OT106: Alexios I Commentos

This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:

1. I had originally asked teams in the Adversarial Collaboration Contest to be done by today. I would like each of the fifteen teams who originally signed up to check in (as a reply to the first comment on this thread) and tell me whether you’re done, whether you need more time, or whether you’ve given up. If done, please send your finished product to scott[at]shireroth[dot]org.

2. I’m going to write some posts soon that reference Conflict vs. Mistake, but I’m not entirely happy with it as some people said they thought it was wrong in important ways. I tried talking to those people and didn’t get a good feel for what they disliked, especially whether they rejected the idea that there was a dichotomy at all or just thought my post misrepresented one side of it. I would be interested in having someone who does think there is a dichotomy but thinks I misrepresented it rewrite the post, changing it as little as possible except to correct what they thought the misrepresentation was. If anyone does a good enough job of this I’ll post it on here as a new post and link the original to it.

3. Comments of the week are by bbeck, a drug patent lawyer who explains how a melatonin patent could incentivize supplement companies to sell the wrong dose, and how drug dosing patents work more generally.

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1,105 Responses to OT106: Alexios I Commentos

  1. spencer says:

    Conflict vs mistake: I guess it’s too late to change it, but my biggest qualm with the theory is with the words themselves. I find the core dichotomy useful, but when I’ve tried to explain it to others the terms tend to get in the way.

    For one, both ‘conflict’ and ‘mistake’ have negative connotations. No one wants to be characterized as having an innately conflict-oriented worldview, nor as being mistaken/seeing mistakes in others. I find the terms hard to relate to.

    Second, there’s an asymmetry in how they apply. ‘Conflict’ refers to one’s own point of view, whereas it is one’s opponent who is making the mistake.

  2. johan_larson says:

    Has the study of foreign languages in high school gotten less popular than it was a generation ago? I’ve been looking through the website of the school I went to, and the language offerings look a bit thin. My school now offers four years of French, three of German, and one of Spanish. I’m sure Latin was offered back in my day, and I think more Spanish was available, too. And there are no language offerings at all from outside Europe.

    Dean Dad has a report of declining interest in language study in institutions he is familiar with, namely community colleges.

    At the three community colleges at which I’ve worked, I’ve seen the same trend in language departments. Spanish dominates the field, and American Sign Language is picking up strength. Every other language is niche, declining, or dead.

    It wasn’t always so. There was a time in my memory when French was vital. At many colleges, undergraduate German was, too. Now, we can’t run enough sections to justify a hire. (If you follow Rebecca Schuman’s darkly comic series about job postings in German, it’ll become clear quickly that this isn’t just a quirk of a few places.). At various points, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, and even Latin have had flashes of interest, but none has lasted. The jury is still out on Chinese; we haven’t been able to get steady instructors to really find out one way or the other.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Language offering declines in HS probably has more to do with funding than anything else. Although, if there is a lack of an offered AP test, I think it would tend to eliminate the offering.

      Both my children took foreign languages in HS and then AP tests for college credit. French for one, Spanish the other.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I don’t know anyone who has become able to speak or read a language other than Latin via school courses in the subject. Perhaps the uselessness of the courses has actually caught up to them. (Took several years of Spanish in HS; I think all I got from it is the phrase “escuchen y repitan”)

      • dodrian says:

        My 3 years of HS Spanish were enough that I could communicate basically when I moved to a Spanish-speaking country. After 3 months in the country (and some private tuition) I would have rated my Spanish as ‘good’, and after 9 months I considered myself fluent.

        My school was private though, and I was put on an advanced track, those things probably made the difference, a few of my peers had similar experiences to me with the German and French offered by the school, but my wife can’t speak a word of German despite her 3 years in public high school.

        • HeelBearCub says:

          If you take enough HS foreign language to pass the top level AP exam, you will be able to at least read and write in the language. Idiomatic and casual writing may be less understandable. Spoken language will probably be more difficult, as it is always more casual than written.

          Whether you retain any of this is, well that’s different. But I haven’t retained my Calculus, and I was a Math major, and for roughly the same reason that my French is in such shambles…

          • dodrian says:

            Retention is certainly an issue – though I managed to keep enough that it was still useful in the four years between my last Spanish class and my needing to use it. At some point living abroad it felt like I ‘internalized’ Spanish, and while I’ve forgotten vocabulary and some of the more esoteric grammatical constructs, I ‘feel’ like I’m still fluent, even six years out of practice.

            It was certainly a worthwhile course for me, though the most obvious benefit was only realized because I had the opportunity to live abroad and really practice it. That said, I hated studying it during High School, as I was better at pretty much every other subject but even then I recognized my English was getting better for understanding a bit of a foreign language, and that was at least a small benefit, if only for the joy of learning about how the process of language worked.

      • sfoil says:

        I think this is the most likely explanation for the decline in high school studies; my experience is the same, right down to the comparative effectiveness of Latin instruction. That might be skewed by the lack of real-world conversations occurring in Latin, on the other hand after three or four years above-average students had the ability to read real, non-instructive texts. Meanwhile, practically no one achieved anything worthwhile in the other classes and the language AP tests were mostly just taken by native speakers.

        I don’t know about a possible decline in post-secondary instruction, also mentioned in johan’s post. Maybe standards have fallen in other fields (e.g. philosophy students no longer required to read original texts in German, so less demand for German language instruction), maybe English has become steadily more dominant, maybe translations have gotten better and more widespread, maybe high levels of immigration have made teaching language of lower value by increasing the supply of bilingual individuals for any given language.

      • Wrong Species says:

        Language learning classes are probably the single most pointless mandatory classes. If a kid isn’t motivated to learn the material, they simply aren’t going to, even if they get an A in the class.

        • Matt M says:

          Indeed. I took two years of German in HS, got an A in both classes, and retained virtually nothing. Although that’s partially due to the fact that the teacher was both mostly blind and mostly deaf, making it trivially easy to cheat on everything.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          If a kid isn’t motivated to learn the material, they simply aren’t going to, even if they get an A in the class.

          This seems like a charge we could level at any mandatory course. Is algebra pointless? US history? Chemistry? I see some value in all of them beyond winning trivia events and having something fun to talk about at parties.

          • Wrong Species says:

            I think it’s worse with language learning. If you aren’t interested in chemistry, you still have to engage with it mentally to some extent, which makes it more likely to stick in your head longer, especially if you want an A. Language learning classes are just rote memorization, which you will promptly forget when the class is over.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            It might, however, be necessary to engage with people who speak a foreign language. Or you might have reason to think you might have to. I suspect that motivated a great deal of the participation in Spanish class in my high school, for example.

            It might not be necessary in general, but then in general in the US, Spanish is probably a good language to learn. Also in general, it might be useful to learn any language, simply to get accustomed to the act of learning one, in case you have to.

            To be fair, I can see this being less the case in places that do speak English or Mandarin. You stand a good chance of being able to get by with one of those two for your entire life.

          • johan_larson says:

            I suspect the fact that most of us are English speakers influences our views of this. We already speak the de facto world language, the one that people everywhere are trying to learn. And they try hard. In Finland, they started teaching us English in grade 3, and I think it continued all through school.

            In Canada, by contrast, they didn’t bother starting foreign language instruction (in French) until grade 6, and it is only mandatory for four years. And I have to tell you, the French-language instruction isn’t even a little bit ambitious. There is typically no foreign language requirement to get into university, or to graduate from it.

          • Wrong Species says:

            @Paul

            If these classes had a lasting impact on someone’s ability to learn a language, I would agree with you. Every American would probably be better off to some extent if they knew Spanish. My point is that spending three hours a week on it with nothing to show after two years is a waste of resources and that’s what’s happening.

          • albatross11 says:

            My kids had Spanish every single year of grade school/middle school. They didn’t retain enough to be able to have a minimal conversation beyond “Buenos dias” or “¿Como estás?” This is despite the fact that I’m fluent in Spanish, try practicing Spanish with them, occasionally take them to Mass in Spanish, routinely listen to the radio or watch TV in Spanish, etc.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            If these classes had a lasting impact on someone’s ability to learn a language, I would agree with you. Every American would probably be better off to some extent if they knew Spanish. My point is that spending three hours a week on it with nothing to show after two years is a waste of resources and that’s what’s happening.

            If this was all there was to it, I’d agree with you. However, I don’t see this as the only point you’re making. (Maybe it is and I’m misreading you.)

            My response to the above is: well, what’s the distinction between foreign language and any other class where students spend 2.5-5 hours a week and forget it all within a few years? I doubt I have to convince you that this also happens with pre-calc, world history, American literature, and chemistry. If so, does that mean we should do away with the entire curriculum outside of straight-up trade skills (mechanics, typing, college prep, et al.)? Or do we teach them anyway, and hope that some of it takes, even though a lot of it won’t? Or something in between?

      • Thomas Jørgensen says:

        Well, this posting is proof I learned English.
        Und etwas Deutch.
        The French, however, did not stick at all.

        • ana53294 says:

          Do you believe you learnt English as a result of public schooling, though?

          • Thomas Jørgensen says:

            I know I did. Not all of my english, the full reach of my vocabulary is the result of extensive reading, but certainly I would not have been able to do that absent formal instruction. Comparing with the german – Which was not assisted by media saturation – then the main difference in attained proficiency is years of instruction and how much I have used it since.

            German is very handy for certain technical subjects, and of course, German language literature, but.. Well, largest recent exposure was binging “Dark” on netflix.

    • BBA says:

      A few years ago I read SUNY Albany was discontinuing its French program. Because it’s not as if there’s a major French-speaking city like Montreal just a few hours’ drive from Albany, amirite?

      • John Schilling says:

        I grew up near Albany. Approximately zero percent of social and/or economic interaction was with the population of Montreal, and of that ~0% approximately all of it was with Québécois who spoke fluent English. The purpose of learning French in high school or college was a mix of signalling, intellectual curiosity, and rationalizing a vacation to either Montreal or Paris as “educational”, and not securing a comparative advantage through superior access to opportunities in Montreal.

      • dndnrsn says:

        If someone really wanted to learn French, why would they do it in Albany instead of going to UQAM?

    • theredsheep says:

      People in community colleges may have somewhat different priorities from the general population; if you’re there to get a vocational certificate of some sort, you can probably use Spanish at your later job (whether it’s in welding or massage therapy or cookery), and maybe ASL, but you’re unlikely to take those skills overseas to places where they speak Arabic or Russian.

      • Matt M says:

        I’d also say that if you live in a place or work in a job where you need Spanish, you probably had opportunity and/or need to learn it in a time and place other than high school.

  3. Doctor Mist says:

    I’ve just stumbled across the notion that there was a period of a few million years when life was possible in the very early universe (popularization here).

    Between 10 and 17 million years after the Big Bang, the universe had cooled enough that in principle there could have been planets and water, even though there were not yet stars — the entire universe was in the Goldilocks zone by virtue of the cosmic background radiation, then radiating at something like room temperature rather than 3 degrees Kelvin.

    It was not a propitious time for life to evolve, as matter was almost entirely hydrogen and helium — most of the heavier elements were produced by supernovas much later — but the Big Bang likely produced minute amounts of heavier elements like oxygen and carbon. And seven million years is surely not enough time for anything very advanced to evolve, so we’re not talking about Elder Races here, and *really* not talking about anything we could prove one way or another.

    Still, I find something poetic and poignant about the idea.

  4. johan_larson says:

    I am not often grateful for having gone to high school in the 80s, but at least I wasn’t sentenced to 40 hours of community service like the kids these days.

    • ana53294 says:

      I wish it were just 40 hours. It’s 40 h + homework. Classes have become so rowdy and ineffective, that even 40 h a week is not enough to teach kids basic stuff to a reasonable standard.

      Spanish parents have gone on a homework strike. In France, after their homework strike, Hollande banned homework.

      Edit: which is to say, I agree with you. My main reason to think about homeschooling my future kids, is that I think making kids spend that much time in a closed jail with people they don’t choose to be friends with is cruel. I think that most topics should be teachable with a 10 am to 1 pm schedule, at least to age 14.

      • johan_larson says:

        Perhaps I wasn’t making myself clear. The “40 hours” I was writing about is a requirement of 40 hours of volunteering in various community organizations. Except it’s mandatory, so it’s not really volunteering. We didn’t have any of that in my day.

        • Aapje says:

          The Christian-Democrats tried to make it mandatory in my country, but they had to compromise to make it voluntary, where doing it supposedly counts extra for hiring decisions for government jobs.

          • johan_larson says:

            I’d be OK with giving students academic credit for it. Having a course that deals with the role of volunteer and community organizations in our society seems reasonable. And if the course were to have a hands-on component that consisted of working with/for such organizations, that would be fine, too. I just object to making it mandatory.

        • ana53294 says:

          Ah, sorry I misunderstood. It just didn’t occur to me that anybody would think that it’s a good idea to force kids to do actual community service, on top of everything else they are supposed to do. Aren’t a lot of them too young to be allowed to do unsupervised community service?

          Some universities have that – Deusto University in Spain is a Jesuit University that forces student to do the 40 hours of community service. But it’s a private University; public Universities or schools shouldn’t force people into sharing their values.

          Also – it is my understanding that a lot of American Universities value volunteering for admittance purposes. If every person who has graduated has done 40 h of volunteer service, that would mean that those who want extra points would have to do 80. This just raises the bar for everybody.

          • johan_larson says:

            I’d be tempted to pervert the requirement. What’s the most obnoxious organization I could volunteer with, and still get credit for having done so?

          • albatross11 says:

            Public schools where I live have a mandatory volunteering requirement for a certain number of hours. I haven’t seen a lot of people opposing it, though for the record, it seems like a kinda dumb idea to me.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            It’s a tax on those with little free time, so people who have time to hang around school board meetings love it.

        • Matt M says:

          This existed in my high school back in 2003. Fortunately my parents agreed with me that it was BS, and happily signed the note stating that I had completed the requirement, even though I didn’t.

          If the experience at my high school was any indication, up to 50% of students are probably finding out a way to fake this without actually doing much of anything.

      • WashedOut says:

        I think making kids spend that much time in a closed jail with people they don’t choose to be friends with is cruel.

        Bit over the top don’t you think?

        Kids in school get to be around heaps of different people, some of whom they choose to be friends with and most of whom they either choose not to, or simply ignore. I would argue that this combination of positive and negative socialization is a net benefit, inasmuch as it is the antidote to a sheltered upbringing.

        I agree with your other views w.r.t. homeschooling though.

        • ana53294 says:

          I agree that kids have to learn to interact and manouevre with unpleasant kids. But one of the things you learn as an adult, is that you only have to do this up to a point.

          So, if your boss is sarcastic and unpleasant but fair and the pay is good, and your colleagues are nice people, you deal with it. Looking for another job is probably not worth it, because who can guarantee that your future colleagues and boss won’t be worse? But if your boss regularly throws stuff at you, and your colleagues force you to pay for their meals and regularly ruin your personal belongings (a typical experience for a child that is bullied), you quit.

          Most kids don’t have that many options w.r.t. the school where they go to as an adult has about their workplace. That is fair enough, because they don’t have the ability to do the work necessary to change jobs. But knowing that, and still forcing them to spend so much idle time together, when they form cliques and hierarchies similar to the ones in jails, is only necessary insofar parents need free childcare.

          Schooling is compulsory in Spain. If there was an option where they would teach us 10-1, and had free childcare/other activities 9-10 and 1-5, my mother would have been able to send me to school just for school. In such a limited time, there would be less chances for kids to be bullied or ostracized, because they would be studying most of the time, with small breaks between classes. So I wasn’t complaining about the fact that kids are forced to interact with other unpleasant kids, but about the length and intensity of that interaction, and the lack of choice. Adults don’t have to deal with this shit! Which is why I don’t understand people who are nostalgic for their childhoods. My childhood wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t the most pleasant time of my life. That was college.

          Edit: homeschooling is alegal in Spain, as our Constitution allows choice of education, but there are national laws that make schooling compulsory. So it usually just ends to the discretion of the prosecutor.

        • John Schilling says:

          Kids in school get to be around heaps of different people, some of whom they choose to be friends with

          I was around a lot of people in school, some of whom I chose to be friends with. But those people mostly didn’t choose to be friends with me. So what good was that?

          and most of whom they either choose not to, or simply ignore.

          You know what really helps when you’re trying to ignore people? Not having to be in the same building or the same room as them six hours a day.

          If you’re serious about this, I wonder if I can persuade you to at least be consistently serious. We can save a lot of money by firing, say, every single schoolteacher everywhere. Keep the security guards, the school nurses, and the librarians. The students will be around stacks of books, some of which they can chose to read, most of which they will simply ignore. They’ll learn what they need to know, right?

          Otherwise, don’t you dare imagine you are providing a “net benefit” with your “combination of positive and negative socialization”, and do understand how much I hate and despise all the people like you who helped guarantee so very much negative socialization for my childhood while not lifting a finger to arrange any of the positive sort.

          • albatross11 says:

            I’m pretty sure I would have learned more (and I would probably have enjoyed it a lot more) if my whole grade/middle school experience had been free access to a library plus adult tutors for when I wanted to learn algebra or physics or something, but couldn’t find anyone who would teach it to me.

            My experience in grade/middle school (not unlike John’s) led me toward developing a pretty toxic worldview. I basically equated value as a human with intelligence, and mentally mapped most of my classmates as either dumb harmless animals or dumb dangerous animals. It took me many years to recover from that and realize it was a fucked-up way to look at the world.

            OTOH, I did much better in high school. I’d like to say this was because I developed much better social skills, but actually, I joined the football team, started lifting weights regularly, and got big and strong enough that picking on me stopped being an appealing prospect. I also met some other kids who were smart and had similar interests to mine, so I wasn’t feeling like the one sentient human on a planetfull of zombies or something.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            … a fucked-up way to look at the world …

            It’s a very useful, practical, and survival oriented way to frame the world, especially for tween-age auto-didact.

            I leave my own copy of that frame constantly running still. I’ve not replaced it, I just developed other frames to run in parallel with it.

          • albatross11 says:

            Labeling your fellow humans as subhuman for not being as smart as you seems to me to be almost guaranteed to lead you to do morally horrible things. It scares me, sometimes, to look at the moral trajectory I was on. Though when I was away from my fellow inmates at the local public school, I wasn’t especially concerned with them–it’s not like I wanted them sent to camps or something, I just really wanted to never see them again.

            And IMO our society has a hell of a lot of thinking that’s at least first-cousins with this. Basically the whole sneering at the red-state nobodies in flyover country, their bitter clinging to guns and racism, their deplorable political views–is a symptom. There’s an overtone there of “whatever happens to these dumb shitty people is fine, as long as the ones we care about[1] are okay.”
            And we’ve spent many years now with the smart people at the top of our society finding ways to screw the dumb ones at the bottom over, by intent or omission.

            [1] Many, though not all, of the Vox crowd’s mascots are also not very smart or educated or intellectual. That usually doesn’t matter, but when it does, that same crowd has generally been fine with harsh policing and supermax prisons and all the other goodies to deal with scary nearby underclass (as opposed to faraway underclass we sneer at).

          • Mark Atwood says:

            In my defense, they defected first.

            And now it’s not the only frame I run.

            And I’ve refined the working definitions of “smart”, “dumb”, and “dangerous”, such that smug cosmopolitan Blues fail, and more and more “flyover” Reds pass.

    • ana53294 says:

      Countries that had the military draft in the past did institute mandatory community service for those that refused to serve in the military because they were conscientious objectors. I know Spain and Germany went through that. At first, in Spain, the people who were conscientious objectors went to jail; this meant that very few people felt strongly enough about it to go to jail. Then there was a movement where so many people refused to be drafted that they realized that they couldn’t just send everybody to jail, but they had to come up with a way that people couldn’t just declare themselves conscientious objectors to avoid the military draft.

      So they put the compulsory community service. People served in the Red Cross and a lot of other charities. The service was a bit longer than the army, but you could live at home and receive a meager stipend, similar to that of soldiers. Spain got rid of the draft a long time ago, and Germany did so recently.

      This seems much worse than the 40 h for graduation, and I heard that some people in Germany supported the community service draft and didn’t want it abolished.

  5. IrishDude says:

    Since Putin mentioned Browder at the press conference I looked him up. He pushed for sanctions against Russian individuals involved in the murder of tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who investigated a $230 million dollar fraud committed by Russian tax officials. The Magnitsky Act was passed and sanctioned 18 Russian officials, banning them from entry into the U.S. and preventing them from using U.S. banks.

    I’m curious if anyone has insight into how those 18 Russians were identified. Did a Senate committee hold a sort of trial in absentia with witnesses and evidence presented? Did CIA do an investigation and give lawmakers a list of names? Something else?

    • MrApophenia says:

      They weren’t sanctioned for personal criminal involvement with Magnitsky’s death, they were sanctioned for being part of the cabal of oligarchs that actually runs Russia. The basic idea of the Magnitsky Act is that human rights sanctions against the Russian state do nothing, because the rich dudes who actually set policy don’t care about those sanctions. Hitting their own finances directly gets their attention.

      This seems to have been the case, because a huge amount of Russia’s foreign policy ever since then has been focused on trying to get us to life the Magnitsky Act sanctions. They have also leveled some reverse sanctions against America, including a ban on Americans adopting Russian children.

      And just to show all this stuff is tied together, that’s also was what the meeting at Trump Tower during the election was about. Remember the stuff about how they just wanted to talk about adoption policy? “Adoption policy” means “if you lift the Magnitsky Act sanctions, we’ll lift that adoption ban.”

      • IrishDude says:

        They weren’t sanctioned for personal criminal involvement with Magnitsky’s death, they were sanctioned for being part of the cabal of oligarchs that actually runs Russia.

        I thought it would be weird to for the U.S. to use Magnitsky’s death to sanction Russian officials completely unrelated to that incident, and so I researched a bit more and found this article:

        “Sixteen people were put on the U.S. list “because of their association with the persecution and ultimate death of Sergei Magnitsky,” a senior State department official said on Friday. The other two people on the list are linked to two other deaths.”

        The article also seems to indicate where some of the names came from, citing “Magnitsky’s supporters” as a source and Senator Benjamin Cardin as another source. I’d be interested to know a bit more about how the final list was created though, as wikipedia indicates the Act is a new tool for holding foreigners accountable for human rights abuses, but also raises questions for me about how to hold accountable those identifying the people to be sanctioned if they should make a mistake in who’s included on the list.

        Some of the intrigue around this act is also fascinating, as you allude to with the Trump Tower meeting, and the different obfuscations used to conduct international diplomacy. Adoption policy cover stories, a Russian pop-star using his publicist to reach out to Trump Jr. to set up the meeting, etc.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          I’m also extremely curious how Mueller’s team identified the 12 specific GRU officials to indict for the DNC/Podesta email breeches last week. These sorts of things are notoriously hard to attribute to specific actors, and they did this without examining the DNC servers or Podesta’s laptop or anything.

          My suspicion is that they don’t have a case, and are bluffing, because they’re never going to be able to extradite these people from Russia to stand trial. It’s a political stunt. Mueller will be able to say “see, my investigation wasn’t worthless! I found the culprits! Oh, if only we could get them in court so I could put those sorry sons of bitches behind bars, but alas!” without ever having to actually prove a case. I would find it hilarious to highest degree if Putin called their bluff and sent one or two of the GRU officials to the US to surrender themselves to US authorities to stand trial. Let’s have discovery and see what you’ve got. What’s the maximum sentence any of them would get even if convicted? A few years in Club Fed? Do that standing on your head, and Putin kicks your family a few million as compensation.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            and they did this without examining the DNC servers or Podesta’s laptop or anything.

            My understanding is that this is untrue.

            First off, CrowdStrike, the company the DNC brought in to initially investigate and remediate the hack, actually shared images of the DNC servers with the FBI.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Okay, that’s better than I thought. I wonder what that means for chain for evidence, though.

            And I’ve read the entire 29 page indictment, and I would still like to know how they tied the online activity to these specific, named GRU officers.

          • Iain says:

            I’m sure the Russians would also very much like to know how Mueller knows. Indeed, just revealing the information in the indictment is already a significant cost: the Russians might not know precisely how US intelligence agencies gained visibility into their activities, but they at least know that it happened, and what sorts of information the US could glean. It looks pretty clear that some of this information is from forensic analysis of the DNC servers, some of it is from Google giving access to search histories, and some of it involved hacking into the communications of the GRU agents involved. In the future, Russian agents are going to be a lot more careful with their search engine usage, and that’s going to make things harder.

            In any case, if you look at the level of detail, there’s no way this is made up. If Mueller says “these twelve agents were involved”, and Putin can say “no, we have clear records showing that those agents were all working on other things at the time, and we’re calling your bluff” then Mueller’s case collapses entirely, and his investigation is almost certainly over. Barring banana-pants conspiracy theories, Mueller has the goods.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            It doesn’t take banana pants conspiracies. When indicting the companies for meddling in the election by buying FaceBook ads and such, he indicted a company that didn’t exist. When another company showed up to call Mueller’s bluff, his team started scrambling for delays and to exempt them from discovery.

            He already bluffed once and got called on it. I wouldn’t put it past him to do it again.

          • dick says:

            I would still like to know how they tied the online activity to these specific, named GRU officers.

            I wondered the same thing; it seems like we traced the hacking back to specific groups within the GRU and then just named people known to be leading or involved with those groups. Do you believe the gov’t is lying about having solid evidence tying the hacks to Russian intelligence, or just that we got the wrong names and should’ve indicted different GRU agents? The former seems wildly implausible and unsupported; the latter seems plausible, but I don’t know of any evidence for it and I don’t know that it would matter much if true.

          • Iain says:

            @Conrad Honcho:
            From your Reason link:

            As to the claim that Concord didn’t exist during the last U.S. presidential election: There are myriad old references to Concord Catering in Russian media, and press releases about Concord events and openings in Russia say that it was founded in 1996. It also still seems to be operational today. It’s unclear if or when Concord Catering began doing any business in the United States.

            Given that the indictment correctly identifies Concord as a Russian agency (Page 6: “Defendants CONCORD MANAGEMENT AND CONSULTING LLC and CONCORD CATERING are related Russian entities with various Russian government contracts”) I don’t see what the mistake is supposed to be. This just looks like blustering from the defense attorney.

            The Reason article seems carefully worded to be technically accurate while giving the inaccurate impression that the lawyer’s claims are true and Mueller somehow screwed up.

          • dick says:

            It doesn’t take banana pants conspiracies. When indicting the companies for meddling in the election by buying FaceBook ads and such, he indicted a company that didn’t exist. When another company showed up to call Mueller’s bluff, his team started scrambling for delays and to exempt them from discovery.

            This is a wildly inaccurate description of the contents of the article you linked to. Like, very close to “you can safely ignore future posts from this guy” inaccurate. The indictment was against the “Internet Research Agency” troll farm and its owner, and is very much not a bluff. And per your link, “As to the claim that Concord didn’t exist during the last U.S. presidential election: There are myriad old references to Concord Catering in Russian media, and press releases about Concord events and openings in Russia say that it was founded in 1996. It also still seems to be operational today.”

            Please say you just skimmed this too fast or misremembered it, and are not intentionally making shit up and hoping no one bothers to click?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I don’t think the government has really shown anything, yet. An indictment is not a conviction. After all, you can indict a ham sandwich.

            If the evidence as stated in the indictment is true, it still doesn’t connect to GRU. They have presented evidence that Russians were doing this, but that’s not the same thing as it being GRU as opposed to Russian business interests or hackers doing it for the lulz. There are lots of people who do not like America, American foreign policy, and who do not like the Clintons.*

            There isn’t anything in the indictment that says “and we know this was GRU and not just the Russian equivalent of the kid who hacked Sarah Palin’s email account because reasons.” And certainly nothing that identifies the actual agents.

            And of course, all of this requires taking assertions from the intelligence community in general and Mueller specifically at face value, which seems like a terrible idea given their histories. The IC lied (not “were wrong” or “misspoke.” Lied.) about WMDs in Iraq. They lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that started the Vietnam war. These people have a long history of intentionally lying about wrongdoing by nations they really want wars with. TPTB have been itching for a casus belli against Russia for a long time.

            Then you’ve got Mueller’s own incompetence, like in the anthrax case where he got fixated like a dog with a bone on “it must have been this one guy!” and ignored everything else. So he starts with the assumption, “it must have been Putin!” and any other explanation does not enter his brain.

            So, the indictment lays out the case that it was Russians, but doesn’t say anything about how it’s tied to GRU, and nothing at all about those specific individuals. And the people making the indictment have a history that puts them somewhere between “bald-faced liars” and a cross between inspectors Clouseau and Javert: as incompetent as they are dogged.

            * The other blind spot in the media and the left with regards to the hacking is that it must be done to help Trump, and with Trump’s knowing collaboration. No. The Clintons have lots of enemies. Lots of people all over the world hate them for entirely justifiable reasons. People they’ve bombed, nations they’ve wrecked, corrupt governments they’ve propped up. It’s far more likely that whoever did this was against Clinton than that they were for Trump. Even Wikileaks. Clinton wanted Assange hit with a drone strike. Maybe Assange would prefer her not be in power, and would act the same regardless of who her political opponent was?

            ETA:

            Please say you just skimmed this too fast or misremembered it, and are not intentionally making shit up and hoping no one bothers to click?

            I should have said “indicted a company that the lawyers say didn’t exist.” We’ll see how it turns out, but I do not think Mueller ever expected anyone to show up in court to stand trial.

            Similarly with the GRU agents, if they actually wanted to get these guys in court and convict them, why have the press conference to announce the indictments? Why not seal the indictments, and then try to get them into a jurisdiction where they can be arrested?

          • dick says:

            “I should have said “indicted a company that the lawyers say didn’t exist.”

            It wasn’t a minor error; your whole point in bringing it up was to argue that Mueller has a history of bluff indictments, and this was the opposite. The indictment was against a very real organization which approximately everyone agrees really did engage in a lengthy campaign of misinformation.

            Anyway, I’m not here to defend Mueller, this is not about him. Here’s a high-level overview from late 2016 that explains exactly what happened and blames the Russian intelligence services: https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR_16-20296A_GRIZZLY%20STEPPE-2016-1229.pdf That’s from well before Trump took office, and it was co-signed by the NCCIC, DHS, and FBI. As far as I know, none of that has been disputed by anyone since.

            So, what are we to make of this? Here are the theories as I understand them:

            1) Russian intelligence agencies really did hack the DNC, and the FBI found evidence of that fairly quickly, and everything since then has been hashing out the details.

            2) Someone else hacked the DNC, and some unnamed high-ranking people in Obama’s FBI and DHS and other agencies colluded to pin those attacks on the Russian intelligence services for one reason or another, and that conspiracy has been a complete success despite a lengthy investigation by a Republican special prosecutor with essentially unlimited resources and the full cooperation of those agencies, which are now led by Trump appointees who have enormous incentive to reveal any Obama-ere wrongdoing.

            My position is that the first one is probably correct. Nothing about it seems hard to believe and I’ve seen no evidence against it. Theory 2 is the banana-pants conspiracy Iain mentioned. If that is not your position, please tell me what theory 3 is.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            My theory is that someone used an unsophisticated spearphishing attack on the DNC/Podesta email accounts/servers and either was Russian, or used a tool like UMBRAGE to make it look Russian. Whether it was or not is immaterial, as pinning it on Putin is right in line with the goals and prejudices of the intelligence apparatus. Mueller is certainly not going to question that and has a history of railroading suspects, facts or truth be damned. Told to get the Russians, he will get the Russians. Unable to find the culprits, but needing to show something for all this to save face for his investigation, he indicts 12 guys from GRU who will never see the inside of a courtroom much less a prison cell.

            Was is Russians? Probably. (I’ll kick this up to 50% now knowing the FBI got the disk images from the servers.)

            Was it GRU? Maybe. (Still 20% as it all seems really sloppy and amateurish)

            Was it these 12 specific GRU officers? How can they possibly know?

            Can Mueller prove this in court? Almost certainly not.

            So why indict? It’s political theater. He’s bluffing.

          • Iain says:

            Was is Russians? Probably. (I’ll kick this up to 50% now knowing the FBI got the disk images from the servers.)

            Was it GRU? Maybe. (Still 20% as it all seems really sloppy and amateurish)

            Was it these 12 specific GRU officers? How can they possibly know?

            Can Mueller prove this in court? Almost certainly not.

            So why indict? It’s political theater. He’s bluffing.

            This isn’t as impossible as you think. We have public information that pretty clearly ties Russia to the Podesta attack. (I’ve previously posted about it: see here, for example.)

            Looking at the details contained in the indictment, it seems clear that Mueller also gained access to at least some of the internal communications of this group. (See, for example, point 25: “The Conspirators referred to this computer as a ‘middle server’.”) I don’t know how he did this, and there are very good reasons for keeping the exact mechanism secret, but this does not seem implausible. This is the sort of thing that the NSA exists for.

            In addition to that, Mueller clearly has access to the search engine history of several of the agents. Again, we’re probably never going to find out how he got it — but it’s a very realistic achievement. This is basically what the NSA is for.

            Now, I do agree that this is political theatre, but not for the same reasons. There’s no way that Russia is going to extradite its own intelligence officers, and Mueller knows it perfectly well. The purpose of the indictment is simply to say: my investigation is not over. Real crimes have been committed, and there are many loose ends yet to be pulled on. Look, for example, at section 43A:

            On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.

            Trump has been trying very hard to make the case that Mueller’s investigation is winding down, and there is nothing left to discover. Little nuggets like that are Mueller’s way of refuting that claim.

            In the meantime, while you may not have any way of personally verifying the accuracy of the indictment, there are people out there who do. The depth of Mueller’s knowledge can’t be comforting to them.

          • dick says:

            My theory is that someone used an unsophisticated spearphishing attack on the DNC/Podesta email accounts/servers and either was Russian, or used a tool like UMBRAGE to make it look Russian. Whether it was or not is immaterial, as pinning it on Putin is right in line with the goals and prejudices of the intelligence apparatus…

            Mueller-bashing aside, this is identical to the theory 2 I described, correct? Your theory asserts, on circumstantial evidence, the existence of a criminal conspiracy within the US intelligence community who is bent on “pinning it on Putin”, yes? And you think the probability of this is 80%? Do I have this right?

            I really should just let this thread go, but since we’ve come this far, why does it follow that Mueller must be bluffing and hoping to avoid court? Wouldn’t his contacts in the Illuminati be able to gin up enough fake evidence to fool a jury?

          • Matt M says:

            I don’t know how he did this, and there are very good reasons for keeping the exact mechanism secret, but this does not seem implausible. This is the sort of thing that the NSA exists for.

            So, to prove that Russian intelligence agents perpetrated a great evil upon the USA by spying on private communications, our heroic and virtuous intelligence agents have “somehow obtained” private communications of the Russians?

          • MrApophenia says:

            In terms of how they identified the specific GRU officials, it seems likely to be tied to the information provided to the US by Dutch intelligence, which we found out about back in January:

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/26/dutch-media-reveal-country-to-be-secret-u-s-ally-in-war-against-russian-hackers/?utm_term=.e8fb4b4392f9

            And the original Dutch reporting (in English):

            https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/dutch-agencies-provide-crucial-intel-about-russia-s-interference-in-us-elections~b4f8111b/

            The short version is that Dutch hackers had thoroughly infiltrated the specific operation that performed the DNC hack, and were not only monitoring their internet traffic while they did it, they had access to the security camera in the front lobby of their building and were watching specific Russian intelligence officials come and go every day, and they gave all of this to the US.

          • Dan L says:

            So, to prove that Russian intelligence agents perpetrated a great evil upon the USA by spying on private communications, our heroic and virtuous intelligence agents have “somehow obtained” private communications of the Russians?

            Less of this, please.

          • albatross11 says:

            Conrad:

            When CIA operations come out in public/the press, they often look pretty sloppy and amateurish. I suspect the same is true for other countries’ intelligence agencies, for the same reasons. Give the DMV or the local school board a black budget and lots of secrecy that allows them to bury their embarrassments and mistakes, and the most likely outcome is *not* that they become more functional and competent or less wasteful.

          • Matt M says:

            Less of this, please.

            Less of what?

            Pointing out that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Suggesting that maybe if our “proof” of Russia’s guilt is that the Dutch were spying on them and told us, that maybe we shouldn’t be that outraged at their spying on us?

            I’m literally mystified here.

          • albatross11 says:

            There are a lot of things NSA does that are questionable; spying on/hacking into the computers of foreign intelligence agents who have been running an intelligence operation on the US is not one of those things–it’s exactly what you’d want the NSA to be doing.

          • Matt M says:

            it’s exactly what you’d want the NSA to be doing.

            Okay.

            But isn’t that also exactly what Russians would want their own intelligence agencies to be doing as well?

            You don’t see the problem of denouncing Putin for spying on us, when our proof of such spying was obtained by us spying on him?

          • dick says:

            You don’t see the problem of denouncing Putin for spying on us, when our proof of such spying was obtained by us spying on him?

            This would be a real zinger, if the person you were responding to had denounced Putin for spying on us. Or if anyone at all had. As it stands, I’m with Dan L.

          • albatross11 says:

            The Russians ran an operation to spy on the Democratic party, which is day-ending-in-Y stuff. But then they leaked that information and ran an online propaganda campaign in the US to try to influence (probably mainly to throw sand into the gears of) the election. That’s worth pushing back on, because we would like foreign countries to be more reluctant to do that sort of thing in the future. That is true, even though we do both of those things to other countries from time to time.

            However, the much bigger issue in this case is that there were people involved in the Trump campaign who were apparently interacting with Russian agents, and may have somehow been made part of that Russian intelligence operation against us. Russia spying on us is 100% normal (though obviously if we catch someone spying on us for Russia, we’re going to deport them or send them to jail–same as everyone else). American politicians getting caught up in the works unintentionally, that’s interesting because we’d like to help them avoid that in the future, since we’d like foreign countries to have less influence over our politics. American politicians / political operatives knowingly taking part in foreign governments’ intelligence operations against the US is a serious matter. We want to push back on *that* sort of thing really hard, perhaps with some jail time, because we *really* don’t want high ranking political figures (elected or appointed) who are beholden to / working for foreign governments.

          • MrApophenia says:

            Right. The problem isn’t that they spied, it’s that they tried to change the result of an election.

            And honestly, even if that was all it was, we probably wouldn’t have much ground to get too indignant – America really does do shit like that all the time too, fair enough. They are our opponent, that’s the game. Nations gonna nation.

            (I mean, it is still an attack, putting the perpetrators firmly in the ‘enemy’ category. But once everyone agrees that we are each other’s enemies, we are going to do spy shit to each other, sure.)

            The real question is why the current President seems so keen to play for the other side in the game, and whether he actually assisted them in their espionage.

            Russia engaging in espionage against us is business as usual. An American citizen – let alone President – helping them do it, is something else entirely.

            It’s also kind of weird how many conservatives are suddenly so defensive of our enemy’s moral right to attack us. Or the way they keep insisting there’s no reason to think Russia attacked us until so much evidence piles up that this becomes incontrovertible, then flip to “Well maybe they did attack us, but so what! That’s fine!”

            I mean, it’s just odd.

          • Matt M says:

            That’s worth pushing back on, because we would like foreign countries to be more reluctant to do that sort of thing in the future. That is true, even though we do both of those things to other countries from time to time.

            This is your personal opinion and I don’t think I agree.

            We want to push back on *that* sort of thing really hard, perhaps with some jail time, because we *really* don’t want high ranking political figures (elected or appointed) who are beholden to / working for foreign governments.

            I’m slightly more inclined to agree with this – but even still I don’t think it’s as cut and dry as you make it sound. The older and more ideological I get, the less stomach I have for supporting the American government for the sole virtue of the fact that it’s “American.” I’ll support whoever is doing the best job of safeguarding my interests.

            I’m not a Putin fanboy by any means, but it is non-obvious to me that having the USA secretly run by his agent Trump would be worse for me than having the USA run by the American deep state cabal and their agent Hillary.

            Foreign governments running the USA sounds really bad, because it seems likely that such people will have very different values opposed to my own and will not act in my best interest. But hey – wouldn’t you know it, all of that is also true about the entrenched American government. I know that they have values opposed to my own. I know that they do not act in my best interest. So what am I supposed to be afraid of again?

          • Matt M says:

            The real question is why the current President seems so keen to play for the other side in the game

            The answer seems obvious to me.

            Any concession from Trump that Russia had anything to do with helping him win can and will be used against him in the court of public opinion, and possibly in a court of impeachment. He has nothing to gain by agreeing with his enemies on this one.

            And from a political point of view (which I believe is all he really cares about), his enemies are the Democrats, not Putin. It’s the Democrats who might try to impeach him. It’s the Democrats who will attack him bitterly in 2020.

            How could it possibly benefit him to agree with their years long line of attack that his election was illegitimate and that he maybe even did something illegal along the way.

          • MrApophenia says:

            Well, obviously, he can’t admit he did something illegal – that’s true whether he’s guilty or innocent.

            But a President who can’t admit it’s bad when our enemies attack us is failing at basically the main job of being President. I mean, there’s a reason even he caved within 24 hours and gave that half-ass would/wouldn’t walkback – even for Trump, it was unsustainable to be so visibly siding with Putin.

            (I also feel like openly allying themselves with an enemy of the country against Democrats may prove to be a poor political strategy for the right wing in general, but I guess we’ll need to wait to see how that plays to be sure.)

          • Matt M says:

            But a President who can’t admit it’s bad when our enemies attack us is failing at basically the main job of being President.

            I think the issue here is that Trump doesn’t see Putin as an enemy (which seems reasonable enough, Obama mocked this concept in 2012), and doesn’t see someone hacking and releasing Hillary’s e-mails as attacking “us.”

            Nor do I, for that matter. Putin has done me no harm. He is not my enemy.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @Matt M:
            Man, you are really down the rabbit hole.

          • he indicted a company that didn’t exist.

            He indicted a company that the attorney for one of the other defendants says didn’t exist. The page you link to mentions evidence that it did:

            As to the claim that Concord didn’t exist during the last U.S. presidential election: There are myriad old references to Concord Catering in Russian media, and press releases about Concord events and openings in Russia say that it was founded in 1996. It also still seems to be operational today. It’s unclear if or when Concord Catering began doing any business in the United States. Searches of Nexis business info, the SEC database, and the National Business Register turn up no results for any company called Concord Catering except a small and unrelated business in Arizona.

          • dick says:

            I think the issue here is that Trump doesn’t see Putin as an enemy (which seems reasonable enough, Obama mocked this concept in 2012), and doesn’t see someone hacking and releasing Hillary’s e-mails as attacking “us.” Nor do I, for that matter. Putin has done me no harm. He is not my enemy.

            This is a novel and interesting position! Why not just come out and say it in plain language, instead of wading into a discussion on a somewhat-related topic and tossing off a sarcastic potshot that kind of hints at your novel and interesting position but does not actually say it, forcing people to draw it out of you via questioning?

          • albatross11 says:

            Matt M: I disagree with a lot of your position, but I think it’s worth highlighting two points of agreement:

            a. Trump’s denial/dismissiveness about allegations surrounding Russian interference in our elections makes perfect sense, given that if those allegations are true, they weaken him in his domestic political battles, and also damage his reputation[1]–it’s like having an asterisk put next to his accomplishment of getting elected president. This doesn’t require any “Russian agent” explanation.

            b. I’m also very uneasy about the way that so much US media, popular culture, and the intelligence/foreign policy establishment seems to be pushing us toward seeing Russia as an enemy we must all reflexively hate and fear. This kind of PR campaign in the US often ends up with us going to war with someone, and somehow stumbling into war with Russia (perhaps because Trump feels he can’t back down from some conflict without validating all the accusations about being beholden to Putin) is something that could absolutely happen, and could plausibly end with a lot of nukes flying.

            [1] Which I think is a big thing for all presidents, and Trump probably more than most. Nothing about this guy’s past life suggests that humility is among his virtues.

          • Dan L says:

            @ Matt M

            I’m literally mystified here.

            If you want to start a digression, opening it by gotcha-ing a strawman is an unproductive way to go about it. I assume you know that. When said gotcha is the entirety of your comment, it makes an assumption of good faith very difficult.

            And glancing at the thread, it looks like it is a good way to derail evidence-based updating of factual beliefs. I feel the urge to launch into a “this is exactly what is wrong with the SSC comments section” rant, but this deep in an old OT it’d just be gratuitous.

            That all said, the object-level topic of moral values in international espionage is an interesting one, and I might engage when I get back to a real keyboard. One clarification though:

            I’ll support whoever is doing the best job of safeguarding my interests

            This is a very strong declaration of intent to Defect. How much do you mean that?

        • Matt M says:

          IIRC there was a Planet Money about this, which suggested this whole thing was the personal crusade of this rich businessman who went to Russia in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, made millions, was friendsw with Magnitsky, eventually ran afoul of the Putin regime for some reason or another, saw himself charged with corruption, leading to having his business assets confiscated and having to flee the country at risk of jail, at which point his buddy Magnitsky ended up mysteriously dead.

          He then returned to the US and made it his life’s work to try and get back at the evil Putin regime through lobbying the USG to impose sanctions on any and everyone he deemed responsible.

          Planet Money, of course, presented all of this uncritically, and made no attempt to even speculate about any sort of ulterior motives, or what the other side of the story might be here. It was basically a “Putin murdered this guy’s friend for no reason, now watch him heroically strike back through the only means left available!” type story.

  6. IrishDude says:

    Anybody watched the HBO series Succession? I haven’t watched it yet and wonder if it’s worth my time to catch up to the seven episodes they’ve shown so far.

  7. Lillian says:

    So in light of earlier discussions on tariffs, i though this article from 1962 might make for an interesting read. Below is my favourite part, which rather cleverly illustrates how even a unilateral tariff can hurt the party that imposed it.

    Perhaps our protectionists could understand this issue better if they would consider the economic effects in Illinois of a tariff against all products from our other 49 states. Here is how it would work.

    We do not have, for example, an automobile industry in our state. The reason is simple—we can buy cars cheaper from Detroit and, in effect, pay for them with machine tools that we produce cheaper than they do. We could easily create an automobile industry in Illinois, however, if the state were permit­ted to put a 25 per cent tariff against “imported” cars.

    With that amount of govern­ment protection (really a concealed subsidy), capital would flow from our machine tool industry into our new automobile industry that could then offer the owners of the capital a higher return on their money. That development would immediately increase costs (and prices) for machine tools because those companies, in turn, would then have to pay a higher price to hold and attract the needed capi­tal. And for a while at least, the machine tool companies would also have to pay higher prices for labor because the new automobile indus­try would bid especially high for the services of those skilled me­chanics.

    Thus, even if Detroit didn’t re­taliate with tariffs against our machine tools, the higher prices would automatically mean that fewer would be sold. That, in turn, would mean fewer jobs in the ma­chine tool industry. Meanwhile, you and I would also have to pay $500 more for a car. In turn, that added cost would mean that you and I would have $500 less to spend for housing, education, en­tertainment, and so on. Thus those industries would also have to lay off workers. And since Illinois would soon run out of “unem­ployment benefits,” those people would have no choice but to scratch out a living as best they could. Under those circumstances, obviously it wouldn’t be much. But unquestionably, many new jobs would have been created in our new automobile industry.

    After that arrangement had continued for 10 years or so, it would be almost impossible to stop it; the protectionist politicians would quickly and correctly point out that all the jobs in our high cost Illinois automobile industry would be wiped out overnight if we removed their protection from competition and permitted those “cheap cars from Detroit” to be sold in our local markets.

    • mtl1882 says:

      I’m not sure if I’m just missing the point, but *does* it necessarily hurt the party that imposed it?

      I’m not a tariff proponent or expert by any means, but it seems to me that tariff opponents take the argument to a ridiculously simplified/narrow place. Yes, the general public would have to pay more for a car. Companies that have to purchase a lot of vehicles would take a hit to their profits, putting some out of business. But if done for 10 years, in a well-planned/scaled manner (I know, that’s unlikely), isn’t it possible that the benefits of the new domestic car industry would outweigh those costs? Consumers have to pay more per car, but more of them have jobs at the local car plant. The car company charges more for cars, but now sells a lot more. And this new, ideally healthy and secure car industry with better paid employees would be able to make improvements that lower costs at some point. Additionally, if enough people are employed at decent salaries, people have more money to spend at other businesses, and a much better, more stable community. Like it allegedly was before the factories went overseas.

      I realize this is an ideal scenario that is likely to be botched completely in implementation, but I don’t understand why people keep pointing out that tariffs raise prices as if that ends the argument. That is the whole point. You are being forced to pay more if you want to support people in other countries instead of those in your community, with the idea being that you should be penalized for doing so because wishing to save money off of cheap labor drives down wages/quality of life here. The idea is that the overall benefits to the community due to jobs etc. justify the costs. Specific individuals may suffer, particularly at first. But that’s what happened when we moved things overseas – some people bore the brunt of that, and others benefited. The idea that the lowest price is the only thing that should matter to consumers is ridiculous, though I know many subscribe to it. Most people, if they really thought about it, would probably prefer a stable job/salary/community and somewhat higher prices to what they have now. I realize some people would definitely not prefer this, and I know by many measurements we are better off due to globalization, but not everything can be measured or satisfied in gadgets and money.

      The predicted collapse of everything is somewhat ridiculous. No doubt it would send some people over the edge, but it’s lazy like the anti-minimum wage argument. Raising the minimum wage definitely has downsides that many proponents completely fail to consider, but the assertion that every business would drop their employees by a proportionate amount is just not true. Many businesses do not have such razor thin margins that they couldn’t raise wages without mass firings. Some do, but many don’t. And the people making these higher wages spend more money and may be motivated to do better, which offsets at least some of the downsides. It’s not a directly proportional issue – things adjust in complex ways. It’s not everyone being out $500 and that’s it.

      Again, I’m not saying we should have tariffs, or that it would go down as intended by the government, but the idea that no one has considered that it would raise prices is bizarre. The debate isn’t ended by pointing out that out, although it is effective as a scare tactic. Raising prices is the stated intention, either to penalize the other country or to benefit our own. Obviously there is a rationale behind them, or no one would propose them.

      To go back to your example, wouldn’t that party be in good shape? Now it has everyone employed in the local community, so it retains power. Sure, some people would not like it, but it’s not automatically bad that they defend those jobs and forego cheap cars from Detroit. I realize the implication is that everyone else is starving and needs those cheap cars, but I don’t think that logically follows. Why does the passage completely ignore the idea that the new industry would create new jobs? Why couldn’t more of the machine workers/companies be hired by the car companies? Why couldn’t some of the people who had to spend $500 extra on the car get a job that more than makes up for it at the car company? I know it is not so easy and there are only so many jobs, but it is at least worth a mention. And eventually, new corollary industries would grow up around the car industry.

      Sorry for the rant, but this issue has been bothering me.

      • Many businesses do not have such razor thin margins that they couldn’t raise wages without mass firings.

        The issue isn’t “couldn’t.” Firms are not in business in order to provide jobs for their employees, they are in business in order to make profits for their owners. The question is not whether they could pay the higher wage but whether, at the higher wage, it would be in their interest to continue hiring the same number of low skill workers.

        The answer is almost certainly not.

        For your question on tariffs, you can find a sketch of the relevant economics in a chapter of my price theory text. I don’t know if you will find it helpful or not.

        • mtl1882 says:

          Thank you for the link – I will check it out.

          My point is that I don’t think support of tariffs is more absurd than many commonly-held political beliefs, but it is treated as such, and the arguments made against it generally don’t engage half of the issues involved. I am not saying that it is likely to work, or that it is not highly vulnerable to criticism, but I do think it should be fairly addressed, and I rarely see that happen.

          For the typical reasons given, I don’t think raising the minimum wage is a good idea, but a large part of the issue I have with this stuff is that I disagree with the notion that a business is solely about profit. I don’t deny that making a profit is the most important concern, as otherwise it would cease to exist, and of course the owners must benefit. But I do believe that a business’s existence should be in part devoted to the idea of contributing something to society, in the sense of making a useful product and not merely finding ways to get money out of people. I do believe that some minor level of morality should be in play, and I think the companies and owners themselves benefit from contributing to a more stable community. Making profit the only aim does not generally provide the biggest benefit to the company or owners, unless you define everything in life by getting a few more dollars. I realize many people do think that way and do not believe in any other purpose, but that is not a self-evident idea nor a healthy one, in my opinion. Many companies are ruined that way, and that logic does not come naturally to everyone.

          I’m not saying firms should be a social support system existing to prop up workers, but it should be considered a great thing that they are able to find and employ workers in an arrangement that benefits both. Employees are not just a cost drain, they are supposed to be contributing to the company. If that’s not true, your company is doing something wrong. Not everyone making close to minimum wage is all that low skilled. At least some companies would be willing to hire close to as many people or even the same amount if they needed those employees to keep the company running. If they are, as alleged, mainly motivated by minimizing labor costs, then they probably don’t have many extraneous employees. It may lower their profits, but it is still in their interest to do so, to keep the company properly staffed and running well. To say otherwise is to admit some employees were unnecessary, or that profits should come at the expense of good service/products, which is a longer term threat to profits.

          Of course, this is all case by case. I agree that in the aggregate, the effects would probably be negative, especially with the minimum wage issue. There is a huge potential for backfire. I just wish the issues weren’t addressed in such a narrow, unrealistically robotic way. Not all firms care *only* about profits, and few decisions are made in way directly proportional to fluctuations in profits, especially in large organizations, which make economically “irrational” decisions all the time. Other things matter, and ripple effects occur. Raising the minimum wage or giving someone a steady job does more than put money in someone’s pocket so that they can buy stuff – it can change someone’s life, pride and attitude in a way that has other benefits. I’m not saying things turn into some sort of utopia, but I think we as a society have sold ourselves short. People are not these perfect rational actors who are always motivated or discouraged by the gain or loss of a few dollars. There are certain thresholds involved that have societal implications that can’t be dismissed.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      By way of counterargument, I offer a picture of Detroit in 1962 versus Detroit in 2013.

      You keep finding other ways to tell me that tariffs make things more expensive. I already understand this. I completely understand this. I’m saying the true cost of the cheaper goods is the hellscape that is Detroit, and my value is not “cheapest goods” but “fewest hellscapes.” So if you want to convince me that tariffs are bad, please tell me how our lack of tariffs in the face of tariffs and import restrictions imposed by our trading “partners” reduce the number of hellscapes in the US and I’ll be right on board.

      • S_J says:

        @ConradHoncho,

        the picture from 1962 appears to be show the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Trumbull [1] as its foreground…the second picture shows another part of the city of Detroit, that appears to be mostly a residential neighborhood (minus a noticeable number of houses that apparently existed sometime before 2013).

        Can you at least give a before-and-after of the same part of Detroit?

        Conversely, I can show many photos of the Detroit Metro Area which show improvement or stasis across the time window of 1962 to 2013.

        Which of those photo-pairings would be more accurate? It is my opinion that the decline of Detroit was not caused by a desire for “cheapest goods”, but by a collection of other factors unique to that city.

        [1] The baseball stadium gives away the location, as does the collection of skyscrapers in the background. A photo of that location from 2013 would not show the stadium, but it ought to show the old baseball field and at least one new skyscraper.

        • Chalid says:

          Call me crazy, but I think a superior approach would be to gather information from about economic activity across the country for the past several decades and compile it into aggregate statistics.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          I apologize for the cheap rhetorical trick.

          That said, I thought it was obvious that the Detroit of yesteryear was a nice place to live, and today is blighted. Is this not so?

          • S_J says:

            As a resident of the Detroit Metro Area (and a worker at a company that supports the Automotive Business):

            The City of Detroit was a much nicer-looking place during the 1960s.

            The Detroit Metro Area mostly looks as good, or better, than it did in the 1960s.

            Most of the “destroyed sections” are in City of Detroit proper, not the wider Metro Area.

            By population, the City of Detroit is hollow shell of its 1960s heyday. At that time, the Metro Area had a population in the vicinity of 2 million, and about 1.8 million or so of those people lived inside the City of Detroit.

            Within a few years of the ’67 riots, many residents of Detroit decamped to purchase houses in the suburbs. I’ve heard stories of people who lived in a neighborhood in the early 60s, then left for University. When they drove through the old neighborhood in ’68, they thought that an army had come through and destroyed everything in sight.

            Most areas of Detroit have seen small changes (up, down, or mixed) since then. The biggest change in the City was in the aftermath of those riots.

            To mention population again: from the 1970 census to the 2010 census, the population of the City of Detroit shrunk. In the 1980 and 1990 census cycles, the City fought hard to convince the Census bureau that its population was more than 1 million. By the year 2000, the City still tried…but couldn’t find more than about 900,000 people. By the year 2010, the City of Detroit population had shrunk further than that.

            In contrast: the population of the Metro Detroit area rose during most of that time frame. From the ~2 million number of the 1960s to a ~4 million number in 2000. (That number remained mostly-the-same in 2010, indicating stagnation but not much decline.)

            The fortunes of the Metro Area seemed to rise and fall with the national economy. The fortunes of the City of Detroit seemed to fall with the exodus of population to the suburbs.

            There is some interplay of the fortunes of the City of Detroit with the national economy, tariffs, and overseas competition. But those things are overshadowed by the population movement that was triggered by the riots of 1967.

          • Lillian says:

            You’re off by a decade, Detroit’s 1.84 million population peak was in 1950. By 1960 it was down to 1.67 million and by 1970 1.51 million, all the while the urban area as a whole continued to grow. The riots merely accelerated the process of white people fleeing the urban core for the suburbs. They were not the cause.

      • CatCube says:

        The problem with Detroit is that its advantages have been eaten by a combination of cheap transport and the increasing cost of mining in the Lake Superior and Appalachian regions. Why was Detroit the motor city (or why were steel mills on the Great Lakes, in general)? Because you had the iron ore mines in Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula, and the coal mines (for coke) in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. You had cheap water transport over the Great Lakes for the iron (which is denser and lower value than the coal), and somewhat more expensive rail transport for the coal. Where do these come together? The shores of Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Lake Erie.

        However, now the mines have closed down, due to the fact that they’re simply too expensive to mine. It’s simple economic reality–eventually you’re hauling your mineral so far vertically that no realistic price for it will pay for the energy to do this. An example for this is the Quincy Mine in the UP’s Copper Country–at the end mine life, the shaft was some 9200′ (about 6000′ deep, as the shaft wasn’t vertical). That means that every ounce of copper and pound of waste rock had to make journey of over a mile straight up, and nearly two miles on its actual path of travel. Unionization increasing wages and environmental legislation increasing costs have certainly sped the process up, and I’m in favor of reducing those burdens to stave off the inevitable as long as possible, but there’s no getting around the basic fact that the iron ore and coal resources that gave the Rust Belt cities their raison d’etre are much reduced.

        Similarly, now that transport is much cheaper, you don’t need to worry nearly as much about keeping the mills as close to their raw material sources as you used to, nor keeping the consumers of steel as close to the mills.

        There is absolutely no lever that Trump or any politician can pull to bring back the Rust Belt to its former glory. He can only nibble around the edges (which is all these tariffs are doing).

        Look, I’m from a small town that is dying because its mine is closed. I recently took a trip home for a family commitment the week after Memorial Day, and I deliberately scheduled my trip to avoid the holiday weekend, because it’s actually painful for me to watch the Memorial Day parade that was a source of joy in my childhood as a sad shell of what it used to be. But my emotions will not change the fundamental economic reality of the mining industry. We’ve been mining in the US for a long time, and many of the old mining districts are played out. Places like Detroit that were located due to those mining districts are in the same boat.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          If we were able to increase mining and steel production in the US, would the state of US manufacturing improve?

          • Matt M says:

            My impression is that the Detroit metro area has some very nice places to live, and some very not-nice places, like most cities.

            When we talk about cities being nice or not, I think what we generally are measuring is the percentage of area in the city that is nice vs the percentage that is not nice.

            Which might not be particularly relevant, so long as you are not forced to either live or work in the not-nice part.

          • CatCube says:

            Unless the steel produced was cheaper, I can’t see how. If you force manufacturers to use it, they’re now less competitive. If the steel isn’t cheaper, but manufacturers aren’t forced to use it, you have to pay the steel industry cash on the barrelhead to keep them from going out of business. (Whether this takes the form of direct payments or a subsidy for Buy American doesn’t change the flow of money.)

            And if they’d be cheaper naturally, you wouldn’t need the government to put a thumb on the scale.

            Note that this thumb is very, very expensive. We just got the word late last week that our cost engineers have been ordered to pull back all of the Internal Government Estimates for the projects currently in the works and recalculate them because steel prices are up 30%. Your tax dollars at work.

          • Thomas Jørgensen says:

            The Swedes, who are certainly not skimping on wages or labor safety do not seem to mind hauling iron up from 1.3 kilometers down..

            but Sweden has very cheap electricity, thanks to nukes and hydro. So, really, to revive US mining, you have to drive down the real cost of electricity.

        • engleberg says:

          @Why was Detroit the motor city-

          Henry Ford did a Runaway Shop from New Jersey to escape his union. After Lyndon Johnson industrialized the old South, a bunch of Midwest industries did a Runaway Shop to the weaker unions down South. Since then Runaway Shops to Mexico and China. Access to steel and coal and transport, sure, and Detroit had factories for iron stoves and horse carriages with workers who had useful skill sets, but management really likes to cut and run now and then.

          • CatCube says:

            That may be part of it, but Ford couldn’t choose literally anywhere. If he ended up paying more for shipping raw materials than he gained from dodging unionization, he still comes out behind–plus paying the cost of rebuilding the plants. He wanted to get away from where he was, but he was still limited by transport networks. Once transport got cheaper and you could get raw materials moved further for the same cost, they decamped for the South for both the better business climate and the actual climate.

            If you’re ever wondering why a city in the US is in a particular place, the answer is “transportation.” That may not be why it stays there now, but that’s why it was founded. Once founded and a network in particular industries has been built up, the city may continue for other reasons, as most US cities have.

            It’s easy to miss how big a revolution in transport has changed lives. As I mentioned in a comment above, I’m from a town that’s dying due to the closure of its mine. But even if that mine reopened, it probably wouldn’t bring the town back!

            Back when the town was first founded around the mines, workers had to live very close to the mine portal, and this more or less continued through the open-pit iteration by tradition, so when the mines were running, a new worker could move to the town and be confident in finding at least some amenities (though they were a lot less picky then). If the mine reopened now, workers would now have the choice of living 30-45 minutes away by car in a larger city, and I’d expect that most would take that option. So we would have an operating mine, but probably still a shrinking, aging population. It’s a death spiral that no politician can really fix, because the fundamental reason the town started–that people live in the same town they work in–is no longer true.

          • Andrew Hunter says:

            If you’re ever wondering why a city in the US is in a particular place, the answer is “transportation.” That may not be why it stays there now, but that’s why it was founded. Once founded and a network has been built up.

            See also: all major cities are built near waterways or ports, which we no longer need to make settlement practical, and which in many (not all) cases limit growth.

            I’ve wondered if there isn’t low hanging fruit for founding new cities far from waterways, though there’s obviously network effects for settlements.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            See also: all major cities are built near waterways or ports

            A minor corollary to this is that one tends to see minor cities about a day’s travel away from any major city, etc.

          • johan_larson says:

            See also: all major cities are built near waterways or ports, …

            That must have started to change by the time the American West got settled. Denver, for instance, isn’t on a waterway of any note. The same goes for Las Vegas.

          • Nornagest says:

            I thought of Las Vegas too, but it’s pretty close to the Colorado River. Not actually on it, but close enough. Denver’s not, though, and neither is Salt Lake.

          • johan_larson says:

            It doesn’t look like there’s a Las Vegas port on the Colorado. Was there ever one?

          • Matt M says:

            Wasn’t Salt Lake selected by the Mormon settlers specifically for its undesirable location. As in, “Nobody else will possibly want this land – which makes us safe from being slaughtered en masse” (a legitimate concern for them at the time)

          • Nornagest says:

            It doesn’t look like there’s a Las Vegas port on the Colorado. Was there ever one?

            Looks like no, but it does owe some of its growth to the Colorado, in a roundabout way — the first casinos there were built to cater to workers on the Hoover Dam in the early Thirties. The city already existed as a railroad and wagon stop, though.

          • CatCube says:

            I phrased it as “transportation” in general, rather than “water transportation” because of the west, where railroads did have rather more to do with settlement patterns than the rivers did.

          • BBA says:

            Atlanta began as a railroad junction and hasn’t got a port on the Chattahoochee, which I don’t think is even navigable that far.

            The largest city without a navigable waterway is Johannesburg, a gold mining boom town that got big enough to keep going after the mines closed.

          • ana53294 says:

            See also: all major cities are built near waterways or ports, which we no longer need to make settlement practical, and which in many (not all) cases limit growth.

            I think that water transportation still matters a lot.

