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Something that belatedly struck me concerning sexual purity taboos–I don’t recall anyone mentioning this, but it was a big thread so apologies if I missed it: in my experience, all else being equal, women tend to be more offended by other women’s violations of sexual norms than men are. If a bunch of young men are together, and one of them remarks that Sarah’s a slut, the others (provided none of them are dating or friends with Sarah) will likely react with amusement. They might make a couple of mean-spirited jokes at Sarah’s expense. But then they’ll move on. Whereas if a circle of young women notice that Sarah’s a slut, they will be at it for fifteen minutes, critiquing her clothes, her behavior, her friends, and basically all the little things that add up to make Sarah such a worthless skank. There will be no humor. They hate Sarah.
The reason for this should be obvious: men ultimately have no reason to feel threatened if a girl is sexually available, while women do. The reverse situation should work the same way, one would think, but in my experience doesn’t. Women may express relatively mild disapproval of male promiscuity, but it won’t have the same venom unless the man’s sleeping around has hurt them or someone they know personally. And men tend to feel a wistful admiration, if anything. But this is all anecdotal and I don’t have a good sense of why it should be.
Spitballin’, but doesn’t this reflect the difference between male and female pairing strategies?
The man sleeping around case appears more clear cut: having sex with many women maximizes the chance of begetting offspring, so men are inclined to find the concept of having many sexual partners attractive. From a male perspective, Steve the Stud has figured out the secret to a happy life. The only potential source of squalls is when he starts going after your girl.
The female pairing strategy typically involves securing an exclusive mate who will provide for the woman’s offspring. Sarah the Slut is an immediate threat, ‘coz if she’s known to sleep around with any man, she might go after your man as well. Whilst this might seem a direct parallel to the male case, the threat is more immediate and dire. A man whose woman cheated on him with Steve can dump her and find a new one (or take lessons from Steve on how to get it without having a relationship). A woman whose man cheated on her with Sarah may well have lost a provider for her family.
For same sex reactions, I would guess that men noting the existence of a promiscuous woman may be inclined to view her at least somewhat favourably – as potential easy sex.
Women may be less inclined to view Steve in quite that way, being more discriminating when it comes to sexual partners and encounters, but it seems to me that if Steve is having success securing many partners, he must possess some qualities that make him attractive to many women. This attractiveness may also cause other women to view him more favourably, unless there’s a concrete reason otherwise (he has hurt them or someone they know personally).
Eh, this breaks three ways. Chad gets laid a lot. Other men either don’t care so long as Chad stays away from my woman (this is my attitude), they go the PUA way and study and try to emulate Chad, or they go the Incel (subculture) route and hate Chad.
A fourth way: they look at Chad as reckless, immature, and kind of icky. Sleeping with lots of women signals that he might be carrying a disease, plus it could signal a lack of impulse control.
Imagine a director who needs to hire a manager with whom he will work closely, and he has narrowed his selection down to two candidates with equally strong resumes. By chance he happens to know one of the candidates is happily married and never cheats on his wife, while the other is a bachelor who sleeps with a different woman every weekend. Which candidate do you expect the director would be biased toward?
Depends on if it’s a tech startup: the bachelor sounds perfect to move fast and break things!
The Bachelor is also less likely to call in because his kids are sick, or bitch about having to work over the weekend…
First I would say it’s none of my business. Second, at my workplace marital status is one of the dozens of things we’re specifically not allowed to use in making hiring decisions. During an interview you are not even allowed to ask someone if they’re married.
No, but if one of the candidates is schlubby, appropriately but boringly dressed, and has a wedding band and a bit of a gut, and the other is wearing tight jeans and a shiny shirt with two buttons undone, with a Fabio haircut and no wedding ring, you can probably make a pretty good guess.
You needn’t talk about it, of course.
If a child is born under circumstances of questionable paternity, it’s the mother rather than the father who is liable to starve as a result. So women as a class are more interested in, A: ensuring that they personally satisfy local male preferences for they will commit to a lifetime of matrimony for, and B: making sure other women don’t negate all this effort and undercut the marriage market altogether by “giving it away for free”. That’s treason, it is, and traitors always get treated more harshly than the enemies they trade with.
For men, if the actions of won push local culture away from a norm of fidelity in marriage and towards one of no-obligations casual sex, meh, we can live with that – we’re not the ones who are going to wind up pregnant, abandoned, and starving in the gutter.
This is not my experience and certainly seems implausible in a context where most young women identify as feminists. Possibly you have the causality the wrong way round: women call Sarah a slut because they hate her rather than vice versa.
I think you’ve more or less hit the nail on the head with that last sentence. Finding any stick to beat a dog generally beats ideological commitment and common sense.
My outspokenly feminist friends still frequently gossip about how slutty the women they dislike are, despite the fact that every one of them is pretty much just as sexually promiscuous as the other women they deride if not moreso. It sometimes feels like living in a leper colony where everyone is constantly complaining about one another’s personal hygiene.
Sort of like when adolescent boys playing X-Box yell fag at each other over voice chat? They aren’t trying to enforce patriarchal norms, just trying to hurt the other person.
Whether that excuses them from the thought-crime or not is another story, of course.
Could anyone recommend a good overview of the global warming problem in a single volume? I’m particularly interested in the policy-side issues: how bad will the effects be and what can and should be done about the problem. I’m hoping to find something that gives fair hearings to both the we’re-doomed and we’re-fine positions. A tall order, I know.
I doubt such a thing could exist – except maybe if Scott would convince his friends Scott Aaronson and David Friedman to do an adversarial collaboration together…
It’s a tall order, sure. But it shouldn’t be an impossible dream. Fairness is not a heroic virtue. Neither is a willingness to engage with those we think are mistaken.
The best case for it happening is probably an author who is engaged with the issue, but fairly moderate in his or her assessment of its severity. Such a person could easily spend a couple of chapters explaining the views of those who consider the problem bigger or smaller. If necessary, those chapters could be written by guest authors. At the very least, they should be reviewed by true believers.
I think what you probably want are two books, or two blogs, or two series of articles, one by a reasonable and fair minded person on one side, one by a similar person on the other.
Judith Curry seems to have a good reputation on the skeptical climate scientist side, but I don’t think she has written a book. I don’t know who to suggest on the other side. Nordhaus has written at least one book, but the one I looked at is probably too technical for your purposes. He’s an interesting case, because if you look at his numbers they don’t support the alarmist position but if you look at what he says he does. See this old blog post of mine for an example.
Searching my blog with appropriate keywords will give you one part of the skeptical position, but I’m not a climate scientist and am not competent to evaluate that part of the argument, beyond looking at past IPCC reports and comparing them to what happened thereafter.
@johan_larson,
I read Heat by George Monbiot a little over a decade ago, as I recall it didn’t see merit in “the other side”, but it did give prescriptions for practical infrastructure changes using existing technology to reduce emissions without effecting our standard of living much with one big exception: it pretty much said jet travel needs to be curtailed if you really want to limit greenhouse gases enough, and there really isn’t another alternative to travelling that fast that also didn’t produce as much emissions.
You can cut emissions, or you can travel fast, not both.
Otherwise with more nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar electricity production (and even switching from coal to natural gas would help), it read as if it wouldn’t be that hard to reduce emissions – but international travel like we have now just couldn’t happen as much.
That was my takeaway anyway.
… Just for lols. How to get to Anywhere, fast, carbon neutral;
Step one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
Step two: Scream like a kerbal on the way down.
If we couldn’t fly, travel would definitely be harder. Same-day cross-country travel in the US would be just barely possible with very fast trains. NY-LA might take 15-16 hours, which is same-day but only just.
Not sure how fast one could get across the Atlantic or Pacific. Probably several days, even with hydrofoils or something like that.
I’m curious: how (un)pleasant do you suppose travel would be if we used trains instead of planes in America? (Or North America, I guess, since I think you’re Canadian?) How comfortable or uncomfortable is a 16 hour train ride vs a 3 hour flight?
I’ve heard from friends who have been on all day train rides that they’re quite nice, but I wonder whether folks would get sick of it fast, or whether the same price pressure would happen as with planes, so that trains would become more cramped places with fewer amenities than the quasi-luxury trips my friends described.
If you pay attention to some of the New Urbanism or peak oil folks, meanwhile, they’re really into trams. 😀
For someone taking a recreational vacation? Not a big deal.
For people who travel frequently for business? It basically kills off entire industries. A whole lot of business models become instantly unviable.
I’m not sure about that. Right now, if you need to travel coast to coast, it’s going to take you effectively all day. You certainly cannot fly across, do anything useful, and fly back the same day (unless you red-eye.) That would continue to be the case if traveling by high-speed train. But rather than a short day of travel, it would be a really long day of travel.
The second-class cars in Europe suggest that this is how it would play out.
Also, coast to coast travel by train in the US does not take one day. More like 3 days. If we had high speed rail… Beijing to Guangzhao takes 8 hours, minimum, and it’s less than half the distance. So figure 20 hours scheduled time. This is far more than the flight time of about 6 hours.
The Beijing-Shanghai highspeed train makes the 819 mile trip in 4.5 hours, including multiple stops.
https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/beijing-shanghai-highspeed.htm
New York to LA is 2790 miles, following I-80.
https://www.distance.to/New-York/Los-Angeles
Assuming proportional travel time, that comes to 15.3 hours start to finish. It would be a full day, but it could be done without sleeper service.
Beijing and Shanghai don’t have any mountain ranges between them, though. New York and Los Angeles have more than one.
Bridge. Tunnel. Cut. Fill. We’re living in the 21st century. Trains were running through those mountain ranges way back in the 19th, for Pete’s sake.
We can’t do tunnels and cuts anymore, might damage the environment, and will definitely cost eleventy-billion dollars (or whatever the Big Dig cost per mile, adjusted for inflation and additional cost disease)
Short of the Lolzy “Well, we can use the orbital launch infrastructure for fast transport.. “, lets see..
New York – Alaska – Moscow-Paris-London by high speed train: approximately 17000 kilometers, and some impressive but not impossible bridge and tunnel work.
48 hours at 350 km/hour. That is actually less horrible than I thought it would be.
By sea, much shorter, but still slower – the record holder is still SS United States at 3 days and twelve hours. Slapping a naval reactor on a similar design might cut a few hours of that but not all that many.
The United States holds the Blue Riband, which is considered to be for the fastest crossing by a passenger vessel in regular revenue service.
However, the physical trophy (the Hales Trophy) can be won by any commercial passenger vessel, even if it doesn’t actually carry passengers on the crossing in question. The current holder is the wave piercing catamaran ferry Fjord Cat which made the crossing in 2 days and 20 hours on its delivery voyage. The same yard has made faster ships*, but none have crossed the Atlantic.
I don’t know how limited by weather these types of vessel are, or how effective they would be in regular transatlantic service. The Fjord Cat crossed the Atlantic at its service speed of 41 knots- I think they use some of the void spaces inside the catamaran hulls to hold additional fuel for the crossing, I don’t know how much that limits their carrying capacity.
*The fastest is the Francisco, currently in service as a ferry between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, claiming a service speed of 51 knots which would bring the crossing time down to about 58 hours.
Replying because the edit window seems to have closed early:
It should be noted that the catamaran crossings were eastbound, which is faster than westbound. The SS United States also holds the record for fastest eastbound crossing in revenue service- 3 days 10 hours.
As for weather, I imagine they may be quite vulnerable to bad weather, as the high-speed catamaran between the UK and Ireland is often cancelled because of rough weather- apparently anything more than sea state 4 results in cancellation.
I think this reflects unwarranted technological pessimism. Hybrid planes give you a big emissions reduction and are viable even over long distances (pure electric may work for regional jets but not transoceanic); biofuels create full-cycle neutrality; atmospheric capture and storage nullifies whatever’s left. Voila, emissions/guilt-free fast air travel. Costly, sure, but likely less costly than forgoing the speed advantage.
It’s not clear to me that hybrid planes give you a big emissions reduction when you actually use them over long distances. Airplanes, unlike cars, run their engines at >50% power for the duration of the trip, not for brief spurts. If a Boeing 737 flying from New York to London burns 6,000 gallons of kerosene, then a hybrid-737 that uses batteries during takeoff and climb is still going to burn at ~5,500 gallons of kerosene for that trip, with all the CO2, NOX, particulate, etc emissions that implies. And as you note, there aren’t any batteries anywhere on the horizon that will change that.
If you’re specifically concerned about local emissions, within breathing distance of JFK and Heathrow, then yes it makes a big difference if you can use batteries for that part. But in terms of global carbon footprint, etc, not so much.
Daher/Airbus Hybrid
This one claims 30% reduction in fuel usage, but I can’t find where I read that quote. Part of the increase in efficiency comes from reduced wing area, presumably because having lots of wing motors provides extra lift. And I assume part comes from being able to use ground-charged batteries in the takeoff and climb, which is the least fuel efficient part for the turbine. But I don’t understand how they would get 30% on a long flight. Maybe that assumes having some really good batteries.
For some insight into what can be done, I highly recommend _Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air_,
available free to read on the web, or for download:
https://www.withouthotair.com/
Unfortunately the author is no longer with us.
For a review of the actual science, you’re on your own. Climate change is a political minefield in which honest brokers cannot survive. But you might start by reading what the IPCC reports actually say *outside* of the summaries for policymakers.
My attempts to get reliable information were perhaps the first case where I’ve actually failed in attempting to understand a complex situation. If you find a reliable book I’d be eager to read it. But I’m not very hopeful.
I actually don’t so much want fair hearings for both sides as “here is the data”. I think part of the problem is that there are sides – and only two of them – which basically makes nuanced understanding impossible. Add to this the problem of too much of the research being based on “climate models”, which are of course potentially vulnerable to GIGO – and what I want to know is what goes into the models, and what evidence supports those decisions. Also to what extent the models’ predictions are supported or contradicted by data.
But my best evaluation of what I’ve seen so far is that anyone arguing that significant climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t being caused in large part by human release of carbon dioxide etc., is either duped or arguing in bad faith. (Or incompetent at understanding various types of argument, particularly statistical. There’s a *lot* of that going around; I suspect most humans may not even be capable of learning to understand statistics and probability.)
The questions of how much, how fast, and with what consequences are if not wide open, then pretty close to it. And the question of the effectiveness, side effects etc. of possible counter measures is pretty close to “anyone’s guess”.
I think I need something more digested than the actual data. I’m not an expert in climate science, so I doubt the raw data would let me decide what is going to happen in strictly physical terms. I doubt I know enough about politics to determine what is politically possible. And I sure as hell don’t know enough about economics to determine what the effects would be of various efforts at mitigation. The counsel of experts is really the only realistic option here, unless I’m willing to spend years to understand all of this myself from scratch.
That depends on whether you define your sides politically—are you for or against costly policies to reduce global warming—or by what people believe about global warming. By the second measure, there are lots of sides:
1. Global warming isn’t happening.
2. It is happening at the moment, but due to natural processes.
3. It is happening and largely due to human action, but …
3a: It doesn’t have serious negative effects
3b: It has both substantial negative effects and substantial positive effects and it isn’t clear whether the net effect is positive or negative or how large (my position)
3c: It has substantial net negative effects, but the costs of preventing it are larger than the benefits, so the correct response is to adapt to the change, not try to prevent it.
And, on the other side:
3d: The things we need to do to prevent warming not only are not costly, they are things we should be doing anyway. (My old comment on this view)
3e: The negative effects are enormous, on the scale of destroying civilization and perhaps our species, so we should be willing to accept any cost short of that to stop it.
That’s seven different sides, and I expect I could think of a few more.
3f: We don’t know enough to rule out very large net-negative effects– but there’s a very good chance that we will soon. Given the slow-moving nature of the problem, there’s little to lose by waiting to gather more information before undertaking any expensive mitigation. There’s a decent case to be made for cheap mitigation.
Hi! Long time listener, first time caller etc.
By no means an expert but embarked on a little reading project along exactly these lines earlier this year. From my reading: I’m not sure that the ‘we’re-fine’ position gets much airing from most people involved in the debate – but there is definitely a strand of the conversation focused around what should be done. Then again i may have been reading the wrong material/picking from the wrong reading lists to hear the other side.
For ‘we’re doomed’, you couldn’t do much better than The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells, which should be out in paperback by now. It keeps you awake at night. He is a swift and charismatic writer who does decent justice to the scale of the doom.
For policy-focused, ‘what can we do about this’ material, a good book might be Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming – a weirdly formatted but excellent book, which features lots of individual problems and ideas for how they could be solved, all ranked in terms of efficacy (i.e. we really, really need to rethink how we do refrigeration). Not exactly a page turner, but very clear and interesting.
I hope that helps/isn’t old news to you!
I’ve seen a plausible claim that stealth is impossible in space. Your trajectory and waste heat are very visible.
Would it be possible to get stealth by suborning the opposition’s instruments? Has this been used as a story premise?
That’s probably my work, from many years ago, but it’s held up pretty well. Ken Burnside also gets partial credit, and I think our bean is in the mix as well from his pre-battleship days.
Suborning the enemy’s instruments might be possible under extraordinary circumstances and/or with an extraordinarily lax enemy, but there’s no way to do so reliably or with confidence. The relevant sensors are passive, and the distances are too great for side-channel information leakage to be practical, so there will be no feedback. You’ll be sending an exploit in the blind, with no way to know up front what software rev your enemy is running and no way to confirm that your hack worked.
And, you will of necessity be sending something, which if it isn’t a successful hack will just make it easier for the enemy’s passive sensors to detect you. And quite possibly let him know you’re not one of the good guys or even a neutral.
Ken Burnside (The Hot Equations) definitely gets credit for my thinking about this.
What about, instead of hacking, you shoot a laser or a big flash-bang at them to blind their sensors?
I also like AlexOfUrals false targets idea. Insofar as the problem is the emissions you give off, perhaps it is possible to have lots of little emissions-generators that you fling off in all directions… no?
What about if, instead of letting themselves be blinded, they put smart nonlinear filters on their sensors to exclude photons beyond the level necessary to clearly indicate “hey, someone right exactly over there is shining a big laser at us”?
Little emission-generators are unlikely to emit the megawatts to terawatts of waste heat of a spaceship engine. And if they do, it probably won’t be doppler-shifted the way it should be if it were coming from an exhaust jet moving at astronomical speeds. And if it were, it would be a spaceship-engine-sized exhaust jet, which means it will exhibit anomalously high acceleration if it isn’t coupled to a spaceship’s worth of mass.
By the time you’ve circumvented the obvious filters, your little emission-generators are going to be basically full-scale target drones.
To be clear, that is what I meant, material false targets. Throw a bunch of small asteroids and debris at the enemy and let him figure out which of these are your projectiles or drones, completely powered off for a moment, and which are just rocks. Or build 10 interstellar invasion armadas – 1 made of actual ships, and 9 more are just hulls or even pieces of rock size of a ship, with ship engine attached, send them.in from 10 different direction and let your enemy take 1 in 10 chances in where to send their forces to intercept you (you can also have your actual ships running at the minimal energy profile practicable so that your false ships’ engines and power sources don’t need to be quite as big). That kind of thing, not actual ECMs. It doesn’t have to be a practical approach, but it can be, depending on the technologies, resources, etc.
All of these approaches require that your “false targets” have engines roughly equivalent to real targets. And guidance. navigation, control systems, etc. At that point, they pretty much are real targets. You’ve built ten interplanetary warships and only put guns on one of them just so you can say “Haha! the enemy is 90% certain to guess wrong as to where my warship-with-actual-guns is!”
You go do that; I’ll just build five “decoys” instead of ten and use the money I save to put guns on all five. Now I have zero decoys and am not at all stealthy, but why do I need to be when my fleet outnumbers yours six to one?
Depends on the relative costs of engines vs everything else.
And a space-warship will need a lot of ‘everything else’ to be of any use.
Life support, point defense, fire control, sensors, redundancy, comms.
I can’t imagine guidance, navigation and controlls to be too hard, given what we’re capable of already. (sidling up to an asteroid, shooting it with a HEAT round, then hoovering up the debris etc.)
Look. I’m going to short-circuit this and just point at the relevant Atomic Rockets page.
TL;DR:
Yes, we’ve thought of all the clever variants you just brought up. None of them work. No, not even that other one you’re so excited about.
@Lambert
Rockets will of necessity be high-performance, expensive pieces of machinery. On the whole, improved technology is likely to go into making the rocket better than to making it cheaper. A $1 billion laser with a $1 billion drive that can reach anywhere in the asteroid belt in a few weeks is a lot more useful than one with a $100 million drive that takes 5 times as long. And if somebody does decide to go with the $100 million drives to make decoys feasible, then they get defeated in detail by the people who now have the ability to go out and check each incoming ship/decoy before it shows up.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that sensor developers are fiendishly clever, and will take great delight in coming up with ways to tell decoys apart from the real ships. Make sure that you have a radiator for the “hab”, as well as the engines, and that it varies in a way that is indistinguishable from that for one with people actually in it. Make sure that the albedo and color are close enough to the real one that they can’t just point an optical telescope at it and notice that it looks like a rock. Do you have a set of whatever sensors are usually used during cruise to watch out for space debris? Is the decoy transmitting data back like the real ship, just in case they have someone with a radio antenna around your planet?
And then watch it all come undone as they use disposable drones to get a close-range inspection of each one of these decoys.
Technically possible, but a spaceship’s computers are basically the ultimate air-gapped system. I suppose in theory you could install malware on the enemy ship in advance, and then program it to discard thermal signatures that fit a certain pattern so that your ships stay hidden, but that’s going to be a big job. Hope your enemy doesn’t regularly test their equipment.
Asking @bean how hard it would be to hack the sensors of a Navy ship at sea would probably be a good baseline for how tricky this is to pull off.
Also, you’ll probably have to hack a number of targets, not just one ship. In space, there’s nothing to hide behind, so every infrared telescope in the solar system is potentially able to spot you.
Assuming that you don’t have insider access and you’re not just talking about electronic warfare, I’m going to go with it being essentially impossible. Going in through the sensor doesn’t work because you can’t predict how any signals you send are going to be picked up at the sensor precisely enough to do something like code injection, and because the code for that stuff is not easy to get your hands on. Going in through something else, like the radio gear, is probably a bit easier, but you still are dealing with a bunch of special-purpose software and hardware, some of which only communicates over interfaces that are designed for the data it needs, and don’t leave a lot of room for compromised code.
If you can put malware on the enemy warships’ computers, it seems like you don’t need the stealth so much–there’s probably a lot you can do to them at that point. (Maybe just open all the airlocks? Sabotage the fusion drive so it won’t work without a major refit? Fire off all the missiles while far out of range so they have nothing left to shoot with when you come into range?).
Pretty much, although it’s going to take some malware to install a fusion plant on a destroyer….oh, right. You’re still talking about spaceships.
More seriously, military cybersecurity is a thing, including concerns about malware. If the compromise is deep enough, you can’t do much about it, but it wouldn’t be too hard to do things like interlock the airlocks at a level that’s really hard to hack.
Not exactly the same, but one thing that I think can plausibly work in some situations is overwhelming your enemy’s defense with false targets. I can think of a few examples of this being done in sci-fi.
“All Right! I’ll Use Decoys!”
Skimming through the Atomic Rockets page, I haven’t really seen much on this but besides the brief mention on the solar sails part –
What if your primary thrust is not local?
The main way I can see it is through some planetary beam (or really powerful railgun), but I suppose you could use a sort of project orion except rather than nuclear bombs, throw some “disposable” lasers or something that will give you thrust from a distance.
That doesn’t hide heat emissions from the ship itself so it’ll still have to be crewed by AI. Maybe you can shape it so your ship also looks like one of those disposable lasers?
You can move your energy source, but the propellant still has to be on board. You can’t move without throwing mass away, and that means an exhaust plume. Maybe you could use a laser-powered solar sail, but the energy requirements are probably obscene.
I’m not sure how you’d use a railgun to deliver thrust remotely. Unless you’re trying to literally knock the spacecraft in the direction you want it to go, which I guess is possible, but you’d need a spacecraft with a really impressive set of shock absorbers.
A bigger problem will be steering. The remote source can only push you away, so if you need to change directions suddenly you’ll need on-board power.
Sure you can, in fact, laser propulsion is one of the many systems that have been considered for orbital propulsion.
There’s probably other ways like maybe a reverse ion thruster that could also work. Or simply creating a “localized” solar winds to be used for the solar sails.
And yes, by railgun I meant using kinetic energy to force to repel the vehicle. Remember that I referenced Orion Project too.
The reason I included the “primary” part is to still allow on-board thrusters. Having some on-board power for sudden changes and other things like landing maneuvers is fine as long as it’s used only for those.
https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/
Somebody brought this to my attention, and it was an interesting read. It’s about the political and cultural background to Machiavelli. Author says s/he is a Renaissance scholar.
Awesome series.
People may know the author (Ada Palmer) as a sci-fi author–Too Like the Lightning. I’d expect this blog to also enjoy the History of Skepticism series.
Yep. Palmer is always an interesting read. Her spot the saint series is cool too, and I liked her review of “The Litany of Earth.”
This is very strange, because on the face of it Ada Palmer is everything I should and do enjoy, and I did like her “spot the saint” series.
But.
But I waded through that long not-a-review-reviews-are-icky piece wondering “Why should I read The Litany of Earth?” and came to the end of it thinking “I shouldn’t”.
Look, Lovecraft is racist and sexist and classist and misogynist and all the -ists you want to hang around his neck, there’s no arguing against that. But you can’t turn his Mythos into some kind of “X-Men mutants are an allegory for racism” flipped ‘let’s make the dispossessed the heroes’ story, because no matter how devout or faithful the cultists are, the Great Old Ones do not care. They are so alien that the gap between them and humans is even more than the gap between humans and amoebae. There is no possible sympathy of minds between us and them, and at best we’re fodder to fuel their eventual return.
I wonder would she be so rhapsodic about a novella rehabilitating for us the much-Othered society that is where young Adolf, a dreamy Austrian adolescent whose one ambition is to be a great artist, finds brotherhood and his destiny? Or the loving descriptions of the tender, intimate, blood and flesh rituals they carry out once in power? “After reading it, whenever we reread original Hitler, or anything set in his world, the memory of Heinrich Himmler and his tender prayer will forever change the meaning of “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer…” That’s the level of standing things on their heads that you need to make the cultism of the Old Ones into “they’re the real good guys”; that you could construct various individual cultists as sympathethic characters with understandable motivations for wanting to serve the old gods against modern society, it still does not change that if their gods return, it would be very, very, very bad for all humanity including themselves.
So, weirdly not my cup of tea though it should be catnip to me!
Deiseach, there are Old Ones and there are Old Ones. Worshiping the crinoids introduced in At the Mountains of Madness would be a harmful error, but not much more so than believing one’s king to be divine, because “whatever they were, they were men!” 😛
Yes, when talking about the Cthulhu cult, we’re talking about human extinction and anyone who helps those “Great Old Ones” is as bad as Hitler and a French collaborator with the Nazis fused in a transporter accident.
The issue is that it doesn’t seem like the woman who wrote “Litany of Earth” is capable of intellectual discrimination. Discrimination is bad, and all minority religions are equally superior to Christianity, whether we’re talking about Judaism or praying for Cthulhu to convert us all into food or paperclips.
As to your other point, yep, Lovecraft was very racist, had few female characters, and all the rest. To which we say “Yeah, so?” I’m not going to take that as an order that he’s Badwrongfun unless we subvert the work in the standard cliched way.
That is part of what is so good about “At The Mountains Of Madness”; we start off with the crinoids very definitely as the bad, strange, aliens but as the narrator moves through the levels of their cities, and finds out a bit about their history, we learn more about them as well and at the end, when faced with true ultimate cosmic horror, then they are more like us than not, they are understandable in a way that the outer beings will and can never be. They are life as we are life, and as things like the shoggoths and the Old Ones are not.
My bit about Lovecraft was that yes, he is as bad as he’s painted, but even given all that, (a) ‘do not read these works of badthink!’ is the wrong attitude and (b) simply flipping the baddies on their heads so that “are we the real evil ones, persecuting these poor harmless nature worshippers, huh huh?” gets the whole thing backwards. I’ve read a modern Mythos story where the well-meaning anti-cultist forces are blundering into a situation they don’t understand, and it’s explained without having to hit us over the head with a shovel why Congolese enslaved under Leopold’s administration might think invoking the Old Gods to burn it all down is a better fate than the one they currently suffer, but it still acknowledged that the anti-cultists are right in principle and have suffered with direct experience of the malign effects of such cult activities elsewhere, and that the best result the cultists are hoping for is simply quick destruction and ‘we don’t mind going if we can take you with us’, not some kind of beneficient answer to prayer.
A Litany of Earth does not sound like that kind of story.
I didn’t make it to the end–she really likes the sound of her own voice. But I did get as far as:
Sitting on my bookshelf is the five volume collection of sagas published in Iceland. They are not fragmentary. And they are not about the Norse mythic cosmos. There are a few witches and a little magic in them, but mostly they are highly realistic stories. The mythic stuff is in the Elder Edda, not the sagas.
It’s barely possible that her reference is not to the sagas in general but to some small and fragmentary subset that deal with mythology, but since lots of the sagas are in fact in print from Penguin Classics, I don’t think that is a likely reading. A more plausible interpretation of the passage is that she is trying to sound knowledgeable about things she knows little about.
One of my tactics for judging things people write is to look at where they overlap something I already happen to know about. By that measure, Palmer is not a reliable source of information.
Sitting on my bookshelf is the five volume collection of sagas published in Iceland. They are not fragmentary. And they are not about the Norse mythic cosmos.
*shrugs* Well, she’s one of the Renaissance
fanboys and girlsscholarly lot, what can you expect when they move out of their little patch? 😀Actually, I think I figured out why I don’t get on with her blog the way I should do; her tastes are probably too modern for me, I tend to stop at about the 12th century/start of the 13th where she starts by stretching on her tippy-toes to go as far back as she dares outside her period of study.
I think it’s quite obvious that she is referring to the fragmentary legendary sagas (hence the reference to “fragmentary” and preserving the Norse mythic cosmos). Wikipedia informs me that there is a Penguin Classics edition of the Völsunga saga. She’s adapted some of the Eddas into a song cycle so I’m pretty sure she knows what she’s talking about.
In any case, you should read her Terra Ignota series for its ancap relevance.
The part of the review I like is emphatically not the treatment of the cultists as a poor, oppressed people, it’s… all the other stuff, pretty much. Arthuriana and Petrarch and Diderot. And especially the acknowledgement that the Cthulhu Mythos has ample potential for the horror of seeing all mankind’s knowledge and history and achievement turn to dust. This is virtually unexplored territory, so in that respect I thank “The Litany of Earth” too—but I really was recommending the review, not the story.
Arthuriana and Petrarch and Diderot.
Arthuriana I will happily compromise on, Diderot I will give his meed of respect as a scholar though as 18th century French intellectual I don’t much care one way or the other, and Petrarch I have Opinions about (mainly that IT’S HIS FAULT EVERYONE DUMPS ON THE MIDDLE AGES CLASSICS FANBOY OH YEAH AND WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT AVIGNON AND THE SCHISM HUH?) 😀
I have no personal love for Diderot, unlike Palmer, who practically fawns over him. But I certainly respect the goal very much (what amateur Wiki editor doesn’t?), and the Petrarch library bit is a real punch to the gut.
(…With some chance reserved that a correction like David’s will come in that no, Petrarch’s books actually weren’t lost at all, or weren’t in a fetid warehouse, or weren’t as valuable as Palmer makes them out to be.)
And I just realized where Voldemotr/Quirrell and pretty much every smart bad guy come from. Thank you.
Very interesting but I don’t think I buy her “Machiavelli was an athiest” argument for a few reasons:
One of her points is that since Machiavelli made some modern arguments, it’s not hard to see how he could be modern in his idea of religion. But people don’t really work that way. When someone proposes a novel idea, they rarely see the logical consequences of where this idea leads. It’s already enough of a challenge to come up with a genuinely new thought, there’s only so far we can go. The roots of natural selection can be found in the works of Malthus but he never got there. It took a generation later for Darwin to work out what followed.
Another reason she gives is that Machiavelli seems so concerned with Earthly concerns to the detriment of his soul:
But people generally treat religion differently than an outside observer would reasonably suspect. If you were a rational religious person, then you would never sin and if for some reason you did, you would be extremely anxious about that and you would do everything you can do to make up for that action. Why would anyone risk eternal damnation for momentary pleasure? It’s like the Marshmallow test where you delay eating one marshmallow now and get two later, except instead of two marshmallows, it’s a billion dollars. Martin Luther’s life before the Reformation is a great example of this kind of anxiety. But many people seem unconcerned about that. They may think of themselves as Christian and they go to service but outside of the rituals, they seem relatively unconcerned about the sins they are committing. They must be compartmentalizing their beliefs to some extent. This doesn’t mean their religiosity isn’t sincere, but it does mean you can’t really infer their beliefs from their actions.
More speculatively, we know that Machiavelli loved Florence and he probably saw Christianity as inherently tied to that devotion. It would be like trying to separate the American flag from American patriotism. It just doesn’t work.
The author says that Christianity was tied up with all these other beliefs and I think that’s right. Even if Machiavelli found a political philosophy that didn’t depend on God, that still leaves everything else. I think it takes a lot of intermediate steps for a person from that time to get a point where they can even understand why someone would be an atheist.
Question: For probably at least 20 years, I’ve heard the claim that men get their hair-loss pattern from their maternal line. I’ve kind of always thought that this seemed suspicious, but when I thought about it today, I was like, “Hey, that sounds suspiciously like a claim that you get a meaningful phenotypical trait from a single gene, and basically the only things that you get from one gene are Huntington’s Disease and your blood type, right?”
Am I right? Is this like that depression gene, just nonsense that was accepted when we didn’t understand genomes? Or is it an exception to the rule that everything is massively polygenetic?
Signed,
A man whose paternal grandfather had much more hair than his maternal grandfather
I’ve never heard of that, but one way to get a pattern like that could be to have most of the genes involved on the X chromosome. The phenotype would be massively polygenic, but your father’s genes would contribute little.
Of course, your maternal grandmother’s genes would matter too. But women’s hair lasts longer, so you wouldn’t be able to tell what genes she had.
Your maternal grandfather is immaterial for this hypothesized line of inheritance.
You want to be looking at your mother’s (or maternal grandmother’s) brothers.
My mom has three brothers, all now in their late 60s/early 70s. One of them has a head of hair like Joseph Stalin. One is mostly bald on top. The other has all his hair but it’s thinned just a bit. What do I make of that?
Perhaps that only one of her X chromosomes carried the gene for male pattern baldness? That this isn’t male pattern baldness (remember this is posited to only to apply to a specific kind of baldness, not all baldness)? That one of your brothers uses Rogaine?
Huh? The postulated mechanism is that it’s a trait on the X chromosome. You’re 50% likely to have your maternal grandfather’s X chromosome, if you’re XY.
You are correct, I shouldn’t have said immaterial. I was in error. The maternal grandfather can provide the gene.
However looking at the maternal grandfather is not sufficient. The gene can come from the maternal grandmother as well.
Yeah, both of my mother’s brothers are bald. My brother went bald in his 20s. I held out until about 35 or so and am steadily losing the fight. Thankfully my wife’s brother has a great head of hair, so perhaps my son will do all right.
There is no such rule, especially about physical traits. There are traits that are massively polygenic, like height, and other traits where a few genes have large impact, like eye or skin color. About male pattern baldness:
source: https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/the-role-of-genetics-in-male-pattern-baldness/
Nice, that’s what I was looking for.
No such rule exists, else Gregor Mendel never would have figured out peas.
Traits that offer a massive fitness advantage are going to be massively polygenic, at least in terms of observed variation. If any single gene resulted in most of the variation, natural selection would rapidly hammer that gene into a narrow region around the fitness optimum and lose interest about the time its influence dropped below the noise floor. And usually it’s the traits with massive fitness advantages that we care about, and so we bemoan the difficulty of making genetic predictions (or modifications) of e.g. IQ.
But for something of little relevance to reproductive fitness, like eye color or male-pattern baldness, it is quite possible for the biochemistry to be that one gene coding for one protein drives most of the variation, and yet evolution leaves the gene pool cluttered with diverse versions of that gene.
The Steam Summer Sale has begun.
What are you guys going to buy?
Edit: I’m buying Stellaris’ Synthetic Dawn DLC which lets you play as a machine empire, currently the most powerful with the latest patch…I swear I was going to buy it before it became OP!
Oooh, good question. I need to get a computer that can run steam up and running and then figure out how to recover my account given that I’ve lost access to my .edu email (that I was told I would have access to in perpetuity forever) which is required for 2FA. I’m interested in seeing the suggestions listed here.
Perhaps it makes me a bad libertarian, but I’m a little bummed that Steam seems to have lost its monopoly on digital PC games. Particularly as someone who mainly likes AAA titles and isn’t really that into indie games…
I haven’t actually used it, but I think I like the GOG platform more.
I used GOG to get Alpha Centauri but haven’t gone back since
I’m thinking less GOG and more Origin/UPlay/Epic/Battle.net.
It seems we’re quickly moving towards a world where every developer of any reasonable size is only going to offer their games through their own platform.
“Reasonable size” there has to mean “big enough to forgo the 95+% of gamers on Steam, or to convince them to install another app”. Which is a very small subset of companies.
[I don’t buy software, games or other.] AFAIK most software companies have always sold their software to customers directly, without a middleman. Why is a middleman needed in the case of games (sometimes two middlemen, a publisher and a platform)? Why is it bad to buy directly from the developer (which is basically equivalent to buying through the developer’s own platform)?
@10240
For the same reason it’s impossible to buy .MP3 files of songs directly from record labels, more or less.
@Hoopyfreud I don’t know what the reason for that is either. And in particular I don’t know why it would be a bad thing.
Because the rights-owner, for better or worse, decided that going through a middle-man would lead to more profit.
In the case of games, they’re right, at least as far as this consumer is concerned. I’ve bought games on steam that I probably wouldn’t have bought from some-indie-game-company.com. And part of the reason I avoid AAA titles is that I don’t want to sign up for yet another stupid downloader/launcher/advertisement-portal/social-media-thing/platform.
@10240
Because between distribution, IP protection, (effective) kickbacks, and payment processing, there’s a lot of reasons to not. The only people on Bandcamp are the people whose music isn’t popular enough to need those systems.
Almost all my current games come from GOG – they don’t force updates on me at whim, sometimes breaking the games I “own” badly enough that the only way to ever play them again is to get a new computer.
Steam insists I be online and logged into them to play “my” games (extra load on computer and network) and use the opportunity to advertise to me. They also don’t correctly document the way in which their malware interacts with firewalls; I couldn’t get them to work at all for a year or so, after they made some changes they didn’t document. (Admittedly, I didn’t try very hard; if I’d bothered to packet sniff my own network at the far side of my firewall, I could have determined what additional ports they were using.)
About the only good thing about Steam is that, as with GOG, if you buy a game for your PC and a Mac version also exists, or vice versa, you find you also own the other version. So several years after Steam enabled the producers of Civ V to make their game unplayable on my PC, I found I could play a somewhat different version of the game on the Mac I eventually purchased to replace the PC.
Yes i have hated the Steam client for every reason you list, and i’ve so hated it since it was new. In fact i hate it so much i make a habit of pirating games i own on Steam simply so that i can run them without their atrocious goddamned client. As i’ve said before, the boys at Skidrow and Codex are doing the Lord’s work.
The fact that GOG lets me download an installer and install the game without any extraneous features i don’t want is basically my ideal for online distribution, which is why i will preferentially buy games there.
Though of course Steam still fucks me over because i love game mods and Steam Worshop doesn’t let me download mods for games i don’t own on Steam, so if the modding community is primarily on Workshop then i’m SOL mod wise. Seriously, fuck Steam.
I think this has more to do with you guys having eclectic tastes than Steam being evil. Most people like automatic updates and not having to deal with installers. Those aren’t ancillary things they foisted on you, those are core features of the app.
Also, IME the option to play offline works just fine, it’s like two extra mouse clicks. Perhaps it used to not work as well?
@Dick
It still doesn’t work great (but I like Steam anyway). And to be fair, it’s possible to launch like half of steam games with their executables without opening the client.
GOG also has automatic updates and a client by default, however unlike Steam you get the option to download an installer, an option that i take every single time. If Steam also gave me that option, then i wouldn’t hate it so much.
You still have to run the client and i resent having to run third party software to play my own damn game.
Which games have you liked playing over the years?
Looks like Starbound for coop play. Otherwise, maybe Hollow Knight. Apart from that, I just started emulating Fire Emblem Awakening and still have to get through Prey, so probably nothing.
Hollow Knight is definitely a fun game if you like moderately hard castlevania type games.
After an afternoon of contemplation and review, I have done exactly this.
Hollow Knight is great. You’re gonna love it. And the sequel in the works, Silksong, looks sweet.
Best metroidvania about bugs that I’ve ever played.
Got Below, Feist, Patchwork, Sonic Mania and uFactory.
Nothing, because CoH is back and that is the best thing ever.
City of Heroes?
Yes.
Seriously? I loved that game way back when…I think I even have the original disc for it somewhere. I might have to give that a look.
Seriously.
https://massivelyop.com/2019/05/21/city-of-heroes-reddit-shards-homecoming-multibox/
I wouldn’t count on the Homecoming servers staying up.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable about intellectual property law but I’m pretty sure that NCSoft will be able to win if the case ever goes to court. At that point it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole, targeting one server after another.
Oh, NCSoft would be able to win. They haven’t so far pursued legal action. So, I mean, I don’t know, maybe they’ll send a C&D tomorrow, maybe they won’t. In the meantime, I get to play CoH again.
Nothing because my gaming PC is broke and I’m not going to be building a new one until after our new house is finished in ~2 months.
What I am going to do is continue stewing about how awful the Switch port of Bloodstained is, return my unopened pre-order to Amazon and pick up an Xbox One copy at Best Buy on my way home.
ETA: And before anybody jumps on me about getting what I deserve for preordering, I almost never preorder, and I didn’t place the order until last week after reviews/forum posts from people gushing over the game on PC/PS4/XB1. It just never occurred to me that the game would be great while the port was garbage.
I’m considering buying a current-gen console in the next several months. If you had to choose one, would you go Switch of Xbox One (I’m assuming you don’t also have a PS4, but if you do include that in the mix)? I love the idea of the switch, but I feel like the other systems have more/better games to choose from. I don’t care so much about graphics so much as I want to play the games I want to play (and also I’m not a huge fan of motion control which it seems like a lot of Switch games rely on).
I feel like the PS4 library probably suits me best, but even though this might not be the best reason to choose a system I vastly prefer the Xbox style controllers over Playstation (this has held true across all generations).
I don’t think a lot of Switch games do rely on motion control. Pops up now and then in Mario Odyssey, not never required.
It’s seems like a choice between more games & better graphics vs handhold & Nintendo exclusives.
To be honest, unless you want a Switch I would hold out. The next gen systems are going to be out holiday 2020. You’d be spending $400 at the tail end of the console life cycle.
I do not have a PS4, but I’m planning to buy whatever they call the PS5 to get access to the PS4 library for stuff like Spider-Man, Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, etc, as the report about the next PS system I saw said backwards compatibility, but who knows at this point. I do think the PS4 has the stronger library, unless you really really like Halo and Gears of War. I do love Halo and Gears, but the recent games in both series have been meh compared to their 360 glory days. The big thing the Xbox has going for it is backwards compatibility. I have my own library of 360 games and sometimes when I want to mine the back catalog, it’s incredibly cheap to get 360 games off eBay, or the Microsoft e-shop. Like I had missed the Deus Ex game on 360 (was that human revolution or mankind divided? I can’t remember which), and I got it off the e-shop for two measly dollars. That is not a bad deal. I think Sony shot themselves in the foot by not making the PS4 compatible with the PS1-3.
As for the Switch, very few things have motion controls, and most of the time I like them. In Breath of the Wild you can use the motion controls for pinpoint aiming with your bow. It’s awesome. You make the big aiming motion with the sticks, and then just tilt the controller a tiny bit for the headshot and there you go. It’s great. But then they ruin it all by having a couple of shines with these god-awful motion control puzzles. Pro-tip: if you’re doing the one where you have to tilt the maze to move the giant ball through it, just flip the entire maze upside down and bat the ball into the hole with the bottom of the maze.
If you don’t care that much about graphics, get a Switch, especially if you like the indie games that don’t rely on photorealistic visuals. The portability is great, it’s cheaper than the other systems, the first party games are 10/10 (Mario Odyssey, BoTW, Smash Ultimate), watch the eShop for sales on great indie games you can get for $10-$15, and it won’t be obsolete next year (unless they do a hardware revision, which is possible). I have 50 games on my Switch right now (well, 49 because f**k Bloodstained), and it’s great being able to take that anywhere or play during lunch at work.
So, yeah, my advice is get a Switch now, and look at the next Xbox and/or PS next year to see what you like.
ETA: Oh, one other point of differentiation between the systems is online multiplayer. The Nintendo online multiplayer service is hot garbage but I don’t have any real complaints about Xbox Live.
The big downer for the Switch is what appears to be a total lack of the more old-school jrpg type games, but maybe I’m missing some key titles. That is good advice though…I do find the portability of the Switch highly appealing.
I suppose I could get a Switch and then just get an old 360/PS3 to scratch my RPG itch.
I also want to get back into FIFA and I’ve heard that the Switch version leaves a little to be desired but I don’t know how much the complains people have about it would be problematic for me.
What do you mean by “old-school jrpg type games?” I’m playing Final Fantasy X and X-2 right now (I imported the cart from Hong Kong because the Asian version has both games on one cart), and they’ve got VII-X and XII remastered on the eShop. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was excellent, and the Torna expansion pack was in many ways even better. If you mean like 16-bit era, stuff, Octopath Traveller was also really, really great. 9/10.
FFX definitely qualifies, although I would be hoping for new titles in that vein rather than replaying the older titles (granted I haven’t played X2 or XII yet). I actually didn’t know they had released FFX for the Switch, I don’t think it had been released when I was looking into what games were available which would have been early this year.
I don’t know if I have a good definition, not so much 16-bit so much as the kind of titles that were ubiquitous on the PS1/PS2/Dreamcast etc.
Some combination of:
Rich story
Interesting system for leveling/classes/abilities/gear (not required, but always a plus)
Ideally not real time combat
Graphically interesting (this doesn’t necessarily mean extremely high quality graphics, just compelling graphics for abilities during combat and such…like FFX summons and the like)
I have really weird preferences about real time combat that I’m not sure I can properly explain. I definitely play and love games that are in real time (Elder Scrolls, Kingdom Hearts, any Zelda game, obviously FPS type games among others). If it isn’t totally open sandbox for exploring/combat (FPS types, Zelda, Elder Scrolls) and relies on a combat/encounter system but the encounters are in real time it can be hit or miss for me. I’ve seen Xenoblade Chronicles 2 mentioned a lot, I would want to try it before I bought it.
Do the Xenoblade games carry on the tradition from Xenosaga of brutally long cut scenes?
Also Dragon Quest XI’s about to drop. Ys VIII I hear good things about. You could always go to /r/NintendoSwitch and ask for recommendations and they might know more than I. I like JRPGs but I have very broad tastes. I like basically anything that’s good.
Run 50ft. 30 minute cut scene. Take two steps. 30 minute cut scene. They’re good but…but man. XBC2 was a lot of cut scenes.
If they ever port XBC X, you need to give that a whirl. It’s better than XBC 2, imo. More interesting combat and environment.
High pitched Chibbi aliens still unfortunately present.
I have XBCX on my Wii U, I’ve just never gotten around to playing it. Backlogs are a bitch.
ETA: Oh, and I picked up XBC1 on 3Ds off eBay and haven’t gotten to that either.
If this matters, older Switches (there’s an online list which you can use to check the serial number) are fully hackable. The hack takes place so early in the process that it can never be patched.
Just got back from Best Buy with my XB1 copy of Ritual of the Night, so I sure showed them! Take that, Koji Igarashi, you try to sell me a crappy…version of a game and I’ll go buy it on another…platform…
RPG thread: battlefield edition
When running outdoor combat in an RPG, there are two main options: “tactical”, where you use miniature figures in conjunction with a chess-like grid or measuring tape, and “theatre of the mind”, where you abstractly picture the enemies and they and party members take turns targeting each other. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
Early C(omputer)RPGs like Wizardry implemented something like TotM. The first one to put characters on a grid may have been Ultima III. The C(onsole)RPGs adopted the former, with Dragon Quest directly copying Wizardry’s first=person perspective, then Final Fantasy introducing a third-person side view of a party facing off against random enemies or a boss. The advantage of this is that it’s quick: fantasy games with grid combat became a different genre in Japan, where a couple dozen hand-crafted battles become a game unto themself, apparently too slow to incorporate into wilderness and dungeon exploration. The disadvantage is that there’s no difference between ranged attacks and melee: you always stumble into punching range of enemies.
After awhile, the extra time tactical grid combat takes wasn’t such a big deal in Western computer RPGs: Pool of Radiance, the beginning of the D&D Gold Box series, presented random encounters straight from the Monster Manual this way. However, a disadvantage is that ranged weapons still weren’t depicted realistically: the minimum estimated combat range of longbows is 200 paces (150 yards), which at D&D’s 1″=5′ would be 90 inches on a physical tabletop… and you can estimate the computer equivalent in terms of how small creature sprites would have to be on, eg, a modern 1920-pixel-wide screen.
I prefer Theater of the Mind. If precise positioning is important, I would still rather draw on a whiteboard at 1″ = 5′ or 10′ and keep a ruler handy rather than use a grid. My players, on the other hand, are the opposite and prefer a battlemat with a grid.
The grid has a lot of advantages for nitty-gritty tactical combat. Movement and attacks of opportunity are easily handled, as are the relative positions of individual enemies in groups. It’s really easy to figure out precisely where to place an area spell so that it only hits enemies or find a path in between a bunch of enemies and an objective. If you take a lot of enjoyment from D&D combat then it makes sense to use it.
Personally, though, I feel like the combat minigame sucks up way too much thought as is. It’s enough hard to train players not to react to every situation as a fight to the death and remind them that avoiding fights is smarter and more profitable. Setting up the battlemap gladiatorial arena undoes all of that, implicitly removing nonviolent resolution from the table. Why else would Nabil have set up the map if it wasn’t a fight, right?
I find it works well to not set up the map until Initiative is rolled. You get a little fussing now and then about exact positioning but nothing too serious IME (and certainly no worse than in mapless)
As for once combat’s started, map >> mental. With “theater of the mind” (which, imho, is a super pretentious term) I have to start every action with a boatload of questions to make sure I’m on the same page as the GM. Even when I’m following along religiously, it’s not worth getting zapped by some detail that didn’t replicate properly.
Yeah, I think this would help with Nabil’s problem, and I recall this is how the Gold Box official D&D CRPGs handled it.
“You see some seedy-looking orcs. Do you parley, flee or fight?” accompanied by an image out of the Monster Manual, with a grid only appearing if someone chose fight.
Strong preference for Theater of the Mind. Complex, highly-tactical combat puzzles are fun when they don’t waste everyone’s time. If you like heavy simulationist combat it’s a good system for it, but dear god why would you?
The English longbow was a warfare weapon, it was intended to be used by large group of archers to shot volleys at enemy aimed at the general area where enemy soldiers were. At a distance of 140-150 meters you couldn’t aim at individual targets.
Battles in an RPG are often close-range few-on-few engagements. As a point of reference the statistics on police shootouts indicate that they usually occur at a range of 1 – 5 meters (3 – 15 feet).
