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I just realized that Google removed the exact phrase search feature. Oh, enclosing a search string in quotation marks still theoretically has some effect, but it now returns all phrases that it thinks have the same meaning as the search string, and it’s predictably bad at discerning this. And obviously, this is much less useful for finding poems, song lyrics, stray lines remembered from books or web pages, etc.
I’m furious and baffled that Google, after assembling one of the greatest teams of programmers in the world and building amazing things, and is now intent on ruining all their products for the sake of ad revenue, trendiness, or paternalism (“Users may think they want an exact phrase search, but we know what they really need”). I mean, I’ve always distrusted their decisions on their secondary products, but for God’s sake, how can Google be fucking up search like this?
Definitely annoying. One of the biggest things I want an exact phrase search for is in order to detect plagiarism; enter a suspicious sentence from a student paper, and see if the paper is cut and pasted from the internet.
If you click on “Tools”, then on “All Results” in the top bar, there’s an option for “verbatim”, which turns a lot of that stuff off. Or use Bing.
The sad thing is they’re often right. It’s actually quite useful for finding poems, song lyrics, and stray lines _misremembered_ from books.
Thank you!
I didn’t know that you could do that, only that recently searching has been a lot more capricious than normal.
*sigh* I’m quite capable of knowing when I want an approximate result, than you so much google.
I wonder if this is part of how (and why) Amazon has trashed their search function. One day I asked for a specific author, giving both first and last name, correctly spelled. 50% of the answers were (at best) people in the same genre, and 50% of those were explicitly labelled ‘sponsored’. While I suspect an A/B test was involved, and I got the side that worked worst, perhaps part of it was Papa Bezos trying to help the poor illiterate customer who couldn’t possibly remember an author’s name accurately. Except without so much thinking this true, as copying the standard “modern” way that everyone in tech (now) does search – newer so therefore better ;-( Maybe I shouldn’t be quite so convinced this was an example of rapacious monopolistic behaviour, and reason to avoid any and all businesses owned by Bezos. (Not a boycott. Just self protection – I don’t choose to be cheated, and lying about which results were sponsored said to me that the company – and presumably anything else owned by the founder – is routinely dishonest.)
At any rate, vendor beware – if I can’t find what I want to buy, I usually don’t buy anything at all. I’m not going to suddenly buy some not-what-I-was-looking-for product that happened to send an ad my way, along with the broken search results.
Ruining all their products for the sake of revenue? What do you think is the purpose of their products?
You’re right, of course, economically and rationally. It’s just hard to let go of the idea that products used by me and paid for by advertisers should be designed for my benefit.
I wonder how long it will be until the same products are available, tailored to and paid for by the people using them. I fear the answer may be ‘never’, as I watch advertising invading previously pristine spaces.
IMO, there’s a place in the seventh cicle of hell for people who sell their customers a product (for real $$$) and then also use that product as a means of advertising – either to that customer, or to others. (Yes, I realize that was the newspaper and magazine business model, and once governments forbade ads-masquerading-as-news-stories, and made that stick, they weren’t too bad. But other than increasing the physical weight of the media, and causing the story to have lots of “continued on page m” making it harder to follow, those ads din’t cost the consumer very much – and in some cases (classified ads) were even the reason for buying the paper. Computerized ads are much much worse. and as for paying extra because a garment has some company’s logo on it – anyone who does that deserves the way they are being cheated.)
I had the same feeling six years ago when they started tailoring results depending on who was asking. I mean, I see the motivation, but I really liked the days when you could send somebody a google query and expect it to be as deterministic as a URL.
For some reason, every time me and the wife sit down to listen to music together, my YouTube recommendations end up looking something like this:
1. Obituary – Insane [OFFICIAL VIDEO]
2. Boney M – Daddy Cool 1976 HQ
It’s been decades since I took an anthropology class and my last history class (both as a teenager at a “community college”), and I have had nor formal “humanities” education after that, so I’m hoping for some knowledge from you guys.
In a previous post I wrote:
and maybe it’s my ignorance, but other than some “gathering” societies (which often keep their numbers low via infanticide) which are sometimes portrayed as “egalitarian”, I can’t think of any actually existing post agriculture societies that aren’t oligarchies.
I’ve seen utopian schemes of “anarchists” and “libertarian socialists” (those who describe Leninist regimes as “state capitalism”) but none of them seem credible to me as achievable, and while “distributism”, “guild socialism”, and “syndicalism” have an emotional pull on me I find it hard to shake the suspicion that trying to change into any of those kinds of societies will make things worse and, except maybe for short lived voluntary communities that are usually inspired by religion (when they don’t become Jonestown),.the 20th century style “welfare state” is pretty much as good as it can get for many for long.
Has there been anything better for most people?
Can there be anything better for most?
What?
How?
I invite your thoughts.
Seems to me that none of the developments seems inevitable. Feudalism could have maintained itself if it felt no pressures, and it mostly felt internal pressures in only a few areas (from what one might have called proto-capitalism) but if it weren’t for those developments then we might have proceeded as serfs and lords as technology progressed (although IMO feudalism would have progressed more slowly, which is why everyone started converting to capitalism, because it was essential to not get passed by).
And socialism/communism dont need to follow. I do see the appeal because greed is a human quality. Capitalism’s strength is it acknowledges greed and seeks to harness it to build prosperity. Feudalism also recognizes greed and utilizes force to quell it. Socialism/anarchic marxism don’t deal with greed all that much. Socialism somewhat does because it harnesses greed for political power (very similar to feudalism), but anarchic communism simply assumes away greed. It cannot work otherwise.
I do think you’ve hit on an important part of why social welfare appears to work, at least in the short term. It balances the greed of the productive in making society more prosperous with the greed of the unproductive to maintain political power.
My take on this subject, which if nothing else has been fairly stable over the past 10-15 years:
Almost all discussion of economic organization, at least in the U.S., is in terms of two extreme positions where one is treated as a pure ideal and the other as a contaminant. Actual economies have collective and individualistic aspects. “Capitalists” differ in how much of the evil of collective aspects in the economy they accept as necessary, but generally favor much less of it than we currently have. Socialists differ in the amount of value they see in market forces, but generally favor much less of that sort of thing than we currently have.
Attempts to arrive at a principled position in neither camp haven’t gone very well. Many Democrats, especially those in the “New Democrat” lineage, are now basically pure technocrats. Their only goal is “good management”. As a result they are almost purely reactive. All they can do is point to specific problems and offer fixes; there is no real “direction”. (Admittedly many of these people are, internally, embarrassed socialists, who still have the ideal in mind while also considering it totally unworkable in practice.) There is a different set of groups that sometimes calls themselves “third way”. The first step in third-waying is to decry the extremity of both U.S. political parties. The second is to decry the budget deficit. The third is to propose entitlement cuts. If there is a fourth step, it’s not yet evident.
Suppose that like technocrats and third-wayers you don’t see a particular problem with an economic system that mixes individualist and collective aspects, seeing both as serving valuable functions. The challenge, then, is arriving at some other guiding goal or principle that is not just reactive. When do you shift things to be more collective and when do you shift things to be more individualistic? How do you move past mere reaction?
I have decided that the “macro” realm is the wrong place to look for such a principle. And I think that there is already a relevant “micro” principle that has been guiding a lot of social organization anyway, which can serve as an overt political principle. The micro principle is that it is socially valuable to reduce unnecessary suffering when practical. This probably sounds merely technocratic, but I don’t think it is.
When I think of social problems now, my first and main method of evaluation is to think of myself in the same room as someone with the problem, and consider whether I would feel the need to arrange help if I could, possibly interfering (or at least being heavy-handed) in the process. I could be entirely naive, but I actually do think that there is a lot of similarity (although not to the extent of consensus, certainly) in attitudes toward such situations, at least within if not across cultures. We spend much more energy arguing about what is happening or may happen than arguing about who is and is not suffering.
One conclusion that I’ve come to about all this is that I’m actually happy about how poor most people are about preparing for potential medical problems, retirement, and other issues can be filed broadly under “insurance”. I’m happy because that lowers the extent to which intervening in those areas distorts the market aspects of the economy. If people were generally much better about such things, you would have to step a lot more carefully. But most people are just terrible at it, leaving “the market” a crappy tool for dealing with all that. You really don’t lose much.
Just as important, things one wouldn’t feel the pressure to help out with are probably better left alone. That would include a lot of stuff currently regulated that we don’t really need to. I’m OK with requiring food service, hair and nail workers, and so forth to attend brief, focused safety classes. Such classes, and whatever certification is involved, should be available to anyone who passes the class. But beyond that, individual decisions and independent rating systems seem fine.
At this point, further discussion of capitalism and socialism mostly makes me want to tear my hair out. Most of our problematic micro-patterns are familiar and long-standing: greed, laziness, envy, hatred, tribalism, various cognitive deficits and irrationalities. We’ve added some new problems that are more challenging to differentiate and describe. The idea that either just socialism or just capitalism will ideally address the macro-patterns that result from the massive interplay of those micro-patterns seems silly to me. Things are messy.
Yes, of course there is a level beyond which it is counterproductive to tax people. No, the U.S. is not already past that point when it comes to the wealthy, or probably even very near it. Those wealthy will argue that only a flat tax is fair until the day after it passes, and will then argue for a head tax. (Think about this last one.) It is very easy to over-regulate and waste government money. It’s hard to know the percentage, but some homeless people can probably be helped only slightly, because they can’t be convinced to act in ways that lead to better outcomes (in our eyes), and coercing them is at least dubious, expensive, and the outcomes aren’t much better anyway. There are real poverty traps, and it might be worth socially engineering the situation around low-income people, even in a very heavy-handed way, to smooth out the effort/resource ratio, so that contributing a bit more almost always gets you a bit more of what you want.
We often already try to do what we can and should and not do what we can’t or needn’t. Why can’t we discuss our social organization directly in those terms, at least for a while?
This is rambly but you probably get the gist.
Think of the seven deadly sins: Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth.
My sort-of cynical guess is that societies do best when they can harness one or more of those toward pro-social ends. Capitalism does a really nice job of harnessing greed (which can be really destructive in all kinds of ways) toward pro-social ends. I want all the marbles, so I build a whole industry or invent the industrial research lab. The baker wants to get paid, so somehow this results in me being able to get bread.
Any society where people care a lot about their reputation, and where your reputation is positively correlated with pro-social behavior, harnesses pride. My tendency toward pride makes me want to do pro-social things so I can have higher standing. I build monuments to myself in the form of libraries and museums and schools which people benefit from for centuries to come. (But they remember the name Carnegie.)
Societies that channel young people into marriages harness lust toward pro-social ends–forming stable pair bonds and raising kids.
And so on.
By way of an answer, let me describe for you the worst outcome I can imagine.
As the capitalist class accrues ever more wealth to itself, the world’s total wealth also rises. Eventually, there are enough resources for everyone to be as comfortable as they want; the human appetite for luxury being finite, let’s say that this involves having a medium-sized house with a robot butler and maid; it’s not impressive, but it’s nearly impossible to be uncomfortable in, and if that’s not your speed, there’s economically-equivalent housing available in the forest, or in cities. Anything beyond this level is, at the layer of abstraction on which we’re operating, a status game.
What’s left?
I see the answer in the specter of feudalism, in the prima noctis. I see it in outgroup politics and bullying. I see it in art, and the concept of ownership and belonging being applied to beauty and truth. I see power over other people – dominance and destruction and loyalty and love. And I see, hanging horrifying on the horizon, the prospect of a world whose economic engine is tuned to the delivery of these things to the people who hold economic power today. When the human appetite for material comforts is exhausted – and it surely can be, no matter what artificial scarcities we can invent to play with – the human appetite for power will remain. And it is easy for me to imagine a world in which the majority are needlessly starved by a system designed to deliver unto the oligarchs unconditional love.
I am horrified by it. But I see it creeping closer, brought in by the tide of the service economy. A large portion of this country is employed in the business, not of making things to improve people’s lives, but in doing things to improve people’s lives. Why do we, as a society, pay wal-mart greeters? For the same reason we pay prostitutes, and why we pay them extra to kiss.
How is this an answer?
I do not know if this outcome can be avoided. But I do know that there are quite a lot of people who would rather die than see this state of affairs come to pass. I think I am one of them, and I think that the proportion of people who feel this way has been growing since the Enlightenment. I cannot actually determine whether the proportion of people who feel as I do has increased, but I see a trend of the symptoms of the paradigm growing much more slowly than the power to implement it, and the institution of norms that protect against it. How will we stop it, in the end? I don’t know. But I think that we will. And I think that, eventually, the choice will become unavoidable. And if we don’t thread the needle – well, there’s Oryx and Crake and Starfish to tell us what that world might look like. Eventually, such a system will crack, and hopefully we’ll leave something behind that can understand the fundamental importance of power. And if we don’t, I don’t think we’ll have deserved to.
It sounds from this as though you assume that the jus primae noctis actually existed in European feudalism. It’s not at all clear that it did–for details, see the Wiki article.
Would starting with the consumption level at which most people lived through most of history and then multiplying it thirty-fold accomplish that? That describes the current U.S. average level.
I have faith that just as modern Americans, despite possessing enormous material wealth by historical standards, manage to find lots more things they would like to have, so will their descendants after another order of magnitude or two increase.
How long do you think it will continue? More to the point, how long do you think that human labor will be a major part of the process of furnishing non-bespoke goods?
My concern is that, as the cost of robot labor falls below the cost of keeping a person alive, people will take on service roles more and more; we already see this happening with outsourcing and highly-automated factories. As computer programs get better and more accessible, the need for human support labor – accountants, tech support, salespeople, uber drivers, and the like – also falls, and this seems to be where a lot of people have gone since manufacturing in the US began to fade.
What’s left, it seems to me, are the areas where the purpose of the human is to provide people with the feeling of power. Waiters, butlers, chauffeurs (distinguished from uber drivers by the fact that they drive their employer’s car and usually only work for them), caretakers, personal trainers, dominatricies. People who are paid to give others attention and service. What I’m scared of isn’t a world where people don’t want anything and capriciously enslave others; what I’m scared of is a world in which the only desire that most people have the ability to fulfil for others is the desire for companionship, love, and servitude.
You don’t seem to need to have such wealth that you can’t find anything else to spend it on before you turn to the desire for power over others or cruelty. You can find that in a street gang in the worst favela in Rio.
OTOH, the wealthiest societies in the world now seem to have less of powerful people terrorizing the peasants than the poor societies. Mugabe and Mao and Idi Amin were not rulers of wealthy societies, but they certainly got plenty of opportunity for imposing their will on others and treating their enemies with cruelty and terror.
I recently had a conversation with a prominent biochemist concerned about nutrition. One set of related points he made struck me as relevant to some questions that get discussed here as well as to our nutritional practices. They were:
1. A majority of Americans suffer from vitamin D deficiency. Symptoms of vitamin D deficiency include impulsiveness and depression.
2. American blacks have dark skin because they, like a number of other dark skinned populations, are adapted to an environment with a lot of sunlight. One result is that, in environments that don’t have a lot of sunlight, they are vitamin D deficient unless supplemented.
3. The standard form of supplementation is vitamin D fortified milk. This uses an inadequate concentration of vitamin D. Further, a lot of people with sub-saharan ancestry are lactose intolerant, because their ancestors evolved in societies that didn’t drink milk as adults.
All of which suggests that some apparently innate black/white differences may actually be the result of blacks being vitamin D deficient and could be eliminated at a very low cost. Amazon has 5000 IU vitamin D pills available at three cents each. He thought 5000 was the appropriate supplementation level for people who either have dark skins or don’t get much exposure to sunlight.
@DavidFriedman
I read enough.
I’m getting me some supplements.
While I was writing that post I was also ordering some 5000 IU vitamin D supplements.
I believe there is also research showing that the body’s ability to synthesize vitamin D decreases with age, so the older you are, the more you might want to get it checked. I started taking vitamin D supplements when I was about 50.
Please be careful. IIRC, Vitamin D is fat soluble, which puts it in the category where it is possible to take too much. (Too much) more may not be better.
That said, I supplement it myself, based on my doctor’s recommendation. I think some recent research has partially invalidated her specific reasons, but I’m still taking it.
Right, don’t take 100,000 IU every day.
5000 IU/day appears to be a reasonably safe dose, although going much above that might be risky, depending on which source you look at.
Also, if you get blood work done at regular physicals and have them check your blood vitamin D level (which I do), it’s easy to adjust the dose based on what the blood work says. I aim for somewhere in the upper part of the normal range; 5000 IU/day seems to be putting me there.
I take vitamin D after having been chronically fatigued for two consecutive autumn-winter-spring periods and diagnosed with a deficiency. On doctors’ instructions I started taking 90μg (3600IU) for six weeks and then dropped down to 25μg (1000IU) for ever. During the winter months I take two of my 25μg tablets a day, but this is on my whim rather than my doctor’s instructions. I live in the UK and I am white.
Based on my research into this, 125μg (5000IU) is a lot. I’ve heard advice from experts that white people in temperate zones shouldn’t need to take more than 10 or 25 micrograms (400 or 1000 international units) per day in the winter.
Anybody reading this who decides to get supplements, I’d be very interested if you’d post about your experience with them in an open thread (even if you experience no change). For me it felt like a miracle cure. For months I’d been unable to take stairs two at a time, and had to pause for breath at the top, as well as just generally feeling terrible all the time. Within two weeks of taking supplements I was going out for runs again and feeling great.
Research also seems to show that your body’s ability to manufacture vitamin D decreases as you age. I didn’t need any supplementation until I was 50; that was when my blood work at a physical showed levels below normal and I started supplementing.
You could have written “Salvation soon came in the form of sanitation”, and instead you did this.
If you’re into movies about war, you might enjoy the film “Hyena Road”, available now on Netflix. It’s about a Canadian sniper unit in Afghanistan trying to play a dangerous game with two warlords. It’s well acted, with high production values, and darker than I had expected. Recommended.
I cleaned out our junk drawer today and I though it was a great example of Chesterton’s Fence, anything that I couldn’t remember what it was for I kept.
So because I’m about twenty years behind on my science fiction television, I have a question about Babylon 5:
I recently started watching the show but had already heard most of the big reveals just from geek cultural osmosis. I’m almost done with the first season now but something keeps coming up which has really confuses the hell out of me.
The Minbari, a technologically advanced species of bald space elves, launch a genocidal war on humanity after a botched first contact. They push all the way to Earth and are ready to wipe out the human race, but their leadership discovers something which they (mis)interpret as proving spiritual kinship between humans and Minbari. They “surrender” at the eleventh hour, ending the war. But ever since then they continue to groan and moan about the one battle humanity won and their warrior caste is constantly trying to provoke a second war. Their idea of diplomacy is to appoint the woman who issued the order to exterminate the entire human race as their ambassador.
Given this, it seems perfectly understandable for humans to hate and fear the Minbari and pragmatic for the Earth Alliance to prepare for the possibility of a second Earth-Minbari war. Yet the show stakes out the clear position that being wary of and arming yourself against people who have attempted genocide against you a decade ago and are currently spoiling for a fight is bigotry and warmongering.
It’s not like the show is incapable of subtlety on this topic. The Narns have a similar grievance against the Centauri, and while they’re portrayed as misguided to seek vengeance it’s still a very sympathetic portrayal. Which makes it that much more baffling when that subtlety is thrown out the window when it comes to pro-human / anti-Minbari sentiment.
So what gives? Is there something that I’m overlooking here or does the show just paper over Minbari dickishness because they’re Space Elves?
(Please don’t use rot13. This show is two decades old now, there are no more spoilers.)
In the interstellar arms race, Earth is North Korea. EarthGov does not understand this. Sinclair (and Sheridan, later) do. If anything shatters the fragile peace between Earth and Minbar, every human will die screaming. For this reason, peace is essential.
The alternative required to develop weapons that will be useful against the Minbari is, as you’ll see, potentially worse.
E: and, of course, there is no “space China” to shield the humanity.
Edit: I misunderstood your point.
I guess if the only alternative to the Minbari sword of Damocles is a Faustian bargain with the Shadows then that’s a more difficult position. I’ll reserve my judgement until the Shadows actually start doing things rather than just being spooky in the background.
That said, Sinclair and company have no way of knowing that at this point in the show’s timeline. It still seems a bit suicidal on their part to object to the idea of developing better weapons. It’s not like you can’t have good diplomatic relations and arm yourself at the same time.
What John Schilling said, basically. Also it’s useful to remember that the only people who truly comprehend how hopelessly outmatched Earth was in the war are soldiers like Sinclair. The official EarthGov stance of, “we fended them off at enormous cost” is a shabby lie that most believe for the sake of their pride, and the Babylon 5 crew’s vehement pacifism should also be understood as a reaction to that.
Also, there’s a description later of the only maneuver that successfully destroyed a Minbari capital ship in the war; it involved hiding nukes in the asteroid belt and baiting them in. Earth’s greatest weapons are about as good, in comparison to the Minbari’s capabilities, as IEDs are against the American military today. The science required to fight the Minbari is, at the start of the series, centuries away for Humanity, and none of the younger races comes close to having their technology.
Also, Sinclair knows Delenn, and I think he knows that the Earth Alliance fired the first shot in that war and what that shot did to the Minbari. The status quo isn’t the worst of all possible worlds, and the future looks better still, provided people don’t do anything stupid. So he’ll call out stupid when he sees it.
Developing better weapons very nearly got North Korea on the losing side of a nuclear war last year. And then worked out pretty well for them, but in both cases because of the personal idiosyncrasies of a foreign leader about as mercurial as Satai Delenn. I don’t recall anything in the first season that suggests Sinclair would oppose private, inconspicuous military R&D programs for the Earth Alliance; it’s the public militarism and the extremely dubious alien entanglements he’s opposed to.
Exactly this.
Thank you, I think this may just be the first time anyone has ever compared Delenn to Donald Trump.
(Speaking of which, it occurs to me that if later-in-the-series Delenn were trying to pass herself off as human, the first thing she would need to do is give herself a massive, ridiculous looking combover… >_> )
Earthgov isn’t quite North Korea, it manages to be quite an influential player on the galactic stage. I’d say it was more like 1930s Japan. they grew a lot in a hurry in a hurry thanks largely to weak competition, and that’s left them thinking they’re a lot bigger than they actually are.
Yeah, there’s a point later where some news person/propagandist is interviewing Sheridan (a famous war hero who ends up as regular cast) and says something about how Earth’s military is strong enough to defend Earth, and Sheridan corrects him and basically says “No, if we get into a war with any of these major powers (Minbari, Centauri, Vorlon, etc.), we’re screwed.”
Though I think it might not be possible for Earth’s military to actually get into a war with the Vorlons. (You send ships into Vorlon territory. They’re never heard from again, and the Vorlons won’t discuss the matter with you.)
Oh gosh it’s been years and the ol’ memory is fuzzy, but if I’m recollecting rightly, if the Minbari are pissed-off about the primitives on Earth kicking their asses (and the Warrior caste hasn’t been told by the Religious caste exactly why the war ended, just ‘stop right now’ and they’re all ‘but we can totally wipe them out, they’re beaten’ so the Warriors have been holding a grudge all this time), so are Earth-Gov. They’re not just being pragmatic about prepping for “what if the Minbari turn nasty again”, they’re spoiling for a fight thanks to hurt pride (and “fuck them, they nearly destroyed Earth, we’re not gonna give them a second chance to do that again”).
Babylon 5 is a joke, they assign Sinclair there because his career is stalled at a dead-end and they’re suspicious about him anyway; the whole ideal of “let us have this space station as a symbol of peace and interstellar co-operation” is taken seriously by nobody and later, when Sheridan is appointed, it’s meant precisely to be a fist in the eye to the Minbari to appoint “Starkiller Sheridan” as the new Commander.
Sinclair and the others, because they’ve been the grunts on the front line who know how nearly Earth came to being destroyed, are in tension with Earth-Gov because they know if the civilian leaders back home do manage to start another war out of misguided hurt pride, Earth can’t take it and will be pounded into oblivion. That’s why they’re so vehemently against anything that looks like “Dum-de-doo, nothing to see here, just us tooling up with better weapons and making alliances, my gosh no it’s not like we’re prepping for the second round in the war or anything” because they know if the Minbari think that’s what Earth is doing, they are just as likely to rain down hell before Earth can get started in the same way the last war started over a botched first contact.
So there are two related problems here, I think.
First, you have earth politics, which are just hollow. The Clark regime is a purposeless, empty “fascism” with no discernable goals, ideology, plan other than anti-alien sentiment. Their actions feel like they were decided by MJS reaching into a bag full of totalitarian tropes, pulling one out, writing an episode about it, then moving on to the next. It would have benefitted the show a lot of they’d settled on some sort of goal for the clark regime besides looking evil.
Second, minbari politics makes zero sense. For 1000 years, the minbari warrior caste builds an entire culture around preparing for the day that the shadows return, and when they finally do, they don’t want to fight. Why? We never get a wastonian reason, and the doylist one is obvious, because there’s no conflict with delen if they do what makes sense, and fight the war they’ve spent their entire existence preparing for. What we should have seen is a warrior caste that’s eager to fight, so eager that it tries to sideline the other castes and take over minbari government in order to better prosecute the war. That would actually be consistent with how they behaved in the earth-minbari war
These two problems combine to make earth’s position vis a vis the galaxy rather ill defined. Ultimately, I think, the big problem is that outside the magnificence that is Londo & G’kar’s arc, MJS’s portrayal of politics is pretty shallow, with lots of clear cut heros and villains rather than individuals with clashing ideals. The main characters escape this trap, but not the side characters that serve as their foils and adversaries.
It definitely seems that way whenever the command staff has a disagreement with other humans, whether that’s Psi Corps, Home Guard, the rest of EarthForce outside of Babylon 5, or their superiors in EarthGov. They all come off as ridiculous straw men.
But the aliens get to have more nuance. I just watched the episode with the Christian Scientist aliens and they had a surprising amount of depth despite that they literally killed their own kid over a made-up alien religion. The episode with the Dilgar war criminal also had more nuance than I expect from a Mengele allegory, although it was obnoxious that Deathwalker herself was such a one-dimensional character.
It feels like JMS is just more comfortable having human villains. If the bad guys are aliens we usually get to see why they’re doing what they’re doing. When the bad guys are humans it’s like “yeah, sometimes people are just dicks for no reason.”
Even the psi corps, despite the quasi SS uniforms, get some sympathetic treatment. Granted, an awful lot of that is Walter Koenig playing the absolute hell out of the part to make himself sympathetic,
Hey, Chuck just reviewed that episode!
The humans are wrong because the Minbari are not the Centauri. The Minbari surrendered and helped Earth rebuild. The Centauri launched a genocidal occupation. The humans are wrong because the Narn are (ultimately) wrong, and the humans don’t even have the excuse the Narn do. The Minbari warrior caste are wrong because the Centauri are ultimately wrong.
The show tells you that xenophobia is wrong. Which it is. One must hate people because they are hateful, not simply because they are different. Trying to antagonize people who can easily kill you just because they’re different is dumb and self-destructive. The Centauri and Narn are exactly where xenophobia gets you, and EarthGov is wrong because it has that example right in front of it and still can’t be bothered to learn that hating aliens is bad.
Also, remember that EarthGov xenophobia extends beyond just the Minbari.
I’m not sure that the Minbari have any claim to moral superiority over the Centauri.
The Centauri conquered and oppressed the Narn the first time because they wanted to exploit their resources, and then conquered and oppressed them a second time after being egged on for years by the Narn Regime’s various acts of war. Those aren’t good acts or good motives, but even under the influence of the Shadows the goal was never annihilation. If they had wanted to wipe out the Narn it would have been as simple as continuing their mass driver bombardment; for them mass murder was the means to an end, not the end itself.
In contrast the Minbari went into the Earth-Minbari war with mass murder as the end. Their plan, right up until they saw that Sinclair had Valen’s soul, had been genocide of the human race. They didn’t care about Earth’s resources, and they attacked the Earth Alliance at literally the first provocation. That seems more malicious if for no other reason than that they literally gain nothing from their actions besides maybe the satisfaction of killing.
I’m also not sure how the Minbari helped Earth rebuild. They helped fund the construction of the Babylon stations but I hadn’t seen anything to indicate reparations to Earth.
Yeah, this part never made any sense to me.
Humanity is still considered heroes by the League of Non-Aligned Worlds for defeating the Dilgar Invasion. That’s a sizable chunk of the alien species we see which view humanity as saviors.
Add in the Narn who sold Earth Alliance weapons during the war and it seems like pro-Earth groups like Home Guard should see the majority of the aliens in the show as natural allies. Their hatred and distrust of the Minbari and Vorlons makes sense but attacking random Centauri teenagers seems totally out of left field.
You could say “that’s how xenophobia works, it’s irrational” but honestly that’s not how it works in real life. For example, I’m personally not a big fan of Islam or Muslim people generally due recent events in America and Germany. But that doesn’t mean that I have a grudge against Chinese people and Swedes. That sort of thinking only exists in caricatures.
Not to Godwin too hard, but… Yeah.
Remember that none of the species that “liked” humanity lifted a finger to help them during the war (except the Narn). Humanity at this point thinks that they’re sort of fundamentally on their own, nobody understands them, and they can’t rely on anyone but themselves. That’s where the underlying anger and resentment come from. And it’s just sort of indiscriminately directed outwards, amplified by the fact that they can’t take it out on the Minbari, or they’ll die.
That’s a plausible explanation. I wish that we got it in the show.
In The Beginning talks about this a bit, but yeah, the setup is… incomplete, I guess. JMS set up the plot threads in season 1 to support a mystery story about Sinclair being spared, rather than to really flesh out the worldbuilding. I promise, things make more sense as time goes on (or at least, the things that don’t make sense now do).
The Minbari apparently avoided civilian targets (per the B5 Wiki). Though the term “genocidal” got thrown around a lot, it doesn’t look like they actually targeted anything non-military. And I swear I have this memory of Sinclair talking about the Minbari surrender and mentioning they helped Earth rebuild. It’s also notable that the NON-warrior caste Minbari are perfectly happy the war is over.
As to the Centauri versus the Minbari morally…no. The Minbari got hurt and overreacted massively, ultimately stopping. The Centauri, meanwhile, exploited the Narn for years, stopping only when forced to do so and resuming as soon as they could.
The Centauri were bullies. The Minbari were angry. The first is worse than the second.
That’s because you are not a xenophobe. If your attempt to understand xenophobia amounts to “for example, [my beliefs]”, then you will fail to understand xenophobia because you are not a xenophobe.
To a xenophobe, there are Bad Outsiders and there are Weakling Outsiders and there are Inscrutable Outsiders What Haven’t Proven Themselves Bad Yet, but there are no Good and Capable Outsiders. It takes overtly Good and Capable outsiders, and not ones who are dispensing unearned charity for Inscrutable motives, to disprove xenophobia.
Where does the average EA citizen see any of those? Narn arms traders during the war would count, but I think their role was minimized in the propaganda. The Centauri would have counted in the first contact era, but their imperialistic deception I think scotched that. The setting is fairly well designed to make xenophobia a plausible response, with almost all aliens falling into the Bad, Weakling, or Inscrutable categories as superficially viewed from Earth.
I disagree with that: as Scott pointed out in (I think) “I can tolerate anything but the outgroup”, the Nazis seem to have liked the Japanese and Chinese a fair bit, and if your definition of “xenophobe” would exclude the literal Nazis, I think you’re defining the term too restrictively.
Maybe not. I’ve been called it enough that I’m at the point of Eminem’s “if I wasn’t, then why would you say that I am?”
To be honest that sounds less like the thought process of any real person and more like a caricature.
Again, maybe I’ve managed to miss all of the real xenophobes but pretty much everyone I’ve ever seen accused of xenophobia was willing to admit that there were other good and capable peoples. Usually not as good or as capable but definitely outside of your trichotomy.
The original Mr. X > The Nazis saw the Japanese as circumstial allies against the British, but also as ultimately future enemies that would have to be destroyed at some point (same deal as with the Soviets, really, just on a longer timescale). According to the anecdote, Nazi officials who visited Japanese held prisonner camps in Manchuria were appaled by what they saw and went home with the certitude that they were far morally superior to these yellow barbarians.
The Centauri would have counted in the first contact era, but their imperialistic deception I think scotched that.
The Centauri are fairly honest about the main reason they backed Earth was because they saw Humans as allies against the Minbari, aren’t they? As I said, going on fuzzy memories here. However much the ordinary citizen in the street knows, I imagine the diplomats and government are aware the Centauri are our friends exactly as long as they see any advantage for themselves in it and will throw us over the minute a better bet comes along, so that certainly would contribute to xenophobia about aliens and alien motives and how Earth can only trust itself and needs to build up enough strength to be able to go it alone.
I was always miffed about how the League of Non-Aligned Worlds were treated; when we had Sheridan and Delenn in cahoots and were in full La Résistance mode, they got pushed around by the ostensible “good guys” into “Agree with what we’ve already decided to do and are going to do anyway or else we’ll economically and maybe even physically attack you – see those Minbari warships we’ve got on call?”
I honestly wouldn’t have blamed the League if they went “if these are the Good Guys who are supposed to be sticking up for us little guys, we’re throwing in with the Shadows”.
As for Earth-Gov, wasn’t there Shadow influence at work there? Yeah, the seeds were falling on willing ground, but the Shadows’ whole rationale was “competition breeds progress and the ultimate competition is war”, so encouraging and inflating paranoia and xenophobia and an appetite for war in the leaders was the thing you’d expect them to do.
My impression was that Earth was pretty messed-up, even before the war, and that all the problems with places like Mars Colony had only been papered-over by the war effort. Post-war these problems were still there and didn’t help contribute to any sense of stability.
Continuing a discussion here from The Economic Perspective On Moral Standards because it was starting to become a Sphinx argument on Scott’s usage of the phrase “There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism” and also starting to devolve in “Culture-War” adjacent discussion of Socialism etc. and not addressing Scott’s original topic. Hence the reason for moving it here.
Summary up to this point: Marxbro objects to Scott’s usage of the phrase “There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism” as “missing the point”. Later in the thread I finally get some clarification from Marxbro that the main missing points of the critique are Scott’s omission of Marx’s “Law of Value” or the concept that Capitalism can only function based on surplus extracted from labor. This surplus belongs to labor and thus the system is inherently exploitative of labor. Marxbro also suggests Point #5 from my post is also associated with the phrase, implying Scott’s original post is essentially meaningless.
So, if you’re reading this Marxbro, here’s the open question or dialectic I wish to continue: If one believes that “ethics” or the considerations Scott put forward in “The Economic Perspective On Moral Standards” is Bourgeoisie moralizing, then what non-Bourgeoisie justification or epistemology supports the notion that “extraction of surplus labor vis-a-vis Capitalism is exploitation of the working class?” Here’s a more detailed explanation of why this leads to a Motte-and-Bailey:
At best, this point becomes superfluous: Read Stirner and “The Ego and its Own.” If a group of people becomes aware that they are being exploited, and recognize themselves as caught in a system where they aren’t thriving or achieving self-actualization, then that is sufficient justification for themselves to organize, so long as they acknowledge themselves as 1)individuals that share an interest in coordinating together as part of their circumstances and to better themselves, and 2)dissolve their association once they’ve either achieved their goals or other are failing to satisfy them. No reference to theories about value or exploitation or Socialism are necessary! If this was true, then you wouldn’t even need the phrase “There is no ethical consumption under late Capitalism!” You could just say, “There is no such thing as ethical consumption!”
At worst, there is no actual notion to defend the idea that all surplus value belongs to the labor that created it, in which case there is equal moral (or lack thereof) justification for the Capitalist class to organize and liquidate any movement that attempts to appropriate their property. Helicopter rides and all.
On the other hand, if Stirner is wrong, then that means that there is some fundamental kernel of ethics or values that justifies #1. But if that’s the case, then Scott is right to at least explore the space of what constitutes “Good” using that phrase. That’s because what constitutes “Goodness” is still valid by the fundamental kernel, even thought the system as a whole has not been optimized. Even if a classless stateless utopia has not happened yet, there is still room for individuals to make tiny marginal improvements in their own life as they navigate trying to make the revolution happen.
Well, yes, it is necessary. Theories of surplus value and exploitation are necessary because they accurately describe reality. A slogan like “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is necessarily a simplistic summation, which is why I see it get used by social democrat types, anarchists and so on. Look at all the Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, etc parties which have large followings and have actually taken over governments. By comparison followers of Stirner seem to be fairly historically impotent.
Yes, that’s called class struggle. Marxists don’t expect capitalists to have the same ethics as the working class.
Theories of surplus value and exploitation are necessary because they accurately describe reality.
Really? How so? It seems to me that this claim relies on the claim that any surplus value must have been produced by labor. But, first, labor does not produce all of the value that goes into a product; and second, there is no reason why the value of a product–what it can be sold for–must be equal to the sum of the values put into it–the costs of the labor and capital that were used. In fact, the “surplus value” you speak of–the profit–just is the additional value of the product, over and above the values of the labor and capital that were used to produce it.
In short, socialism, at least as you appear to be describing it, completely ignores wealth creation, and assumes that the sum total of wealth–value–in the world is constant, and the only thing that matters is how it is divided. That belief does not even come within light-years of “accurately describing reality”.
If you’re talking about the difference between variable capital and constant capital then Marxists already have this covered.
On an individual basis this is correct, but system-wide commodities exchange at their value. Otherwise they would be overpriced and it would be easy for a competitor to sweep in and sell their commodities for cheaper, thereby dominating the market and putting everyone else out of business. Or if they were consistently underpriced then there’s overproduction occurring in that industry, this could lead to certain companies going out of business and production eventually going back down to a sustainable level. That’s how the free market works.
You’re close, but this doesn’t explain anything, it doesn’t explain the source of this extra value. Surplus value is the difference between the value of labor power and the value of the commodities produced by said labor.
No, that’s not what socialists assume. In fact, the opposite is true, given Marx’s famous M-C-M’ formulation. Your interpretation of what I’ve been saying makes me suspect that you’re not familiar with the basics of Marxism.
That’s how the free market works.
You’re conflating “value” with “aggregate dollars exchanged” (or whatever unit of exchange you want to use). Yes, at the level of an entire closed economy, everything that is bought must be sold, and the price the buyer pays is the same as the price the seller receives, so there must be a balance equation that is satisfied. But this does not mean there is no wealth being created.
it doesn’t explain the source of this extra value
The source of the extra value is that both parties are better off after a free market trade than they were before. Otherwise, in a free market, the trade would not occur.
that’s not what socialists assume. In fact, the opposite is true, given Marx’s famous M-C-M’ formulation.
I assume you mean what is discussed here?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm
If so, I don’t see how it relates to what I was saying. An investment banker, for example, for whom the “C” in M-C-M’ is shares of stocks or bonds can realize Marx’s model without creating any wealth whatsoever; his M’ is larger than his M because he is taking advantage of asymmetric information to convince counterparties to take the wrong end of zero-sum trades.
I think we’re getting confused here due to conflation of Marx’s categories of use-value and exchange-value. Typically I refer to exchange-value as just “value” because that’s the value that really matters in the market. Exchange-value is created in the production process and merely realized in the market.
This is use-value. But exchange-value has not been created – the total amount of exchange-value in the system has not changed after we exchange goods.
As I understand it, in Marx’s interpretation someone who simply moves stocks around isn’t creating new exchange-value. This gets into Marx’s notions of “fictitious value” and stuff like that which I’m less acquainted with.
But M-C-M’ refers to the creation of new value and the money expression (M’) is legitimate in this case – new wealth is created.
I think we’re getting confused here due to conflation of Marx’s categories of use-value and exchange-value.
I don’t find Marx’s definitions of value useful (see below for one reason why), so we’re probably not going to make much progress in discussion if we try to use them. I would rather taboo “value” terms and try to talk about what is going on without using them. The point is that in a free market, every trade makes both parties better off, because if it didn’t, the trade wouldn’t take place (at least one of the parties would not choose to make it). That does not require any assumptions at all about why either party wants to make the trade, i.e., why they assign the particular values they do to the items being traded.
One fundamental objection to Mark’s definitions of “value” is that he assumes that a given object has the same value (either use value or exchange value, it doesn’t matter here) to everyone. But if this were really true, no trades would ever take place, because no trade could ever leave both parties better off. The only reason why it’s even possible for a trade to leave both parties better off is that at least one of the items traded has a different value to each of the parties. For example, if you sell me a coat, the coat must have more value to me than the money I pay you, but less value to you. Otherwise at least one of us would refuse to make the trade.
@me:
I don’t find Marx’s definitions of value useful
Another reason why is that Marx says value is basically the amount of labor required to produce something. But this “labor theory of value” seems obviously false. If I hire you to paint my house, the job does not get a lot more valuable if you tell me you’re going to do it with a toothbrush.
Marx appears to try to finesse this by talking about “the amount of labor that is socially necessary”, as if only that amount of labor “counted” towards the value of something produced. (In the painting case, this would presumably be the amount of labor necessary to paint the house using industry standard paint, paintbrushes, etc.) But first, it’s not clear how the “socially necessary” amount of labor gets determined; and second, it still assumes a necessary connection between the labor it took to produce something, and what someone will be willing to trade for it or use it for, that does not exist.
Except that he very explicitly doesn’t do that. Use-values are subjective and change from person to person. Exchange-value is not.
It’s determined by the average amount of labor needed to produce a commodity. If a painter shows up with a toothbrush to paint your house you’re not going to pay them twice as much, because you have this little thing called “common sense”. This stuff is literally in the first 10 or 20 pages of Das Kapital which makes me suspect you haven’t really engaged with it.
Use-values are subjective and change from person to person.
Where does Marx say that? He says that use-values differ for different uses: the use value of a screwdriver for driving screws is going to be different from its use value for hammering nails, for example (though of course Marx himself doesn’t give this example). But I don’t see where he says the use value of a given item for a given use differs from person to person.
Exchange-value is not.
Which, since the key arguments you’re making seem to involve exchange value, means my objection still stands regardless of what Marx says about use value.
It’s determined by the average amount of labor needed to produce a commodity.
This doesn’t help because it depends on who you average over. Do you average over everybody who ever performs a given piece of work? That would include the painter who uses a toothbrush. Do you average over the top 10 performers? Only the ones who do it professionally? For more than six months? Saying we can resolve these issues by “common sense” doesn’t really help because people’s common senses of these things are not all the same.
Also, this does nothing to address my other objection.
I think that Marx misses the idea that the maker’s labor being halved means that the exchange value actually ought to reflect the value of the maker’s now-undisplaced free time as well as the value of the labor. The truth of this is self-evident unless you believe that the per-capita exchange value (less the per-capita total capital value) in the global human system has remained constant since prehistory.
“Every owner of a commodity wishes to part with it in exchange only for those commodities whose use-value satisfies some want of his.”
From the start of chapter 2 of volume 1 of Das Kapital. Methinks you aren’t too familiar with this stuff!
What objection is that?
Why, having called for a professional painter, would you pay for the amount of time it would take an amateur? Again, this is common sense. C’mon now.
“Every owner of a commodity wishes to part with it in exchange only for those commodities whose use-value satisfies some want of his.”
That just means that if I need a coat and you don’t, I’ll be willing to exchange for one and you won’t. It doesn’t mean that the exact same coat would be more or less useful to you, if you needed a coat, than it would to me.
But in any case, as I said, the key arguments under discussion appear to be based on exchange, not use, so whether use value varies from person to person is really irrelevant here.
What objection is that?
The second objection in the last paragraph of my post on November 17, 2018 at 9:33 pm.
Why, having called for a professional painter, would you pay for the amount of time it would take an amateur? Again, this is common sense. C’mon now.
I’ve already said why I have an issue with using “common sense” to resolve the issue of how the “socially necessary” amount of labor is determined. If you really think that concept is well-defined enough to bear the weight Marx puts on it, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
@hoopyfreud
I’m unsure what you mean here, could you explain further?
I contend that the value of a power-loom-woven scarf should be discounted relative to the value of a hand-loom-woven scarf in a way that reflects the differentials in the capital expended in order to create the scarf (assumed to be minimal), the labor of the maker (assumed to be halved), and the potential free time of the maker (assumed to be increased by the same amount). Basically, I am arguing that the value should be reckoned to include the free time that the maker is being “paid”.
So industries that give their workers more time off will have more expensive commodities? I’m still not sure that I’m getting your meaning here.
I’d guess that it does mean within a product that yes, companies with more time off will have more expensive offerings.
The point is that the value of the labor is the value of capital + labor + process improvement, insofar as that process improvement hypothetically decreases the need for labor. Under capitalism, the value of the process improvement is captured at least in part by the owner, not the worker, and I see no reason why this process is exploitative.
“Theories of surplus value and exploitation are necessary because they accurately describe reality.”
Jokes do not help your case.
“Yes, that’s called class struggle. Marxists don’t expect capitalists to have the same ethics as the working class.”
Then there are no such thing as ethics and absolutely no reason to be a Marxist. Unless exploitation is wrong, who cares about it?
I’m not joking and it doesn’t help your case to assume that I am. Replying to every decent point I make with a “Haha! You must be joking!” is a rather obnoxious defence tactic when you have no argument. No wonder Scott has very few leftist commenters on this blog.
Your ethical sense is shaped by you class position. If you are a capitalist, then no, you have no real reason to find exploitation morally wrong. However, your workers do. Hence class struggle.
I didn’t say you were joking, I said it was a joke. Which it is.
As is your ludicrous claim about exploitation. You imagine a belief in both sides that has no contact with reality — when in reality, they have a much more reasonable view of exploitation.
What’s funny is the irony that you accuse Scott of misappropriating a quote for an interesting blog post, when Marx literally did the same thing with his “Law of Value” drawing on Adam Smith’s Labor Theory of Value, or at least expanding its application beyond the original scope Smith observed it was valid (e.g. primitive pre-Capitalist societies)
Scott may not have engaged in such texts explicitly, but he has had posts before at least implicitly addressing such topics, such as Social Conflict Theory.
What’s funny again, is that it took this many posts to confirm what you believed was the original intent and point of that phrase. Nothing stopped you from writing a 250-word post on the quote referring to how surplus labor is exploited in Marx’s analysis and explaining why those norms are better suited than Scott’s analysis. Instead you linked to an RSA Animates of a Slavoj “Eating from the trashcan of ideology” Žižek lecture.
My quoting of Stirner wasn’t to suggest that a “Union of Egoists” would be more effective at appropriating a government apparatus. Instead Stirner accurately predicted that any Communistic society would become far more authoritarian than any Church, Monarchy, or Nationalist movement. “…To each according to their need” means your “needs” are ultimately determined by someone else. Striner addresses the fact that the “Unconscious Individualists” would take advantage of other ideologues in a group to secure their own power at the expense of the group’s mission. He was the OG Conflict Theorist. It’s ironic again you listed Marxist-Leninist, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties. Martov’s prize for helping Lenin come into power was to die bedridden in exile; Gao Gang was pressured to kill himself after participating in Mao’s games of intrigue. Socialist Revolutions are very good at liquidating Socialist Revolutionaries.
And what are the ethics of Marxists when it comes to the working class interacting with itself? Other than to call attempts at holding leaders accountable “Bourgeoisie Reactionary Movements”…
@fr8train
A Marxist revolution will necessarily appear “authoritarian” to the class it is overthrowing. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing.
@Mary
How is it a joke? I’m a very serious person, so maybe I’m not understanding what you find so funny.
And when you’re done killing Kulaks and expropriating their land but still fail to hit your grain quotas, I’m sure your fellow commrades will understand
Interesting. I am not marxbro, but I also felt that Scott’s use of the phrase had very little to do with the phrase’s actual intended meaning. I didn’t say much more than that, because I don’t speak “modern marxist theory” very well, and don’t aspire to. But I do pay attention to marxist critiques of orthodox (American) economic and eco-political theory, because sometimgs I need help finding the sometimes-gigantic holes. I’m also somewhat of a light red diaper baby. My father was a dyed-in-the-wool union supporter, and I learnt language of ‘class conflict’ etc. etc. from both my parents – along with a habit of looking for economic reasons for political actions.
The theory I’d invoke here is the idea that capitalism can only function well when it’s constrained by some outside force. When unconstrained, it collectively extracts too much “surplus value,” and either loses its legitimacy with those not of the owning class, or impoverishes them to the point where they are useless as consumers, or both. So the workers are demotivated at best, and rioting/electing demagogues/going postal at worst, even while not buying enough to keep business growing. Reactions to this lead to vicious circles, and the wheels eventually come off (theoretically, anyway); meanwhile everyone, including the owning class, are less prosperous than they could be. At the same time – and in the same way – externalities are imposing farther costs on everyone – each one successfully dodged by the specific owners creating that externality – only to find that all are paying a lot more than they could be, anyway.
That is, in a nutshell, the normal behaviour of ‘late capitalism’, to the extent that I understand this ‘term of art’. The only way not to facilitate the various abuses (as defined by the essentially powerless folks who want this constrained), would be not to participate at all, but there’s no way to be totally outside the system, except perhaps if you live in an uncontacted or rarely contacted band of foragers (hunter gatherers) – and even then, you are still affected by some of the externalities, not to mention having some owning class person eyeing your local area as a place where money could potentially be made.
[Note by the way – I use ‘owning class person’ where ‘capitalist’ would normally be used, because capitalist can also mean ‘person who favours capitalist theory/organization.’ I’m talking about the people who provide – and control – the capital.]
I would argue that un-constrained capitalism does *better* than constrained capitalism irt things like removing poverty. When the outsourcing boom started in the 1970s, the owning-class got absolutely pummeled by cheap Chinese imports – and couldn’t get their class-struggling union workers to stay competitive. Eventually, the owning-class moved their factories to China too, leaving Detroit a smoked out ruin. All those Union workers are now in destitute poverty and Detroit will never recover. This is making everyone poor except the owning class.
Except huh, will you look at that? I will note that China has a *much, much* larger population than the United States, so to see wage growth like that is truly staggering.
As it turns out – the class that was being struggled against there wasn’t the “rich owning class” , it was the class of even poorer people in other countries. When capitalism stopped being constrained by things like national borders – *more* people become *less* impoverished *faster*.
So, if your theory is true, it seems like we should see ever-greater poverty and hardship among the people living in capitalist societies, the longer they remain capitalist. And greater hardship, the freer the markets.
Is this actually what we see?
At some point I googled for a good burger in Portland, found the recommendation that is the subject of this article, and went there to have one. I didn’t think it was that great.
I do love the bacon cheese burger at Tasty n Sons. Get it with cheddar and (when it’s not included) the side of fries. Be warned, though: it’s the place with the kitchen tip line on the receipt.
Interesting article. I’ve been going there for years and love (loved) the Special*. My wife held my surprise 40th birthday there. I wish that article hadn’t happened and it were still open. But I think the problem was not just being on a Best Of list, it was being on the sort of Best Of list foodies plan their vacation around. Stanich’s might well have been the best greasy spoon in the country but it’s still a greasy spoon, there’s no gruyere in there.
* Double cheeseburger with bacon, lettuce, onion, mayo, ketchup, pickles, a slice of ham, and a fried egg
Relevant to debate elsewhere here, one of the articles in the Oregonian linked to a tweet:
To be fair to the internet, Stanich’s was also closed the first time I tried to go a) for an unusually long period (like a week, maybe?) at b) a weird time of year. And the article doesn’t exactly rule out coincidental eccentricity as an explanation. You can hire extra waitstaff in Portland without much difficulty.
Eccentricity was definitely involved but it’s not realistic to expect a neighborhood dive to cope with nationwide popularity by hiring a couple extra waitresses. The grill’s only so big, and it was already busy enough to have an hour wait on the weekends before all this.
I mean how does any restaurant cope with “nationwide popularity”? There are such places of every size, so it’s not a matter of number of tables. There are also such places that do reservations, walk up lines, and–my personal favorite–tickets, so it’s not a matter of a particular table filling model. Are they just run by better restaurateurs?
But none of this implies that the restaurant must or should close.
But on the other hand, knowing in advance what most customers are going to order is a huge advantage for a restaurant. In my sordid past I actually worked a grill (not very efficiently, mind you) and I doubt that would wind up as the bottleneck.
The issue as far as I can see it is that sudden popularity means that you either have to reduce your quality or turn customers away. Often when a restaurant was popular for their novel food 20 years ago they are mostly serving variations on their old theme so they can produce hundreds of solid, but not spectacular, meals a night while some guy down the road is experimenting with Ugandan inspired burritos.
It sounds like this guy couldn’t make up his mind which to sacrifice which is tough for a small restaurant. The people you turn away will be friends who have eaten there for years a lot of the time, and bad reviews are very painful for a business that probably made itself essentially based on good reviews.
This is what Yogi Berra meant by “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
Whenever there’s a “Top N Restaurants” list in a city I’m visiting, I’ll pick something towards the middle or bottom of the list, because the #1 place is likely to be too crowded/expensive for my tastes, but just getting listed means it’s high quality. This story suggests that just getting on one of these lists may be too much. I wonder if these holes-in-the-wall will start sabotaging their own yelp reviews to keep the filthy tourists away.
It’s not just restaurants. A few months ago, when faced with a wait a few hours long to get into an old palace in Europe, I realized things can only get worse for travelers. The population with the resources to travel internationally is growing rapidly but the number of places to see is staying fixed. We can either build new tourist
trapsattractions from scratch (cough, Times Square, cough) or raise prices so only the upper crust can get in or be stuck with overcrowding and long waits. If you’re a perfectly rational profit maximizer that’s fine. But many of us aren’t.A third solution, which iirc some European cities have started to experimenting with, is effectively to impose quotas on tourism, so that certain places can only be visited by a fixed maximum number of people per day/week/month/etc. Though this means some places we ended up booked months in advance, making impromptu tourism even more difficult.
This has the same effect as BBA’s (2), it just looks less like it.
One advantage to solving the problem by raising the price is that it makes it in the interest of other people to create other attractions for all the people who didn’t make it in and are willing to pay a somewhat lower price for an almost as good substitute. There is an awful lot of history scattered over Europe and not nearly all of it is being pushed at tourists.
There are quite a lot of things for which an almost-as-good-in-the-same-way doesn’t exist, at least locally. Mostly these are products of unique political circumstances that can’t economically be replicated. The Statue of Liberty, the Sagrada Familia, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids (mesoamerican and Egyptian) or the Colosseum are good examples.
My point isn’t that prices shouldn’t be raised (they probably should), but that there’s no use pretending that by doing so people don’t lose access to things that can’t be replaced, and that they would have had access to if they lived in another time, in the same social class, in the same place.
The above isn’t really a problem per se, but there is a certain bitter irony in monuments dedicated to a polity becoming inaccessible to that polity’s descendants. Rich international tourists have more access to the Statue of Liberty than poor first-generation immigrants living in New York, and this is aethetically unpleasant to me for reasons that should, I think, be obvious.
Sorry, should refer to successors rather than descendants, and it’s too late to edit.
You can see the Statue of Liberty for free from Battery Park; it’s $5.50 to get there and back from much of the city. (I can see it from my office, there’s probably a few poor first generation immigrants working in the building but that’s not a general solution). You can get to the island for another $18.50. If you want to go to the crown (if it’s open), you need a reservation and another $3, not to mention a high tolerance for stairs. The National Park Service isn’t Disney, they do not allow you to pay to jump the line. So I don’t see the advantage to the rich international tourist, unless the poor first generation immigrant is _extremely_ poor, in which case it seems unlikely any reasonable solution will work.
@The Nybbler
For some reason I remember it being significantly more expensive – in the range of $20 for the boat and $30 for the statue. That’s good to know! Thanks!
This looks like job for Eliezer Yudkowsky’s alter ego, the Market Economics Fairy:
Related:
And in response to this article, at Hacker News:
And at LessWrong:
I think he’s either wrong about the second point or doesn’t understand the motivations behind the ticket system.
Of course if you have tickets with some mechanism of transfer you’re going to get some scalping, and more the more desirable the event is. But having what amounts to a lottery doesn’t automatically lead to every ticket sold being scalped.
In the past Burning Man has clearly tried to foster a balance between new participants and veterans. And they don’t want that to amount in reality to people paying $10,000 and veterans. Naturally, the new/veteran balance is a source of ongoing contention and frustration, and his message is just dripping with veteran entitlement. Is it that hard to have all the tickets be nontransferable? If you’re worried about not using all of the available capacity, don’t you face that problem with veterans as well? Don’t camps generally need to have some new people, and if you give them that open won’t they be just as tempted to sell their tickets at market value?
Why use what amounts to a lottery when you can use a lottery instead?
It’s how the Olympics allocates much of its capacity.
Textbook economics assumes ideal knowledge; it can’t model consumers who’ve been misled about the good’s worth by a viral marketing campaign. All your magical fairy is going to accomplish is to change some of the “left because the line was so goddamn long” yelp reviews in to “can you believe these jokers wanted $22 for a cheeseburger?” ones.
Every person who doesn’t believe America’s best burger is worth spending $22 on is one less person cluttering up the line at the restaurant. That way the people who want the burgers the most (as demonstrated by their willingness to pay high prices for them) get them, and the restaurant makes a ton of money while not being overwhelmed by hordes of costumers. It could then use the money to expand operations and lower prices (Stanich seems to be groping towards this with the idea of franchising, but there was nor reason to shut down the restaurant for nine months to do so), thus allowing more people to enjoy the burgers.
If expanding operations is impossible or undesirable, they can continue operating in their new high-price, high-quality equilibrium, and lower prices back the way things were if and when the fad ends. The biggest problem with this second option is that Stanich is ideologically committed to continue providing his burgers to the local regulars who helped build the business up in the first place. Is it legal to check IDs at the door and charge the higher prices to people whose registered addresses are outside the city the restaurant is located in? That could separate the tourists attracted by the article from the locals. Actually, if Stanich knows the regulars personally, he can just give them a discount and sell them the burgers at the old price. Though you would need to worry about burger re-sellers (analogous to scalpers in the Burning Man scenario above). No to-go orders at local prices, then (to-go orders being the equivalent of transferable tickets); otherwise you are going to get some local ordering a dozen to-go hamburgers at local prices and re-selling them to tourists at somewhere between the local price and the tourist price.
Absent some oddball local law, yes.
For materialists like me who don’t believe we have souls, don’t we believe we are a different person from moment to moment, never to be the same again, an ad hoc identity held together by an untrustworthy and capricious memory?
if we were rational, we wouldn’t fear death any more than we fear the next moment. We do fear death because we are animal. Except that animals don’t fear death, only humans, who have a concept of death.
Why do humans fear non-existence when the non-existence of our identity happens in the next moment anyway?
Surely human fear of non-existence has evolved just like our animal fear of danger, but these are different things. There must have been a period in human evolution in which instinctive fear of existential danger existed but not yet fear of non-existence.
We must have been braver. No?
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Yes we’re scared of death, because the organism wants to continue. But if Harry Three-Names is with the Dark Wizards on that, then is he also with them when they will do anything – anything, murder, betrayal, worse things – to avoid it? “Slowly cut this living creature apart and torture it to death or I’ll kill you?” Is there anything he would not do, to avoid death, to live longer? Any treachery or outrage or genocide in order to keep existing?
Because it’s all very well wanting to beat the inevitable and having fantasies about being able to kick-start the universe when it finally comes to its end just so you can keep on existing, but in reality Death comes as the end and we can’t dodge it forever. So what in the end does it gain the Dark Wizards to do such things? “Oh it gained me an extra ten minutes of life I would not have otherwise had”.
And you know, I understand that, I completely get the instinctive impulse to do anything at all to stave off that moment of ending, to grab at even a minute more of life. But it’s not worth some of the things you might do to cling on to that last minute, and I don’t trust Harry when he says things like this, and I think he does not understand what Dumbledore is saying.
He’s clever, but he isn’t wise, and he hasn’t put aside wisdom for the sake of clarity, he’s never had wisdom in the beginning.
Deiseach, can you put aside your hatred of HPMOR for like, two seconds and not assume that it’s arguing for the most terrible things you can think of? Principle of charity.
All Harry says is “being afraid of death is a good thing, because dying is bad for you.” He never says “You, personally, dying, is the worst thing ever and literally anything you do to extend your life is justified.” The rest of the book makes it pretty clear that Harry values other peoples’ lives.
From the exact same chapter, a few pages later:
“I don’t know what you take me for, Headmaster,” Harry said coldly
Well lessee: I take you for a kid who so far has shown he values nobody’s opinion but his own, has complete faith in his Ultimate Genius, thinks he knows magic better than the magicians, has shown worrying signs of being influenced by Voldemort and has just flat-out said he’s with the Dark Wizards on fighting death. If Harry doesn’t know about the kinds of things the Dark Wizards do and have done to fight death, maybe he shouldn’t shoot his mouth off so fast?
At first I was going to say “Nah, I don’t hate HPMOR”, but on consideration yeah, I do 🙂 If you don’t understand the effect on me, then imagine your reaction to someone who liked to shoehorn in at every chance “Hey, you should really read the Communist Manifesto/Mein Kampf, there’s some cool notions in there!” And Harry Potter isn’t even one of my real true I’ll bite your hand off for this fandoms!
I’m very sensitive about canon-compliance; I don’t mind AU fanfiction but I really dislike when authors take the original and go “what if we made it completely different including the characters?” That also applies to comics, TV and movie reboots, e.g. Elementary: transplant Holmes to New York? Sigh, Americans, okay they need to make everything about themselves so if this gets a new Holmes show made then fine. Make Watson a woman? Okay, it’s Current Year, why not? Make her Asian-American? Well, alright I suppose. Make Watson the main detective character and Holmes’ main function is to learn The Power of Friendship from a motley crew who are all just as smart as him Mr English Detective? Now come on! (Look, Without A Clue did it first and with humour and affection, not in all seriousness).
“All Harry says is “being afraid of death is a good thing, because dying is bad for you.””
But that’s a meaningless answer to the question “why are we afraid of death”. There are bad things we are not afraid of, and things we are afraid of that are not bad. It doesn’t even demonstrate that death is bad and that therefore it is rational to at least desire not-death — it just asserts that it is.
But in fact you could equally argue that death serves us far more than it harms us. It’s a primary mechanism of evolution, that allowed us to exist in the first place. It’s a primary mechanism of our feeding; we are heterotrophic organisms and as such cannot live without killing thousands of other things throughout our life for sustainance. It’s a final liberation from a life of pain and hardship (which is what life is for most animals, for most of life’s history).
If we’re even going to concede that there’s room for such suspicious notions as “good” and “bad” (other than instrumentally) in a rationalist worldview, it is absolutely not clear that death is bad. And even if it was, it doesn’t follow rationally from this that it is normal and good to fear death.
@Machine Interface:
Are you really asking me to explain why it’s not rational to commit suicide? I mean, I suppose that if you’re starting from a complete tabula rasa that’s something you need to justify, but I’m guessing that both of us already agree that we don’t think it’s rational to commit suicide, or we wouldn’t be here.
(Or as Harry put it, “If you want to die, there’s this Muggle invention called a ‘suicide prevention hotline’…”)
This is the crux of HPMOR’s argument – if you don’t want to live forever, you must want to stop living one day. There must be some point where you say “Sure, I’ve been alive for a hundred and twenty years, but a hundred and twenty years and one day would be just too much.” Do you actually have such a day in mind, where you’d choose to stop living even if nothing was wrong with your health?
Even if living is an instrumental goal rather than a terminal one (debatable, but terminal goals are by definition an axiom so we can agree to disagree), it’s instrumental to nearly every goal it’s possible to have. Regardless of how you define your utility function, “not dying” is going to unlock a heck of a lot of utility.
(Yes, people sometimes sacrifice themselves for a cause. But the sacrifice is also instrumental – if they could find a way to achieve the goal without sacrificing themselves, they would do that instead.)
It served us, past tense. But that’s not an argument that we should keep dying for those purposes, if we have the choice. I would argue that not dying is generally more utility than advancing evolution’s blind march to wherever. And if those purposes truly are necessary to our happiness, I suspect that we can find ways to do them that involve fewer people dying.
And really, “People need to die so that the human race will keep evolving?” If you said this in any other context, they’d say you were making a bad strawman of a eugenics argument.
@ beleester:
Sure, wanting to die is not rational, but neither is wanting to live. Desires are not rational, as witnessed by the fact that billions of creature that lack reason still want to live. We can come up with rational reasons for why we want to live (or die) at any given moment, but those reasons won’t mean anything when you’re getting railroad by, say, severe depression (or by survival instinct, in the case of someone who rational thinks they would be better of dead but can’t bring themselves to pull the trigger).
Even further than that: trillions of lifeforms that don’t even have a nervous system and thus cannot even want things still have a very strong mechanical drive to live. That’s because living is conductive to reproduction, and reproduction is conductive to gene replication. There’s nothing inherently good or rational about us being alive — we don’t exist for our own benefit, but for that of our genes, who are ready to betray us at the first opportunity (from retrotransposons to trisommy to cancer); we are but glorified capsids.
Yes, I want to stop living at some point, because life is pain, and I can only take so much — taking away decay and disease from the equation changes nothing, because psychological pain and isolation are also there. Do you want to spend eternity with 10 billion KKK members? I don’t.
My argument wasn’t trying to seriously prove that death serves us more than life and that we still need death in the future in an eugenistic fashion — rather that the claim that “life is obviously good” is, rather than a rational argument, an unexamined, rationalized manifestation of an instinct that doesn’t actually exist for our interest at the individual or species level, and that it’s actually fairly easy to come up with positive aspects of death.
No. And my memory is not that untrustworthy.
But our brains change from moment to moment. How are we not different people when our brains change?
Because the fact that your brain is in a slightly different state than in the last moment doesn’t make you a different person (under whatever definition of a person we typically use). Most of your memories (including memories of your internal thoughts that couldn’t be reconstructed from other information if you died) are the same.
Everything changes from moment to moment. And even if it somehow doesn’t change, you can’t know that it hasn’t changed. So either the word “same” refers to nothing in the universe and the word “different” refers to every possible relationship in the universe, or “same” encompasses some level of change. And it seems particularly relevant to gradual change with continuity of identity, of the sort humans experience between birth and death.
10240,
Let’s say you step into a cancer-curing machine which copies your brain atom-for-atom into a clone, such that the continuity of your conscious thought is maintained, then instantly kills your current, cancer-riddled brain and body.
Does using the machine count as dying? Would you be afraid to enter it? Is there a difference between using the machine and being rendered unconscious for a night?
No.
Brain uploading would make these definitions more complicated, though. There would be intermediates between dying and not dying. If I was restarted from a saved state right after my birth, forgetting my entire life since then, that would be very close to dying. Erasing the last few hours would definitely not like dying, while erasing my memories since I was (say) 12 would be somewhere in-between.
Also, our consciousness through time could be represented by a tree rather than a line if copies are made. If two copies were made of someone, say, in early childhood, those would arguably end up different persons.
10240,
Now what if the machine malfunctions so that it doesn’t kill you instantly, and a very apologetic technician spends a minute fixing it and then politely asks you to get back in to be terminated. The new version of you walks out and awkwardly mentions that he’s thankful to wake up as the copy that gets to live.
Would it now count as dying since it is no longer a perfect copy being killed?
I’m attempting to show here that a night’s sleep is similar enough to death that we shouldn’t be afraid of death, and that fear of death is just a very strong instinct. I’m skeptical about it because everything about death feels wrong, and the moral consequences of not caring about death are terrible.
No, it would be more like taking a drug that makes me forget the last minute. The copy still holds the same personality, memories etc. as the original, except for the last minute. That’s very different from dying without a copy.
What if the copy watches you die?
How does that matter?
The copy is having an experience that you cannot have, which makes him different from you, with death being impactfull enough for it to be a fundamental difference.
Or to put it a different way, if you cloned yourself perfectly and then murdered the clone, is that a net of nothing to you?
I shot a clone in Reno just to watch me die.
The copy has much of the same memories (of all forms, episodic, semantic, procedural etc., my way of thinking, plans etc.). The memory of one particular event doesn’t change that and make it a different person.
After even a slightly different experience for a few seconds, you and your clone will be thinking different things for the rest of your lives. So if you had to kill yourself in that moment, you would feel the same survival instinct that makes it very difficult.
For another tangential example which I’m plagiarizing but always found clever:
Imagine that your brain has been perfectly cloned and put in a box, hooked up to sensory feeds coming live from your own head. The box-brain has the exact same thoughts as you do because it has the same memories and the exact same experiences. It feels completely independent and in control of your body, even though it has no real control.
Killing the box brain has no moral weight, because it is a perfect copy of your own brain.
But then one day after many years of the box-brain thinking he’s not in a simulation, there is a split second glitch in the feed to his senses. Because of the glitch, the thought pattern of the box-brain is ever so slightly altered, delayed momentarily by a tenth of a second. The next movement made by you is picking up a pencil, but because of the glitch, the box-brain suddenly feels something is wrong with his arm and feels a slight delay. This causes him to pause for a second. “Am I getting the flu? Feeling a bit dizzy? WHOA, I just started writing without even thinking about it!”
