Open Thread 125.25

Posted on April 10, 2019 by a reader

This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.

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1,365 Responses to Open Thread 125.25

  1. robirahman says:
    April 10, 2019 at 9:19 am

    Meetup in DC this weekend!

    Saturday, April 13th at 7pm. We’re in the usual place, 616 E St NW, on the rooftop lounge if it’s nice outside or in the second floor club room if it’s raining. This is the second anniversary of our meetup, so there will be cake.

  2. valleyofthekings says:
    April 10, 2019 at 9:51 am

    So apparently New York is requiring people to get vaccinations now.

    Being vaccinated is important, but I’ve always been sort of fuzzy on the topic of requiring people to get vaccinated.
    Like, at some level, I’m not going to get measles either way, so if someone else chooses to not get vaccinated, it seems like that’s their problem and not mine.
    And if they’re going to get super mad and upset about being required to be vaccinated, that seems sort of not worth it.

    I guess there’s a child safety argument to be made here, but I’m not sure if it’s a good enough argument to justify starting a fight with the parents. For example if we started requiring all children to be vaccinated when they get their general physical, the parents might start keeping their children away from the health care system entirely.

    My preferred way to solve this would be to pass a law saying that, if you or your children get super sick with a vaccinatable disease, you can sue the people who convinced you not to get vaccinated.

    • drunkfish says:
      April 10, 2019 at 10:11 am

      I share your discomfort, but I think you’re missing the main arguments for requiring vaccines.

      The first is that not everybody *can* be vaccinated, because of things like immune disorders. There’s a public health angle to vaccinating everybody who can be vaccinated in order to protect those who can’t.

      Second, vaccines aren’t perfectly effective. You say “I’m not going to get measles either way”, presumably because you’re vaccinated and consider yourself safe. The CDC says that the measles vaccine has a 97% effectiveness. That means you have a very nontrivial chance of not actually being immune to measles, and is why herd immunity is important.

      Third, herd immunity is a thing. Depending on the effectiveness of a vaccine and the infectioness of the disease it prevents, there’s a particular fraction of the population that needs to be vaccinated before a particular infected person has a low enough chance of infecting someone else for the disease to be unable to spread widely. The measles vaccine only being 97% effective is fine if everyone is vaccinated, because the virus won’t be able to easily reach the relevant 3% of people, but if only part of the population is vaccinated, that may stop being true.

      Whether those arguments trump personal liberty I think is a much harder question, but “I’m vaccinated so you’re really only endangering yourself and the only people we need to worry about are the children of anti-vaxxers” isn’t actually accurate. You’re possibly susceptible to measles, and immune compromised people are definitely susceptible.

      (Edit: Added link for herd immunity because on rereading, my explanation was crap and this is easier than clarifying it)

      • albatross11 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 2:01 pm

        One other aside is that, at least intuitively, you’d expect herd immunity to be more important in a densely populated place like NYC than a sparsely populated place like rural Idaho. It may be that the right law is different in those two places.

    • dick says:
      April 10, 2019 at 10:12 am

      Like, at some level, I’m not going to get measles either way, so if someone else chooses to not get vaccinated, it seems like that’s their problem and not mine.

      It’s your problem in some cases. One example is if they die and their destitute children go on welfare (I think this is more or less the same justification for requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets). Another is if you get sick and have a compromised immune system, and catch measles from someone.

    • Theodoric says:
      April 10, 2019 at 10:38 am

      I lean toward’s Megan McArdle’s position: Don’t forcibly vaccinate children, but ban unvaccinated children without a medical excuse from schools, parks, and other public places. If you won’t take the small risk of a vaccine side effect for the good of society, why should society do anything for you?

      • HeelBearCub says:
        April 10, 2019 at 10:59 am

        parks, and other public places

        Somehow I doubt McArdle actually supports the level of government intervention that would actually make this ban effective.

        • quanta413 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 2:00 pm

          Yeah, her plan would be stupid. Forcibly vaccinating people would end up being less coercive than than the massive dystopian police state necessary to keep children from walking across the street from their house to the park. Like what the hell?

          What she’s saying makes no sense except as signalling.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:13 am

            To steelman, you don’t need to check them constantly. Just make being “unvaccinated in the park” something for which people can be fined or arrested.

            In many states you can’t be naked in the park, either, but we don’t need a police state to make sure that doesn’t happen. (Obviously it’s easier to spot a naked person than an unvaccinated person, but, steelman.)

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:23 am

            I feel like your steelman is continuing to explain why this can’t work. The lack of visible indication is precisely the problem.

            What solution is she going to propose? A badge? Maybe an armband?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:37 am

            If a child molester is required to be 500 feet from a school, we don’t need armbands or badges. He knows it, the cops know it.

            Is the cops knowing who isn’t vaccinated a violation of privacy? Yeah, quite a bit. So is a searchable database of vaccine resisters. I’d probably still choose that over vaccination at gunpoint.

            . . . Hell, if you plan on doing vaccination at gunpoint, you probably already have a database of who has and has not gotten one.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:52 am

            Forced vaccination at gunpoint is easier in many ways because you don’t have to continuously keep watch. You do it a few times and you are done. And if you catch them once, you vaccinate them and can stop worrying about at least some subset of vaccines. If you have to prevent people from going to the park you have to watch them forever, and if you catch them once it doesn’t stop them from doing it again unless you throw them in jail. Which is stupid. Putting someone in jail may be a bigger violation than forcible vaccination.

            If a child molester is required to be 500 feet from a school, we don’t need armbands or badges. He knows it, the cops know it.

            I feel like this still explains why this policy won’t work. The child molester 500 feet rules are also a dumb rule for very similar reasons. Difficult to enforce in large communities, incredibly constricting, etc.

            On top of that, you’d have to restrict people without vaccines from a much larger area than child molesters are restricted from. They practically couldn’t leave their house.

            Another large difference is basically everyone hates child molesters. This means there is some level of support for extremely draconian policies.

            The same is not true for vaccines. I’d bet most people would find mandatory vaccination less draconian than house arrest.

          • moonfirestorm says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:48 am

            Maybe combine the policies.

            The unvaccinated child is banned from the park: their penalty for a violation is a forcible vaccination.

            You only need to catch them violating it once because after that they’re allowed in the park, if they really care about not being vaccinated they have a path to avoid it, and the dystopian implication of the forced vaccination is muted by the fact that the government has a clear problem to point to.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 12:10 pm

            I suppose that could technically work, but I think it’s practically equivalent to mandatory vaccination if you actually try hard to catch people unvaccinated in public and succeed at a reasonable rate. Almost no one is just going to keep their kid in their house for decades.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 11, 2019 at 12:25 pm

            To steelman, you don’t need to check them constantly. Just make being “unvaccinated in the park” something for which people can be fined or arrested.

            And you think McArdle will support this? This doesn’t seem like a steelman to me. The Orthodox Jews or Conservative Christians arrested for having their kids in a local public park seems like something she would not be in favor of.

            Your specific point about this guilty of sex crimes perfectly illustrates the issue. a) Sex crime convicts have been convicted of a crime. She is specifically saying being unvaccinated shouldn’t be a crime. The problem here should be quite obvious. b) I strongly suspect that McArdle is not interested in creating a general equivalence between the activities of “sexual predators” and “non vaccinators”. It’s specifically that kind of equivalence she is fighting against.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 11, 2019 at 12:54 pm

            Putting someone in jail may be a bigger violation than forcible vaccination.

            Clearly not, if they are choosing jail over being vaccinated.

            I have a lot of problems with the sex offender lists. A lot. It still isn’t vaccination at gunpoint, though.

            Moonfirestorm’s proposal, where the punishment for using a public service without vaccination is vaccination, may work. I will need to think about it for a while. I still have my other worry about how vaccine exemptions will be gamed.

          • moonfirestorm says:
            April 11, 2019 at 12:57 pm

            I suppose that could technically work, but I think it’s practically equivalent to mandatory vaccination if you actually try hard to catch people unvaccinated in public and succeed at a reasonable rate. Almost no one is just going to keep their kid in their house for decades.

            I agree that it’s practically equivalent, but differs a bit in terms of optics. It’s a lot harder to argue “it doesn’t hurt anyone to keep my kid unvaccinated” if you’re caught bringing him into a park where people are at risk of catching something from him, and it gives people who are seriously concerned about vaccinating their kids an avenue to avoid doing so, albeit one that entails some personal costs.

          • CatCube says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:09 pm

            Wait a minute here, can we point at this exact proposal by McArdle? I read pretty much everything she writes and I don’t recall it. Is this a serious proposal, or more of a “if I was queen of the world” type thing, like our discussion below about which SSC posters would be the best for particular cabinet positions? Because this sounds an awful lot like that second one given what I know about her policy preferences.

            I’m not going to worry about people somewhat misrepresenting a position to do a drive-by to dunk on somebody they don’t like (which is what I took @ilikekittycat’s post to be), but if we’re taking this as an actual proposal I’d like to know that it’s what it says on the box.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:18 pm

            @CatCube:
            Ask Theodoric, they are the one who said they took this position from McArdle?

          • Nick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:34 pm

            Here’s the reference; it’s from a 2008 Atlantic article.

            I don’t see any textual evidence that McArdle is voicing some utopian wish. The only evidence that she’s not being serious is the potential difficulty of the proposal itself. Given the confusion, if she was being unserious then she should have been a little more overt about it.

          • LHN says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:36 pm

            I generally like McArdle’s pieces quite a lot. (Not in 100% agreement any more than with anyone, but I favor her approach more frequently than most other pundits’.) But while I agree that this one probably isn’t practical, it does seem more like a seriously intended (if not deeply considered) proposal than pure spitballing.

            I’m not saying that we should force parents to vaccinate their kids at gunpoint. On the other hand, we might treat vaccines the way we treat drunken driving or car insurance. You have the perfect right to drive your uninsured automobile — on your own property. I doubt the cops are going to come after you for a DUI on your own back 40, either. But when you enter into public space, you have an obligation to protect others from the possible consequences of your actions: You can’t drive recklessly, you can’t drive without liability insurance, and you cannot drink a fifth of scotch and then get behind the wheel of a car.

            So say to parents: You have a perfect right not to vaccinate your children, and we will not force you. But unless you have a vaccination certificate, a letter from a doctor explaining that your child falls into a small number of well-recognized medical exemptions, or a testament from your minister that vaccinating violates the tenets of a church of which you are an active member, failing to vaccinate your child also means failing to qualify for any public benefits for those children. No tax deduction. No public school, college or municipal activities. No team sports that practice on public land. No federally subsidized student loans. No airplane rides for anyone under 18 unless the TSA gets an up-to-date vaccination certificate. If you will not help society protect itself, then society will deny its help to you, and it will do its best to keep your child out of crowded spaces where they might infect someone.

            https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-OaaNZuiz-kJ:https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-02-04/your-right-to-skip-shots-ends-where-my-kid-begins+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d

            (ETA: that this is a 2015 piece and that Nick’s cite above is from 2008 probably supports the sense that it’s something she advocates.)

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 2:04 pm

            @Edward Scizorhands

            Clearly not, if they are choosing jail over being vaccinated.

            I have a strong disagreement with this line of thinking on what it means to violate rights. And I think it will be an interesting disagreement to hash out.

            For example, if I committed some sort of civil tort that enriched me to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, I might prefer to go to jail for a while than to have my ill-gotten money taken back from me. That doesn’t mean my rights are more violated by clawing money back from my bank account than by locking me up for six months. Agree or disagree?

            @moonfirestorm

            I agree that it’s practically equivalent, but differs a bit in terms of optics. It’s a lot harder to argue “it doesn’t hurt anyone to keep my kid unvaccinated” if you’re caught bringing him into a park where people are at risk of catching something from him, and it gives people who are seriously concerned about vaccinating their kids an avenue to avoid doing so, albeit one that entails some personal costs.

            The optics are sort of better, but it’s more complicated and still harder to enforce.

            I suspect the number of people that will violently resist vaccination is low enough to be ignorable. Not that I’m advocating going that far since the problem isn’t that severe. But if the problems became severe enough for house arrest due to some outbreak, then I think the problem is severe enough vaccines may as well be mandatory.

            @LHN

            or a testament from your minister that vaccinating violates the tenets of a church of which you are an active member,

            Religious carve outs like this really bother me although I understand I’m in a forever losing minority on this. For every thing I can think of, it should be important enough that everyone has to follow the law or it’s not important enough and no one should have to.

          • Theodoric says:
            April 11, 2019 at 3:43 pm

            @LNH and Nick
            Yes, those are the articles I was thinking of (I didn’t know you could like directly to Google cache!). I personally would not allow religious exemptions (Mississippi, West Virginia, and California do not).

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:01 am

            For example, if I committed some sort of civil tort that enriched me to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, I might prefer to go to jail for a while than to have my ill-gotten money taken back from me. That doesn’t mean my rights are more violated by clawing money back from my bank account than by locking me up for six months. Agree or disagree?

            I’ve tried thinking this through and keep on getting stuck. Given that there is a tort, I can’t get over the fact that you don’t have the right to the money, so I’m not sure how to square which one is less intrusive of your rights.

            You may see being non-vaccinated as a tort, or a tort just waiting to happen, and I can see that viewpoint.

            If a pro-choice woman wants an abortion but is faced with the choice of childbirth-at-gunpoint, or abortion-then-jail, while she would resent both options[1], a world where she has the option of choosing abortion-then-jail would be (from her pro-choice viewpoint) strictly better than one where she only has the first option.

            [1] Really, she would. I hope this doesn’t become a distraction talking about how horrible her options are.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 12, 2019 at 8:15 pm

            I’ve tried thinking this through and keep on getting stuck. Given that there is a tort, I can’t get over the fact that you don’t have the right to the money, so I’m not sure how to square which one is less intrusive of your rights.

            You may see being non-vaccinated as a tort, or a tort just waiting to happen, and I can see that viewpoint.

            That’s part of it. Since I don’t think that any right is without limits (unless maybe it only happens in your head or something? But then you hardly need a right for it), I think that if the consequences of transmission are severe enough you either lose the right to not be vaccinated or someone else’s right takes precedence. And thus the question for me is do I violate a strong right by physically imprisoning someone, or do I violate a strong preference but a weak right (the right to not have other people put substances into your body).

            The second right is weaker than it looks. It’s violated all the time by pollution in air or water. It’s violated if someone smokes next to you.

            It’s violated when someone punches you, but if the punch doesn’t injure you much it’s considered less of a violation than being imprisoned. Even if some people with a deep fear of physical pain might prefer imprisonment to a punch.

            I don’t hold that the vaccine is worse than being punched since the inside outside distinction doesn’t seem very morally meaningful to me, so even if some right is being violated it’s less violated by than being punched which is less violating than being imprisoned.

            If a pro-choice woman wants an abortion but is faced with the choice of childbirth-at-gunpoint, or abortion-then-jail, while she would resent both options[1], a world where she has the option of choosing abortion-then-jail would be (from her pro-choice viewpoint) strictly better than one where she only has the first option.

            [1] Really, she would. I hope this doesn’t become a distraction talking about how horrible her options are.

            I agree that the world with a choice is preferable to some people and probably not ever worse than the one with no choice. But I think this runs into the same issue. Which thing violates your rights more depends on how you view the original reason for the prohibition or punishment.

            I think rights are correlated with preferences, but no one person’s preferences (or even a large minorities) makes for a right. It has to be something almost everyone wants for themselves and others, and it has to minimally interfere with others rights.

            Not dying unnecessarily by others malice or negligence seems like the most critical right except maybe for “no slavery”.

      • dick says:
        April 10, 2019 at 11:47 am

        Yeah, this seems like “it’s legal to steal, but if you do then everyone can steal from you”. A good parable but not actually an implementable policy.

      • Walter says:
        April 10, 2019 at 11:52 am

        I dunno man, like as funny as the mental picture of the Truant Officer chasing down kids on the street to chuck them into school while the AntiTruant Officer chases kids in school through the halls to kick them out is, I got to wonder if you gamed this out in your mind?

        Here’s how I think it would go:

        Day 1 of this policy:
        Vox: Hey President McArdle, it seems like your policy is that jewish kids aren’t allowed to go to school or playgrounds. Any truth to the fact that you nazi are requiring them to nazi wear some kind of nazi stickers to let the nazi cops know kids to kick out of school?

        Spokesperson: We aren’t banning Orthodox Jewish people from society, just something that they disproportionately do, it is just as not racist as banning yarmulkes.

        Vox: Thanks for clearing that up.

      • aristides says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:58 pm

        I’m always the fan of the economic incentives argument. Someone calculate the expected benefit of her immunity for each disease, divide it by the number of people, and write checks. Alternatively you could make it so that your only eligible to claim dependents for vaccinated children, but either way, economic incentives are much less aggressive than barring entry and having police question children in parks for vaccine records.

      • ilikekittycat says:
        April 10, 2019 at 5:47 pm

        Parents being able to create a situation where the state enforces separation sounds truly stupid and nightmarish (like most McMegan proposals.) Its like homeschool on steroids or Amishness without Rumspringa

        If internet discussion is anything to go by, many unvaxxies wish there was a quick and easy way to get it done under their crazy parents’ noses, even for relatively lesser important ones like HPV. Even short of the actual biological effects I can see any number of situations that turn out like “well maybe if you decided to be more straight-acting I’ll let you get the MMR before high school, sweetie”

        Whatever parental rights extend to, keeping your children from mixing into public society until they’re 18 is ridiculous, and totally against the norms of easing someone into the sorts of civic participation necessary for a free republic, getting into college, certain types of jobs, etc. Any “libertarian” deontological enough to uphold parental individual/property rights like that has totally lost sight of the forest for the trees

      • DavidFriedman says:
        April 10, 2019 at 7:26 pm

        If you won’t take the small risk of a vaccine side effect for the good of society, why should society do anything for you?

        Your taxes are paying for those things, so “why should society do anything for you” is not a fair way of putting it.

        If that’s really your argument, then the parents should be exempt from taxes that pay for schools, parks, etc.

        For a different approach, how about making it legal for a child to choose to be vaccinated without requiring the parent’s permission? That isn’t going to be much help for small children, but it does in part deal with the problem of parents making bad decisions for their children.

        • Theodoric says:
          April 10, 2019 at 9:27 pm

          Many school districts require proof of vaccination for enrollment. Are parents of otherwise eligible children who refuse to vaccinate their kids exempt from paying school taxes?

        • rahien.din says:
          April 11, 2019 at 4:39 am

          Your taxes are paying for those things, so “why should society do anything for you” is not a fair way of putting it.

          It is absolutely a fair way of putting it. That is because everyone pays the same taxes whether they vaccinate or not. The point is that the anti-vaxxers are not paying the full monetary and non-monetary costs of public schooling.

          I am surprised you are not asking what transaction costs are permitting this externality to remain unmitigated.

          A good Coasian bargain would not be “Make them homeschool, let them keep subjecting others to infection risk in public spaces, and let them pay less taxes.” That would simply shift the externality to a different public space, while imposing less cost on the ones imposing the externality. And it’s worth pointing out that many people actively seek out that arrangement regardless of their vaccination status.

        • JPNunez says:
          April 11, 2019 at 6:52 am

          I think that the government should be allowed to discriminate their services against people who are actively endangering the population, aka people who don’t vaccinate their kids.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:16 am

            How would you feel about the state cutting off welfare payments to the antivaxxer families? How about cutting off welfare payments to the children of drug users?

            Antivaxxers are plenty stupid but we need to be really careful here.

          • rahien.din says:
            April 12, 2019 at 4:30 am

            The government already does that in myriad other areas. Reckless driving and drunk driving statutes for example.

            Edward Scizorhands,

            It seems like you wouldn’t have a problem with this as long as we were careful.

    • rahien.din says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:04 am

      All of the above. I feel the need to be sure this is said :

      The “97% effective” number is not as simple as “97 out of 100 people are immune to measles.” It is a summary statistic describing a distribution of immunity levels. A person’s susceptibility to infection is related to their own degree of immunity, the degree of exposure to the pathogen, and the pathogen’s virulence. Exposure increases with disease prevalence. Vaccination determines degree of immunity, and by reducing prevalence, reduces exposure.

      The resultant system is basically Markovian, or graph theoretic. And, we can affect two important values (node receptivity and node transmissivity) by vaccination.

      That’s an important part of how herd immunity works. It is not simply that vaccination prevents the the 3-of-100 perfectly susceptible individuals from being “found” by the infection. Instead, there is a certain level of vaccination that shifts the distribution of immunity, such that the pathogen never reaches sufficient prevalence to spread to a dangerous number of nodes on the graph.

      • drunkfish says:
        April 10, 2019 at 2:45 pm

        Thanks for clarifying. I wanted to be more explicit with applying that 97% number but realized I had no idea what it actually referred to, which is why I punted on the math of herd immunity. Can you explain what the summary statistic is actually reporting? Is it something like “the vaccine leads to an immunity level distribution that results in the same number of infected individuals as if the vaccine made 97% of people perfectly immune and left 3% of people untouched”? Is it itself a function of the vaccination rate? The latter seems pretty annoying, that the vaccine wouldn’t be quantified on its own terms, but I guess is undertandable.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:32 am

      Yeah, vaccination is a tricky issue.

      On the one hand, everyone should vaccinate their kids. It’s better for the kids themselves and it’s better for kids as a group. The reasons that I’ve heard from anti-vaxxers, even back in my own childhood before the vaccine / autism meme had emerged, have always been unconvincing and ignorant. Hurting your own kids and your neighbors’ kids out of sheer ignorance is absurd.

      On the other hand, the State of New York is absolutely not trustworthy enough to overrule parents on grounds as vague as public health. I don’t want to give them an inch because I know from my lifelong residence here that they’ll take a mile. These are the idiots who just banned plastic bags and we’re supposed to be trust that they won’t be just as petty and controlling about every aspect of pediatric medicine? Sorry, no dice.

      I suspect that I’d be much more comfortable if this was left to a township or county level rather than being up to the whole state. If a community doesn’t want to deal with unvaccinated kids spreading disease that’s absolutely their right, but the State (or City for that matter) government will take that power and run wild with it.

      • 10240 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 1:28 pm

        Many European countries have mandatory vaccination, and I’m unaware that it has lead to such consequences. Vaccination is pretty much a standalone policy issue, with not much else directly related to it such that it could lead to a slippery slope.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
          April 10, 2019 at 2:11 pm

          I don’t know about Europe, but here public health is often a stalking horse for bans and vice taxes. It’s urgent-sounding enough to justify expanded government power but vague enough that nearly anything can be justified as a public health risk.

          • 10240 says:
            April 10, 2019 at 4:26 pm

            There are some vice taxes in some countries, but I think they are sufficiently removed from the issue of vaccines in the public mind that one doesn’t make the other more likely IMO. That is, many people support mandatory vaccinations but not vice taxes. So if you think mandatory vaccinations are good and vice taxes are bad, then support mandatory vaccinations and oppose vice taxes.

            What does expanded government power refer to here? Government already has the power to do pretty much anything it chooses to (including mandatory vaccinations or vice taxes), as long as it’s constitutional and the electorate tolerates it.

            I find that a stalking horse is something used to conceal someone’s real intentions. If public health is used as a stalking horse for bans and vice taxes, then what are the real intentions? It can be debated whether public health justifies bans or vice taxes on unhealthy things (I don’t think it does, some do), but I see no reason to think it’s not the real reason some people want such bans or taxes.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
            April 10, 2019 at 5:01 pm

            Every government relies on the populace accepting the legitimacy of their laws. When people ignore the law en masse, like with jaywalking or speed limits, the government simply lacks the force to compel them to obey. Lawmakers and bureaucrats are at least somewhat aware of this and usually try to cloak what they do in the veneer of legitimacy.

            If people don’t view ‘public health’ as a legitimate justification, and make that clear, it reduces the likelihood of laws being passed on that basis.

            If public health is used as a stalking horse for bans and vice taxes, then what are the real intentions?

            The sort of pseudo-religious attitude that demands unpleasant yet entirely symbolic sacrifices.

            It doesn’t strike me as coincidental that the same people pushing a secular weekly fast day (Meatless Mondays) also are the ones who rail against the consumption of sugar alcohol and nicotine, dream of ending private car ownership in favor of biking, and are pushing increasingly puritanical sexual mores.

          • 10240 says:
            April 10, 2019 at 5:43 pm

            If people don’t view ‘public health’ as a legitimate justification, and make that clear, it reduces the likelihood of laws being passed on that basis.

            There is a significant difference between mandatory vaccinations and sin taxes in that unvaccinated people put others in danger. Also, the vaccination issue especially affects children who can’t make the decision for themselves, while the things targeted by sin taxes sometimes affect children but aren’t seen as issues largely affecting children.

            I don’t think there are many people who don’t consider a public health issue where one puts others in danger a potentially legitimate reason for government action. I also don’t think there are many people who don’t consider people put their children in potentially fatal danger a potentially legitimate reason for government action. So I don’t think that getting people to consider health issues as categorically illegitimate reasons for government action is a viable strategy. IMO the right strategy against sin taxes is emphasizing that people should be allowed to make their own choice when it comes to their own health; that’s the main reason many people oppose sin taxes. Whereas the reason many people oppose compulsory vaccinations is that they are seen as a too drastic intervention (even though childrens’ health and the fact that it affects others would justify less drastic interventions.)

            It doesn’t strike me as coincidental that the same people pushing a secular weekly fast day (Meatless Mondays) also are the ones who rail against the consumption of sugar alcohol and nicotine, dream of ending private car ownership in favor of biking, and are pushing increasingly puritanical sexual mores.

            All of these have (good or bad) justifications other than a pointless sacrifice. There are various reasons all of these have ended up as left-wing causes. It’s also plausible that there are people who view forcing unpleasant sacrifices on people less negatively than others. That doesn’t mean that they view them positively, it just means they are more likely to support a trade-off if they think there is some reason for the sacrifice. It’s rather uncharitable to assume that they just want sacrifices for their own sake.

            Yes, there is a phenomenon where people support specific sacrifices that they would realize are pointless if they thought a bit about how little the particular sacrifice matters on the whole (e.g. plastic straw ban). But most people don’t bother to do a even a crude cost-benefit analysis when they hear about an issue like that. They are not trying to signal that they support pointless sacrifices, they are trying to signal that they support the environment, and they (and/or the people who judge them) haven’t realized that the sacrifice in question is pointless.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 10, 2019 at 7:35 pm

            There is a significant difference between mandatory vaccinations and sin taxes in that unvaccinated people put others in danger.

            One of the main arguments for restrictions on smoking was the claim that second hand smoke puts others in danger. As best I can tell, that claim was supported with at best dubious, possibly fraudulent, evidence.

            And, in one non-governmental case I know of (my university), it was used to ban all smoking on campus, including out doors, on still more dubious evidence. My conclusion was that the real objective was paternalism, to discourage people from smoking for their own good. A university is, in my view, entitled to do that, although they shouldn’t, but the same logic could as easily apply to a government.

            The problem with externality arguments in the political context is that governments can claim an externality without having to provide any serious evidence of the size or sign of the net effect, so it becomes an excuse for doing things people want to do for other reasons.

          • 10240 says:
            April 10, 2019 at 10:00 pm

            The problem with externality arguments in the political context is that governments can claim an externality without having to provide any serious evidence of the size or sign of the net effect, so it becomes an excuse for doing things people want to do for other reasons.

            @DavidFriedman Valid concern, but I don’t think that treating externalities (or even just health-related externalities) a categorically inadmissible reason for government intervention is a good solution. (Or for intervention by whatever would substitute the government’s law enforcement power, if we didn’t have a government.)

            From a libertarian standpoint, most smoking bans are not justified even if second-hand smoke is harmful, because they apply to private places, and thus the smoke only affects people who voluntarily enter those private places. Then again, the idea that private persons and companies should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as they only affect people who voluntarily interact with them is unique to libertarians. By non-libertarian standards, indoor smoking bans are a pretty sensible policy IMO, even just on the basis that second-hand smoke smells bad (at least to non-smokers), and people who make a bad decision (i.e. smokers) shouldn’t make the more responsible people worse off.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 10, 2019 at 11:06 pm

            By non-libertarian standards, indoor smoking bans are a pretty sensible policy IMO, even just on the basis that second-hand smoke smells bad (at least to non-smokers), and people who make a bad decision (i.e. smokers) shouldn’t make the more responsible people worse off.

            By ordinary economic standards they do not make sense on private property because if (for instance) restaurant customers on net prefer the smoke free environment, it pays the restaurant to provide it–and libertarians have no objection to the restaurant doing so. The optimal outcome is probably one with some institutions that permit smoking, some that don’t.

          • Aapje says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:18 am

            @DavidFriedman

            My experience is that smokers violate the rules very often, resulting in a very high policing cost. A supposedly free choice by restaurants is then going to result in a burden on non-smoking restaurants that smoking restaurants don’t face. So non-smoking restaurants then have costs that they have to offload on the non-smoking customers.

            That burden seems to high that it’s almost impossible to have good policing, so non-smoking customers then get burdened. It’s a very bad externality, where nearly the entire burden created by the smokers is on non-smokers.

            A response to that could be to have a tax on smoking restaurants that goes to the non-smoking venues.

            However, it’s questionable whether any workable tax can create sufficient compensation for the burdens. So then a ban may be optimal.

          • 10240 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 2:08 am

            @Aapje If smokers violate no-smoking rules often, and every restaurant is non-smoking, and is required to enforce that rule, then once again you have the policing cost, and everyone bears it.

            How costly is the policing, anyway? I’d assume it’s mostly that if people start to smoke in a non-smoking place, they are asked to leave by the staff (possibly after a complaint by other customers).

            I haven’t actually seen people violating indoor smoking bans as of recent, though (with legal bans in place). It’s possible that people are more likely to violate a ban if it’s just a rule posted by the restaurant than if it’s a law. If so, then we should just have a law that if a place has a no-smoking sign, then it’s an infraction to smoke in that place. I would expect that to bring the level of violations down to the level we get with a general ban (or lower, since there are smoking options available).

          • Aapje says:
            April 11, 2019 at 4:23 am

            @10240

            Regular people seem to have only a very limited willingness to police, especially if their actual job is something else. Once non-compliance is too high, either the transgressors win or you call in professional bullies, like the police or bouncers. However, the police have better things to do than constantly police minor transgressors and bouncers are both expensive and very off-putting.

            The problem of non-compliance is especially high if people can justify their non-compliance by pushing vague boundaries or claim lack of knowledge (“this is a non-smoking restaurant? I didn’t (choose to) notice the 2 million signs.”)

            It then helps to have such a clear boundary/law that makes the transgressors look like the selfish people that don’t care about others that they are, like a full ban on smoking at the office and in restaurants.

            From my perspective, the increasingly strict anti-smoking laws are a deserved response to anti-social smoker behavior, given that there are no good alternatives (libertarian Utopians have solutions that don’t work in practice).

          • 10240 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:27 am

            From my perspective, the increasingly strict anti-smoking laws are a deserved response to anti-social smoker behavior

            A law that punishes an entire group as a response to anti-social behavior by a subset is not a deserved response.

            libertarian Utopians have solutions that don’t work in practice

            That is, “they don’t work perfectly in practice, and since in my objective opinion non-smokers’ preferences are more legitimate than smokers’ preferences, no cost on non-smokers is acceptable, and any cost in smokers (including innocent ones) is acceptable”.

          • acymetric says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:56 am

            @Aapje

            My experience is that smokers violate the rules very often, resulting in a very high policing cost.

            I realize you’re just relating anecdotal observation, but do you really have a basis for this? What rules are you talking about exactly? If it is things like “no smoking within 200 feet of a building” then yes, people break that rule all the time but that is about as informative as saying that drivers violate the rules very often when driving.

            If you actually mean that smokers regularly light up in non-smoking buildings I question whether you can really support that, it is certainly not something I can recall seeing particularly often except if done in a confrontational manner, similar to pissing on someones rug as a kind of **** you which is kind of a different thing.

          • Aapje says:
            April 11, 2019 at 7:28 am

            @10240

            Such laws are not punishment of smokers anymore than laws against jay-walking are punishment for pedestrians. The latter is based on the idea that requiring that people use cross walks when available generally works a lot better than having an ambiguous law, like one that only allows jay-walking when it is safe to do so or one that expects drivers to avoid people who jay walk.

            That pedestrians are prone to dangerous jay walking makes a law more sensible that takes choice out of the hands of pedestrians and thereby increases their burden. This is not punishment, but common sense: a law that applies to lots of actually bad behavior and thus relatively little good behavior is better than a law that applies to little actually bad behavior and thus lots of actually good behavior. This may seem like punishment of pedestrians for their bad behavior, but isn’t. A law that puts a burden on a group of people with lots of bad behavior is simply a better law than one that puts that same burden on a group with little bad behavior, because the cost/benefit ratio is better for the former law.

            This is doubly so if the burdens are otherwise offloaded on someone else, who doesn’t get the benefits of the behavior in the first place.

            The less prone smokers are to push boundaries, the more sense it makes to be lenient, as that leniency will then not be abused too often, so the burdens of that leniency on others are few. However, if the boundary-pushing is common, the burdens of being lenient are huge and society may decide that they are too high.

            It sucks if you are a well-behaving smoker, but it also sucks if you are a non-smoker who constantly has to deal with nasty externalities by abusive smokers.

          • Aapje says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:39 pm

            @acymetric

            Just a few examples: There was the teacher who smoked near the window of his class room during breaks (with a heap of stubs outside of it being clear proof, aside from the smell). The kids at school who smoked between the two sliding doors at the entrance. The men who smoked during the checkers games, making me give up that hobby. The people at various workplaces who smoked near the entrance, including at a recent workplace where they had an excellent outdoor place to smoke, with a roof, a shelter for the wind and a trashcan, at only 10-15 meters from the entrance. And yet many preferred to smoke near the entrance.

            What I’ve noticed that smokers never organize and/or pay for collective solutions that reduce the burden on others. At best they use solutions that are provided to them, although even then they are reluctant.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:
            April 11, 2019 at 7:19 pm

            David Friedman, I don’t know whether the claim that second-hand smoke is dangerous for people in general is well-founded, but I thought it was pretty solid that it’s bad for people with asthma.

          • Aapje says:
            April 12, 2019 at 4:55 am

            @DavidFriedman

            One of the main arguments for restrictions on smoking was the claim that second hand smoke puts others in danger. As best I can tell, that claim was supported with at best dubious, possibly fraudulent, evidence.

            Studies of non-smokers married to smokers seem to consistently find higher rates of lung cancer in the former.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:25 am

            Studies of non-smokers married to smokers seem to consistently find higher rates of lung cancer in the former.

            That sounds plausible, but it doesn’t tell us much about the effect of the much lower levels of exposure that laws against smoking are generally aimed at, and that it was claimed caused negative effects. And it’s a risk voluntarily accepted by the non-smoker, like all of the other negative elements of being married to any particular person.

            You can find the context of my views on the subject here, with some additional comments here.

          • Aapje says:
            April 13, 2019 at 6:54 am

            Those studies are relevant because they make for a relatively controlled exposure to second-hand smoke. The findings extend to all who are exposed to second-hand smoke.

            They are consistent with animal studies, which also found higher lung and nasal cancer in animals exposed to second hand smoke.

            It also is just common sense. Second hand smoke is diluted first hand smoke, which has known, enormous risks, even for low intensity smokers.

            Your objections seem to be built on criticism of one specific, non-central claim about possible downsides of smoking/second-hand smoke, ignoring the overwhelming strength of the totality of the evidence.

        • Eugene Dawn says:
          April 12, 2019 at 4:58 am

          @Aapje

          I believe David is referring to a (bad) study on heart disease, not lung cancer, based on a blog post of his on the matter, but I agree that when challenging CDC and Surgeon General reports it would be good form to actually link to the supposed fraudulent studies.

    • Walter says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:41 am

      Like, the thing of it is that it doesn’t matter, its just signalling, flinching from the actual problem.
      Passing laws to dunk on open anti vax evangelists, feels like trying to fix racism by arresting the official members of the KKK. I mean, if you are feeling it we can always do that, this is america, we got jails, and nobody gonna stick up for witches, but what’s the plan when it doesn’t change anything?

      The problem has never been people who are proudly out and resisting vaccines. There are like ten of them. The problem is the people who see them and say…

      “Huh, they are probably mad wrong, but What If There Is A Danger? I will be publicly pro vaccine and quietly get a medical exemption for my offspring, thereby getting the best of both worlds.”

      Like, your goal is to protect the people who “can’t” get vaccinated from those who “choose not” to get vaccinated. But when everybody just says their exemption is a “can’t”, one of the cool disability kind and not the kind that makes you a moral punching bag and then womp womp.

      I guess what I’m saying is, any time it is time to treat people differently based on their health you get the medical marijuana problem.

      • The Nybbler says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:36 pm

        The problem has never been people who are proudly out and resisting vaccines. There are like ten of them.

        No, there are entire communities of them. And that’s why they’re the bigger problem; a few unnecessary exemptions randomly spread through the population would not be a big deal. All of them together in groups where they can easily spread illness to each other… big deal.

        • Walter says:
          April 10, 2019 at 1:54 pm

          Like, I can’t exactly prove my assertion that the percentage of the anti vaxxers who go public are low (ie, that the lady in the linked article who keeps the books has more visiters than peers), but it is weird to me that your intuition goes the other way.

          I mean, all the incentives are aligned, right? If you are anti vax, your choices are, roughly:

          A: Be publicly anti vax. Be treated like scum by all who know this, while people propose that you should be sued into oblivion.
          B: Be publicly pro vax, privately anti vax. Swim comfortably with the flow of contempt.

          Like, given that B is invisible, we can’t know the proportions, but surely, in the same way that there are lots more racists than KKK members there would be lots more private anti vaxxers than public ones? Doesn’t it stand to reason?

          • acymetric says:
            April 10, 2019 at 2:00 pm

            A: Be publicly anti vax.

            You’re setting the standard too high. If you mean “publicly” like they have a blog and signs in their yard, then yeah that is a small (but non-negligible) population.

            What you’re really looking for are people who will openly tell people they know that they are anti-vax, which is hard to measure but significant.

          • Nornagest says:
            April 10, 2019 at 2:03 pm

            Be publicly anti vax. Be treated like scum by all who know this, while people propose that you should be sued into oblivion.

            I think you’re seriously underestimating the size of the communities where anti-vax is open and commonplace. Which… isn’t really that surprising, since we’re all excruciatingly online here and those communities are full of suburban soccer moms in places like Roseville, CA who’d give the side-eye to anything more online than Candy Crush. But it’s a thing.

