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AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
For those neuroscientists among us, I recently came across Closed Loop Neuroscience. Seems like an interesting paradigm. Does anyone have experience with it, good or bad?
Why the NRA doesn’t consider informed gun safety its top priority: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-28/how-defective-guns-became-the-only-product-that-can-t-be-recalled
A man was killed by a defectively engineered gun. The man’s father:
The NRA is the top purveyor of “gun culture”, other than word of mouth. What does this say about US gun culture when the members of the NRA do not hold it to account?
(I probably won’t read any replies to this as I’m sleep deprived and the visible open thread is too much during the week.)
Please don’t feed the troll.
For the benefit of those who aren’t trolling and don’t know the story, this sort of thing is why the NRA does not want to give the CPSC power over firearms.
This is unconvincing. In context (see page 10):
Some people once took the CPSC to court over their unwillingness to ban ammunition; the court forced the CPSC to at least go through the motions of asking for comments on the petition; Congress stopped them from going any further. The horror!
More generally: gun owners clearly have an interest in finding out whether their guns are defective. Gun manufacturers clearly have an interest in keeping that sort of thing under wraps. I do not think it is trolling to point out that the NRA seems to be serving the interests of the latter ahead of the interests of the former.
Gun-hardware safety is different than ammunition safety. Is the CPSC supposed to look at the gun hardware, or the ammunition?
Of note, I own a Remington Model 700. Remington corporation fought complaints about the trigger on that model for many years.
Finally, a recall was issued.
The gun culture won, the corporation lost…somewhat. The Recall/replace-or-get-reimbursement process is confusing. Remington made lots of variations of Model 700 since the 1960s, and figuring out whether a particular rifle is (or ought to be) covered is a little confusing.
I can’t recall whether the NRA took sides in that one or not.
(NRA is an organization that is best known for its political-advocacy arm. However, the NRA has a core focus in firearms training. Their budget is spent heavily on generating training manuals and running training for certified-instructors. There is a side-business in running competitions, and another side-business in supporting local gun clubs.
There is an organization called Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute that is likely a better suit, if you are looking for an organization that is interested in manufacturers developing safe firearms.)
Side note: There are several mechanical systems in a firearm.
The most troublesome for the purposes of “gun fires when the User is not pressing the trigger” is the trigger mechanism and its connection to the firing pin. The problems Remington, and other companies, have with assessing whether or not a recall is necessary for a trigger mechanism include:
1. Owners can, with a minimal set of tools, modify the trigger mechanism themselves
2. Gunsmiths can modify the trigger per request from the owner
3. Poor storage (moisture, rust-inducing environments, etc) can make the mechanism faulty
4. Unintentional discharges by faulty trigger are easy to confuse with the Owner/User having their finger on the trigger when they don’t intend to fire.
Whether you are convinced are not does not matter. The fear that the CPSC would find firearms inherently dangerous, and the lobbying on the part of gun control groups to make ammunition illegal, is the reason that firearms (and now ammunition) are excluded from the CPSCs purview.
That the NRA is actually a tool of gun manufacturers and not representative of gun owners is a common anti-gun talking point, which is why this smells of trolling. I suspect this talking point is supposed to convince legislators, who care little for the interests of a few gun manufacturers but who care a lot for the votes of gun owners, many of whom will vote on that single issue if sufficiently provoked. It’s not very convincing.
I go to art school, and have a lot of art loving friends. I often hear from them that art should be a mandatory subject in school, and sometimes i hear that everyone should be required to go to art school for 1 year before they get to do anything else.
The rationale for this is that art in school supposedly increases intelligence, creativity, or something else. Is this actually true? It honestly seems bit too convenient.
One objection is that they are probably confusing selection effects and aging effects for benefits from the art school. When you put already creative people together in an environment, it surely must seem that the environment is making them creative, especially when those people feel stimulated by that environment. That doesn’t mean that people who are not already very inclined to make art would get those benefits (to that extent) or that they wouldn’t just express their creative side less again when they go back to accounting (or whatever) after that year.
Motivation surely greatly impacts how much people get out of art school. I expect that if unmotivated people were forced to go to art school, many of your friends would change their tune when they see the atmosphere and participation at the schools changing for the worse.
Finally, your art loving friends surely tend to lack first hand experience of the benefits of other forms of education and thus tend to overvalue their own experiences.
I suggest telling your friends that they would surely benefit greatly from a year studying computer science to boost their intelligence, conscientiousness, or something else. Be prepared to see them rationalize why it would be a horrible idea for them to spend a year on doing something they have no interest in. Also be prepared for them not to recognize the hypocrisy.
If everyone had to go to art school for a year, art schools would be much better funded. Since you don’t have the option to refuse they could charge more-or-less whatever they wanted from non-artsy students and give scholarships to the artsy students who would have been there anyway. Plus it creates a lot of jobs for art teachers, which makes it easier to justify an art education for marginal artists who would otherwise struggle to get employment.
This seems like what happened with the humanities and social sciences honestly. Everyone needs to get their year or two of gen-eds out of the way before we’re allowed to study our actual coursework, which makes more money for the college and acts as a safety net for aging Marxists who would otherwise have trouble getting jobs. And the next generation of Marxists get a chance to indulge their passion at our expense.
+1
There’s also the side benefit of deciding what views/models of the world every educated person should carry around with them. Calculus or Statistics? Econ or Sociology? Latin or Spanish?
That’s a conflict about which people should have jobs teaching in the future, and also about what future adults in the world should be carrying around, half-remembered, in their heads as they make decisions.
If art school significantly increased intelligence, everyone would be doing it already. The literature on educational interventions (tldr: nothing works) ought to be a guide on this matter.
Artists think everyone should learn more art.
Philosophers think everyone should learn more philosophy.
Mathematicians think everyone should learn more math.
Scientists think everyone should learn more science.
Everyone thinks their field is super special and any reasons they give for it are probably rationalizations.
Generalists think we should learn more.
I was researching female labor force participation statistics for a discussion on the subreddit, and I came across what would seem to be two major anomalies for the theory that the gender balance of various occupations are driven by sex differences in systemizing/empathizing or people/things.
From table 11 on this webpage: in America, according to government statistics, statisticians are 52.5% female and operations research analysts are 55.4% female.
Statistician is, of course, an extremely “systemizing” job by any reasonable definition, and if computer programming can be said to be thing-focused, then by those standards working with statistics absolutely is.
Here’s what operations research analysts do:
I literally could not imagine a more “systemizing” job if you asked me to try.
This would also seem to be evidence against the theory that occupational gender imbalances are due to there being less women on the far-right tail of math performance, whether due to a higher male mean or higher male variance or both. I admit that my direct knowledge here is limited, but I am still pretty confident in guessing that being a professional statistician requires greater math ability than a majority of programming jobs. Being an operations research analyst also sounds like it involves a lot of complex math.
Is there anyone here who knows more about what these jobs involve, particularly in regards to flexible hours and work/life balance? When I brought up the question of why a majority of accountants are female in a previous Open Thread, the most plausible-sounding answers involved accounting being, for various reasons (a large number of jobs in a lot of locations making it easy to work near home, relatively easy deadlines most of the time) more compatible with family life than certain other technically oriented office jobs, so that’s the first thing I want to check.
While I agree with you that such exceptions are interesting and worth analysis, I disagree that they are anomalies to the theory.
The observed gender disparity at the group-level between more thing- and more people-oriented dispositions leaves plenty of room for a substantial number of women to be quite thing-oriented. If there are clustering effects, for example a tendency for thing-oriented women to prefer to work in a workplace with a higher percentage of women than the overall percentage of women that is thing-oriented enough for very systematizing jobs, you’d expect a non-uniform distribution.
For example, let’s say that 30%* of women are thing-oriented enough for systematizing jobs and that they have a choice between two jobs, programmer and statistician. Then having 30% female programmers and 30% female statisticians is just as consistent with the disparate interests theory as having 10% female programmers and 50% female statisticians.
Calling clusters in jobs ‘anomalies’ is like calling planets and stars anomalies, because the theory is that only a fraction of the universe is made up of matter.
* Just a number I picked for the example
—
Anyway, an operations research analyst seems to be a more specialized statistician, so I would argue that those two jobs are probably just one cluster.
My own observation at the university was that mathematics had a drastically higher percentage of women than computer science and most other engineering disciplines and this seems to be consistent with the overall statistics, so that may explain a lot of the cluster already. If 40-48% of math majors are women, then you need only a small clustering effect to get at 52-55% for certain jobs that require a major in math.
Of course, obviously then the question is why systematizing women are drawn to math, to which I can merely speculate (but won’t).
Although by training I’m a physicist I work at a job which would qualify as operations research (OR).
Basically OR is applying math to the problems organizations have. OR analysts typically will have a mathematical background equivalent at least to an engineer (many OR degree programs are part of engineering colleges or are part of System Engineering or Industrial Engineering degree programs). Many have undergraduate degrees in mathematics.
The team I’m part of fluctuates but typically is around 50% women. My work life balance is definitely better than what is typically described for Silicon Valley tech jobs, finance, or STEM faculty. OR is predominately used in large, established organizations so you’re not dealing with a start-up culture. A major employer is the government both directly and via contractors which tends to keep hours closer to 40 hours a week.
OR does involve more communication than programming, because your end product is usually an analysis or plan that others are going to implement rather than a self contained product.
I mentioned ssc in a facebook discussion of Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses, and was asked to explain ssc. Here’s what I said– any thoughts about improvements? Are there handy overviews of the rationalist community?
***
Slate Star Codex is run by Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist.
Essays are posted whenever Scott feels like it.
Open threads are posted approximately on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Every fourth open thread is public (shown in the upper left hand corner). The rest are slightly hidden– use the open threads link at the top to get to them.
At this point, some of the open threads are “no culture wars” (no topics that tend to be contentious and repetitive, like race and gender), so check the entry before you post.
The bloglist titles are from a Borges story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Celestial_Emporium_of…
Slatestarcodex comes out of the rationality community, which is a side effect of Eliezer Yudkowsky. He’d gotten concerned about AI Risk (an AI might self-improve enough to take over the world, but be badly programmed so that it wipes out the human race), and had trouble explaining it to people, so he set out to teach people to think more clearly. He also wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a quite popular fanfic which drew a lot of people in.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
http://www.hpmor.com/
This resulted in a blog at lesswrong.com, since remade as lesserwrong.com, which led to a worldwide community.
Effective Altruism– an effort to find and contribute to the charities which have evidence of doing the most good– is a spin-off.
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
https://80000hours.org/ How to make as much money as possible so you have more to give.
There’s also the Center for Applied Rationality– an organization for teaching people how to think more clearly. They want evidence that what they’re doing works, so it’s going slowly, but I have great hoped for it.
http://www.rationality.org/
This seems like an overwhelming amount of stuff, but it is in no sense complete. The rationalist community is on tumblr, reddit, etc. There are local meetups and group houses.
It’s kind of amazing what cool stuff in hidden just because the world is so large.
Nice phrase.
It seemed like sort of a typo (an edito?), but I liked it too much to get rid of it.
While we’re pointing out typos, “I have great hoped for it” in your description of CFAR.
And the link to the Borges story is broken, but I would guess that’s because Facebook shortened the link. For anyone who doesn’t know what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge
(Incidentally this is one of my favorite things on SSC.)
To the extent that I am familiar with these different websites this seems like a really good introduction! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Open Threads are usually Sundays, not Saturdays.
I don’t know how I feel about telling other people upfront about the hidden open threads. It’s one of those trivial things that make it harder for newbies to flood the place without acculturating themselves. But then again, I don’t usually see a difference between the hidden open threads and the public ones.
If it helps, -all- the OTs have been showing up on the “recent posts” sidebar for me for some time now even on the front page, even when not logged in. I’m pretty sure that was not always the case.
Has anyone seen any comments from Kevin C. since the first day or two of the last open thread, or know anywhere else that he hangs out online where they might have seen him? His posts on that day seemed even more fatalistic than usual, and since I haven’t seen any in this one, I wanted to make sure he didn’t do anything rash.
Poor old Kevin.
If I was a millionaire, I’d give that dude a job as head of the red team in my company.
He posted on his tumblr yesterday afternoon.
Thanks!
(I probably should have stopped to think that, oh yeah, the site where he linked that snippet of his fiction the other week was HIS Tumblr. To be fair, I’m posting this from work, where I can’t check Tumblr, so I guess it didn’t occur to me.)
Any recommendations for what I can do, as a parent, to get my kids to develop good exercise, nutrition, and body image habits? This question is, locally, triggered by this NYT article, but comes up more generally from my own experience with weight management. What I’ve found works for me is: (a) a lot of exercise, roughly 7-9 times per week which is a mix of weight lifting, moderate to intense cardio, and yoga
(b) strictly tracking my calorie consumption (using myFitnessPal)
(c) semi-strict daily calorie target: I don’t record estimated calories burned exercises and my target is pretty low. If I hit or exceed my target for the day, I will not eat for at least an hour, but will then eat more if I am feeling hungry. I don’t really want a calorie deficit, but I use this technique to distinguish need-to-eat from other sources of desire-to-eat.
(d) I really load up on vegetables (like 1kg of spinach is my normal serving size). This is necessary to be satisfied consuming within my calorie constraints.
From experiments with other variations, I’ve particularly found b+c to be key to maintaining reasonable body weight/composition (could note that I’m just inside the BMI range for “normal”) and d the key to making b+c sustainable. Oh, I’m also pretty strict about getting 7.5 hours or more of sleep each night, but that hasn’t seemed either necessary or sufficient in my past experiments.
While this works for me right now, I am not convinced this is an appropriate or ideal approach to teach my kids. In particular:
(1) it takes a lot of time and attention.
(2) seems prone to getting fixated on achieving an “ideal” body composition
(3) seems prone to getting carried away (more strict compliance with a more extreme calorie target).
(4) Not at all clear to me what the parameters should be for growing kids anyway.
Great thing about growing kids is they tend to easily burn a lot of calories. I’d say two things are probably most important
1) Lots of physical activity
2) Avoiding snacking, especially high-calorie snacks, especially when sedentary. Sitting in front of a screen with an open bag of high-calorie snack (even “healthy” ones) next to you is one of the easiest ways to become obese.
Limiting high-calorie drinks is important for anyone, though when doing a lot of exercise they have their place.
My impression is that calorie quantity is not something you need to worry about for kids; the main issues are quality (don’t feed them too much junk) and exercise.
This may not be helpful if your children are already born, but I know some researchers investigating metabolic programming and it looks like the fetal and neonatal environments might play a large role in weight regulation.
In the mouse, transplanting an embryo from a healthy mother to a pseudo-pregnant obese mouse results in pups which are much more likely to grow up obese. Similarly, if you feed pups a so-called “western diet” formula instead of milk they have the same issues. You can keep their weight down by controlling their diet but as soon as you let them eat ad libitum their weight shoots back up.
Obviously humans aren’t mice but I think there’s some epidemiological data with similar results in the human model.
(Note that while this is epigenetics, as it involves gene regulation, these are not heritable epialleles. There is a lot of confusion about epigenetics in the media due to sloppy science reporting.)
So if they’re already born maybe try to control their diets? You can’t control their eating behavior once they become adults but you can keep them healthy for their childhood and adolescence.
Find a sport each of them like and encourage him in it. Doesn’t necessarily have to be at a highly competitive level either. My 5’5″ brother played basketball from around age 15 to around age 35 two to three times a a week. My late 60s father plays tennis 2-3 times a week and is probably in better shape than I am.
Some people really get into the gamification aspects of exercise for the sake of exercise, but on average sports seem like a better bet.
I’ll echo and expand a little bit on what other people have said. Kids primarily need activity not exercise, as the latter will follow the former. Most children will push their physical boundaries fairly regularly if they are free to do so, climbing trees, running for no real reason, balancing on whatever is around etc. A lot of parents of small children don’t realize this and spend a ton of effort in counteracting their efforts to make their kids active. Half an hour in the car to and from dance class/sports/whatever is undoing a lot of the benefits of the class. Kids riding in shopping carts playing with a tablet likewise is a lost chance for activity which must be made up. The reply is often ‘I can’t send 20 extra mins in the grocery store, I have so much stuff to do, like take Johnny to taekwondo, if he doesn’t get that exercise in he won’t sleep.
School screws all of this up, with hours of restrictions followed by short bursts of activity, you want the opposite.
Modeling the behavior is good. I don’t think you need to model the process of counting calories or reps of exercises, but passing on habits of eating healthy food in moderation and being active every day is important. As they get a little older, you can explain why, of course. Bear in mind most people don’t need to count calories if they limit snacks and sodas.
Also remember you control what is in the kitchen, and how often the electronics–usually enjoyed sitting and with a handful of cheetos–are on. My kids enjoy snacking on carrots, celery, nuts, cheese, left over meat, etc. when they are hungry. Some others I could name get given candy to keep them quiet, and consequently have a mouth full of filled cavities.
Model enjoying vegetables. Talk about vegetables like they’re a treat (“ooh, today we get to have some artichoke”); this works best if you actually think of the vegetables as a treat. NEVER EVER EVER say something like “when you finish your vegetables then you get dessert.” That frames vegetables as a punishment.
Fat and salt make vegetables taste good. Whenever you cook a vegetable for a child, the recipe should have at least one or probably both. This doesn’t have to get very complicated; for example, steamed frozen vegetables with a little butter and salt is a fine thing to serve a child.
I also avoid intentionally avoid “eat everything on your plate”–especially since I don’t exactly measure out anyone’s portions. I say “Try a bite of everything. Eat until you aren’t hungry anymore. If there’s some left, we can pack it up or pass it around.”
Given the times we live in, better to learn to pay attention to your satiety than store up every spare calorie for lean times.
I was touched by Popehat’s recent article on a 15-Minutes-Of-Internet-Fame-Crazy-Racist with schizophrenia (along with a great comment from MawBTS on Chris-chan). The question of how much agency to give the severely mentally ill, or the point where derision should become sympathy, is one I’ve struggled with for a while now.
I know this is the sort of idea not likely to be popular among politicians because it holds them accountable, but has something like this ever been tried anywhere in the world, or even been proposed? I feel vaguely like I might have heard of such ideas in the notion of “sunset clauses,” but I feel like it could be (maybe already has been) made much better along such lines as:
Every time you want to pass a law that you predict will have positive effect x, you have to include some sort of tangible prediction or predictions which, if not met, will cause the law to auto-sunset.
Example, you claim a new tax bill will result in new jobs. Along with the bill, you submit something like “if unemployment has not gone down by at least 1% five years after this bill goes into effect, the bill will automatically become null and void.”
Of course, the worry will be that e. g. your bill will boost employment on net, but the effect might be swamped by other factors such that even though your bill has been helping, you won’t meet your target. Okay, include more details in the bill about how you calculate when the conditions will be met. Let’s say there is some other known indicator that strongly correlates with unemployment but which you don’t expect will be impacted by your bill. Now your bill says “this bill will stay in effect so long as, in five years, unemployment is down at least 1%, barring a spike in commodity index abc of >x%, in which case the necessary reduction will be reduced according to formula xyz.”
Of course, some politicians will still claim, when their favorite bill gets sunseted, that they could never have foreseen developments d, e, and f. Good, make them pass a new bill to keep it going, this time with better predictions. Maybe it would actually select for politicians with better prediction ability.
What I especially like about the idea is that it creates what seems a good incentive structure for politicians. Those who are willing to make bold, unqualified, short time-horizon claims for their bill will have a better chance of getting their bill passed, but also a greater risk of having it sunset, while those who want a law that will remain in effect with a high degree of certainty will have a harder time getting it passed in the first place, given the difficulty of selling e. g. a tax bill that only promises to reduce unemployment 1% in 10 years with asterisks x, y, and z.
Another advantage of this is that it wouldn’t take a Constitutional Amendment or even passage of a law to have it arise as a precedent. If, for example, just a few congresspersons or committees took to proposing bills including such caveats and loudly advertising the fact, would it not put a lot of public pressure on all the others to follow suit? “Mr. Senator, Representatives Alice and Bob guarantee that their preferred bill will reduce unemployment by at least 3% in five years or become null and void. What kind of promises can you make for your preferred version??”
It’s a common criticism of the Supreme Court that it legislates from the bench. One consequence of this proposal is that the CBO or equivalent would be put in a similar position, with, one presumes, a similar effect.
The CBO is already subject to all kinds of Goodhart’s law issues. It’s quite common for major proposals to be tailored to score well according to its metrics, at the expense of others.
Suppose there at present no intellectual property laws. Do you think there a predicable set of non-vacuous positive effects such that a set of those laws could persist under this system?
I don’t really understand why DandaWebmaster was banned, above.
To me, his comment seemed like a fair summary of JPNuez’s arguments. (And Dan finds it to be ridiculous.)
Though, regarding Damore, I would say that politely worded supposedly “scientific” works telling you you suck are far more annoying than people just saying “you suck”. It means you’re going to have to do some work on something you’re pretty sure is malicious nonsense.
So, in a way, completely irrational claims with no evidence *are* in a different category to pseudo-reasoned pieces. They are easier to ignore, easier to produce, and therefore don’t disrupt workflow.
That is why Damore must be punished.
I came to this conclusion by thinking about my experience of being told that Brexit voters were racist/stupid by coworkers, which is water off a duck’s back, and realising that I’d find a Damore style essay about why I was stupid far more annoying.
Agreed, especially given that JPNunez was being far more obnoxious, and at far greater length, without any consequences whatsoever.
I understand Scott’s reasoning.
Communists and SJWs are rare here, and while personally I’d say “good” Scott likes to have a balance. So giving them extra leeway in order to keep their numbers up makes sense.
Yeah, maybe.
Is it ever useful to say, “I find what you are saying to be ridiculous” ?
I don’t know. I mean JPNunez did essentially say, “don’t harass people with hateful facts.”
I agree with the person above who is talking about being fat and autistic. JP makes a fair statement if there isn’t a discussion occurring – but it’s not really fair or reasonable to give one side of a debate free reign, then call harassment on the other side for responding.
Given the actual Damore situation, I think JP might actually be saying something fairly ridiculous.
And, it probably is good to say when something is silly or ridiculous. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s something to do with remaining civilised. Keeping everything absolutely rational is dangerous because you don’t see the breaking point coming. Or because truth thrives in simplicity?
The Emperor has no clothes type thing.
There’s irony here though that if SJ aligned people are given a pass for lower standards of conduct, the ones that do remain are going to be the most abrasive, rudest, and weakest members of the commentariat, which ends up making the right wing posters look that much more reasonable by comparison.
I’m quite far left, and heavily predisposed to agree with our lefties on most things, and that’s already the impression I get from reading the comments here.
Yeah and because of that I don’t think it makes much sense to give those commenters a pass, because it surely doesn’t make this place seem more inviting to have them either be out-argued easily or to have people respond in kind (with rudeness).
I would think that having actually productive discussions with SJ advocates is more helpful to create an environment where more people with those beliefs are happy to contribute. Unfortunately, I think that academic and popular SJ ideology is generally so irrational that it is hard for SJ advocates to argue rationally, because they pretty much have to invent their own separate ideology for it to be fairly defensible. For example, Ozy has spend a lot of time on her blog steelmanning SJ concepts and rejecting indefensible SJ beliefs. She is very smart and spent a lot of effort on that, but it seems like too much to ask from the average pro-SJ person to make such an effort.
SJ-aligned people are not given a free pass here. The list of banned commenters has a number of SJ-ish people on it: 1 2 3 4, for example.
JPNunez made arguments. Lots of people think they were bad arguments, but it seems pretty obvious that they were made honestly. Dan, on the other hand, just dropped low-effort sarcasm into a conversation that was already shedding more heat than light. If that sarcasm had been backed up with actual engagement, I’m sure Dan would have been fine.
Scott doesn’t ban people for making dumb arguments. He bans people for making conversation bad.
Oh, I know they’re not given a complete pass, but people like earthly knight had to literally get to the point of saying “All right wingers are rape enablers and I will remind everyone of this this in every comment I make forever”, and then proceed to do so for a period of time before action was taken. I do think people like that are given much more slack than their right leaning counterparts.
Even many of our good left leaning commenters who contribute valuable knowledge and expertise have a tendency to fall into personal attacks in place of arguments. Your mileage may vary, but I think attacking someone’s status instead of their stance, and arguments of “you must agree with me, or you’re a shitty person” *are* bad conversation.
In the case of Dan, I think his post was true, and to a degree necessary. But that’s only because I think truth is an affirmative defense for accusations of discrimination. That said, it’s Scott’s house and he can Reign of Terror however he likes.
So, I hope for both your and Scott’s sakes that you’re correct and the bans are actually even handed even when they don’t seem so, because I don’t think we disagree that holding one side to a higher standard is likely to make sure the ones who do make the cut outclass their counterparts soundly. This doesn’t seem like a dynamic that one can negotiate away by arguing.
There’s nothing there to be true or false. The comment consisted entirely of playing to the crowd of people that already agreed with him. It was “get a load of this guy” using a tribal shibboleth of the alt right.
So not true, not kind, and I don’t see why such a thing would possibly be necessary. It wasn’t interesting, informative, insightful, or funny. I’m very pleased with the moderation decision and the return of moderation in general. (See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/27/links-2-18-link-biao-incident/#comment-606045 another good call.)
I disagree, because I think:
is a very, very dangerous road to walk down and should be pushed back against.
I agree that he should have gussied it up better, but that’s a little rich given the poster they were speaking to had already explicitly claimed that that saying something politely doesn’t make it ok. To wit:
Also, Brad, not to harsh on you too much personally, but I’ve seen your posts that were single line disagreements calling your interlocutor a ‘shitty poster’. I think you’re a very valuable commentor in general, but glass houses, man.
Low effort isn’t necessarily bad.
“I find that to be ridiculous.”
I mean, if that needs to be said, then Dan was just being efficient.
Even if it didn’t, it’s easy on the reader. Low risk strategy.
Without a further explanation, such a statement is nothing more than a down vote. I’m not in favor of merely expressing disapproval without a proper explanation.
Ultimately, just about any statement is going to be considered ridiculous by some people. Why would I care if Dan the Man has drawn a conclusion about something when he doesn’t express it in a way that lets me rationally accept or reject the way by which he drew his conclusion.
@Barely Matters
It’s not about her. It’s about Scott, and I agree 100%, not wanting these comments sections to be a place for snarky, alt right signaling, vacuous, one liners.
And that’s something that very easily could have happened here. I was saved from making that response by appropriate moderation. It’s a win-win.
Hmm, I’m not sure if “It’s good that Scott banned that guy, because I, one of our best left wing posters, might have said something banworthy if he hadn’t”, pushes against my original point, but ok.
You don’t think moderation should target, among other things, flamebait and trolling?
I do, and I think it should do so evenhandedly.
Because if not, then the side that gets the easy treatment ends up looking worse for it. You’re as good as left gets here, Brad (certainly better than I am). And if you can barely restrain yourself from personal attacks, it makes us all look awful as a group, and makes the right wing’s job of being more reasonable way too easy.
I almost agree with you Aapje, but, on the other hand, Brad scares me.
And, I feel like, with that kind of truthful statement, maybe you have to balance likelihood of usefulness against disturbance caused.
So some little cheeky comment doesn’t have to be as obviously useful as a long offensive rant.
@Barely matters
I don’t really care to be Alan Colmes, the obsequiously polite token slightly left of center poster in an otherwise right to far right space. Based on observing his moderation directives and comments over time I don’t think that’s what Scott is looking for here either. YMMV
Sure, and this collective decision not to do so is why the right ends up looking flat out better here. What we need are left wing David Friedmans, not more MoonJills.
Aapje might be as close as we get (With Aapje being quite left aside from feminism, and David F being considered Right despite advocating for open borders).
Insert generic resistance here against this being a right to far right leaning space. I feel like our rightwing posters are better spoken on average, not more numerous.
I pretty much agree with Brad’s assessment, though for different reasons: I think Dan’s statement was pretty much accurate, but was neither kind nor necessary. It was going to make a tense argument only become more so, for one, and for another, as Iain and Aapje and others have suggested, better to hear an argument than a downvote.
I think there’s a gap between Brad’s occasional on-topic one-liners and something as low-effort and “general purpose” to the extent of being almost contextless as what got the hammer here.
On a similar line: dogpiling is sometimes a thing. What can be done about that? It’s not something where anyone is actually breaking the rules, but a whole bunch of people responding to the same person creates a certain atmosphere.
EDIT: @Barely matters
How one categorizes “left” or “right” is an issue in defining whether a space is left-leaning or right-leaning. A lot of Canadian Tories would be, if you transplanted their views to the US, Democrats of some stripe or another; here they’re right-wingers. The thing in this space that bothers me is, less than numbers, a certain loss of standards of precision when talking about anything left-of-centre – eg, “leftist” is often used to encompass a lot of people and positions, whereas people zoom in to a higher resolution when talking about stuff on the right.
I think that when you feel like you are being dog piled you should say “I feel like I am being dog piled – I don’t like it for these reasons” and then someone should record that data and make an analysis of it.
And, if no-one says that, we should not worry about dog piles.
To be honest, I think dogpiling is less a problem here than other places I’ve been, especially because we aren’t so bad at self-policing. In my experience, as long as people are disagreeing politely, a lot of disagreement isn’t really the problem—rather, it’s when comments like Dan’s are thrown in that the atmosphere feels very different. Thinking about loud here, but it’s the difference between having interlocutors that you’re actually talking to and have a shot at convincing one way or the other, versus just having an audience jeering or mocking you, especially whose minds seem pretty well made up already. So even though I acknowledged that Dan’s mocking was accurate, I still don’t think it was just.
I rarely feel like I’m being dogpiled, but I see it happen.
EDIT: @Nick, I mean, less like, hostile dogpiling, but having a half-dozen people politely disagreeing with you (possibly at length) can seem overwhelming.
@dndnrsn
I agree with you, but doesn’t the fact that people who would be considered left in other contexts being categorized as right here point to the space’s center of mass being calibrated to the left?
If someone who would be a US democrat is considered to be to our right, I’d take that as evidence that the community here is further left than anything. More specifically, if someone who is pro redistribution, pro choice, pro lgbt rights, pro equality, anti discrimination, entirely left leaning except for being anti identity politics is what passes for “Right wing”, then I think that demonstrates us to be quite left leaning as a group.
@Barely matters
I think it points less to the actual political orientation of this place, and more to what gets discussed here. If we only discussed health care policy, Aapje would be left and David Friedman would be right. If we only discussed immigration (and it was taken as given that closer to open borders is left and closer to closed borders is right) David Friedman would be on the left. If we only discussed naval warfare, people would only be port or starboard (I imagine the former as pro-carrier and the latter as pro-battleship, perhaps?)
I think that boiling it down to “is this place right or left” obscures that there’s one stance on stuff that gets categorized as “identity politics” that gets coded as left, and another that gets coded as right, or “right-feeling”, even if held by someone left-wing. This isn’t so much a left or a right wing place, as a place where people are fairly hostile to “identity politics” – in my view, often excessively so, sometimes ludicrously. By the standards of wherever it is mainstream Republicans hang out, this place is left-wing, or would get categorized as such; by the standards of a gender studies department, this place is right-wing, or would get categorized as such.
I am often unsure of the proper categorization of a position. Perhaps you can write a definitive guide to using the terms liberal, left, progressive, social justice advocate, socialist, radial, and communist so we can be clear moving forward.
@Barely matters
It was being pushed back against, indeed there were five or so people in that subthread alone doing so (with contentful arguments) before Dan’s comment. “Damore shouldn’t have been fired” isn’t a bold contrarian point in this sphere.
Who the hell is actually pro-battleship in the current year?
@dndnrsn
I can agree with that assessment wholeheartedly.
For the most part, this place is strongly against identity politics.
Personally that’s one of the reasons I like it, because that’s one thing I would like to see a lot less of everywhere.
@Rlms
“Damore shouldn’t have been fired” definitely isn’t boldly contrarian, but “Facts are not discriminatory” seems to be still up in the air. The inverse, that some facts must be suppressed because we don’t like what they imply, should be pushed back against as hard as possible in my opinion.
@Barely matters (edit: at 3:04 pm this is moving fast)
I don’t really feel like having this entire debate again, but briefly: if all we have is someone’s bare claim that they are “pro redistribution, pro choice, pro lgbt rights, pro equality, [and] anti discrimination” but on the other hand we have endless numbers of posts from that poster that are “anti identity politics” then as a SSC poster, which is all that matters here, he ought to be counted as on the right wing.
The old saying goes on the internet no one knows if you are a dog. The same thing goes with a being a leftist. The best evidence we have is what a particular nym chooses to post about and from what viewpoint.
Ah. I think saying explicitly “I’m feeling dogpiled here” isn’t a bad solution, but most of it’s going to come from people choosing to refrain themselves. Consider these loose rules:
1) Is the post directed at you specifically? You’re good to respond. Otherwise…
2) How many other people have already responded to it? Is it more than (say) 2? If so, refrain, unless…
3) Do you have something to add to the conversation you don’t think anyone else will? Then you can, but there’s definitely a chance you’ll make them feel dogpiled.
I tend to follow something like these rules. Unfortunately, they leave me watching on the sidelines a lot, and sometimes grumbling about it on Discord instead of just posting. But these things are after all a tradeoff. For instance, I hopped into the discussion with LadyJane above, but I’m probably not going to continue, although I have a lot of objections to her latest post. She didn’t respond directly to me but Aapje instead, and Aapje and lvlln can definitely take care of themselves.
ETA: I think the rules I gave are pretty commonsense, almost to the point of triviality, but the key rule in my opinion is 2. It’s all too tempting to be first! when someone’s opened themselves up to a really obvious counterargument, and when we know perfectly well other people are responding to it, or are about to, I think we’re best to just refrain.
I pretty much do what Nick does, with the caveat that I don’t always refresh the page before posting (doing so changes what is marked as new) and so sometimes there are already 2-3 replies down by the time mine goes up.
@Brad
You’ve made that statement before, and I (As well as many others) have disagreed with it entirely. I don’t think the left has a monopoly on identity politics anymore, and believe that it’s just as awful when the right employs them, so, where am I on your scale? I’m also content to acknowledge your viewpoint and agree to disagree here if you’d prefer not to rehash the whole thing.
@Barely matters
Feminism is a topic where I am very progressive IMO, in the sense that I strongly reject double standards for men and women, scientifically unsupported prejudice about men and women, etc; to an extent that feminists don’t commonly do.
I don’t accept that ideologies whose foundation consists of scientifically invalidated or unsupported beliefs, are more progressive than a more realistic ideology, even if the unrealistic ideology theoretically results in a more egalitarian society. I rate ideologies by (their ability to achieve) actual results, not by how good they are at pretending that inconvenient facts don’t exist. If nature is non-egalitarian, we must find a way to minimize the negative effects of that on human happiness. We cannot just make nature egalitarian by wishing it were so.
This is also why I don’t consider Marxism–Leninism more progressive than social democracy, because the former cannot but result in oppression and corruption, rather than the egalitarianism that it promises, because the axioms are incorrect. Acting to achieve a perfect goal based on false axioms is never going to result in getting that outcome, in the same way that 1 + 1 is never going to become 3. Trying to force the perfect outcome is most likely going to result in a much worse outcome than if you go for a less perfect goal that is realistic.
I fully expect Cthulhu to eventually make the traditionalist and sexist aspects of modern mainstream feminism into an anachronism & that something similar to my beliefs will then be the progressive alternative. It may take a long time and by that time the dilemma’s that we now struggle with may be partially solved through technological progress, better science and/or simply by wealth increases which allow us to solve problems by throwing lots of money at it. That then would allow us to set a better realistic goal, but that still doesn’t make it wrong to currently aim for the best realistic goal within our current limitations.
@Fahundo
Look at this, right here. This is the kind of closemindedness we as a society need to get rid of. Please watch all 37 hours of my pro-battleship Youtube channel, and then we can discuss this, in a civil and informed manner.
@Aapje
I’d also argue that your views on feminism are much more progressive than the common understanding, but I think we’re in the minority on that.
This is the main hangup I see in political conversation here, in that most of the political disagreement appears to be different stripes of left trying to paint each other as right wing. I think you’re quite left and very articulate, I think Brad is quite left and very articulate (When he wants to be), but I think Brad would not agree on the similarity. Although I could be wrong, and am open to correction.
“SSC is so right wing” reads to me like:
This place is all godless heathens, everyone worships at the Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915, rather than the rightful Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879!”
If it were up to me, we’d all move in the direction you’re advocating because I think it ends up being better for everyone.
@Barely matters
If what you are in fact saying is the case, let’s just divide into port and starboard. Port is pro-identity politics, in the context of this space, and also likes carriers. Starboard is anti-identity politics, in the context of this space, and favours battleships. Some may say that I am smuggling in completely unrelated naval warfare issues, to which I would reply, look at that what is that over there how about that
But we’ll need to come up with a whole new set of contemptuous nicknames that way.
@dndnrsn
I may just not have the required 185 minimum IQ to know what’s going on here, but you lost me on that one!
Battleships have been left behind by the modern world though, might as well be pro-horsedrawn buggy.
Well, we can’t argue over who had the best armoured vehicles in WWII, because we’d all be tankies then.
@Fahundo
Without a carriage, what use have you for footmen? Checkmate, nonconformists!
@Barely matters
I think that’s for the best. After I started drafting, dndnrsn wrote:
If you want to take what I said about Alan Colmes and substitute “from fairly to ludicrously hostile to identity politics” for “from right to far right” that’s fine with me.
But I think you need to stop and take stock of where you are when you are nodding along with an explicit call out like the term hatefacts. Look at who you are getting into bed with.
Anyway, the vitriol towards people that make up a large-ish percentage of the left of center coalition all across the west is off the charts. Call it the social left, SJ, identity politics, whatever — it doesn’t matter that much. Only people that can tolerate that constant vitriol are going to stick around. I’m not even in any of those groups, just in political coalition with them, and it obviously sticks in my craw. That’s drumbeat is a much larger discriminant in terms of who posts here than all of Scott’s moderation decisions put together.
I get that you basically agree with the anti-SJ people and that’s fine, but I think you are letting the tail wag the dog. You are talking about even handed moderation, but there’s no one on the other side to moderate. There isn’t one single full fledged SJ supporter that posts regularly. The best we have are people that are in ideologically coalition with the people that espouse those viewpoints and are sympathetic to them. And not that many of those.
So when you say:
what do you mean? Ban me? Okay, then what?
Or when you say:
do you realize that you are letting your object level position drive what you are saying is and isn’t acceptable posting behavior?
@Brad
Sure, I’d accept you changing your argument from ‘right to far right’ to ‘ludicrously against identity politics.’ I see these as being entirely different things.
When you mention the other people who use the term ‘hatefacts’, I’d position myself against them because I disagree with their use of identity politics too. But arguments aren’t soldiers in my book, so I don’t care who is saying “The truth can’t be discriminatory”, I agree with them on that point. This, I think, is our biggest disagreement. I don’t think agreeing with a point that someone reprehensible makes is ‘getting into bed’ with them. And certainly don’t think that ‘someone else thinks the same way, and they’re double dog bad!’ is an argument that deserves to be taken seriously.
Further, Ban you? No Brad, not in the slightest. I started out here saying that I don’t think either of you should be banned until you go considerably further. I think the community did a good job in letting you know when you were stepping out of line and you stopped, and I think we would all have been worse off if Scott had banned you at your first “I think you’re shit and thus don’t care about your opinion” post. On the other side, I feel the same about people like Deiseach, who frequently go a off the rails, but have extremely valuable insight into their domains. But this isn’t my call to make; I’m just a reader and occasional poster.
I’m saying that I hope the bans are even handed because I think that bias will be felt in the quality of the remaining posters regardless of what any one of us thinks about the ban’s fairness.
So, no, I don’t think that I am letting the object level determine my meta level principles here. If you can think of any other position I hold where facts should be suppressed for the sake of ideology I’m open to hearing it. I got pretty annoyed when our former conservative government censored ecological scientists, and think the same when the US government does the same. From this angle I believe my perspective on this is quite consistent and applies to both political sides.
But I think you need to stop and take stock of where you are when you are nodding along with an explicit call out like the term hatefacts. Look at who you are getting into bed with.
A thing for your perspective – “You look like [evil person] when you say that!” is not as persuasive against right wing/libertarian sorts as it is on the left. For one, it’s considered better to argue against the argument, or the (alleged) facts, not against the person making the argument, and certainly not against some other, not-involved person or group who is not even present, much less reliably relevant to the conversation.
(It’s a bit too much like repeating someone else’s talking points when one doesn’t even understand them well.)
For another, it invites low quality mockery of the “You know WHO ELSE was a vegan/loved dogs/had facial hair/gave long speeches/liked to paint” sort.
I know its only a small part of your post, but I get the impression you really are interested in changing peoples minds on various subjects, and you might find dropping this particular tactic helpful.
Anyway, carry on.
I think there’s a distinction to be made between an argument and distinctive neologism. I mean I can say “hey the police really ought to stop killing so many black people” or I can say “black lives matter”. I would think there’s important difference between those two statements.
But if it’s not persuasive, it’s not persuasive. Thanks for letting me know.
You rang?
Seriously, I run across people who want to reactivate them every couple months. I took it seriously enough to write a long rebuttal. I’m not pro-reactivation, because I don’t allow my aesthetic preferences to dictate my policy choices, but lots of people do. And I’m pro-battleship in the same way that David Freidman is pro-Medieval Islamic Cooking.
Stop insulting my
girlfriendship.(I take it you don’t know of our tradition of naval discussion. It’s moderated since I set up Naval Gazing independently.)
@dndnrsn
No, battleships are armored vehicles, too. The answer, of course, is the US, because we had the Iowa.
The battleship has not been tried and found vulnerable to air attack. It has been found difficult and left untried.
@Paul Zrimsek
The HMS Prince of Wales was sunk by air attack. And so were the Yamato and the Musashi. All three were battleships.
Ah, but all three had badly flawed torpedo-defense systems, and thus were not true battleships. The true battleship remains untried!
Clearly, the problem with battleships is that they were not big enough.
Fact: airstrikes on land do not cause the land to sink.
Fact: this is because continents are too large to sink. Even most islands are too large to sink.
Conclusion: if we made battleships as large as necessary to be unsinkable, they would be unsinkable.
Suggestion for further study: could we make a battleship large enough to take up every connected ocean in the world?