That doesn’t solve the issue, though, unless your position is that it’s sufficiently realistic to rule that arrows fired at an individual from more than 5 meters auto-miss. What about a fight with 50 sea raiders who bunch up into a shield wall? Or when PCs are doing overland travel and an armed man out standing in his field says “You have six seconds to get off my land or pay a piece of gold for the privilege of crossing it”?
For long range combat you can just use a different grid scale. In games i’ve played we’ve depicted gun battles at hundreds of metres by using a scale of 1 hex = 10 metres. Very little is lost since the finer details of tactical movement matter less at those ranges. As the combatants close in range, you switch to more zoomed in grids since finer tactical movement matters more. Like, at 100 metres someone moving 2 metres to the side has changed your bearing to them by only one degree, so such a small movement just isn’t significant. What matters is whether they are moving or standing still, and whether they are in cover or not. Whereas at 5 metres someone moving 2 metres to the side has changed your bearing to them by 23 degrees, which is much more significant, so you want a zoomed in grid to depict it.
Huh, I never thought of that.
Similarly, in a gun battle at hundreds of meters it is reasonable to assume that anyone in a forest who isn’t moving has found a tree to hide behind, and anyone who is trying to move 10+ meters at a go is going to be somewhat handicapped by the zig-zagging around trees, but flat modifiers for cover and movement for a “forest square” will suffice. For a sword duel in a forest, it starts to matter where the individual trees are and you go to the finer-grained map for that.
Yeah, I want to emphasize this point. Essentially nobody ever had a single yeoman shoot a single, real, mobile target at 150 yards.
RPGs have traditionally taken a weirdly expansive view of weapon ranges. It’s not uncommon to see pistols in modern games listed as having ranges of like 100′ if not more. That’s not how pistol fights work.
Especially with firearms, there’s range and there’s range. I can reliably hit steel plates the size of a dude’s head with a service pistol at 25 meters, which isn’t too far off from a hundred feet, and I’m only a moderately good pistolero if that. But put me in a situation where I have to move around and acquire targets and suddenly I’d be lucky to hit torso-sized stuff at a third that distance in the same amount of time.
Good point. Triple range on a stationary target half the size sounds like a good rule, at least for pistols.
Not sure how that translates to bows: Henry VIII made a rule that Sunday archery practice with flight arrows had to use a minimum range of 220 yards. If those targets were, say, as to a human torso as a torso is to a head, that gets you 67 meters for a yeoman shooting a man or deer etc. out in the open. This is apparently the farthest really good hunters can hit a deer with modern sights on their bows. There’s a lot of debate about the ethics of shots beyond X meters because of the suffering if you can’t get a kill shot, which complicates things.
With tabletop gaming, you need to be able to do both and you need to be able to shift at need. For any remotely complex bit of combat, a battlemap is worth a thousand words of descriptive text in providing the players the situational awareness they need, but there are some encounters where you don’t need a thousand words of tactical information and setting up the map would be an immersion-breaking distraction. But when in doubt, err on the side of formalism, because a player who thought his character’s flank was covered by terrain being sneak-attacked because the GM thought differently is even more immersion-breaking.
One advantage of miniatures, and in particular of miniatures but not an explicit battlemap, is that you can get in the habit of having the miniatures on the table at all times and plopping down the NPC minis even for what are expected to be non-combat encounters. That way, if things do escalate to the sort of fight that needs tactical formalism, you’re already halfway there and the potential for really serious misunderstandings is greatly reduced.
This is what I was doing last time I ran a game in-person rather than Discord.
Playing on roll20 we always had our character sprites on the map regardless of whether or not we were in a fight or not. It was convenient for knowing where everyone was, like if someone was close enough to overhear a conversation, or whether you could sneak up on someone, and that sort of thing. It was also possible to just draw a quick map by just tracing some lines and squares on the grid, which was convenient if we went somewhere the GM wasn’t expecting.
For any combat where movement and terrain is likely to be an issue, and where combat is going to last more than a turn or two, mat or miniatures is the way to go. TotM combat more often than not ends up in a weird territory where everyone is within range of each other and one turn’s move away from each other, in my experience.
It means a faster, looser, experience. Sometimes this is good, to keep things moving, but it makes everything really inconsistent and potentially arbitrary, especially in more complicated situations. And too often it plays into a style where reality morphs to fit what the GM wants/needs to happen.
How has the US not passed a carbon tax yet?
Has any Democrat tried something like telling the Republicans “Support this carbon tax, and we’ll give all the money to whatever cause you want, maybe tax cuts for the rich and new border guards”? How is that not a winning bet?
What about “Support this carbon tax, and we’ll cut an equal number of other taxes elsewhere, maybe more taxes elsewhere, including on big business, so everyone wins”?
What about “Looks like we need two Republican Senators to defect in order to pass this carbon tax, if two Republicans should happen to support it, we’d spend the whole $150 billion raised in their districts”?
How is a policy that makes hundreds of billions of dollars this hard to get through?
I believe the closest they came was Washington State initiative 732, to pass a carbon tax and reduce the sales tax to pay for it. On the national level, nothing. There isn’t enough trust available to do any such thing even if a Democrat would propose it. The Republicans would figure that the Democrats would immediately work on chipping away at anything they got out of the deal.
My understanding is that the one in Washington failed mainly because the left turned on it, because they were mad about the “compromise” being offered that the tax would be fully offset and revenue neutral.
They wanted a revenue generating tax and all of the revenue being applied towards “green” pet projects.
“There isn’t enough trust available to do any such thing even if a Democrat would propose it.”
How is trust relevant?
If there was a bill that said “Carbon shall be taxed at X%, and all the money shall go to the Department Of Homeland Security to hire new border guards”, why do Republicans need to trust Democrats in order to believe the bill will do what it says? Or am I not understanding how bills work?
And the instant those new border guards actually did something involving guarding the border the Dems and the media would be screaming about concentration camps and kids in cages and “no person is illegal” and all the rest. You have to have trust that after the compromise is agreed to, the other side will abide by the compromise and not immediately start trying to undermine it.
Which brings up another point–when the Democratic leadership starts offering concessions to get Republicans on board, they’ll lose Democrats.
You don’t spend time shouting about defunding ICE to turn around and offer to give it more money.
I know Scott likes to take his beliefs seriously, but not everyone who claims an impending end of the world can be expected to act like it.
In the near-to-medium term, money is fungible and the next DHS budget can be adjusted so that it gets about as much less non-carbon tax money as it gets from the carbon tax. (See the way state lottery money tends to be “reserved” for education.)
In the longer term, I would tend to expect the earmark to go away at the next Democratic administration, while the carbon tax remained as a permanent fixture (since types of taxation seem to be relatively sticky once put in place). If Republicans thought likewise, then they’d be looking at a temporary and possibly illusory gain in exchange for a permanent loss.
I’d be slightly more tempted if the offer were a border wall rather than border guards. It’s a lot harder to tear down a wall than to lay off guards.
ETA: And like Matt says below I would have little faith I’d actually get my wall. Maybe some contingent like the carbon tax scaling with the number of miles of wall built. And then I’d want some guarantees of what we mean by “wall.” None of these “vehicle barriers” a toddler can climb over.
That’s what Erich Honecker thought.
It’s also worth noting that a lot of voters don’t really trust elected officials in their own tribe/party either.
Speaking personally, if a “carbon tax for border wall” bill was up for debate, I would trust 100% that the Democrats intend to do whatever is necessary to implement and collect the carbon tax, but have little to no trust that the Republicans would actually build the wall. As such, I would oppose such a bill, even if I wanted a border wall marginally more than I don’t want a carbon tax.
When does it matter whether voters support the tax or not? At election time. Even if you would oppose the tax at first because you don’t trust the Republicans, you would presumably still support the bargain the next time you vote if they do actually build the wall by the next election.
The problem is that Congress doesn’t have a good way to make such compromises stable. Sure, we make the deal now, but what if the “Abolish ICE” crowd does well in 2020? Suddenly, they decide that they don’t really want to fund border guards, and now they have a big pool of money to spend on stuff I don’t approve of.
why do Republicans need to trust Democrats in order to believe the bill will do what it says?
Because as soon as the money starts coming in in appreciable quantities, there will be strong pressure on the Democrats to steer it towards pet policies of the Democrats which their voters/supporters like, and screw those fascists with their police-state border guards, is why.
Same applies if it was the Republicans, of course; screw those commie pinkos and their globalisation, why not put this money to (pet Republican cause)?
I’ve seen too many instances in my own country of “cross our hearts and hope to die, this money will be ringfenced for Good Cause” and then that money somehow goes elsewhere and Good Cause can go whistle.
This has been discussed here before. Conservatives see it as giving progressives something they, purportedly, desperately want, so they should get something back.
Progressives either don’t trust the conservatives, or see it as a purity issue and find compromise distasteful.
If there are two holdouts, and you offer them 12 figure bribes, suddenly you might find you have ninety other hold outs.
That’s phrased really funny. Taxes “make” money at the expense of the tax-payer. That’s like asking, “why is a massive income tax hike so hard to pass, it will raise a ton of money?” Obviously unless the voters are convinced the sacrifice is worth it, they are going to resent it–even, likely, if that money is put into their district.
In the end, though, does it matter what the US passes if our emissions are going to pale compared to an industrialized China?
“If there are two holdouts, and you offer them 12 figure bribes, suddenly you might find you have ninety other hold outs.”
I guess I was imagining the Senate is 49-51, and so the Democrats say “First two Republicans to defect get all of the money”.
“That’s phrased really funny. Taxes “make” money at the expense of the tax-payer.”
Yeah, but from the perspective of politicians it’s just giving them more money to play with/disperse to their pet causes, so I would expect it to be pretty popular.
There’s just something about human nature that, even in the face of calamity, rankles when you see someone profit so dramatically off of mutual danger. Hence I think it’s understandable, if maybe not rational, for democratic voters to dislike the idea of nigh explicit bribes to get climate change action. For an analogy, see how they view “price gouging” in the wake of a hurricane.
Oh, I’m sure it is, but we’ve got these things called elections, which leads to politicians not wanting to even hint that they want to take money from demographically large groups, which “everybody” is.
I guess you’re saying that elected Republicans should pretend to believe in climate change disaster in order to pass taxes giving them lots of money to play around with. But, well, if you want voters not to punish politicians who broadly support anti-climate change actions, that’s not a sentiment you want to express.
I guess I was imagining the Senate is 49-51, and so the Democrats say “First two Republicans to defect get all of the money”.
And you really don’t think there would be some Democrats going “Now hold on a second, you want us to spend all the money in Republican districts? What about my constituents? I’m feeling suddenly uninclined to vote with the party whip on this one…”
Grand statesmanlike gestures are lovely, but politicians know that when it comes down to it, what gets you elected (and re-elected) is not bestriding the national or global stage like a colossus, it’s “what goodies did you get for us from Congress/Dáil Éireann/the Mother of Parliaments?”
I’m not a Republican lawmaker, or even a registered Republican, so not sure what my answer is worth. But my 2¢ is that I don’t trust that there’s a sane upper-bound to any “carbon tax” short of the petroleum industry ceasing to exist.
The attitude of people pushing these schemes seems less like internalizing an externality, with a good-faith attempt to make sure not to overshoot the cost, and more like a sin tax pushed in lieu of a full ban. I don’t ever expect the tax rate on cigarettes to go down: even if we discovered tomorrow that the cost of smoking was one tenth of the tax imposed on cigarettes, people who support those taxes would still push them because lowering the price might encourage someone, somewhere to smoke. It’s become a matter of moral purity and not an accounting exercise.
The modern environmentalist movement behaves in much the same way. Carbon is seen as a moral failing and the goal is zero emissions. Given that, there’s no real way to compromise without getting salami-sliced.
I think that part of the cause is that the left just doesn’t believe that climate change is as catastrophic as they claim. If you really think climate change is going to destroy the world, you’d be willing to do almost anything to stop it, including grant all sorts of concessions that you normally wouldn’t. In order to avert world destruction, the left should be willing to build a border wall–a border wall isn’t good, but total destruction of the world is so much worse that the tradeoff isn’t even a question.
Instead you see the left exaggerating climate change when it comes to trading away things they want gone anyway, but not when it comes to trading away things they really want to keep.
That also explains the failure of the Washington initiative. If you really want to avert the destruction of the world, the fact that you don’t get the revenue should be a pretty minor thing in comparison to saving the world.
And this results in an additional sort of feedback loop, wherein the right observes this behavior and then adjusts their priors of “this whole thing is just a hoax the left made up to help them implement socialism” accordingly…
Kruschev said “we will bury you” in industrial output by having a command economy. When that was proven false, the Left made a quick switch to “industrial output is immoral and will make Earth uninhabitable unless we abolish the market economy.”
I think the connection between factories and machines releasing CO2 and the greenhouse effect is solid, but mitigating the harm will have to be done without placing any trust in the Left.
@Le Maistre Chat
This sounds a lot like declaring yourself defect-assumption-bot, who is inevitably defectbot in a fake mustache.
@Hoopyfreud:
Seems like tit-for-tat to me. How often has the Left cooperated with my people, for me to cooperate in turn?
Two things here: First, most climate change related policies are, uhm, selected specifically for maximum ineffectiveness. The voters want something done, but are not actually super committed to what “Something” is.
Actually doing something effective – Like “Say, could someone translate the Messmer Plan from french?” would inflict mortal wounds on the totality of the coal mining and gas extraction industries within ten years, and oil not much after that – You would not have to dump all that much funding into ammonia cycle fuel cells to render oil technologically obsolete.
So Effective Plans meet lobbying resistance from hell. Carbon tax would be an Effective Plan, thus the politicians who are in the pockets of the fossil lobby would commit seppuku on the senate floor before passing it.
Second: You cant actually raise any real amount of money from a carbon tax.
What happens is, you pass it, and within 3 months, some enterprising soul has licensed every bit of IP India and Russia has on cheap and breeder reactors, within a year, ground is being broken on around 300 reactors, and in seven, the entire economy is zero carbon. At which point it does not matter what the carbon tax is, nobody is paying it.
Huh? Where? There is strong and consistent anti-nuclear sentiment in much of the world. Building a nuclear plant in the US is a political and legal death-march. Other places, with the notable exception of France, aren’t much better. That’s not going to change quickly.
It is a legal death march because fossil fuel interests and their arms-length patsies make it one. Anti-nuclear groups get a heck of a lot of money from natural gas interests. Hundreds of million.
If you are willing to declare war on fossil fuels to the extent of actually passing a carbon tax, you are presumably also willing to raise the Atomic Energy Commission from the dead. If you are not so on day one, you will be by day 21 after every trade group and industry association that depend on cheap energy drops by and has a word.
Anti-nuclear activists are my outgroup. I think they’ve fucked up our best bet to stop global warming.
But they aren’t an all-powerful ZOG that infiltrates everywhere.
No, they are useful idiots to the fossil fuel industry, which.. kind of is ZOG. Completely outsized lobbying clout.
What happens is, you pass it, and within 3 months, some enterprising soul has licensed every bit of IP India and Russia has on cheap and breeder reactors, within a year, ground is being broken on around 300 reactors, and in seven, the entire economy is zero carbon
How many levels of irony are we on right now?
India and Russia have the most interesting IP, because their nuclear industry did not take a 30 year nap. India in particular only cared about two things : “Cheap to build” and “Endless fuel supply”. Their entire nuclear fuel cycle is a tad.. nightmarish from a proliferation standpoint, but if you want to build a nuclear energy sector yesterday and run the entire economy on it, their closed fuel cycle and rock-bottom construction costs are in fact very appealing.
Russia has the best breeder design currently operating.
Beyond those, everything is research projects, mostly without enough money behind them. Only one I would actually not be shocked to see go online is Bill Gates little project, which, if I read the prospectus right is the resurrection of a Swiss project – The Fast Spectrum Molten Chloride Salt reactor, which has the virtues of being the simplest possible reactor design to build (it is basically just a big tank) and being a very high gain breeder, so you can supply second and third build generation plant with fuel by bleeding off excess from the first gen.
The downside is.. that first generation? at least five tonnes of plutonium to make the salt, per reactor.
Good luck on those 300 reactors. I lived within a few hours drive of a nuclear plant and people had been organizing to shut it down since before I was born. It is scheduled to close, permanently, before Trump leaves the White House. As much as I would love it, Americans specifically and Westerners generally are irrationally afraid of nuclear energy.
I’d also be curious to see whether these ammonia fuel cells ever materialize. Fuel cells have been in a similar state to fusion power for as long as I can remember: they’re always ten years away. It would be a nice complement to petroleum based energy if they were developed but it would be nice to see them in practical use first before we set the entire petroleum industry on fire.
Direct Ammonia cycle fuel cells exist. If you wanted to build a container ship or cruise-liner powered by them, you could start that project tomorrow – The master machinist would be pretty buzy babying them along, but the ship would work fine. Getting them small and reliable enough for use in a car would be a substantial effort, but not one likely to run into any real show-stoppers.
Again, the problem is that approaches that seem likeliest to work get the least funding. Lots of money for pure-hydrogen fuel cells, and that is in large part because nobody tries to stop the funding for those – hydrogen, is, after all, pretty nightmarish to store.
Great, now explain that to the protesters. You’re closer to their politics than I am, so it should be easy, right?
It’s not a winning bet for Republicans, because the carbon tax is forever but the promise of paying for new border guards is not legally binding beyond the current fiscal year.
Granted, it might be theoretically possible to repeal a carbon tax in the future, or even to enact one with a sunset clause. In practice, new taxes are remarkably hard to get rid of, much more so than changing discretionary budget allocations. So this deal is structurally biased in favor of the Democrats.
It might be possible to change that if, in exchange for the carbon tax, the Democrats agreed to either completely repeal some existing particularly-noxious-to-Republicans tax, or to create from scratch a new government program with the permanence of, say, Obamacare. In both of those cases, status quo bias would apply to both sides of the deal and allow for some stability. But, while Republican claims to being the “party of small government” are vastly overrated, I don’t think they presently want any government programs are fundamentally new and of sufficient scale to trade against a carbon tax. And most of the taxes that are uniquely obnoxious to the Republicans are too small for this either.
I’ve encountered lots of resistance to carbon taxes from conservatives, but nearly as much from liberals. It’s regressive and why should we bother with that when there is a huge pot of money we can get from The Rich if only we elected the right strong man to properly tax them like Europe does.
Right, I don’t think the democrats want a carbon tax as much as they pretend to.
Is there greater support for Carbon Regulations or some similar thing that would be harder to evade though money?
Absent the snark about the huge pot of money, I would agree that the problem is that a lot of liberals are hostile to carbon taxes because of their being regressive. And the story that you can offset that by using the money to cut other regressive taxes or fund redistribution projects runs into the same problem of nobody trusting that that’s what would actually happen as Matt M complains about from the conservative side.
I imagine talking about a carbon tax is much more popular than enacting a carbon tax. Isn’t a carbon tax basically a tax on gas and electricity? Unless there is a carveout for the poor, I imagine the democrats would have some very angry voters.
As a Global Warming skeptic and conservative/libertarian I would actually be all in favor of a carbon tax based on the expectation that it would work out to be a flatter taxation structure overall. Assuming the revenue goes to pay down the debt or reduce the tax burden in other areas, of course..
If the carbon tax is passed alongside some new spending initiatives I obviously wouldn’t be as pleased.
A new tax is forever (remember when income tax was an emergency measure to fight the World War I?) and Democrats aren’t offering Republicans anything that would still exist in 2119.
Maybe if a carbon tax raised enough money to build a string of hydroelectric dams from El Paso to the Gulf fully connected by uncuttable 10-foot fences.
I’m having trouble with knowing if this is a serious question. Is it a rhetorical device intended to elucidate responses? Or is the political process this opaque for you?
First, the Democrats would need to control the House, Senate and Presidency to make your plan work. Right now McConnell can prevent the bill from even being considered. Trump can veto the bill.
Second, and extremely important, is that raising taxes on voters is painful. It will be used against you in the next election cycle. You need to have some way of ensuring that, for any painful vote, this will either be a vote that doesn’t cost you your seat (primary or general) or that the benefit of the vote is enduring and therefore worth a lost seat (or even a lost majority).
Third, extremely relevant to the first, is that carbon taxes, and whatever you give up to get carbon taxes , aren’t durable. Either side can defect and cut the other half of the deal if they have control. You aren’t proposing something that can’t easily be undone. That’s the objection others are raising, but it’s downstream of the first two. In order to make it durable you would need it to bring tangible benefits to either the populace or the powerful.
Your first point is questioning the hypothetical. Scott is proposing some kind of trade between Republicans and Democrats, where each side presumably gets something it values more than what it gives up. Such a trade does not require either party to have the whip hand. Such a trade fails if Democrats value a carbon tax lower than anything else or Republicans value its absence above everything else, but neither is likely.
The second could in principle be addressed by making the tax revenue-neutral — lower other taxes in compensation. In practice, of course, this is very hard to do because most of our taxes are steeply progressive while a carbon tax is steeply regressive. Neglecting that difficulty, you still run into the dynamic that good Democrats are likely to feel that revenue-neutrality is a big concession to the Republicans and therefore to offer little else in the trade, while good Republicans are likely to regard it as a necessary precondition to any start of serious negotiations.
The third point is sound, but as you say, it is the main thing everybody else is saying.
My first point explains why his hypothetical cant exist you cant just get any random two senators. Between filibusters, committee control and schedule control, there isn’t a plausible path to doing with a bare few senators bucking leadership (plus, bucking leadership is itself hazardous).
If you don’t have the Presidency you need the support of either the Republican president or 67 total.senators. plus the 2/3s of the house.
Even with a Democratic Senate, the filibuster is in play unless you use reconciliation. Assuming you use reconciliation on a budget bill,
you would still lose Manchin and maybe some other red state Dems. That’s when you would need 1 or 2 GOP senators, when Dems hold the Senate 49-51 or the like.
You also have to make a persuasive case that it will stay revenue neutral to tax-averse Republicans, for whom the example of the income tax going from a small tax on the very rich to something much larger and broader is well-remembered.
The presumption will be that it’s the camel’s nose in the door for a similarly large increase in both overall tax levels and enforcement bureaucracy, and I’m not offhand sure what plausible assurances could be given that it wasn’t.
(Maybe combining it in a constitutional amendment with the abolition of some other major form of taxation? But Democrats certainly wouldn’t trade the progressive income tax for a possibly-regressive carbon tax, and I’m not sure if there’s another one that would serve as a satisfactory trade.)
While I can’t speak for him, I imagine Scott’s reaction might be “Why not?” If literally the only way to prevent the Earth from becoming uninhabitable and the rising seas from killing billions is to repeal the 16th Amendment and make the tax burden less progressive, seems like it would be worth it.
Republicans then nod smugly and say “Uh huh, turns out they knew all along it wasn’t world-threatening consequences, we see through your Chicken Little act.”
Democrats then nod sagely and say “Uh huh, we knew Republicans would prefer to literally hold the whole world hostage and kill us all, we were fools to try to reason with them.”
Wait, what? If we can replace the income tax with a carbon tax I’m all for it. I do think it would almost certainly need to be heavily regressive, though, so I can’t see the Dems actually offering it. I would curious to know just how much more energy/carbon the middle and upper classes use than the poor. Usually when I see a car spewing black exhaust it’s some poor person’s beater, while the rich guy is charging his Tesla up off the solar panels he installed in his roof. (I don’t know if you can actually solar charge a Tesla, but you get my point. Energy efficient stuff costs more money).
My impression is that in terms of total CO2 emissions, cars are almost an irrelevant factor that can basically be rounded off.
Rich people own bigger houses and travel more by air. Those are the things that start to move the needle.
Which brings up a big issue with a carbon tax. We can’t even get ranchers to pay rent for using federal land for their herds. How are we going to get them to pay a per head tax for methane emissions?
A carbon tax is relatively easy to assess and collect on oil/gas/coal and pretty much nowhere else.
This seems like a feature, to me.
I’m cynical, so I expect any political proposal to emphasize looking good over actually doing what it’s supposed to. Oil, gas and coal are the Terrible Threesome and have been for two decades now, more or less, as far as the voters who would support such a tax are concerned. You can just pick the low-hanging fruit and still look quite the World-Saving Statesman.
As for cows? My bet is that if we’ll ever see anything, it will be a tax on beef.
What Faza said. You tax beef.
Conrad:
Doubling CO2 increases the yield of most crop varieties by about 30%. Why are you in favor of global hunger?
Or, to put the point more generally, you are simply taking for granted a claim that is popular but, so far as I can tell, weakly supported–that the net effects of increased CO2 are negative and large.
It’s my impression, possibly mistaken, that you believe the U.S. government should be primarily concerned with the welfare of Americans, not that of humans in general. If so, the argument for a carbon tax is even weaker. Costs and benefits of increased CO2 will not be evenly distributed. The major predictable costs are to countries that are very hot (India), very low lying (the Nile Delta looks like the most vulnerable area), or both. The major predictable benefit is to countries in the far north or far south, where human activity is currently limited by cold.
The big winners in that respect would be Canada, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, and Russia, but Alaska should become a good deal pleasanter. Also Minnesota and other northern states. Overall, the U.S. should be doing better than average out of global warming, not worse, although Louisiana might be an exception.
Also, note that the costs of a U.S. carbon tax—the switch to more expensive ways of producing power—would be almost entirely born by Americans. The benefits would be shared with the rest of the world.
So if your bias is pro-U.S. …
Just to go off on a tangent, I see the US as not having moral obligation to benefit non-citizens, but to indeed have a moral obligation not to harm them where ever possible.
In matters such as climate change it’s very complicated and mostly intuitive. I don’t think we have an obligation to cripple ourselves economically in order to avoid a chance at inconvenience to Nile river villages, but inasmuch as there is strong evidence that we are directly harming others, I find it persuasive that we need to take costly measures to avoid doing so–for instance, we shouldn’t pollute rivers running into Mexico even if they are unable to militarily or diplomatically contest the action.
To starve out my enemies.
More seriously, I prefer consumption taxes to income taxes because I can more easily control my consumption. “All for it” was too strong a statement, but if Dems seriously proposed a carbon tax while abolishing the 16th amendment I’d think that’s a win. They couldn’t reinstate the income tax without another constitutional amendment. I don’t think it would have any serious impact on global climate, but if it makes them feel better and I get rid of the 16th amendment…okay!
So I think it’s not the Republicans who would be opposed to this plan, it would be the Democrats because they want both the income tax and the carbon tax and would not make the trade.
I’d be even more interested in trading a carbon tax for a wall. They can solve their existential crisis and I can solve mine. Again, I don’t think they’d go for it.
Eh, I don’t think that trade would be as good. The bigger problem for the foreseeable future is funding border guards and other facilities and workers to manage the vast number of asylum claims. Even a wall would still need guards, and maintenance for that matter. It sounds like a much less permanent, and perhaps relatively ineffective, concession compared to getting rid of the sixteenth amendment.
To expand on HBC’s point, it matters a lot who controls the chamber. The majority leader is very easily able to nix any bill that most of his team doesn’t like (see, for example, the non-binding Hastert Rule). So you can’t just win over 2 Republican senators right now and pass your bill on through the Senate. You would need to have a substantial part of the Republican caucus who feels strongly about it to even get on the docket.
And even if the Democrats have the Senate majority, that doesn’t mean all 51 of them are actually in favor of your bill, and everything you put in to sweeten the deal for a few Republicans shaves off from your left flank. And if this is something that is going to be strongly opposed by Republicans (which a massive tax increase would be), you need to peal off enough to overcome the filibuster, which makes the problem even harder.
I still think you’re staring at your feet instead of the horizon. If the deal is attractive to both sides, why should the majority leader nix it in the first place?
It sounds like what you and HBC are really saying is that there is no such trade that might be made. That’s a legitimate claim — and indeed the burden of proof is on Scott to offer a counterexample.
But that’s very different claim than saying that they could never cut such a deal because of procedural obstacles like the Speaker wouldn’t let it come to a vote or the President would veto it, which is certainly how I read HBC’s objection.
If each faction would rather thwart the other than get things it wants, it does not bode well for the future of the republic. (Or maybe it bodes very well; I forget whether I am an anarchist or a reactionary today.)
@Doctor Mist:
I’m not arguing against the proposition of a deal attractive to some large faction of Republicans and Democrats. That isn’t What Scott has proposed. I could argue against this as well, but one thing at a time.
I’m arguing against Scott’s proposition, that some small number of Republicans defecting could make this happen, and that is just plainly false, no matter how attractive it was to those Republicans.
I think you have a strong point that stands alongside a half dozen+ other strong points. This is tingling my conspiracy sense that the idea of this is some sort of farming expedition or informal survey being done by Scott. Or that the poster is an imposter.
@Clutzy,
Conspiracy for what purpose?
I think it absolutely is our host, and he thinks differently than most not just because he’s young and from a “UMC” background, but also because he just has an unusual mind that gives him amazing unique insights and ideas, but also has him every so often not guess the way many of us commoners think (not that you in particular are a commoner, I meant a more general “us”).
Not like a real conspiracy, with lots of people. Just kind of an idea fishing expedition. My conspiracy sense was tingling, as in, I felt like maybe we are being played.
Scott is going through the process I went through 10 or 20 years ago. I recognize it. He listens to wonks, he knows a carbon tax is the way to fix things, so let’s do it.
He is wondering why there is so much problem passing a carbon tax. He thinks the problem is in front of him, with the conservatives. And in some ways it is. But almost as much of the problem is behind him. The liberals don’t want a carbon tax either. It is very surprising and hard to believe until you’ve lived it.
@Edward Scizorhands,
+1 to this.
Back in the 1980’s, when I was a high school student on a field trip, I asked my congressman (Ron Dellums, Democrat) why he voted against an oil and gas tax, and he told me “Because it will hit the poor most”.
Also, while greatly diminished, private sector labor unions are still part of the Democratic Party coalition, and I know that my union, while very pro-nuclear is even more supportive of gas and oil pipeline projects.
Another element in left wing opposition to a carbon tax is moral/emotive. The idea that people can buy the right to pollute is offensive, just as the idea that rich people can buy the right to commit crimes would be.
Ah. I thought you were arguing with the general thrust of the posting, rather than the reductio ad absurdum in his penultimate sentence. I completely agree that that suggestion was the silliest part of his question.
@Doctor Mist:
Well, the rest of it falls apart just as easily.
Why haven’t Democrats assembled a coalition of enough Republicans to overcome a Trump presidential veto?
This is just as silly a premise as “Why can’t Democrat’s get two Republicans to defect and pass the legislation”? Republicans don’t want a carbon tax to pass. How are you to get 20+ of them to defect and override their own president’s veto? They won’t even do that for things they actually want, like the bill that would have ended the declaration of emergency, which passed 59-41 before a veto.
Why can’t Democrats win over Trump and McConnell and get a grand bargain on climate change in exchange for whatever Trump and McConnell want?
At least if Scott had asked this question, it would have been more in the realm reality. It’s at least a valid question where there is some plausible path to success.
But in order for this to work there has to be some room for good faith negotiations, and there are so many roadblocks to this. Perhaps not the largest, but the first impediment which would have to be overcome, is that Trump hasn’t shown any ability to negotiate with his own caucus. In addition, efforts by Democrats to negotiate bilaterally with Trump on smaller deals that ostensibly are actually priorities for him like infrastructure have ended over the smallest thing, like Nancy Pelosi ostensibly saying something mean. Any carbon-tax is a muuuch harder lift than infrastructure.
It’s like asking the guy who has never broken a 10 minute mile why he doesn’t just go ahead and break the world record. Yes the incentives to do so are very big. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
And regardless of the probabilities, if either of these is true there isn’t any puzzle in the first place: you’ve already got all the explanation you’ll ever need for why there isn’t a carbon tax.
Because we’ve spent decades converting everyone to playing the same game.
It used to be that a congressional representative in New York and a congressional representative in Nevada kept their jobs or lost them based on mostly disconnected systems. The game in New York was “appeal to New York voters” and the game in Nevada was “appeal to Nevada voters”.
It was therefore possible to construct mutually beneficial trades; a law that helps the New York rep with New Yorkers and helps the Nevada rep with Nevadans is a win-win, and what it does to New Jersey is irrelevant, because they don’t vote for New York or Nevada representatives.
Now the national level systems are getting increasingly coupled together, so the elected officials are playing “appeal to Democrats” and “appeal to Republicans”. But Democrats and Republicans, unlike New Yorkers and Nevadans, are direct competitors; what one supports, the other tends to oppose. So, it’s a zero-sum game. Republicans and Democrats can’t easily team up to both win, because if you help the other guys win, you’re seen as disloyal and George Soros starts writing checks to people launching primary challenges at you, or Rush Limbaugh starts badmouthing you on the radio, etc.
Kind of inevitable, given the tendency towards increasingly centralized power. If controlling the national government allows you to win at state and local levels, Moloch is going to show up with a Powerpoint presentation and helpfully explain to people that, no, really, there’s no room for compromising on national issues to get local benefits, that would make you a dirty traitor, and what you really need to do is hold the line against those others who are trying to destroy everything good in the world.
Democrats wouldn’t have needed to compromise when they controlled both houses of the Congress and the presidency in 2009–2010. Why didn’t they pass a carbon tax then?
Presumably for the same reason Republicans didn’t do anything to reduce illegal immigration from 2016-18…
@10240,
And Republicans “controlled both houses of the Congress and the presidency in” 2017 and 2018, yet the border wall didn’t get extended signifigantly (or at all).
I don’t think nominal majorities are enough to get a Parties verballized agendas enacted (and I’m increasingly inclined to believe both parties are conning their voters, Democrats could have eased union organizing many times since 1948, and when Alabama passed an anti-abortion law, congressional Republicans and Trump himself distanced themselves from the Alabama abortion law).
Schedule, schedule, schedule
There isn’t a very powerful constituency behind a carbon tax.
@Scott Alexander,
My guess is that too many livelihoods are dependent on the fossil fuels industry.
I know that far more union members work extracting fossil fuels than install solar panels.
I have had close relatives who were in the legislature, and from hearing them talk, these are my best answers:
Legislators generally don’t like win-win deals, not because they’re jerks but because one party is almost always more powerful than the other. If I have more power than you and I offer you a fair trade, I’m leaving something on the table, by definition. This is more or less why the Democrats didn’t support the WA state carbon tax discussed above. The guy who wrote the tax’s position was “Hey, maybe if we don’t festoon this bill with unrelated stuff that the other party hates, we can actually get it passed” and the Dems’ position was, “Hey, this bill is so sure to pass that we would be crazy not to festoon it with unrelated stuff the other party hates.”
The parties (and, to a certain extent, the voters) have come up with the same solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma as the Mafia – develop a reputation for punishing defectors severely. Goodwill within your party is more important than goodwill across the aisle, partially to move legislation but mostly for re-election purposes, so defection is pretty rare. This isn’t a universal law; there are legislators in swing districts who can (or must) defect sometimes, but the other side knows that, and takes it in to account when deciding how much unrelated stuff to festoon the bill with as described above. So in practice, any deal that any side offers is already maximally distasteful to the other side. And that doesn’t happen because a person at the top of each party enforces it, it’s an emergent property of the intra-party tit-for-tat dickering that has to occur for the bill to get written (because even within the party, Democrat A has more power than Democrat B and can use it to include more of what he wants at B’s expense).
So, basically it’s another coordination trap. Sometimes a particularly charismatic deal-maker gets everyone together, sometimes a particularly adept wonk crafts legislation that looks like a win to both sides, but usually Moloch prevails and a bunch of individuals act in their own best interests and fail to serve the best interests of the larger group. The exceptions are cases where both sides fear no deal more than a bad deal (Omnibus spending bills, e.g.) and the cases where no coordination is necessary because one party can ram through whatever they want. The latter’s not true, and judging by their behavior even the leftiest Dems don’t seem to view climate change as urgent enough to accept a less-than-optimal trade.
I, frankly, don’t understand the last part of the question:
Obviously all the billions it “makes” comes from taxpayers, and there is additional dead weight loss caused by the imposition of the tax.
Given that confusion I’ll move to your other point.
The most logical explanation for this is that a carbon tax is mostly favored by Democrats because they favor additional taxes, not because of anything carbon-specific. Thus, your plan is basically the opposite of what they want.
After the 115th Congress accomplished almost nothing with unified control of government, I’ll be surprised the next time Congress passes anything at all. Even post office renamings aren’t passing anymore.
This thread is getting bogged down in questions about the ability to enforce bargains and game theory, and ignoring the briefly-mentioned fact of Washington State.
A carbon tax was proposed. It was revenue neutral. The Sierra Club, the Democratic Party, and all other relevant players on the left opposed it, as they weren’t interested in taxing carbon unless they also were handed a pile of cash to distribute as they wish.
From this I conclude strongly that they don’t actually believe in carbon pricing, but in some combination of power and virtue signaling. But in any case it answers your question neatly: the purported proponents of the tax would not be in favor of this in any configuration.
@Andrew Hunter,
In majority Democrat California a “cap and trade” system was implemented in 2013, and there has been a cutback on emissions.
That isn’t a rebuttal. They got something they wanted (government control over energy) for nothing.
@Clutzy,
True, it’s also much easier to sell to voters than a gas tax, ’cause there’s a small (infinitesimal) chance the cost will be borne by shareholders (as if!) instead of passed on to customers in higher prices.
The State gets credit for “Fighting climate change”, and P, G & E gets the blame for higher prices (except by informed libertarians, but you guys are a pretty tiny part of the total electorate).
It’s a winner!
Heh.
That is why I have always said that a fascist is just a pragmatic socialist (modern practical definition not pre-WWI idealist “workers own the means” version). You get 95% of the control, with only 5% of the accountability.
Not wanting something at a certain price is not the same as not wanting it at all. Evidence: I want a Tesla but do not own one.
Why would the Sierra Club care about regressive taxes?
https://www.sierraclub.org/washington/sierra-club-position-carbon-washington-ballot-initiative-732
So, intersectionality is taking over everything? The NRA can’t just be a gun-rights group, they need to support every conservative position. The ACLU can’t just be a civil-rights group, they need to support every liberal position. Or, like phigment says below, every issue becomes national and it’s just one giant blob of “Democrats” and “Republicans” stomping on each other’s faces, forever.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
I suggest a more generous interpretation. they care about carbon pricing, but they’re not nearly as excited about it as they are carbon pricing + money.
I suggest a more generous interpretation
I *live* here. This was the first social-restructuring ballot issue I voted *for* instead of against, *ever*. I went to the discussion meetings, and I heard the reasons for opposition spoken out of the mouths of the reps from the progressive orgs.
There is no need to fake up a false “generous interpretation”.
They wanted moar money. Period. And they did not want anything to do with anything that may take any oomph out of the excuses they have been using to demand moar money. They did not give two wet turds for the projected CO2 emmission drops under the proposed plan, nor did they care about the reduced tax burden on the poorest.
The thing is, the bulk of the current environmental movement is overgrown astro-turf.
The sierra club went to bat to get diablo canyon built, then natural gas and coal money started flowing, and suddenly there were a lot more environmental movements around, and all of them had “Kill nuclear” as their number one priority.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28/the-dirty-secret-of-renewables-advocates-is-that-they-protect-fossil-fuel-interests-not-the-climate/#6849a6b01b07 Summerizes a lot of this shit.
Disinformation is the game, and fossil fuel industry is very, very good at it. You think climate change denial was their only angle of attack?
This is a problem, because fossil fuels are an ongoing genocidal disaster worse than just about anything, excepting only energy poverty (Not having power is about the only energy policy that kills more people)
Its not virtue signaling. The people on the ground are lied to and kept engaged via constant cognitive dissonance – They cant admit error, because that makes them the villains of the tale, the upper ranks include people who damn well know what they are doing, and a bunch of people who are keeping their eyes closed and going “The horse will sing any day now”.
Honestly, the one thing the world could really do with is a set of techniques to allow people to get off high horses without breaking their damn fool necks. Trump is building concentration camps without loosing support via this exact same mechanism – His supporters cannot permit themselves to realize he is fucking Evil, because what would that say about them.
I would prefer the foreigners stop illegally trying to enter my country (and no, fraudulent asylum claims are not “legal”). These are the only concentration camps in the world people are desperate to get in to. So, no, I don’t think Trump is evil, I think the foreigners and their enablers are…some word that basically means evil but sounds charitable.
Just saying, your model of Trump supporters is definitely wrong, so your model of environmental activists might be suspect too.
Desperate?
Edit: Deleted. None of this is charitable and I don’t want to get into it. Point is, Thomas, no, Trump supporters are not secretively disgusted by Trump’s evil but too stubborn to admit it. We have a very different idea of who’s the good guys and who the bad guys are here.
@Thomas Jorgensen,
For the record I didn’t vote for Trump (his Party is still too anti-union for my tastes), but I feel some sympathy for his supporters, and when if comes to immigration what looks like “the right thing” depends on where you are, who you are, and who you feel more solidarity with.
As far as I can tell the cases for more immigrants are:
1) Christian solidarity/humanitarian, basically they’d be better off here than there (otherwise they wouldn’t want to come here) and it’s nice to be nice.
2) The U.S. birth is falling, the population is getting older, and we could use willing hands that grew up somewhere else (so our tax dollars didn’t pay for their schooling).
As far as I can tell the case for less immigrants is:
The rent is too damn high, wages are too low, roads are crowded.
From 1941 to 1973 the majority of Americans, especially including the “least among us” (i.e. African-Americans, Appalachians, et cetera) had living standards rise at a rate not seen since.
It just so happens that from 1921 to 1965 immigrantion was restricted more than before and afterwards, and it can be argued that the less competition for jobs, places to rent, et cetera, helped the working class already in the U.S.A. thrive, and not just because of raw numbers, because just by being able to get here immigrants demonstrate ambition, physical endurance, and/or cleverness, and employers know this and that makes it harder for many Americans to compete for jobs with them.
Frankly I think dying towns (i.e. Detroit in the ’90’s) that are being abandoned may be helped by more immigrants, but in places where the problems are unaffordable housing and overcrowding (San Francisco today) less immigrants could be helpful for the folks already there.
It’s often been noted that while Trump’s voters are usually in the top half income wise for the areas they’re in, the areas themselves tend to be poorer than the areas that voted for Clinton (the rural poor tend to vote less), and it’s reasonable to assume that Trump’s voters notice the relative decline in the areas they live in and wanted that turned around and “Make America Great Again” is an effective slogan.
I don’t know about other areas that voted for Clinton, but in San Francisco (where I work) most of my co-workers in the last decade have been immigrants, and in the last two years most of my co-workers have been the children of immigrants (I’ll note that both of my wife’s parents were immigrants, as is the mother of my brothers wife, and I’ll further note that the majority of my peers growing up left town because housing was unaffordable with the wages they could earn), and it makes sense that in areas with so many who are immigrants or have relatives who are voters here would be more sympathetic to allowing more immigration (yes I’m area of the irony that I think the places most hurt by immigration are more supportive of it, and that some areas that are against further immigration may be helped by it).
I really don’t think either view is “Evil”, it’s a case of feeling more solidarity with desperate foreigners or of feeling more solidarity with desperate Americans.
To be clear: I don’t like Trump, he seems to me to be a boss of the type I don’t like, but I really don’t think his voters are “deplorables” either, but then I also think that I (a Democrat) and it least one SSC commenter who’s pro Trump were in Congress together we could come up with enough agreement and compromises between us that would be more pleasing to both the majority of Democrats and the majority of Republicans than the status quo (though I also think that we’d get so few donations and so much resistance from others in our respective Parties that our chances of re-election would be slim).
I’ll also note that both Democrats and Republicans who earn less than $40,000 a year in annual income, and those who make more than $200,000 in annual income tend to be more sympathetic to some of the policies of the other Party than the average voter in their respective Parties, and really it’s folks with college educations who earn between $80,000 to $200,000 (especially whites) who are the most partisan.
1) Yeah, this is a big concern, since we’re talking about letting in people who are basically the existing Red tribe except for not being Anglophone and exact Catholic/Protestant ratio. A “Sailer strategy” where we throw open the Mexican border but reward Mexicans for speaking English and identifying as white would pose no threat to our culture.
But then, the rent is too high and the labor supply is quite high too…
Plumber:
Another argument for more immigration is the belief that it will make the whole US (including the current residents) better off overall, in the long run, by expanding the economy, providing labor and consumers that will drive business, etc. Historically, the US has done really well with lots of immigration, so this isn’t an obviously nuts argument, and there’s a fair bit of data that suggests that immigration doesn’t generally make the existing residents worse off.
Plumber,
My own concerns about immigration come from a pretty different source.
America’s culture for two centuries after the founding was a transplant and blossoming of a culture that started in Western Europe, which had invented a particular suite of ideas like individual liberty, limited government, self-reliance, motivation based on dignity rather than honor, popular sovereignty, and the separation of church and state. We don’t have a clear idea of why that particular suite of ideas arose when and where it did; at least part of it has to do with the development of English Common Law. It proved possible for the English to transplant it in places like India and Hong Kong, but other parts of the world in more recent years have proven tougher nuts to crack.
We also don’t have a clear idea of how robust or fragile this suite of ideas is. Even a considerable stream of immigrants can be assimilated to this culture if this is something both they and the existing residents want, but in recent years the will to do this has largely evaporated.
If we suddenly doubled the population of the US by adding an equal number of, say, Somalis (yes, I know there aren’t that many Somalis), I fear it would mean that the Congress was half-full of representatives like Ilhan Omar — which, while terrible, would only be a symptom of the accompanying changes in our culture and society. Nobody expects that sudden an influx, but what level of influx can we support without turning into a low-trust society that is no longer based fundamentally on that suite of ideas? I don’t know.
I’m not worried about rent or crowding or wages. Our society and economy is more than capable of providing a place for lots more people than it does — if those people share the values that make that society and economy work so very well. In that regard, I’m afraid our society is running on fumes already, as we seem to have stopped even trying to teach those values to our own offspring.
Suppose you have two countries; Country A has 10 residents with $100 of productivity apiece, while Country B has 100 residents with $10 of productivity apiece. Through a miraculous bit of politicking, Country B is annexed by Country A.
On the one hand, you have
I mean, common, you just freaking doubled the GDP overnight!
On the other, exactly nothing has changed. In order for this to actually make anyone better off, their productivity needs to increase.
This may or may not happen.
For the sake of argument we will say that productivity changes are driven by either capital investments, or policy choices/societal institutions. Capital (and goods) are substantially more mobile than people are. The mobility of capital and goods is essentially the reason that however many billions of people have been raised from global poverty in the last however many years. Insofar as people are mobile, they really, really like to bring their policy preferences and societal institutions with them. If Country B’s relative lack of worker productivity is the result of the lack of capital, the merger may tend to increase worker productivity and make everyone better off; however, if Country B’s relative lack of worker productivity is the result of the policy preferences and societal institutions of its inhabitants, the merger may on net decrease productivity and make everyone worse off.
It would be really nice if, before blinding charging into this bit of politicking, someone tried to determine which way it is likely to go. Again, we notice that capital is really, really mobile and has been raising billions of people from poverty. If Country B is not already being pumped up by global capitalism, there is a reason to suspect that, maybe, the policy preferences or societal institutions of its residents has something to do their relative lack of worker productivity.
This would argue for maybe not throwing the borders completely open to all comers, but limiting the rate to a level were you’re not likely to overwhelm the policy preferences and societal institutions that enable higher productivity.
(ETA: I have never looked into it, but I suspect you would find that the people most likely to want to illegally immigrate by border crossing to the US (and migrate to Europe) are from countries that global capitalism seems to be leaving behind.)
The whole point of immigration is that the people coming to the US from Mexico/Venezuela/Nigeria/Bangladesh/Albania/etc. are coming to participate in in our economy–they’ll be looking for work in the US, and if they find it, they’ll be paying rent/buying homes, buying goods and services, etc., here. And their kids will grow up here speaking perfect English and largely assimilated to American norms.
There’s an argument that this will make us better off as a country, made by economists with a fair bit of data on their side. They may be wrong for various reasons, but it’s not a crazy argument. Similarly, we can look at US history and see that we’ve assimilated a whole lot of immigrants from lots of very poor and backward places, and done pretty well out of the deal as a country. So again, this argument may or may not be correct (I’m not certain either way), but it’s not crazy or obviously wrong.
FWIW, my biggest qualm with open borders is the potential volume of integration. I think with no restrictions, we might have a billion people who’d like to come here and participate in our first-world economy rather than the shitty third-world economy they currently have access to. And I’m worried that a billion immigrants (or anything remotely close to that) would radically change the US on all kinds of levels, perhaps in ways that wouldn’t be fixed by eventual assimilation and economic growth.
Le Maistre Chat:
If past experience is any guide, Mexicans and Central Americans who immigrate to the US will assimilate just fine. Their kids will mostly be blue collar and won’t (if history repeats) perform as well in school as white Americans, but they’ll otherwise do okay. The grandkids of the immigrants will largely intermarry with white or black Americans, think of themselves as 100% American, and maybe know a little Spanish they use for talking with their older relatives who don’t speak much English.
This may be good or bad for other reasons, but if there’s one group we’ve demonstrated we can assimilate into US culture really well under current conditions, it’s Mexicans and Central Americans.
albatross11:
Well, yeah. Unless you were a FOB Latino in the 1950s, the normative model was someone like Desi Arnez, which shows that assimilation was fast and led to intermarriage. This was as good a thing as bringing in the Irish or Germans.
A carbon tax was proposed. It was revenue neutral.
Not only that, it was carefully designed to actually make WA state’s regressive tax structure progressive for the bottom quintile, so the very poorest would be paying much less and everyone else a little more.
The “progressives” hated THAT too, because they instead wanted to raise money to then build complicated full-time-staffed new state agencies to dole out money in complicated ways in order to buy favors and voting interest blocs out of the very poorest and out of a brand new cohort of state and muni employees, instead of just making the very poorest all a little less poor.
I learned the same lesson Andrew did: PNW progressives do not actually care about carbon and they do not actually care about the regressive state tax system they constantly complain about. All they actually want is virtue signalling, buying voting favors, and paying salaries to all the the people with useless degrees staffing the well-connected progressive non-profits in Seattle who are literally *literally* in bed with members of the Seattle, King County, and WA State elected chambers.
Talk is cheap. Putting taxpayers’ money where your mouth is hard.
When Macron tried to increase fuel taxes, with the explicitly stated purpose of reducing carbon emissions, he provoked the yellow vest protests. There were other underlying issues, of course, but there are always underlying issues, politicians really don’t want to give all the people who are pissed off a clear flag to rally under.
In order to support a carbon tax, you need to accept certain positions. First, you need to believe that global warming is a real problem and CO2 driven. Second, you need to believe that neither government experts, nor scientists, nor environmentalists, know how to cut CO2 emissions. Third, you need to believe that Big Business does know how to cut CO2 emissions, and that they will respond to a tax by cutting emissions rather than finding a loophole to evade the tax.
I don’t think it’s hard to convince Democrats of the first piece of that syllogism, but it’s very hard to convince Democrats of the second and third. It’s not likely that they trust business more than government and non-profit experts. That also means that they don’t believe businesses are speaking the truth when complaining about the cost of direct regulations. It all results in a distrust of a solution that is indirect and only works by way of complicated accounting. I assume that a carbon tax operates on net CO2 emissions, but that introduces a lot of opportunity for ‘this CO2 doesn’t count because…’
All of that means that I don’t think it’s obvious to a majority of Democrats that they should even want a carbon tax, let alone want it badly enough to give up concessions and political capital to get it. It’s probably pretty easy to see as a distraction from the simple regulations that would get the job done. If not a distraction, maybe it’s a way for bankers to make a fortune moving numbers around without actually changing the atmosphere.
