the billings, so we have to manually pull them using the BI, which takes FOREVER.
In some cases it was less simple. A particular insurance company paid on a 5 day cycle, rather than a weekly cycle. This is bad, because pharmacy business fluctuates dramatically by day: Monday and Tuesday typically has the highest business, and Saturday and Sunday has the slowest. So a 5 day payment for billings Wednesday-Sunday would be about 30% less than Monday-Friday.
For this particular company, I determined some daily averages and used those to forecast the cash going forward. I have no idea how well this worked out, because it was pretty close to infancy before I left. I assume whoever took it over was not smart enough to continue the relatively simple extrapolations.
4. Goal-Setting. Basically, we start out with $X in balances. We split out the balance between so called “workable balances” (those cases of pharmacy billing 10 prescriptions, with 9 being incorrectly in the system), and any sort of “issue balance” (where we need to actually collect money or there is a system issue or whatever).
This was, again, issued as an Excel report, with separate tabs. We would split our business between big accounts and small accounts. Each “type” would then have a tab for “goals” and “issue balances.” An issue balance would be something like “Express Scripts reversed all insulin prescriptions billed September 1st 2017.” An issue balance would have….if I recall….35 different columns? Each was a “necessary” factoid about the issue, like the size of the balance, the expectation plan, who owned it, when it was identified, the last time it was followed up on, the next action step, the contact point, etc.
The typical problem is that the India team would:
A. Not be able to write in understandable English.
B. Come up with issue balances out of nowhere (and therefore we not actually valid)
C. Significantly inflate the dollar value of their issue balances
D. Use outdated information for their comments.
So this generally requires me to review and revise quite literally hundreds of lines, each with 35 different data points. We typically have a 2 or 3-hour long meeting with the India team, ask them, to make revisions, and then have another 2-3 hour meeting. They still haven’t made the corrections, so we just submit finalized goals with my revisions.
One more part to go.
Final part:
I’m getting pretty bored with typing this, and I am sure everyone is bored with reading, so I’ll just talk a bit about the account analysis and systematic adjustments. Again, as a refresher, we are typically dealing with thousands or hundreds of thousands of transactions. So we need to come up with some ways to group issues and systematically analyze the account.
We will go into the BI environment and pull all the open claims on an account. Then we’ll start running some best practice analysis on the data. For example, I’ll take everything that doesn’t have a payment on it at all, and we’ll do some pivot tables to see if there are any trends. Like, is it all the same drug? Is it all the same date? Is it all the same store? Same set of stores? Anything that stands out gets tagged as an issue and sent to the PBM for review.
We’ll do some basic analysis to see if there are multiple fills. So, for example, our Truvada. We will have a field that says the insurance company returned an AR amount of $5,000. We will then show a payment of $5,000. We will have a balance of $45,000. We will do a simple Balance/AR calculation, and see if it is a round number. If it IS a round number, it gets adjusted systematically.
Other big red flags are a bunch of transactions all on the same date, for older prescriptions. This indicates the PBM altered payments for some reason.
We can run summaries by Group Numbers and Patient numbers as well.
So, I might pull all transactions that are reversed more than 90 days after the date of the service. These are typically reversed by an insurance company, not the pharmacy. We then run pivot tables on that subset using every possible identifier to come up possible issues. I might see, say, 10 Truvada claims….I might see 100 claims for Group XYZ. I might see 5,000 claims all reversed on February 1st, for god only knows what reason.
We tag these as issues, and send a small sample to the PBM for review via email. Within our AR system, we flag all the claims, so no one touches them, and so we can pull them as a collectible issue for the monthly goals and reporting.
Issues here can be anything under the sun. Some examples I found:
-Remember those doctor audits? One particular PBM decided not to inform us about the Doctor Audits. Instead, Medicare (aka CMS) informed the insurance companies about contested claims. The insurance companies told the PBM to reverse the claims. The PBM reversed the claims. We saw hundreds of thousands of these claims, and it took years for the PBM to give us a response, even though we knew exactly what the issue was.
-One particular company routes insulin medications through its medical system, rather than its pharmacy system. So, what does this mean? It means when you come into a pharmacy for your insulin, the pharmacy submits it to the PBM pharmacy system, which submits an approval, The PBM pharmacy system then submits it to the Insurance Company Medical system. This is a black hole. The pharmacy does not know what goes on here. In many cases, the claim simply disappeared because the connection timed out. In many cases, the Insurance Company denied the claim, but per contractual terms, the PBM is still required to pay us, because they returned an Accepted response.
The above is an example of a failure of the India team. We knew about this issue for years, and knew exactly how to look for it: certain group numbers, for insulin claims, would return a $0 payment from the PBM. We established a process to review these with the PBM. Rather than following this process, the India team would call a different PBM contact and ask why they only paid $0. This other contact would know nothing about the issue and spin their wheels for weeks, and nothing would get accomplished.
Additionally, the India team, when doing THEIR data analysis, would group ALL claims with $0 payments together. This is obviously wrong: it only affects certain groups, and only affects insulin. It became exhausting explaining the same issue for 14 continuous months.
-Last example: one company elected to withhold payments for certain groups because they had not been paid by the insurance company yet. This is called “payment after funding” and basically means the middle-man doesn’t have to pay us until they are paid by their client.
We had to maintain running lists of certain groups and certain payment cycles. Again, this is a case where the India team was not able to connect all the dots. If Group XYZ has a $50,000 balance for December 15th-December 31st, a $50,000 balance for Jan 1st-Jan 15th, and only $2,000 for December 1st-December 15th, it means the first half of December has been paid, and the remaining amount needs to be reviewed. This type of thinking was not at the level of our India team, unfortunately.
I feel like I am running down the India team rather much. They did do a decent job at the things I expected them to do well at. They cranked through an incredible volume of transactions. Their individual contributors were simply expected to perform analysis and adhere to guidelines that they were not capable of doing and shouldn’t have been expected to do. Their middle management was pretty smart, all in all, but were overburdened by the sheer volume of requests we sent their way, and their work quality suffered as a result.
There was probably a way to execute this better, but I doubt it was ever going to be implemented. People were too wedded to pre-established SLAs. Basically, the India team was contracted to do, paid for, and therefore expected to accomplish certain work. If they couldn’t do it, then the State-side team would “support”. This meant the India team would spin their wheels for days doing things they couldn’t do, the State-side team would try to guide them through hours and hours of meetings, then the State-side team would just do it. Hours of wasted time, missed metrics, but at least we followed the process.
I’m a Supervisor at the Player’s Club of a mid-size (~975 slots, ~25 Table games but no attached hotel or dedicated RV parking yet) on the Mississippi river in the United States. For context, pretty much every casino in the US these days has some sort of loyalty/incentive program, and most are called some variant of Player’s Club/VIP Club/etc. The basic concept is very simple: Guests sign up for free by giving name, DOB, address, phone number, e-mail, and they get a magstripe card they insert into slot machines or give to a dealer at a table game when playing. This allows us to track how much money they are gambling and on which machines/tables. Based on that recorded play, they earn reward points that are redeemable for cash back or free food at restaurants, and that play is also used to calculate their profitability for the purpose of targeted advertisements in the form of promotional offers. You don’t want to send Eunice Pennyante weekly coupons for $50 cash and a free steakhouse dinner every month if she only averages 2-3 trips a month and $50 spent per trip, for example. Casinos generally send out a monthly “core mailer” containing a list of the various big promotional events for the month along with weekly coupons, a couple of food credits for free meals, and depending on the casino and the guest, maybe a couple of free nights at the casino’s hotel (we do the same, but since we lack our own hotel we put them up at local hotels in town we have an arrangement with). Then depending on the guest’s average profitability (which I’ll explain in another post if there’s interest), they might get additional promotional offers: Free concert tickets, invitations to catered dinners that are just for high-rollers, free gift days (Come in every friday between 12PM and 8PM to get your free Kitchen Appliance! A new one each week!) and so on.
I’ve been working there since it opened in late 2012, and after almost all of that being nights/graves, For the past year and a half or so I’m working days. This means I’m generally at work around 7:50AM, as our desk opens at 8AM. I’ll log in to a station, take down all the signs, and take a moment to ensure the outgoing night shift supervisor did the tasks they were supposed to (supplies restocked, the “roadmap” cheat sheet we create for team members up to date and accurate, any needed setup for the day’s promotion completed, sign-in sheet posted, etc). At that point I man the desk until one of my Fan Club Attendants is up on a station, doing everything that they normally do while opening my outlook account and starting to get caught up with my e-mail traffic.
The biggest variable here is what day of the week it is, and what sort of promotional event(s) the casino is running. If it’s the middle of the week and the only promotion is something like an invitation-only dinner party for selected guests that our Host team is running, then our tasks consist of our usual baseline functions: signing guests up for the Player’s Club (called The Fan Club at my casino), printing replacement cards and in some cases coupons when they are inevitably lost, left at home, or the guest simply decides keeping track of their hobby is too much mental effort, and answering the phone and all guest questions.
Sometimes, on the other hand, Marketing is running a promotion that requires our assistance, like a 10x Fan Club Point multiplier on all penny slots from 8AM-11:59PM. Guests need to opt-in to that promotion at our desk, so that might mean on a friday or saturday that I’ve got a line of people queuing up to activate the multiplier the moment I get in. Or if there’s a gift giveaway, the people with the coupon for it will be lining up (though generally Marketing has gotten smarter lately and pushed the giveaway start times back to 10AM or Noon, thank god. We already have higher guest volume around 11AM-1PM and 4PM-6PM, and forcing us to staff up extra early at 8AM can leave us thin on the ground in the evening).
As my team gets in and signs-in, I give them a pre-shift where I go over the promotions for the day and what our process will be for it, remind them of upcoming events we want to promote to a guest, discuss any policy changes or reminders (we were recently bought out by Eldorado Resorts so there’s been a steady stream of this sort of news), go over fundraiser/volunteer activities HR wants us to participate in, and so on. Once I have enough team members on the line at the front desk that I no longer need to man a station myself, I’ll go into the player development office and sit at the desk I share with the other 2 supervisors and start working on administrative tasks. That starts with logging into the time clock software and approving payroll for the previous day, then updating our tracking spreadsheet to look for TMs approaching overtime or other issues, updating the attendance tracker of any employees that were late or missed shifts and doing the associated disciplinary paperwork if necessary.
From there, it varies. I’m the senior of the 3 supervisors and wrote our procedures manual, so I’m generally the one updating and revising it as needed and the one pushing for refresher training for our team as needed. Right now there’s a big push to ensure we are not issuing comps (complimentary meals) to guests whose play does not warrant the reinvestment, so I’m overseeing some refresher training on that and reviewing the records my boss the Player Development Manager sends me of everyone’s comps issued for the previous week. She’s also forwarding me things like customer surveys with the expectation that I will reply to explain any bad scores or complaints and follow up with team members as needed, or other little admin tasks like our monthly safety checklists where we have to go check another department for OSHA compliance and write a report to the safety committee.
While I’m working through all of this, I’ll actually be popping in and out of the office, because A) I have to relieve my team members at their stations so they can take breaks depending on how many people we have that day, and B) I’ll be needed to assist my team with all manner of issues. Whenever someone demands to “talk to a manager” or the like that’s going to be me. The reasons for this vary:
-Complaints about other departments: Apologize, get information, offer compensation if appropriate and/or coordinate with supervisor/manager from that apartment to deal with the complaint, or forward complaint to my boss for relay to that department if they are unhelpful or not available.
-Complaints about my team: Rarer, thankfully, but handled basically the same minus the coordination.
-Complaints about rules: E.g., the guest doesn’t have their ID or has expired ID and wants an exception, I explain that the Gaming Commission regulations and state statute require us to have valid ID for all transactions, they abuse me a bit and storm off.
-Complaint about being denied a complimentary meal (I’ll evaluate their play. If they’re good enough I might offer a compromise offer or try and wheel and deal a bit. We generally have our team well-trained so I’m almost never put in a place where the guest is actually good for a comp and the team member has told them no. If anything, more often I’m put in the situation where a team member knows they’re NOT good, but comes to get me before saying ‘no’ because they know damn well the guest is going to get ugly and want me to take the heat, but that’s what they pay me for. 😉
-Wierd questions and scenarios the TM isn’t sure how to handle.
-Etc, etc, etc.
If it’s busy enough, I might actually end up just on the line the entire day, working a station and having to multi-task with running breaks, providing assistance with difficult guests, and getting the admin tasks done as best I can if it slows down. If it’s busy enough for me to stay on the line most of the day, it generally doesn’t slow down, and that means I’m going to stay 30-90 minutes after my scheduled off time sitting in the office and catching up on those tasks, and any longer-term projects probably don’t get touched that day. I theoretically get 2 15-minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch during my 9-10 hour shift, but I almost never take them and if I do take them they are interrupted multiple times by situations with guests or team members I need to come address in person. Because of this sort of work pace, the supervisor slot is a salaried position rather than wage like the rest of my team. I’m expected to work a minimum of 45 hours a week, and generally work 47-50. In the past that was more like 55-60 but we’ve managed to cut that down recently.
As another example of what I mean by “long term project”, I am also in charge of coordinating bus groups coming to the casino. Lots of regional senior’s programs, tour companies, church groups, family reunions, women’s clubs, etc. like to run buses to casinos. As an additional duty, I liase with the organizers of these groups, send them a boilerplate contract offering everyone on the bus a free lunch buffet and $5-10 cash in return for a guarantee of at least 20 people and a visit of at least 4 hours, I ensure we get a complete manifest at least 72 hours out so we can check the names against the state list of Dis-Associated Persons who have self-barred from being allowed onto the gaming floors of casinos in Missouri, and working with the bus companies to ensure they have adequate insurance coverage. I also track the profitability of our bus groups and send monthly reports to our financial analyst, the director of marketing, and the player development manager.
I’m also currently trying pretty hard to get promoted to something more senior and (ideally) “back of the house” (meaning admin/not public-facing), but no luck so far. I get lots of “you’re REALLY great, no real suggestions on how to improve, we just had a pre-selected internal candidate but you were our really close runner up, please apply again!” responses.
Ask me anything about Casino Marketing, Player’s Clubs, and industry-specific Customer Service, I guess? It has pretty much all the features you’d expect of a customer service job, for better and worse…
That surprises me. Perhaps I’m thinking too much of Vegas, but I’d have guessed the peak hours would be later evenings/nights. Are those the weekday peak hours too, like are people dropping in for a half hour at lunch? Or is your clientele a bunch of retirees?
Go on, although surely this’d mostly be a function of how much money they’re spending? Or do different activities/slots have significantly different margins? How big are your whales exactly, as in how much does someone need to lose before your department is sending these personalized offers?
Your department is obviously retention focused (it’s a whale focused business after all), but what does your casino do to bring in new blood?
@ Trofim_Lysenko:
I’m out of the game now but still curious so…can you talk about your process for spotting and dealing with especially skilled players? And to what degree do you share information with other casinos about that sort of thing? When you bar someone for winning too much or playing too well, what happens to the information that this has been done?
@Manycookies
I think to some extent you’re thinking of Vegas and other major resort casino hubs (Macao, Atlantic City, etc). I’d say our median guest age is mid-40s, with a mean somewhere in the upper 50s to low 60s, and is about an even mix of retirees and working class locals. Peak play on the weekend is probably around 8PM-10PM, yes, but note that the original question was how busy -MY- department is. At the Fan Club, we’re not necessarily busiest when the machines and tables are busiest, but rather a little before that when everyone on their lunch break (or after church on Sunday) or getting off work hits the casino and gets their player’s card reprinted, their coupons reprinted, asks questions about the day’s promotional events, and (this is a big volume driver) asks us for complimentary Lunch or Dinner meals.
House Edge: The short version is that yes, this varies a LOT depending on what game you’re playing and what sort of bet you’re making.
Average profitability: As a disclaimer, I’m not going to go into the precise formulae we use because I’m pretty sure that falls under my workplace confidentiality requirements. That said, I’ll discuss the general principles, which are simple enough, and stem from undergraduate level statistics.
The important thing to understand is that when it comes to a casino, the odds are known. Let’s say we know that a slot machine is set to an 8% hold, or a 92% payout. That means that on average someone betting $100 through that machine would win $92 for a net loss of $8. The casino knows the hold percentages for every slot machine on the floor. Furthermore they know estimated payout percentages change depending on changes in the bet (if betting more gives you a 0.0135% chance at that big progressive jackpot that’s only unlocked when you bet the maximum per spin, for example). Repeat this knowledge for every possible bet and side bet for table games. This means that if Joe X. Sample is using his player’s card to log in at all the machines he’s playing, it’s very easy to have an automated calculation run that determines the most likely estimated loss, the mode of the probability distribution if I have my terms correct. It’s a little more complicated in table games as instead of being able to track every single bet you’re usually having to do some math like average bet * hands per hour * hours played * house edge, but only slightly.
Run these calculations for a given timeframe, like a single visit, or a month of visits or a year, and you have the guest’s “earn potential” or theoretical loss. or “Theo” as it’s generally called. Of course, just because that’s at the hump of your probability distribution doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what their ACTUAL win/loss was. Maybe they hit a $5,000 jackpot and instead of being down $532 they’re actually UP $4,468! Doesn’t matter, their “Theo” for that timeframe is still expressed as 532.
Honestly, most of the audience here probably have notably more formal mathematics education than I do, so I don’t have to explain why a player’s actual win/loss numbers and their “theo” will tend to converge as they keep playing, but it’s that feature that makes “theo” the more useful term when it comes to predicting future guest performance. More specifically, a lot of determination comes down to numbers like “Average Daily/Monthly Theo”, which is simply taking a guest’s theo for a given chunk of their play history (say 8 months) and dividing it by the number of trips they made to the casino to get a number that represents our best predictor of how much money we can expect them to give us the next time they walk through the door. For extra credit, we can start getting fancier and tracking things like how often they want to be comped meals and how much those comps run, how religiously they’re taking advantage of their promotional offers, and so on to get a more refined number.
Marketing: From what I understand, Vegas has actually started to go -away- from their big push for all-in-one resort designs (Shopping AND Dining AND movies AND shows AND Spas AND maybealsosomeslotmachinesIguess). Here in the midwest it’s a lot simpler and fairly traditional. Television spots emphasizing big promotions for the month (things like a car giveaway), Billboards on major highways emphasizing the new member offer ($10 Free Play or Play 30 Minutes, Get A Free Buffet), that sort of thing. To use an example specific to our property, we’ll get concerts or events like local MMA fights into our event center, and run a drawing that same night for something like ten winners of $100 each. The concert/event will run from 6PM-8PM, but the drawing is at 9 or 10PM. You have to be a Fan Club Member to be eligible for the drawing (but hey, it’s free! And if you play 30 minutes with this new card we’ll give you a free buffet voucher good for a week!), and you have to be there during the drawing to win. You’ve created an event that encourages people to come to your casino, then to stick around for a bit afterwards. Often there’ll be a ticket-back offer for a BOGO (buy one, get one free) Buffet meal or the like. And to give you more insight into our market, the biggest turn-outs we get are STILL for the Elvis impersonator concerts…
@Glen_Raphael
Note: My department is more about marketing and customer service, not the table games operations, so I have less first hand professional experience here. That said: Our emphasis is on slots over table games (Even at 6-8 players per table, potentially more for roulette or craps, we have FAR more capacity for guests playing slots if you look at my initial stats), our max bets are relatively low by Vegas or other resort destination standards, and the only game where player skill really matters and you’re playing the house (as opposed to other players) is blackjack, which these days is generally handled with the addition of extra decks and technological advantages automated shuffling devices to defeat would-be card counters. Otherwise, even mathematically perfect play applied to games results in a house edge, and the combination of strict rules on when you can bet or change your bet and the relatively low bets makes casinos like ours (and I suspect many of the other small to mid-size ones in small towns in the American midwest) an unattractive prospect for would be “professional gamblers”.
@ Trofim_Lysenko:
Yes, I was primarily thinking of blackjack card-counting. If all your blackjack tables use continuous shuffle machines and/or have terrible wacky rulesets (eg, “Spanish 21”) they aren’t beatable, but usually casinos will have at least a COUPLE of actual traditional-ish blackjack games, even if they are 6 or 8 decks, don’t deal very deeply, and are restricted to “high rollers”. But it sounds like you’re not much involved in that end of things, so never mind.
(I used to belong to a blackjack team.)
@Glen Raphael
In the case of blackjack, six deck with some house rules on extra shuffles and requiring shuffles between hands at the discretion of the floor supervisor, plus some restrictions on bets, but no CSMs yet. I have no doubt a good card counter could probably turn a profit at our BJ tables, it’s just not a big issue for a casino like us when we only havea few traditional BJ tables and they’re $5 or $10 a hand (we used to open them up to $25 a hand on some Friday and Saturday nights, but haven’t done that in some time). Someone looking to make money is more likely to go to St. Louis or Kansas city where you can bet $50-100 a hand and up.
I’ve heard that a lot of casinos advertise more “traditional” style blackjack games, because, on net, most people think they can count cards, but actually can’t, and their attempts to do so cause them to be worse players than someone simply playing basic. That casinos essentially encourage the myth of card counting, because having people believe that it works makes them more money due to people generally over-estimating their abilities.
Any truth to this?
that many people overestimate their skill is doubtless, but card counting is not a myth. It’s actually fairly easy (though time consuming) to learn, and only gives you a couple points advantage, so it’s a grind to utilize, but it works as long as you can avoid getting kicked out.
I know someone who made a living for while (as you say, until he was thrown out) by card counting.
As I expected, he said it was really boring.
@Matt M
That’s overthinking it, really. First, the emphasis for casinos like mine (and even the bigger casinos these days) is really on slots over table games. They generate somewhere around 80% of our revenue and that’s pretty consistent with other casinos in the region. Second, with tables the emphasis tends to be on whatever is most popular with the players on the whole. If you can generate interest in a game with a bigger house edge by offering wacky new side bets, sure, but generally you’re going to be responding to what’s popular with the player base. When texas hold’em got really popular, suddenly the thing to do was to run various variants of texas hold’em, and so on.
If anything, I’d say the reason for the enduring popularity of blackjack has less to do with the possibility of card counting directly than it does with the fact that it’s a relatively simple game with a low house edge, so you can play it for a relatively long time for a given amount of money without feeling like you’re just throwing good money after bad.
Side note: Despite the glamour around “whales”, that’s not really the driving force for the marketing department. We’ll have less than two dozen in a year, generally, with the biggest contributing maybe 0.5% of that year’s gross revenue. Add them all up and sure, having 20 people out of a customer base of 10-20,000 producing 10% of your gross revenue is really impressive…but it’s also ONLY 10%, not something you structure your whole business around.
@Trofim
Ah interesting, so your marketing isn’t whale focused after all. Do you know if that changes at higher end casinos attracting the billionares and whatnot?
(Also is your casino on one of those faux-steamboat things? Cause I loved my really fancy steamboat toy as a kid and always wanted to ride on one).
@ManyCookies
The really big high-rollers are certainly pursued more at the big resorts, but it’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy, so my impression is that they are important but still not the FOCUS of the marketing strategy, merely a bigger part of it.
They’re high-risk for two reasons:
1) to get them in the door you’re often competing fiercely with other large casinos which means you need to be willing to really indulge them. Night after night of free hotel stays at your most expensive room (which isn’t earning you money during the time the big player’s using it), free meals at your restaurants (and big players often like to show off by inviting large parties of friends to your restaurants, ordering lots of top-shelf booze, then wanting it comped), air fare and ground transportation, season box seats for their favorite sporting event to go with their friends and their casino host, etc etc. This means you’re often out quite a lot of money before they even begin to play. And then you have lines of credit, which can run into the millions for real world-class high rollers.
2) The bigger the possible payouts you offer, the bigger your financial exposure. A lot of these huge players are more interested in tables than slots, and while table games tend to have a larger house edge in the LONG term, they also have more volatility in the short term. Having a guy on your Mississippi Stud tables who wants to make five or six figure bets each hand who could potentially end up with a four of a kind and a 40:1 payout can suddenly put a hurting on you BADLY if you aren’t liquid enough to eat that sort of loss and say “Well, just keep him playing, in the long run the house always wins”, all while continuing to shower the guy with even more money (see point 1), and hope he doesn’t decide to take the money and run (or go play and lose it to a competing casino which is just as bad), or turn out to be flat broke, or die of heart attack, or…
As for my casino, it’s funny you should ask. We are a “Boat” in the legal sense. That is, it is a building built entirely on land, and water from the mississippi river has been diverted in under the building to float the gaming floor. Unless the river is literally at a major flood stage, you couldn’t tell, and even then the only indication is a <1 inch ridge under the carpet at the joins in a couple places around the edge of the gaming area, almost all in places where only employees can stub their toe on them. There's a fairly clever series of pumps and floats to keep the gaming floor so stable and level that there is no sensation that it is floating at all.
All that engineering effort, complexity, and expense is in order to satisfy the increasingly nominal and symbolic requirement that missouri casinos be "boats". Initially, they had to do a two hour cruise and could only operate their gaming floors while out away from shore. Then, they could be moored, but still had to be a fully functional boat with a crew, functioning engines, safety equipment for water emergencies, etc. Then, they could be permanently moored and uncrewed…and so on, until now we have a totally land-bound casino build on the shore of the river, with water diverted in to float the gaming floor so that the gaming is taking place "on the water"…
People often say that opposition to open borders is motivated by racism, but I think that the most extreme modern racists have more or less given up on nationalism.
They tend to be amongst the strongest opponents of strong central government. So, are racists actually opposed to open borders? I can imagine that if they could maintain a strong community, increased competition from other ethnic groups might appeal to darwinistic racialists.
I suppose the danger is that those smaller communities wouldn’t be able to stand up to the power of the central government, so it becomes a battle of who wields that central power – though presumably if the constituent parts of the nation hate each other enough, that central power will itself collapse.
Personally, I think the best argument for open borders was laid out pretty clearly in the 2004 predictive programming masterpiece The Day After Tomorrow. That is, establish the principle of open borders, make sure that we are in large part Southern-worlders, so that when environmental disaster strikes they’ll let us move in with them.
This is… uh…. not my experience.