I like the way you think. I once attempted to model something like that in SpringSharp, and got the following. The guns are somewhat smaller than I’d like due to program limits, but you could easily add Schwere Gustavs without an issue. And a medium-sized flight deck, if you could find somewhere that didn’t have serious blast issues. I’d suggest boarding, probably with paratroopers, as the way to deal with it:
H-1000, Nazi Germany Superbattleship laid down 1950
Displacement:
7,476,174 t light; 8,351,206 t standard; 11,441,950 t normal; 13,914,550 t full load
Dimensions: Length (overall / waterline) x beam x draught (normal/deep)
(5,003.96 ft / 4,921.26 ft) x 656.17 ft (Bulges 688.98 ft) x (196.85 / 232.01 ft)
(1,525.21 m / 1,500.00 m) x 200.00 m (Bulges 210.00 m) x (60.00 / 70.72 m)
Armament:
120 – 21.65″ / 550 mm 70.0 cal guns – 5,688.54lbs / 2,580.28kg shells, 400 per gun
Breech loading guns in turret on barbette mounts, 1950 Model
22 x 4-gun mounts on centreline, evenly spread
10 raised mounts
8 x 4-gun mounts on centreline, evenly spread
8 double raised mounts
240 – 13.78″ / 350 mm 70.0 cal guns – 1,465.94lbs / 664.94kg shells, 750 per gun
Breech loading guns in turret on barbette mounts, 1950 Model
48 x 4-gun mounts on sides, evenly spread
18 raised mounts
12 x Single mounts on sides, evenly spread
12 double raised mounts
480 – 8.46″ / 215 mm 70.0 cal guns – 339.80lbs / 154.13kg shells, 1,500 per gun
Auto rapid fire guns in turret on barbette mounts, 1950 Model
48 x 2 row decuple mounts on sides, evenly spread
16 raised mounts
360 – 3.94″ / 100 mm 80.0 cal guns – 34.82lbs / 15.79kg shells, 15,000 per gun
Auto rapid fire guns in turret on barbette mounts, 1950 Model
90 x Quad mounts on sides, evenly spread
30 raised mounts
2000 – 1.18″ / 30.0 mm 100.0 cal guns – 0.97lbs / 0.44kg shells, 100,000 per gun
Auto rapid fire guns in deck and hoist mounts, 1950 Model
200 x 2 row decuple mounts on sides, evenly spread
Weight of broadside 1,212,027 lbs / 549,766 kg
Main Torpedoes
240 – 78.7″ / 2,000 mm, 131.23 ft / 40.00 m torpedoes – 109.361 t each, 26,246.610 t total
In 60 sets of deck mounted side rotating tubes
2nd Torpedoes
1200 – 29.5″ / 750 mm, 49.21 ft / 15.00 m torpedoes – 5.994 t each, 7,193.305 t total
In 120 sets of deck mounted side rotating tubes
Mines
1000 – 2,204.62 lbs / 1,000.00 kg mines + 2000 reloads – 2,952.619 t total
in Above water – Stern racks/rails
Main DC/AS Mortars
60 – 2,204.62 lbs / 1,000.00 kg trainable AS Mortars + 6000 reloads – 5,964.292 t total
2nd DC/AS Mortars
1200 – 220.46 lbs / 100.00 kg ahead throwing AS Mortars + 120000 reloads – 11,928.580 t total
Armour:
– Belts: Width (max) Length (avg) Height (avg)
Main: 27.6″ / 700 mm 3,198.82 ft / 975.00 m 30.74 ft / 9.37 m
Ends: 27.6″ / 700 mm 1,722.41 ft / 524.99 m 30.74 ft / 9.37 m
Upper: 27.6″ / 700 mm 3,198.82 ft / 975.00 m 8.01 ft / 2.44 m
Main Belt covers 100 % of normal length
– Torpedo Bulkhead – Additional damage containing bulkheads:
0.79″ / 20 mm 3,198.82 ft / 975.00 m 185.63 ft / 56.58 m
Beam between torpedo bulkheads 590.55 ft / 180.00 m
– Hull Bulges:
0.79″ / 20 mm 3,198.82 ft / 975.00 m 131.23 ft / 40.00 m
– Gun armour: Face (max) Other gunhouse (avg) Barbette/hoist (max)
Main: 31.5″ / 800 mm 23.6″ / 600 mm 27.6″ / 700 mm
2nd: 15.7″ / 400 mm 11.8″ / 300 mm 11.8″ / 300 mm
3rd: 11.8″ / 300 mm 9.84″ / 250 mm 9.84″ / 250 mm
4th: 3.94″ / 100 mm 1.97″ / 50 mm 1.97″ / 50 mm
– Armoured deck – multiple decks:
For and Aft decks: 11.81″ / 300 mm
Forecastle: 11.81″ / 300 mm Quarter deck: 11.81″ / 300 mm
– Conning towers: Forward 39.37″ / 1,000 mm, Aft 39.37″ / 1,000 mm
Machinery:
Oil fired boilers, steam turbines,
Electric motors, 200 shafts, 12,651,580 shp / 9,438,076 Kw = 45.00 kts
Range 50,000nm at 40.00 kts
Bunker at max displacement = 5,563,342 tons
Complement:
98,361 – 127,875
Cost:
£3,757.254 million / $15,029.010 million
Distribution of weights at normal displacement:
Armament: 554,200 tons, 4.8 %
– Guns: 400,130 tons, 3.5 %
– Weapons: 154,071 tons, 1.3 %
Armour: 1,403,049 tons, 12.3 %
– Belts: 200,574 tons, 1.8 %
– Torpedo bulkhead: 17,300 tons, 0.2 %
– Bulges: 12,230 tons, 0.1 %
– Armament: 544,601 tons, 4.8 %
– Armour Deck: 542,205 tons, 4.7 %
– Conning Towers: 86,138 tons, 0.8 %
Machinery: 302,669 tons, 2.6 %
Hull, fittings & equipment: 5,166,255 tons, 45.2 %
Fuel, ammunition & stores: 3,965,778 tons, 34.7 %
Miscellaneous weights: 50,000 tons, 0.4 %
– Hull below water: 25,000 tons
– Hull above water: 10,000 tons
– On freeboard deck: 10,000 tons
– Above deck: 5,000 tons
Overall survivability and seakeeping ability:
Survivability (Non-critical penetrating hits needed to sink ship):
29,213,670 lbs / 13,251,100 Kg = 5,754.8 x 21.7 ” / 550 mm shells or 299.6 torpedoes
Stability (Unstable if below 1.00): 1.11
Metacentric height 102.2 ft / 31.2 m
Roll period: 28.6 seconds
Steadiness – As gun platform (Average = 50 %): 100 %
– Recoil effect (Restricted arc if above 1.00): 0.11
Seaboat quality (Average = 1.00): 1.22
Hull form characteristics:
Hull has a flush deck,
an extended bulbous bow and large transom stern
Block coefficient (normal/deep): 0.600 / 0.619
Length to Beam Ratio: 7.14 : 1
‘Natural speed’ for length: 81.37 kts
Power going to wave formation at top speed: 31 %
Trim (Max stability = 0, Max steadiness = 100): 100
Bow angle (Positive = bow angles forward): 30.00 degrees
Stern overhang: 16.40 ft / 5.00 m
Freeboard (% = length of deck as a percentage of waterline length):
Fore end, Aft end
– Forecastle: 20.00 %, 114.83 ft / 35.00 m, 82.02 ft / 25.00 m
– Forward deck: 30.00 %, 82.02 ft / 25.00 m, 65.62 ft / 20.00 m
– Aft deck: 35.00 %, 65.62 ft / 20.00 m, 65.62 ft / 20.00 m
– Quarter deck: 15.00 %, 65.62 ft / 20.00 m, 65.62 ft / 20.00 m
– Average freeboard: 73.98 ft / 22.55 m
Ship space, strength and comments:
Space – Hull below water (magazines/engines, low = better): 32.7 %
– Above water (accommodation/working, high = better): 328.2 %
Waterplane Area: 2,461,481 Square feet or 228,679 Square metres
Displacement factor (Displacement / loading): 306 %
Structure weight / hull surface area: 1,746 lbs/sq ft or 8,526 Kg/sq metre
Hull strength (Relative):
– Cross-sectional: 2.18
– Longitudinal: 1.13
– Overall: 1.33
Excellent machinery, storage, compartmentation space
Excellent accommodation and workspace room
Ship has slow, easy roll, a good, steady gun platform
Good seaboat, rides out heavy weather easily
The designers of the Arkansas
were inspired to choose a form that was
the exact dimensions and the shape
of the state whose name she bore.
Bean and dndrsn
If you haven’t seen it, be sure to check out Admiral Furashita’s Fleet.
Fort Drum is still… uh, I need a better word than “afloat”… and that’s about as close as you can get to a battleship without actually making a ship.
Jumping late into the conversation, I agree with Iain when he said
My take away, when it it is a potentially touchy subject try and make sure your comment is true, necessary, and kind. If it isn’t one of those, make sure you have a good reason for it. Dan’s comments were not necessary or kind hence the ban.
@bean, What a sensible, practical design. Good thing the Kriegsmarine didn’t actually have anyone like you working for them, or the Allies would have been in trouble! 🙂
@cassander
Stuff like that always makes me a bit nervous, because it’s usually seriously contaminated with the classic tendencies of Napkinwaffe. “Here’s a great idea. Let’s assume it will work, and take no account of the ways it can go wrong.”
Take the angled-deck carrier they mention. Probably the biggest driver behind the non-adoption of the angled deck was that up until just before the war, airplanes were light enough that the turbulence coming off the island was a serious problem for them. Or the catamaran aircraft carrier. I don’t even want to count how many things could go badly wrong there.
@Nornagest
Wait, that’s in upstate New York. Why is it battleship-like?
(Checks wiki)
Oh….
@Protagoras
I’ve toyed with the idea of releasing it into the wild and trying to trick Wehraboos into believing it was a real project.
@bean
“ze Englander cannot control ze sees… if our schiffs TAKE UP ZE SEE”
In a similar vein: the HMCS Unicorn, a “shore-based naval reserve” in (thoroughly land-locked) Saskatoon, steadfastly insists that it is in fact a ship.
This has to do with the peculiar British belief that naval personnel must be assigned to a ship. Up until the mid-1800s, the RN continued to cling to the fiction that it was a collection of ships hired for the short term. Also, until the late 1800s, most shore facilities were kept in hulked ships, which were kept in theoretical commission. The result of this is that all RN shore stations are technically commissioned as ships. For instance, the RN gunnery school was HMS Excellent for over a century, first through a succession of hulks and then when it really moved ashore. I’d assume the Canadians inherited it. (In Britain, of course, you’re never that far from the sea, so it’s not as notable there.)
You say “peculiar British belief”; I say “awesome and unsinkable”. Enough of this “shore station” nonsense; in this modern age of global warming and rising seas, our naval installations must be located as far as possible from the threat of water.
Canada has no shortage of things of maritime/naval significance in landlocked provinces, as seen inMeads v. Meads:
No, you have it precisely backwards. Rising seas mean that navies are growing more important, as they have total control over more of the planet’s surface. And that means we need more ships.
@dndnrsn
So Canada doesn’t exist? Excellent. We’d better carve the area into more new states before anyone else notices. Except Quebec. I think I’ll attach it to Texas.
Are we gonna have to dust off Defence Scheme No. 1? And what do you have against Texas?
I also used to live a few blocks from the then-fairly-intact wreck of the SS Palo Alto — so, in my life, I’ve seen a concrete tanker that was a ship and a concrete battleship that wasn’t.
Hah! It won’t help. You have no amphibious capability, and because Canada only exists at sea, you can’t invade overland!
I live in Oklahoma.
How did I not know about that? I really should have. I know about the concrete barge mess from WWII.
I always assumed that the people we’re talking about were Biblical literalists who believe that Psalm 107 commands them to go down to the sea in ships, and call down God’s judgment on the heretics who go down to the sea in cars or buses or whatever and only then get on the ships.
Meads v Meads is a genuinely fascinating piece of legal writing.
A few highlights:
@bean
I’m actually posting this from my phone while riding on the back of a specially trained giant beaver.
@dndnrsn
…Dad?
Note to self. Recommend activation of Contingency Plan Dipole-34-Q-Python.
So bean, you know about the five states of Texas? The reason most people leave out the the Panhandle is because it’s practically Oklahoma.
Southern Oklahoma? You mean Dallas?
This is just something that bugs me, but what in your eyes makes this “science” rather than science?
There are valid reasons to distrust results coming out of the social science literature, and psychological results in particular. Psychometrics doesn’t seem to have been hit much by the replication crisis afaik but no one can fault caution given the scale of the problem with reproducibility.
But “it’s mean” is not a valid reason. A lot of things that we wish weren’t the case have been demonstrated by scientific evidence. We don’t get to pick and choose what science we acknowledge based on nothing but personal prejudice.
Priors.
We’re all operating on trust at some level, and personal experience isn’t a bad starting point for deciding which way to look – if I’m a woman who likes machines, and I’m told that women (on average) don’t like machines, why not assume the person telling me this is full of shit.
It doesn’t matter if I’m wrong, as an individual. It’s irrelevant and damaging to insist on being personally right. What’s important is that the system channels the energy provided by my individual prejudices into generating macro-level truth.
Maybe this is a problem of framing: why should being a woman be the important thing to care about, rather than, say, having kids? I don’t like being in a work situation where I’m the only parent; it is a strong predictor that I won’t really connect with my coworkers on a personal or cultural level. Much stronger than if I’m the only male. If a graph showed that males are less likely to enter my profession or succeed in it, that wouldn’t bother me nearly as much as a graph showing that parents are less likely to enter my field or succeed in it.
Or, maybe this is a problem of personal nuance: if a graph did show either of the above things, I’d take it as a challenge, and even relish the unexpectedness of my being in that field and doing well in it. I imagine a lot of male nurses, cheerleaders, ballet dancers, secretaries, and librarians feel this way.
Because they are saying that women aren’t good at it.
I do think it’s down to personal psychology, and confidence. The example of this, for me, is Japanese.
My Japanese isn’t the best in the world, but it’s alright, and pretty much whenever I read a bit of text in Japanese where Japanese people can see, they’ll say something like “Oh… wow… can you read Japanese?” “Can you read Hiragana?” “A, I, U, E, O”
The fact that they are so amazed that I can read the fucking letter “a” or something, makes me never want to use the Japanese language ever again. And, obviously it’s true that most non-Japanese people can’t read Japanese, but I find it intensely irritating to be reminded of that, constantly.
Or if they start going on about how no-one can understand their culture.
“Foreigners can’t understand saying sorry all the time, it is very confusing for them.”
I’m English, mate.
Now, whenever I meet a Japanese person who wants to talk about anything like that I just go on about how much I admire their “Ninja culture.”
Because that would be typical-minding in the first degree. If you are a person who likes reason, then “I am a woman who likes machines” is a fact that you should consider of very little relevance to anyone’s assessment of women on average. I mean, if you are a Kinsey-6 male homosexual and someone says, “Men on average like to have sex with women”, do you assess them as being full of shit?
If you are a woman who knows a lot of other women who like machines, and in particular about as many women who like machines as you do women who don’t like machines, that would be a half-decent reason to dismiss Mr. “women on average don’t like machines” as being full of shit. It then becomes a fully decent reason when you account for selection bias in the sample of women you know.
I think there is probably something to be said for treating personal experience as higher quality evidence because it is direct and simple.
All things being equal, the more complex a statement is, the less likely it is to be true.
So, personal experience seems like a reasonable starting point, at the least.
[I suppose we’re really talking about which aspects of personal experience we should pay attention to.]
Er, higher quality evidence of what?
If a woman’s personal experience is that she’s a woman who likes machines, it’s extremely strong evidence that she’s a woman who likes machines, and it’s also extremely strong evidence that there exists at least 1 woman who likes machines (equivalently, extremely strong evidence that the statement “there exists zero women who like machines” is false).
But it’s absolutely worthless as evidence on the question of whether women on average like machines, or whether or not women on average like machines less than men on average like machines.
Well, ok, lets say I turn on the tv and it says “90% of people with green eyes don’t like broccoli.” And, now that I think about it, the other people in my family with green eyes don’t like broccoli. But I love broccoli. I have green eyes.
I can’t tell whether my personal evidence is relevant or not without first assigning some probability to the truthfulness of the tv. I know my personal experience is true. How do I tell whether the tv is likely to be truthful (which is what we are talking about for the most part when we go “science”)?
Personal experience seems like a reasonable starting point.
Well sure, it’s a reasonable starting point. But the idea of a starting point is that hopefully we leave where we started and end up somewhere else. How do we tell whether the TV is likely to be truthful? There are a lot of things we can do, such as look at the general trustworthiness of the specific TV show or journalist, or look into the actual study that’s being referenced, call up the scientist(s) who did the research for clarification, try to replicate the study or do a better version of the same study. It’s a difficult endeavor, and like with all things in science, you’ll never achieve 100% certainty, but it’s probably better than trying to infer from an n=1 to a population-level conclusion.
But perhaps the biggest insight to gather from this example is that “90% of people with green eyes don’t like broccoli” does not at all contradict my lived experience of being a person with green eyes who likes broccoli. It wouldn’t even contradict my lived experience if the claim from the TV was that “99.9% of people with green eyes don’t like broccoli.” In fact, even if every human being I knew with green eyes also loved broccoli, it wouldn’t tell me anything about the likelihood such a study being true or false – not unless I personally knew some inordinately high proportion of humans who have green eyes.
So in this example, it’d be perfectly reasonable to dispassionately investigate the claim from the TV using the normal scientific channels available to investigate ANY truth claim, while being perfectly confident that no matter what such an investigation came up with, it wouldn’t and couldn’t possibly contradict my own personal lived experience.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that nearly every woman in tech has had the experience of being the only woman in the room at some technical conference or class. They know how rare it is for women to share their interests.
And they don’t, in fact can’t, have the experience of being a non-technical woman. They are speculating about the motives of those women for avoiding tech just as much as technical or non-technical men are.
The way that that happens, the only way, is that we change our beliefs to reflect new evidence.
What you’re saying is that you’re so absolutely certain that you’re right that you can simply throw out any evidence that doesn’t support your view. That’s dogmatism.
If there is a spectrum of passion for any particular view point, perhaps people at different points on that spectrum have different roles to play in the game of truth.
Extremely passionate people are likely to be rare, they are also likely to be the ones with the motivation to make the arguments. Does it matter if they are dogmatic?
I don’t think so – an individually dogmatic person who is extremely skeptical about anything that someone who opposes their dogma says, is not a social problem.
I would say we would be more likely to have a problem if rather than following our individual preferences and personality quirks and ending up on some weird hill to die on, we all followed some particular method and ended up on the same hill.
Fallacy of composition type thing.
I mean we’re talking about a case where the “particular method” is the scientific method.
Getting everyone on the hill where we judge our beliefs by their testable predictions would be fucking amazing. Even if we all just camped down at the base where we offer up studies which seem to support our preferred beliefs would be 1,000x better than the hills most people are on right now.
When it comes to understanding the world, science is preferable to willful ignorance.
Because your sample size is too small to provide any significant evidence about women on average.
if I’m a woman who likes machines, and I’m told that women (on average) don’t like machines, why not assume the person telling me this is full of shit
Oh for crying out loud. I’m a woman who does not like lipstick. On average, so I am told, women like lipstick. Do I therefore assume the person telling me this is full of shit, or do I look at all the ads for lipstick, brands of lipstick on sale in the chemists, women I see at work and passing by in the street wearing lipstick and so on and so forth, and decide “well, perhaps despite my own preferences, there is something to this notion that women do like lipstick”?
I’d like to think you have a good argument to make, can you please not phrase it in terms that make you sound like you’re a Martian?
People on my tv tell me lots of contradictory things.
There are normally multiple ways to interpret evidence.
At some stage in the process of assessing evidence you have to make a subjective judgement of how likely or relevant something is.
When people give you a bit of science, what they are really giving you is an argument that you’re going to have to be extremely motivated to get involved with.
So, yeah, you’ve got two options. (1) is just more or less ignore what the people on the TV are telling you, and just decide whether they are telling the truth on the basis of their clothes, or something.
(2) is to spend a long time getting into it.
In order to do (2), you need some motivation. Like, “this person is talking shit.”
So, if I hear something that I find personally offensive, and I spend my time getting into it based on the assumption that the person is talking shit, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
“This guy is full of shit” seems like a fine assumption to me, in every way at least equal to assuming they are telling the truth (too trusting), and assuming nothing until I’ve completed my investigation (too boring).
Having said that, we should definitely have safe spaces from annoying “scientific” arguments about controversial topics, when we don’t want to accept or get into something.
JPNunes gave me
pawspause. (Sorry, I always go there mentally, so I basically had to.) I thought about how I would steelman the position that some facts constitute harassment when uttered. I’m still not sure; I only have vague bits and pieces of arguments — no, not even arguments, just the structure of them — swirling around in my mind.How would you do it?
In Jewish law there’s the concept of lashon hara. That’s any derogatory or damaging statement against an individual regardless of whether or not it is true. There are important exceptions but the general rule is that it’s forbidden to say such things. The individual part does make it a somewhat different case then what you are talking about, but I think an analogy could be drawn fairly easily.
First I’m curious to know, is this law Talmudic or Torahic? (I think I know the answer.)
Second (paging David Friedman), I wonder what’s the origin of such a law and how it was supposed to work. If you steal my wallet can I not say you’re a thief? It’s a negative thing to say about you but it’s true. If I see you in a crowd later, I can’t tell people “watch out, that guy’s a thief”?
Maybe you’ve described the law wrong, but it seems highly impractical: basically you can’t describe anything bad that anyone does and tie it to the person who did it! How could a law like that stand?
How do the do Jewish scholars support or justify that law?
(I’m a bit amused/confused that a mere reference to a religious law is being used here in support of a position; I would expect some push back if I pointed out the Bible says “Thou shalt not commit adultery” next time the conversation turned to polyamory.)
Also, Wikipedia points out that the act of Lashon hara is permitted “if a person’s intent in sharing negative information is for a to’elet, a positive, constructive, and beneficial purpose that may serve as a warning to prevent harm or injustice” which a charitable interpretation of Damore could certainly include (harm of say, accusing the culture of Google or tech generally of being sexist)
@Well…
The biblical mitzvah is in Leviticus 19:16:
The fullness of the lashon hara doctrine is the talmud and post-talmudic sources.
Under certain circumstances yes, under others no. You have to look at those important exceptions I mentioned. Chofetz Chaim’s books are the definitive works on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Chofetz-Chaim-CHAFETZ-CHAYIM-volumes/dp/1605856525
@Randy M
I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this because god said not to. I don’t believe that myself. I’m not even saying you shouldn’t do this necessarily.
I’m saying here’s a framework to think about and possibly analogize with when trying to come up with a “steelman [for] the position that some facts constitute harassment when uttered”. Talmudic law often, but not always, has explanations for its dictates. Although everything always ultimately rests on “because god said so” getting there is often through quite human comprehensible rationales.
In other words, I was more pointing towards a source of potential inspiration than making a fully fleshed out argument.
Many here are keen on promoting the discussion norms they prefer. One practice I’d like to see is that of actually making the case here, rather than referencing another source that does so. It makes the discussion more interesting for those following along, not having to interrupt the flow of the conversation to research elsewhere.
I am no stranger to recalling reading arguments that were interesting or persuasive but that I’m not capable for elucidating elegantly; nonetheless I think it’s nice to make the attempt, even if it gets picked apart later.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’d prefer if e.g. David Friedman were to mention a relevant Islamic or medieval Icelandic legal precedent so that I’m aware of it and can look into more deeply if I wish, then to remain silent because the discussion norms would require that he either write a fully fleshed out argument (which he may not even agree with) or stay silent.
For an example more relevant than anything in the Damore memo, suppose John is a eunuch, due to testicular cancer or an industrial accident or whatever. He keeps the fact secret because it’s embarrassing. Someone who makes a point of telling everyone John interacts with about it is arguably harassing John.
I wouldn’t. I don’t think steelmaning is useful or even particularly interesting.
There are a lot of true statements which are extremely tactless. That’s not a new or interesting observation. What is new and interesting is that tactlessness towards certain privileged groups is illegal.
If I blurt out how obvious a co-worker’s toupee is, I’m not in any danger of being fired for my faux pas. I would have to behave outrageously badly to toupee-wearers before it put any legal risk on my employer for not disciplining me. A civil well-sourced memo on the obviousness of toupees might have my employer questioning my sense of priorities but it would be far from a firing offense.
So why are the feelings of toupee-wearers so unimportant? If it’s just about tact then the two situations are perfectly analogous. It’s because this isn’t about tact, it’s about censoring politically inconvenient facts.
Nobody got into office on the platform that nobody can notice toupees, there aren’t hundreds of millions of dollars of toupee funding, and nobody would ever consider protecting toupee-wearers as a reasonable justification for increasing the size and power of the state. So nobody cares if it’s rude to notice toupees.
Even if you work in the White House?
@Vorkon,
Ha! In lieu of a +1, you should know that that got a genuine chuckle out of me.
I don’t know if are facts – however unfortunate – which are, always and unconditionally, harassing simply by being uttered.
A different question is: can the statement of facts be used in ways that are intentionally and effectively harassing? The answer to this seems clearly yes;
is this what you are asking?
I think statements about group averages differences can easily be disingenuously. The misunderstandings and distortions are so completely predictable – so thus can be summoned with ill-will. Even source literature often elides from finding a statistically significant (i.e. of unknown and possibly zero importance) difference between groups X and Y to the summary “If you are an X, then you …”. (The continuation will only be really correct if ‘you’ is read as ‘a random/generic instance of X, but it sure sounds like it’s talking to the reader! This is easy to weaponize.)
That seems an odd thing of academic work dealing with statistics to do. Can you provide an example of source literature doing it?
The Damned’s Dilemma
With meticulous caution he poured the yellowed salt distilled from the Dead Sea into the shape of a pentagram. Then he lit candles of wax boiled down from the flesh of vile murderers. He chanted the terrible words written in letters of human blood, scrawled on pages of human intestines, and bound in human skin.
A low howling of wind rose up, and the candles flickered under its baleful influence. Within the pentagram, a small dot of impenetrable darkness appeared, slowly swelling until in filled the entire space inside the pentagram from floor to ceiling. Then, with a rapid flash, the darkness disappeared, and a small child, barely more than a baby, stood in its place. Its cherubic features, glossy golden curls, and snowy white skin were breathtakingly beautiful. But its eyes held nothing like innocence. They were the eyes of someone old, wise, a full of the chilling knowledge of good and evil.
“Will you play with me?” it asked.
“I have summoned you to serve me,” he replied.
“I would much rather play,” the cherub pouted, as it spoke in a musical voice that contained the sound of joyful trumpets, euphoric bells, lusty pipes, and terrible drums.
“You have the knowledge of all things, science, art, literature, music, history, the thoughts of all men that have ever lived, and everything in this mortal world, do you not?” He demanded.
“Doesn’t everybody?” the cherub replied innocently.
“I have drunk deeply from the cups of wisdom from every field of progress of all mankind. I have studied every work, great and small. Nothing is left for me to learn, yet I still thirst for more. Share with me the knowledge of all things.” He commanded. “I will not release you until you do.”
“O.K.” The cherub replied simply. Then it paused and looked thoughtful. “My daddy says I should share, but…” It trailed off.
“Yes?” he asked.
“But he says not to share with selfish people. When I share, someone should share with me too.”
“I will grant you your freedom. I will release you from the pentagram.” He informed the cherub.
“That’s not sharing,” the cherub replied. “You’re just a kidnapper. No sharing for kidnapping.”
“Very well then,” he replied. “What would you like? A piece of candy? A new toy?”
The Cherub considered for a moment. “I like candy…and toys,” it confessed. “But I like souls better.”
“I thought it likely you would ask for my soul in exchange, and after long consideration, I confess I am prepared to surrender it to you. If you provide me what I have requested.”
“O.K.” The cherub agreed.
The Cherub and the man stared at each other for a few moments.
“When will you give me the knowledge?” the man asked impatiently.
“When you let me go,” the cherub replied.
“But how can I trust you will keep your part of the bargain?” the man asked distrustfully.
“Can’t do sharing in jail. Don’t work. Gotta be free.” The cherub explained.
“But if I set you free, I still have no assurance you will honor your word.”
“Maybe write it down?” the cherub suggested. “Daddy says writing is magic.”
“Ah, a contract, that’s just the thing.”
The man turned to a nearby desk, and took up a pen and some paper. As he was about to put pen to paper he heard the cherub call out.
“Gotta be blood. Ink’s not strong enough.” It instructed him. “You also gotta renounce God,” it added.
“Very well then,” he replied, taking up a letter opener, and slicing open his palm. He dipped the letter opener into the welling blood, and wrote out the basic trade of his soul for the knowledge of all. He added a renunciation of God. Then he added numerous other conditions, riches, fame, eternal life, filling the page, then flipping it over, adding more.
“C’mon, I’m bored.” He heard the cherub say.
He scrawled one final condition, signed his name at the bottom, then said, “Here it is. Now you must sign.”
Suddenly a black dot appeared below his signature. It smoked and stank of sulfur. The dot moved slowly across the page, leaving behind a thin trail of letters. Although it was painful to look at, curiosity got the better of him, and he squinted at the signature.
R-O-C-C-O
“You can let me go now.” Suggested the cherub.
The man turned to his book of spells, and spoke a few words. The candles went out, the pentagram dissolved, and the cherub was enveloped in the horrible darkness for a moment. Then the darkness dissolved, revealing a gruesome, horrifying, reptilian form.
It opened its mouth, let out an evil hiss, and then, in a ghastly voice reeking of something incomprehensibly foul, it said, “Very well then, off we go to eternal damnation.”
“But…but…what about the contract? What about the knowledge of all?”
The lizard laughed with the sound of a thousand thunder claps. “Idiot,” he sneered. “A contract is worthless without an enforcement mechanism. If those in breach are not punished by a higher power, it becomes chaos, might makes right. And right now, you’re looking pretty puny. Nothing will stop me from taking your soul now.”
“What about God?”
“God?” He bellowed mockingly. “What the hell-“ here he chuckled a bit, “pardon the expression, but what the hell does he care? You just renounced him.”
The man moaned in despair.
“Wait,” he implored. “Let me live out my days, and I will be your slave, toiling inexhaustibly to work your evil upon the world.”
“Nah,” the lizard declined. “Slaves are such a bother. Always complaining, always looking for a way to escape, and always doing shoddy work. No real motivation. So it’s off to endless suffering with you.”
As they both slowly disappeared, the lizard mused “Now, as a question of etiquette, which torment should I put you through first? Dip you in the decomposing bodies of your loved ones, or boiling lava? Ass or crotch? It’s the only real eternal question…”
Last open thread, @Nabil ad Dajjal was looking advice creating a tabletop combat system, and I suggested reading George Silver’s text on 16th century combat. It was noted that he really really hated rapiers. And there’s a good reason for that!
He spends a significant portion of the text outlining why the rapier is terrible; it poorly defends a person (as its guards and wards are not sufficient), often both fighters end up getting hit or killed over the course of a duel, that the hilt doesn’t provide enough protection and the hand is in danger of injury (he was very fond of hilts with a metal basket around them), that it is only suitable for thrusting (and that when dealing with thrusts “the force of a child may put it by”), and probably the most expounded point – it’s just too long.
He feels the need to write about this because of how wildly popular the rapier was, along with the teachings of Italian rapier masters. So the question that could be asked is, why was the rapier so popular if it kept getting people hurt and killed? And the answer to this is essentially a mismatch between tools and training.
While the Italian rapier is the well known image of what comes to mind when you hear the world rapier – a long, thin sword mostly used for thrusting – English rapiers were somewhat different. Notably, they were extremely long, often with blades over a metre in length. And with this length came a different system of fighting. While the Italian rapier was used with the point forward, threatening at the face or the body, with attacks done as often-deep lunges, the English rapier was held more vertically, with the arm retracted and the point high above your head, with attacks whipping down when a target presented itself. And these systems suited the context that they were developed in.
The issue arose when lauded Italian masters came to England, bringing with them their skills but not their weapons. The point-forward system that focused on lunges and misaligning your opponents point proved quite dangerous when used with the English rapiers. The long blades and poor cutting edges meant that even getting a little bit past the point rendered the weapon essentially useless. Even worse, having the point of the blade so far in front of you gave your opponent almost complete control of your blade – they could push it aside or even smack it out of your hands with a “down right blow”.
Although George Silver was a man of some repute, he was no fencing master himself. Despite this, watching HEMA practitioners experiment does seem to show that he was onto something. While fighting someone experienced in Italian rapier using a suitable weapon while you have an English broadsword isn’t as clear cut as Silver probably would have believed, using a long rapier in the Italian style it immediately becomes apparent that a skilled opponent can easily do whatever they like to your sword, and hence you. In fact, according to Silver they don’t even need to be skilled, just “[carry] the valiant heart of an Englishman”.
Overall it’s a very interesting glimpse into a cultural dispute at the time, though I’m not sure if there’s any greater lesson to be learned from it. Maybe “if you write a long enough impassioned screed about a pet peeve of yours, then despite not being an expert 400 years later people will listen to your arguments anyway”.
[edit: formatting]
Speaking of, thanks for your information! I don’t know if you saw my comment on the last fractional OT but it was very helpful.
The mismatch in styles makes sense. Another thought occurred to me: could part of the popularity of a weapon poorly suited to defense be from use primarily in duels which may not have been intended to be fatal? Or, alternatively, for self defense against unskilled opponents armed with knives or the like in a mugging?
Alcohol helps people do better in social situations. Is that purely the effect of increased confidence or is there something else going on there?
I don’t know what science has to say about your question, but the first thing I think is that alcohol makes some people do better in social situations, but it makes other people do worse. Depends on the person, how much of alcohol, and (possibly, I’m not sure) what kind.
By drinking alcohol at a party, you are having alcohol-centered social interactions with other people. You can toast with them, you can discuss which beer is the best, you can say “Come on mate, let’s grab another one!” etc. This of course depends on the fact hat many other people are drinking alcohol as well, but that’s how our society is.
So, I’ve got this soul for sale. It’s got a few ding in it, but even after 40+ years, it still runs and passes certification. I’d like to get as good a price for it as possible, and I’m wondering how to do that as an employee.
I’m a software developer. Who should I work for if I want to make bank and I’m ok with being a force for evil in the world?
Hail Hydra.
https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/
https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
If you can pass the interview, a big tech company will pay you $200k+
@johan_larson
Luna.
I’m not sure about the “making bank” part.
Quite honestly, this feels like a bit of an unmet market. There are plenty of ethically questionable or evil jobs out there for a developer, but they’re mostly *not* the most lucrative thing someone of given talent can do in expectations. AmaGooFaceSoft probably is the highest EV thing you do (and certainly a very good BATNA); they’re not God’s work, but I don’t think they’re the devil.
(Does this imply that *ethical* work is a *negative* compensating differential? That’s a disturbing implication!)
You can make more money as a developer in finance in NYC, or so I’m told.
Possibly, but with greater risk and definitely worse working conditions. And even most finance jobs aren’t evil, just morally mediocre.
Run for Congress?
What about writing malware?
Xi Jingping just got rid of his term limits and his government probably is always in need of software engineers who can strengthen the Great Firewall of China or game-ify totalitarianism. Pay has to be pretty decent I’d imagine, though you might need to learn Mandarin.
I’m an electrical engineer, not a software developer, but several of my former classmates are doing quite well working military contracts for Raytheon and Harris. I specifically did not take them up on any of their offers to try to get me a job at those places because I didn’t want to make weapons, but if you feel differently, hey, it’s one of those gigs where you have to be a citizen and pass a security clearance and can’t be replaced by H1-Bs.
The Military Industry Complex: Join Today! Would you like to know more?
I’ll second this. I work at a Major Defense Contractor on a software project, and it’s pretty good work. (Aerospace engineer doing systems, not software dev, but we have lots of those.) That said, look at whoever is big in your area. Pretty much all weapons are software-based these days. My employer is not a company you’d expect to be big into software.
The Military-Industrial Complex pays fairly well in general, but software is a special case and I’m not sure the Boeings and Lockheeds of the world are outpaying Google and Microsoft for top software people.
OTOH, the original poster did say he was on the far side of forty, and age discrimination is pretty clearly a thing in Silicon Valley. Aerospace & Defense has different priorities and a higher value on (long) experience.
I missed the technological unemployment post, but I did have a thought that I figured I’d share here.
There was a decent amount of discussion as to what a “post-scarcity” society might look like, with most people seeming to adopt one or two extremes. That either the lack of scarcity would mean that everything would be so cheap, even the poor could easily enjoy comfort and luxury, or that the value of human labor would be so little, that people who didn’t own robots right away would find themselves with nothing to offer society and would be reduced to living in shabby ghettos, experiencing extreme poverty.
I think both are half-right and half-wrong. The optimists are right in the absolute sense, but wrong in the relative sense. The pessimists are wrong in the absolute sense, but right in the relative sense. Meaning, I think all of human society will be a lot richer and well off and more comfortable than all of society is today. But I also think that “inequality” will become significantly more extreme. The “poor” of the future may be 10x more wealthy than I am, while the rich of the future may be 1000x more wealthy than I am.
Consider – what would happen today if you increased the wealth of the world’s richest 1% by several orders of magnitude – such that any one of them might plausibly be able to afford, say, a perpetual annuity of $50k/yr to give away as charity to everyone in the world living in poverty without meaningfully hurting their own comfort and standard of living. Would every rich person do that? No. Would at least one? I think yeah, probably.
Despite the fact that we haven’t implemented true communism (yet), most people today don’t die of literal starvation or preventable illness in all but the poorest countries. A mixture of charity and taxation serves to keep the poorest of the poor alive – even without socialism, even without UBI. It might not be the exact quality of life they might want to have (due to their relative status vis-a-vis those who are better off), but it’s a hell of a lot better than “the poor” enjoyed 100, 200, or 1,000 years ago. Do you really think that if we made the class of people who donate a lot of money to charity and pay a lot of money in taxes 1,000x richer, this wouldn’t have any benefit to the poor? Of course it would! It would just be an absolute benefit, rather than a relative one (which, I suspect, is what’s at the heart of the matter to any objections that don’t involve massive state-led redistribution)
I think the post-AI economy of the future looks a hell of a lot like the economy of today. Some people are really really rich because of their capital. Some people find a way to trade their labor for additional riches. Some people live off the labor of others via government-mandated re-distribution. Some people live off the labor of others via voluntary charity (I’m thinking less “some big fancy well-known group blindly hands you a lot of money” and more “your loser brother-in-law hasn’t worked in 5 years but has never been homeless because he keeps convincing various friends/family members to take him in or give him money”). Maybe that third group gets bigger. Maybe the middle group vanishes to zero. But if history is any indication, it’s better to be poor in a society surrounded by rich people than to be “rich” in a society that hasn’t yet invented indoor plumbing. I’m in the top 1% (globally) today – but don’t envy me. I envy the poor of the future. After AI, these people are going to have lives filled with comfort and luxuries I can’t even imagine.
Did anyone point out that post-scarcity is necessarily temporary, and that our times now are an example?
That assumes that the world’s richest are rich mainly due to income from capital. I’m not sure it is true. They may end up with capital assets, but at least some of them became rich because of very valuable skills.
Improved A.I. might make those skills more valuable, but also might make them less.
David – my only point is, it seems to me that if you suddenly made Bill Gates 1000x richer, today, that a whole lot of that money would go to the poor. Making Bill Gates and only Bill Gates richer by a lot would not be a bad outcome for the impoverished of Africa. It would almost certainly be a very good one.
But fine, maybe Bill Gates is just a poser who is pretending at philanthropy to feel good and wouldn’t follow through. So expand the analogy, and instead of “Bill Gates gets all the money” make it “The top 1% get all the money.” Maybe Zuckerberg would follow through. Maybe Warren Buffet would follow through. Maybe one of the Waltons. You get my point.
If “the rich” currently give X% of their income to charity, and you suddenly make the rich a hell of a lot richer, then that makes everyone who derives most of their income from either the taxes or charity of the rich a lot better off as well.
To paint the dystopian picture, one has to assume that not only will all of the new gains go to the rich, but that this will also cause the rich, as a class, to become less charitable than they were before. This does not seem plausible to me.
I may have been unclear. My point wasn’t about the result of making the current rich a thousand times richer. It was that the current rich may not be a good proxy for the people who would become much richer if AI became good enough to make capital a good substitute for labor.
I mean, sure, I guess that’s possible.
But what particular reason is there to assume those who get rich due to the benefits of AI would be less charitable than the current rich?
Also, it seems to me that the current rich are very likely to be the ones who get rich off of AI. At least to the extent that “rich” means “people who own stocks” and to the extent that we assume AI will be a product of corporations rather than of like, one solitary genius in a sole proprietorship.
I mean, if we’re open to the idea that AI riches will be assigned based on merit with little regard to current wealth – then there are even fewer problems, right? Those who get rich will have earned it, and those who don’t will have had the opportunity, but not taken it.
@Matt M
Some of that charitableness may result from a feeling of obligation towards the many people who work hard and yet don’t get so much. We see that people tend to be far less charitable to those they perceive to be leeches.
In a post-scarcity world where many people cannot meaningfully contribute and can do no more than leisure, we might see the elite who do have to work to generate huge value for society get resentful of having to make that effort and only be willing to share the bare minimum.
If you look at history and still today, we see people rationalizing inequality by arguing that the lower classes are inferior, that welfare just gets spent on drugs/caviar/etc, that everyone could be rich if they just put in the effort, etc. This is a lot easier when there is a truly overt gap between groups & we can expect that this gap will increase when the lower classes develop their own culture that is very dissimilar from the elite, because they never have to work together anymore.
This is a fair/plausible theory. I’m not sure it holds for the elite philanthropists though. Especially those who hold proper blue tribe/SJ affiliated ideas that “people are only poor because of oppression” or whatever.
Remember, the entire premise of this AI/post-scarcity debate is that the poor are about to get screwed and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. The oppression narrative will continue unabated. I don’t think the future poor will be seen as leeches – they will be seen as unfortunate victims – much as they are today.
The whole “no charity unless you pass a drug test” thing is popular among middle-class red tribers, but I’ve never really heard it advocated by any 1% philanthropists, EA charities, or anything like that…
@Matt M
The current trend among the left to not put much focus on income inequality, but far more on race, gender, LGBT, etc issues is a perfect illustration how members blue tribe can retain their personal narrative of fighting for the oppressed/disadvantaged, while categorizing large segments of the poor among the oppressors/advantaged.
The left are just as human and prone to discrimination as the right & while their narrative has to be different, they can create something that is functionally identical to the lamentation among parts of the right that the poor could bootstrap themselves out of poverty if they just worked harder/smarter/better.
The equivalent left wing narrative merely has to argue that the poor can bootstrap themselves out of poverty if they just give up their racism, sexism and stop clinging to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or …
Matt, you have brought up a good point that whether the ones who own the robots will provide charitable support depends on many specifics of what this future world looks like. Based on your hypothesized scenario, the average rich person of the future will 1000X richer than Bill Gates, so it is easy for them to support the rest of humanity with just petty cash. Perhaps you are right, but of course this depends on the average rich person really being this rich in the future. Yes, people will be richer than today when labor is essentially free, but there will still be restraints on the riches achievable based on limits of raw materials, energy, and land. So it may be that supporting the masses isn’t quite so easy for the rich.
Another difference between now and then is the number of people that need to be supported. Presumably it will be at least 90% of people, and maybe more like 99%, or even 99.9%. So it will cost a bit more than it does now. Also, it is a different thing for those who now provide charity to a small number of poor today and giving charity to the vast majority of humanity, forever. I can imagine theories of the rich in future years asking why they support so many useless people, who will never be valuable, and none of their descendants will have any use either. I suspect that this mass of humanity will be lucky if the rich just require full sterilization for all charity, and not simply the immediate eradication for all the useless people. I mean, those people obviously have no meaning to their lives — it is more humane to end their lives at once. Besides the danger of all those folks out there who likely hate the rich and would destroy them all if they had the chance.