            I mean, Roseville’s not the weirdest place in the world by a long shot. I’ve met people from way weirder places, and they’ve tended to chat me up about things way weirder than anti-vax (chemtrails, for example). Normal people’s impressions of what’s taboo and what’s not have much more to do with their meatspace peer group than with what we might call “elite opinion” around here.

          • The Nybbler says:
            April 10, 2019 at 2:06 pm

            I have no idea if there are more private anti-vaxxers than public. My point is because of the nature of infectious disease, it’s the public ones who are the larger public health issue. Take 20,000 anti-vaxxers, distribute them throughout the US in generally pro-vax communities. One of those kids gets measles, that’s it.. just them and their siblings if any. Take those 20,000, put them all in one community in Rockland County NY, and when one kid gets measles, you end up with a genuine outbreak.

          • dick says:
            April 10, 2019 at 2:16 pm

            The only anti-vaxxers I know would definitely not describe themselves as anti-vaxxers. At the risk of putting words in to the mouth of my outgroup, their justification would be something like, “Vaccines are wonderful and I recognize that they are safe for many people, but our Agnes Rose has some specific health concerns to take in to account and we’ve talked to 6 different doctors and worked out a plan that works for our family and we hope you would respect that.”

            The challenge is verifying the truth of the “specific health concerns” part. If it’s as porous as California’s medical marijuana requirements then we might as well not bother.

          • dick says:
            April 10, 2019 at 2:20 pm

            Take 20,000 anti-vaxxers, distribute them throughout the US in generally pro-vax communities. One of those kids gets measles, that’s it.. just them and their siblings if any.

            This is not true. If you’re in a play group / school class / Sunday School / etc, and one family in that group doesn’t vaccinate, and one other family has an elderly immuno-compromised relative, everyone kind of has to pick sides until the outbreak is over. Watching that play out has given me empathy for anti-vaxxers – it’s an incredibly isolating position with a lot of direct unpleasant consequences (other than the obvious potentially dead child consequence).

          • Walter says:
            April 11, 2019 at 7:10 am

            @acymetric:

            valleyofkings is talking about confiscating wealth, kicking kids out of school, etc. I think only people who meet the standard of blog + signs in the yard would even consider not going underground in that kind of situation.

            @Nornagest

            Like, right back at ya? You got to be as Online as me, right? I counter that, nay, sir, YOU are the one who is out of touch with the soccer moms of the even more rural environs where I dwell.

            @Nybbler:

            I feel like we may be doomed to back and forth without resolution, but I’ll go one more round. I think the public ones are the flowers, the private ones all around them are the roots. In any situation where someone is hosting anti vax book clubs she knows a bunch of people who come to that. For every Rabbi in that article delivering anti vax advice there are a bunch of people taking it.

            From outside it looks like one prominent anti vaxxer, who can be kicked off the playground or sued or whatever. I’m saying that the actual vectors are the many quiet anti vaxxers around them, who you can’t restrict in any way without a MUCH more invasive program than people are up for.

            I’m not disagreeing with your contention that communities of anti vaxxers are where the outbreaks happen. I’m disagreeing that removing their the tiny percentage who have yard signs and book clubs will do anything to stop the spread of their quiet and well behaved neighbors.

            @dick: Yeah, we are in agreement. Agnes Rose is the actual face of the problem.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:31 am

            Watching that play out has given me empathy for anti-vaxxers – it’s an incredibly isolating position with a lot of direct unpleasant consequences (other than the obvious potentially dead child consequence).

            I have to ask. Why? Do you feel empathy for most people who make stupid decisions that might hurt others and are then punished to discourage those decisions or is there something distinct about this case?

            I’m not trying to make feeling that empathy sound morally bad because whether it is or not is not obvious. In a way, that empathy is very Christian. But I’m not Christian, and I’m not sure how else to put it.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:48 am

            My wife recently found out, entirely by accident, that a family we know didn’t vaccinate their kid. Both parents have MIT degrees so they aren’t idiots in the conventional sense. And we don’t know why the kid isn’t vaccinated, but the same way we accidentally found out about the non-vaccination would have told us about a compromised immune system. If they are antivax they are entirely quiet about it, not a word about it on their Facebooks. They have good means so they could easily find a doctor to sign off on some bullshit excuse, the same as all the other UMC hippies.

          • Nornagest says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:16 am

            Like, right back at ya? You got to be as Online as me, right? I counter that, nay, sir, YOU are the one who is out of touch with the soccer moms of the even more rural environs where I dwell.

            If you think this is some kind of one-upmanship play, you’re missing the point.

          • dick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:40 am

            I have to ask. Why? Do you feel empathy for most people who make stupid decisions that might hurt others and are then punished to discourage those decisions or is there something distinct about this case?

            Maybe sympathy is the better word, but the answer is because I feel like their failing is more in the area of being conned by hucksters and clickbait than being malicious.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 12:04 pm

            Maybe sympathy is the better word, but the answer is because I feel like their failing is more in the area of being conned by hucksters and clickbait than being malicious.

            I think I understand this.

            So few people in life have struck me as being malicious while so many have been foolish though.

            My own sympathy is more limited and mostly reserved for the unlucky of which there are already too many for my brain to grasp. Or at least common mistakes or ones that are hard to fix. This one is too easy to fix to get my sympathy.

          • Deiseach says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:38 am

            Both parents have MIT degrees so they aren’t idiots in the conventional sense.

            I genuinely do think a lot of this is down to a generation of parents not old enough to have seen such common diseases before vaccination campaigns came in*, maybe not old enough themselves to have queued up to get the sugar lumps before the new methods came in.

            So they grew up with the benefits of herd immunity, imagine that since in the past a lot of kids got measles etc. and were perfectly fine this is not a real risk, and think they’re too smart to swallow the Mandatory Line and can make up their minds all by themselves about the risk of little Saffron and Tarquin not getting vaccinated.

            If they were a bit stupider they might be more humble.

            *I’m imagining people in the West nowadays think of TB as “that disease in 19th century novels” but I remember from my childhood the public services announcements about “Joe has TB but this is now treatable, so if you think you have symptoms go to your doctor” on television (and this was in the late 60s/early 70s, after the success of the eradication campaign in the 50s led single-handedly – and I do mean literally that – by Dr Noel Browne). Our regional hospital here started off as a TB sanitorium, one of those built during his campaign.

            And now we’re seeing a resurgence in Europe of what was considered a conquered disease.

      • albatross11 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 5:53 pm

        I think Walter is right that a lot of the public outcry about antivaxers feels like ingroup/outgroup signaling, to me.

        The other side is that public health people are looking at battles they thought had been won, and suddenly they’re not won anymore–a bunch of fools don’t get their kids vaccinated for measles, and now we get measles outbreaks again–a problem we’d pretty-much solved a couple decades ago.

        On the gripping hand, a lot of the responses people propose for this seem:

        a. Extremely authoritarian.

        b. Easily extended to many bad causes.

        And finally, there’s this weird interesting thing going on. Being afraid of vaccinating your kids isn’t like young-Earth creationism, it’s like being afraid to live next to a nuclear plant. Vaccine safety depends on the pharmaceutical companies and regulators doing a careful and competent job. To the extent that they’re inept, careless, or on the take/corrupt, vaccines may not be very safe. At some level, it seems like fear of giving your kids the MMR vaccine is as much an expression of some ideas about the nature of our government and society as it is about any scientific claims.

        Now, as best I can tell, MMR and other common childhood vaccines are safe and effective. (Except that the flu vaccine is just barely worth getting.). My kids get all their shots on time. As best I can tell, the FDA is probably *too* conservative.

        But it’s not crazy to me that someone watching the way regulators and regulated industries interact in the US, or noting the absolutely unethical crap some pharmaceutical companies do w.r.t. gaming the regulatory system to charge $bignum for a dose of insulin, would suspect that those systems aren’t all that trustworthy. When the trusted authorities in your society (regulators, media sources, politicians, large companies, etc.) keep getting caught misbehaving or lying, it does, in fact, diminish their ability to be believed when they tell you what you should believe w.r.t. vaccine safety.

        • 10240 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 6:09 pm

          I think Walter is right that a lot of the public outcry about antivaxers feels like ingroup/outgroup signaling, to me.

          Given the set of commenters who take an issue with mandatory vaccination on the basis that the public outcry against anti-vaxers is ingroup/outgroup signaling, it seems to me that taking an issue with mandatory vaccination on this basis is also an ingroup/outgroup thing (with ingroup and outgroup swapped).

          Though I haven’t been aware that anti-vaxers are significantly correlated with major political tribes.

        • Walter says:
          April 11, 2019 at 7:26 am

          I don’t *think* I ever said the outcry against anti vaxxers was signalling? It might seem to be implied by what I did say, but that’s not what I meant.

          (EDIT: Shameful apologies! I totally said that the outcry was just signalling, in the post above, even!

          What I meant to say is that it is ineffective, ‘signalling’ would mean that the parties in question knew this and were only yada yada, I hereby withdraw the signalling accusation. I think the people doing this are sincere, but that it will fail because it doesn’t address the actual problem.)

          To return to my earlier example, it is like whose plan for defeating racism is by arresting the official members of the KKK. Like, if you saw someone proposing that, you wouldn’t say that they were ‘signalling’, yeah? It is more like that they are not understanding the problem’s real shape. They are fighting the tv portrayal of the issue, not the genuine facts on the ground.

          My take is pretty simple.

          Being publicly anti vax is unpopular, and carries lots of consequences.
          Being privately anti vax (that is, lying to your doctors or whoever is asking abotu what they said) has no social consequences.

          Therefore I think most anti vaxxers are quiet about it. (Obviously, this runs into the ‘false allegation problem’, where it is mostly impossible to study or prove this, if you disagree, and think that most anti vaxxers are public, I can’t really argue)

          Because of the above, I think that any proposal for dealing with anti vaxxers that doesn’t address secret anti vaxxers will fail, since it will miss most of them.

    • The Nybbler says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:25 pm

      The main reason to justify vaccination for those who don’t want it is usually herd immunity — some people either can’t get vaccinated or the vaccine fails to produce immunity for whatever reason, so to stop them from getting sick, it’s important to vaccinate enough of those who can be vaccinated to stop the spread.

      However, I think this doesn’t justify the utter panic we’re seeing now. That’s Culture War. The groups that don’t get vaccines tend to be hated, either for that, or for other reasons as with the Ultra-Orthodox.

      • Theodoric says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:45 pm

        If someone’s idiocy causes a disease that was declared eradicated to come back, they deserve some hate.

        • The Nybbler says:
          April 10, 2019 at 6:52 pm

          “Eradicated in the Americas” doesn’t mean much in a world with common international travel. There were 611 cases reported in the Americas in 2015, 12 in 2016 (the year they announced it was “eradicated”) and 775 in 2017. A premature announcement.

          • Aapje says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:26 am

            Common international travel makes herd immunity/vaccinations more important.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:39 am

            International travelers are also an easy place to establish the bottlenecks.

            One problem with “mandatory vaccines” is that there will obviously be medical exemptions, and what do we do about the doctors who say that in their opinion the risk isn’t worth it? Are we going to second-guess every one of them?

            But you can objectively measure vaccine levels. If you visit or come from a country that hasn’t eradicated polio, you either a) objectively show you are immune b) sit in quarantine.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:37 am

            what do we do about the doctors who say that in their opinion the risk isn’t worth it? Are we going to second-guess every one of them?

            Make it a huge pain in the ass for them so they don’t get tempted to do it willy-nilly. Also cap the number of exemptions they can hand out for various reasons. There probably aren’t many legitimate medical reasons to not be vaccinated, and for those that are we can estimate prevalence and thus roughly how often a doctor would need to sign them.

            And then make it so that if something goes wrong possibly due to a patient that got an exemption, we drag the doctor in question up for review before a board and investigate their decision in detail. If their decision turns out to be medically justifiable their name can be cleared, and if not, they can be fined or lose their license.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:52 am

            Now you are picking a fight with the AMA. Probably without realizing it. Never mind, this idea is already dead in the water.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:00 am

            Now you are picking a fight with the AMA. Probably without realizing it. Never mind, this idea is already dead in the water.

            All solutions are dead in the water as long as outbreaks aren’t too common and vaccination rates aren’t too low. There’s no privatized gain to motivate action, and the U.S. populace isn’t going to be bothered enough if there aren’t a lot of deaths. Vaccination rates for serious diseases are still over 90% if I’m not mistaken, and mostly people who suffer are people who didn’t get vaccinated.

            But I don’t think it would be hard to get the AMA on board. It doesn’t hurt doctor’s pockets, and it’s a plus for public health. Most doctors probably would like an excuse to tell parents that it’s just too hard to get that exemption and “shucks, I wish I could help you but the government is tying my hands”.

            Even if the board rarely punishes a doctor (which I suspect is a likely outcome), the hassle of it all will have a deterrent effect.

          • Theodoric says:
            April 11, 2019 at 3:34 pm

            And then make it so that if something goes wrong possibly due to a patient that got an exemption, we drag the doctor in question up for review before a board and investigate their decision in detail. If their decision turns out to be medically justifiable their name can be cleared, and if not, they can be fined or lose their license.

            Possible addition: Let people who get infected from someone who the doctor gave an unjustified exemption to (or their next of kin) sue the doctor. True, this would not exactly be a malpractice action, so malpractice insurance would likely not cover the judgment, but medicine is a reasonably well paid profession, so the doctor would probably have an expensive house to seize (but the victim might have to get in line behind the bank), maybe even a vacation home, and, if he does not lose his license, a large salary to garnish. Yes, this is meant to be punitive.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:43 am

            the doctor would probably have an expensive house to seize (but the victim might have to get in line behind the bank), maybe even a vacation home, and, if he does not lose his license, a large salary to garnish. Yes, this is meant to be punitive.

            If the AMA wasn’t opposed before, they certainly are now. You shouldn’t say that out loud until after you’ve passed the bill.

            The AMA’s position is that vaccines are safe, don’t cause autism, and non-medical exemptions should be banned. All those are to be expected, because they don’t reduce the status of doctors or place them at risk. But they absolutely don’t want their members second-guessed in courtrooms. Who is going to decide that not vaccinating little Agnes Rose because her older sister had a vaccine reaction was the right call?

          • quanta413 says:
            April 12, 2019 at 10:03 am

            The AMA’s position is that vaccines are safe, don’t cause autism, and non-medical exemptions should be banned. All those are to be expected, because they don’t reduce the status of doctors or place them at risk. But they absolutely don’t want their members second-guessed in courtrooms. Who is going to decide that not vaccinating little Agnes Rose because her older sister had a vaccine reaction was the right call?

            This is why my suggestion was a review board rather than a court. The goal was mostly to make a barrier and secondly to punish egregious mistakes. Medical boards can already revoke licenses for egregious mistakes. I don’t think the outcomes of using the tort system instead is ideal. I don’t agree with above poster that using the actual court system for this is optimal.

    • Etoile says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:44 pm

      Some Brooklyn neighborhoods have had measles outbreaks recently, with unvaccinated children going abroad and bringing that very contagious disease back. This might be a reaction to that. And i will say, I would have no desire for my kids to play at playgrounds in those neighborhoods now, if there’s even a small risk to my (vaccinated) kids. Maybe an alternative is quarantining the non-vaccinated upon reentry to the US? I don’t know.

      My tolerance for anti-libertarian public health measures, like smoking bans, went up a LOT since having kids.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        April 11, 2019 at 8:20 am

        I made the comment elsewhere on this page, before I saw this thread, but I saw that if you travel to a foreign land that meets [some measles criteria], you need to either 1) show titers that demonstrate you are currently safe against measles, or 2) spend the incubation period in quarantine.

        I feel this is really the least liberty-infringing way of stopping the outbreaks.

    • 10240 says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:39 pm

      My preferred way to solve this would be to pass a law saying that, if you or your children get super sick with a vaccinatable disease, you can sue the people who convinced you not to get vaccinated.

      Allowing suing people for something like that would be a very dangerous and unjustified move from a free speech perspective. They don’t (directly) harm anyone, those who don’t vaccinate their children do.

      For example if we started requiring all children to be vaccinated when they get their general physical, the parents might start keeping their children away from the health care system entirely.

      Doesn’t the government have a list of all citizens/residents? (If not, how do they enforce compulsory education?) If they do, then keep a database of which vaccines a child has got, and go after the parents if the child hasn’t got a given vaccine by a certain age.

      • valleyofthekings says:
        April 10, 2019 at 2:49 pm

        Allowing suing people for something like that would be a very dangerous and unjustified move

        Have you got examples of ways this might be dangerous?

        Most of the cases I can think of where I give someone advice that leads to them getting killed or horribly injured, it seems to me that I could get sued for that.

        — actually, does “don’t get vaccinated” count as medical advice? I’m pretty sure that giving people medical advice (especially really bad medical advice) can already get you sued — for example websearch turns up https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-legal-ramifications-of-giving-medical-advice-online.

        Can you already (successfully) sue someone for telling you not to get vaccinated?

        • greenwoodjw says:
          April 10, 2019 at 2:55 pm

          No, most of the attempts to restrict speech along these lines have died when challenged in court. You can’t use licensing laws to restrict general commentary or advice like “Vaccines are THE DEVIL”.

        • albatross11 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 3:00 pm

          Consider what other things the same law/precedent would be used for.

        • 10240 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 4:00 pm

          (1) It curtails the general principle of free speech that you don’t get sued/prosecuted for sharing your opinion, and creates a precedent for restricting free speech.

          I’m not sure what practicing medicine without a license exactly applies to, but I assume it applies if you pretend to be a doctor, or at least give medical advice in a somewhat formalized setting where you pretend to be an expert or charge money. (IMO it should only apply to pretending to be a doctor, or perhaps giving advice in a formalized setting without warning people that you are not a trained doctor.) People discuss medical issues all the time, and it would be highly problematic both from a practical standpoint and from a free speech standpoint if it was illegal to do so.

          (2) If an existing or newly developed vaccine is actually found to be dangerous, those who know it may be afraid to speak up.

          (3) It encourages conspiracy theories that government (effectively) bans saying that vaccines are dangerous because they are actually dangerous, and they want to keep people from knowing it.

          • albatross11 says:
            April 10, 2019 at 5:40 pm

            Punishing speech in which people question the safety or effectiveness of approved / recommended medicines means that nobody will be pointing out actual problems with approved/recommended medicines in the future. Since there have been substantial problems with approved medicines in the past, this seems like a pretty bad idea.

          • Garrett says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:48 am

            > I’m not sure what practicing medicine without a license exactly applies to.
            I found a
            good explanation.

            My impression from (barely) inside the field is that it also depends upon how “official” you look and how much you should have known not to do that. For example, if some urine-soaked wino at the bus depot comes up and tells you that the rash on your arm is lyme disease/cancer/whatever, pretty much no one will care because you’d never take that seriously. Putting yourself out as a doctor in a serious (eg. not Halloween costume) fashion and making the same claim might get you charged.

            In some ways its worse for non-doctor healthcare providers. As an AEMT, I have a specific scope of practice. Exceeding that potentially could result in me getting criminally charged under said laws. On a purely technical level, if I see your leg bent in a dozen more places than it should be, I cannot diagnose you with a leg fracture or tell you that your leg is broken. That’s a formal diagnosis which I’m not allowed to make. I can tell you I “think” or “suspect” your leg is broken, but I certainly can’t be sure. Likewise for things that you’d do at home. For example, you might use a sewing needle to remove a splinter from the hand of a child. Technically, that’s surgery and I’m not allowed to do it on the ambulance. But nobody’s going to stop me from doing so at home.

    • JPNunez says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:59 pm

      Obviously the solution is to privatize measles, and fine the owner whenever a kid dies out of it.

      • Guy in TN says:
        April 10, 2019 at 2:09 pm

        Its a classic problem solvable through Coase Theorum:

        The contagious person with measles creates an externality when he comes into contact with the unvaccinated child. Since (via contract) we can put a price on right of the contagious person to leave the house/be in public, the solution is for the child to simply offer to buy this right from the contagious person.

        If the child’s offer is lower than what the contagious person is willing to accept, then we know that the most economically efficient outcome is for the child to die of measles.

        /s

      • 10240 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 4:08 pm

        Unfortunately the market value of a disease like measles is negative, so the government would have to pay the new owner to take it over, and thus accept responsibility for measles deaths. This way we would effectively pay a private entity to handle measures against measles. That entity would then have to find ways to convince/pay parents to get their children vaccinated, as well as manage the development and production of measles vaccines and treatments.

    • Incurian says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:20 pm

      Of all the things governments do with your money whether you like it or not, vaccinations are among the least objectionable.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        April 11, 2019 at 8:24 am

        Forced medical procedures have a bad history. And the people behind them were 100% confident that the science was behind them.

        I really hate the antivaxxers but we need to be really careful. I don’t mean kind of careful, I mean really careful.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:48 pm

      Anti-Epidemic efforts override personal liberty concerns always and everywhere. “Being the child of idiots should not be a potential death sentence” is very mild as such things go.

      • mobile says:
        April 10, 2019 at 4:02 pm

        So, mandatory flu vaccines, then?

      • ilikekittycat says:
        April 10, 2019 at 6:19 pm

        +1.

        The idea of using torts to punish something on the level of disease outbreaks after they’ve started to cause harm just screams that someone hasn’t read enough history, to me.

    • BBA says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:21 pm

      Here’s the health commissioner’s vaccination order. The legal basis for the order is in various cited sections of the NYC Health Code, which gives the commissioner very broad emergency powers to “take such actions as may be necessary for the health or the safety of the City and its residents.” (§3.01(d))

      Now I think the typical use of these emergency powers was to impose quarantines. I don’t find those objectionable (though I’m sure some people here do) yet something about this vaccination order makes my stomach turn a little. Not that much – I’m fully vaccinated, I despise the anti-vax movement, and as a secular Jew I’ve always had some low-level contempt for my Hasidic cousins – but just a little.

    • John Schilling says:
      April 11, 2019 at 11:14 am

      I note that New York is not, e.g., banning peanuts from public schools even though peanut allergy is as real as vaccine allergy.

      In general, if SmallNum people suffer an innate biological difficulty, our society will attempt to mitigate its effects but not to the extent of making intrusive demands of all BigNum people in the rest of society. At most we’ll e.g. demand commercial property owners install wheelchair ramps, but that directly affects only a small fraction of the population and it stops well short of “inject these drugs that we pinky-swear are safe!”

      So if this were any other issue, I think it’s pretty likely that the response would be “If you don’t want (your children) to get the measles, here’s the cheap vaccine. If you don’t trust the vaccine, meh, that’s on you. If you can’t use the vaccine, sucks to be you, join the peanut-allergy sufferers and try to stay out of trouble”. And I’d be OK with that as the least-bad option considering the potentially bad places forcible medication by State demand could lead.

      As others have noted, I’m getting a strong whiff of “We are the Smart People(tm), and you Stupid People need to shape up, believe what we tell you to believe, and Respect Our Authority” here. Perhaps try persuading people, and earning their trust re the safety of the medicines you want them to take.

      • ana53294 says:
        April 11, 2019 at 11:52 am

        I note that New York is not, e.g., banning peanuts from public schools even though peanut allergy is as real as vaccine allergy.

        I was in a plane where they asked not to eat peanuts because a passenger was allergic.

        Some schools do ban peanuts and peanut butter.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        April 11, 2019 at 1:06 pm

        We are the Smart People(tm), and you Stupid People need to shape up, believe what we tell you to believe, and Respect Our Authority”

        “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

        That’s Oliver Wendell Holmes standing up for the public welfare argument of forced sterilization of the unfit. They represent a genetic threat to society. Three generations of imbeciles are enough, after all.

        • Deiseach says:
          April 12, 2019 at 9:25 am

          That’s Oliver Wendell Holmes standing up for the public welfare argument of forced sterilization of the unfit. They represent a genetic threat to society. Three generations of imbeciles are enough, after all.

          That case is especially hard to swallow since reading an article digging further into it, and the person in question may not have been an imbecile; there seems to be a plausible argument that she was the poor relation daughter of an unmarried mother EDIT: her mother was married but her parents separated and she was unable to take care of the child, taken in by relatives, raped and made pregnant by a son of the family, and blamed for leading him on and indulging in the kind of scandalous behaviour her mother had exhibited, so they had her committed to an asylum to hush up the scandal.

          It was just Carrie Buck’s continuing bad fortune that the beneficient state of Virginia then decided to compulsorily sterilise all the “feebleminded” and since she had been committed as one of the feebleminded… Even worse, if this post (different to the original article I read) is correct, the whole “appeal” brought in her name was a got-up case by both parties, without her having any say in it, in order to get precisely the decision Wendell Holmes gave – yep, go right ahead and sterilise all the undesirables, boys!

          On March 28, 1924, Carrie Buck gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Vivian. A few months later, Carrie was admitted to the Lynchburg Colony. Not long after her arrival, Virginia passed a law allowing involuntary sterilization of those labeled as “feebleminded.” Officials at the Lynchburg Colony decided to sterilize Carrie Buck under the new law with the approval of Albert Priddy, the superintendent of the colony. But first, he and his colleagues arranged for her to appeal the decision in the Virginia courts. Although the appeal was in her name, Carrie Buck had no voice in the process. Priddy and other eugenicists were in charge. They hired an attorney for her as well as one for themselves. The two lawyers were in constant contact with one another and with Priddy before and during trial proceedings even though such collaborations are unethical.

          And then people wonder why eugenics stinks to high heavens in the nostrils of the general public? Hitler and the Nazis can’t be blamed for these decisions.

      • 10240 says:
        April 11, 2019 at 1:15 pm

        If you don’t want (your children) to get the measles, here’s the cheap vaccine. If you don’t trust the vaccine, meh, that’s on you. If you can’t use the vaccine, sucks to be you, join the peanut-allergy sufferers and try to stay out of trouble

        People who can’t get vaccinated is only one part of the issue. Anti-vaxers endangering their own children is another.

        I’m getting a strong whiff of “We are the Smart People(tm), and you Stupid People need to shape up, believe what we tell you to believe, and Respect Our Authority” here.

        In this case it’s true, though. Saying it ironically doesn’t make it false.

        Perhaps try persuading people, and earning their trust re the safety of the medicines you want them to take.

        It doesn’t seem to work on everyone.

        • John Schilling says:
          April 11, 2019 at 2:03 pm

          Anti-vaxers endangering their own children is another [part of the issue]

          But one not often raised in the debate, because we have already established for good and sufficient reasons that parents should be given broad latitude in their own children’s health care decisions and that exceptions need to be at the likely-imminent-death level rather than the maybe-they-might-someday-get-the-measles level.

          In this case it’s true, though

          It is true at the object level in this specific case. In the general case, it is true that “Smart People(tm) should be able to force Stupid People(tm) to do what the Smart People think is best, for their own good!”, leads to outcomes that are not nearly so utopian as their proponents imagine. And is dangerously prone to abuse. And doesn’t become any more utopian or less prone to abuse when coupled with Power Word: ForTheChildruuuun!

          Also, as already noted it would violate some fairly well-established rules and it’s not classically virtuous and the stupid people didn’t agree to it, so I think I’m on solid ethical ground in saying please, please don’t do that.

          Yes, persuading stupid people is tedious, annoying, and doesn’t always take. You have to do it anyway, if you insist on doing anything at all.

          • DinoNerd says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:57 pm

            Yeah, anti-vaxxers endangering their own children is what I think about first, but I don’t see much use to saying it. Children have extremely limited rights, and most adults are OK with that – and moreover, when it comes up at all, it’s usually a question of who gets to make decisions for the children, not whether the children should be allowed to make their own choices. Whereas I cheered for the youngster who made the news recently for rebelling against his(?) parents by getting himself vaccinated.

          • 10240 says:
            April 12, 2019 at 11:31 am

            we have already established for good and sufficient reasons that parents should be given broad latitude in their own children’s health care decisions and that exceptions need to be at the likely-imminent-death level rather than the maybe-they-might-someday-get-the-measles level.

            As I’m from a country where there are mandatory vaccinations, I don’t think we consider this a well-established principle. Maybe Americans do. (No, they don’t. You can’t take a medicine that hasn’t been approved by the FDA, nor give it to your children. Then again, death or injury resulting from prohibition or inaction is generally judged less harshly than that resulting from compulsion or action.)

            The two issues (that getting vaccinated is a good idea for the child, and that not getting vaccinated puts others in danger) also matter together. When a choice by some people harms a small minority of other people, there is a tradeoff between that harm, and the harm to the people who want to make the choice in question if it’s banned. If there is some good reason for someone to make the choice (e.g. you enjoy eating peanuts), then we should default to putting the burden on those other people (and only consider a ban if the harm is excessive). If there is no good reason to make the choice, then there is a stronger argument for banning it.

            And doesn’t become any more utopian or less prone to abuse when coupled with Power Word: ForTheChildruuuun!

            That side of the tradeoff doesn’t change. The other side changes: people’s own choices harming them is less bad than people being harmed by the government because they are responsible for it, but children being harmed by their parents is as bad as children being harmed by the government (for equivalent harm, IMO).

  3. DragonMilk says:
    April 10, 2019 at 9:58 am

    Fun topic: Per FMA, what would you consider “equivalent exchanges” for possessing the following superpowers to be?

    – Flight
    – Super strength
    – Mind-reading
    – Invisibility
    – Wolverine-like regeneration

    • mendax says:
      April 10, 2019 at 10:34 am

      Mind-reading

      Whenever you read someone’s mind, they also read your mind

      Invisibility

      So long as you are invisible, you are also blind

    • Aftagley says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:17 am

      – Super strength

      Increadibly weak bones.

      – Wolverine-like regeneration

      Deadpool handles this well – covered in constantly regernerating cancerous sores.

      – Flight

      You swallow at least 17 bugs during any transit you make.

      • Well... says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:21 pm

        Super strength
        Increadibly weak bones.

        Instead, how about whenever you have super strength, your mass also multiplies by some huge number, so your super strength really only allows you to function as you normally would rather than being pinned to the floor by gravity.

        • Nornagest says:
          April 11, 2019 at 12:26 am

          That’d end up being a rather useful superpower, maybe moreso than raw super-strength. You’d effectively be a regular dude in a world of Kleenex. Would have its disadvantages, though — using vehicles would be hard, for one.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:06 am

            Larry Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles has people with this self mass manipulation power. Like you said “regular dude in a world of Kleenex”.

        • DragonMilk says:
          April 11, 2019 at 7:51 am

          How would conservation of mass work?

          • Nornagest says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:25 pm

            If you have super strength and aren’t eating a pig a day to fuel it, conservation laws are already out the window.

          • acymetric says:
            April 12, 2019 at 6:21 am

            @Nornagest

            I think we have our answer then.

            Equivalent exchange for super strength: You have to actually consume the calories/nutrients required to expend that amount of energy*

            *You do not have super internal organs, so your ability to consume/digest food is the same as a normal human’s.

          • Lambert says:
            April 12, 2019 at 7:49 am

            What about η?

            All the energy wasted by the muscles also has to go somewhere, so you’re dangerously likely to overheat.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:15 am

            so you’re dangerously likely to overheat.

            Bujold has a version of that for mages in the Penric stories. Probably in other stories set in the same world, but I don’t remember it coming up.

          • DragonMilk says:
            April 12, 2019 at 10:39 am

            I guess you’ll take very steamy dumps/pee like a tea kettle.

    • Walter says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:32 am

      Regeneration – Anything you do swiftly undoes itself, just like anything done to you.

      Flight – Everywhere you go quickly transforms into the place you made your pact, undoing itself when you leave.

    • proyas says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:18 pm

      – Flight
      Flying is very physically taxing, and you collapse at the end and can’t get up again for a duration of time that is linked to how long you just flew.

      – Super strength
      Commensurate loss of fine motor control and dexterity. You are constantly breaking things by accident and breaking keyboards because you press on the keys too hard. You don’t have a love life because you injure partners during sex, and you’re afraid to fight with people under most circumstances because you’ll often kill them no matter how much you try to hit them softly.

      – Mind-reading
      You must be looking into the person’s eyes to mind-read them, the other person also gets access to your thoughts, and it leaves you mentally drained to the point that you might pass out.

      – Invisibility
      Must be done while naked for obvious reasons (also means you can’t carry weapons or tools because they could be seen), doesn’t mask your thermal signature so people can see you with thermographic cameras, and you are still detectable to some animals.

      – Wolverine-like regeneration
      Extremely calorie-intensive, meaning you quickly lose energy while regenerating. Your body will cannibalize your bone and muscle tissue to get the necessary energy and organic matter to replace damaged tissue, and you can’t build new bone and muscle mass any faster than a normal person. You have to carry around IV bags or powdered “milkshake mixes” containing biomolecules that you can rapidly consume in the event of injury to stave off the aforementioned cannibalization process.

    • AG says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:12 pm

      Flight: your landings have the force equal to if you fell from the highest height of your flight.
      Solution: levitate no more than 6 feet off the ground during flights.

    • Windward says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:58 pm

      Inspired by a brand of dream/nightmare I used to have when younger:
      Flight = you’re continually living at a lower gravity than the rest of the people around you. So when you jump, you fly – but you also overshoot your destinations, end up on ceilings and on top of bookshelves, and take a lot of unsolicited trips into the clouds that it takes you a long time to drift back down from.

    • helloo says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:15 pm

      – Flight
      You’re a bird
      – Super strength
      You’re an ant
      – Mind-reading
      Their thoughts are now your thoughts too.
      – Invisibility
      You’re air (or at least similarly dense)
      – Wolverine-like regeneration
      You’re a cancer?

  4. Aftagley says:
    April 10, 2019 at 11:09 am

    RPG Question:

    I’ve been playing D&D for just over a decade now, split up between around a half-dozen groups. I’ve been a player, I’ve been a DM, I’ve played with small friend groups and I’ve done the in-store large group of strangers thing. I really enjoy the social aspect out of it and the cooperative puzzle-solving it presents players with. Pretty much every group i’ve been in has felt unique and left me with a different impression on the hobby.

    The only constant is that I’ve always hated the combat. 5e is better than some of the previous ones, but I just don’t find fighting with these rules engaging. It always feels like there’s an optimal move you could be making (IE Eldritch Blast warlock) and doing anything else is just deliberately handicapping yourself and slowing down the group. I guess the decision on whether or not you should blow spell slots is somewhat interesting, but you normally know if you’re in a fight where you need to expend resources or if you’re just battling some mooks.

    Unlike some other stuff in D&D the problem exists at all levels – if you’re all low levels no one has any really interesting options yet so combat is just the same basic attacks happening over and over. At high levels the complexity ramps up, but then so does the turn length and number of times people need to start pouring through books.

    This has led me to mostly avoid combat when I’m DMing; I basically treat it as either an avoidable option for the group or as a fail state and find other ways to reward XP. My average session will have maybe two fights per night lasting no more than a quarter or so of the time. This works for me, but when I’m in someone else’s group and 3 hours out of a 5 hour session are just going around in a circle hitting a goblin it makes me want to pull my hair out. Does anyone have any advice on how to find the fun here?

    • woah77 says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:13 am

      Play a different game. I’m going to be totally honest: D&D is geared for combat. Lots of other games either settle combat more quickly, or have a much more fluid form for it. I find that I usually enjoy playing in games with a similar ratio of combat to roleplay as yourself, and I’ve moved away from D&D as a result of that.

      • Aftagley says:
        April 10, 2019 at 11:18 am

        Any recommendations?

        • Hoopyfreud says:
          April 10, 2019 at 11:28 am

          What do you like about D&D?

          • Aftagley says:
            April 10, 2019 at 11:56 am

            Shared storytelling aspect. The DM comes in with a framework and gets to provide it to the players, who interpret it cooperatively.

            It’s a fun improvisation game.

            It puts you in ethical/moral/decision making situations you don’t get to consider in your real life.

          • woah77 says:
            April 10, 2019 at 12:10 pm

            Ah, Tales from the Loop is another good choice for shared storytelling.

          • Hoopyfreud says:
            April 10, 2019 at 12:49 pm

            @Aftagley

            I would strongly, strongly recommend Blades in the Dark, then. FATE or Apocalypse World may be up your alley, but I kind of hate them. If your interest is mostly in creativity/improvisation, I think you may enjoy games which don’t have strictly differentiated mechanics or drive you towards rigid play patterns. D&D does both.

          • Plumber says:
            April 10, 2019 at 9:29 pm

            @Aftagley

            Shared storytelling aspect. The DM comes in with a framework and gets to provide it to the players, who interpret it cooperatively.

            It’s a fun improvisation game.

            It puts you in ethical/moral/decision making situations you don’t get to consider in your real life.

            Use the King Arthur Pendragon rules then.

            Please check out these links:

            https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VACoyvdUdJwnw_luqmcG-F-RA9NsP_f-/view?usp=sharing

            https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c9_lEuH_0F_g1VfzbwrW0ql8er-KvGRt/view?usp=sharing

        • woah77 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 11:30 am

          Well my current favorite is Mutant Chronicles, which is a bit like Warhammer 3k. Humanity is divided into several corporations and the church and they fight each other and the Dark Symmetry (Khaos, but not). It has several anticipated modes of play, from Us versus the Evil (combat galore) to We rag tag freelancers (Think Shadowrun) to Uncover the mystery of the Eldritch horrors (think Call of Cthulhu). Sure, you expect there to be combat in the modes other than fighting the evil, but it’s much more of a mystery or urban campaign, where combat either occurs at the big bad or because someone failed horribly.

          Other good games for low combat are World of Darkness games, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, and… that’s the ones coming to mind off hand.

        • aristides says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:36 pm

          I always recommend World of Darkness to people that don’t like combat. WoD mechanics are absolutely broken with little effort made to balance them, so I usually vouch for cinematic battle descriptions with minimal rolls. Mage is even better, especially at high levels. Once you get to a certain point, battles are decided by who was better prepared and are settled in an instant. It has very good lore and world building that really allow shared story telling as long as you have a flexible DM. I will warn you that WoD is one of the worse games to play with a rules lawyer, so if your group has many of them, look for a different game.

        • dndnrsn says:
          April 10, 2019 at 1:28 pm

          @Aftagley

          It puts you in ethical/moral/decision making situations you don’t get to consider in your real life.

          Delta Green, already mentioned by woah77, sounds right up your alley. You play as agents of a maybe-a-bit-less-moral-than-it-pretends-to-be secret government agency, fighting a neverending losing war against unspeakable horrors. Your sanity will decay, and so will your personal relationships. You will get orders that are sketchy.

          It has the added bonus of being built on the Call of Cthulhu ruleset, which hasn’t really changed very much since the beginning, so there’s a whole stock of scenarios and such to rifle through. Plus it’s not much work to turn it around and use the superior DG rules to run a CoC game.