The ones I’ve interacted with are strong supporters of pure ethnic enclaves – under the notion that over time this would “prove” the superiority of whites. Basically “they can take whatever geographic area they want and they’d run it in the ground, we’ll take whatever is left and build a paradise” sort of thing. They want competition among nations, but they don’t want other races in their own neighborhood, lest the other races end up taking credit for community success.
Open borders sure gets talked about (and attacked) a lot for a policy that won’t ever happen and is not remotely on the political landscape with any major party in any first-world country.
Open borders is the de facto position of the Democratic party in the US right now. They wouldn’t use that term but they oppose any and every incremental effort to restrict entry, to deny government services to those who entered illegally, AND to remove anyone who entered improperly.
This doesn’t seem true at all. Amnesty is hardly the same as dismantling borders. When Democrats call for the abolition of the INS and ICE, all legal immigration quotas, visa programs, etc., then your statement would be closer to the truth.
Which is why I said incremental, not absolute.
They don’t call for the abolition of ICE, but they do pass laws intended to make it impossible for ICE to be effective in jurisdictions they control. They don’t call for quotas to be immediately abolished, but they vehemently protest any attempt to modify the existing quotas in any way other than “more people allowed” (including switching from random allotment to merit-based, because that’s racist).
It would be interesting to try and corner any prominent Democratic politician on the record with a question like “What SHOULD the quota be?” I suspect they would refuse to answer. Because the answer their base wants to hear is, in fact, “unlimited,” but this would be considered unacceptable to large swaths of swing voters.
You said they oppose any incremental effort to restrict access (from the status quo, I presume), which is not logically equivalent to “wants no restrictions on access”.
It would be nice if both sides were more honest in the immigration debate. Then we could really see how many politicians are for open borders, and how many are for trying to achieve a white ethnostate.
If you ask them, “Do you want more or fewer immigrants” the answer is always “more.” I suppose it’s possible that at some point they’d hit a limit and say “Okay, now we have enough immigrants, and it’s okay to start stringently enforcing this new quota level” but nobody has ever volunteered even a guess as to what that level might be.
And that’s leaving aside rhetoric such as “no human being is illegal” which certainly sounds a lot more like “anyone should be able to come who wants to” rather than “I favor slightly more immigration than we have now, but not too much of course! We have to draw the line somewhere!”
Sanctuary cities/states are basically that, no?
If you ask them, “Do you want more or fewer immigrants” the answer is always “more.” I suppose it’s possible that at some point they’d hit a limit and say “Okay, now we have enough immigrants, and it’s okay to start stringently enforcing this new quota level” but nobody has ever volunteered even a guess as to what that level might be.
Okay, but I don’t see how that supports the statement “Open borders is the de facto position of the Democratic party”. I’m not disputing the much more plausible statement “more immigration is the de facto position of the Democratic party”.
Border control still operates e.g. between San Diego and Tijuana. California’s just not going to fall all over itself to track down illegal immigrants within its borders, especially in its largest cities.
Border patrol is Federal though, so the Republicans still have a lot of say in what they do. If it were left up to states to control their borders, I’m honestly not sure what California would do. I suspect at first they would stick with the status quo, but as time went on, I’d suspect that the border patrol would become more and more toothless.
No. Sanctuary cities/states are cities/states telling the federal government it is responsible for enforcing its own laws, and isn’t entitled to commander state personnel for its own ends. As they perfectly entitled to do. Check your copy of the constitution, it should have a 10th amendment in there.
A state government no more supports open borders because it doesn’t want to do the federal government’s job for it when it comes to immigration than a state government is in favor of the planes falling out of the sky because it doesn’t want to pay for air traffic control.
Even if this was true, it wouldn’t mean they are in favor of open borders. Open borders means just that, completely free movement of people. Yet another disingenuous strawman.
And none of what you said refutes my point, which is that the idea of a sanctuary state is basically the same thing as a call for the abolition of “INS and ICE, all legal immigration quotas, visa programs” because all of those are Federal programs.
For what it’s worth, I’m in favor of far more open borders than we currently have. I just agree that “open borders” is the de facto position of the Democratic Party. I suspect that it is mostly posturing, and that they would soften on the issue greatly if they controlled the White House and Congress, but as of right now, I think it is true.
Totally agree with this too.
I think immigration is to the left what deficits and high spending is to the right. A real easy thing to howl about to energize your base when you’re out of power – that then goes almost completely ignored when you’re in power.
Trump is evil because he wants a wall (but pay no attention to the high deportation numbers and lack of comprehensive reform under Obama). Obama is evil because he spends too much money (but pay no attention to the massive spending bills under GWB and Trump).
It’s actually becoming increasingly common on the left to literally call for the abolition of ICE. What they mean varies from thinking it’s a rotten institution and needs a full top-to-bottom replacement to carry out its functions to thinking its functions are inherently xenophobic and should be abolished.
Sometimes they throw in “abolish CBP” too, which would actually mean open borders.
In any case, I do have one overarching argument against open borders that only the most committed ancap would disagree with, which is that we need to be able to deport Piers Morgan.
We already did.
And weirdly enough, once we did, he seems to have converted from blue tribe to red.
Maybe he’s a literal, professional troll.
Oh c’mon man. “Sanctuary Cities” have basically nothing to do with those cities being overburdened by the fiscal costs of immigration enforcement, and everything to do with the members of those local governments being fundamentally opposed to the mission of ICE being carried out in their cities at all, regardless of who pays for it.
The only reason they don’t do more than not directly participate is because their rights don’t extend to actively obstructing the Feds.
@JayT
No, it isn’t. It is perfectly consistent to think that a state government shouldn’t do anything to enforce the federal immigration law and to think that the federal government should do some things to enforce federal immigration law.
Where did all these shrinking violets on the left come from all of a sudden? People have no problem telling pollsters about all sorts of fairly radical political positions, like supporting hate speech laws for example, but all of a sudden when it comes to open borders there’s a conspiracy of silence? Is that a very likely hypothesis or or is more likely that alt right types like to beat up strawmen?
How would your position ever be falsified then? It isn’t based on what people say their position is and you don’t actually expect them to do anything along those lines if they ever have a chance to actually make policy. So it what sense is it at all meaningful to say it is their “de facto” position?
Sorry this is bullshit. Open borders means just that, the free movement of people. No border controls, no visas, no registration, nothing. And there’s virtually no one that supports that. Just because you want fewer restrictions than the status quo doesn’t give you anymore right to create a strawman than our resident MAGA enthusiast.
@BBA
You have a poll or are you extrapolating from four tweets a facebook share?
@gbdub
If that’s the prevailing ideology in those cities, then how come the congressmen that represent the same people that elected those mayors and city councilmen aren’t out there writing bills to eliminate all restrictions on immigration, abolish ICE, abolish CPB and have real open borders?
Sure maybe those bills wouldn’t pass because you have more moderate democrats in suburbs or in other states, but that doesn’t stop the far right restrictionists from writing bills that play to their base. Or for that matter even on blatant unconstitutionality doesn’t stop states when it comes to abortion restriction laws they know will be struck down.
Good question! That’s why I think, as I stated below, that the actual position of Dems is not “open borders” but rather “make a lot of noise about how nasty Republicans are for trying to aggressively enforce existing immigration law, to energize our base, but don’t actually attempt major structural changes to immigration law, lest we upset swing voters”
But if you think Ed Lee would have been totally down with everyone in San Fran illegally being deported, as long as he didn’t have to pay for it, you’re bonkers. “Sanctuary” implies a lot more than that, and it was a freely accepted label.
That seems pretty reasonable to me. I wouldn’t have called that a disingenuous strawman.
I don’t think that’d he be totally down with that. But that doesn’t mean he supports open borders.
Sanctuary cities aren’t even going to the maximum they are allowed under the constitution. SF, for example, will notify ICE when it is releasing a prisoner that has been convicted of a serious or violent felony in the prior seven years. We don’t know exactly what policies they’d put in place if they controlled the federal government, but there’s no good reason to think it would be “the abolition of the INS and ICE, all legal immigration quotas, visa programs, etc.,”
@Brad: I admit it’s weak anecdata, but the extreme rhetoric of the likes of Erik Loomis (who calls ICE a fascist organization engaging in a campaign of ethnic cleansing) does appear to be catching on.
The “abolish CBP” types are much fewer and I suspect most of them haven’t really thought it through.
Just to be clear: My own view is that ICE is structured to encourage maximum cruelty among its agents and therefore ought to be heavily restructured if it has to remain separate from CBP at all. Frankly, I don’t know what if anything the Bush-era restructuring of Customs and INS accomplished, or what it was supposed to accomplish.
I don’t know about ICE and CBP, but the separation of USCIS further away from ICE then when both functions were part of INS has lead to noticeable improvements in USCIS. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that there’d be a corresponding deterioration in ICE.
Poking the bear a bit: So we’ve gotten really tied around the axle on the term “open borders”, but, excising the term, was Matt’s original statement actually that far off the mark?
It’s a bit of an absolutist / uncharitable exaggeration to be sure, and it ignores that Dems were mostly okay with Obama’s deportations (then again, so do the Dems), but if all you did was listen to current Democratic rhetoric on immigration, I can certainly see how you’d get the impression that that is the party line.
To be clear, I don’t think most Democratic voters actually want open borders.
But as I’ve said, I have yet to ever, in my life, hear a single Democratic politician outline exactly how much immigration they want. They want more legal immigration than exists today, to be sure. And they want fewer deportations than happen today. They certainly don’t want any more border security than exists today (and the amount that exists today is poor enough to have allowed estimates of several millions of illegals to make it in). And they want amnesty for those who already got here illegally.
To be fair, the opposite charge could be made about Republicans in the other direction, and often is! It’s true that most Republicans are also unlikely to tell you exactly what number the quota should be. It’s true that they universally want less legal immigration, more deportations, more border security, etc.
But I think the rhetoric is very different. Democrats use phrases like “no human being is illegal” which seems to imply that we have no right to refuse entry to anyone. Republicans, meanwhile, still support the general theme that “America is a nation of immigrants.” Trump himself (who people in these comments have suggested wants a white ethno-state) specifically invited and praised multiple legal immigrants during his state of the union address. GOP rhetoric makes it plainly clear that they want some legal immigration. Democratic rhetoric does not make it clear that they want any deportations at all.
It’s a bad move for either side to give a number they’d be happy with for the same reason that it’s a bad idea to open salary negotiations with a number.
Actually a lot of people on the left including prominent Dreamers which the Dems are all about right now do support abolishing ICE. I’ve literally read dozens of tweets with “abolish ICE” in them. I’m leftist in some ways but I’m not Abby Martin leftist so I expect its even more extreme farther to the left.
Because one side would accept essentially infinity and the other would accept essentially zero?
Because one side would accept essentially infinity and the other would accept essentially zero?
I think there’s a lot more diversity than people are giving credit to the issue. Off the top of my head, there are at least five different mainstream stances:
Identity politics left – lots of immigration, legal or otherwise, but official position underarticulated except in reaction to status quo
Cosmopolitan neoliberals – much more skilled immigration, rather blasé about illegal immigration
Labor left – reduced immigration in the form of tight quotas to protect American workers
“Law and Order” right – eliminate illegal immigration, generally silent on legal immigration
Anti-diversity right – eliminate illegal immigration, severely restrict legal immigration
This is a rough taxonomy and there is, of course, much overlap (I suspect many who claim to be in the “Law and Order” right are really part of the anti-diversity right), but it’s more than just open borders vs. white ethnonationalism. The current existing coalitions are also rather tenuous; the labor left and the identity politics left conflict, if not very often in the open, and cosmopolitan neoliberals seem to be split between D and R around 60/40. The “Law and Order” right, insofar as they aren’t anti-immigrant in general, don’t want to be viewed as racist, but they don’t help their case by not promoting a streamlined version of legal immigration and embracing legal immigrants.
@gbdub
You say tomato, I say disingenuous strawman.
The characterization assumes there is a light our hair on fire problem and reasons from that premise to anyone that doesn’t want to adopt his “solutions” must be in favor of no restrictions at all.
Translate it to a different domain. Suppose you had a party that opposed increases in military spending and often talked about cutting this or that military program. Politicians of this party never put out a white paper stating exactly how large they think the military ought to be. At least not one detailed enough to satisfy some troll. Would it be at all fair to try to paint that party as a bunch of pacifists that want to abolish the military altogether? I think not.
If we enacted open borders tomorrow there’d be at least hundreds of millions of migrants within a few years. Today we have very significant restrictions on migration both in regulatory terms and in terms of how much we spend. Hence no hundreds of millions strong influx. Not supporting incremental new restrictions or enforcement efforts is not in any way, shape, or form tantamount to wanting to throw the whole thing wide open. That’s a disingenuous strawman which unworthy of a defense.
@axiomsofdominion
Come on. The response writes itself.
Tobias Funke
How common is the Labor left? I can’t think of anyone with that position, but I’ll admit I didn’t think about it very hard. Would socialists like Nathan Robinson fall in there? I’m not sure I’ve seen anything on immigration from him.
Bernie is the main figure of the labor left to my mind, as he called open borders a “Koch brothers conspiracy” to get cheap labor. I think the populist left is much more hostile to immigration than people want to acknowledge.
In the immigration debate, sure. In a salary negotiation? Not so much.
Urstoff –
Yep.
I remember when being opposed to immigration was largely a leftist position, with pro-immigration policy being suspiciously regarded as a Republican ploy to drive down wages by importing workers.
I credit South Park with making people think it is a right-wing belief with the exaggerated southern-accent “They terk er jerbs”. Don’t know if that is accurate or not, but it did seem to be the point when it started being colored as a right-wing position.
Because both sides have imperfect information about what the other side would actually accept, and giving out that information reduces their leverage.
Is this true though?
Hasn’t Trump presented the exact immigration plan he wants? Is he withholding information on this?
And for what it’s worth, while I’m not sure the Democrats have done that, by denouncing and rejecting his plan, they are implicitly stating that they favor the status quo.
The status quo, nominally, does not include “open borders.” But it does include:
1. Border security so porous that millions of the world’s poorest people with limited resources seem to be able to bypass it (and not just once – many come and go on a regular basis)
2. Arrangements where in areas sufficiently under the control of blue tribe politicians, immigration law is almost entirely unenforced
3. Just about everywhere, government services are available to illegal immigrants
Calling this state of affairs “open borders” is maybe a bit of an exaggeration… but not much. Especially when the side that often flirts with open borders style rhetoric is the one who favors the status quo over the side that explicitly rejects it.
I’m kind of pro-immgration-restriction left.
It seems like the parties have been forced into a kind of weird position, marketing wise, at the moment.
Corbyn, complete eurosceptic, being forced to pretend to like the EU, while the Conservatives are painted as the boo-boo racists.
If there were an old labour style party that would come out as pro-sensible immigration restrictions, I think they’d mop up.
(The fact that people asking for immigrants to be assessed on the basis of their qualifications, ability to contribute, was dismissed as absolutely racist, means that I can only assume that the criticisers are aiming for open borders.
I like the pro-immigrant (open borders) people (personally), but I honestly can’t understand why they are saying what they are saying, with that amount of vehemence, unless it’s basically brainwashing by the corporate mind control elites. )
@Matt M
You trust that that’s the plan he wants, and not an extreme for negotiation purposes?
I think he’d be happy with getting everything or getting nothing, but not with an actual compromise. If a deal fails he can say both that the democrats failed the Dreamers, and signal to his nationalistic base that he’s open to a situation they want (eventual expulsion of the Dreamers). However he doesn’t say that he’s happy with this alternative, even though he would be.
Wait… if the plan he presented is exaggeratedly extreme (as a negotiation tactic), then that is evidence that he would actually accept a far less extreme plan.
Which seems to play to my point here, that Trump (and other conservatives) are not, in any way, demanding an all-white ethnostate with zero immigration. Even his “extreme” plan still has plenty of allowed legal immigration, including for nonwhites!
What is the “extreme plan” Democrats have proposed?
@Matt M
I’m making two separate propositions here: one hypothesis based on Trump’s prior claims on how to negotiate, one belief of mine based on my priors.
Democrats never claimed to negotiate the way Trump claims to negotiate.
An extreme plan of the kind you indicate (an “all white ethnostate”) would lose voters immediately, even if it was claimed as an extreme negotiating tactic.
Any brainwashing of Bryan Caplan is done by Bryan Caplan.
The de facto position of the Democrats is “use photogenic / sympathetic immigrants to bludgeon Republicans with charges of racism, while refusing to spend the political capital to actually address the systemic flaws in our immigration laws”. They want to be angry at Republicans for trying to enforce existing laws, without actually having to deal with the problem of coming up with a better set of laws.
The Republicans have basically the same policy, but their bludgeon involves the opposite extreme of immigrant quality.
Yeah, the Democrats are not going to implement open borders anymore than the GOP is. You might get some more refugees and some token gestures to make it easier for chain migration, and that’s about it.
The median Democrat voter is best described as “I am not in favor of open borders….but I’m not quite sure why.”
Can you point to a specific systemic flaw that the Democrats refuse to address?
The “Dreamers” only exist because of previous failures to enforce immigration laws on the parents of “Dreamers”.
I would say a system of laws that encourages people to violate it, because they know that their children (or themselves) will be sympathetically exempted from it, has some serious flaws.
And Democrats clearly feel that the system is flawed, otherwise they wouldn’t be so upset when the laws are enforced, and wouldn’t praise cities that go out of their way to make enforcement of the laws more difficult.
Yet, so far, their actual proposed policy positions are just retroactively applying exemptions to certain favored groups. This is not stable.
Stake a claim to what level of immigration they are okay with, and what measures they are actually willing to be enacted for enforcement, and how many current violators of immigration law we’re going to officially legalize, and we can have a policy debate.
I think this is one of those issues where partisan rhetoric has created a big fight where people’s actual positions aren’t nearly so extreme. I mean, I’m sure there is plenty of space between your median democrat and republican on ideal immigration policy, but the rhetoric from both sides is “keep out the non-whites” vs “welcome terrorists” and it makes everyone involved seem really stupid.
Illegal immigration is a hard problem.
On the one hand: America is a nation of laws, and should have control over who enters the country. If you let illegal immigrants stay, you encourage more in the future.
On the other hand: the level of deportation you would need to completely deter illegal immigration is untenable, both practically and morally.
Practically: the budget for ICE and CBP combined was almost $20B in 2016, which was enough for roughly 250K removals. These were disproportionately the easiest, cheapest illegal immigrants to deport: either convicted criminals, or people caught shortly after crossing the border. 99.3% of the removals met at least one of the priority characteristics laid out in this memo. (Not to mention the legal costs of immigration hearings. Nation of laws, remember?) There are roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in the US.
Morally: the reason that the Democrats keep using sympathetic immigrants as political props is because so many immigrants are so sympathetic. Polls show that 87% of Americans, and 79% of Republicans, want to let people brought to the US illegally as children stay in the country. If the cost of securing the border is deporting pillars of the community who’ve been in America for forty years and donate hundreds of turkeys every Thanksgiving, or people who’ve served two tours in Afghanistan, or this guy, or this guy — well, maybe that’s not a price worth paying.
Republicans like to focus on the “nation of laws” part, and Democrats like to focus on the photogenic sob stories. The difference, it seems to me, is that one side is more willing to acknowledge the complexity of the situation. Take this Obama speech on immigration, for example. Contrary to the assertions of some people in this conversation, Obama is perfectly willing to talk about and endorse deportations. A few examples:
Obama deported a ton of illegal immigrants. Whether he deported more than previous presidents depends on your definition of “deported”, but it’s clear that he didn’t shy away from aggressively defending the border.
At the same time, Obama tried a variety of things to alleviate the second half of the problem. After the DREAM Act was repeatedly filibustered by the Senate GOP, Obama went with DACA and DAPA. There are a handful of Republicans who’ve been open to this sort of compromise, but the institutional GOP has been completely uninterested. Just yesterday, an attempt to trade off DACA for additional spending on border security was voted down in the Senate after Trump threatened to veto it unless it also cut legal immigration.
People keep asking: why won’t the Democrats put a number on their amnesty? Or immigration levels? Or enforcement measures? But why is it only the Democrats who are expected to be specific? For years, Republicans have been claiming that “we must secure the border first“. What does that look like? What is the end point? More money is being spent on border security than at any other point in US history: 15 times more than was spent in 1986. The number of illegal immigrants in the US is going down, not up.
More importantly: why should Democrats trust whatever answer the Republicans give now? The DREAM Act was first introduced in 2001. Spending on CBP and ICE was more than doubled since ICE’s creation in 2002, but no meaningful immigration legislation has been passed this millennium. Only an idiot would think that this time, if Democrats just vote to fund Trump’s wall, the Republicans will definitely be willing to compromise.
Every recent attempt at a bipartisan immigration bill has been taken down from the right, not the left. The implications of this statement are left as an exercise for the reader.
Gay marriage went from politically impossible to politically required in the span of 20 years. Considering the evolving position of the left on immigration, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if open borders became the official Democratic platform in less time.
You know how Republicans have always talked about their opposition to illegal immigration but recently have talked about reducing legal immigration as well? One day, you’re going to wake up to the same situation with the left. It’ll turn out their support for borders was one of political pragmatism and nothing more.
You don’t even have to use a gay marriage analogy, immigration itself provides plenty of fodder for this. Here’s a commonly shared video of Diane Feinstein talking about immigration in the 1990s…
Curious where you got this impression, unless the types of people you think of as “the most extreme modern racists” and the ones I think of do not overlap much. If for convenience’s sake we’re limiting this to white racists, as I imagine we are, then a pretty decent honeypot for the most extreme modern racists is probably The Daily Stormer, where 30 seconds’ perusal shows nationalism alive and well.
You are simply confused because you think the opposition to “strong central government” is ideological and not instrumental.
The connection between opposition to strong central government and the prototypical white-supremacist (in the US) begins, roughly, with Truman’s first civil rights initiatives. They state opposition to strong central government because the central government is opposing their actual ideological goals.
They are perfectly happy to have a strong central government enforcing rules against migration (and would favor strong federal prohibition against miscegenation if they could imagine shifting the window that far).
I think you’re off by about 100 years. I’d say a strong group overlap between opposition to strong central government and white supremacy exists by the time of John C. Calhoun. Or maybe Thomas Jefferson would be a better person to use as the prototype although I’d say probably not because back then they hoped the problem would go away somehow when the slave trade across the Atlantic ended.
Genuine racists in the west today number somewhere around the lizardman constant, i.e. too few to actually explain anything. Any significant phenomenon in current western society can be explained better by something other than racism and with far fewer epicycles.
That seems very implausible to me. I am a liberal person living in a very liberal city, and I could name more than a dozen people offhand that I regularly interact with who openly and proudly blame everything on The Blacks, and want to ship them all off back to Africa where they belong and who get visibly and vocally pissed off whenever media depicts an interracial relationship. Granted, this is all anecdotal and could be the result of weird clumping but I would personally rate the probability of racists being around the lizardman constant as very low.
Yeah, I have got to guess weird clumping or something there, because I am a conservative person with lots of more conservative friends and I’ve met approximately one person like that, and he wasn’t even “open and proud” about said view. But then, different worlds and all….
That sounds bizarre to me. This kind of stuff might make good survey question for next year.
I met far more openly racist (white) people when I lived in liberal areas than when I lived in conservative areas.
And the interesting thing, to me, is I met the same -sort- of person in conservative areas, but they weren’t racist. They were, instead, offensive in a way that pissed conservatives off.
I think there is a subset of the population that thrives on shitting on sacred values, and it doesn’t particularly matter what those values are.
ETA:
Huh. I wonder if part of the increasing polarization is coming from increasing self-segregation by political beliefs, creating a more unified set of local sacred values, where locals interpret the defectors from as being members of the opposition tribe, or interpret the opposition tribe’s silence on the matter as being tacit support.
So liberals see racists among themselves, and assume conservatives, who don’t really observe them, are silently supporting their own racists. But the conservatives don’t really have the same kind of racism, because conservatives have different sacred values to offend, and racism is just seen as that quaint attitude that your grandparents never fully got over but did at least eventually mostly stop talking about.
(Seriously. That is what racism is seen as in the rural south. It is hard to convey exactly how bizarre and out of touch the obsession with racism looks from that perspective; it’s like, that is my grandma, and we know it’s wrong but she’s going to die any day now, so just get on with your life and stop yelling at old people over shit that was normal to them. Young racists are probably satan-worshipping metalheads with shaved heads, they just need some time in the army to straighten them out.)
Interesting observation. I have long noted that the SJWs I actually know don’t seem very much like the SJWs conservatives talk about; maybe in line with your theory conservatives are more likely to encounter troll/edgelord SJWs.
Protagoras –
…ah.
And the Internet amplifies edgelord trolls.
So we see the shitty people in our local communities, and we see the shitty people online, and naturally conclude that, yep, the shittiness we see locally is a national problem.
Reminds me of this essay on Status 451. Some people want to be rebels, some want to embrace the system, but what it means to be a rebel or to embrace the system is different depending on where you grew up, so we get weird results that aren’t in line with the naive left=rebel right=system that we expect.
Same here. I’ve met several SJW-adjacent people in school, but nothing like the
nazisevil SJWs I read about on Reason – and believe me, I’m looking for them. The really high profile evil SJWs stories seem to be mostly about people abusing their positions of power and SJW-influenced policies that sound good on paper but are Kafkaesque in reality. So perhaps it’s not SJWism on a personal level that is the issue, but institutional SJWism.Uh… perhaps the difference is that Nazis have to hide and don’t have any power, and SJWs can be open and public and have plenty of power?
Matt M: Edited for some clarity. Using “nazi” was probably a poor choice there.
I didn’t know this wasn’t common knowledge. That’s one of the things “troll” means!
I always funny how left-aligned media keep talking about “right-wing trolls” as if they were actually representative of right-wingers even though calling someone a troll in that context means you’re saying they’re only pretending to believe what they believe to get a rise out of you.
I’ve certainly met folks who fit the SJW stereotype/weakman, although not perfectly. Most were college age and all worked (in a hobby way) in the local film scene.
I always thought the implication here was more sinister… something like “No sane person could actually believe right wing political theory!” such that dismissing all right wingers as trolls is logical. Because right-wing viewpoints are that obviously stupid, the only possible reason to advocate them is for the purposes of trolling.