Now the thought train of the box-brain is completely different from your own. He quickly realizes that he has absolutely no control over his body, and will be stuck watching someone else live in his body for the rest of his life.
Now the box-brain has his own consciousness, and it would be immoral to kill him, unless out of mercy.
The second sentence doesn’t follow from the first one.
Every moment, my brain could be given multiple different inputs. Depending on them, my thoughts would (perhaps) be different for the rest of my life. Out of these, only one line is played out. I don’t regard it as similar to death that most of these possible lines are not played out.
Or, again, take the example of an amnesia drug that makes you forget the last few minutes. Depending on whether I take the drug, my thoughts would be (perhaps) different for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t have a particular problem with taking the drug, even though it would mean that I don’t get to experience the version of my life where I don’t take the drug, and thus the thoughts I have in those minutes are continued. (If I had some really interesting thought, I’d make a note for myself.)
No. Again, I’d consider it equivalent to giving someone an amnesia drug that makes them forget whatever amount of time the box was running for. (Well, giving people amnesia drugs without their consent is immoral too.) It would only be anywhere near comparable to death if the simulation was running for a very long time.
10240,
You are making a logical argument that death/suicide is not bad thing, which I agree with. There shouldn’t be much to fear from death because we all experience it every time we fall asleep. The line of consciousness is broken, and your new consciousness the next morning only has the illusion of being the same person.
The counter argument is that it feels wrong, and I contend that if you had to actually commit suicide just because you were cloned that it would still feel scary and wrong, because that is the way we are wired.
The other counter argument is that if it was true then it opens the door for depraved, counterproductive nihilism.
Absolutely not. In a world with brain uploading, multiple copies etc., it’s not obvious what the proper analogue of our concept of death would be. I’m arguing that the proper definition/analogue of death would be a situation where no copy of me survives, while a situation where the only surviving copies have been forked from my own line of consciousness a long time ago would be an intermediate between death and non-death. A situation where there is a surviving copy whose memory only slightly differs from mine (where the difference is a short time’s worth of memories give or take) would definitely not be death.
10240,
I don’t understand your distinction between a copy and an original. To illustrate that point, two scenarios:
A) the cancer-curing machine works as intended: it clones you, copies your brain perfectly and then kills you (the original).
B) the cancer-curing machine malfunctions and doesn’t actually copy your brain into the new clone, but still kills you (the original).
You seem to be arguing that B) counts as death but A) is does not. But the experience of the original is exactly the same in both scenarios. Whether the copy procedure works or not doesn’t change his feelings or his experience in the slightest.
IMO the physical person doesn’t matter, the logical layer, the mind does. It’s an artificial restriction to only consider what the original physical person experiences, up to the point of the mind-uploading. It’s you who is distinguishing the copy and the original.
This seems simple, I’m really confused by some of the answers here. We have you the original, and the copy (call it you’). As soon as the copy is made, they are two separate consciousnesses. You dies, but you’ does not. As soon as they became separate entities they became separate consciousnesses capable of separate death.
I’m also not sure why a person would care about a separate copy of themselves any more than they would about another person who they share history or worldview with. As soon as they separate they are different people with different experiences (and I mean literally as soon as, because presumably they are not occupying the exact same physical space when the copy is made).
@LesHapablap:
Now there’s a new twist on Theseus’s old boat. I don’t speak for 10240, but I say that’s making a copy and destroying (killing) the original. I’d go into the machine anyway, though; better that a healthy copy of me exists with all-but-philosophical continuity than I die of cancer with no such copy being made.
My attempt to explain the Iran-Iraq war. Note: I will inevitably refer to them at some points, but I don’t know anything about military equipment, tactics, etc. This is not that kind of post. Also, I won’t even try to give an Iranian perspective.
In the late 1970s, Iraq was a rich country, at least by Middle Eastern standards, and not just because of oil. The monarchy had invested massively in infrastructure, and in sending educated Iraqis (including many women) to the West for postgraduate study, and this was now paying huge dividends – these people had returned and had staffed high quality universities training a whole new generation of doctors, engineers, etc. These were now helping Iraq flourish. The Ba’ath regime was not investing the oil wealth, they were just spending it, but the lack of investment in the future wasn’t being felt yet. Iraq was also a pretty Westernized country, and many people from other Arab countries, particularly Egypt and Palestine, went on work visas to work in construction, drive taxis, etc. To this day, the older generation of Egyptians love Saddam Hussein – because he gave them jobs!
What does the dictator of a wealthy country want? Prestige! If only we could have bid to host the World Cup like Qatar or something, but in those days, Arab nationalism was still a potent force, so Saddam wanted to be seen as the “leader” of the Arab world. Lebanon had descended into civil war. Egypt had disgraced itself at Camp David. There was an opening, and this was Iraq’s opportunity to raise its profile to match its economy. The material war aims were not very important – yes, Iran had reneged on a water rights treaty, and yes, they were mistreating the Arab population in the South-West of the country (the suggestively named Arabistan) but these in no way needed to lead to war. But by aggressively pressing these claims, Saddam wanted to be seen as championing the Arab cause, not just enlarging Iraqi territory.
And he thought he could win quite easily. Iran had recently had the Islamic Revolution, and was diplomatically isolated, whereas Iraq considered both the Russians and Americans as allies. The Iraqi assumption was that Iran would also be riven by infighting, that pro-Shah forces would take the chance to rebel, that domestic Arabs would join their cause, the Islamic government would be overthrown, and that the whole thing would be over in a flash.
There was also the matter of the Iranian regime, which was now officially Twelver. This was a big deal because Iraq is the theological and spiritual homeland of Shi’ism, containing most of the key shrines and seminaries. In fact, pretty much all of the new Iranian leadership had studied in Iraq, lived in exile in Iraq, and the modern doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih had been developed in Iraq. They were now keen to re-export their ideology back to Iraq, as the first stage of taking over the entire Islamic world, and so were constantly calling for Iraqi Shi’i to rise up and overthrow their un-Islamic, secular rulers. This didn’t cause rebellions in Iraq, but it did (understandably) enrage the government and alarm the population. I don’t think this was the key reason that Iraq invaded, because there was almost a war in 1974-5 when the Shah was still in power. Nevertheless, it surely contributed.
So in 1980 Iraq invaded Iran, even though Iran was far larger in geography and population, and had better and more modern equipment. But who cares, because the Iranians won’t fight! The government tried to keep the country on a peacetime footing, paying for the war largely by borrowing, and minimally disrupting ordinary life – after all, this was a quick war for glory and popularity. With initiative and surprise on their side, the army managed to make some quick gains, but in a few months they had exhausted themselves and were on the defensive for the next 7 years. Partly this was because they had underestimated the Iranians, partly because the Iraqi armed forces fought very poorly.
Contrary to expectations, the Iranian people rallied around their government – they (correctly) saw it as a foreign invasion rather than liberation from an unpopular government. The domestic Arabs mostly did not support the Iraqi cause. The Iranians fought back hard, with big waves of civilian conscripts, and the much smaller Iraqi army had no answer. In fact it was Iraq which had problems with domestic loyalty, as Kurdish separatists opportunistically sided with the Iranians. However, despite Iranian hopes, the vast majority of the Shi’a population stayed loyal, but a tiny number of treasonous scum called SCIRI sided with the Iranians against their own country. Naturally, after 2003 the Americans decided to help the SCIRI traitors take over the Iraqi army and police force and use them to murder their enemies, because Americans are lunatics. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The other problem was the poor performance of the military. It had previously had a reputation as a very good fighting force (at least by Arab standards) though this had never been seriously tested. Between 1958 and 1968 they had launched so many coups that governments were understandably terrified of it. Saddam had spent the last 10 years making it so thoroughly coup-proof that he destroyed its capacity to function effectively. They had also spent a lot of money on Soviet equipment, which did not work nearly as well as the American equipment the Iranians had bought, whether because of inherent limitations, or poor training. The Iraqi air force in particular was a disaster – they outnumbered the Iranians for essentially the entire war, often by huge numbers, but were never able to achieve proper air superiority.
By 1982 the Iranians were properly on the offensive, and invaded Iraq. Syria cut off Iraq’s oil exports, and even though Iraq now went on a total war footing, it looked like the war would be lost, possibly even with the destruction of the country. On the ground, Iraq was simply overwhelmed by a far more numerous foe, and at sea technical superiority allowed them to essentially eliminate the Iraqi navy. Things were not as clear cut in the air, but it wasn’t turning the tide. Fortunately, the other Arab countries (except Syria) rallied around Iraq, lending billions of dollars and helping with oil exports. Because of this support, and in incredibly desperate fighting, they just about managed to cling on.
At this point, the Iranians decided to bleed Iraq dry, and it basically worked. The demands of the war essentially destroyed the Iraqi economy, and Iraq’s infrastructure was shattered. Pretty much everyone who could serve was conscripted, and huge numbers died. In absolute numbers, casualties were worse on the Iranian side, both because of their human wave tactics and because they were the aggressors, but as a percentage of the population it was far worse for Iraq. The narrative switched from quick, glorious war to desperate battle for national survival, and the pressures of war also meant further clamping down on society. Iraq in the 1970s wasn’t a free country, not by any means, but it was “as good a place as any to stay indoors and thank your lucky stars you hadn’t been arrested.” By the mid-80s this was no longer true.
Up until 1987, this pattern persisted – Iraq using ever more desperate measures to cling on (chemical weapons, targetting civilians – including Iraqi Kurds, increasing reliance on US help in the Gulf) but Iran was basically slowly strangling Iraq, cutting off effective access to the Gulf and nearly capturing Basra. Eventually the Iraqi generals rebelled and told Saddam Hussein that they could no longer tolerate political interference in the military. This was basically a threat to overthrow him because the war was going so badly. He backed down, giving the generals full control, and the military performance quickly improved, although the air force remained rubbish. I believe the Iranian people started turning against the war at this point too, but I’m not sure how much that mattered.
So in 1988, with the US (and to a lesser extent, Britain and France) giving Iraq a lot of backing because they didn’t want to see the country destroyed, the newly refitted, newly effective Iraqi military suddenly turned the tide and started smashing the Iranians! In probably the only sane thing he ever did, Saddam didn’t press the advantage, but agreed to a status quo ante peace deal. Obviously the Western powers didn’t want to see Iraq conquer Iran either, and would have stepped down their support, so this was the right decision, especially considering Iraq had been begging for peace since 1982. Still, it’s surprising that Saddam agreed to it. The Iraqi military then spent a few more months crushing the Kurdish rebels before the country returned to peace.
The aftermath of the war was complete devastation. What remained of civil society had been completely destroyed, with the Ba’ath party now in almost totalitarian control. Trying to pay for the war had squeezed every drop out of the orange, and the economy was completely wrecked. The currency was massively devalued, and (dollar-denominated!) external debt was sky-high. The war had also accelerated the re-tribalisation of society, with tribal peoples moving into the cities, although this might have happened anyway. On a more subjective point of view, the war was fought in hellish conditions, with chemical weapons and trench warfare the norm – God knows what that did to people’s psyches.
But from the regime’s point of view, the biggest danger was the army, newly effective and at odds with the government. In every way that mattered, we had lost the war, and the government might well have fallen at this point, but the brief flurry of success at the end let Saddam cling on and gave him some breathing space. He needed a way to placate the army, gain more revenues, and regain his domestic position. The heavy support he had received from the West in the latter stages of the war made him think he had actual allies, rather than conditional supporters. In retrospect, the next step was inevitable, but I was still shocked at the time.
Very interesting. That’s a war I don’t know much about on the technical side.
Question. When did you/your family leave Iraq (I assume you aren’t still there)?
Also, I can vouch that the US occupation of Iraq in 2003 was run by lunatics. What I’ve read of the immediate postwar days is frankly shameful.
My father left in the 1970s. Some of my family are still there. My uncle served in the war – I have never heard him speak one word about it.
Do you also have the Iraqi perspective on the next chapter? My knowledge of that conflict is extremely one-sided.
I don’t have anything remotely interesting to say about Kuwait or the sanctions era. The most interesting thing that happened in the period was retribalisation, which I do not properly understand.
I was not trying to give “the Iraqi perspective,” just my idiosyncratic understanding of what was going on and more importantly why. But part of the explanation has to involve answering questions like “was the MiG just a terrible plane?” that I have no idea about.
Yes and no. The basic design wasn’t bad, but the monkey models the Soviets sold to non-Warsaw Pact clients were seriously downgraded. And the Iraqi military had serious problems, too.
What is tribalism? People not trusting people outside their tribe? Not interacting?
How could you tell that tribalisation occurred at that time? What did people start or stop doing that showed that tribalisation had occurred?
The people in the cities knew the identity of their tribes, right, they just didn’t act tribal?
Look, I have already said that I don’t fully understand. There is a large academic and popular literature out there if you are interested.
But in broad strokes, retribalisation in Iraq meant the formation of tribal institutions to fill the gap of the breakdown of civil society and the state. You “could tell” that retribalisation was happening because, for instance, tribal sheikhs were dispensing justice. No, the people in the cities did not necessarily know the identity of their tribes. People of no tribe became associated with tribes.
Warning: CW
I am reminded occasionally of the joke about the Jewish man reading a Nazi newspaper. The most recent such occasion was when going over the old free speech arguments with a friend. Steve Bannon is speaking at the Oxford Union. How upsetting, I thought, that such an awful figure is being lent the legitimacy of such a prestigious institution. They should not have invited him. My friend countered that the best way to discredit awful opinions is to air them to expose them for what they are. We continued down the standard lines. I’m not interested in retracing the argument here, but there was one thing that I found interesting: we both made slippery slope arguments.
I was afraid about more and more extreme and horrible people coming more and more into the Overton window, gradually being accepted, elected, invited in from the cold. Trump was elected, Bolsonaro was elected, the UK Conservative Party has stolen UKIP’s policies while UKIP has cosied up to the likes of the EDL, neo-nazi groups are gaining popularity across Europe etc.
My friend was afraid of the assault on free speech. What if we end up in a world where all the opinions being aired are the “approved of” ones? Maybe it’s Steve Bannon getting no-platformed today, but tomorrow? It’ll be Sam Harris, or Stephen Fry… Before you know it nobody to the right of Jeremy Corbyn will be allowed to speak in public. Or maybe, even worse, it’ll flip on its head, and we’ll have high levels of censorship but the un-approved-of views will be the liberal ones, and the only opinions we’re allowed to hear are the very same pseudo-fascist stuff I’m afraid of.
I noticed that we had accidentally done this, invoked slippery slopes and feared sliding in the opposite direction and I tried to argue that mine was the one we need to worry about. More extreme people genuinely are becoming more accepted at the moment. We’re not in danger of a one-opinion state, but we are in danger of far-right demagogues getting elected [citation: it’s happening already].
But then I thought that maybe I’m not reading the other side’s newspapers. Maybe some people genuinely think we are going “up” the slippery slope. And, indeed, maybe we are.
So I thought I’d come here. You guys are not as left or liberal as me and my friend. Some of you are sympathetic to Trump, and many of you believe in free speech above most else. Do you think we’re slipping? Which direction are we slipping in?
(Of course, one answer, and I suspect it’s the correct one, is that both slippery slope arguments are problematic, but that’s not the point of my post. My point is to hear your perspective. All my left and liberal friends fear that the world is falling to the far right. But do right-wing people fear the opposite? Should we read each other’s newspapers?)
I’m of the opinion that we’re still steadily slipping towards greater societal disorder. It’s been a steady slide since at least the 1790’s and hasn’t shown any sign of slowing or reversing lately.
I was pretty thrilled when Trump won the 2016 election because I didn’t think that it was still possible for a candidate to win with the entire political-media establishment united against him. And because he exceeded my expectations in that way, I was more open to the idea that he would exceed expectations again by fulfilling some of his campaign promises. Specifically “draining the swamp,” deporting the illegal immigrant population, and dialing back America’s foreign entanglements and outsourcing of heavy industry.
But so far he’s been a standard Republican president. He’s rolled over whenever the courts rule against his executive orders, despite his portrait of Jackson. There hasn’t been any progress on the wall. The government and deficit have continued to expand. America is still propping up NATO and making disadvantagous trade deals. Even the midterm elections have been disappointing and winning elections is literally the one thing he’s been good at so far.
That is to say, what you see as “going backwards” is just going forward more slowly than you’d like. America is more disordered than ever and the trend is towards further disorder. We’re not roaring down the slope like we would be under Clinton but we’re still sliding down it.
Both slopes are real, and since they are not directly opposing, they can both slide downward at the same time. Speech can be banned, leading to scenarios where more speech is banned, by making it easier to ban speech. Right wing leaders can sometimes win, even when they can’t speak openly, because democracy is fickle, and people react to negative situations whether they are allowed to talk about it or not (see right-wing increases in places that accepted large numbers of Syrian refugees, like Germany).
Consider a world in which far right views are a distinct minority, and that they are consistently silenced as Not Worthy To Be Spoken. Now imagine a typical teenager growing up in a such a world. They hear, quietly, Banned Speech, and think – “I’ve never heard an argument that counters this!” and they really haven’t. So, if they are interested in having a rational and complete worldview (can’t just ignore it) they have two options, defend the status quo by inventing arguments against the Banned Speech, or accepting the corrections to their understanding that come from Banned Speech. The Banned Speech spreaders must lay very low and be careful about their approach, so they are clever about what they share and careful to direct what they say to reach the target audience. The Normal Speech is often spoken by the less intelligent and less thoughtful, since that’s most people and most people have accepted the Normal Speech. Being alone in this endeavor (because you can’t discuss Banned Speech), they come up with relatively poor arguments to counter it. They find that they don’t understand their own moral positions, but that the other side clearly does (at least as far as has been described). Now they’re mad at the majority of society for banning clearly correct speech, and angry because they’re not allowed to talk about it.
(Very simplistic retelling of a more complex historical scenario, for brevity sake):
In the 1950s, far left speech was “banned” in the US. The 1960s saw a great increase in far left thought. Because of that backlash, far left speech was no longer banned. By the 1980s, far left speech was on the decline again, not because it was banned again, but because it wasn’t. By airing their views where it could be compared, it was determined that far left speech was deficient in ways that were obvious only by comparison. Rightward economic views became dominant – but even now we’re seeing more pushback against that, since people can see the excesses in place and discuss them!
That’s why the “marketplace of ideas” is so important. Yes, by allowing rightward speech you may see increases in rightward politicians elected in the near future. Banning it may not change that at all, though, it just makes it uglier in the swings back and forth. When the right wins again, and they will, the left will be the ones banned for a while and frustrated.
I definitely see the danger of slipping left as far more salient than that of slipping right right now. I find Trump despicable and his populist rhetoric to be vapid, but I never predicted his implemented policies to be all that far off from that of a standard Republican, and that seems to be correct so far. However bad as he might be, he has been effectively constrained by our democratic system, and I really have no fears that he will implement any sort of fascist policies or that he will be a stepping stone toward fascism. The resistance to him is too sensitive and too motivated and too fast-acting to make that a real possibility, even assuming the worst intentions on his part. However much the right has power, any attempts to step off to the far right is being effectively resisted.
On the other hand, I see the push toward the far left as facing little resistance and more well situated. Much of academia has been growing further left, as documented by Jonathan Haidt, and there seems to be very little resistance to it – in fact, I see more rhetoric of the type that “23-to-1 leftist-to-rightist ratio in social sciences isn’t nearly enough. We should keep pushing until it’s 1-to-0!” The critical theory “grievance studies” have plenty of critics, but there’s no indication that those studies are looking into reforming their faith-based epistemology. And contrary to many people’s predictions, students are successfully carrying this into their professional environments, with visible effects in majorly influential companies like Google or NYTimes.
And unlike criticism of Trump which gets hailed as correct and brave, criticism of this ideology gets rounded off to crazy right-wing conspiracy theory fear-mongering, even when coming from people on the left like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker (or myself, in my personal experience).
I just don’t see effective pushback constraining the slip to the left, unlike the slip to the right. Socialism – of the type where personal property is banished and a government central planner controls the economy, not of the type seen in the Scandinavian countries – is in vogue in my circles, and any appeals that empirical evidence might indicate that this is a bad idea gets rounded off to being either a bad-faith argument designed to manipulate or the result of brainwashing, which results in the discourse just continuing to ratchet further left. And though these people don’t have national-level power, many of them do have little fiefdoms as administrators where they’ve gotten to implement their will – and the stats indicate that positions of major influence like those tend to be dominated by people who think like them.
That’s why even as a leftist, I’m far more worried about the slipping to the left than the slipping to the right. Being a leftist doesn’t mean being blind to the dangers of slipping too far left – in fact, I believe it should mean being hypersensitive to it, even moreso than to the dangers of slipping too far right. Yet I see a continual insistence among my peers on the left that a good leftist isn’t allowed to be against anything that’s further left, and I don’t see effective mechanisms of constraining that. I’m not privy to the conversations in the right, but I don’t see rightists of equal extremity as my peers but on the opposite direction – i.e. literal Nazis or White Supremacists – as having anywhere near the numbers or influence as those on the left. I’m pretty confident in the current Republican administration’s ability to stay on one side of the line away from Nazis, but I’ve already seen national-level Democratic politicians buy into and implement critical theory-based policies.
I’m certain there are places where the opposite is true. It seems to me you, and those similarly situated, want to have your cake and eat it too.
Perhaps there’s a link here to the people that want to make a living off all the drumming going on in Drumidia, and so insist on leaving near it, but also insist on a drum free bubble around their own houses.
Brad, I think the danger is that the left (however we want to define such a term, spanning from liberals to progressives to that troll over on the sub-reddit defending Mao and Stalin) are in real danger of forgetting, ignoring, or not being aware of the slippery slope that censorship represents. They think that because they are the good guys (and I don’t mean mockery by this, it’s a genuinely held belief because they do think the principles and values they hold are on the whole correct, good and better for human flourishing; the trouble is that easily tilts over into “I’m right, therefore you’re wrong, therefore you’re bad”) then they will never abuse this power and it will never be used except against bad people and bad things.
And that’s not how it works. I’m on the right, I have the examples from history of how the right abused such powers, I know how this can go wrong so easily because you’re convinced you’re doing the right thing. So you know, burned by experience, which is why I’m on the free speech side. And the left should know this too, because they were the ones protesting censorship. But they’re blinded by their own virtue, so what they are doing isn’t censorship (that’s something only the right does), it’s preventing hate speech or the like.
Remember “there is no right not to be offended”? Remember all the people on the left(ish) side proclaiming this, from Salman Rushdie to Philip Pullman to Dawkins to Fry to Ricky Gervais on down? Generally this was trumpeted when it was religious/conservatives being offended, and they were defending the right to dunk crucifixes in urine or make fun of believers, but the principle was there: just because you go “wah, my hurt feelings!”, too bad – that is not enough to impinge on their right of free speech.
And now I’m seeing things like the report of the Cathy Newman/Jordan Peterson interview where she asked “Why should your freedom of speech trump a trans person’s right not to be offended?” (I don’t think Peterson’s answer as reported was quite such a slam dunk as it’s being presented, but that’s a different matter).
And all I could think was “Hold on, what right not to be offended? For decades I’ve been lectured as a religious conservative (both religiously and politically) that I have no right to object to anything on the grounds that it offends me, and now all of a sudden there’s a right to be offended?”
What that means, or what it sounds like it means, is that there is a right to take offence – so long as you belong to the protected groups. Outside of that, too bad. And that’s not a neutral or universal principle, and that attitude will let the left slide painlessly down the slippery slope, unless they examine it. And it’s going to be hard to examine it, because it will question the idea of the virtue and rightness and goodness of the left’s views, and that is going to hurt like hellfire because it’s digging right down into the psychological roots.
@Deiseach: Exactly. Cathy Newman was implying that noble groups like males in dresses have a right to not be offended, while offending peasants is either neutral or virtuous.
And so I worry that the explosion in males identifying as women without a concurrent increase in female gender dysphoria comes from adult males seeing a chance to game the Blue system.
A while back I saw some trans folk chewing out Jill Soloway (AFAB, creator of “Transparent” which a few years ago was the wokest show on TV but is now problematic as fuck) for claiming to be non-binary but still implicitly identifying as a woman in their memoir… but, y’know, explicit self-ID is everything so it’s still offensive to call them “her” and not “them.” From what I’ve read of Soloway, their particular case seems more like some kind of internalized cisphobia than anything else.
Anyway: there has been an explosion in people identifying as non-binary and most of them were assigned female at birth. I don’t know what the statistics are and I don’t know how many are sincere versus just doing it for wokeness points or because it’s a social trend, but I do know I’m a bigot for even asking these questions and if you’ll excuse me I’m going to take a shower now.
Eh, Le Maistre Chat, I’m not particularly upset about men in dresses – I think transvestites are a group that have been bundled into transgender and/or brushed discreetly under the carpet, but if you’ve got the legs for a skirt like Eddie Izzard, sure go ahead! Transvestites generally seem not to be “I am really a woman” but more “I am expressing my feminine side” so that’s their business as long as they don’t try to get women to wax their bits on the grounds that they’ve got a lady penis not a man penis so objections are bigotry.
What I do object to is “guy who doesn’t even make the effort to put on a dress but demands to be treated as a woman” but that’s a whole other mess to be sorted out: some I think are probably not trans but have some mental problem, some may or may not be trans, and some are probably opportunists sniffing out a chance to try and make money or gin up publicity (it seems to be popular to post some heart-rending tale on social media of oppression’n’transphobia, then appeal for crowdfunding or donations to help with the trauma and all).
@Deiseach
You’re on the right Deiseach?
My “tribe-o-meter” must be way off, as other than describing yourself as being religious (which for some reason correlates with “right”) none of the posts I’ve read of yours gave me that impression.
What “right-wing” policies do you advocate?
Another SSC’er described themselves as on the “‘left”, which I didn’t get the impression of at all (seemed mostly pro technocracy to me) and when I asked said something along the lines of “because I don’t accept excuses for voting for Trump”, but otherwise the policies advocated seemed right-ish to me, just as yours seem left-ish to me.
Usually I think:
“Right” = tax cuts for the wealthy, and more power for employers
“Left” = spending for the poor, and more power for employees
and everything else is window dressing.
What am I getting wrong?
Plumber
> What am I getting wrong?
Different people put different weights on different issues.
LMS
> Cathy Newman was implying that noble groups like males in dresses have a right to not be offended, while offending peasants is either neutral or virtuous.
A model of this blog’s emphasis on charity and steelmanning, as always.
Deiseach
It seems to me that you, and everyone on your side of this debate—including Scott—is pushing a norm that is both novel and ill defined.
Absolutely anyone can say absolutely anything with absolutely no consequences clearly doesn’t work and no one really advocates for it. On the legal side that have been millions of words written in the last hundred years (which is how young modern first amendment law is) delineating exactly what freedom of speech means. Even so there are still some quite thorny area left. But on the, it must be emphasized again quite novel and radical, free speech norm side there isn’t even a beginning of such an effort.
Instead on the one hand we get extremely vague but soaring rhetoric like your post above about how censorship is bad, with the strong implication being that the norm being pushed is ancient rather than entirely novel, and on the other hand very specific cases that people decide to champion (Remember the Damore) and others that for some not very well elucidated reason don’t count (Kappernick).
How exactly freedom of association is supposed to fit in conceptual with this version of free speech is never exactly spelled out. But it seems to cash out in a quite asymmetric way.
For me it is very easy to oppose this new version of free speech because it’s supporters haven’t even fleshed it out to the point where it’s a serious ideologically neutral proposition. Right now it’s inextricably tied to resentment at the way right wingers are being treated by people that don’t like what they have to say. Show me a Skokie moment and maybe I’ll take another look.
Left and right mean different things to different people and different things in different times and places.
To me, in economic terms, right means more choices controlled by individuals, left means more choices controlled by government. In social terms, in America at present, right means more enforcement of traditional morality, left means less enforcement of traditional morality, more enforcement of leftish morality. I’m mostly opposed to the enforcement of either category of morality, assuming that moral rules against killing people and stealing stuff don’t fit under either.
Trump represents himself as right wing but is actually a populist with no clear left/right position. One result of his prominence is that people now think of immigration restrictions as right wing, when by my definitions they should be left wing–Bernie Sanders had that one right, from his point of view. Trade restrictions are an even clearer case–although that one has switched between Republicans and Democrats before.
Plumber
I think you are getting both wrong at once.
You have the correct position for the right’s “donor class” and the correct position for the left’s traditional “voting class” (although both coalition’s voters are shifting while IMO the donors are staying the same-ish). The right’s voters have always been less interested in the market than the donors and more interested in preserving culture. The Left’s donors, on the other hand, are less interested in the economy (and to the extent they are they don’t typically have very serious ideas) and are more interested with cultural transformation.
This is how, for instance, African Americans and South American Hispanics vote majority Democrat. This has been a constant cause of confusion to the Bushes and other similar politicians who said, “but they believe in religion just light us conservatives!” The failure is that these people vote almost 100% on fiscal issues like healthcare and wealth redistribution. They are a cultural fit for a position they dont care about.
It also shows how Scott Walker (a guy I know you don’t like and reference a lot) managed to bust public sector unions in Wisconsin. He always had the fiscal donor class and suburban right wingers on his side by arguing these unions made schools more expensive. However, he united that position with the proposition that they weren’t just expensive, but they were corrupt and immoral. They advocated things like sodomy, ,wanted to teach Howard Zinn’s books, stole wages from people who didn’t want to be in the union, used union funds to campaign for immoral politicians, etc, etc. And the Wisconsin public sector unions were vulnerable on these points because, frankly, it was true (also why the Supreme Court recently ruled against unions IMO, it was because they didn’t even try to hide their corruption anymore, they were advocating that it was their right to be corrupt). I live in IL and we know Wisconsin politics well. Walker won his first 3 elections because Wisconsin needed to be “saved” from Illinois machine politics. He at least delayed it a bit.
@DavidFriedman
Up to the limits of my understanding I agree with everything in your post.
Obviously I vote different than you, but I suspect that’s because I want individuals constrained by majority rule more than you.
Yes I acknowledge that “the tyranny of the mob” is a real thing, I’m just even less truthful of completely free individuals (and I don’t want people parking in front of my driveway, especially if they have a loud stereo).
@idontknow131647093
If I understand you correctly your division between the “donor” and “voter” classes of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party seems essentially correct to me, and I’ll add that in my lifetime the donors seem to get what they want more often than the voters (Republicans have passed lots of tax cuts, but Roe v.Wade is still the law of the land, and Obergefell v. Hodges is now the law of the land, but the number of private sector union jobs is still a shadow of what they once were).
And I’m a little odd in while I don’t feel as strongly about it as I do what does determine my vote, if a local community wants to ban abortions in their county, and votes that way, I think the majority should rule there, and I don’t think anyone should be forced to bake a cake.
I suppose to be consistent if a county votes to force people to bake cakes, I should say that’s okay as well,.but that’s a harder pill for me to swallow.
The difference?
Forcing a woman to bear a child sounds like slavery to me, but the principal that human life is sacred is pretty compelling to me, so on that issue I throw my hands up and say “Let the people decide” (other people I mean, I’d have a hard time casting a vote on that).
On the “bake the cake” argument, I default to “majority rules” for most things but I don’t think people should be compelled to labor (yes someone’s going to say “taxes are forced labor”, I don’t agree with that, and I’ll save that argument for another thread).
On economic issues; basically I want February 1973.
Plumber, I agree with most the assessments you posed there.
I wasn’t alive in 1973, but I will advise you that in order to replicate those economic conditions you need to be willing to nuke a few major cities, instigate a Eurasian landwar that kills or maims most males 20-30 (without harming US males much) and then allow for a near total exclusion of 50% of the world from the economy.
with the strong implication being that the norm being pushed is ancient rather than entirely novel
Because it isn’t novel, it’s not different this time round – the impulse to say to enemies/inferiors/the conquered “shut up, you can’t say this, you can’t think that” is as old as our species.
The left thinking that this time it’s different and if they’re doing it means it’s not censorship is precisely the trap I’m afraid of them falling into, and it looks like you’ve fallen in already, Brad. You have only the best intentions and act out of measured reason and not impulse? And do you not think the Inquisition (something often invoked in such examples) didn’t feel exactly the same way? I’m Catholic, I have to sit through lectures about the evil of the Inquisition often enough, do you think I don’t recognise the new progressive secular form coming into being when I see it?
Deiseach
There was no previous round. There’s never been a non-trivial sized society in human history that the norm you are trying to push has prevailed.
Further, you are assuming the conclusion–that “censorship” is some unified, indivisible concept that applies to every actor everywhere that takes some action or thinks differently about a person on the basis of what that other person said is doing the same thing as the government putting someone in prison because it doesn’t like what he’s said.
That’s frankly baloney. You yourself admit elsewhere in this thread that you endorse a church firing a preacher because it doesn’t agree with what he says. Is that censorship?
If you want me to go along with your proposed social norm at least
1) Admit that it’s a radical new social norm. Don’t try to tell me you are only standing up for a principle that’s heretofore been universally honored for centuries and only when those darn kids with their pink hair came along did anyone even question that it might not be honored forever.
I wasn’t born yesterday and neither were you.
2) Outline _in detail_ what it is you think the norm should actually be. Where exactly do you think freedom of association ends and “censorship” begins? Why Damore and not Kaepernick? Why universities and not churches? Why can a baker decide not to bake a gay wedding cake but I can’t organize my friends not to shop there?
Going ahead and actually make your case, don’t just darkly threaten me with vague dire future consequences if I don’t go along with whatever you arbitrarily choose to label “free speech”.
This looks like the result of confusing relative with actual success. The fact that much of the world was in poor shape due to WWII meant that Americans were relatively better off. It didn’t make them absolutely better off.
Presumably you have some theory in which trade is sort of like warfare–the poorer the people you trade with the more likely you are to win. That isn’t how it works. If you look at current U.S. exports, our biggest trading partner is Canada. India is number fifteen. No African country is in the top 25.
For imports from countries, China is number one, Canada number two, India nine. No African country in the top ten, which is as far as the page I’m looking at lists them.
David, I am not confusing them, I am stating that the “feelings” associated with the postwar period of “generalized prosperity” and “national unity” etc required the state wherein US workers were much better off relative to the world and they could not be outsourced or competed with (yet) by EU/JPN/CN industry.
I don’t think people will be overall better off, but they might feel better in the US, because people will be more equal in the US (every US worker will be in high demand) and we also get to feel like the best. That is what postwar nostalgia is about, not prosperity in any meaningful sense.
1. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t Plumber’s point about things being better then.
2. It’s not clear to me that the destruction in the rest of the world made people in the US more equal. Surely the fraction of world labor destroyed, although large, was lower than the fraction of world capital, so one would expect on a very simple analysis that the return to capital would go up and to labor down. I can imagine more elaborate models in which the later development of capital abroad, especially human capital, made foreign workers a closer substitute for American workers and so had the opposite effect for the U.S.
@David Friedman:
I’m pretty sure that was the case even before Trump (at least in Europe).
While technically immigration can be considered an economic issue, culturally ISTM that support/opposition to it correlates much more strongly with leftish morality/traditional morality than with other economic issues e.g. taxation.
@Plumber:
So you’re against conscription, jury duty, etc. as well?
@ David Friedman
This sounds incorrect to me unless you are choosing a starting point prior to the war and measuring the return on labor and the return capital through the war. If labor is scarce relative to capital you should get higher returns from labor, not the other way around.
I am comparing the situation after the war to the situation before the war. But the argument also works to compare the situation immediately after the war to the situation much later, since a lot of the destroyed capital got replaced.
Correct.
And the effect of the war was the opposite. Some labor was destroyed and a lot of capital, making capital scarcer relative to labor than it had been before, which would reduce the returns from labor, not increase them.
@baconbits
The key word in the quoted comment is destroyed.
@idontknow131647093
You may well be right that the U.S.A. in1973 was a historical anomaly that can’t be achieved again, but the Germans, the Scandinavians, and (to a lesser extent) the Canadians seem to have living standards closer to then.
I’ve posted some of this stuff before in other threads, but why 1973?
Highest adjusted for inflation median hourly wages for non-supervisor workers yet.
A lower gap between rich and poor.
A lower gap between college educated and non-college educated incomes.
The draft had ended.
The civil rights act and the voting rights act had been passed ending legal Jim Crow.
The test score gaps between black and white students was closing (and would continue to close until the 1980’s).
While not the market share of the 1950’s, private sector unions were still relatively strong.
Public sector unions were growing, including for garbage collectors (this is important to me because garbage collectors are the government employees most likely to die on the job in peace time, yes more than the fire fighters and police officers who get all the press), remember M.L.K. Junior was shot when he was supporting a garbage collectors strike in Memphis.
The E.P.A.and OSHA acts has passed, a cleaner environment (back in 1970 when those acts were passed the San Francisco bay was pretty much an open sewer, and of course there was more lead in the air) and more workplace safety would result.
I was in Kindergarten in 1973 so I have only a child’s eye view of what life was actually like, but I lived in a mostly black neighborhood, and I remember that my neighbors as homeowners, with relatively new cars who earned middle class wages, but within 15 years that ended, their kids didn’t find those jobs, crime soared, in the mid 80’s it was a rare month that I didn’t hear gunfire and sirens, then by the ’90’s the neighborhood became middle-class again, but college educated whites instead.
@A1987dM
In my experience Jury duty is so easy to get out of it’s effectively volunteer and I don’t have a problem with it, conscription is a more interesting question, I do think some majority rule compulsion for a society to survive is excusable, but I think the lottery system that we had in the U.S.A. for a long while did put too much of a burden on an unlucky few, I’d prefer something more broadbased like the Swiss system (of course it helps that their military has only been a deterrent for over a hundred years).
And when it comes to military matters that something I’ve wondered for a while, the Swiss kept their independence while the Nazi’s were turning Europe into a slaughterhouse, but it was the far from pure British Empire, United States, and the Soviet Union that defeated the greater evil of Nazi Germany (and Stalin’s regime wasn’t that much lesser of an evil, but it bore the brunt of the fighting).
How much lesser evil is acceptable to keep (the practice of preparing for and diverting resources towards the man-made Hell of war) in order to defeat greater evils when they arise? We had conscription for decades during the cold war.
And apparently ignored the responses since you continue to spout a meaningless statistic after it’s been pointed out multiple times that it is meaningless.
@Brad
The wages were real not “meaningless”, I was there! My father only did sporatic work (concrete, hauling, and roofing) out of a 1950’s pick-up truck, and while my mother would get on the roof and work with him from time to time, it still wasn’t many hours of labor that let them buy a house in Berkeley in the early 1970’s compared to what it would it would take today, and my Dad was only in his 30’s and my Mom in her 20’s!
Re-read our host’s “Considerations On Cost Disease” post and try to tell me those statistics are “meaningless”.
The decline of unions correlates with a real decline in living standards for the working class, and far more of my peers than not have been less prosperous than their parents were at the same age.
I believe my eyes.
OH man, I’m definitely blaming that misread on having a 12 day old at home. I read it three times and though “He can’t really mean that can he”, my subconscious knew what my eyes wouldn’t see.
Cash wages are a meaningless statistic. Compensation is the meaningful one.
If you think otherwise, I’ll gladly trade you $1 every two weeks for your benefits.
@Brad
What is meaningful is what an hour of labor earns you, that more money is earmarked for “medical benefits” doesn’t freaking matter because it’s less time with the physician anyway!
Housing matters, especially how unaffordable, and being able to buy more impressive pocket computers is not a freaking equivalent!
Less pensions, less housing, less time with the Doctor when you can see one, is somehow more compensation?
Each year the housing one can buy his your wages is less than, the year before, each years new hires earn less of a pension than those hired before, co-pays to visit the hospital go ever up, this is “compensation”?
Pull the other one why don’t you.
Which is compensation. It’s not a complicated argument. You need to look at compensation, not wages. You may well be able to tell the same story you want to tell, but you’ll be using the correct statistic.
Are you referring to me? I am not a troll, please don’t call me one. It is neither kind nor true.
Thanks for your comment. Your perspective isn’t one I’ve heard much of before. But I do wonder if you and I understand different things by “left”. Sam Harris looks pretty centrist to me, and would be significantly right of centre in my country. I don’t know much about Steven Pinker, but his wikipedia page doesn’t seem to mention political views. This makes me take your “I’m a leftist but worried about the excesses of the left” with a pinch of salt.
Perhaps this is wrong, but I put it to you that perhaps you do “see rightists of equal extremity as [your] peers but on the opposite direction”, but you’re wrong to say that “equal extremity” corresponds to literal Nazis. Maybe it corresponds to “mainstream Trump voter”, in which case there is a lot of them on the right. (And there’s a few people even more extreme than *them*!)
(Also, what’s far-left about critical theory? I went to a lecture course on critical theory and only one of the several lecturers was a socialist.)
Pinker doesn’t involve himself much in politics, but whatever leanings he’s stated tend to be fairly left-wing. As for Harris, I’m puzzled as to how he could be construed as at all right-wing – maybe centrist, but I can’t think of a single belief he espouses that would place him on the right. His whole deal is combating traditional structures – mainly in the form of religion – and seeking to tear them down for the purposes of reducing unnecessary suffering. His opinions on immigration probably come closest to right-wing, but even there, he pretty obviously arrives to it from a left-wing perspective rather than a right-wing ethnonationalist one. Which leads to the unusual belief he holds that USA should limit immigration but should also have effectively open borders for Muslims who come in fleeing from religious persecution.
The connection between critical theory and far-left politics is a mysterious one that probably won’t be fully figured out for a while. I’ve heard some people posit that it has to do with the empirical evidence of the results of far-left politics being so clearly and undeniably disastrous in the 20th century that its proponents turned to postmodernism as a way of routing around empirical evidence, but that explanation seems too convenient and just-so. In any case, right now it seems that the faith-based belief structure of critical theory has taken a good chunk of power in the far left.
Given that, I maintain that the equal-and-opposite of the ascendant SJW left that make up my peers is the literal Nazi or at least White Supremacist. These people profess a deep belief in group-based guilt and punishment and regularly advocate for literal re-education camps. They might have convinced themselves that this will lead to actual utopia rather than absolute hell that’s at least as bad as the holocaust, but that makes their policy prescriptions no less extreme than those of literal Nazis who want to fire up the gas chambers. The fact that they’ve done a better job in convincing themselves to ignore the empirical evidence (again, critical theory makes that easy to do) makes them even more extreme, if anything.
No, these people don’t have national-level power and don’t make up a majority or even a sizable minority of the Democratic party or the left. But the mainstream left is doing a terrible job of resisting their influence whereas I see the mainstream right as having done a fairly good job at resisting literal Nazis. This is why I’m far more worried about the dangers of the creep of extreme left than the creep of extreme right.
Re: Harris: Fair enough. I see that he supports tax raises for the wealthy, but in the US that’s not saying very much. He supported Clinton over Sanders, which makes me think he’s more right wing. I guess for America he’s a centrist or perhaps even a bit left of centre.
I don’t really think it’s fair to accuse critical theory of a “faith-based belief structure”. My impression from the short introductory course I did was that it was fairly rigourous, and had a long tradition of critical theorists explaining why other critical theorists got it wrong.
But if your SJW friends do have a faith-based belief structure, and an inability to consider empirical evidence, then perhaps they are the reflection of the Fox News-watching public, or the people who believe complete factual nonsense just because Trump said it.
I do actually agree with your last point. I think for the most part the right does a very good job of resisting literal Nazis, whereas the furthest left extremists are at best ignored and at worst listened to. Having said that, as somebody who believes the “correct” position is somewhere in the mid- to far-left, the furthest left extremists don’t actually seem that far from the correct position.
Which actually leads me to a question I’d be interested in your answer to: Do you judge somebody’s extremism by how far they are from the centre or how far they are from you?
Rigor doesn’t imply that it’s not faith-based, though. Biblical scholars tend to be quite rigorous too, as far as I can tell, but all that rigor stands atop a structure of faith.
Perhaps at an epistemic level, sure. But that’s not so much that we’re reflecting their politics on the right, but rather just an example of the fact that almost everyone is gullible and blind to their own faith, no matter where they are on the political spectrum. To get a true reflection that of the politics – that is, a right-wing reflection of the totalizing ideology and the extreme policy prescriptions of SJWs (at least the ones in my peers – even among SJWs there’s a range in extremism) – you’d have to get all the way to the folks who are just as faith-based and also genocidally murderous on the right.
I judge extremism more by how far they are from the center – hence why I consider people who are very close to me on the far left as being extreme and identify as someone on the extreme left on many issues (e.g. as an open-borders advocate, I consider myself someone with an extreme view on that issue (of course, some also consider that to be an extreme right/libertarian position, but let’s not get too deep in the weeds of that)).
I think a big part of the reason why I judge it this way is that even though I believe I’m correct in my political beliefs, I acknowledge the fact that because everyone believes that they’re correct in their beliefs, my believing my political beliefs are correct is very very weak evidence that my political beliefs are correct. As such, no matter how strongly I believe that my political beliefs are correct, I try to have enough epistemic humility and skepticism to seriously consider the argument if most people seem to be telling me that my beliefs are wrong and/or extreme. In fact, I’ve noticed in practice that the more certain someone is that their views are the correct ones, the more wrong they tend to be in those views.
So I wouldn’t consider my views to be the “correct” or “central” one from which the “extremity” of other views should be judged off of.
The idea of Trump being “far right” is only able to be entertained because the left has gone so far left. Trump’s positions are that of an 80s-90s centrist Republican or Democrat. He’s basically 1992 Bill Clinton but friendlier to gays and less enamored with free trade. The only way to conclude this is “far right” is if anything to the right of Stalin is “far right.”
Even then I’m not really sure if “left” and “right” are the right way to think about it. I’m more concerned, like Nabil, that we’re heading to dysfunction rather than any coherent political direction. Something more like an anarcho-tyranny. The enemies of those in power are tightly controlled while those useful to the powerful are free to run wild. I think of the Trump rally in San Jose during the primaries. Regular, working and middle class American citizens go to listen to one of the leading candidates for the nomination of one of the two major US political parties, and they’re assaulted, attacked, run down, and pelted with eggs by literal illegal foreigners waving foreign flags on what’s ostensibly US soil, the police do nothing and the media condemns the citizens and runs interference for the foreign rioters. This doesn’t fit in with “left/right” but…just some kind of insanity.
Trump may have political power, but the moneyed power elite, the multinational corporations, the media empires they own, the entrenched bureaucracies have an awful lot of power, and no problem wielding it against Trump’s supporters.
Left and right is kind of an afterthought compared to all that. The Golden Rule still applies.
I think it fits the original meaning of left and right.
The people who sat on the left side of the French national assembly largely went on to support the French Revolution and afterwards the Terror. That’s pretty insane.
I guess, but they didn’t really “win.” They did not get liberté, égalité, fraternité but murder and then Napoleon.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Really?
It’s been a long time since I read “Citizens” but I thought that “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children” and the “Left” of the original National Assembly were mostly displaced by and themselves victims of Robespierre and the Terror when they didn’t put themselves in exile, just as few “Old Bolsheviks” survived Stalin’s purges.
The usual story (as I understand it) is that the original revolutionists set in motion events that they couldn’t control, and were pushed aside by those even more radical.
I’m reminded of the “far left” of the ’70’s who killed liberals like Marcus Foster for being “insufficiently revolutionary”.
On policy, yes. But I’ve been saying for years that he’s being pattern-matched to the far right for aesthetic, not substantive, reasons. Part of this is just cultural cringe — he’s crasser than anybody else on the national stage in recent memory, and being right-wing is crass to the center-left establishment, so he must be extra-super-K-right-wing++. But part of it has to do with rhetoric, and that’s a bit more respectable. It does require that you not take the rhetoric as serious policy proposals, which is something the establishment isn’t used to (I’ve been saying it since day one, but I’m pretty cynical about this sort of thing); but, on the other hand, the job of a head of state involves setting the tone for national discourse, and if that tone’s more reactionary than any other recent administration’s, then in a real sense Trump is being a more right-wing President.
Just not a policy sense.
Also because some positions are popular on the left precisely as a reaction to Trump espousing their opposite. E.g., free trade used to be seen as a right-wing policy and protectionism as a left-wing one, but when Trump started talking about putting up tariffs, a lot of left-wing publications started running articles in support of free trade.
That was weird to me as well. Hillary got pressured from the left to go against the TPP, and the Republicans were almost unanimously for it – and then Trump went against it and suddenly it’s good to be globalist free-traders?
At least the establishment right is also complaining about Trump on that, so somebody comes out not looking the hypocrite.
/r/politics did a 180 on the TPP so fast it made my head spin.
Most people do not have principles so much as they have a side.
Agreed on both points. It really doesn’t increase my confidence that we’re going to be passing good laws based on careful thought of the pros and cons, from either party.
Over here free trade is still seen as right-wing. Protectionism is more neutral, but probably still right-wing.
Obviously I agree that anybody switching opinions to signal their allegiance to a side is doing wrong, though, and I’m sorry to hear it’s happened to American centrists and liberals.
How can both free trade and protectionism, which are opposite policies, both be right wing? Do you mean that they are both supported by (different) right wing factions? Are one or both of them also left wing?
@DavidFriedman
Neither addresses the issue of control of the means of production, neither addresses redistribution, neither addresses poverty.
The great victory of the right since the eighties is to occupy both sides of the debate. Would you like to be killed by fire or water? They’re basically opposites so they can’t both be murderism. If you control the questions you control all possible answers.
I think protectionism addresses distribution and poverty by managing trade in a pro-labor way. Or at least a balanced way.
The Democratic party used to be pro-tariff and anti-immigration (legal, not just illegal) because free trade and mass immigration were obviously bad for labor. They’ve abandoned this for money from the capital class and political power from the new arrivals.
@Conrad Honcho
Ok, yeah, I see how protectionism can be arrived at from a left-wing starting point, if you use it to help the working class in your country. But if it harms the working class in other countries that might not be very attractive for left-wingers.
@Honcho:
I don’t think protectionism actually helps the domestic working class, although it isn’t logically impossible, but it is certainly sold as doing so.
@Fion:
Free trade, and even more free immigration, addresses the issue of world poverty to a degree no other policy I can think of does. Protectionism is an (expensive) form of redistribution, not from the rich to the poor or the poor to the rich but to producers in the protected industry from their consumers (and from producers in export industries).
Protectionism is a very limited case of government control of the means of production, since it is shifting production from domestic export producers to domestic import competing producers, deciding that we will produce cars by building them in Detroit instead of producing cars by growing corn in Iowa, exporting it, and getting foreign made autos in exchange.
Putting that aside, your answer might explain why people on either the left or the right might be in favor of either protectionism or free trade. But it doesn’t explain how the same people can be in favor of both. Is your point that some groups on the right support one, some the other?
@DavidFriedman
Thanks for the explanation.
That is a thing I believe to be true. I wouldn’t say it was my point, but perhaps I’m being pedantic now.
@Conrad Honcho
Clinton was right-wing.
It’s not for nothing that Richard Nixon (considered an arch-conservative at the time) is referred to as “The last Liberal President”.
One generation’s “moderate” is the next generations “radical” and vice versa.
I’d be interested in whether you have an opinion on Jair Bolsonaro, Conrad. Would you characterise him as far-right? Do you have an opinion on whether he’ll prove to be a good or bad thing for Brazil or the world more generally?
To be honest, I don’t know enough about Brazilian politics or Balsonaro himself to have an informed opinion. My uninformed opinion is slightly positive: Brazil has massive corruption, Bolsonaro does not appear to be corrupt and may be welcome force in purging corruption, and he seems to want to act in the interests of Brazilians. So long as the rhetoric I’ve heard attributed to him is just edgelording and not serious.
I’m generally in favor of nationalism, because the least bad thing governments can do is act in the interests of their citizens, rather than inflict bad things on them in service of some “greater good.” Whatever that “greater good” is, it’s probably just the financial interests of those in power, sold to people under false pretenses. To the extent Bolsonaro is in fact a Brazilian nationalist, Brazil will probably be better off with him. Time will tell.
I think someone here commented in an earlier discussion that a major reason for Bolsonaro’s success was likely the example of Venezuela’s meltdown under Maduro.
“National interest” can be easily used as a false pretense to sell bad policies to the citizens. In a middle-income country where there are typically a lot of Western corporations operating, a typical example is to help the companies owned by the government’s corrupt cronies replace the relatively un-corrupt and efficient foreign companies under the pretense that this is good for the country because they are not foreign. Or asking people to put aside their own interests for the benefit of the country and national unity; it may turn out that no one (except perhaps the leadership) benefits.
That’s actually a lot easier IMO than using some “greater good” as a pretense; putting some greater good ahead of the interests of the citizens of the country is not popular with that many people.
That’s why I said “interest of citizens” instead of “national interest.” Our current overlords think mass immigration for cheap labor is in the “national interest” and a moral good, but an awful lot of the citizens who have to compete with them in the labor market and have the character of their neighborhoods drastically change disagree.
I’m curious. The same things could be said of the massive immigration early in the 20th century. Do you think that was a bad thing? If not, what has changed? The actual rate of immigration relative to population is smaller now than it was then.
I’m afraid I have to go with the correct answer, that both slippery slopes are problematic. The increasing strength of the far right is a big problem, but I’m with your friend in thinking censorship is a terrible response. I’m particularly unhappy with recent efforts to cut off undesirables from financial services; prosecuting money laundering is one thing (though since I think some things shouldn’t be crimes I think some cases that currently constitute money laundering shouldn’t, such as the Backpage nonsense), but pressuring banks and online payment services not to do business with people when there is no prosecutable crime goes too far. And I mostly think the same about pressuring social media not to do business with undesirables, though that one is a little more complicated depending on the nature of the service, and my opinions run similarly for the invited speakers at universities and so forth. I tend to describe myself as left with libertarian leanings; I vote for Democrats, though there are some Libertarians I might vote for if any of them bothered to run in my neck of the woods.
I’m one of those free-speech-above-all-else type people, so naturally I’m more concerned about that norm slipping. But more than that, I’m concerned that because of recent mainstream societal movements leftward there is a concerted effort to exclude those on the right from the Overton window, much more than there is a danger of it moving rightwards.
As an example the legislation in the UK that established same-sex civil partnerships passed in 2004. I wasn’t hugely into news media at the time, but I recall discussion over whether that was a good thing or not, and debates taking place, etc. In 2013 legislation was passed to provide for same-sex marriage in addition to civil partnerships, but the discussion had shifted to much more on whether it would be possible to do so without religious organizations (and the CofE) being at risk of lawsuits for not performing those marriages. Perhaps the opinion of the country had changed that much in those 10 years, but a question for you – do you think the Oxford (or Cambridge, or Hull) Union would host a debate along the lines of “this House believes same-sex marriage is beneficial for society” without facing strong backlash for inviting a speaker who disagrees?
I’m also concerned about the casual bandying about of terms such as ‘alt-right’. OK, Steve Brannon identifies as that, so it’s fair to apply it to him, but it seems to me the term is more often used to attempt to silence those with right-wing views by smearing them with a phrase with nebulous meaning but distasteful connotations. I wouldn’t agree with your observation that the Conservatives moving rightward either, though I’m concerned that there are attempts to conflate any criticism of Europe with anti-immigration sentiments and consequently racism. UKIP may have gone rightwards, I’ve been out of the country for three years now and don’t get nearly as much exposure to UK politics, but haven’t they been pretty much irrelevant since the referendum?
So, my perspective has been that traditional conservative viewpoints that were at least up for discussion 10 years ago are often taboo now, and that, in the UK and US at least (I know nothing about mainland Europe), the Overton window is moving leftwards. I appreciated your post though, and I am hoping you will pushback against mine some and let me know how you perceive these things differently!
The run-up to the 2013 legislation was, from what I can remember, the first incidence in Britain of the “Everybody must follow the zeitgeist exactly, and anybody who still holds the same beliefs I myself claimed to hold this time last month is an irredeemable bigot who must be ostracised from polite society” attitude.
Alt-right may not (probably isn’t) the best term to take off, but it is fair to want a new term to describe a new thing. Christian conservatives that oppose same sex marriage, sure that’s not a new thing, but the refugee crises across Europe have brought to the fore a new mass movement and that does deserve its own name.
Similarly the post-9/11 period brought back a military interventionist side of the right wing that had been missing from politics for at least a decade at that point. Neo-conservative might not have been the best name for that, since it had preexisting baggage, but it was a phenomenon that rightly needed a name.
Steve Bannon does not identify as alt-right. He once declared that Breitbart was “the platform of the alt-right”, but for one, that’s not the same thing, and for another, that’s when the operative definition of alt-right was the broad one which included everyone who was neither on the left nor mainline GOP.
My perspective on same-sex marriage is that the debate was won very quickly on account of the anti- side having no good arguments. I’m afraid I haven’t spent very long looking this up, in fact this is just the first non-Wikipedia link when I googled it. (It’s US rather than UK, but I’m nut sure the picture is that different over here.) It looks like there was indeed a very rapid change in public opinion over the past ten years or so.
So yes, I agree with you that there are some ways in which the Overton window is moving leftwards. Gay marriage is probably the fastest such example. But other things, such as immigration, attitude towards Muslims, have gone the other way. I suppose I haven’t really seen any left-wing views recently leaving the Overton window, but I have seen many right-wing ones entering it, mostly along a nationalist axis.
But also an economic one. A lot of hard-right Euroskeptics are using Brexit as an excuse to reduce workers’ rights, marketise the NHS and make taxation less progressive. The people that advocate for these sorts of things used to be the right-wing fringe of the Tory party, but now they’re gaining popularity because they’re the most Brexity Brexiters. They also tend to have conservative views on education and the environment.
I suppose it’s hard to talk about the British Overton window at the moment, because the Labour party is more left wing than usual and the Conservative party is (in my view) more right wing than usual. We’re probably seeing a case of polarisation rather than a simple left or right shift.
Marriage being a tool to promote healthy child-raising and, however imperfect for that purpose, being weakened by its application to an obviously infertile population, is a good argument countered by mere whataboutism. Marriage being explicitly restricted to heterosexual couples by the rules of the religion most of the population in question shares, is a good argument if you’re putting it to a vote. And Chesterton’s fence is always a good argument.
The arguments for gay marriage may be better than the ones against it, but there were actual good arguments in favor of it.
Infertile people can also raise healthy children. Heterosexual marriage is not weakened by the existence of homosexual marriage. (I don’t think either one of these counters is “whataboutism”… I do, however, consider them good enough counters to render your example argument “not a good one”, and I think either is able to do that without the other.)
Except that most of the population does not follow the rules of the religion they claim to follow. To justify banning same-sex marriage on the grounds that it disobeys God’s word is an isolated demand for rigour.
I disagree here, too, but to discus my disagreement in detail would thoroughly derail the conversation.
So I think I stand by my claim of the anti- side having no good arguments. Perhaps I should soften it a little, though. “The argument was won because the anti- side had very very few good arguments and the pro- side had a great many very strong arguments.”
It’s not that the marriage is weakened, necessarily, it’s the the conception that marriage is designed/evolved in order to promote child raising, that it’s purpose is to constrain people who are inclined to do child-making things, is weakened by introducing another, separate definition of the term.
The argument would then be that as people go on to see marriage, not as a way of supporting and coercing the union of child-makers, but as a way of publicly proclaiming affectionate and errotic feelings for an indeterminate period of time, then married people–even heterosexuals–may see marriage as less permanent and children as less of a natural product of the union.
It’s a difficult proposition to test, though, since it’s hardly the only social change to occur in that time period and those making the assertion (myself, here, included) are rather hazy about what metrics to chart.
@Randy M
Fair enough. I stand corrected that there was a good argument there.
I will endeavour to remain in the motte to which I retreated in my last comment.
I saw this “marriage is an expression/celebration of two people’s love for one another” definition literally used during the same sex marriage debates before Obergefell. Not in those exact terms, maybe, but it was there. And not just among committed supporters of same sex marriage, even!
One of the points sometimes lost in the debate was that, for Christians, the damage to marriage had mostly already been done. Two guys getting married is an awfully visible departure from the norm, but is it so fundamental a difference? For Christians, what looms larger is liberalization of divorce laws and decreasing stigma towards divorce and serial remarriage—and for that matter, a rise in cohabitation, even among those with kids. With those conditions, it becomes harder and harder to see marriage as having anything in particular to do with having and raising a family, but rather than as an occasion for two people to show society their love for one another.
I’m a Catholic, but also enough of a consequentialist to feel like divorce, serial remarriage, and cohabitation among childless adults is a pretty small problem, whereas divorce, serial remarriage, and cohabitation where kids get dragged along for the ride is a large problem. And single motherhood is hard on the mom, the kid, and the surrounding society.
I expect not, I was not exactly trying to pass the ideological turning test with my word choice there.
Fully agrred.
Well, for some intellectually consistent portion of Christians who are willing to offend their close friends and relatives, anyway. :/
Minor nit: It’s not just Christians on the one side here. But nobody on the defense-of-marriage side is going to disagree with the claim that enormous damage was done to that institution by e.g. liberalization of laws and more importantly social attitudes regarding divorce. But there’s room for disagreement with whether that damage was sufficient to destroy marriage as anything more than a feel-good endorsement of Twue Wuv, or whether there is a more substantial institution that could still be saved. In the latter case, “be extra careful about causing any more damage, or putting any more load on the already-shaky foundation, while we set about repairing the damage already done” is a fair argument.
albatross11,
I agree on the point about kids.
With the single motherhood* thing, I don’t want to make it any harder on them than it already is. I mention stigma because I’m concerned about incentives. If single motherhood is bad for all involved, then do we want to discourage single motherhood or don’t we?
That’s not a slam dunk answer, of course. Kind of the opposite. To name a few of numerous problems, how much of what I’m calling “discouraging” is requires being a massive dick to the already disadvantaged? And how much of it is going to have any positive impact? And most importantly, how palatable do we find solutions to single parenthood? Abortion looms largest here, but there are a host of other ‘solutions’, like widespread contraception, or pushing the unprepared into marriages, or the state taking the child away.
All the same, it’s something that weighs on me. I can’t imagine the high marriage rate of past generations was a bad thing. Divorce rates have decreased since the 80s: is that mostly independent demographic shifts, or has society learned a lesson?
*And hey now, single parenthood. I was raised by an unmarried father.
Randy,
Yeah. =/
ETA: John, yeah, I didn’t mean to leave you out there, I just don’t trust myself to speak for non-Christians on this.
I agree that both slippery slopes matter, and that they’re not mutually inconsistent. We could end up with continued growth of far right movements, along with increasing policing of speech and no-platforming by the establishment left. Those two may even feed on one another–establishment sources shutting out some views, which still become widespread, serving to undermine the legitimacy of some of those sources at the same time.
It’s probably worthwhile to ask: Is there any reason you can think of that listening to an interview or speech with Bannon might be of interest? It sure seems like his role in the rise of Trump and the right-populist/alt-right movement that put him into office would make him pretty interesting to listen to. Also, he’s apparently a fairly smart guy who’s spent a lot of time talking with other far-right thinkers, so he’s probably got a fairly good grasp of their worldview and ideas. That sounds pretty interesting to hear, to me. What are the actual critiques raised by the far-right movements in the US and Europe? What are their policy goals? How do they see the world?
As I understand it, your concern is that by allowing him to speak in a prominent place like Oxford, his views and movement are being legitimized. (Look, the establishment is taking this fellow seriously–maybe he’s not so nutty after all.) I can see the point of that. But it sure seems like making the decision about who’s allowed to speak at Oxford into a question about which political sides should gain or lose in status/influence just amounts to making that decision into a straight political one–we let people on our side speak, and exclude people from the other side. At that point, you probably lose some legitimacy, because people from the other side will see that you are explicitly excluding their side, regardless of merit. (Can Charles Murray give a talk at Oxford? How about Boris Johnson?)
It seems to me that the rather vigorous attempts to no-platform various people on the right that we see in the US (especially in the academic and journalism worlds) makes a case that the slippery slope that people will try to no-platform worthwhile speakers for ideological/political reasons isn’t unreasonable to worry about. I don’t really understand how the hate speech laws in the UK and the rest of Europe work, but the bits of them that get reported here in the US look like another argument for the view that this slope is indeed lined with banana peels.
I recently watched a Munk debate between Steve Bannon and David Frum in the hopes that Bannon would indeed be interesting to hear thanks to the influence he’s had.
Unfortunately, I found it pretty disappointing, since he actually didn’t come out sounding all that smart (though he was surprisingly charming and charismatic, which I respect). It pushed me more toward thinking that there’s really no there there when it comes to populism – lots of rhetoric, no real substance.
Which in itself was a valuable thing to take away from it! I’m glad I got to see and hear Bannon speak directly about the things he supports. I hope to see him given more public platforms to present and debate his views – either he will continue to spout empty rhetoric and show more people the man behind the curtain, or he will start talking of stuff with more substance and conceivably change my mind.
As an aside, the only Munk debates I’ve seen are this one and another one about political correctness that had Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry on the “against” side, and I haven’t been impressed by any of the debaters in any of them – even the debaters who were on the side that I support. I’d vaguely heard of these debates as being pretty good, so I’ve felt pretty disappointed, since both political correctness and populism are major issues I’d love to see intelligent debate about.
“no-platforming by the establishment left”
I don’t understand what this means. Are you saying the left is the establishment? That the Establishment is left-wing? These seem very far from the truth to me, but even if we grant it (you probably have different definitions of left to me), the people doing no-platforming aren’t the same as the people in power by any stretch I can imagine. The no-platformers are just students who shout and wave placards. They don’t own the means of production, they’re not in government and they don’t have armed bodies of men at their disposal.
Actually yes, I would be interested to hear Bannon, but there’s many ways for me to do that on the internet. The world is not starved of information about what Steve Bannon says.
Regarding your last two paragraphs… I find that very interesting and perhaps this is a genuine difference between the US and the UK rather than just a perspective difference. It seems to me that even if we ignore right/left-ness, and just consider… radical-ness(?), the speakers getting invited to give debates and whatnot are further from The Acceptable Opinion than they used to be. We’re getting less likely to no-platform Boris Johnson and less likely to no-platform Steve Bannon, not the other way around. Sure, there’s always protests, but they seem to be getting smaller, and reserved for more extreme people than they used to be.
This doesn’t make any sense. People with no power literally can’t no-platform anyone. To no-platform someone requires having armed bodies of men at one’s disposal. To be no-platformed means being prevented from speaking in a certain setting due to armed bodies of men not offering you that opportunity.
You might say that the people driving the no-platforming are just students who shout and wave placards. But they clearly have enough influence over the people who control armed bodies of men to successfully deny platform to certain people they disagree with.
Bottom line is, if you have no power, then you can’t no-platform anyone, because to no-platform someone is an exercise of power, in the men-with-guns sort of way.
All my upboats.
It’s very disconcerting to hear people with power say they honestly believe they’re powerless, while exerting their power. That lack of self-awareness is dangerous.
If you’re talking about a university setting, these are not exactly bastions of right-wing institutional power. The “powerless” students and the powerful faculty who control the armed bodies are on the same side. If the students had no power, the armed bodies would be removing them for being disruptive. If a popular left-wing (or “mainstream”) speaker came and angry right-wingers showed up to shout them down and intimidate them into silence I’m pretty sure those right-wingers would be removed as a “threat to free speech.”
I mean, sure, they have enough power to no-platform somebody, but that doesn’t make them “the establishment”, which was what I was originally pushing back on. Besides, there’s not much else they can do with their no-platforming power. Which of these people have power: Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump or Falcon the Pink-Haired Gender Studies Student?
On campus, Falcon is more powerful than DJT or Jeff Bezos.
ETA: I can’t remember which one it was, but Scott wrote an article on this exact subject of different types of power in different settings, using Trump as an example years before his presidential run.
“An analysis of the formalist account of power relations in democratic societies”
Wow, you’re good.
That implies then, that things like PayPal dropping a group is not no-platforming since it has nothing to do with men-with-guns.
Well, if you try to walk into Paypal’s server rooms and reprogram the hardware so that it continues to support your group, it will be men with guns who stop you. OK, a locked door, and men with guns if you try to break down the door.
But I think it would be more productive to reframe this in terms of private property rights rather than men-with-guns, and the role of monopolistic or oligopolistic control over the types of property that facilitate large-scale speech.
I suspect you’re overestimating the degree to which the wider public cares about the Oxford Union. It doesn’t really get reported on in the national media (unless you get a big protest against a speaker, perhaps), and the popular stereotype of Oxford students is “Rich toffs who think they’re better than everyone else”, not “Prestigious people whose views should be listened to with respect”.
A possible data-point in favour: Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time in 2009 was widely held responsible for the British National Party’s lacklustre performance in the next election and subsequent slide into irrelevance, although I’m not sure if this is an accurate assessment.
Haha, that’s probably true.
