1. Josh H and the team at bubble.is have converted the list of SSC-community-approved psychiatrists and therapists around the world to Web 2.0. You can now sort by what you’re looking for, and automatically add names to the list instead of going through me. Go to psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com to check it out, and let me know if you find any bugs. You will have to register to add people to the list; there’s a link in the corner. Any names added in the past few weeks might have gotten lost in the transition, please register and add them back in, sorry.
2. Some old sidebar ads are back up, including for psychiatrist Laura Baur and programming coach James Koppel.
3. Comment of the week is the subreddit thread on Disease Causation And Biomedical Science.
4. Thanks to everyone who answered the survey at the bottom of If Kim Jong-un Opened A KFC, Would You Eat There?. Of 2,130 respondents, 27% believed retired dictators should be put on trial, 31% that they should get immunity to encourage other dictators to retire, and 42% weren’t sure. On the question of whether hypothetical-vegetarian-them would buy fake meat at a KFC, 8% would preferentially buy from KFC to encourage further change, 4% would avoid KFC to punish past misdeeds, 83% would just buy from whoever had the better product, and 4% didn’t know. These numbers didn’t change much based on vegetarianism status or right-left political position. You can get raw data here.
Please fill in the blank.
A jetpack.
That said though, aren’t multiple companies working on flying cars right this very moment ?
PAL-V is working on certification. They claim it will be done this year. First luxury models are priced at €500k, with €300k for the later models with less luxury.
The picture looks like an oddly-shaped helicopter, not really a car. Before car there’s a set of insurmountable at the moment obstacles – it needs to be able to manoeuvrer in tight traffic, maybe even between buildings – which would probably necessitate some kind of exhaust-less technology (I’m not sure how propellers really affect air flow around them, but I don’t think you can pack them tightly either) as well as general agility.
There’s also a question of maintenance, since broken car just usually stops, but broken flier falls and kills everyone, but that can be solved with automation.
I’m sure it’s fun to deal with two separate regulatory agencies, both of which expect full compliance with their relevant bodies of regulations, one for aircraft and one for automobiles.
Forgive me if I’m being obtuse but, uh, how?
I meant that maintenance question can conceivably be solved with advancement in automation – that is, a robot can be invented to maintain your flying car without need to have a dedicated staff, like with modern aircrafts – so it would be accessible to random civilian. While propulsion question can’t be solved without invention of anti-gravity or similar sci-fi technology.
Maintenance isn’t the major driver behind the cost of aviation by any means. John Schilling can provide numbers for light aircraft, but for airlines, I think maintenance is beaten by both airframes and fuel in terms of costs. And it’s not the main driver of crashes, either, although some of that is how hard we work to keep planes airworthy.
If I could run my airplane on automotive gasoline, then maintenance, amortization of airframe/avionics cost, and fuel, would each come to about a nicely-balanced $30/hour each. But that’s only safe and/or legal if the automotive gasoline doesn’t contain ethanol, so thanks to the corn lobby it’s about $30/$30/$50 per flight hour and fuel is the main cost.
In no case is reduced maintenance cost going to be transformative in transportation economics. It’s a marginal nice-to-have, but even absolutely free and perfect maintenance-bots aren’t going to get you a factor of two cost reduction.
Cheap maintenance-bots, cheap airplane-building robots, and cheap oil-drilling-and-refining bots, and then you’d transform the industry and fill the skies with “flying cars”
Why is ethanol not allowed in Avgas? Is the TEL content a related thing?
A cursory google came up with nothing.
I’m guessing either:
high performance of the engines requiring better fuel than for automotive applications
environmental conditions (temperatures, pressures)
engine failure is more of a problem in the sky than on the road
Ethanol is corrosive to materials frequently used in aircraft fuel systems – including to some extent aluminum, and good luck finding an airplane whose metal parts aren’t primarily aluminum. Seals and gaskets are also an issue, as is the adhesive used to hold my particular airplane’s basic structure together. One could design an ethanol-tolerant aircraft, but there would probably be a significant weight penalty and there would definitely be a significant up-front cost penalty for the required testing. Since nobody envisioned ubiquitous ethanol in gasoline when most modern aircraft were being designed, nobody did that.
Cars are made mostly of steel, and society is more tolerant of telling people “if your ten-year old car craps out and dies because some little seal couldn’t handle our mandatory new Green Fuels(tm), that’s your problem”. Ten-year-old airplanes aren’t even halfway through their useful life, and if they crap out and die it can be a problem for everyone in the city they are flying over.
Cheap and fast global travel.
What is your reference point here?
Because I definitely feel like global travel is relatively cheaper and faster than it was in, say, 1960?
Fast = Mach 10, putting any airport on Earth within a couple hours of the one you take off from, combined with no security theater forcing you to arrive 90+ minutes before departure.
Swimming cars.
High speed rail.
Desktop computer displays with a 3:2 aspect ratio.
Molten salt reactor powered international freighter ships.
O’Neill cylinders.
A bridge from Alaska to Kamchatka. // A road from Panama to Colombia. // A tunnel from Japan to Korea.
An international basic income of $5 per day.
Tunnelling cars.
The Darien Gap continues to surprise me. I mean sure the terrain is difficult, but come on, if you can build roads through the rest of Panama, you can go a few hundred miles south.
It seems the obstacles are political not technical.
In case anyone else was wondering, there are 7.7 billion people in the world, so a global basic income of $5/day would cost $14 trillion pa. Gross world product is $88 trillion, so it would cost the equivalent of 16% of all output to provide the basic income, before admin costs.
People keep making this mistake – you can’t simply multiply the number of people receiving a basic income by the value to get the cost. The people paying for the basic income are also receiving it. If I take my wallet out of my trousers pocket and put it in my coat pocket, it’s not costing me $100 to do so like it would if I put it in your coat pocket. The real cost of a basic income depends on who is paying for it.
Arguably it doesn’t even make sense to talk about the “cost” of a transfer payment in the same way you’d talk about the cost of a bridge or a jet fighter. Building a bridge actually consumes materials and labor, you can talk about the fraction of world output that went into it. The basic income consumes nothing, the money for the basic income goes on to be spent on something else. You have to choose between guns and butter, but you can have a basic income and butter at the same time.
It seems like the cost of the transfer program is:
a. The cost of the administration of the program (figuring out who’s eligible, mailing checks, dealing with identity fraud/list IDs, etc.)
b. The losses associated with collecting the extra taxes for the program–IRS agents, tax attorneys constructing schemes to dodge the taxes, people working less because their marginal tax rate is too high, etc.
Yeah, for sure. It’s worth noting that the last one “people working less because their marginal tax rate is too high” isn’t pure cost, though. You can’t just add up all the foregone wages, because people are taking more leisure or working more gratifying jobs or whatever. It’s inefficient but far from being a total loss.
@albatross11
“a. The cost of the administration of the program (figuring out who’s eligible, mailing checks, dealing with identity fraud/list IDs, etc.)”
I thought half the point of making it universal is that you don’t have to have the admin overhead, because everyone gets it regardless of how much they make.
I thought half the point of making it universal is that you don’t have to have the admin overhead, because everyone gets it regardless of how much they make.
Fraud control will definitely be part of it, because there will always be someone who thinks that, if getting one payment of €X is good, then getting two, three or more is even better – so they sign on at different SW offices, fake identities, claim for being their own Cousin George etc.
And then there are some people who just do the dog on it altogether.
One notes that as a side-effect, a universal income will give the government MUCH better data on where everyone lives.
Yeah, I didn’t check the numbers on this at all before I wrote it down on the fly I was just trying to generate discussion. But lets see what I can do.
First lets exclude everyone pre-puberty and down, that’s about 20% of the global population. Next how about bringing that daily amount down to something more reasonable, say US$3 per day.
I get: $6.7 trillion or 7.6% of global GDP.
3 * 365 * (0.8 * 7.7 * (10^9)) = 6.7452e+12
The global median wage is currently about $50 per day. A lot of people (maybe a billion) are not even going to notice $3 a day so they may not even collect it. Finally, the stimulatory effects of such a major transfer of wealth to the world’s poorest, who will be spending every penny almost as soon as they get it, will be huge.
“Swimming cars” already exist… ever been on a “duckboat” tour? It just turns out that the use cases for amphibious vehicles are so incredibly narrow that it’s not really practical for anyone to bother to own one.
Same thing with high speed rail, really. It already exists in nearly all of the places where it is practical for it to exist.
And like flying cars, the ones that actually come off the drawing board turn out to have gnarly handling characteristics that make them mediocre at both. Better stability as a boat makes it a worse car (adding reserve buoyancy with a low enough center of buoyancy is tough without making it wider and more difficult to handle), and vice versa. But if you’re OK with the tradeoffs, you can purchase some pretty nice ones right now.
We were considering some off-the-shelf solutions for an amphibious vehicle at work; there were a lot of promises in their brochures and plenty of smiles and nods from sales people, but once we hired a naval architect and asked them to get information from these companies to independently evaluate them for our purposes, all but one vendor disappeared, and the model they had was overwide on the road. Of course, we required some pretty good cargo capacity that you wouldn’t need for, say, an RV but nothing that wouldn’t be easily handled in a regular width truck. There are just some real opposing design considerations.
I wonder whether you can do the F117/quadcopter solution of making a vehicle that’s impossible for a human to handle, then giving it clever fly-by-wire.
Put some control surfaces on the bottom, or give a jetboat little reaction thrusters on the sides.
That’s not going to go over well with the naval architecture people. They’re not big on vessels that need active systems to be safely stable. Airplanes are a bit different because the failure mode of things going badly wrong is the plane coming down to earth, so the added risk from the fly-by-wire is seen as manageable. If things go wrong on a ship, it should in theory be able to float.
As someone with a foot in each camp, some of this is cultural. But some of it isn’t. If the flight controls break, then the plane crashes with or without FBW. A ship that requires stabilizers adds a big chunk of extra risk that it normally wouldn’t have.
That isn’t to say that active stabilizer systems aren’t used on ships. They are. But they’re used to reduce rolling for improved comfort/fire control, not for making the ship seaworthy. The British designed several classes of small AA escorts with them during WWII, but a lot of those ships were never fitted because they were too expensive/hard to keep going/didn’t work well enough. Modern cruise ships also use them, IIRC. But in both cases, the ship should be totally safe if the system goes down.
@bean, I think Lambert’s point was more that the clever fly-by-wire systems would be for being able to maneuver the boat well — not that it’d be necessary to keep it afloat. But, given that I have no expertise in this perhaps a boat you can’t control in the face of waves etc. is the same as a boat that can’t float.
I don’t think that’s what he’s suggesting, for several reasons. First, the fly-by-wire on the F-16 (and most other modern fighters, but that’s still the most famous one) is pretty much required to keep the airplane in the air. (More or less. It’s possible to fly an unstable airplane by hand, and most planes before the 20s were actually unstable. Nobody is quite sure why this changed.) The instability is built in to improve maneuverability.
Second, that’s not really how boats work. The design driver in this case isn’t maneuverability. It’s roll stability. Yes, you could in theory capsize by making a too-aggressive turn with a marginally stable craft. I’m sure loads of recreational boaters have done so, and a stability system might help if that is really a design case. But the design case is more likely to be, say, high waves and winds from a bad storm, possibly combined with some flooding. And that’s precisely the time you don’t want to have to rely on an active stabilizer.
@bean: That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
The Aquada was the one I was thinking of when I wrote that. A sports car that can convert to a speed boat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_Aquada
High speed rail could do a lot better still I reckon. There are huge variations in cost per kilometre between countries for unknown reasons.
LBJ had one of those. He liked to prank passengers by pretending the brakes failed and “accidentally” driving into the water.
> A bridge from Alaska to Kamchatka.
Won’t happen. As far as I could tell from the internet, there is not even an underseas telephone cable across the Bering strait, despite that people wanted one for more than a century. The difficulty isn’t the seventy kilometers through the strait, but all the land around it, which has a very low population density and too few infrastructure. Going from Kamchatka isn’t much better. It does look ridiculous that it’s cheaper to lay the cables the long way through the pacific, starting from Japan, but it’s true.
Yeah, a lot of my answers weren’t serious, a bridge from Alaska to Kamchatka was one of the not serious ones. It was just meant to evoke some of the other crazy engineering project dreams of the past that would never work in practice due to the economics of the problems they were supposedly trying to solve.
I second the molten salt reactor freight vessels. Can we collaborate on that?
Cheap and fast delivery, including last mile. And I mean cheap, like $1. I’m pretty sure it would revolutionize a lot of business models.
Does it cost $1 even now? Today’s national average gas price according to AAA is $2.72. Assuming 30 mpg on the car, the pickup location must be no further away than 11 miles if the car is running at optimum mpg the entire time, which is nearly impossible due to traffic and the act of needing to start/stop at the beginning and end of the trip at the least.
Of course, gas is much more expensive than that in swaths of the nation. And that doesn’t even get into labor hour compensation.
Economies of scale – you almost never drive 11 miles for just one package. In densely populated areas you can get away with 1 mile or less… actually, I have access to real data. For a small courier company, not high-scale, not optimized, last mile routes for today looked something like this:
19 stops – 26 km
23 stops – 41 km
25 stops – 21 km
13 stops – 38 km
You lose the “fast” part of that with every stop, which only increases the labor hours expenses.
The US post office is like the only employer allowed to screen candidates with an IQ test equivalent, and yet they only perform as well as they do. Like with charter schools, it seems like the ability to improve performance is to filter for higher quality employees, which makes “cheap” untenable real fast.
(I was thinking more about food deliveries, like DoorDash, and those would not work well with that many stops, either.)
I know a company working on it. If you have the skills, those teams are hiring… 😉
I’m selling a courier business SaaS, so I’m doing my (small, non startupy) part. There’s quite a lot of room for improvement even at such low-hanging-fruit level.
But the full solution is probably going to need some form of hardware as well.
probably going to need some form of hardware as well.
Some of that hardware will probably look like:
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/transportation/meet-scout
Huh. They tackle the last mile, but not the last twenty feet.
but not the last twenty feet
To be fair, the USPS is retreating from the last-twenty-feet service as well.
They push back hard against adding front-door delivery to their routes for new construction, and are also pushing back on one-delivery-point-per-address, and instead push really hard on neighborhood delivery Cluster Boxes instead.
I think NDCBUs and CBUs are now mandatory for new construction in many areas in the US.
Huh, is that right? TIL.
Among my parents and siblings, there is an inverse relationship between how new the house is and how bad the mail service is.
And also a positive relationship between how new the house is and how nice/expensive it is.
So my sister with the nicest house of all of us has to drive to pick up her mail. My parents modest little house built in the 1950s gets mail dropped through a slot right into their foyer.
I just bought a newly constructed house, and I have to walk the equivalent of like two city blocks to reach my “mailbox.”
Fortunately, nothing actually goes in the mailbox but unsolicited junk. Actual packages (the only things I care to actually receive) are still placed at the doorstep.
I have a mailbox, but UPS refuses to drop the damn packages at my door because they think they’ll be stolen. Probably for the best, since I don’t actually want things stolen. So I just get those delivered at work.
Nick,
I believe there’s a process by which you can sign a waiver that basically says “I authorize you to leave packages here, and promise not to hold you responsible if they are stolen.”
But, as you say, that might not be the preferable option…
A pil that tricks my brain into craving broccoli instead of sugar and carbs.
Work-from-home 60-80% of the time as a cultural norm.
What would it take to actually drive this kind of cultural shift?
The ability to actually do most jobs from home 60–80% of the time without a major loss in efficiency.
@10240,
So the majority of the populace would be authors?
I’m imagining artificial intelligence being created just to provide an audience!
In trying to think of typical jobs – auto mechanic, cop, air conditioning repair, carpenter, electrician, welder, nurse, teacher, butcher, baker, candlestick maker – a few could be “down from home” by sleeping at work (cops bunking at police stations, et cetera), otherwise?
Consider all the paper shufflers you were recently complaining about. If the paper is all virtual, they can shuffle it from home.
Similarly for more productive people whose work is not directly interacting with physical objects–lawyers, professors, executives, … .
I think a lot of people here have jobs where this could be feasible already. For example, I’m pretty sure in my (engineering job) if I were to be in the office just 2 days per week that would provide enough in-person collaboration and the other days I could keep up via email/Skype/Slack.
To clarify what you’re saying, do you think the cultural norms won’t shift until this is an option for the majority of workers (not just a subset of white collar professions as @Plumber points out)?
Does it matter what the majority do, and who says the majority already don’t? For instance, “on site” employees often have to work weekends and holidays. They are often forced to pick up shifts to cover someone else’s FMLA or PTO. No one expects salaried staff to do the same unless there is a dire need or a deadline.
I can think of three major problems:
1. Technology. Remote VPN systems are straight-up not as fast as just being on the company network. At least this is in my experience with all VPNs, which makes analyzing large data sets absolutely impossible.
2. A lot of people are just lazy and won’t accomplish anything from home.
3. Cultural norms: people just think you should be in the office.
Some firms are moving towards the WFH direction, but others are really stuck on the “Everyone at work, all the time” mindset.
An ultralight Mach 0.6 tilt-rotor with autopilot.
an effective treatment for aging?
Especially including one for dementia.
For what it’s worth, there are a lot of folks over at apoe4.info that have had excellent experience in regaining their cognitive health using pointers from e.g. the book The End of Alzheimer’s (David Friedman recommended it a couple of threads ago) – so the dementia part may actually be a solved problem, just with the knowledge not being particularly widespread yet.
We’re working on it.. it’s just a long long hard slog.
a new drug, one that won’t make me sick
Ghost! Busters!
At first I was like “replicators!” but then I realized that 3d printers are kinda like replicators, but they’re not the sort of replicator I was thinking of. I was thinking of food replicators. Food replicators with algae as the main nutritional component sounds awesome.
3D printers aren’t very good replicators. They’re finicky about what shapes and materials they can handle.
Helicopters that can be driven on roads for efficiency. Failing that, “Mr. Fusion” powered hoverable Delorians. Complete with time machine. Failing that…. no, you know what, forget it, I want my flying cars.
Instant teleportation would be an almost acceptable alternative.
Painkillers with no harmful side-effects.
That would be pretty damned handy just now, in the midst of an opiod addiction epidemic in the US whose reaction seems doomed to leave a lot of chronic pain patients in untreated pain.
Or a sleeping pill that’s not rumored to kill you from meteor strike.
An eight-hour work week.
A 10km tall pyramid.
Only 10?
It seems like a nice number that isn’t a piddly 1km. Also, I want it somewhere like Alaska, Canada, or Siberia; just a giant bleeping blooping techno-pyramid in the middle of a snow swept forest being totally uneconomical and awe inspiring in the middle of nowhere.
“Remember me !”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYURxfaTdpY
Good family structure.
Has there ever been a foreign-language TV program that achieved mainstream popularity in the anglosphere? Off hand, I can’t think of one.
Occasionally, a foreign-language movie will get noticed. I would guess La Femme Nikita was a big enough hit that some people who aren’t foreign-film fans went to see it. There are also niche fandoms of foreign artforms, such as anime, where people routinely watch foreign-language material, sometimes subtitled and sometimes with local voice tracks. But films aren’t TV shows and niche fandoms aren’t mainstream popularity.
The Bridge was very popular in Britain – more so than its English language remake. Don’t know about the rest of the Anglosphere.
Agreed, there’ve been a number of Scandinavian TV shows that were popular middle-class viewing in the UK (and then got remade). Wallander and The Killing also.
There’s a regular slot on BBC4 at 9 on a Saturday (?) that features foreign-language detective dramas. The Italian Inspector Montalbano seems to be the most popular of these in the UK (mainly older middle-class audience as you say).
While not really “foreign”, i can think of 2 rather popular movies/shows that involved a lot of foreign languages, Narcos and Inglorious Basterds
Are you counting Spanish as a foreign language in the US? Because if you are the obvious answer is Sabado Gigante, not to mention and endless stream of mostly terrible telenovelas.
Spanish counts as foreign, yes. I guess the question is whether any of those Spanish-language shows are big enough hits in the US market as a whole to count as mainstream.
Sabado Gigante seems to have gotten better ratings than the average English language show that aired in its Saturday night time slot, but it is a terrible time slot which probably heavily favored shows that appealed to working class Hispanic viewers.
It aired for thirty years on Univision, the more successful of the two major US Spanish language broadcast networks; which from the numbers I looked up online seems to be the tenth rated network over all in the US (out of a bit less than a hundred counting both broadcast and the most common cable channels). Compared to the five major English language over-the-air TV networks Univision comes between numbers four and five, so we can roughly say that Spanish language TV get’s ratings equivalent to middling rated English programming.
That sounds mainstream but it isn’t almost by definition, on account of the fact that it appeals almost exclusively to a minority demographic who I’m not sure could be counted a part of the anglosphere (though most of them are bilingual). In a big deserve country like the United States it’s kind of hard to define what counts as mainstream.
I mean, there’s plenty of animes that have had mainstream success in the west, but generally the most popular ones (Pokémon, Dragonball, etc) have been experienced mostly with English dubbing.
Good catch. Pokemon definitely counts.
Just to add to this, the “with English dubbing” caveat is pretty meaningless considering that many [language]-spheres likewise mostly experience English-language programming with dubbing.
Would Iron Chef count?
Netflix has a list of their own most popular here.
Also, probably more popular than any of them is Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, though that’s sort of cheating as it’s a reality show and only Kondo doesn’t speak English (at least, not on the show).
For movies, IMDB has a list of top-grossing foreign language movies. I am somewhat surprised not to find the Millennium trilogy (“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” et seq) on it; it appears the first movie just missed at a US gross of $10,095,170.
The Israeli precursor to Homeland called “Prisoners of War” might count, especially since the same guy went on to create Homeland directly as an American remake.
Also, Masha and the Bear (children’s cartoon, Russian).
There was a thought experiment I was thinking for a while but can’t really decide. Tangentially related to Fermi Paradox.
Let’s say we pluck a pre-industrial person, say, a medieval peasant, of normal education and intelligence, maybe illiterate to limit possible clues, from the past and drop them onto an island somewhere. Nobody is allowed to come close enough to it to be identified as humans, but trash can sometimes be washed ashore, planes might fly overhead, ships and even city lights might be seen in a distance.
How hard would it be for them – who never seen electric lights, combustion engine or plastic, to deduce that there are other humans outside the island and not just freak atmospheric events, northern lights and unusually solid jellyfishes?
In line with the trend of downgrading rationality, I’d say in the overwhelming majority of cases the decision will not be rationally sound – whether it’s the correct one or not. He will assume the cause of this events is other humans because he’s used to live in a place where humans do stuff. I mean, anthropomorphism goes as far as saying a man-like figure is creating thunder.
That’s excluding trash. If you include trash, it’s easy mode – artificial objects are obvious. First screw bottle cap will be a dead giveaway.
Ships and (illuminated) cities have been well within human general knowledge for thousands of years. According to
http://www.historyoflighting.net/electric-lighting-history/history-of-street-lighting/
public street lighting has been around as early as 500 BC in China.
Even if the person is illiterate or can’t read the specific languages of the trash that’s washing ashore, many packaging materials show pictures or pictographs of human beings, or of everyday objects that our peasant already knows about because they’ve already existed for so long. Also, once our peasant has seen enough airplanes to know they’re nothing special in the grand scheme of things (certainly no more special than being plucked out of your life by some mysterious force), and he observes that they are all similar-shaped, rigid constructs, he must assume someone has made them, a ship in the sky basically.
There is an island full of pre-industrial people – although hunter-gatherer, not medieval: the Sentinelese people, an (almost) uncontacted tribe living on an island near South Asia. We don’t know what they think about the planes that fly above the island, but they attack helicopters with arrows.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/11/30/everything-we-know-about-the-isolated-sentinelese-people-of-north-sentinel-island
And they use the metal scraps that reach the island for their weapons and tools:
The Sentinelese are well aware of the presence of other humans. Outsiders sometimes show up in boats and get close enough to be clearly seen (and sometimes stabbed). I wouldn’t be surprised if the helicopters got close enough for the Sentinelese to see the pilots.
The human tendency to anthropomorphism is incredibly strong, throughout history people have attributed the forces of nature to supernatural beings that were more often than not conceived as being very much like incredibly powerful and long lived humans.
Even believers in religions like Christianity, who’s theologians went to great lengths to emphasis that their god was nothing like that, could not help but represent their deity in very human forms. The extent to which your hypothetical islander would understand that the beings that created the wonders he observed from a distance were human would depend a great deal on his cultural background. He might understand them as created by gods, or angels, or strange foreign people who had mastered particularly powerful magic. The last possibility would be pretty much the truth.
What ever he thought I doubt he would believe in impersonal natural forces, the concept just wasn’t common among primitive peoples.
Thank you for your replies. I see problems with my setup as is.
Garbage with pictures of humans would be indeed cheating. I have my doubts about cities, because I don’t think skyline of modern megapolis would necessary indicate “city” to someone who only ever seen a castle tower if anything tall at all.
I would also would like to point out to hyperboloid that question would be about humans, but anthropomorphising natural forces tend to produce concept of “gods”.
What do people think of the idea of a virus causing rising obesity in recent decades?
It’s a fascinating hypothesis … so much hand-wringing and moralizing over this obesity thing, and turns out it’s a virus? I never heard about it before, worth keeping track of…
It’s comes off as a bit desperate, like a lot of the fringe hypotheses on why obesity is such a problem today.
People today eat a lot of food, and that food is generally very calorically dense. I don’t think that it should surprise anyone that Americans are obese when the average American eats 3,600 calories of food a day. That doesn’t require an exotic explanation: if you maintain a huge caloric surplus every day for years, a lot of that is going to be stored as fat.
This adenovirus is certainly interesting, but I’m fairly sure that it isn’t forcing people to pound down plate after plate of pasta and follow it up with a pint of ice cream. You really can’t get around the fact that people in the developed world eat like they’re trying to climb Mount Everest when they’re almost completely sedentary.
I agree the virus hypothesis comes off a bit desperate, but conversely I don’t think your depiction of diets is fair. There are tons of people who are continuously on diets and never manage to lose more than a few of their excess pounds, despite the distress their weight causes them. And while Americans are pretty sedentary, I don’t think that is true in general of Europeans and Asians, but their obesity rates have been rising steadily as well.
You’re (as far as I can tell) arguing on different levels.
The reason obesity is an epidemic is because people, on average, eat too much and of the wrong sorts of things. This is the bird’s eye statistical view, and it is completely compatible with specific individuals not being able to lose weight despite a healthy diet (hypothyroidism, virus, whatever).
I am sure if the virus hypothesis turns out to be true and treatment is developed it will be a life-changer for certain people. I’m equally sure it won’t completely eradicate first-world obesity as long as the high-caloric-load-plus-sedentary-lifestyle remains unchanged.
Also, reading the abstract of the paper, the authors sound a good deal more sanguine about this being some sort of “silver bullet” than I inferred from your comments? Maybe my fault for reading too much in.
From what I have seen, it looks like the vast majority of females between the ages of 15 and 70 (and a lesser but significant proportion of males between the ages of 30 and 70) are on some kind of diet a large fraction of the time due to excess weight, as they (correctly) see that their weight forms a large part of how much general respect, not to mention sexual attention, society gives them. That is way more people than can be explained by hypothyroidism or this virus (I suppose there could be other viruses involved too).
As for diet: speaking of my own experience, as a teenager and young adult male I ate vastly more than I do now, which is more than the females I know. Yet I was thin then (seeming incapable of gaining weight even if I tried), now I have a healthy weight, and those females tend to be a bit overweight. This experience is anecdotal, but I think it rings true to many people, and what it shows is an *inverse* relationship between food consumption and weight. How is that possible? For one thing, not all calories that enter the body are absorbed by the body; some go out the other end…
I am happy to have treatment/prevention for this virus as one tool in fighting obesity. But the studies quoted show only ~30% of obese people have the virus; what about the other 70%?
I ate a lot as a teenager and young adult, but I was very very active.
One problem is that people move from active to sedentary lifestyles without adjusting their caloric intake.
@eric23
Some explanations for the “how is that possible?” question:
1. How many of those women have had children? This can lead to permanent body fat that you can’t get rid of.
2. How many of those women are on hormonal birth control? I’d venture that the answer is “most of them”, particularly since it’s used for other purposes, such as treating acne and bringing severe period symptoms under control. Hormonal BC is notorious for having weight gain and increased appetite as a side effect.
3. The female body tends to store fat in different places than the male body, on average. It’s much easier to notice that a woman is 20%-30% overweight if she gains the weight on her arms, hips, butt, etc. Compare that to a man with excess body fat on his stomach, which can easily be covered up by layers of clothing.
4. This is just anecdotal, but the women I’ve known haven’t had a particularly healthy mindset when it comes to dieting. They tend to focus on fad diets and obsess over not seeing instant results, rather than increasing exercise or focusing on lifestyle changes. This is a great way to make yourself miserable while ensuring that your weight loss doesn’t stick.
5. Related to 4: common advice says “2000 calories per day to maintain, 1200-1500 calories per day to lose”. Maybe that works for a man of average height, but a woman of average height should eat significantly fewer calories than that. I am on the short side of average and was eating 1000-1100 calories to lose weight or 1350 calories to maintain it back when I was dieting.
