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Boris Johnson in part of his speech upon formally becoming Prime Minister:
You refuse under any circumstances? No checks at all? You know what, feck you Boris, enjoy your chlorine-drenched chicken and your hormone-treated beef and all the smuggled diesel and every last dodgy container load of crappy shoddy gear that will blow up in the faces of your citizens. You asked for it, I hope you get it full measure, pressed down and flowing over >:-(
(If we could trust the goddamned British government not to stab us in the back for a period longer than a millisecond, we might not need the backstop. But of course we can’t, so we do).
Without checks at the Irish border, the UK has defacto open borders with the EU regardless of what kind of Brexit they implement. I’d make some kind of joke about him being on drugs, but there’s no intoxicant like power.
Without checks at the Irish border, it is still possible for the Crown to use London’s access to the World Financial Panopticon to track who paid for what, and when and where, so as to knock on doors and say “Good sir, even though we didn’t stop you when you crossed the border with Ireland, you know full well, and we know full well and you know full well that we know full well that this crate of merchandise originated in Dusseldorf and not Dublin. This is the part where you hire a barrister. Have a nice day”.
De facto open borders requires not just no checks at the border, but a three-monkeys approach to enforcement inside that border. Otherwise, you just have semipermeable borders, and I’m pretty sure the British didn’t vote for Brexit on the basis of the small stuff that can slip through.
It’s not unreasonable to suspect a lack of border enforcement to hint at de facto open borders. It’s definitely not unreasonable to note that having no border enforcement makes everything significantly more difficult. It’s absolutely not unreasonable to suspect a British politician of being up to something shady. Just because they could doesn’t mean they will, or even are likely to.
Right. Just because the UK could have “de facto open borders” doesn’t mean that they will, or even are likely to.
There are sound, obvious reasons for Boris Johnson’s UK to not have physical checkpoints on the A1 between Dublin and Belfast, and there are sound, obvious reasons for Boris Johnson’s UK to not have “de facto open borders” with the EU, and there is an obvious way to satisfy both of these conditions at the same time, so the bit where it is obvious to you that Boris Johnson is lying and secretly plans to open the UK’s borders sounds like unsupported wishful thinking.
He doesn’t need to secretly plan anything. All he needs to do is to idiotically bumble into it, which is what the Brits have been doing for the past three years anyhow.
Huh.
People have been talking for many months about “technological” solutions to the border problem, but this is the first actual discription of what that might begin to look like.
Other than that whole terrorism thing, what’s stopping the Irish from instituting checks on their side of the border?
That reads pretty incoherent. I wonder how often extemporaneous speaking reads well when transcribed? Plus, the power to add punctuation is fairly significant in making sense of long
paragraphssentences like that.I’ve transcribed lots of speaking verbatim, and a lot of it is like that, and it drives me crazy. I try to do better personally. One thing that helps is to pause until you’ve figured out how to end your sentence.
A good word for this, by the way, is anacoluthon.
Wasn’t it the Irish taoiseach who was warning that people might start blowing things up if there were checkpoints on the Irish border? Seems to me that he should welcome Boris Johnson ruling out the possibility of a hard border. Or, if for some reason your government has changed its mind, what’s to stop them setting up checkpoints on their side of the border?
Are there any specific back-stabbing actions you’re thinking of, or is this just generalised Anglophobia speaking?
Well, that was a short-lived friendship!
,
It wasn’t dealt with by the truman administration, it was dealt with largely over the opposition of the truman administration. Truman publicly defended Hiss, for example.
Courtesy of The Cut, Is Bruce Hay the Most Gullible Man in Cambridge? Long read but worth it for those who can’t tear away from stories like these.
The weirdest thing is that just as this was ramping up, Hay used one of the two women as his example of how horrible Justice Scalia was.
Here is Bruce Hay writing about Justice Scalia in 2016.
Meanwhile, the Cut article shows that by 2016, Haider was harassing Hay, alleging that Hay had forced Haider “to postpone gender-affirmation surgery, which was exacerbating her depression. At one point, Haider told Hay she was going to a euthanasia clinic in Zurich, before Hay talked her out of it.”
By October 2016:
(Unrelated, but amazingly, te real jaw-dropper for me was that after all this hostility, “Shuman told him she had another surprise for him, but she needed his computer password. He complied.”)
This is really extreme compartmentalization if literally true.
“You make me want to die! But, do you think I need this opening sentence in paragraph 3 or cut it?”
Nice tie in to the discussion down-thread.
To drive a woman with a luminous mind from the study of quantum theory and statistical mechanics and condensed matter
Which would be more fucking impressive if we didn’t all know Hays knew bugger-all about physics (I’d love to see if he even knows what a proton is) and was simply regurgitating what his fuck-buddy and her pal were telling him – “oh yeah, I’m totes a genius, I’m studying all these Really Hard Subjects, you probably never heard of them”.
There’s open-minded, and then there’s letting your brain fall out the hole in your head you sawed open.
Yeah, maybe it’s Bruce Hay’s turn to hide his head in a bag.
@J Mann: Oh, that’s fantastic. This professor was such a perfect mark for a sexy scammer who opens with “I recently divorced a woman” that he should legally change his name to Marky Mark Marcuse.
Oh hi Mark.
he felt it would have been insulting for a heterosexual cisgender man to question a professed lesbian as to whether she’d had sex with other men
Reason Number 999,999 as to “So, Deiseach, why are you one of those stinking awful horrible nasty bigoted social conservatives that are so terrible and wicked and so mean to nice ordinary folx who only want their civil rights?”
Because, my dear, I’m not the person whose mind is so rotted by the woke shibboleths that he sees no contradiction in a “professed lesbian” being willing to sleep with and have a baby by “a cisgender heterosexual man”, even though he’s presumably being listening to the same message drumbeaten for the past twenty years about “born this way” and “inherent orientation can’t be changed”.
Confidence schemes and other cons have been around longer than the modern civil rights movements, and I resent that you’re pretending this is a modern rather than a human issue.
Agree with DeWitt. This has nothing to do with SJ, except that the con-artist correctly estimated that SJ was a decent attack vector with which to exploit this particular mark.
Had this con-artist been going after you or I, they would have picked something else.
To be fair, it’s not terribly uncommon for people to ID as gay or lesbian even while their behavior looks more bisexual. There’s still a stigma around the “bi” label in LGBT circles.
But a self-IDed lesbian opening with “you’re very attractive” to a male stranger is a bit much to swallow.
@Matt M:
Absolutely agreed that the fake Mort Shuman daughter (do we seriously not have her real name from the court cases she’s in?!)[1] would be capable of concocting a very different scam if SJ hadn’t infected rich people’s brains.
[1]Is it perjury to give your name in court as Maria-Pia Shuman if your real name is, for example, Nigeria Emilia Scam? I imagine it has to be some crime.
This has about as much to do with social justice as abusive priests has to do with Christianity.
Was the abusive impulse caused by the movement? No.
Does the movement (including victims) give undo trust/deference to the perpetrator’s class? Yes.
“Caused” is just too vague a word for it, I think. This may be what you were getting at with your second question, but there are ways in which a specific institution, culture, etc., can exacerbate things. For instance, clericalism (which is a real thing!) can sway a person to cover things up or a parent not to take a child’s report of abuse seriously. Likewise with e.g. #BelieveWomen. On SSC we’ve documented probably a dozen social justice beliefs or practices like this.
I tend to agree with you, Nick, but I wanted to stay on firmer ground and couldn’t really find the best wording for “has some influence on the margins.” Celibate priests arguably make abuse more more likely; an oppression narrative arguably makes SJW aligned minorities care less about harms to dominant groups. [edit: and of course the similarities only extend so far]
Ultimately the instances of abuse don’t, imo, “have nothing to do with” the wider group, but they don’t serve to discredit it either.
Again, with the putting words in your hypothetical opponents’ mouths. “But dick, isn’t it nitpicky of you to complain about a humorous rhetorical device?” Perhaps. But exaggerating the position you oppose in order to make it easier to argue against is a pretty bad habit to engage in regularly on any forum, let alone this one.
@Randy M
Agreed.
I still think this is an incorrect model.
Everyone has different buttons that can be pushed by scammers. And what separates the really good scammers from the garden variety scammers is the ability to quickly read a person and determine what the right button to push is.
So if your read of this situation is “He fell for it because of SJ, and that wouldn’t work on me because I’m not sympathetic to SJ, therefore I couldn’t be scammed by this person” then you’re probably overestimating your own ability to detect and resist scams, or underestimating the ability of the scammer. Because a really good scammer would notice that you’re not sympathetic to SJ, and find some other way to exploit your trust and to keep you quiet about the whole situation.
@Matt M:
Oh yes, absolutely. That said, if a con artist can trust with high probability that Americans as rich as this guy are SJ believers, she only has to learn one script to scam almost any rich mark, making it easier at the margin.
I think it’s clear that, to the extent Hay’s story is true, these women are sociopaths* and would probably find other levers to pull to manipulate him if they needed. But Hay is a Harvard professor who believes “it would have been insulting for a heterosexual cisgender man to question a professed lesbian.” That was a weakness that was exploited, and it didn’t come from nowhere.
Now, maybe him holding that view has other benefits for society or himself (I’d argue not, but perhaps). Nonetheless, this specific aspect of his worldview made him vulnerable.
*At the end of the article, there is a quote from a text that Hay received from an anonymous number that says “Oh and as to your quest for motives? Don’t bother. I just really hate the patriarchy, that’s it.”
I don’t think we can give this too much credence, but take it for what it’s worth. Even if true if could be an example of them just trying to hit him where it hurts; or it could explain their actions.
The frequency with which this piece of crypto-Freudian folk wisdom pops up even on a site like SSC is a source of great sorrow to me. In reality:
No empirical data exists that suggests that Catholic clerics sexually abuse minors at a level higher than clerics from other religious traditions or from other groups of men who have ready access and power over children (e.g., school teachers, coaches).
The best available data reports that 4 percent of Catholic priests sexually violated a minor child during the last half of the 20th century with the peak level of abuse being in the 1970s and dropping off dramatically by the early 1980s. And in the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report only two cases were reported in the past dozen years that were already known and dealt with by authorities (thus the grand jury report is about historical issues and not about current problems of active clerical abuse now). Putting clergy abuse in context, research from the US Department of Education found that about 5-7 percent of public school teachers engaged in similar sexually abusive behavior with their students during a similar time frame. While no comprehensive studies have been conducted with most other religious traditions, a small scale study that I was involved with found that 4 percent of Anglican priests had violated minors in western Canada and many reports have mentioned that clerical abuse of minors is common with other religious leaders and clerics as well.
It didn’t come from nowhere, but…I don’t think that is a conclusion a reasonable person (even immersed in SJ culture) would reach. I think anyone but the most hardcore SJ advocates would react to hearing that with “Uh…what?”
FWIW, I think he’s lying about that. I find it much more likely that the aforementioned vanity got in the way of demanding a paternity test be had: to demand of her she take one would mean admitting to himself that this wasn’t something beautiful, it could well be a sham and he’d been played for the fool he was.
But that’s only my own guess and conjecture if there ever was any. We’ll never really know.
I’m sympathetic to that argument in the general case, but in this specific case that would almost require that “Mischa” Haider have been a guy until his partner in crime came home with “OK, our latest mark is really into SJ, so if you can do a quick and dirty transition we can really sink a hook into his sympathies…”
It seems more likely that this particular group of scammers knew their circumstances gave them an edge scamming the SJ-adjacent and picked their targets accordingly. Which is not to say that a different group of scammers wouldn’t have had an equally good edge against a hypothetical evangelical Christian conservative Bruce Hays.
I could buy that explanation. I’m reasonably SJ aligned, and that explanation sound so stupid to me that it is hard for me to believe anyone could really believe it.
If Achillies hadn’t been dipped by the heel, would he be more or less vulnerable?
A hasty answer might be something like: “If he wasn’t dipped by the heel, he wouldn’t have his well known weak-spot, and he would be invincible!”
But that’s not correct, because if he wasn’t dipped by the heel, he’d have been dipped by somewhere else. And without knowing where the “somewhere else” is, we can’t even speculate as to whether his alterative “weak spot” would be more, or less, accessible to his enemies, than the heel.
I’m sure really good scammers can find the right button for just about anyone. Still, there are ways you can make yourself more vulnerable, as Randy says. Or to flip it around: you yourself distinguished between good and not so good scammers, Matt, so consider that there are beliefs or practices that make you so vulnerable even the worse scammers can get you.
John Schilling,
Fair enough. The best scammers do also play to their own inherent strengths. I think it’s fair to say that the mark’s SJ-leanings made him particularly vulnerable to this specific scam by these specific people.
But D’s logic of “This is why I’m not SJ – because it makes it easier for people to scam you” still does not hold.
Yeah, if Haider has serious gender dysphoria, “Shumer” would not be able to use them as a partner in crime against a different class of people.
There is a whole lot of “If what he says is true” to all this discussion, for sure.
This is the kind of story I don’t update any beliefs on, because it is pretty incredible all around. Some of the particulars could be verified, but on the matters of motives or reasoning it’s all conjecture based on self-serving narratives trying to put the best face on a humiliating string of events.
This analogy holds if a SJ “woke” worldview otherwise protects a middle aged straight white male academic. Does it?
The Hellenistic or Roman (whenever it was added) addition of the invulnerability to the Achilles story strikes me as very much a change for the worse. Even if it is helpful for analogies like this, I think it should be left out of any reference to Achilles.
@Deiseach:
Psychologically speaking, I’d imagine this had a lot more to do with his vulnerability to getting scammed than his social justice views:
Seems like a classic case of “awkward gullible nerd who has no luck with women (and probably hasn’t gotten laid in years) getting scammed by an attractive young girl who’s conspicuously interested in him.” If anything, social justice gave him an excuse that let him save face and retain slightly more dignity than if he just admitted “yeah, I was lonely and she was cute, I’d have believed anything she said.”
“This has about as much to do with social justice as abusive priests has to do with Christianity.”
A better analogy might be one of those cults where the leader abuses the followers “because you’re impure” or “because I have to beat the devil out of you”.
IE if you have a religion that makes it too easy to think of yourself as a sinner, or which is disconnected enough from reality that you suspend your moral common sense, that gives manipulators extra power over you.
At a considerable tangent, I suggest that the most famous confidence man in history is probably Casanova. He was a lot of other things as well, but much of the money that let him, for sizable chunks of his life, live the life of a rich aristocrat, was swindled out of a wealthy elderly French noblewoman in an extended and elaborate con.
But you could argue that the most effective confidence men in history were the brothers Sobieski-Stuart, considering that, two centuries later, lots of people still believe in their invented Celtic lore, clan tartans and all.
By the way, you folks missed by far the funniest line in Hay’s Scalia article:
Reading both the Scalia piece and the article, my initial feeling is that Hay deserved what he got. He is making a confident public attack on Scalia largely based on a factual claim (that his friend is a superb physicist) that he does not seem to have made the slightest attempt to verify. That level of intellectual irresponsibility, especially in a top level professional academic, deserves to be punished.
The fates got it right.
His ex-wife, on the other hand, does not seem to have deserved any of what happened to her.
It sounds like you’re saying this person deserves abuse because of their political opinions.
I’ve probably made mistakes much worse than attacking Scalia for harming a great physicist without checking how great the physicist was first, but I don’t think that means I deserve the kind of torment this guy went through.
I mean, Hays clearly thought that Scalia deserved abuse because of Scalia’s political opinions, or more precisely his jurisprudential philosophy. The juxtaposition of the two pieces does lend itself to a bit of schadenfreude.
For me though, I think the irony is that he attacked Scalia based upon the fact that he had clerked for Scalia, which supposedly would give him the opportunity to closely observe Scalia’s character. Implicit in his criticism, then, is the idea that he is a keen judge of character, and that we can rely upon his perspicacity based on his proximity to the person. This later episode seems to disastrously undermine that implication, and the specific person-to-person comparison he chose to make doubly so.
Yeah, “deserve” is probably the wrong word and there’s certainly a lack of proportionality. But the combination of gullibility and one-sidedness in the Scalia piece, and the specific manifestation of “I’ll believe anything Mischa Haider tells me, and damn as a blackhearted villain anyone who is on the wrong side of that narrative”, is in hindsight a sort of facepalm moment in both this-was-inevitable and my-sympathy-diminishes sense.
Given the magnitude of the wrong done to him, I’ve still got a bit of sympathy to spare. And more still for his ex-wife.
Not because of his political opinions, because of his intellectual irresponsibility. Equally true for someone who defended Scalia or ferociously attacked some other Justice on the basis of factual claims that were inherently not very plausible—mathematical geniuses are scarce, even among Harvard graduate students in physics—without any effort (so far as I can tell from the story) to verify those claims.
No. I put it as my initial feeling, not my considered conclusion. What happened to him was out of proportion to his desert, but he did deserve to have something bad happen to him.
I read it more as “he deserves abuse for (publicly) attacking someone based on hearsay”, which isnt the same as a political opinion.
Not that I really agree with DavidFriedman, first because the “punishment” seems unrelated to the fault, second because I take The Cut story with skepticism. It’s too convienient for my personnal beliefs while being too surreal in it’s description of an absurd level of lack of awareness. I wouldnt be surprised if the complete story was more nuanced than presented.
IMHO, there’s an irony in Hay holding Scalia responsible for Haider’s injuries, then being accused of injuring Haider himself.
It suggests that the Golden Rule might have counseled Hay to exercise a little more scrutiny on Scalia’s behalf.
I don’t think that Hays “deserved” what happened to him, but David said that “the fates got it right” – IMHO, the fates sometimes deal in irony, not justice.
Do you very genuinely believe people deserve to go through this sort of emotional abuse, physical extortion, and home eviction, all for talking smack about someone who didn’t deserve it once?
He sure deserved punishment for that piece, but not what he got. It’s disproportionate.
It isn’t relevant to the content, but by jove that’s a good picture – the one with him standing outside a house – it’s gorgeous.
Agreed. But it actually is relevant to the story, since the “housenap” is one of its highlights!
Respectfully disagree. I’m looking right at Hay’s crotch and up his nose. His body is square to the camera and awkwardly posed. His skin tone is yellow on the right side of his body and red on the left. The horizon is about 10 degrees off, which is enough to be distracting but not enough to be purposeful. The harsh shadows on the house and heavy digital work aren’t helping, either. Despite that the lighting still looks flat. If this were presented to me at a print competition in a Commercial or Photojournalism category I would struggle to not score it in an “unacceptable” bracket. Source: am PPA Master Photographer and Photographic Craftsman and have judged numerous print competitions.
It’s a great picture for a Halloween piece, but otherwise their interior decorator should be flogged. Solid red room? How do you not go a little crazy living there?
I don’t think the coloration is natural. It’s either digital or the photographer put colored strobes in the rooms. I’ve done that same kind of trick for commercial or marketing shoots. Think “of course all us biomedical sciency types work in dark labs bathed in blue light!”
I thought the lighting effect was neat. But granted, I am not a master photographer, etc. 🙂
But shouldn’t the illustration highlight the most important aspect of the article? I mean, it’s right there in the headline, we’re supposed to be focused on Hays’ thought processes.
Fair point.
Possibly the biggest takeaway here is that some men will think with their groinal regions even when those don’t work any more.
Well fair enough! I really liked it, but I know pretty much nothing about photography, so perhaps I should not venture into the territory of “good picture”.
Oh absolutely, like it if you like it.
I probably should have started with something complimentary about how the red and yellow warning coloration in the windows really giving you the sense that something wrong and no good happened with this house and what a great job the photographer did communicating that or something.
You know the judge is going to give you a pretty awful score when he starts by praising the subject. “Gosh, what a beautiful little girl. Just adorable. Look at those curls. Boy I bet her mom bought a great big canvas of this shot, huh? Okay but the lighting is really flat and you see how the edge cuts off right at the knee joint and…”
That story had me banging my head off the desk. It’s very plainly one-sided (there’s a heck of a lot we could be hearing from the ex-wife, not to say the two alleged con artists) but boy oh boy oh boy.
If it’s at all remotely true, the guy should not have been let outside without adult supervision. You need to be smart to be this stupid. I realise this is rather harsh, and it doesn’t take into account that the scammers invested months in grooming him to be pliant and gullible, but honest: just hand over your laptop and passwords? because it’s okay, you’ve already given her access and passwords to your other accounts? That they took the house is no surprise after that.
Part of it is (I’m sorry, gentlemen) male vanity. Not just him but some of the other guys – the Does and Roes – scammed. Reasonably attractive woman walks up to you on the street, gasps how she is smitten with your attractiveness, invites you back to her hotel room and jumps your bones the minute you walk in the door? And they go along with this, and having unprotected sex, because a little voice is smirking in the back of their head ‘heck yeah, I’m this hot and studly that a chick can’t resist me!’
Gentlemen, for those of you who may not realise it: a woman will not walk up to you and give you her email address out of the blue, unless (a) she’s crazy, and you don’t stick your dick in crazy and/or (b) it’s a scam, and ditto there. If, moreover, she tells you “I’m a lesbian, but there’s just something special about you so fuck me now”, don’t even bother looking for the door, jump right out the window and get away from there fast because I regret to inform you, you are not so special and studly you can turn gay women straight.
A large part of it is also being from a class living in a high-trust environment; of course he believes that she’s the daughter of a famous singer with nothing but her bare word that this is so. Of course he believes he got her pregnant after one time and he didn’t even orgasm. Of course he believes her friend is a genius and just needs his help and influence and contacts to get her access to have her work published (the irony of one of these scammers, the alleged but doubtful – ‘help her with her transition by supporting her and paying for stuff’ seems to have been one of the hooks they were using on their pigeons for years, but somehow ‘she’ never did transition – trans woman was writing articles for The Guardian on Bad Conservative Judges like Gorsuch is so rich and thick and creamy I am eating it with a dessert fork). Because he comes from a background where people don’t lie about stuff like that, everyone probably is well-off enough (not stinking rich, but comfortable and connected and mildly famous or adjacent to mildly famous) that he swallowed it all. Why believe the trans woman was a genius physicist when the only evidence he had was she dropped out of her physics course?
I don’t think he is as dumb and gullible as he comes across, but I also think there is an awful lot more that is not being told and digging further in to the story would make him less sympathetic (his futzing around with the ex-wife and kids was frustrating; no, if your batshit insane former squeeze turns up to yell abuse in the middle of the night with her equally crazy friend, you don’t take her side over your kid’s side, you tell her to shut the fuck up and stop shouting at your kid. You don’t tell the kid “well she’s having a lot of problems at the moment, do as she says”).
There’s also nothing to say she really is who she claims to be, which I would have liked to know. Is she really this woman or not?
EDIT: Also, it seems to me it’s pretty clear who the father of all these kids really is – none of the pigeons, but that live-in boyfriend Klein. No wonder Shulman didn’t want any paternity testing done!
With Roe and Poe it was protected sex, actually! At least per them or their lawyers or whatever. And they had the sense to demand paternity tests. From the timeline it sounds like they were marks 1 and 3, while Hay was 2.
There’s no indication in the article, but the journalist has confirmed elsewhere that yeah, she’s totally Mort Shuman’s daughter.
With Roe and Poe it was protected sex, actually! At least per them or their lawyers or whatever.
Yes, but even with Poe, there’s this tid-bit:
So either the lawyers were just as stupid as their clients and Poe’s lawyer never noticed “Hey guy, the baby wasn’t born until two years after you two fucked the one and only time you say it happened”, or else Poe is not telling the whole truth and there was more than one sexual encounter (quite possible, as Ms Shuman seems to have had no trouble forcing her attentions on the men involved). Whild Doe did ask for a paternity test, so he must have had some doubts, he later asked about co-parenting and seems to have been upset by her demands that he “relinquish his parental rights”, so again, another guy who let her persuade him that no, they did magically make a baby.
It’s clear these con artists were able to pick the right marks and knew how to manipulate them and push their buttons, but it’s also striking how clueless and lacking in common sense or self-preservation the men seem to have been, or at least as they’re portrayed in the story. Doe’s tale of:
No, dingbat, what they were doing – the “inside joke” – was making sure you were worth their while. Yeah, they had identified you as a prospect, but if you were just some bright but poor kid then the game would not be worth the candle. Since he apparently went to a good school and had a good job, then he had enough monetary worth to be plucked (with the tried-and-trusted “I’m having your baby” routine).
@Deiseach
1) For what it’s worth, by my standards Hay is pretty good looking and successful, albeit on the far end of middle aged. If anyone less attractive that Bill Clinton and Leonardo DeCaprio is going to get propositioned by random women, he might qualify, or at least believe that on a good day, he might. (But you’re probably right that he doesn’t qualify).
2) It sounds like it’s a sliding scale – a cute stranger starts by introducing herself and suggesting you two meet sometime, which is unusual but not impossible, and when she announces she wants to sleep with you . . . well, in the moment you might not be thinking fully rationally.
3) At some level, lots of scams work on the idea that other people are having easy, and this is your break – you’ve finally found an investment manager who has access to the sweet deals that guarantee a 12% return, or you were super lucky that the person behind you on the sidewalk happened to find an envelope full of money and is offering to share it with you, etc.
As I understand it, one thing the successful scams have is a stepwise process – nothing the grifter asks for is individually outrageous, but they just keep asking.
Or incredibly powerful biological predisposition (not that they are mutually exclusive). Consider, thought, that the inclination to follow the predisposition might actually be higher for someone with the opposite of vanity.
A rare exception to Betteridge’s law. Well, OK, there’s probably someone at Cambridge more gullible than Hays, but “This woman claims I am the father of her child; even though I have never ejaculated in the same room as her, I shall believe her and defend her against all who would question her” is pretty hard to top. Indecisive as well, and completely unwilling to assert his own interests.
But I’m also struck by the lack of any real motive for the women’s manipulations, of both Hays and their other known victim. As a long, and long shot, con for a discount on Cambrige real estate rental, this is pretty weak. There doesn’t seem to have been much financial profit for them, and if there’s value in Hays’ mentorship as a writer and academic that could presumably have been obtained honestly and for the asking. This only makes sense as emotional manipulation for the pure joy of manipulating emotions. So, yes, that happens. Frightening that it happens, because it makes it hard to use reason to discern the trap and teaches that the only defense is to avoid emotional entanglements with strangers.
But I’m also struck by the lack of any real motive for the women’s manipulations, of both Hays and their other known victim.
Money. And power. The story mentions three other guys besides Hays that they pulled the same “oh hi, oh you’re so sexy I can’t resist you, oh I’m pregnant with your baby, no you can’t have a paternity test” thing on – John Doe, John Poe and Richard Roe (the court case pseudonyms). There’s probably a trail of other guys in Canada and elsewhere but the dots haven’t been joined up yet. And I’d be willing to bet this Andrew Klein boyfriend has a sideline in doing the same thing to women, it’s a cosy little trio of scammers and thieves.
As a long, and long shot, con for a discount on Cambrige real estate rental, this is pretty weak.
I think they needed to move into his house because they couldn’t keep up the rent on the house they originally had (not surprising, if they’re paying with money extorted from their victims and have no money of their own) and despite their best efforts, he wasn’t kicking out his ex-wife and kids and letting them move in, so they set this up with the visit to Quebec to get him out of the way (while they charged the ten grand moving fees to his credit card). I bet they’d have tried sub-letting the house for a lot more than $1,500 a month, or even taking out loans on it or selling it; if they could fool somebody into “we need to make a quick sale because we’re moving to Canada/France/the North Pole, the place is worth $3.2 million but we’re willing to take a knockdown price of $2 million”, they could do well even if they only managed to con a deposit of a couple of hundred grand out of a credulous fool. I honestly don’t think they’re rich daughters of pop stars, they’re living hand to mouth from one scam to another and any money is good money.
The scammers claimed to be rich and famous (or at least the daughter of a famous guy) and to have all this property here, there and everywhere, but the pigeons end up paying for a lot of things. It’s relatively easy to set up a rental paying with paper probably backed up by a previous victim and then present yourself as ‘rich person living on own means’, see the Anna Sorokin/Delvey case just recently where she scammed the wealthy into paying for all the trips and meals and the rest of her lifestyle.
I don’t know if this woman really is who she claims to be (if she is, she would have money of her own), but it’s how grifters and con artists work – create the appearance of being well-off, then soak the victims. Because they’re assuming you’re a class equal, they’re much less suspicious than they would be if an obviously poor(er) person was asking for ‘pay for the flights, book the hotel’ etc.
The threats and taking out Title IX and so on were all part of keeping Hays anxious and entangled in the relationship while they tried to get his assets from him (the house thing is outrageous and on the face of it he was a total fool, simply handing over passwords and accounts without a murmur of suspicion) and he’s not the only one. So money and the power of fooling somebody who is supposed to be smart and better class, and getting them to believe any old nonsense.
The pair of scammers come across as slightly crazy as well as greedy, and I don’t suppose it would be any surprise if they turned out to have some kind of personality disorder (or several) that makes them sociopathic and so on.
But did they, really?
Hays wound up paying, effectively, a couple months’ rent on a very nice house in Cambridge, plus all the moving expenses. But even if we assume the girls planned and believed they could get away with that long-term, that’s a lot of effort for a single non-fungible asset whose use-value can’t be that much better than the house they were living in before. There’s strongly diminishing marginal returns from square footage of even the finest hardwood floors, if you can’t expect to sell or borrow against the property. It isn’t indicated that Hays was paying their rent before they stole his house, nor either of the previous victims, there don’t seem to have been any cash payments, and I don’t recall any extravagant gifts.
I don’t buy the real estate scam as the initial plan. There’s too many ways for that to go wrong and too long to set up before it can possibly go at all right. Presumably Hays paid the lion’s share of any shared expenses, like meals the three of them had out, but that’s chump change for something of this magnitude.
I was reading this piece from the start with a position of “OK, the obvious narrative is that this is a scam to part a fool from his money, let’s see if I can be smarter than Hays and spot when that happens”. And even in hindsight, I don’t see where that happened. Oh, he was separated from his money in the form of legal fees to try and undo some of the harm that had been done to him, but not in the form of money or liquid assets that the con artists can walk way with.
So it looks like straight-up power tripping and emotional manipulation.
And the other victims were younger, and no indication they were particularly wealthy. One of them was a 30 year old CPA. I don’t expect a 30 year old CPA to have enough wealth to bother stealing. Go for the old guys with the home equity and the retirement accounts.
I’m always amazed, in these stories, how late in the game the victim gets a lawyer; but I guess if they were dumb enough to believe everything else, they’re dumb enough not to know when things have already gone way off the rails.
A scammer going after a 30 year old CPA might have some idea that they can get the mark to embezzle from their clients. This protects the scammer also as once the mark realizes they’ve been scammed, it’s in their interest to cover it up.
Not that I’m saying that happened in this case, but it’s a plausible motive to scam a CPA.
I recently read a book on con-artists (I think it was called “The Confidence Game” but can’t fully remember).
My impression was that some people are just wired for this sort of thing. They really can’t help it. It’s as if they’re addicted to scamming. You can catch them and sue them and throw them in jail, but they’re never going to stop. A lot of times they end up getting decent sums of money out of people, but that’s really more of a side-effect of their desire to keep escalating the scam more than it is the ultimate goal in and of itself.
Note that this is a separate case from most scammers, who totally just want easy money. They are atypical of scammers in the same sense that Hannibal Lecter is atypical of murderers.
It was really a somewhat depressing book. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. I also didn’t read this article because I can already tell where it’s going, and these stories just make me so sad. Even more sad than like, a random drive-by shooting killing an innocent person, even though the final outcome isn’t nearly as bad.
if you can’t expect to sell or borrow against the property.
If. Since they seem to have managed to get him to the point of preparing to take out a hefty mortgage, and to have engaged in fraud when drawing up the “lease” to “rent” them his house, then I don’t imagine they would have balked at a bit more fraud in trying to mortgage the house, use it as collateral for loans, or even sell it.
If it hadn’t been for the ex-wife fighting for the house as the home for her and their kids, then they would have plucked this guy down to his bones and left him in his underwear by the side of the street:
So it wasn’t mere manipulation and making him jump when they said “when”, it was defrauding him and trying to take assets away from him. I really hope the journalist is making him sound about ten times dumber than he really is, because honestly it sounds like he should be in supervised living or something, else he’d hand over his wallet to the first person who asked him.
And the other victims were younger, and no indication they were particularly wealthy.
Yeah, but this travelling circus of Shulman and her trans female best buddy and best buddy’s live-in boyfriend and Shulman’s three (four?) kids seem to be living the scamming life, moving from A to B to C, putting up the facade of wealth and upper middle-class lifestyle, and that burns up money.
Even if she is the real daughter of Mort Shulman, I don’t know how much money she did come in for from his estate or if she has any access to it or how much is left. Even scamming child support from the CPA could have been worth their while, especially if she got pregnant by Klein (as I strongly suspect to be the real father of the kids). For these criminals and mental cases, why pay to support your own kid when you can con some mark into paying for you?
I’m always amazed, in these stories, how late in the game the victim gets a lawyer
Well, that is how these romance scams work, generally it’s men pulling them on women, and they persuade the woman to hand over her life savings and every last penny, all the while promising that they’ll marry some day (he just needs to set up his business idea first, it’s a loan, he’ll pay her back when the money comes rolling in). Men get scammed too, of course.
This is just the gender-flipped version. Emotional manipulation like this, where you get the mark to fall in love with you, relies heavily on love being blind and on getting away with the cash before the scales eventually fall from the mark’s eyes and they realise they’ve been tricked. The nasty manipulation and threats in this case are just part of the personality disorders in the case of the scammers.
Maybe there was nothing that made it seem like an obvious scam for his money, but at the point where they are trying to get him fired by accusing him to his dean of rape–and he knows this–he is still trying to work out living arrangements with them.
How do you not run away and lawyer up when this superweapon comes out?
Because, like every person railroaded, you know you’ve done nothing wrong. And like every person who has achieved a fairly comfortable and stable life, you have never been railroaded.
Well, fine, I can buy naivete for not finding a lawyer then, but the malice behind the statement should have compelled him to cut ties. I guess he was still trying to be the father and sincerely believed that his blanks hit the target.
Or do other people in relationships make career ending threats as a matter of course? I know some people are just really bad at conflict but that’s so far over the line for someone you are considering tying yourself to.
No argument that his naivety was superhuman. But it’s of the same kind as that of anybody who sticks with an abusive relationship way longer than they should — a stew of sunk-cost fallacy, the distraction of occasional good times, and a hubristic conviction that if you could just explain things and talk it through then the problems would disappear.
What made it newsworthy (if it was; I’m still of mixed feelings) was that Hay was a member of the elite, where one doesn’t often see that level of naivety, and the coldly sociopathic character (at least in this telling) of his tormentors.
how late in the game the victim gets a lawyer;
His ex-wife was an assistant US Attorney. Those are prestigious positions and the people who hold them are good lawyers, and know other good lawyers. (She got her house back pretty quickly.) I was surprised that the scammers would target someone who can call in big guns like that so easily, even if they suspect he won’t.
How common is the living arrangements Hays had even before all that commotion with the other woman?
Apparently we was married, they had a child together, then they were divorced and he moved out. Then he moved back in, and they had two more children.
There’s an old saw that the upper class makes up (progressive) norms that serve them well, but that cause trouble when adopted he more impulsive lower classes. This particular upper-class fellow would probably have been well served himself by stronger norms against divorce, considering his life would have largely been the same but may have been prevented from pursuing the casual fling.
(edit: “May have” and may not, I know, plenty of married men do have flings, of course. The article implied he only had the fling because he considered himself unattached, but who knows how accurate this third hand picture of his psychology is. Still, even weak matrimony bonds surely do more than complete sexual freedom, right?)
Nobody knows if they do, because it is extremely hard to check. Worse, it leads to circle logic: clearly this person believes in complete sexual freedom, not weak matrimony bonds. If he didn’t, he’d not have a fling.
Beware assuming anything about the past if you don’t have a way to measure it. People have had flings for eternity and are going to keep doing so for a while yet.
In this case, he said he felt that pursuing a relationship would requiring telling his ex/housemate, but a casual fling did not.
This is a somewhat reasonable assumption, given that they got divorced. Like, otherwise what’s the point of divorce?
So it sounds like he had some kind of honor about him and might have withstood the temptations of this other woman if he were still married and knew the expectations, rather than in this ambiguous de facto marriage but officially divorced relationship.
But, for all I know, it was a prior fling that caused them to split the first time. Could be, though he doesn’t seem like the highest testosterone bloke on the block.
That’s the charitable interpretation, as written down by a journalist who grew up in a similar area to Hay while taking his side of the story. I’m more inclined to think that Hay wanted to have his cake, eat it too, and saw things (predictably) blow up in his face.
I’m pretty sure the story is slanted in his favor, because for one, he’s the one talking to the reporter, and for another it’s hard to imagine a version that paints the other parties in a worse light. [edit: actually, at some points it does have their side of the story. Still, it’s written from his pov generally]
Still though, I think marriage has >0 effect on partner count, Hay would have been better off with that pressure, and he was basically living as a husband already, so neither one of them can claim they were trapped in a terrible relationship or similar.
People do weird stuff when it comes to marriage and cohabiting. From the story, he seems to be a guy who relies strongly on a woman to make the day-to-day decisions for him; if he moved out, I’d bet he couldn’t manage to live on his own, so moved back with the ex-wife and kid to recreate the same relationship as when they were married. Why she went for it is the interesting thing; maybe they had one of those “can’t live with you, can’t live without you” relationships where she realised on one level he was a disaster as husband and father, but she was still emotionally entangled with him. So she lets him move back in because hey, it’s for the sake of the kid, right?
Then ‘things just happened’ and there you go, two more kids and the presumption that they’re in some kind of relationship once more where they’re not free to have “flings on the side”. Or it was one of those “marriage doesn’t suit us but we don’t need a piece of paper to have a loving, intimate, faithful relationship” ideas which work out better in theory than practice, but lack of communication meant he still thought he could have his cake and eat it (ex-wife to run his domestic life, but if any attractive younger women drag him off to hotel rooms to ravish him, well sure, why not?)
Yeah, I’m betting ex-wife has the right of it here and she’s not just jealous or not jealous without cause; he does seem to be an easy mark for women to take advantage of, and there is that aura of “hey we’re not married anymore, that means I’m available if, y’know, but I’m not saying this is what is going on, but I am an attractive virile male in my own right so why wouldn’t women find me desirable, you’re only being jealous because you acknowledge that” there.
The two seemed to have had differing expectations about that.
Obviously they were in a relationship and he was rationalizing a way for him to get some exotic young intellectual nookie on the side. But, you know, if they were married the expectations of monogamy would be a lot harder to claim ignorance of.
Of course, if they were married it’d be harder for the wife to “disentangle” herself from his nutcase.
I don’t get how there could be a misunderstanding of that magnitude. They say they had a “mostly platonic”(what does mostly mean?) relationship and yet they had more kids after moving back in together? The only explanation for that is him just straight up lying about the whole understanding. But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t Zacks just say that? And why would she still be living with him?
Wrong Species >
It means they’re not newlyweds anymore.
Because they have kids together, which is what parents are supposed to do.
Regrettably those who get divorced and/or have children with those they aren’t legally married to aren’t sterilized as a matter of course to prevent this type of nonsense from re-occurring.
Obviously the passion is going to fade after years of being together but what kind of couple describes their relationship as “mostly platonic”?
@Wrong Species
The kind that got divorced, then moved back in together? The occasional sexual encounter (resulting in a few additional kids) afterwards doesn’t necessarily contradict a description of mostly platonic.
But then why would she “feel betrayed” over him seeing this other woman? You could say that he’s just straight up lying but if that’s true, the way she reacts to all this seems really off.
Maybe they never clearly defined their post-divorce relationship, and he gave his honest characterization as he saw it?
Or maybe she’s lying to save face, because publicly being seen as the woman who had let her ex-husband move back in but keep sleeping around, while occasionally sleeping with him herself, wouldn’t be the greatest look for her either.
Or he’s lying, and it was outright cheating when he knew there was an expectation of exclusivity with the wife.
IMHO, a guy who says that his relationship with his live-in babymomma is “mostly platonic” and that they have a “tacit” understanding that he can date someone else is probably just having an affair.
“My wife and I haven’t really been in a real marriage for years” and “I understand that my partner and I have an open marriage, but haven’t actually told her about my understanding” is (from what I read) verses 1 and 2 in the cheating dad’s playbook.
Agreed. Hence, having his cake and eating it too.
Dad’s don’t cheat; husband’s cheat. But he’s an ex-husband. He has a legal document telling him he is now free to pursue other cake.
He’s got more leg to stand on than the guy who takes off his wedding ring surreptitiously. He took it off and got that notarized.
Yeah, the fact that they are divorced makes me skeptical of what either of them say. There are basically three possibilities:
1) The guy is lying to save face, he knew there was an expectation of an exclusive relationship when he moved back in with his ex-wife.
2) The woman is lying to save face, she knew there was no expectation of an exclusive relationship when her ex-husband moved back in
3) They never really clearly defined what their relationship was supposed to be post-divorce, and instead made assumptions; both believe they are more or less correct in their characterization of the arrangement.
Without more info, I give about equal weight to all three. Maybe 30/30/40.
This is maybe my favorite description of divorce ever.
@Randy M:
Damn Lex Luthor and his legal team!
This seems the hardest to believe. I can’t imagine that a couple would get divorced and then start living together again(and having more kids) without having a conversation about what their relationship is. It sounds like a bad comedy movie.
That’s what prompted my original comment in this subthread.
Maybe they saw themselves as too mature and adult and modern to get hung up on sex and didn’t need to discuss it, and oops, we’re alone and drunk and now I’m pregnant. And of course I could investigate other options since we’re not married, but he/she would have to run that by me since we’re partners.
But I really feel like I’m straw-manning there and actual people aren’t that dumb.
@Wrong Species
The kind of couple that gets divorced and then moves back in together is exactly the kind of couple I would expect to have this problem. It would be hard to convince me that either of these people are likely to be involved in a healthy, well adjusted relationship based on that fact alone.
It’s quite possible that they hadn’t nailed down what relationship they wanted because either they were both uncertain what they wanted, or because they weren’t in agreement about what they wanted but neither wanted to end the relationship.
My uninformed guess is that his ex-wife may have been hoping they would stick together–after all, they’d moved back in together, and slept together enough to have more kids. Maybe she felt like things were going okay (they hadn’t remarried, but he was living with her and they were raising their kids together) and it was better not to rock the boat.
I’ll admit that if I saw someone move back in with his ex-wife and have more kids with her, I’d think “Ah, you’ve gotten back together–that’s great news!” I would not guess “Ah, you’re just shacking up for convenience with your ex-wife and three kids while having a de facto open relationship.”
@albatross11
It would be helpful to know who initiated the divorce (and why) and how he ended up moving back in.
Heck, given how apparently gullible he is are we sure the wife wasn’t running a soft scam on him herself?
We can perhaps reasonably infer that the relationship they didn’t want was, “lives in a committed relationship and domestic partnership with the person they married long ago, with whom they created three children that they continue to jointly parent, and with an explicit condition of sexual monogamy even if there isn’t much actual sex any more”. Because that relationship is called “being married”, which they explicitly decided to not do.
We can also extract from the story that they did chose to live together in a relationshp and domestic partnership, having created three child three children that they continue to jointly parent, even if there isn’t much actual sex any more.
Subtracting the one from the other, what’s left?
This is the only thing that makes sense to me. The only reason we have to suspect him cheating on her is that line about her feeling betrayed but it’s not about anything she directly says but what the author tells us about her emotional state. Here’s what I think is happening:
When they moved in together, they agreed to it platonically. They slipped up a few times but they reaffirmed it after having the kids. Over a longer time period, she starts getting stronger feelings for him but never brings it up. When talking to the author, she talks about feeling upset over the “infidelity” not because she blames Hay, but because that’s just how she feels. The author infers the blame based on her feelings and puts that in the article.
My grandmother moved back in with my grandfather 20 years after they had gotten divorced, following the death of her second husband. She didn’t really have anywhere else to go (due to legal complications, her second husband’s house went to his children from his first marriage rather than her). And besides that, she preferred to live with her own children and grandchildren, and we were living with my grandfather at the time.
My great-aunt moved back in with her husband a few years after their divorce. I’m not entirely sure why, it might’ve been for financial reasons.
My father travelled a lot for business, and when he came back to New York, he’d usually stay with my mother and I, sometimes for weeks or months at a time, even though they’d gotten divorced back in the early 90s. This apparently continued after I moved out, as recently as 2016.
I lived with my ex-girlfriend for two years after we broke up, and only moved out when she got married and wanted her spouse to move in. (Back in college, I lived with another ex-girlfriend for six months after we broke up, but that was because we’d gotten a dorm room together and broke up midway through the school year, so I don’t know if that really counts.)
So, at least judging by my family, it seems to be fairly common.
This sounds like a case where “you can’t con a honest man” would be true.
Hard to think of a less true folk saying.
Well, one of the popular kinds of cons is to pretend to be conspiring with the mark to con someone else. That sort of approach has the advantage that the mark can’t go to the authorities without effectively confessing to planning illegal activity of their own. Obviously, you can’t run that sort of con on an honest person. But there are plenty of other ways to con people.
Sure. I just think the idea that honest people can’t be conned (and the implication that someone who gets conned must not be honest) are…the opposite of helpful.
There are plenty of other popular cons that play on honest folk’s generosity,etc.
“You can’t con an honest man” is as much a definition of “con” as a rule about people – confidence scams definitionally involve the mark believing he’s been taken in to the scammer’s confidence. Without that, it’s just someone lying to someone else in order to accomplish a theft.
The Spanish Prisoner con, in many of its variants, does rely on the mark’s greed, but not so much on his dishonesty.
There’s a classic scam that involves dressing up as a grizzled old security guard, standing by an ATM (preferably one not near an actual bank), and telling customers that the machine’s broken but you’ll be happy to accept their deposits. Take the money, write out a worthless deposit slip on convincing-looking letterhead, and send them on their way.
That doesn’t seem to fit the literal definition of “confidence scheme”, but I think most people would nonetheless call it one.
This does not require dishonesty on the part of the mark, though.