This, though I’m much more skeptical of. First, I hadn’t even heard that opinion until just now. Second, one appearance on television causing a party to slide into irrelevance? That trips my “probably not true” sensors. I think the rise of a more respectable version of the BNP probably had much more to do with it.
I agree with many of the things others said. One thing to add: If we slide all the way to the bottom of the suppressing opinions, that’s a really bad outcome. If we come to the point where anything can be said without repercussions, we still have another avenue to keep the nazis or whomever from getting power (besides silencing them): convincing people that they are wrong (well, most people already think so).
Also, if we are going about suppressing opinions, how do you know that your left-wing opinion about some particular issue is in fact correct? Maybe you’re wrong, but those who could convince you about that shut up to avoid repercussions, or just aren’t allowed in the venues you follow.
I’m not arguing in favour of suppressing opinions, more saying that I don’t think we’re in much danger of accidentally sliding to the point where we do suppress opinions.
And I am quite good (at least, much better than average) at asking “what if I’m wrong” and challenging my opinions. But at any one point I’m still going to argue for the opinions I hold, and if I see the “enemy” employing some particular propaganda, I will be sad if I see that propaganda gaining a large audience.
Let me offer a scrap of evidence on the other side. I put up a comment yesterday about an opinion I had gotten from a prominent biochemist having to do, in part, with the relationship between vitamin D and black/white differences.
The reason I didn’t name him was that I had asked him if he would object to my posting about what he had said, and his response was that he didn’t want to be accused of being a racist. If his opinion is correct, having it well known, especially by blacks, is of enormous importance, since the problem can be corrected at a cost of about three cents/day. He is willing to explain his view in conversation, reluctant to publicize it.
Hmm… good point. Now that you mention it I know of several examples of that type.
However, it seems to me that the basic mechanism here is:
There exist racist people (in the strong sense of the word, where it’s a really bad thing)
There are sufficiently many such people, or they hold sufficient power that they pose a threat to civilised society.
Thus there is a justified feeling that we need to be vigilant about racism.
Thus I am afraid the mob will pattern-match me to a racist for the true and useful science I wish to publicise.
It wasn’t an issue when everybody in power was racist because the backlash was too weak and it won’t be an issue when nobody in power is racist because there will be no need for the backlash. It’s only in the present time of part-way victory against racism that it’s an issue. Perhaps the fact that the part-way victory seems to be retreating rather than advancing makes people more hyper-vigilant.
Perhaps I’m being a little naive and optimistic, but I do think that the silencing of your biochemist acquaintance and the (attempted and failed) silencing of Steve Bannon are different mechanisms rather than two aspects of the same thing.
How do you feel about the silencing of James Watson?
The message that sends is that on some issues one has no basis to believe the current orthodoxy because anyone who publicly questions it, however prominent, will be punished for doing so.
My view is that, by now, society has enough immunity to serious racism that it’s not a major threat, definitely not a bigger threat than various other bad ideas we subject to the same sort of ostracism. Indeed, racism, sexism, homophobia are among the few ideas whose expression is likely to cause ostracism, career damage etc. to people in non-political positions, and perhaps the only ones where even a vague suspicion causes such damage. This is itself evidence that the anti-racist side now firmly holds the public opinion, and racists (especially unambiguous, dangerous ones) are a small minority. Yet the anti-racist left still seems to believe that they are in the 50s, and they are a small minority fighting an uphill battle against a much bigger mass of racists. So they use tools and tactics (such as ostracism that relies on having the majority on their side) that only became available to them when they were not needed anymore.
I doubt that there will ever be a point where the left gets convinced that racism is not a problem anymore, even if racism does become marginal enough to have no influence whatsoever. My impression is that as there are fewer and fewer racists, there are more and more anti-racists, and the ever smaller incidents of racism get taken ever more seriously.
Indeed, asserting that racism is not a problem anymore itself gets taken as evidence of racism. (Cf. kafkatrap. I myself used to assume that in a debate about whether something is racist or not, the person who said it wasn’t was usually wrong and probably racist — until I encountered much more extreme anti-racist views when I started following Western politics.) A charitable interpretation would be that racism is still obviously prevalent, so someone asserting the opposite is doing so in bad faith. But, given how smaller and smaller things (including said assertion itself) get taken as evidence of racism, I doubt people will ever decide that racism is not obviously prevalent anymore. Under these circumstances, it will be impossible to convince anti-racists that racism is not a problem anymore, since claiming that is both taken as evidence of racism, and gets your opinion dismissed because you are a racist bigot. Even worse, they can’t allow themselves to get convinced because that would make them racist according to their own current views.
Btw that last part is really similar to the way some religions sustain themselves, by declaring it a sin to stop believing them.
@DavidFriedman
I feel that silencing is a strong word for what happened to Watson. I think that some of his comments stepped beyond scientific curiosity and betrayed his political opinions. I think his political opinions are bad. I don’t think he deserved to be sacked for them. Perhaps he did deserve to be sacked for insisting that they were not political but in fact scientific? I’m not confident either way on that one.
@10240
If we were having this discussion five or ten years ago I’d agree with you, but it is a fact that in the US, UK, Europe and many other parts of the world, racists are growing in profile and racist parties are gaining popularity. They’re still probably less numerous than anti-racists, but the gap is narrowing, not widening as you suggest.
And then one of the most significant questions is how the centre behaves. Ten years ago I feel as though the centre was allied with the anti-racists against the racists, but now it seems an increasing number of centrists are getting so sick of anti-racists that they spend more energy criticising them than the actual racists.
@ fion
A theory that I’ve seen passed around and have been mulling over myself, is that the definition of “racist” has been greatly expanded in the last 10-20 years, such that many more people are being called racist for activities that would not have earned the title before.
I am not suggesting that this is the rise (or at least sole rise) in the racism you are describing.
Instead, this theory goes on to say that because so many more people are being called racists, for such an expanded base of opinions, that the strong wall between KKK-style racists and the more general right is being weakened. With that weakened, mediocre racists who would not have thought about discriminating against a racial minority no longer have the clear boundaries against doing so, because they’ll get called a racist either way. If the bar from being called a racist is met just by voting Republican or having any Conservative views, then something of value is lost.
I took that to be included in the idea of “Against Murderism.”
fion:
Watson is famously a huge prick who likes to say things to piss people off[1], so it’s possible he was trolling the reporter and it blew up in his face. OTOH, the factual claims in his reported statements seem to me to be entirely consistent with available observations. Suppressing the expression of opinions that are defensible and consistent with observable reality because you dislike the political implications seems like a good way of blinding yourself.
[1] Every public defense of him I saw started with some preface along the lines of “Watson is a huge asshole, but….”
I didn’t follow the controversy in much detail, but I thought the essential comment was the opinion that the problems of Africa were in part due to a genetic difference–lower average IQ.
Am I correct that that was the issue? If so, why isn’t it a scientific opinion?
Are you certain the opinion if false? If it is true, isn’t it important, implying that suppression of it is likely to have bad consequences? If it is false, isn’t the appropriate response to rebut it rather than to punish someone who expresses it–in part because the latter may result in reasonable people concluding that it is being suppressed because of the lack of persuasive rebuttals, hence probably true?
And whether the opinion is scientific or political, why wouldn’t you describe what happened as punishment to silence it? From the Wikipedia article on Watson:
I left that out. Big difference.
I don’t see racists gaining popularity in the Western world. Anti-immigration politics are gaining popularity, but that’s not racism. Whether I agree with particular a immigration restriction or not, I don’t see immigration restrictions as a danger (in the way many racist policies would be bad enough to call the possibility of them getting enacted a danger).
The Watson quote I remember being the biggest issue:
It’s the “deal with”. Fair or not, that’s what he didn’t manage to walk back.
Added: Wrote too quickly. it’s, of course, the “have to deal with”.
Incentives matter. If scientists know that doing research in some areas (say, biological causes of the black/white gaps in IQ or life expectancy or crime rate) is a good way to become an unemployable pariah, then hardly any scientists will do research in those areas, and then any benefits we might have gotten from that research will just not happen. Who needs the heartache?
Similarly, if people who discuss and advocate for political policies know that mentioning some facts gets you fired/no-platformed/ruined, then those facts won’t be brought up much. And if we needed to know those facts to make good decisions, we’re just out of luck, because once again, who needs the heartache.
This is a way of making ourselves, as a society, dumber.
I don’t really see this as a free speech issue. It’s not like Steve Bannon has the right to speak at a given place. It’s not really much different than if you were a communist during the Cold War, especially in the 50’s. No one gave them a platform but it doesn’t automatically mean they were denied their free speech rights. It’s just that they were incredibly unpopular.
I think the bigger problem is that the left wants to treat all right of center conservatives like we used to treat communists and other “degenerates”. It’s one thing when these groups make up a small percentage of the population. But people who have Trumps views number in the millions. Trying to silence all of them is just a recipe for disaster.
It seems to me that there are (at least) five sorts of speech restrictions:
1) Nobody finds it worth engaging with. For example, the ice cream vendor who sold at the same markets where I sold sausage. He had this amazing omni-conspiracy theory that somehow depended on the Apostle Peter being the prime minister, but the Apostle John being Jesus’ son and the true heir. It got weirder and more confusing from there. No one agrees, or thinks arguing is vaguely useful. This doesn’t push my free speech buttons.
2) The government flatly forbids it. This is the core of the First Amendment, and the allowable limits in the US are very tight. I’d actually like to see the limits of what the government can punish directly expanded. (I’d like lack of malice not to be a defense to libel, and for illegally acquired information to be illegal to publish even if you didn’t directly do the illegal acquistiion.)
3) The government directly makes it dangerous or expensive. This is where the core of the debate today is. “Hostile environment” harassment, “disparate impact”, and so on–these often mean that the speaker can’t be punished, but anyone who tolerates him can be. These seem to me to be extremely problematic, and very common.
4) The government indirectly, but intentionally, makes it dangerous. This includes things like ignoring violence against disfavored speakers, breaking up a peaceful demonstration and forcing the protestors into a hostile crowd, and other typical tactics. This is growingly common–Silent Sam and Charlottesville both featured it. This seems to me to be also dangerous, and to be growing rapidly–it’s the basic raison d’etre of Antifa.
5) Civil society strongly disapproves, but the government is indifferent. This seems to be potentially but not actually today a problem. This might be advocating for homosexual rights in 1955, or for theocracy (not as an insult, but as a real thing–Rushdoony for example) today. The government won’t do anything, but a lot of people will just say “no way, you’re nuts”.
TL:DR There’s a big difference between “no one cares” and the government won’t punish you, but will punish your employer.
Right. If you will be fired because your political speech constitutes a “hostile workplace environment”, but political speech made in the same time, place, and manner on the same subject but with the opposite viewpoint does not result in firing, that’s your number 3. Not, as so many people claim and that xkcd comic implies, number 5. It’s the government engaging in viewpoint discrimination through proxies.
The xkcd comic is written by someone who doesn’t understand the issue and cited by those who do not. It is, at best, a superficial treatment of a complex issue. At worst it fundamentally misunderstands the issue entirely because a lot of the time it is cited when government is an active ingredient.
AKA The reason I needed to leave my supposed dream workplace, Google.
@Garrett
Exactly that reason, yes.
Also keep in mind there’s a longer-term effect. It’s easy to argue that in the absence of those “hostile workplace environment” rules, the people with power over policy at Google and other woke workplaces would behave in the exact same way. But those rules have been around, and enforced one-directionally, for a long time. The people now in HR and employment policymaking positions have been _selected_ for their adherence to those rules and policies; most of those who don’t support that sort of thing either didn’t enter a profession where they’d have to enforce it, or left that profession.
It’s almost exactly parallel to having a rule against inappropriate public displays of affection, which somehow turns out to only apply when the gay couples hold hands or kiss in public.
I think you need a level in there for the case where powerful non-governmental institutions are restricting speech. If you’re trying to fit that into case 3 or 4 and assuming that if e.g. universities expel students for wrongspeech it must be because the government is influencing them, that may be wrong and is of dubious relevance if true – the fact that students are being expelled is more important than the reason. And if you’re trying to fit it into case 5 by saying universities are “civil society”, then you’re glossing over the huge distinction between concentrated and diffuse power.
People may disagree about how problematic it is for powerful non-governmental institutions to suppress speech, but it is a thing that happens often enough and with sufficient consequence to need a place in the taxonomy.
I was including that in case 5, but I agree that there is a major difference between “most people” and “a few very powerful institutions.”
As a side note, it seems to me that the “a particular institution” cases can be powerful, but unless there’s some sort of government backing it is rare for it to be a stable and coherent majority of similar institutions. Think of the difference between the pervasiveness and stability of anti-anti-Christian universities (Liberty, Wyoming Catholic, etc) and anti-racist universities (almost all of them). Somewhere in that dynamic, the fact that government makes not being anti-racist high-risk seems important–even though I’m fairly certain that Oberlin would be anti-racist with no government encouragement.
Can you think of a good example of a powerful institution that keeps a topic largely out of certain conversations, and it’s clearly not backed by the government? I agree it should exist, but don’t have a punchy example.
Academia has done a quite thorough job of keeping muggle realism out of basically all the conversations it should be discussed in, and they’ve done so in spite of the fact that this is one of the areas where the government is fairly scrupulous about not intervening.
As a result, we get ill-informed versions of the subject cropping up in other discussions, ones which should be waiting for academia to provide them with the hard data before they take it up.
The new free speech isn’t overly concerned about state restrictions on speech. Instead it’s laser focused on negative reactions by private actors to speech they happen not to like. Well, at least certain negative reactions by certain private actors. If the members of a religious community want to fire a church employee because he advocates for gay marriage, that’s of course fair game and has nothing to do with free speech.
If the members of a religious community want to fire a church employee because he advocates for gay marriage, that’s of course fair game and has nothing to do with free speech
Yes Brad, just exactly the same if a hospital nurse told every parent she encountered in the course of her work “Don’t get your kids vaccinated, it’ll make them autistic!” and the brutal repressive medical establishment told her on the whole maybe she’d be happier working elsewhere.
Also exactly the same thing as when a charitable organization decided they didn’t want a bigot running it.
Which, legality or philosophical principle aside, seems a silly position when you are prone to defining bigotry so broad as to include everyone supportive of a proposition that ended up passing.
I mean I could easily have pointed out what was silly about what the aforementioned religious communities are doing. I didn’t because it would have been irrelevant and rude.
Strikes me that I might be wrong about the particular instance you are referring to; I suspect that it’s still the case that the bigotry is not so clear cut as to make the word less than rude, however.
Irrelevant… you’re probably right, and I try not to be the tone police.
Comment withdrawn.
Brad:
Suppose tomorrow, Wal-Mart announces a new policy–if any employee of theirs shows up at a pro-choice or pro-gun-control rally, they will be summarily fired.
There’s clearly no first amendment issue. And really, Wal-Mart is just deciding they don’t want to be represented by baby-killers and gun-grabbers. So no problem, right? Or might there be some kind of an issue with having this sort of thing become widespread?
albatross11:
Why is it never “that guy has the right not to bake the cake, but he is morally obligated to do so” but always “Mozilla was morally obligated not to fire Eich” and not even mentioning the rights part?
Can you at least acknowledge that my impression that it’s all about whose ox is being gored is a reasonable reading of the advocacy being done here and in related spaces?
@Brad:
Speaking for myself, Mozilla had the right to fire Eich but shouldn’t have. That guy had the right not to bake the cake and no moral obligation to bake it.
I wouldn’t even say that Mozilla had a moral obligation not to fire Eich, but perhaps I use “moral obligation” in a stronger sense than you do. I would have said there were lots of things one should do but are not morally obliged to do.
Okay, but I notice that in introducing the intermediate standard you don’t say one way or the other whether the baker *should* have baked the cake while you do note that you think Mozilla should not have fired Eich. This is the same difference in treatment I complained about in very the post you responded to!
I don’t think he should have baked the cake. Or shouldn’t have. I don’t think refusing to play a minor role in a ceremony representing ideas you disagree with is wrong.
To put it differently, given his beliefs he probably shouldn’t have baked the cake. As it happens I disagree with those beliefs. If he didn’t have those beliefs there would be no reason not to bake the cake but no particular “should” unless the couple were people he liked or the cause was one he approved of.
Suppose, however, that he had agreed to bake the cake and the timing was such that the couple could not easily find a replacement. He changes his mind at the last minute and decides he doesn’t want to bake the cake because he disapproves of mm marriages. He should bake the cake, even if he didn’t have any contractual agreement and wasn’t legally obliged to.
That seems to me more nearly analogous to the Eich case, where there was a longstanding relationship and implied mutual trust.
To make the Eich case more nearly analogous to the actual cake case, assume Eich is a computer repair guy who I would normally take my computer to. I find out he contributed to a ballot initiative I strongly disapprove of and decide to look for someone else.
I don’t think I should take it to him, or shouldn’t.
My instinct has always been that the answer to speech is more speech. Lately I’ve been questioning my instincts more and more. If the modern far-right exists because the ACLU defended the Illinois Nazis’ right to march, maybe they should’ve just treated them like the Blues Brothers instead.
But then Pegida/AfD/FPO/etc. have thrived in an environment with more restrictive speech norms, so maybe not.
Historically, in the US and Canada at least, serious restrictions on free speech, attacks against academic freedom, etc, have been more commonly right-against-left than the other way around, wielded especially against socialists, pacifists, civil rights advocates, etc. I’m especially baffled when I see someone on the left tossing around the “fire in a crowded movie theatre” line – it comes from a court opinion that in a case that decided opposition to the WWI draft was not covered by the 1st amendment. It was part of a more general attack on free speech during the US involvement in WWI that included such things as the “American Protective League” going around beating up IWW members. If the 1st amendment was simply erased tomorrow, I imagine that a lot of red-state type places would bring in laws against criticizing the police, filming the police, etc. Anti-police and anti-military sentiment would be categorized as “hate speech.” Sure, right-wingers would be run off of a lot of campuses, but the right outnumbers both actual leftists (socialists, anarchists, etc) and the hairdye crowd put together.
(Not the far right, but the threat of fascism historically was based on the mainstream right deciding that the fascists could be brought into government and kept under control, as happened in Italy and Germany, or alternatively, as part of a more general degree of social disorder that is more likely to lead to a right-wing authoritarian government than actual fascism).
Do you mind explaining what makes you think that? Have you personally met right-wingers who advocated such a policy? Are there polls that show prevalence of such attitudes among Republicans?
So, I’m not going to drop this on the actual post, but this struck me as “Against Murderism for thee but not for me”:
If you are going to say no one should use the word, because it has no meaning, or the meaning isn’t clear enough, or something then you should stop using it and substitute in whatever the hell you think is a clear description of the behavior in question. Rather than acknowledging that racism does, in fact, exist and steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the human behaviors that comprise it, treating it as an abstract concept that happened sometime in the past, a distant memory.
It seems perfectly fine in context to me: it reads to me as thinking out loud about a particular example of a moral concept whose standards change over time (or over space, if you compare, e.g., US standards to PRC standards), in a post specifically about figuring out optimal levels/targets for moral standards. The meaning of “racism” doesn’t have to be clear here; what has to be clear is merely that it is (a) not a constant, which the endpoints amply demonstrate, and (b) that the version being referred to is not the probably-no-one-lives-up-to-it ideal of “no one ever treats people differently due to their skin color/[other racial marker]” alluded to in part I.
I would say it does, as he is offering at as a “clear” example of something that is bad. In a post where he is trying to explore the idea of what is bad and what is good.
In other words, he implicitly accepts that there is a thing, racism, that is, in fact, bad, but he still hasn’t come any closer to defining what racism actually is.
And remember, the whole point of “against murderism” is that we dare not use the word today because it is an under specified evil that will cause civil war if it is invoked. Well, if he really believes that, then he should not deploy it exactly that same under specified way. Most especially because he wishes to enjoin anyone else from using the word.
Still disagree; it’s meta-level, not object-level.
More specifically, it reads to me as a clear example of something that is viewed as bad by enough people not to require an extra paragraph or four explaining one’s terms*, which has the additional necessary property of “obviously different standards over time” (a property “murder” lacks).
That said, do you have an alternative example in mind that does not have the problem you’re describing?
*That we’re arguing over this now suggests this was an incorrect assumption, but such is hindsight.
How can it both be something so obvious and clear it requires no explanation and something so messy and ambiguous that no one should ever use it?
The obvious (and relevant-to-the-post) part isn’t “it’s wrong”, it’s “different people have had different standards for how wrong this is”.
Different people probably have had different standards for how wrong murder is, but that’s distinctly less obvious.
I’d put in the same camp as a neo-liberal. Neo-liberalism is an actual thing that exists in the world. It’s also a lazy insult that certain set people on the left use to tar people to their right that they can’t quite bring themselves to call fascist. No one wants to stop people from saying “I am a neo-liberal” or to seriously discuss neo-liberal policy proposals, but you do want to stop the lazy sneering use of the word. So I adopt a policy of not using the word as an insult, and looking down on those that do. Other candidates for this category would be SJW, socialist, and fascist, off the top of my head.
Should’ve been a reply to johan_larson’s post. Must’ve pressed the wrong button.
I feel I should be surprised by the legacy admissions number more than I am. It has been my long-time impression that the Ivy League’s purpose is to perpetuate a specific class of American elite – the education being a happy bonus (I have similar thoughts about Oxbridge).
Racial admissions are, frankly, also something of an open secret. Turns out: institutional racial discrimination is a-ok, provided the right kind of people are benefiting. Nothing to see here, move along.
A thought occurs: presumably the children of today’s students shall at some point be eligible for legacy admission criteria; how will the racial component figure into that, I wonder? It seems to me that affirmative admission policies are targeted at a different black demographic than “people who’s parents are Harvard graduates” and that the presence of privileged black students admitted via legacy will not necessarily be seen as offsetting the difficulties faced by underprivileged black students who are trying to get a good education – and therefore not a reason to reduce the weight of the racial component when evaluating applications. Combined, the two could increase the black Harvard student population considerably.
One wonders whether that will be the time Harvard is no longer a school of choice for the old elites…
There’s a reason why Institutions publish diversity stats component-wise rather than as a matrix, despite their public enthusiasm for intersectionality. I don’t think this outcome presents a problem for them at all.
I’ve been thinking about the information that has been coming out about Harvard’s admissions practices due to the current lawsuit, and on balance what has been revealed has made the institution look worse in my eyes.
First, legacy admissions are a much bigger factor than I had realized. Legacy students are five times as likely to be admitted as other applicants, and a third of Harvard students are legacies. I would have guessed 10%. I try not to indulge in hopeless naivete; who your parents are is always going to matter in life. But doing this formally, institutionally, just seems bonkers. It is the sort of insiders-only right-families white-shoe not-our-sort rubbish that should have been left on the other side of the Atlantic.
Second, Harvard discriminates by race much more than I had realized. If they admitted by academics only, blacks would be less than 1% of the student. Applying various non-academic but non-racial criteria boosts their admissions to just over two percent. But blacks are 10% of the student body. So Harvard is into racial discrimination in a big way. This is one of those issues where I am somewhat sympathetic. Some people really did get shit on hard by history, and it isn’t over yet. But if racial discrimination is poison, it should really only be applied in medicinal quantities, and Harvard is handing this stuff out by the cupful.
So, the present lawsuit has shown that legacy status and race are bigger factors than I had expected in admissions. What should matter only a little or ideally not at all matters a lot. In admissions, Harvard is more unfair than I had realized.
The legacy thing makes sense when you consider it’s an informal way of selecting for those individuals most likely to donate to the school’s endowment. If you’re from a family of people who donate to / associate with Harvard, you’ll most likely do the same.
It makes even more sense when you consider that Harvard is less an advanced technical school and more of a port of entry for the elite. Academic performance is secondary.
Third, universities [not just Harvard] can’t *not* employ affirmative action. Going by merit alone [using the colloquial definition] would skew the student body of the schools to an embarrassing degree. If they’re told they can’t discriminate one way, unless told specifically how they are permitted to admit students they’ll find some work-around. An absence of affirmative action is more of a scandal then not, the only scandal here seems to be the public learning how the sausages are made, so to speak.
Scandal and embarrassment are in the eyes of the beholder, of course.
Caltech manages just fine. I’m sure there are repeated calls to burn it to the ground by someones, but not enough that I ever see them.
Also, there is a big difference between “absolutely no consideration to race” and “make sure races match the general population.” Just pulling numbers from a hat, if 8% of the population plays the cello, and your class is only 1% cello-players, you miss out on the perspectives of cello-players. You don’t need to get to 8% cello-players to achieve this, though. As a wild-ass guess, if your class is 4% cello-players you can still get their perspective represented so students aren’t agog when they meet a cellist after graduation.
I’ve commented on legacy preferences before: I think the key benefit of legacy admissions is strengthening the school network, not donations.
Has any breakdown come out between black and African-American (i.e. with ancestry in the US during the antebellum period)?
I went looking for universities that do NOT use legacy preference, and came across this lovely paragraph in Wikipedia:
The top 75 includes some state schools. Government institutions are allowed to use legacy preference? Astonishing.
The top 75 includes some state schools. Government institutions are allowed to use legacy preference? Astonishing.
I wonder if that has to do with funding? If State U can guarantee that X% of its new incoming first years will be kids of its graduates, it can budget accordingly. And playing on the loyalty of alumni to hit them up for donations – don’t you want the place where your kids will attend to have the best of things for them?
Yeah, the two reasons commonly advanced for legacy preferences are cultural continuity and alumni donations. Someone call me a cynic, but my bet is on the money.
And if it is all about the money, I’d rather be explicit about it. Toss out need-blind applications, and admit that paying full fare is an advantage.
Is it known if parental donations are *explicitly* part of legacy admissions, e.g. does a legacy whose parents donate $10K/year have an advantage over a legacy whose parents donate nothing?
(Obviously in the limit of large donations it matters – if you buy a building or similar – but I’m wondering about more normal-scale donations.)
The colleges swear they aren’t, but as I understand it many parents don’t believe them, and faithfully donate to their alma maters until their kids get turned down, and then stop dead.
My understanding is “development” is a different bucket than “legacy” and within the legacy bucket donations don’t help.
@johan_larson Indeed, let’s say that a third of the alumni donate $x (but only if their future children get legacy preference), while others donate nothing. If, instead, Harvard said that they would give preference to the children of those who donate $x, it’s likely that the same people who currently donate would still do so, as they would continue to have any motives they have now. So Harvard would get the same donations, and it would have to hand out only one third of the “unfair” preferences it does today.
It would even get more donations in fact, since people would have more motive to donate, and because even non-alumni would have an incentive to donate. Of course, different models could be used, such as one where a (larger) donation is expected only if the child actually gets admitted. And of course I haven’t discussed the negative PR value of a $$$ preference that may be viewed more negatively than legacy preference for whatever reason.
Has anyone looked at data to see if legacy preferences work as a proxy for unobserved quality variables? The professors giving out grades are unlikely to know if a student does or doesn’t have family connections with the school. So if students with family connections are on average better than their other characteristics signal, that should show up in their grades–they should, on average, outperform their SAT etc. peers. If not, that weakens part of the argument for legacy admissions.
I believe a large fraction of the blacks admitted to Harvard et al are either foreign kids or the children of fairly recent immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean. That can’t really be justified by the genuinely shitty treatment American blacks endured for most of our country’s history.
I think Razib Khan has the right view here: Part of preserving Harvard’s place in the world requires making sure they educate a large chunk of the future ruling class–the federal judges, CEOs, prosecutors, senators, lawyers at top law firms, name journalists, presidents, etc. That drives the legacy scheme, and probably a lot of other recruiting logic. It also drives the racial discrimination in their recruiting–they figure Asians get good grades and test well, but won’t be an outsized part of the future ruling class, whereas blacks will make up a lot of the future ruling class, even if they don’t get as good test scores or grades.
The problem with letting people see how the sausage is made is that what Harvard is doing to keep the racial numbers right is just racial discrimination, and there are laws against that. It’s what Harvard wants to do, it’s part of the consensus view of the ruling class that *this kind* of racial discrimination is good and right and proper, but it’s against the actual laws as they’re written, and as they would probably be enforced on some lesser institution.
The way this has been handled in the past is that the supreme court would find some kind of justification for how the right kind of racial discrimination could maybe be done with the right formula. And I expect that’s what will happen again–it will turn out that there’s a way for Harvard to discriminate on the basis of race in admissions that’s legal, but probably wouldn’t be legal for Ohio State and certainly wouldn’t be legal for the plastic factory in Bumfuck, Iowa. And I’m sure there will be a great many think pieces published by the Voxes of the world, explaining how this is totally not just giving powerful institutions a pass, or selectively enforcing laws based on what the powerful people in our society like and dislike.
Another potential outcome would be that Harvard stop discriminating against Asians, but then those seats have to come from somewhere. For ideological reasons, decreasing the number of blacks and hispanics admitted via affirmative action is probably not acceptable. The only other place for those seats to come from is probably either legacy admissions (mostly white) or just white students. I’m cynical enough to suspect that legacy admissions are too important to future donations and maintaining Harvard’s place to mess with, so probably that means they’ll just admit a lot fewer middle-class / poor whites with no special connections. That’s the answer that’s the least likely to violate current elite opinion. This probably won’t do much to diminish the sense among lots of middle-class whites, and especially white men, that the elites actively want to screw them over.
I’d say the relevant number isn’t how many people who get into Harvard had parents go there, but how many are admitted whose parents went who’s relevent stats (test scores, GPA, sports, what have you) are considerably lower than the non-legacy class. Or, perhaps, the stats differential between legacy and non-legacy.
RPG discussion: monsters & terrain.
One of the pitfalls of a “Challenge Rating” system is that it can’t systematize the force multiplier effect of fighting in different terrain. Those with more manly interests than me (i.e. military history) could write reams about its effects on conflict between humans, but what about non-human enemies?
Some thoughts:
Vampires. Having players open a door inside a building to find one of these seems like asking for player (un)death. Now if he’s walking around outdoors, in daylight, and you have ranged weapons? Way less of a challenge.
Dragons. This one’s kind of the reverse: a dungeon dragon is much more vulnerable than one that encounters adventurers while flying around. Breathe fire until they’re dead, or you run out of that resource (if that’s a thing in the game you’re running).
Further thoughts?
Systematizing the effect of fighting in different terrain (and otherwise in different conditions) is what the Encounter Level system is for. This is precisely the reason for having two separate concepts of Challenge Rating and Encounter Level: to make clear this distinction of “how innately powerful/challenging is this monster, all else being equal, on average, across a variety of the sort of encounters in which the PCs will fight it” vs. “how difficult is this specific encounter, taking into account terrain and other particulars”.
Re: vampires: they can’t walk around in daylight, so that scenario cannot happen.
Re: dragons: I think that their challengingness is often exaggerated. (Rant / details incoming.)
Ok, so you encounter a dragon. Outside. “Breathe fire until they’re dead”, right? Now how would a halfway-competent party handle this?
1. Ranged attacks. Dragons have high AC and good saves! But the archer should have a very good attack bonus, and the party buffers will be buffing him; the magical attackers should have ranged attacks that allow no saving throws (and often, even ignore spell resistance—though a dragon’s SR is bad for its level).
2. Flight. The wizard casts fly on the fighter, and now the fighter flies up to the dragon and attacks it. (The dragon can grapple? The cleric uses his wand of freedom of movement; etc.) Dragons are fast flyers but have poor maneuverability, so it’s not hard to catch up to them if they’re actually trying to engage you (if a dragon turns tail and runs, it can likely outrange you, but then you’ve won the encounter anyway).
3. Debuffs. Too many to list.
4. Breath attacks have cooldowns (or recharges), and are not usable ever round. Also, any non-brain-dead party knows to spread out, and this is easy to do outside.
Dragons are not pushovers, but they’re not that dangerous if encountered outside, in the open. (It’s a well-known fact by now that the true dragons were, in D&D 3e [and derived systems], given CRs artificially lower—by something like 25-30%—than what their stats would suggest. This is because the designers wanted dragons to be challenging—and they would not be very challenging otherwise. Even as it stands, I would not call a dragon, encountered outside and in the open, an unusually difficult “single boss monster” encounter.)
No, the true danger of a dragon is encountering one in its lair—where it’s had centuries to prepare the most devious traps, shape the terrain to its precise specifications, have allies, have resources, have environments favorable to it but deadly to PCs, etc.
Dracula would disagree that he can’t walk in daylight. He just couldn’t use his powers.
Re: dragons, a lot of what you said seems very game-specific. in 1st Edition and BECMI D&D, you couldn’t buy, probably not even craft, any such thing as “a wand of Freedom of Movement” and dragons could breath attack for 3 consecutive rounds,after which that resource was done for the day.
Bram Stoker must have been house-ruling things, then. A D&D 3.5 vampire in direct sunlight is completely screwed – they get one partial action to get themselves to safety, and then they’re dusted.
Re dungeon dragons: how well ventilated are underground caves? Could a dragon suffocate itself or the players by breathing too much fire, or would it just become harder and harder to breathe fire well before then?
It is not clear that dragon fire consumes fuel, and so equally unclear that it would consume oxygen. On the other hand, any secondary fires that the dragon fire happened to ignite could generate the concerns you mention.
Is there an official temperature for dragonfire? If it’s hot enough, it might make all kind of nasty nitrogen oxides, even if it’s not consuming any oxygen.
And in any case, a cave fire would probably kill you from CO poisoning before O2 depletion.
Interestingly, fifth edition’s CR system should be able to systematize terrain effects but doesn’t.
The Advantage / Disadvantage system, rolling two twenty sided dice and taking the higher or lower result respectively, has done a great job of replacing fiddly bonuses, penalties and conditions associated with terrain. As a DM I feel comfortable saying that e.g. a human PC fighting an angry merman underwater has disadvantage on attacks.
Since Advantage and Disadvantage are mathematically straightforward, it should be possible to list the modified CR of a creature with constant advantage or disadvantage alongside its regular entry.
Some tactical elements are impossible to figure out for CR beforehand, unless something is set in stone: unless you are going to mandate that the enemies surprise the PCs no matter what, or vice versa, it’s impossible to add some kind of XP adjustment to reflect the difficulty in either case, until after the fact – so something that’s meant to be a hard encounter will be pushed into the “don’t throw this at them” zone if the enemies get the drop on the PCs.
Similar, terrain: if one side manages to get to the high ground first, they have an advantage in any tactically transparent system. Unless you mandate one side has it by default, you would have to add any adjustment for that after the fact. Etc.
I think CR systems might create an incentive towards designing systems (not tactically transparent) where the statblocks of the participants matter more than the terrain, the situation, etc. Either you can add a clunky system to add XP for the enemy taking the high ground (and recognize that a bunch of baddies who took the high ground might be “too hard” to fight according to the CR system), or you can just ignore all that stuff (when it’s important), or you can make it unimportant.
I wonder if you used a modifier for total damage taken to increase the XP award how soon players would catch on and throw themselves into danger.
That rewards sloppy play in general, too. A bad player who barely survives encounters will level up faster than an intelligent player that plans their approaches and uses their abilities better.
Edit: That said, I like the idea of rewarding results instead of just inputs. Most of the ideas I have about it on first blush feel overly cumbersome or to value the wrong things out of simplicity.
But that rewards narratively weaker victories! A bad player who barely survives encounters is more interesting to follow provided she isn’t surviving by sheer luck or dei ex machina.
That’s a good point!
Maybe the really good players would just take on harder fights instead of trying to be sloppy about it, and each player gets rewarded for where they are skill-wise?
Of course, if the mechanic is as basic as “more HP lost = more XP” then the players gaming the system would be pretty harsh. Standing around a neutered enemy without the theoretical ability to kill a player and taking a few more rounds of damage seems a bad thing to encourage.
Last week I decided to not eat for 5 days.
I was testing out a prolonged modified water fast protocol for purported autophagy and stem cell regeneration benefits.
Incidentally, I had mountains of motivation, good mood, mental energy, and creativity. I would even say that was my most productive week of the entire year.
It definitely wasn’t comfortable to do though and requires a degree of willpower to not eat for that long, but I also don’t feel like it was that difficult. Just sharing in case anyone’s curious about this sort of thing.
No juice or anything, just water? Boy that is pretty daunting. Planning on doing it again?
I say modified in that I allowed some supplements and noncalorie unsweetened teas.
I supplemented electrolytes (sodium/potassium) in my water and I continued taking omega 3, vitamin D, magnesium, and vitamin K. I also continued working out every day so I definitely needed it for what I was losing in my sweat.
Supposedly I only have to fast every few months to maintain the benefits, but I’ll probably try a fasting mimetic diet next time, which is a 5 day highly calorie restricted eating plan of specific macronutrient composition that mimics the fasting state.
That’s very different from my experience: I wonder what the difference is. Fasting for several days generally leaves me shaky, slow-witted, and unmotivated. (Last Easter I was reading at vigil, and ended up eating an apple beforehand for fear I’d either stumble, or read poorly, did I not.)
Hmm, what kind of diet did you have before fasting? Maybe body type has an influence? Perhaps the weather also has an influence? Age could also be a factor?
I have a generally good diet, mostly vegetables and food from raw ingredients I cook myself. I also take a variety of supplements to cover common nutritional deficiencies and probiotics. Before I started my fast, I took a multivitamin just to be extra sure I was covering my nutritional bases.
I also supplemented electrolytes during my fast, ensuring I always had water on hand to stay hydrated.
I have a lean, slim, but athletic body type. 30 years old, good health with no conditions. It was nice that it was sunny during my fast too.
An apple for Easter is theologically very fitting. O felix culpa! 🙂
From what little I know, this is going to depend upon the types of activities you are engaged in, your body’s energy stores, and how quickly your body can ramp up the production of glucagon. In my personal experience, a drastic reduction in caloric intake needs about a week to get back to feeling normal. But that first week is a doozy.
Doesn’t this lead to muscle loss? AFAIK fat can only give you ~60kcal/kilo/day, so if you’re 80kg at 25%bf that’s barely going to cover half your daily expenditure.
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1468824.html?nc=14#comments
A suggestion that questions on medical forms should be priced at $1 each as a rough but adequate way of acknowledging that filling out forms takes people’s time.
There is discussion of how much the forms get filled out and then ignored.
Drove my wife crazy when she would fill out a form, then the nurse would ask all the same questions, then the doctor would ask all the same questions a well.
And none of them actually listen, as my wife found out when, after going through that, she had to stop the nurse giving her something she’d explicitly listed as an allergy.
As a counterpoint: I volunteer in EMS. In practice, this means I pick up “sick” people from where ever they are and take them to the closest appropriate hospital. As a part of this process and facilitating future care, I will ask all relevant questions I can think of, filter out the useless crap and relay the synopsis to the receiving nurse.
The number of cases where I’ve had different answers given to me (which I’ve relayed to nursing staff), vs. given to the nursing staff while I’m standing right there is astounding. It’s one of those “get over it” moments when you think you look like a complete idiot for relaying something that the patient contradicts. Nurses get the same thing.
Ultimately, it boils down to a lot of things:
* Asking a question early-on might trigger a memory being resurfaced for a more comprehensive answer later.
* Patients seem to think that they know how the medical system works (or should work) and get this idea that only questions to/from the doctor matter. And so they omit useful information. (Seriously, as I guy, I wouldn’t be asking about your menstrual cycle unless I thought it might be clinically relevant).
* As a result of fear of medical lawsuits, etc., everybody needs to ask everything themselves. If the patient lies and is harmed, it’s their fault. If a medical provider relies on notes from another provider, they have to worry about being on the stand and being asked questions like “did you ask the patient?”
* Different focus on the answers from the same question, possibly leading to different follow-up questions. That is, the kind of thing that I care about in the pre-hospital environment is focused around getting the immediate care I can provide, and selecting the right destination hospital. Which is separate from the nurse/doctor selecting the set of labs they want to run to rule out specific conditions.
Question for medical folks:
Does anyone have halfway-reliable numbers for the incidence of tethered spinal cords in the general population of infants, and the incidence contingent on the existence of hemangiomas on the spine?
The US government will kindly estimate that for you if you’ve got a range of ICD-9 or -10 codes.
https://hcupnet.ahrq.gov/#setup
Huh, thanks!
Thoughts on Amazon? I’m pretty happy how everyone — left, right, and center — seems to be pissed with their deal.
I hate tax incentives. Either lower taxes for everyone or don’t. Special people shouldn’t be able to escape them. There are a bunch of things that Amazon could have asked for, or gotten, that wouldn’t have been this bad. If infrastructure (roads or subways) were built-out especially for their headquarters, for example, it would still be infrastructure that other people could theoretically use, and would continue to exist if Amazon somehow fails and another business wants to move in.
Basically agree in principle. Preventing this sort of thing is one of the few good sources (to my mind) of arguments against increased local legislative authority. On the other hand, it’s useful for governments to be able to take non-extreme positions on things – less positive than making them mandatory, or less negative than banning them – and to have some mechanism for affecting entities not subject to their laws (out-of-town corporations, say). I haven’t considered this issue fully; these thoughts are still in tension.
I have issues with Amazon, as do many people, but bargaining for tax incentives is rather par-for-the-course when it comes to major corporate moves into a city. Its difficult for me to get particularly angry about it, especially considering the city might view it as a good deal, even strictly in terms of tax-revenue.
Here’s something to consider: If the people of NYC/DC decide they dislike the tax incentives, then they can vote for politicians who will take them away. AFAIK the members of a legislature are never contractually bound to vote a certain way. And since tax law is easier to change than moving a company’s headquarters, the tax incentives might end up being just “bait” that lured the company in.
I’m just glad they picked cities where:
1. They would have the least influence over the character of that city, and the least power to influence regulation (as opposed to a smaller more desperate city).
2. Ecological biodiversity and species endemism isn’t huge in the Mid-Atlanic coast, so the ecological impacts of an expanding city are reduced (opposed to the nightmare scenario of choosing someplace like Florida or coastal Texas).
This is America, so not really. You get 2 choices and approximately nobody (dozens!) ranks the issue strongly enough to flip on their tribe over it. This doesn’t mean people don’t for realsies care about the tax breaks, it’s that there also exist larger issues that are more important. And both parties (demonstrably, despite philosophical denials) love this sort of pork so even if you get one maverick on your legislative body they’re gonna be drowned out by the Machines’ people.
Amazon would sue the city. NYC is one of the cities large enough to actually put up a fight to such a large corporation, but if it actually went to court I’d expect Amazon to win. My money is on using the lawsuit as leverage for another round of shady backroom dealings, though.
Has anyone ever successfully sued a government for damages in response to raising taxes? IANAL, but it seem to me that the only grounds you can overturn a legislative decision in court is if the law violated the constitution in some way, otherwise the legislature’s decisions are law.
And since tax law is easier to change than moving a company’s headquarters, the tax incentives might end up being just “bait” that lured the company in.
You aren’t supposed to say that out loud.
It’s of course possible to slowly turn up the heat on the company because “ha, they aren’t going to leave over 1% more in tax,” until you hit the point where the companies do leave, and then you need tax incentives to lure businesses back in. Governor Cuomo says “New York has to offer incentives because of its comparatively high taxes. … It’s not a level playing field to begin with. … All things being equal, if we do nothing, they’re going to Texas.”
That’s how you get complicated tax codes. Increase the rates, add loop-holes, change loop-holes, increase rates, add more loop-holes, decrease rates, add exceptions… on the wheel turns.
And with every turn, the gap between the incentivized and the proles grows.
Who are the proles here? Everyone is taking advantage of some incentive or loophole, the number of companies paying the top-line corporate rate is close to nil. Now you and I aren’t companies but we work for them. My employer got some substantial tax breaks for locating my office where it did, and most likely so did yours.
I find these practices wasteful and unpleasant, but this isn’t stealing from the public to enrich cronies, it’s shuffling boxes around for temporary advantage in a zero-sum game.
IMO, the worst thing about complicated tax codes with lots of gaming the rules to decrease taxes is that it is a massive zero-sum game–it takes smart, productive people and assigns some to the IRS and some to tax accounting firms, and then has them spend lots of resources (making the total pie smaller) negotiating over who gets the bigger slice of the pie.
@BBA
My employer didn’t, because it was an independent engineering firm close to where the owner lived when it was established, before I was born. My father’s employer didn’t, because his job is tied to a local organization which set up shop where it did to take advantage of plummeting property values, again before I was born.
I’m not a winner here. My employer isn’t a winner here. The local grocery store isn’t a winner here, and neither are independent auto shops, laundromats, restaurants, or bookstores. Those are the proles.
@albatross11
And then once you have an industry of smart, productive people invested into it, they are going to fight to maintain that job security, unless exceptionally altruistic.
@Hoopyfreud
There are plenty of incentives for small businesses, in fact there’s a whole cabinet-level federal agency devoted to them.
Yes. But there’s a very large difference between, “promising Amazon favorable tax treatment for moving its headquarters here” and “small business tax deduction.” In particular, there’s a no-man’s-land between them that seems to me to be designed so that large companies can slurp up small companies who want to cross it.
Yes, NYC/DC has to make sure they don’t dip over to the right side of the Laffer curve. When Amazon is first getting their headquarters established, they will have to keep taxes low. But once Amazon has made significant irreversible investments in the city, they can turn up the heat.
They could have chosen anywhere in the country and it would have been incredibly profitable for them. Amazon is big enough that people go to them, not the other way around. All of these amenities they were looking for would have naturally arisen anywhere they went. In the end, they decided to go with two places that are already doing well economically and have housing shortages after putting out this whole reality show for a year. Jeff Bezos had the power to do a lot of good but he chose the ability to lobby instead. It’s disgraceful.
Were there any prediction markets on the topic? How did they do? How did they handle hq3 vs just hq2?
I’m interested in the claim that it was obvious that they were going to DC, b/c WaPo+lobbying+defense. I didn’t hear this until the last minute, but markets might have recorded it.
Iraqi history in the 1930s and early 1940s is fascinating. The King (Ghazi) was upset at the liberal, pro-British policies of his ministers, but didn’t have the political nous to form a new government, so he set up his own radio station and started broadcasting anti-government propaganda. This was massively destabilising, and encouraged the military to plot coups – the King was the C-in-C of the army, so they were hardly likely to be punished if caught.
At the same time, social structures were mutating rapidly. Lacking a power base in the country, the previous King (Faisal) had given a lot of power and wealth to the Iraqi officers in the Ottoman army who had deserted to support him in the Arab Revolt. These fairly Westernized young men now dominated business and politics (and would do so until 1958, by which time they wouldn’t be so young!) but were very unrepresentative of the rest of society.
Meanwhile, in Ottoman times land ownership had been very hazy, so the British, and the nascent Iraqi state, had instituted major land reform, giving individuals secure, registered title to the land they owned. Unfortunately, in the countryside, this process had been captured by tribal leaders, who had registered tribal lands entirely in their own names (James C Scott fans will recognise this dynamic). However, this entirely changed their positions – instead of being consensual tribal leaders with power and influence based on community ties, they were now just landlords. These former tribal leaders migrated to Baghdad, both to enjoy their newfound wealth, and to be close to the centres of legal and administrative power which now supported them. The result was that the rural populations were leaderless, and the government did not have mediating institutions with which to negotiate, so there were constant low-level revolts and violence, particularly in the North.
This came to a head in 1936, when Bakr Sidqi launched a coup d’etat against the government, and Ghazi persuaded the Cabinet to step down and accept it. From then until mid-1941, Iraqi politics was dominated by the army, as the other institutional bodies lacked the legitimacy or popular connection to resist the army. The violence continued, and Bakr Sidqi was assassinated the following year, but army dominance continued, under a group of pro-German officers nicknamed the “Golden Square.” Germany had a lot of popularity in Iraq at the time, partly because they represented an opportunity to get out from under British suzerainty, and because to a young, rapidly modernizing and scientifically-minded country, they represented the future. In retrospect, the late 1930s represent the end of major German scientific and engineering contributions, but people did not know that at the time – scientific journals were frequently published in German, German companies were keen to invest in Iraq, and the Berlin-Baghdad railway was finally completed at this time.
However, in April 1939, Ghazi died in a drunken car crash, leaving as heir a 3-year-old child, Faisal II. Prince Abdul Ilah, Ghazi’s cousin and brother-in-law, emerged as regent in obscure circumstances. There were other candidates, most notably Prince Zeid, and there were allegations that Abdul Ilah’s appointment was a palace conspiracy by Nuri al-Said. Abdul Ilah was pro-British, and a close ally of Nuri al-Said. What’s fascinating about this is the lack of any intervening institutions in the matter – political parties, tribal leaders, etc. This is because all the relevant people were creatures of the Iraqi state, deriving their power and influence from the state, rather than able to mobilise other resources (e.g. popular movements) to exercise influence over the state. The denuding and obsolescence of the traditional institutions, and the failure to grow new ones besides the army, ensured that.
Abdul Ilah now pursued a pro-British policy in defiance of the army, which lead to a coup in 1941 in favour of Iraqi neutrality in WW2. However, this should be seen as the weakness of the Golden Square, not their strength. Previously, they had been able to change the government without launching a coup – they should have been worried that they had to resort to violence. The regent appealed for help, and the British were only to happy too oblige, crushing coup in less than 2 months and returning Iraq to a pro-British alignment. The Golden Square were captured or fled, and that ended army dissent for the next 15 years – again showing how dependent these events were on a handful of personalities with access to key levers of state power. This was all a major surprise to ordinary Iraqis, who were fed a diet of propaganda that Iraq was defeating the British, right up until the moment Baghdad fell. Again without mechanisms for channelling their dissatisfaction into political expression, the inchoate rage of the Iraqi commoners was mostly taken out on the Jewish population, in a disturbing pogrom called the Farhud.
This was of course not the end of popular or military unrest in Iraq, but from then on it would be channelled in more “normal” ways, through the Communist and Ba’ath parties.
Very interesting. Thanks for writing that up.
+1
+1
I would also be happy to write up something about the Iran-Iraq war (from the Iraqi perspective) if people would find that interesting. Could also write about the events of 1958.
Yes to both, please.
Fast-forwarding via Wikipedia, I find that Abdul Ilah did faithfully hand power back to the young king when he achieved majority in 1953. That I think puts him ahead of most regents in non-fantastic history. Too bad they were both killed in yet another coup in 1958; possibly he forgot the part where you’re supposed to maintain the kingdom in good running order for the new King’s eventual rule.
+1 on this being fascinating, and more of the same would be most welcome.
Well, remember that (1) Prince Abdul Ilah never had children. His nearest male heir was… King Faisal. What would be the point? (2) Abdul Ilah wasn’t running the country during Faisal’s regency, Nuri al-Said was. (3) Abdul Ilah’s sister, the dowager Queen, lived until 1950. (4) There is a selection bias in that faithless, dastardly regents (Gloucester! Horthy! Cixi!) are more famous than boring, loyal ones (Bedford, Orleans, Coimbra).
Power for Prince Abdul Ilah, for as long as it lasts. And the egotistical but perhaps true notion that the country is on the brink of ruin and the snot-nosed kid can’t fix it, only the experienced veteran politician Prince Abdul Ilah can do that. And if not having children of your own is really an issue, then it’s one that can usually be solved by devoting the power and prestige of even a mere Regent to the task.
That just shifts the focus of the question. And I find that Nuri al-Said had two sons.
Ah, I see what you’re saying. But Prince Abdul-Ilah wasn’t an experienced veteran politician, he was the Queen’s dopey kid brother. The (unproven) allegation that he was elevated by a palace conspiracy was given credence precisely because he was nice but ineffectual – supposedly Nuri al-Said had chosen him because he’d be a pliant tool.
As for Nuri al-Said, he was definitely a wily veteran politician. But he had the even more egotistical notion that kings come and kings go, but they would all need his brilliance to actually run the country. Why bother trying to overthrow the Hashemites, when you can have them sitting on the throne – Lineal descendants of the Prophet! Liberators of the Arab world! – lending prestige to the government that you control? And you know what, he was right – Abdul Ilah handed over to Faisal II, and Nuri al-Said stayed firmly in control.
@Conrad
I owe you a response from last thread on Peterson.
I think the argument that “you should do [useful and constructive things] because they feel meaningful” is dangerous because it circumvents the whole modernist project of finding meaning. I believe that there is a difference between meaning and meaningfulness, and that too much meaningfulness and not enough meaning can lead to despondency and nihilism when the going gets rough. Look at the Peterson fanboys who remain losers for a glimpse at this – the type who rant about evolutionary psychology for most of their lonely waking hours and try to convince everyone that they’d be happier if they lived according to that person’s philosophy. It’s an absurd, poorly-thought-out position, and while I’m not willing to blame Peterson for it – he’s certainly not the type to say things like “women don’t belong in the workplace and blacks don’t belong in school” – I do blame him for making people vulnerable to this kind of rhetoric.
That sounds to me like people who didn’t get Peterson’s message. The whole “clean your room” thing started as an admonishment to politically active Millenials who ranted about changing the world and “how things ought to be” when they couldn’t take care of themselves. Whoever it is you’re talking about should stop ranting about evolutionary psychology and clean their damn rooms.
“People shouldn’t say X even though X is fine because listeners might fail to understand X and do something worse than X” sounds like a fully general argument against all X.
My argument is more that “people shouldn’t believe X without some idea of the philosophical underpinning of or justification for X.” I don’t object to Peterson because people can do stupid things with what he says, but because he treats belief as instrumental while pretending it’s fundamental.
Can you explain what you mean by that? I think he treats it as instrumental and explicitly says it’s instrumental. Like when asked about whether or not he believes in God he says he acts as though God is real, because that’s the best way to act. That’s instrumental all the way around.
I have objections to this, but not vociferous ones. My problem is that he makes this distinction clear only when pressed; until he is, he acts like all his beliefs are fundamental, and I think, based on what I’ve read, that he has no objection to people adopting the things he says as fundamental rather than instumenal beliefs. I object to that very much. Terminal values are determined by fundamental beliefs, and we call people who instill unexamined fundamental beliefs in others “cult leaders.” I don’t think Peterson is really a cult leader, but I do think that he has cultists, and that he’s done nothing to prevent that from happening.
@Hoopyfreud
How do you square this argument with the fact that most people don’t really know why they believe what they believe? That goes well beyond philosophy and heavily implicates all of politics.
If you are frustratedly forced to accept it as reality in those other contexts, why harp on Peterson specifically? Isolated demand for rigor and all that.
I have nothing but contempt for demagoguery in general, but I reserve a special place in my heart for those who subvert the search for meaning with it. And yes, I despise people who cannot articulate why they care about things. I don’t mind running into terminal values (in either ethics or aesthetics), but I do mind when people don’t care what those terminal values are.
Fair enough, thanks for the response.
Have you examined why you have terminal value examination as a terminal value?
I suspect most (perhaps all) people’s terminal values – if they truly have such things at all in any useful or consistent way – are so convoluted and weird as to be for all practical purposes inexpressible. If I’m right, this is a serious problem for AI goal alignment, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
Caveat: I’m not familiar with Peterson’s message and don’t care to be. This is a response to what you’re saying, not a defense of whatever he’s saying.
“Finding meaning” isn’t something that ordinary people can or should do. It’s possible to find meaning, and the exceptional people who can find meaning deserve respect for their achievement, but turning that into an obligation is cruel and insane.
My perspective here is cribbed from Nietzsche: if you want to find meaning, you need to suffer in the wilderness alone first. Whether that’s literal hermitage like the Desert Fathers or more of an intellectual isolation depends on the person. But it’s not something that you can do on the weekends while working a 9-to-5 job. It’s an extreme spiritual experience and demands serious sacrifices.
Common people like myself and most of the people here are much better off walking well-trodden paths than wandering in the wilderness. The same way that you can’t have a society entirely consisting of entrepreneurs, you can’t have a society entirely consisting of mystics. Traditional societies respect the search for meaning and that’s good, but if modernism demands everyone to search for meaning then that shows that it’s gone completely off the rails.
Mine too. But in contrast to you, I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone must. I hold that the real insanity is to try to take a deer path through a city, and that modernity is out of the bag. We may not be ready for it, but we have to sink or swim, and we can’t keep clinging to the rock we started out on.
Modernity in the sense of industrial capitalism is somewhere between two hundred and fifty to seven hundred years old depending on how strictly you want to define things. We’ve had ten to twenty four generations grow up under similar circumstances to those we’re dealing with today.
That’s not long in evolutionary time but in terms of history and tradition it’s a respectable period. I would rather trust that multi-generational wisdom than spend my life reinventing the wheel.
The point of modernity, as I see it, is that new structures are continually arising and falling. 50 years ago people were looking to indian gurus for their meaning; now they’re looking to identity groups. None of it has lasted, except perhaps for the churches, but even they bend to follow the waves of public sentiment. Following the waves will get you nowhere in the long run; you have to get off and make your life about something eventually, or drown.
I don’t think of it as reinventing the wheel – more as building a home. Fill yourself with idiosyncrasies and treasured insights. Build minarets and facades out of your life. Become a culture. The world outside has much to offer, but little that you won’t tire of eventually unless you take it indoors.
I mean that’s absolutely true. Fashion essentially didn’t exist for most of history; the idea of constantly shifting trends in clothing, music, food, etc. emerged in early modern Europe. It is a pretty important feature of modernity.
That said, we’ve had centuries of modern fashion at this point. Maybe this is my molecular genetics background talking but I’m more interested in the conserved structures. The most important institutions in society will be the most permanent, because breaking them is that much more dangerous.
Building a home from scratch is expensive and I rather liked my family home. And even though that particular home is gone, there are a vast number of virtually identical homes sitting unoccupied. Any of them much better than a rickety shack I could throw together in my spare time.
Again, I have nothing but respect for people who blaze their own path in life. But it’s something that most people don’t have any need to do and aren’t particularly able to do.
Was there really no fashion among wealthy Romans or Greeks or Egyptians? That seems really surprising, if true.
Hoopyfreud:
It seems to me that most people have and will try to follow existing paths to meaning, and do their deep thinking (if they do any) around the edges–thinking hard about some specific questions while following some basic path that seems to lead to a meaningful life. I have the impression that Peterson is more-or-less in the business of trying to help a lot of people find what he thinks is a socially and personally useful path to a meaningful life. I’m not convinced it’s a bad thing for him to do this without deep-diving on all the questions you find worthwhile, anymore than I’m convinced it’s a bad thing for people to write pop science books rather than demanding everyone work their way through the math of relativity / population genetics / climate modeling.
@Albatross
I don’t think it’s worthwhile to question everything, but I think it’s quite important to know where your fundamental beliefs come from. Do you have faith? Then embrace faith. Be comfortable attributing your beliefs to faith. If you don’t, you’re lying to yourself. Are you a nihilist? Then be upfront about your nihilism. Tell me that nothing matters and you just do what the imp of the perverse tells you, and I’ll be disgusted but not disappointed. Tell me that you’re an empiricist and you’ll observe me walking away spinning my finger around my temple with a smile on my face. But tell me that you believe things because they’re useful and I’ll cry. Thought and questions threaten this framework. From my perspective it’s actively hostile to consciousness – the thought-terminating cliche to end all thought-terminating cliches. It’s a life-support ideology. And Peterson isn’t upfront about it. He doesn’t advertise it as, “believe and don’t think,” but if you exert the slightest pressure on him, that’s the position he retreats to. Personally, I’d love to know why he thinks that’s such a reasonable way to live, but nobody seems to ask.
hoopyfreud:
Okay, fair enough. I think I didn’t understand your objection before, and now I do.
@Hoopyfreud
I don’t know Peterson. But I think I feel this way about a lot of things. My mother played some Raw Food videos for me, form a particular doctor whose videos, work, she respected. And I got the thoughts you articulate in this post from watching it. In particular, it was a person who made the statement, sometimes, that particular foods were good because of their shapes. He never said why the shape was effective at making the fruit good, but I don’t remember him specifying that he never said that. And the shape itself seemed to have been taking by my mother, and I imagined other listeners, as a supporting evidence itself.
This is the man, but I don’t know which videos I watched. I was very annoyed – angry, basically – when I was listening to it – but I waited some time to make sure that this error at least was correct, that I was picking up.
link text
@Hoopyfreud
I haven’t watched enough Peterson to know if the “belief for its own sake” description is accurate, but it’s important to consider who that message is aimed at. If you’re a nihilist then it’s oughts you’re in short supply of, not is’s. You can’t fault Peterson for pointing out that if you want your life to be meaningful you need deeply held values for that meaning to materialize against. Better to believe in things because they are useful, maybe to rationalize them later and repress the memory of ever not having had a rationale, than not to believe in things at all.
Do you have any linked examples of Peterson suggesting we should believe in things because it’s useful?
@Aho
Sorry for taking so long; Peterson does mostly video content or books, so it’s hard to find convenient things to link. See the quotes in this blogpost: link
The Atlantic on “the sex recession”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/
I’m a bit younger than the author of the article, but close enough that my dating experience, such as it was, was much more like hers (or at least, took place in that environment) than what is described as the current experience. To SSC readers who are still dating (or whatever), does the article ring true?
Is this becoming a society problem?
There’s already a thread about this article on the subreddit. Some good discussion there.
Ah thanks, I don’t read the subreddit normally, but I’ll check that out.
Can’t we just have our own conversation here? I don’t like venturing over to the subreddit 😉
I was glad to see that the article mentioned the likely reason why sex is down, even if it was off-handed.
Contrary to stereotype, couples and especially married couples have much more frequent and better sex than single men and women. If we were ill-advisedly* trying to maximize how much sex people were having, then the obvious solution would be to encourage young men and women to form stable marriages.
This aligns with my own experience. When I was single I could have sex with more women, meeting a new friend with benefits roughly once a month and typically seeing two to three women at a time. But those relationships were very short-lived and I typically only saw each woman once or twice a week. I’m having as much sex now with my girlfriend as I did back then and it’s significantly better. For a guy a few inches shorter than me the contrast would be even starker.
*Not saying that my proposed solution is a bad idea, just that it’s a very stupid reason to implement it.
Um… sorry about that. I knew I was bringing the numbers down, but I didn’t realize I tipped the scales into recession territory.
Don’t worry, my highly erratic data points over the last 10-20 years are helping make all the information worthless anyway.
In this post from the subreddit about the benefits of weightlifting, someone asked whether Scott lifts weights, and someone else said that he doesn’t because “getting physically stronger may push him more towards the dark side and thus compromise his ability for dispassionate analysis”, because “There’s some studies that claim higher upper body strength predicts right-wing views or something like that.”
I think this is really interesting if true (the general correlation, rather than Scott’s personal life choices based on it; although those are interesting too).
Personally I would expect the causality to be the other way around, or both caused by a third factor. I can imagine right-wing values making people (or men in particular) more likely to lift weights: valuing strength in a broad sense, looking down on weakness in a broad sense, being willing to suffer short-term pain for long-term gain, perhaps self-reliance (contrasting weightlifting with team sports), valuing traditional masculinity, and wanting to look intimidating to scare rivals and protect dependants.
Then again, maybe strength training increases testosterone and testosterone contributes to right-wing views?
Either way, I think it’s interesting enough to merit at least a discussion here, if not a top-level SSC post.
This seems like a relatively testable thing. I’d hope the research on lifting had gone beyond observational studies.
Are you sure this person wasn’t poking fun at him?
I’ve heard the general correlation asserted, and that comes off like a joke that assumes it’s common knowledge to the audience.
Not completely sure, but the whole comment was “He has an interesting justification, as he doesn’t deny the benefits, along the lines of that getting physically stronger may push him more towards the dark side and thus compromise his ability for dispassionate analysis..” so I took that to mean it was a paraphrase of something Scott had actually said.
The way it was explained to me, upper body strength correlates with political positions which benefit the man. So higher a strong man with higher income / SES will be more right wing, and a strong man with lower income / SES will be more left wing.
There are two problems. Firstly, it’s unclear to me whether this correlation is real given how many similar findings fail to replicate. Secondly, if it is real then we still don’t know the mechanism: it could just as easily be that a third factor influences both strength and political views, or even that political views influence strength.
It’s an amusing joke but I wouldn’t make decisions about my exercise regimen on that basis and don’t recommend that other people do either. Weight lifting has clear health benefits and everyone who is physically able should consider it as an option regardless of their political views.
I thought we had a discussion here about whether weight-lifting correlated with being conservative (made people more conservative?) and the conclusion was that there was no solid evidence.
Anecdotally: getting in the gym, dieting, all that stuff, caused me to realize that something was within my control that I had thought was more or less outside of my control. If we model one axis of right-left difference as “you are the master of your own fate/you are thrown around by social factors” then I suppose that this would make someone more right-wing. However, my voting patterns are exactly the same as they were before, so having more of an appreciation for my ability to control my own life didn’t turn me into a Tory bootstrapper.
Yes. Locus of control. That’s the sort of idea I was groping towards.
Let the doctors here correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember hearing that physical exercises and/or gaining muscle mass increase testosterone level. Brief googling seems to support this. So if true this might provide a mechanism for a correlation in the originally suggested direction.
That’s possible but it sure seems like it would be clobbered by obvious stuff that correlates to both weight-lifting and ideology without being causative, like interest in sports.
The claim that “higher upper body strength predicts right-wing views” was debunked in the Put A Number On It blog post “Strong men are socialist, reports study that previously reported the opposite”. The blog post points out that the claim came from selective reporting of multiple tested hypotheses, and shows that the same data could support the opposite conclusion.
This only shows that the study analyzed by the post is not strong enough to reach any conclusions from. There could theoretically be another better-done study that still concludes the same link between strength and socialism, but it’s more likely that the comment you quoted only saw the original news and not the debunking of it.
The thread a ways back on Does The Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students? has inspired some thoughts of mine, but not about the “advanced students”, instead about the rest of us (including non-advanced me).
I have little doubt that most children could learn academics earlier (and probably better) under the right conditions, but the right conditions require a great deal of one on one instruction from a good teacher for most of a child’s waking hours, instead of one adult with 25 to 40 kids for a few hours, a portion of the year.
Besides being avalible, and a good teacher, there’s a limit due to the shortage of adults who know the subjects in the first place to overcome.
If, however, the goal is to teach how to duck, dodge, run, what it feels like to be punched into unconsciousness, plus how trapped we are by the social class we’re born into, then the schools I attended did a fine job.
In 1982/1983 despIte my begging to go to Maybeck (a private high school) for 9th grade I attended the Berkeley High School West Campus, and the legend that had been passed around in elementary and junior high school was that West Campus was a war zone filled with violence, what I found instead was toilets with no paper or doors, mostly broken water fountains, and everything clearly sized for elementary school kids and too small for high school students (it was closed the next year), but far less violence than elementary and junior high school (no games of “smear the queer” or weekly fist-fights), and unlike “main campus” in subsequent years I was never punched into unconsciousness and then told “That’s what you get for walking alone” by the teacher when I afterwards came to class bleeding.
For English in 1982 I was first assigned to the “Intermediate” track rather than the “Advanced” track (the majority of students were “Advanced”, there was no level lower than “Intermediate”), and IIRC I was the only white boy in class, and I don’t remember any white girls, and most of my classmates every day in that class were black girls, and the teacher was a black man.
No reading was assigned, just the occasional essay (which a couple of the girls in class would ask my advice about), and mostly I did homework that was assigned in my other classes or read the Larry Niven novel “A Gift From Earth” which I found left on one of the mostly empty seats one day.
The only time that I really felt uncomfortable was when the teacher would play speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. and ask us to write our reactions, and I worried that I wasn’t writing a “proper” reaction (no I don’t remember much about it beyond my worry at that time).
When my mother found that I had been assigned the non “Advanced” track she had a fit and insisted that I be moved in the middle of the semester to the “Advanced” English track, which actually had assigned reading (“Julius Caesar and “Great Expectations”), and mostly white students.
Every seat was taken, and I had to sit on the floor whenever a classmate wasn’t out sick, and after being yelled at enough times to “Get out of my seat”, I learned to wait for every other student to take their seats first, and wait to see if I had alternate sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, or if I’d get a desk and chair that day.
Both my teacher and my classmates were clear that my presence was not welcome in the “Advanced” class and despite loving to read I hated that class, and I grew to hate my fellow white students (I missed the black girls) and one day I vomited in class.
I’d have rather have gotten the books to read from the mostly white class and had stayed with the welcoming black students (the girls), and the indifferent black students (the boys), and had a chair and desk, rather than have endured the cruelty of the “Advanced” track.
The other memorable class in ’82 was Algebra were Mr. Henri on the first day of class announced “Half of you will fail this class”, which filled me with so much anger that it lingers in me still decades later, why is this done?
Why can’t all of us be taught?
Why just half?
I’ve read of how passing or failing 9th grade Algebra is usually what divides the college bound from the majority in California, but at Berkeley High School there were no suggested paths other than college (and no real suggestions other than “get a teaching credential”).
Why?
Can’t we have schools teach goals besides being the lucky among the “cognitive elite”?