          It is quite low combat, because combat is deadly – the deadlier you make combat, the less players will want to engage in it.

          If you can’t get people to play anything other than D&D (and frankly, CoC is hardly an out-there fringe game) then I second Nabil – see if you can convince them to play a copy of a retroclone like Labyrinth Lord (available for free, mimics the early-80s B/X rules). Combat is deadlier and much less fiddly.

      • sandoratthezoo says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:38 pm

        Completely this. Play D&D only if you, first, like the combat, or second, can’t get a quorum to play another game. There are lots of games that take very different approaches to combat.

        You could try FATE, Apocalypse World (or its various descendents), Blades in the Night, Call of Cthulhu, the Star Wars games that are played with the funny dice, or many, many others.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:39 pm

      This has led me to mostly avoid combat when I’m DMing; I basically treat it as either an avoidable option for the group or as a fail state and find other ways to reward XP.

      Most people still don’t play it this way, but the official rules about XP for the last two decades have been very clear that experience is awarded for overcoming enemies and not just for killing them. If your players sneak past, scare off, bribe, befriend or seduce a monster then they should get the same experience points as they would have for beating them senseless.

      I emphasize this point a lot for my players and they learned very quickly that trying to avoid a fight is much much more profitable than jumping in. Worst case scenario, they can always fall back on killing the monsters if their original plan fails.

      That said, modern D&D is very focused on tactical combat. If you want a more exploration-focused game it might be better to play a pre-WotC edittion or a retroclone.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:46 pm

        The 3.5 DMG said double XP for overcoming monsters non-violently. Which is trivial since Diplomacy checks are a flat throw of the dice by the player rather than a saving throw that scales with the victim’s level.
        My Little Pony is basically someone’s 3.5 campaign that their players browbeat into running RAW.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:51 pm

          Huh, I’m going to have to check that once I get back from work because I ran that game for years and never noticed that rule.

          And yeah, Diplomancy in 3.5 was absurd. I was very skeptical about bounded accuracy when it was first announced but it really did save 5e from a lot of the goofier problems in that edition.

        • Nornagest says:
          April 10, 2019 at 1:24 pm

          Well, trivial is overstating it a bit — it is a flat roll (although negotiations are opposed rolls, and it’s not clear when a flat diplomacy check becomes a negotiation), but the DCs are pretty steep. To reliably do the Diplomancer thing, you generally need to build a character for it.

          It’s still probably the most broken skill in 3rd Edition, though. Pathfinder added the following obvious rule patch:

          Diplomacy is generally ineffective in combat and against creatures that intend to harm you or your allies in the immediate future. Any attitude shift caused through Diplomacy generally lasts for 1d4 hours but can last much longer or shorter depending upon the situation (GM discretion).

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            April 10, 2019 at 1:39 pm

            Well yes, it’s a “build”, but it’s not a hard one to stumble into if you choose Bard in a Core-only game. Talking to Indifferent people for a minute will turn them into Helpers (“Protect, back up, heal, aid”) on a D20 roll of 30.
            Level 4 Half-Elf with 18 in CHA at Level 1, which a beginner may well know to do with a Bard: 5(CHA mod)+2(race)+7(ranks)+6(you took the synergy skills) = +20, succeeding on a 10+.

    • John Schilling says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:32 pm

      I share your taste in playing style, and your frustration with D&D. If you’re finding the ~75% of the gaming time that isn’t fighting to be still enjoyable and rewarding, and you find that D&D is adequate for that part, that’s not bad. And I agree with woah77 that you should be ideally playing another game, but most of the other games out there either aren’t very well developed or are very niche-optimized and might not be what your players are looking for.

      If you are stuck with D&D because it’s what your players are familiar with and it meets your other needs, you’re going to have to finesse the combat issues somehow. I haven’t played 4e or 5e; 3.5e and Pathfinder I think have a sweet spot running from roughly L3 to L8 with non-munchkin players, where everybody has enough tactical options to keep things interesting but you don’t have to dive into the rulebooks every turn and you haven’t all powerbuilt to something that as you note really has to do the same move every round. So if you can convince your players to retire their characters at 9th level or so, the way Gygax and Arenson intended, that might help.

      Another thing that might help is the discussion we had an OT ago about how real people tried real hard not to get killed in medieval battles, and apply this to fantasy monsters and NPCs. Any set of adversaries that your PCs can defeat in melee, won’t melee your PCs if they can possibly help it. If they are instead e.g. tossing javelins and keeping their distance, then the PCs can’t default to “I attack the enemy immediately in front of me with my best melee combo, because anything else would expose me to an attack of opportunity or be otherwise stupid”. More maneuver, more room for tactical decision-making, probably more engagement and fun.

    • RDNinja says:
      April 11, 2019 at 9:13 am

      So is your issue that you want less combat, or better combat? If you want to shake up your D&D fights, come up with gonzo set pieces that change up the battlefield. I’ve played combats that took place between dog sleds hurtling down a mountain, or in an elevator as it was free-falling down a mineshaft, etc. Or play a system like Feng Shui, where over-the-top stunts are the norm.

      If you want less combat, there’s tons of less combat-focused systems out there (it’s a big trend right now). I’ll shamelessly plug the one my brother wrote (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/262890), which has zero combat mechanics, but just pick the genre and you can find something for it.

  5. Evan Þ says:
    April 10, 2019 at 11:27 am

    John Schilling for Secretary of Homeland Security if they’re going for someone who’ll actually be effective, rather than someone who’ll maximally reassure the voters. Then again, if the voters chose Yang/Alexander, they’re probably focused on things other than reassurance.

    bean for Secretary of Defense. The navy will still be relevant!

    Deiseach for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Her confirmation will be hotly fought, but her experience will hopefully prove relevant, and her views on welfare fraud might actually help Yang and Alexander get their UBI through – at least by distracting the opposition, if not by showcasing “let’s give it to the honest people too!”

    • bean says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:40 am

      I’d give John State instead of Homeland Security. He’s already demonstrated his diplomatic prowess, and it’s a much more important post than running DHS.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:40 am

      No offense but as a biomedical scientist please God don’t put Deiseach in charge of the NIH. American academic scientists are on a short enough leash as it is, even more ‘ethics’ and ‘oversight’ would strangle our work. You can’t count people who die from the absence of drugs that were never developed, but if we could it would be a crisis on par with the worst epidemics.

      Maybe if you split the health off from human services.

    • Deiseach says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:40 pm

      I thank you for the kind thought, but I think I’d slot in better into the newly-created Department of Who Do We Want To Offend Today? where my brief is to engage in diplomatic exchanges with various parties in the cause of settling vexed questions amicably.

      Given my track record of Fighting With Strangers On The Internet, I could reliably get anyone’s back up within a short period of time, with reactions ranging from storming off in a huff (or a minute and a huff) to pistols at dawn to you do realise this means war!

      As you may see from Nabil’s comment, even the very thought of me having any kind of access to a lever remotely connected with power will bring sensible persons out in a cold sweat, so the job would be oxo! 😀

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:
        April 10, 2019 at 5:21 pm

        Maybe you could be in charge of The Spectacle– getting people too distracted to notice what’s important.

        • albatross11 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 5:41 pm

          So we’re putting her in charge of Twitter?

        • Nick says:
          April 10, 2019 at 6:17 pm

          Ooh! Ooh! Deiseach for Press Secretary!

          ETA: I’m imagining this being a weekly occurrence.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:
          April 11, 2019 at 6:02 am

          More seriously, how about a new possibly: Secretary of Bureaucratic User Interfaces? I’m not sure how this could be set up with enough power to be effective, but at least it should come with a nice salary.

  6. dick says:
    April 10, 2019 at 11:35 am

    Continuing last OT’s thread about UI lag: I made a little tool to test your ability to detect it here and two people (Douglas Knight and woah77) reported distinguishing very low values, like 15ms, using a “tap left then right quickly and see whether the second one registers” method. This seems like it’s somewhat different from the “tap left or right and see whether you can detect lag in how long it takes the thing to move left or right”. To test this, I modified the tool so that it will not ignore keypress 2 if keypress 1 wasn’t released yet*. Feel free to try it out and see if your scores change.

    (If you’re curious, the reason that was there was to keep you from just holding down one key, which for some reason the browser interprets as a lot of very fast “keydown” events, even though the key only went down once. The reason I was blocking that is that the app measures DOM latency and adjusts for it, and holding down an arrow key breaks that by generating negative DOM latency. You can make it go back to the old behavior by opening the console and typing “blockFastKeyPresses = true”.)

    • Aftagley says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:09 pm

      *Bug report*

      It only ignores the FIRST keypress when a key is held down. After that it will allow new input.

      *Bug report concludes*

      With this change I can’t percieve a difference between lag and no lag past around 20ms.

      • dick says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:36 pm

        Er, why is that a problem?

        Anyway, 20ms still seems very good to me but I’m too busy with metamechanical’s game to test my own at the moment!

    • HeelBearCub says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:45 pm

      Almost everyone is going to be testing this on a 60 Hz monitor. As such I would doubt that you can actually experience latency values below 17 ms.

      • dick says:
        April 10, 2019 at 1:01 pm

        What they’re actually detecting is the difference between their usual latency and an artificially-added additional latency.

        • HeelBearCub says:
          April 10, 2019 at 8:36 pm

          No. This is incorrect.

          They are perceiving a gap between when the key input and when they perceive output. The output can only come every 16.67 ms on a 60Hz monitor. Basically sometimes output will be a frame “off” , sometimes it won’t, but you are always waiting an average of half a frame anyway.

          This kind of test is very poor for testing what you sort of lag you can perceive anyway. A graphical scene turning in response to your control input is very different than a static “jump” of a discrete distance. That kind of jump isn’t what we are optimized to detect.

          You can reliably tell the difference between output at 60 Hz and 144 Hz, which should tell you that we can easily tell the difference below 16ms.
          If you haven’t ever experienced the difference, you may doubt this, but it is absolutely true for the bulk of the populace.

          • dick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:12 am

            No. This is incorrect.

            I admire your confidence in your opinion, but read my comment a little more closely. With latency set to 500, what you perceive is a latency of either X or X+500 (where X is some base latency incurred by your monitor’s refresh rate, your keyboard’s polling rate, etc) but what you are detecting the difference between is a latency of X and a latency of X+500.

            Your point about the lower limit on X is valid. For a user with a 60Hz monitor, there is (at least) a +/- 8.3ms variance to X. And that’ll be exacerbated by random latency caused by other processes. But in practice, all that means is that users will need to make several keypresses. That’s been my experience, can anyone confirm? More formally, what I’m asserting is that, at low-ish (<50 let's say) latencies, users will consistently get better scores using multiple keypresses-per-trial, compared to limiting themselves to pressing an arrow key once and then making a decision.

            This kind of test is very poor for testing what you sort of lag you can perceive anyway. A graphical scene turning in response to your control input is very different than a static “jump” of a discrete distance. That kind of jump isn’t what we are optimized to detect.

            Sounds plausible; source?

            You can reliably tell the difference between output at 60 Hz and 144 Hz, which should tell you that we can easily tell the difference below 16ms. If you haven’t ever experienced the difference, you may doubt this, but it is absolutely true for the bulk of the populace.

            Distinguishing different display refresh rates seems like a pretty different thing. Some evidence: last thread someone said he couldn’t distinguish below 60ms on my app, but if you’re right about the bulk of the populace, that same person can probably distinguish a 60Hz display from 144Hz, which is ~10ms.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 11, 2019 at 12:13 pm

            @dick:
            My source is playing games at 60 Hz and 144 Hz and the broad community of people who play games. There are “trials” of this over and over and over.

            Put another way, this is just a huge increase in the amount of information available to you about the connection between your actions and the change on the screen. Every pixel changes, and they all change 144 times per second. This is in contrast with a select few pixels changing once.

            Or, you can look at what happens when you double the framerate of a blockbuster movie. Admittedly this is changing from 24 FPS to 48 FPS, but it has a huge affect on what you perceive. That 24 FPS is hiding flaws in the live action, allowing the brain to fill on a more pleasing fantasy.

          • dick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:07 pm

            My source is playing games at 60 Hz and 144 Hz…

            I asked for a source about the idea that people can detect lower latencies when the whole screen changes compared to when one small block moves. That’s separate from refresh rates, which are kind of interesting but a whole different thing from UI lag, which is what launched this whole discussion and caused me to knock out an app to test it. I don’t think anyone disputes that 144Hz monitors are noticeably better than 60Hz, and if I say anything else that sounds as if I do, again, I ask you to read it more carefully.

            So to clarify and restate: the idea that UI lag might be more noticeable in a full-screen view (e.g. turning your head in Skyrim) as compared to a small part of the display moving (e.g. a block falling in Tetris) sounds plausible, I’m not claiming it’s false, but I’m asking for the evidence on which you confidently declared it to be true without qualifiers. If I changed the app so that you’re moving a full-screen image (a 2D static one, not a rendered view) instead of a small red block, are you asserting that people could get lower scores? If that’s not right, what is?

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:45 pm

            @dick:
            Did you read my second paragraph that’s giving you a plausible reason why the full screen rendering matters? There is simply more, and more continuous, information. That’s fairly incontrovertible. The more complex and difficult the task the “game” is asking you to complete, the more the lag will be felt.

            The task you are asking us to complete is to assess “did they box move?” This is a dead simple task. Even animating a dot moving fluidly around the screen in response to mouse movement is going to be more “difficult”.

            You are the one who is eschewing both studies, as well the wisdom of the “crowd” of gamers. It seems a little off you are asking me to cite something?

          • dick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 2:37 pm

            There is simply more, and more continuous, information. That’s fairly incontrovertible.

            Hah! No, that’s plausible. And “You can distinguish latency more finely with a small block, because less information is easier to process quickly” is also plausible. I don’t know which is true, and I try not to assume things are true just because the hand-wavey explanation for it sounds more believable than the hand-wavey explanation against it.

            Even animating a dot moving fluidly around the screen in response to mouse movement is going to be more “difficult”.

            This also seems plausible to me, but if we were going to test it, it should probably be two different things: full-screen vs small-block, and discrete-movement vs fluid-movement.

            You are the one who is eschewing both studies, as well the wisdom of the “crowd” of gamers. It seems a little off you are asking me to cite something?

            Hey, we’re just chatting. You flatly declared something to be true, and I said, okay, how do you know that? If the answer is “it just seems pretty obvious” that’s fine, I’m not the rationality police here to arrest you for holding an opinion too strongly. But neither am I convinced by your conviction.

            Also, which two studies are you referring to?

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 11, 2019 at 3:24 pm

            I wasn’t saying “both studies …”. I was saying “both … studies and readily available large scale empirical evidence”. Sorry if my wording wasn’t clear.

            I don’t have studies, only my own anecdotal evidence as well as the wisdom of the gamer crowd. People happily pay to be able to set their frame rates above their refresh rates. People pay to reduce their monitor lag from 5 ms to 1 ms. Gamers interested in PVP performance disable VSync/FreeSync/GSync even on 144 Hz monitors (which increases lag at most 1 frame) and accept screen tearing as a result.

          • dick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:30 pm

            I wasn’t saying “both studies …”. I was saying “both … studies…

            That just changes it from “two studies” to “more than one study”. I think the number of studies I’m currently eschewing is 0, but maybe the difference between 0 and 2 is too small to distinguish 🙂

            …and readily available large scale empirical evidence.

            I don’t think the fact that people buy things means they work. People buy shielded HDMI cables. I used to know a semi-wannabe-pro-gamer who swore that he missed ults because his keypresses were too fast for USB 2 to keep up with.

            Anyway, this is getting kind of non-productive so I bit the bullet and looked up research, of which unsurprisingly there is a lot. The first Google result was Input Latency Detection in Expert-Level Gamers, which found that a group of “expert level” Super Smash Bros Melee players could distinguish a mean latency of 48ms (as compared to 114ms for non-gamers). And it turns out they had the exact same issue we did!

            Three EVGP [members of the expert group] needed to be excluded for devising a strategy so powerful that it allowed them to “beat” the test with extremely low values. The device would lock out button presses during the fire animation, so participants learned the fastest button timing possible in the no-delay condition and then attempted to replicate it on each critical trial. If their input would trigger two flashes, it would be a no-delay condition, and if it triggered only one flash then it must have been delayed by some amount, since their second press was locked out. As such, it turned from a perception task into a test of timing two inputs together…

            That is precisely what drunkfish and woah77 described doing in the last OT. Anyway, I skimmed a few more and it looks like the results were all in the 25-50 range.

            (And since my spidey sense is tingling, allow me to say once again that no, that doesn’t mean those studies are arguing that you can’t really tell the difference between 144Hz and 60Hz, what they tested and what my app tests is different from that)

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 11, 2019 at 7:46 pm

            @dick:
            Let me quote you from last OT:

            I saw someone mention 15ms being noticeable and doubted it, but rather than doing research (boring!)

            That is what I was referring to when I said you were eschewing studies.

            As to the study you linked, while it is interesting, its not testing the same thing that the gamers are claiming. In fact, we have a clue listed in the study itself:

            A frequently cited study demonstrated that chess masters could memorize a large number of pieces compared to a control group conditional on the fact that the positions were in positions that looked like they could have come from actual games; in positions where the pieces were placed randomly, the expert players performed roughly the same as the control group

            Being able to detect small differences in a complex task you are expertly familiar with is just flat out different than a novel simple task. This kind of domain specific expertise is demonstrated over and over, I believe.

          • dick says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:17 am

            As to the study you linked, while it is interesting, its not testing the same thing that the gamers are claiming.

            It would’ve been neat if you had spelled out what you think they are claiming. If it’s something like, “that fancy video card I spent $1000 on to shave a few ms off my UI latency wasn’t wasted!” then I agree. Shaving 1ms off their UI lag means they will see things and react to them 1ms sooner than before, regardless of whether they scored 1 or 10 or 100 on my app.

            If it means “if you added a few ms to my UI lag, I’d be able to tell!” then I disagree, because the best available data suggests they can’t. If you’re convinced otherwise based on an assumed similarity between a test of visual acuity and a test of memory, that’s no skin off my nose but maybe a forum explicitly devoted to skepticism and rational inquiry isn’t the place to make converts.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 12, 2019 at 10:01 am

            @dick:
            The study itself makes the claim, so I don’t have to, but I will add the clear implication here is that they can make the detection within the game.

            Conventional wisdom within these communities says that stronger players have an increased ability to discern increasingly small levels of input latency compared to weaker ones (e.g. “You can’t tell it’s delayed by 1 frame [16.66ms] because you aren’t good at the game yet”), but the upper limit of this phenomenon is highly contested even within the community.

            With that, I think I am done.

          • dick says:
            April 12, 2019 at 11:22 am

            I wrote that thing as a bit of fun and I’m glad some people took it that way, but I also regret posting it due to this pointless and frustrating discussion.

      • ilikekittycat says:
        April 10, 2019 at 9:05 pm

        Also, whether vsync/gsync is “on” in graphics/monitor properties, whether your browser’s internal tick rate is fine-grained enough (I had to specify layout.frame_rate/layers.acceleration.force-enabled/ layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled in about:config in firefox to get the smoothness to match a 144hz monitor; i don’t even know if chrome allows you to set such a thing) and whether your keyboard/mouse polling rate is sufficiently frequent all matter. If any one of them is too laggy it’s gonna keep the whole thing from working right

        • dick says:
          April 11, 2019 at 10:15 am

          I believe all modern browsers sync redraws correctly to both 60Hz and 144Hz displays nowadays (as long as the person who made the page used requestAnimationFrame() correctly, which I believe I did). But also see my comment above about multiple keypresses per trial to correct for random latency.

    • Dan L says:
      April 10, 2019 at 5:50 pm

      On my personal machine, I can visibly distinguish latency of ~45 ms and above. Below that level, I’m instead relying on a perceived sluggishness in the controls until ~28 ms at around 90% accuracy. Below that level, my accuracy rapidly degrades until it’s imperceptively close to chance at ~22 ms. I’ll guess that I could get a few more ms edge if the testing method was mouse based with a large, detailed field of view, but that’s just speculation.

      On my work laptop, all of the above numbers are ~10 ms higher. I know that the tool is written such that it should be adding a fixed amount of lag so the deltas should be the same, but my guess is that a higher base amount of lag makes it harder to distinguish. Alternatively, Chrome is fucking with processor load in the background and this adds an asymmetric inconsistency.

      I found the method Douglas and woah mentioned, but didn’t use it. I used a single right-key press from the starting position, resetting and repeating if necessary. Notably, I found it very easy to distinguish the no-lag condition if it followed the lag condition, but other sequences were about the same.

      I play a fair number of fast-twitch PC games, competitively but not professionally.

      • dick says:
        April 11, 2019 at 11:56 am

        It sounds like you did a lot of trials, interesting.

        I’ll guess that I could get a few more ms edge if the testing method was mouse based with a large, detailed field of view, but that’s just speculation.

        HBC said something similar, in an authoritative manner but without a citation. Would something like a full-screen display of a picture that moves around when you move the mouse be what you’re describing? It sounds plausible to me and I might take a stab at it but it’d be helpful to have a more precise description of what you’re imagining first.

        • Dan L says:
          April 13, 2019 at 1:58 pm

          The brain has a few different pathways of interpreting visual information, and they function at different speeds and with different levels of conscious cognition. There’re plenty of ways these interface in interesting ways, such as blindsight, wagon-wheel effects, or even the very fact that a fast slideshow becomes a movie. This probably isn’t news to you.

          As I alluded to in my post above, I’m using a qualitatively different mechanism to distinguish latency at lower values; my guess is that I’m leveraging a different mechanism of perception. It wouldn’t surprise me if “sluggish controls” is a mild manifestation of the same thing that gives some people motion sickness in VR. (Notably, far fewer people get motion sick if you can lock a framerate north of 90 Hz, and latency is usually implicated as the relevant factor.)

          Before you go to any effort of writing anything though, I’m a little confused as to what you’re looking to show. Above you wrote to HBC:

          If it means “if you added a few ms to my UI lag, I’d be able to tell!” then I disagree, because the best available data suggests they can’t.

          The low-level pathways of perception I think are involved are quite sensitive to different kinds of stimulus, and I think results would differ based on how the input is presented. I used the single-press method not because it was reliable (it wasn’t), but because my first impression was consistently the most sensitive before unconsciously re-adjusting to the new setting. Even sticking to the red-box method, I bet you could show more sensitivity by giving the “no-latency” and the “latency” conditions at the same time on different sides of the screen, and asking the participant to pick which one was which.

          (As an aside, it’s interesting that the paper you linked uses Melee players as the cohort – that’s actually the game where I probably could clock my fastest reaction times, general timing sensitivity, and burst apm; but for input latency I would think to go for an FPS instead for the reasons above.)

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 13, 2019 at 5:59 pm

            I bet you could show more sensitivity by giving the “no-latency” and the “latency” conditions at the same time on different sides of the screen, and asking the participant to pick which one was which.

            I mean, put them both center field of view. Far easier.

            The problem simply becomes that you can tell which one animated first. Dick isn’t disputing this even at very high frame rates.

            But this should make it trivially obvious that very simple tests can’t reliably discern any (total) latency under the frame rate. Only a series of tests will do this.

  7. bean says:
    April 10, 2019 at 11:45 am

    Ooh, that’s a good game. Here’s the full list of cabinet positions, with my suggestions to fill them:

    State: John Schilling
    Treasury: ADBG? (I’m considering giving this to David Friedman, but that could end poorly)
    Defense: bean
    Attorney General: Brad?
    Interior:
    Agriculture:
    Commerce:
    Labor: Plumber
    Health and Human Services: I guess I’ll go with Deiseach.
    Housing and Urban Development: I’m guessing this gets abolished.
    Transportation: CatCube
    Energy:
    Education:
    Veterans Affairs: Incurian?
    Homeland Security: cassander?

    I’m going to ignore the other cabinet-level positions because few of them are interesting.

    Hmm…
    Lot of slots to fill still.

    • cassander says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:48 am

      I’d prefer to see JS at NASA. We need a secretary of state that’s more interested in and better at reforming the department of state (and much of the upper level nat sec establishment with it) than being the ambassador in chief. Plus I already have a secret plan for turning the state department we have into the colonial office we actually need.

      • bean says:
        April 10, 2019 at 11:53 am

        While I agree that NASA has not been doing a good job since well before I was born, and that it could use reform, it’s not enough of a priority for me to put someone as capable as John there.

        I like the way you’re thinking on the State Department, though. Hmm. So if I stay at Defense, we give you State, and John gets to be National Security Advisor? Or maybe he goes to Energy.

        • cassander says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:17 pm

          Maybe we give up the DoD as a loss and give you the Navy and John the newly re-established Department of War.

        • bean says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:20 pm

          I actually had exactly the same thought. Repeal the National Security Act of 1947. It never really worked all that well.

          Edit: On the other hand, this doesn’t let me gut the Army and Air Force like I was planning to. Decisions, decisions…

      • Nornagest says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:00 pm

        Plus I already have a secret plan for turning the state department we have into the colonial office we actually need.

        Name the office what it’s really for, bordering on dysphemism? That’s kind of a Banksian move. Defense would go back to being War, of course. Energy should be something like Nuclear Infrastructure, except that that’s not snappy enough. Homeland Security begs for something but I’m not sure what.

        • cassander says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:04 pm

          >Homeland Security begs for something but I’m not sure what.

          Department of Wishful Thinking?

        • sfoil says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:25 pm

          Rename “Homeland Security” to “Interior” like everywhere else on the planet. Rename the Department of the Interior to Stewardship or Wilderness or something.

          Although this will end the hilarity of Americans not realizing that the $ETHNICstan Interior Ministry is the secret police, and visiting foreigners wondering why the secret police are responsible for a bunch of empty space, it’s the right thing to do.

          Alternately, rename DHS to “Defense”, since that of course will be freed up by rectifying the name of the current DoD to the Department of War.

        • Erusian says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:34 pm

          Renamed Homeland Security to either Security or Interior. If Interior, call it Resource Management or something. If we’re really being honest, the Department of Everything Else.

        • Clutzy says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:59 pm

          Homeland would be renamed, “Boring and ineffective anti-terrorism efforts.”

    • Randy M says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:50 am

      Health and Human Services: I guess I’ll go with Deiseach.
      Housing and Urban Development: I’m guessing this gets abolished.

      Why not move D to HUD?

      Funny we don’t seem to have too many other medical professionals posting here regularly. Maybe they’re too busy? Or medical posts have gotten too infrequent.

      • Garrett says:
        April 11, 2019 at 7:46 am

        I’m technically a medical professional (EMT) in my spare time. And given that emergency medicine is currently run by the department of transportation and EMS personnel aren’t viewed as medical providers by the Federal government, I’d love to take a stab at it.

    • Walter says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:59 am

      I feel like there was someone who did a long effort post on modern farming and how california was, like, double good at it because they took it mad serious. That post’s author for Agriculture, because maybe they have been on a farm?

      • Erusian says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:32 pm

        I don’t recall talking about California farming specifically, though I do know about it. I have made several posts about governmental agricultural policies and how their priority is basically to suppress the price of food. And how big farming companies have been doing all kinds of scummy things to farmers. And US land management. So it at least sounds like something I might have written?

        Anyway, I have indeed been on a farm and I feel passionately about AgDep, USDA, and Interior. Then again, I also feel strongly about Commerce, Labor, HUD… Basically the economy.

    • Skivverus says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:07 pm

      Freddie DeBoer for Education? Definitely a political pick, but it is his area of expertise.
      Housing and Urban Development: Fold into Transportation so CatCube can work with it too, call the whole thing “Infrastructure”
      Commerce: David Friedman, clearly.

      • bean says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:20 pm

        I’d be nervous about deBoer. I’m trying not to be too political with my cabinet picks, but he’s way out there.
        I like the plan for HUD.
        And you’re obviously correct about Commerce.

      • johan_larson says:
        April 10, 2019 at 1:45 pm

        Can I nominate myself for the Education job? I want to try Hard Cheap College and 10-Enter-1-Leaves U for real.

      • Paul Brinkley says:
        April 10, 2019 at 2:34 pm

        I would have put Dr. Friedman on Education, personally, but Commerce could work. Perhaps dndrsn as SecEd?

        ADBG seems more of a fit for OMB than Treasury.

        Null Hypothesis is SecEnergy, for sure.

        Larry Kestenbaum as AG.

        HeelBearCub as SecLabor?
        Plumber as SecHUD.
        Hoopyfreud as SecInterior, if he were to return.
        Controls Freak as SecDef, or DNI.
        Deiseach as Poet Laureate. Or UN Representative. 😀

        • Hoopyfreud says:
          April 11, 2019 at 1:26 pm

          I’m back, actually. Thanks for the nod. Also TIL the EPA is not actually under Interior, but is, like the CIA, headed up by a “cabinet-level official” who isn’t a cabinet member.

        • HeelBearCub says:
          April 11, 2019 at 3:25 pm

          I’m just curious why Labor…

        • Paul Brinkley says:
          April 15, 2019 at 5:07 am

          I’m just curious why Labor…

          Something you alluded to much earlier (you had adopted some people? were helping them get financially settled? I forget now) suggested you might know more about this than any other SSCer except perhaps Plumber. Thin gruel to base this on, but given that this was a lighthearted thread…

        • HeelBearCub says:
          April 15, 2019 at 11:36 am

          @Paul Brinkley:
          Ah, I understand now.

          Yeah, we have “semi-adopted” a couple of young men, and have helped another family get back on their feet after a really rough go. People keep saying it’s “special”, and I guess it’s not all that usual, but I wouldn’t really know how to have not done so.

          It’s sort of like being a trained doctor and seeing someone in the throws of a cardiac event. You are going to stop and help if you can, even if you are a dermatologist.

        • Controls Freak says:
          April 15, 2019 at 12:12 pm

          > Controls Freak as SecDef, or DNI.

          Aw, thanks! Given that we have an embarrassment of riches in eligible people for SecDef and that I’ve been remarkably absent in an undisclosed location a lot, I would be pleased to neither confirm nor deny my candidacy for DNI.

    • Eric Rall says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:29 pm

      David Friedman might be a candidate for Attorney General. He is a law professor by trade, after all.

      Or, given his policy preferences, you could merge any the departments you want to abolish or privatize into one big department and put him in charge of winding them down.

      • Erusian says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:37 pm

        “Secretary of Don’t Make Me Come Over There”?

        “I’m sorry, your department has failed me for the last time. I have appointed your new head… David Friedman.”

        • Le Maistre Chat says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:43 pm

          Darth Vader breathing

        • Walter says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:45 pm

          My Dad worked at GE a while back, or at one of its other names, and he tells the following story.

          He was walking along at HQ when his guide pulled him suddenly, bodily, out of the hallway. Jack Welch was going by and he didn’t want to be seen.

          Dad’s like “Huh? Shouldn’t we say hi to the big boss?”

          Local: “Nope, they call him Neutron Jack.”

          Dad: “?”

          Local: “Only the buildings remained…”

      • bean says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:48 pm

        He wasn’t a law professor. He was an economics professor at a law school. And the reason I didn’t give him the Treasury was because I was afraid he’d try to close it down.

        Maybe we can make him Ambassador to Israel, and he can promote his No State Solution…

      • albatross11 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 2:06 pm

        I like the idea of David being given a cabinet posts, just for the sheer perverse joy of having an anarchist as a high government official.

    • John Schilling says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:33 pm

      State: John Schilling

      <whinyvoice>Do I haaaaave to?</whinyvoice>

      I’ve been a fly on the wall for just enough real-world diplomacy to know I really don’t want to make a career out of it. And the backstabby-ness of the fictional version wouldn’t be good for my mental health either.

      But NASA isn’t a cabinet position, so doesn’t quite fit the OP’s mandate.

      Plus I already have a secret plan for turning the state department we have into the colonial office we actually need.

      OK, here’s the deal. I’ll accept State, for the good of the Republic, if we go with cassander’s plan here.

      Also, as soon as we make the name change official, I’m going to want NASA placed under the Colonial Office to make it clear just what the Agency’s mandate really is.

      • Erusian says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:35 pm

        So, are we going full China/Rome here? “Office of Barbarians” responsible for dealing with people who are unfortunate not to be as civilized as us? (And managing those who are civilized enough to have figured out they should be listening to us?)

      • bean says:
        April 10, 2019 at 12:45 pm

        I know that running State won’t be nearly as much fun as running either the DoD or the reestablished Navy Department, but you’re definitely our designated international relations guy and someone has to do it.

        • Evan Þ says:
          April 10, 2019 at 12:58 pm

          but you’re definitely our designated international relations guy and someone has to do it.

          Can’t we just throw up our hands and have you conduct all our international relations as Secretary of the Navy?

          Or put David Friedman on the job with his policy of making sure there aren’t any other governments for us to have relations with?

        • bean says:
          April 10, 2019 at 1:01 pm

          Can’t we just throw up our hands and have you conduct all our international relations as Secretary of the Navy?

          “I guess that’s why they call it gunboat diplomacy.”
          But seriously, no. I want to be Secretary of State about as much as John does, and have a much better excuse to not do the job.

          Or put David Friedman on the job with his policy of making sure there aren’t any other governments for us to have relations with?

          While I like this idea, I see a number of practical problems with it.

      • Eric Rall says:
        April 10, 2019 at 1:28 pm

        I’d keep the State Department, but organize it internally into offices based on types of states we’re dealing with.

        The Office for Colonial and Commonwealth Affairs would cover territories (incorporated or unincorporated), as well as anywhere we’re occupying, “nation building”, or “peacekeeping”. NASA could be rolled in here, per John’s suggestion. So could the Department of Insular Affairs, currently part of the Department of the Interior.

        The Office for Foreign Affairs would cover relations with sovereign countries. This could be subdivided geographically (by continent, by hemisphere or quadrant, or by DoD geographic command areas), or it could be subdivided into a Bureau of Allied Affairs (NATO and major non-NATO allies) and a Bureau of Diplomatic Affairs (everyone else).

        I’d also consider adding an Office of Home Affairs. This would handle domestic aspects of the State Department’s core mission (issuing passports, proposing domestic legislation to implement treaties and executive agreements, etc). It might also make sense to move the Bureau of Indian Affairs here instead of the Interior Department. And if we’re also cleaning up and consolidating some of the minor government departments, the Home Office could also pick up some domestic responsibilities that used to be part of the State Department but were later moved to other departments: most notably the Census Bureau and custody of official records of enacted laws and appointments.

    • johan_larson says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:20 pm

      Do we have even a single farmer among us? Or someone who works in a farming-adjacent profession?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        April 10, 2019 at 7:01 pm

        Do we have even a single farmer among us?

        Why, are you trying to marry a farm girl?

      • SamChevre says:
        April 10, 2019 at 7:19 pm

        I’m not a farmer, but I grew up on a (dairy and produce) farm, one of my brothers works in an (industrial) farming-support occupation, one of my wife’s sisters still farms–I may be as close as the readership gets to farming-knowledgeable.

    • habu71 says:
      April 11, 2019 at 9:45 am

      I call energy for myself. Simply for the great pleasure of disbanding the NRC if nothing else.

      • bean says:
        April 11, 2019 at 10:11 am

        How could I forget you for that slot?

        But still, while I think cutting a lot of the NRC is a good plan, getting rid of the entire thing may be a step too far.

        Or are you proposing we move it under Naval Reactors?

        (The last is a joke. Do not do that.)

        • LHN says:
          April 11, 2019 at 10:58 am

          ISTR that Heinlein’s utopia in Expanded Universe included something vague about moving power reactors offshore and putting them under naval discipline. It wasn’t really explained in detail IIRC– just “why are nuclear subs so much less controversial?” and next thing you know there are “power ships” which supposedly solved both the engineering and public relations problem.

          (Not suggesting that this is especially plausible so much as just noting the parallel.)

    • brad says:
      April 14, 2019 at 6:33 am

      I’m flattered, even with the question mark. I know this is for fun, but in reality I’m not sure I’m cut out of a cabinet level position. Solicitor General would be really cool though.

  8. SamChevre says:
    April 10, 2019 at 12:03 pm

    Meetup in Western Massachusetts this weekend:

    The Roost
    Northampton, MA
    6:30 PM, Saturday the 13th

    We are always glad to meet new people.

  9. proyas says:
    April 10, 2019 at 12:31 pm

    Has anyone ever heard of an arrangement in which a bank puts stops on its checks after only 12 days?

    A person recently paid me for something by check, and he told me to cash it within 12 days or else his bank would put a stop on it and charge him fees. He often acts like a jerk, and I think he might have been making it up.

    • Walter says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:33 pm

      Is your friend Saubon or Kellhus? Cuz, if so you should hop on that.

      More serious, I’ve never heard of anything like that, but I’d still cash any check I got as soon as possible.

    • acymetric says:
      April 10, 2019 at 12:37 pm

      Is it a cashiers check/money order or just a standard check from a checkbook? If the latter, yeah it sounds like BS, because how would the bank know when he made out the check?

      Unless maybe there’s some kind of fraud/budgeting service offered where you register checks with the bank in advance when you write them but I’ve certainly never heard of it.

    • mobile says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:25 pm

      I use checks that access my credit card balances a lot. The bank sends me checks with promotional offers (“pay no interest for 12 months”) but the offers have an expiration date. The expiration date is printed on the check, and if the person I write the check to doesn’t deposit the check by the expiration date, the bank won’t honor the check.

      The bank doesn’t charge fees when the deposit comes too late, but sometimes the people I write the checks to do.

    • Deiseach says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:34 pm

      Ditto on cashing the cheque as soon as possible, because that sounds like “I’m engaging in financial jiggery-pokery and will only have the money in the account to cover the cheque for a short while before I’m overdrawn or need to move it elsewhere to cover other bills” and not like anything the bank is doing (unless the bank knows he’s engaging in some kind of hanky-panky which is why they put limits on his account, another reason to get your money fast before the cheque bounces).

    • sharper13 says:
      April 11, 2019 at 8:03 pm

      If it’s drawn on a bank with a local branch, you may want to consider cashing it at their branch, rather than just depositing it into your own bank account.

      While you’ll likely have to put up with additional paperwork and maybe even fingerprinting, they’ll also be able to tell you right away if the funds are there to honor it, while if you deposit it and it eventually bounces because he’s check kiting or something like that, you’ll get stuck without the money and with additional fees.

  10. sandoratthezoo says:
    April 10, 2019 at 12:33 pm

    I read Ann Leckie’s new book, The Raven Tower recently.

    It’s a fantasy novel, told in two parts, one first-person and one second-person. The protagonists are a god and a human. (The god is the narrator, and the god is speaking to the human — when the god tells the human’s story, those parts are in second person.)