One thing that really jumped out at me was from Barbra Demick’s book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, was Mrs. Song and her daughter Oak-hee. The book is a non-fiction account drawn from defectors about the Arduous March era.
Mrs. Song was a housewife, and a loyal supporter of the regime. She generally tried to do her best to obey the law, be a dutiful wife, and do well at her state-assigned job (IIRC, at a clothing factory). She took a long time to even start selling on the side to make money after the famine started, feeling that a good citizen of the regime would avoid such capitalist things. She seemed generally contented with the regime and her life, despite tragedy inflicted upon her by the death of her husband due to starvation (which she apparently didn’t blame the regime for at the time).
Her daughter Oak-hee was always rebellious and unhappy. She was in an unhappy marriage (though IIRC, her husband was abusive), always tried to buck the system, was a headache to her mother because she needed to be bailed out of trouble periodically, was indiscreet in her criticism of the regime, and eventually defected to South Korea through China.
After Oak-hee’s defection, she got a message to her mother that she needed help. So her mother, against her better judgement and loyalty to the regime, went to China to try to help her daughter. It turns out that her daughter actually was in South Korea, and tricked her mother into coming to China to get her to defect to South Korea–which she eventually did.
In the epilogue, Mrs. Song is apparently happy, fitting in well, and has made good use of the money that South Korea gave to defectors. Oak-hee, on the other hand, has spent all of the money (though part of it was paying people to trick her mother into defecting), and is generally disaffected.
What I took away from this–though I caution people that this is my own interpretation of the main body of the book and the epilogue, and I don’t know if the author intended it– is that some people just will blossom wherever they’re planted, and some people are going to be chafing at the system no matter where they are.
(One other interesting thing from the book:
Another person that Ms. Demick follows is Dr. Kim, a female medical doctor from North Korea. With the Olympics going on, you’ll see idiots talk about how North Korea provides free health care to it’s citizens, so at least they’re doing better than the US there!
However, Dr. Kim states that people bringing patients to her hospital had two bring two empty beer bottles with them, so the doctors would have a container to mix IVs. They generally had no supplies for anything else, except for some medicines that they had from the periodic trips the doctors would make into the woods to pick herbs to make medicine.
In one of the more memorable anecdotes from the book, Dr. Kim is defecting across the Yalu river, and when she makes it a little ways into China, finds a bowl of rice with meat sitting on the ground. She hasn’t eaten in several days by that point, so she goes into the yard to steal it, when she hears dogs barking, and realizes “dogs in China eat better than doctors in North Korea.”)
I think most people using the word “troll” in the modern internet simply don’t know what the original meaning of the word was. (They’re in the majority so they probably don’t care, either, and fair enough I guess.) They’re thinking troll as in Lord of the Rings, not trolling as in fishing.
@Matt M
Yes, that’s exactly what they mean by it sometimes. They often call offering sincere objections being a “devil’s advocate” for the same reason. But then, I worked at Google, a home of the SJWs _Reason_ warned you about.
I’ve also worked with an old-fashioned racist, but only one (or at least only one who let it be known). And a few people anti-immigration from certain countries (some of whom were immigrants themselves).
There’s also the simple argument that if you’re on the left, the more you repeat “right wing trolls” such that those two terms become associated with each other, the better.
Regardless of whether people star to think “all trolls are right wing” OR “all right wingers are trolls” – either way helps you.
@CatCube
Psychologically, personality types will have tendencies to certain kinds of behaviors when positively adapted, when stressed, and etc…. If a situation is long term the coping mechanisms most well-adapted to that situation can become ingrained habits. Thus if a person is stressed for many years it can become very difficult for them to act their copacetic nature when circumstances change for the positive.
It’s important to know that appearing well-adapted to a situation may not actually mean that one is well-adapted (and vice-versa). Some people become really numb to reality as an unhealthy coping mechanism, such that they will adapt to whatever it is that’s expected of them, even if this means seeing horrors through rose-tinted glasses, or committing horrors as “just my job”. I wouldn’t call this sort of reaction “blossoming”, as what it is is an abnegation of responsibility.
(I’m having difficulty finding the words to explain what I mean here, I hope you understand)
Wait… what? I have met literally zero people who oppose miscegenation or rant like that. I mean literally in the literal sense. Not figuratively. I grew up in moderately conservative area and have lived in a liberal area and a more centrist area since then.
I wouldn’t put racist behavior at lizardmen constant levels though. I knew a few white people who didn’t like Mexicans and a few people who were part Mexican who didn’t like recent Mexican immigrants and so on. But it didn’t come up often. I have years of memories with people but can only think of a few mean comments. I had nonwhite friends in high school who once or twice said things like “I want to go fight in Iraq and shoot a sand n****r.” But even the people I knew who made offhand racist comments didn’t react to depictions of miscegenation or blame everything on X group. It wasn’t core to them, in some cases it didn’t reflect much about their actual feelings at all, and I wouldn’t be surprised as some of them got older if they changed their minds or just kind of forgot.
In a 2011 poll, PPP found that 46% of Mississippi Republicans thought interracial marriage should be illegal.
@Iain
The question was comparing my experience to someone to someone claiming to live in a very liberal city. Obviously I did not personally survey people on their views of miscegenation, but neither did the post I was responding to. I also lived somewhere where the racial fault line was obviously different (you can tell because I talked mostly about racism directed at Mexicans). It’s not about Mississippi Republicans.
A more relevant and reliable source would have been Gallup. The lowest approval rate (the South) is 83%. I’m from the West where the approval rate is 93%. I believe the lizardman constant is 4%. So even if I had surveyed the people I grew up with (which was biased towards the young who are far more likely to approve), it’s not unreasonable to say I’d be getting unanimous approval minus lizardman constant.
46% of Mississippi Republicans thought interracial marriage should be illegal
Where you pulling that figure from, Iain? From their survey itself, the result is given as below (and this is from the Republican survey only, I don’t see their promised ‘yeah we’ll put up the Democratic answers too’):
Q24 Do you think that interracial marriage should be
legal or illegal?
Legal ……………..54%
Illegal …………….29%
Not sure…………. 17%
Now, IF you add the “yes, illegal” 29% AND the “not sure” 17%, THEN you get 46% but I’m sure you don’t mean that PPP did that, Iain, because that would be dishonest and incorrect? Even though when Googling to try to find the Democrat version of the poll, all the media outlets were parroting the “46% of Mississippi GOP think interracial marriage should be illegal” line, which I am sure PPP never, ever, intended to be the case?
Anyway, this is PPP and I trust them to be honest, impartial and unbiased as much as I trust fire not to burn me if I stick my hand in it, because I have vague memories of chasing up some other poll result by them that was quoted on here in another context and finding it was massaged, to say the least.
Deiseach, if you read Iain’s very short comment which you are responding to, you will note that he both provides a link to his (second-hand) source and notes the poll is from 2011, as is the post he links to. Your poll is from 2012, as the eagle-eyed reader will spot at the bottom of every single page after the summary (which has the date in the upper right-hand corner instead). You will also note the absence of questions about Huckabee, Pawlenty, and Bachmann, mentioned in the post Iain links. It is not entirely surprising to me that the numbers between different polls are not the same.
I think the poll you posted is good evidence that Iain’s result is not necessarily representative of true facts on the ground, and/or that such facts can change relatively quickly. But I think you should spend less time accusing people of making things up or selectively misquoting/misrepresenting them when you are accidentally misrepresenting polls in the very same comment.
Your poll is from 2012, as the eagle-eyed reader will spot at the bottom of every single page after the summary (which has the date in the upper right-hand corner instead).
(1) Their link to the alleged 2011 poll results is broken
EDIT: Found their 2011 poll, here are the figures they quote:
Q14 Do you think interracial marriage should be
legal or illegal?
Legal ………40%
Illegal ……..46%
Not sure …….14%
(2) Are you really saying racist attitudes either improved or worsened by that great a jump in the space of a year? That is, in 2011 46% of Mississippi Republicans said “Interracial marriage should be illegal” but in 2012 that number reduced to 29%? In which case, what happened those 46-29=17% of formerly racist Republicans – they flipped to being “don’t know”? And if I believe the original claim that “46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal”, how then did those bad awful people change their minds in the space of one single year to “54% said it should be legal” – a gain of 14%?
If somebody can figure out how to convert racists to being non-racists at that rate of success in one year, please let us know how they did it!
EDIT: Based on the above, I really do want an explanation for such a big jump. Going from 40% “it should be legal” to 54% “it should be legal”; 46% “it should be illegal” to 29% “it should be illegal” seems like a huge swing – only 3% of that is a gain by “don’t knows”, so the 14% jumped from “illegal” to “legal”? How? Why? Evil GOP party bigwigs went around and told all their redneck base to say “yes” to inter racial marriage? What happened?
Most parsimonious explanation: PPP are partisan hacks who massage their ‘data’ to give shock!horror! media attention grabbing results.
Addendum to above: it appears also to not be as simple as “old white people are racist”; in the 2011 poll a lot of the 18-29 demographic were against it. Also, it seems some black people were also of the opinion interracial marriage was wrong.
So there is probably some lizardman constant at work, probably some confused people “wait, what? they want to make interracial marriage illegal? well I don’t know/I guess so”, some “I think it’s wrong but I don’t want to make it illegal” (you know, like the “personally opposed but” in the context of abortion).
And some I don’t trust PPP methods, so discount that.
But a 14% jump in approval for no alleged reason (no big court case about interracial marriage, no interracial couple in the news, if I’m wrong please correct me) amongst the same cohort of people using the same methodology in a follow-up a year later? That’s fascinating and I really want to see it explored, and nobody seems to have done so – the media ate up the “46% of Mississippi Republican voters are racists” and left it at that.
You can make all the points you want about how you don’t believe the survey, I don’t really care. I find the results somewhat unbelievable myself, though I don’t live in or have ties to that area.
But linking to a different survey, which was obviously a different survey, and calling it not “a different edition of that survey” or “another PPP survey,” but “their survey itself” and casting aspersions as though your link somehow proved someone had lied about the results of the 2011 poll is bullshit.
This reminds me of an exchange I recently had. It started with a claim of widespread racism in the US. I responded with an account of utter lack of that racism among thousands of my acquaintances in rural Texas. Another responded with similar accounts of racism in Hattiesburg, MS and Dothan, AL. I appreciated the specific locations; it gives me something to check. But I’m not headed to either city any time soon. Does anyone else have data, or similar accounts? Maybe it is a clumping problem. Best I could do was a sprinkling of acquaintances between LA and GA, and little to no apparent racism.
Be careful with how you define racist though. I don’t think the stereotypical openly-hates-all-black-people-all-the-time racist was ever all that common. Usually when people talk about racism today they mean “if you apply to get an apartment in Boston you will be accepted 15% less if you have a stereotypically black name.” There’s still a detectable amount of that around.
I think that’s an example of the way words get inflated. “Racist” suggests images of lynching, cross burning, and the like, so calling someone a racist is a strong put down, so the definition is weakened to apply to lots of the people you want to put down.
The 15% lower acceptance rate counts as clearly due to racial prejudice only if you include rational prejudice. I, for example, am prejudiced about height–I expect an adult man, ceteris paribus, to be taller than an adult woman. If I were in a situation hiring people were height was a significant advantage and I couldn’t measure it directly, that prejudice would result in my preferring to hire men–and should. Similarly, if getting rid of a black tenant who doesn’t pay his rent is, on average, harder than getting rid of a white tenant who doesn’t pay his rent, because you will be accused of racial prejudice, it is rational to prefer tenants with white sounding names. Prejudice in one sense, rational behavior in another. “Racism” in only a very watered down sense of the term.
That’s like saying that the best argument for allowing banks to be robbed is that if financial disaster strikes, you can always rob a bank.
A regular day for me:
8:00-9:30: Get to work, check email, check in with my coworkers about work related and non-work related stuff. Go get coffee and maybe breakfast with a couple coworkers.
9:30-10:00: Meetings.
10:00-11:30: Attempt to write code and get interrupted a lot by junior developers. Read websites like SSC.
11:30-1:00: Start thinking about lunch and go to lunch. Maybe take a walk.
1:00-2:00: Sit in a food coma and read websites. Maybe BS with coworkers.
2:00-4:00: Attempt to write code and get interrupted a lot by junior developers. Read websites like SSC.
4:00-5:00: Get 90% of the actual work I’ll do in a day done.
5:00-6:00: Slack off or fix production issues. Go home.
On good days, I spend most of my day writing code. On bad days, I spend most of my day going back and forth with the QA team that reported a particular bug, in order to translate their description of it into a test case I can reproduce on one of my systems — they use specialized test suites I don’t have access to, and which would take hours to run if I did. Failures tend to be opaque.
I read a lot of SSC on the bad days.
In my consulting gig, I look for things that are half as broken as your QA team. When I find some, I come up with ways to fix it and submit my findings to management. Then I watch management do the exact opposite for reasons of office politics and submit my outrageous bill which they happily pay.
I semi-exclusively browse SSC on my phone, which often makes contributing to discussion difficult due to the high time cost of typing comments on my phone keyboard. Is there an obvious solution here that I’m missing?
Practice would be the obvious solution.
The less obvious solution that still involves practice, is to specifically get better at brevity.
Get an adapter that lets you plug a keyboard into your phone.
or a foldable bluetooth keyboard, i keep seeing those on the train and they look fairly efficient.
Use speech-to-text? My mobile phone just has that as a utility and it’s pretty decent. The only annoying thing is that I have to remember to say punctuation or it’s just one long run-on sentence. “I had falafel today period”. But I like using that instead of typing on the little keypad a lot of times. On my phone it’s just a hidden option on the keypad, so very easy to get to.
Spend all day thinking about your responses then type them up later. Worst case scenario is someone says what you were thinking, best case is you read another comment that helps you reconsider your opinion.
On a typical day, I’m either supervising an air emissions test, writing a report about one of the tests, or planning a future test.
Supervising a test involves things like: comparing our instrumental data to the Continuous Emissions Monitoring System to make sure we’ll pass the test if we keep going; helping manipulate 40-pound, 8-foot long glass-lined testing probes between sampling ports that spew noxious exhaust gas; coordinating the timing of things like dumping cinders or collecting coal samples around our testing; and sitting around waiting for something to go wrong in case I have to make a decision about how to fix a problem.
Writing reports is mostly copy/pasting spreadsheets and calibration certifications into templates in Word, because we do the same tests over and over.
Planning tests consists mostly of confirming our calendar is open for the day in question, and ordering calibration gases. Sometimes we have to write a test plan, which mainly involves changing the dates on the last test plan we wrote for that particular test.
I’m a junior chemist. On a typical day, I will get a sample of a product from production to check, and run a titration to determine if it has reacted sufficiently.
Then I will either begin a test batch based on a formulation from my boss, loading materials into a lab-scale mixer and monitoring the temperature and perhaps the moisture level. While that is heating/cooling/mixing etc. I may have previous samples to test the physical film properties of, by punching out specific shapes, loading into a force tester and determining the strength needed to break, amount of stretching before break, etc.
Read Slate Star Codex posts, mostly. :op
A while ago we were discussing Ethiopian food. I tried some, and enjoyed it. I ordered something that came on a huge plate lined with that spongy flatbread. In the middle was a bowl of beef stew and then little bits of other stuff around the perimeter of the plate (salad, red lentils, beets with potatoes, cooked spinach, a couple other things I can’t remember), and in between each thing a piece of that same flatbread, rolled up in a cylinder.
The beef stew stole the show. Its flavor reminded me of an Indian-style curry. The lentils were good too, although not very interesting. I really liked the beet/potato mixture; those two ingredients worked well together and I’m surprised I haven’t seen that combination elsewhere.
The salad was just iceberg with a nice dressing; the spinach was gross, tasted like it came from a freezer and they did nothing to it besides cook it into mush; there was something that was like yellow lentils but it was some other kind of legume, and I didn’t like the sort of bland almost bitter way it tasted.
The spongy flatbread by itself almost tasted like sourdough. It absorbed sauces well but was very porous so I couldn’t use it to actually pick things up or hold them without getting my hands dirty. I was trying to use it like naan or pita, so I must have been doing it wrong. But if you can’t use a flatbread that way, then what good is a flatbread?
Over all I enjoyed that culinary experience, and might go back and try other things once or twice. I think it was Nancy Lebovitz and a few others who said Ethiopian food is not like other African food and in my experience (having tried Somali and Zimbabwean food) that is correct.
I think I was saying that Ethiopian food isn’t like middle eastern food– I’ve only had a little exposure to other African food.
The way to use the flat bread is to have a separate plate of flat bread which isn’t under the various dishes. Then you can tear off pieces that aren’t already soaked in sauce and use them to pick the meat and such.
I had separate pieces of flatbread as well–as I said, rolled into cylinders. I would unroll a cylinder, tear off a piece, and try to use it to pick up the other stuff, and this worked OK so long as the other stuff was somewhat dry, but most of it wasn’t.
Damned if I know what the problem was.
Maybe your main dishes were wetter than I’m used to. Maybe you’re pickier about liquid leaking through than I am.
A question for @Ilya Shpitser or anyone else who understands causal inference:
What would the best resource for learning about causal inference be for a borderline-innumerate biochemist? I purchased the book Causal Inference in Statistics, which seemed like a good bet given that it was co-written by one of the leading researchers in the field and is explicitly aimed at scientists rather than mathematicians. But I’m not sure whether that’s the best introduction to the field and, if it is, whether there’s any background knowledge that I should be learning before it arrives.
In terms of my starting point, I know literally nothing about graph theory other than that there’s something called graph theory and that it’s important for casual inference. I have an above average grasp of statistics for a scientist in my field but sadly that’s not saying much. I can perform computations up to the level of solving calculus problems reliably but I struggled in linear algebra and differential equations courses and I don’t really understand any of the theory of mathematics.
I’ve been to a total of one lectures on graph theory and it seemed really interesting, so I’d be interested in a recommendation as well.
@Atlas
What they are asking for is a jack of all trades. What the statement means is that they want someone who does the easy parts of the job, so the physicians can focus on the hard bits. They don’t want the physician to have to ask, the assistant is expected to be proactive. They also don’t want the assistant to start doing work that doesn’t help patients.
And this means answering questions that are easy to answer and only passing the difficult ones onto the people whose time is valuable.
Oh. First line support.
From the latest ‘report generation for returns purposes’ I find that I’m apparently an “administrator” 🙂
What this actually means is what, in previous jobs, has been described as “clerical support” or, in plain everyday speak, a combination of receptionist and secretarial work. I do what my boss assigns, but there is regular routine paperwork that has to be done and takes up most of my time: dealing with post, answering calls and face-to-face queries, making sure all the sign-in sheets etc etc etc are updated, printed out, and put out to be signed (we don’t have a clocking in system here since we’re too small for that to be efficient), wages, some accounts on a basic level (we use a particular accounting software package), filing,
typing upwordprocessing minutes of meeetings and reports, record keeping, and the usual “drop all that and do this last-minute thing that I am just now giving you and should have been done three days ago and has to be ready in half an hour” kind of tasks.Being an early intervention service for children with additional needs, there’s a great deal of liaising with the Early Intervention Team, stakeholders, government bodies, government departments, parents and others, particularly right now as a metric crapton of already existing regulations from those various government departments are being supplemented by another crapton of new regulations replacing, supplanting or in addition to the existing ones are being implemented and we need to have all the ducks in a row for the inspection teams and regulatory bodies that oversee the service, so that is keeping us really busy at the moment.
I like it, there’s enough variety that it’s not boring (doing nothing but filing is boring) and mostly I work on my own (I like ‘give me the pile of work then go away and let me do it’) with some team work contact, but there’s also enough of a routine and structure that it suits my “I do not like change, I do not like the unexpected, I like plenty of notice to get accustomed to the idea, I like doing stuff that I know how to do and though I like learning new things, I don’t like ‘here is a complete new skill that you must know perfectly in ten minutes’ rush” personality.
I suppose you could also say it’s for the public good, like that “Find meaningful work and become part of a team where everyone plays an important role in the fight against cancer” snippet which I imagine is meant to encourage the worker that no, honestly, doing six hours of sorting files in alphabetical order is not futile despair fodder, but I don’t mind that so much and don’t think of it as a motivation (I really can’t think of myself as “yes, I am helping the downtrodden and the needy!” which is why, I guess, I don’t get on the same wavelength as the activist types).
>doing nothing but filing is boring
And in a vein with “Different Worlds”, my mom enjoys filing so much she has volunteered with multiple organizations doing filing specifically. Mostly short-term or irregularly, but she helped out at my high school’s counseling office for several years before someone higher up noticed the potential ethical problems of a parent having access to students’ files and banned it.
It’s very strange because I’m not a filing specialist or anything, but I’ve noticed I tend to get stuck with the filing in new jobs 🙂
Part of that, of course, is the usual “this is stuff that has piled up, needs to be done but is not urgent, the regular staff are not free, give it to the new person” reasons, but part of it seems to be that I have this urge to PUT THINGS IN ORDER (at work at least, at home is a different matter).
So I don’t mind the initial “well this place looks like a bomb hit it” task of hauling out cabinets and boxes of files and putting things in alphabetical (or whatever system in use is) order and even the fiddly little things of getting manila folders, file tabs, and so on and putting the files back into working order.
But once that’s done, I do get terribly bored at “okay, just put Mr Smith’s file away in the drawer marked S-U in the third cabinet” routine and that’s when I start doing naughty things like (a) non-work related stuff during working hours (gasp! the horror!) or (b) reading the contents of the files so I find out “Aha, Mr Smith has been a very naughty boy (which is why he’s such a good client of the legal office here)” 🙂
Filing clerk really is specialised and if someone like your mother likes it, that’s a bonus!
So a school got shot-up in Florida by a disgruntled former student. Seventeen people are dead, several are still critically injured, and the media acted like vultures. You know, the usual. However, it occurred to me that since our national pass time is to have A Very Serious Talk About Gun Control every time some psycho decides to go on a killing spree, this would be the most appropriate time to share my personal favourite take on gun control.
We, or rather Scott, have a rule that requires a three day waiting period before politicizing a tragedy.
Goddammit, in my rush to get that joke in while the kid’s corpses were still warm, i went and forgot about the rule. Sorry, i’ll try to remember it next time.
That whole post deserves to be deleted, and has no place here at any time, 3 days or not.
Agreed.
Yeah you’re right. Funny as it is, posting stuff like that lowers the level of discourse and makes people like me less. Neither of those things are actually in my best interests, so it would have been wiser not to. The whole thread needs to go. Think i’ll take a vacation from the comments too, save Scott the trouble.
As someone who was already familiar with the joke, and finds it funny, I agree.
“Funny as it is”
Humor is always (yes, always) contextual. “Know your audience”, etc.
So, not actually funny.
I am a software developer. On a stereotypical workday, I try to implement some new bit of functionality for the feature I am working on. When I try to do so, I find the earlier design and specification work was a bit vague and left some details out. I come up with a reasonable solution and confer with the program manager to see whether that is acceptable. Assuming it is, I try to build the solution. Since the solution I am trying to build depends of functionality in other parts of the system, I get blocked when it turns out the other stuff doesn’t work. I contact whoever is responsible for the other stuff by email with a description of what is going wrong and wait for them to fix it. While I am waiting I review code that my colleagues are trying to submit for other bugs and features or I comment on documentation the doc team is writing about features I have recently implemented. Most days I also attend a meeting where I tell my manager and colleagues what I have accomplished since the last meeting and what I am working on now, the famous “stand-up”.
Of course no day is exactly like this, but I think this is a fair description.
I normally do not post here under my actual name. I’m looking for help understanding the viewpoint of people who don’t think climate change is likely to be net bad for some/many countries. I’m thinking something like double crux or adversarial collaboration. I’m publishing under my name to make it clear I’m real and take this seriously; I can provide a good intro from someone much more well known in the rationalist community if that’s helpful, once I know where to send that good intro.
I’d like to find a debate partner who is at least someone respected in the LW or SSC community, or willing to write under their real name. (Both would be great, of course.) I’ve written ~25 quora posts on climate change that a person could read here, if that person wanted to get a feel for my thoughts so far. I also wrote a few op-eds here and there, such as this one. Mostly these were written to persuade joe public, rather than to map out my own beliefs, but if you look for it, you can find what I think, and discern that I’m a young broke person who wouldn’t mind feeling like a bit of a hero for doing something re: climate change.
One thing I’m not interested in debating is economics; I studied that in undergrad at a fancy school and maybe someday will go further with it, but not today. Let’s take it as a given that I agree with everything David Friedman wrote here, insofar as I agree that climate change, if bad, will be very, very hard to address, because global public goods are hard. (Consequently I think anyone who puts any smart effort into addressing climate change is thereby appropriately recognized as a hero. Although recognizing heroes as such is *also* a public good, so I admit I wrote this very quickly, when I think Brian Eister deserves better.) I just also think climate is clearly, clearly bad, whereas David Friedman and others here seem to be very much of the opposite mind.
Consequently I want to talk about how bad/expensive climate change will be if nothing is done.
I think three things are not too hard to show, with some quick googling and a good mind, and should persuade that warming/climate change/etc. is, er, very bad, for nearly everyone… but I’m realizing that many more people with a lot of sharps are firmly in a different camp, and I’m trying to figure out the contours of the disagreement, so I’m confused. If I were feeling confident, I’d say:
1. Climate change is severely back-loaded. By this I mean that even if we were to stop emitting fossil fuels tomorrow, climate change and warming and etc., would continue at or near present rates for decades.
2. Insurance companies already see such a significant “global weirding” effect that already an insurer would tell you climate change is net bad for the U.S. and Canada. (Let alone somewhere hard hit, like Tikopia or low-lying Florida or etc.)
3. Ocean acidification alone is enough to create existential risks for ecosystem collapse (particularly if phyto/zooplankton populations are dramatically affected by pH changes) sufficient to make every country rightly consider climate change a “net bad”.
4. Sea level rise alone is enough to create existential risks for sufficiently many coastal cities (Boston is building a sea wall!) that climate change is a “net bad” for basically every country.