In my sophomore year at high school I took an elective class and found that I was the only student in that class from “the flats” and not the Berkeley hills, and some of my classmates quizzed me about the location of some damn ski shop in Berkeley (which I had no clue of) and loudly proclaimed that “Your not really from Berkeley” despite my living with my mother in Berkeley since I was four years old (I still find I have to fight myself not to show my bitterness towards “UMC” people and their children to this day).
I really don’t know if the fists of some of my classmates who also came from “the flats” or the disdain towards me I felt from some of the “hills kids” was more disruptive of my “education”.
I learned more with a library card, sneaking into the University libraries and reading there, and from the math my union apprenticeship taught me than from Berkeley High School.
A big part of me wants all my fellows who grew up in the flats to get to skip the indignity of high school and just go into trade apprenticeships, and I’ve read some about the educational systems in some European countries and how in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, 55 to 70 percent of all young people enter apprenticeships while only a fraction do here, and those countries have lower youth unemployment rates.
When I took the California High School Proficiency Exam so I could go to community college instead, I found it absurdly easy, I could have passed it years earlier.
High School was a punishing waste.
Already in the 1980’s I encountered street beggers most days to remind me of the price of “not making it”, and now I see dozens of the tents of the homeless every day I drive to and from work to show me how many don’t “make it”, and the only guy from the class of ’86 besides me that is still in town pushes a shopping cart full of cans to be recycled.
A statistic that really hit home with me is that almost half of kids in the California foster care system become homeless after they turn 18, which tells me how useless the schools are in imparting the skills needed to earn a wages to keep a roof over your head.
My wife went to college (she came to my town to go to Boalt) and she’s pretty smart, but the main difference I see between her and most of those who didn’t get a college diploma is that her parents paid for a private high school education and most of her living expenses while she got her college education.
My brother got a college diploma as well. He did it by marrying a nice girl with generous parents, who paid for his living expenses along with my family (including me).
So if you’re in the half that passes algebra and if you can somehow get your living expenses paid then you go to college, and the rest?
“Just over a third of American adults have a four-year college degree, the highest level ever measured by the U.S. Census Bureau. In a report released Monday, the Census Bureau said 33.4 percent of Americans 25 or older said they had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher”
which is the “highest ever”
According to the census (as of 2015) about 42.3% of Americans 25 years old and older have an “Assiociates” (two years) degree “and higher”, but now (unlike my youth) most (58.9%) adults 25 years old and older do have “some college”.
I have had “some college” myself, Laney “community college” in Oakland, where I managed to squeeze in a “Cultural Anthropology” and an “European History” class, which were wonderful, before I was told “You’re 18 now and you’re not living here to go to that ghetto school” and I had to leave school and find work.
When I returned to Laney years later besides a blueprint reading class to supplement my union apprenticeship classes I was in the welding booth practicing welding.
One day of one class is “some college”, and even now which has the “highest ever” percentage of Americans having spent time in college most Americans don’t get even a two year college diploma.
When I saw the “Justice” televised broadcast of college lectures on PBS, at first I was grateful, but then came the student responses, and as I watched the banter of the students at Harvard I grew angry, there were no special insights they had to justify there being able to sit in a comfortable classroom discussing interesting things inside of laboring like so many, and in a State like California were we vote on “initiatives”, every single citizen should have an education that befits a legislator.
ALL OF US!
And not just watching the screen (if I’m going to have utopian dreams why stop at the possible?), I’d like it so every student has actual texts to read and a teacher who answers questions, and a chair to sit in.
A while back Presidential candidate Marco Rubio said “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers“, and in some sense I agree with him, welding is a good way to make a living and I’d like getting that knowledge to be easier.
But I think most can and should be taught both.
First, give kids the 9th grade high school history book at age nine not fourteen!
I’m far from being one of the “cognitive elite” and of average intelligence at best and there’s nothing in that book that couldn’t be understood by me earlier.
Next reduce class sizes.
Schools are dangerously unsupervised (after a classmate tried to stab him with that, and my memories of what high school was like, we decided to homeschool our son), and you can barely get any questions in!
(to be continued)
(Continued from above)
The high school model of a half dozen classes of different subjects, each less than an hour long doesn’t work as well as the community college/apprenticeship classes model of classes at least two hours long devoted to each subject, so have fewer but longer classes (maybe high schools as they exist now work well for the “cognitive elite”, I really couldn’t care less, I want the majority better educated, you guys already have your share).
Move the 10th grade history class from age 15 to age 10 or 11, it’s completely understandable at that age, and my goal is educated voters not warehousing teenagers while preparing a minority of them for college.
Next teach a basic understanding of statistics, some political philosophy and rhetoric all to be completed before the age of 16.
At age 16 start apprenticeships.
Trigonometry was taught to me far better by an old plumber in my union than at my high school (and by better I mean taught at all), when their parents kick them out all the 18 year-old new voters to have started on a path to earning a living that will hopefully let them have a family.
Right now the State pays a small amount to both union and non-union apprenticeship programs (but the non-union one turn out very few Journeyman compared to the unions despite having a bigger market share). Increase that subsidy dramatically. In my old union local the contractors couldn’t just hire cheaper apprentices to use as human forklifts without also hiring journeyman to (in theory) give them training, and the contractors were also obliged to accept apprentices to be trained.
Expand that system to the rest of the economy and force employers who bellyache about “Not enough skilled workers” to train those skills! “But they’ll go to my competition” the owners will whine, too bad so sad! Their competition will be forced to do the same if they want to do business in the State of California.
Start with government work, most municipalities have long job qualifications that must be met to be hired, have the cities and counties train their own damn employees from the teens who live there, yes including training the physicians at General Hospital, and if they have to pay the Catholic schools (where most City and County of San Francisco employees went) to do it then do that, for every job a kid should already be being trained not floundering with the fear of not being able to get a job come adulthood.
Where to get the teachers and the money?
First off police and firemen have generous pensions that let them retire much younger than most, and they have generous disability payments (unlike garbage collectors who are more like to be killed on the job than police and fire) so require them to be teachers to earn those payments! They can work till 65 like the rest of us!
Next, in most States the highest paid public employees are University basketball and football coaches, so stop paying them, and have those be volunteer positions, if the alumni have so much ‘team spirit” one of them can do it their damn self unpaid!
Next, when we bought our house in 2011 our real estate agent immediately told us “I have a new professor who is looking for a place to rent”, he showed his salary offer from the University and he was paid well above the median income, after renting with us he bought a million dollar house (that’s why prices are so damn high!) stop paying him so much!
Still not enough money and teachers?
Close the U.C.’s and the C.S.U.’s, and move the faculty to High Schools and community cilleges, distribute their books to public libraries and stop “public” selective schools that wouldn’t teach all Californians!
Make the professors into true public employees and have them teach all at real public schools not just a selected privileged elite.
Still not enough money?
Steal Peter Thiel’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s, and go ahead and raise my taxes as well, I want more education for most Californians not just a privileged few, better jobs, and less tents.
I may as well ask for a pony because none of that will happen, there’s a better chance of turning into Eloi and Morlocks.
Can we at least copy the books?
You know it’s funny, Plumber. You make a lot of statements I agree with until suddenly you stop.
I could make a lot of arguments on individual points, but I think it really comes down to three things.
1 – I think that it requires a particular temperament to teach, and that Mr. Henri is more common than any of us would like. Even more of us are disgusting little shits as children – and this is coming from someone who also did most of my learning in libraries.
2 – Institutions of higher learning serve a legitimate purpose. I could, hypothetically, have started my career at the age of 16 as a draftsman, and learned far more about geometric design and tolerancing. I would have learned dramatically less, and almost entirely about things that don’t have much to do with my job. An apprenticeship would have worked… poorly. Nobody but a professional teacher is capable of holding that much technical knowledge in different domains, leveraging different skills, at once. And while these skills are somewhat neat in isolation, they’re useful only to people who are committed to a career in which one needs to understand how heat-treating a rod changes the kind of loading you can put on it before it stops being able to bounce back to its original shape.
3 – Money talks, but money also walks. There’s only so much that the government can do to solve the problems with the conversations that children aren’t having, the social connections that aren’t being made, the shortsighted greed that’s destroying the journeyman workforce, and the nepotism that so often pervades all of these. Because if they do too much, the Berkeley Hills money will disappear, and that’ll be left are the people of the flats. And the transient effects of such a shift can ruin families, generations, and communities – just look at Detroit. The government really only has economic power – it can make things more or less expensive and redistribute wealth. Only incidentally can it effect real culture-level change.
@Hoopyfreud
I fear you’re right, history shows that radical changes (and much of what I proposed is radical) is more likely to make things worse than better, and the better usually comes too late for the generation that got the worse.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.
You’re obviously part of the “cognitive elite,” Plumber — you write well-formed sentences with subordinate clauses. You’re just bad at math, or were.
Your description of your childhood suggests to me that you were very different and alienated from all of the kids around you — and yet somehow you see those kids as having been unjustly deprived of the Truth and Beauty that YOU were capable of longing for.
(I went to big urban public schools, graduating from High School in 1984. In Junior High the middle-class kids were persistently persecuted by psychopathic Morlocks. Not even the middle-class kids gave a crap about Truth and Beauty — I’m probably the only one in a Junior High of 1,500 kids and High School of 3,000 kids who ever redd anything or looked at pictures of Great Art. The fact is that the vast majority of kids should be working full-time as apprentices by the age of 12 and any attempt to teach them more than basic arithmetic and the ability to decode labels on food-packages is not only a waste of time and energy, it’s an insult to the Holy Spirit.)
I don’t think Plumber is part of the congnitive elite. There is so much further to go, than knowing how to put together well-formed sentences, with or without subordinate clauses. That’s limiting yourself, if you consider elite to be so low a bar to cross. It is a limit in the sense that elite is what you aspire to be, which I think is the case with Plumber. It definitely is the case with me. It’s also inaccurate, if you consider it a misuse of the word elite, to describe something… either common, or easily achievable by most people. Well-formed sentences is what you do at an early age, the latest, and then there’s so much more!
Disclosure: I may or may not be part of the cognitive elite.
No matter how mediocre one may be, there’s somebody who can make you look elite.
And vice versa, of course.
I may as well ask for a pony because none of that will happen, there’s a better chance of turning into Eloi and Morlocks.
Throwing my pebble on the pile… I read recently a comment somewhere (I could have sworn it was over on the sub-reddit but I can’t find it now) in the middle of a thread about living “your best/happiest/most productive life” or something of that kind, where someone mentioned the “85IQ bus driver who is happily married” etc. as “you don’t need to be smart to have a happy life!”
And this has me frothing at the mouth because of the attitude on display, an attitude I’m sure the person who made the comment has no idea they have. Joe is a bus driver? Well goodness me, he must be a drooling mouth-breathing moron of only 85 IQ! If he were anyway smart, he wouldn’t be in a manual labour/working class job!
How about letting Joe be Average IQ, you know, the Average 100 IQ of the Average taken as the god-damn Average of all the average people tested? Why assume he must be sub-normal if he’s not in a high-pay job?
This is not the first time I’ve seen this kind of example being used when talking about ordinary people, and I don’t know if the person in question is one of the 130+ IQ types, but as an average idiot it really does annoy me to see when people who are intelligent (by IQ test scores at least) strain to imagine “lower IQ people”, they put 2 (works in working class/lower middle class job) and 2 (higher IQ means better jobs, manual labour/working with your hands is not A Good Job) together and get 9 quazillion (therefore working-class/manual workers are all below 100 average IQ, proven!)
It’s entirely possible to be a bus driver, secretary, hairdresser, bricklayer (or even plumber) and be at least 100 IQ. Maybe even more, incredible as this may seem! Any super-smart high IQ scoring working as a software engineer or in STEM person, I’m asking you this much: next time you try to assume the intelligence of your natural inferiors (that is, people who are not working at the desk beside you), at least try to assume we’re not within the category of the “next to intellectual disability”, okay?
And don’t quote me “ackshually, normal distribution of IQ scores means most people fall between 85 and 115, so the bus driver is more likely to indeed be 85 IQ”. That is precisely the attitude I’m complaining about!
(This rant has been brought to you by the product of generations of non-college attending peasants who worked as manual or other lower status labour, thank you).
@Deiseach
I like your style, and I’ll add that I really don’t buy the “intelligence is set in stone by genetics” narrative, and even if that were true most are going to be near average in “intelligence”, and by definition half are going to be ‘below average”, and talent is not virtue.
IIRC @Deiseach you live in Ireland (I think two of my great-grandparents were born on that island!), and I don’t know the situation there, but in the U.S.A. we seemed to be heading to a more equitable society from the 1940’s until the mid ’70’s; but since then wages for the non collegiate majority have been dropping, both absolutely (adjusted for inflation) and relative to the collegiate minority (though it looks like their wages are starting to stagnate as well for all but the very top), and while there’s all sorts of economic arguments that the income centrifuge is needed for growth I really am opposed to so many having living standards worse then their parents and grandparents, which is now showing up in how long Americans live, and now Americans are starting to die younger.
I find this a lousy situation
In Spain, secondary school ends at 16. Primary school is 6 years, secondary school is 4 years. Then you have the non-compulsory pre-University education, required to go to College or if you want to do get a high-level professional education (ranges from plane maintenance technician to glass product development).
If kids are not academically inclined, they can leave school with a diploma, and go on to get a professional education mid-level degree (machining, hairdressers, electricians, plumbers, etc.). So, by the time they are 18, kids can get a useful job.
I think this saves a lot of needless suffering for kids who shouldn’t be in school, and saves money to the government. I just think that for those that are not academically inclined, those last two years don’t give anything.
To my knowledge, quite a few other countries also have compulsory education that finishes at age 16. In the UK, they have GCSEs. Germany also seems to have a system where kids can finish secondary school at 16 and go to a vocational school.
@ana53294
That sounds like a good system!
How accessible is the academic and the vocational training, and how effective is the vocational training towards getting employment in the field studied?
There are two parts to the accessibility of vocational traning; how many people are able to afford it and how many people are qualified for it.
The monetary cost in a public school is 3 euros (insurance) plus depending on the type of school they may ask you to buy some things (security boots, lab coats, that kind of thing). In any case, it will be less than a 100 $.
The second issue is a much bigger problem. When compared to other rich countries, Spain has a higher than average population with a finished tertiary education (36 %), and a higher than average population of people who have no secondary education (41 %). That is, 41 % of people are not qualified enough to go to these vocational schools. Although there is a higher completion rate among younger people, with 80% finishing compulsory secondary education, that still means 20% of people are not qualified to start this type of vocational training.
As for how effective it is, this depends on two things; location and willingness to move, and specialization chosen.
Spain has regions with very varying levels of unemployment; a simple rule of thumb is that everythin that is not on the coasts, except for Madrid (right in the exact middle), has fewer chances of employment.
Spain is a country with very high levels of structural unemployment, for various reasons. But anyway, 64.6% of those with middle vocational training are employed, vs the average for the population of 49.8%.
Statistics say that 13% of those with middle vocational training are unemployed, and only 8% of those with a higher level vocational training. Spain’s unemployment is 17%. I wasn’t able to dig up statistics that are more refined by specialization, but my anecdotal experience tells me this is too high for those that have industrial-specialized vocational training, and are willing to move.
In my hometown, located in the Basque Country, the industrial region of Spain, 100% of those who studied machining found a job, and those who studied Literature in University are unemployed. Statistics say that the % of employment is higher than among those who have vocational training.
So you have to be willing to move, whatever you study; either to more industrial regions of Spain, or to Germany.
I think the best model is in Germany, where people can work while they study and have an income. This doesn’t happen in Spain; vocational training doesn’t pay.
I disagree. Once you know how to read you can learn most things, assuming you want to learn them, from books. It helps to have humans to interact with and ask questions of, but another kid who happens to be good at math should be able to answer your math questions. A friend interested in politics and arguing is probably at least as useful as a social studies teacher.
I think the standard model of K-12 is broken in at least two ways. The first is the assumption that, out of all of human knowledge, there is a subset about the right size to fill K-12 that everyone should at least pretend to learn. There is much less than that that everyone will find useful, much more than that that some people will.
The second is the assumption that the way to learn something is to sit in a room having a teacher tell you whatever you are all scheduled to learn that day.
Both of which are reasons why I favor unschooling. It probably doesn’t work for everyone, but it seems to work for a pretty wide range of people.
I will, again, disagree here on technical grounds.
A great deal of the trouble in technical schooling is learning how to grapple with difficult concepts like limits or justifications for cancelling Navier Stokes terms or Gibbs free energy or what a proper thesis statement looks like. While you can reason your way through this, students in each other’s company are often much worse at determining the bounds of reasonableness than people with substantially more experience. Teachers (at their best) mediate the jargon of books and the directed inquiry of the naive. And this doesn’t even begin to touch on incestuous branches of social science, where it’s quite easy to be trapped by a particular school if not guided to an effective counterpoint.
@Hoopyfreud
I really didn’t find that K to 11 (I tested out so there was no 12 for me), but my brief time at “the high school with ashtrays” (community college) and especially at my apprenticeship night classes approached that.
I think the difference is the community college teachers, and especially the old plumbers in my union looked on their students as potential equals rather than burdens.
Among the reasons we’re “homeschooling” our 13 year-old son is so he can get a head start on algebra, and our son is going to a Spanish class at Berkeley City College , as I think he’ll get better teaching at BCC than at the “Middle School” (I actually was one of five in 8th grade to be given the algebra book at my school, the teacher had is sit in a corner of thr room while he taught the rest of the class pre-algebra, and we five mostly played cards that year after an attempt to teach ourselves from the book, and I tried to learn Latin in 10th grade as my foreign language requirement, which I failed, and tried again to learn a foreign language with German the next year, still a failure but I at least remember how to ask where Alois lives) Our son says he wants to go to U.C. and study computers, I know the chance of that is remote, but I think the odds would be even less if he went to the same kinds of schools I did.
I was homeschooled, through middle school, definitely recommend it. Entered high school well above the rest of the class in most subjects.
Our kids were unschooled–at home by about high school age, in a small and unconventional private school before that. They both ended up going to good colleges.
You’re reminding me of a radical educator, maybe Gatto, who claimed that the purpose of the educational system is to exclude people.
That sounds like an overstatement, but we unquestionably use the education system for social sorting of a kind. The path to most positions of great responsibility goes through rather a lot of schooling, and typically demanding schooling at that. It seems fair to say that excluding people is one of the purposes of the education system.
It has always seemed apparent to me that the purpose of the educational system is to take care of kids for most of the day (or, with after school activities substantially the whole day).
The people who run the teacher’s colleges and such, and thus teach the teachers, and thus control a decent chunk of the zeitgeist when it comes to how teaching is approached, seem to think that 1. everyone is capable of going to university if school is run properly and 2. this is a good thing. Neither is true. There are some people who don’t have the right aptitudes for university, and there are some people who do but wouldn’t benefit from it (there’s a lot of people going to university to get C+ BA’s in whatever so they can get a secretarial job that however many years ago you didn’t need a degree for).
Imagine if baseball was the highest good of the economy, and the baseball-teaching theorists thought that everyone has the potential to play in the big leagues: if someone isn’t reaching that potential, something is wrong. What happens to the kids with crap hand-eye coordination who can’t run?
Part of the problem is that the people who come up with the theories of how teaching should work are people who have been through half a dozen plus years of postsecondary education, and so they think postsecondary education is the highest good. It’s not, and it makes many people miserable; I was miserable in university until I happened upon a subject I enjoyed, and I was well suited for university.
Part of the problem is that theories of aptitude that include intelligence have been grossly misused in the past, and so there’s a negative reaction there. However, that’s not gonna change that in all qualities people vary and people are, on average, average.
I’m a pinko so my ideal society is one where anyone who respects the rights of others and does their bit to the extent of their ability (someone who can’t work because of reasons beyond their control shouldn’t be left on an ice floe) is more or less guaranteed, one way or another, a decent standard of living and a place in society with a bit of dignity. People should be protected from the things they can’t control, and in large part this includes their own aptitudes. Our current system is clearly not doing this. The educational system that seems dominant in the US and Canada seems to do a great job of making a lot of kids feel stupid.
This is obviously just one case, and not representative of teachers generally, but my (honors) English teacher had explicit discussions with the class centered around the fact that not all of us should or would go to college even if we had the ability to get admitted, and that it was a perfectly fine thing not to go if there were other good options available.
@dndnrsn
I very much like the sound of your “ideal society”, I must be a “public” as well.
I’ll forgive you using the word guaranteed (especially since you modified it) and agree with you that I’m fond of a conception of society where everyone who makes an effort to be a half-way decent person can find a place of pleasant mediocrity with good friends and few worries. We had a discussion that touched on this about the WWC back when every other thread was about the WWC last year sometime, I think.
I’m torn between blaming modernity, capitalism, and all that, blaming the natural maladies–famine, disease, etc–that modernity, capitalism and all that are trying to cure, and blaming human nature.
Why can’t it be all three?
I’m not really on board with “more education,” so I don’t really agree with changing the model of high school in order to teach kids more about the humanities. They don’t care, even the smart kids I went to school with barely cared. My JD sister-in-law said she was thinking about the color “red” when someone mentioned the Civil War, becuase of all those redcoats. I didn’t say anything, but there you go: she’s one of the smart ones!
I’m on board with changing classroom time into OJT time, even for relatively smart kids: I don’t think there’s a whole lot of classroom learning that benefits me in my position, but actual work experience on actual budgets and actual accounts and actual-whatever would have launched me a lot further than I currently am. You can see this at a low-level with people who had internships in university, who are doing a whole lot better than I am at the moment.
Where I disagree is in the general classroom management and the general lack of safety in your school. There’s really not a reason to not be able to give the marginal student SOMEWHERE to sit, unless the classroom itself is undersized. Go to costco and get a chair. Even if your concern is not putting an extra chair in the room because of fire codes…welll, having an extra body on the floor isn’t helping you all that much.
Similarly, trying to monitor kids so they do not stab each other seems like a solvable problem that most schools do not really struggle with. Our school mostly “solved” this problem with low-paid, uncredentialed local parents, who roamed the hallways and generally looked out for any security concerns. If you don’t have money for this, you should take money out of the textbook budget, especially the history textbook budget, because kids aren’t reading that crap anyways. Most schools do not have issues with routine stabbings, to the best of my knowledge.
Where I also diverge is the difference between college kids and non-college kids. College kids make a lot of crappy choices, but on average they have made a lot of less crappy choices than the non-college kids in my life. There are obvious exceptions to these rules, but these diligent non-college kids are mostly doing okay for themselves, and I am not surprised. I just finalized our budget, and we’re paying out $50k/year plus benefits to non-union employees that can barely speak English and struggle with signing their own names. The only real struggle is showing up on time, not getting into fights, listening to basic instructions, and not bringing cocaine to work.
On the other hand, you have my cousins, one of which thinks Mountain Dew is a great nutritious drink for 1-year olds because it is green, and one of which is doing somewhat okay for herself but can never finish anything she starts.
The LessWrong Washington DC group will meet this Sunday, November 18 at 3:30pm.
The topic will be Intuition: What is it? When is it useful? When is it misleading? Does it conflict with rationality? How can we develop or use it?
Location: The National Portrait Gallery, F St NW between 7th and 9th St. Near the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro stop. We usually meet in the main courtyard. Look for a table of folks with a LessWrong sign. If there is an event in the main courtyard we meet upstairs in the Luce Center.
Upcoming meetups:
Dec 30th: Predictive Power of Science Fiction
Congratulations! Having done so well with Chad, you’ve been appointed to the selection board for the first interstellar colony ship. 50 people will be chosen to board the first colony ship, which is mostly automated, will have a destination planet with suitable atmosphere, and will not have a follow up ship or communication with earth for the foreseeable future, and will not be able to take off again once reaching the destination.
What criteria do you use? What is negotiable and what is definite? You have the whole population of earth to select from, press-gang if you like but no promise they won’t resent you for it.
Didn’t a previous discussion of colonization conclude that while the minimum population needed to avoid inbreeding problems was surprisingly small, it was still somewhat over 100?
I’m assuming the ship has plenty of eggs and sperm in cryo-storage.
Yeah, I’m using the minimum numbers from Atomic Rockets, assuming we can replenish upon arrival.
Just because their near descendants will have inbreeding problems doesn’t mean that their distant descendants will. We are all descended from these kinds, after all (note caveats): https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/frequent-inbreeding-may-have-caused-skeletal-abnormalities-early-humans
I’m going to assume we’ve got hibernation or something similar (or this venture is a waste of time) and the ship will provide enough equipment to build a self-sustaining colony on a fertile planet.
None of my Outgroup, certainly, because I don’t want the galaxy populated by people like them. That’s non-negotiable. And all volunteers, also non-negotiable. Past that, though… 50 people? I don’t think that will provide enough genetic diversity to thrive, but I’ll do my best and pick young, fit, and healthy couples from varied populations, screened against genetic diseases and a family history of other major disorders. They will have to speak a common language (unless we’ve got sleep-learning too). All will be at least above-average intelligence, and many should have some sort of mechanical skill. At least a few with familiarity with whatever type of farming is closest to the kind the ship will enable. And, alas, several “leader” types. Can’t stand them but you do need them.
Recruit colonists two generations back. That is, in order to be selected as a colonist, not only do you have to be extremely impressive, so do both your parents, all your siblings, and all four of your grandparents. We do this mainly to blunt the impact of regression to the mean–the colonists’ kids will regress toward the mean of their grandparents, rather than the general population.
Screen everyone for deleterious recessives. Eliminate as many of them as possible. Look at family history–you don’t want near blood relatives with major problems that are at all heritable (for stuff where we don’t know the genetic cause).
Everyone speaks English, everyone is fully trained on a couple of primary specialties and several fallback skills. (Like, you might be formally trained as an electrical engineer and be a skilled computer programmer, and also be cross-trained as an EMT and a shuttle pilot.)
Bring a huge durable library, because a population of 50 geniuses can’t carry an industrial civilization in their heads. Bring mechanical samples and detailed documentation for technology the colony will need in its first couple centuries. Plan the transition from high tech to lower tech as the high-tech equipment fails, so maybe four generations after landing, you’ve got a reasonable approximation of 1800s level industrial/agricultural technology going, with a few high-tech bits and a library to guide advances up to that of Earth at the time the ship departed.
What’s the minimum number of geniuses?
Forget the geniuses or lack thereof. What’s the minimum number of people needed to support an industrial civilization? I think it will be many, many generations before we have enough workers for geniuses to matter at all.
Everybody in the first wave should be primarily good at agriculture, and maybe metallurgy. Everything more advanced goes in books for your great-great grandkids.
I think you and Nybbler hit a lot of the essential points.
On a completely different note from most others…
At least two people, and ideally three, who are well-educated in each of the following areas.
Modern agriculture
Auto repair
Electronics repair/assembly
Mining
Metallurgy
Machining
Software development
Mechanical design
Building design
Plumbing
Electrical wiring
Welding
Medicine
Pharmacology
Leadership
Storytelling
Depending on the number of robots they can bring, this composition can change slightly, but these are the things I’m familiar with that are much, much easier to learn from someone than from a book.
(I didn’t explain all my parameters because I didn’t want to limit discussion too much)
Hello, my name is SSC, and I am recruiting for a singularly unique opportunity. There is a ship built that we feel confident can reach a habitable moon on Tau Ceti III. We have acquired and stored the knowledge and tools to rebuild civilization, and have frozen embryos from every race and tribe so that we can preserve all of humanity’s uniqueness. Now I seek volunteers to travel and live on this ship, knowing you will personally not set foot on your future home but must be the ones to raise the generations that will. To give our best odds of success, we are selecting willing volunteers who meet the following criteria, in order of importance:
Between the ages of 15 and 30
No family history or genetic indications of infertility or obligate homosexuality
No personal or family history or genetic indications of debilitating mental illness, such as schizophrenia, claustrophobia, depression, anxiety, based on severity.
No personal or family history or genetic indications of other hereditary conditions, based on severity.
Multiple independent character references demonstrating the following: altruism, courage, reliability, problem solving, conscientiousness, empathy, patience
Will increase genetic variation based on other crew members selected
High intelligence
Pass psychological testing
No criminal record
Literate in English
Excellent physical health
Competency in relevant technological skill
No dependents
No ideological ties
Depends. Are there gonna be any mind worms?
I can’t decide if I’m disappointed that I came to the thread too late to make this comment, or pleased that someone else did.
Better get to work on Centauri Empathy.
I’d ask Hari Seldon to direct choosing the 50 people. He did something like that once already (in the future) and succeeded. If he’s not available, then I’d ask Lazarus Long instead, because he has some experience in colonizing new planets with humans.
Say hello to Chad. Chad, a landlocked country in northern Africa, is one of the most troubled places in the world. GDP per capita is $2,300; life expectancy is 50.6 years; only 22.6% of the country is literate. You have been appointed proconsul to Chad under the new American[1] policy of Guided Economic Uplift[2] and are therefore tasked with improving the economic and general well-being of the country[3]. How will you do so during your ten year term?
[1] Or EU or Chinese. Your choice.
[2] We don’t call it neo-colonialism. Our enemies call it neo-colonialism. You aren’t one of our enemies, are you?
[3] This is not an act of charity. This new policy is backed by sharp-eyed multinationals that have observed that illiterate peasants don’t talk on $1000 smartphones, drive $20,000 automobiles or fly in $30 million aircraft. Ever hungry for new markets, these industrialists are eager for you to create some. And that requires a decent prosperity.
Hi Chad, how’s it hanging?
Our first order of business is to decide on a policy for pregnant Chadians to maximize future prosperity.
Chad doesn’t seem to have a single obvious reason to be a basket case, though it is.
One problem: There’s not even a single common language. Apparently the French couldn’t give them a lingua franca, and as American proconsul I’m sure not promoting French. So we’re teaching English as the primary language, and the only language in later primary grades and all secondary schools (if anyone gets that far). This will require massive investment in school-building and teachers, but the multinationals should understand the benefits of an English-speaking consumer population.
Infrastructure is generally terrible. Gotta start somewhere, and that’ll be roads. Not railroads, they’re too fragile just yet, but paved roads connecting the major population centers.
Chad has oil. I assume everyone involved in this is corrupt, so we’ll just sh…err, jail them and get some people who are no more corrupt than the average Chicago politician to run the government oil department, and accept bids for the multinationals to actually run the business. If they get too corrupt we’ll replace them with Miami or Philadelphia politicians. Might make sense to rotate anyway. The multinationals have to keep the local refinery running too. We will relax price controls so black market sales of refined product intended for local use are no longer profitable. (we may be able to eliminate them entirely but that’s in the far future, when there’s more than one refinery).
From a quick Google search, Chad has big problems with mosquito-borne illnesses (malaria and yellow fever). So my first plan is to spend whatever resources are needed eradicating malaria in the country, probably by trying to drive the mosquitos that spread it and yellow fever into local extinction, ignoring any protests about environmental damage like the evil colonial overlord that I am. That seems like the most straightforward way to get a quick boost to the well-being and productivity of Chadians. Give everybody all their shots and ignore any complaints, again like the evil colonial overlord I am.
Second, Chad apparently has a lot of malnutrition. That’s solvable by just supplying food (and guards who will shoot anyone who tries to keep the food getting where it’s supposed to go), though long-term, the goal has to be to get to population able to feed themselves. If there are missing micronutrients (iodine, say), then furnish them as widely as possible.
Third, half the population is illiterate. That’s solvable in principle by schools, though I’m sure actually trying to get everyone to school would involve massive difficulties. But still, if I’m the colonial governor, I’ll shoot for getting everyone an education. Pay families a little (Chad’s poor–a little money goes a long way) for their kids going to school and succeeding at it. Pay more for girls, if necessary, until almost everyone spends some time in the inside of a school building and learns to read and write. Once the next generation of girls gets a decent education (meaning literacy and basic health information), that will probably push the population growth rate down to something the country can handle.
All three of those seem like they could show results in a generation or so. The next generation will be smarter and taller and healthier, because their growth wasn’t stunted by malnutrition and malaria, and they went to school and learned how to read and write.
Not only is Chad landlocked, it keeps bad company. Neighbours include Libya, Niger, the C.A.R., and the Darfur region of Sudan. The bright points of the region are Nigeria and Cameroon. Getting the Chadian GDP per capita to the level of Cameroon–a 40% increase–would be an incredible accomplishment (Libya and Sudan are higher, but less politically stable so not good models to aim for). Reaching the lofty heights of Nigeria–2.5x–is realistically a multi-generation project. First order of business is therefore to improve transportation links to Cameroon and Nigeria.
The second order of business is cowboys. Animal herding is a common way of life in Chad. Developing a beef export sector would provide a route out of subsistence-level while using the skills people already have. This will require some modern packing plants and railheads with appropriate infrastructure where herders can deliver their animals.
Subsidize an in-country factory to make very cheap and reliable bicycles.
I’m assuming various aid agencies are already working on WASH and electrification projects. I’ll find out which ones are most effective and boost their funding.
Assuming, on the basis of footnote 3, that our measure of ‘economic and general well-being’ is mostly defined in terms of eventual ability to buy expensive products… and that we can power through political objections…
Recruit a police force and government from first-world countries. Pay them well. I buy Dalrymple’s theory on third-world corruption: people with large desperately poor extended families will never have enough money to prioritize the integrity of their job.
Use them to implement laissez-faire capitalism. Become an easy place to do business, for foreign companies and native entrepreneurs alike.
There’s probably also room for some public investments. I’m mostly cribbing these from other answers: malaria control, nutrition programs, maybe some roads. But I’d also suggest investments in information infrastructure, probably via subsidizing phones, plans, and maybe cell towers. These will probably encourage literacy more than schools; facilitate a financial infrastructure; and help disseminate information throughout the potential workforce.
It’s not going to produce a first-world country in ten years, but it should result in substantial progress, with most of the harm occurring in forms not relevant to our objective.
Punishments
For children vs. for adults, which misbehavior/crimes would you increase the punishment for, and which would you decrease?
For me, the list may reflect a wish to enforce more existing laws:
Harsher is Better:
1. Lying / Fraud: I’d be much more angry at a child cheating than failing, and want to reinforce the notion that it is better to confess to mistakes and be forgiven than to try to get away with things. On a societal level, I would permit the direct garnishment of wages to repay the actual damages from fraud, and allow a provision for 3x actual damages as a punitive measure, not dischargeable through BK
2. Stealing / Embezzlement: Again, I’d be really upset if my child stole, and emphasize how upset they would be if something of theirs was taken away. Like the fraud clause, I’d require the actual + punitive damages again, not dischargable through BK.
3. Littering – I have no issues at all with corporal punishment that leaves no long-term physical injuries. Along with respect for individuals, I’d try to instill respect for community/environment by requiring offenders to be pressed into service cleaning bathrooms, taking out trash, etc. of public facilities. In addition to smacks on the behind.
4. Driving under the influence – Cars weigh a lot. Heavy objects at high speeds are potentially lethal. Piloting vehicles while impaired should not just be punished when the lethalities happen. I would have no issues with instantly impounding the vehicle and making the individual stay overnight in a cell on first offense, and face license suspension on further offenses.
5. Drug usage in public: Ok, maybe I’m biased because second hand smoke gives me a headache, but no one should have the right to walk around creating a plume of disutility to those around them. Overnight jail stay + fine for first offense, Direct garnishment of wages for fine payment for further offenses
Give ’em a break
1. Possession of drugs that required a search: In contrast to the last point, if anyone has a small amount of illicit drugs that is not actively being used (e.g., pulled over, and a small baggie is filled with white stuff in glove compartment), a fine is fine. Jailing reserved only for dealers and distributors. Personally, I’d tax drugs and so instead of fine, it would be proof of purchase always to be carried.
2. Child endangerment not involving direct risks to physical safety: I shook my head when I heard about the single mother jailed and had CPS unleashed for giving her daughter a cellphone and letting her play in a playground across the street from the McDonald’s the mother was working at. A “good samaritan” apparently found the child and escalated the issue. Kidnapping is insanely overblown by the media, and there’s a far greater chance of harm from foster home or CPS system abuse. There is no reason in my mind that leaving a child in a public place should be a government issue. If kids aren’t allowed independence, they simply grow up slower and are stunted in all sorts of ways. That being said, I probably wouldn’t leave my own kid in a playground, but absolutely let 6-year olds play unsupervised in the backyard.
3. Immigration status: Yeah, so I’m all for just charging money to get in and distributing fines for violators. If the harm from non-criminal immigration is allegedly harm to native workers….well you can say they paid to be here, and are paying for violating the terms of being here, so unless you’re implying something beyond economics, such as racism, there’s no reason families require separation or detention. They can work off fines just fine.
4. Vicarious liability: You are UPS. There is a truck driver shortage, particularly for the holiday season. You stretch the limit and hire more drivers. One driver decides to get wasted while driving and runs into a J-walker. J-walker’s family sues UPS. I would limit any suits to the individual, and to any policies or practices of the company that may have contributed to a driver drinking on the job, or not preventing him from doing so. There’s a difference between a supervisor overlooking a long-time driver who knowingly drinks on the job all the time, and a new worker barreling into a pedestrian j-walking because he’s too hazy to expect a j-walker in the moment.
For children, I’d punish them
1) Admitting they did wrong. It’s a common trope to punish a child less for this, but in the real world an admission of wrongdoing is an excuse to throw the book at you. Best to teach them the virtues of silence early on.
2) Telling an unpleasant truth. People often think it’s cute when kids notice that an adult is fat or smelly or funny-looking, but again, this is behavior that must be nipped in the bud before the kid learns the wrong thing.
3) Getting caught when they could have escaped. As with #1, kids need to learn that any injuries they suffer in the course of getting away are far less than the consequences of being caught doing wrong.
4) Falling for a scam. Nobody likes a sucker, and the time to learn this is in childhood when the stakes are low.
5) Sneaking in at night and setting fire to the faux-silk curtains on the second floor sitting room of the house of the neighbor across the street. (Yes, this is very specific. What of it?)
(He is too modest and would have me deny it, but assistance provided by one Mr. Screwtape, who is quite a kindly and generous being when you get to know him)
I am very serious about punishing lying. I think an awful lot of evil starts with lies. And if you’re conditioned against lying that stops you from an awful lot of behavior you’d have to lie about.
I’ve seen the result of failure to punish lying in action. My wife’s best friend’s family vacationed with my family, and her 7 year old was a sneak thief and a conman plus other behavioral problems. I could see exactly how this happened. He only got yelled at or punished when he was physical with his little brother or made him cry. But if he got busted lying he just got a smile and a fake finger-wagging like it’s a game. So he worked his will with fraud or deception instead.
He went to take a piece of candy, his mom asked him if he’d already had one and he lied “yes” when we could see the wrapper from the piece he already took and she just smirked at him and said “nooooo you already had one teehee!” All that’s teaching him is to get better at lying. The kid kept trying to con my kid out of candy with word games, and when we were packing up to leave I saw him sneaking my son’s Transformers out of our toy box and stashing them with his stuff so he could pretend “oh I guess they left these here…” later.
Just amazed me she was totally fine with her kid lying to her face.
Oh man, thank you. Lying is bad. Lying is really bad.
That is the kind of behaviour that if not nipped in the bud right now is going to have really bad consequences downstream. The little slyboots is already at the stage of stealing other kids’ property (that is what “taking the toys out of the toybox and putting them with his stuff” is, it’s stealing), if he doesn’t get a short sharp shock now he’s going to continue doing it.
Right up until he’s older and is caught stealing stuff out of some other kid’s locker at school and either gets expelled or suspended, and if that doesn’t stop him he’s going to go on to shoplifting and other petty crime and one day he’ll take the stuff belonging to someone who isn’t going to merely wag a finger or even call the cops, they’re going to break his legs, stab him, or worse.
And then mommy will be “how could this happen, he was such a good kid, just misunderstood and people were mean to him!” Well, this is how it begins, missus.
That’s tricky, because what makes second hand smoke disutility to you is mostly your tastes–as best I can tell, the evidence for actual harm from the levels encountered walking outdoors is weak to nonexistent. But once you take the position that nobody should have the right to walk around doing things that give you disutility that applies to a wide range of things you probably don’t want to ban, such as a gay couple walking around holding hands, which creates disutility for people who find observing gay people upsetting. Being ugly–if someone has the sort of badly scarred face that many people want to look away from, does he have to wear a mask in public? You can probably think of lots of other examples.
Let me clarify the smoking point. Smoking tobacco is annoying but not illegal. But there are restrictions. Smoking marijuana definitely still is in public. In NYC, people blow pot smoke in the face of police officers, yet nothing is done.
I am not proposing a change to the laws. I’m proposing enforcement and modified penalties. On smoking tobacco, there are signs that say “no smoking within 15/30 ft of this zone” with smokers in that zone (typically the entrance to an office building). And those are zones I’d like to wait for my food on windy or rainy days. I would fine those people for violating the no smoking zone statute.
On marijuana, it should simply not be smoked in public given awkward explanations to children of how something is illegal but accepted. And blowing the smoke into an officer’s face should be automatic overnight jailing. Illicit drug use consumption should not be publicly flaunted. Either change the law or stay out of the public eye. Otherwise, face stiff penalties.
I mean, I think there are cases where it seems fairly safe to say that something like this would be a problem — for instance, someone walking around town blasting an airhorn (or, say, excessively loud music). I agree smoking outdoors doesn’t rise to that level, but neither is this something to be dismissed entirely. I guess there are three questions I’d ask here, which are “How objective is this?”, “How avoidable is this?”, and, if the answers to the first two are “pretty objective and not very avoidable”, then there’s the question of, “Is this actually bad enough to be worth the cost of doing anything about it?”. Seems to me that smoking in public mostly just fails #3.
Nah, the disutility is not mainly to my tastes. The disutility is to my grandmother actually. She keeps complaining that I’m not visiting her often. Part of the reason is that visiting her is boring, and I don’t benefit from it, only she does. But the other part of the reason is that her partner smokes, and so her apartment smells so terrible that after I visit, I have to immediately put all my clothes into the laundry and take a shower and wash my hair. This never happens at any occasion other than visiting my grandmother’s apartment.
Though for smokers other than my grandmother’s partner, what bothers me the most is the littering. Why does everyone drop the cigarette butt on the street even when there’s a suitable trashcan two steps away? I admit that in that case, the disutility might be mostly to my tastes, although having to sweep the cigarette butts from the streets and underground passages so often does waste the taxpayer money.
In addition to what David Friedman said, I would also add that while (much as I don’t like second hand cigarette smoke myself) I am uncomfortable with punishing people for smoking out in the open where any smoke will soon dissipate and you can easily walk around it, my vague discomfort immediately ramps up to frothing-mouthed vehement opposition if you propose to do the same with vaping. Given what we know (and have good reason to expect to learn with more data) about the relative risks of smoking and vaping, any policy that fails to incentivise vaping over smoking is likely to cost far more lives than would justify the benefits claims.
Also, re jaywalking… here in the my corner of the world we may not have the First Amendment, but the right to make your own informed decision about when it is safe to cross the road has always seemed to be a traditional British liberty, and I am kind of appalled that in the Land of the Free you are not free to do so, and find that normal*. However, my intuitions may be miscalibrated here, and I would like to see controlled trials of jaywalking laws, if it were possible to arrange, to see what, if any, effect they have on road safety.
*The freedom to own and carry firearms, of course, cuts in precisely the opposite direction. While I have an aesthetic dislike of firearms, I am willing to be guided by the statistics…
On jaywalking, that’s completely fine. The example was meant to show that the jaywalker got killed doing so, yet family is able to sue not just the driver, but the company of the driver for damages.
I’m all for jaywalking. I do it all the time here in NYC. Just realize you risk your own life.
Can we at least fine the assholes who smoke on the move (especially immediately after getting off the train) and force everyone behind them to smell their miniature garbage fire until you manage to overtake them?
Yes! The worst was the tunnel between my dorm and the rest of campus in college. Being behind a smoker was normally annoying, but there, it was terrible because there wasn’t a crosswind to blow it clear of your path.
Vaping is still really annoying in public, especially since more vapers seem to have “see how huge of a fucking obnoxious cloud I can blow” as a terminal goal. Also, these days most smokers seem to have internalized “I should be polite and not smoke around packed crowds” while vapers are more likely to ignore such niceties and get all aggro “piss off, it’s just vape” if you complain about being stuck downwind of them.
I would argue your “most vapers are…” arguments are probably inaccurate, since you are much more likely to know a person is a vaper if they are the “misbehaving” type as opposed to the(in my experience majority) type who vapes as a utility as opposed to potentially annoying hobby.
It’s sort of the same problem as me yelling “all other drivers are idiots” in the car – I only take special notice of the 95% who are fine don’t make a dent in my memory besides what’s necessary for me to not hit them with my car.
I said “more vapers” not “most vapers”, as in, “compared to smokers, more vapers behave impolitely with their secondhand fumes”. And “blow a huge fucking cloud on purpose” appears to be a part of “vape culture” more than “cigarette culture”.
I recognize that these annoying vapers probably aren’t the majority, but I’m not talking about banning vaping, just getting the same written and unwritten rules about secondhand smoke applied to vaping. The polite vapers are already following these rules.
If we are considering about banning annoying activities, let’s start with people talking loudly on cell phones on public transport. When I am dictator that lot will be the first against the wall.
Vapers get a pass from me: quitting cigarettes is a very tough thing to do.
Public transport is dubious but I’ll let it slide (you can’t exactly get off the train to take a call mid-route), but everyone who answers a phone inside a restaurant should be banned from restaurants. I’m not even exaggerating. No “Hey, give me a second to get outside” and then talk on you way out. Let that crap go to voicemail and if it’s important run outside and call them back.
Loudly playing videos on their cellphone in a coffeeshop. (While ignoring the fat guy working on his laptop giving them the stinkeye.)
Mostly I’m just pushing back against the idea that vape fumes are harmless and not annoying.
I (and several people I know with asthma or allergies) find vaping almost as noxious as cigarettes.
Talking loudly on a phone where you shouldn’t is also annoying. But most people already agree that the guy who does that is an asshole. Hell, he probably agrees, but doesn’t care, because he’s an asshole.
Meanwhile I’ve encountered too many vapers who act utterly baffled that anyone could find the secondhand impact if their hobby irritating. I just want the world to recognize that these people are at least “talk loudly on your cell phone in quiet public place” level assholes.
I’m sympathetic to those using vaping to quit cigarettes. But what percentage of vapers fit that category? My social group had basically zero smokers, but now has several vapers. Probably not a representative sample, but still – lots of people are taking up vaping who never smoked, or are going from smoking rarely to vaping frequently.
Anyway that’s all orthogonal to the question of whether vapers should strive to be polite with their vape clouds.
Are you going to find out why they performed these actions first? (1)
And doesn’t that just take the onus off the company to ensure that the driver knows how to properly operate the vehicle in all kinds of conditions. “But they said they knew how to drive, and showed me a driver’s license!” As someone who has driven box trucks and a flatbed, I will guarantee you that it’s quite possible to know how to drive a car or a truck, and still get into situations you don’t know how to handle with a box truck or flatbed.
And as to harsher penalties for fraud: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9xroct/insurance_fraud/
1 – The one and only time I littered (on purpose) is when a friend and I went into a store after school and a guy followed us around watching us (and even out of the store). I don’t remember specifically why (I think he said things to us or in our hearing), but I was under the impression he thought we were potential shoplifters. I bought a fountain soda, and after leaving the store I was so angry at being wrongfully accused that I ‘acted out’ by taking the plastic lid off the soda and dropping it on the ground, at which time this same man called me out on it for littering. I picked it up and threw it away, even more angry at this guy. Later my friend stole from me, so perhaps this guy had reason to be leery of him (and me by proxy), but all I knew at the time is that I was unjustly being accused as a potential thief. I’m white and grew up in a relatively good neighborhood, but this event made me very sympathetic to those youngsters of different backgrounds who act out.
They f**king accuse you wrongfully, they deserve to be shat upon. I’m not saying anymore that this is a right attitude. I’m an adult and understand the grays of the world, and the need to pursue due diligence. I can give it and take it with nothing more than a role of the eyes. But as an adolescent then, raised the way I had been raised, and with a self-image as a ‘goody two-shoes’… yeah, I understand acting out.
By your account he didn’t accuse you—except for littering, which you did.
When I say “under the impression”, I mean a strong, strong impression. I cannot, now, remember specifically why, but I do remember believing this was his motive at the time.
At every which rate, being followed around by a glaring person is an accusation. Body language speaks.
being followed around by a glaring person is an accusation.
No, being followed around by a glaring person is a strong suspicion on that person’s part. And the inability to distinguish this from an actual accusation–you yourself say that the only time this person actually accused you of anything or interfered with what you were doing was when you littered; you were never actually accused of shoplifting or interfered with on that basis–is what gets so many people in trouble that they could easily have avoided by exercising better judgment.
Inspired by an old OT comment chain about My Little Pony having swerved to the Left in its latest season:
Is there anything good for traditional parents to show little kids, or is it necessary to just (wo)man up and read them the classics?
The films Up and Inside Out are fantastic. In general I would stick to the classics.
MLP swerving left might be the least-surprising of all, given their fanbase. I recently had the misfortune of sitting around with friends and watching Netflix’s remake of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which a lot of my female friends grew up watching. Spolier: the producers went full social justice in the most trite and cringeworthy ways possible, hollowed out the raw entertainment value, draped a veneer of darkness/melancholia over it and called it a day.
Full SJ with a veneer of melancholy darkness? Uh, wow.
I don’t know why corporations remake old shows like this. Why remind people that there’s a “problematic” old version for comparison?
Sabrina is much more of “full melancholy darkness with an SJ veneer”.
The new Charmed on the other hand, is full SJ, and not in a smart or entertaining way, more like in the whatever you call the drama version of “clapter” way. Lots of earnest sloganeering.
Yeah, I’d agree with that description of Sabrina. Sure there was an SJ veneer, but it was almost comically childish. The dark and melancholy are far more prevalent themes.
Which boggled me. Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a teen comedy. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is just another dark gritty mediocre supernatural soapy drama for the teen set.
The cat is supposed to wisecrack, dammit! Instead we get a Salem that doesn’t even talk, literal human blood sacrifice, and bar bs gur znva pnfg univat gb Byq Lryyre gurve fbhy-qrnq mbzovr fvoyvat.
Also, I find the lead actress really off-putting. Something about the combo of her voice/inflection and the particular way the script makes her dialogue challenge the human and witch status quo, really comes off as the worst sort of snotty “well, actually…”. Witchsplaining, if you will *ducks*
EDIT: if you found the SJ in Sabrina comically childish, definitely don’t watch the new Charmed. The SJ is a much stronger theme, while still being comically superficial/childish – worse, actually, they really beat you over the head with it and make everything SO on the nose. Which, especially given your target audience probably is already on board with all that, SHOW DON’T TELL.
The new Charmed on the other hand, is full SJ
(1) Wait, what? There’s a new Charmed?
(2) It’s even more SJ than the original? I thought that had gone pretty full-in on the 90s niceness’n’equality’n’unjustly maligned minorities (witches are not evil crones making deals with the devil, they’re helpful candles and flowers Wiccans casting pretty spells to fight badness!) and you’re telling me they ramp this up even more?
I have to wonder if the new Sabrina, having gone the “dark and gritty yes witches are evil crones making deals with the devil actually” path is trying to copy the American Horror Story look and feel?
Honestly, all the revampings and re-imaginings of witches and witchcraft are making me more sympathetic to the Salem judges!
What does this mean? It sounds like Poe’s Law bait.
Quoting my earlier comment from the thread in question:
The first two things I give not a single solitary crap about. Good for them, I say. Divorce is a thing that exists, and what’s more it’s something that a lot of children watching the show might experience. Gay and lesbian couples exist too, and you may as well get used to it.
But Applejack not being country anymore? Okay, that’s just wrong.
Isn’t there a suppressed premise here? These couples exist [and are good], so you’d better get used to it?
Grown men pumping boys who have just had their first ejaculation and dumping them when facial hair starts to come in exist too, but that brute fact doesn’t tell us how to treat them.
I don’t know about good in the sense that you should bounce up and down with glee because they exist, but they are certainly not bad either. They’re just a thing.
But yes, you can put that caveat into my poo-pooing of your concerns if it makes you feel better.
Well, is the message “divorce is a thing that exists,” or is the message “divorce is a thing that exists, and that’s bad,” or is the message “divorce is a thing that exists, and that’s good, and you kids should just learn to be more understanding about when mom and dad just can’t get along”?
Must…resist…culture war…gay…politics…complaining….
And I fail. My problem with exposing little boys to the “gay is normal and natural” message is when they’re 14 and Kevin Spacey tries to rape them they’re at risk of thinking it’s normal and natural to have sex with Kevin Spacey. All else being equal I’d rather not do that, so no, I don’t want the “gay is normal and natural” message in my children’s propaganda.
You can if you want. By all means, I’m not telling you what to tell your kids about homosexuality. But I’m not interested in sending that message to my kids. I’d rather imprint on them that boys and girls go together like mommy and daddy, and when they’re old enough we’ll explain that some people are different.
@Conrad
The equivalence of homosexuality with rape here is… ungenerous and worrying.
When a grown man (Kevin Spacey) has sex with a 14 year old boy, that is rape, correct? Same thing if a grown man has sex with a 14 year old girl, correct? Or a grown woman has sex with a 14 year old?
ETA: this cognitive dissonance or intellectual dishonesty over pederasty is one of the other things that I strongly dislike about gay culture. Everyone says of course it’s wrong for an adult to have sex with an underage person. But then Milo Yiannopolous says it’s common in the gay culture for older men to “guide” young boys into the gay lifestyle and it was perfectly all right when that happened to him, and George Takei says it was just fine when his 19 year old camp counselor had sex with George when he was 13 because the counselor was “hot.” And the vast majority of the “pedo” problems in the Catholic Church are adult gay priests and seminarians having “consensual” sex with post-pubescent teenage boys.
@Conrad
I think this is pretty much the same problem as high-fiving the 14-15 year old kid who sleeps with his hot (female) high school teacher. It isn’t a gay problem, it’s a cultural attitude problem: the assumption that men like to get laid by their gender of preference under any and all circumstances and this is totally fine and should be accepted or even encouraged.
In other words, this problem has a lot to do with cultural attitudes towards men and men’s sexuality and very little to do with homosexuality. I certainly support gay rights, but I do not support 19 year olds sleeping with 13 year olds regardless of the genders involved. Unless you can convince me that this is uniquely a gay problem (I am fairly certain it isn’t) I’m not sure there is much weight to your concerns. By all means teach boys (and girls) what kind of touching isn’t acceptable, and boundaries, and so on (seriously, please do this). But the boys and girls should be taught not to allow that kind of touching by adults (or kids I suppose) of either gender so again, I just don’t see how this is a gay issue as opposed to a general child molestation issue (at which point the depiction in MLP doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion anymore).
Additionally, at least based on the recap, it doesn’t even sound like homosexuality was actually discussed in the episode, it just showed some same-sex couples in the background which is pretty benign (kids will also see same-sex couples in the background during their daily lives).
It may be the anime fan in me over-riding my conservative values, but a same-sex background couple isn’t where I’d draw the line in a story with a substantial children’s audience. The issue is not that a male-male couple exists, but that we’ve gotten to the point where children are associating a pair in an ambiguous relationship (like two unnamed characters in the background of a scene) with sexual activity. A child, even one that’s had the birds & bees talk, shouldn’t be associating a couple in one of these stories with sexual activity, hetero or otherwise.
I conceptually understand why foreigners consider us Americans to be strange for having stronger taboos about depictions of things in the ‘sex’ category than things in the ‘violence’ category, but this is a good illustration as to why that fence existed. That sex is assumed to be normal in relationships aids predatory behavior; if everyone else is doing it, it’s easy to shrug off warning signs.
If you see a pair of male characters in the background and know they’re gay and not just close bromantic friends, there’s a problem. However, this also applies to straight couples. Yes, once kids learn the basics of reproduction, there will be the knowledge in there that ultimately a child character had to come from somewhere, but it’s almost always unimportant to the story being told and shouldn’t be something they think about. It’s why most of the older stories ended at the wedding, and if resumed, picked back up again with their children well after that phase of the relationship.
The underlying problem, to me, as a conservative, is that the default assumption has become anyone in fiction in a relationship is having sex. Leaving relationships in fiction ambiguous helps everyone, contrary to the representation arguments of some of the more vocal intersectional progressives. This isn’t helped by the number of shippers in fandom, going back to Kirk/Spock, but keeping the shippers, whether straight or gay, away from the younger fans is something we should all agree is good.
@Civilis:
All good points, but I think this is a bit of a case of adults projecting. How many kids are thinking about sexual relationships during that scene? Romance and sexual relationships seem more or less synonymous to adults, but I don’t think that is necessarily true to younger children (or at least I certainly agree that it shouldn’t be) although the age where this changes varies from child to child based on what they are exposed to in their personal lives, education, and in the media. Of course, again, this is a general culture issue that relates to straight and gay couples in media equally, so not a homosexual issue.
@Conrad
Throwing my voice in on the side of, “this is more a problem with some men universalizing their predatory views abiut sex than about homosexual men being sex predators.” There are problems – big ones – in the gay scene, but they aren’t implied by homosexuality.
@Civilis
It’s difficult to talk about love without romance, and even harder to talk about romance without sex. I’m not advocating proactive “gorey details” sex education, but I would note that a culture in which children don’t know that sex exists is… aberrant, and possibly only achieved by small groups of Mormons. Ever. Attempts to keep romance out of media are, in my opinion, doomed. And as long as romance is there, the specter of sex will follow alongside it.
No, I think it’s a uniquely gay problem because of the male libido and gay culture.
Adult male, teenage female: While males tend to prefer young sex partners, we have strong cultural norms (and laws) against this, and generally teenage females are not desperate for a man, any man, to have sex with them. I would also oppose cultural messages that it’s perfectly normal and natural for a 14 year old girl to have sex with a 30 year old man.
Adult female, teenage female: I’m not aware of any general predilection amongst adult lesbians for teenage lesbians. Women in general tend to be attracted to things in addition to youth and beauty.
Adult female, teenage male: South Park “niiiiiice” jokes aside, most women are not interested in sex with teenage boys. Straight teenage boys might want to have sex with any woman who’ll let them, but the opportunity isn’t really there. The 22 year old teacher who has sex with her 14 year old male student is “man bites dog” news.
Adult male, teenage male: This is where interests align. Men regardless of orientation have a predilection for young partners. Boys, regardless of orientation are very interested in someone, anyone of their preferred group to have sex with them. In the gay culture, a teenage boy having sex with an attractive older man is “Niiiiiiice” but it’s not a joke.
It’s a uniquely male homosexual issue because it’s only in the male-male relationship that the interests of both parties align.
ETA: Oh, and the gay culture either promotes these sorts of relationships, or disavows them with a big wink in public and then in the next breath says how great their relationships like that were. And the straights pretend they don’t see the winking because they cannot say there’s anything different between straight mating habits and gay mating habits. And this doesn’t happen with straights. You don’t have an awful lot of women who talk about how great it was when a 30 year old man had sex with them when they were 14.
The recent season of Voltron on Netflix features one of the main characters in a gay relationship, but not in a way that most kids would even see a hint about. The only clue for adults was that the type of conversation happening (one character was leaving on a dangerous mission the other objected to) wouldn’t make much sense otherwise. That didn’t tip the scale for me into a problem, because there was nothing at all sexual in it. The fact that they had some sort of close relationship was obvious, but without the sexual aspect, it worked just as well for close friends as for lovers. I would have an objection to an obviously sexual straight couple, if depicted in a children’s show as well.
The hell is up with the assumption that gay man = pedophile? What percentage of gay men do you think actually participate in sex with underage boys?
There are male and female straight pedophiles, and certainly lots of older men attracted to very young women. NAMBLA is a thing, but “barely legal teens” is a mainstream adult video category, so…
EDIT: and what the hell does ANY of that have to do with whether or not two same-age same-sex cartoon ponies are interested in each other?
We’re not talking about pedophilia (pre-pubescent boys/girls) but post-pubescent teenagers. As you said, “barely legal teens” is a common porn category, gay or straight.
Men in general have a predilection for youth and beauty in a way women do not. There was study showing what age of people of the opposite sex people found attractive by age. Women frequently liked men about the same age as them or slightly older up until they capped out around the mid-50s. But men regardless of age were pretty much honed in on 22-year-old women. I can look for the study if this does not seem obvious to you.
This all started with you making the contention that MLP having two gay characters would make 14 year old boys more likely to think it’s okay when Kevin Spacey wants to bang them.
Don’t move the goalposts back to “well, all I’m saying is both gay and straight men like sexually mature partners that look youthful”.
14 year olds are post-pubescent (or at the end of puberty). But they’re not pre-pubescent which is what pedophilia is.
@Conrad
I think you’re making some questionable SJW-style assumptions about men here, but leaving that aside…
By your argument, straight men want to have sex with young girls (and contrary to what you say, young girls are famously available to their older idols), but showing “normal” age-appropriate relationships is OK because it normalizes the latter, not the former. But showing age-appropriate gay relationships is not ok because it normalizes the latter.
Perhaps this is due to a deficiency on the part of the English language. Other languages have more words for different kinds of love.
I talk to my children about love without romance, though; in our relationship there is lots of former without the latter. This is true for most of the relationships they can observe (with each other, parents and children, grandparents and children, parents and uncles/aunts, etc.).
That’s not a good argument. By that logic, cartoons shouldn’t show heterosexual couples either, because when an adult man tries to have sex with a little girl, the little girl will think it’s normal.
It’s very likely that he enjoys it, much more likely than in the case of a male teacher and a girl. IMO laws should treat the situations equally, but there is no use pretending that it’s actually symmetric.
In liberal countries/places, I suppose. I’ve never seen one in Hungary or Italy (and I don’t really want to either).
It looks like you are talking about consensual situations. If the boy (or girl) is old enough to actually want to have sex, and there is no pressure, are you sure that any significant harm comes from it (and that Milo and others are wrong when they don’t think so)? Boys can’t even get pregnant. Age of consent is 14 in many European countries, and I’m not aware that it causes any major problems.
Straight culture is full of memes warning young girls to not have sex at all and adult men not to have sex with underage girls.
Gay culture does not have such memes.
You understand there is a difference between gay and straight mating cultures, correct? This is the entire reason we acknowledge such a thing as “gay culture” exists. What’s the difference between gay culture and straight culture?
And then there’s biology. Men, regardless of orientation, are more promiscuous than women.
ETA:
In the US we have “age of consent” laws because (ostensibly) we do not believe young teenagers are emotionally or mentally mature enough to meaningfully consent. So, no, a 14-year-old can not “consent” to have sex with a 30-year-old.
I agree with everything in this paragraph. And while the spread of social media means that its easier than ever to find the people obsessed with projecting relationships onto the characters, I still don’t think it’s that much of a problem, with one exception: we’re now seeing the showrunners themselves projecting relationships onto the story, not to advance the story but either to stick it to the man or to appease exceptionally vocal factions of their fanbase.
It’s difficult to talk about love without romance, and even harder to talk about romance without sex. I’m not advocating proactive “gorey details” sex education, but I would note that a culture in which children don’t know that sex exists is… aberrant, and possibly only achieved by small groups of Mormons. Ever. Attempts to keep romance out of media are, in my opinion, doomed. And as long as romance is there, the specter of sex will follow alongside it.
Most shows, especially kids shows, aren’t about love, or at least about Eros. You might have a point if we were talking about Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid, but even those don’t get beyond romance. MLP is specifically about friendship; it’s right there in the title. Adding love into it damages its ability to stick to the primary theme of the series.
It’s possible to project love / romance / sex onto anything (that’s the reason rule 34 (and a dozen other rules) exist) but actual stories about love and romance are pretty easy to distinguish. There’s a difference between knowing about sex and being accustomed to looking for it, and there’s a difference between looking for it and seeing it everywhere.
@Le Maistre Chat
This comment single-handedly turned a slightly-CW discussion about ideological content in cartoons into a super-duper-CW discussion about the alleged prevalence of predatory pedophilia in the gay community. It seems like Exhibit A for the case that comments of the form “I’d like to point out that your position would be wrong if exaggerated to an absurd degree” are bad. On top of that, choosing to graphically describe the pedophilia was absolutely unjustifiable.
So to be clear, are people objecting to the factual claim that adult men having sex with young men / teenage boys is part of gay culture? Or are people objecting to the implicit condemnation of gay culture.
It’s pretty easy to find population data and candid personal accounts which support Conrad’s factual claim. The moral significance is debatable but ultimately a separate question.
We’re objecting to the contention that “sex with underage boys” is such an intrinsic part of gay culture that any positive portrayal of gay relationships (even ones that involve age peers) in children’s shows puts boys at a significantly increased risk of being raped by older men.
Plus this all hinges on the idea that gay kids won’t be gay if they don’t see positive gay relationships on TV, which is already offensive and almost certainly incorrect.
I am skeptical of the claim that it is presently a central part of gay culture, and if all you’ve got is that it sometimes happens, so what? Straight adult men sometimes sleep with 14yo girls, shall we stop normalizing straight romance?
Once upon a time, yes, pederasty was central to gay culture. When Jeremy Bentham penned his famous defense of homosexuality, he literally could not conceive of any homosexual relationship that wasn’t pederasty. But, increasing social tolerance for homosexuality has resulted in a disproportionate increase in the number of healthy, adult homosexual relationships. And, the AIDS crisis was transformative, in that it killed off or scared off a significant fraction of the male homosexual community, and it was not a uniform cull.
So I don’t think we should be applying the old stereotypes, however valid they might once have been, without more thought than I am seeing here.
Also, if your problem is with gay adult men preying on 14yo boys, why are you complaining about e.g. TV shows showing healthy romances between adult gay men? Isn’t that what you should be supporting as an alternative? The gay adult men aren’t going away, and if they are going to be treated as degenerate perverts no matter who they are caught having sex with, then many of them are going to have sex with the more physically attractive and psychologially malleable adolescents. And the homosexually-inclined teenagers aren’t going away either; if the only people who will recognize them for who they are and treat them as anything but degenerate perverts are the predatory adult male homosexuals, then they are going to be easy prey.
I’ve found it easy to find personal accounts attesting to the existence of non-predatory gay male relationship, so let’s talk about that population data. To Conrad Honcho and those who back the same argument: what do you think is the critical level of ephebophilia at which it is no longer acceptable to display even a healthy, functional example of a given culture? Genuine question, I’m eager to hear how this metric can be deployed in a consistent way.
+1 to John’s last paragraph (and whole post really) which does a better job of saying what I was trying to.
@dick: the point of explicitly describing ancient Greek homosexuality was to give a reductio of the sort of sexual behavior we could approve of. “They exist so better get used to it,” is empirically false. For any non-reproductive sexual behavior, society can celebrate or punish it in pretty much any way whatsoever. And this example arguably wasn’t pedophilia (since it started the day the boy hit puberty, rather than going after really little boys), which is why I was explicit rather than saying “pedophiles.”
@John Schilling,
I can’t answer some of your questions because I personally don’t see it as a particularly large risk. I’d be much more worried about a hypothetical daughter being groomed by straight men then a hypothetical son being groomed by gay men just on the weight of numbers. Even if ad arguendo gay men are more likely to be predators, they’re still only 3-5% of the male population. It would have to be an order of magnitude difference in rate of child molestation.
What I wanted to push back against was what seems to me like an extreme disgust-based overreaction to Conrad’s more risk-averse position. Even if you disagree about whether the degree of risk is enough to justify shielding his children from gay culture, that’s fundamentally his decision to make and not yours.
Parents try to protect their kids from all sorts of unlikely fates. Being groomed by your parish priest or drama teacher is at least as likely as a stranger luring children into their van with candy. If you think worrying about either is laughable that’s one thing but the response goes well beyond that into moral outrage.
“Right-wingers in the SSC comments section are mostly just libertarians who think SJWs have gone too far, there aren’t really any traditional social conservatives”
Exactly. I see the forced insertion of gay characters into kids’ shows and say “why are you doing this? Who is this for? Couldn’t you just…not?” Yes, you could have a cartoon that shows the kids being offered candy and puppies by a strange man in a van and they get in the van and enjoy the candy and puppies from the kindly man and then go on their merry way, but all else being equal I’d prefer you didn’t.
It’s like memetic grooming. And no, it’s not the same with same-age straight romance on TV because of all the reasons I listed previously about the differences in sexual interests for different gender combinations and the memes warning girls off sex and men off sex with underage girls (“creepy old man,” “jailbait,” “she told me she was 18!”). When gays start shunning pederasts instead of waxing poetically about the time they were statutory raped we can talk. Until then….eh no.
ETA: rlms, no one says that.
ETA2:
@Dan L
I’m not really sure. I think porn is bad, so if you’re talking about “barely legal” genre porn that’s already out. Besides that I can’t think of examples, certainly not that are “healthy and functional.” In media a relationship between an older man and a teenage girl is almost always portrayed as either predatory on his part or exploitative on her part (“gold digger”).