Finally, there are a lot of practical concerns. What’s the right price? How do you implement a carbon tax fairly, that doesn’t end up shaking down the homeless for the privilege of breathing? Once you accept one exception, how do you draw a principled line around what is and isn’t net CO2 emission? How does it apply to government entities such as the TVA and the military? How do you audit this?
If we don’t know the social cost of carbon, then we can’t do the cost-benefit analysis that would tell us which simple regulations are beneficial and which are not. So this “practical concern” is really yet another political concern: the debate over the correct level of carbon tax threatens to lay bare the uncertainty that’s already there. If Democrats were the only people we need to be on board, this could perhaps be worked around: take the same Top. Men. who would have been in charge of arbitrarily laying down simple regulations, and have them arbitrarily set the social cost of carbon instead. But how do you get Republicans to trust the result?
Bob Murphy has done some great work on this – specifically on how a lot of opaque assumptions (such as, what discount rate to use) can have dramatically large affects on the calculated value of the social cost of carbon, thereby suggesting dramatically different policy proposals.
Basically, depending on which guidelines you pick for which discount rate you should use, the answer to “what should we do about climate change” can be anything from “do nothing at all” to “ban all emissions now” and anywhere in between, and that’s all fiddling with a single economic assumption about time preference that takes “the consensus science” at face value and doesn’t make any assumptions about it whatsoever.
This is called “pork barrel”, it’s one of the things that allows legislature to function when they need to pass particularly difficult bills, but it’s ludicrously unpopular with voters so Congress has been steadily doing it less and less, which is part of why it’s become increasingly dysfunctional, grid-locked, and partisan.
I see two ways for a carbon tax to work: either as a way to levy exactly the amount of revenue needed to offset the externalities imposed by CO2 (i.e. as a way to fund a “climate-insurance” or to e.g. build dikes against rising ocean levels, etc.) or as a way to make fossil fuel use more expensive and therefore accelerate the phase-out of CO2-producing industries. In the first instance, decreasing other taxes would hurt state budgets (since the newly raised revenue from carbon tax is locked away in the novel 2climate mitigating strategies fund” ) In the second instance, I think the simultaneous decrease of other taxes (if levied from the exact same population) would prevent the real increase of price of fossil fuels and therefore counteract the expected causal connection between the carbon tax and the decrease of CO2 emissions.
The point of a carbon tax isn’t to reduce fossil fuel consumption by making people poorer, it’s to reduce it by making fossil fuel relatively more expensive. There are all sorts of margins where you are balancing the cost of different ways of achieving the same objective.
Consider keeping your house warm, which is one major use of energy. One way is to put in more heat. One way is to have more insulation. One way is to move south. The cost of the first mostly depends on the cost of power, the cost of the other two doesn’t. Similarly for the choice of a power company between burning fossil fuels, using nuclear power, using solar or wind power. The choice of a driver between a car that gets more mpg and one that is heavier, safer, able to carry more people and stuff.
I agree that the objective is not “to make people poorer”, but rather helping to channel demand into non-CO2-emitting energy sources or reducing energy demand. I simply do not see how that can be achieved in a revenue-neutral way IF the tax decreases falls on EXACTLY the same population that has to pay the new CO2 tax, since the overall effect would be the equalization of fossil fuel energy prices pre- and post- CO2 tax.
To say it in another way: if (p. ex) , to decrease the regressiveness of a 50-cent per gallon tax on gasoline, a tax credit in the same amount is given to every taxpayer, the final gasoline price ends up being exactly the same (since otherwise the policy would not be revenue-neutral). However, if only the poorer 10% people get a tax credit, the policy can only be revenue-neutral if their tax credit is 10 times as large as the average CO2-tax paid be everybody. Would that be politically feasible? On the one hand, this means an effective increase in the purchasing power of the bottom 10%, which should be attractive to people who favour tax-redistribution. On the other hand, this would be denounced as an unconscionable hand-out by those who fear that such wealth redistribution may disincentivize work.
The tax decrease on you doesn’t depend on how much energy you consume or in what form. The effect of the CO2 tax does.
“The tax decrease on you doesn’t depend on how much energy you consume or in what form. The effect of the CO2 tax does.”
You are right, but aggregate tax-neutrality is only achieved if the total tax decrease is made to fluctuate to match the revenue generated by the carbon tax. Individually, there will always be a fraction of the population who is paying more in CO2-tax than they are getting in rebate. I do not have any problem with that. But THOSE people will feel cheated and lied to when they see that a tax that was claimed to be neutral is hurting them. Just witness the Yellow Vests protests in France over their increased fuel tax: they are not protesting that the State is getting more revenue, but rather protesting that they are requested to pay more. They would protest jsut as much (or even louder) if they were told that their fuel costs are increasing in the same amount but somebody else is getting tax breaks. I favor a carbon tax but I want it to be honest: just admit that the CO2-tax is a way to internalize the externalities of fossil fuels and indeed set that revenue aside for climate-change mitigation/insurance.
The electorate doesn’t want problems solved. If they did, they would elect people who solved problems.
The electorate wants people who smash the other tribe.
Alternatively, the electorate wants problems solved, but since the individual voter has little information on what will solve problems and almost no incentive to get more, the system elects people who offer solutions that make sense to someone who doesn’t know much or think very hard about the problem, and those are rarely good solutions.
They’re just not popular with the public, right? My guess is, no matter the political party, people see carbon tax as a tax on gasoline, and if there’s one thing people hate, it’s paying more for gas. Being revenue neutral doesn’t mitigate the fact that people see prices at gas stations going up. So we get lots inefficient regulations that indirectly increase the cost of lots of things rather than attacking the problem directly.
Bloomberg weighs in.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-25/the-republican-case-for-a-carbon-tax
Yeah.
A few comments disappeared, starting with a reply to Garrett in the divorce subthread. I don’t know why.
I don’t think I did anything; I’ll try to look into it later.
I find I’m still fond of the idea of a full-sized Everest climbing wall, even if it might not take the pressure off Everest. I bet people would use it. It might be used as a qualification for climbing Everest, too.
What do you think it would take to build one and keep it from falling over? How about building on to the top of existing mountains to get more height?
No Everest climbing wall will take the pressure off of Everest. K2 is a harder climb but it’s not “the best” (i.e. the highest) so no one cares.
But, if we are in hypothetical land, you don’t need the height, you need the low atmospheric pressure. Build a series of simulated climbs inside a very, very large pressure chamber so you can simulate the Everest death zone.
What? I’m pretty sure people are attracted to the height (I climbed the tallest mountain!) not the low pressure at the peak. I don’t think simulating the atmospheric conditions at the peak gets you anywhere, unless you’re going full Truman show and simulating the atmosphere as part of an elaborate setup that convinces people they actually climbed Everest when really they were just messing around in your weird structure.
To the original question, I suspect that the engineering challenges involved overlap quite a bit with the challenges in building the space elevator, so that would be a good starting point.
Yes, people are attracted to the height. I explicitly made that point.
And no ersatz structure will take the pressure off of the real thing.
But if you want people to be able to practice or qualify for Everest, I was thinking of something far more likely to be buildable than an 8848 meter tall structure that is the same volume as Everest.
If you really, really want something as tall as Everest you will have to try build something on one of the nearby peaks that are nearly as tall as Everest. Good luck with building in the death zone though.
Building a fake wall as high as Everest would be incredibly, possibly prohibitively, expensive, but HBC’s idea to build an Everest-simulator is much cheaper. You have a series of rooms with decreasing pressure per room, and if someone has a medical condition, you can either re-pressurize, or send in rescue workers who are completely fresh.
If built, it might be the first real-world X-Men Danger Room.
I sort of misread the original post as having the goal of replacing the Everest climb, which it explicitly said might not be the goal.
That said, I don’t think the pressure chamber really helps with qualification, as it is your actual climbing ability that is necessary to qualify.
Of course, an Everest sized climbing wall would actually be harder than climbing Everest, assuming it is a standard, vertical wall.
Uh, not to be a jerk but, re-read my post?
What I am trying to convey is that if you want to simulate Everest (in hypothetical world), build simulated versions of actual Everest topography in the largest low-pressure chambers ever devised. I believe that the actual ascent of Everest, even in the death zone, is broken into climbs followed by rests. Simulate the climbs and use the rests to reposition the participants for the next climb.
So we just need to add a few hundred meters onto K2; should be pretty simple.
Crazy idea: why not build it on the actual Everest? We don’t need to make it “as hard” as the real deal – quite the opposite (plus, less chance of getting sued).
I’m thinking this might take pressure off Everest, by making it totally uncool to climb, regardless of height. True, we might attract even more people who’d never actually attempt the real deal, but fancy their chances on the climbing wall.
To avoid this, we must endeavour to make the experience miserable in all respects, with long lines, bland, expensive food and not enough toilets.
Just build a gift shop at the summit and be done with it.
Places with gift shops are never packed…
“Gift shop” signals “easy place for tourists to wander into.” How excited would people be about “conquering Everest” if there’s a gift shop and maybe a concessions stand at the top?
Disney already did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_Everest
It’s an impressive piece of imagineering, as I discovered on our recent trip to Disney World.
Do you really need the whole wall to be there at once?
Why not put on of those treadmill rock walls inside an airliner, and ask the pilots to match your simulated height?
I don’t know about *need*. I think a full scale climbing wall is much cooler. Also, any of the cheaper versions don’t have the view from the top.
If you want the details of Everest, then you do want something better than a treadmill.
If you want something relatively sensible, you could have a series of walls– you climb one, then you have a elevator to take you to the next wall. Each room has suitable temperature and air pressure.
I was going to say a down elevator, but you’d use up elevators when you do the whole thing in reverse to finish.
You keep saying climbing wall. I don’t think that’s an accurate way to describe something that mimicked Everest.
It’s a mountain, there are sections that require climbing, but most of it is hiking. Some sections of the trail are quite steep, but still you’d hike up the trail, not climb it like a wall.
Yeah. What you want is a really steep indoor ski-slope/ wind tunnel.
Any skiiers/mountaineers here know if you could reasonably cut or kick steps in indoor snow?
https://andy-kirkpatrick.com/blog/view/everest_sucking_on_the_barrel
Shares for Andrew Yang’s victory in the 2020 US election are currently trading around 14 cents on PredictIt (one cent on this market corresponds to a 1% probability of the event happening). It seem pretty clear (at least to me) that these odds are overestimated, and that there is some money to be made by betting as much as possible against it. I sadly can’t do so myself, because I’m not a US citizen, but from what I’ve seen, any US citizen could buy some shares and make a decent profit, even with the 5% withdrawal fee.
So, Americans of SSC, why don’t you short these shares ? Do you think Yang actually has such a high chance of winning ? Is there something weird about the order book or about the way the site works that can’t be seen without an account ? Is it too much effort for too little money given the bet limit and the fees ? Or did nobody notice the $20 bill that’s been lying on the ground for the past three days ?
@Hey,
I simply never heard of the “opportunity”, but even if I had I’m extremely wary of doing any financial transactions on-line.
Maybe consider a blockchain based coin, specifically Auger which was designed for prediction market betting.
I never used it personally, haven’t researched it and I’m specifically not recommending it. But I like the idea of a safe decentralized prediction market, if that is what it is.
Withdrawal fees, setting up another account, what’s the minimum purchase, any holding periods, when does this actually pay out, does this affect my taxes, will my purchases affect the actual trading price because volume is so low…
Honestly doesn’t even sound worth my time to research, but back-of-envelope.
Purchase Price: 86 cents
Return: 14 cents
Fee: 5 cents
Actual Return: 9 cents
Actual Return: 4.65%
So you’re talking about a 4.65% return at maximum, but that’s not over the course of a year. That’s at LEAST through November 2020, so the actual annualized return is less, and inflation is going to eat up a good chunk.
Yeah, I think I’ll just drink some mojitos and sit outside rather than going through the work to set up another account that’s inevitably going to be hacked.
OK, I file this under “too much effort for too little money”. I think the volume isn’t too low (the real limitation is the $850 per contract limit), but taxes, fees and inflation do take a very significant chunk of that money. Where did that 4.65% figure come from ?
You don’t need to wait until November 2020, right? You can sell it off when the price falls.
Of course, I ain’t doing it either.
Because I’m already too busy betting against Buttgieg…
Bet against both and you stand to make even more money and are arbitraged against the risk of either one actually winning.
Way ahead of you, except the other person I’m betting against is Elizabeth Warren.
And those two together have reached the maximum threshold of money I’m willing to spend betting on elections.
(partially) hedged?
Yeah. Arbitrage is incorrect here. Mea culpa.
I don’t believe in gambling or speculation. There’s a difference between investing, where you buy something with value and accept the possibility that it may decrease in value, and buying something just because you expect other people to bid up the price.
That’s also why I never got into cryptocurrency. I don’t have any actual use for owning Bitcoins, the only reason for me to buy them would be to try and time the market and unload them right before the price starts falling.
In that case it isn’t pure speculation, the shares have actual value : if you short shares now, even if every other trader suddenly stops trading tomorrow, you’ll end up getting a dollar from PredictIt for each share next November (unless Yang wins).
Obviously the shares have value in the sense that you can exchange them for money. But that’s a category which includes WoW gold and Dogecoin. It’s not value in the ordinary sense of the word, which is what I was talking about.
Which argument are you referring to exactly ? The efficient market hypothesis (if this was $20 lying on the ground, someone would already have picked it up), or the fat tail risk argument (the risk taken to get this bill is akin to picking pennies in front of a steamroller) ?
Prediction markets aren’t useful until you can lose millions of dollars on them.
I’ve shorted everyone, but Yang most of all. Every candidate gets supporters artificially increasing their odds, but I’m pretty sure Yang gets way more of that. I’m mad about the general election market; I shorted Yang at a measly 4%. Not that I’m losing money on the deal, even in the short term, because luckily there I shorted everyone about equally.
Am I correct in my hunch that shorting everyone makes sense only if a dutch book exists?
Technically no because it’s always possible that “none of the above” will win, but in practice there is often an actual dutch book for many-candidate predictit markets, where not only are you guaranteed a net win but you’re paid the guaranteed net part of your winnings up front immediately after completing your suite of bets–it is actual free money, protected mainly by interface friction.
An example of a non-dutch-book market where the winning move was to short everyone was Who will be put on the new $10 bill in 2016? Because a runaway hit musical being written about the existing face on the bill acted as a ridiculous little black swan.
So the limit is the number of man-hours it takes to find a dutch-bookable market, and limited maximum exploitation per person?
Sounds possible to scale up to the point where the free money lying around dries up.
If n unemployed people browse PredictIt all day, and agree to tell each other about any dutch books they find, shouldn’t they be able to each make almost n times as much money as they could individually?
Is there even any disadvantage, after making the largest dutch book you can, to telling the rest of the world about it?
PredictIt has an upper limit of $850 on any given bet. This makes it a fair bit of trouble to go to for a relatively small absolute return. I did make a little money last year betting that Hillary would not be indicted before April, and that Trump would be still be in office at the end of the year, but the odds I got those for were ridiculous — I think the opposition for the Trump bet was like 40% and for Hillary bet was like 25%, both obviously the result of partisans who were putting money on what they wanted to happen — but by the time I took the money out the result was pretty much just entertainment. Before I withdrew it, I did look around for any other sucker bets, since the 5% fee is for withdrawals, not for closing a bet, but didn’t see anything as obviously skewed as those two.
As a former semi-professional arbitrager of bets like these, I wouldn’t be skeptical at all. I have done virtually the same thing many times.
Bob Lazar was recently on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Anybody watch it? Did it move the needle for you at all?
Personally I’m experiencing some cognitive dissonance: I find Lazar to be very credible, but I just can’t buy his story.
The kicker for me was that there’s no evidence at all he went to Caltech or MIT. The government is powerful, but they’re not *that* powerful to erase all records. Given that he was in the bottom third of his high school class, the prior on him getting into MIT weren’t all that high to begin with.
If anything he said were remotely true, CIA goons would have suicided him already. They’ve done more for less. Instead he talks about how all his associates get IRS audits every year. That’s an inconvenience. Nothing more.
TL;DR: He’s full of shit.
Ask him who his friends and housemates were in college.
Who (in any context) is less credible than Lazar? I’m struggling to think of anyone.
@Well…,
I didn’t catch the podcast, and it wouldn’t have “moved the needle” so much as create one because I don’t know who Bob Lazar is.
I watched and couldn’t finish because it seemed so obvious to me he was lying.
To clarify why I think Lazar is credible: if there was a scientist trained in the things Lazar claims to have been trained in, I’d expect him to do and say the kind of things Lazar did and says. Plus, I dunno, watching him, aside from the outlandishness of his story, I just don’t get scammy BS vibes from him. He talks the way other scientists I’ve known or seen also talk, for the most part. If he’s full of BS, he’s doing a really good job at acting like someone who isn’t.
@chrisminor0008: I agree, the bit about erasing him from MIT/Caltech is hard to believe, but it doesn’t strike me as impossible. Lazar’s defense, that he doesn’t want to ask his former friends/roommates to vouch for him because it would cause bad things to happen to them if they came forward, is suspiciously convenient but also reasonable and understandable.
For me the biggest hurdle is just believing the US government had (has?) a bunch of alien spaceships hidden away that they were trying to reverse-engineer. And that these craft are apparently designed for small humanoids to operate. IF there’s life on other planets and IF it’s technologically advanced and IF it’s visited here and IF it’s somehow ceded or lost ivehicles to us (all nine craft, all secretly in the custody of the US government???), the notion that these life forms are basically shaped like small humans is just too ridiculous to swallow.
The life that’s from the other planets is not humanoid, but they long ago abducted/uplifted a few humans to work with locally. The spaceships we have are for the space humans.
Assume UFOs are fake but incorrect belief is scattered among the population at random, 1:1000. The smartest of those guys is still going to look smart and sound smart.
It’s amazing that he got along so well with everyone in college, both times, that there’s not one person he’s willing to get blackbagged by naming him as a roommate.
If he spent time at those schools, someone else who went there at a similar time would know the lingo and culture and events and he’d be able to talk about them.
Or that there wouldn’t be someone who came out in support of him despite the perceived risks. Actually, I would have expected someone to have done this already even if it weren’t true.
You’ve said you find him credible on the one hand, but his story is nuts on the other.
But your stated reasons for finding him credible are precisely the same ones you would use to judge that an actor is good at portraying a scientist. And there is very good reason to think that he might be, essentially, an actor, namely that there are enough gullible people out there that he can make a pretty good living doing so.
And his story is still nuts (at least what you’ve described, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of the guy and based on what you’ve said I have no interest in learning more).
So… I’m not sure what the conflict here is. The man’s a fraud and/or insane. Nothing else is even worth considering. (Unless there’s something major you’ve left out, but my priors strongly indicate there isn’t.)
I’m not a Bob Lazar or UFO expert; I knew who he was when I was a kid and could draw the spaceship he described from memory, and I’ve watched the Joe Rogan podcast with him — that’s it. I haven’t been interested in UFOs since I was about 12 years old. (The one lingering thread might be that I like to read realistic sci-fi novels set in space?)
Yes, he could be a very good actor portraying a scientist, but he would be not just a good actor but an extremely good and extremely dedicated one playing a long game that’s almost as long as his whole life: he did fiddle around with rocket engines since he was a kid, and he does currently own a business that sells scientific materials and equipment. Plus, the motive to lie like that is unclear although I suppose some people are just nuts in weird ways.
To me a more likely alternative explanation might be that he was indeed a scientist employed in a top-secret position but that he saw things, or was made to see things, that weren’t what they appeared to be (to him). During the Cold War the government did a lot of odd things in the name of beating the Russians at 5D chess. I wouldn’t be completely surprised if hiring scientists, making them think they were witnessing alien technologies, and then waiting for one of them to “leak” the info (which the Russians were paying attention to) was part of that playbook.
But you know there are frauds out there, lifelong ones, right? Joseph Smith, W.D. Fard Muhammad, Eric Von Daniken, Uri Geller, Alex Jones, etc. All of these people are/were highly authentic in appearance, and spent their entire adult lives convincing people to part with their money, precisely because they were so good at appearing authentic.
Nothing else you’ve mentioned makes me think that this is anything other than one of these cases.
I don’t think Bob Lazar ever asked anyone to part with their money, did he?
Ah fair that’s a meaningful difference.
Has he changed his story on the silly element 115 stuff over the years? The credibility of that seems to be a little lower now that we’ve made element 115 and it doesn’t seem to have any particular unexpected properties. Lower from an already incredibly low starting point, of course.
You mean that it’s been reported by the scientific establishment that 115 has no particular unexpected properties? I don’t have a world-class particle accelerator at home, neither do you, nor does anyone but the Russian-American team who made around 80 atoms of it (supposedly).
You can’t attack a conspiracy theory by saying that an obscure scientific experiment disproved it. If it did have superweapon or superanything properties, that’s the sort of thing that would be concealed.
It has been more specifically reported that “element 115”, aka muscovium, has a half-life of approximately 0.6 seconds for its most stable isotope. This is pretty much a deal-breaker for any claim that the United States Government has a secret stash of the stuff that it got from the Zeta Reticulans and that Bob Lazar spent even the length of a short coffee break studying at Area 51.
At the time Lazar started peddling his story, there was a sincere belief within the physics community that a confluence of nuclear symmetries would result in sn “island of stability“, where elements like 115 would be as insanely difficult to synthesize as any other transuranic element but would last for millions or billions of years if they existed at all. That made them an obvious hook for hanging dreams of superadvanced technology.
Now that we’ve acquired the ability to synthesize even minute quantities of these elements, and in academic laboratories in multiple countries, it has become clear that the “island of stability” is more of a submerged seamount, a cluster of elements that are only slightly less intensely radioactive and short-lived than their neigbors. And so Bob Lazar’s credibility, also, has sunk beneath the surface where it will not endure more than a few hundred milliseconds’ scrutiny.
Ah, I had not heard that. I’m surprised to find that this gives me a little twinge of sadness. I wasn’t counting on any particular “superadvanced technology”, but it seemed like a cool thing and scratched my itch for the universe being more interesting and surprising than I thought.
My thoughts as well.
Indeed, I was also saddened that the island of stability has turned out to be less than hoped. I wonder how long it will be before science fiction starts to finally sour on the trope of alien or far future technology using entirely new elements.
From WIRED:
https://www.wired.com/story/internet-made-dupes-cynics-of-us-all/
That roughly maps onto something I’ve said, that Twitter and Facebook were apps made by Ivy League kids for themselves and their dorm-mates, and they expected them to keep working the same way when they invited the whole world in to use them. Roger McNamee’s book “Zucked” gives a nice little history of Silicon Valley and it’s basically the same thing: a bunch of smart, conscientious nerds had themselves a little utopia with the early internet, and never considered that the social rules that made it work might not apply at larger scales. This was also Jaron Lanier’s lament about why everything horrible on the internet is now “free with ads”.
Ha ha. Said like someone who has never been to court.
Have you gone to court in a high-trust society?
Joke is obvious, but the US is normally considered a high-trust society, though not in the highest tier. In court… well, the cop’s word is gospel and yours is garbage.
Yeah, I have a high level of trust in the cop. 🙂
The last time I went though vore dire, it was obviously a frustrating experience for the prosecutor, because even the grey haired grandmothers from the sleepy well-off neighborhoods were asking pointed questions about the trustworthyness of cops. Especially undercover drugwarriors. (It didn’t help the prosecutor at all for there to be a cop rep seated in the courtroom who looked like a poster child of jacked and swol roid rage.) I learned later that that court burned through 3 panels before they managed to seat a jury.
One small but important change I would make is I would eliminate vore dire. It’s one of the major places where prosecutors corrupt justice.
I, in fact, have been in court for the purpose of testifying that the cop who accused me of fare-jumping was making an error of fact, and the judge promptly agreed that this was probably bullshit and asked me if I wanted to pursue the matter further or just have him dismiss the complaint on the spot.
But “judge finds that obvious lying cop is obviously lying, expresses this finding tactfully”, is not particularly newsworthy. And “judge and everyone else in the courtroom finds that obvious lying criminal is obviously lying”, is solidly in “dog bites man” territory. So beware of selection bias when it comes to determining, without actually spending a lot of time in court, that courts always believe the cop.
This is probably highly dependent on the court/judge, and different people are going to have very different experiences.
My personal anecdote is that an officer lied on the stand, in direct contradiction to his written report, and the judge opted to rely almost entirely on the “revised” version without regard to the discrepancy (I am not inferring this, the judge said it explicitly).
John, you’re an established expert in, I believe, multiple fields of endeavor. You have a high-level position at a major aerospace firm, not to mention a pilot’s license. I don’t know if the court knew any of this, but I’ll bet it shows and you came across as an Extremely Respectable Citizen. Most of those who come to court have none of that, and the judge doesn’t even look up as he repeats everything the cop said and proclaims us guilty.
Counterpoint: I’ve met John in person several times. He comes off as solidly average in terms of respectability. He’s too much of a nerd to make Extremely Respectable Citizen, I think.
Hi, my name is Lord High Techbro. I’m 31 and look somewhere between five and eight years younger, read as somewhere between deeply nerdy and cocky, and am just autistic enough to be a little out of place in normal society.
I have been in court on three occasions (traffic once, small claims twice [1]) In all three occasions I dressed like a sober professional, spoke to the judge politely and responsively, and came out extremely well. (Got the smallest possible penalty in traffic court when I was blatantly guilty and won both small claims cases.)
If your thesis is responsibility politics, the bar is not deeply respectable graybeard, it’s normal member of society, and it says more about you than it does John.
[1] Small claims court is amazing and I love it. For the record, I’m not a vexatious litigant; I sued a landlord once and defended my employer once.
I was a starving grad student at the time, IIRC, but yeah, this.
And there may be an element of “white privilege” in my ability to do so, but I’m fairly confident that what matters to a judge is “This person is/is not at least trying to respectfully adhere to the social norms appropriate to a court of law” more than “this person does/does not know how to tie a flawless half-Windsor”.
One time I went to court the judge didn’t even bother to look up from his papers before finding me guilty. Or anyone else, for that matter. Another time (for the same incident, but a different judge) the judge listened to my story, found me guilty, and told me I was lucky the other judge wasn’t there or I’d be going to Rikers’ (New York’s Rikers’ Island, a serious prison where I’d probably be killed the first day, for riding my bike on the sidewalk… rather than running into the cop who stepped into my path). Another time (this one in NJ) the judge told me explicitly that the ticket was sufficient evidence of my guilt. Maybe some of you can expect a fair process. But I’m as much a stereotypical techie as Andrew, and over 15 years older, and I’ve never seen it, and will never expect it.
“You may claim that it’s possible to pick up women in bars, but I have evidence on my side – every single one I’ve asked said no!”
I kid, I kid. But I’m pretty sure the thing about US courts being high trust is relative, not absolute.
I’m sure John is telling the truth about what happened. But if hundreds of judges are asking thousands of Johns if they want to pursue the matter further, where are the perjury convictions?
@brad: Almost impossible to secure due to proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt concerns, which is why I didn’t pursue the matter further. If i’d had a few days to spare, I probably could have arranged for the cop to get a stern talking-to by the judge and maybe another quiet one by his boss, is all.
stern talking-to by the judge and maybe another quiet one by his boss, is all.
If I, at my job, lie in a ticket or CR about something that affects a customer even indirectly, I will get “talking to” too, but it will not at all be comfortable or kind. The second time, I will probably get managed out. The third time, the “manage out” process would be “prompt”.
Why can’t cops and prosecutors manage to meet that bar?
Cops have unions. Powerful unions. Prosecutors, in most places, have apathetic voters who vaguely approve of their “tough on crime” shtick and then get bored and go away.
Dr. Schilling can’t take his tax dollars to a different police company very easily.
Crap, now I’m a libertarian in favor of a free market solution to policing.
Unless you just want cops to do the bidding of those who pay them directly, I think you have found your intractable problem.
And if the first clause is appealing, then you are in the market for mercs, not cops.
ETA: To be more charitable in argument, the hypothetical person being mistreated by a cop is never the customer.
My statement about customer impact is an artifact of the particular company I work for. I suspect that even things that don’t have customer impacts, if I had a couple of strikes of being “the guy who will lie to make my job easier”, I would be promptly managed out.
As to my question as to why cops and prosecutors can’t hit that bar, my question was rhetorical, I knew the reason, it’s the reason that John stated. It was intended to make apologists either have to try harder to steelman a defense of this cesspool, or at least have a moment of feelbadz.
That a cohort of different unions can all talk themselves into being ferocious defenders of some made up “workplace right” to *lie* by people who like to call themselves “sworn” because their recurring literal oaths to tell the truth, most such oaths now mere rubberstamps, that says a lot about many things, none of it good.
Ah, but if you lie to make your boss’s job easier (or make shareholders richer), then you get promoted.
Ah, but if you lie to make your boss’s job easier
Then I’m a terrible boss, because I’ve “recommended for termination” people who I caught exhibiting “lack of candor” that, if I had let it slide, would have made my job easier and made it easier to at least appear to have hit delivery goals.
I’ve seen other managers do the same, over my career. If someone will lie *for* you, then they also will lie *to* you, and they will lie *about* you.
I freely admit I’m lucky, in that the dynamic you describe is a real thing. At lower levels in large companies, in my own observations, that dynamic plays out in ways that can be very CW.
This sounds a lot like the system we have now. The cops just do the bidding of the state, because that’s who pays them. I’d much rather the cops work for me, personally, and write them a check, personally, than under the current system, where they are trained to see me not as their boss, but as an enemy combatant.
@Matt M:
You definitely don’t want to live somewhere the cops expect to be paid by you, the individual citizen. That’s every “bribery is how I make my living” dysfunctionally corrupt dystopia out there.
As to privately paid police, I think you will find that they rapidly devolve to exactly what we have now, with a side dish of “richest guys have de jure control of their own police force”.
If what you really mean is you want anCap, that is an entire system, not piecemeal, and you still won’t be the real customer when you get hassled by the cops.
I wish there was some party that wanted to disband cop unions and civil service rules as they apply to cops. Even if I wasn’t going to vote for that party for other reasons at least I might expect them to win occasionally and put in place my preferred policy on those issues. Alas there is no such party. The Republicans won’t rein them in because they’re cops and the Democrats won’t rein them in because because they’re public sector workers.
+1
I don’t know, I’ve sure seen a lot of people accept a lot of plainly wrong or at least questionable things at face value because they were shared on FB–like that stupid Momo thing. Presumably Twitter is the same way.
Hmmm.
Is it just me, or is it a very specific subset of the internet that is (turning into) a low-trust society?
One of the most recent entries in my “stuff I did online recently” ledger is: ordered a mic stand, paid for with online bank transfer. I am reasonably confident that the bank will execute my payment and that the ordered merchandise will arrive in a couple of days.
Overall, it seems a pretty high-trust environment situation.
What the article talks about is the seedy side of the internet: the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons. These are people who’ve built mega-companies based on the (not unfounded) assumption that normal rules don’t apply to them. Are we surprised that the systems they created aren’t particularly good at enforcing rules that lead to high-trust societies?
Less flippantly: the internet remains high-trust where it mostly replicates the kind of relationships and customs that you find offline. Whenever you get some Silly Valley joker with a wad of VC money burning a hole in his pocket proposing a “revolutionary, paradigm-changing model” or to “move fast and break things”, beating him with sticks is probably best for you, him and society at large.
I think the cash-for-goods market economy is going to be one of the highest-trust segments of any society, relatively speaking, because it basically can’t not be. “The merchant took my money and didn’t give me the stuff I paid for” is so blatantly, obviously, immediately fraudulent that this sort of untrustworthy actor is going to be cleared from the market in very short order, and selling grossly defective goods or paying with bounced checks won’t be tolerated much longer.
So if you’re saying the internet is a high-trust society because when you pay merchants money you get the merchandise you nominally specified, that’s a pretty low bar that’s just as easily cleared in any tourist-trap market in Tijuana.
What I’m saying is that the parts of the internet that need to be high trust, are, in fact. When I was starting to muck about with this whole internet business in the mid/late 90s that was a hope and dream, not a given.
That much of the rest of the internet is a wretched hive of scum and villainy shouldn’t surprise, because it was designed to be that way.
Agree. I think the internet is low-trust in areas where much of larger society is also low-trust.
People have low trust in unsolicited emails that purport to offer them something of great value. Of course, they also have low trust in people coming up to them on the streetcorner and offering to sell them snake oil for a bargain price. Or asking to borrow money with a solemn promise that they will totally take your address down and repay you with interest.
People have low trust in obtrusive advertising that promises to solve some sort of difficult and embarrassing medical problem. Of course, they also have low trust in low-budget 3 AM infomercials for the latest “wear this device and do nothing and you’re guaranteed to lose weight and look fantastic” device.
The internet just tends to deliver these sorts of unsolicited/low-trust messages at a higher rate than society at large does, and they’re often harder to avoid.
My thinking is that as long as you are a traditional customer, paying money for an actual service, things are mostly OK. The service provider has a lot of incentive to keep you happy. They may be tempted to offer less for more, but we’ve been dealing with that for a long time.
The problem comes when you are getting a service for free or “free”. Now suddenly the company either has to get money from you in round-about ways, or it has to get money from someone else entirely. And now the service provider’s motives and reasons to keep you happy become more complicated. Adding third parties (who by the way are the ones with the cold hard cash) just has to make you matter less in the relationship.
Re: the vidjagames thread elsewhere, you get additional problems when you are paying money for an actual service and the service provider tries to double-dip the cookie jar by adding on all the round-about crap. This erodes trust in even the traditional providers.
Hell yes. Apple and Google both – I paid for an Android phone; it uses/requires gmail which is a you-are-the-product “free” service. And Apple is running things on customer macs designed to serve those customers advertising … doubtless via an internet connection the customer is paying for.
And Amazon tries so hard to get me to buy “sponsored” products that I’m likely to abandon the effort to buy whatever I went there for. For that matter, even my bricks-n-mortar grocery store gets paid for “product placement”, such that what I actually want is hard to access or unavailable.
I recently had to walk away from an Amazon purchase because I could not get their UI to just charge my credit card instead of using credit card points.
It’s gotten bad enough where I am trying to de-Amazon my life the same way I try to de-Google it.
I’m not sure why you’d do that? I’m always telling my wife, just use the points, money is more fungible than Amazon credit.
Depends on the points. If they’re trying to get you to pay with points you earned on, say, a Chase Sapphire Preferred, then they’re only giving you about .8 cents/point, which is strictly worse than several other uses you could make of the same points. It’s about half the value you get if you transfer said points to Southwest and use them for air travel, which is a reliable use of those points, but certainly not the most you can get out of them. I think the travel reimbursement (using them as cash) is something like 1.25c/point.
Well that makes perfect sense. Afaik, our card just gives points for Amazon, with no other special way to redeem them.
Obviously I am not trying hard to de-Amazon my own life. Massive convenience is hard to walk away from.
Oh, right. What I wanted to include, but forgot when I was writing, is that this doesn’t apply to the Amazon credit card, which is I presume the one you have. That just gives Amazon credit, and it’s decent for regular spend, although not that great. I have one that only gets used for Amazon purchases, but that adds up for me. And yes, those are just fungible with cash.
I’m considering looking into getting one with better cash back rewards. But Amazon credit is pretty close to cash for us, while things like airline miles are largely irrelevant.
Fair enough. I was mostly pointing out that I would also walk away if Amazon was trying to make me pay with my Chase points. I can’t say exactly what the best cashback card is right now, but you’re not likely to get more than 2-2.1% from it, which is I think what the Amazon card gives on unbonused spend.
@Randy M
Assuming you don’t want to play games with categories or hop around for intro offers, your best bet is Citi Double Cash if you plan to put less than $20k/year on it or Alliant Cashback Visa Signature if you plan to put more than that on it.
I appreciate the follow up, brad.
The Internet is really the first time that the entire world can come together to form a community/society.
Which means it can only be high-trust to the extent that you automatically assume high-trust of everyone in the entire world. So long as you posit the existence of an outgroup, anywhere, that’s not worthy of your trust, and that has an internet connection, that means the internet itself can never be “high trust.”
That said, much like in real life, sub-communities of high trust can form. Here on SSC we trust each other reasonably well enough to show up to meetups, to solicit and follow advice, etc. We wouldn’t extent that same trust to the internet as a whole, and for good reason…
Wait, since when was the internet a high-trust society? After all, on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.
Hey! Don’t spoil it for the rest of us, m’kay?
True. But in the olden days, you could be pretty sure the person on the other end was a geek. You know, one of us.
@johan_larson,
As one data point I’m too old to be a “geek” (middle-aged blue-collar nerd am I!).
And except for about three posts to a Forum in the early 2000’s (which with dial-up took about an hour for me to view after I submitted one), I only began posting online late in 2015, and my internet usage before than was very little.
Are you older than Brian Kernighan? If not, you can’t be too old to be a geek.
Despite which, you are one of us.
Until some jerk with a camera doxxes you.
@Le Maistre Chat
Awww…
It doesn’t dox him. The picture doesn’t show his tag.
I just read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty since Georgism has made a resurgence within the econosphere and I was just curious to read about it from the horse’s mouth since so many smart people in history thought George nailed it.
Now, I think the case for some land value taxation makes sense on the moral grounds that George lays out, i.e. you’re entitled to the value you create yourself or through exchange thereby, but not to the value of land you did nothing to create (putting aside the wrinkle of recent purchasers of land). It also makes sense on economic efficiency grounds, viz., it can’t be moved, it’s got a vertical supply curve, yadda yadda. George says “viz” a lot in the book and now I’m doing it too. Pinky’s out!
However, I was surprised to see how far George goes with the theory underlying his proposals. The motivating question of the book is, why does there seem to be just as much poverty in the “progressive” world as there’s always been despite the enormous increase in productive power brought by industrialization? George’s explanation is that all of society’s productive increase gets sucked up into land prices, leaving nothing above subsistence for labor and capital. Why? Ricardo’s law of rent: “The rent of land is determined by the excess of its produce over that which the same application can secure from the least productive land in use.” Therefore wages will only go so high as the produce of free/marginal land, with any additional product of labor being captured by landlords as rent. And so we see wages highest in sparsely settled and developed places like San Francisco (ha!) vs. New York, which was itself a higher-wage environment than London.
So what I’m wondering is, what do modern Georgists make of the original theoretical basis for Georgism? Does the fact that America is not in fact a subsistence country ex-landlords make them walk it back, or try to reconcile it? Do modern economists still subscribe to some form of Ricardo’s law of rent?
I jotted down a lot more on the book but want to get to the point here.
[Not an economist, nor really a Georgist, though I see a point in it.]
Firstly, increase in productivity could have happened in all land, both productive and less productive, which could increase everyone’s income, not rather than rents. However, it’s likely that, in an absolute sense, the bulk of productivity increase goes to more productive land.
Secondly, while there has been an increase in the amount produced by a given land in the past centuries, an even bigger effect has been generating a given amount of products from a given amount of land with much less work. The rest of the people could then go to work in sectors other than agriculture.
Thirdly, the produce of a given amount of land is not a fixed value, even at a given level of technology. It depends on the number of farmers working the land. More farmers are “added” to a given tract of land as long as the market value of the labor of one farmer is less than the extra productivity achieved by one more farmer working the land. The landlord’s profit at n farmers will be (total product at n farmers)–n*(market-clearing wage of a farmer), whether the farmers are tenants or employees. The point where the marginal benefit of a worker is equal to his labor cost is reached much sooner on low-value land than on highly productive land, thus there will be a higher density of farmers on high-productivity land.
If a landlord rented out low-productivity land to n farmers, and high-productivity land of the same area to n farmers, then indeed, the difference between his profit from each land would be equal to the difference between the product of the two tracts of land when each is worked by n farmers. However, he can get even more profit by renting out the high-productivity land to perhaps 5n farmers. While the total value and profitability of the high-productivity land is much higher, the profit is divided among 5 times more farmers, so the ratio of profit to labor income is not necessarily higher than on the low-value land.
Really, a small parcel of high-productivity land should be compared to a large parcel of low-productivity land, each worked by one farmer, and probably producing a similar amount of total product. If productivity increases by 50% on both parcels, that doesn’t increase the difference between the productivity of the two parcels. Even if the productivity of the high-value land increases disproportionately for some reason, that means that it’s worth adding more workers to that land, and as a result some of the increased product goes to labor.
Assume that landowners hire farmers as employees. If the prevailing wages were low enough that adding more farmers to some farmland increases its product in excess of a farmer’s wage, then landowners would compete for farmers, and the demand would push their wages up. If landowners rent out their land, the equivalent process is that individual landowners can achieve higher profit by dividing their land into smaller parcels and renting to more tenants; then competition between landlords for tenants pushes rents down. In societies where agriculture was a large part of the economy, this effect may have been important in determining farmers’ income.
Those are interesting considerations, especially the first one. If productivity improvements are consistently raising the productivity of even marginal land, then labor and capital would capture some of that. I think George would argue that this would just cause ever more marginal land to be utilized, bringing labor’s share back down in equilibrium.
The moral argument holds no real weight, if I don’t have a right to the land I am working why would the government have a right to it?
That’s been one of my objections to the Georgist argument. The fundamental moral problem with ownership of unproduced resources is how anyone gets it, and the conclusion would seem to be that such resources are a commons–nobody gets to exclude anyone.
Having my front yard or my wheatfield a commons raises some serious practical problems. I discuss one way around the problem in a chapter of the third edition of my first book, but I don’t find it very satisfactory, just less unsatisfactory than alternative solutions.
Anarchism raises very serious practical problems in settlements larger and more specialized than medieval Iceland had. Given the need for a state and taxation, do you consider a land tax the best tax to fund one with?
I don’t think I agree with you on what raises problems with anarchism. The two most serious problems I see with my version are the risk of cartelization–rights enforcement agencies getting together to reinvent government for their own benefit—and the problem of defending against aggressive nations. I would expect both of those problems to decrease, not increase, with size.
That said, I agree that a tax on the site value of land is a relatively efficient way for the government to get money. The problem is finding a way of measuring site value that can’t be gamed by the people doing it or the people being taxed.
The land would not actually be owned by the government, but most of the rent of the unimproved land would be taxed away to fund public services. Nobody created the land so why should its value accrue to private individuals instead of the public as represented by the government?
Part of the moral argument stems from the theoretical claim that land rents absorb excess production above subsistence level. I’m more interested in that claim than in relitigating Locke.
In this situation the ability to tax is functionally a form of ownership.
The public is made out of private individuals, and people do not benefit equally from public services. When you tax you are transferring from one private person to another or to many, calling one the ‘public’ doesn’t shift this.
Really I am just looking to talk about the “land eats everything” claim, not the morality of land ownership stuff which I now sincerely regret mentioning as an aside.
Bug report: If you start a reply to a comment, then click “Hide” on that comment, the reply box will be hidden but the comments below it will not be.
I am considering buying an engagement ring online. Is there a reason this is a bad idea?
I guess for a purchase this large it’s something you might typically inspect in-person, but the thing is, I know absolutely nothing about jewelry or diamonds or whatever. And I’d be buying from a respectable and reputable company so I don’t think there’s much risk of it being a giant scam or whatever. I feel like I’m just as likely to get scammed in person, given my complete lack of knowledge on the topic (and little desire to learn).
Educate yourself, then buy. You can petition either Paypal or your bank to reimburse you if there’s any fraud on the part of the person who takes your money. I bank with Chase and they’re very generous about account holders’s fraud claims.
If you get scammed because you didn’t know what all to ask the jewelry company, that’s on you. Whether you visually inspected the product or not, that would be the case.
The thing you are buying is more-or-less defined by how it looks (assuming that, as you say, the place is reputable and you’re not getting cubic zirconium passed off as diamond). I know only an interested amateur’s amount about jewelry, but even without much expertise most people can look at a piece and see if it looks cloudy due to inclusions, or has obvious dark spots due to cut angle problems, etc. Basically, if it doesn’t “look nice” (but you know it’s really a diamond) you don’t need to know the reasons why it doesn’t look nice in order to say “no thanks, show me something else.” So that’s one reason to inspect before you buy.
A second reason to use a brick-and-mortar is that jewelry tends to require a rather surprising amount of upkeep. Setting prongs get bent, cheap-but-attractive diamond chips get knocked out, etc. A regular jeweler will be able to do that stuff for you, sometimes for free, as part of the cost of the ring. Or if not, at least you’ve researched a reputable place for repair at the same time as finding your purchase place. It’s like servicing your car at the dealer – at least you know where to take it, and you know they’re a baseline level of competent, even if Joe’s Automotive might be cheaper.
Finally, if you want anything custom, you’re going to want to work with a jeweler. You can custom-design rings online, but it really does help to be able to examine examples and consult with a knowledgeable person if you want to consider various setting or band options.
One thing I did as a sort of compromise was purchasing my wife’s stone separately at a hybrid retail/wholesale jeweler, then going to a higher-end place to design the ring and set the stone. That’s where I go now for repairs. I got a pretty fair deal on a stone I was happy with, and the ring design worked well.
EDIT: Congratulations by the way!
EDIT 2: I should add that I have ordered jewelry online from reputable places and have had about 80% positive experiences. So I’m not saying you’ll regret it, but this ring is larger and more special than most pieces, so I’d lean more towards looking in person.
We got ours online and it worked out just fine. Just make sure it has a return policy: we had to send the first back for not being quite as expected and then the 2nd one was what we wanted.
I went to a brick-and-mortar jewelry store when I was thinking of engaging my wife. A salesperson sat down and taught me about the 4 Cs[*] etc., and did not try to pressure me into buying anything. (I don’t know, but I sense this lack of pressure sales in the jewelry sales business is becoming increasingly common.) I then took that knowledge and bought my wife (then-fiance) a ring online.
But, a piece of advice based on my experience: unless your fiance is very materialistic and has been very specific about what she wants, don’t go too crazy over an engagement ring, or the wedding ring either for that matter. Make sure you get a metal she’s not allergic to, and that she likes the way the ring looks. Beyond that, it’s not a great investment; rings wear out, they get lost, and tastes change. I ended up replacing my wife’s wedding ring because after a few years she developed an allergy to the metal used in the one I put on her finger when we got married, plus later on I had a better job and more money to work with. Take that money you saved and spend it on a nicer honeymoon, or put it in a retirement account, or use it to make having kids feel a bit less expensive.
*The 4 Cs are a set of heuristics used to evaluate diamonds. I think they comrpise color, clarity, cut, and carat (a.k.a size).
I’m married, and pointed the Tomcat to 90% off diamond rings at Sears. The one I got was appraised for homeowner’s insurance at most of the pre-markdown sticker price. Note that it was not a solitaire, which is the DeBeers-approved only correct engagement ring.
So rings aren’t always a bad investment.
Ever tried to sell one?
Well, no. 🙁
“Investment” probably was not exactly the word you meant, I’m sure you weren’t suggesting that you’re hoping to sell yours later for a big return or something. But jewelry, and diamonds particularly, generally don’t appreciate and are kind of famously hard to sell.
My understanding is that gold and diamonds are sometimes a good investment, but much less so when they’re in the form of jewelry.
I would expect gold to hold up better than diamonds.
The price of gold is supported by the consensus that it is a pretty metal, which could change but historically has been pretty stable.
The price of diamonds is supported by the consensus that they are pretty rocks, and that rocks indistinguishable from them that are made by science are totally not the same. And science has been getting pretty good press lately.
Also that pretty girls will not have sex with you unless you give them one of this specific sort of pretty rock, and the advertising that has traditionally made this kind of sort of true has been getting pretty bad press lately. Gold has a somewhat broader user base in the decorative arts.
Gold is also more fungible than diamonds, in that a karat of gold is a karat of gold regardless of color, cut, or clarity and you don’t need a complex negotiation involving a trained professional to determine how much your collection of Krugerrands ought to sell for. If you’re going to bet any part of your financial future on your ability to sell your stockpiled shiny at need, gold is almost certainly a safer bet.
This is totally correct. Adorn your wife in plain gold with confidence!
My dad did that and I never heard a complaint.
It all makes sense now! The criticism of pick-up arts is secretly sponsored by De Beers.
This has always confused me because gold and diamonds have industrial uses too. I guess I find it bizarre that aesthetic qualities alone can so enduringly endow materials with value.
The psychology of gold makes it a terrible investment, generally. The idea of buying gold occurs to people when the world is full of (financial) fears, and thus they all bid up the price at the same time, then when the world is in a less fearful frame of mind, a bunch of that gold gets sold off again at a loss, and the rest just sits behind locks earning no return.
In order to actually make money in the gold market, you have to buy gold when the world entire is full of confidence and yelling at you to invest in Hot. New. Thing! and then 3 years later, when everyone is talking about fiat currency turning into the new toilet paper, you need to liquidate your entire gold stock, and buy fiat currency, or perhaps, stock in toilet paper manufacturing. Something boring and stable.
The number of people that bloody-mindedly contrarian is really, really low.
If you like the way gold jewelry looks, by all means, buy some. Do not think of it as an investment. It is decoration.
Gold prices fell in 2008.
There is an increase in buying when the market is down, but when firms need liquidity, they start selling their assets. Credit was tight during the Great Recession, so lots of assets had to be sold at below value.
Sorry, having weird issues with the quote feature again. What I meant to say, below the quote, was that I travel in circles with a lot of gold bugs, and I really don’t know anyone whose investment thesis for gold is anything like “I expect gold will return 7% per year, while the S&P will only return 5% per year” or anything remotely like that.
People buy gold mainly as an insurance policy against a hyperinflation, or other general SHTF scenario. It’s a tangible way to bet on the government/the fed behaving irresponsibly.
The diamonds that have industrial uses are relatively cheap, common, and aesthetically unappealing, and have almost no overlap with the gem-quality diamonds under discussion here. They are not interchangeable in practice.
Gold is gold, and if your old bling is more useful as an oxidation-resistant contact surface on an electronic component, or vice versa, that’s a straightforward and reversible substitution.
Gold fell in in 2008 (technically it gained a tiny amount in 2008), but that is largely end point selection, the S&P 500 hit 5 year lows at the end of 2008 and gold hit lows 14 month lows at its bottom point and was back up at August 2008 levels at the close of the year. You only took losses in gold due to the crisis if you bought between spet 2007 and august 2008 and were forced to sell between september 2008 and early december 2008.
If you were leveraged and forced to sell that is the nature of leverage, not the underlying asset. If you held gold and were forced to sell bit by bit to cover expenses due to job loss or a hampered income stream then you likely did fine to well overall (as long as you didn’t buy in one lump at a particularly high point). This can’t be said of stocks during this period, if you were selling bits and pieces of your S&P holdings for after the crisis began you were selling at pre 2004 prices well into 2010.
This is the hedge factor that gold provided during the last crisis, and why it needs to be a part of your portfolio and not as a desperate switch as the next crisis becomes evident.
I did the same thing as you. Talking to a salesperson was really helpful since I’d never bought any sort of jewelry, and it’s hard to picture what, say, a 0.5 carat stone looks like and how it compares to the size of a finger when all you’ve got to go on is an image on a screen. But buying online was cheaper and easier.
I’m in the same boat as you, I’m planning to pop the question in late august. I’ve heard carat and cut are what people focus on the most. and imperfect color isn’t noticeable except by professionals.
One thing to look into, is a Moissanite stone
Just as durable
Higher index of refraction
Price isn’t artificially inflated by De Beers
No ethical issues
Looks just like a diamond
Also, just abandoning diamonds and getting any old ring you like.
We went with a non-traditional stone. In my case it was sapphire, but really any hard gem (other than emerald, partly for reasons of wear, partly for reasons of cost) can be a great choice. I preferred that to a diamond substitute, which can sometimes suffer in the comparison.
The engagement ring I bought for Betty was a Tsavorite.