    If you don’t want to read a story in the second person, don’t read this book. It’s half the book and if that never disappears for you, it will drive you insane and you will die.

    As with Leckie’s Ancillary books and Provenance, the attraction of this story is in a novel setting and a plot that winds deeply into that setting.

    Leckie is apparently contractually obligated to have Some Kind of Commentary On Gender in all of her books, so the human protagonist is a trans-man, which has very little effect on the story. Maybe Leckie is just apologizing for the fact that her Ancillary books kind of imply that trans people aren’t real? Because this is a very party-line view of transness. But whatever, as I said, it never really impacts the story.

    The world is interesting, an examination of a particular metaphysic for gods and the effect of that on the setting. The setting feels well-thought out and authentic. There are lots of cool little details to sink your teeth into.

    That said, the resolution of the book feels like it kind just pulls a rabbit out of its hat? Like, I was expecting a little more cleverness in the resolution, and instead it’s just… it kind of invalidates the rest of the book. Things that you thought were real problems turn out to more-or-less not be real problems. A lot of questions remain unanswered.
    I really enjoyed most of the book, but feel let down at the end. 3 of 5 stars.

    • mdet says:
      April 10, 2019 at 4:16 pm

      If you don’t want to read a story in the second person, don’t read this book. It’s half the book and if that never disappears for you, it will drive you insane and you will die.

      You realize that you don’t want to read a story in second person. You don’t read the book. Instead, you manage to remain sane and alive. This pleases you.

      • Well... says:
        April 10, 2019 at 5:40 pm

        I had an idea to write a novel-length book in the second person, present tense. Mainly because it’s unusual and seems like it would be a very effective way to convey a sense of immediacy. But I’ve never read anything in the 2nd person that was very long. What about it was so excruciating?

        • mdet says:
          April 10, 2019 at 6:18 pm

          I haven’t read anything that long in second person either, but thinking about why it would be annoying, it’s probably because the wording makes it sound like you should have agency, but unless it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure, you don’t actually have any agency. Or because someone assuming what you would do / feel in a situation and getting it wrong causes a dissonant feeling.

        • Evan Þ says:
          April 10, 2019 at 9:16 pm

          I had an idea to write a novel-length book in the second person, present tense.

          So you want to write the next Hunger Games?

          I read it a little while after it first came out, at my sister’s insistence. It felt odd when I was first starting the book, but after a couple chapters in, I stopped explicitly noticing it. Collins was pretty clearly trying to convey immediacy, and it worked.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:
          April 10, 2019 at 9:18 pm

          Isn’t there are novel by Charles Stross that’s in the second person?

        • thevoiceofthevoid says:
          April 10, 2019 at 9:38 pm

          But I’ve never read anything in the 2nd person that was very long.

          I have: Homestuck (well, partially, at least). The gimmick was that it was a pseudo-text-adventure game where the inputs were originally chosen from reader suggestions. Of course that gave way to Hussie actually trying to tell a story, and the next-page links went from “John: Squawk like an imbecile and shit on your desk.” to “[o] Pardon me while I adjust the narrow fenestrated wall,” to just “[A6A6I5] ====>” on every page of the penultimate chapter (technically Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 5).

          Granted, 2nd-person narration is probably one of the less excruciating parts of how Homestuck is written.

        • sandoratthezoo says:
          April 11, 2019 at 5:14 am

          @Nancy: Yes, Charlie Stross wrote a book, Halting State, which was entirely in the second person. I read it. The gimmick disappears for me after a few chapters, just like it did in The Raven Tower. From some other people’s comments at the time, it never did for them and it drove them crazy.

          @Evan: The Hunger Games is not written in the second person. Am I missing a joke?

          • acymetric says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:52 am

            @sandoratthezoo

            I feel like there is some kind of connection to certain optical illusions/visual tricks, where once you see something one way you can’t un-see it.

            I also do not recall any second person in The Hunger Games…so if it was there I guess I can comfortably say it didn’t bother me.

          • The original Mr. X says:
            April 15, 2019 at 12:47 pm

            The Hunger Games was written in the first person, but it was also written in the present tense, so I guess that’s what Evan was referring to.

        • mendax says:
          April 11, 2019 at 6:54 am

          If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino is written partly in second person. It is about you, the Reader, reading a book called If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino (and later other books). It is an excellent book. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading books.

        • The original Mr. X says:
          April 15, 2019 at 12:49 pm

          I find second-person narratives really annoy me, even in choose your own adventure books. I just constantly find myself thinking “Wait, I’d never say/think/do something like that!” and it’s so annoying, like a kind of authorial equivalent of mansplaining.

      • Doctor Mist says:
        April 15, 2019 at 10:20 am

        Ugh. It irritates the hell out of me when an author merely insists on writing the whole book in the present tense. This would indeed drive me mad; thanks for the warning.

  11. b_jonas says:
    April 10, 2019 at 12:54 pm

    Bryan Caplan economist and Zach Weinersmith (author of the webcomic SMBC) are writing a new book titled “Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration”. It will be released on 2019-10-29. At this point I realized that Scott hasn’t reviewed Zach’s previous book “Soonish” yet. (Caplan’s homepage is linked from the blog sidebar in case you need a link.)

  12. Clutzy says:
    April 10, 2019 at 1:07 pm

    In the spirit of Johan’s challenges here is another:

    You are newly elected Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot. Due to an insanely cold winter, crime has been down for this year and the CPD has issued its summer crime reduction plan, which like the previous few, is likely to fail. What do you do to avoid a spike in crime through the rest of this year and into next year (assuming the weather doesn’t continue to bless the police)?

    • Walter says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:11 pm

      Gosh, that’s hard. I’m unconvinced that the mayor actually has the power to accomplish that.

    • honoredb says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:24 pm

      I was going to be sort of cute and say “stop arresting people on pot charges” but it looks like they already did that last year. Uh. How quick could you set up a large-scale randomized controlled trial for UBI that is open to felons but gets taken away if you commit a (subsequent) felony?

      • Nornagest says:
        April 10, 2019 at 1:43 pm

        The impression I’ve formed is that no one really gets arrested for simple possession anywhere in the States anymore. Given a fine and maybe some probation, sure, if the perp’s dumb or unlucky enough to get caught and the department has nothing better to do. But someone that’s actually being held on pot charges is more likely to be a “well, we’re pretty sure he’s guilty of something serious, but this is what we actually have the evidence for” type of deal, like nailing Al Capone on tax evasion.

    • johan_larson says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:36 pm

      Suppose you started a program of arrest/hold/release where you arrest people you know you cannot convict just to get them off the street for a few days or weeks or months while the wheels of the justice system turn until you are forced to admit you don’t have enough to prosecute, and turn these miscreants loose. Could that work? Could it get enough troublemakers off the street to make a dent in the aggregate crime rate?

      • Simulated Knave says:
        April 10, 2019 at 4:49 pm

        When they get out, they’re angrier troublemakers. That sounds break-even at best.

        EDIT: Also, if you write that down anywhere, you will get sued and they will have a decent chance of winning and getting a big payout.

    • The Nybbler says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:42 pm

      I’m going for giant outdoor air conditioners.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:
        April 11, 2019 at 7:03 am

        I’m going for the Mrs O’Leary approach: burn it all down while crime is low so you go out on top.

    • albatross11 says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:59 pm

      The power of the mayor’s office is nothing compared to the power of the force of Goodhart’s Law.

      Abandon hope of overcoming the police union and decades-old dysfunctional communities. Instead, work on gaming the crime statistics. Did someone get shot ten times in the chest but not quite die? Report it as an assault! Find a body riddled with bulletholes? Rule it a suicide! People calling to report rapes, robberies, assaults, etc? Just don’t respond, or lean on them to withdraw the complaint.

      In this way, you can be the mayor who cleaned up Chicago!

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:00 pm

      Fire the police chief and hire Bill Bratton? Or maybe just apply for Chicago to become the sixth borough of New York City and get the whole NYPD.

      I’m only half joking here. It seems like the most recent low point in Chicago’s murder rate followed their brief adoption of tactics recommended by the NYPD & LAPD in 2004. Reforming the police force into an NYPD-style organization is probably the best option to crush Chicago’s criminal class.

    • Matt says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:15 pm

      Unincorporate large portions of the city?

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:37 pm

      Start huge lead abatement program. No, this will not help until after I am out of office. Do not care, I want to actually fight crime, so.

      Short term. Uhm, the city already just issued body cameras, which is the best low-hanging fruit.
      Bump the budget for any and all training programs which have been shown to help clearing rates? Also put the boot to any bottle-necks in the police forensic labs. Actually Solving Crimes is the only effective thing the police ever does to help.

    • Eponymous says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:51 pm

      More cops and longer sentences. Only things I know of with good evidence that work on that timescale. Though not sure how much of that the mayor can actually do.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:01 pm

        Harsher sentences are generally held to do nothing, and they are very expensive. Not that a mayor has authority over them in any meaningful sense, anyway. I mean, I suppose you could invite the local judges around for dinner and ask them to stop wasting quite so much tax payer funding?

        More (and better) cops do help, because it boosts the clearance rate.

        • albatross11 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 3:12 pm

          Long sentences for violent crimes have the problem that men tend to age out of violent crime–there aren’t a lot of 50 year old muggers out there.

          • Eponymous says:
            April 10, 2019 at 3:18 pm

            Lots of violent criminals get short sentences. Some are tried as juveniles who could be tried as adults. Some get parole that could be fought. Many people reoffend, so clearly sentences are not at their crime-minimizing level. Plus, crack down on non-violent crimes, and you get future violent criminals off the street.

          • Eric Rall says:
            April 10, 2019 at 3:22 pm

            That’s an argument against life sentences for violent felonies, even for repeat offenders, but it’s not necessarily an argument against sentences in the 10-30 year range, long enough for the convicts to age out of violent crime.

          • Randy M says:
            April 10, 2019 at 3:24 pm

            Long sentences for violent crimes have the problem that men tend to age out of violent crime–there aren’t a lot of 50 year old muggers out there.

            Why do you call that a problem? That sounds more like a justification, unless you don’t consider a 25 year sentence to be long?

          • mdet says:
            April 10, 2019 at 3:49 pm

            crack down on non-violent crimes, and you get future violent criminals off the street.

            With the counter-effect that prison can turn juvenile delinquents and small time criminals into hardened career criminals by making them unhireable and replacing any positive role models they may have had with convicted felons.

        • Eponymous says:
          April 10, 2019 at 3:17 pm

          “Generally held”? Not by me, or the research I’m familiar with. Or basic logic. If nothing else, longer sentences keep criminals off the streets.

          I’m not advocating for this as good policy, mind you. Just stating that, if my goal was only to reduce crime rates in the next year, this is what I would do.

          (Of course, the incapacitation effect is going to lag; so if you only care about the next year, you need to crack down on granting parole and early release.)

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:
            April 10, 2019 at 10:59 pm

            “Debate rages”, whatever, I should not have mentioned that part, because it being focused on was utterly predictable.

            The primary problem with prison as an anti-crime strategy that locking *one* person up for a year costs the state of Illinois 38.000 dollars.

            That is a very, very expensive way to try to fight crime. Keeping the sentences light and spending the money on police officers, either on additional training, or just straight up “More cops” is going to do far, far more good per dollar spent.

            And no, more cops doew not automatically result in “more prisoners” Higher odds of being caught has really, really strong deterrence effects

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            April 11, 2019 at 7:47 am

            @Thomas

            If the sentences aren’t sufficient to deter the crime, then even if a substantial portion of criminal activities involve successful arrests I don’t see why you wouldn’t just have a very large and frustrated police force contending with massive re-offense rates.

            That said I concede that the current method is expensive.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:54 am

            The typical lout who commits crime has a really strong estimate of how likely the police is to catch them if they commit a crime, because their social circle includes people who have committed crimes, and the math of how often they get caught is the kind of threat assessment which nature actually equipped us to do right.

            They do not have nearly as firm a grasp of the details of what comes after, and are very prone to hyperbolic discounting where any amount of jail time is nearly equivalently scary.

            Which means an effective police department can deter a whole lot of crime as long as your justice system, eh, exists, and the real reason we punish anything with more than a couple of years is that people really want to see graduation in sentencing – You cant just hand down the same sentence for murder, rape, robbery and grand theft.

          • Clutzy says:
            April 11, 2019 at 12:38 pm

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            Citing the high cost of incarceration is not a good argument against incarceration, its an argument against a subset of the criminal rights advocacy groups which have caused that price to be several times higher than should otherwise be necessary.

          • Lillian says:
            April 11, 2019 at 3:50 pm

            @Clutzy: According to the New York Times, 83% of the cost of jails in New York City are in staffing, so you might want to take your complaint about the cost up with the screw’s union rather than the human rights activists.

            Relatedly, according to CBS the prison population in New York state dropped by nearly 20% between 2000 and 2010, while crime rate also dropped by 21%. Naturally one is inclined conclude that the prison population dropped because crime rate also dropped, but that in turn suggests that the cause for the crime rate drop was not due to all the criminals being imprisoned and unable to commit crimes.

          • Clutzy says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:54 pm

            @lillian

            That makes little sense, because increased staffing costs are a likely result of such demands. As to keep an equivalent level of security, you would have to double+++ staffing. Things like nonlethal weapons moving prisoners through doorways with a staffer on each side, etc. This is all much less efficient than a pit + cages manned by snipers model.

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            April 12, 2019 at 4:50 am

            @Thomas

            But they would likely also know from their colleagues that getting caught would involve a speedy release, or in some instances no jail time whatsoever.

            This might count as anecdata but there was recently a documentary on Seattle where storeowners and police are describing a situation where they are obliged to perform what for lack of a better term is catch and release. The store owners describe shop lifers getting caught, released immediately, and then re-offending immediately.

            Incarceration rate / Prison population wouldn’t go hand in hand with crime reduction if there was zero deterrence effect. You can imagine a situation where a state goes from being “tough on crime” resulting in a spike in arrests and an increase in the prison population, followed by a drop off in offense rates, resulting in fewer incarcerations and a drop off in the prison population.

            You’d have to look and see if policing policy changed around the point where the prison population started to fall.

            Even then it’s tricky because a greying population can lower the crime rate without any attribution to change in policy. Most offenders are in the 18-35 age range.

            ______________

            One solution to resolve this problem would be some form of non-permanent and non-mutilating corporeal punishment for minor crimes. It makes convictions extremely unpleasant but relatively quick and inexpensive ordeals.

          • HowardHolmes says:
            April 13, 2019 at 8:17 am

            @Thomas Jorgensen

            Very good stuff. If a person thought he would definitely get caught, he would not commit murder even if the penalty was only a year in prison. It is the fear of getting caught that deters, not the amount of punishment.

            When I had a teenage son with a tendency to drink I thought I could just up the penalty by increasing the amount of time he was grounded. Didn’t work. If instead I had shown up unexpectedly at where he was or supposed to be, that would have worked. He drank when he thought he would not be caught, so if he thinks he want be caught even the death penalty does not deter.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 13, 2019 at 11:22 am

            It is the fear of getting caught that deters, not the amount of punishment.

            Why do you believe that? It’s inconsistent with rational behavior and, as of what I knew of the subject quite a long time ago, the evidence on criminal deterrence. Doubling the probability of apprehension produces more deterrence than doubling the penalty, but both produce some.

          • HowardHolmes says:
            April 13, 2019 at 1:19 pm

            @DavidFriedman

            @David Friedman
            Re: Punishment and deterrence.

            How much punishment does it take to deter me from committing a crime. I am a typical American, let’s say, with friends and family. Would I cheat on my income taxes if i thought I was “for sure” going to be caught and

            1) the punishment was a tax fraud which was published so that my family and friends knew.
            2) Or that I would have to repay the tax with penalty and interest.
            3) Or that I would have to repay the tax with a $10 fine.

            Note that if we do not think we will avoid being caught, ANY amount of punishment deters completely.

            The same is true viewed the other way. If we were sure of not getting caught, we are totally unconcerned about the punishment. If I had the ring of Gyges, I would not care if the punishment was death…I’m not getting caught.

            Would anyone rob a store if they thought they were going to get caught? If the punishment was merely shaming on Facebook it would be more than enough to deter. Any punishment greater than a month is jail for any crime is overkill and symbolic. If you want to eliminate crime put all money into detection so that a potential criminal would figure that he will probably get caught, then the punishment is irrelevant.

          • liate says:
            April 13, 2019 at 1:36 pm

            @HowardHolmes

            Note that if we do not think we will avoid being caught, ANY amount of punishment deters completely.

            Not quite — any amount of punishment that is greater than than the expected gain from the crime will deter completely; if the punishment for stealing a loaf of bread costs than the loaf of bread, even if everyone is caught there is no reason not to steal it. (This includes the social costs of being a person who steals things, ofc, so a fine of 50% the cost of the loaf of bread may still be an effective deterrent with a punishment avoidance rate of 0).

            More generally, crime is worth it when when the perceived benefit of the crime is greater than the cost of the punishment times the percieved probability of the punishment. Probability of getting caught is underweighted mostly because people have a tendency to underweight bad consequences, or at least enough people do that it shows up in crime statistics.

          • HowardHolmes says:
            April 13, 2019 at 1:50 pm

            @liate

            Your bread example conveniently is whether the item stolen is consumed and not available for return. I would assume that getting caught, in most cases, means that one does not keep the booty.

            With few exceptions all crimes are committed by people who do not expect to be caught. If the chances of being caught are great enough 6 months jail time is as good a 60 years.

          • liate says:
            April 13, 2019 at 2:15 pm

            @HowardHolmes

            Your bread example conveniently is whether the item stolen is consumed and not available for return. I would assume that getting caught, in most cases, means that one does not keep the booty

            Well, it was a very contrived example, of course the punishment is going result in losing the gain if at all possible, it’s a good way to make sure the punishment is greater than the benefit (if nothing else).

            With few exceptions all crimes are committed by people who do not expect to be caught. If the chances of being caught are great enough 6 months jail time is as good a 60 years.

            I agree; that’s what my last sentence was supposed to be pointing at, that most people more expect not to be caught than think that whatever crime they’re commiting is worth the punishment. That doesn’t mean that 6 months jail time with more sure punishment is necessarily enough deterrent though; one might desire successfully beating up that person or staying in your gang or getting your drug or whatever more than not being put in jail for 6 months, but less than being put in jail for 60 years. (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that anything past, say, 10 years tends to have little marginal detterence value, though.)

          • Theodoric says:
            April 13, 2019 at 2:21 pm

            Any punishment greater than a month is jail for any crime is overkill and symbolic.

            Any crime? Suppose A has a major grudge against B, would like to kill B, but does not want to throw his own life away. A might well decide that doing what you’d get for, say, a subsequent DUI is an acceptable risk. Now maybe you’re talking about a world with perfect detection, but even if we had, say, cameras in every public place and the DNA of every citizen on file and everything else that might be in a crime detection wish list, I do not think reducing the maximum penalty for rape to one month in jail would pass a democratic legislature.

          • HowardHolmes says:
            April 13, 2019 at 3:31 pm

            @theodoric

            I do not think reducing the maximum penalty for rape to one month in jail would pass a democratic legislature.

            Agreed, but a month in jail would prevent the rape. It would just not satisfy people’s righteous indignation.

          • Clutzy says:
            April 13, 2019 at 3:44 pm

            Yes, increasing the enforcement rate to nearly 100% would be really good for deterrence, but its not really all that easy to increase clearance rates with additional patrols and detectives. Unsolved murders, for instance, are unsolved because they are committed by someone who is not a family relation to the killer, and either was not observed or people refuse to testify where he committed the murder. Even with a cop on every corner he still gets away with it. Even with a cop at every supermarket shoplifters would get away with it.

            Murder is a perfect example of a crime that needs a heavy penalty even with 100% enforcement. There are tons of people who would kill for only a year in prison. I mean if you are retired, it would even make sense to become a contract killer (unless the 100% also includes discovering the payoff), and you could like kill Bezos for Elon Musk for a couple million, then take a year in jail.

          • HowardHolmes says:
            April 13, 2019 at 4:55 pm

            @Clutzy

            increasing the enforcement rate to nearly 100% would be really good for deterrence, but its not really all that easy

            It would help a lot if we did not waste money on prosecuting crimes, just on catching them in the act. If a crime is committed and we don’t catch the guy doing it, spend zero resources on that but put all resources into improving surveillance. If a guy gets by with robbing a bank put more resources into cameras and patrols so that it cannot happen again. The idea is to convince people that they cannot commit crime without detection.

            Unsolved murders, for instance, are unsolved because they are committed by someone who is not a family relation to the killer, and either was not observed or people refuse to testify where he committed the murder. Even with a cop on every corner he still gets away with it. Even with a cop at every supermarket shoplifters would get away with it.

            I am not suggesting we could catch 100% but improving the rate of catching them is the best way to solve crime. Think of all the resources from prisons that could be saved if we had maximum one year sentences. If all that money was put into prevention, crime would drop dramatically. Think of all the money put into trying O.J. My recommendation is that since no one saw it, let it go and spend the money on more surveillance techniques. For every bit we increase the likelihood of a person getting caught crime will go down.

            Murder is a perfect example of a crime that needs a heavy penalty even with 100% enforcement. There are tons of people who would kill for only a year in prison. I mean if you are retired, it would even make sense to become a contract killer (unless the 100% also includes discovering the payoff), and you could like kill Bezos for Elon Musk for a couple million, then take a year in jail.

            Firstly, when we are talking about catching criminals we are talking about the contractors as well. My assumption on catching someone is that they would not get to keep the booty. The contract killer returns the money AND spends six weeks in jail. He would not do the job if he thought he would be caught. The only people who commit crimes (with some few exceptions) are people who do not think they will be caught. They are not really concerned with whether the penalty is six weeks or sixty years. If they thought they would be caught, they would not do the crime.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 13, 2019 at 8:12 pm

            @HowardHolmes:

            If I believe there is a ten percent chance that I will be caught cheating on my taxes and the penalty is a ten dollar fine, it will not deter me. If the penalty is execution, it will.

            You appear, from the comment I am responding to, to live in a world where there are no probabilities other than zero or one. I don’t.

          • HowardHolmes says:
            April 14, 2019 at 5:34 am

            @davidfriedman

            If I believe there is a ten percent chance that I will be caught cheating on my taxes and the penalty is a ten dollar fine, it will not deter me. If the penalty is execution, it will.

            I used extreme examples to make a point which in the above you do as well. I agree that in your example the behavior is rational. However, if you increase the penalty just a bit to, let’s say, it is published to your friends and family that you had cheated on your taxes, then this would probably be sufficient to deter.

            My major point is that virtually all crime is committed by people who think they will not get caught, not by people who think they will get caught but that the penalty for getting caught is worth the crime. A potential shoplifter does not think “I’ll take this item and probably get caught but a month is jail is not all that bad.”

            If we want to prevent crime a dollar spent on surveillance is worth 10 spent on punishing. Our excessive punishment is all about vengeance. It makes no economic sense.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:
            April 14, 2019 at 10:53 am

            Clutzy: Murder is a terrible example for this entire debate, no matter what side you want to take, because, for one thing, there are entire nations which have essentially perfect clearance rates on murder. As in, years where literally every single murder is solved.

            No, people do not get away with it just by being a stranger to their victim.
            As the sage Deadpool says: MAXIMUM EFFORT! (No. Really. It is mostly down to being willing to work very, very hard for every single case. Dead illegal immigrant street hooker found down a well? Okay, then, major manhunt. That is not a theoretical example, she got justice.)

            And those places still have murders happen. Not a lot, but it is frequently a crime committed in a wholly irrational state of mind.

            To clarify my point: Punishment serves two purposes. Deterrence, and the maintenance of social order.

            That is, we have to punish those who offend, so that they are seen to be punished, and nobody takes matters into their own hands, and the offending party can hopefully reenter society.

            This second purpose sets lower bounds on how lenient your justice system can be, and those bounds are high enough that deterrence concerns are utterly redundant. Any penalty for mugging, murder or rape, ect which does not provoke broad outrage is going to be more than high enough.

            Why then do we constantly hear people call for higher penalties to “Deter” crime?

            Because the level which mollifies the broad public is invariably going to be too lenient for the purity, authority, and cruelty oriented. It is a false argument, the calls for harsher penalties are grounded in the desire for cruelty in punishment in and off itself, and if you no longer hear people baying for more blood in the press, know that you have gone much, much too far, and should turn back and contemplate the mountain of skulls you pass on the way.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 14, 2019 at 5:22 pm

            My major point is that virtually all crime is committed by people who think they will not get caught, not by people who think they will get caught but that the penalty for getting caught is worth the crime.

            You are again writing as if the only probabilities are zero or one.

    • Deiseach says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:15 pm

      Due to an insanely cold winter, crime has been down for this year

      What, you mean all the MAGA supporting lynchmobs wielding bleach and nooses decided to stay indoors in the warm like sensible people instead of roaming the streets in blizzard conditions at two in the morning to see if they could stumble across any B-list actors to very gently rough up? You surprise me greatly! 🙂

    • Simulated Knave says:
      April 10, 2019 at 4:58 pm

      Cameras. Cameras let you solve crimes (and eliminate suspects, which helps the community trust you).

      And this sounds weird to me even as I say it, but…can the water system take opening fire hydrants in problem areas at problem times? I’m thinking vertically. A low-level rain probably doesn’t do wonders for gunplay, fistfights, or drug deals – make sure you calibrate it so people can go out with a light coat or something, of course. Fire hydrants in Chicago are 300 feet apart, so if you can get even a 50 ft spray in either direction that makes things awfully inconvenient for people.

      • Garrett says:
        April 11, 2019 at 7:29 am

        > Cameras. Cameras let you solve crimes (and eliminate suspects, which helps the community trust you).

        My thought as well. Cover the problematic areas in layers of multi-spectral cameras and other sensors. It won’t be able to solve everything, but it will definitely make it a lot easier to solve a lot.

  13. AG says:
    April 10, 2019 at 1:09 pm

    I’m more amused that Eliezer will be denied a position of power, because he doesn’t comment here.
    (Sadly, so would Kelsey of The Unit of Caring)

    • Nornagest says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:30 pm

      Secretary of Paperclip Affairs.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:45 pm

      A-Laser You-Cows-Ski for Agriculture.
      Alas, the skiing on lasers program for America’s cows will turn out to be a financial boondoggle.

  14. johan_larson says:
    April 10, 2019 at 1:27 pm

    Your advice is sought by the curriculum committee of the Rhodes & Roosevelt School for Boys. The school is known for fostering a traditional sort of manly virtue; its course of study includes boxing, rifle shooting and wilderness survival in addition to academic subjects. The curriculum committee is currently revising the set of novels studied as part of the English program in the upper school, grades seven through twelve. They would like to include a total of fifteen English-language novels written for adults or near-adults. What books do you recommend?

    • Windward says:
      April 10, 2019 at 1:50 pm

      At least one of Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels about Roman and post-Roman Britain. None of them are bad, but some of them are absolutely stellar… wonderful adventure stories with memorable characters, lots of brothers-in-arms type of friendships, the occasional very sweet romance.

      • johan_larson says:
        April 10, 2019 at 6:17 pm

        At least some of those novels were written for children. I’m thinking grade seven might be a reasonable place to start reading books actually written for adults, at least some of the shorter and simpler works. Perhaps books like The Eagle of the Ninth would fit better in grades five or six?

    • Incurian says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:01 pm

      So much Heinlein.

    • Matt says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:18 pm

      Jack London ~ White Fang or The Call of the Wild

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:
        April 10, 2019 at 4:55 pm

        Add “To Build a Fire” to remind them that you need to know what you’re doing.

      • bullseye says:
        April 10, 2019 at 5:44 pm

        It doesn’t show up in his fiction (as far as I could tell as reading as a teenager), but London was a socialist. This could draw complaints from the sorts of people who’d send their boys to this school.

        • johan_larson says:
          April 10, 2019 at 6:05 pm

          I’m not sure where you’d find pro-socialist sentiments in London’s works. The plain fact is that only a small portion of them get read at all these days. Among the novels, it seems to be mostly The Call of the Wild and White Fang. If you’ve found the time for his fourth most famous novel (The Iron Heel, after The Sea-Wolf) you’re probably quite a serious London fan. And none of those are particularly pro-socialist. Perhaps such views are more present in London’s less popular works.

          • Chalid says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:26 am

            Huh? I haven’t read it in at least 20 years, but I remember The Iron Heel as really, really explicitly socialist?

          • Enkidum says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:48 am

            I mean… The Iron Heel is completely socialist, it’s literally about an overt conspiracy of the big bosses to crush the workers. Martin Eden, which is largely auto-biographical, is fairly socialist as well, and his straightforward autobiographical work is explicit also. It’s possible (indeed standard) to read his adventure stuff and think he’s all about rugged individualism, but if you have any interest in understanding him as an author, thinker, and human, you’ll be very misled if socialism isn’t a central component of your understanding, because it clearly was for him.

          • johan_larson says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:58 am

            I must be have The Iron Heel confused with some other book.

            But no socialism in White Fang, The Call of the Wild, or The Sea-Wolf?

          • Enkidum says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:02 am

            I think it might be possible to read the Iron Heel and kind of miss the socialism, or treat it as a simple plot device, an excuse to write a cool early dystopian novel (hell, people do that with Orwell all the time).

            I think you’re right that Iron Fang and The Call of the Wild aren’t socialist at all, but it’s been decades since I read them, and I’ve never read The Sea Wolf.

        • Matt says:
          April 10, 2019 at 7:09 pm

          As a pretty pro-capitalist guy, he’s the kind of socialist who doesn’t bother me. He died well before there was a ton of opportunity to see socialism’s worst flaws, and lived at a time when capitalism had a lot to be critical of.

          Also, he always struck me as a ‘socialism for thee but not for me’ kind of patronistic socialist – he wanted socialism to protect the vulnerable worker from the bosses, but was a rugged individualist himself.

        • bullseye says:
          April 11, 2019 at 4:05 am

          I don’t think London’s works would actually drive students to socialism, but I think some of their parents would worry about it.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:
      April 10, 2019 at 2:26 pm

      So, you are looking for non-toxic masculine role models ?
      Uhm.

      Pratchett. Because he has those in spades, and I want them to actually read the assigned works, not the cliffnotes.

      Bujold. For being the author Heinlein wished he was.

      Elizabeth Willey, the well-favored man. Currently reading this. Very, very good, and a main character who is an Exemplar of Manly Virtues without being in any way annoying to the reader – Amazingly deft use of show, dont tell.

      Something Nautical, but I cant currently think of any “Moby Dick, only actually good” off hand.

      The life and times of Frederick Douglas. Because it is a very, very good autobiography.

    • Simulated Knave says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:07 pm

      Others have mentioned Heinlein and Pratchett and Rosemary Sutcliff (The Eagle of the Ninth is excellent, and I commend it specifically). All are excellent choices.

      To that, I think I would add a Flashman book. On one level, they’re not for kids (though one that would be child-appropriate could probably be selected). Flashman, for those who don’t know, is a character from a Victorian novel – Tom Brown’s Schooldays. George McDonald Fraser took him and wrote about his adventures after his expulsion from school – he is a lauded, decorated hero of the British Empire. But in his memoirs, it is revealed that he’s a cowardly and duplicitous cad who is always out for himself. There’s also lots of interesting historical tidbits. In short, it’s a simultaneous deconstruction of and celebration of the ideals that such a school would probably represent as the best things about history, and that seems like a good inclusion for the curriculum.

      Also, Three Men in a Boat – everyone should read it, and it teaches you that the past is another country, while still being similar and comprehensible.

    • Deiseach says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:29 pm

      If we’re unashamedly turning out Victorian style Muscular Christians, then go full belt for the old classics:

      Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Rober Louis Stephenson (I had/have such a crush on Alan Breck Stewart! And Long John Silver is an unabashed villain whom I do not have any type of crush on, but still manages to appeal to our sympathies even after bashing out a man’s brains with his crutch).
      King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard (mainly for how funny it is that Allan Quartermain, Great White Hunter, spends most of the book being down on his luck and talking about how he hates any kind of danger or conflict and just wants to get away from any prospect of having to fight).
      The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, though the romance may be a bit mushy for some.
      The Collected Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.
      Kim by Rudyard Kipling.
      Decent translations in English of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.
      Oh all right, I’ll throw in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells as well.

      • Liam Breathnach says:
        April 12, 2019 at 9:25 am

        Treasure Island is the book I read the most times as a child. Pieces of Eight!

        I’d add Alexandre Dumas – The Three Musketeers of course. The Black Tulip, also The Man in the Iron Mask. I haven’t read the Count of Monte Cristo.

        Does anyone read Walter Scott anymore? I picked up a second hand copy of Ivannoe recently and am wondering whether to read it.

    • Simulated Knave says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:37 pm

      Other mentions are all great. Mine is a little more borderline, but I think useful.

      Flashman. One of the more toned down books, probably, so the parents don’t complain overmuch.

      Flashman is simultaneously a deconstruction of and celebration of the whole “British imperialist romantic hero novel” genre. It features lots of history, lots of hijinks, and a protagonist who is a complete phony and coward. He is a major general, a knight, and a complete fraud – he mostly just wants to run away from danger, and yet always finds himself looking heroic at the end.

      Reminding people that people can fake these virtues is not a bad thing at all.

      • The original Mr. X says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:40 pm

        I dunno, I suspect that, in modern society, it’s more important to convince people that virtuous people exist in the first place. Getting them to read a book about a fake-virtuous anti-hero would be more likely to make people cynical of the whole concept of virtue in the first place.

        • Simulated Knave says:
          April 10, 2019 at 4:47 pm

          Flashman is surrounded (and deeply confused by) the virtuous and a regular basis. So you would still expose people to that.

          Also, virtuous people actually existing is irrelevant. Trying to be them is what matters.

          • bullseye says:
            April 10, 2019 at 5:47 pm

            The existence of virtuous people makes being one seem more feasible, and therefore something I’m more likely to aspire to.

          • Nornagest says:
            April 10, 2019 at 9:00 pm

            My favorite theory about Flashman is that most everyone around him is faking it just as much as he is, and he doesn’t realize it, partly because he’s from an incredibly stoic culture and partly because he has a rather low opinion of himself on some levels.

            Doesn’t work for everyone — John Brown, for example, pretty much has to be exactly what he seems to be. But it works for most people.

          • The original Mr. X says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:58 am

            Flashman is surrounded (and deeply confused by) the virtuous and a regular basis. So you would still expose people to that.

            It’s been a while since I read any Flashman novels, so maybe I’m misremembering, but I think he mostly views virtuous people as either hypocrites or else just stupid, and the narrative doesn’t really do much to contradict this. So what you’d actually end up exposing people to is the belief that virtue is for losers and that smart people act like self-interested sociopaths.

            Also, virtuous people actually existing is irrelevant. Trying to be them is what matters.

            If you believe that virtuous people don’t exist, then you’re likely to see exhortations to become one as simply attempts to manipulate you.

          • Simulated Knave says:
            April 11, 2019 at 4:52 pm

            @bullseye
            There are also those who would conclude from a lack of virtuous people that continual striving is the only appropriate course. Whereas if it IS achievable, yet you keep failing, why keep trying? If everyone fails, failure is not defeat.

            @Nornagest
            That makes sense only to a point. I mean, we see other people be brave. A lot. Flashman, OTOH…

            @The original Mr. X:
            Hypocrites, stupid, incomprehensible, etc. He’s quite down on virtue. However, he is NOT presented as someone admirable, merely as someone successful. I never left those books thinking Flashman’s ways were righteous and superior. Usually the opposite.

            Re virtuous people: there’s several centuries of Christians arguing that everyone is a damned sinner doomed to err and sin constantly that would suggest otherwise.

          • Nornagest says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:10 pm

            I mean, we see other people be brave. A lot. Flashman, OTOH…

            Flashman does plenty of stuff that would look brave to an informed outsider, especially in the later books. He usually justifies it to the reader with a risk to his person or reputation, or in one case being high out of his mind on hashish, and that usually makes sense, but not always — volunteering to carry messages to Campbell during the siege of Lucknow, for example, is a brave act no matter how you slice it.

          • DavidS says:
            April 14, 2019 at 5:30 am

            I think there’s quite a sharp distinction in Flashman: most people are ‘he’s just as bad as me but in denial about it’ but occasionally he comes across someone who he recognises has real principles. As other have said they’re often fanatics of some kind (either portrayed that way by Flashman or genuinely seem to be).

            Flashman is also a warning that people who mostly seem like lovable rogues will under pressure do genuinely despicable, awful things.

      • psmith says:
        April 11, 2019 at 5:01 pm

        I wouldn’t suggest Flashman in this context, but Fraser’s war memoir Quartered Safe Out Here should probably be in the curriculum somewhere. Not a novel, of course, so not strictly responsive to OP.

        (Suggestion of One Bullet Away downthread is also good. And Teddy Roosevelt’s own autobiography, obviously.).

    • The original Mr. X says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:49 pm

      The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault, because nobody can read her characterisation of Plato and Dion without wanting to be more virtuous.

      The Lord of the Rings, to inculcate that sort of heroic/stoic, “this will almost certainly fail, but I’ll do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do” attitude.

      A Tale of Two Cities, to teach the importance of laying down one’s life for others.

      And also one about the importance of keeping your integrity even whilst everyone around you is corrupt, but the only examples I can think of at the moment are A Man For All Seasons (which isn’t a novel) and Quo Vadis? (which isn’t English).

      • The original Mr. X says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:50 pm

        And although it’s not a novel, I’d want The Abolition of Man somewhere on the curriculum too.

        • Evan Þ says:
          April 10, 2019 at 3:59 pm

          The novelized version of it is That Hideous Strength. I consider it a good novel, but I’ve heard vigorous dissent – and IMO Abolition of Man is stronger as exposition.

          • dodrian says:
            April 10, 2019 at 4:20 pm

            As a teenager I attempted to read That Hideous Strength several times (after loving the first two books), but failed some 40 pages in each attempt.

            When I came back to it after university I loved it. I think having been to university and understanding the academic politics that the first third of the book was parodying was is essential for making it through, which makes it sadly a poor choice for teenagers.

      • carvenvisage says:
        April 14, 2019 at 1:17 am

        And also one about the importance of keeping your integrity even whilst everyone around you is corrupt, but the only examples I can think of at the moment are A Man For All Seasons (which isn’t a novel) and Quo Vadis? (which isn’t English).

        Not a great example but that reminds me of “The idiot”

    • Well... says:
      April 10, 2019 at 5:37 pm

      Into the Wild
      The Fountainhead

    • JPNunez says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:18 pm

      The Iliad. If you are gonna promote old school values, let’s make them as old school as possible.