6. I don’t understand all the science behind it, but it’s pretty common for men to lose 10-15 pounds quickly while women have to continuously work at it. The aforementioned diet took me a year to lose 25 pounds. Meanwhile, my father can lose 20 pounds over the course of about two months if he just skips a meal, foregoes dessert at his other meals, and exercises a bit each day.
Epistological status: a woman who has dieted and obsessed over weight in the past, but not a nutritionist by any stretch of the imagination.
(Apologies if this posts twice. It mysteriously vanished the first time.)
As jasmith79 said, it’s easy to get into the weeds of why a given individual has difficulty losing weight. But on the population level the answer is pretty clearly overeating.
The human body doesn’t violate thermodynamics. If a person consumes 3,600 calories a day and burns less than 3,600 calories a day, then that difference has to be accounted for. That excess energy is mostly being stored in the form of fat, which matches our observation that as American diets have gotten bigger so have our bodies.
Now there are good questions related to why we’re eating so much. There’s a lot of good work being done on metabolic programming and satiety which might explain why we overeat. But that shouldn’t distract us from the fact that we’re overeating.
It’s notable that pets are also having an epidemic of obesity–that’s consistent with very available high-density foods, more sedentary lifestyles (for dogs–cats don’t care whether you like to go jogging in the morning), and pathogens (if the pathogens can transmit to dogs and cats).
Cats tend to be pretty sedentary when they can get away with it, istm. Dogs less so, but I suspect that dogs are getting kept indoors much more often than in the past.
To add some anecdata about diets, I’ve known a lot of people who have dieted a lot over the years, and all of them have continuously eaten too much, even while dieting. As I’ve begun to figure out what it means to eat fewer calories than I expend, I continue to be surprised at just how easy it is to WAY overeat.
It takes a whole day of paying attention to eat just a few hundred calories less than breakeven, but its possible to then go over by a few hundred calories with a 20 minute trip to fast food place, or a big soda. The work of a day (or two!) can be undone in minutes. Obviously you know when you’re failing at dieting by eating a whole extra meal or a giant soda, but it’s really easy to just have a little bit of this or a little bit of that over the course of the day and eat an extra 500 calories.
And this isn’t to say that people are being obtuse, there are just a lot of incredibly calorie dense foods available (especially in the U.S.) and it’s not always intuitive how many calories are in something. You can pick up some little dessert that’s low sugar and low fat and it only has 100 calories, and then you pick up a “healthy” snack of vegetables and some kind of dip and the dip has 75 calories per tablespoon, and a hungry person is going to eat 3 or 4 tablespoons.
Put aside the fact that perhaps we should know the dip isn’t low calorie, and it’s easy to see how even someone thinking they are making good decisions could have several hundred extra calories in the course of a day.
All this to say, I think we are, in general, spectacularly bad at assessing how many calories we actually eat, and modern food processing doesn’t make it any easier on us.
These conversations continue to be darkly funny verging on depressing to me, because I have the exact opposite problem: I can’t get enough calories in the day to gain any weight.
@Nick:
I would hope the existence of people like you would allow people to consider that the issue has deep complexity.
@nick GOMAD (Gallon-Of-Milk-A-Day). That combined with heavy protein intake and a heavy squat routine will but weight on anybody. It’s not going to be fun, but eating for a specific purpose other than pleasure never is.
@HeelBearCub
Sure. As far as the complexity, some of it is my weirdness, but some of it is also that folks are imprecise in these discussions, I think. Like, @ksdale says a little fast food or a big soda is enough to push someone over for multiple days! But last time I brought up that I eat fast food regularly and can hardly ever find a meal of more than a few hundred calories, I was corrected (rightly or not?) that it’s sit-down restaurants that have the big 1500 calorie entrees. Likewise the processed crap everyone always complains about: I went to the store and looked at a bunch of microwaveable and TV dinners and the like, and they ranged like 200 (!) to 400 calories.
If you want ready-prepared food that’s deliberately optimised for calorie-density, go to a camping shop. It’s not too cheap, and you’ll have to find the ones that taste good.
@Nick: Seconding GOMAD — have you ever tried it?
@j1000000
No, milk doesn’t sit well with me.
????
Chipotle: 1,000+ calories, easy
Panera (steak panini, broccoli cheddar, bread): 840 calories
Big Mac+Fries: 800+ calories
Apparently some people just don’t eat a lot, but most days I can walk into chipotle and easily pound down a burrito and a half without a problem. At Portillo’s, I can throw down a large cheese fries, big beef with hot petters, and a chocolate shake, which probably adds up to over 2,000 calories.
ADBG, I don’t, as far as I can tell, physically consume more or less than other folks at a meal, at least on average. I don’t consume more or fewer snacks during work than my coworkers either. My last burrito at Chipotle’s was definitely not 1000+ calories—I know because I use the nutrition calculator before I go somewhere to max out the calories, I am not shitting you. Granted, I really don’t like guac. A Big Mac and fries is actually 770 calories, which is barely going to break you even for the day. I’ve never even heard of Portillo’s.
As I said last time, the only exception among local places is Mr Hero’s, where I can eat a 1500+ or even 2000+ calorie sandwich—though the latter is very filling, do not recommend unless you’re really hungry. Anywhere else I’ll be lucky to get 1000 calories. Possibly as low as 700.
@nick: Maybe you have a crazy metabolism, but it also seems like you have strong food preferences that hinder your ability to eat the total garbage that many overweight Americans like myself love?
Like DefBetaGuy I’m surprised you can’t get to 1000 calories in a Chipotle burrito. I just used their Nutrition Calculator and got to 1370 calories in my normal burrito (rice, beans, fajita vegetables, guac, sour cream, cheese, salsa) and if I’m feeling especially bad about myself I can easily eat chips+guac after the burrito. At local burrito places sometimes I pair that with a horchata. My favorite meal ever might be the Quesdilla Burger w/fries at Applebee’s which runs me to 1770 calories, and I’ll often eat an appetizer when I’m there. If my girlfriend is away and I won’t be judged I’ll eat an entire large pepperoni pizza and dip the slices in ranch dressing. And I’m not even that fat by American standards.
Bad news–it’s a versatile, nutritious high calorie food.
Good news–it’s usually an extra charge since avocados oxidize if you wave in their general direction.
There’s no Applebee’s near me, and I’ve been to one once in my life. Looking at their menu, looks like they have high calorie counts. But again, this is a (relatively casual) sit-down restaurant; it’s not what folks mean when they say fast food.
Some of it is definitely my weirdness, but I don’t actually have strong food preferences. Like I said, I max out my calories when I go out to eat; I have actually had the burrito with guac before but didn’t like it much—and it would be extraordinarily perverse if those missing 200 calories somehow made all the difference. And I eat chips and fries and junk food, and I drink lots of pop. If eating garbage a lot sufficed to make me fat, I’d be fat. But I’m not, I’m well underweight.
Nick,
How old are you?
I was that way throughout my youth and adolescence, but around 25 or so it started to turn… and it’s been all downhill (and up waist sizes) since then.
@Matt M
I’m 24.
I share your situation, of eating whatever and not showing it, albeit less so now than in decades past (I have less appetite now). It’s why I don’t tend to offer weight loss advice to people.
Resting metabolism, activity level, and satiety (which can depend on what you eat as well as who you are) all factor in.
I’d say my weight gain periods came in 3 spurts:
-16: stopped wrestling. 135 to 150.
-21: 150 to 180?
-24: 180 to 210
I crash-coursed starvation dieted myself down to 170 and have spent the last decade fighting in between the 170 and 190 range. It’s become noticeably more difficult in the last year or so.
@Nick
Do you enjoy baked goods? Cookies, brownies, cakes, pies, doughnuts, or pastries? Do you like pancakes or waffles with butter and syrup?
Those are what always do my diet attempts in: I have to cut all those foods out entirely or I make no progress. If I wanted to gain weight I’d go down to the store and get several boxes of Little Debbie’s oatmeal cream sandwich cookies. I haven’t had them in years but I still crave them. Or several sleeves of nutter butters, a dozen old fashioned donuts, and a sheet cake….I’m just fantasizing now.
Yes to all of the above. As far as cookies, donuts, etc., I eat these as snacks at work. I generally eat 1000+ calories of stuff like this at work every day, and that’s not counting lunch. Like, there are these cinnamon roll things that are like 400 calories that I eat for breakfast sometimes.
Are you having trouble eating enough calories to exceed your maintenance rate, or are you way over your maintenance rate and still not putting on weight?
(Obviously there is a problem with my question: if 2000 KCal/day is your maintenance rate, and eating 3000 KCal/day is not putting on weight, then we could just redefine the maintenance rate to 3000. But I’m trying to figure out which problem we have here.)
Online calculators tell me I should be gaining weight if I’m eating 2300+ calories a day. Which I do, and sometimes 3000+. I don’t know what my actual maintenance rate given this isn’t working.
There’s a fair amount of variation in people’s maintenance rates; those online calculators are more of a rough approximation. Only reliable way to get your actual maintenance rate is to count calories for a few weeks and verify that you’re not gaining or losing weight.
If you can eat 2000 KCal and maintain your weight, and you can eat 3000 KCal and still maintain your weight, it indicates that your body isn’t absorbing the “extra” calories, somehow.
I ain’t no general practitioner, I ain’t no doctor with degrees, but that’s who you should ask next, to see what food’s doing to thee.
And here I thought CICO was simple thermodynamics. Ah well. I’ll gather data and consider seeing a doctor. Thanks to everyone who responded.
Yeah, you can’t beat thermodynamics. And fats are the most energy-dense molecules that can exist in quantity in a living human body. So if you’re eating 3000 kcal/day and your body weight isn’t going up from when you were eating 2000 kcal/day, then there absolutely is an extra 1000 kcal/day “calories out” term in there somewhere.
Note that 1000 kcal of waste heat equates to roughly 2 liters of evaporated water. So if you’re sweating a lot more than you used to, that points to one set of “calories out” terms in the equation, and if you’re not, that points to the other ones.
When Nick said he eats 2300+ calories a day and sometimes 3000+, I took that to mean that he eats 3000+ calories on certain days, not for certain extended periods. Which is perfectly normal and wouldn’t noticeably affect his weight, as long as it all averages out to his long-term maintenance rate — it does imply that the maintenance rate’s somewhat above 2300 kcal, but that’s not uncommon for guys.
Even the weight you’d gain eating 3000 calories a day for a week could probably hide inside normal fluctuations. Now, if you ate that much for a month and didn’t gain any weight, then that would be cause for concern.
@Nick
I think you’re misunderstanding what people are talking about when they talk about high-calorie fast food. The typical regular McDonalds customer isn’t getting a Big Mac, small fries and a water (which is how you got to 770). Change it to the more common “Big Mac, Medium (at least) fries, and a soda” and you’re at 1,300+ calories easily. God forbid you add an apple pie or other dessert. Or a “side” of nuggets. Or a refill on the drink.
In other words, you seem to assume that “Big Mac, small fry, water” is the typical fast food meal but the typical meal will be much larter. Plus, 770 calories is still reasonably high for a single meal unless you do absolutely no snacking or dessert. If that’s all you’re getting then your fast food meal is significantly lower in calories than the average consumer.
Your body can’t break the laws of thermodynamics, but our BMR can be pretty illegible even to ourselves.
Hormones have a lot to do with it. If Nick is skinny averaging >2300 kcal, his BMR is just an illegible point on a bell-curve opposite the side where women cluster.
Exercise is also huge, but that’s a bit different from basal metabolic rate. In short, “Fast food will make you obese!” might be true on average for women, but men with certain genetics/hormones could benefit from going to burger joints as long as they skip soda. It’s not that legible.
It’s also possible to have a body that poops out some of the calories without digesting them, but it’s not clear to me if “CICO” is generally meant literally enough to include that.
Nick, not to be throwing health scares at you or anything, but have you had yourself checked out for (possible) Type I diabetes or thyroid problems?
Because when I hear someone saying they eat junk food and sugary junk at that, but don’t put on weight, then insulin problems are what come to mind.
dick’s answer was precisely what I was going for, and the exact way I would have phrased it, too. I suspect Nick’s food is just not being digested for some reason. [1] (I don’t think it’s tapeworm or anything, but it could be. In either case, we can’t diagnose that over the internet.)
[1] I can easily imagine a mechanism where your body is used to digesting 2300 calories a day, and it optimizes itself for that. If an extra 1000 calories show up, the body can grab a little bit of it but isn’t ready for the rest and they pass by. People are different.
@dick, that depends on whether you count “in” as the mouth or the stomach, but so long as you are consistent the math should work out.
(Let’s have two threads in a row where I embarrass myself with math, yeah?)
Nick’s almost certainly fine; as young men my family could eat anything without gaining weight (except when adding vertical inches). People are different.
@Nick:
I was(am?) in a similar situation to you. Very low weight, eating a ton of snacks/deserts/etc and could put down a huge amount of food at a meal if available.
The gap was that I don’t eat breakfast, and drink only water and black coffee. Lunch would occasionally be rushed, so I was only really eating 1.5-2 meals per day. Even if one of those meals is absolutely massive it just isn’t enough.
Anyways I made a conscious decision to eat more often. I’ll have a protein bar in the morning and make a full lunch and dinner. Sometimes I’ll have a pre-dinner to get some calories going while I make the real dinner.
I took up weightlifting at the same time and have put on nearly 10lb in four months.
@RyanT6
I envy your metabolism!
I drink only water (and skim milk at dinner), never eat both breakfast and lunch and occasionally skip both, almost never eat dessert and don’t snack (except for occasional fruit/vegetables). My weight is stable; if I eat a high-calorie dinner (ex: go out to an Indian restaurant) it goes up, if I eat a low-calorie dinner (ex: make stirfry at home) it goes down. Luckily, I quite like cooking. But it would be nice to be freer to experiment with desserts!
(As is, I mostly do them for meetups – which is fun, but does orient me towards desserts that can be made in advance.)
@Nick
I’m a bit older than you with a similar not being able to really put on weight issue, but managed to claw myself from 58kg at 21 to a relatively stable 70kg at 33 (I’m 174cm). It was slow and came in probably 4 separate spurts and plateaus where I spent time focusing specifically on eating and weightlifting. At the end of the day it is CICO but I think most of the time when we talk about that it is missing the trees for the forest. What actually are your calories in and out? How much of what goes in are you actually getting and how much are you using without noticing?
Some things i’ve noticed:
-I have a very low hunger drive. I do get hungry, but I can quite happily ignore it for hours longer than others. I can also happily eat as much as others at a sitting, even those much larger than me, but it keeps me satiated for longer and when others are having another meal some period of time after i’m still not really wanting to eat. I often actually forget to eat and the periods in which I gained weight were times where I religiously scheduled meals and ensured I ate as early as possible in the day to fit more meals in.
-My fidgeting and activity rate is quite high as a baseline. I’m always moving in some capacity, much to the extreme annoyance of my partner. It gets worse the more I eat.
-The more I eat above a certain threshold the less happy my digestive system is. Transit times seem to get faster and, while I have no way of objectively verifying it, I think less absorption occurs. This can be partly counteracted by diversifying food a bit more (more dairy in isolation did not help me gain weight but it did as part of just more food in general) but I still think it’s a factor.
Like HBC says people like us should serve as examples that while it’s all CICO at the end of the day, we are really not great at being able to measure or control all aspects of that. You and I and others like us are just near one end of the bell curve.
Have you ever paid attention to such people? They talk about being on some sort of diet. They may even think they are dieting. But they aren’t. Either they don’t have the discipline or they’re too good at fooling themselves.
What is the source of your certainty that the virus isn’t forcing people to pound down plate after plate of pasta and follow it up with a pint of ice cream? Most people eat ad libitum, so you can’t really consider people’s diets exogenous. A viral disruption to your hormones that makes it easier to feel hungry and harder to feel full, or similar, would cause people to eat more than they needed to and become fat as a result of overeating, but the virus would still be the root cause.
There’s also the possibility of having causation backwards – what if people eat a lot because they’re fat? If the virus does straight up make you fat by causing your body to produce and store more fat, think about what effects that would have. Building up fat takes energy, maintaining fat stores takes energy. If a bunch of energy is going towards your big jiggly potbelly, you’re going to need to eat more to fuel your other activities. This would explain what I’ve heard from some fat people trying to diet, that they feel like they’re starving even though they’ve had a superficially reasonable amount to eat and they clearly have plenty of energy savings. The fat is acting like a tapeworm and diverting the nutrients they need to live.
It’s thermodynamics, calories in versus calories out, but it’s not a simple system, causality isn’t necessarily straightforward. Human decisionmaking is complex.
The virus may, and from reading the article it sounds like it does, alter people’s regulatory processes so that they feel and are hungry unless they have a large caloric surplus. A virus could be the reason why people in the developed world eat too much.
The existence of drugs that cause weight gain by making people hungry all the time (I think there’s an antipsychotic that does this) implies that this is possible, perhaps as a side-effect to whatever actually makes the virus spread effectively.
Let’s suppose that this is true – that there is in fact a virus that causes people to be excessively hungry, leading to overeating. Let’s also suppose that we can detect, but not cure or even meaningfully treat said virus.
What does that imply?
Should people with this virus be socially shamed for overeating, even if we know they feel super hungry all the time?
Maybe give up on the shaming and demands for greater willpower, and just find drugs that suppress appetite and prescribe them widely?
Well, I guess my point is that willpower could technically still work. You don’t have to eat just because you’re hungry. Someone with the virus could still just not eat and feel hungry all the time.
And I sort of suspect that this is what an uncaring society would expect/demand.
Virus or no virus, plenty of people will feel hungry much of the time if they’re at a healthy weight (or even mildly overweight) and not gaining. That’s just an unpleasant fact. There are ways around it — appetite suppressants like lead and nicotine, for instance — but so far none that doesn’t have bad side effects.
…appetite suppressants like lead…
Is that a typo or dark humor or something? I’ve never heard of that (and googling is unhelpful because the verb ‘lead’ is in so many documents about appetite suppressants)
It’s both dark humor and serious; I have a pet hypothesis that the reasons for the obesity epidemic are twofold
1) Food got a lot cheaper, so we in the first world were no longer seriously weight-limited by economics. Note that fat rich people have long been common.
2) But, the effects were delayed because at the same time we were smoking up a storm and filling the air with lead.
Lead poisoning does cause loss of appetite. There are some claims that chronic low-level exposure does also, but I don’t have any good studies on it.
“A fatter but a smarter man, I rose the morrow morn….”
There’s a meme that shows cell phone sizes over time, getting smaller then larger again, with the nadir labeled as “then we discovered we could watch porn on our phones.”
You could probably get a similar graph with obesity rates and label the inflection point “then we discovered we could put sugar in our coffee.”
Or maybe “corn in our everything.”
just find drugs that suppress appetite and prescribe them widely?
We don’t need to “find them”, we know what those drugs are. They used to be very widely used: nicotine, phenylpropanolamine, ephedra, and amphetamine… Or as they were known at the time, cigarettes, Dexatrim, and “uppers”. People popped them like candy. I remember.
Alternatively, fat-shaming might be counterproductive if you care about health– being shamed tends to cut down on social opportunities, and social connections (so far as I know) are important for health.
Big if true, but my prior is low. And if not, it’s yet another narrative device for enabling people to shirk personal responsibility (“muh virus”).
But why does it matter? I mean, telling me I’m personally responsible for my fat ass is probably accurate (I ate all those calories; nobody forced me), but it doesn’t seem to help me lose weight. If personal responsibility or even overt and rude fat shaming was going to work as a way to reverse the obesity epidemic, it seems like it would have borne some fruit by now.
I think some public health advocates think we just need to shame harder, and maybe they’re right?
I mean, the drop in smoking rates we’ve seen over the past few decades is mostly education-, tax- and shame-driven. Even if a virus is leading some people to have symptoms of addiction to overeating, well, lots of people were addicted to smoking, and many have quit / many have been discouraged from ever starting.
Maybe a big difference here is that it is possible to quit smoking completely, and food can’t be given up. But we’ve got lots of people who have switched from smoking to vaping, which could be analogized to switching to healthier foods.
We’ve been shaming for awhile, and it hasn’t obviously paid off so far. Though maybe the obesity epidemic would be worse without all the public shaming–I don’t know how we’d get the right kind of evidence to decide that.
Examine the obesity rates of subgroups where shaming is most commonly used as a tactic?
My impression is that wealthy teenage girls aren’t likely to be obese, and that this probably isn’t a coincidence.
@Matt M: Is “wealthy teenage girls” really the biggest shaming class out there? I think of them as experts in passive-aggressiveness (the Mean Girls stereotype) but in my experience the stereotypes of lower classes are that they’re far more bluntly insulting. And that’s where the greatest concentration of obesity is.
Maybe passive-aggressiveness is a better shaming tactic, or maybe there’s other reasons at play
@j1000000:
Beauty standards are different in the lower class, though. fat bottomed girls, baby got back, thicc, the image of the wholesome fat mother, etc.
Seems to me that while wealthy teenage girls may not be doing more shaming than any other group (although they do a significant amount), they’re definitely one of the demographics most sensitive to being shamed. Lots of other groups like shaming teenage girls as well. And then there’s the thing where suddenly developing boobs and a butt turns your body into an object of shame (through old men catcalling or pawing at you, dad suddenly not wanting to cuddle you anymore or everyone else telling you that just existing in your body gives people the wrong idea), even though you’re just a kid at heart.
Lower classes may be more bluntly insulting. But IMO they’re also more likely to have a culture where it’s seen as good to shrug off those comments. Young(ish) men of various different classes even go out of their way to be as bluntly insulting as possible to their buddies, and the well-calibrated response to “Duuude, you’ve been drinking too much! Look at the gut on you!” is not to act ashamed and better yourself but to belch and say “Yes, and I’ll be drinking some more!” Teenage girls are expected to listen and take heart, or at least pretend to.
From what I’ve heard, Chinese people tend to be very blunt about weight. They also tend to be thin.
You might want to look at side effects like anorexia as well as the obesity rate.
@ana53294
Chinese cuisine tends to be relatively less carb-heavy. And weights are going up now, as availability of foods (particularly dairy) has increased.
As a previously fat person, shaming absolutely helped me to lose weight, and probably prevents a signifigant number of not fat people from putting the weight on in the first place.
If you’d asked me when I was fat I’d probably have said that shaming didn’t work, because it made me feel bad in the short term and making decisions that made me feel better in the short term at the expense of long term happiness was a big part of why I was fat to begin with.
I’ve read about the disease theory of obesity (also called infectobesity) previously and some of the evidence is pretty suggestive. I also think that in the future we’ll find out some disease we don’t currently know the cause for is actually caused by a virus or bacteria (Alzheimer’s?, Parkinson’s?, peanut allergies?).
In the end I’m skeptical, though, because people in urban areas and people who take public transportation are less likely to be obese than people in rural areas. If there were an infectious agent involved wouldn’t people in cities be more likely to be affected?
Based on my very limited understanding, I thought most people accepted that the obesity crisis is multi-causal. So diet is one fact, sedentary lifestyles are another, this hypothesized virus/disease is possibly yet another. Taking public transportation is probably a good proxy for a (slightly) less sedentary lifestyle, so you’d expect it to be correlated with lower rates of obesity. I suspect the same is true of urban vs rural life.
So the fact that these influence obesity in one way does not mean that this virus/whatever does not independently influence it. There’s plenty of ways both could be true without the putatively higher rate of transmission in urban environments making a measurable difference in the virus’ effect.
Isn’t the second backwards? I would expect rural people to have a less sedentary life than urban people, not more.
A rural person can take their car anywhere, practically right up to the spot, while an urban person using public transportation has to walk to and from stations and stops. I think that’s what he’s suggesting, anyway.
I think that was true when most rural people were manual labourers of one sort or another. That hasn’t been true for fifty years. Now they just tend to be slightly poorer, and poverty correlates extremely highly with obesity, I believe.
Also as Nick says, there’s no need to walk anywhere, and in my experience it’s frequently avoided, especially in the States. Urban people are in general vastly more health conscious, and the health conscious among the urban are more likely to use public transit, I would think. (Then again, so are the poor among the urban, so that screws up my story.)
(I could be wrong about the above, I’m not an expert on any of this and I can’t remember where I learned these “facts” from, so take them with a grain of salt.)
Only if it is person-person infection. A rural concentration might suggest a soil-transmitted or animal-transmitted infection (not that I’m actually convinced: I’m overweight because my office is full of feeders and I have no will power).
I suppose another option is that the virus is so widespread that everyone’s been exposed to it. People in urban areas could have better immune systems from being exposed to more diseases? Or be less obese due to lifestyle differences (like @Enkidum says above (but that would mean the effect of this virus would be pretty small)).
That seems pretty unlikely to me too. But I imagine it’s possible if the virus were transmitted through a vector like flour or corn. I have read that other groups of people become more obese when exposed to the Western diet…
Could it be something in the microbiome?
Bugs / typos in on https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/
David Mitnick : comment has a link in raw html, which doesn’t work
Laura Baur: the sentence “In NYC rationalist social scene and so cannot other people in that scene as patients.” (though if you consider “othering” a valid concept it could work …)
John Bieda: “Say hi to his student Anisha, but if you’re a rationalist you probably shouldn’t work with her directly.” – 1) wait are we talking about John Bieda, or about his student Anisha here ? And 2) it’s not clear if the intended meaning is ” …. because she’s part of the community so won’t be impartial enough” or “… because she’s into touchy-feely hocus-pocus that doesn’t work”.
Judith Sachs: “See full recommendation” … what full recommendation?
Obviously the student. That’s what gendered pronouns are good for…
Sure – the implication is “why the heck are we telling people not to see the *student* of a psychiatrist in an entry on that psychiatrist himself?” (especially, someone reading this quickly may think the recommendation is about the current psychiatrist, and not think to go back and check the name’s gender.)
I’ve seen some posts from Anisha where she said something approximating your first intended meaning.
“I’ve talked with some friends about this, but I think it’s worth it to make a more visible statement about the fact that I do not intend on taking on rationalists (or any people I know) as clients.
As much as I’d love to serve this community as a therapist, it would be unethical with my current level of involvement, as I would be unable to be impartial if my client brought in issues I had heard about through the grapevine.”
<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/lewis-wolpert-as-francis-crick-pointed-out-a-theory-that-fits-all-the-facts-will-be-wrong-as-some-of-54070.html"A theory that fits all the facts will be wrong, as some of the facts will be wrong" — Francis Crick
The link is a eulogy– has lots of good stuff, like “science is the art of the soluble”.
“Collaboration was very important to him. You had to be friends and also very candid, without being rude. You could then sound aggressive, and say it’s all nonsense, without causing offence.”
What’s the criteria for being on the SSC-community-approved psychiatrists and therapists list? Is there anything particularly unique about the ones listed on the site?
The requirement is that someone who reads SSC has had a good experience with the therapist. The relevant info is their ability to get along with someone who has a rationalist mindset, and whether or not they’re safe to talk to about poly-amorous matters (as not all readers are poly, this is an optional qualification).
Related to the discussion on Baumol effects… What are the best arguments and evidence for (or against) the proposition, “teaching has become significantly more effective in the last century”. What about “last half century”?
Note that I mean teaching specifically – we’ve clearly increased access and utilization of education. More people are literate. IQ is up. And there are of course many things we can teach now that we could not in 1919 because they hadn’t been discovered or invented yet. But that’s not due to better teaching necessarily.
For a given unit of knowledge, are we any better at delivering it to a student such that they understand and retain it?
Education is not and has never been about giving students knowledge; that’s the biggest myth in education.
So what’s the purpose of education, then?
K-12: Acculturation (indoctrination if you’re against it), social control
Higher Ed: Signalling, jobs program for intellectuals
Do you really truly believe that we would have the same rate of basic language and math literacy without some form of at least semi-formal schooling? This seems hard to square with historical reality.
Perhaps you are using “acculturation” so broadly as to include a lot of what other people would call “education”. But otherwise, it’s one thing to say “public education is optimized for things other than efficient transfer of knowledge and skills”. It’s quite another to claim that no one cares if any knowledge and skills are transferred.
Historically, you didn’t have parents of all classes know how to read and reading books to their kids.
I went to school knowing how to read, and I learnt to read in Russian, in a completely different alphabet, without any kind of formal education, just my mother reading to me.
I did have to memorize multiplication tables; but going to school is not necessary for that.
In the same way, in a house where food is prepared at home, and children have the opportunity to observe their parents cut, prep, cook food, they will pick up cooking skills. And people who grow up in a house where nobody cooks, need to formally learn how to boil pasta.
The stated purpose of education is to increase a student’s ability to reason, and to provide skills the student will need in “the real world”.
In the US, the current purpose of grade school is to increase the student’s ability to pass a standardized test in whatever subject matter the class is teaching. College/university seems to be mostly signaling, and possibly some vocational skills. Trade school’s purpose is to teach the skills needed for a particular profession.
What is your alternative to standardized testing for evaluating whether “increase ability to reason” and “provide skills” have actually been accomplished?
I find a lot of such blanket objections to standardized testing puzzling. I did extremely well on standardized tests with essentially zero test prep outside of being generally smart and well read and doing well in the relevant classes.
I can certainly see how a less accomplished student trying to achieve my score could do so by taking various not very “educational” shortcuts and “learning to the test”, but the issue there seems to be the incentives to game the test rather than the test itself. Which is a hard problem not limited to schooling (Goodheart’s law).