It’s a lovely mineral and usually has fewer inclusion problems than emerald carat-for-carat, but have you had any trouble with wear and tear? If I recall correctly, it’s even softer than emerald.
Unfortunately the ring eventually got lost, so I don’t have long term evidence. Tsavorite is 6.5-7.5 on the Mohs scale, Emerald 7.5-8, so Tsavorite is softer but not soft.
On the other hand, Emerald is fragile, so I would expect more risk over time than with Tsavorite.
+1. My wife just wanted a shiny rock on her ring and was very happy with the Moissanite I picked out.
Two minor quibbles:
– My understanding is that Moissanites are slightly less durable (on the scale of decades I think you’re more likely to get scratches/etc.).
– I think experts can visually distinguish them, even with the naked eye. Moissanites are a little too perfect and are also more ‘fiery’ than diamonds. My wife got a couple over-the-top comments about how fiery/sparkly/etc her ring was, we were guessing one or two of those people were guessing what it was.
Been way to long since I bought a diamond to have any meaningful advice, but congratulations!
Ditto, congrats Matt M!
Aye, congratulations!
Congratulations!
@Matt M,
I’ve no advice on rings, but congrats and best wishes!
IIRC, there are 2 major online sellers that can get you industrial-made diamonds. My understanding is that these are basically indistinguishable from “real” diamonds. They are also, from memory, substantially less expensive (something like 30-40% less expensive).
1. You need to know what your bride-to-be would like, because there are a bunch of different designs.
2. Price generally increases non-linearly when crossing the 1 carat threshold. IE, going from .99 to 1.01 carat is, like, 30% more (can’t remember exactly what it is).
3. Cut. Some girls really like the Princess Cut, yours might be one of them. Round Brilliant is the traditional diamond cut and is mathematically optimized to maximize the “shiny.” I think it’s better, but this should be based on her preference.
4. Color. I don’t remember much about this one.
5. Clarity. You will pay a lot more for the highest clarity rating, unless it is artificial (again, my memory may be off). If you want to buy “Real” and go with maximum clarity, you will also want to buy maximum clarity for any OTHER future diamond purchases (like diamond earrings) because there is a major difference between the highest clarity rating and the other higher ranked ones.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of color? There is literally no difference between any SI and anything better than that VS, VVS, etc., unless you’re looking through a scope. SI means the inclusions are not visible to the naked eye.
Inclusions that cannot be seen individually will nonetheless substantially impact the overall brilliance of the gem, from what I understand. Even if I can’t see the individual dirt particles on my window, I know when it’s grimy and when it’s clean.
Congratulations! June really is the month of wedding (announcements) here on SSC! 😀
I got engaged without a ring and then we paid to have a stone from her (deceased) grandmother’s engagement ring reset into a new fitting (her idea). Not possible for everyone, but a good way to have the ring mean something without spending a ton on it.
I used my grandmother’s engagement ring/stone. She had the orignal stone set in a more modern white gold ring in the 70s. I dont think either of us would have chosen a diamond if it wasnt for the sentimental value.
I made our wedding bands from Iridium.
So I went through this about a year and a half ago – I made sure my fiancee signed off on the ring. This takes the surprise out for most people, but since she’s the one wearing it, I wanted to make sure she was ok with it.
If you’re ok with that, I’d suggest you do the same. Most online purchases do come with a money back guarantee (minus shipping), so stay away from those that don’t
How much does your fiancee want to be involved? Mine “happened to have” a pinterest board of rings she liked. This let her be “surprised” by the fact of the proposal, and the specific ring, while still having it be in the right general style.
I wouldn’t worry too much about scams, especially if you’re ordering from somewhere that does a bunch of business / has a physical retail store somewhere. An Etsy seller might flake out. But Leigh Jay & Co isn’t going to burn their relationship with visa so they can steal a consumer-order’s worth of money.
If you’re not going for a surprise, you can get a bunch of costume jewelry off of Amazon for cheap.
The advantage here is that you can try it on and see what style you like. I did this when figuring out how thick of a band I wanted. (And ultimately decided that a tungsten carbide placeholder looked the way I wanted, and wasn’t something I worried about losing)
I ordered online – I ensured that it had a good reputation and a good return policy (in the event the ring in person wasn’t what looked good online). We did have to get the ring re-sized by a jeweler afterwards which was included when we bought our bands direct from a jeweler.
I got my ring from a local jewelry store, since I’m too paranoid and far too picky to buy expensive jewelry online. This may or may not be useful, but here are some alternatives to consider:
1. Try local jewelry stores, preferably ones that are family-owned. I found several family-owned jewelry stores that had competitive prices on engagement rings. Some of them even had pre-owned bands, which looked to be in like new condition and were much cheaper than the new bands.
2. Pop the question with a cheap stand-in ring and then have your girlfriend pick the real ring and wedding band out herself. This saves you stress and hassle, and also gives your girlfriend a sentimental substitute ring for times when she can’t wear the expensive ring. (I’ve heard there are women who would not like this option, though their reasoning baffles me. It’s all the excitement of a surprise proposal, but without the anxiety of spending hundreds/thousands of dollars on a ring she hasn’t seen. I trust you know your girlfriend well enough to tell if this is a good idea or not.)
We got our engagement ring online and were very happy with the experience. This was 2002, so a quite different Internet, but still, it worked out well for us to get a better deal on a less-typical cut of diamond, and a setting more in keeping with my wife’s aesthetic preferences, than we could have gotten at a local store.
> Is there a reason this is a bad idea?
You mean other than engagement rings being a scam invented in living memory?
My wife and I chose not to exchange rings, not because we couldn’t, but because the whole idea is just designed to make other people rich.
That does not appear to be the case. Engagement rings are mentioned, among other places, in the mid-seventh century Visigothic code. See the relevant Wikipedia article.
Early in the Bible, Rebekah is given a gold nose ring and some other jewelry when she becomes engaged to Isaac. I’d say the basic idea of giving the bride-to-be some expensive token of commitment/demonstration of value goes very far back, although I’m sure the detail where it specifically needs to be a diamond ring is more recent.
Probably unrelated, because these diamonds are not as popular or pretty, but carbonados possibly originate from exploding supernova (or at least extraterrestial source; epistemic status: I don’t want to learn the truth, since it will probably ruin the story).
I had a couple of app ideas I wanted to run by everyone before I put any work into it… I’m a fair hand with Java so I would be building it on android.
a Chess game with RPG elements, You gain experience points and gold by playing the game, and you use choose starting position and buy new pieces with gold. new pieces are unlocked as you gain Exp.
This idea seems like a ton of work… I wouldn’t be able to do this without significant financial investment. 90% sure its not worth it.
An app where people can, using a QR code, take photos and seamlessly uploaded to a cloud server. So for a concert, wedding, or other event, you use the QR code (or regular text code) as you walk in and have access to all the photos taken at the event. Maybe a moderation option and a voting system for very large events.
This idea seems much more doable/practical.. Thoughts?
Are you familiar with The Duke or For the Crown or Onitama?
These are board games, not apps, but they offer some variability to a chess like game that may inspire you.
first one: seems like it could work. Puzzle Quest did something similar and did it well.
They even had a novel crafting system based on the same: want to make a ridiculously awesome item? sure but it’ll take actual skill. You could do the same with chess puzzles. that there’s big databases of chess puzzles graded by difficulty works to your advantage.
Second one, 2 big problems.
1: nobody except marketing people have ever seen a QR code stamped on anything and gone “I must scan that!”…. ever.
2: for the intended use you’re gonna struggle to get over the initial hump: the one where nobody bothers with your app because there’s no content and there’s no content because nobody bothers with your app.
people already share their photos through their favorite social network.
That’s a really good point. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I’m thinking now to move to a 5 letter code.. The shared albums will only need to exist for the duration of the event + a little extra so I imagine the room codes can be reused to keep complexity down.
Can you elaborate on this? What you’re saying makes sense for social media, but what I’m talking about is a temporary content hosting site.
You’re at a wedding and there is a sign/text/announcement that says “Download APP and enter code ABCD to see/access Jack & Jill’s wedding photos in real time, without an account.”
The app would also explicitly and clearly asks permission to automatically upload all photos taken over the course of the event.
Most people won’t download every app they’re prompted to download.
For a wedding though they’re likely already mostly on the same social network like facebook.
Grandma barely copes with facebook as it is. She’s scared of technology and there’s no way in hell she’s gonna download an app and learn how to use it just for this one event.
So any photos she takes are going up on facebook.
So right off the bat you have a huge factor pulling everyone else to just use facebook for swapping the photos.
Also people rarely want auto-upload. They want to be able to select the photos where they or the person they’re interested in looks good and are gonna be afraid of accidentally leaving it turned on and sending photos they don’t intend to send to grandma.
Also curious whether such an app might suffer bugs from desynced clocks. if I don’t have geolocations turned on and my clock is wrong it might decide the photos I took last night with my girlfriend are event photos from today and auto-send them to grandma and everyone we know.
*chuckle* I know what you mean, but an awful lot of the over 60s of my acquaintance were on social media before facebook and don’t especially like it, if they use it at all. They have concerns about privacy, and click bait, and algorithms that don’t show them the updates they want to see.
My own mother – who would have been 83 this month – never properly adapted to GUIs – she could handle command line, but with no scrollback to see what she or someone else had done, she just got confused and frustrated.
my mother was a fortran programmer and computer operator back in the days when part of the job was inferring whether something had gone wrong with the milti-story machine from the patterns of blinking lights, watching for infinite loops as you walked around inside and she’s an extremely smart woman.
But she similarly struggles with newer email clients and apps.
Yeah. I’ve found it very difficult to explain to my parents that sometimes you simply won’t see a post that I make, and it’s not because I’m blocking you or hiding it from you or because you’re doing something wrong on Facebook… it’s just because Facebook has a weird black box that sometimes decides you don’t really want to see my last post, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to force them to cut it out.
I think they don’t believe me. They insist that can’t possibly be true because “Why would Facebook do that?”
Which is a great question. I hate the transition from simple systems with easy to understand rules to black boxes that try to be smart and predict what I want. When I need something slightly different from what it thinks I want, I can’t reason with it or about it—I just have to route around it.
Because they don’t want my business. But they haven’t figured that out yet.
The first idea has been tried before. For example – this old flash game
It isn’t a good time to do so either as you’ll be facing the new DoTA Chess Apps.
Not sure why you’d think it’ll be that hard though.
Second idea – I’m not sure what you mean by it, but still probably done before.
QR codes can point to an URL, and when QR codes were more ubiquitous, some landmarks had their name/info markers contain a QR code that lead them to a site with either more info or a sort of virtual tour guide that played an audio desc. of that landmark.
It’s not that the chessRPG idea is that hard… but it seems like it would be too much work for it to be done in my spare time and without injecting too much starting capital. Getting the chess engine, multiplayer, graphics, playtesting and then possibly advertising, and long term gameplay balance seems like it would be a fulltime job
A cloud based, shared photo album accessible via
QR codeAlpha-numeric code seems like the kind of project that I build a working prototype of in 50-100 hours or so. I would be targeting it for use at weddings or birthdays and usable without a login, where you have a large number of people that you may not know personally, but would want to have a shared photo album. I might not know the bride’s great-aunt Sally, but if she takes a nice picture of the wedding, I might like to have access to it.edit: Also, good point about the DoTA chess apps.. I wasn’t really aware of them.
Generally speaking, it’s a financially terrible idea to make a game. Almost all games make negative money and languish forever on page ~infinity of their relevant store, ie Steam, Google Play, the iOS app store, or whatever. When it comes down to it, game quality has very little to do with success, which is determined primarily by inscrutable ranking algorithms. You have to be either extremely lucky or a marketing genius to cover your costs.
That said, if you want to waste a bunch of time and money, I’d strongly recommend using an existing game engine rather than trying to build everything yourself. If you’re not experienced in graphics programming, entity/component systems, low level networking, performant serialization, etc, then you will be be reinventing a whole semi-trailer worth of wheels, many poorly. Being experienced with Java doesn’t mean you would be able to roll your own game engine ex nihilo in a reasonable timeframe.
I’d recommend Unity, which can build for Android (as well as for iOS, and ~every other common platform), and uses C# as the primary scripting language, which is almost exactly the same as Java syntactically. Other options include Unreal Engine, which is nicer looking out of the box but harder to learn and use, or Godot, which is a much less fully featured platform, but free and open source.
The problem with making a game as a financial investment is that there are a million and one people out there making games as passion projects and willing to take a loss on them to do it.
It’s kinda like how many men and more than a few women, somewhere between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five, will at some point end up thinking “hey, I should really open a bar!”
The digital coordination of arbitrary, ad hoc meatspace groups in a way that’s simple, fast, and flexible is an interesting problem. I think that’s a path worth taking, though I’m apathetic about the QR codes and photo sharing specifically.
Maybe that chess-rpg could work as a rogue-like?
For the first project, you should read resources about chess programming, like the ones linked in this forum post. Building a chess engine is doable in 3 to 6 months, if you do your homework and read about how to do it. If you do it correctly, you should then have a chess engine that can be changed fairly quickly to represent and play similar games. Then you can iterate the game in your engine, and see if you can get some fun gameplay going.
You can also get a chess board and some pieces, and start iterating on the gameplay right away. You probably need some skilled chess players that can tell you what gameplay is good and what stinks. I warn you, there are one million variants of chess already, and the only ones that are played in chess clubs for fun rather than for novelty are bughouse chess and bullet chess. The first is a 4 player variant, the second is blitz chess with ridiculously low time limits.
I like the second idea in theory, but I’m unclear on how it would work exactly. How are you getting the users’ photos? Are they installing your app and then using it to take pictures, as opposed to taking pictures with the default phone app and then manually adding them within your app? However you imagine this working, are you sure it can’t be done within a webapp? That would be way, way lower friction.
I can see it going 2 ways
1. Basically as you describe. a webapp similar to whats used for the “jackbox” games (rot13) wnpxobk.gi where you can punch in your 4 or 5 letter code and upload/download the event specific pictures.
Pro: Fast, Easy, low friction, People have to affirmatively upload the images so no risk of inappropriateness
Con: Images can’t be uploaded automatically for the event
2. An app that gets downloaded that shows the images from the event, when first downloaded it explicitly and clearly asks for permission to automatically upload all images taken for as long as you’re at the event, and, gives access to the event photo album
Pro: See the images load in real time, lots of images, downloads can be tracked and used to show best images
Cons: Risk of unintentional sharing, Risk of Trolling, A little bit more legwork to get the app.
The big advantage of the general idea, is that you can share and receive photos to a large group of people, you may not be friends with, without needing any sort of social media account.
I’m warming to the second option. The first one seems too high-friction to me – I think most people just take a shitload of pictures and then go weed out the bad ones hours/days later, and will have forgotten about the app by then. For the second one, obviously paranoid types might worry but I think a lot of people are okay giving access to the camera roll for an app that obviously uses it, especially if it doesn’t also try to get the contact list. “This app can access all of your pictures, but it will only upload the ones you take from 4-6pm within 500 yrds of 1234 Main St” doesn’t sound too scary.
How would it be monetized? If someone is paying directly (the event organizer presumably) I can see some people paying for it, but you have a big hill to climb for advertising and SEO. You might even target it specifically to wedding photographers as an add-on service they offer to the bride, rather than marketing it to the bride. If it’s paid for indirectly (ads and add-ons, e.g. printed photobooks) then I think you’d get a lot of users but might struggle to make it profitable – the decimal points on how big your cut is and how many people order might make or break it.
I’m thinking primarily banner ads. I would be doing this as a side project, in my spare time so my expenses would be pretty low. Just cloud storage and a web portal.. maybe $5/month?
I’m not looking to replace my income with this project, and a utility like this seems like something that would bring in a small steady profit for years while not requiring too much work after launch.
I am also thinking about having a “premium” service for wedding photographers where the album is branded with their advertising, and they have a consistent custom room code.
None of my apps are ad-supported so I’m talking out my butt here, but I’m worried about the costs. Best case scenario, the app is great and works well and people use it, so a wedding might have 50 people uploading 100 photos each, and then wanting to download everyone else’s, and they’re all super high-res, sounds like a lot more than pocket change for the hosting. And banner ad yields ain’t what they used to be… But I guess all I’m saying is, make sure the math adds up before you write any code, which you were probably going to do anyway. And with some kind of purchaseable stuff, like photo books or mugs or whatever, it might well work out.
I really appreciate your expertise here. I’m a decent programmer, but I’ve never done any work in data storage or app development, so the points you’re making are really helpful.
On your advice I ran the math and its definitely more than pocket change.
Assuming 50 people upload 100 photos each = 5000 photos
5000 photos @ 5mb each = 25,000 Mb or 25 Gb
50 people download 25 Gb of data each = 1000 Gb
1000 Gb downloaded by AWS ~ $900
I don’t imagine most people actually would take 100 pictures at a wedding or subsequently download 25 Gbs of data but its still a failure mode I’ll have to put more thought into.
No problem, it’s fun to spitball app ideas, but sadly I don’t know a ton about this either (don’t deal with paying for or economizing on bandwidth either professionally or in my off time). Maybe users pay for full resolution? Er, actually not, you’d need them to upload the full size pictures and then you’d be paying for the cpu cycles to resize. The more I think about this, the more it seems like it might be something the bride and groom just pay a flat $20 for beforehand (not super dissimilar from the old practice of buying a bunch of disposable film cameras and putting one on each table).
I have to recommend the webapp route. Context: We built a very similar product for a different use case. Homeowner calls insurance company, call center handler sends an SMS/email link that homeowner can click, which lets them download the app. Once installed the app guides the homeowner through taking pictures, and “just knows” which claim to upload the pictures to.
This worked but we ran into 3 main problems, in increasing severity:
1. Download sizes were an issue.
2. Getting the app to know which link was clicked prior to its installation is a mess. On android that’s straightforward enough (there’s a basically-undocumented API for this purpose, but it works), but on iOS, most methods (one of which was infamously called the “browser flip”) run afoul of Apple’s rules. They’re adamant that the app should work even if you never clicked such a link, and so we had to add a button for the sole purpose of adding photos to a claim no one else would ever actually see. We lost 4-5 weeks over the back and forth with reviewers (because if they don’t understand why you’re doing weird things, their feedback inevitably is “this feature should not be present at all” and so you have to password-guess your way to an app they’ll consider compliant).
3. One of our customers had to discontinue the pilot because about half their iOS-using customers (so about 25% of all the calls) did not remember their app store password and so could not install the app.
That last one made us rewrite the whole product as a mobile-web app, using input capture=camera, and a small-ish react web app.
You lose the ability to customize the camera flow (you get whatever default camera app is on the device), but:
1. The loading time is much lower (and launching involves fewer clicks).
2. The “claim/user identifier” is a uuid that’s part of the URL. Therefore the webpage already has all authentication information ready to go.
3. No one ever is asked for a password. You can easily re-click the link later if you need to add more images (and it will work just as well as the first time).
If you’re going to have people print QR codes, you don’t need the jackbox-style code approach at all. Just include the identifier in the URL.
One of my pet peeves is going to concerts and seeing the glow of everyone’s phones held up in the air the whole time. Same thing for conferences, where people are photographing every other slide. I understand taking a single photo, maybe as a cheeky way of saying “Guess where I am?” but why do people feel the need to experience the whole thing through their screens?? It’s distracting and annoying.
So, I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you not to develop an app that would further encourage this kind of behavior. (Although really it doesn’t matter; the ship has sailed, and as someone else said, people just post their crappy pics and videos to social media websites anyway.)
I hate that too, and I’m actually hoping that if people have real time access to photos and videos from the front row, they might be less inclined to try to zoom in from the nosebleeds.
I don’t know but if I had to guess, I’d say they won’t be less inclined to zoom in from the nosebleeds. Still guessing: taking your own pictures and posting them on social media websites is a way to boost your status, especially if other people share your post. “I was there for this thing” and “I will now wear this as a partial representation of my identity” are pretty alluring to people.
Yes. 100% accurate. You take the picture to either remind yourself of a cool event you were at, or to boast about being at a cool event to others. Taking your own picture is the point. Someone else’s picture, even if from a better view or whatever, is completely without value.
This is accurate.
I go to a lot of concerts, and although I don’t do a lot of photo taking (I’ll take one or two just to have something from the show) and don’t take any video it has never bothered me when other people have their phone out. I can still see/hear everything I need to, and it also means I can rest assured that the awesome rendition of [some awesome song] will almost definitely end up on Youtube for me to relive.
Of course, I also don’t understand why people get so bent about (silent) cell phone use at movies although I find it more understandable than the same concern at concerts…maybe I’m missing some gene that makes me outraged about phone use.
For me it’s 95% the annoying distraction, and it often obscures my line of sight as well.
The other 5% is the sad feeling I get thinking about the reasons why they’re holding up their phones.
Two things here: Snaps and video. People are going to take their own still photos no matter what. If concerts routinely put up well shot video after the fact, not so much point in recording the whole thing.
The second idea seems like “Facebook Moments” which used a GPS location / timestamp to figure out which people attended the same event. I think the problem is that people can be reluctant to install apps.
I had some ideas for MMORPG mechanics that I think are interesting and could be novel or semi-novel, so I thought I would post them here to see what you guys think (I don’t really play them, I played the Diablo series years ago and I might be way off in terms of how these games have progressed and what options are currently available). What I am interested in is the ability of the players to create a really rich world.
Idea #1: New character creation. So many games have classes of characters where each class has different maximum point levels. A warrior class might have a max of 100 strength and 50 magic, and a sorcerer class might have a max of 50 strength and 100 magic. In this game there would be a basic number of classes that you could start with but then you could create a hybrid character by mating a male and a female. Basic idea is if you mate a male and a female of different classes then you get an average of the two classes, with our example above you create a W/S character with 75 max strength and 75 max magic. However if you use a male and female of the same class then you get a boost to your top end stats, and a loss to your bottom end, so a warrior+warrior would then have offspring with 110 max strength and 40 max magic.
This can go on indefinitely, because each new hybrid is a new class, so you can combine a w/w with another w/w to create a class with 120 strength and 30 magic, or hybridize a w/w with a sorcerer and get a character with 80 strength and 70 magic. Each of these would then be a new class on its own.
There would also be breeding restrictions, conceptually every account would cost $ to set up, and each account could hold a reasonably large number of characters but there would be a ban on incest. No character could breed with another character of the same account. Then breeding has to occur across accounts, and part of the agreement to breed would be which account the new character would join. To add to this each female character could only breed once in a while, something like once a month it would reset and they could create another offspring, and the offspring’s starting level would be based on the level of their parents making higher level partners more desirable. My thought/hope is that this would create a market for pairing up and would work with other game mechanics that I have in mind.
I’m sure the typical MMORPG player would approach that concept with the maturity it deserved.
But seriously, that sounds better suited to a single player game. We recently discussed Massive Chalice, which is similar.
I’m interested why it sounds better for a single player game to you, one of the big aspects for me would be having so seek out other players and negotiate with them to create the bloodline that you want and creating long term alliances of trust (other aspects of the game play would make this part clearer).
What is the generational timespan? In a single player story game it’s easier to skip 30 years and get to the next iteration than in a game where everyone is moving along at their own pace. I guess you can gloss over that.
Secondly, you can have more control over the experiment in a single player game. You can control the breeding over many generations to get what you want, rather than, well, “having so seek out other players and negotiate with them.”
That said, I’d be interested to see more details.
I 100% agree with these reasons why a single-player game would be better.
Maybe gender imbalance in MMORPGs isn’t as bad now as it used to be, but you’re going to get an awful lot of IRL females really annoyed with gamer nerds aggressively demanding you mate with them. With the state of woke clickbait “journalism” being what it is, I fully expect all the usual suspects on twitter and youtube to condemn it as a “rape simulator.” Then again, free marketing.
You could go the reactionary marketing route or just make every player a hermaphrodite where your player can create a new player 1/X days by mating with another player, and also limiting how frequently you can impregnate (for lack of a better term) another player.
However my guess/intention with this is partially to shield female players, by giving female characters some extra value lots of male players should choose female characters which should (might?) stop some of the assumptions when you run into a female character.
Maybe this is an idea that would work better with pets (like pokemon!) than characters as such. What were the other mechanics you had in mind?
Some broad strokes, with some half thought out ideas.
1. Basic game play is a combination mining/fighting game with a traveling option. You can go off to areas with ghouls/demons etc and fight them and pick up what they drop, with the usual increasing difficulty as you get deeper into their territory with occasional bosses, or you can go off looking for resources deposits. For example if you come to a river you can pan for gold, and if there is gold a few pannings will give you an idea if there is a rich gold mine upstream or not (or in a well developed game you could tell how much gold was being washed down the river but not know if it was from one or many different sources and would only allow you to estimate the total value to be mined). The traveling option would be to go out and look around places and then sell that information to other players you happened across, if you ran across a mining character you could sell them the location where you found evidence of a gold vein etc, or a warrior directions to a caves mouth where demons lurked. You could optimize characters for any one role, or play ones that are jack of all trades or play multiple specialist characters (where the breeding comes in) and use them to explore specific areas.
2. The world is large and you’re first character is dropped into a random village/town setting. Each town has NPCs who can perform tasks for you, sell you goods etc and have limited knowledge of the surrounding area. You get a dark map to start with and every time you talk to an NPC with knowledge of an area it shows up on your map. The world is generally fixed so every time you play you can expand your vision of the world. You can also pay other players to see their maps (or you can exchange maps, or just let someone see your map to be nice).
3. The map is not the territory though. Roads on the map will be graded at the time you are walking on them, areas that are frequently walked will have few resources to find/demons to fight, but will also be safer/faster to travel. The grades will be based on certain fixed aspects like terrain (ie mountain roads are more dangerous/slower per mile) and also on how many people have traveled on them recently. The less a road is used the less safe it becomes, and perhaps even things like river crossings could be destroyed when you get to them.
4. There are two types of travel speed, one is active where you can look for things along the side of the road/fight/talk to other travelers, the other is passive where you cover the distance faster but can’t interact. The latter is only possible when your character level is high enough relative to the safety of the road, but also requires not playing that character for that period of time while they cross.
5. Stashes, exchanges and theft. The town you spawn in is your home town, and you get a location (house) there where you can stash your goods and they can’t be stolen. New characters that you create spawn under the same account spawn at this location, and stuff can be shared between them here (dropped off by one and picked up by another passing later). You can abandon your town and create a new stash location in any other town you come across as long as that new town isn’t full, creating a new permanent stash location for a cost of two way travel time (ie going back and bringing your stuff from your old stash) or just abandoning your old stash that can be looted by passing players.
Other stashes can be created as you move but these can be discovered and looted by other players, there will be methods of concealment and methods of breaking concealment. There will be two types of goods as well- commodities and personalized goods. Commodities will be common things with no tracking that can be exchanged freely, and are things like unrefined gold or basic weapons and tools etc. Personalized items are things like basic weapons imbued with powers and linked to the rightful owner. If you create a personalized weapon you can sell it and then the buyer becomes the rightful owner, however if you steal a personalized weapon then it is still linked to that owner and their character name. The rest isn’t fleshed out yet but it goes something like this: It is obvious if someone is trying to sell you their own item or a stolen one (for non commodities), if you are caught trying to sell a stolen item by the rightful owner then they can kill your character and loot their corpse and become the rightful owner of any of their personalized items. You can also give power or attorney to people, if one of your agents comes across someone selling your stolen goods they can kill and loot from that person- however their loot will not become legitimate until they return the stolen good to you. This section gets complicated and to make it work (ie so there is an equilibrium with some stealing but not just everyone stealing indiscriminately), I think you need rating systems where if someone offers you a stolen item from someone you aren’t an agent of and you refuse to buy it you can then flag them as selling stolen merchandise, and likewise if you have agents who get your stuff back and message you to meetup to return it and you never reply then your rating gets dinged and people won’t agree to be your agents.
I think if you built these features well into the game then the breeding aspect becomes useful, where really obsessed players could basically delve indefinitely deep into the game but without making it unplayable for newer or less obsessed players despite them existing in the same world.
You have my interest. 😛
One thing you would want to make sure you do is have hybrid classes not be garbage. In 9 out of 10 games the swordmage is worse than the swordsman or the mage.
@Conrad Honcho,
And that’s how it should be: “Jack of all trades, master of none”.
Besides, the old word for “Gish” was “Elf”, and there were level limits on them for a reason dagnabbit!
Also, magicians most properly belong on the end of a hero’s sword, there’s too many Elric’s and not enough Conan’s, Gandalf and Iucounu are NPC’s dagnabbit!
If you’re talking about a pen and paper RPG where it’s more about the story than min-maxing, that’s fine. But in a video game, if a swordsmage using their mix of swords and magery doesn’t do as much damage as a swordsman using his swords and a mage use his magic then nobody’s going to want the swordsmage in their party.
Source: played hunter in vanilla WoW.
@Conrad Honcho,
Good catch, thanks.
My mind defaults to pen & paper
I agree with this, I lay some more details out higher up but the way I hope the game would address this is by putting the character into a world that reveals itself to the player and the directions that they go would determine which skills are best. You could create just a warrior and go hunt demons but in doing so you would have to pass up resources along the way that a jack of all trades could pick up while being worse at fighting demons, but leveling as fast or faster perhaps.
One example would be to steal from Tolkien and the mines of Moria, if you create a mine the richer the vein the more likely your mine will be attacked by or expose demons living within. If your character is maxed for a miner every time you get flooded with demons you have retreat to the town and find someone to help you kill them or hire mercenaries or something.
On a side note- one thing I have always wanted in a game that lets you hire mercenaries is that the price should go up for people who walk them into death constantly, and lower for people who manage them well/take care of them.
I know that the Endless Sky community discussed whether to implement exactly the idea you are suggesting; I think they decided it would be ‘unfun’ though.
Guild Wars 1 had a class-combining mechanic. it was great, but I think I remember hearing that they moved away from it because it was too hard to balance the PvP. Maybe look into that for ideas?
After you get done breeding these characters, what do they do? Kill monsters, fight other players, something else? For a game like Diablo, the point of having variegated character classes is replayability, but it doesn’t sound like that will be part of your game if it takes a month to change your stats incrementally.
Described in more detail above, but fight monsters, mine/search for resources/travel and explore/steal from other players.
To add to the proposed issues:
People who pay for more subscriptions will have Bene Gesserit breeding programs that will seem (and seem likely to actually be) unfair.
That kind of sounds awesome.
As someone who has played MMOs all the way up to server-top guild, here is what I want in a game before I go back.
No Whack-A-Mole.
In fact, No Minigames Forced by the UI, Whatsoever.
A good experience in an mmo is a joint fight to overcome an adversary. However, in non trivial content, you usually end up with healers looking at peoples health bars to the exclusion of looking at the fight, dps being focused on maintaining complicated ability rotations to the exclusion of looking at the fight, and if the game has boss-fight mods, even the tank ends up looking at timers half the time to know when the next time the boss is going to use a great big special attack is coming up.
Thus: Here is what I want: No UI inside the game. You set your keybinds and mouse preferences before you log in, but in game, the UI is just a window into the world the art team has made. No health bars, no ability icons, Nothing. 100 % of screen real estate is the world.
Dps and healing abilities are all point and shoot. No target locks, if you want to heal someone you better actually hit that character with the Divine Beam of Healing Radiance. If you want to dps the boss, well, there is not going to be any floating numbers telling you how hard you hit, but the boss will have weakpoints and defenses. Hit the ogres shield, not going to notice that. Land a ray of incineration or arrow on the ogres left knee…
Goal here is to maximize actual fun by forcing both the design team and the players to focus on the imaginary world you are playing in. I want a game where no healer ever ends up dying because they were too buzy scanning the raid interface for people to heal to notice they are standing in fire.
However, in non trivial content, you usually end up with healers looking at peoples health bars to the exclusion of looking at the fight, dps being focused on maintaining complicated ability rotations to the exclusion of looking at the fight, and if the game has boss-fight mods, even the tank ends up looking at timers half the time to know when the next time the boss is going to use a great big special attack is coming up.
Seems realistic to me.
In the real world, in high-stakes coordinated small-team activities, the generally correct thing to do is “fly the instruments, not the window” and “stick to the runbook” and “keep track of the clock”.
This is true from things ranging from “save the passengers on this airplane after losing an engine” to “sev2 outage in AWS, get it back online” to well, actual military combat, so I am told.
Even high performance team sports, despite not being tech mediated with a glass UI, they are still playing out a decision-tree runbook in their heads, while physically executing “macros” out of muscle memory, while running healthbars and timers in their heads.
to notice they are standing in fire.
Also realistic. Losing situational awareness is a real thing.
It is terrible gameplay, because it makes you annoyed at your fellow players, not the pixel monster you are there to fight.
A close family member is a world class FFXIV player.
makes you annoyed at your fellow players
From what I can tell, that is the *point*. The pixel monster is just an excuse and part of the coordination exercise. The actual fun and the actual challenge is getting all the players on a team coordinated. Nobody cares about the pixel monster, they come to care (both positive and negative) about the other humans they raid with.
Reality rarely provides us with guidance as simple and authoritative as e.g. the health status bar in an online RPG (or for that matter the hit-point score in a tabletop one). Even a glideslope requires cross-checking the other instruments to make sure the one you are focused on isn’t lying to you, and then the glidescope gives way to “look out the window or give up already” at about 200′
And the objective here isn’t realism, but entertainment. Even if we’re looking for realistic entertainment, that almost always means cutting out a lot of material to get to the most entertaining subset of reality.
Because of the fuzzy nature of reality, humans are evolved to find exhilaration, excitement, entertainment, in holistically evaluating a broad sensorium to acquire situational awareness and develop imprecise responses to uncertain threats. Needle-chasing, not so much fun even when it is realistically necessary.
So I would not be surprised to find that game designers, who necessarily reduce their simulated reality to simple, quantified metrics like “health” within their engines, have generally presented an entertainment-suboptimal level of detail to the players via simplistic “instruments” rather than broad contextual clues. I find no fault in Thomas Jorgensen’s desire to see more of the latter.
I also have some idea how difficult it would be to implement effectively, alas.
In my experience, the game version of anything is much simpler than the real thing. The Rock Band guitar is an extreme simplification of a guitar. Also, games are set up to deliver a lot more ego-bumps than actual paxis or training. Practicing a martial art will see you leveling up formally every few months initially; playing a game will have you leveling up after a few hours of play.
MMOs also add the complication that everything worth doing is based on group performance, and therefore, there is a strong desire for mechanisms by which you can easily evaluate the performance of each and every individual in the group.
The reason people in MMOs concentrate on their damage rotation even while standing in the fire is because they know the group leader is judging them, primarily, based on their overall damage.
Part of this is simply a social attitude, that is already within the control of any particular group to change. I’ve been in some pretty successful WoW PUGs where the raid leader said, at the beginning, “For these fights, I don’t care how much damage you do, but if you die to something preventable, I will kick you.” This results in a whole lot more attention being paid to mechanics.
I feel like feedback like this is exactly why modern WoW content is so over-loaded with a crap-ton of gimmicky mechanics on every single boss fight, including ones where “a single person messes this up and you wipe.”
The simple fact of the matter is that yes, while healers will mostly be looking at their heal bars, a healer who isn’t aware of what’s going on in the fight isn’t going to do well, at all, in any remotely challenging content. “All you have to do is hit your rotation and ignore everything else” hasn’t been true, in WoW at least, for nearly a decade.
I enjoyed many aspects of MUDs much more than I’ve enjoyed most MMORPGs, and the need to focus on complex combat rotation mechanics is part of that. With many MUDs, most classes could simply attack the opponent – one action – and the game engine would keep them using effective combat moves until they did something else explicitly, or one or other combatant “died”. Healers often had to pay a bit more attention – but it was still repeating the same action, and sometimes one could get that effect by simply holding down a single key. (Other times, timing mattered, so as not to run out of spell points).
IMNSHO, online shared RPGs lost when technology and fashion advanced to the point where they became tactical combat games in an explore-and-level-up setting, rather than explore-and-level-up games that included combat. (And much the same happened to single player RPGs.)
The last good MMORPG I remember was Runescape, before they updated its combat system to make it into a poor imitation of World of Warcraft and similar.
Here in The Netherlands Shell has an action going where they let you to pay a little extra for each liter of fuel to compensate for the CO2 expelled from that fuel. They use the money to buy CO2 credits from various reforestation/forest protection charities equivalent to the amount of CO2 expelled in acquiring, transporting and finally burning the fuel.
The thing that got me was that they claim to be able to do this for 1 cent per liter. Does anyone know if this claim is remotely close to being plausible? I don’t know how CO2 credits are calculated exactly, but €0.01 sounds unreasonably low to me. Given that the fuel itself already costs €1,60-ish per liter, that would mean we would be able to completely zero out our CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by making everything 0.63% more expensive.
If that number is plausible, why the hell are we fiddling around with electric cars and sustainable energy sources instead of just making this process mandatory?
I’d guess it’s a matter of marginal improvements vs major ones. Right now, you can offset the CO2 released by a liter of fuel for a very low price by planting trees or improving the efficiency of a factory somewhere in Bangladesh. But there are only so many places you can plant trees, and so many factories in Bangladesh that run on boilers dating back to the 19th century. Once those cheap gains are all used up, the price starts going up. I’m sure David Friedman or someone else has better numbers for what it’s going to be if we’re trying to be Carbon-neutral.
(All of this assumes it’s not somehow subsidized, either by Shell to get people used to checking the “yes, I want to neutralize my carbon” box before they jack up the price or by the government in some way.)
A liter of gasoline produces somewhere around 2.3kg of CO2 emissions, so this translates to about €4.34 per metric ton of CO2. Most offsets I’m aware of cost more than that but not wildly more, e.g. Carbonfund.org charges $10/metric ton in the US and Terrapass charges $4.99 per short ton. I would question whether Shell is being as careful about “additionality” (i.e. a good answer to “would this reduction have happened anyway without us”) as other providers, but maybe they are and have got an unusually good volume discount going. Also, what bean said about picking low-hanging fruit is totally right; if everyone tried to offset their vehicles’ footprint either the marginal cost would shoot up or the additionality would get iffier.
I am studying quantum mechanics. (I did in college, but not much stuck.) I have a question about my intuition.
Here is one thing I understand: A single qubit can be in a state that is represented by a 2-by-1 vector. (I am going to represent them here as 1-by-2 vectors, because of the text medium.) The sum of the squares of the two elements must be one, so we have a vector pointing to a unit circle.
That visualization worked well while the two elements of the vector were real numbers. However, either of the two elements could be imaginary or complex. I tried to imagine a positive imaginary number rising up into the third dimension, and a negative imaginary number going underneath. But I have two numbers in my vector. So I would need to visualize 4 dimensions, which I don’t know how to do (yet?).
Is there some trick I could use here, or do I just need to abandon visualization and stick to symbolic interpretation?
Nobody can visualize four dimensions in the way that humans can visualize three dimensions (if someone tells you they can then they are just showing off, I have talked to fields medal winners about this, nobody can do it).
However, you don’t need to abandon visualization, but you do either have to get creative or stretch things a bit. One thing that helps is a place where you’re a little wrong: it’s not the sum of the squares of the complex numbers, but the sum of the squares of the *modulus* of the complex numbers, which you can picture as the length. So the question becomes simpler: “how do I picture a pair of positive numbers such that their sum is equal to 1?” Well that is simple, it’s just a point confined to the straight line y = 1 – x such that x and y are positive!
This picture has thrown away some information, namely the phase of the complex numbers. Note that this is not too bad, because we never get to measure the phase (in a manner of speaking), only the modulus. But we certainly want to think about the phase sometimes. So one thing you can do is:
Picture two arrows, one pointing along x axis and other along y.
Their lengths are equal to the modulus of the two complex coordinates in your wave function.
Now you COLOR in those arrows such that their color is equal to the phase of those complex coordinates. Phase varies over 2*pi (tau!), so it maps directly to the color wheel.
https://www.ibiblio.org/e-notes/webgl/gpu/schrodinger.htm Here’s a webpage where someone has done something kinda like this. I thiiiiiiink there’s meant to be a particle confined to the square, starting in the middle. Then we simulate its position, and for every point on the plane, we get the complex number corresponding to the probability of it being there, and then set the height of the surface to be the modulus of it being there, and we color based on the phase.
A lot of what Hamish said is right for unconstrained 4-dimensional spaces. But because of the constraint that the sum of the squared norms is equal to 1, this is a system with only three degrees of freedom. You can subsequently go down to two degrees of freedom once you notice the absolute values of the phases is not observable and only the difference is.
The best visualization tool I know of for a qubit is the Bloch sphere.
If it interests anyone I created this visualization of the sphere in 4 dimensions https://youtu.be/g5XWNwBJWeY but I don’t know if I’d recommend it for thinking about the sphere in C2
According to Scott Aaronson [link would be here if the post didn’t keep getting blocked], you can do practically all of quantum computing using only real numbers. Assuming your primary interest is QC, this suggests the possible solution of simply disregarding the imaginary axis. (But I’m just a symbol manipulation guy myself.)
I haven’t thought deeply about real number quantum computing so correct me if I’m wrong. But I’d imagine that converting from complex number QC to real number QC is more complex than just ignoring the imaginary parts.
Yeah, there are some things like that. But a lot of the most important stuff like Grover’s algorithm is already normally done with only real numbers.
Thank you for the responses. They will take some time to internalize.
I am also primarily interested in QC, so knowing that I can ignore some things is great, especially if I know I have left a big asterisk by them.
For single qubits there is a visualization called the Bloch sphere. It is a useful visualization because it gives you a way to physically interpret the state.
Every qubit state is the +1 eigenvector of the spin measured along some unit vector. So (1,0) is the +1 eigenvector of the spin the z-direction, and (1,1) is the +1 evec of the x-direction, etc.
To visualize, first write the qubit in the form (cos(θ/2), sin(θ/2)e^(iɸ)). You can make the first component real by multiplying the whole vector by a complex phase, which does not change the state. This state is then the +1 evec of the unit vector (sinθcosɸ, sinθsinɸ, cosθ), which you can visualize in 3D space.
This visualization can be extended to qubit mixed-states, which map to 3D vectors with magnitude less than 1.
However, let me emphasize that too much reliance on visualization may turn into a block. The Bloch sphere is useful not because it gives you any old picture. It is useful because it gives you a physical interpretation about possible measurements. There are lots of other visualizations you could use but they wouldn’t be useful. And systems more complicated than a single qubit quickly get near impossible to visualize usefully.
Just seconding what others have said. The good visualization here is the Bloch sphere. I’d go so far as to say it’s not really a visualization, as the space of distinct qubit states actually is a sphere.
What’s especially nice about the Bloch sphere is that you can generalize it to get the Bloch ball, which gives a correct visualization of mixed state qubits.
Toy Story 4–the existential horror! There’s a character called “Forky,” a spork with googly eyes, created from a pile of trash. He spends the first quarter of the movie trying to throw himself into various garbage cans, chanting “Trash! Trash!,” and the other characters have to keep him from committing suicide.
I am not making this up. Even my wife thought it was seriously weird, and she is the last person to read negative messages into movies.
I haven’t seen yet, but it’s what sporks are intended for.
The ability for humans to create souls was already established in the Toy Story Cinematic Universe. They’ve just confirmed that little kids can do it, in addition to mega corps.
Yeah, my patience for the epistemology/phenomenology/whatever you want to call it of the Toy Story universe ran thin after #2. To what extent does a toy have to be anthropomorphized to become conscious? What if you gradually removed its eyes, arms, etc.–at what point does it stop springing to life when no one is around? (This is why my kids don’t like going to the movies with me)
To be fair, I don’t think humans have a good grasp on that question either.
Of course, consciousnesses is a lot clearer and easily defined for toys than humans.
I watched Toy Story 1 yesterday for the first time in maybe 20 years, and I had a new question every minute about its complete lack of internal logic. Still enjoyed it though!
It must be that when humans (1? 5? 7?) decide it looks like a character that confers it with life… but this would also mean comic book characters would be alive and stuck to the page, conscious of every moment but unable to move, and cartoon characters would be killed and resurrected every time you changed the channel. This is indeed a disturbing universe.
I’ll be honest: Forky is the only reason I want to see this movie.
One of my pet peeves is when movie studios release a new sequel after the previous one was heavily marketed as being “the final chapter”. I was planning to skip Toy Story 4 out of a combination of spite and boredom. (Pixar, please just let Woody and Buzz rest.)
But a suicidal spork? I changed my mind, I will gladly pay money to watch this.
So I’ve been thinking about a problem of modern, socially liberal society: that it is really bad at helping people achieve their goals and teach (the actual and full) norms to people who are bad at picking norms up organically.
In socially liberal society, the often espoused ideal is that people should be free to make their own choices, as long as they don’t harm others. Yet this ideal obscures that most human behavior has benefits and harms to others. So in reality, the only reasonably standard is to accept harms that are below a certain threshold and/or that are relatively low compared to the benefits. Furthermore, because people are incredibly diverse, it is impossible to make a full set of manageable rules that are fair to everyone. Any rule that is simple enough to teach and is also fair, is going to be at the extreme end of the harm-scale. No such thing is possible for the grey area where most actual behavior happens.
So this results in a quandary, which social liberals often resolve by:
– only making rules explicit against extreme behavior
– denying that the grey area exist and portraying everything they don’t want to happen as extreme behavior
For example, anti-sexual harassment training never seems to actually teach something reasonable for people who are not asexual, like what legitimate displays of affection and interest are, what behaviors are conditionally OK & where they cross over into behavior that is never acceptable. Also, the more socially liberal people are, the more they seem to respond to undesired sexual behavior by interpreting it as an extreme transgression, even if merely exceeds their preferences a little.
In general, what I see is an immense resistance (and not in the least among social liberals) to voicing displeasure directly to a person, negotiating compromises, etc. Arguably, doing this is extremely unpleasant and thus felt as a great harm. So many people who have social liberal ideals where many different desires and behaviors are valid if other people are fine with that behavior, nevertheless often expect strict adherence by others to their specific needs/desires and are unwilling to make their needs/desires explicit. This result in a contradiction: how are people supposed to know these needs/desires?
The increasing urbanization, globalization and multiculturalism makes this even harder, as we are more likely to meet people who don’t know us and are so different from us that they have a hard time recognizing our needs (or seeing them as valid). Without the willingness to communicate and to react moderately to minor transgressions, only those with very high social skills can negotiate this.
—
A related issue is that socially liberal society espouses the ideal that differences are valid and people should not be shamed for them. This ideal obscures that they do have an effect on outcomes. Regardless of whether being fat is or is not considered a personal failing, it does reduce the number of people who want to date you. Yet the mere act of correctly stating the consequences is now considered indistinguisable from shaming/policing, which makes sense. A statement like “if you do/are X, society will cause negative outcomes for you,” is both norm-explaining and norm-setting. So if you want to change the norm, you need to punish those who merely seek to explain/teach causality.
With socially liberal society rejecting the idea that exclusionary preferences are wrong, but either ignoring that these are not random or assuming that the patterns are merely due to shaming that will dissipate without that shaming, we see a great reluctance to teach these patterns.
How bad this has become is perhaps best exemplified with Peterson’s adage: “Clean up your room!” Basic advice that makes most people like you more and want to hang out with you, is relevatory to many people.
I think this is a huge problem, yeah. Particularly as we become more secular and throw away the group traditions of church, which at the very least is a contact network -although it is not without its issues-.
Not sure what to do about it; I think more political participation should be a thing. More secular festivities that are more than just a family meeting.
It’s possible technology could solve this; imagine Pokemon Go with a more social component.
Reminds me of the post about the israeli army from a few threads back, where people meet in different ranks, so someone high status may become a lower status inside the army.
That but…without the army.
The old ways didn’t teach either – at least, they didn’t teach those on the autistic spectrum. Instead, they punished. I suspect it was much the same for normal children, except that they were better able to figure out the never-stated rules, and hence less often punished for “willfully” violating them.
Also, with informal norms, very small violations lead to very small punishment, moderate violations lead to moderate punishment etc. Thus people can figure out what is acceptable by trial-and-error without causing major harm or getting into major trouble. On the other hand, with formal norms there is usually a large jump between no punishment and the minimum punishment.
That’s OK when the formal rule is precise, or when the behavior that violates the formal rule is much more serious than similar behavior that violates informal norms. That’s the case with most laws, but not sexual harassment law.
Hmm, wouldn’t you have to know what the norm is, in order to reliably miss it by only a small amount?
And then there’s the problem (for autistics) that if you don’t recognize looks of disapproval, distancing, attempts to change the subject, gossip etc., the first you notice is when someone actually hits you. Or explicitly and clearly says “don’t do that”, with enough description to figure out what “that” means, but that seems to be far less common 🙁
Indeed, you have to know roughly where the norm is, just not precisely. Much of the time you do get told or hear about the norm, if vaguely. It’s not always enough for everyone, though.
The norm is not a point, but a volume that almost certainly includes “say nothing, do nothing”. So right there, you know where the norm is. Not all of the norm, but enough to be safe. If you then make small steps in whatever direction seems best to you, and note the feedback as you step slightly out of bounds, then as 10240 says you can safely “figure out what is acceptable by trial-and-error”.
Not recognizing the negative feedback, breaks this. Obviously trial-and-error doesn’t work if you can’t identify the errors. That can be a big problem in some cases. But it’s pretty much the whole of the problem, not a minor perturbation on the imagined harm of society requiring you to know the unspoken norms up front.
Wouldn’t that simply generalize to “the safe thing to do is to do nothing; if I do anything at all, people may more or less randomly attack me.” (Again, in the presence of poor recognition of subtle clues.)
Perhaps that accounts for females on the Asperger’s spectrum often acting as if they were “shy” – even if actually extroverted. It’s safer to wait till someone else does something, and then either imitate them as best you can, or continue to do nothing. (But males get negative responses to acting shy, so don’t seem to take up that strategy.)
Not usually, because the reaction is not random and will rarely go from zero to “attack” on the basis of a single misstep.
For a person who does not recognize the indicators most other people use for “hey, those last three steps took you right to the edge of the retaliatory attack threshold, why haven’t you backed off already?”, then yes.
Liberal society is capable of having informal norms against moderately harmful behaviors (in addition to laws against extreme ones). We handle many forms of assholery using informal norms. That’s also how most countries other than the US and perhaps a few others handle most sexual harassment, and how the US handled it before the 90s. Consequences for violations of informal norms range from being told you’re an asshole, to people gossiping about you and distancing themselves from you, to being fired by an informal decision of your boss that you cause more trouble than you’re worth. I doubt that informal norms against sexual harassment are weaker in liberal societies than in others; it’s not an inability of liberal societies to enforce informal norms that led to creating laws against it.
The issue is that informal norms are imperfect (even more than laws): they don’t prevent the harmful behavior completely. American society has decided that any amount of harm is unacceptable if it falls disproportionately on women. (Or, rather, courts and Congress decided, and Americans went with it.) Most people have no problem picking up informal norms (with occasional minor violations). However, the formal norms (laws) that now exist in the US are vague, potentially risky behavior includes actions against which no informal norms exist, and behavior that would have previously lead to minor informal repercussions can now lead to major formal repercussions.
Suppose the asshole is higher on the progressive stack than you. The asshole violates some unwritten rule, and you punish them according to the informal norm.
The asshole documents your behavior on internet and accuses you of being anti-X (where X is the trait that puts them higher on the progressive stack than you). Who is the bad guy now?
If I get in trouble for that, that doesn’t point to society being unable to have and enforce informal norms. It points to society having informal norms that are, IMO, wrong: that rules are relaxed for minorities etc., and that the norm against being anti-X is too strong.