That story tries to make the main character into a sympathetic person. But it fails. (My sympathies for him took a dive during his first visit to the hotel room…and kept declining as he made more and more bad decisions.)
The women involved seem to be the female version of the main character from the book/film Catch Me If You Can!…or a version of the trio who are the main characters of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
I count this as a reminder that not all claims of abuse are legitimate. And also that even very smart people can become a victim of a confidence-trickster.
Complete tangent, but I saw Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Broadway and absolutely loved it. Saw The Producers the following day and was thoroughly unimpressed (the best, though, was seeing the Blue Man Group Off-Broadway..
The most surprising thing about this story is that such a redoubt of Internet feminism as The Cut published it. I could easily see them covering this as “Abusive Harvard professor makes ludicrous claim to be victim of absurd scam in desperate effort to avoid Title IX.” Which, for all I know, is just as accurate a description.
It surprised me, too, which is another reason I thought it was worth linking.
I’d like to try changing my breathing patterns for about a week. Does anyone have reccomendations for breathing techniques? It doesn’t matter if its for meditation or not.
Note that when taking deep breathes for about half an hour my head feels quite different, and I’m not sure if this is good.
If what you’re doing happens to be hyperventilation, then it’s probably not good.
All news is fake.
HuffPost has another deep dive on the collapse of Mic.com, which I linked to a previous story on in a thread I don’t feel like digging up. Again, I’m struck by the contrast between the earnest true believers who wrote the site’s virtual reams of idpol clickbait and the apolitical cynics who owned and managed it. Mic lived and died chasing every minor change to the Facebook algorithm in hopes of a bigger slice of a dwindling ad revenue pie, culminating in the disastrous “pivot to video.” In the end, the owners took a mere seven-figure buyout to sell the domain and archives to Bustle (who also own the remains of Gawker and the Outline – is Bustle’s business model a digital undertaker?) while the writers were left with nothing but “exposure.” Poking around the Twitter reactions, most ex-Mic writers still have a lot of praise for the company for letting them write actual pieces at an age when their peers would be fetching coffee for senior writers at more “traditional” media outlets, and for its commitment to diversity and representation, shallow as it was.
Of course the story of Mic is the story of all “new” media, and some “old” media that’s made the digital transition. The story of the rest of old media is storied institutions like the Youngstown Vindicator and the New Orleans Times-Picayune closing in the face of dwindling subscriber bases and Craigslist killing off classified ads for good.
I don’t see this lasting. I also don’t see a profitable business model for news, online or offline. Layoffs and buyouts are accelerating. You can try to goose your numbers by producing a lot of cheap ORANGE MAN BAD content (or, if that’s not your niche, ORANGE MAN GOOD can work) but it’s a game that everyone ends up losing. Maybe Facebook and Google will start their own news-gathering bureaus when they finally kill off all the existing ones. Or “journalism” as a whole could cease to exist, and social media randos will be the main source of information going forward. Who knows.
That doesn’t seem unlikely.
Well, social media randos and people paid by specific interests rather than their consumers’, but we’re already seeing the start of that
I mean, social media randos are already a top primary source for the “official” news networks themselves, most of which are happy to signal-boost their messages, so long as they are ideologically aligned (think: Covington catholic)
CNN didn’t add any value to that story. They didn’t do any reporting. They just found and amplified.
One of the more depressing news trends of the past few years is that there are large numbers of BBC articles that consist of >50% embedded tweets from randos. But perhaps I have an overly naive David Simon-esque view of what news should be like.
Very much agreed (ie, +1) to both of you.
To repeat what I’ve said before, “X said Y” is not news. Obvious exceptions for political figures speaking about policy intentions relevant to you personally or some expert providing context to a finding (that doesn’t fail to replicate) aside, that’s all just narrative shaping, space filling, rabble rousing non-sense you are almost certainly better off ignoring.
Yeah, I hate this trend too.
Cynically, and not even flippantly, being a social media random is how Trump kickstarted his campaign. Twitter is the devil.
But not really accurately. Trump was a household name before Twitter was a thing, like it or not. (It’s the ‘random’ I’m objecting to, not the ‘kickstarted’).
There wasn’t much reason his opinions were terribly relevant to anything, that’s true, but he came in with notoriety and would have gotten coverage in media after announcing his candidacy for President even absent social media.
Trump is an early adopter of social media manipulation for sure. For the past decade now, he’s been very good at it, with the most well-known example being the whole birth certificate thing.
It may be true that he’d have been succesful prior to social media’s ubiquitous proliferation as well, so somewhere before ~2008, but we don’t live in the counterfactual world where this happened. We live in the world where the one person to have been elected president of the United States is the single figure to draw the most attention on social media.
Yep. To take a more recent example, the Erica Thomas Incident. Guy is an asshole to her in a store, she claims it was racism, national media blows it into the stratosphere.
@Nick,
That this is the first time I remember seeing anything about the “incident” makes me happier about NYT articles being hard to view lately.
Covington was a highly noncentral example of modern journalism. So is anything resembling investigative reporting. Almost everything you’ll find on the front page of a major modern newspaper or the like was written by a professional journalist and based on an organizational press release, a public briefing, or a private interview with a known source(*). Which is low-effort stuff to be sure, but it allows for at least some level of objectivity and fact-checking between you and e.g. the local police union’s announcement that they’ve determined that the cops were the good guys in 100% of last year’s controversial shootings.
The reporters are paid by whatever combination of advertisers, subscribers, and rich white dudes with relevant philanthropic and/or Machiavellian agendas will make for marginal profitability. This model seems quite sustainable, at least at the national level, even if it will have to shift more towards the rich white dudes with an agenda model.
If you want your news feed to consist of mostly social media randos, that’s easy to arrange. But you don’t have to, it’s not the default, and it’s probably not the wave of the future. Nor is it in any way an improvement, because see Covington Catholic.
* Which may be presented as an “anonymous leak” and give the misimpression that investigative reporting was going on.
Seems to be becoming more and more central each day. As Nick says, we have a similar such scandal this week, where a sympathetic person described a fictional event on Twitter, and the media uncritically parroted it as established fact (and continues to do so even after a vehement denial by the supposedly offending party, and at least a partial walkback by the original source).
And there’s another increasingly common version of this wherein “People on Twitter are saying…” is more and more becoming a popular headline in and of itself, even if the people are quite few and entirely insignificant. Look back at the “White supremacists are outraged that Disney has decided to cast a black Ariel!” articles that managed to find like three such Tweets, from newly created accounts with two-digit followers.
But does the uncritical amplification of randos’ accounting of events have more or less impact than the type of real journalism you describe?
I wonder what would have happened with the Matthew Shepard case in an age of social media. The murders claimed “because gay” and the media reported this uncritically because the goal was “pass hate crimes laws” and not “report events accurately.” No reporter bothered to ask “wait a minute, we’re uncritically accepting murderers’ statements as truth. Perhaps we should interview other people in the community to find out how plausible this.” Had they done that, they might have found the townspeople familiar with the gay community in Laramie who knew the murderers and the victim were intimate. Today those people would have been able to correct the record almost immediately, and then be amplified by conservative or alternative media.
I don’t know. I don’t have much of a solution or ideal goal in mind.
There are obvious, massive problems with letting the twittersphere or whatever determine what constitutes news. But I’m not sure what the correct way of dealing with this is.
In terms of the Shepard thing: I think then you’d find that there would be two versions of the story believed by two different tribes, which is more or less what the case is now. See also the supposed hate crimes immediately after Trump’s election, which I’m sure you know more about than I do. I don’t think either “only let qualified journalists define the narrative” or “throw it open to everybody” is particularly ideal.
Sure, but we didn’t get the other side of the story in the Shepard case for over a decade. Today it would have been basically instant, and maybe we wouldn’t have federal hate crimes legislation.
And I’m not necessarily putting that as a positive. I am marginally in favor of hate crimes laws.
Reality check: Of the fifty-four articles directly linked on the BBC News front page as I type, no more than five are primarily sourced from and/or reporting on anything resembling “social media randos”. And in some cases, e.g. the lack of public appearances by Turkmenistan’s president adding credibility to social-media rumors of his death, this seems like material that would be newsworthy under any standard.
I don’t think the ratio would be terribly different if you looked at e.g. CNN or NYT; knock yourself out if you think otherwise. But “becoming more and more central” for something that is still at the single-digit percentage level, strikes me as hyperbole.
Heh, and, in contradiction of what you might expect, I am marginally against them.
@Enkidum
Why, if you don’t mind my asking?
Because I don’t actually think it’s worse to murder (or beat up, etc) someone because you hate their sexual orientation / race /etc than it is to just do it because you feel like it, or for money, or whatever. If the laws discouraged people from committing hate crimes, then that might be a point in their favour, but I can’t imagine that the kind of person who commits them is really spending a lot of time poring over sentencing guidelines.
But we don’t just put people in prison for deterrence. That’s one reason. But also “removal,” so they cannot harm someone else. “Retribution,” making the punishment fit the crime. And of course rehahahahhahahahahabilihahaha yeah whatever.
As for it being worse than beating/murdering somebody for money, consider that there are more victims in hate crimes. If my neighbor is murdered because of a falling out with his business partner, that is terrible. But really nothing to do with me and I don’t need to fear. I’m not in business with that guy. If my neighbor is killed because he’s an X, and I’m an X, or I’m one of those stinking X-lovers who can tolerate living next to an X, oh boy. Now I’m living in fear for my kids. This kind of rips apart the whole tolerant and pluralistic society we’re trying to have.
Consider also that we have additional charges for terrorism. It’s one thing to blow up a building for the insurance money, and it’s something else to do it to cow everyone into going along with your politics. Hate crimes are a lot like terrorism.
Locally, we had a person recently convicted for intentionally driving the wrong way on a street/highway, hitting another car, and killing all 3 of the people in it. I’m unclear on the motivation, except it wasn’t targetting a specific group – and so not a “hate crime”. But people like that are a danger to everyone who uses the road(s) – so it would be the same case according to your argument.
Yes, which is why we have different punishments for different states of mind. Intentional murder is worse than murder resulting from reckless behavior which is worse than murder resulting from negligent behavior and complete accidents no one could have foreseen aren’t even crimes.
The issue with media isn’t that it’s inherently unprofitable. It’s that news media has a genteel contempt for acting as a business. I’m not talking about Chomsky-ite criticism of media as an inherently capitalist institution. I mean they feel they should be above monetary concerns, as some professions are wont to do.
I know plenty of people who run media outlets with relatively small subscriber counts profitably. However, they monetize their subscriber base and understand that they need money to keep the lights on.
Mic had eighteen million readers on its second-worst month of 2015. So let’s say they had 210 million readers (which is the low estimate). If 1% of them had signed up for a $5 a month subscription, they’d have made $126,000,000 that year. Double the total venture capital they took in during the company’s lifetime. If their content was really that good, they couldn’t get a freemium model with 1% conversion going?
But the article is painfully light on exactly how mic.com earned revenue or what routes were explored, if any. Google tells me they were selling branded content consulting and placement, basically helping companies produce content targeted towards millennials. If that’s the case, they were more a media consultancy and I’m not sure why they had such a news production focus. I’m also not sure why all the strategy meetings were about getting views instead of, you know, revenue.
The trouble is, if you’re just selling your opinion and not any useful primary reporting–well, you know how common opinions are. Probably even more common than the aphorism suggests, and all available at once, thanks to the internet. So I’m not surprised that they couldn’t monetize it.
SSC I can’t really get anywhere else, so if it became necessary, I’d probably chip in a few bucks a month to keep access to it (but in the present case, the milk is free, so…). Mic.com? Never heard of it, but apparently not many people are willing to make that statement about them.
I would be happy to support SSC with a few bucks a month; I don’t because Scott tells me not to. I pay for a few others already.
I’ve heard of Mic.com, but I’m a little amazed they had 18 million readers (is that really unique readers, and not just hits?) on a bad month.
If Scott was suddenly making millions and driving around in a Ferrari, my guess is that reasonably decent facsimiles for SSC would show up pretty darn quick.
The reason you can’t get it anywhere else is because the audience is relatively small, and he has yet to prove that it can be effectively monetized.
Sure, sure. But the point was that it is a uniquely well explained and thought out opinion and comment section, which cannot be said for large swatches of online opinion journalism which compete with people posting their thoughts on blogs and twitter for free and still compare unfavorably.
This is why he has branched to promoting VRAYLAR to us.
More like, “Please don’t send me money, it would compromise the integrity of any psychological tests I run on you.” 😉
I’ve also found there are types of people. I doubt Scott (I doubt many people here) think of a blog as a business or consider making a profit a goal of the activity. They might even think that cheapens the blog or content in some way. And that’s fine. (Or at least, it’s fine until they start complaining about how they shouldn’t have to worry about plebeian concerns like ‘money’, as some have.) Not everything has to be a business. Not everything worthwhile can be.
If Scott was suddenly making millions and driving around in a Ferrari
Growth mindset, Matt M! Maybe not this year, but next? 😀
This is why he has branched to promoting VRAYLAR to us.
Well,you have to admit: if ever any of us need antipsychotics, we now know what to ask our doctors to prescribe: “VRAYLAR! As recommended by (the paid advertising at the annual meeting of ) the American Psychiatric Association. Accept no other!” 🙂
That doesn’t really matter: just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s not monetizable. Perhaps you personally will only pay for news with primary reporting but that’s not some ironclad rule of the market. Plenty of people pay for work that’s basically secondary opinions or secondary comedy: look at the radical magazines or whole Daily Show penumbra.
It’s possible their oh-so-vaunted content was just clickbait nobody would be willing to pay for, meant to maximize FB algorithms rather than give value to the reader. In that case, maybe no one would pay… but that’s because they weren’t producing something people would pay for, not because of some rule no one pays for opinions.
The NYT, Washington Post, and Vox all made a profit last year. Why do you think that can’t continue?
That can continue but maybe there are only so many news outlets the market can support.
Weren’t the first two of those recently bailed out of financial trouble by wealthy billionaires looking for an already established media mouthpiece?
Two of those are owned by two of the five richest people in the world and the third by a massive company that regularly places high in “most hated company in America” polls. Who needs lobbyists and PR firms when you own the papers?
Huh, you’re right. Consider me updated.
Reading through the NYT’s 2018 financial statement, they turned a respectable net income last year of ~$125 million on ~$1 billion of stockholder equity (p.20). Looking a bit deeper, the NYT makes about twice as much from subscriptions (p.30) as from advertising and their digital-only subscriber base is growing, which has to be their most profitable area.
Sadly, it doesn’t look like the Washington Post releases financial statements since the Bezos buyout and while Wikipedia says the Washington Post should show up under either Graham Holdings or Nash Holdings, I can find anything for Nash and Graham Holdings is a mess of different companies. Graham doesn’t mention the WP but they do mention Slate and I recall Slate was owned by WP so my guess is Graham was a subsidiary/holding company of WP which is still tracking WP’s assets but I’m well out of my depth now so I have no idea where clear reporting on WP’s financials are. Vox also doesn’t release financials, I think because they’re not public yet. Rumors of profits at both these are from “leaked” emails or Twitter posts.
My take away is that WP and Vox are saying they’re profitable but you can take that with a suitably large block of salt. NYT’s annual report/10-k is pretty credible though and it does show a respectable profit.
My (very shallow) take is that the market is bifurcating between Twitter (cheap clickbait) and the Economist (quality reporting/status symbol worth paying for) with a lot of legacy media stuck in the middle. Looks like the NYT has managed to get to get on the Economist/paid subscription side. Looking through the mic article, it doesn’t seem like advertising is long-term profitable; that’s certainly what the NYT’s annual report shows. Making the transitions from advertising to paid subscriptions, especially digital ones, is difficult and scary. It looks like the NYT has or is close to making that transition. I can’t find any evidence WP has but it’s plausable; it’s a high quality/prestiege brand. Vox though, I can’t see Vox making the transition to subscription. (Looks like they might try though).
So to answer Scott’s question, a lot of media companies are still heavily dependent on advertising and we should expect them to die. I’m actually curious whether the NYT will hold the same cultural position is does now or whether it will be more like the Financial Times; very respected but not really culturally influential.
They’ve been my main source for years now! I find them to be approximately as reliable, and a lot cheaper.
I also prefer social media randos because you get instant fact checking. CNN doesn’t have a comments section.
And it’s worth noting that the most useful fact-checking of mainstream media is typically provided not by other mainstream media, but, in fact, by social media randos.
They are the ones that proved the narrative on Covington Catholic was complete BS. Not CNN, not ABC, not even Fox News or Breitbart. Robby Soave, essentially by himself, doing a bare minimum amount of activity resembling real journalism, discredited multiple huge behemoths in a matter of hours.
Robby Soave is a journalist, though with an ideological magazine (Reason) rather than a mainstream one.
Indeed. But his primary contribution occurred on the weekend, in real time, as the events were unfolding, and was reported primarily on his personal Twitter account.
Yes, later on in the week he wrote up a more detailed piece that was published on Reason. But everything he did except that could have just as easily been done by any private citizen. He didn’t rely on any connections or sources or tools or anything else that being a “professional journalist” would have gotten him.
@Matt M
But Robby was only able to boost the exonerating evidence because he’s a journalist with a blue check mark (an automatic reputation boost on Twitter) and a bunch of followers. It’s true a rando could have done the same if they had lots of followers, but then we’re not talking about any old rando, we’re talking about some celebrity.
I think it makes more sense to flip it around and consider the responsibilities journalists have. Like, maybe investigate the story before sharing it thoughtlessly with your 10,000+ followers.
Nick,
Your points are plausible and I can’t really prove you wrong, but in this case I really don’t think that’s what happened. I think Robby’s refutation basically “went viral” in the sense that it dramatically over-reached his regular follower base.
Would that have been a lot harder to achieve by a true rando with only 100 followers? Yeah, sure. But keep in mind there are plenty of somewhat well-known political Twitter commentators who are not in the employ of any journalistic organization and who have a similar reach as Robby does.
To use one immediately available example, Scott Alexander, is not any sort of official journalist, but I think he could have done this just as effectively as Robby, if he had chosen to.
@Matt M
Yeah, if what you have in mind as a rando is Scott, I don’t think we substantively disagree.
As the quote goes, “exposure” is what you die of when you can’t pay the rent because you’re working for free….
“It’s okay, I realized long ago that these things happen periodically,” said Mitchell, thinking dysfunctional split.
(RIP)
“Ugh, Sister Mary invited a friend from the convent!” Tom said, none too pleased.
“Wow. I never knew a person could be that jacked,” Tom said soberly.
Now, somebody be nice and explain all of those to
clueless peoplenon-native English speakers.“Tom said so burly”
Some puns don’t work in text.
Your employer has tasked you with replacing the graphics in the perfunctory CYA online compliance training for data security.
Because you are a sane and decent person, stock images of black-clad masked/hooded figures looming in front of laptop screens in dark rooms with green 1s and 0s zooming by in the background drive you absolutely insane and you leap at the opportunity to banish them forever.
What plausible, realistic, non-cliche, work-appropriate images do you use to represent those who would threaten your company’s private data?
The image we used to create the trainee’s badge?
Boris and Natasha?
Nah, we need modern slavic stereotypes.
Make it a guy in a tracksuit squatting in front of a laptop, typing one-handed while drinking from a bottle of vodka held in the other hand. For bonus points, make the program’s dubiously-helpful acronym for computer security B.L.Y.A.T.
Of course this is already a thing.
Thank you, that image is glorious.
But the modern menace is the “insider threat”. Slavic caricatures like Boris and Natasha were long ago replaced by nice friendly boy-and-girl-next-door Jeff and Tina asking you to do obvious treason.
Where we go from here I do not know, but I’d actually be up for some black-clad masked figures looming in front of screens in dark rooms with green 1s and 0s zooming by in the background.
Guy in a Pepe the Frog suit. If HR won’t let me get away with that, then pictures of the presenter grinning unsettlingly.
The problem here is that if you want realistic pictures, you’re going to get pictures of just regular folks. And that’s going to look boring. I suppose you could go the Sith route of making sure that bad people are ugly.
The other way to go is to ditch realism and just make sure these people look like villains. Go over the top and use pictures of villains from movies, like Loki and Red Skull.
The biggest threat is probably social engineering, which typically is quite boring. Think of a normally dressed guy slipping in behind an employee, who holds the door open, being the pro-social person that she is.
Using (only) exciting examples is bad practice.
It isn’t about making the examples exciting, it is about making the material “exciting” so that people pay attention to all the boring examples.
Intersperse the material with naked men and women?
Then again, that just might get you sent to another training day.
https://cdn.costumewall.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/hackerman.jpg
This one
The glove is a nice touch.
probably a lot of XKCD’s and comics.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-02-20
https://i.warosu.org/data/g/img/0658/75/1526216875327.gif
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/cia.png
http://img.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/reality.png
What are some technologies that should be added to the Civilization game’s tech tree?
My proposals:
1) Human genetic engineering [leads to an incremental increase to your country’s population, productivity, science R&D, and profits each turn, until it tops out once the limits of human biology are reached–enables “Super Soldier” unit]
2) Cybernetics [does the same thing as Human genetic engineering, but adds further benefit–enables “Super Soldier 2” and “Mechwarrior” units]
3) Narrow AI [significant increase to your country’s productivity, science R&D, and profits each turn, until it tops out once the limits of non-sentient AI are reached–enables various military drone units]
4) AGI [confers a large benefit to all of the aforementioned stats, but upon discovery, there is a 50% chance of a Robot Uprising happening in your country, whereupon all nuclear weapons and drones come under the control of a hostile AI that will try to take over all your cities and possibly attack other countries]
5) Chemical weapons [Allows you to build poison gas weapons, which are moderately effective at killing civilian populations of enemy cities without damaging city infrastructure, and at killing enemy ground troops in the field–allows the special battle tactic of gassing mechanized enemy units to kill the humans that are manning them, and then seizing the mechanized weapons for yourself to create a friendly unit of the same type if one of your units grabs it during the same turn. The gas bombs have an “explosive radius” so you can’t use them if your own units are too close.]
6) Biological weapons [Allows you to build germ weapons, which are moderately effective at killing enemy civilian populations and military units in the field. Has the same effect as poison gas weapons, but lingers in cities for several turns (population drops each turn) and can spread between cities in uncontrolled fashion. The disease can even get back to the attacker’s forces and country or third party countries. You can also build bioweapons that only kill an enemy’s croplands. They convert into polluted wastelands.]
7) Green revolution [Lets you re-irrigate all your irrigated land hexagons to double their food output]
Also, I think the world map in Civilization should be a spheroid whose surface is made of (distorted) hexagonal tiles. As you used the mouse cursor to scroll, the entire spheroid would rotate in front of you. This would eliminate the geographic distortions associated with the use of a flat map, and would let your units cross the poles.
Additionally, once you have completed the Apollo Mission, you should be given a view of the Moon during each turn, and you should be able to build spacecraft to go there. It could eventually turn into a battleground itself.
What other technologies and features should be added?
Would that work? I’m not a mathematician, but I feel like no set of hexagons, however oddly shaped, could cover a sphere.
I play D&D, so I know that twenty triangles will cover a sphere nicely, with five triangles meeting at each corner. And you can divide a triangle into smaller triangles with six of the smaller triangles meeting at each corner. Now if you designate each triangle corner as the center of your land tiles, most of the tiles are hexagons but several (twelve, I think?) are pentagons. That describes a soccer ball, but you can increase the number of hexagons as much as you like without changing the number of pentagons.
You’re correct. With only hexagons, you can never make a sphere (unless you permit interior angles greater than 180 degrees).
Proyas said spheroid, not sphere.
It doesn’t matter. It can be some ellipsoid, or egg shaped, or whatever, and it still won’t work. If it’s a surface that wraps around in a way that is topologically like a sphere, it can’t be tiled with hexagons alone.
The issue isn’t one of needing to distort the hexagons, it’s that hexagons fundamentally are “flat” and whereas spheres need positive curvature. You need to do things like introduce pentagons (exactly 12 of them!) or other irregularities to get the necessary curvature.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_characteristic
(well, you could do it with hexagons alone by allowing things like vertices of degree 2 with the same “hexagons” meeting each other on multiple different edges or other weird things, but at that point you’re not really any ordinary sort of tiling).
Pretty sure you can lop off the poles and tile the resulting truncated sphere (or whatever the remaining shape would be called).
Correct.
George Hart has some neat sculptures of these, like Ball and Chain, which is based on the (7, 4) Goldberg polyhedron.
A soccer ball map it is then!
You don’t divide the sphere up into hexagons, you put a regular lattice of points on it, like these and specify which points are neighbors. Then in the actual view of the game you draw a hexagon (or whatever) around the current point and around the other points, hexagons that appear more distorted the further away they are from the current location.
The key is treating the lattice of points as fundamental and the 2D tile shapes as eye-candy that don’t have any fixed shape.
Then, unshackled by the chains of geometry, you implement portals between places, other planets, other dimensions etc. entirely intuitively within the normal data structures of the game.
Because your grid is just a certain representation of an arbitary graph.
The problem with a technology tree is that you (the player) know what will and won’t work. This sort of seems inevitable for Civilization, but it’s also true for Alpha Centauri and Starbase Orion and similar stuff where it’s all made-up technology.
The technology tree should be randomized, in several ways:
a. The cost of researching a technology should be rerandomized each game.
b. Some technologies should be randomized into being unworkable each game. Some of those might simply disappear; others would appear in the tree, but after spending the time on researching them, you would find out that the technology just didn’t work out.
c. The benefits of different technological advances should be randomized somewhat.
d. There should be randomized-in negative and positive consequences for developing some technologies.
Ideally, there would be a fairly well-connected weighted digraph of technologies, and then you’d randomly cut a bunch of links and eliminate a bunch of nodes while keeping the graph connected, and you’d also randomize the weights on the edges and some of the properties of the nodes.
The benefit of this would be that the player would experience technological discovery like it really works–when you start out working on fusion power or quantum computers or strong AI, you don’t actually know if it’s ever going to work, or how long it’s really going to take to get it to work.
Stellaris does this pretty well. The tech tree itself isn’t random, but at any one time, your research options are random.
I think the “technology didn’t work out” mechanic you propose would be extremely infuriating to players.
AC had “blind research” as the default option (in which you would pick a general research theme among explore, discover, build, conquer, but you were unable to specifically select individual technologies to research), didn’t it?
There was a game like that; I believe it was the much maligned space 4X MoO3 (and probably others in the series). Some techs were always available, but many were randomly made not available. I think you occasionally got bonus research breakthroughs or set-backs as well.
Since the units in the game were custom built ships and fleets designed with components unlocked by those random techs, what you sent out would be different every game.
But of course there’s only so much variation allowed; you won’t see a game where you simply can’t make colony ships or there are no shields at all or whatever.
I’ve never found the Civilization tech tree to be problematic in any way.
Speaking of not being problematic, anyone else remember the old days when there were Wonders like Women’s Suffrage that you could set one city to build over a large number of turns?
What’s the problem there? Is the abstraction of burly men in mines toiling away to produce a legal and cultural change too disconcerting?
There’s a reason they went to social policies later on, but early versions were understandably less complex.
edit: It would have been amusingly ironic if Civ2 had Civ4 ‘s slavery mechanic and you could beat people to death in order to discover universal suffrage.
Sort of: not too disconcerting to “believe” in the game, but bizarre and giggle-inducing.
I can almost imagine all the burly male miners and builders around SF or NYC toiling away year after year to build a legal and cultural change and nothing physical, but there were also strong incentives (terrain and the opportunity cost of building multipliers) to separate industrious cities from a Super Science City that produced a super-majority of your science and cultural change. So it was like suddenly the industrial capital of a country produced no steel or trains for many years and then, poof, women can vote.
@Randy M, beating people eventually yielding universal sufferdoesn’t sound ironic at all – it’d just involve an intervening revolution.
I want to propose a conspiracy theory.
Boris Johnson, who was just chosen Prime Minister of Britain, used to be Mayor of London. He ran on a platform of fighting youth crime, but he wasn’t very good at it.
A year after he took office, Franny Armstrong, a famous film-maker and activist, was attacked by criminal youths in a London alley. She shouted for help, and Mayor Boris Johnson, who happened to be bicycling by, ran in, chased away the criminals, and saved her.
The Mayor of a city personally getting a chance to dramatically fight crime seems implausible, but not too implausible – I’ve heard of a few other situations where stuff like that has happened. But for the crime victim to herself be a famous person (Armstrong has been on Top 100 Famous Women In The World lists) defies belief. Add Johnson’s ongoing campaign against youth crime, and his dishonesty and talent for self-promotion, and I start to wonder.
Armstrong is not a fan of Johnson’s politics, so it’s unlikely she was involved in this conspiracy. But there’s no reason why Johnson couldn’t hire some fake thugs to pretend to beat her up, without her knowledge or consent. In fact, this would be the safer option, since it makes the conspiracy smaller.
The attackers were never caught, but Armstrong describes them as “looking like something straight out of central casting” – maybe more like people trying to look like criminals, than like the way real criminals dress? And Johnson has previously been implicated in a conspiracy to beat up a reporter, so it’s not like he doesn’t know where to hire thugs if he needs some.
I think probably less than 5% chance this is true, but I’m still surprised I can’t find anyone else proposing it.
Did he write a personal check to the thugs for his scam crime? I mean, you’d think not, but apparently it’s a good idea to check….
If you’re going to stage things this theatrically, then you’re going to pay with a suitcase full of small unmarked bills. Partly because that’s the trope, and partly because how often do you get a chance to pay for anything with a suitcase full of small unmarked bills?
That, or a bag with… presumably a pound, not a dollar, sign on it.
If it was a bag with a pound sign on it, they wouldn’t know they’d been paid by the Mayor, because he’d make the transaction while wearing a domino mask and striped pajamas.
That reduces the number of conspirators to one.
I worked as a (US) bank teller for a brief time. I do remember a guy withdrawing.. a couple tens of thousands in cash. $25,000 or $30,000 maybe. We did indeed give it to him in a big sack, and I was very disappointed the sack did not have a large $ printed on the side.
As it happens, Johnson did write the thugs a check, but it was for personal training and diet advice.
Seriously, did the attack take place in an area with cameras (in 2009), and were the girls who attacked Armstrong ever arrested?
Wait, girls? Sure enough:
Isn’t “female attackers” and “look like something out of central casting” an oxymoron?
Apparently not in Britain:
“Shocking moment ‘girl gang thugs’ batter Holland & Barrett worker in her 40s after she tried to stop them ‘shoplifting’”
Frankly I’m surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often.
@Scott Alexander,
A group of girl thugs attacked a semi-famous lady and the Mayor of London came and chased them off?
Please someone tell me a re-enactment was filmed!
If they re-enact it, please get Catherine Tate to reprise her role.
That is one fearsome lass!
This theory sounds like fun, but I’d really be interested to see someone to put in the time to do some rough math, to determine the chances of something like this happening under the circumstances (i.e. Johnson + notable individual of opposite political persuasion + mugging), more generally (politician somewhere + some notable person + any criminal behavior), and fully generalized (people not remaining bystanders during crime, or perhaps just witnessing one).
It certainly seems like one of those situations in which the number of degrees of freedom and possible interactions *might* result in there being a not-unreasonable probability of something like it happening somewhere, but in which it happening to a particular set of people is highly unlikely – but it would still be fun to see rough estimates of likelihood. I have a suspicion that the odds are actually higher than we would anticipate, based on my anecdotal experience of how often my friends in New York City run into celebrities (that is, often). Kind of like with the 23-people-means-better-than-even-odds-shared-birthday result, even if your total population is large and your fractional people-of-interest small, if you are matching between enough pairs the odds of a “surprising” result can scale quickly.
Edit: Thinking about it some more, it might almost reduce to the problem of “Johnson witnessing crime,” which is seems significantly more probably than the whole scenario. Think about it: (1) tough-on-crime, in some fashion, is part of probably a quarter to half of politicians’ platforms (2) opposite political spectrum is probably a bit under half on average, etc. Those are factors that reduce the probability, but not by orders of magnitude. The real questions are (a ) the odds of witnessing crime generally, and witnessing crime conditional on being a London politician, and (b) the odds of encountering a “notable” person, and the odds of encountering a “notable” person in London, or some similar variants.
I don’t think you can use probabilities for something like this. If I were staging a crime, I would try to make it look as typical as possible (e.g. by hiring young men rather than young women), so some un-staged crimes will therefore be less “likely” according to a system like this than some staged ones.
Yeah, we probably never hear about a staged crime that looks like a lot of normal non-newsworthy crimes. If Smollet had staged being mugged by a drug addict, the story wouldn’t have gotten all that much attention, and almost certainly would also never have come unraveled.
There’s also the “believability” factor. Part of what made Jussie’s claim non-credible is that it was contingent on him either somehow fighting them off, or them just getting bored and deciding to stop bugging him for no particular reason.
Boris being able to successfully “chase off” a bunch of young women thugs is much more believable than if the thugs had all been tough young men.
Eh, young men might still run away because they attracted unwanted attention.
So what people who stage conspiracies like this successfully do?
I’d say that they would probably try again.
Can you think of any other possible event that Johnson could have staged like this?
I guess the thing about the reporter being beat up counts? But that’s just beating up someone, not beating up someone and then saving the beaten up person.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/davehillblog/2009/nov/10/boris-johnson-franny-armstrong-girl-muggers
Does anyone have data on American public opinion during the Civil War about the conflict? I’m particularly interested in the number of Union citizens who were willing to let the South secede, or who were neutral or pacifist.
I’m also interested to know about the minority voices in the CSA.
I don’t think that data exists outside of election results. There weren’t any polls at the time; a book I read on the Copperhead movement spends significant time talking about how we don’t know how strong the movement actually was or how many sympathizers it had, until the actual election in November 1864. So, we can say the Union public supported the war by November 1862, but that gives very little idea of their views in April 1861. The war definitely appeared to be popular then from the number of volunteers, but we can’t get much better than that.
I’ve also heard of analyses done on the number of deserters, or on sentiments expressed in surviving letters to and from soldiers, but those would inevitably be partial and not quite what you were looking for.
Both are difficult, since opinion surveys weren’t really a thing yet, let alone scientific polling.
For the former, the best proxy is probably the political fortunes of the “Copperhead” faction of the Democratic party, which advocated for unconditional peace with the Confederacy as its core issue. Election results (especially in 1862) are one place to look, although a difficult one since only a few states saw Copperheads and War Democrats cleanly sort themselves into separate ballot lines (with the War Democrats usually forming a fusion ticket with Republicans under the “Unionist” label). The 1864 Presidential election is not a good proxy, since the nominee (McClellan) was personally a War Democrat even though he was running on a mostly Peace Democrat platform.
Relative circulation of Copperhead newspapers vs other political newspapers might be another good proxy, at least in times and places where the federal government wasn’t actively censoring Copperhead publications.
For minority voices in the CSA, the best proxy is probably election results for delegates to the secession conventions. William Freehling did some good analysis of this in Road to Disunion, Volume II. There also appear to be some papers online (unfortunately behind paywalls) looking at individual states.
I would recommend looking into records of correspondence, journals, etc. among West Point officers. They wouldn’t match up exactly with the general populace, but I think they will help you investigate the question regardless.
There are tons of things written by people at that time, and I’m sure a lot describe the political climate around them. It’s not perfectly scientific, but it’d give you qualitative information about what views existed where, at least.
An apparently uniquely Dutch tradition: a “dropping.”
It means dropping kids off in the woods, preferably at night, without a clue where they are and letting them make their way back on their own. I did a weak version of this during school camp.
#DutchTermsThatSoundEnglishButAreUniquelyDutch
#NoDangerousWildAnimalsLeft
I went through a couple of these as a kid, though only one of them had us dropped off in any actual woods. The other times it was more fields and such, much closer to roads and the like.
My father says a version of this was a form of fraternity initiation when he was in school. Not so much the woods, but dropping pledges from his very urban school off somewhere more rural to make their way back. As far as I know, not called a “dropping”
The term seems to be uniquely Dutch, despite being English. Just like we use ‘airco’ for A/C.
I did a related version once in Boy Scouts, where we were dumped on the side of a country road at dawn and left to hike our way back. It was fun at first, but trudging along the side of the road got old afterwards.
When I did it, it was mostly a hike in the dark…which does have its charms/scares.
Reminds me of “Manhunt.”
The basics: One team would get dropped off on the outskirts of town and the other would try to find and tag them before they get to the safe zone (park, school football field, that sort of thing). It was basically a small town-sized game of Hide And Seek Tag with an emphasis on the “safe zone.” Memory is fuzzy, but I think the hunter team only wins if no one makes it to the safe zone. I have no idea how widespread this game is, but I played it in a South Dakota college/farming small town.
At least give them a map (and teach them how to use it beforehand). Otherwise how are they supposed to work out which way to go?
Unless there are fietsknooppunten everywhere.
The Netherlands has a lot of signage and a lot of bicycle paths/roads, so if you know the location of base camp, you can probably get going in the right direction relatively quickly, by just going in a random location until you find a road and following it to the signs.
According to the NYT story, the kids might get a GPS for more challenging drops (like in the Ardennes).
PS. Note that fietsknooppunten are not actually helpful. It’s a number system, where you can plan and follow routes by going from number sign to number sign. Using it requires already knowing the route you want to go and what numbers are on that route.
I suppose that works, so long as the roads are safe to walk along.
In the UK, there’s too many narrow, winding lanes with tall hedges, steep banks and 60mph speed limits.
Once the kids know how to use a map and compass, though, there’s plenty of public footpaths for them to maraud around.
Scouts now apparently get reflective vests, after some kids were hit by cars.
Scouts? Heck, soldiers now wear little reflective belts for safety in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Americans wear body armor when playing football too. You are just really risk averse. 😛
It wasn’t until the last year that I started to actively listening to lyrics of whatever I’m listening at the moment; even now it’s difficult and every little distraction pulls me from this state of mind (basically I can’t do anything besides listening). Before the lyrics were not that important for me, I treated vocals as any other musical instrument (and I was not aware that it could be any different). What is your experience with music in this regard?
How else do you sing along?
Just as I do (almost) everything else, on autopilot; the internal experience is similar to humming along to music. Paying attention to lyrics is comparable to improvising on a guitar with music in the background.
That was mostly just a cheeky way of answering your question. It’s possible for me to enjoy a song with lyrics that I don’t empathize with–I’m a big evanescence fan–but it’s harder.
On our road trip I made use of the skip button on my wife’s playlist, as despite how catchy “There’s not enough rain in Oklahoma” is, I’d reached my quota about songs about abusive husbands/fathers at that point.
Also, thinking about the lyrics is a way of following along with the melody when I whistle a tune.
A lot of vocal music has unintelligible lyrics – either the style of singing makes it dififcult/impossible for me to distinguish the words, or the singing is in a language I don’t speak. That music can be very useful for me in a noisy workspace – reduces distractions from other people’s conversations. The rest of the time, I don’t like it.
But otherwise, the lyrics are the main point of vocal music for me, and have been as long as I can remember. I don’t play it unless I want to listen to it.
I’m obsessed with lyrics, have been since I was very young. I can often remember large parts of a song after one listen, and can remember the specific circumstances when I first heard several songs.
I find it very hard to listen to something like, say, Oasis, where the music is pretty good but the lyrics are borderline incoherent gibberish.
This is a big part of why I listen to so much hip-hop and alt-country, where the lyrics (and their meaning) are generally central.
I’d say that the lyrics in music is grammatically correct nonsense the majority of the time. Even in rap, where the lyrics are more central, it’s so full of slang that I often don’t know what they’re saying.
I generally avoid the songs which are grammatically correct nonsense. FWIW I think it’s not quite the majority of them, but it’s a significant fraction.
I really do miss the idea of a standard song, like it was expected that every jazz singer would cover Mack the Knife or whatever. Then you can have all the variety and improvisation and differences you want, but the lyrics still make sense. Ah, for the days of Ella.
I’ve really never understood why covers aren’t more popular. I love them! I can have a hell of a good time at some bar listening to some crappy band play a poor man’s version of “The Best of 90s Alternative Rock.”
Or even cover bands that attempt to mimic classic singers/bands entirely. Apparently I’m like second cousins or something with one of the country’s most successful Neal Diamond impersonators. Seems like a perfectly respectable career to me!
Covers are extremely popular. They are, however, less lucrative than originals. In fact, I’m not 100% sure a band keeps any of the money from a recorded cover song after they pay royalties on it (I took a Music Business class a long time ago and could have explained exactly how it works but 10 years without using a bit of knowledge is a long time).
If you want covers you have to go to the live shows, mostly.
You mentioned that you like rap. Look at this excerpt from the song “Ned Flanders*”:
I can sort of make out the meaning when reading it but it’s not trivial.
*I’m not picking on this song or anything. I just think it’s pretty representative in terms of lyrics.
Who’s that by? One of Odd Future or something (just guessing because of the skate references)?
I can get most of that on first reading… it’s not exactly dense with meaning. Fuck hoes, get money, spend money, that kind of thing. But I’ve spent a LOT of time somewhat seriously studying this stuff, because it’s definitely very far from my cultural background, and like I said I like it a lot, and am obsessed with lyrics.
For me it all started when I got into Wu Tang back in the day. Quoting Liquid Swords from memory…
It’s not going too far to say that figuring out that funnel metaphor (it’s not that complicated) was one of the more pleasing Aha! moments of my life.
Rap isn’t a unified genre any more than rock is. There is plenty of rap that reads mostly like sentences when the lyrics are written out. I’m not sure music by K Swisha is representative of…anything.
This is especially a problem in battle rap. I think modern battle rappers have some of the best wordplay going these days (doubly impressive considering that their songs are generally performed once only, for a tiny crowd and almost no money), but much of it is incomprehensible without knowing lots of slang and being familiar enough with the scene to get references to other rappers and things that happened in old battles.
The moreso because a lot of the language isn’t slang — it’s idiosyncratic stuff that rappers come up with on the spot and then develop over their career. Aesop Rock (not to be confused with A$ap Rocky) is especially bad with this, although he’s an incredible writer once you figure out what he’s actually saying.
IIRC there are two kind of licenses for songs; the mechanical license and the recording license.
The mechanical license is the license to the lyrics, notes and composition of a song. In USA this can be licensed under a compulsory license, meaning that JPNunez can license, say, whatever Wrong Species’s songs he wants just by paying the this license. This ain’t that much I think.
The second license is to the actual recording. Once you record a cover, you will have the right to this recording, which you can then sell. In this example, JPNunez retains the rights to the cover, and Wrong Species cannot just distribute JPNunez’s version of WS’s own song in his album, without in turn paying up.
So whether recording covers is profitable depends on whether you can charge enough from the recording to make up for the mechanical license.
IIRC the mechanical license is called thus because it comes from when people would make piano rolls for automatic pianos (typical seen in cartoons about westerns), so people would be able to make said piano rolls without reaching an agreement with the song writer, but still making sure the song writer got paid.
I find Aesop Rock (and a lot of similar dudes) so dense that it interferes with the marriage of lyrics to music. It’s less like John Donne (who I think is a very apt point of comparison for rap in general) and more like James Joyce, who I find fairly unreadable. But obviously lots of people love Joyce, and musical tastes are not moral imperatives, so it’s all good.
Agreed, and I’d go further and say that if Aesop Rock didn’t hook up with very good producers in his early career none of us would’v heard of him.
For non-fans, this is fairly typical for Aesop Rock:
I forever wallow in glitches
Grimly distributed by side effects, consumed, cocooned in antisocial trenches
Drenched, cradled between dense pillars of polar value,
Lies a grey so blueless it’s got eye fiending for the sky
Synthesized lies rise synthetic
Sitting inside solidified plastics whose lateral burns germs compatible
My firm’s radically piloted, dodging a fire swiftly
Yellow-brick stalker walking shifty
I’m not so sure about “grammatically correct”. In my experience, many lyrics act as a collection of words that carry an association with some central concept.
People are much better at picking out syntactic mistakes than semantic ones. If you aren’t paying attention carefully, you probably won’t notice anything wrong this guy’s speech. But if I started speaking in Subject-Object-Verb word order instead of the usual Subject-Verb-Object, it would be immediately apparent.
For most music, lyrics are a means to an end. They help the composer/performer get into a state of mind with which they can create the best music that they can. I might enjoy the phonaesthetics of the words, too. But in that, especially in pop, the actual meanings of the lyrics is subject to Sturgeon’s Law, comprehending their meaning can break immersion. So I prefer listening to foreign language music.
The exception to this is in musicals, where the lyrics matter, and their actual meanings can contribute to enjoyment. However, there are cases where the emphasis on lyrical meaning can lead to downplaying the music elements, so a lot of modern musical songs rapidly become skips on the music player (unless, again, the phonaesthetics are sufficient to overcome this).
Often prefer to listen to songs in languages, that I don’t speak, because so often lyrics are an unimaginative repetition on the same three or four common themes (regardless of music genre). Occasionally there’s a gem of a singer, who knows how to work the words, but it’s a rarity.
Most times whether the singer can channel emotions well is way more important to me, than coherent/legible/meaningful lyrics.
I have a deep and abiding love of songs with complicated lyrics and have since I was a boy. I don’t consciously try to learn the words to stuff like Modern Major General or Blazing Arrow, it just kind of happens.
Same! I can still recite a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan from memory, though I haven’t seen or listened to a performance in well over a decade.
I am a distinctly unmusical person, and lyrics are basically the only reason I listen at all.
Has anyone put classical music to lyrics to help me remember which one is which?
I want to learn to recognize more of it, because reasons, and anything with lyrics I can instantly recite.
Didn’t Ode to Joy not originally have lyrics?
Ode to Joy is a poem by Friedrich Schiller, so yes. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has always had a choral movement with lyrics closely adapted from Schiller’s poem. It was I believe unique and is still extremely rare for a symphony to have a chorus and/or lyrics, possibly because everyone who might be inspired to try it looks to Beethoven and says “we’re not worthy”.
Thanks for the correction.
The lyrics include the word “feuertrunken” which means “drunk from fire” and is thus objectively the best word ever coined.
Indeed, approximately half the value I received from studying German for four years was the ability to understand Schiller and Beethoven in the original. Another 30% for Nena Kerner, and 20% for actually being able to speak to German people in my mediocre German rather than their uniformly excellent English.