Oh and Neelix and Tom getting busy with Kes was always creepy. She was like 4.
Whom are you quoting?
Just for clarity, my objection to Conrad’s position is that he seems to be arguing that homosexuals (who has has not here stated he has a fundamental moral objection against) ought to be kept out of sight, since their visible existence is a meme that may prime his children to be victimized by pedophiles.
The risk aversion is not the part of this that disturbs me, but the logic behind it; Conrad is almost certainly not taking similar steps to protect his children from dangers that I regard as equivalent, so I am left with two possible conclusions. One, that he considers visible homosexuality much, much more dangerous than I do, or two, that he has other objections to homosexuals. I’m doing my best not to presume (2) because it would be in bad faith, but (1) seems so deeply contrary to my worldview that I cannot help but let some of (2) sneak in. For that, I apologize.
Also, as mentioned above, my SJW bullshit meter goes off when people start talking about needing to avoid men because they’re just so damned rapey. It makes it a bit difficult to be objective.
Just because your country has laws because people generally think X doesn’t imply that X is true. Just because you live in a jurisdicton where age of consent is 18 is hardly a reason to be more concerned about your 14-year-old child having sex than if you lived in a country where age of consent is 14. Having sex at 14 may or may not harm someone, but it doesn’t depend on age of consent laws. I suspect that it doesn’t as long as the teenager is old enough to know what sex is and want it, there is no pressure involved, no one gets pregnant, and the risk of STD transmission is not excessive (the last one depends more on being informed than on age). (You should be concerned about your 19-year-old child having sex with a 14-year-old because you don’t want him to go to jail.)
Higher age-of-consent laws may be justified by the possibility of pressure on an unwilling teenager to have sex that they may be unable to handle properly. But the fact that mid-teenage girls are less likely to want to have sex than boys is irrelevant in that case.
By the way, I find it weird, and detrimental to discussion, that legal language related to rape and consent has been picked up by colloquial language. (C.f. we don’t consider corporations person in everyday discussion, even if they are in some legal sense). Obviously a teenager can consent in the everyday sense of the world, even if their decisions may be slightly less sound than those of adults, and even if the law shoehorned the prohibition of sex with children into that of rape, and created a legal fiction around consent for that purpose. The focus on using redefinitions on consent to create prohibitions around sex (as opposed to creating separate crimes when we want to ban something) has shifted the discussion from “is it wrong/harmful?” (which should be the real question) to “is there consent?”, which is in turn hard to discuss because the legal definition has departed from the original meaning, and we don’t really have an everyday concept to match the legal definition to.
There’s an strong argument (one I associate with social conservatives, actually) that one of the functions of having a cultural canon is to model prosocial behavior, especially when you’re dealing with people’s baser instincts. That people and especially vulnerable people, if they don’t have strong prosocial templates to follow in their situation, will tend to default to whatever feels good in the short term, which more often than not ends up causing a lot of problems.
The cultures that e.g. incubated the AIDS epidemic of the Eighties and Nineties don’t look very prosocial to me in retrospect, but I think that reinforces the first point if anything — their participants didn’t have much in the way of cultural templates to follow, once privacy and geographical mobility had gotten to the point where those cultures could exist at all. The media culture at the time was busy pretending they didn’t exist, and where did that get them? And we could do a lot worse than apparently stable, monogamous, adult pairs, if we wanted to create such a template. It’s not like My Little Pony is showing pederastic couples or drug-fueled orgies in the background, unless it got a lot edgier when I wasn’t looking.
@Le Maistre Chat
I know exactly what purpose is served by inserting graphic descriptions of man-on-boy rape in to discussions about societal acceptance of homosexuality, thanks.
It’s quite a common sentiment, here’s one example. And in fact I think it is correct, there are more libertarians here than social conservatives! It’s just that sometimes members of the latter group make such obnoxiously terrible comments they appear more prevalent than they really are.
Like what? Keep in mind, the extent of my “anti-homomeme” activity is…not putting homosexual stuff in front of my kids. I’m not asking for anti-homosexual memes in kids show. I’m not teaching them that gays are bad, or that being gay is bad. I’m not mentioning homosexuality at all. For them, for now, it doesn’t exist, but I’m sure in a few short years some kid at school will call some other kid at school a “fag” and they’ll ask me “daddy what does that mean” and we’ll go from there.
Exposing them to that stuff now can’t help them. It can really only confuse them. Similarly, I would not show them videos about how awesome it is to take get in the vans of men who offer them free candy. Just not really a good idea. But I don’t have to worry about that because there doesn’t seem to be some bizarre industry-wide push to cram pro-get-in-the-candy-van memes into kids’ shows.
Let’s try that again. What do you think is the critical level of ephebophilia within a given culture at which it is no longer acceptable to display even a healthy, functional example of that culture?
If you’re calling out gay men as being part of a memeplex so inherently vile that they should not be recognizable where children can see, what metrics are you using? Because if we’re throwing people back into the closet on something more than anecdote, I have a few recommendations. Name your target.
rlms, there’s a big difference between “there are more libertarians than social conservatives” and “there aren’t really any social conservatives.” I think the former is probably right, while I think the latter is obviously wrong and, I take it, hyperbole on your part?
I’m kind of bewildered by Conrad’s objection to gay couples on kid’s shows, but the objection does not make one anti-libertarian. It’s when he calls for banning the depiction of gay couples on television that there is a problem.
Arguments about norms that do not revert to government force seem like a good alternative to government censorship.
I don’t think we have much (if any) of the group of people calling for the FCC to censor everything crowd, and they definitely exist.
In terms of conservative in culture wars, there are probably more than a few, but those people can still be libertarian in their relevant political outlooks.
Holy shit this whole thread is terrible, and very close to plain old bigotry
I can’t speak to all gay culture everywhere but not once in any of my interactions starting in around the year 2000 have I encountered queer or adjacent identity group people saying gross old men who want to have sex with teenagers is anything but gross old men wanting to have sex with teenagers (including in public high school gay-straight alliance, which is exactly the place where the hypothetical youths are getting their first information about being part of a gay or queer community)
I know this community has a lot of Asperger cases who don’t necessarily interact with a wide a range people, but this whole deciding through pure logic and reason that “because gay men want sex with young partners, boys want sex with anyone etc. etc. therefore they must think X and Y” has no more merit than the 19th century race science people who have rarely interacted with black people in their lives going “black people obviously have jungle rhythms inside them, so we can’t expect them to hold some of the more focused, delicate jobs in white society.” You can’t presume to describe the actually existing community just through your understanding of the premises of the community and the major news headlines you’ve seen through the years
Everyone here needs to stop turning their blind-spots into boogeymen
If you want to convince this community to stop stereotyping people, this isn’t the way to do it.
@conrad
My most generous estimate of the level of memetic danger you’d be exposing them to is “about on the same level as allowing them to be aware of the existence of priests, thieves, or guns, and slightly more than making them aware of the concept of a ghost.”
So here’s a great example of what I’m talking about:
Conrad’s argument is logically sound and, if you assume a very low risk tolerance, seems to be empirically valid.
It’s easy to disagree with his argument. I know because I disagree with it myself: that degree of risk aversion is very costly. It’s traditional conservative helicopter parenting and not any better on that account than liberal helicopter parenting.
But the people arguing against him here aren’t engaging with that argument even to refute it. They’re outraged that anyone would even make the argument, or even that people would engage with it themselves.
That’s absolutely toxic to debate and the exact opposite of the culture Scott is trying to cultivate here.
Conrad Honcho:
“I see the forced insertion of gay characters into kids’ shows and say “why are you doing this? Who is this for? Couldn’t you just…not?”
Who is it for?
I don’t know if you’ve read anything about what life was like for gay people in the fifties, but their existence was pretty much culturally invisible, and it wasn’t good for them.
I guess…any? The only reason I gave Roy Moore a pass was because it was in a different time and place when girls got married right out of college instead of right out of high school and he was (according to his words and the accounts in his favor) a gentleman looking for a wife and not casual sex. Still furrows the brow and warrants a squinty-eyed side glance.
But I can’t think of anything in our culture that approves of older men having sex with 14 – 16 year old girls. In media adult men going after 18 year old girls for sex are depicted as sleazy, immature, or unserious, and certainly not healthy. Below that is right out.
What exactly are you thinking of and what’s your point with this?
I didn’t call for any kind of ban. I wish they wouldn’t put those things in, and I’m not showing those things to my kids, but I have no interest in government censorship.
ilikekittycat:
I apologize for being a moral monster because I am unwilling to propagandize homosexuality to my six year old.
But as to the factual claim it is not difficult to find positive personal anecdotes from gay men about their teenage affairs with older men. See Milo Yiannopolous, George Takei.
ETA:
Well, let’s remove “priests” from that for obvious “different values” reasons, but when I make them aware of thieves and guns I do so with explicit warnings that these are bad or dangerous or situationally dangerous things they shouldn’t go near. So is it okay if I tell my kids about gays, but also include explicit warnings to stay away from gays?
And ghosts are not real, so, eh?
@Nabil ad Dajjal
The “actual rebuttal” would be something like “The types of boys who got tricked and raped by Kevin Spacey were a result of too little information about the existence of the gay culture and its standards early in life, not too much.” When you have gone until 16, 17 with no information but “it’s sinful, avoid” until you had to move out of HootNHoller Alabama and move to Los Angeles its a lot easier for an older predator (esp. one you get starstruck by) to convince you that “this is how gays do it, you just haven’t learned yet” instead of the actual behavior of the community and its messages (i.e., not entering into relationships where you are taken advantage of by power imbalances, etc.) If you are taught gay relationships are normal, boring things from a young age, and the standards of being a decent human being don’t differ significantly, you internalize it before you potentially fall victim to a manipulative or abusive partner.
@Nornagest
I can’t help but notice your entire discourse with me on this site has consisted of saying I’m mean, and need to correct my behavior. If that is going to continue to characterize your posts to me in the future, I would request that you conserve your effort, I will just assume you don’t approve of how I am posting in perpetuity.
@Conrad Honcho
Goalpost moving. The controversy in question isn’t the existence of gay pedophiles, which everyone knows to be true (indeed, adult predators who pray on child or teenage victims are a part of presumably every sexuality.)
The idea that you can conceive of “propagandizing” homosexuality shows how ridiculous your position is. Do you have to “propagandize” children to drink water when thirsty, or like warm things when it’s cold out?
@Conrad
I’m really truly doing my best to not make this about what you think of the gays here; I appreciate that you’re being attacked, but… please help?
I’m going to regret writing this but… assuming that gays are pedophiles at a similar rate to which black men are criminals, and you consider exposing children to gays “memetic priming,” do you avoid letting your children watch shows with black characters so that they won’t be memetically inclined to fall in with black criminals?
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with “kiddo that there is a creepy gay man, stay away from him.” It might be overprotective and insensitive, but I don’t see it as absurd. Similarly, “kiddo that’s a gun, they’re dangerous.” But if you let kids watch shows with guns in them and keep the homosexuals out, it seems to me that you think that exposing kids to homosexuals puts them at a higher risk of being molested more than exposing kids to guns puts them at a higher risk of gun crime, or exposing kids to depictions of thievery primes them to commit theft. I don’t understand why.
I’ve just been rereading Lord of the Rings for the first time in several decades. The relationship between Sam and Frodo is very close and I can imagine a modern reader trying to see it as homosexual, but it quite obviously isn’t.
He isn’t arguing that they ought to be kept out of sight. He is arguing that fictional homosexual couples ought not to be gratuitously inserted into works targeted at children, and that he will therefor avoid showing his children works where they are.
Keeping homosexual couples out of sight imposes a pretty substantial cost on them. Not showing his children works portraying such couples doesn’t.
I strongly agree. Every culture is crazy about something, and this is one of things ours is crazy about. I also agree that using “rape” and “consent” in non-legal contexts with their legal definitions is a mistake. There may be good reasons to prohibit sex with 14 year olds, but whether it is anything like rape in its ordinary sense depends on the particular people and context.
H.L. Mencken comments somewhere that he lost his virginity at fourteen with a girl of the same age who, he adds, is now a very respectable grandmother.
“I apologize for being a moral monster because I am unwilling to propagandize homosexuality to my six year old. ”
This is where you go off the rails. You conflate any not-negative depiction of gay relationships with “propagandizing” homosexuality. Presumably you would not consider a depiction of a heterosexual couple “propagandizing” anything at all. It’s just a depiction of a thing that exists. Presumably you do not want to shield your child from any depiction of romance at all (it’s not like we talking hardcore vids here). And I note here you didn’t specify “propagandizing ephebephila”, but homosexuality period.
This is only “logically sound” if you consider homosexuality ipso facto bad, even among consenting adults. And “fine for you, bad for my kid” is still “bad”.
It’s only “logically sound” if you consider your child being targeted for sex by an older gay man a much higher risk than from an older heterosexual. And higher than other forms of sexual violence (empirically, this is wrong – most sexual violence is heterosexual and between legal adults).
It’s only “logically sound” if you think shielding kids from depictions of gay relationships in media will prevent them from being gay, and consider that a positive thing. (Of course empirically this is wrong – lots of factors in homosexuality but “it’s not a choice” seems to hold true)
Basically, you’re holding homosexuality to a different standard, trying to keep it out of sight and out of mind, because you think it’s bad if kids turn out to be gay. Which… hopefully you (and Nabil) can see why calling that “bigoted” rather than “rational” is not exactly crazy?
EDIT: @David Friedman – “fictional homosexual couples ought not to be gratuitously inserted into works targeted at children”
The trouble is he apparently considers any depiction at all to be “gratuitous, not okay for kids”, an objection he does not make for heterosexual romance.
I agree about your annoyance over modern “clearly Sam and Frodo are gay”. They are close male friends who love each other in an asexual fraternal sort of way, we shouldn’t make the assumption that any friendship must be sexual.
@ilikekittycat,
Thank you for posting your counterargument.
I don’t know how well my tone is coming across here but I mean that sincerely. This thread has been depressingly light on real arguments and your point is something that people can actually build on.
Edit:
@gbdub,
“You’re bigoted” isn’t an argument, it’s an epithet.
Anyway, Conrad’s argument as I understand it isn’t hard to understand and isn’t what you’re saying it is.
1. “Positive or neutral portrayals of homosexuality normalize gay culture.” Presumably you agree with this.
2. “Adult gay men having sex with young men / teenage boys is a part of gay culture.” This is the most likely source of disagreement but also luckily the easiest to empirically validate.
3. “Therefore, normalizing gay culture increases the risk of my son falling victim to an older gay man.” This follows logically from 1. and 2., given a very low risk tolerance.
That’s not unsound given his stated preferences. It may be invalid, although you haven’t made much of an argument here. It’s also possible to disagree with his preferences. But throwing around epithets is neither.
@David
That was unclear of me; I should have said, “he should do his best the keep homosexuals out of sight of his children.” Conrad is, clearly, not in favor of incurring any costs to the gays, but only to himself. I didn’t mean to imply the contrary.
And while it might be petty of me, I’ll note that we both gave Conrad a much more generous interpretation of the word “forced.”
ilikekittycat:
This is sort of a sideways query here, not central to your point, but is there any data that tells us whether more or less openness about sex is likelier to lead a minor to end up having sex with an adult? I really have no idea where I’d start looking for such information, but it seems kind of interesting to know. (If I had to guess, I’d guess that more sheltered kids would be more vulnerable to exploitation simply because they wouldn’t have heard of such things, whereas more sexually aware kids might be easier to talk into a tryst with an adult looking to scratch his kink for underaged partners. But I really have nothing to base this on.)
There’s a kind of interesting set of shifts in modes of reasoning here:
a. A factual set of questions about whether gay male culture includes a lot of older men sleeping with teenage boys, what the actual risks are, etc.
b. A moral reaction to some answers to these factual questions.
As best I can tell, every time someone starts with a factual question and ends up with a moral reaction, they’re sabotaging their brain. Perhaps gay men are proportionally more likely to sleep with teenagers than straight men, perhaps not, but answering that question can’t be done in the moral mode of thinking–we’ll never learn a correct answer by considering the moral status of people who ask the question, or the moral status of the possible answers.
@albatross11: Right, apparently I’m getting called out here for defining ancient male homosexuality, with the unfortunate explicit terms involved. I said nothing about the % of contemporary male homosexuals who go after boys before their 18th birthdays, which I just don’t know. It could be that the gay subculture has changed such that >99% of them only go after males old enough for no power imbalance to exist: this seems to be the possibility @Nornagest was gesturing at with “modeling prosocial behavior, unlike the past.” The “gay marriage” campaign could be a huge propaganda program made by members of that subculture to change male behavior. Again, I don’t know.
Obviously I’m not who you are responding to here, but I’m not sure I’d agree with any of these steps.
1. It may normalize the existence of gay couples, but I don’t think it necessarily follows that it normalizes gay culture. Homosexuality and gay culture are not the same thing.
2. It certainly has been a stereotype of it and may have some truth to it (or had at some point). It certainly is not central or accepted in the mainstream part of that culture.
3. Again, normalizing homosexuality is not normalizing “gay culture”, especially if the form of the portrayal (same age couple) is at odds with the part of the culture you are concerned with.
No thanks. Out of sight, out of mind.
Plus, I haven’t been singling out out for criticism, and I’m certainly not going to single you out to avoid criticism. Go ahead and assume whatever you want of me, although I’d of course encourage taking my posts to heart.
Conrad Honcho, what do you think you’d do if you turn out to have a gay kid?
@ Conrad Honcho:
A zero-tolerance threshold is tripped by every culture known to man. Try again.
I am sharpening a wedge.
Nabil has provided a sketch of how your position might arise from protectiveness, conditional on a belief that gay culture disproportionately results in negative outcomes. If that’s your true objection, then even accepting the claim that this image constitutes homosexual propaganda you can presumably elaborate on how the threshold of acceptability lies between the experiences of gay men and the general population. We can extrapolate from there to see what other groups might prove unwholesome.
Because if you can’t substantiate your position, while finding it easy to come up with convenient explanations for why the same logic doesn’t apply to any of your in-groups… well, your argument isn’t a particularly novel one. The reaction that it must be the product of bigotry instead of calculation is uncharitable to be sure, but it’s also a safe bet. This is your opportunity to prove you’re better than that.
So, I invite you to do so.
@ Nabil ad Dajjal:
Do it. Stop saying you can, and do it. Until then you’re still part of the problem.
Nancy, that was the focus of the conversation when Conrad’s view on this first came up a few months back. His response was that he would encourage his son to go the “two gay dads, white picket fence, 2.5 adopted kids” route.
I should note my disagreement with this. Since Conrad is Catholic, he ought to, in those circumstances, be encouraging his son to live a chaste life, which means no sex. (Being in a romantic relationship without being in a sexual relationship is not impossible, of course, but attempting it isn’t a good idea for most people either, first because proximal occasions of sin, second because scandal.) My obvious advice to Conrad here would be to stop trying to screen out homosexuality, especially since his risk calculations don’t actually add up, and instead screen for Christian treatments of homosexuality, which ideally would teach children alternative vocations to married life and the importance of close friends. I haven’t suggested this, though, because it’s a fool’s errand; as far as I know, nothing anywhere fits the bill. So, unfortunately, I don’t have any advice for what Conrad should be doing instead.
«It’s not a choice» is not exactly the same as «it’s not influenced by childhood exposure». E.g. taste in food is not really a choice, yet my impression is that it’s significantly influenced by what you get used to in childhood. I’ve no idea where the current research stands on causes/influences of sexual orientation.
Excuse me but I find kind of hard to determine a pony’s sex. Are MLP-watching kids perhaps better?
I think this statement shows you think you know things that you don’t, which is the cause of homosexuality or homosexual behavior. If you’ve got this one figured out, please publish your paper and collect your Nobel Prize.
I’ve been over this with others on SSC before and it seems like an excellent candidate for an adversarial collaboration. My contention is that homosexuality is non-insignificantly a result of cultural and personal conditioning. There is no “gay gene,” there may be some uteran hormone influence, but there certainly exist cultures (ancient Greeks, many modern Arab tribes, Afghanistan) where pederasty is very common. Are they more “biogay” than neighboring, closely related peoples? If so, how? If not, what causes the difference in behavior? If it has something to do with culture, or personal conditioning/grooming then, well, that’s my whole point. Condition kids that “gay is okay” and pederasty follows.
Now it’s not that incredibly likely that I’m going to lose sleep over it, but I also let my kid walk around the block without being terribly concerned about men in vans offering him candy. But I did instruct him to run screaming from somebody he doesn’t know trying to get him to get into his car, and I certainly wouldn’t show him videos that depict children getting into strange men’s cars as normal or good.
This is pretty loaded. While yes pedos are disproportionately gay (caveats about reporting, which crimes are prosecuted, etc), my concern is not so much gay pedos molesting my 10 year old but “normal” adult gays seducing my 14-17 year old.
Let’s save the “what would you do about black people” question for a different thread. Or just drop that whole thing all together as this thread is hairy enough as it is.
Because when I show him stuff with guns, we have also talked about how guns are dangerous, he should not handle guns at his age, and when he’s older I’ll teach him how to safely handle a weapon. The exposure to guns comes with lots of cautionary instruction. As horrible a person as I am for dodging exposing him to homosexuality, how much worse would you all think of me for telling him about homosexuality, but then warning him strongly against it because of the much greater chance of disease, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and suicide homosexuals experience compared to heterosexuals? Isn’t this the least bad I can do?
No, both are propaganda. While sexual orientation is certainly biologically influenced, large swaths of sexual behavior appear to be social constructs. This is where I suggest the adversarial collaboration thing, because I think other posters are the nutty ones who don’t have much problem with attributing gender role behavior to social constructs but sexual orientation and behavior? Written in the stars, my friend! No. There are definitely cultural influences here.
Yes, straight privilege is a thing. While straight people are no better or worse than gay people, and all are equally loved and valued in the eyes of God, being straight is objectively better than being gay. You can change my mind by showing me empirical evidence that homosexuals are not at a much greater risk of disease, drug and alcohol abuse, childlessness, depression and suicide than heterosexuals. All else being equal, knowing that, if you don’t hope your kid is straight rather than gay, then, well, I don’t think I’m the moral monster here.
I don’t think it’s very likely that my teenage son will be targeted for sexual violence by an older straight woman, no. But that’s a risk we’ll have to take given the preferred outcome that he be heterosexual. There’s no reason to take the homosexual risk, when that is not the preferred outcome for the obvious, objective reasons of statistically better health and happiness for straights.
I don’t think it’s a choice, but my review of the literature points to cultural or personal social conditioning as a definite factor. Again, this can be cleared up with an adversarial collaboration if anyone is interested in putting me in my infernal place.
Given the empirically better outcomes for straights rather than gays, how is this not rational? If the outcomes were the same and I preferred one or the other, yes, that would definitely be bigoted. But when the outcomes are clearly different, preferring the better outcome to the worse outcome is rational, and pretending they’re equivalent is either intellectual dishonesty or moral cowardice.
Sigh and develop an interest in show tunes.
And Dan, can you drive your wedge in already? I have no idea what your point is. Outcomes are better for straights than gays. Sexuality has components that are socially constructed rather than purely biological or fated. The rational thing to do is to encourage the things that have the best outcomes, minimize the things that have the worst outcomes, and deal with them if they arise anyway.
I’m not the irrational one here. The ones pretending two obviously, empirically proven different things are equivalent are the irrational ones. Now if you want to come out and say that yes, treating two different things as the same is your moral choice regardless of the irrationality, great, do so, but don’t pretend it’s rational or optimal.
@Dan L,
This is the first study I found once I got back from lab. It’s very recent but from what I understand it’s hardly the first or the only such study:
A comparison of sexual behavior patterns among men who have sex with men and heterosexual men and women
(Glick et al., 2017)
doi:10.1097/QAI.0b013e318247925e
Working from the values in Table I, 16.7% of homosexual Finnish men had their “youngest actual partner in the last five years” under eighteen years old as compared to 6.7% of heterosexual men.
The tabulated numbers are a bit ambiguous, because the 5-year window allows for licit teenager-teenager relationships. The graph in Figure 2 paints a starker picture, with a typical under 18 homosexual man having an “oldest actual partner in the last five years” being a 25 year old man.
Both homosexual and heterosexual men in the study expressed similar preferences for younger partners but in the words of the authors “[h]omosexual male participants reported a closer match between behavior and preferences than heterosexual male participants.”
Anyway I’m tapping out of the discussion now. If you don’t like the study’s methodology or disagree with my interpretation of the results that’s entirely acceptable.
I’m not sure if the evidence shows that proportions of gay vs. straight people are consistent across time and culture, but I don’t think Ancient Greece or modern Afghanistan disprove it. As best we can tell, few of the men engaging in Greek pederasty (I know less about Afghanistan) were gay as we think of it: most had wives, and many had female as well as male lovers. The easiest way to render that into our understanding of sexuality would be to round it off to “bisexual”, but that doesn’t quite satisfy me: the qualities the Greeks found attractive in boys are all distinctly feminine, which doesn’t sound to me like an equal attraction to both sexes. There’s nothing like “bears” in Classical literature, at least that I’ve read.
Still, those Greek dudes don’t just seem to have been settling; many of the same-sex Classical couples we see in history and literature were high-status people who’d have had plenty of choice. So maybe it’s possible to bend your preferences a bit if culture points that way, but that doesn’t show that cultural messaging’s responsible for that fraction of the population that’s exclusively gay, nor that it has any meaningful impact on your kid’s chances of ending up in a subculture centered around e.g. anonymous meetings in truck stop bathrooms. I know a few people who’ve tried to condition themselves to be bisexual (look up “bi-hacking” on the old Less Wrong site), and most of them have had some success but retained a strong preference that couldn’t be erased. And our culture certainly doesn’t lionize pederasty like Classical Greece sometimes did: it’s a major mainstream taboo, people like Milo Yianawhatsit notwithstanding.
At most it might account for some of the guys calling themselves gay in our culture (male bisexuality’s got substantial stigma attached to it in LGBT culture), but I doubt they make up the hard core of any particular gay subculture, and in terms of actual attraction they’d be perfectly capable of participating in the het dating script. Which has its own problems, but that’s neither here nor there.
I think the meta-issue here (not being discussed, but still hanging in the air) is the idea that the reason gays have worse life outcomes is stigma and non-acceptance.
Now, I don’t know whether that’s true in general or not. It’s possible that gays will end up with overall worse lives even with full acceptance; it’s also possible that in a fully tolerant society, gays will end up with about the same quality of life as straights. We’re kind of running the experiment now–if we see a big improvement in life outcomes for gays over the next few decades, that will be pretty strong evidence that at least a lot of that difference was due to hostility/nonacceptance.
Right now, in the current world, I’d rather my kids be straight than gay. I doubt I have much influence over that, but again, that’s an empirical question I don’t actually have an answer to. And again, we’re running an experiment here as a society. If societal acceptance and visibility of homosexuality leads more people to become gay, then we should see evidence of that over the next few decades.
I think everyone would agree that the stigma against gays has decreased by orders of magnitude over the last few decades. But from my understanding of the literature (again, totally willing to do an adversarial literature review with someone who wants to put me in my place), the numbers on outcomes have barely budged.
My contention is simple:
1) Being straight has empirically proven better life outcomes than being gay.
2) Sexual orientation has significant non-biological influences, including cultural and personal/social conditioning.
3) Therefore, it’s better on average to not expose a child to things that promote/normalize homosexuality. However, one should not stigmatize gays out of general kindness and an interest in hedging one’s bets against the possibility of heavy homosexual biological influence.
And you can prove me wrong with data!
Prove that (1) is false by showing that gays have the same or better life outcomes than straights!
Prove that (2) is false by showing that homosexuality is purely biological with no social construction.
Show that (3) does not follow from (1) and (2).
In the meantime, I think the idea that gay = straight and exposing children to narratives supporting that idea is a moral decision and not a rational decision. And it’s a morality that I don’t understand, and don’t know where it comes from, preferencing hypothetical gays over your own actual children. Do what you will.
“I’m concerned that seeing two male cartoon horses holding hands might, in some subtle way as yet unknown to science, increase the chance of my child someday leading a lifestyle that some believe is statistically associated with elevated rates of negative life outcomes,” he said while playing a gun-themed game with his child in the country where the second most common cause of death for children is guns.
“I’m concerned that
seeing two male cartoon horses holding handsexplicitly promoting homosexuality in multiple venues without caveats might,in some subtle way as yet unknown to science,in a completely obvious way evidenced by the unquestioned existence of cultures significantly more than gay than neighboring cultures increase the chance of my child someday leading a lifestyle thatsome believeis statistically associated with elevated rates of negative life outcomes,” he said while playing a gun-themed game with his child in the country where the second most common cause of death for children is guns while explicitly instructing his child on the dangers of guns and while his guns are allsafely locked awaylost in a tragic boating accident.Come on, dick, you can make a better strawman than that. I have faith in you.
@ Nabil ad Dajjal:
Genuinely, thank you.
I mean, my main quibble is that that DOI goes to Glick et al, 2012 with no sign of a more recent paper by that name in her bibliography… but it still has some relevant data? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s Seattle + other US cities in the 90s and 00s, but it’ll do for a first glance.
There’s a fair amount to dig through there, but my first impressions:
1) The average age delta between partners is within bounds that might be explicable purely through a restricted dating pool.
2) The age at sexual debut data contradicts that though, with MSM being substantially lower. But the heterosexual results also show men starting substantially earlier than women… there’re some interesting dynamics here.
3) More data is definitely needed, but a comparison across the decade hints at a very encouraging trend for anyone who wants gay men to match mainstream mores.
@Conrad
I don’t blame you for not wanting to touch that argument – I don’t really either, on an object level. But I think it’s useful to consider, insofar as it involves justifying making strangers out of the people who live around you.
I also continue to think that the odds of a gay pederast getting into your children’s pants and taking advantage of them are really not that high, and I don’t think that any Twitter anecdotes are going to convince me otherwise. I don’t really want to make a personal attack here, but based on conversations we’ve had I feel that you have a tendency to give weight to anecdotes that’s… at least a little unwarranted. Consider that nobody is ever going to share the story of how they weren’t seduced at the age of 14, and instead just sat in a classroom imagining running their fingers through another boy’s hair.
I guess my point fundamentally is that, while it’s at least somewhat understandable that you don’t want your kids to wind up gay, I have to think that there are many, many things that carry just as much risk that you aren’t protecting them from any better. This is a marginal protection on a marginal risk, and although the real cost to your kids is small-to-nil, I do find it sad that, in your eyes, that vanishingly thin margin overcomes the value of all the art and all the stories and all the lives that gay men have produced or been a part of. It seems rather like tearing down a library because the books are so flammable*.
*: Not that this is literally the case.
So far, here are the actions I have taken in my “don’t intentionally expose my kid to gay stuff” project:
1) Once my wife was watching Modern Family and I asked her to save that for when the kids are in bed.
2) There’s a scene in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey where a pansexual dude propositions your character to have sex with him and a goat and I told my kid to leave the room for a few minutes.
The horror. The absolute horror. How will Conrad Jr. ever recover?
ETA: I declined the invitation to goat sex, fyi.
@ Conrad Honcho:
Wedges are for separating formerly like things. If you continue to decline to be distinguished from your more odious comrades-in-argument, we can go from there.
I have consistently challenged you to show not that it’s better to be straight than gay, but to instead show that you are rationally deciding that this is a battle worth fighting. That being gay (and male?) specifically falls below a previously-determined threshold of acceptability and that this is not a standard you’re pulling out of your ass for this express purpose. You continue to deflect, without even the grace of data.
This is not the argument you are facing here. The specific argument that has provoked your umbrage is the notion that children be allowed to see that gay relationships exist. Not some sinister gay agenda, not a roving gang of leather-clad bears, but two barely-anthropomorphized characters sitting in a cafe on Valentine’s Day. I linked the image from the relevant MLP episode – if you want to pre-screen children’s entertainment further I can find you a link to the full episode and you can issue us a report on why it’s deplorable.
In my experience, the easiest way for a Red Triber to get a firm grasp on the relevant perspective is to experience the suffering of someone they care about at the hands of a culture that believes gays are objectively inferior. The focused injustice is harder to dismiss when it hits closer to home.
(You will notice that this is identical in form to the most common motivation behind charity. If that still seems foreign to you, well… do what you will.)
@Conrad
Like I said, the cost to your kids is virtually nil. I don’t have any real reason to think you’ve made them worse-off; it’s just that this kind of marginally-justified categorical exclusion makes me sad. It’s aesthetic more than it is ethical.
Mrs. Honcho is mean-mugging me for arguing this fervently on the internet so late so I’ll get back with you tomorrow. But this whole thing is ridiculous. “Don’t promote thing with worse outcomes while incurring no real downsides or cost” over “explicitly promote thing with worse outcomes for no reason” is a mind-numbingly obvious choice for anyone rationalist or rationalist-adjacent and yet here we are.
Can we pause for a moment to remember that, although there are merits to both sides in this argument generally, it was triggered by a totally innocuous, unobtrusive presence of an apparently (but not blatantly) homosexual couple in the background of a scene in a cartoon (such that most people probably wouldn’t have even noticed it and certainly children wouldn’t)?
I feel like one side has successfully distracted from the point that was being made into some larger, more general point that people are more willing to engage with, but that isn’t what originally raised the issue and became a point of contention.
I’m really confused, I swear that I copied down the correct title, author and doi but somehow I got a completely different study. I literally have no idea how that happened.
The one I was trying to link is (Antfolk, 2017). If you can’t access it, you can copy the link address and put it into SciHub. Hopefully now the figure and table references I made should make sense.
I’m sorry about the mix-up. Again I’m baffled that I made such a weird error.
Dan L/hoopyfreud:
I’m curious about another wedge. Is your concern:
a. Parents restricting media for probably-not-very-important criteria?
Like some parents are really concerned about not showing their kids violence on TV, others are concerned about sexist images and ideas, some don’t want their kids seeing religious messages (or maybe religious messages from other religions than their own), etc.
b. Parents worrying and overreacting in silly ways about risks that aren’t actually very large?
Like stranger danger and all its offshoots.
c. Parents doing these things specifically with respect to promotion/normalization/portrayal of homosexuality?
My intuition is that the angry reaction is all about (c), for CW reasons, whereas the rational argument is all around (a) and (b). But maybe I’m missing something.
Just as an aside, my impression is that stranger danger and its variants has probably done more to make kids’ lives worse than all the conservative parents blocking channels and installing web filters combined.
@albatross11
For the record, those web filters don’t actually work (or more accurately, they are easily disabled). I suppose they are effective for less enterprising youths, perhaps.
As far as your point, I think you are correct, but that it might be worthwhile to point out that it isn’t just that people are objecting to (c), they are objecting to the fact that this is basically the most benign, innocuous, unobtrusive version of (c) that could possibly exist and somehow has still drawn the ire of those who are concerned about such things. This could certainly lead one to believe that this indicates 0 tolerance for that particular demographic, which is a bit different from CW and SJW endless debates.
Re: the MLP picture and how to sex ponies
Two boy ponies at the front table. Two girl ponies at the back table.
The back table doesn’t strike me as suggesting anything because Ponyville is like 80% girl ponies anyway. I guess you could argue that the boy ponies at the front are a gay couple, but I’ve eaten lunch with a dude every day for the past two weeks. I suspect someone said “hey they are going to show gay couples” and that context is what’s informing us about those couples.
Think 6 year old kids picked up on that?
Yeah, I suspect one reason why the damage of the web filters and channel blocking is limited is that teenagers interpret parental interference as annoying and route around it.
So, on one hand, the whole inferring gay propaganda from kids cartoons thing mainly makes me think of the panic about satanic images/lyrics in music/culture when I was a kid. I’m sure a fair number of parents did, in fact, prevent their kids from listening to some music to avoid those threats, which were basically goofy.
And on the other, parents do that all the time about everything. Being convinced that letting your child eat normal food instead of organic food is going to give them cancer/turn them gay/pare back their IQ enough to keep them out of the Ivy League is no less goofy, but it’s widespread enough. The whole country went crazy about stranger danger to the point that lots of parents were afraid to let their kids play outside unattended in safe suburbs. (Probably the same parents never twitched a brain cell about the swimming pool in the backyard.)
I think the issue here is that the criterion Conrad’s using (or discussing–it sounds like he’s not actually doing a whole lot of enforcing of it on his kids) has a strong CW component. On one side of that is intolerance for gays, on the other is hostility to trying to raise your kids in a way that would have been the default assumption of how decent parents did things in most places, 30 years ago.
A couple points. First: a lot of us are the kids who were blocked from “satanic” music (hint: it wasn’t actually satanic, our parents even retroactively enjoy some of it now). So we understand the panic, and are opposed to it on both the grounds of “we saw this back then and it was dumb” AND the grounds of “this seems silly when observed in isolation”.
Possibly more important, while I don’t have any satanist acquaintances who were personally affected by the satanist panic, I DO personally have friends who are being affected by the apparently similar “gay” panic. Both are incredibly dumb, but the people who get harmed by the gay panic are way more sympathetic than those harmed by the (what I think has been agreed to be) paranoid and unnecessary satanic panic.
The fact that this is the argument in favor means there aren’t really any arguments in favor, as best I can tell.
I’d certainly agree with that. I mean, I’ve never found a web filter that I couldn’t route around with twenty minutes of work, but (a) this sort of thing is my day job, and (b) the chilling effects alone have probably done a lot of damage.
@Albatross
I think that a glance outside this subthread will show that I’m extremely anti-parents-limiting-media-exposure, and I kind of resent the implication that I’m just here to mindkill and muckdrag and don’t really care.
That said, as previously mentioned, this topic particularly bugs me because I can’t understand why Conrad is going to the trouble. The logic at play is frustratingly hard to grasp, and the piece that I continue and continue to miss is, “why the gays? Why not [everything that is analogous]?” And because Conrad continues to respond, I continue to ask.
For the record, I would not blacklist MLP from my kids over that image (or anything else from what I’ve seen of it, which is admittedly not much). What I did ban was “Modern Family” which has two grown men, obviously men, married to each other, and who call themselves “gay.” That’s pretty explicitly gay. It’s about the gayest thing you can have on TV. And the homosexual intercourse and goat sex in AC: Odyssey.
That said, incrementalism. This season it’s ambiguously gay ponies in the background, and I will not be terribly shocked when next season they “bravely” announce their first openly gay pony.
Because I’m allowed to warn him about the “analogous” things. Yes, he is exposed to violence on TV and in video games, but we’ve had many talks about the difference between pretend violence and real violence and that real violence is one of the worst things you can do (we’ll talk about justification when he’s older), and that he should not ever touch a gun until he’s much much older and I’m there to help him learn how to handle it safely, and we go to church where we learn about how important it is to be nice to each other and not hurt each other. I would never show him such things if, for some reason, it were not socially acceptable for me to warn him off of violence, and I simply had to accept that the makers of media for children really want my kid to see violence and think it’s perfectly okay and I can’t correct that.
But in the Culture War the rules of engagement do not permit me to show him homosexuality, and then warn him about how much less desirable this is than heterosexuality, and that he should stay away from older gay men who may have ulterior motives the same way my daughter should stay away from older straight men who may have ulterior motives so they don’t wind up doing something they later regret. See if I tell him that, and then he goes to school and says “gays are bad!” I get summoned to a parent/teacher conference for the wrongthink.
As horrible a moral monster as I am for dodging the issue, how much further into the outer darkness would you be casting me if I did that? If I instructed him about all the bad things about homosexual behavior? Where’s the analogy here, where I’m showing him something bad, or with worse outcomes, and not explicitly warning him off them? I don’t show him anything racist, but if he saw something racist, I would immediately instruct him as to why racism is bad. But I’m not allowed to do that with the gay stuff so all I can do is try to prevent him from noticing it.
Does this make sense now? All the gay media is positive. They don’t show anything critical, and it’s not socially acceptable for me to be critical, either. That’s the difference.
Now then, let’s talk about consequentialism and your deontolgy. It’s a common SSC meme that no one is really a consequentialist. People try to do that, and then they encounter some repugnant moral conclusion and switch to “well can’t do that because of the icky.” e.g., eugenics.
No one yet has argued with my assertion that gays have statistically worse life outcomes than straights. No one yet has argued with my assertion that sexual orientation and behavior is at least partially influenced by culture and conditioning. So a consequentialist would obviously conclude, “Oh, I should not do pro-homosexual influencing, and should do pro-heterosexual influencing.” (The extent to which the influencing is effective can’t be that big a sticking point when we’ll spend 10,000 words sifting through the extent to which Head Start does or does not get you 5% better graduation rates). But that’s apparently an icky conclusion to an awful lot of people so instead they go to the rules-based morality of “must pretend gay and straight is the same for reasons.”
What are these reasons? Hoopy, in the discussion about Jordan B. Lobsterman, you said you are strongly opposed to unexamined beliefs or belief systems. How did you get this belief system? It doesn’t survive on first pass consequentialism. It’s not the wisdom of the ancients, handed down through the centuries of European civilization. It’s not even representative of those other cultures like the Greeks* or the Afghans, because they were about pederasty, and homosexual relations between two consenting adults were still verboten.
Why is it so terribly shocking that not every single person subscribes to your brand new tolerance, acceptance, promotion, and prohibition on criticism of homosexuality deontolgy that appears to have been invented out of whole cloth 20 or 30 years ago?
* Yeah, there was like one famous troop of Greek soldiers who had sex with each other but the contemporary writings show other people thought they were weird.
@10240: Stallions are bigger and have square muzzles, while mares have pointy, rounded muzzles and eyelashes. This image Dan L posted is very low quality. You can see better secreenshots below.
Crusaders walk past the Ponyville Cafe
Apple Bloom talks to her friends at the cafe
Lyra and Bon Bon exchange Hearts and Hooves presents
Lyra Heartstrings and Bon Bon hugging
Big Mac looking at Cranky and Matilda
The gay and lesbian couples in the cafe’s background might be missable, but Lyra and Bon Bon are front and center.
@Edward Scizorhands: You are missing some context. The episode is a St. Valentine’s Day episode (well, Hearts and Hooves Day, which is the pony equivalent). See all those heart-shaped balloons and decorations? It’s pretty obvious those ponies at the cafe are supposed to be couples. Furthermore, the lesbian couple is shown again in a montage of happy couples immediately following Bic Mac’s breakup with Sugar Belle.
Here are the scenes in context. Sweetie Belle Thinks She Has a Secret Admirer and Big Mac Breaks Up with Sugar Belle. Look at them and tell me with a straight face that this episode doesn’t portray three homosexual couples, two in the background and one in prominent, if brief, focus.
@Conrad
OK, I think I finally get it. A lot of the things you said earlier have finally clicked together.
Honestly, I’d rather you show your kid and warn them. I wouldn’t approve, and I don’t agree with the premise, but I think the logic is internally sound and that it’s fundamentally less restrictive.
Where did I get this belief system? I made it. Mostly out of Kant and Nietzsche. And no, I’m not contesting your proposition that straights are statistically better-off than gays. I just don’t really care. Experience matters a lot more to me. Art matters more too. Challenge and love and life, and how individual people experience them. I care about understanding other people and reaching towards the noumena of their consciousness.
And finally, it’s not surprising in the least that you’re doing this; I’m much more surprised that you’re unwilling to talk to your kids about it. Maybe I have a rosier idea of the culture war than you do, but I wouldn’t expect this to be such a problem. I can’t really grasp your position, but I think that if I occupied it, I’d make a different choice.
I assume by “children” you mean 15-18 year olds, and by “guns” you mean suicide and gang violence, correct?
Call me crazy, but I can’t think of any games that glorify or normalize suicide, unless your argument is that Mario having extra lives sends an unrealistic message to children about their ability to surive jumping into pools of lava. I dunno, “Planescape: Torment,” maybe? But that’s kind of a stretch…
As for gang culture, yeah, there are several games that portray that, often ones where your character is a part of it, but they usually at least make an attempt to present a nuanced view of it, and make it clear that it’s not a good thing. This is hardly a good analogy for including gay characters and themes in children’s cartoons, where the intent is clearly to portray them as normal and natural. Also, if My Little Pony is too racy for him, I think it’s safe to say Conrad isn’t playing GTA with his kids.
Seriously, I don’t agree with Conrad’s point here either, but you’re not doing yourself any favors, here. Every study I’ve ever heard of that purports to show this is either fundamentally flawed and dishonest, or is being interpretted dishonestly by someone else. I’d love to know where you got that statistic, so I can poke holes in it directly. Either way, if your kids aren’t at risk of joining a gang, and you take into account that they might choose a method to kill themselves other than your gun, OR if you’re only looking at actual children and not late teens, having a gun in the house is less dangerous than having a swimming pool in your back yard, or driving your kids to school every day.
(To be fair, though, it’s probably still a bigger risk than My Little Pony leading to them being raped by Kevin Spacey! :op )
Unless and until it gets to the point where cps comes and takes your kids for bigotry, you need to work on your “I don’t care” attitude with regards to such meddling.
I think you are correct about how you will be viewed by much of the culture at large for being explicitly heteronormative. I think you overestimate the practical effects of that contempt.
I think my primary obection is to a break-up being a primary plot point in a children’s movie/show/short/whatever this is. Tangled romantic drama doesn’t seem to be approritate kid plot, that’s best reserved for romcoms for tweens and teens. Toddlers and young children get princes and princesses and happily ever afters.
In what way is this distinct from hedonism?
And can you, in your efforts to understand the consciousness of others, conceive why they may not be satisfied with hedonism?
ETA:
I don’t see any reason to get a head start on the contempt, though.
@Conrad
The sentence you left out is probably the most important one.
Here’s where things go screwy, and where I usually stop talking because incommensurable worldviews are involved, but let me say, regarding hedonism, that I hold views very close to property dualism, and that I believe in a Neitzchean will to power. Within that framework you might be able to call me a hedonist, insofar as I believe that unwilled terminal values are empty shells that have been hollowed out by modernity, and that [ambition/desire/will] ought to determine, for each person, what those values are. I am not any sort of hedonic consequentialist, and I don’t believe that universalizable nonmaterialist hedonism is a coherent concept. Universalizable materialist hedonism I find horrifying.
I think that parents should model their terminal values for their children, but I do not understand or accept that parents would try to control them. But I believe in will, and I feel that most here don’t, so… I won’t be surprised if thia argument and this distinction are incomprehensible. I do not have words to explain the difference, only bad German poetry. I can only comprehend a rejection of this philosophy as parents not caring about their children developing their own consciousness, though I can understand why others may not agree with this evaluation.
I tend to keep my head down too, but there’s something to be said for your kids to see you calmly, rationally, kindly, but firmly stand up for your principles.
And, if it comes down to persecution, I think the reasons for it are something to do with perseverance, maturity, and wisdom.
Granted, I don’t think the demographic that mlp targets really needs to know of the inability some people develop to feel romantic attraction to the opposite sex.
But when you say that you avoid approaching the issue as you would others largely because people will get mad at you if you do, I’ll challenge you to consider the relative importance of that.
Okay, knowing it’s Hearts and Hooves day, those are definitely gay couples and kids would probably get it, too.
(The gay character on Voltron is completely missable. In a flashback we see Main Character fighting with another guy about how Main Character’s decision to go on Dangerous Long-Term Mission is selfish, and if he does go, “don’t expect me to be waiting here when you get back.” Adults get that, children won’t.)
I don’t object to dating characters breaking up. I’ve seen people place too much emphasis on “my one first true love” and showing that you can break up, be sad, but eventually get over it can be a good lesson. I can see others disagreeing about it being too heavy for a kid’s show, but it’s not divorce. Assuming that Big Mac and Sweetie Bell didn’t get married at some point.
“Hearts and Hooves Day”? I protest this erasure of Christian role models!
And that will eventually happen. But there’s no reason to rush it, and curses on the media companies that are trying to rush it for me. Especially because
little kidsabsolutely everyone on the planet has trouble with nuance, so trying to explain that there exist things that you should avoid or steer clear of but shouldn’t condemn other people over is difficult and easy to misunderstand.@ Vorkon
That is the exact opposite* of the point of that post. I’m not taking the “violent video games lead to kids getting shot” position, I’m comparing it to Conrad’s belief that putting gay people in TV shows will lead to more gay people. I’m not the Jack Thompson in this scenario. I’m saying, if it were true that this was purely a matter of safety and not homophobia, if he were just erring on the side of caution about media consumption that might cause harm, he would be turning off Halo as well as My Little Pony.
@ Conrad
Did I miss the point where we moved from childrens’ cartoons to stuff made for adults? The transition to bestiality scenes in adult video games is not so much moving the goal posts as tearing down the old goal posts, driving over to Shelbyville, and constructing a new set of goal posts.
* Or the 180 no scope, one might say if one were not treating this subject with the gravity it deserves.
I’m up for this. Let’s do it.
Maybe because sex is different from violence. Also because we get an awful lot of additional information about how violence is bad, but you are not allowed to be critical of homosexual behavior. The rainbow flag waving is at “clapping for Stalin” levels of insanity and I don’t see it slowing down any time soon.
My original comment was never about MLP itself but about normalizing homosexuality in front of kids. As far as the goat thing that was in addition to the gay stuff. The character in the game wants your character to have sex with him, another dude, and a goat. It was also a little funny.
Okay skef, sounds like fun. Here are my contentions:
1) By many important metrics, life outcomes are statistically worse for homosexuals as opposed to heterosexuals (i.e., “straight privilege exists”).
2) The causes of homosexuality are unknown, and while there are probably biological influences, participation in homosexual behavior or identification as a homosexual has not-insignificant social construction.
What do you disagree with me on?
I don’t have any interest in an argument about #1. Being a short man is also associated with relatively negative life outcomes, given a mix of social attitudes and, quite likely, non- or less flexible aspects of what humans tend to find attractive. That’s life. (What differences people tend to shrug about vs relentlessly moralize is a different, interesting question, also clearly tied to flexible social standards.)
As for #2, why would we not be arguing the point that we were previously, and that you’ve been relying on in this thread? #2 could be true without exposure to depictions of homosexuality having any influence at all. That’s what have argued about in the past and what this current thread is about. Would you rather not discuss that?
I’m not sure I see what you’re getting at. You agree homosexuality is socially constructed, but disagree that positive exposure to homosexuality helps construct homosexuality?
I’m not sure how that makes any sense or how you would demonstrate that. Being a baker is a social construct, but exposure to baking does not influence one to be a baker?
To be more specific about my attitude toward #1, there is a one “style” of discussion about homosexuality that implicitly treats gay men as what I would call “bisexuals”. Pressure them into relationships with women and they’ll wind up being just fine, rather than leading lives of quiet desperation punctuated by guilt-ridden cheating. (How shitty a deal this is for the wife tends to be passed over. “Let’s assume she’s a lesbian and the couple had a nice business-like handshake at the start.” What people will convince themselves of for more grandkids …)
I consider homosexuals to be distinct from bisexuals, with the former being understood as having sexual and romantic feelings towards members of their own sex, with exceptions being possible but rare. Implicit in that conception is an inability to change that pattern of attraction — someone who could would be bisexual for these purposes.
Perhaps there are no such people — that would be a different argument. But given this variety of human, the relevant questions about outcomes will be qua homosexual. This is true even for someone who sees homosexuality as a variety of “disability”.
(I personally don’t see it as a disability, but as a mix of positives and negatives. One of the main positives being that it avoids the uncomfortable reality that, broadly speaking, men kind of hate women and women kind of hate men, which puts a drag on some aspects of heterosexual relationships. “What? Of course I don’t hate women! I have a girl friend!” Well, no — doesn’t work in this context either.)
Conrad, homosexuality could also be “socially constructed” by smothering mothers. Or, I don’t know, depictions of Judaism. Presumably if you kept depictions of Jewish life from your children in order to prevent them from becoming gay, other people would not be out of line in assuming your reasoning was more specific than “homosexuality is socially constructed”.
You have been consistently focused on depictions of homosexuality rather than other “social factors”. So if we’re going to have an adversarial argument about the topic, you need to put forward a position that has some relation to your actions and reasoning.
I don’t really have any opinions about homosexuals who marry women and haven’t given them much thought, so I don’t know what that has to do with anything.
ETA: Just saw your other post.
I’m not sure what to make of that. I wouldn’t rule out factors that exist in addition to the normalization or celebration of homosexuality in front of kids, but are you saying that has no impact? That is, it’s impossible that taking your son to a pride parade and waving rainbow flags and cheering when dudes kiss in front of him could ever possibly encourage him to kiss a dude?
For example, we could argue this proposition:
If the only point of contention is whether or not positive (or negative) portrayals of homosexuality increase homosexuality I’m not sure what we could find in the literature about that.
But it seems naively true. Is there anything else where universally positive exposure to Thing does not make at least some people more likely to like, try, or want to try Thing?
@Nick: Well it’s a universe sealed off from the existence of humans, so no Jesus Christ or St. Valentine… unless God was incarnate as som kind of animal…
Social pressure against homosexuality can clearly influence entirely gay men into exclusive and generally unhappy long-term relationships with women. And part of the longstanding resentment between bisexual men and gay men is the sense on the part of the latter that social pressure will inevitably push the former into relationships with women. And what is and is not depicted is of course a huge part of that influence.
As for “encourage”? Well, it depends on what is being built into that term. My main frame of reference on this particular question comes from time spent with 20s-or-so “socially enlightened” crowds in the mid-aughts. Many of the straight men in that group did seem to feel a need to signal their enlightenment by kissing each other. But a) they were very nervous about doing this to anyone gay-identified, to the point of carefully avoiding it and b) it was not at all a risk factor, statistically speaking, for any further actions.
So sure, there is social leeway with respect to things like kissing, but I can’t get into the midset of someone who sees changes in that kind of social convention as some kind of disaster. That particular signalling was a temporary fad among a certain population, like dyed hair or tight pants. “No men were gateway-ed into fucking during the making of this picture.”
I wonder what kind of animal might make a suitable God for talking horses? Seems like someone should have considered that before now.
A lion would be traditional, I think.
Le Maistre Chat, fair point on St. Valentine, but if ponies are rational animals then there must be some means of salvation. There is precedent, but they weren’t separated from mankind, so it’s not parallel.
ETA: Oh my gosh, you guys, the correct answer would obviously be a lamb.
ETA2: Okay, for Randy’s more specific question, I would think angels could be pegasi, but their incarnation would just be a talking horse too. I’m sure they might be inclined to depict God artistically as a pegasus or a unicorn or something, though. I’ve watched basically none of the show, so I don’t know how the mythological creatures are worked into the setting.
Throughout each argument on this subject, Conrad, you have repeatedly expressed:
1) That you have no problem with homosexual, including if your kid turns out to be gay.
2) That instances of acting on same-sex attraction are a big problem to be avoided.
Your general approach to squaring these two positions is in reference to “negative outcomes”. That’s not irrational, but it doesn’t have much to do with the question of what causes homosexuality.
On hearing you argue these points, my own impression of your thought process is:
1) I would really prefer that my kids don’t every do this stuff.
2) One way of lowering the chance that they do this stuff is by delaying their awareness that it is even an option.
3) I’m a good person who has nothing against homosexuals per se.
4) Therefore, my motivation for #2 is not to prevent someone with same-sex attraction from acting on it, but to prevent same-sex attraction from arising.
I think this not from prejudice against all people with anti-gay attitudes — I don’t take most such people to think this way. The impression comes directly from the way the explanations and arguments vacillate back and forth. Your approach is well explained by your negative attitudes toward same-sex “behaviors”. The “causes of homosexuality” aspect is an epicycle on top of that. What makes it clearly an epicycle is how you keep circling back to “bad outcomes”.
That’s a good summary of my position, skef. What’s the point of contention?
The point of contention is that your motives are irrelevant to the question of what causes homosexuality. If who one experiences sexual and romantic feelings for is beyond one’s control — and therefore only (some?) bisexuals are faced with a true choice between acting on their feeling with men or with women — most social pressures only have effect within those constraints. It can be “naively true” that this or that social change will affect behavior without having any reason to think that the change alters the patterns of sexual or romantic attraction.
You can choose what pressures affect your children. You cannot choose that they will not be so attracted — that’s a factual matter. You have a theory about that, but the arguments for it seem to have more to do with social pressures and behavior than they do with desires.
You can also not choose that there are not “really” homosexuals and only bisexuals, and therefore that pressures are only toward “better outcomes”. That could be true. We could argue about it. But it’s a different question. When people argue about what causes homosexuality they argue about what causes homosexuality.
The first coming, in humility, would be as a lamb. (Cf. how Equestrian sheep are sapient but discriminated against and near-universally portrayed as stupid.)
The second coming, in glory, would be as an alicorn.
There are probably biological influences, but also cultural or personal social influences/conditioning. This was my (2) contention that you agreed with.
I think if you wanted to work out costs/benefits to your kids, they would be something like weighing increased risk of homosexuality (due to exposure to media/culture normalizing it) vs increased risk of difficulties coming to terms with their own sexuality if they end up gay (due to lack of exposure to media/culture normalizing it).
I am not too confident that I could estimate whether that ratio is greater than or less than one.
@ Skef, you seem to be assuming that, unless Conrad can prove that exposing children to homosexuality causes them to become homosexual, he shouldn’t avoid exposing his children to homosexuality. But that doesn’t seem a reasonable assumption to me. After all, there are all sorts of cases where the causal link between X and Y is unproven, but we still avoid X just in case.
Plus, it seems that the recent push to normalise transgenderism has coincided with a large spike in the number of children claiming to be transgender. Of course, this doesn’t prove that normalising homosexuality will have a similar effect, but I don’t see how you can dismiss the possibility when we have what seems to be a clearly analogous case working in precisely the way Honcho is worried about.
Scenario A: A difference in social factors/influences results in a man who would counter-factually be attracted to other men not not experience such attraction.
Scenario B: A difference in social factors/influences results in a man who is exclusively attracted to other men and would counter-factually have acted on that attraction to never act on it.
In both cases, a man who might have acted on same-sex attraction does not due to social influences. I would not characterize the man in A as homosexual and I would characterize the man in B as homosexual.
Examples of social factors/influences altering patterns of same-sex behavior are therefore not automatically examples of those factors/influences altering patterns of attraction. Given that the categories we have arrived at implicitly depend on inflexibility of pattern (except with (some?) bisexuals), there is reason to think that B scenarios are more common, generally speaking.
I hope you’re use of “prove” here is accidental, given that every discussion we’ve had over this issue has been about evidence and probabilities.
Go go back to an earlier example, I take it that if someone were to prevent their children from seeing depictions of Judiasm in an effort to prevent their children from developing homosexuality, we could rightly question that person’s motives and reasoning.
So if Conrad’s position is different, it’s because there is substantially better evidence for his theory. This is what I disagree with. All it has going for it is an immediate, unreflective plausibility that melts into magical thinking on inspection. The evidence for the smothering mothers theory was better, in that some people were probably noticing a real correlation.
We haven’t got into this this time around, but Conrad’s position relies in part on dismissing studies correlating personality traits in young children with later orientation. (I believe he just puts that work on the “biology” side, but perhaps he thinks it’s all politically motivated — I can’t recall.) It also glides over the massive changes in homosexuality over the last 100 years (from “almost entirely avoided” to “consistently negative” to “mixed” to the present pattern of mostly-positive) as compared with the relatively modest changes in statistical trends.
Is Conrad’s theory any more intuitive than a “role model” theory? Or hormone-mimicking pollutants? Or any factor at all tied to sex and gender?
What Conrad can reasonably claim given what we know at present is the possibility of a small effect. His focus on this particular theory, and the way he overstates the evidence for it, are not reasonable.
Maybe homosexuals have worse life outcomes because people like you want to scrub them from public view. Maybe they have worse life outcomes because there’s a slew of terrible people, yourself included, that want for them to disappear and rationalise it as ‘caring about my children’ or some other drivel that doesn’t hold up to any close scrutiny at all.
Not caring whether your child grows up straight or gay isn’t a monstrous choice, in that framing, it’s refusing to capitulate. Even if you grant that gay people tend not to be as happy as straight people, joining up with the forces that are actively worsening their lives and causing all these bad things is a far more aberrant position than maybe, possibly, theoretically adding .01% to the odds of them turning out gay. Consider it one very real way in which letting Moloch have his way is going to turn out worse for all.
And, before you even get started: you’re the guy arguing that gayness is, in some way, part of nurture. The poor life outcomes that come with being gay all have plenty to do with shared environment as well. Maybe I ought not let my kids hear rock music because people that listen to classical have better outcomes, or maybe kids who never once touch a piece of chocolate have better outcomes than those they do, but at that point I’d risk estranging my kids from me a whole lot more than I would lowering their QALY by some miniscule percentage.
Even if you could prove on graph paper that video games don’t cause violence, there are a million variations on the same complaint. (veterans have high rates of depression and suicide, are you avoiding positive depictions of military service? pro football players do too, do you turn off the TV when a sitcom character wears a Cowboys jersey?) It doesn’t matter a lot, I’m not trying to prove you’re a hypocrite. The only point in bringing it up was to compare it to your assertion that putting gay people on TV will lead to more gay people. That’s a cornerstone of your whole position, and AFAIK there’s no evidence for it except that it sounds plausible, and the response to it is, hey, there are a million things on TV that could plausibly be harmful from Halo to McDonalds ads, so don’t kid us that the reason you’ve zeroed in on this one particular is not the obvious one.
At any rate, it seems like a lot of this boils down to whether you think being gay is bad or neutral, which is probably not something one can constructively argue about, so that’s that. And this thread has left me in the dust while work intervened. However, there is one thing I still want to harp on:
There are a lot of places in American culture and media where gays are still criticized. There used to be more; it used to be that homosexuality in American culture was universally feared and reviled. It used to be that open contempt and disgust were not just mainstream, they were ubiquitous. It even used to be legal to fire someone for being gay, up until the half-forgotten days of nineteen-oh-wait-it-still-is. So, from where we stand, one generation in to the “let’s try not treating gays like absolute shit” project, which not everyone’s on board with yet, I think it’s a little early to be moaning about how the culture has been so thoroughly conquered by the Left that you have to hide under a blanket to express a critical opinion to your son. And certainly it’s too early to say, ah well, we tried being nice to them and they’re still committing suicide a lot, guess that didn’t work.
Video games where you shoot people with guns?
I don’t see why. Insofar as seeing homosexuality normalized makes someone more likely to end up in a homosexual relationship, I would expect the effect to be larger for a bisexual than an exclusive homosexual–the latter, in our society, will probably end up in homosexual relationships whether or not he sees them normalized in his childhood. So I take Conrad’s policy to be aimed more at protecting a son who might be “naturally bisexual” than one who was “naturally exclusively homosexual.”
And I expect the real pattern is a continuous rather than discrete one, with his policy aimed more at the bisexual end of the innate distribution.
Yes, David, already we know you’re content to throw gay people under the bus for the sake of pressuring bisexual children into conventional relationships. You made that point more than once the last time around.
No worries, you’re comfortably within the “racist grandparent analogue — will be dead soon enough” category.
How would Conrad keeping his young children from watching cartoons with gay couples in them actively worsen the lives of gay people?
I don’t follow that. I assume you agree that, insofar as sexual preference is innate, there is a more or less continuous range from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual.
Conrad’s view seems to be that the probability of someone adopting a homosexual lifestyle is increased if such a lifestyle is normalized in what he sees in childhood. That’s consistent with the position on the range being entirely innate at birth. Someone at the extreme homosexual end of the range ends up either homosexual, celibate, or in a heterosexual relationship to which he is entirely unsuited, and the first is probably the least bad outcome—and, in our current society, the most likely. Someone farther towards the center has the probability of ending up as a homosexual increased by early exposure, and Conrad views that as a bad outcome.
The part where he wishes it wasn’t a thing in general. The part where it’s one child with less of a concept what healthy gay relationships may or may not be because his dad is a homophobe with terrible priorities.
@ albatross11:
I harbor some concern about all of them I suppose, but they’re matters of different scope and intensity, with different sets of externalities. If I were to guess (hah) as to why (c) provokes the strongest reactions, it’s because suppression of homosexuality is something of a sore spot among many, not all of whom are necessarily themselves gay. It’s becoming downright unfashionable to express overt hatred of gays in polite society though, so most will have an excuse. Hence the inquisition.
(To flirt with a separate can of worms, IMO this is the best defense of things like disparate-impact analyses w.r.t. protected classes – bigotry is fully capable of subtlety, and there’s a point where a society might rationally decide that less harm is done by flipping the burden of proof. No comment as to how that justification plays out in current practice.)
It is not at all a coincidence that my challenge was designed to result in a set of empirical values disambiguating the three – if you can think of a better crucible, be my guest. To the degree to which Conrad has refused to answer, should I assume the worst? What else am I to make of his abject failure to substantiate his position, despite empty protestations to the contrary?
@ Nabil ad Dajjal:
No worries. If botched citations were nails in one’s coffin, I wouldn’t even bother with this whole vampirism thing.
Again, my main takeaways:
1) Decent evidence that age preference is a product of the sex of the preferer, not their orientation or the sex of the object of their attention.
2) Women have a narrower preferred age range centered on slightly-older-than-they. Men have a wider range in both directions which widens as they get older, and the lower threshold often stays around mid-20s. There is some evidence that men are also willing to go significantly older for short-term affairs (!), but this is sketchy for now.
3) Where age preferences conflict, female preferences are confirmed to take priority (!). Where preferences do not conflict… *ahem*.
That actually answers a few questions that I had after the last paper, and supports some of my theories while arguing against others. The fact that women tend to start having sex later than men (regardless of their orientation) actually argues against some of Antfolk’s proposed narratives, but it does suggest that some of the gay-straight gap among men is directly due to the influence of women. I’d kill for a few more then v. now comparisons, but I suppose I might have to actually go find those myself.
@ Conrad Honcho:
If someone has given you grief on the first or third, feel free to open the SJW toolkit and judo them for their problematic opinions. The second, yeah, you’re getting some pushback. Can you distinguish why one of those things might not be like the others?
Racism:homophobia as gang violence:STDs strikes me as valid, for example. Racism:STDs as black:gay, not so much. See above.
What the actual fuck? How many seconds has this been true for? Seriously, this is like claiming that the black guy usually lives through the horror movie.
Hitchens’ Razor. Also, I’ve been asking you for your metrics for a while now.
Conrad has consistently indicated that if and when it becomes clear that one of his children is gay he will adapt, making his position far more accepting than the one you have expressed just now and in the past.
(Unless you think that Conrad will inevitably wind up projecting bisexuality onto the kid in question if and when it comes down to it. That could be the case, but it’s not what he’s said he would do, and I try to limit my speculation about “hidden” motives to explanations of dodgy reasoning and skip the wholesale attributions of bad faith.)
Is there evidence about how exposure to pornography affects how often people have sex?
No, Conrad has made it clear over and over and over that his point is about the causes of homosexuality. You’re projecting a different view that you hold onto him. Read what he is saying.
Mr X:
Is there evidence of this kind for homosexuality as social stigma against it has decreased?
In both cases, it’s hard to use casual observations to decide between:
a. There’s more homosexuality now than before, as a result of less stigma and more positive portrayals of gays in media. (Peoples’ orientation is affected by subtle messages in media.)
b. There are more people willing to engage in gay sex or be in gay relationships now, because of less stigma and social hostility. (The price of being gay went down so more gayness was purchased.)
c. There’s the same number of gays and the same amount of gay sex, but now it doesn’t have to be hidden, so Adam and Steve no longer have to pretend to just be roommates. (The price of being out went down, so more gays came out.)
skef:
I’ll admit, I don’t see anything in David’s posts in this thread to suggest throwing anyone under the bus.
So we discourage bisexuals from entering homosexual relationships by not “normalizing” such relationships, and this is OK because “an exclusive homosexual … in our society, will probably end up in homosexual relationships whether or not he sees them normalized in his childhood.”
So what exactly does this “lack of normalization” consist of, that keeps the bisexuals away but is just neutral or whatever for gay people? Paint me a picture.
In this conversation so far, it seems to consist of Conrad not letting his small kids watch a couple shows that portray openly gay couples.
albatross11:
This specific discussion has recurred a number of times, and my responses to David Friedman relate partly to his contributions in past iterations. David’s views are more, shall we say, “game theoretic” than Conrad’s.
@albatross11:
Nonsense. That’s merely an example of what Conrad objects to.
He objects to his children seeing gay people, even fictional ones, at all for fear that it will (somehow?) make them vulnerable to being assaulted by gay sexual predators.
In other words, he objects to his children being taught, nay even being tangentially exposed to the idea, that gay people are acceptable as equal and unexceptional members of society.