            These are the biggest cities in China:

            Shanghai (34 million) – sea and Yangtze river
            Guangzhou (25 million) – Pearl river
            Beijing (24.9 million)
            Shenzhen (23.3 million) – Pearl river delta
            Wuhan (19 million) – Yangtze and Han rivers
            Chengdu (18.1 million)
            Chongqing (17 million) – Yangtze basin
            Tianjin (15.4 million) – sea

            So most of the Chinese cities that are growing are located near waterways. And a lot of these cities have experienced this massive growth during the last 50 years, after modern transportation technologies became available. And they are not all the result of a city just growing – Shenzen was a really small vilage 50 years ago. Sure, it started growing as part of a SEZ, but why did this specific city grow more than others in other SEZ? I think how close it is to Hong Kong and others centres of economic importance probably makes a difference.

            If you look at a night time photo of Spain, you see a bright spot in the middle, where Madrid is, and the lights in the coast; the middle of the country is much darker. Even the cities in Spain that had a lot of historical importance but aren’t on the coast have not been growing at the rate of coastal cities, with the exception of Madrid. And I do think this is due to transportation, in part, although historical reasons also matter. Otherwise, why is Seville (on the coast) growing while Salamanca (the city with the oldest Spanish University) and Toledo (which was an imperial city, before the court was moved to Madrid) are not?

            Edit: I understand that US geography is different than other continents. We don’t have that many big navigable rivers, or big lakes in Europe. But, from my scant knowledge of US geography, it seems like the biggest cities are still located somewhere on the coastal states. Which middle states are densely populated? Is there no correlation with river transport?

          • CatCube says:

            @ana53294

            No, the largest city in the Midwest is Chicago, which is on Lake Michigan, and is tied to the Mississippi River system through the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Because Chicago was a major connection for waterborne transport, it then became a major rail hub.

            St. Louis is at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and right at a major obstacle to navigation (Chain of Rocks), so there was a significant amount of portaging and transloading of river cargo occurring there, so a city naturally sprung up.

            Denver is probably the biggest interior city I can think of where water transport wasn’t a major role, and the Transcontinental Railroad also didn’t originally pass through the area. So for the most part, cities in the heartland are still highly correlated with river transport, though more for historical reasons. Rivers are still a very important method of transportation, but not as huge a percentage of the economy of cities as it once was.

            Edit: I think I didn’t actually discuss your question regarding the density of population, rather than largest cities. The interior of the US is much less densely populated than the coasts. Popular names are the “Eastern Seaboard” or “Boswash Corridor” for the conurbation from Boston to Washington, which is basically one continuous city.

            There’s nothing like that in the interior, which is one reason passenger rail struggles in the US. Look up the rail route from Los Angeles, California to Chicago, Illinois in Google Maps. This is roughly the same distance as Paris to Moscow. The only major cities on the line are Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Kansas City, Missouri.

            There are a whole lot of areas that are nothing but grid squares of nothing in the interior.

          • littskad says:

            Denver is probably the biggest interior city I can think of where water transport wasn’t a major role, and the Transcontinental Railroad also didn’t originally pass through the area.

            The Dallas-Fort Worth area is quite a bit bigger than Denver, with no major water transport to it either. Phoenix, AZ and Charlotte, NC are also bigger than Denver, with no major water access.

          • engleberg says:

            @That may be part of it, but Ford couldn’t choose literally anywhere. If he ended up paying more for shipping raw materials than he gained from dodging unionization, he still comes out behind-plus paying the cost of rebuilding the plants. He wanted to get away from where he was, but he was still limited by transport networks. Once transport got cheaper and you could get raw materials moved further for the same cost for both the same cost, they decamped for the South for both the better business climate and the actual climate-

            Heh.

            @If you are ever wondering why a city in the US (Or anywhere else) is in a particular place, the answer is “transportation.”

            And if you are ever wondering why factories move, the answer is ‘workers who don’t know in their bones you will Runaway Shop if you unionize.’ Ford I was rebuilding anyway for a wild new technology in Model Ts.

            Certainly agree with you that raw material cost and transport cost is vital to cities and factories. I just hate to see anyone mention a factory moving after labor trouble without the magic words Runaway Shop. My shibboleth, not your problem.

      • mtl1882 says:

        Thank you. You said what I meant in a far more concise way. I’m not sure if it was me you were responding to when you said “You keep finding other ways to tell me that tariffs make things more expensive,” but that was the point I was trying to make. That is what tariff opponents keep doing, as though tariff proponents are not aware. They’re ignoring the fact that there are other, almost certainly superior values besides the worship of saving a few extra dollars, and some people might just hold those values.

        “Fewest hellscapes” is my new motto. But it is amazing how many people either find that issue irrelevant, or actively take pleasure in the existence of hellscapes! And they think that attitude is self-evident!

        • BBA says:

          Detroit became a hellscape in the 1970s, well before the American auto industry was destroyed by NAFTA (1994), WTO (1995), and [most crucially in my view] the Toyota Camry (1982).

      • Lillian says:

        @Conrad Honcho: Allow me then to present this picture as a counter-counter argument. If foreign competition destroyed Detroit, why does Grosse Point Park remain intact and prosperous despite being literally across the street? Are we to suppose that national trade policy applies to one side of the street but not the other? Fact is the suburbs of Detroit are doing quite fine despite being subject to the same prevailing economic conditions. While the city’s population peaked in 1950 and has dropped continuously since then, that of the metro area has never been larger and continues to grow. In light of this, i think it makes more sense to attribute Detroit’s sorry state to local factors rather than global ones. This becomes even more evident when you compare Detroit to other cities. Pittsburg in particular stands out for facing a similar decline of its principal industry, yet it fares much better and indeed by all accounts it’s quite a nice city in its own right.

        Also, you are far too dismissive of the effects of cheaper prices on goods. For the people who consume those goods, lower prices are interchangeable with higher wages in that they ultimately translate to more money in their pockets. You want to minimize hellscapes? Well under a protectionist regime half of Detroit would still be abandoned, and on top of that everyone there would be poorer since their dollars would have less purchasing power.

  8. Oleg S. says:

    Hey, has anyone read Rodney Brooks’s recent Steps Toward Super Intelligence? It kinda corrected my understanding of what AI developments are realistically possible within next 5-10 years, but I am not an expert in the field. Is there any response from GAI community?

    • nimim.k.m. says:

      I am unsure who exactly belongs in the GAI community or if such thing exists, but Yudkowsky and his friends like to downplay the observation “our epitome of AI research is still far behind the capabilities of 2-year old human in many crucial aspects”, because their pet project sounds much more important (and easier to gather funding for) if the prevalent story is “AGI could be here soon! There is no smoke alarm, you can’t even see it coming” instead of “our so-called AIs are not very agent-like, let alone on the par with human toddlers”.

      Meanwhile, I assume the Brooks’ observations are things that anyone working on things that get labeled “AI research” are either explicitly or latently aware of.

  9. Randy M says:

    If one has a family history of psych disorders (not sure of the precise term; anxiety, bipolar; some institutionalization) are there specific behavioral habits that can mitigate or prevent the onset?

  10. Alliumnsk says:

    How difficult it’d be to create a bird with hands? Parrots and corvids apparently would have found use for them.

    • theredsheep says:

      Well, are they turning the wings into hands, thus losing their main means of propulsion, or losing the feet they stand on instead?

      • Alliumnsk says:

        The former (many parrots are bad flyers anyway, and when they’re pets it’s no use)

    • Well... says:

      1. To create a bird with hands, you must first create the entire universe.

      2. Would a bird with hands still be a bird?

      3. If I saw a bird with hands — we’re talking real hands, like a raccoon or a chimp, or even like a human’s — I might find it a little disturbing.

      4. So far I’ve assumed the hands would be instead of wings. (I must emphasize, it would be a nightmarish sight.) If the hands were instead of feet, that could be interesting; the bird might grip a perch with one hand and use the other for some fine meticulous work, then alternate hands when one got tired. It’d be hilarious to see two parrots having a conversation and gesticulating appropriately.

  11. knockknock says:

    If you’re looking for literary cultural referents, I’d say that behind The Bard and The Bible #3 has to be … Peanuts! Yes, I’m saying it would pay to sit down with Schulz’ great collections from the 60s for a surprising shitload of wit and wisdom.

    (And then make sure you do or redo 1984.)

  12. helloo says:

    Conflict vs Mistake (we probably should have just created one big top lvl thread on this…)

    Did not like the article all that much actually, mainly because I felt it had too many holes and presents a false dichotomy.

    The first reading I thought it was talking about how most people/discussions use data/facts to justify their side and as ammunition. And that recently there’s been more movement in the side of where people use math/scientific method/rationality to base or judge their decisions.
    However, when reading it that way, the piece wasn’t all that great. It mixes up accounts where someone takes a side due to some logical understanding, but then backs and pushes it with passion OR vise versa where someone takes a side due to values or partisanship but then backs and pushes it with data and “reasoned arguments”.
    There’s also plenty of arguments where it goes “You should do this even if it makes it worse off for you personally”.

    Another idea which took a while longer to form was that this was more “understanding vs value” than “mistake vs conflict”.
    One thing that really kept annoying and itching was how the conflict was somehow able to understand and steelman their opposing side, but the supposedly more rational mistake simply dismissed them as being ignorant.
    Then I realized, that if the mistake side assumes that opposing sides can come to an unanimous agreement on anything, then they are not taking account of different value/utilities that could cause the uncompromiseable conflicts (that the conflicts assume create the issues in the first place).
    By moving the split this way then the conflicts will try to shape one’s values (or to push supporters to action for their values).
    And the mistakes will try to shape one’s understanding.
    Which seems to be much closer to how people actually behave.
    There’s still going to be messes where one assumes mistakes shapes the other’s values or when one’s values promotes mistakes. Things like “you’ve been brainwashed by your political party/media to oppose/support this”.

  13. luispedro says:

    I just found out (at the pharmacist) that here (in Luxembourg), even though melatonin normally requires a prescription, you can get 0.3 mg pills without one.

    The pharmacist was not impressed with the request for a 0.3mg dose, saying “this is basically homeopathy”. Since that was why they were willing to sell it without a prescription, it was probably not in my best interest to correct them (and, thus, they remain ignorant).

  14. johan_larson says:

    You have an odd sort of time-travel ability. Every day at midnight you get to choose whether to keep the last 24 hours and continue, or roll back time 24 hours and live the day again. If you used this ability to make money, how quickly could you amass a vast fortune, say $100 billion?

    • Aapje says:

      How much do you start with?

      One early strategy might be to play roulette and bet on odd, even, black or red and roll back if you lose. That would nearly double the money you have every two days, until the casinos ban you.

      After that, you probably have enough money to start making highly leveraged bets in the stock market or gambling on currency prices. The idea would still be to make 50/50 bets, with high payouts if you win and huge losses if you lose.

      • johan_larson says:

        How much do you start with?

        Let’s say $1000, just to pick a number.

        • Aapje says:

          Playing roulette, you’d need to have 7 winning days to get to $128k, so assuming 50% odds, about 14 days of play. Casinos seem to cap roulette bets, where $100k for even/odd/black/red seems common. So you could play for one more day, but not for your full bankroll, unless you play multiple times.

          At that point, you’d need an alternative to keep doubling your wealth every two days, so on to day trading…

      • brmic says:

        Depending on the exact rules, you could keep betting until you lose, then on the next day repeat, change your bet on the last round and stop betting after that.

        But I suppose it’s much easier and covers a wider range of potential rule sets to use some online sports bets, memorize results and bet on those, with or without safety margin depending on the extent of butterfly effects.
        After a week I’d look into having middle men do the betting for me, maybe come up with some deep learning plus blockchain bullshit story to explain my uncanny predictive ability. Then switch to the stock market.

        $100 billion? Never. The attention that kind of money brings far outweights its utility to me. Expecially when I know I can easily make more money should I want to. I hope I’d spend the time and effort to get close enough to someone in power to prevent/mitigate catastrophes.

      • Tatterdemalion says:

        If you’re going for two-outcome bets, 50/50 probably isn’t your best strategy.

        Suppose for the sake of the argument that each day I have the option of a range of bets, each of which pays off with probability 1/x and multiplies my money by x if it does.

        Then over n days I expect to have multiplied my money by x^(n/x). To optimise that, I want to set d/dx (x^n/x) = 0, which works out at x = e.

        So rather than 50/50 bets, you should be looking for 37/63 ones, I think. That way your expected wealth on day n is 1.444^n times your original wealth, rather than 1.414^n times it.

        Of course, if you bet on things with multiple possible outcomes you can do much better than that.

      • tayfie says:

        Why 50/50 bets?

        For any possible betting activity, you see the winner. All you have to do is live through it once and on the second go-round bet on the highest payout thing that happened. a priori probability hardly matters because the evidence of actually seeing the event happen will outweigh it.

        My tactic could still fail spectacularly if the universe is highly random and rolling back time will not result in identical (except for you those you interact with) days.

        Edit: After reading farther down, this seems a fairly solid argument you don’t want the most unlikely event, but I think my point still stands that you want more risk than 50/50.

        • Aapje says:

          I assumed that the roll back would be complete: you’d also lose your memories.

          This greatly complicates things, as you not only don’t know the future, but you even don’t know whether you are reliving the same day or not.

      • Thomas Jørgensen says:

        Roulette is not going to work – it is deliberately engineered to be a chaotic system, just your own interactions with the croupier and the entire place is going to change outcomes.

        You need to make bets on things that have effectively been “set in stone” before the rollback began. Stock market movements based on information going public is the most certain, though you end up looking like an insider trader if you are not careful.
        For straight gambling.. well, horses and greyhounds? The condition of the animals is not going to change between resets, so you should have at least far better than average odds of picking winners. Though, still, do not bet the entire bankroll.

        • Aapje says:

          If you lose your memories, then you need to be gambling on a chaotic system, to prevent losing loops, where you lose, go back in time, make the losing choice again, go back in time, etc.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I can imagine a dystopian scifi story where someone can roll back, without keeping memories, and they are just having a particularly bad day but on that they can’t do anything about. And they keep on resetting the day, forever, never getting out of it.

    • aphyer says:

      An amusing and relevant article: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/27/2120422/meet-the-man-who-could-own-aviva-france/

      Your superpower is much better, though.

    • Some Troll's Serious Discussion Alt says:

      I suspect how much attention you draw is the important llimiting factor here. Doubling every day is all well and good, but its hard to get your 14th double in when you’re tied to a chair in a dark room shouting “something something blockchain!”

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      This has come up in a few recent open threads (possibly hidden ones).

    • The Nybbler says:

      I think the sweet spot at the beginning might be horse racing. There are a LOT of horse races every day, so long shots are going to win fairly often. And unlike roulette, tiny changes in conditions caused by my rewind aren’t likely to affect the outcome. Looking at Belmont last Friday the 13th, I see a $12.20 payoff (on $1) to win on one race, and the trifecta pays off $80.87 on $0.50. And a Pick 3 (winners in three races) of $987.50 on $1. So if that day is typical, I should be able to assemble almost a million dollars from a thousand on my first day (with one rewind, so 2 days). But total bets placed _per day_ in the US are in the single-digit millions, so that’s about my limit there.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Things break down at the high level. I’m not sure what Jeff-Bezos-with-30-billion-dollars could do to grow his fortune using only 24-hour rewinds. How much money can a hedge fund make on a daily basis? I’m hand-waving tens-of-millions a day.

      • knockknock says:

        And tracks don’t watch people like casinos do. Just don’t win anything at 600-1 odds or better because that triggers the IRS — so stay away from big trifectas or supers

        • The Nybbler says:

          New York reports at 300-1, but there’s no reason not to win the big bet. The IRS is easy to deal with, just pay them. Since you only have to be “lucky” once before you’ve got too much to increase significantly by horse betting, you won’t attract all that much scrutiny.

    • Murphy says:

      Seed money: 5 bucks.

      To get into the millions should be easy enough.
      Conventional betting deals in those ranges so you could roll back once and then bet on accumulator bets picking the winners for a number of event on the same day.

      Or just rewind once buy a lottery ticket 10 minutes before the draw with the correct numbers.

      Though it may take a while for the money to clear.

      Whatever your approach once you’re above the 10 million mark you might attract attention so invest a few million in security and lawyers.

      Once you’re into the hundred-million ranges you probably want to start looking at the stock market. Being able to replay the day you could make crazy returns in any given day.

      Once you’re into the billions your transactions can move the market in their own right.

      Your greatest challenge will be avoiding attention of SEC types.

      Within a few months world conquest would be on the horizon and whatever hour of the day you roll back to will be your weak point since you would struggle to respond to unexpected events/attacks shortly after that point.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Or just rewind once buy a lottery ticket 10 minutes before the draw with the correct numbers.

        Lottery tickets generated by tumbling balls can probably not replicated. Someone did the math, and 1 gram of matter moving 1 millimeter away on the other side of the earth will completely change the result after 13 seconds of tumbling.
        https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/28/open-thread-100-75-2-3-2/#comment-643446

        • Murphy says:

          In that case horse race accumulators.

          Though it would also be interesting to see what’s rigged. If you noticed a lotto where the same numbers did come up again and again then you’d know which ones were rigged and non-genuinely-random.

    • honoredb says:

      I’d either need to retain my memories (or at least know how many times I’ve rolled back) or have access to a source of true randomness. How quickly in calendar time or subjective time? You can win the lottery in one day of calendar time (or it might take like a month to get access to the lump sum payout, I don’t know), but depending on the exact rules it might take decades of subjective time.

      Assuming I’m not retaining memories but have a way of making different random choices, a calendar month seems reasonable–I imagine you could start out by making 10 to 1 bets pretty easily, and have to gradually lower the payout ratio until by the end you’re risking 90 billion for a chance at 10 billion.

      • honoredb says:

        If I am retaining memories, the right answer might actually be to hire myself out as an oracle (over the internet from an undisclosed location, with a butterfly effect disclaimer).

      • baconbits9 says:

        I don’t think you can get there with bets, not one is going to effectively bet you on a 50/50 prop with a 50 billion dollar payout, casinos limit their payouts by limiting the amount you can bet and will eventually ban you. Attempts to get action by offering great odds, say offering 10-1 on a coin flip for a billion dollars might get some traction at first, but in short order people will become very suspicious about how you always win.

        If you can use it to win the lottery getting to a billion is easy, getting above 10 while staying out of prison or something similar isn’t so easy.

      • albatross11 says:

        If lotteries are chaotic and truly random, and you go back in time 24 hours without remembering anything and carry *any* randomization with you (like what direction you’re moving), then every time you go back, the lottery will be a new random number.

        So you can play the lottery with an expectation of winning eventually. However, for safety (in case the lottery isn’t really as chaotic as you think), you should add in some other randomness source that will be rerandomized each time you come back. Maybe roll ten 6-sided dice, and if they all come up 1s, then decide not to go back in time that day even if you don’t win the lottery.

      • johan_larson says:

        The intent of the question was definitely that you would retain your memories of the day you rolled back. But I see I didn’t spell it out. And considering the opposite case seems viable, too.

  15. outis says:

    Have there been any cases of identical embryos gestating in different wombs? In humans or animals?

    • albatross11 says:

      Animals have been cloned–that’s a genetically identical embryo gestating in a different womb *at a different time*. I think there’s a worldwide prohibition on cloning humans, but who knows if someone’s tried it somewhere without issuing a press release, or how well it worked if they did try it.

    • Lambert says:

      Embryo splitting. It’s where they break an early embryo into individual cells and implant them in a uterus.
      There’s no reason for all the cells to be implanted in the same uterus.
      IIRC, it’s used to make livestock, being a middle ground between natural breeding and full on cloning.

  16. frenris says:

    Re conflict vs mistakes I think your problem is that you’re trying to advance an argument to suggest that people who advocate for marginalized groups are either ignorant or just don’t care about facts.

    /S. writing sometimes like a conflict theorist is fun. I think though that you don’t make the case for conflict theory nearly as strong as it could be. There’s a couple reasons why conflict theory makes sense as a way to engage, and I think it deserves the steel man that you refuse to give it (I don’t see how the linked article applies as you’re trying to describe conflict-theory as a practice, not summarizing specific person’s argument).

    Conflict theory makes sense because

    – people are generally self interested

    – evaluating the truth value of people’s claims is hard

    If some technocrat has some proposal I don’t understand, how should I react? Do I believe the claim that the proposal is in my interest? If I think that the technocrat is “on my team” sure, if not he’s probably out to get me and he’s trying to hide that beneath some jargon I don’t understand.

    You see this constantly with the arcane justifications for obviously self-interested proposals by companies trying to effect regulatory capture. You don’t need to hire your own PhD economist to understand that their PhD economist is probably just making stuff up. You just need to understand that the enemy is out to get you and you need to fight back.

    Conflict theory makes sense when you’re in the situation where you’re not intelligent enough to evaluate some truth claim but you still need to advocate for yourself. What can you do? You use basic heuristics to decide if you’re in conflict or not and then you agree or disagree.

    Your Pfizer example I think is super compelling because while given as a mistake theory justification for free speech, it could just as easily be used as a conflict theoretic justification for distrust of power. I mean, if you’re surrounded by a conspiracy of greedy bought out doctors you won’t be able to fix things by engaging with them in a good faith debate regarding medicine. Maybe you do actually need a revolution.

    What makes this extra compelling is that people are quite self interested when they reason. Even someone who is trying to be objective is likely advocating for themselves in some way (insert reference to breast cancer, coffee motivated reasoning study). How can you deal with seeming objective arguments which are likely being made to disadvantage you, when you’re not clever enough to deal with the arguments on their own merits? You engage in conflict-theory type disagreement, because you still need to be able to advocate for yourself.

  17. mustacheion says:

    Conflict Vs. Mistake: I really like this idea, and have some minor suggestions about how to improve your framing of the idea.

    1) I think it is really important to stress that the important difference isn’t a difference between groups of people (even though it does often end up cleaving along group lines) but that at its core it is a difference between ways of thinking. It is a difference in cognitive frameworks, or mental architecture. And I think that some people might alternate between the two frameworks at different times, or in different contexts, which might be the source of a lot of the confusion people are having with the idea.

    2) Even though you made an effort to generalize the dichotomy beyond Marxism, I think you failed. You clearly had the context of Marxism in your mind when you wrote this piece, and this distorted your description of the conflict theorist position. I think it is true that Marxism is dominated by conflict theorists, but I think you can find many conflict thinkers on the right as well. In fact, I might venture that conflict theorists are most common at the extremes of the political spectrum, and mistake theorists most common at the middle and among those who don’t fit well into the left-right spectrum.

    I re-read the piece before posting this. You have three introductory paragraphs followed by many alternating mistake/conflict perspectives that you use to try to clarify the distinction you are trying to make. I feel like the first pair is really clear and helpful, the second is still pretty good, and after that the quality takes a nosedive because you start to use them to shame people and behavior you don’t like.

    I think that rational agents using the mistake framework have can form a mental model of conflict theorists and the conflict/mistake dichotomy. I think that rational agents using the conflict framework lack some key abstract mental … thing (representation?) which forbids them from being able to model mistake theorists or the dichotomy itself. This sounds like a very unkind thing to say, and I apologize for that, but I cannot think of another way to communicate what I am trying to say. This isn’t to say that conflict theorists are stupid or anything – I think that the conflict framework is a very useful way of simplifying political discourse in a way that is very often fair, valid, and useful. But I think that the mistake framework is crucial in the struggle to solve the most sticky and unclear political conflicts.

    • idontknow131647093 says:

      I’d postulate that this is the case because conflict theory has for the last 30+ years been a dominant theory of the American left, and is considered “acceptable” there (ala calling a person a racist) while it has been a fringe right theory, although gaining power recently (ala preaching white supremacy).

      In fact, this is actually what I have seen as a major divide on the right currently between “defectors” (aka never-Trumpers) and “loyalists” is that the “defectors” deny that there is anything like a “conflict” and that Hillary was only wrong, Trump is more wrong, and if the right would vote against Trump then the Hillary camps would go from “wrong” to “less wrong” and the former Trump camps would become “more right”. On the other hand “loyalists” either embrace the conflict with the left (about 5%) or say, “I wish I didn’t have to support this, but I do, because they have overstepped line ______ and thus I can no longer pretend to be having a cordial disagreement with a sane person, but must treat them as an adversary akin to General Lee.” The line that was crossed in almost every situation is one of: Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, or other Attacks Against the Person (whiteness, maleness, etc).

  18. Le Maistre Chat says:

    So I just watched Robocop (1987) for the first time.
    Except for the throwaway references to the white city-state of Pretoria having a neutron bomb and an ABM laser satellite “accidentally” killing two of the President’s predecessors, this cyberpunk dystopia was a really optimistic view of 1987’s near future. Space travel is cheap enough that the President gives a press conference from a space station. People with heart disease can go get an artificial heart – they’re advertised on TV. The South Precinct of Detroit is a nice middle class area where cops don’t “work for a living.”
    Is this bad?

    • The Nybbler says:

      Is this bad?

      Only for the downtrodden of Old Detroit.

      • albatross11 says:

        I’d buy *that* for a dollar!

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          In the future, audiences will love raunchy comedy by a man with an old-timey catchphrase!
          Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting with Netflix to pitch my sex farce about a barbershop quartet trying to get floozies to reveal their ankles.

    • hyperboloid says:

      I also just rewatched Robocop and had the same thought. Remember the board meeting at the beginning were they first show ED-209? The president of OCP gives the following speech:

      My friends, I’ve had this dream for more than a decade now. A dream which I’ve invited you all to share with me.

      In six months we begin construction of Delta City, where Old Detroit now stands. Old Detroit has a cancer. The cancer is crime, and it must be cut out before we employ the two million workers that will revive this city.

      Shifts in the tax structure have created an economy ideal for corporate growth. But community services, in this case law enforcement, have suffered. I think it’s time we gave something back.

      This is also a world where major corporations invest billions gained from tax cuts in massive job creating infrastructure programs. It really shows the naive utopian optimism of the late nineteen eighties.

      • Aapje says:

        Paul Verhoeven likes his sarcasm, so that probably was intended as dystopian, not utopian, which is also made clear by ED-209 failing to work correctly.

  19. adambliss says:

    Scott, I’m glad to hear that you are following up on “Conflict vs Mistake”, as it is one of my all-time favorite SSC posts. I don’t think it’s entirely correct or entirely incorrect, but it has given me a useful framework for thinking about important and otherwise mysterious matters, and that’s about the highest praise I can give any writing in the genre.

    Here’s another recent (longish) article that has been very useful to me along similar lines. I would love to hear what you or the other SSC readers think of it and how it might relate to Conflict vs Mistake theory: https://thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-the-narratives-b91ea06ddf63

    • albatross11 says:

      I really enjoyed the linked article.

    • dodrian says:

      Thank you for sharing this article.

    • Matt M says:

      Eh, perhaps it’s because I’m too far gone down the rabbit-hole of tribal warfare. Or perhaps this is just a red-tribe sort of view… but I’m very skeptical of the claim that you can win people over by “making the issue more complex.”

      I’ve actually called this out as a rhetorical tactic before, the “appeal to complexity.” To the extent that it is used in popular media, it typically seems to be a way for sophisticated blue tribe to try and obfuscate the real issue and trick simple-minded red-tribe into going along with things.

      Yes, most issues are very complicated, but often what people want is actually very simple. To use immigration as an example, what red tribe wants is for existing immigration law to be vigorously enforced. And that’s really about it. And for far too long, they’ve been misled and betrayed by politicians (often Republican ones) whose response to that is something like “Immigration is a very complex issue, what we actually need is comprehensive immigration reform.” And it just so happens that the “comprehensive immigration reform” bill includes mass amnesty.

      I don’t know if there’s a blue tribe equivalent of this, but red tribe is definitely starting to see through it. And, to use a probably inaccurate and beaten-down cliche: “That’s why Trump won.” Trump is the very epitome of someone who does the exact opposite of what this article recommends, and it helped him perform possibly the greatest electoral upset of all time. He literally told his voters “Mexicans are rapists and I’m going to stop them with a giant fucking wall.” And it worked. Because people were tired of hearing the likes of Jeb Bush drone on and on about how immigration is a very difficult and complicated problem and we have to be careful to consider all the potential causes and effects that policy changes might have… *falls asleep*

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        This is gnawing at me… I could swear I watched a documentary about modern political campaigns that included an attack ad of construction workers building a wall with a somber voiceover saying “[enemy candidate] wants to build a wall around America.” The visuals dated it to the late ’70s or Reagan administration.
        Am I crazy, or did Trump reclaim an old reductio/insult?

      • dodrian says:

        but I’m very skeptical of the claim that you can win people over by “making
        the issue more complex.”

        Trump performed well in the polls, but did he change many peoples’ minds about the issues? (I’m sure he collected some Democratic voters who agreed with him about, eg, immigration, but did he change anyone from pro-immigration to anti-immigration?)

        • Matt M says:

          Trump performed well in the polls, but did he change many peoples’ minds about the issues?

          I feel like he changed the minds of plenty of right-wingers on the issue of “Is it worth my time to bother voting for a Republican presidential candidate?” Which is the only issue that mattered to him.

          And none of his “Let me talk to you about how this issue is very complicated for several hours in an attempt to obfuscate the fact that I don’t agree with you” rivals did any better of a job of convincing blue tribe that Republicans aren’t racist. Did Mitt Romney win over any left-wing hearts and minds on any significant issues of our day? John McCain?

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I basically agree. There’s a saying that my googling attributes to P.J. O’Rourke but I swear I heard elsewhere in conjunction with the financial meltdown, “complexity is fraud.” Whenever you hear “complex financial instrument,” run. This is someone trying to steal your money. You know what’s not fraud? Index funds, which are dead simple.

        Compare with Getting Eulered.

  20. J says:

    Someone on the subreddit posted calvinanddune.tumblr.com, which is delightful.

  21. johan_larson says:

    Here’s a question. Who is the least powerful person who can meaningfully affect the outcome of the next US presidential election?

    Let’s peg “meaningfully” at a 5% swing in the probability a particular candidate will win.

    My bet would be some of the staffers who do research to prepare the candidates for their debates. A flubbed answer to a question could possibly have a 5% effect, and ensuring the president had a good answer to that question could be the responsibility of some 25 year old junior staffer.

    • Matt M says:

      I have almost the extreme opposite view here. No one individual can affect the outcome of the election, possibly including the candidates themselves.

      • johan_larson says:

        One person can build a truck bomb that demolishes a major building. Detonating such a bomb in the midst of an election should meaningfully swing the election in the direction of whichever candidate has staked out a more ambitious anti-crime or anti-terrorism position.

        I agree with you that it’s hard for someone to deliberately swing the odds of the election. I don’t agree it’s anywhere near impossible.

        • Matt M says:

          5% is a pretty damn big swing.

          That’s a wider range than the difference between John Kerry/Hillary Clinton and Obama 2008.

        • albatross11 says:

          Yeah, it seems like very few people could shift an election 5% short of massive terrorism or assassination or some such awful thing. Assuming we’re not talking about either of those, what’s left?

          a. The candidates could probably throw the election by saying or doing something super-offensive[1] just before election day. Maybe the running mates, as well.

          b. High-ranking campaign aides could probably cause or help along some kind of unforced error, though it’s not so clear how big that would have to be to shift an election 5%. If Hillary’s collapse on 9/11 had been followed by just the wrong sort of PR response, maybe? (Like outraged denials that it was anyone’s business why she collapsed, an angry attack on journalists who asked the question, an “accidental” mention of a possible stroke quickly corrected, etc.)

          c. Anyone who had actual serious dirt on the candidate could release it to change the election outcome. Though again, this needs to be pretty big. Trump paying off a pornstar, probably not enough–Trump financing half a dozen abortions for his various lovers, maybe. John Edwards’ scandal would have done it[3].

          d. A really high-profile journalist at a high-profile publication might manage to make something up that was plausible-looking and damning enough to change the election outcome. OTOH, this did not work out so well for Walter Cronkite, despite his towering reputation and high-profile position[2]. And even if it worked, it would probably come apart on the journalist soon afterwards and end his career.

          e. If you were the FBI director and just the right information came in at the right time, you might manage to make just the right announcements to swing the election somehow. Probably even the guy you (inadvertently) got elected would can your ass for it, though.

          Who else?

          [1] Offensive to their voters, perhaps not offensive to you personally. And this would have to be really scary or offensive–not some comment that could kinda-sorta be taken in an offensive way, but a complete meltdown on TV, or saying a bunch of stuff that would intentionally drive all their voters away. Imagine the Republican candidate saying in an interview “You know, honestly, we’d be better off without a second amendment, and I’d like to work toward a country with no privately-owned firearms.”

          [2] Cronkite looks to have been fooled himself, probably because he really, really wanted to believe. I suspect that’s a very common situation for major journalistic f–kups.

          [3] A female ex-staffer and a male ex-staffer were living together with “their” child, but it turned out Edwards was paying them off to pretend it was theirs–really, it was his child with the ex-staffer.

          • johan_larson says:

            Let’s keep in mind that the 5% difference is how much a candidate’s probability of election rises or falls, not his lead in the polls. A candidate who is ahead in the polls by 20% has more than a 20% chance of victory; in fact, his victory is almost assured. So the 5% is significant, but not a huge swing.

          • Matt M says:

            But “probability of election” is a speculative and unknowable value.

            Did Comey’s announcements about Hillary’s e-mails decrease her odds of election by 5%? How can we know? Especially when we know that the oddsmakers wildly overestimated her chances throughout the entire process? (well, we don’t *know*, it’s possible they were completely correct and we just witnessed a 1-in-20 event or some such thing)

          • Don P. says:

            I presume you mean Dan Rather, not Walter Cronkite.

        • 10240 says:

          One person can build a truck bomb that demolishes a major building. Detonating such a bomb in the midst of an election should meaningfully swing the election

          … especially if one of the candidates is in the building.

      • sty_silver says:

        I mean, of course they could. All Obama would have had to do was to pull down his pants during a debate, and you got your 5% swing.

        • Aapje says:

          Upwards?

        • Matt M says:

          I’m not even sure Trump’s comment about shooting someone in broad daylight was wrong.

          I myself had made similar comments about Obama during his Presidency (that he could murder someone on live TV and very few of his supporters would stop supporting him)

          • Some Troll's Serious Discussion Alt says:

            Having a bunch of innocent people killed for various reasons is an inherent part of carrying out the day to day duties of being president of the United States.That Trump has the moral courage to look at least one of them in the eye as he personally pulls the trigger is a ringing endorsement! Do you really want some liberal or cuckservative who just picks up the phone and erases people by the villagefull but doesn’t have the balls to be within a thousand miles?

          • AG says:

            insert Cheney joke here

    • John Schilling says:

      Here’s a question. Who is the least powerful person who can meaningfully affect the outcome of the next US presidential election?

      Lee Harvey Oswald was basically an inept loser in every other aspect of life, but he had a profound impact on JFK’s electoral prospects in 1964.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        There’s a question on Quora I had read just the other day that mentioned how this is virtually impossible to pull off today. Most of the answers seemed to say that no assassination has succeeded since 1963 because the Secret Service has gotten that much better.

        I’m not sure if I believe that – the sample size seems too small for me to definitively say they’ve reduced their error rate relative to assassins’ efficacy. OTOH, there have indeed been multiple attempts since then, including apparently many more after JFK than before, according to my brief search, and none have worked. Sample size seems to be roughly twenty.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Most of the answers seemed to say that no assassination has succeeded since 1963 because the Secret Service has gotten that much better.

          Hinckley only failed by the narrowest of margins, so I suspect there’s a large helping of luck involved.

          • CatCube says:

            They’ve changed their procedures dramatically since Hinckley, to where nobody is on a rope line without being screened. This drives politicians crazy, because they legitimately* love rope lines. The following is my recollection from “Inside the Secret Service” by Ronald Kessler:

            The Secret Service apparently started out only screening people on rope lines that were near the president, where they would plan on shaking hands, but didn’t bother with ones in the distance where people were there not to shake hands but to only get a glimpse of the President. Bill Clinton then drove the Secret Service crazy, because he’d walk to any rope line in his field of vision, even the non-screened ones. After the Secret Service failed to convince him to stop doing this, they started screening every person who would come within sight of him, which is where I believe their procedure still stands.

            * I mean in the sense that (based on the little reading I’ve done) most Presidents and hopefuls thereof seem to enjoy it for its own sake–not merely for cynical political calculations. The descriptions I’ve heard is that Clinton especially would “come alive” when out shaking hands in a way that he didn’t elsewhere.

          • John Schilling says:

            Hinckley only failed by the narrowest of margins, so I suspect there’s a large helping of luck involved.

            And Oswald was only captured by the narrowest of margins, which I doubt would be the case today. So, luck and procedures both.

            This isn’t the place to discuss Presidential assassination tactics, but there’s only so much that can be done to protect someone whose job requires so many public appearances. I think any reasonably intelligent person with the resources and credible persona of an average middle-class American would have a good chance of assassinating a president or presidential candidate, if they set their mind to it and if they didn’t mind a near-certainty of being caught or killed in the process.

  22. mobile says:

    Scott recently asked what would happen if the police chief publicly commits that from now on, he’s going to prioritize solving muggings over solving burglaries? No one is sure.

    But thanks to a police chief in Florida, we now know what happens when you prioritize solving burglaries!

  23. HeelBearCub says:

    I’m just surprised that the original Conflict vs. Mistake post did not include the word religion, and did not mention, say, abortion or (even better) homosexual relationships.

  24. albatross11 says:

    Quillette piece by a self-described ex-online-mobber who repented after he was purged from his movement.

    I suspect that the mindset he describes is a common mode for human brains and societies to fall into–one you can find in a lot of times and places. What beliefs are heretical and what measures may be done against them changes over time and place, but the basic mental/social machinery seems very similar. Today it’s secret Jews or heretics, tomorrow it’s secret Communists, the next day, it’s secret racists. But always it’s secret shameful evil beliefs that threaten the community and must be rooted out.

    This makes me suspect that having a predefined program available to help you fit into this kind of social environment must have been useful for our ancestors for a very long time–that would explain why you see it all over the world, from many different cultural and genetic environments.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Have you read any of Rene Girard?

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I think his story is plausible, but I wonder what his well-paid job in the social justice industry was.

    • Aapje says:

      @albatross11

      Think away the police and other bits of modern civilization and instead imagine a (small) society which is faced with challenges and various ideas how to solve them, where the worst option is often to spread the resources thin. So if most people and/or the most respected/capable people decide to do A, they need to be able to make the people who prefer B go along with A, rather than lose those resources by having them do B, or having to kill them.

      Hence the ability and willingness to shame (or worse) people into submission.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Conversion stories are untrustworthy by nature. Pseudonymous ones even more so. Quillette is reasonably trustworthy, but not THAT trustworthy.

      If real, it’s notable that he thinks his story does not identify him.

      • albatross11 says:

        Yeah, I have no idea whether he’s telling the truth about his story. It’s quite possible that someone at Quillette verified it, but I don’t know that, and if so, I don’t know how or how carefully they verified it. And Quillette has a pretty strong editorial position against the sort of woke social-media-mobbing movements that this guy purports to represent, so you could imagine them wanting to believe they had a repentant social-media-mobber confessing his sins. (They publish a lot of the sort of people that the woke social-media-mobbing types either have mobbed successfully or wish they could hound off the public stage, but their target’s making too much money off their Youtube channel, public appearances, and lobster-oriented self-help advice books.)

    • Well... says:

      Imagine you live in a city with a professional sports team that is potentially going to be bought or sold in a way such that the team will “move” to some distant place. There is an organization lobbying to keep the team in the city, and you see bumper stickers with this organization’s motto every-damn-where.

      You personally don’t care about the sports team and are pretty sure its presence in the city is probably a net drain on the economy, as most top-tier professional sports teams are*, and you’d happily support a counter-lobbying organization dedicated to getting the team to leave.

      But you know that if you put a bumper sticker to that effect on your car, the likelihood of it causing you problems would be enormous, so you definitely don’t do that. And, if you were out having some beers with your friends and the bar announced it was giving half the proceeds that night to the “keep the team here” organization, you wouldn’t refuse to spend any money there. None of this makes you a coward. You think, sports teams just aren’t that important anyway.

      Now, if an alien came down and saw your behavior but somehow knew your baseline opinion was that you didn’t really want the team to stay, it might think you’re afflicted with mob mentality.

      *Wait, is this really true? I’ve heard it since forever and assumed it was true but never really checked it out for myself.

      • Matt M says:

        My understanding is that it’s not that sports teams, in and of themselves, are net drains on the economy.

        It’s that the “economic development” promised by stadiums in order to justify massive usage of public funds, tax breaks, etc. never materialize. And as it currently stands, most sports teams benefit from such things, because if their home city doesn’t offer them, they can credibly threaten to move to another city who will (not that they often have to, usually cities don’t hesitate to fork over whatever the team owner demands)

        I have a tough time imagining that a sports team fully funded by private contributions could be a “drain” on the economy in any meaningful way.

        • Well... says:

          OK, gotcha. So, this massive usage of public funds could be called a “drain” since it takes money that might be better spent somewhere else, and in this forking over of whatever the team owner demands in exchange for economic development that never materializes, it’s conceivable that many cities are left much worse off by pro sports teams than they would have been otherwise. Does that sound right?

          • Matt M says:

            Yes – but once again, it’s not the sports team that makes them worse off, it’s the giving of public funds towards a promise of development that is essentially a giant fraud.

            I imagine the same thing often happens with industrial parks, corporate development projects, etc. It’s hardly a unique to sports problem, sports just gets a lot more press than other things.

            Any sort of economic enterprise will provide net benefits if privately financed, and almost certainly net losses if publicly financed.

          • Well... says:

            The difference is, people don’t get tribal over keeping an industrial park in town.

          • Nick says:

            Matt may be relying here on these Atlantic articles about the NFL. From the second one:

            The league’s primary subsidies flow to construction and operation of stadia. All are at least partially publicly funded: some, entirely so. Judith Grant Long, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, estimates that taxpayers provide about 70 percent of the cost of building and operating the fields where NFL teams play. Yet the NFL’s owners keep more than 90 percent of revenue generated at their subsidized facilities, while AT&T, CBS, Comcast/NBC, Disney/ESPN, Fox, Verizon, and Yahoo profit through transmission of the copyrighted NFL images produced in publicly subsidized stadia.

            The NFL is on the dole in numerous other respects. Most of the league’s facilities either pay no property taxes (such as Texas’s AT&T Stadium, where the Cowboys perform) or are taxed at a far lower rate than comparable local businesses (such as New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, where the Giants and Jets cavort). Stadium construction deals often involve significant gifts of land from the public for NFL use (such as Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, where the “San Francisco” 49ers play).

            Hidden costs may include city or county government paying electricity, water, and sewer charges for a stadium (such as First Energy Stadium in Cleveland, where the Browns perform), the city paying for a new electronic scoreboard out of “emergency” funds (ditto First Energy) or the issuance of tax-free bonds that divert investors’ money away from school, road, and mass-transit infrastructure (Hamilton County, Ohio, issued tax-free bonds to fund the stadium where the Cincinnati Bengals play, and has chronic deficits for school and infrastructure needs as a result)….

            Documents supporting the Inglewood plan claim that a $1.9 billion NFL stadium, mostly funded by taxpayers, would cause $3.8 billion in local economic expansion. This “magic multiplier” fails the giggle test. Many studies have shown that for any dollar of civic investment, building roads, bridges, mass transit, and other infrastructure has far more multiplier effect than building NFL fields.

            Baseball fields can pass a multiplier test, because they cost so much less than NFL stadia and are used so much more often. Professional football fields are a capital-investment double whammy—the dearest kind of sports facility to build, then used the least. Glendale, Arizona, where the most recent Super Bowl was played, funded most of the stadium in which the Arizona Cardinals perform, after receiving magic-multiplier promises. Today the city has trouble hiring police officers and EMTs because 40 percent of its budget goes to retiring stadium debt. The promised magical economic boom did not occur.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            The difference is, people don’t get tribal over keeping an industrial park in town.

            Wait, what? As soon as I read this, I instantly thought of the group of people employed by said park (and their families), vs. the groups that want to replace that park with something else (environmentalists, rival businesspeople, etc.).

            Of course, I don’t think that’s what @Well… meant by tribal. Said park employees aren’t attending park events wearing bodypaint of the park logo or anything like that. So, maybe stadiums provide non-monetary benefits? Namely, a tribe for people to be in? How would we measure the utility of that? People who stay in town and cite team pride as a reason?

          • Nornagest says:

            The difference is, people don’t get tribal over keeping an industrial park in town.

            You’ve never lived in a small town, have you? Development politics can get incredibly tribal.

          • Well... says:

            I’ve lived in a small town but not one that was going through this kind of thing, at least not while I lived there. I can definitely envision a small town getting up in arms about a non-sports organization that’s considering relocating, especially if they employ lots of people from the town.

            However, I currently live in a fairly large city that is going through this kind of thing with a sports team, and that’s more the situation I’m referring to. What’s important is, it’s a situation where the Thing leaving probably wouldn’t be so bad for the city, it’s just people’s loyalty to the Thing that makes them want it to remain there.

            When I said “tribal” that was maybe not the best term. What I meant to point to was, if an office park “leaves”, the people who complain will be just the people who work there. You won’t see ubiquitous bumper stickers, window decals, license plate holders, T-shirts, hats, keychains, billboards, etc. all over City X reading “Save the Office Park” or “Keep the Office Park in City X”.

          • Matt M says:

            Well…,

            I was thinking in the other direction. When a corporation promises to move in if only the town will give them a really sweet deal, things can get pretty contentious pretty fast.

            Famously, they bulldozed Suzette Kelo’s little pink house to make way for some fancy development project that was sure to raise all kinds of awesome tax revenue for the city – but now stands as an empty field, because the development simply never came. I’m willing to bet that got pretty contentious.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Oddly enough, Kelo’s house survived that case.

      • albatross11 says:

        Well…:

        This is a nice example of something that ought to (maybe does) have a name.

        It seems like the most important thing about this situation is that there’s some issue X for which some people have really strong feelings, and others don’t care very much. Maybe that’s using the right pronouns for transpeople, or closing down some libraries and hospitals so we can afford to keep the local football team, or saying “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” or whatever.

        The second thing you need is that the people who care a lot about the issue are willing/able to be very vocal about it, and will give anyone who takes the other side in public some pushback. Maybe that means just being treated rudely by X-supporters, maybe it means an occasional extreme X-supporter punches you out, maybe it means an organized campaign of harrassment by X-supporters.

        And third, you need for the people who don’t care that much to broadly be unwilling (or unable) to push back on the pro-X response. That might happen because the community is 90% pro-X and they’re scary when they’re mad, or because only a tiny minority is pro-X, but the issue doesn’t matter very much to most people and the pro-X people are kind-of annoying and loud, and who needs the extra hassle?

        I also suspect there’s a kind of society-wide coordination that happens here. When the pro-X folks are really vocal and the anti-X (or X-indifferent) people are quiet, it can be hard to know how many people really support X. A widespread pushback against loud pro-X people might cause a lot of anti-X people to realize they can get away with telling the pro-X-ers to go pound sand. A very public exercise of pro-X power clobbering a vocal anti-X-er signals everyone that pushing back on X is a bad idea. (Something like this happens in dictatorships, when everyone suddenly realizes that everyone *else* agrees with them that the dictator is an idiot and suddenly, the secret police are outnumbered 20:1 by rioting citizens.)

  25. Deiseach says:

    Another historical find in the Boyne valley.

    • Aapje says:

      Dr Clíodhna Lionáin, Devenish’s lead archaeologist for the project said:

      Ni!

    • John Schilling says:

      Said Dr. Randolph Carter of Miskatonic University, “Whatever is buried here, these people clearly felt the need to put a ginormous stone slab over the tomb. And there are portentous symbols carved into the stone, but since we haven’t been able to translate any of them we’re just calling them ‘art’. But on with the fun, and let’s break into this crypt! I can’t wait to see what awesome stuff is inside!”

  26. thcloak says:

    I remember having read a parable about a bored barista who stops serving coffee, and expects his regulars to keep coming for the morning chatter. He subsequently feels betrayed when people stop showing up.
    It was part of a lengthy article on a bias of sorts… very possible it’s Scott’s, though it might be one of the old ones at Livejournal. Googling didn’t help. Anyone find it familiar?

    • Charles F says:

      I’m almost completely sure it was Yudkowsky, not Scott. And if it helps jog anybody else’s memory, there was also a rich guy who stopped spending money on his dates, and a professor who stopped their class from being worth credits.

    • blacktrance says:

      It was on Eliezer’s Facebook. Link

      • thcloak says:

        Great! Thank you 🙂

      • carvenvisage says:

        What a nihilisticly depressing way to look at life.

        Also, on an argumentative level it he just sneaks his assumption in when he jumps straight from professional relationships where someone is explicitly paid to give a service to personal ones. Those are obviously different, the first two are by definition transactional. And then to add gall to surreptitious snakelike audacity he makes them sexual ones too.

        It’s presented like a natural gradient, but there is no gradient, the whole purpose of the gradient idea is to disguise this non-sequitur of a leap from transactions are naturally transactional to sex is naturally transactional.

        Well, further evidence he hasn’t outgrown his early heinlein based brain damage.

        • quanta413 says:

          I’m going to ignore the sex part, because that just adds another layer of complications. And because I got tired of reading Yudkowsky’s essay long before he finished that section. It’s like he’ll never use 100 words where 1000 words will do. I suppose I have a similar problem although maybe not quite as bad.

          Are you saying it’s nihilistic to believe that friendships are transactional (in the sense of involving mutual exchange not in the sense of being a business)? How do you prefer to think of friendship? I’d probably sort most relationships into having very strong components of either “socially obligated ties by tradition” or “transactional”, but I wouldn’t say there’s a super clear distinction. And rarely you get really (un)lucky and deal with someone who interacts with people based more upon some sort of rules based system with little regard for exchange. But I’ve met very few people (maybe 0) who I’d put mostly in this last category.

          • LesHapablap says:

            I’m the same way in that I regard my relationships as transactional. For example, if someone does a few favors for me I feel strongly that I owe them, and worry about harming the relationship if I don’t return the favor. I used to think this was normal and healthy, but I have come to realize that it is likely very immature. And if you can stand Mark Manson’s writing style:

            https://markmanson.net/how-to-grow-up

            Transactional/rule-based values rob you of the trust, intimacy, and love necessary to remain an emotionally healthy and happy human being. This is because, when you view all relationships and actions as a means to an end, you will suspect an ulterior motive in everything that happens and everything anyone ever does to you.

          • Aapje says:

            @LesHapablap

            I think that it is both true that relationships are actually far more transactional than most people perceive them to be, but also that because people are different, there is no objective ‘fairness.’

            If Bob likes to make dinner and his girlfriend Mary really likes to have dinner made for her, then the benefits of Bob making dinner for Mary is far higher than the benefits of Mary making dinner for Bob. So an optimal quid-pro-quo is then likely to be Bob always making dinner and Mary doing something for Bob that he really likes. This doesn’t necessarily involve (large) sacrifice on her part.

            Due to the impossibility to calculate utils or costs objectively, the usual behavior by couples is a subtle power struggle, where the partners signal their desires and try to get them met, while making sacrifices that they consider fair & reasonable. The best matches couples have partners who are able to meet the desires of the other at low cost to themselves, so the positive sum elements of the relationship are far larger than the zero sum elements.

            It is very common for people to identify and see the value in taking on the zero sum burdens, so they can get the positive sum benefits from the relationships. For example, it is very typical advice that you have to work on a relationship to keep it healthy.

            I disagree with Manson that recognizing the mechanisms at work necessarily results in a cynical outlook that prohibits trust, intimacy and love. A lot of people have low self-esteem. If they recognize that they bring value to their partner’s life and that person is willing to take on burdens for them, this can create a very healthy level of self-confidence. That seems way more healthy than treating the other person as some magical fountain of love and inexplicable behavior.

            A person who truly believes that there is no quid-pro-quo will be very susceptible to either become narcissistic in the relationship or to become victim of narcissistic behavior by their partner.

            I don’t think that Manson truly believes what he says, but that because he is neurotypical, human power struggles come naturally to him. That gives him the luxury of ignoring what he and his partner are doing and believing in the fiction that unconditional love exists.

          • carvenvisage says:

            First a technical thing, I didn’t say “most relationships”, I said personal relationships. -i.e. actual friends, close family, other family you actually like, possibly or possibly not who you hang around with at lunch, etc.

            And rarely you get really (un)lucky and deal with someone who interacts with people based more upon some sort of rules based system with little regard for exchange.

            Maybe I misunderstood something and these people are not so much boyfriend and girlfriend as “fuck-acquaintances”, but it’s really quite simple: if you’re friends with someone, the idea is that you like them and want them to be happy. -That’s the rule, the whole byzantine labyrinth.

             

            It’s not extremely easy to explain why, but I think it is built into human nature:

            One reason would be because humans have a limited capacity for bonding, so if you act like (what society traditionally recognises as-) someone’s friend, but you (in all good will and innocence) view it as a pleasant mutually beneficial arrangement, where neither of you ever need to see one another again, then maybe they’ll end up expending their capacity to built relationships of reciprocal loyalty in that time without doing so, and additionally at some point suffer some backlash.

            Which reminds me: bear in mind that I’m not the best person to explain basic-wholesome-natural-human things like friendship, -I’m the most introverted person I know by far, and the reason I’m aware of this last thing I mentioned is not because I have ever suffered this backlash, but because I notice how comparatively soft and cuddly other people are, and try to avoid that they mistake me for their friend. So any random 9 year old girl could probably give a far clearer and more direct explanation than I can. Or perhaps reading harry potter. -Consider me like one of the four blind guys with a hand on the elephant.. except that instead I’m the half deaf guy relaying their confused report over a very poor line.

            Anyway, humans do naturally “bond” with one another, -one kid goes up to the other and says I like you, or maybe in a fit of exuberance he punches him on the nose and after an enjoyable scuffle they come to a mutual understanding, -and boom, friends for life. (sometimes).

            -Of course, not everyone has to have the same propensity to form bonds with other people, and it’s perfectly okay to be a solitary person or a social butterfly, but just because that’s perfectly valid too doesn’t make it friendship.

            -And the propensity is generally quite high in the human population.

             

            tl;dr I suppose what is nihilistic (that is, other than the shell-game snakelike propogandising of one’s sexual mores, as The Immutable Truth, like a cynical predator), is that not even these people’s intergender-wrestling-and-intimate-talks-partners are their friends.

            -And they seem to think they are, -friendship is like being a professor or a barista, right? (Transactional relationships are transactional. translactional relationships are relationships. Therefore all relationships are transactional, Quod erat demonstratum, bow, curtain fall, thank you and goodnight.)

            edit: actually what is probably more depressing is that the atttitude is essentially hostile and jealous of good will. “I do this, now you owe me. I do this so you owe me so I get what I want”. Rather than “I do this because I like you, you do things for me because you like me”, we both get what we want without having to enter this cunning/grasping/conspiring mindset.

             

            There’s reserving friendship for very few people, -that’s obviously fine, there’s rejecting it altogether -one can respect that too, but this seems like the capacity for ordinary friendship- just liking someone, wanting the best, has died in them altogether, or was never born, and they are trying to raise this lack up as something wise and to be admired. Sorry, it’s probably not your fault, but don’t proselytize your sickness.

             

            “Life is inevitably transactional!” Well sure, in some bizarre technical sense- If you doing well makes me exorbitantly pleased, then “really all I’m doing is fulfilling my own selfish desires by supporting you”, but that’s a bit fucking different from systematically grasping after higher social status, free meals etc by being a hanger-on of the wealthy and powerful, on the basis that it’s more rational to tie-break thus when things are otherwise even.

             

            The reason not to do things like tie-break on that basis isn’t so much that it’s cruel or immoral, -though for the record it is free-riding (it’s not too harmful for some people to do, but if everyone did that would suck), -it’s that it’s degrading to go around thinking like that.

            How can I squeeze the most out of this, how can I sell my body (but all things are transactional!) to the highest bidder?

            What Eliezer calls “reaching up towards” is more usually known as grasping, and what’s wrong with it is not primarily that it’s immoral, -though it is a bit, it’s that it’s 1. ugly 2. degrading (to the person doing it) and to a lesser extent 3. free riding.

             

            did you know that so called “alpha” and “beta” wolves, -the whole source of that dumbass meme, are usually just parent and offspring wolves. -Wolves apparently mate for life and the “packs” they travel around in are usually just families.

            This advocacy strikes me the same way the “everyone is alpha or beta” did way way back when that started to become popular. I can explain something of what is objectively wrong with it,–but what’s fundamentally wrong with it is that it’s blatantly someone’s mental sickness or at best limitation that they’re trying to push on other people for selfish ends. Whether that’s trying to preemptively prevent criticism of behaviour “I’m just alpha, that’s my immutable personality” “Sex is inherently transactional, like coffee shops, why wouldn’t you fuck me because I’m famous? -That’s irrational”, or merely for the speaker to convince themself there is nothing wrong with them/that everyone else is just as bad. (I’m not saying it is intentionally the former- I am serious when I say “heinlein based brain damage”)

          • quanta413 says:

            @carvenvisage

            it’s really quite simple: if you’re friends with someone, the idea is that you like them and want them to be happy. -That’s the rule, the whole byzantine labyrinth.

            I feel like this is sort of true in the sense of how things might feel but doesn’t actually explain how friendship works. It gives no ideas of duty or obligations. It doesn’t help me decide how to balance my friend’s happiness against my moral beliefs etc. Friendship should be roughly symmetric for one thing. If you like someone and want them to be happy, but they don’t like you, then you aren’t friends. And it doesn’t explain how people become friends in the first place either.

            If a friend suddenly stopped doing something important for me that they had been doing for a while and nothing else changed, I’m probably going to like them less. I will then be less likely to do stuff for them. And so on and so forth until the friendship obtains a new equilibrium. So even if there isn’t a literal quid pro quo, human psychology sustains mutual exchange but over a longer time horizon and with much less well specified commitments.

            For example, friendships tend to die when people move away for this reason. It takes a lot more effort to maintain a friendship at a long distance and so it has to be really worth it to expend that effort.

            actually what is probably more depressing is that the atttitude is essentially hostile and jealous of good will. “I do this, now you owe me. I do this so you owe me so I get what I want”. Rather than “I do this because I like you, you do things for me because you like me”, we both get what we want without having to enter this cunning/grasping/conspiring mindset.

            That’s not what I got from it, although I got bored less 1/3 of the way through the last scenario and basically skipped to the last sentence. I see a distinct lack of owing in the story. I agree with beleester’s interpretation that the moral is that you can’t just trade on any specific part of a friendship. So what’s happening is that if you stop doing something with or for someone, they like you less and you probably lose out on some other unrelated thing with them. They’ll find someone who fulfills that need and then they’ll like that person and do things with them. And since a person’s time is finite, you’ll get less time on average. Not always, maybe some other thing will get bumped first if it’s an even worse deal, but that’s not the way to bet.

            I am serious when I say “heinlein based brain damage”

            I’ve never read Heinlein so I have no idea what you’re talking about.

          • “No man is so wealthy that he objects to receiving a gift in exchange for his gift.”
            (Havamal)

          • carvenvisage says:

            You and beelester are missing the forest for the trees, seizing on the nominal unobjectionable idea (motte) that “it’s okay for friendship to be transactional (to an extent)”. No shit! If you think that’s all he’s saying then it’s no wonder you think he’s wasting a thousand words where a hundred could do.

            The whole point of the essay is its application to sexual relationships. He “builds” straight from definitionally, emblematically, transactional relationships, to [-abrupt transition-] lecturing people about how their misgivings or discomfort with unusually transactional sexual relationships is contrary to reason and nature.

            He does not cover a varied sample of relationship types, like he might if he was interested in transactionality more generally. He goes straight from professional relationships, to dates, to harems, and it’s only in the last two, (-and really the last one), that he says anything new.

            The rest is a preamble, a false crescendo. He presents it like a smooth progression, but that is the opposite of what it is. Like the joke;

            Spell “roast.”
            Spell “coast.”
            Spell “most.”
            What do you put in a toaster?

            (bread).

            -It’s a pure bamboozle, using the appearance of progression to justify a controversial case by cases that are so obvious they’re not even questions.

            _

            Lets take a look at case number 3 (because it’s less controversial)-

            Wall street guy is an exagerated caricature of someone who is disillusioned when he realises that a relationship was more transactional than he thought. What makes him ridiculous is that he keeps wearing this 4000$ business suit to the mcdonald dates, which of course comes across as a “fuck you lol”. If he wore casual clothes to the dates it would not be offensive to be wealthy and go on a low key date.

            It is the fact that the suit announces him to be a guy who likes ostentatious displays of wealth (or appears to) that makes the lack of the ostentatious displays of wealth absurd and even offensive.

            His disillusionment is not ridiculous in itself (unless perhaps in how he failed to notice it before). -But his emotional reaction is perfectly legitimate. He didn’t realise how much it was about his wealth, now he does, and he doesn’t like it so much.

            Where does he go from there? The dichotomy he presents is: Either the guy wears his 4000$ suits to macdonalds and calls all the previous women harpies, or he grows up and realises that all relationships are inherently transactional and he’s a big baby for thinking they could be less transactional or perhaps transactional in terms of his humour persona or personality rather than his wealth.

            When the guy could just take off the suit.

            And the guy’s lamenting that obviously the “women don’t care about him at all” is just Yudkowsky putting words in that position’s mouth. The equivalent of having your opponent’s position represented by a guy with a hitler moustache.

            TL:DR The whole thing is just malicious demagoguery.

            And that’s before we get onto what he’s trying to push by this sophistry and why. -He has a lot of admirers. “women, give up your misgivings, shallow transactional relationships are the only kind that’s real” is a very clear bait set on a very clear hook.

            _

        • beleester says:

          I think I took the opposite moral from you. His argument wasn’t really that sex is transactional, it’s that social interactions come as a package deal and trying to break them down into individual transactions is weird and unacceptable to most people.

          If there is a transaction here, it’s one of those weird Platonic social contracts that we never actually signed but was created by mutual expectations. And society’s expectations can be dumb or shallow, but you still can’t renegotiate a social contract all by yourself.

          Not how I’d choose to model it, but maybe it’s useful for some people.

  27. Joeleee says:

    With the discussion of sleep etc on here, does anyone have any recommendations for good dawn simulators? The things I’m looking for (if it’s possible):

    – The ability to customise the length of the ‘dawn’. I wake up significantly before my SO, so would love to have it start a little when I get up, but be properly bright when she does.
    – No noise or alarm when it reaches brightness. I would still want to use my own separate alarm.

    If anyone has any suggestions that either cover the above, or just work well, that would be awesome!

    • carvenvisage says:

      the windows 10 inbuilt one (“night light”) seems to cover those.

      • Lapsed Pacifist says:

        You have to leave a monitor on in the sleeping room. That might be an issue for me. I find that Win10 sleep/wake functions are spotty anyway, but the convenience of your suggestion might lead to my trying to set it up today for tomorrow.

    • Carey Underwood says:

      Any of the smart bulbs can gradually dim and such on a schedule; leds by their nature require micromanagement of their current consumption or they self destruct, and by the time you’ve put a microprocessor on it, literally no further components are needed to vary the brightness millisecond to millisecond.

  28. Typhoon Jim says:

    I think the problem I have with conflict vs mistake is that there are two sorts of truth with which one is concerned when it comes to understanding the world, and a conflict versus repairing a mistake are responses to each kind of truth. There are truths like mathematical axioms and physical laws that tend to be self executing and are open to experiment. Philosophical concepts can also be this sort of truth (they arise from contemplation.) Then there are truths like “that guy stole my wallet” or “France won the world cup” which are not in themselves open to analysis as stated. These are jump balls that could by their own rules have gone either way before the fact, and very little about stating them helps me in the same way that, say, a mathematical identity does. These truths are unalterable (since they already happened) but come from the interactions of people and reality.

    Any coherent political concept has both these truths in play (remember a document starting with “we hold these truths to be self evident”?) but will use them as their purposes demand (said document didn’t just stop there, but went on to define a huge number of contingent systems.) As such I think mistake vs conflict is valuable but only in regard to each sort of truth, and that they are appropriate to what is being addressed. If you can get everyone to agree that something self evident is in play, then you can work with a mistake. If what you have is contingency, then conflict is in order. Also, if both sides can’t agree on truths, they will find themselves in conflict by default regardless of who is mistaken.

  29. Paul Brinkley says:

    Mike Godwin wrote an opinion piece last month on his eponymous law that I think would appeal to SSCers. I didn’t see it mentioned in any OT since then.

    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-godwin-godwins-law-20180624-story.html

  30. ADifferentAnonymous says:

    NYT has a piece today arguing that charter schools have had clear positive results in post-Katrina New Orleans that, unlike other charter outcomes, aren’t confounded by selection bias.

    Is this for real?

  31. Swami says:

    Honestly, every discussion of the conflict vs mistake dichotomy causes my mind to go numb. It comes across as gibberish. I think it needs to be tossed out completely. It doesn’t need a slight editing, but to be pulled out at the roots and started anew.

    May I suggest the following dichotomy. A zero sum vs positive sum view of the world. I would not divide this into groups of people or political camps, but into ways of thinking which we all lapse in and out of.