This last paragraph is very pessimistic, but probably as likely as the optimistic scenario of Matt’s. Society might well swing back and forth between the two positions, but it only takes a few decades of the pessimistic scenario to rid the world of 99% of its population.
Do you really think most current philanthropy is based on a logical calculus of “Perhaps this person’s grandchildren will grow up to be the next Einstein”?
Even among the autistic EA crowd I don’t think that’s true. I think the overarching motivation is “people are suffering and I don’t care for that, it makes me feel better about myself if I can help them.”
I’d also like to add that my estimates of “wealth increases by 1000x” are based on no particular scientific projections of what AI might enable, but rather than the backwards-looking historical observation that I think the rich of today are probably at least 1000x richer than the rich of previous eras.
“Charity” is an interesting word. What does it mean, exactly. I think there’s a lot of people who are supported, some quite well, by people just giving them money sort of because they want to, not because they are engaged in productive labor necessarily. Are the Khardasians “supported by charity”? To a 7th century subsistence farmer it might look so. To him, imagining a society where 99% of the populace wasn’t “supported by” laboring in subsistence farming would be unimaginable. The notion that we would invent a new “occupation” of “being famous for some reason that nobody seems to quite clearly understand and therefore you have a lot of money” would be mystifying.
Who knows what sort of justification the future will come up with for supporting all of us. But I think it probably will.
Similar (in principle) to Altruisto, I highly recommend people check out BOINC projects, in particular those of IBM’s World Community Grid, which uses your device’s unused computing power to research diseases.
If you’re a fan of history and technology, you may enjoy the BBC’s series “Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.” It’s available on Netflix.
The seven episodes cover:
1. The Great Eastern (a steam-ship)
2. The Brooklyn Bridge
3. The Bell Rock Lighthouse (off the coast of Scotland)
4. The US Transcontinental Railway
5. The London Sewers
6. The Panama Canal
7. The Hoover Dam
I would like to come to the Berkeley meetup, but I have an infant. He is generally fairly quiet and I would, of course, remove him if he began to cry. Do Scott or other attendees have opinions?
Are rationalists or the rationalist-adjacent generally anti-baby?
Many people prefer baby-free spaces and I want to be respectful of those preferences.
Babies and small children can be quite disruptive if you’re not used to them.
Sounds good. See you there!
Suggestion from someone with small children, try showing up early. People with small children often show up late (with good reason as often as not) but very small children are often minor celebrities and they often steal the show on entry. Showing up on the early side prevents this from breaking into the more developed conversations.
Another possible advantage of this is that infants sometimes have extreme and unpredictable first reactions to strangers. This can get amplified if the strangers exhibit a big reaction to the infant as well (e.g. spreading the arms, widening the eyes, giving a huge grin, and saying “HIII BAABY!!!” like some people do). People seem less likely to walk up to a baby and do that than they would be if the baby is brought to them.
Also, having the infant there early gives it a longer chance to acclimate to the other people in the room.
I can’t speak for the Berkeley people, but you are more than welcome to bring your baby to the South Bay meetup the week after.
Unfortunately, we live in Berkeley now and don’t have a car.
So persuade someone else in Berkeley who is coming to bring you.
https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-rules-google-firing-james-damore-was-legal/
Did we ever talk about this.
It’d be good to keep in mind that companies have to keep a nice workplace for their workers, in case anybody here wants to start sending quotes of The Bell Curve as memos on their workplace.
In America anyway.
Ken White over at Popehat did a bit of analysis of exactly what this means legally. He’s a pretty good law-blogger, you just need to keep in mind that he’s got a “no friends to the right” policy which colors his interpretations.
The most troubling part is that it seems as though, unlike defamation, truth is not a defense against a discriminatory statement. You can be legally punished by your employer for making factually correct yet discriminatory statements; your employer can be legally punished by the courts for allowing discriminatory statements to be voiced. This use of non-state intermediaries to enforce state censorship of speech is exactly the sort of thing that Ken would normally be vehemently opposed to. His deafening silence here is because he has no friends to the right.
So yeah, according to the NRLB biology is officially a bourgeois pseudoscience. But it’s all good because dissenters who demand fifty Lysenkos are free to do so.
On the other hand, people should not be subjected to discriminatory statements, just because it so happens it is the truth.
What would happen if you are some kind of minority and your coworkers has the state-protected right to spew all kinds of vitriolic bullshit at you just because there’s a substrate of truth to it?
Why would any employee have to endure that?
Check out Exhibit B of Damore’s lawsuit. What the NLRB advice memo is saying is the employer can allow and encourage all kinds of vitriolic bullshit directed one way, but a polite response the other way is unconscionable and reasonable grounds for firing.
That is,
SJW Googlers: White males are terrible, harmful people responsible for driving women out of the tech industry.
Damore: Maybe there are inherent differences between men and women which result in fewer women in the tech industry.
Google to Damore: You’re fired
NLRB: Damore’s statement was unconscionable, it’s OK to fire for that.
The vitriolic bullshit was coming from the other side.
Even if you were accurately representing what happened, I have to point out that both parties are not in equal footing.
Which is not the point or even a legal standard, but should give you some thinking to do if you are going to defend Damore for his racist and sexist writings. I assume he did not extend on the racist side of the argument due to lack of space on the margin or whatever.
You are correct. The SJW Googlers had Google management on their side. Damore was on his own.
JPNunez: Your interpretation of the memo is about as uncharitable as it’s possible to be, even finding racism in it because, although it doesn’t even discuss race, you can infer that he really was thinking racist things even if he didn’t write any.
I’m not up to speed on every aspect of the James Damore story, but isn’t part of the problem that he was part of a group tasked with providing feedback on how the diversity training could be improved, and that was where the memo originated? Even if his memo were all that objectionable, it’s not like he just sent it out apropos of nothing.
@JPNunez
Can you give 1 example of a racist statement from the memo?
First let’s bring things back to the object level for a moment.
Damore absolutely did not “spew all kinds of vitriolic bullshit” at anyone. You can read his memo if you want. It is, if anything, excessively polite. He says that it will be difficult to increase the percentage of women engineers at Google because of a widespread lack of interest in engineering among women and the fact that fewer women have the exceptional abilities needed to perform at that level. He never denigrates his women co-workers: if anything, he’s implicitly praising them as their abilities and interests are so rare.
Ok, now back to the meta-level.
When Google fired Damore, it was at the tail end of a several years long investigation into their pay and hiring practices by the Labor Department and in the midst of a discrimination lawsuit. The higher ups aren’t blameless, but they were also under considerable legal pressure from the federal government. That’s part of why they were so determined to push the diversity policy that Damore critiqued.
That’s why I said that Google was acting as an intermediary in government censorship. The federal government can’t punish you directly for dissent but it can lean on your employer and make it clear that hiring dissenters is a poor choice. That’s exactly what we’re seeing here.
You probably agree with the government that their ends are desirable. But you should consider how dangerous the means used to obtain then are. If this is licit, there’s no limit to what sort of speech the government can punish in this way. Do you feel comfortable with President Trump, or a more competent far-right successor, having the power to decide who can be employed and who can’t?
Again, being polite does not mean it is not vitriolic bullshit.
Women do not appreciate being told they are prone to histerics, no matter how well couched in graphs or polite arguments.
The government is not banning dissenters of whatever SJW policy you can imagine. This was about making the workplace less threatening for a group that historically has had disadvantages in the area.
Had Damore published this outside of Google, I could believe you. Being it an internal document, well, that’s a different thing.
Turns out some women disagree it was not denigratory.
This one writes itself.
Yeah, being polite sort of means it is not vitriolic. It’s practically tautological.
Ironic, as demanding someone’s head for saying that you’re hysterical is proof-positive that he was right.
That said, he didn’t even say that women were hysterical. He said that on average women have higher anxiety and lower stress tolerance. Then he backed it up with scientific studies on personality differences.
This kind of escalating exaggeration isn’t convincing to anyone who is paying attention. He made a well-sourced and limited statement that you disagree with. You are free to disagree with that statement or ignore it, but when you wildly misrepresent it that just makes you look like an unhinged liar.
Again, the point is not whether he couched his statements as scientific truths; the point is that other employees -and, reading the actual NLRB memo- prospective employees found the statements discriminatory.
Of course he did not say that women are hysterical. He was smart enough to couch his statements in “averages”, but turns out that was not enough for his bosses to not consider it discriminatory. Sexist, racist and all kinds of -ist peeps have had a lot of time to learn how to pose their arguments to seem reasonable and polite. It’s just that Google and the NLRB employee were smart enough to see through that common practice.
Turns out some women disagree it was not denigratory.
Crazy how literary criticism works.
You have to ask the subjects of the damore memo whether they find it discriminatory. It is not up to Damore to say whether it is or not.
Right, ok so it’s obvious that this isn’t going anywhere.
Let’s look at this from another angle:
Sexists, racists, whatever-ists suck right? They’re entrenched in the political and economic elite and they would like nothing more than to put women back in the kitchen and re-segregate the workplace. Right now one of them is in the Oval Office and they have a solid majority in both houses of Congress.
Do you think that they and their appointees should have the right to decide who is allowed to work and who isn’t? Do you see how giving them that power is unlikely to benefit women and minorities in the long run?
Strong civil rights are the best defense against oppression. Allowing the government the power to trample our rights when it’s convenient normalizes the practice and leads to even worse abuses down the line. Strong constitutional safeguards against government misbehavior are how you punch up in the American legal system.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Harassment.
People also have the right to work without being harrassed over and over even if the harrassers have the care to couch their harrassment in scientific facts. If someday Trump comes and decides that sexual harrassment in the workplace is no longer a firable offense or whatever he comes up with, well, then that day we will fight that fight. Before that, it seems the NLRB is working right.
I do not think that “but what if Trump” is a good argument to let Damore keep his job at Google. This is not the level this fight should be fought.
To be clear, you are explicitly saying that not merely are the facts of biology irrelevant, the facts of what is or is not in the memo are equally irrelevant. There is a right side, and a wrong side, and nothing could change that, even in principle. Just like how ‘team X plays better sportsball’ does not logically imply ‘I support team x’.
That approach may work for sportsball, but it fails for politics; the teams don’t wear jerseys, they are defined by how they play.
To take a hypothetical cases, imagine it were to come out in the course of the Muller investigation that the person who took the decision to fire Damore, and the key journalists who did the initial reporting on it, were actually all Russian-sponsored alt-right trolls with the goal of destablising the US. And as it turns out, the massive bonus they got paid as a result shows up in verifiable bank transfer records.
Would you still not care, and stick to your guns?
Or if you _would_ accept that hypothetical evidence, why not also the claims of fact in this case? If you can’t trust yourself to evaluate claims of fact, how can you trust yourself to evaluate claims of who is on what side?
And your definition of “harassment” includes “having other employees write things which you disagree with”?
Don’t harass me with hate facts!
@JPNunez
As others have said, he didn’t even say that women were hysterical on the group level. He used a scientific term that sounds bad to lay people and that doesn’t mean what you think it means and you are unwilling to educate yourself. It’s not even a matter of assuming good faith in the face of a ambiguous statement, because he gave the definition of how he used the term as soon as he introduced it. You are simply telling a falsehood that you can trivially verify is false.
Furthermore, this idea that people who talk about group-level differences are being disingenuous and actually want to say that every member of the group has that difference, is extremely toxic, because it is strawmanning of your opponents (allowing you to debate against claims they didn’t make) & it effectively makes any discussion of group-level differences impossible. This kind of bad faith just makes you impervious to reasonable debate & science that doesn’t fit your biases.
Note that Damore explicitly said in his memo that group-level differences are not representative for each individual. He also argued that some programs at Google implicitly assume that there is no overlap in traits that can hold people back (like difficulty negotiating salaries) & that the gendered programs that Google has are discriminatory and should be gender neutral (based on actual need, not gender). In other words, he opposed discrimination by gender. Again, you merely have to read what he actually wrote and not lie (to yourself) about it.
The only thing that is actually sexist here is the ideology that not only commonly makes extreme negative group-level claims about men, but very often explicitly claims that the group-level differences are representative for each individual; and simultaneously doesn’t allow far more mild and actually scientifically supported claims to be made about group-level differences that some interpret as being negative towards women. Double standards based on gender are sexism. Overzealous application of gender stereotypes (accurate on the group-level or not) to individuals is sexism.
Damore was opposing sexism, not advocating it, which people who favor sexism against men (aka ‘benevolent’ sexism) get upset about.
PS. Do you know that Damore is on the spectrum and that he thus is most likely chronically incapable of the kind of duplicity that you allege?
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Yes, and a key civil right is freedom of association, which includes the freedom to fire employees who are harming your business.
The NLRB memo was obviously being silly when it accused him of discrimination etc., but the claim that “those statements were likely to cause serious dissension and disruption in the workplace” is obviously correct. Whether that disruption was “reasonable” is irrelevant.
As an autistic person, many autistic people are fully capable of being polite when we’re being assholes.
@DavidFriedman
No?
That’s not what happened here.
Damore wrote about a certain subset of Google employees being inferior and having characteristics that made them less qualified for the job. Couched with “averages” and yadah yadah science.
The members of said subset felt, correctly imho, that was harrassment.
That’s not, at all, what he said.
He talked about different preferences leading to different rates of interest. This is no commentary at all on the ones who were interested enough to work there.
He was saying “You won’t have as many female applicants as you’d like because females aren’t as interested in these jobs as you would like them to be.”
This does not speak to the qualifications of those who do apply (or are hired) in the least.
@JPNunez
This isn’t the relevant hypothetical. In the relevant hypothetical, Trump says that sexual harassment is definitely a fireable offense – and don’t you silly folks know that questioning his preferred studies on the relative amounts of anxiety or stress tolerance between genders is obviously sexual harassment?!
@rlms
On the meta level, are you in favor of the heckler’s veto in general?
He calls women more neurotic, thus less able to take on more stressful jobs, and also reporting more anxiety at their jobs, at google, which -I have to spell, seemingly- means women currently working at google.
I quote Damore
Googlegeist is an internal job self reporting system.
Which, even if I erased this last couple of paragraphs and you were right that the memo talked about people not at google -you are wrong-, it is still super condescending to go “Women are less able at these high stress jobs! but not you, google girls! you are the good ones”.
But don’t have to take my word. Women at Google started looking jobs elsewhere, and people applying to jobs at Google retired their application. Which means the people being talked about, felt Google was a discriminatory place, and I find hard to go tell women in tech hey, you were wrong in feeling discriminated by this Damore guy.
I can’t tell if JPNunez is a troll, or is an example of Poe’s Law in action.
I mean, if I was to try to LARP as the most uncharitable parody of a “death to the cisbrodude” type, that’s the argument and argument style I would use.
DanTheWebmaster is banned. Everyone else in this thread is urged to consider whether they’re really proud of their contributions here and whether this is the best thing for them to be talking about right now.
I agree, although it may be qualified by what you told people when you hired them.
But one can legitimately draw conclusions about whether an organization is acting badly even if the actions are ones it is entitled to take.
Hmm. This whole debate makes me wonder. Perhaps it does make some sense that Damore was essentially harassing just because the other employees weren’t smart enough to understand the subtlety of his comments. Even if Damore himself didn’t realize how his comments would be so interpreted. It is kind of funny to speak of Google employees as too dumb to understand subtlety, but some people are smart in some areas and not others.
Kind of similar to what rlms said. He was disruptive despite his best efforts.
Good advice. Here’s a contribution I’m proud of.
JP, so far as I can tell, you believe that Damore strongly holds certain beliefs and just has to get them out, perhaps for no good reason. From that lens, it makes a lot of sense to assume that Damore has other discriminatory beliefs, that he has a dislike of women or even a hatred of them, and so forth.
Here’s a different lens, though: Google has been accused of sexism (i.e., disliking or hating women) because it doesn’t have enough female engineers. Damore’s memo is an attempt to say “actually, Google (and I) aren’t sexist, and here’s why”. In other words, Damore isn’t really interested in denigrating women, so much as combating unfair accusations of female denigration.
Moreover, let’s say that Damore is wrong in his belief that observed gender differences are mostly genetic in nature, and instead that they’re cultural (mostly or entirely). What’s Google supposed to do about that? Those ideas get absorbed at a young age, and one company – or even a few companies – changing their policies probably won’t do much to change that. Plus, even if they do, they’ll have to hire people who have been socially constructed to be bad at or uninterested in the jobs Google is offering. So at best, Google is supposed to take a big hit in order to change the culture over a long period of time. That’s their prerogative if they want to do it, but are they really “sexist” for saying “no thanks”?
Let’s say that Google would lose 10% of their income for doing this, as a hypothetical; now, imagine if you had the opportunity to give 10% of your income to charities in Africa who dig wells, give small loans to business owners, et cetera. You don’t have to imagine that part, because you do have that opportunity; it’d be nice if you did, but if you didn’t you wouldn’t be racist or “anti-Africa” either. If someone called you racist for not doing that, I’d stand with you. Of course, if someone called you racist for saying black people are genetically less intelligent, I’d let that slide and then some.
So to wrap this all up: Damore’s trying to defend himself, not hurt anyone; even if the people who disagree with Damore are right (and they’re probably not), their behavior is still wildly inappropriate and he has a right to try and defend himself from it. With that lens, well…if you don’t like what he did, you should instead push back on the people he’s reacting to, like I did and will continue to do. They’re bullies and should be stopped.
@JPNunez
Your reasoning does not make sense, because you are ignoring the selection effect. Imagine a very simplified analogy where jobs are like shaped holes and workers are like pegs. One type of job is a square hole and another type of job is a round hole. Now imagine that blue pegs are more often square than red pegs, so more blue pegs fit in the square holes, but you can still put some red pegs in the square holes.
All the red pegs in the square hole are now still square, because that’s what you selected on. Fewer red pegs being square merely results in fewer square holes being filled with red pegs. It’s not actually possible for the red pegs in the square holes to be round, because then they wouldn’t fit.
Similarly, if men on average have more of the trait or set of traits that we shall call X & you have a job that is a better fit for people with high X, you’d expect the men and women who go into those jobs to have a lot of X. That there are fewer women in that job is then evidence that people with low X are selected out of that job, not that the women who get that job are low in X. That is actually only what you would expect with affirmative action: if you start forcing equal representation that doesn’t fit the actual prevalence of the trait X, you’d need to start accepting women with less X.
Of course, the same argument can be made about jobs that have low representation of men.
Note that the above doesn’t require that the difference has to be biological in origin, as a disparity in traits can be caused (or increased) by culture. So from my perspective, denying that men and women can have group-level disparities in traits that results in more (wo)men being suitable for some jobs and less suitable for others, requires the denial that gender roles influence how people act.
—
Secondly, a mistake that I see you and many SJ people make is that they make masculinity, or at least what gender roles make masculinity into, the norm. The average level of neuroticism that men have is not necessarily healthy, correct, admirable or otherwise positive. Many men are willing to accept poor working circumstances, which hampers the well-being of workers. At the most extreme end of the spectrum, we see that this is a factor that contributes to workplace deaths being >90% male.
I don’t see how one can believe that men are socialized into negative behavior by gender norms* and simultaneously believe that any claim that women have more (or less) of a trait than men is disparaging towards women.
* Note that my stance is that both men and women are socialized into negative behavior by gender norms.
That is unfortunate if it is true. However, what I saw is that the media lied en masse about Damore’s memo and that people then got upset over that misrepresentation. I don’t see why Damore is to blame for that, rather than the media who spread the lies that surely made people far more upset than if they had been told what Damore actually argued for.
Furthermore, I honestly consider it quite absurd for people to quit or refuse to work for a huge employer like Google upon learning that there is just 1 employee, who is not a manager or otherwise is in a position of power, who has beliefs that they dislike. I don’t see how we can have a liberal society if people are not willing to accept mere disagreement in their vicinity.
Finally, if people get immensely upset at the truth, which from my perspective logically follows from their own beliefs, then I would argue that they have been ill-educated. I don’t believe that left-wing sexism should be immune from being called out and confronted (with reason and debate), anymore than that right-wing sexism should be.
@AnonYEmous
I suspect that Damore’s was in part motivated by feeling discriminated by gendered programs and policies within Google.
@AnonYEmous
Defend himself from what exactly? The person he needed defending from was himself. He sabotaged himself out of a job that’s in the top 1% of jobs in the richest country on the planet. No one was hounding him out of that because he is white or male or cis or conservative or hell even Sailerites There are people that fit all those descriptions still collecting sweet paychecks and equity from Alphabet. No, he’s out of a job because he identifies as someone that believes these things and just has to authentically express himself. Or as you put it:
He should have read Paul Graham’s keep your identity small, or in the very likely case that he did, he should have listened.
@ControlsFreak
It doesn’t make sense to support or oppose the heckler’s veto in general. Suppose I’m at a party you are hosting, and I decide to (calmly and dispassionately) explain that the holocaust was a hoax to other guests. This unsurprisingly makes many of them very uncomfortable, and if you want to call your subsequent expulsion of me an occurrence of the heckler’s veto then I’m definitely in favour of it there (both your right to it, and your decision to exercise that right for the sake of the party). The same thing applies if the party is a company.
If the hecklers are preventing ideas being disseminated in society at large, that’s a different matter; societal freedom of speech has important benefits. But I’m pretty sure Damore’s firing gave his ideas more exposure not less.
Women do not appreciate being told they are prone to histerics, no matter how well couched in graphs or polite arguments.
Then your beef is with the psychologists who developed the Personality Traits assessment/Five Factor Model and used the technical term “neuroticism” which I agree is a dreadful decision because of the way the term “neurotic” is used in common parlance and how easily that term is confused with the separate concept of “neurosis”, but then again they probably never envisaged lay people using and discussing their test.
You may also wish to shake your fist at the linked study:
Brad: [For some reason I said “Matt:” originally.]
The Paul Graham essay was very much worth reading, though I’m not sure how much relevance it has to Damore’s situation. Maybe Damore found himself compelled to express his opinions because of how he identified himself (thinking of himself as anti-PC or something). But it seems at least as plausible that he felt compelled to express his opinions because he actually believed them. (Or perhaps the identity/tribe he was defending was male Google employees or something.)
I think a better essay for this whole situation is What You Can’t Say.
In particular, this bit:
When you find something you can’t say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don’t say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
Or
Every era has its heresies, and if you don’t get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.
Graham’s point is that there are always heresies, that they are indeed often pretty silly, but that speaking out in public about them is a good way to find your whole life turned into a fight over that heresy. That appears to be what’s happened with Damore–he was probably doing some other interesting work, and now he’s giving public talks about political correctness while working on his lawsuit against Google.
My only qualm with your comment is that your use of the word “should” is not talking about what’s morally right, but instead what’s prudent. Damore would have been more prudent to keep his mouth shut, collect his paycheck, and look for another job if the political climate at Google offended him.
And that also makes me think of the famous Shaw quote:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
@albatross11
That works much better, but in my partial defense I think the ideas in it are hinted in the first one.
I frankly don’t know what the right answer is to that one. But I have to think that when it comes to fighting injustice magnitude matters. That’s not to pull some kind of whataboutism that leads to only being allowed to ever work towards buying betnets, but what do we think about someone who sacrifices himself on the altar of a trivial moral question? Is it so totally unreasonable for some of us to not even want to get into a big debate about whether or not something he did was moral or immoral, because whatever way that comes out it still leaves the most salient fact that it was trivial? There’s the old Leboski quote “you’re not wrong walter, you’re just an asshole”. And maybe we need assholes that are right for big problems–there are a lot of good quotes along the lines of what Shaw said about such people. But sometimes it is not such a big problem that being right sufficies to excuse being an asshole. When you are the Patton of the local McDonalds, you’re just a meglomanic. Not a meglomanic that helped save Europe.
Anyway, we can disagree on the moral magnitude of the issue he was involved with, and maybe end up just not being able to reconcile opposing views, but that’s where my push back against AnonYEmous was coming from. He was framing the situation as Damore defending himself; that implies some kind of necessity. Saying that he did something irrational because he believed it was the right thing to do is very different from saying he was defending himself.
albatross11:
I don’t know Damore, but I did work at Google for several years, and this assessment strikes me as quite plausible.
The culture at Google has a number of properties I have seen elsewhere, but never shining quite as brightly as at Google. The people identify strongly with the company, as Googlers. They believe, and are encouraged to believe, that their contribution is critical, not just to the execution of the company’s plans, but to their formulation. There is absolutely no culture of “that’s above my pay grade”. (I’ve already told the story here about the engineer at a company all-hands who asked Eric Schmidt what would be Google’s next billion-dollar business and was answered, “You’re supposed to tell me that!”)
Imagine a guy who loves working at Google, and who believes some fairly garden-variety things from evolutionary psychology. He sees Google spending a lot of time and effort in pursuit of goals that his reading suggests may not be possible, at least to the extent which that time and effort seem to be aiming for, and could even somewhat degrade Google’s ability to carry out its mission. He may (as I did) have nothing but respect for the females he has worked with — like him, they are Googlers, and they are obviously outliers on a variety of continua. He has participated in working groups that are a big part of the time and effort he suspects might be a pointless waste.
To shrug and remain silent would be unGoogley. It would be a dereliction of duty and a repudiation of his own identity, not as a man or as a conservative, but as a Googler.
Does Damore come off as a bit arrogant, and a bit Aspergey? Sure, but he’s far from unusual at Google in that respect. Some of my best friends there were like that. I’m like that.
But when I read his memo, my almost immediate reaction was, This is a Googler who is trying to educate his colleagues and prevent Google from going into the weeds on an important issue. At Google that’s part of his job. If he had been ten years older, he might even have written a memo that accomplished this.
Or maybe he IS someone who believes these things and just has to authentically express himself. I sympathize deeply with Damore because I am those things, and I don’t believe that it’s just a matter of self-identification, of me bigging myself up by making myself out to be a certain type of person; in fact, I try to avoid doing that because I have noticed that doing this gets me in a lot of trouble. But in Damore’s case, it really shouldn’t have.
…Oh, and by the way. Anything which causes accusations of sexism to be levelled in force ceases to be trivial, and rebutting these accusations isn’t a trivial matter either. In a larger sense, a blank-slate ideology which is almost entirely wrong and which hereticises anyone who points this out is a big problem, and combating this problem isn’t trivial either. But even beyond all of that, trivial is your own judgment call. Maybe you should have a bit more respect for other people’s utility functions, instead of just assuming that they’re irrational.
defend Damore for his racist and sexist writings
Did you read his memo? I certainly don’t agree with all his points, but he did seem to honestly be trying to offer an answer to “we don’t have 50:50 male to female ratio in engineers, how can we get that?” and part of that is looking at “do women go into STEM in the same numbers as men, if not why not, is it all down purely to sexism or is part of it that over the aggregate population, men in general and on average tend to be at the higher end of maths skills/have more of their population with good skills here than women”?
Because if after all your encouraging young girls to study maths and all the programmes to get girls to code and minority girls and girls from lower socio-economic backgrounds into STEM, and doing all you can to provide equality of access and opportunity you still end up with 60:40 in favour of men, maybe it’s not all purely caused by racism and sexism? In which case, if you still steam ahead with “we must have 50:50!”, then you are going to be hiring less qualified (when compared with equivalent male candidates) women to make up the numbers, or women who are going to be shuttled onto the management or design or non-coding tracks, and the split is still going to be there.
At the risk of starting a tangential discussion, I don’t think that’s really an accurate description. Ken is very critical of both law-and-order criminal justice policies (whether espoused by conservatives or liberals) and the far right, but he seems to get along just fine with plenty of right-libertarians (he seems to be friendly on Twitter with Greg Doucette and various Reason columnists) and even some mainstream conservatives (here is him praising David French). And I don’t know what they think of each other personally, but he represented conservative blogger Patterico pro bono in a case with free-speech implications.
Agreed. Ken White is a straight shooter. It’s hard to square “no friends to the right” with pieces like this, or this, or this.
If you think that he’s taking sides in this piece, you should read it again:
Yeah, Ken has a distinct “conservatives are yucky” bias, which colors some of his work, but “no friends on the right” is a vast overstatement, and he has a pretty good track record of calling a spade a spade, even if he often goes out of his way to make sure that everyone reading knows that he thinks the spade in question is yucky.
I get the feeling maybe this person is over-interpreting his booting of ClarkHat for edgelording.
Tho I have to agree that, after a cursory read of Popehat, it is odd Ken White is on the side of Google here.
These guys seem p rabid free speechers even in the face of clear threats hiding as free speech.
Tim Chevalier just got fired from his job at Google for his anti-Damore statements, among other SJW statements.
There is someone in Google’s HR department whom I really do not envy right now.
Chevalier is a whole another can of worms, but his firing seems quite right?
Will have to wait for the case too, but it honestly seems like Google needs a few moderators for their internal boards.
Including threats of violence towards his political opponents:
Damore lawsuit exhibit B, page 114, marked ’40’
Chevalier’s quote appears to be referring to “being a fucking Nazi.” While it’s possible that he was referring to some people who are not generally considered to be Nazis as Nazis– the lawsuit does not seem to offer the context of his post– if you hold the position that people should be fired from their jobs for saying that we should hurt Nazis, you’re going to wind up firing a lot of good ol’ boys every time a Captain America movie comes out.
According to Chevalier’s lawsuit, he was disciplined and fired for his discriminatory statements against white men, including his generalization that society teaches “white boys” to expect privilege and to feel threatened when they do not receive it.
While the suit doesn’t give context to that one, it’s quite clear he’s referring to real, live people and not historical Nazis nor fictional ones.
Perhaps a more nuanced approach would be to fire the people who say that we should hurt Nazis, and who also call some of their coworkers Nazis. And really, there’s nothing special about the word “Nazis” in that context.
The Nybbler: Okay, you’re going to be firing quite a lot of good ol’ boys after every terrorist attack who have the opinion that we should hurt members of ISIS.
John: Can you provide a citation of Chevalier calling his coworkers Nazis? (I haven’t read every piece of information in the Damore lawsuit, it’s quite likely I’ve missed it.)
Regardless, all of this is a bit of a red herring: according to Chevalier’s lawsuit, he was fired for spending too much time on political activism and making SJW statements that his boss considered discriminatory. Google’s statement agrees that he was fired for “promoting harmful stereotypes based on race or gender”. Google spokespeople have not said anything, as far as I know, about Chevalier being fired for making threats of violence. Is your claim that Google is falsely claiming that he was fired for discriminating against white men when he was actually fired for threatening his coworkers?
I work at Google, all I am going to say is that when I found out that Tim had been fired for his conduct, I was a little relieved and glad to know that Google cares enough about its code of conduct to let go of people on the left and on the right. I suspect that I felt something very similar to what some of my coworkers felt when they heard that James had been fired.
He was fired because he was becoming a liability to the company; the exact reason, whatever it is, is a rationalization; Google has previously made it quite clear that they find stereotypes against white people and men to be acceptable, so if they fired him for that it’s only because the Damore incident made it look like they’d not be able to keep doing that so blatantly.
I would be very interested in knowing who Tim was objecting to being asked to “open a dialogue” with. Based on my experience during my time there, I would be extremely surprised if it was anyone who could reasonably be described as a Nazi, and not at all surprised if it was a co-worker or group of co-workers. However, that information does not appear to be in the lawsuit.
Yes, both Damore and Chevalier were fired for being liabilities to the company. Why else would you expect Google to fire people, out of altruism?
Honestly, I am somewhat skeptical of a person’s deep-seated commitment to free speech on the job if their response to a person they disagree with being fired is “well, they STILL only REALLY censor people I agree with, this doesn’t count because of reasons.”
It does not matter how I presented the issue. The problem, and what got Damore in trouble, is that people at Google, and also women candidates to work at Google, aka the subject of the Damore memo, found said memo discriminatory.
I do not know how discriminatory ideas can be presented in a non discriminatory way. I am not interested in such sophisms.
I’m less committed to free speech on the job as an absolute than I am to evenhandedness. If Google wants to say “no politics on internal lists”, fine. If Google wants to say “You can say what you want provided you don’t wish death on your co-workers” also fine. But if it’s “You may verbally abuse your co-workers based on them being white, men, white men, or conservatives, but the reverse is punishable” then I object strenuously.
And that doesn’t change much if after several years of dishing out abuse, one of the most verbally abusive (based on those characteristics) people is fired.
@The Nybbler: Questioning whether a specific race or gender is inherently inferior at a specific type of job goes well beyond just talking about politics at work. In terms of what I would consider acceptable workplace behavior, I see no issue with workers debating the merits of the Affordable Care Act or the new Republican tax plan. But I see a huge issue with workers debating the innate value of specific groups of people, especially when some of your co-workers happen to belong to those groups.
I generally despise the “check your privilege” argument. I think it’s a cheap way of shutting down discussion, and it’s representative of all the worst aspects of the modern Social Justice movement (and I say that as a huge Social Justice advocate myself, at least by the standards of the SSC comments section). But in cases like these, I really get why people use the privilege argument. Yes, it’s been abused to mean “if you’re not part of a disenfranchised minority group, you have no right speaking out about issues relating to them at all, and should always defer to a minority on those subjects,” which is ridiculous. But at the same time, if you can’t understand why disenfranchised minorities aren’t okay with having their fundamental worth as human beings be treated as just another topic for casual debate, or why they’d be extremely hostile toward theories of biological essentialism that strongly resemble the pseudo-scientific ideas used to justify oppressing them for decades, that displays a serious lack of empathy and understanding.
Also, verbally abusing and harassing and threatening people for their race/sex/gender/orientation is never okay, including when it’s straight cis white men being targeted. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Google feels any differently, and it seems pretty clear from the Chevalier case that they’re opposed to that sort of behavior, and I see no real reason to view that as an exception rather than the rule.
That sounds as though it means “whether all members of a specific race or gender are inherently inferior at … ” But in context, the question is whether the distribution of the relevant characteristics is different, so that fewer members of one group are good at that job than members of another group, which is a very different and much more plausible claim.
And that’s highly relevant if a firm is trying to hire people who are very good at that job and ends up with more men than women, or more East Asians than Afro-Americans, or whatever. If the distribution is substantially different then getting equal numbers is likely to require lower standards for the one group than for the other, which raises a variety of problems.
If someone offers evidence that short men are on average less intelligent than tall men, that doesn’t have anything to do with my fundamental worth as a human being. Women are, on average, better at some intellectual tasks than men and worse at others. That does not say anything about the fundamental worth of me, you, or Damore as a human being.
The only minorities I can think of in the U.S. that are currently disenfranchised are minors, convicted felons and resident aliens. I don’t think any of those were the subject of the Damore memo.
@Ozy Frantz
See page 44 in Damore’s lawsuit where Chevalier claimed that trying to work “with the Trump regime means trying to work with white supremacists” and that “the Republican party is openly advocating for white nationalism in 2017”.
Then on page 46 you can see him arguing for violence against those who make statements in favor of white supremacy or participating in white supremacist rallies, which given the above comments, would then logically mean Republicans & Trump supporters.
So, based on this, I would say that Chevalier believes that coworkers who support the Republican party and/or Trump are white supremacists & that they should be silenced with force if they speak about their beliefs or attend a rally/event that supports the Republican party.
It is possible, although unlikely, given his propensity to equivocate, that Chevalier distinguishes between white supremacy and Naziism. In any case, the above statements are in my eyes sufficient for Republican/pro-Trump coworkers to fear for their physical safety if Chevalier becomes aware of their views, regardless of whether Chevalier will consider them actual Nazis or ‘mere’ white supremacists.
@LadyJane:
You know, I actually agree, to a point. I would not want my coworkers to sit around ruminating about the general inferiority of fat retards (which is an uncharitable but not inaccurate description of what I am). This even though I can in fact agree that obesity and mental disability are, all other things being equal, deterimental to one’s performance in just about any field. I may agree it’s at least partly true, but that doesn’t mean, I very strongly feel, that I should have to hear about it all the freaking time. And I would also not be at all comforted by any form of “present company excluded” disclaimers. I do in fact feel that common courtesy requires people to not examine my lack of success in detail and explain to me how it’s all my own fault.
But.
I also don’t run around ruminating about the evils of skinny neurotypicals. I don’t blame them for everything that’s wrong with my life. I don’t claim that their bottomless malice is the only reason why rotund people on the spectrum are not adequately represented at the very highest levels of society.
If I did constantly go on about how everything was the fault of skinny neurotypicals? Then I expect that a lot of them would start making arguments, at varying levels of eloquence, to the effect of, “no, it’s not! Quit blaming us because your life sucks!” And then I would think it was actively strange if they didn’t start examining in detail why my problems are largely due to my own internal limitations, in order to disprove my allegations that it’s all their fault.
ETA: And yes, I am aware that there is such a thing as a “fat-positive” movement, and I’m entirely too aware that there is such a thing as “autism pride.” I thoroughly despise them both, for exactly this reason – their overreach and guilt-flinging just inspires people who otherwise would have remained civil to me to be assholes to me instead.
I’m glad you feel that way. Most of our society currently does not.
@LadyJane:
Even if I accept for the sake of argument this characterization of the Damore memo, it still amounts to special pleading. Arguments that women are inherently superior or men are inferior at certain things are common in diversity discussions, including at Google. For instance, the statement “If you put a group of 40-something white men in a room together and tell them to come up with something creative or innovative, they’ll come back and tell you how enjoyable the process was, and how they want to do it again, but they come up with fuck-all as a result!” was ruled to be A-OK by Google HR.
Holy crap that’s a pretty big and quick bait and switch going on there.
Discussing observable characteristics based on race/gender that might lead people to be pre-disposed to favor or disfavor certain types of careers is not, in the least, “debating their innate value.”
Saying “women don’t make good engineers” (which he didn’t say, of course, but whatever) is NOT the same thing as saying “women have no innate value” or “women are less than human” or “women don’t deserve equal rights” or anything of the sort. This rhetoric keeps coming from the left all the time and I’m so sick of it – whenever you make ANY point about ANY characteristic of any supposedly oppressed group – the immediate accusation is “How dare you question my worth as a human being!”
Someone could observe me playing basketball, notice that I suck, and say “Holy shit – Matt sucks at basketball!” And it would not occur to me that they are questioning my innate value. Basketball is just one part of life, and I do, in fact, suck at it. So what?
Aapje, by “page 44” you mean “page 44 of appendix B” also known as page 118 of the whole document. Maybe I should have figured that out from the context of Nybbler’s comment, but I bet I’m not the only one who was confused.
DocumentCloud has a text version which can search the text of the message board posts, unlike most of the pdf versions.
I reject your inference. Your quotes are accurate and I would have rejected it if I had just carefully read your quotes, rather than bothering to track down the context. TC says that some Republicans are white supremacists. He explicitly disclaims that not all Republican congressmen are supremacists, let alone all Trump voters. He says that people who attend supremacist rallies are supremacist. I don’t see any reason to believe that includes his coworkers. He does not say that all Trump rallies are supremacist. Maybe he believes that. Maybe that would even be obvious from the context, but it isn’t from this excerpt. (The person on page 45 is pretty sweeping, though.)
@Douglas Knight
I scrolled pretty rapidly through it and when I found the quotes, I gave the numbers that I saw on top of the page. I was not aware that the appendix had a separate page count. Thanks for the correction.
As for my inference, I disagree that Chevalier is blaming only part of the Trump administration and part of the Republican party.
This comment completely rules out any cooperation with the Trump administration, based on the reasoning that doing this is aiding white supremacists. Doesn’t this logically mean that any support for the Trump administration by a co-worker is also aiding white supremacists? Doesn’t that legitimize violence according to Chevalier?
This second quote implies that the Republicans party members that don’t advocate for white nationalism are still guilty of not kicking out the people who supposedly argue for it. I do agree that the later comment about using violence doesn’t argue that violence against people who refuse to ‘take out the trash’ is warranted.
@Ozy Frantz & Douglas Knight: see here:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/11/22/exclusive-google-refuses-to-disavow-political-violence/
Examples of tweets by Tim Chevalier aka “Punch All the Nazis”:
In another series of tweets he approves of a man (an antifa) punching a woman (a reporter who was filming a demonstration).
It’s Breitbart, not the most reliable source, but I don’t think they Photoshoped the Tim Chevalier screenshots (If they did, Tim Chevalier would have accused them of that.)
If Damore used as nickname ‘Punch All the Commies’, said that ‘”Democrats”, “liberals”, “Marxists”, “communists”, doesn’t matter. They’re all working together’ and ‘Dear Democrats, Marxists, feminists and transgenders, wish you were in Hell’ and approved a man punching a woman for wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, then he could be accused of spewing vitriolic bullshit and making people at work feel unsafe around him. But he was far, very far from that. The two cases – James Damore and Tim Chevalier – are not similar.
@Matt M:
And I wouldn’t care if someone said I sucked at software engineering, especially since I have zero knowledge of software engineering. Even if someone said that I could never be really good at software engineering because I don’t have the requisite degree of mathematical intelligence, I wouldn’t take offense to that, since it’s probably true. (For that matter, I don’t think I could ever be really good at basketball, no matter how much I practiced, because of immutable and semi-immutable physical factors like height and muscle density and reflex speed.) But if someone said I couldn’t be a software engineer just because I was a woman, and then stated that most or all women have innately lower aptitudes for technical and mathematical tasks, I would strongly object to that.
Imagine that you were really good at basketball, and had all the physical characteristics required to be a great basketball player, and had the skill and experience and knowledge to be a great basketball player, but people kept telling you that you shouldn’t bother because you have blue eyes, and blue eyed people tend to be a lot worse at basketball. Hell, let’s say that maybe there is a correlation there, like blue eyed people tend to be shorter or have less athletic builds or just grow up in countries where basketball isn’t a common sport. And for your whole life, you heard from your family and friends and teammates and coaches that blue eyed people like you don’t belong on the basketball court, to the point where you have to be twice as successful to be acknowledged as a good basketball player. But eventually, through hard work and perseverance, you make it to the NBA. By that point, I think you’d probably be really tired of hearing arguments about how blue eyed people are inherently worse at basketball, even if they added some disclaimer like “it’s not quite 100% true, obviously there are a few exceptions like Matt M.”
That’s what I imagine being a woman in tech is like. If people have been telling you for your entire life that you can’t do something on the basis of your gender, then you probably aren’t going to take it lightly when one of your co-workers goes on about how that gender is just inherently worse at doing that thing. More likely, that’s going to make you feel extremely uncomfortable and unwelcome, to the point where you might consider leaving the job unless that co-worker left first. (As Baeraad pointed out, this is true regardless of the validity of the actual claim.)
The one place where I feel like the “check your privilege” argument actually holds water is when it’s a response to someone saying that a minority group is being “too sensitive.” When you’ve never experienced discrimination, it’s easy to say that you wouldn’t get offended by hypothetical discussions about your inherent nature, it’s easy to assume that you’d be able to maintain perfect objectivity. You could even argue that, if a black co-worker started talking about how white people are inherently worse at software engineering, you wouldn’t take offense to it… but that’s not the same thing, because a claim like that would just seem patently ridiculous, it doesn’t have the force and weight of society backing it. If you moved to Beijing and kept hearing the Han Chinese majority talking about how white Americans are inherently less intelligent, and your bosses and co-workers kept holding you to a higher standard of scrutiny because of it, I’d imagine you’d lose your sense of detached objectivity in fairly short order.