Now, are we to assume that Conrad will teach his children absolutely nothing about people who are gay? If you believe that is the outcome which Conrad will genuinely pursue, I have a bridge in Brooklyn up for sale…
@Dick
I wasn’t trying to argue that “every study I’ve ever heard of that purports to show [a link between violent video games and real-life gun violence] is either fundamentally flawed and dishonest, or being interpreted dishonestly” (though that is true, too) I was trying to argue that “every study I’ve ever heard of that purports to show [that guns are the number 2 cause of death for children in America] is either fundamentally flawed and dishonest, or being interpretted dishonestly” for the reasons I described above: It is only true for “children” between 15-18 while people attempt to dishonestly imply it is true for all children, and even among that age group it is only true if you are including suicides, which would still be a problem if guns were unavailable, (albeit potentially a slightly reduced problem) and are also including gang violence, which is a cultural problem and not a gun problem, and is pretty easy to avoid by simply moving away from the places where it’s an issue, or otherwise keeping your children insulated from that culture. (Perhaps by encouraging them to participate in MLP fandom? :op )
I apologize if I was unclear on that point in my original post. I can see how it might have sounded like the stereotypical “video games don’t cause violence” argument, since I was attacking the steelman of my own creation (that video games encourage the ACTUAL number 2 causes of death among 15-18 year olds, a combination of suicide and gang violence) rather than anything you actually said. It just irks me when I see anti-gun propaganda thrown out as a side-note, as if it’s self-evidently true, when so much of it is pure bullshit, and don’t like to let it go unchallenged.
So no, I wasn’t accusing you of being the Jack Thompson in this scenario, I was accusing you of being the Dianne Feinstein. And as Scott’s election post pointed out, our position on Dianne Feinstein should be something we can ALL agree on! :op
That said, although I get what you’re trying to say, I still think that you’re making a particularly bad analogy, for the same reasons I described in my GTA example. You’re trying to say that Conrad is making the same argument as people who claim that video games cause violence, but the situations aren’t analogous. In the case of depictions of violence in video games, the violence may be depicted, but it is always treated, at best, as something abnormal, that larger than life heroes and villains do, not as something it would be okay for the player to do themselves, and in many cases it is intentionally portrayed in a negative light. This can hardly be called “normalizing” it. In the case of depictions of gay characters in childrens’ media, those depictions are specifically intended to normalize the idea of being gay; to show children that they should expect to see gay couples all the time, and to let kids who may turn out to be gay themselves know that it’s not something they need to be afraid of and hide, like gay people have been doing to their own detriment until only very recently. The idea that depictions of things might normalize them, while it was argued very poorly by people like Jack Thompson, isn’t an inherently absurd notion on its face, but what arguments like his fail to point out is that the intent and context behind those depictions matters far more than simply what is being depicted. I may disagree with Conrad as to whether or not normalizing homosexuality is a bad thing, but you can’t argue that is not what gay ponies are intended to do, while you can certainly make the argument that even the most gratuitous video game violence is not intended to normalize anything.
Friedman expands on his game-theoretic views here. He does consistently portray it as a reasonable way for a parent to behave, and as what Conrad advocates (although it isn’t) rather than what he would do, although at “grandchildren” the mask slips.
Presumably David is available to correct my impression. Perhaps he is as gnomic-ally disinterested as he always self-presents, those “additional medical risks” aside?
“The purpose of this experiment was to study the very nature of love itself.”
Would thinking of depictions of smoking help here?
Smoking is a lot like homosexuality:
1) Legal, but widely considered undesirable
2) Much more attractive to some people than others
3) Strongly associated with bad outcomes
But modern children’s media never shows people sitting around having a cigarette after dinner. It shows gay couples a lot.
This makes sense if you think the reason for “homosexuality associated with bad outcomes” have to do with stigma against homosexuality, rather than anything inherent to homosexuality. It makes very little sense if you think that a lot of the bad outcomes are inherent.
SamChevre, there are complicating factors with that comparison; see my response last time you mentioned this. I’d add now that since orientation is seen as more stable and less of a “choice” than smoking is—that is, by folks who see it as less open to influence—, there’s a kind of shift in priorities in how it’s portrayed, with intent to show a healthy lifestyle rather than discourage it outright. So some see discouraging it as just ineffective or futile, while others see it as immoral. After all, even if Conrad were right, some people are definitely ending up gay anyway—and when they don’t have those healthy portrayals, what happens to them?
On the other hand, some of the same really could be said for smoking. Where we would be as a culture if our strategy had not been eliminating smoking from much of television but instead portraying healthier ways of smoking, like only smoking half a pack a day, or only vaping? Are we thereby condemning those smokers who are already addicted, or those few who are going to end up addicted anyway? Not intending a gotcha here, given the dissimilarities to homosexuality I’ve already noted; I’m genuinely interested in the rationale for this strategy.
@skef:
We already know that people tend to imitate what they see portrayed as good, so Honcho’s argument is based on a well-known fact about human behaviour (even though we don’t know for certain whether or not it applies in this case, it’s still not unreasonable to think it probably does). Conversely, I’m not aware of any causal mechanism which would make depictions of Judaism cause people to become homosexual, so your analogy isn’t actually analogous at all.
@DeWitt:
There are plenty of socially-liberal gay-friendly countries, as well as socially-liberal gay-friendly parts of the US. Homosexuals have worse outcomes in these places as well. How do you explain that, if it’s all just a matter of nasty social conservatives persecuting them?
Yes. I live in one of them; not one country let the gays marry before we did, things are generally considered fine.
Because you’re an idiot who hasn’t stuck his head out the front door to see what things are like, and instead believe the people who praise Europe or God knows where else as some kind of paradise.
A couple years ago, I worked inside of a warehouse for a couple months to help install a new floor over there. A couple weeks in, I was privy to a conversation that went something like so:
Alex: DeWitt, you doing anything this weekend?
Me: yeah, I’ve got a birthday coming up, what about you?
Alex: oh I’m gonna go drink some beers with Ron and bash gays
Me: .. er, wha?
Alex: yeah, we’ll toss back a sixpack or two and then go to the parking lot of [club] late at night, they’re easy pickings
This guy wasn’t even showboating; he spoke of it all very casually. It’s not an isolated incident: googling in my native language gives way to plenty people who do this. It’s a thing, if not Newton’s law of thermodynamics, and I have faith in society’s capabilities to solve issues like these.
That is, if we agree the very real evil sorts doing the beating are the problem. Not some amount of people being gay, certainly not some random animators having boy and girl ponies in a gaudy show hold hands in the background. Gay people aren’t going away; people beating them up over it just might, if you could shrow a shred of courage and decency.
@ Vorkon
I just googled and took the first thing I saw, which was about 10-14 year olds and definitely combined gun suicides with gun homicides (which is reasonable in this context but might not be in some other argument). The point isn’t affected by guns being the 3rd or 4th or 7th cause of death or whatever you think the right number is.
Both are “seeing X on TV will lead to more X” and both are plausible but neither has solid evidence either way. I’m not arguing that one is more true than the other, I’m saying that having a strong opinion that one is very likely true and the other is very likely false (which Conrad’s position rests on) is not supported by evidence.
Ah, so presumably you are aware of a causal mechanism which “would” make depictions of homosexuality to become homosexual? Are you planning to publish?
The model here, I presume, is something like depictions of firefighters making children want to become firefighters. Except given the early childhood evidence, there are personality traits associated with firefighter propensity — no big issue. But, of course, this window of firefighting consideration subsequently closes, and after that there are a few people who can be interested in firefighting or other jobs, but most never show an interest in firefighting again, while others can’t be interested in any other job no matter how much social pressure is placed on them. Indeed, people under the most social pressure are sometimes sent to reeducation camps, and even those that have internalized the social stigma to the largest extent, and on one level hate being a firefighter with all their hearts, just can’t seem to kick the firefighting thing.
Checks out.
I don’t know about causal mechanism, but there is the recent study that fewer than half of teenagers today identify as entirely straight. This seems to coincide with the widespread acceptance and propagandizing of homosexuality. That doesn’t mean they’re doing anything homosexual (in fact I think right now teenage sex is at the lowest levels ever recorded).
As for DeWitt’s contention that the negative outcomes are because of society “treating them like shit,” we could also look to see if there’s any significant correlation between the vastly improved social acceptance of gays over the past two decades and changes in the poor life outcomes. To my knowledge there is not. And I don’t really see how people not accepting gays makes gays more likely to, say, get diseases.
I speculate that the poor life outcomes for gays are inherent to the nature of homosexual relationships: short term pleasure seeking does not tend to lead to long-term health and happiness. Heterosexual pursuit of sex historically coincided with pro-social behavior like marriage and families. Today the heterosexual sex scene is degenerating, coinciding with the rise of hook-up culture. See the current issue of The Atlantic for various articles on the subject.
Also, with regards to “portrayals make people want to do stuff” and violent video games, the difference is that violence, even in video games, is portrayed as exceptional, a necessary evil in response to worse violence from the villains. I wouldn’t be quite so circumspect about modern portrayals of gays in the media if one or two of the gays on Glee got hooked on party drugs, caught a venereal disease, committed suicide or something so at least it sort of reflected reality. And while I’ll let my kid heroically kill monsters in video games, GTA will have to wait until he’s much older.
At the end of the day, I still think an awful lot of you are engaged in exceptional thinking because of some special status you’ve afforded homosexuality. If I said, “you know, all things considered, I’d prefer my kid be like the rest of my family, with professions in engineering, law, medicine, the military and the like. While I don’t have anything against carnies, don’t wish them any ill will, and have all the best wishes for them, I’m going to abstain from extolling the virtues of the carnie life to my kid, not take him to carnivals and cheer and wave flags for the carnies working there, and not show him pro-carnie propaganda. If, however, it turns out that his life ambition is to operate the Tilt-A-Whirl, so be it and God bless him” nobody would have any problem and no one would expect me to prove that unalloyed positive depictions of the carnie lifestyle might encourage a kid to try his hand at being a carnie. It would be accepted as obvious.
ETA: Also, equating not letting your kids watch “Modern Family” to getting drunk and beating up homosexuals in a parking lot is a pretty good sign you’re engaged in a purity spiral.
I’ve said before I’m not anti-gay, and get lambasted for being insufficiently pro-homosexual. I have close gay friends, support gay political causes, am opposed to the denigration of homosexuals, voted for gay marriage, but since all things considered I’d rather not expose my kids to it I’m the same as drunken violent thugs in a parking lot. Clapping for Stalin levels of insanity.
Yeeeah, that’s my exit.
edit to add: DeWitt didn’t compare you to thugs in a parking lot, he said that as a rebuttal to the idea that societal stigma against gays is a thing of the past. He made it very clear that he wasn’t accusing you of it, he was accusing you of being unaware of it.
@ DeWitt:
I come from Europe and have lived in several countries over the course of my life, so you might want to come up with a different way of insulting me.
Define “plenty”. A large absolute number might nevertheless be an insignificant portion of the population of an entire country.
I see. So gay subculture encourages promiscuity and other risky sexual behaviours because some people sometimes beat up gays? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the causal mechanisms behind this.
@ Dick:
How on earth is it plausible that seeing Judaism on TV will lead to more homosexuality?
Would you say this is more or less charitable than considering ambiguously gay ponies on a kids’ show appearing in a background role the same as pederasty, suicide, and HIV? 80% as charitable, 30?
Nah.
It’s true for someone who’s lived in any country. ‘Several countries are liberal and gay friendly, CHECKMATE’ really is an idiot’s argument, whether you’re wrong about your own or someone else’s country.
The amount of people who think beating gay dudes’ teeth out with construction equipment is understandably not very well tracked. The amount of such violent incidents is tracked a little better, and even there the rate of reporting is low. The amount of people who are just as evil but not as dumb about it is likely higher. It’s enough, all in all, to have a very real chilling effect on the gay community.
If this isn’t enough of an explanation for plenty, too bad. Come up with a better one if it bothers you.
Pithy tone aside, yes, absolutely. If gays aren’t part of polite society, they don’t lose out by showing gauche behavior. If gays are part of polite society, shaming them for such behavior instead of shaming them for being gay on principle could be a strategy that actually works.
One person talking about beating up gays doesn’t prove that gays face a significant amount of stigma in their personal lives. If I overhear somebody saying “Man, I hate those poshos, let’s go to the rich part of town and throw stones through their windows,” would that prove that wealthy people are faced with crushing prejudice from the rest of society?
But have you heard about Brendan Eich?
You didn’t ask for proof, you dumbly asserted that surely gays must be treated just fine outside of red tribe America so that when they have worse outcomes there it must all be their own fault. It’s a wrong belief, and I explained why that’s so; you’re very free to tell me how I’d go about proving that gays do in fact get treated like shit in most of the world, even the places some naive blue tribe kids think must be paradise.
@ Skef:
Yes, because a major company imposing ideological tests on its workforce is exactly the same as a random warehouse worker punching people for fun.
@ DeWitt:
Firstly, I never mentioned “most of the world”, just socially-liberal gay-friendly parts of the world. If you’re going to contest the claim that such places exist, you’re going to need a lot more evidence than a single conversation you were allegedly involved in. And “naïve blue tribe kids”? I’ve told you already that I’m not an American. You’re clearly unwilling or incapable of reading what I’ve actually written, and since I have better things to do with my time than listen in on you arguing with figments of your own imagination, I think I’ll bow out of the conversation.
That would be “seeing X on TV will lead to more Y” and I have no idea why anyone brought that up or thought it was relevant. I was responding to and quoting a post from Vorkon.
No. You prove that such parts do exist – not just ‘more gay friendly than rural Alabama,’ friendly enough that being gay is on par or better than being straight, any state-sized piece of land will do, and then we’ll see about the claim what this does for the QALY of gay dudes. As-is, you made a poor argument, decided mine was obviously wrong, and keep on refusing to provide evidence for your own claim. If you want to tell me N=1 is bad, fine, but so far you’re on N=0.
You mean a major company imposing ideological tests on its chief executive, who as a result has been entirely deprived of his Silicon Valley career.
You think it might be more of a “it could affect me, it won’t affect me” distinction at play here?
“Close” as in visiting-the-house “close”? Do you establish “ground rules” or do they tend to get with the program without prompting?
(I think I have these responses in the right place, apologize if I don’t)
If the child is male, that seems plausible. I don’t have statistics, but the only cases I see of a male minor having sex with a female adult involve pretty old minors, typically a high school kid with one of his teachers.
Skef writes (about me):
I think the relevant bit of the comment of mine he links to is:
I think that was Conrad’s position, but he can correct me if I am mistaken.
I’m not sure what the mask was. When my children were growing up there was no television available to them (there was one kept in a closet for when their older half brother visited and wanted to watch sports games) but they had unlimited internet access. I had a generally negative impression of teen culture and was glad that home unschooling reduced their exposure to it, but that had nothing to do with issues of homosexuality. It’s true, however, that I would prefer my children to end up in heterosexual marriages, in part because I like having grandchildren
I’m not seeing much information in your post, other than the impression that you are not fond of me, so I don’t know what you want me to correct. I offered reasons why it might be reasonable for a parent to prefer that his children not be exposed to positive images of homosexual relationships.
I would have thought that being looked down on made one more vulnerable to the disapproval of the majority, not less.
But in any case, it seems to me that the features of homosexual behavior being discussed have a much simpler explanation–gays are male. Males generally have a greater taste for promiscuity than females, and in the mm context an easy opportunity to indulge it.
DeWitt, I can’t resolve anything out of your comments other than your opinion that I’m evil.
What exactly is it that we factually disagree about?
You seem to think gays have it worse than straights in society. I 100% agree with you. That’s why, all else being equal, it would be a load off if my kid doesn’t turn out to be gay. He’s already white, American, male, Christian, upper-middle class, (by all appearances) cis, if he’s just straight, too, by God he’s got it made. If he were a superhero his alter ego would be “Captain Patriarchy” and his catchphrase “PRIVILEGE OVERWHELMING.” Sounds like a pretty good life, which is sort of the thing parents aspire to give to their kids.
My reading of the literature is that the causes of homosexuality are unknown, but there also doesn’t seem to be any definitive biological cause. There’s no genetic test, or blood or hormone test for gayness. There also exist cultures far more or far less gay than neighboring cultures, strongly suggesting there’s a social construct component to sexual orientation. Do you disagree with this?
If not, well it follows then that if you want the best outcome for your kid (which is objectively straight and not gay), and social factors play into whether your kid is straight or gay, then one should emphasize the social factors that tend towards “straight” and away from the ones that tend towards “gay.” We don’t know exactly what those are, but a big contender for the things to avoid would be propaganda that extols the virtues of the gay lifestyle while hiding the downsides.
This has essentially zero cost to anyone. No gay is made worse off by me not showing my kid gay propaganda. My kid is not any worse off by not seeing gay propaganda. The “cost” of, say, not taking my kid to a gay pride parade is…negative. We get to stay home and play video games or watch movies or whatever. It seems like a really simple “do this, not that” scenario and yet here we are.
Where can we go from here? Do we have any factual disagreements at all? Or is the only problem that, on the margin, I care more about my kid’s well-being than about gay politics?
I am still really curious though if anyone can tell me how they came to this moral paradigm. Is unalloyed support of homosexuality the highest moral good? Is there anything at all higher?
Female porn star August Ames killed herself after intense criticism because she refused to perform a sex scene with a gay man. Was she right to do so? I would have thought a good terminal value would be “a woman (or man) may refuse anyone entering her body for any reason or no reason at all” but is it not, if a homosexual might feel uncomfortable about her refusal?
My child’s well-being is not a reasonable excuse to upset a homosexual. The woman’s preference in sexual partners is not a reasonable excuse to upset a homosexual. Is there any, at all, reasonable excuse to upset a homosexual?
And so if parents would rather their child not marry a Jew, (and can convince themselves that the child would be unhappy married to a Jew), is it fine if they arrange for whatever portrayals of Judaism serving that purpose? In their own homes, of course?
Edit: Sorry, I meant to say “divert their mate search away from Semitic genotypes.”
skef, there’s a stereotype that Jewish mothers encourage their daughters to marry Jewish doctors.
Assuming that stereotype is true, is it wrong for them to do so? Should they be publicly shamed for this behavior?
There is a lot of leeway in the word “encourage”. But if the encouragement approaches what might be called “emotional blackmail” or bringing economic pressure to bear on the daughter, yes, I would say that public shaming of the parent would not be inappropriate. In practice, obviously, what becomes public in the first place will depend on each of the parties chooses to tell someone else about. And of course these days the nature of “public” everything has become so extreme that many people are rightly choosing to keep issues out of it.
But if a parent tells me they’re pressuring their daughter into marriage because “they know what will make her happy”, more likely than not I’ll give that person an earful.
Parents can be shitty to their children in all sorts of ways, and I’m not moved by how some of those ways are socially preserved. I’m very happy to live in a culture where the first decision you get to make is well before choosing the flower arrangement for your parent’s funeral. I hope things move further along those lines worldwide. The benevolence of parenting is exaggerated.
All this said, however, things are necessarily different when it comes to parenting minors, so I’m not sure my views on parents pushing around adult children are all that relevant. Broadly speaking, the topic of ongoing argument is whether and how it is OK to manipulate the epistemic environment of one’s minor children to promote desired outcomes. And in present day that means quite minor children, unless the idea is homeschooling + “extreme” acquaintance vetting. (I definitely object to that combination, but have no particular objections to the former alone. Regular school + extreme acquaintance vetting sounds silly.)
Part of the problem (or perhaps “challenge”) of such manipulation is that you don’t just get to choose the consequences. To give a simple example, if you suppress the existence of homosexuality in your house, when your kids learn about it later they could wind up as unconvinced about your intentions as some of the people here are, no matter what you say. And that could have further implications in any number of directions, from them thinking you unfairly think badly of homosexuals to their thinking far worse of homosexuals than you do.
Marrying someone with a serious physical disability can also be hard. You describe homosexuality in ways akin to physical disability. What would you feel free to do on that subject? Would a cartoon pony in a wheelchair count as propaganda?
@Nick:
You and others already brought up the Lamb/alicorn/lion. I just wanted to say it’s a shame that MLP hasn’t used the word “Houyhnhnm.”
This actually got pretty erudite. There have been flashbacks to before the rule of the Solar and Lunar princesses that showed pegasi as ancient Greeks and unicorns as a Central Asian civilization or even Chinese (which is less correct). Cerberus, Orthros, hydras, chimeras and manticores are among the fauna of Equestria, which contains the gates of Tartarus (Centaur Satan is imprisoned there, except for that time Cerberus wandered off to play, and they sent a Chaos deity to stop him due to the two’s history as frenemies. Cf. Paradise Lost II. 😛 )
Griffons are copied from Herodotus* right down to the detail that guys called Arimaspi steal their gold (“The Lost Treasure of Griffonstone”, Season 5). Dragons also have their own country.
Sphinxes and Aztec mythological creatures have shown up as exotic far-off creatures in episodes featuring Daring Do, an Indiana Jones/J.K. Rowling Expy (no, really…) The tech level and history implied by Indy-like travel to distant exotic lands is not very consistent with lands beyond Equestria being depicted as completely unknown in the movie where they opened diplomatic relations with the hippogriffs/hippocampi…
*Except they don’t eat ponies. Family-friendly and all.
I don’t think parents should lie to their children. But under the assumed circumstances, I think it would be OK for them to avoid suggesting that their children read Spinning Silver, which gives an attractive picture of Jewish culture, even if they share my high opinion of the book. Or The Joys of Yiddish, ditto.
There is a couple who are friends of ours. She is Chinese American, he is Croatian American. Their parents knew each other professionally–hers ran Chinese restaurants, his were wholesale butchers.
Both sets of parents did their best to keep the two kids apart. Hers thought American men didn’t treat their wives well. His thought the children of a mixed marriage would have problems. As anyone who knew the couple might have predicted, the parents were unsuccessful–the two are happily married with four children. We attended the wedding of their older daughter earlier this year.
Ex post, the parents were wrong. But given their beliefs, I don’t think it was wrong for them to try to arrange matters in a way that would make it less likely that the two would end up falling in love and getting married. And I have seen no evidence that either of the two resents the parents’ unsuccessful efforts.
Is that because you think the parents are probably wrong or because even if they are right they shouldn’t try to influence the daughter’s choice?
You don’t specify what “pressuring” means here. I think there are limits to what things it is proper for people to do with regard to each other, including parents and children–my view of the limits on how parents ought to behave is I think unusually stringent. But within those limits I don’t see anything wrong with parents trying to influence their children in ways they believe will be in the children’s interest.
And I don’t think what Conrad describes himself as doing violates those limits.
No, I guess I didn’t in the particular sentence you quoted, but I did say
…
Its because I think influence among adults should be limited to convincing, and manipulating through threats or emotional outbursts is inappropriate, partly because it is cruel. The ends don’t justify the means.
I can say that I take you and Conrad to have made different points arbitrarily many times and you’ll just ignore them all won’t you?
Look back. Conrad hasn’t referenced a creepy breeding program even once.
A couple things.
Firstly, I disagree on the matter of gayness being influenced by social factors very much. The science can’t find a gay gene(possibly yet), but neither can it account for closeted or suppressed gays very well. Intuitively, I find ‘social pressure keeps gays from coming out or even accepting themselves’ a much more reasonable argument than ‘social pressure turns perfectly straight people bi or gay.’
Secondly, I don’t agree that this will lead to bad outcomes for your or even anyone’s child. I don’t think straight people are going to end up gay because of gaudy boy and girl ponies shown holding hands. I think that, insofar gayness currently is socially determined, it’s about revealing preference more than developing it. The pressure on kids not to be gay is overwhelmingly stronger than the reverse is, and increasing numbers of gay people likely are more about them feeling safe and okay about accepting themselves than the environment genuinely making them gay.
Unless, that is, we hide them from public view. Gay issues such as suicide, depression, what have you, are those I find much more likely to correlate with poor acceptance of gays than with something inherent about gayness.
Which brings me to my third issue: it does hurt other people if and when gay people are not to be seen. Acceptance is a long ways off, and neutral portrayment of gays, not even the saintly kind some people argue for, should help with that.
All that said.. I don’t think you’re an evil, or even a bad person. You’re obviously trying to be good, and I don’t know you nearly well enough to make judgements like so. I do think this one practice is a poor one, and I’d rather that you didn’t, but that really is all.
Here is what I wrote when I noticed you making that claim:
—
—
That is what you mean by ignoring it?
Wanting to have grandchildren is a creepy breeding program?
Threats and emotional outbursts are inappropriate—and have no connection with anything either Conrad or I has been arguing for. He was talking about decisions that affect what works a child gets exposed to. In the case I described and you ignored, my guess is that both sets of parents conspired to try to minimize the degree to which the work their children were doing as part of the family firms put them together—scheduling him to make deliveries at times when she wasn’t there to receive them or the like. That’s only a guess—I don’t remember if my friends ever gave me a more detailed account. As best I could tell, their relationship with their parents remained cordial.
Sorry to burst into a thread without reading it.
DeWitt wrote:
I’ve always been curious about the city-state Greeks with respect to this.
DavidFriedman wrote:
Often enough the actions taken by (some of) the prospective grandparents to get those grandchildren is, yes.
http://www.katsandogz.com/onchildren.html
Issendai is a great place to see how extreme it can get, though this is after the grandchildren already exist: http://issendai.com/wp/estrangement/259/
I asked Conrad a question about portrayals of Judiasm, and he responded (without answering my question) with a related question:
The comment you are referring to was my response to this question. Note his use of the word “encourage”, and my discussion at the top of the word “encourage”.
Now, I don’t know how many Jewish mothers have tried to convince their daughters to marry Jewish doctors, and how they have gone about doing it. But I am familiar with the stereotype, which is what Conrad explicitly references in his question. And in that stereotype, the Jewish mother is not just making a dispassionate argument for marrying a Jewish doctor.
So what I did, at the top of my response, was clarify the level of “encouragement” I was going to discuss further, and then I discussed that.
Again leaving what actual Jewish mothers do about Jewish doctors out of the equation, more generally parents use those kinds of tactics on their children all the time. I have witnessed it personally and had many discussions about it. It is a mainstay of advice column letters.
It would indeed be unfair of me to accuse Conrad of acting that way, because he has given no indication he would act that way. And my answering his question does not constitute any such accusation. It’s not there.
Much of your career has rested on academic research. Unless that work is total crap top to bottom, which is not its reputation, you must be able to read with more comprehension than you’re managing in many of the these threads.
You, like many other people here, probably think I am insufficiently respectful of certain views and regulars here. But there are two ways in which I consistently show respect that are directly relevant to what this venue at least claims to be about.
The first is that I try to answer all the questions I am asked. I didn’t see Conrad’s question about treatment of adult offspring as necessarily relevant to what we were discussing, and I explained why, but I answered it first regardless. I did not just imply a response by asking another question. And I did not prattle on about how I “just don’t understand your mental model!” while repeatedly avoiding discussion of any examples, like you did on the tax thread the other day, probably because the examples were inconvenient and you’re a twat.
The second thing I consistently do is to put a lot of effort into trying to respond to the specific arguments and claims people make. I don’t always succeed in interpreting correctly, but I always try. I may bring up hidden motives and alternative paths of reasoning for conclusions, but I label them as such and also discuss the reasoning offered. You are not making this effort, at least when it comes to what I post here. At all.
Here, DavidFriedman, is a separate followup on why I am so put off by your “bisexual calculating” (which, again, is not the view Conrad has expressed in this or earlier threads).
That game-theoretic view is, of course, not at all novel. It seems to be a natural destination in the reasoning of many parents through at least the 90s. Unfortunately, other people out in the world calculate too. And the combined calculation has yielded little but misery.
You are definitely right that a) bisexuals exist and b) they can be encouraged into heterosexual relationships. Indeed, more often than not they arrive at this conclusion for themselves without any need of explicit encouragement. I have met a number of self-proclaimed male bisexuals. None has been in what anyone would call a “relationship” with another man at the time.
This background social situation is consistent enough to have yielded resentment on both sides. However things work out in practice (they’re not actually all that bad these days), gay men are generally looking for at least the opportunity of romantic attachment. Thus they are often suspicious of bisexual men, given the worry that they will eventually pair with a woman to have kids, leaving “other-woman analogue” as the best romantic possibility. Many bisexual men resent this assumption, because they are open to romance at the time and feel accused of “pre-crime”.
Anyway, here’s the relevant point: Actual bisexual men already have a good idea of what their parents want, and don’t generally bring up their bisexuality with their parents. Or at least they don’t in pairing-related discussions. It might be approached later, maybe on someone’s deathbed.
Gay men also know what their parents want, and are very worried about disappointing their parents. Thus — and this is common enough to be a cliche — at the point where the issue of same-sex attraction can’t be put off further, they often tell their parents that they are bisexual.
Together, this means that in the past, although there are many bisexual men and also many gay men, most men who tell their parents that they are bisexual are gay. For the most part, bisexual men discuss their same-sex attraction with potential partners. Gay men who do not want to maintain fake heterosexual relationships or appear celibate don’t have that option, but they can claim to be bisexual.
I hope it is clear where the combination of everyone’s calculating most often leads. The gay man does not want to tell the parents that he is gay, so he says he is bisexual. The parent, calculating as you suggest, then gives the gay man his or her unvarnished views on the nature of gay life.
I have had many second-person discussions about these “talks”. “Thrown under the bus” is metaphorical, but does not exaggerate. These moments are among the very worst in the children’s lives. They create a rift in the relationship that is very difficult to overcome. And having a deep rift with one’s parents is one thing that can lead, as they say, to “poor outcomes.”
I’ll note, once again, that nothing Conrad has said about the origins of homosexual attraction implies this particular calculation. That doesn’t mean he’s not at any risk of making the same mistake; what he thinks and is doing leaves the issue open. So I do not take anything I have said on this subject to reflect on Conrad, or as advice to Conrad more than it is advice to anyone that reads it.
Effort I can’t observe. Results I can. That quote is from you responding to a comment by me in which I quoted my response to a point of yours that your previous comment accused me of always ignoring.
Another part of the exchange was your accusing me of referring to a “creepy breeding program.” Either you really have no idea of why someone would want grandchildren or you are reading my comments through a distorting filter generated by your intense dislike for me.
I have no idea what you are talking about. “The other day” isn’t very specific, and an attempt to search this and the previous open thread produced no plausible answers. Nor did a general google search.
I’m referring to the extensive discussion that spanned two threads and happened less than a month ago. In which I asked you several times how your plan would apply to Apple as compared to a traditional manufacturing corporation and you primarily restarted your high-level position over and over and ignored my questions.
Correct. Nor do I see its relevance to anything I said.
You are describing a particular mistake that parents of sons only attracted to males might make. You may well be correct–pretty clearly you have more relevant data than I do. But we were arguing about whether it was reasonable for a parent to avoid showing his young son images that normalized the idea of homosexual relationships, and I don’t see the relevance of your point to that.
You say you are in favor of convincing not pressuring. That becomes an issue at a much later point. Do you think a parent who believes that ending up as a practicing homosexual has worse life results than ending up as a practicing heterosexual should conceal that belief from his adolescent son? If not, and if the son thinks well of the father, the son will want to believe that the more attractive option is open to him, leading to just the problem you described.
The only sense I can make of your argument in the context of my and Conrad’s comments is that you think the attempt to think rationally about these issues leads to bad outcomes. That could be true, but I don’t know of a better way of thinking about such things.
But that probably isn’t your point.
For purposes of illustration, let’s just go ahead and lean on the disability model. Do I think that a parent of a child with a physical disability should be very careful about expressing disappointment about that disability, to the point of keeping some thoughts to his or her self? I do think that. And I think that similar considerations apply to the case you ask about, and “wanting grandchildren” is a poor excuse for making one’s kid feel like shit.
One of the points I have been making is that thinking in these cases is not always as rational as claimed. The parent of the child with a disability will typically, in virtue of rational thinking, know better. But even when a son is explicit with a parent about his homosexuality, a parent’s desires often lead to his or her projecting bisexuality onto the son, and the conversation proceeds in the same way. That’s not rational thinking, it’s wishful thinking.
Skef responded:
That’s not relevant to my question, because the issue was not expressing disappointment but conveying information. The information that a physical disability is a bad thing to have is unnecessary, since obvious, and also serves no function, since the disability is already there. The analogous case would be a father warning his son against some hobby which had a significant chance of leading to a disability, and pointing out why that would be a very bad thing to happen.
The point of both Conrad’s argument and my defense of it is that, ex-ante, the father does not know that his son is or will be attracted only to males. Both of us are arguing that some sons will be somewhere between obligate homosexual and obligate heterosexual and some choices made by the parents will effect how likely the son will be to end up as a practicing homosexual. You can’t engage with the argument while ignoring that, which is what you are trying to do.
The topic here is talking to offspring at least of the age where sexual attraction has come into the picture. You’ve just said that disability is not a point of comparison because “the disability is already there”. In doing this, you are either denying the existence of homosexuality as an orientation, or asserting that even a man exclusively attracted to other men should couple and pro-create with a woman anyway. The first is wrong, the second is selfish and callous.
This is indeed the impression I picked up on from your initial posts on the subject, and have been responding to the whole time.
Since your second point rests on ambiguity, I’ll draw a different analogy.
Suppose that your son has just experienced a serious sports injury. The doctor says that he might have a complete recovery, but it is likely he will walk slowly and with a limp for the rest of his life. Would that be a good time to share “information” about how that life will be different, and he will have many fewer opportunities than other people? Is there a good time for that?
Suppose you think that effort in rehab will make a full recovery somewhat more likely, although it’s far from clear how much more. Is it then OK to scare your kid into that effort? What if it doesn’t work?
@ Skef
One example from OT 113.25 — your response to David Friedman:
I’m one of those people who think you’re insufficiently respectful, and despite your self-congratulatory remarks above, I still think it. You also seem to behave extra poorly when it comes to interacting with David Friedman.
ISTM that the core question here is about basically four different impacts of parenting intended to minimize the chances that your children will end up gay.
Individual effects:
a. Good: If your kid is in the range where he can be swayed toward heterosexuality by your parenting, then he gets better life outcomes.
b. Bad: If your kid is not in that range, and is bound to end up gay, then that parenting might have a pretty negative effect. (Probably not if you just don’t show him pro-gay media messages, but quite plausibly if you spend a lot of time talking about how you’d disown any child of yours who turned out gay or something).
Social effects:
c. Lots of parents doing this may make homosexuality less common, presumably leading to better outcomes overall, if it dissuades other kids in the range where they could be pushed one way or the other toward heterosexuality.
d. Lots of parents doing this may push social norms toward less acceptance of gays, making life harder for people who are going to end up gay no matter what.
I think figuring out the likely impact requires having some idea of how large a fraction of kids are likely to be in the range where they could be pushed one way or another by parenting choices. And it also requires specifically talking about what parenting techniques are in question.
FWIW, my guess is that the fraction who’s going to be affected by parenting styles enough to matter is pretty small (so that Conrad’s techniques probably won’t matter much), and on the other side that Conrad’s described techniques probably aren’t going to do much harm in the case that one of his kids ends up gay.
I strongly suspect that several of the people reacting most strongly against his techniques are thinking about techniques much more likely to be damaging. *Lots* of gays had to face being essentially disowned and kicked out of their families when they came out, and while blocking pro-gay media messages isn’t going to screw up any kids you have who turn out gay, disowning them and never speaking to them again probably will.
One way we might get some information about how susceptible gayness is to parental choices would be to look at adoption studies. If homosexuality among adoptive siblings (no genetic relation) is reasonably strongly correlated, that would suggest that parenting matters. If there’s little or no correlation, then probably parenting within the normal range of American parenting styles (which does sometimes include limiting access to media, interacting or not interacting socially with openly gay people, etc.) doesn’t have much effect.
This is accurate, and comes from a bias on my part, but not a political one. This context is generally allergic to influence from authority or reputation except when it comes to David Friedman. The statements of our host get at least an order of magnitude more scrutiny than his statements do. That’s not his fault, but rather than lean away and pat down he just basks in it. It makes me ill and I overcompensate. His affected detachment doesn’t help.
At this point it should be obvious that when I’m here, it’s not to make friends. From the very beginning, when my attitude was much more neutral and my contributions had more variety, there have been almost no favorable comments. By the two most reliable scores — favorable citations outside of a thread, and defenses from hyperbolic attacks (and there have been some of those — I’m basically at zero. Occasionally someone will agree with a point, basically no one has ever said they want me around. If I weren’t OK with that I would have stayed away for that reason long ago.
Shouldn’t I, then, have learned my lesson from this by now? Yes. I’ve learned that this is the place where libertarian and various other rightish views are to be argued and, thus tested, demonstrated to succeed. That doesn’t really work with Fox morning show levels of fanaticism, and going on The View doesn’t help. You need an Alan Colmes, rest his soul! And I am not an Alan Colmes. Nor do I wish to be.
I originally came here to pass the time through argument. The homosexuality-adjacent stuff is actually an exception to the rule that most of what I’ve said here is not much tied to any particular position I hold. (My response to Plumber was another recent exception.) And I was, honest to god, purposely sitting out this iteration of the ongoing Honcho Program debate, and then he went and suggested an adversarial collaboration. It’s on him the time, I plausibly claim.
Good lord, after I was out of the picture a while you all started tone-policing HeelBearCub of all people. Almost no one called Matt M on his ongoing pattern of crap until he was banned, which prompted a dozen “yes, but!”s It would be funny if it weren’t sad.
Added: I do not mean to imply that HeelBearCub is an Alan Colmes. Just that he is a gentle soul relative to myself.
Since I’m here I’ll clarify that the overwhelming majority of my part of the argument with Conrad Honcho on this subject is about the origin of same-sex attraction in the abstract. That is, I have been arguing about the facts of sexual orientation and not taking a moral stance about what he is doing as a parent. Part of that argument has involved accusations of motivated reasoning, as an explanation for some of the points he makes.
I have also sometimes commented on ways that what he is doing could potentially be of harm. But I don’t have strong views on that subject. Compared to, for example, using emotional blackmail to direct outcomes, it’s not even worth mentioning. And my taking something as open to criticism should not be construed as taking it as something that should be prevented by force or even shaming. Nothing about his actions is a big deal, in my view.
Many times people have taken me to be raising only moral objections and to be arguing about what Conrad should or should not be doing. I appreciate that Conrad himself has never done this.
I am doing neither. I am asserting the existence of various levels of bisexuality as orientations.
If the son is obligate homosexual, then there is no reason to discourage him from becoming a practicing homosexual (from my standpoint–a Catholic might disagree). It might still be desirable to warn him about potential risks of that lifestyle, point out the advantages of long term commitment, provided he can find a suitable partner, over casual promiscuity.
You complain that I’m not responding to you, but I have been making the point over and over again that the argument for avoiding inputs that normalize homosexuality is to make it more likely that someone who is not innately obligate homosexual will end up as a practicing heterosexual. It should be obvious that that has been Conrad’s point throughout as well–that whether someone ends up as a practicing homosexual depends in part on innate characteristics, in part on environmental ones, hence an environment that does not encourage him to do so will reduce the probability that he will–but of course not to zero.
Does “scare your kid into that effort” correspond to “explain to your kid why that effort is worth making”? If so, why shouldn’t you, assuming you believe it is true?
There is no problem with doing it that way, as long as you are careful.
There are a number of differences between what you have been saying and what Conrad has described, but the most relevant in this case is that Conrad is omitting information about homosexuality, not supplying it. It’s just not the same thing at all.
But clarification is easy in this case. You’re making a point about what it’s fine for parents to do. You have not indicated it is not something you wouldn’t personally do, and the commentary about the positive aspects of encouraging grandchildren indicate you would do something along the lines of what you describe. So give a scenario. What age are we talking about, what if anything prompts the discussion, and what would you say? Or what are you envisioning “a parent” saying?
I’ve made a lot of hay about the “diverts mate search” statement (or tried to) in part because switching to that kind of pseudo-scientific language sounds creepy. And it sounds creepy because it’s euphemistic. People tend to retreat into that language when the plain thing sounds bad. And because it has a built-in motte — there’s always something completely innocent that falls under the description.
So, to discuss this properly we need at least one example. Conrad’s point isn’t relevant to this — he’s not saying anything at present. Give an age and scenario, and show us how to nudge a son towards a heterosexual relationship.
@skef —
Scott’s statements get an order of magnitude more scrutiny than mine, too. Or yours. Or just about anyone else’s, as long as “everyone else” doesn’t happen to e.g. be named “Eliezer Yudkowsky”.
That isn’t because Scott deserves it in some moral sense, and it isn’t because the rest of us are just that awesome. It’s because we’re all (well, mostly) here because we’re pretty impressed by Scott, and also because we’re all (well, mostly) obnoxious contrarians who would like nothing better than to make somebody we greatly like and respect look stupid in comparison to us.
Scott’s the fastest gun in the West around here. David isn’t. That’s all.
I wasn’t clear about why I brought Scott in as a point of comparison, so I’ll expand.
What I’m talking about might be characterized as an “initial degree of skepticism” about a given statement, generally followed by critical scrutiny considered on a 1:1 basis. Of course Scott’s views get a lot of total attention. But it’s still possible to judge that initial degree of skepticism on the part of individuals based on how they individually respond.
Let me put the claim a different way: David Friedman routinely “gets away with shit” that a) newbies would be called out on, b) other regulars would be called out on, and c) Scott Alexander would be called out on. Much of this, but not all, seems to be of the “well, he probably knows what he is talking about” variety.
This is the distinction I mean to pick out, which you or anyone is of course free to disagree with, but that would need to be on a different basis than you’ve raised here.
Skef (about me)
Meaning my failure to get mad and yell at you, even when you call me an asshole?
And I responded to that question:
Through most of the discussion, I was assuming that your objection was to the shift from the current corporate income tax to my proposed substitute. Since the problem of distinguishing reinvestment from production cost was identical for the two systems, that didn’t make any sense to me–as I said, several times over, without your ever explaining that that had nothing to do with the question you were asking. I explicitly asked you
And you didn’t answer the question.
I finally concluded that you were not talking about my proposal at all but about an existing problem in measuring corporate profits, and since I had nothing much to say about that I said nothing much about it.
I was thinking more of your repeated posting about Warren although naturally you have no opinions either way about her personally, and the way you link to that unflattering exchange whenever David Graeber comes up, purely to inform all of us of his potentially questionable reasoning, of course.
Have I said “asshole”? I suppose I may have. “Twat” seems more proportionate.
David, there was a whole discussion in the following thread that included Mark Anderson saying:
You have said you want to treat reinvestment as profit. As I understand your position, it would be treated as conventional income for the shareholder, and taxed accordingly, and thus often taxed at around 30%.
Suppose there are two kinds of “reinvestment”. One, akin to what are currently treated as capital expenses, is easy to measure. Another, akin to paying to create new intellectual property, is not easy to measure (as Mark Anderson notes). Paying to create new intellectual property is not currently treated as a form of profit. It is also not measured, because it is not differentiated from salary payed in service of other purposes.
So further suppose that the idea is to tax easily measurable reinvestment as a form of profit at effectively around 30%, and — because it is not easy to measure — to treat reinvestment that creates new intellectual property as an expense, and therefore tax it at 0%.
A system with this division would introduce a huge market distortion in favor of difficult-to-measure forms of reinvestment. Once it goes into effect companies that expand primarily through traditional capital investment will be much less tax-advantageous to investors than companies that expand by investing in new intellectual property. That pressure will encourage a move from one variety of investment into another.
Given the relatively low amount of detail you have offered about your proposal, I am not sure it would include such a distortion. One good way to figure out whether it would is by example. A company buys a new factory: how in your system is that treated on a tax basis? A computer company pays to develop a new processor design: how is that money treated on a tax basis? By discussing a variety of specific examples, we could evaluate whether the system would suffer from market distortion.
That is why I would like to discuss examples. Your saying “it would just be like it is already” is non-responsive. If you know what it is already like, it should be easy to fill in details like the above. How is a factory purchase taxed in your system? How is creating a new processor taxed in your system?
This is hopeless. I have said that I want to treat profit as profit, and one of the things profit can be used for is reinvestment.
For the seventy-third time, do you agree that the problems you raise are identical in the present system, where corporate profit is taxed, and in the alternative system I proposed, where corporate profit, defined in exactly the same way, is attributed to the stockholders and taxed as ordinary income?
If so, why are you asking me about accounting issues that have nothing to do with my proposal?
@ skef
You admit you can’t stand David Friedman, call him an asshole and a twat, assert that he represents himself dishonestly and that SSC readers are snowed by his arguments. Then, you frame your behavior as one of the few beleaguered leftists facing off against a horde of unreasonable commenters.
Maybe it’s time to stop.
What makes it difficult for me to answer this question is that I don’t think we have the same conception of what the current system considers to be “profit”.
In my understanding, the “destinations” of corporate revenue can, at a high level, be divided into three categories: normal expenses, capital expenditures, and “book profit”. I do not consider the current system to treat capital expenditures as a variety of profit.
Therefore, if the distinction you are asking about is between one in which book profits are taxed on the corporate side, and one in which book profits are taxed as a variety of shareholder income, then yes, the problems would be the same in the two systems, and such a system would pose no particular challenges, as book profits are relatively easy to measure, (ongoing lobbying pressure for loopholes aside).
It doesn’t seem to me that this answer responds to your proposal, however, because from the start you have said that a feature of your system is that it taxes reinvestment as a form of profit. So if in your question above the category “profit” is meant to include reinvestment, then I think the systems do not face the same problems. If the capital expenditure system does not function as a measure of reinvestment, then it can’t be used to treat reinvestment differently in your alternate proposal. And anyway, a switch from asset depreciation to a 30%-or-so tax rate on the part of the shareholder — which I take it would be the result of stipulating that capital expenditures will serve as a measure of reinvestment, would be a drastic change, and would result in the kind of market distortion I have discussed.
Does this answer your question? I’m not sure what else to say.
I can’t stand “DavidFriedman”. An aspect of this dislike is that I don’t think that persona has all that much to do with David Friedman.
That “don’t be an asshole” comment was in response to his asking “You do realize that the corporate income tax is on profit, not revenue?” Given that at that point I had already, partly in an effort to answer other of his questions, given a high level description of the U.S. capital expenditure taxation system, I felt he was being an asshole as he asked that. “You do realize” is not a neutral phrase, and he was using it in the standard non-neutral way to indicate that I am a dumb-dumb.
And no, I haven’t framed myself as one of the last remaining leftists. I don’t have any more views conventionally recognized as leftist than those that are conventionally recognized as rightest. Homosexuality, which for I think understandable reasons is one of my main bugaboos, doesn’t cut hard across that line anymore. And my earlier stated take on cake-baking wasn’t exactly hard-line. I’m taken by others as a leftist here because most of the discussion is, if not rightist, then “left-opposed”. (Feel free to take my anti-socialist comments in Plumber’s thread as criticism of Marxbro. I do.)
But as I said before I don’t care what you think. There are the rules and the reign of terror and as long as I happen to stay to the one side of both I can log in and put words here.
I have no plans of maintaining an ongoing Friedman crapfest. Even if he continues to use not filling in the tax policy case as an excuse not to fill in the talk-with-maybe-gay son case. I wondered in here against my — earlier — judgment because of Conrad’s collaboration offer and David wandered in after. We all three did this all before and I didn’t feel David put much effort into understanding what I or Conrad was saying the first time around. I know too many people genuinely harmed by a particular sort of thing that parents say.
This isn’t a crisis, let alone a disaster, and you haven’t made yourself relevant to any of it anyway.
I have said over and over again that my proposal defines corporate profit in the same way as current law. I did not say that “a feature of [my] system was that it taxes reinvestment as a form of profit.” What I have said is that it, like current law, taxes profit. One of the things profit can be used for is reinvestment–accumulating capital assets for the corporation. I have never said or suggested that its treatment of profit that is reinvested would be different than the treatment under current law–that is a product of your imagination.
The only sense I can make of the whole frustrating mess is that you noticed something I said in explaining profit that you thought you could disagree with. Doing so required you to ignore over and over again my pointing out that I was defining profit in the same way as current law defines it. So you did.
Given the amount I comment here, it shouldn’t be that difficult for you to find something you disagree with and want to attack that is actually a position I argued for.
Well, ok, then what I have fully failed to understand is the second paragraph of the very first post in the first sub-thread I linked to above:
I read this as saying that money that the company reinvests is taxed in a certain way that is different from what happens now. I don’t think that is a crazy reading, and I definitely don’t think my focus on “reinvestment” is a whole-cloth invention of my imagination.
Since I’ve been reading it so wrong, why don’t you explain what the quoted paragraph means, and everyone can put this whole thing behind everyone else?
On second thought, I don’t see that any interests are served by my asking for further explanation. The content of that paragraph was what I was trying to understand, and evaluate, in those two threads. I misread them, and because you didn’t seem to treat my initial questions about reinvestment as non sequiturs, I continued the discussion on the basis of that misreading. Given the overall situation, I have no reason to ask further questions about this.
@DeWitt
Then how do you account for significantly gayer cultures, like ancient Greece? Is that the “natural” amount of homosexuality in a society, and that, absent our society’s repression, we’d be like the Greeks?
And if socialization doesn’t have anything (or much) to do with it, then what is the cause of homosexuality? I think we all agree it’s not “choice,” and science has failed to find any evidence of a gay gene (ruled it out, even?), and only weak biological/hormonal markers. This doesn’t leave much left besides socialization/culture.
Now, for political reasons, interested parties have strongly pushed a “born this way” message, and harshly suppress anyone who suggests otherwise, but “politically correct” does not mean “actually correct.” If it were actually correct we wouldn’t need the word “politically” in there. We could just say correct.
Seeing the boy ponies holding hands won’t make them gay, but gays not seeing boy ponies holding hands will make them kill themselves? You can’t do a “small stuff doesn’t matter” argument in one breath and then “small stuff matters enormously” in the next.
Are you sure you’re not putting the cart before the horse? Perhaps the stigmas against homosexuality (which are common across cultures) arose out of observations of the poor outcomes and non-pro-social behavior of homosexuals, and was not merely lies invented by evil people for evil purposes.
If homosexuals would like to demonstrate good-faith pro-social behavior, one really nice concept they could adopt would be one of “gay responsibility” that come along with the “gay rights.” So perhaps the responsibility to recognize that not everyone agrees with them, that’s okay, and to not force their views on other people’s children.
I like Catholicism, but if the authors of MLP decided the ponies needed to convert to the One True Faith, get baptized and confirmed and welcome the Pony Pope to Equestria, I wouldn’t get super mad at non-Catholics and accuse them of anti-Catholic hatred for saying “thanks but no thanks” and turning off the shameless pro-Catholic propaganda. “Respecting other people’s boundaries, particularly with respect to what they teach their children” seems like a pro-social behavior, and it would be nice if the gays could develop that. Maybe instead of propagandizing how great they are they could just start acting great and other people might notice naturally.
Again, so the ancient Greeks are the natural state of man then?
It’s not hard to find accounts from US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan about how hard it was for them to stay silent and “respect the culture” of the Afghan soldiers they stationed with who habitually took young boys into their tents with them. Are the Afghan soldiers the one’s in accordance with natural biology, and the US soldiers are simply repressed? Should they be taking boys into their tents with them, too?
Now, I’ll offer a theory on the behavior of the Afghan soldiers: when they were young boys, Afghan men took them into their tents, and now as men they do the same thing to other young boys. That sounds like a culturally transmitted practice, and not one emerging from biology, and that they were simply “born this way.”
The portrayals we get are not neutral, though. Or rather, not counterbalanced. There are no evil homosexuals on TV (except maybe Kevin Spacey in House of Cards but he was bi, and kids don’t watch that), there are no consequences to gay behavior, and the only evil people on TV are the ones not completely enthralled with homosexuals and everything about them and applaud them for their bravery and kind hearts.
I’m not on board with the “if you’re not with me then you’re against me” rhetoric, because we don’t apply that to other things. I’m not going to call someone anti-Catholic for not showing only unabashedly positive portrayals of Catholicism, and I’m not going to call someone anti-Muslim for not constantly extolling the virtues of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
@skef
I’m still open to the adversarial collaboration, but you still can’t tell me what we factually disagree about. DeWitt at least did. Do agree with DeWitt’s factual claims? We can’t consult the literature to determine that I’m evil, but if we have a disagreement of fact we can review the literature to see to what extent I’m wrong.
Also, to answer your question without another question, yes, it’s wrong to denigrate Jews because for some reason or another you don’t want your kid to marry a Jew. That’s why I don’t denigrate homosexuals in front of my kid. I just don’t mention them. Not only because it’s mean to denigrate homosexuals, but also because if I said “gays are bad” that would make my kid ask “what’s a gay?” and then I’d have to explain the whole thing that sometimes boys want to be boys. I’d rather in his formative years he imprint on the idea that “boys go with girls.” And that seems to be what’s happening. There’s a girl in his class he talks about as being “really pretty” and everything else I see in his behavior is very male. He likes guns, fighting, competition, games, trucks, machines, computers, all that sort of stuff. Of course that doesn’t necessarily matter, as I know a gay guy who gets shit from other gays for being “too macho” with his leather jacket and motorcycle and all that. And when you ask my daughter what she wants to be when she grows up she says “a doctor and a mommy!” so that looks pretty good too.
Also, I don’t consider it “tone policing” to ask you not to call people assholes and twats. Come on, man. Nobody’s calling you names.
Small aside:
It’s really, really hard to work out a way that a gay gene (or a zillion genes each with a small effect) could make any sense in light of evolution. You seem to either have to assume:
a. The gay uncle hypothesis (gay men as helpers to their siblings’ children). But the math doesn’t work very well on this. Assuming being gay doesn’t make me superhuman, I can either do X amount of good for my kids (1/2 my genes) or for my brother’s kids (1/4 my genes). You can kind-of imagine some situation where this might work out (overpopulation or something), but in general, it won’t be a better strategy for my genes to improve your kids’ fitness rather than my own kids’ fitness. Also, if this were happening, it should be a well-known phenomenon everywhere, but it’s not.
b. The same genes that make you exclusively gay in modern Western societies (so you have no offspring) didn’t decrease your number of offspring much in the ancestral environments in which we evolved (hunter-gatherer tribes, small farming and fishing villages, smallish nomadic herding bands). You can kind-of imagine this–maybe f–ing the other guys in your tribe on long hunting trips keeps the tribe more cohesive, so long as you still do your duty and have a few kids with your wife. But again, it’s hard to see how it would work out mathematically, given that men can have pretty-much unlimited offspring. When you have a chance at a tryst with either the hot young lady next door or the hot young man next door, which one do you prefer? One of those answers seems a lot more likely to leave offspring than the other. When your tribe defeats the other tribe and you have your pick of the civilians, do you choose a girl or a boy? Again, one choice leads to more offspring than the other.
c. Maybe there’s a dual effect, so that having the gay genes makes men gayer but women more attractive or something. That seems like the best bet I can think of, but again, it has some mathematical problems, because women are extremely rate-limited in terms of offspring–the difference between a super-successful woman and a barely-reproducing one isn’t all that big, because (especially in a pre-tech environment) every childbirth is dangerous and takes a hell of a lot of resources. By contrast, a super successful man (in fitness terms) can be Genghis Khan and leave hundreds of offspring. So the payoff of making your sister the prettiest girl in the tribe is that she gets the most attractive husband and maybe makes three or four kids if she’s lucky; you end up gay and have none or maybe one thanks to doing your duty with your wife a few times. It’s hard to see that working out.
I think I’ve been pretty clear about my parameters for an adversarial collaboration. We’ve had this discussion many times now and every time it has focused on the causal relationship between presentations of homosexual content to young people and (later?) same-sex orientation. My willingness to collaborate depends on the proposition being debated being about that link.
So, to give two examples, the proposition “Avoiding presentations of homosexual content to children is likely to substantially reduce the chance of their developing same-sex attraction” would qualify. We could then debate the evidence for that claim. On the other hand “We aren’t sure what causes homosexuality, so it is acceptable for me to prevent my children from seeing presentations of homosexual content” does not qualify. The question at hand in that proposition is moral rather than causal. The implications of the “so” are unclear — it could be acceptable regardless of whether we knew the causes of homosexuality, so what would arguments about the acceptability prove?
Have we not, every time, been discussing that causal link? I think you’ve been extremely clear that your goal is not to “convince” a gay child to live a straight life (should that become an issue for whatever reason), but to stave off same-sex attraction in the first place. But your #2 suggested proposition above implied nothing about that link at all. Just put it all in a sentence or two and we can debate the evidence for the truth of that sentence.
I don’t see much significance to the typical boy/girl stuff given that the evidence I’m aware of is that that is what usually happens regardless, so your experience isn’t evidence for any view that you hold against any view that I hold.
But putting that part aside, you’ve stated exactly what I thought your position to be and have always thought it to be. We got into the whole negative presentation deal because David brought that in, both before and in this thread. He has been reading you as saying that negative presentations would be fine, and I have been trying to convince him that a) no they are not, and b) that anyway that is not what you have been doing or supporting. I have always primarily had a factual argument with you and a moral argument with David, although I have occasionally strayed onto other topics, as people do in these threads.
So yes, good. We understand each other’s positions and maybe David will understand your position now.
But I didn’t say I was being tone-policed or that I had ever been tone-policed. I said that HeelBearCub had been tone-policed.
Tone-police away. I’m on the record as beyond caring about that.
Quoting me:
Skef then writes:
It wouldn’t be a crazy reading if I hadn’t, in the course of the thread, said about six times that corporate profit, which is what both my system and the present system are based on, was defined in exactly the same way in both systems. But I did. At no point did I say anything implying or even hinting that profit was calculated in a different way in the two systems.
In your quote from me “the money” is the corporate profit. The point of the quote is that how the profit is used–whether to pay dividends, accumulate a stock of cash in a safe, or buy capital assets–isn’t relevant. It was in the context of the relevance to capital gains, since under current law if the corporation reinvests and that increases the stock value the stockholder eventually pays capital gains tax on the increase.
The description of my proposal, in an earlier comment in the thread, was:
You may for all I know be correct in believing that there are sometimes practical problems in distinguishing, for purposes of taxation, reinvestment from costs of production. But since those problems had nothing to do with my proposal, I had nothing to say about them.
These (quite common) evolution-based arguments about genes and homosexuality seem to be based on something like this reasoning:
1) Gay people don’t tend to have offspring, therefore they don’t tend to pass on their genes
2) Any trait that tends to cause organisms not to pass on their genes is, by definition, a trait of negative selection.
3) We would expect any trait of significant negative selection, and that does not confer some other substantial advantage to the group, to disappear from the population
4) Therefore, we would expect homosexuality to disappear from the population.
One can argue about anything, and therefore any of these. But what specifically is the reasoning behind #3?
You would not expect such a trait to be prevalent. It would be surprising if more than half of a population had a trait that made reproduction unlike or impossible and that (unlike, for example, bees) didn’t confer any particular advantage. But would it be if it’s just a small percentage?
Until relatively recently humans had quite high infant mortality. We’ve improved that situation (when and where we have) largely with technology. That’s a lot of wasted reproduction. There’s a standard theory that the high rate is related to brain size, and therefore to a significant advantage. But that doesn’t explain why our anatomy didn’t further evolve to compensate. Weren’t the babies that survived, and the mothers who lived to deliver more babies, less prone to the problem?
In other words, why can’t a low rate of homosexuality just have resulted from a bunch of other changes that were advantageous for various unrelated reasons and that happened to have that result? Could that not happen at some evolutionary stage? If it were to happen, is there really a solid argument from evolution that you would expect further evolution to drive the prevalence to zero? And if so, at what expected rate?
When we started discussing this issue I and Lillian were asking about reinvestment as distinct from profit, and you said:
Why were we talking about this at all if it wasn’t relevant? If would certainly have been helpful in directing the conversation. The claim in this paragraph is what the rest of the argument was about.
You seem to be saying that I should have realized the early part of the conversation was irrelevant because of the later part of the conversation, but not because anything in that early part was either retracted or labeled as irrelevant, only by implication. We had this exchange (me first, you second):
How was I supposed to know this was all irrelevant?
Homosexuality doesn’t seem to be 100% heritable, so there’s nothing saying the effects have to be split by gender this way. We could imagine a gene that does nothing in women, 90% of the time makes the guys carrying it 20% more reproductively successful by some mechanism, and the remaining 10% of the time makes them gay. That’d work out.
I think that’s too specific a question, though. I believe the literature would be silent on that one.
Ok, but something like that is the reason you’ve been offering for what you’ve been doing.
I want to be careful about delving into the past, so I’ll just say that I see the gist of your current stated view to be less specifically causal than your view at the time I was first drawn into this discussion. I see that kind of change as only good or bad to the extent it does or doesn’t reflect what else we know. Whatever my other faults, I don’t come here in the hopes of saying “nanny nanny boo boo”*
Would it be fair to say that you’re preventing your kids from seeing depictions of homosexuality on a “better safe than sorry” basis? If so then I don’t see anything in the causal question worthy of an argument between us.
* Technically I was raised in a “nyah-nyah NYAH-nyah-nyah” region, but “nanny nanny boo boo” looks better in print.
@ albatross11:
Explaining why male homosexuality isn’t eliminated by evolution is an interesting puzzle. I think there are two categories of explanation:
1. Homosexuality is a possible negative side effect of heritable characteristics that have another and positive effect—negative and positive being both in terms of extended reproductive success.
A simple example of that sort of thing is sickle cell anemia. One copy of the gene makes you resistant to Malaria, two copies give you a very serious disease. This could be something more complicated along those lines.
2. Ways in which being homosexual could sometimes increase your reproductive success.
Following out your “uncle” example a little further, consider a harem society where successful males have multiple mates, unsuccessful males have none. The best the unsuccessful males can do is to help their sisters bring up their children by the successful males but a successful male won’t let another male that close to his mates unless he is reasonably certain that male is not a sexual competitor. The extreme version is using eunuchs as harem guards, but a less extreme version would homosexual preferences that were hard to fake.
Ideally, that should be a version of homosexuality that could be turned off, with a time delay and with the change externally observable, since the mate supply situation might change. I don’t think real world homosexuality exhibits that pattern, however.
Skef,
You seem to be equivocating on whether “trait” means gene or phenotype. The gene might cause multiple traits, with different fitness; and, conversely, the trait might not be totally due to the genes. I think that yes, we should expect that traits of significant negative selection not to occur at all. But the argument is more powerful when we can observe that the trait really is partially genetic. You might not expect the trait to be driven to zero, but you should expect the heritability to be driven to zero. The Breeder’s Equation tells you how fast.
@ skef
That almost made fizzy water shoot out my nose. I wonder if any other person in history has been declared an asshole for posing (sincerely or not) such a question.
Anyway, it seems to me that there is a big difference between “I’m not here to make friends” and name-calling.* I think a lot of people here fall into the first bin, but they still have civil disagreements.
* which seems misplaced now that you’ve conceded that the misunderstanding with DavidFriedman was on your part.
Earlier I posted and then deleted a question about this because I decided to go off and read about the issue.
I’m still reading, but from the first high-level article and some more specific bloggy explanations, my initial reaction is that to invoke the breeder’s equation this way is to make use of a tool beyond its intended purposes. Making that argument in a general way would (at least) take a lot more reading and thought. But here is a schema:
Suppose it were that simple, and the breeder’s equation is a reliable model for this issue. I suppose that doesn’t rule out kin selection, but it certainly puts serious limits on what forms of kin selection are viable long-term and what forms aren’t. And it doesn’t seem right to rule out those forms based on such a simple model.
Now, there are separate arguments for why kin selection wouldn’t be a good model for explaining homosexuality. But that’s not my point here. It’s just that simple models akin to the breeder’s equation don’t have the generality to rule out any trait of high individual negative selection occurring with a stable frequency. “The Breeder’s Equation applies except in cases of kin selection” isn’t a clearly safe inference.
Since you are portraying yourself as caring about this, I’ll just go with that.
What I conceded was the relevance of reinvestment to his tax plan. It’s not clear why he phrased things as he did given that irrelevance.
The subsequent argument was about whether current accounting methods can serve as a measure of reinvestment. This exchange is from an early part of that argument, again with me first and him second:
I did not think it was the case. David did, and used investing in a factory as one example. I focused on reinvesting money in the development of new intellectual property. I believe the subsequent discussion vindicated my understanding.
I had dropped this, so I’m not sure who you think benefits from all this. Maybe it just feels good?
Skef, one model at a time. The breeder’s equation applies to the situation in your original comment. (Partially) genetic homosexuality cannot exist in equilibrium at the observed heritability, frequency, and fitness. It must be that we are out of equilibrium (new mores, hormones in the water, red queen) or the observed fitness is wrong. (Or the observed heritability is wrong, but that is easier to measure than the other two.)
So people propose that the observed fitness is wrong. No one proposes that gays have secret children. The gay uncle theory proposes that the observed fitness is measured incorrectly, because it fails to include inclusive fitness. The breeder’s equation still applies. Other people propose that the gene has hidden fitness separate from the phenotype (Nornagest, above, or sex-antagonistic selection). Then the breeder’s equation breaks down because it mixes up phenotype and genotype. But we can just define the new trait to be the gene and the equation does apply. Now we need a new parameter, the penetrance (10% in Nornagest’s model).
Douglas Knight:
I don’t see how “one model at a time” responds to the issue I raise.
1) Do the Breeder’s Equation and the kin selection model indicate conflicting, if not contradictory, outcomes?
It seems to me that they do.
2) Does the Breeder’s Equation apply in every situation in which kin selection is not a factor?
Well maybe, and this is what you seem to have relied on in your response, but it’s not obvious or, as far as I can tell, self-evident.
Look at it this way:
Kin selection is a model for explaining the evolution of altruistic behavior. A trait develops in which an individual has a trait that results in its not reproducing, but the trait occurs at a stable frequency. There is some careful thought, and it is proposed that the altruistic behavior makes the survival of kin more likely, and as the kin tend to share genes, the trait is stable.
Suppose that instead there is a trait that also results, or tends to result, in an individual not reproducing. In this case there is no behavior that appears to be sufficiently altruistic. However, (to be a bit crude) a pair of parents with chromosomes that in one combination yield an individual with the non-reproducing trait, in different combinations tend to yield individuals with certain different traits, with various probabilities for the various combinations. And as it happens, those other trait/probability pairs, averaged out, tend to give a selection benefit to the other offspring comparable to that in the kin selection case.
Now, given that kin selection is a life option, there’s strong reason to think you can’t just say “because Breeder’s selection, therefore that situation can’t be stable.” The other scenario is similar in a number of ways. It’s not obvious why it couldn’t arise, and there’s no clear reason to think it couldn’t be as stable as a kin selection case once it does.
To evaluate whether the simple Breeder’s Equation model does rule out the second scenario, you need to understand the space of viable exceptions to it. We know there is at least one exception: Kin Selection. Is it established that it is the only one? What about the heritability model tells us that something like the second scenario can’t arise?
I wrote:
Skef replied:
Under present law, the corporate tax is on profit. Profit is revenue minus cost. Hence under present law there must be rules for distinguishing reinvestment from cost. If there were not, a corporation that didn’t pay dividends and used any money left over after paying its costs to buy assets would have zero profit and pay no tax.
It may well be the case that making that distinction is hard and firms sometime succeed in classifying some reinvestment as cost for tax purposes. I am neither an accountant nor a tax lawyer, so that isn’t a question I either claim any expertise on or am interested in.
And you still have not explained why, after I repeatedly said that the definition of profit in my system was the same as in the present system, you continued to make arguments that assumed it wasn’t.
Yes, “one model at a time” is a rejection of raising new issues. You seemed to ask a specific question and I answered it. You should understand that before thinking about kin selection.
The breeder’s equation applies to kin selection if fitness is interpreted as as inclusive fitness. I would not call that an exception. A trait is stable if and only if the inclusive fitness is 1. That is not the breeder’s equation. The breeder’s equation is not about stability, but about dynamics. It is about how fast equilibrium is obtained.
I wasn’t sure how to pull that explanation together, but you’ve made it very convenient here. What I said several times was that I wasn’t sure we were using the same concept of profit.
The first quoted paragraph above is, in essence, an a priori argument that (assuming reinvestment is a possibility) profit cannot be calculated without calculating reinvestment. Accordingly, I took you to be saying that a certain aspect of the current system was a necessary aspect of that system. And that was not my understanding.
So when you were saying that the same notion of profit can be used in your system as in the present system, that didn’t resolve any issue in my mind. Given that you had claimed a feature of the current system is necessary, of course you would be able to rely on your system having the same feature. But, again, I didn’t agree about that necessity.
As far as I can tell, your argument entails that a system that taxes what I have been calling “book profit” — that being revenue minus expenses of either cost or reinvestment — cannot be a tax on profit. My interpretation of the capital expenditure rules is not that they are intended to function as a measure of reinvestment, and isn’t a plausible substitute for such a measurement. If a) it is not such a measurement, and b) you are correct about the concept of profit, then the current system does not tax profit, no matter how the government might characterize it.