    In our zero sum mentality, the key to success is to get a bigger piece of the pie for ourselves and our group. We assume we already know how to make the pie, the key to success is to get a bigger slice. Since others are competing with us for these slices, it is essential that we do anything to weaken them and strengthen ourselves. Indeed, it makes sense to destroy their slices so as to weaken them so they can’t use their vigor to take our slices. Dialogue is a trick, something we use to get a bigger slice, and something they use to rationalize their slices. Fairness is an argument to rationalize more slices for us, and which they use as an argument for their added slices.

    In a zero sum battle, a zero sum mindset is pretty useful.

    The alternative mindset though is a positive sum one. The key for success is to grow the pie, thus creating more and bigger and better slices for all. Easier said than done though. How do we grow the pie in an entropic, Malthusian universe which is working against us? The focus within this mindset is discovery, trial, experimentation, rational discussion, debate, cooperation and constructive competition with positive externalities. Within the positive sum mentality, we recognize that growing the pie, though extremely difficult, is possible, if we can just figure out how.

    Once we set the dichotomy between two ways of thinking (rather than types of people), it becomes clear that within each way of thinking, the other way is a threat. If you are in a zero sum battle, then you really should suspect the positive sum rhetoric of the other group is a trick to rationalize their bigger slice. It probably is.

    But in a positive sum game, the zero sum mindset itself becomes the enemy or in previous terms, the mistake. It takes our sight off growing the pie into endless zero and usually negative sum battles over slices. The first step in creating a positive sum game is to get everyone to quit treating it like a zero sum game.

    I suggest dropping the conflict vs mistake theory completely and rewriting it as a dichotomy between two useful (in the right time and place) ways of thinking.

    I will end by suggesting at a higher meta level, our positive sum mindset needs to win at least over the longer term. If we treat the world as zero sum, we have already lost.

    • Aapje says:

      A zero sum vs positive sum view of the world.

      That’s what I already argued for when the original post came out.

      The complexity is that:
      – Most situations have both zero sum and positive sum elements
      – You can in theory always achieve the best outcome for yourself by going with the zero sum solution, even in a (mostly) positive sum situation, but
      – Going for the zero sum solution usually means that the other side will fight you hard, which often leads to stalemates, unless you are much stronger than the other side, in which case you can oppress the other side.
      – So this means that it is crucial to maintain a decent ability to fight back, even if only to make sure that the other side decides that a positive sum solution coupled with compromises for the zero sum elements results in the best outcome for them, rather than oppressing you.
      – Lots of people are dumb Utopian, tribal people, who are not naturally tolerant and who only recognize that the other side can fight back when the bullets starts flying, so
      – You generally need to keep a constant low level ‘war’ going to keep these people in check
      – Even people who are relatively tolerant and not so tribal are of mediocre intelligence and thus cannot grasp the mistakes, which causes them to (logically) fall back to zero sum solutions.

      • albatross11 says:

        One core idea I got from the original post, though, was that mistake theorists allowed for the idea that their ideas might be wrong, and so they might need to work together with the other side to get to a better picture of reality. Maybe that’s not a required part of the idea, but it seems important–if we’re disagreeing on how to best build rockets to get to Mars, then scorched-Earth tactics to make sure my side wins are probably a pretty bad way to actually get the rocket to work. On the other hand, if we’re in a true zero-sum situation where either my tribe or your tribe gets the goodies and we’re trying to decide where the goodies will end up, then there’s no difference of opinion to be resolved.

        [ETA] I think even when we are in a zero-sum conflict, there are usually non-zero-sum surrounding areas that allow us to have some level of negotiation and coordination and to benefit from accepting some limits on our tactics. The classic example here is the notion that nobody should be able to get the other side put into jail for holding the wrong opinion–with the underlying assumption that this protection may apply to your side at some point in the future. But similarly, when we’re trying to decide how we will split up the goodies between our tribes, we’ve both got an incentive to avoid costly open warfare or conflict at a level that would destroy the goodies we want to win for our tribe. That’s not mistake theory at all–I don’t start thinking I can actually convince your tribe’s side to favor giving my tribe all the goodies using sweet reason–but it’s still not a zero-sum approach to the world.

        Note that there are a lot of examples of opposite sides in some very serious conflicts (including WW2 and the Cold War) recognizing some limits on warfare, presumably because both sides thought it was better for their side to do so.

      • carvenvisage says:

        You can in theory always achieve the best outcome for yourself by going with the zero sum solution, even in a (mostly) positive sum situation, but

        Given perfect acting and subterfuge, never inadvertently revealing this intention, and dodging discoveries by random bad luck. -Presumably not a theory of human beings.

      • LesHapablap says:

        – You can in theory always achieve the best outcome for yourself by going with the zero sum solution, even in a (mostly) positive sum situation, but

        In theory the positive sum solution will always be better. In negotiation, it is vital to understand the opponent’s interests, and to understand your own interests, so that you can look for ways to create value through the trade.

        The example often given in negotiation textbooks is two people arguing over the last orange at the supermarket. They can fairly agree to split the orange (zero sum) or they can agree that one takes the orange and pays a fee to the other (zero sum). But when they communicate their interests, they realize that one party just wants the rind (to make marmalade or something), and the other party wants the meat. So through communication they have doubled the overall value for both parties (compared to splitting, both parties have twice as much of their desired resource for the same overall cost).

        Notice however that there is still room for adversarial negotiation, even though a problem has been solved and value has been created. The guy who wants the rind can claim that rinds are worth less than meat, and so negotiate over how much of the orange he has to pay for. So there are always zero-sum aspects to any negotiation, and almost always positive-sum.

        • Aapje says:

          Given your and carvenvisage’s response, I was probably unclear.

          What I meant is nothing more than that if you ignore the other side AND get away with that, you always get the maximum that you want.

          If two people are arguing over that orange and I simply take the orange for myself, then I have what I want. That I throw away the rind, which the other person actually wanted, is sad for them, but irrelevant to fulfilling my needs.

          Now, in practice the other person often has power, even if only to damage me, so giving them the rind might prevent them from fighting me over that orange and by doing so, damage both the rind and spill the juice, so it becomes worth less to both of us.

          It can be worthwhile to threaten (and if necessary make good on) negative sum behavior, to force another person into positive sum behavior, if they could otherwise get away with zero sum behavior.

          Also see (threatening) worker strikes as an example.

          Of course, all of this is heavily dependent on various factors, like power disparities, what is perceived as fair, the willingness to accept situations perceived as unfair, etc.

        • carvenvisage says:

          Given your and carvenvisage’s response, I was probably unclear.

          What I meant is nothing more than that if you ignore the other side AND get away with that, you always get the maximum that you want.

          What I was getting at is that there are trade offs in human psychology (and signalling if you’re not a perfect 24/7 liar incl”body language”), for doing so at all, and especially for doing so all the time.

          If you don’t try to disguise it in the first place, like in the orange example then I’d say the statement isn’t true in the first place, as the game one cares about in the long run is “life” rather than “do I get this orange”

      • Swami says:

        In a zero sum game, the best action is to win at the expense of your opponent.

        On the broader level, of course, zero sum games are negative sum. The reason is that surviving and thriving take constant work in an entropic universe, and any effort wasted on net zero sum activities is time and energy and materials lost. If we aren’t paddling upstream, the current is taking us downstream. Thus the only sure fire way to stay ahead in a zero sum activity is to be the baddest mofo on the river. Collectively, we will almost all drift downstream, or a least our corpses will.

        The way out of the dilemma is to convert zero sum games into positive sum, constructive games. There can still be zero sum, competitive dimensions to the game (there usually are), but the overall result is to advance the overall condition of the larger group.

        When I hear this conflict vs mistake theory, I read that the conflict theorists are adopting a zero sum framework, and the mistake theorists are adopting a positive sum, let’s stop fighting over it and figure it out together framework. Neither framing is completely wrong or right, depending upon conditions, but the mistake theory (the positive sum possibility framing) is at a higher level of abstraction. It builds upon and goes beyond the zero sum framing.

        • albatross11 says:

          The more I think about it, the less clear I am on Scott’s original distinction. I can think of several mutually-somewhat-contradictory ways of thinking about it, with zero sum/positive sum being only one.

        • yodelyak says:

          @swami
          I think your entropy-as-a-river post describes theoretical implications of game-theory for zero-sum competitions in no-teams-allowed, no mimetic-contagion settings.

          When big teams are allowed, you can get a big-team/small-team dynamics. The big team has almost everyone on it, but controls few to none of the individually nicest spots in the river. The small team plays defense of the nicest spots, and is targeted by the big team. (It’s a sort of a king-of-the-mountain, all-against-the-king mode.) The unifying element of the big team can be mistake stance (powered by moral realism and/or everyone investing in making everyone else feel guilty about being nasty conflict-types) while the unifying element of the small team–on some views usually a team of one or two, “a master and an apprentice“–is self-interest only. Small-team type teams often have to hide in plain sight, and have to aim to break up the unification of the big team by buying big-team leaders into service of small-team, or making them look bought and feeding them to the rest of big-team, or by hiding in plain sight because big-team people can be so busy feeling guilty they don’t even know how to spot small-team behaviors, or don’t know how to distinguish isolated bad acts by mostly-good big team player (arguably Al Franken) from proven pattern of evil conscience (hopefully uncontroversial example: Bill Cosby) (or, big-team individuals may not feel they can make this distinction without getting eaten themselves). To the extent kings and would-be kings have a unifying stance, it’s an “anti-mistake-theory” belief that conflicts are irreducible and guilt and moral realism maladaptive. IMHO, our current politics in the U.S. fit pretty well onto this mode, but the “big team” is doing much better than in most countries in most of history.

          I’m a moral realist and so, in the abstract, firmly on big team, plus I think life is usually better as a minor leader, or even a not-quite-starving follower, on big team than as a precarious, highly-positioned leader of a small team. Perhaps especially because big-team has good symbiotic cleaner-fish, while small-teams usually have only lead shark, follow shark, parasite, and detritus-feeders. Being afraid and defensive sucks. However I’m not sure how to be effective given all the problems big team has, not least of which is that there are stable equilibriums and an ecology here, so change is extremely hard and trying to change the system from within the system is as ill-advised as trying to literally lift oneself by one’s bootstraps… but we’re all in the system. I also think that social complexity has reached a level that cannot be sustained if big team suffers continued losses, so I’d be pleased to see big team less commonly eating its own, even if that might mean a lowered focus on sharing perks of nice river-spots. I also think big team needs to back off from socialist projects that run mindlessly into fundamental economic laws (e.g. price ceilings cause shortages) or rely on centralized power (because kings) but that bars many of the projects that unify big team, so at least some big teamers would gladly eat me as a would-be king if I were open about my views… which (outside view) may mean that I’m effectively playing for small-team already… Shoot, see how hard this is?

          So far I think the best way to play for big team and enjoy the happiness that can come with that usually smells like religion/humanism, but good luck working out the details of that.

          Oh. At the onset I said “no teams, no mimetic contagion” but didn’t explain why mimetic contagion is a problem. I think usually very small small-teams rely substantially on control of mimetic generation and mimetic contagion… they not only are kings, but it is their divine right to be so, and whole countries come to believe it implicitly. Said mimetic control/contagion is their principle tool for feeding big-team leaders to big team’s rank-and-file. (The King’s competitors can be treasonous or heretical, the King, never.)

          Or look at Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 1 on how tyrants get power:

          “On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

          Problems of central power and mimetic control/contagion are also why I strongly support *small* churches rooted in *old* slow-moving traditions. Certainly a church with more than 1000 members per pastor, or more than 10,000 members overall rings all kinds of alarum in my mind. I was very glad to see the “yes we’re aware of the skulls” post on this blog, and the effort to create small, local meet-ups, because this community has its own problems in that vein.

          This whole view fits nicely onto the typology of “Staying Classy”: a working class struggling against a gentry, which in turn is struggling against an elite, which is mainly struggling to enjoy the prerogatives of being elite while getting the working class to continue not noticing that there’s an elite somewhere above the gentry who are the ones screwing things up for everyone, because if labor and gentry work together to rein in elite excess, that very well might work.

  32. aphyer says:

    My reservations with the Conflict vs Mistake post dont lend themselves to minor edits, but think it’s worth putting them down:

    I think mistake theory/conflict theory in an argument is isomorphic to cooperating/defecting in a prisoner’s dilemma. You can work together on both getting small payoffs, or you can try to screw over the other guy and get a large payoff for yourself (at the cost of trapping both parties in a Nash equilibrium).

    Given this, when Scott says things along the lines of ‘this blog has previously been focused on mistake theory and has not appreciated conflict theory’, I parse it as ‘this blog has previously cooperated in prisoner’s dilemmas and has not appreciated the big payoff of defecting.’ This worries me.

    • Swami says:

      While I was typing my response below, you seem to have written a similar take on the issue.

    • Guy in TN says:

      I parse it as ‘this blog has previously cooperated in prisoner’s dilemmas and has not appreciated the big payoff of defecting.’ This worries me.

      Why does that worry you? The best strategy in a prisoner’s dilemmas isn’t “always cooperate”, or “always screw the other guy”, it’s “tit-for-tat + forgiveness”. Learning when and how to defect is healthy and good.

      …assuming this analogy is even applicable. In a situation with lopsided rewards/punishments, the whole game changes. (Such as in a system of two groups with unequal power, very common in the real world)

  33. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    I’ve seen Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and I wasn’t crazy about it.

    However, it does float the idea of military use of dinosaurs, and this seems like a good place to discuss whether it makes any sense for real world fighting. Dinosaurs are fragile compared to modern weapons, but so are humans, so the question is whether (controllable intelligent) dinosaurs give any advantage.

    I don’t have strong opinions on the subject except that the taller dinosaurs are probably excessively easy targets.

    • Relenzo says:

      I think that Jurassic Park has exaggerated the deadliness of dinosaurs by several orders of magnitude, and if they hadn’t this would be completely unrealistic.

      A huge dinosaur is definitely a dangerous animal. So is a hippo, for similar reasons. But as you said–a good military idea? Almost certainly no. Would lose to a tank in seconds, to say nothing of even more modern air-based weapons systems.

      As for smaller dinosaurs–Jurassic Park routinely portrays them as superhuman Seal-Team type killers. But in reality, do you think that was likely the case? What predator alive today gained an advantage in natural selection by running around and shrieking all the time? Rather, the vast majority of predators conserve energy most of the time, engaging in stalking, waiting, and short bursts of activity to efficiently catch prey.

      Much about dinosaurs is still shrouded in mystery. But I would be highly surprised if velociraptors were capable of that kind of frenetic, deadly activity for more than very short bursts, even if mind-controlled. I think the best point of comparison is to imagine the military use of tigers or lions in a modern military setting–which we can immediately see is laughable.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        The deadliness of dinosaurs is also greatly exaggerated by the end of the movie. The ending is depressing and stupid.

        Qvabfnhef ner eryrnfrq ba gur jbeyq, cnegyl orpnhfr vg’f cbffvoyl onq gb jvcr gurz bhg naq cnegyl orpnhfr uhznavgl qrfreirf gb or chavfurq. Ovt qnatrebhf navznyf unir gb or cebgrpgrq sebz hf be gurl trg jvcrq bhg.

        Do people care about spoilers for JW:FK?

      • baconbits9 says:

        Almost certainly no. Would lose to a tank in seconds, to say nothing of even more modern air-based weapons systems.

        The (not very plausible) reason would be that dinosaurs would be cheap to produce vs their difficulty to kill.

        • beleester says:

          Yeah, that’s a very, very implausible reason. Bullets are cheaper than bodies. And velociraptors aren’t going to pop out of the womb ready to go to war for their country, you’re going to need to train them or fit them with mind control implants or whatever it takes to make them an effective weapon instead of a wild animal, so even if Jurassic Park paid for all the R&D costs and the army can just buy ready-made dinosaurs off the market, you’re going to be paying a lot of money for them.

          (A cow in the US apparently costs ~$800, and that’s for a commonly farmed animal that won’t try to disembowel you, so we can’t expect raptors to be cheaper than cows. An M16 costs ~$700.)

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            It occurs to me that one of the reasons governments can afford large armies is that governments don’t have to pay all the costs of raising soldiers to recruitment age.

          • beleester says:

            I think that just puts the army on an equal footing with every other business that needs people. It’s not surprising that, say, Amazon doesn’t need to pay the costs of raising a deliveryperson to adulthood.

          • albatross11 says:

            I imagine the cost of slaves born into slavery in the US must have incorporated the cost of their upbringing (minus the work that could be gotten out of them, but that’s pretty limited until you’re at least 10-12). Cotton plantations still were economically viable.

          • ana53294 says:

            Presumably, other than providing food and clothing, slaveowners did nothing towards the cost of taking care of the children.
            And I would say that feeding and clothing the child is probably the cheapest part of raising the child. Most of parental work is unpaid – as it was in the case of slaves – but if the government had to take care of kids and pay for carers from birth to age 18, that would cost a lot of money. And the first few years would cost most of it (most creches have 1 adult per 4 kids; this decreases with age).

            Even in Weber’s Honorverse series, where slaves are genetically bred and are thus not direct descendants of slaves, slaves are raised by other slaves who adopt them and work for free, instead of having specific slaves for nursing kids.

          • 10240 says:

            velociraptors aren’t going to pop out of the womb

            They usually pop out of an egg.

          • albatross11 says:

            The Army or FedEx wouldn’t have to pay for parental labor, either. Anyway, this is the closest thing I can think of to a real-world version of an employer having to pay the whole upbringing of his employees. Are there any other examples? Maybe collective farms in the Soviet Union?

          • Evan Þ says:

            @ana53294, raising children would still present some opportunity cost to the planter from not being able to have their mothers (or other caretakers) working elsewhere.

          • Anyway, this is the closest thing I can think of to a real-world version of an employer having to pay the whole upbringing of his employees.

            Early economists sometimes argued in terms of the iron law of wages. The wages of the mass of the population would tend towards that level at which the working population just reproduced itself. That meant that the wages was enough to not only support the worker but pay for him to bring up enough children to replace him.

            If you accept that model, there is a sense in which the employer is paying for the upbringing of his employees.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Is the Iron Law of Wages a special case of the Zero Profit theorem, applied to labor?

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        > I think the best point of comparison is to imagine the military use of tigers or lions in a modern military setting–which we can immediately see is laughable.

        Actually, I have to ask–if we assume technobabble for breeding and control, to the point that a) food supply or maybe space is the bottleneck for raising all the warcats you want and b) you can essentially give an order like “patrol this grid square, stealth-kill any enemy soldiers you can, run away if they see you first, and don’t mess with vehicles”–might they have a use in jungle warfare?

        • bean says:

          Even assuming you had perfect control, the problem is lethality. Tigers are dangerous, don’t get me wrong, but so are swimming pools. Big animals (which humans are) are hard to kill quickly. And the guy with the gun might see you as you’re going to attack, or he might be able to get a shot off as he’s attacking you. Not to mention what his buddies are doing, because soldiers travel in packs.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Now I want to see swimming pools as weapons of war, though I grant I’d see the weaponized dinosaurs movie first.

          • toastengineer says:

            I believe historically such a thing was referred to as a “moat.”

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Moats are so second-millennium. A truly weaponized swimming pool would be galumphing around, preferably in packs, so one of them can draw your attention while the rest flank you. What are you gonna do? Shoot it?? It’s a swimming pool.

            Make it happen, Boston Dynamics.

          • Aapje says:

            Colin Furze already made the initial steps, with a mobile swimming pool.

          • albatross11 says:

            ObSF: In _A Deepness In The Sky_, the swimming pool/pond was actually successfully used as a weapon.

      • Watchman says:

        You’d surely use hippos as anti-infantry weapons though. Although it would be interesting to see how much armour a hippo could carry (I doubt it would be enough to stop a tank shell mind you).

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          “Hippos kill more humans in Africa per year than any other animal save man. Together we’ll be unstoppable!”

        • Nornagest says:

          Let’s see. A hippo weighs about 4000 pounds, and an infantryman weighs about 200. If you assume that surface area scales as the 2/3 power of mass, then a hippo twenty times the weight of an infantryman would have about 7.5 times as much area to armor, meaning that proportionally heavy armor for it would be about 2.7 times as thick. Humans aren’t particularly strong animals, so maybe we could bump that up to 4 or 5.

          If infantry armor can stop 5.56×45 rounds with a muzzle energy of 1,800 J, and if armor can stop bullets carrying energy roughly proportional to its thickness, then I’d expect hippo armor to be able to handle full-power rifle rounds like 7.62×51 but to be penetrated by HMG rounds like .50 BMG (which have almost ten times the muzzle energy of intermediate rounds like 5.56×45).

          Tank shells would be right out.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          I’m fairly sure even a hippo would not be as intimidating as an armored rhino.

    • John Schilling says:

      As replacements for human soldiers, for dogs, or for armored fighting vehicles?

      As replacements for human soldiers, they are going to need 100+ IQs and opposable thumbs, or game over. Seriously, if I’m going to war, please give me an enemy that can be stopped in its tracks by a doorknob.

      As replacements for dogs, note that we don’t use very many dogs in war, and when we do it is for their unique sensory capabilities rather than their fearsome combat abilities. Also, thirty thousand or so years of domestication. Hard to imagine dinosaurs are a better package.

      As armored fighting vehicles, no. Just, no.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I saw this movie a few weeks back and I really enjoyed the visuals and the action. I thought it was probably the most suspenseful of the Jurassic movies. My heart was actually pounding at points. So definitely good on the whole “dinosaur survival horror” scale. That said, absolutely everything to do with the plot was pants-on-head stupid, certainly including the military applications of dinosaurs.

      **** SOME SPOILERS BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THE MOVIE IS DUMB ANYWAY ****

      First off, the targeting system employed (point a red laser at the enemy and press the button) is silly. If you already have the person targeted by your gun just…shoot him with a bullet instead of siccing a dinosaur on him.

      Second, the logistics of deploying a dinosaur to a combat zone must be a nightmare. So the army is going to feed, train, and house a dinosaur during peacetime, and then during wartime is going to freight the dinosaur to the front, along with all the goats to keep it fed (I don’t think dinosaurs eat MREs), as well as handlers, veterinarians, etc? An army moves on its stomach. That’s hard enough when the stomachs aren’t inside dinosaurs.

      Third, the very instant a dinosaur weapon hits the field there’s going to be international outrage and calls to classify them as biological weapons forbidden in war. CNN is going to be on the scene to plaster pictures of whatever’s left of some kid in a war zone who got mauled to death by a US Army dinosaur. Even if the dinosaurs are actually effective in combat (or especially if they are), every nation that either doesn’t have combat dinos or doesn’t want to pay to develop combat dinos is going to be right there signing on to the international anti-dino arms accords because it’s The Right Thing To Do.

      Finally, why did they need to bother with the whole “we’re going to capture the dinosaurs and then sell them to rich people for seed money” thing? If you’re developing new, awesome, effective (or simply flashy) weapons, you’re going to want to sell those to the United States government. You don’t need to go murdering people or engaging in illicit dinosaur trading for this. You go to the military and your senator and say “hey I need a billion dollars for military dinosaurs BECAUSE FREEDOM” and they’ll just put in the next appropriations bill.

      Finally finally, the plan was very poorly thought out. The bad guy had already sent the mercs to the island and constructed the dinosaur pens and auction facilities, bizarrely at his benefactor’s house on US soil instead of, I don’t know, a cargo ship in international waters, before the government ruled on what to do about the dinosaurs. What if that senate hearing at the start of the movie had gone a different way? He spends all this money on the pens and the cargo ship and the mercs and the whole plot, and what happens if the government decides “We’re going to save these animals” and your mercs show up at the island and the US military is already there and says “this island is under control of the US military for a humanitarian relief effort, please move along or we will shoot you?” And then he’s already got the dinosaurs by the time he calls up all the rich people and says “hey, wanna drop everything and fly from Singapore to buy some illicit dinosaurs for no particular reason?” What if everyone said “what the hell am I going to do with a dinosaur?” and hung up on him?

      I could probably go on but I think I’ll stop there. The movie was fun for the dinosaurs and Jeff Goldblum but besides that just shut your brain off any time anyone is speaking or doing anything.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        And besides, why is there a large quantity of poison gas in the mansion?

        Why didn’t Maisie just get on the internet as soon as she found out about the plot?

        I’ll grant that a lot of the suspense worked reasonably well. Sometimes most of my awareness would be on my interior monologue about how stupid the movie was, then I’d realize I was tensed up because of the onscreen threats.

        And I did get involved with the movie some of the time.

        The CGI *still* doesn’t work for a well-lit dinosaur near a human. They don’t look like they’re in the same space.

    • Matt M says:

      I think all movies that present animals as some sort of dangerous antagonist inevitably choose to magically endow the animals with human-level intelligence.

      Like, if someone falls in a tiger cage and has to escape, you can bet the tigers will behave like humans whose primary urge in life is to kill all intruders and who posses tiger-like physical abilities.

    • sfoil says:

      Larger dinosaurs probably aren’t much more dangerous than an angry elephant. War elephants seem to have had something of a problem with being easily spooked and/or insufficiently aggressive. I suppose a combination of being a predator, hormones, and training/breeding could fix that. But it would still lose not just to a tank but to a rifleman.

      As for the raptor-like pack hunters (as portrayed in the movies), are packs of wolves a serious military threat? No. There are uses for both attack and scout dogs that might conceivably be filled by dinosaurs, but a lot of work had to be done on wolves to turn them into dogs.

      If you want dinosaurs to be militarily interesting, you need to go back to the pre-gunpowder era, or propose ways you could augment or breed raptors to replace dogs.

    • proyas says:

      If an army uses (semi) intelligent dinosaurs instead of human soldiers, then could the enemy nation make the case that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to the conflict since it is intended to protect human lives only, and respond with illegal weapons like poison gas and bioweapons that only infected reptiles?

      Imagine the biggest, baddest dinosaur from the Jurassic Park franchise and then picture it keeling over dead after taking a few whiffs of nerve gas.

      And one other thing: As big and as fearsome as dinosaurs may be, I don’t think they could withstand a drawn-out war with a human army. Dinosaurs were probably much like contemporary big animals, meaning they spent most of their time eating or resting, and hunting and fighting were very energy-intensive activities. A velociraptor might be able to quickly kill a man, but it’s probably an energy-sapping task that the animal couldn’t do over and over day after day. It would need long pauses to rest, eat meat, and find water to drink. Combat would be easier for humans thanks to labor-saving devices that make killing easier, like guns and military vehicles.

      Similarly, a triceratops might be big and strong enough to ram a tank and tip it over on its side, but it would be as taxing, painful and disorienting as you doing a running football tackle against a refrigerator. Yes, you could do it once or even twice in a row, but you can’t endlessly take down a bunch of refrigerators in an open field without resting or having to pause because you accidentally hurt yourself.

      • AG says:

        Counterpoint: the Great Emu War of 1932

        • beleester says:

          Despite the memes, the Great Emu War was less a military defeat, and more that the humans couldn’t be arsed to send more than two guys with machine guns.

          (The original example of “just enough troops to lose”!)

      • albatross11 says:

        Yeah, unless your war-animal is at least bulletproof and immune to any poison that can be quickly cooked up, it’s not going to have a very long military career facing off against humans with guns, maybe armor, gas masks (if needed to keep breathing while the war animals are gassed), etc.

    • theredsheep says:

      I could see them being used as a kind of long-term terror weapon, if you got one that was ornery and prolific enough. Real-life velociraptors were actually quite small, but there were dinosaurs of a similar size and temperament. If you got something that was omnivorous, aggressive, and hard to kill, in addition to being intelligent enough to lay low, and let it loose in the middle of the enemy’s farmland, maybe? Then again, it might just be simpler to modify pigs, since they have most of the traits desired. Pigs are devastating wherever they run wild; just make a pig that enjoys killing people, maybe tweak its genes so it grows up slightly quicker if possible.

      Okay, dinosaurs probably wouldn’t be that good at that. But that’s a (highly unethical) use for animals as weapons.

      • Nornagest says:

        Real-life velociraptors were actually quite small

        Imagine an angry, violent goose with sickle claws. Wait, no, I repeat myself. Imagine a goose with sickle claws.

        • theredsheep says:

          It’s a big heavy rooster with no flight, a long tail and mean toenails. A reasonably fit man with a solid six-foot pole could smack it silly. Which isn’t to say it couldn’t be nasty, but roosters can be incredible jerks and chicken farmers aren’t scared of them. And, as you said, geese. We still keep geese for food.

          • Nornagest says:

            Oh, you could absolutely beat one in a fight, although you might end up needing a few stitches afterward. I was mainly just going for the waterfowl joke.

          • theredsheep says:

            As far as birdlike dinosaurs go, I prefer Anzu, literally known as the chicken from hell.

            EDIT: Or Dakotaraptor. Dakotaraptor was around the sweet spot of big enough to be dangerous while still having half a prayer of finding cover.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            How do you think one of the larger sheep-protecting dogs would do?

          • theredsheep says:

            Against a velociraptor? Not super-well, because they aren’t bred for that kind of rumble, but they’d win eventually, with significant wounds. Anzu would kill a shepherd dog and take damage; dakotaraptor would simply butcher it.

          • Fahundo says:

            So why even bother bringing back species from 65+ million years ago when we can do this with cassowaries and emus?

          • theredsheep says:

            I think you’d need to modify the cassowaries significantly. It might be inconvenient that they’re oviparous, also. Anyway, I recommend modified pigs FTW.

          • Alliumnsk says:

            How would a dog win against velociraptor of same size? A dog can attack only with its jaws.

          • theredsheep says:

            A German shepherd weighs about twice as much as a velociraptor, and a lot of a raptor’s weight was tail. Also, the claws were probably not used for slashing; their purpose was to dig in and hold on while the animal bit at the prey. Given the creature’s balance, it would be awkward to repeatedly kick with its feet, I’d think.

            A more accurate comparison would be “how can a dog win against a cat? A dog can only attack with its mouth.”

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        My idea of modified animal as threat is coyotes with thumbs.

      • proyas says:

        As a terror weapon and as a practical one, I doubt velocirators used in that manner would have much effect. For one, they’d be vastly outnumbered by enemy humans, and the latter would be able to use sheer numbers and simple weapons to purge their country of the dinosaurs. Look at what happened recently in Indonesia:
        https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44844367

    • fion says:

      They’d be useless in war, but if you could train them to be guard dinosaurs they’d probably be more intimidating than guard dogs.

    • James C says:

      Like all unexpected weapons I can see dinosaurs working once and then never again. There is something to be said for setting what is essentially a large, carnivorous elephant against infantry as they won’t initially be equipped to do much about it. The plan fails the moment they hit any hard targets, tanks, fortifications or anti-vehicle weapons and you can bet those will be rushed forward to where-ever you deploy your dinos.

      That said, there’s probably space in all-out war for a small, fast breeding and vicious dino to cause havoc behind the lines. Their best target, however, is civilians and that opens a whole kettle of fish most modern planners try and keep as clamped down as possible.

      • Deiseach says:

        Like all unexpected weapons I can see dinosaurs working once and then never again.

        Like this Indian TV serial (English subtitles available), very loosely based on the events leading up to the Battle of Hydaspes. In the prior episode, Porus (Our Hero) has cunningly assembled a small force of elephants to unleash on the Macedonian army (along with prepping the battleground with traps, pitfalls, etc) in a preliminary encounter.

        The Macedonians have never before encountered elephants, their cavalry is useless against them, the elephants run amuck and crush (literally) the soldiers. Disaster!

        Until about five minutes into this episode, when Alexander figures out how to kill elephants (in a ludicrously unrealistic but fantastic move – keep watching up to about the tenth minute). End of advantage!

    • AlphaGamma says:

      I think the most realistic situation is in an SF “biopunk” setting where most power sources for military vehicles are no longer viable due to oil running out/some kind of apocalyptic event, but bioengineered dinosaurs are still viable either because the tech to produce them was maintained and requires less energy, or because they were engineered pre-Collapse and a breeding population exists.

      An example is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, where there are no dinosaurs but the military use “war megodonts” (megodonts are some kind of engineered species related to elephants, they are also used as a civilian power source for large machinery). They also have tanks, but those are pre-Collapse relics and the scarcity of fuel means that tanks only leave their barracks when the shit has really hit the fan.

      Of course, that universe isn’t particularly realistic- Bacigalupi had to make some odd choices in order to end up with a future Earth where almost all technology relies on human or animal muscle power.

      • John Schilling says:

        If you can feed war elephants/megadonts/dinosaurs/whatever, you can just as well make biodiesel for your tanks and armored cars.

        • AlphaGamma says:

          That’s one of the “odd choices” I mention. Synthetic oil (referred to as “coal diesel”) exists in the Windup Girl universe but is very expensive. Biogas exists, but appears to be used only for cooking. We never see biodiesel- the one car that we see is specifically stated to be running on coal diesel, as are the pumps that stop Bangkok from flooding (the novel is set in Thailand). All of these are, again, implied to be pre-collapse relics, as are the few powerful computers that still exist (there are other computers, but they are powered by the user pedalling)

          In general, it’s a good read but has a whole bunch of realism issues.

          I do wonder whether part of the problem is that there is no more heavy industry capable of manufacturing replacement parts for internal combustion engines, so even if cars and tanks could be fuelled they would eventually stop running. But again, this probably isn’t realistic.

      • sfoil says:

        Finding fodder for horses was, by far, the biggest logistical problem that pre-industrial militaries faced. Eliminating fossil fuels but then replacing internal combustion engines with gigantic animals to do the same thing is just hiding the issue.

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      I think obviously T-Rex or Triceratops tanks, while awesome, are impractical in a modern military setting. But one possibility I wonder if previous commentators have missed is the possible use of dinos as area-denial weapons.

      Like, say there’s a city that the Marines really, really need to take, and they for some reason really, really can’t just level it with artillery beforehand but need to go house to house. Let us further suppose that you are a totally unscrupulous actor with no regard for civilian casualties, you just want to slow down the enemy and make him bleed as much as possible. Instead of a minefield, would it be possible to seed an urban area with thousands of ambush predators? The urban environment means a lot of fights will happen at close quarters, minimizing the human advantage in firepower and giving at least some of your dinos a chance to chew on bad guys. The constant possibility of ambush would force him to go slowly and carefully through the city, slowing his offensive, and the psychological toll would be harsh, too.

      Sure, I can think of ways around this – I can’t imagine the predator population would survive more than a few weeks in the city, absent lots of civilians to eat, so a simple siege would clear out a lot of your minefield. But the idea isn’t to stop him, it’s to buy time.

      Of course, there are probably more efficient ways to buy time than resurrecting and breeding thousands of Dakotaraptor and figuring out how to keep them corralled where you want them, but I’m trying to think of any possible military use for dinosaurs. I think biohazard minefield is a way to go.

      • theredsheep says:

        Well, picture the same plan, but with tigers, who are pretty similar to Dakotaraptor for our purposes.

      • bean says:

        That seems like it would only work if the other side didn’t know it was coming, which is unlikely. If I know it’s a possibility, what’s to stop me from building a robot that convincingly simulates prey, and sending one ahead of each platoon? Dakotaraptor jumps out for a meal, and then gets killed by the soldiers. Repeat as necessary. Or if that doesn’t work, send in a herd of the relevant prey animal. Or if that’s going to get PETA all worked up, use tear gas. The Dakotaraptors don’t have masks, after all.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          Damn, I hadn’t considered non-lethal chemical warfare. That might clear out my Dakotaraptor minefield.

          As for the robots, I was sort of hoping that the bad guys wouldn’t see it coming. Not sure how I’d keep my massive breeding and training operation secret, but the hope is that the 1st Marine Division rolls up to the gates of Fallujah and the first couple scouts find out there’s dinosaurs, everywhere. So they have to work out how to deal with it with the tools they have on hand, instead of building specialized prey-bots. But the tear gas would probably work for that – annoying for the Marines, but better than getting a couple of guys mauled.

          • bean says:

            So they have to work out how to deal with it with the tools they have on hand, instead of building specialized prey-bots.

            That’s what emergency appropriation of local livestock is for. Scare them properly, then release them one at a time into the city. Shoot the Dakotaraptors that come out.

    • johan_larson says:

      I think if you want dinosaurs used for war in a fictional setting, it would make sense to use them for cavalry, ridden by a human. Picture a cavalier riding something like a Utahraptor, or maybe something a bit bigger. The human should be as effective with sword or lance as a mundane cavalier, but the dinosaur would be way more dangerous than a horse, since it has a great big set of teeth right up front.

      Personally I reject any reality that doesn’t include Her Majesty’s Tyrannosaur Cavalry, resplendent in gleaming breastplates and purple banners. Such places are simply too drab to bother with.

  34. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    https://www.liberalcurrents.com/did-the-enlightenment-give-rise-to-racism/

    Argues that the Enlightenment is not the source of modern racism.

    There are earlier examples of ideas which are a lot like modern racism– beliefs that you can tell who is better or worse by looking at them, and that good and bad traits are inherited by large groups of people.

    The Arabs ruled a great empire, which possessed a tremendous appetite for slaves. For much of this period the Arabs were both economically more advanced than their neighbors and militarily superior. They enslaved both Europeans and Africans and like later European colonialists in the Americas distinguished between different kinds of slaves based on their skin color and ethnic characteristics. Sweet observes:

    “Wherever there was back-breaking work to be done in the Arab world, black slaves were made to do it. From ninth-century Iraqi land reclamation projects to fourteenth-century Saharan salt and copper mines, black Africans toiled under the worst conditions. (Sweet 1997, 145)”

    It would be surprising if an ideology did not emerge to justify this state of affairs. Given the phenotypical differences between Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans, this ideology of difference centered on skin color; and it was one we would recognize today as racist.

    Islamic racial theorizing may seem of less interest because it was not a direct ancestor of modern racism. According to Sweet, however, this would be a mistake: Iberian racial categories were directly influenced by Islamic practice and thought and these Iberian categories are the direct antecedents of colonial-era racial theorizing.

    Spanish anti-Semitism in the 1400s and 1500s focused on ancestry as well as religion.

    There were pro-racism and anti-racism Enlightenment thinkers.

    “Enlightenment thinkers from Montesquieu to Adam Smith pioneered an approach that was universalist, not relativistic. In Montesquieu, Smith, and others we find attitudes toward the non-European world that are considerably more subtle and sophisticated than one might think based on reading Edward Said’s Orientalism. They were open to the possibility that non-European societies had much to teach them, but willing to condemn anything that fell short of what they considered civilized norms. This is evident in Voltaire’s praise of Qing China, in Smith’s condemnation of infanticide in the classic world, and in Montesquieu’s implied critique of sex mores in the Islamic world.[15]

    Kant marks an exception to this. Kant did not have a full-fledged theory of racial differences, but his hostility to racial mixing and his emphasis on the fixity of race do set him apart from other 18th century writers on race. Recent literature among scholars of racism have highlighted the importance of race in Kant’s anthropology, something that is neglected in most treatments of his political philosophy. The debate on the relationship between Kant’s racial theorizing and his liberal cosmopolitanism is a fascinating one and currently unresolved.[16]”

    I’d never heard of the counter-Enlightenment, though I’d run across a little about it in regards to Tolkien’s effort to develop a national myth for England.

    “This brings us to my third point. Something entirely missing from both Bouie and Mills is the Counter-Enlightenment. The attempt to lay the sins of the modern West on the Enlightenment lets the Counter-Enlightenment off the hook. It was in reaction to the universalizing moral philosophy articulated by Enlightenment thinkers that romantic, nationalist, and indeed ethnocentric ideas sprung: Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, and others produced a well-spring of ethnocentric, nationalist, and in some case racialist arguments to bear in opposition to what they conceived to be Enlightenment liberalism.

    Hardened racial boundaries, romanticized ethno-nationalist histories, and the notion of national cultural and national spirit evolved in reaction to the Enlightenment. This is brought out clearly by Jennifer Pitt in her contrast between Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham on the one hand and John Stuart Mill on the other. Mill, though a thorough liberal, believed in and made use of the concept of national culture. Indeed, he believed that this concept was a major advance on the thinking of Bentham’s generation.”

    On Carlyle:

    “As Levy and Peart document, Carlyle’s doctrines contained the seeds of genocide. Addressing West Indian blacks who “refuse to work” he wrote:

    “To each of you I will then say: Here is work for you; strike into it with manlike, soldierlike obedience and heartiness, according to the methods here prescribed,— wages follow for you without difficulty; all manner of just remuneration, and at length emancipation itself follows. Refuse to strike into it; shirk the heavy labour, disobey the rules,—I will admonish and endeavour to incite you; if in vain, I will flog you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you,—and make God’s Earth, and the forlorn-hope in God’s Battle, free of you.[26]”

    Carlyle’s arguments won him favor with Ruskin and Charles Dickens among others, thinkers today celebrated as critics of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism.[27] They represent the triumph of Counter-Enlightenment, romanticism, and explicit rejection of the Enlightenment project associated with Smith.”

    “We saw that modern racism had its antecedents in the 15th to 18th century. But if any period saw the birth of modern scientific racism it was the 19th century, not the Enlightenment. My reading of the evidence is consistent with Edward Beasley’s claim that in the 18th century “there was no idea of race as we have come to know it—no widely shared theory of biologically determined, physical, intellectual, and moral differences between human groups” (Beasley 2010, p. 1).”

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      Interesting article, definitely going to have to read the whole thing.

      One thing that really jumped out from your summary:

      They were open to the possibility that non-European societies had much to teach them, but willing to condemn anything that fell short of what they considered civilized norms.

      Emphasis mine.

      The implication of this statement highlights one of the fault lines in the modern definition of racism.

      I hope that nobody doubts that e.g. Adam Smith would have condemned an Englishman who committed infanticide, so does that make his condemnation of infanticide in the classical world an example of seeing people as moral equals or of cultural chauvinism? Would it be more or less racist do excuse blatant immorality on the part of foreigners?

      • rlms says:

        I don’t read the latter part of that quote as condemning them, and the previous sentence that calls the authors in question “subtle and sophisticated” suggests that the opposite is implied.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      “This brings us to my third point. Something entirely missing from both Bouie and Mills is the Counter-Enlightenment. The attempt to lay the sins of the modern West on the Enlightenment lets the Counter-Enlightenment off the hook. It was in reaction to the universalizing moral philosophy articulated by Enlightenment thinkers that romantic, nationalist, and indeed ethnocentric ideas sprung: Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, and others produced a well-spring of ethnocentric, nationalist, and in some case racialist arguments to bear in opposition to what they conceived to be Enlightenment liberalism.

      I’m going to read the whole thing, but this jumped out at me. I haven’t read any of those Germans except the Grimms, but I know something of Thomas Carlyle and much more of Joseph de Maistre, and Maistre was no nationalist or racialist.
      Enlightenment racists believed in the inferiority of American Indians and that North American tribes couldn’t be the descendants of the Mound Builders. Maistre wrote “A Bolivian Indian who learns his catechism is a better person than the sharpest wit in France” and concocts an almost proto-New Age thesis in his St. Petersberg Dialogues that North American Indians became savages (= hunter-gatherers) because their ancestors the Mound Builders were an advanced civilization that committed a crime as terrible as the French Revolution despite a superior social or moral science (“We probably don’t know enough to be as guilty”).
      Maistre believed that ethnic culture was an important part of each human’s identity, but that it carried insignificant political meaning unless one was required to write a new Constitution for a population. He was an ethnically French Savoyard nobleman/civil servant who believed all legitimate authority over him came from God, His Church, and the King of Piedmont-Sardinia.

  35. Relenzo says:

    I may have to ask this again, since I’m pretty far down now, but: I want expert advice about milk.

    I ate breakfast cereal pretty much every morning of my life until yesterday. After hearing rumors from my college-mates that the supposed health benefits of milk were all a sham advertised by the dairy industry, I thought breakfast cereal might not be the best way to start my day.

    I’m currently trying a system of frozen veggies fried with 3 eggs in the morning. It is a tasty and affordable breakfast. However, the more I try to research the health of breakfast cereal, the more confused I become. There seems to be something of a small war raged over whether milk is healthy.

    Note, I’m not interesting in IF, so this isn’t about the benefits of breakfast in general. I want to know if anyone here can help me understand whether breakfast cereal, and milk, was actually good for me all these years.

    • Freddie deBoer says:

      Keep in mind that the amount of milk most people pour in a cereal bowl is a tiny fraction of your daily calories so that whether good or bad the impact on your overall dietary health will be minimal.

      • Relenzo says:

        Hmm, if that’s true I was wrong to focus so much on the dairy aspect.

        But breakfast is maybe 1/4 of my food consumption so I have to imagine the the different between cereal-milk and eggs-veggies would still be significant.

        • Freddie deBoer says:

          In terms of bang-for-your-buck, I suspect checking the sugar content on your cereal – often very high even in cereals marketed as health food – will go a longer way. Health food stores like Whole Foods usually have sugar-free options.

    • ana53294 says:

      Whether milk is good or bad depends highly on your genes. Dutch people do fine, you know. I personally don’t handle milk well, but I can eat cheese.
      Try eliminating all dairy for a couple of weeks and reintroducing it slowly – butter first, then cheeses and yoghurt, and finally milk. If at any step you notice discomfort, don’t go further.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I have some lactose intolerance which comes and goes. Dairy products don’t usually make my life worse, but occasionally they do. The amount matters, but I’m not sure my life would be better if I gave up dairy completely.

    • bqbturtle says:

      In the grand scheme of things, milk is pretty balanced between Carbs, Proteins, and Fats. So are potatoes.

      It is commonly recommended to bodybuilders as a good way to get VERY EASY calories that are relatively healthy, though dairy-based. Many rumors of hormones and acne problems, but in the end, usually, food is food. Is eating cottage cheese going to help someone a ton more than milk? Marginal differences at best. Maybe if you ate something different, you would be slightly more lean, slightly more energetic, and slightly less acne prone. But probably not to an extent that your life would be dramatically different.

      When compared to other children’s breakfasts – milk is pretty good compared to a Pop Tart, a Toaster Strudel, or nothing. However, it’s probably slightly less good than eating eggs. The sugary cereal itself is pretty bad for kids, but again, food is food and it probably didn’t make much of a difference vs if you ate cheerios instead.

      When I eat cereal today as an adult, it is extremely rare (When I eat a continental breakfast at hotels that don’t have waffle makers. It feels, just like waffles, like eating dessert for breakfast. Which is to say, it’s very pleasurable and yummy and gives me dopamine. I think I was very happy every time I ate cereal as a child. Being happy isn’t a crime. Denying happy things isn’t always the right answer.

      Hope this helps!

    • AG says:

      Can’t say that milk has definite benefits, considering the many cuisines that don’t feature it in breakfast, and the people of those cultures have done fine without it.

      But I’d say it’s more that milk doesn’t have unique benefits. Said milk-less cuisines likely just have the same nutritional value in other ingredients.

    • SaiNushi says:

      The sham is the idea that you absolutely need dairy to have a healthy diet. Dairy doesn’t have anything that you can’t find from other sources. The things that milk is supposed to be powerhouses for are actually higher in other things (broccoli and chicken are both good sources of calcium, for example). If you’re trying to cut fat out of your diet, then dairy is a high-fat thing that can be easy for a lot of people to cut.

      However, dairy isn’t uniquely bad either. And there was a study that showed that diary fat can help a person feel full for a longer period of time. Plus, dairy fat has been shown to help keep pre-diabetes people from developing diabetes.

      The thing about milk is that most people drink it with very sweet things, like cake, cookies, brownies, or they put it in very sugary cereal. If you’re having it with granola, grape nuts, cheerios, shredded wheat, then it’s not doing any harm. If you’re having it with Fruit Loops, Honey Nut Cheerios, Cocoa Puffs, Cookie Crisp, Trix… then you might want to cut that out.

      Basically, I suspect the reason dairy gets a bad rep in the dieting world is because it tends to be paired with carbs (milk with dessert or cereal, cheese with crackers or bread, butter with crackers or bread, yogurt with oats). Carbs are converted straight into sugar, which either gets used or turned into fat. So you need to pair the carbs with fiber so your system will use the carbs.

    • Cheese says:

      I ate breakfast cereal pretty much every morning of my life until yesterday. After hearing rumors from my college-mates that the supposed health benefits of milk were all a sham advertised by the dairy industry, I thought breakfast cereal might not be the best way to start my day.

      Honestly I think the cereal is more of a beneficial cut out. Depending on what it is. That is, high sugar low fibre = bad, high fibre low sugar = good.

      As others have said, milk doesn’t possess any really inherently great properties that mean you must eat it. But no food, beyond vegetables as a broad group, really does – with the caveat that you need to eat a range of foods to get all your essential nutrients. Whole plant foods are pretty much the only thing everyone can agree on being really good for you. The problem is those are kind of naturally unpalatable in terms of making that your entire diet unless you are a bit of a weirdo, or are super expensive.

      Dairy products are a pretty good source of calories without being overly sugary or fatty (we know too far in either direction is probably bad), contain a variety of nutrients that you need but can get from other animal or plant products if you want, and are generally highly palatable if you can tolerate them. Hence milk is a good choice for a lot of people, but not a necessary one for others. Milk is great for me because I struggle to get enough calories in to maintain my desired weight without it, and I tolerate it well.

      In your case, it may be beneficial if you are increasing vegetable intake and reducing refined carbs. Or it may be totally useless if your diet is already ‘good’ enough. Unless you are eating too much refined sugars, too much processed fats, too little fibre, or have a micronutrient deficiency, then food is food and eat what you prefer without being consistently excessive about it.

    • Deiseach says:

      Serendipitously, this study came to my attention (via a diabetes email newsletter which is evangelising for the low-carb/high-fat diet to help control and even reverse diabetes): fats in dairy won’t kill you by heart attack and/or stroke after all!

      Objective
      The aim of this study was to investigate prospective associations of serial measures of plasma phospholipid fatty acids pentadecanoic (15:0), heptadecanoic (17:0), and trans-palmitoleic (trans-16:1n–7) acids with total mortality, cause-specific mortality, and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk among older adults.

      Conclusions
      Long-term exposure to circulating phospholipid pentadecanoic, heptadecanoic, or trans-palmitoleic acids was not significantly associated with total mortality or incident CVD among older adults. High circulating heptadecanoic acid was inversely associated with CVD and stroke mortality and potentially associated with higher risk of non-CVD death.

      From a quick glance, they don’t seem to have received any funding from the dairy industry (though the Haas avocado people did throw them a few bob) so this is probably straightforward enough.

  36. CognitivelyDissonated says:

    What does mistake theory look like in the real world? Maybe the modern day monetary policy debates? Is that a presentism bias from me?

    Really struggling to see how mistake theory explains society better than conflict theory.

    Was very surprised by Scott, given he has written pages about how terrible the US medical / drug system is. Seems like that is much better explained by conflict theory.

    Could just be my understanding of it is wrong though.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      Lots of people want the US medical/drug system to work better, but they don’t agree on which policies will best achieve that. Therefore, some of those well-meaning people are mistaken. If we could fix those mistakes, and thus get all good-faith actors on board with whichever medical policy would have the best outcomes, I believe the special interests that benefit from the status quo would be quickly defeated.

      • CognitivelyDissonated says:

        To this specific example, is the mistake theory proposition that:
        1) There is a way of making the system better
        2) The reason we don’t do it is the well-meaning* people don’t yet agree what that is
        3) If all the well meaning people were to agree they would overcome special interests

        *well meaning = good faith actors = people who care about healthcare systems outcomes rather than personal enrichment (whatever form that takes)

        If say that the principal reason for (2) is special interests, or that (3) is not true, is it still a mistake theory issue?

        Look I can’t say for sure because I’m not that close to it, but it certainly appears as though how Obamacare developed was a good example of this. Enough people agreed, got something through, but then first opportunity its been wrecked by special interests.

        • albatross11 says:

          If we think of conflict theory as a description of reality, then we might say “Most people are treating their arguments as soldiers, not trying to find out who’s right, and so we can predict that the people who use effective persuasion tactics (ranging from rhetorical flourishes to Dark Arts to the local Inquisitor showing you the instruments and encouraging you to repent) will usually come out on top.”

          If we think of conflict theory as a way of approaching some disputes, then probably nobody *always* approaches them this way. Even if you spend all your time burning heretics at the stake, you’ll still want to allow a safe area for honest discussion of correct theology within the Church. And even if you’re generally in the mistake theory camp and want rational discussion, there’s a point where the rational discussion of whether or not Germany gets to annex a bunch of Europe has ended and we’re now thinking mainly in terms of bombs and bullets.

          • CognitivelyDissonated says:

            so we can predict that the people who use effective persuasion tactics (ranging from rhetorical flourishes to Dark Arts to the local Inquisitor showing you the instruments and encouraging you to repent) will usually come out on top.

            As opposed to who? Those on the side of eventual truth? What happens when they are on the same side? All well meaning people now think slavery is wrong, but there was certainly no consensus at the time it was abolished. I’m not just talking about the civil war here.

            Conflict theory as a way of approaching some disputes

            If I were trying to achieve something, my attitude view would be to try to establish what is true/best aligns with my values (as far as possible), but after that I’m going to try and action it; that’ll involve persuading some people and coming into “conflict” with others.

            Of course, my view would probably change over the course of this. I think what I’m saying is that while internally (organizationally or individually) mistake theory is probably optimal (although again not necessarily a true description), it’s doesn’t describe how things work.

            EDIT: addendum: re-reading Scott’s original post mistake theory sounds more like an aspiration, like a “this is how we should do things and what we should aim towards”, and would be consistent with his ideal form of government (futarchy?). I probably agree with that, but those pesky elites are getting in the way!

          • albatross11 says:

            I think it’s entirely common that the people who have the truth on their side lose out to the people who have the effective persuasion machinery on their side. IMO, this is a good marker for places where the conventional wisdom is likely to be nonsense–if there’s a lot of persuasion machinery aimed at keeping anyone from disagreeing about X, then it’s more likely that X is at least arguably wrong. (That’s not always true, but it’s a useful marker for possible dumb bits of conventional wisdom.)

          • CognitivelyDissonated says:

            @albatross11
            Agreed.

            So going back to your prediction, sounds like you’d have 4 states:
            1) People with truth* on side win out through consensus**
            2) People without truth on side win out through consensus
            3) People with truth on side win out without consensus
            4) People without truth on side win out without consensus

            Fair to summarise: if (1) and (2) are more common than (3) and (4) then we’d say mistake theory is a better description of the policy?

            *The action taken best satisfies agreed policy goals ?
            **Some %? There’s never 100%, but 50-60% seems too far from consensus?

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          Your 1), 2) and 3) above are a good statement of the mistake theory position, or at least my version of it. Re: your objections, I’d say that while special interests may be contributing to 2), we’re more likely to fix it by making a collective effort at truth-seeking via healthy debate than by making a collective effort at smashing the special interests.

          I don’t think you can plausibly hold up Obamacare as an example of all the well-meaning people agreeing, unless you think Republicans aren’t well-meaning.

          • CognitivelyDissonated says:

            we’re more likely to fix it by making a collective effort at truth-seeking via healthy debate than by making a collective effort at smashing the special interests.

            I mean just on this, I’d posit that the 2nd part is required for the 1st part. At

            I don’t think you can plausibly hold up Obamacare as an example of all the well-meaning people agreeing, unless you think Republicans aren’t well-meaning.

            That’s fair, I’ll take that. But isn’t the implication that democracy is all conflict theory? I.e. if you really need materially all to agree for a mistake theory consensus, while actually changes come about based on very small legislative majorities.

            Also if someone is against something because they are basically brainwashed (setting aside whether this is true in the case of healthcare), how does that fit into the mistake theory?

  37. ana53294 says:

    The above thread got me thinking about the Great Classics I have read that I would never recommend to anybody – because they are extremely boring, have crazy formatting, or are basically unreadable. Stuff Dead White Men Get Away With But Nobody Else Can.

    An example, if anybody has read it, is Jose Saramago’s Blindness. He’s a Noble Prize winner that is fairly popular in Portugal. The premise of the book is good, and it’s actually interesting. But he doesn’t use dots. You go through pages and pages of neverending comma splices – you feel like the story is going on, and on, and you can’t breathe. Even dialogues are separated by commas instead of quotation marks. So the book is good, but basically unreadable.

    Another example is one of the Spanish Classics, Benito Perez Galdos. He is one of the Realism writers. Now, Realism was great in painting, but when page after page you get elaborate descriptions of a fence, or the bricks used in a house, or whatever, you feel dozing off. The only way to read it, unless you are an anthropologist who wants to study XIX century Spanish traditions, is to skip most of the descriptions.

    Any other books that are Great Classics, that use styles that would never be published nowadays?

    • kaakitwitaasota says:

      There’s Finnegans Wake, but I’m not sure anybody really takes it seriously. The Finnish novel Alastalon Salissa spends ninety pages narrating the thought-process of a man walking to the mantelpiece to fetch his pipe; it’s never been translated into English. Stream-of-consciousness modernism seems to have fallen by the wayside, really–you get short passages of a character’s thought process in most modern novels, but it’s not the primary narrative technique.

      • ana53294 says:

        Is the book popular in Finland? Do they force you to read it in school?

        I couldn’t read Ulysses, but I was fairly young. Is Finnegan’s wake worse than that?

        • Freddie deBoer says:

          Finnegan’s Wake is far more challenging. Ulysses is not nearly as challenging as its reputation.

    • Nick says:

      Now, Realism was great in painting, but when page after page you get elaborate descriptions of a fence, or the bricks used in a house, or whatever, you feel dozing off. The only way to read it, unless you are an anthropologist who wants to study XIX century Spanish traditions, is to skip most of the descriptions.

      This attitude has always baffled me. I’ll gape when a person says they read some nine hundred page epic fantasy book in six hours, and then they’ll tell me they just skip all the description, and then I have to wonder, is that really any way to read the book? Don’t you think the author was doing something with those pages and pages of description? Granted, when writers are paid by the word, those pages and pages don’t necessarily serve much purpose. But I’m still suspicious that these folks are regularly missing important things, especially when I can see their recall of events or understanding of themes, message, etc. has suffered, and I’m consequently wary of saying they’ve really read it.

      • ana53294 says:

        But I’m still suspicious that these folks are regularly missing important things, especially when I can see their recall of events or understanding of themes, message, etc. has suffered, and I’m consequently wary of saying they’ve really read it.

        That assumes that reading a book implies understanding all the messages that are in the book, in your first read. When I was a child, I was somehow obsessed with Robinson Crusoe and the Prince and the Pauper. I re-read them every year between the ages of 6 and 14, and never got bored of them, because I would discover new things every time I read them.
        For example, 6 year old me did not understand the episode about the Baptist ladies. I only understood that somehow those nice ladies got burned while having commited no crime – the way a six year old sees it. Did I read the book? Back to back. Did I understand it? not everything.
        Only when I learnt about the Henry VIII, and the Reformation, and Martin Luther, and the Inquisition, and all those other things did I understand that the burning of the Baptist ladies was an example of religious prosecution.
        Every time I re-read a book I see new things in it. I still think that I can claim to have read it before, even if I didn’t get everything.

        • Nick says:

          I agree there’s almost always something to be gained from rereading, especially when you’re lacking the background or context for some of it. And maybe I’m being unfair saying it’s not really reading the book. All the same, if I were to finish Robinson Crusoe and I couldn’t remember who Friday is or how Crusoe got back to England or what Defoe’s saying about repentance or the significance of Crusoe building a second home*, you’d rightly get suspicious whether I got anything out of that reading beyond being able to say “I’ve read Robinson Crusoe.”

          *I actually haven’t read Robinson Crusoe, so I’m just borrowing these things off sparknotes. Sorry if they’re poor examples!

          • ana53294 says:

            You should; it’s a great book (and an easy read, too). Everything in the book is perfect and to the point, and adds to the plot.

            If the people you are referring to did not get the main plot lines, then you can fairly say that they did not read it. However, a lot of Benito Perez Galdos’ books are centered in the history of Spain. His national stories are like the Spanish version of War and Peace (also about the Napoleonic wars).

            But if you are reading, say, Fortunata y Jacinta, a story about two married women, one of whom has an affair with the husband of the other one, and ends giving her the child and dying. I say you can focus on the loose morality of the husband, on his lack of character and his wife’s patience. Digressions about Spanish history, the life of the people then, don’t add that much to the setting of the story (although you may go into it in a second re-read).
            For me, I frequently like to get the story first, on a first read, and then go deeper, if the book deserves it. Not everything in a good book has to be read and understood immediately.

          • carvenvisage says:

            >I agree there’s almost always something to be gained from rereading, especially when you’re lacking the background or context for some of it. And maybe I’m being unfair saying it’s not really reading the book. All the same, if I were to finish Robinson Crusoe and I couldn’t remember who Friday is or how Crusoe got back to England or what Defoe’s saying about repentance or the significance of Crusoe building a second home*, you’d rightly get suspicious whether I got anything out of that reading beyond being able to say “I’ve read Robinson Crusoe.”

            In normal life it’s generally accepted that a wide range of experience-archiving levels is acceptable. Why would it be different if the experience is (via a novel) a brief stint in an alternate world?

          • Nick says:

            In normal life it’s generally accepted that a wide range of experience-archiving levels is acceptable. Why would it be different if the experience is (via a novel) a brief stint in an alternate world?

            I don’t know what you’re getting at. I’m not saying it’s unacceptable that a person only skim a book. I am saying that that can hardly be called reading.

          • carvenvisage says:

            If your friend says their summer vacation was an awesome blur does that mean they weren’t experiencing it fully at the time?

            The point is that how and even whether you archive your experience doesn’t prove the level of engagement you had of it at the time.

            Or for a personal example, I remember all kinds of irrelevant details, more than other people but I don’t think it says anything about me at a deep level, I view at it as a quirk of my mental archiving.

            Basically if someone had an awesome journey in neverneverland I don’t see why they should have to remember it any more than their summer holiday.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Moby Dick?

      Basically a dry treatise on the practice and custom of 19th century whaling with a short-story interspersed as a framing device. At least that is how I remember it…

      • dodrian says:

        I second this summary, though I’ll add that the little bits of narrative were excellent.

        Les Miserables similarly suffers from random digressions or overlong descriptions of life in 19th century France, though it’s plot-to-content ratio is still much higher than Moby Dick

    • FLWAB says:

      Absalom, Absalom is the most unreadable “classic” I ever managed to finish. The story structure is convoluted, the prose is dense, and the plot is purposely obfuscated throughout most of the book. At the end I felt a strange sense of accomplishment, and for the life of me I cannot tell whether it was a good book or not.

      • Creutzer says:

        I would say that part of the point of the book is precisely to evoke this experience in the reader.

  38. LTK says:

    Hey Scott, are you aware of what goes on at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center? They recently won another lawsuit that lets them continue to use painful electric shocks as part of aversion therapy. Now, I don’t know much about psychiatric care of children with severe learning disabilities, but this seems to me like an explicit failure of humanity by all involved. Any insight?

  39. Robert Jones says:

    My problem with conflict vs mistake is that it’s unempirical. Unless you actually have some data, or at least specific examples, I just have no idea whether you’re even talking about a real thing.

    My guess is that nobody is really conflict theorist or a mistake theorist (nobody actually treats politics as science or as war; we all agree there are some bad actors and some well-intentioned but counterproductive policies). Expressing it as a dichotomy dodges the hard work of identifying which approach is most appropriate in each situation.

    You identify conflict theorists with advancing the interests of the people against the elite, but this isn’t the only way that society can be broken down into groups with conflicting interests. By doing this, you’ve smudged the meta and object level theories.

    • cuke says:

      This captures my problem with the discussion as well. The concepts seemed poorly defined. Without reference to some clear criteria or empirical referents, in much of the discussion that followed people seemed to use the terms differently. And often the discussion sounded like the dichotomy was “mistake theorists” and everyone-else-who-I-think-are-idiots, which seemed not a very rigorous frame.

  40. rubberduck says:

    Does anyone here know of a work of fiction with an otherwise realistic setting in which a major character (preferably the protagonist) is explicitly the only one in the world with superpowers/supernatural abilities, and it’s NOT thanks to technology/genetic modification or extensive training? Maybe I don’t consume enough fiction but I could only think of 2 works that even come close:

    1. Hardcore Henry, in which the villain has gratuitious telepathic powers that are never explained (but the movie never does anything with this and also it’s… not a good film at all, in my opinion)

    2. Death Note, before Misa shows up

    Anyone know anything that would fit?

    • WashedOut says:

      Well there’s Alex Mack, who thanks to accidental contact with a weird chemical goo has a bunch of strange and unrelated powers.

    • Baeraad says:

      Watchmen comes to mind. One actual superhero, many hapless losers in costumes.

      If you want to include video games, Max from Life is Strange is the only character who has any special abilities (she can rewind time), though the prequel kiiiiiind of hints that Rachel had some kind of subconscious pyrokinesis thing going on.

      • Nick says:

        One Punch Man is sort of like Watchmen in that respect. At least in the first season—we may meet more folks like Saitama later.

        • J Mann says:

          I love One Punch Man, but it’s very clearly IMHO not “a work of fiction with an otherwise realistic setting in which a major character (preferably the protagonist) is explicitly the only one in the world with superpowers/supernatural abilities.”

          1. The setting is an anime-style Japan, where the cities and society have specifically been reorganized as a result of the regular appearance of monsters.