And yes, if “feuertrunken” wasn’t a word before Schiller, it’s now well beyond cromulent.
If you want lyrics for classical music, the Beethoven’s Wig series is great – you can likely find them in the children’s section of your local library.
Star Spangled Banner
Thaxted, for Holst’s Jupiter
“Tonight We Love” is a bastardized standard song of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1, but it’s awful because it takes a 3/4 song and does it in 4/4, ugh. Sinatra sings to the original meter in film musical Anchors Aweigh, though.
Speaking of Sinatra, his song “Daybreak” is from Ferde Grofe’s Mississippi Suite.
John Williams Is The Man
27 pop songs you didn’t know were inspired by classical pieces
A few older examples of classical made pop
The entire musical Kismet is based off of the music of Alexander Borodin.
Cartoon show Arthur set some cute english lyrics to Bizet’s Carmen.
Paired visuals are the better bet than lyrics, imho. Watch the Fantasia films and other similar cartoons. No one will ever set lyrics to Rite of Spring, but you sure can remember dinosaurs.
I do listen to the lyrics of the songs I hear, and most of them (especially the ones on the radio) are vaguely disgusting drivel. That can sour my enjoyment of music even when the sounds are pleasing.
I treat lyrics as aesthetic cues. I pay attention to the aesthetic and mood, but not the poetry. Most songs make for very, very bad poems.
There are a few songs that are delightful poetry and also nice to listen to, and those are really just transcendentally good, but the ones that aren’t don’t bother me.
Since I listen to mostly metal with growling vocals, they’re rarely intelligible in the first place, so lyrics aren’t really important except as just another instrument. And if you read the lyrics of most death metal (of the kind I listen to anyway), it’s generally just vague, abstract sounding stuff with no real meaning or impact, so there’s not much value in knowing the lyrics.
For other kinds of music, lyrics are ok if they’re not so bad they’re distracting. I’m rarely wowed or amused by lyrics of any kind.
This is what I like about old school metal. People don’t just like the song Painkiller because of its impressive instrumentals and vocals. They love its relentless, unabashedly over-the-top metal lyrics. Who doesn’t want to hear a song about a super-powered cyborg who comes to Earth on his motorcycle to save us from the apocalypse?
On the other hand, does anyone like Iron Man for its lyrics?
On the other other hand, does anyone not like War Pigs for its lyrics?
Its metal status probably prevents it from being seen as a legitimately great protest song (that is to say, if it were performed by Bob Dylan with nothing more than a harmonica and an acoustic guitar, it would have been taken much more seriously as such)
Rob Halford is at least twice the lyricist that Ozzy Osborne is, though. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ozzy, but we are talking about a guy that rhymed “masses” (in the sense of “crowds”) with “masses” (in the sense of “Black Mass”) and called it a day.
ETA @Matt M — does that answer your question?
Agreed w both Matt M & Nornagest.
Although I think Ozzy didn’t write the lyrics, did he? Wasn’t he mostly just there to hoover up cocaine and shout incoherently?
Tony Stark.
While we’re talking about great metal protest songs, though, how about Iron Maiden’s “2 Minutes to Midnight”? It’s top-notch Maiden instrumentally, and the lyrics are pretty good too. Too gruesome to resonate with the kinds of folks that go to Bob Dylan concerts, but I think that’s actually a plus with this subject matter.
@Matt M
Maybe among baby boomers…plenty of people see the 70s/80s metal (and 90s grunge/adjacent) as the pinnacle of musical protest. It just isn’t necessarily the same people that see Bob Dylan as the pinnacle of musical protest.
Most of the best and most important protest music made since the 90s is hip hop. Change my mind!
@dick
Since the 90s? Practically the only protest music (at least with any mainstream traction).
Protest music since the 1990’s: I’ll nominate country as a contender.
Not seeing it, care to provide some examples?
@acymetric: Steve Earle has a lot of protest-y songs.
I like the thought of viewing something like “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” as a protest song, in the sense that being unabashedly pro-aggressive war, despite being official government policy, is far and away a minority position among popular culture as a whole.
Of course, that’s not exactly a new thing either. “Fightin’ Side of Me” was basically a red-tribe Vietnam-era protest song. Only it was protesting the protestors.
“Courtesy of the Red White and Blue” – really a battle song more than a protest song
“Keep the Change”
“Little Man” – more a lament than a protest song.
“How Do You Like Me Now” may be the angriest song I’ve heard, although I wouldn’t call it a protest song.
OK, maybe you’re right–straight protest isn’t as easy to find as I thought.
(For older stuff, “9 to 5” and “Sixteen Tons” are great.)
American Idiot by Green Day was, if I recall correctly, listed as the top (or one of) protest albums of the Bush Administration in industry reviews. Very good album, regardless of how one took the message.
From my Dad’s record collection: This 1977 Country song
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gj2iGAifSNI
@Plumber
I was specifically questioning Country as a vehicle for protest in the 2000s (“since the 90s”). Certainly it was that decades ago (along with blues, rock, punk, jazz, and near every other popular form of music at some point). Doubly so if you decide you want to count Southern Rock as a country offshoot (most popular modern country is basically southern rock so that would seem fair).
@hls2003
Yeah, American Idiot counts, but stands out as one of the few popular examples that weren’t hip-hop. Gosh, that album came out almost 15(!) years ago.
There was a fair amount of political rock in the early- to mid-2000s, mostly protesting Bush administration policy. Rise Against, for example. Rage Against The Machine was still popular into the Bush years, although the only album they released in that timeframe was “Renegades”, a cover album (“Battle of Los Angeles” was 1999). NoFX’s “War on Errorism” is probably popular enough to be worth mentioning, although it isn’t really good — there’s good protest punk (Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion), but most of it is pre-2000.
The band Pyrrhon rates high on both lyrical content and unintelligibility. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone who isn’t into metal, though, the music is impressively dissonant, maybe even atonal at times.
Also, I feel remiss not mentioning Nile. Most of their lyrics are about Egyptian mythology, and from the liner notes it seems like they really know their stuff.
Pyrrhon just never clicked with me for some reason. From 2017 alone, I preferred Ingurgitating Oblivion and Dodecahedron for dissonant death metal above Pyrrhon’s album. This year’s Warforged and Ceremony of Silence are really good too. Don’t have a clue what any of them are signing about, though.
Maybe I should give What Passes for Survival another shot.
Just here to namedrop Allegaeon, whose AI-themed “Proponent for Sentience” might be of some interest to the folks around here.
I’m the other way around. I find poetry more interesting than music, so regard the music as accompaniment to the lyrics. I gather Monteverdi was of the same opinion.
Unfortunately, most songs don’t have very interesting lyrics, but there are occasional exceptions, such as Leonard Cohen.
I grew up with no musical instruments or recorded music, but with singing a very common activity. (I could almost certainly sing from memory more than one verse of more than a thousand hymns.) For me, lyrics are the main event. Sometimes I’ll listen to music without lyrics as background while working, but to actually focus on music without comprehensible lyrics takes a good bit of effort.
Often I’ll find the lyrics a distraction from an otherwise good song. In particular I can’t stand RATM because of Zack de la Rocha’s insultingly obnoxious lyrics, even though Tom Morello is an incredible guitarist. (I was into Audioslave.)
Can I ruin it for you by telling you that Morello basically agrees with ZDLR on pretty much everything?
What was wrong with RATM lyrics*?
*On second thought, was your problem with the political/social messages, or the way the lyrics were written?
I don’t need someone screaming in my ear about how evil I am as a rich white person and how society has to be destroyed to punish me. I already know that. Stop reminding me.
I’ve always had to focus on the vocals in any song to the exclusion of all other elements and it’s the primary reason i can’t stand most pop/chart music. That shit is so repetitive and the lyrics will be with me all day every time i hear one of those songs.
my partner on the other hand doesn’t know the lyrics to anything and finds it hard to pick up even when trying to. I’m guessing the majority of people are like her and that’s why popular music is popular, but god i wish it wasn’t!
It depends on the song, I can enjoy stuff like Carl Orf’s Omnia Sol Temperat
despite it being in a language that I don’t speak, but for other songs like Up the Junction by Squeeze, the lyrics make a big difference.
I’m surprised not to see any commentary on the big pre-registered growth mindset study that just came out, finding no effect.
While one study doesn’t settle things, I think this comes pretty close, particularly after one takes into account what our prior should be here (pretty low, in my view).
Is anyone revising their views on this? As expected? Still holding out hope?
@Eponymous,
I never heatd of the study or indeed of “growth mindset training” before, and I generally expect well-proven ways to be superior to most new things that are tried anyway so no revision in my views.
Scott wrote a series of four posts about it in 2015. See here.
From memory, I think Scott’s bottom line was, this sounds like the sort of thing that shouldn’t be true, but it seems the studies are actually solid, though the effect size is probably small so it’s not the panacea Dweck is selling.
I think Scott’s predictions generally look good in light of subsequent research. But if the latest one holds up, maybe he should have been more confident in his anti-GM views.
Finding no effect yet, gr—wait, shit.
Telling under-achieving kids that they can do better if they pull up their socks and do some work, and hey presto they find out that if they study a bit harder and pay more attention in class and do some work, they do improve on tests? Yes, what a marvellous discovery!
Well, that’s too snarky. That is basically what growth mindset boils down to, though; if you discourage children early, they’ll learn to be helpless and hopeless, and if you keep encouraging them (where “encourage” can mean “put the fear of God into them” just as much as “praise and lollipops”) that they can do better and go places if they work hard and then they will improve.
(This is why homework, by the way – I’m amused at times by the posts over on the sub-reddit that crop up every now and again about procrastination, often but not always from college students, about how they know they’ve got to get this particular piece of work done but they just can’t make themselves buckle down to it. Congratulations, this is why homework, to train you to buckle down and do boring, tedious but necessary work and turn it in on time or else.)
Under-achieving is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there; if they’re under-achieving because they’re bright but lazy or discouraged, then “growth mindset” will work. If they’re under-achieving because they’re not able for the work, then it won’t – there will be some improvement because working hard will always garner some improvement, but you’re not going to see huge and sustained gains over time.
Growth mindset as the approved way to encourage and not discourage kids in school, great. I think that’s important, because with the emphasis on measuring schools by performance results which means ‘how do the kids do on tests’, it’s easy to discourage less able students if it’s constantly “you’re not getting As on the tests, you are dragging the school down”. But it’s no panacea and won’t be a one-size-fits-all turn your D students into A students solution (you may get from a D to a C, and that’s good, but it’s not a miracle cure).
But if you are smart enough to pass with your homework scribbled in the first five minutes of class, it trains you that you can get away with procrastinating the busywork.
Indeed. I think this is more ‘why essays’ than ‘why homework;’ my experience is that any homework straightforward enough for the lowest-performing section of the class to have a chance at is so easy for the higher ones that it doesn’t really accomplish much. This is in US public schools, which don’t do a lot of tracking or explicit ability-sorting, so mileage may vary.
Essays have much more subjective grading, though, and most teachers don’t have the energy to reward actually creative writing. My freshman year of English taught me not to try writing any essays not regurgitating the interpretation the teacher gave us for the books we read. But that training also served me well for getting high scores on AP test essays.
The thing that taught me to actually write good essays was competitive debate.
Yup, this is exactly what I learned. Other than English class, where writing takes a little time, I don’t think I ever had to do more than about 20 minutes of work on anything until about Grade 12, and you can bet your ass this did not prepare me for what I’d have to do in advanced calculus, not to mention the rest of my adult life.
I guess the question here is, how confident are you that this approach yields meaningful improvements? Because the study linked above suggests that it doesn’t.
Better to teach that lesson with tedious work that is actually necessary for something the kid wants to achieve.
Right. For the top ~20% of students, homework teaches a very counter-productive lesson – that routine skill-building and basic instruction-following is largely pointless and will not be rewarded in any meaningful way.
It taught me that the adults in authority would cheerfully waste thousands of hours of my time (on top of the classes themselves). It taught me that nearly all of them either didn’t have my best interests at heart (in one case a teacher explicitly said “If I made an exception for you I’d have hundreds of parents beating down my door to demand the same”), or were simply unwilling to accept the idea that their curriculum wasn’t optimal for some students. It taught me that dropping out of the education system entirely, and working on programming myself (and eventually getting paid to do it), was a desirable career path, and one I intend to pass on to others.
Teachers definitely made an effort in this direction when I was in high school. Write about something that interests you! they would say. Same if we were to give a presentation, within limits. But the last thing I want to do with a topic that interests me is share it with my teacher, and I doubt I was unusual in that regard.
Not sure if the problem there is us or them.
For me, the issue was more about not having a constrained thesis to focus an essay or presentation on.
I think that it would have been better for them to teach something useful, but that students didn’t always realize was so useful, like a home ec practical application, or a real example a professional encountered at work.
Wouldn’t it be nice if students graduated high school knowing how to do their taxes, as well as how to research their tax options? Tedious but necessary.
I had a math teacher assign a project where we would put together the research on buying a car and the payment plan as per annuities or something, but didn’t actually teach us anything about annuities or whatever, so I threw together some googled number salad, got a mid-to-lower B grade, and still have zero knowledge regarding buying cars via annuities or something. So yeah. I really would have liked it if I got education on actual practical living things at some point before getting thrown in the deep end after college.
No, it’d be nice if you stopped caving to lobbyists and did what nations elsewhere do: stop being obtuse about taxes. This isn’t some cutting edge reform, this is the case in many places.
It’s true that being able to do your own taxes is a useful skill nowadays, but learning a specialised set of skills that nobody should have to learn but remains relevant because the professionals scream bloody murder when someone raises the idea that they should rightfully become obsolete because and only because you never got around to making them obsolete is the very definition of tedious and unnecessary.
Nah, even this isn’t really true. Almost everyone making near or below the median income can file their taxes for free, in a fairly easy and simple and straightforward manner, online with TurboTax or H&R Block or whatever.
To the extent that “do your own taxes” implies some additional thought beyond this simple form-filling exercise, it’s only useful to the fairly rich, or to people who find themselves in oddly specific and generally rare tax situations.
The point isn’t for everyone to do their own taxes from now on, but to un-black-box taxes, or un-black-box getting a mortgage and calculating how debt impacts lifestyle, or un-black-box insurance, or alert them as to the marketing tricks that calculate out to lesser deals. For people to conceptually understand key parts of their life. So that they aren’t completely in the dark when they vote for policies that only hurt them.
Financial literacy is entirely too low right now.
TurboTax and competitors are too predatory for me to recommend them — they’ll offer federal filing for free up to a point, but state filings often aren’t and they’ll upsell you every step of the way.
If you can do eighth-grade math, though, you can fill out the actual, factual IRS forms online, which TurboTax is basically just a prettier front-end to anyway. The UI isn’t the most intuitive, but they won’t take your forms unless they’re roughly correct, and they won’t penalize you if it takes a few tries.
There are legitimately free online tax services you can use. I can’t remember the name of the one I used this past year but the IRS site actually compiles a list of them (your income has to be under a certain threshold, but it is reasonably high).
Nice for people who live somewhere in between “give me the 1040-EZ and the standard deduction please” and “give me a team of 20 tax lawyers, we’ve got to figure out how to turn this yacht into a business expense”.
Is this study about the effect of growth mindset, or about the effect of trying to change to growth mindset? I can’t tell from reading the stuff on the link.
How does this fit in with previous findings of small but positive effects:
Where and For Whom Can a Brief, Scalable Mindset Intervention
Improve Adolescents’ Educational Trajectories?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797617739704
So the Conservative Party has a new leader and the UK has a new Prime Minister and it’s Boris Johnson, as mostly everyone expected. Brexit is definitely* going ahead, deal or no deal, by October 31st at the very latest.
Things (particularly Anglo-Irish relationships**) are about to get even more interesting!
*Definition of “definitely” to be defined at a later date
**E.g. allegedly said, when Foreign Secretary, about our Taoiseach Leo Varadkar “Why isn’t he called Murphy like all the rest of them?” What a hilarious thigh-slapper, BoJo! But don’t worry, we don’t need the backstop and there won’t be a hard border because magic tech will take care of all that. What magic tech, you ask? Don’t ask that, it’s a simple matter of can-do spirit and the moon landing!
Is there anywhere I can place a bet on there being a general election before October 31st?
I’m sure there is, but do be aware that for that to happen Parliament has to move very fast. The absolute latest they could start the process is the 10th of September, and that might in practice not be soon enough. They’re on recess for almost all of that time – from Thursday until the 3rd of September. Essentially, I think they would have to return from recess and immediately pass a no confidence motion in the government.
Couldn’t they vote no confidence today or tomorrow?
Yes, but since the one issue that would possibly cause Conservatives (who have a majority with the Ulster Unionist votes) to oppose the government in a no confidence vote would be leaving the EU without a deal is the one issue that a reasonable number of Labour MPs would abstain from, I don’t think they’ll try it.
Plus a government has to do something to have no confidence in them I guess.
Plus the polls say a Johnson-led Conservative party are likely to win an election, so not exactly benefitting the opposition.
Seriously?
What even is Labor doing that it can’t win an election after this much blundering? I know polls aren’t that reliable, but sheesh..
@dewitt
well, the conventional wisdom seems to be “being led by an obvious loon and blatant anti-Semite.” CW is not always correct, of course, but in this case it’s at least plausible.
Can the Parliament choose to postpone the recess if there’s an urgent matter they have resolve, such as the brexit?
This was one of the secret escalator clauses in the Anglo-American Political Entertainment Treaty of 2016. The original deal was, the Brits had to actually go through with Brexit, in exchange for our giving them a Trump presidency for their amusement. Since they wimped out on that, we had no choice but to invoke the Boris Johnson clause.
If this works out, AAPE II will involve a Corbyn government in London and an AOC presidency in the United States, both committed to renouncing the Treaty of Paris. That way everybody gets to see everybody else, on every side, at both their “smug and arrogant” and “deranged and insane” extremes, with no chance of moderation or executive competency spoiling the fun.
I hope not, I’ve promised to move to Mexico if AOC wins here. I don’t know Spanish and I’m terrible with languages, so that’s suboptimal.
Que lastima
Careful. From what I hear from my Mexican friends Mexican politics has a far bigger share of Marxists than the US, and they’ve been around a lot longer.
This is trivial because AOC will transform America into Mexico anyway.
Only Texas, Arizona, and California, but that’s a different secret treaty.
Why not just not put up a border at all? Granted there will be smuggling, but so what?
Enforcing a border between the UK and EU is kind of the entire point of Hard Brexit.
It would be like Trump building the Wall then letting whoever turns up at the border in legally.
And it leaves a big hole in the EU’s border control. You’d be able to smuggle anything GB-NI-ROI-France without paying EU import duties.
Isn’t that the actual plan? Anyone who steps up to the Wall can say “I’m seeking asylum”, then they let them into a detention center on the US side of the Wall and every Democrat yells for them to be released from the concentration camp?
The Wall seems like a very expensive irrelevant part of the system.
That’s not the plan. That’s just how it turns out in our political environment.
1: actual Democrat policy is inconsistent with what you’re going on about.
2: what you’re describing isn’t working for the people who are yelling very well at all.
The main purpose of the wall is to prove that red tribe can occasionally actually get something, anything, they want, via the political system.
So far, the lack of a wall only proves that no, they totally can’t.
@ Matt M – given the whole ‘two years with control of both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court’ thing, it kinda looks like the Red Tribe not getting what they want is an own-goal situation. Possibly the Red Tribe does not itself know what it wants to any kind of actionable degree of detail?
What could red tribe (as in, the average red tribe voter, not as in Donald Trump and Paul Ryan and Clarence Thomas) have done to be any clearer about what they wanted to happen in regards to immigration and border policy?
What can they do now? Abandon him and vote for… who exactly? Who is out there running on a platform of “I’m like Trump except I will actually do the things he only said he would do and then didn’t do?” I mean, I think that’s basically Ann Coulter’s platform, but as far as I know, she isn’t running…
@Statismagician
Red Tribe != Republican Party.
The GOP leadership got its biggest priorities (corporate tax cut, SCOTUS nominees). The rest — wall, repealing ACA, cutting spending — wasn’t stuff they actually cared about.
No straw-men, please.
By the way, what’s the argument that Boris Johnson is actually bad? From the limited media coverage I’ve seen, this seems to be taken for granted, but the argument is mainly by innuendo and implication: He’s the “British Trump”. He has messy hair and looks kind of funny. He supported Brexit (boo!). He has said a few “offensive” things.
Okay, but is there an actual case that he’s incompetent or unqualified to be prime minister?
He got hired by the Times via family connections, promptly got fired for making quotations up out of whole cloth Then he landed a job with The Daily Telegraph, again via connections, moved to the position of Brussels correspondent, where he was extremely dishonest and incompetent, but did not get fired for it because The Daily Telegraph did not actually mind that their Brussels correspondent just turned in entertaining lies.
Moved from there to MP of a sleepy, rich, conservative suburb, a job which it is basically impossible to fuck up, somehow managed to become mayor of London, and did a pretty shit job of that, but did an effective job of keeping himself in the public eye.
After this, became one of the focal points of the brexit campaign, with the obvious expectation that it would fail, but bring him more fame and pull in the tory party.
When it went through, you could literally see him publicly panic in interviews, and he made a complete ass of himself when May gave him a job.
Lying liar who lies, shit administrator.
Sounds like he wasn’t incompetent then! Also, I’d like to see evidence for the claim that he routinely printed lies.
How did he do a poor job?
How? Also, how did he wind up PM if your description is accurate?
Because all the other rats know to get the hell of a sinking ship instead.
The most obvious example (which is peripherally related to some of my work) is the notorious Boris Buses, a fiasco masterminded by Johnson which resulted in London paying hundreds of millions of pounds for hybrid-electric buses with damaged batteries, poor air conditioning, and a generally unergonomic and misery-inducing design.
Here’s a rundown of Johnson’s EU claims as Brussels correspondent – most of them are partially true, but the part varies and at the very least, it’s sloppy. (Claim is in bold; explanation follows)
1) EU rules forbid recycling teabags. What Johnson was referring to was that acting under an EU directive, Cardiff forbade the composting of teabags. EU defenders argue that although it’s apparently true that EU Animal By-Products Regulation 2002 directs against allowing the composting of products that have come in contact with milk, it leaves the implementation up to local bodies. (And it doesn’t sound like many other places have outlawed teabag composting).
2) EU Rules set standards on coffin sizes. The “Council of Europe” has passed rules on coffin construction, and those rules do affect coffin sizes, but the Council of Europe is separate from the EU, and most of the rules deal with aspects of coffins other than size.
3) EU rules govern how much power vacuum cleaners may have. True, but EU defenders say the rules are a good idea and you should be happy with the vacuum they allow you to have.
4) EU rules say children under eight cannot blow up balloons. EU rules *do* require balloons to carry a warning that children under eight should not blow up balloons without parental supervision, but there are no other enforcement mechanisms.
@ J Mann
If that’s the worst of it, it’s not so bad. First, most of these refer to things he was saying in support of Brexit, not things he wrote as a correspondent, which was the original claim. Expectations for politicians differ from expectations for journalists. Second, most of the claims are either correct, or at worst somewhat exaggerated. One was based on old data, and one was about a pre-EU ordinance. All had a foundation in fact and support his argument.
How did he do a poor job?
The Garden Bridge fiasco, for one, which was a vanity project by some famous pals of his, ending up costing £43 million of public money and has now been abandoned. Handling of the congestion charges. The Boris Buses which were much-trumpeted but didn’t work out. When he first decided to stand for Parliament, shopped around for a seat and was parachuted into a safe seat in Henley, which he then dropped during his second term there as soon as he won the mayoralty (which, fair enough, is what happens most safe seats used to get a prospect some political experience before they go on to bigger and better things).
Wikipedia has a good run-down; a lot of it was sounding out of touch with ordinary people, especially those finding it hard to live in London due to the cost of living – when defending keeping on his writing and journalism gigs while Mayor of London (because it was simply impossible to live on £140,000 a year) he defended himself by calling what he would earn from these “chicken feed” – some chicken, if it costs £250,000 a year to feed! And for ordinary people not earning anything remotely in that region, that sounds insulting and patronising and out of touch: how can he be mayor of a city where he doesn’t have the first idea of how the majority live?
@Eponymous – it’s a little Trumpy.
Most sources consider Johnson’s statements on those subject to be ridiculous, laughable lies, but coming at the issue from outside, it looks more to me like they’re what the fact checkers would call “partially true” or “partially false.” (“How dare you say that EU rules address coffin sizes, Sir, when in fact Council of Europe rules address coffin size?!?”)
On the other hand, maybe long experience with the guy is enough to remove any entitlement to charity, and we just don’t have that experience.
History teaches us that power vacuums are very dangerous. Anyone willing to take on the job of cleaning one should be entitled to charge whatever the traffic will bear.
Incidentally, the Council of Europe describes itself as “the continent’s leading human rights organisation”. That it should busy itself regulating coffin sizes is surely Peak Europe.
How come coffin sizes are standardised by the Council of Europe, rather than by an EN?
Apparently, the Council of Europe is responsible for a 1973 treaty on the requirements for transporting corpses across borders, and there may or may not have been some subsequent regulation or legislation in 1993. The relevant bits of that treaty apparently mostly address how sturdy and sealed coffins need to be, which I admit seems fairly reasonable.
As an American who has been watching a lot of British TV for many years: Boris seems to have been in the national media for one thing or another for so many years that he’s practically synonymous with “rich twit”. Brits have a sort of complex love/hate relationship with their upper class; Boris, by having been a media figure for several decades and by conspicuously and unapologetically epitomizing many upper-class stereotypes, is sort of metonymically representative of a related set of viewpoints and a worldview associated with posh conservative types. So when you ask people why they don’t like him, it’s not going to be a single thing he did, it’s also the worldview he represents. (Actual Brits please chime in if you think this is way off)
Okay, but is there an actual case that he’s incompetent or unqualified to be prime minister?
“Smart but untrustworthy” is the general view. He gets away with playing the buffoon because he’s smart enough underneath and everyone accepts that he’s playing the traditional Great English Eccentric. However, it really is a case of “The louder he talked of his honour/The faster we counted the spoons”.
For a start, he seemingly cannot stop himself fucking anything in a skirt. Just about a month ago, while involved in the run-up to the leadership contest and the whole “what I will do about Brexit if selected” presentation, the cops were called to the flat he shares with his current girlfriend (whom he has shacked up with while divorcing his wife) due to a concerned neighbour hearing a screaming row complete with plate smashing. She’s not the first bit on the side, either, and his history with the ladies and any offspring he may or may not have fathered is less than gallant.
Put that aside, even though it’s not the kind of brouhaha you want a potential Prime Minister to be embroiled in on the cusp of a very important decision about the fate of the nation.
He’s also a bit two-faced, famously having written two articles (one pro-EU, one anti-EU) for his newspaper employer at the time of the whole leaving referendum, and he’s also stuck with being one of the Bullingdon Club lot. There’s also the whole NHS Brexit bus thing, the being stabbed in the back by Gove for the leadership first time round, and a few other matters of that ilk, including his time as Foreign Secretary where he is perceived (how true or not I cannot say) as having practiced the Duke of Edinburgh approach to diplomacy (i.e. turn up in foreign nations and insult the inhabitants).
Basically, the general opinion is that Boris is out for Number One and he’ll say or do anything to that end, including wrapping himself in the flag, but when the chips are down he’s pure self-interest. He’s already talking about borrowing more money to cover government spending, and if there’s a recession right around the corner, this doesn’t seem like a prudent thing to do, on top of the uncertainty over Brexit.
Why the feigned ignorance when the responses make it clear you already have a strongly held position?
You are mistaken; the question was genuine. My responses were motivated by skepticism and a desire to know the truth. They naturally took the form of questioning the claims put forward by my interlocutors. It’s not my fault that these were mostly of one opinion.
Incidentally, I just heard NPR describe Johnson as “very popular” as mayor of London. This seems inconsistent with the view that he did a terrible job.
It does sound like his October 31 goal is highly unrealistic, so he’s coming into a very difficult situation (of course, partly of his own making!). This lowers his chances for success.
You think that politicians are primarily judged on how well they actually do???
For local politicians, even big city mayors, it probably is. QoL issues like crime, taxes, policing, or utility services are things the mayor will have an influence on or responsibility for, and most residents won’t overlook those for ideology’s sake.
Possibly for identity’s sake in some cases, though.
I would hope there’s at least a correlation. Enough that it’s pretty unlikely that a mayor who was *clearly* incompetent would be highly popular at the end of his term.
In my part of the world, Mayor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci was very popular in Providence for many years. Besides being charismatic, he basically overspent during good economic times and had the good fortune to be removed from office by scandal before the economy turned and cutbacks were needed, and then managed to return to office once the budget had been repaired and the economy was recovering again to do it all over. So, no, I don’t think a mayor being popular is particularly strong evidence of his being competent.
Interesting study looking at the perception gap between what Republicans and Democrats think each other believe and how they actually respond on a survey.
I took their quiz and came up with a perception gap of 10%, which is apparently a bit of an outlier, but they make a good case for the prevalence of ideological bubbles, even if the questions they ask aren’t the most precise possible.
Someone linked to a synopsis of that study a few weeks ago, and IIRC the best and the worst at accurately guessing the opposing parties views were both Democrats.
Low education Democrats were far more accurate in describing Republicans views than were highly educated Democrats who were lousy at it.
Republicans on-the-other-hand didn’t get worse in their guesses of Democrats views with more education, but they did get worse with partisan media use.
Those who mostly got their news from broadcast (ABC, CBS, NBC) television did better in accurately describing the views of the other Party than users of cable television and the internet.
Dratz, and I took the time to do a site:slatestarcodex.com google search first just in case someone had already commented on it. I just tried a few likely searches and still couldn’t find the comment, so I guess the keywords I’d associate with it just aren’t there.
Do you have the source for that handy? That’s a fascinating result.
@Jaskologist,
When the study came out there were opinion pieces that said as much, but I didn’t bother searching for them because from the link that @sharper13 provided above:
which has lots of graphs to suss out your own conclusions from.
I’ve said before that I think these questions are essentially bullshit, because they mostly test how you interpret the question, not the actual views.
Take the first question: “Properly controlled immigration” could mean many things including “immigration from only white, European countries”.
Thus, if I think of properly controlled immigration as “controlled, but substantial inflows from every country of the world” and I answer that you won’t approve of that, I am likely correct, we just interpret the meaning of the question differently.
The fact that my interpretation of an ambiguous question changes as my education increases isn’t surprising.
@HeelBearCub,
Also the organization doing the study is called “More in Common” and their agenda is bi-partisanship.
I think people are finally starting to realize how easy it is to skew results with the phrasing of questions.
I should make a survey to find out.
@Randy M
I’m now morally obligated to link the Yes, Prime Minister video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
-3% for Democrats, -9% for Republicans.
For Dems, I overestimated “proud to be an American” and underestimated agreement with “completely open borders”, “America should be a socialist country”, and “America should abolish ICE”.
For Republicans, I overestimated agreement with “people are right to be concerned about climate change”, and severely overestimated agreement with “Donald Trump is a flawed person” (by 39%, how’d that happen?), but most everything else was within margins of error.
(FWIW: college graduate, independent, get most of my news from the Internet)
That’s pretty good, although it sounds like you fall into one of the their “best” categories already.
I overestimated “Donald Trump is a flawed person” by a lot as well. I wonder if it’s the verbiage tripping people up, in terms of how literally people take it vs. just taking it as a pro/anti-trump thing.
I mean, how many officially Christians don’t think anyone not Christ is flawed in at least some way?
I just started to take this quiz, and the questions really make me doubt the methodology. Maybe you rationalists are rubbing off on me, but they are asking for yes/no answers to absolute questions and I don’t think either response will capture my opinions much at all.
Does disagree mean I think immigration should be uncontrolled? Or that I think there is no chance any immigration, no matter the controls, can be beneficial, ever?
Does agree mean I think systemic racism is a major problem and explains all the racial gaps in outcome or that someone somewhere is racist?
And I agree that no one could call Trump flawless except as hyperbole or signalling, but you could say the same about any previous president, or person. Really odd choice of wording.
It looks like it might get better on the next page.
That said:
Sweet, nevermind the complaints, I’m apparently the resident expert on Democrats. (edit: except for those down thread with lower scores and valid complaints about the scoring method)
0%, baby! But if you sum the absolute values my score would be terrible.
That is interesting. I wonder what the numbers would be asking Democrats “Obama is a flawed person.”
@Randy M:
You and I agree. These questions seemed designed to reach the conclusion they wish as they largely depend on interpretation of the question itself, not the underlying views.
This is similar to how mine turned out–I assumed everyone agreed with “DJT is a flawed person,” but otherwise was reasonably close.
Their math is bizarre, and makes me look a lot more accurate than I really am, because I’m not at all consistent as to which direction I get things wrong in.
So while the absolute value of my misperception of Democrats ranges from 8-38%, the net reported is a mere -3%. The absolute value of my misperception of Republicans ranges from 2-35% giving me a net of 10%. This makes me better than all the averages, except maybe people estimating the opinions of their own party members (not given).
I figure this is a pretty decent result for a foreigner, even one who’s lived in the US for 25 years. (I’m not naturalized, and haven’t really followed US politics at all until relatively recently.)
Agree, it’s using a simple average instead of a sum of squares based formula. I had the good fortune of missing only two in each party by any significant error and it was in opposite directions each time so my net result was (2%) for democrats and 0% for republicans but with a 20% miss in each of my four misses.
I was in a similar boat with my scoring. I got a 1% gap which sounds good, but means I think Democrats are much more pro open borders than I expected, and much more patriotic and fun supporting than I expected
I think both a straight average and an absolute difference average could be useful.
The unsigned average tells you how “informed” you are – a zero indicates you’re perfectly calibrated, a large number indicates you’re way off.
A signed average has the problem you note, you could be way off across the board but get a small number if you were wrong in opposition directions.
But combined with the , that sign if the signed average could give a “bias” score – a large signed difference indicates that you tend to consistently over or underestimate the extremity of that side’s views.
Are they doing something to correct for directionality or really just averaging the raw number? One issue with using the signed average as I mentioned is that the direction of “extreme view” is not consistent among the questions. E.g. someone who thought the Democrats are very extreme would probably overestimate the number who want to abolish ICE, and underestimate the number who are proud of America.
The “extreme” direction varies when they ask the question, which is good as it makes you think more while answering, but if you check the reported section they flip about half the questions to make the “extreme” direction consistent when they calculate the final score.
So IMO the final gap is a useful measure even with strong cancellations, cause a large gap would show that you consistently over/underestimate how extreme a party’s supporters are.
My errors cancelled out and I miraculously (and luckily) got a 0% gap on predicting Republican views.
I had fairly large (~15%) underestimates on racism existing and properly controlled immigration. And I had a fairly large (~15%) overestimate on Donald trump being a flawed person. The rest were fairly close (<5%) and were all slight overestimates.
I'm a somewhat liberal college graduate who gets news from Politico, NYT, 538, and Apple News.
Judging by the tiny sample of your score and @DinoNerd and others, either SSC readers are much more likely to do well on the “test”, or we have a bit of publication bias in that only those who do well are likely to post a comment listing their score, or a combination of both. 🙂
You got 0, but that was averaging pretty large errors. They really should report MSE.
It is an interesting study, which replicates things I’ve seen before, but I think it is biased against certain people. Mainly, if you are an internet based person, you will view your opposition as internet Dems/Republicans, who are different than TV Dems/Republicans.
I had forgotten this was the survey with misleading questions. First, my results:
Perception gap between me and Democrats: -4% (yes, that’s a negative number, means I don’t attribute more extreme positions to Democrats than they hold in reality; hanging out here must be having a good effect on me!)
Perception gap between me and Republicans: 3%
So I’m doing better than many Real Actual Americans on this. But this is a rubbish survey, and I’ll explain why: reading the scores, for the Democrat questions they had FOUR of the six questions scored as “% disagree”, which is NOT how the questions are phrased. They had NONE of the Republican questions scored this way.
So they’re deck-stacking to get a predetermined result: “Oh look, those (unreasonable bigoted) conservatives think Democrats are all crazy extremists, but liberals understand Republicans better and are more nuanced and smell nicer and wear more stylish clothes”.
Bah, humbug.
2% and 12%. Foreigner. I guess Republicans are more Democrat than I expected. Ironically, I was dead right on half of Republicans considering Trump to be flawed 😀
Highly educated Democrat, 8% perception gap against Republicans. I was consistently slightly pessimistic, thinking the other side has slightly more extreme views on every question but one (where I was about 3% too optimistic). I should update slightly, but that seems pretty good.
Took the quiz. My perception gap was -4% — basically democrats are more socialist and more anti-ICE than I thought.
To add: My error was <3 for all other questions. But on those two: I thought ~35% of Ds want to abolish ICE, and ~20% want America to be a socialist country. Turns out the true numbers are ~50% and ~40%, which are *insane*.
I guess Democrats really are a lot more extreme than I had thought.
I had similar results, but I think we’re seeing a similar effect here as with “Donald Trump is a flawed person” — that is, the most topical-sounding questions are getting answered as tribal markers. Not “Abolish ICE”, but “are you woke on immigration?”. Not “Donald Trump is a flawed person”, but “are you anti-Trump?”.
I agree that “Abolish ICE” is a sort of lefty cheer at the moment, sort of like “build the wall”. I don’t think it means literally “our government should have no agency devoted to border and customs enforcement” any more than the latter means “We should build a 1,000 mile Great Wall of Texas along the Rio Grande.”
I suspect with “socialism” we’re seeing a real shift, at least linguistically and probably politically. Socialism is no longer a dirty word, at least on the left — it’s not North Korea or Venezuela, it’s Denmark and Sweden. If this is right, we’ll probably see people like Bernie, Warren, and AOC continue doing well.
@sharper13,
Since I try to imitate the cool kids I took the test as well and got a -18%.
My biggest failures were that more Democrats think that socialism is a good idea and more Republicans think Trump is without flaw than I guessed (both of which confuse me, I’m guessing more Democrats are thinking Norway not North Korea as;the meaning of “socialism”, but c’mon Trump isn’t Jesus!).
I’m a Democrat with a year of community college.
I’m a Democrat and got a -15% gap for Republicans. I have a hard time believing that people are answering the questions literally – do 1/3rd of Republicans really believe that there are hardly any Muslims who are good Americans?
Let’s see, I haven’t said anything controversial in awhile, have I? I’ll give this an answer, though I don’t necessarily think it is reflective of most Republicans.
Like I said, I don’t like these questions. This was the only one that I answered in the extreme direction, and I thought about it awhile before answering yes.
I don’t think that there are no Muslims here who are good neighbors or employees. But a nation is more than a place people work, and I think nations tend to be better with unity rather than diversity.
Obviously a nation that unites around an idea that promotes or condones some evil is going to be worse than an admixture. And also obviously, even if it would be better for America to be non-Muslim, that doesn’t justify any given course of action towards them–I don’t hope for a reconquista here. And it may need to be said that it doesn’t justify wars against other nations; I don’t even see how it could.
And Islam is specifically political, not just spiritual. Its often been interpreted by devout Muslims as instructions for a civil polity, as opposed to Christianity which sees itself as a separate domain that requires submission to civil authorities in the temporal. So if I was going to mix another religion in with historically largely Christian America, it wouldn’t be that one.
+3
This might be the most fundamental disagreement I’ve had with a comment on SSC, at least recently.
I’m going to have to rethink a lot of my opinions, so, thank you? You spelled out what was a fundamental disagreement between me and a lot of people that I could never put my finger on.
Unclear whether you are rethinking your opinions about nations, or about commenters on SSC, but in case of the latter, I don’t claim to be particularly representative of the place. 😉
(I realize I’ve just claimed to be non-representative of different groups in two consecutive posts and I want to make it clear that, unlike most people, I do know I’m not special.)
@Randy M,
So I believe that would be your third claim in a row that you’re non-representative, if I’m keeping score correctly? 😉
I can’t tell from your answer whether you ended up answering agree or disagree to the question that many Muslims are good people. But regardless, you seem to see that the literal answer is obviously yes, and consider answering differently based on interpreting the question more broadly.
I’m extremely annoyed by this attitude. I’m reminded of a survey on right-wing extremism that I filled out in school ages ago. I remember exactly how I answered: I said “disagree strongly” on all but the final question, which all tested political affiliation somehow (so that would be the most anti right wing option). Then the last question was (translation) “national socialism also had good sides”. To which I answered “strongly agree” because it was and is exceedingly obvious to me that a system that’s different on so many variables will have good sides. But I was one of very few people who did this. I also remember that my teacher argued to me that the answer was literally no.
I find it intuitively fairly obvious that the world would be a much better place if everyone answered the actual questions (or differently put: if everyone answered as if they would receive 1000000$ for every correctly answered question judged by some omnipotent power), instead of ignoring the actual question and instead answering the different question of “which answer corresponds most closely to your place on the spectrum that you are assume I’m trying to measure by asking this?”
That was not the question.
I answered the question honestly and literally.
For contrast, I did not see any way possible to answer that Trump has no flaws, as a person or president.
Mhpf, I even made sure to double-check the question before submitting the comment and still got it wrong. Like I said, I was very annoyed.
So the literal question was: “Many Muslims are good Americans.” Well, I can see how it’s possible to interpret “American” in such a way that your original comment is relevant for the literal question. Kudos for the Trump thing.
So I retract the hidden accusation that you do this, however, this doesn’t at all change the fact that tons of other people do this. Apparently, a lot more than I thought, since I was the most off on the Trump question. And Matt M has admitted to doing it just a few comments downstream.
I can understand the impulse, though. I’m asked a question about whether Trump is flawless.
I am a person more than one day past the turnip truck, and thus know that all people are flawed.
So I have to either conclude that the questioner means the question non-literally, in which case I have to guess at the actual meaning; or the questioner assumes I’m some kind of brainless follower, in which case I don’t care about the integrity of his survey. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
The latter viewpoint is kind of a failure to understand that there are actual brainless people on my side which may be of academic interest, of course.
I’m another Democrat who got a negative perception gap for Republicans (the “Trump is flawed” one was my worst). In retrospect, I think that was its own kind of empathy failure, because I can easily imagine giving non-literal answers to a pollster if they seemed like they were trying to build a narrative I hated. If you ever want to make me look like a lunatic, give me a poll with questions like “Do you think it’s possible that someone in an ICE detention camp might have gone on to murder someone if they hadn’t been detained?”
I’ve long admitted that I gleefully do this.
I will answer almost every poll with the furthest right, most extreme answer available, even if my own beliefs aren’t nearly that extreme.
The simplistic algorithm that 30% of Republicans and Democrats alike hold each of the extreme caricatures of the views traditionally attributed to them (e.g. that Donald Trump is a literally flawless individual, or that one should be ashamed to be an American), scores a 12% perception gap w/re Democrats and 7% w/re Republicans. That’s better than almost any of the subgroups they analyzed, with the major exceptions being the completely uneducated and politically disengaged.
Conclusion #1: Politically aligned Americans can be coarsely modeled as 30% fanatics
Conclusion #2: Politically aligned Americans believe the Other/Stupid/Evil Tribe is about 60% fanatics
Conclusion #3: The questions and the scoring of this whole thing are absurdly simplistic, devoid of nuance or statistical rigor, and so conclusions #1 and #2 are low confidence at best.
Got 16%, but nearly all of that is from a gross misestimation of how “It is important that men are protected from false accusations pertaining to sexual assault” would be interpreted. I figured respondents would interpret it as relative importance, but apparently they went with a more absolute importance.
Foreigner. -8% republican gap. I far overestimated the amount of republicans thinking Trump “has flaws” and climate change is a legit concern. If the survey was meant to be reassuring, it did the opposite for me.
4% for democrats. here, my guesses were pretty accurate (which doesn’t follow from the score, since as others have pointed out you can just go wrong in both directions and have it cancelling out).
The first two times I took this survey I accidentally answered with my own opinions instead of what I thought the political opposition believed (-9% bias! Yay?), and the third time I took it I accidentally entered the wrong guess on one of the questions. So… anecdotally, the lizardman constant is strong with this survey.
@sharper13,
Of course we’re mostly forewarned, but it seems like the test results of the commenters here are theopposite of the study makers conclusions as most of us seem to be guessing that the voters for each Party are more moderate than the actual averages.
Separate comment on the survey: the results are obviously going to be flawed due to the fact that you have to answer the first set of questions every time you want to answer the second set (or even just check which questions were asked). This might not be a problem if you were allowed to not answer questions, but you aren’t.
I’d be interested to see if they did some A/B testing to see if stuff changes if they ask the Democrat questions before the Republican ones, or vice versa.
They really need to use root-mean-square. I got a 1% gap, but my RMS would be more like 10%. Still, a fun exercise, and I’m pleased with how I did.
As best I can tell from tea-reading their blurbs, they went with simple average because they’re trying to build an estimate of how partisan you think the other side is, not how accurately you can describe their consensus on various issues — so if you think they’re extra-partisan on, say, global warming, but kinda chill on, say, immigration, it averages out to something close to their actual level of partisanship.
This only works inasmuch as the questions are actually a good gauge of extreme views, though, and I think that’s pretty questionable. We already have good evidence that they’re not being answered literally.
I’m not that sure that using the average of signed differences rather than e.g. the root mean square is the right thing to do. Yeah, it’s interesting that Democrats systematically think Republicans are more conservative than they actually are and vice versa, but differences not as simple to describe would be interesting too.
Took the quiz. I wasn’t extremely careful about placing the sliders, but I don’t think I ever placed them more than about 5-7% off from where I would have put them if I was being really super thoughtful and careful.
My score was -15%. So, apparently I give Democrats too much benefit of the doubt? I thought only a tiny minority, for example, favored actual socialism but apparently the real number is closer to 40%. Same for open borders, where I figured maybe 6 or 7% actually want that when it’s really more like 30%. Same again for abolishing ICE, where I figured maybe 22% of Dems now favor this, purely because of the horrible optics of the detainment centers, but the actual figure is almost 50%! More Democrats believe just about every other thing I thought fewer of them believed, such as “Most police are bad people”, “I’m proud to be American”, and “Law abiding citizens should have the right to bear arms”. The only one I underestimated was about protecting men from false accusations of sexual assault, and I underestimated it by a whopping 3 percentage points.