(emphasis and numbering mine)
Why are you putting these two statements together?! The second one is a completely different thing than the first one. Damore wasn’t saying the first one, and neither is anyone in this thread, and I’m not sure Damore was even saying the second one: saying that women are more people-oriented and men more thing-oriented isn’t a statement about “innate aptitudes,” it’s a statement about interests.
(bolding mine)
I can believe that enough people make arguments similar to the bolded part such that lots of women in tech experience hearing messages like it. I’ve personally never seen a single piece of actual evidence for it, but I’m not in tech, and I’m OK with believing it on someone’s word.
But in the case of Damore’s memo, there’s absolutely nothing in his memo or any of his statements since then that could possibly be interpreted as being anywhere close to that bolded statement. The memo was very clear in explaining that the average gender differences in things like interest-in-things vs. interest-in-people could be the cause of the observed gender gap. No part of the memo proposes or suggests the notion that because of these differences, women shouldn’t bother trying to get into Google or tech in general.
Ironically, the ideology he was pushing back against does discourage women from entering tech. It observes the gender gap in tech employees, concludes that this must be because the tech industry is hostile to women, and tells women that going into the industry will be a challenge that will require them to put in far more work than if they chose some other industry. I’ve had at least 2 women share their apprehension of entering the tech industry because of this exact faulty reasoning.
On the other hand, Damore’s message is that the gender gap in tech isn’t necessarily because the tech industry is hostile to women (though he doesn’t deny that this may be a factor), but also because average differences cause it such that when a company is selecting for people who are particularly interested in things, it leads to a higher proportion of men being selected. As such, a woman who also has an interest in things and considers herself just as apt as any man in tech can be confident that she can go into the industry without unreasonable fear that she’ll be entering a hostile environment.
And Damore goes even further, having an entire section dedicated to reducing the gender gap using non-discriminatory means, by taking advantage of our best understanding of the science in sex differences in order to create a work environment and work positions to encourage women to apply and to thrive. That indicates that he, just like the ideology he was pushing back against, believes that it is good and desirable to achieve equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. He just wanted to take advantage of science to achieve it in an efficient and fair way.
@LadyJane
I understand that people who are a minority may be questioned much more than a majority. I understand how it is unpleasant to be stereotyped (although male programmers are heavily stereotyped as well, so this is hardly limited to female programmers). I understand that this may make female programmers very sensitive to such behavior or behavior that looks like this.
However, when a fairly large group of people/activists doesn’t merely reject the questioning/stereotyping/etc of female programmers, but starts accusing all male programmers of being the primary cause of there being few female programmers, they no longer just reject discrimination/stereotyping, but they are now perpetrating it.
At that point, you can make the exact same kind of argument to defend male programmers, because they are getting accused of being abusive to women, not because of their beliefs or such, but merely for being male and based on claims for which there is no solid evidence, but rather, a lot of evidence against.
I believe that male programmers have just as much right as female programmers to speak out against such slander/stereotyping and tell people the true facts, to counter the falsehoods that are being told about them.
It’s then very unfortunate if correcting these falsehoods is incorrectly interpreted by female programmers and others as an argument to keep women out of IT, but I don’t see why male programmers are obliged to silently accept abuse to prevent the feelings of female programmers and others from being hurt. Male programmers are people too, with emotions and material needs that deserve just as much consideration.
Of course, it is best if the male programmers who speak out for themselves do their best to make their arguments in such a way that female programmers and others are least likely to interpret it as a claim that women are incapable of being programmers. However, they are ultimately limited by the scientific evidence. I believe that Damore tried very hard to keep his arguments from being interpreted as a claim that all women are incapable of being programmers and that female programmers at Google are incompetent.
However, when people take their information from media sources that misrepresent Damore’s arguments, I don’t see how Damore can be blamed for that. Damore is responsible for his own words, not for the words of others.
@Aapje: That seems like a false dichotomy to me. I don’t see why you’d have to make an argument that generalizes men or generalizes women, and I’d like to think that it’s possible to take a stance that doesn’t make either gender feel uncomfortable. I don’t think the only possible answers are “women are less likely to work in STEM fields because they tend to be less skilled/less interested” and “women are less likely to work in STEM fields because men in those fields tend to be sexist assholes.” A better hypothesis would be “women are less likely to work in STEM fields because the whole of society (including other women) perpetuates negative stereotypes about women being unfit for that sort of work, telling them from a young age that they either can’t do it or won’t enjoy it or both.”
Of course, it’s a fairly moot point anyway, because regardless of the actual reason for the gender discrepancy, Damore could’ve simply chosen not to weigh in on the topic.
@LadyJane
Your answer is also that women are less interested, you just attribute it to what women are being told, rather than biological differences.
I agree with you that women being told various stories (including, but not limited to the narrative that male programmers are horrible troglodytes who will make their lives hell) most likely plays a role in causing women to choose other fields.
However, the scientific evidence also strongly suggests that there are biological differences in interest, at the group level. This evidence fundamentally goes against the common feminist narrative and strongly suggests that their attempts to achieve equal outcomes by spreading progressive beliefs will fail.
In fact, feminism has already failed so hard that the most feminist countries have less gender equality in choice of profession than far less feminist countries. What we’ve seen so far that the response to this failure is often to discriminate, to force equal outcomes.
However, if men and women don’t actually have similar interests on the group level, then equal outcomes at the group level can only be achieved by forcing people into jobs that they are less interested in, reducing human happiness. So the stakes are very high. Just like it is/was wrong to forcefully keep women out of professions that they would prefer to do, it is wrong to forcefully keep men and women out of professions that they would prefer to do.
So in the face of these attempts, I believe that we cannot afford to ignore part of the truth, in favor of a narrative that is emotionally more pleasing, but which leads people to discriminate.
LadyJane,
Sorry, but I still think you’re guilty of a bait and switch here. The specific comment you made that I am objecting to is the assertion that Damore and others like him were engaged in
I’m sorry, but this is not even close to reality, nor is your long following example providing any support for it.
Engaging in stereotypes, even harmful and incorrect ones, is not the same as “debating the innate value of specific groups of people.”
If someone tells me I can’t be good at basketball because of my blue eyes – there are two possibilities.
1. They are right – my blue eyes do put me at a disadvantage. Perhaps I can overcome the disadvantage and still be great (Damore and others acknowledge that many great female engineers and coders exist). Or perhaps I can’t, in which case, I should probably embrace comparative advantage and take pride in the other things I am good at instead (as Damore points out, females are generally better suited than males at many other tasks)
2. They are wrong – eye color has nothing to do with basketball. In which case, who cares what a bunch of ill-informed idiots think? I suppose you might object that if they keep repeating this lie others may believe it, but that seems unlikely when it’s a lie that is easily tested.
But in neither case are they “debating my innate value.” They are debating my ability to play basketball. Nobody ever made any claim that someone’s “innate value” is judged specifically and solely based upon their basketball skills. Nor has anyone ever claimed that to be true about mathematical ability.
I pride myself on almost never providing PC disclaimers or “virtue signaling” at all, but I’m going to make an exception here. Let me be very clear – suggesting that people of particular races, genders, beliefs, etc. have lower innate value solely because of those characteristics is horrifyingly awful behavior and I solely condemn it.
I also happen to know approximately zero people who do that. Pointing out that men are typically stronger than women is NOT claiming that they have “lower innate value.” Nor is pointing out that women are more empathetic than men. Nor is pointing out that Asians have higher IQs. Nor is pointing out that Africans are better marathon runners. None of those things are even close to that.
@Aapje:
What do you mean by “forcing” people? I don’t think anyone would seriously propose, for instance, legally mandating that women take STEM jobs. It’s not like the government is going to start telling teenage girls “okay, the software engineering field needs 21% more women, every female who gets above 600 on their Math SAT is going off to tech school whether they like it or not.” I can’t imagine that being feasible for numerous reasons, not the least of which is that it’s not likely to produce very good engineers. Even if the government demands that tech companies implement gender-based hiring quotas, that won’t result in women being forced into tech jobs, it’ll just make it easier for women who already work in tech fields to find employment. (And for what it’s worth, I’m very much against hiring quotas.)
But if you’re just talking about strongly encouraging girls to go into STEM fields from a young age, just like young boys are strongly encouraged to pursue STEM careers, I have no problem with that. At the very least, we should stop actively discouraging them. Even if you’re right and there are fundamental biological differences that make women less likely to be interested in tech jobs, social and cultural factors are still going to ward off some women who’d otherwise be interested in them. And if you remove all those impediments and tech fields are still male-dominated, but it’s a 75-25 difference instead of a 95-5 difference, then I’d be okay with that. This is why I think the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome is a pointless one: we don’t actually have equality of opportunity right now, and until we do, it’s a moot point.
Also, while I can’t imagine this view being popular with either side of this debate, I’m honestly not sure how much importance we should place on happiness within the context of one’s career. Considering that tech jobs tend to pay vastly more than other forms of white collar work, it might be worth it to strongly encourage women to pursue STEM careers regardless. On the individual level, it might result in them having lower rates of career satisfaction, but the significant increase in income may still result in them having higher rates of life satisfaction overall. And on a societal level, we need software engineers a lot more than we need housewives right now. Humans have a lot of natural inclinations that don’t necessarily lend themselves well to success within a highly-competitive globalized capitalist technocracy, but nonetheless, that’s the world we live in, and it’s going to be a lot easier to make people change those inclinations than to change the system.
@Matt M: I would agree that in a vacuum, it wouldn’t be inherently dehumanizing just to point out that statistical differences between groups may have underlying biological causes. But we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a world where for centuries, black people were literally enslaved because white people thought they were inherently less intelligent. We live in a world where for centuries, women were denied access to the majority of possible life choices and career paths because people believed that it was in their fundamental nature to be nurturers and caretakers and nothing else. We live in a world where even today, there are blatant racists and misogynists who use the same ideas to justify their bigotry and to literally argue that racial minorities and women are inherently inferior human beings. (If you don’t believe me, go visit Stormfront or Return of Kings.)
And even among the people who genuinely aren’t bigots, I can’t help but feel that their ideas about biological essentialism are a bit too convenient, and maybe just a little self-serving. When I see people talking about how it’s only natural that certain racial groups tend to be poorer on average, or how women tend to avoid certain fields, it seems like it’s almost wishful thinking, an example of Just World Fallacy at its finest. It’s blaming inequality of outcome on natural causes in order to pretend that we have equality of opportunity, even though we don’t.
If Theory X has almost exclusively been used to justify oppressing Group Y, then it shouldn’t be surprising that people in Group Y will heavily associate Theory X with oppression. To them, it’s going to seem like anyone espousing Theory X is really just looking for an excuse to persecute them. And honestly, in 90-95% of cases, they’re probably right. For every noble truth-seeker who genuinely thinks there might be something to Theory X, there are going to be a dozen monsters who are still just looking for an excuse to be monstrous.
a reader: I don’t believe in firing people for things they’ve said on their personal social media accounts, no matter how controversial (except in a small number of cases such as CEOs or actors where being circumspect on social media is clearly part of the job description).
@LadyJane
By hard and soft quotas. It is true that the call for hard quotas is not that prominent in IT (yet), but it is in other places where a gender disparity is considered a major problem, like company boards, politics and universities (both for the students and staff). In the US the courts have disallowed hard quotas, so people try to achieve the same covertly (like with affirmative action) or by using soft quotas. In Europe it is attempted much more openly, for example, female only professorships have been created in my country recently. In the (far) past, my father also once got his job application rejected (or rather: not even considered) because of his gender (as the rejection letter openly stated).
Soft quotas can involve making the path to a job/promotion easier for women and/or harder for men (like Google did), convincing men to not seek jobs/promotions because of their gender (I recently read a comment on the SSC Reddit by a regular who said that he had turned down promotions for SJ reasons), creating a hostile work environment for men (which Google also seemed to do), etc.
It logically follows that if you have a disparity in interests, achieving gender parity has to result in a less optimal match of interest to jobs.
For example, let’s say that we have a total of 5 men, whose interests in IT are 10, 9, 8, 6 and 3 respectively and 5 women whose interests in IT are 10, 7, 5 and 3 and 1 respectively. Now if we have four IT jobs, we expect to get the three top men and the top woman, for a total interest satisfaction score of 10+10+9+8 = 37. If you force gender equality, you get the top 2 men and the top 2 women, for a total score of 10+10+9+7 = 36. So you have lost job satisfaction here, presumably decreasing human happiness. Of course, this man with an interests in IT of 8 still has to work, but since he was pushed out of IT, he will start competing for his second most desired job, often pushing others out of their most desired job, who in turn…
So you can get a cascade of people being forced into slightly less pleasant jobs. Because the pain is spread out so much, this is not as evident:
I don’t see how it is necessarily noticeable and attributable if all over the economy, people get 5% or 10% less happy with their jobs. If this causes a productivity decline of 5% or 10% over a longer period of time, that may not even be visible if other advances increase the productivity. People may simply exclaim: “wow, productivity has been stagnating.” Or people may blame cost disease or whatever.
Similarly, a 5% or 10% happiness decline may simply be attributed to modern workers being spoiled, on the gig economy or whatever.
Nevertheless, I consider a 5% or 10% decline a serious issue.
Except that the men who are forced out of tech because of the quotas will out of necessity start to compete with women in ‘more female’ jobs, pushing those women out of their jobs. Interest is not the same as ability (although there is a correlation, of course), so some men with less interest will be more capable than the women with more interest.
I partially agree, although I’m not convinced that boys are encouraged into STEM specifically that much or even that men get encouraged that much at all (is that not one of the major reasons why so many young men are attracted to Peterson, who does give actual encouragement?). I think that a lot of ‘encouragement’ of men is negative, putting restrictions on them that force them into a limited number of paths (for example, the provider role closes off career options with low pay and closes off the choice to work fewer hours).
For IT specifically, there seems to be a lot of disapproval of male nerds and many seem to flee into computers and IT not in the least because this results in the least disapproval/abuse/isolation, because it makes them more useful to normal people. I wouldn’t say that female nerds don’t get disapproval, but it is different in nature and probably often better/easier solved in other ways than to go into IT.
In any case, my stance on support/encouragement programs is that they should be gender (and race, etc) neutral. I am not convinced that a lack of support/encouragement happens strictly along gender lines (for example, black and poor people seem (more) discouraged from getting into IT as well) and I have noticed that gendered programs tend to attract administrators/tutors/etc with discriminatory beliefs. So you get people who call all men privileged and refuse to help them, including black men and men from poor backgrounds.
I also believe that a well-run neutral program tends to automatically help those with higher needs more anyway, so there is no need to exclude those who are supposed to be privileged.
If people are willing to destroy equality of opportunity to achieve equality of outcome, the distinction becomes very important. Some people clearly will never be content with any disparity and are willing to risk/cause enormous damage to force equality of outcome.
Perhaps, although there are enormous wealth transfers from men to women (primarily in relationships, but also through the government), so the actual disparity in quality of life is far less than the disparity in earnings. Furthermore, statistical analysis strongly suggests that most of the earning disparity between men and women is because they on average seek a different balance of career satisfaction to income. So if women flood into STEM, they may tend to behave differently from men (including demanding better work conditions and secondary benefits), at the expense of income. So then you may have lower career satisfaction and still not as much gain in income as you’d expected.
In general, pretty much every simple solution that is proposed to solve gender issues cannot achieve it very well, because H.L. Mencken was right: “For every complex question, there is a simple answer – and it’s wrong.”
I agree that a level of coercion to get people to sacrifice to achieve a level of capitalist success is (currently) necessary to maximize human well-being, but I don’t believe that maximum human well-being is achieved when we maximize capitalist success. We need to balance it out with other values (like some freedom to pursue individual interests, even if people are more capable at jobs that they dislike). If men and women are intrinsically different, then it is not unlikely that coercion to achieve equality of outcome is going to violate those values to a greater extent than if we allow people to act more to their (individual) nature.
@LadyJane
This is more a historical point, and doesn’t really affect your central point – that things don’t exist in a vacuum – which I agree with, or with a variant thereof (I’d say that, given our very human tendencies to rationalize our own biases as fact, we should be very careful about saying “this is a fact”).
However, I think you’re confusing chicken and egg with regard to how doctrines of superiority and inferiority, etc came about: a reasonable historical conclusion (I’m reaching back to stuff I learned in undergrad, so this may be a little muddled) is that it was slavery (or colonialism, etc) that led to theories of inferiority and superiority, rather than the other way around: enslaving people from parts of Africa and shipping them to the Americas to be forced to work in awful conditions meant that the people doing those awful things had to come up with rationalizations to soothe their consciences. They couldn’t say “well, we are doing these awful things to people who are intelligent humans with emotions and feelings just like us, because it is profitable” – very few people actually have that little empathy; it is far more common for people to come up with reasons why they shouldn’t apply the empathy they have. Similarly, there were other justifications: eg, that it was part of a mission of bringing civilization and Christianity to those enslaved (or those colonized, etc).
The conception of race in which there were a handful of racial groups, and in which some were considered better than others, did not predate colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, etc; rather, that conception of race was created in order to justify those things. Before a certain point a few hundred years ago, “race” was used in a different fashion, in the same way that one might use “nation” or “people” – eg, you’d see contrasts of “the English race” with “the French race”, etc. Before it became profitable to enslave certain groups of people, those who would later do the enslaving don’t appear to have thought those groups were inherently inferior.
Likewise, people who today maintain that certain groups of people are inferior, are mostly the tail wagging the dog: regardless of the degree to which they maintain their positions are based on science, they came to their views (that they are superior to others, usually) first, then found whatever reasons they could to support those (the old saying is that they’re like drunks, using lampposts for support rather than illumination). If, for some reason, it became especially profitable to (in a rather absurd hypothetical) force women into programming jobs, presumably that would be accompanied by a sudden “discovery” that, in fact, women were suited to programming jobs.
It very much is (as you later identify) a case of the just world fallacy, excessive convenience, etc. I think this overwhelmingly outnumbers people who start with the belief “[group] is inferior” and go from there to the belief “and therefore it’s OK to do [bad thing] to them“.
(as an aside, perhaps someone’s supposed commitment to the “but it’s SCIENCE!” view might be tested by checking the extent to which they follow possible indicators that groups they’re a part of are less intelligent, bad at certain important things, etc)
Absolutely. I feel like a lot of people vastly underestimate the historical ubiquity of slavery. Modern thought seems to be that it was something invented by white Americans in order to oppress black Africans.
Which isn’t necessarily false, but does miss the larger point. Slavery existed everywhere, for all time, prior to like the 18th century. Africans enslaved other Africans, Europeans enslaved other Europeans, Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans. It was just a thing you did when you won a war – it didn’t have to be explicitly racial (although that made it easier to justify).
The notion that differences in inherent ability is needed to justify slavery is just false. All that’s needed to justify slavery is power. People have enslaved others whenever they could – prior to a general sense of “enlightenment” or what have you that said such things were morally repugnant.
Well nobody here.
To be fair to Heinlein a character said that, right? Although author inserts are a hazard of the profession I don’t think we can assume it 100% of the time.
Brad: Right. His character Lazarus Long said it, but I generally consider Lazarus to be an author mouthpiece (if you want to get complicated, Lazarus actually gave Minerva permission to edit his notebook, so maybe the notebooks are meant to be read as unreliable (probably not)).
And what’s more, Minerva was editing LL’s ramblings, so it’s not even established that LL had a strong belief in everything he said.
@Matt M
I think you’re not acknowledging that while slavery is pretty historically ubiquitous, it has varied significantly. Plantation slavery in the Americas was really on the uglier end of the spectrum – slaves were uniformly taken far away from their places of origin, were mostly employed in particularly unpleasant forms of labour, since it was racially based the resulting justification was likely to involve claims of inherent inferiority – which likely led to the slaves being treated worse than they would otherwise, the generational nature of it, etc.
The “good” end of the spectrum over time and space was probably being an intellectually-employed slave in the ancient Mediterranean (although how good that was is usually exaggerated, plus agricultural slaves then had it pretty bad, and I believe mine slaves had a very short life expectancy). The worst form of slavery was probably that practiced by Germany in its war machine during WWII, especially later in the war: they were often worked to death, frequently intentionally. Plantation slavery in the Americas wasn’t as bad as that, but it went on for much longer, and “not as bad as the Nazis” is a mighty low bar.
I also think we can agree that plantation slavery and its legacy are really a black mark and a blight on many American countries, including the US, and it was really only not practiced in places where it wasn’t economically feasible (Canadians like to be smugly proud about not having plantation slavery, but that was more to do with the weather than anything else, but then again being smugly proud of things that are really the result of geography, other immutable factors, or happenstance is kind of the Canadian national hobby). It shouldn’t be minimized.
Is any of that NOT true of slavery as practiced in Ancient Rome? In the Ottoman Empire? Among the Aztecs? Among rivalrous African tribes?
This is not a rhetorical question – I honestly don’t know. But I have a very tough time believing that 19th century Southern Americans were uniquely cruel slavemasters as compared to slavemasters in other times and places.
@Aapje: I don’t disagree with your broader points, just with your assessment of the current situation. I think you’re greatly underestimating the amount of systematic discrimination that minority groups face, and greatly overestimating the amount of systemic discrimination that majority groups face. People aren’t destroying equality of opportunity for the sake of equality of outcome, because we don’t have equality of opportunity in the first place.
@Matt M: People in ancient times didn’t need any real justifications for slavery because they had a very different mindset. Speaking very broadly, ancient cultures viewed the world as a brutal, merciless, unforgiving place where war, conquest, and slavery were simply undeniable facets of life. “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.”
The practice of slavery greatly decreased in medieval times, partially due to economic and logistical factors, but also partially due to Christianity providing people with a humanistic worldview in which the idea of enslaving other human beings became a lot less palatable. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment furthered the development and popularization of humanistic ethical systems. It may have been an effect of slavery rather than the cause, but nonetheless, theories of racial inferiority were necessary to justify the continued existence of chattel slavery well into the 18th and 19th centuries.
@dndnrsn: I’ve never seen people espouse theories in which their own racial/ethnic group is considered inferior in any meaningful way, and I think that says a lot. I’ve seen people claim that other races might be more physically athletic, or better at a specific narrow set of circumstantially useful skills, but never that another race might be superior overall; they only ever seem to make that claim about their own race. (I don’t doubt that there are a few people like that, but they’re probably a vanishingly small minority.) Again, it all seems awfully convenient to me.
@Incurian: As ridiculous as that quote seems, I think a lot of people have less extreme but similar beliefs. Obviously they don’t literally think that anyone who’s bad at math is a subhuman troglodyte, but I suspect a lot of people do judge other people’s worth by their overall intelligence, at least in part. Geniuses are seen as inherently more valuable human beings, and conversely, those below a certain intelligence threshold are seen as inherently less valuable as human beings. So I can see how any theory claiming that a specific race/ethnicity/gender/socioeconomic class is innately less intelligent could easily lead to the dehumanization of that group.
I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who counts slavery as practiced in the antebellum USA as uniquely horrible in the annals of human bondage, or who talks of slavery in “the Americas” without distinguishing Virgina tobacco plantations from the Caribbean sugar variety. Averaged over all of human history, Virginia in the 19th century may be one of the better places to have been a slave.
But most places at least had to limit themselves to ascribing tribal rather than racial inferiority to their slaves, and that makes it harder to treat them as literally subhuman. Or even inferior at all after a couple of generations when they’ve learned to speak your language without an accent.
As a result, the higher classes of slaves in Greece, Rome, and I believe the Ottoman Empire held greater status and a greater chance at manumission than the “house slaves” of the Antebellum US. I doubt this extended down to the field and mine workers, but there’s less information to go on there because they don’t make for as interesting a story.
And there were some societies where slavery was an explicitly temporary condition, lasting at most one lifetime and often less than that, rather than the hereditary slavery of the United States. Classical Greece and Rome did practice hereditary slavery, I believe the Ottomans disallowed or at least frowned on that but I’m not sure.
Indeed.
Of course, we tend to think of life for regular peasants in those times as “nasty, brutish, and short.” So I consider it unlikely that their slaves lived in comfortable conditions and had pleasant and enjoyable lives.
@Matt M
Slavery in Rome was more diverse. Some slaves were treated quite well, while others were treated very badly, the latter generally as punishment.
There was also an evolution, where initially the masters could do everything they wanted, including torture, rape, forcing them into prostitution and executing them. Over time, some legal protections were established though, especially as the Stoics and Christians were egalitarian and they advocated for better treatment of slaves.
The freeing of slaves was so common in at least one period, that emperor Augustus decreed that slaves could not be freed before age 30.
It is notable that the Romans were very afraid of slave revolts (not entirely without reason, see Spartacus) and this probably led both to worse treatment of misbehaving slaves and better treatment of those who submitted.
An interesting parallel between Rome and the Catholic parts of The Netherlands is that they had/have a role reversal or role equalization festival. For Rome, the actual details may have varied over time, but it seems that slaves were allowed to make fun of and criticize their masters. This is similar to how the Dutch Catholic Carnival mixes the social classes and makes a commoner into a prince who rules during the festival.
@Matt M/@John Schilling
You’ll note that nowhere did I say that slavery in the US, or in the Americas, was uniquely bad? My precise words were “on the uglier end of the spectrum”.
And, John, sure, there were differences between Virginia tobacco plantations and Caribbean sugar plantations; the former were much worse. I’d be interested to see sources regarding Virginia tobacco plantations being among the best places to be a slave throughout time and history. The impression I’ve gotten – which may be out of date, and is a bit fuzzy – is that the slaves who have had it the best in any place/time were those employed for specific skilled trades/educational endeavours, which largely excludes agriculture.
And, sure, I’m compressing things a lot to say “the Americas”, but one could also accuse me of compressing a lot to talk about German use of slave labour in WWII: a Dutch Gentile rounded up in a razzia would, as far as I know, have a better chance of survival than a Polish Gentile grabbed under similar circumstances, who would in turn probably have a better chance of survival than a Jew sent to one of the work camps. But not breaking down to that level of detail hardly seems worthy of ridicule.
@LadyJane
Let me give a somewhat related example. Someone who says “[other group] is more criminal, and the cops should be paying them more attention” is probably less likely to be starting from hard facts and moving to opinion than a young man who acknowledges that, all other things being equal, men, young people, and young men especially tend to be significantly more criminal than the average, and so cops should pay those groups more attention. This isn’t so much about superiority as it is about justifying prejudice/discrimination, though.
@LadyJane
Many of the claims of strong systematic discrimination of minorities are debunked by scientific studies, that find no significant or far, far smaller effects than is claimed. However, most SJ advocacy seems to not update itself to be consistent with the best scientific evidence, but instead, prefers to stick with the falsehoods that they need to be true to justify their extreme claims, including the existence of an oppressor hierarchy.
As such, I consider it far more likely that you are overestimating the amount of systemic discrimination that minority groups face and underestimating the amount of systematic discrimination that majority groups experience, than that I am doing the opposite. Or perhaps more accurately, I think that my bias is smaller than yours. However, at this point we seem to have reached an impasse where we are simply making equal and opposite claims.
Debating this further can only be done by digging into actual examples, if you are willing to escalate the discussion (and I fully understand if you prefer not to). For example, you can make a claim about a mechanism by which you believe a minority is strongly discriminated against in a way that is greatly holding this minority back, giving me the opportunity to then point out where I think you are wrong if I believe that you exaggerate.
Alternatively, I can make a claim, like that there is more discrimination in sentencing by the American legal system against men than against black people & far, far more against men than against women, which you can then agree or disagree with, then I present evidence, you can point out flaws or produce counter-evidence, etc.
But such a debate is more effort than what we have been doing so far, so I understand if you decline.
I agree that we don’t have perfect equality of opportunity, but I think that we have far, far more equality of opportunity than in the past & that we should not accept a regression, where equality of opportunity is reduced, based on scientifically unproven and frequently scientifically debunked claims that doing so will be beneficial.
Your statement is like saying: ‘we don’t have equality of opportunity between the rich and the poor in the first place, so why should we fight to preserve welfare and progressive taxation, instead of going for communism?’ I strongly disagree with such fatalistic sentiments. Refusing to see the good that we have & trying to replace it with radical solutions for which there is no solid evidence that the outcome will be better & very good reasons to assume they might be worse, is revolutionary Utopianism and very dangerous.
Humane biodiversity/race realism supporters claim that a subgroup of Jews and a subgroup of Asians are smarter than white people on average & this is usually claimed by white gentiles. So this seems to be a counterexample to your claim.
This is actually a reason why I put more stock in there being a kernel of truth in these claimed ethnic IQ differences, because the theory doesn’t fit very well with what white racists ought to want to be true. I would expect a purely made up narrative to claim that whites are the smartest group.
Matt M:
I’m not super well-informed here, but I think in general the worst conditions for slaves happened when they were doing some kind of brute force labor that could be monitored by a guy with a whip (cotton and sugar plantations, mines, etc.) and when the price of replacement slaves was relatively low so the owners didn’t have to worry overmuch about working the slaves to death.
In the Western hemisphere, my impression is that Caribbean sugar plantations were about the worst places on Earth. The slave populations basically had to be constantly replenished with new slaves because the old ones kept dying off in the awful conditions, and the people managing the slaves tended to be overseers who were rewarded for this year’s harvest, not for any kind of long-term performance.
You have this backwards. The Caribbean plantations were horrific. I seem to recall one of them running experiments on whether it was cheaper to treat your slaves well, or treat them poorly and import more. Guess which one turned out to be the winner?
Right, but you said that about slavery in “the Americas”, which is about like saying that the treatment of Jews was on the uglier end of the spectrum “in 20th century Europe”. Failing to recognize the differences within the Americas is one of the things I was specifically calling out as inappropriate, and the one you are most specifically guilty of.
And what exactly do you think the slaves were doing on the Caribbean sugar plantations?
About ten times as many slaves were imported to the Caribbean, as ever were to the United States(*). But when it comes to ex-slaves still alive in 1865, the US outnumbered the Caribbean about 2:1. Do the math and take a guess what was happening in between. Slaves in Virginia were valuable property; slaves in Haiti were consumables.
Your information is not out of date and a bit fuzzy; your information is dead wrong, and you know less than nothing about the relative conditions of slaves in the New World.
* Including British North America and the CSA.
@bean, @John Schilling’
Jeez, I’m sorry, I mixed up “former” and “latter” in that bit there, which I sometimes do – usually I catch myself and remember that “former” doesn’t mean “the bit just after what I wrote” but this time I didn’t. Mea culpa. The sugar plantations were definitely worse than the Virginia tobacco plantations; you’re certainly right about that. My face is actually red right now.
I think that what slavery in the Americas had in common across space was that it was racially based, that once it was underway it was buttressed by concepts of racial inferiority, and that in places where there isn’t a black majority now, there’s a black underclass, the existence of which can be traced at least in part to past slavery. That’s what I was trying to get at talking about “the Americas.” Additionally, I didn’t want to be accused of ignoring the situation outside of the US.
Gosh darn it, how can we have any substantive arguments if all our points of disagreement are just silly typos? And sorry if my response came across as a bit harsh.
As for race as an aggravating factor in slavery, I’m going to hazard a guess that the slaves in the Athenian silver mines found no benefit to their mostly olive-white skin. Debt or conquest or tribalism are sufficient to treat someone as the lowest sort of property, when it is economically convenient to do so. Race, I think, matters more when people stop being slaves, but are rather blatantly marked as being ex-slaves.
No problem. I was flipping back and forth between my reply and something for an RPG; that’ll teach me to try and multi-task.
Wirth regard to slaves in the ancient world versus American plantation slavery, I think that one key might be the way that people fulfill the just world fallacy (how the slaveowners justify it to themselves, etc). In cases where it’s the norm to turn all POWs regardless of origin into slaves, people can fulfill the “just world” by saying “ah well, shouldn’t have lost!” – which doesn’t seem to lead to doctrines of inherent inferiority in the same way.
Race might have started mattering more once the slaves had been freed and there was the dissonance of continuing to keep down people who were technically supposed to be free. But there were justifications based either on notions of inherent biological inferiority, or on notions of it being biblically ordained, or on notions of it being part of some kind of “civilizing mission”, or some combination, prior to that.
In any case, my initial point was that I think that the arrow doesn’t lead from notions of people being inferior or otherwise deserving bad treatment to enslavement (or conquest or whatever); it’s the other way around – people find it useful to do bad things to other people, then justify it so they can feel OK with what they’re doing/defend it to others. And the lesson to take from that isn’t “we shouldn’t talk about possible differences between people because it leads to inequality“; rather, it’s “we should really be careful that supposed differences between people being presented aren’t just attempts to reinforce/justify existing inequality that’s not due to such differences”.
It seems to me that race is relevant to American slavery in a way that it was not relevant in other contexts because America had set a higher bar for itself:
Previous slave-holding societies had never committed themselves to that kind of radical equality, making it much easier to justify slavery. Once you’ve said that all men are equal, you’ve put yourself in a bit of a bind. Cognitive dissonance is unpleasant, so you start coming up with justifications, and then eventually you end up with the Cornerstone speech:
People are most heavily invested in finding justifications when they are concerned that something really needs to be justified.
@Iain
That was written by Jefferson, who was a radical among radicals at the time. He also wrote
@The Nybbler:
So what? What do you think that proves?
The Declaration of Independence is hardly an obscure document. Why does it matter that the guy who wrote it would have gone further? The bit I quoted was still enshrined in one of the two most important documents in the history of the country. Fifty-five other delegates signed on. To the extent that literally any document except the Constitution can be said to express the founding principles of the USA, this is it.
Does it conflict with slavery? Is it radical? Absolutely. That’s precisely my point. America, unlike previous slave-holding societies, had committed itself (however inconsistently) to a radical equality. The incongruity between that commitment and the ugly reality is why so much effort had to be spent justifying slavery.
In a less idealistic society, nobody would have bothered.
I think you have the causation wrong. Through most of history, death rates in infancy and childhood were high enough that maintaining the population required most women to have a single career–producing and rearing children–along with other activities consistent with that, such as running a household. The fact that women can produce children and men cannot is indeed a matter of the fundamental nature of both.
I don’t think your “nothing else” is supported by the historical evidence. There were female legal scholars, a high status profession, in medieval Islam, at least one prominent female local leader in early Iceland, female authors and poets in medieval Europe. In all of those societies most women were primarily wives and mothers–for good reason.
On the general issue of race and slavery … . One advantage to basing slavery on race, where the latter is observable in physical characteristics, is that it makes enforcement easier.
On New World slavery, my understanding is that the Spanish Commendata system was worse than either Caribbean of Virginian slavery, because the owners had only temporary ownership of the slaves, hence less incentive to keep them alive for future value.
Oh, this Chevalier lawsuit is something I am going to sit back and enjoy. Whatever about Damore’s rights or wrongs, I think Gudeman (his co-plaintiff) was much better, from Google’s point of view, as being more defensible for firing him (he does seem to have deliberately asked questions in a way that made him sound like a jerk, to say the least).
But if it’s legal to be fired for your opinions, then the Chevalier firing is legal. Again, if we believe what Chevalier is claiming (that they were fired for fighting against Badness, rather than their boss asking them to maybe do some of the work the paycheck was actually intended to be for, rather than winning all these bonuses for social activism), it’s going to be so very, very interesting to see if all the same Google managers who came out with statements about how Damore was the kind of no-goodnik that had no place in Google will say anything about their commitment to diversity, or what their personal opinion of Chevalier’s opinions and memos and emails is.
Since nobody seems to have provided it, here is Tim Chevalier’s complaint. Frankly by his own words it sounds like his firing was entirely justified. It takes something special to make yourself look unsympathetic in your own filing, but Chevalier and his lawyers seem to have managed it. It isn’t just the content of his social activism that was causing problems, but that he was also prioritizing said activism over doing the job he was hired to do.
They can demand all they want, but I have enough trouble keeping up with the comments as is!
That’s kind of surprising. My understanding is that workers are free to discuss work conditions and can’t be punished, but it sounds like the NRLB takes the position that you can’t discuss affirmative action if it would make proponents uncomfortable. (Well, more narrowly that your employer may but need not necessarily fire you for arguing that science supports adjusting affirmative action if it would make proponents uncomfortable).
Note: I don’t personally know enough to have an opinion, so I am not implying that Damore’s position has any scientific basis.
It’s not the discussions of working conditions that motivated the memo, but him calling women more prone to histerics. Women may not be fond of such stereotypes and, in the opinion of the NLRB opinion, promoting such was not protected.
Well, he said “neurotic” rather than “hysteric,” but your point is well taken. 🙂
Looking at the memo,
1) If Damore honestly wanted to walk in this mine field, he should have been a lot more careful not to give offence. Not that his memo reads like Moldbug or anything, but it doesn’t read like someone who is being as cautious as they should be to phrase things in a positive way.
2) I find myself wondering if he’s serious. Damore concludes that on average, women are more comfortable working in groups and have a lower stress threshold than men,* so Google should reorganize their whole programming system to be more collaborative and less stressful? Did he seriously think that Google was going to risk producing fewer of whatever it is they produce? If not, I guess I can see people’s suspicion that the whole thing is just a ruse to say mean things about women after his feelings were hurt at the diversity seminar.**
* Note: I honestly have no opinion on either point.
** I don’t know the guy, so I don’t have an opinion on this either, but I can see the arguments on each side.
I thought he had been careful enough. He cited evidence. He admitted the possibility of error. He adopted a generally civil tone. And that should have been enough, even for a topic that is known to be contentious, in a company that I thought was generally accepting of free discourse and criticism.
But it wasn’t, and I’m left to wonder whether this severe action against Damore was an isolated action under special circumstances, or a sign that Google’s culture is (or has become) more intolerant than it seemed when I was there.
I have no inside experience, but as a complete outsider, it looks to me like Google internally espoused a value of open communication that completely collapsed when the Damore memo hit the blogosphere. That said, I have a hard time imagining a company in Google’s position just saying “we welcome all civilly expressed viewpoints – deal with it.”
JP Nunez / J Mann:
I’m pretty uncomfortable with a rule that says that you can make whatever sloppy arguments and claims you like on one side of a socially contentious issue without consequences short of threats of violence or actual defamation, but if you take the other side of that issue, your statements had better be precisely correct and worded with both legal precision and diplomatic language, or we can hammer you.
This seems like a procedural version of an isolated demand for rigor, right? It’s a way to stack the deck in your side’s favor in any discussions of the issue.
There is no such amount of care that can be given; it is the ideas that are offensive, not the presentation. As we can see by JPNunez giving a more offensive presentation and then attacking the memo based on that presentation.
I managed to get one high-level Googler to admit that it was indeed the ideas and not the presentation during an industryinfo@ argument while I was there; be interesting to see if it appears in the lawsuit at any point.
Well, he said “neurotic” rather than “hysteric,”
You DO know that “Neuroticism” is a technical term, right?
Tt’s one of the “Big Five” standard personality traits, and saying “women on average are higher on the neuroticism scale” is as coldblooded factually true as the statement “men on average are higher on the height and weight scales”.
In Damore’s memo, he pretty carefully stuck to the technical meaning.
Flipping back forth between technical and layman meanings of technically defined terms is poor show at best, and intentionally malicious at worst.
I’m not very happy with the name and arguments like this are why. It’s probably less misleading to think of the Big Five term as a negative metric of emotional stability rather than as “neuroticism” as such.
FWIW, women also score higher on Agreeableness on average. There are no significant gender differences in Conscientiousness, Extraversion, or Openness, although there are differences in some of the subscores of those traits.
@Mark Atwood
Yeah, I do. I’m squishy on this point – I’d love to live in a world where people can have rational discussions, but from Google’s perspective, I can see why they don’t want employees stirring up trouble if they can achieve the same thing with less trouble.
If you know that a word for parsimonious that begins with the same letters as the “n-word” is going to offend some people who mis-hear it and you work for me, then I’m sorry, it’s not a perfect world but don’t use it. I’m trying to make widgets and I don’t need the hassle.
So if Damore had said “Our efforts to increase female participation should look at whether the environment is unintentionally and avoidably hostile to many women’s participation. For example, on average women report suffering more stress and having less tolerance for additional stress” that would have caused less trouble than saying women are on average more neurotic. (But yes, probably still plenty of trouble.)
I agree that it’s bizarre to say that employees can be fired for saying that IQ distributions are different between men and women even if that is both (1) true and (2) relevant to designing a workplace sponsored inclusion policy.*
* Again, I don’t know if it’s true or relevant, but the NRLB memo clearly believes it’s discriminatory whether or not true and relevant.
> Did he seriously think that Google was going to risk producing fewer of whatever it is they produce?
Given the amount of people, time, and effort poured into “diversity” efforts, we’re already well past that line.
> or a sign that Google’s culture is (or has become) more intolerant than it seemed when I was there.
It was publicly brought up to executives over a year before the Damore incident that conservatives and those of alternative viewpoints did not feel comfortable at the company and indeed were quitting because of it.
The NRLB memo specifically states that Google’s reasons for firing Damore did not include protected discussion of working conditions.
There was no NLRB ruling because the NLRB case was withdrawn. This is an advice memo, basically administrative law made with no checks and balances at all. Probably made for some political purpose; leftists seem to think it’s the Trump administration signaling that workers have no protection, rightists think it’s the last gasp of Obama deep-state appointees. (Sophir was appointed by an Obama appointee)
It’s not even administrative law. The memo isn’t binding on the regional director and certainly isn’t binding on the GC (who is the memo writer’s boss and a Trump appointee).
It’s of the same character as the Department of Education “Dear Colleagues” letter, which is to say it’s administrative law in all but name.
I didn’t realize you were using your own private definition of administrative law. That being the case I bow to your unique expertise on what doesn’t count.
@Brad – IIUC, Nybbler means it’s legal realist (or de facto) administrative law, which in the case of the Dear Colleague Letter, meant that the letter hadn’t gone through regulatory procedures but was still a statement of what behavior would get a school hit with an enforcement proceeding and what behavior wouldn’t.
@Nybbler – Assuming i understand correctly, I disagree. This memo doesn’t mean that the next case to come before the NRLB will be decided the same way. It might give some information to the next employee and employer in this situation of how their case might turn out, but not enough for either one to safely rely on it. So it’s a step in that direction, but IMHO only one step.
I believe in whatever the guy who signs my checks tells me to believe. You know, as long as it doesn’t get me thrown in jail.
Invitation for criticism is a half-finished yet fully operational Death Star.
Username checks out. 😉
But agreed. At the same time that I’m troubled by firing Damore, I also agree that it was probably untenable for Google to keep him after the story broke.
“Know Thyself”
Hey, you and me both, mate. Nothing wrong with keeping your head down. 😉
I used to criticize Damore for talking politics at work. I still think it’s a good maxim not to, but knowing more about the context in which he wrote what he wrote, I am more sympathetic than I was.
On the other hand, I’m grateful for people who do stand up for truth in those instances where that means standing up against the words of their employers. If nobody did that, it would be bad.
As per Mark Twain.
Scott’s comment asking for investment advice makes me wonder, has anyone on SSC been able to FIRE (Financially Independent Retire Early) like what is discussed over in https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/?
I would be really surprised given the demographics of this blog if there are not at least a couple who have checked out of the rat race. My wife an I are on that path and hoping to hit it sometime in the late 2020s.
Interested in this, too. The most famous FIRE’d person is MMM, but it seems like he benefited some really good career moves that seriously juiced his income, with comparatively little student debt to service.