          2. The very first scene has One Punch Man facing Vaccine Man, a giant mutant born from pollution and waste to punish the earth, and his origin story involves a fight against Crablante, a villain who developed crab powers from eating too much crab.

          3. While Saitama is at an entirely different level from all the other supers, his universe is already cluttered with supers when he gets there.

          but it’s a great show and an even better manga – everyone should check it out.

          • rubberduck says:

            OPM doesn’t fit my criteria at all but I second that it’s an amazing show. Aside from the clever writing, the animation is really pretty.

            Also, in my opinion ONE’s other work Mob Psycho 100 is even better so if you like OPM I highly recommend it.

          • Nick says:

            Hah, fair enough. It seemed to me that the heroes other than Saitama and perhaps Tornado (since she’s an esper) were basically well-trained mundanes or the result of technology or genetic tampering. But it’s definitely not a realistic setting, and a lot of the monsters seem to have weird powers of their own.

          • J Mann says:

            Murata is also incredible.

        • James C says:

          One Punch Man seems almost the opposite. In a world filled with superheroes, monsters and titanic forces the story is all about a completely banal man.

    • bzium says:

      I can not confirm or deny whether the things below strictly adhere to your definition because that would be spoilers, but they are in the ballpark:

      Steven Gould’s Jumper. An abused kid develops the ability to teleport. No explanation of how that works is given.

      Harlan Ellison’s novella Mefisto in Onyx. Guy’s a telepath.

    • James C says:

      There’s a fan-novel where Supergirl ends up in the real world and everyone freaks out in pretty short order. Very good story and the name completely escapes me. Also has one of my favorite background details, as while Supergirl is from the universe where Superman exists, the ‘real world’ is the universe where Spoiler: Nzryvn Rneuneg existed. Although, the book had a happier ending.

    • b_jonas says:

      The protagonist and title character of Roald Dahl’s children’s book “Matilda” develops powers of telekinesis, that is, moving an object far from herself by just looking at it and concentrating. I can’t confirm that she’s the only one in the world who can do that, but it is quite possible, according to the reactions of Ms Honey. Matilda loses her powers by the end of the book.

    • Jugemu says:

      Anime thriller Boku Dake ga Inai Machi (aka Erased) fits.

      Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation series fits IIRC.

      In general I think this kind of thing is more common in children’s media since the more coherent world-building expected in adult fiction makes it hard to justify totally unique superpowers.

      • Nick says:

        Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation series fits IIRC.

        I thought of the same. It’s speculated to be a genetic mutation, but I don’t think we get confirmation of that anywhere in the series.

        • Matt M says:

          And the fact that it is unexplained/unpredictable is, itself, a major and significant plot point.

      • Baeraad says:

        I don’t know, there is one character who’s an extremely powerful telepath for no reason that he or anyone else is aware of, so I assume that’s what you’re thinking of? But there are a number of other telepaths in that series – they aren’t as powerful, but they have what is pretty clearly a lesser version of the same abilities, and they are at least implied to know where they come from.

    • SamChevre says:

      I can’t remember the name, but there is a book where magic is generated/managed using music, and is extremely demanding on its practitioner, in which a trained opera singer ends up there somehow.

      Because she could train without the magical drain until ending up there, she’s orders of magnitude more powerful than anyone else.

      Can’t remember the book’s name.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        It’s a series, IIRC.

        Vaguely French pen-name for the author.

        Edit:
        Got it.

        I think you mean the “The Soprano Sorceress” by L.E. Modesitt.

      • Michael Handy says:

        My first thought was “Black Opera” by Mary Gentle, which I recommend almost as strongly.

        Set in the Bel-Canto era a world where Napoleon managed to stalemate Europe and retired as Emperor of France, with his Brother ruling Naples.

        Although the Church can already do magic here via religious masses, the secret is that our hero can compose (well, write, he’s a librettist) secular music with the same effect, which the church suppresses heavily…until they need him to stop an evil cabal from remaking the world by writing a counter-opera.

    • TracingWoodgrains says:

      Neal Shusterman has a young adult novel that fits, called Bruiser. The title character’s ability is more of an anti-power, though: He suffers pain in place of anyone he cares about who happens to be near him. It’s honestly a fantastic story.

      Actually, now that I wrote that, I recall another of his: The Schwa Was Here. Another anti-power–the titular Schwa has the trait of being almost impossible to notice (raise hand in class, teacher doesn’t see; nobody really knows his name; buys a billboard, the road he buys it on closes for the duration he owns it. That sort of thing).

      He has another that almost fits as well, called Challenger Deep, although it’s made clear throughout the story that the main character’s impressions of having supernatural abilities are manifestations of schizophrenia. Still a thought-provoking, worthwhile book.

      Now that I’m thinking about it, he’s done quite a bit along these lines. One of the best YA authors I know of.

      • FLWAB says:

        +1 for Shusterman, one of best authors most people never heard of. His “MindX” (MindQuake, MindStorm, etc) short stories were some of my favorite books as a kid.

        He does this trope a lot, doesn’t he? In Speeding Bullet the main character has unexplained possibly-in-his head luck based powers: after saving someone from a subway accident every time he flips a coin it comes up heads, and he believes that his luck will protect him as long as he keeps using it to save others. The book never makes it clear whether the powers are real: besides the improbability of his coin flips he never actually does anything that breaks the laws of physics, he just manages to survive dangerous situations.

        • Nornagest says:

          I suppose Ringworld might count, at that.

          • albatross11 says:

            Nah, she just got lucky.

          • engleberg says:

            There are thousands of teelas on Earth- they just got lucky avoiding puppeteer agents. The cynical love story in Ringworld is one of the better things Niven took from James Branch Cabell.

    • Groundhog Day might fit. The protagonist is the only one who has the power (or curse) of time looping in the whole movie, though the movie never explicitly says that he is the only one to ever have looped.

      • Matt M says:

        I don’t count this as a “power” because it seems entirely outside of his control. He doesn’t have any power over time that he can choose to manipulate, he is bound to its whims the same way we are, just with different results.

    • James C says:

      Barking by Tom Holt almost manages this as it seems that while the world is normal, lawyers are all supernatural.

    • Iain says:

      Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, and the forthcoming Perhaps the Stars) is arguably in this neighbourhood, although the “otherwise realistic setting” is a deliberately unusual spin on the 25th century and the most central character does not have supernatural abilities.

    • Saint Fiasco says:

      “Otherwise realistic setting” with one character that has superpowers sounds like a trope of the magical realism genre. For example, in The House of the Spirits, one of the protagonists is a woman with clairvoyance and telekinesis.

    • littskad says:

      Aren’t some Stephen King novels like this? Maybe Carrie or The Shining?

      • Nornagest says:

        Carrie counts, also Firestarter. There’s more than one person with psychic powers in The Shining, and a variety of ghosts.

        • the_the says:

          In Firestarter, I recall both the father and daughter have special (but different) powers.

    • the_the says:

      The protagonist in The Invention of Lying might fit the bill. Gervais’ character is the first person in society to be able to lie (and it’s never said to be the result of genetic modification/evolution, although I suppose one could argue the case) which gives him tremendous power.

      As I recall, for most of the movie, he is the only person with this ability (at the end do we see that his children may have inherited it).

    • helloo says:

      Isn’t this a super common trope?

      I mean like half of the superhero comics (that don’t involve tech/mutants say… Superman) before the supervillans show up.

      The “something odd is happening” of not just Twilight Zone variety, but also things like “now I can talk to animals” of Doctor Dolittle, “can suddenly hear people’s thought” – plenty of examples like What Women Want, “receives tomorrow’s newspaper” Early Edition which has been mentioned in a previous OT, etc.

      I think you probably can find a lot of them if you look at things that focus on single person narratives (rather than a grand setting, or book adaption).

      • John Schilling says:

        Isn’t this a super common trope?

        I mean like half of the superhero comics (that don’t involve tech/mutants say… Superman) before the supervillans show up.

        I don’t follow comics very closely, but I think the rule at least through the Silver Age was that each superhero or close team of superheroes got an origin story that made no reference to other superheroes existing, in a world unaltered by the conspicuous presence of numerous costumed superhuman freaks. Then, when people started getting bored and the sales started to drop, the writers would happen to notice that Gotham and Metropolis existed in this universe so Batman and Superman could stop by for a team-up. At which point, comic-book geeks insist that since Batman teamed up with e.g. the Flash, the Flash must exist in the same world as every other superhero Batman or Superman ever teamed up with(*), and pay no attention to how implausible it is that this world looks so much like our own.

        But at least the origin stories for most of the classic superheroes should meet the stated requirement.

        * Also, the detectives from Law and Order should have realized that half their mysterious crimes were being committed by space aliens or MiBs, because Detective Munch and the Lone Gunmen mean they live in that sort of universe. Fortunately, television doesn’t play by comic-book continuity rules.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          I recall someone citing an instance of one television show existing as a show in another show’s continuity (e.g. Chandler on Friends talking about a scene in Three’s Company), and the latter show also appears in the former’s continuity. Unfortunately, this was at least a decade ago, and a cursory search isn’t turning it up.

          And then there was It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which made glorious fun of the whole notion of continuity itself.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I recall a giant graph showing all the TV show universes that were stated to exist within others or coincident to others, and it was insane. I think I got there from TV Tropes and I need to do some work over the next few days so I’m not inclined to look for it.

  41. Fluffy Buffalo says:

    Inspired by Scott’s article on Melatonin, I gave it a shot. So far, out of five nights with 0.5 mg, I’ve woken up twice with nightmares, which is not something that usually happens to me. If you have tried the stuff, what’s your guess – coincidence or side effect?

    • Nornagest says:

      Never had nightmares with it, but my first few times taking it I had unusually vivid dreams. Seemed to go away after a while.

    • outis says:

      I’m trying to use it now. I took it before going to sleep (as per the box instructions) and it had vivid dreams. Unfortunately, I woke up much earlier than I wanted to, then felt sleepy later (perhaps due to the melatonin, but probably just due to the lack of sleep earlier). I guess I should try Scott’s advice of taking melatonin much earlier than bedtime.

    • Civilis says:

      I’ve spent the past three nights on 1mg (smallest dosage I could find) taken right before bed, coupled with the remnants of a summer cold. The first two I had vivid dreams, not exactly nightmares, but not good, either. I haven’t noticeably slept longer, but I’ve fallen to sleep quicker and the sleep has been less disturbed.

      My take was that since I normally don’t get restful sleep (especially when sick), getting two nights of relatively undisturbed sleep may have given my sleeping brain enough time to enter a dreaming state.

    • Carey Underwood says:

      Someone around here previously mentioned a rebound effect when you start getting enough rem sleep after having been deprived, which sounds similar.

  42. Yaleocon says:

    I am very interested in doing a minimal rewrite of “Conflict vs. Mistake.” Once I’m done, I’ll just email it to your shireroth address? Please let me know if this isn’t the right approach.

    I also have my own thoughts as to what’s going on with “conflict and mistake.” But since expressing them goes beyond the scope of a minimal rewrite, I’ll lay them out here in a reply to this comment, hopefully to receive feedback on.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yes, email to me, although you are not the sort of Marxist who I expect to have a substantially different perspective.

      • Yaleocon says:

        Thanks, will do. I am very close with some seriously committed Marxists, so I hope I can contribute something of value.

  43. nimim.k.m. says:

    In fractional OT 105.75 user johan_larson asked:

    It wasn’t that long ago that going to high school was a bit of a big deal. I think my grandparents in central Finland had grade six educations, gained through the local “folk skola” (folk school, or common school). I’m trying to figure out how much material such institutions would actually have covered.

    In math, I’m picturing a curriculum that covers counting, arithmetic with whole numbers, decimals, fractions, weights and measures, time and money, geometric shapes, and formulas for areas and volumes. And that would pretty much be it. Someone going on to an upper school would first hit integers, algebra, and straight lines.

    Does that sound about right?

    I had the pleasure of finding the official curriculum of the Finnish-speaking 6-grade kansakoulu/folkskola/common school of city of Lahti from 1914, which I assume is about the correct time period and representative of education given in other schools in similar medium/small towns. Attending school was not compulsory until 1921, and before that less common in countryside than in urban areas. (Very rural areas did not have to provide full extent of the school curriculum.)

    The education consisted of religion, native language (divided to “reading” and “grammar”), “education in observations”, geography, history, mathematics, “measurements”, “natural knowledge”, drawing, handwriting, singing, gymnastics and crafts. Kids receive 24 hours of education per week in years I and II, 30-31 hours in later grades. No instruction in any foreign language.

    I’ll refer to the grades / school years as I-VI for simplicity, but if you look at the original document, it has “lower” grades numbered I-II, followed by “upper” grades I-IV. (Total 6 years of schooling.) If the student could pass the entrance exams and the family had the means to afford the fees (or student obtained a scholarship), they could move to the oppikoulu/läröverk (grammar school that prepared for studies in university) after their 4th year.

    Religion: Religion appears to be one of the most important subjects at every grade (judging by the number of hours allocated to it, on par with maths and reading and writing). Grade I: stories from the NT. Grade II: stories from OT. (“No textbooks used” at this stage.) Starting from year III, the students begin a more serious study of the catechism (presumably of the national Lutheran church) and reading the Bible proper.

    Native language, reading: First year is mostly vowel and reading practice. Reading material gets longer and more difficult over the years. In later grades (parts of) some particular books to be read are specified (including a work of historical fiction by the national poet Runeberg). Some poems and stories are required to be memorized.

    Native language, grammar and writing practice: The pupils start the deliberate writing practice on their second year. References to the textbook used. Year VI covers “writing (personal) letters, letters of application, adverts and other practical texts.”

    “Observations” is a grades I-II only subject. Instruction covers natural world and geography as appropriate for small kids. Topics include: household animals, everyday objects (“knife e.t.c.”), stories and fairytales, “discussions on instructional pictures“, clock, “species of important trees”, local streets and the town layout.

    Mathematics instruction starts at grade I, but note that it is not called by the Greek-derived word for “mathematics” (which IIRC was reserved for higher mathematics such as algebra and trigonometry that were subjects in institutions that prepared for university); a more literal translation of the subject name is “numerics” or “calculations”. Topics covered: Addition, subtraction, multiplication, divisions. (Range of numbers and operations gets more difficult year by year). Fractions and calculation with units are introduced in year IV. Year VI covers percent and interest calculation.

    “Study of measurements” (literal translation of an arcane word). Only on the year 6. Curriculum has only a reference to the textbook, but a bit of googling reveals that is subject was mostly geometry and its practical applications. I can’t find any scanned copies and only very scant descriptions of the textbook, so I have no details what kind of geometrical instruction the children received.

    Drawing. While the subject is called “drawing”, it also includes working with clay and paper and some painting. Instructions are surprisingly detailed: topics, techniques and materials are specified, down to the make of the pencils and brushes used.

    Crafts. Grades I-II: Simple use of needle. Clay. Cutting paper to shapes and forms. Instruction diverges by sex starting on the grade III, and subject develops more into make of practical everyday objects and household items than playful creations of little kids: Boys have woodwork and simple metalwork, girls learn to make textiles (from year 5 onwards, with sewing machines.)

    “Natural knowledge” starts at grade III and is what would be called (natural) sciences today, but note that the modern word for “sciences” is not used. (I don’t know if it is a quirk of language from a century ago or indicative of deeper philosophical statement.) . Topics: Human anatomy. Plants. Animals. Year VI has a little(?) bit of physics and chemistry. (Unfortunately, no information on depth of instruction.) Also as possibly a note of interest, “temperance education” gets a specific highlight in the curriculum. (Year V: “influence of alcohol on human body”. Year VI: “the production and chemical composition of alcohol”.)

    Geography. Grade III: local geography, terrestrial globe, Finland. IV: Europe and Russia. V: Asia, Africa, America, Australia. VI: Earth and celestial bodies.

    Handwriting. The text only tells which parts of a particular textbook are covered, so I can’t tell much of the contents.

    History. Only on years V-VI. Both general history, and history of Russia (“as appropriate”). The textbooks are specified, no remarks on their contents.

    Singing. Very detailed instructions are given: which songs (many religious songs from the church hymnal book, also some nationalistic / seasonal songs) are to be sung, what kind of musical theory is covered.

    Gymnastics. The curriculum again lists only the appropriate chapters from a instructional textbook. Also sports, skating, skiing if weather permits.

    addendum. Image search by the name of the geometry textbook brings images that appear to include some work with compass (link to exercise that transcends language barriers I hope) and (unit) computations of area and volume and other geometrical exercises of similar level.

    • johan_larson says:

      Wow. An impressive find. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.

      The curriculum you describe is much richer than I expected.

      • nimim.k.m. says:

        Thank you for your kind words, but it really was mostly a pleasant way to procrastinate.

        Also, it was a surprise to notice that the education (at least, as per specified by the official curriculum) wasn’t at all that different what I had almost a century later in 90s/00s, except we had 1) less nationalistic and religious stint in the readings, 2) far less singing, 3) the contents of natural sciences and geography classes were probably? hopefully? more up-to-date and “modern”, and 4) history as a separate subject started a couple of years earlier. But (for example) all the advanced mathematics, physics and chemistry did not begin before our 7th year, and while pedagogical exposition in the textbooks was probably different, the contents sound strikingly similar: We also spent our 6th year grinding out percent calculations, and frankly, we didn’t do anything as sophisticated as “finding the midpoint of a line with the compass” until years 7 or 8, and I recall anecdotal evidence from my parents’ generation that in their time the students who transitioned to the grammar school (remember, in their 5th year!) started by studying geometry from textbooks that resembled more Euclid than modern textbooks. So our maths education has partially declined challenge-rating-wise.

    • SamChevre says:

      This list of topics is fairly like those of the Amish-Mennonite schools. Fewer years, but longer days (ours were 20 hours a week all years, for 8 years.)

      We would have called the mathematics/numerics subject arithmetic. For us, that included “study of measurements”–perimeter/area/volume calculations for regular figures, units of measure and how to convert among them, time and rate problems, etc. The subject also included estimation and problem-solving methods (sketches, parallel problems, and so forth.)

      Did not have Observation, Crafts, Gymnastics.

      We had spelling as a separate topic from writing.

      • nimim.k.m. says:

        arithmetic

        Thanks, “arithmetic” would certainly have been a more apt translation to modern English … on the other hand, I offer a saving throw: the creators / standardizers of the 19th century (and early 20th) era Finnish language were big on creating “natural sounding” words from “popular” or “non-foreign” roots, avoiding introducing loanwords from Greek or Latin (sometimes also avoiding German, Russian and Swedish if possible). So instead of merely coming up with a Finnish spelling for “arithmetic”, they prefer a construct derived from verb that is usually translated as “to count”. (And while we are at it, the word they use for geography would also be lit. translated as “study of (land|country|ground|Earth)”. The only word of “foreign origin” to make it into the subject list is “history”.)

        • ana53294 says:

          Out of curiosity, did those words stay?
          Late 19th – early 20th century Basque went through a similar process. A guy named Sabino Arana invented a bunch of words, notably the horrible word “urrutizkine” for “telefonoa” because he didn’t like loan words either. He also translated a lot of names to Basque, and invented a bunch of names.
          Some of the words he invented stuck, but most of them didn’t, and we reverted to the loan words. The Basque names he invented did stay, though.

          • nimim.k.m. says:

            Uh, I’m not even a serious hobbyist (let alone a professional scholar) so this is a tough one to answer.

            Sure, the Finnish language has lots of words that were made up or re-purposed in 19th century or before, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t have heard about all the proposed words that didn’t stick.

            As an example of not being aware of words that didn’t stick, apparently “study of measurements” was the ‘accepted’ translation for “geometry”, yet I didn’t even recognize the word. Psychology was called “science of the soul”, which would be now a very archaic choice of word.

            But for the record, our word for “telephone” was invented in the 19th century (“puhelin”, derived from word “to talk”). Likewise the word for electricity (“sähkö”) or the word for “science” (“tiede”). All of these and many others are still common everyday language. Wikipedia informs me that all the words for elementary mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) were introduced in a certain periodical in 1820s.

          • ana53294 says:

            Yes, I guess it’s hard to know if there are words that dissappeared or not, if you don’t read a lot of old texts and realize “Hey, this doesn’t exist anymore”.

            Interesting about the telephone.

            I mostly know about the invented words because they taught us some of them in Literature class. And the main basque political party is called EAJ/PNV, which is translated into Spanish as “The Basque Nationalist Party”, when it’s actually “The Basque Jeltzale party”, JEL being itself an acronym for “Jauna eta Lege Zaharra”, which means “God and the Old Law”.

            So having an example like this of a completely made up word makes me more aware of it, I guess.

  44. Whelming Wave says:

    I’ve just received one and possibly more job offers in the San Francisco area. Any advice on where to start my search for housing (as I would have to relocate from Dallas), or anybody looking for a roommate?

    • entobat says:

      I recently solved this problem!

      If you are interested in a rationalist group house, try contacting people who are more enmeshed in the rationalist community than I am. They will probably know a group house with an opening.

      Beyond that…apartments.com was what I used, and I was pretty happy with the result. You can filter by town, price range, etc. If you are living in South Bay (i.e. a flat place) and don’t have a car, a nice bike will get you a long way, though you will probably end up wanting to shower when you get in in the mornings (either in-office or at a gym nearby).

      Housing here is stupidly expensive, of course, but once you accept that you will be paying $2000 / mo. for a nice room (or somewhat less, if you are going to live with other people) you have gotten past the painful part of the process.

      Were you looking for something more specific?

      • Whelming Wave says:

        Do you know where I’d look to get more information on rationalists with potential housing space?

        • pontifex says:

          If the company you are going to be working for is located in the South Bay, maybe ask David Friedman. He organizes Rationalist meetups there.

          If the company is in SF, you might be able to live in Berkeley and take the train to work. There is definitely some Rationalist housing there.

      • WashedOut says:

        but once you accept that you will be paying $2000 / mo. for a nice room

        You mean after progressing through anger, denial, bargaining and depression?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      There’s a Rationalist/EA/SSC Housing Coordination Facebook Group you’ll find if you Facebook search that name.

    • veeloxtrox says:

      Craigslist if you want to find a roommate that can be a bit of a wildcard

  45. Freddie deBoer says:

    Here’s a weird, pointless, and random debate some friends and I had this weekend: has the number of total t-shirt designs (so different shirt styles, not individual shirts) made in history reached the billions?

    So we’re talking about incredibly rough estimates but we’re also talking about getting an answer right only to an order of magnitude.

    I say no. A billion is a lot.

    • Nornagest says:

      Well, just to ballpark it, I’d guess that somewhere around ten billion people have lived since T-shirts started being worn as outerwear in the Fifties or Sixties (before that, the number of unique designs would be negligible). So, how many unique T-shirt designs per capita over that period? If it’s less than 0.1, then there are less than a billion T-shirt designs in history.

      I’d guess somewhere around 0.02. Most T-shirt designs are probably one-offs for small companies and kids’ soccer teams and such, which I figure probably means between one in twenty and one in a hundred people in the West design a shirt. And then there’s probably enough T-shirt businesses floating around to inflate that number somewhat, but on the other hand most of the world isn’t the West.

      • BlindKungFuMaster says:

        “… which I figure probably means between one in twenty and one in a hundred people in the West design a shirt.”

        Could be significantly more, I think. Every stag party has custom made t-shirts, kids get these t-shirts on many occasions not just for soccer teams. I had plenty of t-shirts from summer camps, chess tournaments, school events etc.

      • yodelyak says:

        I decided to count how many custom t-shirts I personally have had, and compare that to the number of each of those t-shirts that was printed.

        I’ve had… 12 custom shirts from theater-productions in high school (3 per year for four years, about 40 were printed of each design), 2 custom shirts from high-school sports (50ish prints made of each design), 2 custom shirts from middle-school sports, (15 prints per each), ~5 custom-shirts from summer camp (about 500 per run?), ~5 wildlife t-shirts (massive runs, these were sold in gift shops and some box stores), 3 custom shirts from cafe-press for a college society (~5 sales per design), ~5 other custom ‘free t-shirt’ at something in college (runs between 50 and 1000), at least 5 campaign t-shirts (runs anywhere from 20 to a thousand or so for Senate campaign), and then all the other t-shirts I actually bought in stores at some point, plus the 5 different t-shirts with auto logos on them given me by an Uncle who worked for an auto company. I have team-building exercise / commemorative t-shirts from several workplaces including… 2 where I worked, one where a gal I dated worked, 2 where my mother worked, and 1 where my father worked. I’d say I’ve owned ~ 100 unique designs, and that about half of those designs had print runs of 100 or less–sometimes much less–such that I’m pretty close to having the consumer force of one custom t-shirt design.

        BUT did I put enough effort into this?

        I’ve also owned at least four tie-dye shirts and two screen-press shirts, all of them one-of-a-kind. I also attended a family reunion where *everyone* had a unique shirt, each stating the person’s name and their relation to the central relator at the reunion. So now I think as a consumer of t-shirt designs, my contribution to the market place has driven the creation of ~10 additional t-shirt designs. I just realized I forgot church camp and boy scouts. (Many of those runs were quite large… but many were specific to a particular patrol or troop, so only 50 or 100 per design.)

        I think I’m an outlier, so I still agree that 1b is probably high. but 100m is probably low, at least if things like the tie-dye or family-reunion designs above count as one for each shirt.

        • fion says:

          Wow, you’ve owned a lot of T shirts!

        • Aapje says:

          As a kid, I made a batik shirt, which was a fully bespoke shirt, to I’m definitely above 1, just from that shirt alone.

        • dodrian says:

          Talking about unique t-shirts, off the top of my head I can think of three that I’ve tie-dyed, two that I’ve hand-painted, and four that were a common design but with my name embroidered or printed on top.

          So that’s 9 unique shirts on my part, though I’m not sure how many of them would count as a “unique t-shirt design” by Freddie deBoer’s rules.

        • dodrian says:

          I can think of owning 8 choir shirts for ~50 people, 2 school shirts ~100 people, 4 sports teams of ~20, 7 church shirts of ~100, 3 camp shirts of ~500, and maybe 20 graphic tees I’d estimate having a run of 10,000.

          All of those would definitely count as unique designs, without fudging for hand-made patterns or personal additions, which mean I own ~0.46 unique Ts. I think 0.5 unique, printed-run t-shirts would be a reasonable estimate for an American in their 20s/30s.

      • SaiNushi says:

        My college did a custom t-shirt every year for scholarship weekend (1), another one each year for freshmen arriving (1), a dorm shirt each year for each dorm (6), and each class had a fall-fest shirt (4). Plus there was the one for the whole college each year. That’s 13 custom designs every single year. I started in 2003, and I know for a fact they were doing it for at least four years before that. From 1999 – 2018 is 19 years. So, 19 * 13 = 247 shirts so far (at the very least). How many colleges around the country do something similar, I don’t know, and of course their number of dorm shirts might differ.

        Next, way back in 1992, I was part of the kid’s soccer team over the summer. We got custom t-shirts. Changed every year. Assuming that’s continued, that’s another 26 shirts.

        Lots of grade schools in middle class and higher do custom t’s for each grade.

        Now for my dojo. Every dojo I’ve been a part of had a custom t-shirt. That’s multiple martial arts styles too, but they didn’t change every year. So assume 5 t-shirt designs for dojo’s per city.

        Summer camps. Every one had at least one design, many had 2. Not counting different colors with same design as a different shirt.

        Now we go to stores. Walmart tends to have 20 different designs every year since at least 2008. Spencer’s had 10 different designs, two of which changed each year, dunno for how long, but they sure weren’t the ones Walmart sold. Hot Topic had 10 different designs, two of which changed every year, and 4 of which overlapped with Spencer’s. Right now, 5-below has 20-30 different designs, but I only started going there this year, so I don’t know how often they’ll change.

        So, I can say with confidence that there’s at least 100 new designs every single year, plus one design per sports team, one design per dojo, one design per summer camp, and one design per grade per major US city.

        To bloat it even more, at one of the summer camps, each unit would design their own t-shirt, starting back in 1998. I think there were 20 units. 1 had four sessions per summer, 10 had 8 sessions per summer, and the other 9 had 16 sessions per summer. 238 designs per year. Granted, only one of the four summer camps I went to did that, and I know of two others that didn’t (because they were set up the same way as one of the other ones I went to). I don’t think there would be many like it.

    • Montfort says:

      What counts as a unique design? Is there a minimum for number of shirts actually made with that design?

      • baconbits9 says:

        This is (obviously) the question.

        Take a typical US kid who plays one sport for 3-4 years, and each year has a different team name with their number on the back. If a white T-shirt with “The Titans” on the front is what counts for T-shirt design then the number is lower, but if a white T with “The Titans” with the number 1 on the back is unique from one with the number 2 on the back then every little league team has dozens of unique designs. Every couple of years they change the font, or the size of the font, or add a sponsor or shift the color a little, count all of those as unique and then you are probably looking at close to 10 billion unique T-shirt designs just in US history.

    • fion says:

      My first thought when reading your question was exactly what you said in your final line. A billion is a *lot*.

      To work it out more thoroughly, we need some kind of estimate of the shape of the distribution of how many T shirts there are of each design. Obviously the big brands will produce huge numbers of T shirts of each design, and I expect this accounts for the vast majority of T shirts. Nornagest reckons most T shirt designs are one-offs. I’m not sure about this, but it sounds plausible. So we have a really ugly-shaped distribution with a very, very long tail.

      How many T shirts are there in the world? 10 billion? 100 billion? Let’s assume it’s less than 100 billion. So to be under 1 billion T shirt designs, we need for there to be a mean of >100 T shirts per design. But the mean is really hard to estimate because the distribution is a funny shape.

      Ok, so let’s cut the distribution in half. Assume that the bit of the distribution around 100 shirts per design doesn’t contribute a huge amount to our numbers. Let’s pretend that there are “big brands” with >> 100 shirts/design and “one-offs” with << 100 shirts/design. So relatively small designs like conventions or music bands that print a thousand shirts, they count as "big brands". So what fraction of shirts belong to big brands? Well I own about 20 T shirts and one of them is a one-off so that would suggest taking 95%. I’m not going to do that because I’m a Westerner and I think we probably have more unique shirts than the rest of the world. Let’s say 98%, but I really think it’s higher.*

      So we have <2% of shirts are one-offs out of <100 billion shirts. That's 98% of <100 billion, which is <98 billion. We've also assumed that there's much more than 100 shirts/design. Call it 1000 shirts/design, although I think it's much more than that. This gives us <0.098 billion designs. Call it <0.1 billion.

      This gives us an upper bound of 0.6 billion. To be honest I'm surprised it's that high, but I do think my estimates were mostly on the side that would make this number as big as possible.

      Overall, I reckon it's between 100 million and 1 billion, but I could believe it was in the 10s of millions.

      *re-reading my working, this seems to be the most important estimate. If it was 99%, my final upper-bound goes down to 0.35 billion. If it was 99.9% my final upper-bound is more like 0.15 billion. Or, alternatively, would allow me to relax what I call my "weakest assumption" of 4 designs/shirt in the <<100 designs/shirt category.

    • dodrian says:

      This week’s shirt.woot derby currently has 64 entries, and it’s week 664 of their derby. While older derbies wouldn’t have attracted as much attention, not all of their t-shirt designs come from the derby, I wouldn’t estimate that they have 40,000 shirts in their catalog (though not all of those shirts went to print, but technically you said ‘t-shirt designs’). Then there are sites like CafePress, which will let you print any image onto a t-shirt, and looking at the catalog of “Men’s T-shirts” gives 9,626,074 results, again, with the technical definition of “designs”, as we don’t know how many of those have actually been printed (though I’m pretty sure that number doesn’t include the same design printed on different colors, which CafePress allows, of which there are more than 10, which if we’re being very technical with your definition would bring us 1/10th of the way from one site alone, though that’s still a long long way to go, and other sites are probably smaller than CafePress and overlap in some of their catalog).

      As others have noted, in the US it’s pretty common to print t-shirts for local sports teams, performing arts groups, community events, fun-runs (I don’t know how many race t-shirts my wife has), college clubs, churches, local businesses, etc etc. Plus, making custom shirts is a fairly common activity for children and youth programs, either with painting or tie-die. I would bet we could get at least 300M unique t-shirts this way in US alone.

      It’s definitely US-centric, but how widespread is t-shirt mania? I saw a lot of custom shirts in the UK, though I would doubt as many as in the US, and would bet it’s the same in other English-speaking nations, and lesser but still notable in developed world countries. Can this 4x larger but less shirty population support double the US shirt reserve? How common are custom t-shirt designs in the majority world?

      If we only include t-shirt designs that were done for a run, either by a professional printer or by a silk-screen-setup in somebody’s garage, I would guess that we’re short of a billion designs, though a significant percentage of the way there.

      If we’re expanding the definition of ‘design’ to include one-off tie-dyes, hand painted, stencils, etc etc, then I think we’ve easily smashed a billion unique shirt designs.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Assuming that the T-Shirt design wearing population is dominated by USians of relatively recent birth (which is underselling it by a lot, I think), we might guess 333 million “typical” T-Shirt design wearers.

      3 designs per typical T-shirt wearer would get us to a billion, but those aren’t unique T-shirt designs.

      However what matters is the size of the average unique T-shirt run, which includes everything from Nike apparel through sports-teams of various level of amateurism all the way to bespoke Cafe Press single item runs. If we assume the average size of the run is 30, I think we only need a population of 333 million T-Shirt wearers to have owned 90 such T-shirts in their entire life.

      That includes every single Nike emblem shirt you have had just to run it, etc., and many of those will still be unique designs, with slight variations on a theme.

      I think it’s more likely than not that we have had over 1 billion unique designs.

    • pointenlos says:

      The german writer Kathrin Passig has among her many projects a small website called Zufallsshirt, a random generator for shirt designs which you can buy. Per FAQ the designs are combinations of limited sets, enabling 48,323,750,000,000 possible designs.

  46. Chevalier Mal Fet says:

    This is a book recommendation thread.

    A few days ago, we had a discussion in the comments about David Weber, and I was once again reminded that this forum is mainly populated by huge fucking nerds lots of educated and cultured people. Anyway, what David Weber does better than most other authors I’ve read is great Space Battles. I’ve also read Timothy Zahn, who does them well, and Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet, who does okay. What I’m asking for are other books or series with terrific Space Battles. Anything you enjoyed reading that had lasers, missiles (or missile lasers) in space?

    • John Schilling says:

      Well, since I just finished reshelving my library:

      C.J. Cherryh is vaguely passable on the strategy and tactics of space battles in her Alliance/Union series, but she’s really good at making you understand what it feels like to develop PTSD as a result of your participation of dear god when will this end we’re all gonna die space battles.

      Elizabeth Moon in the Vatta’s War series and Lois Bujold in some of the Dendarii-focused Vorkosigan books also have the knack for getting the human part of the equation right without getting the tactics and techniques completely wrong. Somewhat more upbeat, and the protagonists are more likely to be commanders than victims.

      As always, your go-to team for getting hard SF done right with good storytelling and plot and characters is Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, but I think they’ve only done two full-on space battles; the ending of Footfall and the lost opening of Mote in God’s Eye. The latter isn’t truly lost, of course, it’s been published in an anthology or two at least.

      James Corey’s Expanse series has space battles of sub-Weberian scope but greater hardness and better writing across the board. 80% fewer infodumps but you still know what’s going on, 100% fewer magic treeponies and you won’t miss them a bit. But at this point you may be better off watching it on SyFy, er, Amazon.

      Roger Macbride Allen wrote some pretty good stuff in the 1980s, starting with Torch of Honor. From memory it shouldn’t be too dated, but I haven’t reread it since the 1990s at the latest.

      Speaking of Torches, we’ve talked Karl Gallagher’s Torchship Trilogy here at length; it has its weaknesses including a dose of first-novel syndrome, but it’s got decent hard-ish SF space battles.

      Paul Hamilton would rather write about Han Solo flying the Millenium Falcon than Admiral Ackbar commanding the rebel fleet (figuratively speaking; he’s not actually doing Star Wars). And he wants to make sure you know how many hot women enthusiastically bang Han Solo. But he delivered the space battles adequately, IIRC.

      And an honorable mention for David Brin’s Uplift series, or at least the final section of Startide Rising. This is the “baffle them with wickedly awesome bullshit” school of writing science fiction that the audience won’t notice has the hardness of undercooked flan. It’s too difficult to try to convince a technically literate audience that FTL can work, so spin up half a dozen incompatible types of FTL drive and keep them busy trying to keep track of which one is in use today. More aliens than the Star Wars cantina scene, and you can kind of keep track of those too. Plucky heroes, most of them not even vaguely humanoid, and a space battle against impossible odds for the fate of eleven galaxies, yeah, it’s awesome in a fifty-point all-caps SPACE OPERA! kind of way.

      I’ll probably think of some more later.

      • dick says:

        As always, your go-to team for getting hard SF done right with good storytelling and plot and characters is Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, but I think they’ve only done two full-on space battles; the ending of Footfall and the lost opening of Mote in God’s Eye.

        The sequel to Mote, “The Gripping Hand,” hinges on a lengthy and very detailed space battle that I found quite fulfilling to read. It goes in to a ton of detail on the tactics involved and how the two armadas use the light-speed gap to their relative (hah!) advantages. I also loved that the changing relative positions of astronomical bodies within the solar system was a strategic and, more importantly, political factor in how the war proceeded; one of the aliens described the varying distances between rival space-faring factions using the metaphor of ancient Persian trade routes, which might be fast and safe in one season but slow and dangerous at a different time of year.

        Unfortunately, Niven suffers from a bad case of “all mainstream sci-fi from a generation ago looks sexist now” disease, so take that under advisement. Also, too much exposure to realistic descriptions of kinetic bombardment can make it hard to take the Death Star from Star Wars seriously.

        • albatross11 says:

          I have this theory:

          At any given time/place, there is a dominant set of norms about how to think and talk about the world. Over time, these drift and change. Which means that it is inevitable that over time, books will become less and less in tune with the current norms.

          In some cultures, there’s also a high tolerance for variance from many/most of those norms–most people are okay reading stuff that doesn’t perfectly follow them, even though they may sometimes find stuff so jarring or offensive that they get knocked out of a story. In other cultures, there is a very low tolerance for variance from the current norms–most people are offended by even relatively small deviations from those norms.

          In the high-tolerance cultures, you will see a much greater ability to read and enjoy older works. And so many people will be familiar with the historical works, and that will affect the current literature in various interesting ways. In the low-tolerance cultures, you will see far less ability to read and enjoy those works, and so few readers and writers will be familar with them.

      • J Mann says:

        @John Shilling, @Chevalier Mal Fet – have you read Walter Jon Williams’ Conventions of War trilogy? I liked it a lot.

      • engleberg says:

        Randall Garrett’s Takeoff! covered the ‘then my X-beam struck his Q-shield and his R-beam was deflected by my Y-shield’ stuff. Spinning your wheels with stagy military soap opera and a black velvet curtain with some lightbulbs isn’t good science fiction battle. Good science fiction battle at least starts with two galaxies colliding, which of course means they are passing through each other. It’s a fight inside a red sun system, which of course means it’s inside a red sun. It’s when you use the wonders of astronomy as the of course setting for your plot, and if you do it right and have intelligent characters, it’s great science fiction, and if you do the setting it right and let the gods but annihilate all space and time to make two lovers bathetic and happy, it’s great space opera. Nobody has done great space opera or great science fiction for decades. Just reread Niven and ignore the Hugos now they’ve burned the brand.

        • Deiseach says:

          It’s when you use the wonders of astronomy as the of course setting for your plot, and if you do it right and have intelligent characters, it’s great science fiction, and if you do the setting it right and let the gods but annihilate all space and time to make two lovers bathetic and happy, it’s great space opera.

          Let me quote you some Superluminary: The World Armada:

          The memory of Urvasthrang showed what the defenses were: here was the dead supermagnetic gamma-radiating star called a magnetar, SGR 1806-20; two blue hypergiant stars; a supergiant O-type star; and three mysterious dying giants called Wolf-Rayet stars in the throes of pre-nova convulsions.

          All were sources of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, and all were massive enough to house working long-range armatures, and therefore could deliver the magnetic, gravitic, high-energy, and plasma discharges across interstellar distances. Other of the young, massive stars had been Dysoned and weaponized, that full stellar outputs could be directed at a star system, to vaporize all its planets.

          The magnetar released more energy in one tenth of a second than Sol had released in one hundred thousand years: a duodecillion joules.

          • engleberg says:

            @Let me quote you some Superluminary-

            Looks okay, but busy. I want each wonder delved into and given a vivid sense of scale and beauty and power. ‘It looks like a ribbon around a star. What is it?’ Astronomy porn is like any porn, you want a heavenly body described vividly as it performs personable evolutions towards a climax. Chorus lines just blur together.

    • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

      I’m not sure if you’re looking for realism or not; if not, you might want to consider E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, particularly the Lensman series.

    • AlphaGamma says:

      Iain M. Banks? The Culture novels have some impressive space battles (though as it’s space opera, he doesn’t go into much detail on things like tactics and armament). But perhaps a better choice is The Algebraist, set in a “harder”/lower-tech universe where there is no FTL other than via artificial wormholes, and no inertial compensators so spaceships are filled with liquid to let their crews tolerate high acceleration.

      And then there are the Dwellers, an advanced “slow” (experiencing life much more slowly than humans) civilisation who live in gas giants, have lifespans measured in billions of years, and fight wars among themselves for recreation using huge lighter-than-air “dreadnoughts”.

      Of course, Banks’s superb skill at naming his ships continues- one plot-important warship is the Mannlicher-Carcano

      • albatross11 says:

        The space battles don’t seem especially well described or imagined to me, but the terror-weapon assassination at the end of _Look to Windward_ is pretty lovingly described, and probably was pretty effective at sending the desired Don’t Fuck With the Culture message.

        • Nornagest says:

          Yeah, I’d never been too impressed with the Culture series’ space battles. Banks tends to be too enchanted with the scale of his setting to bother making them relatable, and a lot of them come off as curb-stomps or glorified video-game shootouts. His scenes of ground warfare are pretty good, though — ugly and chaotic, but that’s what makes them work. The early Vatueil scenes in Surface Detail stand out, along with the climax of Consider Phlebas, and there are some good bits in Use of Weapons too.

          The terror weapon scene was… well described, but I got the impression that it was there more to satisfy Banks’ need for one gratuitously nasty scene per book than anything else.

          • albatross11 says:

            It worked in context, though. It was pretty clear that the nature of the assassination (and probably footage of it) would work as a deterrent to the next several powerful sentients who thought that maybe blowing up a Culture Orbital would be a good idea.

          • Watchman says:

            In general though a space battle involving Culture ships would be indescribable other than as a computer game. No organic entity is involved on the Culture side, which is the normal narrator perspective, other than as a passenger. Plus after Consider Pheblas the Culture was not in danger of losing space battles as they had no neighbours with capability and will to defeat them, so battles are basically an AI destroying enemies not a contest of tactics.

          • albatross11 says:

            There are other Involved civilizations at the Culture’s level of technology who could probably give them a serious fight–we see a couple of these in the last few books. (Hydrogen Sonata is about an equivalent-level civilization Subliming; Matter shows us an approximately-equivalent-level civilization trying to protect a shellworld. And so on. )

            One difference is that the Culture actually does fight from time to time, and has a lot of constant intervention going on, so it’s probably more practiced than the other civilizations. But it’s not at all clear that this means it would win in a war with its top-level neighbors. (In the Idirian war, the Homadan ships were more advanced than those of the Culture, and in Excession, a Culture ship worried about skullduggery from other Culture factions hides out in a Homadan fleet base for awhile for protection.)

    • Deiseach says:

      If you’re looking for realistic military space battles, I have nothing for you.

      If you’re looking for WORLD-SHATTERING SPACE ADVENTURE!!!, may I recommend Superluminary by John C. Wright? Three book series (but short books), wherein being decapitated is but a minor inconvenience to the hero of the tale. It’s not deep but it’s good old-fashioned pulp style fun.

      EDIT: Also, the “oh come on that can’t possibly be a real astronomical feature” stuff is, apparently, all real.

    • MartMart says:

      The whole Expanse series by S.A Correy is the best sci fi I’ve every read (the show is ok, but doesn’t begin to measure up). The hard science part is pretty solid, the softer “sciences” are surprisingly solid, the characters are great, their relationships feel realistic, various hot issues are there in such a way that they don’t feel like mandatory inclusions.

      I also enjoyed the Red Rising series, although I really didn’t expect to. It’s very far from hard sci fi, more of space romans/viking/celt adventures, but it entertaining, and its mostly written in first person present tense, which works surprisingly well.

      Edit: Peter F Hamilton does some pretty fantastic action scenes in a future high tech society. His endings sometimes disappoint, especially in his earlier works. But the beginning and middle are always fantastic. Magic tree ponies are there, but appear well hidden by fancy words.

    • Nick says:

      A tangent: since y’all were speaking well of Weber and bean linked On Basilisk Station, I read it this weekend, and I thought it was quite good. Especially toward the end when gur Srneyrff fgnegrq punfvat gur Uniravgr fuvc Fvevhf—everything from there on was really great.

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        I went and re-read the ending section again, and oh man, pbzcnerq gb gur fpnyr bs guvatf 10 obbxf naq 20+ lrnef qbja gur yvar, gur Srneyrff – Fvevhf qhry vf nyzbfg dhnvag. Fvatyr zvffvyrf sverq ng n gvzr, zvffvyr qrsrafrf gung pna oneryl unaqyr vg, univat gb pybfr gb raretl enatr gb qrpvqr gur vffhr – zbfg bs gur frevrf vf nobhg gnxvat gung gnpgvpny raivebazrag naq tenqhnyyl eraqrevat nyy bs vg bofbyrgr.

        • Nick says:

          I was hoping you might say that. 😀

          I don’t think I’m pick up any more of the books anytime soon, but it’s definitely on my radar now. I might do a few next year or something.

    • carvenvisage says:

      Book 1 of “night lords trilogy”, I think called soul hunter. Disclaimer: I was greatly dissapointed at how accomodating fate is to them on one particular occasion, -Villains should really have to earn their victories, perhaps especially protagonists. -But the “big gambit in the grand space battle” sequence was pretty frickin awesome.

      It’s also interesting in how it depicts an elite evil crack troops POV with a strong emphasis on it being a martial brotherhood, not something I’ve read elsewhere.

      (To be clear, they’re definitely pretty evil, -not remotely as bad as black company imo, but they are the bad guys, -they slaughter effectively helpless imperial guard, one of the main characters is someone the kidnap, maybe an astropath, I don’t recall, etc.)

      edit: If you like the John C wright thing linked maybe check out his count to a trillion series. I haven’t actually read either one (hear me out), but based on golden transcendence and orphans of chaos he writes grand epic stuff, and I believe that’s his “space is big and epic” series.

      • Nick says:

        I liked the Count to the Eschaton sequence a lot, but I think the final book was weaker than the earlier ones. I haven’t read Golden Transcendence, so I can’t say how the two series compare.

    • aientiaerationum says:

      Readers who don’t mind transposing space-battles into sea-battles, and lasers into cannons, will greatly enjoy Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels (discussed above). Such transpositions are generally satisfactory, except for those rare SF stories whose plots depend crucially upon the detailed technological workings of space-lasers. Example: Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy transposes pretty naturally onto Kipling’s Captains Courageous.

    • AG says:

      Have you ever watched the Legend of the Galactic Heroes anime (either the original classic, the summary movies, or the recent remake)?

  47. Odovacer says:

    Imagine that you’re Jeff Bezos. Trump really grinds your gears. How would you use your vast resources (money, Amazon.com, the Washington Post, etc) to neutralize his influence and prevent him from being reelected?

    • Tenacious D says:

      Run.
      Maybe get Bloomberg, Shultz, or Zuckerberg on the ticket too (or back a run by one of them). Name recognition goes a long way.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Zuckerberg is so unpopular that he’s probably not even going to run, even though it looks like he was thinking about it. Why should Bezos be any different?

        • Ben Landau-Taylor says:

          Bezos is better at this game than Zuckerberg. Many of the PR attacks on Zuckerberg have stuck, but Bezos has mostly shrugged them off. The most damaging one that I can recall was the NYT hit piece about how Amazon is a horrible place to work, which I don’t think got picked up by other outlets very much, and largely got absorbed into the “Amazon is for really intense people” narrative that Bezos was trying to push before.

          That said, as good as Bezos is at this, I don’t know whether he’s good enough to win a major election.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            Any idea why Bezos would be so much better? I don’t expect either one of them to handle their own PR, and I wouldn’t expect a big difference between billionaire-tier PR firms. Is it just the very personal parts of PR that can’t be outsourced?

          • As far as the very personal parts, Bezos is definitely better. His seamless transition from ”harmless book nerd” to ”Lex Luthor” was damned impressive. If you watch videos, you’ll see he hasn’t just changed his look; his manner is different, and his voice is deeper. I don’t think Zuckerberg can control his presentation like this. This matters a lot for elections in particular.

            More speculatively, my guess is that Bezos also probably does handle his own PR, or at least sets the high-level goals. When I looked into him, I got the sense of a man who follows long-term strategies on the scale of decades. (His plan has been “make a ton of money in order to fund space travel” since at least high school.) If this is true, then he’ll be balancing lots of considerations for what his image should be that he’ll have trouble conveying to consultants. I doubt any PR firm could have told him the right time to pivot from “nonthreatening nebbish” to “unassailable mastermind”, because it depends on details of his broader strategic position that Bezos is in a better position to assess. And I doubt that a PR firm would suggest “you should buy the Washington Post”, although maybe billionaire-tier PR firms do think that big, I don’t know.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Where does releasing a metal album called “Democracy Dies in Darkness” fit into his timetable?

          • Deiseach says:

            If you watch videos, you’ll see he hasn’t just changed his look; his manner is different, and his voice is deeper.

            The Maggie Thatcher effect? We should watch out to see if he starts carrying a handbag and using the royal we?

          • Brad says:

            I imagine Zuckerberg must have some face to face charisma or how would he have gotten where he is. But based on videos of speeches he has given, his mass charisma is even worse than HRC. And that’s saying something!

          • Aapje says:

            Ezra Klein argued that HRC’s talent is her ability to truly listen to people, which is a kind of charisma that obviously doesn’t translate into making charismatic speeches that inspire millions.

          • Deiseach says:

            Ezra Klein argued that HRC’s talent is her ability to truly listen to people

            Yeah but I think the trouble there was that she had a tendency towards “Well I’ve listened to Joe and he says we should do this but I’ve listened to Mike and he says we should do that and Sally says the other thing is better” during her campaign – there was some frankly ridiculous number of slogans being tested, trotted out, dropped, etc even in the last days.

            Then she ended up having listened to so many conflicting opinions that she just took a decision and rammed it through because she’s the smart experienced one in the room, regardless if it was a good one or not.

          • Nornagest says:

            @Deiseach — Is that link supposed to go to the front page of the Post?

          • AG says:

            @Aapje:
            So HRC ran up against the Peter Principle, then. She climbed to where her charisma couldn’t take her further. And with just how much of a policy wonk she is, I kind of wonder if “cabinet member” was that +1 level of incompetence, where Senator or lower is where her optimized maximum is?

          • Aapje says:

            @AG

            I think that she exceeded her ability already with her Secretary of State job. She excels in advocacy roles, especially when working behind the scenes, but is poor at decision making and inspiring the masses.

            PS. I assume that Deiseach meant to link to this

          • AG says:

            Yeah, it’s interesting that this characterization means HRC isn’t suited to executive branch positions. I was thinking “maybe then she should stay the shadow power, chief of staff type,” but that would actually mean more decision making. Whereas in the legislature, since it’s all nebulous negotiations, single representatives/senators have little direct decision making power, and so that’s where she works best, quibbling at the details but ultimately passing the buck.

            But does that have implications for an alternate world where she went the judicial path instead? There’s a lot of listening there, but also some strong decision making.

          • CatCube says:

            I was thinking “maybe then she should stay the shadow power, chief of staff type,” but that would actually mean more decision making.

            I don’t know if the lack of charisma being discussed means that she wouldn’t be effective in a power-behind-the-throne role. She might very well be charismatic in a one-on-one type of role. However, when she’s speaking to a mass audience, she gives a speech like space aliens hollowed her out and are drunk-driving her.

            “Ramming a decision through” can be done in both the one-on-one or mass audience type of situation, but you need to have the charisma appropriate to the situation. Successful politicians (which is what cabinet secretaries are) need the second type. Chiefs of staff need the first type.

          • Randy M says:

            Excelling in advocacy roles–behind the scenes. Is that like having a face for radio?

          • engleberg says:

            Hillary’s great talent is as a bagman: 1.5 billion slush fundation. When the Clintons took a half-billion dollar bribe from Microsoft’s competitors to sic the Justice Department on Microsoft and oops, break the dot-com boom, that was really impressive. Appointing the guys who covered for her to the FBI, sending them after Trump, that’s kind of impressive too. So far Trump hasn’t taken that kind of bribe, or caused that kind of damage, or put enough loyalists in place to impeach the next guy in 2024, but Trump has time to grow. New York real estate background might help.

      • Deiseach says:

        Oh my God, sorry, but I’m rolling on the floor laughing at this. Why not throw in Elon Musk too, so we could have the full Billionaire Cartoon Supervillain List?

        “Bezos/Zuckerberg 2020: Vote for these guys, they already own you body and soul, may as well make it official!”

        I think the better bet is to buy a personable-looking congresscritter, then pump money and resources into the campaign that your grinning, glad-handing puppet runs (by strictly following the algorithms which are for sure going to work out better this time). If you want your First Female President, sure, go for it as well, but pick one that has a snowball in hell’s chance of getting elected.

        • Tenacious D says:

          I’m working on the theory that in 2018 all publicity is good publicity (as long as you never apologize or show weakness). President Trump already set the precedent for a billionaire trying such an approach, after all.

          • Watchman says:

            Yes, but the candidate has to have policies attractive to that proportion of the population who would accept the no apology approach. Trump already has that section of the electorate, other than perhaps an indeterminate number of “no liberal act is wrong” types who still support Roman Polanski…

            I don’t think the US left-wing coalition really has much space for a leader without introspection or respect for others to be honest.

    • BBA says:

      My first instinct is that the most important thing is to not get caught, because the massive scandal from a billionaire’s nefarious plot to rig the election will redound strongly to Trump’s favor. My second instinct is that no matter whether Bezos gets caught or not or even does anything Trump will insist he’s nefariously plotting to rig the election. So the logical tactic is to do nothing and make Trump look foolish by insisting you’re doing something… except, of course, that has never worked against Trump either.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        And here I thought Putin was the only judo champion world leader.

        • BBA says:

          I think Trump has more of a Ballmer Peak thing going on. Political figures with similar traits, like Anthony Weiner and Sarah Palin, have self-destructed spectacularly, but Trump naturally occupies a particular sweet spot that makes him inexplicably good at winning elections and impervious to the standard rules of politics.

          I mean, today the entire media and national security establishment and pretty much every retired Republican pol are aghast at today’s joint press conference with Putin, but what are the odds we’ll even remember it by this time next week?

          So in other words, he’s almost certain to win in 2020 and there’s nothing you or I or Bezos can do about it. I don’t like it but it is what it is.

          • Matt M says:

            I’ve had this rough idea for a comedy sketch where someone falls into a coma, and when they are awakened, they are ranting about Russian collusion or some such thing. The doctors inform them that they’ve been in a coma, and actually, nobody really is talking about Russian collusion anymore – the truly outrageous Trump scandal is how he’s separating families at the border.

            Coma victim says “Wow, I must have been out for a really long time!” But the doctors reveal nope, just two days.

          • Nick says:

            Then he sleeps for eight hours and when he wakes up, it’s all Stormy Daniels.

          • albatross11 says:

            The outrage media only has space for one top story at a time, so it is 100% capable of shifting from “Government reports it’s missing half a dozen nukes” outrage to “B-list celebrity caught on video in racist rant” outrage, with everyone apparently forgetting the missing nukes.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            If I was a supervillain, I would use my powers to steal a nuke after putting a national-level politician under hypnosis to speak a racist rant when given the trigger, then time the trigger to get the media to drop the stolen nuke outrage ASAP.

          • bean says:

            @Le Maistre Chat

            The nuclear security people are not as easily distracted as the general public, and they’re the ones you really need to worry about.

          • Deiseach says:

            Anthony Weiner is his own special kind of disaster, though.

    • yodelyak says:

      The Dem bench is, IMHO, sadly thin.

      I think Gillibrand could win in ’20, and the main thing she needs from Bezos is competence among the rest of the folks running in ’20, and the sense that the race dynamic will be unforgiving to candidates that use scorched-earth tactics. It’d probably help if the Dems have retaken the House in ’18, so they can make sure to fund relevant projects like election protection. There’s truth in the line that “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” When Dem primaries get ugly, Rs win. So agenda item one is to get Dems to see it as in their interest to be nice to each other.

      After that, Bezos should a) make a 2020 map and pick a few states where he can ensure a state-level run by a libertarian or other Republican-adjacent (an evangelical party?) who can split votes off from Trump
      b) double-down on work to build Dem party cohesion in states where the Bernie/Clinton split is especially deep. (Maybe just pick 2018 candidates with no ties to either Bernie or Clinton and signal boost them)
      c) start researching what kind of messaging works to suppress turnout among Trump’s base. Will they not vote if they’re sure Trump’ll win? If they’re sure he’ll lose? If they’ve recently seen footage of him apologizing to a woman? If they’ve recently had a nice woman come to their door to raise money for rape and battered women shelters? Find something that works to make Trump voters stay home even half as well as negative campaigning turns off Dems, and then keep that knowledge under your hat (because other Dems and/or the media will throw it away by overusing it) until it’s time to deploy it. And then deploy aggressively.

      Oh, and ffs, do whatever you can to keep Mueller’s investigation going, and in the news.

      • Deiseach says:

        I think Gillibrand could win in ’20

        Just looked her up on Wikipedia and if I were an opposition campaign, I’d hammer home “Hillary Clinton Version II: blonde white woman, succeeded to Hillary’s Senate seat, what is she going to do for the ordinary guy/minorities?” Plus the work for the tobacco company – keep her tangled up in “okay, yeah, Big Tobacco is Evil but by the same token the huge sums it paid me permitted me to do Good Works for the less fortunate” – “oh, so you profited off the deaths of millions of cancer sufferers and tried washing your hands by taking a few pro bono cases, Pontius Pilate?” Find family members of people who died from lung cancer due to smoking and get them to make statements whenever Ms Gillibrand is touting her legal work on “multiple pro bono cases defending abused women and their children, as well as other cases defending tenants seeking safe housing after lead paint and unsafe conditions were found in their homes”.

        I’d hammer on the Clinton connections (with vague murmurings about what else is Gillibrand beholden to them for, and what murkiness might she be entangled in) and the tobacco company work.

        Yes, that’s dirty pool. It’s a presidential election, not a vicarage tea party, and any vulnerability any candidate has is going to be attacked mercilessly.

        (Though it does amuse me that her granny was involved in supporting a classic machine politician – the Irish background coming through there!)

        • BBA says:

          Gillibrand has the advantage of having at least a milligram of actual charisma that works outside Hillary’s narrow-but-intense fan base. (Which is real, and includes more than just DNC staffers, and is going to jump on me screaming that “uncharismatic” is a misogynistic slur and Hillary only lost because shitty men like me privately doubted her… if they ever find out I said this.)

          Last fall during the height of #MeToo Gillibrand broke from the party line and said that Bill Clinton should’ve resigned over the Lewinsky affair. There’s clearly room for her to distance herself from Hillary and burnish her feminist cred.

          The problem is, I don’t know if it’s possible for a Democrat to win without the Pantsuit Nation’s support. But Trump is going to continue harping on “Crooked Hillary” and leading “LOCK HER UP” chants until the day he dies, and defending her is a sure path to a repeat of 2016. Maybe there’s a candidate out there who can thread that needle, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

          • albatross11 says:

            It seems really unlikely to me that Hillary will run again, and even more unlikely she will win the nomination.

          • engleberg says:

            @Hillary’s narrow-but-intense fan base-

            The Hillary voters I’ve met were D party hacks. Not narrow-but-intense, voting for the D party candidate who topped out. Like a guy explaining why he still paid to fix his ex-wife’s roof even though he knew she was, long story.

            Say you go to the union hall and the secretary say ‘I’m voting for Hillary and asking you to join me. And yes, I know-‘
            And he calls on the token R party guy and lets him talk until everyone gets bored and he says ‘Thanks, R party token, I respect you and you made good points, here’s why I say vote Hillary and now the notes of the last meeting-‘
            The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pantsuit stuff was real enough. And It’s Her Turn struck me as Buggin’s Turn repeating farce as flatulence, but I’m not a good party member. Good party members strongly support the candidate who did their time and now it’s Their Turn.

          • Matt M says:

            It seems really unlikely to me that Hillary will run again, and even more unlikely she will win the nomination.

            Strong disagree.

            I believe I’ve already made a friendly wager with someone else here on this topic. I am firmly convinced that Hillary will not only run, but will win the DNC nomination in 2020.

          • Deiseach says:

            It seems really unlikely to me that Hillary will run again

            So I firmly believe, and yet somehow there are whispers about the possibility. I can’t believe the Democrats would go for her a second fourth time, and surely she has burned through all the influence, favours and support she had for the last run so it would be impossible to get yet another campaign team together and off the ground.

            But then again, never discount vanity and ambition.

          • Matt M says:

            I can’t believe the Democrats would go for her a second fourth time, and surely she has burned through all the influence, favours and support she had for the last run so it would be impossible to get yet another campaign team together and off the ground.

            I think I’ve said this before, but I will repeat anyway. The basis for my theory that she will run (and win) is that all of the Russia hysteria has painted the DNC into a corner. They’ll have spent the better part of four years loudly screaming that the only reason Trump won the election is because Putin rigged it for him.

            They’re being careful not to say it explicitly, but the logical implication of this is that Hillary should have been President – that the election was illegitimately stolen from her by illegal and unjust collusion between the evil Trump and his puppetmaster, Putin.

            So if Hillary chooses to run, the first words out of her mouth are “I am the rightful President – everyone knows that I was cheated out of a well deserved victory,” who, exactly, among mainstream Democrats, is going to argue that point? They will have no valid response. Any attempt to dispute that will be a concession to Trump, which is the absolute #1 thing nobody is willing to do. They’d rather lose again with Hillary than say or do anything that might grant even the slightest bit of legitimacy or approval to Trump. Their only hope is that she decides she simply doesn’t want to run (and come on, this is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about here!)

          • theredsheep says:

            That assumes only two choices: run Hillary, or allow that Trump won fairly. There is a fairly straightforward third option of saying that we need a stronger candidate without history and baggage, etc., without explicitly admitting that Trump had a legitimate win. I think the Russia thing is a convoluted way of denying the election too, but I think it’s more about denying the general situation (yes, America really did prefer the moron, or near enough; Your Fellow Americans really are deplorable or deplorable-compatible) than about salvaging Hillary herself.

            She’s been beaten so many bloody times, and Trump shouldn’t have even been remotely competitive. I think Bernie could have beaten Trump. Hell, almost anyone but Hillary could have. All they needed was somebody who seemed like s/he might have been sincere or likeable, or even had a new idea. They went with Hillary, mistakes were made, they paid. There’s no need to follow the logic of the Russia investigations. There isn’t much logic there anyways.

          • yodelyak says:

            @Matt M

            There are healthy number of people in D party circles who preface any remark about their philosophy of choosing who to support with “I don’t pick losers…” and who’ll double- and triple-down on that, because Republicans are worse. We can’t run Hillary because she can’t win, and she can’t win because we all know enough other people who think she can’t, so even if we privately think she as-a-person could win, we know this is not that timeline–a winning candidate needs backing, and she doesn’t have it.

          • Matt M says:

            There is a fairly straightforward third option of saying that we need a stronger candidate without history and baggage, etc., without explicitly admitting that Trump had a legitimate win.

            People keep saying this, but I just don’t think it’s true. Maybe in the immediate aftermath of the election there was some willingness to question Hillary’s fitness as a candidate – but as the Russia thing builds and builds it continues to decrease.

            Hell, the slightest hint of uncertainty over Russian meddling is now dismissed with cries of “But Hillary’s e-mails!” intended to be a mocking derision upon any insinuation that Hillary had any problems as a candidate that may have influenced the outcome.

            And that’s just from random people on social media. I haven’t heard any mainstream/left media pundits talk about what a flawed candidate she was lately. Or any high-profile Democratic politicians.

            And even if they did, it’s one thing to calmly discuss it now when she’s mostly in the background. Another beast entirely to face her, on a national stage, and have to look her in the eye and say “You lost because you were a bad candidate, not because of Putin.” Does any mainstream Democrat have the balls to do that? I don’t consider it likely.

          • Jaskologist says:

            We’re talking about millions of voters; there’s no particular person who would get painted into a corner and feel like a hypocrite. It’s not like Al Gore got renominated in 2004 after he had Florida stolen from him in 2000.