I’ll grant that there are things we try to standardized test for that we shouldn’t (basically any language skills other than vocabulary and very basic reading comprehension). But a lot of standardized testing feels like a perfectly valid way to evaluate skills. I’m very glad my AP calculus teacher “taught to the test” because this consisted of teaching us how to do integrals and derivatives. Which is kind of essential to calculus, if I may be so bold.
There are trade offs to standardization of course, but the upshot is ability to compare results, and I don’t see an obvious alternative to accomplish that.
One alternative is direct observation by the parents, who are the people with the most information about the child and the greatest incentive to care.
In a competitive private education market, whether funded by vouchers or by parents, schools have an incentive to do a good job as judged by parents, since the parents decide whether the school has customers to pay the bills.
Consider restaurants. Do we need some form of standardized testing to make sure they provide tasty food at a reasonable price?
That’s a particularly easy case, since you get immediate feedback on your dining decision, but there are lots of things we buy for which you don’t and still rely on the customer’s judgement rather than some system of formal standardized testing.
Fair, but that requires highly invested students and parents and if you have that you’re most of the way to a good school anyway. As you note, evaluating a school is much harder than evaluating whether your last restaurant meal was enjoyable, and the switching costs are much larger. It also makes it hard to evaluate schools you are not already familiar with, or to evaluate schools across the state or country.
You can outsource it to somebody else, but that’s the USNews rankings which are constantly being gamed and are probably not any better correlated to student learning than just looking at all their incoming students’ SAT scores.
Most parents care about their kids, and they get continual information on how their kids are doing. Shifting from one school to another may be a nuisance, but it is both much easier and much more effective than trying to change the school, especially now that public schools are typically very large.
Using invented numbers to make the point, control via freedom of choice requires parents in the top 80% of “invested in their kids.” Control via lobbying the school board requires parents in the top 1%.
According to some theories, the purpose of education is sorting– deciding who gets a chance at good jobs. This is done partly by credentialing and partly by convincing a great many people that they are incapable of learning or at least incapable of learning some subjects.
Less of this, please. It’s impossible to imagine that you didn’t know this extremely controversial statement would not grind people’s gears.
+1
This is the sort of reductive nonsense applied to an interesting idea (which I don’t like or agree with much, but can tolerate in its thoughtful form) I come here to avoid.
-1
There’s nothing wrong making hyperbolic statements like the above, and this is a particularly unobjectionable example thereof given that “education is mostly about signalling” is a pretty popular belief around here. It’s vastly preferable to e.g. drive-by political snark.
This is very different from even, “education is mostly about signalling,” which is a non sequitur response that would only get an “OK, and?” from the OP. If interpreted as a useful answer to the question, the statement means, “no knowledge is transferred during education, therefore your question is useless.” Not even Caplan is this much of a hard-liner. So the comment is either hyperbolic and irrelevant or pertinent and ridiculously reductive.
The (eyeroll-inducing) analog would, I think, be “everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” This is an extremely obnoxious thing to interject when someone is trying to talk about the subject at hand.
The OP asked about productivity gains in education, asking for an answer in units of effort or dollars per unit of knowledge. Freddie is claiming that those are the wrong units. More dramatically, if I asked whether computers are getting cheaper per unit of quality, and asked for an answer in dollars per usb drive it would be a less than useful answer.
I did not specify the units I wanted the answer in.
I specifically said I was interested in teaching, not the overall education system.
I am perfectly familiar with the “education is signaling” hobbyhorse.
Sorry, the “For a given unit of knowledge…” threw me. I obviously can’t speak for Freddie, but I tend to think modeling teaching as knowledge transfer misses out on a lot of important (I hate the word holistic, but basically holistic) aspects. We can give students a link to wikipedia in like 5 seconds, and I never use 95% of the specific facts that I’ve learned over decades of education. One interpretation of those facts is that its all signaling. A different interpretation is that teaching shapes students in some different way (and that measuring the number of facts you’ve taught is not a good metric for this process).
Yes, as I said before it was (clearly) hyperbole. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s making a substantive and IMO interesting point (that Freddie thinks knowledge transfer is a vastly overconsidered aspect of education). In my view this is a significant improvement on “less of this” comments, which do not have any interesting content. It’s certainly a lot better than than irrelevant CW zingers (except the rare funny ones) and therefore shouldn’t be singled out for criticism if you ignore those.
If it’s substantive it’s irrelevant. If it’s relevant it’s vacuous. In neither case is it meaningfully addressing the question. My tolerance for derailment increases with thread depth; at the top level, it’s annoying soapboxing.
“Less of this” is this blog’s only mechanism for community moderation of discussion. It’s not interesting, but it is useful.
Hypocrisy-avoidance is overrated. That said, I try not to support that in other threads either.
TL;DR THREADJACKING WILL NOT BE TOLERATED
I disagree. More of this please.
This is one of the topics where Freddie and I are in nearly perfect agreement, despite coming from nearly completely antagonistic corners.
And I recall this topic being a SSC post topic and the discussion converged on agreeing with Freddie’s statement.
Even the full apologists for public education state that purpose of public schools is not for the individual benefit of any given student, and the individual benefit of any given student is easy discarded in favor of literally ever other “purpose” of school.
I’m going to make a bold statement here that the vast majority of people who receive an education are meaningfully better off in consequence than people who receive no education. Teaching people to read and write at a high school level and do basic math is individually good for those people. If you believe that nobody cares about those things, talk to a teacher for 5 minutes.
Learning to read and learning to do basic math does not take 2200 hours over 12 years.
The vast majority of high school students do not get better at reading above the level of skill they acquired at 6yo and refined by 11yo, which is a level of skill that could be imparted by 8yo with the aid of an attentive tutor.
I personally can and have taken students who could not do basic single digit columnar addition, and who had firmly convinced themselves that they were “stupid at math I can never learn this I am dumb” and when I was done with each one, one year later, two hours twice a week, could do Jr High basic Algebra, better than the non-remedial students at that grade level.
The metis of how to teach these two literacy skills this fast is a solved problem, and has been a solved problem for multiple millennia. That we don’t do it is proof in itself that teaching this stuff is not what “school” is for.
I probably agree with you, then, (and maybe, therefore, Freddie) but since his statement was so extreme, I asked him to do better.
From where I sit, I could interpret his statement as “Education is all about signaling” or “Education is all about training” or “Education is all about teaching people to teach themselves” or probably a half-dozen other things, but his statement seems written precisely to let people interpret it as they wish and get offended.
You might know from past experience with Freddie that he is intending us to understand what he writes as a critique of the ‘public education state’ but his words actually indict education everywhere and throughout all of history.
I personally can and have taken students…
Were you trying to educate them? If so, Freddie says that what you were doing was not about giving them knowledge.
So what were you trying to accomplish?
There’s an argument I’ve heard before that we’re badly shooting ourselves in the foot by trying to teach math really early. That empirically kids can pick up math more quickly when they’re older anyway, and that when they do, they won’t have long since internalized that math is just bullshit, or a kind of magic.
I have no idea whether the argument is right or not. On the one hand, I had no problem picking up math at a young age. On the other hand, I certainly knew students who treated it as meaningless symbols the teachers wanted in a certain order, with the trouble that math teachers were more particular about that order than English teachers.
200 years ago global literacy was like 10%, with a huge spread even among European countries. And from where I’m sitting, it seems like “teach these skills to 30 people simultaneously” is not a solved problem. In fact, teaching them is so unsolved a problem that even when schools weren’t free, people paid for it. A good chunk of the cost is in material, repetition and supervision, but that doesn’t mean instruction is a zero-value contribution, and it’s not like material that survives from that time indicate that there weren’t bad teachers and good teachers. Quality of instruction exists and has an impact on outcomes, as your own anecdote shows. That means that teaching is not useless.
I’m going to need a citation on, “the majority of high school students read and write as well as they could in 5th grade, or as well as they would be able to in second grade if they were tutored.”
I’ve tutored too, and I agree that schools handle teaching this sort of literacy poorly. That said, I don’t know that I could do much better than the median (decent) teacher with a full classroom, especially one full of young kids. Going from individual letters to a 10th grade reading level, or from counting to calculating a total with tip split 4 ways, is something I can absolutely believe would take years. Probably not 12, but also probably more than 4.
Yeah I think that the issue is pupils per teacher.
You can tutor a kid or two p well, but that won’t scale up to a classroom.
Now, you can argue that public education would actually be about knowledge transfer if we had classroom sizes of 2 or 3, but then you’d have to dedicate a lot more of the GDP to it.
I don’t doubt there is a lot of “keep the useless human units out of the way” going on too, tho.
Things can be about more than one thing.
I agree with Mark, and Freddie:
I’d rather see more of these sort of controversial takes (defended with facts and data), than people being afraid of debate.
This is more true when the topic is something gilded or rarely challenged, and I think the basic premises of education definitely qualify.
I’m not sure one-on-one education is the answer, for two reasons.
First of all, there is the issue of scale. A typical school, whether public or private, offers something like 30 hours of instruction per week in groups of 30 students at a time. If it instead spent that time on one-on-one instruction, each student would get one hours of instruction per week. I have a hard time believing most students would learn more in one hour than they would in thirty. If I had to guess, it would take five or six hours one-on-one to beat thirty hours of class time.
Second, if one-on-one instruction is so good, why is it not used more? There are substantial numbers of parents, an entire subculture in fact, that is wildly committed to high academic achievement and willing to dig deep. They do make some use of tutoring, but that tends to be for supplemental assistance only. They still send their kids to regular schools with classes and teachers and homework and all the normal stuff. Why haven’t they simply replaced school with a handful of instructors, teaching one on one, and reaped the benefits in higher achievement?
One-to-one instruction by a teacher who is highly skilled is very expensive. I am not sure how much @ Mark Atwood makes, but I am pretty sure it’s more than 15 $/hour. Most parents are not rich enough to pay teachers a salary of 40,000 $/year.
Which is the reason why when they decide to have one-on-one education, it’s usually one parent sacrificing their salary, because they are willing to forego the pay.
In the same way I’ve seen feminists calculate how much it would cost a man to hire a wife if they paid market wages for all the unpaid tasks (surrogate mother, nanny, cook, cleaner, administrator), one-on-one teaching is ridiculously expensive, and it’s only practical for middle class people if it goes unpaid, in the form of lost wages.
Let’s work some numbers.
My school system offered 185 instructional days per years. That would be 37 full weeks of instruction. Here in Toronto, skilled instructors charge about CAN$70 per hour. If I were to hire five hours per week of private instruction at that rate rather than sending my kid to a private school, it would cost roughly $13,000. That’s really cheap compared to private schools, and just a bit more than the per-student funding of school boards here in Ontario.
And then there’s the issue of child supervision. It is illegal to leave a child younger than ten unsupervised even for a minute, and the level of supervision you need to provide is in a subjective gray area until the kid is sixteen. So if both parents are working, they’d need to hire a homemaker until the kid is in middle school at least.
Private tutors don’t seem like a good option. I can see why people who are pissed off with public schools either homeschool or send their kids to private schools.
Isn’t one-to-one education what used to happen in the aristocracy, where kids would have personal tutors?
Yes, private tutors were standard in the aristocracy well into the 20th century. Princess Elizabeth, the current queen, was taught this way. But the current crop of royals go to regular schools, typically the upper-crustiest of the British public (i.e. private) schools.
An hour after school tutoring is probably enough to make up the difference between the (nice) public school education and optimal, and so long as you trust the safety of the school, they have the day care for the rest of the day for free.
Or, for the rich, they have the networking at the private school.
I think the issue is that sending you aristocrat kid to an elite school is more about networking than learning -although obviously learning still has to happen-.
And wouldn’t be surprised if some of those also have private tutors at home.
Networking might be some of it, but it can’t be much of the story in elementary and middle school. Socialization is more important, I think. You can’t get the same socialization from your tutors.
I once gave a talk at a private school run by scientologists, I think as a boarding school for children of people who were spending all their time promoting scientology. The people running it gave all the credit to Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, but so far as I could tell it was actually designed by the man who ran it. The model was interesting, and different both from what we did (unschooling) and the standard model.
Most of the time was spent out of class. Some of it was one on one, but most of it was reading, with the one on one time largely to monitor the student’s progress. That struck me as likely to be a better model than the standard K-12 one, public or private.
In the humanities, maybe. The facts (knowledge) I learned have been useful to me independent of any wishy-washy “critical thinking” stuff that was never taught to me in any class, humanities or otherwise.
Unless the punchline here is “education is about keeping presently useless humans out of the way of the workforce.”
Freddie’s comment and the resultant posts are exactly why I posted this in the non CW thread, in the apparently naive hope you guys would answer the question rather than argue about Caplan for the umpteenth time.
As a reminder, my question was if we are any better at imparting a given unit of knowledge than we were last century. I’m curious if there are any accessible studies relating to the effectiveness of various novel pedagogical methods, and whether anybody is actually using those methods effectively. Regardless of your thoughts on the education system, teaching and learning skills are definitely things we do. I’m wondering if we’ve gotten any more productive at that, on an individual level.
The question was NOT “give me your best anti-public education rant”. Please save that for another thread.
I mean, it’s entirely reasonable that the answer to this question might be “No, but that’s because this is not the intent of public education, therefore nobody is even bothering to try to be better at that.”
But I generally agree that Freddie phrased his response poorly and overly aggressively and in such a way as to make it unclear that he was even trying to answer what your question actually was.
People do occasionally try to learn things outside of the traditional public education system, and I suspect some of them, along with some people inside said system, would have motive to work on the problem.
Is there good data on whether test prep operations have become more efficient over time? That’s a competitive market where the buyers care a lot about performance, it’s teaching knowledge (of how to max out your SAT score), and there’s an objectively measurable outcome. If you can find people with before/after test scores, you can control for student quality coming in, too. OTOH, any test prep company handing you those numbers is doing marketing, so they may not be representative.
Trying to put CW conversations into the non-CW thread in order to specifically target the debate seems like something that would never work in practice.
ADBG: I feel this is a double edged sword. There are a number of topics that are not directly culture war, but are adjacent to it.
Sometimes discussing them in the non-CW can lead to greater understanding, because veteran forum members focus on the object level and save the meta debate for later threads where culture warring is allowed.
On the other hand, it is distressing how often regular posters forget which thread it is, or new posters have to be educated as to what is culture war, and why do we care.
Yes to what Gray Ice said. “Education”, broadly stated, has plenty of CW minefields – but so does just about any broad topic.
I don’t think “historic gains in teaching productivity due to improved pedagogical methods” is CW. But yeah, if someone triggers on “education” and brings up their CW hobbyhorse it devolves into CW. I think it is fair in that case to blame the hobbyhorse bringer rather than the OP.
My hope was that putting it here would help posters resist the temptation to do that, but I was clearly wrong. Only saving grace is that it hasn’t been too warlike because “education is all signaling” is basically a shibboleth around here.
We learned about the spaced repetition in the last hundred years, so it seems we could have improved at least. I don’t know how much it’s known or used.
Yes, we have, but every person has a different optimal way of learning, which is not really feasible to implement at scale.
But most new teaching techniques are more effective for some subset of people.
This is an interesting and plausible theory – how would we quantify it?
gbdub,
In theory, we could quantify it by examining gains in productivity for “education practiced at small scales.” Test prep has already been mentioned as an example. Tutoring would qualify as well. I would volunteer corporate training sessions as another potential option (the small group, specialized, kind – not the “mandatory sexual harassment seminar” kind)
Twin studies? One group only gets taught via methods from last century, and the other group gets methods from this century, after being surveyed on their personal ideal ways of learning.
Then we look at test scores.
IQ Tests are not intended to be knowledge tests, the schools can improve the student’s ability to take them passively by getting better at standardized test taking and modern life itself may lend itself to training common IQ subject tasks. These IQ gains are negatively correlated with the general factor of intelligence suggesting that schools are not raising IQ points by much. Also note that in recent years raw IQ scores have not been increasing.
If you’re looking at a metric like worldwide literacy you may be observing more ubiquitous school attendance rather than those schools that already exist in the western world getting better.
The ability of any single school to demonstrably raise student performance on standardized tests without cheating or relying on statistical tricks like selection bias or survivorship bias is very uncommon. Not to say that it’s impossible.
So my guess is that the only improvement that has been seen is that lead and malnutrition have been dealt with and schools exist in places they didn’t previously. The schools themselves are the same, if not worse than before. Public school teachers themselves will argue against using standardized tests to evaluate school performance, and evalulating public officials to make reforms to raise scores, precisely because it incentivizes making the tests easier to pass and/or outright cheating for the teachers.
Lastly I have to ask whether the definition of literacy has been changed, because literature 100 or even 50 years ago seems to have vastly greater vocabulary than what exists today.
My understanding (as an interested amateur) is that there’s some evidence for more years of schooling in childhood raising IQ a little bit (I think like a point or so per year of schooling). This doesn’t seem totally crazy–you’re talking about taking kids and giving them a full-time job learning new stuff, reading, doing math, etc.
Think of it by analogy to your physical abilities. You can imagine some fundamental limits on your physical abilities based on your body shape and makeup–most of us couldn’t be NBA players or pro tennis players even if we were willing to work as hard as we possibly could toward that goal. There’s probably some baseline very hard-to-change attribute of each of us that boils down to innate athletic ability or something, and it’s probably got a substantial genetic component and is very hard to change. And yet, if you take a bunch of kids and put them through a strenuous exercise regimen every day from the time they’re 5 until they’re 18, it doesn’t seem crazy that you’d cause some physical changes to their bodies that affected that hard-to-change attribute of athletic ability.
What we know from adoption studies is that IQ is substantially heritable and that common environmental differences don’t seem to explain much of the variance in IQ in the population. (You can see that from the fact that unrelated adoptive siblings tend to have about the same IQ difference as unrelated random people, as adults.) But changing years of schooling in childhood is a really big change, and one that doesn’t often happen in the US or any other developed country, so you can imagine that this effect wouldn’t have shown up.
I think teaching to students with disabilities and detecting those disabilities has improved vastly.
I know kids who are dyslexic who got help very quickly, because teachers are trained and given the tools to handle it, whereas my mother had to do a lot of complaining and begging to get the school to accomodate my dyslexic brother. My brother is a smart guy, so his high IQ allowed him to hide a lot of the difficulties he had.
And I know some people are skeptical about pedagogical methods, but I think that there is infinitely more material that explains the same thing in different ways, that teachers could use (although they usually don’t).
Are you aware of any good summaries of evidence that this is this case? I kind of suspect it may be true, that most gains have come in teaching edge cases.
Nah, it’s just anecdata from my family’s interactions with the education system.
I have friends who are teachers now, and they told me about all the training they got in identifying those disabilities. They at least know enough to refer kids to specialists when they see issues such as dyslexia, ASD, ADHD, etc. My aunt, who is a teacher, had none of that training.
@ana53294
A lot of experts in my country are arguing that many if not most cases of dyslexia are actually due to bad teaching and not so much a disability, but rather a lack of natural talent.
What is the essential difference between a disability and a lack of natural talent?
That it can still be taught, but requires more intense training.
Any links on that in English?
I don’t see how “lack of natural ability” is any better than a “disability”. To my ears, “lack of natural ability”, sounds like “stupid”, “low IQ”, whereas a disability does not necessarily have these connotations.
I had severe motor defficiency issues as a kid. I was born after a placental abruption and spent several days in the ICU; my Apgar test was horrible. I had bad muscle tone as a baby, and developed physically very late. ASD is also associated with motor defficiencies. It’s all more or less corrected now; I am just a normal non-athletic adult, and I am not a klutz anymore. But I don’t see how calling that a “lack of natural abilities” rather than a “motor disability” makes it any better.
Most kids can learn to read just by having an adult read books to them. Some kids need help to distinguish a “b” from a “d”, p/q, 6/9. Knowing what kind of things these kids need help with, and knowing what techniques to use, by giving these issues a name, “dyslexia”, makes it easier to help these kids.
EDIT: I may have misunderstood you. Do you mean that kids who have no issue with b/d, p/q get classified as dyslexic because they are slow readers?
I’ve always understood learning disabilities to be problems learning that didn’t in general involve general intelligence. That is, you can have trouble reading because you’ve got a very low IQ, but you can also have trouble reading because some specific bit in your brain has trouble distinguishing letters or words visually, even if you’re very intelligent otherwise. I have a dyslexic uncle who got through a bachelors and masters degree in biology, mainly by having his wife read his textbooks into a tape recorder, and then replaying them for himself to study. He probably worked harder than his classmates, but got through. Someone with a 70 IQ (bottom 2%) simply would not have been able to master the material necessary to get through those degrees.
But the weird thing is that IQ tests are often made of lots of different kinds of subtests. I’ve heard the claim (on Tyler Cowen’s excellent podcast) that autistics often score very differently on different kinds of IQ test, depending on the kind of tasks they use. And I believe psychologists will look at the different scores on components of an IQ test to diagnose some kinds of problems–if you do really well on some parts and really badly on other parts of the test, that might indicate a specific learning disability.
In general, IQ scores are constructed by looking at large numbers of peoples’ scores and doing some powerful statistical techniques to construct a composite score, and then they can be (have been) validated by finding strong correlations between IQ score and educational/occupational success. Rare people with some specific gap or pattern of ability at those tests might not really show up well in the statistics.
@ana53294
Here is a link in English.
Note that dyslexia is much more rarely diagnosed in my country for the descendants of recent immigrants (2% of kids between 7 and 11, vs 9% of native kids), even though they are known to have substantial language problems.
Perhaps the better distinction is a temporary vs permanent disability. The issue is that dyslexia seems to become an identity and excuse for many kids and adults, especially as it gives benefits (like getting more time for exams). A disability identity can provide an artificial ceiling that people don’t try to punch through.
Perhaps the best way to look at it is that all of us have natural talent for various skills. The extremely talented kid teaches himself to read before going to school. The very talented kids need some instruction. The average kids need quite a bit. The less talented need way more, perhaps 2-3 times as much as the average kids. Then a few kids can never do it.
The issue is that language skills are so important, that I would argue that schools should give 2-3 times as much teaching for the kids who need that (including children of migrants who are often written off right now as being stupid due to their bad language skills). Reading & writing is not like music making, where it is fine for the least talented to never learn anything. Some skills are so important* that it is important to draw out the talent that is present in the less talented.
* Communication is the #1 human skill, IMO
I’ve always wondered how it seems that dyslexics don’t seem to be a thing in countries with even more dyslexia-difficult writing systems. Did they just weed out those genes in earlier history? But this proposes that it may be more of a git gud situation.
Or perhaps it’s something in the middle, like allergies.
I’m not sure I’d take “last half century” exactly, but over a little longer time there’s some knowledge I think we’ve learned to transmit better.
Learning calculus and physics was probably easier now than the 19th century. Partly the notation improved. For vector calculus we have additional notations besides doing everything in components. When you do need to use components, Einstein notation is great. There are probably other more conceptual improvements as well.
I remember reading something by I think Edgar Dijkstra about how he was unable to write some sort of sorting algorithm when the only language available was machine code (or maybe it was assembly), but it was so much easier after higher level languages were worked out (and by higher level I mean FORTRAN) that when he taught it to students one of them thought Dijkstra must not have been very bright because he told them how much trouble he had writing it before the invention of higher level languages.
So I guess I’d argue that teaching improves the most by new notations or modes of thought that compress past work (or hide away details).
I have trouble believing that Edgar Dijkstra had not encountered S-expressions, which predate the invention of the compiler. Maybe he was referring to the time when he himself was first learning to write programs.
Back to the original point, I will grant better notation in math and in computer science, and I will grant spaced repetition for memorization. Those are all notable improvements in “how to teach stuff” in the past century.
On the other side, Common Core is utterly wrecking teaching and learning public school level math.
On a related note—I had a professor who claimed New Math actually worked. According to him, reviled as it was, it actually did boost interest in math, at least for some students. He wasn’t even sure that Lehrer was mocking it in his song so much as mocking its reception.
I’m skeptical because, if it was working, why didn’t a United States desperate to catch up with the Soviet Union keep it? But he didn’t produce the statistics to back up his argument anyway, and I didn’t pursue it at the time.
Because parents hated it. It’s hard to demonstrate results when the program gets killed before it’s existed long enough to produce a sufficiently measurable signal in the vast vast noise that is education.
Epistemic status: Mostly speculation, this all occurred well before I was born
Like you say, it’s very likely I’m remembering the wrong computer scientist or it was when he was first learning.
John von Neumann, by contrast, wrote the first mergesort in machine code with a pen.
… first mergesort in machine code with a pen…
… in a CAVE! Out of a box of SCRAPS!
I somehow doubt it did work on the first try tho, Von Neumann or not.
Have their been any solid studies of Common Core? What if anything was the methodology based on in the first place? I’ve had a hard time finding any non-polemic articles about it.
Most of these are parents pissed off at Common Core math methods that do, on face, seem really convoluted. And have students getting marked down for arriving at the exact answer to an arithmetic problem instead of estimating using the indicated method.
To the first point, I think it’s really hard for a college educated adult to see any mechanization of mathematics aimed at elementary school kids and NOT find it really convoluted. After all, we can do most of that math in our heads quite quickly.
But for what it’s worth, the Common Core math stuff I’ve seen really does look somewhat more like my mental processes for doing math “in my head” than traditional pen and paper arithmetic does. Whether it was a good idea to try to generalize this to everyone in lieu of the traditional methods is another matter, but I can at least kind of see where they are coming from and it would be nice to see a treatment that at least acknowledges this.
To the second point – I got marked down on plenty of occasions for failing to “show my work” because I could do the math in my head, or skip a couple steps. And this was in a very traditional class. I hated this at the time, but older and wiser now I recognize that the point was to demonstrate mastery of a method you can use when you need it, not just to come up with the right answer and show off what you can do without being so methodical. Again, it would be nice to read a treatment of Common Core that at least acknowledges this.
The Common Core complaint is usually about “friendly numbers”, which first of all is a lousy name, and second, is a case of educators ruining a good thing.
The idea is that if you have some non-round numbers, you can handle them more easily by making them round first. So if you have 530 – 270, you first add 30 to both numbers giving 560 – 300, then subtract, giving you 260 (for some reason, 530 – 270 is the standard internet example). This is probably easier to do in your head than tracking borrows. Or something like 53 * 47 can be done by
53 * 50 – 53 * 3 or even(50 + 3)(50 -3). I remember tricks like this being presented as sidebars in my conventional textbooks.
The problem with them is that while they do help doing arithmetic in your head, the formalisms for them are rather more advanced than for standard arithmetic. Common Core makes this even worse with more bizarro formalisms. And the kids get tested not on being able to do the arithmetic, but on being able to reproduce these complex formalisms.
“537 – 99” really should be changed to “538 – 100”.
Good God, that site’s font is horrible. Why does lowercase w look bold? Why do some letters not respect x-height? And what’s with the dreadful ligature in ff? Burn it with fire.
It seems to me like a tension in the debate over what formalism to teach is whether memorization should occur at the beginning or the end. Like, getting the conceptual understanding of arithmetic is very helpful for sure. But when I learned algebra I was handed math’s most infamous black box and told to shut up and calculate. And it seems to me that getting comfortable with quadratic equations this way was just as important as the conceptual stuff that came later—like showing us how the formula falls right out of the method of completing the square.
‘Friendly numbers’ is a perfectly good name.
It’s just that it already refers to pairs of integers whose factors sum to one another.
I got Algebra I the opposite way — we were given quadratic equations and made to factor them by hand essentially by trial and error (I wrote software to do this for me for my homework, not being clever enough to look ahead in the book for the quadratic equation). Then we learned completing the square, then the equation from that, so it wasn’t a black box at any point. I imagine either order works.
But the Common Core method just looks totally wrong. They don’t teach the associative and commutative properties and other algebraic rules first, then show how to apply them to make problems easier. Nor do they show the “tricks” and only later show the formalisms behind them.
Instead, they invent strange and novel formalisms (as in that link) and expect students to learn how to do math using them… which no adult does nor ever needs to do.
I have a whole lot of time for “common core math” or “friendly numbers” or whatever you want to call it, at least as a substitute for hand-written arithmetic.
The simple fact is that my sixth grade math teacher was wrong. I will, in fact, always have a calculator in my pocket. The era of anyone needing to manually calculate multi-digit arithmetic involving highly specific, non-rounded numbers, is over. Long division has been made completely and entirely obsolete.
Now, that’s not to say that being able to quickly do a limited amount of arithmetic in your head is useful. The use cases for this are limited in number, but highly useful in importance. And all of them involve a person forcing you to not have a calculator present. I’m thinking, of course, of standardized testing, and job interviews.
I took a fancy expensive GMAT prep test when I was getting ready to apply for business school, and they absolutely drilled this stuff in methods somewhat similar to common core. They would absolutely not allow you to “write out” arithmetic problems. If you were in a situation where you needed to do arithmetic more complex than you could do in your head, it almost certainly meant you were modeling the problem incorrectly. (Note that this is also true of high level case interviews, I interviewed for elite consulting firms and the math was deliberately kept simple such that actually writing out a problem was a mark against you just as much as messing up the mental math would be).
Vectors weren’t in general use until the 20s, IIRC, and that seems like a massive improvement in teaching of physics and some types of math.