I don’t imagine us to retire until our late 50s, but we also intend to have more than 1 child, and want to make sure we can help out with their post-secondary expenses. This is still better than my parents and in-laws who will be retiring when they are physically incapable of working.
My take on MMM is that his path and timeline are achievable for only a small subset of people who a) can achieve high earnings very early in their career while b) living in modest-CoL areas or in fields where those earnings are not jeopardized by an ascetic lifestyle, and c) having the good fortune to find a like-minded partner who can resist lifestyle inflation not just in their 20s, when half your friends are broke, but for the long haul. Trying to practice the kind of self-denial MMM does for 12-15 years in your 20s and early 30s, and then reap the rewards of independence and copious free time, seems much easier than doing it for the 20-30+ years you’d need to reach the same place from a position of lower earnings, high student debt, etc.
None of that is to subtract from the fundamental healthiness of the example he sets, or that moving marginally in the direction of his lifestyle would do most of us a lot of good. His version of FIRE by mid-30s is great, but simply having enough cash cushion and budget wiggle room to make risky career/life moves with confidence that you’ll land on your feet, not on the street or your parents’ basement, does wonders for your mental health.
I found MMM very helpful, but I did not take all of his advice – because a lot of his advice seems geared at people who have a certain skillset – eg, people who are capable of building their own deck, or whatever. But the advice on how to cut down on minor expenses? It’s good. That stuff does add up, but more importantly, it’s about a mindset – that night out at the bar isn’t just hitting you in the liver, but the pocketbook, for example.
I very much agree with this statement. I think MMM is a little extreme at times but the whole mindset is something that has expanded my mind of possibilities as an early 20 something making six figures.
I think the piece of MMM advice that I have taken the least is when he advises drinking olive oil as a way to save money, because if you actually do the math, straight up drinking oil is cheap calories.
@dndnrsn
Cheap keto! 😉
MMM also has a very specific environmentalist agenda, which has become more clear over the years. He isn’t just (or even primarily) encouraging people to cut their consumption in order to help people achieve their goals of becoming wealthy; he’s “really just trying to get rich people to stop destroying the planet”.
Is that also his reason to breed so little?
My spouse and I did the FIRE thing, although we heard of MMM pretty late in the game and our definition of early may not match yours.
Context = in Canada, both approaching 60. She = university job 30 yrs, me = various tech precision instrument stuff, 30 yrs.
No kids, not as a choice but a medical reality.
Both came late to decent paying jobs. She had to have a couple of post grad tickets to work in her field, me because of years of drifting between low-end jobs until I found what I could excel at and went to trade school to get a diploma in it.
I think that going through a multi-year period of very financially tough times and observing the questionable life choices made by those around us have served us well. We lived in a really disadvantaged neighbourhood in Toronto, and some people there do the most foolish things with any money they get. Maybe locally sane, but unsustainable.
Basically, we saved and did not piss it away on crap that one does not need.
Our experience has been that anyone could retire early on the kind of money that MMM has, and that it can be done with much less. And do not pay too much attention to the scare stories from the retirement planning industry, who are very interested in getting people to keep dumping money into their savings plans.
Now changes are in order. We have to pick a how long we expect to live and spend down accordingly. Due to our disciplined saving past we will be living on more than we have been for the past 30 years.
MMM has some decent ideas, but I stopped taking his stuff at face value when I learned how much money he makes from his blog. Advice from a scary number of financial gurus has “…if you have a major secondary income stream from self-help advice” buried in the fine print somewhere, and he seems to be one of them. Still not as bad as that Four-Hour Workweek guy, though.
I’m in the final stages of FIRE.
Earned considerable lucre abroad, came back home, bought apartments, underway with renting. Probably earning a profit this year, after getting the business off the ground late last year. Most of the rest of the money is in investment funds, tiding me over while my business is getting off the ground. Probably going to continue with some sublets until I’m satisfied with my passive income level (and under the mandatory VAT revenue limit).
I could just not bother with all this, and put everything in some more passive vehicle, but that would only suffice for me, maybe a similarly ascetic wife… whereas I want to have a large brood. So a little extra effort is needed. Still massively more leisurely than a normal job.
I came across the concept a few years ago and it’s a substantial influence on me, though I don’t agree with everything (e.g.) MMM says. I could retire today if I moved somewhere a bit cheaper or became somewhat more frugal in my current expensive location; I haven’t yet, because, uh, I don’t know. Very good question, given how much I want out of my job. But it has definitely changed how I categorize spending, and increased my savings rate. In a longer term sense, it’s changed the question for me to be “how much longer do I have to do this?”
A few things I specifically disagree with MMM on (as an exemplar of the tribe)
– Health care costs. His current advice is a recipe for instant bankrupcy the second you have an unexpected crisis (note that he admits he doesn’t follow his own advice.) Yes, hospitals have cash discounts, because most people to whom they offer them are broke and you can’t squeeze blood from stones. A hospital’s billing department’s primary job is to find out that I’m rich and soak me. If I’m uninsured and thus uncapped in my liability, they will find ways to generate millions in expenses; game over. Other than relying on Obamacare subsidies–which will never repeat never last my lifetime for someone with substantial savings–I see no sustainable way to remain insured against medical disaster.
– I’d like to get married someday. MMM thinks that I should retire today and move to rural Colorado. That precludes the former from ever reasonably happening. It doesn’t say good things for having a large social group either.
– Cars are often practical, if you want to get any reasonable volume of things done. Yes, I could spend three hours going to the store and carrying home major purchases by bike. Those are three hours I could do something else in. If we all lived in cities with adequate, 24 hours, rapid, highly available, and well-covered public transit, this wouldn’t be true. We don’t. (This actually plays back to the previous point: if all I wanted to do on Tuesday was stay at home and read a book and do some cooking, I wouldn’t need a car. Since I don’t want to die alone, I also need to find time to go to jiujitsu and from there rapidly to my blues dance, and maybe a vet appointment. Well, MMM thinks dogs are gross and I shouldn’t have one, and he’s probably right, but again, only being that spends significant time around me.)
Re: car, you could just rent as needed.
Regular car rentals are ridiculously expensive and take a lot of time to arrange. Unless you’ve got something like Zipcar (not likely in rural Colorado), they’re not reasonable substitutes for owning a car.
Well, I dunno if the car rental system over there is as shit as the health system. But I would guess that there’s still a way to save money on this, given some usage patterns. Like where the rentals cost less than a car amortization plus insurance.
Back when I rented cars traveling for work I found that car rentals from big name companies at airports were 2-4x as expensive as smaller companies. At the time I rented from Enterprise as they took under 25 drivers, and it often carried with it a 10-20 min shuttle ride from the airport, but a small car was reasonable from 1 – 3 days at a time.
Tons and tons of Ubers can be a reasonable answer here (MMM looks down on this perhaps more than owning a car, though.) There are a number of cases where your own car is superior–mine is a staging area where I keep, among other things, audition clothes, sheet music, several kinds of dance shoes, rock climbing gear, medicine, and dog stuff. (Oh, yeah: I don’t think you can take a dog in an Uber.) Parents say this sort of thing is a nightmare: you can, in some cities, order an uber with a child seat, but not one with your kid’s favorite 5 toys, a diaper bag, change of clothes, etc. (My sister’s car seat also is part of her stroller, so she prefers using that to a rental.)
After last night’s adventure crossing a mountain pass in the middle of the night through a driving snowstorm, I think I might add “cold weather camping equipment” to my standard wargear. Not like a decent sleeping bag takes up much space.
MMM’s biking advice that drives me up a wall is this one:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/20/mmm-challenge-try-getting-your-groceries-with-a-bike-trailer/
I have no idea what he is describing when he complains about traffic to the grocery store. I have multiple stores within driving distance that experience no stop-and-go traffic. They ARE, however, along arterial roads, which biking down is next-level dangerous, as MMM himself explains:
Keep in mind that, yes, in the suburbs you can certainly plot a low-traffic route to a grocery store, as long as you don’t mind going out of the way and taking triple the time, and you still have to cross certain arterial roads at some point. And, yes, you’ll be waiting at a traffic light for a walk signal.
Yeah, sure, whatever. The weight isn’t what’s relevant, it’s the cubic footage of your grocery load.
This has minimal storage compared to even a small sedan (aside from it not even having a roof):
http://www.bikenashbar.com/cycling/accessories/trailers/nashbar-cargo-trailer-na-ct2-base
Your cargo capacity is a good 3.5 cubic feet. Your refrigerator probably holds 10 cubic feet of food, and your freezer 4 cubic feet, and we’re not even talking about whatever bulk storage dry goods in your pantry you might need.
Toyota camry has 15 cubic ft of temperature controlled, enclosed cargo.
I’ve considered biking to get groceries and I cannot justify it as reasonable.
Unless you have a family of 8+ you don’t really need to land 10 cubic at the store outside of special events.
MMM is quite nutty though and it isn’t particularly surprising that he has gone further out there in recent years. I don’t keep up as we were doing half his advice by the time we found him and the only thing left that we wanted to do was to switch over to a discount cell phone carrier.
Which is fucking illegal most places! And should be illegal everywhere. (I say as a fairly serious cyclist.) Cyclists on sidewalks are a dangerous menace. I’ve been nearly run down, my dog is in danger *often*, and what’s worse, most of the people you run down then think it’s OK to endanger me on my bike when I’m on the road where I’m supposed to be.
No, you should buy in enormous bulk whenever you can. Chest freezers are the shit. (MMM even point this out in other articles where he forgets this one.)
I have three freezers and two fridges, but this isn’t true. You should buy in bulk when it makes sense, which includes transport costs. Bulk discounts won’t pay for a car, and frequently won’t pay for trips to bulk distributors once you have bought one or two excessive items you see.
You don’t need 10 cubic feet, but there’s a damn good chance you’re going to need more than 3 if you have more than 2 people in your household.
When my Mom was feeding a family of 6, she’d easily stack up an entire grocery cart every week, then go to a second store and do the same thing.
Standard Grocery store carts look to e 4-4.5 cu ft in volume, which probably condenses to 3-3.5 for your average shopper. Between a trailer and saddle bags most grocery store visits can be transported with a bicycle.
There is a large distinction here between pre and post financial independence MMM advice (though he did not always do a good job distinguishing between them when I read him). Some of his time consuming + money saving combinations can work well for people with reasonable amounts of free time, but aren’t going to work at all for double income families with kids.
I think biking to get groceries is eminently reasonable; I used to routinely ride to the grocery store with a child in the trailer, and buy a week worth of groceries for a 2-parent, 3-preschooler family.
I also hate biking on the sidewalk, but I will make an exception for crossing arterial streets with a child. Either ride at walking pace, or just walk–but using a walk light to cross the street is reasonable (and, if you walk, legal everywhere).
Bulk discounts won’t pay for a car, and frequently won’t pay for trips to bulk distributors once you have bought one or two excessive items you see.
And that’s why you have a friend with a truck. Ideally, a friend with a truck, and a similar opinion of bulk buying.
And by “bulk distributors”, are you THAT far away from a Costco, a Cash&Carry, and a Winco?
And to do “bulk meat”, find a local specialty butcher, walk in, and tell him you want to buy a half of a cow, butchered. He will hook you right up, and you don’t have to drive to the slaughterhouse. That by itself will fill a chest freezer, and will pay for itself compared to buying beef from the local grocery store.
I think that the feasibility of buying groceries by bike depends heavily on the specific circumstances.
When i try to report a comment as spam why does it pop up a box with the text “Cheating huh?”?
It’s a problem I get sometimes, too. Mostly by accident, because Scott doesn’t have time to pore over report logs.
Because the report system is buggy. You can temporarily work around it by logging out and back in, but a permanent fix is going to take someone that knows WordPress better than I do.
Can someone explain RationalWiki to me? Some of the articles seem straightforward and some of them seem like bizarre screeds. I don’t really get the whole deal.
Umm, well it doesn’t have tight editorial control. “Rational” locally means “the triibe that really hate evolution-denying bible bashers, oh, and new-agers too”.
Basically, the editor base comes from organized skeptic sphere which means that a lot of people try to emulate the styles of James Randi or Penn Jillette – an aggressive, insulting attack on what they perceive as nonsense (if you’ve ever seen the first episode of Bullshit where Penn lambasts psychic mediums you’ll get a sense of what I mean). It feels very familiar to me as someone who was on the JREF forums – people will get really angry about what most people would see as harmless nonsense. It’s also mostly people who were on the Rebecca Watson side of the elevatorgate schism.
Yeah. The impression I get is that it’s people who cut their internet-arguing teeth going against stuff that’s just completely loony and objectively wrong – forget about theism, which at least has a tradition of intellectually based arguments and so on; I’m talking about crazy pseudoscience nonsense and the like. Which leads to perhaps more playing-to-your-audience than the norm: someone who sincerely believes that expensive water can cure diseases is probably invested enough you’re not gonna change your mind, so you may as well entertain yourself/your audience, right? Score a few cheap points, talk about how ludicrous and moronic your opponents are, etc.
Then they apply this to stuff that is a lot less cut-and-dried and stuff that’s a lot more subjective. The tone is not just “people who we disagree with are wrong and bad” but sneering that someone could ever be so dumb and foolish as to hold those opinions.
Yeah, they seem to assume that everything that is different from the (perceived) consensus of the center-left is nonsense that deserves snark and ridicule.
When things get difficult they tend to resolve their cognitive dissonance by strawmanning.
The “rational” in RationalWiki isn’t the same as the “rational” in rationalist-adjacent: they’re basically old-school New Atheists.
If you’re not actually quitting the internet at least make your L’Hote/Freddie deBoer archives publicly available! I used to read that final L’Hote essay “Getting to Good Enough” frequently before you made L’Hote private.
Good luck to you.
This is my safe space
Have you heard the phrase “sneer club” before?
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/SneerClub
I feel so conflicted when I read something like that. On the one hand Eliezer’s basically right, but on the other hand it’s given such an arrogant, whiny framing that I want to hunt him down and give him a swirlie after gym class.
That’s Big Yud for you. He did a similar thing when trolling for diet plans on Facebook.
lol, his “how do I lose weight as an extreme endotherm, please don’t suggest diet or exercise” post? That one was peak for meme-ability.
Warning to everyone on this subthread that this is approaching the limits of tolerable discussion here. I’m being restrained so I don’t get accused of being biased in favor of Eliezer, but honestly if you were doing this kind of thing to someone else you probably would have already gotten banned.
It’s the atheist equivalent to Conservapedia.
Ding ding ding. Everything follows from this.
When you say social I say justice
social – justice
social – justice
other explanations in this thread seem more complete but this can’t be a nontrivial part of it
The Good: Their articles on logical fallacies tend to be high quality, they’re on par with Wikipedia articles and cover a wider range of topics. Their articles on hoaxes and scams can be very good too. They’re not as thorough as Snopes, but they’re more focused on warning people about the general types of cons to watch out for, rather than debunking specific ones.
The Mediocre: Their articles on actual science are fairly underwhelming, which isn’t surprising given that most of its users aren’t scientists. It’s rare for them to get anything blatantly wrong, they just tend to skip over a lot of details and provide bare-bones explanations. You’d be much better served going to Wikipedia or, better yet, an actual science website.
The Bad: Their articles on religion are basically standard Dawkins-style New Atheism. Organized religion, new age mysticism, and personal spiritualism are all treated as nonsensical, and anyone who even entertains any kind of belief in a higher power is mocked for being a gullible idiot. They’ve been slowly trying to move away from that sort of obnoxious in-your-face anti-theism, probably because they’ve realized how unpopular it’s become within the Blue Tribe, but they have a long way to go.
The Very Bad: Their articles on politics and economics are terrible. Anything that deviates from center-left liberalism, from obvious targets like fascists and communists to slightly fringe ideologies like libertarianism and democratic socialism to mainstream positions like center-right establishment conservatism, are all treated as being not just objectively wrong, but obviously so. Anyone who espouses a political or economic viewpoint that isn’t center-left liberalism is considered to be an extremist crackpot. (The wiki is very much torn on the validity of identity politics, with about half the users espousing Social Justice rhetoric, and the other half treating the Social Justice movement as another crazy fringe ideology to be mocked. Pages related to Social Justice topics tend to be battlegrounds, with edit wars being frequent and commonplace.)
They also really hate the LessWrong Rationalist movement, and while they raise a lot of legitimate concerns about it (including many that I personally agree with, some of which I’ve espoused here), a lot of the disdain seems to be rooted in petty tribalism and personal rivalries. Apparently there was some internet drama between the two groups almost a decade ago, though I’m not really clear on the details.
One individual went to a rationalist meetup, heard someone talk about race-IQ, and became a bitter enemy.
David Gerard?
Has anyone done any research into teeth whitening? I’m interested in things I could do myself (i.e. other than get the dentist to bleach them) beyond regular brushing/flossing and cutting down on coffee.
Some cursory research brought up a bunch of things like oil pulling; brushing with baking soda, hydrogen peroxide or both; swilling vinegar; using weird things like ‘activated charcoal’ or ‘kaolin clay’. My problem is that this is an area rife with bad research and lots and lots of folk/traditional solutions, and each of them seem to be able to find a study or two saying they help so I can’t distinguish between genuinely effective stuff and nonsense.
Whitening trays from your dentist are probably the most surefire way of doing it.
I go with simply getting a mild “plus whitening” toothpaste. Seems to work ok-ish.
This page from a major toothpaste brand seems fairly reasonable:
http://www.colgate.co.uk/en/uk/oc/oral-health/cosmetic-dentistry/teeth-whitening
Normally at home, given my immaculate character, I dream extremely rarely (or perhaps rarely remember doing so). When I spend the night somewhere else, especially where I grew up, I notice I dream much more vividly and remember it more consistently. Does anyone else have an experience like this? Any not crazy explanations?
I think you’re much more likely to remember dreaming if you get woken up while a dream is in progress. Perhaps you sleep more soundly at home in your usual bed?
(Incidentally — and purely out of idle curiosity — is your username a reference to T S Eliot, or something else?)
Dreaming = processing novel information.
Being away = more novel information.
With this recent school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, tons of outlets are saying that it was clear something was going to happen and that the FBI etc. “mishandled” it. But IANAL and I don’t totally understand what could be done without him confessing some sort of plan. (I know he made a vague YouTube comment along these lines, but that seems understandably hard to trace. Maybe I’m just naive.)
Are there legitimate ways law enforcement could’ve prevented this, other than just saying “this kid’s dangerous” and coming up with dubious charges that led to him being sedated for the rest of his life in a mental hospital?
It’s a good question. It’s especially good because not only are we apparently terrible at doing something about obvious disasters-in-waiting, we seem to be quite good at massive overreactions like suspending a kid for chewing his Pop-Tart into a gun shape.
I still remember Voices From The Hellmouth
After columbine there was certainly a crackdown…. on bullied kids.
Oddball kids went from being mere outcasts to suddenly being viewed as dangerous with the result that effectively Americas teachers gleefully joined in as additional bullies.
In the same way that after 9/11 we saw teachers gleefully joining in bullying random Muslim children.
And then people were surprised there was an uptick in school shootings… after they started torturing outcasts even harder with the blessing of teachers and administrators.
There were a host of “profiles” circulated to schools for what to watch out for but the vast…. vast…. vast majority of the time they were steaming bullshit.
it hit the same problem as “how do you describe a knife” “Flat, sharp, metallic, with a handle”. It’s the dry description that’s going to be used to hunt down oddballs.
I remember later on hearing that the Columbine shooters had actually been popular bullies, in defiance of their initial media characterization as outcast misfits. Don’t know if either characterization ultimately proved accurate?
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103287016
Yes, they were popular bullies.
Interview with the author of the book about what really happened at Columbine– he reported on it when it happened, and then found out (partly through the killers’ diaries) that most of the early reporting was wrong.
The interview is from 2009, and includes a recommendation to listen to students about what they think are serious threats, but don’t have a zero-tolerance policy.
Judging by Wikipedia and accounts from friends who read that book “Columbine” a few years back (all very scientific, I know), I think the narrative now is that they were bullied, but they weren’t just smart, harmless kids transformed by bullying — Harris was a violent psychopath who was going to be trouble no matter what and he pulled Klebold under his spell.
In the first days after the shooting, I thought it was a mistake to say that law enforcement mishandled the case. Now, I’m not so sure. It has come out that the tips/complaints about the kid went well beyond the vague youtube comment. As far as what could have been done, my understanding is that the local police department had reasonable grounds to arrest him for domestic violence, that would have resulted in his guns being taken, but they declined to make the arrest. Sorry I don’t have a source on this.
In general, when people start going on about preventative measures, I start worrying about harmless but weird and introverted kids getting targeted. But it actually sounds to me that Cruz could plausibly have been identified, and that his previous misbehaviors were actionable in a way that would have prevented him from legally owning guns, which would likely have been enough to prevent the shooting.
If e.g. this is true, and it is only one of several examples, then local police could certainly have arrested him and a local DA probably could have indicted him on felony charges. That would have ended the immediate threat, and if they got a felony conviction out of it would permanently bar him from legally owning a gun.
Longer term, it’s unlikely he would spend more than a few years in prison, and if he can’t legally own a gun, then after a few years in prison he almost certainly knows a guy who knows a guy who can get him a gun anyway. But after a few years, the specific grudge that led him to shoot up a school will probably have faded, and he may wind up joining a gang that can channel his further violence in directions that are profitable to them and less terrifying to the rest of society.
Or maybe we figure out how to reliably rehabilitate convicted felons and find the political will to actually do so, but I’m not holding my breath.
The two incidents outlined in that CNN article are him hiding guns, which the cops seemed not to find (and I have no idea if that’s a felony), and him getting in a fight with the family’s son, after which the son refused to prosecute.
Again IANAL so forgive my incorrect use of these terms, but if the son doesn’t want to pursue charges, isn’t there little the cops can do in cases like these?
I’m mostly wondering what could’ve been done by law enforcement. That kid who didn’t press charges is a different story — he’ll presumably regret it for the rest of his life, but I can understand why in the moment he thought that prison wasn’t the solution.
It is a common misconception that a victim needs to press charges in order for a prosecution to happen. The prosecutor makes the decision one way or another. The prosecutor can take the victims desires into account, but is by no means obligated to drop charges at the behest of the victim.
My understanding was that they can still press charges, but it becomes far, far more difficult to win the case in that circumstance, so they by and large don’t bother trying. Is that wrong?
I guess I better mention that IANAL either.
I think my understanding matches yours, except that sometimes there is plenty of evidence available even without the cooperation of the victim. I don’t know whether the Cruz incident was like that.
I’m certain David Friedman can give us a long list of societies where this would be meaningful, but Florida isn’t one of them. “The People” prosecute, not any specific person. If the
government“people” had decided to prosecute Cruz for a crime, there is no requirement that the victim of that crime agree to the process. There is no requirement that there even be a victim.The police and/or DA may exercise their discretion not to pursue a case if the victim doesn’t want them to, but if e.g. they have reason to believe there are going to be further crimes, they can arrest and prosecute without the consent or approval of the victim, and they can compel the victim to testify under penalty of perjury. Or just use other witnesses.
“[Cruz] used a gun against people before … has put the gun to others’ heads in the past”, according to the mother who went out of her way to call the police. If she witnessed any of those incidents, that’s a felony indictment whenever the DA wants it to be. And when they start getting more calls saying Cruz was going to shoot up a school, no shit, this is for real, then maybe they ought to have looked through their files for things that would let them arrest and indict Cruz for a felony.
But that would have required amazing leadership.
Followup: Popehat now gives us the story of a disturbed young man who once scared a lot of people with talk of shooting up schools (among other things) and is now apparently busy writing bad fantasy novels without hurting anyone. In between was an intervention by the FBI built around a felony prosecution for making criminal threats, but with a rehabilitative rather than punitive focus.
This is how to do it right, and as far as I can see there is nothing in the story of Kenneth Eng that couldn’t have been carried over to Nikolas Cruz.
I don’t read the article the same way as you
Obviously he didn’t go on a shooting rampage which is good, but the rest of the article is about how even with what look like the best (realistic) interventions he still struggled with behavioral issues for years. I don’t know what the statistics are for people who threaten this type of violence to those who actually commit it but I feel safe in assuming it is well below 1:1. This being a ‘good’ outcome is very scary.
The behavioral issues long preceded the police intervention; they were cause rather than effect.
And we don’t have the magic pill, or the magic therapy words, that can make the behavioral issues go away. Behavioral issues with treatment and without shooting, is the good outcome. Unless you’ve got something better?
Just for starters, the part of Kenneth Eng’s case where his rich parents spent six years hiring a series of lawyers and psychologists to help him might have been difficult to replicate for Nikolas Cruz, who is an orphan. You seem to be missing the point of this piece:
I don’t think the full text of the information that was reported to the FBI on January 5th has ever actually been released. All I’ve been able to find is that “someone close to him” provided the FBI with information about “Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.”
From the sound of that, I think whatever was provided to the FBI was more detailed than JUST the YouTube comment about wanting to be a professional school shooter, or anything like that. The YouTube comment, specifically, was from back in September, while the FBI received this tip on January 5th. It sounds to me like somebody put together a detailed description of numerous different incidents involving the killer, rather than reporting any single incident.
Whatever it was, it was serious enough for the FBI to admit that it was a potential threat to life, and should have been reported to the Miami office, which leads me to believe it was comprehensive enough that he could have been committed under the Baker Act because of it, if they then passed the information to the local police. It’s hard to say whether that would have prevented him from killing later down the road, (to be honest, it probably wouldn’t have) but it might have bought time for him to be arrested for something else, or for put enough time and distance between him and the school that he might have picked a better defended, mostly adult target.
IANAL, of course, and if somebody can find the full text of that tip then it might very well be BS, and nothing I just said would apply. I haven’t had any luck finding it, though.
There’s also discussing ongoing over the behavior of the police and the armed resource officer (I think that was the title?) during and immediately after the shooting.
Lots of screw ups in lots of different ways. It does not make me want to rely on police for protection against criminals.
A previous generation of gun-rights activists coined the bit of doggerel
Avoid the legal nets
That entangled Bernie Goetz
Yell “Help, help police!”
Like Kitty Genovese.
Scot Peterson is lucky his name’s not so memorable (and will end up conflated with the other guy anyway)
The Kitty Genovese story has been seriously distorted.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/08/the-murder-of-kitty-genovese-and-the-myth-of-the-heartless-city/400622/
As much as I hate to give that deputy the benefit of any amount of doubt, it’s at least theoretically possible that he just made a bad tactical decision, rather than showing abject cowardice.
I can sort of understand the mindset; He’s outside the school, it’s a fairly large building, and he knows there’s shots being fired inside the school SOMEWHERE, but he doesn’t know where, so he might have thought the best tactical decision was to take cover and wait for the shooter to come to him, rather than running in willy-nilly, possibly going in entirely the wrong direction, and not doing any good.
Even if you accept that it was a tactical decision, though, he still would have deserved to be fired if he hadn’t resigned, because it was an incredibly BAD tactical decision, made by a person whose entire job is to make good tactical decisions. If the past couple decades of school shootings and similar incidents have shown us anything, it’s that the best way to end an active shooter incident is with quick, decisive, violent action. Even if you don’t kill the shooter, it changes the nature of the situation, and he’s likely to either flee, hole up somewhere (and not be actively going around killing people), kill himself, or some combination of the three. If he had some reason to believe the killer was coming his way, then yes, I suppose taking cover and waiting for him might have been a sound tactical decision, but why would he think the killer would come back out the front door? And if he did, wouldn’t it already be too late?
It was also most likely a tactical decision informed, at least subconsciously, by cowardice, even if he tried to convince himself it was a sound decision after the fact. That’s just me trying to be fair, though. Most likely it was just plain old cowardice.
That said, it highlights the importance of expanding concealed carry in a couple different ways. First, like you said, it highlights the fact that you can’t always count on the police, but we’ve known that ever since Warren v DC. But even more importantly than that, it highlights the importance of having a weapon AT THE SCENE of the shooting, rather than simply nearby. If everyone in the school acted the way that deputy did, but multiple people were armed, (and there are certainly times when it’s not the worst tactical decision; if you honestly have no idea which direction the shots are coming from, or are in a completely different building than the shooter, nobody could fault a civilian for staying put) then a teacher or other faculty member would have been in position to intercept him if he walked into or past their class. At the very least you’re protecting the class in there with you, and that’s a much easier thing to do than actively tracking the killer down.
If the dead students’ parents could sue and win giant settlements from Broward County’s insurer, how would that mean “we could count on the police”?
Huh. I’m not sure what kind of response I was expecting to that post, but it certainly wasn’t that.
Are you trying to argue that the common understanding of the Warren v. DC decision, that it established that police have no specific duty to protect citizens, is flawed? If so, I’d love an explanation. I’ve honestly never heard that one before.
Like Vorkon said, I don’t think there’s serious disagreement with the fact that the police don’t have specific duty to protect citizens, because then yes the police would get sued every time someone gets hurt.
So, given that the police don’t have a duty to protect, and in this case it doesn’t appear they even tried, removing one’s option to defend oneself seems like a terrible idea.
I think everyone here understands the reasons why we can’t just ban guns (politically or practically). Some people are against the idea of allowing teachers to arm themselves should they so choose, and other people think it’ll solve the problem. I think we should give it a try. If after five years it hasn’t made any difference or has made things worse via the Law of Unintended Consequences it’s a pretty easy law to revoke.
@Vorkon
The problem here, from my perspective, is that you are taking a legal decision written in legalese and ripping it out of context to make a broader point that isn’t quite accurate. “Duty” in that and related cases is a term of art from tort law. It doesn’t mean that there’s no socio-political or even other kind of legal obligations that the police have to protect people. What it means is that you can’t win a tort suit against a police officer or a police department generally for failure to protect (unless your circumstance falls into one of the exceptions, like the special relationship test).
There’s a larger tendency at play here. Many Americans seem to have a notion that our tort system with its class actions and giant damages awards is the only possible way of regulating society. And that if doesn’t apply in a particular area then whatever-it-is must be a giant free-for-all where anything is allowed. But that’s just not the case. There’s are other areas of law beside tort and there are other parts of government beside courts. Some can even act prospectively.
Let’s take the case at hand:
–Suppose on one hand that Warren v. DC had gone the other way. In that universe Broward County would be facing some very big lawsuits. But we have little reason to think that those kids would still be alive.
–Suppose on the other hand the police department had vigorous internal policies and trainings that required that safety officer to go in and try to confront the killer. Maybe it included a rule that would allow them to strip this guy of his pension. Maybe there would been several other police officers over the years that were summarily fired for having failed to protect civilians.
In this case there would still be no “duty” within the meaning of tort law, but I’d argue in a more meaningful sense as the word is actually used there would have been a stronger duty.
Brad, in your final example –
Do you think police departments are more, or less, likely to have “vigorous internal policies and trainings that required that safety officer to go in and try to confront the killer” if they are operating under the assumption that failing to protect citizens will result in getting sued for a ton of money?
I get what you are saying and I’d like to think that’s how things work. I like thinking economically — in terms of incentives and so on — it’s a clean way of looking at the world.
But on the other hand there are lawsuits where cities do lose and end up paying out of a ton of money. Excessive force, false arrest, and so on. Qualified immunity and related doctrines make it hard to win cases against the police, but not impossible and the numbers add up. Yet as far as I can tell there’s little being done to reduce civil rights judgments over time. Many police departments have officers still working for them that have caused multiple settlements and judgments against their employing municipalities.
We can talk about the whys and wherefores, and I certain have strong opinions on that, but the bottom line is that the mechanisms that one would hope would have a regulatory effect seem to broken in the case of police officers. I don’t think “failure to protect” judgments would be any different in that regard than “excessive force” ones.
Is mental causation the most seductive idea in human history?
Specifically, the feeling that you can bend reality towards your preferences just by willing it. This has been the hardest thing for me to give up in my journey towards physical realism.
Even now, I hear its siren call. Perhaps something something something quantum will make it physically possible to have a thing just by wanting it?
Seems like you’re conflating mental causation with some libertarian conception of freewill (or something oddly mystical, given your last sentence). We all affect the physical world by making decisions. I don’t know whether that counts as “bending reality towards your preferences”, as that sounds more poetic than precise.
I think he means the kind of thing where you had a bad thought and some act of God ended up punishing you for it.
And I thought the OP was about the law of attraction– you get what you imagine.
Yes, thank you, this is exactly what I meant. I guess I wasn’t as clear as I thought I was.
Quick question for those with more knowledge of economics than I* :
I would like to know more, but don’t have much spare time/energy. I found Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” as a free .pdf, and as an audiobook.
Is this an okay starting point? If you have better suggestions, I am all ears.
* This probably means you.
John Maynard Keynes. Start with Keynes. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Its free, its foundational – all later work either tries to build on him or refute him, and having read the real thing is very important, because it makes it way easier to spot economic tought that is full of shit, because it will more or less invariably involve lying about what Keynes wrote.
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_maynard/k44g/complete.html is the easiest on the eyes version on the net.
http://synagonism.net/book/economy/keynes.1936.general-theory.html With footnotes. But your eyes will cry.
Uhhhh…I wouldn’t endorse much of this, besides this part:
“General Theory” isn’t quite “Ulysses,” but it’s damn sure not optimized for easy reading.
Yeah, it makes “Wealth of Nations” and “Kapital” look like Harry Potter
Quite aside from whether it is right or wrong, The General Theory is not the place to start. I suspect Keynes would have agreed with that. The macro debate to which Keynes made a major contribution is not the basis of economics, not a central part of economics, merely a very important set of ideas coming out of economics.
I find it irritating that people on both sides of the political spectrum, perhaps more on the right than the left, identify “Keynesian” with left of center economic views in general rather than with a particular approach to the problems associated with involuntary unemployment. I used to have, may still have somewhere, a copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom with a glowing endorsement on the back by Keynes.
Keynes also thought Marx was nonsensical rubbish, which I imagine would surprise quite a few partisans
Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT try to start with The General Theory. It pre-supposes a pretty good background in statistics and economics that someone trying to start with ‘Economics in One Lesson’ probably doesn’t have. It’s also not the Ur-text Thomas is trying to make it out to be. While very important to have a familiarity with if you want to be economically literate, Keynes didn’t actually invent macro with it like the pop wisdom pre-supposes.
Economics In One Lesson is heavily recommended by libertarians, and from what I’ve read of it it does have a libertarian bent to it. Doesn’t mean it’s bad, but be aware of that.
I don’t have much knowledge of economics, but I read Economics in One Lesson during my True Believer libertarian phase. Even then I thought it was very redundant and that you get the point after like 3 chapters. It’s just the one lesson again and again.
Aside from just picking up a basic econ text (which you can buy used for dirt cheap), David Friedman’s Hidden Order is pretty good, as still articulates a lot of the basic concepts of price theory that you probably won’t get in other popular texts. I haven’t read Charles Wheelan’s Naked Economics, but his Naked Statistics was pretty good, so it may be a good starting point.
Timothy Taylor’s econ course from The Great Courses is also really good, and it might be available at your local library (mine has lots of Great Courses DVDs available).
+1
Also, the Marginal Revolution guys (libertarian economists from GMU) have done a bunch of videos for Marginal Revolution University which do a nice job of explaining a lot of basic economic ideas, if you find video presentations workable.
Hidden Order is a rewrite of my Price Theory designed to convert it from a textbook to a book for the intelligent layman, the equivalent of a price theory course for someone reading about it for fun. It’s better than Price Theory but Price Theory is webbed for free.
I liked Naked Economics quite a bit. As a point of bias, I had Wheelan as a professor, and liked him.
I haven’t read this particular book, but I’d definitely second (third?) all the caution about the source. The Von Mises Institute falls somewhere between Ron Paul and Ayn Rand on the economic spectrum.
The word “recession” does not appear at all. If you’re trying to get a comprehensive economics education, this text probably isn’t it. You are probably better off going to a bargain book store and picking up an old college textbook for a few dollars, which will give a reference point closer to what the median American college graduate experiences. This will also be a helpful jumping off point into reading the various economic blogs, which will probably teach you more in the long-run anyways.
Maybe worth a look at Economics in Two Lessons, a sort of reply to Hazlitt’s book. This will in due course be an actual book, but for now what there is is a bunch of blogposts containing (in some cases, old versions of) bits of it. A good place to start might be what’s currently the third thing on that page, which links to the introduction of Quiggin’s book.
I haven’t myself read either Hazlitt’s book or Quiggin’s response, but Quiggin is a smart chap. His political leanings are quite different from Hazlitt’s.
I enjoy Yoram Bauman “The Stand-up Economist”. PhD in econ, but actually pretty damn funny.
Pop Econ is really not a great way to learn economics. I don’t think I heard the words “marginal cost” until I actually took a class. If you want to learn more than “incentives matter”, than you need to pick up a textbook and understand those supply and demand graphs. Make sure you start with microecon, that’s more foundational.
There is a Teaching Company course on basic economics by Timothy Taylor which is pretty good.
Well, Canada finished third in the Winter Olympics with 29 medals, behind Norway (39) and Germany (31). Yay, us! We’re a winter sports super-power!
The Winter Olympics have a reputation as a private party for Whitey McWhiteFace, so it was good to see some of the Asian nations stepping up. South Korea got 17 medals, Japan got 13, and China 9.
But seriously, what really impresses me is Norway’s performance. What an incredible result for such a small nation. Is it too early to suspect a secret eugenics program begun under the Nazi occupation, continued through the Cold War by the CIA, and now run by a shadowy group of California billionaires?
Cross country skiiing, biathlon, and ski jumping are called the “Nordic” disciplines for a reason 😉
Norway won 14 of their 39 medals in cross country skiing, 6 in biathlon, and another in Nordic combined. Plus 5 in ski jumping. That’s a huge contributor. No other country takes cross country as seriously as they do.
What’s really wild is they got their 39 medals with only 109 athletes. USA sent 241.
The Netherlands might be the champions of specialization though – 20 medals, all in speed skating (16 in long track). Their entire delegation was only 34 athletes.
We are already doing better. In the past our medals would generally all be long track speed skating and now we are also winning in short track speed skating. #DutchSoDiverse
We are already making plans for world domination, by building an artificial mountain* so we can ski/snowboard/bobsled/luge/etc down it. Get ready to surrender that 4th place, USA!
* As soon as we can make it financially feasible, which is a bit of a challenge.
Well, Scott said he’s looking for investment advice…
I would guess that sports like luge, ski jumping, and bobsled are high on the list of optimizable sports for countries looking to turn money into medals into national prestige. The pools of competitors for these sports are really shallow; there just aren’t a lot of people who take the family out ski jumping for a weekend. Get some capable generalist athletes, give them professional coaching and living expenses, and you have a decent shot at some olympic medals.
@johan_larson
It seems like China was making a concerted effort to do the sort of “moneyball” you’re talking about by throwing lots of resources at relatively shallow competition pools. But this seems to have led to much more success at the summer vs. winter games (then again I don’t think China has much of an “organic” winter sports culture, so the fact that they are competitive at all is impressive).
@johan_larson
I believe that bobsledding and luge are very material-dependent & it’s very hard to break through if you don’t have domestic production expertise. You can buy equipment, but it’s going to be sufficiently worse than what the teams/athletes from the top countries get that you can’t really win with it.
The answer to this is obvious; it is far too late!
What do people here think of the proposition that the political culture America has reached an all-time high in terms of polarization specifically along party lines?
Whenever I hear someone saying “America is more polarized and tribalistic than ever before”, there are several rebuttals (although I think most acknowledge that the situation is more polarized than a lot of Americans, including me, have seen in our lifetimes).
One is to point out that things were obviously worse at the time of, and just before, the Civil War. This is true, but I think it’s arguable that we shouldn’t view that situation in terms of two-party politics, as the party system was in flux at the time because of the deep divisiveness of the slavery issue. Yes the then-brand-new Republican party was 100% regional and pro-North, but it came into being as a result of already existing regional tribalism while meanwhile there were people on both sides in the Democratic party.
Another is to point out that the American people were more bitter and polarized in living memory over the Vietnam War. Perhaps that’s also true, but the more I’ve learned about American political history the more it seems to me that this wasn’t an issue divided along party lines; rather, most of the establishment members of both parties were pro-Vietnam and really this was a conflict between the older generations and the younger generation.
Thoughts?
It seems like there is more strife within each party than I can remember. The Republicans had the Trump supporters squaring off against everyone else, of course, and what they were arguing about where not minor differences of policy. But the Democrats also had to deal with a very serious challenge (by a socialist!) against the candidate supported by the party leadership.
The strife within each party does seem to be at a maximum over my lifetime, but I expect the strife within the Democratic party circa 1968 (over Vietnam, civil rights, etc.) was considerably worse. Nowadays, despite the serious conflicts within each major party, two-party tribalism seems robust enough that most members of each party seem willing to step in line with their party’s leader (or at least that’s my vague impression currently, hard to justify quantitatively).
Off the top of my head – Adams v Jefferson, the end of reconstruction and the New Deal also seem more divided on party lines than today, but I’d want to look at congressional vote totals to say accurately. The Civil Rights era was also more bitterly divided, but that wasn’t along party lines initially.
Adams versus Jefferson was probably extremely divided on party lines, sure, but my impression is that an extremely low percentage of the American population was emotionally invested in following the political situation during that period (of course most people couldn’t vote anyway).
The end of Reconstruction, yeah, that does seem like a candidate (although there were plenty of Democrats in the North, I suppose they weren’t the ones promoting and implementing Reconstruction).
I would say that the New Deal also wasn’t initially divided along party lines in the sense that the two major parties didn’t really have platforms until the Great Depression happened on Republican watch and the subsequent Democratic administration implemented it. In other words, as with the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, a new ideology was becoming prominent and the Democrats wound up aligning themselves with it more closely than the Republicans did, rather than an existing sense of party tribalism determining who defended an emerging ideology (if I’m making any sense).
The militias in several states were ready to muster out over the election, so I don’t know about that.
Re Vietnam, the young were more pro-war than the old.
I suspect there are a lot of systems (social media sites using algorithms to maximize stickiness of their site, outrage farming for clicks, various writers and social media personalities trying to break out of the pack by getting a lot of attention quickly, etc.) that are pushing us toward more bitter polarization. My intuition is that the actual facts on the ground probably don’t have any more tendency to polarize us now than they did 20 years ago, and maybe have less. There’s almost certainly much less overt racism, overt sexism, overt anti-gay bias, mistreatment of trans people[1], etc., now than at any time in living memory in the US, yet there’s more visible outrage over those issues now than there was then.
[1] Who are still getting kicked around plenty, but almost certainly less now than 20 years ago, and it’s at least a topic of discussion in public that they ought not to get kicked around so much.
I don’t think the party divide matters that much. If the country was divided, but the parties weren’t, I think you’d see that rapidly changing. As you say, the pre-civil war era wasn’t really split along party lines, but it did march rapidly in that direction very quickly, and by the eve of the war, you have a substantially republican north facing off against a substantially democratic south. Ditto in the vietnam era, where vietnam starts out with bi-partisan support and bipartisan (if minority) opposition, things shift rather quickly, aided, admittedly, by Nixon’s victory helping to push the democrats into an anti-war party.
I see your point, but I guess what I’m driving at is that my perception of the present-day situation is of the American populace dividing itself on issues largely based on already-entrenched party affiliations, rather than the other way around (as we agree was the case pre-Civil-War and during Vietnam, arguably even during the time of the Iraq War).