          • Matt M says:

            yodelyak,

            That’s an admitted possibility. That the big money behind the scenes doesn’t support her and therefore she won’t go anywhere. That said, I think the way that plays out is that she either knows it already and chooses not to run, or they convince her not to run.

            I actually think her odds of not running are higher than her odds of running and not winning.

            While there are many merits to your argument, a part of me just refuses to believe that Hillary would lose the battle in the behind-the-scenes influence-peddling stages of the contest. That’s 100% her specialty!

          • Matt M says:

            We’re talking about millions of voters; there’s no particular person who would get painted into a corner and feel like a hypocrite. It’s not like Al Gore got renominated in 2004 after he had Florida stolen from him in 2000.

            Al Gore chose to fade away and not run again. Hillary might as well, but she strikes me as more ambitious than Gore. She is kind of old though, and seemingly not in great health, maybe her doctors and family will convince her not to.

            But IF Al Gore had chosen to run in 2004 under a platform of “The election was stolen from me and you all know it,” then yeah, it would have been awkward as hell for John Kerry, or anyone else, to deal with that, would it not?

          • Iain says:

            I actually think her odds of not running are higher than her odds of running and not winning.

            This is because she would not run unless she thought there was a very good chance of her winning. There is not a good chance of her winning. (Unlike Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, she doesn’t even crack the top 15 on PredictIt.)

            She is not going to run.

          • theredsheep says:

            Hillary lost for a whole bunch of reasons, some of which I think haven’t been adequately covered–I suspect Obergefell and its aftermath played a part by convincing white Evangelicals that Trump was their only lifeboat. But part of the reason was that, rightly or wrongly, a lot of Americans reaaaaaalllly hate her. With a borderline-crazy passion. Like, my parents are lifelong hardcore Democrats, and my mother couldn’t bring herself to vote for Hillary. That’s the issue IMO, not any one particular scandal.

            Yeah, most of the scandals appear to be hooey. That’s what “but the e-mails” means. But that’s just it–people make mountains out of molehills like that because they are predisposed, for whatever reason, to think the worst of her. I suppose it’s possible that she could get the nomination again, I don’t know the mentality that well, but after the legitimacy questions with Bernie I really don’t think the energy is there. OTOH, 2020 is still some ways off. Who knows.

          • Matt M says:

            Trust me, I’ve been monitoring that PredictIt closely, and plan to put some money down as soon as they add her.

            I already have a few hundred shares of whether or not she’ll run – but I think there will be more value in scooping up shares of her to win for pennies on the dollar.

            To booster my credibility somewhat, I bought a decent amount of “Trump to win the Presidency” shares at like 20 cents too. I’ve been doing pretty well for myself on PredictIt. I’ve more than doubled my deposit base so far!

          • Matt M says:

            But part of the reason was that, rightly or wrongly, a lot of Americans reaaaaaalllly hate her.

            You know it’s true. I know it’s true. Hillary knows it’s true. Most of America knows it’s true. Most Democratic politicians know it’s true.

            The question I have is, who on the DNC debate stage is going to stand up and say it? This isn’t a question about what is true – it’s a question about what Democrats are allowed to say without appearing to be defending or excusing Trump.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I don’t believe the Democrats will support Hillary in any campaign again. The stink of defeat is mighty powerful in the political realm. But if they do, I sure hope the DNC emails leak again, because the messages from the anti-Hillary faction will be a hoot to read.

          • theredsheep says:

            Is saying so on the stage really necessary? Can’t their primary voters just quietly cough and vote for either A. a transgendered latinx space pirate or B. a white man in a suit who totally gets their subculture and stuff, depending on preference?

          • Matt M says:

            Can’t their primary voters just quietly cough and vote for either

            In theory, sure.

            But in reality, there will be multiple debates held before a single primary vote happens. And the on-stage imagery of Hillary saying “I’m the legitimate President” and everyone else refusing to argue the point will be powerful. And will be fully in line with the last four years of media shrieking about Russian meddling and interference.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            … or C. a straight person who totally gets Latino culture instead of ordering them to change their demonym to “latinx”?

          • Nornagest says:

            Even if Trump gets ousted, the Presidency will fall to someone in the line of succession, which doesn’t include Hillary. She can’t run until 2020. In 2020, she’ll be 74, five years older than Ronald Reagan (still our oldest president) was when he entered office. By then, another scandal will be in the news. She won’t have any more political experience to trade on. And she’ll still have her defeats behind her.

            Those are serious disadvantages, and, as we’ve seen, she hasn’t got the most stage presence even when you stack the deck in her favor. I do think she could say “I’m the rightful president” and D party diehards would believe her, but there’s more to getting elected than playing to the diehards, and everyone knows it. On the other hand, I’d expect her endorsement to carry a lot of weight.

          • Iain says:

            @Matt M:

            When none of this fever-dream comes to pass, I hope you take a moment to recalibrate your mental model of the left.

          • John Schilling says:

            Al Gore chose to fade away and not run again. Hillary might as well…

            Hillary has already chosen to fade away. She is doing approximately nothing to remain in the public eye, which is pretty much a prerequisite for any serious presidential bid.

          • the_the says:

            @ Matt M

            You seem to make two claims:

            (1) Most D-party politicians and voters believe that Hillary cannot win in 2020.
            (2) Hillary will obtain the 2020 nomination because no D-party politician wants to incur the political risk of explicitly airing (1).

            This seems to be modeling the D-party as an inflexible adversary, one that is so monolithic that it would rather lose than openly state that the emperor is naked.*

            So, why do you favor the above scenario more than these other possibilities?:

            (1) A group of D-party politicians announce publicly “Hillary is a losing bet as evidenced by the events of 2008 and 2016. The first case is evidence that our voters prefer a fresh face. As for the second, even though we all know the Russians meddled, it should never have been that close to begin with. Instead, we support [other candidate(s)].” This avoids (1) by diffusing the political impact over a group of politicians; it also positions them as favorites of any new nominee.

            (2) Hillary wishes to remain relevant because she seeks a vice-presidential position alongside a more palatable presidential nominee (who is more charismatic and preferably of a minority/protected group, but still an experienced politician so as to avoid accusations of being a puppet). Or maybe, less ambitiously, Hillary seeks to trade her endorsement for a high-level position in the next administration.

            (3) A young-ish D-party politician calculates (perhaps incorrectly) that the Clinton name has waned sufficiently that she can adopt a “left eats its own” approach. She borrows some of the same “Hillary is crooked/corrupt”/drain the swamp rhetoric of the last election, but still retains the D-party positions on core issues of healthcare, immigration, abortion, gun control, feminism/diversity, etc.

            What I’m getting at: in addition to avoiding a near-certain defeat, there seem to be some decent incentives for D-party actors (including Hillary herself) to dismiss the idea of Hillary as the 2020 nominee.

            * Imagery not intended.

          • BBA says:

            Weird that this whole thread arose out of my post, when I never even suggested that Hillary would run again. What I said is that Trump will run against Hillary regardless of who is on the ballot. (Indeed, I think he’ll keep holding “LOCK HER UP” rallies when he’s 90 and she’s dead and nobody but the basest of his base cares anymore, because it’s the thing that he enjoys most in life.)

            Now, if feminism really is as strong a force as people here claim it to be, a hypothetical Democratic candidate could plausibly denounce Hillary as a fraud to the cause. Her husband is a serial sexual abuser, and not only has she failed to call him out, she’s actively encouraged his behavior by relentlessly slut-shaming his victims. The party and the country need someone who cares about all women and won’t give abusers a pass, and Hillary just isn’t that person.

            I haven’t the foggiest clue of whether this can work. The Vox left has been slowly coalescing around the idea that Bill should’ve resigned back in ’98 but the Pantsuiters haven’t budged and likely never will. And of course if it works in the primary it might backfire in the general.

            I doubt Hillary herself runs again, mainly because the younger generation of Democratic pols have already started their backroom campaigns for 2020 and can convincingly rebuff her with “you’ve had your turn, it’s our turn now.” But she will continue to be a presence in the race because Trump can’t help himself, and the way the Dems respond to him will be… interesting.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Indeed, I think he’ll keep holding “LOCK HER UP” rallies when he’s 90 and she’s dead and nobody but the basest of his base cares anymore, because it’s the thing that he enjoys most in life.

            “Donald! What is best in life?”
            “To crush your enemy, see her driven before you, and hear the lamentations of her women.”

          • Dan L says:

            @ Matt M

            I think I’ve said this before, but I will repeat anyway. The basis for my theory that she will run (and win) is that all of the Russia hysteria has painted the DNC into a corner. They’ll have spent the better part of four years loudly screaming that the only reason Trump won the election is because Putin rigged it for him.

            I believe you have dramatically misread the political situation, and am interested in wagering a nontrivial amount on a point of sharp, falsifiable disagreement.

            I am firmly convinced that Hillary will not only run, but will win the DNC nomination in 2020.

            I actually think her odds of not running are higher than her odds of running and not winning.

            There is an inconsistency here, but I’ll leave it to you to reconcile. What odds do you place on the specific scenario where Hillary runs in a majority of Democratic state primaries prior to the 2020 election, culminating in her being named the candidate at the convention? (Brokered or otherwise, but after her mounting a concerted run)

            I think we have dramatically different predictions, and it should not be hard to agree on a number where we both think we’re getting a very good deal.

          • Deiseach says:

            Indeed, I think he’ll keep holding “LOCK HER UP” rallies when he’s 90 and she’s dead and nobody but the basest of his base cares anymore, because it’s the thing that he enjoys most in life.

            Is he doing that right now, though? I haven’t heard anything (though that may be because I’m mostly ignoring the news; I can’t avoid the whole Trump-Putin meeting and the yelling about this proves he is actual real treason-committing traitor why he doesn’t believe his own intelligence agencies) and the only reason I can see him doing that if he goes again in 2020 is if Hillary herself goes again (dear Azathoth, no) or, more likely, her hand-picked or endorsed candidate gets the nod. Attacking Hillary as the puppet mistress with her hand up the puppet’s backside would make sense in that context.

          • dick says:

            Is he doing that right now, though?

            Yeah, he still holds campaign rallies regularly and bashing Hillary is one of the recurring features. Most recent one would appear to be the anti-Jon Tester rally in Montana two weeks ago.

          • BBA says:

            Is he doing that right now, though?

            Yes, he is. He held his first reelection rally in February or March of 2017, and he’s been taking his usual shtick wherever he holds a rally nominally to support a local candidate. Several times, the crowd has started chanting “LOCK HER UP” unprompted, before he even took the stage.

            At yesterday’s Helsinki press conference he launched into a non sequitur about the (mythical) missing DNC email server, which I guess isn’t technically about Hillary but is close enough.

            We’re going to be relitigating 2016 forever… I guess it’s not as bad as relitigating 1916 forever.

          • quanta413 says:

            @BBA

            The Vox left has been slowly coalescing around the idea that Bill should’ve resigned back in ’98 but the Pantsuiters haven’t budged and likely never will.

            So what? This is totally meaningless and possibly a some people saying it even realize they are lying (not managing to even deceive themselves). Now that Bill and Hillary look politically dead, it’s convenient to pretend to have principles beyond winning, but we know how this turns out.

            When a party wins the presidency, all moral requirements are stuffed in a deep, dark hole, lit on fire, and then the hole is sealed with concrete. Only their opponents have a strong incentive to try to hold them to the fire, but considering you know that you’re likely voting for lying sociopaths regardless of who you vote for it’s hard to care.

            I think the fact that some Democrats are publicly willing to say “maybe 20 years ago what Bill Clinton did was kind of sort of wrong” just for vaporous social credit is a good sign that Matt M is really wrong though.

          • mdet says:

            As a millennial, most posts I see that mention the 2016 election seem to feature an obligatory #BernieWouldHaveWon, so I don’t see any appetite for Still More Hillary. The only people I know personally who were enthusiastic Hillary supporters were women over 50, every other left-of-center person I know treated her nomination with a sense of resignation. But that’s just what I can see.

            Hillary has already chosen to fade away. She is doing approximately nothing to remain in the public eye, which is pretty much a prerequisite for any serious presidential bid.

            She occasionally slips into the headlines for giving some kind of talk somewhere, but you’d be forgiven for missing it. Doesn’t seem to have been covered very well, neither in terms of the amount nor the tone of the coverage. Google found me two samples.

      • Deiseach says:

        If they’ve recently had a nice woman come to their door to raise money for rape and battered women shelters?

        Only works if you believe his voters believe he rapes and beats women. What’s the current sex scandal – that he was fucking a porn star* and paid her off to keep the affair secret? Whatever your feelings about adultery**, there’s nothing about “raping and beating” there; probably helps his image as successful guy who can get the hot chicks, and if getting an intern in your work place to give you a blow job whilst you yourself are president isn’t disqualifying, why would a consensual affair (at least within the understood parameters of “trading sex for money as a mistress”) with someone not an employee or under his authority before ever he was elected be such?

        *Or two; another purveyor of adult entertainment seems to have made a similar accusation, but I’m not interested enough in the story to follow it

        **Only prudes like me care about sex outside marriage, and aren’t we all agreed the Religious Right should rightfully lose their influence in politics, yeah?

        • albatross11 says:

          I’ll admit that a scandal involving paying off a porn star to not disclose the existence of his bastard child with her is *exactly* the kind of scandal I would have expected out of Trump.

          • Matt M says:

            And yet, the media still can’t help themselves from constantly making gay jokes about him anyway…

          • yodelyak says:

            @Matt M

            Yeah, the gay memes are a mistake–I don’t know why I didn’t notice that sooner. Better are the ones that just treat Trump as a toddler and Putin as daddy. That makes the same point without either villainizing gay relationships (which do not necessarily involve a power imbalance!) and it also uses a lens that is much more salient an insult in the minds of Trump’s base.

        • David Speyer says:

          This would only be a small part of Bezos’ wealth, and a minor part of the strategy, but get Summer Zervos a lawyer who is as good a PR hound as Stormy Daniels’ attorney. It is absurd that the woman who claims Trump assaulted her is forgotten and the woman he claims he had a consensual affair is in constant headlines. (I imagine Bill Clinton haters felt the same way about Monica Lewinsky vs Juanita Broddrick.)

        • yodelyak says:

          It just has to make 10% of them sufficiently less excited to vote for him that 2% do other things first enough on election day that they never get around to voting. I’m not sure if battered women is the issue–the point is more that if the person at their door is a nonchalant young woman making simple and effective steps toward addressing gender violence… anyway, it was just an example.

          If I were to guess at what kind of canvasser would be effective, I tend to think a canvasser who seems at first to be a Mormon missionary but turns out to be a very thoroughly prepared conservative/Republican advocate for a small (say, 1/10th of a percent of a particular property assessment) decrease in certain taxes, where half of the decrease is just a straight refund to taxpayers and the other half is made up for by an increase somewhere else, because reasons. As an afterthought, said canvasser signals that they’re not one of the crazy Republicans who doesn’t see the lies our President says, but that won’t stop them from going door to door talking to Republicans about the issues all good Republicans should be thinking about.

          • Deiseach says:

            if the person at their door is a nonchalant young woman making simple and effective steps toward addressing gender violence…

            …they’ll think she’s from the local rape crisis centre and yeah, isn’t it awful and yeah, sure, we’ll donate but they won’t think it has anything to do with the election or the candidate who is running.

            I mean, would Democratic Voter think the nice young woman talking about domestic violence was (a) canvassing for Jim Jimson, local Dem Party representative in the forthcoming election for dog-catcher, vote the party ticket for Jimson all the way! or (b) oh crap, got caught by a chugger and it’s too late to shut the door, just nod and smile?

          • yodelyak says:

            Hm. Deiseach, we may have different views on the effectiveness of door-to-door and other person-to-person conversations/canvassing that might be worth exploring sometime. At the moment I feel that I’m obviously pretty partisan about canvassing/people-to-people comms as effective, to the point that I’ve noticed and am not sure I want to advocate for it until I’ve reflected on whether I believe everything I think.

            If I did feel like believing what I’m thinking…
            I think canvassing can very effectively move people from using their threat-response thinking, which is very conservative (think zombie survival mode) to using other modes (e.g. the mode they use to encourage their kids to cooperate) that are not, and back again. These modes work wildly different political outcomes–and while people don’t that often switch which mode they use to decide who to vote for, *if they have already decided to show up to vote* they do sometimes switch, and more importantly, they do sometimes neglect to bother to vote at all if they’re mostly working from a mode that isn’t the one that normally motivates them to vote. The predominance of a religious mode that insulates against Fox-viewer-scared-mode is, I think, a good way to understand why Utah doesn’t vote the way other R-states vote.

            I believe Penn can be a swing state, Florida can be a swing state, Michigan can be a swing state–all of them have communities and demographics that can probably see turnout go up or down dramatically because people’s “scared mode” is being deactivated, or not. All of those communities probably need different types of communication programs to be effective in activating other modes. I do not know what would work for most of them, and am not claiming that the young woman in my example is the right answer. I’m merely claiming that answers exist, and a good way to find them is with focus-group-style well-trained canvassers who try out different messages. Somebody with deep pockets who wants to affect 2020 should be hiring locals in each place to do the work to figure out what works. (A distinguished-seeming veteran coming to your door and talking about the need to support disabled veterans, who pivots to being pro-honesty and anti-corruption and then pivoting to be anti-Trump? A chess club member who points at the comedy of errors at achieving minimal competence in Trump’s cabinet who wants effective governance? How do female Pennsylvanians who live alone react to Quakers coming to their doors to talk about forgiveness? How would older Michiganders react to having young men quoting former Gov. Romney at them, in opposition to Trump? How much does simply hearing an earnest young man say, “well, Trump is obviously losing” and double- and triple-down on that if challenged affect how much people bother to turn out? I think the answer is “well, we’ve tested things like this in low-saturation elections with double-blind randomized controlled experiments and gotten surprisingly strong results. In high saturation years, the effect of the marginal additional communication is probably smaller, but not zero, unless sufficiently targeted/high-saturation/high-effectiveness.

          • Deiseach says:

            How much does simply hearing an earnest young man say, “well, Trump is obviously losing” and double- and triple-down on that if challenged affect how much people bother to turn out?

            Really does depend; if some guy twenty to thirty years younger than me pitches up on my doorstep lecturing me in a thinly-veiled “well obviously you old people are stupid, let me tell you what is wrong with the way you voted last time” manner, I’d be moved to “get out of here, whipper-snapper, and let me head straight to the polling booth to vote first, last and in between for the candidate you were just telling me couldn’t tie his own shoelaces”.

            Canvassing is a delicate art; if you are going to send in obvious door-steppers who are plainly Not From Round These Parts, you’re not going to have much luck – people tend not to like headquarters parachuting in people to direct the little people how to vote. You have to have someone who can at least pass for “vaguely in the locality”, even if that is “from the big town”. But not “from the capital” because that strikes all kinds of “coming down here telling us what to do because they think we’re all knuckle-draggers” notes.

            Some people have built up great canvassing machines, and advice from them would be useful. Myself, if I had someone on the doorstep who started talking about veterans, domestic violence, or getting cats out of trees who then segued into “by the way, isn’t Candidate Jones just awful?” it would ring so many alarm bells with me, the fire brigade and ambulance would show up on the street. I would find it very hard to believe this was Person From The Same Party, which is going to kill the whole effort stone-dead (of course you expect Person From Other Party to lie about Your Guy) and if I did believe it was Person From Same Party, I’d think this was just more of the usual in-fighting and throat-cutting which renders local politics ridiculous and trying to get a unified party message out ineffectual (the turf wars round here at election time over ‘you crossed the wrong side of the street to put up posters for your candidate when this is our candidate’s patch so we tore them down’ when they’re all from the same party and are supposed to be getting elected to serve the public interest and not their own self-interest is stupid and all too common).

          • Deiseach says:

            Okay, yodelyak, I think I’ve worked out what is bugging me with this suggestion.

            If it’s a Bezos wants to take out Trump effort, then it’s a false flag operation: it’s an enemy pretending to be one of yours. And I think the falsity will be detected by some voters, maybe not in a sophisticated way, more in a little niggling voice in the back of the head that something seems a bit off about this young man in a suit/distinguished older gentleman/pleasant young lady telling you “Hello, fellow Republican voter! I too am a Republican! Let me immediately start ripping into the Republican president who is running for a second term!”

            If it’s a genuine Republicans want to run a candidate other than Trump effort, trying to get Trump voters to switch or not bother turning out by attacking Trump is going to look very odd if it’s done while Trump is the incumbent going for a second term and has been nominated. They need to convince people not to support him but support the other candidate for nomination, so attacks then make sense. But not on the doorstep canvassing, which is the general/presidential election? Too late then?

            And I honestly don’t know how convincing “the last four years when we were in power were so awful, vote for us again” is going to work out. So as an enemy action trying to get a spoiler candidate nominated (as Hillary’s campaign allegedly did with Trump) – sure. As a supposedly genuine Republican effort? Going to look very odd. Even Hillary didn’t try “Obama’s last four years were so terrible, put me in to fix his messes”.

        • dick says:

          Only works if you believe his voters believe he rapes and beats women…

          Only tangentially related, but when that whole “Grab ’em by the pussy’ tape came out, am I the only one who was most bothered by the furniture part?

          Here’s the bit I mean:

          I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and fuck her. She was married. And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture—I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there.

          I’m not impressed by a guy who chases bimbos and cheats on his wife and brags about how much pussy he gets to strangers, but I can at least empathize. I mean, I’ve known guys like that who were not awful people. I wouldn’t vote for them, but it’s not alien to my experience.

          But the furniture part, man, that’s kind of fucked up. Not just doing it, I mean admitting it, and to a stranger. Imagine for a second: you’re at work, chatting with someone you see there occasionally, maybe the copier machine repairman or something, and you’re shooting the breeze and he tells you, apropos of nothing, that he tried and failed to seduce a married woman by buying her furniture. I cannot imagine anyone I have ever known saying something like that. Am I alone on this?

          • theredsheep says:

            Well, I wouldn’t call it disturbing; I don’t say, “You monster! You took her to Ethan Allen just for sex!” or anything. It’s more like, “You were expecting to get somewhere by buying her furniture? On what planet is that sexy?” Is she going to be filled with lust by teak, or what?

            One counterexample would be the ludicrous furniture-fetish story from Cryptonomicon, but that’s Neal Stephenson, if you’re depending on him for realistic scenarios you left the right path some time ago.

          • Matt M says:

            1. You have to adjust for class/status. Trump’s buying a woman furniture might be his equivalent of a guy complaining that he bought a woman a few drinks at a bar and got nothing.

            2. Admitting failure is a form of self-deprecation, which can be a great bonding ritual among someone you want to get on your side, particularly someone lower-status than you.

            I’ve definitely had friends tell me stories of the like of “I tried to pick up this woman, here are some things I did specifically to try to convince her, and it didn’t work, haha, oh well for me!”

          • dick says:

            You have to adjust for class/status. Trump’s buying a woman furniture might be his equivalent of a guy complaining that he bought a woman a few drinks at a bar and got nothing.

            I get that you’re a fan, but no it really isn’t. Buying someone a drink is a way to introduce yourself to them and have a conversation with them. The monetary value of the drink is not supposed to be what impressed her. Buying a woman something expensive in exchange for sex is… well, the name for that doesn’t change depending on how rich the guy is.

            Also keep in mind, Trump was referring to the guy’s co-host, a woman he had worked alongside for several years. One presumes he’d met her husband and family. If you put on your “what if it was someone from the other side” filter, this doesn’t skeeve you out? Really imagine this. You’re at work and some rich guy, let’s say the owner of the company on the next floor, who you’ve met and chatted with a couple times, tells you that he tried and failed to seduce your married coworker, and says he did his best, he even took her out to buy furniture. That doesn’t lower your opinion of him? He’s still a decent chap? Diff’rent strokes, I guess…

          • Randy M says:

            That doesn’t lower your opinion of him?

            I don’t think Trump was talking about rape in that tape. But he was talking about adultery, and in a “it was bad because I failed” sort of way, not a “it was bad that I tried” sort of way.
            Which is scummy. Shitty. Whatever we’re calling bad-but-not-illegal these days.
            Not sure it’s exactly unpresidential, which is a shame.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I really don’t think demoralization propaganda is going to bring down Trump in 2020. That was the game plan in 2016, and it’s continuing non-stop to this day, with something like 90% of media reporting on Trump being negative. I think Trump supporters are well inoculated against the media screaming at them that Trump is bad.

        To be honest, I don’t know what the Democrats can do. The correct answer is “run 1992 Bill Clinton” and I think that’s mostly what Trump did. He hammer[s|ed] on the dinner table issues voters care about. Jobs, economy, trade, immigration, military, terrorism. About the only issue voters care about that Trump doesn’t really have his finger on the pulse of is healthcare. But I don’t think the Dems have a good or simple answer for that largely because I don’t think there are good or simple answers to healthcare. Instead they’ve got Tom Perez calling Ocasio-Cortez “the future of the Democratic party” but the whole “abolish ICE” thing does not play well with the flyover states.

        In politics 2020 is a lifetime away so anything could happen, but I don’t see a path for them right now. They get really worked up about minority issues or the treatment of foreigners, but for the actual voters it’s still “the economy, stupid.”

        • Thomas Jørgensen says:

          Eh, you are over-complicating the healthcare issue – The US has an uniquely inefficient healthcare system. Truly optimal healthcare provision might be hard, but a massive improvement on the status quo is not a difficult achievement, just adopting any of the half-dozen proven-to-be-better systems would do it.

          Medicare for all is pithy, and would work, so would adopting Swiss style rules that standardize private health insurance into fungibility.
          (The extra costs the us incurs is in large part down to every insurance company insisting on being a special snowflake in what it covers, what percentage it pays and how it is billed.. which burden health-care providers with enormous work loads for no good reason. If all insurance companies cover the same list of things, and use the same standardized form, hospitals could, and would, fire 80, 90 percent of their billing staff)
          The issue is that you have to be willing to go scorched earth on a lot of the participants in the current system. For example, the aforementioned billing staff?That was several hundred thousand people you just let go as surplus to requirements.

          And you have to fire them, in order for any reform to work, because their wages are a very large chunk of the excess costs.

          And a Medicare-for-all platform is a declaration of war on the health insurance industry. Politically solid once you have done it, because firms that you bankrupted cannot fund lobbying efforts against you, but.. they better not see it coming.

          Heck, that goes for a Swiss style reform too – Because the firms would have to go through their staff with a barrel of pink ink to survive under such conditions. Not much chance of getting super rich in a field regulated that tightly.

          • albatross11 says:

            Yeah, it was interesting to see how Obamacare was shaped. This was a popular president with little experience but both houses of congress behind him (at least nominally), which seems kinda familiar somehow. And health care reform was absolutely the hill he was prepared to die on. And they still got Obamacare, which is (as best I can tell) a complete mess optimized to make sure the existing insurance industry and medical industry didn’t lose anything, which could only be passed using a questionable gimmick that left it open to court challenge, and which was born financially unstable and required executive-order-provided external subsidies that were predictably withdrawn when his party lost the white house.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Obamacare is the only reasonable option available at the time. Obama wasn’t a dictator and there were, are, and will continue to be large number of conservative Democrats that aren’t going to back aggressive reform, and a bunch more that will get quite skittish when rubber hits the road and they can’t just pose by Bernie Sanders for a picture.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          ‘it’s the economy stupid’

          IIRC Polling of R, Is, and DS puts ‘immigration’ as the #1, #1, and #2 issue respectively. #1 being healthcare for Ds. This is why, I believe, Trump’s immigration rhetoric has gotten edgier over time as polling data reveals that the general electorate is closer to the dubbed ‘far right’ position on this issue then the center left position on this issue. I should stress that ‘how far’ is difficult to determine b/c of the wording of polling questions.

          I don’t think it’s just that ‘Abolish ICE’ is unpopular, it’s that aggressive immigration enforcement is *more* popular than doing nothing (which in turn is more popular than abolishing ICE and immigration enforcement generally)

          Rs and Ds are, by my estimation, both biting their nails most over the same issue; “What will the US look like 10-20 years from now” — obviously each side rooting for the opposite outcome of the other.

          But otherwise I agree that the negative reporting has lost most of its impact; it has become the new normal and if approval ratings are anything to go by, the public has adjusted. If reporting became more neutral, justified or not, I can imagine approval ratings going even higher. Ironic.

          The economy affects general satisfaction and voter turnout (both pro and con)

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I googled around for polls on issues that are important to voters and the first result from HuffPo pretty much confirms my prejudices. The #1 issue for dems is healthcare, then guns, and immigration is far down the list with only 10% rating it in their top 2 issues. And yet, the most passion I’ve seen out of the Dem leadership lately has been about the treatment of illegal foreigners at the border. I do not think this is a good way to energize the base. Dems should be hammering on healthcare because that’s where 34% of their voters, 30% of Is and 26% of Rs are paying attention.

            If the Dems want to make the midterm elections about immigration I think this is a losing proposition for them, as this is a top 2 issue for 43% of Republicans and 25% of Is. Focusing on policies that your base is lacklaster about but your opposition feels very strongly about in the opposite direction is not a winning formula.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          And the economy ties into the Culture War, stupid.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Yeah, demoralization is entirely the wrong way to go. Instead of trying to come up with ways to suppress half of the population, maybe try to give them a stake in the country instead?

          Stop telling everybody how bad Trump is; they know that already. Instead, show them some reason to think that you are good. This was what the Republican establishment failed to do, and why they failed to stop Trump.

          I’d say get the SJWs under control and call for a truce (from the left) in the culture wars. (I’d like to say expel the actual socialists too, but honestly I’m not sure that bothers most people like it should.)

          • albatross11 says:

            There’s not a Pope of Leftism who can excommunicate the SJWs.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I don’t think that’s possible. I think the identity politics have the Dems painted into a corner. Some white guy is going to come along and say “hey, we need to cool down on the racial politics for a bit and focus on economics to get more people voting for us” and the BLM crowd is going to say “sure, that makes sense?” No, they’re going to cast him into the outer darkness because their rhetoric is that black people are dying on the streets to racist cops every day and boohoo that a bunch of rednecks don’t have jobs. His focus on economic issues supports a system of white supremacy, and probably the Patriarchy, too.

          • Matt M says:

            The SJWs are the ones running the show on the left, and they’re really well practiced at expelling people. If someone is getting expelled, they’re the ones doing the expelling.

            You’re more likely to get run out of the left for being insufficiently SJW than for being too SJW (if such a thing even exists?)

          • Jaskologist says:

            But Bezos could do more than most.

            Use the Post to build a media campaign against them. Start with a series of exposes of the different male feminists who have been revealed by #metoo to be abusers. As it goes on, highlight more and more their connections to the social justice movement, so that you tie the abuse and the movement together in people’s minds.

            I’m sure somewhere in Amazon there’s an SJW with a sordid past that the company can-with great reluctance of course, but really they have no choice given all the recent public outcry-make an example of to encourage the rest. No doubt the move will be lauded by the Washington Post. If you can get one or two other large corporations to follow suit, you should be all set from there.

          • Aapje says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            The solution to that is to have a woman or black person give that message.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Internalized racism / sexism, Uncle Tom sellout to white supremacy and the Patriarchy.

          • theredsheep says:

            The thing is, the SJWs aren’t terribly constructive AFAICT. They’re very big on denouncing, but if they have a detailed policy plan involving things other than the purging of reactionary elements, I haven’t heard it. What are they going to do if they win, besides conduct endless purges for more or less arbitrarily defined offenses? The energy is bound to run out sooner or later.

            (Of course SJW is poorly defined; I’m taking the typical internet specimen as the type species here, which may be a mistake. I don’t know where the overlap is between such critters and social democrats, who do have constructive ideas even if I don’t believe they’ll ever achieve them)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Honestly as a right-winger, I think social democrats have achievable ideas. They’re not going to collectivize agriculture or do something else that makes not being optimally capitalist a matter of life and death rather than inside baseball.
            The huge thing they get wrong is immigration.Be firm that social democracy is only for people like us and you’ve got something.

          • theredsheep says:

            I don’t think anybody’s ideas are all that achievable at this point, we’re so politically dysfunctional. The more achievable ones would be extremely modest ones you can get bipartisan support for. Or goals which can be achieved at the local level. The DemSos want too much.

          • Deiseach says:

            I think the identity politics have the Dems painted into a corner.

            Which is why I think the seizing upon Ocasio-Cortez as a possible presidential candidate down the line (certainly not in 2020, she’d only be thirty by then and has no real big-time experience): she’s female! and Latina! Two “firsts” for the price of one! Better than a white guy or woman, anyway!

            I think the problem is that right now, the most electable candidate is still going to be a white guy, but the Democrats have positioned themselves so hard as the party of progressive firsts (first African-American president and tried hard for first woman president) that the bloc of college-educated voters they rely on are going to want “more than just another white guy” as candidate. Good luck squaring that circle.

          • Matt M says:

            The huge thing they get wrong is immigration.Be firm that social democracy is only for people like us and you’ve got something.

            Wasn’t this Bernie’s position at first? Until the media/Hillary campaign called him racist and he started to walk it back?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Matt M: Could be; not sure. I remember something to the effect of him trying to talk about flourishing vis-a-vis class issues and getting shut down by a couple of BLM women to the extent that he submissively gave up his podium when they’d tried that with Hillary and got smacked down.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Bernie Sanders interviewed by Ezra Klein calling open borders a “right-wing” “Koch brothers” proposal.

            “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.”

            “It would make everybody in America poorer — you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or (the United Kingdom) or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people.”

          • Iain says:

            There’s no need to speculate about Bernie’s immigration policy. He published a lengthy position paper. The summary:

            Senator Sanders will fight to implement a humane and secure immigration policy that will:
            — Dismantle inhumane deportation programs and detention centers;
            — Pave the way for a swift and fair legislative roadmap to citizenship for the eleven million undocumented immigrants;
            — Ensure our border remains secure while respecting local communities;
            — Regulate the future flow of immigrants by modernizing the visa system and rewriting bad trade agreements;
            — Enhance access to justice and reverse the criminalization of immigrants;
            — Establish parameters for independent oversight of key U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies.

          • Aapje says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            It’s not necessary to convince the SJWs, the key is to make the other 95% of Democrats tired of them.

            I don’t think that the ‘bounty‘ accusation worked very well against Obama.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Bernie is “old left” and also “socialist left” (FYI, not Marxist or Communist).

            That means he has a ton of allegiance to Labor left, and I don’t mean the current party in the UK. I mean unions. Unions were not traditionally in favor of immigration or international trade. Unions weren’t much in favor of cheap “Southern” labor, either.

            Bernie favors a class-based interpretation of structural inequity. He doesn’t really like including other forms of inequities, or at least it doesn’t flow naturally from him.

            Bernie-bro was a meme for a reason.

      • outis says:

        Clinton/Garland 2020. Make things right.

    • James Miller says:

      Identify and hire the best talent at Fox News to have them work on projects that won’t help Republicans.

    • AG says:

      Influence all of the pertinent lower level elections to control the gerrymandering.

      • John Schilling says:

        Gerrymandering has basically no effect on Presidential elections. That’s strictly a House of Representatives thing.

        • AG says:

          But it eventually trickles back up into Electoral College shenanigans. Gatekeeping Congress also influences the presidential candidate pool, or opens up congressional-approval actions like impeachment.

          I’ll add the additional action that Bezos should lobby to change election day logistics (move it to a weekend, mandate that all employees be given a number of election day/hours pay, etc.) to re-enfranchise the necessary demographics.

          • Nornagest says:

            I can’t see how. Most of the states use winner-take-all electoral systems; no amount of creativity in drawing district borders would help you there. Maine and Nebraska use districting systems, but they only have a handful of electoral votes between them, and neither one’s a common swing state.

          • John Schilling says:

            Aside from Maine and Nebraska, there is the possibility that no candidate wins a majority in the EC and the (gerrymandered) House gets to pick the next president. But that’s an extreme long shot.

            AG, what do you mean by Electoral College “shenanigans”? Have these shenanigans actually occurred in previous elections, and if not what is your basis for assuming that they will or could in 2020?

          • AG says:

            Not any “we found an exploit in the law” type shenanigans. I meant a broader incentive gradient. When tribe A get effectively disenfranchised by Tribe B’s gerrymandering, they tend to move to another place where tribe A actually has power. We have more and more Democrat-aligned people moving to the cities to get away from non-city cultural norms, but that’s abandoning more and more states to the Republicans. Hence popular vote overturned by Electoral College, due to increased self-sorting.

            Or do you think we’ll soon reach the point in which Texas’s State Legislature and House Congressmen are still Republican dominated, but they somehow go for the Democratic candidate for executive branch positions and federal senators?

          • John Schilling says:

            When tribe A get effectively disenfranchised by Tribe B’s gerrymandering, they tend to move to another place where tribe A actually has power.

            I’m fairly certain that this is untrue, but would be interested in e.g. the accounts of anyone who says that they moved for the sake of being in a more representative legislative district.

            People frequently move because they become detached from the local culture, possibly because the culture moved away from them. Blue-ish people move out of small towns into cities, because they don’t like the culture of small towns, not because their particular town is always represented by Rednecks in Congress.

            We should see clear evidence if this were otherwise. Gerrymandering works by e.g. shifting some, but not all, cosmopolitan suburbs and college towns, into predominantly rural/Red districts. That way, some suburban or college-town Blues are effectively disenfranchised, and the inevitable Blue districts centered on cosmopolitan cities only count a fraction of their associated suburban populations. If you shifted all of the suburbs into the Red districts, they wouldn’t be Red any more. But we don’t see people moving out of the Red-gerrymandered suburbs into the Blue-ungerrymandered ones, because they are still cosmopolitan suburbs populated by fellow Blues and griping is way easier than moving.

            Gerrymandering works precisely because people don’t move to get away from it. They do move for other reasons, and the gerrymanderers can redraw the lines to compensate for that.

          • AG says:

            Control over the local government plays a role in the local culture. For example, gerrymandering so that the city council is primarily NIMBY/pro-immigration, leading to the entire area getting gentrified/flooded by immigrants, changing the local culture against population that was neutralized by the gerrymandering.
            Losing control of local government can lead to punishing local ordinances that further disadvantage a particular group, such as access to abortion, anti-business regulations, environmental racism, or a shoddy school system.

    • tayfie says:

      Bezos, if your goal is purely to hurt Trump personally and prevent him from being re-elected, the obvious goal is to split his base.

      Run as or promote a candidate as similar to him as possible, but younger and better looking.

      Do everything possible to dampen the rabid media attacks on Trump. They did more to make him look sympathetic and genuine than he could have possibly accomplished on his own. Have them attack your guy instead and use this as evidence that Trump has sold out to the swamp but your guy is still pure.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        And then everyone’s going to call Bezos a nazi for supporting Hitler 3.0. I’m not sure he wants that kind of heat.

        • tayfie says:

          Yes. The most effective routes to destroying Trump will absolutely have collateral damage, and the easiest person to sacrifice is oneself.

          I don’t think Bezos is the type to go for all-out vengeance at any cost, but I think it is the likeliest strategy to work.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Unless you’re promising 72 virgins in the afterlife, suicide attacks are a tough sell.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Also you have to be _credible_ about the 72 virgins. And then there’s the wiseguy negotiator

            “Look, 72 virgins. Sounds great, but it’s either way too much or way too little. I mean, if I gotta handle ’em all at once, it’s way too much; there’s only so much of me to go around. But if I get to spread them out, well, the afterlife is forever, right? 72 virgins ain’t going to last more than a blink of an eye. So forget this 72 stuff… we need be talking infinite virgins; how about three a day?”

          • John Schilling says:

            At least according to some hadiths, IIRC, the houris get re-virginized every night. And the men get divine ultra-Viagra; if your erection lasts more than four hours, don’t worry, be happy, it’s supposed to work that way.

            They’ve got this covered, man. Or at least they aren’t afraid to pander to their target audience (which varies from hadith to hadith).

    • Civilis says:

      *Note: commenter is a Republican that voted for Trump as better than Hillary*

      Buy a couple of really nice golf courses far away from Washington / Florida, hire some attractive hostesses, and make nice with Trump in an attempt to convince him that he’s won; he doesn’t need another term in office. Besides, if he’s spending time golfing, he’s probably not messing anything else up. You don’t need to go full conservative for this, just centrist, and centrist is probably more believable than having a come-to-Jesus moment anyways.

      The only viable dirty tricks are probably the most subtle. If you try to force Trump into a compromising position, you’re more likely to only end up yourself looking bad, but if you give him the opportunity and he bites, you win. (Just keep some of the more… amorous Democrats away lest this backfire. This means no Bill Clinton!) The best dirty trick might be to make sure the food is as good… and unhealthy… as possible.

  48. 10240 says:

    Recently figured it out why text in the comment sections occasionally jumps up and down: if the comment box is narrow, an edit countdown may break into two lines. And whether it does may depend on the remaining time: it may fit in one line when there is no seconds counter for one second or, more rarely, when the seconds counter is single digit. If I’m looking at comments, and somewhere far above there is an edit counter, the comments may occasionally jump up and down for no apparent reason.

  49. Sniffnoy says:

    So, let me restate one of the problems I had with “Conflict vs Mistake”, that I’ve stated in various places.

    In your post you talk about these two different points of view and treat them as if they are two different descriptive theories. But that’s not the real difference. They’re different ways of thinking (“conflict stance vs mistake stance”?); the difference doesn’t ultimately stem from some factual disagreement, as you present it.

    That is to say, we might identify “narrow conflict theory”, the actual idea that apparent disagreements are mostly due to conflicts; and “broad conflict theory” (or “broad conflict stance”), the more general cluster of ideas that you’re talking about. The thing to note is that the former does not imply the latter! You can hold the idea that apparent disagreements are mostly due to conflicts and not therefore conclude that you should act like “conflict theorists” actually do, because it, well, really doesn’t follow. (And like, it seems to be unambiguously true that certain apparent disagreements really are due to conflicts. But again I would not advise acting like “conflict theorists” actually do in those cases, because that’s not actually the correct path to take in case of a conflict.) So like I said, I think you’re wrong to identify a factual disagreement as the root of it; it’s down to different styles of thinking, more like.

    In particular one of the problems with “broad conflict stance” is the not worrying about mistakes, like, at all. They don’t seem to consider it important to put systems in place to keep one aligned with reality; they seem to think that if they win the conflict the right things will happen automatically, and that doesn’t work.

    I could probably identify other issues but I think that’s the biggest one.

    • fion says:

      Bit of a nitpick, probably doesn’t detract from your overall point:

      You say acting like a conflict theorist isn’t the correct path to take in case of a conflict. I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “acting like a conflict theorist”, but I understand it as trying to defeat the other side rather than negotiate with them. I think that if something is an actual conflict then this is the correct thing to do. If the Paperclip Maximisers from Outer Space have sent a paperclip factory ship to Earth, saying “oh goody, a planet we can turn into paperclips” then you nuke the bastards before they can land. You don’t say “I wonder if we can find some common ground here.”

      WWII was a genuine conflict. The correct thing to do was to win; negotiations failed a long time ago. Many conflicts are not like this, and there are options for working something out (correcting the mistakes), and that’s why I think the world could use a good deal more Mistake Theory, but I really do think that in the few cases of actual, genuine conflict, the correct thing to do is to “act like a conflict theorist” and fight to win.

      • Aapje says:

        I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “acting like a conflict theorist”, but I understand it as trying to defeat the other side rather than negotiate with them.

        I think that it is a mistake (hah) to equate a stance with a certain strategy to resolve the issue.

        A mistake theorist can choose to debate the other side to find agreement or he can decide that the other side is completely wrong and needs to be ignored/oppressed/annihilated/etc.

        A conflict theorist can decide to compromise or to ignore/oppress/annihilate/etc the other side so they can have everything that they want.

        WWII was a genuine conflict. The correct thing to do was to win; negotiations failed a long time ago. Many conflicts are not like this, and there are options for working something out (correcting the mistakes), and that’s why I think the world could use a good deal more Mistake Theory

        You are using the words conflict and mistake theory completely incorrectly here. People can go to war for both conflict theory and mistake theory reasons & they can negotiate based on both stances.

        For example, let’s say that we are neighbors and that you like to play the piano in your house, while I hate piano playing.

        Mistake theory would be to believe that one of us or both of us are wrong in our desires and that we can, if both of us are reasonable/perfect, align our desires perfectly. Based on this theory, I could then try to convince you that the sound of a piano is horrible. Or I could conclude that you are mistaken, but not capable of reason and shoot you.

        Conflict theory would be to believe that we have inherently different desires that can’t be both be met. To solve this issue, we can come to an agreement where you play the piano only during some periods of the day, or I can shoot you.

        Anyway, “Conflict vs Mistake” might be Scott’s most misunderstood post, which is quite ironic.

        • fion says:

          Thanks for your comment. Perhaps my emphasis should have been on “what do you (Sniffnoy) mean by ‘acting like a conflict theorist’?” rather than “here’s what I think you mean and my explanation of why you’re wrong based on that.”

          Since you mention it, though, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that conflict vs mistake theory is the same as kill vs compromise. I’m aware that a conflict-theory resolution to a conflict could be to compromise and I’m aware that a mistake-theory resolution to a mistake could (in very contrived circumstances) be to kill the mistaken person.

          I guess I’m of the opinion that if something is definitely a conflict you should use conflict-y tactics to solve it (which could include war, assassination, slander, statistics that back up your side, sitting around a negotiating table trying to come up with a mutually-agreeable compromise etc.). And if something is definitely a mistake you should use mistake-y tactics to solve it (which could include listening, debating, good-faith use of statistics, adversarial collaboration, putting very dangerously mistaken people in places where they can’t hurt others etc.). But I understand Conflict vs Mistake Theory as being about whether you interpret the ambiguous situations as being fundamentally built on conflict or fundamentally built on a mistake.

          • Aapje says:

            And if something is definitely a mistake you should use mistake-y tactics to solve it (which could include listening, debating, good-faith use of statistics, adversarial collaboration, putting very dangerously mistaken people in places where they can’t hurt others etc.).

            Most of those tactics put high burdens on both sides. What do you do if the other side doesn’t want to debate or (according to you/me) listen to reason? Who decides who is right when both sides believe that the others are dangerously mistaken people who need to be put in the gulag places where they can’t hurt others?

            At a certain point of mutual inability to recognize each others points of view as legitimate, it may be better to use the conflict-y tactics of tolerance and compromise, rather than desperately trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.

          • fion says:

            @Aapje

            At a certain point of mutual inability to recognize each others points of view as legitimate, it may be better to use the conflict-y tactics of tolerance and compromise

            One could reach a similar conclusion as a mistake theorist. After failing to figure out which one of us is mistaken, we try to figure out a solution that fails as gracefully as possible under the outcome that one or both of us is mistaken. This will look like a conflict theory compromise in most situations.

            As for your first paragraph, if neither side is willing to contemplate that they might be the mistaken one then mistake approaches sadly break down and conflict will probably ensue. Even if only one side refuses to engage virtuously, that can force the other’s hand as well.

          • Aapje says:

            One could reach a similar conclusion as a mistake theorist. After failing to figure out which one of us is mistaken, we try to figure out a solution that fails as gracefully as possible under the outcome that one or both of us is mistaken. This will look like a conflict theory compromise in most situations.

            I didn’t think of that, but that’s a very good point!

      • Sniffnoy says:

        No, see, that’s the sort of thing that, like, actually plausibly follows. Remember, I’m not talking about a descriptive theory, I’m talking about an empirical cluster, and my point is that many features of it don’t follow from the descriptive theory that Scott uses to define it.

        I gave an example above, but I think I should try to make it more specific. We’re talking about politics here, right? And the thing that these “conflict theorists” do when it comes to politics is to ignore the possibility that the policies that they have run on and intend to implement, will not actually help their side once implemented. That is to say, the existence of conflicts does not obviate the need to avoid mistakes, yet “conflict theorists” act as though it does.

        • fion says:

          the thing that these “conflict theorists” do when it comes to politics is to ignore the possibility that the policies that they have run on and intend to implement, will not actually help their side once implemented

          I think this is a really key point that I had missed. Does this imply that the biggest difference between conflict and mistake theorists is that mistake theorists question themselves and conflict theorists don’t? That doesn’t seem quite right to me either, so I’ve probably misunderstood.

          “How much you question whether your actions will actually help your side” sounds like a continuous variable that you can take too far in either direction.

  50. 10240 says:

    On a tangent from David Friedman’s comment in the last OT about the public discourse on tariffs being conducted in terms of 18th century economics:
    Is someone aware of any country where economics is taught as a high school subject? Does it have any benefit?

    • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

      Economics was one of our optional subjects when I was in high school (in New Zealand, in the 1980s).

      But I don’t think it is in my son’s high school curriculum. They do business studies, but not theoretical economics.

      • smwls says:

        When I was in high school in NZ 8 years ago, there was definitely a “theoretical” economics course (NCEA Level 3). I sat in on a class once; it was a discussion of diminishing marginal utility, more or less at Econ 101 level.

      • Matt M says:

        This was also true in my high school (US) as well. Economics was available as a very high-level intro elective course, basically for one semester, covering only the most basic concepts. Very few students chose to take it.

        • albatross11 says:

          Yeah, my high school also had an economics class, taught by a one-year-from-retirement teacher who DGAF and who played films and slept through class pretty much every day. I probably learned *something* from that class, but I don’t recall anything. (But I studied a lot more economics in college, so maybe I’m forgetting it!)

          By contrast, I also had a high school statistics class, and it was really nice–I learned a lot of stuff that made my college-level stats class much easier.

    • In the UK you can certainly study economics at A level (i.e. the last two years before university). Here is a syllabus.

    • Aapje says:

      @10240

      In The Netherlands, all high school students get taught economics initially, until about age 15, where they have to choose a study profile. Only for one of these profiles is economics mandatory, although it is the most popular profile with > 1/3rd of students picking it.

      It’s hard to say whether this helps in general. Studies into the abilities of citizens/students generally focus specifically on financial literacy, which is a much more limited skill set, dealing with the ability to handle money, rather than being knowledgeable about financial policy at the (inter)national level.

      PISA ranks The Netherlands quite well for financial literacy, although it found that relative to math and reading skill, Dutch students rank relatively low. So it seems that my country under-performs on this subject.

      Belgium ranks higher, but they teach financial literacy specifically, rather than just economics. So the rankings might reflect this. For adults, the financial literacy seems high in The Netherlands and higher than Belgium. This may reflect different styles of education of the past, though.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        AFAICT (having recently moved here), compared to the US and UK the Netherlands seems to have a much higher cultural aversion to debt. For instance, any advertisement for a product for which you pay by instalments (including things like mobile phones) has a mandatory warning similar to tobacco adverts, translating as “Caution! Borrowing money costs money!” with a little cartoon of a person chained to a euro symbol.

        Cars on the road also appear to be much older on average than in the UK, although I don’t know how much of that is people not wanting to take out a loan to buy a new car and how much is very high purchase taxes on new cars.

        • Aapje says:

          The Netherlands actually has one of the highest debts per capita, mainly due to mortgages. The savings are also extremely high, due to large pension savings (in other countries people tend to pay down their mortgages to save for their pensions). A major reason for this disparity is a substantial tax deduction/subsidy on mortgage payments.

          It is true that for anything but mortgages, Dutch people tend to not want to get loans, although this cultural habit seems to be eroding, among younger generations.

          The average age for UK passenger cars is 8.5 years vs 9.5 for The Netherlands. The Netherlands has relatively old cars for north-west Europe, but not that high for Europe as a whole. Sweden has 9.6 years, so quite close. Denmark has 8.5 years, the same as the UK, but seems to have a huge purchase tax, so that doesn’t seem to be the explanation.

          I looked at the details of the car markets and it seems like a far higher percentage of UK cars are company cars. These usually get replaced much more quickly than privately owned cars.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            I looked at the details of the car markets and it seems like a far higher percentage of UK cars are company cars. These usually get replaced much more quickly than privately owned cars.

            That makes a lot of sense (I was aware of the figure that a slight majority of the new car sales in the UK are to fleets), and I can think of all sorts of reasons why the UK would have more company cars, which of course enter the used market after a few years as relatively new used cars, than the Netherlands.

        • Lambert says:

          Do they grit the roads in the Netherlands?
          Salt causes British cars to rust awfully fast.

          • Aapje says:

            Yes, the government is very eager to grit the roads*. I do think that Britain has more days with freezing/snow, so they may grit the roads more often.

            * They often do the cycle paths as well.

    • beleester says:

      It’s an optional course at my high school (US). There are also AP exams for micro and macro, but they aren’t commonly offered.

      I don’t know of any countries where it’s mandatory.

    • bean says:

      I took AP Econ in high school. The problem is that it was taught by the marketing teacher, who wasn’t really up to the job. Still, I got 5s on both tests.

      • Aapje says:

        Still, I got 5s on both tests.

        I’m sorry about that (5 is a failing grade in my country 😛 ).

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Theoretically, students of Illinois are supposed to understand concepts like specialization and interest by 5th Grade. High schoolers should be able to understand the basics of marginal analysis. This would be tacked onto whatever regular social studies classes they have, I imagine. We ran across basic supply and demand graphs when we were in 8th grade and dabbled a bit in our mandatory Consumer Education classes (more focused on personal finance than anything else).

      I’m not sure how useful the courses would be. At business undergrad, economics WAS required, and for the most part they’d just parrot whatever political line controlled the day’s headline, with no evidence of an economics education behind it. Plus, they are young kids, with mostly motivated reasoning: rent controls and student debt forgiveness were the most important things.

      From their POV, they’d have to spend more time learning calculus, statistics, finance, and accounting. There wasn’t much mindspace for economics left. I imagine this would be even worse for high schoolers.

    • ana53294 says:

      In Spain, during the non-compulsory schooling between the ages of 16-18, the Bachiller, or the pre-University education, there are two tracks, each split into two parts.

      All students have to learn: PE, Spanish & Literature, English*, The Local Language & Literature, Philosophy, Citizenship, History.

      Then students are divided into the Arts and Humanities Track and the Scientific track.

      In the Arts and Humanities, there is the Arts only specialty, which focuses on drawing and painting; this option is not offered in most schools.
      There are generally two options: The Classical branch** (have to study Latin, Classical Greek and an optional subject) or the Social Sciences branch*** (compulsory: Math for Social Sciences, Economics, +optional).

      Then there is the Scientific branch. Both sub-branches have to study Math. Then there is the Life science option (Biology+Chemistry+optional), and the Technical branch (Physics + Technical Drawing +optional). The optionals can be subjects from other branches, or Geology.

      *Technically, it’s Foreign Language I, but most schools don’t bother offering anything other than English.
      **The only reason most people take this option is if they are really, really bad at math. I do not understand how it can be easier to learn Latin and Greek rather than Math, but human diversity is incredible. The ones who actually want to study Latin and Greek are a tiny minority.
      ***Most people who choose to go to University on the majors that involve math usually choose the scientific specialization, because Social science math is easier.

      • Aapje says:

        In The Netherlands, the highest level of high school is split into Gymnasium and Atheneum, where the former has Latin and/or Classic Greek as a compulsory part of the curriculum. As far as I can tell, the main reason for this existing is to allow for signalling and/or for the elite to separate themselves from the commoners a bit (although these are often offered by the same school, but a few schools only offer the Gymnasium option).

        The actual interest in Latin and Greek for their own sake seems minimal.

        • ana53294 says:

          Voluntary choosing to go to a school were you have to learn Latin – on top of a lot of other subjects – is a good way to filter bad students and self select into a class with kids interested in learning.

          • albatross11 says:

            That makes sense. I’ve heard the same thing about some foreign-language-immersion magnet schools in the US, too–most kids will not remotely be interested in a French-language immersion middle school. I talked to a woman whose daughter was in such a school, and she thought it was a good experience for her daughter. But she also pointed out that (as is common in this area) the magnet school had been put inside a failing public school to raise the average test scores. (See, we’ve fixed the problem with all these kids not learning to read by the 4th grade, by bringing in a bunch of smart kids selected by exam to get good scores on the tests. Mission Accomplished!) So the magnet kids got education, and the other kids got endless test-prep to further raise the school’s test scores (on which the school administration was being judged).

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      When I was in high school in the southern US in the 90s, every 11th grader had to take one semester of Economics and one semester of Government. I don’t know if they still do that, but we did, and it wasn’t optional. It was a requirement for graduation.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      My high school in rural Texas (Elgin) had an AP Econ class in the 1980s. I don’t remember what had been in it. However, I see some of the current class’ contents are available online, if you can read PowerPoint files.

  51. dlr says:

    “Easy conflict theorists think that all our problems come from cartoon-villain caricatures wanting very evil things; bad people want to kill brown people and steal their oil, good people want world peace and tolerance. Hard conflict theorists think that our problems come from clashes between differing but comprehensible worldviews ”

    OK, what about super-hard conflict theorists, maybe you want to call them ‘legitimate conflict theorists’ who believe that there are legitimate irreconcilable differences between different groups of people. There are many, many situations in this world where it’s not a case of making the pie bigger, it is a case of dividing the pie, and when group A gets more, group B is going to get less. Neither group A nor group B are cartoon villains. Both have legitimate interests. You can’t solve this by discussing different world views. Because both world views reflect reality. Ignoring this fact ignores 90% of what politics was designed to deal with in the first place: dividing up the pie when there is no right answer, when more for A means less for B.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      You might have to give more of an example.

      In literal pie-splitting, the fair plan is obviously to split it evenly. Or according to existing laws and precedents. The exact definition of “even”, or which laws and precedents should be applied, or whether there are compelling interests that make an uneven split higher-utility, seem like the sorts of things that there can be either conflicts or mistakes over.

      • Wrong Species says:

        Imagine that I’m a father of two children in the middle of an epidemic. Both of my children get sick and if they aren’t treated, they’ll die. Thankfully, I’m just wealthy enough to pay for two cures. However, my neighbor, who also has two sick children, is not. The “fair” thing to do, splitting the cures, would allow both of us to have one child alive. But I care infinitely more about my children than his and won’t do it. It’s not because I’m a cartoon villain and it’s not because we have different world views*, it’s just that there isn’t enough for both of us, and I’m prioritizing my own. I think that this is what dlr is getting at.

        *Maybe a platonic utilitarian would actually decide to split it evenly, in which case it does come down to different world views. For the sake of the example, imagine the poor neighbor is a typical person. They would have done the same.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Can you give an example on the society-wide level? I agree your example is heart-wrenching, but it doesn’t seem to scale very well.

          • yodelyak says:

            Societal-level example…

            Let’s imagine an undiscovered continent, Australia-sized, hidden somehow in the Pacific Ocean all this time. There is a native population who have a single family-like social structure, and no violence. By quirk, they have all the medical immunities we do, and generally have disease-free lives about as long as westerners’ lives. They all also live their whole lives wrapped in the songlines of a single, unified and unifying sacred music they all are cooperatively contributing to.

            It is also a very resource rich continent (great oil deposits, nearly zero extraction costs!), and the locals are not making a very intensive use of their land, so if we just send some modern humans there, we can expect to coexist peacefully… although we can also expect the introduction of our phonemes and ways of life to destroy theirs…

            So, either some industrialists make some mega-bucks by declaring themselves owners of the mineral rights (and bribing governments as necessary), *or* a way of life is preserved.

            Or if you really want, just picture the continent as empty, and assume that it’s surrounded by reefs and cliffs and only has one navigable harbor such that whoever finds/occupies that harbor will therefore gets military/political/economic control over the whole of it for generations. Your Esperanto ship and a Klingon ship are almost within shooting distance, and neck-and-neck, and closing on the harbor (and each other)–racing, it feels like–although technically Esperanto and Klingon are currently at peace with each other. Both ships are armed with precision cannon such that a single broadside has a high chance of ending the conflict with an immediate and complete victory for the first ship to open fire (and total or near-total casualty rates for the other side)… you start to think about what the other captain must be thinking about, and strain to see if there’s any activity near the guns on the other ship. How long until you say, “better us than them” and fire everything you’ve got?

          • Aapje says:

            @Scott

            Welfare for citizens, but not for foreigners, even though those people have needs as well, but we prioritize our own.

          • Wrong Species says:

            @Scott

            I think the problem is that when we do scale it, people end up thinking the guys fighting are more evil than good. In the Warring States period of China, trying to come up with a positive sum agreement was impossible because everyone wanted each other’s territory and there was no trust that anyone would live up to any peace deal. If you remained neutral, you would be taken advantage of. Does that make the heads of these states evil because they engaged in this machiavellian game? It’s the same thing. Your state either wins or loses.

        • idontknow131647093 says:

          I actually think this, your initial example, is very good because it is scalable.

          There is an epidemic that kills all children under 18 if untreated. There are a few classes of adults:

          Adults without children.
          Adults with children and they can buy cures for all.
          Adults with children and they can buy cures for some.
          Adults with children and they can buy no cures.

          Conflict theory says there are conflicts between all these groups. Group 1 doesn’t care for government purchases of cure, and group 4 wants it redistributed to them. Group 2 prefers the status quo, and group 3 might prefer the status quo (if there is a ton of group 4 people) and might prefer the re-distributive option (if they have a lot of children and there are a lot of group 2 people). So conflict theory doesn’t really tell us much about what is wise.

          Mistake theory will end with the same 4 groups, but will ask what is the best way to allocate cures. Is it based on the cost of the cure (ala groups 1-4), which is essentially betting that past results correlate with future returns (smart parents = smart children), or is there another better option? At current tech levels the only arguable way for there to be a better result than the status quo would be some sort of IQ test of children. But this has its own weaknesses as IQ tests are a good measure of intelligence, but not of culture and other things that may be important for not only individual, but group success. Thus, without omniscience, no system of allocating cures is objectively better than the “past performance” model, while several others (random lottery, inverting the wealth distribution, giving all the cures to the childless, etc) are objectively worse.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Water rights might turn up some legitimate hard conflict situations.

  52. deluks917 says:

    Idk if scott will be happy or horrified but based on his review of ‘The Hungry Brain’ I went on a ‘bland food diet’. I got great results. Lost ~30 pounds in ~14 weeks. The diet invovled eating things like:
    — Plain Cereal (Rice crispies or Cheerios)
    — Vegan protein shakes
    — Plain bread
    — Dried Edamame
    — Plain Peanut Butter (I wanted a fat source but plain peanut butter should be replaced with something more bland like a plain avocado)
    — Plain pasta with a little extra salt

    I did not manage to perfectly follow the diet and unfortunately the peanut butter had to be portion controlled. But its amazing how much your ‘hunger’ just melts away when you tell yourself ‘If you are hungry we can eat more elbows pasta with no sauce’.

    • Well... says:

      You find plain avocado bland?? To me it’s nutty but also somehow fruity…very flavorful. When there’s just a little avocado in something I can always tell.

      • Eric Rall says:

        Avocado by itself tastes bland to me. It has a good amount of flavor, but it seems very muted without some salt or some acid to bring it out.

      • pontifex says:

        Avocado honestly tastes somewhat neutral to me as well. Compare it to butter, for example. Or peanut oil. You could make the argument that soybean oil is more neutral, but people aren’t selling “soybean oil toast” for $10 a plate. 🙂

      • dodrian says:

        I’ve always thought avocado bland as well. I’d certainly never dream of paying an upcharge for guacamole!

        • Well... says:

          Neither would I but that’s because I’m a cheapskate.

          Now, suppose you go to a burrito place and aside from the other ingredients you can choose between meat and avocado but the price will remain the same, then it’s a tougher call. For me it would depend on what else I’ve eaten or expect to eat that day: if I haven’t had much protein I’d probably go for the meat, but if I’ve had meat at other meals then I’d go for the avocado, and that would be an easy call.

          • dodrian says:

            Have you even been tested / do you believe you are a supertaster? What are your opinions on cilantro?

            (I am not, and I love cilantro)

          • pontifex says:

            I thought hating cilantro was less about being a supertaster, and more about having the gene that makes it taste like soap for you?

      • toastengineer says:

        I suspect it depends on how fresh the average avacado is where you live. Avacadoes tasted way nicer when I lived even slightly further to the south.

        • Well... says:

          I’ve eaten avocados while living in the Great Lakes region and while living in California. I noticed huge differences in price of course, but not in quality.

          Even a half avocado that’s been in my fridge for a couple days still tastes just as good as the first half did a couple days ago, though I think avocado’s always a bit nicer at room temperature.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Congrats!

    • fion says:

      That’s really interesting. I’d be interested to know how much thought you put into nutrition? Like, did you try to make sure you got enough vitamins, protein etc.? (Sounds like you got the protein covered, but there’s not a lot of fruit and veg in that diet…) Did you count calories or make sure you didn’t get too much sugar/salt/saturated fat?

      Also, how did you feel when doing it? I know a lot of people who would rather be overweight than have to only eat bland food, or who would rather be constantly trying to control themselves and not eat more nice stuff, but still be eating some nice stuff.

      And I’m assuming it had the added benefit of being cheaper. Was it much cheaper?

      • deluks917 says:

        Too be honest I didnt put that much thought into nutrition while I was on the diet. I took a multi-vitamin and wasnt planning on being on the diet that long. I felt great during the diet. Compared to previous diets I was barely hungry at all. It was an incredibly cheap diet.