In a similar vein, I’m told that back in Newton’s day, a lot of people had difficulty wrapping their minds around the concept of momentum. It occurs to me that part of the reason it’s easier for today’s students to understand it is that it’s so common as a metaphor: “The Steelers have a lot of momentum going in to the final week of the season” and such.
Shitpost answer:
Of course we do. Memes! Memes! Glorious memes! And sometimes narratives.
Bill Nye. Magic School Bus. Cyberchase. Crave that mineral. Mitochondria. 10 kinds of people in this world. Ea-Nasir.
Something you might be interested in knowing:
When I was attempting to become a teacher, I ran across this bit of information about school reform curves. Basically, the first year, the reform does worse than whatever happened previously, because both teachers and students are unfamiliar with what’s going on. As time goes on and everyone involved gets used to the method, the effectiveness of the method gets better and better. Usually about the time that it reaches whatever the baseline quality was, someone comes along with a new reform, so we never get to find out if the previous one would’ve continued to get even better.
I also learned that the best way to reach a student is partially dependent on what culture they grew up in. A student whose parents always gave reasons for rules will want to know the reasons, and will respect the rules if they have a good reason. A student whose parents used “because I said so!” coupled with physical dominance will respect teachers based on confidence and physical dominance.
Maybe students should be stremed by learning style, rather than abilit…
Bugger. That’s just the Sorting Hat. Nevermind.
More seriously, I expect the best thing to do is to copy psychopharmacology.
Have multiple ways of explaining things, and keep trying different ones till one gets through to the student.
Don’t you somewhat get that in hobby/extracurricular competitions? Whoever has the best synergy learning style and coaching style wins. People mostly self-sort into the hobby that matches their learning style best, as well.
This but unironically. Allowing students to select a teacher was the single biggest driver of improvement in quality of instruction between high school and college IME.
So far as I’m aware there’s no good evidence of the actual existence of “learning styles” – they were just another fad from the education departments. However speaking as someone who’s taught a lot, there’s a hell of a lot of wisdom in the idea of presenting something in multiple different ways – for whatever reason, a series of plots might make it resonate with Jane today, while a series of bullet points might make it resonate with John today, or Jane tomorrow.
how is that different from learning styles? I’m not trying to be snarky, but putting aside particular taxonomies, isn’t the basic idea of learning styles just the idea that some people grok presentations better than others?
Because there’s nothing particularly stable about it within individuals. Jane might learn better from one style of presentation one day and another the next. People often report that they strongly feel that they learn better one way than another, but to my (extremely limited, so someone who knows the literature better please correct me) knowledge, there is no evidence that they are right about this.
Hard to separate that from the general benefits from repetition.
I am a spatially challenged person. So when I get a 2D image of a 3-D molecule, or of a 3-D reaction, I struggle to understand how the picture on paper relates to the 3 D aspect.
For this reason, I had trouble with advanced organic chemistry, and with some parts of physics (optics and waves). Being able to get a 3D image via videos helps me a lot.
For understanding engineering concepts, how certain machines work, videos are the nearest best alternative to touching and building the machine yourself, at least for me. I never understood a lot of the engineering behind the Industrial revolution until I went to a museum that had the machines, and I watched a lot of videos explaining how things like the spinning jenny work. If you explain to me in a textual form how these things work I won’t get anything. I need to see the stuff to understand it. I think there are many more resources like that available.
That comment of the week left me completely baffled for about ten seconds, to the point of concern about my own health. I thought either responses were deleted from the thread or I was having some sort of medical episode.
Does anyone else find it ironic that rational/ist fiction got its big start from a fanfic for a really not-ratfic set of books? Admittedly, I’m still a bit fuzzy on the exact definition, but Harry Potter gives zero craps about clearly defined rules or rational heroes; there are enormous plot holes and ambiguities in the lore, and the course of events often hinges on really silly oversights (Such as, “Oh yeah, Snape’s in the Order too” or “So that’s why our map showed our big brother, and then our little brother, sleeping with a dude for several years”). Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy Harry Potter, but it just hit me how weird it is that EY decided to go that route.
It’s ironic, but reasonable given the assumptions that most people don’t really find that perfectly rational behavior makes a narrative more compelling and that EY would choose a very popular story to riff off of.
There’s definitely an audience for fiction, like, say, the Martian, though, so I don’t know how precisely accurate that assumption is.
The next book from the The Martian author, Artemis, doesn’t sound as appealing (although it seems to have done ok).
I assume the difference is that Artemis is set farther in the future than The Martian, and thus the problem solving will be a little less grounded. The Martian has a bunch of problems that someone with a decent education can grasp, and a lot of duct taping things together.
Which is a lot of what makes HPMoR tick. Harry rides a rocket instead of a broom, uses batteries, iron balls, guns, acid, etc, etc. The most bullshit moment is, of course, flying nanofilament across a big area to kill a bunch of wizards, but by then it has been foreshadowed so much that it makes sense.
Compare the other popular-among-rats-tho-not-really-part-of-rationality fiction, Worm.
The antihero controls insects. It’s something people have contact with, and that most have some understanding of. All the bullshit powers have to fight against a girl who can control spiders with super resistant silk, so it’s easy for the reader to imagine what’s going on. Worm wouldn’t work so well with a lot of the other character’s powers (contrast, for example, Grue…it’s never clear what his darkness does, and every time it comes up it is not that great a moment).
I have Artemis but haven’t been able to get through it. I’m not a big fan of the protagonist, I’m not a big fan of the other characters, and I’m not a big fan of the plot. The world is somewhat interesting, but not enough to carry the story for me.
It would make a great sandbox video game. Try your hand at blackmarket couriering, confined-space fire fighting, ancap law enforcement, and lots and lots of welding!
I read a preview and bounced off Artemis.
I enjoyed it, although not enormously.
Yeah, I’ve read Artemis. The science wonkery seems sound enough from my ignorant POV; the problem is that the main character is basically Mark Watney pretending to be a woman, and all the cringing and sighing detracts from one’s enjoyment of the plot. Andy Weir should just … not write women. At least, not as viewpoint characters.
Also, Grue never really gelled as a character in any respect, IMO.
Grue is not great. The romance is easily the weakest part of early Worm -the one time it works well is the bus trip when they encounter Shadow Stalker-.
IMHO the protagonist’s powers is part of the problem in Worm 2; Victoria powers are less interesting and well defined, and just super force and super flying works better in comics.
The bus scene works because it’s about Taylor finding a way to show up her nemesis. Brian himself is mostly a prop there.
Not even going to get started on Ward. My lunch break is only so long.
I liked Artemis okay, but never felt the urge to reread it, though I have reread The Martian multiple times.
(Of course, I started early enough that my kindle version cost 99 cents and has the original ending.)
I don’t find it surprising, because if you’ve read any of EY’s pre-fanfic short stories you’d know that he’s A) an incredibly weird dude and B) the platonic ideal of an uncultured geek when it comes to his media consumption. His references and homages are almost exclusively to science fiction, fantasy and anime.
There’s nothing wrong with those genres. They’re very fun beyond that there have been a lot of incredible and underappreciated works of art there. But if your literary horizons are limited to that handful of genres like EY’s are you cut yourself off from the vast majority of the great art that humanity has produced over our long history. Great science fiction and fantasy authors often turn to the classics to inform their works, while lesser authors crib from them and can only create derivative works. The fanfic is the ultimate example of derivative fiction so it’s not surprising that he was attracted to the ease of writing within a pre-existing fantasy universe.
Except didn’t EY say he’s only read the first HP book?
He read the first three books, watched the next five movies, read over a hundred fanfics, and got help from the Harry Potter Wikia. See “Hero Licensing”, the TVTropes HPMOR page discussion, and these two reddit comments.
Where does this “only read the first book” meme come from?
Imperfect memory of a response to someone asking why he did X when Y happened in the book with a response being he didn’t read the book where Y happened.
But for the sake of relevance, how much of that was done prior to deciding on using HP as his vehicle? Is HP his taste, or did he intentionally choose a popular book?
He first claimed he pragmatically chose Harry Potter based on its popularity, but then realized that was a rationalization and his real reason was his love of Harry Potter fanfic.
I couldn’t say, I couldn’t force myself to read past the first chapter or two of the fanfic. I even tried to read an MSTing of it but just the exerpts were too painful for me to keep going.
Either way though it kind of demonstrates my point. Harry Potter is well known enough that even someone who’s never read it will be familiar with the broad strokes, has tons of crib notes available on Wikipedia, and if you need to dip back into the original material for any reason it’s written at a 5-6th grade reading level. It’s basically pre-digested, the literary equivalent of a McNugget.
I will never understand the overlap between those who really like anime and sci-fi. They are two very different things.
It’s easier to show things that don’t exist in animation than in live action.
Or was a couple decades ago, anyway.
There’s a lot of overlap between people liking sci-fi and fantasy, and most anime (or at least what the people I know watch) is either fantasy or sci-fi so soft that it’s basically fantasy. I’ve heard that there’s also realistic anime, but I’ve never seen it.
Oof. I feel like there’s way more non-genre anime than I’d like, these days.
Or maybe it’s that genre anime has way higher chances of being total garbage than non-genre, so I end up watching more non-genre anime.
Wings of Honneamise FTW.
How about Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises?
There’s a number of animes which are a weird mix between Star Wars tier fantasy pretending to be science, and realistic science fiction. For example there’s Gunbuster, which is a martial arts anime and also a super robot anime, which together makes it about as over the top ridiculous as you might imagine. Except it’s also a story about fighting a space war when you don’t have faster than light drives and have to deal with absurdly long travel times and relativistic time dilation.
Then there’s Universal Century Gundam, which has low key psychic powers, giant robots, and the basically magical Minvosky particles. However it also has very realistic space colonization and technology, with most space colonies being O’neill cylinders, and space ships have to follow orbital mechanics and have limited delta-v. At one point you see a fleet electing to do a Hohmann transfer orbit in order to conserve fuel, which yes is exactly what you would do.
There are also animes which are straight up just hard-sci fi, though. The most stand-out example is probably Planetes, which is about cleaning space junk in Earth orbit in the year 2075. It’s mainly a character driven anime, and a very good one at that, but the premise and tech is all rock solid. It also starts dealing with deeper themes as it goes on.
Wings of Honneamise, mentioned by John Schilling, isn’t so much science fiction as alternate world historical fiction. The story is about the program to send the first man into space, so everything is 1950s tech, but it’s obsessively realistic 1950s tech, with just some minor differences to make it feel distinct. It’s a great movie, gorgeous animation, excellent plot and characters. Highly recommended to anyone who is even the slightest bit interested in space exploration.
@Lillian:
UC Gundam is my absolute favorite work of SF within the John Campbell genre conventions: real science except for “one impossible thing” plus smuggling in psi because Campbell believed in it. Instead of the bog-standard FTL which gave the writer unbelievable space colonization, he spent that nickel on Minovsky particles and then used Gerard O’Neill’s believable space colonies. The characters are also a cut above the flat ones normal for Golden Age SF, and when new technology is used to kill vast numbers of people, the people doing it are motivated by a new ideology. Very realistic.
Gunbuster is more (Aim For) over the top, but yeah, it’s interesting that it puts physical limits on science rather than treating it as magic.
Universal Century Gundam dispenses not just with FTL travel, but also with gravity manipulation technology, which means that the only way to have gravity in freefall is through acceleration. It’s really neat watching people in space ships actually using straps to hold themselves down and floating from place to place to get around.
The Minovsky particles are also really clever in that while i said they were essentially magic they do have some pretty defined properties. Specifically they allow for compact fusion reactors, which makes the mobile suits and beam weapons possible. They also interfere with electromagnetic radiation, making radar and microwave detection systems impossible to use, forcing heavy shielding of electronic components, and even fogging infrared and visible light if the fields are dense enough. The net result being that it forces close combat engagements, thus giving a reason why all fights in the series are fought fairly short distances.
One other cool setting detail is the Jupiter Energy Fleet, which is an independent faction who make runs to Jupiter in order to collect fusion fuels. Nobody wants to mess with them because everyone is dependent on their product, so their independence and neutrality is protected by treaty. By the same token however the Jupiter Energy Fleet is weary about messing with any of the Earth Sphere powers because they don’t have the military might to stop the major players from simply seizing their ships by force. It’s not very relevant to the plot, but the tension between the Energy Fleet’s economic strength and military vulnerability is still an interesting setting detail.
Le Maistre-Chat, have you been keeping up with the prequel series? Personally i think the Char bits are good, but i’m not very enthused about everything else. The Zabis all feel off, especially Dozle whose character design and characterization is just straight up butchered. Just compare the original to whatever the hell this cartoon is supposed to be. Also incredibly disappointed by their depiction of the One Week Battle. It was supposed to be an apocalyptic space war in which everyone and their dog had nuclear bazookas, the atomic party favours were being thrown around like candy, and billions of people died. Instead what we get is… more Gundam. We have tons of Gundam already thank you very much. What was promised was an orbital thermonuclear war, so where is my orbital thermonuclear war!?
“The previous generation is to the next one as angels are to men; the next generation is to the previous one as donkeys are to men.”
I have a hunch that Eliezer’s love of fanfics stems not just from his legendary geekdom but from his personal philosophy concerning the wisdom of the crowds. There was an interview of Justin Roiland with AV Club about Rick and Morty where he talked about how hard it is to outsmart a crowd of 20 million viewers and analogized them to a render farm. Perhaps that’s Eliezer’s idea of the fanfic community as well – if ten thousand people riff off some popular work and there’s at least one cluster where good ideas float up, they’re bound to have an advantage over the original writer. Especially if the writers in said cluster are closer to you in taste and cultural baggage.
No, I think it makes sense. The more broken the original story is, the more fun it is to explore what happens if you put in a rationalist.
Like that time Scott steelmanned Time Cube.
Generally speaking, in order to inspire fanfic, the original has to not have what the fanfic is about. Nobody, to my awareness, writes smut fanfic about bodice rippers that already include lots of that sort of thing. Unless it is very bad. I have not checked, but I imagine someone wrote a version of 50 shades that features a healthy bdsm relationship in a lengthy fit of rage. Thus, rat fic originating in a very anti-rational setting is perfectly in keeping with the general pattern.
How do celebrities conduct mandatory interactions with government gatekeepers? Do Barbra Streisand, Elon Musk, and Beyonce go to the DMV and wait in line for their driver’s license renewals, passports, etc? I want to believe our society doesn’t treat them like they’re special, but I don’t actually believe it.
So are there legal arrangements where an attorney can bring in a photo and sign for the documents? It seems like a dangerous idea – giving Tom Hanks’ new passport to some con man pretending to be Hanks’ lawyer is probably not a great idea. Does the DMV or post office open up off-hours instead? How do you get civil servants to do that, (extra money?) and how does the DMV decide which celebs/politicians/rich guys qualify?
Not a celebrity and not in US, but I am a guy that got sick of postponing the registration of his motorcycles. You go to a notary, pay a moderate amount, and give specific power of attorney to somebody else. At least here they tend to be rather fussy about details – for example you need to specify the full identifying information for each vehicle.
I have no idea of US prices, but in Romania the notary cost me around $30, the lady helping me with the registration around $100 and the government around $150 – for registering two vehicles. So about $130 for at least a full day of running around and queues. Probably two.
You do have to go see the notary, but I imagine for a fee the notary will come see you.
> I want to believe our society doesn’t treat them like they’re special, but I don’t actually believe it.
Why? They are special.
A lot of this sort of thing can be done – or dramatically streamlined – by someone else with power of attorney, or even just a personal assistant (i.e. setting up appointments, handling paperwork, doing things by correspondence online). But AFAIK A-list celebs are seen at DMVs from time to time.
Babs has her own personal DMV, the location of which she had removed from all Internet mapping programs. Unfortunately the obvious hole in the maps led to Streisand-watchers immediately discovering it.
Beyonce goes to the regular DMV with her entire entourage, and it’s just a big party that day.
Elon Musk drives without a license.
More seriously, passports are easy; you don’t have to go in person to renew. But apparently at least some celebrities just do licenses the normal way, except when they don’t.
Another “and sometimes they just refuse to go to the DMV” story is Steve Jobs and his license plates thing which I never understood: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-closed-california-wants-temporary-license-plates/
Who knows, maybe he just didn’t like the aesthetics of license plates. But that said, one could imagine that he didn’t like the idea that someone might figure out the license plate number of his car and use that knowledge to more easily track his movements.
Given how many tours I’ve seen cancelled due to visa issues in the US, I can tell you that the American government gives no special preference to mid-level metal celebrities in their visa process even though I wish they did. But for real celebrities? No idea
Tangentially: I have a friend who I met at a Helmet show and have only ever met up with at Helmet shows. He’s my Helmet show friend. We’re both huge Helmet fans but he follows them a lot more closely, will take the whole day off when they’re playing in our state so he can hang out with them before or after shows, the band members all know him by name, etc. He is also a successful business financial consultant so he has that domain knowledge, and he told me they do all their paycheck and bookkeeping stuff out of some European country because of the tax advantages.
I think the real question here is why the US still thinks getting people to queue in DMV offices rather than say use an online portal is a good idea? If the rich can bypass this through playing others to so it, this is an even more stupid idea.
Because the United States thinks it is a good idea to have a national ID card but isn’t willing to admit that so we use the drivers’ license(*) for that purpose. Reasons why the “This really is Bob Jones and nobody else” card is handed out to Bob Jones in person rather than created on demand and mailed to the drop box specified in some bitstream that came in over the DMV’s T3 line, are left as an exercise for the student.
* And the “State ID card” that is exactly like a drivers’ license except for the fine print saying “not actually valid for driving motor vehicles” and which is administered by the same group of bureaucrats.
I didn’t even know these existed until I needed one and didn’t have a license. Even after I learned this folks told me to get a temp instead.
The UK does the same thing with drivers license and non-existent ID card but we manage it online and by post without any particular issues. I’m not sure what fraud an in-person attendance cuts out that makes it worth the hassle and expense of doing though.
Most DMVs queue by handing out numbers and people can sit and wait for their number.
Some still have people physically queue by standing in line, which I attribute to sadism.
A man finds an old lamp. He rubs it and out floats a genie. The man gets excited and starts formulating wishes to pose to the genie. “Not so fast!”, the genie warns. “I am the Inverse Genie. A traditional genie grants requests to alter the external world to conform to the wisher’s preferences. The Inverse Genie has no power to affect events in the outside world. But while I can’t change external reality to accommodate your preferences, what I CAN do for you is the opposite — I can alter your preferences to match facts that already exist in the world. So for instance, say you have terminal cancer. Sadly, the Inverse Genie has no power to cure you of the disease. But what I can do for you is instantly to cause you to prefer to have cancer than not to have it. Which may not be as good as a cure but hey — if you have to have incurable cancer isn’t it better to want to have it than to be very sad about having it? In the course of granting any wish, the Inverse Genie changes your psychology to the minimum extent possible consistent with your having the new preference. If you wish to prefer to have incurable cancer, there are likely to be a cascade of unpredictable changes in other areas of your psychology that are necessary for you to adopt that preference. (That one would be a big psychological change, and hey, I’m a genie, not a magician.) But rest assured, whatever incidental changes do occur to your mind and thought processes will be the absolute minimum necessary to permit fulfillment of the wish. Also, while the physiology of the wisher’s brain will be modified in order to effect the wished-for change in preferences, there is no chance that the wish will result in any detrimental health or other physical side effects from the procedure. The only thing that will change is your wished-for preference, and any other preferences absolutely necessary to make that change possible.”
It seems like using the Inverse Genie would be a very high-risk proposition, since abruptly modifying your psychology in unpredictable ways is no small side effect, and common sense would seem to suggest that that risk would be greater the more significant the wish. Is there any circumstance where it would be rational for the man to present wishes to the Inverse Genie? Probably. If the man happens to be addicted to heroin, it would probably be worthwhile to roll the dice and wish to prefer never to ingest any more heroin. If the man suffers from severe clinical depression, then again, maybe it’s worth the gamble to formulate a life-changing preference alteration of some sort. But I’m thinking that for a regular person without profound problems, you walk away from the Inverse Genie without exercising your wishes. At the same time, I would hate to throw away an enormously powerful tool for potential increases in happiness. Is there any way that it could make sense for a person of average happiness, not facing an immediate crisis, to avail himself of these services?
“I would like to always prefer to make the wisest choice”.
That would massively alter you away from being a human.
I’d rather be wise than human.
The Inverse Genie sounds like a Stoic genie; one who can make people magically fall in love their own fate — Amor fati.
I’d use the genie if I believed I had no more chances of being happy again.
The perfect scenario IMO would be to find a Stoic genie for harsh times and an Epicurean genie for good times.
While it is true that using it is high variance, the unforseen changes could also be positive.
So if I have unlimited wishes, I’d just try out lots of stuff.
If I don’t, I’d be really tempted to wish that I enjoyed working more than anything else.
Yes. Number of wishes would be important.
Also, trial runs would help, if feasible. At the very least, that would prevent you wishing yourself into a state where you can’t wish for something else.
I would think of it as a self improvement genie.
I see no downside to inverting slight preferences to net big gains in personal happiness.
1. Prefer not to recognize spouse’s passive aggressive way of implying house is not clean enough.
2. Prefer a hairy back over hair on my head.
3. Prefer being slightly slightly overweight.
4. Prefer grit over actual achievement.
5. on and on and on.
Is #4 really a good idea? Wouldn’t that make you less likely to optimize for actual results?
#4 orig: 9 min miles over 8 min miles. Never quit working on something even when formerly easy things recede into the fantasy.
There’s a number of gay people who would prefer to be straight that would find this quite useful. There’s probably a (significantly smaller) number of straight people who would prefer to be gay that could make use of this as well.
Oh no! I didn’t realize the twist at the end of this story was the genie being locked away in a California state penitentiary…
My reading was that the genie can’t change your sexuality — it can only make you want to be the way you already are.
Seems like a genie who can change your preferences should very well be able to change your sexual preferences.
Yes. It all depends on what facts the genie is altering one’s preferences with respect to.
It all depends on just whether it’s an “orientation” or “preference” or something else. I don’t purport to know, and won’t speculate on a CW-free thread.
This is 1/3 of the Serenity prayer in a bottle, provided you already have the wisdom down.
I’d like to like the taste of mushrooms more than I do. Not much more, but it would be nice if they improved rather than ruined a dish for me.
Preferences — you know, if it could just alter my internal states, I would wish to have a full knowledge of what my problems were so I could target wishes.
I would consider wishing away my love of junk food, and particularly my addiction to sugar. It may well kill me as it is, so I’d just be trading one risk for another, and I like my subjective assessment of the odds.
That’s definitely a “regular person” problem, but it’s debatable whether it qualifies as a “profound problem”, and to what extent it is analogous to addiction to harder drugs.
I have the gene that makes cilantro taste like some sort of solvent. If I wish to get rid of this, does the genie change me to taste cilantro like other people or to like things that taste like cleaning agents?
I’d specify the former.
Developing a taste for cleaning agents is somewhat of a health hazard. (“Hey look, this delectable all-purpose cleaner has some added sodium hypochlorite! I do love the extra kick that gives.”)
https://www.theonion.com/it-sounded-fancy-so-i-ate-it-1819583392
The metawish: “I wish for the preferences that will result in the most desirable outcome as specified by my current preferences.”
You can then apply that wish recursively, trending towards holistic optimization.
I’ve been trying to implement this one in real life for a long time. I’d love one of those inverse genies at this point.
The inverse genie sounds like a fantastic solution to phobias. I have an irrational fear of several things, but as an example, let’s use wasps. Inverse genie, please make me like wasps instead of fearing and loathing them.
It could help people who are more generally risk-averse as well. There are certain things I refuse to do (ie, skydiving) and certain things I highly dislike doing (ie, riding rollercoasters) because my brain is constantly screaming “What do you think you’re doing, falling from great heights? DO YOU WANT TO DIE?!” Logically, I know I probably won’t die, short of a news-worthy disaster. But none of that matters, because my lizard brain won’t stop panicking. Inverse genie might be able to fix this problem by altering my emotional state to something calmer.
You might come to like wasps too much, to the point of actively seeking them out.
I’d want the genie to get rid of my laziness.
Most of the time I barely know what my preferences are, beneath all the layers of self-doubt and overcompensation. I’ve got a whole hangup that if some course of action makes me materially worse off or just feel miserable, it is innately morally superior to doing something that doesn’t. No matter how much I tell myself this is at best silly and at worst self-destructive, it’s a feeling that won’t go away.
Then there are the nagging doubts that follow me whenever I decide something. “Are you sure about that? How sure are you? Are you sure that you’re sure?” Every opinion, every instinct I have is subject to all this. Just once, I’d like to actually believe in something and shut up the critic in my mind.
Of course, having seen the damage true believers can wreak, I don’t think I’d actually ask the genie for this… or is that the inner critic speaking again?
Recently, I went with my girlfriend to a concert she wanted to see. I won’t name the artist, but let’s just say it qualifies as “pop country” leaning pretty heavily towards the pop side. Before going, I downloaded one of their albums to get a little familiar with the music, and was pretty unimpressed. A lot of catchy synthesizer stuff, little in terms of impressive instrumentation, overproduced, etc. The actual show was much better, in the sense that the actual musicians on stage were featured much more heavily, tuned a little louder compared to the vocals, given a few solos that didn’t exist in the studio version, etc.
And this is generally my impression in terms of live performances vs studio recordings. Across nearly all genres, it can be expected that at the live show, the actual musicians playing the instruments will get much more time and be featured much more heavily than they were on the album.
1. Has anyone else noticed this? Is this a widely observed thing that I am only recently discovering? Or am I crazy and wrong?
2. If so, why do we suppose that is? As someone who prefers the musicianship I obviously prefer the live show when I can hear a cool guitar solo, but assuming my girlfriend prefers the excessively produced synth loops, that’s fine too. But why should the two mediums be consistently different in this regard? (Specifically, I think her complaint is less “those guitar solos are dumb and boring” and more “I wish he would have done more songs”, which he could have if he kept each individual song to its radio-length rather than indulging extra time for solos she didn’t particularly care about).
I think you’re right – I don’t attend a lot of concerts, though.
Firstly, I think the pop audience doesn’t care about the musicians, only the lead singer.
So I think part of the reason artists offer instrumental solos during their performances is that a lot of pop performances nowadays offer dancing/costume changes etc. by the singer, which can be exhausting. A couple minutes for a drum solo can offer a chance to catch their breath. Not needed for the studio recording, of course.
Right… which is why I was somewhat surprised to see this happen at this concert. Given how pop this particular person is, almost the whole audience there was the “pop audience.” So, as much as I may have enjoyed the solos relative to the alternative, most of the audience probably did not.
This of course is an interesting hypothesis. Better than nothing but not sure how much I buy it. In this particular show, the lead singer was dancing around and expending a lot of energy, no real costume changes or anything like that though.
Also my impression is that this phenomenon far pre-dates modern over-produced live shows. Not that I was actually attending any concerts back in the 60s or 70s, but if you listen to live versus studio albums, the songs are definitely longer, the solos more extended, etc. Maybe David Friedman or Plumber can confirm this for us!
A rest between dancing is pretty weak sauce, I know. There are also ‘rap breaks‘ in a lot of pop acts nowadays which pop audiences seem to prefer anyways. Also, I think it’s an open secret that certain high energy pop acts feature tons of lip synching by the lead singer anyway, precisely because nobody can really dance and sign at the same time.
Maybe the solos are about satisfying the musicians themselves and pop artists do it as partial compensation to make sure their guitarists, keyboarders, and drummers are pretty good.
To answer my own question – I suppose one theory that also covers the 60s/70s is that studio albums inevitably need to include “radio-friendly” potential singles, and that radio stations will, for various reasons, refuse to play anything over ~5 minutes long.
Therefore, even if the Allman Brothers artistic vision requires Whippin Post to go on for 25 minutes, they have to make a 5 minute version of it to put on their studio album if they ever expect anyone to actually hear it.
@Matt M,
Oh jeez.
Well I was two years old in 1970, so I have just a kid’s eye view of the live concerts of the ’70’s that my parents brought me to, but to me it all sounded like endless solo’s, but my Dad was a Nina Simone (Jazz), Hank Williams (Country), and Grateful Dead (???) fan, and my Mom liked The Doors (Acid Rock), so I think except for Country-Western those genres tend towards live improvisation.
My main concert going years were the 1980’s and a little bit in the ’90’s, and mostly of many godawful and mostly unknown “Punk” bands.
Of the more well known bands I’ve seen some had a little improvisation (AC/DC, the Gun Club), some a lot (Television, Sonic Youth), and some played their songs live almost exactly like the record versions (Dead Kennedy’s, Ramones).
From concept films it seems Led Zeppelin regularly more than doubled the lengths of their songs.
Epistemic status hot take: in the age of synthesizers, the skill of playing an instrument is too easy to fake so it’s not impressive. If you hear a guitar solo on the radio, you don’t know if that’s a dude shredding or GuitarTron 2k15 calling its “shred” function, so producing the sounds of an instrumental virtuoso is no longer proof of work. When you see the dude live, you can tell he’s shredding (unless there’s a guitar version of lipsync I guess), so it’s more impressive as a demonstration of skill and consequently gets more focus.