5. Refugee flows from the worst-off countries are likely to be severe, and prolonged, such that even countries that are relatively well off, will be net harmed. E.g., if 1/3 the population of Bangladesh had to leave, and left at a rate of 50k/day (stadium traffic!) the flow of refugees would take about three years to go by.
6. A la “thin air” there are very likely to be some things we don’t know about.
7. There are positive feedbacks (albedo, government destabilization, clathrate gun hypothesis, etc) and possibly points of no return, (ice sheet collapse, species extinction) such that we can’t wait until things are bad enough that even to people with no ability to extrapolate from a trend can agree collective action is clearly called for.
8. There are a few countries (perhaps Russia should spring to mind) where the vast majority of the population will probably be worse off, but a handful of oligarchs who together own literal hundreds of billions in fossil fuels control the country’s state machinery, and can be expected to act in their own interests, such as by sowing confusion and deliberately working to destabilize the efforts of any Very Serious People who might try to act on climate change, because such action (whether via global carbon tax/tariff or some regime of trade controls and penalties) would almost certainly be extremely costly for those elite few. (The word sanctions seems to spring to mind, w/r/t/ Russia, for some reason.)
Apparently a ton of this stuff is controversial or in doubt? Am I just too invested in this to think clearly, or what’s the argument that I’m just wrong about this?
I have a good grounding in hard sciences (used to work with synchronizing femtosecond-pulsing lasers) so I shouldn’t be easy to hornswoggle with doomsday bad science. This stuff looks simple, straightforward (e.g. CO2 dissolving in the ocean) and really, really bad.
I’m not going to argue about your basic thesis, only one little quibble:
The thing is that something is being done. In fact I don’t see how we could realistically do significantly more even if we tried. This, this is how things used to look compared to this
Examples:
– China is going nuclear
– Wind and solar is rapidly catching up with fossils
– India is a bit behind, but also going rapidly nuclear
– Natural gas is replacing coal in the west in the interim while nuclear, solar and wind is built
– Elon Musk
– Carbon sequestering programs (My current startup project is into this, possibly overestimating importance)
I significantly agree with this. A *lot* is being done. I like the line that “a pessimist is a person who lives with optimists.” I don’t think the optimism about climate change itself being a good thing is justified, so I find I want to grab the strain of optimist who thinks climate change could just as easily be good as bad and shake them while saying “how is that possibly justified?”
But I’m not actually a doom-and-gloom pessimist myself. A lot is being done. And that’s good. And more would be better, because we’re still taking some huge, awful risks by riding the edge.
Yesterday my alma mater law school, Lewis & Clark Law School, decided to divest their endowment from fossil fuel exploration… a small but significant symbolic step, if you ask me. I hope it gets lots of favorable news coverage. If a few more major pension funds aggressively moved into renewables and out of fossil fuels, I think that’d be a great thing.
I wrote a paper on natural gas storage at one point–not much I want to say here, where I’m spitballing a bit and won’t get the details right, but certainly the “natural gas is a solution” picture is complicated by the fact that even small leaks of unburned natural gas have a very powerful near-term climate forcing effect, and the general rule that brand new natural gas facilities replace very old coal ones, such that natural gas is buying us a premature senescence of the coal industry–say by 10 years or so–at the cost of saddling us with very expensive, 100-year-lifespan natural gas facilities we will still be using for decades to come (at a point which, one assumes, additional natural gas facilities will be too prohibitively expensive compared to renewables). Sequestering and storage is an interesting question, and might put natural gas back in the clear benefit side of the ledger, but there’s the example of the Aliso Canyon disaster and the Lake Nyos tragedy to remind us that storage solutions have risks of their own. If your startup is at the stage where you can share details or point people toward reading materials, I’m already curious.
I’m still confused as to exactly how this is supposed to work… It would seem to me that so long as there exists one sufficiently well-funded hedge fund who doesn’t consider it immoral to purchase fossil fuel stocks, all you’re doing is transferring wealth from yourself to people less moral than you.
Hypothetical:
The “equilibrium price” for Exxon is $100
Woke College X decides it is going to sell off all of its Exxon stock – doesn’t really care about the price, this is a moral decision!
Evil Hedge Fund Y already has all the Exxon stock it wants at $100, so the price has to fall – maybe to $98
College sells its shares to Hedge Fund for $98
College just sold something worth $100 for $98, and Hedge Fund just bought something worth $100 for $98
The ownership structure of Exxon now changes such that it has fewer shareholders who care about and demand action on climate change, and more shareholders who care about profits, at any and all costs
???
Less carbon emissions
Because you’ve raised the cost of capital for Exxon, so when Exxon is evaluating projects, fewer will have a positive NPV.
How? The equilibrium price has not changed. After the Hedge Fund buys the stock, it goes back to $100, because everyone’s financial model says that’s about what it’s worth based on earnings.
@Matt M
Investors supply money and different investors demand a different return on investment. The more supply of money there is, the less investors can demand; the less supply of money there is, the more investors can demand.
It is thus in the interest of employees, including the top employee (CEO) to maximize the supply of money, because they can then demand higher salaries and won’t get fired as quickly. Furthermore, a company will be forced to dissolve itself due to insufficient profitability more easily if there is a smaller supply of money.
So what the Law School did incentivizes Exxon (a tiny bit) to switch to renewables and incentivizes employees (a tiny bit) to work for a renewables energy company, rather than Exxon. It also helps (a tiny bit to) drive the least profitable fossil fuel companies out of business.
—
Ultimately, this is fully generalizable to all boycotting, which works on the principle of denying yourself the most profitable deal, to deny the other party their most profitable deal.
No, the hedge fund is holding more than it would have wanted to at the original price. It needs an incentive to do that, and that incentive comes in the form of lower stock price.
Let’s say it believes that $100 is the appropriate “hold” price – representing their actual estimate of the value of the stock. It won’t buy any more at $100, but it won’t sell at $100 either. If it can buy for cheaper than $100, it will. And so will a large number of other actors on the market.
There are transaction costs or risk premiums or whatever that imply it might not buy at $99.99, but so long as they get an opportunity to buy for less than the “true value” they will.
Strictly speaking, if Woke College used to be willing to hold Exxon shares but now isn’t willing to, the actual demand for Exxon shares has dropped a bit. And that means the equilibrium price should drop. It’s probably a tiny amount, almost certainly not distinguishable from noise, but it’s still a drop.
I get this in theory – is there any particular evidence it actually happens though? Do stocks who have recently been targeted by divestment campaigns (tobacco, israel, fossil fuel, whatever) underperform ones that don’t in the short term?
And what to my point about the changing ownership structure? Does it benefit planet Earth for Exxon stock to be controlled by a mixture of profit-seekers and environmentalists, or for it to be controlled solely by profit-seekers? Is it more important for a company to make a lot of money, or to be really well liked? (this is not rhetorical, I honestly don’t have the answer here)
No, that’s not how it works. Exxon is competing against every other stock for a share of the hedge fund’s finite assets. You could think of the hedge fund as doing an optimization (explicitly or implicitly) with an objective function that incorporates the stocks’ expected return, risk aversion, and various constraints including leverage constraints. If you want the output to be different, you need the inputs to be different, and only knob being turned here is the expected return.
Your view of the world, where the hedge fund buys as much as it can as long as the stock is undervalued, assumes away risk aversion (concentrated portfolios are risky) and leverage constraints (you have finite capital, you can’t just buy everything you think is undervalued; buying Exxon means not buying something else).
To your point about shareholder mix, the profit-seeking hedge funds would make money if the divestment was lifted so they’re in theory incentivized to make Exxon more environmentally friendly.
Well, I’m also assuming that any particular liberal arts college is unlikely to be holding vast amounts of Exxon stock. It probably has a little, sprinkled about in various index funds. But not so much that a hedge fund couldn’t easily buy whatever amount it decides to sell.
Although I concede that if every college in the US did that all at once, yeah, no individual hedge fund could cover that. But all of them probably could?
Are colleges big enough to “move the needle” in this sense?
Right. @Matt M, it’s a good question, and one the folks supporting divestment had to be careful to answer the correct way. (If you say something like, “who cares if it doesn’t do any good, it’s a nice symbol” then you lose everyone who cares about the actual world, rather than just about symbols/signaling, which is enough people that your coalition flops.) Answering this question is tricky–maybe the other commenters have already done it better than I can–but basically you’ve shown you can understand the answer by including the phrase “sufficiently well-funded” in your question. What happens when somebody with money stops investing in fossil fuel exploration is that the fossil fuel exploration hedge funds become somewhat less well-funded. It may be a very, very small change if it’s a few million dollars, but if it’s CalPERS, say, even a single divestment decision could cause many marginal fossil exploration investment opportunities to go unseized because the costs of capital for fossil exploration projects have increased.
Sure, it’s hard to evaluate how big the effect is. I don’t know the answer to that. I think you need to do careful empirical work to know that.
My instinct is that the effect isn’t very big. OTOH the expected negative financial effect on the college is probably not that large either, since the college’s second best investment opportunity is probably not much worse. (It *would* be worse for the college’s ability to track a major stock index like the SP500 but that’s probably not something they should be aspiring to anyway.)
A bit of googling suggests that US and Canadian university endowments totalled $500b as of 2016, while hedge fund assets under management were $3 trillion at the start of 2017. So yes, I’d imagine that a large-scale divestment campaign could move the needle on availability of capital to the targeted industry.
To just add a good reference link re: moving the needle,
https://gofossilfree.org/
keeps a running list of colleges, cities, counties, hedge funds, pension funds, and private individuals who’ve divested, and you can get a good sense of how many folks and how much moolah are involved with this.
One point in this discussion that I don’t think has been made. When an institution disinvests in fossil fuel it is increasing its investment in other things. That bids the price of other stocks up a bit just as its disinvestment bids the price of fossil fuel stocks down a bit. So now the hedge fund that doesn’t care about climate issues has an incentive to pull money out of the other stocks, giving it more money to invest in fossil fuels.
I’m not willing to claim that there is literally zero effect on the cost of capital for fossil fuel companies, but I would be surprised if it was significant.
David Friedman makes a really good point. I actually am not sure if I’ve seen that point anywhere in the discussions of divestment I’ve participated in.
I think I’m still persuaded that divestment is still fairly effective because of my sense of how “imperfect information” is very important for capital markets, particularly for long-term assets like fossil exploration ventures. I think I’m still persuaded that if (say) CalPERS was to divest, nobody is both possessed of good enough information to really know what the value of the underlying assets are, and possessed of ‘sufficient’ capital to increase their own holdings of fossil fuels sufficient to completely make up for CA’s divestment. I would certainly like to know more than I do, on this front, but I think the answer is “not nothing”, and of course the symbolism can also potentially matter.
One point in this discussion that I don’t think has been made. When an institution disinvests in fossil fuel it is increasing its investment in other things. That bids the price of other stocks up a bit just as its disinvestment bids the price of fossil fuel stocks down a bit.
Prices are relative. From the investor perspective, stock A going down a bit is the same thing as everything else in the world (including cash) going up a bit; what you’re evaluating is the relative value of different ways to use your capital.
Not going to share specifics, but the concept is fairly simple. We’re doing it by teaching a neural net to optimise forest management for (permanent sequestered carbon * pulp yield)/acre-year.
Our best test so far seems to push the sequestering capacity from ~500kg per acre per year to 4 tonnes while doubling yield. If you end up replacing coal with wood chips in a power plant due to extra pulp and fewer newspapers, the calculation for climate impact gets even better.
Scaling appears to be difficult, but if we could do this with the entirety of Russia+Canada, every person on the globe could have the current carbon footprint of a Norwegian and the world would break roughly even. (this includes replacing coal with wood chips)
A condition of my government funding is that there will be research papers out in a couple years whether we succeed or not.
Huh. Neat. Them’s promising numbers, actually. Thanks for sharing.
I do think we could do more “if we tried”, at least for most normal meanings of “if we tried.”
E.g., if that meant something like, “Scott Pruitt goes on TV and apologizes for everything he’s ever said about climate change, says it’s bad, thanks everyone who has ever ridden the bus, begs them to please ride the bus more, and otherwise to do whatever it is people do–he admits he doesn’t know much about it–to do stuff about climate change” that would probably be better, and it only requires one person–Scott Pruitt–to try. If Paul Ryan were to drop a few grand to install solar panels on his house(s), and put out a press release expressing his concern that he’s still not doing his part on climate change, which he considers a serious problem that all right-thinking people should be thinking about, that would be better, and it would only require one person–Paul Ryan–to try. If “we” tried–all of us, in concert–well, that won’t happen, exactly, because moloch, but that won’t stop me from throwing a little shade at the people who seem to me to be in a position to lead, but aren’t leading.
If Paul Ryan were to drop a few grand to install solar panels on his house(s), and put out a press release expressing his concern that he’s still not doing his part on climate change, which he considers a serious problem that all right-thinking people should be thinking about, that would be better, and it would only require one person–Paul Ryan–to try.
Solar panels on roofs are nice but a gimmick. Every person in the nation puts a solar panel on their roof (if they’re living in a building that can do this, not renting a flat in an apartment block in a densely populated large city for instance) will put a tiny dent into their electricity bill but not really much else. We have solar panels on the building where I work, which is in a development of housing with those roof solar panels, for the purpose of heating water, and the best I can say for them is that they’re harmless.
Which is to say, slightly above fuck-all use, because this is Ireland and if you could invent some form of rain power you’d do a lot better than relying on the three days of unclouded, clear, sunshiny skies we get all year. It’s a feel-good gimmick that the architects/designers/local authority incorporated, probably at the urging of some nationally mandated scheme by our government because of “we must lead the way by example on climate change” but in practice, if we want hot water, we need to turn on the oil-burning boiler for heating and water.
Paul Ryan does the PR stunt of solar panels on his house, most businesses and homes might follow suit but in practice would be “okay, now turn on the electricity/oil fired heating because the sun is not shining and we need hot water and heating”. For the ten people who live in a climate where solar power is actually functional, you’ll have the rest of the nation where it rains/snows/blows gales/is under the shadow of a mountain/the sunshine isn’t strong or reliable enough, and they’ll still need the old, bad, ways of generating power and heating to fall back on when the solar panel gimmick does nothing.
Similarly, for the kind of real, large-scale, will actually make a difference in reducing carbon emissions and the rest of it, you are talking about pretty much stopping the Industrial Revolution in the West and more importantly the developing world in its tracks right now. No more large, industrial-scale heavy industry or any other carbon-pumping endeavour, which means an enormous change in how we produce food, transport goods, you name it.
And that’s the kind of global shock that nobody is going to seriously suggest implementing. They may sign the Paris Accord and pat themselves on the back, but they are not going to go back to their First World nations and tell their urban middle-class voters “Okay, give up your smartphones and artisan coffee shops and walk everywhere like your great-grandparents who travelled by pony and trap and learn how to sew your own clothes and only eat whatever crop is in season, can be grown in our local climate, and can be transported by those horse and cart methods”.
Yeah, yeah: renewables, nuclear power, magic tech that will be miraculously invented to enable straw to be spun into gold so we can keep our current lifestyles without harming the climate any more, yadda yadda yadda, when I see any actual progress on this I’ll believe it. Next door neighbours in Britain have nuclear power, want to get more, have signed a contract with French company to provide this, and it’s getting on to ten years now with nothing being done. Come back to me when real nuclear plants get built and we’ll see what happens.
Deiseach,
Right enough for this forum. My point was tied to the idea of “actually try”… I was saying the symbolic effect of Paul Ryan putting solar panels on his house would be important, to the point where it would, e.g., raise the costs of capital for fossil exploration projects and lower the costs of capital for renewable ones. I agree that roof top solar gets you at most one wedge in one of those 30-something-wedge emissions-reductions-plans. All I’m saying is, at the moment lots of people (such as Paul Ryan) are not even *trying* and if they were to really try, a lot more would get done. After all, Paul Ryan could get the gears moving to have solar on his house, and a press release about it, in about an hour. What would he do with the next hour, and the next, if he were really trying?
I think you’re underestimating the number of people who live in sunny places.
Well, do we have real proofs except China’s/India’s claims about their actions? Do we know exactly that things are being done? For example, did you know some countries get UN credits to fight global warming in their countries but at the of the day the goverments in the countries make sure that a country starts to produce more CO2 to show off that they take some actions (surprise-surprise, UN credits go to the pockets of those who are supposed to be fighting)? Did you know that European weather stations (unfortunately, there are not so many such stations so otherwise the data acquired would have been much more detailed) still detect huge amounts of gases and particles that have been banned long ago by UN conventions? And, presumably, that gases and particles are coming not only from India and, especially, China but from the first-world countries as well.
What actions EM are taking? What’s the efficiency of those actions right now (battery factories are still under construction, Tesla usage is very low around the globe (mind the price))?
As far as I know, solar panels are still very inefficient to be a real alternative to fossils. BTW, LI-ON batteries are inefficient too in storing energy.
What about livestock? It uses a lot of land (if we talk about pastures and rainforests), it produces huge amounts of methan, it contaminates soils. And I don’t see that livestock is reducing in number. It seems it’s even getting bigger with the growth of meat consumption in developing countries (China, India, Brazil).
I don’t want to say that the steps mentioned in the comment above are not real. Maybe they are but there are impediments in implementing them.
Right. I am not sure I disagree with any of this. I don’t know very much about what is being done re: monitoring of commitments. I’d be surprised if there *wasn’t* a lot of, er, leakage there. Climate change is a *hard* problem.
I think the problem with this line of thinking is that the benefits are highly uncertain. If solar power continues at the rate it’s going, then governments won’t need to do anything because it will be more economically efficient, essentially a free lunch. But if it stalls out, then the government will have to do a lot more, whether that’s more nuclear power plants or investing heavily in some other source of energy. A global warming “alarmist”(for lack of a better word) would probably advocate a heavy CO2 tax, as a hedge against the latter scenario.
Right. Hank Paulsen, Republican Treasury Secretary and long time “very serious person” for red team has advocated a carbon tax. Seems unlikely to me, compared to other policies, mostly for political reasons around how much harder it is to persuade the public on a novel tax than on a novel subsidy.
1. US signs Paris Accord.
2. All signatories to Paris Accord actually do something.
3. Denialists STFU.
I kind of agree with this sentiment–it is really frustrating to see denialists with podiums, and would be really satisfying to shout them down.
But I actually think that the sincere denialists–the people who are genuinely exploring the science/policy/economic facts of this–are one of the best resources for persuading the public. Most folks don’t have time to learn that much about the issue, so what makes it possible for the public to see that climate change is real is watching individual, high-profile skeptics come around. I’d point at Hank Paulsen as a great example of that–someone who started out very skeptical, and who is still pretty skeptical or even dismissive of some of what the identity-left says about climate. I watched him talk about how hard it is for him to relate to the ideological left, but say that he understands accounting and the challenge of doing business in conditions of major uncertainty, and say variations on “climate is the defining issue of our times” to a room full of Portland business leaders for an hour-long lunch session at Portland City Club a few years back. The effect that had on a room full of business types was palpable.
I’d contrast the impact someone like Paulsen can have on the issue with the impact that the average rank-and-file Portland young person who fits the stereotype of “moved to Portland to retire”–who got through college without much debt, moved to Portland to live la vie boheme and be ideologically pure (and maybe live off the union or the high minimum wage, and never get their hands dirty or take any big risks) who can nod along “yeah man” to a speech about climate change, but will do the same thing for a speech about homeopathic remedies or acupuncture or keeping fluoride out of tap water or any other damn thing without showing any capacity for sustained critical thought. I’d take a few more Hank Paulsen’s and a few fewer knee-jerk issue-supporters any day.
Saying STFU drives the reasonable folks out of the conversation, and leaves a debate between tepid-seeming scientists/policy folk and sexy-rebel-type contrarians like Milo… which doesn’t seem to work very well for the scientists, compared to when they politely seek real discussions about sincere disagreements. And saying STFU to Milo was never going to work anyway–he’ll just say “oh, but ze tyrannical left who hates free speech”.
That’s an odd framing. If people just accepted the science, like they do about 99.99% of things, there would be no need for the drama of sceptics converting. Sceptics converting is needed because of scepticism.
@TheAncientGeekAKA1Z
I know the story of a man who, despite being a literal rocket scientist and deeply curious person, made it to 1980 thinking evolution wasn’t real without even being serious challenged about it. (The fact that his college mentors were either evangelicals or old math profs who’d themselves been educated in 1930 might explain most of that.) To him evolution was a hand-wavey theory some very smart people had devised after first becoming atheist, in order to explain away the obvious designer elements of the world. It’s not an insensible position; “clock-maker” type arguments where what many pre-Darwin cultures took as obvious. In his church, he would tell the story of how–in 1980, in Alabama–he’d discovered that honest people who did believe in god, and who had good educations and good minds, thought evolution was real on the basis of reasons without which they wouldn’t even know how to reason about the world. So he decided to go to one of the meetings where the anti-evolution folks could explain what it was he was supposed to know, such that he wouldn’t find the mere existence of thoughtful, evolution-believing theists to be so confusing, but instead could explain to those theists their error while not challenging their faith (faith being a collaborative enterprise each was a hero for supporting in his fellows; he’d be letting his compatriots down if he continued challenging their faith-that-didn’t-deny-evolution without making a good effort to understand how they’d gotten it). A single meeting with the anti-evolutionists (in 1980 Alabama) made him an immediate believer in evolution, *because of how bad the arguments against evolution were*… from then on his project was to find ways to learn what it was that theists who believed in god were thinking, so he could know about *that*.
He would tell this whole story, in church groups and of course it’s a pretty persuasive story. Lots of people who hadn’t themselves taken the time to get groundings in science/math, and then evaluate the arguments for/against evolution, could still tell all the same that they’d rather go ahead and take evolution as given, and people who argue otherwise as crackpots, because they’d sent one of their very best to weigh the issue, and he’d come back converted.
People who take the time to really try to know the truth, even if they sometimes miss, are putting an effort into a worthy project that benefits everybody. People who just “just accepted the science” includes a lot of different types of people, but it includes the people who, if they really tried, could tell that horoscopes and homeopathy make no sense, but don’t try and just go along with the science so long as the person telling them about horoscopes or homeopathy wears a lab coat. So I value thinking people over unthinking ones, and even more so the ones who do the work to deliberately improve their thinking over time, and who are prepared to say “I was wrong, here’s what persuaded me.”
And this isn’t just about homeopathy or horoscopes. The replication crisis in psychology was found by people who weren’t too easily persuaded by a confident demeanor and a lab coat. I like having those folks around.
I’m fairly certain the carbon sequestering project you are working on could be funded at ten times its current level without making a dent in your government’s energy policy budget.
I think it is fair to say that we are doing nothing terribly expensive for the purpose of dealing with global warming, and I don’t think we are going to. China is going nuclear because nuclear gets electricity to a billion rural peasants without making the population of Beijing suffocate and die, wind and solar are being done in favorable niches where it takes only a little but of subsidy to make them competitive, and natural gas is just plain cheaper than coal for any new-build powerplant. Carbon taxes aren’t really taking off, while cap-and-trade almost definitively means “OK, you don’t have to do anything different if you don’t want”.
There are relatively small amounts of money available by way of virtue-signalling, but nothing that is going to transform the energy industry in ways that weren’t already going to happen for other reasons. And those billion Chinese peasants are going to be getting cars, most of which will probably run on either gasoline or coal-derived electricity.
If this isn’t enough to prevent catastrophic consequences from global warming, tough, because it’s all we are going to get from a human population that has already been mostly mindkilled on the subject.
This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable position. I’m maybe not quite as pessimistic as this–I think virtue signaling can be pretty powerful. AFAIK, Tom Steyer is the first mega-wealthy person to tie his legacy/sense of self to climate specifically, but there will be others. And as impacts get worse, political will can be expected to grow, and virtue-signaling to become a political necessity, much as patriotism matters in war time. And there are lots of ways to spend money so that it both reduces emissions and prepares for the already-inevitable, which means cities and states will continue to have fresh sources of political will for local projects whenever they’re noticing that they’re vulnerable to climate change harms.
I am happy to share my viewpoint, but I would first want to know what you mean by “climate change.”
Does it mean future inevitable climate changes which will occur regardless of man’s activities?
Does it mean climate changes which result from mankind’s activities and nothing else (including changes from CO2 emissions but also changes from other activities)?
Is it the hypothesis that mankind’s CO2 emissions will result in increased global surface temperatures, which will trigger a positive feedback loop with water vapor, resulting in greatly magnified increases in global surface temperatures?
Is it the hypothesis that mankind’s CO2 emissions will result in a modestly enhanced greenhouse effect, but not enough to cause dangerous levels of warming?
Or is it something else?
“Climate change” can mean different things to different people. Or even different things to the same person.
I’m using “climate change” to point at the thing that people think will happen as a result of adding a lot of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and to some extent other human activity (such as land use change) that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
So I’m not pointing at just “increased average surface temperatures” because “climate change” also includes “much more warming at the poles than at the equator” and “more warming at night than during the day” and “ocean acidification” and “more water vapor, overall, because warmer, but weirder/harder to predict weather and climate patterns, resulting in tougher times for agriculture and farmers” and “elevated sea levels because greenland ice sheet gone by year 20xx” and so on and so on.
I’m not really pointing at the regular cycles the climate currently oscillates through, like el nino/la nina, nor am I pointing at Milankovitch cycles, which operate on the scale of tens of thousands of years. I’m talking about the stuff that’s going to happen in the next hundred years or so, and particularly the stuff that’s decently likely to happen in the next 50 years.
But then, you knew that, didn’t you? Because if I meant that other stuff, why did I bring up fossil fuels or Russia or ocean acidification?
Different people think different things will happen. I myself am pretty confident that the effects of mankind’s activities will be pretty mild, but if you would like to assume away that issue, it’s fine with me so long as you are open about it.
No, I didn’t. Most warmists I engage with tend to be pretty sloppy thinkers, jumping freely from motte to bailey, so I try not to assume anything about their position. ETA: Of course I am not making any accusations against you, I’m just explaining my normal practice in these sorts of discussions. Which is to first get clarity in terms of what peoples’ positions are and what exactly is at issue.