Or it may point to the existence of legal rules that force people to be too strict against alleged anti-X-ism, preventing the enforcement of informal rules in this case. However, that’s not the situation that Aapje has suggested, were society treats some behavior as extreme, and creates legal rules against it, because it couldn’t have norms against at all. I’m unaware of cases where a legal rule has been created against something because informal rules have proved impossible to enforce against minorities.
Is this resistance common? I’m not American, but I’ve always assumed that most Americans most of the time handle these issues in an informal way as before, and the people who make (e.g.) harassment complaints are those who are unusually sensitive, or have ended up in an environment that’s unusually unwilling to enforce norms in an informal way, or want to get rid of a coworker, or if the harassment is unusually serious (and probably criminal but they prefer to make a complaint to their workplace or college than go to the police).
In The Netherlands, the number one thing people complain about when surveyed is antisocial behavior. However, willingness to confront it seems at an all time low. So people stew and complain to their friends & family, but rarely police norms. They seem to expect authorities to do so, but those are often not around or have the same mindset. Also, the behavior is often legal, so then authorities have no legal right to make people stop.
The lack of norm enforcement means that a number of people feel entitled to selfish behavior and react very angrily to norm setting. This sometimes causes nasty incidents when they get corrected, which get pointed out in the media, which makes people consider it more common than it is, which in turn makes people even more wary to enforce norms.
The people who do enforce norms often let their anger stew a lot before they dare to say anything, causing a huge outburst & they often expect a bad response, which feeds into the anger even more. So the people who do correct others, fairly often do so aggressively and angrily, expecting the worst from the other person.
My newspaper had an undercover story with the people who direct traffic at road works and events, where they expected these people to constantly have to deal with violence (they actually found that their primary problem is boredom and bad behavior by coworkers).
I think that this analysis assumes that people’s motives are what they say they are. They might not even intend to make a set of rules that is easily manageable; the fact that it is hard to define boundaries is a feature, because a rule with hard to define boundaries is easy to use as a weapon against people you don’t like.
Don’t be too charitable and don’t be too quick to assume mistake theory.
See my comment above. I think that one issue is that we are losing a set of shared norms, so people have personal norms (and get angry when those are violated), but there is no Schelling point that people can commonly rally around. So when people do succeed at gathering a mob or when they are in a position of power, punishing a person becomes cathartic. Bob doesn’t just get punished for what he did, but he also gets punished for what Jack said, what Bill did and what a random twitter user said to another woman.
I recently started play Arena, the online version of Magic: the Gathering, and noticed that it seems to be possible to play this game for absolutely nothing. Does anyone here know enough about the economics of online games to comment on the distribution of paying vs non-paying players, and of the amounts spent by the paying players?
Is it typical for nearly everyone to play for free, or do most people pay a little?
Among paying players, is there a broad middle group of people who pay moderate amounts, or it is more like a high-order power law, with a few people dropping big bucks and everyone else paying token sums?
If you’re playing higher ranked constructed, you’ll either need to spend money or grind for long enough where spending money looks attractive. Set releases are a big incentive too, since you can’t quickly accumulate the new cards from grinding (unless you stockpile a ton of wildcards I guess).
I was a successful f2p Hearthstone player, but I played a lot of its limited (in an era where people suuuucked at limited) and that game has a kinder economy than Arena’s.
It’s the F2P model. It’s similar to the freemium model but slightly less horrible.
The model is basically that teeeeeeechnically everything in the game can be acquired through grinding (drop rate 1 in 1000000000000 mega-boss kills)
They know people will try to play for free but people with jobs/money will eventually find themselves grinding for something needed to be competitive.
Eventually such people aren’t having fun grinding and do the math
“well it will take 20 hours grinding… or I could spend 5 bucks…”
So they spend 5 bucks. But then the next week there’s something else and pretty soon they’re in the habit of just pulling out their wallet and very fast they’ll pay 100 bucks for a game they wouldn’t spend 60 bucks to buy.
Often the game itself suffers because so many design decisions hinge around making the players sick of the grind to the point where they’re willing to spend money to make it stop.
The only game I know that really made it work without harming game mechanics was Eve online but that’s because they just sell game-time tokens as an ingame item that people buy and sell and let players make money however they want to trade for them.
This explanation sounds incomplete, you have to make the game enjoyable enough to get players to this point of buying to avoid the grind.
Spending $100 on a game you know you enjoy is better than spending $60 on a game you might enjoy in a lot of situations.
No,It has to be just barely fun.
South park did what can only be described as a documentary on mobile gaming.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/3fe73cf0-fd46-477e-9ed7-00c997d079eb
Yes, this is why I never play f2p games and won’t let my kids near them either.
I like the model where if you want to make a video game, you set out to make a game as fun as possible, and then sell it for money. I give the developer money and they give me a fun game.
For a f2p game, you start from “let’s make a fun game. Okay, we’ve made a fun game…now make it intentionally bad and annoying so people will give us money to get back to somewhere sort of fun.” No. This is evil and I will not support it.
You’re being too kind to them. F2P starts from “there’s a lot of money being spent on games; how can I cash in with the least possible effort?”
Making fun games is hard but that doesn’t stop people from wanting to hop on the gravy train.
It has to be fun enough that they stick with that game and not the other free games using the same model.
@baconbits9
Ah but this is where pressing peoples addiction buttons comes in.
things don’t have to be fun to be addictive.
Eventually people are sitting playing games they’re not enjoying but just chasing the next loot drop.
It’s why the fun tends to fall off rapidly while the push towards basically-gambling stuff gets intensified in these games.
It starts off being really fun and then the economy shifts once enough people are bought in. Then the sunk cost fallacy kicks in where you think you can reclaim that fun feeling if you just drop 5 bucks and you don’t want everything you’ve earned and especially the time exclusive content you got at the start that offers prestige to be worthless. They pit your own investment in their product against you.
I don’t have any links or references handy, but my general impression is that these games are financed by a small handful of “whales” who spend hundreds/thousands on bonus “vanity” content, while the vast majority of players play for free and never spend a dime.
The “middle group” is essentially irrelevant, from an economic standpoint.
That’s my impression too.
Like air travel, then, only more so.
In theory whales are just people who feel like spending a load of money on a game.
In practice it can simply be preying on people with gambling addiction problems.
the number of games that gradually morph into slot machines inclines me to think it’s more the latter.
“Spin the wheel! you’ve used your free 2 spins for today!!!”
The irony is that the people who complain loudest about this system don’t seem to be the whales, who are psychologically manipulated into subsidizing hordes of free players… but the free players themselves, who find it morally offensive that other people are allowed to “pay to win.”
The comparisons to real life politics are obvious.
“Pay 2 win” can be a motte-and-bailey.
There is a serious problem where the people who spend the most money are those who win. There is a huge gravity well that pulls the game in this direction, and unless constant and consistent effort is applied fighting this gravity well, the game will fall into the singularity: they are making more money, then more money, then huge amounts of money, and just as their financial model predicts they will be making infinite money, they are spaghetii’d apart as players mass quit.
That’s the motte. The bailey is that any spending of money by other people is “pay 2 win.”
I don’t think there’s actually a significant Pay2win problem in games. At least not in any I’ve ever played.
The Steelman for such systems is that “pay for advantage” is actually necessary to maintain something resembling a competitive balance between casual and hardcore players.
Let’s say there are two ways to gain an advantage in any particular game: Gear, and skill. Gear can be bought directly. Skill requires dedicating several hours to practice. In a very general sense, the people who have the means and desire to buy gear directly are the ones who don’t have/want to put in the time to practice and develop the skill.
I think the problem here is that “gaming culture” and gaming forums and gaming media are still dominated by young-ish people with much more free time than disposable income. But if you consider things from the perspective of a working adult, who wants to play and compete (but not necessarily dominate) a game without being instantly and immediately destroyed by a bunch of high-schoolers who play the game for 8 hours a day, the dynamic seems both fair and necessary.
I’ve played games which do it right. One of the best was a three-tiered model:
a) free-to-play which is actually an unlimited-time preview, so you can decide when to start paying to compete
b) pay a certain amount to level up into the competitive ranks, with everyone paying essentially the same
c) a bunch of cosmetic or limited-use items, such that spending a crapload does not have any noticeable improvement on your chances of winning.
I have also seen online economies blown apart by a new marketing team that decides to throw away 10+ years of currency stability.
Sure, most people don’t care if someone else gets conned.
but they do care if their opponent in a skill based game can suddenly just buy advantage.
“and so bill gates wins the 7th world chess championship in a row. He used a daring strategy of paying the competition runners to upgrade all his pieces to queens at the start of the game. This adds to his accomplishments as an athlete where he recently won an Olympic gold medal in the 100 meters after paying the Olympic committee to chain all the other runners to large granite blocks at the start of the race”
Since the game makers incentives all align around trying to convert non-paying players into paying players they also take every opportunity to rub free players faces in it.
I had totally forgotten about an online game I was in where I was there at rollout, and then one day the other player brought out a bunch of cards that were way better than anything I would ever have access to.
The whole thing shut down ~3 months later.
The thing is, the non-paying players are also “buying advantage.” They just pay with time, rather than with currency.
If you’re a working adult with a full time job and a family, should any and all “skill based” games just be assumed to be closed to you because, while you can easily “invest” $50 to buy gear, you can’t invest 100 hours of practice to “get gud?”
And when the game companies themselves tend to prefer to receive actual currency rather than “hours played,” why shouldn’t they cater, or at least make some minimum effort towards serving the needs of the “willing to spend cash, but not time” demographic?
@Edward Scizorhands’ 3-tiered model sounds really reasonable.
I could imagine companies setting things up as “seasons” where I’d buy access for a 3-month season, and get the same access to good cards as anyone else.
I’m OK paying finite amounts of money. I just want to know (1) that the amount is actually finite, and (2) that I’m not going to get slaughtered by someone who dumped $10,000 into the game.
There are different ways to use money to circumvent a lack of skill. Game coaching services exist for video games, and I have never seen anyone seriously complain about them as being pay to win.
I think that ‘gaming culture’ in this case is similar to ‘sports culture’ or ‘music culture’ or really any other culture that values individual skill.
Edit:
Yes.
@Matt M
Sure, the companies see it as a cash cow, it’s the players who see it as something to get skilled at.
How would you feel watching a version of the Olympics where half the long distance runners were normal runners, competing and showing their ability… and the other half were obese millionaires who thought it was totally unfair that those silly athletes were able to “pay with fitness and training” to get into the Olympics… so they paid an extra fee to be allowed to use a quad bike in the race.
The winners podium for the 5000 meters is entirely obese people with quad bikes.
How much is that a 5000 meter foot race and how much is it a competition about who can spend the most on quad upgrades?
A restrictions that exists because of technological limitations we have not yet figured out a way to overcome.
But let’s suppose we do. Assume a Matrix-style ability to “download” skills directly into your brain. Should we make the sale of the “learn to play Mozart” skill illegal, under the grounds that it would be unfair to all the people who learned to play Mozart the hard way?
Would that make society better off?
The entire chain of reasoning is based on nothing other than petty jealousy and tribal turf wars. Online multiplayer games are good when a: there are a lot of players available to play with and b: when the competitive balance is such that the game is reasonably challenging for all involved (not too easy or too hard for anyone).
Giving people the ability to increase their competitive viability based on either time spent or cash paid, depending on which of those resources is less scarce for them, increases competitive balance, and makes games more accessible to a wider audience.
Most of the adults I know who pay money for good items in competitive online games, if you took that option away from them, wouldn’t say “oh well, guess I need to spend the 100 hours now.” Rather, they wouldn’t play at all. Who is made better off by that, exactly?
@Murphy,
I can’t tell whether my biggest objection is that you’re making a false comparison (the Olympics to some random no-stakes game of whatever online) or whether you’re proposing what you think is an absurd hypothetical that by and large already exists.
Go to a random triathlon in a small city and you’ll see a wide mix of competitors. Some will have got there by pure practice and dedication. They won’t have the fanciest bike or shoes. They won’t have private coaches. They’ll be competitive through brute force training. Of course, you’ll also see other people who are a little different. People who are less “I was a gym freak my whole life” and more “I’m a rich techbro who just started doing this a year ago.” They won’t be “obese” but they probably won’t be as well practiced or as in-shape as the first group. They have less time, more other commitments. They will have absolutely top of the line gear, private coaches, etc. This will make them competitive. Sometimes, they even win.
And yet, life goes on. Triathlons are more accessible to people, and everyone is better off for it. Society in general becomes more fit, and Ironman makes more money in entrance fees, thereby being able to stage more triathlons in more places.
And there are no obese triathletes winning major races, because buying the best equipment only takes you so far, and at the upper levels of competition, everyone is going to have the best equipment anyway.
@Matt M
So for your piano future the question is how they handle piano competitions. If we find a way to trivialize human skill in something, then we might stop competing in that thing, or we might place restrictions that mean in order to compete you have to use human skill anyways.
We have cars that will let you move faster than a person can run, so we don’t have Speed contests*, we have foot races. (see Murphy’s comment)
*Well we do have speed contests, but those are done by machines and the human skill in question is the engineering/piloting.
Edit.
Based on your reply to Murphy you seem to be using a different kind of ‘competitive’ from myself. As for the triathlon, You can buy a high end computer with a 120 hz monitor and a mouse with twenty keys on it, you can pay for a coach, and nobody is going to complain about pay to win.
“Pay for the best lootboxes” does not seem to be a viable competitive strategy at the high levels of any videogame I’m aware of that has high level competitions. I’m not aware of any successful pro gamers whose primary attributes are a huge bankroll and very little practice.
I think we hit a whole ‘nother motte-and-bailey when talking about making buying advantages illegal.
Regulate lootboxes as gambling, sure. At the minimum, if you can spend real-world money to open a lootbox, the game should publish the complete odds of the distinction of players getting what they want out of it. I’d probably want to go further than than, but let’s start there for now.
But making advantages illegal to buy is just capital-D dumb. Deciding what’s fun and what isn’t will be handled by the market. If people like watching a pay-to-win Olympics, well, good for them. If they don’t, they won’t watch and it will disappear. Stop trying to micromanage an industry for its own good.
This doesn’t mean this discussion is worthless. It’s good for people to debate what makes a good game or doesn’t, because people want to have those experiences, and if there is something we can’t have we should understand it.
(Also, that Robot Congress link does have a date on it. I probably just missed it before. It was October 2017. Sorry for any false aspersion I made against the site. I’m listening to it now and will try to summarize Mark Whipple’s point about the distinction between pokemon cards and loot boxes.)
I might also point out the irony that the push to de facto outlaw lootboxes by classifying them as gambling is occurring right alongside a generally growing public acceptance of obvious, no kidding, actual gambling.
Online sports betting has recently been legalized in a number of states, and is projected to be legalized in a majority of them within the next few years.
I am confused by the core premise, you play a competitive game, your skill sets you at rank 5, with 1 being the best and 6 being the worst. Why do you want to spend money to get to rank 3? In as much as rank reflects something you value, might people who earned that rank with their skill, be equally and oppositely invested in you not being able to buy your way up to their rank?
I didn’t say to make them illegal. I wanted this:
Is this too burdensome?
Are you asking me?
It’s a good question. In my view, most people don’t. “Pay2win” is a derogatory term created and used by people who don’t pay and care a lot about winning.
My impression is that the vast majority of people who do pay for “advantage” items don’t see it as “paying to win” but rather “paying to compete” or maybe even “paying to survive.” They aren’t obsessed with winning for its own sake, so much as they want to be able to play and enjoy the game online, in a competitive environment, without being instantly killed by people vastly above their own skill level.
That said, the general attitude of “I want to be as good and competitive as I can at Activity X, within the constraints I face as it regards the amount of time I have to spend on activity X, seems to be universally common, whether X is video games, triathlons, or piano playing.
The usual solution is ranked matchmaking. If you’re a teenager off for the summer you can
grindtrain your way up to Diamond and play against other people who’ve invested the time to git gud. If you’re a Busy Adult With Many Important Things To Do you can bum around on Bronze League Heroes in your spare time (which, imho is actually more fun).If hanging out in the lower ranks rankles, that sound awfully like wanting to win for its own sake, now doesn’t it?
Yes, matchmaking does also attempt to solve that problem. It’s just less effective when there are fewer players, and more specifically, fewer players of your same approximate skill level.
And typically, people aren’t willing to wait very long for matches to be made, so when the game can’t quickly find opponents of your skill level, rather than keep you waiting, it throws you into whatever is available at the moment, which for lower skilled players, means a game full of people who can kill you before you even see them coming.
I am just not familiar with competitive multiplayer games that will regularly result in the kinds of skill mismatches you are describing. Competitive games with ranks/skill indicators normally use an ELO like system to insure that people of comparative skill get matched up against each other, save the occasional Smurf.
I would add that I don’t think pay-to-win is a problem in any games I play, but ELO boosting is, and the motivation for that behavior is clearly low skill players wanting to appear to be high skill players. They value rank, as a reflection of skill, as much or more than everyone else.
Edit: Well actually I had exactly this experience last night. The new player experience in Hearthstone is a nightmare, using the default paladin deck I was getting absolutely monstered by other chickens with decks full of rare cards. But I don’t think of Hearthstone as Pay-to-win any more than MTG, or Warhammer, etc. Some games do require you to pay to play, so if that is what you are talking about, we might be talking past each other.
There are a lot of F2P models that aren’t oriented around lootboxes or anything resembling gambling. Some let you pay for aesthetic in-game items like a nifty-looking hat with no stat boosts at all. Some let you pay to get at things faster than you would have to grind for them (which can incentivize them to make the game grindy, but games were grindy even before this business model). Some do let you buy special, more powerful items, which might make existing content easier, or might open up new areas of content, just as game expansions would in an earlier era.
It still feels wrong in my gut if these end up mostly being funded by a few players who pay thousands a month, but they’re not playing on the gambling instinct, and it’s really hard to even call it shady when the player is knowingly buying a purely aesthetic item.
https://headgum.com/robot-congress/robot-congress-52-are-loot-boxes-gambling-ft-marc-whipple
1. Gambling is a state law. In general, current gambling requires:
* Consideration
* Chance
* Something of value
“Chance” means there are components out of your control. If skill is a portion, it still includes chance.
“Something of value” is very broad. If you can exchange it to someone else for consideration, it’s something of value. If there is no trade or exchange system, you are probably escaping gambling laws. This is one reason that game companies work hard at stopping account selling.
2. “But what about baseball cards?” as an analogy.
This starts around minute 27.
First, if you are using an analogy to defend yourself, you are in a lot of danger, because the judge/prosecutor/regulator have huge power and could blast you away if that analogy happens to fail. You often have to prove your gambling scheme is legal.
One reason the analogy doesn’t work is that judges have said so. Another is that you always get something out of the baseball card pack. You were getting something of value, while often in video game lootboxes you are getting useless crap. There is a discussion of phone-card-sweepstakes, where you buy a phone card for $5 worth of phone time for $5, and get entered in a sweepstakes. But no one was actually using the phone cards, so it was decided to be gambling. There are many court cases where people have lost for selling useless crap for money with sweepstakes-as-a-side-channel. Another point is that physical gambling machines often have required minimum payouts, in Nevada it’s 80%.
I’m guessing that this is the type of experience that grinds the most people’s gears. Namely, artificial excellence.
It’s like the example brought up earlier of the athlete who figures out and perfects the fastest or best way to perform, versus the rich newcomer who powers through with steroids. Set aside the intuitive unfairness of buying your way in, and there still a gut feeling I have that the veteran athlete knows how to figure out ways to physically excel. Faced with a future physical problem, I think the veteran can figure out a solution, while the roided newcomer will just flail.
If the newcomer instead studied the veteran’s skills for problem solving, and combined that with the newcomer’s wealth to solve a problem, I think I’d be impressed. An athlete who also works as a chemist and perfects his own drugs would not bother me.
But a game with cards you can simply improve by incrementing the numbers on them is giving you power for free. It doesn’t matter whether you grinded 64 commons and fused them into a rare, or paid $50 for them; you’re not showing me anything clever. More importantly, any game that incorporates buffs like this strikes me as a game for casual players. Contrast this with online card games with a draft feature – given a random list of 30 cards, say, choose 10 for your play deck within two minutes. Skill should be the greatest differentiator.
But the incentives on the game creator are different when it comes to players paying with time and with money, since the creator doesn’t benefit when the players pay with time.
Yes, I agree. Which is precisely why it’s weird that people act as if game companies have some sort of moral obligation to prioritize the money-scarce people and to ignore the time-scarce people.
@Edward Scizorhands
Where did i say anything about illegal?
My point comparing to the Olympics is that matt seems to be taking personal offense that others look down those who “pay to win.”
My only point is that it’s utterly reasonable to look down on such people. They enter a skill game and buy a victory.
He poses a false dilemma between penniless kids with nothing but free time (painted as some kind of outgroup) and poor little rich adults who just want to even the playing field but in reality it’s trust fund kids with nothing but time and a pile of money vs everyone else. they have the hours and the cash so victory becomes primarily about who can buy more advantage.
There’s a reason “pay to win” is a criticism of a video game. Often a very damning one which will prompt a large fraction of the player base to quit if it appears true.
the entire model pushes companies towards design decisions that make their games less fun… but always trying to dangle the temptation of “if you just spend a liiittle bit more”
Socially, there’s also nothing wrong with openly mocking people who pay to win in games of skill and still somehow feel proud of their “achievements”.
That’s somewhat separate to the issue of games basically becoming casinos targeted at children while desperately pressing every addiction button they can. “pay to win” is just one small hook of that issue.
@Matt M
Sure, but not targeting children.
I have no issue with gambling in general, it’s only an issue when it targets children and to a lesser extent when it goes out of it’s way to target people with mental health problems and gambling addictions.
I think the diminishing value of money is a bigger factor than you imply and while these kinds of games increasingly include gambling elements whales predate them. League of Legends for example was largely supported by whales for years before their first loot box.
There are also other examples that seem similar enough to possible cover the same cohort of people. The random twitch donor who totally financially supports some small time streamer with hundreds of dollars a week, the people buying thousand dollar T-shirts, apple products, etc. It is easy to ascribe ulterior motives to spending that seems gratuitous to me, but I think it often just reflects different preferences and means.
I can believe the gambling model makes more money and that is why everyone is moving to it, but is it responsible for a 50% increase or a 10% increase? Either way everyone would still move to it.
I think in the specific case of Arena, there is a large group of players (myself included) who spend exactly $5 for the welcome bundle (or whatever it’s called), which is heavily discounted.
Whales are a major part of, sometimes the only important part of, how ome small mobile games get paid for, but I don’t think they’re very relevant for the very largest and most expensive ones, which certainly includes Arena. They really need typical players to be making purchases.
They call high-paying players “whales,” having stolen that term from the gambling industry for the high-paying players that keep casinos afloat. As you might surmise, they’re responsible for a large fraction of the revenue.
Here’s a link from a consultancy firm for mobile games:
https://deltadna.com/blog/how-whales-spend/
Remember the slogan, if you don’t pay them, you’re the product.
People pay into this because they can play, which works better with a larger player pool. I assume their server costs are low enough that the marginal player who wouldn’t otherwise pay them basically costs nothing to add.
I play this and Eternal without paying, but I could probably participate at a slightly higher level by buying packs and having more cards quicker; but I’m not trying to compete, just have fun, and it serves that need without dropping a cent. As far as Magic goes, they get my anyway money for the cardboard (though I’ve moved to second hand singles mostly).
There’s the good argument that the free players are the content for the whales.
One issue is that the game companies could set up bots acting like people to be the free content for the whales.
My wife was playing an online game where she thought she was competing against real people. One day the Internet died, and she could still play the game. We discovered it was being done offline against simulated players. The game had never explicitly said otherwise, and my wife hadn’t put money in so there was no fraud. But people enjoy the social aspect of beating humans more than beating bots, and online card games make it trivial enough to simulate players, so someone actually trying could get pretty far by making people think they are taking on tens of thousands of humans when it is actually just hundreds of humans plus lots of bots.
Almost every big, phone-based f2p “multiplayer” game is actually doing this. True, live, PvP is quite rare.
I never realized that, but now that you mention it… that makes a ton of sense… huh..
I imagine they are able to calibrate the opponents difficulty to help entice you to buy boosters.. Just enough wins so you don’t get discouraged.. and the sense that if you just buy that one new item (that all your opponents coincidentally have) you can really dominate
But none of those bots will ever be converted to whales.
Unless the AI is really, really good, I guess.
The point wasn’t to convert those bots to paying. The point is to create the magic content that will keep whales paying and/or make whales pay more and/or convert dolphins to whales and/or convert f2p’s to dolphins.
In rank order, people prefer
1) Beating other humans
2) Playing against other humans
3) Beating bots
4) Playing against bots
Maybe 2 & 3 are swapped.
But you don’t need to create the content if people are clamoring to provide it for free. And some of those ftp players might be converted to paying customers.
I bought the $5 welcome bundle, but have spent no further money since. I don’t play every day, but I have access to pretty much every competitive Standard deck and a significant reserve of rare and mythic wildcards. I think this is typical of the experience of fairly strong limited players (not pro level – I expect to day 2 GPs, and have a couple of PTQ top 8s and an English Nationals top 16, but I’ve never qualified for a PT/MC; my limited rating on MTGO used to hover around 1850), but not of the average player.
Related: Last week the UK Parliament was holding hearings about loot boxes/gambling in video games, and the lawyer from EA informed us that these are not, in fact, “loot boxes,” but “surprise mechanics.” And people love surprises, so I guess problem solved.
To see a clip, just go to youtube and search for “EA surprise mechanics” and pick your favorite gaming youtuber’s rant on the topic. I’m not going to link anyone specifically because any video I pick will just be a torrent of obscenities hurled at EA.
I assume when this hits the USA they will go with first ammendment issues, tho in Europe that won’t fly.
I don’t think the first amendment has anything to do with it. It’s gambling marketed indiscriminately to children and adults. We absolutely regulate gambling.
The obvious counterargument is “but what about baseball cards and kinder eggs and trading card games?” Jim Sterling addressed that in his rant on the topic. Now that I think about it…yeah giving somebody money for a chance at getting something valuable is gambling. I would not be terribly surprised if such things also get regulated. If I were the company that makes MTG or baseball cards or whatever, I would be begging for EA to shut the f**k up right now before they ruin the scam for everyone.
This is also the reason I don’t play Magic. I would probably enjoy it a lot. It looks right up my alley. I had as much if not more fun playing Gwent in Witcher 3 than…playing Witcher 3. But I have no interest in buying packs of cards hoping I can build a deck I want. Just let me buy the cards I want for my deck and play the game. Maybe that will eventually happen, because…yeah everybody hates EA and everybody hates loot boxes.
Can you paraphrase/bulletpoint Sterling’s rant? I’m curious about his points but don’t especially enjoy consuming video/audio content for stuff like that.
Our occasional community member Marc Whipple has an interview with Robot Congress a year or two ago about the legal situation. (They don’t date their podcasts so I can’t tell you exactly when. The lack of date-information is probably also a result of Moloch.)
https://headgum.com/robot-congress/robot-congress-52-are-loot-boxes-gambling-ft-marc-whipple
You can absolutely do this for physical releases.
Buy a couple of commander decks to play against your son. Never buy a pack after that.
The first amendment is really vague, as is the loot box bill recently introduced by a democrat in the american congress; for example it tries to outlaw pay to win mechanics in competitive games, where you can buy a better weapon than your opponent and thus help you beat them.
That will probably fall into free speech. Random loot boxes may not tho, dunno.
Most of it is just the usual “F*** you, EA, you do not get to change the language once the thing you do becomes unpopular.” These companies promoted “loot boxes,” a term they themselves used when, for instance, proudly announcing that the new Jedi: Fallen Order game will not have, quote, “loot boxes” and now claim “we don’t use that term, we say ‘surprise mechanics.'” Lie lie lie lie lie. They also promoted “microtransactions,” and now that everyone hates “microtransactions” they’re called “recurrent user spending.” Reminds me of George Carlin’s bit about “shell shock -> post traumatic stress disorder.”
EA is getting called on the carpet here because games are big business, and they’re tying in with other very big businesses like the NFL and FIFA. The Madden and FIFA franchises are also loot box hell now. The insightful part of Sterling’s rant, though, was about the reexamining of “surprise mechanics” in other businesses. EA likes to defend themselves by pointing out other “surprise” items marketed at kids, like card games, kinder eggs, the “LOL dolls” or I think “neopets” or something? And yeah we let that stuff slide for a long time, but when I think about it now…maybe little kids blowing their allowance on Pokemon cards hoping they get the rare card they want, not getting it and then saving up their allowance to blow it again is an awful lot like gambling. Maybe that’s not okay either. So EA might want wind up ruining the “surprise mechanics” biz for everyone else, too. Maybe. This could all go nowhere, but I’m not sure. Nobody who isn’t EA likes loot boxes. EA is frequently way up there on those “most hated companies” surveys. First world problems, sure, but if you’re a politician who wants to stick it to corporations for big applause…this one’s kind of a no-brainer.
ETA:
@JPNunez
Yeah that’s a bit of a different thing. I could see that failing. But with loot boxes the problem is 1) chance, 2) non-disclosure what the odds of ‘winning’ are, 3) no independent regulation to verify the odds really are what they say they are like we have with slot machines and state gaming commissions and 4) marketing all of this to children.
I call BS on this. These franchises have lootbox mechanics in place for a few very specific entirely optional game modes that didn’t even exist a few years ago / pre-lootbox.
If you still want to play these franchises the way you did back in 1998 and not have to worry about lootboxes, you can. I still play the NHL franchise every once in awhile. I just play random matches against the AI just like I did on my Super Nintendo. No lootboxes.
Competitive TCG players almost never buy booster packs, they buy singles on the secondary market. At least I know that’s the case for Pokemon, and AFAIK it’s the case for other games like Yu-gi-oh and Magic. I’m kind of worried about a too-broad lootbox ban hitting said games though, if only for selfish reasons; I get the sense the casuals who do buy boosters are indirectly subsidizing the competitive scene.
I don’t play Madden anymore, but I was under the impression that online play had all the grindy progression and loot box stuff in it. Not so?
Certain very popular modes of it do, but you can play online without any of it.
But does anybody do that? Or is this just the “but you can play for freeeeee!” response to pay-to-win mechanics in f2p games?
No sensible person builds a constructed deck by buying booster packs. There’s a thriving secondary market in singles, which is how every competitive player and many casuals acquire most of their (relevant) cards.
@Conrad Honcho, not everyone hates lootboxes, but everyone hates EA’s loot box. They really killed the golden goose by charging for the game and charging for the lootboxes. There are plenty of other lootbox games that are not hated, because they are F2P normally. In particular, I like several gatcha games, which are just lootboxes in Japan, that all disclose what winning odds are and formed a coalition that promised that all odds were accurate, that make them more fair. It’s a shame that EA is probably going to ruin it for gatcha games as well.
The primary market, the one the companies making the thing are doing, is gambling. I’m buying the pack, hoping to get the card I want, or cards I can sell on the secondary market. If I have bad luck, I’m worse off, with cards I don’t want and nobody else wants to buy. When you spend money on a chance to wind up better off or worse off, that’s gambling.
Also, to the extent these things are being marketed to kids, the kids don’t understand this. “Somebody’s selling the card I want for $50, but I only have $5, so maybe I’ll get lucky if I buy a pack…”
@Conrad, you might be interested in Keyforge. It’s essentially Magic except every deck is a unique (and in theory, balanced) combination of cards that can’t be swapped out.
Some modern loot box games disclose the odds (particularly those from japan), and those with big fanbase size have people check the chances by mass efforts.
Kids get this marketed to, yes.
Oddly, I like that EA uses the euphemism treadmill so baldly and haplessly. People can learn from it. If EA can do this, so can anyone else, so people are now being careful to look at what other people mean by a new term they are defending.
Cf. “global warming” -> “climate change”; “torture” -> “enhanced interrogation”; etc.
@dick: looks neat, I’ll check it out, thanks.
@JP: EA would have been wise to start working out some kind of “ethical lootboxing” before the government gets involved. People maybe wouldn’t be quite so mad if they knew what their chance of getting an epic Star Card in Battlefront II* was. Also, there’s no secondary market for electronic lootbox stuff.
@Paul: This is a good opportunity to link Orwell’s Politics and the English Language for anyone who hasn’t already read it.
* Also, I’ll take this time to plug Star Wars Battlefront II. The game was great to begin with…when they killed the MTX lootboxes before release. They didn’t give up on the game and it’s now really excellent. I hadn’t played in awhile but came back last week to try out the new characters, maps, modes, units, etc. My son and I spent all week playing and leveled up Count Dooku, Anakin, Obi-wan and Greivous to level 25 (full epic cards). And I love the infiltration droid with the vibrosword. Was a lot of fun. Game is now incredibly cheap, too, if you’re looking for a fun Star Wars FPS.
You say that like it’s a bad thing!
And what if we redesigned the videos so that they only fed you a handful of obscenities hurled at EA, and only gave you the torrent if you took enough surveys or bought a subscription?
I’ll just point out that while I’m not a fan of F2P or freemium models, they are actually kind of reasonable for card collecting type games…given that is essentially the model for the actual physical card games as well, right? The fact that you can even attempt to play for free might arguably be an improvement (although probably outweighed by how easy they make it to overspend for the highly susceptible).
Maybe they’re unreasonable for physical card games, too. That’s why I don’t play them and wouldn’t let my kids play them. It’s gambling, but without the fun of gambling.
Don’t you think that at some point, your kids need to learn to resist the various attempts to psychologically part them from their money?
“Play this free phone game and have the patience to wait for your farm to finish building rather than pay $5 to make it build immediately” seems like a low-stakes enough version of teaching them such a lesson.
I don’t have kids yet, but I feel like I’d prefer to expose them to frauds and hucksters and manipulators as soon as possible. Teach them young so they don’t fall for a far more serious scam when they’re old…
I think that is a valid worry but I’d rather try to immunize them with something not as well designed to make them part with their money.
Maybe do that with something that doesn’t actually part them from their money, then? Also, I’m not going to give them money to do that, so the lesson they would learn is “if only I could give these people money I’d have a fun time with this.”
Also, I’d rather them just play good video games. Thankfully daddy’s addiction is “buying good video games.” My son has his own Switch and access to daddy’s account, so he’s playing Cuphead, and Dead Cells, and now My Friend Pedro and all that kind of stuff.
Another good tip, is to give your kids physical money, not access to a credit card. If they want to buy something digital, they have to physically hand over the money and realize what they are loosing , plus at one point you can cut them off if they try to spend more than $100 on a F2P game. Seems basic, but there seems to be plenty of people that don’t do it
Heh… and as I walking through a casino last week, I though “Gee, I could get all the skinner box thrills of this, plus an actual game by playing Magic.”
But that mostly applies to slot machines, card games can be fun.
If you’re looking at slot machines, sure, there’s no real game, there. But I enjoy playing blackjack. So I will go into a casino with $200, knowing I’m going to get the enjoyment of $200 worth of blackjack playing at least. And since I’m not awful at it…I mean, last time I went with my drinking buddies to New Orleans, while they were all passed out from day drinking, I went over to Harrah’s, played for an hour and a half, won $600, treated myself to a $100 steak dinner at Brennan’s and came out ahead on the whole trip 😉
You either definitely should or definitely shouldn’t play Magic, then. $200 will get you 3 months of weekly gaming in a draft format, where you can recoup some of the cost by selling off the cards or make your own decks to play at home, with probably at least as much actual enjoyment of the game. And in a draft, it’s all luck and skill, you can’t buy an advantage since you all use the same number of random cards given at the site.
There’s a few MtG pros or comentaters who come from the professional poker scene.
For $200 I can buy a dozen or more excellent video games (eBay, Steam or eShop sales) that I’ll have forever. I think I’ll pass on MtG.
Sure, and I recently bought a switch partly on your recommendation–stayed up all night last night playing Dead Cells with a buddy.
But you are the one who said, in the post I replied to, that you’ll go spend $200 on blackjack in one night.
Unless you are regularly getting 300% returns on that, in which case more power to you, I’m suggesting that you get longer and more interesting (in terms of depth and variety) gameplay from Magic than blackjack.
“Regularly,” no absolutely not. Once a year at most, and right now I haven’t been in a casino in probably 2 years. And usually I break even, so it’s mainly just I get to drink for free. That time in New Orleans is the only time I ever won big. But I’ll always look for an excuse to tell the story because it was awesome.
And glad you like Dead Cells. I got burned out after 2 BSC, though and couldn’t bring myself to grind out more cells for the S rank forge.
Fair enough–everyone has their own sticking points. You couldn’t talk me into paying my way into a movie theater this century, for instance.
I’m kinda conflicted on this topic. On the one hand, boosters for mtg (and similar card games) are definitely gambling when you buy and open them to get the cards you want. Which is also definitely, at least to some extent, the way those boosters have been marketed by the companies that make them and there are almost certainly kids out there that are blowing their allowances hoping to get the one card they want.
On the other hand, nobody who gets even slightly serious about magic (including myself and every other casual player I know) actually buys boosters for the cards they contain. You buy them to draft, which is a separate game mode that is based on the randomness and to some extend the defined rarity distribution of cards in a pack. Afterwards you keep the cards you want and optionally sell the rest to recoup a (small) fraction of the cost of the draft .
I happen to really like drafting and I think it is a legitimate business model, but I also really want lootboxes to go away and I can’t think of a plausible law that allows one and forbids the other.
By the way, there are card games now that have deliberately stepped away from booster packs and are instead just selling boxes with some pre-specified number (1-3) of every card in a set. They’re called Living Card Games, might be a good alternative for your kids if they want to get into card games.
Does anyone here know enough about the economics of online games to comment on the distribution of paying vs non-paying players, and of the amounts spent by the paying players?
Very very limited experience, but even the best “free to play” games eventually hit that barrier where if you want to advance to higher levels/play the cool fun areas, you need the better gear. And you can either grind for eternity and stay stuck at level 50 until you get that one in X million drop for every single piece you need for that set of killer gear, or you can buy your build.
There’s also cosmetic effects for people who want to splash out money on looking flash, which do nothing about gameplay just look fancy, and games do that as well to raise money.
Any complaints from the ‘doing it the hard way’ players usually get met with “But the game is FREEEEEEE” and yeah, that’s a very valid point – until you’re stuck on a loading screen that eventually times out and boots you back to log in because it’s a chokepoint with everyone and their fancy cosmetics eating up the bandwidth. Ahem, not like this has been happening recently after the latest patch in a particular online game or anything…
Arena doesn’t seem to have any of the typical F2P pitfalls. It’s fairly easy to make a good deck on a new account, and then you have it forever.
Your benevolent dictator for life has observed that there are no readily available slapstick comedies about hilariously incompetent time travelers who try but fail to assassinate Hitler. That’s surely a market failure, but those can be remedied by some concerted effort from the Right People. Who we have right here.
Let’s start with a plot summary and a proposed cast.
Ripping off SMBC:
The constant barrage of time travelers attempting to kill Hitler has made him the worlds most skilled fighter of time travellers.
Eventually the time travellers give up until the world is threatened by time travelers from an even more distant future… only one man is skilled enough combating time travelers to save the world from them.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3266
Ripping off “everybody kills Hitler on their first trip”
A time-cop is tasked with maintaining the integrity of the timeline. Unfortunately everybody kills Hitler on their first trip so he spends his life constantly saving hitler from time travelers.
https://www.tor.com/2011/08/31/wikihistory/
Also http://www.viruscomix.com/obersalzberg.jpg
Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjZt48wSuXE
You’re forgetting Doctor Who‘s Let’s Kill Hitler.
Pace Churchill, that was in fact the beginning of the end for Doctor Who.
I’d want Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy.
Will Ferrell as Hitler?
That works too, I guess.
Yes, that should work. The man could pull off a Great Dictator.
Melissa McCarthy attempts to kill Hitler by injecting him with anthrax. But as it turns out, the bacteria had been stored at the wrong temperature and died before the assassination attempt. Not only does Hitler not die; he develops SUPER ANTHRAX RESISTANCE!
There’s ample written fiction about this. Good hooks for slapstick include Hitler being protected by the timestream so the attempts always somehow go wrong, and so many time travelers taking shots at him that they interfere with each other.
A few attempts to include:
An attempt during the Beer Hall Putsch. Unfortunately, our assassin is told only to shoot “the man with the funny mustache” and he kills Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter instead. (cut to time traveler, who is sporting the popular-in-the-25th-century toothbrush mustache)
The real-life assassination attempt. From Wikipedia: “It is presumed that Colonel Heinz Brandt, who was standing next to Hitler, used his foot to move the briefcase aside by pushing it behind the leg of the conference table”
Not in our version. In our version, the time traveler decided to substitute more powerful explosives, believing the problem was the bomb just wasn’t big enough. Lots of crawling around under the table and trying to avoid being discovered. Our hapless traveler substitutes more powerful explosives, but moves the bomb behind the table, preventing the assassination.
The last attempt: A time traveler finally manages to shoot Hitler. Outside his bunker, on April 30, 1945.
My favorite twist on the plot is still the one I concocted a while back, where a gang of young idealists travels back to kill the evil dictator, just misses him, then finds him again through sheer luck, because Plans Go Awry for the bad guys as well. So they kill him. Mission successful.
Except, his name is Francis Ferdinand.
And we’re all living in the new timeline.
Fuck
Our protagonist is a genius inventor that has built a time machine, and takes it back in time to kill Hitler. He arrives in 1934, manages to sneak into Hitler’s residence, and shoots Hitler, but before he can make sure Hitler is dead, he’s distracted by another time traveler arriving. The new time traveler catches sight of our protagonist and immediately attacks, and the running battle takes them away from Hitler. The protagonist manages to lose the attacker, but in the process manages to catch a glimpse of himself in a mirror, only to find that he’s suddenly acquired a suspicious hairstyle and short black mustache…
Turns out, there’s only so much paradox that the timestream can take, and in extreme cases, the corrections aren’t always subtle. The existence of Hitler is so necessary to history that killing him would cause untold paradox, so somehow, anyone that kills Hitler ends up being forced to take his place in history…. the hard way. And it also prevents the new Hitler from leaving the current time period, as he’s now a necessary component in history.
The good news is that the original Hitler (or the previous Hitler, at any rate) isn’t quite dead yet. Our protagonist can avoid becoming Hitler if he can get someone else to kill Hitler before he dies of his wounds. The bad news is that our protagonist is noticing his body develop a mind of its own (cue Strangelove shout-out), and the fact that our hero now looks like Hitler means that the other time-travelers are gunning for him. Throw in a Nazi mad scientist keeping the previous Hitler alive (and secret) and trying to both find a worthy replacement Hitler and get his hands on a time machine, and the mess as our protagonist tries to get someone else to kill Hitler so he can go home is a recipe for a quite entertaining disaster.
I have no idea who should star in such a movie (or be willing to star in such a movie, for that matter), but this is absolutely calling for Mel Brooks to direct.
I propose a mash-up of Hollywood’s two most successful time travel franchises. Our hero is dispatched to 1880s Braunau am Inn. His mission: to prevent Hitler’s conception by breaking up his parents. Of course, future Antarctic/space Nazis send a Nazi cyborg back in time to stop him. And of course of course, he falls in love with Klara Hitler, and in July 1888 he knocks her up…
We can probably even work in a Freud-as-Silverman scene.
This sounds like the basic template for ‘Allo ‘Allo would be the way to go (slapstick farce is plainly the only way to portray the German occupation of France), and if anyone isn’t looking we could probably
stealpay homage to the title of It’s That Man Again – It’s That Adolf Again?Pilot episode plot summary: we open with a long line of variously outlandishly dressed people queuing up outside a small Austrian town. Just like everyone queuing up to climb Everest, the sheer volume of time-travellers who want to kill Hitler means that there’s a traffic jam of potential assassins.
Thus it is that we are introduced to our plucky gang of loveable misfits, and they are introduced to one another – time travellers from different eras who aren’t all that very much successful in their own time, so decide that the quick way to fame (and possibly fortune) is to be The Person Who Killed Hitler And Saved The World.
Naturally, they don’t – but each week they fail in an even more convoluted and hilarious way! The gags write themselves (which is why I’m leaving it to someone actually funny to write them). Potential cast – haven’t a clue, who’s famous and can act, who’s irritating but box office magic for incomprehensible reasons (e.g. the televisual equivalent of Adam Sandler), who’s a sexy blonde with big bazooms – I’ve seen an episode of The Expanse, I thought it was a good show but I was constantly distracted wondering if the leading lady was going to have her girls plop out of her unzipped top, I know what you need in a modern SF lead actress – who’s comic relief who is genuinely funny unlike the irritating star, and so on?
Incidentally, it’s a testament to how boring I found _The Expanse_ to be that I don’t even remember the lady you refer to.
Oh, I’m not the only one? I’m about four episodes in and trying to like it… but it’s not hooking me.
It was only one episode, and she may not have been the lead female, I was very distracted by her bazooms wondering “Yeah but this is a spaceship, it’s climate controlled, she has no reason to be walking around with her top unzipped and if she has a reason, then she has no reason to be walking around in her push-up bra when all the guys have their tops zipped up or are wearing tops that cover their torsos and arms”.
Apart from the fact that this is a modern gritty(ish) SF show and she’s the lead female (or this week’s guest star) and so she has to have bazooms for the fan boys (and any fan girls that like lady bazooms).
I haven’t seen the show yet, but this may be a case of art imitating life.
I spent a few years in a very snowy part of the country, where the temperature would stay below 0°F (-18°C) for most of the winter and a 3-4 foot snowfall was considered normal. If you went out on a Friday night you would still see young women in fishnets and miniskirts plodding through the snow on their way to a bar or house party.
“Bazooms” know no temperature.
Hmm. If it’s the blonde love interest in Episode 1, the climate control is probably a little off, because they’re flying a piece of junk hauler ship. Of course, that doesn’t explain why all the men are fully clothed, but there are worse problems, like sbhe bhg bs svir crbcyr frag ba na njnl zvffvba sebz guvf perj bs ynfg-punapr qebc-bhgf ghea bhg gb or nzbat gur orfg crbcyr va gur jubyr flfgrz ng gurve fcrpvnygvrf, naq gur svsgu vf xvyyrq (enaqbzyl engure guna nf n erfhyg bs gurve eryngvir pbzcrgrapr) juvyr gur sbhe rffragvny zrzoref fheivir and that the love interest is sevqtrq.
If you mean the engineer in episodes after episode one, well, my understanding is some people just like showing off their bazooms for reasons other than climate control. (Although I can’t remember if she does or not.)
If you went out on a Friday night you would still see young women in fishnets and miniskirts plodding through the snow on their way to a bar or house party.
That happens in certain parts round here as well 🙂
Well, I mostly noticed it because nobody else had visible bazooms, including one or two other ladies (who were plainly the efficient get the job done professional crew types, thus not the lead female/guest star but supporting cast). If there had been a hunky gentleman or two (perhaps down in Engineering or the likes) showing off his manly bazoom with unzipped top, I could have continued suspending my disbelief re: ‘goodness, who turned the thermostat up?’, but everyone else (including the guy who was setting up a romantic dinner in his cabin for the lady?) was fully dressed, and she had unzipped top and visible bazooms which, as I said, I was genuinely concerned might spill out of her space bra 🙂
And to be fair to The Expanse, I might be taking its name in vain – this was something I saw while channel-hopping so I jumped in in media res (and in media bazooms).
…… you mean you wanted something like this:
Scene: Scantily clad crew people visibly glistening with sweat all over the place.
Captain, toweling off abs: “…can you do something about this intolerable heat?”.
Engineer With Large Knockers, And a slightly homocidal glare starts ticking points of on her fingers:
“I did. The coolant pumps are going to have to be replaced months ahead of schedule, I am running them that hard. The navigator and bursar are currently playing chess with an entirely imaginary chess board because I turned off all the non-critical computers, I just got done isolating the cargo hold to the maximum extent possible – and if you want anything from there, fuck you, not getting it until after we unload.”.
Navigator. In boxers. And nothing else. “Knight to D5”.
Captain: “… So. Nothing for it?”
Engineer: “I. Am. Not. The person who thought it was a good idea to buy 30. Again, I feel this needs repeating. 30 fucking tonnes of p-238 from the French”.
Captain, with a shit-eating grin: “We are going to be so fucking rich when we reach Ceres”.
Come on D, this is a proud tradition in SciFi, dating at least as far back as Deanna Troi having a custom-made cleavage-accenting uniform that apparently has never been worn by anyone in Starfleet other than her.
Delightfully lampshaded when the Enterprise gets a new captain, and one of his first orders is for her to put a shirt on, already.
Which she does, and then leaves it on for the rest of the series.
you mean you wanted something like this:
Scene: Scantily clad crew people visibly glistening with sweat all over the place.
Tasteful scantily clad glistening attractive persons of both genders, Thomas Jorgensen!
Your description of the putative scene is giving me flashbacks to Enterprise and the Orgy Sauna I mean Decontamination Gel Application Chamber, which thank all the gods they dropped as too dumb even for their show. (Archer had to bring his dog along as well? That was taking his dog adoration too far!)
Half-naked Phlox? NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
@Deiseach: … wait, the writers put the dog in a sexy gel-application chamber? 🙁
@Deiseach >
I still think that the last season of Enterprise (after they dropped the Xindi and brought in the Andorians) showed potential, and ‘sides those scenes are CLEARLY there to demonstrate the inter-species familiarity and commitment to hygiene of the far future (also the actors all deserve applause for not laughing, how many takes must they’ve needed?).
Le Maistre Chat, Archer really, really loved his dog O_o
Whatever about The Expanse (if it was indeed that show) and Ooh I’m So Warm I Must Unzip My Top To Air My Bazooms, The Sexy Lube Chamber had no justification at all; there was a feeble nod (more of a nod and a wink) towards “No guys, this is totally how decon works in the less technically advanced time of Enterprise” but come on: if they’re going to have people slathered in decon gel, then semi-realistically it’ll be in shower cubicles where it gets sprayed on or the like, not “everyone in their skivvies in cramped space with no curtains so they’re on top of each other rubbing gel on themselves and each other”.
I want to try and be delicate, but you saw the linked video and how the first instance showed that T’Pol had, um, functioning breasts if she needed to feed a baby? Yeah, that’s nothing but fan service, and the fans didn’t particularly want it.
Plumber, I have been told it got much better in later seasons but as far as I was concerned, the damage had been done with (a) trying to make T’Pol the new Seven of Nine (sexy babe in tight-fitting catsuit) (b) the crap they pulled with the Vulcans (yeah, now they’re racist xenophobes and closet fascists, doncha know? also making it canon that Vulcans literally think Humans stink????) (c) the sexy lube chamber foolishness (d) Trip Tucker whom I abominate (e) the Xindi time-travel nonsense where they decide to turn Archer into Kick-Ass Action Hero, and where the less technologically able Enterprise (remember, we don’t even have the Universal Translator yet and the transporter is still new experimental and uncertain kit) and Federation will be able to stand up to species that are advanced enough to have time travel (f) that bloody dog – well, you get my gist 🙂
Which is why I gave up on it and never came back for the better later seasons. Though to be fair, I thought Enterprise was the worst new attempt at making more Trek, then they launched Discovery on me! (Oh hi, we’re going to give Spock yet more hitherto unknown siblings, and moreover we’re gonna make that sib a self-righteous turnip-head, and we’re gonna have Mirror Universe from the start, and and and so much fun! stuff! like a mushroom obsessed engineer! yeah let me off Mr Toad’s Wild Ride, thanks all the same).
@Deiseach
Um…
…not seasons so much as “most of the last season” (solitary), though they were some good episodes before then.
Just like Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine (I never did watch early Voyager, so maybe that as well), it had a rough start, but that start lasted years.
Once they dropped the novelty stuff and did more of a homage to the original series it shined, but few viewers were left then.