Maybe I’m not seeing things in a balanced way though because I’m looking at the current situation up close while looking at past situations zoomed out through a historical lens.
Well, obviously the country was more polarized during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. But this is the most polarized that the country has been since the Reconstruction era.
It’s not that people are disagreeing with each other more, but rather, they’re increasingly less willing to try to find common ground, or even to discuss their disagreements in a civil manner. The disagreements are also much more sharply drawn along party lines than they used to be, which makes it that much easier to dehumanize the other side; when it was more of a mixed bag, you’d be a lot more likely to agree with someone on a few issues and disagree with them on others, which fostered earnest discussion and good faith discourse. Now, it’s gotten to a point where roughly one-third of Republicans see the Democratic Party as an existential threat to the nation and to civilization as a whole, and vice-versa. This is reflected within the political system as well: politicians are far more likely to vote consistently along party lines, and far less likely to hammer out successful bipartisan compromises, largely because any politician who’s seen as insufficiently conservative/liberal will get voted out in the next primary.
Political scientists have a lot of theories as to why the U.S. has become so much more polarized: poor economic conditions causing people to view politics as a matter of survival more than preference; modern media allowing people to isolate themselves in political echo chambers and choose their own facts; primary elections being more important than general elections in many districts due to gerrymandering; less people being taught about proper civic engagement in school due to decreasing education standards. Probably it’s a mix of all of the above.
The puzzles this time are excerpts from pop songs, with only the first letter of each word shown. Find the titles of the songs.
You are welcome to post answers, but please ROT13 encode them to avoid spoiling it for others.
http://www.rot13.com/
1.
T W T A P I T C J
T P B W T A T B T W
T B W J A T J B T S
Y S H T K O J S
2.
W, Y C T B T W I U M W
I A W M: N T T T
M L A W W, I B K A
S I W B
3.
P D P
I I T D
P D P
I B L S
B I M U M M, I K M B
O, I G K M B, M
4.
C K, B Y T M
C K, F P B
C K, I K Y F G
C K, T W G E
5.
I B S B
T O B D K H T A
I T I S, W B Y B
S T A A I P U T S
#2 is fgnlva nyvir
I am going to make the hints and answers available early, because I will be away for the next few days. If you want to give yourself a challenge, only decode the hints you really need.
First hint: the topic of each song.
1. Cevfba.
2. Trggvat ol.
3. Cneragubbq.
4. Eriratr.
5. Frk.
Second hint: the year of release of each song.
1. Svsgl-frira.
2. Friragl-frira.
3. Rvtugl-fvk.
4. Avargl-gjb.
5. Bu fvk.
Actual answers:
1. Wnvyubhfr Ebpx
2. Fgnlvat Nyvir
3. Cncn Qba’g Cernpu
4. Pbc Xvyyre
5. FrklOnpx
Finally, something within my area of expertise! I got 3 straight away and will continue to meditate upon the rest.
A nice easy one (maybe) in this vein:
W I L?
B, D H M!
D H M—N M.
Jung vf Ybir?
Yep.
There is an recent interview with the Weinstein brothers which I found very interesting. To decide whether you want to spend the almost 3 hours, you can read this.
Same planet, different worlds: I saw “interview with Weinstein brothers” and instantly muttered, “Wait, I thought Bob was preoccupied with selling what’s left of the company, and Harvey was busy trying to stay out of jail!”
Yeah, that’s why they sent Bret and Eric to do the interview.
Posted this on the Subreddit:
Is there an upper limit to human physical attractiveness beyond which it only elicits diminishing responses?
Suppose there’s some neural mechanism in human brains that’s used to appraise physical attractiveness. What I’m wondering is if it’s capable of being completely maxed out, and whether everything over a certain point of hotness would be overkill.
Say you instructed a strong (and friendly!) AI to design what most humans would agree is the most attractive girl/guy possible. So through a series of optimizations, the AI uses its unfathomable knowledge of human biology and psychology to do just that.
Would the resulting human trigger a much different response than the people currently considered “the hottest”? Would it be like those Veelas in Harry Potter who make people completely lose their minds? Or would they just appear slightly more good-looking than your run-of-the-mill local beauty due to maxed out neural hotness receptors?
Very interesting question! My guess would be that optimising physical appearance wouldn’t change responses hugely, but optimising gestures/body language/facial expressions/outfit would have a significantly bigger impact, and optimising speech could create a Veela effect. (assuming this is personalised, since tastes differ so widely). On the other hand, the relevant comparison is the hottest person in the world (by your standards) coming up and flirting with you, which would probably make people lose their minds anyway.
I’d claim that an even modestly attractive member of your preferred gender coming up to you and flirting with you is much more likely to peg your arousal response than just seeing an image of an “optimally attractive” person.
I also think there’s a whole lot of variability in what different people find attractive, at least based on personal experience of my reaction to various friends’ celebrity crushes.
I mean the question appears to be where attraction falls on an optimizing/satisficing scale. For me at least it’s much closer to satisficing than it is to optimizing but I’m also kind of desperate so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
From my first person experience of attraction, yes it maxes out, and a fairly significant fraction of prime-reproductive-age members of the opposite sex reach that level for me.
Agreed. Anything above the 40th percentile is basically a tie to be resolved by personality (after which their subjective physical attractiveness is updated to match).
I had a friend who used to say that rating attraction on a 1-10 scale was pointless, the real scale is 0-1.
When you use fractions, there is no meaningful difference 😛
Seriously though, 0/1 is merely meaningful to the individual, if you want some cross-person comparability, you need more detail (although numbers from 1-10 are not necessarily detail enough to make usable claims).
@OptimalSolver
What do you mean by “diminishing responses”? I don’t think that beauty operates on merely one axis.
Very high attractiveness may cause behavior from others that the person dislikes and/or that harms the person in some ways, like people they deal with not being able to look past their beauty or turning off their brain.
In general, I would expect that benefits minus costs of increasingly good looks will increase rapidly until some point, where it slows down. Then at one point, the costs may start outweighing the benefits for further increases in beauty.
I think part of what’s going on might not just be individual responses to beauty– past a certain point it’s not just “here is the person I’m attracted to”, it’s “here is the person I and a whole lot of people– everyone who’s normal, in fact– is attracted to”.
Sure and that has advantages (I have high status because Pretty McPrettyFace dates me) and disadvantages (Pretty McPrettyFace is out of my league and may leave me for someone prettier).
However, I think that the status benefits always increase with increased looks, while the anxiety depends on the gap with the looks of the partner. In general, I have my doubts whether these effects ever make it better to be less pretty on average (I can see how it can sometimes be better for an individual, when the person they are attracted to is less pretty, but I’d expect the opposite case to be more common even at high levels of attractiveness).
I think physiological response to beauty definitely saturates; there’s only so much electrical signal and so many neurotransmitters that can be produced.
I’m ambivalent on this. On one hand, considering examples of existing people who are really attractive, there does seem to be an asymptotic limit.
On the other hand, anime is more attractive than 3DPD, so it’s possible that there is a region of stimulus, unreachable (or just unreached?) by biological humans, which results in greater perceived attractiveness, even though the result is counter-adaptive.
On the third hand (also known as the Dick), a lot of people have specific tastes or “types”, which may call into question the possibility of “maxing out” attractiveness. Furthermore, these tastes may change during one’s life and be affected by experience. I feel like there is a lot of research to be done here before the original question can be addressed.
On the fourth hand, if we reduce the experience of beauty to the release of some neural transmitters in some area (boring!), then it seems pretty clear that there has to be a practical upper limit, though the question of an actual human can approach it remains.
I do some acting/singing, and so occasionally meet someone 2-3 standard deviations from the attractiveness mean. I’m no slouch, but the difference between pretty attractive and at the top range of human ability is vast.
They’re all incredibly nice people, but the immediate response is a kind of terror, a recognition of unearthly power, like the fair folk just appeared in front of you.
As a counterpoint, I am also involved in musical theater, and also run into stunningly beautiful actresses on the quasi-reg. I would say I have the opposite reaction: while they certainly draw attention and can be somewhat distracting, if anything the experience has somewhat lessened the effect of physical attractiveness. I wouldn’t say it’s normalized the scale–I can still tell they’re very pretty–but I’m much less likely to stop thinking beacuse of their presence. Some variant of the joke “No matter how beautiful she is, someone somewhere is sick and tired of her shit” applies: I have ample historical evidence that they’re basically normal people with normal mindsets.
That said, it’s still noticeable. I don’t agree with the people that call beauty a positional good, at least not entirely: if everyone in the world was Hollywood-pretty, definitely some fraction would start competing on the exact details of their eyebrows and ombre and who had the *best* liposuction, but I think everyone’s day to day experience would just be more pleasant. Both because it’s pleasant to be surrounded by beauty, and because we would subconsciously default to a more friendly norm.
Note that attractiveness is culturally mediated/learned. A person who is very “hot” to e.g. a 21st century American might be something else entirely to a medieval European peasant. The well known part of that has to do with extreme slenderness, but my guess is that this is just one of many factors. (Or maybe I’ve been taken in by an urban legend on this bit of information. I didn’t research it.)
If that information is accurate though, then presumably each culture constructs an almost/rarely attainable maximum, and the question is moot.
Human minds and senses are finite, so yes, there is an upper limit. Furthermore, human senses tend to be saturated by stimuli over time, which means that even the maximally attractive person will seem less attractive over time. On top of that, there’s no universal standard for attractiveness; yes, there are certain trends that all humans share, but each person has one’s own preferences on top of that.
As with most of our hormonal responses, people would build up tolerance to attractiveness. People who work and live in entertainment industry hubs are often surrounded by the cream of the physical crop, and their sense of attractiveness scale is warped compared to people who live elsewhere. An aspiring actor who is a 10 in Michigan might think themselves a 3 after they move to LA.
See also the stereotype that all South Korean women look the same because they all get the same optimized plastic surgery face.
Hypothetical: there is an asymptotic relationship in how many abs one has to their increase in physical attractiveness, compared to the previous number of abs. Otherwise, less people would be grossed out by the bodybuilders.
I think this very unusual study with teaching chickens to recognize faces shows there’s something pretty basic about neural networks at play in physical attraction: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26192929.
In other words, “looks like a face” has to be high, but once it is, then we’re done with physical attractiveness and on to other factors.
This is relevant to my interests. Thank you.
I can’t empirically prove this, but my impression from portraits over the past six hundred years or so is that human facial attractiveness has dramatically increased over that period, perhaps thanks to some combination of sexual selection and improved nutrition. Go back a few hundred years, and people regarded as great beauties by their contemporaries look pretty ugly to me. The earliest attractive (to my sensibilities) woman I’m aware of based on portraiture is Emma Hamilton, a little over two hundred years ago, and it may not be a coincidence that she was having an affair with her country’s biggest celebrity.
Hotness set points?
This one from 1490 looks a bit like Scarlett Johanson –
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xQnw0gAEu1I/UM78Pr3fDnI/AAAAAAAAPxA/YSyJBmQnBX0/s1600/beaa.jpg
https://www.agefotostock.com/age/en/Stock-Images/Rights-Managed/UIG-911-06-157991
1475 –
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FVrlo0hBzgo/UM7d-relL3I/AAAAAAAAPs4/_0NRL-OU0gQ/s1600/Untitled-2.jpg
1485 –
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TzvSWCdzd0k/UM75_NX1TqI/AAAAAAAAPww/OiZWVeX-a1U/s1600/simma.jpg
http://jeannedepompadour.blogspot.co.uk/2012_09_01_archive.html
The curmudgeon in me says it’s been all downhill since 1,000,000 BC.
I’m pretty sure people are objectively better looking, at least on average, but I’m not sure how much portraits actually tell you. Stylistic matters aside, any portrait artist is going to have a desire to his patron, at least a little, and they generally left out smallpox scars, missing teeth, skin blotches and moles, and lots of other unattractive features.
They also probably tend to favor young people and if you look at countries with hard lifestyles (like Afghanistan), the young people look fine, people just age very fast.
One of the rudest and most uninformed commentaries on Jordan B. Peterson I’ve come across. Thing is, it’s viscerally delightful.
Official SSC policy is now that Jordan Peterson is a Class III Ideohazard, black box warning “almost uncontrollable tendency to spawn levels of discussion completely out of proportion to the importance of his ideas”. Commenters are earnestly advised to voluntarily dial back discussion of Jordan Peterson to sustainable levels, though this will not be enforced by specific penalties at this time. Low-quality comments and threads about Jordan Peterson may be deleted without warning.
Commenters are warned that unprovoked discussion of how Jordan Peterson is overrated or how people should talk about him less are also forms of talking about Jordan Peterson (it’s different when I do it because it’s in red text). Please refer to Ideohazard Containment Procedure 6.14 for further information.
Is he really discussed that often or are you worried about SSC becoming associated with him* or do you have a not so rational aversion to him**?
* Which is the most understandable reason, because even my generally reasonably centre-left paper had one of these ‘gotcha’ interviews with him, which they rarely do, so this suggests extreme aversion on the left.
** Which is my impression
For years Scott has made an effort to be cautious about the concentration of ugly culture war discourse that shows up in the comments sections of his blog. As it happens, Jordan Peterson seems to be a lightning rod for several major culture war controversies, so his warning makes some sense to me.
I don’t disagree with that, but I that is not the explanation that Scott gives. An “almost uncontrollable tendency to spawn levels of discussion completely out of proportion to the importance of his ideas” is an argument that JBP is discussed more than his ideas warrants, like one may believe that Bryan Caplan should be discussed less.
That is a different argument to ‘culture war lightning rod.’
I suspect it’s less to do with fear that discussions will become uncivil so much as being sick of the guy coming up every. single. OT.
Jordan Peterson seems to be a lightning rod for several major culture war controversies
To this quasi-outside observer, JP appears to attract more heat from the left than he does warmth from the right, if that makes any sense. So describing him as a ‘lightning rod’ seems…off.
But perhaps that’s just my tribal blinders. *Are* there things which left leaning people see as ‘meh to pretty ok’ which get attacked full throttle by (parts of) the right?
(And again, let’s hear it for diversity, where people come up with notions that I would have never in a hundred years considered.)
@aapje
There’s been a ton of discussion in the last dozen open threads about JP, and almost none (if any? I can’t recall any at least) involved discussion of his ideas, so
“almost uncontrollable tendency to spawn levels of discussion completely out of proportion to the importance of his ideas”
Seems almost trivially true
@johnjohn
There are quite a few topics that get way more debate, so I don’t see the issue.
But of course, the appropriate amount of discussion is subjective.
How about communism and (full on) socialism? I hear about those topics much much more often in the context of full throttle attacks by parts of the right, then I ever do advocacy for them by left of center people. A few online weirdos aside (I think they are called tankies?) the nicest thing I ever hear from left of center people about them is “its a good idea, too bad human nature is compatible with it”.
Things that I, a leftist, perceive as basically reasonable that attract vitriol from the right.
1) Marxism
2) Reparations
3) Indigenous rights
4) Free Palestine
5) Animal rights
These all have various levels of support on the left, but are not considered particularly controversial.
@Keranih
Taxes on sugary drinks.
Almost all of the above are actually things I find common ground on with my upper-middle-class liberal friends. The only exception is “Free Palestine,” which some actually support (with my Jewish friends being…less understanding of the plight of Palestinians).
We just had the sugary tax drink in Chicago get rolled back. People were pissed. As in “fuck you, I will drive to Lake County and post it on Facebook” pissed. And Chicago is not a conservative stronghold by any imagination.
Animal rights is an interesting case, because it sort of depends on what you mean. Like, conservatives don’t support dog fighting, and my leftist friends generally think the “anti animal testing” folk are deluded fools up there with the “I only buy non-GMO salt” crowd.
@ A Definite Beta Guy, Optimal Solver’s example is a much better one. By animal rights I mean things like ending factory farming (or even all meat consumption). Think PETA or Sea Shepherd.
Since most of those drinks use corn syrup, wouldn’t it make more sense to just subsidize corn less?
@fahundo
It does from a god’s-eye-view; not so much from the viewpoint of a politician who has to contend with massive amounts of angry farmer money.
@Aapje:
I don’t think that Scott has such an aversion to Jordan Peterson – remember what he wrote in the five years predictions thread:
@a reader
You can read that in different ways, including one where Jordan Peterson loses much of his heroic appeal if SJ becomes more reasonable. Then the heterodox don’t feel as much need to rally behind him, so he becomes far less prominent. That’s a good outcome if you dislike how prominent he is.
So hoping for that is not inconsistent with having a (mild) aversion, which Scott himself seems to realize may not be entirely rational:
I can see why, because Peterson likes to use labels/archetypes that are fairly sloppy and tribal, while Scott prefers to employ far more charity.
However, if non-rational thinking is prominent among people (which Scott’s own writings suggests is the case), then a mix of tribalism and reason may be more effective than to maximally appeal to reason. It is not a given that Peterson’s strategy is worse, to weaken SJ so much that the polarization is more manageable and so there is more room for reasonable debate.
Irrationally overvaluing how susceptible others are to reason and overvaluing how capable others are of becoming more rational is exactly the kind of mistake that one would expect a rationalist to make.
I won’t speak for Scott, but his reaction to Peterson’s anti-SJ rhetoric doesn’t surprise me considering that (1) Peterson seems quite hostile to some aspects of Scott’s pro-trans perspective; and (2) Peterson’s flavor of anti-SJ seems to be a bit too strong on the “Waah! Stop making yourselves victims, little babies!” scale, which Scott has expressed a distaste for.
I can’t remember the last open thread that didn’t have at least one large thread that was, if not devoted specifically to Jordan Peterson, then at least heavily involving him, and I can think of at least one that had no less than three large threads specifically devoted to him, not even counting the one that simply started, “So, how about that Jordan Peterson, huh?” by way of mocking the other threads. I’ve also noticed that, “so you’re saying we should model our society after lobsters?!?” has become shorthand for “you are deliberately misinterpreting what I’m saying.” (I know I’ve done used it that way, myself.) So, yeah, I’d say that he’s discussed often enough that the site becoming associated with him is not an unreasonable concern.
Or, rather, even if it might be unreasonable TO BE concerned about it, it’s not an unrealistic concern…
I’m in the same boat. I never much knew or cared about him one way or the other, but now it seems like half of every OT is all Peterson, all the time. A self-imposed time out for the threads might do us some good.
Looks like we have “secure” down and “contain” in progress. Not sure about “protect,’ though.
Take your class A amnestics and you’ll be fine, although we might need to reach back for a class B.
I proffer my grateful thanks to the Rightful Caliph for his ruling on this matter because I would have spontaneously combusted with one more comment on this.
Seconding Deiseach here and toastengineer above.
(Agree that “topic x gets discussed too much” is a subjective complaint, but registering that my subjective view on it is such that I’m happy with Scott’s warning.)
Thirded.
Fourthed.
Agreed.
I am confused why he seems to be everywhere now though. I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of him until the last week, now i’ve seen multiple threads about him
Lobster is now haram?
That will be a harder dietary restriction than the one on moldy bugs.
It would have worked better if lobster was halal to begin with.
That missing CDC worker was a grad student of Jordan Peterson’s!
What’s the virtue of silence in this case? Is it risk of culture war levels of animosity, risk of attracting the “wrong sort” to SSC, or just risk of boring everyone who doesn’t care?
(And is there any chance we could get a sequel to The Virtue of Silence considering those issues? I haven’t thought about them before, and now I’m curious.)
The polarization around him is in some ways a shame, because I think his actual research into dividing the ‘big 5’ into aspects and also figuring out how different political affiliations can be predicted by these traits, is quite interesting and the sort of thing often discussed on this blog.
Maybe it’s been discussed, I don’t read every thread.
Also, I’d be curious to hear people comment on his ‘Future Authoring’ stuff, which purports to have tremendously increased academic outcomes in underprivileged demographics in a way that seems very improbable to me. Knowing what we do about how ineffective educational interventions tend to be, and in a way Peterson himself sometimes references.
But that would certainly be discussing Peterson, so maybe that ship has sailed.
Personally, I don’t like swearing as argument. My feeling is anybody could do it, and the Matt Taibi’s of the world are just capitalizing on the fact that other people don’t.
I guess I don’t really have a basis – I love Kevin Williamson’s snide poison pen letters to his enemies, and I guess they’re not substantively different. Williamson’s style requires a rarer talent, but if it’s not more likely to be informative, then I guess enjoying him more that Taibi is just hipster snobbery.
What’s up with the URL? Was there an older version of that post that used that title? Was it about Peterson or the album? BOTH??!?
After working my first real job for a while, I’ve saved up a decent sum of money and figure I should start investing it, probably in something like index funds with some diversification added in.
EMH seems to say it shouldn’t matter when I invest it, but common sense says that we’ve been in a boom for a while, there will probably be a recession soon, and maybe I should wait until the depths of the recession before I buy.
Anyone have any advice?
Near the end of this interview, journalist Greg Hunter tells CA Fitts how all investment today is gambling (IIRC), while she argues (or tries to argue) it is not. My two cents.
Haven’t watched this interview and will also try to resist temptation to give investment advice (very not qualified to do so); just wanted to say I have felt frustrated by this sense that all investing is a gamble nowadays, and I think I’m not alone among that small number of my generation who have already paid off their student loans and credit cards.
Example:
I listened to Peter Schiff years ago and got worried the US dollar would collapse. This prompted me to buy gold and silver as a “safe” investment. Hasn’t been a good investment.
Okay, but maybe I shouldn’t have listened to Austrian economists and instead listened to Serious People. Serious People would have told me that cash is a good place to be during a recession. But Serious People would also have told me real estate was a good investment in 2005. Also, my most profitable investment ever by far has been magic internet money I bought at a time when I couldn’t really comprehend how it could ever have value.
So let’s say we’re right to assume that we’re due for a recession. Leaving aside that recessions seem persistently never to come when everyone is expecting them, that would predict now is a good time to be in cash, assuming the past is the best guide to the future. Cash was a pretty good place to be during the last recession and I’ve certainly learned that my lack of confidence in the US dollar was at least premature. Yet this assumes the next recession will be kind of like the last one. And that doesn’t seem a very safe assumption. After all, the US can’t just keep on printing money forever and expect to avoid high inflation… or can it? Who knows? Seems to have worked so far?
I perceive among my generation a real sense of being in uncharted financial and cultural waters: I recall polls that solid majorities of millennials don’t expect social security to be meaningfully available by the time they retire, for example. Maybe they are overestimating how fast things change or underestimating the US federal government’s capacity for debt, but the confidence certainly seems lacking, even if maybe things haven’t changed as much as they seem?
I am pretty sure what Serious People say is not anything about real estate or cash, but instead “index funds, index funds, I N D E X F U N D S.”
Vanguard has some great time balanced funds. You tell them when you want the money (by buying the 2035 fund or the 2060 fund or whatever) and they balance index funds in US stocks, international stocks, bonds, real estate, etc., so you can just set up an autodeposit and forget about it for the next year.
I second this. I am not smart enough to predict the markets. I just buy index funds and forget about it. If the economy collapses to the point that index funds are worthless, the only good investments will have been in stockpiled rice and lead.
I intend to add some beans to my rice/lead portfolio.
@J Mann
The funds you speak of are not terrible ideas, but probably not what scott (or most of the people here) wants. They have dramatically higher fees than straight index funds, which isn’t so bad once you’ve accumulated a big pile, but will really eat into your gains if you’re starting with a small one. If you have no specific need for the money, you’re better off just dumping into some reasonable ratio of debt to equity and leaving it alone, and skip paying a few decades worth of fees. You can always (at least if if your assets are in a retirement account) shift to a target date fund at a later date when you actually have a target.
Huh? Vanguard target funds impose no additional fees. They only pass through the same fees the underlying index funds have. And the total fee is nominal — 2040’s for example is currently 15 bps.
@cassander – sorry I wasn’t more clear. Vanguard’s Target Funds are literally just mixes of Vanguard index funds, so their fees are effectively the same. For more, see the Vanguard page on target funds, but as an example, the Vanguard 2050 fund currently holds 53.9% Vanguard’s Total Stock Market index fund, 36% Vanguard Total Interantiaonal Stock index fund, 7.2% Vanguard Total Bond Market II index fund, and 2.9% Vanguard Total International Bond index fund, while the Vanguard 2020 fund is lower on stock index funds and higher on bond index funds, as those investors are likely to want their money sooner.
It’s IMHO a great way for index fund investors to diversify between stock and bond index funds and between US and international index funds without doing a lot of work to decide how to diversify or to balance over time.
@J Mann and Brad
Fair enough. I’m familiar with my own retirement plan, which has fidelity target date funds, which have a substantially (literally 20x) higher fee than the index fund. I agree that target date funds are a great idea if you can get them with reasonable fees.
Gold seems to be relatively cheep these days. Maybe an interesting investing direction (disclaimer: I don’t know much about investment. No one should take what I’m saying on the matter too seriously).
Adjusted for inflation, gold is only cheap right now relative to the financial crisis and a brief period in the 1980s. For most of its history it hovered around $500 current dollars an ounce; post-Nixon it’s been much more volatile, but the average still hasn’t been too far off that. Currently we’re about $200 off ATH.
I thought the same thing a couple of years ago and I don’t want to know how much I lost by not investing in the meantime.
If it’s any comfort, probably a lot less than I lost by thinking the same thing in the 1990s.
Fifty percent now, fifty percent held in reserve for the big correction. Optimizing for minimal regret rather then expected value.
This is a terrible time to invest. Here’s a collection of equity return forecasts from some big names, and almost all of them are saying it’s not gonna be great.
BUT, just because it’s a bad time to invest doesn’t necessarily mean you will be better off trying to time a recession. Also it’s not like bond yields are high, so the alternative is also pretty bad.
Overall I’d say maybe keep 20-25% in short-term bonds and use that for timing. Allocate the rest of the portfolio normally.
It’s either a terrible time to invest, or a terrible time to be making equity return forecasts. We shall see.
(I am not an investment professional. This is not advice, etc.)
If you wait for the moment in which you’re sure that you’re at the bottom of the market, you’ll be losing out on all of the time before that moment in which dividends and interest could have been accruing.
This actually turns out to be a very straighforwards math problem; look at the gains you’ll expect to make based on average returns, then as yourself how much of those more-or-less-guaranteed-compared-to-market-timing returns you’re willing to wager based on a probable incoming recession.
Then just set yourself a deadline; you’ll definitely buy into the market at either date X, or economic indicator Y. And if you don’t have a lot of confidence in the market doing what you think it will on the micro scale, then you can set X’s range to be fairly small.
You can also subdivide your money, and invest some immediately, and the rest in intervals when you think you’ve hit relative recessions, as suggested below.
What are your investment options? Do you have a 403b or a 401k through your work? Any matching percentage, and if so a vesting period? Like your current job and plan on staying there for a few years?
Also, what’s a “decent sum”? Like 5 months of expenses, 3 months of expenses, 6 months of expense…planning on moving anytime soon or buying a house…?
Stocks do look semi-pricey right now, but trying to time the market based on P/E is tough. Where on the curve do you think we are right now?
http://www.multpl.com/
Also, a recession may happen, or it may not happen. Australia has not had any recession since the early 90s. And looking at the GDP maps, even that was mild. Australia basically hasn’t had a real recession in the entire time FRED has data, which goes back to 1961. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NAEXKP01AUA657S
The Leading Index doesn’t look like it’s predicting a recession any time soon either:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSLIND
So I’d be careful about timing to enter during a recession. Recessions will probably be with us until the end of time, but you never know when one might hit. Once a recession does happen, though, we will have to talk about your entry plan, too. But we can always cross that bridge when we get to it.
It sounds like you expect to make money throughout a relatively stable career, possibly even more money as your career progresses. If so, your continued earnings provide a hedge against market volatility, so don’t worry about it too much. You’re going to be slowly investing little bits of your total lifetime savings, and this will naturally spread out over a period that includes all sorts of economic environments.
That all said, everyone feels nervous right now, so it’s probably excusable to keep more money in cash or low-volatility assets (short-term bonds) than usual. You can see this as buying insurance: you are forgoing some small expected-value gains (paying the insurance premium) in order to avoid a lower-likelihood big crash. The hard part, though, is knowing when to stop. For this, as always, do your best to set a plan ahead of time. Getting these conditions to sound reasonable is the hardest part. What do you do if the market goes up like crazy for the next two years? How big a drop do you want before you invest your held-to-the-side money? It’s hard.
In aggregate, ‘retail’ investors like you stereotypically lose money by trying to time the market, especially making short-term judgments. If you have money that you want to set aside for long term investments, I would recommend just putting it into low-cost index funds now and forgetting about it. Vanguard funds are usually slightly better/cheaper than competing options.
Using something like PE ratios, stocks are historically on the expensive side now, but probably still have higher expectancy than cash/bonds. E.g. if you think that:
-the long run real returns to stocks are 5% per year, and
-stocks are 40% more expensive right now than they will be on average in the future
then over the next 10 years, even if valuations fully revert to normal, you’d still expect a real return of 1.6% per year over that period.
If you almost definitely won’t need the money ’til retirement, investing in a tax-advantaged account (HSA, 401k, IRA, etc.) is a great option. HSA’s in particular are supercharged retirement accounts – contrary to popular conception, you usually shouldn’t actually use them to pay for medical expenses while you’re young; unless you actually need to take money out of your retirement accounts, in which case having that option is what makes HSA’s better than those other account types. I can elaborate if anyone’s interested.
Edit: All that said, I keep way more of my money in low-risk/no-risk assets than most people in my situation. I do think the expected value of owning stock index funds is higher, but only by a little with current valuations, and I don’t mind forgoing that to reduce risk.
Can you elaborate on HSA’s and what you think is strategic use of them?
Most people with an HSA don’t realize that rather than pay for a medical expense directly from their HSA, they can instead reimburse themselves for that expense any time in the future.
Say you have a well-funded HSA and you have a $4000 medical expense. Most people would pay the expense directly from of the HSA. But if you can pay it out of your savings, you should do that instead and allow the money in your HSA to continue growing tax-free. If you ever need the money in the future, you can just withdraw $4000 from your HSA with no penalties/taxes to reimburse yourself for the previous expense. There’s no time limit – if you have medical expenses when you’re 30, you can reimburse yourself for them when you’re 60 (if you document the expense – you should save images of receipts for large bills).
Tax-wise, having money in an HSA (almost*) strictly dominates having money in an IRA. Both have tax-free contributions and growth. If you are lucky enough to never have medical expenses for the rest of your life, the HSA winds up functioning just like an IRA (when you withdraw your HSA money during retirement, you’d pay taxes on it just like you would for an IRA). But every dollar of medical expenses that you have for the rest of your life is a dollar that you can withdraw from your HSA tax-free, with big savings relative to an IRA/401k.
* Two caveats:
– If you need to withdraw money from an IRA before retirement, you pay a 10% penalty. For an HSA, if you withdraw early and you have no medical expenses, the penalty is 20%.
– I’m assuming that your HSA has reasonable investment options. If you need to invest in a crappy mutual fund that charges 2% annual fees, that’s going to swamp the tax savings over a long enough period.
Here are a couple slightly longer write ups:
https://www.madfientist.com/ultimate-retirement-account/
https://fjwealthmanagement.com/health-savings-account/
Another major benefit is that an HSA does not have a mandatory withdrawal age. A typical IRA requires withdrawal as soon as you hit 70.5. A HSA can continue to grow, because you are not required to withdraw it.
How do you go about investing money in a HSA? I had an HSA qualifying individual insurance plan last year, and I wanted to reduce my tax liability and save up for some health expenses that I knew were coming so I went to the local bank and opened up an HSA account. As far as I know the money is just sitting there. How would I go about investing it? Do I just use the money to buy an index fund or something?
Only some HSA administrators have investment options. The fees, minimums, and available investments vary quite a bit. Your local bank may not have an investment option.
Fortunately for me, my employer opened an HSA account for me with good investment options, so I haven’t had to look into finding an HSA administrator that offers investment accounts for individuals. Sorry I can’t help with that aspect.
@Jon S — thank you for the detailed explanation! I didn’t realize you could refund yourself… in fact I still find that really confusing, but I’ll check out your links (and also the rules for my HSA).
Timing the market is really hard, as other people have said, and probably not worth attempting. But I recall seeing an interesting comparison of the relative returns of contrarian investing vs. momentum investing (buy when the market’s rising vs. buy when the market is dropping), and somewhat surprisingly there was a dramatic difference, with momentum investing having a huge advantage. Apparently there is a strong tendency for trends to at least be longer than a month (and not to last forever, of course, but sadly there is no consistent upper bound to how long they last to use to time when to get out). So since there has been a bit of a dip just recently, there might be an argument for waiting a little while and not investing in equities until they start rising again. That’ll guarantee that you won’t get the benefit of buying at the bottom of a trough, but as others have said your chances of timing that right anyway are too low to bother with.
Or just conclude that while it might be a bad time to buy, it’s unproductive in general to stress out over that and try to time correctly. So since as I understand your situation the decent income is likely to be a long term thing, just set up to invest on a regular schedule and count on the times when you happen to be buying at the right time to make up for the times when you’re buying at the wrong time.
Why not start by looking at investments that come with a cash flow, such as stocks that pay regular dividends or an REIT? I’m not saying they’re necessarily better than investments where all the value comes from increasing equity, but they are easier to analyze.
For example, this stock (https://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=BMO) has consistently paid a quarterly dividend that has been at least $0.80 per share for the past couple of years. Its current price is $78.48 per share. Ignoring any changes in the share price (which has gone up in the same timeframe), the ROI is over 4%. I’m not giving it as investment advice, just suggesting investments of this sort as a baseline to compare other opportunities to.
It sounds like you mean that you have a chunk of cash you are going to invest now as basically your first significant investment. This is important as a large chunk invested early will have out sized impact on your long term financial situation. There are two basic choices you can make.
1. Accept a lot of variance in your retirement income. $50,000 compounded at 8% over 35 years compounded at 5% would be a difference of well over $400,000 in value. If you accept this you go with a solid, diversified portfolio and do your best to forget about it.
2. Sacrifice some of the long term upside to smooth out your returns. Basically you make a small, leveraged bet against the market a couple of times a year for the next few years to ensure that you didn’t buy in to close to a peak. This is not a fool proof strategy, and requires some active management as well as some time investment to understand the basic strategies and also requires you to pay attention to the markets.
The basics for option 2 are as follows, you take the majority of your holding and put it into a diversified fund. Then you purchase small, out of the money put options with a decently long dated expiration (12-15 months) every 3 to 6 months. If there is a major market crash your put options will increase by a large amount and cover a lot of your ‘losses’, upon selling your puts in such a scenario you immediately (barring emergency need for cash) put that money right back into the market in a diversified fund. If there is no market crash then your puts wind up with zero value and you just eat those losses, this is what eats away at your upside.
As I noted above this plan is not fool proof, it is possible to get crummy market returns without a large crash, and put options have to be managed and sold.
Look at the concept of dollar cost averaging. The theory is that market timing is difficult, verging on impossible. So don’t do that. But also don’t invest a big chunk of money all at once, in case the timing happens to be bad.
Also look at concepts of diversification, and periodic rebalancing of investments. I.e. you have a broad swathe of investments that you hope won’t all tend to have the same cycles, with target % range for each. If one group does well for a while, and another group does badly, you sell some of the successful group and buy the less successful, to get back to the same % (expressed as currency, not e.g. # of shares).
Note that I am not an economist, or an accountant, or an investment advisor. This is just the theory I’m pursuing, as someone who’ll need to retire eventually, and currently has surplus income, which I’d like to see growing – but who doesn’t find paying lots of attention to investments fun.
Dollar cost averaging isn’t a particularly good solution to Scott’s situation. It is much more appropriate for someone who has been investing for a substantial period of time and then receives a windfall (say an inheritance around 45-50) that they want to invest. Scott’s goal should be to get his money into the market sooner rather than later, 50,000 invested for 35 years at 8% return is worth >$50,000 more than if invested for 34 years.
Well, I don’t know the details of Scott’s situation, but I would guess that what he calls “a decent sum of money” means “enough money that I feel stupid just getting passbook interest for it”. That’s where I was when I started investing. For such an initial investment, investing an equal tenth of it every month is a good way to avoid losing heart if you happen to invest it on January 25, 2018, and it gets it into play almost as fast, relative to his entire investing lifetime, as stuffing it all someplace tomorrow.
More to the point, he’s past his slave labor days and is presumably going to have a regular income going forward. Investing the same amount every paycheck is dollar-cost averaging, and is a great way to “pay yourself first”, before you’ve become accustomed to spending all of the larger income, and it gives you a structure that will mitigate against the temptation to try to time the market.
I must add that 8% annual return over 35 years is, um, ambitious. If you’ve been getting that for more than a decade, I’ll retract everything I’ve said because he should obviously listen to you instead. Also I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The concern for putting a large chunk into the market at time X isn’t isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a concern that the market might correct 5-10% during its upward march unless you are likely to panic and sell out immediately if that happened.
The concern is that you pull a 2005-2007 and put your money in (or worse dollar cost it in) and it takes 12+ years to double that investment when putting it in late 2008-2010 would have increased by 2-3x in 8-10 years or that you miss out on a 1954 where the market (s&P 500 at least) jumps by 52%. DCA does very little to alleviate what ought to be the real concerns.
I’ve always hated this, it is not true. Investing the same every paycheck is investing when capital is available to you which is the opposite of dollar cost averaging.
Whatever positive number you choose the extra year is always (on average) the largest gainer because of the (likely) larger base of capital. DCA’ing is like saying “let me give up the best 6 months of return I could expect so I don’t feel bad about market swings”.
baconbits9-
I mostly agree. The advantages of dollar-cost averaging are psychological rather than financial.
If you’ve got an amount you are ready to invest (and you’ve done due diligence about what cushion you need for expenses and emergencies), dividing it up over a few months is sort of like diversifying it — you don’t know what sector will do best this year, and you don’t know whether it will go up or down in the short run, so spreading it out over several sectors or several dates means you don’t get the best possible results but also don’t get the worst possible. But if you trust yourself not to get indigestion if your very first investment goes down by 10% the next day, by all means don’t wait.
To your other objection, if your income stream or your essential expenses are choppy, I’d never recommend sitting on investable cash just to wait for your next scheduled investment. Regularly adding to your investments is good because it is regular. But it’s also DCA, and seeing the bargain you got in June and July may make it less painful that things went down right after your deposit in August.
What I actually did for years (until I retired) was keep a day-by-day forecast of my income and expenses at least a year in advance, mostly by just guessing they would be whatever they were last year modified by anything exceptional I know is coming up — like a checkbook ledger, but extending into the future. Then I wrote a simple script that went through looking for places where cash could be extracted without the future balance ever going below $500. That amount got added to the ledger as “invest this”; when that time came, I wrote a check to Schwab just like I wrote a check to the mortgage.
If you haven’t come across the blog before I would suggest looking into http://www.mrmoneymustache.com which is a very interesting blog. The idea is that by living a satiating life structured to avoid american consumerism you can be able to save lots, retire early (<40 if you start <25), and live independently doing what you want from there. Its a possibility someone with your earning ability should at least ponder once.
As for your specific question, this form post has a very good break down with explanation of where to put money if the goal is to maximize your $$$.
As for being worried about a down turn, they happen, you will lose a lot of value. If you invest consistent amount month after month for the rest of your life, it will not make a big difference even if it hurts sometimes.
MMM is probably useful as an antidote to the high-maintenance consumerist lifestyle. The most important part about retirement is managing your expenses. You can have a $5 million nest egg and blow throw it in 2 years if you decide to “treat yo’ self”
My parents are definitely screwing themselves with continual high-dollar purchases. Boats, big expensive SUVs…yep, retirement is never coming for you.
There’s enough unknowns there – how long until the recession? Will stocks fall to below their current levels? (even if p/e ratios normalize earnings could go up a lot over a couple more years of growth.) How close to the bottom would you be able to time your buy-in for? – that I’d argue that, even taking as given that stocks are currently overpriced, trying to hold back doesn’t necessarily improve your expected returns a bunch.
I’d invest the money now, with a slightly higher share of bonds or equivalent to stocks than you otherwise would. But that probably implies something like an 80/20 mix instead of 90/10, given your age, so not particularly dramatic. Then you can try to rebalance towards the more aggressive ratio at a well-optimized time.
The story of Bob, the worst market timer ever:
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/27/the-inspiring-story-of-the-worst-market-timer-ever.html
Short form: Bob invests in four lump sums: right before the crash of 1973, the crash of 1987, the crash of 2000, and the crash of 2007. He changes $184K into $1.1M.
If you “wait for the market to correct” before investing, you will never invest.
Decide how much risk you can accept, and invest to that threshold.
I recall a fairly conclusive analysis of historical stock data that shows that you should invest your money as soon as you get it. Because unless you’re extremely lucky you will not be able to outsmart the market. On average you will just earn more if you follow the pattern of “get paycheck, invest money”.
Scott, I found myself in Precisely the same situation as you about two months ago. I’ve devoted a decent chunk of my time thinking about this problem as it related to me, and this is what I ended up doing:
I spent a couple of weeks in my off-time looking at long-period historic data of the Dow, and I tried to come up with some algorithm for taking money out of a theoretical perfect index fund, and putting it in an interest bearing bank account and vice versa based on what had happened in the market. This was useful because I was able to convince myself on an actually visceral believable level that I could not pick timings to outperform the market. Of course, this was something I knew to be true already on a trivial level, but it became properly internalised during that process. I’ve satisfied myself that given as much investment of time as I am willing to do, I can’t do better than the market.
So, I invested in a couple of exchange traded funds at the end of January. Watched them immediately lose about 5% of their value, but the thing is, I was not unhappy with this result. I didn’t have buyers regret, because I had put in my time and due diligence beforehand. And of course, since then it’s risen back up to close to the buy value.
I highly recommend you go through the same process, it really worked for me
I’d suggest reading The Elements of Investing. Pretty short, you can read it in the time it takes to fly from Houston, TX to NYC.
The main thing you’ll learn from it is to keep your costs low, so index funds FTW.
I’m in the exact same situation. In the end I think I’m siding with the boggleheads. Their basic premise is that timing the market is impossible- or if it is possible, it isn’t for you. You can’t say “oh, I believe in buy-and-hold, except right now surely the market is due for a correction”. That’s timing.
It’s a random walk biased upwards. So the time to invest is always -right now-. Huge upside being that you can avoid the cognitive labor normally spent on worrying about a random walk.
Do you have student loans? If you do, paying it off should be your low-risk investment, assuming the rate is above 4% or so.
Paying down student debt does reduce optionality. Probably still be a good idea, but that’s worth thinking about.
A ‘better’ return isn’t the same thing as a ‘higher expected’ return.
In the sense that utility can be nonlinear with dollars? I guess that’s true, but for people like Scott and other readers of this blog, I expect to be fairly risk tolerant in a way that “higher expected return” is more or less synonymous with “better”.
Here’s the S&P On average, you can see, it returns about 10% a year, but over 15+ years,the worst anualized return is about 5%, so even if you buy at the peak of the market, you probably won’t do too badly as long as you just hold. More importantly than that, though is the realization that waiting a year or two, unless your timing is very good, doesn’t help you that much. And the math presented there is not taking into account taxation, which is huge. Your best bet, assuming you won’t be taking it out any time soon, is to throw your money into some sort of tax advantaged index fund. Waiting around for 6 months or a year probably means giving up any gains you would get over that period in favor of hoping that things crash so you can buy low.