Where are people getting the second set of numbers? Did they take the quiz twice, or did they start by saying they were independent?
I said I was independent, and was given two sets of attitudes to judge, one for the Dems and one for the GOP. That gave me two numbers at the end, one for each.
Alternate history timeline jumping off point:
There is some physical limit to how small one can make transistors. In this alternate timeline, that limit is around 0.1 mm. How does technology evolve differently?
So like 100µm feature size? I don’t think you even get ICs. We’re basically stuck with vacuum tubes in that world. So we already know what world looks like: the 1960s.
We don’t know what the world looks like when we have 1960s computers for fifty years. We wouldn’t still have 1960s culture, because culture always changes, but we wouldn’t have our present culture without the internet as we know it.
The brain must contain some sort of transistor-equivalent or basic components that allow for computation in another way. So if there was a physical limit preventing transistors (or analogues) smaller than 0.1 mm, it would also mean we couldn’t pack nearly as many neurons in our head as we do. So we probably either wouldn’t be intelligent, or our head would be much bigger, which would in turn require a lot of further changes in the physics or the biology of our hypothetical world.
If we assume that this applies to electronic transistors but not biological ones, perhaps it leads to an alternate timeline where biological computers saw much more development.
Are transistors any good for analogue computing?
Full analogue has some pretty bad problems, but maybe you could do a hybrid, where all the logic is discretised into hex. i.e. a wire is at one of 16 voltages.
It’d be awful, compared to anything else except valves.
If the French government decided to build a larger-than-life replica of Notre Dame using modern materials and construction techniques, how large could they make it? In order to qualify, the building must be visually but not structurally identical to the original: e.g., it must have flying buttresses, but they don’t need to be load-bearing.
(Once construction is complete, we’ll put the final boss of Dark Souls IV in there.)
More interesting question for me personally: You are an evil French wizard with the ability to make Dark Souls monsters and bosses for France. The final boss is in this super Notre Dame Cathedral. What do you make? La Pucelle de Douleur? L’Empereur Renaît?
The hunchback, obviously. This being Dark Souls, he’d be modeled as a twisted giant wielding one of the bells as a flail.
Hmm…Dark Souls really loves its corrupted monarchs. How about Philippe Petain?
Steel is a much better construction material than stone. Ten times the size in each linear dimension, so a thousand times the volume, would make it the tallest structure in the world, but would only beat the Burj Khalifa by a slight margin. I believe the reason nobody’s built anything like Notre Dame to that scale is expense and pointlessness, not physics, and so I’d expect that, or something close to it, to be possible.
Disclaimer: I am not a civil engineer
That’s not how structures scale. It’s not just a matter of supporting a certain weight or not being so heavy as to sink into the ground. There’s also interaction with wind, among other things, which is very important for tall structures.
Not that I disagree it would be impossible to do, in principle. I’m just saying it isn’t implied simply by better strength to weight ratio (along any measure – compression, tensile, shear, etc.).
I didn’t mention strength to weight ratios; I just vaguely gestured in the direction of what we can observe to have been done with steel. The estimated size was an extremely vague ballpark estimate based on the observed difference between what people have managed to accomplish with steel and what they’ve managed to accomplish with stone. The complications you mention mean it’s very hard to get a more precise estimate, but I wasn’t going for that.
I’m imagining this thing with pews too big to sit in, doors to big for normal use, etc. I’m all for it.
And you haven’t even seen the 1000x scale tabernacle!
The 1000x scale tabernacle is cloth and a priest can walk into it.
Have any AI buffs here come across Graphcore? A youngish startup who produce chips which they claim can outperform GPUs by ‘orders of magnitude’ for machine learning tasks, and who seem to have got a lot of funding. They’ve had some impressive write-ups.
I’m curious as to whether anyone more knowledgeable about the field has any feelings about the extent to which their product seems like a genuine innovation, or whether their funding is due to AI bubble-ish hype. Based on previous well-funded chip startups in modishly buzzwordy fields, and on my sense of tech bubbles generally, my priors lean towards ‘bubble-ish hype’, but I don’t have enough of a technical sense to know whether there’s any substance there. Certainly I don’t know of any reason why it shouldn’t be possible to outperform GPU architectures for machine learning.
I’ve not read their literature, but…
It’s possible to design “ML-PU”‘. So far, ML-PUs are really just lower-precision faster GPUs with a faster general store/read mechanism. We call them “GPUs”.
Add on that it is Very Hard to do bleeding edge performance microelectronics design, and its very very very VERY expensive to do bleeding edge performance microelectronics fabrication.
But, they might have hit on something really innovatively better than huge arrays of really fast low precision multipipeline GPUs. It could happen. There are a lot more breakthroughs that are possible.
But I wouldn’t bet a lot on this particular company.
Eric Raymond has a couple of articles about where parallelism doesn’t work well – where the algorithm is intrinically serial.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8223
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7979
If the problem space isn’t suitable for GPU-like parallel processing, but isn’t *intrinsically* serial, there’s a possibility that someone could have come up with a processor architecture which can handle the problem space more efficiently than a serial CPU.
But something like that would probably have some university research into it somewhere, even if the company is the first to instantiate the algorithms into silicon. If they cite a bunch of papers talking about the algorithms, they may be real.
It is definitely possible to outperform GPUs by a substantial degree for machine-learning tasks; that’s the point of Google’s Tensor Processing Units. Whether Graphcore has done so, I have no idea.
They are using reduced precision floats which gives you the speedup vs traditional GPUs, but looking at the linked articles I don’t see anything else that would justify a claim of order of magnitude (by some reasonable metric) vs google’s TPUs or Intel’s forthcoming hardware.
Yeah, it seems like that, in itself, would only give a linear speedup. An eightfold linear speedup is perhaps not to be sniffed at, but I have to raise a quizzical eyebrow at ‘orders of magnitude’.
A youngish startup who produce chips which they claim can outperform GPUs by ‘orders of magnitude’ for machine learning tasks
“Orders of magnitude”, hmmm? Why, I’ll bet there could be as many as dozens of people interested in that!
Fuzzy extraordinary claims make me very suspicious, but since I have no knowledge of the topics of either chip building or machine learning, I can’t say whether they’re Theranos Mark II or the best thing since sliced bread.
It’s a tough market to get into with limited money to be made.
Very few people are training neural networks vs running them.
Of them most rely on standard libraries that may not play well with random hardware. It’s tough enough to get them to see and use your GPU in some cases.
GPU manufacture and design is subsidized by the hundreds of millions of video-game-playing people.
Even if they had an idea that worked I’d probably not invest in them.
And what’s your moat? A patent?
moat?
I’m not sure what you mean.
My position is that even if we start with some generous assumptions:
* their tech works as advertised and really is that fast for the task.
* they have whatever patents or protections they would need to protect their invention.
* the chips they sell produce sweet frozen treats once per day.
lets assume that’s all true
So, what price can they charge? well if they can outperform a GPU by an order of magnitude then you also have the option of just buying 10 GPU’s so there’s a price ceiling.
GPU’s, for what they are are incredibly cheap and their development and tooling cost is spread over millions of units and they keep improving.
With electronics economies of scale are everything. The difference between something that costs 10K per unit or 2 bucks per unit can be whether someone ordered 3 units or 30 million units.
If you’re trying to compete with someone who’s selling 30 million units… you don’t want to be selling 1000 units.
The pool of people who would buy this is small. lots of people use neural networks but they’re cheap to use. Training them is the expensive bit. But there’s really not that many groups with a big budget training neural networks on a large scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s in the low thousands.
When you’re doing any kind of neural net work you’re gonna be using various standard libraries and frameworks like TORCH.
Those things can be a pain in the hole to get working even with the exact graphics cards they’re built to run on.
So the deck is stacked heavily against them however good their product is.
Sorry I was agreeing with you but also pointing out that I don’t think patents would likely be sufficient to protect their secret sauce in a durable way.
The picture round on University Challenge tonight was good.
Thanslate the following Beatles songs’ titles back into modern English:
Ic wille beclyppen Þin hand
Æfre æcera EorÞ-berigena
Ne cann lufe me bycgan
Her ancymÞ seo Dæg-Candel
Since I couldn’t resist: another pop song performed in Old English.
I’m fairly confident #1 is “V Jnaan Ubyq Lbhe Unaq”.
No idea about #2.
#3 is perhaps “Pna’g Ohl Zr Ybir”.
#4 is perhaps “Urer Pbzrf gur Fha”.
I agree with you on #1. I know a little modern German and it fits pretty well.
Correct.
Modern german also helps with 2.
Interesting choice to translate gur Fha with a kenning, ‘day-candle’.
1’s easy.
‘Qba’g cnff zr ol’ came to mind for 3, but I think johan_larson has got it right.
pretty sure 2 is Fgenjoreel Svryqf Sberire. Think johan_larson was right about the rest.
yup.
Dang it, my Anglo-Saxon is plainly not up to snuff, I could only get two of those with a guess at a third:
(1) V jnag gb ubyq lbhe unaq
(3) Zbarl pna’g ohl zr ybir
(4) Urer pbzrf gur fha
You’re the commander of the secret base known as “Area 51.” 100,000 people have assembled to storm the base. They have massed in three camps of equal size in nearby public areas and will simultaneously charge towards Area 51 from three different directions.
Law enforcement agents have infiltrated the insurgent group and have provided you with very good intel. They plan to charge the gates in 48 hours, and will be mounted in thousands of vehicles ranging from RVs to dirt bikes. A minority of them will be armed with guns, and many others will be high on drugs and/or dressed as aliens and other types of popular fiction characters.
What do you do to protect the base?
Use my alien technology to mind-control them into leaving and telling the world that yeah, Area 51 is just a boring airbase, nothing to see here. Obviously.
Any particular reason why copious amounts of heavy machine gun fire wouldn’t do the trick? Besides the moral and political ones, of course.
Helicopter the aliens to Area 52 for the weekend. Fly in some Russian fighter jets being used for obscure but nonclassified OPFOR training. Put up some token resistance.
Get a bunch of grading equipment, destroy existing roads from those gates and set up “roads” so the three groups will be funneled into each other. Evacuate all aboveground facilities, conceal all underground facilities that cannot be evacuated. Set up cameras and buy popcorn.
Napalm
First of all, have the DOD lean hard on whatever agencies are responsible for the land these 100,000 people are standing on to make them disperse. If it’s state land, get the state troopers to order people to go. If it’s a federal park, close the park. And have the rangers tell anyone who’s there to go. Use big SUVs, helicopters, and rangers with dogs. Be as intimidating as possible. And take anyone who fights back into custody. Those agencies aren’t set up to deal with 100,000 people, but they may be able to reduce the size of the problem by getting some of the most lawful hangers-on to go home.
Second, deal with base security. I’m assuming the base has an integral security force of maybe 100 guards and is surrounded by something like a chain-link fence.
Get on the phone and call in as many MPs as you can get (1,000 maybe?) with truncheons, teargas, and rifles. Also an engineering unit with excavation gear. Use the engineers to build a trench around the base sufficiently deep to stop cars. Also evacuate the base of all personnel who are not of use defending the base.
Deploy the MPs with tear gas grenade launchers and truncheons near the fence. When the protesters come, have the MPs launch gas grenades outside the fence, and use the truncheons to push back anyone trying to climb over the fence. Have smaller units of MPs farther back with rifles or shotguns firing rubber bullets, to deal with anyone getting past the folks at the fence. Have even smaller units in all of the buildings, with rifles firing actual live rounds.
Finally have some sharpshooters stationed in guard towers with orders to shoot anyone seen with a firearm within 100 m of the base fence, or anyone farther seen farther out making preparations to fire.
– out of 100,000, 10,000 go home either on their own or in police custody
– 90,000 head for the base
– 80,000 get a whiff of gas and head home
– 10,000 get near the fence
– 500 make it over the fence
– 100 reach a building
– 20 get inside a building
Damage to base: Fence breached in one location; one lab room burned. Persistent odor of tear gas.
Attacker casualties: 1,000 injured, 50 dead
Defender casualties: 20 injured, 2 dead
johan_larson, the level of detail in your reply (down to defender fatalities) makes me wonder if you know something we don’t 🙂
These figures are definitely not from a confidential study I did for the RAND Corporation in 2005. There is no such study. I have never worked for the RAND Corporation. And 2005 is a fake year anyway.
Given that this never-commissioned study was not carried out by you for an institution not your employer in 2005 which doesn’t exist as it’s a fake year, I definitely do not want to know why a corporation with nothing to do with it was sufficiently uninterested enough in the scenario to not commission such a study which was not on behalf of the US Armed Forces who don’t have secret(ish) desert bases at risk of assault three lustra before such a meme was not discussed by anyone on social media 🙂
This is more or less my plan, although I do think you could probably go further in dispersing the camps and bringing in support. 48 hours gives you enough time to bring in a lot more than 1,000 reinforcements. California and Arizona both have MP units in their national guards, and there’s probably reservists available, too.
I’d be more aggressive about attacking the camps and getting people to go home early. Cut off the water supply and any movement into the camps ASAP. Call a Psyops unit and get them started working. (If you’re smart, you’ll have booked one when you saw this was actually going to be a thing.) Cut off cell service to the area. For the first 12-24 hours, you’re just making life unpleasant, flying helicopters overhead during the night and playing the Barney song at them on repeat. Announce repeatedly that anyone who leaves now is free to go, no questions asked, but with a deadline. This should be enough to cut things by 50% or more.
After that, turn up the heat. Send in the civilian police, with military units waiting behind in case they need backup. Make the music even more obnoxious. The helicopters fly lower. Start jamming any other means of communication you can. Jam GPS, or better yet spoof it to make them drive to somewhere that isn’t your camp. And 12 hours or so before the deadline, at a different time for each camp, go after them with tear gas. Ideally, you can reduce the attack on the base itself to minimal levels. Lots of people go to the wrong place, and those that do go to the right one trickle in, instead of arriving as a wave.
Yes, going on the offensive against the staging grounds is good thinking. But I would expect police units to be a bit reluctant to take on groups as large as 100,000. They may not be able to do much more than keep more people from showing up. But that’s something at least.
We also need to worry about public perceptions. We need to avoid the perception that the military are the ones doing the attacking, which makes me reluctant to gas the camps. “Military Police Attack Peaceful Protesters” is the sort of headline I really don’t want. But making life in the camps difficult would be fine, I think.
Also, I think you’re too optimistic about mobilizing the National Guard. The run-up to Desert Storm (or was it Iraqi Freedom?) showed that many National Guard units have really crappy readiness. Mobilizing them effectively in 48 hours is asking a lot.
We’re talking about using the Guard as police in Nevada for a day or three, not sending them halfway around the world. This is the day job of a lot of the people in question, and the level of competence needed is a lot lower than we’d want for Iraq. I’m sure there’s a civil disorder plan that we can use. Also, readiness is a lot higher than it was 20-30 years ago. They’ve been in the deployment cycle for most of that time. A lot of these people are combat veterans.
@bean
Is this true? I realize this is anecdata, but none of the people I’ve known who were in the National Guard worked in law enforcement (and, conversely, none of the people I’ve known in law enforcement were in the National Guard). Maybe it depends on what you mean by “a lot”.
It’s not the general National Guard. It’s MP units in particular. Traditionally at least (this isn’t my area of expertise) being an MP in the Army is a good way to get into the police.
We’re talking about using the Guard as police in Nevada for a day or three, not sending them halfway around the world.
Yeah, but the minute you have even the perception of a thought of the National Guard possibly firing (even baton rounds) on civil protesters, you are evoking the spectre of Kent State.
Now, my own opinion is that if you rush an army base even in a jokey manner, you are provoking a response that will be decidedly unjokey and frankly you are asking for it. But American troops shooting American citizens on American soil is not something anybody wants to see happen, and simply handing it off to the National Guard is not very much better for the above reasons.
Keep in mind that I said the rebel group was divided into three different camps, so that’s about 33,333 per camp. It would be easier to deal with them piecemeal, and the Area 51 base commander should deploy his own security forces in ways that keep the rebels broken up.
Also, the P.R. problem you brought up could be solved if some of the secret government agents who had infiltrated the rebels to get intel staged an early false flag attack on the Area 51 security forces. This could involve a handful of guys in Mad Max outfits shooting bullets at the base from such a distance that there was no risk of anyone getting hurt. However, it would provide an excuse for the riot police to raid the staging grounds.
I totally agree that disrupting the staging camps beforehand is the best strategy.
Home alone style traps. Road spikes, nails, tar, pits ~2.5 meters deep covered with tarps and with super/rubber glue at the bottom; closer to the base build a labyrinth with dead ends that seal themselves off after peope go in. Only one way through to the actual base, with a 50 meter stretch from the labyrinth exit to the base entrance. Position a small army on the walls there, have them shoot off to the side as civilians sprint to the base.
Have a massive party for the soldiers on base and have anyone who makes it join in.
Sod protecting the base. I film the next Mad Max film instead.
Area 51 is disguised as a Burning Man event. The protesters are encouraged to join the party.
Close the blast doors to the undeground facilities, wait a couple of days, week tops.
Ok so ignoring the McCarthy issue….how many spies did infiltrate the american government.
Was it ever a real danger?
I’m not an expert, but I’ve read that the USSR managed to get access to details of US military technology, including nuclear weapon designs, and also to learn the identities of CIA agents and informants in the USSR from their spies in the US. This Wikipedia article and this one are good starting points for known Soviet agents and operations in the US. Some of the really famous cases are Aldrich Ames, Robert Hansenn, John Walker, and the Rosenbergs.
Does this extensive Wikipedia list mean that there wasn’t much danger anyway?
It’s hard without looking at the counterfactual world, but the USSR developed nuclear weapons anyway, everything else seems just icing on top of the cake.
It would have taken McCarthy being a senator during WWII, him being precise on rooting out spies around the Manhattan Project, to put a dent on the Soviet program. And probably would only have delay it a couple of years anyway.
edit: The russians even obtained intelligence from the Smyth Report, which was openly published by America.
Dunno.
Hansenn is pointed out as the more damaging, and he was active until the fall of the USSR. Seems the biggest thing he leaked was plans in the event of nuclear war, so maybe that actually helped deter the USSR.
Don’t think any of this seems like they were ever in position to turn the USA into a communist state, McCarthy or not. It’s a lot harder to say if they moved the atomic clock closer to midnight or farther away from it.
Of course this list is missing the guys that were never found.
It’s not as though we’re still strapping 1945 era Fat Man A-bombs onto ICBMs.
Even if for some reason nuclear weapon technology were literally the only defense secrets that you cared about the Soviet Union having unfettered access to, American nuclear technology continued to develop long after the end of WWII.
In fact, the period of McCarthyism almost perfectly overlaps the time between the first American and the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb test. The initial Soviet designs for their H bomb, incidentally, were based on information from American spies and it’s still debated as to how much of their final design owed to information leaked as late as 1953.
But at that point it was too late; even a perfectly calibrated McCarthy would have missed the window to even _delay_ a USSR atomic bomb. The house committee started earlier, but it seems to have centered on Hollywood anyway.
It’s fair that spies may have helped the USSR get their hands on more advanced delivery methods, tho, but I don’t know whether to categorize this as moving the atomic clock either way.
The point was to illustrate that there were still nuclear secrets worth protecting in that era because nuclear weapons continued to evolve. And that evolution didn’t stop with the first hydrogen bomb either, there were newer and better designs being made constantly throughout the Cold War.
The fact that they had already stolen designs for earlier bombs should make protecting the designs for the next bomb a higher priority, not a lower one.
The cold war was largely an economic battle, where the US and USSR were spending vast resources to develop advanced military technology. And this wasn’t actually a totally crazy way to decide between the systems, since they were two very different economic and political systems organized on quite different lines, each claiming to be more efficient and humane[1] than the other.
Spies for the USSR stealing technology that had been developed at high cost in the US probably lengthened the cold war. I wonder if, without that, the cold war might have ended sooner, with the USSR clearly unable to keep up with the kind of military and other technology produced by the US.
My not-that-informed impression is that the thing that really screwed the USSR over was that almost everyone lost faith in Communism. In 1930 or 1940, it wasn’t so hard to find honest well-meaning people who were true-believers in Communism. I think that got harder over time, as the nature of the USSR became clearer. That presumably made it harder to recruit spies–they couldn’t count on ideological commitment so much–instead they had to pay cash.
[1] The USSR lost the “which society is more humane” competition pretty visibly–you just had to look at which way the border guards were pointing their guns.
@albatross11
Some other things that screwed USSR were that it lost millions of people in civil war and WWI, and millions again in WWII, went through three massive famines even before Stalin croaked, and following the revolution was underdeveloped industrially and had abysmal infrastructure. All this on top of government running a country in a fairly unorthodox (no pun intended) way not tried before in human history.
US, on the other hand, benefited massively from brain leak that happened during communist revolution and WWII, and didn’t lose much (comparatively) people or infrastructure in either world war.
@albatross
Ah, that’s a great point. But on the other hand, maybe spying committed the USSR to even greater spending than it would have otherwise.
Take, for example, Buran. Apparently this didn’t rely on regular ass spying (aka getting a communist agent infiltrated on the enemy country) but just plain old industrial spying.
And yet Buran was a huge failure and waste of money. I mean, the American Shuttle was also a waste of money, but at least it was successful. Maybe Buran and other failed projects the USSR could not really afford could have bought the USSR a few months more here and there. Or even successful but unnecessary projects.
@Paper Rat says:
Those aren’t things that just happened to the USSR, those are things that the USSR did to itself. The communists chose to have a civil war, chose to embark on collectivization, chose to ally with hitler to carve up poland.
@cassander
I never said that those things “just happened” to USSR, I said they were a factor that made USSR lose the cold war.
As for your point, that USSR did all those things to itself, it’s a very simplistic view of a complex situation, useful for signalling your disapproval of communism and for little much else.
I think it’s correct in a straightforward way to say that the USSR “did” the famines to itself. Everything else, yeah, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
@Enkidum
The famine of 1921-1922 was largely caused by drought, wartime destruction and piss-poor infrastructure that Soviets inherited from tzarist Russia.
The famine of 1932-1933 was made much worse by poor harvests, but largely was caused by internal policies. Industrialization also played a part and arguably was a necessary measure, albeit poorly timed/handled.
The famine of 1946-1947 was caused by drought and wartime destruction.
Of course state policies played a large part in all major famines, but putting all the blame squarely on the state is still incorrect, IMO.
@Paper Rat:
Arguably necessary, sure, but industrializing agriculture with collective farms and command economy plans is extremely risky/inefficient/homicidal. Backwards countries that industrialized their agricultural base with a market economy didn’t have famines. The market is a very sophisticated set of feedback mechanisms that may not be the answer to everything, but is demonstrably the right way to grow food.
@Le Maistre Chat
My knowledge of economics is virtually nonexistent, so I don’t have a strong opinion on correct policies in that area anyway. I’ll take your word for it :).
From what I read, bad use of statistics was a significant factor in a lot of soviet economic policies backfiring in a multitude of horrible ways.
According to the Wikipedia article linked, only one of the Rosenbergs, Julius, was a proven Soviet spy – his wife Ethel Rosenberg was seemingly relatively innocent, falsely accused by her brother, who sacrificed his sister to cover his wife, and by his wife, her sister-in-law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg#Later_developments
Reading more, it seems that actually Ethel Rosenberg had some (although quite minor) involvement in her husband’s activities and her brother’s recruitment:
https://www.weeklystandard.com/ronald-radosh-and-harvey-klehr-and-john-earl-haynes-and-allen-m-hornblum-and-steven-usdin/the-new-york-times-gets-greenglass-wrong
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/opinion/what-the-kgb-files-show-about-ethel-rosenberg.html?_r=0
Not enough for a death sentence imo, though.
I’m not sure about numbers, and the numbers are probably a lot smaller if you specifically look at “actively spying for the Soviets” rather than the broader group of “Communists and communist sympathizers”.
Both groups were largest before and at the very beginning of the Cold War. The big-name Soviet agents who are known have done real damage (the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, etc) were mostly recruited in the 30s and early 40s and caught in the late 40s or early 50s.
On an unserious tangent, “Alger Hiss” sounds like a snake cultist Conan would defeat.
Wait, no, that’s too on-the-nose for Howard. A WWE heel, maybe?
Cobra Commander’s real name, maybe?
Or Snake Plissken’s nom de guerre.
This is just a bizarre take, which appears to have ignored all the comments above.
What specific things did McCarthy do or say that were true, useful, or even just successful?
You seem to agree that he did quite a bit that was wrong. What did he do that was right?
If all you’re trying to say is that modern liberal takes on the Cold War are insufficiently aware of how bad communism was, then you should say that. And I think most of use would agree (I certainly would).
But you seem to be convinced that McCarthy did something that was a net positive. What?
Considerations on cost disease, UK edition: the Society for All British Road Enthusiasts discusses the cost of road-building in different countries in Europe (with a segue into nuclear submarines).
Why does it seem like such a trend to not have in house engineers?
Some of the analysis I have seen of the low cost of the Madrid underground, for examlle, explained how having an in house team of engineers led to lots of savings. It seems to me it would be quite reasonable for Highways England to have in house engineering staff instead of hiring consultants.
Because it’s part of the neoliberal dogma that all public utilities should outsource their operations to private for-profit companies, which will somehow make them more efficient.
The choice is purely ideological and resistant to cost-benefit analysis. Or perhaps, the ability to leech public funds should be assumed to be perceived as a benefit by the decision makers.
Part of the discussion on the original link is about how even major contractors don’t seem to have an in-house team anymore, instead sub-contracting even the design.
Since they are not the ones picking the tab, I guess it’s a saving, but couldn’t they be more efficient and get more bids if they could offer the synergies an in-house team offers?
I just see so many advantages to having an in-house team of engineers – the main one being that you can make quick on the spot decisions (even when the politicians are the ones making decisions, having somebody who can quickly tell you what the best option is saves tons of time).
A lot of costs are due to wasted time – whether on lawsuits or paperwork compliance. And some of the time is wasted because oops, there is some rock/water pocket/natural stuff that is completely expected yet somehow totally unexpected in the middle of the project, and they need to decide what to do with it. Having an engineer that is able to say whether the contractor is reasonable, and the politicians quickly approving changes, would save lots of time.
I am not saying that the government should design the roads themselves (although I don’t see why not – from what I’ve heard, the US army is pretty decent at building stuff). But at least having somebody in house, at all times, so when something happens, they can quickly make a decision/give advice, seems very useful to me.
The thing about government contracts is that you basically cannot make quick on-the-spot decisions about changing their specs, the regulations being strict as they are for transparency and anti-corruption reasons. (Which alone makes it preferable to just specialize on one hand and subcontract everything on the other.) I have no idea whether this is ultimately more cost-efficient than more elasticity for the price of outright nepotism and corruption. (It might.) I am pretty sure that, yeah, doing as much as possible in-house would be more efficient than both, but, again, this option often isn’t even considered, for ideological reasons.
When the contract for the construction of a tunnel is awarded, sure, you cannot make a quick decision on who gets the contract. But when during the construction of the tunnel they encounter say, a pocket of water, and need to decide whether to dig around it or to pump it out (according to prices in the bill of quantities), the project does not go to tender every time. That is where the cost overruns come from.
But it is possible to make quick decisions with reasonable costs when such things happen, such as was done in Madrid.
You’re stealing a long base, here. What have those three/four done that you find comparable to McCarthy and the blacklists? Well, skip Abe Lincoln, for him I’ll stipulate and point out that he was empowered to do so by the constitution due to the insurrection. But what’s your beef with FDR/Warren and Obama?
If I am not mistaken, the oldest presidential candidate is Bernie Sanders; if elected, he would come into office at age 78. Regardless of whether or not Bernie Sanders would be a good president, we can pose the following question:
Anecdotally, we know that mental faculties decrease somewhat linearly with time. Subsequently, we should be wary of presidents that are over a certain age threshold. Grant that most people would prefer a president that does not align with them on policy positions but had firm mental faculties over a president that aligned with them on policy positions but had the beginnings of onset dementia. Given this preference, is there a specific age threshold upon which we can agree to disqualify presidential candidates?
One naive strategy that we could use to get a value here is to take the age of the oldest president (at inauguration) and arbitrarily add 5 (as a “slack” value, in the hopes that we are not being too aggressive with the cutoff). For this strategy, we would use Reagan (at the beginning of his second term): 73 + 5, making 78 as the arbitrary cutoff.
But we can probably do better than this by using actual senility data. Based on this page and this page, it seems that there is a 0.2% chance of dementia at 65, and this doubles every 5 years until it is around 7% at age 90. Of course, this is only looking at dementia – it would perhaps be prudent to add on top of this the risk of Alzheimer’s and related diseases.
This is not my domain of expertise, so this is where I stop. And of course, even after the proper research is done, the question remains of “what percentage of risk constitutes presidential disqualification?” and this percentage is of course arbitrary. (Is a 10% risk too much? 20%?) But nonetheless, I would be very interested in an SSC-style blog that tries to get to the bottom of this question. Does anyone know if research has been done in trying to analytically answer the question: how old is too old?
If they win the election, they’re not too old.
Or, “too old to win the election is too old.”
You are dodging the premise of the question. I agree that a hypothetical candidate could be very old, but vibrant enough to garner support from the country and be voted into office. I’m more worried about the 4 years following the inauguration in which they are likely to develop dementia, a related disease, or simply a sizable reduction in general mental faculties. Another way of stating this is: we definitely care that a candidate is provably non-senile before an election, but we also care about senility when the president is being a president and making decisions.
The President has a cabinet thought and could be declared incompetent.
Is it enough of a risk compared to a young President developing a brain tumor that alters their behavior (or just turning out to order crazy things which has happened plenty of times before) that it’s worth having a rule? I don’t think so.
I’m dubious about a formal upper age limit as being necessary or useful. But I’ve come to doubt that section 4 of the 25th amendment to remove a president for inability to discharge duties will ever actually be invoked.
The threshold is extremely high: the VP, a cabinet majority, and 2/3 of both houses. Maybe you can get that if the President is actually in a coma. But if they’re merely erratic or having memory or temperament issues, aligning all the relevant actors seems very unlikely in the face of active resistance by the President.
(If the president recognizes and agrees with the issue, he or she can voluntarily invoke section 3 or simply resign, so section 4 still doesn’t come into play.)
if the President is actually in a coma
That situation is pretty much exactly what the 25th is for.
Otherwise, anything promptly catastrophically bad is why the Joint Chiefs are supposed to have some backbone.
Everything else, so the Administration muddles around being random for 3 years while the cabinet is staffed with hold-station-protem undersecretaries. Big deal.
That would put it in the top-quintile historically for “Good Presidents”, IMO.
I’m not dodging the question. The voters look at a candidate. About a candidate, some may say, “this candidate seems too young.” About another they may say “he seems to old.” The voters will make up their minds on a case by case basis.
To say nothing of the election process itself. What does it take to seriously run for that office? How much sleep do you get? How many meetings and briefings and speeches and Q&As and this and that do you have to be on your A-game for hour after hour, day after day, month after month? It’s exhausting just thinking about it. I’m in my mid-30s and in something close to the best shape of my life and I’m sure I would ring the bell to quit within a couple weeks of that.
I agree with Conrad. No reason to make a new rule. The election process is a fine filter.
While we’re at it, may as well remove the lower age requirement as well. If everyone wants a 2-year old president who just smiles at the camera and says cute things, the problem isn’t that there’s not a rule against a 2-year old president. The problem is that that was the most appealing candidate.
I could be easily convinced that running a campaign to successfully become President is significantly harder (or at least more demanding of ones full mental and physical faculties) than actually being President is.
Which puts a lot of credence into the “If you’re able to get the job, you’re presumably able to do the job” camp.
Unfortunately, winning an election and governing a country require two rather different skill sets. A great deal of misery has resulted from this fact.
The age requirements seem orthogonal to the difference between skill sets problem though. I don’t think be older or younger can fix that issue.
Yeah, I would say while the two jobs require different skill sets, one skill they have in common is you need to be mentally present (i.e. not have dementia) and be in decent enough physical shape. (Hillary was, er, pushing the limit on the latter requirement.)
I’m definitely reluctant to grant this premise. A useless president just means the executive branch doesn’t do much for 4-8 years. A competent but evil president would, from my point of view, be much worse.
Perhaps I can frame the hypothetical in the different way: If you are an American Democrat, then it would probably be in your interest to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate that aligns with your 80% of your policy positions and had firm mental faculties over a president that aligns with 100% of your policy positions and had some reasonably strong risk of developing onset dementia.
It seems like age should play some part in all of this, even if it is small.
Yes, that’s much easier to grant, and now that you mention it it’s the obvious comparison to make when talking about whether or not to want Bernie to win the nom. “Competent and disagrees with me about everything” is worse than useless, but as you say, “Competent and agrees with me about most, but not all, things” is better than useless.
If the President has dementia, his advisers will run the White House, and they will have been chosen for their policy proposals. So I would in fact prefer a candidate who agrees with me 100%, even with a risk of dementia.
Only if by “run” you mean “viciously fight for power”, at least if the history of regencies is any guide.
Reagan was beginning to have signs of dementia in his second term in office, though I am not sure whether his advisors really fully understood that. Are there other historical examples we can draw on?
Wilson’s wife basically ran the white house after his stroke IIRC
I think the concern over presidential age has generally been less about dementia and more about the risk of dying in office, causing a minor succession crisis and leaving the White House run by a former VP with an shaky mandate. Historically, VPs elevated to president after a death in office have been neither popular nor very effective.
We average living to about eighty now, so electing at sixty or younger is probably ideal and seventy might be a reasonable place to start getting really concerned.
The 20th century examples (TR, Coolidge, Truman, and LBJ) were all reasonably popular and effective. All four were reelected to full terms in their own right, and of the four only Truman’s reelection campaign was close. And all four have major signature policy initiatives they pushed through.
The 19th century examples (Arthur, Andrew Johnson, Fillmore, and especially Tyler) are much more in line with your description, though. The question then is whether the difference between recent and more distant experience are changes in institutional culture (perhaps we’re better at picking VPs, or maybe we’re more used to the Presidential succession process, or maybe the combination of Civil Service reforms and the expansion of both society and the federal government’s role in it have made the President’s job different in ways that make VPs succeeding to the Presidency more effective), or just a sample size issue.
Wasn’t Truman really unpopular? His approval crested high enough to get him reelected and then immediately plunged again, bottoming out at 22% at some point.
I personally think this means that approval isn’t a good metric of how good a president is, but calling him “reasonably popular” seems wrong.
That was later on, after he was reelected to a full term. The Korean War appears to have eroded his popularity quite a bit.
During the term he inherited from FDR, his approval rating was very volatile, but above water more often than not. Here’s a good annotated chart of his approval ratings.
We know that decrease in mental faculties is highly variable between individuals. And we elect individuals, not statistical abstractions, to the office of President. By the time we actually elect them, we have had ample opportunity to assess their aptitude and their alleged senility, and it does not matter what the statistics say about the average or even three-sigma X-year-old, because we know what we are getting with that specific person.
If there is reason to be concerned about their post-election future decline, then that’s what the 25th Amendment is for. Also, if your “somewhat linearly with time” hypothesis is correct, then we can extrapolate from that. The older a candidate is at the time we deem him fit to be elected, the slower the linear decay rate must be in their specific case for them to still be fit today. If we really are going to adopt a linear-rate statistical approach to minimizing the probability of a POTUS going senile during his term, then we should be looking for the oldest not-yet-senile candidate we can find on the grounds of their demonstrated resistance to senility.
Or we could, you know, just elect the best man for the job and trust that we are not North Korea and do have robust succession processes in place.
John,
Some odds and ends:
1) Has there been work done to show how exactly, on average, mental faculties decrease with age? If it turns out to be exponential instead of linear, then of course we would want the youngest candidate instead of the oldest one. Part of my post is to probe for such information.
2) I didn’t word this very well, but I wasn’t necessary advocating a new formal legal rule for disqualifying candidates. To rephrase the question in another way, we could break it into two parts:
2a) Is there good age-to-senility-probability data?
2b) If yes, and armed with that data, is age ever a useful consideration or heuristic when evaluating potential politicians / presidential candidates?
It strikes me that the common-sense answer to this question is yes, but it sounds like once we have had “ample opportunity to assess their aptitude”, then you would argue that the answer is always no.
My understanding is that decline isn’t linear, and a significant decline is more likely the older the candidate is. But I would love to hear an expert weigh in on this.
I think that significant concern about the older candidates is warranted, particularly since we don’t actually have full information about their current cognitive abilities.
The 25th amendment realistically will only be invoked under extreme circumstances, and thus could allow for quite significant decline to go unchecked. Under such circumstances, the administration would presumably take significant steps to shield the president and keep his/her condition secret. The actual decision making process could be quite opaque, and driven largely by unelected staffers.
Indeed. I remember reading/hearing that this kind of thing actually occurred during the Reagan administration. Although to be fair Wikipedia does not support this:
+1.
This is the same argument about various other forms of discrimination being applied just as accurately here: it doesn’t matter if older people are generally less intelligent than those yoinger than them because we can just measure the intelligence od the person in question instead of relying on second-order heuristics.
Do we know anything of the likelihood of dementia setting in within 5 years, if the person is perfectly healthy at the start, and whether that correlates with age at all. If the decrease is linear (is it?) then a 90 year old that starts her term at state X would degrade to X-y – and so would a 50 year old who started his term at state X. Zero reason to exclude the 90 year old.
Now it may be that some 50 year olds (and no 90 year olds) start at state X+Z, where Z is much bigger than Y, so are still above X at the end of term. But either reject all as low as state X, or none of them. (At least with these assumptions.)
He may be something of a joke candidate, but former senator Mike Gravel is 89 years old and running.
Technically there’s no reason Jimmy Carter couldn’t run for a second term, even at 94 years old.
“You added Sister Mary to our D&D party?!” Tom said nonplussed.
The Atlantic has a piece up on the growing number of Millennial nuns. Author Eve Fairbanks grew up in an incredibly secular community, but years later her classmates are turning toward Catholicism. And it’s not the easygoing Church the aged try to cast it as, either. These girls don’t want to be jean-clad nuns trying desperately to be cool—they want to be the real deal, habits and all.
Fairbanks visits a Catholic school in a small town whose theology teacher, Olon, had been inviting religious to speak to the class. They all sung the same tune: “We’re just like you. We do all the same things.” This was the spectacular failure it deserved to be, because this is no pitch for the religious life at all. It challenges absolutely no one, and these monks lining up to be the most Cool Parent have failed to articulate why it’s worth choosing at all. It’s only until a dour priest sporting a collar comes that Olon’s class gives a positive reception.
Though she doesn’t put it this way, Fairbanks is saying younger generations are more polarized: they’re less religious than ever on the whole, but the ones who are are attracted to more traditional religion. The habit is just the beginning: they prefer older liturgy and defend the whole gamut of doctrine. Boomers and Gen X are pretty Laodicean—Millennials and Gen Z like me, mostly the opposite.
As a contribution to the usual debates over modernity and religion, it’s an interesting one. We can expect religious practice over the next few debates to decline at the same rate it has been. The question on the mind of many of believers, me included, is when will the wider community get wise? Will I ever see the Benedict Option in my lifetime? This article drives home, from an unlikely source and with unusual clarity, what I’ve long suspected: this is a generational change. Not until the last catechetics class is taken from the last Boomer will we stop digging. And when that happens, it will be through young women like Tori and Mackenzie.
So we’ve gone full Pharisee. What brand of hat does God truly want you to wear to satisfy the command to cover your head before the Lord, etc.
Are you suggesting the young nuns want the habit because they think it’s a question of doctrine? I don’t think that’s it at all. They want to be challenged in living a religious life instead of being told “the regular secular American lifestyle plus maybe some God talk.”
Right. You can get that from the Episcopalians. The vows of a nun are challenging, so why take on those rules if you’re going to present like an Episcopalian?
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Pharisee is a religious sect. As a Christian trope, they are basically people who are really, really good at rules in a way that mostly ignores love of your fellow man or a sincere desire to be good in favor of lording your rule-following over normal people.
Matthew 12:
At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.”
He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that the priests on Sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’[a] you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
Going on from that place, he went into their synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to bring charges against Jesus, they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”
He said to them, “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”
Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other. But the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus.
Well there ya go, Nick, now you know what a Pharisee is!
Not the answers I was expecting, I admit, but this works actually.
I was laughing too.
IMHO, that’s pretty uncharitable – my guess is that most of the nuns take very seriously their obligation to love their neighbors, and don’t judge people for not wearing habits.
Without a lack of Christian love and a habit of judgment, I don’t think they come close to “full Pharisee.”
(They might have those qualities, but my guess is not, and it’s uncharitable to assume without evidence that they do.)
The charitable reading is that hardcore joining the institution supposedly about God is often not as “authentic” as simply living a good life as a “civilian.” Jesus was all about people not joining up with the religious institution.
Consider savebandit’s quote: What brand of hat does God truly want you to wear to satisfy the command to cover your head before the Lord
Their interpretation is that Pharisees made a point of putting on an Official I Am Religious Guys hat, but you don’t need to do that to satisfy the command. Similarly, joining up with the nuns is an overt signal and choosing to reduce the Christianity’s accessibility to the people by that signalling. They could just as well demonstrate their love for God without becoming nuns, without alienating potential converts by bringing up the icky connotations of The Church.
If this is the charitable reading, then the charitable reading is at variance with the article.
ETA: (since the damn editor ate it) To be less flippant, Olon’s students were only interested in a priest who pitched a challenging life while the opposite strategy failed miserably, and Tori’s friends began to turn to her for advice as she was considering becoming a nun. This conflicts with claims that they’re “alienating” people or reducing “accessibility.” It’s only anecdotal, sure, but still better than bald declarations to the contrary—if this is what savebandit meant, then he’s simply speaking right past us.
Does it signal that Christianity is inaccessible, or does it signal that Christianity is a viable option that people choose and aren’t ashamed of. I’m Catholic, and it literally never occurred to me that the presence of a habited Nun at Mass meant I was unwelcome.
(Similarly, I’m Catholic and I don’t find a robed Buddhist or a white shirted Mormon to be exclusionary).
It has never occurred to me that Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees was that by observing religious laws, they made religion unwelcome. He doesn’t object to their religious practices in any of the scenes I can recall – he objects to them criticizing him and his apostles for not following the practices.
One of Jesus’s most famous criticisms of the Pharisees was the parable of the poor woman who could only donate a couple of coins. In this case, loudly signalling their virtue was the bad thing the Pharisees were doing.
@AG – I hate to be so combative, but I don’t see anything in the parable of the Widow’s mite that suggests that Jesus was opposed to excessive religious observance by the Pharisees. He was concerned that they weren’t giving enough charity, but I don’t think he wanted them to cut their earlocks or start harvesting grain on the Sabbath – he just thought they should give more money.
The parable is reported twice:
Mark 12:41-44
and Luke 21:1-4
In neither case does Jesus even mention the Pharisees, or criticize anyone for excessive religious observance. He criticizes the “rich” for not giving enough money, full stop.
(In Mark 12:38-40, Jesus does criticize “experts in law” who “devour widows’ property, and as a show make long prayers,” but (a) that’s not the parable of the Widows’ mite, and (b) I read it as primarily condemning the sin and hypocrisy, not the prayers. Jesus himself made long prayers, most notably in Gethsemane.)
——
In any event, let me say that while I enjoy the discussion, I hope it doesn’t sound confrontational. if there’s anything you want to talk about or any way I can help, let me know.
I’ve always read this story as saying that God grades on effort rather than on outcome–a rich man tossing a few gold coins from his hoard into the collection box would feed a *lot* more hungry people than the widow’s pennies, so grading by outcome, the rich man did a lot more good. But in terms of virtue, the widow, who gave ’till it hurt, did better than a rich man, who would never miss the coins he dropped into the box.
Jesus also condemned being ostentatiously showing in your prayers; those who pray loudly on the street corner already have their reward.
A big difference between Jesus and EA is the latter being in favor of virtue signalling as a way of establishing norms, and Jesus being concerned about motives.
I grew up Amish-Mennonite; one kindness a friend did me when I was leaving was recommending what clothes do buy to look reasonably normal–I’d never gone out in public without being absolutely identifiable before. My parents were converts.
The distinctive clothes made it less easy to drift in and out–but they were also a walking advertisement: “we’ve got something great that you should want.” And it attracted a lot of people.
@J Mann
You are correct. My memories got mixed up of a pastor’s sermon making this connection to that parable.
I was actually thinking of Matthew chapter 6, verses 1-8, and Matthew 23, verse 5 particularly resonant with savebandit’s comment on hats.
@SamChevre
In your experience, do the Amish get a lot of converts?
@AG – Thanks!
That one is interesting and challenging. Jesus is clearly not against fasting and praying, but against advertising that you do so.
On the other hand, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14-16, Jesus says:
I tend to reconcile this by looking at motive. If you’re displaying your light for your own glory (and that can sneak up on you), then you’re praying like the hypocrites. If you’re allowing your deeds to be seen for the good of God and your neighbors, then you’re letting your light shine.
Probably based largely on that distinction, I think that calling nuns Pharisees for wearing the habit is really uncharitable, and I’m kind of offended, because I read it as saying that they’re doing it to be exclusionary or vainglorious, and they might well not be.
On the other hand, if the argument is that letting people know that you practice religion is contrary to the teachings of Jesus, well, that’s a pretty aggressive interpretation, but I appreciate the challenge and will think about it.
As per my first comment in this thread, it’s not that wearing the habit is inherently bad, it’s the official joining up with an institution that’s bad, taking on an official title that sets you apart from the people. (As per Matthew 23, being called Rabbi).
People can go around living pious lives and wearing habits, if that helps them live pious lives, but they don’t need to go about making a formal order out of it and calling themselves a special kind of career and having membership requirements and such. To denote a special kind of Christian is the thing being frowned upon, when they are to all be brethren and sisters together.
We have different definitions of taking things seriously, I think. I actually know a lot of nuns (but probably not a truly representative sample of nuns, I’ll admit that.)
The American nuns I know mostly grew up in a relatively privileged household, most are college-educated, and most importantly most have good career prospects. The convents I know have mostly these characteristics.
