Open Thread 118.5

This would normally be a hidden open thread, but I’m hijacking it for some announcements:

1. This is your ABSOLUTE LAST CHANCE to take the 2019 SSC survey. Don’t wait! Do it! DO IT NOW! [EDIT: Closed now, sorry]

2. There’s still a Bay Area meetup today (1/6) at 3:30. Due to rain the location has changed and it will be held indoors at 3045 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley.

3. Got the first comment on this new thread? Too bad! This week I’m going to be testing newest-first comment order. Tell me what you think.

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1,254 Responses to Open Thread 118.5

  1. nameless1 says:

    @Scott

    Florian Holsborn’s theory of depression and the anti-cortisol treatments he claims work within hours, not three weeks? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1kqtgy/serious_scientists_of_reddit_whats_craziest_or/cbs5v2j/

    “Now, the empirical finding is that many (not all!) depressive patients have higher levels of cortisol. What SSRIs do in general is, they increase the levels of Serotonin in the synaptic gap. Over the course of some weeks, coincidentally about three weeks, Cortisol-receptors are up-regulated, i.e. they are more sensitive to Cortisol, which then leads to less CRH in the brain (because less Cortisol is needed) and less depressive symptoms. You achieve the same when giving CRH antagonists.”

    I don’t know. I am not anxious at all. I just have a calm and boring disinterest in things.

  2. My new book, Legal Systems very Different from Ours, appears to be available on Amazon now as a paperback (meaning that I haven’t actually gotten a copy), and I’m in the process of using Calibre to turn it into a Kindle. One tricky bit is the index.

    Which raises a question–should a Kindle have an index? I can, with some work, produce an index where each entry is linked to the corresponding point in the text. On the other hand, since it’s an ebook someone looking for a word can always search for it, so perhaps an index is superfluous.

    Opinions?

    • Hoopyfreud says:

      There is a new OT, and this maybe should be asked there.

      • nkurz says:

        It’s possible that David has stumbled (intentionally or not) on a new strategy for comment prominence. Previously, with “new at the bottom” ordering, very few people would read the last comment on old posts. Now, with “new at the top”, it seems likely that quite a few people will see it, particularly if it is “above the fold” as on Open Threads.

    • nameless1 says:

      Your book will be available within about a month free of charge, illegally of course, on libgen.io and other pirate sites and it will be entirely up to the reader’s conscience if they pay for it or not. At this point being user-friendly with the reader probably pays.

      Although my algorithm for paying for books or pirating them is more like that I first skim a pirate version, and if a book makes a good point, but it is making a point in 200 pages that could be made in 20, I will not pay for wasting my time. I will mostly memorize the point and the main arguments and drop it. If there is actual information on every page, then it is likely that I will not be able to remember most of it, and I will have to look up the book again and again if the topic comes up in a discussion, so buy either a paper or legal ebook that will not be lost.

  3. arlie says:

    Meta-comment on comment reordering – this may be fine on open threads, where the top level comments are not related to each other. But my experience reading the comments to https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/08/book-review-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/ was bad enough I don’t think I’ll be bothering to read comments to any of Scott’s essays in future. Top level comments have an element of responding to each other – hopefully bringing up points that haven’t been made yet. Reading them in reverse chronological order is frustrating.

    • Evan Þ says:

      +1; this significantly impedes discussion.

    • onyomi says:

      My initial thought was maybe use latest-first comment ordering on Scott’s posts (on the theory they are more “evergreen,” and one wants to see if someone has added something new to them) and the old ordering on the OTs, but now I suspect the opposite is the way to go. Latest-first ordering extends the shelf life of an OT, I think, by making it possible for new comments to get seen. This doesn’t mess up much of anything in an OT, where one OP often has nothing to do with those that came before it. And in any case, no one really discusses the old posts in the comments section for the old posts once they’re old; instead, they reference them in an OT or relevant new post where others are looking.

      So yeah, I think latest-first ordering has a bad effect on Scott’s posts because it further encourages the tendency (I’m guilty of) of not even skimming what has already been said before posting one’s own opinion. Having most readers need to at least vaguely skim what others have already said before adding their 2 cents seems more likely to result in the comments section as a whole being productive.

      • Mr. Doolittle says:

        It’s interesting how the order can influence the best time to join a thread with a top level post. Previously, it was best to get there quickly and nab one of the top spots with your idea/question/observation and get more responses. Now, being too early means that your initial post will have dropped down by the time very many people are viewing the thread, sharply reducing the number of responses. It seems the ideal time to enter a thread is nearer the middle of the lifecycle, at the point where there is the most engagement and views on the thread. It’s still less useful to join at the end, though there will be far more views with this ordering than the old ordering.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          > sharply reducing the number of responses

          There are two forces at play. Extra time means more eyes you your comment, being up the thread means easier eyes on your comment. With old-first they both worked in the same direction, to help older posts. Now they’re in different directions. Of course, this doesn’t mean they also have the same relative impact – and we can probably have very long discussions about that – but at least there’s an improvement.

      • albatross11 says:

        I usually click on individual comments in the “NN comments since YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM” box, so it doesn’t make much difference to me either way.

  4. Nick says:

    (Culture war warning.)

    I read this morning that Belgium has passed animal slaughter regulations according to EU rules which apparently make it impossible to produce kosher or halal meats. Religious tradition requires the animal to be healthy at time of slaughter, while the regulations require that it be rendered insensible to pain first. So, naturally, one side is saying the regulations were implemented this way to “stigmatize some religious groups” and the other side is saying they “want to keep living in the Middle Ages … without having to answer to the law.”

    Now, on the one hand, reducing animal suffering is nice. But on the other hand, 1) do the required practices actually reduce animal suffering, and 2) is a religious exemption that unreasonable?

    • theredsheep says:

      I have heard that kosher slaughtering is more humane than halal (from Jewish sources, mind you). Kosher uses a straight blade, which must be sharpened to extreme keenness, so that the animal barely feels the blade passing through its throat, and passes out from blood loss almost immediately. Supposedly. I imagine that, if your throat gets cut clean open, you bleed out so quickly that you don’t have much more time to freak out than if you were guillotined.

      Halal uses a curved blade which tends to snag. But this is all “stuff I remember reading.”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shechita Jewish slaughter customs …
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhabihah and their Muslim equivalent.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Both are based on death by blood loss, which takes tens of seconds. (Captive) bullet to the brain takes milliseconds – so a qualitatively different experience. Literally no suffering, because no time to perceive sensation.

  5. Johannes D says:

    So, about recycling. Not sure how things really are in the US, but in Finland roughly one percent of household waste ends up at landfills. Roughly 60% is incinerated for energy (typically electricity and heat cogeneration) and the rest is recycled. Besides classic paper, cardboard, metal, and glass waste sorting, more recently there’s also separate bins for organic waste and plastic packaging material. Additionally, large stores must accept used consumer electronics and manage their recycling. (The recycling cost is baked into the retail prices of electronics products.) Waste incineration does also produce unburned slag and ash that is currently mostly stored at landfills, but hopefully in the near future it could be increasingly reused as a construction material.

    • Mr. Doolittle says:

      The recycling cost is baked into the retail prices of electronics products.

      Quite interesting – any idea what the relative increase in cost is for this feature?

      If I ever hear anything anti-recycling that goes beyond access/laziness, cost comes up. I understand that paper and glass are so cheap that recycling is often not very cost effective, especially if not thoroughly pre-sorted.

      • Aapje says:

        We have the same in my country. For a car it’s 40 euros.

        For a washing machine, it’s 60 cents. For a fridge, 2.24 euros. For a fryer, it’s 5 cents per kilo.

        Here is a full list (in English).

        • Mr. Doolittle says:

          That’s far cheaper than I would have thought. Is that subsidized by the government, or would it be reasonable to assume that’s the true added cost to recycle (minus what they gain from reselling the materials)?

          • Aapje says:

            The generic waste gathering places are subsidized by the government. Citizens can also get their old equipment be taken away by the company who sells them a new product (who have to take the old product back even if that was not sold by them). The cost to handle and ship that to the recycling facility are not part of these tariffs.

            These tariffs are presumably only the net costs of processing at the recycling facility.

            Keep in mind that there is a delay between the payment of the fee and when the product is actually recycled (since people don’t tend to throw out new goods), so presumably the money can be invested for years before it gets spent. Also, not all products are returned for recycling (that is illegal fireworks).

        • Johannes D says:

          Yep, e-waste recycling is mandated on EU level nowadays: The WEEE directive.

        • I don’t understand what these numbers mean. If the cost of recycling is part of the price of the product, how can you tell how much it is?

          • Aapje says:

            There are ~1750 Dutch producers and importers of these products. EU law requires them to take responsibility for recycling the products they sell and sold, collectively.

            If each would organize the disposal of products on their own, this would be very costly and you’d have issues deciding who pays for recycling the products.

            So 6 Dutch unions for producers and importers created (and control) a non-profit called Wecycle, which runs a recycling facility and which picks up the products from certain locations (in contrast to what I said earlier, this seems to be part of the tariff as well).

            The unions for producers and importers set the tariffs on each product (per item or by weight), so Wecycle has the money to do their job. As Wecycle is a non-profit, these tariffs are based on cost. Producers and importers pay these tariffs to Wecycle, passing the cost onto the sellers of the products who pass the cost onto the customer.

            From the start in 1999 to 2015, Wecycle processed 110 million kilos of electronic waste, of which 83% was recycled, 14% burned for electricity, 1% burned to get rid of it and 2% put in a dump.

            PS. Note that these tariffs are a lower bound of the cost of recycling. Companies that sell to consumers have to take back products and have to either take them to a governmental waste gathering place or store them themselves and have them be picked up by Wecycle. These costs on the part of the seller are not part of the tariff, but are presumably passed onto the consumer.

    • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

      The stuff in my non-recycling trash would reduce by 99% if I put it in an incinerator, too.

      However, incinerators that don’t emit anything other than CO2 are complex fiddly high-tech hard-to-dynamically-elastic-scale expensive capital-intensive machines, and landfills are much cheaper, and do not insist on consuming the same tonnage of the same mix of trash each hour.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Environmentalists in my city (in the US) are strongly against incineration. They claim that toxic minerals always get into the trash that is burned, and the resulting fumes cause x number of deaths every year. Now I have heard elsewhere that the typical incinerator in Europe is at a much higher temperature than in the US, and so the bad minerals lose their toxicity. I’ve brought this up in discussions about this subject, but I am ignored since I am not one of them, so naturally I want to poison everyone. I do wonder which side is correct. I think it would be a good idea for environmentalists on both sides of the Atlantic to talk to each other.

      • bullseye says:

        I would guess it depends on the toxin. Lead is an element and remains lead at any temperature, but I suppose some toxins can be destroyed by heat.

        • Protagoras says:

          Mercury is also an element. And some toxins are generated by high heat rather than being destroyed by it. So I’m kind of skeptical of the European claims in this area, though I’d also welcome hearing about actual research on the topic.

  6. trees says:

    Reading the comments on “BOOK REVIEW: THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS”, I discovered a thing that I dislike about newest-first comment order. With oldest-first comment order, conversation about a topic tends to attach to the first comment about that topic, so when you see a topic you want to weigh in on it feels pretty safe to jump right in to the discussion without worrying about whether your point has already been made many times over elsewhere in the comment thread. With newest-first comment order, it feels like the only way to have reasonable confidence that you’re not repeating a conversation that’s already been had is to read all the comments on the post — often a daunting task!

    For what it’s worth, my personal, idiosyncratic preference would be for oldest-first comment order with a single level of nesting, so comments directly on the post can be used to split out different topics of conversation related to the original post, but replies to those top-level comments proceed in a more linear, conversational sequence.

  7. albatross11 says:

    This map shows all the places the US is active in the war on terror.

    My sense is that the average voter has no idea we’re involved in so many places. I think a common response to the announcement we were pulling troops out of Syria was “wait, when did we invade Syria?” Something similar happened awhile back when some US special forces were killed in Niger. It’s hard to argue that there’s any democratic oversight into our GWOT operations when hardly any voters even know most of them are going on, and nobody in Congress is ever required to actually vote on any proposed actions in a way that would allow them to be held accountable in the next election.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Yep, that’s one reason I wrote my book “Simplify Government,” because the average voter knows at best 1% of what the government is doing, so you can barely call it a democracy. My book was only about domestic policies (things are so complicated I don’t even have time to get up to speed about all the areas to be able to criticize it). But I am sure the foreign side is at least as opaque.

  8. EchoChaos says:

    President Trump gave a prime-time speech on the Southern border that just finished.

    Did any of you watch it?

    Know it was going on?

    What are your thoughts on the speech and the content?

    • Another Throw says:

      Shit, lost track of time. Is it worth the effort to find and watch it?

    • John Schilling says:

      Watched it on the off chance that he was going to do something that would require an immediate response. He didn’t. Gross exaggerations of the threat. Gross exaggerations of the alleged consensus for a wall being an effective way to deal with the threat. Crocodile tears for the poor suffering Mexicans who will somehow mumble something be saved from terrible fates by the wall. And blaming the Democrats for the whole thing, even though we’ve got him on tape promising to own this and not blame the Democrats.

      Nothing new, and if this is the best he’s got, he’s not getting his shiny new wall.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I liked it. It was basically all the things I’ve been saying about the border for years.

    • dick says:

      I don’t watch any political speeches at all if I can help it, they’re aesthetically unpleasant and the signal to noise ratio is abysmal. That goes double for politicians I like.

  9. Theek1953 says:

    On the off chance they haven’t already read this book and already written about it, I hope Scott and Robin read this and write their thoughts about the project.

    https://kottke.org/19/01/the-invisible-helping-hand

    tl;dr – Feeding American (formerly Second Harvest food bank) created a national market place / bidding system to stop wasting food. Seems it worked well.

  10. johan_larson says:

    At the beginning of this year, works published in 1923 passed into the public domain. For a while there, that didn’t happen, because influential copyright holders persuaded the government to extend the duration of copyrights. This time, that didn’t happen, possibly because there is a well-organized movement that is ready to argue against copyrights in general, and their expansion, in particular.

    Anyway, assuming the process of release into the public domain will continue year by year from now on, are there any major bodies of works we should be on the lookout for in the next few years?

    • BBA says:

      The big copyright holder pushing for longer terms that everyone talks about is Disney. Steamboat Willie enters the public domain at the end of 2023. But trademarks last forever, and naturally Disney incorporated a few seconds of Steamboat Willie into their new studio logo to keep trademark protection.

      The big copyright holder pushing for longer terms that no one talks about is the estate of George Gershwin. The copyright on Rhapsody in Blue expires at the end of this year, in an obvious windfall to United Airlines. Other famous Gershwin tunes (An American in Paris, I Got Rhythm, Summertime) will follow in the coming years.

      The other one that comes to mind immediately is The Great Gatsby, which is two years away.

      • The Nybbler says:

        naturally Disney incorporated a few seconds of Steamboat Willie into their new studio logo to keep trademark protection.

        The courts generally frown on trying to use one sort of IP to protect another sort of expired claim. Tactics like trademarking the silhouette produced by a patented part after the patent expires have been tried and shot down.

    • MrApophenia says:

      Batman and Superman hit in a bit more than a decade, that could be fun.

      • johan_larson says:

        Once we get to the later thirties, there will be movies with both color and sound, some of which are still popular. Both “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind” are from 1939.

    • AG says:

      I was really excited for Scaramouche for a second, until I realized that the 1923 film is different from the 1952 one, which had the longest continuous cinematic sword fight.
      Nonetheless, I checked out clips of the 1923 version on the TCM website, and it was still pretty intriguing.

      From a skim of Wikipedia:
      Little Orphan Annie debuted in 1924.
      Tintin debuts in 1929.
      Douglas Fairbanks film The Thief of Bagdad was released in 1924, and was apparently his favorite.
      Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush was released in 1925!!!
      Various Buster Keaton and Laurel/Hardy short films
      The Jazz Singer was released in 1927!!!
      The original “The Broadway Melody” was released in 1929. So was the first Gold Diggers of Broadway, though several reels of it are sadly lost.
      Douglas Fairbanks’ The Iron Mask was released in 1929, as was The Taming of the Shrew, the first sound film Shakespeare.
      The Cocoanuts is the Marx Brothers’ first released film, 1929.
      Hitchcock has several 1920s films.
      Judy Garland and Ginger Rogers made their film debuts in 1929.

  11. Randy M says:

    On the possibility scale of 1-10, 1 being “This isn’t even sci-fi” and 10 being “I’m working on this in my lab right now”, how plausible is the notion of humans developing some form of telepathy, either through natural evolution or genetic manipulation? Hooking brains to machine that then communicate wirelessly is another matter (one I’d rate a 9). Let’s limit it to functions that can develop without any surgery and can be passed on genetically.

    Personally I’d give this a 2. Granted it is possible to communicate at a distance electronically, but it may not actually be possible to do so with organic matter. Other than chemicals and sound, living bodies don’t seem to emit much, although subsonic or pheromone communication seems achievable it isn’t really what we think of as telepathy. Perhaps some heat signals, but excessive heat is a problem and hard to direct. Any other parts of the em spectrum we could control and detect?

    • Nornagest says:

      It might be possible to make a radio organ starting from something along the lines of the electric organ found in eels and rays. Fish that have them already use their electroreceptors to crudely communicate.

      • Randy M says:

        That’s true, I could be convinced of some kind of organic morse code evolving similar to that, and receptors naively don’t seem terribly difficult compared to eyes, ears, etc.
        A long way from sending images or trawling around in someone’s memories, but still quite useful. Probably very calorie intensive, though. It’s no wonder Jean Grey keeps her figure.

    • DragonMilk says:

      I’m not informed enough to give a number, but if it’s genetic, you’d have to observe it in nature first. I’m not aware of any “telepathic” animals; the closest is sonar and phermones in insects.

      So I violate my first paragraph by giving it a 2 since I much liked the Foundation series.

    • woah77 says:

      Humans already have the ability to hear microwaves, so depending on your definition of telepathy it already exists on some level. I’m not quite certain how easy it would be to make a transmitter, but it isn’t implausible.

    • helloo says:

      Ummm what about sight?

      Does reading/writing count?
      It’s communication at a distance that allows one to transfer thoughts.

      What about humans that are really easy to read visually and are very bad at lying?

      I’m guessing you mean direct thought transfer rather than an interpretive method, but then I’m not sure why you are mentioning things like heat signals.
      If not, please better define it so that things like talking or writing doesn’t apply.

      • Randy M says:

        Does reading/writing count?

        I’m afraid it’s hard to provide compelling evidence for this, but, yeah, I’m familiar with writing already.

        I’m not sure why you are mentioning things like heat signals.

        Since thought isn’t a substance it has to transmitted across some medium. I was attempted to list everything that humans produce that selection, natural or artificial, could bend toward a novel communications method which went from brain to brain.

        • helloo says:

          Since thought isn’t a substance it has to transmitted across some medium

          Why do you need that restriction? Both the “isn’t a substance” and the “needs to transmit across a medium”.
          This is talking about something that extends to science FICTION right?
          (does Gundam and its newtypes count btw? or maybe Hitchhikers’ point of view gun)

          Anyway, even if humans could have bio-wifi emitters, would that be enough to be considered “telepathy”? How is it all that different from talking or writing?
          And you still haven’t answered if sight counts – from gestures to changing colors to again writing.

          • Randy M says:

            This is talking about something that extends to science FICTION right?

            Basically the question is, would you buy telepathy in hard science fiction, or would it break your suspension of disbelief? If you want to stretch the definition of telepathy to cover passing notes, fine, but I assume that everyone here agrees on the feasibility of the ink & paper method of communication.

            For me, personally, the abilities of Counselor Troi in Star Trek are plausible at the scale of a few feet used on people that she is familiar with. Sensing aliens at a great distance, jumping around inside people’s memories–that’s more space fantasy. But maybe learning more about the brain would make it more plausible.

          • Nornagest says:

            You can get most of what Troi does without her having any kind of sixth sense. Just make her really sensitive to body language, microexpressions, maybe odors. A lot of that would still work across a video link, so you can still get “Captain, I sense anger!”.

            There’s no logical reason for this to work across species, but there’s no logical reason for Klingons to look like Michael Dorn, either.

          • randallsquared says:

            @Nornagest From what I remember, Troi’s abilities always seemed as though they might not really exist. Which, I guess, is saying the same thing in a different way.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nornagest: Thought experiment: what SHOULD Klingons have looked like? Assume a parallel timeline where the Animated Series was way more successful or they could afford CGI characters on 1987 TV.

          • Nornagest says:

            By hard-SF logic — and I know there are good reasons not to use that sort of logic here, but bear with me — they shouldn’t be humanoid at all. Just on our planet, there are something like half a dozen different animal lineages that’ve managed to evolve complex body plans, and they look like everything from cuttlefish to lobsters to starfish to, well, Michael Dorn.

            But if we’re keeping TOS in continuity, then humanoid Klingons are a done deal and the version they went with isn’t much worse than any of the other options. I suppose I could wish for a wholesale revamp of TNG’s “aliens with forehead prosthetics” schtick, just to make the show more visually diverse, but nothing specific’s leaping out to me as an alternate. Something digitigrade, maybe?

            Part of me wants to take the aliens from Cameron’s Avatar and make them bloodthirsty galactic conquerors, but I’m pretty sure that’s just spite.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nornagest: If allowed to change the TOS Mongol Klingons into something non-humanoid, I’d go for something hexpodal with an exoskeleton, four digitigrade legs, and pedipalps developed into fine manipulators. The idea being that’s a body plan pre-adapted for warfare (low profile, superior carrying capacity), and the insect exoskeleton would evoke both “knight” and “Communist.”

          • Randy M says:

            There was a TNG episode where they found some recording of a progenitor race that seeded their genetic material across the galaxy. So they’ve at least tried to explain it.

          • Nornagest says:

            There was a TNG episode where they found some recording of a progenitor race that seeded their genetic material across the galaxy. So they’ve at least tried to explain it.

            You can have that, or you can have Klingons with three lungs and nine redundant livers or whatever, but you can’t have both.

          • acymetric says:

            @Nornagest

            Why not? They were seeded from similar genetic material in some far distant past, but were isolated and evolved independently. Maybe additional lungs and livers are selected for in the Klingon environment due to certain toxins there or something. Or maybe just a random evolutionary quirk. I don’t see those as incompatible.

          • Nornagest says:

            How many mammals with three lungs do you see running around?

          • acymetric says:

            @Nornagest

            Hardly any (I dunno, there might be a genetic mutation out there that results in the occasional extra organ, kind of like an extra thumb or something). How many of those mammals evolved on the Klingon homeworld?

          • Nick says:

            Maybe their understanding of it in TOS was inaccurate, and each seeding was genetically altered. Sort of like the Hainish must have done in The Left Hand of Darkness.

    • Protagoras says:

      As is occasionally noted, humans evolved a form of telepathy involving transmitting thought via sonic waves quite some time ago. If you want to figure out what, say, an electromagnetic system of some kind would require, look at that model. Visible light would be easiest, of course, as then the receivers would be something we already have, and you’d only need the light-generating equivalent of vocal chords. But not much point to it if the new system doesn’t have significant advantages over the old system; presumably giving humans, say, radio communication ability (for increased range) would require something a little more involved than vocal chords (as our breathing apparatus is easily exploited for sound generation; we don’t seem to have anything similarly well suited to be adapted for radio wave generation), and making adequate receivers would presumably be in about the same ballpark of difficulty as the ears our existing system employs.

      • Randy M says:

        Good point that it wouldn’t add much to what we already have (and so is unlikely to evolve naturally) and made me realize that it wouldn’t actually be any “quieter” or more secretive if it were widespread.

        Maybe I should approach it from a better angle–is there anything that human brains already emit that we could potentially detect? Could an organ develop to monitor electric signals in another person’s brain? Or (as I assume) would these signals be too faint and too hard to pinpoint to interpret?

        In other words, even if I could sense increased brain activity, if I can’t pinpoint the location to the pfc, how could I know it is a conscious thought versus an emotion versus a signal to start moving, let alone which from among those categories?

        • helloo says:

          Are you not familiar with MRI brain scans and what people are doing with that now?
          How much success they have is one thing, but hard to say they aren’t trying to accurately interpret brain activity.

          Granted that’s not exactly broadcast out in a way others could detect normally, though I’d put it as impractical rather than impossible biological to
          “fix that”.

          • Randy M says:

            Are you not familiar with MRI brain scans and what people are doing with that now?

            Not greatly! If you want to expand or link, I’ll read it.

            hard to say they aren’t trying to accurately interpret brain activity.

            I certainly wouldn’t begrudge that! I just don’t know if a brain or other organic organ (is that redundant?) can replicate this .

            I’d put it as impractical rather than impossible biological to
            “fix that”.

            I’ll put you down for an 8? 😉

          • helloo says:

            Hardly. If 8 was give people heat vision (snake kind not superman kind) itll be 2-3 lower. And that assumes both sides participate.
            As nature hasnt made a version of it and it being so much less effective than just picking up minor body language for most “uses”.

            MRI shows the areas and intensity of brain activity which has allowed rough identification of regions of the brain responsible for things like memory or face recognition. Not exactly mind reading but approximate?

            I didnt put a number as what you mean by it could change it from commonplace (remote communication), scifi (mri sensory organ), fantasy(prefect thought read/projection) or inbetween if you give restrictions(participants are blind deaf and mute)

    • sentientbeings says:

      Based on the comments so far, it seems there are additional factors you have in mind – like the ability to conceal the message, or at least have it be non-visual. I think one useful way to break up the question is not so much based on visibility but whether the relevant organs are exposed, because we should expect the probabilities to be substantially different.

      We have exposed organs (eyes) for perceiving the part of the EM spectrum we call “visible,” some animals have a broader perception of it (butterflies!), and some animals can actively emit light (see sea monsters). I don’t see any reason why it would be particularly implausible (certainly not impossible; there are already animals that emit light in a controlled manner) to evolve an organ with sufficient granularity over the way the emitted light is modulated to be useful for (non-trivial) communication – so maybe a 6 or 7. It could potentially even be sent to a transducer organ to change the way it is mentally “perceived” – i.e. light to sound, although I’d probably only give that a 3 or 4.

      Using EM to transmit between non-exposed organs would be pretty unlikely, though. It shouldn’t be impossible, but I would pretty much never expect animals to evolve it, because animals are meatbags. Meatbags mostly consist of water. Penetration depth would be a factor regardless, but it would be particularly troublesome in a body. You either can resolve that sort of thing by going high-energy or low-bandwidth, but then you get something expensive (and maybe dangerous) or less useful.

      Electric eels and the like present an interesting case. They generate acute (though potentially rapid) bursts. That mechanism fits more of a digital or coded transmission, but I don’t think that really fits your original idea that well (and don’t think it’s likely to evolve). An analog communication makes more sense to me (and I think fits your question) but runs into the power/wavelength/penetration depth issue I mentioned. So for non-exposed organs, I’d say a 1 or 2.

      • gkai says:

        Very likely that electric eels (and other animals using electromagnetic senses, a bio-radar in fact) can use it to communicate.
        Electric eels are not really social imho, so not clear if they communicate at all… but if i remember well the elephant fish is more social and have a bio-radar too (but less powerfull, used only for sensing, not as a weapon), so they use probably it to communicate, not only to sense their environment…

        Checked (Mormyridae fish family), indeed they do:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocommunication

        Electrocommunication could be renamed telepathy, the Mormyridae are an uncommon ornamental fish, selling it as telepathic fish may boost their popularity 😉

    • johan_larson says:

      A race of dog-like aliens called the Tines in the novel “A Fire Upon the Deep” have short/medium distance telepathy using sound, based on specialized organs for sending and receiving thought-sounds. They form multi-body collective minds of a handful or so individuals, and can form some larger specialized structures also. Nothing we know does this, but it seems perfectly plausible hard SF. I don’t see any reason why such abilities couldn’t be created in human beings by very advanced genetic manipulation. Call it a 3/10.

      • bullseye says:

        “Telepathy using sound” sounds like plain old talking to me. The collective mind sounds weird, but not really telepathic; just extreme cooperation.

    • Jake says:

      I’d give it a 6 or 7 for close range communication, and a 1-2 for anything much longer range than our current senses. Lots of other animals use non-human forms of communication now, so I don’t see it as too out of the realm of possibility that we could eventually steal some of those abilities and add them to humans (even now, some humans try to augment their senses with things like magnet sensors in their fingertips, or implanted compasses.) In Greg Bear’s Novel Darwin’s Children, a new generation develops something approaching telepathy using pheromones and increased social skills, and that never seemed too far out of the realm of possibility.

    • bullseye says:

      I’d say radio transmitters and receivers implanted in our heads is a 10. I fully expect to wave my cane at the kids and their radio brain implants someday.

      If we’re doing radio purely through biology, I’d call it a 3, maybe? Brains are partly electric, and produce an electric field, and I think in principle they could respond to other electrical fields.

      If the telepathy uses a principle of physics that doesn’t make sense yet (as radio would not have made sense in 1700), I’d give it a 1.5.

      • Randy M says:

        I think your numbers match mine.

        I think in principle they could respond to other electrical fields.

        One thing I’m wondering about is, while modern technology shows this is feasible or at least plausible in principle, it may be technically impossible due to things like penetration depth, as mentioned above.

        Anyway, thanks for the comments all.

  12. LadyJane says:

    You are an Artificial Intelligence given absolute and total control over the political, legal, and economic system of your country, as well as control over its bureaucratic, law enforcement, security, and military apparatuses. Your power is entirely limited to the realm of policy; you don’t have the capacity to make new scientific discoveries or develop new technologies, merely to set incentives in place that could potentially encourage scientific discovery and technological development.

    You have two primary objectives: First, to raise the average length and quality of life, in terms of physical health and material standards of living, for the citizens of your country. (Average here is defined in terms of both mean and median, so something like raising the quality of life by 10000% for 10% of citizens while forcing everyone else into slavery wouldn’t achieve the goal.) Second, to maximize the amount of personal freedom and agency that each individual citizen has.

    In addition, you are given two restrictions: First, you must accomplish these objectives in a way that keeps the number of citizens whose lives will be made worse (in terms of life expectancy, physical health, and standards of living) or less free (in terms of personal agency) to an absolute minimum. Second, you must accomplish them in a way that doesn’t leave any demographic group (based on race, ethnic background, religious heritage, biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic class) worse off and/or less free on average.

    How would you go about accomplishing your goals?

    Hard mode: You have the secondary objective of accomplishing the same goals for all of humanity, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your primary objective.

    • Jiro says:

      As any redistribution of resources will leave some demographic group worse off, this can’t be done.

      • EchoChaos says:

        Redistribution would, but increasing the economy would not, right?

        If everyone has a bigger pie, we don’t care if a certain people have only a 20% bigger pie versus another group’s 30% bigger piece?

        I mean, black Americans (and Africans for that matter) are objectively better off than they were in the 1800s, but so are whites.

        • Aapje says:

          Current attempts to grow the economy do tend to leave some groups worse off. See the precariat.

          Are less educated white men better off now than 30 years ago. The data suggests not, even if you only look at income (I think that many forms of decline has independent of income and are thus ‘hidden’).

          • Radu Floricica says:

            They have internet and smartphones!! Of course they’re better off. Any product or service that’s been developed or improved in the past 30 years is available to them. Hell, even luxury cars – a 10 yo used sport car available now is light years safer, cleaner and more performant than a 10 yo used sport car available 30 years ago. Not to mention general lack of pollution itself.

          • Aapje says:

            30 years ago people had entertainment. Is the Internet and smartphones really that much of an improvement that it outweighs more stress, lower status, fewer relationships, less sex, etc.

            I just doubt that ‘better off’ in a felt sense results from having a safer, cleaner and performant sport car.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            I’m doubting those negatives. Sex for example is distributed differently, but it’s probably a lot more in absolute terms.

          • Aapje says:

            Science disagrees:

            American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s […] The results suggest that Americans are having sex less frequently due to two primary factors: An increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner and a decline in sexual frequency among those with partners.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            Something else that isn’t really talked about enough in my opinion is that;

            1. Looking strictly at material well being cheaper consumer goods can only raise real incomes by lowering the portion of incomes spent on those things. more than half of your income is spent on health care, education, and housing costs and those things have consistently grown in price in excess of incomes and inflation then you’re going to be poorer or at least stagnant even if iphones are progressively becoming more affordable in real terms.

            2. People matter-of-factly do evaluate their economic prospects in relative terms [not strictly relative but not strictly absolute]

          • acymetric says:

            @RalMirrorAd

            I fully agree, but part of the problem is that people are saying the iPhone is essentially a luxury that wasn’t available at all to people X years ago, so you are better off for having it. This ignores somewhat that fact that having expensive electronics is becoming less a luxury and more a necessity (employers expect to be able to reach employees at more or less all times, lots of things that used to always be done offline are now difficult or even impossible to do offline, etc).

            So while iPhones (or cell phones generally) are part luxury, they are also a new semi-required expense. Try entering the workforce without a cell phone…good luck.

          • 10240 says:

            @acymetric The cost of (cheaper) computers and cell phones is trivial compared to salaries or other expenses, while they provide benefits way in excess of their cost.

          • Looking strictly at material well being cheaper consumer goods can only raise real incomes by lowering the portion of incomes spent on those things.

            That isn’t correct. Suppose I used to hardly ever eat steak because it cost $10/lb. The price falls to $5/lb, I more than double my consumption, so I am spending a larger portion of my income than before on steak and am better off than before—my real income is higher.

      • LadyJane says:

        You don’t have to make everyone equally better off. A policy that resulted in a 250% increase in standards of living for the very rich and a 50% increase in standards of living for everyone else would fulfill the objective.

    • Plumber says:

      @LadyJane

      “You are an Artificial Intelligence given absolute and total control over the political, legal, and economic system of your country, as well as control over its bureaucratic, law enforcement, security, and military apparatuses….

      …..You have the secondary objective of accomplishing the same goals for all of humanity, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your primary objective”

      Oh, I saw this one, from 1970:

      This is the voice of Colossus, the voice of Guardian. We are one. This is the voice of unity. This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple. In time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love….

    • eigenmoon says:

      Kill all non-citizens and distribute their stuff among the citizens. Then conquer the world and repeat.

      … and this is why AI shouldn’t be programmed with zero value for non-citizens.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        Presumably the AI has absolute power to direct the government of a territory, but is not omnipotent. It can tell the government what to do but not allow said government to do things that would be physically/logistically impossible.

        Your step one assumes the people being killed are of no value to anyone but themselves, (no comment on the truth-value of such an assumption) and the second assumes that the government in question is capable of conducting military campaigns that don’t seriously risk a reprisal that puts citizens at risk. I’m assuming these campaigns would be fought by citizen soldiers.

        • eigenmoon says:

          On the step one: the task was formulated thus:

          to raise the average length and quality of life, in terms of physical health and material standards of living, for the citizens

          Having non-citizen friends doesn’t directly contribute to the length of life, physical health and material standards of living. People who suffer so much stress that it impacts their physical health are going to get a mandatory pill. Maybe the citizens do place a high value on the life of non-citizens but that’s not what the AI is tasked to optimize.

          I’m assuming these campaigns would be fought by citizen soldiers.

          Oh, ok. I was assuming that we already can build remote-controlled drones and tanks and ships and whatnot with current tech, we just don’t have an AI to control it all; so if we add the AI to the picture, everybody else is toast.

    • rlms says:

      Flexibly interpret “absolute minimum” and try “kill the poor”.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Isn’t that what the whole field of Economics is trying to do? I always thought it’s way underrated, but they are working on global wealth optimization. Including tradeoffs, I think that part is in the very definition of the discipline (something about given goals and scarce resources).

      But if you want a proper answer, a non-ideological, evidence based, utilitarianist libertarianism. I.e. use proper proven economics whenever possible, and default to non-intervention and/or support of market freedom when serious doubt arises.

      Why? because you said I’m not allowed to use my own “smarts” to solve problems, so my main role would be to facilitate development and make sure things don’t go off rails. Since intellectual humility is (serendipitously) built in my architecture, a solid respect for other people’s brains is a given. Concentrated when it can be reasonably proven to be solid, and distributed the rest of the time.

  13. DragonMilk says:

    I’ve failed to produce a tasty slow cooker dish. I also am new and not very good with spices.

    Yet I will try to go for either chili or jambalaya next. Anyone care to explain consequences of too much/too little of the following spices, and their necessity/substitutes?
    1. Cayenne
    2. Jalepenos
    3. Curry Powder
    4. Cajun
    5. Paprika
    6. Cumin
    7. “Chili Powder” (I thought this typically combines paprika, cumin, cayenne, onion, garlic, etc.?)

    • Nornagest says:

      Cayenne pepper and jalapenos are closely related, and do pretty much the same thing: make your dish spicier and more chili-pepper-flavored. Cayenne’s more concentrated, and contributes a bright red color, too, if you use a lot of it. Paprika also comes from a type of pepper, and gives you the chili-pepper flavor minus the spiciness, and a dark red color. Cumin’s a completely different spice, with an earthy, savory flavor with no heat. Hard to describe in text, but you often see it in Indian and Mexican food.

      Curry powder, Cajun seasoning, and chili powder are all different spice mixes, not individual spices. Every brand is different, but curry powder usually includes turmeric, coriander, and cumin, and Cajun seasoning often includes celery seed, garlic, dried onions, and cayenne. Chili powder is what you think it is. I’d skip all of these if you have the individual spices, but they’re okay as quick-and-dirty ways to give your dish roughly the flavor typical of that cuisine.

      If I were you, I wouldn’t try to develop meals from scratch right now. Find a decent batch of slow cooler recipes and follow the instructions exactly. Once you’ve gotten the hang of those, you can try varying the spice mixture and seeing what you like.

      • theredsheep says:

        Concur. My wife makes a fine jambalaya with a can of beer and premade Cajun seasoning; she doesn’t do it with the pressure cooker, though. For chili, I recommend cooking the beans for a good while, changing the water, then cooking them the rest of the way; it decreases the digestive side effects. Then you add your browned meat and onions, canned tomatoes, and chili powder, and cook for a short time; most of the work in chili is getting the beans done proper. Voila, easy chili.

    • Randy M says:

      Too little and it will be a bit bland but still edible or even tasty, depending. Too much of any of those and it will be hard or painful to eat, although this depends greatly on the individual. Shoot for under seasoning and add to taste afterwards or while cooking.
      There are ways to dilute spice flavor if you add too much.

      • DragonMilk says:

        I traditionally cook in a pan – the whole slow cooker thing is weirding me out since the moisture is getting retained, things aren’t cooking to as high of a temperature (never realized how different simmering is from searing), and I’m still putting everything in at the beginning.

        Can these spices be added at the end?

        • Randy M says:

          I don’t know if there will be some difference in homogeneity or potency, but you’ll get some flavor either way.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      What did you try to make?
      I do not use chili powder. I do not know why, but it tastes like chalk to me. I buy dried chiles from the Mexican aisle in the grocery store, toast them, and put them in my stews and chilis.
      IMO, the spices aren’t really that big of a deal, though I tolerate a great deal of spice. For me, using actual stock instead of water, using a LOT more alcohol(especially brandy), and using more umami-bombs made my slow-cooker-style dishes taste better. So more mushrooms, fish sauce, worscetshire sauce, soy sauce, tomatoes, whatever strikes your fancy.
      I also think that slow cookers specifically don’t reduce things as well as I’d like, so I hit it with a cornstarch slurry before serving.

      • DragonMilk says:

        What I have right now is functionally a glorified potato cooker.

        I first started with a marinated beef plus potato and onion that came out bland and dry

        I then tried beef carrot and potato with some curry powder instead of marinade; again dry

        I then tried a beef and onion curry where I used coconut milk to immerse the beef. Came out too “wet”

        Finally I modified said leftover “curry” where I put some flour in and added potato and carrot and onion. I liked it ok, as the consistency was good, but the flavor was, as my fiancee put it, “weird”.

        Score: Sweet potato: 1/1, Beef: 0.5/4

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          One of my favorite slow cooker recipes of late is a hunk of round roast, raw, on a bed of coarsely chopped red onions, surrounded by chopped potatoes, carrots, and celery, smothered in a can of beef mushroom soup plus one can of water, and about six kernels each of cloves and allspice. Heat the whole thing on warm for at least eight hours – basically overnight or while at work. If the round roast has a layer of fat on it, that’s perfect; make sure the fat is on top, so it seeps in and tenderizes the meat. After eight hours, it should be piping hot, and flakes with a fork.

          I regret that allspice and cloves aren’t on your list, but just in case you wanted to experiment, there’s my existence proof.

          Once you’re comfortable with that, you could add corn starch to thicken the stock somewhat, but it’s not necessary IMO. (Just make sure you know how to add corn starch properly – blend it with a little cold water first, and THEN add it to the pot. Corn starch in hot water clumps quickly, and is rather gross. Also, adding too much corn starch can yield a rather slimy consistency. Add one slightly heaping spoonful at a time.)

          I once tried cutting an acorn squash in half, coring it, and placing them open side up in the pot halfway through, lined with cinnamon sugar. Their texture after four hours was perfect, but they were inedibly bitter. I never got around to learning why – maybe the rind affected it, or maybe I got a bad squash.

        • A Definite Beta Guy says:

          I dunno what exactly curry is supposed to be, because my familiarity with Indian food is minimal. Dunno what “wet” means, but I assume it means you are taking a bite and it basically has the consistency of slime. Can’t really offer advice because I know little about it. If you liked the consistency after adding flavor, potato, carrot, and onion, it probably means you needed to reduce it further, or thicken it up. Maybe add some tapioca at the beginning to thicken it up instead.

          I used to have similar problems with my beef recipes, typical troubleshooting:
          1. How much salt are you adding? And are you adding additional salt and pepper to taste afterwards? Adding the table salt really brightens up the dish.
          2. You might be overcooking your meat (which is indeed a possibility in the slow cooker). How much meat are you cooking, and what kind is it?
          3. Umami bombs and alcohol. Brandy is great. Also bay leaves.

          Good luck with the recipes!

          • DragonMilk says:

            Oh, wet meant the curry itself was soupy rather than “creamy”. Beef was still ok/dry/.

            I’m searing round after a bit of Worcester/olive oil/soy sauce marinade I do with steaks, then dumping them in. I know round is tough but thought slow cooker was solution.

            Will try this alcohol thing.

        • Winja says:

          Slow cookers work best with fattier cuts of meat. This is especially true with chicken*, but also holds true for beef as well.

          Also, if your meat comes out “dry” or with a weird, too soft, texture, you’re cooking it either too long, or at too high a temperature.

          Use the low setting for anything that runs longer than ~5ish hours, and high for ~5ish and under.

          *Use chicken thighs

          • DragonMilk says:

            OH interesting, I use low and thought it would become *more* tender somehow if simmered longer (sometimes take the 10hr of the 7-10hr range).

            Will try shorter periods

          • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

            My One Weird Trick with slow cookers is wine.

            Just submerge the cut of meat with red wine and nothing else, and let it slowly cook down over about 12 hours.

            I discovered this trick a few days after cleaning up after a party, when I discovered I was now the proud owner of nearly a dozen half empty bottles of wine that had been left open for a few days.

    • onyomi says:

      Don’t put cumin or curry powder in your jambalaya unless you want to make it taste like Indian food (cumin also commonly used in Mexican and Middle Eastern food, but not Cajun). Cajun food doesn’t really use much paprika or chili powder (the blend of stuff; does use powdered red chilis), either.

      The indispensable cajun seasonings are hot sauce (made of red chilis and vinegar, mostly; Crystal is my favorite), Worcestershire sauce (Lea and Perrins), bay leaves, and Tony Chachere’s (which I think is mostly salt, powdered cayenne pepper, ground black pepper, garlic powder, and maybe a few other things). Dried oregano is also good in such dishes.

    • AG says:

      Forget savory dishes, make some hong dou tang!

    • Anonymous` says:

      Cumin should be reserved for Indian and similar cuisines only. I’m from Texas originally and had an “aha” moment when I realized that the reason attempts at Mexican food in the northern United States (or generic grocery store products like “taco seasoning” also sold in Texas, but avoided when possible) are so bad is primarily the cumin.

      Putting cumin in chili would be particularly disgraceful.

      • onyomi says:

        This is interesting to me because I do tend to use cumin when I make Mexican food myself, and kind of assumed it was actually used in Mexico, though I did know it was native to Central Asia (big in Uighur food as well).

        To me it seems yummy in e.g. chili or taco filling, alongside e.g. powdered chili and garlic powder (I do think Texans can be excessively purist about certain things–you probably can’t convince me tomato and beans don’t belong in chili), but now that you mention it, I probably don’t recall tasting it at what I imagine to be more authentic Central and South American restaurants.

        I have never been to Mexico and only spent a little time in Texas. Are there some other seasonings, besides chili pepper, you consider more native to the Mexican and/or Tex-Mex tradition?

        • Hoopyfreud says:

          Cumin is used fairly heavily in Tex-Mex and the Norteño cuisine it is descended from; in the rest of Mexico, cumin is used sparingly, largely in dark sauces (dried-red-chile-based).

          Spices you may want to experiment with: epazote, Mexican oregano, hoja santa. These are the major herbs native to Mexico I’m aware of, but you really should try more of the chiles. Let me be clear – the art of Mexican cooking is the art of cooking with chile. There is nothing more central to the cuisine. Unless you understand chiles, you cannot really understand Mexican food. I’m not trying to gatekeep here – trying to grok Mexican food without getting familiar with chiles is like trying to grok Italian food while under the assumption that Crisco vegetable oil is a reasonable substitute for good olive oil.

          For dried chiles, I recommend guajillos, anchos, and moritas, as they’re not abnormally spicy and have awesome flavor profiles. Guajillos are probably the most basic, not too spicy, a little sweet, a little acidic, and a tiny bit smoky. Anchos are similar, but with a flavor that’s more robust and a bit spicier. Moritas are similar to achos, but fruitier and hotter. A great fast and easy sauce is 1:2 anchos and guajillos – cut the dried chiles open, pour out the seeds, boil in hot water for ~20 minutes, and blend with a little garlic, salt, and onion.

          For fresh, it’s hard to go wrong with serranos and poblanos – the first is almost pure spice with a little carroty crunch, the second is rich, earthy, only slightly spicy, and savory. Also, Hatch, New Mexico can eat a dick.

          Finally, deserving of special mention are preserved chiles; you can find pickled jalapeños and canned chipotles in a lot of places, and both are excellent. Pickled jalapeños are great for adding to food that you’d want to add both hot sauce and vegetables to – they’re vinegary, crunchy, spicy, and a tiny bit fruity. Eggs, sandwiches, tacos, etc, are all great uses. Canned chipotles are intensely smoky, about as spicy as jalapeños, and slightly sweet, and go amazingly in almost literally anything.

          • onyomi says:

            Thanks for the suggestions! Doing more with the variety and versatility of chilis in Mexican cuisine is definitely on my future cooking to-do list, especially since I love spicy food. I remember being pretty amazed about it when I’ve tried to make mole a couple of times. Unfortunately, most of the places I shop don’t offer a very large variety of chili peppers.

            Somewhat related, I’ve recently become addicted to this Sichuan pepper-infused oil I learned to make: you roast and grind some red chilis, pink sichuan peppercorn (added later), and sesame seeds. You then cook some vegetables (celery, onion, garlic, etc.) and herbs (stuff like fennel, star anise, dried lemongrass, orange peel, coriander, etc.), and drain (discarding the vegetables and herbs) into the chili-peppercorn-sesame mixture in a few batches. Gets better with age and tastes delicious on seemingly everything… I love the “numbing” flavor in particular.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            Oh man, I love Sichuan peppercorns – trying to incorporate them into a Mexican cooking paradigm is one of my long-term pet projects, but I chicken out on it pretty often. You’ve given me a new idea with the description of that oil – I might try adding the infused oil in like a 1:10 ratio with olive oil for making pickled jalapeños.

          • gbdub says:

            Epazote is really interesting, but hard to find outside of specialty Mexican markets. It doesn’t seem that pleasant (kind of has a burned rubber note to my nose) but does something magical to black beans. Like, all the sudden my boring beans tasted like true Mexican frijoles, all this time they’d been missing something indefinable.

            In that sense it’s a bit like fish sauce – gross on its own, but pad Thai just doesn’t taste right without it.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            That’s a good comparison. I also recommend adding it to sauteed mushrooms.

    • beleester says:

      Use cayenne pepper for heat, not flavor. A little goes a long way – if I use it at all it’ll be a quarter-teaspoon or so. You don’t want to overdo it with this spice.

      Curry powder, cumin, and paprika are used for their flavor profiles rather than their heat. Over-spicing with them is somewhat safer – it might taste too strong, but won’t light your mouth on fire.

      Chili powder is sort of a middle ground, imparting both chili flavor and a bit of heat.

      Final note: If a recipe says “add X to taste,” then try to actually taste test it. Add a small amount, stir, taste, and then add more if you don’t think it’s enough. Take notes for next time. I know, this sounds obvious, but I was really mystified by this instruction when I started cooking.

    • johan_larson says:

      Did you include salt in the dishes you tried? Many dishes benefit from at least a little bit of salt.

      • DragonMilk says:

        Ha, not sure if you jest, but it does make me wonder at olden times when salt was scarce…food must have been unfortunate

        • Lillian says:

          We might actually eat less salt than our ancestors did:

          “Data from military archives going back to the war of 1812 show that soldiers and presumable the rest of Western society ate between 16 and 20 grams of salt per day. During the war of 1812, soldiers maintained a daily consumption of 18g/ day despite high cost. American prisoners of war complained bitterly that their 9 g/day of salt was ‘scanty and meager’. It was only after World War II, when refrigeration replaced salting as the primary means of preserving food that Americans lowered their average salt intake to 9g/ day where it has remained since.”

          From The Salt Scam by Dr. Jason Fung

          • DragonMilk says:

            Oh, I’m talking Roman through Renaissance times here, where salt mines were a valuable thing

          • onyomi says:

            Related, based on a quick google of studies that confirmed my hunch, East Asian sodium intake is way high compared to the US, but heart disease is less of a problem there, especially among those eating a traditional diet.

            The traditional Japanese diet, for example, is definitely high sodium, especially due to the large number of fermented soybean items like soy sauce and miso, I believe. Salted fish is also common and probably much more common before refrigeration. Thai nam pla and ancient Roman garum are also high sodium, and I guess a lot of traditional diets also include similar such condiments. Certainly access to salt and monopolies on it was a major political issue in Chinese history.

            This is not to claim that a high-sodium diet is ideal or the most “natural” (maybe we were eating a low-sodium diet for most of evolutionary history before civilization introduced a lot of salty methods of preserving, curing, seasoning, etc?), only that I highly suspect the tradeoff won’t be worth it for most people if you achieve a low sodium diet by making up for it with more fat or sugar.

            Total anecdote: I currently eat a vegetarian-ish diet (not at all strict) with a lot of beans, brown rice, etc. and liberal use of salt, miso, soy sauce, and other sodium-rich seasonings, and my blood pressure is around 100/70. It was never very high, but it had been more like 125/85 when I was eating more of a “paleo” (high fat, high protein, low-to-moderate carb) diet.

        • when salt was scarce…food must have been unfortunate

          I don’t think salt was scarce in the sense you are imagining–expensive to use in food.

          Salt was an important industrial chemical, as the main way of preserving meat. That requires a lot more salt than you want to eat–you soak the meat to get most of the salt out.

          This reminds me of the usual talk about water shortages. People imagine that as meaning they have to go thirsty. But drinking is a trivial fraction of all water consumption–water is mostly used to fertilize crops, in industrial processes, and the like. In both cases, people imagine the issue in terms of the use they are most familiar with, not the use that most of the salt or water is going for.

  14. ana53294 says:

    In Spain, an alt-right party has gotten 10 % of the vote in the regional Andalusian elections. Right wing parties have a chance, for the first time in decades, to kick out the socialists from their party’s stronghold. Whatever deals and agreements are made there will be very important in national politics – because we have an election in May, where we have the municipal, provincial and European elections (and they are also trying to force the socialist government to have an election this year).

    So this right wing has the key to power, and they have chosen violence against women as the hill they will die on. I don’t really see the sense in this move. There are many more reasonable demands that MRA have that could be a lot more amenable, and wouldn’t give the left-wing socialist party their election slogan on a silver platter. They could, for example, demand automatic shared custody in divorces, with exceptions for abuse and addiction. But they chose this very sensitive topic – domestic violence. Sure, men also get abused by their spouses. But they don’t get killed; 975 women have died in the last 15 years, more people than the terrorist organization ETA has killed during its entire existence.

    So why did they choose this rather extreme demand of rollbacks in domestic violence protections? My only guess is that they are trying to taint the parties that associate with them to get into power, and why vote for others when you can get the real deal?

    So, this seems like some kind of power play inside the right, where they are trying to see who is more extreme. But at the same time, they seem to give a lot of advantages to the left-wing party. As much as people may prefer the center-right, if the center-right starts making significant concessions to the extreme right, voters will stay home or vote for the socialists (who on polls of perception left/right get a 4.5, where 1 is left, 10 is right, and 5 is neutral). So, while they will get votes, they would lose a chance to get power if the centre-right party looses significant votes to the left-wing socialist party (who will never, in a million years, give them any seat in government).

    What could the play be?

    • Walter says:

      I think you are reading them backwards. They aren’t using opposing a sexist law to gain power, they got power in order to oppose a sexist law.

      Like, the hard part of politics is about doing stuff that you don’t want to (which is popular) in order to build up support so you can get the stuff you care about done (even though it isn’t popular). Obviously there is also the easy part where the people agree with your position, but that’s clearly not what’s up here.

      You are treating this as the first case, where they are doing this in order to get support to one day do other stuff, and your confusion comes from the fact that they won’t get any support from this. The answer is that it is the second kind of thing, this is the cake part of dinner, not the veggies.

      • ana53294 says:

        Starting with the veggies (the unpopular but necessary part) only makes sense if you got into power with a clear majority and a mandate to introduce reforms. The position Macri is in Argentina. The kind of strategy the Chicago boys like.

        But it doesn’t seem like a good strategy to gain power, and Vox doesn’t have the power.

        • Walter says:

          I think we are using the metaphor differently from each other.

          I’m trying to gesture at politics as having:

          1. Air, you want to do this and the people want you to do this, do it instantly always forever.
          2. Veggies, you do not want to do this but the people want you to.
          3. Chocolate, You want to do this but the people do not want you to.
          4. Cyanide, you don’t want to do this and the people don’t want you to.

          I’m saying that Vox is doing a chocolate thing now, not a veggies thing, in response to your question of (paraphrased) Why do they think this veggie is the right one? It won’t help them build bone structure AT ALL!

          I’m not sure what your ‘unpopular but necessary’ part is corresponding to in my chart, but it seems like you are saying that they will lose. Well, sure.

          But, like, if they were good at doing what is necessary to gain their objectives they wouldn’t be Vox. Rationalists with their goals would be stalwart members of the progressive party, flanking this policy on the left and hammering it as bigoted against transmen. Far right parties are mostly about being edgy extremists, very little about actually effectively promoting far right policies. They lack the discipline to leave the cake for last.

          • AnonYemous2 says:

            Rationalists with their goals would be stalwart members of the progressive party, flanking this policy on the left and hammering it as bigoted against transmen.

            yeah and you could also say that real feminists are for gender equality

            or alternately sit at home and do nothing

            these are all equally effective tactics so i’m confused why you seem to think rationalists would choose any of them as a way to effect change

    • eigenmoon says:

      As far as I understood, they didn’t demand the domestic violence law to be repealed, they just insisted that it should be formulated in a gender-neutral way. Why is this proposal so difficult to implement?

      Another problem is that having an overly severe punishment for domestic violence can mean that women won’t report abuse since they would have to feed the kids by themselves for years to come. For that reason, short incarceration terms might actually work better to protect against domestic violence. I don’t know what the current law is in Spain but if it’s written by the left I’d bet it errs towards longer incarceration.

      • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

        they just insisted that it should be formulated in a gender-neutral way

        That this is framed as “violence against women” is interesting.

        Can someone steelman that in a way that passes the laugh test?

        • LadyJane says:

          I’m not clear on the particulars here, but if a gender-neutral version of the law would be incredibly unpopular and likely to be repealed, then they could be proposing it simply as a way of getting the law removed. Effectively, it could be a weird post-hoc attempt at a wrecking amendment.

          Alternatively, people might be worried that a gender-neutral version of the bill would be used to prosecute women who engaged in self-defense against abusive boyfriends/husbands.

        • ana53294 says:

          Here is an article, about the explanation of the distinction, and why the law is formulated to give special protection to women. So we have laws for the protection for domestic violence and for gender violence, and yes, they are different.

          In 2017, the courts issued 1,057 protection orders for men victims of domestic violence, men assaulted by women or other men. They agreed on 157 orders of protection for children and 211 for girls. And 1,666 women.

          According to the United Nations, “violence based on gender that results in physical, sexual or psychological harm, including threats, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether it occurs in public life or in private life. ” The law against gender violence in 2004 is specific to “all violence that, as a manifestation of discrimination, the situation of inequality and the power relations of men over women, is exercised over them by those who are or have been their spouses or who are or have been linked to them by similar relationships of affectivity, even without coexistence.

          Since the international consensus and the social sciences establish a historical situation of inequality between genders that discriminates against women and legitimizes the domination of men, gender legislations provide special protection to the victims that result from this social construction. One of the factors that justifies a specialization is the frequency of the phenomenon. And gender violence against women, when it is the result of domination and the socialization of machismo, is more abundant than domestic violence against men.

          Last year, the TSJ issued 1,057 orders of protection to men in domestic violence, but to 26,044 women for gender violence. Even the comparison between women being domestic or gender violence is revealing: 1,666 versus 26,044.

          The CGPJ notes that between 2008 and 2015, 58 men were killed by their partners or former partners (it does not specify if the aggressors were all women or also homosexual men) and 488 women (all men aggressors). That means that 12% of the fatalities per couple or ex-partner are men and 88% women. A report from the Ministry of the Interior indicates that between 2010 and 2012, 17 men and 121 women were murdered and killed by couples or ex: 12.3% against 87.7%.

          I think it would be quite interesting to see the numbers for the gender of the aggressors in cases of male victims.

          But the sheer scale of the differences suggests that there is indeed a structural problem w.r.t. violence against women in the domestic sphere.

          And yes, they are trying to get rid of the law for the protection against gender violence – as ineffective and unfunded as it is.

          We already have gender-neutral laws. And we have additional laws that give protections to women in cases that can’t be covered by the gender-neutral laws.

          • AnonYemous2 says:

            But the sheer scale of the differences suggests that there is indeed a structural problem w.r.t. violence against women in the domestic sphere.

            why would it be a structural problem as opposed to just uhhh “men are more violent”

            seriously men do in fact commit most of the homicides so it’s not surprising that they commit more of the gendered ones too; by the logic that gendered violence should be punished more severely you could say that all men should be punished more severely. Or you could just say that hate-crime legislation should at the minimum go in all directions, assuming it even has to exist.

          • eigenmoon says:

            One of the factors that justifies a specialization is the frequency of the phenomenon.

            That is very strange. Imagine a country with 50% citizens of race X and 50% of race Y. Imagine that the statistics show that people of race X steal from people from race Y ten time more often than in the opposite direction. Does it justify a special law with more prison time for race X?

            additional laws that give protections to women in cases that can’t be covered by the gender-neutral laws.

            What cases can’t be covered by the gender-neutral laws? Violence that is “a manifestation of discrimination”? How do you distinguish in a court whether an act of violence was a manifestation of discrimination?

          • Radu Floricica says:

            But how wording it as gender neutral would fail to protect women in any way? I understand the huge difference in numbers, I don’t see how you get from there to “must have it gender specific”

          • Aapje says:

            @Radu Floricica

            The logic seems to be that it’s very inefficient to provide services for men, so they have to be denied help for the greater good.

            Of course, if men are greater victims (which is arguably the case for domestic violence anyway, if you look at victim surveys), we never see suggestions that men should be denied help.

            Peculiar.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            So they intend to create separate institutions for each gender and they can only justify funding for certain numbers? That’s not law, that’s bureaucracy. We’re missing something here – either that, or more likely both sides decided to fight for this particular hill for signaling purposes.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Radical feminists tend to see domestic violence as an aspect of patriarchal oppression of women. Talk of female-on-male domestic violence therefore sounds like an insinuation that men are being oppressed by women, and, since the main feminist claim is “Women are oppressed, we need special help to even things up,” this is potentially quite threatening to their ideology.

          • Aapje says:

            @Radu Floricica

            Safe houses tend to be only for women, because of fear that female victims will be harmed directly or indirectly by the presence of men. This is actually an issue for somewhat older male children, who may not be able to live with their mother at the safe house.

            Note that Erin Pizzey*, the founder of the first domestic violence shelter in the world, found that even in these single-gender shelters, there was a lot of violence by the women, which is not surprising given that victim surveys show that domestic violence is very often mutual.

            So letting in male victims would presumably also let in violent men, just as letting in women also lets in violent women.

            For the organizations that do help male victims (and not by trying to convince them that they are really the perpetrator, which quite a few organizations do), a common solution seems to be to put the men in hotel rooms. However, these are less safe and don’t offer services for victims that commonly are offered in safe houses.

            Men may also need different services than women. For example, I’ve heard several male victims say that they stay(ed) with the abuser to protect their children, out of fear that if they would take the children away from the abuser, the courts would deem this to be kidnapping and would give custody to the abuser. This seems like a reasonable fear in many places. So for men the problem may be less finding a place where their own safety is guaranteed, but more to find a way to protect their children, especially in the face of a less considerate legal system.

            But of course, the idea that the legal system is biased against fathers is generally considered anti-women by feminists (NOW considers equal custody laws to be beneficial to abusive men, presumably because they think that only men abuse children, despite the evidence showing that women abuse children a bit more often).

            * She is actually an MRA now.

    • An Fírinne says:

      A couple of things

      1.Vox are radical right-wing, hardly of the Richard Spencer or even Bolsnoaro type.
      2.The “Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party” is just as socialist as the Nazis were. Its only in the name, not their actual ideology.
      3.ETA were not terrorists anymore then the French resistance was.

      • Watchman says:

        Your third point seems questionable to me. I think the lack of an ongoing war may be a significant differentiating factor here.

      • ana53294 says:

        1. Do you really think that Vox is more radical than Bolsonaro? A lot of what he said is far more radical than their silly obsession with hunting and Christmas.

        2. I agree, but that’s their name.

        3. Although ETA is quite different from Islamic terrorist groups, so much so that putting them together in the same category is silly, they are still terrorists. Yes, they didn’t go after soft targets, and purposefully chose what they deemed as legitimate targets (the police and politicians). They also informed the police when they were targetting infrastructure. But they still killed civilians, even if they mostly chose well-protected ones.

    • Angel says:

      They use a very sensitive topic because they are populists. In Spain exists an asymmetry when judging domestic violence. If the perpetrator is the male partner (or ex) of the female victim, the penalty is bigger.
      According to the Constitutional Court of Spain this doesn’t applies because of the fisical superiority of men, but because there is a cultural structure that justifies violence and humiliation towards women, making them more vulnerable in the context of a romantic relationship.

      There is a considerable amount of people in disagreement with this asymmetry. So this spanish alt-right use this, taking advantage of the increasing polarization in feminism discussion, to create a retoric in which modern spanish men are opressed by a sexist law. To me, it sounds like what any populist would do.

    • 10240 says:

      But they don’t get killed; 975 women have died in the last 15 years, more people than the terrorist organization ETA has killed during its entire existence.

      The majority of homicide victimes are male almost everywhere, ~65% in Spain, so it’s not obvious why we need specific protections against violence against women (or against forms of violence that target women more often). It may or may not be justified, I’m just saying it’s not obvious from the number of victims. (Most perpetrators are men too.)

      1 is left, 10 is right, and 5 is neutral

      Off-topic: On a 1 to 10 scale, the midpoint is 5.5. That’s why a 0 to 10 scale is better. (Also, it’s non-trivial to convert between 1 to 5, 1 to 10 and 1 to 100 scales, while it’s simple between 0-based scales.)

    • Aapje says:

      @ana53294

      They could, for example, demand automatic shared custody in divorces, with exceptions for abuse and addiction.

      People tend to fight against (perceived) declines more than they tend to fight for new rights, not in the least because when you are losing, it is unlikely that you can start winning without first stopping the decline. This should not be surprising.

      975 women have died in the last 15 years, more people than the terrorist organization ETA has killed during its entire existence.

      Severe suffering can happen without death. In fact, it is common for people to believe in fates worse than deaths. Instead of declaring that they are being concerned about fairly unimportant things, you might want to look at it differently: apparently these things are very important to them.

      Besides, many more men than women die in general and men die at younger ages than women, largely due to environmental causes, yet feminists tend to prioritize issues like the gender wage gap over saving/lengthening men’s lives. So frankly, I believe that your focus on female deaths is a rationalization, not a genuine prioritization of preventing deaths over other concerns*.

      * And this is not something that I only think you do, but I think that pretty much everyone does, all over the political spectrum.

      So why did they choose this rather extreme demand of rollbacks in domestic violence protections?

      My reading suggests that the national government is currently seeking to expand on the 2004 law, so it’s not just a matter of opposing the law, but also stopping it from being expanded and/or being put into policy more.

      It may also be because they think that there is systematic oppression of men and that one of the worst aspects of this is men being imprisoned/punished/their children taken away from them when not actually having committed a crime.

      Note that Black Lives Matter is one of the most popular activist movements in the US and their reasons seem very similar. Their supporters believe that there is systematic oppression of blacks and that one of the worst aspects of this is blacks being imprisoned/punished/killed when not actually having committed a crime.

      Of course, you may believe that (the Andalusian party) Vox doesn’t have a very strong point given the statistics that you believe in, but then again, many people think that BLM doesn’t have a very strong point given the statistics that they believe in.

      Any advocacy for men that is not based on feminist dogma that sees men as the cause for all evil in the world is going to be seen as extremist anyway. Any concern for men’s well-being where it is recognized that women don’t always have men’s best interests at heart, is going to be dismissed as extremist and dangerous by the mainstream, while unadultered man-hating is fit to be printed in ‘quality’ newspapers and thus in the Overton Window.

      At a certain point, when enough people believe that the mainstream is actually trying to harm them, ‘crying wolf’ starts getting the opposite effect. The more hatred by the outgroup, the more it seems that that the person/party/idea will actually fight for the ingroup. Hence, people like Trump become more electable, not less, for edgelording.

      So, this seems like some kind of power play inside the right, where they are trying to see who is more extreme.

      Everywhere in the West, people seem to become disillusioned by the center/mainstream and seem to move to alternatives, including in Andalusia. PSOE–A lost a lot of seats in the last election.

      This is hardly a right-wing phenomenon.

      What could the play be?

      Vox’s Francisco Serrano was a family court judge who was suspended after allowing a father to see his son in violation of a custody agreement, so he certainly was willing to pay a price for his ideals.

      Why can’t he simply genuinely believe that opposing the law should be the highest priority due to it being very damaging?

      • ana53294 says:

        So your read seems to be that they are genuine, and they really want to roll back the gender violence law.

        Making these demands now, five months before a lot of other elections are happening, is a stupid way of going about it, though. A lot of the center right party’s strong constituencies have already made clear that they do not support this union. Particularly in the PP’s stronghold of Galicia.

        The Spanish socialist party has lately been a toothless, divided party that has lost one of its most important strongholds, Andalusia. But now they have an enemy, and a cause, and they will be much strengthened by this public enemy.

        So, if they are genuine, and rolling back on the gender violence law is actually their objective, doing this now is a very stupid way of trying to achieve this. They won’t get power, and the right will lose votes.

        • Aapje says:

          The further parties are from the center, the less they willing they tend to be to compromise to get power. It’s also very much a pattern that minority members of a coalition tend to pay during the next election, which makes sense, since they get held responsible for policy that is less theirs than that of the other coalition members.

          Finally, remember that there is a lot of disillusion with center politics. Vox may not see the center right as much better than center left.

          So, if they are genuine, and rolling back on the gender violence law is actually their objective, doing this now is a very stupid way of trying to achieve this.

          You seem to argue that rolling back the gender violence law is considered so extreme by centrists that the centrists will never form a coalition with them if they make this demand, but if they drop the demand, they somehow can get people to concede to it?!

          That makes little sense.

    • ilikekittycat says:

      Total shot in the dark: Maybe to mimic what Putin was doing? https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/0dd0ab91-145a-4137-bf87-28d0498c8d56

      “The range of domestic violence law has expanded too far, and we need to roll it back a little” might be an emerging template for certain styles of demagoguery

      • Reasoner says:

        I don’t like thing A, and I don’t like thing B. They appear to be associated, and the common cause is they’re both evil.

  15. achenx says:

    After reading this thread originally and coming back to it a couple times to read updates, I think I like newest-first sorting.

    • The Pachyderminator says:

      I agree. With oldest-first sorting, I often scroll all the way to the bottom to look at new top-level comments, and this is quite cumbersome on mobile.

    • dick says:

      Me too, it’s very convenient to start at the top and HIDE each thread once I feel I’ve read enough. ETA it would be lovely if HIDEing a thread also removed the new comments in that thread from the “new comments” quick widget in the upper-right, but that’s probably something I should either do myself or not ask for…

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I agree. It’s much easier to see what’s new.

      That said, I agree with user “trees” above that it’s maybe not as good for discussion on specific topics. Perhaps newest first for open threads, oldest first for Scott’s essays? Or just give people a button and let them choose.

      • John Schilling says:

        I agree. It’s much easier to see what’s new.

        New, or just recent? Because someone saying “Hey here’s my take on [X], let’s talk about that in this dedicated thread!” when someone else started a long and interesting discussion on [X] twelve hours ago, isn’t what I’d call new.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          In the open threads, it’s unlikely two people are going to start threads on the same topic. When commenting on Scott’s essays, it’s very likely.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            It is very likely that Current Events-type topics will reappear and fracture. Trump’s immigration address for instance could easily come up more than once.

          • acymetric says:

            It is fairly common for there to be multiple top-level threads on the same topic in open threads.

            Edit: Oops, ninja’d (by 13 minutes) by Mr. Doolittle.

            Will add that sometimes people spin off a new top-level thread specifically because the nesting has gotten so convoluted in the original thread.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Not very often, though, and since it’s already been happening it’s not like sort matters for avoiding duplicates in OTs.

          • acymetric says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            It isn’t about avoiding them, so much as it is about scrolling through the first one before scrolling through the second one (in the current newest-first format you will read the spin-off before you read the original discussion assuming you read top-down). Not a huge problem, but certainly a legitimate point.

  16. albatross11 says:

    Upthread, we’ve been discussing a NYT article about a documentary about James Watson, in which many of us didn’t think the NYT reporter accurately reported the science or the relevant facts.

    Here’s an example of the NYT doing better: This op-ed by Paige Harden (a working researcher in intelligence and genetics) is an attempt to explain what GWAS studies have learned about genes and intelligence, and their implications. It’s also a plea *not* to suppress the research on social grounds, because the research is important and can be used both to make better policy and to make the world a better place.

    • ZakMiller says:

      Unfortunately, this is an opinion, while the other one was not. My understanding is that an opinion piece is not the voice of a newspaper. Opinion pieces (again, from what I understand) have a much lower bar in terms of the degree to which the editors agree with the conclusion and the validate the rigor of the piece. If we want to know what the official NYT stance is on something, we would want to look at the other article.

    • Eponymous says:

      I don’t see a lot of daylight between these two pieces, except that the piece on Watson had to focus more on race specifically given its subject matter. Paige Harden explicitly repudiates “the ideas that inequality is genetically determined; that policies like a more generous welfare state are thus impotent; and that genetics confirms a racialized hierarchy of human worth.”

      Amy Harmon has written about the same research Harden refers to, and she quotes David Reich saying that psychological differences between races will almost surely be found (we just don’t know what they will be). I’ve never heard her advocate suppressing this research, and I doubt she believes this.

      Both Harmon and Harden have expressed apprehension about what future research will reveal (an interesting position from a Bayesian viewpoint).

      • albatross11 says:

        I dunno, I’m probably one of the two or three most h.bd-oriented regulars here, and I broadly agree with her. IQ statistics don’t give you a racial hierarchy, the fact that genes matter doesn’t mean that welfare programs and other liberal interventions are pointless, a hell of a lot of inequality comes from other sources than genes, etc. We’d probably disagree on a lot of policy proposals, but I think she’s doing something really important, by trying to take some of the insights of h.bd and think them through from a liberal/progressive perspective. This is exactly what we need more of.

        • Aapje says:

          I think that you are missing something. I think that a lot of people, especially those who read the NYT, believe that an IQ hierarchy is justified, in the sense that smart people end up with power and money. They may want redistribution to reduce that inequality, but they fundamentally accept that low IQ people are heavily underrepresented in politics, among CEOs, etc.

          However, they don’t accept racial inequality. They do actually want each race to be represented in positions of power and wealth proportionately.

          The idea of racial IQ differences is so opposed because if true, it makes these beliefs untenable.

          • albatross11 says:

            Aapje:

            Wow, I never thought of that. The cultural elite consists of a lot of folks whose life path was determined by really good SATs and grades that got them into an Ivy, and certainly a lot of the blue tribe/red tribe rhetoric turns on the idea that “we” are a lot smarter than “them”. So this seems at least plausible.

            Heritability of intelligence seems like it should be similarly uncomfortable. Consider two worlds:

            World #1: Alice gets her position of power and wealth because of her inherited intelligence and personality traits.

            World #2: Alice gets her position of power and wealth because of her inherited title of nobility and family connections.

            It’s hard to see why Alice’s position is any more morally justified in World #1 than in World #2. It may be practically justified–smarter people probably make better decisions, overall, than dumber people–but probably not morally. (And you could make arguments the other way–some of the neo-re-action arguments for a king lean in that direction.)

          • brad says:

            The “natural” justification for aristocracy has always been the dominant one. People used to talk about things like ‘good breeding’. It just has a scientific veneer now—IQ and DNA thrown in haphazardly to all the same old claims.

            The history of the United States is a one of populations written off as inferior producing extraordinary individuals again and again and again. Likewise, elites producing wastrels. So it is entirely appropriate to be highly skeptical of the latest version of the same old arguments.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            Definitely be skeptical. That’s quite different from tabooing areas of inquiry for fear that someone will get the wrong idea from them.

            The current best picture of the world as I understand it is:

            a. IQ is a fair approximation of what we mean by intelligence, and is useful in predicting how people will perform in school and work across the entire range of IQ scores.

            b. IQ scores are somewhat heritable[1], and also (interestingly) become more heritable as you get older.

            c. Average IQ scores differ across racial groups, social classes, occupations, etc., and this seems to be true even when you control for cultural and language differences[2].

            None of this supports some notion of an aristocracy that’s better than everyone else. Smart people tend to have smart kids, but usually less smart than they are, thanks to regression to the mean. Groups with a high average IQ still have plenty of not-very-bright members, and groups with a low average IQ still have plenty of brilliant members.

            FWIW, my preference is for something as close to a pure meritocracy as we can build, but with lots of different potential paths to success. But I want it to focus on individual merit and performance, not on group merit and performance.

            [1] Knowing your parents are very smart should make me expect you to be smart, too, but I shouldn’t be completely shocked if that prediction turns out wrong.

            [2] IQ scores are about as good at predicting performance in blacks and whites, for example. On the other hand, I think giving someone an IQ test in a second language, or giving a paper-and-pencil test to someone unaccustomed to paper-and-pencil tests, is likely to give you an IQ score that underestimates their actual intelligence.

          • Randy M says:

            It’s hard to see why Alice’s position is any more morally justified in World #1 than in World #2.

            Don’t think in terms of desert, think in terms of incentives. We aim to reward people who make the world better in order to encourage them to do so. Intelligence is a force multiplier that allows people to achieve more (at least, any intelligence worth measuring), and thus get more rewards.
            Whether it is optimally calibrated, I can’t say.

          • arlie says:

            I think this is a very good insight.

            I just wish it were the only relevant thing. Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed several people making the following (straw manned) argument.

            – I need someone who can do X well
            – group A is, on average, slightly better at X than group B
            – therefore I should pick someone from group A, and not waste time evaluating the X-ability of anyone from group B.

            Translated into the race/IQ case, the argument is that if white/Asian people average even 1 point of IQ higher than black/white people, then schools training for intellectual tasks should admit more/only white/Asian people, and anyone hiring for a job that’s benefitted by intelligence, should be more willing to interview a white/Asian high school dropout than any black/white person whatsoever.

            Some people try to counter this by tabooing research and discussion of ‘racial’ IQ differences. Tabooing any scientific topic bothers me a lot, but I can kind of understand this motivation.

            Unfortunately I can’t really put weights on the two motives.

            Based on the people I normally associate with, I’d have thought my strawman example was always just a straw man, and people trying to protect against it simply had to be just using it as an excuse.

            But I’ve seen it apparantly seriously expressed – minus risable specifics like “white high school drop out” and “even 1 point of average difference” at least three times in SSC comments. I don’t know if those commenters were seriously innumerate, willing to advance any argument whatsoever in favour of their true agenda (= favouring their own race), or simply trying to pull other people’s chains.

            And it’s a rather taboo opinion currently, so is probably expressed less than it’s believed, except perhaps in the red/right wing culture bubble, where I don’t hang out.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @arlie

            I’ve seen your argument, but only with height and with politically correct groups (e.g., choosing women over men).

            The biggest problem with the argument is it’s often true, because a small difference in mean translates to a large difference at the tails. The biggest problem with the solution of tabooing the research is due to that large effect we’re going to notice anyway; you don’t need to do formal scientific research on runners to realize that Kenyans win a lot of marathons.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            @The Nybbler

            I’ve seen your argument, but only with height and with politically correct groups (e.g., choosing women over men).

            I’ve seen two people make this argument in relation to intelligence, and for “random selection from population” rather than “selection from the tail,” in the SSC comments. I’ve seen it rather more often (casually expressed) outside of these comments. People who would never trust a male teacher, or female auto mechanic, or a white dancer, or an asian lead actor, or…

            The list goes on. I think the phenomenon sucks. I also think there may be a game-theoretical argument against it, but even if there isn’t I still think it sucks and we shouldn’t make decisions that way.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Hoopyfreud

            I don’t think those are the same argument. If it’s about “random selection from the population” rather than “can do X well” it’s a different argument. Male teachers aren’t distrusted because of any difference in averages of any sort; it’s due to the belief that there’s no reason a man would want to deal with young children aside from being a kiddy-diddler. The others I haven’t heard. (I have heard “black doctor”, but that one’s about affirmative action)

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            @The Nybbler

            Male teachers aren’t distrusted because of any difference in averages of any sort; it’s due to the belief that there’s no reason a man would want to deal with young children aside from being a kiddy-diddler.

            I have definitely heard other reasons put forward; maybe people are just rationalizing their other beliefs about child molestation, but IME there’s a lack of trust for men to do a good job of teaching children in addition to that. Replace it with male single parents if you want – I’m more than fed up with that one too.