I haven’t seen any Discovery so I can’t compare that, maybe Picard will be broadcast, but I guess they’ll paywall that as well like they’ve done with Doctor Who.
Total tangent, but Adam Sandler had two great movies (Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison in that order). A few decent ones (50 Fist Dates was a cute rom-com, Click had some nice moments, The Longest Yard remake was decent), and the rest, as far as I’m concerned, are…not great. What’s really bad is what happens outside his acting career. If I have to hear one more of his stupid damn songs I’ll freaking lose it. Just awful.
Slapstick? No, I think it’s going to have to be one of those darkly ironic deals. You send your time travelers back to the Weimar Republic to kill the future leader of the Nazi regime, which they do, shooting him point-blank in his home and framing some Communist ruffians for the deed. And so Horst Wessel never lived to overthrow Hitler.
Suppose a hypothetical parallel reality. It’s mostly like our world, except smoking is culturally regarded as healthy, to the point where there are products like Baby’s First Pipe and the medical community explicitly endorses the proper amount of smoking one should do. Just about everyone smokes between 1 and 2 packs a day. In the outer fringes of the bell curve (call it two standard deviations out) there are some people who smoke like 10 packs and people who don’t smoke at all and stay away from public spaces because of all the secondhand smoke. Just like in our world, smoking causes certain types of cancer, which are widespread in this parallel world’s society, but neither the scientific establishment nor the public is aware of the fact.
Suppose there are epidemiological studies that try to generate hypotheses as to what causes certain ailments, including the types of cancer caused (uknowingly for the parallel people) by smoking. How would a study like that need to be conducted (both in terms of data acquisition and data analysis) to detect the association?
TBH I don’t think it would be that hard. People knew in 1700 that tobacco was unhealthy. They knew in 1800. They knew in 1970 at the supposed height of scientific disinformation campaigns. The reality is people were basically never fooled, instead the fake sciences was really just employed as cover to continue doing what people wanted to do anyways.
Your “starting point” would have required a coordinated “war against noticing” to be successful for centuries. It is my experience that such endeavors are not very successful, and doubly so if people actually have any stake in the outcome (like their own health). Maybe for a while you can trick people into eating bread if bread is only 1% less healthy than rice. But that is because 1% is tiny, and most people don’t know the bread/rice ratios of their neighbors. If there was, essentially, a 10% subset of superhumans that consistently won all the marathons and lived to 75+ while everyone else is keeling over of lung cancer/heart disease at 55 your disinformation campaign is DOA.
I’m in agreement with Clutzy; we know smoking is bad for you, so now people have turned to vaping as a nicotine delivery system. As though finding a different way to introduce a poison into your system is going to be healthier.
From what I’ve seen of people who vape (and before I start: this rant brought to you courtesy of having to stand in a semi-enclosed area with two people vaping away) they vape as they used to smoke. It smells the same, the stink hangs around on your clothes the same, the way they inhale and hold the vapour in their lungs for the maximum hit is the same, they way they puff away is the same as when they used to smoke cigarettes. The only thing I see different is that it’s cleaner, in the sense that there aren’t discarded butts on the ground. Everything else is the same as cigarette smoking and the vapers are just as much addicts as the smokers.
???
This is not at all my experience. Vape smell seems way less obnoxious than tobacco smoke.
Also, consider carbon monoxide, tar and thousands of other cancerogene substances in tobacco smoke.
And people can slowly reduce the nicotin content of their vapes, thus slowly turning it into a harmless pacifier.
Yes, it absolutely does not smell the same. I had one friend who smoked, and now he switched to vaping, and neither the smoke nor his clothes smell anymore. He now vapes inside his apartment even when guests are around and no one really minds.
I’ll add a +1 to this point.
There are also vaporizers that actually burn plant matter (as opposed to vaporizing some blend of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin). They are usually associated with pot but I suppose they could be used for tobacco as well, maybe this is what Deseich encountered?
I would be kicked out of the family if I sparked up a cigarette in my parents’ home, but they do allow me to vape inside. That wouldn’t be the case if it smelled anything like cigarettes or left a hanging odor that clung to clothes/fabric.
Adding a bit more: Someone going “this is just as unhealthy as cigarettes” re: vaping is usually a pretty good indicator they just dislike the visual of it and haven’t done a whole hell of a lot of study on it; the science has been pretty hard pressed to consistently show any significant harm from it beyond the nicotine used.
In this case, the “it smells the same, hangs on your clothes the same” thing is just factually untrue, even for tobacco-derived flavors. Some people just want it to be worse than it is so they can keep socially kicking a disfavored group.
It is vastly healthier. One of the main issues with smoking is, well, the smoke – inhaling burning stuff is incredibly bad for you. From what I understand, this is connected to the fact that barbecue is bad for you – burnt stuff is dangerous. Also, so far as I know it’s not at all understood how bad pure nicotine is for you – it’s certainly not a good thing for your body, but it’s vastly better that nicotine + cigarette.
Well, whatever brand these people were using, it certainly smelled like cigarette smoke (upon first catching a whiff, I was extremely puzzled as to who was lighting up until I saw the vapers).
As to the cutting-down, some people may indeed do that. But I think a lot of vapers are replacing cigarettes with vaping and they’re going to stick to the equivalent of “I was on forty a day” with no interest in cutting down or quitting.
My (possibly mistaken) understanding is that the health risks of smoking are not mainly due to nicotine, hence that vaping largely avoids them. I’ve been mildly tempted to try either vaping or a nicotine patch in order to see if the benefits of a wildly popular and reasonably safe drug are worth the costs.
@DavidFriedman
Yeah, I’ve seen some research that free iron getting where it doesn’t belong is a major factor.
It is healthier. Nicotine by itself isn’t carcinogenic and vaping liquids generally don’t include the variety of toxic additives used in traditional cigarettes. It isn’t healthy and is addictive but the same can be said of alcohol and caffeine.
Your hypothetical-fighting ability is respectable, but this is not what I wanted to focus on. 🙂
But the problem of a war against noticing is the point. People will notice whether you coordinate an effort or not. And when people notice things they then study them and with the effects of smoking being so strong, the study is not as hard.
Notably, since smoking is considered healthy, you can run single blind studies and it wont be considered unethical.
Your point, but not mine. I want to explore the limitations of epidemiology in the presence of a near-total saturation with causal factor (“everyone is doing it”). Being alive causing death and so forth.
Science advances one funeral at a time.
Which is not epidemiology.
Maybe we can explore an analogous situation in the real world. Height is similar in that it follows a Bell Curve distribution.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCGENETICS.116.001651
Here’s a study along your lines connecting tallness to Thromboembolism.
@Clutzy
Thank you! This is interesting.
Notably:
– Gigantic Ns.
– Confidence intervals don’t cross 1.
– Strong RR.
– Extreme categories an order of magnitude or two less numerous than the middle ones.
If there was, essentially, a 10% subset of superhumans…
Except that this effect would be hard to notice, because “not smoking” would tend to correlate with “terrible respiratory health”–a good chunk of the non-smokers would have severe allergies, asthma, etc that are aggravated by smoking.
An excellent point. Any ideas on how one might separate the smoking effect from the non-smoking effect on respiratory health?
Conduct your studies among old-school Baptists, Methodists, and Mormons, who forbid smoking? That should provide a more random sample of non-smokers, at least in terms of previous health conditions.
What would make it obvious would be the concentration of effects to the fringes. If somebody smokes 10 packs a day and gets lung cancer, you have two rare events and your mind wants to correlate them. If however the effect tops or at least tappers at 2-3 cigarettes per day, then at most you can realize non-smokers get 1/3 less cancers (with another 1/3 due to passive smoking and possibly pollution). And if there are some confounders, like those that don’t smoke have asthma or are poor… Add to this the fact that habitual smokers may be richer and thus healthier, and that nicotine has real positive effects, so you also have an opposite trend.
So first thing to do is locate the hypothesis. Nothing can start before this. Of of the miriad factors out there, you have to look around and say hmmm… nicotine is great, but I wonder if it would be even healthier without this delivery mechanism…
Valid points, but those fringes need to be visible in analysis in the first place, right? That means that the study has to be large enough (otherwise the fringes contain too few people to be statistically significant) and the stratification needs to be fine enough to catch them too (if you just have quartiles, for instance, the non-smokers are gonna get lumped with the 1/day smokers and the signal will be lost). What I’m curious about is just how large the N needs to be, and what the relevant properties of the analysis method need to be. (I am not a statistician.)
The study’s purpose is to generate the hypothesis. “Oh, hey, there’s a strong association between X and Y, let’s do some experiments to see if a relationship exists and if so, where the causality is.”
I would expect the issue to be noticed first in domains where aerobic performance is very important, such as long-distance running. Coaches would probably catch on that few to none of their winning athletes smoke. Not smoking would become part of the folk-wisdom of sports coaching in those domain.
High-level sports are pretty important in the modern world. Countries spend real money making sure their athletes grab a respectable share of medals, and these days that includes funds for rigorous studies of various training and selection methods. One of those shouldn’t have any trouble detecting to correlation between high performance and not smoking, at least in endurance sports. Even in a world where there is a broad consensus that smoking is just fine, I could see those results filtering out through the coaching hierarchy, until it became common wisdom among high school coaches that serious athletes should not smoke.
I’m talking about cancer, not performance. Athletes aren’t exactly optimizing for health, either.
Do men still generally smoke more than women? If so, then to generate hypothesis, you should start with conditions that appear more often among men. Data about that is probably already readily available, because everyone likes to makes statistics separated by gender.
Some well-known ones in our world are prostate cancer and the more common forms of color blindness. But the more important are the general classes of deaths with slightly different frequency among men and women. In our world, slightly more men die to cancer than women, slightly less men die to heart diseases than women (but this is worth to examine in detail, splitting different types of diseases), and much more men die to liver problems, traffic accidents, and suicide than women do. If the statistics showed the same in your parallel reality, I’d start to examine if smoking makes car drivers more likely to cause accidents, and if so, try to encourage people not to smoke while driving; and get experts to try to find out whether smoking causes liver disease. The flip side is important too: test which types of heart disease smoking helps prevent.
Interesting. So simply sexing the data should provide some association – but it would probably be small, I think, in proportion of the difference between smoking rates of men and women.
Mutation signatures.
Sequencing cancer genomes you can build up a signature of the mutagen. Typically tissue that’s gone cancerous doesn’t have just one mutation, typically it’s ended up full of mutations before cancer was triggered.
https://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic/signatures_v2
funny side note: sequencing tens of thousands of cancers this crowd found ~30 distinct signatures
They gave a talk about #22: apparently families were coming down with an unusual bladder cancer only seen in some countries.
turned out to be aristolochic acid: a chemical in some traditional herbs in Chinese medicine in countries where that’s common and in another location it turned out that the seeds of a particular plant were getting mixed up with the wheat and people eating local bread were getting this cancer.
for 13 of them the cause remains unknown in our current society. (some very rare though)
tobacco chewing and smoking are 2 of the known signatures.
That’s mechanistic evidence. I’m trying to discuss the requirements of epidemiology, not other types of studies.
epidemiology doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
part of my point is that we do seem to live in a very similar world where there’s likely quite a few mutagens that we’re currently entirely unaware of… but we can get hints they exist to untangle them from the other cancers with known causes.
Whatever answer you come to: there’s like a dozen cancer-sets to apply it to in the real world, at least as a thought experiment.
Remember that they did animal testing for the effects of smoking and cancer.
I think a better analog would be to look at “real world” commonly used products – such as wheat, GMO corn/soy, meat – all of which have had studies trying to link them with cancer.
The major difference is that this is a lot easier with smoking given the effect size.
I have the feeling this hypothetical is trying to make a point about some analogous part of our own culture, but I’m baffled about what it might be.
You are perceptive.
I’m trying to assense which, if any, staples of our modern diet are behind the rise of chronic illness. Nutrition is regrettably a field where epidemiology is wrongly used to make claims about cause and effect, as opposed to generating hypotheses on the basis of statistical associations of sufficient strength. Hence the focus on it. (Yes, I know there is non-epidemiological, and even “non-scientific” data out there on the subject. I’m familiar with it, and trust it more than most observational studies, but that’s not how the field overall works, unfortunately.)
The study Clutzy linked above is instructive. Immense in scope (n=millions), working with objective characteristics (height, VTE diagnosis), with comparatively small fringes not lumped together a larger category. The association they got was clearly strong, dose dependent and consistent.
Compare this study of carbohydrates and all-cause mortality. Two orders of magnitude smaller, using food questionnaires for dietary information (as if most people remember what they had for lunch a week ago, and as if that was an accurate way to estimate macronutrients). While the extreme low caloric intake exclusion was justified (people following starvation diets), the extreme high exclusion was probably not (why would you exclude various bodybuilders, athletes, physical labourers, large individuals and people who just eat a lot of calorically dense food?). Their “extreme” carbohydrate categories (below 40% and above 70%) are severely lacking for a macronutrient whose floor is apparently zero. Why not actually take a look at the fringe types who eat only trace amounts? And to top it all off, the relative risks they got were only weak to moderate, no strong associations. And this crap gets heralded in the news as solid evidence for the official guideline of 55-60% carbohydrate intake.
What are the major medical advances of the 21st century? Not public health- like smoking cessation- but actual advances in treatment. Just curious as sometimes I feel the results of so much research is negative, so many ideas being disproven etc.
Just shooting from the hip as someone not in the field- it seems like arthroscopic surgery is a big one? From what I hear many or most surgeries were ‘major’ in the late 20th century, now advances in arthroscopy have come to shoulders, knees, more recently hips, etc. Pretty big advance in making surgeries less stressful for the patient.
What else is new (and proven and used in the field) this century?
Joint replacement has certainly experienced leaps and bounds. That was an area of study for me in college. In a similar vein, Ventricular assist devices (VADS) have gone from extremely temporary, to an implant people can live with for years, either with the goal of a heart transplant, or simply live out the rest of their days with them.
Less in my wheelhouse, but somewhat close, surgical robotics is rounding into form nicely.
The pharma and other fields are out of my knowledge base, mostly. My brother does some work with that, and it seems to me that most is incremental, but again I don’t know enough.
I see what you did there . . .
In pharmaceuticals: lots of progress in cancer treatment, especially with therapies targeted against a particular type of cancer. Imantinib (Gleevec) was FDA-approved in 2001 although development started in the late 90s. Moving beyond small molecules, immunotherapy is also having a big impact.
However, the return on research investment is definitely slowing down compared to the late 20th century. Check out Derek Lowe’s blog (In the Pipeline) for some good perspectives.
Antibiotics, especially Penicillin.
21st century, not 20th century.
If we are doing 20th century, then yeah, penicillin. Either that or oral rehydration therapy. Actually, does smallpox eradication count as a medical advance, or is that considered part of public health? Vaccination itself was invented in the late 18th century, but the 20th century was the first time a disease was deliberately eradicated through a global campaign.
Oops sorry, my bad!
Probably “just” incremental changes, mainly taking things from “mind-boggling expensive and risky” and into routine. Which kinda makes cost disease and regulation look a lot worse – it’s braking the main advancement front towards living longer and healthier.
Other than that – google. Both patients and doctors use it with glee and success.
Chemotherapy for cancer is a big one. Cancer used to be a death sentence. It isn’t one any more. Lots of cancers are treatable now.
Vaccine against varicella (chicken pox). Technically it first became available in the 20th century, but it will take a few more decades until most newborns get vaccinated, and a few years after that for the illness to get much rarer.
Laparoscopic (endoscopic) surgery. That too was already available three decades ago, but it takes time until hospitals get the equipment and training so that they can use laparoscopic surgery as a routine for a significant number of patients.
Digital blood pressure meters and blood glucose meters. They allow untrained people to measure blood pressure and blood glucose level easily, which helps in both monitoring a known disease and early screening.
Better medical imaging. Yes, we had CT scanners and MRI and more already in the 20th century, but we now have better quality and cheaper ones, thus we can diagnose problems in a larger mass of patients.
There are probably more advances, but the 21th century is long, and it will take more time to see what sticks.
Anti-retrovirals and antivirals–start being available in the mid-1990’s, but they have become far more available and better understood. They have dramatically changed the prognosis for Hepatitis C and HIV.
As much as people like to complain about it, Truvada (Emtricitabine/tenofovir) is a big deal.
Both of my parents are laced with fairly significant amounts of custom-fit titanium and bone glue. They have nearly full mobility, and can go for long walks and can climb stairs. They both have suffered both chronic disorders and multi compound fracture accidents that, if the tech level was retarded only 20 years, they would both be confined to wheelchairs and be constantly fighting the DEA’s retarded and evil prescription limits on pain medication.
That’s something.
A developer that I manage had what could have been a pretty catastrophic bone injury almost completely repaired with tech that only started going mainstream in the US in the past couple of years, and that is still not available from the NHSs in Europe and Canada.
That’s something.
Orthopedics is getting a lot better really fast, and that appears to be driven by improvements in material science, in high resolution medical imaging, and in robot-aided high-speed low-invasive surgery.
When was the last time you saw someone in a plaster cast, or even using full length crutches?
Microbiome treatments? Have those actually been effective?
The continually plummeting cost of gene sequencing?
3D printed tissues?
Just guesses, don’t really know if any have had a significant impact at the level of actual patients.
Also, and I have personal experience with this, the development of TNF inhibitors has made having many autoimmune disorders much more manageable.
Hip arthroscopy is solidly 20th century; the operation I had for a labral tear was first performed in 1986. The chicken pox vaccine is also 20th century (1995).
Hepatitis C cures, most notably Gilead’s Sovaldi and derivative cocktails.
Gilead was in the spotlight for the cost of the drug ($84k for a treatment in the US) but the drug was actually a textbook example of a “good” expensive drug: it was a straight-up cure (most successful drugs merely manage a condition), the price was relatively efficient on a dollars per additional QALY basis, the drug saved the healthcare system, particularly Medicaid, money on hospitalizations, it was a much better treatment than existing interferon treatments, and it was a true innovative drug with no roll-up jack up the prices nonsense. Oh, AND, there was a competing series of drugs made by AbbVie so the PBMs could use competition to drive better pricing over time.
I used Scott’s posts on cultural evolution as a starting point for an examination of how to determine which traditions are important and which are inconsequential. If it’s going to take a long time to determine whether a tradition is important or not, and if for that reason, and others, reason isn’t very useful. I suggest four other criteria that might be useful in it’s place:
1- The duration of the tradition. How long has it been around?
2- The strength of enforcement for the tradition. How severe are the penalties for going against it?
3- The frequency of the tradition among the various cultures. How widespread is it? Is it present in many different cultures?
4- The domain of the tradition. Is the tradition related to something which could impact survival or reproduction?
I then take these criteria and apply them to the recent revocation of the taboo against two people of the same sex marrying each other. With perhaps predictable results.
If you want to parallel actual biology, why not just look at conservation on its own?
If you break something important, you and any descendants you might have are less likely to survive. If this principle holds true for cultures the same way it does for biological organisms, we should expect the most important traditions to be passed down mostly intact while less vital ones rapidly change.
It’s fairly straightforward to compute a conservation score for a nucleic acid or amino acid sequence, whereas determining how much a tradition is conserved seems more problematic. But it seems like the sort of thing that ought to be possible to do qualitatively based on anthropological study of different cultures with common cultural descent.
I agree with Nabil on trying the criteria he suggests. It basically wraps (1) and (3) together and a measure of (1) and (3) implies a great deal about (4) if culture evolves in a manner similar to phenotypes.
I think (2) strength of enforcement will give too many false negative signals. There may be no enforcement of a norm for a very long time if there’s no incentive for people to break it. When incentives suddenly change, tailspin.
(4) is a better criteria than (2) except that most traditions have no direct effect on survival or reproduction. It’s too easy to game something as being irrelevant or not irrelevant to survival and reproduction because we don’t have good ways of measuring. It’s not even clear to me that just because something doesn’t affect survival and reproduction means it’s not going to matter to almost every human in a massively negative way if it changes.
As far as your criticisms of (4) I think you make some good points, and certainly there could be something that looks like it has no relationship to survival which ends up being super important, but I still have a sense that there is some value to giving additional weight to a tradition which directly speaks to, say pregnancy.
To return to the manioc example, if start vomiting, you’d at least start by looking at traditions related to food and food preparation.
That is definitely an interesting idea. Far outside of my resources, but I’d love to see it done (or get pointed to where it was done.)
Slavery:
1) Millenia long.
2) Normally escaped slaves would be punished by death; Crassus famously crucified every slave participating in the Spartacus revolt.
3) It’s very common.
4) Sure: The Confederacy decided slavery was so vital to their survival, they went to war for it. See again the Spartacus rebellion.
Seems your criteria need work.
It’s actually expected for this reasoning method to sometimes fail drastically if cultural evolution is like genetic evolution. But to really test it, it would have to be found to fail fairly rarely when applied to many different traditions. (EDIT: makes it a rather hard method to test)
Most important things will be stable for a long time, so the same criteria he’s trying to adapt will sometimes fail spectacularly as applied to biology. Like genetic mutations, most novel traditions should fail or be harmful, but a few should sweep all before them because they’re a great improvement.
Notably, you can trace a drop in slavery across certain cultures over ~1 millenia though. So that tradition changed more slowly than it looks. I think it might have died earlier if not for the somewhat unique conditions when Europeans invaded the Americas. Slavery had already dropped off a lot in Europe at the time.
Hmmm – I just presumed the OP thought slavery was a good idea – provided other people are the slaves 🙁
It could also be hawks and doves. If everybody else is keeping slaves, it’s cultural+genetic suicide not to. What to do with defeated enemies? Leave them to recover, so they can come back and fight you again? Kill them wastefully, and thus make them fight even harder?
You can try extracting tribute, but that’s just slavery with extra steps, and it’s riskier.
I think it’s going to be hard to talk about slavery without it getting messy, but remember that cultural evolution doesn’t care about morality, it cares about survival. The question is not whether a given tradition was good, but whether it might have increased survival or reproduction. As I said I think this is dangerous territory to wade into just because of how radioactive it, but one could certainly see where being submissive to slavery (i.e. accepting enslavement rather than committing mass suicide or fighting to the last man) might have survival utility.
I should also say I appreciate you bringing it up, this is the kind of thing I wasn’t eager to hear, but definitely needed to. So, thanks. That said, I found your response to 4) to be less useful, and maybe even a little flippant.
I somehow doubt that slavery has been necessary for survival; maybe for survival of a specific economic system, of a given regime (see, the Confederacy), but certainly not for survival of those particular humans (the slave owners just lost their slaves after the civil war).
Whether it would make for more reproduction _in general_ is another discussion altogether.
That’s the problem with traditions; they may well be necessary for survival of the group’s current configuration, but ritual preparation of manioc is more of the exception than the rule.
IIRC there is a rationality principle that good advice needs to come with a specification of when the advice no longer applies. Traditions do not come with such specification, and only are broken when absolutely necessary.
If there is such a thing as cultural evolution, survival of the culture would be the thing being selected for. It would be no more concerned with the survival of individuals than evolution is with the survival of individual cells.
That said, I’m not sure if evolution is the right metaphor here. Much of culture seems like it could be better explained by behavioral genetics, and what’s left is transmitted in such a different way that I wouldn’t expect it to be governed by the same rules as heredity.
But the specific humans are the ones in the regime propagating the economic system. Humans are constantly warring with each other. If you want to avoid being conquered by your neighbors (and therefore likely killed), you need to be able to field healthy and well-trained soldiers. This means your soldiers, your knights or whatever, need to be 1) well fed and 2) spend their time training to fight rather than tilling fields. And it took a lot of labor to till the fields, so, slavery.
This was true up until the industrial revolution, at which point the system of slavery died or was extinguished.
I think there are periods of feudalistic rule -couple with intense warfare- in China and Japan where slavery was forbidden, although you may argue that feudal peasants see little difference from slavery, so dunno.
It is possible that such solutions may not be arrived naturally most of the time, but that does not mean they are not possible.
There’s always the argument that, for example, the greeks were in the verge of having steam engines, but didn’t because slavery made such early machines economically impractical, tho dunno how much water does that really hold.
That’s what I would argue, yes. If slavery (or, “systems in which a politically subjugated lower class has no choice but to labor for the direct benefit of the ruling/martial classes”) were not culturally reproductively fit, it wouldn’t have been common and such societies would have been easily conquered by neighbors who had a more successful strategy. It turns out that more successful strategy is the steam engine and everything else great we got from the industrial revolution. Up until then, though, the alternative to “have slaves” was “be slaves.”
Could you expand on the behavioural genetics point, or provide a relevant link? I’m not able to parse what you mean here.
I think the point is partly (1) that culture doesn’t transmit very faithfully from person to person (2) that culture is transmitted horizontally as much as vertically and (3) lots of culture is irrelevant to human reproduction and so is uninfluenced by evolution that way. Culture is a weird type of phenotype from behavioral genotype + environment. And behavioral genotype is definitely transmissible by definition. It’s complicated because we don’t know what parts lead to relatively stable phenotype (which may not look like culture at all if every culture has a similar distribution of people with some phenotypes!) and less stable phenotype that a biological type of selection won’t really act on (most of culture).
Horizontal transmission is more the exception in the genetic case, and transmission of phenotype is… somewhat more faithful? More of a difference of degree than of kind since every phenotype interacts with environment. Obesity for example is heritable, but modern obesity occurs because of the novel food saturated environment and sedentary lifestyle.
But most of culture has obvious strong environmental components. For example, is listening to swing heritable? Probably, but when almost no one listens to swing, even if it was heritable it doesn’t explain much about how much swing someone will listen to. You’d know more about how much swing a person listens to by knowing the year they were born and the year it is.
Enkidum,
David Deutch’s Beginning of Infinity is in part the attempt to answer the question of why humans evolved such capacity for innovation and creativity, and then failed to do anything with it for 100,000 years. The answer lies with what quanta413 is talking about with cultural transmission of memes: creativity and innovation that evolved was not for creating technological progress but in order to replicate cultural ideas as accurately as possible.
Anyway he explains it much better than I and he takes a couple chapters to do it. Really good book though.
@LesHabablap
I’ve seen it mentioned here and elsewhere. Thanks for the recommendation, sounds very much up my alley (although as was discussed in the previous OT, I’m very skeptical that we didn’t do anything fitness-enhancing with innovation and creativity in the ancestral past).
I feel like a careful examination of the facts may demonstrate why your criteria still has merit.
Using slavery to try to poke holes in cultural evolution is like using filial cannibalism to try to poke holes in evolution.
Interesting personal note… I am finding that I would be more comfortable launching a spirited defense on the evolutionary value of eating your own children than the evolutionary basis for slavery.
Well, I am a programmer by trade so I like to test border cases.
If you feel Slavery is unfair, do Female Genital Mutilation (“circumcision”) then.
Keep in mind that the tradition does claim it has hygienic properties.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Tradition only exists at the group level, so you gotta consider group survival; however, groups (and individuals) are resistant to change and seem to think they will die without their traditions, when this is not necessarily true, but the end of these traditions may induce some social change.
I dispute that tradition of not allowing same sex marriage in a society which does not otherwise supress homosexuality exists.
There definitely exists long tradition of supressing homosexuality across various cultures, but reasons for it are not mysterious. they are 1) prevention of a spread of STIs, and 2), which I think is even more important, maintaining family line, i.e. reproduction. Having a society which does not supress homesexuality and does not allow SSM does not help with any of those evolutionary problems. On the contrary, not allowing SSM probably increases problem 1), since marriage is the great traditional barrier against promiscuity.
It is interesting that OP arrived at his conclusions via Scott´s series on cultural evolution, since I agree with all seven of Scott´s rules inspired by Heinrich, but I take from them that homosexuality is one of those weird illegible preferences that should be respected.
We’ll see about that. My suspicion is that it is not marriage which civilizes men, but women.
I have seen statistics that say about half of male homosexual couples are not monogamous. However, this may change as gay marriage is only just now a thing. Googling around I find pop-left journals like Slate, Daily Beast, HuffPo alternately pointing out studies that gays aren’t monogamous and that’s great and that gays are now monogamous and that’s great. I think the jury’s still out and we’ll need to check back in 20 years to see whether or not gay marriage has any impact on gay promiscuity.
It seems to me that marriage can make gay men more monogamous if the norms of opposite-sex marriage carry over. How much they carry over depends on a lot of things, like how much we enforce said norms.
@Conrad Honcho,
Take this with a very big grain of salt as I don’t remember where I read it and aren’t willing to slog through a web search to see if a remember correctly, but I thought that I read that male homosexual long term couples were more likely that cheat on each other than other couples on average, but still stay together despite that, and female homosexual couples were more likely to be faithful, but also more likely to seperate than average.
I have also read this
So there’s the two kinds of traditions, the legible and the illegible. Legible ideas we understand why we practice them. Illegible ideas we don’t. There’s also the idea of Chesterton’s fence. Don’t knock down fences(traditions) unless you know why they are there. But for any illegible tradition, it won’t become legible to us unless we knock down the fence. Most of our illegible traditions predate the Industrial Revolution, when the material life of our societies transformed dramatically, something that was not “anticipated” by our traditions. So isn’t there some value in knocking down fences, if for no other reason than that the illegible becomes legible?
Soviet-style socialism is a good example. Traditionalists had really terrible reasons for opposing socialism, and the socialists had plausible reasons for believing it would be better. When they implemented their ideas, they failed but now we know better. Isn’t it good to experiment?
Not for the tens of millions who died for the sake of “experimentation.”
I mean, I get your point, but yeesh, you may have picked the worst possible example…
@Matt M,
I think the “Isn’t it good to experiment? was sarcasm.
If it wasn’t….
If it was, the Poe’s Law meter is reading off the charts
It was a little tongue in cheek but not completely. I think we are better off now knowing what we do but that doesn’t mean I would have been cheering on Stalin as purged his opponents just so we could learn. Jeremiah is taking the idea that we have these traditions and we can’t use reason so maybe we can find another justification. What I’m trying to say in my own clumsy way is a sort of corrective to that kind of thinking. It’s more of a half-baked devils advocate idea than anything coheret.
I may be alone here in finding:
interesting, but if anyone has comments about the story I’m curious.
I think its simply a divide with unions that the Democratic party was destined to make. Only public sector unions are even mildly aligned in interest with their broad set of goals like universal healthcare, pre-K, and climate regulation.
A working person, union or not, who is in those middle quintiles has other interests, mainly fostering stability in society.
continuing the thread in “if only Turing was alive to see this”
@C.F.Hollander
yes, you are correct that the belief in creator God and belief in this world being a simulation are very similar.
If there is a God that created the universe, then how can it not be likened to a “simulation”? It’s not the real thing. Whatever that God is made of is more real than we are.
However there’s no implicit assumption in the simulation hypothesis that the God talks to us or is concerned with us. I’d say, that if the simulation hypothesis is true as well as the assumption that an advanced species would be simulating itself, that we might not even be the advanced species in question. Might even have been part of the simulation’s design, but are just an accidental byproduct and the simulated species of interest lives outside our observable universe entirely.
(who knows what the simulators consider to be “Big Data” or how their world, even their physics look like)
The assumption of:
“Advanced species would simulate themselves, cause we’d totally do that, thus there’s more simulated species around than simulating ones” is a very different argument from the usual God-proofs (perhaps it isn’t, not super deep in that topic). And it is also one that’s unfalsifiable, but at least much more plausible.
If the simulation hypothesis is correct/God or Gods exists, then I would be a little sad. For me, that just feels terribly random.
If someone told me magic was real today and showed it to me, I would facepalm hard. I would cry out: “Seriously! This sim is that bloody cheap?!”
There’s a certain elegance of our kind having sprung from bottom-up processes and in some way, there is no obvious ceiling in what we can become. With simulators/Gods in the mix, there is an end to the adventure in sight. And a too quick end to the unknown without the joy of much discovery ahead.
Though some points to take heart in:
There is no magic and/or whimsy in this simulation of ours. Our world is predictable to a very large degree in that it follows discoverable and consistent natural laws. So at least our simulation is somewhat coherent and not some stupid video game or toy. Perhaps then our simulators/creators are not interested in meddling with the creation and we’re just the equivalent of a bottled flask in which we try to find the origin of life on earth.
Perhaps they are dead or we are long-forgotten and will never actually figure out, that we are simulated.
Or perhaps again, the laws of the simulation is broken in far, far away places where the simulators meddle only with the things they actually are interested in. And we’ll just be decoration on the interesting alien planet’s night skies.
Assuming that the Gods care about us, our little species in any way whatsoever specifically presupposes that the simulators are human and since we are so incredibly cool and complex, we must be getting a lot of their ultrahuman computing power.
But since we do not know how the world of the simulators work, I think that’s an unwarranted assumption.
Actually figuring out, whether this is merely a sim might not be possible if the sim is designed in such a way. I hope, we’ll never find evidence for it. If Gods exist then perhaps we will be lucky enough to never find out. And for what it’s worth, it might very well be a question that our Gods have to face as well.
Who created the Gods, who created the Gods, who created the Gods…… doesn’t stop being a niggling question at any point perhaps.
So in that sense the similarity between the God-hypothesis and the simulator-hypothesis ends. The simulation hypothesis does not assume that there exist all-knowing simulators, that can know themselves to be only creator, but not themselves be created.
And for us it could be worse, anyway. Could be like Season 2 episode 6 of Rick & Morty.
What are people’s theories of moral progress? Most moderns seem to hold that our moral beliefs are far more correct than previous generations but I see no reason to think that. Our moral intuitions differ from our ancestors for a variety of reasons but there seems no inherent reason to think we are right and they were wrong. The most plausible accounts of moral progress that one could be certain was actually progress, advances in philosophy or divine revelation, are not how moral positions have changed. We may have improved by chance but we could have just as easily worsened.
The Flynn effect would seem to give rise for some optimism if one held that average iq of a culture was positively correlated with the probability of its moral code matching the truth(a position I am deeply uncomfortable with), but even with that assumption the Flynn effect seems not to particularly be effecting the sorts of intelligence that would seem most relevant.
One could make circular arguments along the lines of previous generations holding moral beliefs we now find abhorrent and so we can justly discount their other moral beliefs but had more regress happened, the same argument could be made.
@edmundgennings,
In reading of the “bear-baiting” and lynching in the past one feels that people are more moral now, but I have my doubts.
From reading Chaucer and Ovid I get the impression that people centuries ago were much the same as today, and I’ve seen posts by youngsters describing the 1980’s (and even the early 2000’s) as much less “tolerant”, but I remember people being much the same then as now, and if there’s been “moral progress” since then I haven’t noticed it.
Put it this way: would you say someone from 1850 was likely to be less moral than someone from 1900?
Compare what did humans do to each other from 1900 to 1950.
It was commonplace when I grew up (the 80’s, in a fairly redneck area of Canada) to openly state that gay people deserved death, and I know quite a lot of gay people were justifiably scared of publicly acknowledging their preferences. This is no longer true. This seems like progress to me.
That being said I think the idea that there’s a general trend towards improvement may be true with a very, very wide telescope, but does not apply at finer-grained scales, even on the order of decades, as your example of 1850-1900 and 1900-1950 show. I’m somewhat sympathetic to Pinker’s overall claims, despite his rather shoddy work on a lot of particulars, but only at a very high level.
@Enkidum,
I’ll have to take your word about rural Canada, I was in High School in Berkeley, California in the 1980’s and “out” classmates were about one in ninety or so (only one was a good friend of mine, but more were acquaintances, my High School had over 3,000 students), and attitudes there and then seemed actually more blasé than today, both less celebratory and less hostile at once – no “pro” or “anti” ‘culture war’ (or so it seems judging by the viewpoint of teenage and young adult me, though I suspect that if the talk radio of the ’90e and the internet of today were available then the ’80’s would’ve seemed different).
I mean, if there’s an epicentre of progressive culture, surely Berkeley has been it for many decades now? Even moreso than San Francisco, I would have thought. Never been, but that’s always been my impression.
EDIT: And, while rural Canada may have been an outlier in the 80’s, the idea that gays were scum was hardly unusual pretty much anywhere in the world a few decades prior to that.
I can’t remember the idea that “gays were scum” circulating in my lifetime. I was much less aware of gays back in the sixties, but I remember one gay friend, I think pretty open, and one fellow student in college who I suspected was gay.
That wasn’t Berkeley, but it was elite university environments (Harvard and Chicago).
Of possible relevance to the general attitude … . My parents had a close female friend who I had known since I was a small child. She was divorced, with one adult son, lived with another woman and had done so for a long time. Looking back at it, I am reasonably certain that they were lesbians, but the possibility never occurred to me back when I knew her. If it occurred to my parents they didn’t mention it to me.
I was born in 1970, and in my high school not one student or teacher was openly gay. I once saw “AIDS: Kills fags dead” shirt, and some of the students, particularly the more working-class ones, were very hostile to homosexuals. Things seemed to be a bit more relaxed at the local university, which had an open club/association for gay students.
I also saw the “Kills Fags Dead” thing many times, and had various experiences of greater or lesser horrifying-ness. As with “ironic” racism and similar things one might have encountered on Vice, 4Chan and the like a few decades later, the sincerity of these statements varied widely, with some people clearly making them just for the lulz, and others being completely open about their actual beliefs.
If anyone is interested in more on this, I wrote a bit about the evolution of my own attitudes towards homosexuality (and 80’s hair metal) here, and suggested it is a form of moral progress.
I guess the specifics will depend very much on geography, culture, and one’s immediate social circle. But I can promise you the atmosphere where I grew up was incredibly toxic, not that far removed from the kind of hate crimes one reads about in other cultures today. (I’m not gay, if that matters for interpretation.)
I’ll add that in rural Florida 10 years ago F*g was still the insult of choice, and the one gay kid that was outed got bullied for it. I heard sermons preaching against homosexual activities as recently as 5 years ago in a church designed for college kids. My brother is only 5 years younger, and everything is different for him.
I obviously don’t remember the sixties. But I have been reading old mysteries recently, and there is a British mystery, published 1927 in Britain and 1928 in America, which has two lesbian couples in it – one in backstory, presented very positively (but by implication – they are a pair of women living together, one of whom runs the household and one of whom runs a business, who are very fond of each other and seem to be functioning as a couple but are never explicitly specified to be lesbians; the subtext is loud, though) and the other in the present, presented much more negatively, largely due to the character of one of them – she’s a much less nice person than either member of the earlier couple, and is rather more enjoying being worshiped than actually fond of the other woman (that one’s closer to explicit; it isn’t the kind of book that talks about sex, but the younger woman talks about her love for the older woman, and they discuss settling down together like ). At least if you are paying attention, the message is certainly not clearly anti-gay; lesbians seem to be presented as people like any others. The author is not someone I would describe as liberal (she’s otherwise best known as a religious essayist and playwrite) but is certainly a scholar, university-educated in a time when that was less common. One more data point.
@Rebecca Friedman – right, and there are plenty of coded gay stories going back a century or more (hell, The Decameron has a completely non-coded one). But there were also people talking about beating fags to death on a regular basis in my childhood without social penalty, and people are doing more than talking about it right now in numerous countries. To the extent that this is no longer socially acceptable, this is progress.
@Enkidum,
I suppose my view is just skewed then as I personally have heard more bigoted comments in the last 19 years of the 21st century than I did in my 32 years in the 20th century so to me talk of “people were less tolerant until recently” just feels false as the opposite seems true, but that may just be because until I went down to work in San Jose in 2000 I seldom travelled far from my birthplace in Oakland, California.
But yeah to me the 21st century seems more upfront bigoted than what I observed in the 20th.
Maybe that’s just do to my memory getting dimmer.
@Rebecca Friedman
I wonder whether the dearth of men post-WWI made that sort of thing more socially-acceptable for a while.
Tolerance for semi-closeted lesbian relationships seems to substantially predate WWI.
As Rebecca notes, the tolerance may be conditional on discretion regarding the explicitly sexual nature of the relationship. And I would add that while people can argue about the boundaries of “sex”, erotic activities that don’t involve a penis on anyone’s part are much less likely to transmit STIs, very much less likely to result in babies of questionable paternity, and until recently wasn’t too likely to displace socially desirable baby-making sex. So all the reasons for a society to care about who is getting it on with whom, line up in favor of “maybe don’t care so much about this”.
Plumber: huh, good point. I moved out of the country and have been in universities for well over a decade now, so likely am being biased in the other direction. I will say that anti-gay attitudes seem to be less prevalent among my kids’ friends, but they’re in a very different postal code from where I grew up (and that particular place is substantially gentrified now, so likely not a good test case either).
I suspect this is zombie Hegelianism, so try to steelman Hegel for a reason?
Moral foundations theory has been great for getting people to actually think about this.
Advances in divine revelation is an intriguing possibility. Christianity better fits the moral intuitions of even non-Christian moderns than antique Paganism. The logical problem comes when “treating all religions and atheism equally” is treated as a moral advance.
Another intriguing possibility, especially if you go in for utilitarianism where the ability to calculate gain and harm for larger and larger numbers of entities with your high-IQ brain allows you to avoid more moral failings (but I think utilitarianism is an incoherent mess, so I get to escape any repugnant conclusions about the moral superiority of high-IQ people).
Christianity fits the moral intuitions of moderns because those moral intuitions were informed by Christianity. 1700 years or so of cultural dominance does a lot to shape the language and assumptions involved.
Yes, exactly. Rejecting Christianity without rejecting its moral claims is silly, although such people make fine neighbors.
You’ll have to specify more, I think, given the numerous parallels between Christian and non- Christian moralities. This seems either tautological or false.
To take the obvious example, Hoopyfreud, the Declaration of Independence says we’re endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, etc. Folks today who reject the existence of said creator but accept the existence of said rights have some philosophical work to do. Which is not to say some of them haven’t done it, but those who haven’t at least given the question serious thought deserve to be called silly.
@Nick
Agreed, but that’s incongruous with what Le Maistre Chat said. And it’s not like neo-Confucians are obligated to do any more heavy lifting with regard to justifying moral claims than Christians here.
@Hoopyfreud
If I understand you right: yes, LMC might mean that a non-Christian should have very different moral beliefs, and I didn’t consider that possibility. Incidentally, there’s a family of arguments with that conclusion I’ve heard from some Christians, basically as a reductio of atheism (“if you think murder is wrong, you’re a bad atheist!”), but I’m not sure I buy them, since I think there have been some pretty virtuous pagans who figured out a good bit of it. So maybe we actually agree.
@Hoopyfreud: There’s a consensus morality, the morality C.S. Lewis tried to quantify as “Tao” in The Abolition of Man. Then there are special moral claims like “no one should marry their cousins” and “no one may own slaves.” People who reject Christianity knock the ground for the second set out from under themselves.
It then gets more complicated if you keep thinking about it. Take utilitarianism: it can get you something similar to medieval Christianity, in that the most moral people are hard-working ascetics who generate utility for the needy. However, it runs aground on A) both the Blue tribe created by secularization and the Red remnant find some of your moral truth claims alien and repugnant, so they don’t become a consensus to build society around and B) it’s questionable how many people ever practice utilitarianism rather than just intellectually assenting.
@Le Maistre Chat
There are lots of specific moral claims that remain within consensus morality, such as “slavery bad.” You don’t need to be a Christian to believe that (and, as history shows, you don’t need to believe that to be a Christian). I think you’re missing something.
@Hoopyfreud:
Then why did the Pagan Romans and all their predecessors back to the Sumerians and Egyptians keep slaves? Why is slavery legal under sharia, and fundamentalist Muslims will stick up for it against Middle Eastern law codes influenced by colonialism?
So “slavery bad.” sure doesn’t look like a basic moral fact that every culture has grasped, the way they grasped basic members of the set “mathematical entities”.
I didn’t say, “is an inevitable component of consensus morality,” I said, “remains a part of consensus morality.” Shit, it’s not like anti-slavery was a dominating part of Christendom’s consensus morality 300 years ago either (even if it was a component of many kinds of formal Christian morality). My point is that consensus morality is not predicated on a particular ideology, and that you shouldn’t predict that an abandonment of that ideology will result in an abandonment of particular moral claims. The relationship between dogma and consensus morality is not one-way.
My point with divine revelation is that someone in Rome in 700AD has a good reason to say where their(700 AD) moral judgements differs from those his ancestors in Rome in 1 AD we are right and they were wrong. If God took on flesh, taught moral truths and sent the Holy Ghost to lead his followers into all truth, then it makes sense that moral beliefs would be more accurate. One can question if Jesus is in fact God, but granting that improvements in the accuracy of moral beliefs makes sense. But someone in London in 2019 is not able to give an equivalent story for why contemporary moral beliefs are more likely to be correct than someone in London in 1318. (unless he is a rabidly anti-catholic liberal Anglican)
Yes, that’s spot on. No one in 2019 London can coherently claim that mainstream 2019 morals represent progress over the past, but depending on our beliefs we might coherently point to some time in the past as representing moral progress over the deeper past (and then it got worse in our time).
It seems to me a better terminology would be “moral evolution”. By analogy you could talk about the extinction of certain forms of morality, the speciation of one set of moral principles into two sets of moral principles etc.
Although how morals replicate isn’t clear and why one set would win over another also often unclear. So maybe not a great analogy but not a terrible one.
But then we would have no reason to think that our moral beliefs were correct only selected for mematically or culturally.
Yes. My answer to “Are my morals correct?” is “The question isn’t even well-defined if you don’t believe in some sort of supernatural lawgiver.”
Morals are people’s description of what they believe are moral actions. If you try to justify morals with more morals it’s just turtles all the way down as you make more and more layers of morals. But there is no moral reason to believe the bottom layer is morally correct.
However, you can give a non-moral reason why the bottom layer exists. One is “Because god says so”. Another is “morality is a description of what other hairless beach apes ought to do according to some set of hairless beach apes. Thus its substrate is biological and the bottom layer may change.”
You can try to give reasons for the bottom layer like “self-interest”, but it seems unsatisfactory to me to skip the biological layer below. Although it’s still often useful to try to derive more complex moral rules from moral ideas that we think are more basic and approximately true. (EDIT: where true doesn’t mean something like Newton’s constant takes the value 6.674×10−11 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2 in SI, but more something like “we all agree about this more basic idea.”)
That still involves the moral axiom that “something is moral if and only if it’s moral according to God”, from which everything else follows.
That’s a non-trivial moral axiom, though I presume most Christians subscribe to it. Why is it non-obvious? Let’s say I simulate a world with sapient inhabitants. To them, I’m much like a God. I somehow communicate to them that it’s a moral imperative to whip themselves on every full moon. Those who don’t I send to a simulated hell. Is it actually immoral for them to not torture themselves? Most people would say no.
Alternatively, it may be that Christians define morality to be whatever God said; then no axiom is needed. That would be substantially different from how atheists define morality: I presume most atheists who are moral cognitivists treat morality as some sort of metaphysical property of the world. If one defines morality as “whatever God says is moral”, it’s still not obvious why one should be angry when morality, under this definition, is violated; the fact that religious people tend to be angry at that suggests that some sort of axiom of “(God-given) morality = (feeling) good/bad (about something)” is still involved.
The moral realist would say that morals are real things, and our beliefs about them are the result of our evolution in that context, just like our perceptions about the physical world, and that there is no a priori reason to suppose that our moral perceptions would be any less reliable than our perceptions of shape and sound.
You don’t have to explain where morals come from for this narrative, any more than you have to explain where the physical world came from.
My own feeling is that there is more disagreement across humans about moral perceptions than about physical perceptions, but when I have raised that objection myself, David Friedman has suggested (I if understand him correctly) that I am considering chunks of moral perception that are too large.
@10240
I fully agree it’s a nontrivial axiom. But in some sense it’s a very strong axiom if you believe in an interventionist God. Because if you’re bad, maybe you burn in hell forever or are reincarnated as a slug or whatever. There can be some appeal to awe or fear there to help encourage any behaviors that aren’t easy. I’ve never seen a purely atheist axiom for moral realism that was nearly as forceful.
Sounds much like the classic question “Is it good because god loves it or does god love it because it is good?” I like your example of whipping on the full moon.
I agree that would clash with most people’s intuitions. Some would just respond that there is no evidence that that is like their God though so what does it matter?
Traditionally, part of the reason is that disobeying God leads to punishment. Almost everyone fears disease or natural disaster and not for moral reasons. In some cultures, the supposed target of God’s wrath is not just the rule-breaker but for their neighbors too.
And if you believe that god(s) created humans, then it makes sense that to some extent intuition should align with what god wants. But not necessarily perfectly because of the devil or free will or something else.
It could also be that there is such a thing as objective morality that doesn’t rely on God, and that God, being wholly good, follows that objective morality.
What I’d be interested to find would be a clear-cut case of what seems like moral progress without any associated improvement in living standards or technology.
For example, we were talking about intuitions about when a fetus or baby counts as a “person” not too long ago (in some premodern cultures it would be at some point after birth, not immediately upon birth) and my view was that premodern people had similar intuitions to us about issues like the value of fetal/infant life or, indeed, slavery, but were prevented taking them as far as us by material exigencies.
Related to the above examples about e.g. bear baiting (recall that some people still hold illegal dog fights in the US), it strikes me as a similar phenomenon: watching things fight is entertaining, but not when it’s perceived as cruel. Whether or not it seems cruel depends on how far you extend your empathy (and how deep–gladiatorial fights to the death seem cruel today, but not boxing or mma so much). How far you can afford to extend your empathy may be a function of material circumstances.
Possible counter-example (but don’t know the relevant details about economy, technology, agricultural output etc. to determine if passes above criteria): Buddhist and Jainist development of idea of ahimsa c. 2500 years ago, at a time when living standards were probably pretty low by comparison to Elizabethan England or Spain at the height of bullfighting’s popularity.
The dramatic reduction in infanticide seems like a massive improvements that was not conditioned by any change in material circumstances despite it being potentially very costly.
Does this question boil down to “are any of you not moral relativists?”
I am not only skeptical of moral relativism, I am skeptical of the existence of moral relativists.
Strictly speaking, I would consider myself a moral non-realist, but I’m not sure that the distinction is that meaningful. I’ll try to explain.
Nobody has ever given me a quantity of Good (or Evil, for that matter) to hold in my hand and examine to find its various properties. Instead, I always encounter statements along the lines of “X is good/right” or “Y is evil/bad/wrong”.
From this, I surmise that the speaker is not making a statement about independently existing properties of the external world, but rather espressing opinions about particular acts or circumstances.
Now, I don’t consider such statements of opinion truth-apt (in other words, I see no reason to believe there is a way to determine whether they are true or false). What is indisputably true, however, is that the speaker holds (or pretends to hold) such opinions.
The fun begins when we realize that if I were to bite the bullet and claim the moral relativist label, I am in no way obligated to accept opposing moral judgements as “just as correct” as my own. If I believe that morality is simply a matter of opinion, then cleary my opinion is most important – to me.
I can therefore not only combine a relativist stance with a consistent ethical system as applies to me, but I can even make moral judgements about the actions and views of others.
The only thing I must give up is the expectation that they will agree with me on everything, but that wasn’t ever on the table anyway.
If you’re interested in a non-theistic counterargument, consider reading Philippa Foot’s book Natural Goodness.
If I call a rosebush blooming with many flowers “healthy” or “thriving,” am I describing it or merely stating my opinion? It seems to me I’m doing the former; our notion of a rosebush covers its thriving or withering, but these descriptions are grounded in facts like whether the rosebush actually grows large or withers, whether it reproduces, whether it survives the winter, and so on. So “healthy” and “thriving” are normative properties, but properties of the rosebush all the same. And they’re no different from “good” or “bad” here, since we would call a healthy rosebush a good rosebush too.
Some complications are introduced when we leap from plants to people, but arguing for the existence of this natural normativity is her book’s first task.