1. They support a lifestyle business, like running a hospice, making rosaries, etc., that supports the convent. I call it a lifestyle business because it is intended to leave most of the nuns with ample time for prayer, and because the businesses simply aren’t that big compared to the pool of labor in the convent.
2. They focus at least 50% of their help to others through prayer. Whether that is offered Masses, vespers, individual contemplation, etc. The other time is spent running the charitable lifestyle business.
Given that the nuns I know are picking from a pool of people who disproportionately have the option to go to silicon valley, strike it rich, and fund the entire convent’s lifestyle business several times over, what are the odds that God has called all these women to a life of ascetic prayer? Something is wrong in the discernment process, just like the Pharisees incorrectly (but sincerely, I’m sure!) discerned that the best way to love God was to compete on who could follow the literal rules of the sabbath the closest.
For what it’s worth, I feel roughly the same way about monks, some journalists/writers/musicians, and generally anyone who complains about problems in society after voluntarily squandering their power to fix things.
Not everyone is a consequentialist.
I assume the nuns enjoy monastic life. Not to generalize too much from my own experience, but the ones I know do, the same way a weightlifter enjoys going to the gym despite the time commitment and frequent effort.
If they’re not meant to be consequentialist, and it really is okay to focus on self-improvement through prayer like that because you enjoy that kind of thing, that’s about the most hedonistic thing I’ve ever heard. I guess they should thank God every day that something so awfully convenient to them is their calling.
So if you enjoy something, it must not be God’s calling?
Prayer is not for self-improvement; most of it is actually offered for the rest of us. Alexi Sargeant wrote about this at First Things the other day. You can’t even do the math here on their impact if you aren’t taking that into account, and, well, good luck measuring it. So it seems to me a consequentialist analysis of the religious life doesn’t even get off the ground.
The cynical answer is: when a fandom is dying, of course only the hardcore fans remain and only the extra-hardcore join.
Pretty much.
That’s not any kind of answer, because it doesn’t explain why recruitment is actually up rather than down.
Doesn’t that depend on the group you are calling fandom?
You are interpreting him as calling nuns fandom, he is calling Christianity (prob. in America) fandom.
It doesn’t make sense either way. This is basically an evaporative cooling argument: the less hardcore leave the group, so the group looks more hardcore afterwards. But that doesn’t mean there are more hardcore members.
It doesn’t mean there necessarily will be, but if potential zealous recruits are attracted to the group when they judge average level of zealotry to be sufficiently high, evaporative cooling could create an environment that attracts recruits even though there’s a net loss.
I’m not saying I buy it, just explaining MI’s reasoning.
The possibility occurred to me too, but it’s pretty dubious (is there any evidence it happens?), so it doesn’t seem like it fits with MI’s apparent confidence.
That explains newly inducted nuns being extra-serious about it, but not recruitment numbers going up.
That explains something that had been confusing me lately.
I had been hearing about how orders of nuns had been dying out due to flagging recruitment for years, but the nuns I see wandering around these days are usually in their 30s or younger. And they were definitely wearing the full habit.
I was open to the possibility that I was just walking past a weird convent but if this is a broader trend it makes more sense.
Fairbanks doesn’t dig into the statistics, but my impression is that there was a mass exodus from the priesthood and religious life in like the seventies—and once most nuns stopped wearing habits you were unlikely to know you were encountering one anyway. So yeah, with vocations up, a young, habited nun today is both more likely today than in years past, and guaranteed to stick out like a sore thumb.
Would you recognize a nun that wondered around you if they weren’t wearing the full habit?
Anecdotal support for this: a friend of a friend is currently going through holy orders, and he mentioned how the new priests want to bring back the cassock and other more traditional wear. The reasons given seemed similar to what you’ve posted: the appeal of traditional religion is, well, the religious tradition. You don’t join a holy order if you aren’t wholly into it.
That it’s cyclical may be what Fairbank’s Nietzsche scholar dad was suggesting. I’m not so sure, but definitely a plausible way to read it is that it’s a strong reaction by young folks to the ways of their parents’ generation.
I see what you did there.
Like most journalism, it’s light on statistics and focuses heavily on characters. I would be really hesitant to assign any underlying trend based on this narrative.
The statistics bears out the trend; the narrative is an attempt at explaining the trend.
Are the number of priests going up as well, or is this only for women?
They were a few years ago, at least in America; I’m not sure about, say, the last two years.
I think numbers of priests in total are still going down, but number joining is going up (slightly, from an unsustainably low base.)
But anecdataly, yes, the younger priests are much more likely to be conservative; if they didn’t think the Catholic Church had something uniquely valuable to offer, they wouldn’t be priests.
The premise: You have a time machine and can go back in time to any point in the past. Once there, you are able to speak the language and have all the other necessary skills to live in that time period as well as a sum of money that will buy you as much as $1000 can today.
Your assignment: Find one (1) item that would be the most useful in the present. One item means one physical object; no collections or stocks. I’ll let you define “useful” however you want, but if you don’t feel like defining it then “monetarily valuable” can be substituted.
The catch: you cannot take any items with you in the time machine. You must hide your item or give it to someone in such a manner that you can retrieve it in the present day. Additionally, you cannot bring anything modern to the past; however you choose to preserve your item, it must be done with what you have at your disposal then. There are no other restrictions on the size or complexity of your item. If you might need additional material to hold your item between the past and present (a crate, envelope, etc), assume that as soon as you get your hands on the main item, whatever you used to store it poofs out of existence.
What item do you choose? How do you plan to retrieve it in the present?
My choice: travel in time to 1856 British Guiana, buy a 1856 British Guiana 1c magenta, send it inside an envelope postmarked with a normal stamp to my 1856-era relatives with an explanation of my time-travel and additional information about the future and/or them to make them believe me, and trust them to hold onto the stamp and envelope until 2020.
More mundanely, you could also use this power to return an overdue library book.
July 2010, Buy $1000 of BTC at $0.008/BTC = BTC 125,000
Today: 125,000*$10,000 = $1.2 billion
Does a bitcoin wallet count as an object? maybe a single cold storage wallet with 125,000 BTC if I need to rules lawyer it.
Yeah I considered adding an addendum saying “no bitcoin”, since it’s not a physical object, but I guess the cold storage counts.
Wouldn’t buying that much BTC in 2010 change how much it’s worth now?
That’s a problem with any historical object that’s valuable primarily for its rarity. For example, rubberduck’s 1c Magenta would probably be quite a bit less valuable as one of two surviving stamps of the issue compared to the current value of the one known surviving stamp.
125k bitcoins are about 0.7% of the total current bitcoin supply (17.3M, including about 4M lost bitcoins). A substantial chunk, but not so much that you couldn’t sell then gradually without eroding too much of their paper value.
A bigger concern would be the effects on the bitcoin market of buying up so many of them back in 2010. I don’t think the market was particularly mature or liquid back then, so buying them up would be a laborious process with substantial ripple effects.
Time your stamp-purchase right and you can catch the guy who got the second one, thus ensuring yourself as the only owner of that particular stamp. Heck, with a bit more effort you could get something even more valuable, like an entire mint sheet of some other valuable stamp (I am not a philatelist and don’t have any examples).
Well, you know what they say: philately will get you nowhere.
What will you do when a stranger comes around asking to see your time machine? With convincing proof that you have altered the timeline and lowered the value of the stamp?
(not an attack, just a similarity to a fun little book)
Ha ha, I did not know about that book when I wrote the top post but it sounds fun, time for another entry on the to-read list.
If I get to prepare, I’d go back to the United States just before or after the Civil War. Basic knowledge of modern physics and engineering would allow me to make significant advances in technology in a framework that’s at least somewhat culturally and economically familiar. Additionally, capital would be available for investment if I could credibly convince some well-to-dos that I am an inventor (which is something they are culturally predisposed to consider a normal investment.) There’d also be economic and industrial booms coming. And no income taxes or significant regulation.
From there, I could purchase whatever item I wanted and put it in a bank lockbox owned by a trust that would get my net worth/patents/etc. There are trusts that date back to those times and banks/safes in continuous operation so it wouldn’t be terribly unusual. In modern times I could reclaim the trust and item at leisure. The lockbox poofs out of existence and I pay a small fine.
I’m not sure what I’d get. Maybe Twain’s Lost Works? Or Liszt’s Geneva Manuals? I’m not sure how much value something from the past can have that isn’t cultural.
I think the actual amount of money I’d receive should be enough for me to bribe some people to look the other way long enough that I’ll be able to do away with the shroud of Jesus; if I’m particularly morbid or otherwise strong-stomached of a person, I might even get away with a whole femur. It’s not as if the local rulers are very fond of him, anyway.
The bigger issue is preservation. Whether cloth or bone, burying the items inside properly sealed boxes should make them last the ensuing two millennia just fine, but I’m not too confident about my ability to bury them somewhere that they won’t be found by anyone but me. Most places with the kind of soil I could actually dig in are going to be farmed at some point or another, I don’t want to bury them somewhere that’s very prone to floods, and it can’t be a place that’s going to suffer two millennia’s worth of earthquakes for me to completely lose my tin box afterward.
The best bet is likely to head somewhere that won’t be populated too much for too long a time and bury the box there. Croatia has a bunch of isles that I know are uninhabited right in the Adriatic, which my remaining bribe money can hopefully let me travel towards, so I’d try spending a couple days digging a hole deep enough that there’s no dumb tree roots or whatever about to disturb my box and head there in the present day to dig it up.
You might find a way to sneak your artifact into the Qumran caves….though I don’t know how to identify the right one. If you’re arriving around the time of the Crucifixion, it’ll be 40-or-so years until the Romans sack the Masada fortress. So the Qumran community will be pretty active, and may be visiting the caves occasionally.
Do you think you could leave behind evidence that will convince the scholars of 1948 (who discover the scrolls in the Qumran collection) that you left them there as a time-traveler?
I thought the point was to leave it behind to myself. If I want to leave the shroud behind as something other people can put to use I might try lobbing it at a figure like Paul or somesuch.
True, if you’re trying to save it for yourself to find, you’ve got a much harder problem.
Are there other caves in that area which weren’t used by the Masada community (or whoever), but would likely allow your object to remain unobserved from then until now?
I’m not very familiar with the area, which is why I mentioned the uninhabited isles off the Croatian coast. My $1000 hopefully can get me enough for a bribe, a boat ticket or two, a tin box, and food to spend the time digging a hole and then heading back to the present.
Bitcoin is hard to beat for personal gain.
For societal usefulness, go back to Bronze Age Crete and hire scribes to write out a clay tablet of a text in Linear A, along with the same text in Cretan Hieroglyphs, and again in a language that modern scholars can read (probably Egyptian Hieroglyphs or Hittite Cuneiform). Linear A and Cretan Hieroglyphs were used in parallel for about a century, and during the time period Crete had significant trade with both Egypt and the Hittites, so I should be able to find scribes who can write the three languages. The goal is to allow translation of the currently-unreadable corpus of Minoan documents. Just knowing what the language is will tell us quite a bit about who the Minoans were (e.g. if their language was related to any other known language family), and the contents of the corpus could fill in a lot of gaps in our knowledge of the ancient world in general and the lead-up to the Bronze Age Collapse in particular.
For bonus points, make the corpus an account of some important Minoan myth or historical event, to give additional context about their culture.
Bake the tablet so it will survive getting wet and seal it inside a jar with a chunk of copper. Bury the jar in a remote area or dump it overboard in water. I’m not sure where would be best. If I want to be the one who finds it, probably some exact number of nautical miles directly north or south of some particular landmark (*), then go back to that location in the present and search the area with a metal detector. If I don’t care who finds it as long as it gets into modern scholarly hands, that’s a much easier problem: bury it in the future path of the Suez Canal (**).
(*) Nautical miles are minutes of arc along a great circle. I should be able to measure that based on the elevation of the North Star. I’d need prep and practice before traveling back in order to figure out how to make a good enough astrolabe, quadrant, or sextant with period tools and materials to determine my latitude with enough precision to make the search area tractable, but it should be doable.
(**) The Suez Canal was dug in the mid-19th century, with hand tools, under the direction of a French company. A number of artifacts were found during the excavation.
Bitcoin seems less liquid (and less in favor among the respectable authorities) than a lot of other things. Why not just figure out what stock had the highest overall return in the same amount of time and go that route? Or bet on an unlikely sporting event outcome (Leicester City literally re-wrote the rules of what sort of odds bookies were willing to take on these events)
Coinage is a moderately recent invention, so I don’t know if bronze age Crete is going to get you anywhere. You may very well be able to just collect hand-me-downs of tablets nobody is using anymore though.
One small problem with your “bury it at a known location” plan: In the relevant era, there was no North Star. You’d still be able to estimate based on the elevation of surrounding stars, but it’d be more complicated.
Good point. You could also use the height of the sun at noon.
It’s less convenient to take sighting of (you only get one shot per day, and you need to do math to compare one day’s sightings to another), but it’s easier from an instrumentation perspective (measure the shadow of a vertical object on a horizontal surface, then do the trig to get the angle). “Vertical” and “horizontal” to the required level of precision is tricky, but I feel better about making a plumb bob or even a spirit level with period materials than I do about making a sextant.
Huh. I’d heard of precession, but I’d always thought it occurred on the scale of millions of years, not thousands.
The Great Pyramid points to α Draconis (Thuban) which was, at the time, the closest thing to the pole.
Edit: Ninja’d by DeWitt
I would go to 1st century Roman Palestine and use part of my $1000 to buy the true cross.
Then I would try as closely as possible to replicate this method of petrifying wood using Roman technology. I would have to invent the blast furnace first, get enough argon or other noble gasses somehow (helium is found in some natural gas deposits so maybe start there?), and hope that the technique scales from a 1 cubic centimeter piece of wood to a massive cross. But all of that is less implausible than time travel so for these purposes let’s say that I can do those things.
Once I have the petrified true cross, I would sink it into an Irish bog deep enough that nobody would dig out the peat surrounding it for 2000 years. Then, quantum leap back home and have fun trying to convince people that it’s real and their reliquaries are all fake.
I feel like both of you left out the part where this is “useful.” How do you convince anybody that you have the actual true cross/shroud, and what’s the play if you do? Use the blood samples to clone
KahlessJesus?Clearly I’ve been succesful in doing this already; you didn’t think he actually rose from the dead, now did you?
I feel like it’s at least as useful as a collectable postage stamp.
The process of speed-petrification would definitely destroy any DNA left behind so there would be no possibility of cloning Jesus. The only real use would be as either an object of veneration or as a museum piece depending on whether other time travelers had proved or disproved the resurrection. Either way it would be worth an absurd amount of money.
Also I’m assuming that the true cross doesn’t actually have miraculous properties. If it does, presumably God wouldn’t let me stick it in a bog since it’s supposed to be broken up into pieces and scattered around Europe as reliquaries. That said, a miraculous cross would be much more useful.
Assuming it doesn’t have miracles, how do you verify it?
“This cross was miraculously preserved using techniques unknown to the people of the time and then stashed in a bog” sounds more like a hoax than most actual hoaxes.
Radiocarbon dating and the depth of the peat should both be able to firmly establish the age at least.
The discrepancy between the recent age from carbon dating and the fact that wood takes millions of years to petrify naturally would demonstrate that it was likely artificially preserved. The drill marks would also definitely help with that case.
As for proof that it’s the true cross, yeah that’s definitely the hard part.
I’m saying that the evidence of it being artificially preserved in a manner not “possible” in that time period will be used as evidence that it is a fake.
You would be better off if you can figure out some way to naturally preserve it (something unlikely, but plausible like “they just happened to throw the cross in this weird pit that prevented it from rotting until we discovered it thousands of years later).
While you’re wasting your time making actual relics that nobody will believe in, I’ll be burying an actual copy of Q in the Qumran caves. Or, if I can’t find one, a note addressed to myself with words to the effect of “The Q Hypothesis is disproven. PS: buy bitcoin.”
This all sounds like the setup for an Indiana Jones movie.
albatross11: Or possibly a SF novel by German SF author Andreas Eschbach. (Really good book, both it and its sequel, pity no US publisher has come out with an English edition…)
I agree with Jaskologist: we already have a shroud and alleged relics of the cross, and it’s a minor cottage industry for skeptics to explain how one was faked up by Leonardo da Vinci and the other is “so many pieces, enough to build the Ark! *pause for hearty guffaws*” – to the point where an irritated and obsessive guy named Charles Rohault de Fleury did Trojan work listing all verified relics, then calculating the mass and volume and rebutting this joke.
Even if you successfully acquired, stored, and received in the future the real Shroud and/or Cross, the likes of the Amazing Randi, Penn Jillette, the New Atheists, and everyone from Voltaire onwards would be coming up with ‘more plausible’ explanations of how these are fakes (e.g. “come on, if a guy can build a time machine, you’re telling me it would be too difficult for him to hoodoo a piece of cloth? oh it’s the real cross because miracles? hey I’m a professional magician, I can do miracles too, watch me change water to wine!”) Nobody will believe you except the nuttier faithful, and you may not want to be lumped in with the Sindonologists.
If we are going to this extent, I’d just somehow save Jesus. Probably by bribing the corresponding authorities.
Just cash your $1000 in some gold coins.
$1000 in today’s money is going to net you about 20 grams of gold. No inconsequential amount of money, but I don’t know if it’s bail out a guy who pissed off the Romans kind of money.
Just offer Judas 60 pieces of silver.
Side question: How much was 30 pieces of silver worth in ancient Jerusalem?
I saw the question in r/AskHistorians once, unanswered.
It likely refers to the Denarius, which was worth a day’s unskilled labor. Offering him 60 of them is doable, but if the Romans keep making better counter-offers you’re definitely gonna get outbid.
I assume reverse inflation means $1000 in today money is more money relatively than ~2000 years ago.
But yeah, prolly enough to bribe Jesus’s guards, or Judas.
The hard part is probably trying to convince Jesus himself of leaving. Maybe the dude would pull off some Socrates shit.
I was deliberately allowing for the possibility that Jesus is actually resurrected. I don’t believe it, but I also don’t want to be the moron who guessed wrong and got cursed for all eternity.
If God is real and Jesus was God, messing with the cross is pretty blasphemous but probably just regular blasphemy. Trying to nab Jesus on the second day and stick him in a vat of formaldehyde is double secret blasphemy.
FYI this is the “bring something cool back to the present” challenge, not the “CHANGE HISTORY!” challenge. Both history and Jesus Himself are pretty set on Jesus dying and getting resurrected, or at least on a large number of people truly believing that he was. I don’t know how the world could work around that and arrive at a recognizable present if you got Jesus freed, never mind bringing him to the present.
Well, you could just wait for the resurrection and then bring the resurrected Jesus forward afterwards. I mentioned Eschbach’s novel Das Jesus Video up above; well, in the sequel Der Jesus-Deal the somewhat looney billionaire character funds a project to build a time machine so they can do just that, travel back to the first century and bring the resurrected Jesus here so he can bring about the Second Coming. Seriously, that’s the guy’s plan. (Well, part of it, the rest of the plan is even more insane.) Things don’t go as planned, however…
Go back to Alexandria in 81 AD, join the Christian community, buy a scroll the same length Jews use to copy the Torah, transcribe as much of the New Testament as I can, try to remember an existing modern find site in the Egyptian desert and bury my papyrus scroll close enough that the people who used the site after me won’t see it but it’ll enjoy very similar preservation chances.
After reading Beowulf, and learning about its textual history (and the damage by fire), I’d like to try to find a way to preserve a better copy of that piece. Certain sections were likely re-written by later scribes, and the only copy of the original was damaged in a fire at one point in its history.
This gives two options:
1. Try to find, and preserve, the pre-edited texts.
2. Try to find, and preserve, a copy of the manuscript before it was burnt in a fire.
If I go for option 1, find might be hard. Should I visit the court of Alfred the Great, or the cultural centers of Danelaw, or the sciptorium of Malmesbury Abbey? Would I abscond with the old copy after the editors/copyists finish creating a new copy, or would I try to pay them to produce an extra copy for me?
If I go for option 2, I think I’d want to get access to the script sometime before it was bundled into the the Nowell Codex, or shortly before the fire at the Ashburnham House in the 1730s. It might be possible to find a noble family that could preserve the text in a different library, and I can fortuitously discover the text when I visit them in the near future.
Preservation, in either case, would likely be a wooden case with lead lining, with wax used as a seal. Working with lead sounds dangerous to my health, but I might be able to do so safely.
Metallic lead’s really not that dangerous.
Especially if it’s only one thing you’re doing.
The problems come when you put organic lead compounds in petrol, or you use it for plumbing.
Would I abscond with the old copy after the editors/copyists finish creating a new copy, or would I try to pay them to produce an extra copy for me?
You really need to be sure you have permission to copy any texts first, else you can get in real trouble over that (and require the High King to issue a copyright decision) 🙂
The proposal was to copy Beowulf, not the Tain.
If S_J is copying texts held by a monastic foundation, then intends to “abscond with the old copy”, the dispute between Ss. Columcille and Finnian over the copied psalter is precedent for unintended consequences.
something something Infinity Stones…
Go to Alexandria in 55BC and read as many scrolls as I can find. Copy the one that seem most interesting, and bury somewhere I can try to find later. Even is archeologists find it before I do, I can make an enjoyable career of being a classics professor from the knowledge I would gain at the time.
The cheaty answer I haven’t seen yet is to create an interesting object, which would make it much easier to find a secure way to smuggle it to the present day. Go back to where your house is before that area was inhabited, carve some nice and accurate prophecies into some rocks, bury them deeper than anyone has ever dug. Plenty of ways to make a fortune off of that, but all you’re really contributing to society is proof of the existence of time travel.
I think the most legitimately valuable thing you could preserve would be an interview with an enigmatic historical figure. There are some places and times that might have secret lost technology (preserve a Silphium plant somehow?) but that’s quite a risk for your one trip.
Thoughts on San Francisco so far (limited to SOMA, Cow Hollow, Presidio, Haight, Pacific Heights, Russian Hill, Financial District, and obviously excluding Tenderloin):
1. Not surprising that people like it here. The weather is pretty good, everything is dense and walkable, there are lots of good restaurants. Almost all the people are young, attractive, and fit. I think I have seen only one obese person and my mildly overweight frame would probably be in the 90th percentile of weight.
2. The traffic seems trivial. Your peak rush hour seems to be 1hr30 minutes between SF and San Jose. The average seems to be an hour. This is 55 miles. It takes 2 hours to get from my house to the Chicago Loop, and I live only 30 miles away from the Loop.
3. The homeless are incredibly well-behaved. I have only heard one rant about how the Ethiopians are the true lost tribe of Israel and the Israelites are not true Jews. Not a single person has pan-handled. Several homeless folk had brooms to clean up after themselves. Granted, I have gone out of my way to avoid some areas, so I have not come across any major encampments, for instance.
4. I have seen only 2 Golden State Warrior shirts, and nothing of Steph Curry. I do not understand. Golden State is in a dynasty. This is like going to Chicago and seeing no Michael Jordan jerseys at the peak of the Jordan era. There are also no 49ers jerseys, and only a few Giants jerseys. I see more Chicago Cubs jerseys than I see San Francisco jerseys of ANY stripe.
5. SF water tastes horrible.
6. Green spaces are large when there are green spaces, but good lord other than that there is nothing. Maybe if you go through some neighborhoods they have some small element of greenery. A lot of homes in other areas have small front lawns that have a bit of greenery to them, which I’ve only seen in the Pacific Heights on the East side of the island.
7. Despite the large number of people, it has never actually felt crowded. I don’t quite know how to explain this. This might be because I am not going through Financial District during a morning commute, though.
8. There are families, but there are practically no large (>2) families that I’ve seen.
9. There are a huge number of cars, and many of these cars do not seem particularly high quality. Like, if you fork over millions of dollars for a 3 bed/2 bath, I don’t see why you’d have a Toyota corolla instead of a Lexus IS.
9a. Where are the convertibles?
10. The garages are pretty large, at least the ones I have peeked into. It almost looks like they take up the entire first floor? Maybe these are just renos?
11. What are the notable Bay Area breweries? I’ve tried some of the local beers and have been uniformly disappointed.
12. There seems to be more construction in my suburb of under 100,000 people than there is in this entire city. This not only applies to the housing construction, but even the road construction. Okay, SLIGHT exaggeration, but outside of maybe a few things in the Financial District, this feels like a city that’s entirely stuck in its current state.
13. So. Many Hills.
How local does it need to be? Sierra Nevada is up in Chico, and their pale ale is great.
Don’t worry about the water tasting funny. As far as I can tell, the local water always tastes a bit off when you move to a new place. Eventually you habituate.
Wait, what? Is this some alternate universe SF?
Going off Google Maps along with what local television has said. Perhaps this is seasonal, or otherwise inaccurate?
Try it sometime. Also try coming in to San Francisco from somewhere in the East Bay during commute hours, or going back in the afternoon. I live 14 miles from my office which is about 2 miles south of downtown SF. I leave home at 5:45 to get in before 6:30 – usually closer to 6:15. If I leave almost any time after 15:00, it will take an hour to get home.
It’s somewhat seasonal. The worst traffic is during the rainy season. I haven’t done SF -> San Jose then, but SF -> Sunnyvale, for example, can easily take two hours or more on a rainy December morning.
I never drove San Francisco to San Jose in the afternoon, but I did go the San Jose to San Francisco commute ten to twenty years ago and IIRC the day of the week mafe a big difference, on Mondays 40 minutes was pretty common, on Thursdays 150 minutes was regular.
Six months (or more) of no rain is plenty of time for every single Californian to forget how to drive in the rain.
And they all make different mistakes. If they all made the same mistakes, they’d probably crash into each other somewhat less.
It rains like 200 days a year.
… what? No it doesn’t. https://www.ggweather.com/sf/daily.html
Huh. I guess I’ve just had awful luck everytime I’ve been there. It’s basically always cold and misty and sprinkling whenever I visit!
@Matt M,
That’s because some neighborhoods are almost always cold, and misty.
Go a mile (or less) east and it will likely be sunny.
Basically, you bring layers to cross town.
That doesn’t count as rain. That’s Karl the Fog.
To answer the original question, for convertible driving to be fun you want not just a non-rainy day but a 70+ degree sunny day without too much wind, and those are rare in any season anywhere on the Pacific Coast north of Monterey or so.
Lagunitas (Petaluma), 21st Amendment (San Leandro), Drake’s (also San Leandro), and Anchor (San Francisco) are all large craft breweries based in the Bay Area. Lost Coast (Eureka) and Sierra Nevada (Chico) are located in rural parts of NorCal, but you’ll still see a lot of beer from them in the Bay.
I hope you like IPAs.
Anchor gets a lot of credit from me for having several good non-IPAs. Their trademark Steam Beer (California common) and their porter are quite solid.
I actually do like IPAs, but I prefer almost everything else Lagunitas makes to its trademark IPA that you find everywhere. Little Sumpin’ (red ale, ish) and Citrusinensis (pale ale with blood oranges) are both in my regular rotation.
The entire West coast, man. shakes head
A ton of beer scenes are like this. In Chicago its generally better, but there are still entire brewpubs that have 20+ draft options, but only 1-2 ales that aren’t IPAs.
Also:
Mendocino Brewing (Hopland/Ukiah)
Anderson Valley (Anderson Valley, a half hour northeast of Hopland)
Gordon Biersch (San Jose)
There are also a good number of brewpubs whose beer isn’t available outside their restaurant.
You are disappointed because you are from the Chicago area, which has the best beer scene in the country.
Russian River is local to Northern California, high quality and hard to find in the Midwest.
@A Definite Beta Guy >
If you do see an out-of-shape un-fit middle-aged man in black overalls that’s me, hello!
The traffic in San Francisco is concentrated getting to and from the bridges to Alameda County and Marin County, what’s most terrible about it is that the traffic is also lousy and often worse on weekends!
Glad you’re having good relations with the “ambassadors”. I haven’t seen as many tents in SF this last year as last, but across the bay in Berkeley and Oakland they’re still hundreds.
More Warriors fans are in Oakland where the still play while the new stadium is being built, and the 49’ers moved to Santa Clara and aren’t forgiven!
No, it’s the best!
Parks are big, yards are small, and island? San Francisco is on a peninsula!
Try near the BART (Subway), and Cal-Trans (train) stations.
Yep, space is limited.
If you park on the street you don’t want the car to be a Tesla!
Where you will see the expensive cars is on the bridges leaving The City, and most other cars belong to commuters as well, far more work in The City than live in The City.
Down south in Los Angeles
Maybe? Most San Franciscans that I’ve visited in their homes didn’t have cars.
I’ve driven by a dozen, but in the last year I’ve only sampled the beers at
Gilman Brewing Company in Berkeley (the “La Ferme Noire” is very good),
Westbrae Biergarten in Berkeley,
and
Novel Brewing Company in Oakland,
but I suppose that Anchor Steam is the oldest and most “San Francisco” brewery in The City
????
Come to the roof of my work and you’ll see a dozen large cranes, each for a new skyscraper.
Yes, if you’re parking your car please “curb” the wheels to prevent roll-away.
I usually get in my car to leave San Francisco around 3:30PM Monday to Friday, but if you want I’ll linger, e-mail me at HOJ.plumber @ gmail . com (no spaces)
Seriously, Plumber, there’s only so out-of-shape a person who does your job can get.
My blue-collar uncle is something of a health nut, but even if he wasn’t, I can’t imagine he’d get terribly out-of-shape landscaping for a living.
If his baseline is all the health nuts in the Bay Area ADBG described, he had no way of knowing that!
Good point. A blue-collar man getting Calories Out every weekday but doesn’t put effort into Calories In like affluent health nuts could rationally feel out-of-shape in a city like SF.
You guys have a bad model of what blue collar work is like and what it does for your body. The kind of stuff you’re doing as a blue collar worker will have you stronger than most people other than serious weight lifters, but not necessarily in better shape. It is pretty easy to work a physical, blue collar job and still be substantially overweight without the ability to run for more than 30 seconds without taking a break.
You probably won’t end up morbidly obese doing manual labor, granted, but you can certainly be out of shape.
@acymetric – it’s hard to be a landscaper and be that out of shape, I would have thought, but easy to be a plumber or other tradesman.
@enkidum
Yeah, I won’t disagree with that.
@acymetric:
I know from personal experience that it’s also pretty easy to be a serious weightlifter without the ability to run for more than 30 seconds without taking a break. It doesn’t mean our hearts are going to give out on us, which is the main risk for the sedentary obese.
Doing a good job with CI or CO should keep you from being dangerously out-of-shape, was my thinking.
Well sure, but you were talking about being in shape vs. out of shape, which isn’t a synonym for “lower risk of heart disease”. I’m not disputing that people who do manual labor are healthier than people who are sedentary (wear and tear on the body notwithstanding).
@acymetric: True. Chalk it up to under-defined term.
@Le Maistre Chat,
Nope, I very much look like a Goblin compared to the Elves shopping at Whole Foods!
Bah, goblins are fitter than those namby-pamby elves.
Goblins ride crazy wolves while elves ride ponies? Which takes more fitness? Crazy wolves.
Elves plink plink with their little bows while goblins hack and stab at you. Hacking and stabbing is a real workout!
What do elves got huh? They’re skinnier. Just means they make good toothpicks for wargs.
Most blue collar work helps you build strength, but isn’t aerobic exercise. Also, that kind of work makes you *hungry*, so it’s fairly easy to settle on an equilibrium where you are strong and muscular under tens of pounds of fat.
Working muscle is different to sculpted gym muscle, though. You can have a bit of a tummy and still have core strength if you’re getting exercise through manual labour, which is not the look of “I need to work on definition of this anatomical muscle group” that the fit and beautiful strive for.
When I was 8 my mother married a general housing contractor. For the next several years he had me working during the summers and on weekends and even some evenings after school. Not a lot, but regularly. One of the things he had me do was sweep his unfinished homes, maybe a dozen times or so while the house was being built. The push broom I used had a 3 rows of regular bristles, and 1 row of steel wire bristles. The broom was quite a workout for a boy 9-12 years old, but it wasn’t the only hard work I did.
Flash forward to gym class in middle school when we had our first exposure to the weight room. I got on the butterfly machine and worked out some, and when I was done, I felt like I had been pushing that broom all day.
Later, puberty struck and basically overnight I grew pecs.* I thought I was growing breasts – it really freaked me out. Of course, the pecs weren’t exactly symmetrical, because nobody told me I should be sweeping left-handed half the time. I continued working construction until I was almost through with my undergrad, and nobody pays you to work left-handed even if you were inclined to spend half they day trying not to smash your good hand with hammer swings from your off hand. You have to look closely but you can still see that my upper body’s right side has more muscle than the left.
*I’ve actually never seen any confirmation that this could be true – that muscle growth due to puberty responds to pre-puberty exercise, but it seems obvious that this is what happened to me.
Your general housing contractor was Mr. Miyagi?
Mr Miyagi would have had me sweeping left-handed, too. My stepdad just wanted me to do a good job, quickly. But yeah, he had me doing a lot of ‘make-work’. He had some rental property where he had some trees planted, and he had me fill & carry 5-gallon buckets of water to the trees every time he mowed the grass. Every tree needed 5 buckets or somesuch. When I asked him why I couldn’t hook up a hose to water the trees, he told me ‘because I want you to carry buckets’.
@Matt
How dare you duck when I throw things at you!
Anchor Steam is delicious.
Just went through there a couple of times last month on a trip with the wife.
My experience with their traffic does not match what you have experienced. That said, I live in a relatively small town and most of my commute is inside the gates of a military base.
Why would my employer insist on “unconscious bias” trainng?
I work for a large tech company in California. For the last 2 decades, through several employers, I’ve been taking mandatory HR courses, that generally teach such concepts as “don’t give bribes”, “don’t grope your coworkers”, “don’t ask legally prohibited questions in interviews” and similar. Most places demand each employee repeat the same material every year, and it’s basically a low grade annoyance/waste of employee time, fairly obviously intended as a CYA for the company if (when?) some employee gets caught doing something illegal.
My current employer is less annoying than most – they let you start with the test, and test out of courses you’ve taken in the past, rather than requiring you not only spend time each year in the same (online) course, and in one case even timing how long you spend in each screen, with a mandatory minimum total. (I left the stupid course on my screen while going about my ordinary work, so as to meet the time [supposed to be attention] goal.)
Currently I’m getting nags from the automated system about taking a course on “unconscious bias”. The one before that was what to do in case of an active shooter in the workplace. I’m having a lot of trouble seeing either one as a legal CYA.
Any idea what’s going on here? It doesn’t seem likely to be as simple as someone in HR using their position to encourage wokeness, because in that case the active shooter course wouldn’t fit.
My impression is that the wave of active shooter trainings was a response to the last year one targeting a tech company. So it presumably wouldn’t fit the pattern if there were one.
I work for an energy company. In Texas. And this training is offered and widely promoted (although fortunately not mandatory… yet)
I think it’s as simple as someone in HR justifying their employment and trying to get a promotion.
I suspect the “unconscious bias” stuff is a product of the tech companies trying to thread the needle very carefully. On the one hand, they have very real racial skew among their staff, and the execs both see this as a problem (being mostly good liberals) and certainly understand that other people consider it a problem. But on the other hand they don’t think they themselves or their immediate colleagues are racist, so they don’t want to take heavyweight anti-racism measures, particularly since doing so might alienate the staff, most of whom can walk and would probably do so if actually accused of racism. So they set up weaksauce stuff like these unconscious bias courses. The execs want to do (and be seen doing) something, and there isn’t much more they can do.
And yeah, this strikes me as pretty clearly correct.
Unconscious bias is pretty cleverly designed as a way to signal all the correctly woke values in a modest and non-confrontational way. It’s a way to give your employees racial sensitivity training without calling it racial sensitivity training in a way that implies they’re all horrible people. The concept of it is a way for CEOs to explain their insufficiently-woke hiring and promotion numbers as if its some force of nature that they can’t really control, while the training itself implies a good faith effort to… well, control it.
It’s really no wonder that corporations love it, as it goes out of its way to be as inoffensive as possible to both tribes. Except grey tribe, who is probably bothered a bit by the fact that it’s totally made up and not at all correct.
+1
Tech companies have the problem that they *need* to hire on merit, and the results of that don’t look like America, and in fact look not like America in ways that are pretty maximally politically incorrect. They don’t want to end up getting forced to hire a bunch of less-capable people and then add the organizational complexity to route around them, and they don’t want to get in trouble from the EEOC or get tons of bad publicity for their obviously racist and sexist hiring practices that lead to a 90+% male, 90+% Asian and white workforce.
They thus find it necessary to be very loudly and overtly pro-diversity and anti-discrimination. They similarly have lots of concrete programs that say and do exactly the right things. They need to suppress internal discussion that might get the EEOC et al on their asses. Because they can’t avoid having their workforce be overwhelmingly male and Asian/white without suffering a huge loss in capability, but they can visibly fire the Damores and have big loud diversity operations and trainings that don’t actually change the makeup of the workforce much.
University-educated Asians and Ashkenazi are maximally politically incorrect?
White on demand, so yeah.
Yeah, no. This is absolute horseshit. They don’t *need* to hire on merit any more than General Electric, Union Pacific, Bechtel, or Goldman Sachs do. If they don’t like the current legal environment, then Alphabet can either start putting “Fuck Woke Politics! Disband the EEOC!” ads in front of YouTube videos, or they can eat the same dogfood as the rest of corporate America.
Or, I suppose, shift hiring to some place with more congenial hiring rules.
@johan_larson
You mean like a lot of other people’s jobs have done? If I had a button that would rationalize our hiring practices here in the US, I’d be hammering on that like a rat in a cocaine experiment. But if we’re not going to rationalize them for everybody I’m absolutely against giving one industry a pass because they think they’re super-special on needing competent people without having to worry about diversity census concerns.
Goldman-Sachs, as far as I know, does hire on merit. And merit is very easily measurable in their industry, it’s measured in dollars. Unlike large tech companies besides Amazon, they’re quick to get rid of employees for performance reasons (or so I’ve heard), too. And I don’t know about Goldman specifically, but other financial industry companies have the same BS HR trainings as in tech. And certainly GE does also — Saturday Night Live’s “be handsome, be attractive, don’t be unattractive” skit is styled as part of a GE training video (SNL being owned by GE at the time).
I don’t think tech companies have any specific legal or EEOC needs to have these trainings. But big companies in other industries have them also, so there’s no need to posit any specific need.
Really? Because this sounds like a pretty blatant implementation of gender and race-based hiring quotas, as far as I can tell…
This is either blatant quota use, or feel good nonsense, depending on the meaning you assign to “aspirational”. In my experience, “aspirational” often describes BS that obviously isn’t true, at least in the mouths of senior HR types.
YMMV. But every time I’ve pointed out that some claimed policy isn’t being followed, the answer has involved words like “aspirational”. This compares with a “stretch goal” which is something we really want to do, but fear we won’t be able to.
So they may just be trying to have their cake and eat it too.
I mean yeah, sure. We’d have to know the local culture of GS to appreciate whether “aspirational” means something like “We all know that this is external messaging BS that none of you are supposed to actually take seriously” or whether it means something like “Anyone who doesn’t meet this quota in their hiring decisions will be forced to defend why, and will probably receive a lower performance evaluation because of it.”
Tangential, but that skit seems to have been partially memory-holed. It used to be available on YouTube, but now it has either been taken down, or else delisted from its search. Fortunately after some digging i found a link to a remaining copy in LiveLeak of all places.
Eh, probably not a real conspiracy here. SNL, in general, has always been incredibly vigorous about defending its IP online. It’s one of the shows that’s the absolute hardest to find clips of on YouTube or elsewhere (including of the freaking musical performances).
The sketch is still up on NBC’s own SNL page. You gotta sit through an ad first.
Yeah…usually when a video like that disappears it hasn’t been “memory holed”, its just that either the person hosting the video (probably in violation of copyright) decided to take it down (or took down their entire channel) OR the copyright holder finally said something and had the infringing video taken down.
I’ve lost a lot of great live concert footage that way (primarily the former, I think but probably some of the latter as well).
You cant train your way out of unconcious bias.
If you actually want to do something useful, what you should do is blind recruitment up to and including the job interview. And advertise you are doing this.
Every step of the way, just make damn sure the people making the decisions have literally no way to tell the race, gender or age of the applicants, by denying them access to that information. – This should be reasonably attainable. I mean, if classical orchestras can do it, any tech firm worth its salt should be able to arrange a genuinely blind interview process.
Now, the important step here is “Advertise you are doing this”. Because that will get you applicants who are highly confident they can get hired on the merits, which should be a higher quality pool of applicants, via self-sorting.
Potential downside: This should get you people who know what they are doing, but you might also selectively attract people with, uhm, chips on their shoulders. Because they genuinely have been discriminated against.
You know, this isn’t a completely crazy proposal. It’s maybe a bit too risky for permanent employees, but a company like Facebook hires a lot of interns every summer. And since the interns are gone after three months, the risk of making bad hires is pretty low.
The company could commit to hiring one summer’s crop blind, on the basis of a written test in computer science. Grade the tests blind, add a few stipulations like “no convicted felons” and then hire the folks with the top N scores, without further interviews.
I sort of wonder what would happen. You might get more people who are self-educated. And since the only test you’re using is academic, you’ll almost certainly get more hard-core nerds, some of whom could be hard to deal with. I wonder if the racial mix would change at all.
johan larson:
I think it’s possible to predict the outcome of that experiment with very high accuracy, because we know statistics for test scores and fields of study. My prediction is that the new crop of summer intern hires will be overwhelmingly Asian, with a few whites scattered in. It will also be nearly all male.
Even worse, you absolutely can train your way out of unconscious bias tests.
EDIT: Actually I’d disagree with your initial statement – I think you absolutely could, with a well-designed protocol of some sort, train your way out of unconscious biases. But we’re very far from a reliable way of detecting them on an individual level (and it’s somewhat controversial whether we can even on a group level).
First you have to credibly pre-commit to accepting the results, otherwise you get hilarity like Github cancelling a conference because their blind selection conference picked all men, or Strange Loop rejecting Moldbug after their blind selection picked his talk.
The way it goes is always “heads we win, tails you lose”. If the blind selection picks more of the people claimed to be discriminated against, that’s proof of the discrimination. If it does not… ooops, let’s try something else instead.
Yeah, the problem with this plan is that when your completely blind process picks a inconveniently “non-diverse” set of hires you have to explain the results in a politically correct way, which can be difficult to do. In many industries (tech, government, academia), those doing the HR weeding and hiring are currently actively promoting female and minority candidates over equally qualified others. In those situations, moving to blind hiring can backfire on their original discriminatory intentions.
Of course, personally, I’m all for it, but then I’m one of those people who prefer merit-based hiring over hiring based on racial or sexual characteristics. No doubt that’s just because I’ve been successful that way.
fixed
My employer does blind recruitment up to interview (blind interviews are hard and introduce all sorts of other difficulties).
From how they write their application I find I can reliably identify the gender and race of candidates anyway.
(I haven’t calibrated on this – I will do next time I do any recruitment – but anecdotally I only recall feeling surprised when I meet a candidate maybe 1 or 2 times in 10)
Charitably:
1) If you assume for a moment that employees actually have substantial unconscious biases that can be corrected through training, it’s possible that the company will benefit.
2) Organizationally, I assume that there are a certain number of hours and dollars for training, some people believe that unconscious bias is a substantial and addressable problem, and no one else feels strongly enough to argue for something else in its place.
The most potentially useful example I ever heard in one of these is that some cultures apparently view direct eye contact as intrusive and rude, and that if pro-eye contact people don’t know about this, they tend to read this as a lack of confidence or as dishonesty. I’m not sure how common that issue is, or what to do to correct it, but I can see how correcting it might help to prevent overlooking qualified people.
Tangent here:
I once attended an employer sponsored class in how to conduct interviews, which turned out to be all about judging “soft” qualities, not the technical skills I was interested in better ways to evaluate. That class taught us to insist on eye contect. I pointed out the problem, noting that both autistics and some non-Americans had problems with this. The answer was that since we were in the US, we should select for people that conformed to mainstream US cultural practices. When explicitly called on the autistic part of it, the answer was that they intended to do all the law required. (An explicit rule that discriminates against an autistic trait without a strong reason would be an ADA violation, as I understand it. IANAL however.)
Different employer, and I got out of there pretty fast. But FWIW, it wasn’t one of the companies notorious in the tech industry for ill treating employees or employees of particular types. Just an ordinary collection of soft skills specialists lacking in empathy, common sense, etc.
Cultural awareness training can be interesting, even if not useful. One of my previous employers offered such a class (optionally) to facilitate dealing with our coworkers in India (and vice versa). It was fantastic.
But that’s a far cry from “here’s a poor test which we will use to make you feel bad for being racist”.
A salesperson from a company that makes HR resources persuaded your HR purchasing person to purchase it.
+1
There’s no reason to think that the HR people are especially capable of judging the validity of marketing pitches based on (relatively) new research results in experimental psychology.
HR thinks it can somehow reduce long-run liability. It’s a scientific fact that 95% of corporate decisions are made due to liability considerations.
At-best, it’s a way to claim that they are doing everything they can to prevent a racially-hostile environment.
The IAT has a large number of problems.
Avoiding liability?
Political lawsuits are expensive. If you make your employees take training such as these you can point to them if something goes wrong, rather than taking the blame for this or that.
Haven’t “unconscious bias” studies mostly or entirely failed to replicate?
Studies? Who cares about studies?
If someone sues your company for BLATANT RACISM, you’re looking at a large amount of money going to legal proceedings and settlements. Time spent making your employees attend some stupid training costs them some productivity, but it might well be worth it if it gives you legal ammunition to prove that you are very serious about it all.
No, they generally have been replicated on a group level. The test/retest reliability isn’t great, however, meaning that one individual’s score at time A might be very different from their score at time B.
Also, it’s very controversial to what extent the test actually predicts anything useful about behaviour outside of the lab (read: there are no strong correlations with overtly racist acts).
I’d consider the individual to be the more relevant, though.
This is more important. Let’s validate our metrics before we judge ourselves by them.
Depends what kind of claims you want to make based on the data.