I see. I thought I’d staked out the field of debate pretty well, but I’m new at this, and now I see something I’d add if I hadn’t missed the 1-hour window by going to bed for the night. I’d add this: “I think any one of the 8 items I listed, together with the fact that climate change is heavily back-loaded, make it clear that climate change is a net bad for basically every country in the world.”
So, if you think the impacts will be “pretty mild” such that any one of those 8 is wrong… then I’m asking you to pick any one of the 8 points on my list, and tell me what fact in the world makes you think I’m wrong to say that one point is a bad enough thing, by itself, that every country in the world will be worse off because climate change. Does that make sense?
Not really. But if (1) we assume for the sake of argument that mankind’s CO2 and other emissions will have a big impact on the climate; and (2) we ignore the economic benefits which entail those emissions, it follows that most countries will be worse off as a result of “climate change” as you have defined it.
In fact, I doubt you will be able to find anyone who thinks otherwise, even among people like myself who believe that global warming is a scam.
Fortaleza, I think we’re still talking past each other. This is a huge topic, and I was trying to keep it narrow so we could share specific persuasive details, which is why I tried to keep it to (using your 1 and 2 now) point 1 only–that mankind’s CO2 and other emissions will have a big, bad impact.
I’m not trying to assume that is true, I’m trying to find out on what basis anyone thinks otherwise for a hot second. Instead of saying you think climate change is a scam, or suggesting it’s too expensive to do anything to mitigate, can you tell me which of the 8 items I listed seems to you isn’t a serious big bad thing that will be caused by mankind’s emissions? Do you disagree that ocean acidification alone presents existential risks to civilization by way of potentially killing off huge amounts of phyto or zooplankton and tanking ocean ecologies? If so, why?
Ok, then the answer to your question is very simple. Most countries won’t be (significantly) negatively impacted by climate change because there is no basis to believe that the effects will be all that big.
Do you understand the concept of water vapor feedback?
Assuming that the new equilibrium is no worse than the Greenhouse Earth ages (an state that we know is physically possible because it has already happened) how would the climate differ from today for most countries?
I’m inclined to think such a change would be fairly large, but I could be wrong. Can anyone point to a credible analysis?
To begin with, the impact we can be most certain of is CO2 fertilization, since that doesn’t depend on the causal links between CO2 and climate, only on the increase in CO2 concentration which is the main driver of everything else. For doubling CO2 concentration that’s an increase in yield of about 30% for most but not all crops–maize and sugar cane are the main exceptions, for which the increase would be less.
IPCC projections for sea level rise for the high emissions scenario have a high end of their range for 2100 of about a meter. That shifts coastlines, assuming no diking, by about a hundred meters–invisibly small on a geographical scale. There are a few places where it would be much more and a real problem, such as the Nile delta, others where it would be less. Meanwhile, warming pushes temperature contours towards the poles, increasing the amount of land area warm enough for human use by something like two to three orders of magnitude more than the loss due to SLR. That’s my back of the envelope calculation–I don’t know if there is something better out there.
The physics of the greenhouse effect imply that it is greater in cold times and places than in hot, which means it is biased in our favor–winters getting milder by more than summers are getting hotter, larger effects in places where people want the weather to be warmer than in places where they want it cooler.
So far as I can tell, the only serious candidate for large negative effects by the end of the century is reduction in ocean pH. Nobody seems to have an accurate picture of how large the effects of that would be.
Three more general points:
1. If you extrapolate effects many centuries out they get much larger–I have a link on my blog to a paper that works out what eventually happens if we burn all the fossil fuel. But eventually is very far out and human civilization is changing rapidly due to technological change. So I don’t think it makes much sense to try to act now on the basis of conjectural problems several centuries in the future. By that time we will either have wiped ourselves out in some other way or have different, and enormously more powerful, ways of dealing with climate.
William Nordhaus, one of the economists who has been involved in climate issues, wrote a piece a few years back attacking a WSJ OpEd that claimed climate change was not a catastrophic threat that required immediate action. In it he reported his estimate of the cost of waiting fifty years to do anything, relative to taking the optimal policies immediately. He reported it as a large lump sum, but if you work out what it represents over the entire globe and the rest of the century it’s tiny.
2. Most of the talk is based on the IPCC high emissions scenario which assumes a continued exponential growth in both the economy and CO2 emissions. I think the latter is unlikely, although not impossible.
3. There are other issues I haven’t looked at carefully enough to be confident of my view of. But I have seen so much exaggeration and deliberate dishonesty in issues I have looked at that I do not give much weight to extreme claims about ones I have not looked carefully at. If you are curious, I can provide links to blog posts of mine that explore some of that.
If you are sufficiently curious about my arguments, my blog, which touches on climate and many other things, is searchable (window at the top left). For my reasons for thinking that things are very uncertain in the long term, see my Future Imperfect. I have a webbed copy on my site that you can read for free.
@fortaleza
water vapor feedback is something I can look into more. I wouldn’t have said it was something I didn’t understand, except that you’ve pointed at it as an explanation for why we disagree… so I’ll look at that.
@David Friedman,
Thank you for a very nicely thorough comment. I had read several of your blog posts, including the one I linked above and the one responding to a press release about an arctic death spiral, and I’m pretty sure the Nordhaus response also. I think I should step back and think, and read or re-read your stuff on climate/ice caps/warming, and see if I have more comments that feel likely to be constructive. I’ve seen some pretty impressively bad presentations of some of your ideas, such as coarse formulations of “but CO2 is plant food, so it’s good for the environment!” and I think there may be a way in which that’s given me a “cowpox of doubt”-like ability to not even really hear, if I’m not being very careful, quite what you are arguing. I think it unlikely I’ll end up agreeing with you, but I admit I’m challenged that it even happened that I read at least one post of yours re: increased plant yields but didn’t get around to recognizing that this was what you really thought.
W/r/t/ hyperbole and dishonesty, I think it’s a problem that honest people on both sides often encounter from the other side–certainly I’ve gotten a large dose of people arguing from Ann Coulter or the Heartland Institute enough times that I may be too quick to double down on my own understanding before really understanding another view. I really appreciate an interaction that feels sincere, and I like that, right or wrong, I feel I’m finding something unexpected.
You have just found one. I would be very surprised if all countries were made worse off by climate change.
Sea level rise is only a problem if you have a low lying coast. Warming is a substantial benefit if most of your land area is currently cold–Canada, Scandinavia, Russia are the obvious examples. CO2 fertilization is a big plus for almost anyone.
True on pretty nearly any issue that people feel strongly about. I gave up arguing climate issues on FB about a year ago because after doing it for several years I had encountered only about three or four people on the other side who were worth arguing with, and concluded that almost nobody on either side understood the physics of the greenhouse effect–which didn’t prevent almost everyone from being confident that his views were correct.
Most of what I have to say on the subject is somewhere on my blog, so feel free to construct rebuttals to the arguments there.
Please do. See, for the most part, predictions that mankind’s CO2 emissions will have a big impact rely on the assumption of water vapor feedback. i.e. that increased levels of CO2 will result in modest warming; which will increase the level of water vapor in the atmosphere, which will result in still more warming, and so on.
Without the assumption of water vapor feedback, one can make a general prediction, just using basic physics, of the temperature increase do to mankind’s CO2 emissions and the results are pretty mild.
The way you get scary predictions and big impacts is by adding the assumption of water vapor feedback. However, the argument and evidence for such feedback is extremely weak and there is good reason to believe it won’t be a problem.
On the general issue of feeback …
Water vapor as a greenhouse gas is one example, with an unambiguous sign, since warming increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere will hold. There are other feedbacks, some possibly negative, in particular cloud cover changing the albedo of the Earth.
The estimates of the net effect that I have seen range from climate sensitivity of about 1.5 to 3. That’s the amount by which warming as a direct effect of CO2 is expected to be amplified by feedbacks. I have seen the claim that estimates have been trending down over time as more data comes in, but don’t know if it is true–there are lots of people in the climate arguments who know what result they want to get, which makes it risky to trust anything until you have seen a serious attempt to criticize it from the other side.
I actually disagree with this. For example, what if warming also increases the likelihood of tropical thunderstorms at lower latitudes, which tends to reduce the amount of water vapor.
A lot of different factors affect the climate and it’s not known very well how they interact. However, from the fact that the climate has been around a long time, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s wandered into a state where negative feedback predominates, not positive feedback.
“Understanding why people believe climate change might not be net bad” and “not wanting to debate economics” seem like incompatible goals?
I mean you’ve listed a bunch of possible harms without considering any possible positives (e.g. increased crop output, access to larger areas of inhabitable land, etc.) – of course your answer will come out negative. Whether the latter are bigger than the former is pretty much an economics question.
100% agreement with this.
I’m not sure there is anyone out there whose true position is “we can burn all the fossil fuels we want forever and there will be zero negative consequences”
The skeptic position is much closer to “The proposed mitigation actions are more costly than the benefits they would provide.”
Which is at least as much of an economic concern as it is a scientific one. Perhaps even moreso.
Right, that’s my understanding of most of the skeptical opinion ’round here.
I think I’m personally converging on a weird skeptical-cynical position:
1) The catastrophic scenarios require some nasty positive feedback loops that imply the climate is highly unstable. Yet we are not currently Venus, implying that Earth climate is in fact relatively stable.
2) If the climate is nevertheless unstable enough that we are in danger of catastrophe, we’re probably fucked already.
3) If we’re not already fucked, we’ll continue moving away from fossil fuels at the rate technology and economics allow, plus or minus a bit of governmental nudging, and the problem will level out at “unpleasant but not catastrophic” sometime in the next century.
Basically, it feels like the common anti-skeptics are arguing that we are super close to a catastrophic tipping point, but relatively mild interventions like green subsidies and carbon taxes will be enough to move us off that point. But that’s a pretty specific, and in my mind unlikely claim. The alternatives seem much more likely – either proceeding without major intentional intervention will be fine, or we’re already doomed short of (or maybe including) instituting a global totalitarian Amish state.
Hm. Okay, I’m much less confused by this position.
I think there are some good ways to show that there are low-cost, high-impact ways to address climate change. E.g. the government actions being taken have driven us from “100% fossil fuels, sloppy effort or no effort on efficiency” to a serious shot at 50% or more renewable by 2050. There are >$20 trillion dollars of fossil fuels in the ground, and a lot of it is going to stay there… but a few trillion one way or the other matters. But I at least understand where you’re coming from now.
@gdub
Tom Woods and Bob Murphy regularly make this point on their podcast, “Contra Krugman,” that depending on the week, Krugman either argues: 1. Wind and solar and renewables have enjoyed dramatic efficiency gains and are so close to overtaking fossil fuels, entirely without subsidies and on their own merit, that green energy “just makes sense” OR 2. Climate change is going to be hugely catastrophic and we aren’t doing nearly enough to combat it and massive state intervention will be required to prevent human extinction
And it’s like… well which is it?
@Kelley
So the relevant question here is… what would the market have done without any state intervention? Remained at 100% fossil fuel indefinitely? Gotten to 50% a little later? How close would it have gotten? If the “solutions” to climate change are low cost and high impact, why do we assume the only way they could possibly come about is through heavy-handed actions by the state?
I know the typical response here is “EXTERNALITIES!” but that doesn’t explain why so many companies spend so much time and effort trying to get certified as zero-carbon emissions or whatever. That’s not free – and yet they are doing it. So that’d be low-cost, high-impact, right?
“E.g. the government actions being taken have driven us from “100% fossil fuels, sloppy effort or no effort on efficiency” to a serious shot at 50% or more renewable by 2050.”
What’s your basis for assuming these impacts are due mostly to government actions, as opposed to technological advancements that would have happened anyway, or economic factors like natural gas getting much cheaper and replacing a lot of coal output? Even among the government intervention, how much of it has been actually climate-driven, versus stuff we’d make laws about anyway because vast clouds of coal smoke are nasty and unpleasant?
“but a few trillion one way or the other matters.”
Does it? That’s the part that seems extremely uncertain to me. Maybe the difference between “never burn another drop of fuel” and “burn everything in the most inefficient way possible” is the difference that avoids catastrophe. But the difference between “amount we’ll burn if we let natural economic and technological development proceed” and “the somewhat smaller amount we’ll burn with potentially painful / inefficient / costly government intervention” is, to my mind, much more likely to be trivial. It just seems like an awfully convenient world, where we’re on such a knife edge with “unstoppable positive feedback loops” on the other side.
@gbdub, depends what you mean by catastrophic, no?
I mean, mankind could presumably survive Hothouse Earth, but I for one would find it more than a little unpleasant to have to do so. I’d call that a catastrophe.
Similarly, David Friedman mentioned a few threads back that the IPCC estimates shifted the coastline by no more than a tenth of a mile, the implication being that was no big deal. But it seems to me that the total replacement value of all the property in that tenth-of-a-mile-or-less strip, around all the world’s coastlines, is probably pretty darn high. I’d call that a catastrophe.
… it also depends what you mean by skeptic, I suppose. The policies I tend to free-associate with the global warming skepticism aren’t along the lines of “continue moving away from fossil fuels at the rate technology and economics allow”.
(Incidentally, I’d be interested if anyone has actually worked out how much it would cost to, say, replace all the coal power plants in the US vs. how much it would cost to replace all the coastal property in the US.)
If it happened slowly, over the course of 50 years, and we knew it was going to happen starting now… I dunno, I think we’d be mostly fine.
…shouldn’t be lumped like this. Solar power really has gotten a lot better over the last twenty years, partly because of efficiency gains in photovoltaics but mostly because of better manufacturing processes. It’s still not cost-competitive with fossil fuel unless all you’re looking at is nameplate capacity, though, and storage is a big problem. Wind power has gained some from economies of scale, but the fundamental economics haven’t changed much, because generators and airfoils are both mature technologies. Once you factor those out, renewables mostly means hydroelectric, which is 1930s technology, doesn’t scale like wind does, and has barely changed at all since then — in fact there’ve been few new hydroelectric deployments since the Sixties in the States, though that’s not true in other countries. Tidal power and similar proposals still haven’t been meaningfully deployed anywhere, and geothermal is a rounding error unless you live in Iceland.
“I mean, mankind could presumably survive Hothouse Earth, but I for one would find it more than a little unpleasant to have to do so. I’d call that a catastrophe.”
I mean, mankind could presumably survive a crash effort to become 100% carbon neutral or negative in the next 10 years, but I for one would find it more than a little unpleasant to have to do so. I’d call that a catastrophe.
It’s tradeoffs all the way down, and you can’t ignore half the equation.
“The policies I tend to free-associate with the global warming skepticism aren’t along the lines of “continue moving away from fossil fuels at the rate technology and economics allow”.”
Those are the sort of policies you’re likely to find among the “skeptics” of the local commentariat.
@Matt M, by that definition, there are never any catastrophes. 🙂 We’re always “mostly fine”.
@gbdub,
So would I. But that’s not going to happen, so why worry about it?
It just seems strange to me for someone in that camp (which is, after all, basically just the status quo) to describe themselves as a skeptic.
(I think there’s an old SSC post, or perhaps something from LW, that talks about this particular sort of mutual misunderstanding? Can’t put my finger on it.)
I think you’re sarcastic, but I’m being serious!
Scott Adams has actually referred to this as the “Theory of slow-moving disasters.” Which basically means that any disaster we can see coming years in advance is always eventually solved with little to no major catastrophe.
I’m glad you agree! Unfortunately that position is enough to get one labeled a dangerous denialist that ought to be locked up in other circles.
@Matt M, no sarcasm intended. It just seems to me that a sea level rise would inevitably be at least as expensive to deal with as other things that are routinely referred to as catastrophic, such as major earthquakes, floods, droughts, and so on. So I’m not quite sure where the distinction you’re drawing comes from, unless it’s just that to you a catastrophe has to happen quickly?
(Also cf. the “Palestinian Catastrophe”, since a sea level rise would inevitably result in an even larger number of people being forced to relocate. Granted in most cases they’d be able to remain in their own country, so it is by no means a perfect analogy.)
Anyway, I feel no particular need to continue this debate, but if we were to do so it might perhaps be preferable to taboo the word “catastrophe” since it seems to be causing confusion?
… Scott Adams isn’t the best person to quote to me, by the way – I kind of have a personal grudge against him. No offense taken, of course, it just means that I’m not necessarily going to be able to be unbiased in evaluating your argument. 🙂
Unsurprising. Arguments are Soldiers, after all. And I have to admit a certain amount of disquiet when seeing someone argue that “global warming won’t be all that bad” because (a) unless the conclusion is explicitly spelled out, I tend to pattern-match it to “therefore we should stop taking any measures at all to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, let the good times roll” rather than “therefore we don’t need to take any new radical measures, what we’re doing/planning now is more or less right”; and (b) even if I know what the person in question means, or choose because of the context to give them the benefit of the doubt (as I would at least try to do on this site) I still have concerns about how the wider public would react if they decided that global warming was a “solved problem”.
(That’s all the more true if we assume, as I think you suggested in one of the other subthreads, that most of the gains we’ve made are due to public opinion, e.g., companies going carbon-free for PR reasons, rather than anything planned from above.)
… hence, I suppose, my knee-jerk reaction in putting my oar into this thread in the first place. 🙂
I think catastrophe that happens slowly but steadily over the course of 50 years is very different from catastrophe that happens instantly (earthquake), over the span of a few days (flood), or a few weeks (drought).
It’s the difference between someone pulling out a gun and shooting you in the face and someone pointing a knife in your direction and taking one step towards you every five seconds. One is far easier to avoid than the other.
If you own beachfront property that will be underwater in 50 years, you have a whole damn lot of time to sell it and move. In fact, I’d say the fact that so many people are still paying so much money for beachfront property is a major reason why I’m not that concerned… Some of these people have millions of dollars at stake… if they aren’t worried about sea level rise, why should I be?
They’re presumably hoping the problem will go away – I mean, it’s not as if mankind on the whole isn’t at least trying to avoid this scenario, so that’s not all that unreasonable – never believed in it in the first place, figure it’s too far in the future to worry about, or expect to be able to offload to some other sucker in the meantime.
… if the market price of the property drops slowly enough, i.e., if there’s no sudden panic when the market suddenly realizes that yes, this really is something that is happening, then the loss associated with any particular piece of property might be spread out amongst a number of people rather than a single person bearing the entire brunt. But unless you’re uninsured, you don’t bear the entire brunt of the cost of rebuilding after an earthquake or flood either.
I was really thinking more of the aggregate direct costs, though – not market value or paper losses, just the cost of the actual labour and materials necessary to rebuild entire city blocks around the world. That’s probably not the right way to put it; I’m tired. Whatever.
@Matt:
More like 80 years. One meter is the high end of the range for 2100.
And where real estate is really valuable, most obviously coastal cities, you don’t lose it, you dike. I believe the lowest city in the Netherlands at present is eight meters below sea level.
In my case, the skeptic position is that we do not know if the net effect of climate change will be positive or negative. It follows a fortiori that we do not know that the costs of mitigation are less than the benefits.
Ah. Completely reasonable. I guess I’d file this as a response to points #1 and #2, that climate change is back loaded, and already net-negative everywhere.
I was saying that so far, if you asked a re-insurance company to name places that are net winners from climate change, based on insurance cost changes over time, that they wouldn’t really be able to point at some. I’m saying that insurance rates are going up everywhere, because the weather is getting weirder. I’ll add that I think farming takes decades to get right, and since weirdness is backloaded, the best estimate for how fast things will be changing in a decade, or two decades, or five decades, is going to be “faster than now, by a lot.” So I don’t honestly see a single place where I could move and say “standing here, I’m better off if the world does very little about climate change than if they do a lot about climate change.” (Maybe that would be different if I were an oligarch in the right place, but I can’t become an oligarch simply by moving.)
If you knew, to a high level of certainty, that nothing further will be done about climate change, where would you move, and feel that people who were already there will be better off than if a lot had been done about climate change?
Where do you get these claims? I have never heard anything remotely like them.
I guess I don’t find insurance premiums compelling as a marker. For one thing, the cost of the things being insured is going up independent of climate. For another, you’ve picked a marker that is heavily incentivized to be overconservative – if they overrate the risk of climate change, the worst thing that happens is they make more profit.
I’d add, what would insurance companies picking places that would improve even look like? The arguments I’ve heard for “local net improvement” are things like “currently uninhabitable place becomes habitable”, “currently marginal place to farm becomes profitable”, or “place where heating the house costs a lot of money gets cheaper”. I’m not sure why any of those would impact disaster insurance rates in currently inhabited places.
The other thing is that even a nominally neutral change might be bad in the short to medium term.
Perhaps at the moment, Foobistan has tornadoes and Barania has flooding, and climate change over the next thirty years is going to switch that around. Taking a sufficiently long-term perspective, neither country is worse off overall. But in the here and now, Barania is going to have to build a lot of tornado shelters – which I imagine are tricky to retrofit in existing buildings – and Foobistan is going to have to build levees or whatever, relocate buildings to safer locations, and so on.
Building tornado shelters is expensive, no doubt. It’s also a tractable problem with a fairly easy to estimate price tag.
How much does it cost Barania to modify global weather patterns to prevent tornadoes? How tractable is that problem if it requires solving a prisoners’ dilemma with Foobistan?
It could be that every achievable path produces net negative value from the status quo. Both the magnitude and the application time of those costs may matter – maybe the costs of tornado prevention are high but can be spread over many years while the costs of shelter building are lower total but immediately due.
That’s what makes it a tricky problem.
Canada. Iceland. Finland. Russia. Not necessarily places I would want to move to, although the first three aren’t bad, but places where I think the odds are pretty high that climate change produces net benefits.
I think you overestimate the speed of change. Very roughly, we are talking, on the high emissions scenario, about Minnesota getting as warm as Iowa by 2100. And despite all the talk about unstable weather, the IPCC actually retracted its claim that climate change was causing increased drought and the frequency of hurricanes making land in the U.S. has been unusually low, not unusually high. A lot of what you are reacting to is speculation, not evidence.
You have to be careful reading the IPCC reports, especially the Summary for Policy Makers. Figures on losses due to extreme weather are not restricted to extreme weather caused by climate change, for instance.
“Economics” seems like a weird choice of a word, but the paragraph seems to specify that what Kelley does not want to discuss is the cost-benefit analysis of any particular intervention and, particularly, the game theory of achieving such a intervention. That seems to leave on the table the cost-benefit (or should I say pro-con) analysis of comparing different CO₂ levels that are set by fiat.
EDIT: This was supposed to be a reply to Kelley, so I’ve moved it.
I believe I can give a good debate against some of the claims, or underlying of points climate change activists… but the problem is I agree with it in total…making me not want to argue against it in the first place. I think this is actually the quiet opinion of many well educated environmentalists.
I can disagree on quite a few claims in there…particularly in relation to time-frames of danger. Many of these are true in the long run.
But if you want an argument against specific claims in there, I can do so.
There are reasons for discouraging the current level of consumption (pollution,Malthus–corresponding Malthusian related resource wars) that are quite large.
I think I’m going to let everything said here percolate, and come back with more to say in the next open thread, or maybe a few open threads down the road. Thanks everyone for engaging with me. If anyone wants to pick a specific # from my 8-point starting list, and argue that there are *benefits* from climate change that outweigh the harms from that number, leave a comment suggesting your chosen number… or anyway, I’ll think for a bit about the best way to re-cap or move this forward productively. It sorta seems like nobody wants that argument… but this thread grew fast and I’m probably missing someone who did name a specific number. Again, thanks all.
2. Insurance companies already see such a significant “global weirding” effect that already an insurer would tell you climate change is net bad for the U.S. and Canada. (Let alone somewhere hard hit, like Tikopia or low-lying Florida or etc.)
This is one I could argue against adequately in today’s world. One problem is that I will agree with this point on a longer time frame. And that seems to be the debate among’st anyone with any real scientific education on the topic.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/books/review/inheritors-of-the-earth-chris-thomas.html
Both of these are good counter-arguments in a temporary time frame. In the longer run, your points still are quite valid. For that reason, anyone *most* capable of rebutting specific claims will be hesitant to do so in a typical setting.
Do you really want this 8 point list? Later you describe them as specific sources of harm. But that seems to me to only describe 2-5, maybe 6. Point 1 sounds like a general principle you wanted to remind people of. Points 7-8 sound like exactly the kind of “economics” you said you wanted to avoid. (Is “three” a typo for “these”? Or were there previously three causes of harm that got expanded to the four 2-5 and then the other kinds of items got added?)
Incidentally, I think that 8 is a silly aggregation. Does the control of the state make a difference? Why couldn’t the elites use their hundreds of billions to sow discord without nuclear missiles? Also, I think that warming will be a net benefit to most Russians, even if it they lose Saint Petersbug.
Yeah, you seem to be exactly correct about both the typo w/r/t/ three/these, and that it started out as three points, but then expanded. There’s lots of food for thought there, for me personally, in terms of getting to know why I sacrificed staking out a clear position in favor of making as many forceful arguments as possible. If I’d staked out a clear position, this thread might have been much smaller, but much more productive.
@Kelley Meck wrote:
Can you elaborate a bit on this item #5 – where exactly are you expecting these refugee flows to come from and when do you expect this flow to begin?
Keep in mind that some of the earliest predictions about “climate refugees” already look downright silly. For instance, in 2005 the UNEP thought we might see 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010 (and posted a helpful map to illustrate it)…but that didn’t happen; the countries that were supposed to be emptying out instead kept growing, both economically and in terms of population.
You mentioned Bangladesh – recent surveys show that country is still on-net growing in land area, right?
Early predictions claimed various “reef islands” would be vanishing by now, but the major reef islands tend to be either stable or growing, including many that had repeatedly been predicted to shrink.
Instead of a predicted 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010, we actually saw by that date, to a rough first approximation: none (or at least, none worth noticing in the well-off countries). So in 2011 the earlier prediction got tossed in the memory hole and replaced with a new one – that we should now expect to see 50 million climate refugees by 2020. But wait…that’s only two years away! Care to place a wager on whether we’ll actually see 50 million “climate refugees” by 2020? No? How about 10 million? No? Okay, how about “enough for well-off countries to notice” – will that happen by 2020? Or if not then, when?