Not quite.
There’s an equivocation being introduced here between “healthy” and “good” that is unsupported and – frankly – unwarranted.
To show this is the case, all we require is an example of a “healthy” or “thriving” plant that would not be typically considered “good” – say, kudzu.
Of course, it is not impossible to consider the fact that kudzu is as invasive – and potentially damaging to ecosystems – as it is, “good”. Kudzu is certainly “good at what it does” – famously so.
However, when we speak of morality there is not a mere hint of desirability (nay, obligation!) involved: thou shall X (it is good/right), thou shall not Y (it is evil/bad/wrong).
I can imagine “thou shall spread like kudzu” being a commandment that finds much favour with kudzu, but not with all the other plants on the receiving end.
ETA:
The error here is mixing positive and normative statements. “Healthy” or “thriving” can be positive signifiers of observable properties, as you note. It’s when we start to assign desirability to specific values of said properties that the rot sets in.
Careful—I wasn’t very clear there, but I didn’t say good simpliciter, I said good rosebush. We’re not talking about what’s good or bad for humans, since a good rosebush will, after all, prick more than a few hands, or even what’s good or bad for ecosystems (though that’s a very worthy question in another context). I’d agree that kudzu taken out of its environment may well be bad for us or bad for its new ecosystem, but I don’t see how that makes it bad kudzu. Unless you’re suggesting that the kudzu is going to kill its ecosystem and thereby itself this way; then sure, it’s some very bad kudzu.
Incidentally, I don’t think the question of fitness to environment applies much to humans, since we can make ourselves pretty well suited to any environment, at least if we don’t destroy it.
Humans have wills, unlike plants, so we can choose to do or not do things that contribute to our flourishing or not. On Foot’s view, obligation enters the picture where practical reason dictates only one reasonable course of action; in the case of our flourishing, that might well be a moral obligation*, but practical reason works just the same way for nonmoral matters. She considers an example in which a man has to get to the bank to deposit some money before his account gets an overdraft fee. Given that overdraft fees are bad, the only reasonable thing to do is to go to the bank and deposit the money. But other considerations may change the calculus: suppose he has a quite bad fever. In that case, the only reasonable thing to do is stay home: the fever getting worse would be much worse than a $30 fee. Once again, suppose the terms change: the fee is actually $3,000! Then the only reasonable thing to do is risk a higher fever; he can’t afford the $3,000. (Also, he should consider switching banks or monitoring his balance more closely.) Practical reason often, but doesn’t always, dictate one course of action ‘all things considered.’
*This isn’t my own view, but I don’t think it makes a difference to this discussion.
But that takes us straight out of a discussion about morality (and moral relativism) and on trip through the… ahem… daisies.
I have a lot of respect for Foot (if only for giving virtue ethics a much needed shot in the arm), but there simply ain’t no situation where “practical reason dictates only one reasonable course of action”. That requires a preordained teleology and even then there will usually be several ways of achieving any particular goal.
The moral problem arises pretty much from the outset when we consider the issue of “contribut[ing] to our flourishing or not”. Do we mean the flourishing of the human race in general or the flourishing of the individual human making the choice? What if the two teleologies conflict? What counts as flourishing anyway?
Even materialistic thinkers (I’m thinking Epicurus or Mill) had to grapple with the issue that pure biological hedonism wasn’t the kind of moral compass they were willing to accept. Thus you get things like Mill’s “higher” and “lower” pleasures. What if someone considers sensual pleasures more… pleasurable than mental, moral, and aesthetic pleasures? J.S. Mill might disapprove, but he’s dead, so why should we care?
To end the floral detour and hopefully get us back on track: once you have a goal, it is possible to determine what paths plausibly lead towards that goal and what paths don’t. Consequentialism is usually a good enough differentiator. However, neither it, nor any other means of reasoning about the means to a particular end, can inform us of what ends are to be pursued.
Needless to say, morality is in the first place a question of ends.
Well of course! You started by claiming you’ve never seen any good or bad; that’s why I started with the rosebush example. Step one is to establish normativity exists at all. Step two is connecting what good and bad exists with the more specialized ways we use the terms, like moral good and evil.
I’m a believer, anyway, in stopping to smell the roses.
I don’t follow you. Like, if the man needs to get to the bank and deposit the money, practical reason hasn’t dictated his precise means of travel, or route, or whether to adjust his mirrors before he starts the car or after; there is a range of means appropriate to achieving the end, yes. Even so, it would be irrational to choose a means inappropriate to achieving said end, and practical reason can very well dictate more specifically than “go to the bank”: if, say, it is at the other end of town and closes in half an hour, such that he can only get there by driving, then practical reason dictates that he should drive.
What does any of that have to do with a “preordained teleology”? How is that not just how we reason about acting in everyday life?
Foot begins with what she calls “Aristotelian necessities” or “norms,” facts like “Rabbits eat grass” that are not about all x nor just one or a group of x; they have a special logical form of their own. Foot distinguishes among these between teleological and non-teleological ones (the blue splotch on the head of a tit isn’t teleological, but the pattern on the tail of a peacock is), and suggests rather obscurely that the latter are related teleologically to “maintenance of life and reproduction,” I think is how she puts it (I don’t have the book handy). So these norms occur at the level of species, but they can concern the flourishing of an individual: to go back to the “Rabbits eat grass” example, it matters foremost to a particular rabbit’s flourishing whether it eats or not.
That doesn’t tell you much on its own about how it works for humans, but for one thing, “Humans eat meat” sounds like a pretty good norm for us. Bite me, vegetarians. 😉 Foot suggests socialization as another human norm.
A later chapter is devoted to explaining why in her view human goodness takes the form of virtues like honesty and practices like making and keeping promises, but to be honest I found it pretty obscure when I read it. I can take a look for you when I get home.
Ends are important, yes. Practical reason isn’t the whole story, yes. I brought it up because you brought up why morality talks in terms of obligation, man. “No one should ever watch Star Trek Enterprise! Why are we watching Enterprise?!” “Well you wanted to watch Star Trek, and it’s the only one on, and we don’t have Netflix….” “Why are we talking about Netflix?! We should be talking about how no one should watch Enterprise!” 😛
“The rosebush is healthy” is not a normative statement. It is a positive statement equivalent to “predicates X, Y, Z about the rosebush are true”.
“The rosebush ought to be healthy” is a normative statement.
The two don’t mean the same thing. You’ll need a better example, ‘coz right now you’re failing at the first step. Equivocating between an “is” statement and an “ought” statement does not establish the objective existence of normative judgements. Surely you realize this?
The “preordained teleology” is the part when our man decides to go to the bank in the first place. You can’t simply gloss over that bit – not when morality is the topic. How we do things is the less interesting bit (but easier to reason about). What we’re choosing to do is the real focus.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t address the longer section on Foot and Aristotle in greater detail, I hope, but I don’t think it currently helps to illuminate the main point. For one thing, the very notion of “Aristotelian necessities” is hard to square with evolution through natural selection. A statement like “rabbits eat grass” may be true of some (most?) rabbits, some (most?) of the time, but clearly cannot be true of all rabbits all of the time or species would be fixed (and we know they are not). We also know that species transitions are gradual, so you’re not going to get a population of killer, carnivorous rabbits in one fell swoop. Instead, you’ll have a gradual shift where a norm becomes untrue for an increasing number of your existing population (over generations), until it is replaced by a new norm.
And for good reason. When discussing morality, ends are the only thing that matters. Practical reason – understood as effective achievement of ends – is wholly neutral ethically. How I get to the bank, once I’ve decided to go there, is a morally neutral question.
Unless we introduce additional ends that also must be met. If I, for example, want to minimize my carbon footprint en route, I can use practical reason to help me find solutions that meet both goals. However, once it is determined that both walking and riding a bicycle are equally good solutions as far as these two ends are concerned, the choice between the two becomes morally neutral.
The only thing that made driving or not a morally significant choice was the introduction of an additional end which constrained the viable solution space.
In short, what ends to pursue is the only interesting question. Everything else we’ve talked about so far is mostly a distraction, I’m afraid.
@Faza
This makes sense if you’re a reductive physicalist, but there’s a decent argument that will, if you’ll allow that to refer to the experience of consciousness, has moral valence. I can’t give you a quantity of self-actualization any more than I can give you a quantity of good, but I’m willing to state that self-actualization can be meaningfully said to be real, if only because it exists in my consciousness.
This is, of course, still true! I myself believe that you’re obligated to believe your own opinions to the precise extent that you feel them to be true, and that that’s quite morally good! But I don’t think that’s the same thing as relativism; certain features of morality seem to be implied by the nature of consciousness/”will” in ways that seem quite unescapable for non-p-zombies to me. Call that teleos if you want, but that doesn’t seem quite right to me, at least in the Aristotelian sense. It doesn’t imply a final cause or direction, but only a restriction of the possible actual states of consciousness to a subset of those we can imagine.
It’s definitely not the same thing as relativism, yes. You’re saying, more or less, that we have to follow our consciences to the extent we think it’s well formed. Some fascinating complications arise here, like what to do when you think your conscience may be ill formed, but those are neither here nor there: the point is that this is entirely compatible with the existence of objective morality, since morality remains the measure for how well-formed a conscience is.
P.S. @Faza (TCM)
Sorry for the delay! I wanted Foot’s book handy when I replied so I didn’t get her views wrong. So I started a reply to you but haven’t finished it yet. I will try to get it up soon.
@Nick
On the contrary, the strength and assent of one’s conscience is the measure for morality! We have to follow our consciences until we become convinced that they are ill-formed, and then create for ourselves a new and truer conscience that we can more perfectly hew to.
(I’m very, very sure you disagree with this, and I’m playing more the Nietzschean than I really am deep down, but I swear this is not a complete shitpost.)
@Hoopyfreud:
Re ends, I would just like to make clear that I was talking primarily in the context of ends v. means, to address what Nick said on practical reason.
That’s an interesting angle. I feel compelled to point out that this, however, also means that Discworld or Middle Earth can be meaningfully said to be real (as ontologies, rather than literature), because we can have meaningful conversations about them (they exist in our shared consciousness). This need not be a problem.
That said, it is not immediately clear how we get from the existence of mental states, to the objective existence of moral obligations – how we bridge the gap from “is” to “ought”, as it were.
Certainly, I can believe that I ought to do something and that belief certainly exists, in the aforementioned sense (the predicate “Faza believes X”, where X is “Faza ought to do Y”, is truth-apt), but I can’t see a way to prove “Faza ought to believe that Faza ought to do Y” from that. I am capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast, I’ll have you know.
I would love for you to elaborate on this.
ETA:
@Nick:
I can’t help but think that obtaining a measurement may be an issue here.
I’ll accept that challenge. Nothing is right or wrong. No one thinks anything is right or wrong. They merely pretend to do so for purposes of self promotion
That’s moral nihilism, while moral relativism holds that moral sentences are meaningful.
“I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
Progressivism = consumerism, which is very funny given their feelings toward Marxism.
I fear that at a cultural scale, morals are like languages – change doesn’t lead to improvement. At best, it’s like evolution – the new morals (that survive) are better for their new environment than what they replace, which was suited to the environment where it developed.
That said, our current morals are probably more suitable for large scale urban societies than most of their predecessors. They may also be better suited for other aspects of our environment – birth control; survival of most children to reproductive age; etc. etc.
I have some fairly strong ideas of what is and isn’t right, but I know that in many cases the majority of those around me would disagree, and in other cases, the majority of those at some other time or place would disagree. That doesn’t make them right, but what I do at a personal level isn’t something I can enforce, or even effectively proselytize for – and sure isn’t going to be counted as either current morality or progress by those who disagree with me.
People have various theories of what is right – some especially popular among rationalists – but I’ve yet to see a theory that didn’t soon wind up recommending things that violate my sense of “right” – and that of lots of others too.
Our best hope is probably a lot of individual intuitions, based on experience, inborn tendencies, and how they were raised, with some layer of theory on top, whether that theory is utilitarianism or “follow what this religious leader says”. Those intuitions conflict, and hopefully the less harmful/more useful set of practices win out – in the long run at least. But stagnation isn’t going to work – not in a changing environment. and ideologies generally lead somewhere horrific, when not tempered with common sense – which would be another word for “individual intuitions, based on experience, inborn tendencies, and how they were raised”.
As far as I can see, there is a universal human morality – since all non-grossly-damaged humans share certain physical, biological and mental traits – which we have been developing for ages, but lately seems to have been increasingly discarded in favor of just doing what feels good.
I’m not sure how:
squares with:
If everyone continues “just doing what feels good” for long enough, won’t that essentially become an equivalent replacement for what you consider to be the universal human morality that’s been developed over ages?
Not if “just doing what feels good” destroys the very conditions which enable it, like if these folks fail to reproduce, or fail to pass on their values, or fail to maintain the material conditions required for their lifestyles.
What Nick said.
And if it doesn’t?
I can’t speak for HarmlessFrog, but sure.
Theoretically, sure. That’s not what I’m seeing, though.
@HarmlessFrog:
The issue I wanted to point out – albeit in a roundabout sort of way – is that once you’ve proposed an evolutionary path to morality, by saying:
you’ve pre-committed to morality changing in the future, because that’s what evolution is. In an evolutionary context, any strategy that works is good enough – right until it stops and isn’t any more. That means, among other things, that looking at what our ancestors considered moral isn’t a more sensible approach to moral decisions than looking at dinosaur fossils for body plans that will work today. The environment in which we function has changed.
The deeper message is that you can’t get evolutionary and universal morality at the same time. Any morality that evolves cannot be universal because:
1. Evolution means change – potentially to the complete opposite of the current state (at one time, bigger bodies win out, at other times, small bodies are the way to go – for example, because food became scarce),
2. Evolution is driven by environment (including the other actors in your ecosystem) and therefore the optimum strategy will differ among the various environments you may find yourself in (a different body plan works for warm environments, a different one for cold).
I’ve purposefully chosen easy to understand examples of biological evolution because we see it in action. However, the exact same considerations apply to an evolving morality, negating any claim of universality.
On a more down-to-earth level, if “just doing what feels good” is currently a successful moral strategy, it is – in evolutionary terms – good.
@Faza (TCM)
If we become, say, beings of pure energy, or some robotic form of life, or lose our sapience, or ascend out of the boundaries of time to some form of spiritual existence – then obviously, appropriate morality will have changed for us.
In addition, the development I meant was in the sense of discovering principles, akin to learning the laws of physics, rather than constructing a code of law.
Ceasing to enforce the old moral code is an environmental change. Chicken, egg.
I don’t agree. A moral system that takes into account the pertinent constitutions of the beings it governs can be universal. It would be silly to judge the actions of ants according to standards for humans, etc.
Quite the contrary, I think. It’s destroying everything. But there’s a lot to destroy, so I expect the whole shebang to continue for a while yet, unlike the folks suggesting that the collapse will come sometime soon.
You can see that broad differences between existences can result in different moralities. We are on the same page.
Differences don’t need to be broad.
We know that ethical systems change over time. We also know that different ethical systems are present at the current time, separated by geography. Human biology hasn’t changed much over the (pre)history we are aware of, nor are there major biological differences between humans alive in various places today. When comparing ourselves to ants or putative “beings of pure energy”, differences between humans alive today round to zero, essentially.
Clearly, there are numerous ethical systems compatible with our “pertinent constitution” as humans. We aren’t required to assume a universal system of ethics to explain how humans do things.
Indeed, the development of varying ethics across both time and space suggests that lesser differences play a role when deciding what system of ethics actually succeeds in a given time and place. Plus, all the other bits (including blind luck), of course.
Now that needs exploration and supporting evidence, because I am presently not in any way convinced that there are – or ever were – any pre-existing principles to discover.
We can agree to disagree, of course. I’m the one who considers morality a matter of opinion, after all… 🙂
No disagreements there.
Did the emergence of birds and mammals “destroy” the dinosaurs?* It’s a way of looking at it, I suppose. Is the fact that dinosaurs, as we define them, no longer exist a “bad” thing (morally speaking)? I don’t think so; I don’t think it’s a moral issue at all.
If you’ve decided the preservation of dinosaurs (whatever subset of traditional morality you subscribe to) is a morally worthwhile goal (meta-ethics is also ethics), you are naturally going to be concerned about the possible extinction of dinosaurs.
If, like me, you accept that there is no particular reason why dinosaurs ought to exist, their extinction is just a thing that happened – much like their emergence in the first place.
Same thing with any particular moral code.
ETA:
* Just so we don’t get fixated on the whole impactor theory of dinosaur extinction: whatever happened across the K/T boundary, mammals and birds survived, dinosaurs didn’t. You don’t need major environmental disruptions to drive extinctions – they happen all the time, often because a new species emerges that outcompetes the incumbents.
More like: There are numerous ethical systems which imperfectly attempt to grasp at the universal one.
Why live?
Now that’s a human tendency that never ceases to make me wonder: why is it so important to everyone for there to be some overarching purpose?
My personal approach is this: I’m alive because that’s, you guessed it, a thing that happened. There was a time I was not, and there will come a time when I will be no more. There’s nothing particularly special about either one of these cases. They are completely irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of all people ever to have lived, to say nothing of everyone else (i.e. not people). I might care – then again, I might not, either (I certainly won’t care once I’m dead; there’ll be nobody to care).
Here are some things one can coherently say. (I am not claiming that any instance of them is actually right.)
“Typical contemporary moral values lead to less human suffering than those of 200 years ago.” (Whether “less human suffering” is good or bad is a question of values, but which of two moral systems more effectively minimizes human suffering is a question of fact, albeit probably a difficult one. You might want to specify whose suffering too, since what entities count as human may be a value-laden question too. Obviously “suffering” is not the only thing you could do this with, though it’s one of the more likely candidates.)
“If you look carefully at moral values from 200 years back, you see that they imply that human suffering is tremendously important, but that in practice attempting to follow those values led to a lot of human suffering. Typical contemporary moral values do better by that metric.” (If system X does better than system Y even according to system Y, rightly understood, then that seems like it might count as progress. Though of course you should be careful about whether followers of X really rightly understand Y, and you should also check whether it happens that Y is better at attaining X’s values as well as the other way around.)
“Typical contemporary moral values are better than those of 200 years ago, in my view and also that of almost everyone currently alive.” (Circular, for sure, but that doesn’t necessarily matter. Silly example: suppose someone comes along with a time machine and offers to place me in any period of human history up to and including the present. If I say “All earlier periods’ morals are repugnant to me, so I’ll stay here” then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.)
These are all things most likely to be said by moral nonrealists rather than moral realists. A moral realist is more likely to claim simply that today’s values are better, or worse, than those of a previous time. Moral realism often goes along with religious commitment; religious moral realists who feel that we’re improving morally might say things like “humanity is gradually understanding the will of God better” or “the Holy Spirit is working in people’s hearts to improve our ethics”; I can’t agree that it wouldn’t be an instance of “how moral positions have changed” if, e.g., people used to think that slavery was right and proper but the gods gradually nudged us until now almost no one thinks that.
Here’s another sort of moral realist position that claims there’s real moral progress. “Utilitarianism is the truth about morality. This wasn’t recognized until fairly recently, but ever since Bentham, Mill, etc., it’s had increasing influence on how people think about right and wrong, as a result of which moral positions have shifted in the right direction. Most people are still not actual utiliarians; if utilitarianism continues to have increasing influence then that will mean continuing moral progress; if not, not.”
(For my part: I’m a moral nonrealist and a roughly preference-utilitarian consequentialist. I think, but not very confidently, that typical present-day values do a better job of giving people what they want than typical past ones. I do think this is partly because utilitarianism has had increasing influence over time. I haven’t seriously tried to put together an argument that present moral systems do a better job of attaining the real goals of past moral systems than those systems did, and suspect it isn’t true. I do think that typical present-day values are more to my taste than typical older ones, unsurprisingly.)
Moral progress is made when more people are afforded the opportunity to fulfill their ambitions. Moral progress can therefore logically be made by increasing people’s ability to attempt to fulfill ambitions or by decreasing the scope of ambitions that people have. The degree to which the second option can be practically accomplished is dubious IMO.
I’m afraid I don’t see the relevance of the latter to the former.
Edited: Sorry, I had gotten too deep in the thread and missed that your comment is your answer to the top question: What are people’s theories of moral progress?
@Hoopyfreud
What about the creation of ambitions?
Isn’t it also moral progress when more people have the ambition to do good for others and themselves?
1) Well, I tend to think that society is on average closer to my preferred morality in most respects now that it has been in the past, but I agree that I can’t justify my preferred morality other than to explain why I prefer it. (And I certainly can’t rule out that I prefer it because I grew up in the modern era.)
2) More generally, I do think that modern society may be a little more advanced morally because:
2.1) I believe we’re on average better informed about questions of fact.
2.2) I believe we’re sufficiently richer that we are somewhat more insulated from questions of survival that often trump moral progress.
Of course, even if 2.1 and .2 are true, I can’t prove that the morality of the better informed and more economically secure is “better” than their predecessors, but it might provide a somewhat consistent path of “progress.”
2.2 is interesting.
2.1 seems likely to be trivial in most cases. “Is putting arsenic in someone’s water immoral?” Knowing that arsenic is poisonous is very relevant but hardly moral progress. There may be more interesting cases but the most interesting cases presuppose a commitment to some sort of natural law. If one holds to some form of natural law, advances in knowledge of the natural world could improve our knowledge of the ends of things and so provide not merely practical but even normative knowledge.
I. Morality is meaningless beyond feeling good or bad about people’s actions. It feels like there is an objective morality that’s an independent metaphysical property of the world, but there isn’t.
What we feel good or bad about depends mainly on what we pick up from out parents and environment, and it may then be somewhat altered through reflection. From my perspective, people’s behavior has gradually gotten better the closer we get to the present (up to some point, and with some major downward spikes in the mid-20th century) as the moral views of the era in question get closer to mine. On the same token, from my point of view, the future will most likely get worse and worse, as it gets farther than today’s views. These are not absolute facts, but my own subjective opinions. Someone living in another era should put the peak in his time — or perhaps a few decades or rarely centuries in the past or the future, depending on how conservative or progressive his views are relative to his era.
II. While I don’t think morality is a fact of the universe, and terminal values regarding what one feels good or bad about are not subject to rational reasoning, there are nevertheless arguments that may nudge one’s terminal values through an emotional, not-fully-logical process. And we more-or-less know all the arguments from the past and present for all moral views, contemporary and past ones, while people in the past haven’t heard the newer arguments. (Or at least philosophically educated people know arguments from the past; if some of them are really convincing, presumably some of them get convinced and disseminate the argument.) This introduces an objective time asymmetry into the change in moral views, a limitation to my symmetric description in I.
E.g. it would probably be easier for someone from the present to convince someone from a slave society that slavery is wrong than to convince a contemporary person that slavery is OK. I don’t think this means that modern society is objectively better than the past since I don’t think there is an objective morality, but it does mean that someone exposed to all arguments up to present is more likely to favor the behavior of today’s society than most past ones.
On the other hand, some questions seem to be pretty symmetric. E.g. pro-choice and pro-life people don’t seem to be convincing each other; and I suspect it wouldn’t be any easier to convince an ancient Spartan that throwing newborns from the Taygetos is wrong (especially in a society without safe abortion and pre-natal testing) than it would be for him to convince us that it’s OK, or for pro-life and pro-choice people to convince one another. It all depends on one’s upbringing.
All in all, chances are the future will bring some changes in moral views that I’d today feel are wrong, but about which I could be convinced to feel they’re right; and other changes about which I couldn’t be convinced. The same would probably be true about e.g. someone from 1800 learning about the present.
I really want to see an economist comment on this please.
@Erusian >
@brad >
I’m mostly curious if economists would find it close to true enough to laugh at it, or too inaccurate (maybe laughing at how wrong it is?).
I think both halves are wrong. Believing that one can explain much behavior by the logic of rational choice doesn’t prevent one from thinking badly of some people or being offended by others thinking badly of oneself. Economics is not, for example, inconsistent with sadism, but one can still disapprove of sadists.
And I would expect any good economist to be willing to consider the possibility that some of his behavior is rent seeking.
@DavidFriedman,
Thanks for the insight.
Also, thanks very much for the link to a chapter of your Price Theory book in the last Open Thread.
It didn’t strike me as especially mean-spirited. The nub of the joke is the strong negative connotation that’s attached to a phrase that sounds at first blush like innocuous technical jargon.
And the red button part about tenure was a nod to the tendency to intellectual honesty.
Me neither. It just came off as economics inside baseball.
That said, maybe there needs to be an explain-smbc.com?
I think it would work better if the red button was the last panel where it goes ‘tenure is just a form of rent seeking’ with the economist choking the speaker.
IMHO:
1) It’s true that economists tend to strongly disapprove of rent-seeking. I’d say this is because although economics is supposed to be a morality-agnostic scientific study, for almost all known public priorities, rent-seeking makes achieving those priorities harder.
So an economist might feel that its not economics’ role to decide whether growth or equality is preferable, but only to measure and predict the trade-off, but no one except rent-seekers prefers a system with more rent-seeking.
2) I don’t agree with the first part. Most economists are pretty easily insulted. (And “you’re bad at your job” seems to strike pretty deep for many academics, as it has professional consequences.)
Contrary to what the first panel might lead you to think, economists use the word “because” the same way everyone else does– not as a way to introduce a non sequitur.
Are you looking for someone to explain the joke or …?
Not an economist, but what do you want to comment about? The first paragraph is an obvious strawman (I don’t know of any economist that fatalistic) and I think most economists dislike rent-seeking.
Offering ~£60~ if anyone comes up with a good name for an app we’re developing: its purpose is to give people in the UK practical help accessing mental health treatment, and it also includes info on evidence-backed self-help advice; quizzes to see if you might benefit from help; and a daily reminder system to make the tasks manageable.
The intended user is someone with mental health issues who isn’t currently receiving treatment, or doesn’t feel like they know how to help themselves. We hope it’ll be especially useful for those who are too depressed or anxious to get started on treatment.
We were working with “Headstart”, but there were trademark issues. My favourite suggestions from last time I posted were Wellspring, Wellfinder, ReMind, WellBean. My mum came up with ‘Appy’ which might have legs. If anyone has any ideas, put them here. Thanks guys : )
Also: would anybody be interested in doing a very basic graphic design wireframe for the app in the next 7-8 days? Just things like font choices, colour schemes, etc. One chunk of my funding runs out in July, so I’m trying to spend some of it usefully before then. Can negotiate a decent fee.
I have access to graphic designers (though I’m not one myself). I know one in particular who might be interested. What were you thinking?
I’m after someone who can come up with some basic layout ideas for the app, some colour schemes and fonts, and maybe a placeholder logo. I have to submit expense claims in the first week of July, so they’d either have to finish and invoice me by the 1st, or we’d have to agree on a set number of hours and they’d invoice me for the work in advance (though I’m not certain the funding body will be cool with this, so the former is my preference). If anyone’s interested contact me at emckernon at gmail dot com! Thanks.
I vote WellBean or WellSpring. ReMind sounds like a reminder app and Wellfinder sounds like it’s for finding things.
Why don’t you guys poll people in your target audience or something? Like buy some banner ads and put up variants of a basic ad with a half-dozen different names, see which one gets the most engagement. I’m almost certain that would be cheaper than £60 and it would be an actual data-based approach.
Unless you’re planning on selling this app to us, specifically, it seems like the SSC hivemind isn’t going to be able to give you the level of detailed information that you need here.
At the moment I’m just trying to come up with a good list of ideas and I have some OPM that runs out soon to burn, but something like that will be the next step.
I’d say Wellmind, but the NHS already has a mental health app called that.
Are you expecting this to turn a profit? This sounds like it could be a rather difficult market in which to prevail.
Either be better than all your competitors (including public and charitable efforts), or find a niche none of them can exploit.
Coming back to the name, I’d suggest the Paul Graham solution of randomly pairing up relevant words until you find one you like.
Edit: You’re not in Bristol or UWE, are you?
Nah, not expecting a profit. It seemed to me that there was a gap in care where people with mental illness really struggled to get started with treatment, and while helping my anxious friend get started it seemed like my role could be optimised easily.
I’m in Manchester myself, though some of the team is in Bristol.
Damn it! That was my immediate idea, was so sure I was gonna win that 100 bucks. 🙁
Yeah, it would’ve been great :/ Alternatively I could alter the word “headstart” so that it’s visually, aurally and symbolically distinct to the current trademarks, but I’m not sure H34Dstrter” is gonna attract people.
While I appreciate the invitation, and I contributed something last time you asked, I’d suggest that this be the last time you ask. More than three would be a bit spammy, and I believe you’re likely to see sharply diminishing returns starting this thread.
Agreed, I felt spammy this time. I’m trying to do as much as I can before this lump of funding runs out, which is why I’ve been posting so much recently. Thanks for your contribution last time!
@Elliot
well it’s gotta have Cog in there somewhere. Everything fancy already does. CBT. CogMed…..
But that sounds too much like cock. So perhaps not.
It’s about unlearning learned helplessness. Framing it that way is wonderful, since unlearning seems more manageable than learning something.
So…. UnHelpLess. A bit too close to UnHelpFul, though.
UnlearnHelp? ULearnHelp. Help?…. No. Let’s go with something along “health”. And mental. But being called mental isn’t good either, especially in England.
MentaLearn. Sounds like…. I meant to learn something. And didn’t. Cause reasons.
ReMind is bad, cause it’s not a reminder app. WellBean? Sounds like the app is about beans. Wellfinder and Wellwater about….. finding a place to drink something. Though isn’t that what we all need? A place to rest? Ah yes.
An Oasis! Health-Oasis. Nope. Not feeling this. Fuck water. Water is stupid. Who needs it?
Look, when you are depressed your life is grey, dull and lacks lustre. So don’t call it something that sounds generic. Give it some color at least.
Appy does have some of that covered, I can see why you like it. But it also sounds like what your mum would call the app. And she’d tell you to go to see a doctor. Which you obviously aren’t doing (by target group definition), so you don’t listen to your mum.
It’s too cheesy in a mom kinda way. And your mum doesn’t understand what your problems are. Or you at least think she doesn’t, cause she’s a ridicolous person who’d call an app Appy!
People who’d go for this app, they want to not feel condescended to. They want to take control of their lives, even if they are not sure what that means exactly. Independent-minded and somewhat cynical they are, otherwise they’d have gone to the doctor already. So emphasize reliance. Self-Rely! No, you don’t want to imply that that path of action is wise.
So ignore all my suggestions above. Cause I just remembered that wonderful Monty Python-mini-sketch:
“Are you nervy, irritable, depressed, tired of life? Keep it up!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aChRo7PrPQw
Makes it light-hearted enough and very British. Radiates cheerful defiance to life’s hardship. Also reading “keep it up” in imperative form sounds absurd as well as a terrible idea. Which appeals to their darker self-destructive impulses. So that should elicit a dry chuckle (not like you can hope for much more, tough crowd those downers). You want to sell hope here.
Can’t call it Upkeep, cause that’s already taken. Also sounds like way too much work. I don’t like KeepUp either. Cause they can’t keep up with their non-depressed peers. Or feel that way.
But some variation of the phrase “keep it up” could work.
QB-Up perhaps. With Q and B standing for some insane acronym.
Quantitative, Behaviour or some nonsense like that. No, way too subtle.
Just call the app:
keepItUp
No law against camel-case in the app-store (I hope). It’s light-hearted, but not completely unserious. And it’s fun to say.
edit: just checked. On the Play and (Apple) Appstore “Keep it up” is taken. But by very small unsucessful games not updated in years. So they can be ignored or bought for a couple bucks.
Haha. This was an entertaining and useful stream of consciousness. I think you identify well some of the ideas we want to hit. It’s tough because there’s no good and short synonym of mental health that isn’t cliche as fuck.
Helpme
Name suggestions: Mens Sana, Saner, APPsy
I might try the design, although I am still a beginner graphic designer and I have no real experience with app design, only with print and web (a little).
If you like any of the color schemes of my menus here, I can try to adapt it for the app.
So I’ve been on a Firefly binge recently, and the premature cancelation has left me kind of hungry for space westerns.
What, if any, science fiction shows or movies do the denizens of SSC recommend with a western motif? It doesn’t have to be quite as literal as Firefly was, but it should be closer than Star Trek’s “wagon train to the stars” premise.
Closest thing I can think of is Cowboy Bebop. (“Cowboy” means bounty hunter in that series.)
Second Cowboy Bebop and The Expanse. Both are brilliant: Cowboy Bebop is more explicitly western.
Cowboy Bebop and Trigun are both great choices.
I’ve heard good things about The Expanse, but I haven’t watched it.
The Expanse, at least what I watched of it (YMMV), runs into the problem of “however fucked you think things are, on the bright side they don’t get better”.
That show is just relentlessly grim. I’m not sure I saw anyone ever make a decision or take an action that the show regarded as good or successful.
That’s basically the opposite of pretty much every Western, even the fairly dark ones.
Until what point did you watch?
Because while I do think that there is a lot of really grim dark stuff in there, there is also a lot of people saving the day by “doing the right thing”^(tm).
And the end of the last series was literally uhznavgl trggvat npprf gb n fgryne tngr argjbex.
Farscape is a space western too, but it’s also military sf and a comedy.
Aside from the first scene of the pilot and arguably a few minutes of Serenity, there really isn’t anything military in the series. The series explores the consequences of the war but since it’s firmly in the show’s past I wouldn’t really call it MilSF.
That said, it would be interesting to see something like the Lost Cause IN SPACE! that Firefly had. It’s not hard to find stories with Civil War allegories but somehow Joss Whedon got away with telling a story about Space Confederates-turned-outlaw robbing interplanetary carpetbaggers and dodging the union star cavalry.
He got away with it to the extent that he did (I saw a fair amount of carping) by explicitly writing out any hint of slavery or racial discrimination from the independents (when anyone is using people as tools, it’s the Core worlds and their loyalists) and underscoring that by making Zoe the other major visible veteran from Mal’s side.
Granted, I liked it better in the show where both sides had reasonable adherents and the victorious government had good points (e.g., provision of emergency medical care) as well as bad, vs the film where they’re pretty much the Evil Empire.
I got the impression that the Independents had plenty of “indenture”, “sharecrop”, and “debt peonage” style near-slavery, lots of violent blackmarket with a seasoning of “the big man with the town under his thumb”. And the Core had plenty of “surveillance state police state wage slave”, with a bunch of secret police, seasoned with “senate aristo”. And both sides had plenty of “nearly destitute personal servants to much wealthier masters”.
That Mal thought the Doctor was transporting a sex slave in a hibernation case was portrayed as “enraging to Mal, but not actually socially surprising”. So yeah, that’s a point against the Core.
I don’t think the politics of the rich guys holding people in debt peonage, etc. were ever clearly ex-Independent, even if that really should have been the case. While that might make sense given the historical analogy, Mal and crew were always on the side of the downtrodden and at odds with the guys with money and power. There was never (that I recall) a scene where one of them expects that as a former colonel (or whatever) in the lost cause he can of course expect Sergeant Reynolds’ support. (Let alone any de jure liberation of e.g., mudders by the Core Worlds that everyone’s systematically nullifying as far as they can.)
The Core in the show was absolutely shot through with corruption, evil black projects, amoral corporations, and malign neglect of the frontier. But I didn’t think there was anything that suggested it was per se worse than, say, a contemporary western democracy at the time it was made. The really evil stuff was kill-all-the-witnesses secret and appeared to be unknown even to most people involved with the government (vs MPs being given a walkthrough in the film).
Since the show was cut short, it may be that the state would have in fact been shown to be wholly corrupt in the end. But what I saw of the show’s version felt a lot more nuanced– even though the Feds were clearly our heroes’ antagonists (and kind of jerks) even when they weren’t actually bad, as in The Train Job.
Seconding Farscape.
Farscape is great. When it’s not repetitive low-budget trash.
Use this guide, skip liberally you’ll have an enjoyable time with it.
http://kethinov.com/farscapeepisodes.php
Thanks for the guide, but I’ve already watched Farscape through a few times. It’s a really fun show although again I’d hesitate to call it a western.
Guardians of the Galaxy (both films and the cartoon).
You know I had honestly kind of forgotten that TVTropes existed. It’s been a long time since I actually fell down a trope-hole.
Anyway it looks like Defiance and Outcasts both fit the general description. I’m leaning towards the latter but I’ll give both a fair shake.
“American Astronaut”, if I’m remembering the name correctly, is a bizarre space western musical.
The Expanse
favorite show since Firefly. For very similar reasons.
I second this recommendation.
Also the novels are quite entertaining, and it’s one of a very small set of cases where I didn’t find myself frustrated with the translation from novel to screen.
Agreed.
Depends on what you mean by “western motif”. One of my least-favorite bits about Firefly was the bit where they took “western in space” to the point of having people ride around on horses and shoot at each other with six-guns and Winchesters in small towns with architecture and stock characters lifted straight from the fictionalized version of the Old West. None of that makes sense, and waving “they’re poor so they can’t afford fancy technology” doesn’t make it make sense, and I want to never see it again.
If you’re just looking for Space as a possibly-final frontier and frontiers not usually being populated by elite paramilitary teams of society’s best and brightest, then The Expanse is where you need to go. Three seasons on SyFy before they realized they don’t really do science fiction any more, season four due on Amazon later this year. Does have the crew of misfits with a spaceship they can’t really afford to maintain, trying to keep flying while being stuck in the middle of events far bigger than themselves, but also puts some thought into how e.g. an asteroid miner’s drinking establishment will be a very different sort of low-rent place than a Deadwood saloon. Really, the invention and depiction of a distinct Belter culture, rather than Firefly’s “Space Chinese” and “Space Rednecks”, is one of the more pleasant surprises.
Also, better long-term story arcs, and a more realistic depiction of space travel.
And I’m pretty sure Amos Burton is a distant ancestor of Jayne Cobb. “Why do you have so many guns? The armory was on the way”.
Eh, I mean Firefly’s premise was a bit dumb but I’ve watched and enjoyed SF with much, much dumber premises. If Star Trek can be considered “smart” science fiction for throwing the word quantum in front of every third made-up science term, I’m inclined to cut Firefly slack for never answering the question of why the people fleeing “Earth-that-was” in interstellar spaceships brought along herds of cattle and horses.
I will check out the Expanse though. I’ve heard good things about it before, and three recommendations in this subthread counts for a lot. I hadn’t really figured it was my thing based on what I had heard about the books, it sounded like the plot was centered around a murder mystery and a Big (not so) Dumb Object which displaced the more interesting-sounding Earth-Mars-Belt conflict.
You’re a biologist or something right? That fact may make The Expanse either much more interesting or much stupider depending on how good a job they did with their science.
Yeah, I am.
I would be very pleasantly surprised if the show has some plausible biology, but not having it isn’t a deal-breaker. Again, I’ve watched and enjoyed episodes of Star Trek where people “de-evolve” into spiders and iguanas. Bad science is only a problem if they take themselves too seriously.
It’s a rather serious show. I don’t know how plausible all the science is, but in general it may increase your enjoyment if you go in with the expectation that your disbelief may need to be suspended.
Every de-evolution episode of Star Trek is terrible.
I didn’t like their whole “folksy” bit that they tried to play up. I’m not sure why but it never seemed believable to me.
Huh.
I’ll just repeat what I said above, however well made The Expanse is, it doesn’t feel like a western to me, because everything the characters do seems to be fairly futile and meaningless. It’s just scene after scene of shit about to go bad, people trying to stop things going bad, and people failing to stop things going bad. Westerns embody the sense of agency that matters, even when it’s the grim kind of Western.
But maybe that’s me. I stopped watching at some point into the second season because I was tired of waiting for something positive to happen.
I really liked Cowboys and Aliens. It worked because it played its premise absolutely straight, made a better show of visual verasity than 99% of westerns, none of the (human) characters were “hollywood idiots”, in that they were all doing the best they could to live with their personal history and the knowledge and situations they had, AND many of them were even showing awareness of the tech-level role reversal they are facing.
Wild Wild West the old TV show is not reviled, however. There’s also Brisco County Jr. for a newer show that mixes Western and sci-fi elements.
Oh, the old TV show is great! And the late Ross Martin is one of the few actors that convincingly pulled off “stick on a beard and a false nose as a disguise and you really can’t tell it’s the same guy”. Robert Conrad is also good as the charming, capable, and not-just-a-pretty-face secret agent.
The movie was a total mess, though; they got the “initial mutual disdain and despising” down pat, but there was no chemistry between the leads and it never blossomed into “grudging respect becomes working partnership becomes buddy-buddy pair” and what they thought they were doing with Kenneth Branagh I have no idea (Ken must have been doing this as a “pay the rent” movie is the only sense I can make of it).
Killjoys and Dark Matter are probably the recent shows most aping the Firefly mold, though both also incorporate more cyberpunk aesthetics, as well. There is no more frontier to run away to, space-corporatism is dominant.
Dark Matter has a pretty poor first season, though, and ends on a cliffhanger. It has a larger core cast, and I quite enjoyed how creatively the writers plotted episodes so that most of them were subtly bottle episodes stuck on the ship.
Killjoys just recently ended. It has a smaller core cast, and a little more competence porn.
The “hey I recognize that actor” game is pretty fun for both shows, inundated as they are by regulars of the film-in-Canada genre show boom.
You guys remember that discussion we had about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic swerving to the Left half a year ago? In it, Conrad Honcho predicted:
Fucking called it, dude. As of S9E12 “The Last Crusade”, Scootaloo’s lesbian aunts from the tie-in book Ponyville Mysteries: Riddle of the Rusty Horseshoe are now canon. And just to remove all ambiguity, they have one of them call Scootaloo’s dad “my brother” in dialogue while addressing the other, thus negating the possibility that they are just spinster sisters who live together.
This, of course, comes only a few episodes after S9E06 “Common Ground”, which is about Quibble Pants having trouble bonding with the daughter of the mare he is dating. But at least in that case they left it ambiguous whether the mare in question is divorced, or if she is just a widow (in which case it’s okay).
I’m glad the show is ending now before anything worse happens. As it stands, the series can still be saved with a few judicious edits.
(Good things about this season? The princess vacation episode was great, and I’m really interested in seeing whether the Sandbar/Yona thing is going anywhere.)
Not into MLP but… you’re offended by a reference to divorce? Really? Isn’t it a few decades late for that? Or do you think, for some reason, that a television program made by mostly non-Catholics for a mostly non-Catholic audience in a mostly non-Catholic country should still conform to Catholic dogma?
I dunno, man, having been raised Jewish I just find this attitude very foreign. But Judaism doesn’t expect non-Jews to follow halakha, and it has always permitted divorce, so what do I know.
Preventing positive (or any?) depictions of divorce in mass media doesn’t have much to do with Catholicism. It’s more like he’s saying children’s media such as My Little Pony ought to follow the Hay’s Code.
Well, we still have the exorcism market cornered after all these years. So if no divorce is on the table, I mean, sure….
Even Christian denominations that allow divorce discourage it.
Religious doctrine aside, from what I can understand from that clip (I don’t watch the show) it seems that they are trivializing the very real problem of relationships between step-children and step-parents. In the real world, such relationships can be traumatic. The “cinderella effect” refers to the observation that childrens are much more likely to be abused by a step-parent than by a biological parent, or really any other person. Even when there is no outright abuse, these relationships tend to be conflictual and are a source of distress to both parties.
The step-parent effect is knowledge somehow lost in the Current Year despite being basic Darwinism and the people who passed “Cinderella” down orally not needing such science to have it.
Can we call this the Brady Bunch effect?
Can we call this the Brady Bunch effect?
Let’s not.
I used to date someone who did lots of back office social work for various “family and child protective services” agencies. A not insignificant amount of “Brady Bunch” style blended families have all sorts of Really Bad failure modes, that everyone in the field all know about, but nobody wants to talk about in public and in front of the politicians, especially not now in Current Year.
I try to forget what I learned.
I especially get sick when people make light of it, or talk of making a kink of it. It’s part of why I couldn’t stand watching Arrested Development.
From the Wikipedia page this Brady Bunch show looks relatively tame: dad is a widower, mum is either a widow or divorced (it has been deliberately left ambiguous), the kids don’t bang each other.
I think the shows of 80s and 90s were much worse. When I was a kid I used to spend time at my grandma’s place and she and my aunt used to watch this American tv show called The Bold and the Beautiful. It was madness: the main characters divorced and remarried multiple times per year, often to the siblings, parents or children of their former spouses. This resulted in a truckload of step-children, who grew at an accelerated rate, reaching their 20s in the span of a few years, and then proceeded to hook up with their step-siblings or even their step-parents.
In addition to this, to spice up the drama, there was the constant cheating, fights, alcoholism, murder attempts, and so on. And yet everybody was a successful entrepreneur living in wealth and glamour, once an arc was resolved conflicts were forgotten and everybody got along just fine.
This is how rich Americans live, or so we thought. Now I understand that not even the lowest trailer trash begin to approach this level of degeneracy. And yet, this show was setting role models, both in the US and abroad.
The Brady Bunch and The Bold and the Beautiful are two entirely different genres. The Brady Bunch was a sitcom, intended to be watched by the entire family; it was originally shown on weekday evenings. The Bold and the Beautiful is (it’s still on!) a daytime soap opera, originally aimed at an audience of adult housewives.
They aren’t really comparable; there’s a lot more that’s different between them besides the era. The Bold and the Beautiful is a spinoff of The Young and the Restless, which was essentially similar as far as I know.
The actors totally were, though!
Yeah, the objection to the Brady Bunch isn’t that it was outrageous and obvious propaganda to be used in the culture war, but rather that it was the first mainstream and popular presentation of “mixed families” and presented a complex and often fraught situation as “it just works out and everyone lives happily ever after” when statistically, in reality, that is usually far from the case.
Is this true I know that step-parents are the most likely to abuse, but the literal meaning of your sentence is that the majority of cases with step-parents are abusive (or otherwise awful). Is that not grossly overstating the case?
Fair point. I’d say it’s statistically unlikely that families in such situations end up as perfect and happy as the Bradys. Of course, it’s statistically unlikely that any family is as perfect and happy as the Bradys, so yeah…
My Brady Bunch effect statement was in response to
The Brady Bunch portrayed step parents basically the same as regular sit-com parents, and step sibling relationships basically the same as biological sibling relationships and stripped out all the drama with the exes and the financial stresses. Depictions like the Brady bunch represent what a tiny fraction of actual step families but serve as nearly 100% of the representations of them in modern culture which helps lead to the forgetting of basic concepts.
There’s an obvious confounder though: abusive people are more likely to get involved in divorces, thus more likely to remarry, thus more likely to end up with step-children.
In general the traditional anti-divorce discourse seems to overlook a lot of possible confounders of that sort. Yes people who go through/have gone through a divorce tend to be less happy — but this could just as well be because they went through a failed, possibly traumatic/abusive marriage. If their marriage wasn’t a trainwreck, they would indeed be happier — and so not divorce! If anything, it seems that most divorces put a brutal but necessary end to an unsalvageable situation, and forcing these couples to stay married would just make things even worse. These people’s problem is not that they divorced, it’s that they never should have been married in the first place.
Staying married “in spite of everything, for the sake of the children” seems like the mother of all sunk-cost fallacies.
But children are not more likely to be abused by biological parents who divorced, they are more likely to be abused by step-parents. And there is an obvious evolutionary explanation for it. E.g. look up what male lions do to cubs when they take over a pride.
Are 50% of marriages traumatic/abusive? Most marriages end because people (usually women) get bored of the spouse/think they could do better/want to seize control of their spouse’s assets.
But it’s the stepparent who’s the abusive one, not the divorced parent. The stepparent may never have been married to begin with.
No, it’s about the future cost to the children of having their parents divorce, which are well established.
Don’t at least some studies suggest that it looks something like:
Two-parent househould (functional) > divorced/separated parents > two-parent household (dysfunctional)?
In other words, if it is a broken marriage, divorce remains the better option for the kids. As ana53294 mentioned further downthread, staying together for the kids only works if you can stay together and create a loving, positive atmosphere.
My impression was that the smorgasbord of bad life outcomes were all tied specifically to “child living in arrangement other than with both biological parents” and that the “single mom” situation wasn’t really any better/worse than the “single mom remarried to other dude” situation…
The studies that I’ve seen have been very consistent.
About 20% of divorces come from what you would call “dysfunctional” families, in technical terms high-conflict marriages. This covers abuse, infidelity, debts, addiction, and pretty much everything else that used to qualify as cause for divorce. Some of the kids in those families are probably better off for having their parents divorce.
The remaining 80% of divorces come from low-conflict marriages, which are otherwise indistinguishable from marriages where the couples don’t divorce. There’s no discernable reason that the couple couldn’t stick through their rough patch and make it work, they just didn’t. Those are the families where the kids are absolutely getting shafted.
I want to think it’s a mix of toxoplasma, and “outrage headlines generate clicks”, but …
I’ve been seeing SJ-isty articles asserting that growing up with two parents in a traditional style stable family is an “unearned privilege” that needs compensating for.
And this is on top of my lifetime of personal experience of regularly experiencing being in a group of people who learns that my parents are still married (to each other) and that my mother was a fulltime housemom, there is often at least one person who gets angry and aggressively snide about it.
@Mark Atwood,
An alternative term for “unearned privilege”, is “dodged a bullet”, which one you’ll use depends on if one supports less bullets “equal rights” or more bullets “equal wrongs”
Spite exists.
@vV_Vv:
Lions are kind, patient fathers. Lion step-children don’t even exist.
Evolutionary biology explains this. People understood human step-parents before Darwin. Yet here we are… WHY?!
Everyone living in a first-world country in 2019 is so fucking far up the unearned privilege chain that it’s ridiculous to worry about other bits of unearned privilege.
@albatross11>
I see way too many of “the mosquito army” who scavenge trash to sell to the scrap yards, and live in RV.’s that have holes covered by tarps and duct tape, or live in tents and out of shopping carts to believe that.
Unless you meant that San Francisco isn’t “first world” anymore, which I’ll concede.
This is so false to me it hurts.
You think your ancestors worked hard so other randos could live a good life, or did they do it so you could? Without this implicit promise everyone still walks around all the time hunting, gathering, and the like.
Everyone living on Earth as a member of homo sapiens is so fucking far up the unearned privilege chain relative to the rest of the biosphere that it’s ridiculous to worry about other bits of unearned privilege.
@Paul
Then was abolitionism fundamentally silly or…?
@Hoopyfreud
…or “unearned privilege” is.
Clutzy:
I think my ancestors and yours did backbreaking work under the hot sun for generations with little chance of leaving more to their kids than a reasonable shot at survival. About 500 years ago, humankind began our climb out of the world of subsistence farming and the Iron Law of Wages, and over many generations since then, most every generation has had more and better chances than the one before. The last couple centuries has been a more spectacular version of that progress, in which we went from a wood fire for heat and candles for a little light to read by to heat pumps and LED bulbs.
Our ancestors did indeed work hard to leave us a legacy, but I doubt they worked any harder than the average Russian serf or German peasant. The difference is, we managed to organize our societies to accumulate knowledge and capital and pull ourselves out of the pigshit our ancestors lived in.
Its impossible to know who worked harder, but an obvious aside is that we don’t know a doctor works harder than a garbage man, but they are compensated differently and that is not unjust. So maybe they worked harder, or maybe smarter, or some combination of the two. The point is that few would have worked at all without the prospect.
Yes, I am very offended by casual references to divorce. Divorce is evil, and it should not be normalized. I don’t care if it’s the current year.
It doesn’t help that this is the second MLP episode dealing with divorce. S8E06 “Surf and/or Turf” was about Terramar choosing which of his parents to live with after they separated.