    • melboiko says:

      I also had success with a Hugry Brain-based diet (I read the actual book after the review); it lost me 17kg in 10 months.

      My staple was bland steamed potatoes with nothing, on the basis that potatoes are almost a complete nutritional source, they’re exceptionally cheap, and they’re the most fulfilling food known to humankind (as in calories/fulfilment). Seriously, look at the food satiety chart. Potatoes are literally off the chart.

      About half of my meals have been bland steamed potatoes with nothing. I complemented that with canned fish and steamed liver, for proteins+fat+b12+vitamin A (=what potatoes lack). I also had normal meals, for which I used calorie-counting to avoid overeating. This allowed me a more or less humane diet, that nonetheless lost me a lot of weight at a steady 0.5kg/week which I heard would be a healthy pace (the exceptions being two trips, one to Japan and one to Ireland, where I let it go, ’cause I’m a sucker for local cuisine).

      My staple breakfast was oatmeal, which is also high-fulfilling, quite bland, and which I happen to love. (No sugar, of course—I already hated sugar on oatmeal anyway.)

    • j1000000 says:

      Re: “Hunger” melting away, I second that — years ago I lost a bunch of weight on the paleo diet. Obviously many actual scientists suggest this as the mechanism of weight loss, but as you mention about the plain pasta: yes, I always suspected I lost most of the weight because I couldn’t eat Doritos/pizza/ice cream or order out when I was bored, more than any nutrient-specific things.

      When I was watching TV and wanted to bored-eat I’d think “Well I really don’t feel like cooking more bacon, and bacon doesn’t even taste good to me anymore since I’ve eaten so much of it, and honestly I’m not actually hungry, so forget it.”

    • MartMart says:

      I’m glad this is working for you, but there is no way it would work for me. I love plain, refined carbs, and while the sauces make them better, they aren’t necessary. I could eat a whole lot of plain pasta (or plain bread, or plain tortillas, etc). It would not end well.

      • dodrian says:

        I’m initially thinking the same as you, but wonder if I would change my tune if it were _all_ I was eating.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        You can? Like those Barillo packages? I can’t stomach that unless I at least salt the boiling water.

        • MartMart says:

          Yes. I’ve also been known to eat whole loafs of bread (sliced or not) or packages or tortillas in a sitting. If I must blame it on something, I’ll blame it on growing up without access to conventional american snacks that come in bags.

          I got serious about weight control about 3 years ago, first going to low carb route, which was wildly successful, but very difficult to maintain. Later, we switched to a mostly vegetarian diet (occasionally cheating mostly on social occasions), where I try to keep refined carbs low. Not sure if its as effective at weight loss, but it’s much easier to maintain, as I don’t find meat at all tempting anymore (but I thought I would).

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Not sure if impressed or terrified. Though, I guess it makes sense if you did not grow up with other junk food. Pasta can be a good bored-food, since it has an inoffensive taste and is incredibly soft. Ditto for most mass-market breads.

            I can’t find any weight-loss techniques that don’t involve some sort of discomfort, particularly over the short term. After a while I can adjust to the changes, but the first week is not particularly fun, even if I only have a mild calorie deficit.

          • MartMart says:

            Go with terrified. There is nothing impressive about pigging out on bad food.

            In the short term, all diet changes are unpleasant. The trouble with low carb was that it remained difficult, It always took an effort. At first, as the pounds were dropping, that provided motivation, but as weight started to stabilize, it became more and more difficult not to slip back.

            Surprisingly, that’s was not the case with going vegetarian. I don’t find myself craving meat products, I find the smell of cooking meat to be somewhat unpleasant (despite remembering it being appetizing). I’m never tempted to cheat.

          • Sidok says:

            n=1 (well, 2 including you i guess), but I’m also a plain food lover who has been known to eat entire loaves bread in one sitting, and I’ve always had decent access to snack food.

          • Aapje says:

            Different breads have different kinds of appeal. I used to really like to eat tiger bread on its own as a kid (not that I did it much, because that is junk food), because it is very soft on the inside, yet the rice paste crust gives texture and taste.

            Nowadays I’m more into bread with heavier texture. Turkish Ramazan pide is excellent for eating on its own. It ages very quickly though, so should be eaten on the same day as you buy it.

            In general, the key to eating bread on its own is to eat the bread when it is still very fresh.

            Of course, Americans are barbarians when it comes to bread, lacking quality and diversity. You guys like to eat bagels, for God’s sake!

    • gryffinp says:

      I’m kind of troubled by how much I want to believe that all of my worst completely unreasonable suspicions are completely true and it really does just boil down to “eating anything that makes you feel good is bad for you, never eat anything good.”

    • Nearly Takuan says:

      I have an allegedly-chocolate-chip-flavored Rx Bar at my desk that serves a similar purpose. If I were ever truly hungry, I’d eat it as it doesn’t taste bad. But I’ve eaten one before and never want to again, so I must not be hungry.

  53. dlr says:

    One serious problem with ”Conflict vs Mistake’ is the assumption that there are only two groups in conflict: “The Elites are few in number, but have lots of money and influence. The People are many but poor – yet their spirit is indomitable and their hearts are true.” In reality there are dozens, no, hundreds of groups, all in conflict on a variety of issues. A few obvious examples of groups whose interests are identical with neither ‘the elite’ nor ‘the people’: ‘federal employees’, ‘school-teachers’, ‘teamster union members’, ‘doctors’, ‘nurses’, ‘lawyers’, ‘people with high IQ’s’, ‘plumbers’, ‘electricians’, ‘Christians’, ‘Jews’, etc.

    The way you frame ‘Conflict Theorists’ and talk about them almost makes them synonymous with people who have a left wing ideology, but that is just incorrect. It is a fact that almost any identifiable group has unique goals that conflict with the goals of other groups and can’t be solved by good faith negotiation. One group is going to win, and one group is going to lose. Conflict Theory isn’t a theory, it’s a fact of nature.

    I would say that ‘Mistake Theory’ is about making the pie bigger, by making government more efficient, and finding Pareto optimizations. It is absolutely a real and important way to improve the well being of everyone. But that doesn’t mean that ‘Conflict Theory’ is wrong. Both theories are correct. Both exist. Both describe reality.

    Your assumption that people who believe ‘Conflict Theory’ is real are going to address it by organizing the poor seems simplistic to say the least. In reality of course people who believe in ‘Conflict Theory’ address it by organizing the group of people that have the same unique goals as they do, goals that are in conflict with some other group. The American Medical Association is a great example of people who have proceeded to act on the realization that ‘Conflict Theory’ is real. It’s a mistake to look at Conflict theory as if the only people who believe in it and act on it are left wing radicals.

    It is also a mistake to claim that one theory is true and the other false. Sometimes the problem is poor design, and both sides can win, and the answer is discussion; but a lot of times the problem is both sides can’t win, and then the only solution is ugly politics. Claiming one or the other of these theories is true and the other one is false is wrong, and frankly, not useful. Better to identify which is which.

    • sharper13 says:

      Some of the conflict with conflict theory you seem to be bypassing is that some of us don’t think of groups as having interests. Individuals have interests. Sometimes they may even have interests in common with other individuals and you can stereotype them with a group identity, but in the end, just because you group individuals doesn’t make their interests identical in all respects.

      I could come up with examples of individuals within all of the groups you mentioned ( ‘the elite’ nor ‘the people’: ‘federal employees’, ‘school-teachers’, ‘teamster union members’, ‘doctors’, ‘nurses’, ‘lawyers’, ‘people with high IQ’s’, ‘plumbers’, ‘electricians’, ‘Christians’, ‘Jews’) who have primarily opposing interests to each other. At best, you could say most of the individuals in a particular group share this small set of interests.

      So the disconnect where conflict theory doesn’t make sense to me back in reality is that anyone who claims to be speaking for/representing a particular group of people against another appears to be claiming something mostly impossible and thus is generally a charlatan out for themselves individually in the end. As I have no trouble finding many examples of this (which I won’t name in order to avoid obvious culture war implications), I’ve found it tough to believe in the whole class struggle right on down to particular groups struggling with others for power and who gets their way. Is there any doubt in your mind that the average (not exceptional) Democratic/Republican politician wouldn’t toss the rest of their “group” if given the opportunity for much more individual power? Seems more like they work together because they have to in order to achieve their individual goals, not because of some group identity.

      I’m interested mostly in why you talk of group goals and groups winning/losing, rather than as a shortcut generality for specific individuals within those groups, as I’ve never been able to really understand that perspective.

      • albatross11 says:

        sharper13:

        It’s worth noticing that even though you don’t really feel the call of this kind of group identity much[1], a little observation will show you that a lot of people do. Everything from political parties to football teams/fans to racism points to this tendency of people to see the world as “us” and “them.” I think most people have multiple levels of us/them distinctions in their minds–race, religion, social class, party affiliation, occupation, nationality, language–depending on who you are, every one of those may be an important distinction. Even if you don’t find this very interesting or important, it’s pretty useful for understanding the world around you–rather like even if you were entirely asexual and uninterested in romance, you’d still want to understand sexual and romantic attraction as a way of understanding how most other people behaved.

        Further, it’s often the case that groups have some interests in common. That is, there are some interests that an identifiable group shares. To use a pretty obvious example, everyone living in the US has an interest in seeing the US government continue operating at some reasonable level of functionality, rather than (say) collapsing into civil war. Psychiatrists have a shared interest in making sure that psychologists aren’t ever allowed to write prescriptions. Social Security recipients have a shared interest in seeing Social Security payments made no matter what other budget cuts must happen to do it. And so on.

        Of course, all these “group interests” are really just shared individual interests. A lot of psychiatrists would lose business if, say, everyone with a PhD in clinical psychology were allowed to prescribe antidepressants, and that would darken the earning prospects of most psychiatrists. Most of us living in the US would expect to do really badly in a civil war. And so on. But shared individual interests can and do show up pretty regularly.

        The interesting thing is that a lot of people are inclined to go well beyond shared individual interests, once they start identifying with a tribe/team/whatever. This is an aspect of human psychology that must have evolved to solve some universal problems, because it seems to appear everywhere.

        [1] I don’t either, for what it’s worth.

        • sharper13 says:

          I agree with pretty much all of your response.

          Thinking about it, I suppose what I’m attempting to do is get someone who does see the world in terms of primarily groups vs. groups to describe why they hold that perspective.

          For example, why would it be good if group A beat group B, even if the result made the actual members of both groups objectively worse off? I can see there are people who believe that way and I can find multiple examples of that exact situation occurring, but I’m not sure if that’s a mistake by them, or just their conflict theories about the world playing out due to their different perspective.

          So calling any hard-core conflict theorists, please share your perspective to help the rest of us understand better. 🙂

          • pontifex says:

            It’s just a cognitive mistake, like seeing a face in the clouds. Your mind is optimized to see faces everywhere, whether they’re there or not. The ancestral environment was one of small groups that really did have goals and plans. It’s natural that people would anthropomorphize larger groups like All the Jews or People with Incomes Below 50k/year, even though they aren’t at all the same thing.

      • Nearly Takuan says:

        It’s probably easier to understand if you restrict the domain a bit. It’s difficult to build a model of all traffic out of nothing. It’s easier to build a model of just vehicle traffic on public roads. It’s easier still to build a model of vehicle traffic on public suburban roads with 25 mph speed limits on a pure grid system with traffic lights every 10 blocks. Once you have a reasonable framework in place that can accurately model that scenario, then you can start adding more complexity.

        Economics is a really complicated field on its own, without having to consider political affiliation. Wage negotiation is a specific example of an interaction that is(n’t, but ideally should be) almost entirely influenced by economic policy, and is itself really complicated.

        Even if we assume a world with zero prejudice, wage negotiation is at its core a conflict of incentives. A company wants to do as much as it can with the limited resources it has available. If the company pays more for something than it must, that represents an opportunity cost. As a representative of the company, a hiring manager is responsible for setting a wage that makes the company more money than it costs. A new hire, of course, wants to be paid as much as possible for the work they do. Typically they meet somewhere in the middle, and the Grey Tribe declares this means we’ve found the Market Equilibrium and the system is working as intended.

        Of course, in any negotiation, the outcome is skewed pretty heavily by the power balance. Power in a negotiation often comes from the ability to “walk away from the table”. An employee with savings and/or another job to fall back on has a better bargaining position than an employee with neither of those things. So, rich, privileged employees will often end up getting paid more than poor, desperate employees, regardless of either’s actual level of productivity. This is true even if The Man isn’t prejudiced or deliberately setting things up to make whites and cis-men and straights get paid more.

        The room for nuance and difference of opinion here is that one may believe this is simply the best we can do; that a white person getting paid Market Equilibrium plus 15% and a black person getting paid Market Equilibrium minus 15% is still preferable to bosses being unable to set wages, companies being unable to hire without loss, lazy people and hard-working people both getting paid exactly the same, etc. and so the current system is worth defending. Or one may believe that the current system can be incrementally improved. Or one may believe that the current system is fundamentally flawed. I think these are disagreements of a different philosophical nature than what Scott’s description of a Conflict-Mistake axis would measure, but like maybe that’s just my opinion, man.

        Continue to zoom in until we have a Mortal’s-Eye View. Alice notices that she’s getting paid more than Bob but less than Charlie, even though they all have the exact same job title, number of years of experience in the field, and they even all started working at their company in the same quarter. At first, Alice might feel sorry for Bob or jealous of Charlie. But if they take a slightly higher-level perspective, they may notice that their hiring manager Debbie was the one who established all their wages in the first place. Alice can’t renegotiate with Debbie on her own; they’re in an At-Will Employment state, and Debbie might decide employees who ask about wage decisions aren’t needed by the company. The best way to make sure Debbie has to listen to Alice is if she, and Bob, and Charlie, all get together and make their case at the same time. The company can’t afford to fire everybody at once, so short-term demonstrations where everybody decides to stop working for one day on the same day, or nobody makes any sales for a while, are strategies that can help persuade the company that it’s making a mistake.

        But the thing is, companies just keep making these mistakes. And even after they’re called on it, they still try to make as much of this kind of mistake as they can get away with. What if it’s not a mistake? What if it’s a pattern of social behavior, influenced by a macro force? And what if that force is Capitalism, a set of ideals that sound nice in the abstract and offer lots of easy solutions to natural problems, but in practice capital = money = power means the rich get richer while the laborers who spend all their time and energy providing goods and services that are actually useful to the society around them can never quite save up enough money = capital = power to influence anything to their own benefit?

        It generally isn’t a zero-sum game, sure. But it generally is a bounded-sum game. We have finite resources, including labor as a resource. Some individuals have a lot of power/capital/money that they came by unfairly (i.e. they didn’t labor to get it, and in some cases their grandparents basically stole/pillaged it in the first place). Some individuals can’t hold on to any money no matter how hard they work or how wisely they invest. The pursuit of a fairer system is likely to result in the loss of power from those who currently have it, even if they deserve it, and the gain of power by those who are without, even if they don’t. Among those who agree the conflict is inevitable, there is debate over whether this outcome represents acceptable losses.

        tl;dr: when there’s a specific topic of discussion, it makes sense to talk about group goals and groups winning/losing.

  54. Jack Lecter says:

    Re: conflict vs. mistake- I really don’t want to criticize it, because it clarified a lot of things for me. I think it’s almost almost right, and a lot closer than I’d have gotten on my own- it’s just different enough from my own experience to throw the discrepancies into relief.

    So it seems churlish to nitpick it, but here goes:

    I think you’ve hit on a bunch of dichotomies that are heavily, heavily correlated, giving us two rough clusters of people defined by a set of connecting, mutually reinforcing (behavior patterns? narrative structures? mechanisms for filtering and interpreting reality?) I immediately recognize the attitudes of mind you’re getting at. And I agree that this isn’t completely decentralized- that there’s a sort of underlying ur-difference in perspective between these two groups. But when I meet conflict theorists, I don’t feel like the gap between us is that they believe in conflict and I don’t, or, more reasonably, that they think politics is mostly about conflict and I don’t.

    (I do believe in conflict, and I think it plays a pretty darn important part in politics, actually.)

    A few months ago, I was talking to my mom about… some specific critic of the Trump administration, I can’t remember who. [Obligatory but minimal tribal signaling: I am not personally a fan of the Trump administration.] We were talking about this… guy, I think? And I was trying to explain why I disagreed with him even though from a coalition politics pov we had a lot in common. And I said, it just kind of came out, “It’s like, I think he thinks Trump’s the bad guy.”

    Not a bad guy. The bad guy. My mom’s a lawyer, smart, good with words, and I’m on the autism spectrum and I’ve been doing this kind of playing with words for literally decades now, so she’s used to it. She expects it. So I consider it (weak, but existent) evidence in favor of the hypothesis that she didn’t get what I meant and I had to explain it. Most people might tune out the different article, the way most people can tune out duplicate ‘the’s (including me!), but I’ve subjected her to a lot of this sort of thing over the years, and she has a natural talent for it. It’s notable that she missed this one.

    Again, I get that this sounds uncharitable, but… I think some people have the alief that, if it weren’t for the Other Tribe, everything would be just kind of basically okay. So if they’re, eg, in favor of the minimum wage, and you try to argue that there are disemployment effects, it isn’t just that they distrust your motives for making the argument- it’s that their prior for things like that happening is incredibly low to begin with; on an emotional
    level, they live in a world where bad things are the result of hostile agentic forces, where if your intentions are good things aren’t allowed to backfire.

    (If I wanted to go out on a limb, I’d try to link this to Dennett’s stuff about agency detection, or Yudkowsky’s stuff about feeling like the world is, in some essential sense, a safe place if you follow the right rules.

    And I know this sounds like Bulverism, but I’ve had conversations with people- people I’ve known a long time, people I respect- that don’t seem to make sense under any other paradigm I’ve heard of.

    • Viliam says:

      I think some people have the alief that, if it weren’t for the Other Tribe, everything would be just kind of basically okay.

      This is the dark side of optimism. An optimist believes that the natural state of things is to be good. Therefore, if something turns out to be bad… the obvious conclusion is that someone did that on purpose. (And we need to find and punish that person, or group of people.)

      For a pessimist, things going wrong do not require any special explanation; it’s what happens naturally. (Food rots, iron rusts, tools break, people die, ideas get misunderstood.) Things working well is what requires explanation, and suggests intelligent design and a lot of work.

      Beware of a disillusioned optimist!

    • MartMart says:

      The biggest problem I saw with the conflict vs mistake idea, is that there is a certain duality, where each can be the other on a different meta level.
      Most conflicts can be thought of as a mistake, in that its a failure of leadership to allow conflicts to become so encompassing that the limit possible action.
      Most mistakes can be thought of as conflicts “here we have a bunch of smart people trying to solve a difficult problem, and these conflictists are making it about tribal warfare. We need to purge out the conflictists so that the experts can work.

    • pontifex says:

      I think the original Conflict vs. Mistake post was thought provoking, and does seem to describe a real difference in how different groups of people think.

      However, I feel that that post tried way, way too hard to be kind to Conflict theorists. I feel like “conspiracy theorists” would be a better name for what Scott called Conflict theorists. If you consider the classic 20th century “conflict theorist” ideas like Marxism or Nazism, they’re essentially conspiracy theories. Jews are the bad guys in the Nazi conspiracy theory. Kulaks are the bad guys in the Communist conspiracy theory.

      Once you get this idee fixe that there’s a conspiracy out to get you, you can hang everything else off of that. Standard of living dropping after your favorite policies were enacted? Well, it’s obviously the Bad Guys, out to get you. Someone says that the Bad Guys aren’t real, or that they don’t work together like you claim they do? He’s obviously one of Them. The conspiracies are almost always unfalsifiable.

      The conspiracies have changed over time, but the mode of thinking hasn’t. Everyone agrees that there have been conflicts — WWII really happened. But some people have a paranoid and distorted view of events.

      I think a lot of the problems come because the ancestral environment of humans was an environment of small groups of tens or hundreds of people, who really did have common goals and agency. But people want to apply the same mode of thinking to groups of millions of people, who often have little in common. So people make absurd claims about what a particular social group or race “wants” (as if it were a person with goals and desires).

      • zzzzort says:

        I disagree, both with your characterization of mistake theorists, and with your characterization of Scott’s post. Scott used the word ‘elites’ to describe the conflict, and you use ‘Bad Guys’, I would have gone with the more modern ‘interest groups’ (or if I wanted to signal they were bad, ‘special interests’).

        So, here’s one example where conflict theory might have some explanatory power. I’ve chosen this deliberately to be outside the culture war, and supported by right leaning groups to counteract any impression that conflict theory == marxism. A majority of people (if they knew enough to have an opinion) would think the subsidies to the sugar industry are too high. Experts believe that sugar subsidies are too high. Various political groups believe that the subsidies are too high. The only people that are supporting these subsidies are the sugar industry. Seriously, a google search shows calls to end sugar subsidies from National Review, Cato Institute, OxFam America, and the Sierra Club, with a lonely article in support from the Sugar Beet Growers Association. There is no real mystery as to why the split exists. The group of sugar producers doesn’t map neatly onto any preexisting outgroup/ingroup, and the members probably don’t have much of a tribal identity (and certainly the masses don’t think of themselves as sugar consumers). There is no additional information needed on the effects of sugar subsidies; the studies have all been done, and they all agree that they’re a bad idea. You can say that this is a conspiracy theory, but the conspiracy is pretty much in the open. This situation persists because the benefits are concentrated while the harms are dilute, because there is a bias towards the status quo, and because people have a finite amount of attention/outrage. The solution is to educate and organize people more effectively so that the special interests/sugar elites/Bad Guys are defeated.

        • cuke says:

          Can you clarify how you see the conflict vs mistake theory frame illuminating this situation? Your point that this is a failure mode where the benefits are concentrated and the costs are diffuse seems to be a more useful frame.

          I don’t see arguing that beet growers are particularly “conflict theorists” or working from a conflict theory stance. They are just working from a narrowly self-interested stance, which is what industry associations do.

          Are we saying conflict theorists are any group of people who defy overwhelming evidence when it’s presented to them? I’m still having trouble finding the usefulness (or coherence) of this dichotomy.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            No, he is saying that sugar producers are in conflict with everyone else, that their interests are inemical to the rest of us. Thus no amount of “facts” are going to correct the “mistake” that the sugar producers are making. Treating sugar producers as people who can be convinced that encouraging sugar production is bad is to misunderstand their fundamental nature, as, by definition, sugar producers want money for producing sugar.

          • pontifex says:

            I still don’t understand what the point of this example is. I think most, if not all, mistake theorists would agree that special interest groups exist and can lead to bad outcomes in a democratic system.

            The conflict theorist way of looking at this (they’re pure evil! Mustache-twirling Disney villains who want what’s worst for all of us!) is again much less useful than the mistake theorist way (there is an information asymmetry between voters and special interest groups that should be corrected).

          • zzzzort says:

            The mistake theory way of dealing with this (or at least the caricature of the mistake theory way) is to publish a study showing that sugar subsidies raise costs for consumers by x amount, then write a white paper proposing a different industrial policy, and then rationally trying to explain this position to the decision makers. Meanwhile, the sugar industry is publishing their own white papers. There is a lot of work put into finding what the optimal policy is is (but the optimal policy is really pretty obvious from the begining).

            The conflict theorist says that the persistence of these subsidies isn’t due to some error or lack of understanding, it’s due to the influence of a group in conflict (in this case, sugar producers). The white papers from the non-sugar economists may be more convincing, but the sugar white papers are enough to give political cover to politicians acting to please their patrons. Trying to understand the reason these subsidies are bad isn’t going to help, the hard work is in actually implementing the correct policy over the political objections of the special interests. Assuming politicians are actually convinced by the sugar white papers (as a mistake theorist would) will lead to worse outcomes than acknowledging that the politicians are responding to political pressure, and organizing an opposing political movement.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Not just the politicians.

            Mistake theory frequently assumes that everyone is operating in good faith. It assume that you can convince the sugar producers to agree, and that if they fight tooth and nail to keep the subsidies, it’s because they are not yet convinced.

            Conflict theory assumes that the sugar producers will oppose the loss subsidies, and they must be defeated, and that logic won’t be particularly useful in that battle.

            It’s slightly odd to me that the libertarian contingent generally opposes the idea of conflict theory, but at the same time abhors regulatory capture and thinks it is inevitable. They seem to be similar to two sides of a coin, in my mind.

            As to whether I am a conflict or mistake theorist, por que no los dos?

          • zzzzort says:

            there is an information asymmetry between voters and special interest groups that should be corrected

            If the caricature of conflict theorists is people who believe in mustachioed Disney villains, then the caricature of mistake theorists is the mathematician who wakes to see his room is on fire, does a series of calculations, says ‘a solution exists!’ and goes back to sleep. Saying that an information asymmetry ‘should’ be corrected elides who will do the correcting and how. If a conflict theorist is always primed for a fight, they are also more prepared to do the work of organizing, or at least give actionable prescriptions (i.e. you should call your senator, you should boycott these companies, me and my friends will change our profile pictures in sugar solidarity, I promise that if you promote the sugar industry line I will sic a twitter mob on you, etc.). And conflict theorists are certainly more aware that the system is not passive, and that actions to address the information asymmetry will evoke a reaction from other actors. Anyone can see that the concentration of information is bad, the hard question is how to correct it.

          • pontifex says:

            I’m not trying to argue that nothing is ever really worth doing or that all problems will work themselves out in the end without our efforts. However, I do think that people should dial down the outrage and learn to understand more about the world and each other before making accusations.

            For example, do you even know how much federal money the sugar producers use each year? Do you understand their arguments for continuing the subsidies? (One argument is that the US should be self-sufficient in food production, for example.) How much money do they get in comparison to other big federal expenditures like the wars in the middle east or the entitlement programs?

            The bottom line for me is that if people had to understand what the hell they were talking about before opening their mouths, Twitter would be a ghost town, and the world would be much better off.

      • Kulaks are not The Enemy. Kulaks are merely small capitalists. Capitalists are not The Enemy. They are representatives of The Enemy. Their wills represent The Enemy because that’s what The Enemy forces them to do. Capitalists are held hostage by Capital just as workers are.

        The Enemy is Capital, which is an objective force ( sort of like gravity, except imagine a historically-contingent form of gravity that once did not exist and someday will no longer exist) that is outside of anyone’s intention. No conspiracy theory involved.

      • tayfie says:

        I think your post is characteristic of how mistake theorists often strawman conflict theorists.

        Many people with similar interests moving towards similar goals is not necessarily a conspiracy, because they do not have to get together and coordinate. Incentives are sufficient to ensure working together because of a common group interest. The actions that look like “conspiracy” are an emergent, rather than planned, outcome.

        Pointing out that different groups have different interests that are often mutually exclusive does not imply that any of these groups are morally bad, though it can and has been used this way. It tries to bring to light the motives of everyone involved and hopefully look for the proper balance between exclusive interests.

        • pontifex says:

          Groups don’t have motives. People have motives.

          The people in the groups may be persuaded, by means of propaganda, but that requires a conscious effort and action to happen. There’s no such thing as the will of the people, no World Spirit or cosmic ghost.

          Propaganda very often convinces people to do things that are against their own individual interests, like serve in a war. And very often against their collective interests as well.

          The groups themselves don’t want anything. You’re treating them like small groups of people from our ancestral environment. They’re not. They’re just collections of people, mathematical abstractions.

          • I agree with this. Marx’s definition of “capitalist” is so abstract that no individual person is ever going to fit into it 100%. Any time that someone attempts to boil you down to an abstraction, or pick out a particular aspect of your many-faceted life as an abstraction, it feels uncharitable. I certainly would not enjoy being profiled by law enforcement as a “leftist” and being lumped together with all other leftists, with my particular idiosyncrasies being ignored.

            But at least for the historical moment, some level of abstraction is a necessary corollary of attempting to make sense of a vast and complicated social reality.

            To the extent that I object to racial profiling, it is not because it discards the particular humanity of each individual victim, but rather because it is an abstraction that places inaccurate attention on a factor that is, as far as I can tell, inessential and non-causal (race).

            I would feel more comfortable with a sort of class profiling that subjected lumpenproletarian types (which would most definitely include “black thug” types who look self-evidently like they are up to no good, along with “white thug” types, etc.) with a slightly higher level of initial scrutiny (we are not talking about extra-judicial shootings here, just a slightly higher than average frequency of stops, etc.)

            The problem is, society and its institutions do not have the material time or resources to take into account every particular circumstance, at least at the level of investigating leads. When it comes to prosecuting leads after those initial leads have been narrowed down, I think we do have the time to take all particular circumstances and qualities of the individual into account, and I am glad that our justice system does so. And at a higher material stage of development, it is likely that we shall be able to apply the same thoroughness to even the most preliminary stages of criminal justice.

            Stalin and co. used class profiling in the investigatory phase of prosecutions of Kulaks, and in some cases it also colored the prosecutory phase (although they attempted to compensate for this by reviewing cases and rehabilitating a large fraction of Kulaks who had been incorrectly sentenced for treason or sabotage). Ideally, no profiling at all would have been needed, but I cannot fault them as harshly as others do because at least they were using an abstraction with some casual, predictive power.

            (And yes, I know that black men have higher crime rates. But I think you’ll find that, if we rigorously define “the lumpenproletariat,” you’ll find that that category has even better predictive power of criminality, so I would argue that, if we are going to profile, that is the abstraction that we should be using).

          • pontifex says:

            Well, categories of objects exist and can have different properties. I can say that the widgets that came off the factory line on Thursday had a higher defect rate than the ones that came off the line on Friday. I can say that men are more likely to commit violent crimes than women. And so on. Whether or not this information should be used in a particular context is a legal and moral question, but surely the information exists and has predictive power.

            Where things go wrong is if I start to believe that the Thursday widgets are all in a secret conspiracy to do X, Y, and Z, or if “all men” want X.

          • Viliam says:

            Stalin and co. used class profiling in the investigatory phase of prosecutions of Kulaks, and in some cases it also colored the prosecutory phase (although they attempted to compensate for this by reviewing cases and rehabilitating a large fraction of Kulaks who had been incorrectly sentenced for treason or sabotage).

            How specifically were the kulaks compensated? Were their bodies unhanged and resuscitated?

            The theoretical view of the suspect’s guilt was, incidentally, quite elastic from the very beginning. In his instructions on the use of Red Terror, the Chekist M. I. Latsis wrote: “In the
            interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused.”

            — Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

            Prosecution, defined as “trying to find out the objective truth about a possible crime” did not exist. The goal of Red Terror was to scare the population into submission. (Hint: it’s in the name; they didn’t even bother to call it “Red Justice” or something like that.)

            The secret police had quotas on how many people need to be killed monthly, so in the typically Soviet way they often grabbed random people just to meet the plan. They went to take a person for some completely benign “crime” such as having traveled abroad, having a foreign former classmate, speaking Esperanto, or failing to produce the magical harvest promised by comrade Lysenko… but when the person wasn’t at home, they took the wife… and when no one was at home, they simply took a neighbor.

            “You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday’s telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so … Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people.”

            At these times, there were numerous reports that Cheka interrogators used torture methods which were “matched only by the Spanish Inquisition.” At Odessa the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims’ hands to produce “gloves”; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Dnipropetrovsk; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Orel, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim’s body in an effort to escape.

            Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on the outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian Civil War. After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver. Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside the town were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves.

            Wikipedia

            Don’t you fucking dare to whitewash the utter inhumanity of Soviet Communism! Your comment is a left-wing equivalent of “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

          • tayfie says:

            @pontifex

            You are arguing semantics. What defines a group if not some commonality possessed by most or all of the members?

            Propaganda can create artificial groups, but plenty of groups arise organically. No possession required. It just takes multiple people with similar interests undertaking similar actions.

            Sometimes these actions conflict with a different set of multiple people with similar interests undertaking similar actions.

          • Aapje says:

            @Viliam

            The secret police had quotas on how many people need to be killed monthly, so in the typically Soviet way they often grabbed random people just to meet the plan.

            The US did the same in Vietnam, so I’m not sure it makes sense to call it ‘the typically Soviet way.’

          • albatross11 says:

            Yeah, there’s a line in a book by Bueno de Mesquita that keeps coming back to me–he points out that the king of Belgium ruled over a very pleasant and advanced liberal democracy in Belgium, and a fair attempt at creating hell on Earth in the Congo, at the same time. Same guy, same government, different incentives.

            Culture and values are important, but I think it’s easy to overstate their impact, relative to that of incentives. The wrong incentives can make decent people and societies do really awful things.

          • Viliam says:

            @Aapje

            The US did the same in Vietnam, so I’m not sure it makes sense to call it ‘the typically Soviet way.’

            You are right; I guess to make this “typically Soviet”, we must also add that you are doing it to your own population, and then you keep doing this for decades after any significant resistance was gone and the population was completely brainwashed (so the ones you randomly choose for destruction keep believing it was a honest misunderstanding, and keep making excuses for you while you torture them to death), and a few more details.

            Or more importantly, that it’s not a relatively unique situation that creates big protests at home, but a crucial component of your regime.

  55. bean says:

    Naval Gazing: A discussion of the Quick-Firing (QF) gun.

    Also, a reminder that I’m having a Naval Gazing meetup at the USS Salem in Boston next Sunday.

  56. ing says:

    I recently encountered a Wired article from 2017 about “metformin“, claiming that it reduces cancer and extends healthy lifespan.

    I checked Gwern’s page; he doesn’t say anything that sounds like “this really works” or “this really doesn’t work” but he does note that 51% of users get diarrhea.

    Has anyone tried this?

    • Deiseach says:

      On it for Type II diabetes. If I live to be 120, I’ll let you know the “extended lifespan” bit is true, ditto any cancer I don’t get (but how will I tell the cancer I don’t get is because of the metformin rather than being the cancer I don’t get because of other reasons?)

      The diarrhoea/flatulence/gastrointestinal distress part is correct, but that’s only at the start. Once you get used to it, it stops (generally; some unfortunates never do get used to it and have to go off it).

      The question here is: is metformin any good for healthy people without diabetes (as distinct from “type II diabetics on metformin do better and live longer than type II diabetics on other treatment”) and that, I submit, nobody really knows.

    • James Miller says:

      I take 2 grams a day for life-extension reasons. I slowly worked up from this dosage from .5 grams a day. I’ve been taking Metformin for around a year and I’ve had no side effects. Indeed, I can’t feel any difference but since my goal is to slow down aging related decay and to reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease, I didn’t expect to. I’m also part of the “Metformin Self-experiment Group” Facebook group. If you live in the US you will need a prescription. To get one: (A) tell your doctor you don’t need insurance to pay for it, (B) tell him the exact dosage you want, (C) research the side-effects and tell him you will look out for them and stop taking the drug if they become too bad, (D) look for a legitimate diabetes related reason such as your having the possibility of developing diabetes because a relative of yours has it or you have signs of developing it, (E) explain that you want to reduce the risk of getting cancer and heart disease and you have done research. Try to convince the doctor that you have the background to have done this research in an intelligent way. Don’t mention anti-aging as this will make you sound like a quack to most doctors. (F) Expect your doctor to “think about it” and get back to you after he has looked into it.

      I’ve considered trying to set up some kind of GoFundME for the rationalist community to better look into this. I think Metformin could be a big win for us, or at least those of us older than, say, 40.

      • maintain says:

        A while ago Scott was talking about how Sarah Constantin just founded an org called the Longevity Research Institute. Their goal is to look into things like that, although their web site doesn’t mention metformin specifically.

    • toastengineer says:

      So the real question is, how much of the lifespan gains are wasted sitting on the can?

    • David Speyer says:

      I have Diabetes Type I. In 2008 my doctor suggested that, although normally used in Type II cases, metformin might make my response to insulin more predictable. It did, and also made my response to a given dose much stronger. I was on it for about 4 years without noticeable side effects besides a small increase in flatulence. When I went on an insulin pump, I went off metformin again to reduce the number of variables, and that seems to be working well enough to not need to go back.

      I can back up the other people saying side effects are mild; no idea about the life extension stuff.

  57. Andrew Hunter says:

    Okay, screwed up threading, trying this again:

    Hey there, New York commenters. I live here now [1]. Despite the warnings some of you (counting the NJ set…) offered, it seemed my best choice.

    Would love to drink or eat with anyone here. Reply here or email me.

    [1] …Okay, I’m in Cape Cod with my family literally right now, but I’ll be in my Brooklyn apartment in less than 48 hours.

  58. theredsheep says:

    Since Scott brings it up, sort of, does anybody know of a good, in-depth, accessible book on Byzantium? I’m good on general history, but you just can’t find a book that details the patterns of everyday life across centuries the way you can for Western Europe. Tamara Talbot Rice wrote a daily life in Byzantium book, but it was full of egregious errors and it’s now something like sixty years old.

    • JohnBuridan says:

      I assume you’ve read Norwich’s Byzantium: Apogee? I’m very interested in Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood and the Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities. However, I have read neither.

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      John Julius Norwich is the expert, of course. His trilogy gets really in depth.

      I’m not sure if it’s precisely what you’re looking for, but the other good Byzantium book I’ve read is Sailing From Byzantium, which explores ways the Byzantine Empire influenced the modern world. There’s a little bit of discussion of daily life, I think.

      • Nicholas Weininger says:

        Norwich also has a one-volume Short History which is basically the Reader’s Digest version of the trilogy and which still went plenty in depth for me.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      What, the half of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about the Eastern Empire after 476 isn’t good enough for you?

      • theredsheep says:

        Gibbon, from what I understand, is the originator of our now thankfully-dead belief that the Byzantine Empire wasn’t worth studying because Christianity poisoned the Empire and made it stupid, effeminate and worthless. Also, he’s centuries old by now; not exactly cutting-edge research.

    • Schmendrick says:

      This is more focused on foreign relations, governmental structure, and the military, but I highly enjoyed “The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire” by Edward Luttwak.

    • theredsheep says:

      Just FYI, I’ve read Norwich’s trilogy and the short version, plus Cyril Mango’s history, Lovelace’s, Justinian’s Flea, and a Time-Life history book from the sixties which sadly turned out to be the best source I’ve found yet for nitty-gritty details. I’m good on general history, I’m more interested in what life was like for the average person in Amorium or Callipolis in 900 AD vs 1300 or 550. You can get books like that for, say, Norman England.

    • eightieshair says:

      Warren Treadgold’s A History of the Byzantine State and Society is a good fairly comprehensive one volume history. Not as colorful as Norwich’s books, but also takes more of a big picture approach.

    • cassander says:

      I’m not a big fan of John Julius Norwich, but his book is probably the best single account. There are a couple books here that I might not read first, but I would definitely suggest reading. Byzantium and Venice is an interesting history of their relationship, both cultural and political:

      https://www.amazon.co.uk/Byzantium-Venice-Diplomatic-Cultural-Relations/dp/0521428947

      Last centuries of byzantium is an in depth look at everything that happens after 1204, which is a period often overlooked in other accounts:

      https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Centuries-Byzantium-Donald-Nicol/dp/0521439914

  59. johan_larson says:

    Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to settle Antarctica. The UN invites proposals to form a new nation spanning the entire continent and to incorporate this state into the regular community of nations. Your proposal should address what people will move to the continent; what combination of resource extraction, industry, agriculture, and service work will support them; how they will be governed; how the security of the state will be provided for; and how the entire enterprise will be financed.

    • beleester says:

      Yikes. The coldest place on Earth, no rainfall, no arable land, and you want to talk about agriculture? Call Mark Watney, because this is only marginally better than trying to grow crops on Mars.

      As for other natural resources, Antarctica apparently has some rare metals and hydrocarbons, but not in economic quantities. Still, if the UN wants us to be there, we may as well grab what we can get. Other industries are going to be limited – anything you can build there would probably be more affordably built somewhere else. Wikipedia also says that there are some offshore fisheries which we could put to use feeding our colonists.

      The last resource we might find useful is wind power – Antarctica has strong katabatic winds and apparently a number of research stations have wind farms to reduce their fuel needs. Getting some renewable power plants up and running will be very important – it’s hard to call yourself an independent colony when you need shipments of diesel from the mainland to survive. (We could also go nuclear – McMurdo used to have a nuclear reactor – but I think that might be a bit much for the UN to accept).

      Probably your first step is to take McMurdo Station and expand it a bunch, because that’s the biggest permanent settlement we have right now.

      EDIT: Apparently my quip about growing crops on Mars was closer to the truth than I thought – there’s a research project to grow vegetables in Antarctica as practice for growing crops in outer space!

      • Nornagest says:

        Does anyone know if penguins are delicious?

      • johan_larson says:

        It might be useful to crib some notes from Iceland. Cheap energy — wind in this case — means aluminum smelting is a viable industry. Also, given the sheer size of Antarctica, I expect some mineable minerals would turn up. And of course if Antarctica is a sovereign nation, it gets control of its 200 nm Exclusive Economic Zone, which will matter for fishing.

        • spork says:

          Sorry, this is a terrible idea. Antarctica may have lots of steady wind, but the turbines would have to be anchored in the bedrock beneath the ice. Oh, and that ice flows, so good luck getting those pylons to withstand the pressure. And good luck finding cheap labor for the installation and the necessary maintenance. But that complete unworkability isn’t even the worst part of your idea. That would go to the suggestion that dirty humans should make a city on this very ecologically sensitive continent. That makes sense neither for the people nor the continent.

        • beleester says:

          Yeah, wind energy won’t be cheap, it’s just more practical than other renewables and I think not being completely dependent on foreign oil is a good start to independence. Antarctica is still a very hostile environment.

        • Aftagley says:

          Sorry, this is a terrible idea. Antarctica may have lots of steady wind, but the turbines would have to be anchored in the bedrock beneath the ice. Oh, and that ice flows, so good luck getting those pylons to withstand the pressure.

          Contrary to what you always see on nature shows, there not all of Antarctica is covered in massive ice flows. in some areas you can build right on the ground. Here is a good webpage about the McMurdo wind farm where you can see they’re not having to deal with building on ice.

          That’s not to say that wind is the perfect solution, however. Like that page points out, getting materials to Antarctica is difficult. Scott base is relatively accessible, considering for Antarctica, and you’ve still got roughly 3 weeks a year where you can ship in bulk parts, like those needed for wind farms.

          Another concern is that these kinds of katabatic winds can be, well, dramatic. I’ve seen 8 hour stretches where the winds jumped from 15 knots (good for power generation) to over 170 (not even slightly). The weather changes so often and so dramatically that I wouldn’t try to rely on it for economic viability.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Another concern is that these kinds of katabatic winds can be, well, dramatic. I’ve seen 8 hour stretches where the winds jumped from 15 knots (good for power generation) to over 170 (not even slightly).

            For reference: a cat-5 hurricane is 120+ knots. So, like, whoa.

            Now I’m wondering how one might efficiently harness swiftly changing winds like that. I keep imagining some sort of variable transmission system, like in the drive train of a car.

          • engleberg says:

            @Now I’m wondering how one might efficiently harness swiftly changing winds like that. I keep imagining some sort of variable transmission system, like in the drive train of a car-

            Yes, but in the blades. Have to feather the blades or they tear off anyway, so let high winds spin the hubs and stems of blades at high speeds, then extend for slow winds.

      • Deiseach says:

        I don’t know if you could make an industry out of it, but scientific research seems to be doing quite well in Antarctica (and with what seems a lot of infrastructure, so they seem to be improving on that front).

    • Tenacious D says:

      Instead of resource extraction, how about an industrial focus on waste management? China is scaling back the amount of waste it is prepared to accept, so this is an area where a new nation could find a niche. The cold temperatures and geological stability (or am I mistaken on that count?) mean that landfills and even nuclear waste repositories could be built with low risk of spreading contamination. Maybe carbon sequestration as well.
      If the technical challenges can be solved, you could also tow icebergs to Cape Town or Jeddah for a tidy profit.

    • John Schilling says:

      What purpose is to be served by this?

      If the idea is to e.g. have a remnant human population left over to repopulate the Earth after the AI Fooms and Transcends and leaves a barren wasteland, that’s going to argue for digging through a couple kilometers of ice, depositing colonists with lots of gear and a closed-ecology life support system and nuclear reactors and lots and lots of uranium, then filling up the hole and destroying all record that you ever thought of this. Which is an interesting idea, and possibly doable, and I kind of want Neal Stephenson to write that missing section of Seveneves. But the bottom line is, you can’t define the architecture until you know the mission.

      If it’s just to have a human population for the sake of having a human population, then we already know what McMurdo station looks like. If it needs more people, make duplicates and start looking for economies of scale. If it needs families, send married couples and add day care and schools, and maybe talk to Argentina and Chile who have already done that (albeit on a token scale). If it needs to be politically independent, tell the station commander he doesn’t have to take orders from Washington any more, and maybe tell him you’ll run guns to the rebels if he doesn’t stand for election every four years. Or heck, make it a constitutional monarchy if you like.

      If it needs to be any sort of self-sufficient, now you’ve got a tricky problem. Most of the continent has naught for resources but ice, air, and wind. And I’m guessing the people saying that wind will make for cheap energy have neither been responsible for maintaining wind turbines nor lived through an arctic winter. The combination of those two is going to add up to the opposite of cheap power. But it’s that or nuclear, or maybe solar power satellites in orbits that are inconvenient for everyone else’s requirements.

      If you stick to the coasts, you’ve got some assorted mineral deposits and fisheries. I think some of the mineral deposits would be economically viable at current prices if it were legal to exploit them, but a strictly mercenary exploitation would involve all-adult, mostly-male mining camps whose crews rotate from Argentina or New Zealand or whatnot every two months. It’s not clear that market revenues would be sufficient to support everyone’s families in that environment. Still, it’s probably going to be the basis of your economy at the start, so get on with serious prospecting and talk to the Canadians and Norwegians about mining in arctic environments. This also gets you some of the materials you’ll need for local construction and industry.

      Also, tourism. A bit of science for hire, maybe. There’s a need for a satellite communications station in the extreme Antarctic; you can take over for McMurdo and TrollSat. Invent new extreme sports, film spectacular movies on location, make reality TV shows about people cooped up in small camps over six-month winters. All of these are little niches, but they’re what you’ve got. On the purely economic side, you’re making Mars look attractive.

      Hmm, if it’s the UN doing this, ask whether whatever imperative makes this so important to them, is important enough that they’ll run cover as you set Antarctica up as an offshore banking haven a la Switzerland of old, because that might be enough to make ends meet.

      Barring that near-miracle, you’re almost certainly going to need lots of subsidies to make this work. And unless your mission requires an unnatural level of autarky, you’re probably going to wind up using those subsidies (and your mining etc revenues) to import almost everything you consume. Think Singapore or Hong Kong or Dubai, because notwithstanding the geographic expanses of useless wasteland this is basically going to be a city-state plus mining outposts.

      But if it matters, you can make greenhouses plus hydroponics plus aquaculture, and the offshore fisheries, give you nominal self-sufficiency in food. Pay no attention to the imports of fertilizers and spare parts, and lots and lots of kerosene or uranium for the grow lights. And you can look into what level of local manufacturing is possible at any level of population and investment, but waving your magic 3-D printing wand probably isn’t going to give you material self-sufficiency.

      As the scale grows, you’re really going to want to think about arcologies, to minimize the relative exposure of the population to the environment. Please to be taking inspiration from e.g. Paolo Soleri, rather than William Hope Hodgson.

      Hmm. If Niven and Pournelle are to be believed, the natural form of government of an arcology will be feudalism. But I think that was at least three parts let’s tell a neat story to one part serious futurism. All real power will flow through whoever controls the distribution of the economic subsidies (or profits of the mining or banking industry, if those are enough for self-sufficiency). You can probably make anything work with enough good planning and effort. If you leave it to fate and efficiency, the Spanish and Portugese colonization of South America will probably be your historic model; they also faced the problem of a very harsh environment that could only be made survivable and productive by the application of concentrated wealth and power. New England this isn’t.

      You did mention defense, but that’s a solved problem: we just appoint Bean Minister of the Navy, or at least the Coast Guard.

      • johan_larson says:

        What purpose is to be served by this?

        I’m thinking the current Antarctic Treaty System starts breaking down. The system bars commercial exploitation, but permits scientific work, though some of the science looks more like claim-staking. But that starts breaking down, presumably because of commercial pressures; there is something there, and people want it. The something is probably ore, though I suppose it could be oil.

        Because of these pressures, some countries start cheating. They start setting up “geological research stations” that sure look like mines. The UN, being no fools, sees that this is going on and recognizes that the Treaty System isn’t working. Something else needs to be put in place. Failure could mean a competitive rush to claim the continent before others do. And that could very easily get violent.

        A number of options are put forward.
        1. Split up the continent among existing nations. Sure, but no one can agree on who gets how much.
        2. Have the continent taken over by one existing nation. Great, but which one. Again, no agreement.
        3. Have the UN run the continent directly. No, the UN bureaucracy is at best slow, and sometimes corrupt. No one is keen on that solution.

        Finally they hit on the possibility of creating a new nation in Antarctica. With few other sources of funding, the government would presumably sell or lease mineral rights promptly, and would have plenty of reason to administer the rights soundly.

        That’s the least implausible reason I can come up with. The challenge is well toward absurdity, of course.

      • Deiseach says:

        Please to be taking inspiration from e.g. Paolo Soleri, rather than William Hope Hodgson.

        Well damn it, John Schilling, now you’ve got a Lovecraft/Hodgson Mountains of Madness/Night Land fusion-vision rattling around in the back of my head, and it could be glorious. Where better to build the Last Redoubt than in the ruins of the city of the Elder Things, both facing and defying the subterranean evil of the shoggoths and the more dreadful sinister entity lurking in the unknown mountains?

        • John Schilling says:

          Crap. Now I’ve got it too. And it will be glorious, but if I write it the humans are going to win in the end.

        • Nick says:

          I approve of this plan. The writing it bit, not the colonizing-the-cities-of-Elder-Things bit.

          • albatross11 says:

            So, have all the people from the Antarctic colony been driven into shrill, unreasoning madness by the Elder Gods, or is it just the usual effect of social media and political arguments?

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Just the usual.

          • Deiseach says:

            the colonizing-the-cities-of-Elder-Things bit.

            WE DEFY THE GIBBERING DARKNESS BEHIND THE STARS WITH THE THIN BUT ETERNAL RIBBON OF EARTH-CURRENT! LET THE DISKOS SING AND SLAY AS IT RENDS THE SHOGGOTHS!

        • Nornagest says:

          I’d read that.

      • albatross11 says:

        Would you need grow lights to have food self-suficiency? You should be getting a fair bit of sunlight in the *summer* months, after all. Could you just grow all your crops then (in a greenhouse)?

        • John Schilling says:

          You could probably do fresh vegetables in naturally-illuminated greenhouses, but most cereal crops are particularly unsuitable for growing under arctic illumination. Svalbard is probably going to be your model here, and it doesn’t look good for the local farmers.

          Really, Svalbard is probably a pretty good model for an Antarctic coastal settlement in many regards, and worth studying in this context.

    • proyas says:

      First, set up population centers in the ice-free parts of Antarctica and expand from there.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_oasis

      Sticking to the coasts would be critical anyhow since that’s where all the food (penguins, whales) is.

      It’s so cold and dry that it would probably be best if the Antarctic towns were domed, or consisted entirely of linked buildings.

      As far as which people should be admitted as citizens, the inherently harsh and resource-poor lifestyle should dictate that only able-bodied people be allowed.

      If “security of the state” means “national defense,” then I don’t think Antarctica has a prayer, and its smartest move would be to not even try building a military and to instead create a mutual protection pact with a stronger country that can project military power across the seas. However, I could see Antarctica having a small Coast Guard consisting of a few patrol boats and spotter planes, mostly for deterring illegal fishing, doing rescues at sea, and maintaining a basic level of surveillance of the areas around the population centers, so something like a 1,000-man amphibious invasion a few miles out of sight of the nearest Antarctic town wouldn’t go undetected.

      Economically, an Antarctic state might make money by copying the banking laws of the Cayman Islands to become another international money laundering haven. Cold weather and cheap wind power electricity could also make it well-suited for Bitcoin mining or operating Facebook server farms.

      • cryptoshill says:

        As someone who has heated their home in the winter with Bitcoin mining – that sort of thing also has the added advantage of being a revenue-positive way to generate heat. Which if you want to have any sort of settlement in Antarctica, you’re going to need a lot of.

    • johan_larson says:

      Anyone planning to jumpstart an economy on Antarctica needs to study the economy of Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous part of Denmark. They make their money almost exclusively from fishing, but are trying to develop mining, oil, and hydro-power industries. They also get a lot of subsidies from Denmark. Pretty goddamn ballsy demanding home rule when you can’t pay your way, I must say.

    • johan_larson says:

      We need to talk about how to build a citizenry.

      Given how desolate Antarctica is, and how little it would be starting from, I expect no one would be willing to pull up stakes and just move there permanently. The first generation would consist of people from other countries, coming on work assignments, firmly intending to return home. For them, the Republic of Antarctica would be an abstract sort of entity, entirely administrative. And many of them would return home. But as the population grew, there would be some who just never got around to returning. There would also be some who were born on Antarctica. Some of them would leave for their parents’ countries, but some would stay even though their parents arranged for dual citizenship. And the people of the second generation that never left would be the first Antarcticans in spirit.

      • Watchman says:

        I think the UAE is a reference point for importing a citizen body of non-permanent residents. But to ensure the new country is run for the benefit of the country not the immigrant workforce you’d need a core group of Antarctic citizens (the equivalent of the Emirati but with snowsuits rather than robes) to represent Antarctica’s interests. This group would have political power at least to the level of veto. Otherwise the temptation is for the short term residents to act in self-interest and focus on maximising profit through short term actions (resource stripping and the like).

        • johan_larson says:

          Interesting thought. I wonder if some of the scientists who visit Antarctica for research purposes could be enticed into staying permanently and becoming the guardians of the new nation. Bet they’re a clever bunch, and they already like the place enough to visit despite the harsh weather.

    • J says:

      I’m told that waste heat management is actually one of the more annoying bottlenecks for alternative fuels, so nuclear plants might enjoy a simplified design there. My Mars terraforming plan calls for fusion plants that sit at the poles and melt the water ice.

      • Nornagest says:

        “You seem uncomfortable, Mr. Bond. Just to distract you from the advancing groin-laser, shall we watch this PowerPoint presentation about my Antarctic colony and the Nuclear Climate Engines I’ve built in the ice below? You’re a cultured man — what do you think of the millions that’ll drown as their meltwater raises the sea level? Tragic, of course, but we must make sacrifices for the new order…”

  60. akc09 says:

    We’ve got a 5-year-old autistic son who is pretty “high-functioning,” but not very verbal, so I can’t ask him this sort of thing yet, but I’m curious:

    Those of you on the autism spectrum, were there things your parents did during your childhood that you really appreciated and/or really wish they’d done differently?

    (I haven’t heard a lot from the perspective of adults looking back on their own childhoods, aside from the “ABA sometimes used to be terrible a few decades ago” types of accounts.)

    • theredsheep says:

      I was very high-functioning (I can pass for extroverted), but the #1 thing I’d say is to be very, very careful about any kind of teasing. My family goes for banter, and that really messed me up even though I knew they didn’t mean much by it. And be careful about video games, I used them as an escape from a miserable and unfulfilling life for a ridiculously long time. Took me a while to kick that habit. My $0.02.

      • akc09 says:

        Thank you for this!

        I’ve always been kinda stressed-out by teasing too, and although I was lucky to grow up in a family where there wasn’t a lot of it, I had always wondered whether I would have been able to handle it better if I’d been exposed to more of it growing up.

        (The answer is quite possibly “nope,” heh)

      • Placid Platypus says:

        And be careful about video games, I used them as an escape from a miserable and unfulfilling life for a ridiculously long time. Took me a while to kick that habit.

        Do you think the video games were actually making things worse? The way you describe it it sounds like the real problem was the miserable and unfulfilling life part.

        • thevoiceofthevoid says:

          I think the issue is that the short-term enjoyment of video games can reduce one’s time and motivation to work on making one’s life less miserable and more genuinely fulfilling.

          • Robert Jones says:

            As a child there’s not all that much one can do to make life more fulfilling. Provided the games aren’t interfering with school, I don’t they will do much harm, and may even do some good.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I agree with Robert Jones. I know other parents who insist on “educational” toys for their kids, and so they’ve got all these Melissa and Doug wooden toys that look neat and signal they’re the Good Kind of Parent, but the kids play with them for 20 minutes, get bored and lose the pieces. On the other hand, my 5 year old is rotating three dimensional mazes on Captain Toad Treasure Tracker on the Wii U and I think that exercises the old thinkin’ noodle a little more than banging on pieces of wood.

          • akc09 says:

            @Conrad Honcho – Captain Toad Treasure Tracker has been a big hit with us as well!

            For our situation, our little guy loves anything and everything related to the Mario universe, so it’s actually been a decent jump-off point for helping him practice language: describing what’s going on in the game, asking for help, and taking turns.

            Not gonna lie, he’ll also the Nintendo to just straight Chill Out, but it’s been nice to have something that he’s motivated to talk about.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I find it especially helps with numeracy. If you asked my kid to divide 20 by 5 he wouldn’t know what to do. But when he was watching me play Breath of the Wild on the Switch and saw I was going to buy arrows (in bundles of five), he asked how many I wanted, I said “20” and he said “so you’re going to buy four.”

          • theredsheep says:

            My objection is not to the games per se; as a teenager, I tended to not so much enjoy games as use them to consume hours of life I didn’t want for any other purpose. Autistics love systems, and I dove into RPGs, dumping hour after hour into playing the same games over and over again just because my life was crap and I saw no way out. There were better things I could have done with that time.

          • akc09 says:

            @theredsheep – Yeah, sounds like it’ll be important to keep asking “what role is this activity playing in our lives” every so often, especially as he gets older.

            Like you say, there’s a big difference between playing games for leisure and playing because you’re feeling powerless and/or miserable about other parts of your life and don’t know what else to do.

          • Matt M says:

            Eh, I don’t know.

            I’ve reached the point where I feel like the “point” of everything I do in adult life is to free up more time for me to play video games.

            On the one hand, philosophers might call that a miserable sort of existence. On the other hand, I feel like I’m much happier just seeing that as my life and accepting it than I was back when I was a wreck, searching for the ultimate existential meaning of my life and depressing over all the things I wasn’t accomplishing, didn’t have, etc.

            Games are fun. Some people like them. Autistic people are especially prone to liking them. There are worse things to do with your life than maximize your time and ability to do things you like.

      • Baeraad says:

        the #1 thing I’d say is to be very, very careful about any kind of teasing.

        I’ll second this. I was absurdly sensitive as a kid. In particular, I squirmed horribly at sarcasm.

        Another thing is socialising, which is a tricky balancing act. My parents pushed me into some social contact with my peers, and I think that was fortunate, because if I’d been left to my own devices I’d probably stayed alone all the time, never gotten any practice at talking to people, and ended up even more incapable of interacting with the rest of the human race than I did. At the same time, it wasn’t pleasant, and it would have been nice if my parents had shown any sign of understanding how very difficult it was for me to adjust to other people, and that I wasn’t just being difficult or selfish.

        (then again, this was back in the 80s and my parents barely knew that autism was a thing that existed, so it might be a moot point today)

        • Robert Jones says:

          I partly disagree. My parents pushed me to socialise with other children, I hated it and I don’t think it was useful. Socialising with children isn’t good practice for socialising with adults, which is the skill you actually want.

        • ana53294 says:

          As a child, I did want to interact with people – but only with adults. I mostly found other kids boring and uninteresting. I don’t think socializing with peers is that necessary. You also learn by socializing with adults. It is true that most adults are not interested in interacting with kids, but then let them find people that are interesting to them.

          • Viliam says:

            I mostly found other kids boring and uninteresting.

            I wonder how much this is a consequence of autism, and how much of high IQ (I guess we can take that for granted for most SSC readers). Essentially, people of the same mental age are more fun to talk with than people of the same physical age.

        • liskantope says:

          Judging by this and other comments, people here on the spectrum are quite split on whether parents should push their autistic kids to socialize. I suspect this is in accordance with how innately introverted/extroverted each of us is, on a level independent of conditions such as autism which make socialization difficult. Parents should ideally push their kids to reach their full potential with respect to the level of social life they’ll ultimately want (which I acknowledge is a tough thing to evaluate as someone is growing up).

          I really feel strongly about this because I know people of my generation who are autistic and yearning for an active social life but hid behind the internet and video games during their most formative years and thus grew up with a greater disadvantage than comes from autism alone. It’s easy to point the finger directly at autism in these cases, but to me that’s an indirect cause and the parents who passively let them spend all their free time alone do share some of the blame.

          I consider my parents allowing pretty restricted access to the computer and constantly pushing me to go out with other people to be among the best parenting decisions they made with me. But that’s because I’m naturally quite an extroverted person whose happiness as an adult has largely been dependent on having the constant presence in my life of large social groups. Someone who truly prefers a more reclusive lifestyle, as part of their personality, deserves parents who are receptive to that and adjust their approach accordingly.

          • akc09 says:

            This is interesting.

            Both of us parents are introverts, and the kiddo seems to be somewhere in the middle (happy to entertain himself, but looooves when we go to see his friends).

            We’re hoping that we can at least help him acquire the language/skills to get by with his peers and grow the friendships that he has so far. So as an adult, if he wants to be more of a loner, it’s on his own terms and not because he just feels too anxious interacting with people.

          • Baeraad says:

            There might be something to that. I don’t know if I’d call myself an extrovert, but I do feel a strong need for emotional connections and for feeling like I belong somewhere. I’ve heard a lot of autists who sound like they’d be perfectly fine if the rest of the human race just left a lifetime supply of canned goods and then disappeared, but that never made sense to me. I’ve always felt like people are significant insofar as they are significant to other people – if I have a thought and there’s no one who’s interested in listening to it, what was the point of me having it in the first place?

          • Aapje says:

            @Baeraad

            Understanding? Becoming a better person in your own right, regardless of whether others recognize it?

          • Baeraad says:

            Understanding? Becoming a better person in your own right, regardless of whether others recognize it?

            I perceive no value in either of those things. I think because I don’t really trust my own mind – I might just think I understand something, and I’ll never know unless I get someone else to go over my reasoning and see if they can spot any errors in it. I’ve had entirely too many brilliant ideas that turned out to be completely off the mark because I had failed to account for a bunch of pesky factors that fell outside of my mental tunnel vision. :/

            Also, my memory is crap when it comes to anything that I mentally mark as “not important” – which is how I instinctively mark every thought that didn’t end up having some sort of consequences in the real world. So whatever it was I thought I understood, I’ll probably end up forgetting it anyway if I don’t get to solidify it by at least talking to someone about it.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        Like Baeraad, I’ll second the comment about teasing. I remember being especially sensitive to it too, as a kid. I don’t think I’m autistic, but I don’t think someone needs to be in order to respond poorly to teasing, and I think someone who’s autistic could easily be even more sensitive to it.

        That said, people tease, and eventually an autist will meet them, and have to deal with them, so as a parent, I think you’ll need to prepare your son. I don’t know exactly how, but I know that I’d start by calling it out explicitly. I’d even make it a game. The rules could be:

        1. you (the son) score a point if you can say “I think you’re teasing me” and be right, but you lose a point if you’re not
        2. you score two points if you can play along with the teasing without calling it out
        3. you score two points if you can tease me and I don’t realize it after about fifteen seconds
        4. the game is always being played

        The key, IMO, to teasing that throws off autists and adjacents is that they’re having to deal with someone who isn’t saying what they mean. Moreover, they’re enjoying it. They’re enjoying fooling the autist, who would really prefer everyone says what they mean and save everyone else a great deal of time. The autist needs to understand how teasing and fooling other people can be fun. And since it can be fun, it becomes useful to know how it’s done, and how to detect it.

    • Andrew Hunter says:

      misplaced comment deleted.

      I have some thoughts here, but not sure exactly what to say. I know my parents did a lot of things I didn’t like but I really don’t know what the counterfactuals would look like.

      • theredsheep says:

        Nagging comment deleted in turn.

        It’s not a bad idea to just give your experiences just so the OP gets a good feel for the diversity of experience, etc. ASD covers a loooot of ground.

    • Nicholas Weininger says:

      A couple of things my parents and other caring adults did that I remember very fondly and now try, very imperfectly, to do with my son:

      1. Treating my elaborate rule-bound fantasy constructions with at least apparent respect and appreciation. At one point my dad had T-shirts made up for my family members listing the government posts I had carefully assigned them in my fantasy nation, and my delight at this is one of my more vivid childhood memories.

      2. Marking off safe spaces where I could indulge in repetitive behavior without bothering others or endangering or unduly embarrassing myself. I recall an elementary teacher who put tape on the classroom floor to delineate a zone within which I could pace around in circles as much as I liked.

      • akc09 says:

        I like these! #1 sounds like good parenting advice all around, even with a kid who isn’t on the spectrum but has a good imagination.

    • ana53294 says:

      Not pressuring to interact with age peers was a great one. People all around me were pressuring me about playing with other kids. Especially teachers, although that was probably mostly to get rid of me. Let him interact with adults if he chooses to – at least he will be interacting with somebody, even if adult – child interactions are qualitatively different from peer interactions.