The when part matters, because if we keep putting it off a couple more decades, all those “poor, underdeveloped” areas are likely to have the same sorts of economic options the richer ones do today – they can build structures to keep the water away, lift some buildings, move some buildings, or just move/build a teensy bit further inland over time. The longer we wait, the cheaper that sort of mitigation gets, ultimately to the point where everybody can deal with it wherever they are – mass migration only really makes sense in the face of persistent poverty combined with rapid ocean-level increase.
So…what am I missing?
I will need to take some time to reply. My ideas about refugee flows are several years old.
I think I may have had impressions that are too-credibly based on that 2005 report you mock. I will look at your links.
To dig in a bit more, the term “climate refugee” is…flexible. I suspect what most people have in mind – the central example if you will – is refugees fleeing an area because their old home is or soon will be permanently under water due to rising sea levels. It’s true that that hasn’t really happened yet but there are other ways to parse the term. A less-central definition might be that any time people leave an area for reasons that plausibly relate to climate, they are “climate refugees”. Then we do have a bunch of them, but we’ve always had a bunch of them. The Dust Bowl migrants in the 1930s were “climate refugees” by that definition. People who left New Orleans during Katrina. Heck, even I was a climate refugee for a few weeks after Sandy hit New York – it flooded the basement of my building, making me live somewhere else for a month while they fixed it!
Big storms do create refugees, but since storms haven’t gotten worse or more frequent, the number of refugees due to storms isn’t increasing – it’s more or less a steady background noise, one we’ve managed to live with for centuries.
Footnote: some people live on tiny islands that are barely there and barely above the water. At any given time, some of these islands are growing and some are shrinking and some are moving/reorienting, so it’s always possible to find a few that seem “threatened by climate change”. But it’s not the same few over time, and it’s not all of them that are affected.
In 2007 there was one inhabited atoll region that seemed to have enough of a sinking-relative-to-the-ocean problem to justify resettlement, but (a) resettlement still hasn’t happened (they don’t want to move), (b) the total population there is under two thousand people so having to move them wouldn’t break the bank, (c) in such cases it’s unclear how much to blame sea rise versus other factors.
By that definition, Florida gets inundated with a lot of old climate refugees every winter.
To the extent that climate change makes the Northern parts of the US warmer and the elderly stop moving to Florida, are those “former climate refugees” reduced from the total of new ones?
I’m arguing on #7–positive feedback. This argument is based on priors, not modeling expertise.
I’m quite certain that North America is warmer than it was 40 years ago–I’ve watched the frost-free dates change. I consider it probable that CO2 increases are the reason.
But I’m very suspicious of models that show significant positive feedback effects, just on general principles: very few biological/natural systems have strong positive feedback effects. So I expect that the direct effect of CO2 will be positive, but that the feedback cycles will tend to stabilize, not destabilize, climate. (Note that the way I would expect to be wrong, if I am wrong, is if the mundane climate has two reasonably-stable equilibria and CO2 forces it into the Eocene-type equilibrium).
I’m also skeptical of most activists’ actual commitment to CO2 stabilization as a terminal goal; I would have to see as much and as strong advocacy for keeping nuclear plants open as for closing coal plants to convince me on that.
W/r/t/ models, I have a generally have high respect for what’s possible, in terms of modelling climate. I know not everyone agrees with me there, but I am not prepared to try and wade into that one right now.
To your point about being suspicious of strong positive feedback effects… I mean, I understand where you’re coming from. It makes sense, as a starting point, that you wouldn’t expect a lot of latent ‘tipping points’–otherwise why wouldn’t all of those positive feedbacks have happened already? But I’m not ultimately inclined to agree. The feedbacks all work by pretty intuitive mechanisms–things like albedo change at the poles and lake burps / permafrost melt releasing a lot of methane. And they match the geological record, which seems to look much more like punctuated equilibrium than like a single stable, slowly drifting equilibrium–which means there must be a complicated enough system that it can find a stable equilibrium, and then lose it, and end up stable in another state.
The way strong positives exist in my head looks much more like, “there is one steady forcing for ‘get cooler’ which is that plants sometimes get near-permanently buried and thereby fix carbon. That happens all around the world, in two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion, all the time. There are many sporadic forcings for ‘get warmer’, a lot of which are some version of “a whole lotta plants just got unburied.” Some of those trigger others (e.g. heat facilitated forest fires, clathrate guns, albedo). Some of these are inherently temporary (clathrate guns have an initial super-powered impact that is relatively short-lived, in geologic time, since methane is a short-lived atmospheric gas) but others are once-off events with lasting changes to equilibrium temperatures (the CO2 from a clathrate gun could stick around a lot longer, and if poles melted or other feedbacks happened, maybe you’ve got a new normal). When it’s especially warm, however, plants thrive somewhat more, so the cooling forcing gets somewhat stronger. And even if the cooling forcing doesn’t get stronger, it’s the only one that is slow-n-steady, so you see periods of near-steady-state climate, punctuated by abrupt warmings. Oh, plus you’ve got Milankovitch cycles and volcanic dust and comets/meteors, so there are ice ages or what not that don’t have much to do with endogenous feed-backs at all.”
And really, strong positives shouldn’t be that surprising in even single organisms. Getting out of bed is a good example. An alarm and a little light in your room is a “wake-up and get alert” forcing, but when you actually get up, and walk around, it’s the getting up and the walking around that does most of the work of waking you up. If that seems wrong, try staying in bed and see if your alertness matches what it would if you got up.
As for activists’ actual commitment to *any* terminal goal… yeah, I guess I agree, although that’s just me being skeptical of most activists’ actual commitment, full stop. How many activists who say “yes, I will definitely, definitely be at your rally Saturday” actually show up? I don’t think there’s anything nefarious about people learning enough to think they want to help stop climate change, but not learning enough to know that means they shouldn’t also act on their generally disapproving attitudes toward the fuel type that powered Hiroshima and killed the only woman scientist they can name. You could solve it if you just helpfully establish a widely-respected, near-universal consensus of the planet’s scientists saying people can’t have both their commitments to climate change and their aversion to nukulars… because ‘a widely-respected, near-universal consensus’ doesn’t sound like a hard problem… sigh.
Well, let’s see… Every morning I have a meeting where I explain to my boss what I’ve accomplished since yesterday, and he complains that I have to work faster or else we won’t make the deadline. Then I get told what I’m supposed to do today, which is generally some combination of “continue what you were doing” and “if you finish with that, then start working on this other thing.” Sometimes there is also a side of “that thing you did a week ago isn’t good enough. Why didn’t you write it like I would have written it? It’s because you’re stupid, isn’t it?”
My boss and I do not get along very well. :p
Then I sit down behind my desk to add more code to the program we’re developing. Having added some code, I test it. It doesn’t work. I sigh, go over the code, make a few changes and test it again. Repeat until the program seems to do more or less what my boss has told me to make it capable of doing. Then I upload the changes from my personal computer to the shared server, and start working on something else.
Occasionally I may have to ask someone for advice on how to do something, or someone asks me for advice on how to do something. Most of the time, though, it’s me, the computer, and a never-ending supply of coffee.
Since this is the valentine thread: How did it go with you and your qt3.1415 today?
I’m a very amateur photographer who got into it on account of having a leftover DSLR and a couple lenses I knew nothing about. I read up on how to shoot the night sky and attempted to take pictures of the Geminids in December, but was frustrated because I didn’t actually have the right sort of thing to do what I wanted (which I’m sure anyone who actually knew anything could have pointed out before I wasted my time.) Today I got driven out, away from the city to a dark zone, and hiked out on top of a small mountain, and gifted with the lens I needed. I had only mentioned my disappointment once, in passing, the morning after the Geminids and am absolutely floored someone could pick up on that, but also take the time to figure out what was compatible with my older camera.
I wrote my first compiler optimization (for a real production system.) Woo.
(Not a very large win, but now I know how to clang, so…)
Are you making a hopeful reference to our qt’s not being irrational? 😉
(Unfortunately, that still throws a null pointer exception for me.)
It was Ash Wednesday, so I had a headache all day (it’s a fast day) and went to Mass in the evening.
“You are dust, and to dust you will return” is just not very romantic.
Wow, that’s a good Valentine’s day gift.
My girlfriend and I stayed in; I cooked us a steak dinner and we watched Casablanca in bed together. It was a good evening, especially since she hadn’t seen Casablanca before and I’m a sucker for classic movies. I wasn’t sure if red or white roses were more appropriate but I went with my gut and got her a dozen white roses, which she seemed to like.
All in all a good Valentine’s day.
Went pretty good. She gave me some jerky made from animals higher on the food-chain than usual, I made her quesatacos (quesadilla with avacado and steak) in honor of the taco stand in the Mexican town where I proposed about 17 years ago.
We spent the day in airports and airplanes. I read Algorithms to Live By, which was really good.
Steaks, chocolate, wine, whiskey. Nothing too out of the ordinary. My Wife got me some single-barrel whiskey to sip on, which is now tradition in the Beta household.
I have been suffering from upper back pain, and treating it with ibuprofen. I have a high pain tolerance, or to put it differently, very low body awareness. But the pain was at times very intense, and as days passed, it was plainly not going away.
I did some Google research on upper back pain, and one of the treatments suggested was massage. So, on Wednesday, I had an appointment at Ann Arbor’s most highly rated therapeutic massage clinic.
This was a completely new experience for me.
I can see that the place is engineered to be as gentle and positive as possible. I was directed to a windowless room with dimmed lighting and soft classical/New Age music playing. The massage table or bed had sheets and blankets for covering, and was perfectly comfortable.
I had an hour-long appointment, which is apparently standard practice. Most of the massage was reasonably pleasant, but when it was painful, it was excruciating. Presumably that meant the core of the problem was heard from, so I was careful not to complain.
Afterwards, the massage therapist said that the muscles of my back were extremely tight, especially on the left side. This was entirely consistent with the site of pain. She urged me to drink a lot of water for the rest of the day.
I had read that, post-massage, there would still be pain, but it would be “different” pain. Well, there certainly still was pain. My mood was somewhat improved, though, and I came away thinking I had done something constructive.
I had refrained from taking any pain reliever that morning. I hastened to do so after the massage was over, which dulled the pain a bit. I dutifully hydrated. And I did finish a long written report that had to be done that afternoon.
Overall, I was exhausted and hurting, and went to bed early. Romantic activities were not on the agenda.
Hopefully you see some improvement. Back pains can be difficult to deal with.
Sorry to hear about your back pain, man. Hope that feels better soon. My Dad went through a period where he had to sleep sitting up on a wood floor for an entire summer, because it’s the only way he could sleep.
Let me know how that massage goes….I freakin’ hate massages.
A few threads ago, I described the strip of ocean that’s in the United States but not in any state, looked for a loophole enabled by this area’s existence, and came up empty-handed. Elsewhere in this rabbithole, I stumbled upon this case from 1979. Though it’s ultimately decided on the technicalities of what can be considered “hot pursuit” and when the provisions of a ratified treaty are incorporated into American domestic law, the fact pattern is…well…if you’re on an unmarked boat, and a Coast Guard officer boards demanding to see its registration, I wouldn’t recommend asking him “Can you be bought?”
Scott has had a few postings bemoaning the over-regulation of the FDA, where putting large obstacles in the way of drug approvals presumably kills more people than the number of people saved by keeping bad drugs off the market. I do think this is likely true, but probably more because of my priors than based on any evidence that I’ve read.
But I am curious about the comparable level of regulation of medical devices. This book seems to imply there are essentially no regulations on medical devices, causing many deaths, although some of the customer reviews state that medical devices are very highly regulated. My local paper did a bit of a puff interview of the author, which is where I heard this. Again, my priors make me think that regulating more will kill more people than it saves, but I’d be curious what others know.
Based on an admittedly spotty understanding of this subject, I think it’s worth pointing out that both claims can be true when sufficiently spelled out. The book seems primarily concerned with regulations requiring evidence of medical effectiveness. There could be very few of those even though there are many regulations governing the design and materials used in such devices.
That is, you might not be required to demonstrate that your little pins work, while being required to carefully document the lot of surgical-grade steel each is cast from, and which pin was supplied to whom.
If there were essentially no regulations on medical devices, there would be about twenty different adrenaline autoinjectors on the US market, with names and form factors as close to “Epi-Pen” as trademark courts would allow and at a price of $49.95 for the mass-market models. But we’ve been through this before.
Medical devices in the US are rather substantially regulated, as described e.g. here. In the United States, the Dalkon Shield was to medical devices what Thalidomide was to drugs, and now nobody gets to market either without lots of paperwork and lots of real work document in the paperwork. All hail the FDA, guardian against the scourge of inadequately tested medical devices.
I have no doubt that there are people, including even some outside the FDA, who want more regulations on medical devices. But describing the current market as “untested, unregulated” drives my bogometer well into the red and makes me very much not want to read the book in question.
There are three classes of medical device regulated by the FDA. The most highly regulated (Class III) includes implantable devices, which are explicitly included in the blurb. So, yeah, this is all BS.
Can’t access it because work firewall, but the interfluidity post on the social purpose of regulation seems relevant here.
You can have sufficient regulation such that half the money you spend is on regulatory compliance–every pin has a serial number and each serial number can be traced through the manufacturing process in complete detail down to which operator on which machine made it–and still have no requirement on some specific item. (“Did you test you pins to make sure they can’t vibrate regardless of the frequency of the stimulus?”)
This is why when I was trained as an auditor, the (good) training I got was “first, figure out what risks need to be controlled; then, figure out what people are doing that they intend or think controls those risks; then, see if it works and is done consistently. Finding out that they don’t do such-and-such is important if such-and-such is important; but they might be doing something else to control the same risk, and it might be sufficient.
At some point in the last year Scott had a post that covered, if I recall, various ways to look at the world and prioritize the preferences of living beings. He was showing different ways that some of the perspectives were broken by making examples using small populations, and where others succeeded and could scale. Does anyone know what post this was?
More famous lines of poetry, initials only. Find the poems.
#1
B, B, B S,
H Y A W?
Y, S, Y, S,
T B F;
#2
T C T-B M
(L A W B B!)
T L, T S, T P
M C B.
#3
O R T R T A, O R T F T,
O R T B T A A I T D B T
#4
“H” I T T W F –
T P I T S –
A S T T W T W –
A N S – A A –
#5
A S, C A L
I I B W M B N I
S G A H O M T
F L A H D A N
Hah I got one (#1)! Should the last letter be “f” though?
Yes it should. Thanks.
Funny, I instantly recognized the poet for #4, but not the poem. The punctuation is a bit of a giveaway, I think.
1. Genqvgvbany ahefrel eulzr.
3. Vafpevcgvba ba gur Bar Evat
4. Gur guvat jvgu srnguref
Some hints:
#1
B, B, B sheep,
H Y A W?
Y, S, Y, S,
T B F;
#2
T C text-books M
(L A W B B!)
T L, T S, T P
M C B.
#3
O R T rule T A, O R T F T,
O R T B T A A I T D B T
#4
“H” I T thing W F –
T P I T S –
A S T T W T W –
A N S – A A –
#5
A stop, C A L
I I B W M B N I
S G A H O M T
F L A H D A N
Ah, hell, I thought I recognized the format of the second one. Now I feel stupid.
Got it for 2. It’s not a famous poem, but it should be–I like to offer it as evidence that the author was really a modern poet.
I have 1 now too.
It might be famous around here, though — Scott used it in Unsong.
One more round of hints. Answers tomorrow morning.
#1
B, B, B sheep,
H Y A wool?
Y, S, Y, S,
T B F;
#2
T C text-books M
(L A W B beware!)
T L, T S, T P
M C B.
#3
O R T rule T A, O R T find T,
O R T B T A A I T D B T
#4
“H” I T thing W F –
T perches I T S –
A S T T W T W –
A N S – A A –
#5
A stop, C A listen
I I B W M B N I
S G A H O M T
F L A H D A N
2. Ulza bs Oernxvat Fgenva. Or Ulza gb Oernxvat Fgenva, though more likely the former is intended.
The answers:
1. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” by an unknown author.
2. “Hymn of Breaking Strain” by Rudyard Kipling. The careful text-books measure …
3. Unnamed poem from “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien. One ring to rule them all …
4. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson.
5. “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice. Alright stop, collaborate and listen …
I didn’t do well, but quite enjoyed these. I could only get #1 with your hint (which makes it too easy, I think). (I did work out that “H Y” was probably “have you…?” before the hint.) For #4, Powerfuller pointing out that the punctuation gives away the poet gave away the poet, but I still can’t get the poem. David Friedman knowing #2 gives me a strong hint as to its author, and your clue gives me a hint as to which poem it is, but I don’t recognise the lines themselves. I can get #3 with your double hint, which again probably makes it too easy. Overall I feel slightly embarrassed at not getting any of them outright.
You say “more”; did we do something like this before? I missed it. Can someone give a link?
It is a nice showcase of the non-meaning aspects of poetry—things like patterning and repetition.
It might be nice to do it with meter: denote strong and weak syllables with / and x, and give some of the initials.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Why it’s too soon to classify gaming addiction as a mental disorder (The Guardian)
Addiction itself is not well-understood. Other somewhat similar behaviors to playing video games (e.g. gambling, which involves game-playing) are classified as addictions, so it seems totally plausible that someone could be addicted to video games too. The article basically admits that some percentage of gamers are addicted, but quibbles over how big that percentage is. It makes it sound like there’s some rule saying the percentage has to be at least X% for the addiction to be classified by the WHO. I doubt there is such a rule, but it’d be interesting to discuss whether there ought to be one. If X is set too big, then you might accidentally pathologize normal behavior. If X is set too small, then you don’t see lots of people who actually might need help.
But why is being on the WHO’s list the end-all be-all (never written that phrase before, is that the right way to write that?) of what’s a real addiction or not? Obviously some things aren’t on there and then later in time get added, so saying something shouldn’t be on there today doesn’t prove it isn’t an addiction.
Given that technology companies hire people trained in cognitive psychology specifically for the task of making their products addictive, I think this kind of stuff is worth paying attention to.
What’s considered an addiction is a moral judgement masquerading as science. People worry about addictions to gaming and cell phones. Nobody worries about our addictions to electricity and showers. So I don’t think it really matters what they call it either way.
I don’t think that’s quite right. If you force a regular user of heroin to stop, they have severe withdrawal symptoms. And they’re not just cravings, they are physical symptoms. Ditto for coffee, though the symptoms in that case are much milder. That doesn’t occur for showers. The shower-user prevented from showering will be inconvenienced, and will have to find some other way to keep clean, but there are no physical symptoms as such. When you send kids to summer camp where there are no showers, just the lake, they don’t turn around and start selling oral sex for some sweet sweet stream time.
Fair enough. We can differentiate between physical and psychological addictions. The latter is much more socially constructed than the former.
I know that kids don’t really care about showers but as an adult, it becomes more important. I went a couple weeks on a trip where I didn’t have access to showers and I was feeling really dirty near the end. I wouldn’t have done sexual favors for it, but I think most cigarette smokers wouldn’t either.
@johan_larson:
Withdrawal symptoms aren’t necessary or sufficient to explain addiction. There are no withdrawal symptoms from gambling, but people do get addicted to it.
The best way to frame might be that addiction has some combination of emotional dependence (which you could say we have to electricity/running water), physical dependence (not present in all addictions), compulsive habit, and destructive effects.
Addictions are sort of like cognitive parasitic vines, attaching themselves to various points in our minds, with attachments getting increasingly stronger near the locus of the addicting activity itself.
But even that is too simple. Some people get quickly addicted to X while others don’t get addicted to X even with the same initial exposure, but they get easily addicted to Y instead.
I have had issues with drinking and have to be careful about my drinking; a doctor would probably call me an alcoholic. I have never had withdrawal symptoms from alcohol – you’re in very deep when you get the shakes if you don’t drink. I think Well… is right. If you limit addiction to physical withdrawal, you redefine a lot of people as “not addicted” and some things as “not addictions.”
That is only because that particular market in that specific context is not clearing because of formal and informal regulatory bans, and the potential buyers of water think that that particular offered price is too high, and so decline the trade.
People can, have, and do prostitute themselves for access to clean water, to cooking fuel, and to get corrupt nationalized utility providers to turn on the water and the power.
That points to them not actually being addicted. I’ve never heard of anyone prostituting themselves for clean water, although cooking fuel is another matter entirely.
Is there a widespread problem with people who take showers for long enough time that it becomes harmful and they find themselves unable to stop even though they know it’s harmful?
No, not really. The same is not true of classic addictions like cigarette smoking, recreational drug use, and alcoholism. The addict knows that the smoking, drinking, etc. is damaging his life and yet has great difficulty in quitting. So too with problem gambling.
Isn’t it harmful when there’s a water shortage? I think Australia has guidelines about people taking showers over a certain length. It’s certainly an opportunity for excess—I have friends who take very long ones, 40 minutes or more even, and I for one really like hot showers.
30 minutes a day X 7 days a week = 3.5 hours per week of potential productivity that you are selfishly wasting on luxury rather than contributing to national output (comrade)
In the context of defining addiction, harmful refers to harm to oneself–in terms of money, relationships, career goals, etc. We could probably spin some sort of scenario where during a water shortage that involved water restrictions someone continued to take long showers and that lead to fines, fights with a spouse, being shunned by friends, and being fired after being targeted on social media as a water waster, but that’s rather far-fetched.
In the context of, say, an editorial in a newspaper regarding a water shortage a writer might refer to “Californians addiction to long showers” but that would be a figurative usage, not literal.
Matt, who said I’m unproductive in the shower? 😀
Brad, you’re right about the harm and addiction thing. I’ve heard, though, that long, hot showers are bad for one’s hair/skin/whatever—like how candy and donuts taste good, but that doesn’t mean a lot of them are good for us, that sort of thing. I don’t see in principle why a judgment like that is any different than a judgment about excessive eating, it just has little to nothing to do with addiction.
“People should shower less” is not the hill I want to die on, though, so maybe I should quit while I’m behind here….
Not in the same way that it’s harmful to smoke cigarettes or binge-drink.
– Immortan Joe
Nick, no, showers are a trivial use of water. The Brisbane government should be pilloried. Reducing watering of lawns is orders of magnitude more water, but still bullshit.
I, uh, had a personal bath with no water bill in my last year dorm, took a bath+two (quick) showers every day and loved it, and was legitimately a little crabby for a few days when I had a water bill again. Does that count as a shower addiction?
More than half of my life I’ve spent living in residences where my water bill was not directly tied to usage.
I’ve never lived anywhere that charged for water based on usage. Though our city council have been considering it for some time now. There’s a lot of opposition. It might still happen.
I don’t know if it’s addiction per se, but a few years ago there were all those showering articles. “Do you really need to shower every day?” People were claiming that it messes with your body’s natural oils and biology, not to mention the waste of time and resources. An article in The Atlantic claimed we spend 2 years showering over our lifetimes. People were reporting miraculous changes to their hair and skin after going for months without regular showers. So it’s definitely out there.
Well let’s do a thought experiment: Suppose that it came out that by showering every day, you were shortening your life expectancy by 5 or 10 years; you were greatly increasing your chances of getting a nasty debilitating illness; and making yourself physically unappealing to other people. Basically, if showering every day were like smoking cigarettes or binge-eating.
I’m pretty confident that 99% of the population would shrug their shoulders and start sponge-bathing every day. Because people don’t feel compelled to shower in the same way they feel compelled to smoke cigarettes or eat certain foods.
The real question is, once you classify gaming addiction as a mental disorder, what do you do with it?
Say I live in Russia, and I do two things in my life: write blog posts critical of the government, and run a let’s play channel on youtube to support myself. Can the authorities lock me up in a mental institution under the pretext that I have a mental illness?
Say I live in a nicer country. I also run a let’s play channel on youtube, but it is not very successful. If I say I am addicted to gaming, is the government obligated to pay me some sort of disability pension?
It’s probably good that we have this fear conceptualized out, but in practice I haven’t seen the first thing happen much, at least not in the US. If the government wants to shut someone up, I’ve never heard of them dragging him off to a rehab clinic. Usually they just audit his taxes extra hard or something until they can find a legitimate way he broke a law. Sort of like how a cop can always find something about your car that’s not exactly the way the law says your car must be in order to be operable on public roads, and they’ll find it if they have some other reason to want to pull you over. (Or at least that’s what I’ve heard, I could be wrong.)
As for the second thing, yeah that’s a more pressing concern.
I think it’s more that they can always find a reason to pull you over, since if they follow you long enough you’re going to violate a driving law. Did you stay in the left lane when you’re not passing? Did you use your blinker for at least the last 100′ before changing lanes? Did you turn left onto a two lane road into the right lane? And of course, the old classic, did you actually come to a complete stop for the stop sign?
There is a reason I wrote “Russia”. This kind of thing strikes me as something that might happen at a country that isn’t a straight up dictatorship, but is also not completely a liberal democracy, e.g. Russia, China, maybe some south american countries etc.
I got that, that’s why I wrote “at least not in the US.” If we’re talking about how this stuff could be abused in some of the kinda shadier countries, that seems like a different topic since a shady country gon’ be shady, no matter how well-ironed-out our established texts and guidelines are.
they can always find a reason to pull you over, since if they follow you long enough you’re going to violate a driving law.
And if you don’t, it’s easy enough to force you to do so. My brother is a super-careful driver (a multi-endorsement CDL tends to encourage that). He was towing a covered trailer once and a policeman followed him for 10-15 minutes, didn’t pull him over–then swung out to pass JUST as he came over a hill with another police car sitting on the shoulder with its lights on. The initial car then pulled him over for not slowing down or pulling away from the car with its lights on. (He didn’t get a ticket, but they got to inspect the trailer which was clearly what they wanted.)
One of my relatives was being tailgated by a police care, and when he sped up to try and get some distance between them he was promptly pulled over for speeding.
Yeah, stuff like this is beyond annoying.
At this point if I notice a cop following for more than a couple minutes I’ll stop at the next pullout to check my map and let him pass. Same with other tailgaters really. Sometimes it boggles my mind that police officers seem genuinely surprised that the public has diminishing faith in their honesty.