I think I misunderstood how you were using “expect” in your first post on the Breeder’s Equation. I thought your point was “Because Breeder’s Equation -> therefore one should expect”. So I focused on exceptions. But I guess it was more like “because the Breeder’s Equation tends to apply, yes one would expect X to happen.”, which I do see is a solid first-glance take on the question.
Yes, “expect” is a slippery word. I do expect evolution to come up with solutions to big fitness costs. I think that my first usage matched your usage. But when I switched to the more powerful, quantitative argument based on measuring heritability, I should have switched to a different word.
Correct.
And with such a system, a corporation that doesn’t pay dividends and spends all of its profit acquiring assets will pay no corporate tax.
Is that what you believe to be the case?
David, before answering your question I’m going to revise something I just said.
Quoting myself:
This is not a realistic conclusion given how the relevant concepts work; the government’s characterization can still be correct by the strict economic definition.
I’ve lived in at least one state with a sales tax that excludes food. If one were in a certain frame of mind, one could say this is not technically a sales tax, because look: here is a sale of a food item and it is not taxed. This is eye-rolling in at least two ways. One, it is being overly picky about the denotation of descriptions. Two, it is easy to patch up with some adjectives, yielding a precise description.
Now when considering business taxes, the term “tax on profit” seems to be understood to contrast with “tax on revenue”, or some such. One could go down the road of folk-meanings of “profit” to vindicate this, but let’s stick with the strict economic understanding of revenue minus cost. Does a tax on revenue minus cost minus reinvestment count as a tax on profit? It does in this sense: every dollar (or whatever) taxed is a dollar (…) of profit.
Unlike with the sales tax, this system is not easy to patch up into an exact definition using adjectives. But it’s otherwise similar. And I think in general, tax on X does not imply all Xs are taxed. An income tax with a standard deduction does not fail to be an income tax.
Now, I was certainly not thinking all of this at the time of the earlier discussion. I was thinking, more or less, “the government says it’s a tax on profits, people commonly understand it to be a tax on profits, and David agrees it is a tax on profits, so why would I or anyone else disagree that it is a tax on profits?”
I think what David is getting at with these last few questions is something like: If I understood how the system works and did not think it measured reinvestment, and I accepted that profit is revenue minus cost, then I should have said that the corporate tax was not a profit tax. And alternatively, at that point if David did not know the details of the system, he was accordingly entitled to assume the government somehow measured reinvestment because it claimed to tax profits. Even if he wound up being mistaken, I came to the wrong conclusion given the information available to me, and he came to the right conclusion given the information available to him.
All I can say about this now is that I don’t think my trust in the conventional understanding at the time was misplaced. A tax on some profits is still a tax on profits, and therefore taxing profits does not entail measuring reinvestment.
Well, no, it depends on the assets.
Clearly a business should not and cannot go down to the bank, spend all its profits on dollars, and thereby avoid paying any tax. Maybe that’s not “spending” in a technical sense, but for the same reason it shouldn’t be able to spend its money on gold and avoid being taxed either. In that case the tax laws would be trivially meaningless. So there is no viable system in which spending can be a sufficient condition for not paying taxes.
My understanding of the current system is roughly this: Spending on assets understood to be investments is largely “neutral”. The company spent the money but got back an equivalent asset, so it still owes the tax on that profit. Spending on tools and factories and so forth is where the capital expenditure rules kick in. That’s similar in one way, in that the money spent is not treated as an expense in that year. But it is different in that there are (more or less) standardized “depreciation schedules”, that allow the corporation to deduct the value of the asset from further profits over the following years. This is a kind of “simulation” of wear and tear on the capital asset, but generally much more favorable to the company than trying to measure actual wear and tear would be. (There is a related system of amortization of “intangible” assets.)
So what I take this system as trying to address is not “reinvestment”, but the problem that much of what one can spend money on has monetary value. One hasn’t “lost” that value in spending it, the way a company loses the money it spends on the raw materials for its product (in the sense that it no longer owns those raw materials).
Can this be interpreted as a measure of reinvestment anyway? Not (ironically) in the case of the investments, or at least that sounds wrong to me. A business buying an investment isn’t doing the businessing with that money — that’s the role of some downstream entity. With the capital investments — sure, one could say that. But it would be a lot more convincing if the depreciation wasn’t so artificial.
Anyway, that’s my understanding of the relation of corporate spending on assets and corporate taxation at a high level.
skef:
It’s not that gay men leave zero offspring, it’s that we should expect them to leave fewer offspring than straights in just about any environment we can imagine. (Interestingly, the math is somewhat different for lesbians.) Even in a society where everyone is married off at 16 and expected to produce a couple kids for honor’s sake, the gay man is going to want to produce his required kids and then go find some similarly-inclined guy for pleasure. When there are chances for extra dalliance, or remarrying after your first wife dies, or the spoils of war (aka raping the survivors after you kill the other side’s soldiers), the gay man is going to behave differently from the straight man, in ways that change how many kids they leave behind.
That means that if there is a gene[1] for being a gay man, that gene should be selected against–every generation, there should be fewer copies of it than in the previous generation, because the people who carry it have fewer offspring than the people who don’t, on average. Homosexuality has been around for a really long time, so there have been a lot of generations during which any genes for being gay should have become more and more rare. And yet, while I haven’t looked at historical data closely, it seems like there’s a pretty consistent fraction of the population who are gay.
So if there is a gene/a set of genes for being gay, it’s an evolutionary puzzle. What would keep that gene from being selected out of the population?
You could imagine some kind of kin-selection thing, like the gay uncles hypothesis, but the math doesn’t work out. You could imagine some kind of group selection thing where gay sex holds the tribe together, but that’s not too consistent with what I know of actual hunter-gatherer tribes or traditional societies, and also this is a situation where group selection is not going to work well because it’s pulling directly against individual selection. You could imagine some kind of genes with multiple effects–if it turns out being gay is substantially genetic, that would be my guess–but again, it’s not easy to see how this would work.
If I had to guess a genetic mechanism, I’d guess that the ability to fall back into gay sex was a useful technique for holding some all-male groups together, as long as you go back to preferring girls as soon as you’re in their presence. Then exclusive homosexuality would be an instance of a complicated strategy breaking sometimes, the way our tendency to care for our helpless kids can get captured in raising pets and adopting kids[2].
That would be consistent with the way lots of men switch over into homosexual behavior in all-male environments (prison, boarding school, the British navy[3], etc.). It would also be consistent with lots of social pressures against homosexuality–those would be societal adaptations to prevent this strategy being engaged when it was inappropriate.
I’m not at all an expert here, but this seems like a genuine evolutionary puzzle.
[1] I’m sure it wouldn’t be as simple as one gene, but I think the same logic holds for multiple genes each with a small additive effect or something.
[2] By human moral values, definitely including my own, adopting children unrelated to you is a good thing. But in evolutionary terms, it’s mostly not.
[3] We still need evolutionary explanations for rum and the lash, however.
What about just a libido release when men are away from women a long time? I guess in our ancestral environment that means hunting, but were trips long enough to lead to that?
@skef:
I have read through the entire exchange between you and DavidFriedman in the previous thread about his alternative tax system that you linked to. My key takeaways were:
(1) I had no trouble understanding what his proposal was, even without him having to say over and over and over again that his proposal defined “profit” exactly the same as current tax law does. (I’ve read a number of his books and much of his blog and other online writings, so perhaps I’m more familiar with his writing style than you are.) Nevertheless, he did say that over and over and over again, without any apparent comprehension of that on your part.
(2) During the entire exchange, you and he were talking past each other. He eventually realized it, made a post saying so, and stopped talking. You still don’t appear to have realized it.
I also have two more general comments:
(A) I have no idea why you think DavidFriedman is getting some sort of special credence given to his posts here. I see plenty of argument from other posters here in response to what he says. If he ends up getting the better of most of those exchanges (at least in my opinion he does), perhaps that’s because he deserves to.
(B) I have no idea why you think the persona “DavidFriedman” here is so different from “David Friedman”. I don’t know David Friedman in person (do you?), but, as I said, I’ve read a number of his books and much of his blog and other online writings, and I don’t see any difference between what he writes there and what he writes here.
@ Nick:
It seems to me that masturbation ought to be enough for a libido release, and would avoid the various health risks associated with homosexual activity.
@skef:
1) Gay people don’t tend to have offspring, therefore they don’t tend to pass on their genes
This statement, while strictly correct as you state it, is not the right one to look at if you are trying to evaluate the fitness of a genetic predisposition towards homosexuality. A gay person who has no offspring still has copies of their genes in other individuals that might have offspring, so it’s still perfectly possible for a gay person to take actions that increase the number of copies of their genes in the next generation.
Hence the gay uncle hypothesis, which would be great except it doesn’t work out in math terms (for kin selection, the gay uncles have to be twice as good at increasing their nephews’ fitness than they would have been at increasing their own kids’ fitness) and it doesn’t look at all like what we can actually observe (where there’s not some kind of widely noted phenomenon of gay men being super-dedicated uncles to their siblings’ kids).
The second scenario parallel to kin selection in my discussion with Douglas Knight was an attempt to outline one way that could work.
PeterDonis :
In writing that I was accepting a premise. I went on to make an argument similar to the one you just made.
Note that I take the topic of this sub-discussion to be “To what extent are there a priori reasons to think that homosexuality is not genetic?” That is, starting from principles of natural selection, is the possibility ruled out? I’ve tried to outline one or two ways it wouldn’t be ruled out, as others have.
The actual empirical evidence for homosexuality being mostly or entirely genetic seems to be weak.
for kin selection, the gay uncles have to be twice as good at increasing their nephews’ fitness than they would have been at increasing their own kids’ fitness
This isn’t the relevant question. The units of selection are genes, not people, so the question needs to be asked from the gene’s point of view: can a particular gene increase the number of copies of itself from one generation to the next by having some of its copies in individuals that do not have direct offspring?
To put it another way, we would of course not expect a “gene for homesexuality” to be present (at least not expressed in behavior) in 100% of the population; but the “twice as good at increasing nephews’ fitness” argument assumes that it would be. A “gene for homosexuality” whose equilibrium frequency (based on inclusive fitness) in a population was only 1%, would work, roughly speaking, if the presence of the “uncles” gave a 2% boost to the chance of making more nephews, as compared to zero frequency of the gene in the population.
It’s also worth noting that the fraction of males in a given generation who have offspring is significantly smaller than the fraction of females (how much smaller depends on various social factors; in historical cases where harems were common the difference could be quite large). That means a “gene for homosexuality” in males might have a higher inclusive fitness benefit than in females, since it would have more chance of being expressed in a male who wouldn’t leave direct offspring anyway.
Bringing back the gay uncle argument, the ability to fall back into a long term, perhaps permanent, commitment to exclusively homosexual preferences would be a useful technique as insurance against finding yourself in an environment where more successful men had all the women, so the only thing you could do to improve extended reproductive success was help with your nieces and nephews but the dominant men wouldn’t let you do that if they saw you as a sexual competitor.
As in many cases, the equilibrium would not be for all men to carry the gene but for some to, since the more men follow that strategy the higher the payoff to the “do everything you can to be one of the successful males–never give up” strategy.
If that’s right, then modern exclusive homosexual preferences would result from the combination of carrying the gene and finding oneself in an environment which the genetic programming interprets as “the more successful men have all the women, time to fall back on strategy B.”
Which would make it both genetic and environmental.
From very early in that conversation, the subtopic we were both discussing was whether current accounting policies measure reinvestment. That was the problem I saw in his proposal from the start, given the way he worded it. We debated this question.
Since you’ve read over the thread, can you point to when and how that discussion ended? Because what you and David both seem to be saying is that it ended when he started saying that you can just measure profit the same way in both systems. But David was very clear at the start that measuring profit entails measuring reinvestment.
So I take it the idea is that it’s churlish of me to expect David to wrap up that sub-discussion with some indication that perhaps current practices don’t measure reinvestment, and somehow address the a priori claim, especially to someone so loathesome as I. That would have really helped to make it clear how it was possible that profit can be measured at all, so that it can be measured in “the same way”. I just failed to understand that wrapping up that subject was simply intolerable under the circumstances, which is entirely on me.
There is most likely no point in discussing your more general observations. Here is a nutshell of our context:
Where are we right now? It may not be obvious, but it also isn’t very mysterious. Take a number of sound and useful epistemic principles. Add Goodhart’s Law and shake vigorously. Let stand for a few years. And voila: a rhetoric video game. An important aspect of that game? One rule says that in contesting statements one should bring evidence to the table against such statements. Another says that one should apply the principle of charity to a person’s statements. Combined, these mean that everyone is free to lie within the constraints of available evidence. Presumably just about everyone is aware of this. It occasionally pops up as a subject of meta-discussion, if not in such stark terms. But it’s not a problem, it’s a feature; part of the fun!
So how would we discuss this subject? It’s clear how it must be discussed: We’ll take the list of statements in question, evaluate each in their context according to whatever norms apply, and assign points. Oh look, I lose!
I am fine with that. I am not playing. I am just, for whatever reason, here.
It’s been established in past discussion that, based on reasoning from scarcity, Scott is morally obligated to provide a stable and engaging environment in which conservatives can debate. (This is only slightly hyperbolic! Do I need to find a link to one of those?) Look at me, being so openly and flagrantly unfun — it’s like I’m clubbing a baby seal. If you listen close, you can practically hear the antibodies scrambling around.
I don’t have a program or a strategy. I don’t know what I will say next and with what tone — not in a life-of-the-party way but in the old boring sense. I do tend to answer questions, so if people keep bringing what I’ve already said up I’ll probably keep talking about it. Is that part of the idea — getting further “evidence” on record? Or is it just more of the usual rule-awareness signaling?
@skef:
From very early in that conversation, the subtopic we were both discussing was whether current accounting policies measure reinvestment.
No, it wasn’t. That was the subtopic you thought you were discussing. It wasn’t the subtopic David was trying to discuss; he was trying to discuss his alternative corporate tax proposal, which, as I noted before and will note again below, is a separate discussion that could have been had without ever discussing the issues with defining “reinvestment” that you were trying to discuss.
Since you’ve read over the thread, can you point to when and how that discussion ended? Because what you and David both seem to be saying is that it ended when he started saying that you can just measure profit the same way in both systems.
I didn’t say the discussion ended at that point. I just said he said that over and over, which he did. (See further comment below.)
I said that David stopped talking after he realized that you and he had been talking past each other the whole time, and said so. That was much later on, after he had already said over and over that his alternative system was using the same definition of profit as the current system.
But David was very clear at the start that measuring profit entails measuring reinvestment.
His original wording could have been taken to imply that, yes, and evidently you took it that way. But as soon as he realized that that wording in his original post was causing confusion, he started saying, over and over, that his alternative proposal used the same definition of profit as our current system, so that the issues you were raising about *how* profit is defined, and what “reinvestment” means, were irrelevant to discussing his proposal (while still being valid issues to be discussed in a separate discussion). He kept on saying that until he finally realized that the two of you were talking past each other, said so, and stopped talking.
to make it clear how it was possible that profit can be measured at all, so that it can be measured in “the same way”.
I don’t think David ever said that wasn’t a valid question. He just said that discussing that question was a separate discussion from discussing his proposal. Clearly our current system taxes *something* that it calls “corporate profits”, and manages to get real money for the government doing so. So any alternative proposal can say “I’m doing that same thing” without being meaningless or ill-defined.
@skef:
Here is a nutshell of our context:
I’m afraid this doesn’t help, because I can’t tell what post of David’s this is referring to.
Where are we right now?
I have no idea what this and the rest of your post is about. I’m obviously missing a lot of context, probably because I don’t post here nearly as often as you do. Which is fine, I don’t need to have more context if you don’t want to supply it.
I simply don’t agree with your reading. At the end of the first of the two threads, I again clarify the specific question I was asking.
David responds:
David is not rejecting the issue of reinvestment here. He starts out once again with the a priori point “the stockholder is taxed on it … because what was available to be reinvested is profit”, and then asks me why I think the issue would be different in his system vs the current system.
You’re reading this as saying the issue is not relevant. I read this as saying the issue is settled in either system by the definition of profit. But that is what we were arguing about.
How do you reconcile your reading with the first quoted paragraph? At what point does he either give up on that claim, or indicate that the claim is not related to the issue?
I don’t think anyone will be served at this point by my pointing to the discussion that message refers to. And anyway it was the sentiment rather than the context that was relevant.
Rather than trying to restate those thoughts in another way I’m going to let that version stand.
@skef:
I simply don’t agree with your reading.
And I don’t see how to explain it to you any better than I already have. The things you point out that appear to you to support your reading, appear to me to support mine. So I don’t think we’re going to be able to make any progress. I don’t have any more to say on this particular topic at this point.
Skef is banned indefinitely.
OK, I am literally shocked that you consider “allegory for divorce” and “gay pony in the background” both a) problematic indoctrination of kids and b) the worst problem of MLP, but different culture and all that.
But that reminds me: Do TV stations still play the old Pepé the Pew cartoons? The pretty much literal embodiment of sexual predatory behavior, made for kids?
That should be pretty safe from being too leftish.
But isn’t the message of Pepe le Pew to avoid people like Pepe le Pew?
It’s been an awful long time since I watched that show (and it wasn’t one of my favorites even when I was a kid), but I don’t think so. Or at least, that message was too subtle for the age of the audience watching it.
But in every Pepe le Pew cartoon, he’s chasing after the cat (thinking she’s another skunk) and she’s running away. From the wikipedia article:
The message was never that Pepe’s behavior was good or natural or gets him what he wants. The cat always gets away and Pepe is left lonely or (cartoon) injured.
This is completely different than a cartoon showing that everything is good, or normal or natural and works out fine from divorce or gay relationships or whatever other thing it is the authors are conveying.
My impression of Pepe le Few was that it was all hopeless. The cat would never get any peace.
They are all trapped in Hell.
Sylvester will stay hungry for the rest of his existence, unable to fulfill his natural predator role, always emasculated in front of his son he is unable to feed. The mouse and/or bird will never have a moment’s peace.
The Roadrunner is the only one not suffering, so by process of elimination he is Beelzebub.
Bugs Bunny tends to do okay for himself.
But when it’s painfully, cartoonishly, obvious that the cat does not want Pepe’s attentions, how is it encouraging kids to grow up to be like Pepe?
Playing devil’s advocate, the show doesn’t exactly discourage acting like Pepe either.
But Pepe always fails and/or gets hurt. Isn’t showing someone doing A to get B and always ending in misery while never getting B dissuading someone from doing A?
Because Pepe le Pew is cool. He’s not a bumbling idiot like many of the other looney tunes characters. The reason he doesn’t get what he wants isn’t necessarily because his behavior is wrong, it is because his target is actually a cat.
So it’s really a polemic against race mixing?
It’s even worse than that; I know there was at least one time he had a white stripe painted down his back, and needed to deal with Pepe.
It’s mostly about mocking French people
I only watched a few MLP shows– just didn’t click for me– by I’m fond of Applejack. So far as I know, country characters are rare on tv, and I have nothing against an urban character, but I think that should be a new character rather than losing the existing Applejack.
Define rare?
Non-stereotypical country characters are rare, and certainly country stereotypes can be unflattering, but unflattering stereotypes come with the territory of produced media.
My gut sense is that “country” characters who aren’t just a stereotypical butt of jokes are fairly rare, except in shows that are explicitly set in the “country”. But there are a number of shows that are…
In re country characters being rare on tv: I was going on a vague impression. I watch very little tv, and Applejack was the only one (especially the only non-stereotypical one) I’d ever heard of.
TV watchers, tell me about any other non-stereotypical country characters on tv.
Also, I like Applejack– she’s modest and sensible, which are also not the most common things to see on tv.
What Nancy said about Applejack.
The audience for children’s shows needs representation. And so if they need an urban character, so urban children can feel included, great, I applaud and encourage that. But don’t sacrifice the sole rural character, because rural kids need representation too.
If you are okay with a massive inversion anyway, do it with Rarity. The billionaire kids will get by without representation. (If you want gentler changes, Rainbow Dash or Twilight Sparkle could also be made urban.)
Farmer Yumi in Paw Patrol.
Well, like I said, lots of “rural/country” shows: Justified, Longmire, Friday Night Lights, True Blood…
I happened to have that SEAL show on in the background last night, don’t really know anything about it but one of the dudes on the team has a heavy good ol boy vibe, but not apparently in a butt-monkey sort of way.
Can’t think of a lot of others offhand.
They used to be a lot more common. Probably this has something to do with changing demographics and something else to do with changing mores.
(Another point of evidence for my wild idea that the modern cultural environment started in the Seventies, by the way.)
@Nornagest: could you elaborate on that in a new top level comment?
My impression is that MLP isn’t strong on world-building. Should an urban character have a city to be from?
Reading the pastebin, the urban-Applejack is for MLP G5, which they have yet to produce and create, so they can create an urban pony land for an urban character.
The Seventies thing? I’m not confident enough in it to stick my neck out with a top-level comment, at least not yet. But I think my basic idea is that the Seventies brought a loss of faith in a whole bunch of institutions, including government, international politics, and military affairs but also including the counterculture as it had existed up to then, and that modern cultural alignments largely define themselves in terms of their reactions to that.
The punchy way of putting it is “modernity began at Altamont”, but other landmark events include the oil crisis, the end of the Vietnam War, the end of Bretton Woods, Nixon’s removal from office, etc. If you look at graphs of cultural markers, you see a lot of elbows in them around that time. In film and TV (and in rock and pop music, but not in hip-hop or electronic), it’s the decade when most of the modern genre formulas first became recognizable. And so on.
@Nancy:
They’re talking about rebooting the universe, so who knows? Current MLP is weak on world-building… there have certainly been recurring locations and populations introduced after the series premiere, but there’s no telling what the writers will latch onto (like yaks, or Tartatus) and what will be disappear through a hole in reality (like dog people, or slave cows).
Can someone explain how an episode about divorce would be a veer to the left? It seems more like “addressing a topical issue that they are almost guaranteed to experience sooner or later either personally or by way of a friend who goes through it”. I guess it could depend a bit on the presentation, but I’m still not sure what a left presentation of divorce would look like compared to a right presentation of divorce, starting from the assumption that the purpose is to show a divorce that actually happens.
There has been a push to identify single-parent families as “okay” that ties very closely with the overall divorce topic. That’s certainly a left-right divide issue, especially in regards to religious objections to divorce.
Not all depictions of divorce have to even touch that part, but most children’s media that goes out of its way to mention divorce seems inclined to soften the blow for kids. That’s well-meaning on the show-creators part, as helping kids with their parent’s messy divorce is intended to be a positive. The fact that it hits culture-war buttons may be incidental at that point, but still true.
I’ll try to handle this. The following is what I think a set of statements on divorce that should be equally acceptable (but not perfectly acceptable) to most conservatives and most moderates.
1. In almost all cases, kids do better with male and female role models.
2. In almost all cases, parents have more attachment to their own children than children that are not theirs.
3. Given 1 and 2, children almost always do better with both their own parents than they do with one parent or one parent and a step-parent.
4. Children with parents separated that they are otherwise good with is suboptimal, whatever the reason for the separation. This applies even to temporary cases (such as one parent being military and deployed overseas for a long period of time), and this definitely applies to joint custody arrangements.
5. Given 3 and 4, children almost always do better with both parents living together, and divorce is almost always harmful for the children.
6. ‘Almost always’ doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions. Further, even if divorce is harmful, it doesn’t mean the other options aren’t worse.
7. Despite the existence of cases where divorce is the best option, divorce is sometimes used for bad reasons, and some marriages that ended in divorces could have been saved.
8. It’s never right to put the blame on children for a divorce.
9. If done delicately, you can disapprove of actions of a parent that led to a divorce without it transferring to the children.
A kind conservative message to children about divorce would concentrate on the children of the divorce that are likely to be either the recipients of the message or come into contact with the recipients of the message: they did nothing wrong, and are likely in a lot of emotional pain from having their parents split up, so treat them kindly. This would make a point that divorce, even if the best option, is often damaging to the children involved, and, hopefully, by extension that marriage is not something to be entered into lightly. This seems moralistic, but it’s generally something you can derive from any ‘wicked stepmother’ cliche, even if it doesn’t directly involve divorce.
Left wing messages about divorce that a conservative would object to would be anything that implies that divorce is easy or consequence free and by extension anything that makes marriage and parenting seem something easy to enter into. And this is always a problem for a kid’s show, since you generally can’t show the darker stuff and everything has to have a happy ending; a divorce, even when the right thing to do, shouldn’t be considered a happy ending.
None of your points seem to be obvious to me (though I don’t really understand 8 and 9). Perhaps because my mother was never married (nor lived with my father), and thus I never considered marriage an obvious default like most people do.
That said, I entirely agree that marriage shouldn’t be entered lightly (if at all).
I really don’t think that matches any widespread left wing views on divorce. That would be a pretty fringe take on divorce that I don’t think maps to political affiliation.
I don’t think “divorce is easy and consequence free” is a left wing view. But “there is absolutely nothing wrong with single parenthood, and in fact single mothers are superheroes that deserve encouragement and praise” does seem to be a view of social liberals. Given that divorce is one way to end up a single parent, I guess there might be some connection to downplaying one negative aspect of divorce.
But I really doubt that a MLP storyline about divorce is likely to be presented in a way that makes kids more likely to want to be single parents though.
The other ways are also some assortment of tragic or foolish. Dan Quayle was right.
Well, can social liberals answer me why divorce should be difficult or fraught with consequences? Restricting it is going to fall hardest on those who most need it, surely, if we’re going to accept that anyone needs divorce. We can rehearse arguments all day about long term social ills from liberalizing divorce laws, but we could do the same about abortion, and I don’t think that will change anyone’s minds about how accessible or easy it should be to obtain one. Indeed, it seems easy to me to imagine having conversations very like the ones we have over abortion, where Republicans are constantly trying to tighten up the laws at the state level, and the number of officials able and willing to sign the paperwork is dwindling, and Vox is warning us that the end of divorce is already here in flyover country.
Epistemic status: just thinking out loud here.
To clarify a bit, there are ongoing arguments about whether the net cost of easy divorce on children outweighs the benefits of getting out of bad relationships. Same for (voluntary) single parenthood. Social conservatives are going to push back on “normalizing” either one.
But those are fundamentally “adult” issues. Any children’s shows that portray divorce as anything other than “mommy and daddy are breaking up but it’s not your fault and they still love you and things will be hard sometimes but you’ll be okay” is going to piss off people on both sides of the aisle. Likewise any portrayal of single parenthood that isn’t “having only one parent doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, be nice to kids with only one parent”.
I’m inclined to think that telling children fairly early about bad things (or denigrated things) is typically left-wing and shielding children from knowing about bad things is right-wing.
There is a fascinating exchange between George Orwell and Frank Richards, possibly the most prolific writer who ever lived, in which Richards, in his response to Orwell’s criticism of his work, makes the latter point.
On the contrary, positive things about the current state of My Little Pony:
The Apple siblings’s grandfather is in their lives now, and he’s William Shatner.
The monster students are a welcome insight into the non-pony parts of a world that’s established many sapient species.
Rare positive portrayal of a male with autism as a valid love interest (Pinkie Pie’ s autistic sister’s boyfriend) rather than a predatory creep.
Spike’s familial relationship is now explicit (Twilight is his mom).
There’s a neurotic Kirin who teaches an Aesop about avoiding hurting people’s feelings being a lousy terminal value.
?? Things:
Pinkie Pie now believes that yak culture is superior in all ways to pony culture.
Spike went through puberty (again). He’s still hitting on Rarity. I don’t know where to draw the line between pedophilia and Bizarre Alien Biology.
In the new holiday special, Fluttershy and Discord engage in the same level of PDA as the mane character’s older siblings with their SOs.
Treasure it while you can, Pinkie Pie – Cthulhu swims Eqwest.
Ekwhoa, that’s a bad pun. You deserve PIE in the face.
Wait, Twilight is his MOM?!? How does that work? I know it was a random explosion of her magic that caused his egg to hatch, but “mom” seems like kind of a stretch. Also, why are we talking about gay ponies and ponies getting divorced, and not single parenthood involving dragons and ponies who are generally depicted as being way too young to be mothers?
For almost eight years, Spike’s relationship with Twilight was highly ambiguous. Twilight hatched him from an egg with her magic when she was a filly, he acts as her assistant, they live together, and they are obviously close, but some people saw them as just friends, others as adoptive mother and son, yet others as adoptive brother and sister, still others as boss and employee, and some even as owner and slave (this last one, of course, mostly tongue-in-cheek).
Then along came S08E24 “Father Knows Beast”, the plot of which is that a dragon shows up claiming to be Spike’s father and starts taking advantage of him. This leads to a confrontation with Twilight, in which Spike pretty much tells her “You’re not my real mom!”, thus breaking her heart (literally!) and making her cry. At the end of the episode, Spike apologizes to Twilight and tells that he knows she is his real family.
In other words, this episode makes it canon that Twilight is Spike’s adoptive mother.
As for her being too young to be a mother, I imagine she did what young mothers have been doing since time immemorial and relied heavily on her parents to help her raise him.
And Dan Quayle had NOTHING to say about this?!? :op
Yeah, Season 6 started implying that the ponies’s parents play huge roles in their lives that were just never “on camera.” Like in “Flutter Brutter” everyone knows Fluttershy’s never-before-seen parents and brother. And a good thing too, because if not for that there’d be some really screwy mores like Rarity’s little sister being a latchkey kid.
I know this is tongue in check, but since I was the one who last mentioned the unfortunate former VP, let me say that I see a significant difference between choosing to bring a child into the world when you are a modern single woman, and finding an orphan in a pre-modern society and doing your best to care for them with your
meager resourcesmagical powers.I’m so late, but I have to respond that I think you are over sensitized to this kind of thing. I was worried about obvious preaching when the first episode this season and introduce the student six with each a different species and the antagonist was the “pony-first” education official, but the finale leaves that looking like a misdirection.
Your first example was all about how choosing between two aspects of yourself is hard and you shouldn’t do it. They literally named the character “Terramar”, meant to be “Earthsea”. His parents are still on good terms, but chose to live in different environments after some huge changes in circumstances.
Gay couples have been fanon for years because some ponies are placed next to each other all the time due to the background-fill computer program liking the combination of colorschemes. Lyra and BonBon were confirmed in season 5 to be more than friends, so nothing has really changed on that front.
I’m mad about Applejack losing her rural aspect too, but I think it is more about the writers can’t write her character and it leads to her episodes sucking, so they want to try something else. I think urban AJ could work if they make sure she stays honest, stubborn, hard-working, and family-oriented. Poor isn’t a change.
@tayfie – I think it would change her character substantially, for CW reasons. That said – I am unsure of MLP’s general involvement in the CW on the whole, apparently it is nonzero but not enough for me to take the cynical view that “they changed AppleJack to an Urban stereotype because rural people vote Republican and we can’t have a positive portrayal of a Republican on our kids show”.
jaimeastorga2000 reposted what he(?) meant the first time around.
Basically, MLP started out as a standard little girls’s cartoon, maybe feminist in a Lowest Common Denominator way (“the mane six represent six right ways to be a girl”) that even right-wing women couldn’t object to. Then during Season 5, they had a villain who was a small-time Marxist dictator. Princess Twllight won her over to royalism with the Power of Friendship and she became a seventh mane character whose motivation was to make up for having been, in her words, “pure evil.”
In retrospect that should probably be seen as a fluke. “Swerving to the Left” would just be standard-issue American cartoon writers moving past having accidentally written something conservative.
I read (here’s a phrase I never expected to type) an article in The Federalist summarizing the children’s cartoon in question, and it still smells like Poe’s Law to me. Do you, like, pre-screen your kids’ cartoons and books for ideology? I mean, even old stuff from the 50s where the kids punch each other and shoot squirrels still has a lot of “take care of each other” and “we’re all equal in God’s eyes” and so forth.
…why do you think those are incompatible with traditional morality? “We’re all made in the image of God” != “we are all equally intelligent, athletic, handsome, etc… and any difference in outcomes is therefore a product of bias”. Nor does “take care of your neighbor” = “throw your neighbor under the bus in order to signal how holy you are for caring about some strangers you have never met over on the other side of the world”.
Those are positive messages, though.
And if not you, then to whom do you trust this task?
I’d like to believe that I’d love my children no matter how ideologically misguided they become.
@Christopher
Them
Why is it that whenever somebody tries to discuss actually parenting their kids, somebody else always comes along to smear that as failing to love them?
Co-screen, but yes? As an extreme, how happy would you be if your kids got hooked on some cartoon made in the image of /pol/ and started spouting nazi rhetoric about how Hitler did nothing wrong and we need a race war?
@Hoopyfreud
That’s evidence that you weren’t exposed to the right cultural artifacts as a kid. My standardized government-approved childhood enrichment product included a tale all about the folly of such an approach.
That is great, so long is it isn’t rationalization for “I don’t love my children enough to guide them ideologically.”
@Jaskologist
I read that book too. Some time around the fifth grade. I was so angry at the children for how they treated Piggy that I fell asleep crying.
I’m very glad that I read it when I did, and not at the tenth(!) grade level that a Google search says it’s recommended for. For one thing, it was much more relevant to my life, and for another, it was written in just such a way that it was easy, even at that age, for me to think about it.
Finally, I’ll note that I feel much more strongly about this regarding books than nonparticipatory forms of media; it’s very easy for children to self-censor books, and very hard with a television.
@RandyM It most certainly isn’t. I do my best to impart values and guide them ideologically. But I don’t curate their entertainment in an attempt to form their ideology.
How do you impart your values? Isn’t storytelling one of the age-old ways of imparting values?
But I don’t know why you would assume someone doing so is going to stop loving their kids, or even introduce it as a possibility here. Seems needlessly antagonistic.
@RandyM
I’m not insinuating that someone curating their children’s entertainment would stop loving their kids. I was talking explicitly about myself. I’ve certainly seen families where the children decided to not buy into their parents’ ideology and it caused fractures in the family, but I wasn’t suggesting a cause-effect relationship at all.
@Conrad Honcho
I do tell stories, give advice, explain things as best as I know, etc. It’s just my opinion that everyone should be able to find their own way in the world.
If I can probe, what’s going on here exactly? Is it that (1) you feel that sort of journey is necessary for everyone, or is it that (2) you think different “ways” are best for different people, or is it that (3) you’re working about the risk of backfiring, or what? At first it sounded like (3), but what you say afterward sounds more like (1) or (2) or something else?
But we’re talking about young children. Like under 10. You’d be fine with them watching, say, Nazi propaganda, because it’s important for them to find their own way in the world, and if that’s being a goose-stepping Nazi, c’est la vie?
To each their own, but I would put the kibosh on the Nazi propaganda for my 8 year old.
That face when you know how all the rest of the thread is going to turn out…
Oh come on, what did I say this time? It’s an extreme example, but to show that not ideologically screening your kids’ media is the extreme behavior. Everybody else screens their kids’ stuff. This is why we have explicit lyrics warnings and movie ratings and video game ratings and content warnings.
ETA: Oh, and why people care at all about “representation” and “strong female characters” and all that stuff. Because people pick up messages, consciously or subconsciously, from media.
As an extreme, what if you were so busy co-screening your kids’ cartoons that you forgot to lock the front door and CANNIBALS walked in and ATE YOUR FACE???? This kind of exaggeration doesn’t seem useful to me.
To answer the unexaggerated version, I do screen my kids’ media, for age-appropriateness and commercialism (mostly this just translates to avoiding Disney). There’s nothing else in mainstream culture I find objectionable enough to worry about. I suspect your first response will be something like, “Well that’s easy to say when your side controls the media,” and there’s some truth to that – if for example it were super important to me to shield my kids from religious messages, I could still let them watch anything on the PBS Kids app – but it’s also true that I’m an atheist and my kids get exposed to plenty of religious stuff and I don’t care.
@Nick
Mostly just (1). I think that developing your own identity and world view is important to being an independent individual. Not to make light of Conrad’s nazi spiel but if either of my teenagers were to be thoroughly invested in watching Nazi propaganda, I’d challenge them intellectually instead of attempting to prevent it. That said, I’m in a different position from Conrad, in that of my three children, two are teens and one is under 1. So I don’t really attempt to control what the teens watch (although it seems to be mostly YT personalities like Pewdiepie [or similar, I don’t know who’s hip atm] or spongebob), and my 10 month old isn’t exactly absorbing much other than how to make noise.
I suppose if I saw them approaching extremism, I’d probably do something, but they’re as (or more) politically apathetic to the state of America as I am. I am certain there are things I’d rather them not watch, but I’m kinda at the intersection of observing 0 interest from them and having too little visibility to actually affect that outcome. AFAIK they aren’t using netflix to watch Human Centipede or other disturbing films behind my back, but even if they were, I expect it would result in a conversation instead of acting out.
christopher hodge:
Personally, I think the best choice is to allow multi-million dollar media companies full of famously ethics-free people make the choice of what ideas to feed to my small children. Ideally with the input of the equally ethical companies involved in advertising to children. Because I can completely believe that those guys have my kids’ best interests at heart. It’s hard to imagine how that could go wrong, really.
All positions are stupid when taken to extremes. That’s why responding to an exaggerated version of someone’s argument has a special name and is widely frowned upon.
Edit: Also, out of curiosity, how do y’all know that the ponies/badgers/cars/etc in these cartoons are gay? Are they making out? How are your kids supposed to know these are gay couples and not just friends? Are Burt and Ernie part of this?
There is a subtle but important distinction between the representation argument and the modeling argument I outlined here. The representation argument aims at helping people feel better: like they’re part of society, not like outsiders, like their troubles are understood. The modeling argument aims at helping people become better: showing how, in their situation, they can help themselves and their society. That usually comes with a side of feeling better, but it’s not the terminal goal.
Bert and Ernie aren’t, but I’m pretty sure about that one teletubby….
@albatross11
You raise some good points about Big Media but I personally agree with the guy further up the thread that lifting a finger to guide what media my children consume leads to… cannibalism or something, so now my eight year old son gets all his news and opinions from The Daily Stormer. Anyway I’ve got to run, there’s an angry mob trying to bash my front door in whilst I’m at work.
It takes effort to make something that can’t be interpreted to support both conservative and progressive values. It’s nearly impossible if you’re trying to avoid cartoonish stereotypes. In order to write something that is only acceptable to one side’s values, you generally need to reduce complicated problems to one dimensional caricatures, and most people recognize that and turn away, even if they generally agree with the point being made.
Although a conservative, I don’t have a problem with metaphors about divorce, despite my values being more critical of readily available divorce than the average American. I’ve also grown to expect subtle digs like background same-sex couples; that itself also doesn’t herald a major change to a product. From what I’ve heard, MLP fit solidly into the niche where both sides could find something to like in the series, and neither of those two developments change that.
What worries me is the idea of re-writing a major character. It’s almost always a shift from artistic integrity to focus-group trend following, which always ends up damaging a work. The reason good series are good is that they stick with a consistent set of writing, art, and characters paired with universal themes. Meddling with that, whether for political propaganda or any other reason, is a sign that a series is going to go downhill rapidly.
I think this is a pretty reasonable take.
Personally, I would like to screen divorce from my kids. They don’t need to incorporate that into their idea of marriage right now, nor should they have any worries about their own parents reliability in this regard. Sadly, that would mean they didn’t get to see any grandparents.
My kids get enough subtle messaging about divorce from classmates with unstable homes. They don’t really need the TV telling them that divorce exists. The messaging at school is also sufficiently downbeat about divorce, as the kids dealing with it hate it. It’s led to some discussions and sympathy for the kids involved, which I think it where it should be.
I think that actively teaching along the lines of “single-parent homes are fine!” is a net negative. We want to discourage that as much as possible, because it leads to some really bad life outcomes. It sucks for people who get stuck in those situations, especially beyond their control, but we should not try to make it seem like a good thing or even just neutral. It’s not.
Although I disagree with most of the complaints about MLP so far, rewriting the country character as urban seems pretty stupid to me. Although I see it more as a sign of demographic change than political alignment (more of the kids watching the show will identify with the urban pony than a rural one). Just add another damn pony though, it’s not like the number of ponies in the show is some kind of law of nature than can never be broken lest the souls of the dead pour through the gates of hell and engulf the Earth or something.
Wow, country!Applejack is getting a lot of support here. That’s actually kind of cool.
For context, below is Meghan McCarthy’s e-mail in question.
https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/mlp/image/1513/46/1513460505619.png
https://pastebin.com/HtekX6Yp
I gotta feel for the author of that email, just in terms of ‘bosses change timelines, womp womp’. That must bite. The fact that it seems like the rest of the team (merchandising folks griping about earth color pallet?) are getting creative input must also be interesting.
@jaimeastorga2000: wow, that email is… disgusting. “Let’s kill Applejack.” “She’s very polarizing” … The takeaway is that she should only be allowed to exist if she’s 100% never “associated with anything farmy/Western/hick-ish.”
Rich leftists treating the people who feed them with that much contempt is more viscerally offensive than most of their ideological statements.
@Le Maistre Chat: Yeah, no kidding. You can really feel the hate coming from that e-mail. There’s a reason why it inspired this comic.
This was the main thing I wanted to ask about when the subject of My Little Pony “swerving to the left” came up. Just how hard did they try to disavvow the anti-marxism/anti-equality-of-outcome themes in that episode?
I actually stopped following the show around the time they started talking about Twilight becoming a “princess” and announced that Equestria Girls show (My general feelings at the time were that the shark was that way <===, and that all the stuff in the previous season about some crystal city or whatever was pretty tedious, too) but I did watch that one set of episodes when everybody started talking about it, and thought it was pretty good. My expectation was that they'd try to do a hard about-face, however, since I don't think they actually INTENDED to write such a scathing condemnation of the innevitable results of pushing for equality of outcome, just that they weren't specifically thinking about politics and inadvertantly stumbled over a contradiction in the Narrative and were too wrapped up in writing a fun adventure story about celebrating your differences to notice.
It sounds like they MIGHT have done so, but at the same time most of the examples we've heard so far about this "swerve leftward" have been pretty tame. Do you think they've specifically been trying to apologize for that one episode?
No, I dont think they’ve ever disavowed the anti-Marxist message from the Season 5 bookends/Season 6. They kept hammering on the theme of Starlight Glimmer’s contrition (at one point she sheepishly admits she was motivated to learn the skill of mass-producing books to make copies “of a certain Manifesto”), and then her role just shrank because they introduced so many new characters.
Ha!
Maybe those themes were more intentional than I gave them credit for.
Intentional pun?
The “mane six” pun is, like, the oldest pun in the fandom.
Additional commentary on this: Mitch Larson wrote that episode and has talked about being a fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, so it is fairly safe to say the episode was explicitly modeled to have a similar premise and message (the focus on “equality” and how it must be enforced by violence and fear). At least some of the animators picked up on this and gave many of the visuals Stalin-esqe vibes.
As for feeling vaguely rightish in outlook, they’ve long been ruled by immortal royals they clearly view as something similar to demigods. Their fundamental values and how they come together to create the terminal goal of harmony/order. There is much talk about destiny and finding one’s place in the world. The Crystal Empire is powered by a plot device that converts national pride to magic, and in the episode they sing a song about saving ponies with their history.
I redd my son the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion. I’d have to start the next night a little before where I’d ended the previous night, because he’d fall asleep after a while. The project ended with Paradise Lost — the syntax is just too screwed up. More recently I’ve redd him the Phaedo, the Republic, the Apocalypse of John, the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, and Paul’s letter to the Romans (everything from Republic on while he was playing Team Fortress 2 on his laptop). I’ve run out of steam on this, though. I’m coming to terms with the fact that he doesn’t really care about Art and Ideas. He’s very interested in Chemistry, though (he’s in his first year of High School), and I’m glad about that — I just want him to be interested in something. And has joined the Dungeons & Dragons Club. Apparently he’s stuck in some kind of magical mirror and might have to suicide his character in order to rejoin his team, which hasn’t yet made it out of the first 9-room dungeon.
Good plan; I fell asleep reading the Silmarillion to myself. 😀
I’ve been rereading The Lord of the Rings for first time in several decades, impressed again with how good it is.
The first time I read it I had to wait for The Two Towers to be published.
Are you noticing different things this time?
LotR and The Hobbit are both great. I own the Alan Lee-illustrated hardcovers.
It’s been so long that it’s hard to remember what I didn’t notice. Also, I probably read it ten times or so in the first twenty years.
One thing that struck me this time that I don’t remember noticing before is how subtly the Aragorn/Arwen plot line is introduced. You see them together in Rivendell, but no more than that. It’s only in Lorien that you get a clear signal if you are paying attention, and I’m not sure I would have noticed it the first time when I wasn’t looking for it.
I did the same thing. My first n readings were a little more recent, I think, and I defintely remember picking up new bits and piece each time through, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you which ones I picked up in pass 1 vs. pass 8 this far down the road. That is something that I love about re-reading good books (actually, I can get the same thing out of some long-running TV shows if I wait long enough to rewatch).
There is nothing quite like the first time through a book, movie, or TV show though.
Similarly, I love seeing live music of all types, and make a point not to check out a band I’m going to see in advance if I don’t know them well. With good musicians, that first time being full of unanticipated moments is really something special that can’t be replicated.
Re: noticing different things on rereading – little things that you don’t realise until you come across sources elsewhere; for example, what was Arwen doing while Aragorn was out fighting? If we go by the book, only sitting at home weaving – such stereotypical “woman’s work” that the movies had to have her riding around on horseback and otherwise being active in order to justify her presence and show her as a “strong independent woman”.
But unless you find out about weaving magic in Norse mythology, you won’t understand that this was the traditional division, that while the man was out on the battlefield with sword and shield, the woman at home engaging in magical weaving was also helping/hindering in war:
This makes the black banner woven by Arwen and only unfolded by Aragorn at a particular time and place very different to the “oh Tolkien was such an old-fashioned sexist, all he could think of to do with his few female characters was have them sit at home doing womanly work!” attitude floating around a few places.
The raven banner didn’t work out very well for Earl Sigurd.
Getting back to Tolkien, however, Galadriel, Arwen’s grandmother, also weaves, and she and/or her maidens wove the cloaks that helped to conceal Sam and Frodo on their journey.
In my Salamander Ellen, the female protagonist, wears an amulet that protects her against insects. Its real function is to distract attention from the cord it is on, woven by her mother to absorb any spell cast on Ellen.
Oh yeah, those count. 🙂
There are hundreds, if not thousands of old Disney, MGM and Warner Bros short cartoons from the 30s-50s period, right now on youtube.
There’s two useful approaches here.
1. New shows are almost always to the left of old shows. Therefore, you will have more luck watching older shows. Remember that culture is not about aesthetics; old shows are often just as good as new shows, but with less brainwashing designed to make your children hate you.
2. Anime is less pozzed than American cartoons. Japan is not immune to the leftward drift, but it tends to drift more slowly. Therefore, if you take an anime and an American cartoon from the same time period, the anime almost always has less prog propaganda than the cartoon.
Combining these two principles, I’d recommend Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974) and Marco, 3000 Leagues in Search for Mother (1976) as two great choices, both part of the wonderful World Masterpiece Theater series of adaptations of children’s classics into anime. Alternatively, if you want something a little more religious, you can opt for Superbook (1981-1982) and The Flying House (1982-1983). Or maybe branch out from anime to puppet shows? Japan has some good ones as well, such as Growing Children: Daisuke the Tiger (1984-1986) and Puppet Theater (1990-1991). And don’t forget live-action shows aimed at children! I remember Choujuu Sentai Liveman (1988-1989) making a deep impression on me; along with Saint Seiya (1986-1989) it was my introduction to masculine virtues like strength, courage, honor, loyalty, and sacrifice.
(If you’re wondering why all my links are in Spanish, it’s because all these shows were broadcast in Latin America, which is how I became familiar with then, and I’m indulging in a bit of a nostalgia trip).
“Pozzed”?
From HIV positive, as a disease metaphor for progressivism.
It’s not a very helpful term. Like the phrase “rape culture” on the left, it makes polite debate impossible.
For what purpose? They’ll find out you were keeping them sheltered soon enough.
I see your point, but most of us don’t show our kids snuff films, BDSM porn, or neo-Nazi propaganda videos, even though we recognize that they’ll soon realize that those things are all out there. Choosing what media to expose your kids to is actually a choice, at least to some extent. It’s not crazy to exercise that choice.
There’s a pretty big difference between hiding your kids from something that is out there somewhere in the deepest corners of the internet and hiding things that they will almost certainly see in their daily lives once they start making friends.
Procedurally generated YouTube videos… *shudder*
Who said anything about hiding? The original question asked for better (by the standards of “traditional parents”) shows and the only concrete suggestion so far is to show your kid old Anime.
I can’t think of a lot of anime I think is suitable for children. If not for the violence then the sex. Right now I’m really enjoying Goblin Slayer and my wife is digging on KonoSuba but neither of those are appropriate for children.
If you’re into “traditional values,” I’ve heard Darling in the Franxx might be good for that. It was excoriated by the SJW anime fan crowd when it was coming out for pushing forward traditional gender norms and implying that boys and girls are different and erasing gay people or some such. I only watched the 1st few episodes, so I don’t know how much violence and sexual content there is in there overall, though.
You would think the SJW crowd would find all they could ever want to criticize in Anime just from the “big boobs breaking physics” shows.
Maybe that’s a far group, and Darling is close enough to be a hated outgroup?
That’s an interesting point. As someone who was immersed in far left anime fandom for a while, I think there’s a level of “suspense of judgment” when it comes to various tropes in anime. Basically just a cost of doing business if you’re an anime fan due to the fact that anime is produced by unwoke Japanese people who are primarily creating shows for adolescent Japanese boys. And that includes a lot of the typical character design tropes that are made to appeal to said adolescent Japanese boys.
It’s not like they don’t face criticism, mind you, but it’s so near-ubiquitous in the medium that it’s more like stepping on a bed of nails rather than on a single nail.
I think part of the Darling in the Franxx thing might also be that anime is a source of a lot of very progressive-coded stories in scifi works that appeal to SJW anime fans, which causes that show to stand out. For instance, there’s a show called Simoun which is particularly loved by that group, which I think has a society where everyone is female at birth but then some can choose to transition to male at adolescence or something like that (haven’t seen it).
Also, Darling in the Franxx is by Trigger, which has been in the shit list by SJW anime fans for a while due in part to their earlier big hit Kill La Kill which had skimpy clothing on adolescent girls as a major story theme and also one of the directors or animators being on 4chan and talking bad about SJWs (don’t recall if he actually used that term).
Re: Darling in the Franx:
I don’t think “men and women need to pilot giant robots together via simulated fucking” is really where you should be looking for “traditional values.” Traditional gender roles, maybe, but while they may be related, values and gender roles aren’t necessarilly the same thing.
I’ve heard it’s at least halfway decent, but I’ve also heard that it’s VERY “oh, Japan…”
Do you (collectively) really consider mainstream children’s media to be the equivalent of that?
This discussion reminds me of David Willis relating the weird reasons his traditionalist parents had for banning various kids’ shows from his home growing up, even “Care Bears” had some violation of Christian morality… and look what an obnoxious SJW he turned out to be.
(Don’t get me wrong – if I ever have kids, I won’t let them watch “Care Bears” but only because it’s annoying.)
No, I’m saying that in principle, it’s not unreasonable to limit your childrens’ media consumption, especially when they’re young. That includes trying to exert some control over the moral messages taught by that media. We all agree on that, so the question is where we should draw the line. We all agree that not letting your six year old watch Game of Thrones is probably pretty reasonable (“Oh, boy, it looks like they’re going to have a wedding!”); we can probably all agree that not letting your 17 year old watch normal network TV is silly. The question is where you draw the line.
Look, if the idea is you don’t want them to become SJWs and lecture you about how problematic you are, I’ve got some bad news for you.
To possibly extend BBA’s point (they may not actually agree with this), the problem with this kind of deceptive sheltering is that when the kids get older and exposed to other ideas (which they will), if they start being swayed by the side you oppose (which they probably will) the fact that you hid that side from them will be ammo in their arsenal (because young people have a tendency to enjoy throwing things in their parents’ faces). Better to leave those things out in the open and address them honestly.
Mine haven’t yet, and the youngest is 24.
They’ll be able to pirate anything they want eventually. The question is what entertainment to encourage. Leftist parents don’t put on Fritz the Cat for their kids, do they?
@Le Maistre Chat
The movie?
No, but my Dad left a lot of R. Crumb “comix” lying about, and I basically learned to read from those and“The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
“Curious George” and “Bob the Builder” are good, as are the “Babar” cartoons from the ’80’s and ’90’s which are still being broadcast.
Bavaria seems somewhat “traditional”, and I see nothing particularly “left” or “right” about the other shows.
“Adventures From The Book of Virtues” may meet your needs, but I don’t think younger kids will follow it well.
Babar into Bavaria?
Damn you auto-correct!
“Bavaria seems somewhat traditional” made me go looking for a “lederhosen-clad Catholic elephants eating donuts on feast days” joke, but I couldn’t find a good one.
If Calvin and Hobbes hasn’t been mentioned here, it should be
Calvin and Hobbes is very, very good, but it’s not particularly traditional. It does show a married and apparently loving couple raising a child (and a tiger) in the suburbs — there are even a couple of scenes in church, IIRC, albeit only for stuff like weddings — but Bill Watterson is an opinionated guy, on a whole range of subjects, and it shows.
It certainly wouldn’t be traditional or conservative by 80s and 90s standards, and there is certainly an anti-authority streak to it. But it doesn’t push any SJW memes and it should still be really entertaining to kids today I would think.
Oh hey, me too. I think my parents still have the whole set.
I don’t have much to contribute to the actual question here but I think that kids are more resilient to propaganda than we give them credit for. If for no other reason than the messages are ultimately designed to appeal to other adults watching and not to the child audience.
When I grew up, my mother read me books like Farmer Duck, which was basically Animal Farm retold from Napoleon’s point of view. I watched Captain Planet and every other woke 90’s cartoon. She took me to see Austin Powers when it came out, pretty sure I wasn’t even ten at the time. I started watching hardcore porn a few years later, right around when I first started puberty. No toy guns in the house though, that would have been a bad influence.
The thing is, compared to the adults I’ve met who came out of highly traditional homes, I’m as sober and straight-laced as they are if not moreso. I don’t want my children to grow up like I did but in the end all of that messaging just rolled off of me like water off a duck. Kids aren’t blank slates after all; you can try to teach them whatever you want but you can’t change their nature.
People who are naturally politically minded probably aren’t influenced very strongly by cartoons and other low-tier propaganda; simply because they can think about it and reason out of it. The question becomes to what degree does this kind of programming [in both senses of the word programming] act as a normalizing influence or set baseline assumptions about what is normal/desirable in the world — by people who aren’t motivated to do any kind of introspection or extracurricular study.
A personal anecdote would be me enjoying captain planet as a kid. I’ve become more sympathetic to [particularly non AGW] environmentalism recently but for most of my life I was skeptical of a lot of environmental advocacy. But in the same token, I did very well in the history classes I took during high school and college but the moral and ideological lessons that the textbook writers were obviously trying to inculcate didn’t really have an effect on me, but I do know they had a profound effect on people who did far less well at memorizing the actual test material and who are otherwise not necessarily ‘deep thinkers’
Two tangentially related thoughts;
1. I imagine that good propaganda has to hit a sweet spot because anything that’s too overt or cognitively disruptive won’t set the baseline and instead trigger a negative reaction in the viewer.
2. I don’t keep track of what kids shows are popular nowadays so how does the change rank the show against competing programs?
The more people talk about normalization, the less important I think it is. Maybe it’s just that it’s been normalized.
Less flippantly, people usually follow incentives but they rarely follow orders. Recently I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of marriage and divorce rates. From the research I’ve seen and my own experience, women who initiate divorces typically expect to come out ahead financially and they typically do. Men who choose cohabitation over marriage are following parallel incentives, as they don’t typically work as hard yet still gain many of the benefits of married life. Half of the country hasn’t been hypnotized by cultural messaging, they’re living their lives by making whatever decisions make the most sense in that moment.
If we flipped a switch somewhere in Hollywood and all American entertainment went back to the Hayes Code tomorrow, I don’t think that it would make a difference. As long as the law and the economy incentivize chaos, people will choose to live chaotic lives.
Shame and acceptability play a non-trivial role in whether a particular lifestyle passes a cost benefit analysis. The very fact that someone would adopt a short-term mating as a materially better option implies that the social taxes associated with that behavior have been reduced or removed completely.
But you’re right that a switch to more conservative programming wouldn’t immediately signal a return; again I think that baseline assumptions would need to be adjusted which is to some degree an intergenerational process.
My kids like Octonauts, Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom, and Peppa Pig. And we play a lot of video games. I don’t think they’re ever going to turn Mario into an otherly-abled lesbian Eskimo who fights racism and the patriarchy.
To a “I googled some lists” first approximation, all the most iconic/popular video games are either:
* From Japan
* Targeted at teens or older (or at least claim to be)
* Sports games
The only major exception was Minecraft, with the occasional mention of other Builder/God games like Sims or Civ.
As discussed earlier in the thread, Japan’s cultural exports are fairly insulated from America’s culture wars. So playing Nintendo is a natural fit.
Another contributor is that they’re the only console that seems to actually give a shit about anyone under 12. This whole search started for me from trying to find an American counterpart to Mario to suggest “sure, Japan won’t do that to Mario, but a domestic company might for X…” and then was unable to solve for X. I can’t think of any iconic kids game characters that aren’t from Japan.
Any notable examples your kids like that don’t fit those categories?
Iconic kids game characters that aren’t from Japan? Crash Bandicoot. All the Disney characters in Kingdom Hearts and the like. There’s all the Lego games like Lego City Undercover, Lego Star Wars, Lego Marvel Superheroes. So there are some, but they’re not first party. Nintendo is full of first party stuff kids like, that many that adults like too. I still like playing Mario and Zelda games (both Odyssey and Breath of the Wild were great). But when I think of the exclusives for Xbox and Playstation, it’s Halo, Gears of War, Uncharted. None of these are aimed at kids.
My six-now-but-five-at-the-time-year-old really got into Star Wars Battlefront II and (“you’re a bad parent” admonishments inc) Gears of War. Once he was able to manage the modern controllers I was looking at my library for couch co-op stuff and realized everything I own for the Xbox besides Halo is rated M. He’s never had a problem with monster-type violence (he walked in on me watching Starship Troopers when he was 4 and the next day asked mom if he could “watch the bug movie” again) so we played through all five Gears games together. “Nice headshot, daddy!” Family that slays together and all that. There’s plenty of other stuff he’d be interested in (he loves watching me play Assassin’s Creed) but most games these days require reading too advanced for him just yet. He’s going at a pretty good clip these days so maybe next year.
My daughter is 3 and likes Mario and Super Smash Bros.
I enjoyed the Worms games when I was younger. Is that still a thing that is cool with the kids these days?
Related question:
If much of culture comes through popular media, and most kids of the same age mostly watch the same stuff, does stopping your kid from watching mainstream media effectively result in them being a future immigrant in their own culture? That is, so much of what people my own age relate to involves the things we shared from when we were kids. If that shared experience isn’t there, will that result in some form of future harm?
The whole point is that in the future, some customs should strike them as strange and they should have a hesitancy in adopting them.
This is why there is a movement to eliminate all smoking from any motion picture, or in fact why the ratings are used at all.
Presumably anyone who thinks ready social integration is a goal worth paying the price of risky or immoral behavior is happy to pipe a steady diet of the popular into the environment.
It’s possible, too, the effect from media is negligible. But what you describe is just another way of phrasing the intended effect.
Stopping your kid from watching whatever everyone at school watches will make it harder for them to socialize. To quote Hunter Thompson in Kingdom of Fear:
That’s what homeschool is for.
Judith Harris, in The Nurture Assumption, argues that the main environmental influence on the adult personality is normally the peer group, not the family. She mentions the special case where the family is, in effect, the peer group. I gather that was her own situation growing up, and I think it was mine.
One argument both for and against home schooling is that it puts the family, and other children and adults the family socializes with, in the role of peer group instead of the age peers in school. In my case, both as child and parent, I consider that a benefit, since I think my family culture, both times, was better than the alternative. Obviously some will disagree.
Even if I am correct, one cost of that approach is to make it harder for the child to fit into the social pattern of his age peers when and if he has to do so. I think that was the case for me in college and for the two home unschooled children of my second marriage in college. By my daughter’s account, she got along better with the adults she interacted with in college than with her fellow students.
I’m only concerned with the problems you have if they are A. super over-the-top propaganda or B. keep the show from being good. With that in mind, here’s two recommends
Avatar: The last airbender(the show, not the movie) is pretty good. Before they got to Korra, they were mostly just concerned with making a pretty good show; It’s not exactly Rambo, but it’s not Ted Turner’s AGW hour either. The Korra one is pretty much only concerned with teenaged angst, rebellion against parents and figuring out non-standard sexuality; it more or less forgets it’s supposed to be entertaining and I’d be hard pressed to tell you what the plot even was. The first show is entirely self contained, so you can skip the second one entirely and not really miss anything.
Phinneas and Ferb is very good. They are in a blended family, but the reasons for initial requisite unblending of the original ingredient families is never looked into, and feels organic and un-forced. The show mostly just deals with good times and much better writing than required.
Everyday I’m Rumblin’
Rumblin’ Rumblin’
RUMBLE ROUND 2
As the bell rings on the second round the 4 remanining heroes take a moment to seize each other up before springing into action. Well, 3/4ths of them spring into action Particle Man springs to his second sight and his gold medallion. He considers then rejects the idea of protecting himself, in either branch of reality and instead throws his considerable diplotatic force at either Gobbobobble or Subject4056, if GB should happen to turn on him.
Subject4056 adopts a classic crane defense, devoting a substantial portion of his energy to this. But considering he’s still at full strength that leaves a comfortable surplus to tap into the Shared Life Force and then send a knee to honoredb and a quick backhand to the muttering Randy.
Gobbobobble meanwhile has learned an important lesson about throwing himself with complete abandon at a single foe. Instead he takes a second to tap the SLF then throws about 42% of himself at honoredb leaving the rest for defense.
honoredb for his part is finding his fists once again touched by the balancing forces of the universe. But while last time this force left him sluggish and flabby but surprisingly resilient, now he feels himself glowing with the white-hot energy of pure violence. Combined with that good old shared life force he unleashes a furious combination attack on all around him, perhaps hoping to end things here and now leaving just a token defense.
This powerful attack manages to slightly overcome Subject4056’s practiced defense and the wise monk tastes pennies and suspects he might lose a molar, but is otherwise fine. Gobbobobble takes practically as strong a blow and with much less of his focus on defense the seismic slams stagger him but he stays on his feet for now. No such luck for Particle Man, between the almost incidental blow from Subject4056 and the concentrated rage of honoredb he falls, like so many laureates before him. Finally, as the glowing rage ebbs honoredb feels the force of the massive, diplomancy enhanced, blow from Subject4056 suddenly and totally and then he, like Jake before him, is little more than a wet smear on the arena floor.
DOUBLE KO
END ROUND 2
ROUND 3 ALLOCATIONS DUE SATURDAY 9PM EST UNLESS THE REMAINING PLAYERS COME TO AN AGREEMENT NOW BUT WHAT DO I KNOW I’M JUST THE ALL-POWERFUL COSMIC FORCE RUNNING THE SHOW
The nitty gritty
Player: Particle Man/Randy M
Starting energy: 47
Powers activated: Branch (1), Diplomacy (46)
Attacks made: none
Defense: 0
Attacks received: Subject4056 (2, +17 SLF) Honoredb (20, +17 SLF, +32 TOWBB)
Damage taken: 88
Energy received:0
Ending Energy: -41
Player: Gobbobobble
Starting energy:67
Powers activated: SLF (10)
Attacks made: Honoredb (27, +17SLF)
Defense: 30
Attacks received: Honoredb (17, +17SLF, +32 TOWBB), SLF (17/3 =5 rounded down)
Damage taken: 41
Energy received: 0
Ending Energy: 26
Player: Honoredb
Starting energy: 73
Powers activated: SLF (10), The One Who Brings Balance
Attacks made: Subject4056 (18, +17SLF, +32 TOWBB), Gobbobobble (17, +17SLF, +32 TOWBB), Randy M (20, +17SLF, +32 TOWBB)
Defense: 8, -32 TOWBB = 0
Attacks received: Subject4056 (7, +17SLF, +92 Diplo), Gobbobobble (27, +17SLF), SLF (17/3 =5 rounded down)
Damage taken: 165
Energy received: 0
Ending Energy: -92
Player: Subject4056
Starting energy: 89
Powers activated: SLF (10)
Attacks made: Honoredb (7, +17SLF, +92 Diplo), Particle Man (2, +17SLF)
Defense: 70
Attacks received: Honoredb (18, +17SLF,+32 TOWBB), SLF (17/3 =5 rounded down)
Damage taken: 2
Energy received: 0
Ending Energy: 87
By the way, Randy only just got his allocations in before I posted this, and in fact I’d already starting writing up the results where he just devoted all his energy to defense. Funnily enough, the outcome was nearly identical (PM and honoredb both KO), but Gob had only 3 energy in that case.
Well, considering Subject4056 has more than double my energy and we’re both basically mortal, there’s nothing I can do!
So uh, *hack, wheeze* hey there, dude. You, uh, you win ok?
Sounds fine by me, though our dastardly captor will have to give the rules on concession.
Thanks for the game everybody! Looking forward to dying first next round.
The all-powerful cosmic force came to the same conclusion about your chances and your dignified surrender will save us a lot of busy work, so thanks for that.
Ah man. Honoredb is down to -92. My attack added 92 to an attack against him, meaning I accomplished nothing. :/
That Candy man and Balance Bringer made this one a brain burner.
Wow, good game! It came so close to running long, too…
Thanks for playing all! Glad you guys had a good time, I quite enjoyed seeing it all unfold from on high and enjoyed the creative writing prompt. If there’s interest in another bout I’ll open up the applications again next OT.
What is a thing you’ve been trying to achieve or learn, and failing, for more than five years?
Why aren’t you quitting? Do you have a plan you think will work this time, and if so, why?
Retirement.
Because I can’t yet.
My plan is “accumulate money until I have enough, then quit”. However, taxes and expenses and soon inflation push the goal out further all the time, so I suspect the plan will never, in fact, work.
I’m curious, if you don’t mind my asking, what number are you trying to hit?
Probably about $7M in post-tax money at the moment to live at my current standard of living for my likely remaining lifetime, but it goes higher all the time, as do the taxes to reach that much.
What safe withdrawal rate are you assuming? At the standard 4% rate, that would give you an inflation-adjusted income of $280k/year. At a more conservative 3% rate, it’s still $210k/year. That’s a pretty rich lifestyle, especially since you specified post-tax money.
4% is the normal withdrawal rate for people around age 65. I’m 46, and have a living grandparent in his 90s. So I ballpark $150K/year for 45 years, and assume (probably optimistically) that inflation and higher taxes won’t eat it up faster than that.
I thought 3-4% was the “live off the investment returns” rate? I’m at the “throw money into Vanguard and don’t watch it obsessively or you’ll be tempted to time the market” stage personally, so dunno how realistic a consistent 5-6% return is.
Also damn your CoL is high. Expecting to put a lot into medical expenses or what?
are you including housing wealth in that figure?
Inflation is already baked into the safe withdrawal rate studies: 4% rate means you withdraw 4% of your balance the first year and then adjust for inflation thereafter.
And yes, the 4% figure is based on a conventional retirement, specifically for a 30-year retirement duration. But there’s only a very small difference in safe withdrawal rates between a 30-year retirement and a much longer retirement: “failed” retirements in the models are almost always driven by sequence-of-return risk (a market crash or period of high inflation right after you retire), and if that doesn’t happen you’ll almost always have more money at the end of 30 years than you started with.
Bill Bengen, who did the 1994 study that established the 4% safe withdrawal rate, currently recommends a 4.5% safe withdrawal rate for a 30 year retirement, 4.3% for 35 years, 4.2% for 40 years, 4.1% for 45 years, or 4% for an indefinite time horizon. More here.
By his recommendations, for a $150k retirement income on a 45 year retirement, you only need about $3.7M.
I thought the rule of thumb for perpetual funds (e.g. endowments) was 2% of the trust every year (whatever the trust happens to be that year).
I’m living in the NYC area, and moving someplace much cheaper isn’t going to happen. And of course the point would be to enjoy life, not to switch the problem of money-and-little-time for time-and-little-money.
However, Bill Bengen isn’t going to be there for me if I run out of money, and neither is anyone else. (Also I don’t have $3.7M either)
A long time ago I met someone in an Objectivist special interest group in New York who wanted to write a novel and had concluded he first had to make a million dollars to support himself while doing so. As best I could tell he was already working on his second million, had not written the novel.
People who want to write are doing so already.
People who want to write for a living… well, I think the joke about, iirc, board games applies, more and more as writing as a profession is getting harder to achieve due to increased competition in the form of self-publishing, other entertainment, and so on.