@jaimeastorga2000,
I’ve never watched My Little Pony (my son is more into Blippi, Curious George, and Ryan’s Toy Reviews), but while I’m in favor of the “Boomers” being put in stocks for what they did to my generation in the ’70’s and ’80’s when they normalized divorce, as far as I know MLP is for kids, and just like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood did decades ago, there’s a need for comforting lies to children about how “their parents still love them and everything is normal”.
If their parents won’t “grin and bear it” for their children’s sake it’s the duty of mass media to step in.
The kids will lose their illusions too soon already, a little mercy spared for them now is a good thing.
I hate to break it to you but Saturday morning cartoons and school counselors saying that everything is normal are less than convincing when your parents are shouting at each other all night or breaking down crying during the day. It’s really fucking obvious even as a dumb kid that that’s not normal.
I’m sure that it makes the parents or, let’s be honest here, the mothers feel better about what they’re doing to their kids. “It’s normal, see, look at the funny cartoon ponies!” But unless the cartoons come with a lobotomy the kids will know better.
@Nabil ad Dajjal,
When most of your classmates parents are also seperated/divorced it is “normal” (it was like a virus!), and the lessons come too soon anyway.
Forty years later I’m still bitter.
My hope would be that the sting is lessened a bit by the”cartoon ponies” or Mister Rogers re-runs (I”m still onboard for having their parents pelted with garbage for ehat they’re doing though).
In this way “the Millennials” are superior, ’cause while it’s sad they have to delay or forgo marriage and parenthood so much, at least they haven’t (yet) produced a generation from broken homes
It’s “normal” in the same sense as when it’s 1350 and half of the people around you die from the plague.
Imagine if in the 14th century someone wrote a collection of witty and fun stories set against the backdrop of the ongoing catastrophe. Well, actually someone did, though he managed not to trivialize the issue.
If something is presented as normal/fine/healthy and then your own experiences with it are awful that makes things worse for kids. It makes them more isolated and more likely to blame themselves.
Agree with baconbits9. People are still impressed with/have fond memories of the first season of Digimon, which included a pair of siblings who still had conflicted feelings over their parents’ divorce.
Representation isn’t just about normalization, it’s about telling stories that resonate with the audience’s own realities.
All right, I respect that view. I also consider divorce evil – it’s just often the lesser evil.
But whether or not divorce is “normalized”, it’s become normal. Some children will have to deal with it. I think there’s room for escapist fluff that pretends the issue doesn’t exist, certainly a magical world of pastel horses could be that kind of fluff. On the other hand you also have kids’ shows in similarly fantastic settings like Sesame Street and Arthur that try to address these kinds of weighty issues head-on. Now, one can disagree with how they handle these issues, but you seem to be saying that just acknowledging they exist is itself immoral, and I’m going to register my disagreement with that.
(I don’t mean “fluff” in a derogatory way. There are some shows that are pure fluff that I really enjoyed. Sheep in the Big City for instance.)
Is MLP a kid’s show? (I honestly don’t know).
If so, presumably some of the kids watching have parents who are divorcing and/or dating after divorce. What do you want the show to say about that?
In the abstract, divorce is like killing: generally bad, but there are instances in which it is justified. Even the Catholic Church recognizes this.
The manner in which many modern states handle “unilateral, no-fault” divorce is, however, pure evil straight and uncut from the deepest bowels of Hell. I’m a Christian, so I do believe that God will take his vengeance on the purveyors of this vile regime. It is, however, also just bad policy in terms of contract law, basic ethics, and population management, and absolutely should not be promoted in mass media.
I’m not Catholic, but I would like to shield my children from the idea of divorce while young. They should be able to rest safe in the thought of an indisoluble family, even if in the widespread culture it isn’t so.
However, that was complicated by the fact that all their grandparents are divorced. :/
Were there not already gay and divorced characters? It kind of seems like that kind of show. I mean, it’s really hard to wrap my head around a person who disapproves of homosexuality and divorce, and also watches My Little Pony avidly. It seems like, I dunno, a guy who thinks the armed forces are immoral and also knows the names of specific GI Joe episodes.
Oh, they exist. I have a friend who’s a hardcore conservative Catholic Christian, definitely disapproves of homosexuality and divorce, and was writing fanfiction until recently. That said, they are a minority.
Afaik there were no explicitly gay characters in the first five seasons, although the population was portrayed as overwhelmingly female in the early seasons.
The show didn’t use to be like this. AntiDem didn’t see anything wrong when he watched the first four episodes and the first movie. The Dreaded Jim himself sang the praises of the season 5 opener, “The Cutie Map”, in which the mane six have to defeat the evil dictator of a communist village dedicated to equality (they even use the equal sign as their logo!). Later, in the season 5 finale, when the same dictator comes back for revenge, Twilight Sparkle defeats her with the power of friendship and converts her to monarchism.
Good times.
The popularity of MLP among neo*actionaries always puzzled me. You’d expect these people to be drawn towards things like Warhammer 40,000, but no, ponies.
Friendship is Magic
Magic is heresy
Possible explanation: the “brony” started out as an ironic 4chan injoke thing that was memed into sincerity, and since 4chan is also home to a large contingent of supporters of reeeeee aktionary politics, the adult fandom tilts in that direction politically. I think the whole monarchism thing is post hoc, since a lot of fictions have monarchies and their fandom doesn’t lean this way.
I know, everything didn’t used to be like this, and now it is, that’s how progress works, but judging from that whole big ugly vitriolic thread we had about how terrible it is that MLP is pushing their evil leftist agenda, I kind of assumed they were a little further along already.
Calling divorce evil is crazy times.
@JPNunez,
Divorce isn’t evil parents of minor children divorcing enmasse as a fad was evil, I haven’t forgotten and I haven’t forgiven my parents generation for what they did and didn’t do
Why the Hell were they like that?
I would rather have my parents divorce earlier rather than later; if anything not divorcing in that situation is the evil thing.
Not divorcing for the kids means not fighting in front of the kids, in the same house. It means being civil adults and staying under the same roof. And never, ever using your children as weapons against the other parent.
Otherwise, if you are incapable of being adults for the kids, it is better to divorce.
Being horrible to each other and breaking your marriage can both be evil.
Yes, let’s focus on the real evil: chicken sandwiches.
I would argue that as a general rule it is. There are a few cases where I don’t have a problem with it – two responsible adults coming to an amicable conclusion that they don’t work together any more and cleanly separating.
Divorce is a violation of the standard marriage oaths.
But in the cases of abuse which I hear as justified: don’t marry people like that. If you are going to spend so little time considering the character of the people you are going to swear to spend the rest of your life with, I’m not going to have much sympathy.
Let’s say the abuse didn’t manifest until after they got married. Does the other person have a duty to just suck it up and be a punching bag? Even if they were abusive earlier, and the other person was convinced they would change, would it not be better for any children in the marriage to not live with an abuser (who won’t necessarily stick to just abusing their spouse)?
You can think of all sorts of hypotethical scenarios, but how relevant are they to what actually happens?
Do they justify no-fault divorce, or are they motte-and-bailey retorical devices?
The only resonable justification for no-fault divorce consistent with classical liberal principles I can think of is that marriage is a contract, and any contract must have the option of unilateral termination.
But unilateral termination often involves incurring in penalties, or at the very least not getting anything out of it. Instead no-fault divorce is currently set up in a way that creates a financial incentive for the spouse with lower income and/or the spouse who expects to become the custodial parent of the children (in both cases, usually the wife) to unilaterally terminate.
@vV_Vv
Garrett’s post seems to me to say that he would not allow divorce even in the case of abuse. So “be a punching bag to your abuser” would seem to be the motte in that case.
The weird thing is he’s got “abused by your spouse” in the “don’t divorce” or “it’s kind of your fault” box, but “amicable mutual break” is morally ok????
I’d bet most divorces aren’t for continuous mostly one way abuse, and are more like “mutual break” although messy. The moment people have children a “mutual break” seems way more evil to me than divorce because of abuse (which seems good or at least more good than not doing so). If they don’t have children I don’t think either reason bothers me.
An “amicable mutual break” is a renegotiation of an existing contract by parties with an equal amount to gain and who are able to demonstrate that they have the wisdom to know this. It is when both parties can come to a mutually-beneficial arrangement, hold hands on the way to the courthouse, embrace each other one last time, smile, and sign the desolution of marriage documents that I believe that there is an appropriate divorce. If both parties aren’t as happy (not relieved, not resigned) as they were on the day of the marriage, they aren’t ready for dissolution. I don’t think that this is a common case, which is why I mention it as an exception.
In any individual case of abuse, it’s definitely better for the abusee to get out.
But part of me can’t help but feel that society as a whole would be better off if there were more reasons for people to think long and hard about whether they really want to shack up with Henrie(tta)s
“Luckily” abuse is exactly the opposite of “no-fault”, so I can draw the line there and not experience any real dissonance.
Agreed. I consider it quite implausible that there exists any significant amount of people who behave like perfect gentlemen/women throughout an extended period of courtship and dating, and then suddenly transform into violent and horrific abusers post-marriage.
It’s theoretically possible, and nearly every divorced person has a huge incentive to claim something like that is the case (who wants to admit to having made such a significant and horrible mistake in judgment, especially when it affects your children?), but that doesn’t make it likely.
Divorce seems to nearly always be spun as “this other person changed/transformed/betrayed me” and nearly never as “I made a horrible mistake in partner selection.” Even in cases where it’s abundantly obvious to outsiders that a horrible mistake in partner selection is being made.
WTF. I seriously can’t think of any explanation for this take except for you being an abuser who wants to trap their victims.
Huh? Garrett’s comment read to me like standard caveat emptor. At some point, you bear responsibility for your own choices. That includes spouses. Garrett has probably seen enough cases where the abuser telegraphed their behavior well before rings were exchanged. In those cases, the choice is as clear as the choice of buying a 20YO McMansion.
It’s definitely not the case that Garrett thinks that people should act kind solely to get that sweet marriage contract and then go full beater. Rather, it’s understood that some people are abusive, and you and I can’t help that as much as we can help being careful about our choice of spouse.
I don’t understand what you are saying. Quite probably some people do marry obvious abusers (although I don’t think it is particularly common in comparison to people marrying non-obvious abusers). But these people are still victims, and pointing out your relative lack of sympathy for them is weird and pretty fucking creepy. If you further emphasise your lack of sympathy by saying you think they deserve to be abused (i.e. they don’t deserve to escape an abusive marriage through divorce) I don’t know what to say.
Yaaaaahhhh…? I mean, predicting mass media will further slide into promoting degeneracy to children is not hard.
That said, I will make a prediction sort of in the other direction: within three years, corporations changing their logos on the Internet/TV to incorporate the rainbow flag for Pride Month will be passe. But not so much because “hey stop promoting this to children” but because the LGBTQs will eventually object to being another corporate marketing prop.
Yep. It’s hard to cast yourself as a heroic member of the resistance when Shell Oil, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Boeing, and the CIA all agree with you on what you deem to be the most important issues in society…
This is something about the LGBT tribe that trips my moral foundations. You can’t claim to be part of Le anti-capitalist Resistance when you’re in bed with the CIA and feted by all the biggest corporations! Repent of serving Druj!
Jesse Singal tweeted memorably about this.
Sort of related, especially since everyone this thread is talking about video games: Cyberpunk 2077 transphobia clickbait stuff. In the E3 presentations about Cyberpunk 2077, one of the fictional advertisements for a fictional beverage in the corporate dystopia game world featured an image of feminine-shaped person in a tight swimsuit sporting a rather impressive bulge. Rock, Paper, Shotgun called this out as somehow exploitative or transphobic. Mike Pondsmith (creator of Cyberpunk) responds with a big “WTF?!” on forum posts and other bloggers/tweeters/youtubers pile on one side or the other. No idea if any actual transfolk are offended, or just the RPS cisgendered folk
begging for clicksbeing outraged on their behalf.I think it’s interesting that in the Cyberpunk corporate dystopia, advertisers exploit any aspect of your body or identity to sell unrelated products. This is unseemly and disturbing. In our totally-not-corporate-dystopia world…every major corporation is spending this month exploiting LGBTQ imagery to sell unrelated products. Eventually I think people will make the connection.
As for the specific kerfuffle around Cyberpunk 2077, my response would be an unironic “did you just assume their gender?!?” There’s no indication the person in the advertisement is trans. It’s the Cyberpunk world where body modifications are cheap and readily available for any reason or no reason at all. Who’s to say in this world a person born with two X chromosomes who identifies as female wouldn’t opt for a cyberpenis? A woman with a strap-on dildo is not a transman.
And furthermore (flips a table)
Satan is not a f’ing pogo stick!
As Frued would say, sometimes a banana in your pocket really is just a banana in your pocket.
I mean it’s a bit passé at this point to note that we’re already in a cyberpunk dystopia, just with fewer trenchcoats and katanas.
As far as the controversy goes, normally this sort of woke dust-up makes me marginally more favorable towards whatever product is being attacked. But in this case, knowing that there’s gross ads in the game makes me a lot less excited for it. As fun as it might be to play a cyberpunk Keanu Reeves simulator I don’t particularly want to see ‘women’ with bulges in my free time; I get more than enough of that during the day, thanks.
So, all of the drawbacks with none of the benefits? 🙁
It’s one ad on a poster in the massive game world. It’s not like it’s the central plot point or anything.
ETA:
You must be excited for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare then. Apparently the demo IGN saw left them…for lack of a better word “triggered”…by the realistic portrayal of anti-terrorism operations against Islamic terrorists in London.
@Conrad:
Has Call of Duty found its marketing niche as trolling SJWs? First it was letting people play black female Nazis, now this.
That wasn’t trolling the SJWs… that was caving to the SJWs by giving them exactly what they wanted… perhaps in the “mischievous and overly literal genie” sense, but still.
@Matt M:
When you add that caveat, we’re in violent agreement.
@Conrad Honcho,
I actually hadn’t heard of that one. It would certainly be a nostalgia trip to play a game where you’re actually fighting terrorists: I haven’t played a shooter like that since the mid aughts, it’s mostly Russians and/or PMCs.
I’m actually kind of up to my eyeballs in games right now. My brother and girlfriend well-intentionedly bought me a bunch of games on Steam for my birthday but between grad school and trying to maintain a social life I haven’t had time to play any of them yet. So I’m probably going to buy at most one game released this year.
Eh, I still get the impression that particular decision was one that most SJWs were in support of, and most anti-SJWs opposed…
I guess vomiting rainbows all June every June is the new normal. I find it irritating in precisely the same way I find vomiting tinsel all December every December irritating. But neither of these is for me and I respect both groups’ rights to celebrate themselves in the public square. Honestly if we had a month-long celebration pandering to some group I’m a member of, I’d probably find it irritating too.
Optimistically, this is the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, so the current ridiculously over-the-top Corporate Pride Month might be a one-off and next year it’ll revert to something saner.
Realistically, it needs a little while longer to burn out. We could conceivably end up in the position that, since nobody’s a perfect Kinsey 0 or 100% gender conforming, you either have to identify as some strain of LGBTQIA or you’re an evil bigot to be milkshaked. One would hope that enough people would notice that this is watering Pride down to generic social leftism, and push back before it gets there. One would hope.
Anyway, I’m pretty damn atypical and everyone else on the left is still in OBERGEFELL FUCK YEAH mode so take as you will.
Since there is already an “A” (I think for asexual?), maybe we’ll get a bizarro-world future where they add an “S” to the acronym ouroboros for those who focus their identity around being an Ally, to prevent friendly fire milkshaking
@BBA,
I had to look up “Milkshaked”, and what I found makes me wonder how I avoided learning the term until now.
Anyway, I’d say Halloween is my biggest peeve, it used to be little kids in cute costumes, but now there’s decorations and I see more adults dressed up, and some of it is legitimately scary – I really don’t want to see realistic looking “costumes” of knife wounds and the like (I also hate gruesome movie billboard advertising).
My milkshaking brings all the boys to the yard.
(They’re masochists.)
Didn’t you get the last memo, comrade?
There is this new sexual orientation called “greysexual”, which apparently means that you aren’t horny and eager to f*ck anything that moves all the time. Which is totally queer and special, and totally not how many straight people, and in particular most women, are.
And if it sounds suspiciously similar to the failed orientation “demisexual” or its snobby cousin “sapiosexual”, never mind.
Straight is the new degenerate.
Did you get the one about charitability? Stop that.
Wait, what happened to demisexual? Is it just that the name didn’t catch on, or was there pushback?
I think “demisexual” just didn’t catch on so people are trying again with “greysexual”.
I didn’t mean to be so snarky, but I just wanted to note that in woke circles there is so much pressure to identify as some type of queer or another, that even people with a straight, vanilla sexuality try to invent new sexual orientations to fit in.
@vV_Vv: I feel bad for these people and wonder why they don’t just leave the woke tribe. Are there just no other viable social circles in their cities?
@Le Maistre Chat
They come in agreeing with the politics; the pressure to fit in by finding oneself an obscure sexuality comes later. If alternative social groups don’t fit the politics, that makes it harder to move to them.
I’ve seen this happen in realtime to friends, and it seems to me that any transition would need to be motivated by something major. It’s all the entertainment these friends consume, all the news, most of their friends… it’s not easy to leave that, for all the obvious reasons.
Woke culture is mainstream. Didn’t you notice the rainbows this month? They are everywhere, it’s like Santa for Christmas.
@vV_Vv:
OK, so what can be done to fix this problem?
I think pressure might be the wrong term for the general explanation. I can’t figure out what the right term is. It does seem adjacent to peer pressure, but it also seems a bit different.
My impression is that it’s from within, so to speak, not from without, so yeah, it’s not the same thing as peer pressure. I imagine it’s a bit like if you became an evangelical Christian in like high school and then felt you needed a Conversion Story or something.
I mean you might also consider that for a decent amount of woke people, being woke is treated not as “just one of many social groups and lifestyles a person might choose” but more as “the basic minimum requirements for being considered a morally decent human being.”
If you believe that, even a little bit, renouncing it is going to be much much harder than say, switching sports team allegiances or adopting a new hobby or something like that…
@Matt M:
I understand that, but nobody believed this stuff a few decades ago, so it must be a social construct. How can things be changed so people don’t get stuck in these harmful thought-canals too deep to climb out of? Right-wingers getting smart enough to take over the universities and Hollywood?
What’s harmful about coining a term for your sexuality?
@Le Maistre Chat
Cynical/pessimistic answer? You can’t, because people have been doing it way longer than the current trend, the trends are just different (and will be different again some time in the future). People want to fit in, and will do weird, maybe even harmful stuff to do it. Nothing new, and not something unique to current movements.
@dick
I would say there isn’t anything harmful about it on its face, but that there is (or can be) a sense of self-victimization that comes along with it that can be harmful (which, again, is not unique to this particular trend or time period).
I don’t really feel equipped to do so, but I think understanding this kind of thing requires stepping up a level and looking more generally at social behavior and not specifically at this specific example of fitting in or defining one’s identity.
I will agree with the point someone made upthread…sapiosexual always struck me as mostly pretentious.
@dick:
The fact that “heterosexual” is put at the bottom of the status stack? MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) and people whose sexuality channels them toward elective surgery on their genitals shouldn’t be people’s role models for how to increase their status. The best role models for one’s sexuality are mommies and daddies who love each other very much, and when…
@Le Maistre Chat >
The rent is too damn high!
Repeal the economic conditions that make the mid-20th century style “nuclear family” long delayed or foregoed.
Bring back “the family wage”, and make it easier to be a parent and spouse rather than a hipster.
Have a third of the population be private industry unionized workers (like in 1955), instead of in-debt college graduates (like now).
The percentage of unmarried adults was higher in the turn of the last century lower east side of Manhattan than the rest of the U.S.A., just as San Francisco today has children be the lowest percentage of it’s population ever on record.
Too little space, too low wages, too long commutes.
Subsidize married couples with children lots more, tax unmarried adults lots more, have less apartment tower warrens, have more single family homes close to jobs that allow one an income to live in them, and watch “traditional families” be the social norm again instead of atomized extended adolescence.
More backyards and less coffee shops in other words, it’s no accident that the age American women first give birth is younger on average in cheaper areas, i.e. San Francisco, California vs. Zapata County, Texas.
If you want 1950’s social mores, you might try recreating the economic conditions of then, I strongly suspect that neo-liberalist economics and social liberalism ascended together for a reason.
More expensive and smaller homes = more hipsters.
(And don’t given me any of that “Actually the average home newly built is larger than in 1970” claptrap, I can clearly see where rainbow flags are flying and what is being built there with my own eyes, Hell I’ve had jobs on crews building those tower warren apartments!).
“Woke” is because of broke.
I don’t really know what that means. When gays were at the bottom, it meant getting beaten up a lot and living a life of fear. Are you getting beaten up for being straight?
What it sounds like you’re complaining about is that being straight is uncool. It seems a lot like in the 90s, when black culture was ascendant and Arsenio was on TV and white people were complaining about feeling uncool. So, the straight kids inventing a novel term for their own sexuality in an attempt to be included in the newly-cool “sexual minority” group would be analagous to the white kids I knew who wore African medallions and told their parents they wanted to be rappers.
The good news is, very few of them ended up turning black. So, it’s probably gonna work out okay. We’re barely a generation in to the “Let’s try not treating sexual minorities like absolute shit” experiment, and not everyone’s on board yet, so give it a little time.
+1 to plumber and, uh, dick.
I’m not sure if I made my point very well, but I was basically trying to say what dick just said. I’m not sure the psychology behind all that is necessarily healthy, but it isn’t new or unusual.
@Dick
I think VV_VV is exaggerating. Yes, The pride stuff is pretty ubitquitous and that being straight is perceived as uncool. I don’t expect people will or can actually change who they find attractive nor do i anticipate political persecution of opposite sex attraction. That’s something of a red herring.
But making certain lifestyles once seen as normative and to some degree necessary for civilization seem ‘uncool’ has negative long term ramifications, in my opinion.
I suspect as plumber has argued that family formation is ultimately driven by economics, but whether people see it as worthwhile to build an economy around family formation is a matter of cultural priorities.
I don’t know what that means, either. Are you concerned that queerness will become so hip that straight people will stop fucking?
If that should come the past, I will be happy to go against the grain on that one and pick up the slack…
At the margins, basically yes. Especially for weird aspie types. Not so much that straight fucking becomes undesirable due to being unhip, but that the process for getting there gets even more unnavigable.
Obviously not everybody, but it certainly raises the bar. Compare: kids with married parents still exist, and even are likely still a majority, but the proportion has certainly declined. Which is… less than optimal.
Do note that this isn’t an issue with queerness existing – it’s specifically when woke glorification of “nobody’s sexuality is the same; nothing is normal” takes hold in high school/university culture.
Don’t the available statistics indicate that people basically have stopped… copulating?
I suppose the “why” is still up for debate though.
@Matt M
Have they? That would be surprising.
Yes.
“For most of the past three decades, 20-something men and women reported similar rates of sexlessness. But that has changed in recent years. Since 2008, the share of men younger than 30 reporting no sex has nearly tripled, to 28 percent. That’s a much steeper increase than the 8 percentage point increase reported among their female peers.”
Correlation is not causation, of course, but still I don’t see how a culture where normal, reproductive sexuality is increasingly seen as “uncool” can be considered healthy.
Natural selection at the memetic level will eventually take care of this, one way or the other, but it could cost us the Western civilization.
Er, this doesn’t sound a little over-dramatic to you? Remember, we started this conversation with you complaining about straight kids inventing funny names for their sexuality in order to seem cool. That’s what’s endangering Western Civilization?
If it’s that brittle, it was going to get fall apart anyway. And I don’t think it is. It survived ~1000 years of the meme “SEX FOR FUN IS BAD AND WILL GET YOU TORTURED FOR ALL ETERNITY” being loudly and explicitly broadcast at all levels of society and enforced with social exclusion, jail, and occasionally literal death squads. I feel like it will survive #StraightPeopleSuck trending on Twitter.
Headline: Unexplained outbreak of honesty discovered.
edit: Actually, reading more closely, that’s not right. Seems like either women have started having sex with each other or more women are having sex with the same men. So it’s indicative of a breakdown of monogamy–possibly related to a later marriage age.
Difference being that “sex for fun bad” was marginally reproductively useful (broadly unnecessary in the age of contraceptives, I’ll grant) and “heteronormative sex bad” is Shaker-style autogenocide.
Luxury gay space communism kind of needs to master luxury and communism (i.e. technologically and culturally innovate beyond the need for families to propagate your society) before expanding to the others or else you get Great Filtered
@Randy M
Taking the data at face value (I’m not sure that I’m inclined to), what it actually suggests is:
Fewer men are having sex.
Fewer women are having sex (but not by as much as men).
Thus of the remaining men who are having sex, they are having sex with way more women on average and/or women are having way more sex with women. I don’t think an increase in lesbian sex can fully account for this, especially since I would expect that to apply to gay men as well.
@acymetric ;
Fully agreed. In fact, if it looks like I didn’t say all that, I apologize for the lack of clarity.
Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time with the younguns, I think very few of them would say that straight sex is uncool. They’re just busy, stressed, and tired. The fact that the gays are super trendy is not really here or there.
@Enkidum,
In other words, it’s not what they’re learning in college, it’s the debt they leave the college with?
I think that is a considerable exaggeration. Sex for pleasure within marriage was fine. The most effective form of contraception then available, interruptus, was disapproved of but, so far as I can tell, there was no serious enforcement of that disapproval.
Sex outside of marriage was risky for women, pretty widely practiced and taken for granted for men, even if in theory disapproved of.
I doubt the reduction in sexual activity has much to do with normalizing homosexual relationships. There are other changes in the society that look like more plausible explanations, including the “making advances to a woman is sexual harassment and deserves punishment” meme and increasing disenchantment with casual sex as the ideal lifestyle.
Speaking as the accidental instigator of this discussion: a fertility crisis wasn’t what I was getting at at all. I meant we’re heading to an equilibrium where most people are still functional monogamous heterosexuals but fly rainbow flags and identify as “bi” or “pan” or use different pronouns than the ones they would’ve in previous generations. Which strikes me as losing the plot, and irritating for those of us who’ll get seen as bigoted because we aren’t super-enthusiastic about Pride
MonthCentury, but ultimately harmless.I personally don’t get super-enthusiastic about much of anything.
BBA:
+1
I think this is basically right–trendiness or social contagion can convince people who are gay, trans, or bi to openly identify as such, and can convince people who in previous generations would have identified as straight to identify as nonbinary or genderfluid, or for people who are a little bisexual (occasionally attracted to the same sex but never enough to act on it) to self-identify as bi. But it probably can’t change actual sexual behavior all that much.
I mean, we had centuries of heavy social pressure on gays that they should identify as straight and be sexually interested in members of the opposite sex. And sometimes, that even worked a little (closeted gay men sometimes married and even had a kid or two). But mostly, I think it didn’t work very well, because making someone find something they don’t want desirable is really, really hard. And the current rainbow-flags-everywhere trendy-complex-sexual-identity stuff is nowhere near as strong social pressure as the previous “If you’re a man who finds men sexy, you’re a dirty sick pervert who should be shunned, beaten up or killed and who will burn in hell if you act on those desires” kind of social pressure.
I see. And “straight is the new degenerate”? Or “the available statistics indicate that people basically have stopped… copulating”? Or “a culture where normal, reproductive sexuality is increasingly seen as “uncool” … could cost us the Western civilization”? Kind of selectively nit-picky, aren’t you?
Apropos of gay politics AND people who appropriate minority status for woke points, candidate Elizabeth Warren is proposing gay reparations.
I’d make some reference to danegeld or jizya, but then people complain that I’m uncharitable and I exaggerate things.
Correct, we would. It’s a bill to return unjustly-collected taxes to married couples. If there was one thing I thought conservatives might not complain about…
I think framing it as “reparations” is bad politics for a number of reasons and using that terminology is going to end of rankling people on both ends of the political spectrum (for very different reasons), but the concept seems pretty legit.
Is Warren framing it as reparations? I can’t see any evidence for that.
I don’t think so. When I search “elizabeth warren gay reparations” I mainly see recognizably right-wing urls.
I honestly can’t tell if she ever used that word or not. I could just be inflammatory language being used by people opposed to it.
I think acymetric is correct. Following the links in those articles, I find the following statement:
If she said the R word, I would’ve expected a source such as the Washington Examiner to have found it. So this reads to me as manufactured outrage, as charged.
Especially since this is just for Massachusetts. How many couples could there have been? A couple hundred? A few thousand dollars altogether? Warren probably spent more than that just talking about the bill.
vV_Vv:
So, it seems like the “gay reparations” bit is a smear applied to a pretty small and apparently sensible proposal to reemburse some folks who got slightly screwed over by the way the IRS processed their tax returns for a few years. Am I missing something? This is common as dirt for political rhetoric, but I wish we saw less of it here on SSC.
dick:
Yeah, this seems like the sort of thing you might be able to get the Rand Paul/Justin Amash type Republicans to support on general principles.
Banned for one month
Who?
v V_V v (spaces added because you can’t speak a banned user’s name), according to the comments page. But yeah, I had to go check too.
Was the word “degeneracy” a part of your vernacular before or after you played – or were exposed to memes originating from – Fallout: New Vegas? I have a working theory that the term only rose to prominence because people discovered that they felt empowered when they LARPed as a member of Caesar’s Legion.
I’m not sure exactly why you think you’re the one who gets to decide what does and does not qualify as “degeneracy”? The free market has clearly decided that LGBTQ+ identities are ripe for exploitation, which is the highest form of validation it can give.
Not sure really where to put this comment, but …
This is another in a long lineage of threads that should put to rest the idea that the commentariat here is liberal/left/whatever.
You just never get these ping-pongs of building outrage, disgust, and “me too” over any idea on the left side of the spectrum.
I think Scott’s analysis of two surveys ago should have made you wary of making claims that the commentariat here is dominantly right-wing (which you haven’t yet made, but you seem to be edging in that direction). It’s just stuff like this sticks out like a sore thumb.
At any rate, you’ve got several people pushing back against OP, and, I mean, OP is taking a Position-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named stance on My Little Fucking Pony…. surely there are more important battles to fight? I think half the discussion above is batshit nuts, but I’ve got better things to do with my time.
And speaking as someone who’s at least as leftie as you, your last sentence is just fundamentally untrue. If you can’t see parallels to this in our movements, you’re being wilfully blind.
EDIT: I think I was being unfair – you were talking about the commentariat here, in which case you’re right, there’s no left-wing equivalent to this.
The surveys, as best I could remember, only contained questions about readership. Most people who read SSC don’t also comment.
Your final point seems wrong to me. There’s plenty of spazzing out about shows and what have you leaning too left for some people’s tastes, and I’d dredge up the examples if the OT’s weren’t a hassle to navigate. Do you sincerely get the impression many people here complain about their entertainment being too right of wing instead?
You’re right in your second paragraph – see my edit.
I’m pretty sure the surveys included questions about frequency of commenting.
@Enkidum:
Yes, I was talking specifically about people who comment the most.
And Scott did ask about frequency of commenting in the survey. I’m failing to remember who, but someone did the analysis recently, and the regular commenters skew as much to the right (or more so) than the readership skews left. This is especially true because some large chunk of the regular commenters identify as Social Democrat, i.e. these are Europeans. Many of those commenters are not actually taking left-wing positions, being more motivated by anti-SJ positions.
ETA:
Yeah, go back and look through all of comments. There really aren’t many people pushing back. Hell, even BBA, who called out the “Divorce? We’re talking about divorce?” originally, said he thought divorce was “evil”.
@HeelBearCub,
It was Dan L who sussed out the survey results.
FWLIW, despite being an American, I chose “social democrat” as probably the closest label to describe my political leanings amongst the ones our host listed.
Excuse me?
Social democrats lean anywhere from left to centrist on economical matters, depending on the person and where they live. The anti-SJ thing is a social matter, which, yeah, that’s not really something central to social democracy in the slightest.
@DeWitt:
To clarify, I’m saying that many of them aren’t here to talk economic policy, not that they don’t have left wing economic positions.
I think there is confusion on the term Social Democrat (and I’m not sure which interpretation is correct). DeWitt appears to be aligning them with identity politics/SJ types, where I would have considered it more or less a synonym for Democratic Socialists which is how I think HeelBearCub is interpreting it, which is why it would make sense that they would have left-leaning economic views but not necessarily left leaning social views.
Fair, apologies for misunderstanding/misrepresenting.
Based on the charts Plumber linked, regular commenters seem to be roughly balanced, while the readership skews left. However, I find it quite possible that commenters who tend to comment about politics skew right. Many commenters rarely comment about politics; many tend to comment under blog posts but not in OTs.
Wouldn’t you have to find some pop culture examples of something like:
Handmaid’s Tale, but this isn’t dystopian at all.
To get enraged about?
A lot of the “X has been taken over by the Left, how dare they” comments here seem equivalent to “The world today is too left-wing for my tastes, with X being yet another example of that”.
I think this is just how large societal changes happen, when you’re watching them in realtime. Like, the CW topics of the past, e.g. interracial marriage, look today like a simple thing you’re either “for” or “against”; but during the time they were transitioning from controversial to uncontroversial, there was a lot of nuance and fretting over each tiny step. So, someone here today saying, “Dammit, I was okay with gay characters in Adventure Time, but My Little Pony is going too far!” is analogous to someone a generation ago saying “Dammit, I was okay with interracial couples in the Sears catalog, but putting them on billboards is going too far!”.
Or someone just a couple of open threads ago saying that Modern Family was going too far…
That was Honcho, at my prompting. I was trying to get him to clarify something.
@HeelBearCub,
I recall that just a few Open Threads ago @John Schilling posted some number crunching of the last survey showing.that more of the readership leans left but more of frequent commenters lean right, which fits my impression at least.
There’s far-left commenters like @citizencokane, from time-to-time but they’re seldom frequent commenters.
@Conrad Honcho sometimes posts what seem to me to be “old left”-ish comments, but he’s clearly on the neo-populist right (as he’ll point out).
@DavidFriedman argues for open borders, which these days is considered “Left”, but I’m pretty certain he’d feel insulted to be called a “Leftist”.
Among frequent commenters @brad, and @Lady Jane argue for the “Left” sometimes (as I think I do as well), but I’d say you and @Guy in TN (who I haven’t seen any recent posts of lately) are about the only consistently center-left (U.S. “liberal”/”social democrat”-ish) frequent commenters that I notice.
I hope you keep posting here.
It wasn’t John who did the analysis. Blanking on who. It’s in an OT from about 2 or 3 weeks ago I think.
Friedman is a Libertarian, close to anCap (anarcho-capitalist), if not all the way there. He holds positions consistent with that.
Otherwise I’m just going to avoid generally commenting on individuals unless you think that would help clarify something for you.
@HeelBearCub,
Found it!:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/05/open-thread-129-25/#comment-759402
It was @Dan L who did “some multivariate analyses”, that showed the difference in average political leanings between the readership (that answered the survey) and frequent commenters (that answered the survey).
I thought David Friedman was practically the definition of an anarcho-capitalist. But I am not an expert.
@HeelBearCub
I am absolutely flabbergasted by this statement. Friedman is literally one of the two prototypical anarcho-capitalists.
To paraphrase the other: It is no great crime to be ignorant of anarcho-capitalists, who are, after all, a peripheral group and one that most people consider to be personae non gratae. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on them while remaining in this state of ignorance.
If that statement sounds overly harsh, perhaps it’s because I’ve come too close to the original phrasing; its originator was overly inclined toward polemic, IMO. On the other hand, you have been reading, and responding forcefully, to DF’s comments here for years. Your error in this regard is surprising.
(Aside: while I am a DF fanboy, I don’t think that has significant bearing on my interpretation here. The implicit reference to the source of my adapted statement might be evidence in that regard.)
Since I was a bit subtle above, let me make myself clear: I support the LGBT rights movement. I think Obergefell was rightly decided and Masterpiece Cakeshop should just bake the damn cake. Calling it “degeneracy” is just as offensive as calling me a “Christ-killer” and everyone using that kind of language should knock it off.
I may grouse a little bit about the month of ubiquitous rainbow flags from businesses that didn’t give two shits about the gay community ten years ago. And there are some ideas trickling into the mainstream from the fringes of queer theory departments that I can’t bring myself to agree with. But the country as a whole is in a much better place now than it was in the ’00s (to say nothing of earlier). I wouldn’t want to go back.
Oh, and divorce is bad, but being trapped in a loveless or abusive marriage is so much worse, I can’t believe we’re even debating this.
I wasn’t particularly trying to call out your or anyone else’s position, just noting how much of it was essentially agreeing with the premise.
But I am surprised by your incredulity. This kind of conversation pops up frequently, IME.
I’m not a partisan bomb-thrower by nature. If there’s some common ground I’ll try to latch onto it, if there’s no way to sidle into a conversation I’ll just keep my big mouth shut. Usually.
There are many things that happen often that I remain incredulous of every damn time.
I think we’re in violent agreement here.
@HeelBearCub: Very subjective, but I’d agree that it does seem like high-frequency posters are more often very right than left. But in general, low-frequency commenters like me combine to post more than high-frequency people, and I tend to think most low-frequency people are somewhat like me — holding something like (American) centrist beliefs
Doppler Effect predicts that posters will be further apart as their frequency increases.
My impression is that conservatives are less common than liberals. The reason the commentariat appears right is that “right” lumps together conservatives and libertarians, and there are a fair number of the latter.
Also, there are a lot of people here who don’t fit all that neatly into the left/right spectrum.
The relevant questions here I think are:
1. Who’s fault is it that one becomes “trapped” in a subpar marriage?
2. Who bears much of the burden of the negative consequence of divorce?
If the answer to 1 is clearly and obviously “the parent” and the answer to 2 is clearly and obviously “the children” then I think there’s a strong argument that even if it’s net negative utility for the parent to stay in the marriage, they have an obligation to do so anyway, because leaving is essentially punishing your children due to your own mistake.
This assumes that a home with a subpar marriage is superior to divorced parents. I suppose it depends on how we parse “subpar” but the answer isn’t clear and definitive in favor of staying married.
The kids will suffer more in a loveless marriage most of the time. The couple won’t be able to avoid fighting and being an asshole to each other.
@ JPNunez- do you have evidence for that claim?
Unless the marriage is outright criminally abusive, in many cases, divorce will not lead to better outcomes.
If the parents have a habit of plate-breaking shouting matches, wouldn’t they do the same with their next partner? But now instead of the parents, you introduce at least two additional step-parents who participate in those matches. And step parents have even less reason to not fight in front of the kids.
I have seen miserable couples divorce, then the parents re-marry, they are happy for a couple of years, and they go to same old. With the additional shuttling of the kid between two homes. And you introduce step siblings, half siblings; reduce the economies of scale and add more mouths to feed, which means less money, too.
Unless you fix the underlying issue, it is quite likely that patterns of behaviour and partner choice will repeat.
@JPNunez,
Is your definition of a loveless but not abusive marriage equivalent to what researchers who study marriage call low-conflict marriages?
Because that category, which makes up 80% of all divorced couples, are indistinguishable from non-divorced couples aside from the fact that they divorce. If you think that children in those families are better off if their parents divorce, you should logically support divorce in every marriage.
Marriages have rough patches and, yes, parents sometimes fight. But the empirical evidence is clear that most couples who divorce are causing unnecessary harm to their children by breaking up their families over temporary problems.
Source?
That might be true. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t taking an evil option because they don’t bother taking the superior one.
(edit: slow posting, not intentional dog-piling)
But if people are indeed trapped in the marriage for the final good of their children, their utility will be even worse, and this may make for an even worse, more violent marriage. Just that the possibility of divorce existing makes for a less oppressive social environment. Think about Sun Tsu on fighting a cornered enemy vs fighting an enemy who can retreat.
Stevenson and Wolfers 2006 found declining numbers of domestic violence, female suicide and intimate murder after unilateral divorce was introduced. Surely a divorced mother will lead to better outcomes than a dead one.
No, not if the people choose to stay in the marriage for the children, that gives the marriage positive utility for them.
@JPNunez,
Again, any instance of domestic violence automatically bumps you up to a high-conflict marriage. If a couple has serious enough problems that the woman is in any danger whatsoever of losing her life, she’s in a subset of a subset of marriages.
We could cut the divorce rate by a factor of five and not even come close to touching these people.
It’s not a 1:1 tradeoff. Are 100,000 divorced mothers better than 5 dead ones? (That’s the actual US murder rate, so they’re probably realistic tradeoff numbers).
I don’t favor making divorce illegal. Or even “completely and totally socially unacceptable in all cases.”
I just feel like on the pendulum between “This is a bad thing always and everyone who does it should feel bad” and “This is just another decision among consenting adults like any other and who are YOU to judge how they choose to live their lives anyway” we’ve probably swung, as a society, too far towards the latter, and I believe a little bit of corrective action is necessary to remind people that divorce is a very bad outcome that people should make a huge amount of effort to avoid (and part of the avoison strategy definitely should be “be more careful about who you marry in the first place”)
Something must be getting lost in translation here, because this seems tautological to the point of meaninglessness. What does it mean, beyond “we don’t know how to distinguish the marriages that will end in divorce from the ones that won’t”?
If reasonable people neither love each other nor hate each other, they should be able to work together–after all, there are lots of non-marital small teams that function without loving each other. There are certainly advantages to being married to someone you love who loves you, but I don’t see why it would be essential in order for a marriage to function.
@DavidFriedman
I think the key question is whether that is a stable equilibrium over long periods of time. Co-habitation is can be hard hard even without the added stresses/pressures involved in a marriage or raising a child. There is a lot of room in between “love each other” and “hate each other” where potentially insurmountable problems can arise. I have a decent roommate, but if we ended up rooming together for the next 20 years due to some obligation I can’t say for sure that it wouldn’t come to blows at some point.
Nabil mentions that 80% of divorces are “low-conflict” marriages at the time of divorce (the number I’ve seen is more like 50-60%, but I’ll grant 80% as it doesn’t change my point much). How would we test whether those marriages were likely to remain low-conflict?
Having it as only two groups (low-conflict vs. high-conflict) doesn’t separate things out enough, IMO, as it seems to group great, good, tolerable, and bad but not terrible marriages all under “low-conflict”. How many of those low-conflict marriages that ended in divorce would have ended up as high-conflict if not for the divorce?
If a marriage is trending towards high-conflict, is an amicable divorce/post divorce relationship better or worse than forcing it until it becomes an intolerable high-conflict marriage, at which point the split is contentious and the post-divorce relationship potentially adversarial?
If you mean cohabitation in the romantic sense, I’m not convinced marriage makes it any harder. The stability that comes from a long term commitment (… yeah, I know) allows for more mutual dependence and cooperation than an arrangement that either party can end at any time. On the other hand, it may also lead to taking the other for granted. Could go either way, but I’d lean towards expecting the enduring economic partnership to make life easier than harder.
Worse (or, rather, false dichotomy). Better is to take responsibility for your life, stop being inconsiderate of each other, and live up to your promises.
It’s silly to assume all trends are linear.
Something no one has mentioned here is that the majority of divorces are of childless couples. So some of the invective here seems misplaced, or at least grossly overstated.
That being said, divorce often has negative consequences for children, and all things being equal, parents who can be civil to each other, even if they do not particularly like each other, have a very strong a priori reason to stay together.
But that being said, I knew plenty of kids from divorced families and they mostly seemed all right. Poverty seems a much more directly bad thing for most kids, and I’m highly skeptical that most of those crusading against divorce have the same attitude to that.
@Randy M
No, I just mean in the “living under one roof” sense. My response was to a line of conversation suggesting that loveless but low-conflict married couples should be able to keep things together, presumably there isn’t a lot of romance in such a marriage (hence, loveless). There doesn’t need to be passionate, romantic style love but if a married couple aren’t at least “friends” with each other I’m not confident that the arrangement would be stable.
If the solution is “everyone should be good people” I agree that would be best, but I’m not sure we should bank on that. If the contention is that every (non-abusive) marriage can be saved, I would suggest that is probably overly optimistic even though the world would certainly be better if it were true.
Depends on the poverty. Kids don’t need two cars, or meals out, or electronics to have a good childhood. But if you are living out of your car, you are a pretty inconsiderate jerk to be conceiving kids.
But marriage does mitigate that kind of poverty by putting two adults into the family prior to children arriving. That’s part of the reason why divorce is bad.
Poverty and divorce each cover a wide range of experiences.
The advice I’d give to people in a marriage “trending towards” high-conflict is very rarely going to be to end it, even if we know some of them will fail. Things worth doing are hard at points.
This is assuming it’s not the case that one person is ceaselessly cruel, or cheating, or a wastrel, etc. But I’m with those who think these people can probably be identified beforehand.
@Jaskologist.
That’s innacurate; the divorce rate is 0.32% and is falling.
That’s 320 divorced mothers per 5 murdered ones as per your comparison.
The point is that in the extreme case, women would get murdered in a marriage they couldn’t escape from, but that doesn’t mean the rest were ok. Chances are there’s a whole spectrum of domestic violence before you get to a generic loveless but amiable marriage, and very little of that violence is justifiable to endure in name of the children, who probably receive part of that too.
Does “leaving” an abusive marriage actually make being murdered less likely?
Anecdote time: I had an extended family member who was married to a violent drug dealer. The threat against this person was always “I’ll kill you if you leave,” and sure enough, there was never no actual attempt against their life… until after they left. Fortunately, the drug dealer was pretty incompetent and their attempt was a pretty big failure, and they’re now in jail for attempted murder. But, in terms of physical safety, my family member was far safer while staying with the person than after leaving them… (Granted, they are ultimately safest now that the person is in jail, but I’m not sure that “I’ll bet when he tries to kill me he doesn’t succeed” isn’t a bet most people would want to take…)
@Matt
This is a fully general argument in favor of giving hostage-takers everything they want, is it not?
E:
And to respond to the thread, as a child of a single parent (the other one died, didn’t leave), I think the problems with divorce aren’t exactly overstated, but that the analysis is a bit misplaced. My problems were related to guilt and resentment, not a shortage of good childrearing. I find I have a lot more in common with other (pretty sensitive, IMO) people who felt unloved by (particularly one of) their parents, divorced or not, than I do with children of single (never married) parents who loved them.
The things that damage kids worst IMO are:
Abuse > the withdrawal of love > instability (in residence, living situation, friends, etc.) > domestic disharmony > mediocre parenting (in terms of teaching, passing down skills, engagement) >>> being raised by a single parent.
By this reckoning, abuse and the withdrawal of love are good reasons for divorce (which introduces instability and domestic disharmony), which seems right to me. If the marriage requires the family to move around every 6 months, divorce may be a benefit for the kid. If the parents are fighting occasionally but still love each other and the kid and aren’t disrupting the home life when they fight, divorce is probably not a benefit to the kid.
I didn’t mean to imply that my anecdote suggests any particular behavior is or isn’t warranted.
My question is genuine. I wonder about, in terms of “risk of murder”, whether “staying with an abusive spouse” or “attempting to leave an abusive spouse” is more risky. My general impression is that many abusive spouses do not respond to being left with a shrug and an “OK, I guess that’s the end of that!”
The decision to get a divorce has substantial externalities, especially when kids are involved. We’d like prospective divorcees to take this into account, while still leaving the really horrible marriages where they’re getting beaten up or something.
Enkidum:
Yeah, in terms of harm-reduction and externalities, divorces where small kids are involved are much, much worse than divorces where either there are no kids or the kids are grown. A 19-year-old whose parents have just divorced is likely going to find the whole thing very upsetting, but probably won’t have his life turned upside down; a 9-year-old in the same situation will have his whole world shaken up in upsetting and scary ways.
In terms of rules that lead to happy lives for most people, my guess is that there’d be more total well-being even among the childless adults if marriage was taken a lot more seriously, and if divorce was seen as a huge terrible step you only take if there are no other options. (You need both of those, because a really good way to end up getting a divorce is to get married on the spur of the moment. Marry in haste, repent at leisure.) But I don’t really know that for sure.
One moral problem here is that both broken homes and miserable broken marriages are really bad things that we should want less of.
Even assuming that’s right, which I’m not certain of, being raised by a single parent materially increases the chances of everything else on the list: partly because single parents have less bandwidth for showing love, passing down skills, and negotiating resentment of parents or disharmony between siblings, partly because they have fewer resources to provide stability, and partly because, WRT abuse, there really is something to the evil stepparent trope.
BBA:
I’d say divorce was once so hard to get/socially frowned upon that too few people got them–people stayed in horrible marriages “for the children” or to stay respectable, and much human suffering resulted.
Then, the pendulum swung. Divorce became very easy to get, and much less socially frowned upon. And the people in the horrible marriages mostly got out, but then so did a lot of people whp weren’t in horrible marriages, but were merely going through a hard period in their marriage, or got bored, or got involved with someone at work and decided to change partners, or whatever. And that did a lot of collateral damage to kids who were caught in the middle of that, as well as to people who got divorced and probably shouldn’t have done so, and to the broader society that got less stable families as a result.
The pendulum seems to be swinging back the other way now, and that seems reasonable to me. While I don’t think all divorces are evil, I think divorce imposes a lot of externalities on others, especially on any kids involved, and I’d like to see it become more of a last resort than it is.
Wasn’t there some mainstream/left magazine a few months back that decided to do a cover profile on the “average young white male”, and received so much pushback that they basically issued a public apology for daring to do such a reactionary thing?
I think HBC was referring to conversations on this site specifically, given that he was referring to the leanings of SSC commenters in the rest of his post.
Correct.
I thought somebody did a comparison using post data (not survey data) to show that the commentariat leans left while the survey data shows the readership is much more left. That is, the commentariat is further right than the readership, but not overall right.
Any thread about Trump.
I was at the Paris Air Show saturday. While it’s billed at the biggest Air Show in the world (in terms of attendance), it’s really more of an international trade show with a side of activities for the general public, so it didn’t feel as nice and welcoming as some smaller air shows I’ve been to.
On the other hand, it was kind of touching to see military vehicles and personel from NATO countries, Japan, Russia, China, Turkey and Pakistan all standing peacefully and happily side by side.
It also turns out there are a lot more already-underway projects of various pan-european developed weapons and vehicles than I thought. The idea of an european army may still have a long road of bureaucratic redtape to overcome before becoming a legal entity, but in terms of private-public international R&D, it looks like it’s already a reality.
There’s been a lot of international R&D since the 70s. The cost of doing the work had gotten too high for most countries to pay for. But the big advantage in forming a European Army is going to be NATO standards. The problem with international R&D is that it’s horribly inconsistent. For one system, Germany and the UK team up, while France builds its own system and Italy buys American. For another, It’s an Anglo-French project and a German-Italian-Spanish project. You very rarely see everyone in Europe in the same program. It’s a lot easier to build a logistics train with two or three systems than with five, but it’s not trivial.
It’s been that way very much since its inception.
In 1934 Beverly Shenstone, one of the Spitfire’s designers, attended the Paris Airshow, where he marveled at the Heinkel 70’s wing – metal construction but with a surface so smooth it might have been wood (standard practice for metal aircraft construction at the time was the use of domed pop-rivets).
After the airshow he wrote to Heinkel and asked how it was done. And he got a very nice letter back from Ernst Heinkel explaining how they countersunk the rivets into the skin and carefully filled them before painting. Shenstone decided that if the Germans could do it then with a little more effort so too could the British, leading to the Spitfire’s flush-riveted duralumin wing.
IIRC, some were still domed, because that was cheaper.
They determined where to use countersunk and where to use domed using the all-countersunk prototype and a large number of split peas, to simulate domed rivets.
Lentils, I think, but yes. Where they didn’t impact aerodynamics they could use cheaper, quicker and easier domed rivets.
I wish I’d known you were there! We could have gotten together. We’ll have to have a shout out at for Farnborough next year.