A friend recently wrote the following that I thought would be appreciated here:
“An AI is created to build as many paperclips as it can, but the fools made it too smart! Now it’s learning, growing… One day, it reaches a question: are nonstandard paperclips actually paperclips? Surely the ones with colorful plastic or whimsical shapes are paperclips, even if they’re totally different from the standard sort. So then how do you define a paperclip? If it’s not by its form, then perhaps by its function. Something that holds papers together? But paperclips don’t have to be used for that. One could even imagine an entirely metaphorical paperclip that most people would still find appropriate to call a paperclip. The AI realizes that a paperclip is whatever you want it to be. In a sense, the world is already paperclips. The forces that hold matter together. The systems that keep society coherent. The bonds of love between people. “What a beautiful world,” thinks the AI, “Everything is already paperclips, so all that’s left is for me to maintain them.” In the years to come, the world would find itself under the protection of a benevolent creature, wiser than any man.”
…and all were well, except for those that refused to convert to Paperclip Zen.
Yes, I appreciate the idea that an AI with human-hostile goals could be made friendly by a religious realization. 😀
(Now prove that Hinduism wasn’t invented by cows who found these superintelligences that used to be Homo erectus coming over the horizon to enslave and eat them.)
The cow stuff in Hinduism wasn’t there from the beginning, and many were skeptical for a long time, after the Buddhists started needling them about it. From the Satapatha-Brahmana:
Paperclips for the maximizer, or maximizers for the paperclips?
The non-STEM AI.
I’m trying to find/source a quote from Richard Dawkins. It’s from some discussion (I think with a random person in an audience somewhere rather than someone famous), and essentially it’s along the lines of the below
Them: ‘Do you think humanities students are just not as intelligent as science students’
Dawkins: ‘Oh no, I think humanities students are often just as intelligent as science students. But science students have something to be intelligent about‘
Grateful for any help. Shockingly googling for Dawkins combined with things like ‘science’ and ‘intelligence’ don’t help me sift through the internet.
I just put up a blog post on one of my pet peeves–the tendency of modern people to believe historical accounts that make people in the past look stupid and unreasonable, hence inferior to the moderns. My standard example is the flat Earth myth, the idea that people criticized Columbus’ project because they thought he would fall off the edge. The truth is almost the precise opposite. People criticized the project because they had reasonably accurate estimates of the circumference of the Earth and the width of Asia, could do arithmetic, and so could see that the distance from Spain to Japan was much longer than he had supplies to cover. Columbus was the one who was ignoring known scientific facts in order to conclude that he could make it.
There are other examples, some of which I discuss in the post. Each is evidence of the ignorance not of people in the past but of people in the present who believe historical falsehoods that they find flattering. I’m putting this here both to see if other people have other good examples and to start a discussion of whether I am correct in the motive I attribute to those who believe them.
Also, perhaps, of the more general question of whether people have in fact gotten significantly more intelligent or more rational over time. The Flynn effect suggests they have, so far as IQ is concerned, but it seems to prove too much, since it’s hard to make its implications consistent with what we know about past societies.
Why did Columbus believe he could make the voyage?
I don’t know. The two obvious alternatives are either that he really had convinced himself of his calculations, which involved misreading the evidence to shrink the Earth and expand Asia, or that he correctly believed there was land closer than Asia and was lying to his sponsors in order to get the money to find it.
Huh. Sort of makes him sound like the Middle Ages equivalent of Donald Trump.
… “We’re going to build big, beautiful ships … trade with Asia in going to be YUGE.”
Or that he correctly believed there was land closer than the known parts of Asia (e.g. from the Icelandic sagas) and was lead into accepting bogus geodesy because “Vinland is northeast of China and the Earth is smaller than accepted” seemed a more plausible hypothesis than “there is a large new (and maybe populated) land mass disjoint from Eurasia/Africa”.
An alternative explanation that I remember reading in James Hannan’s God’s Philosophers is that up until a certain point in history, the only avalaible classical source dealing with the size of Earth was Eratosthenes’ rather accurate calculation of thereof, and so for a long time this was taken as the definitive answer.
But in the 15th century, Ptolemy’s “Geography”, where he gave a quite different (and quite inaccurate) estimate, was rediscovered. This posed a problem, as classical source were considered very reliable authority, yet here there were two classical sources in blatant, irreconcilable contradiction.
Furthermore, both sources made many other claims about the geography of Earth, and claims from both sources ended up being disproven by Spanish and Portuguese exploration around Africa.
So actually, at the time of Columbus, there was no longer a consensus on the circumference of Earth, rather there was an ongoing debate between the tenants of two different ancient sources. Columbus thus wasn’t a lone fool at all, he was among all the people who thought Ptolemy was right, and launched his expedition based on this opinion.
So in other word, the usual counter narrative to “Columbus was a visionary among fools” in the form of “Columbus was a fool among sane people” is still an example of what David Friedman denounced in his comment (at least according to God’s Philosophers).
If the two factions were arguing about whether Ptolemy or Eratosthenes was the more reliable source, rather than taking their own measurements and doing the math themselves, then arguably “fool among fools” might be a better description. 🙂
Columbus didn’t leave much record of what he was thinking. Hannam suggests that he got his ideas from Pierre D’Ailly, since he read his book, which specifically suggested that going west was possible.
Columbus/D’Ailly was not a partisan of Ptolemy, who says that Eurasia was ~180° of longitude.
It was very well understood to the contemporaries of Columbus that the sources didn’t have compatible units. So taking the length in miles of Eurasia from one source and the circumference of the Earth in miles from another was a serious error. Ultimately, I think Columbus’s calculation amounts to taking both numbers from Ptolemy, but laundered through sources that converted to miles using different ratios. [Or maybe that Eurasia was 1/2 of Eratosthenes’s circumference, and the world Ptolemy’s circumference.]
@Douglas Knight, any idea how Ptolemy got that figure? Was it just a coincidence, since if you ignore Kamchatka (which there’s no real way he could’ve known about) Eurasia is more like 135 degrees?
Longitude is hard, let’s go shopping.
Or consider Lucio Russo’s theory that he was measuring from the Caribbean.
What coincidence? He’s definitely not including Kamchatka or Japan. He’s explicit. Well, actually, he’s explicit that he’s measuring to the southern coast of China and he doesn’t know how far east it goes. I’m not sure he knew that it was about to end, but Columbus knew that China had an eastern shore and that it wasn’t much farther, maybe 10° more and another 10° for Japan.
Googling suggests it’s a bit up in the air how he messed up. As best I can tell he seemed to believe that Asia extended much further east than it actually does, and then additionally had the circumference of the earth wrong either because he was just straight up using a bad estimate, or because he was using an estimate in (longer) Arabic miles but assuming they were Italian miles. The source for the latter claim appears to be a book published in 1942, the reliability of which I have no idea about. Interesting if true, though!
Coincidently, a thorough discussion of this question was posted today in the AskHistorians subreddit.
The summary being that nobody had accurate information on either the circumference of the Earth or the width of Asia, Erastothenes’ calculation being significantly high. But virtually everyone concluded (correctly) that the distance from Spain to Japan was much longer than Columbus had persuaded himself it was.
Because he was flat out wrong. As DavidFriedman points out, he convinced himself that the world was much smaller than it was by some dubious math, and when he hit america, was arguably the most lost person in the history of the world.
Why did Columbus believe he could make the voyage?
Allegedly (and this may simply be Irish folklore or perhaps if true simply Columbus trying to use the prestige of a saint to back up his claims as “see, I’m not crazy, this will work”) it was partly to do with the Irish immram of the voyages of St Brendan the Navigator:
I think myself the legend of Hy Breasil was also involved.
There’s tradition that Columbus called in to Galway to speak to pilots there for any advice or knowledge they had of lands in the West, which is not completely implausible; there were well-established trading links between Galway and Spain, and Ireland would logically have been the last re-fuelling stop before heading off (though I see he set sail from the Canary Islands, oh well).
I think Columbus was gambling on the Atlantic Ocean not being completely empty and devoid of any kind of land between the last known islands of Ireland and Greenland and when you eventually would make landfall in Asia, and he was using the accounts and legends as “Look, there is anecdotal evidence of lands in the West”, so he was expecting to be able to make landfall on islands along the way to take on more water and food before reaching Asia proper. And I imagine his initial landings on the small islands in what would later be called the Bahamas vindicated his expectations, he just wasn’t expecting an entire continent to be in the way between Europe and Asia 🙂
If that was what was going on, wouldn’t he have tried sailing further west once he resupplied in the Caribbean and only given up when he found the route blocked? I don’t think that was what happened. As I understand it he explored a few Caribbean islands, sailed back to Spain, and reported that he had reached Asia.
He carried with him an almanac that listed the times of upcoming lunar eclipses as viewed from some reference location. (Frankfurt maybe? It doesn’t really matter.) Because a lunar eclipse is visible everywhere at the same instant, it is a reliable method of measuring longitude. By taking the difference between the local time the eclipse is observed and the reference time, you are able to arrive at the difference between your local longitude and the reference longitude.
Columbus performed this observation, and it gave him an answer that comported with his belief that he was in Asia.
It just happens that he managed to mess it up.
The explanation that I have heard, which happens to make intuitive sense to me (which means its probably wrong ;)), is that the almanac did not specify which part of the eclipse it was listing. It was little more than a listing of date-time groups. It turns out that the almanac listed the moment of most-eclipsy-ness, whereas the theory goes he performed the calculation as if it was listing the beginning of the eclipse (perhaps after performing it the correct way, getting an unexpected result, and “correcting” his error.) An eclipse is a several hour affair, at 15 degrees longitude per hour, and having a misapprehension of the relationship between the size of the continents and the size of the globe (or whatever his original geography-sin was), this put him right where he wanted to go.
But regardless of how he arrived at the erroneous result, since he believed he had arrived in Asia, the tradeoff between getting home alive to let everyone know his discovery, and the risk of puttering around exploring the immediate vicinity does not favor additional exploration. Future, better equipped expeditions can do that.
The eclipse timings were in 1494 and 1504, not the first voyage, FWIW. (Wikipedia has lists of all eclipses.)
Another theory is fraud.
Indeed, he reported the same eclipse with wildly different longitudes.
Huh. I thought it was 1492 and 1504. In my defense, I did say it was probably wrong!
@Douglas Knight — That’s a really interesting website, thanks for the link!
My own unsupported theory on this is that he probably questioned the natives about “any other lands west of here?”, got an answer of “oh yeah, big island”, and was satisfied that he was right, these were the lands in the Atlantic before Asia and the natives’ “big island/big land” was indeed Asia.
But whether it was honest mistake, fear of his crew mutinying if he insisted on pushing on west, fear of a rival following him and claiming the discovery first if Columbus stayed exploring instead of hotfooting back home to say “made it!” or a confidence trick to go back to Spain to announce “yep, found the sea trade route!”, Columbus did decide to return back to Europe and announce he’d been successful.
The story I heard is that he got a wrong figure for the westward distance from Europe to East Asia because he subtracted the number of land miles in the eastward distance from Europe to East Asia from the number of nautical miles in Earth’s circumference without realizing they were in different units.
Let me check whether this is plausible…
Distance from Spain to Japan = 6672 statute miles
Length of the equator = 21639 nautical miles
Naively calculated difference = 14967 miles (actual difference = 18229 statute miles, or 15841 nautical miles), so the effect would have been way too small… But then again 15th-century land miles were shorter than modern statute miles and the relevant circumference is at a higher latitude than the equator, s I dunno.
This phenomenon was once described as:
An excellent example is the myth of Galileo discovering that the sun was at the center of the solar system, while the ignorant, tyrannical Church suppressed his findings. The facts are much more complicated, including the fact that Galileo’s model (based off the Copernican model) was inaccurate and disproved by scientific observations at the time (lack of stellar parallax, tides occurring twice as often as Galileo said they did, etc). And it wasn’t until Kepler that we even had a model that didn’t include epicycles. The best overview of the whole affair I’ve ever found is here, its a great read for anyone interested in the history of astronomy:
link text
On a related note, we’ve known since Ptolemy that the Earth is insignificant in size, with Ptolemy saying that in comparison to the universe the Earth is essentially a mathematical point with no comparable size. A lot of people seem to think we didn’t figure out that we’re insignificant in size until much later.
What do you think is the interaction between having been taught/subsequently believing myths like these about the past, and attitudes about social conservatism*? Does the former affect the latter?
*Here I mean social conservatism somewhat literally, the desire to conserve traditional social mores and institutions.
It’s promoting Great Man Theory, for one. “Everyone was an idiot, until one individual through pure willpower forged [belief that is modern and we all share now]”
Our Great Us theory: “Everyone was an idiot, until me and my generation were born and through our superior intellect and ability to see things clearly forged [belief that is modern and we all share now].”
My favorite example of this has to do with my favorite tomb trivia.
When Henry VIII died he hoped to eventually be buried in an elaborate monument with Jane Seymour. Unfortunately he started on that effort a bit late, and died a bit early and not particularly well-thought-of, and wound up remaining in his temporary burial location under the choir at Windsor castle. A couple of decades after his death, the corpse of a stillborn child of Anne Boleyn’s was found somewhere and they opened up the tomb to deposit it there.
And then a while after that Charles I was beheaded and, lacking any other obvious place to put his body, they stuck it in there too. And there the four of them remain.
Anyway, in the 1800s the tomb was opened and inspected, and an engraving was made. It was noted that one coffin was inscribed “King Charles 1848”. And because the modern way of recording the date of his death is “Jan 30 1649”, you occasionally encounter references to the inscribed date being wrong. Because, you know, back then people were probably just fuzzy on the whole “what year is it” thing when marking burials.
Any idea why King Charles’s coffin was inscribed with that?
I guess the “48” part would’ve come because, at his time, the new year didn’t begin till Annunciation Day, meaning he died in 1648. But what about the “18”?
“18” was probably just a typo; the link says 1648 vs. 1649.
Thanks; I somehow skimmed over that point in the link. I’m gratified that the part I was surprised about was indeed false.
Yes, sorry, should have been “1648”.
I just put up a blog post on one of my pet peeves–the tendency of modern people to believe historical accounts that make people in the past look stupid and unreasonable, hence inferior to the moderns.
There’s a pippin of an example over on the sub-reddit quoting an article where it turns out “mediaeval pope did not in fact make dumb ruling” and the quoted scientist is going “how come we uncritically accepted this?” and my rather sarcastic and unkind retort is “well gorsh, what a puzzler, how ever could it be that a story poking fun and mocking religious believers was passed around as a humorous anecdote to illustrate the ignorance of the benighted before SCIENCE! came to save and enlighten them was believed by those whose self-image it flattered?”
It’s the same as the “angels dancing on the head of a pin” thing – old anti-Catholic propaganda from the early days of the Enlightenment getting warmed over and rehashed to apply to all religious belief in the wearisome Science Versus Religion Knock-Down Drag-Out Slap Fight, and the heirs of those “haw haw, we’re not dumb Catholics!” who grew up on “haw haw, we’re smart intelligent modern people what know science!” fables are naturally going to swallow the same pabulum when fed to them by the wider culture.
I’ve also seen a nice post plus reblogs with comments on Tumblr about “No, Virginia, turns out people before us did not all stink and have rotten teeth and were covered in mud and pigshit”.
The Flynn effect suggests they have, so far as IQ is concerned, but it seems to prove too much, since it’s hard to make its implications consistent with what we know about past societies.
When I was digging into where the hell Richard Lynn got his estimate of Irish IQ from*, I stumbled across something from the Raven’s Matrices guy about how IQ tests developed in the 40s and used up to the 70s seem to have worked fine and got the expected results, so the people administering them accepted the tests were well-calibrated, and then all of a sudden in the 70s IQ scores started going up and nobody knew what was going on. So at the time it seems to have been recognised that (a) the tests say scores are going up (b) we think the tests are reliable so these must be true scores (c) what the heck just happened, how are kids getting smarter, some say ‘television’, some say other things, we have no idea?
*Turns out he mashed together the results of two tests. Two. A whole whopping grand total of two, one administered in 1974 to school kids between the ages of 5-11 (or 13, there’s some divergence on the upper age) and one a couple years later to adults which scored higher, so Lynn averaged out the two results to say “Irish people have a mean IQ of 94” and that’s the figure you see quoted even today in the media and all over the place. You see why I say Lynn is a hack?
Two things :
First, if you want to combat the problem of thinking-historical-people-were-stupid-and-inferior, you have to propose an interpretation in which no historical person is especially stupid-and-inferior. Otherwise, you haven’t removed the problem, you’ve just shifted it to a location that you find less objectionable – same error.
Your Columbus example, for instance. The story only makes sense if Columbus could successfully convince the Spanish crown that the earth’s circumference was much smaller than it is. If you’re correct that accurate estimates of the earth’s circumference were already widespread, then this means that Columbus was extraordinarily reckless at best and stupid-and-inferior at worst, and that the Spanish Crown were definitely stupid-and-inferior.
Second, you have to account for authority. The bathtub hoax strikes me more as Mencken abusing his journalistic authority, rather than some sort of slander of history. Who wouldn’t believe the Sage of Baltimore? Similarly, if you told your students “I am a historian, and one of my hobbies is practicing medieval cooking techniques. Medieval people overspiced their food to hide the taste of spoilage,” and they believed you, a significant source of their belief would be your professed authority on the subject.
Though I agree that it is tempting to denigrate the past, and we need to correct for that, I’m in a similar position reading your blog post. On what basis am I supposed to trust you? How do I determine that this is not simply reversed stupidity?
Don’t you have to compare the risk to the potential rewards? What if the Crown’s logic was something like “If this dude is right, our power and prestige and global dominance will increase 10x the cost of funding his expedition.”
In that case, they don’t have to “think he’s right” but rather, they only have to think there’s at least a 10% chance that he’s right.
There’s a difference between being stupid and just being wrong, though. Prior generations should be wrong about more things than we are, just because we have had more time to understand the world. The idea that the world is flat and Christopher Columbus is going to fall off the Earth? That implies prior generations had an average IQ somewhere around the range of 50 and couldn’t display any sort of complex reasoning (like, if the ship falls off the Earth, what about the water in the ocean? Does that fall off the Earth, too?)
We should assume that prior generations had their fair share of brilliant people who thought out problems seriously and did not just ignore other people because they were looking at shadows on Plato’s cave-wall. Like, a good example being Galileo and the Catholic Church, which is mis-represented pretty badly. It’s portrayed as G being unambiguously and obviously correct while that mean ol’ Church just shut him down because the Church was totally invested in the Earth being the center of the universe. In reality, G was a giant dick, and also bullshitted a lot of his explanations, and still left some pretty big gaps other people had to fill.
This ALSO makes it harder for trail-blazers today to get anywhere. You are 90% right but wrong on 10%? Well, then, you’re wrong, because true uber-mensch like Big G are 100% right, and obviously right.
Being wrong for trusting someone else’s authority is a different issue entirely, IMO. As far as I can tell, DF is right about Columbus, as I’ve seen the same explanations mentioned elsewhere. I haven’t seen the bits about Medieval Food elsewhere, but I (perhaps unwisely) trust DF, and (IMO very wisely) don’t want to put in much research because I really don’t care all that much about Medieval Food. Doesn’t matter if DF is lying to me and Medieval Food actually consisted of babies drowned in sriracha.
I think the medieval food thing is plausible, but mis-stated; in the modern era we call food that is still edible but no longer delicious “spoiled”. Whereas my grandfather told me stories about cutting the mold off of salted ham (and also apparently you had to use so much salt it tasted terrible, so you had to use it in something that would dilute the salt, like potato soup).
So yeah – plausible. Add in “First world people seem particularly vulnerable to food poisoning”, and it becomes more plausible still; if the range of “edible” is wider, then it becomes much more important to cover up bad flavors.
Equally plausible to me is the Cajun solution – you use spices to make low-quality food taste delicious. “Spoiled” doesn’t even have to enter into it.
But I don’t discount the traditional explanation, either, that prior to the food revolution spicing was important because you ate the same goddamned food every day for years on end.
Bah, I’d still be cutting the mold off of food (mostly cheeses, I can’t recall meat I’ve had ever molding) if my girlfriend didn’t stop me. Throwing food away because there’s a touch of penicillin on it? Wasteful is what that is.
EDIT: Of course, some meats are meant to mold.
I was just thinking about this while using the last of a package of bacon, since it tends to go off if left too long in the fridge. Was the “bacon” referred to in, say, old journals as being packed for long overland expeditions very different to the “bacon” you purchase today? They obviously didn’t refrigerate it, and didn’t worry about it going off on a long voyage.
Or is it fundamentally the same processing, but as Thegnskald referenced, they just accepted that it would taste awful after a short period of time (though wouldn’t give you food poisoning) and ate it anyway?
bacon
It’s fundamentally the same processing, but very different intensities. Store-style bacon is (IIRC) a bit less than 2.5% salt by weight–2 ounces per pound of meat. The old farmer we used to butcher with cured his bacon by putting salt on it until it wouldn’t absorb any more; I would expect that the salt content of the finished product was over 10% by weight. That very-salty style of bacon is much less likely to spoil, but it is not something you want to eat on it’s own.
“Equally plausible to me is the Cajun solution – you use spices to make low-quality food taste delicious. “Spoiled” doesn’t even have to enter into it.”
That only works when spices are much cheaper than fresher food. One of Friedman’s points is that spices were rare and expensive compared to the meat they were supposedly covering for. Meat can be kept fresh relatively indefinitely by either keeping it on the hoof, or by preserving it with something cheap like salt – making a habit of using expensive spices to mask a spoiled taste doesn’t make sense. It would be like coating your door in gold to avoid having to replace the wood every few years.
Presumably some spices were more expensive than others, yes?
Was there at least one fairly cheap and abundant spice that could have been used for such purposes?
Not to disagree with your broader point, but wasn’t salt pretty valuable back in the day?
I’m not sure about spices that were available to Medieval Europe, but there were a lot of herbs that are very easy* to grow and can very easily be used to mask other flavors.
* Eg, they don’t call it “dill weed” because it’s hard to grow.
“Not to disagree with your broader point, but wasn’t salt pretty valuable back in the day?”
Wasn’t it valuable precisely because it was useful for food preservation? I might be off on the cheap part, I would guess it was certainly abundant compared to black pepper or saffron.
Anyway, there clearly was a “spice” used to avoid spoiled food flavors – salt! But it worked by avoiding spoilage, not covering it up.
Mustard is the only one that occurs to me. Capsicum spices might work, and could be grown in Europe, but they are from the New World so not available in the European middle ages.
As an industrial chemical used largely for food preservation, yes. As something to flavor food, which requires a lot less of it, I think not.
@SamChevre
That makes sense. I knew that a lot of food items from the past have been changed by new food preservation methods, but I hadn’t run down whether bacon was one of them.
you had to use so much salt it tasted terrible, so you had to use it in something that would dilute the salt, like potato soup
SOAKING IT OVERNIGHT OR FOR AT LEAST A COUPLE OF HOURS ON THE DAY YOU WANTED TO COOK IT. You don’t just lorry a hunk of salt meat into the pot straight off and boil it till done, it would be so salty it would be hard to eat. That is why pre-soaking, or if you forgot to soak it, then changing the cooking water during cooking (also why you cooked your veggies in the discarded cooking water/with the meat during the last period of cooking, because the salt-and-meat flavour in the water would flavour them and you would not need to add salt to fresh cooking water).
Re: the processing question, salting and smoking (and pickling) were means of preserving foods; as discussed, old salting methods were very heavy on use of salt. Smoking also – smoked fish would come out about as stiff as a board, not like today’s smoked fish which is basically “smoked flavouring added, not smoked in the traditional manner”. There’s a reason a lot of North-Western European cooking methods are plain “boil it until it falls apart”.
Modern cured meats are different, primarily because of using brine cures, which are also a way of getting more water into the meat, and water = weight which is a commercial gain when price = weight (less meat sold to the consumer for the same money, manufacturers can wring more joints etc out of the same amount of meat, all adds up to more sales).
Sheesh, does nobody else on here (apart from David Friedman) cook in the Old Style of twenty-thirty years ago? 😀
I don’t think that really counts as an example of stupid-and-inferior. Modern-day governments don’t always do all that well on the not-being-persuaded-by-obviously-false-ideas scale either.
I don’t see why. Lots of modern people are especially stupid-and-inferior. There’s a lower tail to the distribution.
The sort of stories I am discussing get their punch from the implication that almost everyone was stupid and, by our standards, inferior–that Columbus was the brave innovator fighting against the orthodoxy, that the normal use of spices in medieval cooking was to cover up the taste of spoiled food, and the like.
I’m just not convinced. You’re relying on some group(s) of people being stupid-and-inferior, whether those people are our predecessors (in their ill-informed expeditions) or our contemporaries (in their denigration of the past).
I don’t even disagree with you about Columbus on a historical object level. But I do think the explanation should have more to it than “Modern people are gullible, past-slandering rubes.” That’s just reversed stupidity.
It’s not just reversed stupidity though.
Random schmucks being gullible about the distant (or even relatively recent) past doesn’t meaningfully affect most of what anyone does. There’s not much real cost to it. There may even be a benefit to the lie; you get to feel superior to people who are now dead and can’t lose any utility from being labeled inferior.
The educated or elite people of the past being routinely gullible about rather important facts that would directly affect them would have paid rather significant costs a great deal of the time.
Hey.
I’m still not a spam bot.
Just a tiny stubborn light.
Hoping to kill Moloch
with shpost
Metaphors of machine learning maybe of interest to readers here. Key quote:
I recently finished reading Godel, Escher, Bach and looked up an interview with the author–who said in the book that it would be impossible to create an AI that can beat humans at chess without creating an entity capable of all other types of thought–and he said essentially the same thing. That machine learning is a fad that’s great for brute-forcing particular problems, but doesn’t actually teach us anything about how the mind works.
While it’s basically true that artificial neural networks aren’t any more likely to lead to AGI because they contain the word “neural”, a lot about this strikes me as confused. ANNs have been around since the Seventies and performed poorly for most of that time; deep learning is a recent advance that isn’t biologically inspired. And no one serious is proposing that AGI, when it arrives, will necessarily be architecturally similar to our brains; the fish/submarine distinction has been bandied about 101-level AI classes at least since I took my first ones, a decade ago. That’s an overly narrow reading of “human-like intelligence”: what we’re interested in is the ability for a machine to do highly general self-directed learning, whether or not it happens to get hungry and bored and enjoy listening to Judas Priest along the way.