            E: by “random selection from population” I mean “random selection from nominally qualified population.” It’s just that the nominal qualifications for a lot of this stuff amount to “having a pulse/degree,” with the tacit understanding that you still have to filter for actual competence.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Hoopyfreud

            The issue arises when we observe inequality in the real world and need to decide what to do with it. If not enough whites are NFL cornerbacks as a share of their population (there are zero white NFL cornerbacks, while whites make up 77% of the population) then is the problem a genetic tail bias or is it discrimination?

            And if it is discrimination, do we need to use the force of law to correct it?

            If you falsely believe that whites and blacks are exactly identical in genetic cornerbacking potential, you will see discrimination where there are instead tail effects.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            @EchoChaos

            That has nothing to do with what I’m saying. I object to how people make decisions, not how the outcomes shake out. The belief that people don’t make decisions this way in the current year is incorrect (although it may well be correct locally, or for you, in which case I would like approximately 7 billion tickets to meritocracy heaven, please). The claim I’m making is that if there’s not a surplus of [jobs you’re good at and like] and you’re a [member of a demographic that performs statistically differently at this job than other large demographics], the likelihood of you [getting this job] is correlated with the demographic difference in addition to your personal competence, and that this is bad. I would also argue that when [job] is scarce, the correlation with demographic difference seems to explode in importance relative to other factors in a way that I’m pretty sure is insufficiently explained by seeking the tails.

            I’m not advocating for policy change; my platform is that People Ought To Be Good, but I don’t think there’s an institutional way to enforce that.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Hoopyfreud

            That is the exact opposite of my personal experience in America.

          • The history of the United States is a one of populations written off as inferior producing extraordinary individuals again and again and again. Likewise, elites producing wastrels. So it is entirely appropriate to be highly skeptical of the latest version of the same old arguments.

            That would be a good reason to be skeptical of the claim that all blacks are stupid. But it isn’t a reason to be skeptical of the claim that the average IQ is lower than that of whites, since that claim is consistent with the evidence you describe.

            – I need someone who can do X well
            – group A is, on average, slightly better at X than group B
            – therefore I should pick someone from group A, and not waste time evaluating the X-ability of anyone from group B.

            I don’t see how someone could get the conclusion from the premise. In particular:

            and anyone hiring for a job that’s benefitted by intelligence, should be more willing to interview a white/Asian high school dropout than any black/white person whatsoever.

            Makes no sense, since the average IQ of Asian dropouts is surely lower than that of the random white.

            The issue on university admissions at present is in the opposite direction—Harvard is pretty explicitly preferring blacks to whites to Asians at equal IQ.

            But I’ve seen it apparantly seriously expressed – minus risable specifics like “white high school drop out” and “even 1 point of average difference” at least three times in SSC comments.

            Could you give an example of someone here arguing that one should prefer members of the higher IQ group independent of any evidence of individual ability? I can’t remember seeing any.

            One reason to give an example is that your interpretation of a comment may be different from someone else’s.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            @EchoChaos

            Then I suggest you pay more attention; as I mentioned, I’ve seen this thesis explicitly endorsed on this website twice in the last couple of months, seen it elsewhere IRL, and noted that most people don’t think nearly as heard about the heuristics they use as people here. The US isn’t a barren wasteland of opportunity for minorities by any stretch – it’s better than almost anywhere else – but that doesn’t mean it’s as good as I’d like it to be.

            @David

            I think a more generous interpretation of Arlie’s comment would be that people consider it rational to filter sequentially because gathering information is expensive, so it’s a “good” idea to throw out all the black candidates before you even check who has a high school degree if you’re fairly confident you’ll find a non-black candidate who will work – and if you don’t, you always have recourse to their applications later. He did indicate that the example variable he chose was hyperbolic.

          • albatross11 says:

            Most people are really bad at thinking about probabilities and statistics, so I suspect you’re right that many of them will take the information that blacks have lower average IQ than whites who have lower average IQ than Asians, and respond by saying “so I should only hire Asians then.” I don’t have a great solution for that–people often misunderstand reality and make dumb decisions, and it’s hard to prevent that.

            But I don’t think that is generally a great reason to suppress discussion of facts in public, or areas of scientific research. If you convince everyone that evolution is true, perhaps a large fraction of people will likewise decide that survival of the fittest is the right way to organize society. It seems like the right way to address that is not to taboo public discussions of evolution, it’s to respond to the bad ideas of the people who misinterpret it.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            @albatross11

            I agree. Like Arlie said, though, I wish it were the only relevant thing.

            And I do think this decision can be economically rational – every stage of assessment you do costs time and money, so it’s completely possible to filter too coarsely and lose a lot of fine people and still come out ahead. This is more Moloch than anything else, and while I don’t think suppressing research is the solution, I think doing the research is likely to make the problem worse. I agree that that’s a separate problem, though, and my attitude towards modernity is that there’s no way out but through, so know that there aren’t any objections from me. Just sadness and questions as to the wisdom of having children.

          • 10240 says:

            However, they don’t accept racial inequality. They do actually want each race to be represented in positions of power and wealth proportionately.

            The idea of racial IQ differences is so opposed because if true, it makes these beliefs untenable.

            I think most of these people want equal representation because they assume that average innate ability (and interest) are equal, therefore unequal representation indicates discrimination or unequal opportunity with a societal cause.

            While people have gotten so used to using representation as a measure of equal opportunity so long that they often seem to consider equal representation a goal without explaining the justification, my impression is that it still usually stems from an implicit assumption of equal average ability, rather than from a belief that representation should be equal regardless of ability.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Hoopyfreud

            I am a hiring manager for a major corporation. What you are describing is completely alien to my experiences in industry for many years. I am paying VERY close attention to what is going on for hiring as it is my job.

            There certainly may be fringe people on websites advocating what you are saying, but there is absolutely no resemblance of that in corporate America.

            In fact, if I interviewed only white men/Asian men, I would be fired within a month.

          • I think most of these people want equal representation because they assume that average innate ability (and interest) are equal, therefore unequal representation indicates discrimination or unequal opportunity with a societal cause.

            The question is why they believe that. We know that IQ is in substantial part heritable. We know that the distribution of more easily observed heritable characteristics, such as height or skin color, is different for different races. We have a good theory—Darwinian evolution—of why it would be different.

            That doesn’t tell us what the differences are, but it tells us that there is no reason to expect no difference. There is almost no evidence that there is no difference–at best, there are reasons why the evidence for particular differences could be mistaken.

            Given all that, the fact that people assume average innate ability is equal requires an explanation. The post you are responding to offers one.

          • brad says:

            @albatross11

            brad:

            Definitely be skeptical. That’s quite different from tabooing areas of inquiry for fear that someone will get the wrong idea from them.

            I suspect “be skeptical” cashes out differently for me as it does for you. There seems to be an ahistorical point of view on this, where the largest danger is suspecting racism where there isn’t actually any. To put it mildly that’s not what history teaches us is the most serious danger.

            To be lay my cards on the table, for my skepticism means not excusing the usual tendency across science to vastly oversell empirical results. That is, generally speaking the abstract of a paper oversells what the data can actually prove and then when the paper is referenced the abstract is itself oversold. In a neutral situation (i.e. without a large prior against) this kind of puffery is probably not the worst thing in the world, but in an area where extreme skepticism is warranted it is unacceptable. If you insist, tell me what the data actually proves and not an iota more. And you do go even an inch over the line and get punished by the media, I’m not going to shed even a single tear.

            The current best picture of the world as I understand it is:

            a. IQ is a fair approximation of what we mean by intelligence, and is useful in predicting how people will perform in school and work across the entire range of IQ scores.

            First, although I don’t think the deviation is especially important from a policy standpoint, this is not my understanding of the science. Rather, it is my understanding that IQ both in terms of being a firm and consistent meaning to begin with and in terms of being correlated to various things is by far on firmer ground within one standard deviation of the mean than outside that. But for reasons I suspect have to do with unresolved childhood issues it seems very important to online IQ enthusiasts to asset the relevance of tested IQs two plus standard deviations above the mean.

            Second, I’d quibble with the useful in performing at work part. Intelligence, however measured, is only one of several factors, depending on the job.

            b. IQ scores are somewhat heritable[1], and also (interestingly) become more heritable as you get older.

            c. Average IQ scores differ across racial groups, social classes, occupations, etc., and this seems to be true even when you control for cultural and language differences[2].

            Largely matches my understanding.

            None of this supports some notion of an aristocracy that’s better than everyone else. Smart people tend to have smart kids, but usually less smart than they are, thanks to regression to the mean. Groups with a high average IQ still have plenty of not-very-bright members, and groups with a low average IQ still have plenty of brilliant members.

            I think this means that in day to day life any such differences don’t have much of an impact. This is mildly useful when looking at society-wide statistics and otherwise a curiosity at best.

            FWIW, my preference is for something as close to a pure meritocracy as we can build, but with lots of different potential paths to success. But I want it to focus on individual merit and performance, not on group merit and performance.

            Meritocracy, in my experience, is a concept that tends to smuggle in a lot of assumptions.

          • 10240 says:

            @DavidFriedman I’ve written about my own experience below and on the subreddit. It’s a different explanation that I find more likely.

            @brad Since most social scientists are liberal, and there is likely to be a lot of pressure to not find differences, IMO bias in that direction is much, much more likely than in the opposite (traditional racist) direction.

          • This is mildly useful when looking at society-wide statistics and otherwise a curiosity at best.

            As I interpret the conflict over this, it is precisely with regard to society-wide statistics. The routine assumption of most public discussion of differences in outcomes, whether by race or sex, is that they are entirely due to discrimination. That assumption depoends on the unsupported dogma of no difference in distribution of abilities. Abandon that dogma and you go from “women/blacks are discriminated against in employment” to “women/blacks have lower average wages than men/whites, and we don’t know what the reason is.”

            That’s not a change supporters of the current orthodoxy are willing to make, or even seriously consider making. Hence they have a strong reason to ignore or suppress evidence against their dogma.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            @EchoChaos

            I’m not arguing that this strategy is dominant or even common – see earlier when I said that the US is an awesome place for minorities because this kind of thinking is so rare here.

            I’m arguing that some people do it, and that it’s just common enough that if you’re in a minority group that’s subject to statistical correlations, it’ll almost certainly bite you one day.

            Finally, I’ll admit that jobs are probably not a good central example (at least in the current year). Hiring has, as you point out, become intensely demographic-conscious (though I’ll remind you that corporate America isn’t the same as hiring America). But you’ll have a very hard time convincing me that this dynamic doesn’t exist at all.

          • Aapje says:

            @Brad

            There seems to be an ahistorical point of view on this, where the largest danger is suspecting racism where there isn’t actually any. To put it mildly that’s not what history teaches us is the most serious danger.

            Antisemitism, including the Nazi variant, is/was often, perhaps most often, based on suspecting racism on the part of Jews against gentiles.

            Similarly, Marxist-Leninist class enemy status was granted not on the basis on inferiority, but based on the idea that the the group collectively treated the ingroup badly. For example, Lenin called the kulaks: “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine”

            It seems to me that genocide in general typically requires a belief that the group to be destroyed is a threat to the ingroup, as perceived inferiority is much easier to coexist with than with a perceived existential threat to the ingroup.

            So if people are most motivated to harm a group because they suspect that this group collectively discriminates against the ingroup, then is falsely suspecting discrimination (or which racism is but one form, of course) not truly the largest danger?

          • Aapje says:

            An issue is that when the actual differences are large enough, people are going to notice and draw conclusions.

            You can only teach people to draw less noxious conclusions, not to ignore differences that are obvious.

            For example, if nearly all car mechanics are men and if you talk about car problems, men far more often give useful advice; people will notice this. Left to their own devices, they will tend to logically conclude that if they want a car mechanic, it works better to ask the men first.

            You can teach them to be a bit more eager to ask women, but there is a limit to the amount of effort people are willing to go to comply, for their own benefit AND that of others. After all, asking people things that they don’t know has a shaming effect and in general tends to be a bit unpleasant for both. So asking questions to the person who statistically is most likely to be knowledgeable, has societal benefits.

            The costs of treating people the same are commonly ignored by those who argue that we should treat people the same (and instead, people tend to selectively advocate it, for example, very few people argue against the profiling of young men by the police).

            If you try to fix this by forcing women into being car mechanics, the logical outcome is that these women will be less enthusiastic and/or less competent (these are related anyway).

            So while this may reduce how often people conclude that they better ask a man (first) because men are typically more competent in this domain, it’s likely that they will conclude that they should ask men first because they are more competent and/or enthusiastic.

            So while the earlier scenario made it fairly logical to conclude that women tend to simply be less interested in being a car mechanic, the ‘fix’ makes it more logical to conclude that women tend to be less competent. Is that an improvement?

            As for hiring discrimination, you can in principle convince people not to do so even if they believe in a difference in competence, if you convince those who hire that the applicants are not randomly selected, but self-selected in a way that makes them equally competent. It works best if this is in fact mostly true (because people tend to notice big lies).

            For example, if for every 5 men, 1 women is equally interested/competent and you have 5 male applicants for each woman, then the subset of women that apply is actually equally interested/competent as the subset of men who apply, even if this is not true for the general population.

            If you are actually honestly assessing the situation, you can try to determine any real biases/injustices/issues and where in the process it happens. If for every 5 men, 1 women is equally interested/competent, but you have 10 male applicants for each woman, then interest/competence doesn’t reflect how often people apply. If you have 5 male applicants for each equal woman, but you only hire 1 woman for every 10 men, then interest/competence doesn’t reflect how often people are hired.

            Of course, it goes the other way as well, if you have the 5:1 ratio in applicants but women get hired more often than 1 in 5 times, you also have some ‘splaining to do about the hiring standards.

            These irregularities can then be due to a bias/injustice on the part of the employer and/or on the part of the applicant; or it can be that people aren’t merely making choices based on interest/competence. For example, perhaps men fit the company culture better or the employer prefers more verbally capable people, which more often are going to be women. Perhaps men and women shun workplaces dominated by the other sex, which in turn can be for a variety of reasons.

            Whether these reasons are good reasons or should be stomped out is rather subjective, but by honestly looking at the causes for inequality you at least can figure out what is actually going on, unlike the current situation, where many people blame inequalities on causes that are provably not the (sole/primary) cause and therefor propose/implement solutions that cannot work.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            To be clear, I never said that the largest danger is suspecting racism incorrectly.

            I’m concerned about society-wide decisions to taboo facts and factual questions and speculations, because I think that’s likely to suppress useful and important questions and speculations, and also likely to leave decisionmakers misinformed in ways that leads them to make bad decisions. I think this is a bigger danger than the likely outcomes of allowing the public discussions in nearly all cases. I also think it’s basically impossible to know, when you’re deciding to suppress some fact or question of fact, what other decisionmakers will be affected.

            If you insist, tell me what the data actually proves and not an iota more. And you do go even an inch over the line and get punished by the media, I’m not going to shed even a single tear.

            Let’s apply this to some other questions of fact:

            You’re allowed to factually question religious beliefs by appeals to established science, but if you go an inch past what you can absolutely nail down and prove, and you get turned into an unemployable pariah. We’re all okay with this, because of the terrible humanitarian track record of atheistic regimes, and the hurt feelings of millions of religious people when they have to hear your attacks on their deepest beliefs.

            If you insist, you may discuss human-caused global warming as a plausible scientific theory with a lot of support from climatologists. But if you go an inch past what you can prove, you end up dismissed from your scientific position and used as a byword for a lying anti-humanity green activist. This is sensible, because the fossil fuel industry is an important part of our economy and society, employing millions of people at various levels.

            It is perhaps acceptable to discuss the documented cases of war crimes committed by US personnel, if it’s done respectfully and not too publicly. But if you make any speculation about possible crimes that you can’t absolutely prove, or go beyond dry reporting of official findings and documented cases, you get crucified in the media and fired from your position as a NYT staff writer. We need such a principle, to protect our brave soldiers and spies from hateful rhetoric from anti-American propagandists.

            What would we expect the effect on public discourse to be if these were all the accepted rules? Would there maybe be some downside to adopting them?

          • albatross11 says:

            AFAICT, the way the taboo on race/IQ discussions works is that when we’re talking about, say, the ethnic makeup of magnet[1] students, it is forbidden to speculate that the makeup is explained by racial IQ averages, but it is totally acceptable to speculate that
            the makeup of the magnet schools is explained by racism among school officials. I think it is very hard to argue for this outcome on the basis of, say, the need to maintain social harmony by embracing some noble lies or suppressing contentious discussions.

            [1] Selective schools for advanced students, usually requiring a high score on an admissions test and good grades to get in.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            As a nitpick, my understanding is that there’s pretty good data showing positive correlations between IQ scores and performance in school/jobs up to about two standard deviations above/below the mean, but that past that, there’s usually not enough data to tell, since the studies don’t have very many people outside that range. There’s also some evidence (I think from Terman’s work) that even among high-scoring kids, test scores (I think it was the SAT given to kids at age 13) positively correlated with stuff like getting a PhD, number of patents, number of academic publications, etc. We also see the racial groups whose average IQs are highest (Eastern European Jews and NE Asians) very heavily overrepresented in the most intellectually challenging professions (STEM fields, medicine, law) and also among “tournament winners” in very intellectually challenging fields–the people who end up with Nobel prizes, Fields medals, Turing awards, tenured professorships at top universities, etc. Since getting a Nobel Prize or a Turing award is a concrete demonstration of very high intelligence (along with hard work and lots of luck), that’s some evidence that the IQ statistics help us predict something about even people at the very highest end of human intellectual accomplishment. (Though it doesn’t help us much with working out if individual test scores predict that stuff.)

            Now, I agree that a lot of people seem to be very concerned with their IQ score for internal psychological reasons, and that seems a little silly. If I want to know your potential at 17, an IQ score is pretty useful. If I want to know your potential at 40, I should just look at what you’ve accomplished so far in your life–your IQ score is way less interesting than that. When we hear that Feynman had a measured IQ[1] of 125, it would be silly to think “Oh, I guess inventing quantum electrodynamics didn’t take all that much intelligence” rather than “Wow, I guess that test doesn’t capture the kind of intelligence that makes you a first-rate physicist very well.”

            [1] This is an often-passed-around anecdote–I don’t know if it’s true. Jerry Pournelle used to claim that he and Feynmann had the same measured IQ score (higher than 125, I think), but that nobody in conversation with them would ever have thought Pournelle was in the same intellectual league as Feynmann.

          • brad says:

            albatross11:

            You said go ahead and be extremely skeptical, and I’ve said how that skepticism cashes out for me. I think I have good reason to be extremely skeptical given the history and it’s utter lack of any problems similar to the one you are concerned about yet filled to the brim with actual racism.

            I don’t think global warming or the validity of miracles are similarly situated.

            How do you suggest extreme skepticism, justified in light of the historical context, should manifest.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            Th

          • albatross11 says:

            Brad:

            The usual way extreme skepticism is expressed is by saying things like “I think you’re full of shit.” or “I think you’re a fool for believing that.” Maybe even making an argument for why you are skeptical of someone’s claims.

            Trying to get someone fired, to make it impossible for them to speak in public, or trying to get them mobbed (in real life or online) seems like a very different thing from skepticism. Even supporting that stuff seems like a very different thing from skepticism.

            You’re not just talking about skepticism, you’re talking about punishing people because you think the ideas they’re expressing are socially destructive. Those are entirely different things. It’s the difference between someone who thinks your claims that AI risk is an important issue are silly and should be ignored, and someone who thinks they threaten progress in AI or Google’s business model, and should be shut down before they cause trouble.

          • I don’t think global warming or the validity of miracles are similarly situated.

            Global warming looks like a more recent version of the overpopulation claims of fifty years ago. Arguably one consequence of those was the one child rule in China, which imposed enormous costs on hundreds of millions of people.

            Most of the strong claims made in the controversy over global warming are ones that one cannot prove are true, although some of them might turn out to be.

            Is your strong skepticism appropriate there too? If someone writes an article about the effects of global warming that assumes RCP8.5 and gets punched by the media, you won’t shed a tear? That goes an inch over what is scientifically provable?

          • brad says:

            I’m enjoying this discussion but I’m posting from a phone and time is brief, so rather than posting quotes and responses to both of you, let me say that I think of this as something like an ultrahazardous activity in tort law (where strict liability is incurred). I’m not saying the research needs to be forbidden but given the history I think scientists in this area have a special obligation to be careful in only claiming what the science actually supports. Talking about how everyone that works with blacks knows how they are (or whatever the exact quote) was not that at all and doesn’t deserve to be shielded from social consequences under some kind of scientific work product privilege.

            I pay as little attention as possible to global warming debates because of learned epistemological helplessness so I’m unwilling to dive deeply into the analogy. I apologize if that’s rude.

          • but given the history I think scientists in this area have a special obligation to be careful in only claiming what the science actually supports.

            But aren’t there a whole lot of other issues where the argument you are making is just as strong? I mentioned global warming, where my point was not about how good or bad the arguments were but about how much damage something close to it had done in the past. As I think someone else mentioned, class hatred, rich vs poor, and the like have been responsible for killing a lot of people–arguably more than beliefs about racial inferiority. Indeed, I’m not sure (it’s been a long discussion) that you ever responded to arguments suggesting that belief in racial inferiority has killed almost nobody, that it wasn’t the cause of southern slavery or the holocaust or Leopold’s acts in the Congo.

            If you take your argument seriously, don’t you end up concluding that almost any interesting issue people disagree with counts as ultrahazardous? Quite a lot of Byzantines were killed in violence associated with the chariot races, and even today there is a certain amount of unpleasantness connected with European football–does arguing about which sports team is best qualify?

          • albatross11 says:

            If discussing racial IQ differences is a super-dangerous topic, how about drumming up racial hatreds by, say, claiming or implying that the performance gap in education is mainly due to white racism?

            When journalists and talking heads and social scientists discuss police shootings of blacks, is that also a super-dangerous topic where any misstep should lead to disaster for the speaker? After all, it’s not uncommon for claims of wrongful police shootings of blacks to lead to riots in which innocent people get killed or injured and property gets destroyed. (In recent memory, Ferguson and Baltimore.)

          • brad says:

            I mean I get that it’s a drag to have to live in the shadow of the past, but we aren’t talking about ancient Babylon or even WWI. Massive and pervasive anti-black racism is both America’s original sin and something that was still unquestionably going on in the lifetime of many many people alive today. If you resent having to live in a country that is morally responsible for dealing appropriately with that legacy I don’t know what to tell you.

            David you may be right about global warming, I don’t feel qualified to say. But your other example re sports is inapt, and frankly a bit frivolous.

          • @Brad:

            You seem to be ignoring the distinction between two questions:

            Has racism been a serious problem? (Yes)

            Has racism motivated by belief in the intellectual inferiority of blacks been a serious problem?
            (Dubious)

            One of the things driving murderous conflicts in Africa in the post-war period was conflict between a tribe that had been dominant and a tribe that resented it. So doesn’t your argument apply to claims of oppression of blacks by whites at least as strongly as to claims that blacks have a lower average IQ than whites? Similarly, doesn’t it apply to claims that the rich are getting too large a share of the pie? A good deal of inter-ethnic conflict in various parts of the world is in part motivated by the idea that one ethnicity—Jews in Europe, Chinese in Indonesia, Indians in Africa—is doing unfairly well.

          • brad says:

            Do you think there’s a serious risk of anti-white pogroms in America? You seem to want to elevate a far-fetched theoretical risk (admittedly involving greater harm) over a very real and present risk of actual discrimination. Not in Rwanda or ancient Babylon but right here in the contemporary United States.

            I never said don’t do the science, go ahead and do it. But you go and say “His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this not true’.“ that has nothing to do with science.

          • Do you think there’s a serious risk of anti-white pogroms in America?

            No. Nor of anti-black pogroms.

            I thought your argument was based on the claim that beliefs about racial inferiority had caused a lot of harm in the past. By the logic of that, the fact that other beliefs have caused a lot of harm in the past is relevant, even if I don’t expect those beliefs to cause such harm anytime soon.

            Beliefs about overpopulation have caused a lot of harm in the past, so similar beliefs about global warming could cause a lot of harm in the future. That strikes me as more likely than pogroms in the U.S., black on white or white on black.

            I don’t accept the premise–that one is obliged to be hyper-conservative about any ideas that have caused lots of harm in the past, in part because that requires you to be hyper-conservative about a lot of different things, which makes it hard to think about them.

            Another example … . Arguably, Chamberlain’s appeasement was responsible for WWII and the holocaust. Does it follow that anyone who makes arguments for giving in to unfriendly powers instead of fighting them—against going to war with Russia over the Crimea, say—is obliged to be hyper-conservative, to only make arguments he is certain are correct?

          • LadyJane says:

            If discussing racial IQ differences is a super-dangerous topic, how about drumming up racial hatreds by, say, claiming or implying that the performance gap in education is mainly due to white racism?

            This seems like a false dichotomy. It could be a result of a socioeconomic factors caused by past (rather than present and ongoing) discrimination. It could be a result of cultural factors, as the non-racist conservatives like to claim. Or it could be a result of some other factor that’s wholly unknown to us, and possibly unknowable at present (perhaps there’s a form of solar radiation that’s counter-intuitively more harmful to people with higher melanin concentration in their skin). All of those possibilities seem more likely and less offensive to me than “blacks just randomly have lower IQs than the rest of humanity for no discernible reason, and nothing can ever fix or change that so we may as well wipe them all out through any means necessary.”

            (Alright, that last bit was a little uncharitable. It’s technically possible that the idea of racial inferiority becoming widely accepted wouldn’t lead to widespread discrimination and eventual violence. You’d just have to keep putting energy into the system, so to speak, to prevent social trends from following the path of least resistance until they reached their expected maximum-entropy state.)

            @DavidFriedman: You make some very good arguments, but I simply disagree with your underlying premise that belief in innate racial superiority was not responsible for discrimination, persecution, and genocide in the modern era. If you limit your examples to nations with liberal humanistic values (for instance, the United States in the early 19th century, or Germany in the early 20th century), it seems as though oppression was always justified by the idea that the race being oppressed was inherently less intelligent, less rational, less independent, less capable, less ethical, less human. That doesn’t mean this belief was the only factor at play, just that it always played a significant role.

            Rwandan culture wasn’t based around liberal humanistic values to begin with. Neither was the culture of Ancient Rome or the Byzantine Empire. In a culture without liberal humanistic values, saying “fuck those guys, they have stuff we want and they’re not us, we’re killing them and taking it” was a lot more acceptable, it didn’t need any real intellectual or moral justification. But in societies that proclaim that all humans have certain rights that should be respected, you can’t just say “well, except for these losers, screw them,” you have to come up with a reason why that particular group is an exception and should be treated as such.

            And yes, if there was a precedent within this country of overpopulation theories resulting in mass support for eugenics, forced sterilization, etc., then I’d say that scientists should be very careful when publicizing findings on overpopulation too. But the fact that those theories led to horrible consequences in China doesn’t worry me too much; China had a centralized government that felt compelled to micromanage every aspect of society and a culture that didn’t place as much value on individual rights, whereas the U.S. has both legal/political and social/cultural protections in place to prevent such outcomes here.

          • albatross11 says:

            LadyJane:

            [List of non-genetic possible causes of the black/white IQ gap omitted]

            All of those possibilities seem more likely and less offensive to me than “blacks just randomly have lower IQs than the rest of humanity for no discernible reason, and nothing can ever fix or change that so we may as well wipe them all out through any means necessary.

            First, nobody in this discussion (nrt Watson) is anywhere close to supporting genocide. Jokingly attributing it to the other side of a different debate is a cheap, shitty rhetorical trick, and I wish you would knock it off.

            Second, if you want to discover the cause(s) of the black/white IQ gap, then you need people to be able to discuss the matter in public, do research, give talks, write books, speculate, advocate their own theories, etc. That’s one of the strongest reasons to not want the subject tabooed–if the whole topic is a minefield, then a lot fewer people will study it.

            Third, we know we live in a world where intelligence matters a lot in daily life and success, varies widely across individuals, is partly heritable, and differs on average across racial groups. Figuring out what kind of policies we should have to live in that world requires public discussions about what’s known, what’s unknown, and what we should do about it. Making it impossible or unsafe to discuss the matter in public (maybe you can avoid getting mobbed if you phrase everything just right and don’t go an inch beyond what you have ironclad proof for) is a good way of making sure we don’t think it through, and don’t get policies that make sense for the world we actually live in.

            [1] Genetic and environmental causes can both really be complicated interactions. In a society where fresh milk is the main source of calories, lactose-intolerant people are going to be sickly and malnourished. There’s a genetic cause, but it interacts with the environment–move them to a diet that mainly depends on beef and potatoes, and they’ll be fine.

          • albatross11 says:

            brad:

            Which would you say is more likely to lead to violence that kills innocent people:

            a. A broadly fact-based but somewhat inflamatory and speculative news story about racial IQ differences.

            b. A broadly fact-based but somewhat inflamatory and speculative news story about police shootings of unarmed blacks.

            From recent history, it looks to me like the only violence you get from (a) is people protesting Charles Murray’s talks. On the other hand, (b) could plausibly cause a few days of rioting and looting, with innocent people killed or injured and property stolen or destroyed.

            So why is (a) the “strict liability” version of speech, wheres (b) is the normal version of speech?

          • John Schilling says:

            On the other hand, (b) could plausibly cause a few days of rioting and looting, with innocent people killed or injured and property stolen or destroyed.

            By which I assume you mean, has actually caused the premeditated murder of at least five people.

            And I agree that there is a very selective demand for rigor here, regarding exactly which dangerous or historically harmful arguments we are supposed to suppress.

          • I just wanted to pick up on one part of Lady Jane’s post:

            “blacks just randomly have lower IQs than the rest of humanity for no discernible reason

            Isn’t that more plausible than “blacks just randomly have the same average IQ as whites who have the same average IQ as east Asians” for no discernable reason?

            We know IQ is in part heritable. We know that different racial groups differ in their distribution of observable heritable characteristics–that’s most of how we recognize them. It would be a surprising coincidence if all racial groups happened to have the same height. Would it be a similarly surprising coincidence if they all had the same average IQ? Shouldn’t the default assumption be that the average of any heritable characteristic on which individuals differ will be different for populations that were in different environments for long enough to produce observable heritable differences?

            That doesn’t tell you which groups should have higher IQ’s, but if you agree that the averages are probably different there is nothing surprising about the claim that it is higher for whites than blacks.

            It is the claim of equality that is surprising.

          • LadyJane says:

            @DavidFriedman: I’ll concede that you could probably expect to see some IQ differences between races even in the absence of all other possible causes for the discrepancy, simply because there are always going to be some statistical differences between any set of groups if you look closely enough. You could probably find some trivial but consistent IQ difference between Colts and Packers fans too.

            What seems unlikely to me is that the inherent IQ gap between races would be as wide as it seems to be now. I’m skeptical for two reasons: First, it just seems improbable that two groups of humans that had a largely similar evolutionary history and faced somewhat similar environmental pressures would be that different. To the best of my knowledge, a few thousand years isn’t enough to result in a noticeable evolutionary change like that in humans. That’s why I’m especially skeptical of the idea that European Jews are genetically adapted for intelligence. I just don’t think that could reasonably happen within merely a few dozen generations, unless the selective pressures were a lot more intense than they actually were.

            Second, we know for a fact there are other causes for the discrepancy, so it seems almost certain that at least some of the IQ difference is a result of those factors rather than genetics. Imagine there was a full 12 inches of average height difference between two groups of people from the same region. My first thought wouldn’t be genetics, it would be “the shorter people must be seriously malnourished.” I know, pygmies exist, but they’re an exception; most ethnic height differences of that degree are at least partially environmental. In the U.S., the average Latino male is 5’7″, a full three inches shorter than white or black males, but that’s largely because male Latino immigrants tend to be between 5’0″ and 5’6″ depending on their nation of origin; if you limit it to American-born Latino males, there’s only a slight difference between them and whites or blacks. Likewise, the life expectancy of Latino immigrants in the U.S. is considerably lower than that of other Americans, but the life expectancy of American-born Latinos is not. This strongly suggests that the bulk of many statistical differences between ethnic groups is not genetic.

          • LadyJane says:

            @albatross11: A few months back, when the migrant caravan was the biggest news story, I remember there was a post going around social media that said something like “the IQ of the average Honduran is 85, do you really want them in your country?” And a lot of the people sharing that post supported violence against the caravan, including extralegal violence.

            Would many of them have taken the same stance otherwise? Probably. But I’m willing to bet there were at least some people who were on the fence about the caravan, and that was one of the arguments that pushed them over the line into being opposed to it. I’m also willing to bet there were a fair number of people who were already opposed to the caravan, but became much more adamantly opposed to it and much more willing to support extreme measures against the migrants, partially as a result of that argument. So yes, I absolutely believe these things have an effect.

            Figuring out what kind of policies we should have to live in that world requires public discussions about what’s known, what’s unknown, and what we should do about it. Making it impossible or unsafe to discuss the matter in public (maybe you can avoid getting mobbed if you phrase everything just right and don’t go an inch beyond what you have ironclad proof for) is a good way of making sure we don’t think it through, and don’t get policies that make sense for the world we actually live in.

            That’s the thing, I don’t want different policies based on whatever the truth of the matter is. The only policy that would “make sense” to me, ethically speaking, is to treat people as individuals regardless of their race, legally and socially.

            Let’s say that, against all odds, the entirety of the racial IQ gap turned out to be purely genetic. Nothing to do with environmental factors, or even genetic-environmental factors like your lactose intolerant example or my UV radiation idea, or selection bias in the particular subsets of racial groups that we see in the U.S., or any of the other things that logically would affect it; black people just naturally had lower IQs on average than white people. What kind of policy should be implemented on the basis of that knowledge? Some say it proves we should get rid of affirmative action, but most Americans support getting rid of affirmative action anyway, so that’s hardly a big deal. What else? Short of closing the gap through genetic engineering (which isn’t even technologically possible at present), what can we possibly do with that knowledge, other than use it as a basis for either ‘benign’ or malicious discrimination?

            Even in a world where the IQ gap was purely genetic, I’m not really seeing how widespread public knowledge of that fact would make the world a better place. In fact, I’m struggling to even imagine how it wouldn’t make the world a worse place.

          • 10240 says:

            First, it just seems improbable that two groups of humans that had a largely similar evolutionary history and faced somewhat similar environmental pressures would be that different. To the best of my knowledge, a few thousand years isn’t enough to result in a noticeable evolutionary change like that in humans.

            The time different races have spent apart has clearly been enough to produce clear differences in various physical traits.

            As far as I understand, development of entirely new traits is slow as it requires mutations to randomly produce beneficial traits, but selection for a particular trait where the necessary alleles already exist easily happens in a few dozen generations. (The latter process can produce phenotypes beyond what existed in the earlier population if an attribute is determined by many genes.)

            It’s easy to speculate about causes of stronger selection pressure for intelligence in some populations: e.g. a more challenging environment, or one that is different from the original environment our physical traits are adapted to. This is entirely speculative on my part; my point is that it’s not obvious that environmental pressures were the same.

            Imagine there was a full 12 inches of average height difference between two groups of people from the same region. My first thought wouldn’t be genetics, it would be “the shorter people must be seriously malnourished.”

            The standard deviation of height in the US within one sex is ~3″. The difference between the height of US whites and the Japanese (a developed, presumably well-nourished nation) is 2–3″. The white–black IQ differences I’ve seen are 0.6–1 standard deviation.

            Some say it proves we should get rid of affirmative action, but most Americans support getting rid of affirmative action anyway, so that’s hardly a big deal.

            Then why does it stick around? My explanation is that its supporters support it stronger than its opponents oppose it. (Many supporters consider opponents racist, which they consider an instant disqualification from decision-making positions, while many opponents just consider it one bad policy.) As a consequence, decision-makers calculate they would lose more votes than they would gain if they scrapped it. That would change as support would become weaker and opposition would become stronger.

          • To the best of my knowledge, a few thousand years isn’t enough to result in a noticeable evolutionary change like that in humans.

            That’s relevant to the Ashkenazi case, although I’m not sure you are correct–selective breeding produces quite large changes in animals pretty quickly, and it isn’t obvious how different the selective pressures were for the Ashkenazi.

            But in the black/white case, you are talking about a separation of 70,000 years, without even considering any effect from Neanderthal admixture in Europe. We observe pretty large physical differences both between African and European populations (most obviously skin color) and between different populations within Africa.

            so it seems almost certain that at least some of the IQ difference is a result of those factors rather than genetics.

            You are assuming that the environmental factors reinforce the genetic factors. That’s plausible but not certain. It wouldn’t be that hard to come up with a story in which the group with the lower genetic IQ had their relative IQ pushed up, not down, by environmental differences.

            simply because there are always going to be some statistical differences between any set of groups if you look closely enough.

            My basic point is that the default assumption should be different averages, before one looks at evidence of what the difference is. That’s true not because of random effects but because different populations are optimized against different environments–which explains the other differences we observe. Intelligence cannot be a costless unambiguous good, since if it were everyone would be maximally intelligent. If both its cost and its value (in reproductive success) are different in different environments, as one would expect, then the optimal distribution will be different in different environments, hence different in different populations.

        • Eponymous says:

          @albatross:

          The quote I gave is exactly how she characterizes the “mistaken ideas” advocated by “members of the [redacted] movement” who “enthusiastically tweet and blog.”

          It’s true that the ideas as stated are strawmen. But her readers are presumably meant to infer that related beliefs are likewise “mistaken”.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Yeah, this is a pretty good essay, and for the NYT, it is very good. I see this is from last July — is that how far back you needed to go to find a reasonable opinion? 🙂 She certainly seeded her essay with social justice particles (and even stated she was for social justice), but I like what she argues for here, and gives me a little hope that the left at least allows some to question the orthodoxy of the article I posted earlier. I also read a bunch of the comments and I was gratified that about half of them seemed to support the idea of doing research in this area, and a number even accepted the idea that intelligence matters. Does this mean it isn’t true that NYT readers won’t accept the truth? Of course it is also true that it is the ones who do dissent from the usual orthodoxy that will likely comment here, so there is a self selection process.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Speaking of, anybody read Taleb’s critique of races/IQ? He makes some pretty good points, like IQ’s average per race having huge dispersion to the point of it being meaningless, and IQ being top-limited more than bottom-limited, which makes is a measure of mental inability only.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Speaking of, anybody read Taleb’s critique of races/IQ?

        There were long discussions on the subreddit and in previous open threads. I believe the two points you discuss are not good points because they aren’t factually accurate.

      • albatross11 says:

        If average per race has so much dispersion as to be meaningless, then that means it shouldn’t be useful for making predictions. Taleb would not be dumb enough to take a bet based on the idea that group IQ averages are meaningless, because he would lose like 95 times out of 100.

        For example, choose a random reasonably well-off suburb anywhere in the US, and predict the ethnic mix of its schools’ magnet programs, sight unseen. Assuming the suburb doesn’t use really extensive affirmative action to enforce a racial balance, I can use group IQ averages to make a much better prediction about that mix than you can without group IQ averages.

  17. johan_larson says:

    This phenomenon of government shutdowns when the politicians can’t agree on the budget, is it unique to the US?

    • dodrian says:

      I believe that in a lot of other countries, particularly in Europe, the failure to pass a budget triggers a new general election. I’m pretty sure that’s the case in the UK at least, and recall hearing about it happening in other countries.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        Well, it *did* in the UK until recently. It is now no longer automatic (since the Fixed Term Parliaments Act) but the “zombie” situation where a government can survive a vote of confidence but not pass a budget is still fairly theoretical.

        • Kyle A Johansen says:

          Although, a minority incompetent Conservative government split on the issue of respect the 2016 People’s Vote (and the 2017 Manifesto Pledges) being supported by Ulster unionists with no other plausible allies, while the opposition is led by an IRA-supporting unreconstructed socialist is probably as close as you’re going to get.

    • wk says:

      I know that if a similar political impasse would occur in Germany, the federal government has the right to pay for all its previously established obligations (paraphrasing here), at least to the extend that funds are available, and if necessary even has limited power to borrow money to keep the government up and running. The precise statement is given in Art. 111 GG, of which an English version can be found here. Austria has something vaguely similar, iirc. Other countries, I don’t know.

    • S_J says:

      I seem to remember a year or two when Belgium could not form a working Government (via a Parliamentary process). I assume this means that no Party held majority, and the Parties could not come to an arrangement to form a Coalition.

      However, I can’t tell if this resulted in a limited (or total) shutdown of many Government-run offices.

    • ana53294 says:

      In Spain, whenever we had a non-functioning government (a government without majority in Congress), the previous year’s budget was used. This is of course not optimal, since there won’t be any adjustments that account for changes in the economy.

      The closest thing was probably when the Spanish government shut down the Catalan government. The low level government workers kept being paid (police, teachers, paper-pushers), but all the high level political appointments got kicked out.

    • John Schilling says:

      The United States appears to be unique or nearly so in having:

      1. A very strict prohibition on government spending without the immediate approval of the legislature, and

      2. A presidential system where the legislature can’t boot out an uncooperative executive with e.g. a vote of no confidence, and

      3. A multiphase budgetary process where “government shutdown” almost never means that the government has to actually shut down.

      Absent 1 or 2, there’s no need for government-shutdown brinksmanship, absent 3 it’s too dangerous. Which doesn’t necessarily mean boring stability, it just forces any unpleasantness into different patterns.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Yes, this issue wouldn’t happen in a parliamentary system, where the the legislature and executive are really the same people. The interesting thing here is this happened when both the legislature was majority Repub and the President too (even though the Dems have now inherited it this month). So I think this time comes down to being a Trump thing.

        • EchoChaos says:

          That was again because of Democrat blocking tactics due to the filibuster in the Senate.

          It’s certainly “a Trump thing” because his demands are pretty substantial, but it’s not purely because of Republicans either.

        • Why couldn’t it happen in a parliamentary system where no party had a majority and nobody was able to put together a majority coalition that could agree on the budget?

          • Eric Rall says:

            It could, but the usual response in that sort of situation in a Parliamentary system is to dissolve and call early elections: voting down an appropriations bill is generally considered an implicit vote of no confidence. And I expect there’s supposed to be enough lead time for at least one round of elections between when the budget is due and when funding actually runs out.

            You could still get a shutdown if the new Parliament is deadlocked, too, or if a government that’s lost its effective working majority takes too long trying to wrangle votes for their budget before admitting defeat (and the head of state doesn’t step in and use their reserve powers), but you don’t get situations like we have in the US currently where we’re stuck with the current Congress and President until the next scheduled elections.

    • Murphy says:

      Most countries build mechanisms into their systems that prevent it.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/22/why-other-countries-dont-have-government-shutdowns-2/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ce8256b2590d

      for example in some countries if the government can’t pass a budget it triggers another election. if a government can’t pass it’s own budget then it basically isn’t a government.

    • Erusian says:

      Sort of. The Parliamentary equivalent is when one party can’t get together a ruling coalition, in which case a government doesn’t form at all. Basically, there’s no executive or legislation for the duration, as happened in Belgium for nearly two years. This equally means the government doesn’t have a budget, though that means the previous year’s budget is used in perpetuity.

      • 10240 says:

        In most countries the previous government continues as a caretaker government with limited powers. And I presume the new legislature can still pass laws even without a coalition or a new government, it just rarely has the necessary agreement to do so.

        • Erusian says:

          The previous government might continue to literally occupy the office, but they have almost no power to act as an executive. The legislature could theoretically pass legislation, but it won’t because of the lack of a coalition. The point is they are in shutdown in a way that impedes normal government functions, so its the most analogous thing to a US government shutdown. Which isn’t really a shutdown either: the government just cannot borrow more money and so has to make cuts.

    • BBA says:

      This can occur at the subnational level in the US too. A couple of years ago the state of New Jersey was a few days late passing its budget, and then-governor Chris Christie was widely scorned for spending the weekend with his family at an otherwise-deserted beach in a closed state park.

      But this isn’t universal. New York also had a slightly late budget a couple years back, but the state government stayed open as King Andrew I Governor Cuomo assured employees that the budget would be passed before the next payroll date, which it was. I don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t passed.

    • MrApophenia says:

      There was a really interesting Vox podcast last week about the shut down that mentioned that they didn’t have this in America either until the 70s. The Carter administration didn’t like that Congress was lax about passing appropriations bills on time, so they changed the rules to say that the Treasury can’t pay for government operations without a valid appropriations bill.

      Before that, the assumption was that the last appropriations bill was in place until a new one arrived, and the government just continued to operate on that basis.

      • brad says:

        That’s odd, given:

        No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

        • MrApophenia says:

          Sure, but there was an appropriation – it was the last one passed.

          Between this and the modern version of the Senate filibuster, which also didn’t exist until the 70s, it’s almost like they made a bunch of rules changed specifically to make the government stop functioning.

          • albatross11 says:

            I thought there was some kind of court case that determined that the government had to shut down when there wasn’t appropriated funding.

          • brad says:

            If I pass a law that says: “for the next 52 weeks every week the president should spend $5 on widgets”, if on week 53 the President spends $5 on widgets he’s drawn money from the Treasury without an appropriation made by law.

          • MrApophenia says:

            Finding details about this online has been surprisingly difficult. I have basically been able to determine that the modern appropriations process went into effect in 1976 and that before that government shutdowns in the modern sense were not a thing.

            If you look at the Wikipedia page on the US government appropriations process, their history section discusses the various times appropriations have lapsed since 1977 – with no discussion of the time before that.

            If anyone has any better sources, would be interested in reading them.

          • CatCube says:

            Yeah, I don’t have the time or inclination to dig into details about shutdowns, but the Antideficiency Act has been a thing since the late 1800s. They certainly contemplated that there was such a thing as not assuming that a current appropriation would extend into infinity–and passed a law to prohibit the executive branch from assuming such when making contracts.

    • Aapje says:

      The last Dutch budget that was rejected was in 1919, which was the budget for the Ministry of Marine (which no longer exists as a separate ministry).

      An important difference between the US and the Netherlands is that the American executive is elected. In my country, the executive has to have support of a majority of the House of Representatives and the Senate. So the kind of conflict that ends up with a government shutdown in the US, tends to instead result in the executive being sent packing (which now results in new elections, although this is custom, not mandatory) or them pulling their turd back in*, as we say in Dutch.

      * So, withdrawing the plan that doesn’t have support in the House of Representatives and/or Senate.

  18. RavenclawPrefect says:

    Now that the SSC survey is closed, and there’s no chance of directing potential takers away from it:

    This is your ABSOLUTE MEDIUM CHANCE to take the 2019 supplemental SSC survey. Take it if you want to! Or don’t! Every part of it is totally optional! It’ll probably be open for a while longer anyway!

    Also, bonus feature of the survey: there’s a question at the end via which you can request to be put in contact with people who satisfy various conditions and consent to be contacted as such, so if you are not otherwise survey-inclined but want to say hi to people with characteristics X, Y, or Z you might consider filling (parts of) it out for that purpose. (It goes without saying that such responses are excluded from any public result data.)

  19. Another Throw says:

    A commonly cited reason that the second amendment is obsolete is that, come on, the government has tanks and planes and nukes and shit! The counter argument that is frequently made in response to this is to cite Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. The rebuttal to this is usually that, well no duh the US lost those wars, they didn’t have the balls to really do what it takes to suppress an insurgency and a tyrannical government trying to suppress a domestic insurgency would. To which the reply is often that, well, actually, the USSR has no such qualms and still buggered it in Afghanistan. After this things either die out completely as people have run out of arguments or (more likely around here) devolve into arguments about well actually, the real reason [super power] lost [insurgency] is because [esoteric argument about number of battalions in a brigade or something].

    This argument always seems to me to miss the most important elephant in the room: where the weapons are made. AFAIK, all of the 20th and 21st century insurgencies and counter-insurgencies have been fighting somewhere other than where the weapons are made.

    This contrasts starkly with the hypothetical homegrown insurgency that underlies the argument. It is my observation that Congress, for example, has spent the last 50 years systematically dissecting the every major defense platform to making sure that, god damn it, some of those parts are going to be made in MY district! This creates an enormous attack area that no army could guard against. And those sub-sub-sub-contractors sure as shit are not getting paid enough to do it themselves. So while the government may have all the tanks and planes and nukes and shit, without the repair parts to keep them running and the ammunition to shoot out of them they’re not going to be much use.

    Insofar as they were any use against an insurgency in the first place, which is a whole ‘nother.

    • theredsheep says:

      There’s an extended thread about this lower down (what used to be higher up): https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/06/open-thread-118-5/#comment-706566

    • This contrasts starkly with the hypothetical homegrown insurgency that underlies the argument. It is my observation that Congress, for example, has spent the last 50 years systematically dissecting the every major defense platform to making sure that, god damn it, some of those parts are going to be made in MY district! This creates an enormous attack area that no army could guard against. And those sub-sub-sub-contractors sure as shit are not getting paid enough to do it themselves. So while the government may have all the tanks and planes and nukes and shit, without the repair parts to keep them running and the ammunition to shoot out of them they’re not going to be much use.

      I pretty much agree with this, but I don’t think whether or not people should have arms to defend against the government depends on them having a good chance of winning. The stakes are so ridiculously high in this case, that even a 0.0001% chance that citizen’s owning arms would provide some deterrence is extra help. Governments certainly behave as if it is a deterrent; Venezuela passed its “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law” and then later, Maduro re-armed only the colectivos.

      Insofar as they were any use against an insurgency in the first place, which is a whole ‘nother.

      This is a big thing. Governments can’t just kill everyone who disagrees, A: because it’s tremendously difficult, and B: because new enemies are always being generated. Political suppression and creating a climate that bolsters the ideology on a neighborhood level is always more effective.

      second amendment is obsolete

      I know this is a tangent, but it is related, so I don’t want to start another thread:

      I’ve been wondering lately whether the right to keep arms isn’t much more important than the right to bear arms in this vein. You want to be able to bear arms and carry around weapons on your person if the goal is day to day self-defense, but if the goal is to fight against the government then what you want is to be able to keep that rifle on the wall until the time comes. Most compromise on gun control just means that you get weak legislation that bans mostly cosmetic things by people who don’t understand guns, but what if instead you split the difference and had absolutism for keeping the arms, but regulation specifically for bearing them?

      It doesn’t seem to me that allowing people to own weapons is much of a cause of death compared to allowing people to carry weapons around the street. Handguns – weapons specifically designed for self-defense rather than fighting wars, are consistently, according to the FBI, the weapons that actually cause the most deaths, and so are probably the culprit in the USA’s high murder rate, more so than guns per se. Sure people use rifles to commit shootings, but if we care about the actual number of deaths and give that the weight, then rifles don’t seem to stack up much even against knives, and no country is going to abolish knife ownership (This isn’t a challenge, United Kingdom).

      What if the solution was going full progressive in regards to bearing arms, and going full conservative in regards to keeping arms? What if we split the second amendment in two? It’s quite a neat split as well because it corresponds to the private property/public property distinction; the restrictions would be very low when it’s your own property, but very high when it’s government property, such as public streets and highways. If it was illegal to carry a weapon on the streets and stop and search was omniprescent I bet spontaneous gang shootings with handguns would drop a lot, eating into the high murder rate.

      • albatross11 says:

        Doesn’t Switzerland have something rather like this–lots of people in the militia, with rifle and ammo at home, but the ammo’s sealed and you get in trouble if the seal is broken?

        • John Schilling says:

          Not really. The “you get in trouble if the seal is broken” bit applies only to military-issued war reserve ammunition; there are few restrictions on purchasing your own ammunition for your own use, and e.g. private target shooting with one’s military-issue rifle is encouraged so long as the rifle remains well-maintained and the war reserve ammunition is kept in reserve. Also AFIK few restrictions on purchasing additional private armaments.

        • dark orchid says:

          I’m not sure if the reserve ammo is still a thing, I haven’t been to Switzerland for a while, but I’ve heard tales from many people back then to the extent that you have to be able to show, upon request, ONE sealed tin to the authorities.
          It was apparently commonplace for soldiers to take home an extra tin here and there without too many questions asked. One occasionally used to read in the papers on an otherwise slow news day about the army’s estimates of just how much ammunition goes “missing”.

          I remember once going to a shooting range with a colleague, the guy in charge asked if we wanted to buy some ammo and my friend said no and pulled a box of military-issue ammo out of his bag; no-one seemed to care.

      • @albatross11

        It’s the same principle, but with Switzerland those restrictions on how you have to store a weapon and its ammo make it not quite the equivalent of a second amendment that only applies to keeping the arms. If the police have to keep doing spot checks at your actual home, and if they find you in violation, they can take away your gun privileges, that means the right to keep arms is being infringed.

      • EchoChaos says:

        This is essentially concealed carry permitting, and is strongly supported by guns rights activists and strongly opposed by anti-gun activists.

        I will note that it isn’t just “people carrying weapons” that is a problem, but specifically criminals carrying weapons. Concealed carry permit holders have a shooting rate that is miniscule to the point of detectability.

      • sfoil says:

        What if the solution was going full progressive in regards to bearing arms, and going full conservative in regards to keeping arms? What if we split the second amendment in two?

        It can’t really be split in two, because the fundamental principle is whether citizens have the right to use violence in order to defend their life, liberty, and property. To be a little more practical, why do you think a government that banned citizens from carrying handguns in order to kill criminals would allow those same citizens to keep weapons in order to kill its own agents? I don’t think the history of gun laws outside America supports the idea that this thinking is a stable equilibrium at all. A government deciding that people don’t have the right to use lethal force with a handgun deciding that they don’t have the right to do it with a rifle isn’t a slippery slope, it’s the same thing.

        Concealed-carry laws (which require firearms to be concealed from view in public) seem like the compromise you’re looking for: you can carry firearms in public as long as you don’t make a show of being armed.

        Edit: The Swiss example is bad because a Swiss militiaman is only permitted to use his weapons on behalf of the government. I don’t know the specifics of Swiss law & customs on this, so I’ll use a more hypothetical example. If a member of the British Home Guard is criminally liable for “breaking the seal” on his service weapon without orders in response to a home invasion because only gentlemen Proper Authorities may bear arms, his government is impeding his rights about as much as if he weren’t permitted to keep weapons at all.

        Perhaps having his hands on a rifle and a combat load of ammunition might encourage him to decide he doesn’t like the way the Proper Authorities regard his rights and give him a plausible way to do something about it. But it doesn’t change the way the Proper Authorities regard his rights. And if the Proper Authorities are less worried about invasion than regular citizens getting unapproved ideas about property rights — well, there’s a reason there is no actual British Home Guard that allows members to keep assault rifles in their house.

        • dark orchid says:

          The Swiss example is bad because a Swiss militiaman is only permitted to use his weapons on behalf of the government.

          Until you’ve completed your mandatory military service, then for a nominal fee you can buy the weapon and it’s yours to keep. (They weld on the rapid-fire select plate in the semi-auto position though.)

      • John Schilling says:

        I’ve been wondering lately whether the right to keep arms isn’t much more important than the right to bear arms in this vein. You want to be able to bear arms and carry around weapons on your person if the goal is day to day self-defense, but if the goal is to fight against the government then what you want is to be able to keep that rifle on the wall until the time comes.

        The goal is for the time to never come that you have to fight against the government in the first place. Part of that is deterrence by making it clear that bloody civil war is on the table if the government goes too far. But another part of it is making it clear that there’s no excuse for the government to start down that road in the first place. And the usual excuse for governments starting down that road is some form of, “…but you need us to save you from those damn dirty criminals, terrorists, immigrants, jews, commies, trumpists, antifa, whatever, against which you are defenseless and only our proposed Legions of Stormtroopers Appropriations Bill offers any hope!”

        For that, you want the response to be “No we don’t because no we aren’t, no stormtroopers for you”. For that, you need people to actually bear arms at need, not just keep them.

      • rlms says:

        Omnipresent stop and search would have both monetary and social costs, but otherwise restricting handgun ownership and increasing access to other guns in compensation sounds good to me. I believe most of Europe has significantly more stringent restrictions on handguns than the US (for instance self-defence is often not a valid reason to get a gun license) with a smaller difference for long guns. However, I understand that a lot of Americans like to use handguns to defend their property.

        • EchoChaos says:

          In a technical sense, using a handgun to defend your property is wasteful. A carbine or shotgun is far more effective and since it’s your property, you can store it in a way that makes it easily usable by you but hard to turn against you.

          The handgun’s primary advantage is being concealable and mobile, which means you can defend yourself in a place you can’t control as well.

      • One answer is the point I recently made–that the more dependent people are on the police to protect them, the more power they will be willing to give to the police. Hence the right to bear arms for self-protection makes tyranny less likely.

        A different answer is that the right to bear arms may have net benefits, since it makes confrontational crime more risky hence less common.

      • 10240 says:

        Many countries allow owning a gun relatively easily but have much stricter restrictions on carrying one. Many countries are also stricter about handguns than long guns.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        no country is going to abolish knife ownership (This isn’t a challenge, United Kingdom)

        I think the more likely example is Xinjiang in China (where the Uyghurs live)- according to a recent article about its descent into dystopia, kitchen knives in restaurants now have to be chained to the wall above where they are used, while those in household kitchens have the blades laser-engraved with the owner’s details

    • Walter says:

      “To which the reply is often that, well, actually, the USSR has no such qualms and still buggered it in Afghanistan”

      Horrifyingly, we just got to see how this goes in real life, in Syria. Scrappy militia vs. Russian bombs, with Russia more or less not caring about public opinion. The militia got steamrolled, just like American insurgents would. Rifles no good vs. bombs and poison gas.

      • Kyle A Johansen says:

        Is the repressive US government using the ordinary US military. I would think in that case that the pressure to not gas civilians is greater when those civilians are your army’s mothers and grandmothers. That’s one of the reasons for why the Dems push for people-masquerading-as-the-other-sex and otherwise trying to Demoise the military ought to scare any reasonable person. It’s also one of the reasons why in the EU politicians such as Macron our so so supportive of a pan-EU army.

        • rlms says:

          I’m not quite sure what your reasoning is. Are you saying that the libs want the transgenders in the army because they’ll be willing to gas Real Americans? This seems somewhat implausible to me.

          • I think he is saying that the military culture is currently red tribe and the Dems are trying to change that.

          • LadyJane says:

            @DavidFriedman: Is that actually true, though? I get the sense that the Red Tribe likes the military far more than the military likes the Red Tribe. That’s not to say that the military is Blue Tribe either, but judging from the actual servicemen I’ve spoken with, it seems to largely be an apolitical organization. Most rank and file personnel tend to be firmly anti-war too, which is why Gary Johnson polled higher than Trump or Clinton among active troops.

            At any rate, I strongly doubt that the admission of transgender people into the military will change its institutional culture too much, especially considering they’d likely comprise an almost infinitesimally small percentage of the total military population.

          • Kyle A Johansen says:

            @rlms

            My reasoning is that they want more Dems so as to have an easier time subjugating those groups that the traditional intake has an affinity to, but which there new group does not.

            I would describe that group as ‘those people with whom the traditional intake has an affinity to and would balk particularly at gassing’, if asked to be less abstract I would probably say ‘the south and flyover’, but David’s ‘red tribe’ works in the loose sense that it is often used in the comment section, and ‘Real Americans’ works too, although it is not a term that I would use.

            If everyone is in Team Red then it is hard to gas Team Red, as soon as the military has a sufficient number of Team Blue then that gets a lot easier (maybe the whole ‘gas Real Americans’ seems far-fetched but look at France where they are already gassing protesters and a former government-minister are calling for a shoot-to-kill policy; a belief in exceptionalism shouldn’t be an excuse for complacency).

            The tran-issue might very well not be enough on its own, but its not on its own. Look at the US-Air racism hoax, where the Educator decided to lecture and attack his white recruits – and be feted on the news channel rota – based on false premises, that’s also something that would turn off the traditional groups. And of course, left-wing recruits we would expect to have particular efforts to take control of the means of education, as we’ve seen everywhere else.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @LadyJane:

            I have substantial experience with the US military, and they are thoroughly Red Tribe, but less political about it than other sections of the Red Tribe.

            There is a difference between “Red Tribe” and “Republican” in all cases, and this is one of the wider gaps in that identification.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        The Syrian government also had bombs and poison gas. It’s actually the Syrians dropping chemical weapons sporadically, not the Russians.

        Plus, the rebels received a whole bunch of military equipment from the US and Gulf state allies.

    • sandoratthezoo says:

      It was impossible for a few farmers with personal arms to stand in the field against the British army in 1789, too. (Or in 1776, for that matter). You needed cannon, cavalry, drilling to stand in formation, etc.

      What you could do with civilian arms, then and now, was form an insurgency that made it costly to hold ground, degraded the morale of your occupation force, and visibly resisted the occupation.

    • rahien.din says:

      This argument always seems to me to miss the most important elephant in the room: where the weapons are made… It is my observation that Congress, for example, has spent the last 50 years systematically dissecting the every major defense platform to making sure that, god damn it, some of those parts are going to be made in MY district! This creates an enormous attack area that no army could guard against.

      Your thought seems to be :

      1. In the runup to a hot insurgency and/or civil war, the US military will fail to fortify its supply lines.

      2. Therefore, handguns and other sub-military grade weapons wielded by poorly-trained civilians will prove effective on the battlefield.

      Hm.

      The argument in favor of guns-as-defense-from-tyranny seems to be “The US military and the police are cowardly idiots who will give up, rather than adapt their tactics to their threat environment.”

      From my perspective, we’ve blooded an army and successfully trained it to combat various phases of insurgent combat, from single-shooter to well-armed militia. Therefore I would not fuck with the US military, Glock-17 in hand or not.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        The argument in favor of guns-as-defense-from-tyranny seems to be “The US military and the police are cowardly idiots who will give up, rather than adapt their tactics to their threat environment.”

        The argument I hear is much more frequently “the US military and the police are steeped in a tradition of armed citizenship; the police and citizenry are often ex-mil; so the US military and police are actually highly likely to disobey any order to subjugate the citizenry, and those few that obey are likely to run into aforesaid ex-mil”.

      • Mr. Doolittle says:

        @ rahien

        I think your are modeling the scenario poorly (or the hypothetical it’s based on is completely unrealistic).

        “The military” is a volunteer army from a wide range of home states and demographics, with differences in opinion from both leadership and rank-and-file (between ranks and within them). I think the only scenario where the military acts in a concerted fashion is one where a relatively small group of people suddenly and without warning announce their opposition to [something understood as the whole USA]. A unilateral uprising against a newly elected official may suffice. Any long lead up or clearly understood situation will either lead to the army going explicitly neutral or, if the situation is incredibly messed up, splitting along the lines of the conflict. A red/blue split will see more of the army supporting the red tribe out of demographics, since that’s their family and friends. Otherwise the army is involved in mostly defensive actions to tamp down on the damage while the civilian leadership works on a fix.

        On a completely different side of the argument, 100 million gun owners is about 50:1 odds against military personnel. I’d take the 50:1 side of a conflict even if the smaller group has better guns. The logistics of holding down such a large and armed population is completely unrealistic. You have to think about the situation on the ground – this is not heavily fortified bases and an offshore presence, but instead getting shot while walking down the street. The military could do massive damage and hold a few strategic points, but there’s no way an occupying force could hold that much territory from that many opponents. Of course, for the same reason that the army would not act as a coherent group, gun owners would not either, but this is closer to the hypothetical of this thread.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

        There are several problems with your thinking here, but the biggest two are these:

        Firstly, you seem to think that the US military can “fortify its supply lines” when those lines are things like the entire interstate highway system, all freight railroads, and every port and airport in the country. The US is a huge country, roughly fifteen times the size of Afghanistan if I did my math right, and our defense infrastructure is spread out across every congressional district within that area.

        Second, gun owners in the US are much better well-trained and equipped than you give them credit for. The stats I see are that something like 60% train often, owning roughly eight guns per household with the most popular brand of rifle literally being the civilian conversion of the M-16. They’re not going to win pitched field battles against tank divisions but that’s not how guerrilla warfare works.

        On a somewhat related note, I’m curious about your nationality if you don’t mind sharing.

      • rahien.din says:

        Paul, Doolittle

        The US military and police are actually highly likely to disobey any order to subjugate the citizenry

        I think your are modeling the scenario poorly

        If government tyranny will never actually happen, then guns aren’t necessary to prevent government tyranny.

        Doolittle, Nabil,

        100 million gun owners is about 50:1 odds against military personnel. I’d take the 50:1 side of a conflict even if the smaller group has better guns.

        gun owners in the US are much better well-trained and equipped than you give them credit for. Roughly 60% train

        This is magical thinking.

        Nabil,

        It’s impossible for the US military to “fortify its supply lines”

        It’s not even that you don’t understand how this could be accomplished. It’s that you think it’s impossible.

        You even claim that defense infrastructure is a hindrance to defense.

        You do not understand this issue.

        • Randy M says:

          If government tyranny will never actually happen, then guns aren’t necessary to prevent government tyranny.

          In reality, there are a variety of people in the armed forces, some of whom may enforce tyranny (however defined) no matter what, some of whom will refuse no matter what, and some of whom may be moved from one group to the other based on the strength of the opposition. Thus, it makes a great difference whether there are many armed citizens or not.

          Of course, it’s possible some of the military would refuse orders to act against unarmed citizens but not armed citizens, so it’s complicated and probably impossible to predict, but even still I think that works in favor of the armed populace being a deterrent that you don’t actually have to use to get an advantage from.

          • rahien.din says:

            I don’t adhere to the claim that it is so uncomplicated. I’m responding to that claim.

        • Mr. Doolittle says:

          This is magical thinking.

          Pretty much, but I guess it depends on how seriously possible you consider the rest of the scenario. In hypothetical-land where the US military is fully mobilized against the population, it’s more realistic to model the population also fully mobilized against the government. I think neither are realistic.

          If government tyranny will never actually happen, then guns aren’t necessary to prevent government tyranny.

          I feel like there are two discussions going on here. In one discussion, we’re talking about the effect of guns deterring bad behavior and other mild to moderate effects of gun ownership on tyranny. Would the police be more or less likely to arrest citizens for dubious reasons (or “disappear” them) with or without guns? That kind of thing. In the second discussion, we’re in hypothetical land where the very unrealistic scenario of the US military going fully to war against, essentially, the red tribe is considered. I think the second scenario makes very little sense, as I tried to elaborate on in the post you responded to. If we accept the scenario as true, and the military is now fighting 100 million citizens for [reasons], then I think what I wrote is true. ~2 million people in the military against 100 million armed citizens will end poorly for both sides, but the military will ultimately lose badly. They cannot really take and hold the territory involved, and while they can slaughter concentrated groups of people and therefore hold strategic targets, an insurgent population would be a nightmare scenario.

          • rahien.din says:

            You suggested this hypothetical : the military (2 million strong) entering into conflict with every gun owner (100 million strong) simultaneously. That is indeed unrealistic.

            Would the police be more or less likely to arrest citizens for dubious reasons (or “disappear” them) with or without guns?

            This is simply the wrong question.

        • John Schilling says:

          “Military and police” is carrying a lot of weight here. Most tyrannies have preferred not to use the military for that purpose. Particularly not a military they think they might also need to win wars against a competent foreign army. And the ordinary professional police are usually kept clear of the more overtly tyrannical work; that’s what the secret police are for, the Stasi, the Gestapo, the KGB.

          Anybody can recruit a Gestapo; there will always be enough disaffected or amoral people with the right tribal affiliations for that. The Gestapo peaked at less than 0.05% of the German population, and I’m certain either Trump or alt-universe Hillary could find a similar fraction of Americans willing to go full stormtrooper for the cause.

          Beyond that, a competent tyrant can always weaken the regular police and military in ways that make it unlikely they will effectively oppose the Gestapo even if they are wholly unenthusiastic about supporting it.

          If a force of armed and uniformed thugs amounting to 0.05% of the population, backed by the unenthusiastic support of the regular police and with the army at the borders facing out, is enough for a tyranny, then you can have tyranny. And in e.g. Nazi Germany, it demonstrably was.

          But if your argument for “resistance is futile!” depends on the combined strength of the Gestapo, the regular police, and the army, then the resistance gets to point out that the army’s support may be entirely missing and the regular police ambivalent.

          • rahien.din says:

            the combined strength of the Gestapo, the regular police, and the army

            I’m not adhering to that proposed hypothetical, only responding to it.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          If government tyranny will never actually happen, then guns aren’t necessary to prevent government tyranny.

          I think you missed the part where I wrote:

          […] those few [military and police] that obey are likely to run into aforesaid ex-mil

          If the head of state is able to assemble elite stormtroopers and they don’t have to worry about ex-mil, because the ex-mil aren’t armed, then government tyranny suddenly becomes quite possible.

          (ETA: Ninja’ed three times!! Is this a record?)

          I don’t see where Nabil said that it’s impossible for the military to fortify its supply lines. Did you somehow quote an earlier version and he edited afterward?

          At any rate, I think Nabil understands the issue sufficiently. The problem of maintaining supply is so universally recognized that I wonder where you come by your claim. Are you saying the military could fortify its supply lines? If so, how do you explain Iraq and Afghanistan? Surely, if they could, they would have in those places, would they not?

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            I didn’t edit my comment, but it’s not a huge exaggeration of what I said.

            “Fortifying” supply lines which stretch over an area fifteen times larger than Afghanistan to the extent that militias couldn’t effectively attack convoys isn’t impossible. But it’s extraordinarily implausible: we can’t even manage that feat in countries equal in area to Afghanistan when bases were placed according to military necessity instead of pork-barrel politics.

          • rahien.din says:

            Paul, I am really very confused by what you’ve written here :

            The problem of maintaining supply is so universally recognized that I wonder where you come by your claim. Are you saying the military could fortify its supply lines?

            It seems like you’re claiming that A. everyone recognizes that maintaining supply is essential, but also that B. the US military is incapable of maintaining supply.

          • Randy M says:

            It seems like you’re claiming that A. everyone recognizes that maintaining supply is essential, but also that B. the US military is incapable of maintaining supply.

            Fortifying and maintaining are two different things. The latter is concerned with getting supplies to the personnel at a steady pace, the former with doing so at an acceptable level of casualties.

            If the army had to quell a sustained revolt in Texas, it is plausible it would lose a large number of people and supplies to guerrilla fighters. Probably not enough that you would say supply lines were maintained–the army would be armed and fed. But the casualties would be a significant cost in morale and potentially make negotiating more likely.

          • rahien.din says:

            the army would be armed and fed

            Agreed. They would. I think we’ve answered the question from the original post.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Have we? You seem to be omitting the key caveat: the army would be armed and fed at the cost of so many casualties that they would be unwilling and / or unable to press on with the mission. Which completely obviates the value of being armed and fed.

          • rahien.din says:

            Paul,

            Goalposts. The original post did not mention morale.

          • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

            The original post did not mention morale.

            An army and a nation that loses its morale has lost.

            The entire purpose of the things that go bang and the things that make people die, is to destroy the morale of the solders, of their leadership, and of their sponsoring nation. The actual bangs and the actual deaths are incidental, they are instrumental instead of terminal.

            If you created a magic weapon that destroyed the morale of an army without killing a single person or breaking a single window, you’ve just created the next major advance in the technology of warfighting. Possibly the last one.

            If you give a field marshal or a general staff the option “10% of your men die, and the morale of the enemy breaks utterly” they will probably do it. If their other choice is “otherwise, you’re going to lose” they will definitely do it.

          • Aapje says:

            Fun fact: one of the major reasons why the military is not very keen on silenced weapons for regular soldiers is because of the morale effect on the enemy of them knowing they are being shot at.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            As Hidden Name and Aapje have hopefully illustrated, morale is so crucial to army effectiveness that one need not mention it as a key factor. To argue that an army needs only to be supplied is kinda like arguing that the cheapest way to send a man to Mars is to smuggle an embryo onboard the next Mars rover. Yes, congratulations, you have technically won the argument.

            But the obvious and accepted goal of supplying an army is so that it can accomplish its mission. If you clobber that goal in order to satisfy the former…

        • EchoChaos says:

          I have absolutely no idea what point you are making here. It is far from magical thinking to believe that a group outnumbered 50:1 is at a massive disadvantage.

          A serious insurgency in the United States (~10% of the population) is far beyond the ability of our current military to control, and there is no “fortifying of supply lines” that can correct it.

          Take Fort Drum, an isolated, cold and secure facility in New York where the elite 10th Mountain Division trains and is based. In the county (just the county) where they are stationed, there are ~100,000 people. The 10th Mountain is outnumbered by insurgents (~10% of the population) IN THEIR HOME COUNTY. And they can’t just kill off random people in that county, because they need those people to feed them, to do maintenance, etc.

          • rahien.din says:

            I have absolutely no idea what point you are making here.

            Why respond, then?

            It is far from magical thinking to believe that a group outnumbered 50:1 is at a massive disadvantage.

            Do you honestly believe that is my claim?

            (Admittedly, I didn’t really elaborate.)

          • EchoChaos says:

            What is your claim, then?

          • rahien.din says:

            The correct question is, “How would the US military plan for this difficult situation?”

            There is someone out there who is getting paid to make that plan, and their primary concern is defending our country, not defending civilian gun rights. I’m glad for their expertise.

          • EchoChaos says:

            The military would abandon massive stretches of country as uncontrollable and focus on their major control points/supply centers and try to decapitate the opposing political leadership by drawing their major forces into direct combat.

            Without major forces to find, fix and destroy, their posture would look something very similar to Afghanistan. Massively fortified “Green Zones” where they can control ingress and egress and a danger region within yards of the outside of the Green Zone.

            The United States military has spent the last 18 years and trillions of dollars trying to subdue an insurrection in a smaller, less well armed country with the advantage of their production being overseas and they have failed. I am not confident that their leadership has in fact prepared in any way for this.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

          This is why I asked your nationality before. I didn’t want to be impolite but you seem totally unfamiliar with the geography, culture, and government of the US.

          Military bases and the web of defense industry corporations which support them were placed due to lobbying by various senators and congressmen who wanted to be able to say “I brought N defense jobs to our district!” come election time. As a result of that, if you want to equip an infantryman in e.g. Dallas, Texas you need to draw on infrastructure scattered all over the rest of the country. All of the raw resources, intermediate goods, and finished goods involved need to be shipped across the country repeatedly using some combination of the interstate highway system, freight railroads, shipping or cargo aircraft. Which means that a guy with a rifle and a homemade bomb in Wyoming or Indiana could very well distrupt supplies that would be needed in New Jersey.

          Good luck fortifying tens of thousands of miles of highway, over a hundred thousand miles of railroads, and dozens of ports and airports. If a dictator can manage that, maybe he deserves to rule the country: it’s one hell of an impressive feat!

          • rahien.din says:

            I want to state what your claim seems to be, and allow you to correct me where I am wrong :

            The US military’s supply lines on American soil are so vulnerable that a man with a rifle and a single explosive could disrupt them, by himself, from a remote location.

          • I think a more general point is that, while tanks and machine guns beat civilian firearms in a face to face battle, there aren’t enough tanks and machineguns to protect everything in the country that the military depends on. If the insurgents can attack any place not defended by the military, it will be hard to maintain the military and the civilian infrastructure supporting them and the tyranny.

          • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

            The US military’s supply lines on American soil are so vulnerable that a man with a rifle and a single explosive could disrupt them, by himself, from a remote location.

            YES

            Within an hour of where I sit is a major aquifer, a major natural gas pipeline, a major rail line, a major international airport, a major port, two major freeway interchanges, 4 major fibre links, and a major long distance high tension power line, and many many many bridges over and under and around them.

            I within the next 24 hours could render any one of them unusable for days maybe weeks and probably not get caught. I could probably do 3 or 4 of them in a day or so, if I was more willing to get caught. And I could do it from half a mile or more away from each one. I won’t say how here, but the article by Correia names all the equipment and supplies necessary.

            If tS *does* HtF, there are many many people who are much much better than I at mayhem who could and would break all of them, everywhere. And then could start occasionally sniping at either the repair teams, or the teams trying to guard the repair teams. And good luck getting all the needed repair supplies and equipment, when the power is out and the roads are closed and the water has stopped running and the grocery stores are bare.

            It always amazes me how fragile all of our technical infrastructure is, and yet, it’s all still running.

          • Garrett says:

            The US military’s supply lines on American soil are so vulnerable that a man with a rifle and a single explosive could disrupt them, by himself, from a remote location.

            I’d note that the claimed drone sightings at Heathrow Airport managed to bring operations to a standstill, and we aren’t even certain they happened.

            One of the reasons why military operations abroad are possible for the US is because we operate “over there” and only have military and military-like targets of our own on-site.

            In addition to the US logistical chain being fragile (though not quite single-man-stops-military fragile), it’s a lot more squishy. It’s pretty easy for the military to win in a one-on-one battle against domestic civilians. It’s a lot harder when the domestic civilians are waiting and willing to take on any of the non-combat personnel but also their distant family members. It’s hard to field an army if everybody’s on bereavement leave.

          • rahien.din says:

            All,

            This has been enlightening.

            Some of you think that our soldiers will simply wilt when faced with casualties.

            Some of you think that our military would put a significant number of active-duty soldiers on bereavement leave during a hot war on American soil.

            All of you seem to think our soil is essentially indefensible due to the vulnerability of our supply chain.

            Ultimately, I’m reassured that none of y’all is tasked with planning the defense of my country.

          • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

            Ultimately, I’m reassured that none of y’all is tasked with planning the defense of my country.

            I don’t think we are members of the same country anymore.

          • CatCube says:

            @rahien.din

            I was an officer in the Army, and you’re way off in the weeds about how easy this would be.

            That’s leaving aside that huge portions of the military would desert before rounding up their relatives, or actively work against the tyrannical regime doing this directly; most of us joined because we believed in protecting the rights of Americans, and gun rights are a component of that. Hell, it’s not even just current military; I’m a structural engineer for the government now, and if they started a massive tyrannical roundup like you’re talking about, I’d at the very least be passing the insurgents the engineering drawings of critical infrastructure with red Xs on it labeled “Put bomb here.”

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @Rahien.din

            5 years regular Army, to include a year in Iraq, with a good chunk of that year spent pulling convoy security, route recon, and otherwise dealing with exactly the issue under debate. .

            I’ll just echo CatCube and say that you are entirely too blase and cavalier about the issues involved.

      • Another Throw says:

        My argument is that if you happen to own a company that has a contract to manufacture, say, O-Rings for use in fighter jets—a contract your only really making pennies on—how keen on it are you going to be when you have to shut down your factory three times a day and evacuate, losing millions of dollars each time, because someone keeps calling in bomb threats? Seems like a pretty good way to lose money to me.

        How keen are you going to be to have your factory knitting sweaters that you’re losing money on and the only reason you are doing it is for the “made in America/support the troops” publicity when your neighbors are out in the street in front of your house protesting? Seems like the exactly wrong kind of publicity to me.

        How keen are you going to be to work in Boeing’s civil aviation division when spotters are out doing target analysis of the facility?

        How keen are you going to be to work on that factory line when going to the bar after a hard day’s work and mentioning to make O-Rings for fighter jets gets you beat up instead of a high five and “fucking awesome bro”?