Only drums have gotten to the point where artificial/live are indistinguishable, and that’s just because drum programs use sound recordings of actual drums. For other instruments, it’s still relatively easy to tell when it’s the actual instrument and when it’s a synthesizer.
This is wrong on both parts: it’s almost always easier to have a real person play something rather than mimic it artificially, and pretending to play an instrument is easy (it’s ubiquitous for on-stage bands in reality TV music competitions).
Pure speculation but perhaps the incentives are opposite in the two situations?
iHeartRadio (and their predecessors) may want (or, really, refuse to play anything but) short songs so they can cater to listener ADD and constantly deliver a new dopamine fix every few minutes with another hit, otherwise people may get bored and change the channel.
While maybe at a live performance, a pop artist with tons of very casual fans needs to stretch the hits to a longer running time because the huge number of casual fans there are not interested in deep cuts and would rather hear a longer guitar solo over the familiar chords of the hit they love.
I think the main thing is that it’s boring for musicians to play the same thing every night! They want to improvise, or at least do something different every now and again. And it’s boring for musicians to never get a chance to shine. And it’s boring for the audience, even if they don’t consciously realize it, if the music is exactly the same on stage as it is on the record. I mean I think most people would at least ask the question, if not agree: why pay lots of money to go see it live if it’s just going to be exactly the same as listening to the album?
I wouldn’t underestimate the value of boredom in causing musicians to try different things. Why do you think people moved on from gregorian chant in parallel fifths to doing counterpoint? Boredom of musicians is a driving force.
I have a lot of time for the “this is a roundabout way of compensating the musicians themselves” theory.
Possibly because I’m a huge fan of Frank Zappa, who almost certainly was doing exactly this, in that he’d only hire A+ quality musicians, would rule over them like a ruthless dictator, but would always go out of his way to credit them and give them opportunities to shine during the shows.
Zappa was famous for only showing the setlist to his band a few minutes before the show (if at all), and insisting that the transitions between songs be improvised in new ways each gig. This became a valuable selling point for getting people to come to his shows, as each show was effectively a unique once-off performance.
More than just a powertripping gimmick, this approach made a tonne of sense considering how his albums were actually recorded – often as one conceptually continuous piece with multiple movements that blend into each other – e.g. Joe’s Garage. Even on his recorded material he frequently includes references/cues to his band in the lyrics, which made the transition to live sets even more seamless, and gave the records a nice live feel.
It varies from one performer to the other (and from one show to the other), some play live shows almost exactly as on record, some like to invite live musicians to play the gigs, even when the music on the album is fully digital.
One reason for playing live shows differently from the records is that, if you play live music, it’s really-really boring to play exactly the same thing hundred of times (rehearsals and all), and having actual fun when performing is a pretty big part of why people like to play music in the first place.
Second reason is, that your dedicated fans have most likely heard your record a non-trivial amount of times, some of them have even been to your shows several times already, so keeping it fresh for them is also a consideration.
For sure when it comes to classical music!
I’ve only been to metal concerts, but I’ve not shared that observation. Rather I’d say it super varies; some live performances increased my respect for the band, and some decreased it.
The kind of metal bands I care about tend to make fairly complex music, which could be the relevant dimension. Surely it’s easier to surpass the album if the album is simple.
My take is that this is very true, especially in genres like pop or indie rock. One of the (many) reasons I love metal is that it usually tends not to do this, most of the fun live stuff is on record too.
Why? I really don’t know for sure, but I would guess it has something to do with how tacky a lot of that fun stuff is perceived as being. A big guitar solo in a song on radio is going to be perceived as a fairly regressive addition by modern critics. But really it probably is just time issues, when it comes to radio/streaming singles every second counts to maximise your number of plays. Even metal music tended to cut guitar solos back when it was aiming for radio dominance, look at Judas Priest’s “breaking the law”.
Concerts are, to a first approximation, the entire earnings of most musicians. Yes, All the way up to Taylor Swift. Record sales are important because they mean you can fill bigger venues. The actual income stream is largely… appropriated before it ever reaches the musician, while the earnings from filling a stadium, well…
This means keeping the band happy, engaged and sane is very important. If you burn them out, you are Fucked.
FWIW, I personally prefer trance/electronica, which arguably cannot exist outside of a studio recording. That said, I’m aware that most people don’t consider it real music anyway, so YMMV.
I’m not sure why you’re hiding the artist, which is of some interest to me. Pop country can mean a lot of things.
Ditto. It’s not like any of us are going to be able to sabotage their careers with this information.
Eh, I just figured it might bias the answer or the analysis.
If you’re super curious, the artist was Thomas Rhett.
The artist in question has chosen to work in music yes? So we can probably assume they enjoy music. And this might explain the silos and variations: the guy whose show this is enjoys music including people messing around.
It seems likely that any artist or band that has creative control will offer a show that reflects what they feel music should be about. If there is an increase it what might be classed as improvisation this probably reflects the fact that artists nowadays are rarely controlled by management.
I mean, sure, none of what you say is wrong.
But people who work for radio stations and record labels have also “chosen to work in music” and thus could be assumed to actually enjoy music.
And people who buy studio albums have certainly expressed a revealed preference for “actually enjoying music” as well.
Your theory explains why live shows have a lot of “messing around” but doesn’t explain why studio albums don’t.
Because a show is a discrete and continuous (pop and rock shows don’t normally have interludes) event and an album is (generally) a set of discrete recordings packaged together, perhaps with some narrative or thematic link. So one can allow for more improvisation and fun than the other.
And whilst your hope that record company executives and radio station programmers enjoy music as well, their roles are not to produce music but to make money/attract listeners, and the evidence is that what works here mostly is not innovating on the basic song to the point that one version of songs with multiple recordings becomes the standard. In a role where you are not the artist your opportunity to promote improvisation is much more lomited: note producers and even sound engineers can innovate though but even this can quickly become the sound of the standard version of a song.
But there is no rule of God or law of physics that says this must be the case. This is the case because people in the music industry have made it be the case. Any particular artist could release albums that are completely continuous (Thick As A Brick actually hit #1 in the US, so you can’t even claim this isn’t commercially viable). And any particular artist could perform live shows where every song is performed exactly as it is on the album, with hard silent breaks between songs, etc.
And I don’t even think we can blame record label execs who optimize for money rather than “the love of music.” Do you mean to tell me there’s no equivalent of this for live shows? Live Nation doesn’t have execs who are out there dictating “do your show this way, because our studies have shown it will generate the maximum amount of revenue?”
Artists already do all those things. There are live shows with no improvisations at all, and there are albums consisting of one long-ass track, composed, or improvised, or both.
The variety in music, modern and otherwise, is truly staggering, the trend you seeing is not really a trend. Mainstream stuff tends to consist of bite-sized, easily digestible pieces, but that’s not something unique with regards to music (same goes for books, paintings, what have you), nor is it a problem in an age of Internet.
As for the radio, there are a lot of different stations, some of them have special programs that cater specifically to niche tastes.
I finally have a use for the slow cooker – chili maker. Made it for the first time and realize this is sort of a re-hashed question, but nonetheless…
Which spice is used to make something more spicy? Cayenne pepper? More jalepenos? Different type of pepper?
What other non-standard things do you like throwing in chili? Chicken? shrimp? veggies?
Depends on how much more spicy you want to make it, and what kind of spicy. Most non-bell peppers work. Red pepper flakes are what I use, but I’m really sensitive to spice. Chili peppers are standard in chili. Jalapenos are the most spicy I’ve heard about being included commonly. Ghost peppers are even more spicy.
The more other things you throw in the chili, the more you’re making it something other than chili. There’s goulash, which is a spicy tomato sauce with random meat and veggies, usually whatever’s cheapest in the store, and often includes some sort of pasta. There’s gumbo, which is like soupy goulash without the pasta, sometimes with rice.
There are a lot of peppers in between jalapenos and ghost peppers! Please do not go straight from jalapenos to ghost peppers!
https://pepperjoe.com/pages/hot-pepper-heat-scale
I’ve done a little experimentation with combining hot and medium peppers (not in chili, but the principle should apply) and I think the flavor is more interesting.
Thank you for fleshing out my input. As mentioned, I’m very sensitive to spicy, so I don’t keep up on what peppers are available.
If goulash is gulyás (from Hungary) or Gulasch (Austria) the primary ingredients are **lots of onions** and **lots of hot paprika**. Everything else is specific to the type of Gulasch. Don’t let Wikipedia trick you.
But no, not tomato. Tomato is used in Gulasch, but it’s not essential (you can totally skip it).
And good gulasch can be cheap, but it’s not made from cheap stuff by default. Gulasch meat contains lot’s of fat (“cheap”), but that’s for taste. You can make great vegan gulasch, w/o crappy meat, as well.
Oh my. Gulasch “cheap”. Tomatos. Oh my.
Goulash is an African American dish from the inland areas.
Oh? I found out about it playing Thea, a pagan Slavic deity game. Wikipedia indicates Hungarian origin. What made you associate it with African American cuisine?
I was assuming that SaiNushi’s comment was a joke, just one I couldn’t figure out.
I thought it might be a joke on Gullah cuisine, but the Gullah are not from inland.
There’s also American goulash, which is mostly unrelated to the Hungarian kind outside of the name, which is what I assume SaiNushi is talking about.
Aha! Yes, that’s surely what was referenced.
I never heard it called that. My mom called it (wince) “hishy-hash”, perhaps because she thought we wouldn’t eat it if it sounded exotic.
Ancho, guajillo, morita, or chipotle chiles. All dried, except the chipotle, which is canned.
Carrots are startlingly good for how not-good you’d think they’d be. Weird texture though. Same for nopales tbh. Recommend black beans but honestly chili is just a bad version of mixiotes IMO.
If carrots work well, maybe a full sofritto would.
Italian cooking:
1) chop and lightly fry some carrot, onion and celery
2) decide what you are going to cook
According to my Italian mom (am excellent cook) the Italian flavor profile is “salt, pepper, garlic, parsley, cheese”. Soffrito (carrot onion celery) is something she almost never used, but that’s probably just a regional/traditional/personal thing.
Canned chipotles are almost always in adobo sauce, which will give a rich, smokey, almost chocolatey flavor. Good for chili, but not every chili every time.
I was definitely thinking carrots and celery.
I am not familiar with the differences between beans – I used red kidney which seemed fine. What would using a black or others do?
Depends if you’re using canned or dried beans. If they’re canned, they will have slightly different flavors (and kidneys would be my favorite in that case: they have a nice sweetness to them, and a fuller flavor than black beans or pintos). (Canned lima beans or butter beans are surprisingly good in chili too.)
If they’re dried I haven’t found much difference. It’s mostly about looks.
As a general point, fresh lima beans are wonderful, assuming you like vegetables in the first place.
The canned lima beans of my childhood were nasty, but I don’t know whether canned lima beans have improved.
Black beans are by far the tastiest and best-textured beans. They’re softer and slightly milder than kidney beans, but IMO they take salt and spices much better. Black beans will taste like “”the spices you add, but bean-y,” while others taste more to me like “beans, and also the spices you add.”
People will recommend different peppers, and hopefully someone will recommend hot sauces containing those peppers. I just want to remind you that it matters when you add them. In my experience, the closer to serving you add jalapenos or habaneros, the more piquant your chili (and if you add them and leave the chili in the fridge overnight, the next day it will have lost a lot of its piquancy) — but this isn’t true for certain other peppers that gradually increase the piquancy of the chili the longer they sit in there.
I basically always add diced yams or sweet potatoes to my chili now. (One large sweet potato is enough for an 8qt pot.) I add them near the beginning, and if done right they should completely dissolve by the time the chili’s done. This shouldn’t be a problem in a slow cooker.
Is the yam/sweet potato in lieu of sugar?
I sauteed the pepper and put it in at the beginning; only beans went in at the end. What else should go at the end?
Yes.
Sauteeing the pepper at the beginning, depending on the type of pepper but definitely for habaneros and jalapenos, will greatly reduce its piquancy. If you want your chili more piquant, put the peppers in at the end.
Personally I think beans should go in at the beginning too so they can soak up the flavor but if they work for you at the end that’s probably fine.
add hot chilis early to maximize hot-ness (it takes more strongly after a day of rest), add hot chilis later to maximize aroma.
also, fresh herbs: add late, to preserve aroma; dried herbs: add early, so that taste resolves in stew.
Again, depends on the type of pepper. Habaneros definitely don’t work this way.
For vegetarian chili soy chorizo works really well, to the extent that most people don’t really register that it’s vegetarian. Also, juice from one lime in the last couple minutes is really tasty.
I use dried peppers in my chili. I effectively toast them and then simmer them with aromatic herbs in chicken stock, then blend it all together to effectively make chili paste. That gets added into more stock, cut up chuck roast, and red kidney beans to simmer in the dutch oven for a few hours.
(oh, and brandy)
Curry fusions
Pure spice: Cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes
Spice with flavor: Chili powder or paprika
Spice with tomatoes and misc seasonings: Salsa
As for additions, chicken works very well – throw in chicken breasts and then shred it with forks the next morning. Potatoes are good for filling out a vegetarian chili. I also have a recipe for black bean chili with oranges.
@DragonMilk Be careful, Chilli can be culture war just like barbecue and pickup trucks!
My personal preferences for chilli are the following:
– Chop 1 large onion and 2 bell peppers
– If you like mild heat, add 2 jalapeno peppers
– If you like medium heat, add 3-4 Serrano peppers
– If you like high heat, add 2 or 3 habanero peppers
Heat all of the above with butter or Oil
– Add 1 lb beef for every 2 peppers/1 onion
– As beef starts to brown, add garlic and chilli pepper (until it smells like the kind of chilli you like to eat).
Once meet is browned:
– Pour meat, onion, peppers into crock pot
– Add 1 quart tomatoes for every lb of beef.
– Add 2 16 oz cans of chilli beans for each lb of beef
Stir frequently
– Smell and add spices to taste, this includes:
– Salt
-Pepper
-Chilli Powder
-Garlic
– If you are a fan of high heat, commercial sauces such as Dave’s insanity sauce.
Cook for 2 to 8 hours at low heat
– Add Crackers, cheese, and sour cream to taste.
Make enough so that you can have seconds after the Chilli has refrigerated over night.
Coriander, if you consider that non-standard.
IME cayenne pepper works well but I’m no chef.
As for non-standard ingredients: I always add half a bottle of (light) beer to my chili with the canned ingredients. Not sure how well it would go with vegetarian chili but with normal chili it’s delicious.
There are lots of spices you can try beyond pepper! Ground cumin, oregano, cinnamon, garlic powder. Cocoa (a small amount).
I prefer chili with lots of vegetables: carrots, spinach, corn, squash. You can keep these (plus canned beans and tomatoes) around in canned or frozen form and basically always have the ingredients for a chili.
Hopefully the dust has settled on this issue enough that it’s not CW-territory:
How does the motivation for the (most recent) US-Iraq war break down? Between oil, geopolitical control, fear of WMDs, 9/11 hysteria, etc?
Maybe separating it out by people would help (if Cheney’s motivations were different than Bush’s or congress’s).
My vote is, “not nearly dead enough for this thread.”
We could invoke the three-day rule for great tragedies involving loss of life and say that we should discourage litigating this until three days after the US occupation of Iraq has ended.
Of course, that risks the debate being delayed long enough that our grandchildren might be having it, instead of us.
The usual rule of thumb applies: if you feel the need to preface your post with “I think this is non-CW”, it’s CW.
Aw c’mon that’s not always true.
“Rules of thumb”, by definition, aren’t always true, but the point is that they usually are…
True. What I should have written is that I think this axiom is untrue enough of the time that it’s not a good axiom.
Effectively zero. I mean, Iraq is a more important country than it would be without oil, and so looms larger on the radar than, say, syria did in 2003, but the war had nothing to do with control of the oil, petrodollars, or any of that nonsense.
You’d have to elaborate on what you mean by this.
This is hard to disentangle from 9/11, which made the WMD threat loom a lot larger in everyone’s mind.
Hard to judge in a strict percentage basis. You can make make a case for 0%, or 100%. Without it, no invasion of Iraq happens, because it gave the administration political capital and encouraged them to act far more aggressively than they would have without it. But in a different administration with different instincts, you would have gotten a very different response.
Putting aside the question of hysteria, the biggest single reason for the war was that after 9/11, Bush told his advisors that he wanted to solve the terrorism problem for good, and the only people who had a real plan to do that were the neo-cons. They said that terrorism was basically a product of non-functional societies with an excess of angry young men, and the way to stop it was to remake those societies into something that actually worked by spreading democracy, mom, and apple pie. The less neo-conny members of the cabinet, like Cheney, went along with this because the policy prescription (knocking off american enemies) was something they were on board with for more traditional reasons.
This, mostly. It wasn’t a terribly good plan, but it was a plan.
But even if you are cynical enough to believe we can have peace and prosperity without democracy, putting an end to international terrorism means making sure that autocracies like Saudi Arabia have as their #1 priority “don’t piss off the United States by encouraging your angry young men to go abroad and kill foreigners”. Through early 2003, the #1 priority of Saudi Arabia etc was keeping Iraq safely contained, and #2 was keeping the attention of their angry young men focused outward rather than inward. Or maybe #2 and #1, respectively. Invading Iraq superficially looked like it would take one of those issues off the table while serving as an object lesson on the costs of pissing off the United States.
Invading Iraq with no good plan for the subsequent occupation, had the actual effect of making everyone’s new #1 priority in the region being the containment of a newly-empowered Iran while undercutting the “don’t piss off the United States” message by making it clear that we had exceeded our tolerance for messy Middle Eastern military interventions, so no points for the neocons on that front.
Also undercutting the “don’t piss off the United States” message: we invaded the wrong country. None of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis. Most of them were Saudis, as was Osama.
If you are suggesting that the United States should have invaded Saudi Arabia instead, note that it is geopolitically infeasible to invade just Saudi Arabia. And the smart plans for invading a collection of countries including Saudi Arabia, probably start with Iraq and move on to Saudi Arabia second. Note also that, contra Blutarsky, the Germans never bombed Pearl Harbor (and the Italians didn’t even invade Poland).
Since it demonstrably is possible to invade just Iraq, a plan that starts with invading Iraq, conquering and effectively occupying Iraq, and then saying “Any volunteers for #2?”, has some merit. It does however require that the conquest of Iraq not turn into a quagmire that occupies some 2-300% of the US’s political and military bandwidth in the region.
In addition to what John Schilling said, you don’t want to punish countries that are getting better*, because that sends the completely wrong message. It’s a big part of why doing what we did in Libya was such a disaster, because Qaddafi, for all his faults, had actually caved to US pressure and was reforming. Invading him sent the message that “If you do what we want not only will we not defend you, we’ll throw you under the bus as soon as someone in your country gins up a half decent mob”, meaning that any dictator with any sense will just dig his heels in and refuse to reform.
Saudi Arabia, for all its faults, has been getting better, if very slowly. And anyone who could run the place would almost certainly be worse.
*better, in this case, means doing more of whatever it is people think you want than they were recently.
I don’t know that invading Saudi Arabia in retaliation for 9/11 would have been a good idea. But invading Iraq in retaliation for 9/11 made zero sense. We might as well have attacked Paraguay. It sent the message that the U.S. might invade you no matter what you do.
Saudi Arabia was and is a major ally in the region, so invading SA would also have kind-of undermined the incentives of other countries to be our allies.
The point of attacking Iraq wasn’t retaliation. It was draining the swamp, and getting people on board with the project by going after a particularly smelly swamp first, not necessarily the one that was the largest or most mosquito infested. Afghanistan was about retaliation.
The United States hadn’t spent the previous decade randomly bombing Paraguay to no good end.
And maybe we shouldn’t have spent the previous randomly bombing Iraq to no good end, but we did. Having done so, changing our mind and bombing Saudi Arabia instead would have made us look weak and indecisive. And it would have meant that whatever we did in Iraq, we’d be doing with a powerful and hostile force on our flank with every incentive to make our Saudi invasion as difficult as possible.
Iraq didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, yes, but Italy didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor. Iraq was already our enemy for reasons that had nothing to do with 9/11, and wasn’t going to stop being our enemy just because we changed our mind. So whatever we did in the Middle East, we would have to do with Iraq standing as our enemy.
I’m struggling to figure out how this helps us solve any issue with Saudi Arabia. In addition, further weakening Iraq strengthened Iran, who also don’t like us.
It’s one thing to say that regional and geopolitics forced us not to confront Saudi Arabia. It’s another to say that this forced us to attack Iraq.
It’s like the old joke about the NCAA that they were so mad at Alabama’s cheating that they gave Southwester Illinois Technical Community College the death penalty.
So we can you expand on the idea that invading Iraq somehow was intended to meet some sort of strategic goal associated with 9/11?
It was kind of like looking under the lamp for your keys in dark.
cassander stated it earlier up:
The concern back then was that we could retaliate for 9/11 with a focused attack on Al-Qaeda, declare the problem solved, and return home, only to have two more skyscrapers fall to the next terrorist group to figure out AQ’s formula. Or a city nerve-gassed, a nuclear bomb set off, etc.
This wasn’t implausible. 9/11 was just the latest in a series of gradually escalating terrorist attacks against US assets, including civilians. Each time, there’d be proportional response, and the next move was yet another attack. So Bush apparently decided to get proactive and try to solve the general problem.
The general problem meant bringing down several bad regimes, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. NK had nukes, and was propped up by China, which was both far too powerful and actually a good trading partner, so diplomacy was likely the solution there. Saudi Arabia was an ally, and improving, so the solution there was to just wait for it to solve itself. Iran was the root, but it was hard to get to without a closer base. Syria was propped up by Iran. Libya was vulnerable, but far from Iran.
So, Iraq fit the sweet spot between being vulnerable and leading to the primary solution.
If Iraq’s occuption had gone well, I fully expect Bush’s rhetoric to turn toward Syria / Iran / Libya next. Qaddafi folded early, yielding an unexpected win and leaving just Syria and Iran. So next would have been to deliver an ultimatum to renounce terrorism, or be invaded from a bordering country. If they capitulate like Libya, great. If not, the US rolls Iran up, Syria shrivels up (as well as Hezbollah, turning Lebanon into a staunch ally), leaving NK as the last rogue state.
Or so the story might have gone.
“Iran was the root”
Uh… citations most definitely needed.
Those that say that Saudi Arabia is reforming, does this extend to the funding of terrorist groups?
Because what I *sense* is that, terrorist supporting nation on the one hand, and geoppolitical rival on the other, are used as if they are interchangeable. Iran being threat number one and Saudi Arabia being a US ally and showered with weapons in the context of terror attacks against US citizens makes little sense. It also makes little sense in the context of supporting secularism.
It does make sense in the context of certain countries being enemies of the United States for reasons unrelated to how likely or how often groups from that country want to harm American citizens.
This was common knowledge since at least the 1990s. I recall cartoons tracing funding for Hezbollah, for instance, to Syria, and in turn to the Ayatollah.
I agree that “terrorist-sponsoring nation” and “geopolitical rival” are not equal, although the former is pretty much a subset of the latter.
As for the difference between SA and Iran, it’s more akin to the difference between you kicking out a party guest who makes a scene on your lawn and the other guy who makes a scene on your lawn gets to lie down on your couch in the basement because he’s been helping you around the house for the last five years.
Iran supports Hezbolah, which carries out terrorist attacks against Israel and sometimes against rival groups in Lebanon, but which had nothing to do with 9/11 and doesn’t have much to do with the US. (At least since we pulled the Marines out of Lebanon under Reagan.). I think Hezbolah also has done a lot of fighting in Syria on the side of Assad.
Compare with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia–both allies of ours with track records of supporting terrorists, including some that have attacked the US.
At the risk of opening a can of worms: There’s a belief I’ve encountered that the Bush administration was planning to invade Iraq from the moment Bush entered office, and 9/11 was just a pretext. No idea how accurate this is.
It’s been a really long time, but I remember Bush talking about finishing the job in Iraq during the 2000 presidential campaign. My sense is that there was a faction of people (neocons as well as the older cons) who wanted to invade Iraq for a long time. The 9/11 attacks created a political situation in which everyone was in a panic and it was possible to get support to invade Iraq. The utter mismanagement of that invasion and occupation probably killed voter enthusiasm for that sort of adventure for the next decade or so.
What is the strongest form of the argument in favor of raising the minimum wage?
I don’t know if it’s *the* strongest argument, but my reason for support of minimum wage is that my experience has led me to believe that most employers cannot help value employees by how much they pay them over any other measure (endowment effect?)
Likewise, someone who is earning almost nothing ends up being seen as a less valuable human being, including less valuable than someone not working at all! (who I guess is seen as having potential value).
I can remember quite vividly when I was affected by a decently sized minimum wage increase when I was a student. Management wasn’t too happy, but oddly enough, the bosses were treating us with a little more respect a few months afterward.
It made me understand that when brain and economics collide, brain wins 4 times out of 5.
This effect seems to extend to the general populace. Most of us (including myself) have difficulty unlinking someone’s worth as a human being from how much they earn.
Anyway, since I consider it important that all human beings in our society are accorded a certain minimum level of respect, and that many human beings are simply incapable of according respect to someone earning too little, I support a minimum wage.
You should hire them all away by offering the higher wages.
Otherwise employers will just lay them off, and we do, in fact, have less respect for the unemployed.
Again, only personal experience here, but that was certainly not what I was told by a friend in HR (later confirmed by a head hunter). I was facing the unemployment as the company I worked for collapsed and was contemplating worst case scenarios. Discussions about what was the household could run on were discussed in the presence of my friend, who surprised me by being adamant.
“Businesses never have a good idea of how valuable you are, so they usually want to use another company’s idea of how valuable you are. If you take a low paying job, you’re telling your next employer that in fact *you* believe that’s how valuable you are. And that will be the end of your career.”
Now the apocalypse scenario didn’t come to pass, but it gave me incite that in the absence of a first-order metric, respect is accorded by what we perceive as the potential earnings.
Hence why I see the bottle-picker who earns a dollar or two an hour gets less societal respect than the person who doesn’t have a job, and has too much “self-respect” to scrounge around for any job that earns *something*.
I dislike the tendency, even as I notice my brain falling into exactly that same rut.
I think this works to a limited extent. HR people will also tell you that almost nothing is as deadly as a “gap” in your resume – a period of say, over a year, where you weren’t working and don’t have a really good explanation as to why you weren’t working. Possibly because it implies that you weren’t really worth what you thought you were worth after all.
Agreed that long-term unemployment is going to hurt your status (although its the hammer blow to one self-esteem that makes me quite worried about high minimum wage disemployment effects), but honestly, I am not certain whether you’d be better off telling a potential employer that you’ve unemployed for three years, or that you’ve been earning a dollar an hour picking through trash for the last few years.
I’d like to think unemployment is worse, but I can’t shake the feeling that it might not be so.
[Putting my comments about status in context, I’m not comparing $7/hr minimum wage with $15/hr. I’m considering no minimum wage at all vs. a $7/hr minimum wage. It’s at lowest end of the spectrum where I see people’s valuation for another human being just plummet, even below those being supported by the state.]
“gap” in your resume
Which is why I tell tech people if they think their resume may develop a gap, they should promptly join an unfunded startup, or start an unfunded startup, or sign up for some sort of training academy (even if the reality of it is is going to meetups and reading manuals while sitting in a cafe), or somehow “consult”.
It’s not been necessary advice for the past couple of years, of course. But, winter is always coming.
Respect and desire to hire are not the same thing. Otherwise you are not respecting anyone you don’t hire.
@tlwest,
Which is why, on the resume, “earned $1 an hour picking through garbage” becomes “launched an entrepreneurial venture to optimize local recycling techniques”
Thank you for starting my day off with a good laugh.
Well, respect is not binary, so I don’t think that would hold even if they were the same thing.
However, given roughly similar qualifications, I’d say hirers (at least at the levels I’ve had exposure to) really gravitated towards status as a qualification – mostly because they don’t have any metrics worth a damn to differentiate between qualified candidates, and their “hunch” was correlated with status (albeit unconsciously).
> Management wasn’t too happy, but oddly enough, the bosses were treating us with a little more respect a few months afterward.
Do you have any evidence that this was caused by psychological effects and not ordinary economics? Once someone has been receiving a higher wage for a period of time, it allows them to have built up more savings which in turn gives them a better ability to quit their job without having already found another one.
But that isn’t unique to a minimum wage, it would be true of anything that increases the ability to do that, including an alternative like a UBI which doesn’t provide a disincentive for employing less skilled workers.
Also, to whatever extent a rise in the minimum wage does lead to layoffs, and to whatever extent the layoffs are determined by level of productivity/skill, then the remaining minimum wage workers are, on average, more productive and more highly skilled than the previous class of minimum wage workers were, and thus, worthy of more respect.
The amount of respect society offers people based on their wages is not absolute but relative. So if you go from 3% of people on min wage to 6% on min wage after the increase, you’ll now have doubled the number of people looked down on for being minimum wage employees.
But, as I say above, the only concern isn’t “minimum wage employee” vs ” non-minimum wage employee”, but also the status inherent from “minimum wage employee” vs “welfare recipient/lazy bum”
Basically, during the MW increase there can be three distinct groups of people who see their status affected. Those who get laid off because of the increase (huge status decrease), those who were making MW before and continue to make MW at the new rate (slight status increase, so long as people appreciate that layoffs were made and were made based on skill/ability), and those who were making above MW before but are now making MW (status decrease).