      • Robert Jones says:

        Fully agree.

      • Nicholas Weininger says:

        Big +1 to this. As an elementary school aged child, interactions with adults and even teenagers were much much more fulfilling and much easier than age-mate interactions, and I learned an enormous amount from them and sought them out at every opportunity; I would have been truly socially disabled had I been rebuffed and limited to age-mate interactions.

        • ana53294 says:

          And, if you think about it, being forced to interact with age-peers is an unnatural invention that came with schools. In a family, you would interact with brothers and sisters, cousins, parents, grandparents, of different ages. Few of them would be exactly the same age as you – so you could interact with somebody who is closer to you developmentally.

      • Watchman says:

        Counterpoint: interaction with adults prepares children for unequal relationships but not for a lot of key social interaction where status is unclear, and particularly where it needs to be asserted.

        The point of age-group play (which is a norm as humans don’t normally live in small family groups but in communities) is that it is unstructured and challenging. It’s a preparation for status contest in adulthood, right down to the stereotypical gender roles which kids seem to revert to despite various noble efforts. To fail to have this experience is to lose out on training for key spheres of adult interaction where the hierarchy is horizontal and therefore negotiation is required.

        As you might guess, I still reckon the best thing my parents did for me was transport me to see friends (it was a rural area…). I’m not autistic, but the lack of diagnosis (I am possibly adjacent at least) might well be more to do with learning to interact with age-group peers from about three years old.

        • Nicholas Weininger says:

          I agree that lack of age-group interaction makes you worse at status assertion and status contests/status negotiation. I would submit, however, that there are lots of satisfying and successful life-paths that require very little of this (including paths which involve leadership, albeit of a low-key, consensus-driven style).

          As for me, I hated a lot of age-group interactions as a kid precisely because they involved this sort of thing, and am very glad I was not pushed to engage in more of them anyway.

    • Deiseach says:

      No formal diagnosis so no idea if I am “on the spectrum” (have very strong suspicions about family background) but one thing I would say is: be careful of literalism. It’s only recently that I’ve realised how incredibly literal-minded I was as a child, and how I took things literally that weren’t meant to be taken that way. Made for a divergence between me and other children when interacting/socialising.

      So maybe just keep an eye out for using figurative language and explaining what you are doing and what that really means, and not to take everything as meaning absolutely literal.

      • akc09 says:

        Ha, I’ve been catching myself at that, especially lately as he’s starting to pick up more language and we can alllmost have real conversations. 🙂

    • MartMart says:

      My parents supplied me with lots of toys that allowed me to improve my mechanical abilities. From stuff like erector sets, to model airplanes, random build projects, hand tools, basic pulley sets and other simple machine etc. These were things that I could mess with alone, and quickly turned as a way to escape from the stresses of socializing. It would have been nice if there were basic electronics involved there as well, but I suspect that they were worried I would ask for help with something.

  61. Scott Alexander says:

    Suppose I want to become more Cultured by having read more of the Great Books that will often come up in conversation or debate. Which books are highest-yield for this?

    By high-yield, I mean books that frequently come up, are impressive to have read, are relatively short, at least a little readable/fun-to-read, teach you important things you wouldn’t learn by reading the one-page summary, and might be educational for me personally (eg are from exotic traditions other than Anglo-American liberalism which I might not otherwise be exposed to).

    (if it helps to have an example, the dialogues of Plato and Beyond Good And Evil both seem to fit the bill, but I’m also looking for literature, economics, etc, not just philosophy)

    • Well... says:

      Heart of Darkness is probably one.

      • blacktrance says:

        Anti-recommend – one of the most boring books I’ve ever read. Despite being short, it was still a struggle to get through, and without any payoff besides being able to say that I’ve read it.

        • frenris says:

          Yeah not a fan of Heart of Darkness though I really enjoy Joseph Conrad as an author. Loved Nostromo, Lord Jim, and the Secret Agent.

          I wonder if part of the reason Heart of Darkness is conventionally more respected is because it has more anti-colonial politics. It also feels like it tries to be more literary than either Nostromo or Lord Jim.

    • Charles F says:

      I think none of us are in as good a position as you to answer that question, since I don’t know what comes up in your conversations, and it probably varies a lot from person to person. (e.g. from @Well…’s comment, I’ve heard of Heart of Darkness, but don’t remember it ever coming up in conversation).

      Things that I get a lot of mileage out of are:
      The Brothers Karamazov
      The Intelligent Investor
      The Story of Civilization series (still working my way through it, slowly)

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        What Charles said – this is a question that seems only answerable if we know that you’re going to tour the entire world, giving talks about, say, Great Books. In reality, though, you’re probably going to spend most of your time in the Bay area.

        OTOH, I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer about this, and really, the more I think about the question, the more I enjoy it. For example, in my current circles, the Great Book list would probably be:

        the Torah
        the New Testament
        1984
        The Gulag Archipelago
        Atlas Shrugged
        The Handmaid’s Tale (I don’t know what the cutoff for Great is, and I know it’s especially hot now because of television, but it might have legs)

        …and just looking at this list, I can see that my circles might be a tad depressed…

      • frenris says:

        When I was halfway through Brothers Karamazov I thought it would be my favorite book of all time. When I got to the end I thought it was in the bottom half of my top ten. Great book, but arggh.

        • zoozoc says:

          If it helps, I believe that Dostoevsky was planning on writing a sequel to the Brothers Karamazov, but died before he could do so.

    • theredsheep says:

      The Brothers Karamazov is an enormous slog, like all Dostoyevsky novels, but The Grand Inquisitor section is sometimes released separately (including on Project Gutenberg) and I find it fascinating. It’s one chapter, but needs to be paired with the preceding chapter, “Rebellion.”

      • Protagoras says:

        “Notes from Underground” is not an enormous slog. It is always the Dostoyevsky I recommend for that reason, though it may not be everyone’s cup of tea in every respect.

        • frenris says:

          It’s a short slog. A portage through waist high swamp for a few hundred meters.

          Great story and better than an all day hike if you’re going to visit the marshlands for the first time.

          I wasn’t able to enjoy Crime and punishment. I could recognize it was a great book, but it was too dark for me to have fun reading it. Brothers Karamazov I enjoyed much more.

          • g says:

            I have several times had the following experience: Start reading “Crime and Punishment”. Think “wow, this is an astonishingly good book”. Have to put it down for some reason. Somehow never feel like picking it up again.

            (After a few iterations of this, I did eventually get myself to finish it. I still think it’s an astonishingly good book, though at times it felt as if there was more authorial axe-grinding than I would like.)

      • BlindKungFuMaster says:

        “The Gambler” is pretty short and very readable.

      • DavidS says:

        Agreed (I actually think “Rebellion” is far more interesting: it’s one of the core literary texts for me on the problem of evil, along with the obvious Candide and the less obvious Brave New World (the bit near the end where people ‘claim the right’ to starve, get diseases etc.)

      • Chiffewar says:

        The ‘highest-yield’ works in classical Russian literature are probably Gogol’s short stories — I’d start with “The Overcoat”, “The Nose”, and maybe “Viy”, which I think might be right up Scott’s alley. And I’d agree that Brothers K is not the best place to dive into 19th century Russian lit. Crime and Punishment, however, is the highest of high-brow detective stories, and both useful and fun.

        • WashedOut says:

          Crime and Punishment, however, is the highest of high-brow detective stories, and both useful and fun.

          Do you say that tongue-in-cheek or do you really view it as a detective story? I’ve never heard it framed that way, presumably because a) the central ‘crime’ has no mystery to it apart from asking the reader to examine multiple complex motives; b) there is an inevitability about Porfiry’s investigation that bypasses most of the intrigue of a standard whodunnit.

          As you probably know, the Russian version of the title is closer to ‘transgression’ than ‘crime’, which steers the reader toward the book’s moral/philosophical questions rather than it’s plot events.

          • Chiffewar says:

            Tongue in cheek! That’s how the professor in my first Dostoevsky class tried to sell it to us. But it is very readable, and a lot of that is due to plot events. It’s pretty action-packed.

          • sclmlw says:

            And hilarious! I feel like this book doesn’t get enough credit for being something of a page-turner. Sure, it has a couple of slow points, but it makes good on them.

            Dostoevsky really knows how to write “talkative drunk” convincingly.

            I usually frame this as a “psychological thriller”.

        • JohnBuridan says:

          Checkhov’s short stories are excellent as well. I have never met anyone else who has read any of them.

          • yodelyak says:

            Yes! I have only read a few shorts and one play, inspired by realizing I’d seen a couple of his plays, not knowing they were his, and added him to my favorites and finally got a copy of a collection of his works.

            The Seagull and The Three Sisters are his plays that I finally got around to reading the originals after realizing I’d seen and loved adaptations, and I’ve read The Lady with the Dog. A veritable butt-load of his stuff is online, which at some point I noticed and flagged to follow-up on, but sadly haven’t yet.

            The play “Stupid Fucking Bird” is a Chekhov adaptation that has been a pretty big success in a few of my circles, I think–I saw it in Portland on a suggestion from a Bay Area friend. It showed in PDX in a packed house, and afterward I was able to talk about it with friends on the East Coast who’d also seen it.

    • Tyrathalis says:

      St. John’s College uses something called The Program, which is based in readings from historic thinkers. The math and science sections don’t have such nice lists, but the history/philosophy/literature section publishes the list read by every student that year. It’s a good summary of some important books and how much of them may be efficient to read, since most of those readings are supposed to be done in three or four days by a college student. This year’s version is available here:

      https://www.sjc.edu/application/files/9915/0550/4096/Undergraduate_Seminar_Reading_List_Santa_Fe.pdf

      Also, some specific suggestions:
      Any of Shakespeare’s comedies are easy reads and great to reference in conversation, plus there is a lot of fun trivia about them in the annotated copies. His histories are maybe more quotable, though.
      Knowing just a single book of the bible well gives you a lot of cultural context. Psalms is a pretty good choice for this, since it summarizes a lot of specific advice.
      The Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics are of course somewhat foundational to western thought, although you have to read them in the right way. Socrates and Aristotle aren’t always right, but they have probably already thought of most of the complaints you might have with them.
      Herotodus’ Histories can be very readable. Not very accurate, but often hilarious.
      Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is great, although not very short. Just doing the readings on the list I linked above is much more efficient than reading the whole thing.
      The Federalist Papers are important to American history in particular, and aren’t very long.

      • Nicholas Weininger says:

        For the Hebrew Bible, I can strongly recommend Robert Alter’s translations, which include commentaries that give useful highlights from a ton of the last thousand-plus years of previous commentaries. I kind of figure you must already know all of this stuff because Unsong, but just in case, he’s really quite engaging. The most narratively interesting of his is probably The David Story:

        https://www.amazon.com/David-Story-Translation-Commentary-Samuel-ebook/dp/B009XP56AW

        The “Wisdom Books” (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) are also super good and quite short:
        https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Books-Ecclesiastes-Translation-Commentary/dp/0393340538

        And if you are at all a Song of Solomon fan, his translation there is worthwhile too:
        https://www.amazon.com/Strong-Death-Love-Translation-Commentary/dp/0393352250

      • jrdougan says:

        If you are going to read the Federalist Papers, I’d also include the Anti-Federalist Papers. Significant, and almost no one reads them.

        • engleberg says:

          The Arcana Imperi has a cool title, is referenced in Franklin’s Autobiography, was widely read in coffee shops for a hundred years before the Constitution was written, and is still a good read. But, umm, I don’t remember any cool quotes for upmanship.

          • Joseph Greenwood says:

            I definitely encourage you to read anti-federalist papers if you are reading the Federalist papers, but I dispute the word “the”. Lots of stuff was written by antifederalists, but there is not a canonical anti-federalist text. However, there have been several efforts to organize (some) anti-federalist writings in a way that is symmetric to the Federalist papers, and I second the recommendation to read some of them.

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        One thing that drives me nuts is that people treat the Republic as a political treatise, instead of an ethical/philosophical book. Plato isn’t talking about a literal Republic, guys, he’s talking about your soul! What is the best way to live?

        but every few months I see someone joke about philosopher kings as if the Republic was meant to be consulted when writing the Constitution or something. Bah.

        • Tyrathalis says:

          Recognizing that the republic he describes is largely and explicitly metaphorical is definitely the sort of thing I was talking about. Plato means a lot of different things with his examples, and he almost certainly means some from a political perspective, but it also isn’t necessarily accurate to say that he literally thinks infanticide is the foundation of a healthy society, for instance.

          In a more general sense, though, I think it’s important to recognize that Plato and Aristotle are not necessarily saying the answer they think is most /true/, they are saying the answer that they think is most /useful/, and specifically most useful for the individual person they are talking to. The dialogues in particular have specific interlocutors. The answers Socrates gives are meant to guide those individuals closer to the truth. The answer that is right for them is not necessarily the answer that is right for you, and it is definitely not necessarily the answer which is right in a completely abstract sense.

          When Plato or Aristotle writes something, it is intended as a tool to guide your thinking in a particular direction. There are little clues that you can use to figure out what they actually think, but I think it is relatively rare for either author to just explicitly tell you the answer they think is correct. Normally, the answer that they officially give you can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and which way you interpret it says more about you than about the author. Further, I suspect that they often tried to construct the answers such that each person will interpret the answer in the way which will be most useful for the sort of person who would interpret it in that way. I’m not sure they always succeeded at this, but I think they tried, and it can be very useful to work under the assumption that they did.

          So I personally think that the right way to read Plato and Aristotle is to treat the texts as tools for thinking more deeply about problems, and to use the methods of Socrates, not the answers. They are trying to teach specific lessons, but many of those lessons are lessons of thought, not lessons of politics or even ethics. Learning those styles of thinking is much more useful than learning whether a four-part caste system is really the optimal way to arrange a city-state.

        • Viliam says:

          Plato isn’t talking about a literal Republic, guys, he’s talking about your soul! What is the best way to live?

          vs

          And so, Glaucon, we have arrived at the conclusion that in the perfect State wives and children are to be in common; and that all education and the pursuits of war and peace are also to be common, and the best philosophers and the bravest warriors are to be their kings?

          That, replied Glaucon, has been acknowledged.

          Yes, I said; and we have further acknowledged that the governors, when appointed themselves, will take their soldiers and place them in houses such as we were describing, which are common to all, and contain nothing private, or individual; and about their property, you remember what we agreed?

          Yes, I remember that no one was to have any of the ordinary possessions of mankind; they were to be warrior athletes and guardians, receiving from the other citizens, in lieu of annual payment, only their maintenance, and they were to take care of themselves and of the whole State.

          So, having wives and children in common, and no private property for soldiers, is not a political program?

          Poor Glaucon seems to have missed the point, and the narrator actively misleads him.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          From Book 2:

          “The inquiry we are undertaking is no easy one but [368d] calls for keen vision, as it seems to me. So, since we are not clever persons, I think we should employ the method of search that we should use if we, with not very keen vision, were bidden to read small letters from a distance, and then someone had observed that these same letters exist elsewhere larger and on a larger surface. We should have accounted it a godsend, I fancy, to be allowed to read those letters first, and examine the smaller, if they are the same.” “Quite so,” said Adeimantus; [368e] “but what analogy to do you detect in the inquiry about justice?” “I will tell you,” I said: “there is a justice of one man, we say, and, I suppose, also of an entire city.” “Assuredly,” said he. “Is not the city larger75 than the man?” “It is larger,” he said. “Then, perhaps, there would be more justice in the larger object and more easy to apprehend. If it please you, then, [369a] let us first look for its quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less.”

          This is the origin of the text that you quoted at me – yes, they’re discussing a city, but as a metaphor. A city is larger and easier to comprehend than a human soul, so looking for what makes a city just will also show you what makes a soul just.

          It’s also worth nothing that the Greek title is Politeia, which may be variously translated as “Civic Matters,” “Public Affairs,” or, my preference, “Governance.” Cicero translated it to res publica, hence English The Republic. But there are shades of meaning in the Greek that are largely lost in the English associations of republic as one particular form of government. The Greek is rather just referring to the ways that polis might be organized – and by analogy, how a human soul likewise is to be governed.

          I say again: It’s an ethical/philosophical text, not a political treatise like Locke or Montesquieu.

        • Viliam says:

          This is the origin of the text that you quoted at me – yes, they’re discussing a city, but as a metaphor.

          Maybe I am dumb here, but could you please unpack for me the meaning of the metaphor “wives and children in common, and no private property for soldiers; that’s the perfect State”? What specifically does this advise about governing one’s soul?

        • yes, they’re discussing a city, but as a metaphor.

          That’s not what I get from the passage you quoted.

          It sounds as though they are using political philosophy as a tool to understand the individual. You figure out what the ideal city would be like, then consider the ideal person as a scaled down version of that.

          So the first step is political philosophy. If, in the ideal city, people would not have things in common, then anything deduced from an imaginary city where they do will be a poor picture of what the ideal man would be like.

        • Enkidum says:

          The Republic is a political treatise. It’s also an ethical treatise. For Plato, the two were inseparable. Yes, there are aspects of it that are probably metaphorical. To read the whole thing as a metaphor is to have completely missed Plato’s point.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          Maybe I am dumb here, but could you please unpack for me the meaning of the metaphor “wives and children in common, and no private property for soldiers; that’s the perfect State”? What specifically does this advise about governing one’s soul?

          Consider the entire context. The city/soul as described by Socrates (Plato) is divided into three parts: The rulers (the much-derided “philosopher kings”), the soldiers, and the producers. Each part of the soul is governed by a different nature. The rulers are rational and wise, using reason to determine the best course. The soldiers are brave, spirited, driven by passion. And the producers are driven by appetite – for food, sex, wealth, status, what have you.

          The unjust polis/soul is one where these are out of balance. There’s a lot of discussion of the character of tyrants in Book VII – in all cases, the city/tyrant’s soul are governed unjustly, usually by one passion or another run amuck. Plato analyzes each form of unjust government in this light, from oligarchy to democracy to timocracy and tyranny.

          So, avoiding this imbalance of passion is a very powerful concern for the man who wishes to be just.

          “One who is just does
          not allow any part of himself to do the work of another part or allow the various classes within him to meddle with each other. He regulates well what is really his own and rules himself. He puts himself in order, is his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of himself like three limiting notes in a musical scale… And when he does anything…, he believes that the action is just and fine that preserves this inner harmony and helps achieve it, and calls it so, and regards as wisdom the knowledge that oversees such actions. And he believes that the action that destroys this harmony is unjust and calls it so, and regards the belief that oversees it as ignorance.” (443d-444a)

          In other words, you mustn’t let your appetites rule you. In Book V, where the commonality of wives and property amongst the soldiers is described, Plato gives the reasoning: since men and women of the ruling class are to be educated equally, and hold the same pursuits, necessarily they will be closely intimate, and sexual desire will be inflamed:

          And they, having houses and meals in common, and no private possessions of that kind, [458d] will dwell together, and being commingled in gymnastics and in all their life and education, will be conducted by innate necessity to sexual union. Is not what I say a necessary consequence?” “Not by the necessities of geometry,” he said, “but by those of love,87 which are perhaps keener and more potent than the other to persuade and constrain the multitude.”

          “They are, indeed,” I said; “but next, Glaucon, disorder and promiscuity in these unions or [458e] in anything else they do would be an unhallowed thing in a happy state and the rulers will not suffer it.” “It would not be right,” he said. “Obviously, then, we must arrange marriages, sacramental so far as may be. And the most sacred marriages would be those that were most beneficial.”

          In other words, the communal marriage is a means to avoid jealousy and disharmony, which would threaten the rational state. The just polis/soul has all parts working in balance – your reason must temper and control your appetites, you mustn’t be ruled by your appetites (or by your courage untempered by wisdom, like if the soldier part of your soul gained control).

          I am willing to concede Atlas’s criticism – the polis Plato describes is really complex and detailed, and I will grant that Plato probably did indulge himself in imagining a utopian, ideal state. What I want to emphasize, though, is his purpose in doing so: it’s to teach individuals how to live. It’s not meant to be a guide to a Constitution, that’s not what he was writing. If that’s all it was, the Republic would be remembered as a silly little exercise by an ancient philosopher who had other, stronger works.

          But there’s a reason it’s still considered one of the greatest works of Greek philosophy – it’s one of the earliest and most coherent ethical treatises ever written. Contrast it with a lot of the Jewish wisdom literature being written at roughly the same time (I’m not an expert in the Hebrew Scriptures, I don’t know the specific chronologies on the individual books). Lots of ethical injunctions, yes – but totally different foundation. Relies a lot more heavily on the Word of the Lord, divine commandments, while Plato purports to be reasoning his way to the ideal soul from first principles.

        • Rob K says:

          With the caveat that I know a lot about that period of Greek history and only a bit about Plato, this angle strikes me as too clever by half.

          Part of what’s great about the Greeks is that they thought big, and had wildly different examples of how to organize a society packed into a tiny area to draw inspiration from. I see very little reason to believe that Plato wasn’t largely serious – the 150 years of Athenian history leading up to his time saw several great constitutional shifts, and the city’s great rival Sparta had a vastly different constitution with at least hints of some of the blurring of family and community described in the republic.

          (Also, from my little philosophical knowledge, this isn’t some crazy outlier take; Popper at least takes Plato at his word.)

        • quanta413 says:

          Also, from my little philosophical knowledge, this isn’t some crazy outlier take; Popper at least takes Plato at his word.

          How trustworthy is Popper as an interpreter of Plato? I’ve been very, very far from impressed from what I’ve gleaned about Popper as a philosopher of science (it’s possible this is not all Popper’s fault but partly the fault of summaries), so I’m reluctant to trust him in an area where I have no expertise (ancient philosophy).

        • Philosophisticat says:

          The Republic is about a lot of things – besides ethics and political philosophy, for example, it spends a lot of time on the metaphysics of the forms and the nature and structure of the soul.

          All of these things are related for Plato, and even if it’s in some sense true that his driving interest is in how to live, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to treat it as in part a political or metaphysical treatise. Plato wants to illuminate justice in the soul through analogy with the city, but this doesn’t make the discussion of the city “merely metaphorical” in any sense that contrasts with it being a serious presentation of Plato’s substantive views about ideal political organization.

        • Protagoras says:

          Yes, Popper is an outlier in his Plato interpretation. To understand Republic, one of the first things to keep in mind is that Plato absolutely hates Homer. He is surely unfair to the nuances in Homer, but it is true that Homer treats his warrior-aristocrats, his “heroes,” as the only people worth writing about, and Plato was in a position to know how this influenced those who heard Homer over and over again growing up. All the little Greek boys wanted to be Achilles. And Plato is convinced that this is a horrible model, that nobody should treat Homer’s warrior-aristocrats as in any way admirable or worthy of emulation. Evidence of Plato’s opinion of Homer is most blatant in book X, but it’s really all over the place in Republic.

          But perhaps we should start at the beginning. Socrates and Thrasymachus engage in a lightning-fast debate. Another key element of Plato; he thought anything people couldn’t figure out for themselves they didn’t really understand. He did not favor giving out the answer key, for fear it would become a set of worthless platitudes. He always wants you to work to figure out what’s going on. And it takes a lot of work to figure out what’s going on in the Socrates/Thrasymachus debate. And in the end, somewhat surprisingly, the person who seems to understand it second best, after Socrates himself, is Thrasymachus; his moves, while ultimately futile, are clearly calculated to respond to the arguments Socrates is actually making, indicating that he has a pretty good sense of what the arguments are. He still doesn’t completely get it; he concedes when he runs out of tricks, and never seems to get that Socrates isn’t actually trying to trick him, that Socrates wins because Thrasymachus is actually wrong.

          Glaucon and Adiemantus also do not get it. They tell Socrates they are not convinced, and present their attempt to elaborate and strengthen Thrasymachus’s view (a totally unnecessary effort; as Socrates insists, he knows what Thrasymachus’s view is, and doesn’t need the elaborations). A non-trivial amount of their inability to understand seems to come from their early Homeric brainwashing. And yet they claim to be in sympathy with Socrates, and just want him to be clearer about things. So Socrates embarks on a very long discussion which is carefully calculated to pander to the prejudices of people like Glaucon and Adiemantus, and to try, with luck, to dislodge a few of their errors and nudge them a tiny bit closer to the truth.

          There’s a lot more going on, of course, but again, to emphasize the obvious, Plato has one of the very few dialogues where Socrates has anything to say about politics be one where he is talking to politically ambitious young members of the Athenian elite. Socrates hardly looks much like a philosopher king, and if Republic tries to present a philosopher king as something appealing, it is because being like Socrates himself is too alien to have any hope of being something that he could sell to the likes of Glaucon and Adiemantus. And even at that the text doesn’t make it sound like one would particularly want to be one of the described philosopher kings. The main message is that there is something very much wrong with the ideas Glaucon and Adiemantus (and really everyone) have about what is desirable, and Socrates is pushing anywhere he can to dislodge the incredibly deeply ingrained errors people have in that respect.

      • SamChevre says:

        My recommendation for the Bible is “read the whole thing, in the KJV”; but for a single book of the Bible, I would recommend Isaiah. It is realistically utopian, hugely influential for both Jewish and Christian thought, and very poetic with awesome imagery.

        And the strong shall be as tow, and the maker of it as a spark, and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench them.

        they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

        Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet:

        For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still. And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly:

        • sclmlw says:

          As someone who loves Isaiah, I have to disagree with your recommendation. It seems like Scott is looking for something that you can easily sink your teeth into without having to make a huge study of it. That’s the exact opposite of what you get with Isaiah. If you have extensive knowledge of the political, cultural, and literary background of Isaiah’s time period, it’s a very enjoyable read.

          If, on the other hand, you don’t have the time to put in all that work, aren’t interested in it from any religious perspective, and want something you can get through quickly to better understand and apply cultural references, Isaiah isn’t what you’re looking for.

          Isaiah is like marzipan, an acquired taste well worth cultivating but not immediately recognized as enjoyable. It’s not like a Costco-sized bag of Reese’s.

          • Aapje says:

            Is marzipan an acquired taste???

            It seems better to use wine, coffee or licorice as an example.

          • outis says:

            Indeed, marzipan is naturally good. Conversely, Reese’s is an acquired taste (acquired by growing up in the US, like Capri Sun), though not worth cultivating.

          • SamChevre says:

            Hmmm. It’s hard to factor out that I have read the Bible a lot, so I may be missing the importance of background. I think, though, that Isaiah stands on its own as a literary work, which is referenced over and over again in American popular culture (The picture The Peaceable Kingdom“, “The Grapes of Wrath”, swords into ploughshares, etc.)

          • Matt M says:

            When I attempted to read the KJV cover to cover, I recall Isiah being among the most boring and hard to get through parts.

            I much preferred Hosea. Something about “in order to show you how wicked you are all being, I am going to marry a whore” made for a much more compelling narrative!

          • sclmlw says:

            The first trick to Isaiah, for the uninitiated, is to understand that in general he’s talking about the historical context of 7th-6th century BC Israel’s threatened invasion crisis. At the same time he’s generally considered to also be prophesying about the future, and often with Messianic themes.

            The second trick is to understand Isaiah is that his preferred form of ancient Semitic poetry heavily relies on parallel structures. You say something, then you repeat it again in a similar way. Or you reverse it. Or you say the opposite.

            “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”

            Even if you understand the historical context, if you don’t understand the basic poetic forms, it makes the book nigh unreadable. There was good reason to write like this back when few people could read, and most reading was done aloud for the benefit of others who would rely solely on their memory to recall concepts later on. But it’s not a literary style we’ve needed since most people became literate and books became cheap.

            Once you get the hang of it, you can forget that for most people who just pick up the Bible Isaiah is very difficult and doesn’t immediately appear like it will yield dividends. The same goes for marzipan and sushi. Most people need multiple exposures to get used to the flavor bitter almond or raw fish. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worthwhile. I love all three of these, but they are an acquired taste for most – including myself.

          • Squirrel of Doom says:

            My theory on “acquired tastes” is that they’re addictive substances that taste bad, but win you over by the addiction.

            I don’t know of many counter examples.

          • Aapje says:

            @Squirrel of Doom

            Pepper?

          • Joseph Greenwood says:

            +1 for this comment

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I loved marzipan from my first taste. It doesn’t taste bitter to me.

            And I love sushi with no effort.

            I’ve gradually gotten used to peanuts, which seem to be an easy default for most people.

            As for Isaiah, I thought parallelism was easy rhetoric for most people, and I’ve seen a claim that if was providential that it was a sort of poetry which is easy to translate.

      • Zeno of Citium says:

        I strongly recommend against reading Shakespeare if you’re looking for the best effort to reward ratio. Watch a well-reviewed movie version instead. Almost everything has a good movie, and most plays have multiple good movie versions. Despite having been, historically, read a ton (there are print runs of Shakespeare’s plays there are no extant copies of because they’d literally all been read to pieces), they’re simply not designed to be read – they’re plays, they should be watched. Live on stage is best, but that’s a lot of effort for most people, and a good movie is not far off.

        Top plays to watch if you want to get cultural references are:
        1. Romeo and Juliet (which, if you haven’t been exposed to it since you read it in highschool, is rather different when you’re an adult.).
        2. Hamlet (ditto, also Hamlet is dense and strange and IMO overrated. Worth watching just so you can then watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead which is a parody of sorts. Has three or four incredible speeches referenced in tons of places. The Laurence Olivier movie is only okay overall, but Olivier himself is great in it).
        3. Macbeth (short, bloody, and to the point. IMO the most fun tragedy – it’s neither as emotionally or morally complex as e.g. Hamlet and that’s part of the fun).
        4. The Merchant of Venice (often played as a tragedy focusing on Shylock, but also a very funny comedy. The 2004 version with Jeremy Irons is reportedly very good, with a focus on the tragic aspects).
        5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (bawdy, absurd comedy. Absolutely delightful).
        6. The Tempest (A lovely comedy that includes magic, drunken antics, and romance).

        If I had to pick one play to start with, I’d go with The Tempest. It’s not quite as rich with things that have entered our cultural lexicon as Hamlet, but it’s up there, and I think The Tempest is one of the better comedies which I’d expect almost anyone to enjoy. Macbeth is the easiest tragedy to understand, and it’s the shortest (this is not a coincidence). If you only watch one tragedy, pick Macbeth. Hamlet is referenced more – a lot more – but it kind of drags, and because there’s 2 major versions of the text, it’s a crapshoot which version, or more commonly which portions of each version, you get.

        • AG says:

          Co-signed, but more in that Shakespeare’s words are so much more dependent on actor/director interpretation than anything else. The same line can be delivered in completely different contexts, depending on the text-extraneous action that is unique to every production.

          I actually recommend first watching adaptations not using the original text (for example, Throne of Blood for Macbeth) in order to get a sense of the plot and characters, so that when you are listening to the text you have a preexisting model for parsing the language. Actually, you can’t go wrong with the Wishbone versions.

          Much Ado About Nothing is a personal favorite. I’ve seen more than 3 versions of it now, and every one has taken very different approaches to the material. Whedon >>> Branagh don’t @ me

        • Fahundo says:

          Romeo and Juliet (which, if you haven’t been exposed to it since you read it in highschool, is rather different when you’re an adult.).

          How so? I really hated this one in high school.

          • theredsheep says:

            A major subtext is that kids are stupid jerks who make things worse with their impulsive decisions. High schools tend to downplay this, and the part where Romeo barely knows Juliet and the Friar only goes along with the stupidity because it beats the way their two families normally treat each other.

            I assume that’s what Zeno was getting at. But I don’t much care for the play myself. I’m a King Lear kinda guy.

          • Fahundo says:

            A major subtext is that kids are stupid jerks who make things worse with their impulsive decisions.

            Oh, I picked up on that the first time and that’s why I hated it so much. At 14 I thought the titular characters were so moronic they deserved to die.

          • Matt M says:

            Did they really “make things worse” though?

            In the long run, their actions may have led to the end of a destructive feud between two powerful families that would have had unknowable future costs.

            Utilitarianism suggests that their sacrifice may have been net beneficial to humanity overall!

          • Fahundo says:

            Does a red check mark where the report button usually is mean I’ve reported the comment? If so, I might have accidentally done that to Matt M.

          • John Schilling says:

            In the long run, their actions may have led to the end of a destructive feud between two powerful families that would have had unknowable future costs.

            You know what else would have ended that feud(*)? A nice public wedding between Romeo and Juliet, with the heads of both houses in joyful attendance. And note that Capulet is already on record as saying,

            1. That he accepts the Prince’s decree ending the feud, and doesn’t want any more killing,

            2. That Juliet is not going to be forced into loveless diplomatic marriage with someone like Paris any time soon, and

            3. That Romeo is such an admirable young man that it’s OK for him to crash our parties even if he is a Montague.

            So, Plan A: talk to Capulet and say “We’re madly in love with one another, can we please get married?”. Or Plan B: stupid idiotic teenage drama, whining about “forbidden love” that basically every adult not named Paris would support if they knew about. Shakespeare was in on the joke; those two morons died because they were too stupid to live.

            * Aside from the Prince of Verona saying “this feud is over, or I’m having the lot of you killed”. Act I, Scene I.

          • Fahundo says:

            You know what else would have ended that feud(*)? A nice public wedding between Romeo and Juliet, with the heads of both houses in joyful attendance.

            It’s a shame Thanksgiving didn’t exist back then because that would be the perfect counter to this.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Fahundo: too bad no one today can imitate Shakespeare’s style at length. An alt R&J with a Thanksgiving feud would be amazing.

          • Zeno of Citium says:

            At 14 I thought the titular characters were so moronic they deserved to die.

            Okay, maybe it’s not different for everyone. The way it’s generally taught to teenagers is a sappy story about twue wuv, the way I studied it in college was much more complicated. Romeo and Juliet are two hormone-addled teenagers, sure, but Shakespeare’s age really believe in love at first sight and all that, so there’s a tension between the classic story of forbidden love and the comedy of errors that occurs in the last act when they kill themselves. Yet somehow, all the hokeyness and coincidences don’t matter when you actually see it staged, even though the plot and characters are all kind of dumb on paper.
            I don’t know. I like it – it’s a great play – but for tragicomedy The Merchant of Venice is better, for (semi-)forbidden love Othello , for major characters being stabbed Macbeth is better. Also, it’s completely wasted on teenagers, most of whom don’t get it even a little bit.

            I’m a King Lear kinda guy.

            Yessssss. Lear is the purest, most tragic tragedy Shakespeare ever wrote. No one in all of Shakespeare falls as far as Lear, no one is as pathetic (in the sense of having pathos) as Lear. It deserves to be on the level of Hamlet. Maybe Lear isn’t as popular because it doesn’t have any memorable soliloquies and Hamlet has about three.

          • AG says:

            I disagree that Shakespeare was trying to write a “teens are stupid” morality play. He wrote the characters as they are. Take the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation, which sets the aesthetics (visual framing, pacing, acting direction) from the view of the hormone-addled teenager, where everything is apocalyptic. Or are we going to say that FLCL is also sneering at adolescence now, as it, too, acknowledges the ways in which teens lack perspective?

            (Ironically, the anime adaptation of R&J rejects the tragic ending.)

            R&J continues to be referenced again and again because it explores how passion (love or hatred) drives us all, and so infinite stories can use it as a touchstone. Universal emotions and all that.
            What elements of R&J criticized here still apply to West Side Story? One of the things made more clear (via the Officer Krupke song and the Lt. Schrank character) is that the kids are what we’ve made them. The teenage impulsiveness that would be harmless in one world lead to needless death in another because the adults have constructed the context where kids can cause such chaos in their actions. Teenage rashness is inevitable, so the adults bear the burden of having stoked those flames for their own selfish pride, instead of letting them be silly safely.

            R&J can continually be re-skinned to whatever factional conflict you can think of, and it will still remain compelling to most people. (After all, the Bard already stole the plot from someone else.)

          • Tarpitz says:

            For my money, Lear’s the greatest piece of writing/thought/poetic expression of ideas, but Othello’s the most successful qua stage drama – the best play.

        • Cliff says:

          Well, if you watch a play you’re not going to understand what the F anyone is saying. You really need an annotated written copy to understand more than about 50% of it even if you’re pretty damn smart and have a strong vocabulary. Yeah you can get the gist of what is happening, but for me I want to understand the words. There’s all kinds of jokes and wordplay in there that you just aren’t going to get without it being explained to you.

          I would say read first, then maybe watch it acted out. They’re not that long to read.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’ve almost had the opposite experience. At this point in my life I can usually get through Shakespearean English without too much trouble, but back when i had more trouble with it, a well-done play would give me all sorts of context cues that the text wouldn’t. The “country matters” line delivered with a pause and a leer is way more salient than the line alone, for example.

            It does have to be a good play, though, put on by actors that know the text well.

          • AG says:

            Exactly. A footnote saying “this line is a bawdy joke about the butt” is not nearly as illuminating as watching said bawd character toss the line out and Slappin’ Dat Ass.
            Similarly, the intent of any given monologue is entirely up in the air dependent on the extra-textual elements chosen by the director and actors. What is a wistful musing on a subject in one production becomes an angry rant in another, stemming from very different characterizations for what is the same character and the same lines in the text.

            Kyle Kallgren’s video on Richard III talks about a very clear example, where the “Winter of Discontent” monologue begins as a public speech to in-play characters, but then switches to an airing of unspoken inner thoughts to the audience, which therefore demonstrates how the character is two-faced. The annotated text may tell you what the words mean, but they don’t do the literary heavy lifting for you, which is effortless conveyed by the live/visual framing. Picture, thousand words, etc.

          • Zeno of Citium says:

            YMMV, but I’ve seen a few plays blind and they’re easy enough to follow. I even saw The Tempest some time in middle school, before I’d read any Shakespeare, and loved it. Words that seem archaic on the page jump are full of emotion and context in a play.

            Exactly. A footnote saying “this line is a bawdy joke about the butt” is not nearly as illuminating as watching said bawd character toss the line out and Slappin’ Dat Ass.

            There’s a section in Macbeth, right after Macbeth murders the king, where to cut the tension a porter comes out and make some dick jokes. This is none too subtle on the page, but most stagings have hand gestures.

      • warrel says:

        I think the point about ‘wives and children in common ‘ is more like saying :
        — family ties are problematic for governing because they divide people’s loyalties. ..
        BUT ,
        in order to get rid of this problem, you’d have to take radical measures that are a) completely impossible and b) probably not desirable.
        SO..
        A better regime has some way of fighting nepotism/etc. but will never be perfect at it barring
        some extreme experiment that will likely not happen or would involve too many other harms to implement.

    • SteveReilly says:

      The Wealth of Nations fits some of your criteria, and you get to win debates with people who refer to things like “the theory of the invisible hand” and quote some other famous bits that get taken out of context by people who I assume have never read the book. It’s also just good to read to know the history of some ideas. Keynes’s General Theory is decent for similar reasons, though a bit harder to read.

      Literature’s tougher to recommend since “readable” depends so much on your taste. I tried Death in Venice today and I found myself vaguely wishing an underreported contagion will kill me on a beach somewhere in Italy. If you like poetry, Elizabethan plays? Some of those longer works by the Romantics?

      • SamChevre says:

        I will second The Wealth of Nations; it’s not short, but it’s skimmable, and the common quotes represent it poorly.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          Is there a representative summary of it somewhere? I started reading it a few years ago, and was pulled away by other projects somewhere around the halfway mark. I’d be inclined to finish it someday, and then check my understanding of it against the summary.

          I know I could just search for one (and I have), but I think I’m looking for something between CliffNotes and the full text.

      • Alex Zavoluk says:

        Third Wealth of Nations, since there’s plenty that can be skimmed or skipped. Like the digression on the price of silver.

      • BlindKungFuMaster says:

        “I tried Death in Venice today and I found myself vaguely wishing an underreported contagion will kill me on a beach somewhere in Italy.”

        Is that a recommendation?

      • engleberg says:

        Keynes was the twentieth century’s most brilliant essay writer: every lucid phrase slides smoothly into the next and points to the essay conclusion like a cherished 1880’s pump in your beloved family ever since with a slide like oiled glass, a balance Maat could salute, a stock your shoulder loves and a bead that never obscures the target it always points to perfection. His complete works are stuffed of pearls for upmanship, and the General Theory has lots. As well as a much more saleable title than Disjointed Bunch of Brilliant Essays That Never Amount To A General Theory Because Marshall Did Keynes’ General Theory For Him. Essay collections don’t sell.

    • johan_larson says:

      A few months back I did a bit of research to create a list of famous novels I aspire to read. I’ve read some of them, but so long ago they would be worth a reread. Perhaps the list contains some with good value per page.

      USA – 10
      My Antonia — Cather
      Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Twain
      Portnoy’s Complaint — Roth
      To Kill a Mockingbird — Lee
      The Great Gatsby — Fitzgerald
      Moby Dick — Melville
      The Call of the Wild — London
      The Sound and the Fury — Faulkner
      The Sun Also Rises — Hemingway
      Invisible Man — Ellison

      British – 10
      Heart of Darkness — Conrad
      Never Let Me Go — Ishiguro
      Atonement — McEwan
      Nineteen Eighty-Four — Orwell
      Pride and Prejudice — Austen
      Frankenstein — Shelley
      Jane Eyre — Brontë
      Great Expectations — Dickens
      To the Lighthouse — Woolf
      Kim — Kipling

      Canadian – 10
      The Handmaid’s Tale — Atwood
      Who Has Seen the Wind — Mitchell
      In the Skin of a Lion — Ondaatje
      Fifth Business — Davies
      Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town — Leapock
      Two Solitudes — MacLennan
      The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz — Richler
      The Orenda — Boyden
      How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired — Laferriere
      A Fine Balance — Mistry

      French – 5
      The Three Musketeers — Dumas
      The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Hugo
      Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — Verne
      Dangerous Liaisons — de Laclos
      Madame Bovary — Flaubert

      Russian – 5
      Crime and Punishment — Dostoevsky
      War and Peace — Tolstoy
      The Master and Margarita — Bulgakov
      Fathers and Sons — Turgenev
      A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — Solzhenitsyn

      • Nicholas Weininger says:

        Of that list, Portnoy’s Complaint, Gatsby, 1984, and 20,000 Leagues are all easy reads with definite high value per page.

        • FoxLisk says:

          Strong disagree on Portnoy’s Complaint, which, in my opinion, is almost exclusively an attempt at shock that feels paper thin in $CURRENT_YEAR now that so little of it is shocking. For context, though, I also read American Pastoral (also by Roth), which is not at all like Portnoy’s Complaint, and also thought that sucked, so… I might just not like Roth as a rule.

          • j1000000 says:

            I love American Pastoral. Read it a year ago and thought it anticipated the current era by kind of noting how all of that 60s cultural upheaval stuff was still simmering under the generally calm surface of the 90s. But I never like other Roth.

      • Aapje says:

        From that list I would highly recommend:
        Pride and Prejudice — Austen
        Jane Eyre — Brontë
        Nineteen Eighty-Four — Orwell
        The Three Musketeers — Dumas
        War and Peace — Tolstoy

        I found this one OK:
        To Kill a Mockingbird — Lee

        Bored out of my skull (I was young when I read it though, perhaps I would enjoy it more now):
        The Great Gatsby — Fitzgerald

        Book that doesn’t fit the criteria, due to being very unknown, but is excellent:
        The Darkroom of Damocles (analogy: Fight Club for WW 2 resistance)

        • Hanfeizi says:

          The Great Gatsby is a book that is wasted on high school and college students, who are often bored out of their skull by it.

          I’m glad I didn’t read it until my early 30s, when it hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d just witnessed half a dozen Gatsby-like rise and falls in my late 20s spent in roaring Shanghai, myself just a Nick Carraway witnessing them.

          For my part, it’s a better take on the universal lie of the “American Dream” (which goes a lot further than just the US) than Death of a Salesman.

        • Joseph Greenwood says:

          I second this entire comment.

      • Deiseach says:

        Just beware when reading Frankenstein, if you’re expecting anything like the movie versions, it’s not like that. Long dramatic speeches by The Monster on the lines of Satan’s monologues from Paradise Lost are more like it.

        • albatross11 says:

          Definitely worth reading, though, as long as you’re not expecting it to be like the movies!

        • The Nybbler says:

          Now you’ve got me imagining Al Pacino as the Monster, which is ridiculous.

          • John Schilling says:

            No, it isn’t, and now I want to see that version. Pacino’s still in good enough shape to make it, I hope?

      • thirqual says:

        If you read Flaubert, read Bouvard et Pécuchet, not Madame Bovary. It is an immensely superior book, and its subject should be dear to this audience.

        • Simon says:

          I read Bovary last year and while I would not recommend it as an answer to Scotts question I found it a highly enjoyable read and very funny if you just accept that Emma is an absolutely terrible person.

      • “Frankenstein” is really, really a great book, but you’d have a hard time trying to recognize it from the countless movie interpretations. The book is much, much deeper than the movies. Mary Shelley might have been a genius.

        “Never let me go” is also a great book. Each chapter is like another blow to the head. You think: that’s ghastly, but surely from now on the characters’ lives must become better. And time and again you’re proven wrong.

        • Nornagest says:

          Frankenstein was good, but it’s the only one of the classic monster books that I really liked. Bram Stoker, for example, was a hack.

    • WashedOut says:

      Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. It doesn’t get discussed explicitly all that often (at least in my circles) but it’s rich in themes that do. I once read a great article in Quadrant that explored psychological parallels between the underground man and Julian Assange’s personality and circumstance. I’ve found Crime and Punishment to be excellent for similar reasons, and whilst it fails your “relatively short” criterion, I don’t think this should matter much.

      Not part of the Great Books canon, but Taleb’s Antifragile is fun to read. Although it is long, it’s a good gateway to ancient Arabic and middle-eastern schools of thought re: economics and philosophy.

      If you’re interested in the apprenticeship/journeyman model of learning, and want to know more about 16th century Italian life, I highly recommend the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini – an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, musician and soldier.

      For a story of human suffering and achievement, you can’t go past Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey In The World, which describes Scott’s second (and terminal) scientific expedition to Antarctica in 1910.

      • Estera clare says:

        Aaah someone else has read Notes From Underground?? I love it but I can never find anything about it outside of Sparknotes and a few sentences from David Foster Wallace. (Just looked it up, and an article from the New Yorker I guess.)

        I also want to recommend avoiding the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation—I usually like them but in this book they made the terrible decision of translating the word that is usually translated as “spiteful” as “wicked” instead, which almost completely undercuts the whole book imo.

        • Nornagest says:

          I’ve read “Notes from Underground”, but I’m not sure I can intelligently comment on it.

        • sustrik says:

          Russian Existentialism, if ever such thing existed. If you liked it you may also enjoy Austro-Hungarian existentialism: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke.

        • Chiffewar says:

          Who would you recommend instead? AFAICT, Pevear/Volokhonsky are still the most faithful to the text. But I haven’t read any English translation in full, so I couldn’t really say.

          • Estera clare says:

            The only other translation I’ve read is Constance Garnett, which is not great but it’s passable. (Alternatively, you could do what I did, which is cross out every instance of “wicked” in P/V and replace it with “spiteful”).

          • Chiffewar says:

            Looking at the original, Pevear, and Garnett translations side by side, I think I like ‘wicked’ better than ‘spiteful’. That might just be because Garnett’s is so clunky. Neither really captures the slyness and whimsy of the original. ‘Sick’ and ‘wicked’ don’t go together nearly as well as ‘злой’ and ‘больной’ (though better than ‘sick’ and ‘spiteful’.) When I read ‘wicked’, I think of a ‘wicked smile’, which is not necessarily as cold and malicious as a ‘spiteful smile’, and maybe has some humor in it … Spite also makes me think of particular grudges with explicable reasons, whereas ‘wickedness’ is innate, inexplicable — the narrator just is that way, deal with it.
            Would you never translate ‘злой’ as ‘wicked’, or just not in this situation?

          • SteveReilly says:

            Anyone have thoughts on the Guerney translation? It’s a revision of the Garnett translation, available in his Treasury of Russian Literature. I have it on my shelf and have been meaning to get to it. Just curious what people think of it.

          • Estera clare says:

            (replying to Chiffewar) I guess I can see the appeal of “wicked,” it just seems vastly out of place for me. (And I am very much not coming at this as an expert in translation, just going by what I think works in the text). In their foreword P/V talk about how the word zloy is associated with evil witches and the opposite of a “good fairy”, and this doesn’t fit with my conception of the Underground Man, who I think of as someone primarily reacting to his society. I think our different understandings of spiteful might be doing a lot of the work here—when I think of spitefulness I’m more likely than not to imagine a grudge against society, or even against existence or abstract concepts—like the way the Underground Man keeps railing against “two and two makes four.” Starting with the Underground Man being wicked feels like it throws the book out of step. If the matter is that he’s just immoral, on a basic unchangeable level, then what’s the point of discussing the Crystal Palace, or anything else? Would he just be this way no matter what society looks like?

            (There’s also the rather more minor fact that I think “wicked” makes for some confusing sentences, like “I refuse to be treated out of wickedness.” I can imagine not going to the doctor because you’re spiteful and as willing to turn that on yourself as anyone else, but because you’re wicked?)

            I think it’s possible that I am just missing an entire reading here—”substituting the psychological for the moral,” as P/V say—and I may have overreacted in completely disrecommending (contraindicating? what’s the word for that anyway?) P/V’s Notes just ’cause of that, but in the way I understand the book, the Underground Man can’t be separated from the society he lives in, and that’s exactly what the word wicked does.

          • laughingagave says:

            My father was reading Notes From Underground and talking about just that translation problem a few days ago.

            Since it’s a single, important word, the most obvious solution seemed to be to teach the reader the Russian word somewhere in the introduction, in all its depth and nuance, then use it in the text, as is often done with podvig, nous, and others.

            At the same time, I’m not sure that wicked is altogether out of place. “I refuse to be treated out of wickedness” makes some amount of sense. His wickedness is the mirror image of Elder Zosima’s holiness (from Brothers Karamazov) — whereas Zosima shows his holiness by being careful about everything and everyone, considering himself responsible for the sins of all and praying for suicides just in case it might do some good, the Underground Man exhibits his wickedness by being slothful and negligent of everything and everyone, even very normal human goods like his own health.

    • sflicht says:

      Not sure how impressive it is, but a non-Anglophone “classics” (?) author I enjoyed a lot and found philosophically interesting (at least years ago when I read his stuff) is Hermann Hesse (most of his novels are short except his magnum opus Magister Ludi).

      I would suggest classical music is also a good thing to spend time on in this vein, in terms of payoff per unit time invested. Find some you like (the big names are popular for a reason) and listen attentively to what seems like the best recording on Youtube (which is rarely the most-watched, but you can often tell from what music buffs write in comments to various recordings). I find it much easier to delineate major artistic movements (romanticism, modernism, etc) through music than through novels, but maybe that’s because I don’t like a lot of classic literature.

      • Of a few Hesse’s novels that I’ve read, I would recommend “Steppenwolf”. Fantastic read. I have never discussed this book with anyone, though, so it may not bring much conversational bang for page read. The band Steppenwolf took its name from this book.

        Some evidence in favor of the utility 😉 of reading Hesse: he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 “for his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style”.

      • AG says:

        Actually, the synthesis here of classical music and literature would be opera. You even got Shakespeare adaptations!

        Also, imho the easiest in on classical music is often in the famous overtures. Shorter runtimes, an associated story to match motifs to, and written with more of crowd-pleasing bent, since many are previewing the most iconic of the upcoming melodies. Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, one of my favorites, hilariously includes some melodies imitating the donkey’s bray for Bottom. The most famous classical romantic melody comes from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture. I’ve heard it said by some conductors that the two most perfect pieces of classical music are Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Beethoven’s Egmont overtures.

        And then after operas, you’ve got ballets. Sometimes I prefer them to operas, because then you’ve got more of a requirement to keep the rhythms snazzy, following dance style conventions, and still again an associated story to remember things by.

    • Nornagest says:

      Beyond Good and Evil is short and reasonably fun to read, but good God is it not very accessible. Nietzsche is denser than anyone else I’ve read bar maybe Thomas Pynchon, and his style’s very idiosyncratic; most of his books are less like reading Plato or even Kant and more like reading the Book of Proverbs. If you can read one straight through and get a detailed thesis out of it, either you’re a Nietzsche scholar or you’re way smarter than I am. He’s more a “read a few pages, put the book down, and think about them for a week; after you do this a few times eventually a half-dozen related theses will sort of self-assemble” kind of guy.

      • lazydragonboy says:

        Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice I found quite accessable and very good. I have never read any of his other books. I tried The Crying of Lot 49, but I couldn’t get the thread and gave up.

      • engleberg says:

        Jeez, I just read it as standard late-Victorian ‘Ma! Watch me reverse these platitudes and look cool! Ma!’. Samuel Butler and his fan Suzuki, Oscar Wilde, Frank Harris and water, so forth. Maybe in German it’s a masterpiece?

      • Robin says:

        I can’t help thinking that Nietzsche was an evil person. Why not Schopenhauer instead? The Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life (part of Parerga and Paralipomena) are easy to read and full of good ideas.

        I also liked the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

        Oh, and Franz Kafka! But please, not the “Metamorphosis”. “The Trial” is his best book, I would say, but “Amerika” is also very good, funnier, and must be particularly enjoyable from the perspective of an American. I always imagine it as a slapstick comedy from the twenties.

    • JohnBuridan says:

      I still think knowing about Wittgenstein is important and recommend Ray Monk’s biography on him.
      Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger casts a quiet but long shadow.
      Waiting for Godot and A Man For All Seasons are both great plays to read.

      I think Great Books tend to lean heavily towards literature and philosophy because a literary work has completeness and philosophical work creates conversation. But the daily grind of scientific and mathematical work does neither.

      Read biographies. From them you receive an arsenal of anecdotes, examples, perspectives which add value to conversation. Instead of reading “Great Books” to catch references. Read them so you can have better conversations. I think biographies can do this for you on the cheap.

      Also, I liked the advice that you should pick up foreign books that have been translated into English. They are likely to be very good if that extra effort of translation has been put in.

    • Tenacious D says:

      Narrative poetry probably fits the high-yield criteria. A lot of famous ones are often quoted even by people who haven’t read them; knowing the original context could be enriching.

      A few examples that come to mind are Book 1 of Paradise Lost, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“, and “Evangeline” (the latter is on my summer reading list).

      • Matt M says:

        Probably a little too obvious, but Shakespeare is good in this sense as well.

        I remember the first time I read Hamlet thinking, “Holy crap – half of the idioms I’ve ever heard are from this thing!”

        • Tarpitz says:

          This is completely true.

          The other half are from Top Gun.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Voice Over: In a world of danger, a world of intrigue, a world of murder a man will rise up and avenge his father. Coming this summer to a theater near you

            Top Dane

            Prince Hamlet enters with Lady Ophelia:

            Hamlet (call sign Maverick): I feel the need, the need to be
            Lady Ophelia (call sign Goose): . . . or not to be

            ************
            Flashback scene: King Claudius (call sign Viper) drops in behind King Hamlet’s (call sign Ghost) fighter, locks on and shoots him down, allowing him to become the head of Denmark’s fighter academy.
            *******

            During training Maverick ‘shoots down’ Yorick (call sign Jester)

            Getting off his plane he turns to Ophelia: Alas poor Jester, I knew… he’d fly right by.

            ***********

            Hamlet and Ophelia are flying when Ophelia’s oxygen goes out, she starts babbling in rhyme before ejecting and drowning.

            Laertes (call sign Ice Man) to Hamlet: You are dangerous.
            Hamelt: To thine own self be true Ice Man.

            **********

            Final scene: Claudius tells Laertes to shoot down Hamlet, but Laertes only wings him, and Hamlet shoots him down. Then Hamlet crashes his plane into the control tower killing Claudius.

          • JohnBuridan says:

            Beautiful

          • Tenacious D says:

            Very nice, baconbits9

          • John Schilling says:

            I feel like we need to fit Rosencranz and Guildenstern in here somehow, but I’m not sure there’s match.

            OK, time to rewatch Top Gun

          • Joseph Greenwood says:

            Or from the Bible!

        • tayfie says:

          That, of course, leads to the following joke:

          “There’s nothing special about Hamlet. It’s nothing but a moldy old plot tied together by a million cliches.”

          • dick says:

            “I don’t get why people are so impressed with Bullet – the car chase scenes are pretty much like the ones in all the other movies I saw growing up.”

        • knockknock says:

          “Half the idioms I’ve ever heard” … Not to mention half the titles of Star Trek episodes

      • Zeno of Citium says:

        Beowulf is great, although it’s been so long since I’ve read it that I can’t recommend a translation.

        • massivefocusedinaction says:

          I was really impressed with the Seamus Heaney translation, over whatever translation they gave us in high school.

        • S_J says:

          For Beowulf, I’d recommend either Seamus Heaney, or J.R.R. Tolkien (edited and published by Christopher Tolkien).

          I don’t think it works as “culturally relevant work that can be absorbed quickly”, unless your local social group is dominated by nerds who like Old English texts, and related Germanic myth-traditions.

          • Zeno of Citium says:

            Yeah, it’s probably not as central as The Illiad or The Odyssey in the Western canon, but it’s not that long and it’s still not uncommon to see references to it. Honestly, just reading the first section with Grendel would get you most of the way there, although the whole thing is great.

    • Skeptical Wolf says:

      The field of Chinese literature has been polite enough to identify a very small number of novels as its most influential classics. How quick they are to read will vary (some of them are quite long and translation quality is obviously a factor). My recommendation for this would be Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Water Margin. Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in addition to their historical importance, both cast long shadows on modern media.

      I’ve also seen lists that include one or more of Golden Lotus / The Plum in the Golden Vase (two translations of the same work’s title), and The Unofficial History of the Scholars. But as far as I can tell, the agreement on the importance of the first four is universal.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        In the case of Journey to the West, the 1943* translation into English by Arthur Waley under the title Monkey is perhaps the most available and the one I have read, though I have consulted others. It is a reasonably short (ca. 250 pages) paperback. Waley chose to abridge his translation by cutting the number of episodes in the story but claims not to have abridged individual episodes beyond removing what he calls “incidental passages in verse, which go very badly into English”. His version has 30 chapters to the original’s 100.

        More recently, Anthony Yu has published first an unabridged translation (in four volumes), then an abridged version called The Monkey and the Monk. I don’t know these well enough to compare them to Waley, or to say whether the unabridged version is worth reading.

        *Waley worked on his translation while working in the British Ministry of Information during WW2 as a censor, AFAIK of Japanese business cables. I need to check exactly what these cables would have been and who would have been sending them.

      • onyomi says:

        Of the “big” Chinese novels, most don’t have a high “value per page count” for someone who isn’t e.g. professionally researching Chinese lit, because they’re both very long and often episodic in nature (like the Iliad, Mahabharata, Tale of the Heike, etc., they are heavily influenced by oral storytelling versions of these stories designed to keep you coming back, day after day for an exhaustive telling of the exploits of a big cast of characters; the exception here would be Journey to the West, where a core group of characters engages in a repetitive series of “monster of the week” adventures). This doesn’t mean I don’t recommend them, just that I don’t recommend them on a “bang for your reading buck” basis.

        Plum in the Golden Vase and Dream of the Red Chamber (Story of the Stone; recommend the David Hawkes+John Minford translation) are quite different, much more like Chinese Downton Abbey than Chinese Dragon Ball Z. The former has a reputation for being perverted and indeed includes a lot of kinky sex. That said, it still influenced the latter in terms of its psychological realism and domestic novel themes, and is worth a read.

        Story of the Stone definitely deserves its title of “greatest premodern Chinese novel”; though it’s long, it’s jam-packed with psychological and philosophical complexity, not to mention a kind of intertextual artistry that may be hard to recognize without e.g. first studying Chinese poetry, drama, and Buddhism for years. Also one of those books where if you read it once and then read it again ten years later you will get something totally different out of it because it speaks to so many life stages and aspects of human experience.

        But enough gushing about Story of the Stone. If you really want bang for your premodern Chinese literature buck, read short stories by people like Feng Menglong, Pu Songling, and Li Yu. I especially recommend the short, pornographic novel “The Carnal Prayer Mat.” It’s hilarious but has quite a lot going on in it too, in terms of major themes of late imperial Chinese lit.

    • Freddie deBoer says:

      Swann’s Way

    • Chalid says:

      Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Short, readable, full of interesting anecdotes, and relevant to your interests.

      • Viliam says:

        A review: “Kuhn got me interested in the cultural history of science when I read this book around 1971. But the more I studied it, the more I became convinced that Kuhn’s thesis is simple, appealing, and wrong.”

      • Protagoras says:

        There are some interesting ideas, but what always struck me as terrible strawmanning of opposing views. Well, unless historians of science in Kuhn’s day were much less sophisticated than philosophers of science; I can’t help but cringe when he mentions “the positivist” who bears no resemblance to any of the famous positivists in philosophy.

    • Nicholas Weininger says:

      Thinking about philosophy, it strikes me that the Tao Te Ching and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations might both fit this bill.

    • Alex Zavoluk says:

      Aristotle is quite readable, and for very efficient return on time Asop’s fables are pretty good.

      Shakespeare is surprisingly witty and easy to follow. Despite our modern conception of it being highbrow, he had to appeal to the commoners in the cheap seats and there are plenty of jokes that aren’t hard to get (including crude ones). His writing is also just masterful; his reputation as the greatest writer of the English language is well-deserved. That being said, I dislike reading plays, and think that they are best observed being performed.

      One of my classmates described Lock as “boring”, which isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s only because the modern world is so absurdly Lockean that it can seem baffling that what he claims was ever considered controversial. You’re probably intimately familiar with most of his ideas, as they fall into the category of Anglo-American liberalism, but it’s more than that. Locke is the ur-Liberal, and his works are quite short. You once mentioned that philosophy since the 19th century should be “suffused with Hegelian ideas.” Well, the entire history of the developed world over the last 3 centuries is suffused with Lockean ideas.

      • engleberg says:

        Despite our modern conception of being highbrow-

        Yes, reading Loew’s translations you notice most classical authors aren’t highbrow. Homer wrote war porn and worse, Cicero made Al Sharpton look prissy. Then there’s Marcus Aurelius doing a self-help potboiler, the Neoplatonists were proof 1st century Crack was Bad, and the Bible makes funnymentalists look classy, and after a while you remember CS Lewis’ Screwtape saying that God is very unscrupulous.

    • littskad says:

      Thucydides and Xenophon are very interesting history.
      St. Augustine’s Confessions is one of the most important things ever written, and really very good.
      The Divine Comedy (the Inferno is more fun than the rest, I think).

    • Evan Þ says:

      My first guess is you used one of the words Scott banned because he thinks they cause more heat than light, and he doesn’t want the blog to show up in Google results for them. Feel free to repost using a synonym.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      You ended up in the spam filter for some reason. I’ve unfiltered you.

    • scherzando says:

      I love Dostoevsky, especially The Brothers Karamazov, and I find his writing thought-provoking, but unlike some people in this thread, I’m not sure it’s exactly what you’re looking for with this question. I don’t get the sense that all that many people have read Brothers [edit: in the US, at least – and really this is a guess], though it comes up fairly often talking with people who have; moreover, theredsheep is correct about it being “an enormous slog”, though it’s a rewarding one if you’re ever up for it.

      My suggestion for Russian literature based on these criteria is instead One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – it’s short, viscerally effective as a depiction of the Gulag, and historically important.

      If you haven’t read Hamlet, that’s about as high-yield as anything outside of the Bible in terms of its cultural influence. Another thing I would expect to be high-yield is to get a good poetry anthology and skip around in it – of course, the poems in it will vary a lot on all the axes you mentioned, but some will be high on several of them, and having a broad idea of different eras/poets and their styles is likely to be valuable in itself for these purposes.

      Because I happened to see it on my bookshelf: All the King’s Men is an very good novel and I think it’s fairly well-known – it’s most famously about political corruption and is worth reading just for that, but it’s also interesting as a psychological novel with the narrator’s reflections on personal/family/American history. It’s not especially short but is decently readable.

      • Nornagest says:

        My suggestion for Russian literature is The Master and Margarita. Shortish, very fun to read, influential, and you’ll finally understand the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”.

        • scherzando says:

          This is a good suggestion, for the reasons you mention – and the reimagining of the Jesus/Pilate narrative, which I found especially interesting. I just checked, and I had remembered it being much longer than it actually is – not because it’s at all dull, I don’t think, but maybe because there’s quite a lot going on.

          • Bobobob says:

            The reason you remember it being longer is that Master and Margarita was expurgated under the Soviet regime, and one of those censored versions wound up being translated. Suffice it to say you want the translation with more pages, rather than less. (You may also want to read the book to the accompaniment of the two-disc jazz adaptation by Simon Nabatov.)

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Maybe I’m shallow, but 50% of the reason I find The Master and Margarita fun to read is Begemot/Behemoth.

        • kaakitwitaasota says:

          My favorite Russian novel is Fathers and Sons, which is short enough (though dense, even so) to finish on a longish train trip or airport layover plus flight.