      Yes, yes, prompted by the discussion in the previous thread.

      • toastengineer says:
        April 12, 2019 at 1:14 pm

        Sulk by the boats while everyone else gets maimed, until your best friend gets himself killed trying to do your job, then get really pissed off and drag your noble enemy’s corpse around until someone finally convinces you to quit being such a douche?

    • DavidFriedman says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:18 pm

      Possibly some of John Buchan.

    • Hoopyfreud says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:43 pm

      In no particular order (but including some books for younger students)

      Into Thin Air
      Homage to Catalonia
      Catch-22 (Infinite Jest if this is a school for true galaxybrains)
      Ten Thousand Years of Solitude
      The Woman in the Dunes
      The Martian Chronicles
      The Metamorphoses (Ovid’s)
      Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
      (A single-volume version including the Bhagavad Gita of) The Mahabharata
      To Kill a Mockingbird
      The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
      King Lear
      Another Country
      Don Quixote
      The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

      • Liam Breathnach says:
        April 12, 2019 at 9:51 am

        I wouldn’t recommend Jane Austen for teenage boys. Good list otherwise. I’d add Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, not mentioned so far above.

        • Hoopyfreud says:
          April 12, 2019 at 10:25 am

          I don’t have Austen in here, though. Which book are you looking at?

          • Nick says:
            April 12, 2019 at 10:36 am

            You mean Jane Austen didn’t write Martian Chronicles?!

            In all seriousness, not a bad list.

          • Liam Breathnach says:
            April 13, 2019 at 8:19 am

            I was confusing your post with Tarpitz’s. Though I did love her memoir of the Spanish civil war..

        • Deiseach says:
          April 12, 2019 at 4:09 pm

          I wouldn’t recommend Jane Austen for teenage boys

          On the other hand, there was a cult of Janeites in the description of Wikipedia:

          Janeitism was “principally a male enthusiasm shared among publishers, professors, and literati”. Rudyard Kipling even published a short story entitled “The Janeites” about a group of World War I soldiers who were secretly fans of Austen’s novels.

    • thevoiceofthevoid says:
      April 10, 2019 at 9:15 pm

      In addition to others already mentioned, I highly recommend Of Mice and Men. It’s short but incredibly poignant, and tells a harsh story of people falling just short of their dream. Sad, but thought-provoking; what does the American Dream mean to people who are unlikely to ever achieve it? A good book well worth the read for entertainment and education. I understand why this one’s considered a classic. (As opposed to the Great Gatsby, which despite similar era, themes, and length never resonated with me at all.)

    • johan_larson says:
      April 11, 2019 at 2:40 am

      Lots of books are being recommended here. Thank you. But I notice many of them are quite old. How about something more recent, from this century?

      Black Hawk Down and Generation Kill don’t quite fit; they’re non-fiction accounts rather than novels. But they are the right sort of stories, and they are from 1999 and 2004 respectively.

      • bean says:
        April 11, 2019 at 5:45 am

        One Bullet Away is probably better for the purpose than Generation Kill. Personally, I think it’s the better book, and it’s rather less cynical about its subject than is Generation Kill.

        • Nornagest says:
          April 11, 2019 at 5:17 pm

          I enjoyed both, but I’d recommend reading them both over reading just one. WRT the military’s role in our society and how it’s perceived vs. how it perceives itself (which is really what they’re both about), the differences between Wright’s take and Fick’s are often more interesting than the similarities. Especially since they clearly like and support each other.

      • noyann says:
        April 14, 2019 at 9:22 am

        The Martian by Andy Weir (NOT the movie!) for more contemporary outdoor activities?

        ETA: The Once And Future King by T.H. White, for the ideas on “might is right” vs. chivalry vs. rule of law.

    • Tarpitz says:
      April 11, 2019 at 7:38 am

      Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett
      1984, by George Orwell
      Espedair Street, by Iain Banks
      A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin
      Dracula, by Bram Stoker
      Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene
      Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
      Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh
      Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote
      The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
      Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos (too lazy to look up the translation I’d recommend, but there is at least one good one)
      Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams
      The Spy who came in from the Cold, by John Le Carre
      Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
      It, by Stephen King

      I am looking for the intersection of books I think are good and books I think a teenage boy would be reasonably likely to enjoy, the object being to get them to read and like reading stuff that is good. Attempting indoctrination through literature is folly.

    • Plumber says:
      April 13, 2019 at 10:25 pm

      @johan_larson

      “…The school is known for fostering a traditional sort of manly virtue…

      ….What books do you recommend?”

      The Big Strike, and On the Drumbeat by Mike Quinn

      Billy Budd by Herman Melville

      How to Tell When Your Tired, and Unmade in America by Reg Theriault

      The Acts of King Arthur’s Knights, The Grapes of Wrath, and In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck

      Which Side Are You on?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back by Thomas Geoghegan

      Harry Bridges; The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States by Charles P. Larrowe

      The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

      Lord Jim, and Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

      Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:
        April 13, 2019 at 10:55 pm

        In re Shop Class as Soul Craft– I only read part of it. I thought the material about jobs being deskilled was important, but the author was awfully repetitious. What ideas did you get from the book?

        • Plumber says:
          April 14, 2019 at 8:19 am

          @Nancy Lebovitz,

          I’d say for me the main idea I got from Shop Class as Soulcraft was for me to be less envious of those who have white-collar jobs (though I still envy the priveledge of the classroom time they typically had).

          I also had more of an appreciation of why self-employment (sole proprietor businesses) could be a good thing, my thinking had been rather more collectivist before reading the book.

    • carvenvisage says:
      April 14, 2019 at 1:09 am

      disclaimer for my own dignity: very preliminary list, basically the 1st fifteen that came to mind, also I don’t have my main list of books on hand to reference.

      1. The camels are coming by W.E. Johns
      2. The lost world by arthur conan doyle
      3. Lion of Macedon by David Gemmell (or another of his books, maybe midnight falcon)
      4. The golden age by John C. wright
      5. Ramses, the son of the light by Christian Jacq
      6. Something by G.K. chesterton, -not either of his novels, maybe a yet-to-be-collated collection of the essays where he makes relevant pronounciations for the topic.
      7. Something by Jack vance (maybe the star king, the book of dreams, the dragon masters, or to live forever)
      8. The night watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
      9. Something by Robert E Howard, not sure what
      10. Something with a detective?
      11. The way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
      12. Something by Mark Lawrence, maybe his original unpublished book that’s free online or something from the red sister series
      13. Nine princes in Amber by roger zelazny, or one of the later books in that series
      14. Something by Steven Brust
      15. Alex Rider series book 1 (or whatever the best book is). (It’s just too bang on the nose, -good place to raise the topic of how books should be assigned/education carried out, and as an experiment in the importance of relatability. ..Also quite good)

      And the curriculum can’t be complete without One Piece by Eiichiro Oda.

      __

      Honorable mentions (that I think of offhand);

      HPMOR (the first tenth or fifth where the world is introduced has some very lively munchkinry also called advantage-seeking), Garth Nix in general, Gene Wolfe in General, Orson Scott Card in general, though more his shadow series than anything else, Christopher Paolini (partially out of personal annoyance at his exagerated criticism, but he also has some hardcore, violent, lively, youthful, etc stuff), Bram Stoker, Darren Shan, Cormac Mcarthy, Winston Churchill (did he ever write a novel?—.. yes, only 1 apparently. Well there’s a good candidate but I haven’t read it), Conn Iggulden, Robert Harris, Walter Scott, Poul Anderson, Dune. Also old books where a youngster makes his way in the world, there’s a name for them which I forget, a genre of sorts. Oh and of course JRR Tolkien.

  15. Eric Rall says:
    April 10, 2019 at 3:03 pm

    This post is inspired by the recent discussion about cabinet reorganization (specifically, JS and cassander’s proposals to create a Colonial Office and reassign NASA under it) and by Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar Series.

    In Turtledove’s series, there’s an alien race (“The Race” to themselves, or “The Lizards” to us) with some capacity for interstellar colonization (“cold sleep” suspended animation, combined with a Daedelus/Longshot-style slower-than-light starship design, and a spaceborne industry base that allows construction of colonization fleets) but otherwise not far ahead of the late 20th century tech levels. The Lizards scouted Earth with robotic probes around the 12th century AD and decided that we were worth conquering. They took their time (assuming that our technological progress rate would follow their own history’s very gradual trajectory) preparing the invasion fleet, which finally arrived in 1942 AD.

    The actual force mix they sent, while providing an interesting match-up with the human militaries they actually found (Lizard equipment horrendously outclassed 1942 human equipment, but this was balanced out by the Lizards being badly outnumbered with no hope of reinforcement or resupply, and by the Lizards’ tactical doctrines being completely uninformed by actual combat experience), don’t strike terribly well-suited for the defenders they expected to meet. For example, if you’re expecting to fight knights and pikemen, why bother bringing anti-air missiles and armor-piercing tank rounds?

    So let’s say you’re a planner in the Department of Colonial Affairs in the near future, and you’ve been tasked with recommending a size, force mix, and concept-of-operations for an invasion of a nearby planet with a native civilization similar in tech levels and population to 12th century Earth. Assume there’s a way to get an invasion force there (a planner in another office is working on that), and also a confidence interval on the natives’ tech level when the invasion force arrives as “no significant progress from High Medieval tech levels” to “late preindustrial (c. 1750s) tech levels”.

    Your superiors are in a hurry to send the expedition as soon as possible (*), so they instruct you to limit yourself to equipment that’s already in inventory or equipment that can be put into production in the next 2-3 years at the latest.

    What kind of force and equipment do you recommend sending, and how would you expect them to be employed to effect the conquest?

    (*) I know that realistically, the starships and the orbital infrastructure to build them would take decades to develop, but let’s ignore that for the sake of the hypothetical scenario.

    • Thomas Jorgensen says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:08 pm

      … You do not send an army for this shit. You send a diplomatic corps with a data base and play local factions against each other. For “And we completely screwed the pooch” contingency planning, you could include a bio-war lab. Intra-species viral and germ warfare is limited by the risk of backfire – if you are aiming at aliens, you can deploy pathogens with the kind of free abandon Australians use on rabbits.

      • Evan Þ says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:41 pm

        On the other hand, that near-zero risk of blowback is limited by near-zero knowledge base. Actual aliens very likely won’t even have DNA, let alone enough biological overlap to make our knowledge of earth diseases useful.

        • albatross11 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 3:49 pm

          Yeah, dropping big rocks from the sky has the advantage that it doesn’t turn on a multi-decade program to understand the aliens’ biology in detail.

      • cassander says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:51 pm

        your diplomatic corps has a hell of a lot more sway when they have some firepower at their beck and call. You get more with a kind word and a gun than you do with just the kind word…

        • quanta413 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 5:31 pm

          Bringing weapons also enables selling guns to one side or the other for your own long term benefit. Conflicts that end too fast don’t help weaken the group you are conquering as well.

          You can sell them some second-grade stuff and keep the really good stuff for yourself too.

    • Randy M says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:19 pm

      so they instruct you to limit yourself to equipment that’s already in inventory or equipment that can be put into production in the next 2-3 years at the latest.

      Could we build orbital lasers or “rods from god” type weapons at the moment? If so, that’s first. Second is a very good linguistics/anthropology team to learn the language and negotiate/blackmail cooperation from the local leaders. Having your nation obliterated by unavoidable, unreachable weapons seems like pretty strong leverage.
      Third some special ops team to protect the diplomats.
      Fill out the rest of the cargo with whatever equipment you need to build your civilian colonies or extract the resources or draw your face in the shoreline or whatever reason you have for conquest.

      edit: If we have to do it from the ground, then replace priority 1 with all terrain armored vehicles with anti-personnel weapons, I guess. Not very imaginative, but tanks usually beat spearmen.

      • Simulated Knave says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:34 pm

        There’s a line from a military sci-fi novel I read once where the general and his aide see an air-car come in with a spear sticking out of it. The aide asks how they can lose against an enemy attacking air-cars with spears, and the general asks how they can win against an enemy willing to attack air-cars when all they have is spears.

        This anecdote, which feels like it must have been adapted from something in colonial history, kind of sums up all the war results of the last few decades.

        • The Nybbler says:
          April 10, 2019 at 6:44 pm

          Sounds like the Zulu. Except that the Zulu lost.

        • Nick says:
          April 11, 2019 at 5:41 am

          Surely the spear is sticking into it? If your natives are commandeering air-cars then you’ve got other problems. 😀

          • Simulated Knave says:
            April 11, 2019 at 4:39 pm

            If I were to stab you in the head with a spear and leave it there, there would be a spear sticking out of your head…

            The spear is sticking into the aircar only from the narrow perspective of the aircar. The general and his second in command both outrank the aircar, and so get priority in these matters.

          • Randy M says:
            April 12, 2019 at 7:24 am

            I think the prepositional phrase is used very loosely but I support Nick’s proposed usage. The direction of flight/origin of the spear should be indicated by the preposition chosen; spear from tank = “sticking out of”; spear from outside tank = “sticking into”.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:07 am

            “A spear shaft sticking out of it” would eliminate the directionality implied by the spearhead and so solves the problem.

          • Simulated Knave says:
            April 12, 2019 at 6:28 pm

            Leaving aside the bit that I’m pretty sure that’s how the original book put it, a quick google for “spear sticking out of” and “spear sticking into” leans overwhelmingly to the former. Same thing if you use arrow instead of spear. This is not an everyday phrase, but to the extent it is used this is the form it takes.

            The proposed phrasing also overlooks the problem that the spear is sticking out of the car far more than it is sticking into it. It at most penetrates a portion of the surface layer, but the handle is waving around outside. By this logic, telephone poles could not be said to stick out of the ground.

            Saying spearshaft implies there may not be a spearhead.

          • Another Throw says:
            April 12, 2019 at 7:48 pm

            I would probably phrase it as “a spear stuck in it.”

            To me, using the past-whatever tense implies that someone stuck it in (or out of) the air car and didn’t bother retrieving it. The direction indicates the direction that the sticking originally happened in.

            Whereas using the continues-whatever tense (with either in or out) implies that their is an ongoing reason for it the spear and the air car to be engaged in their stuck relationship. In this case, the direction indicates which end is the business end in the context in question. Someone inside the air car is waving the business end of the spear out the window at you, for example. Or the business end you have to pull on to dislodge it from its stuck position. Or, really, the side of the thing it is stuck in you happen to be on at the moment.

            ETA: Grammar pedants can suck it.

      • Nornagest says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:51 pm

        It’s hard to be sure without details of our transport, but our mass budget’s probably going to be tight, so “rods from god” and heavy armor are probably out. Orbital lasers might not be, but I’m not sure we could get those done in 2-3 years.

        Local allies are definitely going to be key. The closest thing to this in our history was probably the Spanish colonization of the Americas (very late medieval/very early modern vs. Chalcolithic or early Bronze Age), and Cortes and Pizarro wouldn’t have gotten far without some fairly deft maneuvering.

      • John Schilling says:
        April 10, 2019 at 4:02 pm

        It’s hard to be sure without details of our transport, but our mass budget’s probably going to be tight, so “rods from god” and heavy armor are probably out.

        Plan on manufacturing at least the heavy parts of those on-site. Nickel-iron asteroids are probably ubiquitous, maybe not as numerous as in our solar system but you could forge every tank and armored fighting vehicle ever built on this Earth from a single ~250m chunk and have enough left over for about five thousand equivalent megatons of orbital kinetic bombardment.

        • Nornagest says:
          April 10, 2019 at 4:07 pm

          I’m not sure if an orbital foundry capable of processing a 250-meter rock would work out to more or less mass than a tank battalion, but I doubt you could get one built in two years with present-day tech.

          • John Schilling says:
            April 10, 2019 at 5:04 pm

            I think I could if I had access to zero-gravity for development and debugging. The catch is, the detail work will be done ahead of time by making a battalion (regiment, division, whatever) of tank-forms out of thin sheet metal with embedded electric heating elements while I still have access to Earth’s industrial base. The “foundry” is basically a big gold-laminated plastic bag. Insert one tank-form and a bit more than a tank-weight of ore, inflate with carbon monoxide, then park it in an orbit where the bag will be solar-heated to ~200 deg C, and electrically heat the tank-form to maintain ~300 deg C. Details of pressure and temperature TBD during the debugging phase.

            The nickel and iron from the raw ore will form high-purity nickel and iron carbonyl, which then pyrolizes to deposit a fairly high-grade nickel steel on the heated substrate. It’s not a fast process, only a few millimeters per day at most, but that’s enough for a heavy tank in a month or two and I can probably ship at least a company’s worth of reusable tank-baggies.

            Good for heavy artillery tubes and solid rocket motor casings as well. Probably diesel engine blocks and maybe turbine blades, but that starts getting tricky.

          • bean says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:18 am

            I strongly suspect that you’d need more than that to produce useful tanks. Metal like that isn’t just chemical composition, it’s also processing methods. Yes, many tanks have been cast, but I suspect there were more steps. Face-hardening at the very least would be a good idea. The same applies to gun tubes and the like, in spades.

          • John Schilling says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:37 am

            Face-hardening would be useful, but from the preliminary results I’ve seen just the carbonyl vapor deposition can be tuned to give something pretty close to RHA(*). If I’m invading a planet, and particularly one I expect to be relatively low-tech, and I have my choice between a regiment of RHA-clad M60A3s and a company of M1A2s because that’s all the mass budget would allow me to ship fully assembled, I think I’ll take the regiment.

            * Rolled homogenous armor; commonly used as the benchmark against which other armors and armor-penetrators are compared

          • bean says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:49 am

            That’s pretty impressive. I had no clue if you were looking at RHA or mild steel coming out the process, and I’d definitely take the M60s in that case, too.

            But I’d still be worried about things like gun tubes, which have a lot of extra processing done to them.

      • Randy M says:
        April 11, 2019 at 9:54 am

        I’m surprised no one gave me flak for sending in soldiers/tanks with no way to rearm them once the ammo ran out. Would it be better to make high quality crossbows than rifles? It’s hard to have a modern elite fighting force without an industrial base to support them.

        And feeding them is another hassle! Better to announce yourself via robot and nuke it from orbit, I think, if it must be done.

    • Simulated Knave says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:31 pm

      I tell them that this is a terrible idea, since we have zero idea of what we will actually find when we do arrive a few centuries later. This is also oddly complicated, since we’re at a lower tech level than what you describe the Lizards having.

      Plan A: Leaving THAT aside, there are two things possible. If we’re planning to colonize the planet and displace the native species, we probably want to displace their entire ecosystem. So I’ll recommend we pack something that would allow us to find some big rocks in their solar system. Then we drop one on the planet, release some terraformers, and go back to sleep for a few centuries.

      Plan B: If for some reason we don’t want to completely destroy their ecosystem, we should still look into dropping big rocks onto their centers of population, then invading. If we’re not technologically up to dropping big rocks on things (whether we bring the rocks or use local ones), we’re not up to conquering a planet at the end of a multi-century supply chain. Genocide is wrong, but if you’re planning something like this it shouldn’t be the sticking point.

      Plan C: Finally, if we actually are invading (like morons), we need local allies. Local allies give legitimacy to imperialist conquerors, and if we’re a few centuries from home we’ll need that something fierce. Bluntly, a modern army of any transportable size can’t defeat a planetary population, even one at a Middle Ages tech level. We will run out of bullets or bodies before they do. So – rods from God to persuade people that attacking us is not worth doing. We’ll need a ring of orbital death launchers (for the aformentioned dropping of big rocks/depleted uranium rods). Then negotiate for/make friends with someone on the most defensible piece of land. As their neighbours invade them for whatever stupid reason (and they WILL), conquer the neighbours and integrate them to the extent possible. For added sneakiness, combine Part C with Part B and don’t tell them we did Part B.

      This will still fail. There is no colonial empire in history that has not, sooner or later, fallen apart. The only thing likely to be stable would be more like a merger than a colonization effort. I can think of no successful examples from our own history that would make this seem like anything other than a terrible idea.

    • John Schilling says:
      April 10, 2019 at 3:40 pm

      That’s going to depend highly on just what level of technology I have available to me; note that “Worldwar” is now a quarter of a century old and so even Turtledove’s “advanced” aliens seem laughably undersupplied in, e.g., drones. And if you’ve got starship engines, that has implications for weapons technology that will have to be explored.

      But there’s no excuse for inadequate pre-invasion reconnaissance. Starting with a Big Freaking Telescope before you launch the first starship, and then sequential flyby probes during the approach. And depending on the results of those probes, I’m going to insist on the option of a heavy kinetic and/or nuclear bombardment, and of converting the whole mission to trade and diplomacy instead of invasion.

      Actually, trade and diplomacy should be a major component even if we stick with the invasion plan; it worked for Cortez well enough. Maybe mock up one of the “flyby” probes as the scout ship for a fictional, hideously warlike alien race (we’ll put Adrian Veidt on that one), have it crash mostly-intact where our hapless victims can find it, and sell ourselves as the altruistic saviors come to protect them from the Evil From Beyond The Stars What Wants to Eat Their Brains.

      • albatross11 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 3:56 pm

        I had the impression that the Lizards had basically stopped developing military technology once the predecessor of their global empire won their planet’s final war, probably at WW2 levels or so. The innovations already in the pipeline at that point, plus incremental improvements and tech transfer from other areas, get you to something like NATO technology as of 1990 or so. But the sense I got was that there was really not much new science or technology happening at all. The Lizards seemed to be about as bright as humans, but it’s possible they had a lower variance, so didn’t get as many geniuses. But mainly, the society was extremely rigid and didn’t value innovation. (And sometimes suppressed it till its social implications could be worked out.).

        • Eric Rall says:
          April 10, 2019 at 4:34 pm

          I had the impression that the Lizards had basically stopped developing military technology once the predecessor of their global empire won their planet’s final war, probably at WW2 levels or so.

          That’s something that confused me a bit reading the books: one of the later books in the original tetrology quotes a Lizard pretty much confirming your impression, but that contradicts the impression I got from the earlier books that the Lizards had unified into a single Empire during their equivalent of the late classical era: specifically, Lizards seem astonished that humans got to WW2 tech levels without being a single unified Empire, and Lizard scientists talk about competition in a fragmented society as a driving factor for human progress (which doesn’t work if Lizard society didn’t unify until ~WW2 tech levels).

          But mainly, the society was extremely rigid and didn’t value innovation. (And sometimes suppressed it till its social implications could be worked out.).

          In addition to that, I got the impression that the Lizards had a centrally-planned command economy, at least for institutional science and major industry. And a centrally-planned R&D/industrial organization that expects slow, linear development of tech is more likely to get slow, linear development than breakthroughs and exponential progress.

          • moonfirestorm says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:09 am

            Lizard scientists talk about competition in a fragmented society as a driving factor for human progress (which doesn’t work if Lizard society didn’t unify until ~WW2 tech levels).

            The Lizards unified around WW2 tech, the stuff in the pipeline pushed them ahead a little further, and then they just stayed that way for 50,000 years with no changes in military technology. At one point they had competition in a fragmented society that got them that far, but that’s ancient history to them: they’ve had a long, long time to stagnate.

            Remember, Earth will be the third planet the Lizards have conquered, and they’ve had enough time to fully integrate both of the previous civilizations into theirs. I don’t think we see any Hallessi or Rabotevs in the actual invasion fleet, but they show up in Homeward Bound. Both previous conquests were a total rout: a few hundred casualties on Rabotev (14,000 years ago), a few dozen on Halless (9,000 years ago). They had no incentive to develop anything better, because what they had was just crushing every species they met.

        • Protagoras says:
          April 10, 2019 at 6:03 pm

          The lizards are described as being about as smart as humans, and sometimes act like it, but it never made any sense to me that the lizards with perfectly functional spacecraft did not do the obvious thing to inflict massive damage without using up their supply of nukes (or creating radiation), especially when even the possibility that the author hadn’t thought of it was ruled out when the humans did employ the obvious tactic.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:50 am

            Side point about the book: I found it extremely unlikely that a species capable of addiction would have no experience of it on their own planet.

          • moonfirestorm says:
            April 11, 2019 at 7:18 am

            I found it extremely unlikely that a species capable of addiction would have no experience of it on their own planet.

            And they sort of had this concept of harmful effects in their adoption of technology, right? The archetypal example is television, which they studied for a decade to make sure it didn’t have ill effects before letting the public have it.

            But maybe that’s why ginger had such a significant effect. They’re not a species that’s used to having vices beyond the control of authority. Either it’s not harmful, it’s released, and everyone enjoys it as much as they want. Or it’s harmful, it’s suppressed by the all-powerful government, and your average citizen never even hears of it so there’s no mechanism for a black market to form. They surely had this concept in their past, but after unification they managed to lock down everything and it’s been thousands of years.

            Then we get to Tosev 3, and we get a substance that’s highly addictive but also already present everywhere. Even if the military had full control of the planet, it’s already going to be accessible to random soldiers because it’s in half the kitchen cabinets.

            And the military explicitly doesn’t have control. The sneaky Tosevites are already running rings around the Race in everything social and have much more experience with less-controlled addictive substances, and now they’re given strong tactical and profit-driven motivation to bypass whatever controls the Race tries to set up.

          • albatross11 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:48 pm

            I assumed that every such substance that had been found throughout Lizard history had also been eradicated.

      • Eric Rall says:
        April 10, 2019 at 4:25 pm

        note that “Worldwar” is now a quarter of a century old and so even Turtledove’s “advanced” aliens seem laughably undersupplied in, e.g., drones.

        Even reading them as they were being published, the Lizard military tech seemed a bit behind NATO’s deployed equipment in the 1990s. For example, I remember a Lizard fighter pilot getting shot down while doing close air support because he lost both engines to FOD from rifle bullets, which I don’t think is a problem F-16s are vulnerable to. Likewise, I don’t think there’s any angle or range at which a Panzer III or a bazooka could knock a hole in an M1 Abrams.

        And if you’ve got starship engines, that has implications for weapons technology that will have to be explored.

        True. I was imagining a Daedelus/Longshot-style open-cycle or pulsed fusion drive, as a compromise between “near future” and “practical starship” (at least combined with suspended animation), and even that compromises both fronts quite a bit.

        Obvious military applications of that are 1) it’s a lot closer to a practical general-purpose-power-source fusion reactor than anything we have now, which would in turn imply a much larger power budget for energy weapons than anything we have now, and 2) “Maxim 24: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun”: the only major difference between an open-cycle fusion drive and a nuclear death ray is which direction you’re looking at it from.

        • Auric Ulvin says:
          April 10, 2019 at 7:53 pm

          The whole point of Book 1 was that the Lizards didn’t really know how to fight, that they were bad on a tactical, operational and strategic level. Expanding this, we can assume that their technological advantage is stunted by bad logical choices resulting from military inexperience.

          The Abrams has its armour all nicely sloped, vulnerable points all properly protected because it’s the product of an experienced military and has been tested in battle. Winning tank battles is what it’s supposed to do.

          I could easily imagine a Lizard design committee, who’d never fought a tank battle in their lives, maybe never expecting one to occur making a dumb mistake. Maybe they save a lot of weight (cause this is an interstellar campaign) by scrapping parts of the composite underarmour and using aluminium or something. They might be using some all-in-one doctrine, producing a mediocre MBT, self-propelled gun and APC that’s pretty bad at everything but is light enough to fit onto the invasion ships and uses only the fewest spare parts or needs the least maintenance.

        • bean says:
          April 11, 2019 at 5:10 am

          For example, I remember a Lizard fighter pilot getting shot down while doing close air support because he lost both engines to FOD from rifle bullets, which I don’t think is a problem F-16s are vulnerable to. Likewise, I don’t think there’s any angle or range at which a Panzer III or a bazooka could knock a hole in an M1 Abrams.

          Neither of these is really true. The Abrams isn’t very vulnerable to a bazooka, but I believe the armor on the back has a few weak spots. I know we lost a couple in Iraq to short-range attack from behind, not to mention hits on the tracks. And the F-16 is reasonably vulnerable to machine gun fire if it chooses to play in the weeds. Which is why it generally doesn’t.

          • Eric Rall says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:46 am

            The Abrams isn’t very vulnerable to a bazooka, but I believe the armor on the back has a few weak spots.

            I did a little digging online, and it looks like you may be right: at least one source claims the engine compartment’s armor is only 40mm equivalent at its weakest point, which is within the range of a Panzer III’s strongest armor (15, 30, or 45mm, depending on the model), and there were plenty of WW2 tanks that could pierce with that at combat ranges, and is quite a bit less than the designed penetration of a bazooka (76mm). I think an Abrams is designed with the engine compartment separated from the rest of the tank, so a hit there would be a mission kill but would leave the crew alive and the tank potentially salvageable. You can probably also mission kill an Abrams (or any other tank for that matter) by blowing off a tread, but that’s a much easier repair than a destroyed engine.

            The rest of an Abrams’s armor ranges from 100mm equivalent (rear turret) to 600+mm equivalent on the main glacis. The 100mm figure is about the same as the main armor of a Panther, which could probably be pierced by late-WW2 tanks and by heavy anti-tank guns earlier, but is solidly beyond the aspirations of a Panzer III.

            IIRC, the Lizard landcruiser that got killed by a Panzer III was hit at very closer range on its underchassis while cresting the hill the Panzer was hiding behind. I don’t think that would kill an Abrams, but that can be read as a “Lizard tank designers lacked combat data and made less-optimal decisions” problem, not an inherently lower tech level.

            And the F-16 is reasonably vulnerable to machine gun fire if it chooses to play in the weeds. Which is why it generally doesn’t.

            I stand corrected.

      • CatCube says:
        April 10, 2019 at 8:55 pm

        It’s worth noting that the central conceit of the aliens here was that the pre-invasion reconnaissance (a probe sent 700 years ago) was adequate…until Earth. They had conquered two planets already doing exactly that, and everything went according to plan.

        I’m going from memory on the timelines, but their society had been about as advanced as ours overall (some a little more, like colony ships, and really well-designed nuclear plants) for some 100,000 years since they reunified their planet. They conquered two other planets in that time, a few thousand years apart.

        For both, they took a few hundred years to plan the invasion and subsequent colonization, develop the equipment, develop the starships, build and train the army, then send it off. A small snippet of the books talks about how they had their tanks on the drawing board for several centuries, working out all of the bugs before they started building the factories (and working the bugs out of them) some decades before they launched the invasion force. In the thousands of years between invasions, they have no military forces at all, only civilian police.

        For the first two conquests, it was a walkover and they conquered two entire planets suffering tens of casualties each, since both of those alien races were as static as the Lizards, and had been at the Middle Ages level of technology they expected. Their plan was to come to Earth fully prepared to swat a fly with a sledgehammer, and they had done exactly that twice before.

        It’s also worth noting that the Lizards are very bad at diplomacy, due to both their arrogance about their technological superiority and the fact that since their own planet had been unified under a single government for 5,000 generations and they easily conquered the only other two planets they encountered, they had no experience with it.

        They’re also extremely inflexible, both militarily and bureaucratically. For example, the first thing they do after arriving and realizing that the planet is engaged in a massive war using technology not that far from their own is to send a status update back to their homeworld. It doesn’t come up until the second trilogy, but after twenty years of speed-of-light delay they start getting detailed instructions from the homeworld about the next steps to take! It just never occurs to the aliens who haven’t encountered Earth that things could really have changed that quickly.

        The second thing they do is to proceed according to plan–the leader of the conquest force considers turning around, but rejects this. The previous two leaders of conquests were literally some of the most famous people in the 100,000 year history of their planet, and their leader, Atvar, wants to be known as “Atvar Worldconqueror,” not “Atvar Worldfleer.” He also has to consider the fact that the colonization fleet has been prepared to arrive 20 years later, and the speed-of-light delay means they can’t halt them.

        They do have the ability to break orbit and send both back safely, but both the conquest leader and the colonization leader elect not to do this–though after having dealt with Earthlings for 20 years, the conquest leader tries to talk the colonization leader into scrubbing the colonization plan and going back home, but doesn’t have the authority to make it stick. It’s really just one of their central psychological traits that if they just take as much time as they need to make a plan, and everybody executes that plan perfectly, everything will work out okay and both leaders are all “We have a plan, Goddammit!” when they first arrive.

        One of the plot threads of the second part of the series is the aliens who lived through the first part getting to play Cassandra and watching their colonization force walk face-first into the same walls they did 20 years earlier.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:
          April 10, 2019 at 9:13 pm

          It’s worth noting that the central conceit of the aliens here was that the pre-invasion reconnaissance (a probe sent 700 years ago) was adequate…until Earth. They had conquered two planets already doing exactly that, and everything went according to plan.

          All according to keikaku.[1]

          [1] Keikaku is the sound a lizard makes.

    • bullseye says:
      April 10, 2019 at 5:38 pm

      Pick a promising native empire. Show up at the capital and tell them that you’re gods and they’re the chosen ones, or whatever line of BS your scouts think they’ll buy. Equip them with the weapons, communications gear, and transportation they need to conquer the world, with all of it rigged so you can turn it off remotely.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        April 10, 2019 at 6:42 pm

        For some stupid reason, Darkseid did this with organized crime instead of a promising Earth empire.

    • bean says:
      April 11, 2019 at 5:34 am

      If our confidence interval runs through 1750, then this shouldn’t be too hard. I have communication and surveillance technology the other side couldn’t even dream of, and modern precision weapons allow a lot of force multiplication.

      Our first objective is to establish a base on the planet. Somewhere we can start setting up our own industry in relative safety. A big island would be idea. If this target planet is Earth and it’s 1750 or earlier, Australia. (Which I am aware is not an island, but it’s basically the same thing.) Provided I can find somewhere with no major civilization, I really should only need a brigade or so of troops for security, and they can be really light. We’re not talking tanks, we’re talking armored cars to stop spears and maybe musket balls.

      Any attempt to attack the base is easy to defeat. A sailing man-of-war is vulnerable to a modern patrol boat with a 30mm gun, because the OPV can stand upwind of it and hit it from out of range. Or I could just use a laser-guided bomb. A single F-16 should be able to carry at least a dozen bombs each of which is capable of taking out even the largest man-of-war reliably.

      At this point, I start playing local politics. Even a few satphones and advice based on the satellite pictures would be of incalculable value in the 1750s, and that gives me a lot of leverage. Soon, the people I want are in charge of pretty much everywhere, and without me giving them weapons they could turn on me.

      And if real conquest becomes necessary, then I can use my base to build weapons for the follow-on force, which can be a lot lighter than the first wave because it’s mostly troops to use those weapons.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      April 11, 2019 at 7:23 am

      It kind of depends on the local environment and the landscape of civilizations. Post-industrial societies have dramatically new tools that enable them to do things pre-industrial societies cannot even dream of. We could easily carve out huge sections of South America, North America, and Africa that are barely inhabited, and no contemporary civilization would be able to mount anything like a serious assault, particularly if we have no compunctions with simply eliminating the locals and replacing them with our own frozen embryos.

      The existence of a nuclear weapons arsenal also means the ability to take out political opposition and make organizing against our invasion force basically impossible. You can also perpetually keep them pre-industrial by nuking whatever network of cities is about to have an industrial revolution. It’s not like you need to start a nuclear winter: in the 1750s, you’re basically talking about a few key cities like Amsterdam, London, Paris….

  16. albatross11 says:
    April 10, 2019 at 3:44 pm

    IQ tests as a left-wing cause.

    Standardized testing is actually one of the strongest forces we have for social mobility, because smart kids are often born in poor families that aren’t going to be able to help them craft the perfect resume. Similarly, using IQ tests to track kids into better classes is a mechanism for social mobility. The current kick about how the SAT is evil and meritocracy is all a lie is likely to lead us into a world where the people at the top have an *easier* time keeping their kids at the top.

    Also, for my part, _The Bell Curve_ was a strong argument for compassion for the people on the bottom. Part of the premise of the book is that my success and your failure is largely down to differences in our IQs, which in turn is largely down to differences in our genes and early childhood environments. If you’re poor and I’m well-off because of genetic differences or differences in our upbringing, it’s hard to see that as especially just. (It may be the best way we know how to build a society, though.) How is that any different from a society where I’m well-off and you’re poor because I was born into the minor nobility and you were born a commoner?

    • 10240 says:
      April 10, 2019 at 4:38 pm

      How is that any different from a society where I’m well-off and you’re poor because I was born into the minor nobility and you were born a commoner?

      An obvious difference is that there is no good reason one’s birth as noble or commoner should be relevant to how we treat him or interact with him, while one’s intelligence is relevant in many ways. Intelligence is also relevant to how much value the person provides to others. Whether these should influence a person’t prosperity (and to what extent that question even makes sense) is a matter of worldview.

      • albatross11 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 5:34 pm

        I think I agree with the second reason, but not so much with the first. Or rather, I agree that this is a value that gray tribers everywhere share, but that’s not most of the world even today, where plenty of people think your race, religion, and conditions of birth matter a great deal for how you should be treated.

    • ilikekittycat says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:09 pm

      If the IQ stuff starts to become really widespread and popular amongst the public, I can see the left taking a position that’s along the lines of: “Well, there’s your proof equality of opportunity really is 10x tougher than equality of outcome. We know how to transfer wealth, if there is the political will to do it; how in the world does an 83 IQ person ever find themselves at the same starting line as the truly nurtured and gifted, without creating the abomination of a Brave New World/Harrison Bergeron?”

      • The Nybbler says:
        April 10, 2019 at 8:18 pm

        how in the world does an 83 IQ person ever find themselves at the same starting line as the truly nurtured and gifted, without creating the abomination of a Brave New World/Harrison Bergeron?

        They can’t. Some people are short, some people are weak, some people are ugly, some people are socially inept… none of these people get any accomodation. So why should the low-IQ? Either go full Harrison Bergeron, or let the dice lie where they fall; picking just IQ as a source of leveling just enhances the dominance of the tall and handsome smooth talkers over the nerds.

        • ilikekittycat says:
          April 10, 2019 at 9:00 pm

          You don’t gotta tell me… tell the next person you hear starting in with the equality of opportunity bullshit to cram it

        • helloo says:
          April 11, 2019 at 8:03 am

          There’s been suggestions for both a handsome tax and a tall tax.
          Haven’t heard about a general tax on intelligence (perhaps based on highest academic schooling level?) but wouldn’t be surprised by it.

          In some ways, the progressive income tax includes all that plus a “lucky” tax.

          • Randy M says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:47 am

            Alright, just for the lulz, I’m now in favor of taxing every positive trait based solely on public affirmation. It would be hilarious to have people publicly aver to being ugly idiots to reduce their tax burden.
            And in America today, I think we could fund the government entirely by taxing the narcissists who swear they are brilliant studs.