I’d say, it is a simple policy that will disproportionately benefit the poor. (Not everyone who’s poor will get the benefit, but (almost) everyone who will get the benefit will be relatively poor.)
That is just begging the question. What is the *argument* that it will help the poor instead of hurting them as conventional microeconomics would predict?
The way I use the word advantage, the fact that they would get more money is obviously an advantage / argument / benefit. There could then be other disadvantages for the poor, but they wouldn’t make the advantage non-existent.
I’m not arguing that it will be a net benefit for the poor.
All an employer has to do is automate their jobs away, and they would get LESS money.
But minimum wage is not the same as giving poor people more money! This is my pet peeve that people talk about minimum wage as if the law stated ‘you have to raise Bob’s wage to $15/h’. But what it actually says is that your current contract with Bob (who makes $10/h) is not illegal. Several things may now happen, one of them being that you (the employer) take the hit to your profits and raise Bob’s wage. Other possibilities include eliminating Bob’s job altogether, automating it away and using more capital and less labour intensive methods of production in general, hiring fewer but more skilled workers – all of which means firing Bob. Or you could raise Bob’s wage and use your new negotiating power to shift more costs to Bob by for example making him buy and pay for cleaning his work uniform, spillage costs etc.
That minimum wage results in the poor getting more money is something that needs to be argued not asserted.
Personally I find the oligopsony argument the most convincing. Minimum wage seems like a very crude tool to fight market inefficiency but at least I understand why it could work.
I’m also open to the possibility that it just works even though we don’t yet understand why.
The argument by automation only works if the automation is more expensive than current minimum wage, but less expensive than the increased minimum wage. If it is above the interval, the employer will not automate the job. If it is below the interval, the employer will sooner or later automate it anyway.
(For the long-term perspective, if the progress of artificial intelligence does not stop, sooner or later each of us will be replaced by a machine that costs less than the minimum wage necessary for our survival.)
I don’t know exactly how far the automation wave has travelled, but the people who are most sensitive to being hit by a marginal increase are those at the margins.
Also, the calls for repeated and follow-up increases in the minimum wage encourage more investment into automation. Maybe my $16/hour job isn’t worth automating away, but at $20 it is, and if employers or robot makers think the $20 mark is going to come in a few years, then they’ll start work on the robots now.
Note that automation is not an all or nothing proposition. A widget factory will probably not replace a worker with a robot that performs the exact same function. Rather it will buy a more expensive machine that it now takes only 9 instead of 10 workers to operate. Or it will build widgets with more expensive materials that will require less work doing quality control. Or switch to a process that uses more raw materials but is less labor intensive. There are countless ways to substitute capital for labor.
Empirical experience. Certainly there is some theoretical level at which a too-high minimum wage which will do net harm, but minimum wage increases that actually happen have worked out well if you look at the data.
Could we be more specific about what exactly the conventional microeconomics predicts? Just to make sure we are not playing motte and bailey here.
As far as I know, microeconomics predicts that if you increase the minimum wage, some people will lose their jobs as a result. However, it does not say how many people will lose their jobs. The exact number would depend on the specific shapes of the supply and demand curves, which can be almost arbitrary. Both the supply and demand can be very flexible, very inflexible, or anything in between, depending on all kinds of things.
So the fact that “someone will lose their job” does not necessarily imply it will make things worse on average. Depends on numbers. Perhaps the increase of minimum wage by 10% will cause 10% of workers to lose their jobs. In that case, it is easy to argue that it is not worth doing. But for other shapes of the supply and demand curves, it is also possible that a 50% increase in minimum wage would only cause 0.5% of workers to lose their jobs. That could actually be an improvement on average.
It is actually quite possible that the result would be a net improvement for all workers. (Notice that “net improvement” and “increase in gross income” are not the same thing.) For example, imagine a situation where previously both the husband and wife had jobs, making 1000 copper coins each. After the change of the minimum wage, the husband now makes 1500 copper coins, and the wife stays at home. It would not be completely surprising to find out that the previous costs of the wife keeping her job (such as maintaining the second car, paying for babysitting, etc.) were as high as 500 copper coins, in which case the new situation is actually a net profit for the family as a whole.
tl;dr — I believe that by saying “as conventional microeconomics would predict” you are making your case appear much stronger than it actually is.
Fair enough. Some workers get raises some workers get fired. On net value is destroyed but the worker class as a whole may plausibly get a bigger piece of the slightly smaller pie. If this is what you care about ‘conventional microeconomics’ allows that things get better or worse. My bad.
On the other hand the group of people who lose on the change are the least productive workers – precisely the ones who are the most disadvantaged already. So saying that ‘the poor benefit’ – even if on average they would (which is uncertain) is at least debatable.
I read in Thomas Sowell somewhere that early US minimum wage legislation was in big part driven by the desire to price blacks out of the market (I don’t have an audit trail for this claim, but it makes perfect sense). How’s that for benefiting the poor?
The double income trap thing you describe does count as an argument in favor in my book (if not super convincing to me).
I think Viliam gets to the meat of the issue.
Depending on how the shape of the curve, increasing the minimum wage could be
a) a big win for the working poor, with few to no losers
b) a big loss for the working poor, with few to no winners
c) anywhere in between.
Why would this be so? As I understand it the world of spherical cow economic models (workers with one non-fungible skill), if there is more demand for my skill than there is supply, I earn my marginal product. If there is one more person providing that skill than demand, then everyone with that skill earns what it costs to keep us alive and not a penny more.
If adding or subtracting a worker doesn’t add or destroy value, why would any other arbitrary wage altering factor do the same.
Now if minimum wage was above unskilled worker’s marginal product, then obviously there are problems, but historically, wages for the unskilled seem to be influenced far more by excess supply than marginal product.
@tlwest When a worker gets a raise because of the minimum wage, what he gains is what someone else (consumers, higher-skilled employees, shareholders) loses: it’s zero sum on monetary terms. When a worker gets fired because of the minimum wage, both the worker and the employer lose: a mutually beneficial trade is prevented, it’s negative sum.
Supply and demand are not fixed amounts, they are functions of the price (in this case, wage). Even if supply of labor is relatively inelastic (everyone will work one full-time job at whatever wage the market will pay), demand isn’t.
If there are n unskilled workers, they will each make the product of the marginal (nth) worker, which is equal to the wage at which the demand is n full-time workers (assuming each worker works one full-time job). This value may relatively small (though way above subsistence), as n is bigger than the number of unskilled workers the economy can put to highly productive use.
However, when you talk about excess supply, you seem to assume that this value is zero: that there is demand a fixed (smaller than n) number unskilled workers, and employers have no use whatsoever for more than that. This is not the case (and if it was, unemployment would be way higher than today, and way more people would make the current minimum wage).
Your source on economic models seems to have missed the fact that both supply and demand are functions of price.
I don’t think that’s the case. My understanding of earlier increases is that they were supported by the northern textile industry, both employers and employees, to reduce the competitive advantages of the southern textile industry.
More generally, the most unambiguous beneficiaries are skilled workers for whom unskilled workers provide a lower quality but less expensive substitute. The most unambiguous losers are those unskilled workers who get priced off the market.
It corrects labor market monopsony power for the poorest and appears to have small effects on employment.
The case for raising the federal minimum wage is very hard to make.
This is my personal bugbear for supporting UBI. Hypothesis being that labor conditions would be very different when people can actually afford to quit over petty feudalistic bullshit. Currently the friction costs are just too high, so you have to suck up what the
minor lordlings with delusions of grandeurmanagement dishes out. And smile and ask for more.Unions are an alternative but kinda crap in comparison because they degenerate into an alternate track to petty fiefdoms.
This is definitely an argument against the minimum wage, however. If there is more supply than demand for unskilled work, then workers can afford to resign or get fired, as they can’t be sure that they can find another job. And employers can abuse workers without having to pay any price for it. On the other hand, if there is no minimum wage or it’s low enough, then employers have to choose between paying a lower wage and not abusing workers, or abusing workers and paying a higher wage to those who will put up with it.
I don’t think that’s actually true.
There’s a fundamental disparity of negotiating position between employer and employee that’s worth keeping in mind.
The employer will, presumably, offer someone a job if, and only if, hiring that person will earn the employer more than it costs to hire that person.
The employee, on the other hand, starts in the red – they have costs of living that must be met, whatever happens. The employee must take whatever job is available to them or go into debt. They are seldom in a position to keep refusing jobs until some minimum level of wage and/or working conditions is met.
This disparity privileges employers considerably. It is quite conceivable – and has been known to happen, which is why we got labour laws in the first place – that an employer will pay a pittance and abuse employees to boot. He may even consider himself their benefactor whilst doing so – he’s providing them with a living, after all.
@Faza (TCM) People need to have a job, but they can choose between the jobs that are available. Even if you don’t have another job offer available right now, you can start looking for another job, and switch once you find one. Also, if there aren’t loads of job offers above the typical wage level, that indicates that the typical wages are pretty close to the market-clearing wage (what you would get on a perfect market). Otherwise either existing or new companies would try to poach other companies’ employees by offering a wage that’s higher than their current wage, but still allow a company to make an above-market-clearing profit.
We can observe that in places with a low minimum wage (compared to the productivity of the place), the vast majority of people make more than the minimum wage — whether because they have options, or because employers want to motivate them, or some other reason. According to a quick search, in Texas, where the minimum wage is $7.25, just 2.7% of the people make less than $7.50, and just 11% make less than $10.
Now let’s say that employees are indifferent about making $x/hour without abuse, or $(x+1)/hour and being abused. Let’s say some employer pays $9/hour and abuses its workers. Whatever is its reason to pay $9 rather than $7.25, it could achieve the same by paying $8 and not abusing the workers.
That happened when productivity was low, so the market-clearing wage was pittance by today’s standards — and companies couldn’t have paid much more than pittance even if they hadn’t made any profit. We make a lot more than pittance not because of labor laws, but because we are more productive.
We have labor laws because people wanted better working conditions without accepting a decrease in salaries, and they figured that they could get it if they get the government to force companies to provide better conditions. I can imagine that nominal wages didn’t decrease because of stickiness, but I’m pretty sure that on the long run the laws did decrease wages by about as much as workers would’ve had to accept in exchange for the company voluntarily improving working conditions: the market-clearing wage for less work in better conditions is less than for more work in worse conditions. Note that most of the bad conditions labor law prohibits are not pointless abuse, but actually lower costs or increase revenue for the company compared to providing better conditions.
I find it unlikely that there are monopsonies or even oligopsonies in the labor market, especially for unskilled labor. Salaries for unskilled labor are low because the market value of unskilled labor is low (it would be low even in a perfect market). However, in any city, there are countless companies, small and big, employing unskilled workers. It’s implausible that they can form any sort of stable cartel. {Mono,oligo}-{polies,psonies} form when there are one or a few companies on one side of a market, and this fact only allows them to significantly increase/decrease prices if the barriers of entry are high. The only situation where I can imagine a significant monopsony situation for low-skilled labor is small towns centered around one big employer.
An evidence that the labor market is competitive is the fact that the vast majority of people make more than the minimum wage, often significantly more, especially in places where the minimum wage is low. If the labor market was uncompetitive, they would have no reason to pay significantly more than the minimum wage to anyone. (Except perhaps to incentivize good work, but even then they could just threaten to fire those who don’t work hard enough rather than pay more to those who work hard.)
ISTM that a minimum wage is an attempt to drive a better bargain for all low-wage workers than they can get for themselves. The bad news is, some people won’t be employable at the new higher wage, and if the wage is too high, that will be a *lot* of people. So I think the strongest argument for a minimum wage is going to be that it will be set at a reasonable level, and will get a better bargain for enough people at the bottom that their benefit outweighs the losses of the newly unemployable.
The empirics are definitely the strongest argument, as they are for most things.
One complementary argument is that companies choose salaries that are optimal for them, and as with most maxima, you’d expect only a small change in utility for a small change in wage (for example, higher wages could attract better people, or induce the existing people to work there longer and gain more skills). In contrast, workers don’t have any such trade off and are overall better off.
I’m also curious about the argument that raising the minimum wage will increase productivity, as it increases incentives to automate work or train people better. I personally find it weird that this is only mentioned by left economists (because they like the minimum wage) and is not discussed by the more conservative/libertarian economists who otherwise argue that anything that slightly increases the rate of growth is a moral imperative.
In a competitive labor market, the main reason to pay a particular wage (namely the market-clearing wage) is to have people work for you at all, rather than for your competitors. I’ve argued above why I think the labor market is competitive.
Two things. First, I don’t accept that companies actually set wages fine tuned to the market clearing rate. For instance, there is good evidence for nominal wage rigidity, where companies are very unlikely to cut wages in recessions even as unemployment goes up. In addition there is evidence that companies raise wages for reasons besides getting bodies into positions. Walmart and Amazon both made fairly dramatic wage hikes recently, the unemployment rate is falling but not discontinuous, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
And the second is that you’re treating (here and elsewhere) the prevailing economic conditions as an exogenous, completely uncontrolled parameter. If a company can’t come up with a business model to employ people at the higher wage, then I agree that person will be out of a job. If no company can come up with such a business model for a broad swathe of people, then the Fed will cut rates and either growth or inflation will sort it out. (note the empirical disemployment effects of minimum wage hikes are quite modest even in jurisdictions without an independent monetary policy, so the ask from the Fed would not be very big.)
Automating something doesn’t cause economic growth if automating it costs more than paying a human to do it at a market-clearing wage.
Employers decide how much they train their employees depending on what amount of training maximizes the value they get out of the employee minus the cost of the training. That doesn’t depend on how much salary they pay. (Assuming they are employing the same people, as opposed to, say, employing more trainable people as a result of the minimum wage. Also, one way the minimum wage might increase the incentive to train people is that it creates a surplus of labor, and thus makes it harder for the worker to go to another employer for a higher wage after getting trained. I doubt it’s worth it.)
I’ve seen an anecdotal argument against the minimum wage along similar lines: in jurisdictions with a higher minimum wage, employers force their workers to work harder. The wage for a given quality of work doesn’t increase; instead, in places with a high minimum wage, only jobs that pay a higher wage for harder work are available, while in places with low or no minimum wage, jobs that pay a lower wage for less hard work are also available.
As a libertarian, I don’t support forcing people to work hard for higher pay even if they prefer to work less hard for less pay. I’m for people having the opportunity to produce more and get a higher income; and for not reducing people’s incentive to work hard below the market value of said hard work. It may appear that people like me consider the GDP super important because most measures that decrease GDP (or GDP growth) do so by preventing people from being productive, or reducing their incentive to do so. However, raising the GDP by giving people more incentive to work hard than they would have on a free market makes people worse off.
A more sarcastic answer to why libertarians/conservatives don’t discuss these arguments would be that the arguments are wrong, so only those people discuss them who are motivated because they like the minimum wage
Investing in automation and training are both decisions that have the potential to leak to other companies, so I wouldn’t expect the optimal social rate to be the same as the profit maximizing rate for individual companies. Some role for government intervention in encouraging R&D is (mostly) uncontroversial, and a broad incentive to raise worker productivity to at least $15/hour seems like a worthwhile goal with the advantages of being technology agnostic (no picking winners and losers) and resistant to political capture (no hand outs to favored companies).
I agree that it might not help growth in the short term (though the jury is still out imho), but long term growth is largely determined by improvements in technology leading to increases in productivity. For a historical comparison, the role of high wages in driving innovation is popular (though not universally accepted) as a theory for the onset of the industrial revolution in England.
And finally, if we go around assuming ideas that are mostly espoused by one side of a debate are wrong, we would end up accepting that some wildly contradictory things 🙂
Do you mean that competitors would copy it? If your company can produce more with less cost by doing something (such as automation and training), it’s in your interest to do it even if your competitors will copy it. You enjoys increased profit at least until it’s copied, while if a competitor does it first, your profit will decrease until you copy it.
I don’t see how automation even comes up if we are concerned about the poor. How does replacing a $8/hour worker with an (amortized) $12/hour machine benefit the worker?
I only see government involvement as probably beneficial* in fundamental research, which can’t be directly turned into dollars. When it comes to applied research, or the development of business models, which can be directly turned into profit, private companies have ample incentive to do it, and I doubt government intervention (beyond the patent system) has much of a benefit. I don’t know what economists would say.
* At least in terms of increasing the amount of research output, less clear in terms of economic growth. I don’t know how much fundamental research is actually eventually turned into something practical, and (especially if it’s a small part) whether that part wouldn’t be done by private companies in the absence of government involvement.
I´ll just note that there is a difference between arguments for existence of MW vs for its increase, and with regards to raising of MW lot depends on which country we are talking about and to what level.
I’ve posted a reply to this in completely the wrong part of the thread (I hate typing on a mobile phone), so here’s a placeholder instead.
Link
I don’t know about strongest, but the most elegant argument is due to Card and Kruger. The argument (my words, not theirs) is that if the employers of unskilled labor are monopsonists they will pay below marginal revenue product for the same reason that a monopolist charges above marginal cost. Forcing wages up towards MRP then increases both employment—the monopsonist was deliberately holding down his demand for unskilled labor in order to hold down the wages he had to pay—and economic efficiency.
The problem with the argument is that unskilled labor is unspecialized, which makes the assumption of monopsony employment in most contexts implausible.
Suppose that there are only two employers in town: Dick’s Ditch Digging and Friedman’s French Fries. Both jobs are unskilled, but you can afford to pay your employees $15/hr and I can only afford to pay mine $10/hr. If there’s a $12/hr minimum wage, obviously I’ll go out of business. But without one, an assuming there were more job seekers than jobs, wouldn’t our salaries converge? Without collusion, I mean, just due to you occasionally lowering your wages and noting that you still have applicants.
(ETA if it wasn’t clear that my point in asking is that, if so, it seems like this would be functionally equivalent to the case with only one employer, even if these jobs are totally unspecialized)
(ETA 2: I realize unrealistic hypotheticals are unrealistic, and “as long as there are more applicants than jobs” could be interpreted to mean that there are an infinite number of applicants and our salaries would tend towards zero. So perhaps I should pre-emptively clarify that I don’t mean that. What I mean is, if there enough job seekers that both of us can comfortably under-pay, would we converge at the same wage or different ones?
Yet another way to put the same question, in case there are other mis-interpretable parts: if there was a single employer in some town (let’s call it Dick & Friedman’s Ditch Digging and French Frying Emporium) who, as the town’s sole employer, enjoyed monopsony wage-setting power, and it had settled at paying all of its employees $5/hr, would it not follow that, if the business split (presumably due to some sort of abstruse political disagreement between the owners), the two resulting businesses would also end up paying the same $5/hr wage, even if they weren’t colluding and their margins were different?)
No.
When it was a single firm, the firm knew that in order to hire one more worker it would have to raise wages for all workers. Suppose the wage is $5/hour and the extra production from one more worker was $10/hour. Hiring that worker increases profits by $5/hour, if you only look at him. But in order to hire one more worker the firm will have to raise wages to $5.06 for all workers. There are a hundred workers, so that costs the firm $6, making hiring one more worker a net loss.
Now the firm splits. Each half is hiring 50 workers. If my half hires one more it still gets the $5 gain but the loss to it is only $3, so it pays the firm to do so. So, assuming no coordination, it does.
When it was a single firm, the firm knew that in order to hire one more worker it would have to raise wages for all workers.
Can you please tell me what magical industry this is where, upon hiring a new worker, all the existing workers get pay raises? I would be very interested in applying for a job there, as every time they needed to take on someone new, I’d get an automatic raise!
I have never, ever worked anywhere where “we need to hire new seasonal labour/we’re getting more orders and need to hire more workers, oh well guess that means our regular staff all have to be paid £1 extra per hour AND for each new person” happened, so you can see why this intrigues me!
@Dieseach: Sure, not in the short term.
But in the long term, which dick and David are discussing, that information leaks out.
Right, and then you would hire one of my employees, right? Suppose we each employ some number of people at $5/hr, and I’m at equilibrium but you’re not. If you want more employees, you raise your wages to $5.01 and some of my employees quit to work for you. Now I need to find a new equilibrium in a tighter market than I’m used to, and either raise my wages to match or make due with fewer employees. Until I raise my wages to $5.01, you never have to raise yours to $5.02.
I’m not arguing with you, I know this is your area, but what am I missing here? As long as we share a labor pool (which seems to be implied by our jobs being unspecialized) it seems like the fact that our businesses are not equally efficient ought to mean we end up employing different numbers of people, but at the same wage.
@David Friedman, if you missed this question, I’m still curious as to the answer.
Dick,
Your follow-up question seems to be a different question than your original question.
Your original question seems to suggest that a single employer in town will be paying the same wage as if there were 2 employers engaged in competition. This isn’t the case.
1 employer, raising a wage from $5 for 99 workers, to $6 for 100 workers, is actually spending $56. That last worker needs to add $56 to the top-line to be worth his salt. He’s extremely expensive.
If there are 2 employers, and the market is effectively price-taking (IE, you can’t actually affect wages), and the wage is $6, the worker needs only to add $6 to the top-line. He’s literally $50 cheaper, from the POV of the company, because the company’s hiring decision does not affect the price of labor.
But if you ARE affecting the market, you might substantially reduce your hiring, so you can keep all of your wages low. This means a bunch of people unemployed for no good reason.
As for different efficiencies among firms, theoretically you would still be paying the same wage for the same labor, but in the real world this gets much more complicated much more quickly.
I think I see what I was missing now. I asked whether the two businesses would “end up paying the same $5/hr wage”. David answered no, which I took to mean that they would pay different wages (than each other). Upon further review, I guess he meant that they would pay the same wage as each other, but not the same wage as before.
By the time I made the second comment, I realized that would be the case. I didn’t intentionally move the goalposts, I focused on the wages being equal was because I thought that was what mattered. The underlying thing I’m actually asking about is whether C&K’s reasoning (that setting a minimum wage can increase employment, if the employer has a monopsony) would apply to this scenario, and I was thinking it would if the two companies paid equal wages. But, re-thinking it in order to respond to you, I see now that, in determining whether the employers would be subject to C&K’s reasoning, what’s important is whether they would pay the same wage as before, not as each other.
Correct.
And it follows that, if someone were to invent a new type of unskilled labor which is worse than all others (by which I mean, a type of work with less marginal revenue per worker than any other), that would drive the wages of all unskilled labor up slightly, right? I had always intuitively felt the opposite, i.e. that legislating the worst jobs out of existence drove the wages for the next-worst jobs up, so this is a useful update for me. (Though I still favor some level of minimum wage for other reasons)
I’m still more used to lurking on this board than posting, but I do want to say I appreciate all the responses and that many of them are very good arguments that I’d never heard before.
Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales recently hit 1,000,000 words and has been running for about 2 years. Based on chapter 162, which contains a very meta scene of Juniper talking with You-Know-Who, it seems like the work is halfway done, so we can probably expect another million words and couple of years before it finishes.
Alexander Wales also commissioned some Amaryllis art as a donation goal, but the reception was… mixed. I admit I didn’t like it too much (Amaryllis is not a fucking Sister of Battle), which is a shame because she is probably my favorite character in the webnovel, aside from Juniper himself (Joon/Mary OTP).
Oh hey, I was just thinking about this story this weekend.
V’z pnhtug hc nf bs fbzrjurer va gur yvoenel nep. Vg xrrcf zl vagrerfg, ohg V unir fbzr ceboyrzf jvgu gur cybg. Be znlor jvgu gur cnpvat, ernyyl. V gubhtug gur svefg nep jnf gur orfg nep bs gur jubyr fgbel, sebz Wbba’f ehqr njnxravat nobhg gur pehrygl bs gur frggvat, gb Nznelyyvf’f vagebqhpgvba (lbh ner pbeerpg ogj, fur’f gur orfg punenpgre), gb gur qvfcngpuvat bs gur eviny grnz, gb gur rneyl jbeyqohvyqvat naq abg-fb-fhogyr uvagf ng gur qverpgvba gur cybg jnf tbvat—cnegvphyneyl Nznelyyvf’f Rkvfgragvny Rzretrapvrf cbfvgvba va gur tbireazrag, juvpu vf jung gbyq zr V unq gb xrrc ernqvat.
Naq gura jr qebccrq nyy gung sbe n ernyyl ybat gvzr, va snibe bs gur nyzbfg pbzcyrgryl aneengviryl cbvagyrff pbasyvpg jvgu Nznelyyvf’f eryngvirf, naq n ybg bs whfg trggvat pnhtug onpx hc bapr ur qenvarq uvf obarf. Gur Pbybe Evbg be jungrire gurl jrer arire pnzr hc ntnva. Gur dhrfgvba V gubhtug jnf orvat frg hc—jung unccrarq gb gur frperg erfrnepu yno va Fvyzne?—jnf arire fb zhpu nf nfxrq. Gung frrzf yvxr n jnfgr. Naq abj jr’er onpx gb gung ybat-unatvat cybg ubbx, rkprcg Wbba jnagf gb tb evtug sbe Sry Frrq. Pbhyqa’g ur gnpxyr fbzrguvat yrff pbzcyrgryl vzcbffvoyr svefg?
Naq znlor vg jnf whfg zr, ohg Wbba frrzrq gb or orpbzvat zber bs na nffubyr gur shegure gur fgbel jrag. Vg jnf vzzrqvngryl boivbhf gung abg vairfgvat va fbpvny fxvyyf jnf tbvat gb uheg uvz, naq fubhyq unir orra boivbhf gb rirelbar. Gung vg gbbx uvz fb ybat gb ernyvmr gung vf cerggl qvfnccbvagvat, naq znqr zr pner yrff naq yrff nobhg gur eryngvbafuvc qenzn.
This is maybe the only piece of serial fiction I’m still reading right now. If this is an implicit recommendation I’m seconding it (it’s very niche, but a lot of commenters here are likely to be in that niche).
I was mildly surprised that we were only halfway through, given the exponential takeoff vibe we’ve been getting recently.
Still sort of rooting for a postmodern battle between Amaryllis and Juniper over who’s actually the main character.
I don’t think it is even possible to create Amaryllis art, because she is explicitly described as fulfilling the protagonist’s deepest fantasies, in appearance as well as mannerisms. Therefore, any art that does not fulfill the viewer’s deepest fantasies on at least some level will fall woefully short — but achieving this is impossible, since every viewer will have different preferences.
I get the feeling most people are trying to step around issues with the art. I personally haven’t written anything in locations where I suspect it might be seen by the artist, because it just doesn’t seem polite.
I feel like Alexander told the artist “No bikini armor, she is in heavy full plate” but the instead of drawing an athletic woman wearing a bulky costume, the artist just sketched the anatomy for a bulky woman.
Most of the body ratios in the image are just wrong unless it is supposed to depict a fantasy dwarf.
>Based on chapter 162, which contains a very meta scene of Juniper talking with You-Know-Who, it seems like the work is halfway done, so we can probably expect another million words and couple of years before it finishes.
I don’t think that statement is credible since Juniper can exceed or underperform in-story expectations. Alexander himself recently wrote that he expects to finish the story in 2019 ( https://www.patreon.com/posts/worth-candle-faq-26938299 ) which given plausible estimates would make more than 250,000 words unlikely.
Of course Alexander has consistently underestimated the length of this work so maybe it keeps going. I recall that two years ago he was expecting 700,000 words for the entire story.
Are air fryers worth it? Can you do anything with them that you can’t do with a convection oven? Or are they just the latest fad in a long line of 1-purpose kitchen appliances that end up in a garage sale two years down the line for 95% off because they take up too much space on your counter?
I use my air fryer more than I use my toaster, so I’d consider it worth it. To the best of my knowledge, air fryers *are* convection ovens, with a shiny coat of paint. I’m really satisfied with the product, and I’ve had it for two-ish years now. It’s basically the combination of all of the best features of an oven and a microwave. I put onion rings in for ten to fifteen minutes and out pops perfectly cooked, crispy onion rings. Without the hassle of bending over and grabbing a cooking tray from the cabinet, or letting the oven preheat. Frozen pizza? French fries? Any type of meat? Toasting bread? I basically just twist the timer and forget about it until I hear the chime. Basically the only thing I haven’t done with it is baking, but I hear if you make it small enough, that works as well.
Is this to say that if I have a convection oven, an air fryer is not worth it? Or does the size of the oven, and placement, power, and duration of the fans matter? I’ve haven’t really used the “convection” function on my oven too much, but my normal, full-size oven has a convection setting. But I thought that was mostly just to normalize the localized hot-spots throughout the oven. I don’t think the fans run all the time in my convection oven, just sometimes. Maybe the fact that my convection oven is very large, and the fans are at the back means that the air will be less concentrated, and less quickly moving around the food, meaning that it’ll be less analogous to actually frying food? I’m not sure if this is true.
My air fryer will produce results analogous to a regular oven in the same amount of tine, sans preheat. Sometimes even faster. Google says that the results are quicker than a convection oven, typically, though I’ve never owned one.
My dad bought an air fryer. He likes it, but to me it’s a lot of counter space to give up for just one function, and the capacity is *tiny*. He already has a microwave, a regular gas oven and a toaster oven and now he has this thing that can basically cook a few chicken wings and that’s all that fits. For comparison I used to have a convection microwave that could do everything ALL of those appliances did and was big enough to bake a tray of cookies or a sizable lasagna. I’d recommend one of those- same function as the air fryer and way more versatile.