I agree that these tests probably aren’t much use for HR purposes, as they stand.
The founder of a company I work at is a racist. Imagine Archie Bunker, but he means it. He’s made blatantly racist statements at the office.
The workforce he hired had a higher percentage of blacks than almost any firm hiring from the same pool in my experience, including firms started by black people.
So even explicit bias doesn’t always lead to racist outcomes.
@Anthony:
Uhhhh, just because he hires black people doesn’t make the outcome good. Just as a for instance, in the segregation era the jobs were fairly firmly sorted by race. When it came to, say, factory work, Blacks got the the extra-crappy jobs and Whites the only moderately crappy ones.
So before we can conclude that the outcome is good, we’d need to know something about the jobs in question and the overall employment environment.
@HeelBearCub
Your argument is valid insofar that he may be part of a racist culture, where black people are funneled into certain jobs. His racism might result in him believing that black people are better for the jobs at his firm.
However, I don’t see how his hiring decisions are bad for black people. If he favors hiring black people, they get a better job than if he wouldn’t favor them, assuming that the black people are choosing the best job available. If the racist firm owner would offer them a worse job than they could get elsewhere, they wouldn’t work at his firm, right?
HeelBearCub and Aapje – the black guys basically got the same jobs as the non-black guys based on their experience, and got raises that were generally fair. The firm is small, and most of the people were doing essentially the same job.
Construction industry specialty work, in San Francisco.
@Anthony:
You don’t describe the form of his racism. Perhaps it involves negative opinions of blacks that are irrelevant to how productive they will be as employees, for instance the claim that they are sexually promiscuous. Or perhaps he believes that blacks are, on average, poor workers, but he has the expertise to select the good ones. Or …
“Racist” could mean a lot of different things.
@Anthony,
In the ten years that I did construction work in the south bay and peninsula most of my co-workers were Hispanic or white, and more than once there’d be a guy who told vile anti-black “jokes”, but when a black man got on the crew the “joke” teller would be best buds with him, more than they rest of the crew.
I saw this a few times on different job-sites often enough to look like a pattern to me, but I’ve never figured out a theory of why.
@Plumber
Depending on when the jokes were told, it could be a case of Friendship Is Countersignaling. I saw an unmistakable example of this once back in college.
I wonder if that would actually work or if it’s just false hope to think that sort of ass covering would work. I can’t imagine being a judge or jury facing a company whose manager constantly called their employees various racist slurs over e-mail and in person and wasn’t punished for it (or something else egregious enough to reach the bar for pervasive discrimination), and the company’s defense of “But we had all our managers do an online bias training” swaying my opinion in the slightest.
I can easily believe what you say explains it though since they hope it would work and so they do it anyways.
Why would my employer insist on “unconscious bias” trainng?
The fad for it just recently trickled down to some higher-up in your company who is now enthused about Hot New Shiny Thing and is insisting it is done. Since it’s easier to say “yes, sir” than waste time fighting over this trivial matter, and since it also ensures more CYA protection for the company, this gets instituted.
Alternatively, where you work has particular requirements/comes under particular legislation and regulations that mandate “training of X type must happen”. Does your company deal with government (in any form) contracts, for example? Part of that is “any third-party providers” (which may be your lot) “must be in compliance with the regulations above”.
An anecdote: Some months ago, at the company where I work, there was an incident where a tied noose was prominently placed in the work area of a black employee. Naturally this was a big deal; people were fired, etc.
Afterwards, our VP announced that we would all be doing unconscious bias training. Which is fine, I guess… except that leaving a noose on a black guy’s desk isn’t freaking unconscious bias. It’s about as conscious bias as you can get. But I guess that deciding these things is above my pay grade.
They could be following a variant of the cockroach theory. If there is one blatant raciest, there is probably a bunch of unconscious bias as well.
I don’t have anything good to say about Trump, but I don’t think McCarthy is exactly right. He’s not really accusing anyone of being a secret agent for Al Qaeda or whomever – he’s saying that their overt actions are harmful to the country.
I do wonder about McCarthy and the blacklist, though.
1) A blacklist seems to be forming for people in entertainment who have been accused of sexual misconduct. Maybe that’s a good thing – I honestly don’t know – but it calls into question a lot of the mythology I learned about what was wrong with the anti-communist blacklist.
(Note: being a sexual abuser is clearly bad, whereas being a communist is more arguably bad, but as pointed out upthread, we’re learning more and more that being a communist was maybe well intentioned but actually pretty bad!)
2) In general, the new sexual politics seems a little McCarthyist. We’re passing around lists and making accusations, because we know that there are a bunch of secret bros who are being abusive and/or holding back women’s participation in fields, but we’re not sure yet who they are.
Note: I’m not saying the MeToo movement is worse than Trump, or even “more McCathyist,” whatever that could mean, just that it reminds me of McCarthy in some ways that Trump doesn’t.
Helen Andrews had an article comparing a communist blacklist effort with the #MeToo list, and the latter did not come out of it looking good. It was a really interesting article, but the title, and the repeated use of “McCarthyism” in the introduction, does it a major disservice, because the work of Red Channels was apparently really incredibly far from that of McCarthy.
ETA: Reworded a bit, since I realized right after posting that #MeToo doesn’t have to be entirely discredited by association with the list just as Red Channels doesn’t have to entirely discredited by association with McCarthyism.
I don’t want to pile on you any more than necessary, but I wanted to add…
Reading the above comments, I think a succinct summary is that The Crucible is pretty accurate, except that in this case witchcraft (Communism) was actually real, and actually evil (which is, as you insist, an incredibly important point). McCarthy’s House Committee was a travesty of justice, did immense damage to the real fight against Communism, and, so far as I’m aware, had no successes of any kind at all. And it destroyed numerous people’s lives. Everything you’ve said about it, other than that Communism was genuinely bad and active measures needed to be taken against infiltrators, is utter nonsense.
This is really a terrible, terrible take. Please, do consider the points raised in pretty much all the replies to your OP, by a very wide ideological spectrum of commenters.
This is related to your more personal post from a couple of OTs ago, but you really are sifting through garbage heaps looking for diamonds. The people you’re getting your intellectual food from are not worth your (or anyone’s) time, and you’re not getting anything nutritious. What you’ve been arguing is borderline Dinesh D’Souza level nonsense. You would be well-served by reconsidering an awful lot of your priors.
I’m saying this with a great deal of sympathy, as someone who is personally susceptible to a lot of the same terrible argumentative styles and tactics, just from a very different set of ideological priors. I do my best to acknowledge when they screw up my thought processes, though I am far from perfect at this. You’d be well-served by taking a long break from this poison.
Probably a typo on your part but it leads people to a common misconception so I’ll correct it:
The House Un-American Activities Committee pre-dates McCarthy, who was a Senator and could not chair a House Committee.
Thanks for the correction, not a typo, I was just wrong.
Has anyone been convinced to change their mind about anything lately? If so, was there a particular argument or fact the convinced you?
This is definitely not what you had in mind, but I was convinced I would hate James Taylor’s music and then I heard it consciously for the first time last week and I pretty much liked it.
Yeah, Trump not stopping the “send her back” chants convinced me that his behavior is more dangerous than I had previously thought. To a lesser extent, the firebombing attack on the ICE facility convinced me that the Squad’s rhetoric is also probably more dangerous than I gave it credit for.
@J Mann,
I hadn’t heard about the attempted detention center firebombing.
Interesting.
The good news is that it was fairly incompetent – the guy showed up in the parking lot of an ICE facility and apparently tried to blow up the buses with road flares and a tank of propane. He was also carrying a rifle (and had written a manifesto), so he was dangerous but thankfully not very well organized.
The thing I don’t understand is why he thought firebombing the detention facility was a good idea. Maybe an office or something, okay. But if he had succeeded in setting the facility itself on fire…wouldn’t that have killed an awful lot of illegal immigrants? Who are locked inside?
@Conrad – I think he was trying to blow up the busses that bring people to the facility.
@J Mann
Still though, that kills like 4 guards and how many detainees?
I assume J Mann is referring to empty buses sitting vacant at the facility.
From the article:
It sounds like he was trying to set buildings on fire.
If he’d been successful, I imagine he would have killed a lot of people he wanted to protect, through incompetence. But whether competent or not, I expect he’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars, as he should. Neither arson nor terrorism are things we want to encourage.
The rest of his life ended last week. The officers shot him dead.
I always find your comments about what you have/have not heard about in the news very illuminating plumber. Its like a perfect encapsulation of what “mainstream media” fails to cover.
@Clutzy,
I used to read The Wall Street Journal, but the “paywall” got in the way of that, I still read some of The New York Times, but they’re making it harder to read there as well, so that leaves me The Washington Post which I read a bit on-line, and The San Francisco Chronicle when I buy a copy, otherwise it’s the radio during my commute, and a bit of broadcast television (no cable).
My wife sometimes tells me grisly crime stories that she reads on-line that I don’t seek out (and I don’t know where she’s finding them!).
In this specific case the attempted attack on ICE wasn’t known by me until mentioned here, but a websearch resulted in lots of links about it, most prominently CNN which I don’t watch because I don’t pay for it.
Not lately, but when I was in college I had an argument with Isaiah Berlin which persuaded me into moral realism.
My conversion from minarchy to anarchy was mostly arguments with which I convinced myself, but reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was part of it, since it showed a convincing picture of a society where rights enforcement was endogenous.
Also a long time ago.
The linked piece is one of the better things I’ve read about this. Thank you.
That’s very odd—you held an emotivist view, and were persuaded (backwards, as it were) into intuitionism. I got the impression from After Virtue that most people were persuaded the other way, from observing how intuitionism worked in practice. (I have MacIntyre’s passage on intuitionism online.)
I appreciate having another moral realist, to be sure, but how do you avoid Mackie’s argument from queerness? This seems like a particularly acute problem for the intuitionist.
The post that he links to strongly suggests the line of response to Mackie that focuses on arguing that moral properties and non-moral properties aren’t that different after all; Mackie underestimates the “queerness” of non-moral properties to make moral properties look more like outliers than they are. I don’t think this can be strengthened into any kind of decisive knock-down argument, but then Friedman never says otherwise, and Mackie’s argument isn’t a decisive knock-down argument either. Often in philosophy there’s just a choice of which bullets to bite.
Your linked piece was fascinating, and not an argument I’ve ever heard before. I think it’s something I need to think about for a while.
If I was going to distill the central premise a bit, I think it could be summarized as
“if 99.9% of people think X is intuitively immoral, then they’re probably right.”
But it seems to me that the problem with that is moral intuition is culturally variant, whereas ability to see a tiger isn’t.
Even your stated example of “human pain is completely irrelevant to judgments” as being so rare as could be described as crazy only seems true in particular cultures.
Slave traders in the 1700’s didn’t care about the pain of their cargo.
Imperial Japanese didn’t seem to care about their victims in Nanjing.
Guards at Auschwitz treated the prisoners as if they had no moral weight at all.
It would seem to me that the only moral intuition people have could be surmised as “It’s immoral to hurt members of the in-group/tribe.”
With apologies for my philosophical amateurishness: Honestly, I don’t really understand what precisely moral realists are claiming.
The claim that there is a tiger on a table is a claim about a physical thing-in-the-world, what I would call a “fact”. A claim about the wrongness of some action, such as sticking pins in unsuspecting people because you like the feeling of doing so, doesn’t seem to be referring to any thing-in-the-world. So I don’t know what it means for this claim to be “true” or “false”.
The only coherent way I can think to express the position is to imagine that moral realists are a kind of platonists, who believe that there is some actually existing “moral” realm where this is specified. But I don’t think they’re actually claiming this.
Would anyone mind clarifying this?
(Note: to avoid derailing this thread, I suggest that if anyone wants to continue this conversation, they reply with a brief note here, and then start a new top-level comment for a further discussion of moral realism).
In the post you say you cannot believe the tiger might be on the table. I agree. Neither can I nor anyone else. However, you compare that with moral intuitions like being unable to believe that “one should not lie.” There is no comparison in this respect. Sure people commonly claim to believe that one shouldn’t lie, but lie they do. IMO everything that come from our mouths is probably a lie. IMO our big brains evolved specifically to lie. No one lives by the moral code that one should not lie. Saying one should not lie has nothing to do with behavior and everything to do with pretending (lying). A belief is that upon which a person is willing to act. People (all people) believe that one SHOULD lie. They lie when they say otherwise.
As I tried to explain in the chapter, I’m not talking about stated moral rules. People disagree a lot about the equivalent of those for non-moral questions—consider the effect of the minimum wage or global warming. The equivalent of the tiger on the table is something like the moral judgement on a fully described action, context included. There isn’t perfect agreement there—but then, people disagree on simple factual questions when they are less clear than whether there is a tiger on the table.
@souleater,
@DavidFriedman has done a good job of casting doubt on the majority of Americans being in financially worse than the majority of Americans 45 to 50 years ago.
I still think that the growth in homelessness that started in the ’80’s shows me that a lot are worse off, but a lot are better off as well (i.e., there’s no way that 30 years ago so many could afford to own all the Tesla’s I see driven around town lately).
The growth of homelessness goes along with the growth of activism for the homeless, and I suspect cause and effect runs in the opposite of the expected direction.
That is an interesting response, and one I didn’t expect. I will say it was very enlightening to see the back-and-forth. I’m a child of the 80s/90s, and I can tell that I have lots more technological toys than my parents had at my age. But I hadn’t seen the huge changes in wealth/productivity that came about in your generation, and I haven’t seen the changes in employment/wages that you’ve seen.
Watching the back-and-forth between you and @DavidFriedman, I learned that economics of the average American since 45-to-50-years ago are more complicated than I originally thought.
Where/when did this David Friedman discussion happen?
Would you be able to find a link to the discussion? I would be interested in reading it.
@j1000000 and @souleater,
The back and forth has been many times over the last year or so, from a quick search some posts in
“Open Thread 131.75“,
and
“Open Thread 132”
look to be the most recent ones.
David Friedman convinced me that Cook et al’s “97% of climate scientists claim” is likely wrong, mostly on the grounds that he’s clearly not very credible.
Isn’t that denying the antecedent?
Someone claiming something without good evidence for it being true is not good evidence that it is false.
I don’t know what percentage of climate scientists believe that human activity is the largest factor contributing to climate change, and I agree that Cook’s work is not useful for working it out, but “high 90s, but not 100%” sounds like the right ballpark to me.
What concerns me here is the number of ostensibly academic classes (MOOCs) about climate change placing this number front and center.
According to one MOOC (not about the science, but conveying a lot of it nonetheless) this is because some people in the scientific community have become so concerned that they are specifically trying to convince members of the electorate, rather than trying to make accurate information available, and research has shown that the most convincing thing, for “average” people, is the % of agreement number, as if science proceeded by majority vote.
If the number is in fact the result of sloppy or biased research, or even credibly looks that way, that’s going to result in a lot of people who understand neither the scientific method nor basic climate math becoming (re)convinced that the whole thing is bogus – and not only those whose tribal affiliations require professing that belief.
Oddly, whether or not Friedman is right in this instance, it doesn’t affect my conclusions about global climate change. It wasn’t a vote in the first place, and this, if incorrect, or even not supported by its data, is sloppy social science research, not sloppy climate research.
Deliberately dishonest, not sloppy, but I agree that it is not climate research.
It is relevant to whether you believe the current climate orthodoxy only indirectly. All of us are dependent largely on second hand information. The fact that a transparently dishonest claim (people are welcome to follow the link and see if they agree) is routinely cited by many of the people who say things on which the widespread view of climate threats is based, and that virtually none of those people have pointed out its faults, is a reason to give less weight to the sources of information on which that view is based. People who do not care whether the facts they cite in defense of their views are true are not to be trusted, since they are either incompetent or dishonest.
That isn’t a reason to reject the belief that human production of CO2 tends to increase temperature, since the physics are pretty straightforward, or the belief that global temperatures have trended up over the past century. But it’s a reason for skepticism of anything less straightforward–in particular the claim that the complicated collection of effects, positive and negative, clearly add up to a large negative.
As DF describes in the relevant blog post, authority is the main thing we all lean on in the climate discussion, and when a very widely cited number comes from a demonstrably dishonest source, I’m comfortable concluding the number isn’t true. It doesn’t logically prove that the number is actually lower, but given that Cook is presumably trying to inflate the number, it strongly hints at that being the case.
Uhhhh, most of these are more pregnancy related:
-Breast feeding is definitely not worth the effort for working women, though that’s up to working women to decide.
-A year ago, I’d say you’d be crazy to have any drinks as a pregnant woman. Now, if you want a glass of wine over the course of the evening, I’d say go for it.
-Caffeine while pregnant? Sure, go for it. Just don’t go crazy….but most women aren’t going to be drinking 5-6 cups of coffee while pregnant anyways. High-power employed women might need to be more conscious of this.
A lot of this comes from reading a bunch of different pregnancy related books and online blogs. Most of the evidence on this seems exceptionally conservative and not particularly concerned with the welfare of the mother. The talk on breast-feeding seems insane: relatively mild benefits, many of which are difficult to tease out, misrepresented as iron-clad-real-as-gravity “evidence,” entirely disregarding how difficult it would be for working women to pump regularly.
Others:
-The natural rate of unemployment is probably not a useful measure to target and output gaps are difficult/impossible to reasonably calculate. Just switch to an explicit inflation target. That comes from the employment record of the last decade.
-My opinion of Elizabeth Warren as an honest has seriously degraded: I’d consider to be as craven as Kristen Gillibrand. This mostly comes from comparing her books (which I read on my flight to CA) to her current stated positions, and the course of her campaign. All of it just looks like unnecessary progressive pandering when more centrist positions could accomplish 80% of what she wants.
-The description of the North Korean economy in the thread below makes me want to read more about recent developments in North Korea.
-I don’t have exact estimates of this, but my concern over air pollution in general has increased. AT happens to have a quick little snippet on this. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/air-pollution-kills.html
That The Catcher in the Rye isn’t a bad book. I didn’t read it until adulthood, so while I remember being a teenager with my head far up my own ass, I don’t have much sympathy with past me so I didn’t have much sympathy with Holden Caulfield. However, after reading a few commentaries on the novel, I realized that I was projecting a bit too much of my past self on Holden. Whereas I was a typically overconfident teenager that thought I had the world figured out (except for girls, of course), running full steam ahead into becoming an engineer (don’t ask me how that worked out), Holden is deeply distrustful of the world, particularly adults, due to a variety of experiences and doesn’t want to enter the world of adulthood. In that way, he’s not a typical teenager, who can’t wait to grow up. Holden is being forced to grow up, but doesn’t want to because he has no reason to think the adult world will allow him to thrive, make connections with other people, or just be a normal person.
This experience with literature is not atypical for me; you think I’d learn, but it’s hard to break out of my own experiences when reading literature. Often, the “classics” are much better and more interesting after reading why other people think they’re great (reading why other people think they’re terrible is not so interesting; negativity is cheap and easy).
How much effort would it take me to re-convince you otherwise?
Not that I’m gonna do that, because I’d have to reread that book.
I used to believe that Democrats had simply incoherent views on immigration. All their rhetoric suggested that they wanted open borders but they didn’t actually believe it. It was just a weapon against Trump. But after Ocasio-Cortez compared the detention centers to Nazi concentration camps, the Democrats all agreed on free healthcare for illegal immigrants and especially how Elizabeth Warren proposed decriminalizing illegal immigration, I’m more convinced that a non-trivial percentage actually do want open borders. The jury’s still out on how large that group is but we’ll find out after they nominate a presidential candidate.
You think that’ll reliably tell you how large that group is?! 😛
For all intents and purposes, yes. If Warren wins the nomination, then Democrats will be forced to spend 2020 defending her immigration policies. If she wins the presidency, four years minimum and it will almost certainly change the official party position in the future. If Biden wins, then it means they are rejecting Trumpism more than than they are embracing far left activists. People think it’s the razor-thin margin presidential elections that are the watershed moments in this country when it’s really the primaries. Presidential elections have been about rejecting somebody more than embracing some principles since 1992.
I was more questioning whether who the Democratic Party nominates can be used to measure how many people actually support various policies.
People’s “actual support” is often based on what the party leaders say. Look at how the parties have essentially flipped their views on Russia. If Democrats vote Warren over Biden then they are at least tacitly supporting an open borders Democrat Party.
Of course, people don’t always listen to the party leaders. Many Republicans had been very upset with the party leaders on immigrations for years. But if Warren gets the Presidency, how much resistance do you think she’ll get from her party on immigration?
I don’t know, but that’s a separate question from “How many Americans who vote for Democrats actually support open borders?”
I agree, there’s an interactivity between a party’s nominee and what a lot of the nominee’s supporters believe, which only makes answering this question harder, not easier: who gets nominated is (I suggest) not clearly indicative of how many people support that nominee’s stance on immigration, plus (as you said) some people will change their stance on immigration based on what the nominee says. Plus the nominee can (often does?) change his or her stance on various issues before and after being nominated.
What makes you think she’ll even try to do anything? Immigration and foreign policy seem to both be issues where, no matter what the people vote for, all they’re going to get is the status quo.
Trump ran on “Build the wall” and had two years of GOP-controlled Congress. No wall. No meaningfully increased restriction of immigration at all.
Obama ran on “End the wars” and had two years of Dem-controlled Congress. Still wars. No meaningful reduction in military adventurism at all.
I see a bunch of conjecture in this thread, which has me ask the question: why?
Supporting open borders isn’t something like being gay or a nazi, where it’ll get you fired if you’re in the wrong place. Surely someone has went around to ask people if they support such a policy? There’s really no need to wonder when you can go around and figure it out.
What happens if you’re a gay Nazi in the US?
It is if the place is congress. For some districts/states, anyway.
@Le Maistre Chat
You and your stupid hair get banned from Facebook, Twitter, and Australia, apparently.
@Well
I don’t really care about what’s in people’s heart of hearts(which is often fickle and easily manipulated). I care more about the candidate they support and the tacit approval of what that represents. They may not be die-hard open borders supporters but if they nominate Warren, they supported the candidate who wants that more than they supported the guy who didn’t. They are saying that this is what they want the party to represent. My original point is about that more than whether the average Democrat would support open borders if they were President.
@Matt
It takes a lot to overcome inertia and making the borders more secure. It takes very little effort to make them less so. I see no reason not to take Warren at her word when she says that she doesn’t plan on supporting border enforcement.
@Dewitt
Democrats have been so incoherent on the general idea of open borders over the last few years that I would take any such poll with a grain of salt. You can accuse me of just making things up but if Warren does get elected, the Democrats will fall in line. If she does get major pushback from her party, then you can consider what I’m saying falsified.
I don’t trust you or anyone to be able to decide what people must really think. I’ll agree with the falling in line bit, but that’s so weak of a claim that going from there to big-time support to open borders is very far of a reach.
As a data point, Obama spent eight years bothering conspicuously little with anything immigration-related, and nobody seemed to care; people really did fall in line. Insofar open borders is popular, I suspect it’s mostly because it’s the reversed form of stupidity.
LMC:
Depends on whether you support open borders.
@Dewitt
Why do you think Warren proposed decriminalizing illegal immigration in the first place but Obama didn’t? Why did Bill Clinton advocate increased funding to fight illegal immigration when doing so today would be political suicide for a Democrat? Even in Obama’s second term, you can see him moving him more towards less restrictive immigration policies. You’re missing trends. I think the best argument against what I’m saying is that these individuals Presidents don’t matter as much as I’m making them out to be. If Warren loses to Biden, then he’ll be pressured to loosen immigration enforcement. If Warren loses to Trump, then that just delays it a bit longer. It’s like how Goldwater is considered a kind of frontrunner to Reagan. I’m not 100% convinced by this but it does have its own logic.
But supporting my original point, look at what Trump has done to Republicans. Before him, there was a strong group of them that tried to push for more immigration. Look at Jeb Bush and his whole “illegal immigration is an act of love” thing. But we are certainly past that point now. If Trump never ran, maybe a President Rubio could work in that framework. But we’re clearly at a point where self-identified Republicans are more fundamentally anti-illegal immigration in a way they weren’t before.
Maybe I’m being too deterministic in thinking that all this will lead to open borders support among Democrats. But I think it’s lunacy to dismiss this possibility. Especially how many Democrats accuse Republicans of believing this as a “conspiracy theory”. If anything, it should be considered more likely than not.
I’m inclined to agree. I’ve talked to or heard enough people from X minority who don’t like Y minority (e.g. a Mexican who doesn’t like Guatemalans) or even aren’t very fond of people from the country their ancestors were from a few generations back to be pretty confident that past a small influx, politics would rapidly swing immigration back towards current levels.
I don’t think there’s any large enough group that would be happy long with truly open borders that they could stem the backlash towards lower immigration levels after a flirtation with open borders.
I think you’re wrong. Immigration policy isn’t the only argument taking place within the Democratic Party, and people might easily choose Warren over Biden despite Warren’s more vocal support for open borders.
Most Democrats believe in a more open immigration system than Trump will deliver, and much more than Trump will promise. So any candidate who promises that is generally good enough, whether they are tepid moderates or rabid anti-border activists. One could easily believe that a President Biden would at least fix the current mess while Warren wouldn’t have the experience to make it happen, and favor Biden though Warren’s position was closer to their own.
@DeWitt
I think it depends on what questions you ask on the poll and how you interpret the answers. If you ask people “are you for open borders” few will say yes. But if you ask about almost any specific type of border enforcement many Democrats are against essentially all of them. If you have you border, that you don’t enforce, and don’t deport anyone who crosses it illegally, that’s an open border. Wrong Species is not the only one to notice.
If you want an example of the other side behaving incoherently, I saw a poll last year that while very few people identify as “white nationalists,” when asked about specific issues many more people aligned with WN preferences. So there are more white nationalists or white nationalist sympathizers than a poll asking “are you a white nationalist” will reveal, and there are more supporters of or sympathizers with open border policy than a poll asking “are you for open borders” will reveal.
There’s definitely a number of incoherent people around, as is true for any issue. I believe the difference in people supporting ‘gay’ marriage and ‘homosexual’ marriage, when phrased that way, is something like twenty percentage points; I can see why open borders would have much the same issue.
I do expect the gap here to be a lot closer though, given that supporting open borders isn’t really going to affect your personal or professional life that much. Coming out as a white nationalist very well might, so I expect the savvier among them to avoid the actual label white nationalism while perhaps being more honest about the specific beliefs and policies that they hold.
Edit, because I thought of this in the time it took my post to load:
This is also all a hell of a lot of conjecture if we lack some actual data. I’m definitely curious to see what the actual numbers on open borders supporters versus people who somehow just don’t want border enforcement crowds are like.
Perhaps I should go find the survey but my impression wasn’t that the people were aware they were white nationalists and lying about it, it’s that they didn’t really think through the implications of the policy proposals they supported. So, not that they were savvy but the exact opposite. And the same with open borders. When you look at Warren’s proposed border policy, I’m not sure what the difference between that stance and “open borders” is except the label. I’m sure there are a lot of Democrats who when asked “do you support open borders” say “no,” but when you go through each of Warren’s policy proposals and ask if they agree with those say “yes.”
I don’t really know what Warren’s policy proposals are, because I think she’s the biggest electoral dead end the Democrats could possibly pick, but I think that’s still a dangerous assumption to make. Asking people how they think border enforcement should work, what the points of exit should be, seems like a much better way. If nothing else, it forces people to think for a little while, rather than go along with what one of their leaders is saying.
I think you had it right the first time: it’s policy incoherence (like every other political party in the world which promises six impossible things before breakfast, then get caught up in the tangles of trying to backpeddle on impossible promises from ten years ago while not looking like this is what they are doing, while mushing in their own new shiny set of impossible promises).
I think if you asked them “are you in favour of open borders?” they’d say “no, of course not, but – “. Some few hard-core types probably do want open borders, most of them don’t exactly know what they want because sitting down and thinking about it would mean they’d have to either dump some principles dear to them or acknowledge that they can’t have jam on it.
But after Ocasio-Cortez compared the detention centers to Nazi concentration camps
Yeah, no. That’s just loudmouth headline chaser doing some loudmouth headline chasing. Really seriously believing “these are concentration camps” people don’t do method acting Lamentations of Ramah in front of chainlink fences with the cameras shooting at the best angles.
especially how Elizabeth Warren proposed decriminalizing illegal immigration
Warren is grasping at straws since her nomination isn’t at all certain; she’s also suggested the “gay reparations” thing which seems like utter bandwagon jumping, and a bit racially insensitive, to follow up proposals to pay reparations with “I think reparations are so good, everyone should get them! Like cis white middle-class gay guys* who are the ones that suffered most from not being able to be recognised as married for a couple of years there!” Right now she seems to be equally as likely to suggest paying these by seizing leprechauns’ pots of gold, so don’t take the latest headline of her most recent attempt at trying to keep her campaign relevant and afloat too seriously.
*There’s some dissatisfaction with respectability politics, and it’s shaking out along the usual lines of ‘who has more privilege than others’ here as elsewhere:
Elizabeth Warren is certainly not floundering about like Beto O’Rourke is. She’s gotten much more support since that statement and is the second most likely candidate to become the nominee, based on polling.
If I was arguing your point, I might make a comparison to the anti-war movement. It was really strong in the mid-oughts in opposition to Bush. The Iraq War was very unpopular and there was a strand of Democrats who wanted to push a general anti-war policy. After Obama was elected, most of them stopped caring and the true believers were hushed.
However, another comparison is to gay marriage. In the same time period, most Democrats talked about “civil unions” rather than equal marriage status. Even Obama suggested that. However, there was a small group who wanted to push the gay marriage issue harder. Now we’re at the point where you can be accused of bigotry if you aren’t supportive enough. I think immigration looks more like this.
Why? Because of coalitions. The wars America fights are in distant lands that we don’t really care about. But the illegal immigrants are showing up at our doorstep. The Democrats may not at this moment support open borders, but they certainly support the power of demographics against Republicans. Open borders(whether de-facto or de-jure) is a very useful way to support that goal.
Elizabeth Warren didn’t call for gay reparations. She called for refunding married gay people the money they were charged during the years that states recognized their marriages but the federal government didn’t. (Married people get a break on their taxes.) The reparations thing is right-wing people sneering at her, and giving the policy a name they presume (correctly, I think) will make it less popular. It’s certainly not a case of her saying, reparations are great (and popular!), so I’ll spread ’em around.
So she’s calling for paying people money to compensate them for harm suffered under what she views as an unjust law. Isn’t that exactly what “reparations” are?
It is, but it’s a very good example of Worst Argument in the World.
There is a big difference between specific harm suffered by specific individuals and indirect harm suffered by groups. Restitution versus reparations.
(That said, I don’t see why it is a sin for the federal government to treat people according to the federal understanding of marriage rather than their particular state understandings.)
Refunding money is not reparations. Labeling it as such was an attempt at clickbait, and if you didn’t realize that, it worked.
@dick
It’s not a refund. The marriages were not recognized under federal law, and so the couples were not entitled to file jointly on their federal tax returns. At least that is my understanding.
@Eponymous, even if it is, and I’m with dick on that, it’s not reparations in the sense that Deiseach means it in her comment.
Reminder quote:
The implication is that the out of touch and desperate Warren is grabbing on to reparations, since they’re so popular with the primary electorate, and spreading them around. Note the quotes on gay reparations, which certainly imply to me that Deiseach thinks this is part of Warren’s branding. I’m pointing out that reparations is in fact not a part of Warren’s presentation of the issue, and is rather the sneer term attached to the policy by Warren’s critics on the right.
@Eponymous,
It’s a refund in the sense that Warren (and I’m with her here) thinks that those marriages should have been recognized (since marriage policy is a state issue) and that they were unjustly not recognized because of DOMA. It’s money they would have had if not for DOMA, which was later struck down as unconstitutional. So it’s a late refund for a tax overpay.
I suppose you can make the case that it’s reparations, but that’s not what’s going on here. The label is being used as an insult. Which tells you, more or less, where real reparations are in terms of their popularity.
Agreed. My (somewhat facetious) point was simply that the literal description of the policy could accurately be called “reparations”.
Hmm. I could get on board with calling it a “refund” on those grounds, since the law was actually found unconstitutional. (And I think I agree with the SCOTUS on this one!)
Incidentally, what is the precedent concerning harms incurred due to a law later found unconstitutional? I assume you can’t sue directly for compensation, but have there been legislative actions to provide compensation in past cases?
I suppose it could, but as DeWitt pointed out, it’s also a very clear example of the Worst Argument in the World. Isn’t that enough? Do we need a thread discussing whether using the Worst Argument in the World is good or bad?
Some married people get a break on their taxes. Others, particularly couples with two largish incomes, pay a penalty for being married. It cost my wife and me several thousand a year to be married, until we retired. I’d be more inclined to go along with Warren’s proposal if it worked both ways.
No, it’s clearly not enough. There was a big thread two weeks ago about whether describing the detention facilities at the border as concentration camps was okay. And Scott just had a post about a fairly straightforward kind of equivocation (the Against Lie Inflation one) that got lots of pushback from commenters. It’s disappointing that this is the case, but I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
You know, if you really want to insist this is a central case of reparations, I’m not even going to really disagree. It’s just going to end up in reparations looking a hell of a lot more reasonable then.
@Eponymous – I am not a tax lawyer, but I’m pretty sure this is right.
Generally, in order to get relief from a law you feel to be unjust, you have to preserve your right – appeal, sue within the statute of limitations, etc. In fact, DOMA was held unconstitutional based on a tax challenge brought by Edith Windsor challenging an estate tax she was required to pay upon the death of her wife.
If I understand correctly, the IRS issued a statement saying that if you overpaid taxes under Windsor and you were still within the statute of limitations, you could get a refund, and that if you were outside the statute of limitations, they would grant you some retroactive relief.
This is mostly for gift or estate taxes – I’m not sure if there is any avenue if you could have filed jointly (and then appealed the IRS denial of your filing) but didn’t because you were law abiding or thought it wouldn’t work.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s worth calling Warren’s proposal reparations -as they’re a payment outside of the normal legal system to repair a wrong that isn’t compensable under the current law.
Something like the original 9/11 relief fund, where the government agreed to pay various injured parties but extinguished their existing civil claims against the airlines, etc., is less reparations as I see them because it was substituting one right for another.
So, I agree that this is a non-central case of “reparations” and that calling it “reparations” is an attempt by her political opponents to make her plan seem weirder and crazier than it actually is.
That said, she makes it easy for them, because while the responses in a place like this seem to be something to the effect of: “These sorts of reparations are sound and logical and based on actual observed wrongs that we can measure and compensate accordingly”, that directly implies that the other kind of reparations are, you know, not so sound or logical and not based on any measurable wrongs that can be objectively quantified.
And since Warren favors those kind of reparations too (or at least, she wants her base to believe she does), she herself can’t come out in public and say “No, no, these aren’t at all like those crazy reparations for slavery wherein people are proposing rural whites need to be cutting a check to Barack Obama for wrongs that were committed 150 years ago, these ones are actually proper and legit!”
@DeWitt and dick
How exactly is this an extremely non-central instance of “reparations” or an example of The Worst Argument in the World?
I agree that in the current political debate “reparations” is most closely associated with slavery reparations, but the term has much wider usage; indeed, its most common historical association is with war reparations.
Also, I think the difference between this case and slavery reparations is more one of scale and of the passage of time than a difference of kind. I’m not opposed to our paying reparations for past wrongs in general, assuming the victims and we can calculate damages.
This is the same argument that you shouldn’t over use the word racism, btw.
Connotations rub off in both directions.
@Eponymous
The central case of reparations is indeed that of slavery, which was an institution that ended a century and a half ago, whose costs are extremely hard to calculate, and the beneficiaries of which are long gone.
Contrast this with forking over some money to what gay couples missed their tax breaks: the US government is still around, the people who missed out generally remain alive, and it’s much less of a mess.
Conflating something most people find ridiculous with something that’s actually quite workable is too clever of a move for me to write it off as an innocent mistake. I’m much more inclined to believe it is, indeed, very intentional instead.
@Randy
Yeah, pretty much.
@Matt
Warren is, indeed, an easy target, but that doesn’t excuse being very uncharitable towards her in this case. You can disagree with this stated policy being a good one, and there are good arguments for why you would, but the way Eponymous is going about that is a very bad one.
By that logic, it’s reparations when I tell the cashier at New Seasons that I want a free apple because the apple I bought last week was rotten.
But, I think all of this is beside the point – the question is not whether Warren’s bill is “reparations”, the question is whether it’s “gay reparations”, and it 100% isn’t. This is not like the argument over “concentration camps”, where one side really does think it’s that bad and the other side disagrees. This is clickbait websites using misleading language to give readers the impression that Elizabeth Warren proposed a gay reparations bill, because they know that if they represented the bill’s contents accurately, fewer people would click on it. I think it is tendentious at best to steelman their language in this endeavour.
On reflection, I now disagree with our host, and believe a stronger candidate for “Worst Argument in the World” is:
“You shouldn’t say that word because it has a negative connotation that you believe is accurate but I don’t.”
1) I mean yes, I would prefer if people only used “racism” for the things I think are racism, but (a) I have never, to my knowledge, convinced anyone who didn’t already agree with me that they should use my definition, (b) interminable debates about conscious racism/racial animus/willful blindness to structural racism are not interesting or productive.
2) For that matter, the Worst Argument in the World principle means I can’t use the word “racism” to include acts of racial animus against Caucasians (and maybe Jews) because someone else will argue I’m unfairly importing negative connotations from racial oppression. (And for all I know they’re right, but we’re going to derail the underlying discussion trying to figure it out and failing.)
3) Reparations literally means compensating a group for a wrong done, such as through monetary restitution.
4) Lastly, The Categories Were Made for Man, not Man for the Categories.
Because reparations means “making of amends for a wrong one has done” and the wrong being compensated for here is an extremely non-central example of the wrongs done to gay people.
I’m trying to be charitable here, but this position really strains my credulity. Can you honestly imagine anyone who is not familiar with this bill seeing a headline like “Elizabeth Warren promises reparations for gay couples”, and interpreting it to mean something within a lightyear of the truth?
I think I’m in the process of being convinced to change the way I’ve written an article. I wrote the article for an audience that’s savvy but not necessarily expert in the general topic under which my article can be categorized. My article explores the potential downsides of something, and I left out the biggest upsides figuring my audience is almost certainly already aware of them.
A combination of my brother telling me to explore those upsides just as vigorously, and reading a separate article in which the author explores the downsides of something else but then explains (and specifically addresses) the upsides of it, has convinced me to at least think about trying to include more about the upsides of the thing I’m criticizing in my article.
I have been self-radicalizing into a depressingly solitary climate change stance: That of the Nuclear Environmentalist.
The more I read about grid storage costs, the externalities of fossil fuels, and the actual costs to end users of power, the more I get convinced that virtually everyone has their head way, way up their behinds when it comes to energy.
Coal is insane. Extremely destructive to the natural world, extremely destructive to public health, the worst possible choice, as regards climate change. Externalized costs outright exceed cost of production.
Nothing about natural gas makes any sense. Production at fracked wells fall off a cliff pretty much instantly. which means people are polluting aquifers and burning capital like loons to produce gas for.. 2 years, more or less. And the entire US grid is shifting to natural gas? What? Can someone pinch me? Have the time horizons for planning really gotten that short? Natural gas is pretty darn obviously going to get really expensive one day not very far removed. Also. Climate change. Still Terrible.
The usual renewable plans also look terrible because every time I try to cost out storage required to get that to actually work without natural gas as defacto backup, my eyes start bleeding.
So I am sitting over here in what feels like a very lonely corner and holding a sign saying “Build some damn reactors already”.
With a small, extra heretical subtext of “Stop pretending electricity production is a market. This shit needs planning”.
Physical storage facilities are apparently startlingly practical. But yes, I agree. Build the goddamn reactors.
Is making that much concrete practical?
They claim to be able to use recycled concrete for their blocks, which seems not-unreasonable. You’re only ever loading them in compression, and the dynamic loads ought to round to zero (noting that if you want to build one of these on a fault line you’d be better served by bending over and inserting the block up your ass). Initial costs will be large, for sure, but better than battery or gravity hydro costs.
Thing is, if you want rid of gas turbines for peaker power – which, yes, yes, we do, then even that price is a bit peppery.
Worked examples: You have a nuclear reactor you want to run at full load 24/7. This means you need to shift about a third of its output at night into daytime peaks. Lets call it 3 hours of production.
Enough energy vaults to provide leveling services to an EPR would thus cost 1650000 x 3 x 150 = 742 million.
That is not an unreasonable price to get full capitalization utilization on your reactor. Expensive, but it gets you off the hook with Russia, or whoever is your nat gas dealer, and it wont break the backs of the consumer.
If electric cars get really common, they will largely charge at night, or at least, you can certainly persuade your customers to do that, and you can make do with much less storage explicitly on the grid than this (Though really, you are still storing power – it is just spent on transport now, and part of peoples cars, thus off the budget of the utility)
A wind or solar based grid which is not just a coat of green paint on natural gas would need a lot more storage than this. The most optimistic example I can recall off hand assumed high voltage direct current lines turning all of australia into a supergrid, and that still required storage equivalent to 24 to 48 hours of consumption. Meaning, 24 x 150 x 1000000 = 3.5 to 7 billion dollars per gigawatt of generating capacity for the storage alone. Without costing the enormous interconnect, or the generating plant.
The people claiming renewable are cheaper are, unfortunately, either ridiculously wrong, or arguing in explicit bad faith because they have been bought lock stock and barrel by natural gas. If you look, you find so many donations from that corner to notionally green orgs.
I’ve seen proposals to out a high-efficiency grid across the continental US, with simulations and other evidence saying that this was a workable way to make renewables a lot more practical because the wind is usually blowing somewhere and the sun is (in the daytime) usually shining somewhere.
The Australian work was this type of simulation using actual historic weather data and calculating what modern wind and solar would have produced on a given day and location, based on wind-speed and cloud cover. As I said, they still needed a *lot* of storage, to cover shortfalls.
Then they triumphantly announced that they had gotten the storage requirements down to only 2 days, and I ran the numbers and.. Tears. Of. Blood.
Building EPRs, even if you assume they are all going to run over like okiloutou (Which.. kind of ridiculous assumption) is cheaper. Than the storage. By itself.
The continental US is actually worse than Australia for this, because it has much larger seasonal swings in production. And a whole lot more population centers that would have to be tied into the supergrid.
And.. There really are no other places for which this plan is even a theoretically available option, because they are the only places with sufficient territory under one flag. Europe is too dense – weather fronts routinely put all five hundred million of us under very similar weather, Russia is too northern…
With a small, extra heretical subtext of “Stop pretending electricity production is a market. This shit needs planning”.
Okay, but why do you expect government to do a good job planning it? I mean, the stuff we’ve seen w.r.t. energy policy from the feds so far doesn’t look all that great, to me. Ethanol subsidies are actively counterproductive but politically useful, so they stick around.
What would we need to do to create market mechanisms that would incentivize private investors to do this planning well? That seems a lot more likely to work out for us that expecting that Congress or a federal bureaucracy with a politically-appointed head and directives from Congress will do a good job planning this stuff out.
France.
Well, I don’t know how to plan around the fact that the US federal government is so stupid it makes the French look like winners.
I don’t know much about the way the French run their nuclear reactors, but France in general isn’t a good model for how I’d want to run basically anything.
Even so, the choice isn’t between inefficiently run nuclear and hyper-efficient coal, it’s inefficiently run nuclear and inefficiently run coal. The status quo ain’t peaches and cream either.
Isn’t France curbing their nuclear power?
france-to-close-14-nuclear-reactors-by-2035
From what I know, the issue is politics.
EDF exists. As does the Valley Authority. Mostly however, it is just that none of the various attempts to make electricity markets seem to work very well at all. The grid is the very definition of a natural monopoly, and it shows.
I mean, yeah, absolutely agreed. Maybe if we ever reach a world in which hundreds of millions don’t watch Homer Simpson bumble about at a nuclear facility, this might actually be feasible.
As it is, however, nuclear power is something unpalatable to the middle-aged respectful lady demographic, which is a key demographic of politics anywhere, so I don’t know that anything can be done.
If you believe that, you should be looking for a futures market that lets you speculate on a sharp rise in natural gas prices.
If I believed I could set a date on it more exact than the term of a futures contract, yes. That is probably possible, but would require me at a minimum to make a survey of how many wells are being dug, what the strike rate is, how much natural gas burning plant is being built, and then make a guess about how much national reserves and so on will get released when Wiley Coyote runs of the cliff. Not a full time analyst, so no, not doing that, despite being highly confident it is going to happen. ‘
The bet which is less likely to blow up in my face would be something like buying stock in uranium mining, since that is simply a bet that the world will at some point before I retire come to its senses, and no-one is going to get fusion working before then.
I took your
as implying a high enough confidence and short enough time interval to deal with those problems.
I can see the ambiguity in the time statement. Sorry for the insufficient clarity in communication. In this particular instance, what I meant was “Soon enough that it should damn well be a highly salient concern for anyone building generation capacity.”
Switching the grid over to more natural gas – which is what utilities are doing – is a decision which is really hard to back out of on less than a decade scale. Which means that if gas goes through the roof in three-five years, a utility which made that decision is going to be passing on some pretty darn unreasonable prices for, oh, about seven years after that point.
It could happen sooner than that, but if anyone wanted to sell me a ten year future on natural gas at something approaching todays prices… well, I would probably not take it because anyone that dumb is not going to be around to honor it. (also, just not a big fan of exotic investment vehicles, full stop. Buy, hold, do not read the stock ticker.)
I wouldn’t want to go through with the current nuclear designs. It’s too bad that research was limited by anti-nuclear feelings. At this point I do see some hope in research for utility scale flow cell batteries when you have relaxed requirements for storage mass ratio.
Brazil and Ecuador generate over 50% of their electricity from hydropower so they are candidates to have 100% renewable grid since the hydropower capacity represents significant storage capacity.
I used to be an anarchist, but over the past year or so I’ve become convinced that most Stalin-era policies in the USSR had quite a bit of merit to them. I changed my mind mostly by reading some of the works of Grover Furr.
Grover Furr?
“In Marxist terms, the Soviet Union was a socialist state. Communism was a historically inevitable future state that would supercede socialist government without another Revolution. The question was how near/far communism was.