          • Nick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:50 am

            Like that Athenian tax on self-assessed wealth? I love it.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 11, 2019 at 2:22 pm

            Like that Athenian tax on self-assessed wealth?

            I’m pretty sure Adam Smith describes a German city or state which had a tax on either self-declared wealth or self-declared income.

            In Athens, the wealthiest citizens had to produce a public good every other year. The rule on that one provided a mechanism for testing the claim that you were less wealthy than someone else.

            Is that what you are thinking of, or is it something else I don’t know about?

          • JPNunez says:
            April 11, 2019 at 2:25 pm

            @DavidFriedman

            How did that work? Wouldn’t the richest citizen just build a less luxurious bridge and claim he didn’t do that good those two years, or were they trusting that the loss in reputation would keep the rich citizen honest?

            Any quick link on this?

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 12, 2019 at 12:48 am

            Examples of the sort of obligation:

            To captain, or hire someone to captain, a warship for a year, and pay all its expenses.

            To sponsor the Athenian Olympic team.

            In the first case, my guess is that doing an inadequate job would be obvious. In the second, my guess is that a wealthy Athenian would see it as an opportunity to gain status.

            My main source was The Law in Classical Athens by MacDowell. For my summary, see the Athenian chapter in my Legal Systems Very Different. A late draft is webbed.

          • Nick says:
            April 12, 2019 at 1:39 am

            @DavidFriedman I was thinking of one of your posts last year:

            The self-evaluated property tax is a very old idea. The equivalent was employed in Periclean Athens to determine which of two men was wealthier, hence which had to produce a public good that year. If you claim I am wealthier than you are and I disagree, I offer to trade everything I own for everything you own. If you refuse you have conceded that you are wealthier.

            It’s also the way claiming races are done in horse racing.

            It sounds like the Athenian example was only an equivalent if the “tax” was producing a public good that year, so mea culpa.

          • JPNunez says:
            April 12, 2019 at 6:20 am

            @DavidFriedman

            Thanks!

      • Ghillie Dhu says:
        April 11, 2019 at 9:07 am

        That sounds to me like a misrepresentation of what opportunity is; insisting on equal chance of success is really just smuggling in equality of outcome, just in expectation.

    • SamChevre says:
      April 10, 2019 at 7:13 pm

      I’m an exemplar of “standardized testing as means of social mobility.” My family was quite poor (EITC eligible), I quit school when I was 14 and was out of school for 9 years–but a near-perfect SAT score got me admission to a selective school. It made a massive difference.

    • DinoNerd says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:49 pm

      I’m honestly not sure what the various strains of leftists “really want” these days, and I’m supposedly one of them 😉

      To my (more left wing than me) parents, favouring smart people was self-evidentally good, whereas favouring people for ethnic, racial, class or nationality reasons was not. But they were born early enough they could still see communism as good.

      Most of what I’m being asked/presumed to support these days involve
      – groups with a history of marginalization
      – traditional civil rights (more about voting rights, avoidance of arbitrary police action; less about freedom of speech)
      – environmentalism
      – freedom from religion; freedom from Christian religion in particular (this continually decreases)

      Notably missing:
      – anything concerned with class, whether in terms of income, parental income, wealth, etc. or symbolic markers like prep schools, accents, degrees etc.
      – use of government power to protect individuals from predatory, dishonest, and outright incompetent businesses – or, for that matter, government departments and their possibly rogue employees

      And that’s from the list I consider left wing – I could do a similar analysis for the traditional right wing list, but I’m *not* generally on their mailing lists, except for the ever persistent CATO institute – so I’m not sure I really know what they are presuming/pushing internally.

      I’m not sure that the left wing currently cares about individuals being able to better themselves, as compared to groups improving relative to other groups.

      On the other hand, traditional liberals would care. But I think that’s an endangered species currently 😉

      I think the current left doesn’t see why one disadvantaged person should do better than any other with the same disadvantage – except based on “connections” and similar “soft skills”. (OTOH, I frequently think that the right wing – at least the part acting as corporate decision makers – has the same belief that only “soft skills” and connections matter :-()

      • Viliam says:
        April 11, 2019 at 2:29 pm

        To my (more left wing than me) parents, favouring smart people was self-evidentally good, whereas favouring people for ethnic, racial, class or nationality reasons was not.

        I believe my parents (formerly communists) would agree with this, too.

        If I had to guess what has changed…

        I seems to me that these days, the largest source of original “left-wing thought” is American academia. (After the collapse of Soviet Union and its satellites, the left-wing thought in that part of the world is mostly either “Lenin did nothing wrong, bring back Soviet Union” or repeating something read at American left-wing blogosphere.) This brings two types of change:

        First, introduction of specifically American topics (black slavery, feminism), as opposed to specifically Soviet topics (how biology is completely irrelevant, because we are going to become new Soviet people anyway). It’s not that in Soviet Union racism didn’t exist (everyone knew that all people are equal, but Russians are the first among the equals), but it was a taboo. Women were supposed to work at factories and achieve 110% of the quota just like men.

        Second, signaling sophistication (knowing the correct pronouns for all 1000 genders, etc.), as opposed to appreciation of uneducated workers and peasants. It is painfully obvious that in America, “left wing” is dominated by upper class (trust fund kids at universities, female CEOs making less money than male CEOs, etc.). To be fair, Lenin & co. also mostly came from nobility; but they nominally abolished nobility, and spoke favorably about working-class people. The American left-wing nobles continue to talk as nobles, and express disgust at the “deplorables”.

        Together, this made a shift from “all people are equal, the smart and hard-working should get to the top” to… uhm… what is currently called “Social Justice” by its opponents.

        • Nornagest says:
          April 11, 2019 at 2:34 pm

          what is currently called “Social Justice” by its opponents.

          Proponents, too. “SJW” and its derivatives are used mainly by opponents, although I know a few people who self-identify that way and a lot more who’d snark about how fighting for social justice sure sounds like a good thing, but it’s the “W” that makes it a shibboleth: the American idpol left absolutely does believe in “social justice”, and absolutely calls it that. Maybe less prominently now than five years ago, but still.

          • Aapje says:
            April 12, 2019 at 4:26 am

            I’m getting a bit tired of people bringing up ‘SJW’ when people discuss Social Justice, for no apparent reason.

            Can you (and others) please refrain from this?

          • Nornagest says:
            April 12, 2019 at 10:42 am

            Uh, no? I think the context here should have been pretty clear.

        • Viliam says:
          April 11, 2019 at 3:50 pm

          Also, I forgot…

          “all people are equal, the smart and hard-working should get to the top”

          …it was assumed that when the smart ones get to the top, they will make the society better for everyone, not just for themselves.

          But in academia, education is mostly a positional good. The value of your diploma is that other people don’t have it. Giving certificates to the smart people only makes things worse for the stupid ones, because now they can be easier eliminated from job interviews.

          The old left saw the world as zero-sum game between capitalists and workers; but the new left sees it as a zero-sum game between groups orthogonal to the class divide, e.g. men vs women, or blacks vs whites. The old left tried to unite the workers, the new left arranges them along the “progressive stack”.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:36 pm

            The old left saw the world as zero-sum game between capitalists and workers; but the new left sees it as a zero-sum game between groups orthogonal to the class divide, e.g. men vs women, or blacks vs whites. The old left tried to unite the workers, the new left arranges them along the “progressive stack”.

            It’s probably been noted before that this is a leftism much more congenial to big business: your Google, Facebook, Disney, Comcast, AT&T…

          • Enkidum says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:46 pm

            It’s probably been noted before that this is a leftism much more congenial to big business: your Googles and Facebook and Disney and so on…

            It very much has – Adolf Reed Jr would be one of the go-to people making that claim.

          • Aapje says:
            April 12, 2019 at 4:27 am

            @Le Maistre Chat

            It’s congenial to policies that benefit the upper (middle) class at the expense of the lower (middle) class in general.

          • toastengineer says:
            April 12, 2019 at 12:54 pm

            The old left saw the world as zero-sum game between capitalists and workers; but the new left sees it as a zero-sum game between groups orthogonal to the class divide, e.g. men vs women, or blacks vs whites.

            It’s worth noting that this is what the anti-SJWS are talking about when they say “cultural marxism,” or at least it was way back when I hung out in those kinds of places.

    • JPNunez says:
      April 11, 2019 at 11:53 am

      I think that, very generally and roughly speaking, the basic leftist tenet is “everyone is equal”, so I don’t see a test revealing inherent differences that cannot be changed by any combination of economic, social or educational policies, to be embraced widely by the left.

      • dick says:
        April 11, 2019 at 12:01 pm

        Very much disagree, for me it’s more like “treat everyone as if they were equal even though they obviously aren’t.” More generally I’m a staunch liberal who knows almost all staunch liberals and don’t know anyone who thinks the SAT is evil or meritocracy is a lie or any of that nonsense and this whole thread and the article that spawned it seem strawmannish, but I’m not excited to get in to the particulars because this topic is so historically unproductive.

        • Randy M says:
          April 11, 2019 at 12:20 pm

          Both of those seem like strawmen to me, or at least, like ideologies I personally wouldn’t want to have to defend. It’s slightly easier to buy that all demographic groups somehow happen to have equal averages for every trait anyone cares about, then that no person differs meaningfully, but only slightly. And dick’s formulation implies that the differences will never practically matter, which certainly isn’t true personally or professionally, and probably isn’t true as matter of policy in many instances. Especially once you start enforcing non-discrimination according to disproportionate outcomes.

          “Treat everyone kindly despite their inherent differences” is a noble principle; pretending the later don’t exist or are never relevant, not so much.

        • quanta413 says:
          April 11, 2019 at 12:22 pm

          “treat everyone as if they were equal even though they obviously aren’t.”

          I feel like the question is “treat as if equal” in which situations? And what does “treat as equal” mean?

          Like I think everyone should have the same legal rights and process uniformity is good although other good things may trade off with that.

          But my version of “treat as equal” for things like college admissions would be deeply hated in the U.S. by many groups since I would remove extracurriculars from consideration. I’d just use a well proctored test and some noise. Drawing some numbers out of a hat. The noise is there to help keep track of how well the test is working and lower the payoff to extreme gaming of the system a little. It’ll add some deniability to the process for those rejected and maybe a little humility to those who get accepted. There are a lot of countries where education works this way minus the added noise.

          But in the U.S. this would totally tank admissions by legacies and athletes who would scream bloody murder, and the racial composition of university students would shift in a way that almost any liberal I’ve ever met would not like. And I’m not in an anti-liberal bubble. I’m the only sort of libertarian or conservative person I know where I work. There are probably others, but they’re also quiet about it.

          • dick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:37 pm

            As I said, not excited to get in to the details, all h-b-d related content is IMO a complete waste of time and toxic to boot. I shouldn’t have responded at all, but “I think (your ingroup) tends to think (something you don’t think)” is tough bait to leave alone.

          • Randy M says:
            April 11, 2019 at 1:43 pm

            I could be mis-remembering, but I think JPNunez would put himself in the group he was speaking for, though JP can correct me if I’m wrong.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 2:26 pm

            @dick

            I’m not talking about that. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to tar me with something I didn’t bring up. Regardless of causes, test scores vary between different groups of people (racial and otherwise, you can find religious and geographic differences too) and there is no sign these differences will vanish soon.

            I brought up legacies and athletes to point out that the opposition is broad based. But few people will admit to liking the legacy system, and it doesn’t make them as immediately uncomfortable because their desires don’t conflict so much there.

            And just to be clear, I’m not h-b-d unless that somehow has been redefined to include people like Steven Pinker.

          • dick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 2:58 pm

            Sorry mate, I meant that this discussion is about h-b-d, not that you’re on one side of it or the other. And I said that “everyone is equal” is not IMO a basic tenet of the left. I honestly have no idea how that relates to legacies getting in to college more or less often. I’d delete my original comment if I could. I probably reply to someone about the topic of IQ and then delete it five minutes later on a weekly basis and I should do more of it.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 3:14 pm

            I honestly have no idea how that relates to legacies getting in to college more or less often.

            I mean it’s related to the question of what does it mean to “treat people equally”.

            If you give everyone the same test for college admissions, you will tank the admissions of dumb rich kids and you will also vastly alter the racial and geographic composition of a college. Even if you adjust for socioeconomic status.

            So what I’m saying is, if you find that test correlates well with college performance and shows no obvious biases in how well it predicts outcomes does using that test count as “treating people equally” or not if the results feel unequal to people or are unequal with respect to groups (grouped by whatever method you like)? A lot of liberals I’ve met would say “no” or “that’s not the goal”. But not all would say no. A lot of conservatives I’ve met would say yes. But not all would say yes.

            And like the original article says, in Britain originally the political saliency of school tests and such was different compared to here. Conservatives hated it because it’s bad for aristocracy and such. And liberals liked it because it help raise poor people up.

            I don’t think the discussion has to be h-b-d related. At least some causes are obviously cultural, and other genetic causes are within group which has little to do with what h-b-d people think about. The underlying moral question isn’t totally different even if all the causes are environmental or all the differences are genetic but just between close relatives.

          • JPNunez says:
            April 11, 2019 at 3:30 pm

            @Randy M

            I am.

            Obvs I think my version is closer to the basic tenet than dick’s version; both the Declaration of Independence of the USA and the French Declaration of Human rights are closer to mine in saying that everyone is equal (sometimes with qualifiers) than dick’s “as if they are equal”.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:01 am

            in saying that everyone is equal

            What does that mean?

            Obviously people vary in height, hair color, ability to bear offspring, etc. “Everyone is equal” could mean “everybody is identical in all the ways that matter to how other people treat them.” But that also is pretty obviously not true—you are, and should be, more willing to accept advice from someone you have found to be wise and intelligent than from someone with the opposite characteristics.

            One meaning, and one that fits the passage from the declaration of independence,

            all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

            is that all men have the same rights. But that still leaves open the question of what those rights are.

            Another possibility is that all men are of the same moral value. So you should be willing to bear the same costs to save the life of one as another. It’s hard to fit that with the strong moral intuition that some people, on the basis of what they have or have not done, are more deserving than others, that you should not be willing to risk your life to save that of a mass murderer/sadist, for instance.

            A final possibility is that all men deserve to have equally attractive outcomes. It’s hard to know what that means, and again it doesn’t fit with our intuition that what people deserve depends in part on what they do.

            Could you specify what you mean by “everyone is equal?”

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 12, 2019 at 9:49 am

            It’s an agreed-upon myth.

            “Our rights are granted from our creator,” is clearly incorrect as a Platonic truth, but as an agreed-upon societal myth it makes us unwilling to violate each other’s rights. People who disagree are either 1) debating Platonic truths, or 2) trying to violate someone else’s rights. One of those is dangerous and we have mimetic antibodies to fight it.

            Same thing will “all people are equal.” Clearly this is incorrect. But people who disagree are either 1) debating Platonic truths, or 2) trying to come up with some argument to punish or violate their outgroup. One of those is dangerous and we have mimetic antibodies to fight it.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 12, 2019 at 10:15 am

            Same thing will “all people are equal.” Clearly this is incorrect. But people who disagree are either 1) debating Platonic truths, or 2) trying to come up with some argument to punish or violate their outgroup. One of those is dangerous and we have mimetic antibodies to fight it.

            People can understand the difference between vague, metaphorical statements and concrete literal ones. But sometimes people who would like something to be empirically true try to use sleight of hand to make agreement about a metaphorical statement be agreement about a different literal statement. To not push back against that by not arguing against the literal interpretation is to eventually let the metaphor die when it becomes obvious that as a literal statement, it’s false.

            The metaphor is useful in the same way a parable is, but to treat a parable literally totally misses the point.

          • Randy M says:
            April 12, 2019 at 10:40 am

            But people who disagree are either 1) debating Platonic truths, or 2) trying to come up with some argument to punish or violate their outgroup.

            Is that your take or a paraphrase of another argument? Because that hardly seems exhaustive.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 12, 2019 at 11:05 am

            My take.

            Another way of saying it, the autistic person honestly questioning something looks a lot like the dishonest concern troll.

          • Randy M says:
            April 12, 2019 at 11:16 am

            Then I’m obligated to bring up the oft raised point that objecting to policy based upon the obviously mistaken presumption of equality is not an attempt to punish or violate the outgroup.

            “The beatings will continue until morale diversity improves” is worth arguing against even if doing so points out that diversity has salient aspects.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:
            April 12, 2019 at 11:21 am

            Sure. I think questioning the hidden-level policy is good at times, because sometimes those hidden-level policies need to be questioned and updated. The fact that people aren’t equal leads to some real problems.

            But, I just know why debating these things is so hard.

          • JPNunez says:
            April 12, 2019 at 12:46 pm

            @DavidFriedman

            The point of my original reply was to provide the vaguest possible agreeable statement for the left wing. Maybe I was mistaken cause I saw some -I assume- left wingers disagree. So I don’t think there is a point in specifying what I meant, the whole idea was to provide some basic common vague idea. Sorry that was not made clear.

            edit: on second thought, if you are asking why I am saying dick’s version is further from the text of the DoI of America and the French UDoHR, well, it is because dick included “even if obviously they aren’t”. So I think that makes mine version closer to those.

            Now, if you ask me what _I_ understand for it, I’d go for the opening to the declaration of independence of America, yeah. I don’t think everyone deserves identical outcomes. Don’t think that’d be even desirable if I was God or had three wishes or whatever. In general I like to assume that differences -that do exist- are, or should be considered to be, or should be made to be, unimportant.

            Here’s where I go back to the original thread theme, the whole IQ test for everyone thing. I doubt the left will widely adopt such things. Unless somehow IQ can be significatively modified somehow, where I am open to the idea. Not gonna claim the left would widely adopt IQ tests in this case, since I was already caught speaking wrongly of the left wing once on this thread tho.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 12, 2019 at 2:55 pm

            In general I like to assume that differences -that do exist- are, or should be considered to be, or should be made to be, unimportant.

            Do you mean differences between large groups (men and women, races as conventionally described, …), or between individuals? I would have said that differences among individuals are large and important.

        • lvlln says:
          April 11, 2019 at 1:54 pm

          It strikes me that “treat everyone as if they were equal even though they obviously aren’t” seems, very generally and roughly speaking, the same as “everyone is equal.” After all, someone who treats everyone as if they were equal (whether or not they obviously are or aren’t) is indistinguishable from someone who genuinely believes that everyone is equal. If the only time that obvious inequality is acknowledged is in private non-consequential conversation or something else that has no impact on anyone, then while that’s not *exactly* the same as claiming that everyone is equal, it’s generally and roughly speaking the same.

          I too disagree that that’s a basic leftist tenet, though. I think a particularly vocal and powerful subset of leftists have made it implicitly their basic tenet, but I don’t think that’s common to leftists outside that particular subset. I’m not sure if I could come up with what *is* a basic leftist tenet, but I’d say it’s something more like “everyone deserves some minimum standard of living” (where that minimum standard can be a moving/amorphous target). I think this impulse to uplift the worst-off can easily get transformed into the impulse to reduce inequality (to the point of complete equality), but I think they’re different things. And the broadest forms of “everyone is equal,” i.e. everyone being equal in the eyes of the law, I think that’s not a particularly leftist tenet, but one that rightists share as well.

          • HowardHolmes says:
            April 13, 2019 at 6:39 am

            We cannot both hold that everyone is equal and inequality exists. If everyone is equal (which I believe) then there is no inequality. The homeless is every bit equal to Jeff Bezos. Jeff has nothing of significance not owned by the homeless.

      • albatross11 says:
        April 11, 2019 at 5:52 pm

        JP Nunez:

        That seems like an obviously counterfactual belief. Is the janitor at your local grade school as smart as Terrence Tao? Does anyone actually believe that?

        • JPNunez says:
          April 12, 2019 at 1:54 pm

          Re: Janitor

          Maybe? I don’t think it is important or that it should be the basis for policy.

        • Plumber says:
          April 12, 2019 at 2:57 pm

          @albatross11 ,

          The head custodian seems bright to me, Terrence Tao I don’t know.

        • JPNunez says:
          April 12, 2019 at 3:11 pm

          In general, I hold said beliefs because they are useful. If you are in a moral quandary, “all people were created equal” will rarely lead you wrong, even if you hold scientific knowledge that (a) people were not created and (b) people are in fact all different.

          • albatross11 says:
            April 14, 2019 at 5:28 pm

            Those beliefs aren’t useful when you use them to predict how everyone will do in a world of super-complex rules where success is mediated by book smarts and schooling and standardized tests. Or in a world where everyone thinks a college degree is the ticket to middle class life. In that world, you’re better at making humane policies if you understood that people differ a whole lot in intelligence and personality, in ways that will make getting through algebra 2 in high school a hugely painful slog, or that some folds would find 60 hours of coursework and a standardized test to be allowed to braid hair to be a huge, almost-insurmountable barrier to making a living.

    • Viliam says:
      April 11, 2019 at 1:54 pm

      _The Bell Curve_ was a strong argument for compassion for the people on the bottom.

      Yeah. Like, it’s horrible when smart people end up at the bottom of the society, but in some sense it is even more horrible when stupid people end up at the bottom — because in the latter case, there is no hope, and often no compassion either.

      And being born stupid is in no way more fair than being born poor.

      If we deny that stupidity is a real problem, then we are going to have a social problem we can’t solve. Because the stupid people are going to have bad outcomes in life, and someone is going to be blamed for that — either the society for not providing enough learn2code programs for the stupid people; or the stupid people themselves for refusing to take the wonderful opportunity offered by the learn2code programs.

      • quanta413 says:
        April 11, 2019 at 2:35 pm

        To be fair, you have to be really stupid or have additional negative traits to not be helpful to other people and net productive economically. Or at least, any issues should be minor if enough people make an effort to try to make laws and social rules understandable and reasonably comprehensible. Comprehensibility is good for everyone too, because sometimes you’re tired or you need to deal with a somewhat harder case or you need to figure something out fast.

        On the other hand, you’re kind of right that it looks like things are sliding in the direction of ever increasing complication.

      • cassander says:
        April 11, 2019 at 3:40 pm

        someone has to be on the bottom. that’s how status works.

        • Garrett says:
          April 12, 2019 at 10:32 am

          > someone has to be on the bottom. that’s how status works.

          The important question is whether the person on the bottom is merely *relatively* useless, or *absolutely* useless. That is, someone who ends upon on the bottom need not be unable to earn their keep. As an example, if you were to rank-order the status of everybody who works for your company, the person at the bottom of the pile almost certainly is able to support themselves simply due to having that job.

          Where it becomes a challenge is when they or a large group of people end up being unable to support themselves at all. It’s being in an position where they are unable to support themselves in society in absolute terms.

        • baconbits9 says:
          April 12, 2019 at 11:38 am

          only in a single hierarchy, you can escape this trap by having multiple hierarchies.

    • BBA says:
      April 11, 2019 at 5:03 pm

      The SAT is evil and meritocracy is a lie, but that doesn’t mean getting rid of them will make things any better.

      • quanta413 says:
        April 11, 2019 at 8:45 pm

        I don’t get your weird hatred of the SAT. The meritocracy is partly a lie, but not because of the SAT. Rather because of all the other bullshit factors that are included.

        You realize that it was an improvement over the system it replaced, and you admit the replacement will not be better. Well not only will it not be better, but if there was a replacement will be worse because the replacement will be a return to elites picking out who replaces them in a purely subjective manner. Aristocracy blows.

        So evil how? What’s your better idea?

        • BBA says:
          April 11, 2019 at 9:25 pm

          I don’t have any alternatives. The current system, as I said on the last thread, is the best we can do with the schools we’ve got. But over-reliance on standardized test scores just gives you a warped view of a person’s true intelligence and potential. You see… I’m really good at standardized tests, and I’m a failure as a human being.

          (Among other reasons, which have been argued to death elsewhere.)

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:38 pm

            A few people may overrate standardized tests, but I’d hardly call them overrated by the culture as a whole. If they were overrated by the culture as a whole, we wouldn’t see them gradually being used less and less in the cases where they are most useful. Like graduate school in science.

            Using colleges as a sorting mechanism is what we actually have in the broader culture, and it’s worse in many cases than using the SAT on its own and rarely might even be worse than nothing.

            You seem like an ok person. Like maybe you didn’t do anything amazing (well you don’t act like it), but so what? It seems unlikley you’ve done anything awful either.

            Intelligence isn’t magic. It’s just handy. And a lot of it is utterly critical for certain things (like high level mathematics), but past a certain point for most things the returns diminish pretty quickly.

          • Aapje says:
            April 12, 2019 at 4:47 am

            @BBA

            All measurements of people’s potential are imperfect and have their weaknesses.

            However, that doesn’t mean that judgments will necessarily improve when you add more measurements. When the weaknesses of those additional measurements are greater than their strengths, the measurement makes the judgment worse.

            For example, in my country, kids do a standardized test after primary school. There is a fight over whether this should be used for tracking, rather than a more holistic judgment by the teacher (of their last year).

            The statistics of how people do after primary school strongly suggests that the teachers put too much stock in work ethic and other traits that are far less innate and thus more changeable than the actual ability of the student, as measurement by the test. This is especially harmful to lower-class kids and/or second/third generation migrants.

          • Mark V Anderson says:
            April 12, 2019 at 8:24 pm

            Intelligence isn’t magic. It’s just handy. And a lot of it is utterly critical for certain things (like high level mathematics), but past a certain point for most things the returns diminish pretty quickly.

            +1

  17. hash872 says:
    April 10, 2019 at 4:29 pm

    Hash872’s Centrist Neoliberal Tweaks of the Day (for US politics). Here are a couple of proposed changes to the US political system, with the explicit goal of enhancing centrism, bipartisan problem-solving, and a general consensus approach. I’ve come to identify more strongly as a centrist than SSC’s Red Tribe/Blue Tribe dichotomy in recent years.

    1. Change the 60 votes required to beat the filibuster in the Senate to 55 (and make it a law so it doesn’t get monkeyed with again). I think the Founding Fathers had the right idea with the Senate being the more deliberate, consensus-oriented body. However, requiring 60 votes to do effectively anything is too high of a bar these days. (I’m on a US political history reading kick at the moment, and it’s shocking how often Dems or Repubs could easily have 60+ Senate seats as recently as 20 years ago. Now, other than 2008, the country is divided enough that one party having 60 seats would be a pretty mean feat).

    A reasonable piece of major legislation by one party could probably pick off enough moderates from the other one to get 55 votes *some of* the time. There’s not enough moderates generally to clear the 60 vote bar though- making consensus legislation on tough issues kinda impossible. I think healthcare and even immigration (pre-Trump) could’ve found a middle ground that makes extremists on both ends mad. Or, alternately- if one party has won 55+ seats, they get the right to run the chamber as they see fit. TLDR- 60 votes is too high of a bar.

    2. Weakening the Speaker of the House/Senate Majority Leader positions so that a majority of the body can vote to bring a bill to the floor, without their consent. Right now (as far as I know), Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer- the former of whom represents .002% of US population- have absolute Godlike power about what bills may even be considered. Who on Earth elected them to have that power?? It reminds me of the Senate pre-direct election. I suspect that it empowers lobbyists, special interests and general partisan fanatics to pressure them about what bills may or may not be considered- because they only have to focus on one person, ‘one neck to choke’.

    By allowing a simple majority to bring a bill to the floor on their own, it’s a) fundamentally much more democratic, and b) could allow for bipartisanship by allowing parties to come together on shared goals. McConnell is holding back both healthcare & immigration compromises from what I’ve heard. It’s a very smoky backroom 19th century type of democratic system. TLDR- a majority may bring a bill to the floor, and the House/Senate leader is weakened

    • Erusian says:
      April 10, 2019 at 5:43 pm

      1. Change the 60 votes required to beat the filibuster in the Senate to 55 (and make it a law so it doesn’t get monkeyed with again). I think the Founding Fathers had the right idea with the Senate being the more deliberate, consensus-oriented body. However, requiring 60 votes to do effectively anything is too high of a bar these days. (I’m on a US political history reading kick at the moment, and it’s shocking how often Dems or Repubs could easily have 60+ Senate seats as recently as 20 years ago. Now, other than 2008, the country is divided enough that one party having 60 seats would be a pretty mean feat).

      A reasonable piece of major legislation by one party could probably pick off enough moderates from the other one to get 55 votes *some of* the time. There’s not enough moderates generally to clear the 60 vote bar though- making consensus legislation on tough issues kinda impossible. I think healthcare and even immigration (pre-Trump) could’ve found a middle ground that makes extremists on both ends mad. Or, alternately- if one party has won 55+ seats, they get the right to run the chamber as they see fit. TLDR- 60 votes is too high of a bar.

      Is it possible that this is an accurate reflection of political division? If it’s impossible to get the required number of Senators because the country is so divided and polarized, the issue is surely the polarization and not a system that accurately represents it? Or do you imagine the country is less polarized than the political class?

      2. Weakening the Speaker of the House/Senate Majority Leader positions so that a majority of the body can vote to bring a bill to the floor, without their consent. Right now (as far as I know), Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer- the former of whom represents .002% of US population- have absolute Godlike power about what bills may even be considered. Who on Earth elected them to have that power?? It reminds me of the Senate pre-direct election. I suspect that it empowers lobbyists, special interests and general partisan fanatics to pressure them about what bills may or may not be considered- because they only have to focus on one person, ‘one neck to choke’.

      By allowing a simple majority to bring a bill to the floor on their own, it’s a) fundamentally much more democratic, and b) could allow for bipartisanship by allowing parties to come together on shared goals. McConnell is holding back both healthcare & immigration compromises from what I’ve heard. It’s a very smoky backroom 19th century type of democratic system. TLDR- a majority may bring a bill to the floor, and the House/Senate leader is weakened

      The Speaker of the House is an actual official position. It’s elected by the Representatives and does set when bills come to the floor. However, the Representatives can bring a bill to a floor by a petition of 218 members. In contrast, the Senate generally functions this way and Majority Leader is just a partisan position. However, due to partisanship the Majority Leader (which is a partisan position) effectively gets to set the agenda.

      So I believe this is already the case. How would you weaken them further?

      • hash872 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 7:45 pm

        The polarization is sharp enough that 60 votes is out of reach most of the time, but 55 is (sometimes) not. Simple as that. The Senate seems to swing low 50s one way to low 50s another, and there are enough moderates that the opposing party should be able to stretch and compromise and reach them. Things that I assert had a decent (not guaranteed but OK) chance of passing the Senate with 55 votes (I am an obsessive political junkie)- the Gang of Eight immigration compromise pre-Trump/late Obama years and the Murray-Alexander healthcare compromise in 2018, for example. Notice how that word ‘compromise’ keeps coming up.

        The US risks long-term decline by having a political system wherein a willful group of partisans, acting in bad faith, can obstruct literally everything that comes before them. That’s what we have now with 60 votes- of course hardcore Dems are calling for the end of the filibuster and a raw majority rules Senate- I am striking a middle ground.

        Representatives can bring a bill to a floor by a petition of 218 members

        Yes, via a discharge petition that takes at least 30 days. I am proposing that we do away with this delay altogether. I’m not sure what you’re trying to say about the Senate (you seem to be agreeing with me?), but regardless- partisanship is not for me an acceptable reason to prevent a bill being brought forth that’s desired by a majority of the chamber

        • Erusian says:
          April 10, 2019 at 8:26 pm

          I’m not sure you’ve argued that lowering the standards by five votes would make a significant difference. You’ve admitted this reform would have been irrelevant twenty years ago. What’s to say the political moment isn’t transient?

          As for what I’m trying to say about the Senate, I’m saying they already operate the way you describe. Bills are brought to the floor by vote. You’re saying partisanship is an unacceptable reason to keep something the majority wants to vote on off the floor. Fair enough. But I’m pointing out both chambers already have mechanisms for that.

          • Nornagest says:
            April 10, 2019 at 8:28 pm

            What’s to say the political moment isn’t transient?

            Every political moment is a game-changer until it isn’t. Remember when Evangelical and Mormon birthrates were going to deliver permanent GOP majorities?

    • ilikekittycat says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:02 pm

      Like many neoliberals, you’re assuming the process is being done honestly and so the hitch is in the design; it isn’t. The reason things don’t hit 60 very often isn’t because we only have a few free thinkers that never get critical mass to snowball to 60. What we have is a party-line, very partisan institution where, once the majority figures their vote out, there is a small buffer left over for certain people. Some want to create a character who makes bold moves that don’t really affect anything like John McCain. Some are up for election in areas where their party doesn’t win, or where an issue is so toxic that region doesn’t fall in line with party consensus, so they take turns being the “defector.” One day Max Baucus won’t vote for this, one day Claire McCaskill will be the one who doesn’t quite get the vote to the threshold, next time, Joe Manchin will take the hit, and they can all maintain the aura of “good Democrat who had to take one hard stand this cycle” without all three having to take all three hits if they voted honestly.

      Lowering the threshold will shift the tactics and change the margins of how the buffer is being played, but the same exact thing will continue to occur juuust under the new threshold. There are no true “mavericks” waiting to be loosed, everyone knows exactly what they are doing

      • Jaskologist says:
        April 10, 2019 at 6:24 pm

        Worse: he’s assuming that the populace being able to prevent others from forcing their will on them is a flaw in the system. This is the same thing I complained about when the train fans were trying to think of ways to “fix” the problem of the little people keeping trains from being built through their backyards.

    • JPNunez says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:15 pm

      The problem is not the filibuster limit.

      Senators seats need to be more proportional to population. Blah blah complaint of the gerrymandering of the representative system, electoral college blah blah.

      You are attacking a symptom.

      edit: is this CW?

      • Jaskologist says:
        April 10, 2019 at 6:24 pm

        CW is allowed in .25 threads.

        • JPNunez says:
          April 11, 2019 at 6:40 am

          Oh. I am never clear on when it’s allowed.

          Cry ‘havoc’, and let slip the cultured dogs of war.

          • CatCube says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:27 am

            Originally, one of the reasons for the “No-Culture-War” threads was so we could have one open thread every so often where you didn’t have a bunch of bickering about the same crap where nobody changes anybody’s mind. It was originally “no race or gender” as those were always guaranteed to blow up. Then it was made “no Culture War” to generalize it. (Which is one reason that “Culture War” is so ill-defined; if we had two people who’s hobby horse is the proper care of begonias and they were diametrically opposed, that could end up as a “Culture War” if one guy always brings it up and the other guy flames him.) That was originally set as the 0.5 open threads.

            The 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75 don’t show up on the main page, and only the whole-number. Scott recently decided to make the visible whole-number open thread as the no CW, so people who are only casually visiting don’t necessarily stumble across it.

          • Randy M says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:41 am

            so people who are only casually visiting don’t necessarily stumble across it.

            We’d hate for them to be confused and think they were on the internet or something. 😉

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:
          April 11, 2019 at 7:52 am

          “CW is allowed in .25 threads.”

          Has CW been cut back? I thought it was allowed in .25, .5, and .75 threads.

          • Randy M says:
            April 11, 2019 at 7:57 am

            Has not been cut back. He was not making an exhaustive list, just clarifying about the current.
            Opening text should specify the restrictions.

          • Nick says:
            April 11, 2019 at 7:58 am

            Jaskologist is either behind on the times or perhaps means quarter threads? But a whole number is a quarter too; one is four quarters.

            Perhaps we should say CW is disallowed in whole numbered threads.

          • Jaskologist says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:10 am

            I meant only to indicate that CW is allowed in the current thread. I wasn’t making a broader statement.

            The broader rule: CW is disallowed in integer threads, but fine in the decimal threads.

      • Erusian says:
        April 10, 2019 at 6:32 pm

        How is that the root of the problem? Republican senators (which is what I’m presuming you object to) represent 45% of the population and have 53% of the vote. Sure, that’s disproportionate. However, it’s significantly less disproportion than many other democratic systems. However, even if they were reduced to a slight minority, how would that solve the problem? They could still filibuster and it’s not as if slight Democratic majorities are better at resolving deadlock than slight Republican majorities.

        Or is it that states have representation instead of people?

        Is it simply that it benefits Republicans and you’d prefer Democrats?

        • JPNunez says:
          April 11, 2019 at 6:47 am

          Better distributed seats would be more competitive and easier to lose. Right now a majority of the senators (prolly both sides) are sitting on what are sure seats. That reduces any incentive to negotiate. They can just sit inactive and inamovible in their positions that they know are very hard to lose.

          See how the few oppositions to Trump have formed in the senate. For example, Lisa Murkowski knows she cannot fuck around and has to keep her base happy.

          • Gobbobobble says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:20 am

            Senators are elected state-wide (unless this is one of those things where my state is weird?). How would you make their elections more contested without making them supra-state elections? Which, y’know, would utterly defeat the whole raison d’etre of the Senate.

        • Erusian says:
          April 11, 2019 at 7:25 am

          How so? If that was the case, I think you’d expect to see the effect in the more competitive and demographically representative House of Representatives. Yet you really don’t.

          As for Trump, if Murkowski is acting according to her bases wishes, that’s a feature, not a bug. Politicians should fear that they’ll be ejected if they do something their bases disapprove of.

    • BBA says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:50 pm

      1. The filibuster has nothing to do with the Framers. It’s an accidental loophole in the Senate rules introduced in 1806 and first invoked in 1837. I don’t worship the Framers and I take William Lloyd Garrison’s view of the Constitution (“a compact with death and an agreement with hell”), but even those who disagree with me should know that whatever grand design they had, the filibuster wasn’t part of it.

      2. Discharge petitions already exist, how is this any different?

      But I don’t think there’s any point to changing legislative procedure when the central problem is that there is no significant legislation that can pass both houses, regardless of what rules are in place.

      • hash872 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 8:03 pm

        2. Because they take a minimum of 30 days, and don’t exist in the Senate? Also they are obscure and rarely used, whereas an explicit rule change would be to send a message- we’re a republic, if a majority of representatives want a bill brought to the floor it will be done posthaste, no more allowing cunning career politicians power second only to the President despite merely winning one tiny fractional district multiple times, etc.

        the central problem is that there is no significant legislation that can pass both houses, regardless of what rules are in place

        That’s just silly, the Trump tax cuts were extremely significant from an economic & incentives perspective, and they passed that pretty easily via reconciliation. Partisans on both sides are chomping at the bit and would absolutely pass even more radical legislation given even half a chance. And partially my 55 system is a reaction to Democratic partisans who are openly discussing jettisoning the filibuster altogether if they take power. The 55 filibuster blocks outright partisans but leaves the door open a little wider to compromise than it is now.

        As a true neoliberal I’m saying the current system just needs some….. tweaks, not radical changes

        • cassander says:
          April 10, 2019 at 8:29 pm

          >That’s just silly, the Trump tax cuts were extremely significant from an economic & incentives perspective

          Not particularly. They’re twiddling about with taxes in the same narrow range that they’ve been in since the korean war. they don’t represent a serious shift in tax policy.