As part of our biweekly dive into the archives, an audio version of Considerations on Cost Disease has been released on the SSC podcast feed.
It makes a useful companion to the recent review of Why Are The Prices So D*mn High
Random-ish over-specific job search question:
Because my resume is mostly administrative, I often/always get contacted for some jobs slightly outside my sphere. One of those job categories is help-desk type stuff; answering questions in company chat, answering questions by email and fielding occasional phone calls.
I’ve noticed that while all the requirements for these jobs are near exactly the same (clearly demonstrated communication abilities, help desk experience if possible and not much else) some of these jobs will mysteriously pay at a range much, much higher than others (think 70-80k with 100% paid insurance as opposed to 30-40k, nebulous benefits). I sometime apply to these higher-paying positions, but mostly just to try to figure out why two jobs with apparently identical duties have a 30-50k pay range difference.
Does anybody with experience working with these companies know what the secret ingredient they are stealthily looking for is?
Are the high-paying jobs with companies in the same industry as the low-paying jobs? If they’re different industries, the secret ingredient might be particular knowledge of tools used in that industry.
If my memory can be trusted, pretty much all of these jobs focused on the “using commercial tech tools” and online retail markets, usually both. Most of what comes down to me in this category is third-party companies that fill this role for other entities.
I havent noticed the pattern you suggest but i might have just missed it, honestly.
You’d have to get more specific for me to even make a guess at what you’re talking about there.
In other words, recruiting/head-hunting firms? My advice based on personal experience is, those are great if you’re having trouble finding job openings and landing interviews, especially if you’re looking into a new geographic area where you don’t have much of a network, but be very selective about which firm you go with (i.e. which one you allow to submit your resume) and DO YOUR RESEARCH ON THEM FIRST because they vary a lot. Some treat their “resources” (that’s what they call you) really well, some treat them poorly, some provide very competitive benefits packages, some provide no benefits at all.
I’m sorry I wasn’t sufficiently clear, definitions below:
Commercial Tech Tools: Computerized point of sale type things, data entry programs, email management programs, inventory management programs and tools, etc. Things that normalish people would have to use and might get confused about using, and thus the company provides a help desk for them to call so they can get through their tech problem on the tool they are trying to use.
Third party: If you are a company trying to provide a help desk for your workers, you might not have the resources or the desire to actually create this help desk and train the people to run it; you might then go to a third party company who provides help desk services to various companies. Alternately, if you run a web store or sell a software and want 24/7 chat/phone/email support, you might pay one of the same companies to provide this.
If the company wants to get a bright, diligent person that’s going to actually solve problems they are going to need to pay the higher salary (and still get lucky). How would you suggest that someone looking to hire for that circumstance–i.e. do this same job but do it really well–in a job posting other than by listing a higher salary range? I think the salary part is the best way of making the point.
I don’t disagree with the premise itself – that higher pay buys better people – but I’m guessing a 50k work-from-anywhere job would attract top-notch talent already, at least if special skills weren’t involved. I know plenty of bright, tech-savvy people who would kill a man for 45k a year; it’s hard to imagine 70k buying a better unskilled laborer than 50k, really, in the same way it’s hard to imagine 100k getting a better ditch digger than 150k.
I don’t say this to devalue the job itself, and I’m certainly not even worth 40k (sayeth the market). It’s just hard for me to wrap my head around being willing to pay 70k if you weren’t buying a rare, formal skillset.
” I know plenty of bright, tech-savvy people who would kill a man for 45k a year;”
You keep strange company, I guess 🙂 Or else the military pays less than I thought
I think your confusion is the result of focusing too much on formal skills and too little on soft skills/professionalism. An admin person making 30k and an admin person making 100k are doing basically the same stuff, but I would expect the person making 100k to be at a much higher level of professionalism, to include tact, diplomacy, better dress, perhaps more upper-class background/accent/appearance. They might be able to know without being told who the most important people they will meet are, and how to treat them. Maybe also more experience in the role.
I suspect people you know who are bright, tech-savvy but somehow can’t make 45k a year may be lacking in professionalism.
On the subject of your comment and PedroS’ above it, I wonder how different our job markets are. I’m in Phoenix, and whether or not I’m professional doesn’t even come into the equation most of the time; for anything above about 40k I can’t even get a call back, much less get to a point where how expensive my shirt is factors in. I know at least a dozen people in the same boat.
This might be a product of credentialism, I dunno, or I might just know a particularly unfortunate group of horrifying cretins, although I doubt it. I just know that outside of degree holders, programmers, small business owners and people in hard quota-driven sales jobs, I don’t know a single person who makes over 50k at this point in my life.
Should i interpret “outside of degree holders” to mean you and the people you know don’t have college degrees? That might indeed affect your ability to get these jobs.
@benjdenny,
If you have a high school diploma, and you can spend some days in San Francisco or San Jose, California (on the right days) to apply for and take the tests to be a union apprentice plumber, after five years of night classes, plus 9,000 of work (worst years of my life!), and a “turn out” test, you should get a union journeyman wage, and if you work full-time you’ll earn about 100k in a year.
If you’d rather serve your apprenticeship elsewhere and then transfer in as a journeyman learning pipe welding is the skill that your most likely to be able to work here as a “travel hand”, and after working as a “B” hand for enough hours you can get “A” status, which means you hear the job dispatches before the “B” hands.
Another way to make a 100k a year is to get a 4 year college diploma and a six month to twelve month teaching credential, and be a teacher here, the pay will be low at first (but a bit hgher than the pay of a first year apprentice plumber), but after ten years seniority you should get 100k a year.
If your goal is to save money you may want to skip California if you plan to live in a house without multiple roommates, and be a public school teacher in a cheap area of Texas instead, the pay is less than expensive areas of California, but about the same as expensive areas of Texas, so if your not living in Austin, et cetera, you can save quite a nest egg (for some reason, unlike California, most Texas school districts pay about the same).
The unemployment rate in the phenoix metro area is close to the worst of any major metro area, but it’s still not that bad–3.7% to NYC’s 3.3% and SF’s 2.4%. Nationwide the spread for high diploma to college degree is about 2%, but even 5.7% is a pretty low unemployment rate in historical terms.
That said, $38.4k is the median wage for a worker with a high school diploma and no college but still–half are above the median.
I can’t claim to be able to set out the argument in its strongest form, but the reason I support it, in its simplest terms, is that it appears to raise the lowest centiles of standards of living.
To provide a less circular justification: economics 101 says that trade takes place whenever you and I each have a commodity, and the rate of exchange I value them at is more favourable to yours that the rate you value them at. If I have apples and you have bananas, and an apple is worth 10 bananas to you but only 6 to me, then exchanging one apple for any number between 6 and 10 bananas makes us both better off.
As well as telling us when trade can take place, economics 101 also tells us what terms it can take place on – that range between 6 and 10 bananas per apple is called the “zone of possible agreement”, or ZOPA. If trade takes place in the ZOPA, we both benefit at least a little, but if it’s near the top end then most of the value created goes to you, while if it is near the bottom end then I get most of it.
What economics 101 *can’t* tell us about, at least not alone, is where in the ZOPA trade will take place – for that we need to know about things like psychology and politics and negotiating skills too.
If we impose a.minimum wage we’re limiting the terms trade can take place on. That’s bad news for you if the top end of your ZOPA with your employer is below the new minimum wage, because you’ll lose your job, but it’s good news for you if the new minimum wage lies between what you were previously being paid and the top end of your ZOPA.
So whether or not raising a minimum wage is a good idea depends on what fraction of low-paying employers would secretly be willing to pay more if they had to, and what fraction would just stop employing. And that’s a tricky question I’m not qualified to address, but far more people whose judgement I respect think it works out in favour of minimum wages being higher than they are in many places than don’t.
There are also a couple of theoretical reasons I find that likely. The last few decades have seen massive increases in GDP and productivity, but only small ones in wages. That suggests that there’s probably room at the top of lots of ZOPAs where the extra profits have not been going to the workers. And the decline in American union power and much greater negotiating strength of employers than low-skilled employees in most circumstances makes it likely that wages will typically be nearer the.bottom than the top of their ZOPAs.
This is a very good comment, clearly stated. It seems to me that employees would lie along a spectrum, with some whose ZOPA is now entirely below the mandated minimum wage, and others for whom their ZOPA extends above it. So for the ones below, they would see their wages drop to zero, and others would see a wage increase. In order for a minimum wage to be a good idea, the number in the second group would have to vastly outnumber the number in the first group, since the negative utility of going from some wage that is below the new minimum to zero is much higher than the positive utility of going from some wage below the minimum up to the new minimum.
I guess my other concern is how people become productive enough to earn more than the minimum wage. That’s usually through work experience. But if your ZOPA doesn’t intersect the new minimum, you’re shut out of the labor market altogether and denied the opportunity to acquire work experience.
It’s hard to see why people passing minimum wage laws are going to be especially good at figuring out what the distribution of ZOPAs for all the workers out there looks like. But that’s at least plausibly something that could happen at a local level. At a statewide or nationwide level, the ZOPAs are extremely broad, and they’re different in different regions. A minimum wage that matters in NYC or the Bay Area is probably pricing a really large chunk of bottom-tier workers out of a job in Jefferson City, Missouri.
What mechanism ensures that the people setting the minimum wage will know enough about the ZOPA to set it well, or that they’ll update it when it needs updating? How does that mechanism compare to the incentive to promise a rise in the minimum wage for the next election regardless of what that’s likely to do to the local labor market?
You don’t need to compute the whole distribution, which is good because obviously you can’t.
What you can do it tinker and hope – raise your minimum wage a bit, see if that seems to be significantly increasing unemployment, if not repeat until it does, and then stop and let inflation bring it back down. If lots of other people in similar circumstances are doing the same, that helps a lot, because you can gather more data and try to tease out effects on unemployment from the minimum wage from other effects.
It’s an incredibly messy and imprecise approach – c.f. how much economists disagree about it – and quite often it will do more harm than good, but on average I think it will do more good than harm.
That doesn’t sound like the way legislatures do any other kind of law, though. We still have crazy high mandatory minimum sentences for a bunch of crimes plus crazy high incarceration rates because of politicians’ and voters’ reaction to crime waves in the 70s and 90s. Why are legislatures going to be more reactive with minimum wages than they are with crack sentencing guidelines?
How is keep raising the minimum wage until you get significant unemployment a sensible policy to help the poorest? Its economic experimentation with their livelihoods, and is exactly the sort of application of theoretical knowledge to real life that causes huge problems. Whilst theoretically you seem to be correct applying Economics 101, Economics 101 is about models. You’re ignoring second-order effects here for a start, the most obvious one of which is what is increasing unemployment of willing-to-work individuals doing to the economy (my guesses: 1. Slowing it, or 2. Developing a black economy in employment). Life is full of complex systems which don’t work as we believe they should.
That sounds as though you think the relevant statistic is the unemployment rate. That’s wrong. Minimum wage workers are something like one or two percent of the labor force, so even a change that priced half of them out of the market would have an effect on the overall unemployment rate hard to distinguish from random noise.
He isn’t. He is confusing the logic of bilateral monopoly, which is a rare situation on the labor market, with the logic of perfect competition, which is what econ 101 is largely about.
Another factor that is probably not taken into account, is inertia. Even if you may be able to earn more in a different job, you might not quit and switch, because, uh, reasons. Well: you might get a longer commute, lose your working buddies, and so on. And you might not even be aware that there are better paid jobs at the new factory across town.
If a minimum wage means you are laid off, on the other hand, chances are you will start looking, and, if you find a job at all, it will by definition (ref minimum wage) be better paid. So maybe the main “benefit” of the minimum wage is economic upheaval of throwing people out of low-productive jobs?
A “benefit” that costs them their working buddies and forces them to spend more unpaid time commuting?
Your implicit assumption is that you know more about what is in the interest of the people it affects than those people do.
Market power is an economic concept, and that factors in heavily as well in every model I know of.
Adding on, there’s a relatively simple causal model for why increasing the minimum wage can increase employment under some conditions (offsetting the obvious ways it can decrease employment).
tl;dr: Wages are sticky, and some people would prefer unemployment or underemployment to low-wage jobs.
Concretely: Suppose each employee-hour brings in $20 of revenue for my business, and I’m currently paying for 200 employee-hours a week at $10/hr. I decide that one more employee-hour (having an extra cashier during rush hour on Monday, say) will also bring in $20 of revenue, but I can’t find anyone interested in working that extra hour. Should I raise my offer to $10.10 to try to attract someone? No! Sure, I’d make $20 more a week in exchange for paying $10.10 more a week, but inevitably I’d end up paying $10.10 for all of those pre-existing employee hours, costing me $20/week more in raises to my existing employees. I’d rather be short-staffed than raise wages in response to what might be a temporary difficulty in hiring.
But if the minimum wage gets set to $15/hour, that’s still within the ZOPA, assuming(!) my business is still overall viable with only $5/employee-hour revenue net of wages. Now I have no reason not to add that extra employee-hour, even though it’s making me less profit.
honoredb:
Why doesn’t this work the same way for other markets, then?
Most prices aren’t sticky. There’s logistical and cultural friction around wages that doesn’t exist around orange prices. If I cut my offer by 10c per box of oranges, you can go find another buyer, and if none exists, you absorb the hit. If I cut your wages by 10 cents an hour, there’s all sorts of logistical issues and costs around finding another employer at short notice, and there’s less cultural expectation that you should be able to just absorb the loss. So temporarily raising my offer on the marginal box of oranges during a shortage doesn’t hurt my future negotiating power nearly as much as temporarily raising wages.
Some amount of this is that humans have natural emotional dispositions that tend to result in sticky wages. We could solve a lot of problems by doing some moderate social engineering to make wages less sticky but the optics of that would be terrible. Also Wages have a bilateral monopoly problem so some degree of stickiness is probably a good way of addressing that.
@edmundgennings I’m not sure it’s natural emotional dispositions. Rather, policies like minimum wage, collective bargaining mandates, wrongful dismissal, right to strike, unemployment benefits etc. that don’t exist in other markets make wages sticky. Some of these are weaker in the US than in many other countries, but AFAIK they still exist.
In an actually free market, they wouldn’t be sticky; people would dislike a wage reduction just like any other seller dislikes a reduction in the market price of its product, but they would be forced to suck it up just like any other seller. IIRC Milton Friedman observed how easily wages in Hong Kong adjusted downwards or upwards according to the state of the economy.
I don’t think it’s all emotional or cultural or whatever. There are perfectly rational reasons workers might prefer a consistent and predictable and “locked-in” wage to one that continually varies based upon market conditions. And they might prefer it so much that they’d accept it, even if that means their total compensation ends up being slightly lower.
The Austrian school discusses this as one reason we can expect that entrepreneurs, as a class, will out-earn laborers, as a class. Laborers are unwilling to accept the risk and the delay of payments that entrepreneurs must accept. The consistency they demand (I get paid whether the business makes money or not, and I get paid right now even if the business isn’t making any money at all yet) comes at a cost.
@10240
In the U.S.A. and the U.K. employees have a long history of work stoppages and even violence in response to pay cuts by their employers.
The usual way here to get labor to work for less is job loss first, and only have lower pay new jobs, direct cuts in pay by current employers is usually less acceptable.
What you are describing isn’t sticky wages, it’s a monopsony employer.
Sorry if I’m abusing terminology. I’d think the way to put it would be “high friction in switching employers” -> “monopsony-lite phenomena are widespread” -> “overall wages are sticky”.
In markets where there are one seller and one buyer then negotiating is very important. In markets where there are one seller or one buyer and lots of the other then the monopolist or monopsonist will price carefully and get a lot of the value of the trade. In markets where there are lots of sellers and buyers then the people at the margins determine the price. Price will equal marginal cost which will equal marginal benefit.
There are some situations where there are quasi monopsonies and so we would expect employees to get paid less than their marginal productivity. Most of these situations are involve professional athletes where leagues act as buyers’ cartels viz salary caps. Low wage labor is a market with an enormous number of buyers and sellers. It is importantly subject to subdivisions, but there will be more than ten buyers and sellers of low wage labor in almost every travel area in the contemporary United States. For market power to begin to be relevant one would need for there to be severe limits on mobility or something weird to be going on. In a company town or very rural environment with highly rooted people might be weird enough for such a scenario to develop.
Have you seen this?
No, there seem to be a number of slights of hand that I am not qualified to judge and it only establishes employers as marginal monopsonists but it does shift my priors. Still very low wage labor is possibly the least occupation specific type of labor. In a meaningful sense a lawyer can only be a lawyer and so if there is only one law firm in town hiring it does have a far bit of monopsonistic power. But at the wage rate of people earning the minimum wage I imagine that switching occupation if one has demonstrated general basic competence and functionality is relatively easy. I have wondered about this question before and have found no good data on it.
Best case for a minimum wage is a situation like this:
Worker is supplying $18/hr value to his employee. Because of so many other workers, wage ends up negotiated to $11/hr. Wages can go up to $15/hr and the worker is still productive to employ.
(I tend to be against the MW, so please don’t ask “what if it isn’t this situation?”)
You are describing bilateral monopoly–one buyer, one seller. That exists, but it’s pretty rare. Ordinary markets are considerably closer to perfect competition, although often not all the way to it. And for perfect competition, economics 101 tells us that the bargaining range shrinks to a point.
Adding a minimum wage would shift the ZOPA, which invalidates a lot of this, but provides another (IMHO strong) argument for a MW in the right circumstances.
Imagine a truly competitive industry (fast food?). Perhaps consumers would buy a similar amount at a higher price (low elasticitiy) but, because of free and effective competition, company profits and costs — including wages — are driven into the ground. No one can charge more, since then their wage costs need to rise in order to stay solvent (assumption: “perfect” competition), so their prices would have to rise commesurately, and then suffer such a dramatic decline in business so that they would be unviable. In this hypothetical, consumers are gaining a huge economic surplus at the expense of companies and their employees.
Now, add an industry-wide minimum wage. Now, I can increase prices (and will) since everyone else can and will (and must). (My ZOPA has moved, though I think that’s not a useful way of thinking about things.). Consumer surplus is reduced, but wages are correspondingly higher (though, as far as I can speculate, the business itself doesn’t particularly benefit or suffer either way.)
Any thinking in terms of a fixed ZOPA or a fixed “here is how much revenue I get per employee” is missing the potential importance of an economy- or industry- wide MW. It’s not just about one employer bargaining with its employees all else being equal.
An unlikely proposition in most markets. Fast food, for example, definitely funges against cooking at home.
Also, to have an inelastic demand for unskilled labor, you need not only an inelastic demand for some product (or, really, all products whose production uses unskilled labor), but also that companies can’t replace unskilled employees with a smaller number of skilled employees, or perhaps a few even more skilled engineers who automate some of the work.
Ok, I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. Do you not understand my argument, not believe it, or think it’s true but so contrived/theoretical that it has real no relevance to anything in the real world? Of something else?
It really seems to me to be possible to imagine such a economy that a consumer generally enjoys a huge economic surplus on “very competitive market” goods, and that in such markets the available wages are driven low (by such very competition) to low levels. And if there is an economy-wide minimum-wage, some of this surplus ends up in the hands of the (mostly still-employed!) workers in such industries. Is this a nonsense thought, or just unrealistic? Your second comment hints at the former, but I honestly don’t follow 🙁
A much weaker version of my argument is the claim: after raising the minimum wage across the entire economy, and not just for your firm, prices and thus your revenue/employee (and thus ZOPA) might change a lot. If the minimum wage just hit you alone, well maybe this isn’t expected, but that’s not anyone’s proposal.
I agree with your argument that, on the condition that demand for unskilled labor is inelastic, increasing the minimum wage could increase the wages of the poor while causing little increase in unemployment. I just find it unlikely that the condition actually holds in the real world.
A personal story of planning for the future, grappling with the question of our climate challenge, and how we are orienting ourselves.
Would appreciate some critique about:
1) the forecasts. I acknowledge there is likely to be a bunch of questions around “showing my work”, because I haven’t really done that at all in the post. There are lots of threads for me yet to really write about in that regard.
2) The “Little Civilization – Big Civilization” mental model or frame. Does it help you see things from a different perspective? Is it unclear what the implications of the model are?
https://twicefire.com/littleciv/littleciv/
Happy pride!
Sorry, off-topic. This just caught my attention:
I found out my city had a gay pride parade a couple weekends ago, and for all I know June was/July is gay awareness month or something (thus why I keep seeing temporary-rainbow company logos everywhere?). But randomly saying “happy pride” to each other, the way you might say “happy holidays”… is that actually a thing people do?
Asking because if it is, I’m fascinated by how something like that could catch on without my knowing about it. I live in a very gay-friendly city, but I don’t use Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc. so my first thought when I see stuff like this is usually that it spread via social media. But it’s still perplexing to me to see stuff that started on those websites bleed into the rest of the world.
I’ve never heard it before, but I think pride month is new. When I was young there was only national coming out day.
Pride Month was only Pride Week last year. We’re now starting Indigenous People’s Summer, which used to only be in the fall.
This is a positive development. Eventually it will be “lots of different kinds of people exist so you’d better figure out how to get along with them” time all the time, which is what it should have been in the first place.
But: this is the non-CW OT so I digress. Again, I was more interested in the phenomenon of how these kinds of memes spread.
But it’s the Pride non-CW thread, so you can speak positively about Pride, just not negatively.
That’s fine — Pride (is it just “Pride”? I thought it was “Gay Pride”?) is tangential to the thing I’m interested in, which is how memes like that spread.
You know, I hardly ever hear gay pride specified anymore. This raises the question whether November will be Gluttony month. Or February Lust month. Or March Avarice month.
Hah, I hadn’t thought of that. To me “Pride” by itself has a strange ring because I think of a group of lions.
@Nick: That statement made me VERY ANGRY! I might not calm down FOR ALL OF JULY!
I’ve said it like twice this month, specifically in a context where people were talking about LGBT issues. So, rarely, but yes?
Had you heard someone else say it first? (Ever, I mean.) If so, was it on the internet or in meatspace?
Yes, under similar circumstances. On the internet, but people I know in meatspace quite personally, they’re just home for the summer (I’m in college).
From my perspective: just saw the thread banner, and it is the day after a lot of cities had big pride parades/celebrations, so just threw it in there.
Have you ever just thrown it in there anywhere else? Where did you first learn it was a thing you could throw in (if you remember)? Genuinely curious.
Mmm, struggling to recall.
I live in the Bay, and have spent pride week/weekend here and once in Seattle in the past five years (since moving to the USA). I’m cis het white he/him male and in communities that are fairly queer-friendly. Hard for me to pin point when the first time I heard or said it was but certainly don’t recall anything like it when back home in Australia. Certainly by 2015 pride, everyone was jazzed about the supreme court ruling, and I actually went out and joined in on the public activities.
I’ve always been fascinated that different cities have different dates for the pride parade. LA’s was June 8 but many cities had a parade this past weekend. It ‘should’ be close to the June 28th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, but I guess there are advantages to spacing it out (so that some of the same personalities can participate in multiple cities)? It does seem to make ‘Happy Pride’ a less effective internet greeting though.
My city’s was earlier — maybe the weekend of June 8? 15th? One of those — and I remember seeing the word “Stonewall” among other things on a couple rainbow-striped banners downtown, so there ya go. Spacing them out so the same personalities can participate in multiple cities makes sense, but also surprised me when you mentioned it: it seems to prioritze celebrity over history.
This is the first place I’ve seen anyone say “Happy Pride”, on or off-line.
I think a parade is a good cutoff for when people can exchange pleasantries. Seattle has a (great) parade for the summer solstice, and I’ve heard more than a few ‘happy solstice’s there.
I’ve never herad it the real world, neither from my straight friends/acquaintances nor from gay ones. That said, I rarely hear “happy holidays”, too, outside of retail stores.
Personally, I have about as much respect for Pride Month as I do for any other corporate-branded holiday and/or event, e.g. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, or whatever — though that’s just me.
In the West Village this weekend, it sure is.
How is NYC treating you?
This is the ‘Culture War Free’ open thread, so I can’t respond in detail. If you post this link to the last fractional open thread or hold onto it for the next one I’d be happy to give my detailed thoughts.
One recommendation though: hold onto this post, print it out and keep it somewhere where it’s easy to reflect back on it. It’s going to really help you and your wife to have tangible proof of what you actually thought was going to happen as the 22nd century moves closer. When the world doesn’t end you’ll be a much wiser person if you haven’t forgotten how convinced you were that it would as a young man.
This open thread is different from other open threads? Sorry, I haven’t been tracking that if so, how can I adjust?
Whole number threads are “visible” on the main page of the site and are supposed to be kept reasonably free of controversial issues.
Fractional threads only show up in the sidebar or by clicking the Open Thread button and you’re allowed to post about controversial issues as long as you’re not obnoxious about it.
Scott has a pretty hands-off moderation style so it’s mostly on the honor system. Theoretically we’re still in an official “Reign of Terror” (Scott’s words) but even so I wouldn’t worry about an honest mistake: if you get banned it’s typically for a pattern of behavior.
I guess I am surprised that forecasting, climate stuff, and civilizational outlook would fall into the Culture War realm. I get that folks get wound up about climate stuff but thought my post was pushing for an analytical discussion that ought to avoid unproductive discussion…
So, I repost on a fractional hidden open thread and you’d feel more comfortable answering there?
I mean you watch the new right? Climate change is a huge cultural / political football right now.
And yeah, I would be more comfortable. This topic isn’t as inflammatory as some but some people here feel very strongly about it one way or the other and will pile into threads discussing climate change.
well, there it goes!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/26/open-thread-130-75/#comment-768832
What are your illegible policy preferences? By which I mean policy positions which you support and which you are not able to defend via rational arguments, and especially those positions which contradict or are at least in tension with your broader values? By policy positions I do not mean those values (like equality, freedom and so on), but something more concrete.
For me, I favor conservation of nature and of old architecture to a far greater extent than I am able to justify on cost-benefit basis, despite fancying myself to be strict moral consequentionalist.
100 mile hour speed limit on the interstates. I realize America can never hope to be as libertine as za Germans when it comes to speed limits, but 100mph seems like a reasonable dream.
No, I don’t know how many people would die and I don’t care. I’m tired of having to piddle around at 55mph in the land of the free and home of the brave.
Said the guy who lives in the middle of DC and walks to work half the time!
I zip up and down 95 at a little over the limit, with nary a care. (Except late at night, when the Fast and Furious crew seem to play. Brrrrr.)
I might live in DC, but my soul is a that of a freeway loving Californian!
Economic liberalism and less regulation, due to a variation of Chesterton’s fence – I believe without being able to prove that any regulation has a huge invisible cost. Actually, I believe the whole concept of invisible (i.e. not staring you in the face) costs is completely ignored by governments.
Speaking of conservation of nature, I have a strong hunch that going with the current instead of against it would be a much better strategy. We have economic lighting because it’s cheaper, and recently better. We have cleaner air because we no longer need coal. Also because we have better and more economic cars. On the other hand – we haven’t been able to stop people from smoking, even though the cost/benefit is obvious and it’s … well… plain impolite to smoke with non-smokers present.
So I’m extrapolating from that and thinking that anything that is taking an already existing tendency and accelerating it, or maybe slightly moving it has a much better chance of making a big impact than tackling something with a lot of inertia head on.
Great question. After some thought, I can’t find any- lots of “weird” things I believe, but I’m perfectly willing and able to make (what seem to me as) rational arguments to defend.
I think it’s more likely this is a blind spot for me, and that I *do* have illegible policy preferences that I’m not easily able to surface, than that I actually lack them. I’ll have to think on this more!
If it’s legible to me, it’s not illegible, dammit!
Does policy preferences held in the face of learned epistemological helplessness count? I’m unable to argue with David Friedman on global climate change, and I’m unwilling to do the work to try to get there, but meanwhile I, at least mildly, support center left policy positions in that area.
I don’t think that qualifies.
All of us, necessarily, base large parts of our world view on what other people we trust tell us. People you trust tell you that climate change is a terrible threat. You aren’t willing to do the work to decide whether they or I are correct, so you go with the usual rule of thumb of accepting the beliefs of trusted sources of information unless you have a strong reason not to.
I think it would qualify only if I persuaded you that net costs were small or negative and you still retained your preference for policies to slow climate change.
In my case, being reluctant to cut down large trees, even ones that are serving no useful purpose.
I also value conservation of nature, as well as aesthetic enjoyment and plain old fun — observing natural beauty, watching movies, reading fiction books, playing video games, etc. That said, I don’t necessarily want to have such preferences. If there was a magic pill that converted my desire to do these things into the desire to work harder, I’d probably take it — because I cannot, in fact, rationally justify doing things that cost time but produce no tangible output.
Wait, what’s so great about producing tangible output?
It depends on what you mean by “great”. If you mean, “makes me feel good”, then yeah, obviously entertainment is fun… But then, is there a good argument against wireheading yourself at the first opportunity ?