          My all-time favorite novel, The Maias, is similar to Fathers and Sons, but it’s very little-known outside the Lusosphere. That’s a pity, because Eça de Queirós is a masterful writer, and there’s an excellent English translation available. Like most nineteenth-century novels, the plot wanders a bit, but he’s second to none at creating good characters, so it’s never a slog. The plot finally does get its revenge, towards the end of the novel, with a twist that is rather unexpectedly frank for a nineteenth-century tome about high society. Everyone should read it, but since it’s not something everyone has (pretended to have) read, it doesn’t really fit Scott’s criteria. A pity.

        • thedooperator says:

          The Master and Margarita is an excellent suggestion. Let me also add Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which is essentially a highly successful attempt to adapt the general literary idea behind the Master and Margarita to the context of recent immigrants to the UK

    • sustrik says:

      1. Stanislaw Lem: Summa Technologie. A collection of futuristic essays. He discusses most of the themes that the rationalists would consider their own. Does so in 1964. https://www.amazon.com/Summa-Technologiae-Electronic-Mediations-Stanislaw/dp/0816675775

      2. Stefan Zweig: Erasmus & Right To Heresy. Portraits of intellectual who tried to stay balanced and calm in the face of fanaticism. Somehow reminds me of yourself. https://www.amazon.com/Erasmus-right-heresy-Stefan-Zweig/dp/B0007JQGES

      3. Heinrich Boll: Group Portrait with Lady. Super detailed picture how life in Nazi Germany looked from inside, for common people, from many perspectives. At the same time it’s very mundane, IIRC it doesn’t mention Hitler or concentration camps even once. https://www.amazon.com/Group-Portrait-Lady-Essential-Heinrich/dp/1935554336

      4. Umberto Eco: Foucault’s pendulum. Postmodernism exemplified. Also, you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about European mysticism. Highly entertaining in an intellectual kind of way. https://www.amazon.com/Foucaults-Pendulum-Umberto-Eco/dp/015603297X

      5. L.J.Borges: The Garden of Forking Paths. Collection of short stories. It has hypnotic effect on rationally minded people, even today.

      From my own cultural area what comes to mind is Jaroslav Hasek: The Good Soldier Svejk (Catch XXII from WWI). Lately I read a series of sci-fi novels by chief Czech rabbi (“Altschul’s method”), that reminded me of Unsong, but those are not translated to English AFAIK. Maybe Gustav Meyrink: Golem. An Austro-Hungarian counterpart to Lovecraft.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      By high-yield, I mean books that frequently come up, are impressive to have read, are relatively short, at least a little readable/fun-to-read, teach you important things you wouldn’t learn by reading the one-page summary,

      I assume you’ve read all of the Hebrew Bible multiple times. I’ll name-check the New Testament just in case.
      The Iliad. The Odyssey comes up a lot too, but the Iliad is easily twice as high-yield.
      I’m going to name a bunch of epics, because they’re shorter than a lot of Great Books novels with a higher total yield too.
      Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This should be your primary source for Classical myths if you’re not going to get scholarly about them.
      The Divine Comedy. Don’t stop after Dante and Virgil experience how gravity works on Satan’s body at the center of the earth. Keep going; it teaches you a LOT of important things about traditional Christianity, and Paradise can be as fun to read as Inferno in its own way.
      Paradise Lost I-X. Arguably the second-best verse or prose in our language, and some amazing characters.
      If you buy a Landmark Edition, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides suddenly become high-value-per-page. I can’t say enough good things about how they unpack important texts written with the assumption that you’re a 4th century BC Hellene.
      Wealth of Nations (pretty long, but it’s no Russian novel) and The Communist Manifesto.
      Notes From the Underground or maybe the Rebellion and Grand Inquisitor chapters from the much great Brothers Karamazov, both options I already see recommended.

      Not gonna touch philosophy for the moment.

      • Robert Jones says:

        Metamorphoses is useful to read because it was hugely influential, but great care is required in using it as a source of classical myths, because much of it was Ovid’s invention.

        For the same reason, I wouldn’t recommend the Divine Comedy as a way of understanding traditional Christianity (whatever that means). Where it certainly is useful (together with Paradise Lost) is in understanding popular but non-canonical beliefs about heaven and hell.

        In all three cases, the poet has taken existing beliefs and massively elaborated them. The poetic work has been very widely read and some subsequent writers have been so immersed in them that they’ve taken the poet’s description as accurate. But at least in the case of Christianity, this runs up against the fact that the church literally has canonical beliefs, which are only partly consistent with what Dante says.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Almost nothing Dante wrote was inconsistent with scholastic theology of the time (and scholastic theology is still Catholic canon to a large degree and influential on traditional Protestants), is what I’m getting at. It’s obviously not Scripture (the circles of Inferno are sui generis, and who’s in there is bitter political commentary), but it’s in no way accidentally heretical.

          • Deiseach says:

            Agreeing with Le Maistre Chat. He pushes the theology of the day, and will use a variant theologian to an officially preferred one if it suits his point, but he never veers into outright heresy.

        • Protagoras says:

          The Greek pagans regarded pretty much everything in the form of verse as canonical; it’s all divinely inspired (even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff). I’m not absolutely certain that would extend to material not in Greek, but I’m sure Ovid didn’t contradict the Greek tradition any more than the various Greek poets contradicted one another.

      • FLWAB says:

        Seconding Paradise Lost. The best epic poem I’ve ever read by a long shot.

    • Soy Lecithin says:

      Chalid already mentioned this, but I want to second their recommendation of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This gets talked about a lot in my circles, mostly negatively, so I was surprised at how much deeper and more thoughtful its thesis is than the parody version I had absorbed. To me, it rings true as a description of what scientists are actually doing when they “do science.” But more than this it also hints at profound things about truth, knowledge, and society.

      It is also an easy read, so high-yield.

      • yodelyak says:

        I’ve never read this, but viscerally reacted “no!” and then realized why: I’ve had multiple people (a professor, a boss) include in the stylesheet I was to follow that the word “paradigm” was not to be used even if I was sure I was using it correctly, because (the professor’s reason) they were so tired of it and so despairing of ever getting people to stop misusing it, or just because (the boss now) they’d come to hate it and believe it rotted gray matter merely to say the word, let alone use it to think.

        So, if it was catchy enough that it still has that strong a reaction, then it’s prolly going to have some cache, right?

        • Nick says:

          Not a professor, but I have a list of banned words and “paradigm shift” is on it. I haven’t read Kuhn’s book, I’m just tired of hearing it thrown around by Catholics as a way to lend legitimacy to reversing rather than developing doctrine.

          • albatross11 says:

            The set of people who use “paradigm shift” in conversation or writing is much, much larger than the set of people who have read Kuhn’s book. OTOH, a fair number of people (me included) have read the book, but never use that phrase, since it has been taken over by marketing types and no longer means anything.

      • kaakitwitaasota says:

        David Wootton’s The Invention of Science is more recent and has a lot to say about Kuhn’s view of the Scientific Revolution. It’s also incredibly readable and interesting. For example, everyone knows that the old “everyone thought the world was flat and Columbus proved it was round” saw is a myth–everybody in 15th-century Europe knew terra was round. But what was terra? Aristotle, and his medieval heirs, believed there was a round ball of earth (so terra) inside, and poking up out of, an orb of water, which formed the ocean; these were surrounded by the atmosphere (an orb of air), and then finally the orb of fire, where the fixed stars resided. This was why the ancients believed there could be no land in the southern hemisphere, since the orb of earth was smaller than the orb of water and could only stick out at one end. It’s hard to underestimate just how weird the premodern conception of the world is–as Wootton shows, we keep imposing our own understandings onto it, and read terra as “a round ball of rock, on top of which there are oceans that continents poke out of”. It’s not as simple as that.

      • Ryan Holbrook says:

        Somewhat related, The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler is a great account of the development of Heliocentrism. It focuses especially on Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo. Galileo comes off not quite as sympathetic as often thought to be. (The same author’s novel Darkness at Noon, about Soviet oppression, is also good – and short.)

    • Robert Jones says:

      In terms of “frequently come up”, you should read Crime and Punishment, 1984 and Catch-22. People just love referring to those books, often in quite elliptical ways.

    • Plutarch’s Lives is good if you want to opine on Classical civilization, and it consists of very brief, highly engaging standalone biographies. If you’re really after high-yield, maybe just read the biographies of famous people you recognize.

    • Orpheus says:

      The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. Incredibly fun and quotable.

      • SteveReilly says:

        I got married for the second time recently and a friend told me that someone had told him that second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience. He thought the guy had made it up and was surprised when I told him it came from Boswell’s Life. It’s one of my favorite books.

    • yodelyak says:

      Hm. I got carried away, and now am short of time to edit this. For what it’s worth:

      If you are talking to programmers who have woke politics:
      Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions has been described to me as “eye-opening” or something like that, in a lowered voice, on both coasts, a decade apart. Bonus: It is very short, and you can ignore anything that seems like it might be a political statement about a very narrow slice of life in another time–that’s what it is.

      If you are talking to energy/industrialists
      The Prize and The Quest by Yergin have stood me well, and been recommended to me variously. I’m not sure it really matters if you read these or something else/something shorter. Really depends if you want to hang with people who explain the importance of the Strait of Hormuz (might not quite get you there by itself).

      If you are talking to high school math teachers who’ve at any point taught Calculus, “The Calculus” by Leithold is the best calculus textbook for wicked-tricky but solvable high-school calculus problems. In my experience, merely being able to recall his name is worth a point, and recalling a specific problem or two from the “wicked-tricky” category, and how to solve them… this is a good example of something for which (as far as I know) no other book or cliff’s notes version does the same thing. You cannot get as good at Calculus with three non-Leithold calculus books as with Leithold alone. Albeit it’s probably very much not something you are likely to need at parties. But if you *do* find yourself talking to a Calculus teacher, who uses any other book, get them to consider getting a copy of Leithold and adding one or two of his harder problems as a bonus problem to students’ usual problems… just to keep the bright kids engaged.

      You can fake your way through any Russian literature conversation if you’ve read The Death of Ivan Ilych (a quite brief short story), Notes from Undergound, and the first half of The Master and the Margarita, or anyway that’s been my experience… mostly people who want to talk about Russian literature want to talk about it, not hear about it. My sense is that if I find time to read more, I’ll really enjoy it, but no more impressive or interesting at parties.

      You can’t avoid having to talk about Freud or Adam Smith (so count me as a 3rd or 4th vote for Wealth of Nations). Or Nietzsche or Machiavelli (The Prince is short!) I’ve never really tried to learn anything much from Cliff’s Notes or whatnot, so I dunno re: those. Also, I’m not really sure which of these are important–I haven’t gotten to enough of them to say, e.g., whether “The Gay Science” or “Beyond Good and Evil” is more deserving.

      Some lesser mentions… Erving Goffman is well-known enough that your site’s spell check knows to tell me that “Irving Goffman” deserves a “did-you-mispel-this” line under “Irving”. Maybe all you need on him is to read about the work he did, and the results he got–not to read his actual writing. Actually this 10-page article and his wikipedia page will do the job. Francis Fukuyama’s a one-trick pony, but a commonly referenced one. Hume is great, and so is Bertrand Russell, though I’m not sure anyone’s wanted to talk about them. Leo Strauss has been pressed into my hands by people very interested to get me to re-read classics with a more careful eye to noticing that most or even basically all classics were written to dodge a censor’s pen, so you have to read much more carefully for the real meaning than when reading, e.g., Thomas Paine.

      I think it is hard to encapsulate what is great about Hemingway (novel: The Sun Also Rises and short story: Hills Like White Elephants); there’s something good there about how to bear up under private pain. I also think there’s something great–really, really great–in “Franny and Zooey”. Uh, the world is hard. Suddenly I also want to say “Catch-22” (but skip everything else by Heller) and Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut (and all the rest is also good, albeit similar). But mostly I think you don’t need any of these, as long as you don’t get “So It Goes” tatooed on your neck without having read any Vonnegut, you can just prove you’ve read a hefty amount of some *other* respectable literature and whoever it is you’re talking to will soon not-so-grudgingly be quite impressed.

      With Christians, the most important *by far* are C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and G.K. Chesterton. Lewis probably beats the others combined, in my experience. Huge bonus if you’ve read something other than “Mere Christianity”, the Narnia series, and the Screwtape Letters. I’ve made a concerted effort to read his whole oeuvre, and I’d say the biggest bang-for-the-buck comment to make about him is to say these things:

      1. His personal favorite of his books was “Till We Have Faces.”
      2. He reported that he did not enjoy writing “The Screwtape Letters” because he couldn’t put anything good in it–no joy, no forgiveness, no grace, no companionship, no real comedy, none of the good stuff.
      3. The best book of his for modern audiences may be “The Abolition of Man”… and maybe just maybe it’s making an argument other than the deontological one. He wrote it explicitly as a defense of virtue even among atheists.

      But all you need from Lewis to get through most parties is either Mere Christianity or The Screwtape Letters. Popehat has a non-Ken-White post, written as Screwtape, Screwtape Embraces the Internet that is great companion reading. A blog post trying to use any C.S. Lewis character except Aslan, the White Witch, or Screwtape is probably doomed to fail–even among Christians not enough will have read it for it to have salience.

      It’s hard to go wrong with great plays or great biographies. Oscar Wilde’s plays are great, and The Picture of Dorian Gray was important to me as a young person, and whenever I want to be charmingly irrascible it stands me in great stead not as something to talk about, but something to channel. [aside: ditto P.G. Wodehouse] De Profundis is reportedly terrible and I’ve never, never encountered anyone who wanted to talk about it. Shaw is great. I’d love to know what specifically it was Shaw wrote/said that prompted Chesterton to (IIRC) disagree with Shaw by name about whether women should be encouraged in their tendency to see through all the complicated philosophies of men as just so much posturing. (Chesterton viewing Shaw as approving of that ‘seeing through’, and Chesterton tending to think that the complicated philosophies of men are load-bearing in some important respect, and not to be ignored, however inclined the gentler sex is to ‘see through’ all of it.)

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        In re wokeness and 2 dimensions: Probably doesn’t meet Scott’s specs, but there’s a bit in The Planiverse (a second visit to Flatland, with much more science and, as I recall, without the sexism) where the human who’s been in contact with a 2-dimensional world realizes he’s been thinking worse of 2-dimensional people merely because they’re two dimensional.

        This might be sort of a cliche now, but it hit me as a surprise when I read the book in the 80s.

      • Hanfeizi says:

        My favorites of C.S. Lewis’ work are A Grief Observed and Until We Have Faces; which are also his last, and most doubting, yet still permeated with faith.

        • Fans of Boswell may not be aware that he kept an account of his life, most of which has survived and been published. Not as readable as the memoirs of his contemporary Casanova and not as interesting an author, but still enjoyable as a first hand picture of a different world.

          • engleberg says:

            Boswell’s claim that he studied under an aged blind fencing master is too good to check, and all the better for it.

          • Where is that? My impression is that contemporary duels were with pistols and that Boswell makes it clear he was a coward who went to a good deal of trouble to avoid one.

          • engleberg says:

            @Where is that?
            @Boswell makes it clear he was a coward-

            The internet says it’s from Boswell in Holland and the master was 94, Franz Sircksen. My memory tells me the master was blind, don’t swear to it, but then I thought the story came from Boswell’s memoirs.

            Choosing a fencing master too old to hit hard fits ‘Boswell makes it clear he was a coward’. Humble-brag, maybe.

      • The Pachyderminator says:

        Abolition of Man and Till We Have Faces are good recommendations for C.S. Lewis. Perelandra is my favorite, but it’s not for all tastes.

        De Profundis is reportedly terrible and I’ve never, never encountered anyone who wanted to talk about it.

        Then you have the wrong friends. De Profundis is “terrible” in the sense that Chesterton uses the word in Ballad of the White Horse:

        It was wrought in the monk’s slow manner,
        From silver and sanguine shell,
        Where the scenes are little and terrible,
        Keyholes of heaven and hell.

        • James says:

          Yeah, I like De Profundis, though parts of it have an offputting tone that somehow combines the self-aggrandising with the self-pitying. But it’s true that no-one wants to talk about it.

    • ana53294 says:

      Out of Russian literature, the novel in verse Eugene Onegin is short, and easily readable. It is highly influential in Russia, with lots of references to it. Onegin has kind of become an adjective. All other books are much longer, so I would say in degree of influence to length that’s one of the best. Ruslan and Lyudmila is also very influential – and also short. Great way to familiarize with Russian folktales.
      I cannot say which translation is best – I read it in Russian. But I would definitely say, don’t use Nabokov’s translation as anything other than commentary. Part of the big charm of the novel is that it is a novel in verse, and the rhythm, stanzas and the metaphorical language it uses. Nabokov tried translating the verse, said it was mathematically impossible to do literally correctly (which it is), and lambasted anyone who tried (not the nices guy ever, Nabokov).

    • Aapje says:

      That is to say, I think that you often learn the most interesting and useful stuff when you aren’t intending to, sort of like what I understand the Taoist concept of wu wei to be.

      Serendipity.

    • eliza says:

      Greetings from eastern Europe!

      Solaris, Fables for Robots, The Futurological Congress – S. Lem
      The Magician of Lublin – Isaac B. Singer
      Red cavalry, Odessa Tales – Isaac Babel
      The Captive Mind – Cz. Miłosz
      Barbarian in the Garden, Still Life with Bridle – Zbigniew Herbert
      Cinnamon Shops – Bruno Schulz
      The Tenant – R. Topor
      Travels with Herodotus, The Soccer War, Shah of Shahs – Ryszard Kapuściński
      Zama – di Antonio
      One Hundred Years of Solitude – Marquez
      Conversation in the Cathedral – Llosa

      • Do you, by any chance, come from the tribe of Lechites? Cheers from Warsaw 😉

        As for the books: I second reading Lem, who surely would be interesting for the folks around here. Lem discussed things like singularity at least a decade before Vernor Vinge: Vinge’s “The Coming Technological Singularity” was published 1993, whereas Lem wrote “Golem XIV” in 1981.

        • eliza says:

          Ha, ha! Yep, that proud Winged Tribe, no other! I suppose that fact of reading this blog make me kind of magician, since I’m from Lublin;)

          As for author You mentioned: Universe must have great sense of humor to give Jews and Poles their first true prophet in the person of Lem. 😀

          Also, it would be fascinating to study how local culture had influenced his books. Recently I found several old jewish/polish/centraleuropean jokes mixed in his s-f narrations. Besides that, he alone allow to answer in satisfactory way to old question “did our country contribute to world culture?”

    • melboiko says:

      High-yield literature:

      The Nausea, Sartre; Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevski; The Bell Jar, Plath; The Silent Cry, Ōe; your pick of any novel by Kawabata (I like The Old Capital);The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt.

      If you can complete even part of this list, you’ll understand the difference between genre lit (Harry Potter etc.) and “literary” lit, and what is it that we humanities types are always raving about, the Human Spirit and so on.

      As a bonus, these stories are genuinely interesting and entertaining. They might feel a little difficult to “get” at first, in the same way that classical music or exotic cuisine feels weird at first. Just stick with it, re-read paragraphs that seem confusing, and quite soon you’ll find yourself having pleasure with them.

      Once you get used to this kind of reading, try Chekov, Woolf, Raduan Nassar (I hope the translation is half as good, he does… things… with language that seem hard to translate), and poetry (The Iliad + Odyssey being the obligatory picks; it’s very important to read them in verse; ideally you should listen to them sung, but some weird cultural glitch of post-industrial society has made it hard for us to find poetry the way it was meant to be enjoyed, i.e. musically.)

    • Tarpitz says:

      About the industry I work in:

      Adventures in the Screen Trade – William Goldman (film)
      The Empty Space – Peter Brook (theatre)

      Literature not already mentioned:

      Jude the Obscure – Hardy
      Howard’s End – Forster
      The End of the Affair – Greene
      Brideshead Revisited – Waugh
      Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Capote
      Lolita – Nabokov
      Amadeus – Shafer
      Any and all of Larkin’s poetry

    • Ryan Holbrook says:

      Some books with American social history:

      Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger. A Horatio Alger story actually by Horatio Alger.
      The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. About the conditions in meatpacking factories in the early 20c.
      Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. About the breakdown of a Company Man.
      Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. Another Company Man breaking down.
      A Traveler from Altruria by William Dean Howells. Socialist Utopian literature.

      Kafka is pretty high-yield: The Metamorphosis (novella), In the Penal Colony (short story), The Trial (novel).

      • Ryan Holbrook says:

        Some other random books with a high impressiveness to length ratio:

        The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. A postmodern detective story.
        Illuminations by Walter Benjamin. Essays on literature, Kafka, Baudelaire, Brecht. Hannah Arendt writes the introduction.
        Collected Stories by Robert Walser. Very short stories, somewhat like Kafka, but more innocent-seeming.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      Shakespeare is immensely referenced and great fun, and comes in chunks much shorter than novels, but not everyone enjoys reading plays rather than watching them.

    • Deiseach says:

      It does depend on the company you are in; for general social chit-chat of a mildly cultured nature, I imagine your best bet is a quick trawl through the New York Times best seller list for non-fiction (I imagine some combination of pop-psychology, pop-science, or pop-history is currently the book in vogue, though right now the soul-searching ‘trawl through the heart of America to see where it all went wrong’ political hand-wringing volume seems to be also popular ).

      I’m going to be very cynical here and say that I don’t think you need necessarily read the latest work en vogue to be able to have a bluffer’s conversation about it, just a quick skim and read the reviews to see what are the talking points.

      For different contexts, e.g. the likes of us on here who do read Old Books by Dead White Males, it’s probably different 🙂

      In no particular order, and you may already have read these:

      – The Divine Comedy. (What a surprise, sez you). All of it, not just the Inferno. In fact, if you can only face one book of it, skip the Inferno, leave the Paradiso aside, and go straight to the Purgatorio. There are decent translations out there in both poetry and prose, what one you pick will be the one that appeals to your own tastes (I’m constantly banging on here about the Hollander translation which I think did an excellent job, but there are other good ones).

      – Suetonius’ The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. A good gossipy read, very much subject to the author’s prejudices (and/or the prejudices of the audience he was keeping an eye to as he wrote). A social diarist’s gossip column crossed with a historian.

      – Journey to the West. A Classic of Chinese literature. Again, plenty of translations out there, and you may want to get an abridged one as a lot of the second half of the book is very repetitious; Tripitaka is kidnapped by yet another demon that wants to eat him as the rumour is that eating the flesh of such a pious priest will confer immortality; Monkey has to rescue him; generally this is done by him showing up going “I’m the Monkey King, surrender now or I’ll have the tedious task of slaughtering you all”; they don’t; he slaughters them all; rinse and repeat. The first half is definitely the best, and Sun Wukong is a very appealing character and my second favourite monkey god.

      Dream of Red Mansions/Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone. Another Classic of Chinese literature, and available in translation. Again, you might want an abridged version. Combination of mythological/metaphysical fable or parable with gossipy tale of high status Chinese household and its ultimate downfall. A memoir by an aristocrat who has come down in the world, lamenting the fall of the elegant days of yore (but carefully tempering it not to appear critical of any Imperial – or even more importantly, the court eunuchs – authority).

      – The Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Classics of Indian literature and mythology. Only translations in English I’ve found are 19th century ones which need to be approached by the reader as though on safari through the dense jungle, machete in hand hacking away. Easiest way is to cheat and watch a TV serial instead, which will give you the main points. Ramayana contains Hanuman, who is my first favourite monkey god and an absolute sweetheart, I love him to bits.

      No-one is ever going to ask you this, but sticking up for my own nation – the Táin Bó Cúalgne 😀 (Though it is just barely possible someone somewhere might mention Cú Chulainn, in which case this gives you his background).

      EDIT: I was forgetting! An oldie now, since it was published in 2000, but Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence is great fun, wonderfully gloomy in an Eeyorish type of way and thus very amusing if you have the kind of sense of humour that is amused by long lists of how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket in these degenerate days (all the way back in 2000, God knows what he’d make of 2018), an amazing display of erudition, very good at giving the Continental view of things over the usual English and American philosophy/history we all know, and an absolute door-stopper of a book (if you ever need to bash someone over the head with a blunt instrument, the hardback of this will do very nicely, provided you can lift it that high).

      Personal favourite, but probably nigh-impossible to find easily now: Cephas Goldsworthy’s The Satyr, his biography of Lord Rochester. Hobbyhorses being ridden wildly off in all directions, as some reviews (when they bothered to review the actual book rather than give a ‘greatest hits’ of Rochester’s life) pointed out; Goldsworthy is, if not an atheist, at least not at all approving of organised religion and casts a lot of doubt on Rochester’s supposed deathbed repentance. Starts off with a bang and keeps on going, maybe not the best historically but an enjoyable read.

      • Or you could just read Rochester’s Satyr.

        • Deiseach says:

          Oh, you should do that anyway, though it’s a little sour. But Signior Dildo is just funny (if a little catty about some well-known names of the day) 🙂

      • BlindKungFuMaster says:

        What’s your favourite monkey god?

        • Deiseach says:

          Definitely Hanuman, as I said 🙂

        • Watchman says:

          I think the key question is what is the rest of Deisarch’s top 10 monkey gods? Or if we’re feeling extensive and slightly esoteric, top 50.

          • Aapje says:

            I better be in there.

          • Deiseach says:

            Don’t have any past my top two; I do have a slightly longer list of favourite smith gods:

            1. Aulë i Talka Marda – yes, even though he had not one but two Maiar go dark side. He is so lovely in the story of the creation of the Dwarves.
            2. Hephaestus – compared to the rest of the Olympians (with the exceptions of Hestia, Athene and Hades) he comes off very well.
            3. Vulcan – yes, I know he’s the Roman version of Hephaestus. Yes, he is still sufficiently different for me to like him separately.
            4. Wayland
            5. Goibniu

      • engleberg says:

        I liked Dorothy Sayers’ version of the Paradiso. If I ever build a space station it will be named The Rose of the Empyrean.

    • Anon. says:

      Start with the Greeks. The Iliad, Herodotus, Thucydides. I assume you’ve read the philosophy stuff already.

    • Lambert says:

      The Tao Te Ching.
      https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching

      One of the two most important works of Taoist philosophy. Quite short and readable. Much more of a philosophical than a religious text. Some themes should be oddly familiar to readers of War and Peace.

      • Viliam says:

        Seems to me that different translations of Tao Te Ching are wildly different from each other, so if one does not impress you at the beginning, give a chance to another.

      • Deiseach says:

        I think we’re getting off the track of “what Big Name Books can I casually name-drop at dinner party conversation?” but this topic is so delightful, I don’t mind digressions and divarcations.

        If we’re going for the Tao Te Ching, I’d also recommend the Ascent of Mount Carmel – the poem around which and upon which the entire spiritual guide is constructed. You don’t need to read the rest of the book, but if you’ve ever heard the line “casting my cares among the lilies” and wanted to know where it came from? Also an influence on Eliot’s Four Quartets.

        While we’re throwing in poetry – yes, Yeats, Eliot and Auden. Pound as well, for his Cantos, even though he’s what the young people nowadays call “problematic” for his Fascism (the real thing, not the term so lightly tossed about today).

        • ana53294 says:

          If you are going for obscure Spanish Catholic mystics, why not choose one that is not a White Dead Man?

          I find that Saint Theresa of Jesus is a great poet, even if you read it as an atheist. Her love of God sometimes feels very carnal, and her poetry is also very profound. “I live not within myself” is my personal favourite. And, you know, she started the movement St John followed.

          And if you are going for Catholic saints, why not go for the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola? It’s not poetry, but it was really influential.

          • Deiseach says:

            why not choose one that is not a White Dead Man?

            Ah, sister. Do we dispute the petals of the White Rose?

            It’s not poetry, but it was really influential.

            Because I am going for poetry, not spiritual exercises. This is not a contest in who is the more influential! This is about language, beauty, and inspiration!

          • ana53294 says:

            Ah, sister. Do we dispute the petals of the White Rose?

            I think we are talking about different Theresas. If I understand correctly, you are referring to this one, while I am referring to this one*. The French St. Theresa’s poetry is also beautiful, though, from the samples I have found online.
            My favourite of St. Theresa of Avila’s poem is this one. This one is even shorter, but really spiritual.

            *I think I made a spelling mistake. The Spanish St Teresa is without an h. The other one is French.

          • Deiseach says:

            The reference to the rose was not to the Little Flower (though good link), it was to the Rose of the Empyrean where the souls of the saved make up the petals of the rose of light.

            It’s a Dante allusion 🙂

        • Lambert says:

          The Tao Te Ching itself isn’t that name-droppable, but the concepts within are.
          Just this evening I mentioned the whole ‘carving reality at the joints’ thing, which comes from a Taoist proverb.
          ‘Zhuangzi and the butterfly’ is also pithy and deep enough to sound wise mentioning.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I was surprised to find that “Rule a great empire as you would cook a small fish– carefully so it doesn’t fall apart” was from the Tao Te Ching.

          • Protagoras says:

            The idea of carving at the natural joints of reality is also present in Plato (Phaedrus 265e, and I seem to remember he might have said something similar in Cratylus).

    • DavidS says:

      A meta-suggestion with a focus on appearing cultured: sensible thing might be to read (and read about) a lesser-known work by a well-known author. So while you know the basics of Paradise Lost by other people talking about it and so can bluff it, you’ve read Samson Agonistes. Or some of the Shakespeare nobody really reads.

      In my experience, if you know something really random/obscure people assume you know the rest too.

      • Deiseach says:

        Or some of the Shakespeare nobody really reads.

        Pericles, Prince of Tyre if you want to be trendily obscure; Titus Andronicus if you want the early ‘imitating the gore-hound stuff that was popular’ starting off playwright – and the pun that still works and is understandable, four hundred years later (when the empress has just delivered her baby, unmistakably the offspring not of the emperor but of Aaron the Moor):

        DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
        AARON: That which thou canst not undo.
        CHIRON: Thou hast undone our mother.
        AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.

      • eightieshair says:

        That was used as a joke in an old 80s sitcom that I can’t remember the name of. A decidedly uncultured character wants to convince a woman he’s interested in that he’s educated and so starts reading Shakespeare. When his friend asks which play he’s reading he says “Coriolanus” , and then adds proudly “No one reads that one!”.

        • Matt M says:

          Hey – I somewhat enjoyed the random modern remake!

        • Deiseach says:

          My sister had to do that one for her Leaving Cert and to this day she’s never forgiven the Irish educational system 🙂

          (I was luckier; being two years older, we did the cycle of Julius Caesar for the Inter Cert and Hamlet for the Leaving Cert).

          The Tom Hiddleston version seems to have been well-received, as well.

        • AG says:

          Well, what does Cole Porter say about this?

          The girls today in society go for classical poetry
          So to win their hearts one must quote with ease
          Aeschylus ans Euripides
          One must know Homer, and believe me, eau
          Sophocles, also Sappho-ho
          Unless you know Shelley and Keats and Pope
          Dainty Debbies will call you a dope
          But the poet of them all
          Who will start ’em simply ravin’
          Is the poet people call
          The Bard of Stratford on Avon
          […]
          Just declaim a few lines from Othella
          And they’ll think you’re a hell of a fella
          If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ‘er
          Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer
          […]
          With the wife of the British ambassida
          Try a crack out of “Troilus and Cressida”
          […]
          If you can’t be a ham and do Hamlet
          They will not give a damn or a damlet
          Just recite an occasional sonnet
          And your lap’ll have honey upon it

          • WashedOut says:

            Best thing i’ve read all day. Thankyou!

          • yodelyak says:

            you skipped the coriolanus line though!

            “… If she says she won’t buy it or like it
            Make her tike it, what’s more As You Like It
            If she says your behavior is heinous
            Kick her right in the Coriolanus
            … “

          • James says:

            Really quite incredible that writing at this level was, at one time, the main stream of pop music. Just amazing.

            “Pop music is dumb nowadays!” is a perennial cliche, but it’s hard to read things like this and not feel like we’ve lost something.

          • albatross11 says:

            What fraction of stuff written at the same time do we remember now?

          • James says:

            If you mean to imply that this is an outlier and that the median song was much worse, well, yes, I agree to some extent, but, though I’m no expert on the period, from what I can pick up it really does seem like there was a level of wordplay and wit that’s been lost. Cole Porter wasn’t the only one.

            Can you imagine something like this getting anywhere near the top forty if released nowadays?

            I guess you can point to rap as something current with a high density of impressive linguistic effects, but it doesn’t seem like that’s doing the same thing, somehow.

          • AG says:

            @James: When it comes to the top 40, lyrical density is and has always been secondary to have a good iconic melody/rhythm/hook. Hamilton wouldn’t have become nearly as popular if the sonic whole wasn’t also super earworm-y. And the song I quoted is accompanied by one of the best melodies you could ask for.

            With the advent of technologies that enable vocal processing, the role of lyrics in shaping vocal timbre is much less important. Voice is just another instrument in the mix, and lowering the diction diversity enables more remixing the same sounds into various patterns. Rhyming in order to achieve the polyrhythm replaced by chopping.

            And the other reason lyrics are not so prioritized is that back in the day, such songs were excerpted from musicals. The songs’ lyrics have a function beyond music, to interact with specific character and plot, imparting information to the audience they wouldn’t get otherwise. In this case, it’s from Kiss Me Kate, in which the characters are putting on a production of Taming of the Shrew. The equivalent today isn’t any one genre, but the case of an artist from any genre putting out a concept album. Probably the most critically acclaimed recent example would be Beyonce’s Lemonade, so perhaps check out the lyrics to the songs on that.

          • James says:

            @AG:

            You’re right that technology has a lot to do with this. Why spend all that effort on creating linguistic effects through your writing now that we have the plugins to produce a catchy, glossy superstimulus digitally? And even though the highbrow/hipster thing is currently to look down on things like autotune as brainless, I love all that stuff too. I’m just equally aware of, and slightly saddened by, what’s been left behind.

            I hadn’t thought of the musical angle—that’s interesting.

            Lemonade‘s an interesting suggestion for a modern analogue, but I didn’t really like it, apart from the track that sounds like weird reggae (“Hold Up”?).

          • mdet says:

            Lemonade is best enjoyed as an artsy short film, I’d recommend watching it over listening to it. (Hold Up is good, Freedom is my favorite)

            But if you’re looking for concept albums with a cohesive narrative, lyricism, and themes, then Kendrick Lamar is unrivaled. good kid, mAAd city’s narrative is so vivid you could straightforwardly adapt it into a movie.

    • zzzzort says:

      For philosophy of science, Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy is impressive relative to the investment required. Lucretius ‘On the Nature of Things’ doesn’t come up that much, but it’s fun to know an early atomist/greek natural philosopher that wasn’t completely wrong about everything.

      For literature, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is super short and enjoyable. Similarly Borges. “The Time Regulation Institute” by Tanpinar probably won’t come up on it’s own, but it’s great, and you can always use it to respond to people talking about Orhan Pamuk.

    • jstr says:

      I very highly recommend the two books by the late Robert M. Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values” (1974) and “Lila: An Inquiry into Morals” (1991). Two philosophical novels with enormous depth and reach, and both highly original, while at the same time connected to important philosophical works of both Western and Eastern tradition. (Also about insanity /mental illness.)

    • Nick says:

      Rod Dreher has been calling Houellebecq prophetic for years now. He brings him up nearly whenever he talks about contemporary France.

    • albatross11 says:

      Jane Austen’s novels are pleasant and easy enough to read, and are widely considered important literature. (I noticed while reading them that I was using my SF-reading skills–inferring the rules and assumptions of this foreign world in which they live and accepting their worldview while still occasionally thinking “no, don’t talk to the local doctors, they’re all quacks!”) There are also a lot of pop-culture references to them (Bridget Jones, Clueless), and film/TV versions of most or all of them that are pretty decent, if that’s your thing.

      I read some of Dumas’ works (The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo) when I was in high school (or maybe early college), and felt like I was totally beating the system–getting social credit for reading Great Literature while I was actually reading these rather trashy romps through French society dodging outraged husbands and plots by Richleau.

      Cyrano de Bergerac is referenced everywhere (to the point of invoking the “Hamlet is Derivative” trope), and is a quick, fun read. (I don’t remember what translation I read.) Similarly, Frankenstein was a quick, fun read.

      • Aapje says:

        Will future generations read 50 Shades of Grey as Literature?

        • The Nybbler says:

          We read 19th century popular trash and 16-17th century fart jokes, so why not?

          • Nornagest says:

            Hard to say. There have been wildly popular novels that sank without a ripple after the fad died — there was a time when every literate household in America had a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, and who do you know that’s read it now? But there were others that are still read today. Not sure what makes the difference, except that I don’t think it’s quality.

          • James says:

            And there are books that no-one read at the time, or for decades afterwards, which are now regarded as classics, like Moby-Dick.

        • ana53294 says:

          I think Harry Potter has a better chance. Or Elena Ferrante.

          • Matt M says:

            Agreed. What’s the old line that all the “best” popular music as selected by critics just happens to be the music that baby boomers loved in their teenage years?

            The millennial generation is going to declare Harry Potter a classic and there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it. Once they have full control of the media it’ll be ridiculous.

            The prospects for 50 Shades are much bleaker, because it’s audience already skews older and is exclusively female.

          • AG says:

            So, Harry Potter and Hunger Games are the current frontrunners for millenials’ classics. What else? A Series of Unfortunate Events?
            Honestly, I do think Twilight’s chances are good. And 50 Shades won’t because it’s literally Twilight-derivative.
            Redwall, Tortall, and Young Wizards seem like they’ll become Pern-tier “classics” (Ender’s Game-tier at best), doomed to the genre ghetto. But it is interesting that the mainstream pickings are so thoroughly genre. Do we have a historical fiction or modern day drama that’s anywhere close to Harry Potter cultural consciousness?

            Game of Thrones, lol.

            Will select comics and manga be canonized? Sailor Moon? Naruto? Homestuck? Miss Marvel? Walking Dead?

          • andrewflicker says:

            Harry Potter probably makes it, considering how durably it’s stayed on bestseller lists. Hunger Games hasn’t a chance- it’s already mostly faded and will continue to fade, and never had the sort of market penetration Harry Potter had.

          • Matt M says:

            Will select comics and manga be canonized?

            Dragonball Z has a chance. Nothing else.

          • SpeakLittle says:

            @Matt M:

            I think certain stand-alone Allen Moore works have a chance, such as Watchmen or V for Vendetta. Much as I like The Killing Joke or his run on Swamp Thing, I don’t know that those have the same strength.

            Maus comes to mind as well.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Jane Austen’s novels are pleasant and easy enough to read

        Some of them are pleasant – or even more than pleasant. Some of them are unbearable. Are you really telling me you can get through Mansfield Park without a desire to throttle Fanny strong enough to make you a danger to those around you?

    • Calvin says:

      Of the people who have already commented – I would particularly agree with:

      Kafka – Metamorphosis and The Judgment
      Heart of Darkness (alternatively you can just watch the movie Apocalypse Now)
      Shakespeare

      I would add the following that I haven’t seen mentioned:

      Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
      Sun Tzu – Art of War

    • Erusian says:

      Frequently come up and are impressive depend heavily on the who. There are few books that are impressive to everyone, and those that are tend to be so well known a lot of people read them (and so they cease to become as impressive). This is true even within the Anglo-American tradition. Literature tends to ‘belong’ to groups, to such an extent that I often find literature is useful as a tribal shibboleth. (Well, if he can actually intelligently discuss the wieszcze he can’t completely be one of those ignorant foreigners.)

      • A favorite of mine, although I’m not sure if it works for the thread purpose, is Casanova’s Memoirs. An extended first person account of 18th century Europe from London to Moscow, servants to sovereigns.

    • Aaron Cohen says:

      Slightly sarcastic, but useful answer: How to Talk About Books you Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard is a short, entertaining book about the (relative) irrelevancy of actually having read many of the books various intellectuals claim to have read cover to cover.

      Honest answer: I agree with some of the other folks saying that reading these books individually with the idea of ‘yielding’ from them is probably the wrong approach — I think it is necessary to start with the question: ‘why have these works survived?’ and my best guess at an answer is not exclusively in their usefulness, but in their ‘artfulness’ or ‘sublimity’ or ‘beauty’ or whatever word you want to use to talk about fuzzy stuff. With that in mind, I’d suggest starting or reading selections of as many of the works as possible, and sticking with the ones that grab you, rather than tactically trying to derive which will be most useful — different books mean very different things to different people. I’d suggest Bauer’s Well Educated Mind as a list from which to pull potential books from, in the Western tradition. Not sure if similar lists exist for others.

      One other thing: I’d argue towards a semi-chronological reading, simply because these books are in conversation in a major way — most of the authors of ‘great books’ were exceedingly well read (and largely lived in times when it was possible to have read ‘everything’ and did so), and so, e.g. I think reading Dante without having read the New Testament, is going to be much ‘lower yield’ than reading the New Testament first.

    • SamChevre says:

      I have a recommendation that I think meets the goal, but not the criterion.

      Dorothy Sayer’s books on Christianity do a good job of summarizing clearly a lot of key points that aren’t original, but they are much easier to read than Aquinas, and much more clear and direct than Chesterton, and more in-depth than Lewis. So, I recommend them highly. And they read really well–she was a professional novelist, and it shows. I prefer Creed or Chaos, but The Mind of the Maker is incredibly worth reading, and it’s available online so you can see if it’s the kind of thing you like before buying a copy.

      The Mind of the Maker

      The village that voted the earth was flat doubtless modified its own behaviour and its system of physics accordingly, but its vote did not in any way modify the shape of the earth. That remains what it is, whether human beings agree or disagree about it, or even if they never discuss it or take notice of it at all. And if the earth’s shape entails consequences for humanity, those consequences will continue to occur, whether humanity likes it or not, in conformity with the laws of nature.

      The vote of the M.C.C. about cricket, on the other hand, does not merely alter a set of theories about cricket; it alters the game. That is because cricket is a human invention, whose laws depend for their existence and validity upon human consent and human opinion.

      A good excerpt from Creed or Chaos is at the link.

      • I can’t tell from this whether she had read “The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat” or just seen the title. It isn’t a story about people believing that the world is flat.

        • SamChevre says:

          I have often wondered the same. It’s one of Kipling’s best stories in my opinion, but yes, it’s definitely not about people who believed the earth was flat.

          • At a slight tangent … . Orwell wrote a moderately sympathetic essay on Kipling–from which it was clear that he not only had not read Kim, he did not know it existed.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        The Mind of the Maker was called out as one of the best books of the 20th Century by Jacques Barzun, a Franco-American intellectual who lived through most of it.

    • CheshireCat says:

      Surprised you didn’t mention The Stranger by Camus, I see that recommended a lot in rationalist-adjacent circles. I read it, and while it didn’t speak to me like it seems to for a lot of similar depressed loners, I still enjoyed it a lot.

    • Silverlock says:

      I quite enjoyed Machiavelli’s The Prince. And Chesterton is always worth reading, if only for sheer joy in the language. It has been years since I read it, but I still look back fondly on The Man Who Was Thursday, although I do now know whether you would consider that “high-yield.”

      • theredsheep says:

        I want to like Chesterton, but I can’t get past his tendency to say the same damn thing three times, in slightly different ways, for emphasis. He’s enjoyable in small bites.

    • googolplexbyte says:

      Progress and Poverty by Henry George.

    • qwints says:

      Focusing on short, influential and commonly referenced:

      1) John Donne “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” – find out what “no man is an island” actually means

      2) Ernest Hemingway “The Old Man and the Sea” – one of the most defining works on masculinity in the modern age.

      3) Veblen’s – “Theory of the Leisure Class” – one of the most accurate and predictive economic texts with a concept (conspicuous consumption) which is frequently relevant

      • yodelyak says:

        Veblen reaches much the same typology as the authors reviewed in Staying Classy. Veblen’s other stuff is not as good.

        But absolutely I found it very curious that Staying Classy had three other authors who’d reached something that looked somewhat like Veblen’s typology, while apparently independent.

    • Bugmaster says:

      I could be wrong, but AFAICT “readable/fun” and “Cultures” are practically antonyms. The Great Books are not supposed to be read, but rather studied and investigated. Just as you wouldn’t skim a math book for fun without doing any exercises or following along with any of the proofs, you shouldn’t read a Great Book for pure entertainment. You are supposed to analyze it, familiarize yourself with the cultural milieu of its setting, and thus learn the deep philosophical and/or moral truths it is designed to impart.

      In other words, Great Books are much more akin to textbooks than to light fiction.

      • Nornagest says:

        This is what your high school English teacher will tell you, but I have my doubts. I don’t know any serious readers that don’t do it for pleasure, whether they’re reading litfic or SF or Fifty Shades of Gray.

        • Bugmaster says:

          No, my high school English teacher told me that all the Great Books are wonderful and amazing and super exciting. I made my conclusion (above) after investigating such claims.

          But don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not saying that the Great Books are somehow “bad”. They’re not entertainment, but then, neither is your high school Calculus textbook. Does that mean that you should shun it, and read SF instead ? No, obviously not.

      • aientiaerationum says:

        A undoubted exception to the proposition that “high culture ain’t fun” are the justly celebrated Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian.

        Read as ripping yarns of intrigue, romance, and adventure, O’Brian’s novels can’t be beat. Yet simultaneously, pretty much any given episode, in any of O’Brian’s novels, composes an historically accurate, in-depth account of (e.g.) the radical-versus-moderate Enlightenment, and/or the politics of the British Empire, and/or the evolution of modern medical practice, and/or the early roots of modern evolutionary science (etc.).

        When we compare (for example) O’Brian’s character Sir Joseph Blaine with the historical personage of Sir Joseph Banks we find plenty of similarities. And yet, even with zero appreciation of the historical context that O’Brian so scrupulously respects, O’Brian’s tales move along pretty darn entrancingly. 🙂
        ————
        PS: the lecture collection Professor Borges: a course on English literature opens further doors to literary appreciation.

        “About two hundred years ago it was discovered that [English Literature] contained a kind of secret chamber, akin to the subterranean gold guarded by the serpent of myth. That ancient gold was the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons.

        Hence, to better appreciate Tolkien, read Borges! 🙂

        Generally speaking, both in literature and in critical analysis of literature, what matters most are the “best” works … and it is inherent in the nature of literature, for the “greatest” literary works to be most brightly illuminated by the “greatest” critical analyses of those works, such that appreciation of the critiques, greatly enhances appreciation of the works, and vice versa. This back-and-forth discourse is what culturally distinguishes “great literature” from just plain “stories”.

        • Andrew Hunter says:

          I deeply enjoy Aubrey/Maturin, but be aware that some people find them frustrating. I like to put it as: O’Brien knows just about everything about the era, and does not give a fuck if you can keep up. There will be long passages about sailing, and about British marriage politics, and social class indicators, none of which will be explained–you can figure it out on your own or you can sink.

          I enjoy that–though I’d be very happy if someone released an annotated edition with 10+ footnotes/page explaining all the references–but some people don’t. And I can see why. The one I just finished had a major scene at a captain’s dinner party aboard ship during which two people start an extended Latin pun contest. Untranslated. If that doesn’t sound fun, don’t read them.

          • Aapje says:

            I really dislike it when authors sprinkle different languages in their books, especially if it is for no good reason, to show of their erudition. It was really the only dislike I had for ‘Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company*,’ a polemic against the Dutch colony of the Dutch Indies.

            That is actually a book that some people here may like, as it in a way reminds me of War and Peace (published 9 years after Max Havelaar), combining both fictional narratives of people, with non-fictional descriptions (of the colonial system). In other ways, it is more like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a polemic against an unjust system.

            D.H. Lawrence really liked it and wrote a foreword for it.

            * The subtitle is ironic

    • sharper13 says:

      Yeah, the top three I thought of are partially covered by others:
      1. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is my personal favorite (and the Three Musketeers, but the Count is better, get the unabridged Penguin Classics translation, not any of the abridged versions!)
      2. “Art of War” by Sun Tzu is one you have to read (and study) if you haven’t already.
      3. “Collected works of Shakespeare” (mentioned elsewhere) which you could also consume as movies/plays if you have the time

      Not as likely to be well known and probably only brought up in your conversation circles if you bring them up honorable mentions you would learn from:
      1. Thomas Sowell’s Conquest and Cultures: An International History (and the companion books “Race and Culture” and “Migrations and Cultures”, but Conquest is the best one to me)
      2. “Economics in One Lesson” by Hazlitt
      3. “The Law” by Bastiat.
      3. Something by Hayek (Road to Serfdom, or The Fatal Conceit) or Mises (Human Action, perhaps), if only to see what it looks like when someone correctly predicts the outcome of a grand social experiment and is mostly ignored by those conducting it.

      Less classically minded, but very beneficial:
      1. Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change” You’ll find this quoted everywhere and much of the management/self-help industry using it as a basis going forward. Supports the field sort of like “Thinking, Fast and Slow” does for behavioral economics or like a modern Dale Carnegie book (both of which you could also read if you haven’t).
      2. “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” by Wiseman and McKeown. Explains way more about effective people management than anything else out there. One side effect is that you’ll get a lot better at managing groups. Another is that you’ll start to really notice when people are doing it wrong, diminishing others who work with/for them, sort of like once you can hear music better, badly played/sung music sounds worse to you.

      In terms of things to watch you may not have (if you’re younger), you can’t go much wrong with Monty Python shows and movies for sheer intellectual comedy entertainment.

    • tayfie says:

      For all your criteria, The (Anti-)Federalist Papers fit better than anything else I can personally recommend that you might not have considered.

      They are relevant to any topic involving the history or government of the United States, especially relating to the Constitution.

      It’s impressive because many people know about them but few have actually read them.

      They were published in the newspaper. This means that each run of essays had to stand on its own and be approachable for the common man. The downside to this is they start to feel very repetitive if you read them all.

      What I think they most bring to the table that can’t be captured in a one page summary is how the Founding Fathers thought about the gravity of designing a new country, the breadth of ideas and examples that were around at the time, and the incredible detail of all the nuts and bolts of designing a country.

    • J says:

      Bhagavad Gita is short and worthwhile. I liked Stephen Mitchell’s translation. Also, Oppenheimer’s quote just scratches the surface; the surrounding several pages are all quite evocative in the context of nuclear weapons.

      Neil Gaiman just came out with his rendition of the Norse myths. I haven’t read anything to compare it to, but I enjoyed it, and he seemed to be serious about authenticity.

      I’ll second the endorsement of Dante and Vonnegut.

      I don’t think this book is particularly famous, but “Structures, or Why Things Don’t Fall Down” was recommended by Elon Musk, and is a very enjoyable layperson’s introduction to mechanical engineering, ranging from greek arches to bird feathers to animal arteries.

      Also, someone here a long time ago recommended Impro by Keith Johnstone as a book about improvisational theater that’s insightful far beyond theater. I agree, and also it got me into improv which is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. I now see the world as consisting of two kinds of people: improv and scripted, who have almost completely non-overlapping approaches to things like dance, music, and even engineering.

    • A good heuristic for finding great books might be to look at the list of Nobel Prize in Literature awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Literature

      Some great books from that list that I’d like to especially recommend:
      “Steppenwolf” – Hermann Hesse
      “The Plague” – Albert Camus
      “The grapes of wrath” – John Steinbeck
      “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
      “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum” – Heinrich Böll
      “Never let me go” – Kazuo Ishiguro

      I think that of these books, “The Plague” gives the biggest conversational return on page read.

    • sclmlw says:

      Lots of people suggesting their favorites, but not necessarily books that are a good fit for Scott’s prompt. One that hasn’t been mentioned that’s fun, full of cultural dividends, and not a Russian novel (sorry Bros. Karamazov, but as much as I love you you’re too long to make this list):

      Dracula

      I’d also add a couple other quick reads, such as:

      Candide
      Ender’s Game (classic for SF)

    • gemmaem says:

      Seconding Pale Fire. I enjoyed it as a novel, loved the way it messes with your head, wrote a sonnet in response because I felt like it … and I also enjoy it as a way to not talk about Lolita. Nothing like “I haven’t read it, but I’ve read Pale Fire, it was so cool the way Nabokov played with the narration, don’t you think?” to separate the people who like literature from the people who just wanted to be edgy.

    • frenris says:

      Art of war – sun tzu

      Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – Wittgenstein

      Tao te ching (and compare to above, makes far more sense to me as a result)

      On certainty, blue and brown books – Wittgenstein

      True believer – Eric hoffer (Hillary Clinton’s favorite book!)

      Anna karenina or war and peace- Tolstoy. Read Tolstoy for the characters. I think I understand people better because of his books. Usually Anna karenina is advised, but this crowd might actually not be annoyed by the hundreds of pages war and peace dedicates to describing logistics of the Russian army.

      Paradise Lost – Milton. Don’t bother with the whole thing unless you really feel you must. At the very least books 1-4 & 9.
      On the road – Jack Kerouac. Preferably the less edited version.

      Beautiful losers – Leonard Cohen Not sure if it qualifies as significant enough but Leonard Cohen is amazing.

      100 years of solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I need to read this again taking notes, cause there are a lot of similarly named characters with similar slightly different personalities and it’s a challenge to keep track.

      Various Icelandic sagas – comedy! Law! Murder! Where you learn such rules as “it’s not murder if you don’t kill them by surprise and you pay their family afterwards.”

      History of Western philosophy – Bertrand Russell. People who study philosophy hate this book not because it’s bad but because Russell spends half of it trashing various philosophers. Found it quite fun to read given the intensity of the subject matter.

      Decline and fall of the Roman empire – Gibbon. Historians hate these books. Obviously not short. It’s still amazing.

      An enquiry concerning human understanding – Hume. Is/ought. Problem of induction. Hume is a god of philosophy.

    • Urstoff says:

      I assume you’re already reading Moby-Dick every few years like all right-thinking individuals do.

    • pontifex says:

      Solzhenitzen’s The First Circle and the Gulag Archipelago are worth reading.

    • knockknock says:

      Wow, you mentioned two of my faves back to back right there at the end.

      Pale Fire is a riot, the ultimate “unreliable narrator” novel. My favorite writer said it was his favorite novel, so I gave it a shot.

      Long Goodbye is a great read but also valuable as a look at America about to stumble into the modern postwar era of suburban affluence, with its whole new set of dark problems amid the sunshine

    • Nietzsche says:

      You’ve probably read this already, but Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. It is short, brilliant, and I feel both awe and envy every time I read it. For something less philosophical, how about Richard Rhodes’s Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb? Easily the most terrifying thing I have ever read–I finished it and wondered why I was alive. It’s longish, though.

    • nimim.k.m. says:

      I don’t have not many great books to suggest that have not been suggested above.

      I recall that Scott has already read Lovecraft and other genre fiction. One way to reap more benefits from that (and appear more “cultured” to many if you care about that) is to get knowledgeable about its history.

      How much have you read Edgar Allan Poe? My favorite stories by him include The Gold-Bug, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

      Someone recommended Dracula. If you ask me, it is certainly not great literature, but an example of a possibly worthwhile pick of genre history.

      Then I’m also going to recommend something completely different: in addition to “reading great books”, how much you know about cinema? Especially the films that are significantly older than you? If you pick good ones, I would regard that immensely high-yield activity: each individual work is usually consumed under two hours (which is much shorter time for me than time spent reading a novel of any length; I also realized how silly the current Hollywood standard of making all films extremely long marathon experience truly is), watching it is also enjoyable activity itself, and the visual medium has had a significant effect on the Western (popular) culture. If you go for “great classics”, ability talk about them in any detail may also appear impressive to many because surprisingly few people bother with them (their mistake). Some suggestions:

      * Some early Chaplin shorts, and all of his features (but if you pick one, maybe The Great Dictator? If you pick two, add Limelight.).
      * Marx Brothers. (Frankly, I was disappointed with Duck Soup. Maybe A Night at the Opera? Harpo wrote an autobiography which I hear is excellent fun to read.)
      * Buster Keaton (The General).
      * Kurosawa was eye-opening regarding where the Star Wars and Clint Eastwood’s Dollar Trilogy and many others came from.
      * Jacques Tati
      * Orson Welles
      * M by Fritz Lang
      (Add your recommendation below, I’d like to hear them. For example, I’ve always wanted to see the full Metropolis.)

      Caveat: Often you won’t learn anything that you wouldn’t learn by reading a summary (and maybe you could pass as a cultured person in a party going by just a summary), so in that sense the idea is at odds with your laid-out criteria. But I like to believe that experiencing the book/film on you own can make conversations with other people more meaningful. But then another caveat: I can’t remember a live discussion about films that I would have particularly enjoyed, but some good text-based discussion on the internet, so maybe my recommendations are way off for your purposes.

    • SamChevre says:

      It seems to me that there are several types of books that could meet the description, and it might be worth grouping some of the books recommended by type, so I will try.

      Books that give you tools for thinking about the world:
      Atlas Shrugged
      The Wealth of Nations
      Antifragile
      Structure of Scientific Revolutions
      The Prince
      Theory of the Leisure Class
      Progress and Poverty
      The Art of War
      The Law
      (Bastiat)
      I would add Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions” here.
      Most philosophy and religious literature aspires to this, but relatively little succeeds.

      Books that were hugely influential so you see the concepts or language or imagery all over the place:
      The Bible
      Shakespeare
      Bhagavad Gita
      Socrates
      Aristotle
      Herodotus
      The Divine Comedy
      The Odyssey

      Books that give insight into specific people or cultures:
      The Brothers Karamazov
      Democracy in America
      The Federalist Papers

      Most novels
      Most biographies
      Books that do this well can make it into “tools for thinking about the world”.

      Very quotable:
      The Rubaiyat
      Most poetry
      Shakespeare
      Chesterton

      Books that everyone talks about this year:
      The NYT non-fiction best-sellers list

      • SamChevre says:

        Also in the “tools for seeing the world” category, missed by mistake:
        The Communist Manifesto

    • migo says:

      “Dom Casmurro” and “The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas” by Machado de Assis (Brazilian, 1839–1908). Brilliant, delightful, touching (relatively) short novels.

    • Michael Handy says:

      A lot of people have mentioned The Prince, but I’d like to mention the Discorsi as well. If you don’t read it you are missing 80% of his political theory (He was a republican after all). Reading Livy first is useful, but not really needed if you have a vague idea of pre-imperial roman history.

      The key point is that while the base laws of Realpolitik hold, a republic is a very different beast to a dictatorship, and that collaborative rule requires a different set of institutions. Especially useful are his instructions on building a civic and engaged society. He does bang on about citizen militias as usual though.

      As for other books, Montaigne and his essays, especially the small penguin collection with “On Friendship” are short and some of my most influencing pieces.

      I’m also a fan of Kropotkin’s work, especially, “to the youth” if you want to read something from a hard left perspective. His compassion and assumption of good faith from is enemies always makes him stand out from his peers.

      In literature, Frankenstein isn’t that long, and an excellent read.

    • I’ll give you a list of “books that should be considered Great Books but are woefully underrated.” They combine readability, importance, and novelty.

      “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes
      “Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy
      “Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell

      • DavidS says:

        I’ve heard of the Bicameral Mind one and sounds fascinating, but is there any reason to think it’s not (brilliantly inventively) incorrect about its central thesis.

        • Viliam says:

          What exactly do you consider to be the central thesis?

          I am a fan of the book. I have a small child, and it is often fun to observe her self-directed commands and explanations. So it makes sense to me that humans may have special brain modules (not necessarily corresponding to the two hemispheres) — one for commanding yourself by temporarily role-playing an external authority, and one for obeying the commands and solving the situational logistics. Though, are those self-commands really perceived in “god mode”? I have no evidence, and children suck at introspection even more than adults.

          It is the historical explanation that makes me most suspicious. Suppose that “consciousness” (of the modern type) is a trait that appears only under some circumstances, which mostly did not exist historically — so, how exactly would you explain this trait using evolutionary perspective? How can a “potential ability to do X, under special circumstances” become a common trait of the whole humanity in a situation with zero selection pressure in favor of the trait, because the special circumstances allegedly did not exist yet?

          (As an analogy, imagine that there was never light on Earth, and everything including humans evolved in total darkness. Only in 20th century, someone invented electric power, and suddenly there was light. And people who spent enough time in light, started to use their eyes. — Wait, says the guy who learned about evolution on high school: How do you explain that humans had functional eyes, when there was no ancient evolutionary advantage for having them?)

          • John Schilling says:

            How do you explain literacy, when there was no ancient evolutionary advantage to wiring the visual cortex to Wernicke’s area?

            The human brain is very good at learning new tricks without having to evolve new wiring, and that’s been the case since at least the Neolithic period. That’s an entirely different matter than developing new sense organs, which are not required for a shift from bicameral to unicameral reasoning.

    • Joseph Greenwood says:

      Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are both short, fun, readable, and are referenced in lots of places. I’d also strongly recommend reading Matthew 5 through 7 in the King James Bible.

    • mwengler says:

      Camus The Stranger: existentialism 101.

      Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land. Grok it.

      Heller Catch-22. It is WWII, you are with the good guys, and it is absurd.

      Stephenson The Diamond Age. A powerful story about the future, some of the most interesting future tech i have ever seen.

      Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Why i did a philosophy minor.

      Atlas Shrugged already covered in this thread

      Jared Diamond’s Guns Terms and Steel and also Collapse. A lot more about human civilization then I ever learned anywhere else.

      All of these changed my life.

    • mwengler says:

      Steve sailer is the obfuscated author of half blood Prince about Obama. Why the weirdness in the original comment?

      • dick says:

        He’s currently banned from commenting here and I’m guessing his name was obfuscated because people have been admonished for bringing him up in the past.

    • youzicha says:

      I think for becoming Cultured, Deleuze and Guattari is a standard choice now? E.g. the reference in The Gig Economy,

      Normally I just fulfill my smart contracts and go back to reading Deleuze and Guattari, by which I mean I play first person shooters while the pdf is up on my other monitor, but this job presented a unique opportunity over and above making lewd jokes about rhizomatic assemblages on Discord.

      I guess A Thousand Plateaus is not short, but it’s helpfully divided into many allegedly independent essays.

  62. Scott Alexander says:

    Teams, please report your adversarial collaboration progress here. Please nobody else reply to this comment.

    • JohnBuridan says:

      We are finishing up tonight with the intention of having it submitted before midnight.

    • TracingWoodgrains says:

      We have finished and submitted our collaboration.

    • lamaybe says:

      We’re done the bulk of our adversarial collaboration, but I have some time conflicts preventing me from completing my part. I just asked my adversary if he’d be OK with a two-week extension.

      • sclmlw says:

        We’re working on a draft. Shouldn’t have a problem getting this done in the next two weeks.

    • maintain says:

      My argument was that porn makes you lose motivation. The guy I was supposed to be collaborating with (who loves porn) lost the motivation to collaborate. I’m not sure if this counts as a victory for me.

      • vaaal888 says:

        This would be really interesting. Maybe you could post/send me your part of the argument?

      • R.G. says:

        As an (unfortunately) porn-addict who works pretty hard: would be interested to see the argument

      • jeray2000 says:

        Could I try taking over as your partner? I’m a bit reluctant since I don’t think I’d do a very good job, but if there are only three other teams that’s a 25% chance at $1000.

    • Erusian says:

      My partner was under the impression the deadline had passed and stopped replying to me.

    • Keller Scholl says:

      Not ready, unlikely to be ready in the immediate future, and intent on finishing regardless of eligibility status.

    • tayfie says:

      We couldn’t make our schedules work in June and I haven’t heard from my partner since.

      Don’t expect a report from us. We both did a decent amount of research, but never synthesized it into anything readable. I still enjoyed it though and would love if this became a regular thing.

      • tailcalled says:

        I think one problem that normal adversarial collaborations might have is that getting a platform for them might be hard. Competitions like this help motivate it because there’s a good chance for the result to be read by a lot more people.

      • fion says:

        Since you’ve done the research, if you still don’t hear from your partner would you consider writing up what you’ve learned and posting it in an OT some day? Obviously it’s a shame to not get an adversarial collaboration out of it, but it also seems a shame for your research to go to waste, and well-informed one-sided persuasive essays are good too.

        Just a thought. 🙂

      • dlr says:

        What was your subject?

    • a reader says:

      My partner-adversary abandoned at the very beginning, after two email exchanges, without giving an explanation – just stopped responding to my emails.

      The collaboration was about transgender children, if they should transition in childhood and take puberty blockers or not.

      I gathered a lot of documentation (mostly studies, but also some press articles and parents’ experiences), so, if somebody else is interested to be my “adversary”, to advocate for transition in childhood, and Scott gives the two-week extension lamaybe & sclmlw asked, I am still interested to do it.

    • Soeren E says:

      We signed up to collaborate on investigating if AGI could be developed within 1000 years.

      Unfortunately, the adversary had some stuff come up in real life, and forgot about the project. I wrote down some of my thoughts, but I was not satisfied with the quality of my work. This (and lack of time) caused me to not remind him actively.

      I’ve sent a reminder now, and maybe we will continue.

    • tailcalled says:

      My adversary pretty much abandoned the project after writing some initial notes. I’ve tried getting a new partner some times during the timeline, but have had no luck. I don’t seem to be able to get one, and even if I did, we would have to start from the beginning.

    • JRM says:

      We will not complete, sadly.

      • toBoot says:

        Sad indeed! It’s been a pleasure bouncing thoughts around though – let me know if you want to pick this up someday when life is less hectic!