How do you make a small fortune as [professional writer/game designer/other hobby turned occupation]? First, start with a large fortune….
Being good enough at WoW to be at least average, preferably better than average, in the raid group I was with. I eventually stopped playing after concluding that I was not going to succeed. I’m still not sure if the reason was not growing up with analogous games or not putting nearly as much time into playing WoW as the people I was playing with.
@Atlas
In terms of mechanical shooting ability – I was once an *excellent* counter strike player, by any standard (back in the days of 1.6) and now I am “bronze or lead” tier in the mechanical shooting aptitude in the current game me and my boyfriend play (Destiny 2). I have a feeling a lot of that has more to do with spending almost every waking moment that wasn’t spent on schoolwork (which was quite easy for me pre-highschool and early hs) playing Counter Strike.
I call it the “make it a job or quit” point. You eventually come to realize that to make any measurable improvement in a skill area, it must consume at least as much time as a full-time job would. This seems true in any vaguely “competitive” hobby or skill.
I once asked you if you were interested in playing tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons and you said that you preferred WoW.
I assume that you’re still not interested in going back to tabletop rpgs — which can now be played online — but I *have* to ask.
@Anatoly
To not be as bitter and resentmentful as I am, and to be more grateful for what I have.
Because I’ve not achieved serenity
Yes, by pickling my brain in alcohol I’ll eventually forget what I’m angry about, or I’ll die trying, or I’ll work hard for my son’s to have a better life and get some comfort from that.
Can someone in Berkley please give this guy a hug?
One strategy I’ve read about that can help some people is doing an end of the day active reflection on things you’re grateful for or were nice that day.
That usually means having a little notepad n your night stand and writing 3 good things about that day.
It’s easier for the human mind to focus on negative things, to the point where it can overshadow everything else, so this kind of exercise forces you to remember that not everything was terrible.
Thanks, feeling a bit better today.
Had our Thanksgiving party at work, besides those of us in “Engineering” (building maintenance), Custodial pitched in, our old boss visited and said a prayer, a couple of bigwigs from the City Hall campus came, as well as some cops, and medical records staff (who have an office near our boiler room), some singing was had, and too much food. I used a sick day and a new Public Works plumber went up to do the work in the Jail in my stead, after I showed him some of the tricks for the antiquated building, and the only work I did was fix a sink in Homicide with him looking over my shoulder (he thought he’d have to drill something out, I showed him a work-around).
Came home and my wife amazed me by understanding that the sounds our younger son was making were his words for “please give me that blanket”.
A pretty good day
our old boss visited and said a prayer
Gasp! They permit this on government (well, state?) property during work time in California? I thought this kind of “forcing compulsory religion down the throats of the unaligned (i.e. anyone within a ten mile radius who might be presumed not to be religious)” was specifically banned! 😉
Glad you enjoyed the party and had a good day.
@Deiseach
City and County not State (our city is a county as well), and I suppose “technically” maybe prayers are banned on city properties, but it’s a bit hard when most of the City and County’s workforce were educated in Catholic schools, and/or are religious immigrants, who will momentarily forget how to understand English if you hassle them about it.
Maybe the couple of law enforcement officers who were with us could have stopped it if they weren’t too busy having their heads bowed and making the sign of the cross.
Thanks!
Oh wait, that didn’t come out right!
Our old boss is retired, and that he said a prayer as a private citizen while current city employees happened to be nearby and silent in entirely coincidental.
*whew*
Good handwriting.
I’ve mostly quit, but my girlfriend’s is beautiful, and I feel bad for not being able to write to her as beautifully as she can to me. I really should get back to practicing.
The banjo. Admittedly I’m sufficiently inefficient at my work that I rarely have free time to practice, but I love the sound, when I get the chance. Though there is probably some aspect of the phenomenon whereby even as you get better, there is always someone better than you, even if you are a high-level professional, so an amateur dabbler is never going to feel like they have arrived.
See also, all the languages of the places I expect to visit again, and would like to speak better (Dutch, Finnish, Bulgarian, Portuguese, others…)
Losing weight.
Not quitting because even failed diets slow the upward trend.
Sure, this time I’ll just not eat so much and do more exercising. Definitely going to work.
Losing weight past a certain point. Going from “lots of fat, no muscle” to “some fat, some muscle” was pretty easy but losing fat past a certain point gets tricky – a diet will go for a while, stall, and then some of the gains will be reversed.
Not quitting because I have been, by reasonable standards, successful: I get in the gym 4-6 days a week, I’ve gone beyond the “lose x% and keep it off for y years” that is supposedly only achieved by single digits or whatever according to the studies, I’m not even really fat by most standards any more. Plus, doing enough BJJ to have smooshed guys with abs is an ego boost.
This time, I’m combining two things that seem to have worked in the past – intermittent fasting (of sorts) and daily weighing.
Also this. My goal is be a more muscular 175. Right now I am at a178, with a small amount of muscle, down from 208 and far too much fat.
I probably am never going to get to the “muscle” % I want, in part because I am not measuring that and I have no defined goal, but at least it should keep pounds off.
Just the opposite. I’ve been trying to gain weight.
Check out /r/fasting
A girlfriend/spouse.
Because concluding that I don’t get to have kids is the end of meaning in my life; the daily grind is boring.
No, because history. And I’m getting to the age where fertile women will say “don’t you think you are too old for me?”
In this brave new world a man can have children on his own. It’s more expensive and difficult than for a woman on her own, but it is doable.
Finishing my simulation side strategy game. Because I have no other major goals or desires that are achievable. Even if the game sucks I can at least code it and finish at some point.
I don’t have a plan I think will work. I can push carts 10 hours a day always being on time and never missing work but even though I was a national merit finalist, didn’t have the GPA requirement, I am just totally incapable of doing something mentally difficult but also boring for a sustained period. Drugs are apparently mostly not effective on me at acceptable doses for some reason ADHD or anxiety wise. Therapy didn’t really work either. Shrink said sometimes it just happens that way. Bad luck.
Qualify for a Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour. I am (and have been for a while) good enough that I could plausibly catch a few breaks, spike a tournament and get there. I also know I’m capable of being a better player than I currently am, though it’s unclear to me how much better: I honestly don’t know if there is an amount of work I could do that would put me in the class of players who can actively expect to qualify, even from only a few events, and given that I don’t want to make the game a full time job I’ll never find out. Alternatively, I could buy more tickets, in the sense of entering more qualifying events. I fail to do this partly through disorganisation, partly due to brokeness, and partly out of an unhealthy fear of failure.
What is a thing you’ve been trying to achieve or learn, and failing, for more than five years?
Getting full-time employment in a decent job/having an actual career
Why aren’t you quitting? Do you have a plan you think will work this time, and if so, why?
I have quit. I no longer have any plans since all the plans I did use, constructed from all the advice about “how to get this thing you want”, didn’t work and I’ve finally accepted (having had it smashed into my face) that I am not worth anything; in the discussions on here about minimum wage and how employers will only pay the value of employees, I’m not even worth working for free – yes, I tried that as an offer and still couldn’t get anywhere – this was a tactic advised, back before the days of “unpaid internships”, to the likes of me looking for work:
1. Offer to work for a trial period for free
2. Your employer will see how great you are and offer you a paid job
3. Profit!
Step one went just fine, the problem was step two – as long as I worked for nothing, the employers were happy with my work and had no complaints over quality, the minute I went “so if I’m doing okay, how about a paid job?” it was “oh sorry, can’t keep you on anymore, you simply don’t have the qualifications” and I was out the door, so no step three I’m afraid.
Most egregious example of this, though not the only one, was local pharma company where I applied for lab tech work (I actually had a three year diploma certifying me as a lab tech, this was back in the day). Sorry, can’t even take you on for summer work washing the glassware, we just don’t have the vacancies. Literally a week later, heard so-and-so got in the lab there. Oh, has she a degree? No, she’s not even interested in science, this is a summer job until she goes back to college. So how come she got hired on (completely unqualified, at full wages) when they told me there wasn’t even temporary summer work? Well, turns out she’s the daughter of the managing director, you see…
I couldn’t have asked for a clearer signal from the Universe “Face it, you’re fucked. It’s never going to matter what you do, how much you try, what certificates you earn – you are not going to get anywhere because you Just. Don’t. Count.”
You write well. Have you thought about ways of getting paid for it, while doing whatever else you do? You could, for example, have a blog and either host ads or have a Patreon account. Find a niche of people who would be interested in your view of the world–a very small fraction of the world population is still a very large number of people–and target it.
My daughter is a free lance online editor. It doesn’t pay very well but it does pay, and she has the additional benefit of feeling as though she is helping authors learn to write better (myself among them, at the moment). You obviously read a lot. Manuscripts by authors who are self-publishing are not as worth reading as the published works you read, but there is the benefit of actually having a hand in making them better.
Or write a book yourself. Getting professionally published is very hard, but self-publishing at this point is essentially costless. Even if it doesn’t make you any significant amount of money, as long as some people read your book and like it you have evidence that you are achieving something of value.
Your past experience suggests that you are poor at selling yourself to employers. Sell yourself to customers instead. Since any such approach might not work, find ones that don’t require you to give up your present job, at least until and unless it is clear that this one really is working.
Oh yeah.
I wanted to discuss a thought i’ve been mulling for a couple years that was brought up in the recent post on preschool. Namely the comment by Mr Doolittle and particularly the second point he made about how openly saying we are removing children from poor environments would be insulting and incredibly taboo, but essentially that is what we are doing and we just don’t talk about it.
If any of you are familiar with playing MOBA’s you’ll know that there is often a back and forth within communities on how ranking systems should work. Hardcore fans often want a straight number or ELO and developers want to disguise this number with tiers so as not to be discouraging to people in lower ranks. When i played League of Legends regularly i was quite proud (at the time and in hindsight what a waste of time) to be in the top 5% of players. At the same time i could see on forums and other channels people claiming to be high elo giving endless grief to everyone below maybe the top 40%. Given the majority of the playerbase is bronze rank, bronzies was a typical insult. It made me think about the toxicity of the scene and ask myself why would anyone who wasn’t super good at this game stick around?
I’ve often had this thought with professions that openly have leader boards (like i believe surgeons do?) where they rank everyone in the place in order of how good they are, and think if you were below average why would you stick around? Surely you’d leave and go somewhere else if you were repeatedly able to see exactly how unexceptional you are. Extending this to life in general, i know when i’m distinctly aware i’m pretty crap at something, i remind myself that i’m good at plenty of other things and my self esteem isn’t usually that affected. But then without going in to detail i know, as i’m sure many here are as well, i’m objectively pretty smart and successful relative to the average population.
What about those who are objectively pretty crap at everything they try? How do people on the bottom of the “ELO curve of life”, i.e. those who statistically must exist who are just objectively pretty crap at everything, motivate themselves to get through every day? My answer is they just must not think about it and will have developed coping mechanisms, or they’d inevitably get depressed. If you were cursed by some ancient deity to just be terrible at everything you tried to do, would you not feel immensely suicidal?
In a long-winded way i think what i’m trying to say is that sometimes having the “truth” open and available for all to see is a net-negative in terms of overall happiness for humans. We need lies to some degree in order for society to exist. Everyone wants to believe they are special. In this case, maybe trying to ascertain whether pre-school is marginally beneficial or marginally negative or whatever is wrapped up in political issues that are too uncomfortable for us as a population to admit, as Mr Doolittle said. We need ways to help those in “bronze tier of life” without coming outright and saying it as that would have the opposite effect and breed resentment. Case and point, when players in league aren’t at the tier they STRONGLY BELIEVE they should be, they often troll other players as a way to regaining control in a way. I believe the same applies in life as well.
Help them to do what? That’s the great question of the industrial age, isn’t it? When education was made nearly universally-available for religious reasons, those who were too dumb for school could still be farmers, same as their ancestors for thousands of years. And before there were farmers, every woman was a gatherer and every man a hunter, and you didn’t need preschool to prepare you for 13 years of sitting in classrooms for that.
How about trying to build our society so that people in the bronze tier, or even the lead tier, have a path to a basically rewarding and good life? That doesn’t mean everyone needs to become a dot com billionaire or an investment banker or something, it just means that there needs to be some way to live a rewarding life when you’re of average intelligence and talents.
That is mad hard though. Like, how does that society look? Let me do the Feinmann thing and consider a concrete example so I can visualize what you mean.
Consider Kelly. She’s a cousin of mine, lives in London. Never had a job in her life, everything paid for by our family or the gov (combination of the dole and a fake disability). Educated to the high school level, but just screwed around and didn’t pay any attention, so knows less than that would suggest.
She’s got 4 kids, by 4 dudes, raising them how she was raised (none of the dudes are in the picture, the notion that they would be would strike her as ridiculous). She abuses pot, alcohol and prescription drugs, been to the hospital a few times for the reasons that that kind of lifestyle lends itself to.
I don’t know of any hobbies or passions that she has, aside from self medicating, being around her kids and dunking on folks on social media. She used to go clubbing, but she’s a bit old for that now, mostly just stays in.
So, what would it look like to help her? What could be done, or should be done, for her? She has the bare necessities, in spades. Roof over her head, fast food every day. Internet on tap. A boy any night she wants one. Friends and family visit a few times a year (mostly family). A ready supply of the kinds of drugs that aren’t ruinous, and no inclination or way to get the worse stuff.
There are MANY folks who are worse off than Kelly, but she always comes to my mind when I talk about helping the unfortunate. Does she need help, and if so, what would it look like to help her? Would that scale?
It is very hard for me to get from people’s desire to build our society such that she can have a rewarding/good life to the actual actions that you could take to change her lived experience.
I suppose this is because the fix isn’t to change her or what she’s given at a personal scale, rather to change the civilisation she’s sat in at large, so she can (must?) interact with it in a non-degenerate way. A much bigger ask and much more open-ended.
So she has all her needs and wants fulfilled and doesn’t have to work at all to do it? Why would she need help? She’s living the sweet life.
Realistically based on the theory of the hedonic treadmill at least some portion of society needs to feel useless. Its comparative. What do you do? Segregate them somehow? Hide the fact that they are well below average? Basically the only option is some sort of obfuscation but no matter what some % of humans will know they are at the bottom.
Brains adapt to circumstances. There’s nothing we can do about that. At best we can pick a standard of living that is the minimum materially and get people there. We can’t make them fulfilled and happy.
The idea that feeling useful is necessary to be happy is perhaps a problematic one. I’m certainly not sure it’s true, at least in the grandest sense (useful to society at large).
There are millions of ways to be “useful” that don’t require high ranking. Spending time with children or the elderly is generally low status, but quite useful to those who get social interaction instead of crushing loneliness.
What we should worry about is separating corporate ladder-type competition from our notions of “useful.”
Aren’t you giving in a bit to typical mind fallacy here? I know a lot of people who enjoy games but don’t care about winning; I even know some who enjoy some games at which they always lose badly, because they enjoy a specific aspect of the game so much that they always end up pursuing it at the detriment of any chance of achieving a good position.
Of course these people also tend to stay far away from competitive scenes.
I enjoy watching speedrunners breezing through platform-hell rom-hacks of Super Mario World, and finishing in record time a game where I couldn’t even get passed the first level. Doesn’t prevent me from enjoying “vanilla” Super Mario World, even though I’m fully aware, by comparison, of how bad I am at it.
You’re probably right to be honest. But do people not care about winning because they are crap at things, or are they crap because they don’t care? Probably a mix of both.
In life though don’t we as a society want everyone to buy-in to a certain extend though? I realise i’m taking this to an extreme but on some level throwing a game in league out of spite and shooting up your school are both trolling.
It’s true that there’s a strong societal discourse oriented toward competition, success and 1st place.
But it’s also true that many people don’t buy into it — either because they don’t care, or because they’re already too busy about making it through the day to worry about “finishing ahead”.
throwing a game in league out of spite and shooting up your school are both trolling
But that only happens if you’ve “bought in” to the notion that you must be on the top tier or else your life is miserable and worthless, that if you can’t beat others to be on the top of the leaderboard there is nothing to be gained.
Someone who doesn’t care if they’re 99 out of 100 on the board isn’t going to throw the game out of spite at not being number one. Someone who doesn’t think they should be dating the cheerleader and popular with everyone and getting straight As in every class isn’t going to shoot up the school for not getting what society ‘promised’ them they ‘should’ get.
[epistemic status: bloviating]
I don’t think there’s an ELO of life, the way you’re describing. Is an IQ 85 bus driver with a loving family and a stable community in bronze or plat? How about an IQ 130 millionaire trapped in a loveless marriage who needs three double-vodkas to fall asleep? Someone who hates their 9-5 but loves their hobbies? Someone who excels at work but dreads the loneliness of their empty apartment?
It might be fair to say there is something akin to ELO, in specific social milieus. If you go to an SCA meeting or a corporate boardroom or a prison yard and spend 15 minutes there, you can probably discern a pecking order there, which is not unlike ELO. But it’s very much a mistake to say that’s a feature of the universe, that the ranking is there because some people are better at things than others. It’s not – there’s no such thing as “best philatelist”. The ranking is just something that got bolted on by super-intelligent monkeys.
Our ancestors lived in bands with strict hierarchies, and each individual knew their place in it, and knew roughly what activities would increase or decrease their standing. Our monkey brains still have all the hard-wiring to do that, we still retain the desire to understand our place in the world and to move up the ranks, but we no longer have a pack – just a weird and complex world full of overlapping pack-like structures, but with ever-shifting rules and no sure way to know your place. So to compensate, we just latch on to anything that looks a little bit like a pack hierarchy and treat it like it is one, kind of the way our brains are so good at analyzing faces that anything featuring two dots over a line gets interpreted as one.
So, I think you’ve got it reversed: people don’t need coping mechanisms to deal with being low at life ELO, because there isn’t any such thing. We need coping mechanisms to deal with the lack of a life ELO, and one of those coping mechanisms is inventing games with clear rules and objective success criteria, which we can practice at and see measurable improvement in.
I agree — we want to understand our place in the world. I don’t know about the moving up the ranks part, but definitely the understanding our place in the world part. And the Divine Mind signifying Its satisfaction with the propriety of our placement. If we can imagine that, we’re okay. But it’s hard to imagine that now. So, as you say, Games.
I think this way of looking at things is more relevant than the top level post.
Almost all of us are going to suck even in our best areas compared to someone. There are so many humans out there. I don’t think you can hide that from people, but I don’t think you need to either.
The sheer number of choices and whatifs? though can be confusing and even torturous. It’s a lot of effort to just figure out what to do and keep track of all these social structures.
I think life has not one but several metrics, which are correlated a fair bit. Some people get their self-worth by looking at their best score, others by looking at their worst.
One solution is to put a lot of time and effort into a hobby that most other people are putting much less time and effort, thus becoming relatively good at that hobby despite less natural ability.
Another is to associate mostly with other low skill people, and evaluate yourself, as most of us do, relative to the people you mostly associate with.
A larger scale solution, in one sf book, was the creation of a bottom layer of fake people–AI’s playing games poorly enough so that not very able people usually beat them, but pretending to be humans for the not very able people to feel superior to. It works until someone finds out.
That SF example sounds very Iain M Banks to me, with the irony of an AI that is light years ahead in terms of intelligence explaining this to someone relatively smart so they can feel superior to those less smart than them.
But like you said it works until someone finds out. I guess if Scott etc determine pre-school is pointless and that becomes public knowledge we’d just be eliminating an inefficient way of providing benefits. My concern is that any method of providing benefit will inherently become inefficient once it is publicly known to be a benefit.
I think something like this is more or less why there are so, so many niche hobbies in the world. When a club gets big enough, some people won’t want to join it just because the social structure is too well-established to break in and make a name for themselves. So they go off and decide to start their own club doing something else, and attract some people who think, “Well, I’m not hugely interested in this, but at least this group is small enough for me to get to know everyone, and it’s growing so there’s some a chance for some upward mobility, so maybe I’ll give it a chance.” Enough people doing that over a long enough time period, and you wind up with stuff like Locksport.
Hence the popularity of Lacrosse, Ice Hockey and Ultimate Frisbee.
I notice that everyone is writing ELO, as if it was an acronym. I didn’t know what it was so googled it, and discovered that it is the name of the person who invented the system–Arpad Elo.
My understanding is that it is written ELO, even though it’s a name. I never understood why.
It’s written ELO Arpad to remind you that it’s the surname. Same with Corrado GINI.
Maybe it’s meant to be shouted.
Weird, its a huge term in chess. Always figured you as a person with at least a passing familiarity with chess.
Thank you. I was very annoyed at the use of what I thought was an acronym. All I could think of was Electric Light Orchestra. Thanks for pointing our what it is.
And now I’ll be filling in “Electric Light Orchestra” every time I see references to ELO.
Don’t let me down.
@Bamboozle
Too late, I’ve already been seething with resentment and bitter envy for decades.
All it took was the conditions of my schools and a short walk to U.C. Berkeley, using their restrooms, and sneaking into their libraries (the Morrison reading room was like heaven!) and comparing it to my schools.
I felt the same way comparing East Palo Alto to Palo Alto decades later.
You’d have had to induce severe fetal alcohol syndrome ala “Brave New World” for me not to notice the difference.
I see no merit in this “meritocracy” designed by and for the “cognitive elite” caste, and if it was in my power to do so I’d cast you out of your Ivory Towers, take your books and distribute them to the rest of us and force your professors at gun point to teach all of us.
I’d make your children go without nannies, take your gardeners away, let the tenants crammed in noisy moldy apartments with leaking roofs, those who sleep in their cars, those without any roofs at all live in your leafy suburbs and enjoy quiet instead of the screams of their neighbors and the sirens and gunshots.
I’d have us all enjoy your wine and “artisanal” “organic” what’s it, but not for me now, because now is too damn late for me!
I’m too old, give it to the young!
Let them have the hoarded learning and comfort.
“What if we helped, would we be resented?”
You really think the resentment isn’t there already?
We have eyes, we see, we don’t know all you know, but we know enough to see what we have lacked.
I “teach” about 200 working-class 18-22 year-olds per semester — Humanities-related classes — and with very few exceptions they don’t give a crap about anything and quite obviously never gave a crap about anything and never could have given a crap about anything.
This is in NYC — people from everywhere in the world. With very few exceptions they don’t have the slightest bit of curiosity or sense of beauty or even of anyone else’s independent selfhood.
I believe that you’re seething with resentment because you’re one of the exceptions.
Oh — and on “using their bathrooms” — these people that I “teach” don’t flush urinals and toilets.
On distribution of books “to the rest of us” — after it became apparent that they would never read any assigned material on their own I started making my own files of excerpts, distributing copies to them in class, and reading out loud to them. They look at their phones and computer screens.
They don’t give a crap about anything, never did, and never could have.
Why are these people in class? They are old enough that school is not just optional, but costs them money.
I do some teaching at a community college, and while I’m not as down on my students as Aging Loser (or maybe my students just aren’t as bad), they are mostly there for credentials, not to learn things.
The credentials game is pretty f’ed up most of the time. Bad for students, bad for teachers.
See an older article, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower/306810/
Apparently it was turned into a book, which I didn’t know until just now, but the article is good.
“I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.”
So, like the other replies said, credentialism.
Its not just lower end education.
The same happened at my Alma Mater, including in the engineering department. And again it happened in law school.
Education is mostly credentialism.
It’s worth asking whether the problem is:
a. Future policemen, nurses, firemen, etc. not giving a f–k about classes relevant to their future career. (Future cops sleeping through classes on how to do investigations or how forensic techniques work, say.)
b. Future policemen, nurses, firemen, etc., not giving a f–k about some irrelevant-to-their-lives required class that they are taking only because someone told them they have to, in order to graduate. (Future cops sleeping through trigonometry classes, or classes in American history, or English composition.)
I spend most of my waking hours trying to learn new things from others, or trying to do research so I can maybe learn entirely new things from the universe. And yet my employer requires a number of classes every year involving safety, diversity, etc. I don’t sleep through them or play on my phone during them, because that would be rude, but I sure am not there because I find the subject interesting. (Though these days we’re moving to online training, where my bored eyes-glazed-over look won’t offend anyone.)
@albatross.
Yes, exactly! Aging Loser says they care about nothing, but I am positive that isn’t true. I imagine they care about sex, and money, and their own hobbies. What they don’t care about is whatever Aging Loser is teaching. Humanities he says. I was usually pretty bored about that too at age 20, and I was always an intellectual.
The problem is requiring kids to take this stuff that they don’t care about, and arguably wouldn’t do them any good even if they did pay attention. Too bad for both the teachers and the students. Hopefully they do pay attention for the classes they actually need to learn.
Of course the point that Aging Loser was making, that most of these kids don’t give a crap about the books that Plumber was raving about, is totally true. OF course it is also mostly true for the 20 somethings going to the elite colleges too. Plumber over-stated his point, but the reaction of Aging Loser in response over-stated in turn. Maybe I am continuing the trend.
There’s a huge difference between things you seek out to study and things someone makes you study that you don’t care about. I’d happily sit in a lecture hall for a class about immunology or population genetics. Someone else would be ecstatic to get a class about ancient Chinese history or Native American religions. But make us swap classes, and it’s pretty likely we’ll both be glazing over.
To be fair, Berkley did try to teach everyone, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content
Some schools do have all their courses up on the internet still though, https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm is pretty good.
The nannies and gardeners might not appreciate that as much as you think. And I imagine most of the stuff you want to redistribute wouldn’t exist in the first place if we didn’t have a system under which people could hang on to their own stuff. Your ideal system needs to take into account how wealth is created, not just how it’s distributed.
And what makes you think all can or want to learn? You’re going to need to point those guns both directions.
Meh, never had a nanny as a child (and no children now). Nor a gardener; cutting the grass was up to the Nybbler with his hay fever (and this was before current-generation antihistamines), or his father before that. I have a landscaper now; not sure why you want to take away the livelihood of a Portuguese immigrant family and their employees.
Take “those who sleep in their cars, those without any roofs at all” to live in my leafy suburb, and they won’t get peace and quiet. The neighbors will scream, the gunshots will come. The houses will be damaged or destroyed; certainly the roofs will leak. It’s not true individually that people create their own Hell, but it’s true collectively. Near me, East Orange, NJ, was once a wealthy suburb of Newark. After the 1967 Newark riots, exactly what you suggested should happen did happen to East Orange. And now East Orange is a poor and crime-ridden town.
@Incurian and @The Nybbler,
Judging by some very terrible history in Asia and Europe you guys are very likely correct, and for the most part attempts at radical change makes things worse, but my larger point remains that the idea that more help will breed resentment in the helped is delusional, the resentment is already there, I’m living proof.
OK, so why would I be at all interested in helping these people who hate and resent me and would harm me if they could?
I’m not claiming that. I’m claiming that certain, specific things are not helpful and are probably counter-productive. I think many of the potentially genuinely helpful things are of the “teach a man to fish” variety, rather than the “give a man a fish” variety, though I don’t think many of them would be welcome.
ETA: Diamond Age is a decent book on the subject.
@The Nybbler
I could post some claptrap about “A better world for your grandchildren”, but really?
There’s no reason at all.
You’ve probably seen “All Quiet on the Western Front”, “Johnny Got His Gun”, and/or “Paths of Glory”, or have at least read of the trench warfare of “The Great War”.
What would be your opinion of recruiters into that?
I have kinda the same opinion of those who encourage the young to be “activists” (especially if they don’t “walk the talk” themselves).
My father fancied himself an “activist” and his was not a life ti be copied.
While I have ideas and ideals for society, from one person to another my advice is to accommodate yourself to this society as it actually is, and to do what you may for your kids to be middle-class or better.
Nicholas Bordoise never got a union wage.
Don’t be a martyr.
There are things we could do to support the working class, things that would raise my taxes that I would vote for.
“Forcing them to attend schools that they hate” would be nowhere on that list.
I suppose it’s worth pointing out that forcing the children of the middle/upper classes to attend schools they’ll hate is also a pretty bad policy.
If anyone wants to take my course on the economic analysis of law, the videos of the classes are linked on my web page, as is the textbook. All free for anyone with web access. The same is true, to varying degrees, for four other classes–the older ones have audio recordings I made instead of video recordings made by the school, and two of them used textbooks that didn’t belong to me and are not, so far as I know, webbed.
I don’t have recordings of my price theory course, but the book version is free on my web page.
My guess is that, at most elite universities, a non-student who wanted to audit courses would find it easy to do it unofficially at no charge. My university library doesn’t check ID (the law school library I think does), so anyone who looks like a possible student could come in and read books from the shelves, although he couldn’t check out books.
Getting an education is pretty easy for someone who really wants it and is willing to spend the time getting it. What’s expensive is getting the credentials.
That was all mostly true of the college I attended (a moderately prestigious state school), with the exception of auditing (which depended on professors: some insisted on formally registering as an auditor before sitting in so the department got credit for them for funding purposes). In addition, the university library was officially open to the public for reading books from the shelves, and non-students who lived in the same county could buy a card to check out books for a relatively modest fee (looks like it’s currently $60/year).
@DavidFriedman
1) David Friedman, you are awesome.
2) In the ’80’s I could get into U.C.’s libraries, but not in the ’90’s after I was told “You have to show your faculty or student I.D.” which left a bitter taste.
I felt a little better when the “Link Plus” system allowed me to (briefly) check out books from the C.S.U.’s, but then they dropped out of the system. Right now I have a book checked out through Link Plus from Santa Clara University, and another one from the University of San Francisco, both private universities that are kind enough to let the general public borrow books from them, but the public California universities don’t, which seems counterintuitive.
Really I should be more grateful for the books I can borrow, still having once seen the garden…
The UC Berkeley library isn’t on the Link+ network, but it does claim to be open to interlibrary loan requests from public libraries in California or elsewhere in the US and Canada. Maybe see if your local library can hook you up?
It also looks like you can get a UCB library card as a CA resident, but it’s a hundred bucks a year, which strikes me as a little steep.
MIT open courseware has some really amazing lectures available for free. Linear algebra and AI were both very much worth the time; I kind of got bogged down in the circuit theory lectures (partly from life and work constraints).
iTunes U has a bunch of lectures, or did as of a year or two ago. I think you can get access with any iOS device.
Khan academy has what are basically high-quality high school lectures on just about anything you’d like to remember from high school, including stuff that you might take in your first couple years of college. (Calculus, organic chemistry, etc.)
I agree with David–credentials are harder to get than learning. Though I also think the main obstacle to learning is often time and mental energy–you can learn a lot when your full-time job is to learn; it’s harder when you’re trying to pick stuff up around the edges of a job and a life.
I once had a library card at UCLA, which was $80/yr (and being stuck on the UCLA fundraising list forever, but that’s another story). Gave it up because I lived an hour away, and was only able to check out books for two weeks, renewable once. It wasn’t worth all the driving. But if you’re close to UCB, then doing that might well be worth it. You get access to an incredible library. Or even see if there’s another college nearby that’s cheaper and will sell you a card. (I haven’t done this because I know my collection of books I care about is better than all but the very best colleges.)
Interesting. I’ve been able to walk into the UCLA stacks and reading rooms unrestricted from the ’90s to present, and I haven’t noticed any signs saying that I shouldn’t be doing this.
Either UCB and UCLA have very different policies for some reason, or they both have an unwritten policy of challenging people who “look like they don’t belong” and I pattern-match for “probably a professor of something” better than you do.
I’d really prefer public universities not be doing either of these things with books paid for with my tax dollars. OTOH, I appreciate the need for university libraries to not become the sort of de facto homeless shelters that some public libraries are turning into.
The public libraries in downtown Berkeley are very much the de-facto homeless shelters you mentioned, and campus is backed right up to downtown, so that’s probably what’s driving this policy. I’ve been to libraries on several other UC campuses and none of them screen on entry, except for rare-books rooms and the like. It’s been a while for some of them, though.
I assume you know about Project Gutenberg, which lets you download a wide range of out of copyright books for free.
I once led a discussion section on Heidegger’s Being and Time at the University of Chicago. It was a terrific group of undergrads. They were prepared and interested, the discussion was lively, we all learned a lot from each other. A few weeks into the quarter I discovered that one of the participants was not enrolled in the class and wasn’t even a UC student during that quarter. Neither I nor any of the other students had a problem with it. If you’ve read the material and are willing (and able) to join in the conversation, you’re welcome in my class.
I’ve been reading your price theory book the last few months. Thank you very much for putting it online.
Happy to be of use at zero marginal cost.
Plumber, I greatly appreciate your perspective on things (even if it’s hyperbolic), which comes from a distinctly different place from most other commenters here. Please keep posting.
Others have already mentioned that there are many free courses and books. I would add that you can also download about half of the non-free books illegally. So it’s not like the Guild of Academia could successfully hide the secrets of the Pythagorean Theorem from you, even if they tried.
The real danger in acquiring knowledge is rather the abundance of stupid books and stupid topics, so the real reason to miss the Pythagorean Theorem could be that instead of it you are studying e.g. astrology. The least replaceable part of education is the “look here, don’t look here” outline. Also, having classmates, i.e. people who solve the same problems as you do, at the same time as you do.
But I fully agree that some people have much better conditions to learn than others, which gives meritocracy its motte and bailey flavor. It seems like intelligence and hard work determine your outcome, but another huge factor is how much of that intelligence and hard work can you effectively spend on building your human capital, and how much will be wasted on overcoming various obstacles which are quite unevenly distributed.
For example, some people use their high intelligence and hard work to become good at computer programming, which allows them to make a lot of money. Other people start with the same intelligence and hard work, but first they need to spend a lot of time and energy on getting their own computer and some uninterrupted free time to learn.
No one thinks they are bronze tier, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I do.
This is a serious question: why not leave California? Austin has an interesting mix of blue and red tribers, the cost of living is rather low (especially if you stay away from downtown), and people are less snobby in general. Also, though Austin has “traffic,” it has nothing you will recognize as such. There is a really nice Less Wrong meetup group here, too.
Thanks.
I did leave California for Seattle, Washington for some months back in ’99 (my wife grew up there).
Seattle had some good bookstores, but I found it extremely disorienting, my sense of North-South-East-West was askew, the water tasted wrong, everything was “off”.
I felt much the same way in different areas of California, while I worked a decade mostly in Santa Clara county (and some in San Mateo and San Benito county) it just never felt “right”, I could swear that the water and air tasted better every mile north from San Jose.
Because our older son had a visit from the case worker that is affiliated with the charter school that he’s nominally enrolled in so he may learn on-line and take community college classes instead of going to middle school), despite the smoke and bad air quality from the wildfires up north, I took our younger son to a playground in Albany, and to the Berkeley Public Library North Branch, and unlike the parts of Oakland and south Berkeley where I grew up (and the parts of San Francisco I work in) north-east Berkeley and most of Albany just look “right” to me like no other places I seen (except for maybe photographs of the “Cotswolds”) have.
I’m not happy when the bungalows are torn down, to be replaced by oversized homes on undersized lots, or when long-time shops go out of business, and I’m really not happy that we couldn’t buy a house until both me and my wife were closer to 50 years old, then to 30, and we had to delay having children for so long (at the end of my 9,000 work hours plumbing apprenticeship my wages were over three times what they were at the start, but home prices went up more than five times and continued to climb and it was only the heaven sent crash of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the subsequent short dip in prices that allowed us to buy).
Things could be far worse, when I worked a construction job just north of Hollister I saw the people working in the tomato fields, and I could see why my grandfather wouldn’t touch a tomato decades after he worked in the fields, but even though out house is too small for a family of four, and there’s no way we could afford to move into a bigger one near here, as long as California law stays the same, it allows us to change our sons into something like the Ancien Régime aristocracy (hopefully no tumbrels will come for them!) as the property of taxes on the house will not rise to current market value and will instead stay closer to what it was when we bought the house, and that lower tax rate can be passed on to your heirs (yes it’s perverse, but I went to lousy California schools too long to not want payback!), plus what would I do for a living on Austin, Texas (or “There be Dragons”)?
If there’s a prosperous enough local union near there I could probably get work as a “travel hand” but it’s been nearly a decade since I did construction work, I doubt that I could keep pace at my age, plus the codes and materials are different.
As of now my job with the City and County of San Francisco is relatively secure because I have some seniority and finding other people who still know how to repair the obsolete plumbing fixtures used for the court holding cells and up in the Jail is hard (if they remodeled to newer equipment they’d have an easier time, but they’d rather band-aid it for decades than spend the money).
I may change my mind though after the octogenarian next door dies or sells his house (he’s one of the few other working-class homeowners left on the block) and some “tech” or University employee buying it and building up (in theory they couldn’t due to zoning laws, but “variances” seem to be granted more often than not).
The neighboring houses being sold as “teardowns” or me suffering a crippling injury before I can collect a pension, are two of our biggest fears.
Before we got our house we lived 17 years in an apartment in Oakland, and I never want to go back to living hearing the sounds of that neighborhood.
If anyone tells you “More money won’t make you happier” they’re lying to you, a quiet neighborhood without gunshots, reliable transportation, health insurance, a self defrosting refrigerator, not fighting with the landlord over a leaking roof, an oven that works, and most of all space for a family, these things very much help happiness.
My main grievance is not getting those things decades earlier, and my fear that my sons will have to wait as long or longer.
On the evidence of your comments here I disagree. You and Deiseach are the clearest examples here of intelligent self-educated people functioning in niches not usually occupied by such people.
Both evidence of something wrong with the world and of something right with the internet.
Wow, that’s very kind (and a bit surprising since when I have too much tea or coffee I start to rant like a dimestore Pol Pot) thanks.
I should come clean that most of my “self education” lately is just reading the Paul Krugman (from the center-left) and Ross Douthat (from the center-right) columns and following the links (how I originally found SSC).
Since I have your attention, and speaking of education, I have to thank an organization you’re affiliated with as their library kindly loaned my local public library (through “Link Plus”) “Wage labor & guilds in medieval Europe” by Steven A. Epstein, which has been fascinating.
In some other works on the subject, usually from the early 20th century, and most definitely “On the history and development of gilds, and the origin of trade-unions” by Lujo Brentano, which was from 1870, the link between the older guilds and the then rising trade unions is stressed, and while the “craft” unions certainly modeled themselves after the guilds (apprentice and journeyman status), in reading the later book it’s clear to me that corporations are the descendants of the guilds, more than trade unions.
As much as it rankles some (okay me) given the material incentives, the development of capitalism does seem inevitable, which is sort of the old Marxist line, except they maintained that socialism and then anarchistic communism would follow afterwards, but feudalism or capitalism sure look more likely to me as what different material conditions will bring us to by default, other ideals and ways of societal organization (Jeffersonian agrarian “yeoman” republics, social democracy, “actually existing socialism”, plantocracies) just don’t seem to last.
It is very kind of you, but no, I’m definitely Bronze Tier in life 🙂
That’s part of why the assumption that, on the scale of “average intelligence as measured by IQ” people like bus drivers must fall on the lower end annoys me – no, sometimes we plebians just find our natural level.
Bronze tier in life but not in intellectual ability. That’s the puzzle.
One of the points of The Bell Curve was that that pattern was much more common in the past. The mechanic might easily be the intellectual equal of the wealthy customer whose car he worked on. The graduate of a state university was substantially poorer and lower status than the graduate of Harvard but not significantly less intelligent.
The authors argued that that was much less true at present, due to an increasingly meritocratic society—if you are very smart and also poor, Harvard lets you in and lends or gives you the required money. While there are obvious advantages to that change, there are also disadvantages. There are problems with more powerful people correctly believing that they are much smarter than less powerful people.
Further, better sorting by ability leads to more assortative mating, which leads to a more unequal distribution of abilities, which also has problems. I think they were writing before the data indicated an increasing inequality of income, but that’s an obvious possible explanation.
One of the things that irritated me about the treatment of that book and its surviving author is that it was making important points, points that should have been of special interest to the sorts of people who demonized the book without reading it.
@DavidFriedman
I read The Bell Curve back in the ’90’s, and I chiefly remember reading something along the lines of:“If you’re reading this book you went to a private High School or an upper-middle-class (for some reason Americans are always described as “middle-class”, “upper-middle-class”, and occasionally “working-class” or “under-class”, as for some damn reason just ‘upper-class’ and ‘lower-class’ aren’t used) school district’s High School, and on reading that I bristled and thought “The Hell I did”, but I read further and saw “..or you went to a large High School that had students from different classes”, which was true and I calmed a bit.
I thought Herrnstein and Murray way overstated their case of inherent “I.Q.” rather than circumstances mostly determining success, I know that I got far better grades in High School than my brother, but he got a college diploma not me (I helped pay his way!), I know my wife has a diploma as well and I don’t judge that much smarter than me (she may have a different opinion), and the one college graduate on my crew at work (our apprentice) is bright, but not the brightest.
I thought that the book also understated the cognitive demands of the non-college track, an effective auto mechanic or HVAC technician (for examples) can’t be stupid.
Mike Rose’s excellent book The Mind at Work does a good job of illustrating the cognitive demands of “unskilled labor” (how much a waitress has to keep track of for example), a similar story is told in Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft about “blue collar” trades.
I only skimmed Murray’s later book Coming Apart but the tale he tells there of lower class American whites falling to the pathologies that were previously decried in non-whites (“cultures of poverty”, et cetera) has a simpler explanation than the change in “morals” he bemoaned (that I believe previously explained the conditions of non-whites as well):
From 1946 to 1973 the majority of Americans had rising fortunes, and afterwards an economic centerfuge occurred.
It’s economics and power, not morals, and not genetics.
For almost 30 years the difference in “tiers” was becoming less extreme before we started our fall towards the inequality of the 1920’s, and while the argument that some inequality provides incentives for growth has some merit, the 1940’s, ’50’s, and ’60’s had plenty of growth and diminishing inequality, and while I’m very sympathetic to the idea of some of the cultural changes in the 1970’s being bad (the widespread acceptance of childrens parents getting divorced tops my list), but other nations had the same cultural changes without having so many fall into poverty, and we don’t have to just look at Scandinavian countries to see an alternative way, across the border there’s Canada.
When I visited Ottawa no one asked me for “spare change”, and I saw no tents.
Except for the people who aren’t bronze-tier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
Ok, good point. I have said in the past, half-jokingly, that everyone is terrible, some people are barely good enough to recognize they are terrible.
Hot take: isn’t that what video games are for?
Hot take: isn’t that what video games are for?
Also depression, Randy M. Have crying fits for no reason, get reminded constantly how you’re an absolute fucking failure by every metric of adulthood, have your nose rubbed in your lack of achievement by casual, not even directed at you and certainly not deliberate, little actions and speech of those around you, struggle with wanting to just throw yourself off a bridge or overdose and finally stop taking up space in the world you cannot justify your existence in taking up, still don’t understand why you haven’t done that yet, get up in the morning and do it all again.
Down on the lower levels you get to know your place just fine, I realise it’s a real puzzler to our superiors as to why we continue to keep going (“if that were me, I’d kill myself rather than endure such a meaningless useless life!”) and all I can say is I have no idea why I haven’t done the rational and selfless thing of taking myself out of this life as yet.
I get it that I am stupid and useless and unqualified and just sucking up resources, I really do. As I said, down here we get plenty of reminders. And I understand why people on the silver, gold and platinum tiers have no idea what “those down there” do with themselves – hmmm, they must play video games all day or something? who knows what the Morlocks do in their dank underground tunnels? not we Eloi up here in the sunshine and flowers!
I can’t speak for the rest of my troglodytes about video games, as I was too old by the time these became mass culture to get into them – books were my soma (that is what you Upper Tiers want to know, right? How us Bronzies pass the time to drug ourselves into ignorance of our futility?)
Whether you are useful, qualified, or productive (other than here) I have no way of knowing. But you obviously are not stupid.
Before you think about doing anything, don’t you have to first resolve your paradox first?
As in, why do those people stick around?
If you can’t even answer that question for purely voluntary activities, I don’t think you should start pushing this to the human population in general.
You might feel uncomfortable knowing about half the population being below average, but the fact is that they still exist and the only explanations you give are denial and depression (not particularly persuasive explanations either – they could make up most of that portion, but you haven’t really examined if they do).
There are some other opinions like apathy or contentment, but similarly you’ll still need to evaluate how appropriate and in what amounts they can explain the situation.
If you are below the bell curve in general but really, really good at something that would be motivating and give meaning. I’m talking about people who are bad at everything. If you are bad at a game you change games, you go try to find something you’re good at, but if you’re bad at everything thing you try your hand at?
I’m aware i’m typical-minding as reflecting on this i realised Mastery is a key part of what motivates me, and for others this probably isn’t so.
I’m saying that reality is already in a way that is coping with these circumstances. And that you are being pretty pessimistic on how it is dealing with it or at least not convincingly “realistic” about it.
But as you mention, most of the players are bronze and I do not belief most of them are trolling others.
Can you first answer what are you/society/game admins to do about bronze tiers players in just that game?
Until you are able to put into perspective your worldview in this game and how it fits with reality, should you be trying to generalize it?
There are many activities that are not zero-sum or competitive, at which many people can participate without diminishing others. Volunteering at a soup kitchen, for instance, takes very little skill and almost no long term commitment. People who recognize themselves at the lower rungs tend to congregate towards these activities, rather than competitive gaming (to use your example).
Another obvious activity for the under-skilled are social games, like Yahtzee or Go Fish, where it’s more about spending time with others than maximizing strategy (since winning and losing often comes down to random chance).
1. Post on SSC
2. Watch The Good Place
3. Drink hot chocolate
4. Watch Thursday Night Football
There’s also the Country Solution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtMy5IBmX7E
but if you’re bad at everything thing you try your hand at?
Continue one day after another until you can’t do it any more (that’s what I’m currently doing, anyhow). Kind words from others on here won’t change the fact that I am bad at everything I try my hand at, and I’m sorry Bamboozle, I have no good answer for “so why haven’t you killed yourself yet?” or “how do you pretend you’re not a useless waste of space?” I suppose drugs and alcohol help with the latter, but I’ve had to stop drinking and I’ve never been around fun party recreational substances, so it’s mostly self-induced emotional numbness that keeps me going.
Hope that helps answer your question! Sorry I couldn’t be more help! 😀 😀 😀 (have to keep up the facade, after all).
EDIT: To be less depressing, I have a lack of ambition which does in some sense help – if I play a game, I don’t care if I’m playing badly or not grinding my way to Level 100, I care about “is this fun for me, am I enjoying it?” I’m not matching myself against a league table of other players or “do I get all the cool fun gear/can I complete this in the fastest time/will I hit Mega Diamond Ultra Platinum Supreme Rhodium Level”. That really takes a lot of the pressure off.
Gold Tier people probably are marked by ambition, emulation, wanting to be Number One and being dissatisfied with anything less than the achievements and goals they’ve set, but when you know that “setting goals to Get Places in life and career” is about as realistic as “fly to the moon by flapping my arms”, not particularly caring that you’re not A Leader does help with that.
EDIT EDIT: Just in case anyone thinks “Aw, you’re just saying that, you’re not that bad!”, how bad at everything am I? So bad, I couldn’t even get myself prescribed anti-depressants when I went to my doctor and admitted suicidal ideation, is how much of a failure I am! Considering “getting anti-depressants” is supposed to be “basically as easy as falling off a log”, and I’ve certainly seen other people getting them for simply turning up and asking, this is how much a fucking useless failure I am. There you go!
Apropos of another comment I made, you might try vitamin D. Doesn’t require a prescription, very cheap ($.03/day for 5000 IU’s on Amazon here), and one of the symptoms of a shortage is depression.
I had that advice from a very prominent biochemist who believes a majority of Americans suffer from insufficient vitamin D. I ordered the pills for myself yesterday.
I had that advice from a very prominent biochemist who believes a majority of Americans suffer from insufficient vitamin D.
As another anecdotal data point, I heard about this a number of years ago and got my doctor to add a vitamin D check to the blood work at my next physical. It indeed showed low. I have been taking 5000 IU/day since then and my level is back up into the normal range. I can’t say I have noticed any drastic change to my mood, but that wasn’t the main issue I was concerned with, it was the higher risk of other health issues. The pills are so cheap that it seems like an easy call.
This assumes that you derive most or all of your self-worth and self-image from your work. For a lot of people, work is mostly about the paycheck, and their self-image comes from somewhere else (family, hobbies, etc.)
Also, if you’ve put a lot of time, effort, and money into training for a particular profession, then even being a mediocre member of that profession might still result in better value than giving it all up and starting over on something different. Even a low-ranking surgeon is still making well into six figures, and if that surgeon quit, he would take a massive pay cut while still being burdened with his medical school debt.
Re: elements of “globalist” culture that are distinctly not American in origin.
I’ve been trying to compile a list of such thing based on my own intuitions and asking some people around. It’s basically cultural items or concepts that you’d expect to be able to find in most big cities around the world and/or that you’d expect most educated/higher middle class people regardless of their country to be at least passively familiar with.
Feel free to suggest more items/contest the items I’ve indexed so far.
Andersen’s fairy tales.
The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Association football and most other sports with a strong international presence.
Belgian, Swiss and Italian chocolate and confectionery (both artisanal and industrial).
Black pepper and salt.
British “popular” literature; JRR Tolkien, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl, JM Barrie, CS Lewis, HG Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, JK Rowling…
Card and domino games. While local rules can varry enormously, we find the same families of games (trick-taking, ladder-climbing, fishing, etc) played all over the world.
Chess; similarly: Checkers, Backgammon (though rulesets are less unified), and to a lesser degree, Mancala, Mah-Jong, Go.
Cinnamon.
Coffee and tea.
East Asian food, notably Chinese and Japanese food (particularly sushi, but also instant noodles), as well as Korean, Thai and Vietanemese food to a lesser degree.
European board games.
European soft drinks like Orangina or Schweppes.
French and Belgian comics.
French or Belgian food items including bread, cheese, crepes, croissants, waffles…
French and Italian languages’ significant contributions to international vocabulary, in the domains of arts, sciences, cuisine and politics.
French “popular” literature: Jules Verne, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Alexandre Dumas, Jean de La Fontaine, Victor Hugo…
French wine and champagne.
The Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
Haruki Murakami.
Hello Kitty.
Hindo-Arabic numerals.
Indian-Pakistani food.
Japanese video games, anime and manga.
Latin alphabet; “default” writing system in many technical domains and in advertising/branding even in many countries where the main language uses another writing system.
Latin-American folk music and dances, most notably tango and rumba (which are themselves the product of the admixture of many different traditions from various countries).
Licit and illicit recreative substances; alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, cocaine, heroin, LSD, metamphetamine…
The Matter of Britain.
Mediterrenean food, including pizza, paella, kebab/shawarma, fallafels, hummus, greek yoghurt…
Mexican food.
The One Thousand and One Nights.
Public museums and public libraries.
Pre-European New World crops, notably potatoes, tomatoes, corn and chili pepper.
Pretzels.
Robin Hood.
Shakespeare.
Western music; this includes western classical music corresponding to the Common Practice Period, western systems of tuning, harmony and musical notation, western technical innovations on various instruments such as keys (clarinet, saxophone, concert flute), valves (trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn, etc), western-style free reeds (harmonica, accordion — the latter in particular displaced a huge number of traditional instruments in many countries during the 19th century), not to mention the industrial development of better metallurgy techniques which allowed the evolution of the piano in its modern form; the western violin has often displaced more traditional bowed instruments even within their own associated traditional genre of music. Guitars. Classical dance, ballet, waltz.
Chinese food was discussed in the last thread, but lots of food tells a similar story. Sushi in its international form (or, at least, as I’ve seen it across the US and in the Philippines) is as American as it is Japanese, for example; elaborate maki rolls, especially, are a Japanese-American invention, with a half-dozen sushi joints in California claiming to have invented the California roll. Mexican food, too: its roots lie in Northern Mexico (Southern Mexican food is very different), but the modern burrito was invented in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Well again with the nuance that you won’t necessarily find the american variations outside of America — as far as I can tell most Japanese restaurant in France serve “normal” maki rolls; the only time I’ve seen californian rolls is in a sushi recipe book…translated from English.
What’s a normal maki roll to you? I’ve never had sushi in Europe, but if the rice is on the outside, then it’s Americanized — that’s meant to hide the seaweed. Avocado, salmon, or crab salad as an ingredient is often a tell, too.
Yeah I’ve never had one with rice on the outside. And the ingredients are usually exclusively fish. And in fact in France they aren’t even served as “rolls” – you order sets of (multiple of) 6 pieces, typically.
It’s like that in the States, too, unless you order temaki, which are kind of like ice-cream cones full of rice and fish (and fairly rare these days). Thin rolls with few ingredients and the nori on the outside does sound traditional, though.
Where I come from (London), a roll with the rice on the outside is an inside-out roll.
Although this is true re: Mexican food, I’m inordinately proud of the fact that every chili in the world, across hundreds of cuisines and cultures, ultimately comes from Mexico. It’s an accomplishment matched by nothing else I’m aware of – nor rice, onion, potatoes, or maize – let alone a spice – has had such astonishing success.
Note that I am excluding salt here, as its extraction and use don’t, to my knowledge, come from anywhere in particular.
I would say that black pepper (India) is a more ubiquitus spice than chili. Sugar is also ubiquitus, and it’s mostly made either from sugarcane (S.E. Asia) or sugar beet (Europe). Cocoa though is Mesoamerican.
That’s an interesting comparison. I might actually buy the sugar one – I’m much less sure on black pepper.
I’m interested to see how Korean food ends up getting Americanized. The BBQ is an obvious candidate flavor-wise but it’s pretty unwieldy in terms of running a restaurant (compare the number of hibachi restaurants to sushi restaurants).
Some “globalist” culture came from the British Empire, not the United States. But as Nornagest said, “globalist” food is more American than you think.
Also, France has been having a go of exporting its culture: the metric system, the French language in its former colonies, Vietnamese baguette sandwiches, the strongly anti-Church version of liberalism, etc.
Indian food is kind of like Vietnamese food: the international version isn’t particularly traditional, but its Western influence is primarily British, not American. And it spread further from there: the Japanese got their curry from the Brits, making it a copy of a copy. (It’s also one of the few Japanese dishes that I can’t stand, although I like the Indian version and tolerate the British one.)
Yes, yes, exactly. And Indians and Pakistanis play soccer and cricket.
The British Empire laid a lot of groundwork that was convenient for corporations in the biggest Anglophone country to piggyback on.
Oh yeah I mean, that’s not a problem in my equation. It’s like how “Chess” is an indian game in origin, but the international version everyone plays was codified in Spain, Italy, and then France a bit later.
A lot of globalist culture is indeed western infused, no problem here — it’s just not necessarily specifically american infused (although it often is).
The most important one is probably the English language.
I think American economic strength and culture was the most important factor in making it a global lingua franca, except in areas of the former British Empire.
The British commonwealth has 2.3 billion people. And many, perhaps most, of the people who learn English as a second language learn British English. (People in Europe all learn British English, while Asia is split.)
My teacher (in Hungary) often showed us both British and American spellings, I don’t know what less conscientious teachers teach.
The main question regarding my comment is which country is the reason most of us learn English in school as a foreign language, Britain or the US. Which variety of English is taught in school doesn’t necessarily answer that question.
The phrase “lingua franca” is an illustration of the ability of English to assimilate phrases from other languages and make them part of its own.
Resistance is futile.
Which, ironically, is the Latin for “French language”.
Even more ironically, the original lingua franca wasn’t French, it was Italian. Specifically Northern Italian mixed with Occitan and Catalan, both of which are more related to Spanish than they are to French. However it also had elements Central and Southern Italian, Berber, Arabic, and Greek. Later on it incorporated some Turkish, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The core however was always the Gallo-Italic with Gallo-Narbonese.
This might confuse the effect for the cause though. Any language can and will absorb a lot of loanwords unless it is completely isolated geographically or its speakers make deliberate efforts to avoid loanwords in favor of native coinages instead (so Icelandic people don’t use a “telefon”, they use a “sími”, a word derivated from an archaic Norse word “síma” which simply meant “cord”, “rope”).
It is not because English has a lot of loanwords* that English is the modern lingua franca: it is because it is the modern lingua franca that it has a lot of loan words. Its status as an international language exposes it to many other languages and has it used by speakers from many different background, so of course this seeps back into English.
It’s similar to how, after the Roman conquest of the Gauls, we suddenly see a number of Gaulish loanwords pop up into late Latin. Then, a millenium later, when Medieval Latin was the first language of no one but the lingua franca of everyone, we find a language that is choke full of loanwords coming directly from the first languages of its european speakers — Cicero would have been quite puzzled in front of Medieval Latin words like “baro” (baron), “burgus” or “feudum”, all of Frankish origin.
*: as I always say though, English has a lot of loanwords, and English has loanwords from a lot of languages, but english doesn’t have a lot of loanwords from a lot of languages. That is, the vast majority of loanwords in English come from French, Latin, Greek or other Germanic languages, leaving only 6% of loanwords from all other languages. English only borrows a handful of terms from most languages, and those loans tend to be found in other languages anyway (Nahuatl gave English “potato”, “tomato”, “chili”, “cocoa” and “chocolate” — but most other languages have those words too).
English got lots of loanwords way before it was the modern lingua franca and in fact pretty much from the beginning, since it originated as a pidginization of Anglo-Saxon (a West Germanic language) with Britonic (a Celtic language) and Latin. Then it got further influences from Old Norse (East Germanic) and Old Norman (Romance with Frankish influences).
Sure but these Latin and French loanwords found their way into most European languages. It’s just that during the era of national awakening, many of these languages deliberatedly tried to get rid of their loanwords to make their vocabulary more native. German used to have a lor more French loanwords, which were then replaced by native coinages in the 19th century.
I may be wrong but it seems to me that when people highlight the friendliness of English toward loanwords, they’re not just talking about French and Latin, but about all the relatively recent loanwords borrowed from Nahuatl, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Yiddish, German, Hindustani and what have you.
(Also, the influence of Celtic languages over English is probably overstated; the core vocabularly and grammar of English are overwhemingly Germanic, with very few words or structures that can be pointed out as borrowed from a Celtic substrate).
The amount of French loanwords in English is vast, like, about 50% of the vocabulary — I doubt other Germanic languages ever came close to that. There are plenty of French loanwords in English for everyday concepts for which German, Dutch, etc. use Germanic words, e.g. “air”, “art”, “science” — and glancing at Wiktionary it doesn’t seem to me like “Luft” or “Kunst” or “Wissenschaft” are deliberate 19th-century coinages in order to replace them.
There are two questions. First, WHEN English became the global lingua franca. Because up until about 1925, the British Empire was 25%-odd of the global population. Even now, I think it’s fair to say Indians learn English not because of America, but because of England. As someone else mentioned, the Commonwealth contains 2.3 billion people. Dismissing that overlooks something extremely important.
The guy who wrote Three Men in a Boat commented on the growing prevalence of English as an international language in the late nineteenth century, and that was at least as much Britain as America. He blamed the English tourist’s complete unwillingness to learn any other language. Anecdotal, but still interesting, and I think a serious sign the process was well underway even then.
US population only surpassed the English population in the late nineteenth century (and still hasn’t surpassed the population of the Empire, let alone the former Empire). The US economy only really started beating England’s very shortly before the First World War. Basically, if it was the lingua franca before about 1930, I think it’s fair to give the British most of the credit. Note that the Treaty of Versailles was signed in English in 1919 – before then everything was signed in French. To me, that strongly suggests that the change had happened before then.
The other question is what you mean by lingua franca. In the sense of “if you learn it, you can go to any country and manage”, I think the British deserve more credit. In the terms of its utter social dominance, the Americans played a huge role, though it is a little chicken-and-egg (would it have worked as well if the British hadn’t already done a lot to lay the groundwork?).
Here in Europe, my impression is since WWII. Before then, French and German (the latter in Central Europe) were as important. (My point is not that German being spoken in most of Central Europe made German a global lingua franca, but that there was no global lingua franca in the sense English is today if, in a large region of Europe, most people who knew a foreign language spoke German and not English.) I may be wrong, though.
@10240
See, to me, if German and French and English were all equally successful in Europe pre-WWII, then that strongly suggests English was already the global lingua franca at that point. Post-WWII is just Europe recognizing what had already happened.
Consider this – German was the language of everywhere there were Germans (which is most of Central Europe – it makes sense for Austria and its empire, Germany and its empire, etc). French was the language of diplomacy throughout Europe and had been for centuries. English, meanwhile, has no particular reason to be used in Central Europe – which to me suggests that even at that point it was already demonstrably the global lingua franca. It just wasn’t as dominant about it as it has since become.
This is true, but 4/5s of them were indian, only a tiny fraction of whom learned english.
When the US starts “beating” the english economy sort of depends on how you measure.
US GDP pulls even with the UK around 1870, when the population of the countries are about 31 million for the UK and 41 million for the US.
US per capita GDP hits parity around 1890, while the populations have grown to 37 million and 63 million, meaning that over those 20 years, the UK GDP has grown by about 50% while the US GDP has more than doubled.
By 1913, the population is 40 million and 98 million. US per capita GDP is about 7% higher than the UK’s. By 1929, US per capita GDP is 25% higher, and it’s 40% higher by 1950.
The traditional date for the ascendency of English is the paris peace conference after ww1. I can’t recall if the formal treaty document was in french or english (I’d bet french) but I believe that the english language version was given co-equal legal status. And at the conference in general, english was spoken much more than french was by the delegates.
At a tangent …
Adam Smith, commenting on the American revolution, suggested that if the U.K. was not willing to let the colonies go they should offer them seats in parliament proportional to their contribution to the Imperial revenues. He then casually added that, if that was done, in about a century the capital would move to the New World.
Published in 1776.
Simulated Knave My impression English was less common in Central Europe than German (rather than equally common), again, I may be wrong.
Modern pop music?
“The formula of successful pop music (of the past 20 years in particular) is no secret. Everything seems to go back to Abba. Abba in it’s time and to this date did something wild when it comes to the structure of modern pop. It revolutionized the concept of “producing” music that is formulaic, catchy and cross-cultural. A Swedish band became a global product not only because of the talent involved, (especially in production) but because of the business acumen of those involved. The Abba generation spawned a revolution in Scandinavian music production that was designed for a global audience; they put their heads together to create American pop music as we know it. A handful of middle aged Swedes and Norwegians and their American understudies have created pretty much every song that is “pop” in the United States. Karl Martin Sandberg, Stargate and their understudies like Esther Dean and some others will account for something like 60% or more of the songs in the US top 10 at any given moment.”
Well, it depends a bit on what definition of “pop” you are using. In some contexts it is used to describe basically any music that isn’t…”classical” (for lack of a better word) so includes a lot more than what you find charting on Billboard. As an example, in that usage Metallica, Iron Maiden, Mastadon (ick), Parliament, Tool, and Primus would all be “pop” (I was trying to think of the least “poppy” sounding bands I could).
I’m guessing Metallica et al would be classed as “rock” even though they feature in the “pop” charts. Maybe the best description for the “poppy” sound would be “commercial pop”.
I’m pretty sure ABBA doesn’t go anywhere without Phil Spector. And ’80s pop music without the ABBA influence would be different, but ’80s pop without the Wall of Sound would be unrecognizable.
More generally, pop artists are almost interchangeable, it’s how you produce and market them that matters. The US and UK music industries have long set the standard in that regard, I believe.
Burgers (Germany), Fries (Belgium), Pizza (Italy) have all been brought over to America by European immigrants, then appropriated(?) cheapened, repackaged, marketed globally and sold to the world as American fast food.
I don’t know to what extent pizza was spread to the rest of the world through America, rather than directly from Italy and Europe. I guess it came to at least part of Europe directly from Italy (though significantly changed, just like in America), in the rest of the world it’s more likely through America. Also not sure if American style pizza is cheaper than Italian style; in Italy, a cheap pizza (that serves one person) starts from around €5.
I think if you ask most people worldwide what’s on a pepperoni pizza, you’ll get small American salami, not Italian bell peppers. Pizza hut is a global business and frozen pizzas I think are a more American invention than Italian, but I think Italy probably did export before American corps got involved.
By cheaper, I mean lacking the artisanal style and tradition of Italian pizza (which I agree can be really cheap (not in Milan, but in Sicily definitely). The industrialisation of the process by a corporation, mass manufacturing, using bleached flour and processed cheese.
In the English-speaking world, maybe. In the rest of the world, many people probably won’t know (or guess bell peppers based on the sound of it).
In Hungary we have a few Pizza Huts which are a clearly distinguishable style from other pizzerias which mostly belong to local chains and are somewhere between American and Italian style (with a few close to the Italian).
Huh. I was caught out by that in the Netherlands recently. Still not sure what I should have asked for if I wanted what I think of as a pepperoni pizza. The menu listed ‘salami’ but for me that implies slices of a larger-diameter, coarser-textured sausage.
+1 to AppetSci’s point from experience in Russia. Me and most of my friends there whom I asked were genuinely surprised to learn that “true” Italian pizza has a thick crust, and thin crust is New York style pizza.
Huh? I live in Italy, and the typical pizza has a thin crust, except those rectangular ones sold by slice. Whereas Hungarian Pizza Hut sells much thicker ones.
@10240
All I can say in my defense is that I’ve heard it from another person from Italy, and for the New York one I checked myself. I think by this point I’ll just give up, admit that I don’t know a shit about cooking and start referring to pizzas as thick- or thin-crusted, keeping toponyms for places on the map.
I think you’ll need to be much more specific in both definition and scale.
How far are you going to stretch the “distinctly in origin” part?
As in, there’s various comments regarding foods that are distinctly non-American in a cultural sense might have American origins – ie. fortune cookies.
However, you haven’t noted if that is a valid complaint in the first place. Most people would still consider fortune cookies non-American regardless of their actual origin.
What about things that are largely (globalist) cultural because of America influence?
Chop suey is mixed in that it is at best a local poor man’s cuisine that changed greatly to become a staple Chinese-American dish.
Ketchup is another where they might have had a past link to Asian fish based sauces but tomato based ones originated and spread from America.
Japanese animation was originally inspired by Disney art (particularly it’s large eyes and distinct movements).
How far are you going to stretch the “culture” part?
Famous non-American people and other various historical places and events?
Vampires and other mythological creatures and beings?
What about governments or languages?
There’s also complications like mafia which are mixed in both the “traditional” Godfatherish mafia is Italian but there’s plenty of American prohibition style mafia elements in the connotation too.
It might be an idea to see what each “cultural group” (like food, media, technology, etc.) has American and non-American elements, but you’ll need a lot more stricter definitions to be both practical and definable.
Off the top of my head:
– Male suits (Victorian Britain)
– Pajamas (India)
– Boxing / Martial arts (Europe, Asia, South America)
– Countless scientific discoveries and technological innovations
– All major religions religions other than Christianity
– Any language with >~ 50 million native speakers
Btw, If you are going to include things that are ancestral to the American culture such as the Latin alphabet and the Indo-Arabic numerals, then you should also include:
– The English language
– The Gregorian calendar, week/hour/minute/second time units
– Christianity (unless explicitely banned)
– De jure (if not de facto) Westphalian sovereignty
– Written laws, courts
– Professional law enforcement and military
– Professional government officials
– Human universals
The Harry Potter books. David Morgan-Mar claims that they are elements of global cuture “http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3285.html”.
Some additional thoughts for your list:
Telephones
Postage stamps
Christmas / Valentine’s cards
Penicillin
Pencils
The eradication of smallpox.
Well, the problem with “backgammon” is that variants of the game played in different countries typically have a local name more in the guise of “tabla” or “tavla”. A bit of research for Hungarian suggests “ostábla” (but it’s well possible that the game isn’t out of fashion in Hungary and thus not recognized by most people).
I thought that was approximately as American as apple pie. Why does it make the list here?
Different meaning of “American”, native-american vs Usan. When I say “not american”, I meant the latter. Hamburgers are american because they were invented in the US. Tobacco is not “american” because it was invented hundreds of years before the US were a thing, and was diffused into the world before US culture went into existence (and its diffusers weren’t even English).
Sort of. It’s speculated that hamburgers were first served on the ships of the Hamburg America Line, a German-owned transatlantic shipping enterprise.
I would think that “American” in this context would have to include everything that was incorporated into the USA in 1776 regardless of which group of proto-Americans brought it to the current state. Otherwise we risk a standard where e.g. pizza doesn’t count as an Italian contribution to global culture because it predates Garibaldi.
And even post-1776, things that were introduced to global culture, primarily through American cultural fusion, probably count as American. Same deal everywhere else there is cultural fusion going on.
While this is true, as far as I can tell the center of Tobacco culture when Europeans arrived was in Mexico, and it’s mostly the Spanish who brought it back to the Old World.
Hoopyfreud touches on this point early, but salt isn’t a part of culture, any more than ‘beathing air’ is a part of culture. Salt is a basic part of human survival.
America is merely the most recent superpower. We weren’t even all that until about 110-120 years ago – long after “global culture” already existed. Global culture doesn’t get replaced by the most recent superpower, unless they are far, far more empire-minded than we ever were.