Now, I am assuming that your “decent sum” is closer to 5 figures than 7. If you were trying to preserve a large chunk of money for some specific purpose (like building up a downpayment, or to maintain a certain minimum nest egg) that would be very different. But if you just want to sock it away so it can compound, you probably aren’t going to time the market well enough to beat just buying today and hoping nothing goes sideways for a year or two.
Eyeballing that chart, I get the same intuition, but if you actually compute it out, what you see is that the annual return over each possible 15-year span gives you annual returns ranging from just over 4% to just over 9.6%. The median is about 5% and the geometric mean is a bit less than 6%.
Moreover, I’m pretty sure those returns include increases due to inflation; if you deduct for inflation you get returns ranging from 1.6% to 7.4%, median 2.7% and geometric mean 3.3%.
None of that argues against your advice, of course. On the contrary, getting started today is what gives you the benefit of compounding (the “invisible foot” on the accelerator); over thirty years even 3% multiplies your money by 2.4.
Out of curiosity is there survivor bias in there? If a company falls out of the S&P 500 and is replaced by another is it always the case that the new company and the old company have the same market cap? What about things like a listed company being bought by a foreign parent company that isn’t eligible for inclusion? Or being taken private?
I’ve often wondered that myself. For what it’s worth, I’ve owned shares of Vanguard Total Stock Market Index for decades, and its return seems to track the hypothetical return of SP500 pretty closely. (VTSMX tries to match the whole market rather than just the SP500, and it has some small maintenance fees that the hypothetical “SP500 return” doesn’t, but the apples are pretty close to oranges.)
I believe I have read that the Dow is a little more problematic in this way, because one company coming or going is a significant fraction of the total. But 10% of SP500 is Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, so I’m not sure the argument holds a lot of water. (That’s also why I’m a big fan of the Guggenheim equal-weight ETF, which owns equal amounts of the 500 companies, as a hedge on my position in VTSMX. If the efficient market hypothesis isn’t true, it’s not my fault.)
There is no survivor bias from changing index composition.
Here’s a somewhat simplified example of how stock indices are reweighted when firms are added, removed, or replaced.
For more details, you can check out the methodology document for the family of indices you are interested in, e.g., https://us.spindices.com/documents/methodologies/methodology-index-math.pdf for S&P’s indices.
Example:
MyIndex and is replacing ABC Corp. with XYZ Inc., effective at market close on March 31. At that point in time, the total weight [market cap if MyIndex is market-cap weighted] of the indexed firms (including ABC but not XYZ) is 100, of which ABC account for 5. XYZ’s weight at that time is 10. So the total weight is 100 before the switch and 105 after. The requires re-weighting — every firm’s weight is multiplied by 100/105 to get the new weight.
So an index fund can track MyIndex through this change by doing the following:
1. Sell all ABC in the ETF.
2. Sell 1 – 100/105 of its holdings of all other stocks
3. Use all of the proceeds from 1 and 2 to buy XYZ.
If all trade are executed at exactly the closing price on March 31, and if there were no transaction fees, then the index fund would track the index exactly. (These are two of the many reasons why real-world index funds have tracking error, and don’t track the underlying index exactly.)
Analogous procedures are followed for additions or deletions that do no involve replacements, and for things like new equity issuance that change the market cap of the firms.
So an index fund or an individual investor can very closely mimic the performance of an index, without having to worry about survivor bias.
Thanks for the explanation.
I made a decision about half a year ago to start investing and chose to use Schwab’s Intelligent Investing Service. It’s similar to an index fund and there are no fees. It has a high yield (by comparison to other index funds) and the advantage that its contents are traded periodically by computer algorithm. Schwab also has excellent customer service and for their checking accounts they give a debit card that can be used at any atm in the world without fees.
Cursory search suggests that the expense ratio on schwabs intelligent investing service range from .06 to .20%. Very competitive, and totally interesting and worth looking at, but without any evidence I’m not feeling motivated to move my money away from vanguard with .04% index funds..
> Schwab also has excellent customer service and for their checking accounts they give a debit card that can be used at any atm in the world without fees.
I wouldn’t count this as an advantage as any smart spender will be using a credit card for 2% returns or better on the majority of their purchases
If your income allows you to deduct IRA contributions (AGI 63K or less), open one and contribute the maximum.
Otherwise, if your income allows you to contribute to a Roth IRA (AGI 135K or less), open one and contribute the maximum.
Otherwise, open an IRA, contribute the maximum, open a Roth, and do a Roth-conversion to move it from the IRA to the Roth (the “backdoor Roth”).
In any case, read James Lange’s The Roth Revolution. If you already have an IRA to which you have made nondeductible contributions, read Chapter 9. Executing chapter 9 was my big project for 2017, and it was hilarious.
I have an anecdote that I want to turn into data: I’ve always had a really hard time waking up. I inevitabily end up feeling shitty and have a hard time getting myself out of bed if I haven’t gotten more than 9 hours of sleep already.
However, I’ve observed that when I drink a lot of water before going to sleep, waking up becomes way easier, even if I’m waking up after 8 or even 6-7 hours. I get less of that waking dysphoria and just feel so much better in the mornings. I’ve never heard anyone mention this before. Anyone else have experience with this or are willing to try it? For reference, the amount of water I drink is usually 1.5-2 ordinary water bottles.
I’d be interested in trying, but if I drink a lot of water just before bed I need to get up to pee once or twice in the middle of the night. Does this not happen to you?
This was definitely the confounder I had in mind. And no I don’t, I never wake up in the middle of the night to pee, even if I chugged a bunch beforehand.
I have the same question as shakeddown. My “natural” time necessary for sleep feels like at least nine hours, but I often wake up after about six hours needing the toilet. I’ve actually been considering trying to avoid drinking water in the late evening so that this doesn’t happen.
Just in case I do decide to try your method, do you mean that you drink 1.5-2 bottles right before going to sleep, or do you mean over the course of the late evening?
Either or really, but I usually do it less than 30 mins before bedtime. You’re probably good as long as you do it within the hour, but that’s a good point I hadn’t considered.
Worth noting: I had to wake up after only about 6 hours of sleep this morning in order to study for an early test, and had a relatively easy time of doing it once again! I think I might be onto something, at least in terms of my experience.
After moving to a much drier climate than my previous homes, I’ve noticed a similar issue and will try drinking 0.75 liters of water between 8pm and when I go to sleep.
I’ve at least noticed the reverse; if I go to bed dehydrated, I wake up feeling unrested and in an unmotivated mood. Hydrating still leaves me feeling a bit tired for the rest of the day.
To avoid the problem shakeddown pointed out, it’s probably necessary to be reasonably well-hydrated in general for this to work out. I’d advise increasing water intake generally so your body is more used to more fluids, then also making sure you’re well-hydrated before sleeping.
Possible explanation: Better hydration means thinner mucus, thinner mucus means less obstructions in your airway. You’re sleeping better because you’re breathing better.
Interesting hypothesis. I was thinking it was related to hydration, in the same way that hangover dysphoria seems to be related to alcohol’s dehydrating properties. I don’t drink a lot, so it seems like the most likely answer.
Also I took a sleep apnea test as part of a clinical trial a few months ago, and my tests were within normal range. But your idea is worth remembering.
Scott said in his “LessWrong Crypto Autopsy” that “Our epistemic rationality has probably gotten way ahead of our instrumental rationality” drawing on how few in the rationalist community made lots of money from cryptocurrency even though practically the whole community agreed it was a good idea to invest. It seems the mild inconvenience of obtaining any Bitcoins was enough to dissuade many individuals from pursuing the matter. There was opportunity, but no action.
My first question, having only ever been on the fringes of the community in question, is if this is really a general problem. Are there any other examples?
Assuming it is a problem, what way might there be for converting those ideas into action?
My idea is this. Imagine an invite-only community exists where members pre-commit money to some goal for community use. Then, members of the community submit ideas for the best use of that money to satisfy said goal. After a discussion period, each community member gets one vote for the best idea. Once votes are tallied, money is distributed to proposals based on the percentage of members that voted for them. Think of it as crowdfunding with a twist. How would you react to such a community, and would you pay to be a part of it?
If you look at the reasons that people gave to not invest into bitcoin, a lot of it involved transaction costs, where getting into mining or buying the coins or learning enough or coming up with a sensible exit strategy was prohibitively expensive.
So this suggests a need for specialization: RatioInvest Inc. The investment company that (tries to) achieve better returns on investment than the market. Of course, it will be funded by an ICO.
Are those votes weighted by how much people pre-commit?
Anyway, there are various ways in which that can go wrong/be hijacked that makes me wary to pre-commit. For example, it can be used to almost or more than double the money spent on your favored solution, if you can coordinate to get 51% of the votes. If votes are unweighted by the pre-commit amount, this problem is greater, but even with weighted votes a person/group can take control of all of the money by contributing only 51%.
And this is when we assume hostile intent, rather than other issues like group-think.
An example:
1. Goal is to reduce animal suffering
2. I pre-commit
3. ‘Kill all wild animals because they suffer so much’ wins
4. Guns are bought and animals get killed with my money
5. I feel very sad
You misunderstand how I intended funds to be allocated. They are allocated according to the percentage of best-idea votes the idea received.
That means someone who convinces 51% of the group to vote for their idea only gets 51% of the pot to spend on that idea.
That produces various issues, such as some ideas being too underfunded to actually implement them. Do people have to follow through on their pre-commitment if the money is insufficient to actually try the idea?
Your solution seems inferior to a Kickstarter-like setup.
Eh. I noped out on moral grounds. Easy to say, yes, but I have been pretty consistent on this. Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, which.. well, I could possibly justify that as parting fools from their money and donating some of the personal gain to worthy causes, but it is a very leaky pyramid scheme. Most of the money going into it go out to utilities and chip makers, not to other participants. That is just equivalent to lighting money on fire.
Things I dislike #12: People claiming that something is a pyramid scheme just because the price of a good doesn’t seem driven by an actual need for the good, but by speculation.
Bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme!
Nonetheless, whether or not it’s technically a pyramid scheme, I share Thomas Jørgensen’s reason for staying out of it, except for the moral coloring. It’s the same reason I don’t invest in gold – things with no value in themselves, that are currently agreed-upon-stores-of-value, are impossible to predict, because they are always at risk for losing some of their popularity.
Gold has value in itself. There is almost certainly some in the computer/smartphone you typed this comment on.
If you really want to avoid buying/investing in anything whose value is not purely determined by production/mining costs, you are going to avoid some useful things like houses, bonds, stocks, etc. Also, any product where the supply and/or demand is not constant may experience loss (or gain) of value. Even paperclips will become worthless when the singularity consumes us.
The notion that gold doesn’t have any value in and of itself always struck me as weird. It’s shiny, pretty, easy to work with, and doesn’t tarnish, those are valuable traits in the very literal sense that people have valued gold for them since the dawn of time. The fact that gold’s primary historical usage is for adornment doesn’t make it somehow have no inherently value, you might as well argue that clothes dyes are not inherently valuable since their only use is decoration. Hell you could make the same argument about spices, since they have little nutritional value, their only purpose is to decorate our food to be more pleasing to our palates.
Now we do use gold as an agreed upon store of value, but that’s because the traits that make it useful as adornment also make it useful as a store of value. It’s the same story for silver. However any non-perishable good is inherently a store of value, sure ten tonnes of coal only store some $300, but there is still value there. The thing about gold and silver is that we can count on humans always finding them pretty. Rhodium is both more valuable than gold and has a number of industrial applications, but if society collapses its stored value will be pretty useless because nobody wants to wear rhodium jewellery.
The idea you describe sounds like the definition of a privately-owned company. Take out the “invite-only” part and it becomes a publicly-traded company.
The “submit ideas” part is what interested investors do in both cases. Those with control of the company get to decide if the ideas are worth pursuing. When interested investors think their ideas are good enough, but are ignored by those in control, you get takeover attempts.
I would disagree with the premise (and this is a case where I actually agree with Eliezer). Investing in Bitcoin to the point where it produces enormous gains was only a good idea in hindsight. It would be impossible to have an investment policy, designed in advance, which would lead you to buy it low and sell it when it makes you hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are reasonable investment policies which would have led you to buy some Bitcoin and sell it for more than you paid for it, but you wouldn’t have gotten filthy rich off of it.
Furthermore, Bitcoin is useless as a medium of exchange. It was easy for a knowledgeable person to look at Bitcoin back in the day and correctly figure that out. Deciding to buy bitcoin as an investment would amount to “I anticipate that this will be useless for its intended purpose, but its price will be driven up for other reasons, which I can also anticipate”. That’s not very likely.
Bitcoin/cryptocurrency is greatly valuable for criminals who need to move money around the world. Even high transaction costs are not that prohibitive, as the transaction costs of a money mule are very high.
Although if the police figure out how to trace all transactions, which they might do/already have done, then it may not work well for this either.
Nonsense. Because Bitcoin’s meteoric rise happened and did make some people, admittedly few, filthy rich, there has to be a way for a “reasonable investment policy”, whatever that means, to have predicted it and made lots of money.
As for Bitcoin being useless as a medium of exchange, that is completely false even for normal people besides the criminals brought up by @Aapje. People HAVE used it as a medium of exchange, with great success. A medium of exchange that works over the internet, allowing trade over arbitrary physical distance without powerful intermediaries, is very valuable indeed. Existing ways to transfer funds over large distances are expensive and insecure. Before Bitcoin ran into scaling problems which drove up miner fees (easily fixed, but there are tradeoffs the maintainers aren’t willing to make), it was a far cheaper way to send money over long distances than any alternative.
The lottery makes “some people, admittedly few, filthy rich”. Nevertheless, there is no reasonable investment policy that involves playing the lottery.
A reasonable investment policy has to have positive expected value in real-time, not just in retrospect.
This does not seem to me to be different than an investment club, which is an old idea.
Investment clubs can be very good ideas, but past returns are no guarantee of future results. YMMV.
Basic problem with this as a “solution” to the “problem” of “invest in Bitcoin” is that, if you can’t be bothered to by Bitcoin, you probably can’t be bothered to join an investment club. On the margin, it probably has some positive effect investment rate among aspiring rationalists, but a very small one.
Thanks. I did not know the name for what I had in mind. I want investment clubs on the internet. Who is going to fund my startup?
Your points prove too much. They are reasons against joining an investment club because they are reasons against anyone investing at all.
I figure, while people may not have the effort or tolerance to pursue individual risky-but-a-good-idea investments, they would find it easier to invest with a community of like-minded individuals helping to decide.
I found Scott’s piece pretty persuasive, and for LW members who were exposed to the idea at the time BTC was a big opportunity largely missed. On the other hand, a structured effort to find opportunities like this funded by this invite-only community is going to be funneling money to a whole lot of speculative ideas that by and large suck, heavily diluting the returns from the ones that succeed. (This is a venture capital firm’s business model, and it works great if you’re e.g. Andreessen Horowitz and have a reputation of not only funding projects, but providing useful advice that raises the probabilities of such projects succeeding. A bunch of anonymous people on the internet is unlikely to have access to the same space of opportunities.) That being said, I would front a small amount of money for such a scheme orchestrated by SSC/LW/etc types on the off-chance it hits something out of the park (but I probably don’t participate here or elsewhere enough to get an invite anyway).
I sort of regret not getting in on Bitcoin when it was a wacky idea, but stand by the notion that if I had the outlook necessary to put non-trivial money into this wacky idea which I did not understand, and hang on for the ride long enough to get fuck-you money, I also would probably have the type of outlook to put lots of time and money into similar-sounding but objectively terrible ideas along the way.
I am new here and I was completely taken by the Technological Unemployment post! I went through the reports and the graphs myself (before reading the post) and came to some conclusions which were pretty similar to what the post aimed at.
Particularly, I had one question for the author and the community. The fact that there is nothing historic happening here wasn’t stressed on that much in the post. Isn’t that the most important consequence here? We don’t need to panic because nothing special is going on; we are trying to feel like we are on the cusp of something huge here, but that’s what we always feel with things. (eg: Industrial Revolution changed the world; telephones changed the world; the Internet changed the world; low cost air travel changed the world; et al)
A lot of industries (middle-wage, middle-skill level) are going to be automated as time passes on. This has always been the case. The best way to escape being replaced by a bot is to ensure that (a) you either aren’t part of one of these industries or (b) keep trying to hone your skills, so that when the time comes, you can jump ship and move higher in the ladder, instead of having to slide down. If everyone followed this philosophy though, there might be sudden supply side increase in the slightly higher-wage industries than the one that was just automated. What would be the consequences of that?
Now, the point about the supply of labor doubling: I feel like we are in a really optimistic scenario. When women entered the workforce, the available supply of people doubled (after allowing some time for women to settle in and all the basic stuff to be taken care of, eg: moving the responsibilities that women had before to more gender-neutral settings). Once supply nearly doubled, neither did the wage become half what it was nor did we see a lot of people out of work. I find this to be very encouraging. The system absorbed the new people without causing a lot of trouble to the older ones. (perhaps the reason why even though we are pumping out young engineers every year, older engineers on the shop floor still have their jobs even if they have a lot of problems associated with their employment) So, my question is, Is this encouraging or is there something more sinister going on here that I have failed to acknowledge?
I think that it is a bit misleading to say that labor doubled. Women in the past more often took unpaid care of their children (and those of others), more often produced their own food instead of getting it from the store, more often made/fixed clothing rather than buy something, etc. Unpaid labor is still labor that contributes to people’s well being.
I think it’s more accurate to say that mostly, women moved from unpaid (or implicitly paid) labor to paid labor.
If I don’t cook my own food, but pay another person to cook a meal for me, I haven’t necessarily increased overall well being. If that person is doing the exact same thing as me, standing in a kitchen making one meal at a time, in the same way as me, the same amount of labor is still done. It’s just paid now.
Of course, capitalism enables certain arrangements/solutions which are good, like specialization creating higher productivity (like cooking meals for multiple people at the same time) and specialization allowing people to do what they enjoy. However, if you go from unpaid to paid labor, those benefits are generally going to be less than the increase in the GDP. So part of the increase in the GDP is an artifact of more labor becoming capitalist and doesn’t accurately reflect the increase in productivity.
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In general, it might be better to think of overall unemployment as a matter of productivity rather than supply and demand. Demand for labor is not fixed, as people who get more money/buying power than in the past tend to not reduce their productivity to sustain their old lifestyle, but instead tend to buy more. So the key factor to not becoming unemployed is to be productive enough so others consider your productivity sufficiently high to ‘outsource’ labor to you, rather than just do it themselves or not have it done.
One of the concerns about technological unemployment involves the rate of change. Given that training/specializing for a job takes time, and that new employment opportunities might involve moving substantially (eg. you can’t be a coal miner if there aren’t any coal mines nearby), there are additional concerns. What is the social and economic “carrying capacity” for technological unemployment, either on a short-term or long-term basis? And, could the increasing rate in technological unemployment cause us to exceed that? What are those implications? Consider that in most States, the most common occupation is some form of truck driver. If half of taxi/Uber/truck drivers become unemployed in the span of 5 years, what happens?
Taking into account the above points, women entering the workplace was something like a 50% increase in the labour supply over multiple decades.
Immigration has some pragmatic upper limit that’s not going to be significantly higher than that.
Whereas if you can manufacture a for-some-purpose-human-equivalent machine, you can make as many as needed to completely saturate the market, at least unless the cost of the machine is greater than a years wages. Each such class of machine could represent an arbitrarily-sized percentage increase in the labour force. So if a lot of such classes of machine come together at the same time, it could be like having immigration in the billions per year, or suddenly discovering and emancipating 10 new sexes.
Yes. We feel we are on the cusp of something new. We are over-reacting.
Even if everything changes…you know, then everything is going to change, you have no idea what’s going to happen next.
Suppose the following world:
Though there is a gradient, all people are born belonging to one of two categories, “natural individualist” and “natural communalist.”
In all populations (other than those defined as “the population of individualists” and “the population of communalists”) natural communalists greatly outnumber natural individualists.
When natural individualists dominate a culture, state, territory, etc. the result is technological advancement and increased wealth.
When natural communalists dominate a culture, state, territory, etc. the result is either isolationism and stagnation or poverty and conflict.
Living in a culture dominated by an individualist ethos makes communalists unhappy. Living in a culture dominated by a communalist ethos makes individualists unhappy. Communalists are, on average, happier than individualists, controlling for external factors. The number of people who feel truly at home in an individualist dominated culture is a small fraction of any given population.
Everyone prefers to live somewhere wealthy and with advanced technology.
In such a world, what is the preferred political strategy or outcome?
Individualists ban together and live by themselves? But how do they stop the hordes of communalists who want to enjoy their wealth and technology? Plus, they are individualists. They aren’t good at banding together for any reason, including the protection of individualism. Moreover, are they okay with just letting the lest of the world, even many of their own family, live in poverty and/or with a social ethos that makes them unhappy?
And what is the desired outcome for the communalists? Everyone appoints an individualist king but lives by a communal ethos in daily life? How to establish and maintain such a system? What about the unhappiness caused by lack of political representation among the communalists?
Having experienced communalist culture firsthand, I reject the premise that communalists are happier under communalism than individualism. Many of them obviously suffer from their culture if you listen to them talk about their lives, but the alternative seems morally or socially wrong, or simply doesn’t occur to them. It’s common for them to have some strawman view of individualism (e.g. they think “no man is an island” is a refutation), but when they genuinely understand what it is, they tend to agree that it’s better, but is unpatriotic and/or goes against the tenets of their religion, or is “unrealistic” (whatever that means).
(Staying at the level of hypothetical where I get to just decree facts for the time being)
Well, a big part of the conflict I’m describing is that the communalists aren’t happy with the material poverty and conflict their preferred ethos tends to bring about, yet also can’t feel psychically comfortable embracing the socio-cultural ethos that produces material prosperity and peace.
Strange there is at least two things I constantly see communalist immigrants actually pointing out in Western Europe:
1) people not helping each other, just expecting the state will, neighbors being cold to each other
2) the lack of family solidarity, parental authority, looking after your relatives, respecting your parents, marrying whoever your parents want to when they want to and making them grandkids
Case in point: we considered buying a flat from a Turkish family. They relatives never visited them from home, they never managed to have any human contact with neighbors, they figured life just cannot be going to work then sitting at home and talking only with your family, so they are moving home and accepting a lower standard of living but a real community. This was before the Erdogan autocoup though.
I started a reply that tried to take you questions at face value, in the spirit in which they seemed to be asked, but discarded that once I lost track of what you are after.
It is easy to rewrite your question in which the (now, supposed, fewer in number) communalists achieve great things, by dint of cooperation, solving coordination problems, standing ‘on each others’ back, where the individuals (greater in number – evolution) who can’t even coordinate defense, just fight (or if they don’t actively fight, can’t get leverage from shared action and shared learnings) aren’t wealthy and create no advanced technology. So the same (?) moral questions, just flip the categories.
Is this rewrite (which seems trivial, and equally plausible to your fantasy) just as good in terms of the question you want us to consider, or is it anathema?
One difference would be that the collectivists are not faced with the contradiction of banding together to defend collectivism (which in the mirror scenario is the ethos that generates material prosperity), since banding together is what they’re naturally inclined to do.
Otherwise, I guess the rest of the conflict I’m trying to explore is the same: what to do in the case where most people in the world feel a strong, natural inclination towards an ethos that promotes conflict and poverty and a strong, natural unease about an ethos that promotes material prosperity (an unease that doesn’t go away even when material needs are lavishly provided for)?
Why even bother about the preferred outcome? By formulating the question this way you are encouraging utopian thinking. Better to look at the likely, probable outcomes and choose which one you like most.
So here is something I consider both probable and desirable. Get multiple communalist communities into one confederation, empire, union whatever you prefer to call it. They live segregated, that is, having borders that are not very permeable, and live under their own rules. The confederation has a ruling elite. Naturally all communities are suspicious about the other community become a ruling elite and oppressing them, but they can all put up with the individualists becoming the ruling elite who can believable judge inter-community conflicts fairly. Of course communities are free to set any rules for their own community, individualism is not forced on them. Thus it is Patchwork with an individualistic aristocracy hovering over them.
As for business and economy. There shall be two kinds of businesses, corporations. One is formed by members of acommunity and operates inside the community. Again this is up to the rules of the local community how they are ran. They are allowed to openly discriminate except they don’t need to as basically no no-community members live in their territory. But if their culture says only bisexual men should be CEOs, OK.
The other kind of corporation or business is started by individualists and operates by something very much akin to a royal charter. Their offices and factories and other buildings and territory inside a community’s land are determined by careful negotiation with community leaders in order not to offend them. Basically special economic zones are set up, mostly out in the prairie. These businesses must not outwardly offend the community but on their own premises they do what they want to. All locals they hire must accept that. The idea is that they move the economy, they pay well, and more tolerant locals will put up with work there in exchange for the money.
This is workable because based on historic examples. The US was meant to be a federation of communities, the problem was that they could not find this independent individualistic elite so they the communities fought over the Federal Government from the very begining, 3/5 rule etc. The second, of special companies, are the free zones of Dubai. Maybe stuff like the Western trading factory island in the isolationist era of Japan.
In virtue of a governmental structure, both groups make a series of compromises based partly on ideal preferences and partly on practical outcomes. Neither dominates. Members of each group remain suspicious and grumpy about members of the other, but not enough to implode the system.
If you have a society where 60 % of people are one and 40% the other, then structure it so that around 60% of careers work one way and 40% the other, and let people sort themselves into the careers and social environments that suit them.
For example, imagine you try to organise health care or defence on individualist assumptions, but all the smart individualists are already off being merchant bankers and advertising executives. Or vice versa.
Either you end up with gulags, or some other measure that involves forcing people to act against their nature, ultimately at gunpoint. Or you have to stick with an inefficient and slow system with reluctant workers who don’t believe in it, don’t understand it, and so have no ability to improve it.
What’s the official SSC stance on Snopes then? Discuss.
in what regards?
I treat it like wikipedia. It’s a good starting point, but you should probably verify the sources if it’s for something important.
It’s in the blog post: FALSE
In my experience, the only fact checker worth a damn is the Washington Post’s, and their scope is fairly limited.
Snopes seems to be fine for anything that is indisputably a fact. Did Carl Sagan hold up a sign that said “No Billboards in Space“? No. Would he have? Is this sentiment a sentiment Carl Sagan would have? I don’t know; probably? Snopes just isn’t great for those kinds of more nuanced, analysis based fact-checking.
Yes, exactly. Snopes is good for stuff that is, well, factual. Not so much for analysis.
I remember some discussion on SSC alleging that Snopes was consistently more generous to Blue Tribe politicans than Red Tribe ones when rating statements “mostly true” or “mostly false.” I don’t remember the thread, though, and I didn’t check into it myself. I guess it’s probably inevitable that political issues will be, well, politicized, to some extent.
I thought that was Polifact, not Snopes? Might be true for both, though.
Team USA Wins Curling Gold! Great games from the whole team to knock out Canada (who shockingly goes home without a medal) and then Sweden, capped with a clutch double takeout for a five-ender for Shuster and the “rejects”.
Wrapping up the series on Broomgate: (Part I) (Part II)
Broomgate Part III: Ruling and Resolution
In May 2016, the WCF held a Sweeping Summit and undertook a sweeping study and survey of… sweeping. The purpose of the survey, which included both elite curlers and the public, was to determine the desires and expectations of the curling community. If these brooms really were altering how the game was played, did people care? Did they agree with the Canadian teams that the tech should be limited?
The survey results showed fairly clearly that curlers and fans had a negative view of new technologies that fundamentally altered sweeping. They wanted sweeping that lengthened and straightened shots only, keeping the skill of the thrower as the most important aspect of a good shot. Sweeping to “back up” or reverse the curl was viewed very negatively, as was sweeping to slow down a stone. However, they were less concerned about novel sweeping technique. At that point it became obvious that the WCF would need to set some regulations on sweeping equipment, but what?
The sweeping study, conducted by the National Research Council of Canada (naturally) determined that the new brooms really did have an outsize effect on sweeping. Traditional foam-and-uncoated-nylon brooms behaved as expected: they made the shot go farther and curl less, but nothing else. With this style of broom, the novel sweeping techniques had minimal if any impact compared to standard two-sweeper styles.
Ultimately, the WCF decided to set regulations on brooms for sanctioned competition, primarily on the head and pad. In particular, they limited the approved fabric covering to a single style and color from (currently) a single fabric maker. Hair brooms are no longer allowed. Waterproofing is allowed, but only on the inner surface of the fabric. Foam must be pliable and at least ½” thick (but not so squishy that it completely compresses below a minimum thickness during use). Designs must not allow anything other than foam-backed-fabric to touch the ice while sweeping. Minimum and maximum head sizes were instituted.
Additional regulations were added to how players use brooms – most sweeping styles are allowed (other than intentionally dumping debris on the ice), but players must now declare a single sweeping broom that they (and only they) use for any sweeping during the game (if players prefer a different style of broom to use for balance while sliding, that is allowed, but it must not be used to sweep).
Perhaps most importantly, all sweeping devices must now have their designs approved by the WCF, and each model is assigned a unique ID that manufacturers must stamp on the pad. Penalties for using unapproved brooms are severe – the first offense in a competition game results in a game forfeit and suspension of the player for the tournament. Multiple infractions can result in a 12-month ban.
These regulations are currently in effect for all WCF events, and will likely continue for the future. Hopefully they can find a way to allow multiple fabric colors, because the current mustard yellow is boring. But otherwise these seem like good and necessary rules that have defused the sweeping arms race.
And a bonus video: This clip from NOVA talks about the (still not quite settled) science on why a curling stone curls the way it does.
Cocoa. Competing countries. Coalitions.
Communist cows.
The plot thickens as statistical power struggles escalate.
I recently heard a Marxist say that communist countries worked out badly, but they didn’t follow Marxist ideas.
Are there Marxist theories about why Communist countries turned out badly? About how Marxism could be applied better?
I’ve been following the online lefty/Chapo crowd for a while, and as you might expect of a bunch of socialists, they have a lot of true and correct criticisms of the status quo and insightful explanations of our problems, and they talk seldom-to-never about the specific details of fixing them — or at least, not about fixing them beyond what the European social democracies do.
The one concrete idea I hear mentioned every so often is the idea of making all businesses worker cooperatives; that is, mandatorily giving employees voting rights when it comes to the company’s business policy and strategy, not just negotiating working conditions and pay and benefits like strong unions do. I guess this would be “libertarian socialism”, compared to the statist socialism of past attempts.
I’m pretty stupid and not well-read about
anythingthis stuff, but to cherry-pick one example, I’ve been following the Barnes and Noble death spiral that massively accelerated two weeks ago, I hear about the policies and strategy coming down to the stores from on high, and I fervently believe that the book-lovers working the floor in those stores would do a waaaay better job than their witless executive leadership has done. I imagine that some industries are far more suited to this than others, though.That’s basically how Yugoslavian communism did work. Pretty clearly better than a centrally planned system, but there are some serious problems.
The workers coop has capital assets–factory, brand reputation, whatever. Existing workers are receiving a share of the income from those assets. Hiring additional workers means diluting the ownership rights of the existing workers–they now have to share in the income stream. So the existing workers have an incentive not to hire more even when doing so would product net benefits.
The workers’ coop could use additional capital. They can borrow it. But they can’t get it by selling shares, because the existing workers can defraud the non-worker shareholders by using their control to pay out all profits to themselves.
So not an intolerably bad system, but not a consistently good one. The appropriate solution is the one you get in a capitalist society. Firms can choose to be organized as workers coops, and some are, but are not required to be so organized.
One major issue is the inability of members to sell their shares on an open market, heavy restrictions on sales prevent the best way for a company to change its focus or direction. Co-ops aren’t nimble enough to keep pace with small businesses and don’t have the access to capital that larger, entrenched ones do and end up the worst of both worlds.
I don’t follow the dilution argument. In a normal single-owner company, the owner is also disincentivized to hire more people because their salaries come directly out of the owner’s pocket. Shouldn’t these cancel out? If a new employee costs X and profits Y, a normal owner nets Y-X. In an N member coop, each member nets (Y-X)/N, so the sign shouldn’t change.
The only difference I can see is that the new coop member applies some of their cost to the coop in the form of their ownership in the company, but this will just factor into X. If we assume employees are hired at some equilibrium rate for labor, they should demand the same X whether they’re paid in ownership or dollars, shouldn’t they? I may be missing something here…
I have the same confusion with your defrauding non-worker shareholders point. Why doesn’t that risk apply identically to normal capitalist-owned companies?
Their salaries only represent the return from their labor. In a co-op, the members own the company, which means they get the return from its capital as well–they are simultaneously employees and stockholders, each with one Nth of the stock, where N is the number of employees.
Think of a two-person law firm organized as a partnership. Alice and Bob are the two attorneys, and each owns half the firm. They’ve put quite a bit of work into building the firm’s reputation and client base and they’ve retained a fair amount of the firm’s earnings to buy office space and equipment.
They’re doing quite well, and they have enough work in the pipeline to justify hiring a third attorney (call her Carol). If they make Carol a partner, then that will dilute Alice’s and Bob’s shares to 1/3 of the firm. Now, Carol is just as good an attorney as Alice and Bob, and she’ll contribute just as much to the firm on an ongoing basis, but Alice and Bob might be reluctant to give her a third of their ownership of the firm’s reputation, offices, and equipment (effectively as a signing bonus).
@Eric Rall
Why would Carol have to be given partial ownership for free??? I think that you are confusing a capitalist co-op with a communist co-op.
Alice & Bob can simply demand that Carol pay them a third of what the company is worth (perhaps requiring her to take out a loan).
For example, the Dutch multinational dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina requires new members (dairy farmers) to pay 15 euro for every 100 kilos* of milk that they are expected to supply yearly. This cooperative has an annual revenue of 11 billion euros and is in the top 5 of the largest dairy producing companies. So it seems to work perfectly well in the dairy market.
* Remarkably, the dairy business actually measures by weight, rather than volume
General Motors has a market capitalization of ~$58 billion, and about 209,000 employees. That comes to a $277,500 buy-in per new employee-owner.
When you tell the UAW that the brave new world of employee-owned cooperatives means that they will have to take out a quarter-million dollar loan in order to get a job, for which they will have no meaningful collateral(*) but for which they will still be liable if the company goes bankrupt, they may not be so enthusiastic. Likewise the bit where their income will be directly tied to the business cycle and they may have to go a year or two without pay in exchange for those big bonuses in the good years.
Capitalism intrinsically involves bigger economic risks than most people really want to take with the bulk of their earnings, and it’s harder than you imagine to do employee ownership while insulating the workers from the bulk of those risks.
* I’m presuming employee shares will be restricted and can’t be sold on the open market.
Is it a possible solution to handle ownership of a coop kind of like startups handle employee stock options: A worker owns a share of the company that depends on how early they joined and how long they have been there?
I guess the former is unworkable if you imagine turning, say, GM coop, but it seems like the latter would mitigate the disincentive to hire new people if they would be useful.
I guess it would be a disincentive to somebody deciding between taking a job at this sort of coop or an equal-shares coop — unless history showed that coops of the first kind tended to succeed more?
@John Schilling
Some non co-op companies already reduce the assets they need to have by selling some of their assets and then renting them back. And some never acquire certain assets in the first place, for example, by renting office space. So such a solution might work equally well for co-ops.
Anyway, I’m not arguing that co-ops are necessarily great for every situation. I attempted to counter an IMO rather weak argument why co-ops can’t work for situations like law firms.
Leasing major assets works well for a generic widget factory. Likewise taking out loans to buy major assets, with the payment of the loan balanced against the depreciation of the asset so the net book value stays near zero.
But in a law firm, the major assets are the client list and the reputation; they have a real value that will remain with the partners of the firm even if they (pretend to) sell them and lease them back, to make them collateral against a loan, even if they actually go bankrupt and have to sell every liquid asset at auction and start over from scratch under a new name. A new partner joining a law firm cannot help but to obtain a share of real value that other people have created.
To the extent that the necessary capital to run a firm is illiquid, this is an obstacle to employee ownership. Not an insurmountable one, law firms do add new partners, but it’s a much bigger deal than just issuing/selling shares to every new hire.
An obvious problem here is that the organization paying your salary is also the one in which a lot of your net worth is invested. The day your coop goes out of business will be a really bad one for you.
Something like this happens with startups–you’re essentially being paid a salary plus a chance to make a lot of money if the company ever makes it big. When (as usually happens) the company folds up, you’ve both lost your source of salary and had all your lottery tickets turn out to be losers on the same day.
Speaking of lotteries, the difference between the syndicalist revolution making you a worker-owner of 1/30 of a McDonalds franchise and the syndicalist revolution making you worker-owner of 1/1000 of a refinery is kind of like that.
Which is usually why this risk is defrayed in Syndicalist proposals by the workplaces also being part of unions of workplaces. So if one place goes out of business, the workers will be retrained/offered a position at another workplace with need for labour.
It’s not a matter of risk so much as it is one of inequality. 1/1000 of a refinery is worth vastly more than 1/30 of a McDonalds.
Replying to you again because comment depth limit prevents me from replying to your reply (I’m new to commenting here, is there a better approach?)
> Their salaries only represent the return from their labor.
Shouldn’t it be their total compensation represents the return from their labor? And if they’re getting part of the company, their salary should be correspondingly lower. It definitely seems like their cost to the company (whether in ownership or dollars) should represent the return from their labor.
Either way, I put it at the end but I think the stronger complaint is about defrauding non-owner shareholders. Why would that be any different for a worker owned company?
They can get around that by setting by-laws that deliberately tie their hands on when and where the profits can be distributed to member-workers instead of being reinvested back into the firm. Mondragon does that IIRC, limiting when and where members can pull funds out of their share capital in the “financial” side of the cooperative federation.
The “politics” is a trickier issue. It’s probably not a coincidence that cooperatives tended to either be small (like many partnerships) or something that existed among semi-autonomous producers doing similar work (farmers’ cooperatives).
Why can’t the workers solve that problem by voting to raise their wages, thus converting some of what would have been profits into wages?
I actually think that most people do not want to work in a worker’s coop as it would mean turning the politics up to 11, but I could be wrong.
Still, it’s noteworthy that there aren’t that these organizations are perfectly legal in most countries, but still rare. In the early 20th century, this would have been a weak argument: the capital requirements to start a company are too large for a few workers, so they’re stuck working for the capitalists. But nowadays, in many industries, companies don’t have much in terms of physical assets, so you’d think it wouldn’t be that hard for a group of people to come up with the capital.
Some businesses that I’d have never thought were coops turn out to *technically* be such.
I think it’s because what tends to happen is that at some point during expansion the existing workers tend to decide to cut future workers out of the deal and then you’re back to the same old deal even if it’s still a coop on paper.
Unless the state somehow blocks them from changing.
I suspect coops tend to be an unstable equilibrium.
That’s consistent with my experience. We eventually pulled out of a small private school run along unschooling lines because of the effects of the internal politics. And my impression is that academic departments can have problems with internal politics as well.
My mentor once told me that academic politics were the worst kind because there is so little at stake.
Western socialists seem like sheep in wolves’ clothing to me…they want what social democrats want, but also want an edgier label.
Ouch. Fair though.
This is a good way of putting it. It’s weird to see people who at most want to go back to state-owned power or railways talking like they’re seize-the-means-of-production insurrectionists.
In the UK, Waterstones is a major chain of book shops which was all but dead in 2014 but has turned around and got profitable again since – one of the decisions its boss credits with saving the business was precisely giving local managers back the decision what would work well in their area:Guardian news article.
What do you do about the fact that most blue-collar employees don’t want to be paid in shares of stock, and would rather have the cash?
Free market economists regularly point out that owning a company isn’t all peaches and cream. Unlike employees, you only get paid if and when the production cycle is successful. Most employees want a steady and consistent paycheck right away, not “wait two years and you might get a lot of money, or you might get nothing, oh well”
To the extent that ownership is valuable, making it a required part of employee compensation decreases the other amount of compensation they will receive – and you seem to be suggesting that they need to be forced to take compensation in shares rather than pay, you know, for their own good. Not so sure about that…
@Matt M
I think it also depends a lot on the level of risk AND the ability to predict & influence the risks.
I am wary to join a startup in return for shares because I don’t feel particularly capable of judging the risks, nor whether the risk vs reward ratio is reasonable. What if I’m left holding the bag if the company fails, but don’t actually get a commensurate payout when the risks pay off and the company succeeds?
Venture capitalists are (or should be) capable of this and why not let them judge/take the risks? This lowers the average payout compared to a extremely well-functioning & transparent labor market, but we don’t necessarily have an extremely well-functioning & transparent labor market.
Good point. I suspect if we ever did somehow end up at a point where worker-owned cooperatives were the only form of legal business organization, there’d be a bunch of them that basically consisted of “temporary” labor suppliers.
I believe the answer to your question is that there are no Marxist policies that could be applied, either good or bad. Marxism is simply opposition to capitalism and has never officially offered a replacement to my knowledge. Authoritarian communism arose out of societies that were already authoritarian.
St Benedict said work is prayer. Marx said commodities can be fetishized. Obviously they were both right.
The communist manifesto(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf) offers specific policy proposals – e.g. page 26. Marx specifically rejected describing what the stateless society (communism) would look like after class distinctions had disappeared under socialism, but socialism is well described in Marx.
Hitler applied every proposal in the Communist Manifesto and made May Day a national holiday; a more effective anticommunist act than invading Russia.
Nazi germany had private ownership of land (I think, suprisingly difficult to find a source on this) and private banks. [406], which are both proposals in the Communist Manifesto.
AFAIK, the Nazis got around the issue of private property by legally obligating/ordering private property holders to do what they wanted. Confiscation not required, just obedience. If anyone has any sources on, I’d definitely like to see them, because I forget where I got this impression.
The link I posted is a pretty good overview of viewpoints of the existing (as of 2006) debates on how to characterize the economy.
Marx thought he was just observing the inevitable processes of history, and was deliberately somewhat vague on what might come after (which was probably smart in its way – could the dynastic monarchies of the Middle Ages predicted that their successors would eventually be democratic republics?).
That makes me remember an article I have read last week:
“But that wasn’t REAL socialism!”
Quote from the third part (about Venezuela):
There is nothing contradictory about those statements from Chomsky.
avoiding that the two quotes don’t quite match up, the big problem with this argument is that it doesn’t prove much from a steelman perspective; from that perspective, a lot of socialists are just dumb or so desperate for victory that they lie to themselves. Which might give you leave to dismiss them individually, but not the underlying philosophy.
I don’t see the contradiction there. Years ago the regime look promising in terms of what appeared to be happening, but now it’s soured and the transformation never really happened. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened.
While there is history of socialist countries failing to either work as states, I think the point is that since none of these countries fully adhered to the principles of socialism, this doesn’t demonstrate that socialism itself is inherently flawed, just that apparently everyone who wants to implement it is really bad at doing so. If we snapped our fingers and a perfectly socialist state appeared in the middle of the Pacific tomorrow, no one would have a good prediction of whether it would be stable or not, since we’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
State’s don’t come into existence by the snapping of fingers, and that is the only reason we wouldn’t have an idea of what it would look like.