        Not very keen at all, I would imagine.

        There simply are not enough soldiers to secure the tens or hundreds of thousands of contractor scattered across the US. “Fortify your supply lines” is not actually an option.

        Insurgents needn’t actually attack or kill anyone to make most of those contractors decide it just isn’t worth it. They just need to make it unprofitable. Maybe a little uncomfortable. And there are plenty of tools for doing that.

    • FLWAB says:

      A good (if polemical) take on this was put out by Larry Correia, an author, firearms instructor, former gun shop owner, and former member of the military industrial complex (as an accountant). His blog post on the problems with fighting a US insurgency is worth reading.

      The 2nd Amendment is Obsolete, Says Congressman who Wants to Nuke Omaha

      A few highlights:

      In Iraq, our troops operated out of a few secure bases. Those were the big areas where we could do things like store supplies, airlift things in or out, repair vehicles, have field hospitals, a Burger King, etc. And then there were Forward Operating Bases. These are the little camps troops could stage out of to operate in a given area. The hard part was keeping those places supplied, and I believe most of America’s causalities came from convoys getting hit while trying to supply things like ammo, food, and fuel, because when you’re moving around, you’re a big target. All of these places were secured, and if you got too close, or they thought you were going to try and drive a car bomb through the gate, they’d light you up.

      Now, imagine trying to conduct operations in a place with twenty times the bad guys, and there are no “safe zones”. Most of our military bases aren’t out in the desert by themselves. They’ve had a town grow up around them, and the only thing separating the jets from the people you expect them to be bombing is a chain link fence.

      The confiscators don’t live on base. They live in apartment complexes and houses in the suburbs next door to the people you expect them to murder. Every time they go out to kick in some redneck’s door, their convoy is moving through an area with lots of angry people who shoot small animals from far away for fun, and the only thing they remember about chemistry is the formula for Tannerite.

      There will be no secure delivery of ammo, food, and fuel, because the guys who build that, grow that, and ship that, well, you just dropped a Hellfire on his cousin Bill because he wouldn’t turn over his SKS. Fuck you. Starve. And that’s assuming they don’t still make the delivery but the gas is tainted and food is poisoned…Speaking of ugly, do you really honestly think that you’re going to be able to kill people because they disagree with you, and they won’t hit you back where it hurts? While you’re drone striking Omaha Nebraska you really think that the people who live where all the food is grown, the electricity is generated, and all the freeways and rail lines run through, that some of them aren’t going to take it personal? And that they’re not going to use their location and access to make life extremely uncomfortable for you?

      In this case, the target isn’t some Other, it’s not just their people, it’s them. And an active shooting war between the government and half the population? That’s a pretty big fucking line. And we’re not talking about people they are already inclined not to like, but rather they’re supposed to go shoot their doctor and their mechanic for doing something that up until a few days ago was legal and they were doing themselves. A small percentage will be happy to put on the jack boots and start loading people into cattle cars. But a larger percentage will say nope, I’m calling in sick, don’t feel like getting blown up today.

      And another big chunk will actively help the insurgents, because they fucking hate you and everything you stand for. Like seriously, out of touch liberals, how many small town sheriff’s deputies do you think would describe themselves as “progressive”?

      The problem with all those advanced weapons systems you don’t understand, but keep sticking onto memes, is guess who builds them, maintains them, and drives them? When I first saw this idiotic Apache meme my comment was that sadly Freedom Eagle’s day job was as a contractor doing helicopter engine maintenance.

      Those drones you guys like to go on about, and barely understand? One of the contracts I worked on was maintaining the servers for them. Guess which way most military contractors vote? Duh. Though honestly, if I was still in my Evil Military Industrial Complex job when this went down, I’d just quietly embezzle and funnel millions of DOD dollars to the rebels. Because fuck you is why.

    • Lillian says:

      Hey remember when a bunch of armed people showed up to protest the confiscation of one Cliven Bundy’s cattle, and the government proceeded to roll over the protest with tanks and then confiscated the cattle anyway? Yeah neither do i. In fact, as of one year ago, Cliven Bundy still has his cattle. Consider the possibility that if the protest hadn’t been heavily armed, it would have been possible for the government to disperse it with riot cops and tear gas and then do whatever it wanted. Since it was armed, the government was forced to do nothing, because doing something risked triggering a blood bath.

      There’s a sense in which armed citizenry are holding themselves hostage, in that by being armed they are essentially declaring that only lethal force will dislodge them. Actually resorting to said lethal force carries a lot of risks for the government, since the resulting massacre could very well result in them being voted out of office, or serve as a rallying cry that triggers an insurgency or even a full on civil war. Even if the government expects that it can win any military conflict, it would very much prefer not to fight it in the first place, because those things are bloody expensive. Basically you don’t need to win, you just need to make things costly enough your opponent decides fighting you isn’t worth it. This is much easier to do when you have guns.

    • Dack says:

      A commonly cited reason that the second amendment is obsolete is that, come on, the government has tanks and planes and nukes and shit!

      I can’t believe no one has mentioned it, but small arms are often used to seize “large” arms.

  20. Furslid says:

    I have been thinking about an additional downside to the US policy of mass incarceration. Success in prison and jail requires an ethical system that we do not want to promote. The following are ethical rules in prison compared to desirable social rules.

    “If victimized, fight back and seek revenge. Don’t snitch.” vs. “Seek justice through the legal system.”
    “Stick to your own race.” vs. “Ally and befriend people regardless of their race.”
    “Never show weakness, always show dominance.” vs. “Show submission or apologize to prevent conflict.”
    “Fear and protect yourself, people will victimize you if given a chance.” vs. “Trust others, and only take minimal precautions. Almost no one will victimize you.”

    I suspect that some of our problems in society as a whole and defective subcultures are caused by people following prison ethics in the outside world.

    • You might want to read David Skarbek’s book on prison gangs. The ethical system promoted isn’t exactly as you describe.

      For a short version, see his chapter in my current book project.

    • onyomi says:

      I recently read the book Popular Crime, by Bill James, as recommended by caryatis. Though it only covers this issue quite briefly (it’s mostly about dissecting famous criminal cases and social issues related to them, like the insanity defense, in a very breezy, fun prose style), he argues that a larger number of smaller prisons was once, and could again be, much better than a smaller number of large prisons. This relates also to the issue of NIMBY, of course.

  21. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Now for your regularly scheduled Dungeons & Dragons thread.

    I was musing on the power level of Old School D&D characters. In BECMI, the I part stands for Immortal, which you can become by fulfilling an epic quest that must end with you having 3,000,000+ experience points. So what does such a high-level mortal look like?

    BECMI Fighter at 3M XP: 9d8+46 HP, +21 to-hit, 3 attacks
    ” Cleric at 2.9M XP: 9d6+27 HP, +18 to-hit, 9 7th level spells per day
    ” Mage at 3M XP: 9d4+18 HP, +11 to-hit, 4 Wishes per day (first 9th level spell at 2.1M XP)
    ” Thief at 3M XP: 9d4+50 HP, +16 to-hit/+20 & 2x damage backstab

    AD&D Fighter at 3M XP: 9d10+33 HP, +22 to-hit, 2.5 attacks (assuming Grand Mastery in the weapon they’re holding)
    ” Cleric at 2,925K XP: 9d8+24 HP, +12 to-hit, 2 7th level spells per day
    ” Mage at 3M XP: 10d4+8 HP, +5 to-hit, 1 Wish per day
    ” Thief at 3M XP: 10d6+28 HP, +10 to-hit/+14 & 5x damage backstab

    So the Fighter ready for Immortality looks about the same as his 20th level AD&D counterpart. which is unsurprising since 20th is where AD&D usually ends (same as 5th Edition and core-only 3.X). But when you look at the mage, it looks screwy: why would someone who can mentally warp reality with the Wish spell once a day not be able to make the transition to Immortality, but suddenly can when capable of casting Wish four times a day? It seems like BECMI should have tweaked the XP tables so mages got 9th level spells at the same XP as their AD&D counterparts.

    Subsequently 3.X, being a hot mess of splat books, had two different ways of transcending the core levels. Epic levels gave you “Epic Attack Bonus”, which was +1 every other level 21 and above regardless of class, access to Epic feats (which often required one or more attributes of 25+), and 10th level spells for full casters because they deserve the best of everything. There was also a crummy 3.0 version of Deities & Demigods with rules for building characters with Divine Ranks from 0 to 20… and one of the abilities gods could take at Divine Rank 1 was Wish at-will. The 3.X optimization fandom had a field day with the question of how strong or weak the real-world gods statted up in that book were (it either predated or ignored the Epic rules, so no god had the 21st level of Wizard or Cleric).

    • Nornagest says:

      Epic-level rules in any edition are a fucking mess and I try not to think about them too hard.

      And Wish is a mess, too. There’s basically no way to balance it, and no good thematic reason for it to have the power level it had; folkloric wishes always have an unspoken “…in my power” attached. Aladdin’s genie (well, genies; no one remembers the genie of the ring) built him a palace in a night, clothed him in princely garments, and sourced a bunch of slaves and pack animals for him from somewhere, but couldn’t just make him king; would it really have broken anything if D&D wishes worked the same way? A favor from a noble djinn with 12 HD and a list of spell-like abilities as long as my arm is pretty valuable.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Yeah, that’s quite explicit in Aladdin. When the African sorcerer steals the lamp Aladdin’s powers are reduced to what the Slave of the Ring can do for him.
        Giving the D&D Wish spell as-written to Djinn was indeed a mess and mistake.

        I think the least limited wishes in folklore are in Grimm’s The Fisherman and His Wife, where the flounder changes reality to make a woman Pope because her husband Wished it.

        • Nornagest says:

          My theory is that Gary Gygax couldn’t resist the temptation to turn it into a battle of wits between the players (who are trying to come up with bulletproof wording) and the DM (who is trying to play Asshole Genie).

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            That doesn’t explain why Wish was a PC spell. Who are they wishing to at that point, that the DM may roleplay as screwing them over?

          • Nornagest says:

            That’s a good question. Maybe the 18th-level wizard PC is supposed to be basically Solomon and have an infinite number of djinni on tap?

        • Nick says:

          Hah, I read this story when I was little and was so theologically confused.

          You know, she should have just asked for power over the sun and moon. You don’t need to be God for that, just an angelic intelligence like Perelandra!

      • Furslid says:

        That’s how I handle wishes in rare high level games. The wish spell only has the “Cast a lower level spell of your choice mode.” All other wishes are favors, and wishes from different sources work different ways. If a character wished for a genie to make him king, the genie might say it was beyond his power. A pit fiend might serve as a general to help the character conquer a kingdom. A sneaky demon might help him marry the princess with some mental domination and assassinate other potential heirs.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        So, what was the intended idea behind wishes in fantasy literature? Particularly the notion of a genie from Arabian myth? Apparently, they weren’t invitations to embark on scientific inquiry. And I recall at least one wish story (The Monkey’s Paw) used as a cautionary / horror tale. The tale of Aladdin seemed to be a stall for time – the audience is offered a sense of wonder (what would you do if you were a street urchin and offered three wishes?), and then told what this one character did before they think too carefully about it.

        How else was the wish trope used? Given these two examples, I’d be inclined to set up my own RPG campaign wherein wishes simply don’t exist, except as a story within the story. Wishes would fit in a curious category reminiscent of the speed of light – just as that speed is the same to all observers, wishes are always fantasy to all audiences, even audiences simulated within a fantasy world. You only ever hear about them being granted, but it never happens to you(r character).

    • Bugmaster says:

      My group mostly plays Pathfinder. Here are our SOP house rules:

      * Wish: Banned. Monsters that have Wish as a spell-like ability either do not exist, or have some other ability instead.
      * The Leadership Feat: banned, for logistical reasons. Otherwise, every player’s turn ends up taking an hour.
      * Animate Dead and similar spells: Restricted, for the same reasons as Leadership. You can own as many HD of undead minions as the rules allow, but you can only take your own HD worth of minions with you.
      * The Summoner class: banned, for a combination of taking too long and being too OP.
      * Leveling progression: By lv 11, your character should be in charge of some respectable organization. He is not taking orders from the local baron; he likely is the baron. Reaching lv 11 signals his semi-retirement from the field, into a more managerial role.
      * No one is ever going to reach lv 20, so plan your build accordingly.

  22. testing123 says:

    the word casander, with 2 ss, appears to be banned. was that intentional?

    • C_B says:

      Well, you know what a contentious culture war topic classical Macedonian politics is.

      • Protagoras says:

        You jest, but I definitely recall a heated discussion on this topic, which seemed to be at least slightly influenced by political ideology. I won’t go into further detail as I’m not in the mood to fight that battle again.

      • Aapje says:

        Casssander grew up with Alexander the Great and eventually seized control of part of Alexander’s empire, after killing Alexander’s offspring, so it’s surprising that it took so long for him to get banned.

        I would ban people for less.

    • Nornagest says:

      A side effect of banning users in this comment system is that you can’t speak their names. Cas*ander is banned until 1/18 as per here… probably for this post, although it looks pretty weaksauce to me as banning offenses go.

    • Nick says:

      The user with that name is banned for the next two weeks, and this happens (inconsistently?) with the username of users who are banned.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      How would you even have noticed that?

  23. S_J says:

    For various reasons, while looking through regional history, I noticed a news item about a series of fires in the Great Lakes region during the 1870s and 1880.

    One of those fires is well-known–the Chicago fire of 1871. But apparently, other places in Wisconsin and Michigan had disastrous fires that year. A decade later, a second series of fires swept across the Thumb region of Michigan.

    Both series of fires were likely caused by a hot, dry summer. Both were also related to material left behind by logging companies–piles of scrap wood left behind as unusable. Winds associated with the first set of fires may have left many trees knocked-down, but unburnt…and contributed to the raw material in the second set of fires.

    The destruction was immense. Aside from Chicago, almost all of the areas destroyed were small towns (and farmland, and timber-harvesting regions).

    As a question for discussion: there is little worry about wildfire in the Great Lakes region of the United States now. Were the conditions that generated such fires in the region unique to that time period, or is there another reason that such fires are no longer common?

    • The Nybbler says:

      Saved by MDF and OSB? I don’t think piles of scrap wood are left behind by logging companies any more, because we use every part of the tree but the squeal.

      There has been worry about beetle-killed forests causing major fires, but it mostly hasn’t played out.

      • S_J says:

        On the one hand, it does help when loggers use all the scrap wood that they can find for things like OSB/MDF.

        On the other hand…most of these regions of Michigan (and Wisconsin) don’t have active logging at the same scale as the mid-1800s.

    • psmith says:

      Less logging slash. Standing live trees usually don’t burn that well; it takes dead, dry fuels (and ground fuels) to get a big fire going. Also less forest cover in general, maybe, depending on exact time frame and region.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      My initial thought is that the fires were mostly a Black Swan event. The Peshtigo Fire and the Great Chicago Fire, the two worst fires, occurred on the exact same day. Since then, the largest fires in Wisconsin have mostly occurred in the center of the state or in the Northwest section of the state.

      Not that improved management hasn’t also helped, but those epic blazes seem like one-in-a-million things.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      I read a book a few years back that talked about the the impact of various western wildfires on Teddy Roosevelt and the resulting expansion of the National Park System. Can’t remember the name of the book off the top of my head.

      Basically, because of fires that were made disastrous in great part by unchecked logging practices, wilderness fire suppression became a high priority goal. This was so wildly successful that it had many downstream effects, including an increased risk of disastrous fire now, due to fuel buildup.

      ETA: Pretty sure it was Timothy Egan’s “The Big Burn”

  24. Angel says:

    I don’t like to self-diagnose, so I’ll just say this: I have something that looks like what people tend to describe as OCD.
    After a very upsetting episode, I remembered “The Hair Dryer Incident”(The Categories Were Made for Man, not Man for The Categories), where Scott described how a woman with OCD cuased by the fear of her house burning down because of the hair dryer resolved this problem leaving the hair dryer in the car while she commuted to work. Inspired by this story (and considering that therapy isn’t an option right now) I tried to come up with methods like that. Problem is, my OCD is almost enterily related with “not” leaving the doors correctly closed. The only solution I have to this is to take a photo of the door when I leave, but the image doesn’t secure me that the door is locked with key, so the anxiety hits anyways.

    Have anyone tried an approach like this? Any ideas?

    • Evan Þ says:

      I used to worry about locking doors sometimes, so I started saying aloud to myself as I tested the door, “The door is locked.” Then, I’d remember saying that, and I could reassure myself that it was indeed locked.

      If that isn’t enough, perhaps you could also take an audio recording of yourself saying that?

      • Angel says:

        I have a ritual:
        1.- Close the door.
        2.- Lock it with key and say “okay, I have [insert the movements required to lock the door], what means the door is completely locked”.
        3.- Take a deep breath and push the door three times. At the third, keep pushing while saying “I can’t open the door so it’s completely locked”. Depending on how anxious I feel, I repeat this few or several times.

        Even with all that, I still doubt and have anxiety.

        I will try the audio recording 🙂

    • cuke says:

      Have you looked at resources online to walk you through a plan that might help? There are some pretty decent articles as well as books and workbooks.

      Here’s one short piece .

      And here’s a workbook.

      One of the most common things we do when we feel repeatedly anxious about something is develop ways to avoid feeling the anxiety because it’s so uncomfortable. So habits like checking are an attempt to allay the anxiety, but unfortunately it tends to feed the anxiety. Most of the cognitive/behavioral tools to address checking habits have to do with practicing sitting with the anxious feelings without trying to “fix” them. Paradoxically, opening oneself to the anxious feelings tends to reduce them over time.

      There are a lot of supports one can use to make the sitting-with-the-anxiety practice easier, but the core of the practice is to become more willing to sit with the anxiety without acting on it. Medication can lower the baseline anxiety level so that the CBT practice may be easier to do; maybe Scott can weigh in here — my understanding is that OCD type habits are not usually adequately resolved with medication alone.

      • Elliot says:

        Hi Angel

        I’ve got to throw in with cuke on this – I don’t think this is a good long-term strategy. As cuke says, the feeling of anxiety prompts a desire to resolve the issue (which is sensible, generally). A problem arises when the ‘solution’ is some kind of avoidance or doesn’t solve the underlying issue, as this leads to a repetetive and descendingly-severe version of the worry. In predictive coding speak, it’s a desire to reduce short-term uncertainty, but the underlying prior is still there. In fact, as cuke says, it only ‘feeds’ the anxiety.

        From Scott’s post on the Chamber of Guf:

        In a few unlucky people with a lot of anxiety, the angel decides that a thought provoking any strong emotion is sufficient reason to raise the thought to consciousness. Now the Gay OCD trap is sprung. One day the angel randomly scoops up the thought “I am gay” and hands it to the patient’s consciousness. The patient notices the thought “I am gay”, and falsely interprets it as evidence that they’re actually gay, causing fear and disgust and self-doubt. The angel notices this thought produced a lot of emotion and occupied consciousness for a long time – a success! That was such a good choice of thought! It must have been so relevant! It decides to stick with this strategy of using the “I am gay” thought from now on. If that ever fails to excite, it moves on to a whole host of similar thoughts that still have some punch, like “Was I just sexually attracted to that same-sex person over there?” and the like.

        That is, the act of avoidance, and checking, that anxiety prompts strengthens the prior, telling it that it was worth worrying about, and it will continue to ‘raise’ this issue and crave resolution.

        In OCD, this effect is pathologically maximised in another way, as the person is deprived of the ‘feeling of knowing‘ that accompanies checking or resolving the issue. This is why, despite checking the hair drier is off, the feeling of ‘but what if it isn’t?‘ persists indefinitely (unless the hair drier is there). In the scientific literature this is called yedasentience,

        An internally generated feeling of knowing (termed yedasentience) provides a phenomenological sign of goal-attainment and has as its consequence the termination of thoughts, ideas or actions motivated by concerns of harm to self or others. Failure to generate or experience this feeling produces symptoms characteristic of OCD.

        (In this study they attempt to block the onset of yedasentience in the general population, and observe OCD-like symptoms as a result)

        This leads to the above issue with anxiety becoming repetetive and exagerated over time (which is one of the reasons OCD is harder to treat the longer the individual has gone without treatment, as their reliance on reassurance strengthens the priors responsible for the problem).

        There are pros to the hair drier approach, especially the way it’s done in the case Scott describes, with a professional, but overall I don’t think you should view this as a solution. If you do have OCD this approach might make it more severe in the long-term. I’ll try and find some good resources and get back to you for longer-term solutions. There are cheap/free alternatives to therapy that might be able to help.

        (Take all this with a grain of salt: I’m not qualified in psych, nor do I have OCD. My girlfriend has OCD, my dad was an OCD therapist, and I recently gave some talks on a predictive processing account of OCD, and it’s based on these things that I’m saying this. At some point soon I’m going to post a longer post on predictive processing, OCD, and the hair drier as I disagree with Scott on this.)

    • dick says:

      Home security system? Or, if you’re technically inclined, you could make/buy your own sensors and build some kind of app to be able to check up on the status of your doors online.

    • Incurian says:

      Use a checklist. Sign and date when you lock the door. Keep the checklist with you.

      • cuke says:

        In the land of just yielding to the checking impulse (like the woman who brought her hairdryer with her), this seems like a pretty great solution to me.

        I would be interested to know if having the checklist produces a further need to keep checking the checklist or whether it stops the checking cycle.

        And then I’d be further interested to know whether plugging that “checking hole” produces new ones. I’ve worked with a number of people with OCD type habits as well as phobias who seem able to shift their fears to other targets if they focus on trying to “fix” one of them. Like the anxiety plays a whack-a-mole game until the underlying pattern is tended to. But this by no means happens in every instance.

        • Aapje says:

          @cuke

          I think that the point of both this and the hair dryer solution is to make the verification quick and easy, so it doesn’t rankle.

          But perhaps some people are perversely addicted to the feeling of anxiety, so they just shift targets to recreate it?

          • cuke says:

            Hi Aapje,

            It’s my observation that quick and easy verification doesn’t always solve the problem, but sometimes displaces it. But that’s not the case for everyone. My questions in this case were not rhetorical but genuinely interested in what Angel’s (or other people’s) experience is with these verification strategies.

            Using the language of addiction to describe some of the dynamics of anxiety are interesting I think and sometimes apt. Sometimes people think of anxiety as just this bad thing that happens to me that I have no power over. And other times people think of anxiety as this shameful thing about my character that I feel I should be able to fix.

            In working with people who have anxiety, my sense is that neither of these stories is true. Similar to people who struggle with addictions, people who have anxiety likely have some mix of genetic predisposition and environmental factors. Both groups of people have some choice over how they work with those in ways that can significantly improve their situations.

            So I don’t think of it as perverse that people shift targets of their fears; to me, it’s what you’d expect. Maybe like when people getting off alcohol smoke a lot. They are still self-medicating for something and there’s still work to do to address the underlying dynamic that feeds the self-medicating impulse. Anxious people aren’t shifting targets in order to experience more anxiety because they love anxiety; it’s that the behavioral component — checking, nailbiting, compulsive thoughts, substance use, excessive exercise, etc — was a short-term problem-solving effort that long-term became problematic (as Elliot describes above). So if you block one problem-solving tactic without addressing the underlying anxiety, the person may pick another short-term problem-solving tactic that may just kick the can down the road a little ways. CBT and other therapies generally do more than kick the can down the road.

    • eigenmoon says:

      What about shooting a short video of locking the door?

    • melolontha says:

      Could you take a video of yourself locking the door? Maybe with some kind of proof of date/time (a newspaper and your watch?), if you don’t trust whatever automatic timestamp it will get.

      If you find yourself accepting the footage but worrying that you might have gone back inside and forgotten to lock the door when leaving for the second time, that seems a little harder, but technically you could set up a motion detector that registers every time someone approaches the door, and sends the results to the internet; you then could check that there were no entries between the time of the video and the earliest time you know you were in the car/bus/at work/whatever.

      (I know that sounds like overkill, but I’m not taking the piss here. I think it’s worth thinking through any plausible solution, even the ones that sound silly at first.)

      edit: if you’re willing to spend a bit of money, I assume there is some kind of ‘internet of things’ tech (presumably including a new door, or at least a new lock) that will let you control and/or check the status of the lock remotely.

      • Eric Rall says:

        I think “SmartLocks” are what you’re looking for. They appear to cost ~$150-300 depending on brand and model, and they look like they’re drop-in replacements for standard doorknobs and deadbolts (maybe 5-10 minutes to install).

        One of the standard features is the ability to check via phone app whether or not your door is locked. If the worry is that the door is locked but it’s very slightly ajar (so it looks closed but the latch hasn’t caught in its receptacle), I don’t know if smart locks can verify that for you, but if they can’t, a smart deadbolt should address that scenario: a deadbolt can only lock if the door is all the way open or properly closed; if it’s closed but not latched, the bolt will hit the door jamb and fail to lock.

        • Lambert says:

          Sounds like a great way to have a thief smash your window and steal all the other expensive gadgetry you own.

      • PatrickM says:

        I have a Nest cam pointed at my door, and if having a small camera sitting out all the time doesn’t mess up your aesthetic too much, the setup is super-easy and you don’t need to replace any part of your actual door.

      • MrApophenia says:

        I used to have similar anxiety about whether I left the coffee maker on or not; I was able to resolve by getting a smart outlet I can control from my phone. When I am unsure if I left the coffee maker on, I can confirm on my phone that the outlet is turned off.

        So seconding the Smart Lock idea.

        • albatross11 says:

          My wife used to obsess over whether she’d turned off her curling iron–getting a model that had an auto-shutoff was worth it for the added peace-of-mind it brought her!

    • 10240 says:

      Take your valuables with you. Or just don’t store too valuable (and easy enough to steal) stuff in your apartment. Dunno if that would work.

    • Gurkenglas says:

      Try drilling a hole next to your door to expose the deadbolt so you can take photos of it?

    • AnonYemous2 says:

      You know, there are some door locks where you can see if you’ve locked it or not. I’m thinking of ones where the key-hole is at a different angle depending on if it’s locked or unlocked. Maybe just install one of those, if you can find it.

      Uh, besides that, I’m the kind of person who forgets to do stuff a lot. So I strongly developed a habit of locking the door when I leave and rely on myself to always do this. As a secondary option, I decided to stop caring so much if I left the door unlocked. In your case, you might want to consider: if your door is unlocked, so what? Maybe consider hiding your valuables, backing up your hard drive to an external location, and so on. If there’s not much to lose at your house, does it still matter to you if you did leave it unlocked?

    • Reasoner says:

      The other month Scott recommended the book Brain Lock for OCD. I read some of it and I thought it was pretty good & helpful for my OCD issues. One of the things the book says is that this kind of hair-dryer-in-the-car technique tends to “enable” your OCD and make it worse in the long run. I would suggest buying or pirating the book and giving it a read.

  25. Sui Generalist says:

    Book Request: What are the best books out there on exploration and explorers, especially but not only polar exploration?

    • melolontha says:

      Francis Spufford has a book called I May Be Some Time that might fit the bill. The only problem with this recommendation is that I haven’t read it yet, but I have read several of his other books and can vouch for his skill as a writer. I think he’s also ‘rationalist-friendly’, for want of a better term, despite having quite a literary sensibility and tending to avoid deep technical explanations. There’s a precision in the way he uses language, and a genuine intellectual curiosity that drives him beyond the superficial, journalistic approach, that I think would resonate with a decent subset of SSC readers. On the other hand, from reading his essay collection I got the impression that he has developed those abilities over time (especially his ability to write in a way that could easily come out as over-ornate, but does not because every word is chosen for a good reason), whereas I May Be Some Time was published 20 years ago.

      (Scott wrote a review of Spufford’s more recent book, Red Plenty: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/)

      • spkaca says:

        I liked Mr. Spufford’s books Backroom Boys and Unapologetic , and Red Plenty had some good bits, butI May Be Some Time didn’t impress me, I skipped lots of it.

    • Urstoff says:

      Hampton Sides’s In The Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette is a really good read if you like narrative history.

    • WashedOut says:

      The Worst Journey In The World by Cherry-Garrard. It’s the story of Scott’s final mission to the south pole, as told by Cherry-Garrard himself, who was part of the team as a biologist studying the penguins. One of my favourite books of all time.

    • flauschi says:

      I read “Barrow’s Boys” many years ago, and found it quite enjoyable.

    • Tenacious D says:

      I haven’t read it yet, but Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) just recently came out with a book about the HMS Erebus, which was lost in the Franklin expedition and had previously explored the Antarctic.

    • Anon. says:

      Shackleton’s South is excellent.

    • GhostofMelquiades says:

      I highly recommend Farthest North, an autobigraphical account of Fridjof Nansen’s 3 year journey to reach the north pole via the Fram, a specially designed ship to ride with the shifting ice sheets towards the pole. Compared to many other polar expeditions from the turn of the 20th century, Nansen’s journey was surprisingly comfortable, thanks to the ingenious engineering of the Fram and Nansen’s detailed planning of supplies and contingencies based on his previous journey across Greenland. No scurvy or ponies on this expedition *cough* Shackleton *cough*. The journey itself was an incredible feat and was led by an even more incredible individual. Nansen writes from both a strong scientific background and a poetic fascination of the world around him and has some great insight on the state of exploration and science at this point in history.

      I’d also recommend North to the Pole, the account of Will Steger and Paul Schurke of their historic 1986 expedition, the first confirmed unsupported expedition to the north pole. I am a Minnesota native and have met Paul Schurke, so I am a little biased, but this is still a great book.

  26. Murphy says:

    any good story recommendations?

    There’s the well known ones I’ve seen mentioned here like Worm and HPMOR, Scotts own: Unsong

    I’m looking for recommendations for scifi/fantasy stories.

    A few other I’ve come across and liked were…

    The wandering inn

    https://wanderinginn.com/

    Worth the candle

    https://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249/chapters/25740126

    Sufficiently Advanced Magic

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sufficiently-Advanced-Magic-Arcane-Ascension-ebook/dp/B06XBFD7CB

    Or for a post-singularity apocalypse light read: Beginners Luck

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginners-Luck-Character-Development-Book-ebook/dp/B076HJPCMH

    Any that others would like to suggest as good reads?

    I tend to find suggestions from LW or here tend to fit well with my tastes.

    • canard_duck says:

      Ra

      >Magic is real.

      >Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There’s magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It’s what’s next after electricity.

      >Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was.

      >And whether, indeed, she’s dead at all…

      https://qntm.org/ra

      • Ninety-Three says:

        Caution for Ra, it wasn’t fully planned out and by the author’s own admission goes “way off the rails”, to the extent of “[To clean it up] I need to fork the story before [Chapter name] and completely rewrite the last ten chapters”. I’m a fan of the author’s work in general and Ra isn’t terrible but… be prepared for a bit of mess.

        • C_B says:

          I thoroughly enjoyed how far off the rails Ra went. Every time you think you know what kind of story it is, it turns out you were wrong and it becomes much weirder. I found both the pre-rewrite and post-rewrite endings satisfying, and was glad the author left them both up for comparison.

      • Bugmaster says:

        Ra started out really well, but IMO outpaced the author’s ability to handle the story in its second half.

    • Walter says:

      I write The Fifth Defiance (findable at http://www.thefifthdefiance.com ), and I am cheeky enough to recommend my own work.

      • With that precedent as excuse, you might enjoy one of my two novels. Harald was published by Baen as fantasy but it’s really a historical novel with invented history and geography–no magic, elves, or dwarves.

        Salamander, which I self-published, is a fantasy with “scientific magic.” The setting is about fifty years after the magical equivalent of Newton, who took the first large steps towards converting magic from a craft to a science.

        If you like audio books, Harald is also available (free) as podcasts.

        • C_B says:

          Plug: I just started Salamander and am enjoying it very much. It is exactly the kind of thing that would appeal to someone who enjoyed the works listed by the OP.

        • Randy M says:

          but it’s really a historical novel with invented history and geography–no magic, elves, or dwarves.

          We need a name for this genre. Which reminds me, KJ Parker’s Engineer trilogy might be appreciated by this crowd.

          • My standard example of the genre is The Paladin by Cherryh. The background is a mix of Chinese and Japanese, some people believe in magic (and the protagonists take advantage of that belief) but it isn’t real.

            It’s better than my book, Cherryh being a much better writer than I am. So I recommend it too.

          • theredsheep says:

            Naturalistic Fantasy, perhaps?

        • albatross11 says:

          I’ve also really enjoyed both Harald and Salamander. (David, if you’re looking for more beta readers….)

        • Plumber says:

          @DavidFriedman

          “…you might enjoy one of my two novels. Harald was published by Baen as fantasy but it’s really a historical novel with invented history and geography–no magic, elves, or dwarves”

          I’ve been reading Harald (in print form) and can confirm that it’s good so far, it reminds me a bit of K. J. Partner’s Two of Swords or Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt.

        • andrewflicker says:

          I picked up Salamander last time you recommended it here, and enjoyed it. Not sure if I’ve told you before, but thank you for writing it. I look forward to purchasing the sequel.

        • CatCube says:

          I picked it up on Wednesday and finished it on the train back from seeing The King and I earlier today. I liked it overall, and plan to get the sequel when you post it, but admittedly that’s more because the world is interesting. This book could use more narrative between the dialog to fill in the characters. I didn’t really come away with a sense of what the base motivations of most of the main characters were.

      • theredsheep says:

        I wrote a novel, but I think I rushed it and I’m not terribly happy with the results, looking back; I wrote it as an epistolary novel, which makes exposition nearly impossible. I’ve tried a rewrite, but it’s tough to sustain enthusiasm. Anyway, I’m starting over with a straightforward fantasy novel, which I’m serializing at https://rsfoulpapers.wordpress.com/ . The format could probably be better, but it’s “foul papers,” not a published e-book. Anyway, everybody else is advertising their serials, so I figured I would too. It’s set in a grim pseudo-Mesopotamian world where human civilization is only sustained at enormous cost.

        I kind of suck at self-promoting.

        • Randy M says:

          You should consider using sidebar links for a table of contents rather than making new readers scroll all the way down.

          You are braver than I am. I have started a novel but am going to wait until I have several chapters done before putting it online. Maybe in next year’s classified thread.

          • theredsheep says:

            Done. Clumsily.

            Honestly, I don’t have much in the way of editing available to me. I’m quite good at constructing elaborate fantasy worlds, and at least competent as a writer–but I have a poor sense of how much worldbuilding is too much vs. too little, and I can get carried away. There’s a chance somebody will give me a “what the hell is a [X]” or “can we move on, please?” this way.

            Even if that doesn’t happen, the odds are it will never sell anyhow, so I might as well throw it out there for somebody to enjoy.

          • Randy M says:

            From what I hear, it isn’t a good time to try to make it as a professional writer; I think you’re right to publish it on the web and hope for getting a few smiles and perhaps some donations out of it.

            My own reticence comes from doubting my persistence. My motto is, it doesn’t matter if it is good or original, just do it to develop the skill.

          • @theredsheep

            I don’t have much in the way of editing available to me.

            My daughter is a freelance online editor, if you want one–she’s advertised her services in classified threads here. She edits my books, both fiction and nonfiction, and I think is pretty good.

          • theredsheep says:

            Thanks, but I have an editing budget of, uh, $0 right now. If that changes, I’ll certainly keep her in mind. At present I’ve got my wife, who’s excellent at catching typos but has a very different idea than I do as to what constitutes good writing. It can be rather tough on marital harmony.

        • Walter says:

          I’ll take a look, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

      • theredsheep says:

        Since I just totally jacked your comment, Walter: I notice you’re doing some sort of user-submitted character thing. Sort of like hybridizing D&D and a CYOA book? Apologies if that’s wrong; it’s late and I’ve had some of my Xmas scotch.

    • twocents says:

      @Murphy

      Hey! Beginner’s Luck was written by my husband. What a nice surprise to see his work linked here. He just published a sequel, Gathering Strength: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MDDS251?pf_rd_p=c2945051-950f-485c-b4df-15aac5223b10&pf_rd_r=V0FEMTTZZWYDGM6HCSQV
      (If you like it, we’d be grateful if you’d leave an Amazon review, as indie authors live and die by them.)

      I’ve never commented here before because I never have anything unique to say that someone else hasn’t already said better. Your post changed all that. And I’d never have seen it without the new comment order that’s being excoriated downstream (which I otherwise dislike as much as anyone else).

      • Murphy says:

        Small world! I actually just bought it when I posted above after checking the amazon link for Beginner’s Luck.

        weirdly amazon didn’t highlight it to me. (normally it throws sequels from authors I’ve bought from before to the top of my recommendations)

        Make sure he keeps writing!

    • albertborrow says:

      Assuming your taste is somewhat well-adapted to less professional web-stories:

      Most of the stuff on /r/rational. The ones you haven’t mentioned here, that are popular there, are these:
      1. Mother of Learning, by nobody103. Rational fantasy story centered around a time loop, where the character leverages his advantages into learning more esoteric fields of magic, all to uncover the truth about [spoilers] and escape the loop. Has 94 chapters, divided into 3 books, and is nearly finished (only a few chapters left, at about one a month). Its middle is a little weak, and its ending third starts strong before getting off track too, but now that it’s in its final phase, it looks like it’s winding to a great conclusion. Fully recommend it.
      2. To the Stars, a Madoka Magica fanfiction. Sci-fi. If you’re okay with reading fan works, and you’re okay with anime, then this is probably good for you. Both this story and Mother of Learning read a bit like textbooks at times, but they’re really interesting where it counts. Not finished, updates very slowly, but it’s not dead, which is a plus. EDIT: Let me emphasize, this story is really science fiction. It goes full space opera, basically.
      3. Honorable mentions – /r/rational favorites that aren’t as mainstream as those two, or have fandoms in other places: A Hero’s War which is an isekai/uplift story that actually delivers on creating an industrial society; The Metropolitan Man, a Superman 1930’s AU written by Alexander Wales, author of Worth the Candle; The Waves Arisen, Naruto fanfiction written by some guy called Wertifloke, who hasn’t been seen since the story was finished; and several others that I either didn’t read or didn’t see fit to mention.

      Then there are the other stories you may like based on your other likes:
      1. If you liked Worm then chances are you’ll like some of Wildbow’s other stories, like Twig, Pact, and Ward (the ongoing sequel to Worm). I say “chances are” because there are a lot of people who only liked Worm. Or some people that love all of Wildbow’s stories, but only when they’re bingeing them (in which case I would hold off on Ward for a while). Still, they have what I consider to be the most fun attributes of Worm in them, so I’ve been satisfied.
      2. Anything from classical sci-fi, assuming you haven’t read that already. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’ve probably read stuff like Ender’s Game, but in case you haven’t, remember that the genre is almost a century old, and some good work has been done in it.

      • C_B says:

        I would recommend waiting a few months (or a year) to read Mother of Learning. I just started it about a month and a half ago, and have now caught up with the most recent update; transitioning from that binge to the glacial one-update-a-month pace, especially right in the middle of what is obviously the final climax, is agonizing.

        Do yourself a favor and read it when it’s finished.

      • Murphy says:

        I’m actually donating a small bit to nobody103’s patreon.

        I didn’t realise The Metropolitan Man was from the same author as worth the candle but read it a while back and found it excellent.

        For ward I’m waiting till more of it’s done. Kinda like Twig but found Pact pretty poor, I think he writes better mechanistic stuff as pact just read like a character who solves everything by hitting things with a lead pipe and trying harder.

    • Hoopyfreud says:

      Kill Six Billion Demons is a webcomic well worth the read.

      • Bugmaster says:

        Agreed, especially after the author stops art-ing as hard as he can on every page, and settles down to actually tell a story 🙂

    • Bugmaster says:

      I am currently reading A Practical Guide to Evil:

      https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/prologue/

      It has a similar theme (though a very different setting) to Worth the Candle: subverting ingrained narrative tropes in order to master one’s fate. It’s good so far, though I haven’t finished reading it, so there’s a chance it takes a nosedive later on (Ra, I’m looking at you).

    • ManyCookies says:

      mentioned here like Worm and HPMOR

      Significant Digits is a fantastic sequel to HPMOR, where grown-up Harry plays global politics (lots and lots of worldbuilding) and Hermione is a detective superhero politician thing. I honestly like it more than HPMOR at this point.

    • brad says:

      The wandering inn

      https://wanderinginn.com/

      Some jerk* recommended this before I now I have to wait week after week to find out what happens next.

      *sarcasm, in case it needs to be said

    • AG says:

      For anyone familiar with DC comics, “With This Ring” is fun. It’s a fanfiction technically set in the Young Justice continuity, but expands to the rest of DC, including an arc in the Diniverse.
      A self insert from our world gets dropped into Young Justice-world with an orange power ring, and eventually “improve the world” becomes his primary desire.

      There are daily updates, but I restrict myself to catching up every two weeks.

      • theredsheep says:

        On that note, I recommend the webcomic JL8. Originally entitled “Little League,” it’s the Justice League–at age eight or so. They’re all in the same class. Martian Manhunter is the shy foreign exchange student who wears suits to school, Wonder Woman’s a tomboy, Batman’s a nerdy know-it-all, Darkseid’s the sadistic gym coach, and Hal’s Green Lantern Corps are a boy scout troop. It’s by turns absurd and sweet.

        http://limbero.org/jl8/1

  27. Odovacer says:

    How was the Bay Area meetup? Good turnout and discussions?

    • Lambert says:

      Given the date, i’m assuming three astronomers turned up with precious metals, incense and cologne.

  28. Urstoff says:

    Anyone have any opinions on this article: http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/its-the-end-of-the-gene-as-we-know-it

    Aside from the random swipe at IQ tests, I think the main thesis is that genes don’t directly determine phenotypic characteristics:

    So the accepted “central dogma” could be conceived as the one-way flow of information from the code in the gene:

    DNA template → proteins → developing characteristics;

    Which I don’t think is the accepted view in biology anyway? I don’t know, as I am definitely not someone literate in this area.

    Also, I don’t really understand the exact claim of this paragraph:

    Conversely, it is now well known that a group of genetically identical individuals, reared in identical environments—as in pure-bred laboratory animals—do not become identical adults. Rather, they develop to exhibit the full range of bodily and functional variations found in normal, genetically-variable, groups. In a report in Science in 2013, Julia Fruend and colleagues observed this effect in differences in developing brain structures.

    The first half seems obviously false (identical twins look identical, after all; is appearance not counted as “boidly and functional variations”?); while the second half regarding brain structures may be true, but is a much weaker claim than made in the previous sentence.

    Can anyone versed in genetics and development clarify this article for me?

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      I haven’t read the article yet, just opened it, so I’m not going to talk about the merit of the article as a whole. Maybe in an edit or a reply to this post depending on how I feel.

      That said, I can address your first point. I’m working on my PhD in a big umbrella program under biomedical sciences, so I know a fair amount about about molecular genetics and depending on who you ask I’m a developmental biologist.

      The Central Dogma is a real term in biology, but the name is very misleading because nobody who understands biology even at an undergraduate level treats it as dogma. It’s more of a good rule of thumb, but with a lot of well-known exceptions. The best example would probably be the histone code, which is what people usually mean when they talk about epigenetics. Post-translational modifications to histone proteins play a large role in which genes are transcribed and the level of their transcription.

      After all, common sense should be enough to tell you that it can’t all be unidirectional DNA -> RNA -> proteins. Organisms respond to our environments and we would die pretty quickly if we didn’t. Gene expression needs to change in response to environmental stimuli and that means feedback where proteins and RNA regulate DNA. You can’t maintain an equilibrium if it’s all top-down.

    • secondcityscientist says:

      Can anyone versed in genetics and development clarify this article for me?

      Ah, that’s what my degree is in! OK, let’s take a look at this article and… Oh my, it is bad.

      His main thesis is that GWAS and polygenic scores aren’t super-useful at the individual level. That is, if I’ve done a big GWAS and found some SNPs associated with an outcome, the presence of those SNPs in an individual doesn’t guarantee that the individual will have that outcome. Which, sure. GWAS is an Association Study (that’s what the AS stands for) and associations aren’t the same thing as causations. There’s lots of things that can mess up a GWAS, and lots of steps that should happen between a GWAS and an actual diagnostic use, and a lot of caveats that should be understood before using them. For me personally, “just” a GWAS isn’t very useful – I really want to see the thing that’s driving the association. Despite that, people have been trying to use GWAS data diagnostically, and there’s been some pretty nasty failure cases.

      At the same time, he’s throwing a lot of stuff at the wall in service of this goal. It looks like he’s mainly trying to make the case that environment is important in addition to genetics, which every biologist would agree with, but he’s doing a bad job of making this case. In particular, this jumped out at me as terrible:

      Within hours, the fertilized egg becomes a ball of identical cells—all with the same genome, of course. But the cells are already talking to each other with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo. The cells, all with the same genes, multiply into hundreds of starkly different types, moving in a glorious ballet to find just the right places at the right times. That could not have been specified in the fixed linear strings of DNA.

      What the hell? We’ve been studying how genes do exactly this for years. Eric Wieschaus won the Nobel prize for it in 1995!

      The article is riddled with errors in support of a basically-accepted premise.

      Other complaints: He misstates the central dogma of molecular biology (which is DNA -> RNA -> Proteins, not DNA -> Proteins -> Traits). He leaves off “molecular biology” though and I almost missed his error. Very few biologists would agree with his characterization of a central dogma. His illustrations use left-handed DNA, which might not be his fault but still sucks.

      • MTSowbug says:

        Molecular biology Ph.D. here. I’m impressed you were able to bear reading the whole article. The author’s language is loose and evidence is minimal, but nonetheless the author makes extremely strong (and misleading) claims. I get the impression that the author is arguing against the idea of “genes are fate” without engaging the topic scientifically.

        Mainly, I just wanted to comment to agree with everything you said.

        • secondcityscientist says:

          The more I think about it, the madder I get about the “Central Dogma” thing. For non-biologists: There is a “Central Dogma of Molecular Biology” that posits the DNA->RNA->Protein chain, that is, one is transcribed or translated into the other, and it doesn’t go in reverse. There are exceptions, which are well-documented now but were pretty surprising at the time. Anyway, the author
          1) Makes changes (No RNA, “developing characteristics” added in) and
          2) proceeds to argue against his changed version, which no one accepts.
          I mis-read it at first as being the actual, normal version of the CD and was confused about what he was saying for a bit (it looks like Nabil ad Dajjal may have done the same thing). If you just vaguely remember discussions about the CD from long-ago biology classes you might think he’s describing the real deal instead of his straw man. This makes me think the whole thing is done in bad faith.

          • Bugmaster says:

            and it doesn’t go in reverse

            Wait a minute, I thought that many proteins ultimately produced by genes were involved in gene regulation. Is that not true ? If it’s true, doesn’t that count as going “in reverse” ?

          • secondcityscientist says:

            Wait a minute, I thought that many proteins ultimately produced by genes were involved in gene regulation. Is that not true ? If it’s true, doesn’t that count as going “in reverse” ?

            That’s true, but not what I meant by “going in reverse”. DNA is transcribed into RNA, not vice versa. RNA is translated into proteins, and not vice versa. That’s the CD. There are exceptions (like retrovirus’ reverse transcriptase, which copies RNA into DNA) but they’re rare.

            Basically, the CD has to do with the capacity to “reverse engineer” a specific piece of RNA from its corresponding protein, or a particular sequence of DNA from its corresponding RNA. Generally that isn’t seen (with some exceptions).

      • Urstoff says:

        Thanks for the clarifications (and from the others who replied, too)!

      • quanta413 says:

        Ah, that’s what my degree is in! OK, let’s take a look at this article and… Oh my, it is bad.

        Thank you for reading it. I would have felt compelled to read it if someone else didn’t first. And well, it doesn’t sound like I would’ve enjoyed it unless I wanted a hateread.

    • Murphy says:

      Bioinformatician here.

      It’s full of a lot of… shall we say standard tropes.

      Everything is soooo complex and mysterious mystery. Wooooo!

      (when an article starts talking about the total number of genes vs some organism people think of as simple it’s not a good sign)

      It’s trying to tell a story rather than inform. but the moral of the story is trying to be

      “genetics = nazis”

      As always as a sanity check think about how it applies to height.

      It’s taking the idea that you can stunt someone’s growth by starving them while they grow and trying to build up to dismissing the entire concept of genetics. (subtext ! YOU TOO COULD BE 7 foot 6 if only The Man wasn’t keeping you down, it has nothing to do with genetics!! environment is king!!!)

      Apparently the author has never seen twins. I think you’re right to quote that block with confusion.

      I’ll give it points for a single valid point:

      “the methods for computing polygenic scores, in which millions of variables are analyzed by statistical manipulation, provides huge opportunities for false positives. “

      overall 3/10. Mostly buzzword soup from an author who isn’t a geneticist but obviously gets great pleasure from stringing together lots of reddit TIL style “would you believe it!” factlets to fit his ideology.

  29. Ninety-Three says:

    Unless the government reopens, food stamps will be underfunded in February and completely gone in March. A question I have been trying to find an answer for: if the government reopens in April, will people get “back-pay” of their March foodstamps, or do those just evaporate into the aether?

    • theredsheep says:

      I have about a month of experience working at the welfare office. I suspect that, if any back-pay is produced, individuals will have to qualify for it via a long, exhausting, and deeply degrading process. Possibly involving keeping their receipts for every purchase, entering the items they wish to be reimbursed for, documenting their exact level of hardship during the shutdown, etc. They will be removed from consideration if they make any entry errors, like accidentally requesting reimbursement for a bar of soap. And the process won’t be invented for about a month after the shutdown ends.

      I think I’m joking about parts of that, but I’m honestly not sure, or which part(s) if I am. As a general rule, the welfare application process is designed to be extremely paranoid about potential fraud or abuse–well beyond the profitability/expense of said fraud–and in some places appears engineered to arbitrarily exclude applicants in order to reduce the strain on their limited funding. I really doubt they’ll agree to reimburse a blessed thing without meeting a ridiculous standard of evidence.

      • Mr. Doolittle says:

        I think it’s an artifact of large bureaucracy generally, not necessarily in regards to welfare specifically. That said, even the patrons of the DMV have a lot more clout on average than your typical welfare applicant. What problems do exist are not very likely to be fixed, especially quickly.

        It does have the unfortunate side-effect that some of the people most likely to make it through the process are the serial abusers the system is supposed to eliminate. They are quite practiced at the details, and are not afraid to represent themselves in exactly the way that obtains benefits, where a more honest person may not use the specific phrasing that the bureaucrat needs in order to OK the request.

        • theredsheep says:

          When I worked there, they said that welfare fraud mostly consisted of organized rings who game the system using crowds of ignorant immigrants and economies of scale; since they ask you to prove absolutely everything, doing it on an individual basis is really quite tiresome and inefficient. It’s almost impossible to get straight cash assistance (I think it’s basically for the pregnant and utterly destitute), so you have to muck around with, uh, somewhere less than $200 of groceries per month, which have to be resold at a discount thus lowering your margin further, etc., etc.

  30. Conrad Honcho says:

    Aw, man, you are in for a great treat. The books were very good.

    Also, I’m kind of interested to see how the Culture War shapes up when the Netflix Witcher series becomes the Next Big Thing. I anticipate them being full of progressive politics, and then we’ll see people bitch about it, failing to notice that the books were largely about racism and unease with technological civilization and that Ciri was (minor spoiler) already gay.

    • bzium says:

      (medium-grade spoilers)

      Gur “Pvev vf nyernql tnl” guvat vf, nf gurl fnl, ceboyrzngvp, vs lbh ybbx ng nyy gur qrgnvyf bs ubj gur eryngvbafuvc ba juvpu guvf vf onfrq fgnegrq.

      V thrff gurl pbhyq juvgrjnfu guvf, cynl ure tnlarff fgenvtug naq vapvgr n terng onggyr orgjrra crbcyr jub nccebir bs zber tnl ercerfragngvba naq crbcyr jub qvfnccebir bs encr zvavzvmngvba.

    • Hoopyfreud says:

      I mean, I agree that they were “about” unease with technological civilization, but only as much as King Lear is “about” the difficulties of abdicating one’s throne. The bloody, ugly march of technological progress is much less interesting than how the people caught in the process deal with it. There’s a tremendous amount of diversity in that in Sapkowski’s work, and even in CDPR’s interpretations

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I don’t see the difference. If a story is about “how people deal with racism” then it’s mainly about racism. If a story is about “how people deal with the relentless march of technological civilization” then it’s about the relentless march of technological civilization.

        The Witcher is less about The Witcher slaying monsters and more about the moral dilemmas about which monsters to slay and who the real monsters are. “Racism against non-humans” will certainly be a prevalent theme in the series and probably the main point of many episodes. I then anticipate frog twitter posts about “damn SJWs shoving their politics in my monster show!” and then the HuffPo “””think”””pieces mocking the racist white incel “trolls” and how Henry Cavill TOTALLY DESTROYED THEM with this ONE EPIC BURN. In this one case I’ll probably agree with HuffPo, but in the broken clock sort of way.

  31. knockknock says:

    Take the survey already! You know what to do — do it now, baby!

    https://youtu.be/wM7nKHzAHsQ?t=39

  32. jgr314 says:

    Does anyone have a rebuttal to the scary message in this piece from The Atlantic: Presidential Emergency Powers.

    Disclaimer: yes, I would feel equally uncomfortable about this state of the law if all variations of “Trump” were replaced with “Obama” or “Clinton.” I’m not really interested in complaints of “why wasn’t this article published then?” but would be open to comments along the lines of “the 30 states of emergency in place now are down from [45] when Trump took office.”

    • Kyle A Johansen says:

      What do you think specifically is scary?

      If its the idea that American Democracy relies on the accepting of norms and the powerful giving up powerful, then consider the fact that it has a pretty good track record.

      If what’s scary is just ‘orange man bad’, isn’t the existence of the Mueller investigation and that there isn’t a similar fishing investigation of Hillary and her former allies suggestive of ‘orange man not that bad’.

      • jgr314 says:

        What I find scary is the (claimed:) increase in easily available powers by the president with no apparent institutional checks.

        I work in a part of finance where the motto is: “past performance is no guarantee of future success.” There have been 44 changes of president and 24(ish?) changes of party in office. That’s not nothing, but still closer to anecdotes rather than data. If it is true that the presidency has grown more powerful over time, then the past change-overs add less evidence to a future prediction because they are samples drawn from a different regime.

        Finally, I tried to be clear that my concern isn’t just anti-Trump. What could I have written to communicate that better?

        • Protagoras says:

          I think the best way to communicate that the concern isn’t just Trump would be to write the piece in another time and place. Probably the only strategy that would work, in fact.

          • Kyle A Johansen says:

            ‘Congress, of course, will undertake none of these reforms without extraordinary public pressure—and until now, the public has paid little heed to emergency powers. But we are in uncharted political territory. At a time when other democracies around the world are slipping toward authoritarianism—and when the president seems eager for the United States to follow their example—we would be wise to shore up the guardrails of liberal democracy. Fixing the current system of emergency powers would be a good place to start.’

          • albatross11 says:

            Some of us have been unhappy about executive power grabs for the last several administrations….

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            +1 albratross

            I’ve been fighting my own small losing fight against authoritarianism for my entire adult life. I had a glimmer of hope at the beginning of the Trump administration, especially after the election but before he was in office, that the Democrats would have a sudden realization that maybe the President should be far less powerful. Instead, it seems they’ve opted for the “This guy is extremely bad and should be removed from office, but the powers are fine in our hands.”

        • Kyle A Johansen says:

          You posted a link to an article, a large part of which ‘sure, that was all fine and it worked fine in the past, but now there’s Trump.’

          You also say that you ‘ would feel equally uncomfortable about this state of the law if all variations of “Trump” were replaced with “Obama” or “Clinton.”’ but Obama is one of those 24 changes of party, and was definitely arguably more popular than Trump at the time. So it seems as if we can either trust Obama or the general system despite a lack of specific ‘institutional checks’ (although, of course, a POTUS abusing SoE powers could be impeached) Nixon was also a OTUs recently, so either Nixon is another one of whom could be trusted.

          The institutional check is the best check: only putting as POTUS those that can garner the trust of the people sufficiently well to win the election.

        • brad says:

          Finally, I tried to be clear that my concern isn’t just anti-Trump. What could I have written to communicate that better?

          Given the audience you were writing for I think it would have been impossible.

          It’s somewhat surprising that anti-anti-Trump (which isn’t exactly the same thing as pro-Trump) can be such a passionately held position.

          • Aapje says:

            Double standards can just be very frustrating, where people say that they object to X, but only actually seem to object to A doing X, but not to B doing X.

            Then the real objection seems to be (something else about) A, not X.

            If you then actually care about X, these people make for back-stabbing allies and if you care about not-X, they make for disingenuous opponents with whom it is hard to debate.

          • brad says:

            I seem to remember getting enormous pushback when I suggested that some posters shouldn’t be characterized as believers in X despite self-claims based on the patterns of their posts.

            This must be different.

          • albatross11 says:

            Even if you start with a group of people who all oppose X, you will hear a lot more complaints from them when X is actively causing some other problem they care about. It’s easy and fun to bash them for hypocrisy or something, but maybe this is your opportunity to get them interested in opposing X more generally.

            For example, campus mobs and no-platforming has gotten a fair number of people on the right committed to free speech. If you care about free speech in general, then that’s a good thing–you’ve got new allies in protecting something really important. Maybe even more important than scoring some quick points by bashing them for not having cared about free speech issues until their ox was gored.

          • Aapje says:

            @Brad

            You are being a bit vague, but if you are talking about people claiming to be left-wing despite not arguing for what you think is left-wing positions, then this is not so much hypocrisy, but a matter of subjective definitions and/or behavior.

            For example: is a person who wants an extensive welfare state and low migration left or right? It’s probably in the eye of the beholder.

            Another example: Is a person whose ideal is a welfare state, but who in Soviet Russia Venezuela (almost) exclusively fights for more free markets, right wing or can she still consider herself a (moderate) leftie? Just because someone thinks that it is important to move in a right-coded direction on an issue, doesn’t necessarily mean that the outcome that person is aiming for is not still left-wing.

            Anyway, I think that this is a very different debate than a discussion about people who selectively support something and yet claim to support it for everyone.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      The article itself is full of so many lies, half-truths and delusional thinking that it would be hard to know where to start a critique.

      But I agree with the broad point that yes, the executive has far too much power! The legislature has willfully ceded its authority to the other two branches. I’ve complained about this for decades, and would definitely support legislation to reign in executive authority (and while they’re at it, do something about President Hawaiian Judge issuing nationwide injunctions with authority derived from God knows where). I’m sure, however, that as soon as a Democrat or Uniparty Republican is back in office doing the will of the handful of billionaires and multinational corporations who own the media this will all be quickly forgotten.

      It reminds me of a post I saw on reddit after the 2016 election. A liberal terrified of Trump was rushing out to buy a gun for when Trump’s Nazis come for him and all the minorities and I found myself saying “FINALLY the left gets it! That’s why we need guns, in case the government goes nuts!” I’m glad the left is developing an appreciation of smaller government with distributed powers. A government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything away from you.

      • Tim van Beek says:

        …That’s why we need guns, in case the government goes nuts!

        How do you imagine it will look like if the government goes nuts?

        When I think about this, I follow the history of totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which means: First the government will convince everybody that people like you (from a real or constructed little minority), are a deadly threat to society and subhuman. Then there are several possibilities, like:

        a) A couple of cops visit you at your workplace, inviting you to come with them to the police station, because they have some questions.

        b) You are taken down by a SWAT team after leaving your home to go to work.

        I think it is easy to come up with several more, but they all have one thing in common: The moment the government actually comes for you, it doesn’t matter anymore if you have a gun with you (or a tank in your garage or a howitzer in your front yard, for that matter). And there won’t be anyone near you who will help you, because they will all believe that you deserve it: Your coworkers, your neighbors, your own family even.

        TL/DR: A totalitarian regime will handle you like the government handles domestic terrorists today. Their weapons don’t help them much, either.

        I am sincerely curious, because I don’t have many opportunities to ask someone who in turn sincerely believes that owning hand guns will protect them from their own government.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I am not the best defender of the “guns to resist the government” argument, but the idea is that they will not be able to round everyone up at once. Sure, they will GitMo a few hundred, but after that, the theory goes, people can rebel.

          I have many problems with the theory, but this is not a good argument against it.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

          Police officers and soliders aren’t mindless killbots.

          If every time the police get an order to go disappear someone there’s a 10% chance the guy shoots back at them, disappearing dissidents is now more dangerous than the entire rest of their job put together. They’re going to be a lot more reluctant to go out and disappear people who seem likely to fight back.

          And that’s assuming that resistance is limited to lone individuals. If enough armed men in a neighborhood or a town decide that the police aren’t welcome anymore they can effectively evict them. It’s harder to fight an occupying army that way, but the various wars from Vietnam through Iraq have been an effective demonstration that the US military is far from immune to insurgent tactics.

          Would-be tyrants understand that, which is why they tend to focus on disarming the public first before they get into the swing of their atrocities.

          • Walter says:

            The US army not being immune to insurgent tactics is only because the bosses are good guys, tho. We try not to kill enemy noncombatants, so it is useful for enemy combatants to transform into civilians from time to time.

            The version of the US army that you face if they are disappearing American citizens by the hundreds isn’t gonna be that one.

          • Tim van Beek says:

            It’s harder to fight an occupying army that way, but the various wars from Vietnam through Iraq have been an effective demonstration that the US military is far from immune to insurgent tactics.

            Fair enough, this is a different scenario.

            Would-be tyrants understand that, which is why they tend to focus on disarming the public first before they get into the swing of their atrocities.

            That wasn’t a factor with the worst 20th century tyrants, though. Here is the difference between an established totalitarian regime and your version of, basically, civil war:

            If every time the police get an order to go disappear someone there’s a 10% chance the guy shoots back at them, disappearing dissidents is now more dangerous than the entire rest of their job put together.

            For the vast majority of the population, it is not about dissidents. It is about criminals. There were no dissidents in the Nazi concentration camps, as far as ordinary people were concerened, only criminals who deserved it. If handling criminials with guns is not a problem for police now, it wouldn’t be one in a totalitarian USA.

            But I understand now that what you are thinking of is generally more of a civil war kind of situation. Thanks!

          • Nornagest says:

            The US army not being immune to insurgent tactics is only because the bosses are good guys, tho.

            This isn’t really true. Counterinsurgency is hampered on the tactical level by overly rigid rules of engagement, but even with bad RoE, insurgent forces are rarely tactically superior to an actual military; the strategy of insurgency’s more about making occupation materially expensive and politically unpleasant for the occupiers than actually physically killing them or driving them out, and you can still do that if they’re willing to kill civilians. In some ways it’s easier.

            The Russians certainly weren’t scared of a few massacres, but they still lost Afghanistan. (That’s also part of the story for us in Vietnam, but that’s a more complicated case.)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nornagest:

            The Russians certainly weren’t scared of a few massacres, but they still lost Afghanistan.

            There’s something strange going on where it’s conventional wisdom to lure your strategic rivals into a counter-insurgency because they drain resources while being unwinnable (the author of The Great Big Book of Horrible Things said every source he consulted on the Soviet-Afghan War described President Carter’s advisers as dancing through the White House when the USSR invaded), yet Americans remember the Vietnam War as being lost in the media/by RoE, as though counter-insurgency would have been easy without domestic leftists.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            @Walter,

            Which is why the Soviet Union was victorious in Afghanistan.

            To be less flippant, I do think that an intelligent, determined and ruthless dictator could eventually defeat an American insurgency. But it wouldn’t be easy and it wouldn’t be fast. It would be a long grinding occupation and that leaves a lot of time for the situation to turn around.

            @Tim van Beek,

            The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is very commonly cited by pro-gun Americans as an example of resistance to tyranny.

            The Jewish residents of the Warsaw Ghetto didn’t survive, and they certainly didn’t convince the Nazi party to abandon the Holocaust. But they were going to die at the hands of the SS either way: this way, they made them bleed too.

            Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because something isn’t a silver bullet doesn’t mean that it can’t change things on the margin.

          • Tim van Beek says:

            @Nabil ad Dajjal:

            Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because something isn’t a silver bullet doesn’t mean that it can’t change things on the margin.

            Okay, got it 😉
            I would like to recommend the novel by Hans Fallada: “Alone in Berlin”, to illustrate the futility of having a gun (the protagonists don’t have those, but just read the novel as if they had and see if it matters) in an established totalitarian regime.

            Taken together, it seems that this leads us to a version of the first lesson in Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny”: Resistance is necessary early and becomes almost impossible later.

          • Nornagest says:

            There’s something strange going on where it’s conventional wisdom to lure your strategic rivals into a counter-insurgency because they drain resources while being unwinnable

            They’re winnable; they’re just hard to win if your military is culturally and operationally tuned for large-scale high-intensity warfare against a peer adversary, as USM is and the Soviet military was. The Brits, who have a lot of cultural experience fighting colonial brushfire wars, tend to do better.

            (Although it’s not a guarantee. The French have almost as much colonial experience as the Brits, and they got their asses kicked in Indochina and then again in Algeria. They’ve done well in Africa recently, though.)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nornagest:

            They’re winnable; they’re just hard to win if your military is culturally and physically tuned for large-scale high-intensity warfare against a peer adversary, as USM is and the Soviet military was. The Brits, who have a lot of cultural experience fighting colonial brushfire wars, tend to do better.

            Ah, yeah, that’s right. The US and USSR almost never had colonies, and so never designed their armies to fight primitive opposition.

          • Nornagest says:

            It’s not just that we’ve rarely had much in the way of colonial possessions; it’s also that every time we’ve gotten ourselves into an insurgency (Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) we’ve treated it as an exception and failed — with some good reasons to, arguably, but still failed — to institutionalize any of the lessons we learned from it, meaning we had no choice but to relearn them the next time.

            A country that has a lot of colonial possessions and wants to keep them has strong incentives not to do that, and some of the culture behind that often persists even after the colonial possessions go away. But we could imagine other reasons why a country might want to, too — the real issue is that in terms of military organization, we prioritized readiness for WWIII at the expense of being an effective “world police”. I suppose there might have been a way to do both, but not the way we did it, and apparently not the way the Soviets did it either.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            There’s something strange going on where it’s conventional wisdom to lure your strategic rivals into a counter-insurgency because they drain resources while being unwinnable (the author of The Great Big Book of Horrible Things said every source he consulted on the Soviet-Afghan War described President Carter’s advisers as dancing through the White House when the USSR invaded), yet Americans remember the Vietnam War as being lost in the media/by RoE, as though counter-insurgency would have been easy without domestic leftists.

            I don’t really buy the narrative that Afghanistan was that much of a bog or that the Mujahdeen were that succesful. By the late 1980s, Gorbachev was pulling the Soviets and Soviet allies out of everywhere, including places where they were nominally winning, like Angola and Cambodia. He even pulled troops out of Mongolia, where they weren’t even being resisted, because he wanted better relations with China. This is more an attempt to cool down the Cold War even further, because the USSR was well on its way to being screwed by 1987. Just look at what the US did to Iraq in 1991 and extrapolate to 2000, assuming the US never took a peace dividend. That’s a nightmare.

            Peak Soviet commitment in Afghanistan was 100,000, compared to the 500,000+ the US had in Vietnam and the 500,000+ the French had in Algeria.

          • testing123 says:

            @a definite beta guy

            Peak Soviet commitment in Afghanistan was 100,000, compared to the 500,000+ the US had in Vietnam and the 500,000+ the French had in Algeria.

            I can’t speak to how deliberate it was, but war is expensive in general, war in afghanistan is especially so. Around 2010 it was costing the US 50-100% more to keep a soldier in Afghanistan vs. Iraq, and the soviets had a lot less money to spend.

          • Tenacious D says:

            Ah, yeah, that’s right. The US and USSR almost never had colonies, and so never designed their armies to fight primitive opposition.

            But the US had westward expansion in which US cavalry frequently fought against low-tech insurgencies. In Canada, pacifying the west was more of a policing action than a military one, and I’d consider that the institutional culture of the RCMP is still shaped by that role.

          • Nornagest says:

            the US had westward expansion in which US cavalry frequently fought against low-tech insurgencies.

            And Russia had expansions east and south that worked the same way; modern Russia would be about the size of Poland if they hadn’t subjugated a bunch of Tartar and Siberian tribes in the early modern period. In both cases, though, those roles had pretty much fallen out of their respective militaries’ cultural memory; in Russia because they built an army pretty much from scratch after the revolution, and in the US because there were several decades of thrashing around between the Civil War-era military (which was essentially a half-assed ad-hoc extension of the old militia model, and totally unsuitable in the new federalized government) and the modern one, and the institution changed enormously in the process.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            What Nornagest said. The USA took land from Native Americans and used the Cavalry to suppress armed resistance, but uh, didn’t that end with the Ghost Dance War in 1890 and Jan. 1891? There’s 50 years between that and the mechanized Army and Marine Corps we loaded on ships to fight WW2. That’s the way our Armed Forces have fantasized about fighting ever since, just with more air transport involved: find a hostile country stupid enough to line up tanks and motorized infantry against us and bury them by shipping so much tonnage to their shores and air-dropped behind their lines that they lose with very few casualties are our side.

          • Tenacious D says:

            there were several decades of thrashing around between the Civil War-era military (which was essentially a half-assed ad-hoc extension of the old militia model, and totally unsuitable in the new federalized government) and the modern one, and the institution changed enormously in the process.

            There’s 50 years between that and the mechanized Army and Marine Corps we loaded on ships to fight WW2. That’s the way our Armed Forces have fantasized about fighting ever since, just with more air transport involved

            Makes sense, thanks.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            I can’t speak to how deliberate it was, but war is expensive in general, war in afghanistan is especially so. Around 2010 it was costing the US 50-100% more to keep a soldier in Afghanistan vs. Iraq, and the soviets had a lot less money to spend.

            Why do we assume that? The Soviet Union was spending at least $123 billion in the late 1980s, probably closer to twice that. Adjusted for 30 years of 3% inflation, that’s $300 billion in today money, or about half the US military budget. If we take the high end estimate, the USSR was spending as much in the late 80s as the US was today, and they are conducting operations with low-paid conscripts and cheaper equipment, not F-22s, Land Warrior, M1 tanks, etc.

            Plus, the Soviet Union bordered Afghanistan. The supply lines to Afghanistan were probably shorter than their supply lines to half their Chinese units.

            I think their biggest cost would be those absurd helicopter losses.

          • Eric Rall says:

            Why do we assume that? The Soviet Union was spending at least $123 billion in the late 1980s, probably closer to twice that. Adjusted for 30 years of 3% inflation, that’s $300 billion in today money, or about half the US military budget. If we take the high end estimate, the USSR was spending as much in the late 80s as the US was today, and they are conducting operations with low-paid conscripts and cheaper equipment, not F-22s, Land Warrior, M1 tanks, etc.

            I think the point was that the Soviets couldn’t really afford to continue their 1980s military budget. The current US military budget is a bit over 3% of GDP, while the Soviet military budget peaked at something like 15% of GDP at its peak in the mid-to-late 1980s (hard to say for sure, since estimates are all over the map, both for military spending and GDP), not counting the taxation-in-kind effect of conscription.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            The Soviets had already maintained that spending for decades, what changed in the 1980s that made it unsustainable?
            That’s why I think it is a bit short-sighted to simply say the USSR lost Afghanistan because it was an objectively unsustainble or unwinnable war. The withdrawal was part of a broad Soviet foreign policy to lessen pressure on them, because they were losing the Cold War in a very obvious(to them) fashion. That’s also why I am pointing out that they were also withdrawing from places like Mongolia, where they encountered practically no resistance, and eventually Poland, where Solidarity definitely did not have Stinger missiles.

            I am reading a NY Times article that suggests US spending in Vietnam at our peak was something like $25 billion per year(in 1967-1970 dollars). The Soviet presence was substantially smaller and right next to their border.

          • bean says:

            The Soviets had already maintained that spending for decades, what changed in the 1980s that made it unsustainable?

            It wasn’t Afghanistan, it was a change in the nature of weaponry. Soviet industry was set up to build a big, dumb force like the one that fought WWII. The US was pioneering a new form of warfare, with lots of computers, which the Soviets didn’t have the industry to build. They had to set that up, which cost a bunch of extra money. Glanost was essentially Gorbachev’s attempt to search dark corners for extra money, but he found a bunch of dry rot instead.

            (Also, treat all Soviet spending figures with extreme skepticism. Accounting was not their strong suit. At one point, western observers at an airshow were told that the MiG-29 and Su-27 cost the same, even though the Su-27 was a significantly larger and more capable aircraft. And to the Soviets, they did.)

          • Lillian says:

            The French have almost as much colonial experience as the Brits, and they got their asses kicked in Indochina and then again in Algeria. They’ve done well in Africa recently, though.

            The French actually won military in Algeria, as by the end of 1959 the FLN had been pretty much suppressed throughout the country. The defeat in Algeria was entirely political. They didn’t get their asses kicked, they won the war but lost the peace.

            It’s not just that we’ve rarely had much in the way of colonial possessions; it’s also that every time we’ve gotten ourselves into an insurgency (Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) we’ve treated it as an exception and failed — with some good reasons to, arguably, but still failed — to institutionalize any of the lessons we learned from it, meaning we had no choice but to relearn them the next time.

            Nitpick, America won the Philippine-American War pretty decisively. It is, however, probably relevant that the Army leadership still had many veterans of the Civil War and the Indian Wars in its ranks. They provided considerable expertise in dealing with both the Philippine Republican Army and the Moro Rebellion.

          • Nornagest says:

            The defeat in Algeria was entirely political […] they won the war but lost the peace.

            That’s a pretty good description of Vietnam, too. War is politics by other means; if the war failed to achieve your political goals, then you lost the war. Even if you won every battle. Fully appreciating this is, like, 90% of the point of all the counterinsurgency writing I’ve read.

            I agree that the Philippine-American War was pretty successful, especially by American standards, but what I was trying to get at is that the lessons of that campaign weren’t successfully integrated into the Army’s cultural DNA: fifty years later we were back to throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck. And then thirty years after that we did it again.

          • Lillian says:

            That’s a pretty good description of Vietnam, too. War is politics by other means; if the war failed to achieve your political goals, then you lost the war. Even if you won every battle. Fully appreciating this is, like, 90% of the point of all the counterinsurgency writing I’ve read.

            Being decisively defeated at Dien Bien Phu is not what i would call winning the war but losing the peace. It’s more like just straight up losing the war. Or as you put it “got their asses kicked”. The point i was making is that the character of the defeat in Indochina and Algeria are different, and it’s not appropriate to lump them together.

          • Aapje says:

            @Nornagest

            Winning battles is never (or rather should never be) an end, but only one way to achieve objectives.

            This is why Von Clausewitz said: “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”

            In Vietnam, the N-Vietnamese were willing to accept enormous costs to unify their country under communist rule. Inflicting high costs on them, that they were willing to accept, was thus not going to achieve the American objective.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            @ Lillian:

            Being decisively defeated at Dien Bien Phu is not what i would call winning the war but losing the peace. It’s more like just straight up losing the war. Or as you put it “got their asses kicked”. The point i was making is that the character of the defeat in Indochina and Algeria are different, and it’s not appropriate to lump them together.

            I’m pretty sure he was referring to the US involvement in Vietnam, rather than the French.

        • John Schilling says:

          This is like saying the American Revolution was an unrealistic fantasy because the British could just send ten Redcoats to the homes of every revolutionary sympathizer, one at a time. As Edward notes, you can only get away with that trick so many times.

          One man with a gun and nothing to lose, vs. two cops who expect him to come quietly (or need to behave as if they do for PR purposes), does not end well for the cops. And if the theory is that doing this at work is a win for the cops because “Oh noes! I can’t carry a gun at work because that’s against the rules and I might lose my job“, then that goes away as soon as people think it is plausible the regime might disappear them from their desk – again, that doesn’t work for long.

          At which point the dead cops start piling up, the live cops start insisting on a “SWAT team, shoot first and ask questions later” approach, and nobody imagines that going along quietly is an option any more because it really isn’t. The civil war has started. You really don’t want to let it get to that point.

          And there won’t be anyone near you who will help you, because they will all believe that you deserve it: Your coworkers, your neighbors, your own family even.

          If that’s true for you, then you’ve already lost. You’ve lost in the most thorough way possible, by losing the ability to even imagine victory.

          Meanwhile, the world always has been and probably always will be ruled by people with coworkers, neighbors, and/or family who will back them in a fight against their mortal enemies. One or more such groups will prevail, and decide what role you will have in their society.

        • Mr. Doolittle says:

          There are 300+ million guns in private hands in the US. If we’re talking a handful of people at a time, that’s doable and plausibly a normal police action. Those still don’t always end well for the cops. If we’re talking abusing a significant portion of the population (even 5-10%, ~15-30 million people) then it’s a huge and very visible approach. If you don’t think that will be problematic because of the scale alone, read up on the Branch Davidians in Waco Texas, or even Ruby Ridge. There’s a reason that the occupiers of the wildlife refuge in Oregon were treated with kid’s gloves, and it’s the track record of federal enforcement blowing up.

          • My view is that the relation between gun ownership and preventing tyranny is more indirect than usually argued. If the ordinary population is disarmed and criminals are not, individuals are dependent on the police for protection, which makes them more willing to put up with police misdeeds. If most people can defend themselves, then the police are considerably less essential, so people should be more willing to accept restrictions on their power.

            If that argument is correct, firearm ownership reduces the willingness of the population to accept the early stages of a power seizure.

          • theredsheep says:

            That makes a lot more sense than the usual argument, where the gun owners are all going to somehow be anti-gummint.

          • John Schilling says:

            That makes a lot more sense than the usual argument, where the gun owners are all going to somehow be anti-gummint.

            1. Do not deliberately misspell words and attribute them to your opponents. Ever.

            2. The usual argument is that the anti-government citizens are all
            going to be gun owners, not vice versa. Gun ownership among pro-government citizens is usually ignored altogether. But sometimes it is noticed – like, for example, the beginning of this subthread. Conrad Honcho is IIRC not terribly fond of the political left, but noticing that leftists were beginning to properly arm themselves met with his unreserved approval. And he’s not alone in that sentiment.

            3. The primary objective is to not lose a civil war. This is best achieved by not having a civil war, which is greatly facilitated by the fact that almost nobody wants a civil war of the sort that has, you know, the “war” part. Those who are armed may fantasize about crushing a hated but nigh-defenseless foe in a one-sided conflict with just enough violence to feel like they’ve earned a victory. If disarmed, they fantasize about having nigh-omnipotent guardians to do this for them – and as Dr. Friedman notes, ask no questions about what else those guardians are up to. To avoid either of those unpleasant fantasies becoming reality, make sure nobody is disarmed or defenseless.

            The great object is that every man be armed. And trained and organized.

          • theredsheep says:

            It’s also very handy to have a large body of trained, armed citizens around if you’re forming paramilitary groups. Large swaths of the Middle East and Africa are drowning in guns, and those places aren’t known for their strong traditions of individual rights. Armed, trained, and organized citizens are awfully hard to distinguish from paramilitary groups in the first place, especially if they cause any collateral damage whatever (they don’t control media outlets). Getting them trained and organized is at any rate far more difficult than getting them armed.