        • John Schilling says:
          April 11, 2019 at 6:19 am

          That’s just silly, the Trump tax cuts were extremely significant from an economic & incentives perspective,

          What behavioral changes have you personally observed as a result of the tax cuts? Do you know anyone who e.g. was planning to retire but decided to keep working for a few more years because of the increased take-home pay? Anyone who decided to move from California to Texas because the SALT deduction went away? Decided to open or expand a business that they otherwise wouldn’t have because of the tax on corporate profits?

          This is the sort of marginal behavior change that comes from changes in tax policy. And while it will almost certainly happen to some extent for even small changes, if you’re going to call it “extremely significant”, then you should probably be able to point to specific examples. Otherwise I’m with cassander, this was a minor tweak.

          • Chalid says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:40 am

            Just going to say that I have personally observed people who have had decisions about where to live be altered by the SALT changes.

            (One imagines that this is much more significant in the NYC region, where if you work in Manhattan you have a choice of three states to live in, plus the choice of whether to live in NYC and pay income tax.)

          • John Schilling says:
            April 11, 2019 at 10:01 am

            Interesting point about NYC’s sensitivity to the SALT change; I hadn’t considered that, but it makes sense in hindsight. Thanks.

    • cassander says:
      April 10, 2019 at 8:14 pm

      On 2, weakening leadership will almost certainly result in LESS legislation getting passed, not more.

      Your point fundamentally misunderstands how parliamentary politics works. If a majority really wants a bill to come to the floor, it will come to the floor, or new leadership will be found. Leadership does not exercise godlike power, it exercises power with the consent of the caucus. Most of the time “leadership is blocking a bill” what’s really happening is that in private the members are encouraging them while lamenting the fact in public. This benefits both sides, the members don’t have to take a difficult vote and all involved can posture without consequence.

      As for empowering lobbyists, again, it’s strong leadership that makes lobbyist weak, because strong leadership can corral their caucuses. it’s the weak leaders that are more susceptible to having lobbyist peel off their members one by one.

      • hash872 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 8:46 pm

        Interesting, but I think you mean ‘a majority of the party’ wants a bill to be brought to the floor. Not, a majority of the chamber altogether. For example, I’m thinking of the (now unnecessary) Mueller protection bills that apparently had the support of a numerical majority of the Senate (and maybe the Paul Ryan House?), but obviously not a majority of the Republican party. The power of the Speaker/Leader is a fundamentally partisan one.

        Basically, my deeper hope is that allowing bills to be brought up by simply majority would encourage bipartisanship. As a centrist Dem I was hoping for things like raising the gas tax to cover infrastructure costs, which should get most Dems along with say Collins, Murkowski, Gardner, Alexander, maybe Rubio or Romney, I dunno. Raising the gas tax and paying for infrastructure improvements (which absolutely should be done) is a great example of a non-populist, tough but necessary for the good of the country type of vote. The type of vote that was much more common when our politics was more functional and less hyper-partisan.

        On that note, I’d also encourage the return of earmarks, which Eurasian helpfully described a few Open Threads ago. Another bipartisan smoother that encourages horse-trading and cooperation

        • cassander says:
          April 10, 2019 at 9:00 pm

          Interesting, but I think you mean ‘a majority of the party’ wants a bill to be brought to the floor. Not, a majority of the chamber altogether.

          The number of bills where a majority of either house but a minority of both parties actually wants a bill to come to the floor is vanishingly small.

          For example, I’m thinking of the (now unnecessary) Mueller protection bills that apparently had the support of a numerical majority of the Senate (and maybe the Paul Ryan House?),

          They were posturing.

          Basically, my deeper hope is that allowing bills to be brought up by simply majority would encourage bipartisanship.

          Hope is what that is. You should read more about how legislatures actually work. they are institutions run by parties, not random individuals who happen to be members of parties. Bipartisanship comes when leaders strike deals and compel their members to follow, not when members act on their own.

          Raising the gas tax and paying for infrastructure improvements (which absolutely should be done) is a great example of a non-populist, tough but necessary for the good of the country type of vote.

          It’s a mistake to try to determine ideal institutional arrangements by starting with your policy preferences and working backwards from them.

          >The type of vote that was much more common when our politics was more functional and less hyper-partisan.

          Those deals were more common when leadership (then in the form of committee chairs) was massively more powerful than today.

          On that note, I’d also encourage the return of earmarks, which Eurasian helpfully described a few Open Threads ago. Another bipartisan smoother that encourages horse-trading and cooperation

          And something that good government neoliberals like yourself were vociferously against when they were allowed. I’m not accusing you of hypocrisy, mind you, I’m just pointing out that your exact instinct is what killed emarks, because they seemed corrupt and inefficient, and ignored the effect that it would have on the power of leadership.

          • hash872 says:
            April 10, 2019 at 9:25 pm

            they are institutions run by parties, not random individuals who happen to be members of parties

            I read quite a bit about how the political process works. The interesting thing though, is that we are in an era of strong partisanship but weak parties. US parties are increasingly unable to corral their own members, especially the Dems. I frankly see outside influence groups & large donors as more powerful. So I think the legislative process is quite a bit more complex than that.

            Earmarks were largely killed by ideologues, which does not really overlap with neoliberalism

          • cassander says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:12 am

            @hash872

            American parties are weak, always have been, for a wide variety of reasons. but they keep getting weaker in large part because people keep successfully arguing that it’s more democratic to weaken them, almost word for word the arguments you just made.

            And the definition of ideologue is not “someone who isn’t my political label”. The reasons that earmarks were banned were classic neo-liberal arguments, good government, rational process, government thrift. The correct response to the failure of the previous effort is to reconsider one’s priors, or at least one’s opinions on other topics, not ignore ideological complicity. And I say that as someone who largely agrees with neo-liberalism and laments its decline.

            Further weakening american political parties and parliamentary leadership is going to make things more chaotic, more partisan, and less well functioning because weak leadership empowers partisan grandstanding. You don’t want a legislature full of Orcasio cortez and Ted Cruz, at least not if your goal is centrist legislation. For that, you want strong leaders that can tell the firebrands to sit down and shut up or else.

          • Aapje says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:54 am

            @cassander

            It’s like economics:

            You can have many companies that are strong and they will keep it other in check.

            You can have very few companies that are weak.

            What doesn’t work is to have very few strong companies, because then become authoritarian and dangerous.

            So if you want strong parties, reform your system to support multiple parties.

          • hash872 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:06 am

            The Tea Party had a huge role in banning earmarks, more so than Obama. There’s plenty of documentation out there, from here to the Wiki page for them. I’m gonna stop arguing this one and mark it a win.

            So far in this thread I’ve been told that bipartisanship is dead and that moderates would never come together to advance a bill, and also that allowing them the opportunity to do so would dramatically weaken political parties. These seem to contradict each other. And also that it’s unnecessary because of discharge petitions, but also that it would never be used because Congress could never come together to pass major legislation. Methinks everyone doth protest too much.

            I agree the function wouldn’t be used too much, but it’s enough to have it there- and I suspect that a Speaker/Leader might be forced to bring a bill to the floor (say, the Mueller protection bill) to avoid the humiliation of being publicly overruled. So its power might exceed its actual usage.

            I guess I don’t share the abundant faith in political parties that others here seem to have, which is definitely not what I would’ve expected from SSC/the general public in this age of cynicism and low trust in institutions

          • cassander says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:10 am

            @apje

            It’s not like economics because legislatures only act when a majority of the legislature agrees to act. You can’t really have strong mutual contenders in a legislature, because legislative strength is basically a product of the size and coherence of your majority. Multiple strong parties would replicate the dynamic of the mid-century US when you had extremely powerful committee chairs that were de-facto leadership. that would be stronger leadership than what the US has today (deals could be cut among the dozen or so chairs), but still fairly weak by international standards.

            see the logic of collective action and the logic of congressional action.

          • CatCube says:
            April 11, 2019 at 11:41 am

            @hash872

            I guess I’m not sure what you see in your proposal that (as has been pointed out) we don’t already have. I don’t know why you think the 30 days in a discharge petition is a huge problem. If there are really all these secret majorities against the Speaker’s proposed schedule, how is the fact that they have to wait 30 days on a discharge petition really keeping them from overruling the Speaker?

            Come to it, the Speaker has to be elected by a majority of the House. If he was really tamping down things that a majority wanted desperately, the majority would get together and vote in a new Speaker, party lines be damned. At best, there might be a majority that only sort of vaguely wants something that is being kept off the floor, but not enough to break party lines. That won’t change even if they can vote a discharge petition in two days instead of 30.

            For the vast majority of things, I think @cassander has the right of it: an actual majority of the members don’t truly want to bring them up, and are making the Speaker a stalking horse. (Or the permanent civil service bureaucracy–often when you see a Congressman complaining about an Executive agency doing X, Y, or Z, they could totally introduce a bill to fix it and logroll to get it through. They don’t actually do that because they realize that overruling the agency is a bad idea, but don’t want to say that because it’ll make their constituents mad.)

    • ana53294 says:
      April 11, 2019 at 2:27 am

      A good example of weak leadership is the current British Prime Minister. It doesn’t seem like having a leader who doesn’t have a command of the party is useful in achieving much of anything (whether they are a Remainer or a Brexiteer, everybody’s unhappy with May).

      Parties make deals. They negotiate.

      In Spain, we have many parties that negotiate and have deals. But all of this is only possible because parties have a lot of power over their representatives (they can kick a member out of the party and ensure they don’t get re-elected). In Spanish Congress, AFAIK, the party can kick you out (but not in the Senate).

      So all these multiple parties can exist because there is strong leadership, and a party as an organisation can enforce their ideas on representatives (except on non-consequential issues or issues where the party is deeply divided, with slim majorities). Otherwise, nothing gets passed. In Spain, we even spent a year without a government. And that was because the parties could not make a deal. If all 350 individual Congress members had to negotiate over who becomes President, we would still have no president in Spain.

    • Gobbobobble says:
      April 11, 2019 at 8:27 am

      There’s not enough moderates generally to clear the 60 vote bar though- making consensus legislation on tough issues kinda impossible. I think healthcare and even immigration (pre-Trump) could’ve found a middle ground that makes extremists on both ends mad. Or, alternately- if one party has won 55+ seats, they get the right to run the chamber as they see fit. TLDR- 60 votes is too high of a bar.

      Maybe it’s a sign that the party system is fucked and we should spend more effort actually debating the issues, building consensus, and negotiating compromises instead of the current Wagon Circling Olympics.

      ~52% vote for Brexit has everyone up in arms about the injustice of taking dramatic measures on such a slim majority, but 55% of the Senate is enough to ram through your whole platform?

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:
      April 11, 2019 at 6:37 pm

      I am hesitant to support any major changes. Most of the argument seems to be driven by center-leftists who are upset that they briefly held a lot of power, and felt they could have made huge changes if things were just a bit different. But I think they overestimate how easily they can pass major bills, and overestimate how durable their policy consensus was.

      Basically, torching institutions because they were in your way 10 years ago is foolish, because you’re assuming they won’t be protecting you 10 years from now. The leftward lurch of the Dems and the possible conservative populist coalition should realllllyyyyy cause the neo-neo-liberals to exercise some caution.

    • littleby says:
      April 13, 2019 at 10:48 am

      I think the problem is partisanship. I think we should fix it by removing gerrymandering, fixing campaign finance, and switching to approval voting.

      Less important than the other ideas: I also think nobody should be allowed to list a party affiliation on the ballot. This won’t inconvenience anyone except for the people who go down the ballot and vote for everyone with the right letter next to their names, and I think making those people read individual candidate descriptions will be a net positive.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        April 13, 2019 at 11:20 am

        I also think nobody should be allowed to list a party affiliation on the ballot.

        You are assuming that individual candidate descriptions provide enough reliable information to be useful. Party membership is one way of reducing information costs to voters.

      • Rebecca Friedman says:
        April 13, 2019 at 12:02 pm

        Less important than the other ideas: I also think nobody should be allowed to list a party affiliation on the ballot. This won’t inconvenience anyone except for the people who go down the ballot and vote for everyone with the right letter next to their names, and I think making those people read individual candidate descriptions will be a net positive.

        By ballot you mean the actual sheaf of paper you use when voting, right? How long are those, where you are? Candidate descriptions don’t appear on them, and you can’t have your phone out in the voting booth (for obvious reasons), so I – a libertarian who spends multiple days researching before each election – will still sometimes rely on “the one I disliked less was the democrat/republican” to remember which of the names was which. They all blur together after a while. If you have a shorter ballot or a better memory for names (or followed local politics all the time, enough to remember specific individuals, but I do not think requesting that of everyone would be a net positive) this presumably wouldn’t be a problem, but I think “won’t inconvenience anyone except…” is a bit too broad. You’re removing one bit of information from a system containing very few of them.

      • John Schilling says:
        April 13, 2019 at 12:17 pm

        and I think making those people read individual candidate descriptions will be a net positive.

        You’re not making those people read individual candidate descriptions. You’re just making them read the cheat sheet their party or party surrogate handed them during its get-out-the-vote drive.

        Or possibly just encouraging them to vote for the candidate whose name suggests the gender and ethnicity they are most comfortable with. But if your objective is better-informed voters, think real hard about the unintended consequences of a plan that starts with “first thing we do is take away a source of information from the voters”.

      • greenwoodjw says:
        April 15, 2019 at 11:16 am

        What is “fixing campaign finance”?

  18. BBA says:
    April 10, 2019 at 5:56 pm

    Do us minor commenters get sub-cabinet-level posts? I call dibs on ambassador to Barbados.

  19. Mark V Anderson says:
    April 10, 2019 at 6:39 pm

    My wife and I were talking about Easter today, and we are confused about some things. This may just come from being lapsed Christians who never much read the Bible in the first place, so maybe there are easy answers.

    They say that Jesus rose on the third day. But he was on the cross on Friday and rose on Sunday, which is two days later. Were journalists even more innumerate 2000 years ago?

    I’ve recently heard that Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday) was the day of the last supper. How can that be? Did Jesus somehow get arrested, was tried by Pontius Pilate, and somehow nailed to the cross in one day? If only our court system today was that swift.

    We didn’t talk about this, but I am curious what Lent represents. What happened six weeks before Easter that is now being celebrated?

    By the way, my wife insists on calling the Friday before Easter Black Friday, not Good Friday. It is a very strange name for the day Jesus was crucified.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:57 pm

      Friday was the first day in the tomb, Saturday the second day, and Sunday the third day. It’s a different way of counting than you usually use, but if you checked into a hotel in the evening and slept in the room six consecutive nights, that would validly be called “seven days and six nights”. Doesn’t prove the industry is innumerate.
      If you read the Passion chapters of the Gospels, Jesus dies around 3:00 PM on a Friday. He’s taken off the cross in the early evening by special permission of Pontius Pilate and buried in the tomb Joseph of Arimathea bought for himself. His women followers, who are practicing Jews, don’t get the news that Jesus was allowed to be buried rather than rotting on the cross until after sundown. So they go to ritually anoint his body at first light after the Sabbath. We are well aware that the timeline mostly concerns the Jewish Sabbath, the dark hours of Saturday-Sunday, plus a small margin at either end.

      I’ve recently heard that Maundy Thursday (the day before Good Friday) was the day of the last supper. How can that be? Did Jesus somehow get arrested, was tried by Pontius Pilate, and somehow nailed to the cross in one day?

      Maundy Thursday does commemorate the Last Supper. I’ve never heard that Christians are supposed to take it literally as His arrest happening on Thursday night on a year Passover started on a Thursday and the whole waiting for trial, trial, and execution taking place between late Thursday night and Friday afternoon.

      Nothing special happened 40 days before the first Easter, off the top of my head. The 40-day corporate fast (non-consecutive, as Sundays aren’t included) of the Church re-presents Jesus’s 40-day fast in the desert.

      It is a very strange name for the day Jesus was crucified.

      Well it was good for us.

      • Douglas Knight says:
        April 10, 2019 at 7:37 pm

        seven days and six nights

        Yeah, and Matthew 12:40 says three days and three nights.

      • Evan Þ says:
        April 10, 2019 at 9:05 pm

        His women followers, who are practicing Jews, don’t get the news that Jesus was allowed to be buried rather than rotting on the cross until after sundown. So they go to ritually anoint his body at first light after the Sabbath.

        To nitpick, they saw Jesus’ body being put in the grave just before Friday sunset which started the Sabbath (then as now, the Jewish day began at sunset). They didn’t have time to prepare the spices, though, so they went to anoint his body at Sunday dawn.

        I’ve never heard that Christians are supposed to take it literally as His arrest happening on Thursday night on a year Passover started on a Thursday and the whole waiting for trial, trial, and execution taking place between late Thursday night and Friday afternoon.

        Actually, if you look at the Gospels, that’s pretty much what they say. Jesus went out to the Garden of Gethsemane after supper; the arrest party found him there; the Sanhedrin tried him overnight; Pilate then ratified the sentence (after an abortive retrial) around dawn the next day.

        I’d say that’s laudable swiftness… except that it ended up condemning an innocent man.

        Well it was good for us.

        Exactly.

    • mdet says:
      April 10, 2019 at 6:59 pm

      Lent is 40 days (not including Sundays). The flood in Genesis that Noah built the ark for lasted 40 days, the Hebrews spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness before arriving in the promised lands, and Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days before starting his ministry, so the number 40 represents purification / preparation.

      I don’t remember the answer to the “How was Jesus dead for three days if he died Friday and rose Sunday?”, but as a programmer I’m going to say that clearly the New Testament writers used 1-based indexing.

      • Evan Þ says:
        April 10, 2019 at 9:06 pm

        but as a programmer I’m going to say that clearly the New Testament writers used 1-based indexing.

        See also how Jude (1:14) calls Enoch “the seventh from Adam”… when if you look at the Genesis genealogies, we’d call him the sixth. One-based indexing strikes again!

        • woah77 says:
          April 11, 2019 at 5:33 am

          Gonna call this a cultural thing. Zero wasn’t a common concept in Greek or Roman numeracy (if it existed at all at this time). With no zero, there is no zero indexing.

      • Conrad Honcho says:
        April 12, 2019 at 1:32 pm

        I was under the impression that “40” was frequent shorthand for “a long time.” It’s the ancient times equivalent of saying “I wandered the parking lot for 100 years looking for my car!”

    • dodrian says:
      April 10, 2019 at 7:03 pm

      The counting starts at one, not zero, so Friday is the first day, Saturday is the second day, and Sunday is the third day.

      Jesus’ trial before the high priest was pre-decided (all the witnesses were ready to go, he was pretty much ambushed and dragged before the waiting magistrates, etc). Jesus was then taken before Pilate to apply for the death penalty, which only the Roman governor could give. Jerusalem was a powderkeg as it was full of zealot nationalists right before the most nationalist festival of the year. Pilate, though (according to the Gospels) not convinced of Jesus’ guilt, was willing to quickly go along with the Jewish leaders’ wishes because A) their angry mob was demanding it, and B) Jesus’ death would probably take the wind out of a potential insurrection.

      Lent represents Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the wilderness, which didn’t immediately precede his crucifixion (and the days are counted not including Sundays, which should always be feast days in celebration of the Resurrection), but is supposed to be reminiscent of Jesus’ suffering as well.

      The origin of the term “Good Friday” is debated.

    • S_J says:
      April 10, 2019 at 8:07 pm

      About the timing of Passover, arrest, and trial of Jesus:

      Jesus and the twelve disciples have a special meal together on Thursday evening, in a room supplied by a generous host. Judas leaves early. Jesus does a ceremony with bread and wine (later remembered as the first Communion), then leaves with the remaining disciples.

      Jesus and the remaining disciples end up in the garden of Gethsemane late that evening. Jesus separates himself from the group and prays for some time, apparently in anguish. His disciples eventually fall asleep.

      Judas is said to have arranged to betrayal beforehand. The leadership of the Temple Council wanted to arrest Jesus, but not when the crowds were still in town for Passover. Either Judas sells them in moving early, or the leaders of the Council decide that the opportunity is too good to pass up. A squad of Temple Guards are sent with Judas to arrest Jesus in the garden, in the middle of the night. [1]

      One of the disciples attacks the Temple Guards, but Jesus intervenes, and goes peacefully.

      During the rest of the night, Jesus is put on trial by the High Priest, and by part of the Temple Council. [2] They refer Jesus to Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea. Pilate doesn’t quite see why Jesus should be executed; Jesus talked about the Kingdom of Heaven but wasn’t a revolutionary. Pilate discovers Jesus is from Galilee, and tries to pass Jesus off to Herod, ruler of Galilee (who is visiting Judea). Herod doesn’t know what to do, and sends Jesus back.

      By the time Jesus is back at the governor’s court, it’s sometime in Friday. The Temple Council somehow gets a crowd together outside that palace.

      Pilate had a tradition of releasing one prisoner to the people over Passover.

      The crowd demands another man, Barabbas, be released. And that Jesus be killed. Pilate acquiesces to the request.

      The Roman soldiers scourged Jesus, then forced him to carry the cross to the place of execution alongside two other men. The soldiers checked the victims late on Friday, and found Jesus no longer breathing. They were ready to break the legs of any victim still alive. [3]

      Late Friday evening, a concerned citizen has Jesus brought down and buried quickly. A large stone is rolled across the entry to the tomb. The next day is Sabbath.

      Some stories say that a squad of Roman soldiers also guarded the tomb.

      On the morning of the third day, some of the women who followed Jesus went to the tomb, and find the stone rolled away, with the tomb empty. Peter and John ran to confirm that.

      I don’t think it’s “after three days”, but it is “on the third day”.

      [1] The political situation in Jerusalem meant that a Roman governor was in charge, but the religious leadership of the Temple Council had lots of political and social influence. The Temple had it’s own military force, but the Council couldn’t issue a sentence of capitol punishment.

      [2] One disciple, Peter, apparently followed the Temple Guard and Jesus to this event. To keep cover, Peter denied that he was a follower of Jesus several times. Reputedly, the denials ended when a rtoster crowed… Apparently per a prediction that Jesus had made earlier that night.

      [3] Crucifixion puts the victim in a posture in which breathing is a painful struggle that involves using the legs to lift the body for each breath. Breaking of legs quickens death.
      If the victim is apparently already dead, one way to confirm that is to thrust a spear into their chest cavity… But that was apparently much less common than breaking of legs.

    • dndnrsn says:
      April 10, 2019 at 11:34 pm

      As people have noted, the use of “day” and “night” elsewhere in the Bible would seem to indicate that a day is a day or a part thereof. Friday-Saturday-Sunday is 3 days. We today are more likely to say, no, that’s 2 days, 2 24-hour periods, but consider that for us timekeeping is much easier. While that use of days is no longer colloquial, we still use similar language for other units of time – a 25 year-old is in the 26th year of life, we’re in the 21st century, etc. Friday, Saturday, Sunday – Sunday is the third day.

      There’s scholarly debate over the chronology of the end of Jesus’ life, with there not being exactly one consistent account in the canonical Gospels. I can’t say much more without dipping into my books, which I am currently away from. It will probably come up when I get to that point in my effortpost series, though.

    • bullseye says:
      April 11, 2019 at 4:00 am

      “On the third day” is a translation issue; different languages count time differently.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting#Inclusive_counting
      (Side note: I suspect this issue is why the Romans misunderstood the Greeks’ instructions for leap years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Leap_year_error)
      The odd phrasing in English is the result of translators choosing to preserve the number three in the passage without saying “three days later” (because three days later would be wrong).
      I have no explanation for the three nights in Matthew 12:40.

      Roman sources tell us that Pilate typically didn’t bother with trials at all, and eventually the Emperor fired him for crucifying too many people. So I’m not surprised he pushed Jesus’ trial through quickly.

      • Douglas Knight says:
        April 11, 2019 at 10:28 am

        The leap year story shows the Greeks using exclusive counting and the Romans using inclusive counting. But the Gospels are in Greek, apparently using inclusive counting (although it could be a mistranslation from Hebrew or Aramaic). The Greeks used to use inclusive counting, as seen in Mr X’s example (or the more easily googled penteric Olympics) or in Hippocrates describing quartan fever, a term used to this day to describe quartan malaria as repeating every 72 hours. If the Greeks were still using inclusive counting in common language, isn’t it odd that the Greek scientists using exclusive counting weren’t careful about the difference?

      • Nick says:
        April 11, 2019 at 10:35 am

        The inclusive counting thing used to trip us up in my Latin class when dates and date periods were used.

        And now I’m a programmer and still screw up date periods in my SQL scripts.

    • The original Mr. X says:
      April 11, 2019 at 5:41 am

      They say that Jesus rose on the third day. But he was on the cross on Friday and rose on Sunday, which is two days later. Were journalists even more innumerate 2000 years ago?

      Ancient Greek counted numbers inclusively. Hence “triennial” festivals in Athens happened every other year, etc.

    • JPNunez says:
      April 11, 2019 at 6:40 am

      I don’t think there was much of a journalism profession back then. At best you’d have someone like Caesar reporting back his own adventures in a surely objective way.

      • Mark V Anderson says:
        April 11, 2019 at 7:11 pm

        I was using “journalist” in a very broad manner. In a sense the gospel writers were journalists about the life and death of Jesus. Of course I mostly use that way to make it sound humorous.

    • Randy M says:
      April 11, 2019 at 7:44 am

      There is a difference between “the third day” and “three days later.” Day refers to a calendar period with a specific start and end point, which happens to be 24 hours long, as well as to a period of time 24 hours long.
      This is my second day of commenting on this thread, despite not having had 24 hours elapse since it’s creation!

  20. eyeballfrog says:
    April 10, 2019 at 7:39 pm

    Is there a significant SSC presence in Iowa City, IA? It looks like I may be moving there soon and might want to try setting up some meetups.

  21. johan_larson says:
    April 10, 2019 at 7:39 pm

    I like to imagine there is an entire genre of art that riffs off the International Monetary Fund sharing an acronym with the Impossible Mission Force: stories, songs, and poems celebrating the derring-do of IMF staffers as they race to save the world, all of it produced and consumed purely within the walls of the institution itself.

    • Nornagest says:
      April 10, 2019 at 8:22 pm

      There’s something very sad and banal about a world where we take the name of an increasingly central figure in our folk mythology, a representation of the horror of a dumb, uncaring universe that could blot out everything we’ve built and planned in an instant without thinking about us or indeed at all, and give it to an unusual sea cucumber.

      I mean, it could at least have been the Chicxulub impactor or something.

  23. onyomi says:
    April 10, 2019 at 8:21 pm

    Would left and right see it as a reasonable-ish compromise if it were made easier for immigrants to enter the US at a federal level (for purposes of work, study, etc. if not necessarily to become a full citizen) but individual states were allowed more freedom to restrict the ability of e.g. non-citizens to live and work there? Maybe a similar question could be asked about the EU.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
      April 10, 2019 at 8:31 pm

      I can’t speak for anyone else, but no that would be a bad compromise.

      The only practical way for that to work is with a system of internal movement controls, which are probably unconstitutional and definitely a huge hassle for actual citizens. As an example of how insane that is, if everyone had to stop and go through a checkpoint every time they crossed the George Washington Bridge or Lincoln Tunnel it would be almost impossible to commute between New York City and New Jersey. Tens of millions of people a day would be held up in similar situations all across the US.

      When you have freedom of movement in a country or a supranational union, you lose the ability to fine-tune immigration policy for the desires of individual states. At that point, you should either let states with lower tolerance for immigration exit peacefully or set immigration to a low enough level that everyone is happy.

      • quanta413 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 8:51 pm

        I agree with the above that it is a terrible compromise. It’s not quite as bad as proposals to try filling shrinking cities and towns in the midwest by letting more immigrants in conditional on their living in those places (after which of course they immediately leave because no one is going to hod them there at gunpoint because that would be crazy), but it’s pretty bad.

        At this point, I’ve given up all hope on some sort of reform. My own preference for a points system or special tests we administer at U.S. embassies where we steal the best people from other countries with crappier institutions than ours (because otherwise the best people aren’t leaving their country after all) for something like 95% of visas, plus improved enforcement at the borders, and the roughly the same immigration (adjusting up or down over time depending on the supply of high quality human capital) is so hilariously hopeless as a political possibility in particular that it’s definitely out.

        • DavidFriedman says:
          April 10, 2019 at 10:50 pm

          It isn’t clear how you should define “the best people.”

          I think the usual assumption, as per your reference to high quality human capital, is that we want educated people who will earn high salaries. The only argument I can see for that is that the rest of us might be able to collect more from them in taxes than they cost us in services.

          In terms of the joint benefit from immigration what we want are people different from us, in order to maximize comparative advantage. We don’t want people who will impose costs on us by stealing or going on welfare, but honest, hard working, people at the low end of the skill distribution probably gain more from coming, and benefit us more by coming, than professors.

          We have a lot of professors already.

          • Aapje says:
            April 11, 2019 at 12:06 am

            We have a lot of professors already.

            Too many, probably 😛

          • RalMirrorAd says:
            April 11, 2019 at 4:33 am

            My guess is that people who are currently professors are cognitively capable of other kinds of work, be it as analysts/consultants, managers, or tradesmen. They’re just not pre-disposed to enjoy/do it in the same way certain segments of the population shy away from high stress or dangerous occupations.

            The reverse is not necessarily true. And unemployability is probably more socially/psychologically crippling than underemployability.

          • Etoile says:
            April 11, 2019 at 8:09 am

            I’d guess you’d want some commitment to the country; who wants a professor who will come just to hate it in the new country, resent loss of their past status, and work to undermine the host?

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:59 am

            I am concerned with two things (1) Not letting the immigrant population be too large compared to the not immigrant population and (2) basically what you said.

            If the number of immigrants is too large regardless of the exact type of immigrant, the country as a political unit will almost certainly change in unpredictable ways. Or it will have too much of the adult population disenfrachised which seems like an unstable situation to me. I am way too conservative to think it’s wise to try something untested like letting the immigrant population of the U.S. quickly swell to 100 million in an uncontrolled manner (roughly double what it is currently) and then seeing what the effects are. You can’t take that sort of thing back.

            I figure you can fill the entire current inflow with people who produce a lot so you should for a combination of fiscal and productivity reasons. Someone brilliant from Nigeria will have their output multiplied immensely by being here instead of there. But their dumb cousin will only produce more in monetary terms due to cost disease. I’ll call it the “smart people but not their dumb cousins” immigration policy.

            In terms of the joint benefit from immigration what we want are people different from us, in order to maximize comparative advantage. We don’t want people who will impose costs on us by stealing or going on welfare, but honest, hard working, people at the low end of the skill distribution probably gain more from coming, and benefit us more by coming, than professors.

            My problem with this is there isn’t any good way to test for honesty and hard work. Or at least, not one I can plausibly expect the U.S. government to manage. But you can test for English or math proficiency with a paper and pen. You can measure physical health with a little effort too. The metrics for these sorts of things are objective. Hardworkingness not so much.

            Currently, the U.S. “tests” illegal immigrants being smuggled across the border for something like gumption or hard-workingness by making it dangerous (potentially lethal) and expensive, but I think it’s a bad process and I don’t think you can formalize it.

          • Eponymous says:
            April 12, 2019 at 7:09 am

            I think our fellow citizens produce an awful lot of externalities for us, and that should reasonably be of paramount importance. And those externalities are probably greatly increasing in things like intelligence, education, gainful employment, not having a criminal record, etc.

            Obvious negative externalities are crime and voting for terrible politicians. Less obvious ones include degrading cultural standards (public education, public debate, news, entertainment, safe driving).

            On the positive side, plenty of high achievers capture only a fraction of the value they create. Einstein and Newton created a lot more value for humanity than what we had to pay them. And I’d rather have the nuclear scientists and rocket scientists here than in Iran.

            Personally, I’d much rather live in a country full of the best and brightest (and maybe we could select some *nice* people too), then one chosen on the opposite principle.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:
          April 12, 2019 at 8:19 am

          I can’t see a case for forcing immigrants to stay in the midwest or wherever.

          I wouldn’t consider it an outrage to require or even subsidize them starting out in the less famous places which are looking for people.

          If it’s possible for them to have a good life there, at least some will stay because moving is expensive.

          • onyomi says:
            April 13, 2019 at 4:39 am

            Actually this is kind of what I see as one of the major benefits of the idea (or something like it).

            Apparently Trump recently said something like “the US is full,” predictably prompting pushback.

            To the extent Trump’s statement reflects a sentiment genuinely felt by some significant portion of Americans, it clearly doesn’t mean “we’re out of habitable, useful land and totally have all the labor we can use anywhere.” It means something like “housing prices are already high and employment opportunities scarce in the places we live so why are we bringing in more people?”

            Though of course more rural areas can sometimes be more xenophobic, the advantage here is that to the extent they are not/are willing to get over it, Wyoming can theoretically let in a million Venezuelan farm hands, if doing so seems beneficial to them, without imposing any cost, real or perceived, on the people of Kansas City and Chicago.

          • Aapje says:
            April 13, 2019 at 6:18 am

            We recently had someone argue that The Netherlands can let in many people, because some rural parts have relatively few people*. However, this ignores that those places are obviously far less inhabited than Amsterdam for a reason. So if you let in more people, why would they want to live in those rural places anymore than the current inhabitants of Amsterdam would (which is not at all)?

            You can also just as easily make the argument the other way: if rural Netherlands or rural Wyoming should be a good place to house these migrants, then why not Turkey, Mexico, Syria or Venezuela? If there are valid arguments against those places, then why not against rural Netherlands or rural Wyoming?

            Would the people who make the claim that these rural places allow for way more migration be willing to migrate there themselves? I bet not.

            * Of course, this doesn’t make them empty. Pretty much all that land is used for farming or nature. Lots of people who object to migration object to the transformation of their country that migration causes, losing something they love.

          • onyomi says:
            April 13, 2019 at 6:54 am

            Yeah, so what I’m suggesting is that right now maybe there are some potential immigrants, maybe many potential immigrants who, though they’d rather live in Flushing or LA, would still take the opportunity to live and work in Wyoming over whatever the options are where they are now. Right now we are effectively unable to say to those people “you can come here but you’ve got to live and work in Wyoming.” It’s either “you can come here and go anywhere” or “you can’t come here at all.” This seems pretty lose-lose.

            Of course, proponents of open borders might say that any prevention of a foreigner who wants to come to the US and an employer who’d like to hire him from striking a deal is frustrating a potential win-win, but the case when they come to work in a crowded area at least arguably causes some negative externalities for renters, job-seekers, etc. in that place. But much less so if it’s a place not a lot of US citizens want to live anyway.

          • Aapje says:
            April 13, 2019 at 7:10 am

            Even if we could make a deal with those people, they will have children, who presumably aren’t bound and will be prone to move.

            So you’ll merely delay the inevitable.

            Some/many communist countries have/had policies against migration against the will of the state by people and their descendants, by linking rights to services to a region. This has led Chinese people to abandon their children in the rural place where they are supposed to live, as this is where the kids have access to schools and healthcare, while the parents live illegally in the places with (better) work and higher salaries.

            Not exactly a great outcome for progressives or conservatives.

          • onyomi says:
            April 13, 2019 at 5:48 pm

            I do think birthright citizenship makes untenable a lot of immigration idea space and is probably a bad idea in general. Of course, some will argue that, even without birthright citizenship, the second or third generation of people stuck in Wyoming are going to start agitating for citizenship rights and aren’t going to accept something like second-class citizenship, so maybe it’s unavoidable.

          • Aapje says:
            April 14, 2019 at 3:11 pm

            I think that the first generation will agitate and they will succeed.

      • onyomi says:
        April 10, 2019 at 8:55 pm

        Doesn’t sound that technically demanding to me: those who are allowed to live and work in both states and who frequently commute could apply for some sort of EZ pass thing that gets quickly scanned. States between which people very frequently travel could also have the autonomy to enter into agreements whereby e.g. there are effectively no movement restrictions between NY and NJ.

        • Evan Þ says:
          April 10, 2019 at 8:57 pm

          We’ve already got that at the Canadian and Mexican borders; it’s called Nexus.

          There’re still huge backups, and you’ve got the cost of maintaining it.

        • The Nybbler says:
          April 10, 2019 at 9:02 pm

          This idea basically ends the United States as an entity, EZ Pass or no EZ Pass.

          • onyomi says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:24 pm

            I would expect all US citizens to still enjoy complete freedom of movement, abode, and employment within the 50 states and different state policies wouldn’t necessarily have to be enforced with border checks, at least not in all cases. Could also be enforced at the level of employment. The right granted, to a non-citizen, to live and work in California doesn’t automatically grant the right to live and work in Texas, but we also give California the freedom to grant that right more liberally than they do now, assuming they want to.

        • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
          April 11, 2019 at 7:45 am

          Every passenger in a car doesn’t have their own E-ZPass. Under your proposed system there’s absolutely nothing stopping me from driving up to the New York / Canada border in Niagara, picking up a carload of Canadians, then driving back downstate and dropping them off across the New York / New Jersey border in Fort Lee. If New Jersey doesn’t want unlimited Canadian immigration but does want free movement with New York, they’re screwed.

          The only way to fix this is to essentially recreate the US federal immigration system through a web of bilateral agreements between states with similar priorities on immigration. At that point, you might as well just secede from the US and form your own country.

          • onyomi says:
            April 11, 2019 at 6:22 pm

            It doesn’t necessarily have to be enforced at the border. It could be enforced more at the workplace or home. For example, maybe California is allowed to more easily grant non-citizen rights of abode and employment to foreigners but Texas doesn’t necessarily have to allow those same immigrants to live and work in Texas. Of course, once they’re in California probably some percent will work illegally in Texas but then that’s Texas’s problem/that’s why it’s a compromise between those who want more and those who want less immigration.

          • quanta413 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 9:05 pm

            In the case that Texas now has to engage in border control against people from California but can’t just ban Californians from coming to Texas, your “compromise” has just become a victory for whoever wants more immigrants and a loss for whoever wants less.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
            April 12, 2019 at 5:03 am

            @onyomi,

            Of course, once they’re in California probably some percent will work illegally in Texas but then that’s Texas’s problem/that’s why it’s a compromise between those who want more and those who want less immigration.

            That’s not a compromise, that’s the people who want more immigration winning outright.

            If your attitude towards Texas in this scenario is to shrug and say “hey it’s your problem” then don’t expect them to ever willingly sign on to your plan. Which is a problem for you given that you started this conversation asking if this plan would be agreeable to both sides.