Highly socialist/Communist countries have been tried and were awful, highly capitalist countries have been tried and are pretty good for human societies and arguably the best to date. People who say ‘real/pure socialism hasn’t been tried’ are trying to end run around the obvious that getting even remotely close was awful.
Would you accept the same argument from someone advocating, say, fascism? If not, why not?
“We praised it a lot, but then it created a mountain of skulls. Oops! Not our fault. On to the next experiment.”
OK, maybe my earlier post was a little too much heat, and not enough light.
But to phrase it in a better way: if you are going to criticize Venezuela for being “not real socialism” you should be specific about what was missing. The earlier posts in this thread did not do this.
I guess Chomsky has attempted to do this with his argument that capitalists undermined Venezuela by exporting capital. But this argument seems manifestly absurd: the Venezuelan government controls a ton of capital in the form of the state oil company. And furthermore, there are lots of industries that can’t move, like food production.
Also, hopefully we can all agree that it was intellectually dishonest for Jeremy Corbyn to remove things like this from his
website.
Chomsky has the causality arrow backwards. Venezuela isn’t bad because capitalists exported capital, the capitalists started exporting the capital because Venezuela got bad. Before the Chavez administration Venezuelan émigrés were pretty rare, and in fact many people from Colombia and Ecuador would immigrate into Venezuela (often illegally) to look for work. Hell the Chomsky quote were he praises Venezuela was eight years ago, by that point the murder rate had already quintupled in Caracas, and he has the gall to call this a better world being created.
Nancy, see The Political Economy of Socialism, Horvat (1982). I’ve read its first few pages and browsed through it. That, along with this collection of excerpts from Horvat (1989), which I selected and translated, gave me a pretty good idea of what can be said from a perspective of a Marxist technocrat and an economist.
Since I’m neither an economist, nor a Marxist, nor a technocrat, and at the same time come from a former communist-led country, it’s insufficient for me to make sense of how history unfolded in Eastern Europe.
I might add my tentative non-Marxist list of instructions to any Communist out there:
1. never allow what is opportune in a fight to destroy personal liberties
2. genuine mass revolution is anthropologically unrealistic. education and personal development should be pretty much aim no. 1
3. in the fight against fascists & Nazis we lost the wide perspective; for example, the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents (with an effect of something like inverse Stockholm syndrome).
related to it,
4. Leftist revolutionaries had frequent problems understanding nationalism. It looks to me they often underestimated its power, while at the same time overestimating the strength of its ideological underpinning, and stability. Nationalists “really mean it,” but much of what they do is driven by e.g. spite, by intuition, things highly dissimilar to ideology.
Lastly, I’m irritated by this phrase: “Communist countries” .
Those countries did NOT call themselves “Communist.”
It’s just that Communist parties’ managed what they called socialism.
NO one in my childhood ever called the system, the society or the country we live in, “Communist” …
If anyone would have ever told us we live in “a paradise” (as in “worker’s paradise”), he would have been seen as a 24-karat nutter.
A parallel to Westerners calling us “Communist” might be us in the East calling the USA Dreamlandia, and prod you to explain how come you fail to realise your best dreams. You do realise them, you say? Explain why they are so miserable, unimaginative, etc.
So, one thing is that almost all radical leftists in the West follow Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, or some brand of Anarchism. Ocalan and Bookchin are the heroes of the day, for the obvious reason that the Syrian Kurds are making quite a go of it.
Tankies and Maoists are Ultra-rare, any you meet are likely reddit edge-lords. Outside of Yugoslavia there’s not much respect for the Eastern Bloc, despite some admirable aspects.
1. Oh man, This is something that has fucked up every single go left wingers have had. And look, we’re still fucking doing it!
2. Is mostly what they’re going on about with “Class Consciousness” and “Vanguard of the Workers. One of the larger Trotskyist orgs around me calls itself a “propaganda organisation” rather than a “party” the implication being that if the propaganda works the mass party will form itself.
3-4. This seems to be mostly a new-left/progressive issue. I got my copy of “Fascism: What it is and how to fight it” and Orwell’s essays (which always show a bit of respect for nationalism from a left perspective.) pretty early.
Oh, and as for communist countries, we didn’t call them that either. “State Capitalist” is most common, followed by “Bureaucratic Collectivist” or “Degenerated Workers State”
Thanks. It annoys me to refer to the USSR etc. as socialist even though that’s what they called themselves because then they don’t get disambiguated from the democratic socialist countries, but maybe I should go with democratic vs. authoritarian socialist.
Your pdf doesn’t work on my computer (Chrome browser)– there are a few phrases in English, but most of it is a smallish number of symbols I don’t recognize.
People in both western and non-western countries refer to the U.S. and similar societies as capitalist, despite the fact that something like thirty to fifty percent of income is collected as taxes and spent by the government, and much of the rest is constrained by government in various ways.
That’s because real capitalism has never been tried 😛
The dichotomy of capitalist vs. communist bloc was flawed from both sides, it can be argued.
Some Marxists argue that the main reasons various revolutions “failed” was because of external intervention or pre-revolutionary circumstances.
So for example, the Russian Revolution “failed” for a range of reasons including the fact that Russia wasn’t an advanced capitalist country with a well defined proletariat, but rather a very large peasantry, whose interests were not quite the same as the interests of the small proletariat. Or because the violent counter-revolution (supported by foreign imperialist armies) successfully prevented the revolution from achieving its aims. The Bolsheviks found themselves in a position of having to choose between losing the civil war and losing all the progress they had made, or sacrificing some of their ideals and adopting an authoritarian “war communism” from which they never really recovered.
Later, many smaller countries were made very isolated by their rejection of capitalism (sometimes embargoed, sometimes actually invaded) and for safety had to kowtow to the USSR. Rather than having a 20th century of many countries trying various alternative systems and working well with each other to find better ones, we had two dogmatic “empires” (one pro-capitalism and one pro-communism) that were very paranoid about the other gaining international influence and stifling any attempts made by any smaller countries to stray from the dogma.
I don’t know how well this idea stands up to historical scrutiny, but the arguments made by most of my Marxist acquaintances (mostly Trotskyists) tend to be along these lines.
(I haven’t said anything about China because I know even less about it. My understanding is that Maoism is different from Marxism in some important and fundamental ways, wheres Marxism-Leninism is a more subtle modification, but I’m not confident on details.)
The details are subtle, but a cheat sheet is this
Marxist-Leninists think that the workers on their own can be split apart into competing interest groups and atomised by the ruling class. To stop this, a section of the workers must take control of the early stage of the revolution. This “Vanguard Party” will mobilise the masses to revolt, and then play a guiding and educational role as Socialism is stabilised and the work towards communism begins.
Additionally, many Leninists think that if the society is largely feudal, as Russia was, the Proletariat must force the other classes to bypass capitalist development and politics and go direct to Socialism via mass collectivisation.
Marx said this couldn’t happen, Capitalism had to be developed and have its crises for the dialectic of revolution to take place (also, he had a…less violent idea of revolution.)
This obviously had mixed results in the long term, but is what allowed them to grab power by recognizing they could topple the weakened capitalist and Peasant revolutionary government before its institutions could be built.
Maoists are essentially an offshoot of Leninism, and more-or-less additionally think that in a rural society the Peasantry can become the primary Vanguard group, collectivise and merge with an underdeveloped (Urban) working class and push towards Socialism.
Marx also said this couldn’t happen due to Peasants not being concentrated enough, and not having the right class interests.
Thanks, this was a good breakdown.
He definitely did not. His concept of revolution was explicitly based on the mass terror of the french revolution.
To be fair, the mass terror of the French Revolution was relatively tame compared to what ended up happening in the Russian and later Chinese Civil Wars. They don’t get a lot of play in the West — partly because out of sight means out of mind but partly also because the Whites and nationalists committed just as many atrocities as the Reds and Maoists and so they didn’t make great anticommunist propaganda — but they were some of the worst wars of the 20th century.
Then, of course, there’s later events.
the French revolution’s mass terror is much wider, and the body count much higher, than is usually appreciated.
Many marxists have made this argument. Marx made the opposite argument, explicitly saying that russia didn’t need a period of capitalism to develop class consciousness, because of its tradition of communal landowning in the peasantry.
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. I would have guessed such an argument to be made by Lenin, if anything.
Anyway, most modern Marxists disagree with Marx on a few things. Perhaps this is one of them.
A couple of answers touched on this, but I would say that there is a non-trivial group of Marxists who think that the problem is that the Communist countries were not democratic. I think that’s the broader point underlying 75th’s comment on worker cooperatives (actually run by workers, as opposed to the centrally imposed “cooperatives” of the Soviet Union and its clients). Also Levantine’s point 2 about education and personal development vs. mass revolution seems to me connected to this thought. It makes me think of Otto Neurath, one of my favorite Marxists, who was very much of the opinion that if the people aren’t going to elect a socialist government, the response must be to work on better ways of teaching people socialist ideas, rather than using violence to impose them. Of course, pretty much all Marxists think existing democracies are corrupt and easily manipulated, but, again, one significant train of thought for why Soviet-style Communism failed is that what’s needed is better democracy, not an alternative to democracy. And you can certainly find Marx himself advocating for more truly democratic institutions in a number of places.
The imperialists, reactionaries and the revolutionaries themselves (Pol Pot for example) screwed over lots of revolutions.
Cuba is still going strong though.
The Democratic Socialists, at least on paper, are opposed to authoritarianism whether it occurs in a capitalist or socialist regime.
A small followup to the char-rnn thing.
What if we have two rnns, and let them complete each other’s sentences? Here is rnn!scott x rnn!bible:
http://www.stoodfarback.com/stuff/rnn_scott_x_rnn_bible.html
(underlines mark which rnn was doing the completing)
I take it feeding one the output of the other as seed text?
Nice.
I experimented with something similar to try to get interesting sentences out of a version of the HMM bot used for King James Programming but that was more brute force: creating a corpus of terms unique to each text and rejecting sentences that didn’t include at least one word unique to each corpus.
Some people have reported that MDMA makes them better at speaking a foreign language. Have any neuroscientists or linguists investigated this?
I’d imagine it’s the same as moderate alcohol consumption having an effect.
Speaking a foreign language is the kind of thing where increased confidence and reduced inhibitions improve performance.
I cannot confirm the alcohol effect. I get too enthusiastic at talking and screw up my grammar. I find it better to be sober, speak slower and get my grammar at least mostly right. It shows respect to them, and it makes me come across as someone putting effort into learning, not like some random fool who is happily babbling is his own private version of pidgin.
Eh, in my experience it depends on the kind of situation you’re in, who you’re talking to and why.
While I probably make more grammatical mistakes after some alcohol, it’s easier to keep up with the pace of “normal” conversation, which in turn makes it easier to make friends. In regards to showing “respect”, there’s a trade-off here between respecting people’s time and attention and respecting the…I don’t know, integrity of their language or whatever you want to call it?
Drinking before a business meeting or other formal occasion in a foreign language, however… might not be the best idea.
An anecdote: A few years ago I was in Moscow for the New Year visiting my Russian ex-girlfriend’s family, and on New Year’s Eve I was sitting and chatting with her brother-in-law, who speaks almost no English, and my Russian is pretty bad (but was better than his English). My ex-girlfriend said that at first she would get questions pretty frequently about how to say something in Russian, but as time went on and we got more and more drunk the questions became much less frequent, until eventually we weren’t bothering her at all. If you’re both drunk I guess it doesn’t matter much how good your language skills are.
I wonder how well the recollections of the chat match up. My guess: not so good.
So like, my understanding is:
MDMA causes your brain to have a higher amount of serotonin.
Children naturally have a higher amount of serotonin.
I got curious if maybe the reason children are able to become native language speakers has something to do with serotonin. So I googled if MDMA improves language abilities, and there are indeed a bunch of people on different forums claiming “MDMA made me a native speaker while I was on it!!!”
If it’s true it could have big implications. Maybe people could take MDMA to become native speakers of a language even into adulthood. Do the results stick around? If you take MDMA enough while practicing a foreign language, do you stay a native speaker?
Then again maybe it’s not true at all.
I don’t think you can drink alcohol to become a native speaker of a language, or else science would know this already, since there are plenty of alcoholics out there.
From what I’ve heard, the ‘children are better at learning languages’ thing is an illusion, created by the fact that they are basically getting lessons in their native language pretty much every waking hour from birth. Apart from the very specific task of developing a perfect native pronunciation, I understand that per unit time being exposed to the language, adults actually learn faster; it’s just that no adult with a normal life has anything like the amount of hours in a day to pick up a foreign language that a young child has to pick up their native language.
I think there must be some real effect, since Chinese children learn Mandarin more quickly than foreigners in China do. My anecdotal impression is also that children often do learn second languages (for instance English) faster than adults, but I don’t have any statistics on that.
I’ve heard a theory that adults underestimate how hard it is for children to learn languages.
It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of adults give up because they expect themselves to learn faster than they can.
Children are good at learning to hear and speak sounds. For everything else that has been measured, adults learn faster. see here (ungated, but huge)
As a former ESL teacher and spanish speaker, I will argue with complete sincerity that two drinks will improve your ability to speak a foreign language you know at least moderately well, so it certainly seems possible.
If you’ve tried LessWrong 2.0 but didn’t like the interface, I’ve created an alternative: https://www.greaterwrong.com/
More details and discussion here.
My current problem with LW2.0’s interface isn’t the appearance, it’s the comment box.
The pseudo-WYSIWYG interface, where Markdown is automatically transformed into rich text as you type, is a “worst of both worlds” scenario. It has all the problems of WYSIWYG editors — getting precise formatting right is a pain in the ass, dealing with links is a pain in the ass, the current formatting mode keeps changing unexpectedly as you move the cursor around — and then makes things even worse on top of that by not showing the formatting buttons at all times. That’s just awful! If you want a rich text editor, you need to have the formatting buttons constantly visible. In particular, the part about the current formatting mode changing as you move around is made much worse by this — ordinarily this would be fixed with a single click; as it is, you have to *first* type the thing you want in the wrong formatting, *then* highlight it and change the formatting. Ughhhh.
But, really, much better than a rich text editor would be straightforward Markdown (with whatever appropriate additions), *not* transformed into rich text as you type. Ideally but not necessarily with concurrent preview. And then optionally with a separate rich text editor for those who really want to use that.
(Meanwhile, Markdown no longer works in profiles like it used to, so my profile page remains broken at the moment.)
Seriously, the comment editor is bad and needs to be entirely replaced.
GreaterWrong.com has a straightforward Markdown editor, exactly like you want. (There are also buttons that insert Markdown markup, for people who don’t like typing it manually or can’t remember it, etc. The buttons are, indeed, shown at all times, and do not move around.)
Huh, I couldn’t find the comment button at all?
Edit: Oh, I see, it was because I wasn’t logged in. Silly me. I just mistakenly inferred that GreaterWrong was purely a read-only interface…
My biggest complaint about LW 2.0 is that the interface is very prone to completely failing depending on browser issues. It gives me serious problems both at work and at home, possibly for different reasons although some of the problems seem similar.
Actually that greaterwrong looks a lot better, but it really needs a way to shrink the font size. Too large a font has the same problem as big blank spaces–you can’t keep enough material on the screen.
Re: font size and “enough material on the screen”:
Try some of the alternate themes (the six buttons, labeled A through F, at the upper-left-hand side). The “grey” theme (theme C) might be what you’re looking for.
Depending on the size of your screen, and how you feel about narrow vs. wide content columns, you might also try one of the two alternate settings for the content width (the width selector is the three buttons on the upper-right-hand side).
Edit: Uh, actually, here’s a question, sorry if it’s a silly one: is there any reason you can’t just use your browser’s zoom feature to shrink the text…?
The grey theme only produces a very small change in font size and seems to be doing that only by coincidence.
If you use it to shrink the text, it increases the size of the blank spaces so as to prevent your browser setting from showing more text. The interface is being actively user-hostile.
Wow! What browser is this?!
Edit: By the way, yes, you’re right about the grey theme—I was misremembering. Well, it looks like adding a text size adjuster is now on the to-do list!
Edit 2: I just tried using the zoom feature in Chrome. Indeed it does not zoom only the text (although zooming does cause more text to fit). However—if you are using Chrome, or a browser with similar behavior—try zooming, and also using a different width setting (such as the “wide” one).
I have no idea if I have a “wide” setting or where to find one. At any rate I would like to avoid having to change a setting every time I visit a particular web site.
At least greaterwrong doesn’t cause me browser malfunctions. I’ll have to try it at home on Linux Pale Moon to see if it works.
As I noted in my earlier comment, the width selector is a GreaterWrong.com feature; look at the upper-right-hand corner of the page. (It looks like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w2fo5tam45n04on/Screenshot%202018-02-26%2018.05.28.png?dl=0)
And you certainly don’t have to change it every time you visit! Whatever setting you pick will be saved by your browser, and retained for all future visits.
Re: the Pale Moon browser:
Unfortunately, this feature (and basically all other Javascript-based features of GreaterWrong) won’t work in Pale Moon (which seems to be based on a very old fork of the Firefox codebase).
The good news is that the site’s basic functionality—browsing, reading posts and comments, searching, etc.—doesn’t require Javascript at all. The bad news is that you probably won’t be able to post comments or upvote/downvote, and won’t have width and theme selectors, the theme tweaker, etc.
If at all possible, I would suggest selecting a different browser—one with better compatibility with at least reasonably recent web standards. If that’s not an option, then I can only apologize for the inconvenience, and hope that you can at least get some value out of using the site as a reader.
not “morewrong”?
Less Wrong 2.0 is at lesserwrong.com.
Rationalists: getting closer to being right, website relaunch by website relaunch.
I just got off a boat. Ask me anything.
Did he play “Curl”?
When is he going to start touring again?
Yes.
He didn’t say.
@BBA
Did you play Dungeons & Dragons or another tabletop game with Wil Wheaton?
How did you like John Hodgman?
What was Anita S up to?
Didn’t get a chance to.
I prefer his earlier stuff.
[redacted]
If I like “Shop Vac” and “Code Monkey” (but not as much as Shop Vac), what is the third Jonathan Coulton song I should listen to?
Other excellent pieces:
Baby Got Back (Sir Mix-a-lot cover)
Re:Your Brains
The Future Soon
“I Feel Fantastic”
I second “I Feel Fantastic”. I’m also a big fan of “Ikea”.
Yeah, I concur with these recommendations. JoCo has some weird fannish songs (which I love!) but “Shop Vac” and “Code Monkey” are slightly odd songs about normalish people with normalish problems. If outis wants songs similar to those, rather than (what I would recommend) being adventurous and branching out, those are two good choices.
DNA
Song: Future soon.
Also, I think about 1/2 of Coulton reminds me of BNL. I mean, if you love Ikea and Future Soon, as well as Shop Vac and code money… you might as well start a Pandora playlist for “One Week” by BNL and see what else you get.
Skullcrusher Mountain
Huh. Costs less than I would have feared. How much interaction with the famous people did you actually get, and to what extent were there extra charges or higher chances for somebody who booked one of the more expensive cruise options to get access to them? How was the time not spent interacting with famous people?
I’ve attended one Comic-Con, which I didn’t like much; it seemed like primarily an opportunity to admire celebrities from only slightly less distance than usual (unless, perhaps, one got a VIP pass. I didn’t spring for that, so I don’t know how much it would have improved things). I’ve also gone to a bunch of science fiction conventions, from tiny local cons to a couple of Worldcons, which were quite variable but in general had a lot more interaction with notable people I was interested in meeting, as well as a lot more interesting things to do other than gawk at the famous people. I guess I’m sort of imagining the cruise as a longer convention, and wondering if it’s more like a Comic-Con or more like an SF convention or not really like either.
Definitely more like an SF convention – though with less comprehensive programming, so there was time to do regular cruise vacation stuff. The aim was for a “summer camp” experience, with everyone having meals together and running into each other throughout the day. The lack of reliable internet connectivity was certainly more of a plus than a minus, to me anyway.
Did you spec out any of the Pandemic Legacy: Legacy sessions? My wife and I have been consumed by Seasons 1 and 2, and I’m curious whether they were playing one of those or something different that explained the doubling of the word Legacy.
It was season 2. I think the doubled “Legacy” referred to the format, which was that each game would have a different set of players picking up from their predecessors.
That sounds like less legacy than more… but who am I to stand in the way of clever marketing.
Yeah, first time I heard about “legacy” games I had the same confusion. “Pandemic: Legacy” sounds like “original Pandemic”, but it really means “Pandemic with ongoing consequences”.
A few people have said they’d be interested to see some thoughtful, knowledgeable criticism of Jordan Peterson. I think I might have found some:
A biologist debunks Peterson’s lobster claims. If the biologist is right, and I’m convinced he is, then this could shake Peterson’s credibility on a number of other claims.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Bret Weinstein describes an error Peterson made in his Vice interview. (Close to the 4:30 mark in that clip.) I agree with Weinstein on that one.
So, there’s two pieces of it anyway.
That’s not just a random biologist, it’s culture warrior extraordinaire PZ Myers, who has a long history of being a disingenuous ****.
Just last month he called Steven Pinker a “lying right-wing shitweasel” for saying that certain members of the alt-right are literate and intelligent.
None of this is to say that he’s wrong about lobsters, but I’d say that he *is* being disingenuous in his reading of Peterson.
(Also, his comment that “I have no interest in ever having a conversation with Jordan Peterson. He’s an ignorant ass.” is just rude!)
PZ Myers is so frustrating. An actual biologist critiquing some of Jordan Peterson’s biology-based arguments would be very interesting, and a valuable addition to the conversation.
But why does he have to go out of his way to be so abrasive to people he considers his outgroup? It’s like his actual purpose is getting people riled up, rather than being a voice of reason in the conversation.
Within the first thirty seconds he’s scathingly referring to ‘fanboys’ he ‘pissed off’, and acting shocked that their comments are so ‘unintelligent’ they are not worth replying to. That’s a style of interaction better suited to a random jerk on YouTube, not a Associate Professor of biology.
It made me feel hostile towards the video, and I’m basically on his side.
I think we have a winner.
Don’t ask what PZ Meyers is like as a person, ask what kind of person the process of getting a very popular skeptic blog selects for.
Meyers is the same person who did this, which I think merits taking absolutely anything he says with a grain of salt.
Also, he circulated a third-party anonymous #metoo accusation against Michael Shermer (4 years before #metoo was even a thing) and attacked Richard Dawkins on the ElevatorGate incident, becoming one of the leading figures of the Atheism+ schismatic movement.
i’ve always been confused with this hatred for Pinker from US moderate progressives. I’m pretty much as far left as they come, and while the Anarcho Syndicalists and Spartacists and the other reprobates I meet have quibbles with his naive interpretation of the Enlightenment, it’s respectful and intellectual, and has none of this venom you see from the “moderate” US social left.
And this reasoned discussion is from people who set police cars on fire for fun, so it’s not a lack of spirit restraining our leftists.
Finally, I’d always placed Pinker LEFT of Meyers, somewhere just right of Chomsky. So this confuses me no end.
Social Justice ideologues seem to generally argue that the core of the problem is the wrong beliefs being taught to people. A decent number of SJ people don’t believe in the ability to successfully counter these wrong beliefs in debate, but in silencing and isolating wrong beliefs, hence solutions such as ‘no platforming’.
Steven Pinker has a platform, which he uses to say anti-SJ things. Hence, some SJ people see him as being the core of the problem, who must be neutered.
Revolutionaries who want to gain control over the economy/society tend to put far less weight on gaining control over the idea/debate space and are more focused on ‘practical’ power. So they logically will not get outraged by Pinker, while they do get outraged by cops, managers, etc.
It’s all about who people see as a threat, which is not the same as the distance in beliefs. Scott has written about this.
I strongly disagree with the idea that Pinker is close to Chomsky – Pinker has said capitalism leads to peace and that large scale socialism is against human nature (He also says anarchism is untenable in the second interview)
@qwints
That may have been a bit strong, true. Pinker is not an Anarcho-Syndicalist (I assume Chomsky hasn’t made the jump to council communism of democratic confederalism or whatever.) But Meyers doesn’t really engage with economic issues outside of standard Blue-tribe positions. Pinker does, and he takes a position left of what this non-American thinks of as the US political centre (which I will define as Hillary Clinton.)
Pinker in those statements is by his own admission using rather specific definitions of socialism and anarchism, in the context of highlighting that of all the societies we’ve managed to artificially put together, Capitalism outperforms the state of nature the most. This is somehow contentious in the left, even though every major left figure from Marx to Bookchin has immediately conceded the point
Additionally, (and I’ll need to look this up.) he’s come out as rather communitarian in other statements, particularly in his approach to international institutions.
He’s internationalist, has strong support for local community bonds, a strong welfare state, and strong international institutions, and while he’s definitely a capitalist I’d probably say his politics place him in a Western Europe Centre-Left party (that is, somewhere to the left of the Democrats, even those of Bernie.)
I don’t understand how these two go together. “Internationalism” means prioritizing the interests of foreigners over those of your local community.
It’s easy to say one supports both, but pudding and eating. Pick an issue (free trade, immigration, etc) that pits the interests of foreigners against the interests of “local community” and if you’re always on the side that benefits foreigners then you’re not really prioritizing the local community.
@Conrad Honcho
The opposite of internationalism is nationalism not “localism”; communities are a lot smaller than countries. One could be a big fan of free trade and the EU, and also e.g. funding local churches.
@Conrad Honcho
He might be some kind of old timey feudal Catholic. Bonds based on personal loyalty to your immediate liege, rather than tribal-national bonds, and preference for kings to be Christian, rather than preference for kings to be of the ethnicity they rule over.
A lot of internationalists like city-states as well. I think it makes most sense to think of them wanting to build strong local blue communities as well as a large-scale, strong central government run by blues.
Not that I think that they are aware that they are trying to remove the need to compromise with the red tribe as much as possible, but I do think that’s behind it. Red tribers with the same sensibilities opt for isolationism, but blue tribers are less willing to put up with others doing the wrong things ‘over there.’
Not that I think that they are aware that they are trying to remove the need to compromise with the red tribe as much as possible
I disagree. They are very much fully aware. I live in the heart of a Blue wanna-be city-state, and the Blues who like to talk about how “things should be run” absolutely despise that they can’t just utterly subjugate the Reds that live to the north and to the east, instead of just mostly dominate them.
I think there’s a thing on the left (probably amplified by Social Justice) that success by the larger society must never be acknowledged. Any mention of it must include either claims that there’s much more work to be done and/or reminders of historical injustice.
When Larry Summers was involved in the debate over his statements regarding the possible reasons for the relative lack of female faculty in the engineering and math departements at Harvard, Steven Pinker defended and agreed with Summers that biological reasons are at least a part of the story but for some reason Pinker was not hit by the shitstorm.
The outrage factory was probably busy concentrating on Summers.
A few years back, there was kind of a critical back and forth between Myers and Pinker over evolutionary psychology. Maybe it left some bad blood.
PZ Myers is the exemplar of the Irish saying “What would you expect from a pig but a grunt?”
He seems to have gotten even more irascible and narcissistic since the hey-day of desecrating an (allegedly) consecrated Host, something I would not have thought possible. His star seems to have waned with the eclipse of New Atheism, though.
PZ Myers enforces politically correct rudeness on his blog. To my mind, that makes him the platonic ideal of just how modern liberalism has gone wrong (political incorrectness is supposed to be bad because it’s rude, and rudeness hurts people, and hurting people is bad. When you decide that hurting people is good as long it’s done in a progressive and enlightened way, you have officially traded the essence of progress and enlightenment for an empty shell of the same).
This does not, by all means, necessarily mean that he’s wrong on the subject of lobsters.
TL;DR on the first video? I couldn’t stand 30 seconds of that concentrated smugness.
Yes, I’d be interested in getting a summary. It seems Peterson’s point is that humans organize ourselves into hierarchies mainly as a result of inborn biological tendencies. This seems pretty clearly correct to me and I would be pretty surprised if there is solid evidence that he’s wrong.
Like a lot of people, I noticed that in the famous Jordan Peterson interview the interviewer repeatedly and aggressively twisted his words, misrepresented what he said, etc., all in an effort to make him seem unreasonable as possible. So I would guess (without watching) that this person does more of the same.
AFAIK, Peterson’s lobster points are:
– lobsters are very distantly related to us (obviously true, unless you are a on the lunatic fringe of creationism),
– lobsters have altercations with one another, just as humans do (also obviously true),
– lobsters have dominance hierarchies, just like humans (I don’t know anything about lobster society, so I can’t tell – and googling lobster societies just brings up food clubs – but it’s pretty obvious that humans rank-order themselves),
– lobsters have neural structures similar enough to humans that the same antidepressants work on them in the same way (I’ve found a study on this here).
I clicked on that link to find out “who gives lobsters anti-depressants?” but am now even more side-tracked by the following:
“Diplomatic skills” is not something I would ever have associated with lobsters. Now I’ve got the image of the tidal pool version of this stuck in my head 🙂
I saw the video and wondered if this is an example of, “sophisticated argument gets dumbed down when interviewed on TV” or if that’s really his actual argument.
As summarized by Anonymous (which matches my recollections if the video), this doesn’t need a sophisticated rebuttal, because it doesn’t stand at face value. It’s basically the Monty Python “witches float” argument.
To take it even remotely seriously, you’d need:
-An explanation of the common factor between humans and lobsters that got inherited (I believe he says “serotonin” but serotonin is related to like, a million behaviors, so that seems silly)
-An explanation of why dominance hierarchies are any different from all the other human behaviors where the biological impulse can be overridden, is culturally mediated, etc. Otherwise nothing follows from his argument.
I’m not terribly skeptical that humans have some fairly innate drive towards status-negotiating behavior, but going beyond that observation to the claim that it’s either inevitable or good based on lobster anatomy seems like quite a stretch.
I don’t think he’s calling it “good.” “Inevitable,” maybe. Essentially his argument is just that it’s so common across the animal kingdom that pretending hierarchies are some kind of arbitrarily imposed social construct in humans is silly.
If Peterson were wrong about lobsters, it wouldn’t change the underlying point. One could just drop lobsters and talk about primates and you’d still be talking about millions of years of evolved behavior.
I think one of the important texts in this debate is On Aggression by Kondrad Lorenz. He discusses aggression and status heirarchy throughout animalia and if I remember correctly he does talk about reciprocal Cortisol/Testosterone levels in Crayfish at some point. It was a controversial book because it seemed to suggest that aggression and maybe war were inevitable in our species. UNESCO even got involved with a Statement back in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seville_Statement_on_Violence
I don’t think he’s calling it “good.” “Inevitable,” maybe. Essentially his argument is just that it’s so common across the animal kingdom that pretending hierarchies are some kind of arbitrarily imposed social construct in humans is silly.
Precisely. He goes into this in more detail in a recent interview with (of all people) Russel Brand. Brand seemed to have quite leftist intuitions and so was very skeptical of Peterson’s seeming support of hierarchy, inequality, and so on and so drilled down on the topic a bit.
I’ll try to summarize.
Peterson asserted that hierarchy was basically inevitable where there was inequality, and that inequality was inevitable because different things are different, and that large inequality seemed quite inevitable as well because we can even see Pareto distributions in reproductive success across the animal kingdom, the size of trees, and even the size of cosmic bodies. He sees it as being a sort of natural law, much like entropy; success breeds more success, even in creating larger gravity wells.
And, when asked, he regards this as actually being a huge problem that we struggle against but have no ultimate solution to, any more than there is a solution to decay. Brand wondered if there might be a ‘spiritual solution.’ Peterson said that he didn’t know, but that no other sort of solution seemed satisfactory.
Yes, and I think that’s all true. In the dominance hierarchies, though, there are feedback mechanisms Peterson talks about. Like the mice that play together, and if the dominant one doesn’t let the weak mouse win ~30% of the time the weak mouse stops playing. Or the apex chimp that must be diplomatic in his treatment of the other chimps or else the weaker chimps gang up on him.
There are spiritual solutions, which is what you get with religions and political ideologies that emphasize the strong protecting and caring for the weak. Where I think the equalist left goes wrong is with their pseudo-gnosticism. The belief that we’re naturally equal, and the inequalities in society are imposed from above via malice when in fact the resultant social or economic inequalities we see are an emergent property of our innate inequality.
Indeed. I also find this ‘everything is nurture’ belief extremely misanthropic*. There seems to be this belief that we are doomed to be racist/sexist/etc if there are any group-level differences that are not merely trivial preferences.
As if humans cannot choose to be kind and generous to those with poor luck and as if we have not become kinder and more generous over time.
* And I’m pretty misanthropic myself, so when I notice it in others that is saying something…
Tl;dr It’s more complicated than Peterson makes it. You can’t make meaningful claims about common traits between two species by just looking at two species. It would be unlikely that humans and lobsters share a trait because of their last common ancestor if other arthropods like butterflies or other mammals like bats don’t have that trait.
Only specific factual error is that the common ancestor was 700 million years ago not 350 million.
Right. That seems very short of a “debunking”.
I don’t see how this follows. Evolution is not a linear process, so traits can disappear again or be suppressed.
The environment can play a major role, so it’s quite possible that some species live a life where status hierarchies are very important, while other species do not, but that the latter species do have the same wiring, but it’s just not expressed/visible.
If the criticism is merely: Peterson argues too much based on 1 specific example, then this seems reasonable criticism of poor evidence, but proof that he is wrong.
If Peterson is arguing that the behavior of lobsters, standing alone, demonstrates something about human nature, then obviously he is wrong.
However, it seems he made it pretty clear that he was citing lobsters simply as an example.
So a better way to make his argument is to say that (1) there are numerous species which organize themselves in social hierarchies, even species which are very dissimilar to humans; (2) the brain chemistries that are observed in connection with an organism’s position in the hierarchy are similar among these species, including in humans; therefore (3) it follows that human self-organization into dominance hierarchies is primarily the result of in-born biological processes.
(1) seems to be correct; I don’t know if (2) is correct, but if it is, it’s reasonable to conclude (3) from (1) and (2).
The essence of the video is something like – Peterson uses bad evidence and reasoning therefore he’s an idiot, and everyone who thinks he’s persuasive is also an idiot just like christians and muslims. It’s what you’d expect given PZ.
Sure, but that’s besides the point. You can’t just say humans and lobsters both have serotonin and a common ancestor, therefore the way serotonin operates in lobsters (where it affects dominance behavior (at 737-738)) is a valid model for how it operates in humans. You could just as easily make claims about the way it operates in locusts (where it affects swarming).
@qwints:
I think that’s a good summary, though it’s not just that Peterson has simplified the issue; he has incorrectly represented it. It’s not just that it’s “unlikely that humans and lobsters share a trait because of their last common ancestor if other arthropods like butterflies or other mammals like bats don’t have that trait,” it’s that it’s a claim drawn from a totally erroneous understanding of evolution.
Another key point is that serotonin isn’t just associated with status the way Peterson describes it, but rather is known for its association with tons of other much more basic stuff.
Peterson might be right that humans have an evolved, deep-seated instinct toward forming and existing in hierarchies, but he’s got the underlying evolutionary arguments for it wrong, and it might not be as deep-seated as he’s making it out to be. And that’s important when Peterson is saying our drive for hierarchy is so fundamental that we need to rethink how we treat it in policy or social mores.
Myers once wrote a glowing review of Testosterone Rex which proves (among other things) that the idea of women being choosier about their sexual partners as an evolutionary strategy is a sexist myth. One of Myers regular readers did some calculations showing promiscuity would actually be more advantageous to men from a reproductive perspective and asked if Myers could clarify where he was getting the math wrong, to which Myers responded, “your math is fine, it’s your humanity that’s broken.”
That says everything you need to know about the man honestly.
I think Weinstein make a good point.
PZ Meyers, on the other hand, is tilting at straw men. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but he is seriously misrepresenting what Peterson said. For example, he thinks he is refuting Peterson by pointing out that the specifics of hierarchy institutions are social constructs. But Peterson clearly said that the hierarchy instinct is like chess. It creates the rules of the game, but it is up to us to determine what moves we make. So he refutes Peterson by making a point Peterson made also.
I would agree with him if he were accurately representing what Peterson said, but I don’t think he did. I did not listen to the entire Peterson interview, but it seems his point was that makeup and high heeled shoes are at one end of a continuum of sexual behavior and that there are not clear rules regarding sexual behavior in the workplace.
Of course it’s true that in particular cases, wearing high heels and makeup are not intended as sexual behavior, for example if a widow dresses up for her deceased husband’s funeral, chances are she is not doing it in order to meet a new husband at the event. But I think Peterson would respond that’s true about a lot of sexual/non-sexual behavior and that the point is that it’s difficult to draw a clear line between sexual and non-sexual behavior.
I think you’re right that’s how Peterson would respond. But Bret’s right that Peterson didn’t make this argument very well in the interview.
Well, according to the video you linked to, Peterson accused women of hypocrisy for wearing high heels and makeup to work while at the same time demanding not to be sexually harassed.
Where in Peterson’s video does he actually make such an accusation? I didn’t listen to the whole thing, but in the part I found, he doesn’t seem to be saying that.
His interviewer, Jay Kang, straight up asked him if he thinks women are being hypocrites when they wear makeup/high heels and expect not to be harassed. Peterson said yes.
Now, I think this was just Peterson making a misstep: you can tell he was on edge and that his “journalist is trying to frame me as a monster” sensor had gone off (false positive in my opinion, though I don’t have as much context as he did); but he should have been much more clear that when he said that, he meant it as his idea of where to set one aspect of the baseline in what a mature conversation about sexual standards in the workplace would look like, were it to be had.
Throughout that whole Vice interview, I took his point to be “there are a lot of unknown unknowns in this topic. Here are some of the known unknowns as I see them” but he came off as saying “we don’t know what the rules are but here are what I think they should be.”
Where in the video is that? TIA
I’m not sure but it might depend on which version of the video you are looking at. The 9-minute one initially released by Vice is tightly edited, but there are other versions out there that are longer. I can’t seem to find the approximately 30-minute one I watched, and I can’t remember exactly where in the video it was, you’ll have to watch it. It’s definitely a ways in, once things get a bit tense.
The video was cut in a way to make Peterson look bad, by removing the nuance, making it seem like Peterson argued something other than what he did. Here is a video showing the cut and the uncut portions.
My interpretation of his actual argument based on what he said (although he doesn’t argue it too well) is that:
– he is unsure whether men and women can work together without excessive harassment
– he is unsure whether there are rules that enable men and women to work together without excessive harassment
– he believes that right now there are no clear rules
– he believes that make up & high heels are sexual signals
– he wants people to be open to the possibility that the rules may have to be more strict, including banning make up and such, to desexualize the workplace sufficiently to enable men and women to work together without excessive harassment
– he believes that it is hypocritical for a woman to complain about getting sexual attention, when she is herself sending sexual signals
Ultimately, isn’t this just a basic complaint about (lacking) workplace norms, where depending on which norms you argue for/against, it can be a conservative, feminist or MRA argument?
Not necessarily. Consider statements like “black lives matter” or “all lives matter” or even “it’s okay to be white.” Ultimately all of them are statements that — in isolation — are obviously true and uncontroversial to any reasonable person. And yet the statements are all very controversial; I suppose it’s a matter of tribal identification.
@fortaleza84
I would argue that those statements are actually treated as labels that identify worldviews/beliefs, not taken literally.
Fundamentally, isn’t that why Peterson is so controversial? In the wake of the Weinstein fiasco, if a man publicly states that the rules of sexual harassment are very vague and that’s a problem, it’s basically like saying “men’s rights matter.”
Of course it’s true that in particular cases, wearing high heels and makeup are not intended as sexual behavior, for example if a widow dresses up for her deceased husband’s funeral, chances are she is not doing it in order to meet a new husband at the event.
Unless it’s the case as in the lyrics of this song 🙂
Well, fortaleza84@ said “chances”. Sometimes the long side of the odds pays off, after all.
Between Peterson and Myers, I can’t decide who I’m more tired of. Peterson is almost entirely wrong about everything whereas Myers is actually right sometimes, but that just makes it all the more frustrating that he chooses to express his views in such a grating way.
Not only are they both assholes, they’re both functionally the same kind of asshole: the intellectual shock-jock who combines the worst traits of the pretentious ivory tower elitist and the aggressive populist provocateur, the academic who thinks that the best way to explain their theories to the general public is to express them in the most outrageous, offensive, controversial way possible.
And the really worrying part is, they might be right. The fact that so many people have heard of these two is proof that there might be some merit to their approach, loathsome as it may be.
I’d be glad not to have heard of Peterson and I’m doing my best to avoid reading anything about him. I’d be even more glad to have left Myers in cow-college obscurity, but he sorta forced himself on my notice.
From what I’ve seen (which is far from comprehensive, admittedly), Peterson seems a very far cry from PZ Meyers’ brand of deliberate abrasiveness; certainly nothing quoted here approaches Meyers’ typical tone, or for that matter literally desecrating the holy objects of multiple major religions just to be an edgelord. I do know that among Peterson’s fans a particular infamous interview of him responding calmly to a hostile interviewer is at meme status.
…which makes this is kind of weird to read.
I’m pretty sure I had never heard of either of them until this week and now they seem to be everywhere. Assuming its not recall bias, why has it happened?
Peterson’s Cathy Newman interview was, I think, at the end of January. That was an explosion, and the shockwaves are reaching you now.
I can’t speak about why you’ve only heard of Myers this week, because I’d never heard of Myers until a few days ago as well, and the video I linked to is the only thing I’ve seen from him. (Not counting DDGing him to verify that he is actually a biology professor who therefore probably knows what he’s talking about.)
Up until after I created the OP I pretty much ignored everything about Myers except his specific criticisms of Peterson’s arguments. Now, looking back at the other stuff he said in that video, I agree he is deliberately abrasive, even anti-intellectual to some extent.
You’re correct about Peterson. It’s weird to me that Myers only came on your radar now, though. I mean, not to say you should have heard of him earlier, but I don’t know of anything recent that’s bringing Myers a lot of attention—unless the anti-lobster video has been viewed a lot more times than last I checked….
From my end, I actually remember Myers from the time of the Eucharist scandal, and I’ve read some stuff from his blog. He’s also come up a few times on SSC, if you google “slatestarcodex pz myers”, with the obvious example being Myers’ Race Car Versus the General Fitness Factor. So maybe you just haven’t been paying attention. 😛
Oh, that is a definite possibility!
Here’s how I came across Myers, IIRC, which I might not:
I sometimes putter around by reading a few random Twitter feeds. Sometimes I check out Peterson’s. He had a post with comments on it and one guy was very anti-Peterson but didn’t seem to be a dumb person or making bad-faith arguments, though he was abrasive. I clicked on that guy’s feed and saw the Myers video.
Naval Gazing continues its exploration of battleship propulsion with turbines and oil fuel.
You’ll be relieved to know Wikipedia has an article on toilet paper orientation. Some of it is humorous if you look closely.
I had seen this one and it’s great. Thank you for the reminder. 🙂
lol :p
We’re probably seeing the unexploded landmines from a lame edit war.
Man, whenever you comment I can’t help but think of the Jeep Renegade’s taillights.
That link’s amazing BTW.
I found a lot of good stuff at that link, particularly this:
My favorite Wikipedia article segment was the dry humor on the page for “continent”, unfortunately now cut down a bit:
I love being in continent.