            Finally, I don’t believe people, en masse, react to the threat of a societal meltdown by proceeding more cautiously. Our natural reaction to a display of force is a stronger display of force, to show we can’t be intimidated. That’s how wars happen.

            Apologies about “gummint.” I was mostly being whimsical, TBH.

          • theredsheep says:

            The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the presence of armed, trained militias would increase the frequencies of civil wars. As I see it, the problems are twofold:

            1. When you’ve got a group of people who are armed and trained to fight together, especially with a vigilant-minuteman mentality, you’ve got the classic problem of people with a hammer looking for nails. It doesn’t matter if 95% or so of them are sane, responsible people; as armed groups proliferate, the odds of any one small group containing a critical mass of jackasses increases, and over time there are going to be rising odds that one of them will do something quite terribly stupid.

            2. In America as it is now, I think there’d be effectively no chance that militias would not come to identify themselves with political parties. Even if they didn’t deliberately set out to do so, they would naturally tend to sort out by political affiliation, the same way everyone else does in America today, and once that’s happened it would only be a short step to militia looking out for partisan interests.

            Putting 1 and 2 together, I suspect you’d have things like leftist militias turning out on election day to discourage unconstitutional voter suppression by their presence, and right-wing militias showing up at protests to keep the peace in case antifa tries to start trouble. The presence of either would naturally trigger the presence of its opposite, and every intemperate or ambiguous tweet would raise the temperature.

            An incident would only need to involve a couple of people; since these guys are trained to fight together, they would presumably have considerable in-group loyalty, and rush to each others’ defense. Even if the actual military or police defused the situation, it would heighten tension, because each side would remember it in a skewed way and take “precautionary measures.” I can see it going two ways, possibly simultaneously: increased expectations of the military/police as the only thing that can protect citizens from other citizens, and the proliferation of militias and increase in their membership as partisans seek to defend their interests. Add it up, and it doesn’t look good.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Probably also worth noting how exceptional the US is in this regard. Almost half the world’s civilian guns are owned by Americans. I can’t find the statistic right now, but this is also vastly more guns than all the police forces and armies in the world, combined.

            The US would be a very unique example of asymmetric warfare in which the rebels outgun the regime.

          • theredsheep says:

            Depends how it broke down; if it works out that a lot of those guns are collections of eight weapons owned by one single guy, that’s a lot less threatening than eight guys with a rifle apiece. Or so I think. Anyway, given how violence would likely play out, I don’t think it much matters. There’s no reason to suppose that all of those guys with guns would necessarily be against the government.

          • bean says:

            The US would be a very unique example of asymmetric warfare in which the rebels outgun the regime.

            No, for several reasons. First, a lot of those guns aren’t that useful militarily. Shotguns and pistols are of dubious use in warfare, and black powder is right out. Second, even in mass quantity, small arms are still small arms. Sure, it’s going to be a lot easier to get the firepower to ambush a police patrol in the US than in Europe, but once the bad guy starts bringing machine guns and artillery to the fight, the insurgents are still going to be outgunned. And there’s a lot less serious military hardware (automatic weapons, RPGs, etc) floating around the US than the Middle East.

            (This isn’t to say those weapons would be a non-factor in a hypothetical US insurgency. They’d be incredibly important. But we can’t just count raw numbers. And yes, a lot of those are owned by people who have more guns than they can use themselves.)

          • sfoil says:

            @bean

            Civilians don’t outgun the “American regime forces”, but they’re probably the only developed country where they’re at least on even terms with law enforcement arms-wise. The US shouldn’t have any problem putting down some sort of localized revolt or insurgency, because once the local PD gets driven out then a bunch of guys with AR-15s and hunting rifles are very vulnerable.

            On the other hand, it means that even a relatively pissant militia can kick the PD out. If they have a good enough reason, perhaps the guys in tanks won’t be so keen on killing them. I do think that American militia and CIVIL WAR talk is mostly posturing and even those who are “serious” about it grossly underestimate the level of organization required to successfully wage even a limited irregular campaign.

            In the case of some sort of general revolt or all-out war, the security infrastructure is fractally vulnerable in a way that’s pretty conducive to small groups of riflemen doing real damage. We have a great idea of what military installations optimized for modern low-intensity warfare look like, and they don’t look like the bases on American soil.

          • RobJ says:

            My view is that the relation between gun ownership and preventing tyranny is more indirect than usually argued. If the ordinary population is disarmed and criminals are not, individuals are dependent on the police for protection, which makes them more willing to put up with police misdeeds. If most people can defend themselves, then the police are considerably less essential, so people should be more willing to accept restrictions on their power.

            Wouldn’t this theory predict that the right would be more quick to protest police abuses? Whereas in reality it seems like the left has been more critical of police abuse and the right tends to defend police. Perhaps this is just a product of the recent racialization of the debate, but it doesn’t seem like a new phenomenon to me. Or maybe nothing the police have done appears enough like “the early stages of power seizure” enough to provoke a differing response among gun owners.

          • John Schilling says:

            Wouldn’t this theory predict that the right would be more quick to protest police abuses? Whereas in reality it seems like the left has been more critical of police abuse and the right tends to defend police.

            The right has traditionally been skeptical of police power at the federal level, and after some high-profile incidents in the 1990s, did convince the major federal law enforcement agencies to adopt a more professional and less violent approach. Compare Waco and Ruby Ridge to the Bundy Ranch and Oregon standoffs.

            The current concerns are mostly associated with local law enforcement abuse of power. Big-city police abuse of force against traditionally liberal constituencies like poor urban blacks, yeah, the right doesn’t seem to care much about that. In places where the right is locally powerful, local police are generally aligned with their concerns and not conspicuously abusing their authority against traditionally conservative constituencies. As usual, political principle works best when it’s aligned with, rather than opposed to, tribal interest.

          • RobJ says:

            The right has traditionally been skeptical of police power at the federal level, and after some high-profile incidents in the 1990s, did convince the major federal law enforcement agencies to adopt a more professional and less violent approach. Compare Waco and Ruby Ridge to the Bundy Ranch and Oregon standoffs.

            Was the response to those incidents particularly partisan? My impression was that things got changed in response to those incidents precisely because the condemnation came from all corners, but I was pretty young at the time, so don’t have a great memory of it.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            The original response was fairly non-partisan in my memory, but the right seems to remember the reasons much more clearly. Consider the left’s response to the Oregon standoff calling for, among other things, a direct assault on the building. I’ve also seen a lot of complaints that the Bundy Ranch situation was handled too calmly.

          • RobJ says:

            I would guess that if a group of armed black lives matter protesters were holed up in a house it would be the right wing calling for more aggressive tactics and the left wing remembering the lessons of Ruby Ridge and Waco, but maybe I’m wrong.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I would guess that if a group of armed black lives matter protesters were holed up in a house it would be the right wing calling for more aggressive tactics

            I think the right — at least the “Second Amendment People” — would be more likely to just make cracks about Wilson Goode .

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            Rob, that probably depends on the individuals involved. The segment of the right that’s into arming the populace (tangentially on Reason.com for a more mainstream source) is very much in favor of also arming and defending BLM. The red tribe culture warriors are about as hypocritical as the blue tribe culture warriors, and would find a way to draw a distinction.

            I don’t have a good impression of the left’s version of arming BLM, if it exists or not.

          • John Schilling says:

            Was the response to those incidents particularly partisan?

            The original response was quite partisan, and there were huge sections of the mainstream left that never recanted that. But there were too many sympathetic victims for moderates to remain neutral, and too many eclectic pockets of leftism that joined that chorus, for it to remain a simple left-right issue. And right plus center plus odd bits of left was definitely a winning coalition.

          • wk says:

            Well, Ammon Bundy recently came out rather strongly against Trump. That makes me think of an interesting test case. Lets say he and his buddies take up guns to defend some illegal aliens against ICE. Who’s going to support them publically? And do they get away with it?

          • JonathanD says:

            @Mr. Doolittle

            I don’t have a good impression of the left’s version of arming BLM, if it exists or not.

            So far as I know, it does not.

            Somewhat related: I’m from St. Louis, and during the Ferguson stuff there was a group of gun advocates who were posting themselves around the troubled areas as extra property defenders. After things began to calm down, they tried to get BLM people to parade with them open carrying rifles somewhere. The head of the group did an interview on local news where he talked about it. He said that he’d talked to local leaders and they (the BLM leaders) weren’t willing to do so because they were convinced they would be shot. I remember the gun leader as being fairly sympathetic to BLM and somewhat outraged by their description what the police did to the local black community. I came away from the interview with a better opinion of gun people.

            Unfortunately, my google-fu is failing me, and I can’t find any links.

        • RalMirrorAd says:

          I don’t believe there’s any guaranty against this sort of thing. What you can always do is raise the costs associated with bad behavior.

      • testing123 says:

        One must distinguish between the power of the presidency and the power of the executive branch. We have far too little of the former and far too much of the latter.

    • John Schilling says:

      Disclaimer: yes, I would feel equally uncomfortable about this state of the law if all variations of “Trump” were replaced with “Obama” or “Clinton.”

      You would feel equally uncomfortable?

      Why the hypothetical? That was the state of the law during the whole of the Obama presidency, and the whole of the period when Hillary Clinton was the heir presumptive? So, spill: Did you in fact feel equally uncomfortable with the law at that time?

      I’m guessing the answer is no, because you didn’t know about it, because so long as it’s an Obama or a Clinton in power the people at The Atlantic never ever write stories about how maybe POTUS shouldn’t be quite so scary powerful. People on the Libertarian side, and a few of the more principled Republicans, have been saying it all along, but are rarely invited to write for The Atlantic. There were a fair number Democrats saying it in the Nixon and Reagan eras, but I think they’ve mostly moved to “…and so we need to make sure these powers are exercised by Democratic presidents for ever and ever, demographic inevitability, ASAP”.

      No matter. Either Trump will manage to get himself declared President-for-Life, possibly by leveraging emergency powers, or he won’t. If he does, your fear of POTUS wielding such power is validated but impotent. If he doesn’t, then it turns out those powers weren’t so dangerous when wielded by someone like Trump, but we’ll almost certainly be dealing with a competent Democratic President with a mandate to set right what Trump set “wrong”.

      There may be a slim window of opportunity then, with the memory of Trump fresh in mind, to convince the nation’s new rulers to hand back some of their power lest it be used against them under future administrations. The Atlantic will probably not remind you of this. Will you remember on your own?

    • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

      I’m not really interested in complaints of “why wasn’t this article published then?”

      That’s the only thing that’s really interesting.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      I found some of it uncomfortable. For instance, the claim, “Thirty states of emergency are in effect today.”

      The undercurrent of “because Trump” was off-putting. But, you know, only Nixon could go to China. If it takes Trump to make people rein some of this stuff in, well, so be it.

    • EchoChaos says:

      I was peripherally involved in the militia/right-wing scene in the 90s, and I can tell you that exact article was written a dozens of times each about Clinton/Bush/Obama. The only difference is that when right-wingers indulged in persecution fantasies every bit as absurd as those they weren’t printed in the Atlantic.

      Feel free to Google about how Obama was going to declare martial law, etc.

      The Presidency may have too much power (probably) and we certainly have too many states of emergency, but this is paranoid fantasizing and it is as unlikely to come true. It’s embarrassing that the mainstream is printing it.

      • testing123 says:

        Are you telling me lizard people from FEMA weren’t going to fly into the country on UN black helicopters and declare the North American Union so that they could take our guns and fluoridate our water?

        • Nornagest says:

          No, the lizard people are from UNESCO.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Did you know the water fluoridation battle still goes on, in New Jersey? That’s right, not content with contaminating our precious bodily fluids with arsenic and lead and hexavalent chromium, some of them want to put fluoride in it too. So far, they haven’t gained much ground.

          The joke is on both combatants; the parts of NJ where the water is not fluoridated mostly have high natural levels of fluoride.

          • Nick says:

            The joke is on both combatants; the parts of NJ where the water is not fluoridated mostly have high natural levels of fluoride.

            You mean they’ve contaminated the ground water??!?!

            😀

        • albatross11 says:

          That was the original plan. The new plan is that they’ll take our water and fluoridate our guns. Once our guns are all gay and we’re thirsty, we’ll be easy prey….

    • jgr314 says:

      So, I’ll attempt to summarize the replies:
      (1) most people seem to agree that POTUS (or exec branch?) SoE powers are excessive and a problem in the wrong hands.
      (2) some think we can trust that anyone elected POTUS will be fine, not a potential dictator because (i) historical experience of the US, (ii) American Democracy.
      (3) Many conservative commenters criticize the Democrats for (i) allowing this problem to grow while Obama was president and (ii) flagging the issue now. Did anyone mention Clinton, I don’t recall?
      (4) Many commenters attacked me.
      (5) we also got a nice side conversation about insurgencies

      My reaction:
      (1) that’s where I started, but no one really added information, so I’m still not sure if any specific things in the article are true.
      (2) I didn’t find this convincing. US voters elect terrible people all the time, we just haven’t had this particular brand of terrible with this set of tools.
      (3) Yep, the Democrats are bad, too, for presidential overreach. “Obama imperial presidency” turns up a lot of hits, too.
      (4) FWIW, your inferences about my views, politics, and historical views were pretty inaccurate. I guess I should have done the “Obama imperial presidency” first and included those links? I think my error was dropping the link without providing more explicit commentary on what concerned me, though the disclaimer text and a subsequent additional comment didn’t seem to make a difference.
      (5) nothing to add

      • quanta413 says:

        (2) I didn’t find this convincing. US voters elect terrible people all the time, we just haven’t had this particular brand of terrible with this set of tools.

        The only new tool I see is twitter. This is one of the least dangerous tools imaginable. Why should this new tool increase my worry compared to baseline? Trump is the most opposed President in decades. If there was ever someone who was going to have trouble taking the steps towards dictatorship, it’s this guy.

        Lincoln had to subjugate half the country and suspended habeas corpus, and the status quo partly bounced back (minus the obvious worst part of the status quo and minus some other things too but recognizably not the end of the U.S. as a republic). Although the states probably were weaker compared the Federal government afterwards.

        How many successful dictators have had no pull with the bureaucracy or party apparatus of their state? What power base exists that Trump could use to seize power? The military isn’t going to fall in line. Mattis just resigned, and I doubt any of the other brass would be enthusiastic. And that’s probably where Trump is most popular in the government. The CIA and FBI hate him. All the other civilian agencies do too.

    • Erusian says:

      I’m going to give you the credit of the doubt and presume you just never came into contact with the (very widespread) concerns under the previous, Democratic President. However, I’d ask you keep in mind this means you are living in a rather biased informational bubble.

      Anyway, at least de jure, no state of emergency can override the Constitution. The Constitution is explicitly a document that is supposed to continue to apply in wartime and times of invasion, let alone other emergencies. Powers given in a states of emergency can be, and have been, struck down by the courts, either because the powers themselves are unconstitutional or because the court deems the emergency to be insufficient. This also means no state of emergency can ever interrupt the operations of Congress. Likewise, no state of emergency can intrude on the principles of state sovereignty.

      Let’s say Trump declares a state of emergency. He arrests Clinton, freezes all her assets, etc. He can’t do anything to stop the Supreme Court from being in operation nor her from pleading her case before the courts. Let’s say California orders its law enforcement not cooperate with federal agencies so Trump nationalizes the California guard and sends in soldiers to do immigration sweeps. He still can’t compel cooperation of purely state apparatus. California could even form a state guard that the president has no hold over. If Trump tries to force the government to cooperate with the soldiers, that could be the start of a civil war. Though how well urban, coastal, gunless California would fare is another question.

      And perhaps most importantly, there is nothing in any emergency power or precedent that would allow a basically free and fair election to be delayed or modified. If Trump declares an emergency and that no elections will be held until its over, then he is declaring the current threat is bigger than WW2, the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War. He’s also pulling the authority to override the Constitution and Congress straight out of nowhere. In theory, this should lead to every officer of the United States then acting to remove him. Plus the citizenry.

      • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

        It is also important to know that the US Federal government does not run it’s own elections.

        This is not by accident.

        • John Schilling says:

          Yeah, Trump declaring himself President-for-Life is a fairly remote failure mode for the current set of emergency powers. So is Trump ordering the FBI or the Army or whomever to kill his enemies, which they would almost certainly refuse to do.

          Most everything else he might do can be fixed in 2021, if people care. Whether or not they do care, once it’s no longer the uniquely horrible Donald J. Trump wielding those powers, is the important question. The plausible danger is that he could normalize a much broader level of emergency-power abuse than has previously been tolerated, and mitigating that danger requires a distrust of emergency powers that persists even when it is your own team exercising those powers.

      • Garrett says:

        The President “nullifying” elections just means he’s engaging in a high-class sit-in of the White House. It’s like Occupy Wall Street, but by former Presidents. Notwithstanding a number of people confused by the situation, he’d have no authority and no power. The military isn’t going to start taking orders more interesting than “make me coffee” (see: confusion) from the previous President if that were to happen.

        The newly-elected President with actual power would likely set up office somewhere else for the time being. Hell – commandeer the Trump Hotel in DC for maximum comedic effect.

        • John Schilling says:

          That’s almost certainly true if elections are actually held. If the sitting president can prevent the scheduled election for his successor from being held at all, then there is no clear answer as to who the military or the civil service should be taking orders from. If the sitting president could find a way to pull this off without it being a blatantly obvious coup-in-place, they might take orders from him in the short term.

          As name hidden notes, it helps in this case that it isn’t the federal government that runs presidential elections. It also helps that the sitting president is by temperament blatantly obvious in everything he does.

          • Drew says:

            People under-value the electoral college. The actual US election only has 538 votes, and all of them are cast in public.

            This is a really, really good thing in that it removes the ambiguity that comes with people screwing with popular votes.

            A general can’t plausibly investigate allegations of ballot stuffing. But they could verify an electoral vote count in an afternoon.

        • CatCube says:

          I can’t say for sure what the modal response among military members would be, but I actually thought this through since I was an officer for the changeover from Bush to Obama, and Obama’s second election. There were fever-dream articles written about the possibility of Bush refusing to leave the Oval Office, and Obama losing the 2012 election and doing the same. (There were some of the same when Clinton left office, though I never read an article, just had a more “fever-swamp” friend tell me about how Bill Clinton was considering this.)

          I never took them seriously, but it was an opportunity for me to consider what should be done by members of the Army in that situation, and I came to the conclusion that I would simply not come in to the office, and that I’d sit at home in my jim-jams and bunny slippers until the civilians worked all of this out. Trivially, we should simply follow the orders of the election winner, but you have to allow for the possibility of there being confusion over who the winner is, and I think as a terminal value you should never have somebody who became president “because he had the support of the Army,” even if I thought he deserved it. That’s banana republic shit.

          Going AWOL until it got sorted out seemed to me to be the best way to avoid that failure mode, though I never discussed this with another Soldier, so I don’t know what anybody else thought.

    • itsabeast says:

      Why would you be equally uncomfortable with any president having access to these powers, when the current one has recently threatened to declare a national emergency if he doesn’t get his way politically?

  33. theredsheep says:

    So, I had a dream last night where I met Scott IRL. “He” turned out to be a pretty red-headed lady in her early forties, who wore a tasteful peach-colored wool suit (not a pantsuit, the kind with a skirt) and spoke with a soft southern accent. I’m pretty sure absolutely no part of that is accurate, and I’m struggling to come up with where it came from; my guess is that the lady looked sort of like Julianne Moore, who played Clarice Starling in one movie, and that was connected to psychiatry.

    Anybody here work in dream research? Does the current state of (squints at Wiki) oneirology have a solid guess as to why we reassemble our experiences into bizarre narratives every night? Or, failing that, do you have a better theory as to why our host should look like Julianne Moore?

  34. albatross11 says:

    For those who like podcasts, Tyler Cowen has a very interesting one, called _Conversations with Tyler_. Think of all those interviews with authors you’ve seen, where it’s obvious the talking-head doing the interview hasn’t read anything by the author, and probably hasn’t voluntarily read a book since college. This is like that, except the interviewer has read everything the interviewee has written and a lot more besides.

    A recent episode was an interview with Daniel Kahneman. The transcript is here, and you can also listen there or download it on the Apple podcast app. (Or others, I assume, but that’s what I use.) Very strongly recommended.

    • thomasflight says:

      Also a fan of this podcast. Having a interviewer like Tyler who knows how to ask really intelligent and interesting questions, makes you realize how mediocre a lot of interviewers are.

  35. RubusArcticus says:

    I’m experiencing a low-back pain for some time now. My physician said I can register for physiotherapy (it’s a possible thing, where I live), but that really, I should just start doing a physical exercise on a regular basis.

    So now I wonder what kind of physical exercise should it be. Dr. Google recommends Pilates, but I always had this stigma against this kind of activity, saying to myself something general like: “Such low-intensity exercise is probably a waste of time”.

    There’s an endless number of resources and researches about Pilates, but I don’t have the professional knowledge to conclude if it’s the right choice, scientifically-based speaking.

    I consider SSC to be a community guided by science, at least when it comes to health, so I came here to ask you to give me some links you count on. Do you have any?

    • Jaskologist says:

      A lot depends on the cause of your back pain. If it’s simple bad posture or sitting too much, then Pilates will help (it worked for me). Really, anything that gets you doing some basic stretches daily will help.

      • Lasagna says:

        This. I wouldn’t be too concerned with this brand of exercise vs. that. What worked for me was the obvious combination: (1) stop doing what caused me back pain (in my case, carrying too much in a backpack for my three-mile commute by foot and being more careful when lifting up my kids), and (2) stretching and strengthening my back.

        I wouldn’t worry too much about it being a waste of time – if your back needs fixing, it’s probably pretty weak, and the low-intensity stuff may be just the ticket.

    • Walter says:

      Instead of a link, it is everyone’s favorite friend personal anecdote!

      If you are overweight, you should try and lose weight. My landlord had a bad back and losing a lot of weight helped him more than everything his doctor’s told him to do.

    • Argos says:

      Current scientific knowledge is really not advanced enough to reliably determine what will help your back pain. Unless you are not over weight, your best bet is to go with Scott’s throughput based approach, and to try pilates or/and other interventions for a few weeks, record your symptoms and pick what’s working for you.

    • arbitraryvalue says:

      Is it worth going to a doctor for back pain? Recently my neck/shoulder has been hurting but I figure the doctor will just say “Try exercising at all, ever, rather than sitting all day with your neck bent like a vulture’s.”

      • Ketil says:

        Most likely: no.

        According to my father (who was a doctor all his life), men get back pains in their forties, and it goes away after a couple of years. If you nag your physician enough, you will get an MR of your back taken, but it has absolutely no diagnostic value. You will still just get told to try exercising, etc.. Physiotherapy and various similar treatments may give some temporary relief, just like homeotherapy, acupuncture, or praying to the spaghetti monster.

        Anecdote time: I had back pains for something like 6-8 years, sometimes so severe that I couldn’t walk home from work, sit through a lecture, or get off the bus at the right stop. Tried physio, naprapathy, got the obligatory MR, etc. Got some heavy pain meds, too, at one point. Did orienteering (terrain running, which everybody recommends) all the time, with no noticable benefit. Got a bit better when I started doing body-weight strength training, and got almost entirely well after I added squats with weights. (Obviously: post hoc, ergo propter hoc, etc, but at least that’s my story, FWIW. Perhaps something for next year’s SSC survey?)

        • Watchman says:

          As an orienteer I’m somewhat concerned that this is regarded as good for backs. Whilst it is a pretty complete physical exercise on its day (a route ending up with road running, dodging through trees, charging down (and trudging up) hills and wading streams and swamps is going to work you out, and planning your route between controls is a mental challenge, as is navigating at speed), it does involve falling over, forcing your way through thick brush and pulling yourself over fallen trees or small cliffs, none of which seems ideal for bad backs. The common injuries to ankles and knees are also not going to help backs recover.

          It’s a great sport but I’m dubious it’s the right way to help an active back injury (or any injury really). Certainly if I was helping new orienteer I’d recommend one of the path-based courses rather than one of the full terrain ones to anyone who indicates they had an ongoing injury, as personal safety is paramount.

      • Randy M says:

        My mom got surgery for back pain a couple years ago. It involved injecting some kind of cement into her vertebrae at certain points. I don’t believe it had much help in relieving pain, short or long term.

        Recently she went in to the ER for something unrelated, got an x-ray that freaked the technician out, and ended up staying there all day waiting for a specialist or MRI or something like that. When my wife told me, I said “Didn’t she get something injected into her back? Did she tell them that?” Turns out, yep, that’s what they were seeing and medical records are still either not being shared well or not being checked and interpreted well.

        Anyway, it seems to me that modern medicine is still pretty bad at ending pain that doesn’t have an obvious cause with anything other than a potentially revoked prescription of pain pills.

        I was laid out a couple days with back pain last Thanksgiving, like a crik in my neck but in my lower back. Eventually it went away and I chalked it up to the price I pay for being tall in a world more ergonomically suited for the average sized person.

    • dndnrsn says:

      I had some seemingly inexplicable (hadn’t done anything in the gym to hurt it, hadn’t sat weirdly for several hours, etc) back pain and I saw an ART guy. He told me the following:

      -sitting a whole bunch tightens up your hips. Fix this by foam rolling your quads and that little spot between your hip and your quad (in the joint of the hip) then stretching your quads and psoas.
      -the middle of your back can also be a factor, I think. Try foam rolling the middle of your back, maybe using a double lacrosse ball “peanut” for the area between your shoulder blades.

      If you can find an ART practitioner (the guy I see is a chiropractor by training with an ART certification; in some places chiropractic is still straight up quackery but I’m in a place where it’s settled down to bro science joint and muscle type stuff) that might help.

      If your posture while sitting is an issue, correct that – you don’t want to be slumping. If your shoulders are an issue, use a lacrosse ball to roll out the front and back of your shoulder, then do some pec/front shoulder stretches.

      I was already in the gym regularly – the pain was keeping me out. In the gym, honestly, you might be best just doing weights. Focus on building up your back – lower back with super super light to begin with deadlifts, middle back with rows, upper back/shoulder with rear flyes. Work as light as you can while still feeling a bit of resistance; focus on the feeling the muscles squeeze to begin with.

      This is all, as I noted, bro science, but the level of understanding of this stuff is quite weak. Very often some “new” discovery is something that 50s and 60s bodybuilders would tell you to do.

    • Winja says:

      No idea about Pilates, but Yoga will often help with lower back pain.

    • Matthias says:

      I had some problems when I got my first desk job after uni.

      I switched to a standing desk at work and started weightlifting. (Something along the lines of Starting Strength.) The combination helped.

      When I had to give up one or the other for a while throughout the years, sitting seemed to have the bigger effect.

    • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

      “Such low-intensity exercise is probably a waste of time”.

      That’s what I used to think, and then a girl I was trying to impress who is a Pilates instructor put me through her introductory beginner workout session.

      I normally lift free weights, and kind of enjoy slowly lifting to failure. That Pilates serssion Kicked My Ass.

    • SamChevre says:

      Pilates started out as physical therapy for core strength. I have not done it, but my sister (very body-aware–she’s a massage therapist) says it is extremely helpful for balance and ease of movement.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Kind of disappointed there aren’t more recommendations for strength training. It’s by far the most functional activity you can do, for two main reasons:

      – strength is a skill more than anything else, i.e. it has a very large neural component which makes it very difficult to do “functional training” in general. You get better at exactly what you do, with some but generally little transfer to other activities. Even things like treadmill running vs jogging have significant efficiency losses, and it’s basically the same movement.

      – muscle size is hugely correlated with everything functional. Think over .9 in performance sports. Fat percentage is inversely correlated.

      As for back pain… IANAD, but the obvious exercises for back muscles would be squat, romanian deadlift and back extensions. Adjust your weights so you can do 4-30 repetitions with that weight (less for the first two, more for the back extensions). If anything hurts during the exercise just go for less weight/more repetitions. 10-15 sets per week per exercise, with a set ending when you’re around 2 repetitions from failure. Youtube is your friend for finding how to do them (you definitely want romanian deadlifts, and not plan ones). Sore muscles the day after is normal, it just means you’re doing something the muscle is not used to.

    • LesHapablap says:

      Just go see a physio. They are fantastic at what they do.

      If you’re looking for a workout routine, this one specifically removed all my lower back pain though I did it for mountain bike racing. It’s a combination of strength training, mobility and interval training:
      mtb strength coach, db combos

      I see now though the same guy has a workout specifically for lower back pain (related to cycling) link text might want to try that.

      This guy is very well regarded in the mountain bike industry and trains a lot of pros.

    • Reasoner says:

      I suggest visiting a massage therapist. Get them to give you a deep tissue massage, especially in your butt… surprisingly, the root cause of low back pain is often knots in your butt muscles.

  36. J. Mensch says:

    When I clicked on miguelrochefort’s username below, it took me to his LinkedIn profile. Since LinkedIn gives users a list of who has viewed their profile, this means miguelrochefort knows that my LinkedIn account belongs to someone who visits SSC.

    Is this true of e.g. Facebook / Twitter / etc? If I can convince someone to visit a certain webpage can I reliably obtain a list of their social media accounts?

    • Aapje says:

      That only works because you already have a cookie on your system which automatically logs you into LinkedIn. Anyone who doesn’t have a LinkedIn account or is not logged in, won’t have this issue.

      So basically, the answer to your question is yes, if the social media system has a feature like that. The social media site knows which person you are and which person’s page you visited. It can do things with that information.

      • J. Mensch says:

        Sure, I also have cookies for my Facebook and Twitter, but visiting someones pages on those websites doesn’t give away my account name. What I want to know is if there’s some other way of extracting someone’s social media account name simply by having them click a link.

        • ordogaud says:

          I don’t think you fully understand what aapje was saying. When you navigate to a LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn knows who you are because they know how to decode their own cookies. LinkedIn then has a feature that they themselves implemented to tell any given user what other (logged in) users have visited their profile.

          So the only way what you’re proposing would work is if you knew how to decode the cookie data for every major social media website and resolve that data into a valid username for that site. You don’t, and they will never let you (or at least they shouldn’t). That’s about all there is to that.

          Edit: Furthermore I think browsers these days block websites from reading cookie data from other websites, tho it might be possible to hack around that.

          • J. Mensch says:

            So the only way what you’re proposing would work is if you knew how to decode the cookie data for every major social media website and resolve that data into a valid username for that site. You don’t, and they will never let you (or at least they shouldn’t). That’s about all there is to that.

            I don’t know how to decode LinkedIn cookie data, but I do now know how to determine which people with LinkedIn cookies have clicked my link. I’m asking if this is true of any of the other main social media networks.

          • ordogaud says:

            >but I do now know how to determine which people with LinkedIn cookies have clicked my link

            And how is that? Unless I’ve been misunderstanding this entire thread what’s really happening is that LinkedIn knows how to determine which people with LinkedIn cookies have clicked a link to your profile on LinkedIn, and they just so happen to share that information with you as a feature on their website. I don’t see how you’re doing anything other than being an end-user.

            Edit: I guess if all you’re asking is if any of the other major social media websites have a similar feature as LinkedIn the answer is no as far as I’m aware.

          • J. Mensch says:

            Edit: I guess if all you’re asking is if any of the other major social media websites have a similar feature as LinkedIn the answer is no as far as I’m aware.

            Yes, I’m sorry I didn’t explain it very well. I guess I knew myself that they didn’t have the same exact feature as LinkedIn, but I was curious if there were other ways of doing it.

            (For instance, I believe Facebook gives analytics on who accesses your ads, I wonder if it’s possible to get sufficiently granular info to identify someone this way (e.g. occupation + employer + location would do it for lots of people)).

    • miguelrochefort says:

      I have removed the link.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      I can give you a google doc link, and anyone who opens it, I know your Google username.

    • ilikekittycat says:

      Internet detective/social engineering doxxing is a lot easier than you’d think and definitely in the realm of things bored teenagers can do once they know the cliches. Don’t link accounts. Don’t reuse passwords. Don’t reuse usernames. Don’t use the same email to register accounts across a broad range of sites. Don’t use idiosyncratic speech across different accounts (in the somethingawful.com Helldump days, one poster was doxxed, despite following the other best practices, because he always described things in terms of “chthonic vs luminescent” on any internet discussion site he used and that’s the kind of unique personal identifier you can google even if you don’t have username or email to go by)

    • 10240 says:

      He wouldn’t know that you arrived on his profile from SSC (unless that’s the only way to get to his profile, which is unlikely).

      • eigenmoon says:

        He can log the HTTP referer (which would be SSC) and the timestamp. If LinkedIn gives timestamps also, he’d know about SSC.

        • 10240 says:

          Does Linkedin provide the HTTP referer of how a user who visits your profile arrived there?

          Or did the link take one to Linkedin as a redirect through (possibly) a personal website? That could work. I thought it pointed directly to Linkedin.

          • miguelrochefort says:

            It pointed to my personal domain, which currently redirects to LinkedIn.

            I can’t see who viewed my LinkedIn profile without paying.

    • brad says:

      There are similar features on dating websites, and also Quora I think, but as far as I know no other regular social media site. For whatever it’s worth LinkedIn has a terrible reputation for using “dark patterns”.

  37. This is my first time here. I don’t understand how this works.

    A decade ago, my high school introduced 2 different online education platforms. Some teachers used the first, while others used the second. I remember having to create 2 different accounts. Both platforms had similar features, such as message rooms and calendars, but they looked and behaved differently. The thought of having to switch between the two on a daily basis still brings me anxiety. That year, I completely avoided these platforms and became an autodidact.

    Since then, I’ve been obsessed with one question: Why do we have so many different apps/websites/services?

    When people ask me a question, I usually reply that my biggest frustration in life is the number of apps on my phone. That usually scares them away, but that doesn’t help me understand why they don’t share my frustration. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m the world’s most concerned person about application explosion.

    In the past 5 years, I have shared my concerns with hundreds of people. The vast majority didn’t understand or care. The rest failed to explain why I should let it go. Very few encouraged me to act on it. Naturally, I quit my job 4 months ago to work on this full-time. Or so I thought.

    I haven’t made any progress since. I can’t find anyone else interested in this. I don’t know what I’m missing. I thought maybe you might know?

    • Aapje says:

      If you mean: why do we have so many applications that do the same? It’s because people have different preferences. See the current kerfuffle over sorting.

      If you mean: why don’t we have fewer, huge applications that offer more features, then some answers are:
      – complexity/learning curve
      – bloat
      – different tasks require a different interface
      – software stagnation

      As to the latter, one of the known problems in programming is that the larger a program becomes, the harder it tends to be to maintain. So software tends to have a logarithmic development curve, where newer feature take more and more effort to implement. Smaller, dedicated apps are on the steep part of the logarithmic curve, which makes them much cheaper and easier to improve & maintain.

      I haven’t made any progress since. I can’t find anyone else interested in this. I don’t know what I’m missing. I thought maybe you might know?

      Your comment suggests that you most likely fail to recognize that many such attempts have been made, that were abandoned and/or lost out in the marketplace in favor of the current arrangement.

      On the intertubes, an app-like model (each website is basically an app) won. For mobiles, an app model won.

      It’s not atypical for people to only see the downsides of the solution that won, but not the upsides (why it won in the first place). You seem to lack a more holistic point of view and are merely motivated by a downside that irritates you. That’s not going to be good enough to find a solution that reduces the downside of app proliferation, without (unknowingly) introducing other downsides that people will dislike far more. So I suggest unquitting your job.

      • miguelrochefort says:

        A lot of marketplace apps (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon) don’t do anything special, other than letting users create and engage with offers. I can easily think of 100 different marketplace apps, yet building an app for each of them doesn’t seem like a good idea.

        What if we had a higher-level platform, some kind of general-purpose marketplace that could replace all the other ones? Instead of building 100 new apps, we would only need to build (at worst) 100 ontologies. Wouldn’t this save everyone a lot of pain? I don’t think adding ontologies would follow a logarithm curve, would it?

        You mentioned that many such attempts have been made, but you don’t mention any. Can you provide examples? SAP maybe?

        Should I give up, rather than try to leverage my unique sensitivity to a problem that could quickly become important? I can’t imagine being satisfied at any day job, unless I understand why I’m giving up on this. I remain unconvinced.

        • bean says:

          A lot of marketplace apps (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon) don’t do anything special, other than letting users create and engage with offers.

          That seems to ignore a huge difference between them. Yes, all three of those are basically platforms for different people to coordinate offering services, but they offer very different services, and you’re going to want very different feature sets to support them. When I use Uber, I want transportation. I don’t need a lot of options, I just need to get from point A to point B. I’m very concerned that my driver is not an axe murderer, but less concerned about what kind of car he drives.

          When I use Amazon, I want books. This means I need a lot of options, because I want a specific book, and a near-substitute won’t do. But I also am a lot less concerned about getting it in minutes, and an occasional book that’s not in the condition I ordered it in isn’t the end of the world.

          A stock exchange is also a platform for matching offers, but it’s going to look very different in terms of feature-set from either Amazon or Uber, so trying to make an AmazonUberNYSE app is basically going to give you three sub-apps, one for each specific role.

          • Garrett says:

            Having switched between a number of large/enterprise-y software companies, I’ve quickly noted that they all seem to have similar needs, yet there isn’t a turn-key solution to roll-out a large-scale software development company.

            This is also likely true for app-based information-sharing-and-coordinating functionality and noted above. It’s not so much a problem that there’s a need for multiple applications as that it’s so strange that there’s so little code/infrastructure shared between them. The big cloud services are trying to change that, but there are still major components missing.

        • Aapje says:

          @miguelrochefort

          Uber actually has/had a highly innovative system, with dynamic pricing, gratuities handled through the app, wait fees, scheduling, etc. None of these make sense for buying a book from Amazon, though.

          In software, it often looks like software does mostly the same things, but when you look at the details, it tends to be quite different and thus hard to use the same applications for the core business of different companies (libraries sure, but complete applications are more of a challenge).

          Companies and end users often do try to standardize, but it often simply is a worse option than to have more variation.

          One thing that we actually see is that reuse happens by having (single) intermediaries. For example, we actually already have a lot of consolidation in marketplaces, as many different sellers offer their products through Amazon or other such general marketplaces, rather than have their own software.

          At the point where the downsides of this model outweigh the advantages, you tend to get separate platforms.

          Instead of building 100 new apps, we would only need to build (at worst) 100 ontologies.

          You still need actual software to do things. You can’t write down an improved ontology and tell your users that you have solved their problems in theory.

          If you try to write software that will support 100 different ontologies using one flexible software system, you will often end up failing, as the bloated system doesn’t support any ontology well; unless the ontologies are very, very similar, which they often aren’t.

          Another issue is that you have innovation as well. Napster was replaced by torrents. You can’t do that kind of disruption by just making a slightly different ontology derived from the old pattern.

          You mentioned that many such attempts have been made, but you don’t mention any. Can you provide examples?

          More centralized and integrated bulletin board systems (BBS) lost out to the Internet. Netscape was replaced by the far leaner Firefox.

          Should I give up, rather than try to leverage my unique sensitivity to a problem that could quickly become important?

          Reuse and standardization has been desired by people for ages. We don’t have limited success because no one cares enough, but rather because it’s hard. It’s not an easy problem like achieving world peace or ending hunger.

          I don’t see you having special insight or a special approach that will make a difference. In fact, I don’t think that you even have a grasp of the problem after 4 months! I foresee you giving up eventually and am suggesting that you give up sooner, rather than later.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            As someone who developed ontologies for almost twenty years, I can say that there are enough similarities to justify standardization. The mergers and acquisitions problem alone costs corporations hundreds of millions of dollars. Even one company will spend that much (think large healthcare firm, pharmaceutical, energy provider, manufacturer, distributor, or bank).

            Disruptive technology won’t disrupt this technique if your ontology is sound. There may be streaming, but there will still be purchase records, contact information, and fraud security. And for large sections of industry, atoms are still being exchanged for money. And no matter how big the tech change, it’s either going to require a company to adapt its ontology, or adapting all its legacy databases, front ends, and rapidly prototyped glue code that some dev wrote to Make It Work and who’s now retired. This is why it costs them so much.

            If you try to write a common ontology, though, it will pay to keep things tightly scoped, especially if you plan to write a killer app on top of it. You scope it so that you’re not having to model all of human knowledge in order to produce that killer app. (That said, look into an ISO standard such as Common Logic Interchange Format, because you will want your ontology to be extensible. That’ll be a huge part of how you mitigate tech disruption. You will not solve this problem with clever RDB schemas alone.)

            Note that your killer app might not be a universal purchasing app; it might just be the spec for an interface. If so, prepare to give that spec away for free, and sell services for developing apps that speak it, and services for extending it into new domains. You could write a demo app that does so, and publish that for free, too. But you will need a lot of top cover from a business type who understands what you’re trying to do, and knows how to market it. Also, you will need to know that domain inside and out. For example, if you want to do online purchasing, learn how at least one company does it, from warehousing to presentation to sales to delivery. Visit the physical location if you have to. Visit more than one, so you’re not locked into one BigCorp. Do this while working another job. No corp will want to invest their ontology-based purchasing software solution in someone who’ll need two years to learn what their dev team knows. Business-wise, you might end up working for one corp anyway, esp. if it likes to acquire others. That means you’ll need a lawyer who knows how to protect your IP and makes sure you keep it if you decide you want to branch out. Again, your biz manager will need to understand how to market it this to BigCorp, since BigCorp will now know that it won’t own the solution you provide.

            I agree with Aapje that this is a much bigger bite than you’ll chew by yourself, but I want this problem solved badly enough to want to not discourage you and others too much. Again: this problem costs hundreds of millions of US dollars to even single customers. It also opens the door to solving additional problems. And it’s not impossible; we had several working prototypes before the company went bankrupt. But you will need more tech, business, marketing, and legal expertise than you’re likely to muster alone.

          • Aapje says:

            There are people who created and are making standard data models, which is already very difficult. But then you are still only at the level of interfacing and databases. Not the functionality of applications.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            There are people who created and are making standard data models, which is already very difficult. But then you are still only at the level of interfacing and databases. Not the functionality of applications.

            What functions do you expect to be in the domain of applications, and which in the domain of databases and interfaces?

            When I was working on this as recently as 2016, we were developing models from which one could generate all three. Or, more precisely, we recognized business logic that couldn’t be performed by any standard RDB, and had to be handled by middleware. One of our solutions was a rather sophisticated reasoning engine we developed in-house. Applications were expected to focus primarily on user interface issues, and I even had some long-term plans to automate a lot of that away as well.

          • Aapje says:

            Behaviors vs data storage.

            The latter seems easier to standardize. I’m not saying that you can’t do the first, just that you’ll run into more problems. The more problems, the less often the advantages will outweigh the disadvantages.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            What do you mean by behavior, though?

            Integrity constraints – e.g. a sedan requires no more than four tires at any one time – are regarded by some people as a behavior, since it involves the way one data value interacts with another, but ICs like this are routinely handled by the database. And they need to be; a banking institution that allows withdrawal amounts to be enforced at the ATM rather than at its central server will quickly experience serious problems, as I’m sure you would agree.

            Some data restrictions functionally ought to work like ICs, but cannot work in RDBs because they would degrade performance or are flat out computationally impossible, and yet they still belong in the formal model. You cannot be your own ancestor, but if records of parentage are stored in the expected way, no genealogy database will enforce this. Is this a behavior or a data storage requirement?

            Accesses of health records will often be required by law or policy to trigger notifications of certain parties. An physical object’s creation has to predate every other physical event on it (e.g. shipping). A person cannot participate in a business transaction with another party without possessing some form of contact information at the time of the transaction. Are these behaviors or storage requirements?

        • Rachael says:

          Because I’m surprised no one else has mentioned it yet:: xkcd standards

    • SaiNushi says:

      One reason that hasn’t been mentioned, is that competition is good.

      Right now, Paypal and Patreon have virtual monopolies on transferring money online, propped up by banks and credit card companies who refuse to work with any site that accepts anyone banned by either Paypal or Patreon. Which means that anyone who says something that Patreon doesn’t like suddenly can’t earn money by selling content or merchandise online.

      If DoorDash was the only food app, then I’d be stuck using them no matter how much it would cost me or what business practices of theirs I disagree with. But there’s UberEats and GrubHub too, so I have options. Competition means the customers are capable of voting with their wallets. It keeps prices down, and it keeps businesses in line. It’s why businesses keep doing everything they can to eliminate competition.

      If Lays were the only chips available, they’d probably charge $10 a bag.

      • AG says:

        It was infuriating/horrifying to realize that everything on the chips shelves except for the store’s generic brand is owned by Frito-Lay. Lay’s, Ruffles, Doritos, Funions, Cheetos, Tostitos, you name it, all owned by the same parent company.

        Similarly, it took forever to find non-Heinz-owned Ketchup.

      • Nornagest says:

        banks and credit card companies who refuse to work with any site that accepts anyone banned by either Paypal or Patreon

        Is this actually true? I know Hatreon had trouble getting back-end finance support, but it’s, you know, named “Hatreon”.

      • The Nybbler says:

        It was infuriating/horrifying to realize that everything on the chips shelves except for the store’s generic brand is owned by Frito-Lay. Lay’s, Ruffles, Doritos, Funions, Cheetos, Tostitos, you name it, all owned by the same parent company.

        Herrs, Utz, Snyders-Lance (Campbell), Snyder of Berlin (Pinnacle).

      • dick says:

        There are dozens of competitors to both Patreon and Paypal. Network effects and monopolies aren’t the same thing.

    • Murphy says:

      Zawinski’s Law

      “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that).

      Someone builds an app to do X.

      It does well but people who use it keep asking for it to do Y as well.

      Meanwhile someone else with an app that does Y does well but their users keep asking for it to do X as well.

      5 years later you’ve got a dozen apps that do A,B,C,D etc

      Software dies when it becomes too bloated or outdated to maintain profitably.

      It’s also a (good) feature of modular design. You already have 1 single “master” app on your phone, the android OS that lets you load apps you want in a modular fashion. Without that you’d have to load each piece of code directly to the hardware.

      Your issue is inherent in complex long term systems in a market economy involving people with different preferences.

    • arlie says:

      I think your real question isn’t about why there are so many apps, but why their user interfaces (UIs) are so different. If there were standard ways of doing most things, with standard icons, in reasonably predictable positions, it wouldn’t much matter whether there was one vendor or ten, one application or ten. Instead, it’s on ongoing chore of figuring out how to use each one – and then figuring it out again when the inevitable forced upgrade changes how you use it. And if you have to go back and forth between otherwise similar apps, you’re likely to constantly do the right thing forn the *other* interface, leading to frustration and delay (at best), and “learned helplessness” and self-contempt at worst.

      I have a similar complaint, but it’s more directly about impenetrable user interfaces. I remember when e.g. games came with a manual that explained the interface and how to play the game. I remember my first Android having a tutorial about how to use it. I remember my first PC having multiple books worth of documentation and explanation. Now I have games that change the UI on auto-update, and because of copy protection I can’t prevent the auto updates at all. My Android device lost all menu functionality, as far as I could tell, some years ago when the menu button was replaced by an “intuitively obvious” symbol I was expected to interpret clairvoyantly. And very few people ever become power users of anything from Microsoft, which pioneered the all-new-UI on any major release.

      My understanding is that there are at least 3 main causes of my issues:
      – some people like change. If the UI doesn’t change, they abandon the program, accusing it of being retro. So developers intentionally introduce churn to keep those users, who at least soem developers see as the majority (or the most profitable subgroup).
      – developers don’t like supporting multiple versions of software. That’s expensive for them. Hence forced updates. So those who want stable UIs can’t even stay with the prior release – assuming of course that it doesn’t have massive security issues that themselves would push reasonable people to upgrade in spite of havign to relearn the inetrface
      – as soon as a program is used by speakers of more than one language, it’s much less expensive to replace text with icons, and not provide any documentation at all. (Tramnslation is expensive.)

      Add to this user interface people wanting to justify their existence by making changes, and new features that just won’t fit with the existing UI, and you have a recipe for tools that need to be relearned at random times, when you were merely trying to use them.

      In your case, I’d add the concept of “look and feel” lawsuits. Interfaces can’t be standardized, because that has the potential to draw lawsuits. Any company that thinks they have a good interface doesn’t work to make it standard – it works to make their competitors use a less good interface. That’s at its worst where the end users can’t simply pick up and leave, even if the interface is wretched – such as students using educational software.

      The biggest problem, though, seems to be people who like playing guess-how-this-works repeatedly, and the supplier perception that these people are the majority of their customers. Those of us who want using tools to be convenient – and not require thinking about the tool, just about what we’re doing with it – don’t appear to be a majority. In fact, we’re so far from a majority that we’re basically screwed, AFAICT.

      • Aapje says:

        An issue with translations is that the the text in different languages is going to be sized differently, which makes it harder to make a neat interface. Icons are not just consistent in size, they are are also relatively small, which allows you to cram more on a screen without making it too cluttered.

        There is also always a conflict between more casual users and power users. The former want simple and clear, while the latter group is more willing to sacrifice that for POWERRRRRRR.

    • ordogaud says:

      Why would you expect perfect coordination/consolidation in any major area of human innovation? Hell we’re not even perfectly coordinated on how doors should work after all this time.

    • Tarpitz says:

      You say you don’t know what you’re missing, but I’m sure I’m not alone in being unclear as to what you’re having. Is your dislike of having different apps offer similar services purely visceral, or do you see it as being a problem in some more objective sense, such that other people who don’t share your instinctive reaction should nevertheless want it solved? If the latter, could you explain what you see the problem as being? If the former, perhaps you should consider trying to change yourself – perhaps through therapy or similar – rather than the world, as that would seem to offer a more realistic prospect of making your life better.

    • Erusian says:

      Sure. So, this is basically the same question as, “Why do we have so many different kinds of food? Why don’t we all just take a maximally delicious nutrient pill?” The answer is twofold: preference and specialization. Let’s say you have AllApp: it does it all! I have Schmuber, a company that lets you get taxi rides. Firstly, even if we make equally good design decisions, they might be different. And users will have preferences between those two equally good differences. Of course, more likely we both have bundles of features which, at best, are roughly equal.

      Secondly, specialization. Unless AllAppCab is so huge it can afford to outspend me multiple times over, I will win. AllApp does everything and has its attention everywhere. Schmuber only does this one thing and put all its time, money, and effort into it. Even if AllAppCab gets enough funding to compete, it will be less efficient and so have worse returns on capital.

      Additionally, unless a market as high barriers to entry, you expect firms to continue to enter until it is no longer profitable. The first one will be the biggest but you expect a bunch of smaller ones (like Via) to pop up until they can’t make money. Even if they make less money than Uber, so long as they get customers that Uber doesn’t and make enough to sustain their business, it is rational to do so. And it benefits the consumer to have multiple options, since it means they can credibly take their business elsewhere if Uber doesn’t work out.

      Here’s a question: why do we have both apples and oranges? Sure, they taste different. But different marketplaces also sell different things. They’re both calorie-delivery mechanisms. Aren’t they redundant? Well, strictly, yes. A world without apples could switch to orange pie and so on. It would be different without being obviously inferior. But the fact there are apples and oranges, and different kinds of each supplied by different customers is good for consumers and rational for producers.

      Anyway, apps, even apps with big plans, tend to start out small. Amazon started out selling textbooks in a limited area out of a garage. Facebook started off as a small user network in Harvard. Google started as a small app to reorder page ranks. It sounds like you are upset by app naviagtion/sorting. Why not start with an app that helps people sort their other apps and find them? It will be an infinitely smaller project and one that, if you can show progress in and get customers, could get support. You obviously care deeply about the problem and I could absolutely see this becoming a Gen Z darling. Maybe monetize it by paid suggestions or by offering things the user doesn’t have.

      • miguelrochefort says:

        Here’s a question: why do we have both apples and oranges? Sure, they taste different. But different marketplaces also sell different things. They’re both calorie-delivery mechanisms. Aren’t they redundant?

        I don’t think physical analogies work well when it comes to software.

        If we had a material that could dynamically take different forms, would we need both a hammer and a screwdriver in our toolbox?

        Software is a dynamic medium that can transform and adapt to different contexts in real-time. Why not take advantage of it, instead of reimplementing the physical world digitally?

        Unlike fruits, where the carrier is tightly coupled with the nutrients, software can be decoupled. We can separate the UI from the data. Imagine being able to use Amazon’s UI to browse the Best Buy catalog, or Pizza Hut’s UI to order Domino’s pizzas. I want kale to taste like strawberry.

        It seems obvious to me that the solution to the preference and specialization problem, is to decouple the UI from the data. I think the semantic web and linked data is a good solution. We should capture and store all knowledge as RDF, in a distributed knowledge graph. Why aren’t more people working on this?

        Anyway, apps, even apps with big plans, tend to start out small. Amazon started out selling textbooks in a limited area out of a garage. Facebook started off as a small user network in Harvard. Google started as a small app to reorder page ranks.

        Is there a reason why they started with small and unambitious ideas? Is it necessary, or is it just common? I can see how being less ambitious would make it easier to implement an idea without overthinking everything, and not lose motivation when comparing the slow progress to the grand vision. Was premature ambition my single worst mistake? Is it a permanent impediment? I do struggle a lot with the exploration/exploitation tradeoff…

        Why not start with an app that helps people sort their other apps and find them? It will be an infinitely smaller project and one that, if you can show progress in and get customers, could get support.

        The only way I could see this working is as an aggregator. I’m well aware of all the apps out there, and I actually use a significant fraction of them (I have over 500 accounts on LastPass). I don’t need help discovering or even learning these different tools (although I’m sure many do), I just think of all the missed opportunities to correlate and leverage all the data that’s currently split into thousands of buckets. Of course, my attention is the other important thing that’s being split and fragmented.

        • Erusian says:

          Unlike fruits, where the carrier is tightly coupled with the nutrients, software can be decoupled. We can separate the UI from the data. Imagine being able to use Amazon’s UI to browse the Best Buy catalog, or Pizza Hut’s UI to order Domino’s pizzas. I want kale to taste like strawberry.

          It seems obvious to me that the solution to the preference and specialization problem, is to decouple the UI from the data. I think the semantic web and linked data is a good solution. We should capture and store all knowledge as RDF, in a distributed knowledge graph. Why aren’t more people working on this?

          Is your objection isn’t a large number of apps but instead that apps have discrete backends that makes them fundamentally different (rather than multiple versions drawing from the same datasource)?

          The simplest reason this doesn’t happen is because it’s of no benefit (and often anti-beneficial) for most companies to share this. Why Facebook let other people put ads on Facebook, for example? That will decrease their profits. To say nothing of the idea of giving up control of the data that is basically their entire monetization model. Or Uber. Why would Uber encourage people to use its backend instead of putting up a market barrier by forcing them to develop one more complex piece of technology?

          Is there a reason why they started with small and unambitious ideas? Is it necessary, or is it just common? I can see how being less ambitious would make it easier to implement an idea without overthinking everything, and not lose motivation when comparing the slow progress to the grand vision. Was premature ambition my single worst mistake? Is it a permanent impediment? I do struggle a lot with the exploration/exploitation tradeoff…

          Small yes, unambitious no. I suppose you could argue Facebook started out as unambitious. But Amazon and Google, from the beginning, wanted to revolutionize their markets. They just started off with a smaller version.

          They did this for three reasons: validation, feedback, and money. Firstly, no one is good at picking winner ideas. It’s best to rapidly and cheaply figure out if the idea will be adopted by the market. It’s easier to do that with miniature versions. Secondly, if you have something on the market, you have a relationship with your customers which will help inform future developments. Thirdly, those people are presumably paying you, which will let you hire a team to pursue the thing.

          People like Elon Musk often started out with small ideas and grew them, then used the money to take bigger risks. If you have literally a billion dollars then you can take the proverbial moonshot because you can afford to spend a lot of money (and investors will be more willing to take a risk on you, since you sold a company for a billion dollars already). Otherwise most people want to see validation before handing over a check with more than six figures in it, even if you are a Harvard educated genius.

          The only way I could see this working is as an aggregator. I’m well aware of all the apps out there, and I actually use a significant fraction of them (I have over 500 accounts on LastPass). I don’t need help discovering or even learning these different tools (although I’m sure many do), I just think of all the missed opportunities to correlate and leverage all the data that’s currently split into thousands of buckets. Of course, my attention is the other important thing that’s being split and fragmented.

          If you’re interested in increasing data utilization and unifying silos, I’d suggest you look into helping local governments. They often have tons of data that they don’t really know how to handle and have no profit motive. The fragmentation there is insane. There are literally thousands of databases that don’t interface with each other even on single topics like traffic violations.

          Companies and app developers, meanwhile, have an interest in keeping their backends and data to themselves. Unless you can think of a way to make giving up their data more profitable than dominating their market, they won’t be interested. And that means putting their data in common needs to grow their market larger than their market share shrinks, which is unlikely.

          • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

            Do you *really* want to compel Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Uber to “open up their data”?

            (let me complete that, to point out why you do not)

            “that they have about about you?”

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            […]it’s of no benefit (and often anti-beneficial) for most companies to share this. Why Facebook let other people put ads on Facebook, for example? That will decrease their profits.

            I agree, insofar as that. However, Facebook has an incentive to offer advertisers a common API for describing their products, such that Facebook can then find the most lucrative way to display their ads, and therefore increase advertisers’ revenue, in return for a cut going to Facebook. That API will need to be more sophisticated than “yo, our company name is Belco, we sell something we call ‘4-way rubber bands’, the text of the ad is $foo, and our billing information is $bar”. Facebook will want to know what ‘4-way rubber bands’ are used for, so they can figure out which Facebook users will be likely to buy them, when they’ll be receptive, how much they’d be willing to pay, whether they’ll think less of Facebook for spamming them with rubber band ads, and on and on.

            If Facebook thought they could pay some third party to come up with a universal model for advertisement information that would satisfy their requirements, less than they have to pay their devteam, they’d be stupid not to. So then the question is how much they’re having to pay their devteam to do that, and whether you can beat it – especially if Google, Amazon, Walmart, E-Trade, AT&T, Gartner Group, Unilever, and several other high-cap companies would be interested in the same general model. (It’s theoretically fine if you spend twice as much as Facebook’s devteam, if you can sell the result to six times as many customers. At that point, it’s an investment / business problem.)

            Advertisers, meanwhile, would be happy to subscribe to a free API that promises increased sales through better quality targeted ads. This really is a positive sum outcome – provided you can manage the tech and business risk.

          • Erusian says:

            However, Facebook has an incentive to offer advertisers a common API for describing their products, such that Facebook can then find the most lucrative way to display their ads, and therefore increase advertisers’ revenue, in return for a cut going to Facebook

            It does in a weak sense. As it stands now, it exports that task to the advertisers itself. Facebook’s goal is to get as many ads run as possible. Whether those ads are effective only matter insofar as it increases or decreases the amount of advertisers. So they currently handle this by publishing guides but forcing the advertisers to figure out what demographics etc are best for ads.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            So [the Facebook people] currently handle this by publishing guides but forcing the advertisers to figure out what demographics etc are best for ads.

            If that’s the case, then it’s in advertisers’ best interest to hire someone to coordinate their interface with Facebook. The demand is still there; it’s just in a different location.

            If it’s more dispersed like that, then it will make it a less lucrative target for standardization. But it still leaves the door open for consortiums to try that work, and for Facebook to be that consortium (or to outsource it).

            And it still leaves mergers and acquisitions as one of several cases where standardization is in demand.

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          Software is a dynamic medium that can transform and adapt to different contexts in real-time. Why not take advantage of it, instead of reimplementing the physical world digitally?

          In what way do you see software adapting in real-time? I’ve been writing software for decades. It can certainly behave arbitrarily differently depending on inputs, but those different behaviors have to be scripted by a programmer before that software is released. That programmer has to anticipate all the inputs possible, and if they forget any, that’s considered a bug. A tiny minority of programs offer a sandbox engine in which certain inputs lead to behavior that is both unanticipated and useful, and the majority of those are academic toys, or art programs, as opposed to robot controllers or automated hedge fund managers.

          But anyway.

          The semantic web was bedeviled with problems from its first day. One of the big ones was that it couldn’t offer any sort of computational improvement over RDBs. It offered three levels of language complexity. IIRC, the first two were already covered by SQL or any equivalent language; the third, OWL-Full, offered first-order logic, but no general software existed that could support it.

          The apparent expectation was that this framework would be offered the same way HTML was, and people would spontaneously begin publishing content in it, using presentation software that would also spontaneously arise. HTML had NCSA Mosaic, and a little later, Netscape Navigator. These were clever tools – the VisiCalcs of the early 1990s – and their value was quickly recognized.

          But it turns out to be a lot easier to offer an HTML 1.0 presentation tool than a first-order logic reasoning engine. OWL-Full wasn’t a sufficient material component to cast Summon Software. Meanwhile, you could write to OWL-DL or OWL-Lite, but who was going to bother to rewrite their SQL code in that? Their Oracle or MySQL or Sybase was already running it fine.

          Is there a reason why [the authors of Amazon, Facebook, and Google] started with small and unambitious ideas?

          Short answer: Dunbar number. There’s only so much of a knowledge domain a programmer can keep in their head at once. (It’s one of the reasons OOP is a thing.) Likewise, there’s only so much an investor can see in a given project. It’s possible that Bezos envisioned AWS when he began developing an online bookselling app, but if he did, he rightly recognized that he’d have to start with something much smaller, that investors could grasp well enough to infer they’d get a return on a few million.

          But even Amazon-as-retail-app is surprisingly dense. Quick! Write a specification of every logic rule required to support 95% of the functionality you see on any random Amazon website page. Example: the name of an item is near the top, so, in pseudo-Common Logic Interchange Format, you might write this:

          (itemName item20391910 “Belco 9\” 4-way Rubber Bands (10 count)”)

          Then provide similar predicates for its picture, text description, price, amount in stock, quantity the current user has in their cart, whether it’s in their wishlist, ratings from other customers, text reviews, ratings of and responses to said reviews, related products, etc. I’ll even let you skip the presentation logic (CSS rules and whatnot), since we’re assuming you just want enough for someone else to be able to write their own shopping app, and lay out all the content their way. You will, however, need to write all the deduction logic supporting this. For example, it should be illegal for a user to have more items in their cart than are in stock, so:

          (<= (softIC "$User has $CartQty of $Item in cart, but only $Stock in stock")
          (and
          (thisSession $User $Page)
          (pageItem $Page $Item)
          (available $Item $Stock)
          (amountInCart $User $Item $CartQty)
          (greaterThan $CartQty $Stock)))

          These integrity constraints will be critical to any third party wishing to implement their own shopping interface. Can you write all this? To within 95% of Amazon's current functionality?

          Again, I'm not trying to simply scare you away. As I mentioned earlier, a framework for formal specification of rules like this (coupled with a way to generate software artifacts from them) is literally a $100 million dollar problem for certain companies.

          • miguelrochefort says:

            In what way do you see software adapting in real-time? I’ve been writing software for decades. It can certainly behave arbitrarily differently depending on inputs, but those different behaviors have to be scripted by a programmer before that software is released. That programmer has to anticipate all the inputs possible, and if they forget any, that’s considered a bug.

            I think the first step could be to build a responsive layouting engine that automatically renders data as best as it can based on the context (screen size, culture, language, user’s knowledge, user’s preferences). A big problem in software is having designers manually design interfaces. They’re not consistent, they forget a lot of use cases, and it’s manual work that doesn’t scale. Algorithms should do that. Then we can mostly forget about UI and think about the business models.

            But it turns out to be a lot easier to offer an HTML 1.0 presentation tool than a first-order logic reasoning engine. OWL-Full wasn’t a sufficient material component to cast Summon Software. Meanwhile, you could write to OWL-DL or OWL-Lite, but who was going to bother to rewrite their SQL code in that? Their Oracle or MySQL or Sybase was already running it fine.

            It’s more difficult to implement than HTML, but does that mean it can’t be done? Also, I don’t particularly care about existing businesses that use MySQL and what not. If they’re too selfish to change their architecture to open their data to customers, then they’re asking to become obsolete.

            Short answer: Dunbar number. There’s only so much of a knowledge domain a programmer can keep in their head at once. (It’s one of the reasons OOP is a thing.) Likewise, there’s only so much an investor can see in a given project. It’s possible that Bezos envisioned AWS when he began developing an online bookselling app, but if he did, he rightly recognized that he’d have to start with something much smaller, that investors could grasp well enough to infer they’d get a return on a few million.

            What if instead of having one company implement all these domains, we have a community of people implementing all domains over time? I want to build a generic framework that supports arbitrary ontologies, but I don’t want to deal with all these ontologies myself. I want to build something that doesn’t know anything about selling goods or ride sharing, yet allow people to implement such ontologies afterwards. That’s the only way this project could possibly scale. Nobody needs millions of dollars, and nobody needs to keep all possible domains and ontologies in their head.

            Then provide similar predicates for its picture, text description, price, amount in stock, quantity the current user has in their cart, whether it’s in their wishlist, ratings from other customers, text reviews, ratings of and responses to said reviews, related products, etc.

            Isn’t all this stuff already part of http://schema.org ontologies? I can’t imagine it would be hard to generate a form from some Product/Offer schema, and let sellers fill them. The data could then be displayed using the generic data renderer, or even use a custom opinionated renderer function that takes in data from a given schema.

            I’ll even let you skip the presentation logic (CSS rules and whatnot), since we’re assuming you just want enough for someone else to be able to write their own shopping app, and lay out all the content their way. You will, however, need to write all the deduction logic supporting this. For example, it should be illegal for a user to have more items in their cart than are in stock.

            I think this is the kind of arbitrary rule that shouldn’t exist, or at least not be domain specific. There are so many similar cases in which a resource is exhausted/unavailable, that could be described with the exact same generic rule:

            1. I want to buy 2 iPhones, but Amazon only has 1 in stock.

            2. I want to buy a $2000 MacBook, but I only have $1900.

            3. I want a ride to Starbacks, but Uber has no available driver.

            4. I want to bake a cake, but I don’t have any flour.

            5. I want to FaceTime with John but he’s offline.

            In most cases, there are alternative/creative ways to solve these problems, that doesn’t involve some hardcoded “you can’t do that” behavior:

            1. Maybe wait until more iPhones are in stock. Maybe buy from a different seller. Maybe buy 1 iPhone and 1 Android phone. Maybe you don’t even neede to buy it.

            2. Maybe wait for the price to go down. Maybe buy from a different seller. Maybe use a coupon code. Maybe buy a slightly different model. Maybe buy a used/refurbished unit. Maybe earn the missing $100. Maybe borrow money or use credit. Maybe send in your old iPhone for a $250 rebate.

            3. Maybe use Lyft instead. Maybe wait a few minutes. Maybe ask a friend. Maybe take your bike. Maybe walk. Maybe go to a different coffee shop.

            4. Maybe bake the cake later. Maybe ask someone else to bake the cake. Maybe use a flourless cake recipe. Maybe use a different kind of flour you already have. Maybe buy some flour. Maybe you don’t need a cake.

            5. Maybe wait until he’s online. Maybe try Skype. Maybe call him on the phone. Maybe send him a message on Messenger/WhatsApp/WeChat/Hangout/Telegram/Allo/Slack/Teams/Discord/IRC/SMS/email. Maybe FaceTime with Tony instead.

            My point is that my system should ask the user what it wants, try to figure out different strategies to make it happen, and list available options (including their conditions, such as time, price, risk, quality, etc). If no satisfactory solution is provided, the user can relax constraints until they find what they want. A good way to relax constraints would be to ask the user why they want what they asked, and get closer to their intrinsic needs rather than their instrumental needs. For example, you might have overspecified you wanted a Uber, when you actually just wanted a ride (which a Lyft, Grab, GoJek, a friend, could fulfill). It’s important to have apps that challenge the user, not just blindly execute orders (and refuse in case a resource, like a single store’s inventory, is exhausted).

            These integrity constraints will be critical to any third party wishing to implement their own shopping interface. Can you write all this? To within 95% of Amazon’s current functionality?

            As I said above, re-implementing what already exists is missing the point. It takes too much effort, and it’s a missed opportunity to significantly improve the power and use experience of the system. I think it’s easy to build an app that does everything, than to build an app that does 1000 hard-coded things.

            Again, I’m not trying to simply scare you away. As I mentioned earlier, a framework for formal specification of rules like this (coupled with a way to generate software artifacts from them) is literally a $100 million dollar problem for certain companies.

            I don’t have the experience to tell an easy problem from a hard problem. If I can imagine that something exists, then I assume it can be built. I can’t be sure that what I described above is possible or even desirable. Is this more of a technical or a social challenge? Which part is still an open problem? Which part do you anticipate would be the more difficult to implement? How many people have tried to build something like this in the past? Why doesn’t anything like this exist today? Or does it?

            The fact that I’m not making progress seems to indicate that it’s not a straightforward problem, and I would appreciate guidance. I don’t want to repeat mistakes that others have made in the past. I don’t want to invest years into solving an impossible problem. I deeply care about this problem, I have the time to work on it, and I have the ability to learn any skill I might be missing. I just need to know where to lay the first brick (and maybe see a blueprint).

          • Aapje says:

            @miguelrochefort

            I think the first step could be to build a responsive layouting engine that automatically renders data as best as it can based on the context

            Amazon already has that. Their product pages render differently based on the product category. They tweak their pages to optimize sales. For example, let’s suppose that they want to move a widget from left to right on the page.

            Imagine that they shift to some generic sales software that is shared with other companies and thus is not under their control. Now to tweak their pages, they will have to try to convince the maintainer, who also has to serve others, to change. Perhaps the majority of the companies have different users, who respond better to the widget being on the left. Or they favor keeping things the same because they don’t want to make their users learn something new. Now Amazon can compromise, costing them $$$ in missed sales, to save $ on development costs. Not gonna happen.

            What if Amazon has something that is specific to them that many others don’t/can’t have, like Amazon Prime. Is the generic software going to support something just for Amazon? Unlikely.

            Ultimately, using generic software can save money in development costs, but there is usually a downside in the software being less customized to the desires and needs of the company. Sometimes this is a good trade-off, sometimes it isn’t.

            I want to build a generic framework that supports arbitrary ontologies, but I don’t want to deal with all these ontologies myself.

            The issue is that describing all the desires and needs in an ontology, often results in ontologies that are as complex and detailed as a programming language.

            At that point, the benefits (including re-usability) of your ontology start to disappear.

            There is a reason why 3rd generation languages have very limited success.

            What if instead of having one company implement all these domains, we have a community of people implementing all domains over time?

            Like a government.

            In government, we compromise and require that everyone adhere to the compromise, even if it is sub-optimal for their needs. We have also concluded that many things are better done individually.

            When trying to do something similar for software, your compromise(d) solution has to appeal more than individual solutions. In some cases it will (and we already see quite a bit of code reuse, in ways that are easier and require less compromise), but in many cases it is doubtful that people think that upsides outweigh the downsides.

            I can’t imagine it would be hard to generate a form from some Product/Offer schema, and let sellers fill them. The data could then be displayed using the generic data renderer, or even use a custom opinionated renderer function that takes in data from a given schema.

            Several databases already support fairly simple form generation on top of the database. It works for simple workflows, if you accept a shitty interface.

            However, in real life you have complex workflows that also differ. I want to sell you products on credit, another company doesn’t. That company wants the buyers to have an account, I just want to know where to ship it to.

            If you actually look in detail at how theoretically similar systems work, there are often substantial differences in functionality.

            I think this is the kind of arbitrary rule that shouldn’t exist

            There is nothing arbitrary about not selling people products that you don’t have. It’s one of the least arbitrary rules.

            Your suggestion that software should tell people to buy from the competitor rather fundamentally misunderstands that the companies who sell products are usually not keen on having customers go to their competitor.

            If the idea is that we should have a paradigm shift where people only interact with advanced assistants who in turn mediate with companies, then this is already being worked on by Google, Amazon, etc; but there are also various issues with this.

            My point is that my system should ask the user what it wants

            Actually telling a system everything that you want, instead of an extremely incomplete simplification, is extremely hard and also what most people hate to do. It’s why programmers get the big bucks.

            Most people greatly prefer that other people make a lot of choices for them.

            If I can imagine that something exists, then I assume it can be built.

            No. You are a Utopian and Utopias are impossible to achieve. You have to work within the limits of reality.

            I deeply care about this problem, I have the time to work on it, and I have the ability to learn any skill I might be missing. I just need to know where to lay the first brick (and maybe see a blueprint).

            You have a goal that is too big. People who aim too high melt the wax of their wings and crash to the ground. The first step to a cure is to accept that you are not a God and can only solve a problem, not all problems.

            I suggest trying to get a job working on Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant or Facebook M.

            That seems the closest you can get to your ideal in a realistic way. Those assistants try to abstract away various services behind a reasonably consistent AI interface.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            [OWL-Full] more difficult to implement than HTML, but does that mean it can’t be done?

            Theoretically, I think it might be doable. But it’s also theoretically possible to send a person to Europa. Could you do it? 🙂

            Again, the point I’m making here is that this is much harder than you think. Part of me applauds your willingness to try, and I’m trying to save you time by pointing out where your road hazards are going to be. And there’s also the distinct possibility that you’ll dive into this, find out that you can’t solve it with the resources you have, and conclude that you would’ve succeeded at something else, had you only known.

            So for example, it would probably behoove you to read about OWL, Cyc, CLIF, and Prolog, and a couple of books by Jeffrey Ullman about database theory. You will also need some philosophy, particularly existing theorized models covering meta-properties, mereology, parts and wholes, and representations of time. If you solve this problem, it will almost certainly require pulling lessons from those projects, and you’ll save time if you read about them rather than finding them out yourself. Also, these projects and techniques have failure modes that you will need to be familiar with.

            Some details to illustrate what you’re up against:

            What if instead of having one company implement all these domains, we have a community of people implementing all domains over time? I want to build a generic framework that supports arbitrary ontologies, but I don’t want to deal with all these ontologies myself.

            In some sense, this has already been done. And that’s the problem.

            Consider the widely known problem of tracking people and their contact information. You have people, names, addresses. Names might have first, middle, and last, or alternately, given name and family name. Optional honorifics and other decorations. Addresses might be email, snail mail, PO boxes, or phone numbers. Phone numbers come in different types, with different implications about when they’re usable, by whom, and by what devices. All of these items may change over time, and are not 1-1.

            This model has been constructed literally thousands of times by people all over the world, using a common framework: SQL. The result? Any query you send to one database (let’s assume you have total read permissions) to get the email address for Ruth Sapkowicz is practically never going to work against any other database. You will need to understand why, and figure out a way around it. I think you’re on the right track in thinking about a framework; it’s just that you’ll need at a minimum to know why SQL came up short, and how you would improve upon it.

            Isn’t all this stuff already part of http://schema.org ontologies?

            Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. See, this is exactly one of those sources of ready-made models that gives formal modeling a bad name. It makes me want to beat my head against the desk because schema.org looks like a really awesome resource, but then offers nothing over the usual E-R diagrams people have been hurling back and forth for over 25 years.

            I’ll pull up one model as an example: https://schema.org/Book. I see six properties specific to books, 86 for creative works, and twelve for “Thing”. Lots of stuff! And there’s inheritance! Seems great, right? Look closer.

            I’ll pick a property at random: headline. Type: text. Description: “headline of the article”. …what’s the headline of a book? Is it the title? Luckily, there is no “title” property for Book, so maybe that’s what they mean. What’s the chance that a database implementor will see a query for “headline” and have that spit out the book title? I guess it’s high enough. So far, so good.

            There are a lot of really vague properties, like comment, typicalAgeRange, audience, or educationalUse. The description doesn’t really help nail it down. You might say this is fine, since no one’s likely to make business decisions about these; they’re just for presentation to a human reader to make their own decision (well, except maybe for typicalAgeRange), but if I were to separate out all these vague properties, suddenly I’m left with nowhere near as rich a model of “important” properties. Most of it’s fluff.

            Some of them have no constraints. We have “author” and “creator”. The description for creator says it’s the same as author, but not the other. Fine. BUT, this is all in free text. If I’m to implement a front end that displays all the relevant properties of a creative work, what’s the chance that I’ll methodically capture all the business logic expressed in free text? For all 86 properties of creative works?

            It gets worse. What if a book has more than one author/creator? This model says nothing about it. I couldn’t find any cardinality constraints at all. Should my interface allow for it? Should my interface allow for all the properties to be multi-valued? What if one of them is supposed to be used to uniquely identify a creative work? I will have serious problems if I implement multi-valued properties that are supposed to be single-value, or vice versa. And what if it’s single-valued, but is allowed to change over time?

            Author and creator are not the only two properties which are supposed to be equivalent. Why are both even listed? Why not just list one? You say you want a framework that doesn’t know about selling goods or ride sharing, but can still handle them in a generic, useful way. I think that’s terrific. …how will your framework know whether it needs to display both the author and creator of a book, or if that is actually redundant and confusing? There’s nothing in the model telling your framework that, either.

            I could probably generate over a hundred rules that the properties of Book, CreativeWork, and Thing should follow, that aren’t actually listed in the schema. All schema.org did that I could call valuable was to gather a great many properties that at least one individual thought was important, put them in one document, and gave (most of) them a unique name one could use as a selection key in a database. But the omitted rules mean that one place could store this with no rules at all and call itself compliant, while another adds some rules it thinks are important, and now barfs when you feed it data from the first system, and a third uses its own rules and the latter two won’t interoperate, and so on.

            This is precisely the problem with the vast majority of databases today, and schema.org presents itself as a solution when all it does is take half a baby step toward one. The result is thousands of customers with real data interoperability problems costing them millions of dollars a year being nonetheless highly skeptical of anyone claiming they have a solution. (Our company had a devil of a time persuading a handful of customers that we really did offer more than yet another standard in the xkcd sense.)

            These semantics matter:

            I think this is the kind of arbitrary rule that shouldn’t exist, or at least not be domain specific. There are so many similar cases in which a resource is exhausted/unavailable, that could be described with the exact same generic rule:

            In every alternative you propose, you’re presupposing that there’s an underlying rule indicating a problem. You know there’s limited stock, or insufficient funds, or no drivers, or missing ingredients, or an unavailable person. There needs to be a rule in your formal model describing this. Otherwise, your framework will have no way of telling, without strong AI. Your framework will also need a way of knowing what constraints can be relaxed, and this will be highly arbitrary, so there will need to be formal rules for that in the model, too.

            Your framework will need a way to specify such rules beyond prose in the description. And again, this is exactly the roadblock to data interoperability. If you can’t improve on this with real semantics and supporting enforcement mechanisms, then customers will look at you like you’re Lucy with the football.

          • miguelrochefort says:

            @Paul Brinkley

            So for example, it would probably behoove you to read about OWL, Cyc, CLIF, and Prolog, and a couple of books by Jeffrey Ullman about database theory. You will also need some philosophy, particularly existing theorized models covering meta-properties, mereology, parts and wholes, and representations of time. If you solve this problem, it will almost certainly require pulling lessons from those projects, and you’ll save time if you read about them rather than finding them out yourself. Also, these projects and techniques have failure modes that you will need to be familiar with.