NEAR! FAR! NEAR! FAR!”
Not the sorts of things you care about – but I’ve radically changed my opinion of the programming language called lua over the past 3 or so years.
I went from “the last thing we need is to introduce yet another programming language into our system” to enthusiastically rewriting a chunk of C++ code in lua(*)
It turned out that when I was finally persuaded to try it, I really liked the language. I also couldn’t find a better way to do the task at hand, for complicated technical reasons. To complete the set of incentives, the existing C++ implementation had such a horrible case of bitrot as to approach unmaintainable, and we had a huge backlog of features we needed, but no one dared try to add. And a complete language switch protected me from the managerial temptation to try to preserve any of the existing code. (You know the existing code is horrible when it’s faster to rewrite than to figure out how even a small piece of it works.) But mostly it’s just a really good language, for things that need to behave like scripts, but interface conveniently with compiled code, particularly compiled C code.
(*) To be hyper technical, the rewrite is 95% lua, 5% plain old C.
Never knew people used that for things other than game scripting/modding. 😉
Yup, as soon as I saw Lua I was like “oh hey that thing I’m trying to write WoW interface code in”
I’d be interested in what particularly you like about it: I started out hating it because of how different all the syntax is from the Java/C# I usually work with. I sort of like the simple data structures, but it feels like a very fragile language to me where you have to do a lot of checking to make sure things aren’t nil (really, you couldn’t just call it null like every other language?). Could just be because of the work I’m doing though.
Better than calling it (), with NIL as syntactic sugar.
Go does the same thing with ‘nil’ I believe. Agreed that it seems unnecessary.
#notalllanguages
Also, nil was first. It’s the “null” people that are heretics.
I think I spotted your issue.
What do you all think is the best method to store valuables at your home?
I recently bought a house that I intend to live in for quite some time. I’ve been considering purchasing a safe, but I have some concerns. Namely, there are lots of small safes you can buy in the $100-200 price range… but it seems to me that any safe that one person can easily pick up and move themselves isn’t secure at all. Even if it “bolts to the floor” for security purposes. Presumably, if I’m handy enough to bolt it, a potential thief is probably handy enough to un-bolt it, if they so desire. And the existence of a safe is basically a giant signal that says “VALUABLES ALL HERE, TAKE ME FIRST” to any potential thief.
A larger, professionally installed safe seems like an option, but those tend to run in the $1000 range.
Right now I’m using a very small “diversion safe”, which is basically a small, hardly-at-all secure lockbox designed to look like a common household object. I like the idea behind this concept very much (objects hiding in plain sight, won’t get stolen because nobody will even notice and think to steal it), but it’s very small. To expand my storage space (and keep in mind, I’m one of those people who thinks it’s a good idea to buy a bunch of gold coins) I’d need to get several of them and probably spread them throughout the house. And these things have another kind of risks – there are stories like “I had one of these that looked like a can of shaving cream and my wife threw it away!” and stuff like that.
So. Any thoughts/recommendations?
One home I owned had an accessible but unusable attic space. There was nothing up there except ceiling beams and a foot or so of insulation. That seemed like a place that would be safe from anyone but the most determined thieves.
Hmm, I have some of that as well. That seems like a decent idea. Maybe bolt the safe up there for double-protection (as in, they aren’t likely to find it, and even if they do, it will require some work to remove it)
Depending on where you live, watch out for humidity which leads to mold/mildew inside the safe on paper items, especially in an attic.
Hmm, I do live in an incredibly humid place. Is there anything that’s to be done about this?
Dehumidify the general area around the safe and keep it dry. Silica-type desiccant inside the safe worked OK but requires frequent drying of the desiccant and quickly became more trouble than it was worth.
I think for the “Bolt in the floor” type safe, the bolts are screwed in from the inside of the safe, so that the safe can’t be unbolted unless you already have access.
I logged in to say this. This won’t stop them from, say, using a Sawzall to cut out the part of the structure entirely, but they won’t be able to unbolt it the same way you bolted it.
One other thing to consider with a safe: make sure that tools useful for safecracking are secured themselves. For example, make them carry the Sawzall through the neighborhood, don’t have yours sitting out where they can use it.
This was one of the things that was part of a physical security inspection for military arms rooms. The inspector would make sure that your arms room itself was up to standards, but the area around it had to be free of unsecured tools as well. There are innocent explanations as to why somebody would be carrying bolt cutters around at 2230, but the MPs will stop you and find out what those reasons are.
Further, remember what the purpose of these kinds of physical security measures isn’t to stop thieves; it’s impossible for them to stop thieves. They only slow thieves down to make it more likely they’ll be caught in the act. You need to consider how often some sort of “check” of the secure area will occur as part of planning. For example, it may not be a worry about thieves using a Sawzall to cut your little safe from the floor if you live in a townhouse where the neighbors will call the cops when somebody uses powertools during the night (whether because they suspect burglars or because they think you’re being a dick for making that kind of noise that late).
On the other hand, even a vault constructed as an integral concrete-walled room in your house with a door built by Mosler will be unsecure if you live where nobody can see your house from the road and the thieves know you’re gone on vacation for a week. They can put in 8-hour shifts cutting through the door with a torch they hauled in on their pickup, and smoke weed in your living room on their breaks.
Alarms fill this gap by providing warning when there’s movement when there shouldn’t be movement, or some types of damage that correlate to intrusion, but they ultimately work by summoning somebody to stop the intrusion. An alarm will often chase off a thief by generating the fear that somebody will be by soon, but that still relies on there being somebody to summon.
I’d more trust a securely-bolted safe, even if it looks like a safe, over most types of “hidden object” lockboxes. Remember, thieves won’t be “looking” for these things, or gently moving things around, they’re going to be feeling for them as they toss your place. If you use one of those book “safes,” for example, they’re going to realize that it weighs and feels different as they toss all of the books off of your bookshelf. Similarly, it’s not hard to find a hiding place on a shelf in a back closet if you’re just raking the entire contents of the shelf onto the floor, rather than painstakingly moving things out of the way the way some homeowners like to imagine when they create these hiding spots.
TLDR: safes bolted down can be your best bet, but you need to consider the entire environment in which you’re securing things, not just the safe and its four bolts.
Edit: John pointed out one thing below that I meant to put in my stemwinder and forgot about during writing–if you have a concrete floor, you should be bolting to that. It’s not impossible to remove (especially if you don’t install the anchor bolts right) but it’s going to be sufficiently difficult that most thieves won’t bother (barring you gone for a week and a house not visible from the road, as above).
Yeah, obviously this is all true. And I’m not a billionaire here – I’m not needing super duper security and I shouldn’t be any more of a target than any other upper middle class person is.
I just want to at least put up at least a token level of resistance towards a quick smash-and-grab sort of robbery.
We had a burglary program on TV where ex-burglars would burgle volunteers. What I found very interesting is that the burglars would often use stuff that people had lying about, to get entry, but also to carry things out. One burglar even took a car with trailer (the keys were in the house).
So be careful with tools in a poorly locked shed with (power) tools or a ladder, because burglars will use your stuff against you.
Combine the two and make it so that an inconspicuous object is your safe and that’s bolted down?
For example an “unused” old fridge or dresser in the basement.
For more “interesting” ways, if you are not in any hurry to access the safe, have it contain a time sensitive outer lock (say, only opens at 10-11PM Mondays).
Place it under a sofa or other heavy furniture that needs to be moved to access it.
Place it above a ceiling light or chandelier that needs to be lowered to access it.
Just use the safety deposit box at your bank and hope you’re not in a heist movie.
A wall is only as secure as its shortest section. So you need to cover, as far as I can tell: unmovable, hidden and hard to open. Best compromise for low cost is to take a $1-200 safe and bolt it somewhere where it doesn’t scream “seif”. Anything from wardrobe to book-case with a couple of books in front of it to pantry to … wherever is ok for you can you can place something innocuous in front of it.
As for being easy to unbolt – not as much. Even the cheap ones have pretty good steel. I wanted to add an extra hole in one once to bolt it on one side as well, and I ended by giving up, even though I had the tools. Sure, for an equipped professional it’s probably not very difficult, but if you meet one you’re screwed anyways. For anybody else it’s a pretty decent setup.
Ah, and don’t keep the spare key in the same house. That’s just …
If you have a concrete slab floor, your small office safe should bolt to that, with anchors sunk deep in the concrete and the bolt heads accessible only from inside the safe. Depending on where you live, that may mean putting the safe in the basement rather than some more convenient part of the house. And you may need to rent or borrow a drill capable of sinking concrete anchors, but that’s still way cheaper than a $1000 safe.
If your safe or whatever is bolted to wood framing, then wherever it is that’s only a few minutes’ vigorous work with an axe. But most burglars don’t bring axes, so you may be OK.
If you think you’ve got a clever place to hide things where burglars won’t find them, you might be right. But they’re professionals and you’re not, so that’s probably not the way to bet.
How many professional burglars are there, as opposed to junkies hoping they can score enough to pay for their next hit?
Right. I’m relying on a mixture of “I’m probably not a target for professional burglars” and “If I somehow become a target of professional burglars, I’m screwed anyway, so might as well not waste a lot of money/effort on fancy security stuff.”
I need just enough security to discourage low-effort robbery. That’s all.
Ask a bank to store your gold coins.
https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/average-cost-of-safety-deposit-box
Having a safe at all is a sign, that you do in fact own valuables. So if the burglars are under no time pressure, then they’d take that as a signal to look more carefully?
I don’t trust the banks not to confiscate my stuff if they go bust (which I suspect many will).
I want my valuables within quick and easy access for myself, in the event of some sort of catastrophe. Even if that means compromising a bit against anti-theft security.
That seems inplausible. Is there precedent for that ever having happened?
(not many banks going bust, but then them trying to pay off debt with things that are not theirs)
Closest I can think off was when during the financial crisis, savings-accounts were frozen by the Greek government, IIRC.
But ok, you might get a Sanders-type and things might escalate.
Then how about digging a hole in some national park (or whatever makes sense), putting it in an air and watertight container, jotting down the coordinates and have peace of mind? Take pictures of each gold coin, if you want to keep track of it’s value. Store that on one of those cheapo usb-sticks with a number-lock on them.
Retrieve whenever you want to sell or add stuff.
Well the problem is that safety deposit boxes are not covered by FDIC so if somebody steals the contents of your box, you’re out of luck. In most cases the bank doesn’t keep any record of what you put in the box, which means it can be hard to tell if someone has stolen something inside. Sometimes security boxes get lost or misplaced if the bank moves, and without an inventory they can’t really tell whose boxes should be whose if a mistake does occur.
But the most important think is not being covered by FDIC. If the bank goes down, your bank account is insured by the feds up to a certain amount but your security deposit boxes aren’t and very well could end up liquidated to pay the banks debts. They probably shouldn’t be, but if the bank is gone and your box is gone, you don’t really have anyone to complain to or sue.
Yes.
The cited source explicitly states that seizure of safe deposit boxes did not happen and that claims to the contrary are a hoax, and that the contents of safe deposit boxes which came into the government’s possession due to bank failure were and are held for their owners to claim rather than being looted for gold (or anything else). The one cited instance of a safe deposit box being searched and its contents seized was pursuant to a specific warrant, which would just as surely breach Matt M’s private safe or any other such measure.
The loss of public trust in any mass seizure of safe deposit boxes would almost certainly cost more than any revenues that could be obtained from cash and gold therein, and would be unprecedented, thus ought not be considered a high risk at present IMHO.
If he’s going to bury them, he might as well use his own yard. It might well cross a thief’s mind that he has buried treasure, but it’s not worth excavating the whole lawn on a hunch.
Bank of America will damage or lose the contents of your safe deposit box out of sheer incompetence.
The banking industry has already done more than enough to lose *my* trust. The fact that the rest of the country hasn’t caught up is its own problem…
I don’t trust banks for a lot of reasons, but I would trust them not to steal my safety deposit box.
Couple people have mentioned safe deposit boxes. There was just this last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html
My standard heuristic is that if it’s in the news, it’s probably not actually something that I need to worry about: the reason an event is in the news is because it’s unusual. Dog bites man and so forth. Nonetheless that article was somewhat concerning.
I have a fire safe that is bolted to 2x4s inside the drywall, behind a painting and above a gas fireplace. (Note to thieves – there is nothing in it and I am not sure I remember the combination. It is unlocked, so please just take a look before you rip up my walls).
1) Unless you thought to show up with a sawsall, I don’t see how you could steal the safe in less than 20 minutes.
2) It wouldn’t be that hard to conceal the safe further – for example, put it in a cutout behind a built-in bookcase with a panel that can only be removed once all the books and shelves are removed, or dig out a space under the basement floor. (If you’re into that and can find it, I recommend The Construction of Secret Hiding Places, by Charles Robinson).
3) Generally, I see an in-home safe as designed to deter casual thieves such as houseguests, cleaning staff, wayward druggies, etc., and to protect from fire. You’re right that for determined thieves, you might be better off with a safe deposit box.
I get around this by owning virtually nothing that is worth stealing.
You don’t have to have nothing worth stealing.
Just less than your neighbours do.
That’s why I always try to lock my bike next to a nicer bike.
Just like you don’t have to be Usain Bolt to get away from a bear, you just have to be faster than your hiking partners.
+1
Note to self: Don’t go hiking in bear country with Usain Bolt.
First thing I would consider before I would waste time and money on a safe is security on the house.
Do you have an reasonable lock on your door? Do you have good door- and window frames? Can people see your door from the street? (Do your neighbours like you well enough to hassel with calling the cops when they see something funny?)
When thiefs get into your house in 30 seconds they have literally all day to find and open everything. When they need either half an hour, or need to make serious noise, to get in, most thiefs will think twice.
I mean, you’re definitely not wrong about that.
But replacing all the doors and windows is definitely out of my price/effort range at this time.
I don’t think a lock on the door provides much protection if you have windows people can get at and they are not solidly barred. I figure the main purpose of a locked door, short of serious precautions, is to force the burglar to make it obvious that he is a burglar by breaking a window, so he can’t claim that he just had the wrong address for a friend whose house he hadn’t visited before.
Well anecdotical evidence here, but it matches the advice the local police gives out regularly:
I witnessed the aftermath of four burglarys in my live, two times at a club house, two times at a former workplace. All four times the means of entry was an crowbar applied to a door or window frame, and the lock bar not beeing up to it’s task.
AFAIU, breaking and entering is a worse crime than trespassing; so by locking the door, you make sure criminals, if caught, can’t just pretend they wandered in by accident or something.
For insurance purposes, if you don’t lock the door and get robbed, the insurance will not imburse losses.
A locked door also prevents the drunk who came to your house instead of his from getting in.
It’s happened to me, once.
This happened to my mom, too. She came downstairs one Sunday morning to find a strange man passed out on her couch. After she woke him up (probably by yelling in surprise at finding a strange man passed out on her couch), he was very apologetic and stumbled out of her house and (presumably) toward his own home.
You would think that, but in my case the drunk’s key to his apartment (in another building in the same complex, but the same location within that building) worked fine on our lock.
So we came home to a naked guy sleeping it off in our bed with a few drops of Wild Turkey left in the bottle on the floor.
Yeah, so after the apartment complex management sent us flowers and paid to have the door re-keyed, we were still looking to move elsewhere as soon as possible. This was all 15+ years ago, of course…
There’s a Russian movie about that, based on the premise that Soviet era buildings are identical.
I have to wonder how frequent outright ransacking of a home is. I’ve had my home broken into once, and as far as I could tell, all that was missing was a big-screen TV and a digital camera. If I had had something hidden in a fake book or something like that, it would almost certainly have remained unfound.
Having worked in the professional door and lock industry, all of this advice about securing your house is both correct and useless.
residential house construction is not secure. It’s not built for security.
Your door locks are terrible, and can be picked or bypassed by any joker with even a tiny amount of practice and skill at lockpicking, which is easy to pick up.
If you buy better door locks, the door frame they’re anchored to is weak and won’t stand up to any reasonably determined person with a crowbar or a sledgehammer for any time.
Replacing your door frame is a non-trivial project, but if you do that, you still have ground-floor level windows that can be broken or forced open.
Fixing all those things about your house is possible, but starts to look like major renovation work for the sake of paranoia.
Your best defense against home robbery is good neighbors
Replacing a KwikPick with a hard to pick lock has the advantage that a burglar can’t come by, rake the lock, and spend as much time as he likes inside unsuspected by neighbors. But on the other side, while such burglars exist, they’re not very common.
Reinforcing the door frame so a single kick can’t work has some similar advantages, and if one lives in a high-crime area would have some life safety advantages (gives time to get up, get one’s gun, and be ready; fortunately I do not live in such an area as NJ will not allow me a gun)
If you can force the entry to be noticable (so the burglars can’t count on having a lot of time), and use a good safe, you can protect what’s in the safe fairly well.
I’m wondering if what you should do is get a small safe—and hide the valuables somewhere else.
Obligatory xkcd.
Live somewhere without endemic crime, keep backups of irreplaceable paper where possible, carry appropriate levels of insurance coverage.
This may sound snide but I very much doubt you can practically obtain secure storage thieves can’t get into. (I in fact recently attended an excellent talk by a physical security guy who had an entire section about how all consumer safes are awful.)
You can, however, live the kind of place you can leave your doors unlocked. Hell, I left valuable stuff on my front porch in Seattle for four years. I now live in NYC, but I still think I’m at minimal risk here. There just aren’t very many break-ins on tenth floor apartments in nice neighborhoods. If I get very unlucky, I have insurance, which is cheap. (That itself is a hint: State Farm thinks I shouldn’t worry at all about being burgled. Do you think you know something they don’t?)
Mostly I’m just advocating keep calm and carry on.
Hell, I left valuable stuff on my front porch in Seattle for four years.
So did I. It was one of the things I loved about Seattle.
It doesn’t work anymore.
Commercial safes don’t have to be good enough to resist a serious attacker to be useful; they just have to be good enough to resist the guy who’s broken into your house, who probably isn’t all that much of an expert. Similarly with other defenses.
You can’t afford to make your house a fortress, but you can make it a harder target, and most of the guys you’re trying to resist aren’t top-tier physical security experts who give talks at hacker conferences, they’re guys who dropped out of high school because it was too hard, and whose subtle burglary techniques involve kicking a door in, prying it open with a crowbar, or busting a window and climbing in. This is the same reasoning behind alarm systems, right? It’s not like these provide ironclad protection, but they may be enough to convince the criminals to move on to the next house instead.
Right. “Be a harder target” is my only real goal here.
Speaking of alarm systems, have there ever been studies on whether those little “Protected by” yard signs do any good?
On the one hand, I can’t imagine something as simple as putting up a little plastic sign threatening surveillance does much of anything at all to deter any serious crime.
On the other hand, I feel like if I was a criminal and I had to choose between two identical houses, one with the sign, and one with no sign… I’m probably picking the no sign?
From what I’ve heard, those are quite effective, for exactly the reason you give.
“Be a harder target” generally means visibly-different. That is, you need to separate two extremes:
* Look totally ordinary but resistant to the type of force the police will attempt to use the 1st time.
* Look totally imposing so that burglars decide your place isn’t worth the effort.
A bunch of fake (or broken) surveillance cameras outside might be of substantial value whereas book safes will merely minimize total losses after your front door is kicked in.
Get a fairly roomy safe, then fill all the spare space inside with lead weights?
Could be destructive towards your floor.
In a co-op commercial construction electrical engineering job I worked at in undergrad we had a customer who, in our opinion, wanted a severely over-designed battery backup system for their telemarketing terminals. The building structure had to be redesigned and the battery cabinets had to be relocated to accommodate their weight.
Heavy enough to be a major pain for burglars can still be well short of heavy enough to endanger the floor.
riiiiggghhhht….
I still do not withdraw my warning that you can inadvertently overload your building structure if you “Get a fairly roomy safe, then fill all the spare space inside with lead weights”, particularly if you haven’t considered that it might be possible.
If you’re keeping significant quantities of gold coins, I’d go for the kind of floor safe that actually gets set in in a concrete slab. These are not cheap (and installing them is less cheap), but you’re not going to get them out without a jackhammer.
And then get a cheap, easily stealable, safe screaming “LOOK AT ME”, with less valuable things inside.
Your house isn’t a bank. I highly doubt any would-be thieves are going to put that much effort in to worrying about what’s in a heavy safe. And if you live in a reasonably safe neighborhood, you’ll probably never have to worry about a break-in, especially if you do the bare minimum of locking your door.
Oh, I forgot to ask in my earlier reply, what is your address?
Is the stuff you’re storing something you’re going to want access to regularly, or is it your apocalypse gold? Because if it’s the latter, I’d recommend covering it with bricks and mortar and sticking it in a crawlspace.
I am surprised no one has mentioned coupling physical security with surveillance, e.g. a camera system. Yes, cameras can be destroyed too, but you can position them so that that’s awkward and will probably get you captured on the video feed first, no?
Eh, plausibly worth doing, but assuming a “smash and grab” style robbery, even if you’re able to successfully identify the person, the odds of the police catching them in time to actually recover your stuff are practically zero.
I’ve only had one break-in before, and everyone involved knew exactly who it was. It didn’t really matter or help that we knew. We told the police and they seemed to believe us, but I never heard back from them.
I just finished rereading David Deutsch’s “The Fabric of Reality,” and I’m currently rereading “The Beginning of Infinity.” I was impressed on the first-go round (especially the former book), but now I’m not so sure that Deutsch’s overarching vision of reality really makes any sense. Any thoughts?
I’m about 1/3 of the way through The Beginning of Infinity. It’s been a very long while since I’ve read something so breathtakingly arrogant that isn’t obvious bullshit. Most of the time when I read someone who is attempting to discuss, well, everything, and is so sure of themselves, I end up deciding the person is deluded at best, and severely mentally ill at worst. And most of what I read that I find cogent and sound is far, far more constrained in what it argues.
I find myself agreeing with probably the large majority of what he says, but there appear to be several books’ worth of arguments missing (not surprising, given how broad his range is). I am much less comfortable with grounding my understanding of reality in possible worlds, which seems to be one of his main tricks, but I find it difficult to articulate why.
What troubles you now?
Here’s one thing: in both books, Deutsch’s guiding principle is “take your best scientific theories as seriously as you can, and see where they lead.” In FOR, the argument he presents leads to…Frank Tipler’s Omega Point theory, which is now as discredited as any theory can possibly be. (For example, we now know that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, so no Big Crunch and no Omega Point, which would be problematic in any case because Tipler ignored black holes.)
Deutsch also seems to adhere to the axiom (and here I’m not so sure what he’s actually saying) that once the process of knowledge creation begins in the universe, via evolution and/or intelligent agents, that process is guaranteed to persist into the indefinite future.
The reason I’m conflicted is because I’m pretty sure that Deutsch is one of the two or three smartest people on the planet. On the other hand, I’m also pretty sure that Roger Penrose is one of the smartest people on the planet, and as far as I can tell he has been wrong about pretty much everything.
Well his tiles are pretty cool, you have to give him that. (When I have the time and money to spend on something this frivolous, I am absolutely going to Penrose tile a bathroom.)
It’s unlikely that we know who the two or three smartest people on the planet are, even assuming that there is an unambiguous metric. Think of all the people born into an environment where it takes the combination of enormous talent and quite a lot of luck to become visible on a global scale.
Ramanujan could, had things gone a little differently, have died in obscurity.
The stupidest part about Ramanujan’s tale is how he was discovered and still allowed to die young.
You are dead. But you didn’t die for nothing. You fought for something that mattered and made a real difference, but didn’t make it back alive.
What cause did you fight for?
Getting people to place their toilet paper rolls so that the loose end is facing away from the wall.
All gave some. Some gave all. God bless you.
I’m not saying I was the greatest person who ever lived, but I’m not saying I wasn’t, either.
The one good argument I’ve ever read for having the roll facing the other way is from someone who said that their pet cat liked to unspool the entire roll onto the floor by clawing at it. Reversing the roll so that the flap faces the wall prevents this from happening. Which means that playful cats and excess toilet paper manufacturers approve of your sacrifice as well.
It enrages me that I’m forced to acknowledge that this is a pretty good reason.
Surely this can be solved by not letting your cat enter the bathroom?
The Streisand Effect is a cat thing. Whatever room your cats aren’t allowed to enter, is the room they lurk just outside of waiting for you to crack open the door so they can rush in and play with whatever neat stuff is inside. And the bathroom is absolutely not the room where you want to bet on your being attentive and disciplined every time you need to open the door.
Some people also use the bathroom to store the litter box, so that it doesn’t smell up other rooms.
Yeah, my aunt and uncle used to do this.
Or not having cats in the house in the first place? They don’t come pre-installed. I checked.
Ah, yes. I grew up and always have lived in a house where the actual toilet has its own tiny room and the bathroom just has a shower/sink. I can see how merging the two could come with increased risk of cat-related toilet roll savagery.
I don’t even understand how people can even care which way the toilet paper roll goes. I replace the roll without regard to direction. Maximizing butt-wiping efficiency doesn’t seem to be a thing anyone should be burning calories on.
If I go to someone else’s house and they have it the wrong way round, there’s probably a 1/4 chance that I’ll actually reverse it.
I realize this says more about me than it does about them, but here we are.
If you come over to my place and reverse my roll, you aren’t invited back.
So 75% chance we’ll be cool, then. I can live with that.
Agreeing on a single way makes it slightly easier to unroll in the dark.
I don’t particularly care which way, but would moderately prefer to know which way each roll was placed.
Leaving me valuable seconds to practice my in-the-dark juggling-kittens-on-the-toilet skills while I’m evacuating, I suppose.
I have shared a bathroom where not everyone could be relied on to replace the roll when it was out or nearly out, and one where everyone could be relied on for that. I have a strong preference that there is always enough TP on the roll for the next person. Having achieved that goal, I am content.
Establish a norm that there should be at least two rolls in the bathroom.
It leaves a comfortable safety margin.
You people don’t store your rolls in the bathroom?
Sure it’s a couple unpleasant steps to the cabinet or whatever, but much better than the alternative. I thought everyone did this…where on earth are you keeping yours?
In the toilet roll room. It’s behind the servant’s quarters.
Some bathrooms are small? Mine doesn’t have any cabinet space. I could have stuck them under the sink, but I already have a trash bin and a couple other things under there; there’s no room.
@Nick:
If you want, specific storage containers are relatively cheap and effective.
This or something very like it is what we have in our guest bathroom
@HeelBearCub
Thanks, that actually would fit! Not sure it’s worth the $15, but it’s a good idea.
True centrists (monsters) stand the toilet roll on a shelf.
Vertical toilet paper racks?
link text
Vertical makes a difference if it’s in a corner or against a side wall. The true centrists invest in one of those reversible dispensers where you can change from over to under by twisting the thing 180˚ along the Z axis.
Why of course I died by accidentally killing myself wildly experimenting with black-market TMS-eqipment to unlock Savant-skills old course. For science!
Two choices.
1) Riddled with bullets by the FAA Toy Aircraft Enforcement Squad and the Secret Service while openly and notoriously disobeying the anti-toy-aircraft rule in the Trump Exclusion Zone.
2) Protesting the speed limit laws by finding the top speed of my car on I-80, while driving right past the State Police barracks. Killed in a fiery wreck after running over a stop stick.
OK, in the second case my “real difference” was counterproductive and in the first, probably nonexistent. Actually making a positive difference is for other people with skills other than mine, and in any case nearly all those people are opposed to me. But while my causes may be stupid, I’m not actually a rebel without a cause.
It makes me wonder. Would it be possible for a team of gajillionaires, let’s say, to work together to do something really major like “end the internet by launching a bunch of satellite-destroying rockets” or something?
Good news is, you’re not going to destroy the Internet by bringing down satellites. Satellite Internet is handy if you’re in a remote area, but there just isn’t a lot of bandwidth up there; most traffic is carried by fiber.
Bad news is, it’s a lot easier to cut fiber links than to build and fire a working anti-satellite missile. And deep ocean cable isn’t that much easier to repair or replace than a satellite would be, although taking a backhoe to land-based fiber would be another story.
OK, so our band of gajillionaires somehow manages to cut an awful lot of important fiber cables too. 80% of the cables, let’s say. (And somehow do something to make it even harder to repair/replace them, such that it would take a full 25 years before most people could use the internet in most situations where they currently do.)
Is it possible? Could a team of motivated gajillionaires do this? What about a team of everyday terrorists who don’t have that much funding?
Well, they would need to hire people to do the hard work (or I suppose do it themselves) and somehow keep what would need to be a fairly widespread terrorist attack secret despite having to include a number of people in the plot.
Yeah, I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t see how they keep it up for any length of time without getting caught.
The Sea-Me-We fibre-optic cables only took a few years each to build in the first place.
I bet even if you removed every single piece of internetworking infrastructure in the entire world, we’d have it all rebuilt in 10 years.
If you want to destroy the Internet, first you have to build JC Denton…
That has only a one in three success rate.
Couldn’t the gajillionaires just take over the world the old fashioned way and then order the countries to stop their internet relays out of their country?
It’s not like countries haven’t done so before in isolation-
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/8288163/How-Egypt-shut-down-the-internet.html
I suppose they could also invest in a lot of devices to “corrupt” the routing and traffic of the internet (ie. they could mimic other IPs and MACs and be numerous enough that it couldn’t be easily blocked).
Basically, if you start putting additional sign posts on every intersection, noone can reliably get anyway far.
I’ve tried to think of what I personally would want to die for, if I had to die for something, and I’m having trouble coming up with anything. The original question stipulates that my death, or rather the actions leading to my death, made a difference. But presumably there is some reasonable limit to how much good it did, since I’m a pretty ordinary man. So I’m not finding anything really compelling to throw the benefit to.
My family varies from well-functioning working class to the top tier of the upper middle class. It’s hard to say they are in any need worth dying for.
My country is Canada, which is a modern first-world nation. There are things that could be improved, sure, but are they literally worth dying for? Die to make the Canadian school system the best in the world? Die to make one Canadian industry clearly the standout in the world? Die to Canada a more active partner in its military alliances? None of these seem very compelling.
And stepping things up to the wider world, I have to wonder about making a measurable difference. How much of a dent do I put in petty corruption with one death? Or how much can I improve the prospects of the very poor with one death? How much can I reduce ocean pollution through one death? The problems just seem intractable.
It seems I gave you a harder problem than I realized.
I’ve tried to think of what I personally would want to die for
I’m guessing you don’t have kids.
That’s true.
I made a case that convinced everyone of the impossibility of philosophical zombies, and was ironically eaten by horror movie zombies immediately after doing so.
The United States does not, and has never, used the the “Imperial” system of measurement. We use U.S. customary units, which are very similar to the older English system. The Imperial system was a revision that Britain did after U.S. independence.
I’m curious; what’s the difference?
The biggest difference is in liquid measurements, where there are two significant differences.
The first is the choice of gallons. English Customary measures (from which both US Conventional and Imperial systems derive) have several different competing “gallon” standards (each originally an industry standard, with different industries standardizing on different gallons). The US Conventional Gallon is based on the Wine Gallon (128 fluid ounces), while the Imperial Gallon is based on the Ale Gallon (160 fluid ounces). Quarts and pints are defined relative to gallons (1/4 and 1/8, respectively), so US Quarts are 32 oz and US Pints are 16 oz, while Imperial Quarts and Pints are 40 and 20 oz respectively.
The second is the exact size of a fluid ounce. The US kept the fluid ounce size implied by the official definition of the wine gallon (231 cubic inches), while the Imperial fluid ounce was made very slightly smaller (about 3.5%) in order to make an Imperial Gallon of water at standard temperature weigh exactly 10 pound, and to make an Imperial fluid ounce weigh exactly one weight ounce.
The was originally a very slight difference in distance units as well. The US defined a foot as 1200/3937 of a meter, while the Imperial foot was defined as exactly 304.8 mm. The difference is minuscule: an old-style US foot is 609 micrometers longer than an Imperial foot. The US restandardized on the Imperial foot in 1959, with the old-style US foot redesignated as the US Survey Foot (still used in surveying, as the name implied, so old survey records (including property boundary definitions) don’t need to be updated). The ratio of inches, feet, yards, rods, furlongs, and miles to one another have also been the same in US and Imperial units.
How to hold people in position of power accountable? On one hand, more power means greater probability of doing something wrong despite and potential policy needs to adjust for that (or should it?), on the other e.g. a politician needs to hit rock bottom performance to face any consequence of his/her actions, which is probably not optimal either.
There’s a detection and a consequences-side.
For detection:
That works fairly well in the US with fact-checking sites.
Nobody however considers broken promises or lies (or half-lies) to the public treason or even particularly noteworthy.
I’ve heard it argued that Obama’s promise:
“If you like your healtcare plan, you can keep it.” was not a lie, because that just referred to the fact that the insurers were allowed to grandfather in old plans. Which of course they did not, cause they were unprofitable.
For consequences:
A shame-based honor culture like in Imperial Japan.
So a strong societal expectation (or at least one within the political elite), that if a polician in question lies, breaks a promise or behaved in an incompetent manner, he must kill himself to restore his honor.
I suppose that might lead to intransparency, because people don’t want their mistakes to be discovered.
So there’s a detection-problem, now.
Don’t know how the dynamics in actual Imperial Japan worked out in actuality, rather than in my “I’ve watched ‘Man in the High Castle’ and listened to some Dan Carlin”-understanding of it.
And in some situation with inadvertent mistakes, you don’t want the person in charge to kill himself, cause he’s got valuable experience.
another idea would be public precommitment with consequences:
“I will promise to hit the x% target by date and if I do not, I will step down. And if I don’t step down, I call upon all patriots and/or the Secret Service to assasinate me.”
I am not quite certain why that never happens.
Is it impossible to give yourself “skin in the game”, even if you would want to?
Does that not poll well or something?
I’d probably vote for that guy, even if his promised policy is diametrically opposed to what I consider sensible.
The proactive stance towards the Public-Choice-problem I’d value a lot more than any particular issus.
Dominic Cummings (the defacto Brexit-leader) writes and thinks lot about the issue (not quite in those terms and more about what he perceives as general incompetence of the powerful, rather than their untrostworthiness).
He’s fun to read:
https://dominiccummings.com/
“Why would you eat an animal when you can eat some chips?”
– Billie Ellish
This quote exemplifies something I think I’m seeing more often and I’m worried about: Lack of Empathy as a Status Symbol.
Clearly the rhetorical question is nonsensical. All Ellish has to do to understand the answer is to imagine her favourite food X, then ask the question “Why would I eat X when I could eat some chips”.* Clearly the answer is “because I love eating X”, and then imagine that, for many people, many of their favourite foods are meat or other animal products.
There are plenty of interesting arguments to be made against eating animal products** but this is not one of them. This only makes sense if the speaker is so lacking in empathy that they cannot conceive that other people might have different tastes to themself***. I don’t believe that the Ellish actually thinks this. I think it is much more likely the she is pretending as a social status symbol. She believes that she will gain social status by pretending to be less empathetic than she really is. She appears to be right.
I have also noticed a similar, related, phenomenon in which a speaker can gain social status by showing (honestly or not) an inability to differentiate between satirical and genuine expressions of views that are associated with their outgroups, even when such differentiation is easy for members of the outgroup. Of course, if nobody can make the distinction, then either the satire is not particularly good (it’s just an accurate portrayal of what it is intending to satirise) or the views of the outgroup may be somewhat fuzzy or indistinct, but in the cases where adherents to a school of thought can easily distinguish satire from the genuine article, but an outsider cannot, it seems to me that all that has been demonstrated is that the outsider lacks detailed knowledge of the school of thought and, therefore, lacks a degree of empathy for, or knowledge about, its adherents.
This would seem to me to indicate an oppurtunity for learning on the part of an outsider (that may or may not be worth undertaking), as it’s impossible to usefully argue against someone if you don’t actually know what they think. However, I am consistently noticing people holding up their failure to pass an ideological Turing test as some sort of badge of honour, and bragging about and often clearly exaggerating their ignorance about what their opponents actually believe. Although this is a bit more about specific knowledge rather than ability to empathise, the two are closely linked, and both appear to be part of a general trend in which lack of empathy is being seen as something desirable and something to be flaunted for social gain.
It’s possible that I only just started noticing this, and therefore am seeing it everywhere regardless of whether it is actually increasing in prevelance. I’d be interested to know if anyone else thinks this is happening more and more, or if it’s just in my head. There’s also a possibility that I’m not fully understanding the dynamics at play here. I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts generally.
* If chips are her favourite food, then just ask “Why would I eat chips when I could eat Y” – with Y as some other food.
** I am sympathetic to many of them, and am currently ramping down my meat consumption, though not sending it right to zero for complicated reasons. I’d rather not go into them as I view it as a distraction from the main point I want to make here.
*** Or the speaker does not experience taste preferences and eats only for sustenance, and does not realise that other people experience taste preferences at all, but this is unlikely.
Come on, isn’t she like 17? Development of true empathy (i.e. actually feeling and caring for other people feelings, not as a learned behavior of reacting to stimuli – anosmic people are often unaware that sense of smell exists, but they anecdotally act as if they do – sniff when presented with a flower etc.) takes a really long time.
I don’t know much about her beyond that she’s a current pop music (I mean in the general sense of music that is popular – not making any stylistic comment) star. I didn’t realise she was 17, in which case the lack of empathy is more likely to be genuine. Either way, the main thing I’m worried about is that such a lack of empathy seems to be viewed as positive.
I think we’re over-parsing a glib, offhand remark by a 17 year old here.
“Why would you X when you can Y” is as old as time and almost never truly profound, meaningful, or insightful. I think that holds true here as well.
It’s not about empathy, it’s about “17 year old teenybopper star regurgitates the opinions du jour” as to what is currently Down With The Kids to get them to buy her records (or download her music onto Spotify, however it’s done nowadays, I’m too old to know this stuff).
Few years back, she’d be on the “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” bandwagon; ten years from now, the 17 year old teenybopper idol of the day will be talking about how could you possibly be mean to plankton.
(Look her stuff up on Youtube – she’s an infant! She’s doing the whole ‘world-weary’ schtick that has whiskers, it’s been a gimmick for so long! Any child like that doing the Wednesday Adams imitation to show that she’s not a vacuous pop idol but a Serious Singer-Songwriter isn’t operating on a level of empathic identification with the outgroup, she’s reeling off the rote shibboleths of the environment she grew up in – there’s a cute family photo including twelve year old Billie on this site, before she became all languid Goth Girl).
People pretending not to understand the motives behind acts their community disagrees with is very common. It’s a good way to signal morality even if it makes very little sense.
Let’s say that you’re talking about something awful, like a rape in the news, with your friends. You want to position yourself as being exceptionally morally upright, but everyone in your friend group already agrees that rape is wrong so just expressing your disapproval isn’t enough. You could go for a hyperbolic disapproval, try to one-up everyone else’s expressions of moral outrage. But you could also play dumb and claim to be so morally pure that you cannot understand why someone would do that despite the fact that it has a fairly obvious motive.
Yeah. One of my least favorite reactions to any sort of negative/tragic news event is something like “I just don’t understand how someone could do something like that!”
Really? You’ve never been so angry you’ve thought about doing something bad to someone? I mean, sure, it’s possible you’re telling the truth and that you’re some sort of saint compared to wicked ol’ me. But I absolutely understand what motivates people to do awful things to each other. Doesn’t mean I agree with it.
I always figured statements like that weren’t to be taken literally in the first place. The intended meaning is more like, “That is a completely outrageous thing to do.”
Even if it’s not meant to be taken literally, couldn’t performative outrage of this form become reality? If your (proverbial your) reaction is to yell about how incomprehensible it is, you probably aren’t spending much time trying to comprehend it.
This. To me it signals not only “I find this thing outrageous” but also “Anyone who pretends to understand this at all is probably a bit suspicious themselves.”
Like, if you were at work and someone brought up a school shooting and said “I can’t imagine what would bring somebody to do that,” would you really feel comfortable responding with “I sure can!”
I think johan_larson hits the nail on the head, and find it unsurprising that people suddenly become unable to discern figures of speech when used by someone they disagree with.
FWIW, I’ve never been so angry I wanted to kill someone, or so committed to an ideology that terrorism seemed reasonable. Similar thing with (unprovoked) domestic violence from someone who actually loves their target, actually. I just… don’t understand that warped sense of morality. I have considered whether I’m lying to myself about this, but I’ve been through some rough times and I’ve never felt the urge to take it out on either the innocent or the people I love. I can’t get myself in that headspace.
Is that the same as understanding how they can do that? How someone can walk into a school with a gun and just start shooting up random people without somewhere along the way thinking “um… maybe I shouldn’t do this”?
Pretty much all school shootings seem to be by a student of the school and thus do not involve random victims, but victims who can be argued/rationalized to have a certain amount of culpability for the bad experiences of the shooter, if only by not intervening.
Imagine looking out of your 3rd story window and seeing a person kicking a dog/cat/koala bear, while other people on the street refuse to intervene. Would you get angry at those people who refuse to intervene?
Can you imagine someone considering themselves and/or those they care about in the position of that defenseless dog/cat/koala bear and getting very angry at the people who don’t intervene?
Then that anger can result in a desire for retribution: you let this major wrong happen and I will do a major wrong to you to punish you for it.
I might get angry, but I wouldn’t shoot those people. “I just don’t understand how someone could do something like that!” doesn’t mean, “I don’t understand how someone could get angry”, it means you don’t understand how someone goes from getting angry to doing terrible things to the people your angry with. I don’t usually do that, do you?
People quite commonly do terrible things to others, for relatively minimal reasons. Like bullying to the point where the victim contemplates suicide. That is not that far removed from directly shooting someone.
We have built civilization in a way that tends to minimize this, in large part by instilling a sense of outside justice, but if this faith is lost or never was present in the first place, bad things happen.
Is it not?
To say so smells to me a little like not blaming the mugger, because he did give you the choice between your money or your life.
Your main point may be correct, but having read the one sentence that you quote, I think you’ve misunderstood it. My takeaway is not that “chips taste better than meat, therefore eat chips”, it’s that “chips don’t involve death/cruelty, therefore eat chips”. She’s making an implicit moral argument, not a taste one.
I didn’t think that she was saying that chips taste better, but, by claiming not to understand why one would eat meat instead of chips, I thought she must not be admitting “meat tastes better than chips” or even “I’m feeling more like eating meat than chips right now” as a possible positions, as otherwise that would be the obvious answer to the question. It is possible, though, that I’ve misunderstood.
I dunno, my natural interpretation is that she acknowledges it’s perfectly possible to say “meat taste better than chips”, but thinks that acting on this desire is a Bad Thing.
That being said, this is the first sentence I’ve ever read from the woman, and I barely know she exists, so I could be just as wrong as I’m arguing you are.
My understanding was that it’s both — “hey, you can eat this even more delicious food, and as an added bonus they even taste better than meat!”
Yeah, that seems pretty clearly what the intent was.
It’s not as if she said “Why would anyone eat meat when they could be eating raw turnips?” or something like that.
Ben Wōden
Before I go down the rabbit hole of doing a websearch, is this “Billie Ellish” person significant enough for me to bother to know who they are?
She’s a new teenage pop star who just performed at Glastonbury. There, now you know exactly as much as I do about her.
Personally I dig her well enough, but I can’t see her being your thing, Plumber.
I kind of like her too.
I’m well past 30 and I still like new pop music constantly, and that fact kind of makes me cringe. I almost WISH I was a crusty old “music was better in my day!” type like my parents. What use is an old Billy Eilish fan? It’s like I’m desperately trying to stay hip!
Same here.
I know it’s all very i’m 14 and this is deep*, but she’s a genuinely talented artist.
I was kind of surprised by the amount of compound metre she uses for a pop artist. Then I read that she works closely with her brother, Fineass O’Connor, and everything made sense.
*Apart from the fact she’s 17, and the correct thing to be at that age is insane.
It’s probably more accurate to think of “Billie Eilish” as a band created by the two siblings. They both write. He produces. She’s responsible for all the visual creation. He managed to basically record and produce much of the album in his childhood bedroom, her recording the vocals sitting on his old bed.
They are both genuinely and incredibly talented. If you want someone who gives voice to a certain feeling of being out of place and wracked by sadness, and yet doing the best one can, the current album is pretty spot on.
It’s not pure pop, either. There are quite a few different musical influences. The whole album is also functioning as a concept album, as well, where the central theme as that each song is a dream over the course of a night.
Erratum: Finneas.
I always seem to double the wrong letter in words.
Related, I keep seeing stuff in the news about insect farming for human nutrition because save the planet or something. No. I’m not eating bugs. And I know the news execs who keep pushing this for the masses are not going to be eating the bugs either. They’re going to keep eating steak and so am I.
I’d love to eat bugs. But not when they’re super-expensive hipster-food, which they are at the moment.
And not as a steak-replacement either, cause steak is wonderful.
Tried them once and they didn’t seem something that could be more than a snack-food.
Though, I really like snack foods.
Despite vegans insisting that you can substitute meat/fish with other foods plus some vitamins while keeping your health (you can’t), there isn’t any suitable alternative to animal flesh/animal products.
Insects could be an incredibly cheap source of protein. At the moment, all insect products are ridiculously expensive (three times per kg chicken prices).
There are people out there who cannot afford meat, even chicken. Developing a product that contains all the nutrients of meat while being as cheap as beans would be a huge nutritional boon to a lot of poor people.
I would eat insects if they ever get cheaper than chicken (commercially grown caged chicken).
The specific instance just might have been light-hearted and not very serious? Don’t know the context.
But accepting your premise:
Isn’t a performed lack of empathy towards the members of the outgroup and a “I can’t even…”-attitude towards their customs an obvious way to signal your ingroup-membership?
Why would you expect this not to happen?
Given that I can’t find this quote online (although I do see it referred to): is it possible that it’s in a context where “why you shouldn’t eat animals” is argued in greater length? (Or next to a video of animal slaughter horrors, which is something that I got close to in my Googling on this.)
I think it would now be reasonable and advisable for Scott to revisit “You Are Still Crying Wolf”, along with the disclaimer he added to the beginning. I know this is culture war territory but I think it’s worth the price. I’d be interested to see whatever he says now, even if it’s just to explicitly say “I have thoughts but I don’t think that sharing them would lead to positive things on net” or even “I don’t think that there’s anything particularly interesting I could say about ‘send her back’.”