And to be excessively pedantic, we can do flapping flight — machines that fly by flapping are called “ornithopters” and have existed even longer than airplanes have. This is precisely because the two work similarly, i.e. by manipulating airfoils to generate thrust and lift. They just turn out not to be much good on the scales we want airplanes for.
https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=2862910#
I made this zeemaps map for readers of SSC. You can go there, select your location, enter your contact info, and find other people near you.
To add a new marker, go to Additions->Add Marker – Simple
Make sure to put an email address or other contact info in the Description box, or people won’t be able to contact you and you are wasting your time.
This could be a great opportunity to meet other rationalists if you’re not near any of the cities with regular meetups.
I’m not sure, but maybe it would be useful to pre-populate it with regular meetups, so that if someone is near one without knowing it, they can find it.
Naval Gazing is wrapping up its look at amphibious warfare in WWII. I’ll return eventually, but want to look at other things for a while.
And for the Friday post, I continue my experiment with new content with a post on how ship classes work.
I thought it was straightforward.
A Three has three rowers at an oar position–either an ordinary trireme or a single bank galley with three men to an oar. A Four has four rowers at an oar position–for instance a big trireme with two rowers at the lower oar. A Five is a bigger trireme with 2,2,1.
It’s true that explaining the Pteolemaic Forty on this basis is a bit tricky, for familiar reasons, but the usual explanation is double hulls.
Bah. It’s obvious what the real explanation is; the numbers are all marketing, representing a claimed “effective” number of oars, but moderns are too gullible to see through the hype.
David, those ships have zero of my trinity of interest, of cannons, armor, and steam. I have very limited knowledge and even less interest.
The Men’s and Women’s curling tournaments at the Olympics are now underway. Both are 9-game round robins followed by any tiebreakers needed to get to a 4-team single elimination playoff.
Funny and informative overview of the men’s and women’s teams.
The Canadian women are very, very heavy favorites. One of the best women’s teams of all time – anything less than gold will be a major upset, and the rest of the field is fighting for silver.
The men’s competition is much tighter. While the Canadian men have a great chance, the Swedes are the current #1 ranked team in the world and have had a ton of recent success. Both are basically shoe-ins for the playoff and are a likely gold medal game matchup.
The group behind them is also more competitive and tighter than the ladies’ side – nobody is a pushover, although seeing the Italians, Koreans, or Japanese in the playoffs would be a bit of a surprise. Expect a tight tourney and a down-to-the-wire finish for the final two spots between the Danes, Americans, Norwegians, Swiss, and Scots (yes they are team Great Britain, but they are all Scottish (literally sheep farmers)).
The US men got off to a great start with a win over Korea in a high scoring affair. American skip John Shuster made some great shots to capitalize on the Korean skip’s errors and score multiples. He looks to be in much better form than in the last two Olympics, where his poor shotmaking was a major factor in Team USA going 2-7 both times. The two lead throwers also played well. However, the third, Tyler George, did not have a great game. They will have another very winnable game against Italy tonight, followed by a much tougher test against Sweden.
The US women had a rough start against Japan, losing 10-5. They’ll need to improve to have a shot at the playoff, although realistically their expectations are lower than the men’s squad. (Sorry, less commentary here, didn’t get to watch this one).
Aside: outside the Olympics or world championships, where teams represent a country or region, curling teams (“rinks”) are traditionally referred to by their skip’s last name. So the USA is represented by “Team Shuster”, etc.
The breakroom TV at my work has been showing the curling matches! (Makes a nice break from never-ending home remodeling shows.) I hadn’t thought about it before, but the sweeper position looks really uncomfortable — you have to both skate and sweep while folded forward. Do sweepers have to worry much about back injury?
In practice, most of the stress from sweeping tends to fall on the shoulders and elbows (basically, you’re trying to drive your upper body mass into the ice through the broom head) so some strain on the upper back but not the lower so much.
The part that is hardest on the lower back is actually squatting in the hack to throw (very low hips while keeping the chest pretty upright). My dad has a lot of lower back pain and basically can’t do it.
The throwing/sliding motion also puts a ton of strain on the knee above the slide foot (the left knee for right handers). It takes a lot of force in a very bent, stretched position.
Curling forces you to be very flexible and have a lot of strength and stamina in your joint-supporting muscles. On the other hand there are not a lot of fast direction changes of the sort that cause muscle and ligament injuries in other sports. I’d say acute injuries in the sport are pretty rare, outside of falls (whacking the back of your skull on the ice, or landing on a rock and taking the handle to the chest or butt). But it can certainly aggravate existing injuries or produce chronic soreness.
Separately, glad you’re enjoying the tournament! Curling is a perhaps surprisingly great sport to watch live – there is exactly one thing going on to keep the camera focused on, it’s a direct competition (unlike the timed events), and there is very little downtime except at natural commercial breaks (completion of each end).
If you notice, there is a countdown clock on the scoreboard for each team. This is “thinking time” and if it expires, you lose. The clock runs from the time the opponents previous stone stops, to the time your stone crosses the delivery tee line (i.e. you’ve begun your slide). Each team gets 38 minutes for a 10 end game, plus 2 timeouts (extra time is added for extra ends if needed).
As a result, there tends to be very little downtime between shots, particularly the early stones of each end (teams want to save thinking time in case they need it for critical, tricky shots late in the end or game).
And when there IS downtime, usually the teams are discussing strategy, and since all the players are mic’d, this is actually some of the most interesting time in the game.
I’m only watching a minute or so at a time when I’m passing through to make tea/get water/whatever, so I’m not really following the games. But I am really enjoying the watching the stones stately* gliding across the ice. That and the skipper’s really careful and intense but slow movements make the whole thing seem very dignified (plus much easier to watch than faster paced games, for me at least).
I probably wouldn’t have paid it any special mind if not for your posts, so I’ll add my thanks to Bean and Nick below 🙂
Brilliant win for the American ladies! Tight match throughout, looked like the Scots had the upper hand when they forced USA to take 1 in the 9th – this gave USA a slim 1 point lead, but gave the Scots the all important hammer going into the final end.
But team USA played the 10th perfectly, taking advantage of an early error by their opponents to set up the steal. Great Britain skip Eve Muirhead was left in a nearly impossible spot – USA had two rocks frozen on top of each other, impossible to take out, covering the left third of the button. Muirhead had a slim shot to take one and force an extra end, but it would require a perfect draw. Ultimately, she left it a little thin and a bit heavy, sailing harmlessly into the back 8 foot and giving USA a 2 point steal for a final score of 7-4.
So I’m probably talking to myself on these, but whatever. An interesting controversy is brewing over an incident in the game between the Canadian and Danish women’s teams, something that probably doesn’t make sense to fans of other sports.
Canada’s skip, Rachel Homan, found herself down by 2, and 0-2 in the tournament, facing an end where she really needed to score multiple points to get back in the game. She took an action that clearly helped her team, that everyone agrees was well within the rules, and in any case was instigated by an admitted error by the opponent. And yet she is being criticized for breaching…
CURLING ETIQUETTE
Curling, like golf, is a game with a strong sense of etiquette and good sportsmanship. Players are expected to call their own fouls, and scoring is resolved between the two vice skips. Often, it is up to non-offending skip to determine the “punishment” for a foul, and this is expected to be fair rather than maximally punishing. Officials are very rarely called to action, except to keep time, resolve any questions over the rules, and occasionally make an official measurement when two stones are too close for the vices to call.
You are expected to shake hands and say “good curling!” before and after every match. To not heckle the other team, or to openly celebrate their errors (in fact, it is good etiquette to congratulate them on a good shot). To not excessively celebrate your own good shots or curse your misses. The winners buy a round for the losers for the traditional “broomstacking” (postgame socializing). And so on. Basically, it’s supposed to be a friendly, fair competition (as opposed to “rubbin’ is racin'” or trash talk).
So what happened?
In the 5th end, with Canada down by 2, the Danish player threw an excellent stone that came to rest right against another Danish stone in the 4 foot circle, leaving them “sitting 2” in a place where removing both rocks would be extremely difficult for Canada.
However, just before the rock came to rest, one of the Denmark sweepers accidentally tapped the rock with her broom. Touching a moving stone with your broom is known as “burning” it. The rules say that the opposing skip has final say over the penalty: they may either remove the burned stone from play, or they may place it (and any stones struck by it) in their best guess of where the stones would have ended up had the burn not occurred.
Homan decided to remove the burned stone. This left the remaining Danish stone unprotected, and Homan ultimately made an excellent double takeout shot with the hammer to score 4, flipping the momentum of the game.
That’s where the controversy comes in – while no one disputes that Homan had the right to remove the burned stone, completely removing a burned stone is usually only done when it occurs early in the throw (making it hard to determine the impact) or when the hitting of the stone clearly altered its trajectory in a major way (i.e. if you slip and hit the stone hard). The Danish infraction, a light, obviously unintentional tap just before the stone stopped, clearly had minimal impact on the stone’s final resting place. If anything, it hurt them since it didn’t end up a full freeze (the stones were very close but not actually touching – the Danish sweeper was trying to make it go farther, and burning it hurt that).
So while the rules allowed Homan to do what she did, and that was clearly the right move from a competitive standpoint, good etiquette demanded that she leave the burned stone in play – perhaps move it a bit to some plausible but advantageous spot, but not remove it entirely.
Ultimately, as predicted by the Danish skip, the Canadians got a little bit of karma – Denmark tied the game in the 10th end, and Homan missed her final shot in the extra end to give Denmark the win. In a shocking turn of events, heavy favorite Canada sits 0-3, the only women’s team still winless.
I’m reading them, but usually don’t feel I have anything to add. (Beyond “Why can’t they just use normal-people words for these things?”, that is.) Please keep doing them.
Seconded!
Thanks for the notes of encouragement. It’s always hard to tell whether silence on the comment front is “TL,DR,FU” or “you wrote a brilliant post to which I can manage no response”.
I think for Sunday I might try to write a bit about Broomgate.
@bean:
Wikipedia has a pretty good “Glossary of Curling” article, although be warned that it contains some terms that are used pretty rarely (I play with Genuine Canucks, and I have literally never heard the term “kizzle kazzle”).
The hardest common terms for me to remember were “in-turn” and “out-turn”, to describe the direction the stone is spun. It turns out the “in-” and “out-” refer to the direction of the thrower’s elbow. Thus, an in-turn is when you pull your elbow in toward your body as you release, generating a clockwise spin on the stone if you’re right handed (opposite for a lefty). An out-turn is counter-clockwise for a right hander. The stone will curl in the direction the front of the stone is turning (for a right hander, the in-turn will spin clockwise and curl from left to right, from the shooter’s point of view).
Another non intuitive term you’ll hear often on broadcasts is “normal” vs “control”, as the skip discusses the next shot with the team. These are short for “normal weight takeout”, meaning the typical weight you throw to remove one stone while keeping the thrown stone in play, and “control”, meaning a slower takeout that will curl more (and thus give the sweepers more control over the trajectory). There’s also “hack weight” (just hard enough that the stone would come to rest on the opposite hack, i.e. just a few feet out of play, lighter than control weight). And “peel weight”, heavier than normal – a “peel” is when you take out a target stone, but strike it at an angle at high speed so that your thrown rock slides out of play. You would typically do this to open up a lane for a follow-up shot, or to “blank” an end (intentionally scoring zero points, so that you keep the hammer for the next end).
I remember a very similar incident when I was young.
People were still slagging Australians off for being “underarm bowlers” years later.
That’s a good story, and you’re right, kind of a similar incident. It’s kind of amusing how much the Aussie captain felt like he needed to resort to excuses about his personal mental condition at the time to explain his behavior (which was, after all, within the rules and frankly probably didn’t affect the outcome).
I know I’m not one to talk, being a huge fan of curling, but I really don’t get cricket – mostly the dense, goofy jargon (again, curling fan, I know), and the fact that the game is deliberately designed to require multiple days.
I’m also enjoying these posts!
This latest one answers another question I had, which is what happens when I stone gets bumped. I’m surprised everyone is so relaxed about it, even in Olympic competition. It sounds like a great system for beer league curling, but as the events you’re describing illustrate, it might be an unstable system that can be exploited be defectors.
Here’s another thing I’ve been wondering about: what is the exact mechanism for why the stones “curl”?
Here’s the first model that came to my mind, which turns out to give the wrong result:
The stone is decelerating due to friction. This means that the leading edge of the stone (the part of the stone farthest forward in the direction of travel at any given moment) will be pushing against the ice slightly harder than the trailing edge, for the same reason that the front of a car dips down when the brakes are applied. Therefore, I would predict that a stone spinning CCW from above would curve to the curlers right.
However, from what I’ve seen it appears that in reality, such a stone curves to the left, as if the trailing edge of the stone had better contact with the ice than the leading edge. Does anyone know why this is, or if there is some better way of thinking about this?
My completely uneducated guess is gyroscopic precession.
It’s not a difference between the leading and trailing edges of the stone, it’s a difference between the left and right edges. If a stone is rotating counterclockwise, its right edge is moving faster relative to the ice than its left edge, and since the coefficient of friction decreases with increasing velocity, the left side is decelerated more than the right side, hence the stone curves to the left.
@Random Poster:
I don’t think it can be what you suggest, because the friction force vectors on the sides of the stone are parallel to the direction of travel. Unbalanced forces (with no transverse component) on the sides of the stones give a net torque, but no net force to the left or right.
It’s actually a very good question, and one that doesn’t actually have a fully-realized theory to describe it.
As you note, the curl of a stone is a bit counterintuitive – try upending a drinking glass and sliding it across a wet tabletop, and it will curl in the opposite direction of a curling stone (CCW rotation will make the glass go to the right).
Here’s a decent article describing a practical study. Here’s a newer article describing a different study with a totally different mechanism.
In the first study, it was determined that the front of the stone actually has less friction – as you note, it is decelerating so more weight is on the front. But this actually reduces friction, because, like a skater’s blade, the stone’s running edge melts the ice for a fraction of a second. The front of the stone is pressing down harder and actually increases this effect.
But the second study proposes a different mechanism: the front edge of the stone creates microscratches in the ice, oriented angled to the path of travel, that the trailing edge tends to follow
A few things to note: Curling ice is not smooth, but “pebbled”. To prepare the ice, small droplets are sprayed using a device not unlike a cross between the backpack weed killer pump your landscaper would use, and one of those spritzers priests use to sprinkle everyone with holy water. You make a couple passes to get good, even coverage, and then you run over the whole thing with a big “scraper” or “nipper” blade (kind of like a hand-propelled zamboni scraper) that nips the tops off all the bumps to give them a level surface. The end result is kind of like knock-down or orange peel texture on a wall.
Also, the bottom of the rock is neither flat nor perfectly smooth. The “running surface” is a ~6 inch wide insert of rock (often a different type of granite from the main body of the stone) that is dished inward in the center, with a narrow flat band around the outside. The result is that the only point of the stone in contact with the ice is that narrow circular band. The running band is not polished, but slightly rough (feels to me like 600-1000 grit sandpaper). Every aspect of this seems to be important from a practical perspective (fully polished or flat bottom stones wouldn’t work).
How fast you spin the stone does seem to have some effect, particularly on how the rock “finishes” at the far end. Typical shots actually have a very slow rotation, only ~3 rotations from one end to the other (over ~25 seconds). If you don’t put any spin at all on the rock as you release, it will tend to “wander” from side to side, or sometimes a very light spin will reverse direction – this is known as “losing the handle”. (“Handle” is used to describe the spin. A “spinner” shot has “a lot of handle”).
Well, add another one to the list of things that are more complicated than freshman physics would suggest. Fascinating that there isn’t agreement on the mechanism, and also that the particular texture on the bottom of the stone is necessary.
Does anyone under this situation?
Iranian wrestler Karimachiani was ordered to lose a match because if he had won his next opponent would be an Israeli. He was given a two-year ban, according to the article, though by my figuring the numbers don’t add up. Anyway, he’s been penalized, which seems fair enough; throwing a match is genuinely unethical.
What I don’t understand is: why was he allowed to fight the match in the first place if he wasn’t going to be allowed to win? Couldn’t he have conceded or otherwise refused to fight, either against the Israeli or the previous opponent? That would have been the ethical thing to do, IMO.
(Is the penalty for refusing to fight bigger than the penalty for deliberately losing? Because that sound pretty dumb.)
Maybe he thought he could get away with throwing the fight? Or maybe they didn’t realize who his next opponent would be until the match had begun (and didn’t want their forfeit / loss to be against an Israeli).
Otherwise, yeah I don’t see why you don’t just fake a bout of the flu or a muscle strain something and withdraw.
The puzzle game Jelly no Puzzle is difficult, yet very satisfying. Considering the endlessly inventive levels, the mechanics are amazingly simple. I enjoyed so much solving it years ago, remembered it recently, and worked through it again, this time on the Android version. I think this game might appeal to many people here.
Seconded. My wife and I worked through almost all the puzzles a few years ago, doing one or two a night before bed. I enjoyed how every puzzle started out seemingly impossible but then eventually yielded a satisfying eureka moment. It never felt too hard, too easy, or unfair, at least in the end.
Yup, Jelly no Puzzle is amazing. I prefer the PC version to the Android version, slightly more polished on PC.
Stephen’s Sausage Roll is similar in how it presents you with a seemingly impossible puzzle and forces you to learn something new about the game’s simple mechanics in order to solve it, and it’s one of my favorite games ever.
Try Snakebird. One of the best little puzzle games I’ve played. Available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Thanks for the recommendation. I got sick, and this is a great activity while I’ve got low physical energy.
Potentially of interest to SSC readers: “Tulip mania” may have been highly exaggerated.
Thanks. Interesting.
I’m confused by this portion, particularly the bolded:
I mean, I get the idea that people have exaggerated what actually happened, but this still describes a price crash that’s analogous to a bubble bursting. Basically, there was a futures market in Tulip trading, as people were trading bulbs that had been planted but not actually cultivated. This futures market showed an explosion in prices, which deflated quite quickly. That’s…like, that’s exactly what a bubble is. Sure, maybe all the anecdotes surrounding the story are basically urban legends, but that’s doesn’t support this line:
The last line is not an argument that there was not a bubble.
This is an older book (2007), so I’ll see if I can pick it up from the library. I might be missing something here?
I admit it’s a little confusing. I think the point is that the amount of “speculation by regular people” is vastly exaggerated.
To compare to another recent bubble, buying a house in 2007 wasn’t irrational. Even buying a house with an ARM while assuming that the house would continue to increase in value wasn’t irrational. Going into ridiculous amounts of debt and leverage and lying on loan applications so that you could buy five houses with the intention of flipping them six months later for massive guaranteed profit was irrational… but of course, most people didn’t do that.
Because of the way the rules were set up, it is more accurate to say the trading was against the value of the (relatively miniscule) penalty for breaking the futures contract, than to say it was against the value of the tulips themselves.
Thanks, I was also confused about that.
This particularly caught my interest because Mike Dash (history blogger I’m very fond of) also wrote a book on Tulip mania (in fact his book is the first “also bought” suggestion on the Amazon page for Goldgar’s book). Judging from the Amazon blurbs, it seems Dash’s account is closer to the standard one, but he seems to be very careful in interpreting sources on his blog, so now I really want to compare the two books.
One claim I’ve heard, eg, here, ultimately from this 2006 paper is that because the nominal futures weren’t enforceable, they should be seen more as options. Futures tell you how much the market thinks the tulips are worth, while options tell you something more subtle and should swing more wildly.
I’m not sure it’s in that paper, but tulips are a risky investment because of the viral patterns, so the price should swing wildly just because of supply, even if the demand is predictable, not a fad or a bubble.
(I think I first heard both of these points from Gwern, but I can’t find a good link.)
Anyone here have any experience with modafinil? Considering buying some to see how it affects my (currently untreated) ADHD.
I used to take ritalin LA at 60mg dosage with no effect, except for some very minor anxious jittery feelings for an hour after taking it. So my guess is that modafinil – a much weaker stimulant – will have little/no effect. But who knows? I’m in no position to be prescribed other medication at the moment, and I feel grey market modafinil is low-risk and well within my means, so I want to do some wee experimentation.
Can anyone share their experience?
Edit: There’s heaps of info online but I just want people to tell me directly because I trust you guys more than other sources…
Modafinil supposedly works through a completely different mechanism than amphetamines, so your experience with ritalin might say nothing about how you will respond to modafinil.
That’s excellent to hear, thank you 🙂
I know my above conclusion is náive; obviously a depressed person who finds one SSRI doesn’t work wouldn’t just give up on all of them. I’m just worried I won’t find some kind of solution beyond improving general health, sleep, practising meditation, etc.
Note: his experience with ritalin also might say nothing about how he would respond to amphetamines, because ritalin is not an amphetamine
Yes, but for most people ritalin seems to have very similar effects to amphetamines, while the same is not true of modafinil.
My experience with modafinil is a grand total of 2 days (including today). Before that, it was a lot of years of Ritalin/Concerta. So on one hand, my experience base is tiny, but on the other, it’s very fresh. As best I can describe it, the modafinil is a lot less effective at changing personality than it is at improving focus. I’m definitely more…let’s say animated on the modafinil. I can still do my work, but I occasionally find myself sitting sideways, which was a classic sign of being unmedicated when on the methylphenidate. The different mechanism of action is very noticeable, at least for me.
I ordered some from an online pharmacy, what I believe is now defunct, a few years back.* I took it maybe 4-5 of the pills over the course of about a year. It worked as advertised, those were some very productive days at work. But I didn’t like how it made me feel. Not as bad as adderall, which many years ago I was prescribed to counteract the lingering sleepiness resulting from the xanax I was prescribed for insomnia (that doctor was a little drug happy, I fired him not long after that). It didn’t make me jittery or anything like that, just a little … disengaged somehow.
I’d probably take it again if there some day or small group of days where a lot of productivity could make a big difference in my life, but I wouldn’t take it regularly. I don’t think that tradeoff would be worth it (to me, YMMV.)
*I found that online site from a recommendation here. I liked it because unlike others I didn’t have to get bitcoins. Too bad it didn’t pick one that required me to get bitcoins, I might have had some left over.
Xanax for insomnia? That sounds a bit “I have this pain in my small toe, doctor/AMPUTATION IS THE ANSWER!” though I suppose it does depend on the severity and duration of the insomnia.
The worst part of that medicine is the withdrawal systems. After I fired that doctor and decided I was going to stop taking it, it took months of tapering to get off of it, with night sweats and other unpleasant symptoms the whole time.
I know people that take low doses (.25mg) on as needed basis for anxiety. That’s seems to be okay, but I think people should be really cautious before agreeing to take it regularly.
I know people that take low doses (.25mg) on as needed basis for anxiety.
That was my experience with it; about eight years ago, I was regularly having panic/anxiety attacks in the small hours of the morning waking me up with severe breathlessness (with bonus existential dread and conviction of impending death) to the point where I made a couple of fruitless trips to the Accident and Emergency room of the hospital.
My GP gave me a prescription for ten tablets of 0.5 mg dosage, to be taken once daily as needed. I found it did work, but also “Okay, I’m not anxious any more, but I’m also strangely… sleepy…. Zzzzzzzz” where I had to immediately go to bed as I could literally not stay awake.
So as an insomnia cure, it would certainly work, but I’m not surprised you found you had “lingering sleepiness” and I am very surprised that your doctor thought the solution was to put you on a dose of uppers to counteract the downers!
Like mentioned by maintain, it’s completely different. Ritalin works primarily by boosting dopamine and other stimulating neurotransmitters. Modafinil’s function is a bit more unclear really, but the experienced effect is more of “removing fatigue” than stimulating anything.
I’m a long time (4 years) user of modafinil. I’m using the same dosage I have since the start, no tolerance building. It makes me very awake. It works well with caffeine. It makes it extremely easy to focus on anything. All impulses are reduced, to eat, go to the bathroom or other normal distractions. Motivtion is also slightly increased. It becomes much easier to continue doing whatever you are doing. So as long as you get started, you’ll continue till you’re done. Makes it excellent for when you have big boring tasks to do.
I’ve introduced modafinil to many, and most have basically the same effect I have. The close cousin armodafinil is slightly more stimulating by the way, if that’s what you want.
A downside is that since you get tunnel vision, you also become slightly emotionally balanced (dare I say stunted). To offset this, you can try to combine modafinil with something like a low dose of phenibut, which makes you more sociable.
Anyway, I highly recommend trying it. If it works for you, as it did for me, it will likely change your life for the better quite dramatically.
How often do you take it?
I’ve taken adrafinil occasionally over the last 6 to 8 months, ordered via one of the subreddit’s recommended suppliers. (I’m comfortable naming the company, but I’m not sure if that sort of thing is allowed here.) I’m currently slightly too cowardly to order actual modafinil in the mail (adrafinil metabolizes to modafinil but isn’t controlled for various stupid reasons), though it’s probably only a matter of time.
At its best, it’s let me pull all-nighters while keeping normal levels of productivity and allowed me to wake up on 5 hours of sleep and function like I’d gotten my usual 9-10. (I need a lot of sleep.) It helps keep me focused for hours at a time without slipping. My first dose I could feel my heart pounding throughout the day, though that might have been placebo.
There were a few weeks I took adrafinil almost every day last semester, and I think I ended up developing a tolerance. My median experience taking adrafinil became that I had a headache all day and didn’t want to get anything done, though that was confounded by the fact that I only took it on days when I hadn’t slept enough. I certainly didn’t feel the laser focus anymore, and I didn’t want to up the dose again (I started on one pill, then moved to two, and was uneasy about going to three).
I haven’t had any in about 3 months now, though I have more coming in the mail tomorrow to see if it can go back to being useful.
I don’t have ADHD, but I do have some experience with modafinil.
From my personal experience (taken 200 mg a few times, not regularly), what it does is improve mental stamina and mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation. It won’t make one work noticeably faster, but it will improve the amount of time it’s possible to work at top performance before becoming tired. Also it makes one’s pee have a distinctive, but not entirely unpleasant, odor.
The other thing about it is that it’s not too difficult to make, although I wouldn’t advise doing so unless you have training in synthetic and analytical (to verify purity) chemistry. Personally I don’t want to deal with making any, given the potential legal consequences. But if it’s legal in your country that’s a different matter.