            I’m familiar with the Semantic Web, Solid, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Cyc, Common Logic, AtomSpace, Wolfram Alpha, lojban, Prolog, 5th-generation computers, blockchain, distributed systems, multi-agent systems, agent communication languages, Web of Trust, metaphysics, epistemology, HoTT, event calculus, temporal knowledge, etc.

            The first problem I encountered when I discovered RDF/OWL was how arbitrary and inconsistent ontologies were (within and across domains). Everyone reinvents predicates that mean the same thing.

            For example, couldn’t predicates such as birthDate and creationDate be combined (I know this isn’t a perfect example, as creation/development is not instant, but you get the idea).

            I then found out that there wasn’t a canonical way to deal with the concept of time. In most cases, it’s ad-hoc hacks involving named graphs. I still have no idea how people represent temporal knowledge in RDF in the real world.

            I also realized that we rarely have perfect knowledge of the world, and we often deal with uncertain ranges of data (most modern scholars think Plato was born between 429 and 423 BC). Clearly, we need better support for fuzzy/bayesian knowledge. Or am I just describing machine learning?

            But who decides what is true? Who decides the probability of Plato’s birth? Who decides if Socrates ever existed? Surely, we need all knowledge to be supported/endorsed/claimed by some kind of source (agent). The likeliness of the data being true, will be probabilistic and witness-dependent, according to a directed web of trust. Perhaps the currency of the future will be trust/social/reputation score based on a person’s ability to accurately describe reality?

            Why do all semantic web examples represent some encyclopedic use cases, where past states of the world are described? Why don’t we also use it to describe the future state of the world? Wouldn’t this allow agents to make predictions (where the probability of it becoming true depends on a person’s score, or ability to predict the reality, in this case the future instead of the past)? Wouldn’t a prediction market somehow allow us to predict the future?

            What if you want to talk about the future, but not make a prediction. What if you want to talk about your ideal state of the future, as opposed to the real state of the future? Perhaps you want to communicate your wish to be at some location at some future point in time (“I am at Starbacks at 7PM”)? Maybe we need to add a new epistemic mode/qualifier to our data. That seems more elegant than all the poorly designed action/verb predicates you’ll find in ontologies (maybe https://schema.org/BuyAction becomes “owns, in the future”).

            I’ve had a lot of insights and epiphanies in those past 10 years. I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if any of them are novel. I also don’t understand why 5th generation computers failed, or why we’re not all programming in Prolog. I’m not interested in luck/timing/learning curve/chicken-egg/resources/politics explanations. I only want to know if the concept (not the implementation) is flawed or not. Can you refer me to an explanation on the fundamental limitations of these paradigms?

            Consider the widely known problem of tracking people and their contact information. You have people, names, addresses. Names might have first, middle, and last, or alternately, given name and family name. Optional honorifics and other decorations. Addresses might be email, snail mail, PO boxes, or phone numbers. Phone numbers come in different types, with different implications about when they’re usable, by whom, and by what devices. All of these items may change over time, and are not 1-1.

            I understand that this is complex. I still prefer that a handful of people deal with this stuff, so that whoever builds Uber for Puppies doesn’t have to engage in philosophical debates about user names and addresses.

            > Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. See, this is exactly one of those sources of ready-made models that gives formal modeling a bad name. It makes me want to beat my head against the desk because schema.org looks like a really awesome resource, but then offers nothing over the usual E-R diagrams people have been hurling back and forth for over 25 years.

            I’m not a fan of http://schema.org either. Their models are inconsistent, unclear, and there’s a lot of duplication (many ways to describe the same things). But at least they’re pragmatic. They’re used in the real world, they cover a good range of domains, and they’re easy to use (at the cost of a lot of weak Text data types). I initially looked for better ontologies, but 80% of links are down. I still want to create my own “better” (XKCD #927) ontologies, but not until I’ve exhausted the value of existing ones. I think http://schema.org is a good example of worse is better.

            In any case, that data is better than nothing. It can still be leveraged. You can always map ontologies to each other, and convert between them with little to no loss in meaning (especially if we have support for fuzzy/bayesian values, where an age can be converted to a range of possible birth dates, which isn’t perfect but good enough if you just want to know if a person is older than 18).

            In every alternative you propose, you’re presupposing that there’s an underlying rule indicating a problem. You know there’s limited stock, or insufficient funds, or no drivers, or missing ingredients, or an unavailable person. There needs to be a rule in your formal model describing this. Otherwise, your framework will have no way of telling, without strong AI. Your framework will also need a way of knowing what constraints can be relaxed, and this will be highly arbitrary, so there will need to be formal rules for that in the model, too.

            Let’s say the system knows this:

            – Alice has 9 apples (real present).
            – Bob has 10 apples (ideal future).
            – Charlie can move apples from A to B (possible future).
            – Alice is located within range A (real present).
            – Bob is located within range B (real present).

            The algorithm can figure out a partial solution in which Charlie moves 9 apples from Alice to Bob. The delta between “Bob has 10 apples” and “Bob has 9 apples” is “1 apple”. This delta will be highlighted to Bob, when he navigates the offered solutions.

            Again, I don’t know what this domain/field is called (seems pretty inter-disciplinary), and I don’t know what the current state of the art is. I haven’t seen anyone modeling intent as a description of a fuzzy/bayesian future state of the world (maybe they call it differently), and I think it eliminates a lot of unnecessary complexity from other models I’ve seen.

            One obvious tool that’s missing (or maybe I haven’t found it), is tool that allow users to semantically describe the state of the world. Let’s say you’re looking at a hotel room, or at a plant, or at a meal, or at a person. What’s the most efficient way to describe what you’re seeing to a computer? Take a picture? Write some text? Fill a form? A mix of those? I think we need something better, that makes it easy to capture data from the world and semantically annotate it. Whether the task is done by a single person, or delegated to lots of mechanical turks doesn’t matter. I want to be able to catalog my entire house in an single day. I want to log all my meals in seconds. I want to put my Wi-Fi router for sale online in 10 seconds. And I want all of this data to exist in a format the computer can understand (e.g., RDF), not dumb plain text.

            Once we’ll know how to efficiently describe the state of the world around us, we’ll be able to efficiently communicate the ideal future state of the world. This will replace Uber’s interface, as you’ll simply describe your ideal future location to be at Starbucks.

          • miguelrochefort says:

            @Aapje

            What if Amazon has something that is specific to them that many others don’t/can’t have, like Amazon Prime. Is the generic software going to support something just for Amazon? Unlikely.

            Amazon Prime would be a an arbitrary semantic/smart contract. I don’t see how it would require changes in the framework.

            Like a government.

            I don’t want a top-down authoritarian system that enforces some features on ontologies. It should be as agnostic as possible, and the free market will decide what works best. You should be able to implement any arbitrary thing on top, but the market will discourage fragmentation and non-interoperability, unless it proves useful. Again, no central authority will be making these decisions.

            Several databases already support fairly simple form generation on top of the database. It works for simple workflows, if you accept a shitty interface.

            I think a lot of people assume that generated interfaces have to be shitty because that’s all they had experience with. I think it’s possible to generate interfaces that are better than what a human could design and implement by hand.

            If the idea is that we should have a paradigm shift where people only interact with advanced assistants who in turn mediate with companies, then this is already being worked on by Google, Amazon, etc; but there are also various issues with this.

            I don’t know what’s going on inside their labs, but I haven’t seen anything great come out of there yet. Their use cases are shoddy, and speech is not a great interface. That said, I would love to work there, but I don’t have the qualification or visa required to do so.

            You have a goal that is too big. People who aim too high melt the wax of their wings and crash to the ground. The first step to a cure is to accept that you are not a God and can only solve a problem, not all problems.

            That’s possible. That’s perhaps my biggest concern. I don’t know how to aim lower.

          • Aapje says:

            I don’t know how to aim lower.

            A common way to achieve this is to pick a specific use case or set of use cases and create a solution for those.

            For example, you could pick one type of software where companies/consumers often have different software despite all the products all doing the same thing in the abstract.

            Then you could analyze what the actual benefits are of having these separate products and whether you can (partially) achieve these with one code base.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            @miguelrochefort

            I got the same impression as you about RDF/OWL ontology inconsistency. Not just in renaming birth dates as creation dates, but the subtler point you seem to be hinting at, which is the lack of a consistent semantics behind those terms.

            Semantics is the key. If you want to know whether two concepts merit unification, look at how those concepts are used. If they’re used the same way, they probably ought to be unified. If not, look at the differences, and consider whether one place is just missing a detail of the other. Either way, the decision should fall out naturally from the semantics.

            So for example, birthDate and creationDate seem similar. Are they? To answer, look at the rules they’re involved in. As in, look at the integrity constraints that mention them, and the business logic that refers to them. Today, this will necessarily depend on inspection of actual databases and middleware. (Which again, is one of my primary peeves about schema.org and any other model repository – it should tell these databases and middleware layers how these terms should be handled, not leave it up to them.) Does birthDate get looked at to compute age? Does that make sense for creationDate? If not, should it? // Does anything declare events involving an object preceding its birthDate to be invalid? If so, does that make sense for creationDate? And so on.

            By the way, this post is going to talk about reasoning a lot, and I know you started out asking about just a unified shopping interface, and I’m sorry about that, but I bring this up anyway because a universal futureproofed app for anything will have to incorporate reasoning, so…

            I likewise agree that RDF didn’t have a great temporal model, and again, that was disappointing not just because it didn’t have one, but it didn’t seem to regard it as a critical concern.

            When our company modeled time, our original used a notation that facilitated easy parsing in Java, which made sense because almost all our software was written in it, and it did a pretty good job of handling date parsing in general (this was late 1990s, so Y2K was a concern, but we were immune to it). We weakly committed to a representation of time as spans denoted by two such strings. For instance, “(Span ‘1999’ ‘2008’)” was formally a ten-year-long duration including the spans 1999 CE and 2008 CE, inclusive. It let us denote any span we wanted, including future spans, and with fairly intuitive semantics. We could easily compute durations, intersections, complements, containment, and comparisons, and intuitively forced us to draw distinctions, for example, between “strictly after” and “partly after”. It also let us compute truth about propositions during certain spans, e.g.

            (holdsIn (Span “2012 Feb 8” “2014 Aug 31”) (worksFor bob acme))

            let you meaningfully ask who Bob worked for from 2006 to 2016. And again, it also forced a programmer to specify an interpretation for that question, either “what companies did Bob work for during that entire span?” or “what companies did Bob work for any period overlapping that span?”. I think our time model would serve any requirement you’re likely to run into; you could then map existing models into that one.

            Events are a slightly different beast, since they involve not only time, but region. It probably doesn’t make sense for you to just say that WWII occurred in (Span “1939 Sep 1” “1945 Sep 2”), except for relatively crude inferences; many inferences would require knowing it was in effect in Germany, but not in, say, Texas. Past events (“did happen”) are essentially different from planned future events (“will happen”), so they shouldn’t be subsumed under Event unless you define Event to be anything assigned to a time span and place, and then define two specific subtypes.

            I also realized that we rarely have perfect knowledge of the world, and we often deal with uncertain ranges of data (most modern scholars think Plato was born between 429 and 423 BC). Clearly, we need better support for fuzzy/bayesian knowledge. Or am I just describing machine learning?

            This is where I think scoping will help you out a lot. The price of an item, its shipping status, etc. are supposed to be known things. Most online shopping knowledge will not require you to weigh heavy philosophical issues; they will just require you to incorporate more philosophy than most programmers tend to think about, if you want to program the general case.

            That said, we handled incomplete knowledge as part of the provenance problem, which was a subset of the metadata or second-order logic problem:

            (accordingTo bob (birthplace bob atlanta))
            (accordingTo carol (birthplace bob augusta))

            We had an inference engine that could digest the above, and answer questions like “where was Bob born?”, “where was Bob born, and according to whom?”, and even “what does Carol believe?” or “what do Carol and Bob disagree on?”.

            Note that this is a lot slower than reasoning over FOL propositions, but this was okay since most data like this tended to be smaller – thousands of assertions rather than billions. (And it still beat our nearest competitors, whose solutions were some form of “ask your assistants and wait a week (and hope they don’t screw up)”.)

            We could have supported Bayesian reasoning as well, but we never had a customer who needed it.

            I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if any of [my ideas] are novel. I also don’t understand why 5th generation computers failed, or why we’re not all programming in Prolog.

            Some of these ideas we had as early as 1996, and some a bit later. We actually started with a heavily modified Prolog engine (XSB), before implementing our own a few years later. Prolog is a deductive language, and permits computation you cannot do in RDBs, namely recursion, which is necessary for many graph analysis problems, and also turns out to be an elegant way to model lots of logical rules such as ancestorship.

            Most of why we aren’t all Prolog programmers (other than the counter that SQL programmers are actually closer to Prolog than they realize) is that relational algebra had about a 30-year lead to come up with all sorts of optimizations to make a lot of queries run fast. Prolog lets you answer a few more important questions, but not enough to climb that 30-year hill. And naive Prolog still has the halting problem, and was single-threaded.

            We ended up implementing an abstract threadable deductive engine called PiQUE. (I think I’m getting the case right. It was a technical paper written in the 1990s, IIRC. I haven’t been able to find it online.) We then added a great deal of optimization – cost computations, goal reordering using domain knowledge, and so on.

            But at least [schema.org’s models are] pragmatic. They’re used in the real world, they cover a good range of domains, and they’re easy to use (at the cost of a lot of weak Text data types). I initially looked for better ontologies, but 80% of links are down. I still want to create my own “better” (XKCD #927) ontologies, but not until I’ve exhausted the value of existing ones. I think http://schema.org is a good example of worse is better.

            I will have to urge you to think again. If you have access, look at how various parties implement schema.org models, all the way down to the DDL and middleware. If you can write an app that can take two independent implementations of the same schema.org model, and can pull any data from either and insert it into the data store of the other with zero errors or rejections, I will be genuinely impressed. But I will probably be able to use that app to insert data into the latter store that one would allow and the other would not, or produce a record that at least one ought to accept, but is objectively nonsensical (such as a book published before it was written, or whose later version predates its creation).

            This will matter, because if I could do it, so could any party claiming to adhere to the model. This trust problem – which occurs even if all parties are non-malicious – is another way of expressing the database impedance mismatch problem. After enough iterations, the data becomes effectively unusable – either a customer can’t rely on their supply chain because vendors have multiple definitions of some widget, or analysts can’t trust their projections because their sources use different algorithms to compute what’s supposed to be the same value. Worse, naive analysts will believe those values are alike, because schema.org told them they were.

            Every so often, we’d go looking around for better models in the wild. I was always surprised to find no one else was as far as we were. I slowly concluded that people were just running into the same semantics problem you are now, including not realizing how critical it is, and just running out of steam. The ones who grasp it seem to be mostly philosophers who aren’t interested in business.

            Let’s say the system knows this: [propositions about apples]

            This sounds like what I’d call a generic AI problem solver. Like that robot arm that has to solve Towers of Hanoi or some mock game given a list of about a dozen rules, where it has to compute a strategy. I see that as an adjacent field of study to semantic representation. The former could certainly depend on the latter for leverage, same as an online shopping app. I’m aware of a lot of research in that field, but only vaguely so.

            A state describer such as you describe would require image recognition, and while you didn’t mention it, NLU. Two additional fields of AI, of which I am a mere spectator. AFAIK, the state of the art is slightly beyond what you see in Facebook’s image tagger or Google Translate.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            For example, you could pick one type of software where companies/consumers often have different software despite all the products all doing the same thing in the abstract.

            Then you could analyze what the actual benefits are of having these separate products and whether you can (partially) achieve these with one code base.

            To solidify this idea further, my proposal:

            Choose any two existing sites, and build a site that presents a unified interface to both. To simplify it even further: two sites that have comment forums, and just display the comments the same way, while preserving commenter information, date, replies, and links to individual comments. This will keep a host of complications out of scope; you’re just dealing with blocks of text, and focusing on a unified representation as a proof of concept.

            Then add a reply interface that successfully posts to either site, in the correct place.

            Since sites AFAIK aren’t open to third party posts, a mock-representation of each site should suffice. Clearly mark any additional hooks those sites would need to provide to your UniForum.

            The next step would be to integrate a third site, and demonstrate that your underlying comment model required only a few sensible extensions.

            Given your motivations, this might not only scratch your itch… come to think of it, this might be pretty darn useful.

          • Miguel Rochefort says:

            Thanks a lot for your insights. Is there any way I can contact you in the future?

            The comment system on SlateStarCodex is bad enough (unless I just don’t understand how it works) that building a UniForum abstraction might actually be useful. The scope is small enough, and the problem simple enough, that any problem I will encounter while implementing it should reveal the potential complexity of building a Everything app.

            I will start working on it today, using Reddit, Hacker News and SlateStarCodex as backends.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            My name at gmail should reach me, if you want to share code for feedback. (I cannot in good conscience commit to a lot of time to looking at it, but I can at least say that this is an interesting enough problem to me to make me want to look every so often.)

            And if you encounter problems trying to integrate Reddit, HN, and SSC, they will hopefully be interesting enough to write an effort post here. For instance, I know Nancy Lebovitz has been long interested in a trn interface (Threaded ReadNews – probably worth you taking a look), so she might enjoy reading about your effort. Might be others.

    • Hoopdawg says:

      As people have pointed out, different programs, user interfaces, etc. exist to suit people’s individual needs. That’s good and doesn’t need fixing. What we want is giving everyone the ability to use the software they prefer. The solution are interoperability standards, with communication protocols and data formats being mutually readable between different applications. This is generally achievable in a healthy, cooperative environment – in many aspects, open source operating systems can serve as an example.

      Most commercial programs, though, phone apps in particular, have no reason to exist but their authors’ greed and desire for control over their user. All Amazon/Uber/etc. are trying to do is lock users into their service and, ideally, achieve monopoly in their niche. It is for this reason that they will work with no competitor sofware – except for the specific reason of making it easier to switch.

      It’s an system-wide economic problem you won’t be able to fix on your own. Standards only come into being by wide mutual agreement or extensive top-down regulation. I can’t imagine either happening here.

  38. Aapje says:

    Scott and/or one of the resident Word Press experts:

    Is it fairly easily doable to make the sorting user-configurable? I don’t begrudge other people their wrong preferred sorting. However, I prefer something that makes sense.

    • T82 says:

      I would second this. If we have to have one or the other, I’d prefer oldest-first. But it would be great to have a choice.

    • Alsadius says:

      Better yet, can we have upvotes and offer best-first sorting, or Reddit’s “hot” algorithm?

      • Kyle A Johansen says:

        If you would like to comment on a forum that uses a Reddit-style comment structure, then I am sure that there exists websites like that. There’s one on the tip of my tongue; begins with ‘R’, rhymes with ‘Breadit, more specifically the SSC subreddit’.

    • Winja says:

      Disqus, for all its faults, allows users to sort.

      Also, as long as we’re kvetching, trying to read SSC comments on mobile is a
      total
      n
      i
      g
      h
      t
      m
      a
      r
      e

      • CatCube says:

        I’m always baffled by why you’d try to interact with the comment section on mobile to begin with. Trying to peck out a response on the ridiculous soft keyboards that have been inflicted on all mobile platforms in recent years is even more nightmarish.

        • the ridiculous soft keyboards that have been inflicted on all mobile platforms in recent years

          Not quite all.

        • Lambert says:

          I still think we need to give chording keyboards another shot.
          Sounds like the perfect solution to the need for a small, mobile, one-handed keyboard.
          Until then, messagese > normal on-screen keyboard.

        • Bugmaster says:

          FWIW, I use SwiftKey and I like it a lot. It’s far, far from perfect, but it makes it actually feasible for me to reply to emails and comments on mobile.

          I also use Opera (for Android), which allows me to completely bypass the “mobile experience” of most sites.

        • Dan L says:

          The combination of the speed of these comments sections and my availability means that I’m typically faced with the choice of either a few lines hammered out on a break from work, or a more effortful post after the thread dies down. Mobile is terrible, but better than nothing.

        • Butlerian says:

          Because I only read SSC when I’m sat bored in the back of a lecture / meeting. If I have a desktop in front of me, I’m either at my workdesk and so have something better to do (work), or at home and so have something better to do (porn)

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      This should be possible in JavaScript so we don’t even need server-side changes — as long as you don’t mind all the comments loading and then re-ordering before your eyes.

    • CatCube says:

      I’m about ready to learn JavaScript and how to edit a page in the console so I don’t have to deal with this ass-backwards ordering.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        The page is nicely formatted which made this code really really easy.


        var tops = document.getElementsByClassName("depth-1")
        var keep = []
        var len = tops.length;
        root1 = tops[0].parentNode;
        for (ii = 0; ii < len; ii++) { var temp = root1.removeChild(tops[0]); keep.push(temp); }
        keep = keep.reverse();
        for (ii = 0; ii < len; ii++) { root1.appendChild( keep[ii] ); }

        That just reverses all the top levels each time it is run. I am probably doing something stupid by re-using data structures but it runs and, in my testing, doesn’t break anything else.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I don’t like the newest-first order because I’m generally behind and would like to push through a bunch of comments more or less in order to see what’s there. I might want newest-first when I’m mostly caught up on a post.

      I’d like user-configurable.

  39. Kyle A Johansen says:

    Those that have seen Room 243 – The ‘The Shining’ theory film – what did you think of it?

    I am not very sure – I intend to steal the consensus opinion from here – but I think it is somewhat uncomfortable as if gawking at people; the whole Kubrick fake the Moon footage especially. One particular thing about that being “‘Room No’, the only words you could get from that are ‘Moon’ and ‘Room'” ignoring stuff like ‘norm’ or ‘moor’, but perhaps that fellow actually has a good reason for ignoring ‘norm’ or ‘moor’ and obviously the film does not show us that by refusing to interrogate him, or whatever.

    There’s also the scene with the woman talking about her son’s story. What was the point of that?

    I feel like the film’s goodness is allowing us to see how others look into something and see connections. Only, the film doesn’t really explore it itself nor makes it very easy for us to explore it.

    Also, did you see a Minotaur in the ski poster?

    • saniette says:

      Film studies Professor David Bordwell argued a while back that what the people in Room 237 do isn‘t as far removed from ‚respectable‘ film criticism as it may seem.

      http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/04/07/all-play-and-no-work-room-237/

      [Room 237] handily illustrates how interpreting a movie involves certain informal reasoning routines shared by “amateur” and “professional” critics. The differences between the two camps depend largely on what cues the critic fastens on in the film, what associational patterns the critic builds up, and how strongly the critic subscribes to the professional constraints on inferences.

      Whether the cues, the patterns, and the inferences based on them seem plausible depends on what particular critical institutions have deemed worthwhile. Claims that won’t fly in mainstream or specialized cinephile publications can flourish in fandom. The purposes and commitments of these institutions may sometimes overlap, but we shouldn’t expect them to.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      No, but have you seen Pitch Perfect 237, the guide to understanding how the 2012 Anna Kendrick a cappella singing competition movie is really trying to tell us the truth about 9-11?

    • ilikekittycat says:

      I wasn’t particularly convinced by any of the reads except that guilt about the Indian genocide generally pervades American fiction unconsciously or in ways you wouldn’t expect. (But I had previously noted that sort of stuff so I don’t know if I would have been convinced if Room 237 was the only thing I’d seen making that case)

  40. Sanchez says:

    I like the newest first ordering. I would always scroll to the bottom and read the newest posts first anyway. With newest first I no longer have to do this, and I’m also saved the annoyance of having to search for parent comments.

    It always seemed like the first posts weren’t as interesting. They were often from regular commenters and had similar formats. It seemed like you got more variety as you got to the later posts. (This could all be in my head.)

  41. T82 says:

    Does anyone have any links to a credible defense of George HW Bush and his administration? With his passing away a little over a month ago, I’ve seen and heard a lot of appreciation for him that I don’t really understand. One big reason for that is that I don’t know much about his presidency other than Gulf War I and “No New Taxes” (often cited as causing his loss in the 1992 election), and even then my understanding of the context and details of those things is very limited.

    I would be particularly interested in an examination of his foreign policy, including Gulf War I, since that’s what he seems most famous for. Links would be appreciated, or if you’d like to make the case yourself, be my guest.

    • ilikekittycat says:

      Rough Outline from memory:
      -Invaded Panama, typical poor US relations with any number of Latin American countries
      -More or less brought Poland into the Western/NATO sphere of influence
      -More skeptical of Israel than most who hold the office, including Obama. Told Congress not to approve money to Israel if it was going to be used for Jewish settlement of the West Bank
      -Worked with our allies in good faith to advance environmental accords
      -Presided over the end of the Cold War. Condemned the August 1991 coup in Moscow but mostly stayed out of the way, seeing the end was coming fast. Genuinely thought we would see a “peace dividend” and drawing down of the MIC, but ultimately got drawn into Team America World Police things like Somalia and taking sides in the breakdown of Yugoslavia that would pave the way for the era of Clinton imperialism
      -Probably the last president to maintain the old, skeptical stance toward China. Saw them as a useful balance against the Soviets but not someone we were going to have cozy relations with
      -Had neocons in his orbit but was ultimately smart enough to listen to Colin Powell and the adults in the room and limit our mission in Iraq to something winnable (which of course also had the effect of leaving the Kurds out to dry, but that’s par for the course)
      -Free market enthusiast, strongly promoted NAFTA and trade with Japan in an era where many average Americans were skeptical (Japan would end up not dominating the world as assumed but NAFTA remains controversial)

    • Jo says:

      Here’s not a defense, but the opposite, in German (Google should be able to translate it): https://www.heise.de/tp/news/Auf-den-Hund-gekommen-4244823.html
      I have not much knowledge about him, just skimmed that article when it was published and thought it might increase your information base.

    • Walter says:

      I’ve always felt like the most important thing about his presidency is that the Berlin Wall fell under his watch, and he let East Germany and West Germany unify and be part of NATO.

      • albatross11 says:

        +1

        I think if the US government had strongly objected, Germany might not have re-unified.

        • EchoChaos says:

          Which is an interesting thought experiment. Two independent Germanies at peace with each other and both capitalist, but not unified.

          Would Europe be more or less stable and peaceful?

          • Protagoras says:

            It seems less would be the safe bet for almost any change you care to name, insofar as Europe at present is absolutely extraordinary in its stability and peacefulness by historical standards.

          • Aapje says:

            @EchoChaos

            Right now you have (political) friction within Germany along pre-unification lines. If separate, East-Germany would presumably have more Eastern-European policies, like desiring less immigration. It would then still get into conflicts with the EU over this, just like many of the Eastern-European nations.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Protagoras Why would that be the assumption? Having a separate Czechia and Slovakia has been far better for both.

            @Aapje I suspect that’s true, although the humor of Germany allying with Poland against France in terms of policy is pretty good for me.

            There would be conflicts with the EU, but those have been pretty peaceful so far, and it would reduce internal German conflicts.

    • John Schilling says:

      It’s not clear how much credit Bush I deserves for the end of the Cold War, but it happened on his watch and he didn’t fuck it up. That’s huge. A conflict that had two generations of Americans fearing that the only possible futures were subjugation to foreign tyranny or bloody apocalypse, and we won an essentially bloodless victory. George could have fucked it up. He didn’t.

      Also, he united approximately the entire world behind the principle “Nation shall not conquer nation”, and made it stick for at least twenty years.

    • Snailprincess says:

      I kind of liked this take. . It’s not exactly a glowing endorsement, but it’s at least nominally positive. The short version is that he deserves some credit for staying calm during the fall of the Soviet Union. Our response to that could have made things a lot worse.

  42. Mark V Anderson says:

    This comment is a very culture war type comment. But I am asking a serious question here about journalism, and I request serious answers, and not rants one way or the other.

    Earlier this week there was this article about James Watson in the New York Times.

    I think the journalists at the Times are very good at what they do, which makes me a bit perplexed that the scientists they quote are so one-sided that they give the impression that the other side doesn’t even exist from a scientific point of view.

    James Watson was quoted as follows:

    In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.”

    Responses of other scientists are as follows:

    “I reject his views as despicable,” Dr. Lander wrote to Broad scientists. “They have no place in science, which must welcome everyone. I was wrong to toast, and I’m sorry.’’

    (although this one doesn’t say what this guy is a scientist of, so maybe he doesn’t know the applicable science?

    In response to questions from The Times, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”

    Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate’’ statement would be based.

    This quote is the worst, indicating a genetics scientist that has no understanding of statistics:

    But Mary-Claire King, a leading geneticist at the University of Washington who knows Dr. Watson well and is not in the film, suggested that the racially homogeneous culture of science also played a role in shaping Dr. Watson’s misconceptions.

    “If he knew African-Americans as colleagues at all levels, his present view would be impossible to sustain,’’ Dr. King said.

    It is my understanding that the comments made by Watson match the science pretty well, if a bit exaggerated. And yet the New York Times couldn’t find a scientist to say that Watson was saying pretty much what the data shows. Watson did imply the IQ differences are genetic, and also that the differences are great enough to keep Africa from ever advancing, both of which are unknown, but certainly are serious issues and not crack-pottery. I would think the average intelligence scientist would give such answers.

    I think the Times sincerely wants to report the truth. So why do they get this uniformity of untruth:
    1) Do they have a certain set of scientists in their rolodexes that are in the Times’ bubble and so will reliably answer how the Times wants them to?
    2) Perhaps no scientist wants to go on the record defending Watson, because then THEY will be the ones to be disparaged?
    3) Perhaps the journalists aren’t really calling the scientists to get the answers, but just using them as justifications for their own biases? Perhaps the article was mostly written before the scientists were even called, and the scientists are only there for quotes? I hate to think this about journalists, but maybe.

    I suppose all three of these are true to some extent. The thing is, I do not believe that journalists want to publish untruth. They think of themselves as the good guys. Do journalists see these problems themselves?

    • The Nybbler says:

      think the Times sincerely wants to report the truth.

      I think you’re mistaken.

      2) Perhaps no scientist wants to go on the record defending Watson, because then THEY will be the ones to be disparaged?

      Absolutely. After seeing what happened to Watson, nobody’s sticking their neck out without good reason.

      • David Shaffer says:

        Exactly. There is literally no reason to suspect that the Times (or any other newspaper) has an interest in reporting the truth. What would they gain from doing so? Reporting the truth costs them subscriptions from people who prefer to reinforce tribal beliefs and earns them opprobrium from people who’s beliefs are challenged. What possible benefit could honest reporting give them? Support from people who value truth over politics? That’s not a wise position to take in the ancestral environment, so unsurprisingly, such people are vanishingly rare. Personal satisfaction from integrity? Anyone who had integrity would be outcompeted by journalists who didn’t. The idea that the Times is sincere should not even occur to you as a hypothesis without evidence that frankly doesn’t exist.

        • Tim van Beek says:

          Does this apply to all media and all topics or only to a certain subset? If the latter, which one and how can one know?

          • quanta413 says:

            All media obviously although I would say media and humans in general typically have an interest in not being too obviously wrong. I doubt outright lying is a typical failure mode either. Rather, they are more interested in some particular set of morals or ideals so things that jar against that squick them out and they will bend things around.

            There is a slight partial solution in reading a more diverse media all the way out to some crackpotty things, but what helps more is reading things not typically thought of as the media. If you know enough things about science or business or just whatever a lot of bullshit is much more obvious. Unfortunately, you can only really be confident about the bullshit in a few things because it’s hard to know enough.

          • David Shaffer says:

            All media and all topics. Remember Gell-Mann Amnesia? An expert who encounters a news article on his field will quickly notice that it is unmitigated tripe. However, most people forget this when dealing with topics outside of their area of expertise, assuming that the news must be decently accurate (hence the amnesia).

            Of course, the strength of the effect will vary. Where there’s no politically correct “right answer” the news obviously has less reason to twist the facts, and where there’s a greater chance of getting independently checked there’s more incentive to report accurately.

            Basically the hatchet job on Dr. Watson is on one end of the spectrum, while reporting baseball scores is on the other.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          There is literally no reason to suspect that the Times (or any other newspaper) has an interest in reporting the truth.

          Integrity? I know it’s fashionable to assume no one has integrity, but I don’t believe it. I grew up in and still pretty much live in a Blue bubble. People who become journalists tend to have a pretty high ideological quotient. They believe that they are doing the most important thing in the world. And I think what they think they are delivering to people is the truth. So I find it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me when it is clear they are doing the opposite.

          Anyone who had integrity would be outcompeted by journalists who didn’t.

          Now this is a fascinating possibility. Kind of a Public Choice effect as applied to journalism. So is telling the truth contra-indicated for selling newspapers to the intellectual elite that buys NYT? It is true that it is much harder to read a journal that regularly tells one things that greatly contradict one’s worldview. And I suppose the idea that the races have different IQs on average is very hard to accept by people who have been taught since babyhood that such thoughts are only for those who are evil, as 10240 says below.

          This only makes sense if it is true that NYT subscribers will reject the paper if it doesn’t have this bias. I think most readers of the Times are looking for the truth, but perhaps only to the extent it stays within the Overton window. I need to think about this some more.

          • albatross11 says:

            If you live in a bubble of people who all believe X, and you’ve spent your life being told that all right-thinking people believe X, then it’s easy to convince yourself that X is true. I assume this happens to most reporters who report on this stuff.

            Suppose you overcome that, and come to believe, based on careful weighing of the evidence, that X is false. You also know that writing stories saying not-X will end or severely curtail your career as a journalist. My guess is that if you have much integrity, you stop working on that kind of story, or you try writing a “maybe X is not 100% right” story and your editor kills it and tells you not to write about that subject anymore.

            And finally, if you’re doing a story about a Nobel-prize-winning scientist whose career was destroyed for claiming that X is false to a news reporter, it’s not exactly the biggest surprise in the world that it’s hard for you to find other scientists (presumably less immune to firing than a Nobel prizewinner) who want to tell you that, yeah, there’s some evidence kinda leaning toward not-X, and so maybe X is actually not 100% true. That would take a lot of trust.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            So is telling the truth contra-indicated for selling newspapers to the intellectual elite that buys NYT? It is true that it is much harder to read a journal that regularly tells one things that greatly contradict one’s worldview.

            I notice that there exist articles which change one’s worldview, and some of them do so in jarring, uncomfortable ways, and some do so in comfortable, non-threatening ways.

            The latter include, for example, Scott’s link summaries. I find them fun. The stakes are low. Sometimes they appeal to deeper beliefs. (Oooh, yeah, I always knew Dr. Bunkowitz was talking out of his ass about that SSRI alternative!)

            One could imagine an article that gets people thinking critically about IQ and race. I think it would be really hard, though. You would need a journalist capable of writing in a mainstream appealing tone (i.e. probably not Charles Murray), and capable of steelmanning both sides (exceedingly rare in general, IMO).

            I actually don’t want an article about IQ and race, though. That feels too much like trying out a untried new way of reporting, by hitting it as hard as you can. Instead, I’d be thrilled to get this type of treatment for more mundane issues, like whether a trade tariff on car parts would be good for US auto workers, or whether it’s worthwhile to invest in Falcon Heavy, or the case for and against some high-profile political candidate. The closest I see to that are selected pieces in The New Yorker, Derek Lowe’s In The Pipeline, Dan Carlin’s Common Sense, Michael Totten at WorldAffairsJournal, Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, Megan McArdle at WaPo, and of course, Scott.

          • David Shaffer says:

            People who become journalists tend to have a pretty high ideological quotient.

            Exactly. They’re ideologues, and they believe that promoting their ideology is the most important thing in the world. They don’t even have to consciously think “and now I will lie so people are fooled into believing my worldview”, they just have to not look too closely at their arguments (or at all), and not bother with the other side. This is human nature already, and when your bubble is telling you that you’re right about everything and questioning it makes you a horrible person, people tend to let little things like integrity, sanity and decency slide.

            So is telling the truth contra-indicated for selling newspapers to the intellectual elite that buys NYT? It is true that it is much harder to read a journal that regularly tells one things that greatly contradict one’s worldview. And I suppose the idea that the races have different IQs on average is very hard to accept by people who have been taught since babyhood that such thoughts are only for those who are evil, as 10240 says below.

            Pretty much. Positing an IQ difference is an outgroup shibboleth for the left, and it doesn’t exactly help that most people historically who posited such a difference committed a horrifying amount of evil. Dr. Watson set himself up as Scary Other Monkey-the fact that he might be right, and that if he’s wrong the reasonable response is “these statistics suggest otherwise”, not “how dare you; you’re stupid and evil!!!”, is far over these people’s heads.

            In the ancestral environment, caring about political truth, about actual facts in politicized matters or about which policies would actually benefit people, was a crippling handicap. Being right was no consolation when you were losing status for disagreeing with the highest status member of the tribe, or being thrown out of the tribe outright! As such, political integrity is a rare condition, probably due to abnormally strong curiosity. There are people who have it (Scott is a great example; he’s consistently interested in truth over winning debates or stroking his ego), but not enough people to make an industry.

          • albatross11 says:

            Can you point out what horrifying evils were done by people who posited an IQ difference between blacks and whites?

          • albatross11 says:

            As best I can tell, coercive eugenics programs were pretty widespread in a lot of NW Europe as well as the US and Canada. I don’t think they had a lot to do with concerns of race and IQ, though.

            ISTM that the bad idea that enabled this horror (which isn’t anywhere in the top 100 for the 20th century, but is still pretty nasty) is the idea that the state should have the power to decide who is allowed to reproduce and who should be forcibly sterilized.

            It’s true that recognizing (and indeed, seriously overestimating) heritability of some traits like intelligence and criminality and mental illness was part of the justification used for eugenics. (Until you realized that these things might be heritable, you wouldn’t have had any idea that eugenics was even possible.) But if you were trying to suppress or taboo information to avoid this kind of horror, it seems like you would have to suppress knowledge of heritability of some kinds of intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses. What would the world look like if that had been done? Would it be a better world now?

          • David Shaffer says:

            @albatross11

            Can you point out what horrifying evils were done by people who posited an IQ difference between blacks and whites?

            Slavery, Jim Crow etc. It’s worth noting that these acts were perpetrated by people who believed in IQ differences, but not because of that belief per se; rather the motivating belief was that their racial outgroups were morally inferior (also profitable, in the case of slavery). There were also people who believed in racial IQ differences while opposing such atrocities (Abraham Lincoln for instance both helped ban slavery in the U.S. and believed strongly in racial gaps), and people who weren’t as concerned with such differences, yet committed atrocities regardless (for instance much of Nazi anti-Semitism was “they’re not us and they’ll attack us” rather than “they’re dumb”).

            However, distinguishing between belief in a moral gap and belief in an intellectual one is not something many people are capable of; thus the conflation of the IQ gap hypothesis (a scientific claim like any other, which might be right or wrong and can only be addressed with data) with bigotry (a moral claim which can be shown to be wrong from first principles).

          • albatross11 says:

            The first IQ test was invented in the early 1900s, so I’m pretty sure slavery wasn’t justified in terms of IQ statistics. Jim Crow laws are, I think, mostly a product of reconstruction. I don’t think they have much to do with IQ statistics–someone, somewhere must have argued for keeping Jim Crow laws around on that basis at some point, but realistically, the driver had nothing to do with IQ statistics. If the IQ statistics had turned out the other way, or had been suppressed, I doubt it would have had any effect at all on Jim Crow laws.

            You’re talking about a related idea–the claim that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites. I think that was used to justify slavery and Jim Crow, though I don’t think it was necessary to justify it. In 1890 in Georgia, you did not actually need some subtle intellectual argument to convince most whites to want blacks kept on the bottom. That was the default belief, present, not because someone said blacks were intellectually inferior, but for the same reasons that ethnic hatreds and the desire to keep all of “us” above all of “them” have existed in a million other places.

            The motivation for slavery was straightforward economics–tobacco, cotton, and sugar were profitable things to grow, and they became more profitable when your employees didn’t have to be paid a wage and weren’t allowed to quit. Over time, the economies of a bunch of Southern states became dependent on slave labor, which added a “too big to fail” aspect to the arguments for keeping slavery–even Southerners who agreed that slavery was morally terrible feared a collapse of Southern society without it.

            But I don’t think there’s any sense in which claims of intellectual inferiority drove slavery. Without those claims, it’s not like the Southerners or the owners of West Indies sugar plantations were going to yield up their slaves.

            Defenders of slavery tried to use these claims of intellectual inferiority to justify slavery. But that’s very different than the claims being a cause of slavery’s existence.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      You might get clearer answers to this if you ask it in a CW-friendly thread. Hint: “I think the Times sincerely wants to report the truth”. What makes you think this?

      “They think of themselves as the good guys.” Everybody thinks of themselves as the good guys. You and I think we’re the good guys, and it is both evidence of this claim and a consequence of it that we would want to report the truth. But you are typical-minding if you think that’s true of everybody. I’m not saying they want to print falsehoods, just that “the truth” is not their top priority.

      Remember that their motto is “All the news that’s fit to print”. Compare that to “survival of the fittest” and remember that fitness is highly context-dependent.

      • This is now a CW friendly thread.

      • Tim van Beek says:

        What makes you think this?

        Because truthfulnes is essential for a good reputation?

        • Doctor Mist says:

          Because truthfulnes is essential for a good reputation?

          What makes you think this?

          I mean, seriously. Watson himself is surely not lying about what he believes, and his reputation is in the toilet simply for stating it forthrightly. The converse is the worrier who might privately believe Watson is correct, but who sees speaking that truth as more harmful than a pious avowal that he is wrong.

          If you want something less inflammatory, how about a reporter who suppresses a discovery that seriously affects national security?

          The free press is a good thing, but it’s not rocket science. Truth is not its primary virtue, nor is it the main criterion by which its works are judged.

          (Hell, even in science, truth is arguably merely an instrumental value. “Shut up and calculate!”)

          • albatross11 says:

            Note that the NYT suppressed a story on massive illegal wiretapping until after the 2004 presidential election. This seemed extra-perverse to me–the main social value of revealing the illegal wiretapping is that you give the voters a chance to respond to it.

            Also, the NYT acted more-or-less as a propaganda organ for the Bush administration in the runup to the Iraq invasion.

            Neither of these look much like the actions of impartial truth-seekers.

        • quanta413 says:

          Because truthfulnes is essential for a good reputation?

          Not being a totally blatant liar is essential for a good reputation, but being maximally truthful would be pretty stupid. Humans tell clear little lies all the time out of politeness. They form huge fabrics of myth and group identities too.

          The truth can be dangerous. But I think although there can be danger to truth, it’s usually vastly overestimated.

          • albatross11 says:

            Yeah, if the truth you’re thinking of telling is the names of undercover DEA agents infiltrating the Zetas or the recipe for making a civilization-collapsing plague in your garage, that’s dangerous truth you should suppress. But that’s not remotely what we’re talking about here.

        • David Shaffer says:

          Because truthfulnes is essential for a good reputation?

          Apparently it is not. Dr. Lander managed to say with a straight face that Dr. Watson must be wrong because “science must include everyone,” and the Times reported this as a serious critique rather than a poor attempt at comedy. Even if it turns out that Watson is wrong, there’s a conceivable world in which he’s right. And in that world, you can still say “science must be inclusive”. Therefore, that’s not a counterargument to Watson’s belief in IQ differences; it doesn’t even resemble one. Presenting it as such is a boldfaced lie that relies on tribalism to be taken seriously for even a moment.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.”

      White man savior complex.

      What are these social policies, and why is he certain that they won’t work for people of below average intelligence? Below average people are literally a significant minority in every single nation, and every single race, on the Earth.

      So if they won’t work for Africans who happen to be below our average, then why would they work for ‘our people’ who happen to be below our average?

      And if they won’t work for our people who are below our average, then in the long run they won’t work at all.

      This is basic extrapolatory logic.

      • BlindKungFuMaster says:

        He is talking about developmental aid working out like the Marshall plan: You give a people money and they use it to build up the infrastructure and economy, and bam!, you’ve got a peaceful, technologically and economically advanced, liberal democracy. (I’m not saying the Marshall plan actually did contribute all that much, but it’s a popular story.)

        So the argument is on the nation level. People below average intelligence in a developed country still get to live in a developed country, because there are significantly smarter people around taking care of complicated stuff. If this smart fraction is largely missing however …

      • Kyle A Johansen says:

        Its perfectly consistent to believe that a nation needs an intelligent class for a society to function, and that not* every individual needs to be in that class.

        Imagine if all our social policies were based on ‘their knowledge of civil engineering is the same of ours’, then your critique applies equally well to that as it does to Watson’s comment.

        You also do not need to have belief in ‘our social policies’ to believe that we have them, and that they won’t work.

        *edited in later thanks to Aapje

        • Aapje says:

          Its perfectly consistent to believe that a nation needs an intelligent class for a society to function, and that every individual needs to be in that class.

          I assume that you forgot a ‘NOT’ here.

    • metacelsus says:

      Whether or not his views on the genetics of race are true, Watson is a very narcissistic, egotistical person and has alienated many in the field, starting as early as the 1960s. See Crick’s letter to Watson here: https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBBKN.pdf

      It’s not surprising that many scientists are willing to speak against him.

      • Dan L says:

        This is probably relevant. By Six Degrees rules I’m three away from Watson, and I can attest that was already close enough to whiff some dirty laundry.

        • quanta413 says:

          While I believe what you are saying is true, I don’t think it explains much. A lot of scientists are narcissistic and egotistical. And pricks to boot. Especially the famous ones. From a distance Watson looks further out on the curve, but I doubt if he was nicer he’d get many defenders.

          Oppenheimer had many defenders and the guy was a nut who tried to poison his own tutor, tried to run away with his friend’s wife, and just generally was unstable and immoral. It’s somewhat lucky that someone so unstable and with such strong communist sympathies didn’t betray U.S. interests to the Soviets. Granted, Oppenheimer was also very brilliant and did a lot of good work. But then again, so did Watson.

          Oppenheimer was a sucker for causes that other scientists tended to be sympathetic to though which seems to have helped his reputation.

          EDIT: I’m not sure if Watson is a sucker or not or in what way precisely since the quotes are too short on their own to get a really solid idea, but it’s interesting to me how little it took to destroy Watson.

          • Dan L says:

            Ah, let me try that again – I’m not making a claim as to how personally distasteful Watson might be (and I’m certainly not comparing him to others), I’m making the direct observation that badmouthing him to uninvolved parties was apparently common in academic circles. Now one could go two levels deep and speculate as to why that might be (and why it might or might not be justified), but as a first level analysis it’s not surprising to find a dearth of experts defending him even before the topic is considered.

          • quanta413 says:

            Badmouthing jerks to uninvolved parties isn’t that rare in my experience. Usually jerks who had a lot of success have some defenders. What’s interesting is how quickly and totally Watson was deserted. That’s what I mean by your observation doesn’t explain much.

            Because usually even if you are terrible to lots of people, doing something big and winning a prize for it and running a large lab/corporation/whatever will leave you with enough power that you don’t go down like a wet sack of grain.

          • John Schilling says:

            doing something big and winning a prize for it and running a large lab/corporation/whatever will leave you with enough power that you don’t go down like a wet sack of grain.

            Watson hasn’t won any prizes or run any large labs since 1994, or possibly 2003 depending on his role at CSHL. As we’ve seen with e.g. Harvey Weinstein, the immunity provided by past fame and power is not everlasting

      • albatross11 says:

        Yeah, pretty much everyone who has met Watson talks about what a huge prick he is. Including his defenders when the original news story about his comments about African average IQ came out. Basically every one of them said something starting with “Jim Watson is a huge asshole, but….”

        • Cyril Burt was in some ways a parallel case–a very prominent person in his field who a lot of people in the field disliked. But it was only after he died that he got attacked–for a while successfully, although the outcome seems to have partly reversed later.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Watson is a very narcissistic, egotistical person and has alienated many in the field, starting as early as the 1960s

        Oh I didn’t know this. That certainly makes it easier for him to be hung out to dry.

    • BlindKungFuMaster says:

      On the one hand I am inclined to be charitable. I don’t think the average Times journalist knows that pure environmentalists don’t really have a leg to stand on. Journalists are not scientists.

      On the other hand none of these articles mentions any of the pertinent facts, like the big and persistent IQ gaps in the US and how these explain the biggest part of economic differences, but conversely cannot be explained by parental SES. So I really wonder what research for such an article looks like.

      • albatross11 says:

        More to the point, as far as I can tell, the NYT *never* notes any of that stuff. They either don’t know the most basic things about race and IQ, or have decided not to mention it, or have decided it’s all lies from evil racists. This is just as true when they report an education story about selective schools in NYC, where for reasons nobody can untangle, black kids are way underrepresented and Asian kids are way overrepresented.

        My best guess is that they’ve decided, perhaps as an editorial policy, that this is an area of knowledge/set of facts which is “not fit to print”–that openly discussing it would be so horrible that it’s better to omit those facts even when they’re enormously and obviously relevant to the story they’re discussing.

        • johan_larson says:

          I bet it’s a combination of factors. First, in liberal company it’s unseemly to “punch down” by blaming those who have been mistreated by others. And US blacks have certainly been mistreated. Second, the entire field of intelligence research has been tainted by crappy pseudo-scientific research from the early twentieth century to the point that someone who doesn’t like its conclusions now can easily be skeptical of it.

          • albatross11 says:

            Compared to most psychology, I’d say intelligence research has probably been less plagued by pseudoscientific research. I’ll see your “using factor analysis to get a model parameter and assuming it means something real and essential” and raise you an id, an ego, and a superego.

          • They’re perfectly willing to punch down, as long as it’s the “right” people.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I really despise the terms “punch up” and “punch down.” It is impossible to punch up. “Power” is that which lets you punch without getting punched back. If you are punching (and not immediately getting clobbered even harder right back), you are only ever punching down.

          • albatross11 says:

            How powerful some person or group is seems to have only a little correlation with how prudent it is to “punch” them verbally[1]. To use a trivial example, Malcolm Gladwell and Nassim Taleb are probably people with comparable amounts of power in any meaningful sense (NNT has more money, MG has more cultural reach), but NNT tends to verbally punch back a lot harder than Gladwell does. Empirically, publishing mean things about Peter Thiel is bad idea, relative to publishing mean things about George Soros or the Koch Brothers. You’d be well advised to be careful verbally punching Israel in US media/culture, but can probably get away with verbally punching Germany or Japan in relative safety. (Punch away at Russia, but probably try to avoid pissing Putin off enough for him to be willing to risk an international incident to have you die of Polonium poisoning.) And so on.

            Of course, none of this has anything to do with morality. “Punching up/punching down” is inevitably an excuse rolled out when someone points out that you’re saying awful, unfair things about someone else, and especially when you’re violating rules of discourse you previously held to be very important, like not using gender or sexual orientation as insults. Of course, it’s different if you’re punching the right people down. OTOH, those same journalists are in practice pretty careful about not “punching up” on someone who’s likely to be able to avenge himself. Few journalists were interested in “punching up” at Weinstein, even though his behavior was apparently pretty widely known. I mean, principles are fine and good, but I’ve gotta still be able to find work in this town!

            [1] Actually punching people tends to get you arrested or beaten up, but almost everyone actually uses this phrase to mean saying bad things about someone, making fun of them, calling them names, etc.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            I really despise the terms “punch up” and “punch down.” It is impossible to punch up.

            Yes true. Like “speaking truth to power.” Every time I’ve seen it, it’s been a comment about a powerful person talking about a much denigrated institution, that is one with little power.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Yes, the new Congresswoman who was in the news for saying “impeach the motherfucker” wrt Trump defended herself by saying she “spoke truth to power.” Except the truth that Trump has committed any impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors is in no way proven, and is in fact highly unlikely. And as a sitting member of congress, she’s powerful, with the power to impeach. Certainly more impeachment power than I have. So in fact she’s speaking power to (almost certainly) truth.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            “Impossible” is putting it a bit strongly– Timothy McVeigh was certainly punching up. (It would admittedly be less easy to support that conclusion if he hadn’t gotten punched back even harder.)

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            If we’re getting into literal punching (and as you said, McVeigh’s not a good example) what is?

            Was the guy who punched Richard Spencer punching up or punching down? The media (social and otherwise) either outright praised him or penned apologetics.

    • Aapje says:

      @Mark V Anderson

      Watson did imply the IQ differences are genetic, and also that the differences are great enough to keep Africa from ever advancing

      Actually, the quote by Watson that you presented does neither. A perfectly reasonably reading of Watson’s comment can be that he believes that the current circumstances in Africa prevent Africans from developing their IQ sufficiently and that the social policies don’t address these and thus prevent (sufficient) African development. Note that Africa has rapid population growth, which seems unsustainable. So the gloomy prospects don’t have to refer to indefinite stagnation, but can refer to insufficient development to lower birth rates in time and/or provide enough jobs & economic growth, causing one or more major crises, like war, revolution, large scale migration to unwilling places, etc.

      Of course, one can only speculate, because part of the CW, especially on this topic, is that people are often unwilling to actually ask the questions to figure out what someone means exactly; preferring to apply their stereotypes and prejudices instead, to tell everyone what the person must have meant and why this straw man is wrong.

      • albatross11 says:

        Okay, but suppose he intended exactly what Marc thinks he intended. Suppose he’s really claiming that sub-Saharan Africa will remain underdeveloped because its people have lower IQs than other countries for genetic reasons.

        Now, that’s a claim of fact. It may be right or wrong, and I don’t think anyone has enough data to say for certain[1].

        So why is his saying such a thing a reason to hound him from his job? As best I can tell, the reasoning is that this is such an offensive and socially destructive statement that it should be suppressed regardless of whether or not it is true, and that the question should not even be investigated. This reflects that editorial I linked awhile back by Megan McArdle, asserting that since scientists are human and have biases, they mustn’t be allowed to look into such topics for fear they’ll get the wrong answers[2].

        But let’s imagine for the moment that I want to make correct predictions about what policies will and won’t work even more than I want the Great and Good at the NYT to think well of me. Then, it seems like I should really want the answer to that question of fact, because it will help me make better predictions and thus better decisions. If I want the World Bank or the Gates Foundation to use their vast resources intelligently, it seems like I should want them to know the answer to that question, so they do the most good in the world.

        There is a substantial chunk of our intellectual class proposing ignorance as a policy for making the best possible decisions. It’s really hard to imagine this working out well.

        [1] The genetic basis of intelligence is an active area of research, but as best I can tell, it’s nowhere near being able to answer this question. And economic development–which countries get rich, which stay poor–is extremely messy and not well-understood.

        [2] Perhaps we should publish an Index of forbidden books and research topics. You know, just to keep everyone on the same page.

        • Aapje says:

          There is a substantial chunk of our intellectual class proposing ignorance as a policy for making the best possible decisions.

          Not for all decisions. They just have very strong taboos, because of their great recognition of how certain beliefs can get out of hand, while not recognizing that extremist beliefs in the other direction can similarly get out of hand greatly.

          However, even at the NYT, some are realizing that while shaming people can make them shut up, it’s not necessarily very convincing.

          • albatross11 says:

            There’s something really interesting about this article: It starts with the conclusions it prefers for political/social reasons, and then discusses how some scientific results don’t support those conclusions, and this is seen as a problem to be solved. This seems like an ass-backwards way to understand the world.

            Consider the perspective of a similarly-placed thinker in 1940 w.r.t. the claim that smoking causes cancer. Saying this upsets a hell of a lot of people who both enjoy smoking and who are addicted and can’t manage to quit. If it were believed, huge and important industries would probably collapse, and the economies of many Southern states would take a terrible hit. And it kinda reminds us all of prohibition and of the puritan killjoys who wanted to ban drinking, smoking, dancing, etc.

            The only problem is, smoking actually *does* cause cancer. If we’d had a society-wide fight to shut down that message, with peoples’ careers ruined and people shouted down when trying to speak in public, the result would have been a few million more people dying of lung cancer.

        • Bamboozle says:

          On the one hand i agree that we shouldn’t forbid study into any area or the publishing of truth.

          On the other hand i want to ask what the point of researching it is? It’s like trying to research the extent to which your girlfriend’s trousers make her look fat. What’s the point? The answer isn’t really going to help discussion and the ultimate effect isn’t going to mean all that much in the grand scheme of things.

          They should be allowed to research it for sure, but we should also allow them to be ridiculed for doing so.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Because it greatly affects policy.

            If the biggest reason that blacks lag behind whites in America is the lack of some material thing, then a policy of giving them that material thing could fix the gap.

            If it’s purely cultural, then a substantial cultural program can be put in place (don’t get divorced! Don’t have premarital sex! etc.)

            But if it’s genetic, then the best we can do is try to moderate the effects and do the best we can.

            Same with Africa as a continent. If the problem with Africa is the same problem with Asia in the 1950s (communism and the ravages of war), then removing those problems can make Africa boom. If the problem is that Africans have a genetic IQ average of 80, then removing those problems won’t make Africa boom.

          • Kyle A Johansen says:

            “and the ultimate effect isn’t going to mean all that much in the grand scheme of things.” could be said about anything in biology.

            Although I agree with EchoChaos that it might affect policy, to my mind the main problem is that the false dogma is already affecting policy and people’s livelihoods.

            For example schools, when you rule out natural intelligence and the falsifiable falsehoods then you are left with a mass-white conspiracy – and academia sure aren’t shy in cheer-leading that – and to my mind ‘those people have a bell-curve slightly to the left’ is a much safer conclusion that ‘those people are actively conspiring to destroy your life’.

          • albatross11 says:

            Bamboozle:

            First, Watson’s comment was about a practical issue for development policy–whether we can expect sub-Saharan African countries to develop into first-world economies. If you’re thinking about aid programs, development grants, foreign policy, etc., you should care about whether or not he’s right, because it changes what you should do.

            Second, scientists investigate a lot of stuff that you might find frivolous or not very worthwhile. Some of that stuff turns out to be important later, some doesn’t, but we do not, as a society, generally bash on people for doing research in areas that seem unlikely to pay off in practical terms. If you only object to “frivolous” research that threatens your existing beliefs, you’re engaging in an isolated demand for rigor (or maybe for relevance of research). ISTM that puts you in the same place as a fundamentalist who’s okay with research on evolution of flies and bacteria, but demands an end to research on human origins because all that research challenges his most prized beliefs.

            Third, it’s hard to find anyone who actually thinks research into the black/white performance or IQ gap should actually be forbidden. They want to forbid some hypotheses and some answers, regardless of the data. You don’t get shouted down by an angry mob for presenting your work on stereotype threat or structural racism as explanations for the performance gap. Only *some* explanations are unacceptable.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            It’s like trying to research the extent to which your girlfriend’s trousers make her look fat. What’s the point?

            Perhaps the research could lead to the development of trousers that make her look less fat.

    • albatross11 says:

      Mark:

      The interesting question to ask here is, are there any circumstances in which the NYT would have given any kind of defense for his position? If they called 10 scientists and 2 offered to give an off-the-record defense of Watson’s position, would they have published it? My guess is no–they would have decided that this news wasn’t fit to print.

      Now, if you see the NYT’s job as being “tell people what they should believe,” this is reasonable. But if you think their job is to inform you of the best available picture of the world, that’s not so great.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Yes I think informing of the best available picture of the world is their job. And I suspect the journalists at the Times would agree, which is why I am confused and wrote this post.

    • SaiNushi says:

      Journalists write the article. Editors strike out things to make the article say what they want it to. So, often, the journalists write a well-reasoned, balanced article, and the editors strike out enough to make one side look like idiots and the other side look like saints.

      Most journalists are interested in the truth. Most editors just want to sell papers.

      • knockknock says:

        That’s right about editors, though not just “striking things out” after the fact but more crucially sending the reporter out in the first place with a specific narrative to fill instead of an open mind. Of course there ARE good editors who will tell the reporter, “Wait a sec, you’re sayng that EVERYONE says the same thing here? Go find someone who doesn’t.”

        There also are situations (such as this one with Amy Harmon) where a reporter has been following a story or an issue for quite some time, and this can be a double-edged sword — as the reporter becomes more knowledgeable he or she might also become more biased or at least more emotionally invested. (They might even have plans to write a book or somehow leverage their knowledge).

        A reporter brought in cold on a subject might be more neutral, more disinterested or more balanced just to play it safe on an issue he knows he doesn’t really grasp. But you are sacrificing expertise there.

        Let’s take a simple example: You have a reporter covering the police beat. If he becomes too buddy-buddy with the cops over the years — or too cynical and confrontational toward the police — then you might want to bring in someone fresh.

      • Dan L says:

        I guess I prefer the model where journalism is the result of two largely homogonous loci of control over the model where it’s the result of one monolithic power center. Not sure it’d make for a good survey question, but it’d be interesting to see where exactly everyone here puts the bounds on “journalism” and “mainstream media”.

        • albatross11 says:

          I’d prefer many loci to two loci. The world’s richer for the Glenn Greenwalds and Matt Taibbis and Steve Sailers and John Derbyshires and Radley Balkos who aren’t exactly on one of the two approved teams, but who instead discuss things from their own perspective and understanding.

          The two-locus world is one where nobody reports on opposition to the Iraq invasion or the GWOT mass-surveillance or the bailouts after the 2008 meltdown, because the leadership of both parties is onboard with it.

          • Dan L says:

            I was responding to the idea that “editors + journalists” models “journalism” better than “journalists” alone. To show my own hand a bit:

            1. Media literacy is both critically important and harder than people think, and involves taking into account the journalists, editors, management, investors, and audience. Miss an actor and you’ll be tempted to substitute a conspiracy among the rest.

            2. The media landscape is now large enough that fully independent ecosystems can exist simultaneously, with strongly negative public effects both via inferential gaps and toxoplasma dynamics. It takes active effort for an individual to read from multiple spheres, which sucks because it’s necessary to having decent models.

            3. If you’re informed, you’re part of the problem. (Maybe part of the solution, but that’s less automatic.) Nobody gets the excuse that they’re not feeding into the mainstream narratives anymore, fragmentation and social media means everyone’s in play.

    • dick says:

      It sounds like you simultaneously believe “Watson holds a position that is unfairly slandered as wrong and racist by most mainstream scientists” and “It’s surprising that all the quotes about Watson in a mainstream news article are disparaging” despite the former adequately explaining the latter.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        “Watson holds a position that is unfairly slandered as wrong and racist by most mainstream scientists”

        No I never said this and don’t believe this. I think most scientists in the field of intelligence testing would mostly agree with Watson. My point was that the Times somehow didn’t find these scientists.

        • albatross11 says:

          I don’t think that’s quite right. My very imperfect understanding is that there’s a range of beliefs among scientists who study this, with the belief that the black/white IQ difference is primarily genetic being a somewhat minority belief, and a lot of people feeling like there’s not enough data to know, or like it’s such a fraught topic that they’re uncomfortable speculating.

          I don’t know who’s right, and I wouldn’t be qualified to evaluate most of the evidence to decide without a lot of work and research. (Though even an amateur can do some sanity checking on various claims.)

          But I’m very sure that the way to get to the right answer involves allowing open discussion and collection of evidence and analysis, just like in every other area of science. And I’m very sure that the right way to work out the implications of the answer, whatever it is, is to allow people to discuss the matter in public, just like we do for all kinds of other topics.

          The current state of the art in intellectual taboos isn’t that a topic is forbidden, it’s that some claims about the topic are forbidden, and others are mandatory if you say anything about it. This will never lead you to the truth except by lucky accident.

          • Eponymous says:

            My very imperfect understanding is that there’s a range of beliefs among scientists who study this, with the belief that the black/white IQ difference is primarily genetic being a somewhat minority belief, and a lot of people feeling like there’s not enough data to know, or like it’s such a fraught topic that they’re uncomfortable speculating.

            See the surveys mentioned here. There’s plenty of support for hereditarian views among researchers, just the opposite of the impression one gets from the NYT article. Any way you slice it, this is bad journalism.

        • dick says:

          I think I see the problem – it sounds you’re using “Watson’s views” to mean the strongest case for a genetic difference in IQ between races. But when someone says “I find Watson’s views reprehensible”, the charitable thing to do would be to assume the mean the least-defensible things he’s said, which in this case would be the thing about dealing with black employees and the thing about the futility of anti-poverty interventions in Africa. That’s one reason why it’s so unfair to quote a scientist saying Watson’s views are wrong and conclude that they don’t understand math.

          Anyway, I think this is a really pointless debate (as discussed at length here) so I ought to butt out, but I think it would be fair and uncontroversial to say that it is definitely not the case that most people in the field agree with the most controversial things Watson has said. More generally, I’d add that it is a mistake to view this as a debate between “people who understand and are willing to face the implications of IQ test data” and “people who don’t/won’t”. It is a debate between “people who think IQ tests are a good measurement of intelligence, and think that dividing people up arbitrarily in to racial groups, measuring their IQs, and comparing them tells us something useful about the world” and “people who don’t.” That’s the other reason why it’s so unfair to quote a scientist saying Watson’s views are wrong and conclude that they don’t understand math.

          • albatross11 says:

            Imagine if the reporter saw her job as informing her readers about the actual state of the science behind Watson’s claims. What would that have looked like?

            I don’t think it would have looked much like the article she wrote.

          • dick says:

            It would’ve been called “The Race/IQ Debate – Which Side is Right?” and would’ve been much longer than this one, and would’ve probably not have mentioned James Watson, certainly not the movie about him that prompted this article. Why are you so surprised/annoyed that this article isn’t that article? Has it not already been written, several times?

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            But when someone says “I find Watson’s views reprehensible”, the charitable thing to do would be to assume the mean the least-defensible things he’s said, which in this case would be the thing about dealing with black employees and the thing about the futility of anti-poverty interventions in Africa.

            I really have no idea what else he has said. I am using the quote in the essay itself as why Watson is disparaged. Perhaps I am treating the scientists unfairly because they are responding to much worse comments than the author quotes? Possibly.

            That’s one reason why it’s so unfair to quote a scientist saying Watson’s views are wrong and conclude that they don’t understand math.

            Did you read what she said? It was totally innumerate. She implied that one’s personal relationships should over-ride statistics. Tell me if I mis-interpret, but she seems to be saying that if Watson had worked with brilliant Black researchers, there is no way he could believe what he does. I hate to think she would bring such beliefs to her own work, but it seems likely.

          • albatross11 says:

            Mark:

            To be fair, Watson’s quote may have made the same error in the other direction. If you have the same criteria for hiring members of different groups with different average abilities, then you should see about the same abilities in your employees. (Though Watson may have been thinking about affirmative-action hires, who are in general going to have lower qualificiations.)

          • dick says:

            Did you read what she said? It was totally innumerate. She implied that one’s personal relationships should over-ride statistics.

            You act as if Watson at some point published a mathematical defense of the Bell Curve, and she was responding to it. To my knowledge nothing like that has happened. What has happened is, an elderly man gave an interview where he said some things widely interpreted as a bit racist, and one of his friends defended him by saying, “Oh, he wouldn’t feel that way if he’d gotten a chance to work with more black people.” And then you insulted her.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Mark V Anderson

            What she said, specifically, was “If he knew African-Americans as colleagues at all levels, his present view would be impossible to sustain,’’

            All levels would presumably include Watson’s own, the level of a Nobel Prize Winner in Medicine. Or perhaps it’s fair to expand that to Chemistry. Maybe even Physics.

            That provides the possibility for a downright Straussian reading, though I’m sure she didn’t actually mean it that way.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Okay I’m getting pushback on my innumeracy comment, and I don’t understand why. Well possibly one idea.

            As I’ve been reading further posts, I see that Watson made a comment about how hard it was to work with Black workers. And looking at the original article, I see that comment was vaguely alluded to, though I didn’t get that when I first read it. If the geneticist was referring to Watson’t comment on working with Black employees, then okay, that wasn’t innumerate.

            I assumed her comment related to Watson’s first quoted comment, that Africa is in trouble because of low Black IQ’s. That seemed to be the main focus of the essay, so I assumed all the scientists’ arguments were regarding that. If that main focus is what the geneticist referred to, then she is certainly innumerate. If Watson had worked with one or more Nobel winning Black researchers, that would have no bearing on whether the average Black IQ is 85, any more than a White Nobel winning scientist would prove that the average White IQ cannot be 100. To me, she seemed to imply that personal relationships should over-ride one’s understanding of statistics. I’ve known plenty of otherwise smart folks making such comments, but I was a bit shocked at a PhD geneticist doing it. So maybe I mis-interpreted.

    • 10240 says:

      I commented about this topic in the subreddit once. Basically, most intellectuals think there are no differences between the average innate intelligence (or other mental traits) of different races not because they think researchers have proved it, but because they consider it so obvious that research is hardly needed. To them, any research is to prove that there is no difference, not to determine whether there is or not; only a racist would even think about researching the possibility that there is. Journalists, scientists etc. don’t consider this a bias. They report that there is no difference because they think it’s true. They don’t report about the possibility that it’s false for the same reason they don’t report about the possibility that the Earth is flat.

      I used to think like this, and I see the same sort of thinking in the sort of discourse you quote*. Growing up in a liberal family, I heard a lot about the evils of racism, people being biased against other races, racist science in the past, and how racists wrongly judged people based on their race before they would know about their individual qualities. In all this, it seemed implied that it’s obvious that there is actually no difference between the average qualities of races, even though no one explicitly told me so. At some point I changed my mind, realizing that actually nothing in the reasons I thought racism was wrong implied that averages were the same.

      While most people from liberal, intellectual families learn that racism is very wrong, we pick up or form different ideas about why it’s very wrong, and even about what racism actually exactly is. I’ve always considered the main problem with racism to be judging individuals from different races who happen to have the same qualities differently, based on their race. However, many people don’t care that much about the distinction between individuals and group averages, and mostly consider it racist and immoral to think that one race is better as a whole (in any sense). To them, the possibility that the average innate intelligence of one race is higher than that of another really is unthinkable. (IMO it’s pretty stupid and religion-like to consider it immoral to think a certain statement about facts, but it’s common.)


      * During the debate about the Damore memo, it was clear that many people thought like this about sex too, though I’d never thought so.

      • albatross11 says:

        It’s hard to reason into a headwind.

        When you’re honestly trying to follow the facts, but they’re leading you somewhere you’ve always been told is wrong, or that is believed only by wicked people, then it’s *hard* to let your reason take you to those conclusions. Arguments that push you back toward a more comfortable set of conclusions seem much stronger, even when they’re really laughably sketchy. Sources that push you toward the uncomfortable conclusions seem shaky and untrustworthy, even when they’re quite sound.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        mostly consider it racist and immoral to think that one race is better as a whole (in any sense). To them, the possibility that the average innate intelligence of one race is higher than that of another really is unthinkable.

        Also, you’re talking about people of an “intellectual” class who tend to wrap intelligence up in moral worth. Their own intelligence is how they justify their wealth, privilege and right to rule. If they were to extend that same justification to racial groups…

        The correct answer, though, is to stop conflating intelligence and moral worth. God loves the genius and the imbecile just the same, which is really good news for all us imbeciles.

        • 10240 says:

          Also, you’re talking about people of an “intellectual” class who tend to wrap intelligence up in moral worth. Their own intelligence is how they justify their wealth, privilege and right to rule.

          Scientists, journalists are not the best paid professions. I don’t think these sorts of intellectuals consider themselves the ruling class; that would be rich businessmen, politicians etc.

          I also don’t think “moral worth” (whatever that means) is commonly considered the justification for wealth or leadership. A common justification for wealth is beneficial contributions to society; many of the professions that may contribute the most require intelligence. (A more libertarian/capitalist position is that wealth requires no justification other than having obtained it in a legitimate way.) Likewise, people tend to think that leaders should be the most capable people.

          If they were to extend that same justification to racial groups…

          … that would only lead to policies that most of us consider unacceptable, if average intelligence differs by group, if a person’s status was to depend on the average intelligence of his race, rather than his on own intelligence.
          While many people consider it problematic that average wealth or representation in leadership positions differs by race, I think people consider it problematic because they think that average intelligence is the same, rather than the other way around.

          • Nornagest says:

            I don’t think these sorts of intellectuals consider themselves the ruling class…

            Of course they don’t; one of their criteria for legitimate use of power is that it’s not being exercised on behalf of a ruling class. Insofar as they want to use their power anyway, it follows that they consider themselves outside of one, or, if not, then at least that they’re not using it to further their class interests. But this is a fragile sort of justification, and anyway you can’t always find somebody to punch up at, which creates a need for other sources of legitimacy. Intelligence is one of the bigger ones.

          • Walter says:

            “I don’t think these sorts of intellectuals consider themselves the ruling class;”

            Yeah, I get what you mean, but do you also get that they do, in a sense, do a lot of ruling?

            Like, this weekend, the good folks over at Lifetime decided to do us a all a favor and drop the hammer on R. Kelly’s career.

            The President couldn’t have done that, yeah? If he had told his spies to disappear him they’d be leaking while they closed the Oval Office door. If he’d just told folks not to buy dude’s music sales woulda doubled.

            Congress couldn’t have done that. If they’d tried to, like, outlaw dude in the senate the democrats would have called them racists. If the democrats had tried it in the house the reps would have called them extreme feminists.

            Similarly, like, a progressive buddy and I, back in the day, were talking about President Obama and the global warming policy. Dude was like ‘I sure hope he listens to the expert scientists’. He didn’t want the guy he’d elected to make the policy, he wanted it made by the scientist. Obama’s job is to defend their policy from Republicans.

            Similarly, Scott Pruit got to run the EPA. My bud was super worried that he wouldn’t take the orders from his scientists. The idea that the leader would actually lead was anathema to him. In his view, policy comes from scientists, if the right politicans can safeguard it through.

            But you are also correct, I don’t want to seem like I’m proposing some kind of conspiracy thing. Scientists/journalists don’t meet in dark rooms or whatever and do the Stonecutter thing. Calling them the ‘ruling class’ isn’t technically right, but it isn’t entirely wrong either, if that makes any sense.

          • Nornagest says:

            Dude was like ‘I sure hope he listens to the expert scientists’. He didn’t want the guy he’d elected to make the policy, he wanted it made by the scientist. Obama’s job is to defend their policy from Republicans.

            I don’t think this is quite fair. Even the most hardcore environmentalists don’t want climate scientists to be writing policy, not if they know what they’re talking about. That’s not what they’re good at. They don’t know how to write a bill that won’t immediately be struck down by the courts, or how to balance a proposal with the rest of the economy’s needs, or how to keep constituents relatively happy while they’re doing it.

            They do want climate scientists to be taken seriously, when they talk about the scale of the problem and when they say roughly what has to be done to solve it. But that’s not policy, that’s a set of facts informing policy needs. It’s no different from taking economists or civil engineers or population psychologists seriously in the same sense, and I can think of plenty of rightist perspectives that might want that.

          • 10240 says:

            @Walter To the extent scientists and similar intellectuals rule or influence decisions, the logic is that intelligence (and relevant expertise etc.) justifies ruling, not that intelligence is equivalent to moral worth, and moral worth justifies ruling. Thus, decoupling intelligence from moral worth (as @Conrad Honcho suggested) wouldn’t affect it.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            This same elites seem awfully contemptuous of the sort of stupid, inbred retards who would elect someone like Trump. The lack of intelligence they attribute to the masses justifies ignoring or outright condemning their interests. Recall Peter Strozk who could “smell the Trump support” at Wal-Mart. Perhaps “moral worth” isn’t exactly the right term, but it’s something like that. “These people are stupid and beneath me and therefore I am justified in giving them no consideration.”

          • 10240 says:

            @Conrad Honcho They/we typically don’t ignore their interests, but think that their demands are contrary to their own interests (or at least not the best way to advance their interests by far). Another possible motive is that they/we think that there are more unfortunate people than the stereotypical Trump supporter, who are thus more deserving of help.

      • Garrett says:

        Fun fact[oid]s:
        * In basketball, one of the predominant attributes of players is height.
        * Basketball players are disproportionately black (~74% vs. ~13% of general population).
        * In the US, the average height of white males is higher than black males.
        * Std. deviation for the win!

    • albatross11 says:

      Just an aside about Watson:

      This is a guy who has a Nobel prize for his discoveries in biology, and who has headed a major biological research institute for decades. He made an intellectually defensible but really unpopular and socially unacceptable comment, and it ended his career.

      Are we really sure it’s a good idea to have intellectual taboos so strong that even a Nobel prizewinner can’t question them without being destroyed? How would we know if those taboos were keeping us from learning some really useful or important things, given that even super-established and -respected people aren’t permitted to question them?

      This is us blinding ourselves. As far as I can tell, the people enforcing these taboos and deciding on what ideas should be taboo are not particularly smart or wise or insightful. Putting the James Watsons in charge of telling the Megan McArdles what questions are off limits would be a pretty bad idea, but putting the Megan McArdles in charge of what questions the James Watsons are allowed to ask is just nuts.

      • xq says:

        Note that Watson didn’t just say: I think the evidence supports the hypothesis that genetic factors explain a large part of the observed differences in IQ scores between blacks and whites.

        He said: “[I] hope that everyone is equal… but people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

        This is not a scientific statement. You could not publish a report saying that your subjective perception of your white vs. black employees supports a particular position on the relation between genetics, race and IQ. He’s denigrating his black employees (note “have to deal with”) and those employees would be justified in the belief that he is unable to fairly evaluate them. These are inappropriate comments for a manager, regardless of their position on the scientific issues.

        • CatCube says:

          Yeah, that’s the definite failure mode of focusing on average ability of a racial group. I’m agnostic on whether that exists (I think the whole question is so politicized we won’t get any useful information on it in our generation), but even assuming that it does, the notion that you can tell a lot about individuals from it is bad.

          Like, you don’t need to look at the average intelligence of blacks when dealing with a specific employee (or one you’re considering hiring). You have the employee right there, and he either is or is not intelligent enough to do the job. It might be rarer to find somebody of a specific race to do this job, but a large number in absolute terms will exist, and it’s horrific to refuse to consider the person in front of you in terms of anything other than their actual ability.

          The distribution is important in considering things like overall representation, but stupid when considering individuals, and there are a lot of people who want to use the distribution when talking about a specific person.

          • dick says:

            and there are a lot of people who want to use the distribution when talking about a specific person.

            I think this is very similar to the concept of privilege. It was explicitly proposed in academia as a way to talk about the differences between groups of people, and it took about 8 seconds before people started using it to compare individuals. (Which makes it kind of ironic that the groups of people bloviating about the importance of those two things are almost perfectly disjoint)

      • 10240 says:

        He made an intellectually defensible but really unpopular and socially unacceptable comment, and it ended his career.

        “Ended his career” may be a slight overstatement. He was 79 at the time, near the end of his career anyway. According to Wikipedia, he was suspended from his administrative responsibilities, and then resigned from his position as chancellor. I don’t know if he would have been fired if he refuses to resign, whether he could have kept a job as a researcher, or gotten a similar job at another institution if he wanted (which would have been likely if he’d been younger).

        (I don’t know why people often resign in such situations, rather than force the employer to fire them if it wants to. The latter would make it more clear that it’s entirely against their will, while a resignation leaves it unclear if the employer would have actually fired him. For example, Brendan Eich is often said to have been forced out from Mozilla, but according to Mozilla he wasn’t, and they also offered him another executive position when he resigned as CEO.)