My point is only that I think you have things backwards. Like, suppose material wealth has either intrinsic or instrumental value. If it has intrinsic value, creating it’s going to run into the same problems as you have with enjoying a beautiful sunset. If it only has instrumental value—in other words, it’s ordered to some other end(s)—then it not only inherits the problem of the first case, because the further end has to be justified, but could also fail to achieve the end(s) too. Enjoying a beautiful sunset, meanwhile, almost anyone would agree has intrinsic value; it could be unjustifiable by your lights, but at least doesn’t run into the unique problem instrumental goods do.
My main one is my support for Israel. I think it is my loyal moral foundation, plus my military background, plus my religion, all coming together to make me unwaveringly support Israel, no matter what evidence is brought against them. Factually, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, but I still want to give the US’s full support to help Israel deal with all threats.
This isn’t so much against my conservative values, but it’s the policy I have the hardest time justifying with logical argument.
Conservation of nature seems legible to me: it gives pleasure and makes for a healthier environment. It is also a common demand in every society where a wealthy middle class has developed, so seems to be a common desire.
In terms of legibility though, at a certain level all my beliefs are illegible. Whilst I can create pretty justifications for them, these justifications depend on people taking on my priors. Thus, I oppose the death penalty as I believe the risk of the state murdering an innocent is too high: but that is only legible if you can’t accept the good of the many argument, and if you hold the state responsible, and probably a lot of other such issues. I can even hold beliefs that I think are logical, such as a libertarian case for almost no gun ownership, that are probably illegible to everyone, even advocates for gun control.
Possibly the only belief I have ever tried to make fully legible is my absolute support for abortion on demand (yes, I do spend a lot of time arguing with social conservatives; how did you guess?), in the context of a surprisingly civilised argument between a pro-lifer, a Catholic, a couple of radical feminists and a collection of ‘liberals’, where I was trying to show that you can think about the issue outside the existing framing of the debate. That was hard to do, although may be the only time I’ve convinced a militant feminist of anything (or at least anything about which I wanted to convince them).
I’d like every country in the world to drive their vehicles on the right side of the road. Yes, I know the costs of switching would be massive, and it won’t matter in a few decades since all cars will be autonomous, but the tidiness of having a global standard appeals to my way of thinking.
Bloody French and American revolutionaries making everyone drive on the wrong side of the road.
Left-hand travel served us fine for at least 15 centuries.
It’s just a relic of Roman imperialism though. Probably…
I think I can defend it logically, though not rhetorically:
I’m a libertarian, supportive of the decriminalization of hard drugs, prostitution, and many currently illegal dangerous activities.
I loathe gambling.
In the form that it usually takes, I mean. A game of true skill, like poker, that requires betting to be sensible, I understand. Occasional betting to test the rationality of one’s claims, excellent. But house-advantage casino table games are a blight on humanity. Slot machines, using science to turn humans into addled lab rats, are horrific. By far the worst (the part that resonates with this libertarian) are government lotteries, a poor tax bound up in layers of lies, that ought to damn its perpetrators to the lowest level of hell.
@AlesZiegler
I like old and familiar things, yet I’ve spent a substantial portion of my life as a construction worker, including on semiconductor chip plants, despite resenting “Silicon Valley” for the displacement and distribution it brings, and I’ve had a hand in building tower block apartment warrens, despite regarding such buildings as anti-family, anti-human, anti-sanity, and as just plain Hellscapes.
I like local businesses and institutions and think there ought to be some kind of policy to stop the trend of consolidation and homogenization, even though it’s economically irrational and politically indefensible. Newspapers, for instance – when I travel and pick up a paper that’s been around for 150 years, expecting to find some kind of insight into what people here care about that they don’t back home, and instead find four pages of local coverage and the rest is just a reprint of USA Today. (Maybe I visit too many places with Gannett papers?) Or how every city used to have a big homegrown department store downtown that it could be proud of, and now it’s either closed or a Macy’s. Live kids’ shows on independent UHF stations… none of this makes economic sense, but I have some inexplicable fondness for it.
Kind of hard to tell for me, because I don’t even keep a catalogue of my positions. The ones most salient will be the CW ones, because those ones come up most often. Most are not really in tension with overall values, but of which I am more confident in than the evidence probably merits.
-Pretty opposed to low-skill immigration
-against higher income tax rates
-against greater non-labor business regulation (not including labor regulation because I think that is substantially clearer)
-American leadership in the world in general
I used to have an affinity for older architecture as well, and then realized it was really more motivated by a selfish desire to walk through neighborhoods with “character” as opposed to actual cost-benefit. However, I’ll add one more:
-Tear down any Brutalist architecture. Burn the books and distribute the ashes into the sea. Erase all digital mention of it. Obliterate, obliterate, obliterate.
I am anti-nuclear. No rational argument will convince me otherwise.
I am also against legalizing drugs and prostitution. There are a lot of arguments I agree with for legalization, but I am still against it, even if I cannot entirely justify it.
I want incandescent lightbulbs back! I don’t like LEDs, halogens or any other lightbulbs. They never last as long as they’re supposed to, and the light just feels wrong.
Basque independence. I believe it is an economically losing proposition, we will become a small insignificant country in the world arena, and we will get out of the EU and the euro. I still want it, because f*** Spain.
What are some proven[*] tricks for reminding myself to consistently stand up straighter to the point where I end up doing it automatically, all the time, without thinking about it?
*By proven I mean “definitely worked for you, someone you know, or a bunch of people you know about”.
What worked for me: make a bit of a ritual out of straightening your posture if you notice yourself slouching. It’s a bit like meditating – don’t curse yourself for slouching, just notice that you are and gently, ritualistically fix your posture. You’ll start slouching again, it’s ok. It takes literally years but eventually the straightening motion becomes a sort of unconscious habit and you’ll notice yourself slouching less and less.
I already do that if I notice, but how do I notice more often? Right now I only notice it if I’m walking where I know lots of other people can see me (and not doing anything else but walking), or if I’m looking in the bathroom mirror doing something that doesn’t involve leaning over the sink. Like brushing my teeth or whatnot.
Pick something you do very often, and decide that from now on, whenever you do that thing, you will also check your posture?
Maybe every time you pick up your cellphone? I’m just saying that if you have a habit, associate the habit you have with the habit you want.
Hmm…OK, I’ll give that a shot.
You could set up some alarms on your phone to remind you at certain times of day.
There is probably an app for randomizing that, too.
Flip phone user here, but my phone has the ability to add lots of custom alarms. I’ll consider that.
Reading this comment thread, I realized I was slouching and immediately straightened up. Maybe just a simple post-it reminder on your monitor or wherever you spend most of your time would be a good idea.
Learn ballroom dancing.
As far as learning how to move/carry yourself, it seems like learning any type of dancing would do the trick. But, I hate dancing (except for a few times a year in my living room with my kids) and am unmotivated to learn, so that’s pretty much off the table.
Besides, I’ve known people who knew how to ballroom dance but had terrible posture.
Try pilates or yoga then, where awareness of the core and posture is important as well?
Frankly any form of exercise should help (other than rowing perhaps…) as part of the problem is retraining your muscles to hold you more rigidly, and most exercise is done with the body upright (with apologies if you are an NFL lineman or a rugby forward…).
Try to develop a graceful balletic walk: movements with full extensions. Your stride should be trying to take advantage of the full length of the leg and rolling across the full length of the foot to push off of the tips of your toes, in a single continuous movement.
You can’t really do that in a slouch, which tends towards more clomp-clomp-clomp bent-knee-impact walk.
Most marching bands have a posture chant that’s a variant on “Feet! (Together!) Stomach! (In!) Chest! (Out!) Shoulders! (Back!)
Elbows! (Frozen!)Chin! (Up!) Eyes! (With pride!) Eyes! (With pride!) Eyes! (With pride!)”Mine did “[…] Head! (Up!), Chin (In!),
Hands! (Up!), Eyes etc.” (hands up for the instrument position)You are a number of different wearable trackers that will annoy you went you slouch. I don’t know if any of them work.
I mostly solved my problem with slouching by switching to standing at my desks 100% of the time, and standing on a stepper for all of that desk time.
I strongly suspect this is a typo but I quite prefer to interpret it as commentary on human biology 🙂
By stepper do you mean like an elliptical-ish version of a walking desk?
y stepper do you mean like an elliptical-ish version of a walking desk?
Yes.
I am standing on one of these right now, and I spend all my at-work at-desk time standing on it and slowly stepping with it, ticking off about 5000 steps a day.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016BQFSS
(The exercise model in the picture is not included.)
Oh neat, that’s actually affordable enough to justify trying it out. How long do they last before breaking down, in your experience?
I will not use wearable trackers.
I already have a standing desk, but I often find myself slouching at it. I should get a stepper though…
Are you getting enough sleep?
I’ve been making an effort to get at least 7 hours per night, and tracking how many nights out of some arbitrary number of nights that I do. I’m batting around 80%.
I took a continuing ed class on acting a few years back, which began by teaching us a starting position whose name I unfortunately can’t recall (perhaps “Noble Stance” though I can find no warrant for that via google) — chin slightly up, shoulders slightly back, arms loose at the sides. It opens your chest for speaking and encourages a deep, calming breath and a feeling of being in control — or at least it did in that context. Since then, going into that position has given me a very slight endorphin hit that makes it easier to remember to watch for the opportunity.
A ski accident resulting in chronic (light) back pain did the trick for me. Not recommended.
If you’ve got a decent amount of cash to burn, buy a posture-improving shirt of some kind, like an AlignMed shirt. Even just a back brace could work.
I’ve seen harness-looking things you wear under your clothes that seem to do the same thing. Do they work?
Deadlifts and standing desk worked for me.
I use a standing desk already, and I work out my lower back (although not with deadlifts — too scared I’ll use bad form and mess something up, so instead I do a combination of side planks and back extensions with an inflatable ball and my ankles anchored under a cable machine). I also work out my back a lot in general. So I don’t think it’s a back strength issue.
I was also going to suggest deadlifts. Goblet squats or front squats are also great for posture. Really anything athletic that emphasizes posture will help (someone else suggested ballroom dancing which I’m sure also would work), but deadlifts probably have the best reward per effort.
It’s great you exercise your lower back, but there are a lot more back muscles than just the lower back. Slouching is more of an upper-back thing than a lower-back thing. You need to build up rhomboids, lats, and the upper spinal erectors (which I don’t know the proper name of :). Deadlifts are an awesome exercise and will get pretty much all your back muscles. If you don’t think you can deadlift safely and can’t get a trainer to teach you, then next best things is rows (any variation) to hit more of your upper back.
I do a ton of rows. Upright, seated cable, and on the bench (one knee/one hand on the bench, one foot on the floor, back parallel to the ground, etc.).
I struggled for my whole life with bad posture until I went to a physiotherapist for a shoulder injury. It is much, much easier to fix your posture after a physio has loosened up all the muscles in your upper back that have been stuck in an awful position for decades. Nearly impossible to fix your posture without it.
Exercising the back muscles worked wonders for me – I used to slouch while standing/walking for my entire life, picked up rock climbing, stopped slouching after a few months. No conscious effort was involved.
Now I’m trying to improve my posture when sitting at a desk (to correct my loss of lumbar curve) – that one’s a bitch to remember. Apparently stretching out hamstrings may help with making the proper posture more natural and comfortable, we’ll see how that goes.
Since you’ve written that you already exercise, maybe see a physiotherapist? There may be some non-obvious biomechanical reason for your posture problem.
I could see that. I started slouching a lot in 7th grade and didn’t really do anything for my musculoskeletal health until my mid-20s, so it may be built into my musculature at this point. I wonder if my insurance would cover a consultation…
I’m going to put in a good word for Kathleen Porter’s work– she studied people who move well, mostly those in third world countries who carry heavy weight on their heads.
https://naturalposturesolutions.com/
There’s also Alexander Technique, which is a way of not interfering with one’s ability to move well.
I mistrust people’s efforts to improve their posture through direct choice– it’s too easy to add stiffness rather than make good movement easier.
A friend with chronic nerve issues triggered by compression swears by the Alexander Technique. I should try it, as I’m having a similar issue.
One thing I did myself was go to a posture therapist for a few sessions. The exercises didn’t seem to do much, but she did give me one great piece of advice. She asked me to have someone take photos of me sitting at my desk, and then pointed out all the things that were f—ing up my neck and back. I had figured my desk was pretty ergonomic, but I’m 5’1″, and now I know even the lowest peg on ergonomic adjustable stuff may not be a good height for me. Are your feet resting solidly on the floor or something else such that the angle of your knees is 90 degrees and there’s no stress on your lower back? Do your elbows rest at 90 on the armrests of your chair, and is your desk low enough that you can type this way? Is your computer at an angle where you tend to keep your head straight or are you stressing your neck? People at either end of the height spectrum might be coping with things like this all day and not realize it. Now I realize that my chronic low back pain might have been from my feet not touching the floor in any standard chair! I don’t have that anymore since I started insisting on a chair that fits.
One thing I’ve found very valuable from Kathleen Porter is to swing one’s pelvis back and forth like a bell. Notice where breathing becomes easiest.
This makes a lot of sense to me because it involves a functional standard rather than a visual standard.
What really helped me slouch less was doing a few minutes of back strenghtening exercises every other day. Since then, I find standing or sitting with a good posture much easier and more natural.
Some libertarians criticize state welfare systems by claiming that they create welfare traps – supposed situations where individuals on unemployment benefits are disincentivized from finding work because, since their potential salary would be not much higher or even lower than the benefits, it makes economic sense to just stay on the benefits indefinitely.
Libertarians (perhaps a different group of them) also claim that private charities superior to state assistance as a method of helping the disadvantaged.
Here’s my question: if welfare traps are real, then how do charities (in particular anti-poverty charities) avoid them? Shouldn’t they be creating the same type of dependency? And if they found a way around this problem, is there any reason state programs can’t use the same workaround?
Private charities can do the kind of tough-love like “you need to stop drinking” or “we will cut you off after six months” that government-mandated benefits cannot.
I don’t know how well this works in practice, although Utah seems to have a really nice privately-run welfare state.
Governments totally can do and usually attempt to do “tough love” approach with means tested programs. E.g. notorious US welfare program SNAP (“food stamps”) has some work requirements.
@alesziegler
People have the right to due process before welfare benefits are cut off under US government programs. This is not as much due process as with e.g. a criminal trial, but it still meaningfully limits govmt programs’ ability to cut off people who are not cooperating. See Goldberg v Kelly and related cases.
Idea would be that different programs would try different things, and those who work better (by whatever measure) would have a better chance to find sponsors. Similar to GiveWell being able to find sponsors who care about the E in the EA stuff. Or the Gates-es founding a new foundation after finding existing programs lacking.
But primarily: Because the sponsoring is voluntary, it’s the sponsors problem, and not a moral problem for the rest of us. If they sponsor, they seem to be happy enough with it. Because libertarianism has, beside harm principle, individual volition has a very important moral value, this alone – having a choice – is already morally better. Stuff like “deserving poor” vs. the rest is at best a triviality, but if it is in the sponsors interest, the world where deserving are helped more than the undeserving is the better world, and so the method is superior.
In that system, states cannot replicate this, because collecting the information about what it’s tax-paying constituents think as “deserving” vs. “undeserving” poor is both hurting electability of officials in power and also bacause the centralized information collection issue thingy.
If the private charity consists of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation establishing a gigantic bureaucracy to disburse funds to the poor according to whatever formula best fits Bill and Melinda’s values, it would probably have the same failure modes as a government in this regard.
Real charities tend to be decentralized and local, which gives them more actionable information about who specifically needs help and who is being caught in a trap. And being private means much greater flexibility about acting on that information without being e.g. sued. Decentralized funding and local knowledge also means that the people paying for all this can probably see if the local parish priest or whomever is doing the job right, or if they ought to be sending half their tithing money to the local Rotary club instead.
State-run programs can’t do the same thing because their monopoly power means the local community can’t say “nope, you suck, our money is going to the Rotary this year”, which means whomever the State tasks with applying local knowledge to discretionary aid will likely end up playing favorites in accordance with his private biases (or larcenous desire for kickbacks). You could try making it a local elective office, but A: almost nobody pays attention to local elections any more and B: democracy just means 51% of the population controls 100% of the funding and unpopular local minorities can be left completely in the cold rather than “merely” served by an underfunded charity from within that minority and its sympathetic allies.
I don’t really see it.
Historically charities tend to really really really suck at resource allocation.
part of the reason for strict government regulation of charities, requiring a certain level of transparency was because of the long long history of routine rampant corruption with donors having almost no idea where their cash was really going.
I remember my grandmother talking about a charity she used to support, it was nominally supposed to be helping orphans with a motto along the lines of “no child turned away”.
It turned out, years later after a scandal, that the reality was that the “charity” had been effectively selling children as farm labor abroad in horrible conditions.
Yet no donors realized for decades.
And that’s before the basic resource allocation issue that people want to give their money to sexy causes, not to boring things that still need doing, hence the classic dog shelters vs orphanages problem.
Everyone loves puppies and humans are horrible things with moral flaws and everyone kind of assumes someone else will fund the boring grey stuff that needs doing like keeping orphans alive, so the dog shelters end up far better funded than the orphanages even if, when pressed, most donors would rate the human kids as more important.
If you only attribute chivalrous intentions to private charity and only attribute evil intent to state actions then you’re probably going to make almost nothing but really really bad choices.
This sounds like the “my grandmother sent a check to a very large bureaucracy and then ignored the issue, confident she had done good” sort of charity I alluded to in my first paragraph, and not the “my grandmother joined the Rotary Club to make sure none of her neighbors went hungry” sort. It is true that, at the large bureaucratic limit, private charity can fail in the same way that government assistance does. The difference is, it doesn’t have to.
I said almost nothing about intent, focusing instead on expected outcomes. But since you seem to see the two as interchangeable, I note that your post attributes 100% evil and 0% good to private charity, so right back at you. All hail the omnibenevolent glory of Murphy’s State and Murphy’s Law.
Poverty traps are created not so much by the existence of welfare as by the requirement that welfare be legible, in the Seeing Like A State sense: that implies hard (if perhaps complex) cutoffs based on impersonal requirements, and leaves the system without a human face (so people get much less averse to exploiting it), and recipients with a need to make tough and not always prosocial choices if they want to qualify. Private welfare managed centrally by large NGOs can have the same issues (and in fact this is the same family of problems as gives us e.g. Central African guys using malaria bednets as fishing nets), but historically most charity has been local, managed by bodies like churches or clubs or fraternal societies, and therefore having much more leeway to adapt to individual recipients’ needs without running afoul of policy or incurring legal risks.
ETA: I see John covered most of this while I was typing. Well, I’ll leave this up anyway.
Off topic, do you have a source for this? I’ve seen this theoretical concern come up over and over whenever bed nets come up, but the only actual source (givewell) I’ve ever found indicated that misusing the bed nets in this way was vanishingly rare.
This study concluded that there’s a lot of malaria net fishing, especially in East Africa.
As Murphy’s link below indicates, most nets are used for their intended purposes, but enough aren’t to apparently affect the fishing industry. (One concern is that the fine mesh is depleting the very small fish that are required to sustain the ecosystem). Arguably, the solution is to also provide fishing nets.
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/01/10/givewell-top-charities-explained-against-malaria-foundation/
That’s nice. It also has almost nothing to do with my actual point.
Am I getting this wrong, or is the main distinction between Objectivism and libertarianism that Ayn Rand disapproved of charity per se? You could call that more consistent maybe, but a regular libertarian could easily say that the mere fact that private charities can run out of money in contrast to a state’s effectively endless coffers is something that pressures those using them to do so on a temporary basis and find work even if it pays out less.
Ayn Rand was personally charitable, at least to the extent of subsidizing the schooling of a younger female relative—it comes up in the letters. I think what she objected to was not someone choosing to be charitable but someone feeling obliged to be, or being told by others that he was obliged to be.
I think the main difference between Objectivism and libertarianism is that Objectivism is a package deal, a sort of non theist religion, which includes views on lots of things that are not implied by libertarianism. Politically, Objectivists are libertarians even if, like Rand, they deny it.
I believe, IIRC, Rand was very clear she was not extending charity and was extending a loan. I thought she went out of her way to make this very clear, but I could be wrong.
Was it ever paid back?
I think I may have been misremembering this letter Rand sent to her niece, Connie, who asked about a funds for the purchase of a dress.
I don’t know whether Connie accepted the loan or paid it back.
OTOH, I can’t at first glance find any mention of her funding college for anyone, so I would like to see a link for that.
Not college, but the letter says she tried to support two of her nieces by marriage through high school and art school respectively. (Neither finished the course.)
@LHN:
Ah, yes. Good point, I hadn’t read that carefully.
I don’t think her tone here is very consistent with the idea that she is personally inclined to charity. It’s certainly not inconsistent with the idea that she didn’t favor it.
I assumed one of those views was the “charity is bad” position. Guess it’s more complicated than that.
> Guess it’s more complicated than that.
Sadly, most criticisms of Rand involve people who haven’t read her work in detail.
In terms of charity (from memory), Rand objected to the concept of duty as such. Roughly, charity should be looked at in the same way that any other spending or consumption is. If it’s something you enjoy, great. But you should be looking at it not as “doing good” but “doing something you enjoy”. Likewise, there is no value in showing how much you are suffering to help someone else. Electing to make a poor trade-off doesn’t make you virtuous, it just makes you stupid. Contrast to “I gave up the best years of my life for you” or “I live an impoverished life to give to children in Africa, I’m a great person”.
Part of it is that altruism is bad, but Rand doesn’t mean the same thing by altruism as most of us would.
I believe Rand’s main problem with libertarians was that they arrived at their conclusion without following her own derivation of them, which she fondly imagined to be rigorous.
Yes. And one of her disciples managed to convert the true statement, “whether you are a libertarian does not depend on how you reached libertarian conclusions” to the false statement “being a libertarian means believing that how you reached your conclusions doesn’t matter.”
I think part of what drives the hostility of orthodox Objectivists to libertarianism is the desire to be a big fish in a small pool. If Objectivists are merely a kind of libertarian, it is hard to claim that Leonard Peikoff is an important philosopher since alternatives include Nozick. But he might be one of the most important Objectivist philosophers.
Do objectivists disagree with Rothbard on any actual issues of policy or is it all axiomatic and definitional disagreements?
Rand and her orthodox followers are strongly against anarcho-capitalism, although it has been argued, most notably by Roy Childs, that it’s the logical implication of her views.
Judging at least by my past argument with Objectivists, their position is that the government has a monopoly of retaliatory force. Given that monopoly, it can fund itself by charging for services such as the enforcement of contracts and so doesn’t have to have taxation, which, as I understand their position, is not legitimate.
If there are any reasonably orthodox Objectivists here they are welcome to correct my understanding.
I always thought the main distinction was that Ayn Rand was okay with aggressive war so long as the enemies were sufficiently socialist?
No, on a few accounts. First, Ayn Rand was very much against socialism, but also viewed environmentalism and religion as a “destroyer of men’s minds”. So “sufficiently socialist” is either over or under sufficient.
IIRC, she held that war itself was okay if defensive as it was a core function of the government. And that offensive war could be acceptable if:
1) It was to liberate people who wanted/deserved it from an oppressive regime.
2) The costs to do so were borne voluntarily.
So in the first case, a nation of people who held that the current system was good but that the people in charge had merely made a few mistakes weren’t deserving of liberation. As I type this, I suppose that is one of the key themes of Atlas Shrugged. So a people who legitimize the current oppressor (eg. by insisting that Sharia law is the only way to run their country) shouldn’t be helped. Likewise, a country which is strongly socialist but which has free and fair elections shouldn’t be overthrown because the people themselves are the ones causing themselves the harm, and also because they are one election away from their own freedom.
The second part holds that the war shouldn’t be funded by taxes of any sort. Taxes, being compulsory, are a restraint on freedom. And since foreign liberation isn’t an essential purpose of government, it should not be funded in such a way. Thus it would be fine to pass around a large collection basket and give the proceeds to eg. Blackwater to free the foreign people, but not to have the domestic government do so.
> Here’s my question: if welfare traps are real, then how do charities (in particular anti-poverty charities) avoid them? Shouldn’t they be creating the same type of dependency?
Anti-poverty is really two separate problems. One is ensuring some sort of minimal baseline so that people aren’t starving or freezing to death. The solution in that case is to provide the benefits unconditionally. Everyone who wants it can have some gruel, a bunk in a former school gymnasium with communal showers, and a triage-based free clinic where non-emergency care may involve waiting in line for a while. You aren’t deprived of any of that if you make more money, but people who make more money may be inclined to make their own arrangements.
The other problem is wealth inequality, but that is more a market issue than a charity issue. So you get the argument that there wouldn’t be so much concentration of wealth if not for regulatory capture and political corruption. Then without that corruption driving up prices and driving down wages, ordinary people would be better off, but not in a way that creates any disincentive to work.
> And if they found a way around this problem, is there any reason state programs can’t use the same workaround?
The state equivalent would be a UBI and the same removal of regulations that impede competition.
In my experience, it’s because private charity tends to be smaller scale. If the local church is helping 30 families, the Deacons can know the individual situations of each household and tailor their aid appropriately. This can’t really be done if your goal is to give aid to millions.
I recently finished reading Dignity by Chris Arnade. The book is Arnade’s accounts about his travels through depressed areas of the United States, starting at Hunt’s Point, Bronx, and going on to such places as the Rust Belt, California, Tennessee and Maine. The book was an interesting look at parts of the country that most people don’t think about-what Arnade calls “back row kids.” I live in the NYC area myself-and I’ve never set foot in Hunt’s Point (a motel there apparently gets enough business to be able to turn away sex workers). He discusses how the McDonalds and storefront churches that many of the “front row kids” sneer at have become the community centers of these places (not that religious myself, but I have never considered it to be “low class” to go to McDonalds). It was a very interesting book. I do have a nitpick with one of Arnade’s identifiers of a low class neighborhood: Big Lots and dollar stores. Both my parents had college degrees, and, when I was growing up, we shopped at Big Lots and dollar stores. I still shop at dollar stores, and would still shop at Big Lots if there was one near me. But that’s a nitpick, the book was overall good.
@Theodoric,
Thanks for the tip.
I just put a library hold request on it, looks like a long que.
Do you like magic used in clever ways mixed with physics? What about considerations on stable ways to build a society, in a world with wildly varying degrees of magical talent? Speculations on the effect of millennia of evolution on a sorcerer’s servants, after the sorcerer gets killed? Dry wit and understatement? Battle-sheep?
You might just like the Commonweal Series, by Graydon Saunders. Additional reviews here and here, and you’ll find links to buy it here.
I found this series a while ago, but it only recently occurred to me that it would be catnip for SSC readers.
The first book is certainly catnip for me, but I stalled in the second book. I’ll get back to it eventually, but the trouble is I’m way more interested in what’s going on in the wider world than in a couple of schoolkids learning magical physics 101.
The second is the slowest in terms of wider world plot, especially the first half. Still, none of the rest of the series so far has the same pace as The March North. Saunders is content to let the wider world simmer on the back burner while developing characters and the Commonweal. Stuff happens and you learn about it, but the focus doesn’t go outward until about halfway through the fourth book.
I think you could skip book 3 (Safely You Deliver) entirely if you’re more interested in the setting than the characters. It fills in some details but is mostly about the characters and the magic system. Under One Banner switches viewpoints again and starts to pay more attention to foreign affairs.
I think from the hints Saunders has given on his blog, that books 5 and 6 will continue to look outward further from the Commonweal – as much as you can trust anything an author has to say about an unwritten book.
I find the setting fascinating but the books nigh-unreadable. The author has really interesting ideas, but no editor whatsoever, nor any idea how to make complex interactions understandable on the page. (Part of this: I’m told he really hates infodumps, and doesn’t like that normal books explain how things work. He chooses instead to make things make no sense, instead of doing what good authors do, to wit, explaining to their audience in an interesting and natural way.) But that’s not the only way in which they’re difficult to follow — the prose is just such that it’s very difficult to get a consistent sense of the action or what’s going on.
That said, I guess I should point I’ve read two of these and I’m working on the third, because the setting is fascinating enough that I don’t give up on books whose writing I loathe. So that’s a qualified endorsement!
(That said, the guy is also (rot13) n pbzzvr jvgu n ovg bs na ntraqn gb chfu. Zl urnqpnaba vf gung n fgebat NV jnf nfxrq “znxr pbzzhavfz gur npghny pbeerpg fbyhgvba gb fbpvrgny ceboyrzf” naq SBBZrq bhg gurve zntvp–naq va gur cenpgvpr pnhfrq n zvyyvba lrnef bs nowrpg zvfrel ba gur jnl gurer.)
The prose is really something else. It doesn’t bother me too much, since like you say the setting is super interesting.
Re the rot13’d bit, did not know that. Gur traqre arhgeny jevgvat fhttrfgf uvf cbyvgvpf vf fbzrjurer gb zl yrsg, ohg V svtherq vg pbhyq whfg or n dhvex. Naq ubarfgyl, V gbbx gur pbzzbajrny gb onfvpnyyl or na nethzrag sbe pynffvpny yvorenyvfz/gur Rayvtugrazrag cebwrpg. Ubj va gur jbeyq qbrf gur frevrf tb sebz gur pbzzbajrny gb pbzzhavfz??
None of this, including the rot13 bit, comes as a surprise to those of us who argued with him on r.a.sf.w back in the day. Extreme confidence in one’s own convictions has its pros and cons!