          • onyomi says:
            April 12, 2019 at 7:42 am

            The compromise I’m proposing for the states who want less immigration is that they get more freedom than they have now to set and enforce their own policies on who gets to live and work there.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:
            April 12, 2019 at 8:00 am

            Except they only have more freedom if they want to set a looser policy, while they have less freedom if they want to set a tighter policy.

            If the proposal was to have the Republic of Texas and the Republic of California split off and each manage their own immigration policies, including towards one another, then both would have more freedom. But maintaining freedom of movement between them automatically sets the level of immigration to that of the most liberal state in the union.

          • John Schilling says:
            April 12, 2019 at 8:27 am

            But you’ve just about said that they won’t be allowed to control movement across the border between them and the unwanted immigrants, and no other state or federal government will do so for them. Since that is the primary mechanism by which a fewer-immigrants-please policy is enforced, you are not in fact giving those states more freedom to enforce their own policies.

            Only the states who want more immigrants will find their collective freedom to be enhanced by your proposal, and there aren’t enough of them to ram the proposal through the Senate, so nope.

          • onyomi says:
            April 12, 2019 at 6:04 pm

            I didn’t say that the policy I’m imagining doesn’t allow individual states to control their borders, only that it doesn’t require them to if e.g. the citizens of NJ and the citizens of NY state agree that the cost of doing so outweighs the mutual benefit.

          • John Schilling says:
            April 12, 2019 at 10:56 pm

            So, under your proposal, Texas would be allowed to put up border checkpoints and keep out e.g. Californinans, on account of California gives drivers’ licenses to immigrants that Texas doesn’t want and only by keeping out anyone with California ID can Texas police its borders against the immigrants it doesn’t want?

            That’s not what I understood you to be saying, and if it is what you meant to say then it is going to be massively disruptive and probably destroy the United States as a functional nation within a generation. But if that’s not what you meant to say, then what effective means do you imagine Texas has the “freedom” to use in enforcing a policy that only a small select group of immigrants will be allowed in Texas?

          • onyomi says:
            April 13, 2019 at 1:00 am

            I guess what I’m suggesting amounts to keeping the question of citizenship at the national level (as I’d concede one must to still be a “nation” and not a federation of some sort) but devolving the issue of non-citizens’ right of residence and employment to the state level. So Texas would not have the right to deny any US citizen entrance to Texas or the right to work and live in Texas, but would not have to automatically admit or grant the right to live and work in Texas to every non-citizen to whom California was willing to grant those same rights.

            It might make sense to keep tourist visas at the national level, since tourists are probably more likely to visit a large number of states in a short period of time and it could be too burdensome to expect them to e.g. apply separately for right of entrance to all the states they plan to visit.

          • John Schilling says:
            April 13, 2019 at 8:47 am

            but [Texas] would not have to automatically admit or grant the right to live and work in Texas to every non-citizen to whom California was willing to grant those same rights.

            How can Texas effectively stop them, when those people all have California drivers’ licenses that will look exactly like the drivers’ licenses that California issues to citizens?

            And all of the tricks and support networks that currently allow illegal immigrants to actually live and work in Texas even though that’s illegal, will still be available, but the most Texas can do when it catches someone is send them back to California.

          • DavidFriedman says:
            April 13, 2019 at 11:18 am

            but devolving the issue of non-citizens’ right of residence and employment to the state level.

            Don’t you already get a good deal of that via illegal immigration? A sanctuary city makes a point of telling illegal immigrants that its local authorities will not enforce the laws they are breaking by being here. A city or state with the opposite preferences (Arizona?) sends the opposite signal.

          • Lambert says:
            April 13, 2019 at 12:15 pm

            Why not make them show some kind of (federally issued) proof of citizenship when they want to get a job?
            You (in theory) already have to prove you have a right to work, right?

            Though good luck dealing with jobs that regularly take people across state borders.

          • onyomi says:
            April 13, 2019 at 5:55 pm

            @DavidFriedman

            Good point! My gut-level reaction to states doing things like issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and otherwise slow-walking federal policy has been to be annoyed at the lawlessness of it, but since I tend to like the idea of federalism, or even state and local-level nullification of unjust or unsuitable federal law, maybe I should actually support it!

            Yet I guess it’s also not symmetrical in the sense that, while a state that doesn’t want more immigration can strictly enforce existing immigration law, presumably they can’t be even more strict than the federal law allows by say, not accepting a visa as a right to work in that state. Maybe what I’m proposing amounts to formalizing and making more symmetrical something like what already exists?

      • Theodoric says:
        April 10, 2019 at 9:00 pm

        I’m not sure they’d even work. We are having trouble stopping people crossing an international border between Mexico and the United States; how are we going to stop people from crossing between (say) New Mexico and Texas?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:
        April 10, 2019 at 9:09 pm

        When you have freedom of movement in a country or a supranational union, you lose the ability to fine-tune immigration policy for the desires of individual states. At that point, you should either let states with lower tolerance for immigration exit peacefully or set immigration to a low enough level that everyone is happy.

        What he said. And expecting hundreds of millions of citizens to give up our freedom of movement within the United States as part of letting people immigrate here sounds like a parody of the utilitarian calculus.

      • 10240 says:
        April 10, 2019 at 9:10 pm

        Another option is to make it illegal for them to work in some states, and go after employers who employ them illegally.

        Another theoretical option is to have no internal border controls, but if someone gets caught in a state where it’s illegal for him to be (e.g. in a random police search or after committing a crime), he gets severely punished (as in, years in prison if the probability of getting caught is small). This wouldn’t work in practice because of the public outrage when people get sent to long prison terms for such a “minor” crime.

      • AlphaGamma says:
        April 11, 2019 at 1:00 am

        The only practical way for that to work is with a system of internal movement controls, which are probably unconstitutional and definitely a huge hassle for actual citizens.

        Really? This sounds quite like the system in the EU/Schengen. There are no border controls within the Schengen area, tourist visas automatically cover the whole area, and AFAIK non-citizens with a visa to live in one Schengen country can travel freely throughout the area for business or tourism. However, long-term visas are issued on a national basis.

        It helps that (almost) all Schengen countries have national ID cards and all AFAIK have a central register of who lives where. So in your example, someone with a New Jersey visa could cross into New York to shop or sightsee (or attend a business meeting) in the same way as someone with a Dutch visa can cross into Belgium or Germany- no checks of any sort required. But they would be required to maintain their residence in New Jersey, and it would be illegal to employ them in New York.

    • Clutzy says:
      April 10, 2019 at 8:34 pm

      I don’t think that one addresses either coalitions concerns all that well.

    • AlphaGamma says:
      April 11, 2019 at 1:08 am

      Switzerland AFAIK regulates immigration (and short term visas) on the federal level, but allows the cantons to decide, within certain limits, who gets a residence permit.

      Actual naturalisation requires approval not just at federal and cantonal level but also at communal (town) level- hence the recent high-profile story of the Dutch woman denied citizenship by the voters of her dairy-farming village for being vegan and “annoying”.

      • Vermillion says:
        April 11, 2019 at 8:16 am

        Interesting postscript to that story that I just heard about from Radiolab, after being rejected by the town (twice) she appealed the decision to the Canton and was granted citizenship.

        The implication from one last interview at the end of the program was that since then she’s been working harder to integrate into the community and has become less annoying as a result.

        • quanta413 says:
          April 11, 2019 at 10:03 am

          So the Swiss system works?

          It’s a bit much for me though. I can’t imagine that system working in the U.S.

        • Aapje says:
          April 12, 2019 at 4:14 am

          This story says that the cantonal authorities bypassed the village committee, not that she became more agreeable.

          Presumably, the canton merely considered formal requirements (like having lived in Switzerland for a certain number of years, not having a criminal record, etc), not her activist behavior.

    • RalMirrorAd says:
      April 11, 2019 at 4:51 am

      1. My impression is that measures in place or proposed to regulate the activities of non-citizens within the country are resisted as if not more fiercely then efforts to control inflows at the border.

      Also logistically it is simply easier to regulate movement at points of entry then trying to track every person down individually. And as others have pointed out it imposes very harsh restrictions on citizens.

      2. I think it’s generally understood that permanent residents could be granted citizenship as by some political process. Whoever manages to do it first, especially in a situation where tens of millions more reside in the country, will make huge bank.

      3. Related to #2 David Friedman at one point made an argument that granting permanent residence rather than citizenship is the equivalent of giving someone 1 thing (residence, employment) instead of giving them 2 things (residence/employment, citizenship) . In practice having large numbers of certain types of visibly distinguishable people without the rights enjoyed by others has horrible optics, and the movement to grant citizenship will be seen as a civil rights struggle.

      4. Birthright Citizenship makes this entirely moot as the descendants of the permanent residents would become citizens automatically even if citizenship wasn’t granted to the first generation.

    • Randy M says:
      April 11, 2019 at 7:40 am

      Hypothetically, I could accept it. Politically, no one will endorse it. Practically, it would never be enforced nor could it be so without severe adverse side effects.

    • ana53294 says:
      April 12, 2019 at 8:46 am

      The EU already kind of works that way, at least for non-EU citizens.

      Citizens of EU countries are allowed to move to any EU country. Permanent residents of an EU country that is in a Schengen country can visit any Schengen country, but they can’t stay there for long, and the same for visa holders. Having a visa for work in Ireland gives you no advantage to travel to other EU countries.

  24. Plumber says:
    April 10, 2019 at 8:33 pm

    @Atlas,
    Immediately my mind kept to Sir Cariadoc (@DavidFriedman) as Minister of War (WAAAUGH?) and making lance charges and forming a shield wall as part of military basic training.

    He’s not a bad choice for Secretary of Education, but I’d put Deiseach there.

    Guy From TN for Treasury.

    Heel Bear Cub for Commerce.

    johan_larson as Energy

    The Nybbler or brad as Ambassador to the U.N.

    Though every previous suggestion upthread looks good to me!

  25. onyomi says:
    April 10, 2019 at 9:21 pm

    Related to this question: do you see there existing more than one type of nation in the world? Should there be? I don’t mean democracies versus autocracies, I’m talking instead about something like “nations” versus, for lack of a better term, “empires” or “multi-ethnic free movement and trade zones.” Examples of the latter would be the US, China, arguably the other BRICs, and arguably the EU, though obviously there is still more autonomy there than exists with e.g. US states.

    David Friedman has an interesting theory on why nations may be the size they are, geographically speaking, though this is more descriptive than prescriptive.

    The reason I ask this is because I feel like right now there are, de facto, these different sorts of nations, and people have different expectations about them, such as Americans’ strong expectation of no restriction on movement within that large geographic area. But to those same people it would probably not seem a weird hardship to have borders between e.g. Belgium and the Netherlands (or does it?). And at the same time as this, I feel like we get this phenomenon where people talk about the USA and Sweden as if they were roughly analogous entities, making me want to say something like “no, I’m not talking about immigration policy for a nation, I’m talking about policy for a multi-ethnic free trade zone!”

    Yet this latter point is also clearly highly controversial: is “American culture” a thing analogous to Japanese culture, for example, or as a “nation of immigrants” is it assumed to be more variable and malleable? And then the PRC wants to present itself to its own citizens and the worlds as much more culturally homogeneous than it really is.

    I guess what I’m gesturing at is that there seems to be some sleight of hand where empires are incentivized to pretend to be nations even though we all know they’re empires and actually have different sets of working assumptions about them?

    • quanta413 says:
      April 10, 2019 at 9:53 pm

      I would agree that to some extent the U.S. is well described as an empire. I don’t see how else to describe a country that has spent such an immense amount of lives and wealth going to war across the globe for a little over a century now. And from the beginning the U.S. absorbed chunks of what were formerly the part of the empires of England, Spain, France, and others.

      But I think the U.S. also makes sense as a nation in a way that (for example) Austria-Hungary didn’t. English is still overwhelmingly the dominant language. People routinely move from state to state, and not just the richest people. There’s probably more variance within states in many senses than between states. Rural areas of California are pretty red and urban areas of Texas are pretty blue.

      • onyomi says:
        April 10, 2019 at 10:06 pm

        Yeah, I think the US is especially unusual by virtue of being so comparatively “new” (excluding Native American culture) and geographically spread out such that e.g. the variability of pronunciation of American English is probably smaller across the whole big territory than just within the British Isles.

        I think part of what I’m getting at with the question is that behind a lot of debates about e.g. immigration is the assumption that the US is somehow a different kind of nation even though we also seem to know what we mean when we say “American culture” in the same sentence as “French culture.” Maybe that’s because of its newness, its diversity, the idea that it’s a “proposition” nation rather than an ethnicity-based nation, etc.

        I’m wondering to what extent this is really true, or should be true: is the optimal number of raisons d’etre for nations in general >1?

        • quanta413 says:
          April 10, 2019 at 10:35 pm

          I think the idea of a proposition nation is bad or at the very least a terrible description of the U.S., but the U.S. is obviously not an ethnicity based nation.

          I think it just is. These people live here with me in this political unit and we share enough background to communicate and trade fruitfully, and I want some things and they want some things and we’re just going to muddle through. Sometimes some people will win and sometimes others. Mostly I hope that there is a minimum of shooting and stabbing. But I wouldn’t say there’s an idea behind it. There’s a history, but no continuous idea worth a damn.

      • DavidFriedman says:
        April 10, 2019 at 10:40 pm

        I would agree that to some extent the U.S. is well described as an empire. I don’t see how else to describe a country that has spent such an immense amount of lives and wealth going to war across the globe for a little over a century now.

        I think that for that to qualify a country as an empire, the wars have to for acquiring territory, as in the Roman or British cases. The U.S. hasn’t added any significant territory since considerably more than a century ago.

        • Aapje says:
          April 11, 2019 at 12:05 am

          Ever since colonialism was seen as very evil, a classic empire can no longer exist without extreme oppression. Modern empires are built on vassal states, military interventions to get your way and/or allies in power, etc.

        • Murphy says:
          April 11, 2019 at 8:36 am

          War can be to install friends into power.

          In the modern world it seems like conquest is hard and frowned upon… but replacing the local government at gunpoint with your old friends from college…

          Why install a governor and call it conquest when you can install a president and call it freedom.

        • quanta413 says:
          April 11, 2019 at 9:24 am

          I agree with the above comments. The U.S. might not have taken South Korea as a territory, but it sure as hell had a hand in how things ended up. The U.S. would’ve in Vietnam too if it had won. As is, it only had a lot of influence on South Vietnam while it existed.

          U.S. millitary bases also often sit inside other countries. If that’s not a sign of submission, then I don’t know what is.

          The U.S. has had an awful lot of satrapies over time.

          I’m glad our rulers aren’t into full blown territorial expansion at the moment, but it’d be nice if they’d engage in less “nation-building” at this point too.

    • RalMirrorAd says:
      April 11, 2019 at 5:08 am

      I’d say that the Nation-Empire thing is like temperature, with Mono-ethnic perfectly homogeneous nation being a theoretical construct set at absolute zero, and one world government being on the other extreme.

      Neither of those things exist but you do see historical clusters. Multi-ethnic states have the benefit of scale but the cost of cohesion and visa versa.

      The US is unusually varied but it’s likely this was made possible by the size of the country and the ability of people to move around (and the cultural willingness to do so) What happens to the US when you can no longer escape the parts of the country you don’t like because those parts exist wherever you go and if they don’t now they will catch up to you in a year or so.

    • Randy M says:
      April 11, 2019 at 7:39 am

      do you see there existing more than one type of nation in the world?

      You could probably make a case that every nation is it’s own type.
      Or if not that extreme, each case certainly has significant variation. The UK before and after Brexit will be different types of nations. The US before and after the Civil war were different types of nations.
      The particular features of a nation are related to it’s political rights and obligations, the relationship the government holds with the citizens, the cultural and genetic variation within, etc.

    • Enkidum says:
      April 11, 2019 at 7:46 am

      But to those same people it would probably not seem a weird hardship to have borders between e.g. Belgium and the Netherlands (or does it?).

      I’m not sure I’m parsing you correctly… but unrestricted free movement between member states is one of the central pillars of the EU. There are still “borders” in some sense but they are, in many ways, closer to state borders in the US (although there is almost always at least the potential for them to be shut down, and the physical infrastructure to do so mostly exists).

      • Aapje says:
        April 12, 2019 at 4:06 am

        What the claim seems to be is that Americans who care strongly about open borders between US states wouldn’t consider it weird if those borders would (again) be closed.

  26. Frederic Mari says:
    April 11, 2019 at 12:08 am

    This is intended as a discussion regarding comments see here regarding my claim that Trump is racist is a pretty obvious fact.

    There’s quite a bit of ground to cover but I want to point out that @Aapje is wrong to expect that Trump will be coherent w.r.t. race/nationality/religion. In immigration as in everything else, he has, at best, feelings and impressions and shortcuts, not a mapped out coherent philosophy of things.

    But let’s start with what I see as his most basic racist belief – the idea that he has superior genes because of his German blood ( https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com/2017/08/16/trump-boasts-of-genetic-superiority-german-blood-2/ ). Trump himself has mentioned that several times (on the campaign trail : “Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart” but well before too, when he could string a sentence together : http://time.com/4936612/donald-trump-genes-genetics/ : stick to just his conversation with Oprah, the first 30-40 secs ) and it’s also the reason behind his recent crazy ‘lie’/weirdo claim that his father was born in Germany. Maybe he meant of Germanic descent. If I have to explain to you why the belief that having German genes makes you a superior being is a racist one, then I give up.

    W.r.t other races/skin colours/nationalities/religions etc. Trump isn’t particularly fussy. He just believes they are bad or unproductive people, who will handicap the USA in its struggle for domination and that’s that. Take his claim that the US shouldn’t take migrants from shithole countries but accept Norwegians instead : “As Durbin explained how deal would impact people from Haiti, Trump said, “Haiti? Why do we want people from Haiti here?” Then they got Africa. ‘Why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway.” Again, if you believe that success is mostly/entirely genetic and that some races/ethnic groups (say, northern Europeans?) have those success genes while others don’t then his objections to the immigration lottery and where immigrants come from makes perfect sense.

    His dislike for Afro-Americans (his insistence that the Central Park Five were guilty even after they were exonerated) and for “Mexicans” (all Latinos/Hispanics/LatAm) is well documented. Need I remind you how he actually launched his 2016 Presidential bid? “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” i.e. he seems to assume “Mexico” today does what Cuba/Castro did do during the Mariel boatlift. That’s regardless of the evidence that first generation immigrants, even illegals, are far less prone to crime than natives (or second generation Hispanics i.e. American citizens).

    His dislike for Muslims is similarly well established. Apart from the Muslim ban itself (and, yes, the administration couldn’t legally deliver what he promised so what we/the USA does have is a watered down version of what Trump ideally wants), you got tons of various comments : After San Bernardino, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” (read from a statement at a rally). Also his (debunked) claims he saw Muslims in New Jersey celebrating after 9/11. And generally every comments after terrorist attacks. His reaction to the attacks in London was particularly revealing : “I think he [Khan, the Muslim London mayor] has done a bad job on crime, if you look, all of the horrible things going on there, with all of the crime that is being brought in”. Note the emphasis on “brought in”. For Trump, Muslims, just like Mexicans, bring in crimes, drugs and duct tape to rape white women… Again, if I have to explain the particular history of the “brown/black/the Other want to rape our women” meme and its open racism, I don’t know what would convince you.

    • Aapje says:
      April 11, 2019 at 3:07 am

      There’s quite a bit of ground to cover but I want to point out that @Aapje is wrong to expect that Trump will be coherent w.r.t. race/nationality/religion

      The claim of incoherence on the part of the opponent can result in unfalsifiable accusations. Any evidence that is consistent with a claim is then seen as proof that the claim is true, but counterevidence is then treated as atypical and irrelevant. It creates an asymmetry where you argue towards a claim, rather than a more moderate and accurate assessment.

      But let’s start with what I see as his most basic racist belief – the idea that he has superior genes because of his German blood

      The link you provide has a transcription of a spliced video. The video has short segments from many different speeches and interviews. The transcript makes it seem like this is part of a single speech, which is deceptive. You should have noted this.

      Looking at the video, I never see him say that he has superior genes because of his German blood. I see him say that he has superior genes in some segments and see him connect some traits to genes. I also see him say that he is proud of his German blood, in a segment where he doesn’t talk about his genes.

      Here is a larger segment, which I can’t play with audio right now. However, the autogenerated subtitles seem to have him talk not of genes, but of German culture. He segues from proclaiming his pride in the German cultural traits that he believes he has, to the statement about being proud of his German blood, suggesting that it was meant metaphorically, which such statements often are.

      The way the video was cut to remove his statements about German culture and splice in statements about genes, is extremely deceptive, if not outright defamatory.

      Again, if you believe that success is mostly/entirely genetic

      Perhaps he believes in the influence of genes less than you think, because you consume media that signal boosts his claims about genes, while either ignoring or falsely attributing genetic claims to his statements about culture or other reasons?

      “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”

      That statement actually says that the Mexicans who decide to migrate are on average worse than those who don’t. Such a claim doesn’t require a belief in (overall) Mexican inferiority, let alone genetic inferiority, rather than cultural inferiority.

      What is interesting to me is that a lot of progressives interpreted this statement as a claim that Mexicans are worse in general, which to me seems to be due to their prejudice. They ignore what was actually said, in favor of what they think that Trump actually meant, based on their model of Trump’s beliefs.

      The issue with that is that if the model is wrong, the interpretation is false. In fact, the false interpretation can then actually strengthen the belief that the false model is correct, resulting in a feedback loop.

      W.r.t other races/skin colours/nationalities/religions etc. Trump isn’t particularly fussy. He just believes they are bad or unproductive people, who will handicap the USA in its struggle for domination and that’s that.

      My understanding of Trump’s basic world view is that he presumes selfishness on the part of everyone, where people will exploit you if they can get away with it. He believes that other nations will engage in unfair trade if they can, that countries will let/make their worst people migrate to get rid of them, that climate change is a hoax by China to hobble the American economy, that other nations take advantage of the safety provided by the American military, etc.

      I think that many people have severe problems understanding certain viewpoints and instead aggressively pattern match to viewpoints that they do understand. In this community, we tend to disfavor this.

      • Frederic Mari says:
        April 11, 2019 at 4:01 am

        “The claim of incoherence on the part of the opponent can result in unfalsifiable accusations. Any evidence that is consistent with a claim is then seen as proof that the claim is true, but counterevidence is then treated as atypical and irrelevant. It creates an asymmetry where you argue towards a claim, rather than a more moderate and accurate assessment”.

        … or he’s just incoherent? My personal take is that he is none too bright and thus proceeds by approximations/cliches. I suspect he likes eugenics b/c he thinks it says he’s smart and that’s about it. He’s not going to go deep in the weeds of nature vs. nurture, blank slate vs. inheritable traits etc.

        “Here is a larger segment, which I can’t play with audio right now. However, the auto-generated subtitles seem to have him talk not of genes, but of German culture. He segues from proclaiming his pride in the German cultural traits that he believes he has, to the statement about being proud of his German blood, suggesting that it was meant metaphorically, which such statements often are”.

        If he conflates German culture and German blood, that’s again a pretty good case of beliefs in eugenics and the superiority of certain races/cultures. I think it’s self-evident that certain institutional setups are superior to others but I would already be nervous about attributing that to ‘culture’, let alone to ‘blood’/genes.

        “That statement actually says that the Mexicans who decide to migrate are on average worse than those who don’t”. Yeah. Encouraged by the government of Mexico. Not only is that questionable from a factual p.ov. but it veers into conspiracy thinking. Does the US send its criminals to Canada? Does France send its criminals to Germany? Castro did do it and I suspect that factoid stuck in Trump’s impressionable mind.

        “My understanding of Trump’s basic world view is that he presumes selfishness on the part of everyone, where people will exploit you if they can get away with it. He believes that other nations will engage in unfair trade if they can, that countries will let/make their worst people migrate to get rid of them, that climate change is a hoax by China to hobble the American economy, that other nations take advantage of the safety provided by the American military, etc.”

        That’s all true (as in Trump does believe all those things).

        “I think that many people have severe problems understanding certain viewpoints and instead aggressively pattern match to viewpoints that they do understand. In this community, we tend to disfavor this”.

        Are you trying to teach me what confirmation biases are? And isn’t it a bit presumptuous to assume that, because I’m fairly new to this website, I haven’t been interested in rationalist debates before?

        • Aapje says:
          April 11, 2019 at 6:17 am

          I suspect he likes eugenics b/c he thinks it says he’s smart and that’s about it.

          A belief that genes determine many traits (or a large part of traits) and that one has superior genes is not the same as eugenics, which refers to the goal of improving the genes of future generations. Your sentence is not actually sensible, as written, unless you think that Trump’s father practiced eugenics. Perhaps here and later in your comment, you meant to say “genetics” where you wrote “eugenics”?

          If he conflates German culture and German blood, that’s again a pretty good case of beliefs in eugenics and the superiority of certain races/cultures.

          It can also be due to a belief in the pretty obvious truth that some culture is practically always passed down from parents to children. If Germans with German culture migrate to America and raise a child there, that child will typically adopt some German culture from the parents. Then when that child has children, culture will again be passed on. Explaining the child’s or grand child’s behavior as being due to their German blood can then be an intentional or unintentional conflation of two things that are typically correlated. Lots of people conflate correlated things, either intentionally or because they have trouble distinguishing them. You do this in your comments as well.

          Also, conflating a belief in the superiority of races with the superiority of cultures is extremely sloppy. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who clearly doesn’t believe in the superiority of certain cultures or cultural elements. Such a person would for example have to consider the slave culture in the American South of the past no worse than the Northern culture of that time or than modern American culture. In my experience, people who say that claims of cultural superiority are racist actually object to the belief that some specific culture or cultures are superior to some other specific culture or cultures and then falsely claim that their rejection is based on a general principle that cultures have equal value.

          I think it’s self-evident that certain institutional setups are superior to others but I would already be nervous about attributing that to ‘culture’, let alone to ‘blood’/genes.

          Institutions are culture (especially as institutions often work as they do not merely because of the written rules, but due to unwritten rules that people obey). You can define all the cultural elements that you think can make a culture inferior or superior out of the definition of culture to get at a claim that all cultures are of equal quality, but that is just a rhetorical trick.

          Encouraged by the government of Mexico. Not only is that questionable from a factual p.ov. but it veers into conspiracy thinking.

          The correctness of his views are not the topic at hand. If Trump believes that Mexico sends their criminals, then, regardless of whether he is correct, this is sufficient to explain his comment and his desire for stricter border controls with Mexico.

          What I object to is taking someones statements and rejecting them as being so absurd that it can’t be their real motivation and then presuming they have other beliefs that you consider more realistic, but also more evil.

          It’s really irritating behavior that I see a lot.

          PS. Comments are more legible if you use quote blocks to quote, rather than mere quote characters.

          • albatross11 says:
            April 11, 2019 at 5:09 pm

            Just as an aside, I believe that:

            a. Some cultures are better than others at promoting the kinds of values and behaviors that lead to success in modern life.

            b. Genetic differences between people matter a lot for success or failure in modern life.

            c. Sometimes, those cultural and/or genetic differences lead to some identifiable ethnic/religious/language/racial groups having very different outcomes from others.

            You can define those as racist if you like (I’d say only (c) could even possibly qualify), but they’re all factual claims, and ones I think have a fair bit of evidence behind them. If you apply a moral term to judge factual claims, you’re sabotaging your own brain.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:
            April 14, 2019 at 6:44 am

            Could someone remind me of how to do blockquotes without italics?

            I really don’t like reading long passages in italics, and I usually don’t.

            Might it make sense to have a top tab for tools and navigating the interface?

          • The Nybbler says:
            April 14, 2019 at 6:57 am

            Could someone remind me of how to do blockquotes without italics?

            Just italicize them. <blockquote><i>Your Quote Here</i></blockquote>

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:
            April 14, 2019 at 8:05 am

            Let’s try it.

            Just italicize them.

            Here’s my quote

            Hully gee. So it’s a toggle in this case. Thank you.

            How did you get the site to display html instead of activating it?

          • The Nybbler says:
            April 14, 2019 at 8:19 am

            If you replace the open bracket “<” with the entity reference “&lt;” it won’t render the html. e.g. <strike>not stricken</strike>

          • Plumber says:
            April 14, 2019 at 8:50 am

            @Nancy Lebovitz
            "Could someone remind me of how to do blockquotes without italics?

            I really don’t like reading long passages in italics, and I usually don’t..."

            I don’t mind the italics, but when I have to read a blockquote in a subthread of a subthread the words are often presented as only one to four letters wide which makes it hard for me to read, so I often use <code> and <i> instead.

        • DavidFriedman says:
          April 11, 2019 at 1:47 pm

          “That statement actually says that the Mexicans who decide to migrate are on average worse than those who don’t”. Yeah. Encouraged by the government of Mexico. Not only is that questionable from a factual p.ov. but it veers into conspiracy thinking.

          Are you agreeing that your original claim that it was evidence of racism is false, and for some reason not bothering to say so?

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 11, 2019 at 3:45 pm

            When Donald Trump has to “assume” that “some” of the people coming from Mexico are “good people”, … yes, that is a pretty racist statement.

            It’s like people here don’t understand how language works (when it is convenient).

            “It would be a shame if something were to happen to Mr. Friedman. A damn shame.”

            I eagerly look forward to everyone telling me how that would really be me expressing a solicitous concern for your well being…

          • Aapje says:
            April 12, 2019 at 2:38 am

            @HeelBearCub

            When Donald Trump has to “assume” that “some” of the people coming from Mexico are “good people”, … yes, that is a pretty racist statement.

            Would it be more racist than if he had left it out and had claimed or insinuated that all Mexican migrants are criminals?

            What is interesting is that you are upset over the part of his statement where he weakens his earlier claim of Mexican criminality. It seems to me that calling this racist requires a belief that Trump is aware of good people who migrated from Mexico and intentionally refuses to acknowledge that, in an attempt to make people believe that good Mexican migrants are extremely rare, rather than that he can’t come up with any examples, but thinks there are.

            Yet I’ve seen a lot of claims that Trump has a deficiency in his ability to make smart arguments and/or remember things. Why can’t that be an explanation of what he said, rather than a nefarious plot?

            In general, I see a lot of inconsistency between claims by progressives, where the same behaviors by individuals or groups are sometimes attributed to a nefarious plot and sometimes to lack of knowledge/understanding. It seems to me that the main reason for this difference is how prone the person making the claim is to conspiracy thinking (or alternatively, how drawn to conflict theory rather than mistake theory).

            “It would be a shame if something were to happen to Mr. Friedman. A damn shame.”

            I don’t see how this statement in similar to the statement that Trump made, in a relevant way.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 12, 2019 at 5:59 am

            I don’t see how this statement in similar to the statement that Trump made, in a relevant way.

            “This is just a mind-numbingly idiotic statement that could only come from a cretin of low intellect and poor moral fiber, although you must, I assume, say some intelligent things from time to time.”

            Is that statement above insulting? Does the final clause modify the antecedent in any relevant way so as to make it non-insulting?

            Seriously, this is what I mean about people pretending not to understand how language works. You use debate shenanigans and selective logic to avoid the point being made.

            When Trumps uses word like “animals” or “infest” in reference to some subset of illegal immigrants, and then uses diminishing language to imply that the subset makes up the vast majority of these illegal immigrants, he is using a common rhetorical trick. You transmit the meaning, while embedding technically exculpatory language in the statement.

          • Aapje says:
            April 12, 2019 at 7:42 am

            @HeelBearCub

            I agree that Trump made the claim that the majority of Mexican migrants are criminals. I oppose a definition of racism that calls this racist, especially given Trump’s stated motivation for making this claim: that Mexico is treating the US as a sort of penal colony, rather than a claim of inherent inferiority.

            I don’t really understand why you focus on whether Trump was being insulting. Many political claims/accusations are considered insulting. The claim that smokers tend to particularly often misbehave, which I argued elsewhere, is surely considered insulting by some/many smokers. Why is it less wrong to argue that than to argue that an ethnic group or even just a filtered ethnic group has negative traits?

            By your standard, we can’t criticize ISIS members or demand that migrants from Syria should be vetted more.

            Ultimately, the standard that you seem to defend is typically only afforded by people on the left to some groups that they deem to be victimized, while other groups are fair game. I reject such asymmetries and rhetorical games where people try to win arguments by redefining hypocrisy as fairness.

            Adopting your position seems pointless, because I don’t expect that a decent number of people on the left will start to entertain the idea that they are racist when they accuse white people of certain behaviors, sexist when they accuse men, etc. This despite mounting scientific evidence that people on the left are actually far more inherently racist and sexist than those on the right or in the middle (in the sense that they will interpret evidence in a more biased way, will be far more eager to sacrifice a white or male person than a black or female person, etc).

            I try to not call most people on the left racist or sexist, even though I do believe that they mostly have strong racial and gender biases, not in the least because using a broad definition results in conflict, not understanding. I think that people should do the same for the right, for the same reason.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 12, 2019 at 8:31 am

            I don’t really understand why you focus on whether Trump was being insulting.

            I am going to try this one last time.

            I gave you an example of rhetoric that was actually threatening without being explicitly threatening.

            I then gave you an example of rhetoric that was actually insulting while containing words that meant the opposite of the intended insult.

            What I am NOT doing is concentrating on threat or insult. The fact you cannot, or do not want to, see this is the problem.

            I AM concentrating on how language is used in a frequently self-contradictory manner for rhetorical effect. Applying rigorous rules of logic to this language to attempt to exculpate the statement from its intended effect is wrong.

            The fact that Trump makes explicit statements that some immigrants aren’t animals, that some Mexicans back in Mexico aren’t rapists or drug dealers, these small exclusions don’t exculpate the plain meaning of the overall statements.

          • Aapje says:
            April 13, 2019 at 5:33 am

            @HeelBearCub

            I feel that you are overthinking this. It’s not some dog whistle or covert message. Trump is blunt. He thinks that a lot of criminals are crossing the border and wants to clamp down on this. The part of his comment that you are zooming in on indicates that he thinks that good people are also coming, but that he doesn’t particularly care about them.

            America(ns) first. This is what he constantly says, in a dozen variations.

            The core of his narrative is that he sees it as his duty to put the interests of America(ns) first and that foreign and domestic powers have made American interests subordinate.

            Now, a typically human trait is that we tend to see a lack of interest & care that we think is owed to us or a group, as hatred. So it’s perfectly normal for you to see him as hateful for having different priorities than you.

            It’s also perfectly normal for him and his supporters to see you as hating them, for having different priorities.

            Until you accept this, you are putting your own biases on a pedestal, where you are going to get very upset over insults to your ingroup, but will gloss over insults to the outgroup. Ironically, that itself is dehumanizing.

          • HeelBearCub says:
            April 13, 2019 at 6:34 am

            @Aapje:

            I’m not overthinking it. You are forcing me to overexplain it.

            As best as I can tell, because it’s not convenient to you to understand.

          • Doctor Mist says:
            April 13, 2019 at 1:56 pm

            Maybe you should try underexplaining it; overexplaining does not seem to result in a convincing argument. I find Aapje’s narrative much more economical, and perfectly consistent with what we see.

          • Aapje says:
            April 13, 2019 at 3:12 pm

            @HeelBearCub

            As far as I can tell, my relatively cynical point of view that sees bias and motivated reasoning everywhere, but intentional evil only rarely, is most consistent with what we learn from both scientific study and what people tell us they believe when we truly pay attention to what they say, rather than what is said about them.

            I’m not sure it is healthy for me personally, but perhaps the truth drives you insane, as H.P. Lovecraft believed. At least, it seems isolating.

            Not sure that it is convenient. It’s probably more an affliction.

      • RalMirrorAd says:
        April 11, 2019 at 5:22 am

        Not to be rude but I don’t consider a deep-dive on these sorts of comments made to be particularly valuable. At least I’m not convinced that the conviction is based on things he’s said. (only they provide some measure of confirmation)

        Having that particular stance on immigration, however justified, would be sufficient confirmation.

        I mean it’s treated as a given that in disparate impact the intent of the party in question is irrelevant. And immigration seems like an obvious case of disparate impact in terms of who the intended beneficiaries are on both sides of the issue.

    • The original Mr. X says:
      April 11, 2019 at 5:32 am

      His reaction to the attacks in London was particularly revealing : “I think he [Khan, the Muslim London mayor] has done a bad job on crime, if you look, all of the horrible things going on there, with all of the crime that is being brought in”. Note the emphasis on “brought in”. For Trump, Muslims, just like Mexicans, bring in crimes, drugs and duct tape to rape white women… Again, if I have to explain the particular history of the “brown/black/the Other want to rape our women” meme and its open racism, I don’t know what would convince you.

      Where did Trump say anything about Muslims raping women? (Not that he’d have been entirely wrong to do so.) I think the most likely interpretation that the “horrible things” he’s referring to are terrorism (which in modern Europe is largely the province of first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants) and possibly knife crime (I don’t know what the demographics are of that, so I don’t know how accurate it would be to blame it on migration).

    • Randy M says:
      April 11, 2019 at 7:30 am

      “Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart”

      Many people correctly observe that they share traits, such as intelligence, with close family members. It’s also not controversial that traits increasing intelligence is desirable. I don’t think that quote in particular does anything for your case. If other videos show more damning proof or racism, you should lead with that. If you think that that itself is racist, that further reducing the negative affect of the term.

      (Now, granted, that quote doesn’t actually show Trump sharing nuclear engineer level intelligence, but that seems besides the point. Incorrectly believing oneself clever is also common.)

    • Enkidum says:
      April 11, 2019 at 7:42 am

      I don’t see how it’s possible to be the most prominent member of the birther movement and not be racist. Similarly for the Central Park Five thing. I doubt I’m interested in arguing the point, but, seriously? Intelligent people dispute this?

      • Nick says:
        April 11, 2019 at 7:54 am

        I doubt I’m interested in arguing the point

        So you posted just to mock them?

      • quanta413 says:
        April 11, 2019 at 9:09 am

        I’ll put it this way. I think he’s probably only a little more racist than a lot of rich white liberals who talk a good game, mostly he’s just not very polite. And it’s not racist enough that I’m sure I care if I don’t have to deal with him personally.

        His policy choices (in as much as he has coherent ones) are a separate question. He could have more or less racist reasons for any of them, so that’s not how I’m going to evaluate them.

        I can see where people live, who they socialize with, and where their children go to school. I can also talk to them occasionally. I am unconvinced that Trump is an outlier in any way other than that he shoots his damn mouth off. Maybe he’s one or two sigma from the mean in racism. But it’s one of the less bad things about him to me.

        And despite the fact I’ve found him a deeply unpleasant and terrible person ever since I saw him on TV (long before 2015), he could morally do better than the last Republican President by just not invading two countries. The bar is so low I-don’t-even.