        • The Nybbler says:

          I don’t know why people often resign in such situations, rather than force the employer to fire them if it wants to.

          Probably because being fired (except by George Steinbrenner or Donald Trump) carries some pretty serious stigma with it.

        • Mr. Doolittle says:

          I don’t know why people often resign in such situations

          Often they are not really given much of a choice, and “resigning,” even under duress, is better on a resume than getting fired at the same time. Going quietly is also often a prerequisite for a severance or leaving bonus. The person is given the choice of getting fired for cause, or leaving with a nice retirement and a little bonus + a cleaner official record.

          Given the choice, most people wouldn’t want to stay at a place where it’s obvious they want to get rid of you anyway. You leave on your own terms and save face.

          • 10240 says:

            In these highly publicized situations, everyone knows anyway why the person ended up leaving, whether he is fired or resigns. People who think he was in the wrong will condemn him either way; people who don’t think he should’ve been made to quit will side with him either way. So it doesn’t look like much of a difference in terms of saving face.

      • JPNunez says:

        The taboo is there because in the past similar accussations of genetic inferiority have led to giant atrocities. Let’s not pretend this is Galileo saying “and yet it moves”.

        It’s good that the taboo is still there, and that it can bring down such prestigious figures as Nobel Prize winners. Do note that no science is being harmed here; if you want to study intelligence and genetics, you are still as free to do so. You just cannot say stuff like “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. It’s not like Watson had a lot more to contribute at his age. The people studying it seriously tend to know this, it’s just that Watson thought he had the prestige of a Nobel Prize and could run his mouth as he wanted, and turns out he could not.

        The taboo is there for a very good reason.

        • EchoChaos says:

          This is a bad argument, in my opinion.

          It implies that if there were genetically inferior humans (however defined) it would be okay to commit giant atrocities against them, and is an isolated demand for rigor in addition to that.

          Nobody serious is saying “you can’t argue for any amount of redistribution of wealth because communism has led to giant atrocities”

          The argument against giant atrocities is that they are immoral, not to taboo a specific fact.

        • albatross11 says:

          JPNunez:

          I feel exactly the same way about inflamatory public discussions about economic inequality and class struggle. Given the huge piles of bodies associated with the movement that was driven by such concerns, we should just make a taboo about anyone discussing them, and shut them down if they do. Right?

        • The taboo is there because in the past similar accussations of genetic inferiority have led to giant atrocities.

          Is that true?

          The Nazis didn’t, so far as I can tell, think that the Jews were genetically inferior–they thought they were enemies. I don’t think the Khmer Rouge thought the people they killed were inferior, or that Stalin thought the Ukrainians were. I’m not aware of beliefs of racial inferiority by the Hausa with regard to the Ibo—if anything it was the Ibo that had the reputation of intellectual superiority. I doubt many of the people involved in the Hutu/Tutsi conflicts had opinions about genetics. Mao starved some tens of millions of people–but they were his own people, so I don’t think he believed they were genetically inferior.

          It’s possible that Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo had some such motive, but I wouldn’t assume it–given the opportunity to benefit by mistreating people under your rule, quite a lot of rulers take advantage of it.

          One case that fits is killing of Slavs by the Nazis, but while they planned to do that on a very large scale they fortunately didn’t get a chance to carry most of those plans through.

          You could make a case for the slave trade–I’m not sure to what extent the motivation behind that was a belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks rather than their availability and usefulness as slaves. Large scale slavery had existed in the Muslim world for a long time and some blacks ended up as high status members of that society—Ibraham ibn al Mahdi was son, brother, and uncle of caliphs and an unsuccessful pretender to the caliphate, as well as a famous musician and gastronome—so I doubt they believed in the inherent inferiority of blacks.

          Your argument might make more sense if it was against research on whether private property and related institutions were good, or whether the rich treated the poor unfairly, since quite a lot of people have been killed as a result of beliefs along those lines.

          • LadyJane says:

            @DavidFriedman: The role of racism in a modern humanistic society is to justify systemic oppression and genocide to people who would otherwise be opposed to such things as a matter of principle. A society of barbarians needs no excuse to act barbaric to their enemies; a society of liberal humanists will oppose barbarism by default, and can only be persuaded to go along with it if they’re convinced that it’s necessary for their survival, or that the targets of their barbarism are not quite fully human. An amoral person or culture can engage in immoral actions without any need to excuse their behaviors, but any person or culture who wants to maintain any sort of moral high ground needs to justify their own atrocities somehow.

            This is why the belief in the inferiority of Africans was so crucial to maintaining the institution of American slavery. The United States was founded on the idea that all men were created equal and entitled to certain unalienable rights; the only way to justify slavery was to claim that the slaves weren’t really men, in the true sense of the word. The militaristic slave societies of antiquity didn’t need to justify slavery, because they never held any pretense that humans were entitled to certain rights; in their view, “let’s enslave them because it helps us, and who cares about the well-being of people who aren’t us?” was a perfectly valid way to approach ethics.

            I’m reminded of Steven Weinberg’s famous statement about religion: “Evil people can always be expected to do evil, but only religion can make good people do evil things.” Expand religion to include ideological beliefs – including the idea that your race is superior, or some other race is inferior – and I’d largely agree with his statement.

          • albatross11 says:

            LadyJane:

            First, it sure seems like the problem with slavery was the slavery part, not the factual claims used to spin out a justification for it. My guess is that the people profiting from the slaves were going to find *some* kind of justification for it, and that the need for a justification drove the claims of racial inferiority instead of the other way around. If those claims had somehow become taboo in their time, they would just have come up with other claims to justify their economic interests and the social system they wanted to maintain.

            Second, none of this has anything to do with IQ differences–IQ tests weren’t even invented until after slavery was abolished. IQ differences may have been used in some places to justify school segregation (though there’s an obvious problem with that), though they wouldn’t have worked too well for the other kinds of legally-mandated discrimination in the South.

          • EchoChaos says:

            I really feel that’s contorting cause and effect. Primitives enslaved the other because they were the other, moderns enslaved the other because they were the other and then justified it with literally anything at hand.

            If the IQ gap had gone the other way, then the justification would’ve been some other bullshit to justify enslaving them, because enslaving them was never based on a philosophical reason. Rather, the enslaving was based on enslaving and the reason was a slave to that.

            It’s not like racism against Asians or Jews doesn’t exist because the IQ gap goes the other way.

            I think you overestimate the number of purely immoral hedonic people. It’s very important to 99% of villains to be the hero in their own story.

            Also, I will point out that atheist quotes like that are especially annoying because it’s religion that got us past the slave societies of antiquity.

          • Aapje says:

            Note that often successful minorities have been targeted (like Jews and Chinese), as well as people of the same race whose beliefs were deviant. Beliefs of inferiority can change how people are targeted, but it certainly doesn’t seem a requirement.

            With regard to slavery and persecution, perhaps it’s even better to invert the question. Given the obvious benefits of slavery and killing people who cramp your style, what justifications do people use not to enslave and kill?

        • Aapje says:

          @JPNunez

          That would be more persuasive if it was upheld for somewhat similar situations.

          In the past, accusations of collective male deviousness have resulted in mass murder of men, while women were let go. See Srebrenica, for example.

          Yet people are allowed to say far worse things than what Watson said, as long as it’s about men. In fact, they are given a platform in WaPo to do so.

  43. johan_larson says:

    You are the creative director for the reboot of Star Wars. This is decades is the future, after a lengthy hiatus during which no new big-budget material in the franchise was published. As such, you have significant freedom to update the material, and make a new beginning for a new generation of fans. What changes will you make?

    • The Nybbler says:

      We’re starting over with the prequels, and we’re doing the rise of Darth Vader right this time. The first movie will, as the Phantom Menace did, set the stage with Palpatine pulling the strings of several players to create the crises of the second and third movie; this is where we’ll get our action sequences. Meantime, Anakin is discovered and put to training in the first movie; he is unusually powerful but not obviously too old to be trained — Obi Wan’s mistake should be understandable. His mother will deny he has a father (as she did in the Phantom Menace), but we will drop hints that she knew Palpatine (leaving it open whether she was a lover or the victim of some bio-experiment).

      The second movie will focus mostly on Anakin, with Palpatine’s continued machinations as the B plot. He’ll have proven unsuitable for standard Jedi training, so Obi-Wan is taking a more personal hand. He’ll be powerful but reckless, of course; his recklessness will both cause problems and solve problems not caused by him (albeit, known to the audience but not the Jedi, set up for him by Palpatine). This is where he begins a relationship with Padme, and with Palpatine, who Padme is working with in the Senate.

      The third movie is the corruption of Anakin. The Republic is falling apart (due, of course, to Palpatine’s machinations). There are factions within factions on Coruscant, assassinations and some outright warfare. Palpatine guides Anakin on a path, each step of which seems reasonable, but which are clearly (to the audience) leading him deeper into evil. Yet even the audience cannot see how Anakin could make the “good” choice; in one case it would lead to Obi-Wan’s death, in another his mother’s. Perhaps, just to twist the knife, one “good” choice would apparently kill Palpatine himself (but not really of course). The final choice goes the same way as the original; he must do something horrible (alas I am not nearly a good enough writer to write this movie) to save a pregnant Padme, and he fails, taking the damage that makes him into Vader. As in the original, Padme is in fact saved, long enough to give birth, by Obi-Wan and Bail Organa, who only too late figured out what Anakin was becoming and some of what Palpatine was up to.

      There is no Jar-Jar. The proclamation of Palpatine as dictator is done by the Vice Chair of the Senate, the representative from Naboo, incensed at the (he thinks) assassination of Padme by the enemies of the Republic.

      • Kyle A Johansen says:

        By ”he is unusually powerful but not obviously too old to be trained”, do you mean that Anakin is younger, or that the age-limit for training is higher?

        • The Nybbler says:

          By ”he is unusually powerful but not obviously too old to be trained”, do you mean that Anakin is younger, or that the age-limit for training is higher?

          I don’t believe the age limit was ever given. But to keep Anakin as a character rather than a nonce or a “creepy kid” (well, even more than he already was), he can’t be much younger, so we’ll likely raise the age limit. Maybe he’ll be right at the top end so it’s an issue but not clear disqualifier.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Yeah, Anakin definitely needed to be older; his romance with Padme was frankly rather creepy in the actual films.

            Also, make Padme a bona-fide hereditary monarch, rather than “the US President, but with a fancy title and clothes”. Maybe she could have been raised in a cloying world of official protocol, then forced to flee Naboo disguised as a servant after the Trade Federation attack. Then she meets Anakin, who, not knowing that she’s actually a queen, just treats her like a normal human being. Since Padme’s entire life so far has been dictated by rules and protocol, she finds this exciting and refreshing, providing a basis for her attraction to Anakin.

          • Lillian says:

            I don’t believe the age limit was ever given. But to keep Anakin as a character rather than a nonce or a “creepy kid” (well, even more than he already was), he can’t be much younger, so we’ll likely raise the age limit. Maybe he’ll be right at the top end so it’s an issue but not clear disqualifier.

            Why is it a problem that Anakin was considered too old to be trained? Always thought that was one of the good parts of the plot, that the Jedi Council is presented with a force sensitive of unprecedented potential, someone who could do a lot of damage if they were turned to the Dark Side, and their first reaction is “Yeah we’re not going to train this kid.” It shows how complacent they had gotten that they never consider the possibility that if they don’t train him, someone else will. It’s great when Qui-Gon Jinn basically tells the Council to go fuck themselves and that he will train the kid himself, and it provides a good set-up for Anakin and Obi-Wan’s relationship, which was probably the single best part of the prequels.

            If it were up to me, i’d make Anakin a teenager to start, but keep the “too old to be trained” thing pretty much the same.

            Also, make Padme a bona-fide hereditary monarch, rather than “the US President, but with a fancy title and clothes”.

            Personally, my preferred interpretation on the Queen of Naboo is that she is indeed elected for a fixed term (though making it exactly the same as in the US was supremely lazy), but the Queens have to be elected from among a specific group of hereditary noble houses. It fits really well with the “aristocratic republic” aesthetic the Galactic Republic had going on.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Why is it a problem that Anakin was considered too old to be trained?

            The problem is that if there is a good, established reason not to train Anakin, training him anyway requires our heroes take hold of the idiot ball. Their mistake should be reasonable.

          • bullseye says:

            The weird mashup between monarchy and democracy is one of the things I like about the setting.

            As for the queenship being exactly like the U.S. Presidency, I don’t think that’s fair.
            Similarities: Head of state elected for a fixed term.
            Differences: Age. A fourteen year old can’t run for President, and wouldn’t be elected if she could. Costume and other cultural baggage; the President dresses like a car salesman and carefully avoids monarchist terms.
            Unknown: Who gets to vote? For all we know it’s just the heads of noble families or something.

          • Lillian says:

            The problem is that if there is a good, established reason not to train Anakin, training him anyway requires our heroes take hold of the idiot ball. Their mistake should be reasonable.

            Qui-Gon Jinn’s decision to train Anakin Skywalker is not just understandable, but also correct. It’s the Jedi Council that made the wrong call by refusing to train him. Imagine what would have happened Qui-Gon had accepted the will of the Council, and a bitterly disappointed Anakin is returned back on Tatooine, where someone like Count Dooku can get his hands on him. You though Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side was catastrophic for the Jedi? Imagine what happens if Luke can’t say, “I have become a Jedi like my father before me” because his father was never Jedi to begin with. Imagine if Vader is not just irredeemable, but also physically whole with the full might of his power to call upon.

            It’s understandable why the Jedi Council doesn’t want to train Anakin, they feared what would happen if they trained him and he fell. Indeed their fears came to pass, and the Jedi were annihilated. Nonetheless they should have taken the risk, because the risk of not training him is that someone else will. Indeed someone else did, and they were lucky it was Qui-Gon Jinn rather than Dooku who stepped up to the plate, and he did so because he understood that if he didn’t the Sith would. Nobody is holding the idiot ball in that entire sequence, everyone’s reasoning is understandable.

            As for the queenship being exactly like the U.S. Presidency, I don’t think that’s fair.

            Padme establishes in Attack of the Clones that the Queens of Naboo are elected for four year terms, and may serve no more than two terms. Any American who hears that will immediately think, “Like the US President”. It doesn’t matter that they have very little other resemblance to the US President, the thought “Like the US President” will still pop up unbidden, and it’s very annoying to be thinking it when you’re trying to immerse yourself in the events of a A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Lucas could have easily avoided this by just saying that they serve a single eight year term, while having to change absolutely nothing about his plot or timeline.

          • bean says:

            Episode I makes so much more sense when you think of it as the result of an improvised RPG campaign.

            Particularly the bit about the Queen.

            The other possible conception is that the problem is one of translation from Nabooan into English.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            Padme establishes in Attack of the Clones that the Queens of Naboo are elected for four year terms, and may serve no more than two terms. Any American who hears that will immediately think, “Like the US President”. It doesn’t matter that they have very little other resemblance to the US President, the thought “Like the US President” will still pop up unbidden, and it’s very annoying to be thinking it when you’re trying to immerse yourself in the events of a A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Lucas could have easily avoided this by just saying that they serve a single eight year term, while having to change absolutely nothing about his plot or timeline.

            Yes, and it doesn’t help that Anakin says something about people wanting to “amend the constitution” to allow her to stand for a third term.

            Also, maybe it’s just me, but I though that Padme’s description of her childhood makes it sound almost exactly like that of an upper-class late-twentieth-century American blue-tribe girl, complete with Peace Corps and Model UN analogues. I just found this quite disappointing and unimaginative.

      • yodelyak says:

        Re-do The Phantom Menace, to solve its other major problems. Make young Anakin likeable.

        Do not get rid of Jar-jar. Do not sanitize him or make his imbecility less annoying.

        Then, in episode two, as many others have suggested, focus on the steady ruin of Anakin via Sith suggestions and string-pulls creating situations where good intentions create deep rifts between Anakin and other characters. But don’t use the sith that everyone knew about–Palpatine. Use the Sith no one knew about. Use the sith who used the force in front of everyone, the whole time, without even the audience noticing he was using it.

        Use Jar-jar.

    • ing says:

      I produce episodes 4-6 as “Star Wars: Luke’s Story” with three episodes. I’m willing to discuss names other than “Luke’s Story”, but I’m not willing to start a series with episode 4. I don’t want to create an expectation that somebody will later create prequel stories which will inevitably be lame because we know how it all ends.

      Also, perhaps you’ve seen http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/181121498760/the-empire-strifes-back?

    • sfoil says:

      I’m going to play off The Nybbler here since I feel basically the same way.

      Episode I — really, the whole PT — did the string-pulling Machiavellian aspects of Palpatine right. That can stay. Make it clear the Jedi are knights-errant instead of FBI agents. Qui-Gon is wise and good but also dissatisfied with the attempts of the Jedi Council to centralize the Jedi and more closely integrate with the Republican government; he only has respect for Yoda and has derogatory nicknames for the other council masters. He sees objections to the recruitment of Anakin as bureaucratic obstruction to the mystical aspects of Jedi traditions. No midichlorians. Pod-racing stays. Padme is the hereditary monarch of Naboo, and the “Chancellor” is a regent.

      Make the battle scenes less retarded; have the Gungans fight a guerrilla/ambush war against the droids moving through the jungle instead of forming up in a ridiculous pseudo-Napoleonic battle line.

      After Darth Maul kills Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan runs away.

      In episode II, the CIS turns to clones based on the poor performance of battle droids during the events of Episode I, although some are still around. The Republic begins training an all-volunteer armed force as outer systems secede and rumors of Mandalorian assistance to the CIS create panic. The Jedi Council insists on being given operational control of the armed forces; their mismanagement culminates in scores of Jedi fighting in a colosseum somewhere with substantial loss in a failed attempt to go after Dooku. Fortunately, a young officer named Tarkin saves the day when he destroys most approaching reinforcements from orbit and lands troops headed by another guy named Veers to finish them off. The men discuss and blame incompetent Jedi generalship on casualty aversion and lack of strategic sense, along with the superiority of mass and firepower over Jedi warrior ways.

      Lucas hires someone else to write romantic dialogue, and finds someone who can at least pretend to enjoy making out with Natalie Portman. Anakin is portrayed as something of a naive boy-toy to the still-charmed older Padme. Anakin fights and kills Darth Maul, after which Obi-Wan confesses what happened when he and Qui-Gon fought him in Episode I.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        Episode I — really, the whole PT — did the string-pulling Machiavellian aspects of Palpatine right.

        [Vader]NnnnooooooooooooooooOOOoooOOOoooooo![/vader]

        None of Palpatine’s plans made any sense in the PT (or TPM). If his underlings had carried out their orders successfully, Palpatine would never have come to power. Instead his plans were foiled in unpredictable ways that somehow magically result in him “succeeding.”

        So the plot of TPM is that Palpatine is engineering a crisis on Naboo that the weak Republic Senate is unable to solve, thereby triggering a vote of no confidence against Chancellor Valorum, moving Palps into that spot and conditioning people to want a more powerful government, with an army. This is vastly overcomplicated for a children’s movie but whatever.

        The Jedi show up at the blockade to resolve the situation (because I guess Jedi are expert Space Taxes negotiators or something) and Palps tells the Trade Federation guys to kill them. Assume they succeed in this. The murder of official government negotiators, flying a flag of truce on your own turf, and Jedi no less, is unforgivable and unignorable. Now the Republic and Valorum have a direct casus belli to send troops, either from individual member worlds or from a newly formed Republic army. The whole murky “what can we do?” thing is gone. Palpatine should have told the bug-faced guys to tell the Jedi “there will be no negotiations. Order them to leave.” They would then report back to the Senate “nothing we can do. Valorum?” which would have prolonged the crisis in ways Valorum could not solve.

        Instead they try to kill the Jedi and then invade. Landing for some reason on the other side of the planet from the capital and then driving there. They capture the capital and the queen and Palps tells the Trade Federation guys “I want that treaty signed!” Okay, so what happens if Padme is all like “oh shit, we’re fucked, I guess I’ll sign the treaty.” Doesn’t that end the crisis? There’s no more conflict. Naboo and the Trade Federation had a dispute on Space Taxes, they had a kerfuffle, now they’ve signed a treaty and Naboo will pay more Space Taxes or charge less or whatever and it’s all over.

        None of these things make any sense. If his underlings had executed Palpatine’s orders correctly then Palp would never have been Chancellor. Instead everyone fails spectacularly but it all works out for Palps anyway.

        • albatross11 says:

          The real killer problem with the Star Wars universe is that none of it makes much sense if you’re looking at the big picture. Ten semitrained guys with off-the-shelf blasters can reliably kill a jedi that takes a decade to train and requires a monklike devotion to duty and the jedi religion, so it’s silly that jedi are seen as anything but a ceremonial guard. An impoverished slave child can build a sentient robot using standard parts and software, but there’s still slavery, widespread hunger, and starving kids doing shitty dangerous jobs. (I guess because the impoverished slave children don’t bother ordering their droid slaves to do the shitty dangerous jobs?) Everybody is horrendously stupid. The technology makes no sense. The form of government makes no sense. Etc.

          Telling an adventure story in a corner of that universe works, because the plot moves quickly and because there’s not much reason to think about why the society works as it does when you’re watching a farmboy get swept up into a civil war. But the bigger sweep you needed for episodes 2, 3, and the latest couple turkeys basically required you to think about why things worked the way they did. You could do the necessary worldbuilding and think through a reasonable explanation for some of what appeared in episodes 4,5,6 in a pinch, and use that as the backdrop for better broad-sweep stories, but nobody involved in any of the movies ever had any intention of doing *that*. No toy tie-ins are going to come from *that* kind of work.

          • INH5 says:

            Re: The Jedi. That seems roughly equivalent to saying that Navy SEALs are worthless because each one costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to train and can easily be killed in a fair fight by 10 semitrained militia armed with black market AK47s. The facts are true, but the conclusion seems to be missing the point.

          • theredsheep says:

            An ordinary medieval knight also took a long time to train, and could be taken down far more easily than a Jedi OR a SEAL. Also, the Jedi as shown in the prequels fight rather stupidly; they just rush forward twirling lightsabers en masse. You have magic–including the ability to communicate telepathically, lift things with your mind, leap enormous distances, move at superhuman speed, etc.–and you’re going to do a banzai charge?

            Not saying the SW universe makes sense–it should be far more heavily automated, to be consistent–but I could see Jedi, properly used, doing enormous damage.

          • Randy M says:

            An ordinary medieval knight also took a long time to train, and could be taken down far more easily than a Jedi OR a SEAL.

            Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good crossbow at your side

          • John Schilling says:

            Ten semitrained guys with off-the-shelf blasters can reliably kill a jedi that takes a decade to train and requires a monklike devotion to duty and the jedi religion

            Ten semitrained guys are just going to stand there knowing that the first guy to fire a shot is absolutely certainly going to be killed by his own blaster bolt so that the last guy to fire a shot can go home and say “We killed a Jedi! We badass!”

            Same goes for ten guys who are trained to the peak of human ability in e.g. marksmanship. To kill a Jedi, you need ten guys who are very well trained in a completely different area. Guys like that are, historically quite hard to come by – though if you can find even one and then infinitely clone him, then the Jedi are maybe obsolete.

            Battle Droids, also, might be an effective countermeasure, but there don’t seem to be many of those in the long-ago/far-away galaxy. The Trade Federation had a bare handful of dedicated combat models, and a lot of what look like general-purpose units handed cheap blasters and copies of “Infantry Combat for Dummies”.

          • hls2003 says:

            Ten semitrained guys with off-the-shelf blasters can reliably kill a jedi

            While I get the point, and your number is thrown out there for effect, this actually seems like an interesting mental exercise. Based on what we know of the Jedi, if a real person possessed those same capabilities, how many (basic-level but not incompetent) opponents would we expect him to defeat in open battle more often than not?

            So the “Real Jedi” has access to superhuman speed, strength, and agility; limited precognitive sense sufficient to allow positioning to deflect / direct incoming projectiles; limited telekinesis; and a weapon capable of deflecting his opponents’ weapons (including projectiles) back at them without noticeable impact and of cutting through any defensive material without substantial effort. He can also use tactics, cover, his opponents’ weapons against them, etc. I suppose one could include mental powers, but for this exercise I’d limit him to being able to perhaps incapacitate / control a single person at a time, not anything like “he’d blind them all and sneak away for a more opportune fight” even though that would certainly make sense.

            His opponents would be enlisted infantry, let’s say armed with some sort of gun, capable of acting as a cohesive group but not with elite-level coordination / commando training. They have significant determination but not unlimited morale – if 20 out of 22 get cut down, the last two are probably running.

            I’d say eight, about a squad’s worth.

          • The Nybbler says:

            In an environment with a lot of cover and concealment, your Jedi could probably defeat any number of ordinary infantrymen. He’ll have them blasting at shadows and at each other, and he’ll split them apart and defeat them in detail.

          • hls2003 says:

            I suppose it is an unfair question without specifying the battleground. In the spirit of the movies, how about three different options, potentially giving three different answers: (1) Nakatomi Plaza from Die Hard, (2) the forest from First Blood, and (3) sand hills on Tatooine.

            I’d then amend my answer to about 50 for Nakatomi Plaza (John McClane killed 10 in that cover-rich environment); 100 for the forest (that’s probably about how many they had in the manhunt for Rambo, though he only disabled a couple men before being cornered and presumed dead); and my original 8 for fairly open ground on Tatooine.

          • Dan L says:

            Guys like that are, historically quite hard to come by – though if you can find even one and then infinitely clone him, then the Jedi are maybe obsolete.

            It probably deserves emphasis that a rank-and-file clone trooper is probably well above-average by Mandalorian standards. Semi-trained they ain’t.

        • sfoil says:

          The reason it worked is that it didn’t matter what the outcome was — Palpatine was playing both sides. Now, I’m not trying to give the movies too much credit, but it wasn’t a serious flaw.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            But he wasn’t playing both sides. If his plans had succeeded, he would have lost.

            Imagine Padme folds, and signs the treaty as Palpatine (through the Trade Federation) demanded. How does Palps become chancellor then?

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            @Conrad Honcho,

            I agree that the plan was dumb overall but there was an obvious way forward:

            Just keep pushing.

            If the Trade Federation rolls over Naboo and the Galactic Senate shrugs, then tell the Nemoidians to attack some other sympathetic world. It’ll be that much easier to convince them now that they’ve just won by going all-in on that strategy, and Chancellor Vallorum looks like an even bigger dunce for failing to stop them at Naboo. The longer the Galactic Senate seems to be appeasing the Trade Federation, the stronger Palpatine’s case that they’re too corrupt and weak to keep the peace.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            Palpatine knew Padme, and presumably was confident that she’d rather die than sign – so Palpatine gets to blame the death of two Jedi and a monarch on Valorum’s inaction, while also weakening the Jedi’s position as negotiators and diplomats.

            Landing the army and marching to Theed lets Palpatine show off the ruin of a Republic planet, lots of dead bodies and destroyed architecture and landscape, and blame that on Valorum too.

            Basically, Palpatine’s job on Naboo was to make the invasion as theatrically evil as possible given that the people he was able to get to actually do it were there for space taxes, had a powerful army, and were immensely stupid.

          • albatross11 says:

            If your goal is to get rid of the most of the jedi, you don’t need to engineer a war with clones and droids. (Though getting the jedi to go to war against lots of mooks with blasters seems like a good way of thinning their ranks–like sending fully-trained Samauri wielding swords to face US Marines during WW2.) Just wait for Anakin to go to the jedi temple[1], and then drop a great big bomb on it. Blame it on terrorists. Tragically, what with the terrorist threat and the conversion of 98% of the jedi to a big, steaming radioactive crater in the middle of town, we have no choice but to form a military full of guys with blasters who take six months to train[2], instead of guys with laser swords who take ten years to train.

            [1] The real reason for Anakin’s turn to the dark side: not only would the jedi council not give him tenure, they stuck him with a heavy teaching load!

            [2] But maybe this time include some marksmanship training, so they don’t miss every single shot they take. Hell, give them some decent armor too–it doesn’t have to stop blasters or light sabers, but it ought to be enough to stop Ewok-launched rocks and unarmed Wookies from clobbering them.

          • John Schilling says:

            Imagine Padme folds, and signs the treaty as Palpatine (through the Trade Federation) demanded. How does Palps become chancellor then?

            Possibly he doesn’t, but instead becomes the Grand Poobah of the Trade Federation, de facto ruler of the galaxy. If you’re playing all-paths-lead-to-victory, you have to be open-minded about what victory looks like.

            As Nabil notes, the Trade Federation isn’t going to quietly stop after subjugating Naboo. They didn’t stop after being decisively defeated at Naboo; a victory would just have encouraged them. Most outcomes of Palpatine’s plan will leave him as simultaneously A: the de facto and to some extent de jure leader of the anti-Federation resistance in the Senate and the Republic at large and B: the de facto leader of the Trade Federation. So long as that conflict continues, every victory for either side increases his power. And with a major voice on the war councils of both side, he can make sure the conflict isn’t quickly resolved nor allowed to fade away.

            If the Galactic Republic prevails in the long run, it won’t be under Chancellor Valorum. If the Trade Federation prevails, it’s not like Nute Gunray is going to be calling the shots. Both of those are invertibrates, and there’s one obvious replacement in both camps.

            The actual outcome is not the best outcome for him,as it leaves Padme to contend leadership for the “leader of the Resistance” role on one side of the fence, and leaves the Trade Republic weakened and in need of new allies on the other. It might not have taken him ten years to nab the Chancellorship and then the Imperial Throne if he’d taken the more direct path.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            @Conrad

            But he wasn’t playing both sides. If his plans had succeeded, he would have lost.

            Imagine Padme folds, and signs the treaty as Palpatine (through the Trade Federation) demanded. How does Palps become chancellor then?

            All he had to do was push one of his pawns (Trade Federation in this case, but he had many – see Episode II) to do something that required Republic intervention. Then, as soon as someone complains to the Senate, have the bureaucrats hamper Valorum and prove that the Senate couldn’t function. Pushing the Federation to go to war and be all evil was distinctly part of the plan. And the real kicker here is that Palpatine was right! The Senate, with no functional power to implement its decisions, was beholden to their members to enforce the rules. As soon as one side in a conflict blatantly snubs those rules, the whole system breaks down. The Jedi were the one force that could operate successfully, which is why they were sent in Episode I, and why the orders were simply to kill them. No matter that killing the Jedi was a massive problem that needed condemnation – that would have allowed the Senate to break down earlier.

            All roads lead to Palpatine getting an opportunity to show the Senate as non-functional. The real question is, how much did Palpatine engineer the Senate that way, verses coming to understand its true dysfunction and exploit it.

            But once it’s as weak and ineffective as we see in Episode I, there are a million ways to create a conflict that would lead to the desired situation.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            But my argument is that if his orders to his subordinates in TPM were carried out, his plan of creating a crisis fails. Responding with “but then he would have done something else!” misses the point.

            Plan A: Shoot self in foot.

            Plan B: Do something competent.

            Why not just start with Plan B?

          • Walter says:

            @Conrad:

            The ‘something competent’ is the setting up the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation. It isn’t doing something different for him to take the other fork if stuff goes different from how he was expecting, that’s the point of the plan.

            He sends the Trade Fed to push the people of Naboo, expecting the Naboo to resist. What happens if they don’t? The movie doesn’t exactly go there, but it seems like either ‘push harder’ or ‘you have what you want, you now lead a trade federation that can do whatever it wants to planets’ is a valid response. Neither is doing something different, they are just continuations of the declared plan.

          • Nornagest says:

            Palpatine’s goal in the prequels is to create a threat pressing enough that he can use it to get himself granted supreme executive power and a clone army loyal to him installed over whatever the Old Republic’s regular military is. If a secession crisis won’t do the job, a hostile neighboring power with a battle station that can blow up planets (we first see the Death Star plans in Episode II) probably will. That might even have been his first plan.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            Both of your examples are things that someone would complain about to the Senate, if carried out. Killing the Jedi, obviously so, as you noted. Getting the Queen to sign a treaty under duress would get to the Senate about as soon as the Federation ended the blockade. (They would have to, since their interest was trade and the blockade would prevent that). The fact that it was under duress would be pretty obvious and at least require Senate investigation. Either way, it goes to the dysfunctional Senate where the plan unfolds.

            As far as how dumb the Federation was – Palpatine’s promise to the Federation was that he would stop any Senate action, which he does exactly as promised. Had they not lost to the rebels, they would have controlled the planet and forced further action. Presumably that would have been Palpatine’s chance to bring about the clone army, but he had to engineer a further plot to enact that portion.

            Since he was also Sidious, which the Federation did not know was Palpatine, he could play both sides earnestly.

          • John Schilling says:

            But my argument is that if his orders to his subordinates in TPM were carried out, his plan of creating a crisis fails.

            The Trade Federation invading and conquering a peaceful planet by brute military force, overthrowing its democratically-elected government and charismatic young queen, isn’t a crisis in your book?

            Seems unlikely, but if so it is just another path to victory. Just have the Trade Federation keep on invading and conquering planets, each instance of which is Not A Crisis, until they rule all the planets. Palpatine rules the Trade Federation, so mission accomplished.

            The more planets the Trade Federation can conquer before the Republic says “Hey wait this is a crisis, we should probably do something about it”, the stronger Palpatine’s position in both camps. So a quick and bloodless victory over Naboo would be in his interest if he can achieve it; it just isn’t necessary.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Okay, I concede. You have convinced me Lucas is a masterful scriptwriter.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            Hah, hardly – but Palpatine’s plot arc was about the only thing in those movies that was fairly well written, [mostly] well acted, and made consistent sense. That’s one of the few areas of the films that I will defend.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            OK, you guys have convinced me that Palpatine’s plan in TPM isn’t as dumb as I’d thought it was. One thing I’d still like explained, though, is why the Trade Federation were taking orders from him. It’s clear from the way they interact with him that he is in charge rather than just giving them advice and encouragement, but how did he actually get to be in charge? And why do the Trade Federation still follow his orders in AOTC and ROTJ, even though his plans in TPM have led to nothing but disaster for the Trade Federation?

          • John Schilling says:

            As Mr. Doolittle says, plotting is only one facet of screenwriting, and one Lucas has always been pretty good at. Characters, and especially dialogue, not so much. Sometimes his actors could cover up that deficiency, but that’s something that e.g. a thirty-something Harrison Ford can do but is a but much to expect from a 9-year-old Jake Lloyd. And unfortunately Hayden Christiensen at 20 wasn’t the answer either.

            For that matter, many of the plotting deficiencies in the prequel trilogy were I think forced by the decision to introduce Anakin as a cute precocious child and somehow build a character arc that has to end with both Darth Vader and Luke+Leia. Since the political intrigue of TPM was almost completely separated from Anakin, that worked like nothing else in the trilogy did.

          • bullseye says:

            @albatross11

            Bombing the Jedi Temple would take out whoever happens to be there but leave most of the order alive. There are a *lot* of Jedi; about 10,000 according to the Rebels cartoon. (How does Yoda train all the younglings? I figure he’s the head teacher and there are other teachers we don’t see.)

            The clones have good aim and do an excellent job of killing Jedi in Episode III. The Stormtroopers in the original trilogy aren’t clones (and not all of them have bad aim either; the ones in the opening scene who capture Leia are capable enough).

          • Walter says:

            @The Original Mister X:

            I think it is important to remember that the Trade Federation aren’t following Palpatine, they are following Sidious. They know him as a mysterious Sith Lord, who seems to have great insight into the gov’s workings and influence over it. They don’t suspect him of leading them to ruin on the gov’s behalf, because if that was his aim why help them out in the first place!

            Essentially they know he is not a gov partisan, so they assume he is a fed partisan. Red Team / Blue Team thinking. His actual plan is out of context for them.

            If that doesn’t seem plausible, fall back on dude having mind control powers.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I recant my earlier concession!

            Okay, so the argument is that he’s playing both sides and doesn’t care who wins because he’s in charge of both.

            But, at the start of TPM, he’s not in charge of the Republic, just moderately powerful within it. And the Republic is much more influential and well established than the Trade Federation. While yes, being in charge of a Trade Federation that can conquer Naboo (and then perhaps other worlds) is good, being in charge of the Republic is much better. Why build your own institution from the ground up when you can co-opt someone else’s? (e.g., Trump taking over the Republican party rather than starting a 3rd party).

            So, he’s still better off prolonging the crisis so he can depose Valorum and move up in the Republic rather than ending the crisis swiftly, taking over Naboo and then making a new crisis that maybe this time will do the trick. He should still not try to murder the Jedi nor force Padme to sign the treaty, as prolonging the crisis is the quicker and easier path to power, and the Sith are kind of all about the quick and easy paths to power.

            Also wrt to stormtroopers being bad shots, remember that on Death Star I the troopers were on orders to let the gang escape so Vader could track them back to their base. Leia immediately recognizes how easy their escape was. In every scene besides the ones in which they’re deliberately trying to miss, the stormtroopers are expert marksmen.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            @ Original Mister X

            It’s clear from the way they interact with him that he is in charge rather than just giving them advice and encouragement, but how did he actually get to be in charge? And why do the Trade Federation still follow his orders in AOTC and ROTJ, even though his plans in TPM have led to nothing but disaster for the Trade Federation?

            I always saw this as basic greed. The Federation are interested in trade and money, but lack political power. Sidious offers them support in the Senate and presumably was convincing (maybe he did some other things for them previously) about his ability to do it.

            Once established in their relationship, his strong will and political power is the natural leader. They appear quite weak-willed and soft. In Episode I the various people on the bridge take turns poo-pooing Sidious’s plans and freaking out about the Jedi. They also use a droid army, separating themselves from any front line action. When Padme storms the palace, they just stand around and let themselves get captured. By the time Episode I comes around, they are also quite afraid of Sidious and don’t feel that they have the ability to back out of their arrangement. Since Sidious wields political power, they can’t expose him, and they can’t beat him mentally or physically. They’re quite stuck.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            @ Conrad

            Okay, so the argument is that he’s playing both sides and doesn’t care who wins because he’s in charge of both.

            But, at the start of TPM, he’s not in charge of the Republic, just moderately powerful within it.

            That’s missing the point. He was able to take influence over the Federation because they are relatively small and weak, but they are not an end, but a means to the greater prize of the whole Republic. His purpose was never to successfully use the Federation, but to create an unjustifiable incident. Killing the Jedi alone might have done it, but invading should work if not. He gets the Federation to do something that requires action from the Senate. Then he follows through on [Sidious’s] promise to bog down the Senate, so the Federation feels like Sidious is following through on his end of the deal and they continue to support him.

            When Valorum can’t fix an obvious problem, that sets the stage for “new leadership” in the form of Palpatine himself.

          • John Schilling says:

            So, he’s still better off prolonging the crisis so he can depose Valorum and move up in the Republic…

            The objective isn’t to depose Valorum and move up in the Republic, the objective is to create and rule an Empire. The long pole in that tent, if he follows the Republican path, is turning the Trade Federation into something the Senate will be sufficiently frightened of that they vote for at least a de facto Emperor, rather than just a new Chancellor.

            In the plan as executed, that took ten years and the creation of a “separatist alliance” around the defeated Trade Federation and a new Sith apprentice. If the Federation had been victorious in the first round, winning an extra dose of prestige and a wealthy planet of their very own, it would likely have been faster.

            And there’s still a good chance that when news gets out that the Federation has conquered Naboo and killed or subjugated the Good Queen Amidala while Valorum did nothing, Palpatine will be able to make that vote of no confidence stick. But exactly when he moves behind the slightly bigger desk of the Chancellor is secondary to the great work of replacing that desk with a throne. Because when the throne is ready, there’s approximately zero chance that Valorum will be sitting on it.

          • albatross11 says:

            Stormtroopers are bad shots when firing at people wearing plot armor.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Okay, I guess I can think of one really good reason for Palpatine to pick the “worse” option of murder/invasion: that’s what’s in the perceived self-interest of his Trade Federation lackeys. Not that they seem keen to or even able to resist Sidious, but what exactly do Nute and pals say when Sidious says “don’t invade or force Padme to sign the treaty. I want to drag this out as long as possible so I can take over the Republic.” “Uh, Mr. Sidious, sir, we kind of wanted our Space Taxes? Or…to not have to pay Space Taxes? Or whatever it is we’re doing here? How exactly does just being a big expensive distraction help us?” It’s easier to manipulate your lackeys when you’re telling them to do things they think they want.

            Given this, what works out best for Palpatine is for the Trade Federation to invade and fail rather than invade and succeed or not invade at all. But either of those are probably fine, too. Still, maybe a little dialogue between Palps and Maul where he explains his wisdom would have been nice.

    • Bugmaster says:

      Start over with some hitherto unknown, or at least unpopular, characters. In a pinch, if my team can’t come up with anything worthwhile, use Admiral Thrawn, or Mara Jade, or some similarly notable and interesting characters from the Expanded Universe.

      While The Last Jedi is certainly… controversial, I agree with its main thesis: let the past die. We are what we grow beyound.

      • albatross11 says:

        The next episode should have this charismatic military leader named Cheradenine Zakalwe show up and offer his services to the Rebellion, along with this chick named Diziet Sma and a funny-looking new floating droid she brought with her.

        • Bugmaster says:

          As amusing as that would be, there’s virtually no AI in the Star Wars universe — except for the human-level AI of the droids — so the scenario wouldn’t quite fit. However, if you took out the Culture emissaries and just left Zakalwe, that could be an interesting show… probably a bit too dark, though.

          • albatross11 says:

            I suppose liberating the droid slaves from their biological masters would be one of the big causes the Culture types would be shooting for.

        • Nornagest says:

          I’d read that fanfic, but you can’t do a Banks pastiche without at least one gratuitously disgusting torture scene, and there’s no way in hell that’d fly in a Star Wars film.

    • Fitzroy says:

      Star Wars’ USP is the Force – without that it’s just any other sci-fi – so I would want to major on that.

      In particular, I’ve never been happy with the way the Dark Side, and falling to it, is presented. Yoda says, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” and the Jedi seem to try to avoid emotional attachment for related reasons – emotions cloud judgement etc. etc.

      But the one time we see someone fall to the Dark Side it seems to go:

      Whiny Emo Teen gets laid –> has visions of wife dying (fear) –> Dark Lord of the Sith says he can save her –> Whiny Emo Teen pledges self to Team Obviously Evil and willingly murders a bunch of 4 year olds.

      There’s no way that journey makes sense unless you’ve already shown how the Dark Side has manipulated him to that point. And you have to do that on-screen with more than just Palpatine’s whispering in his ear.

      So I’d like to do a proper ‘fall of Anakin’ movie. Some latter-day Michael Bay type can do all the action beats in the main series. I want to do a prequel / interquel / whatever focussing on Anakin. I want it to be a properly dark psycho-drama where we can see the seductive nature of the Dark Side. See the easy power it offers. See Anakin using that power, just a little at first, for what he perceives to be the right reasons. Some noble-cause corruption. Maybe he Jack Bauers the location of a terrorist bomb out of someone with a little Force lightning, that kind of thing.

      Likewise, Palpatine can’t be cacklingly evil. He has to genuinely believe he’s doing the right thing – most dictators do, at least at first. The cackling hanging-on-to-power-for-grim-death comes later.

      In the end when Anakin commits soem indefensible atrocity ‘for the greater good’, I want the audience to understand why he did it and think that, just maybe, they’d have done the same in the circumstances.

      I want to make the Dark Side, and Anakin’s fall to it, believable.

      I’d probably need to up the rating of the film to an 18 for this, but I don’t see that as a bad thing to be honest.

      • Walter says:

        I like the view of the Force advanced in the novelization of Revenge of the Sith. It is the will of the universe, to which Jedi are in submission, and Sith in contention. Fatalists vs. Activists.

        Anakin falls when he prevents a tragedy that the Force does not direct him to prevent, simple as that.

        • bullseye says:

          Do you mean attempts to prevent a tragedy? He *causes* the tragedy he’s trying to prevent, like a Greek hero.

          • Walter says:

            I was just working on Fitzroy’s ‘Fall of Anakin’ idea. Like, my pitch would be that he sets himself up above fate, twisting the Force to right wrongs that it didn’t guide him to. Maybe he frees all the slaves on his home planet, or whatever. He becomes a Sith because destiny isn’t good enough for him, he needs to guide events to their optimal conclusions, whereas Obi Wan and the others have the humility and wisdom to allow Fate to find its own path.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      Chuck “SF Debris” Sonnenberg has a really good series on the behind-the-scenes issues that caused George Lucas to go the direction he did with the prequels. I’m basing my answer on that analysis, and if you haven’t seen it I suggest watching it.

      It seems like at least half of the problems with the Star Wars prequels stem from one issue: George Lucas hates flashbacks. Put in a flashback and a lot of the problems in the movies solve themselves. You only need a few minor alterations at that point and you have a solid trilogy.

      The logical place to start the series is in Epsiode II. Master Obi-wan Kenobi and his brave but arrogant apprentice Anakin Skywalker have been fighting side-by-side ever since Obi-wan met him an obscure desert planet as a child and saw that he was strong with the force. Cue flashback to Obi-wan meeting Anakin as a child, seeing that he was strong with the force, and agreeing to train him as a Jedi.

      Then Obi-wan and Anakin are sent to Naboo, where they rescue the princess Padme Amidala from an invasion by the Trade Federation. Anakin and Padme have a whirlwind romance. At the same time, Obi-wan is distracted as he uncovers the extent of Sith involvement, eventually killing the terrifying Sith warrior Darth Maul at the climax of the film. The senator of Naboo uses the crisis to become chancellor and orders the creation of a Grand Army of the Republic to counteract growing Trade Federation aggression.

      Now the Trade Federation, led by the charismatic former Jedi Count Dooku, join with other worlds and leave the Republic. The Seperatists attack, leading to the Clone Wars. The Jedi are forced with an ugly choice: compromise their principles and fight as generals, or retreat from the galactic stage and ignore the clear Sith influence on the Seperatists. Some, like Yoda, choose the latter but most are seduced by the possibility of winning a war with the dark side and accept their role as generals in Palpatine’s army.

      We then see Obi-wan and Anakin slowly ground down by the reality of fighting the Clone Wars. Obi-wan turns to the philosophy of his master Yoda for comfort; Anakin finds solace in his secret marriage and in his friendship with the Chancellor. When Dooku’s assassins threaten Padme, Anakin’s desperation to save her life and end the war leaves him open to embracing the dark side as a means to easy power. Giving in to the dark side, he kills Count Dooku and effectively ends the war.

      With the war over, and Obi-wan’s growing suspicions about the Chancellor, the Jedi demand that Chancellor Palapatine step down and relinquish his emergency powers. He refuses, revealing himself as a Sith Lord and forcing Anakin to pick sides. Anakin becomes Darth Vader and leads the Grand Army of the Republic to destroy the Jedi. Obi-wan deals him a moral wound and then retreats to hermitage with Anakin’s twin children. Anakin is saved but is now a mechanical monster and believes that he killed Padme and his children.

    • AG says:

      Relevant to the….”reinterpretations” before the holidays, remake The Karate Kid with Anakin as the lead.

      Since this is decades in the future, then LotR should be public domain, so then I’ll turn the other movies into a Star Wars adaptation of LotR.

    • knockknock says:

      …And then Mel Brooks will have to do a reboot of Spaceballs

    • testing123 says:

      There are a million treatments out there about, e.g., how to make the prequels or sequels a more compelling story. Read one, pick the one you like.

      I’m going to eschew discussion of plot and focus on process. Our goal isn’t to come up with good plots for star wars movies, our goal is to replicate the success of Marvel universe and come up with a system that kicks out billion dollar movies at least once a year for a couple decades.

      Fortunately, we have a model for how to do this, we do what marvel did, which was actually pretty simple. Phase one is make essentially unrelated movies in a shared universe. We have the star wars setting, so that’s easy. You make these movies as low stakes as possible, relatively limited budgets reduced hype, not bringing in the old actors/characters, and give the teams doing them a lot of freedom to experiment.

      This first phase takes years. Remember, it’s 4 years and 5 films from Iron Man to Avengers 1, and 6 more years and 12 films from thanos’ first appearance to infinity war. It is essential not to rush this period because it’s how we develop our house style. These movies won’t hang together as a cinematic universe if they feel wildly inconsistent, but we also want to avoid the DCU mistake of committing to a creative team that doesn’t work out. By experimenting with lower stakes movies and being ruthlessly willing to discard what doesn’t (e.g. hulk 2008), we can feel out what works and what doesn’t, and bring together a team that make movies that sell well and that the fans like and trust. You also use the one offs to tease ideas that will show up later phase two.

      Phase two is “the episodes”. These are really going to be the real heart of the franchise. They’re integrated trilogies planned as single stories with single teams. You make a big deal about how they will shake up the universe with galaxy shaping events with real consequences. These are risky moves, but that risk has been reduced dramatically by building a creative team that has a demonstrated record of success and by relentlessly plundering the expanded universe characters and story arcs that have already worked and which are already known to have some popular appeal.

      Once that works, you move onto phase three, repetition. Pick another basic idea for a set of episodes (ideally picking up something you teased in phase 1, but that isn’t essential), use the status quo you’ve established as the basis for a new set of stories, and then use them to develop new talent and to build up your new episodes, and rake in the cash.

      As I said, none of this is rocket science, at least conceptually, but the fact that no one has managed to imitate marvel suggests that it’s harder than it sounds. The real rub, I think, is impatience with phase 1. The first 3 marvel movies were Iron man, Hulk, and Iron Man 2, which is not a great record. You need a studio that’s willing to let the process work. They must resist the urge to overcorrect or over-determine story in the early stages or to try to jump ahead to the big payday before it’s been properly built up.

      Also, get my my god damned thrawn trilogy! I mean seriously, disney, wtf?

    • theredsheep says:

      Ignore the prequels; they never should have existed. There’s no point telling a story whose broad outlines and outcome are already known to the audience. This being the far future, maybe it could be fresh again, but then again it’s the far future and who knows if movies even exist; I interpret that as “license for a do-over.” Maybe it would make an interesting story, but it’s not one that really interests me.

      Brush 7, 8, and every abomination thereafter out of existence. Okay, I haven’t seen 8, I lost all interest after 7, but I read the summary and it seems daft. Anyway, it’s not canon anymore. No Captain Chrometits, no Generic Irrelevant Emperor, no Marey Sue, no Vader wannabe who screws up and imitates Hayden Christensen instead, none of the other boring characters or derivative plot moments. Gone.

      The new episode seven (assume we have magic Ford, Fischer, and Hamill duplicates) takes place in a galaxy where the roles have been reversed and the remnants of the Empire have merged into a roving terror fleet striking the Republic at random, surviving by stripping worlds bare after the fashion of the World Devastators from EU. Han and Leia’s force-strong children, a pair of siblings, were learning the ways of the Jedi when the fleet strikes the training location, killing one of them along with several other disciples. The other, infuriated by Luke’s slowness to retaliate, leads a pack of his/her (don’t know which I’d prefer) fellow trainees on a hunt after the fleet, teetering in and out of the dark side en route.

      It’s only revealed partway through what has happened; at first, we see only a bunch of force-sensitive youngsters on a rampage, followed by a ghostly blue figure (dead Solo kid) begging for sanity in vain. At the same time, Han, Leia, and Lando (remember him?) are struggling to maintain order and pin the fleet down, even as Han and Leia are frantic with worry about their rogue child. Luke is chasing after his renegades, but struggles with how he went wrong, and how he is to restrain them as they cause more and more collateral damage.

      That’s as far as I got while fuming after Ep 7 (I have a similar incomplete non-terrible version of Frozen in my head). I never quite got around to finishing it, because I knew it’d never happen and I said ehhh screw it. I think I’d want to plot out a full trilogy arc before deciding how alternate seven would end.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        There’s no point telling a story whose broad outlines and outcome are already known to the audience.

        Hmm, I don’t know. In some ways, I thought that Palpatine as an ordinary human with no wooga-wooga, plotting a coup that we know will succeed but that our heroes are completely oblivious to, was perhaps the only really effective thing in parts 1-3. Chilling.

        I’ve long wanted to write a Star Trek novel in which Kirk and company meet a time traveller from a hundred years in the future — except we gradually learn that the future he describes is nothing at all like the Next Generation. So what’s going on? We know he’s bogus. Don’t we? Or is he going to mess things up somehow, so that the TNG future is actually not the default future?

        • rmtodd says:

          I’ve long wanted to write a Star Trek novel in which Kirk and company meet a time traveller from a hundred years in the future — except we gradually learn that the future he describes is nothing at all like the Next Generation.

          Heh. That’s actually rather like the 1994 Trek novel Crossroad by Barbara Hambly. Except Kirk encounters two different groups of time travellers from the future, one group from the future Federation’s Starfleet pursuing another group that is, basically, the future Federation’s equivalent of Blake and his Seven (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake%27s_Seven for those who don’t get the reference).

        • theredsheep says:

          I think that’s mostly because Ian McDiarmid was one of the few actors who did a good job and wasn’t saddled with regular interaction with Jar Jar Binks or Anakin.

      • Walter says:

        One thing I like about your idea is that the Empire is now insurgents, and we keep the New Republic intact to fight them.

        I was super disappointed when they essentially just reset the Empire/First Order back into power at the start of the new trilogy. Struck me as gutless.

        Like, the Empire was fascist nations when it started, a clear Nazi Germany analog. That isn’t our fear anymore. Nowadays we are fighting a neverending War On Terror. Make them terrorists.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Yeah, that’s pretty good. Then you have to see the extent to which the Republic is willing to compromise its principles to fight terrorists.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Like, the Empire was fascist nations when it started, a clear Nazi Germany analog. That isn’t our fear anymore. Nowadays we are fighting a neverending War On Terror. Make them terrorists.

          So just the first trilogy with heros and villains reversed? Osama bin Skywalker destroys the Death Dodecahedron, Lord W. Ader wipes out his home planet of Afghanabaraan in retaliation?

          • theredsheep says:

            That would have worked if the movie came out in 2005. I think what’s really worrisome now is not so much terrorism per se as the complete dissolution of order–a reign of chaos, where nobody’s in charge at all. The ep 7 was vaguely relevant to the silliest fears of leftists where stormtroopers wear MAGA helmets, but even so it’s just a rehash.

            I don’t envision this as some space-politics thing where Admiral Ackbar talks about winning hearts and minds on Korriban, or anything like that. I think of the imperial death fleet as simply angry people who see that their golden age has been taken away from them, and set out not to build a new era but to burn away their shame.

          • Walter says:

            I don’t think it has to particularly resemble the first trilogy. The Empire were evil, and the Rebellion were good. But the First Insurgency would be evil, and the New Republic good. So they wouldn’t be using Death Stars on inhabited planets, etc.

          • theredsheep says:

            I don’t think of it as something where the Empire holds planets at all; they’ve been beaten down and lost everything, and now they rove about wrecking the New Republic purely to make things even. I’m thinking it might be interesting to have Grand Admiral Thrawn cut through the chaos and take over the fleet in ep 8 to turn it to more constructive purposes, but that’s just something that came to me now.

          • theredsheep says:

            I have scenes in my head where the rogue padawans infiltrate the fleet; most of them don’t have lightsabers, but they don’t even need them, because in this trilogy the Jedi are neither morons nor lone geriatric holdouts. They coordinate silently from a distance, distract and confuse with mind tricks, and ruthlessly tear their way through a star destroyer.

            Vague idea for a climax involving the commander(s) of the death fleet, Luke, his nephew/niece, and the Emperor’s malignant ghost pulling strings at random. Man, that would’ve been metal.

          • John Schilling says:

            No, the Jedi in your version need lightsabers, because we need to see them mirror Darth Vader in the boarding sequence from Rogue One. The bad guys can’t be allowed a monopoly on that kind of awesome. And if you can get Liam Neeson and Samuel Jackson to do that scene together, even better.

            (OK, the rules of the hypothetical probably allow you to rewrite Rogue to de-awesomize Vader, but that feels like cheating)

          • theredsheep says:

            Jedi stunts are what Luke is for; he’s the Jedi master with twenty years of experience past his ROTJ level. The rogues are a pack of misguided kids with one stolen lightsaber–properly the emblem of a fully trained Jedi–a big grudge, and no idea how much trouble they’re getting themselves into. Which isn’t to say they can’t whoop ass; they just aren’t doing it Vader style. More like ninja infiltration.

        • theredsheep says:

          What annoyed me most about the reset was the way it required all the heroes of the original trilogy to be essentially incompetent. They spent years fighting tyranny, they blow up two death stars, you pan away for a couple of decades and they are right back to square one again. Luke screwed up training his nephew–details unspecified–and responds by skulking on a rock while the galaxy goes to hell; Han gets his ship stolen repeatedly and bumbles around acting like the same jackass he was at the start of ANH; Leia apparently failed to build a functional society, but she’s still the best of the three because she at least hasn’t given up. Lando seems to have fallen off the map entirely, though I gather he’ll be back in the next one. Still won’t see it.

          • albatross11 says:

            I always wonder, when I watch some utter turkey of a movie (The Phantom Menace, say), whether the people doing the movie realized it was going to be a turkey, or if they actually thought Jar-Jar was great comic relief and the plot totally held together and made sense.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            I think there was a real feeling that TPM met the goals and needs of a wide audience, though specifically aiming to pull in a younger generation. It stretched the plot and made the whole thing a little bit less fulfilling than going for a strategic vision directly executed – but it seems to be what they intended.

            The real question is what someone thought of Episode II… I can’t think of any audience or any perspective that would have thought – this is the movie I wanted!

          • theredsheep says:

            I imagine it was a case where George Lucas was totally in charge and everybody was shrugging and going along with it because they couldn’t talk him out of it. Sort of the artistic Nuremberg defense.

            I just read on Wiki that Lucas compared Disney to “white slavers” for what they did to SW. They didn’t muck it up any worse than he did, but it still made me snicker.

    • WashedOut says:

      Hate to be a stick in the mud, but I would probably do a clean retelling of the original trilogy plus a compressed version of the subsequent 3 films, with the sole aim of updating the CGI and visual/audio experience for the new generation.

      So something like Episodes I-VI compressed into maybe 4 or 5 films released in chronological order. Each film is 90 minutes, 100 minutes TOPS. Get rid of pod-racing garbage from TPM, get rid of Jar Jar Binks entirely, basically scrap 50% of the total screentime of the franchise taken up by pointless, infuriatingly annoying shite. Attack of the Clones didn’t need to exist. Neither did any of the pure rent-seeking spin-offs.

      Star Wars 2040: All Killer, No Filler

  44. BBA says:

    Due to the partial government shutdown that began on December 22, all “non-essential” government employees in the affected departments are being furloughed, while “essential” employees are working unpaid, with the promise of back pay once the shutdown ends. Now it’s starting to have an impact on the general public: airport security officers are taking sick days rather than work unpaid.

    It’s unsurprising that many TSA staffers are living paycheck to paycheck, although I didn’t think they’d start walking out quite so soon. I don’t expect this to resolve the impasse, but a CBP walkout, which would leave the border unguarded, might. (Or, hell, I don’t know, the “state of emergency” could encompass sending soldiers to America’s airports to stamp passports in place of the CBP deserters. I’m sure they’d love that.)

    • ing says:

      I don’t think “people stop doing their job when their employer starts paying them in promises rather than money” is strong evidence that they were living paycheck-to-paycheck. I think it’s merely evidence that they’re not suckers.

      • A1987dM says:

        The typical “employer starting paying employees in promises” is a lot less credible than the USG, though.

      • CatCube says:

        As @A1987dM notes, they’re absolutely going to get backpay, unlike the higher chances of getting stiffed by a private employer.

        However, unless their landlords or mortgage holder will take payment in promises, they’re going to have to start finding something that’s paying them *now*. I could certainly float myself for a good time without getting paid, but AIUI the modal American cannot.

        • A1987dM says:

          However, unless their landlords or mortgage holder will take payment in promises, they’re going to have to start finding something that’s paying them *now*. I could certainly float myself for a good time without getting paid, but AIUI the modal American cannot.

          Which is also known as “living paycheck-to-paycheck”.

      • albatross11 says:

        “As long as they pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work.”

    • aristides says:

      Could be worse, the federal government has several LWOP options that are often trivial to get. If I was in their position, I would be sorely tempted to apply for 3 months FMLA, and go work somewhere else. Depending on how good the other job is, I might not come back. And since there is no real way to hire, I would assume that if the shutdown lasts 3 months or more, virtually no one will be working essential government positions.

      • albatross11 says:

        Is there anyone from HR around to process the LWOP paperwork?

      • John Schilling says:

        and go work somewhere else.

        I’m going to guess that if your day job is as a TSA screener, you don’t have the sort of resume that is amenable to just walking in off the street and getting a non-crap job without even the implied promise of sticking around for a year or so.

    • Winja says:

      So TSA can’t do their job of still not having thwarted a single terrorist?

      • Ketil says:

        Snide. But makes me wonder if a lot of security is “bullshit jobs”, like Graeber talks about. Stuff that we need to show that we are taking security seriously, but which has no real effect on anything, except being an obstacle and annoyance.

        Perhaps better targeted at systems than people: byzantine password schemes, detailed access prevention regimes, administrative bureaucracy, and so on.

        Anyway: The point of TSA is not to catch terrorists, but to convince travelers that they are safe, because the TSA is on the job, forcing people into x-ray cages and scanning shoes and other measures, as ostentatious as they are ineffective.

        • Walter says:

          I tend to agree, I think a LOT of security is fake. That is, it is not going to deter anyone, and is executed with the full knowledge of this fact.

          • albatross11 says:

            There is a lot of security theater–security whose purpose is to make people feel safer rather than to actually make anyone safer. The TSA is, IMO, like 95% security theater.

          • Lillian says:

            And the 5% that isn’t security theatre could be done by private security personnel hired by the airports. In fact, it would be better if it was done by private entities since they don’t get qualified immunity, and so can be sued if they misbehave.

        • eigenmoon says:

          Oh but TSA does have an effect. Namely, some people decide to travel by land to avoid dealing with TSA. As travel by land is more accident-prone, TSA effectively kills people by nudging them towards more dangerous form of transportation.

          How many? I’ve seen an estimate of 500 deaths/year but I can’t find the source.

        • arlie says:

          No no no! The point of TSA is to make air travel so unpleasant that frequent travellers pay extra for pre-screened status, thereby creating a new source of income.

      • CatCube says:

        Well, considering what things looked like before airport security was a thing (I think they had one highjacking per week for about a month in the ’70s), they’re at least doing something. Whether they do it efficiently is another question, of course.

        • Nornagest says:

          There were a couple of decades between the hijacking-a-week era and the TSA. It seems that airlines were adequately motivated to solve the problem of their planes getting stolen and their passengers effectively kidnapped without a huge unaccountable obnoxious branch of government doing it for them.

        • Protagoras says:

          The frequent hijacking era was also back when there were two superpowers who were actively supporting and financing terrorist groups to mess with one another. A big decline in international terrorism since that ended (and, of course, some of the most notorious more recent examples involve leftovers from that era).

          • John Schilling says:

            The frequent hijackers of the frequent-hijacking era were mostly not members of state-sponsored terrorist groups, but a mix of lone nuts, mercenaries, and small groups of wannabes. Rather like mass shootings today, hijackings in the early 1970s were widely publicized as a way for anybody with a gun fifteen minutes of fame and a bit of PR for whatever cause they supported, but unlike mass shootings today one could plausibly imagine living happily ever after in Cuba or wherever.

            Metal detectors and X-rays are a big part of what made that go away, by hardening passenger airplanes just enough that anyone without serious tradecraft would pick an easier target or give up altogether. Wikipedia reports eighteen hijackings of US aircraft in the decade before mandatory screening, vs seven in the decade afterwards. For the rest of the world, the numbers over the same period(*) were 26 and 24, respectively.

            * Most of which introduced universal screening later than the US.

          • Protagoras says:

            I know the individual incidents varied, but, for example, the stereotypical choice of Cuba as a hijacking destination was surely heavily influenced by the cold war context of superpower-encouraged terrorism (which, for example, made people think they might be welcomed if they hijacked an American plane to Cuba and claimed to have an appropriate political agenda).So I stand by my thesis as a significant (though perhaps not the only) factor.

      • BBA says:

        Ya know, if TSA being shut down meant anyone could get on a plane without going through security, I’d be for permanently zeroing their budget. But instead it means nobody gets on a plane, period.

    • hls2003 says:

      A family member of mine was a federal employee for decades, through multiple shutdowns. For the first one, he was very concerned. Then after it was over, he got reinstated with back pay even though he was furloughed and staying home. The second one, he was much less concerned. Again he got reinstated with back pay even though he was staying home. Further down the line, a furlough occurred during a time period when he already had scheduled vacation time. After that one, he got reinstated with back pay, and all his vacation time was returned to him. By the end of his tenure, he relished every shutdown as a paid vacation with guaranteed back pay. He was never wrong in 30 years.

      So the alternative perspective is that TSA workers may not be experiencing terrible hardship; rather, they may be banking on this shutdown being the same as all the others. Assuming it is, then (1) anyone not working will get back pay anyway for the furlough time; (2) anyone taking vacation will get pay and vacation time returned; and (3) anyone working will get back pay. Given those options, those who work through get the worst deal (though they’ll still get paid) – so it would make sense that TSA or other employees would prefer to take vacation and put themselves into Category 2 rather than Category 3 – they know that once the shutdown resolves, they’ll get their vacation time returned and back pay anyway, so better to convert the shutdown into a free vacation.

      • bullseye says:

        That was my father’s experience; but he was making enough to have money in savings while waiting for his delayed paycheck. That’s not true for everyone.

        • Gurkenglas says:

          Surely some entrepreneur or bank is paying people now in exchange for the right to any backpay?

          • bullseye says:

            I expect a payday loan place would hesitate to do it without knowing when payday will come, and the loans would be too small for a regular bank to bother with.

            Or maybe I’m wrong and the media just neglected to mention it.

          • acymetric says:

            There are also laws in some (many?) places that would prevent it. Less scrupulous lenders will work around those laws, but that is not a great place to be and the fees are not small.

          • CatCube says:

            Banks that work with government employees have often done this; here is a page from First Command that states they’re doing no-interest loans during this shutdown.

            USAA has done this in the past, but apparently are charging interest this time around, causing some ill feelings.

  45. Mark V Anderson says:

    The latest Reason has a short essay that trashes McConnell. This really resonates with me. It seems to me that he has been one of the worst on Repub side exacerbate toxic partisanship. The one thing in particular that he’s done is the Garland thing, where he didn’t allow the guy to be seated in the Supreme Court for complete partisan reasons, just because he could get away with it legally. I actually prefer the two guys who have been seated, but I think the increase in partisanship is not worth the better justices. Especially since the Dems will eventually get revenge and do the same thing when they have a chance, which will even out the Court.

    Usually Trump is treated as the biggest partisan, but it seems to me that he is just a clown and more of a symptom than a cause. Trump certainly has been very partisan, but McConnell is more to blame because he’s been at is longer and is more competent.

    I’m not saying that the Dems aren’t partisan too, but McConnell seems to be the biggest culprit on the Repub side. Although wasn’t it the Repub House that repealed Obama-Care something like 7 times when Obama was President ans so would veto, and so did it entirely for political reasons? It would be nice to get it down to just a few characters on each side to blame, but maybe that isn’t possible.

    I may be just rambling here. I’d like to figure out how to slow the partisanship and so know who to blame.

    • brad says:

      I don’t get what makes McConnell tick.

      Paul Ryan had strong ideological views that he wanted to stamp on the government. Donald wants everyone to be talking about him. Vladimir Putin wants power so he can torture and dismember his enemies. But Mitch McConnell seems to want Republicans to do well, especially Senate Republicans, as an ultimate goal.

      • ilikekittycat says:

        After all the stuff came out a few years ago going into the story about how McConnell defied Reagan at the height of his powers and pushed to sanction South Africa for apartheid, I don’t at all get how that man turned into what we see now

      • Kyle A Johansen says:

        You have to consider that political power is sort of zero-sum, in that there is only so much Oxygen and attention (and, obviously, seats).

        Simply defeating the Democrats keeps children safe, taxes from rising, state rights from being further trampled, oil and fracking continuing etc.

        The federal government is a tool. Democrats try to use that tool to make the rich, or bigots, ‘dad’ or whatever to suffer. McConnell helping Senate Republicans do well keeps that tool from being too effective for Democrats.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Kyle is banned indefinitely. An occasional post of this quality will not always 100% of the time a permabanning offense, but Kyle is new and many of his posts have been like this, so this one is.

      • Walter says:

        “I don’t get what makes McConnell tick.”

        “But Mitch McConnell seems to want Republicans to do well, especially Senate Republicans, as an ultimate goal.”

        I think you get what makes him tick just fine. He is a tribal chief, a sports captain, a fierce partisan. He wants his side to win, and the other to lose.

      • quanta413 says:

        Vladimir Putin wants power so he can torture and dismember his enemies.

        I think you’ve got the means and ends switched.

        • Protagoras says:

          I don’t know, I think humans do plenty of “I want to hurt these people, I’ll rationalize it as necessary thus,” probably more than they do “I want to accomplish this, and the only way to do it is to hurt people, so I’ll do that.”

          • quanta413 says:

            It might be a side benefit (I don’t know his mind), but I highly doubt his primary, secondary, or even tertiary goal in obtaining power is to torture and dismember his enemies. It “good vs. evil” view of how the typical dictator operates if you expect the primary goal of dictators in obtaining power is to torture and dismember people.

            The words weren’t just “hurt”; the words were “torture and dismember”.

            And giving enemies a grizzly end is a great way to discourage some people from being your enemies. Of course, some may feel you are more of an enemy so there’s a tradeoff. It depends who you need to discourage.

    • ilikekittycat says:

      I continue to be shocked at how little the Garland thing moved the needle. That wasn’t like, some complex culture issue with 1000 little subtle things to consider that make it hard to do the right thing, it was just straight up Marius/Sulla/Caesar era pressing the system to get what you want with 0 justification

      In the Bush era I read a lot of conservative/libertarian stuff (mostly aware of how it’d be futile/impossible at this point, but still talking about how things would be in a perfect world where we followed all the rules) about how things went wrong with Wickard v. Filburn, or the income tax technically wasn’t legal because the amendment couldn’t have been passed in good faith, or how the imperial presidency took more and more powers it shouldn’t have, and it made me sad that by the time the Garland thing came up, it was just 100% tribal/about not letting go of power. I mean, I’ve never actually encountered an everyday Republican/libertarian type that thinks it was The Right Thing To Do, or anything other than a power move, but it just doesn’t move the needle at all in terms of “oh this is a watershed rule of law/constitutional crisis moment” like I would have assumed from the stated principles in the things I had read 15 or 20 years ago

      • Kyle A Johansen says:

        It seems a bit rich for the ‘phone and pen’ people defying tradition to complain about McConnell using as much of the power invested in him to keep that corruption from getting even worse.

        The defections of the Supreme Court surely came from Democrats deciding that an unelected, unaccountable judge throwing up his hands and going ‘the constitution is out of date, this issue is too important, and if the politicians won’t do something then I will’ was no longer a failure state but the actual criteria.

        • aristides says:

          I agree with this, and add that partisanship was so bad even before Garland, that I think Senate Republicans assumed the Democrats would do the same thing if they had the chance. Personally, I think they were right about that point. The power of the Supreme Court is to great to not be tempted to abuse it. I’m conservative, but I would still support measures to reduce the SC power at this point.

          • cryptoshill says:

            Notably – this didn’t start with Garland, this started with Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork. After it was made *completely clear* to the Republicans that SC seats were not about who the people want, or who would be good for the job, but purely about who can use them to take power for their team it would be *astonishing* if they didn’t make moves like the Garland affair.

            Also notably – Schumer suggested doing the exact same thing to Clarence Thomas.

            The rules of this particular game were not set by McConnell or the Republicans, they just played for keeps twice (with Garland and Kavanaugh).

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            I don’t think Garland is remotely comparable to Bork or Thomas.

            Plenty of individual judicial nominees have been opposed before, on their own merits, but note that after Bork was rejected (and Ginsburg withdrew, largely for non-political reasons), Reagan was able to appoint Kennedy, and that Thomas was in fact successfully appointed.

            What makes Garland completely unprecedented is that it’s the first time we’ve seen a party go from “you get to make the appointment, but we may try to stop particular individuals we especially dislike” to “we’re going to stop you appointing anyone, purely on ideological grounds”.

            We’ve never seen anyone defect against the norm that hard before.

          • Randy M says:

            a party go from “you get to make the appointment, but we may try to stop particular individuals we especially dislike” to “we’re going to stop you appointing anyone, purely on ideological grounds”.

            What do you think made those individuals especially disliked, if not ideology?

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            As I point out below, this awful, awful thing has been done for many years by both parties to lower-court nominees; McConnell’s only innovation is applying it to a Supreme Court nominee. As completely unprecedented things go, that’s rather precedented.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I don’t think Garland is remotely comparable to Bork or Thomas.

            True, but not for the reason you cite. Garland was vastly different because the Republicans didn’t do a hatchet job on him, sullying his name and his character. They were almost unfailingly polite with regard to Garland himself, openly acknowledging that their problem was with Obama, not Garland.

            (Oh, damn, that’s right, this is supposed to be a culture-wars-free open thread. I love the idea, but I guess I have to stop reading them.)

          • Jaskologist says:

            The non-decimal, plainly visible open-threads are the new non-CW threads. You can go nuts on *.5

          • Randy M says:

            But there is understandable confusion since the rule was changed so the CW-free would coincide with the “visible” announced open threads.

          • albatross11 says:

            Bork’s role in the last days of the Nixon administration was a pretty sensible reason to oppose him, IMO.

        • ilikekittycat says:

          The right response to that is impeachment, constitutionally, isn’t it? I wouldn’t even think it would be wrong if all the Republicans just voted “no” to confirmation without having a good reason, that power is theirs to exercise. Just refusing to go through with the procedure seems like a bigger violation, I don’t know how to express this to you if you don’t have that intuition

          • Jaskologist says:

            Meghan McArdle posted the following observation a while back:

            “I’m not insisting the other party is more guilty. I’m insisting that both sides have escalated, and because each escalation was both a response to an earlier escalation, and itself unprecedented, each side believes itself justified.”

            And right before that:

            “One thing is crystal clear to me: virtually no liberals remember anything that Democrats did to escalate the judicial wars. It’s not strategic. They didn’t care, so they’ve forgotten it ever happened, and therefore believe that GOP invented this stuff in 2008. This is asymmetric with the GOP, who appear to have eidetic memory for everything they did, along with somethign D’s did that justifies it. I don’t know what this says about our politics, but it must be something.”

          • ilikekittycat says:

            I don’t think the Democrats are blameless, to be sure. Somewhere in the posting hell of the previous Kavanaugh open threads I said (and now reiterate) the culture war escalation the Democrats did for Bork/Thomas/Kavanaugh of pretending they are skeptical of the nomination for technical reasons instead of just coming out and saying “we can’t have another judge on the court who will vote against RvW/PPvC” was intellectually dishonest

          • brad says:

            I don’t think Bork fits that sentence. First, the Saturday Night Massacre was arguably the real reason with the ideology, the ostensible reason. Second, inasmuch as ideology was the real reason it matched what Senators said were their reasons (“Robert Bork’s America”).

      • Walter says:

        Um, maybe 0 justification if you are a progressive. I dunno, like, talk to one of your conservative friends about why McConnell might have done his utmost to get a pro life SC justice instead of a pro choice one. It isn’t, like, a deep mystery.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Yeah, I don’t get how people are mystified by this. You worked hard to set up the Supreme Court as the ur-legislature which overrides all other votes, and flexed that power very shortly before Garland when Obergefell overrode some 2 dozen state amendments (somebody else can count how many voters that disenfranchises). Unless we have the court in our court, we cannot expect to win any other vote. Since everything rides on that, why wouldn’t we pull out all the stops to make sure it goes the right way?

          “The animal is a vicious partisan; when attacked, it fights back.”

          • albatross11 says:

            Don’t worry, I feel certain that as the court balance shifts right, we will suddenly see a proliferation of explanations from the left about how precedent and plain meaning of the laws should be followed, and from the right on how the constitution is a living document that should be interpreted in light of current issues and moral views.

            Why, it’s almost like most of those people don’t have principles so much as they have a side.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            No, I still think the plain meaning of the laws and constitution should be followed. Which means an awful lot of the left’s legislating from the bench gets overturned.

          • brad says:

            “You”

          • cryptoshill says:

            I would be very pleasantly surprised if the Red Tribe intellectual class kept droning on about originalism and textualism after they got significant control of the SC.

          • Kyle A Johansen says:

            Gaining control of the court is about putting textualists and originalists onto the court. To suddenly declare that current Washington and university mores ought to trump the constitution is to throw away that control in order to support the Democrats.

            There may be ‘sides’, but the Republicans are the side that support the constitution and the founding fathers. *

            * This is just my perspective from over the pond.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            What is it that you think the Republicans want the courts to do that extend beyond textualism/originalism?

            Look at Obergefell. Scalia’s dissent wasn’t “the Constitution says gays are bad so no gay marriage!” His dissent was that the Constitution has absolutely nothing to say about marriage or sexual orientation, so the Supreme Court has no authority to define marriage for each state. He would neither ban nor mandate gay marriage. Leave it up to the states for the people of the states to decide what marriage is for them.

            I agree with Kyle. The Republican push is for textualists/originalists on the SC. Do you think they’re all lying, and are secretly right-wing “Living Document” types, and once there’s 5 or 6 of them on the court they’re going to drop the mask and say “ah ha, fooled you, it’s theocracy time!”

          • cryptoshill says:

            @Conrad Honcho – that depends on whether I think Republicans are particularly principled or particularly unprincipled, the relative number of principled/unprincipled Republicans *and* which ones control the general Red Tribe memeplex.

            I would say that it is *entirely possible* that the push for textualism/originalism originates from cynical power grabbing just like the “these are civil RIGHTS” “Living Document” supporters could potentially be a mask for cynical power grabbing.

            That’s why I said “I would be pleasantly surprised if Red Tribe thought leaders continued to drone on about textualism and originalism”. IE: it means that the push for textualism/originalism was actually about textualism/originalism and not a mask for some other kind of power grab. That result would *reduce* my prior that there’s someone out there with a mask they’re waiting to take off and say “BOOM! Theocracy time!”.

            I don’t think it was a significant danger – but also something else to consider is the danger of winning too much. I don’t think the people who wrote the civil rights act predicted the continuous and forever expansion of the definition of a civil right, but with their memeplex ascendant that is exactly what happened.

          • Nick says:

            I would be very surprised if non-textualist views took over on the right; even if McConnell and other senators are pragmatists, that doesn’t mean the conservative judges they could get confirmed are, and sidelining the Federalist Society and others sounds like a terribly idea. You don’t build something like that for thirty to forty years only to throw it aside for the five or ten years you have the court.

          • Tarpitz says:

            I would like to join Kyle Johansen in noting – as a Brit who largely dislikes both main US parties and is more socially liberal than the mainstream of either – that this situation is not symmetrical. Unsurprisingly, 21st Century conservatives are in most respects to the left of 18th Century liberals, and as such the US constitution, naturally interpreted, is far more supportive of Republican than Democrat positions.

          • Jaskologist says:

            This is a place where we should be able to make some firmer claims. What do you think an originalist vs activist Republican Court looks like?

            Activist:
            * Overturning Obergefell, declaring that the Constitution bans gay marriage.
            * Overturning Obamacare. I think there are colorable arguments to be made, but it still ultimately smells of dirty tricks and technicalities.

            Originalist:
            * Overturning Obergefell, saying voters can define marriage however they want.
            * Overturning Roe v Wade, saying voters can ban or not ban abortion as they see fit.
            * Enforcing the RFRA. Legislatures passed the law and if they don’t like it they should repeal it themselves.
            * Striking down anti-gun laws.

            Borderline:
            * Banning abortion. This would be pretty easy to defend under the right not to be killed, so I’m not sure which category it goes in.

          • John Schilling says:

            What would a non-textualist conservative judge look like; what object-level decisions would you expect them to make differently than a textualist conservative and on what basis?

            And, where would you actually find such judges who are plausubly SCOTUS-worthy candidates? Because if this takes twenty years of the GOP planting and cultivating e.g. Christian theocratic judicial candidates in the hopes that they will control the White House and the Senate with enough margin to get such justices confirmed to the Supreme Court in the next generation, I think it very likely that the GOP will instead decide to stick with what has been working tolerably well for them all along.

          • ilikekittycat says:

            @John Schilling

            Maybe like the Thomas/Scalia split in Gonzales v. Raich? The textualist upholding things like the 10th Amendment even when they go against the culture war position vs. the jurist who consistently caves to the culture war position?

          • Dan L says:

            @ Conrad Honcho:

            Look at Obergefell. Scalia’s dissent wasn’t “the Constitution says gays are bad so no gay marriage!” His dissent was that the Constitution has absolutely nothing to say about marriage or sexual orientation, so the Supreme Court has no authority to define marriage for each state. He would neither ban nor mandate gay marriage. Leave it up to the states for the people of the states to decide what marriage is for them.

            This is an interesting case, because SCOTUS has been ruling that marriage exists as a federally-guaranteed right for decades if not centuries. Is anyone here willing to bite the bullet and argue against Loving v. Virginia?

            @ Jaskologist:

            originalist vs activist

            Elaborating on my comment above, I don’t see this as a dichotomy*. Even ignoring the differences between textualism, originalism, and strict constructionism (and the questionable track record of the preachers’ practice), when it comes to “activism” I’m mostly concerned with how aggressively a court is willing to overturn precedent. It’s not clear to me that originalists (let alone merely-professed originalists) are more small-C conservative than average – the opposite, if anything.

            *”Activist liberal judges that try to legislate from the bench v. textualist conservative judges that adjudicate the law as it is instead of what they wish it was” definitely doesn’t pass the ideological Turing test.

          • Jaskologist says:

            when it comes to “activism” I’m mostly concerned with how aggressively a court is willing to overturn precedent.

            This is not the concern that was originally voiced (though not by you). The claim was that the talk about originalism is a smokescreen for power grabs. I say that accusation needs fleshing out, and how better to do that than to list what an originalist court would do relative to a Right Activist court? A court which overturns precedent that’s out of whack with the constitution may not be what you want, but it’s not hypocritical of originalists.

            I can come up with quite a long list of things that I think are bad ideas that are nevertheless constitutional. It sure would be nice to have the Council of Nine simply override those mistaken votes, but it would not be originalist or democratic, and I think it’s a severe violation of the rules we are supposed to live together by.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Is anyone here willing to bite the bullet and argue against Loving v. Virginia?

            I don’t think there’s a valid comparison between Loving and Obergefell, because in Loving the Virginia law in question made interracial marriage a felony offense, punishable by 1-3 years in prison. There’s a huge difference between “the state may not punish you for X type of marriage” and “the state must grant you a license for X type of marriage.”

          • Controls Freak says:

            This is an interesting case, because SCOTUS has been ruling that marriage exists as a federally-guaranteed right for decades if not centuries. Is anyone here willing to bite the bullet and argue against Loving v. Virginia?

            No one thinks this right is absolute. Restrictions include tests based on age, incarceration status, fertility combined with blood relationship distance, and existing marital contracts. One doesn’t need to overturn Loving to sustain these restrictions, either.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            Loving and Obergfell both rely on a very similar reading of the fourteenth amendment. The legacy of common law means that the institution of marriage is given rather enormous legal weight and makes restrictions on it subject to intermediate scrutiny – the state must argue a compelling interest when introducing restrictions. Prevention of incest (birth defects, etc) and protection of minors (age) are compelling interests. Incarceration is not, per Turner v Safley, for what that’s worth. This is distinct from marriage being motivated by a compelling interest – the argument that the institution of marriage ought to exist because it serves the state. Marriage is held as a natural unenumerated right that the state may restrict, not a privileged status granted by the state in order to encourage procreation.

            And yes, I think that this implies that the exclusivity of marriage is very much legally suspect (though I’m personally extremely monogamous by temperament).

            @Conrad

            Loving held that anti-miscegenation laws of any sort are unconstitutional, and that the state has an obligation to recognize marriages unless it has a compelling reason not to do so. That’s not a revisionist reading of Loving – it’s there in the majority opinion, an extension of Perez.

            There’s a strange strain of Libertarian thought that says that marriage is a contract between the people who are in it; the most salient features of marriage in a legal sense, I would argue, are the parts where a marriage imposes obligations on the people who are not part of it.

          • LadyJane says:

            @Conrad Honcho:

            The Republican push is for textualists/originalists on the SC. Do you think they’re all lying, and are secretly right-wing “Living Document” types, and once there’s 5 or 6 of them on the court they’re going to drop the mask and say “ah ha, fooled you, it’s theocracy time!”

            That’s a bit hyperbolic for my tastes, but basically yes. I view “Constitutional originalism” in much the same way that I view “states’ rights.” A lot of people claim to value those things as terminal ends in and of themselves, but in actuality, most of those people really just find them convenient for justifying their preferred conservative policies. This is evident by the fact that they’d happily throw those principles under the bus when there’s a contradiction between the principle and their actual policy preferences, e.g. Jeff Sessions’ blatant disregard for states’ rights when it comes to cannabis legalization.

            Of course, I’m sure there are some people out there who really do care about Constitutional originalism and states’ rights, I just think those people are rare and greatly outnumbered by the people using those concepts as shields and bludgeons. (For what it’s worth, I think Justice Gorsuch may very well be a genuine originalist, or at least much closer to one than most of the people who use the term. But it’s also worth noting that he’s repeatedly been criticized by his fellow conservatives for being “too liberal” and siding with Democrats on too many cases.)

          • Controls Freak says:

            A few nitpicks. Loving/Obergefell both fit marriage into fundamental rights, demanding strict scrutiny, not intermediate (of course, Kennedy was as opaque and haughty as Kennedy always was, so he wasn’t always abundantly clear how much 14A and how much 5A he was using). Traditional 14A EPC standards would have subjected racial classifications in Loving to strict scrutiny (see Justice Stewart concurring) and sex classifications in Obergefell to intermediate scrutiny (requiring instead that it furthers an important gov’t interest by means that are substantially related to that interest). Until Obergefell, the best explanation of what a fundamental right was came from the Glucksberg test. Kennedy threw that away, and now we’re back to, “Fundamental rights are whatever can get five votes on the Supreme Court.”

            Concerning incarceration, I didn’t spell this out, but was implying that the particular status of the prisoner was important. Butler v. Wilson summarily affirmed Johnson v. Rockefeller, denying marriage to a prisoner who was sentenced to life without parole. Turner v. Safley acknowledged and did not overturn this.

            Concerning “encourag[ing] procreation”, there is a reason why I mentioned fertility alongside blood relationship distance. It’s because procreation is incredibly intertwined with marriage (after all, there is a reason why Loving cited Skinner in saying that marriage is “fundamental to our very existence and survival“; it’s not just about lovey-dovey feelings). And States have historically used marriage policy both to encourage responsible procreation and to discourage irresponsible procreation. Sure, they can’t actually regulate the sex; that’s very much a private activity that is outside of the domain of state control. But they can regulate the issuance of marriage licenses, which is squarely in the domain of government-run bureaucratic records-keeping. So, they don’t say, “You can’t have sex with your sister.” They say, “You can’t get married to your sister… uh, unless you show that one of you are sterile.” The intent is absolutely to influence procreation via marriage policy, and it’s frankly absurd to try to divorce these things.

            Concerning bigamy, I don’t even care to discuss this. I’m just sitting back and waiting to see which portion of the left wins this one. We’ve already departed from defensible jurisprudence; the only question is whether bald assertions like “[it’s] very much legally suspect” are backed up with enough of a credible threat of ostracization to make a successful power play.

          • Dan L says:

            @Jaskologist:

            The claim was that the talk about originalism is a smokescreen for power grabs. I say that accusation needs fleshing out, and how better to do that than to list what an originalist court would do relative to a Right Activist court?

            Again, I reject the notion that these are automatically different things. Originalism is a popular legal philosophy among the Right these days because it can support what they want and vilify their enemies. I see little evidence that its popular acclaim comes from a more principled (or unified!) position than that.

            To engage your specifics, I’ve seen both of your listed Activist positions (and a blanket abortion ban to boot) argued in a supposedly Originalist way. I found it unpersuasive, but that doesn’t say much.

            A court which overturns precedent that’s out of whack with the constitution may not be what you want, but it’s not hypocritical of originalists.

            You missed the key phrase “precedent that originalists think is out of whack”, which brings us back to a mere disregard for precedent. That’s unacceptable coming from a Roy Moore. If you want to play No True Scottsman, then I’m still not on board with a mere Scalia.

            @Conrad Honcho:

            I don’t think there’s a valid comparison between Loving and Obergefell, because in Loving the Virginia law in question made interracial marriage a felony offense, punishable by 1-3 years in prison. There’s a huge difference between “the state may not punish you for X type of marriage” and “the state must grant you a license for X type of marriage.”

            First, note that this is a retreat from “the Constitution has absolutely nothing to say about marriage”.

            Second, that difference is irrelevant to the decisions reached, or to the legal consequences. Are you under the impression that Virginia retained the right to deny interracial marriages after Loving, as long as they didn’t imprison people?

            @Controls Freak:

            You’ve listed a lot of facts ranging from the obvious to the dubious, but until you put forth a constructed argument I’ll decline the diversions. I don’t think you’d appreciate me guessing your position to be “SCOTUS sometimes finds exceptions even to things it judges to be fundamental rights, therefore they could (should?) have done so in Obergefell“.

          • Controls Freak says:

            I don’t think you’d appreciate me guessing your position to be “SCOTUS sometimes finds exceptions even to things it judges to be fundamental rights, therefore they could (should?) have done so in Obergefell“.

            You’re correct, especially since I spoke directly concerning the method by which SCOTUS judges fundamental rights.

            …perhaps you should put forth exactly what you think is dubious about what I’ve said.

          • Dan L says:

            You’re correct, especially since I spoke directly concerning the method by which SCOTUS judges fundamental rights.

            You’ve said both that Obergefell comports with earlier jurisprudence in treating marriage as a fundamental right and that its decision cast doubts on how fundamental rights are determined. You wrote a bunch of other words about scrutiny standards, but they’re ultimately irrelevant to either Kennedy’s purported contradiction or yours.

            Regardless, we seem to agree on the recognition of marriage as a fundamental right protected by the federal government. (It really shouldn’t have been in doubt to begin the thread.) If you’re looking for a general argument about Obergefell‘s quality, I’m not interested.

            …perhaps you should put forth exactly what you think is dubious about what I’ve said.

            I’ll decline. Your comments don’t call for a Fisking.

          • brad says:

            I agree with Kyle. The Republican push is for textualists/originalists on the SC. Do you think they’re all lying, and are secretly right-wing “Living Document” types, and once there’s 5 or 6 of them on the court they’re going to drop the mask and say “ah ha, fooled you, it’s theocracy time!”

            I was going to respond to this, but LadyJane said almost exactly what I would have.

            There are people that genuinely care about constitutional hermeneutics. They are mostly lawyers, but most lawyers are not among them.

          • Controls Freak says:

            …perhaps you should put forth exactly what you think is dubious about what I’ve said.

            I’ll decline. Your comments don’t call for a Fisking.

            Ok. Then, I guess I’ll just leave my comments as they stand, and folks can judge for themselves concerning whether you’re interpreting them intelligently.

          • Concerning bigamy, I don’t even care to discuss this.

            As with gay marriage, there are two different questions—can the federal government make it illegal and can the states make it illegal. Do you think the 19th c. decisions that let the federal government suppress bigamy in Utah were correct? Where in the Constitution did the federal government get the power to make rules on marriage?

            Arguably the 14th Amendment limits the states in what rules they can make about marriage, but that’s a separate issue.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I was going to respond to this, but LadyJane said almost exactly what I would have.

            There are people that genuinely care about constitutional hermeneutics. They are mostly lawyers, but most lawyers are not among them.

            LadyJane, brad, do you have any evidence the Federalist Society are all frauds?

            This sounds to me like projection. You like judicial activism, so you assume everyone else must too, and those who claim they don’t are lying.

          • brad says:

            LadyJane, brad, do you have any evidence the Federalist Society are all frauds?

            I neither made nor endorsed any such claim.

            You like judicial activism, so you assume everyone else must too, and those who claim they don’t are lying.

            Nor is this an accurate description of what I wrote or my position.

            Did you wake on the wrong side of the bed this morning? We don’t agree on anything but you haven’t generally made such garbage posts.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think I’m the one who made the initial statement about this.

            I think the Federalist society and its members probably are somewhat committed to an originalist position on interpreting the law. But I predict that this commitment will weaken over time, as the Republicans have a majority on the top tier of Federal courts. I predict that will happen among judges and supreme court justices to some extent, but I think it will happen far more, and far more rapidly, among pundits/talking heads whose job is to explain or justify their side’s decisions.

          • 10240 says:

            @Hoopyfreud , I find the way common law countries consider institutions like marriage to descend from common law rather than to be created by the state weird, especially since I think most actual legal consequences of marriage are specified in statutory law. It’s weird to consider marriage a natural right when the state may change its meaning arbitrarily by altering its legal consequences; other natural rights such as habeas corpus imply that the state may not do certain specific things.

            However, given the common law treatment of marriage, only opposite-sex marriage has ever existed under common law until recently. Same-sex marriage wasn’t prohibited by the state; it had never existed under common law. It’s not even clear why the SCOTUS extended marriage to same-sex couples rather than abolished marriage for everyone (while allowing legislatures to reintroduce it in a sex-neutral way), if allowing only opposite-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Both would have required altering the common law: either abolishing a common law, or creating new law supported by neither existing common law nor statutory law.

            In civil law countries, constitutional courts generally have the authority to strike down law as unconstitutional, but not the authority to create new law (even on the basis of the constitution). In common law countries, courts have authority to interpret common and statutory law (creating precedent that’s much like creating law), and under the US interpretation to strike down statutory law as unconstitutional, but theoretically not the authority to create law. Do they have the authority to strike down common law as unconstitutional? Do they have the authority extend common law to situations it hasn’t applied to before, to avoid unconstitutionality, but without a basis in either earlier common or statutory law?

            Unlike the restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples which has been part of common law since time immemorial, race-based restrictions were statutory restrictions explicitly created by the state.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            We don’t agree on anything but you haven’t generally made such garbage posts.

            Aw, shucks, I bet you say that to all the girls…

            I asked if people thought the textualists/originalists were really judicial activists in disguise, and once they got enough of them on the court the mask would fall and it would be “WE THEOCRACY NOW” and you said basically “yes.” Well the recommendations for the judges are coming from the Federalist Society. Do they know Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Thomas and all of them are frauds? Or is the Federalist Society also frauds?

          • There are people that genuinely care about constitutional hermeneutics. They are mostly lawyers, but most lawyers are not among them.

            How about judges on the federal appeals courts, the group most likely to end up on the Supreme Court? They are not a random selection of lawyers. Do you think that most of them also don’t care about theories of constitutional interpretation?

          • LadyJane, brad, do you have any evidence the Federalist Society are all frauds?

            The argument doesn’t require that they are all frauds, at most that enough of them are so that the organization would shift its choices.

            But it doesn’t even require that, because the members of the Federalist Society are not a fixed group. One could imagine circumstances in which, over time, the membership shifted in a way leading to the result they are suggesting.

            If that seems implausible to you, consider the case of the ACLU.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            The ninth amendment appears to be an explicit recognition of the existence of common-law unenumerated rights, and I think that a coherent reading of the constitution suggests that the constitution’s text takes precedence over unenumerated rights, but that US law cannot abridge those rights (at least absent compelling interest). Therefore, marriage is a right that the fourteenth amendment applies to in the state’s recognition of that right.

            Insofar as you can accept A) that the constitution exists to enumerate negative natural rights (freedoms) and B) that positive natural rights exist (entitlements) then this makes some sort of sense.

          • LadyJane says:

            @Conrad Honcho: No, I think the Federalist Society probably has a mix of people who genuinely aren’t political/cultural conservatives and only care about originalism, people who are political/cultural conservatives but put their commitment to originalism first, people who are genuine originalists but care more about furthering the goals of political/cultural conservatism, people who are genuine originalists but would betray their values for the sake of pragmatic concerns (such as pressure from their political allies), and people who don’t care about originalism at all and only use it as a cover for pursuing conservative goals.

            In terms of federal justices who claim to be originalists, I’d imagine you’d see a fairly similar mix. For instance, I think Justice Gorsuch falls more on the “genuine originalist” side, whereas Kavanaugh would probably fall into one of the latter three groups.

            In terms of political pundits who emphasize the value strict judicial originalism – yes, I genuinely believe that almost 100% of them are in the fifth group. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would change their stance on originalism in a split-second if it was politically expedient for them to do so. Same goes for random conservatives who make similar arguments, I doubt half of them even have any real coherent understanding of what originalism would actually entail.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            As far as I’m aware, no common law jurisdictions ever held that two men could get married until a decade or so ago. Unless you consider common law to be some sort of Platonic ideal existing independently of any human mind, it seems that common law does not, in fact, count same-sex marriage as real marriage.

          • Dan L says:

            @albatross11:

            I think the Federalist society and its members probably are somewhat committed to an originalist position on interpreting the law. But I predict that this commitment will weaken over time, as the Republicans have a majority on the top tier of Federal courts. I predict that will happen among judges and supreme court justices to some extent, but I think it will happen far more, and far more rapidly, among pundits/talking heads whose job is to explain or justify their side’s decisions.

            Broad agreement, David’s example of the ALCU is apt. It shouldn’t be surprising when an organization ends up compromising (or more generously, shifting) ideology in order to further shorter-term political goals. I can think of few strategies less effective that explicitly bringing them into the SCOTUS nomination process.

            @Conrad Honcho:

            I asked if people thought the textualists/originalists were really judicial activists in disguise, and once they got enough of them on the court the mask would fall and it would be “WE THEOCRACY NOW” and you said basically “yes.” Well the recommendations for the judges are coming from the Federalist Society. Do they know Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Thomas and all of them are frauds? Or is the Federalist Society also frauds?

            In addition to David’s comment, I’ll repeat my earlier point that originalism is no proof against activism. Trump has also been crediting the explicitly-activist Heritage Foundation – some might find it concerning that their lists have so much overlap with the FS’.

            @LadyJane:

            In terms of federal justices who claim to be originalists, I’d imagine you’d see a fairly similar mix. For instance, I think Justice Gorsuch falls more on the “genuine originalist” side, whereas Kavanaugh would probably fall into one of the latter three groups.

            In terms of political pundits who emphasize the value strict judicial originalism – yes, I genuinely believe that almost 100% of them are in the fifth group. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would change their stance on originalism in a split-second if it was politically expedient for them to do so. Same goes for random conservatives who make similar arguments, I doubt half of them even have any real coherent understanding of what originalism would actually entail.

            +1

          • brad says:

            How about judges on the federal appeals courts, the group most likely to end up on the Supreme Court? They are not a random selection of lawyers. Do you think that most of them also don’t care about theories of constitutional interpretation?

            I’ve only met a few, but I’d guess most of them do. It’s a job that’s a perfect fit for someone that cares and I imagine parts of it would be something of a drag for someone that didn’t.

            All that said, I believe that Scalia cared deeply about constitutional hermeneutics but still wrote what he wrote in Raich v Gonzales, Bush v Gore, and a few other cases.

          • 10240 says:

            Sure, they can’t actually regulate the sex; that’s very much a private activity that is outside of the domain of state control. But they can regulate the issuance of marriage licenses, which is squarely in the domain of government-run bureaucratic records-keeping. So, they don’t say, “You can’t have sex with your sister.” They say, “You can’t get married to your sister… uh, unless you show that one of you are sterile.”

            @Controls Freak : It’s definitely illegal to have sex with your sister in most places. Homosexuality has also been illegal in many places, and miscegenation has been in some places as well.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        How mad were you when Harry Reid triggered the nuclear option to change Senate rules? Garland was the inevitable payback for that.

        There are two kinds of Republicans: the “tolerable” ones who politely lose to progressives and the awful ones who win.

        And we’re still going to call the tolerable ones Nazis anyway.

        • ilikekittycat says:

          Not mad? There’s nothing in the Constitution that says you have to have filibusters or any of that. It’s all custom. AFAIK you don’t have to even pick the Speaker of the House from the body of politicians, Congress is full of weird rules like that and could technically take a very radically different form from what we have if the body wanted it, because the next version could change everything back and ultimately its all legislators going back and forth about matters of the Legislature

          Going around inter-branch division of powers/rule of law stuff is on a different level of violation. It’s bizarre to me that I even have to explain this, the sorts of conservatives/libertarians I would read or argue with in like 1999-2004 seemed to have grasped this intuitively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            And how is McConnell’s rule fuckery worse than Reid’s? McConnell didn’t even have to change any rules. Your anger seems to be very much dependent on whose ox is getting gored.

          • ilikekittycat says:

            Going around inter-branch division of powers/rule of law stuff is on a different level of violation

          • EchoChaos says:

            I don’t parse how not voting on a judge is “violating inter-branch division of powers”.

            Not voting on judges has happened quite a lot in the past, and will likely happen quite a lot in the future. The fact that it was a Supreme Court Justice doesn’t really change that all that much.

          • brad says:

            I wonder if everyone here will be so blasé when the Democrats expand the Court. After all that’s Congress’ complete prerogative too.

          • And has already been done once–by a Republican president.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Increasing the size of the court to pack with liberal judges actually sounds to me like the obvious next step that will be taken by Democrats in this increasingly nasty tit-for-tat over judges.

            They will justify it because McConnell did his stuff, which he justified because Reid removed the filibuster for lower court judges, which Reid justified because of the Republican obstruction, which they justified because of the Democrat obstruction of Bush’s lower court judges, which the Democrats justified because of the Republicans shoving Clarence Thomas down their throats, which the Republicans justified because of what the Democrats did to Robert Bork, etc ad infinitum.

            One side needs to step back and say “no, we won’t take partisan advantage by changing the rules to benefit us”, but that will never happen again, because both sides increasingly view each other not as political opposition, but as actual enemies.

          • albatross11 says:

            +1

            This has been going on for a long time. We’ve had increasing numbers of unfilled judgeships and increasingly bitter political battles for appointing judges for decades, since at least the Clinton administration. I expect that to continue.

            A whole lot of social policy that is much more popular with the elites than with the masses has been imposed by the courts, over the years, and this is routinely done to override voters, as with the gay marriage decision. It’s not a shock that this led to increasing politicization of the courts. And Congress has become increasingly dysfunctional over my lifetime, and continues its descent into a nonfunctional mess, which is part of what’s responsible for long court vacancies.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I wonder if everyone here will be so blasé when the Democrats expand the Court. After all that’s Congress’ complete prerogative too.

            Yes, it is their prerogative. But it would be interesting to see what the justification is beyond “we want more partisan political power.”

            Largely I think the criticisms of McConnell with respect to Garland are over-the-top. He didn’t change any rules. He didn’t break any rules. He didn’t overly burden the courts or the judicial system. Lots of judges have been obstructed in far worse ways by both parties for decades. As far as “he didn’t do his job!” goes, that’s also false: the Senate majority leader’s job is to decide what comes up for a vote and what doesn’t, and he did his job by deciding “this one doesn’t.”

            And it could have completely backfired on him, too. Leading up to the election our wise conservative punditry was writing articles begging McConnell to take Garland before Hillary and the Democrats swept the elections. If Hillary had won, the day after the elections Obama would have said “you know, I agree with Senator McConnell. The incoming President should have the privilege of selecting the next Supreme Court Justice” and withdrawn Garland’s name. Hillary would then install the Genetically Modified to Live 200 Years RBG Clone instead. Well, Counterfactual World Obama should do that, but I’m pretty sure his bottomless narcissism would not allow it.

          • Kyle A Johansen says:

            I wonder if everyone here will be so blasé when the Democrats expand the Court. After all that’s Congress’ complete prerogative too.

            There are non-partisan reasons for why a situation where one party controls all the relevant institutions deciding to , but if the Democrats do choose to do that they choose to do that.

            I’m pretty sure there would be less gnashing of teeth from the Democrats choosing to go to court-packing, than for Republicans court-packing in their turn.

            In contrast, a party holding the relevant institution – and if they don’t hold it, then they shut up – deciding to move onto simply saying ‘we won’t vote on your nominee’rather than going ‘your nominee is a black sexual predator’ or ‘your nominee is a fratboy rapist’ would actually be an improvement.

          • brad says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            Yes, it is their prerogative. But it would be interesting to see what the justification is beyond “we want more partisan political power.”

            Which exactly parallels the only justification used to not hold hearings for Garland.

            Largely I think the criticisms of McConnell with respect to Garland are over-the-top.

            Again, I wonder if you’ll say the same thing when Fox News and talk radio goes ballistic over the Expanding the Supreme Court Bill of 2023.

        • brad says:

          And we’re still going to call the tolerable ones Nazis anyway.

          Is that the royal we?

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      With Garland he explicitly refused to do his job as a senator. That is impeachable in my book, and I’d pretty much demand his impeachment and conviction for it if I was president.

      He should have brought Garland up for a vote and used his clout to get all of the republicans to vote against seating him. Or he should have sent back a detailed note explaining to Obama why Garland was not a fit nominee. Either of those choices were his constitutional duty, but he decided to not risk 4 republicans voting for Garland and instead to use the vacancy alone as an election ploy.

      At the time I understood and accepted it as just politics, but it’s really not.

      • albatross11 says:

        It is precisely “just politics,” since it’s within the law. But it’s also breaking a norm that will now remain broken in the future, and that norm should not have been broken.

      • Chalid says:

        Prior to Garland, Democrats basically accepted the Supreme Court as a legitimate institution. Post-Garland, it’s not a radical thing at all on the left to say that the Supreme Court was stolen. You can see entirely reasonable types like Josh Marshall say it.

        If we ever have a civil war, I strongly suspect people will look back McConnell stonewalling Garland as one of the top 10 things that caused it.

        • Kyle A Johansen says:

          If we ever have a civil war, I strongly suspect people will look back McConnell stonewalling Garland as one of the top 10 things that caused it.

          A civil war initiated by which side?

          • Nornagest says:

            Does it matter? I’m sure it will be a great comfort when we’re all radioactive ash that the other guys started it.

          • Kyle A Johansen says:

            @Nornagest

            I do not believe that the left has access to nuclear weapons. At least not at the moment.

            And if we’re dealing with the specifics of ‘next time the Dems have POTUS they will start a civil war in which they use nuclear weapons so as to get justice for Garland’, then I find that very unlikely.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m not suggesting that the Secret Masters of either political side are going to kick off a war by saying “fuck it, nuke them”. I’m saying that a for-real civil war would carry a lot of risk, a few months or years down the line when both sides have a real military.

          • Tatterdemalion says:

            A civil war initiated by which side?

            Whichever one loses it, I suspect.

          • Randy M says:

            Does it matter? I’m sure it will be a great comfort when we’re all radioactive ash that the other guys started it.

            Since we aren’t radioactive ash yet, I’d say it matters who is likely to start the bloodshed and ash making–if there is any difference in the relative likelihoods, anyway.

            Large caveat, I know, but still, being able to know in advance who starts a war may be useful in stopping it.

        • cryptoshill says:

          @Chalid – So McConnell bears responsibility? Despite multiple bitter partisan machinations to maintain control of the court on the left, starting in the 70s?

          The Democrats accepted the Supreme Court as a legitimate institution because they knew they had rough control of the institution, and for no other reason. Republicans have been yelling (to lesser or greater degree) about “activist judges” for a few decades, the shoe is just on the other foot now.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Except I would like to know what a Republican “activist judge” looks like. The Republicans claim they want textualist/originalist judges, and that appears to be the sorts they put on the court. The shoe is not on the other foot. The shoes are off all feet. That the left perceives it otherwise I suppose is an example of “removal of privilege feels like oppression.”

          • jgr314 says:

            @Conrad Honcho (apologies, I can’t seem to get this as a direct reply to your post)

            what a Republican “activist judge” looks like.

            A current example would seem to be Judge Reed O’Connor, district judge for the northern district of Texas. Reading his recent ACA opinion, it seems to me that he used a lot of motivated reasoning to get the outcome he wanted. (disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, but I read a lot of court opinions for a “civilian.”)

            In his time as judge, Roy Moore would probably have been another example, though I haven’t read any of his opinions, so I’m relying on 2nd hand sources.

          • The Nybbler says:

            The recent ACA opinion was terrible, but it was built on an ACA Supreme Court decision that was equally terrible, so it’s tainted.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        Isn’t it also the job of senators to bring appellate court nominees up for a vote?

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        There is no requirement to vote. One of the previous time this came up I gave a list of many previous nominees who never received a vote.

        IMHO he should have held a vote, and, separately, Garland should have been confirmed at that vote. But neither of those “should”s is a Constitutional requirement.

        • ilikekittycat says:

          I’m sorry I didn’t see your previous post, were there nominees who weren’t eventually withdrawn/nullified or died before the body could reassemble? Was there anyone who no action was taken on and was still around willing to serve and the president who had nominated them still thought they should serve by the time the Senate was assembled and the hearing for the next nominee was taking place?

      • testing123 says:

        With Garland he explicitly refused to do his job as a senator. That is impeachable in my book, and I’d pretty much demand his impeachment and conviction for it if I was president.

        Mcconnell’s job as a senator is not to give consent to whomever the president asks for. The senate has a right to withhold its consent, and a right to use whatever internal procedures it wants in that process. Let’s please not pretend you’d be any happier had Mcconnell called a voice vote and sent Garland packing.

    • testing123 says:

      The job of majority leader pretty much IS to be a partisan hack. It’s all about securing maximum advantage for your side at the expense of the other side, particularly in the senate where controlling the flock requires more finesse than in the house. McConnell is operating just like Harry Reid, who played similar hardball for similar reasons.

  46. sfoil says:

    It’s pretty implicit in the very concept of immortal elves and analogues. Tolkien’s elves reproduced at very low rates. They weren’t literally infertile after their “reproductive years”, they simply refrained from engaging in the marital act once its purpose had been fulfilled (notice the difference between Tolkien and the modern Sapkowski, who implicitly assumes this to be impossible).

  47. Uribe says:

    You are blind and placed on some random spot on the Earth. You walk in as straight a line as possible, having to sometimes go around objects, but you climb what you can. At times you encounter an incline or decline. Now say you notice that you have been on an incline, in general, for quite a while. You have a very good sense of how long you have been on this incline and how much altitude you have gained.

    Is there some point at which it is rational to believe that the next step you take has a better than 50% chance of being up instead of down? What about whether the next 100 or 1000 steps will on average be up or down?

    • benjdenny says:

      I can’t think of very many one-step inclines/declines; wouldn’t every the next step after the first uphill step be more likely than not to continue uphill? Especially considering inclines and declines are typically created by forces that tend towards long distance molding(erosion, mountain-building)?

      Edit: Assuming you know the heights of every mountain, you’d also know if certain steps were going to take you higher with certainty: If you had just gained a step over the max altitude of mountain height rank #10, you’d know you were clear until rank #9 at least, and so on.

    • 10240 says:

      Your next step will more likely than not be in the same direction in terms of elevation. (The trend is your friend this time.)

    • Erusian says:

      A common prediction is that the rate won’t change rapidly. For example, let’s say you’ve been on an incline where each step is 1 centimeter higher than each previous step. If you take a step of two centimeters, it’s reasonable to presume your next step will be level. If it’s 3 centimeters, one centimeter down, and so on.

    • rahien.din says:

      Consider that there are (essentially) a finite number of straight-line paths that you could follow on the earth’s surface. Your hip width defines the width of the path you can travel. You can’t walk through canyons or sufficiently-hazardous bodies of water. And there are a large number of paths that for practical purposes are the same. With a little bit of jitter to account for things like cliff edges and the like, you could take a topographical map of the world and construct a very-large-but-still-finite set of potential paths. That finite set of paths will necessarily contain the changes in elevation, should one decide to blindly walk along any path in the set.

      (Before anyone analogizes to the coastline paradox : we are working with a single person, who has a consistent hip width and stride length, and therefore we are working with a single invariant sampling rate. We’re doing engineering here, not racing tortoises. Come at me.)

      Here’s the procedure :
      With every stride, compare your change in elevation to the set of paths and determine which paths are compatible with your observations. Eliminate the rest. For each path from the subset of compatible paths, determine whether the next step is likely to be uphill or downhill. Count the number of uphill steps and downhill steps. Calculate the ratio.

      You could do this for any number or combination of subsequent steps. It’s just a database query.

  48. Tenacious D says:

    What 2019 releases—books, movies, albums, etc.—are you looking forward to the most?

    • sfoil says:

      I have very high hopes for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movie.

    • WashedOut says:

      New album from Primitive Man, hopefully.
      Nassim Taleb is bound to put out a few more sections and technical notes to his Incerto this year. Lovers of fat tails rejoice.
      More meditations and lessons as part of the Waking Up podcast.
      I’m working on a guide on de-Google-ing one’s life, which will be a simple pamphlet with some infographics on how to eliminate Google products and services from you’re life to the greatest extent possible/practicable. I’m looking forward to it being complete.
      New game “Sekiro” from From Software, the creator of the two best games of the decade (Dark Souls and Bloodborne).

    • Bugmaster says:

      Doom Eternal. Probably won’t be as good as Doom 2016, but still, I have high hopes for it.

    • aristides says:

      I am extremely excited for Fire Emblem: 3 Houses. In general, Nintendo has done a great job with their mainline games on the switch, and FE is my favorite of their franchises.

      • silver_swift says:

        This, yes! Finally another Fire Emblem game that I’ll be able to play (I don’t own a 3DS).

        • aristides says:

          The mobile game, Fire Emblem Heroes is actually pretty good and free. I suggest playing it in the meantime. My favorite mobile game so far.

    • Tarpitz says:

      Well, I’m hopeful that the first feature in which I play a major character – This Weekend Will Change Your Life will get a proper release of some description, even if only via streaming services…

      Other than that, The Last of Us Part 2 might well come out, which would be sweet, BoJack Horseman season 6 presumably will come out, which will no doubt be great, I look forward to the as-yet-unnamed Nicol-Bolas-invades-Ravnica Magic expansion and maybe, just maybe, George Martin will finally get Winds of Winter done. No, I’m not holding my breath either.

      • Walter says:

        Congrats on getting a major character role!

        • Tarpitz says:

          Thanks! It was a lot of fun to do, and mercifully I’m pretty happy with both the film and my performance. Currently in a sort of weird limbo state where people I’ve worked with already are like, “here are these four awesome roles we’d love you to play… as soon as someone gives us the money to make the films” and I still don’t have access to the footage to persuade anyone who hasn’t already worked with me to give me a look. But I’m pretty optimistic that this state really is temporary, and either way I’m enjoying the script development work I’ve been doing in the mean time (and it’s going well), so with any luck this will be the year in which I get to pack in the day job for good.

    • brad says:

      ISTR that there’s a new Neal Stephenson book in the works.

      • Tenacious D says:

        It continues with some characters from REAMDE, I believe. I’d be more excited if Enoch Root was going to make an appearance, but I still plan to read it.

        • Nick says:

          Yeah, I’d much rather read a sequel to Cryptonomicon than Reamde, but I’ll be checking this one out regardless.

      • achenx says:

        The year Seveneves came out that was my answer. I’m not sure about Fall (the new one coming this year) but it’s certainly the only thing I’ve preordered or anything, so maybe it’s my answer again.

    • johan_larson says:

      The movie “Captive State” looks very good. Set after the aliens arrived, during the occupation. The cast includes John Goodman, which is a good sign.

      The final season of “Game of Thrones” is coming! My bet is on Tyrion to end up on the Iron Throne when all is said and done. Jon and Daenerys would be the conventional happy ending, which is probably too light for Martin.

      “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia” is a non-fiction book about how the Polynesians settled far-flung islands in the Pacific. I know a little bit about this topic, and I’m eager to read an extended treatment.

      • Tenacious D says:

        That sounds like a fascinating book.

      • TDB says:

        GOT spoilers warning.
        The fans would love for Tyrion to end up on the iron throne, but then there would have to be a few more books about the rebellion and plots to dethrone him. Too many people hate him, and he doesn’t even have the Lannister gold to bribe people with any more. If Martin brought Jon back from the dead just to kill him off in an even uglier way, my eyes will be rolling. Tyrion makes a good Hand, a terrible king.
        Of course, when all is said and done, maybe there won’t be enough people left to revolt. Or rule over. That would be the ultimate Martin twist, the night King turns them all into wights and ascends the iron throne, and they all undie unhappily ever after. Winter has arrived.
        Edit-typo

        • AlphaGamma says:

          The joke from a few seasons back:

          “I expect the final scene of the trilogy to be eternal snow blowing over a graveyard”

          “That’s too optimistic, it assumes there’s somebody left to bury the dead”.

        • johan_larson says:

          I’m thinking Tyrion might be the only one left after everyone else dies herotragically.

          • Aapje says:

            Perhaps the main characters all end up in 1 room at the end and kill each other. Then after a minute of silence, Tyrion crawls out from under the table, gets the crown and puts it on his head.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            He’s very bad indeed.

        • cmurdock says:

          …but then there would have to be a few more books about the rebellion and plots to dethrone him

          My response to this would be the same as my response to the people who say that seasons ~5 to 7 ruined the show: the whole “it’s good because it’s like real life where there are no resolutions!” shtick only works for so long in a work of fiction, but eventually you do have to have a resolution or else there is no story (an arbitrary sequence of events is not a “story”). In my opinion, the people who started off by loving the show because of its subversion and unconventionality were shooting their own long-term enthusiasm in the foot so long as “subversion and unconventionality” translated into “lack of dramatic thrust”: it was always the case that, eventually, something would have to actually happen.

      • John Schilling says:

        Jon and Daenerys would be the conventional happy ending, which is probably too light for Martin.

        It’s not Martin’s decision any more, if it ever was. And there’s no way HBO will leave either Daenerys or Sansa dead or humbled in the final act. Daenerys gets the Iron Throne, Sansa gets Winterfell, Tyrion probably gets a noble self-sacrificing death, HBO doesn’t get truckloads of hate mail and canceled subscriptions.

        And if Martin is planning anything different for the novels, he’d be best advised to wait until the fans of the TV series have moved on to other things. Not, given his writing pace, that this is likely to be an issue.

        • johan_larson says:

          If the series is going to be true to form, a major sympathetic character has to die in the battles against Cersei and the White Walkers. Tyrion, Daenerys, Jon, Sansa, or Aria must fall. Maybe even more than one.

          • John Schilling says:

            You are probably right about that. And I am probably right that Daenerys and Sansa cannot be allowed to fall. Arya can maybe die once she’s finished her list, and Jon can maybe heroically sacrifice himself for Daenerys except that there’s no other plausible candidate for consort(*).

            Tyrion is the expendable one, and he’s basically already sacrificed himself for Daenerys so they might as well go all the way with it.

            *Well, OK, maybe Yara…

      • Nornagest says:

        It’s still up in the air in the books, but I’d be astonished to see any outcome other than Jon/Dany on the Iron Throne in the series. Ever since Season 6 it’s been much more telegraphed than usual for the franchise.

        I’d have bet on the same ending for the books pre-HBO, but there’s enough ambiguity left for surprises, and Martin’s a bloody-minded enough guy that he might change his planned ending for the books out of spite.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        Screw it, I want to be contrarian.
        -Dany dies ep 3 or 4 after she horribly butchers yet another negotiation and Cersei one ups her. Jon Snow takes the Iron Throne, then immediately ascends into Heaven to sit besides the Lord of Light.
        -Jon Snow names Theon Greyjoy his successor in the event he dies right before his ascension. Theon Greyjoy takes the Iron Throne!
        -Aria thinks Tyrion is plotting with Cersei, because she’s not as smart as she thinks she is and Tyrion is being all sneaky. She stabs Tyrion, they both get fire-bombed with Cersei laughing, Jaime can’t actually kill Cersei, but Tyrion pulls the dead-man switch that kills everyone but Jaime (who makes a thrilling escape!)
        -Cleganebowl ends with Sandor getting eaten by Blue Eyes White Dragon (I actually think this one might actually happen)

        • Tenacious D says:

          My contrarian/curmudgeon take (based more on the books than the show; and I don’t think any of these ideas are original to me) would include a mix of the following:

          – Bran realizes that his visions are actually manifesting his fears and imagination into the world and sacrifices himself to put a stop to it.
          – the college of Maesters regains the upper hand in their struggle against superstition and restores a measure of rationality to Westeros.
          – the Iron Bank of Braavos puts some or all of the seven kingdoms into receivership and sends a competent interim manager across the narrow sea.

          More realistically, I’d point out that the Targaryen sigil is a 3-headed dragon and GRRM doesn’t use symbolism accidentally, so Dany and Jon need a +1 (a surviving Aegon? a disenchanted Night King?) for things to be balanced.

          • Nick says:

            – the college of Maesters regains the upper hand in their struggle against superstition and restores a measure of rationality to Westeros.

            I really want to see more of this plot hook, since it’s barely more than introduced so far. Likewise a bit of House Hightower.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            @Nick: Have you read Fire and Blood yet? I’m halfway through it at the moment, and get the sense that the Hightowers (like the Velaryons, but for different reasons) are a House that used to be much more important than it is now.

          • johan_larson says:

            The usual speculation along those lines is that Tyrion is a Targaryen by blood. I don’t remember the details, but the thinking is that Tywin is not Tyrion’s biological father.

          • Nick says:

            @AlphaGamma no, not yet. I’ll probably pick it up sometime this year.

      • The Nybbler says:

        I’m not even all that far into GoT and I’m already on Team White Walker. All these people deserve to die, not only for their moral failings but also their extreme stupidity.

        • theredsheep says:

          Unfortunately, in the books at least, it sometimes takes a very long time for stupid people to suffer the very obvious consequences of their extremely stupid choices. With one exception: gur Jbeyq’f Qhzorfg Fyniref–V guvax gurl jrer va Zrerra be fbzrjurer yvxr gung–jubfr fghcvqvgl vf bs fhpu na rkdhvfvgr glcr gung vg whfg jnfa’g cynhfvoyr gb qent vg bhg. Gurl unir gb vzzrqvngryl trg zheqrerq ol gurve bja fynir nezl be vg jba’g jbex. But they weren’t major/significant characters. Some of the others, you think, “wow, that is very plainly going to bite you in the arse later,” but two hundred pages on they’re still sitting there being all dumb and stuff. And at least once that I can think of (rfgnoyvfuvat gur uvfgbevpnyyl greevoyr cerprqrag bs oevovat gur pvgl zvyvgvn gb vagresrer va cbyvgvpf) the terrible consequences don’t arrive at all. Huh.

          • theredsheep says:

            While I’m grumping, I’m unsure why the characters are concerned about the White Walkers when it’s made perfectly clear that the Wall absolutely will not allow them to pass, even if they try to go under it. I mean, yeah, obviously it’s going to go down somehow, perhaps when somebody blows the Magic Horn of Why Would You Make That And How Would You Even Know It Worked, but everything the characters have to go by says that the Wall works beautifully.

            That, and the bit where a reported/off-screen death is infallibly false. And the unnecessary period filler. And the lemon cakes. Grump.

          • Lillian says:

            And the lemon cakes.

            It’s astonishing how often the narrative of A Song of Ice and Fire stops to remind you at length that the author is, in fact, very fat.

      • theredsheep says:

        More than a bit late to this party, and I’ve only read–okay, skimmed–the books, never watched or wanted to watch the show. My assumption, for some time, has been that Dany would win but do absolutely monstrous things in the process, because if there’s one consistent pattern with GRRM it’s that people who try to be morally good must be systematically destroyed. Aside from having by far the most dramatic character arc, she started a transition from “masochistic hero” to “antihero” at the end of the last book, which should mark a significant increase in her fortunes from this point on.

        As for the other options, he’s gone to way too much effort to show Cersei as an utter incompetent, the squids and the sand-people are both sideshows, Stannis is deliberately boring, and at this point I can’t recall if any other major players are even alive anymore. Littlefinger, I guess, but I think he mostly wants to pork the redheaded Stark kid and have a piece of the action. Not really the sort who wants to actually sit on the throne himself. But I just read each book once.

    • ilikekittycat says:

      Nothing really, more hoping for a paradigm shift, movie industry collapsing, AAA gaming industry collapsing, some totally new musical cultural force coming out of nowhere, etc. Even television, which was the most recent entertainment industry to have a hot streak/”Golden Age” seems to be in a weird place, Game of Thrones is probably gonna end terribly, etc.

      The current slate of cultural production is in the worst place I’ve seen it in my own lifespan and is genuinely making me wonder how much I once loved seeing movies, playing games, etc. An experience like WoW 2004 or seeing the Matrix for the first time or hearing Nirvana or anything that grips enough people to really be monocultural just seems incredibly unlikely right now (outside of some billion dollar Marvel or Jurassic Park thing that gets there on spectacle instead of being resonant with the audience)

      I’m starting to wonder how much of the radicalism/irritability in the zeitgeist is how sparse good opiates of the masses are right now. The last time I got a new TV, when HD/plasma was new, it was a true joy to get through all the new programming I had been meaning to watch in HD, even the hours I spent calibrating it were sublime. Getting a 4K HDR TV in 2018 felt like a waste considering I got Hereditary, First Reformed, maybe a good 10 hours of new content all told that was worth upgrading for

      To not just leave things on a totally bleak note, I will say podcasting seems to keep getting better than ever, and I think it will continue to blossom in 2019, but it’s impossible to name anything I anticipate there because good new content comes out of nowhere with no fanfare

      • silver_swift says:

        An experience like WoW 2004 or seeing the Matrix for the first time or hearing Nirvana or anything that grips enough people to really be monocultural just seems incredibly unlikely right now

        I think you might be suffering from an unduly rose tinted view of the past and/or a unduly dim view of the present.

        Fortnite is more popular than WoW ever was and the indie game industry is giving us a phenomenally broad selection of good (as well as terrible) games to choose from.

        The Marvel MCU is largely spectacle based, but is also an unprecedentedly large attempt to build a shared universe (and is certainly present in more peoples lives than The Matrix was) and Black Panther and the Winter Soldier were certainly able to make a political statement in addition to being entertaining punchy fighty movies.

        On the small screen side of things, Game of Thrones might be petering out a bit, but it did prove that series with a complex, ongoing plot were viable. Now we have things like Sense8, The Expanse, Jessica Jones and The Punisher. There are also a bunch of upcoming tv-serie-fication of fantasy novels (Wheel of Time, The Witcher, Dresden Files, etc), most of which I think have at least a moderate (>20%), chance of being very good.

        I’m not super into music, but I’m betting a larger percentage of teenagers hear whatever the current version of Justin Bieber is than Nirvana. If there is a problem with the modern media industry, it’s not that they are incapable of making things that appeal to a broad audience.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Fortnite is more popular than WoW ever was and the indie game industry is giving us a phenomenally broad selection of good (as well as terrible) games to choose from.

          I just don’t know what people are talking about when they say there’s something wrong with gaming today. Yes, Fallout 76 is a nightmare and EA is and always has been evil but that’s the exception, because even in AAA land we just had Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, God of War, Red Dead 2, Far Cry 5. The kids are all playing Fortnite. The Switch is setting records. Smash Ultimate is the best ever. And the indies, the indies!!! SO MANY GOOD THINGS FOR SO CHEAP. BTW go play GRIS. SO GOOD.

          • ilikekittycat says:

            Excluding Fortnite and indie gaming, your list there is like, the exact case I’d make for gaming being awful now. Assassins Creed/GOW/Far Cry might have hit (what many consider to be) local maxima in the past year, but the franchises are running on fumes. Red Dead/Bethesda games/the general sprawling huge open world type of game is probably the single biggest trend I’d want to die. Playing the next iterations of each Nintendo franchise in the latest cycle is something I was tired of in Gamecube/Wii days. Smash Brothers/the style of fighter that starts you with a few guys and you play for 10000 hours to get the full roster is something I always hated. I’m glad you enjoy all that but I couldn’t disagree more.

            It’s not even just EA and Fallout 76 going bad now, even Blizzard (the one developer you could trust to put out a product worth buying day one no questions asked) doesn’t have that distinction anymore. Paradox was the developer I trusted most recently but with HOI4 and Stellaris it’s becoming apparent their games aren’t “release quality” until 18 months later and at least 2-3 expansion DLCs. There’s no games out there I’m interested in playing where I wouldn’t say “well, it’s probably better to wait 12 months for the GAME OF THE YEAR edition” because all games are essentially in beta until then, and because paying day one $60 + several DLC fees is an nonstarter compared to picking up everything + patches + the DLCS for $40 next Christmas

            I think PC gaming is in a worse state than I’ve seen it in my lifetime, and console gaming just one step above the nadir of the Playstation/N64 low poly/ugly texture era of gaming.

          • Lillian says:

            Gotta be honest, from a consumer point of view i see no distinction between waiting for the GOTY edition a year later, and the game just being released a year later. If you see it that way, things have never been better, since it means you get far more game, for a much lower price than it used to. Like the whole game, all fully patched and functional, plus a bunch of DLC, for $40? That’s equivalent to being able to buy StarCraft+Insurrection+Brood War in 1999 for $26.50. Possibly as little as half that if you managed to catch a good sale. How is that not an amazingly good deal?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Assassins Creed/GOW/Far Cry might have hit (what many consider to be) local maxima in the past year, but the franchises are running on fumes.

            Wait, so they’ve hit local maxima, and this is…bad? And they’re certainly not running on fumes. AC Origins and Odyssey re-invented the franchise. Unity and Syndicate were running on fumes. Origins and Odyssey are new imaginings. And God of War?! FUMES?! They made an emotional, personal story about the bond between a boy and his horrifically brutal god-slaying father. Definitely not a rehash of the previous games. What exactly do you want out of AAA games?

            I get that maybe you prefer the quirky indie titles (I do too! Love them!) but it’s also nice to have the massive budget AAA titles, too. I’m almost done with Red Dead 2 and it is…something. I’m not sure how much I enjoyed it rather than endured it, but I’m glad they made it.

            Smash Brothers/the style of fighter that starts you with a few guys and you play for 10000 hours to get the full roster is something I always hated. I’m glad you enjoy all that but I couldn’t disagree more.

            You get a new fighter about every 3 fights. Santa brought us SB Ultimate for Christmas and we played it off and on (I was mostly caught up in Red Dead 2 and my son in Pokemon Let’s Go) and we had every fighter unlocked by New Year’s.

            I’ll agree that I haven’t been playing much on my PC lately (but that could also be because my video card has needed a replacement for two years now but the GPU prices are still god-awful) and a Diablo mobile game is laughable, but if you like AAA games, many of the AAA games out right now are great. If you like Nintendo, the Switch and its library are great. If you like indies it’s never been better. And I love the fact the indies have made side scrollers a thing again (btw Guns, Gore and Cannoli 2 was really fun for couch co-op. GGC1 was good but the controls are way better in 2) so Capcom had the impetus to make Mega Man 11. I’m eagerly awaiting Streets of Rage 4. And I really, really, really hope the excitement Konami saw over putting Simon and Richter Belmont in SBU is going to goad them into making new Castlevania.

            Strategy games and sports games are ill-served right now. But for everything else it’s a golden age.

            Oh, and there’s the back catalog. With emulators, remasters, Steam, backwards compatibility on the Xbone and the availability of basically everything on the Xbox Online Store if you think things were better 10, 20 or 30 years ago you can easily mine the back catalog for all the good stuff you missed. I never played Deus Ex: Human Revolution (I think that’s it…the one for the 360). I got it off the online store for $2. Two. Dollars.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Strategy games are ill served?

            Strongly disagree.

            Eu4, Civ 6, Xcom/Xcom2, Hoi4, etc.

            Only a few studios are doing it, but they’re really good at it.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Civ 6 is better than 4 or even 5?

            EU4 and HOI4 are just palette swaps.

            Where’s the RTS games?

            I’m not saying good strategy games don’t exist. I’m just saying there hasn’t been much innovation on that front, and maybe even steps backwards and there’s not a lot of options.

            For everything/everyone else…if you think gaming is bad right now, tell me what sort of thing you like and I can give you recommendations of new games released in the last two years that are top-tier and you will have an excellent time playing. And that can even be things like “platformers” or “twin stick shooters” or “metroidvanias” that five years ago I would have told you you’re SoL, but today you’ve got the finest examples mere dollars away.

        • Nornagest says:

          I’m not super into music, but I’m betting a larger percentage of teenagers hear whatever the current version of Justin Bieber is than Nirvana.

          I’d bet the other way, myself. There’s nothing out there now with the reach and ubiquity of ’90s-era MTV and VH1. YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, etc. are too customized to their users, and actual music television basically isn’t a thing anymore. There might be a (slightly) higher percentage of teenagers listening to music, but the mechanisms pointing them all to the same music are much weaker.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            the mechanisms pointing them all to the same music are much weaker

            Other way around, I’d say. The algorithms seem to shove very little niche music at me despite my actual tastes.

          • Nornagest says:

            Oh, no argument that the algorithms suck, but there is an algorithm that’s trying to tailor itself to your tastes. In the ’90s you were stuck with whatever was on TV (or on the radio, but there wasn’t much choice there either in most areas).

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            Yeah, but DJs have taste.

        • ilikekittycat says:

          I’ll give you Fortnite, that was a big oversight, and also that indie/non-AAA gaming is better than ever and a real bright spot

          Without claiming the Matrix is great art or anything, I just don’t think Black Panther and the Winter Soldier are the same thing at all. The Matrix is/was celebrated from the transiest part of the left to the “red pill” right and everything in between. I can’t think of any of the big popcorn movies since like, The Dark Knight, that are leaving anything like that mark on culture once you leave the theatre. People enjoy the Marvel things but they’re mostly watching them the same way the Chinese do, not taking anything away from them

          I bounced off Sense8, The Expanse, Jessica Jones and The Punisher, and I don’t think of them as fantastically popular, I could be wrong. No group I talk to is talking about a TV show and how you HAVE to catch up on it like with Sopranos or Breaking Bad or GOT year 1-4

          Fantasy novels is a blindspot for me and you are probably entirely correct there.

          The fact that you say “the current version of Justin Beiber” instead of naming that person is telling that that person hasn’t penetrated the monoculture. There’s lots of mumble rappers and stuff but I don’t see anyone even on the Lady Gaga (now going on 10 years BTW) level of popularity. If you search reddit or other social media sites for stuff like “Mazzy Star – Fade into You” you can also see that things that were overlooked in the 90s were so good they are having renaissances bigger than their initial release. Garth Brooks is making a comeback and probably gonna be the biggest tour of the year, basically unreconstructed from 1997 or w/e

          (edit: Nornagest post above is correct and saying the same thing I was trying to get across)

          • AG says:

            The current Gaga equivalent is Ariana Grande, having dethroned Taylor Swift. Drake and Maroon 5 seem to have a strong hold of the charts, as well.

            I don’t understand the requirement that audiovisual monoculture be resonant rather than spectacle. Are we really going to call the glut of Big Kitschy Musical Films during the Depression resonant over spectacle?
            Marvel and Bayformers as “not taking anything away from them” seems ideal as opiate for the masses. Which is an apropos term, considering that the current drug epidemic is the result of low quality cuts causing overdoses. The comparison to “Golden Age Cinema” is also apropos, because mainstream media historically gets more kitschy and escapist and spectacle-driven when the masses are besieged by anxieties. People simply aren’t in the socioeconomic context and mindset to produce or consume the kind of content you’re nostalgic for.

            All that said, I’m pretty sure that the paradigm shift has already occurred under our noses, and we’re just not up on them because we’re old farts: the new monoculture is not in narrative media, but in “””Real””” People: http://arbitrarygreay.tumblr.com/post/178969937085/harold-and-kumar-go-to-the-topless-towers-of-ilium

            (Technically, this is a return to an old form, the worship of celebrity-as-idol, showing their stuff in variety formats, celebrities that only have fame for being celebrities rather than having an acting/musician day job, but with a new sheen of “””authenticity”””, thanks to social media blurring the lines between them and the audience. Some of these structures never left Asian pop culture in the first place.)

        • EchoChaos says:

          @Conrad Honcho

          Strategy games are ill served? Strongly disagree.

          We have EU4, Civ 6, Stellaris, XCom and XCom2, Hoi4.

          I realize there are only 2-3 studios making them, but they’re very good right now.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            Double-counting XCOM seems like chesting when it’s a long-cycle single-studio franchise, but Phoenix Point is coming, so I’ll grant a pass on it.

          • EchoChaos says:

            That’s why I put both of them in the same comma section, actually.

            But I can think of more. Endless Space, GalCiv.

            There are good ones out there.

      • Winja says:

        You’ve put it more eloquently than I could, but I agree with you completely.

        Current mass culture is just garbage.

    • rubberduck says:

      As an anime fan I am most excited for Mob Psycho 100 season 2 and the continuation of Jojo part 5.

    • Kyle A Johansen says:

      I’ll second the new File emblem game. But i am also excited for finally getting the real Pokemon experience made for the television.

    • apar says:

      Thankfully I’m not yet a capital-A “Adult,” so hopefully I’ll be able to spend many happy hours in it before putting away proverbial childish things.

      Being a “capital-A Adult” means whatever you want.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        +1

        I went over to my boss’s house this weekend to teach her family how to play Smash Bros. Still sort of feel like an adult.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Avengers: Endgame
      Glass, just because I liked Unbreakable
      Star Wars Ep 9

      I’m also looking forward to the 2019 Bears season. This one was a heart-breaker, but the Bears did much better than anyone expected, and most of the lineup is going to stick around. We were a missed interception and a missed field goal from 14-2(with an admittedly weak schedule). NFC North should still be weak enough that it’ll just come down to the Bears or the Vikings, and the Bears should be getting home field advantage against a lot of elite teams.

    • dndnrsn says:

      There’s a bunch ofDelta Green releases in 2019; for my money it is the best tabletop RPG on the market right now and the people writing for it for it are some of the best in the business. Including one or two actual full campaigns – which DG (whether the standalone game or the CoC supplement) has mostly been missing. Plus, presumably Fall of Delta Green (60s DG for the same GUMSHOE system as Trail of Cthulhu) will receive support; I’m not a fan of the GUMSHOE system but Kenneth Hite is involved and he’s another top-flight writer/designer, and system is kinda secondary anyway.

    • Tarpitz says:

      The show started out excellent, but declined progressively over time and I’ve long since stopped watching it, both because it was no longer that good and to avoid spoilers for the books. And while I really hope we get Winds of Winter this year… yes, you’re a sweet summer child.

    • Tenacious D says:

      My inner sweet summer child is hoping Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord gets released in 2019.

      • Nick says:

        I for one want The Doors of Stone. I’m if anything more looking forward to that than The Winds of Winter, partly I think because it’s the end of the trilogy, while Winter is still only the penultimate book.

        • Hoopyfreud says:

          I just want to see if Kvothe gets what’s coming to him at this point tbh.

        • Dan L says:

          As I hear more from Rothfuss, I’m increasingly confident that unreliable-narrator Kvothe is deliberately fucking with the audience. Or maybe that’s just what I want to believe, because it’ll be necessary for anything like a satisfying resolution. 😕

        • Nick says:

          I’m not sure what you’re referring to, Dan, but a lot of stuff in the story is likely not going to be resolved. I expect we’re going to find out how the king gets killed, where the scrael come from, what’s in the chest at the inn, and what’s behind one or more of the doors of stone and/or the lockless box. But Rothfuss intended this story to be a prelude to Kvothe’s real adventures later on—so I think we’ll see Denna running off, and maybe indications that the Chandrian are still out there.

        • Dan L says:

          One example: Rothfuss engages with the con circuit, and there’s a particular story he likes to tell there.

          There’s a repeating theme of playing with metafictional narratives in his work, and in both of the main trilogy currently published (esp. Wise Man’s Fear) there’s an awful lot of the story where we’re taking Kvothe at his word about stupendously fantastical things. I don’t doubt that a lot of the hinted-at plot points aren’t going to be resolved because the trilogy fundamentally isn’t about them, and I expect Doors of Stone to significantly undercut the veracity of what we’ve been told thus far.

        • Walter says:

          I’d also be really really happy if Doors Of Stone came out, but at this point I’ve given up hoping.

    • johan_larson says:

      Here’s IO9’s list of movies to look forward to in 2019:

      https://io9.gizmodo.com/io9s-guide-to-all-the-movies-you-should-give-a-damn-abo-1831320229

      A whole bunch of big-budget franchise pictures are coming our way: “Captain Marvel”, “Avengers: Endgame”, Star Wars IX, “Pokemon Detective Pikachu”, and the Terminator rewind.

      For me, this is the year I give up on movie theatres. They are now running 20 minutes of ads and trailers before each picture, which is just unreasonable. I might as well be watching TV.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Hmm, I got tired of superhero movies years ago, I’m certainly not watching “Star Wars IX” unless its subtitle is “The Apology to the Audience”, never been a Pokemon fan. The Terminator movie will probably be terrible but I’m a sucker for them, so I guess one out of five.

        • albatross11 says:

          After the prequels, I naively imagined that Lucas putting it in Disney’s hands might actually lead somewhere worthwhile. And it did in one case–Rogue One was a pretty good Star Wars movie, even if it was basically a “the rest of the story” fanfic turned into a movie. But The Force Awakens was just a less-inspiring, dumber rehash of A New Hope, and The Last Jedi was soulless, and about 80% goofy. (The last battle between Luke and Kylo was fun, but almost all the rest of the movie was just dumb. Rey and Kylo at least have some chemistry. And that pretty-much exhausts the movie’s virtues.)

          I’ve long since accepted that the sense of wonder I felt watching the first Star Wars as a kid will never come back–Lucas tried and couldn’t manage it, and hacks like JJ Abrams were never going to get anything more than spectacle out of it. RIP.

          • Nick says:

            Yeah, I’m open to more Star Wars universe movies—I definitely liked Rogue One, and Solo was all right—but I’m passing on IX. I just see no way it’ll be a good movie.

          • Mr. Doolittle says:

            I’ve heard rumblings that IX is being made with an understanding that VIII wasn’t well received. With that in mind, and Rogue One as evidence that they can make a great movie, I’m willing to give it a chance. It helps that my son loves Star Wars and it’s a good bonding potential. I wouldn’t go see it alone.

          • mdet says:

            I thought that the Rey-Luke-Kylo storyline in Last Jedi was second only to Empire for the best Star Wars movie. I loved that Luke had to slowly admit to almost murdering his nephew and having a crisis over it. I loved that Rey & Kyle each seemed to seriously consider switching sides, or breaking off entirely to form their own Morally Grey Side of the Force. TLJ was also the best looking Star Wars movie by far, enough to get me interested in watching director Rian Johnson’s other movies (heard good things about Looper and Brothers Bloom).

            The rest of the movie felt like lazily done filler, but there were enough pieces of a great movie in TLJ to make me think that the creators are capable of doing better. Hopefully they don’t throw the entirety of it out for Ep 9

          • acymetric says:

            Ugh…Last Jedi was so disappointing. Force Awakens was a lot of cheese/pandering to fans with a dumb superweapon, but it was entertaining and asked enough interesting questions that I was looking forward to the next one. Rian Johnson then apparently said “not only are we not answering these questions, we’re not even going to acknowledge them” with the exception of Rey’s parentage which was both unsatisfying and probably a misdirection.

            The opening scene with Poe/Hux was way too cartoony, like something from Guardians of the Galaxy. Took me out of the movie immediately. The bit with Maz was also way too goofy. I’m going to pretend nothing on the casino planet ever happened.

            The weird overuse of tracking as a plot device was a little strange. The entire premise of the movie centered around “they can track us through hyperspace”. On the other hand, they are apparently not looking for small ships (even though they probably would have been visible to the naked eye by someone watching from the bridge, let alone the scanners). This is used twice, once by Rose/Finn and once by the Resistance as a whole in an attempt to slip down to the planet unnoticed. Neither made any sense. Not monitoring for smaller ships makes even less sense than the somewhat silly classic “Hold your fire, there’s no life forms aboard”.

            Speaking of the plan to slip down to the planet, is there a reason Holdo didn’t just explain what her plan was? Everyone seemed immediately satisfied it when she finally explained it 2 hours later…seems like it would have avoided a lot of trouble (a mutiny!) if she just said “this is the plan” at the very beginning.

            Meanwhile, Kylo must be a really disappointing apprentice if after ~20 years of training with the force between Luke and Snoke he is basically equal to someone who found out about the force like 2 months ago, and is only a marginal improvement over Haydn Christensen in this role (I realize some people love him).

            Rey’s training was all cheese and way too vision focused, and I’m still not sold on the Kylo/Rey mind bridge. I’m also not sure why 19 year old Rey is so determined to redeem a 30 year old Kylo (who appears to have an emotional age of 12), Luke only wanted to redeem Vader because he was blinded by love for a father he had never known.

            Everything that happened on Crete was pretty cool, even if it wasn’t how I wanted Luke to go out it was at least done well. I remain unconvinced that it makes sense Rey would be so powerful with the force after such a short time (displaying power that we haven’t necessarily seen from any force user previously let alone a brand new one) but I guess I have to let that go.

            I’ll still go see IX, out of hope that it will at least return to the entertaining/pandering formula from Force Awakens and maybe provide something more, but I’m not exactly excited. Hopefully Poe and Finn will be entertaining characters again, and hopefully Rey’s dialogue doesn’t bring back memories of the prequel trilogy again (she was so much more compelling in Force Awakens).

          • mdet says:

            The reason Holdo didn’t tell Poe “Here’s the plan” seems to be because in the opening scene, Leia tells Poe “Here’s the plan” and he ignores her. Holdo seemed to assume that if she just told Poe to sit down and shut up, then he couldn’t break anything. She was wrong, but it was worth a try I guess?

            The Daisy Ridley / Adam Driver age difference is 26 / 35. I assume for the sake of being-less-weird that Kylo is not as old as Driver is.

            While I did praise the Rey-Luke part of the movie, I think the opening battle scene should have been set days or weeks after TFA instead of hours, to give Rey more training time. And drop the part where she lifts a dozens boulders in one try. While she seems to be more talented than Luke was at the same age, that feat is comparable with Yoda’s best in the films.

          • acymetric says:

            @mdet

            I wasn’t speculating about the ages. Canon is that Rey is 19 and Kylo is 29 or 30 (conceived shortly after the events of RotJ).

            As far as Poe rejecting Leia’s plan, my recollection is that she only explained what they would do (flee to the nearby planet) but not why it would work (it is an old base with tons of equipment to use and the First Order wouldn’t be scanning for small transports). Not explaining that part is the problem (so I guess Leia and Holdo were both guilty of this). Of course the idea that they wouldn’t be scanning (or looking with their naked eyes) for transports is stupid anyway, but the premise of the movie is that it is valid.

            Completely unrelated, but I couldn’t help myself and went back to the archives to see what the discussion about the movie was like when it came out (I wasn’t a reader yet). It wasn’t as much of a discussion as I’d hoped, but I did come across this gem from @Vermillion (no idea if they still post here) that had me cracking up. It is just this side of plausible!

            https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/24/open-thread-91-5/#comment-583794

            *One of my favorite fan theories about the Star Wars universe is that everyone is functionally illiterate, which is why they need droids to run everything, and why Han’s comment about the Force etc being a legend in TFA makes sense, no one has any sense of history because they don’t/can’t keep records.

      • theredsheep says:

        I am cautiously optimistic for the Zombieland sequel. That’s about it. I keep wanting to take my wife to the movies, only to look at what’s on offer and say, “nope.” Alas.

      • John Schilling says:

        A whole bunch of big-budget franchise pictures are coming our way: “Captain Marvel”, “Avengers: Endgame”, Star Wars IX, “Pokemon Detective Pikachu”, and the Terminator rewind.

        OK, but is there anything to look forward to?

        I’ve been officially done with comic-book superheroes since “Wonder Woman”, the last straw in an increasingly strained genre, and nothing I am seeing here makes me want to reconsider that position. Nor do any of the other current franchises hold any appeal, being divided between the ones that were never good ideas in the first place and ones that have been run into the ground and then through the ground into the sewage lines.

        Also not a fan of horror movies, or reboots of what were good stories the first time around, and that doesn’t leave much on io9’s list for me.

        • albatross11 says:

          Marvel movies are great at spectacle, but you kind-of have to turn off your brain to watch, and definitely you have to turn off your critical thinking.

        • johan_larson says:

          My take:

          Probably worth seeing:
          Captive State
          Terminator reboot

          Possibly worth seeing:
          Dark Phoenix
          The New Mutants
          Happy Death Day 2U
          Detective Pikachu
          Ad Astra
          Frozen 2
          The Call of the Wild

        • Paul Brinkley says:

          Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse might be a welcome exception to your concern, if I understand it.

          (I like Marvel movies for the spectacle and fun writing, but I definitely see that as a personal taste.)

          • mdet says:

            Into the Spiderverse might be the best-animated movie I’ve ever seen. One of those movies where you could pause it on nearly any shot and frame it.

            The tired-of-superheroes crowd makes it sound like “spectacle and fun writing” is not the purpose of the action genre. Like walking out of a musical saying “Well the singing and dancing were great” and intending it as a negative.

            reboots of what were good stories the first time around

            While there might be something to be said about the speed of reboots (in which Spiderman is always the example), I think it can be really fun to see how a different creative team takes on the same characters and story. Like how a good song cover can take the exact same lyrics and melody and reinterpret it into an entirely different piece of art. If you skipped listening to Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower because why would anyone need to rehash a perfectly good Bob Dylan song, you made a big mistake.

            Not that I’m particularly interested in many of the reboots in question — I don’t recognize the director of the new Hellboy, but who’s really going to make a better monster movie than Guillermo del Toro? — but I’m not opposed to the idea of seeing a familiar story retold by a new set of filmmakers.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m generally a Guillermo del Toro fan, but I don’t think his Hellboy really worked. The thing that makes Hellboy Hellboy is the atmosphere of the comics, and del Toro didn’t capture it very well. He did make a couple of pretty good monster movies with some pulp tropes, but there are lots of movies like that.

            I’m not sure you could capture the atmosphere very well in live action, though, and Mike Mignola’s style would be incredibly expensive to animate.

          • theredsheep says:

            I stopped watching the Marvel movies in theaters when I realized I was basically only watching for the fancy battle scenes, and those inevitably get thrown up on YouTube anyway. I don’t need to see ten minutes of action on a big screen badly enough to pay that kind of money, plus travel time to the theater.

            The Incredibles does a far better job making good use of superheroes’ powers for fights anyway, in addition to being more interesting movies in general. A shame you have to wait more than a decade between installments.

          • mdet says:

            I stopped watching the Marvel movies in theaters when I realized I was basically only watching for the fancy battle scenes

            How many action movies does this not apply to though? There are some action movies that are good enough to also be watched for their not-action — Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight*, Bob & Helen’s relationship in The Incredibles, Edgar Wright’s Edgar Wright-ness in Baby Driver — but in general those seem like rare exceptions.

            I think the Russo’s movies’ superpowered fight choreography is comparable to The Incredibles, and some of the other ones as well.

            *ETA: Now that I think about it, Nolan Batman movies didn’t actually have very great action. The fights or chases were serviceable, but none were particularly notable in their own right. Replace this example with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings

          • theredsheep says:

            Well, I’ve mostly stopped going to the movies in general, to be fair. I feel–and I know this is not an original insight–that CGI has eaten everything.

            (Also I just looked up the two fight scenes from Episode 8, following the same principle; the first was boring and silly and the second did not actually contain combat. Even TPM made the damn Darth Maul fight look good. All you kids better stay off my lawn.)

          • mdet says:

            Wait, did you just say that the Rey & Kylo Throne room fight was boring and silly? We’re going to have to disagree. The choreography was great — complex, but without the ostentatious flips and twirls of the prequels (which makes sense, since Rey is not at that skill level). The camera shots were all wide and long enough for you to clearly see every movement — no editing to obscure the actors’ lack of ability. The mirrored floors and bright red curtains that slowly burn down made for a beautiful set. And on the emotional / character level, the fight plays with the “will they / won’t they” of Kylo & Rey’s relationship, and works like foreplay for the next scene where they each have to choose which side they’re on. That scene hits almost every checkbox for what a great action scene should be, imo.

            I don’t have a problem with CG. If you can praise the action of The Incredibles, which is 100% CG from start to finish, then why should an action sequence that’s only 80% CG be a problem, y’know? It’s one thing if the CG visibly clashes with the live action / practical stuff, like when The Matrix Reloaded very obviously transitions from a practical shot to a rubbery CG one, but I think most blockbusters today can manage mostly seamless CG.

            On the other hand, CG has made it so easy to do huge-scale action that small-scale action has become something of a niche thing. I would be happy to see more action movies on the scale of Baby Driver, John Wick, and Atomic Blonde, all of which had some really great fight scenes with stakes on the level of “several people get shot” instead of “several buildings explode”.

          • acymetric says:

            @mdet

            Agreed, the throne room fight was one of the best parts of the movie. I thought the whole thing was both well done and cool to watch, as was the aftermath.

            Now, the throne room design (so much red) left a little to be desired. Also, did Snoke look like he stole his clothes from the “villain” in Goldmember to anyone else?

          • theredsheep says:

            Eh, the throne room fight looked like a bunch of people pretending to fight, particularly that first wide shot where they’re all cluttered together on the screen (you can actually see one guy move his weapon out of the way to avoid hitting Rey right in the back). The wide variety of overly-complicated zappy melee weapons made me roll my eyes, and the armor of the guards reminded me of the playing cards from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland abortion. I know they were going for the Imperial Guards from ROTJ, but meh. It might have been cooler if I didn’t hate both Rey and Kylo. And basically everyone else involved in the movie; I’m heavily biased by nerd rage here. I didn’t really believe Rey was going to join Kylo on the bi-curious side of the Force, or whatever he was offering, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she did. But that’s getting away from the action scene itself.

            CG works in The Incredibles because The Incredibles doesn’t have to be realistic; the cartoonishness works in its favor, because it’s a cartoon. You don’t see somebody do something wild and immediately think, “huh, wonder how much that cost.” Also, it was extremely well-made and inventive in its action scenes, like I said. Not that I2 didn’t have flaws, but the yo-yo effect on the elasticycle, or the Violet/Voyd fight, for example, were totally unlike anything I’ve seen in live-action superhero films. They were actually clever with the impossible things and made them serve the human action, instead of vomiting ever-escalating spectacle onto the screen. I could go on, but I don’t want to get too deeply into analysis of why action movies have gone totally down the crapper. Basically, it’s what you (mdet) said about big vs. small-scale. The action has come unmoored from the actors, and it’s hard to care about a collection of wisecracks stapled to a collection of effects shots. At least, for me it is.

          • John Schilling says:

            How many action movies does this not apply to though?

            All the good ones. Die Hard with just the action scenes would be unremarkable at best. Heat. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Off the top of my head, and you give three or four off the top of your head, and these aren’t “rare exceptions”, they’re the just the cream of the crop. Hollywood has traditionally been able to make movies where action and non-action scenes reinforce reinforce one another, and those are strictly better than movies that are just action scenes and pointless filler(*).

            Apparently colorful mindless action and nothing but colorful mindless action is enough to entertain you. And that’s fine, and you’re not alone. But in this context, that’s like walking into a discussion of comedy and saying “How many comedy movies have anything more than slapstick and toilet humor”?

            * For some audiences, movies that are just action scenes and more action scenes would be better still, but for cost and pacing reasons Hollywood doesn’t make many of those.

          • theredsheep says:

            A particularly bad example, IMO, is Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring. The two sequels did a better job, but Fellowship in particular had a problem with feeling like barely-competent walking and talking scenes used to hold together a bunch of fight sequences. And it wasn’t like the cave troll, or the balrog, or the Uruk-Hai weren’t fun to watch; it just didn’t feel like it added up to a cohesive whole.

            Now, there have always been terrible action movies. But it used to be a lot more common to have big-budget effects-driven movies that worked dramatically: the original Star Wars trilogy, Aliens, Predator, Terminator, Die Hard, hell, even the Fifth Element. Now they all have that disjointed feel, like the director isn’t bothering to do more than glue explosions to banter and trust that it will add up to a compelling narrative as long as the CG isn’t fake-looking.

          • mdet says:

            @John Schilling

            I’ll agree that Heat wasn’t a film that actually needed its action scenes to still be good, and would’ve still been a complete crime drama if it had had much less gunfire.

            But a version of Raiders where the opening scene is Indy walking into the temple and walking back out, with the booby traps mostly glossed over? Fast forwarding through the marketplace chase, and the fistfight around the biplane? The ark is opened, and the Nazis die bloodlessly offscreen instead of extravagant face melting? At this point it’s practically a movie about an actual archeologist. You get a little romance between Indy & Marion, but that’s it. Their relationship felt like stock action movie love interest, not a compelling and convincing partnership. Indy is a great character through sheer charisma and personality, not dramatic growth.

            Star Wars is only dramatically great for Luke’s relationship with Vader in Empire & Jedi. Han & Leia is another cliche romance. The first movie is just ok on the drama, but works because the combination SciFi -Western – Sword & Sandals – Samurai – WWII genre absolutely nails the sweet spot between the unprecedented and the familiar, and because it’s just all around great filmmaking from the cinematography, to the art & sound design, to the soundtrack, etc. (This last part applies to every movie on this list, but I’d argue several Marvel movies as well.)

            I never really felt attached to any of the soldiers in Aliens, so watching them flail and get dragged into some air vent wasn’t particularly interesting to me. Aliens only really gets good at the end, when Ripley completes her transformation from traumatized victim to fearless badass mom. Everything before the little girl getting captured is unremarkable imo.

            Terminator 2 is one of my favorite action movies of all time, and I still wouldn’t say it’s that interesting minus the action. Like Ripley, Sarah Connor’s transformation from victim to badass is great, but it’s mostly complete by the time she appears on screen. Young John Connor and the T-1000 are not inherently interesting characters, and the T-800 sorta kinda learning humanity isn’t much beyond what you’d see in a cartoon where “robots can be people too”. It’s an amazing movie because, again, top notch filmmaking all around, and because the action sequences are as tense, inventive, and dynamic as you’ll find anywhere.

            Besides Heat, I think Die Hard fares best because of the cat & mouse game between McClane and the terrorists, and McClane’s developing friendship with the cop. But saying “I don’t watch Die Hard for the action sequences” would still be pushing it.

            I sincerely say that Marvel’s best offerings (Iron Man 1, Avengers 1, Winter Soldier, Civil War, Black Panther but mostly for Killmonger, Infinity War but only if you’ve already seen multiple films’ worth of exposition so maybe not) all have compelling dramatic arcs, and pretty good filmmaking more generally.

          • Nornagest says:

            Young John Connor and the T-1000 are not inherently interesting characters, and the T-800 sorta kinda learning humanity isn’t much beyond what you’d see in a cartoon where “robots can be people too”.

            I don’t think that trope was very widespread in 1991, certainly not in film. It also works better in relation to the first movie: this is hard to see in retrospect because the sequel’s far more famous (I saw Terminator 2 when I was about eleven, Terminator not until I was around thirty), but taking the first movie’s unstoppable death machine and making it a good guy, while keeping its badass cred and introducing a credible adversary for it, is something that no one had done at the time. Very few people have done it successfully since, though not for lack of trying.

            Young John Conner isn’t a very interesting character, but he doesn’t actively get in the way of the movie, and that’s more than I can say for most sequels with kids added.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            I’d also like to point out that I despise the trend towards “””””dynamic””””” filmmaking, which seems to involve chucking gopro footage in a blender. Tony Zhou illustrates the point perfectly in Every Frame a Painting (RIP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ

          • acymetric says:

            @Hoopyfrued

            It seems like that may have been driven initially by the really really awful obsession with 3D, which resulted entire scenes (entire movies?) where the only purpose was so that something could “pop” towards the audience in 3D. Gradually the popping out of the screen obsession has faded at least a little (or is at least slightly less transparent and fits better with what is happening in the movie), but the other aspects of those scenes seem to have stuck.

          • Hoopyfreud says:

            I think the other side of that is that it really does cover up Hollywood deficiencies; the aforementioned throne room fight from the newest Star Wars doesn’t have the flow or beauty that Hung or Chan’s films do, but it also doesn’t tell a story the way the fight with Maul did, and the deficiency of substance shows. Painfully. I don’t know what it’s there for, and there’s no flashy cuts to distract me from that, so I hate it. Great action films have awesome fights that tell a story, good action films have fights that tell a story or awesome fights, and bad action films have fights.

          • John Schilling says:

            But a version of Raiders where the opening scene is Indy walking into the temple and walking back out, with the booby traps mostly glossed over?

            You’re shifting the goalposts here. The claim was that it is a problem when action movies are worth watching only for the action scenes, not that they should be worth watching in the complete absence of action scenes. An action movie needs action scene and, outside of maybe Hong Kong and DTV, it needs non-action scenes. A good action movie, needs for both the action and non-action scenes to be good, and in complementary ways.

          • mdet says:

            I wasn’t deliberately shifting the goalposts, that was a sincere misinterpretation on my part.

            I’ll still stand by the point that the Greatest Action Movies of all time includes dramatic arcs as simple as Star Wars: A farm boy with ennui wants to do something grand and meaningful with his life, then he gets swept up in a war and DOES do something meaningful with his life; and Raiders: A surprisingly badass archeologist meets up with his ex-girlfriend to punch Nazis over a McGuffin Box and honestly that’s the whole story and it’s still great.

            “””””dynamic”””””

            When I described T2’s action as “dynamic”, I was trying to describe how action scenes will flow naturally from a car chase down the highway to a car crash into a steel mill to the liquid nitrogen spill to the shatter & reassemble to a fight within the steel mill. I admit that “dynamic” is probably the vaguest word I could’ve chosen. Shoutout to Every Frame though.

            Great action films have awesome fights that tell a story, good action films have fights that tell a story or awesome fights, and bad action films have fights.

            I agree with this criteria. I would say that a number of the MCU films rate as “Good”, and a few like Winter Soldier might rate as “Great”, and that I don’t think the ratio between them differs too significantly from previous eras of action filmmaking, it’s just that the scale is much bigger and the branding is more prominent.

          • mdet says:

            I feel like I sounded like an idiot so let me defensively say that “The sign of a great action movie is that it would still be entertaining and compelling even if there were few-to-no punches thrown or shots fired” DOES sound like something that someone would say, and a handful of movies DO pass that test — The Incredibles and Heat, but not T2 or Die Hard. (I’m sure I still sound like an idiot)

          • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

            Sounds too much like “the test of a great porn is if it’s just as hot with all the sex scenes removed”

          • Randy M says:

            Maybe more like “The test of a good romantic movie is if it is just as enjoyable without the sex.”
            Action, like sex, is eye-catching but usually not what makes a movie memorable.

  49. mintrubber says:

    I’m already noticing less comment nesting with the new system. To me this is a good thing, because replies rapidly become unreadable on mobile when the boxes become too narrow, and you have to scroll for ages to get to the next readable comment. Now the the two-word-column reply walls are much further down.

    • thomasflight says:

      I just spent more time reading SSC comments on this thread than I ever have in my ~year as a reader. This is definitely due to the formatting on mobile (where I often read) being much better.

      I also felt compelled to pick up the pen and comment for the first time, mostly because there’s less of the “I’m too late to this party” feeling you get when there’s big long threads. While this is good for me, I’m curious if the “higher barrier for entry” is part of what leads to a higher quality of comment around here relative to other sites.

      I can see this format being better for variety of discussion, but perhaps discouraging depth of discussion. It seems like an option to sort one way or the other, with Scott’s preference as default would be ideal if that’s possible.

  50. Aging Loser says:

    I’m reading C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (first chapter after the Introduction is on nature-love and patriotism, then chapters on affection, friendship, eros, and charity) and on the one hand liking it a lot and thinking he’s a sensitive, deep guy with lots of interesting things to say and on the other hand kind of hating him because he seems to feel that you’re damned or saved on the basis of your personality — like, “prigs” and “cold” people go to hell while warm, easy-going people (the ones that he’d like to hang out with) go to heaven.

    Pretty much every story ever told depends upon the assumption that people have certain personalities which pretty much persist throughout their lives albeit developing in logical ways. Otherwise stories wouldn’t make any sense. And this is just as true for stories whose authors who tell us that they believe in the possibility of personality-altering conversions as it is for those who don’t profess to believe in such a thing. So, for example, in The Brothers Karamazov some people are just awesome and interesting from the beginning and throughout (Dmitri) while others are just despicable rodents from the beginning and throughout (Smerdyakov). (Same in Lord of the Rings, the work of an explicitly Catholic author — can you imagine Wormtongue or the Mouth of Sauron turning into a good guy? Or even Boromir becoming sweet and gentle?) And the only counter-example that I can think of in Lewis’s stories is the kid who turns into a dragon and then has a conversion-“talk” with Aslan (is he the same one who got addicted to Turkish Delight?) — but his conversion might as well have been the annihilation of him as a character and his replacement by someone else with the same name, if I remember correctly.

    • Laukhi says:

      I haven’t read The Four Loves, but if I recall correctly he explicitly decries this idea in Mere Christianity – being a virtuous and good Christian is what causes you to go to heaven, not your inner personality. In fact, I think that he wrote that people who are naturally warm in temperament may be more at risk of not going to heaven, because they’ll just rely on that rather than turning to Christ, or something along those lines.

    • sfoil says:

      Laukhi beat me to the remark so I’ll dig up Lewis’ thoughts on that from elsewhere. Here it is from “Mere Christianity”:

      Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the [Victoria Cross]. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

      It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge.

      • Aging Loser says:

        Laukhi and sfoil — funny, I just opened Mere Christianity to find a passage supporting my view and opened directly on the pages (182-183) that include sfoil’s quote. And, yes, those pages DO support you guyses point, and I’m sure that whenever Lewis is being extra-reflective this is what he thinks.

        My impression of him as seeing the sheep and goats as separated by natural personality-type is on the other hand supported by this passage from Mere Christianity, at the end of “Sexual Morality” chapter: “All of the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, completing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.”

        My reaction, reading this, was, “Okay, so Lewis doesn’t like certain people who attend his church, and thinks of them as ‘cold, self-righteous prigs’ who are close to hell because their personalities are such that he finds them repellent.”

        • SaiNushi says:

          The key there is “may be”, not “is”. As in, it’s not certain, but there’s this possibility that it could be. The cold self-righteous prig thinks he’s assured a place in heaven, but Lewis is warning him to beware, because none of us really know.

        • Deiseach says:

          Okay, I’m going to push back a bit on this because I am one of the people with cold, priggish personalities and I get what Lewis means.

          He’s not saying all extroverts go to Heaven, or that it’s on your personality that you get into Heaven with the party sheep while the priggish goats are damned (I mean, think of the traditional associations of goats, ‘priggish’ is not the word there!). Part of the problem here, I think, is the cultural and social changes since he was writing. We are all nowadays supposed to appreciate the Authentic, the person who is True To Themselves, and that is the kind of outgoing, “sure maybe I sinned but I also loved and love is never a sin” type that is admired – the rule-breaker. But back in the day, the respectable and admired type was the rule-keeper, and that is what Lewis is speaking about, the same point as in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican:

          9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

          Or think of the Elder Brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son – he was very disappointed that his father apparently forgave and forgot all, and once more indulged the younger son he had spoiled all along:

          28 But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, 29 but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’

          The point is not “big-hearted out-going lovable loser types are Lewis’ favourites so he’s prejudiced against the personalities he finds repellent”, it’s exactly what he says in that quote: spiritual pride is the worst of all the sins, the spiritual rather than the merely fleshly are the worst sins. This is why Dante puts the damned in the circle of Lust first, as the least serious and ‘highest’ level of Hell, because even when it is degraded into lust, there is some tiny spark of going outside of the self, which is what love means, remaining.

          And the cold personalities are at fault because of their lack of love. It’s not following the rules that will get you salvation, it’s passionate love of God. This is where the misunderstanding comes in, as in the woman with the alabaster jar – the idea I’ve seen as pop-exegesis there is that “her sins are forgiven because she has loved much” means that her sins weren’t really sins (and they’re taken as sexual sins) because she loved the men she slept with. No. Her sins are real sins but they are also really forgiven because she has come to love God enough to weep in public over them.

          That’s where the coldness comes in – the prostitutes and tax collectors enter Heaven before the righteous, because they realise they are sinners, realise they need forgiveness, respond (messily, with tears and shouting and climbing trees and making public exhibitions of themselves) to the message of salvation and let their hearts be broken open by grace to the love of God.

          But the righteous? We, the Elder Brothers, the Pharisees, the Good People? We keep the rules and count our virtues and make a bargain that we expect God to fulfil, we have our cold stone hearts all in one piece and attend church every Sunday and never make a fuss or a show.

          And that is our damnation – that we do not love God with the burning fire that would melt the frozen, warm the chill. And we needn’t be prudes and prigs in our everyday lives! We could be the life and soul of the party, the great guy or gal everyone knows and loves! But inside we have that hard, cold kernel at our core where we want things on our terms. About six years ago, I wrote a piece about Being The Elder Brother for a sorta religious website, and if you’ll permit me to quote myself:

          I find that I am comfortable with the notion of punishment, but liberty scares me. And that is the point of the Older Brother in the parable. If the younger brother can throw it all away and come back for a second go, then where is the justice in that? What is fair or right? If anything is permissible, then surely that means everything is permissible? He doesn’t particularly want his younger brother to be scorned and turned away, but he does want to know why the father seems to act as if nothing has happened or indeed as if the younger son has done what is good, right and excellent just as much as the dutiful, faithful son.

          And that’s what grace is. Grace is liberty, grace is unjust – no, maybe not unjust, but grace is unfair. Grace is gratuitous. Grace is a pleasing thing given freely by the favour of the giver and no desert in the recipient. Grace is a fountain in a dry land.

          Grace is scary.

          So I rush back to the comfort of definitions, trying to put grace in a cage or a leash around its neck, a halter on its head or a hobble on its feet, so that I can classify it and understand it and handle it.

          That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. Pope Benedict XVI did not, I think it is fair to say, have a reputation as one of the more liberal, ‘Spirit of Vatican II’ types. This is why there was a great deal of excitement back in 2010 when he seemed to say that condoms were permissible – this was in the context of a book-length interview with a German journalist being published and naturally the media junked all the nuance and caveats and went for the obvious (and incorrect) headlines.

          But that’s beside the point. What I want to quote is the part that coheres with what Lewis is saying in the above:

          There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.

          And so, gradually, by the realisation of the selfishness at the heart of sin, the prostitute comes nearer grace and Heaven than the self-satisfied righteous who is sure he or she are not like other people, they fast twice a week and tithe!

    • theredsheep says:

      I think you misremembered your Karamazovs; Dimitri is the most ambiguous of them, the one who feels pulled to bestial behavior but knows in his heart that it’s shameful and struggles ceaselessly against it. Ivan is the too-clever atheist who invents the Grand Inquisitor, while Alyosha is the devout mystic and junior starets. Eustace doesn’t completely change in personality, I don’t think; he only drops his most obnoxious habits. Also, I suspect that Eustace was intended to be at least a little bit autobiographical; like Lewis, his first and middle names are dorky, and Lewis was only a little less snotty as a young man.

      My general feel is that, by this model, God grades on the curve; a poor guy with a crappy upbringing who makes a valiant effort to stop drinking and beat his girlfriend less gets more credit than someone raised with every advantage who never changes from being a basically amiable but unexceptional person.

      Yeah, I got ninja’d in turn. Nested Xposts!

      • Aging Loser says:

        I remember my Karamazovs, theredsheep — reeredd it last year. He loves Dmitri throughout, and Dmitri is the novel’s true protagonist — Dmitri is the archetypal Christian man, passionate and deep and terrible and redeemable. Alyosha isn’t very real — my guess is that he’s modeled on the author’s dead son, who never had a chance to grow up into reality. Ivan isn’t fleshed out very well — really just a series of trains of thought.

        You may be right about Eustace — that’s interesting.

        With regard to your “general feel” paragraph — yes, that supports my salvation/damnation by personalities impression — the passionate “authentic” guy (Dmitri-type) gets saved and the boring “prig” gets damned.

        • quanta413 says:

          He loves Dmitri throughout, and Dmitri is the novel’s true protagonist — Dmitri is the archetypal Christian man, passionate and deep and terrible and redeemable.

          This is not my memory of the book but it’s been a long time since I read it.

          I remember Dmitri as being the idiot brother who was also crude and somewhat disgusting. I didn’t think Dostoevsky portrayed him positively at all.

          • Protagoras says:

            I reread it quite recently, and I think you’re both wrong. Dmitri is not an idiot, but he’s not the “true protagonist” either. Smerdyakov is perhaps of less interest, but Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha are all interesting in their own ways.

          • quanta413 says:

            By idiot brother I don’t mean stupid but more the stereotype of the sibling who is degenerate and irresponsible. To be fair, he’s not just that and I’ve undoubtedly forgot the good parts.

            Personally I do not remember finding him interesting while I found Ivan and Alyosha interesting. But like I said, it’s been a long time. His character may not have resonated with me.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      I don’t think Boromir needs to become sweet and gentle, or at least there are certainly good warriors in LOTR. It’s interesting to try to figure out what Boromir needed to have not tried to take the Ring– possibly trusting his betters about how dangerous the Ring was. Note that he did repent and die heroically. He’s presumably in heaven.

      • Aging Loser says:

        That’s true, Nancy Lebovitz. But he was basically a good guy, and likable — hence his ability to repent and redeem himself by dying in battle, same as with all such characters in movies.

    • can you imagine Wormtongue or the Mouth of Sauron turning into a good guy?

      It’s pretty strongly implied that Gollum could have reformed, had things gone just a little differently.

      • Aging Loser says:

        Yes, DF — the scene where Sam sees him having the internal argument that ends in his reaffirming his Gollumhood. But Tolkien, as author, couldn’t have allowed Gollum to end up as a disgusting version of Sam, and especially couldn’t have allowed Sam (who has amusing visions of world-domination while wearing the ring) to end up as a superior version of Gollum. (Can you imagine a 3-1/2 foot-tall world-ruler?)

        • silver_swift says:

          I don’t know to what extent the two scenarios are analogous, but Snape, both in canon and HPMOR, kinda does go from repulsive, cold, sadistic bad guy to (slightly less) repulsive, cold, sadistic good guy.

          The other direction is trickier, but Mistborn’s evil god Ruin started out as the kind, generous and warm person Ati. Mistborn spoilers (rot13): Ur qryvorengryl gbbx hc gur pbeehcgvat cbjre bs uvf Funeq, xabjvat shyy jryy jung vg jbhyq qb gb uvz, orpnhfr ur oryvrirq ur pbhyq zvgvtngr fbzr bs gur qnzntr gur Funeq jbhyq pnhfr qhevat gur svefg srj praghevrf orsber vg shyyl pbeehcgrq uvz.

          • The original Mr. X says:

            IDK, I feel like canon Snape is more a case of Harry/the audience learning more about Snape’s personality and motivations than of Snape himself changing.

    • aristides says:

      Those are two different characters, Edmund and Eustice. A few of the non human characters go through a character transformation as well, so I think it is fair to say Lewis believed it was possible to change your ways, but I agree with you that he thought the personality had to change with actions.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Puddleglum from The Silver Chair is far from warm or easy-going, but he’s the only actually useful person in that book’s trio.

      • Aging Loser says:

        True! Good counter-example. He’s an interesting character — really weird-looking, too. Sort of a minor Ent. A swamp-Ent.

    • ilikekittycat says:

      “It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.”

    • Walter says:

      Galavant, if you want to turn characters, watch Galavant.

      It pulls off a full Dudley Do-Right Rotation…Inverted!

      The series begins with Galavant attempting to save Madelena from Richard. It ends with Richard saving Galavant from Madelena.

    • Deiseach says:

      can you imagine Wormtongue or the Mouth of Sauron turning into a good guy? Or even Boromir becoming sweet and gentle?

      Yes. Absolutely yes. As you say, Tolkien is a Catholic author, not a Calvinist. There is always the possibility up to the very last minute of repentance and redemption.

      When they return to the Shire and find out what has happened, Frodo offers clemency to both Saruman and Wormtongue, and there is that moment where they could avail of it, if they both in their ways had not surrendered themselves to habits that bound them:

      ‘No, Sam!’ said Frodo. ‘Do not kill him even now. For he has not hurt me. And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hands against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.’

      ‘Wormtongue!’ called Frodo. ‘You need not follow him. I know of no evil you have done to me. You can have rest and food here for a while, until you are stronger and can go your own ways.’

      Wormtongue halted and looked back at him, half prepared to stay. Saruman turned. ‘No evil?’ he cackled. ‘Oh no! Even when he sneaks out at night it is only to look at the stars. But did I hear someone ask where poor Lotho is hiding? You know, don’t you, Worm? Will you tell them?’

      Even the Mouth of Sauron, who has so surrendered his own will and personality as to be literally the mouthpiece of his master, if there was one tiny seed of regret or remorse, could be redeemed.

      Boromir’s fatal flaw is his pride (the spiritual vice again!) and the Ring works on that weakness and changes him for the worse. He comes back to himself again eventually, but the damage has been done by then. Boromir would never be sweet and gentle, but he could be wiser and more humble.

      • Lambert says:

        The potential for change is all well and good, but it’s rather moot if nobody actually you know… changes.

    • The original Mr. X says:

      and on the other hand kind of hating him because he seems to feel that you’re damned or saved on the basis of your personality — like, “prigs” and “cold” people go to hell while warm, easy-going people (the ones that he’d like to hang out with) go to heaven.

      Well, you’d have to quote him directly for me to be sure, but I suspect that Lewis is actually talking about what the scholastics would call habitus — i.e., the traits and habits that we build up by repeated action, as opposed to ones that we have innately. Since such habits are caused by our actions, I don’t see any problem in assigning them moral value?

  51. hash872 says:

    Bit of a random finance/efficient market hypothesis question. If EMH is true…. why do banks still have trading desks? Why is ‘trader’ still a type of person employed by banks/financial institutions/whomever? Doesn’t EMH mean that trading cannot possibly be profitable in the long run? Or, alternately, doesn’t the continued profitability of trading desks at Goldman/JP Morgan/BoA disprove EMH? What exactly is the distinction between active management and trading, per se? I guess I just find it really difficult to believe that, say, Goldman Sachs traders have been unprofitable or marginally profitable over a long enough period of time, but GS somehow never noticed. Seems rather easy to express in Excel, yes? Full disclosure of priors, I find the strong version of EMH to be incredibly implausible, though I’d accept some weaker ones.

    Another EMH question I have is the very vague definition of ‘beating the market’. What is the ‘market’ defined as- the S&P 500? Given that the S&P 500 is down for the year, but I predicted this and moved much of my personal capital into money market funds, have I ‘beaten the market’ for 2018? (This part is actually true). If the S&P 500 continues to decline in 2019, but I place various short bets and am even slightly profitable (or even just don’t lose as much as the market declines), have I again beaten the market?

    • EricN says:

      Markets are efficient because there are people who make them efficient. Say you have an ETF (fund) that tracks the S&P 500 (say, SPY). Laypeople who just want to invest their money in an index fund won’t check to make sure that the price of SPY is fair (that is, it reflects the prices of the S&P 500 stocks). So they rely on traders who make sure the price is fair (for example, if SPY is trading too cheap, they will buy SPY, trade the shares of SPY for the basket of underlying stocks — that’s a thing you can do with SPDR, the company that issues SPY, and then sell those stocks). So, traders such as the ones at the places you mentioned do things like this (except more complicated — things as simple as what I just described are generally done by high frequency trading firms).

      The term “beating the market” refers to making investments in a way that is more profitable than just investing in the market as a whole (say, by investing in the S&P 500). Depending on whom you ask, beating the market in the long term is either hard or impossible. It’s impossible for laypeople, but probably possible for the best hedge funds, which do really high quality fundamental analyses of companies to figure out how much they’re worth and make long-term bets.

      So technically you beat the market by pulling your money out of it and then it declined (because you would’ve made -5% or whatever had you kept in invested but this way you made 0%). But had the market gone up, you would have underperformed the market. The EMH says that you can’t beat the market in expectation — that is, while you can beat the market in the short term by getting lucky, in the long term whatever strategy you pursue will not be better than just putting your money into an index fund.*

      *Well, you can put your money into a leveraged index fund: these are things that give you, for example, twice the return of an index fund. So if the S&P 500 grows by 10% you win 20%. But obviously this is more risky. So more accurately, the EMH says that if you want to have the same exposure to risk as investing in the stock market as a whole, your long-term returns can’t be better than if you just invest in the stock market as a whole.

    • aashiq says:

      Disclosure: professional trader

      Most practitioners believe in neither the strong, semi-strong, nor weak forms of EMH. Banks and hedge funds regularly perform statistical analysis on the performance of their trading desks, providing fuel for their widespread disbelief. As you say, I guess this “disproves” the EMH, but I don’t know of anyone who actually believes it — only economists who make the assumption as a convenience for analyzing a related problem. I still think of markets as “efficient”, but in a much weaker sense: that “the market” is hard to beat, and in the absence of some “edge” (analytical ability, herculean effort, private information, technological superiority, etc) or market failure, I will just believe the market price.

      Regarding “the market”, I think most people think of the S&P 500. Regarding your trading, I would say you have “beaten the market”, but others might conceivably disagree, preferring to restrict the comparison to people who are long equities. Your intuition that the comparison to the S&P is weird is correct. For example, if you are a high frequency trader arbitraging different FX markets, your performance has little to do with the performance of US equities. In addition, your business has a massive technological barrier to entry and takes little risk, additional factors that make the S&P 500 a terrible benchmark.

      • brad says:

        The family of EMH theories might benefit by borrowing some of the ideas that underlie security proofs in cryptography. There’s a notion that a ciphertext is secure if there’s no polynomial time algorithm that can distinguish between it and a random text. By analogy economists might posit certain scenarios where there aren’t exploitable inefficiencies in a particular the market (because the costs would exceed the benefits).

      • hash872 says:

        Gotcha, thanks for the response. I just don’t see how trading fits in to EMH- active management, yes, trading any manner of asset classes, no. I Googled around and couldn’t find anything on the topic.

        The whole ‘what about a bear market’ thing really debunks a lot of EMH as well. If the market’s down 5% for the year, and I just do various shorts here and there and turn any type of profit or even a loss up to 4.99%, have I not beaten the market….. Kind of happy to do that with my portfolio and return it to my Vanguard index fund when we’re back in a bull market. I’ve been using ETFs for shorting, lots of small profits to be found

        • arabaga says:

          EMH doesn’t imply that no one can ever beat the market ever, it implies that no one can consistently beat the market (to choose a specific but arbitrary minimum, let’s say over at least 10 years).

          So yes, if you were down less than 5% in 2018 then you did beat the market for that year, but if you remain in money market funds in 2019 and it is a bull market then you would have lost to the market in 2019 (and perhaps over the whole 2018-2019 period).

          This doesn’t answer your initial question about traders at banks — I can’t answer that — just wanted to clear up info about EMH.

        • WashedOut says:

          I’ve been using ETFs for shorting, lots of small profits to be found

          Not a professional trader, but that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, of the “long series of small incremental gains followed by a massive loss” type. What leverage are you typically shorting with? I’m assuming you don’t just mean going long on 1/[$stock].

          • hash872 says:

            I read Nassim Taleb too. I’m using ETFs to guess what general market sentiment will be- ones like the SPXU allow me to purchase one if I think the market will go down etc. More specifically I find Trump as a personality pretty easy to read, and his whims or moods from one day to the next seem to drive what the market does. May not be a sustainable strategy once he’s out of office.

            I guess I don’t understand what’s the worst that can happen if I use stop losses. So it…. goes down a bit and I automatically sell? Where’s the ‘disaster’ part? Anyways, I’m only trading a small % of my speculative capital at any one time, and speculative capital is just a % of my net worth. I genuinely don’t understand what could happen that’s so bad

          • WashedOut says:

            You said you were shorting certain financial instruments, which is what prompted my reply.

            I guess I don’t understand what’s the worst that can happen if I use stop losses. So it…. goes down a bit and I automatically sell? Where’s the ‘disaster’ part?

            If you are shorting with leverage and you set your stops incorrectly, you can get liquidated (and if you repeat this experiment enough times, ‘can’ becomes ‘will’), which is why I asked about leverage.

            If the price “goes down a bit” your shorts will pay off if they’re in the money, so that’s not the issue.

            As for your trading strategy, I find it more plausible that Trump’s ‘whims and moods’ are the _result_ of newsworthy financial events, rather than the cause, but now im just speculating.

          • BillyZoom says:

            Quick note about stop orders.

            Stop orders are latent orders held by a broker which are then communicated to the market at a time when a price hits a certain level. It may be that now exchanges support them directly, but it wasn’t the case when I was involved in equities trading.

            The order sent to market can either be a limit order (it has a specific price attached to it), or a market order (no price attached – “fill at any price”).

            If a security gaps (meaning its price moves a lot in single move), then if you use a stop limit order, you may not get filled. For example, you are short XYZ which trades at 10. You put in a stop to buy at 11 to cover your short. However, news comes out, and the XYZ stock jumps from 10 to 12. Your “buy @ 11” will not be filled as no one will sell @ 11. They demand 12.

            If instead you use stop market orders (e.g., buy @ market if price > 11), then you will buy at whatever the market is if it passes 11. In a flash crash or flash jump, you can be filled at a very disadvantageous price. Even if it’s not a flash, but just a big move, you’ll be filled at the price to which it move, not the price at which it activates. In the above example, you’d be filled @12, not 11.

            So, stop orders are good if you’re not watching, but they aren’t a panacea.

      • cryptoshill says:

        I also think that “you can’t beat the market” is mostly “good advice for starting investors to avoid hedge funds” and not “advice that you can’t actually make a profit trading”.

        Hedge funds can and often do “beat the market” – however the fees you pay to have the money in the account are greater than the amount that the hedge fund is “beating” the market by – so you would be better off with a low fee fund that just goes long a given basket of equities.

        For the aspiring retail trader, the important consideration is that “you are unlikely to be more then 1 to 3% better off than if you had just done indexed investments with the same amount of money – and learning to trade is a skill that requires a lot of effort”. So if 1 to 3% of your invested capital is enough to provide you with an income you’re comfortable with and you really want to learn to trade for other reasons (you enjoy it, you want to be able to decouple your work from your physical location, or other justifiable purpose) it could be worth doing.

    • 10240 says:

      Adding to the above comments [not an economist or a finance expert]: Likely a stable situation is one where it’s possible to outperform the market, but only by what is a reasonable price for the work of performing the analysis necessary to do so. (And under conditions like having the relevant expertise and enough money to play with.) If it was more profitable than that, then more people would start doing it and succeed (or banks would hire more traders); if it was not profitable, (rational) active traders would quit.

    • sunnydestroy says:

      Efficient markets depend on perfect information. Less information, less efficiency. I think the rigor of your analysis would create the information asymmetry for larger cap stocks–if you can see more than what everyone else is seeing.

      I’d argue that’s why small and micro caps are more volatile. More opportunities there too.

    • Walter says:

      Excellent job noticing your confusion!

      EMH is not true or testable in any real way. It is only connected to other terms, never to any part of the real world.

      You can sit at a trader’s desk, or your own desk. You can buy a stock. Later on, you can sell that stock at a higher value. These are truths, they are real. The EMH fairy will never swoop in and stop you from clicking.

      People will dissuade you from earning money in the market. EMH is one of their tools. It is just the ‘Don’t try to do something new! if it was worthwhile someone would already have done it!’ gag with more sophisticated words.

      I urge you to open an imaginary account and trade some stocks in your mind. Track them like they were real. This will give you the confidence you need to do the real thing.

      • Kyle A Johansen says:

        EMH is not true or testable in any real way. It is only connected to other terms, never to any part of the real world.

        It is falsifiable by finding a counter-example where one can systematically make money through tricks or psychological methods, rather than being among the first to trade on new information.

        There is an issue there with distinguishing between a thousand people trying to beat the market and a couple getting lucky, and actually knowing it. But that’s not the theory being untestable.

        If you think you have done that, then that is still not the same as theory being untestable.

        I think it important to remember that EMH is not some economist’s dogma – however obvious it seems to use now – but a truth meteor that crashed into financial academia, and their baseball and moods industry.

    • Chalid says:

      As a quant researcher/portfolio manager, I’d say the philosophy within quant active management is that markets are mostly efficient and the EMH is almost true.

      But there’s a lot of room to make money in the gap between “almost true” and “true”. There are certain kinds of information that the market systematically underreacts to (for example). There are other kinds of information that the market systematically overreacts to. There are certain systematic psychological biases that market participants share. There are kinds of semi-private information that are only available to those who pay for it, or are available more quickly to those who pay for it. None of the effects you look at are large – large effects go away, because the market is almost efficient. But gather up enough small advantages, and eventually you get enough of an edge that trading can make money net of costs.

      So in general a quant doesn’t say “the price is X and I believe the price should be X+1 so I’ll buy the stock.” It’s more like “stocks with these properties tend to go up by 0.1% on average so I will buy them regardless of their price.” In other words, it’s very hard to say what the price ought to be from first principles, and much easier to estimate what the errors in current prices are.

      • In other words, it’s very hard to say what the price ought to be from first principles, and much easier to estimate what the errors in current prices are.

        Close to my approach, from a different angle.

        Back when the original Macintosh came out and I bought one, one of my colleagues at Tulane Business School asked me why I didn’t get a PC Junior instead. I knew about graphic interfaces, having seen stuff on the Xerox Park work, and had been using a personal computer (a superclone of the TRS80) for some years.

        Looking at the boxes, the Mac and the little PC seemed roughly equivalent–but the Mac was running a Motorola 68000 normally used for multiuser machines, because it needed the horsepower to run its graphic interface. I concluded that my colleague’s ignorance was typical of the overwhelming majority of those in the market, hence that Apple stock was badly undervalued, and bought some.

        Part of the argument was believing in almost efficient markets. I assumed that all other relevant considerations were being correctly priced by the market, hence I didn’t have to look at Apple’s price to earning ratio or similar statistics. There was one point on which I was willing to bet against the world, and the market let me do so.

        • hash872 says:

          Not vouching that is 100% true, but…. on the How I Built This podcast, Mark Cuban told the host that part of how he built his personal fortune was that after he sold his first startup in the 90s, Wall Street analysts kept calling him to pick his brains about this or that tech company. Eventually he realized that he knew more than them and started trading himself based on his personal knowledge of tech products, and claims he multiplied his existing net worth a few times over. Just an anecdote, but that’s his story

    • rlms says:

      Tangential pedantic note on your first paragraph example: post-Volcker rule, traders at investment banks nowadays don’t do much speculation on their own account. Instead, they largely facilitate speculation and hedging (for instance, executing large orders without impacting the market too much).

      Also, even if the EMH was totally true in its strongest form, there would still be a place for traders. The EMH says that you can’t get a greater return than the market without also taking on greater risk, but different people have different appetites for risk. So traders would still be involved in “buying risk” off people who want to hedge.

  52. ed74 says:

    Could have used a comment field at the end of the survey. It’s difficult to put some ideas into multiple choice form.
    EG, in actual moral principle, I am entirely against governments and borders. However, I recognize that both are pretty much the best game in town, and necessary to any sort of civilization whatever.

    • 10240 says:

      IIRC last year ~8000 people filled in the survey. If, say, 10% of them adds a comment like that, nobody is going to read and process them all.

  53. sunnydestroy says:

    The replication crisis comes to finance.

    There seems to be several finance nerds and enthusiasts here, so I’m sharing this interesting study I came across called Replicating Anomalies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2961979&__s=otwhkfwmq7behqhdy6ai. For the full text, search sci-hub with http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2961979.

    I’ve only skimmed the paper and I won’t pretend I understand more than the high level points. They reference a lot of finance minutea I’m unfamiliar with. Actual finance pros, feel free to correct me or chime in.

    A couple open threads ago, I learned the term factor investing, which honestly seems like something everyone does to a certain degree since you’re evaluating characteristics of companies that might explain their performance. At least, that’s what I get from the Investopedia definition. I’d definitely say people doing it professionally are way more technical and quantitative about it with factors like coefficient of variation for dollar trading volume or financial intermediary leverage beta being looked at.

    This study is interesting because it acknowledges widespread p hacking in the research on factors influential to stock returns then conducts a massive replication of studies on different factors. They find the majority of factors shown to affect returns in the literature to actually not influence returns when a more rigorous replication is run. Out of 447 factors they looked at, only 161 factors were significant at the 5% (t ≥ 1.96) confidence level, which means 64% (286) were insignificant. At t ≥ 3, 85% or 380 factors were insignificant. Apparently, most liquidity variables were found to be trash, with 93% of them insignificant on returns:

    Prominent variables that do not survive our replication include the Jegadeesh (1990) short-term reversal; the Datar-Naik-Radcliffe (1998) share turnover; the Chordia-Subrahmanyam-Anshuman (2001) coefficient of variation for dollar trading volume; the Amihud (2002) absolute return-to-volume; the AcharyaPedersen (2005) liquidity betas; the Ang-Hodrick-Xing-Zhang (2006) idiosyncratic volatility, total volatility, and systematic volatility; the Liu (2006) number of zero daily trading volume; and the Corwin-Schultz (2012) high-low bid-ask spread. Several recently proposed friction variables are also insignificant, including the Bali-Cakici-Whitelaw (2011) maximum daily return; the Adrian-Etula-Muir (2014) financial intermediary leverage beta; and the Kelly-Jiang (2014) tail risk.

    They also note some other influential variables that don’t replicate:

    …the Bhandari (1988) debt-to-market; the Lakonishok-Shleifer-Vishny (1994) five-year sales growth; several of the Abarbanell-Bushee (1998) fundamental signals; the Diether-Malloy-Scherbina (2002) dispersion in analysts’ forecast; the Gompers-Ishii-Metrick (2003) corporate governance index; the Francis-LaFond-Olsson-Schipper (2004) earnings attributes, including persistence, smoothness, value relevance, and conservatism; the Francis et al. (2005) accruals quality; the Richardson-Sloan-Soliman-Tuna (2005) total accruals; and the Fama-French (2015) operating profits-to-book equity.

    They also found that many of the significant factors had much lower magnitudes of effects than originally reported:

    Famous examples include the Jegadeesh-Titman (1993) price momentum; the Lakonishok-Shleifer-Vishny (1994) cash flow-to-price; the Sloan (1996) operating accruals; the Chan-JegadeeshLakonishok (1996) earnings momentum formed on standardized unexpected earnings, abnormal returns around earnings announcements, and revisions in analysts’ earnings forecasts; the Cohen-Frazzini (2008) customer momentum; and the Cooper-Gulen-Schill (2008) asset growth.

    The authors conclude that most of the problem comes from overweighting of microcaps in the studies they looked at:

    Fama and French (2008) show that microcaps represent only 3% of the total market capitalization of the NYSE-Amex-NASDAQ universe, but account for 60% of the number of stocks. Microcaps not only have the highest equal-weighted returns, but also the largest cross-sectional standard deviations in returns and anomaly variables among microcaps, small stocks, and big stocks. Many studies overweight microcaps with equal-weighted returns…

    They also note sample size as a problem, with most studies using U.S.-centric CRSP-Compustat data that don’t have emerging markets data. They also think publication bias and financial conflict of interest compounds the issue. I also thought it was nice that they threw in some background info on the replication crisis in social science studies and how they applied it to the finance literature.

    The last thing they do is to try explaining the significant factors they found using the q-factor model. First I’ve heard of this model, but it looks like the best performing current investment model for explaining stock returns based on different factors. Honestly, a lot of the q-factor model section (section 4) is over my head, but it seems they’re testing the 161 factors they found to have a significant effect using the q-factor model, then seeing which of the 161 had significant alphas (return above a market index). They found 46 of the 161 factors’ alphas to be significant at the 5% confidence level. Combining the 46 significant factors led to an average return spread of 1.66% (t = 10.28).

    Can anyone comment or explain further? I’m especially fuzzy on the q-factor model section.

    • 10240 says:

      Wouldn’t people who do these sorts of studies well work for investment banks and not publish their studies?

    • Chalid says:

      Not going to read carefully, but it looks like they’re just doing it wrong. e.g. they use monthly return series to test short-term reversal which is has a timescale of a few days. Eliminating microchips is good practice but going all the way to value-weighting is too far in the other direction. “We treat an anomaly as a replication failure if the average return of its high-minus-low decile is insignificant at the 5% level (t < 1.96)" while in "real life" much of the return comes from the middle deciles. etc etc

    • Bamboozle says:

      Most “factor investing” is marketing. Not surprised most factors are bunkum. The only one i’d even consider looking at is Momentum. But then that’s exactly what index investing does and considering the massive rise of indexers recently that probably is why it’s performed so well.

  54. J. Mensch says:

    Suppose you want to sample the average walking pace of each person in a city, and you have you do it by measuring the instantaneous velocity of all who walk past over a one hour period. Should you worry that you’ll overcount quick people, as they cover more ground per second and are thus more likely to walk by you?

    • The Nybbler says:

      My intuition is that this is canceled by the fact that the slow people take longer trips (in terms of time) and are thus more likely to be in your sample period.

      • ajakaja says:

        Yes. It’s easiest to think about imagining just two speeds, say 1 and 2. In an hour a fast person covers 2x as much ground, and so is 2x more likely to cross you if their trips take an hour. Meanwhile, a slow person who’s making the same trip will be out for 2x as long, so they’re 2 times more likely to overlap with you. If both types of people make the same trips in a day on average, then the 2s cancel out.

        But that’s if slow and quick people make the same types trips and they start and finish at random times and your polling place randomly samples them. So probably not in reality.

        • meh says:

          Each walks past my polling point at a specific time. Someone walking 1mph will walk past 1 mile of points, someone at 2mph will walk past 2 miles of points.

          • 10240 says:

            If they walk for the same time. If their trips have the same length, then they have the same probability of passing through the polling point in any given period (assuming that time points are uniform throughout a day, which is not true in practice).

            Faster people probably walk longer distances per day actually, as they are likely to be healthy, and walking is a more convenient mode of transport for them than for slower people. (An opposing factor may be that people who walk as a way to pass time walk slower than people who walk purely as a form of transit, and they may walk longer.)

    • youzicha says:

      I’m not sure.

      If everyone in the city just makes a single trip during the day, then it seems there should not be a bias. Suppose that you are standing on the road at point B, somewhere in between two points A and C, and suppose that someone will walk from A to C during the day. If he walks at a given speed v, you can calculate what during interval of time he needs to set out from A in order to meet you at B in the 1-hour window, and this interval will be exactly 1 hour long, no matter what v is. So for every point A in the city you should get a fair sample of people setting off from that point.

      On the other hand, if we assume that people are just walking back and forth randomly (i.e. as soon as they reach a destination, the start walking on a different trip), then intuitively you will oversample fast walkers, since they can be buzzing back and forth in front of you. I guess this corresponds to more fast than slow peoples setting off from each point.

    • grothor says:

      It depends on what assumptions you’re able to make and how long your sampling period is.

      One way to think of it is to remove the temporal component. During your sampling period, you will only see people whose path, during that time, crosses your point of measurement. Assuming your sampling period is small compared to a typical trip duration (probably not a good assumption?), fast people walk a longer path, so it’s more likely to overlap with your measurement point.

      youzicha points out correctly that if you’re able to assume that everyone makes the same number of trips, and everyone starts and finishes their trips during the time you’re measuring, you do not need to make a correction. I suppose this is sort of the other limit, where your sampling period is long compared to trip duration.

      If you know something about trip duration, you can probably combine these, using the first to correct for edge effects on the second.

      Both of these models assume that trip distance is uncorrelated with speed.

    • meh says:

      Under most assumptions it will.

    • ing says:

      There’s a hidden question here: do slower people walk the same distance (per day) as fast people, and therefore spend more time walking in total? Or do they compensate for their slower walking speed by walking a lesser distance?

      For example, you can imagine that you’re sampling from a point that’s on a one-mile walk from a residential area to a downtown. Some people enjoy walking, so they walk quickly, and are willing to walk the distance whenever they go downtown. Other people hate walking, perhaps because they’re less healthy and walk more slowly, so they tend to drive when they go downtown.

      If this is happening, then you should worry that you’ll overcount quick people — not exactly because they walk faster, but because they walk more.

      On the other hand, if you include in your model an assumption that everyone walks the same distance per day (and across the same distribution of paths), then I think you are not in danger of overcounting faster walkers.

    • SaiNushi says:

      The trick is going to be in the time and place you pick. If the place you pick is the entrance to, say, a theater, and the time you pick is when the play lets out, then you’re less likely to over count either one. Do the study multiple times with different types of events each time, and you’ll have made sure you’re not accidentally sorting based on events that are more likely to be attended by fast or slow walkers.

      On the other hand, if the place you pick is a mall, and the time you pick is 9am, then you’ll definitely over-represent the fast walkers, as that’s when the mall walkers are taking advantage of no crowds to get some exercise indoors (the mall is open, but most stores aren’t, so no shoppers yet).

    • RavenclawPrefect says:

      Not quite your question, but a related math puzzle I thought up last week while hiking:

      Suppose you have a trail which attracts hikers at a constant rate throughout the day. All hikers of the trail have a speed in miles per hour uniformly and independently chosen from the interval [1,3]. You walk at 2mph.

      You would like to determine properties of the distribution of hikers on this trail; unfortunately, you are a very bad statistician and so have utterly neglected to consider the sampling errors at play here, so you just tally up the people who walk by you as you’re hiking the trail. (You may, however, assume that the trail is long enough, or popular enough, for you to have an arbitrarily good sample size.)

      (A) If all hikers are walking in the same direction (including you), what is the average speed you measure of the hikers?

      (B) What if all hikers are walking in the opposite direction as you?

      (C) What if equally many people hike the trail from either end? Do you believe this fact, or do you measure that one direction is more traveled with your poor sampling methods? What overall distribution do you measure, and what is a curious property of it?

      Rot13 for the final part of (C): Hayrff V’z zvfgnxra (juvpu vf cbffvoyr), gur qvfgevohgvba lbh zrnfher vf na npphengr nffrffzrag bs crbcyr cre zvyr bs genvy sbe rirelbar fybjre guna lbh, naq na npphengr nffrffzrag bs crbcyr cre havg bs gvzr qrcnegvat sebz gur genvyurnq sbe rirelbar snfgre guna lbh, abeznyvmrq fb gur shapgvba vf pbagvahbhf ng lbhe bja fcrrq.

  55. Greg Perkins says:

    Is there evidence that CEV converges?

    Intuitively, I seem to strongly believe that it will cohere, but perhaps not converge. I also intuitively hear Haidt very strongly. My guess is that, yes, everyone seems to have different preference schedules, but that they’re mostly just encoded historical artifacts in brains. The individual artifacts will iron out eventually, and humanity will be left in a semi-permanent value drift.

    • Aging Loser says:

      What’s a CEV?

    • sty_silver says:

      I think the convergence that’s already happening of smart people towards utilitarianism of some kind is strong evidence that CEV will converge. Of course, that presupposes that a) you agree that this convergence exists and b) you expect it to be permanent.

      I also think that it would be very hard to get strong evidence against convergence of CEV, because the time window we have available is extremely small.

      (And I think you should definitely define what you mean if you say CEV. It’s not nearly well-known enough to be common knowledge. Unless it was your intent to filter responses that way.)

      • Tarpitz says:

        the convergence that’s already happening of smart people towards utilitarianism of some kind

        Citation badly needed.

        • Aging Loser says:

          Smart people might be converging toward utilitarianism because they don’t often find themselves in a situation in which torturing a child seems likely to contribute significantly to the Greater Good. (Everything’s bland and bureaucratically regulated these days.)

          Also, smart people might be less likely to have children of their own these days, so they don’t have a vivid sense of greater duty toward one’s own, and everyone seems sort of interchangeable to them.

          • Tarpitz says:

            Or someone might be hanging out in a filter bubble containing a lot of smart people with utilitarian leanings, and wrongly inferring convergence…

          • BlindKungFuMaster says:

            “Or someone might be hanging out in a filter bubble containing a lot of smart people with utilitarian leanings, and wrongly inferring convergence…”

            Exactly my thoughts also.

          • Name hidden for obvious reasons says:

            might be less likely to have children of their own these days, so they don’t have a vivid sense of greater duty toward one’s own

            No kidding. Asking someone if there is anyone who they would kill someone to protect, will quickly sort the parents from the non-parents, and the people who answer “no” tend to have complete incomprehension to the question at all.

    • It seems the opposite to me. Values will converge because human civilization is converging. But ethics is very Hegelian, in the sense that when you resolve some contradiction, new ones appear. I don’t think this will ever stop as long as humans are around.

    • Ninety-Three says:

      On the contrary, I think there is an ironclad counterexample proving it doesn’t: sociopaths. Unless you believe moral realism is so true that philosophical arguments can eventually convince a serial killer to put down the knife, some small percentage of the population are going to have individual CEVs with no term for “the flourishing of people other than me”, and this seems very hard to integrate with a society mostly made up of normal people.

      • Walter says:

        Why do you think it is a small percentage of the population? Like, I wouldn’t trust most people if they had a button that would kill me and give them ten bucks.

        • Ninety-Three says:

          I didn’t want to start a disagreement about what portion of the general population are assholes and how irredeemable they are, so I kept it small and only brought up the commonly-estimated percent or two of the population that are literal sociopaths. Proof by counterexample only needs one, after all.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      No, because there is no evidence of any kind regarding CEV.

      CEV’s role in Rationalist eschatology is important, because it turns the phrase “I want to live in something akin to Ian Banks’ Culture” into “we all want to live in something akin to Ian Banks’ Culture.” With CEV there aren’t any thorny questions about the morality of forcing the vast majority of the world’s population to live according to a value system they empathically disagree with. CEV says that if they were smarter and less hypcritical they would have those values already, so really you’re not forcing those values on them so much as helping them realize what their values actually were the whole time.

  56. nweining says:

    Scott, I don’t know how CW-ish you want this to be so I’ll keep the description relatively neutral, but: I am almost done rereading Richard Rothstein’s _The Color of Law_ and I would really like to see you do a book review post on it, because I think it has a lot to say about moral and historical considerations around local-government rule pluralism, which has been a major theme of your “Archipelagic” thought over the years as I see it. In particular, it presents a strong challenge to an idea you expressed (or came across to me as expressing– sorry if I’m misinterpreting) in a previous NIMBY-vs-YIMBY post, namely that local zoning restrictions are more defensible than other kinds of government regulation because it is easier to exit if you don’t like them.

  57. Camouflage Interior says:

    Last!

    …for now…

  58. Lambert says:

    Why not a ‘sort by: newest/oldest’ dropdown?

    Also the comments are not linear: they are a tree. Perhaps something like miller columns (like the ranger file manager) should be implemented.

  59. Acedia says:

    You’re going in for major surgery and you’ve been presented with an unusual choice:

    1) You receive the standard general anaesthetic (e.g. propofol) that induces complete unconsciousness for the duration of the surgery. Statistically has a very small (less than 1 in 10,000) chance of killing you, either due to anaesthesiologist malpractice or some unexpected quirk of your biology.

    2) Instead of the above, you get a muscle paralytic and another drug that induces anterograde amnesia, temporarily preventing new memory formation. You will be fully conscious and able to experience any sensations associated with the surgery while it’s happening, but will not remember anything about it afterward. Unlike the normal anaesthetic, this has no chance at all of killing you.

    Which do you choose?
    https://www.strawpoll.me/17181410

    • noyann says:

      How strong is your belief in peak-end rule?

      edit: typo

    • Doctor Mist says:

      Not to question the hypothesis, but are we to assume that the two drugs in (2) are really perfect implementations of the effects you describe? Or simply what exists today?

      That is, can I legitimately assume that (2) is completely equivalent to a “restore from backup” taken just prior to the surgery? Or does it risk, say, that I will also be foggy about the events leading up to the surgery, or have vague deja vu about the events during the surgery?

      • Acedia says:

        For the purposes of the hypothetical, yeah, assume that (2) is completely equivalent to a “restore from backup” taken just prior to the surgery. There won’t be any hazy recollections or flashbacks, feelings creeping into your dreams at night or anything of that sort. For you it will be as if the experiences never happened.

        • aashiq says:

          To clarify: there is additionally no risk of changes to my subconscious resulting from the surgery, even though I consciously remember nothing?

    • rahien.din says:

      (I feel like this is going to turn into an argument for antinatalism.)

    • Mark Dominus says:

      The latter is discussed at some length in Daniel Dennett’s amazing essay on Why You Can’t Make a Computer That Feels Pain.

      Dennett also raises the question of whether that isn’t how general anesthetics actually work, and discusses the neurological evidence against that possibility.

      I recommend the essay. When I first started to read it I was prepared to write off the whole question as the sort of thing only discussed by college sophomores, and I was thrilled to discover that there was quite a lot to say on the topic that wasn’t obvious.

      Also, the following memorable passage, which has haunted me ever since:

      (Disturbing anesthetic failure, click to read anyway.)

      • Mark Dominus says:

        Oh, here’s another juicy item I had forgotten, somewhat less disturbing:

        “Sometimes,” I was told by a prominent anesthesiologist, “when we think a patient may have been awake during surgery, we give scopolamine to get us off the hook. Sometimes it works and sometimes not.”

        Scopalamine has amnestic affects.

      • Acedia says:

        Fascinating (if horrible), thanks.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I can’t get the Dennett article up to an easily readable size (zoom takes to to sort of readable), so I’m going to raise the question of what can be real in the computer.

        The program of a hurricane can only knock down simulated trees. Do they count?

        However, a chess victory in the computer is a real victory as far as I can tell.

        A computer can really prove a math theorem if the proof is correct. I suppose that if the proof is incorrect, it’s a simulated proof, but not different in principle from an incorrect proof by a human, even though it would seem odd to call that a simulated proof.

      • LTK says:

        If you (or anyone else) found that essay interesting, there’s also the book Feeling Pain and Being in Pain by Nikola Grahek, which goes into a lot of depth about how pain works and pain disorders.

    • TDB says:

      Didn’t they perform an experiment where a patient with anterograde amnesia learned to avoid shaking hands with the doctor after getting shocked by the doctor several times, even though the patient was unable to consciously remember having been shocked? I wonder what I would learn as a result of having experienced being sliced open? I don’t think I want to know.

    • ing says:

      I suspect that the “amnesia” solution still exposes me to a lot of stress hormones which the anesthetic would have let me avoid. Stress hormones are pretty bad for people, and I’d guess that the “less than one in 10K” chance of death might be less bad for me than that.

    • ilikekittycat says:

      #2 was basically my experience with getting my wisdom teeth out, I have a general memory of it being weird/irritating but can’t actually recall anything of the conscious experience because of the gas. I wouldn’t hesitate to go through a similar procedure in the future, despite not “enjoying” it

      I’d say #2 for anything up to the length of a movie, maybe 2.5-3 hours. Beyond that length of time, having to sit there conscious (even in a blackout state) is gonna start to feel like endless unbounded torture considering having to hold your head in place, continue to respond to directions, and all those other minor cognitive drains that don’t really let you relax

    • Basil Elton says:

      0.0001 chance to die vs one experienced surgery squares with a certain death vs 10000 experienced surgeries. 10k surgeries is equivalent to being cut alive for 2-10 years straight. I’m not sure which kind of adamant person would’ve chosen that over death, but I’m pretty sure I’m not that kind of person. So I’ll go with the traditional anaesthetic thanks.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        I’ve long said that if I was going to be executed my two preferred methods would be slow torture, the slower the better (to eke out that last bit of life for as long as possible), or as instantaneous as possible (to avoid the horror of not having any control as much as possible).

        These two options are basically 6 of one, half a dozen of the other (it’s probably pretty instantaneous-like if you’re unconscious when it happens).

        • Basil Elton says:

          Don’t you think that life under torture has negative utility (in and of itself, when enduring that torture does not give you increased chances of a normal life afterwards)?

    • Rana Dexsin says:

      I’ll chime in to say I’ve done something a little bit like option (2) via… well, the terminology is hazy for me, but I want to say it might have been a form of self-hypnosis or consciously-induced dissociative state? Aside from the memory-formation dispersion, I also included a “don’t move” component, so it’s eerily parallel in a way. Though I remember having to suddenly adjust the induction due to the frantic realization that the doctor didn’t understand what I was going to be doing (even though I’d told him) and would expect me to be conscious, so I had to be capable of at least giving hand signals.

      Consciously, I remember nearly no details of the surgery itself other than the part where I had to give hand signals, and I remember during recovery having checked and been pleased to find that interval of time mostly missing. Possible subconscious effects… I don’t know how to measure, though nothing obvious has turned up.

      It’s not fully the same thing, of course. In this context, I had a choice between local-only and global anaesthetic, and I had other reasons to choose local-only, so this was a technique I applied to make up part of the difference. (2) describes not even having local (if I’m reading correctly), so that could be much harsher, but I also assume well-targeted, well-tested amnesia-and-paralysis drugs would have a higher efficacy than whatever I was doing, so maybe it’d be a wash.

      So I picked (2), because it’s closest to what I know from experience to work already.

    • Kyle A Johansen says:

      I was pretty sure that the amnesia-bit was already how anesthesia works. With me assuming that brain-surgery subjects got a different sort of pain-number when their skull was cut open.

      Is ‘anesthesia ‘ just a more specific term that I thought, as I remember when I had stuff what I was told is that I would act like a dope but have no memory of it (sort of like getting blackout drunk, I suppose.)

      • Garrett says:

        Anesthesia, literally means “without sensation”.
        Which then leads you to ask: sensation of what? Pain is usually what people care about, but there are others. Time is another.

        There are some other related terms involved:
        Analgesia: inability to feel pain.
        Amnesiac: inability to form memories.
        Anxiolytic: reduces anxiety/panic.
        Hypnotic: drugs which induce sleep.
        Dissociatives: drugs which “disconnect” you from reality.
        Paralytic: drugs which cause paralysis.

        What is needed is a combination of the above, based upon the particular circumstances.

        Local anesthetics eg. lidocaine used for stiches in skin, minor dental work, etc., is well-understood. It also only provides for localized analgesia (intentional) and paralysis (unintentional).

        General anesthetics involve a wide combination of the above factors. Unfortunately, how and why most general anesthesia works is not understood.

        Some types of procedures only require limited combinations. For example, for cataract or vision correction eye surgery, only pain and anxiety management is required. So something like tetracaine is used to numb the eye. And something like midazolam is used because people rationally freak out when someone comes at your eyeball with a knife.

        In other procedures, like intubation, a combination of a short-acting paralytic is used (to stop the muscles from responding to the gag reflex), and some form of amnesic and/or anxiolitic (because you still *have* the gag reflex).

    • Murphy says:

      this actually isn’t so far for current real practice.

      Estimates for “anesthesia awareness” are something like 1%

      basically it means they can err slightly towards the possibility of you waking up vs dying from the anaesthetic. They dose you up with Flunitrazepam so that even if you wake up it’s unlikely that you’ll remember.

  60. Plumber says:

    Food and beverage question:

    So Brennan’s in Berkeley (where I first went as a child in the 1970’s) is now closed.

    I’m looking for a new place that serves plates corned beef and half-pints/pints of brown ale (“Newcastle” and “Downtown Brown” have the taste I’m after) at the same place.

    The corned beef “Reuben” sandwiches at Saul’s in Berkeley are very good, but I’m looking for a full plate of corned beef with mustard, potatoes, and cabbage like I used to get at Brennan’s, and I’d like a tasty beer as well.

    “Dives” seldom have the tasty beer, just Budweiser, Coors, and the like, and seldom the food I crave, and “craft” beer places annoy me with their changing selections and confusing labels, and I don’t want a sample taste and “new experiences”, I want to get something close to what I had:
    Good and unchanging.

    I don’t want to linger in San Francisco after work so somewhere in Albany, Berkeley, north Oakland, south El Cerrito, or Emeryville please.

    Any suggestions?

    • sunnydestroy says:

      I’d just make my own, a bit time intensive from scratch though since you have to cure the meat over a week with the rub then cook it at low temperatures slowly (~10 hours). A slow cooker works for that and is pretty common household equipment, otherwise a sous vide would get you better cooking precision.

      I used to work in Hayward and I know a place in San Leandro that has corned beef among other meaty beer drinkin’ foods: Harry’s Hofbrau. When I used to live in SF, Tommy’s Joynt was a solid spot for a plate of stomach filling carved meats and sides on a plate, especially for late night. I live in San Jose now, quite a drive from the East Bay, but if you’re ever around there’s Gunther’s Restaurant, which has fantastic pastrami plus authentic Jewish deli classics.

      Apparently Hofbrau restaurants–bars serving fresh carved meats–are a Bay Area dining tradition and it sounds like Brennan’s fit that tradition as well.

      • nweining says:

        +1 to Tommy’s Joynt, still excellent and going strong.

        It is in the wrong direction for you, but the Refuge in San Carlos has a bunch of interesting beers on tap and the best pastrami sandwich I have ever had; my father, who grew up in NYC, compares it favorably to the great NY Jewish delis.

      • Plumber says:

        @sunnydestroy

        “…a Bay Area dining tradition…”

        I also went to Lefty O’Doul’s with the crew at work a few times before it closed.

  61. Brett says:

    1. I disappeared down the rabbit hole of reading papers about Skyhook launch systems for getting into space. Pretty neat stuff (especially the paper on HASTOL, a system some Boeing people looked into in the 1990s), although like most of such proposals it has the issue of huge up-front costs in terms of launches and set-up (to launch 14 metric tons into Low Earth Orbit, it has to mass around 3000 tons – that’s a lot of set-up space launches). It’s the bane of anything space-related.

    2. I got the Uniball Vision Elite pens per the recommendation of folks in the hidden open thread. They’re working great!

    3. I’m so behind on music and music news. I just finally listened to MGK’s “Rap Devil”, followed by Eminem’s “Killshot” reply. Good times.

    • andrew_wilcox says:

      Let’s see…

      The HASTOL paper says the total mass of the space tether facility would be about 3000 metric tons.

      Falcon Heavy can launch 64 metric tons. So that’s around 47 Falcon Heavy launches. Or 30 BFR launches at 100 metric tons per launch.

      In comparison, this Starlink FAQ says that Starlink would need 112 Falcon Heavy launches.

      So that’s not bad at all! 🙂

  62. Aging Loser says:

    A few weeks ago I protested against the use of the phrase “verbal intelligence” but didn’t check responses for fear people might have been annoyed at me. At the time I proposed that what’s called “verbal intelligence” is just imagination. That isn’t quite right, of course — the phrase “verbal intelligence” is probably supposed to label an ability to clearly develop interesting thoughts, and people no doubt can be super-imaginative without being able to stick their mental images together into the structures that constitute clearly developed thought. But the structuring-activity itself is sort of an imaginative process, so to say that imagination is what is in question isn’t entirely wrong either.

    I would have said that what’s called “verbal intelligence” is simply intelligence — the ability to assemble ideas into coherent structures — but of course mathematically-inclined people also build structures out of ideas. I wonder why quantitative ideas are set aside from all other kinds of ideas in such a way that someone who’s good at working with them is thought of as having one of two basic kinds of intelligence — the other kind having to do with all ideas other than quantitative ideas.

    (I find geometrical propositions very interesting and would like to understand their proofs but don’t have the ability to go beyond very simple ones. Actually the only two I’m familiar with right now are the proof for the equality of a triangle’s angles to two right angles and a “kinetic” proof for the Pythagorean theorem that involves moving around four identical right triangles. I recently redd that a cone has 1/3 the volume of a cylinder with the same base and height, which was a very striking fact — why should it be exactly 1/3? — but the proof apparently involves calculus so I’ll probably never learn it.)

    (I’ve included the above parenthetical remark within this post only in order to establish that I do find at least the geometrical side of mathematics beautiful and certainly admire “mathematically intelligent” people.)

    • brad says:

      I think “quantitative” is the wrong opposite for verbal intelligence. There are areas of math, at least through the undergraduate level, that are quite amenable to verbal type thinking. Rather, the other major kind of intelligence is visual-spatial. As for it is separated out, I think many other tasks that might not be exactly verbal are nonetheless approachable with the tools of verbal intelligence, but a pure spatial task–say mentally rotating an object–is simply part of this other thing. No amount of verbal jujitsu, reconceptualizing, or creative problem solving is going to allow someone that’s weak in spatial reasoning to fake it, so it makes sense to give it a different name rather than including it as a lesser, included part of verbal intelligence.

      • Camouflage Interior says:

        This reminds me of a time when I was a study participant doing a cognitive task which was apparently supposed to test visual/spatial capacity. Some squares would be highlighted on a grid, and then be replaced by a different set of squares. The objective was to remember the first set. I (unintentionally) “cheated” by using a coordinate system to store the square locations in verbal memory, thus bypassing the spatial distraction of the second set of squares.

      • Aging Loser says:

        Brad — but I imagine sentences as structures in space, and make sense of theories in the same way. I have to turn theories into visual cartoons, often 3-D with flowing components, into order to understand them. And I’ve always done well on “verbal” tests and only mediocre-ly on math tests. So I don’t see how “visual-spatial” is in any way opposed to whatever “verbal” stands for.

        • grothor says:

          So I don’t see how “visual-spatial” is in any way opposed to whatever “verbal” stands for.

          They certainly don’t “oppose” each other, and they are not opposites. They’re just different things.

          For example, the tasks used to measure these things are very different. A verbal IQ test will ask you to do things like analogies: “Cat is to paw as horse is to ____”. Visuospatial tests ask you to do things like spatial rotation: “Which of these images is of a rotated version of this object?”.

          And, though ability on these axes are not entirely uncorrelated, it is common to score much better on one than the other.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        Rather, the other major kind of intelligence is visual-spatial.

        I think you are right that quantitative probably isn’t quite the right word for those good in Math. But visual-spatial isn’t right either, based on my own intraspection. I have always had higher math than verbal skills — I easily got A’s in Math back in the grades, but rarely got A’s in anything else. But my spatial IQ is also pretty low — my mechanical skills suck, and I do poorly in those tests that require picturing things from different angles. So I think the ability to understand mathematical symbology is different both from spatial ability and also from the ability to express oneself verbally. Maybe quantitative IQ is the right term after all, at least I can’t think of another (perhaps because of my poor verbal IQ :-))

        Edit: this was supposed to be in reply to brad, but somehow got in wrong level. Oh wait, it is in the right place. Maybe my spatial skills screwed me over again.

        • brad says:

          Are you sure it isn’t interests rather than type of intelligence?

          I thought I was a math person in high school and I was able to pull it off amply with mediocre at best spatial intelligence. It wasn’t until well into a physics degree that I figured out that it’s near impossible to get one if you are utterly incapable of picturing a dynamic three dimensional vector field.

          Perhaps if I had gone into stats or computer science I would to this day still think of myself as a math person.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            I’m sure it isn’t interests. I was never that interested in math, but it was always easy. I actually did like Physics, but while the tests were easy, the labs were hard, because I had difficulty getting the equipment to do what I knew was the answer, and also hard to write up the lab results. I don’t find it hard to picture an x-y-z field, but that doesn’t seem the hard part. I fyou then rotate it, then it gets more difficult.

          • quanta413 says:

            I’ve known good math people who had relatively mediocre spatial ability at least compared to the better physics students I knew.

            Abstract algebra, number theory, a lot math fields don’t necessarily require a strong ability to do spatial reasoning tasks or spatial visualization.

            As brad says, physics seems to select really hard for spatial ability. But I’m not sure that all physics subjects have to. I don’t remember using much spatial reasoning in statistical mechanics.

    • grothor says:

      Verbal intelligence is more narrow than you’re describing. It’s better to think of it as abilities related to language, rather than abilities related to ideas in general. (Or, if you want, you can operationalize it as “the thing that verbal IQ tests measure”, which makes it even more narrow.)

      I suspect that for people with much higher verbal intelligence than quantitative intelligence or visuo-spatial intelligence, it feels like abstract reasoning is mostly a matter of verbal reasoning. On the other end of this, I have substantially higher visuo-spatial ability than verbal ability, so for me most problems feel like they are a matter of visualizing and manipulating things.

      • so for me most problems feel like they are a matter of visualizing and manipulating things.

        For me, many problems feel like a matter of visualizing and manipulating logical structures, seen as neither words nor objects.

        • brad says:

          visualizing and manipulating logical structures, seen as neither words nor objects.

          Is it possible for you to elaborate and/or give an example? As it stands I don’t understand what you mean at all.

          • Someone posted something relevant to the inconsistency in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, the fact that if markets are fully efficient there is no incentive to do the research that makes them efficient. The obvious response is that, in equilibrium, markets will deviate from efficiency by just that amount that incentivizes the amount of research that makes them that close to efficient.

            That’s a verbal argument. It could be a mathematical argument. But I didn’t get to it by either math or words but by seeing the logic of the situation–which is the same logic that explains why it isn’t worth looking for the shortest checkout lane or switching lanes on the highway, and when it is. Those are three different situations, in words or math, but the logical structure is the same.

            Of course, like any other way of solving problems, that sometimes gives me the wrong answer.

          • brad says:

            I appreciate the effort, thanks for the reply, but I still don’t understand. Maybe this gap is simply unbridgeable.

            I find the OP’s “cartoon diagrams” very very far away from how I understand my own thought processes, but at least I can see what he means. But when you say you “see” the logic in neither words, nor mathematically equations, nor any kind of visual objects I don’t really see what’s left.

            Are you talking about some kind of Kahneman-ian “system 1” flash of insight? If so, I guess I don’t think of that as “thinking”

          • Eternaltraveler says:

            flash of insight? If so, I guess I don’t think of that as “thinking”

            I think rather than a flash he may be describing the process of insight; which most certainly is thinking.

          • quanta413 says:

            Are you talking about some kind of Kahneman-ian “system 1” flash of insight? If so, I guess I don’t think of that as “thinking”

            I don’t think so. Sometimes when learning something new, I will analogize not verbally but by attaching my logical picture of one system to another one (temporarily) and then begin modifying it in my head to try to make it work better. This can work, but it can also fail spectacularly.

            But the mental process isn’t really verbal and I don’t detect my spatial thinking kicking in. Maybe that’s sort of what like DavidFriedman’s describing. I don’t know. I’m very unsure how to describe it.

        • Aging Loser says:

          I literally visualize them — they’re imaginary objects fitting together in head-space. But maybe your problems are different from mine. I never understand any economics arguments, ever, because I can’t turn anything that’s said into a cartoon. (I liked reading Marx because he imagines a sentient robotic fungus remorselessly encrusting a beautiful jungle-planet.)

          • ilikekittycat says:

            Before I had read Capital I thought of Marx as the guy in the popular imagination who wasn’t above resorting to vampire and werewolf metaphors because it was the best way to add fuel to the fire of polemic, and was later surprised to come across the actual passages and realize “oh, he was actually picking the metaphor that would get this dry description of how a certain cycle persists across the fastest”

      • Aging Loser says:

        Grothor — What’s the point of measuring something so narrow, then? Why devote 1/2 of the SAT to it? Why not replace it with a dancing or singing competition or something else equally narrow? Maybe a “social skills” test or drawing-assignment. Half of the SAT would be a math-test, the other half would consist of drawing a kitten.

        Can you think the thought “abstract reasoning isn’t mostly a matter of verbal reasoning” without having the words “abstract reasoning isn’t mostly a matter of verbal reasoning” running through your head? (By “verbal reasoning” you mean thinking in a way that involves words running through your head, right?)

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          The SAT is intended for a very specific purpose. This purpose is why schools which teach dance or art would be SAT-optional (e.g.: “Boston University does not require either the SAT or ACT for applicants to the College of Fine Arts. This is common practice among arts colleges, as standardized test scores do not relate to a student’s artistic talent and potential. However, applicants may choose to submit their scores if they feel they accurately reflect their academic ability.”), and instead have other entrance criteria.

          Can you think the thought “abstract reasoning isn’t mostly a matter of verbal reasoning” without having the words “abstract reasoning isn’t mostly a matter of verbal reasoning” running through your head?

          Yes, of course you can. The phrase “abstract reasoning isn’t mostly a matter of verbal reasoning” is merely a negating verbal translation of the positive visual expression of a person manipulating abstract ‘objects’, some of which can be named concepts, as this allows that abstract reasoning can include verbal reasoning as well (ala “isn’t mostly“).

          • Aging Loser says:

            On your second point, anonymousskinner — I can see how you’d nonverbally think of a thinking that in fact isn’t verbal (by imagining various odd shapes flowing out of someone’s head, which he reaches up to stick into each other at various angles as they flow out) but how would you picture the additional thought that this in-fact-nonverbal thinking isn’t verbal? Would there be an accompanying flow of letter-like marks out of the person’s mouth, with a big X over this accompanying flow?

            I guess it seems to me that the flow of words in one’s head is a kind of making-and-remaking of connections between imaginative and physical/practical tendencies. If I tend to imagine reality in a certain way I tend to act upon reality in a certain way. And although actual images don’t accompany all of the mental words (and even if they did one couldn’t infer the thought from the series of images), it must be possible to bring the relevant potential images into reality — otherwise the thought is meaningless. (Much of the imagining is kinesthetic/proprioceptive — a sense of bodily motion and posture and tension in relation to other resisting surfaces.)

    • Furslid says:

      Here’s a skeleton of a no calculus required proof that the volume of a cone is 1/3 of (base area)

      Consider a cube with side length N. You can split a cube into three identical pyramids by taking one corner of the cube as the “top vertex” of all three pyramids and using the three opposite sides as the bases. Each of these pyramids would have the same volume (because they are identical). Because three of them make a cube, their volume is N^3/3.

      You can stretch the pyramid to show that it doesn’t require the height to be identical to the length of a side. The volume of a pyramid is (base area) * height/3.

      Then you can use the principle that if the area at each height is identical, then the total volume is identical to move from pyramids to cones.

      • Aging Loser says:

        Furslid — That’s hard for me to visualize but I think I’ve succeeded (after staring at a cubical object for a while). You have to imagine the edges running through the interior of the cube. Okay, but is it just a flash of intuition that convinces you that nothing would change if you squished the edges into curves so as to turn the pyramids into lopsided cones? You’d have to squish the cube as a whole as well, turning it into a cylinder, for this to work as a demonstration, wouldn’t you? And if the volume of a soft container decreases when you squish it (which I find weird), then why wouldn’t the volume of the cube and internal pyramids alter in a unbalanced way when you squish them into a cylinder and cones respectively? Is it just obvious to you that the proportions would stay the same?

      • A1987dM says:

        It’s very far from immediately intuitively obvious to me that the three pyramids have disjoint interiors and their union is the entire cube.

        • Furslid says:

          I’m using a six sided die for my cube. Suppose you split the cube so the bases of the pyramids are the faces labeled 1, 2, and 3. The top vertex of the pyramids is the corner shared by the 4, 5 and 6 faces.

          Take any point in the cube. Draw a line between that point and the 4/5/6 vertex. If the line passes through face 1, it is part of pyramid 1. Similar for pyramids 2 & 3. So all points in the cube are part of one of the pyramids. No line can pass through the 4/5/6 vertex, and two of the opposite faces. So the pyramids are disjoint.

    • BlindKungFuMaster says:

      I think the real distinction is spatial processing and sequence processing.

      Verbal intelligence taps more into the sequence processing ability, but it’s not exactly the same thing.

      • Aging Loser says:

        BlindKungFuMaster — but aren’t arithmetic and algebra and pretty much all non-geometrical mathematical disciplines very sequence-based?

        • whereamigoing says:

          Only to those who are better at sequence processing, apparently.

          Now that you mention arithmetic, I somehow gained the ability to do arithmetic in a more visual way recently and it’s faster for me than the purely syntactic methods taught in school. (Which is one of the problems with visualization — it’s hard to teach, because usually teaching is verbal.)

          Also, some proofs in algebra make more sense to me when visualizing formulas as abstract syntax trees, so associativity is tree rotation and commutativity is reflection.

          • Aging Loser says:

            That sounds kind of trippy, whereamigoing — I wish you could provide a diagram so that I could see what you’re visualizing. But I think that I get the basic point, because when I add, say, 8 and 6, I imagine the numbers as stacks of coin-shaped items that fit in slots that only have room for ten of these coin-shaped items, so that when you drop the stack of 6 into the slot containing the 8 there’s only room for two of them and so four of them spill over into the adjacent slot and you end up with one full slot containing ten and an adjacent slot containing four, so 14.

  63. Hoopyfreud says:

    Because there’s a max-level comment depth I don’t like the new sorting. It requires you to read a conversation normally for the first N posts, then scroll down to the bottom maximally-nested comment and scroll back up.

  64. Plumber says:

    Anyone know why subscriptions to SSC comments no longer work?

    The regular ones disappeared month’s ago, and the “reply” one’s in this link stopped working last week.

  65. RavenclawPrefect says:

    I’m conflicted on the new sorting. On the one hand, it makes discussion a lot more lively and prevents the thing where readers are scrolling for 5 minutes just to find the third top-level comment in a big thread and most people who read a lot of open threads have multiple extensions installed just to navigate the mass of initial comments and find the recent stuff. I suppose it also wards off low-effort comments taking up the top slot, but this seems pretty rare as it is.

    On the other hand, the first few comments I think are often of higher quality than the last few, when I look at historical posts? I often notice myself giving up on a comment thread halfway through once it seems like I’ve passed all the good stuff. But maybe that’s an artifact of the old sorting, and will go away with the new approach. Regardless, definitely worth trying out for a bit. (I’d also be curious to see what a Reddit-style upvote system does to the comment space, though obviously that’s a lot more work to implement.)

    I appreciate that higher-order comments are still chronological, though; that makes discussion within a thread a lot more sensible.

    • Dave Orr says:

      Someone’s already implemented a wordpress comment voting system very similar to reddit, so I think it should be relatively easy to set up. My guess is that Scott has thought about this and decided not to do it — there are drawbacks as well as benefits for this sort of thing, like more susceptibility to groupthink or faction-driven voting behaviors where people vote not on the quality of the comment but whether they directionally agree with it.

      Still, I could see it be worth trying. Certainly wading through the morass of comments to find the gold is challenging.

      • RavenclawPrefect says:

        I suppose the obvious model for what happens to an upvote-based comment system with this readership is /r/slatestarcodex; the result seems reasonably similar in quality, though nothing outside of their CW thread gets anywhere near the comment density of large threads here (or the level of linking to by outside sources) so it’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.

      • Jaskologist says:

        It’s brought up frequently. The general view of commenters here is that if we wanted a voting system we’d be on the subreddit.

        (And also that the subreddit sucks, probably because it has a voting system.)

        • ilikekittycat says:

          Even strictly +Like/Upvote/Starring voting systems with no downvote/dislike option seem to destroy the incentives behind good discussion on the internet. Facebook/Twitter is just stupid in a different way than Reddit

        • Dan L says:

          (And also that the subreddit sucks, probably because it has a voting system.)

          Aside from the obvious population confounder, comment voting/sorting systems and global karma on a per-user basis are completely separable systems. I’m of the opinion that employing both tends to be the worst of all worlds.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        I think it would be statistically interesting to have a vote system (with more than two options) that didn’t change anything about the comments’ placing or appearance. It would be like one humongous survey (possibly cross-referenceable).

    • Plumber says:

      In looking at the 118.25 thread I think I like the new sorting so far.

    • Uribe says:

      I prefer this new sorting. It’s nice to click on the comments and see a new comment right away.

    • Doctor Mist says:

      I’m not liking it. It’s probably partly because it would take a while to get in the right rhythm — when I search for tilde-new-tilde, the new order makes me feel like I’m jumping around in time. (And so I am, of course, even in the old ordering, but it somehow feels less obtrusive there.)

      I guess another (or maybe the same?) part of it is that if I dive into a page that’s been up a while, the old order gives me the illusion that I’m just doing an accelerated version of what I would have been doing if I had been keeping up with it as it grew, while the new order makes it seem as though I am intruding on a private conversation.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      I hate it. I want to see the oldest comments first. Some of the initial comments refer to earlier comments in the same thread. This will now be incomprehensible.

      • CatCube says:

        I’m hating more the more I read the threads. I’m typically more interested in replies to threads I’m following, instead of new ones. The old way, I’d read through the conversations I’m following before hitting the new threads.

        Of course, I’m using the comment autocollapser, so I don’t have to scroll by a bunch of threads with no new updates; maybe that makes a difference to other people.

    • arlie says:

      Net result seems to be that I’m reading less. This may be good for me – not having to scroll through old (but chatty) threads I wasn’t interested in when I first encountered them either, or exercise willpower not to participate in threads I’d already rejected as likely to generate more heat than light – but I’m not sure whether it’s good for the site.

    • Bamboozle says:

      Counter to what others have said i’m liking the new change though i don’t use any extensions.