(I’ve posited those two possible statements not because I think they’re particularly likely, but because they show that even the most boring things he could say would still be interesting to me.)
Not willing to sink the energy into digging for it now, but Scott has been asked about this in a thread in the past week or so IIRC, and said no, he wouldn’t substantially revise his opinion.
EDIT: n/m, CTRL-F made it easy. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/14/ot132-open-shed/#comment-774412
If you think any of the circumstances behind “Still Crying Wolf” have changed, then you are still crying wolf.
I just went and re-read it, and there are two statements regarding “camps” that one could now selectively quote to pull a bit of a gotcha, but I think it’s clear from reading the whole piece, and with knowledge of the current unpleasantness at the border, that neither of them mean what one would have to present them as meaning in order to make out that they have turned out to be wrong.
In one case, he says that there won’t be “death camps”, and that’s still true. People can argue the toss about how best to use “concentration camps” all they want, but “death camps” is clear – it means somewhere you send people to kill them in large numbers, and that’s obviously not what’s happening.
In the second case, he says no “major demographic” will suffer internment, which is also true. The way illegal immigrants or immigrants awaiting processing are being treated at the southern border is very bad, but this isn’t the internment of a “major demographic”. It’s equivalent to, for instance, terrible conditions in jails and prisons (which are a much bigger problem in terms of the numbers, but less media-sympathetic), not to, for instance, Japanese-American internment in WWII.
This is the sort of media hysteria that made people cry wolf in the first place. Frequently during the 2016 campaign I would watch a Trump rally and come away thinking “that sure was nice. What a great big two hour long love fest for the country and really good ideas to make things better. Can’t wait to vote!” And then the next day look at the news and it’s wall to wall controversy because Trump had some throwaway line I didn’t even notice, but if you interpret it in a maximally uncharitable way it proves he’s Literally Hitler.
I watched Trump’s NC rally last week. Really fun. Everybody was cheering about how great the country is doing. Lovin’ that record low black unemployment and hispanic unemployment and all that stuff. I didn’t even notice the chant. But yeah for a little over 10 seconds a small section of the crowd (not Trump) shouted that they wanted to send Omar back to Somalia, not because she’s Somalian, but because she’s an ingrate who is extremely and unfairly critical of the nation that welcomed her as a baby and saved her from having to grow up in Somalia. Random people in a crowd saying they want to send somebody back to Somalia is mean, but really not that big of a deal.
And the outrage is entirely selective. This is the same woman who said “this is not going to be the country of white people.” I’m not a racist, so I’m not sitting here spinning dials on a demographic chart trying to achieve my ideal race mix for the country. She apparently is. That’s pretty threatening and racially divisive. I would never go to Somali and announce “this will not be a country of Somalians.” And jokes about political deportations are fine, so long as you’ve got the right targets. Captain America was rockin’ a “Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Republicans” t-shirt. You can buy our own ha ha isn’t that cute?! So cheeky. But the media doesn’t care about this. And pretty much rightly so. It’s not that big of a deal. But still, nobody’s asking the Democratic candidates to disavow Chris Evans because he wants to deport their political enemies. I’m sure he will be welcome to campaign for whoever wins the nom.
It is just another media created tempest in a teapot, designed to make people maximally outraged and minimally informed. The media is conducting psychological warfare against the American people. And it worked and is working. My wife’s best friend is now depressed and divorced because of what these people did. They worked her into such a frenzy in 2016 that she couldn’t talk about anything else and got depressed and broke down crying all the time after the election. Her husband of 20 years (who’s a democrat, but didn’t buy into all this stuff) couldn’t deal with it, grew distant, stopped talking to her, and now he’s divorcing her. Two little kids too. The media makes me so mad with this stuff. But hey it works. Psychological terrorism, but it works.
From what I’ve cursorily gathered, it sounds like “send her back” is the new “lock her up”. I imagine since Hillary Clinton is still at liberty, people need something new to be outraged about.
I think it’s a little different. People genuinely wanted Hillary Clinton locked up for crimes they believe she committed, and that other people are in jail for (recklessness with classified information). I don’t think anyone is seriously expecting the federal government to lay hands on Rep. Omar and move her bodily to Somalia. It’s just an expression of outrage at her behavior and attitude.
As you say, Conrad, many people (myself included) were exceedingly pissed-off about the whole email servers thing because of how you would be hammered as a minor government minion over shit like that, her being the boss makes it even worse, and her campaigning on her experience in office making her the right choice for president because she knows how to do this government thing was just the cherry on top.
And yet, Hillary is still walking around free (whatever she is doing these days) and isn’t in prison and there’s no real chance she’ll ever go to prison.
So the whole Omar thing may be in poor taste, but (a) it’s a political rally, people are going to chant slogans including ones about the opposition and (b) it’s not going to happen. This is just pearl-clutching by the usual suspects who need a jolt of outrage with their morning beverage.
I’m just saying “lock her up” was at least feasible. Wouldn’t happen, but could happen. “Send her back” both wouldn’t happen and couldn’t happen.
What about the three people born in the US Trump thinks should “go back”? You think he’d say that to a German-American like himself?
I think Trump is at times incoherent. I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed or not though.
Absolutely. Trump’s beef with these ladies is their apparent disdain for America and the American people. If a German moved to the US and kept going on about how evil and terrible America and the American people are and advocating we tear down the American political and economic system and reshape it closer to his heart’s desire, Trump would absolutely tell him to screw off back to Germany if he hates America so much. Doubly so if he said a cross word about Israel.
You’ll notice he’s not telling random Somalians to go back to Somalia. Just Omar. This is because his beef is with her politics and not her race. But the media is race obsessed, so we’re looking at 2016 Part Deux: no substantive discussion of issues, just the media screaming RACIST! 24/7. With occasional breaks to scream about sexism and tax returns.
That doesn’t concern you?
We are talking about people that were born in the United States.
Omar herself was quoted as saying that if a Somali immigrant was wearing a MAGA hat, Trump (and Trump supporters) would not demand they “go back.”
So she seems to disagree with the notion that Trump’s primary issue with her is her race or national origin.
Not any more than other politicians. As long as he does the right policy things he can be as incoherent on his twitter feed as he wants. If if if if if if if if if if if if if if okie doke.
And I’m saying I’m not sure he knew where they were born, or exactly how plural and singular language works. But absolutely he would tell somebody named “Murphy” born in the Bronx to “go back to Ireland with all the other leprechauns if he don’t like America.” And then he’d insult his mother and call his wife ugly.
And as Matt says, yes, he would not tell a MAGA hat wearing Somalian to go back to Somalia. He’d bring him up on stage and give him a big hug and put him in front of the microphone so he could tell everyone how much he loves America (and Trump!). Trump cleaves the world into “people who love America and people who can screw off.” It’s not race. But the media will never stop harping about race, so whatever. We are doomed in 2020 to repeat the absolute shit show that was political media coverage in 2016.
All I know is that all of the “Trump only attacks women and racial minorities” hot takes are going to look pretty interesting a year from now when Trump is debating Joe Biden.
I’m sure he’ll be totally respectful and deferential to his fellow white male in that situation.
@Matt M:
Trump attacks everyone. It’s what attacks he uses that show his particular set of biases and assumptions.
So where’s the tweet? Or are you saying no Irish-Americans have said anything to similar to Omar?
I have no reason to suppose otherwise. Irish-Americans are typically far more assimilated than Omar is.
Find one who has said something similar without a response from Trump, and we can talk.
[Edited so I’m not later accused of moving the goalposts: I don’t mean some random schmoe with an Irish surname; it ought to be somebody comparably notable.]
As a notable as a freshman congressman? Most aren’t terribly notable outside their districts.
For some reason, can’t imagine what it could be, these four freshmen congresswomen are getting tons of attention on talk radio, fox news, and so on.
So as notable as a typical freshman congressman or as notable as someone the right wing machine has decided to grab onto with its typical rabid dog obsessiveness?
I’ll accept any Congressman, freshman or otherwise.
That’s the metric I’d be more worried about falsifiability on, IMO. It’s trivial to find a notable US politician of Irish descent that has attacked Trump in a way that either got a response or was comparable to one that did, but to my knowledge Trump hasn’t responded in a way that plays on that racial angle.
The bailey people are interested in defending is the fact that Trump (or his base) views and responds to criticisms differently depending on the race of the speaker. So, exactly what words was Trump responding to? Specifying that would do a lot to nail down the target.
I’m as confident as I can possibly be that Trump would say anything about anyone who is on the other side from him. He criticized Ted Cruz for being from Canada and for Kennedy assassination woo, criticized John McCain for being captured in war and (posthumously!) for being dumb
Also called Rand Paul short and heavily implied he’s ugly, too, and gave out Lindsey Graham’s cell phone number in public so people could harass him. The man is a complete asshole to everyone, so singling out him being an asshole to POCs is not evidence of racism. Just further evidence of him being a complete asshole.
@Conrad Honcho
More accurately, he is a bully, who will go after people’s weaknesses.
Which I guess is totally different from all the various Democrats who gleefully mocked him for having “small hands”
This and unironically. The degree is not even close to being the same.
Trump is mocked mercilessly for his hair, his skin tone, his weight, the size of his hands, the implied size of his penis, his intelligence, the food he likes, the way he dresses and the way he speaks. And probably many more things. As many insults as Trump slings, there is no way he will ever catch up to the insults he receives.
He’s the other guy’s candidate; I don’t know that it was ever in doubt. The difference with his predecessors and would-be peers is where the stark contrast is visible.
If they were his political opponents and emphasizing their German roots? You bet. Heck, in an alternate world where that could happen, he’d be calling them Nazis.
It’s become obvious that Trump really is a white nationalist to the extent he has any discernible political views at all besides self-glorification.
It’s also obvious that he hasn’t got the political chops to accomplish much of anything on his own. McConnell has played him like a fiddle. There’s a lot of fire and fury, but the only substantial policy difference between him and Generic Republican is that he hasn’t invaded Iran yet.
What worries me is the obvious appeal his message has, and because he can’t deliver on it we’ll just assume the next demagogue to come along won’t be able to either.
BBA:
If you draw an arrow from the mainstream US center to Trump’s discernible political views, I think that arrow points in the *direction* of white nationalism, but doesn’t actually extend nearly as far as you’d need to be to be an actual white nationalist. I doubt Trump’s politics are as far in that direction as, say, those of Steve Sailer or Greg Cochran[1], let alone genteel white nationalists like Jared Taylor or American Renaissance, and certainly nowhere near the more overt Stormfront stuff.
For example, Trump seems to be 100% comfortable with having Jews as part of his extended family, and likes and respects Israel, which is a pretty noncentral example of a white nationalist.
Similarly, Trump seems perfectly comfortable with blacks, and I don’t see any reason to think he’s more prejudiced/racist against blacks than the median New Yorker of his age. This, again, doesn’t look like what I’d think of as a white nationalist.
I don’t recall seeing any rhetoric from him that implied a particular animus against Asians, either.
And similarly, Trump seems to have little or no concern with establishing/promoting a white racial identity, or a white homeland, or laws giving whites better treatment than nonwhites under the law. Again, I’ve never heard of him pushing for anything like this, and it seems like the kind of thing that we’d hear of a lot if he had said it. But as I understand it, that’s kind-of the core belief of white nationalists–the idea that whites should be deeply invested in a white identity and deeply concerned with the well-being of the white race.
What am I missing?
[1] I’m pretty sure neither Steve nor Greg would classify themselves as white nationalist.
There is a fair amount of evidence that Trump regards anyone who isn’t white as not fully American.
– Referring to Israel as “your country” when addressing a group of American Jews.
– Saying an( American) Judge couldn’t be impartial because he was “Mexican”
– Saying of the four congresswomen “Why Don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” It’s very clear from context he is talking about countries, not states.
That may be “garden variety” Archie Bunker style, “them kikes are smart” thinking, it’s not fully codified and thought out, but it’s still essentialist thinking about who “belongs” in America, and who America belongs to, and who doesn’t.
I’m skeptical of your interpretation of his statements, but even granting that he has an Archie Bunker style racism, that’s not white nationalism.
I mean, sure, but I think you are treating an analog measurement as if it’s binary.
If one harbors the belief that the only true Americans are White, and anyone else is inherently less American, that’s not merely pointing towards White nationalism, that’s very nearly there.
I have a big issue with treating a statement like “Trump is pretty comfortable with Blacks” as exculpatory. This misunderstands racism. History is replete with examples of people working alongside those they were bigoted towards.
That is probably because, throughout history “racism” has been much more like the modern “race realism” than most people (typically in both movements) would like to admit. There are many stereotypes that are true. There are also people who break stereotypes. This is why a lot of people who anti-racists describe as racist respect people like Thomas Sowell (on the softer side) or why you will hear things like, “He’s black, not a N*****,” (a real quote I heard in Boston).
@Clutzy
Such statements seem perfectly coherent if you distinguish between black skin color and ‘black culture’.
A person who hates ‘black culture’ can be fine with black-skinned people with ‘white culture’ and can hate white people with ‘black culture.’
Note that if hating a cultural trait that is strongly linked with a skin color is considered racist, then SJ advocates often should also be called racist for how they associate white people with a cultural trait they hate.
I strongly object to this. My grandparents may not have fit in on a circa 2019 college campus but they never engaged in the kind of race baiting Trump does.
If you limit the statement much more narrowly to people with Trump’s exact background you’d likely be closer. But most New Yorkers had more wholesome upbringings.
The hyperbolic “white nationalism” accusations are very played out.
Killed TPP, trade war with China, pressuring NATO to up spending, the wall is being built, greater scrutiny of H1-B applications, met with Kim Jong Un.
Do these sound like things President Jeb Bush would have done?
I was in a conversation where a back of the envelope calculation was made, and those making it made a mistake in a multiplication.
(something far off like 2,000×100,000=200,000,000,000).
I pointed out that this multiplication was incorrect and they rechecked themselves mentally, and came out with the same answer again, and insisted that it was
I knew my math held, mentally checking and rechecking gave the same answer every time no matter how i moved the numbers, but slowly felt myself not believing i did the math right. This was mildly terrifying, and still is.
I held to my math and after a minute or so they saw their mistake, which is nice, but the memory of that feeling of mental slipping still bothers me.
Any ideas how this could work, how to combat it, and when to combat it?
Think Bayesian, not mathematical. If you get evidence that your mental process was wrong, it’s perfectly ok to start updating on that evidence. That slip was something to treasure, not repress.
In more practical terms, if you get to a point where you disagree on something like that (or if you want to recheck your mental process) find a completely different way of verification. But do it with twice the usual attention – since it’s usually a bit more complex, I tend to have a higher rate of making mistakes here.
How is Bayes’ Theorum not mathematical?
As ways of thinking, in mathematics a proof is correct or not. In logic, an inference chain is correct or not. In Bayesian thinking, you never have an event with the probability of 1 or 0. If nothing else, you have a non-zero probability you’re a Boltzmann head. So everything is negotiable.
In practical terms, the brain is a (bad) Bayesian engine. The “math” part of it is at most a sub-process. It’s useful to think in math terms when the problem requires it, but most times you’re updating on everything – including if you math subprocess is working well or not.
Amongst Rationalists, “think Bayesian” is code for “trust your gut, and when you’re confronted with new evidence, change your assumptions as you see fit”. There are typically no formal probabilities involved, despite them being, well, the very essence of the Bayesian theorem.
I think you’re being a bit uncharitable to the “Rationalists”. Even without explicit numeric probabilities there is conceptual value to the theorem, and I think that’s what they’re getting at.
For example, the fact that prior probability is an major factor in the equation is a reminder to not forget about base rates, which many people do forget in many cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
You don’t need to go all the way to numeric or formal probabilities to be able to patch the much bigger gaping hole in one’s intuition of not even thinking at all about the background frequency/likelihood of something.
IMHO, the phrase “think Bayesian” could mean “apply a Bayesian view of probability” or it could mean “apply Bayes’ theorem.”
As I understand Bayesian probability, your quote is consistent with the first interpretation.
It is perfectly normal to get confused even when calculating simple things. There are three things you can do in that case.
One is to try to solve the problem in a very different way, so that if you were commiting an error, you do not blindly commit it again because it’s cached. For a multiplication of two numbers, there’s not much you can do, but in a real situation, when there’s usually some meaning behind the numbers, it’s usually possible.
The second is to ask someone else. A fresh point of view usually helps to find mistakes. My advisor helped a lot about this when I did research. But it can happen in much simpler problems too: “https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/64919/4918” shows an example that I encountered.
The third one is not always applicable. It’s to decide that the problem you wanted to solve is unimportant, and is not worth the effort for you to try to get unconfused. You just give up and let other people deal with whatever the issue is.
When I say I checked I mean ‘solved differently and found the same answer’.
I knew my math was right as far as math goes (and I’m not insane?) and still felt my brain changing it’s opinion. This is what bothers me, and what I’d like to understand mechanically
You checked twice and got A, the conversation partner checked once and got B. Without knowing anything else, there’s a 2/3 chance you’re right and a non-trivial 1/3 chance you’re right. Depending on context, it could move a lot either way – if the other guy is a math expert and I’m a high school student, it could well be under 50% that I’m right even if I double checked. Your brain did well.
I saw this very interesting yacht during the weekend. It seems to be mimicking a WW 1/2 submarine, in shape and due to the dark color. I wouldn’t be surprised if it would turn up in a Bond movie.
I like the article pointing out that the owner had the yacht painted to match his car.
Because of course that’s exactly what you’d do when you have more money than sense.
And I agree: this looks exactly like the Bond Villain’s ocean-going base from which they issue their global threats and implement their nefarious plans while cruising in international waters to avoid the law.
It doesn’t strike me as particularly submarine-like. It’s following the trend in yachts (and warships, I guess) of trying to look really sleek and smooth, but that’s only coincidentally like an old submarine. I was particularly amused by their “new hull design”. I can’t comment on the technical specifics, but I know how much research has gone into that field, and I really doubt there’s much space available for new and revolutionary hull forms.
It’s mainly the bow that triggered me, which seems fairly similar to submarines designed primarily for surface-running.
Supposedly, the hull is a sort of hybrid between a hull designed for planing (where the ship rises up and glides over the water) and a hull designed for displacement (where the ship is carried by the water and needs to push the water out of the way).
It seems that the main advantage is at intermediate speeds (more than can be efficiently met with a displacement hull, but below planing).
It seems plausible that this use case has gotten relatively attention, as neither transport ships, large military ships or speedboats have this use case.
Counterpoint: the attributed maximum speed of that yacht is 19.5 kts. This is slower than the typical warship of, oh, 115 years ago. Yes, it’s a relatively short ship, which means that hull speed is pretty low, but the article you link classifies semi-displacement hulls as operating with Froude numbers above .5 and below 1. By my math, this thing has a maximum Froude number of .45. The alternative hull speed calculation gives me 17.1 kts. 19.5 kts on such a hull is somewhat faster than optimum for good fuel consumption, but it’s way better than, for instance, all WWII destroyers.
Of possible interest, Argdown is an attempt at a language similar to markdown for mapping which points support/oppose which other points in an argument. It’s not clear to me whether this would be discourage/highlight when people talking past each other; someone might need to try using it in an adversarial collaboration to really find out.
This assumes that people want to argue in ways that make their argument clear to their opponent most of the time, which isn’t the case. Lots of schools of thought encourage writing in non-formal prose that communicates points that can’t be engaged with line-by-line. Developing this syntax is pointless when no one will use it to write the latest clicks-driving hot take essay. And even for more good faith effort, it’s not proven that a more formal style is more convincing. Of everyone’s favorite SSC posts, which are written in a more formal way, and which are more effective for adopting a prose closer to fiction, and which would maintain their reading enjoyable-ness in this language?
If anyone tries to map an essay into this language, it will just devolve into arguments over if the subjective interpretation was accurate to the writing.
People have been developing ways to record line-by-line debates ever since competitive debate was created. For formal argumentation, where both parties are on the same footing, the conventions are already there, already quite useful, and no need to learn a new syntax without years of practical testing behind it.
What proportion of those who McCarthy accused do you suppose were guilty of anything at all resembling collaborating with the USSR? Do you think it was higher, than, say, 1%? If not, don’t you think you should be a little more worried about false positives?
Yes, there were real actual genuine Soviet spies and moles. Yes, they needed to be rooted out. Do you have any evidence that McCarthy had any success in doing that?
TLRD:
1. There really were Soviet/Communist agents in the United states in the 1950’s.
2. People who dismiss any discussion of these agents as “McCarthyism” are often sympathetic to socialism or communism.
3. Joseph McCarthy was a asshole who used a legitimate concern for personal power, and left a ugly less behind himself.
Also, as soon as superweapons are created and set down on the table, they start getting used in day-to-day battles for political power and audience share and internal political disputes within organizations. Even though it’s pretty obvious that doing so dilutes their effectiveness and probably is socially destructive, superweapons are effective, so they get used.
It’s fairly clear from history that McCarthy picked “anti-communism” out of several other choices of issues he wanted to use to get elected. He may conceivably have started with some actual knowledge about some actual communists in government, but because once you do that it’s easier to raise the ante than actually provide the (non-existent) proof. He was a raging bully and severe alcoholic, neither of which helped his credibility. As time went on his accusations became ever more fanciful, including literally making up numbers on the podium. The Republican Party sort of tolerated him as long as he was attacking Democrats, but eventually he became sufficiently unhinged to suggest that maybe even Eisenhower was a communist sympathizer. Attacking the Army (for being mean to one of his subordinates, who had been drafted) was the thing that went public via televised hearings, but his was already well on the downward slope before them.
Nixon’s accusations against Alger Hiss were anti-communist, but targeted and backed up with actual evidence. In the end, after the fall of USSR, Nixon’s accusations were confirmed by revealed Soviet documents (not that there was any doubt after decades of debunking).
There has, to my knowledge, never been any indication that any of McCarthy’s targets were actually Soviet agents. It’s possible (even likely) that some of them were actual communists: there were plenty of communists in the US government, the media, publishing, etc. McCarthy didn’t find any of them.
The analogy for our current culture war is that when you accuse people of being racist (or any other current mortal sin) it gets you lots of credit from your side if your targets are on the other side. Once you start accusing people on your own side your “allies” start re-thinking your usefulness.
We discussed this several OTs ago and what I took home from it was that McCarthy was emphatically not vindicated, because even though there were indeed some Communist spies attempting to infiltrate US institutions, there weren’t nearly enough and they weren’t nearly successful enough to substantiate his accusations, which were almost entirely disproven.
Who else read the book, “Days of Rage”? Of all the things Scott has linked, that has had the most lasting impression on me. It’s amazing.
Highlights from the book:
The Weather Underground (then the Weathermen) take over a college democrats group in their nationwide election, with the aim of becoming an American Viet Cong.
Rather than run the organization, the predominantly white, college-educated leadership puts all their hopes in a protest in Chicago, called the Days of Rage. The idea was that Americans would rise up against their government at the behest of these students in a Million-Man-esque protest march. The idea did not go over well with other aligned groups. As Burroughs puts it:
It wasn’t just aligned groups that disliked the Weathermen’s idea; they had no success in rallying the proletariat before the Days of Rage. From the book:
Also during this time their (much nicer) offices get raided routinely by the Panthers, including a smash-and-grab at gunpoint. They decide to smash monogamy by breaking up all existing relationships in the group and having orgies, which bring lasting morale problems.
They detonate a bomb at Haymarket Square in Chicago, insinuate to the press that thousands upon thousands of people are coming to the Days of Rage, and when the day comes they get about 200 people to show up, give or take a few. They smash a bunch of stuff in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago and get arrested, which will become important later.
Then they go “underground”, giving up their identities and making fake names. The once-large college association shrinks down to 150 people as they remove people who aren’t committed to live on the run. The leadership leaves Chicago for San Fransisco.
Bombings continue. They set a bomb for a police shift change in Berkeley, but only succeed in getting shrapnel in the arm of one cop. They are suspected of killing a San Fransisco police sergeant in another bombing, though they don’t take credit for it. They fail at two more bombings targeting police in Detroit and Cleveland. They set a couple bombs in New York, targeting police and the military, that hurt no one. Pride wounded by their failure to kill only one police sergeant, they target a military ball at Fort Dix. They butcher the bomb-making and blow up the New York brownstone that they were using as a safehouse, killing three Weathermen. At this point they have killed one of the opposition, and three of their own.
The botched Fort Dix bombing makes them realize they have no taste for actual violence where they could get hurt. From Burroughs:
They hit on a new strategy of setting small bombs off in government buildings and monuments, and altering authorities anonymously before the bombs go off. This takes up the bulk of their time. Eventually, they realize that no one is paying attention to them LARPing as Viet Cong and begin to have doubts about having shed so many members of their old student organization. The organization, Students for a Democratic Society, hates them for having almost destroyed the organization so many years ago. To get back into their good graces, they write a long manifesto called Prairie Fire, with the hopes that the book will catch on and they can eventually claim authorship. Instead, SDS members figure out that the group is the Weather Underground, and rejects them entirely. Most of the group eventually faces legal action, but surprisingly not for the hundreds of bombs; most answer to old charges from the Days of Rage.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/23/links-117-inaugurl-address/
Several things stand out after reading the book. The first is that the Weather Underground completely fails as a violent group; they kill one (maybe two?) people, and three of their own by accident. Then they attempt to pretend that they were never interested in bombs as weapons, only in bombs as a means to make a statement. By contrast, the various Black Panther offshoots and Puerto Rican independence groups are far more successful, with far less resources. Also, due to their methods (bombing public areas and government buildings) there is a culture of having metal detectors and “if you see something, say something” that exists to this day. They are extremely full of themselves but fail harder at achieving their goals than any group I’ve ever heard of.
Blowing themselves up is the perennial risk of amateur bomb-makers, and even more experienced revolutionary/paramilitary groups still have trouble with it.
As for the inability to mobilise the workers, it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a group working on theory and LARPing as revolutionaries; I wasn’t aware that they started off as a college group but I’m not one whit surprised to learn it.
And while they might have yearned to be France in 1968, they picked the wrong time to try and get the American working class to rise up – when the good times were rolling, jobs were plentiful, the economy was booming for the workers to get all those consumer goods in the 60s and early 70s.
The description of the ideological splits irresistably reminds me of similar splitting amongst Irish left parties, especially the Official and Provisional IRA split (with the same split concurrently amongst Sinn Féin) between those moving towards Marxist-Leninist principles and those adhering to traditional Republicanism as the aim and goal. But where the Official IRA eventually failed as a revolutionary armed group, the political devolution into what would ultimately become the Workers’ Party was successful (in that the party still exists today), and the Provos were much more effective in the armed struggle.
The Weathermen, by contrast, seem to be neither fish, flesh nor fowl in what they achieved. I’ve always thought America was lucky never to have something like the Northern Ireland Troubles kicking off, and I think in large part that was due to the success of the Civil Rights movement; when definite and noticeable concessions are being made, this reduces the impetus to take to the streets, undercuts support for armed struggle, and the majority of people not affected directly by the disadvantages (the white population) accept, whether willingly or grudgingly, that the law is now changed.
due to their methods (bombing public areas and government buildings) there is a culture of having metal detectors and “if you see something, say something” that exists to this day
I don’t recall hearing “see something say something” or seeing ubiquitous metal detectors prior to 9/11.
I saw them pre-911; the change post-911 for me was that they spread from high-rises, government buildings, and public transportation to many more places.
Where in the US are there metal detectors for public transportation?
Reminds me of the French resistance groups, who mainly busied themselves with fighting other resistance groups:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO-Ocueehfc
Speaking as someone who’s been peripherally involved in a fair bit of fairly far-left activism (though not much for close to 20 years now), people like this are the fucking worst. Almost exclusively young men between the ages of 18-30, no actual positive agenda at all, willingness to use any tactics at all in service of… something.
Buncha fucking meatheads. They make life difficult for those of us who actually wanted to accomplish things, and piss off the normies.
This somewhat surprised me. In my limited experience (admittedly more recent than yours), there are plenty of young women between the ages of 18-30 there too.
Among the left who are looking for physical confrontation? Perhaps, but I didn’t meet many.
The West German “Rote Armee Fraktion” terrorists had a lot of women. Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Birgit Hogefeld, Astrid Proll, and many more.
But perhaps more to the point of this comment, in 1974 Jean-Paul Sartre visited Andreas Baader in prison and supposedly said afterwards: “An a***hole.” I believe him. The terrorist group was largely driven by toxic group dynamics, like a schoolyard bully gang.
I also kind of remember Michel Foucault saying something like the terrorist groups being an anachronism, left over from 19th century “fight against the state”, but their tactics completely obsolete in 70ies Western civilization. But I’ll have to look that up again.
Fair, I may perhaps have been mixing with an unrepresentative crowd. (I was never any kind of active member of these groups, and was more peripherally talking to them when they were involved in, e.g., the same protests I was.)
There’s an interview Geoffrey Miller did with an antifa guy. He calls it a team sport and says that those demonstrations are very fun.
One thing that I’m not entirely clear on is why the Weathermen / Weather Underground thought that the American working class was ready to rise up in communist revolution. Obviously a bunch of bougie college kids aren’t going to have their finger on the pulse of working America, but this wasn’t exactly a new problem for socialist ideology.
From what I understand, Marcuse was hugely influential at this time and he correctly identified that any revolution in a western capitalist country would have to be a revolution by the dregs of society against both workers and owners together. That’s been the definitive playbook of western Marxists since at least the 1970s, relying on deviants, foreigners, and petty criminals as their muscle rather than trying to recruit native workers.
Does the book go deeper into their thought process and ideology there? Maybe this was the turning point in the radical left’s adoption of that strategy but I had assumed that it was older.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but IIRC, they were expecting a largely black revolution, reinforced by conscientious white youth such as themselves. And in fairness, 1969 would have been a relatively easy time to believe that; race riots had been in the news for years. As time went on and the revolution failed to materialize, though, “reinforced” started to drift into “precipitated” and then “spearheaded”.
Semi-unrelatedly, one of the most striking things about the book, to me, was how similar the Weatherman rhetoric was to contemporary social justice ideology. The language has evolved somewhat, but the core concepts have stayed the same for nearly fifty years.
I guess I should have guessed from the involvement of the Black Panthers, but I was thrown off because everyone was described in terms which obscured their race. Race was extremely salient at the time (not implying that it isn’t today) so not mentioning it is very misleading.
But yeah, that seems closer to the modern plan. Ayers and company weren’t as practiced then as they became but it seems like they found their footing in the intervening decades.
One of the funniest anecdotes from the book is that some of the Weathermen were received in Cuba before they went underground, where they were visited by a Viet Cong delegation who advised them to begin armed struggle. Even the Viet Cong told them to make sure they weren’t too far outside the mainstream. Then they promptly ignored that advice and continued even after poor turnout at the Days of Rage proved them wrong. So it sounds like the actual communists warned them about this exact problem too.
But to be honest, it sounds like everyone outside their group hated the guts of the Weather Underground and everyone like them. The Panthers showed up to steal stuff from Weatherman offices, but eventually that relationship soured. The aboveground folks in SDS hated the Weathermen and forced them to do Maoist-style confessions of their sins for hours when they reintegrated into normal society. In one instance a white group was able to link up with a black revolutionary group, they kept them entirely at the fringes of their group (literally calling them the “white fringe” and keeping them around to talk to cops and so on). In another instance, a white group was headed up by an actual crazy person, because he was the only black former inmate who would join their club.
While that’s an accurate description of Marcuse and his influence on the 60s New Left, I’d dispute the “correctly” part. I don’t think his analysis was correct at all, either from a Marxist perspective or from a purely practical point of view.
From a Marxist point of view, the lumpenproletariat (criminals, beggars, and social deviants) had no revolutionary potential because they were solely concerned with their own short-term individual survival. This made them more likely to work against the proletariat than join them, either through criminal activities that primarily targeted the working class (banditry, burglary, fraud, etc.) or by working with the bourgeoise as scabs and extralegal enforcers. Marx himself seemed to have a strong disdain for lumpenproles, and would’ve been disgusted and appalled by the idea of lumpens rising up against workers.
In this regard, Marx seems to have been correct: In developed areas, attempts at organization by lumpenproles typically lead to the formation of gangs and mafias that operate within the context of capitalism rather than trying to overthrow it. In undeveloped areas, they may cause a reversion back to pre-capitalist tribalism, warlordism, and barbarism (as with the cartels in Mexico and Columbia, or the various tribal micro-states in Somalia and Afghanistan), which Marx would’ve considered to be even worse than capitalism. And disorganized lumpenproles do indeed tend to sell out to the capitalist class by working as scabs, driving down wages, and so forth. Not so much as hired muscle for factory owners anymore, but I have no doubt that was the case back in the 19th century.
And from a pragmatic perspective, a revolution comprised entirely of the dregs of society has virtually no chance of succeeding. For revolutions to succeed, they need the support of a sizable percentage of the armed forces (the military, the police, local militias), an overwhelming majority of the population, or some mix of both. A small minority of outsiders simply doesn’t have any way of gaining or holding political power. At most, they could successfully disrupt the existing system through sabotage and terrorism. But even if they managed to cause a systemic collapse, they wouldn’t end up on top, they’d just be paving the way for another group that actually had social and/or military support to come out on top. And given that most lumpenproles don’t have the knowledge, education, or skills required to be competent saboteurs, it’s highly unlikely they’d even get that far.
Sure, as I understand it that was exactly Marx’s argument. Orthodox Marxist theory agrees with you there.
The problem is that orthodox Marxist theory is largely garbage, and Marxist practice has only lead to successful revolutions to the extent that it was heterodox. For example, revolutions in single pre-industrial countries lead by a vanguard party.
Marxists who actually wanted to see a revolution in the west realized that twentieth century western workers were pretty content all things considered. Certainly too content to take up arms against their prosperous societies. The only people discontented enough were the outcasts of society.
Sure, they’re losers and there just aren’t enough of them to make a proper army. But guys like Bill Ayers did actually end up riding their ability to stir up underclass violence right into the halls of power of the most powerful nations in the world where they’ve been implementing their ideas essentially unopposed for decades now. Compared to, say, the Baader-Meinhoff gang it’s pretty obvious which one was the winning strategy.
that’s not at all heterodox. Marx specifically wrote about the possibility of revolution in russia, speculating that the tradition of peasant communal land ownership was enough to develop the class consciousness necessary for revolution, and it’s that, class consciousness, that marx thought was the essential ingredient for the socialist revolution, not material development.
I agree with you that the Orthodox Marxist view is wrong, I just think Marcuse’s theory was even more wrong.
Granted, Marcuse’s critique of Orthodox Marxism was correct: Modern first-world nations are prosperous enough that workers are generally too comfortable and too wealthy (in an objective historical sense, even if they’re poor in a relative sense) to risk everything by trying to overthrow the capitalist system. But Marcuse’s proposed solution to this problem was nonsensical. There is no way that a revolution of the lumpenproletariat could ever bring about the establishment of a proper socialist state, both because such a revolution could never succeed in the first place, and because lumpenproles are even less inclined to socialism than modern workers are. In Marxist terms, they don’t share the class interests of the proletariat, so even if they did take power (which they can’t), why would they implement a system designed for the benefit of proletarians?
Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he was correct in his assessment of the lumpenproles. Marcuse’s strategy is one that’s inherently doomed for complete and total failure from the outset, even more so than Orthodox Marxism.
@Cassander: I don’t know if I’d count a few letters Marx wrote toward the end of his life as “Orthodox Marxism,” especially when they contradict the bulk of his published academic work. In his earlier writings, he was actually supportive of capitalist efforts to modernize pre-industrial societies: With regards to development in Russia, he wrote that he was delighted about the fact that “all that trash [i.e. agrarian peasant communalism] is coming now to its end,” and with regards to British colonization in India, he said “these idyllic [traditional Indian] village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition.” He also viewed the Union victory in the American Civil War as a triumph of industrial capitalism over the barbaric feudalism of the Confederacy’s agriculturally-centered slave system, and was highly critical of the “primitive communism” of Native American hunter-gather tribes as well.
It was only in his old age that he started to develop sympathy towards pre-industrial peoples, and started entertaining the possibility that their own anti-capitalist sentiments could lead to a socialist revolution. Even then, he remained uncertain about whether it was really possible to skip the capitalist phase of societal evolution, and waffled back and forth on the issue without ever reaching a conclusion.
This has a surreal hilarity to it. The Weathermen sound like a faction of losers in Mad Max that would get blown up to establish how tough the bad guys are, but with Communism and nice offices instead of hydraulic despotism and cars.
It makes the Black Panthers look good that they shout down these white college kids for coming to them with plans for political violence like “If we fight the Chicago PD during a large enough protest, we can order a Communist revolution into existence!”
It makes me glad I wasn’t alive in 1968. I can’t believe things are so bad in the United States if, in living memory, race riots were a thing and left-wing agitation was big enough to prevent a Democratic President from running for re-election and turn the Convention into a riot (after the assassination of the previous President’s brother while on campaign, even). 1968 through Deng Xiaoping taking power seem like a real nadir in civic life.
There’s precious little evidence that most of the Americans named in the Venona papers were anything other than objects of Soviet attention and surveillance. They named Fiorello LaGuardia, for god’s sake. And even if they were, it was deeply, fundamentally wrong for McCarthy to harass his fellow Americans without evidence of any wrongdoing on their part. Arguably, he did the cause of anti-Communism considerable harm by accusing people without evidence. He turned his own name into a slur, for God’s sake.
A number of people have already posted that they’re reading/have read Stephenson’s latest (Fall; or, Dodge in Hell). I’ve just finished it, in the sense that I got halfway through, started skimming larger and larger chunks at a time, got to the last two hundred pages and realized I was skimming substantially more than I was reading and didn’t care enough to invest the effort to find out how it ended. Basically, I felt that he wasn’t playing to his strengths, and many of the world’s basic conceits made so little sense that I couldn’t get invested in it. He was just chucking crap at the wall without bothering about internal consistency because he wanted the plot to go in a certain direction. And I usually love NS, even if I wasn’t a big fan of his work since Reamde (the magnificent first two-thirds of Seveneves being ruined by the utter mess of the end). Rot13ing for spoilers.
Fb, Qbqtr vf oenva-qrnq. Gung zrnaf uvf oenva QBRF ABG JBEX. Ohg gurl fcraq ovyyvbaf bs qbyynef qrirybcvat n jnl gb fpna vg, juvpu vf gur ovbybtvpny rdhvinyrag bs znxvat n cresrpg pbcl bs gur pbagragf bs n serfu-sbeznggrq uneq qevir. Sbe fbzr ernfba, gur qvtvgvmrq pbcl abg bayl jbexf va fvzhyngvba, ohg jbexf jryy rabhtu sbe uvz gb Erar Qrfpnegrf uvf jnl bhg bs orvat n qvfrzobqvrq oenva naq unyyhpvangr na ragver jbeyq vagb orvat nebhaq uvz.
Ur, naq nyy uvf cerfhznoyl abg-oenva-qrnq svefg-tra pbubeg, pbzr vagb gur jbeyq jvgu nzarfvn, va fcvgr bs gurve shyy pbaarpgbzrf orvat fpnaarq. Sbe fbzr ernfba gurl unir n unml erpbyyrpgvba bs oebnq nfcrpgf bs uhzna rkcrevrapr yvxr rngvat naq frk, gb gur cbvag jurer gurl pna fvzhyngr gurz jvgu zvavzny pbafpvbhf rssbeg, ohg qba’g erpnyy gurve anzrf be nal uvture-yriry zrzbevrf. Guvf vf rfcrpvnyyl jrveq orpnhfr gur jubyr ceboyrz jvgu gur svefg-tra pbubeg vf fhccbfrq gb or gung gurl’er hcybnqrq nf oenvaf bayl, abg obqvrf. Ohg gurve zrzbevrf bs gurve obqvrf jbex jryy, whfg abg … nalguvat ryfr. Abobql erzrzoref gur vagrearg, be zbarl, be Nzrevpn, be nal cneg bs zbqrea yvirq rkcrevrapr.
Qbqtr naq Irean unir xvqf. Qvtvgny xvqf, jub gura pbzzvg pbzcbhaqrq qvtvgny vaprfg juvpu jbexf bhg bxnl rira gubhtu sbe fbzr qnza ernfba plorefrk cebqhprf ploreonovrf va gurve pnfr ohg ab bguref orpnhfr Irean unf gb or n sregvyvgl tbqqrff orpnhfr Fgrcurafba yvxrq vg gung jnl. Gur nanybtl gb npghny vagrepbhefr vf yvgreny rabhtu gung infrpgbzvrf jbex, nygubhtu vg nccrnef gurfr crbcyr qba’g haqretb bgure ovbybtvpny cebprffrf fhpu nf ntvat be arrqvat gb rng haqre abezny pvephzfgnaprf. Ry pbzrf va jvgubhg nzarfvn, naq jvgu zrtn-fhcre-cbjref, rkprcg jura ur qbrfa’g, orpnhfr Fgrcurafba yvxrq vg gung jnl gbb. Gurer vf ab pbafvfgrapl, ab birenepuvat frg bs ehyrf urer.
Nybat gur jnl jr trg n jubyr ybg bs ovoyvpny naq zlgubybtvpny nyyhfvbaf gung trg guebja bhg gb ynaq jvgu n guhq naq sybc nebhaq yvxr qlvat svfu. Ryzb Furcureq vf Ry, orpnhfr gung’f n Uroerj anzr sbe Tbq naq ur’f yvxr gur Wrjvfu Tbq. Ohg fb’f Qbqtr, jub unf n qvfgvapg Gbjre bs Onory zbzrag ur erfbyirf jvgu na Bylzcvna guhaqreobyg orpnhfr Qbqtr vf nyfb fbeg bs yvxr cntna tbqf jub trg bireguebja va n gvgnabznpul, juvpu jbhyq or irel pyrire vs gurer jrer fbzr fbeg bs pyrne zrffntr be zrnavat oruvaq vg, ohg gurer vfa’g nf sne nf V pna gryy. Ur’f znxvat nyyhfvbaf sbe nyyhfvbaf’ fnxr urer. “Lbh xabj gubfr guerr fbatf lbh yvxrq, oeb? V fnzcyrq gurz naq zvkrq gurz gbtrgure ng enaqbz, juvpu zrnaf lbh abj unir n fbat gung’f guerr gvzrf nf tbbq.”
Creuncf gur zbfg onssyvat cneg, sbe zr, vf gur jnl vzzrafr nzbhagf bs erfbheprf trg fcrag ba cerfreivat, rffragvnyyl, n ernyyl cbbeyl vzcyrzragrq naq vapburerag Veba Ntr nsgreyvsr YNEC. Erny fbpvrgl ngebcuvrf naq orpbzrf n irfgvtvny nccraqntr gb guvf fpranevb jurer cfrhqb-Nzvfu tubfgf pubc qbja gerrf haqre gur jngpushy tnmr bs cfrhqb-Zbatby rasbepref.
I think that, if this book has anything like a moral or a message, it’s something like, “Gnosticism is bad, including digital forms thereof, so let’s all be real and live in the real world with intelligible limits.” Is that about right? Is there some critical insight I’m missing?
Did you read the end carefully enough to see the maguffin? Also, remember Stephenson was channeling “Paradise Lost,” not writing a treatise about how a digital afterlife would actually work.
Some years ago, I read “REAMDE” and my first reaction was that it was a somewhat lame combo of techno-thriller with lots of action sequences and a super-MMO with lots of action sequences. (I had heard anecdotally that Stephenson had gotten a lot of criticism that he didn’t have many actual action sequences in his work, and “REAMDE” was his ‘hold my beer…’) Anyway, after reading “Fall” I re-read “REAMDE” and realized it was actually excellent. I tend to read thrillers too fast and miss the complex plot design and other tidbits, but a re-read often pays dividends.
So maybe actually reading the second half of “Fall” will pay dividends for you.
And just as an aside, “Seveneves” was clearly two novels that got glued together. On their own terms they were one that was really good (though pretty implausible) and a sequel that was sort of “let’s go nuts with the backstory and then tie up the loose ends from both.” The second “novel” was worth it for the name “Sonar Taxlaw” alone.
My objection is not that it isn’t a realistic or plausible depiction of a digital world. I don’t believe there could be such a thing, but would still be happy enough going along with a story with implausible conceits. If I weren’t, I’d never read any fantasy novels. That’s not the issue.
The issue is that there’s no internal consistency here. He goes to basically no effort to establish rules for his fictional world or the characters in it. The plot moves forward according to Stephenson’s whims, not because of any internal logic. This makes it extremely difficult to enjoy or give a crap about, because he’s given himself license to cheat with the narrative at any point he pleases.
Huh. I posted last week that I’d basically stopped reading because meh everything is boring now, and after realizing this might be a bad idea, I got back to it and this weekend read the latest Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space novel, Elysium Fire. (verdict: ‘sokay.)
I put a hold on Fall at my library. Should I bother keeping it? Or is the book boring and no good?
Aside: my library offers eBooks you can check out. You go to the library website, find the book you want, check out the digital version, enter your library card number, select how you want it and download it. I use Kindle, so I select that option, it links to Amazon, I sign in to my account and the book shows up on my Kindle for whatever the checkout duration is. This is a very cool service and I think a lot of people don’t know libraries have eBooks now. You might want to check out your local library to see if they offer this service, too.
Yeah, I’ve used it. I don’t know if they have Fall on their ebook stack, but I had a long road trip years ago and got to read Snow Crash in the passenger seat without dragging a physical copy around and risking losing it out of state.
Re: Fall … eh. Some people apparently like it, some don’t. There’s some distinctly entertaining stuff near the beginning of the book (which is to say, around page 150 or thereabouts). Given your politics, you might be rather annoyed by the way he depicts future America, but that’s a smallish part of the book. The bulk of it is concerned with other things.
I just did a back of the envelope calculation. If human population growth rates decline by another third from their present level and then remain constant there will be a ball of human flesh expanding at the speed of light in about 15,000 years.
Of course that mass of human flesh would surpass neutron degeneracy pressure after only ~6000 years.
Please explain what you are saying more clearly. I think maybe you are saying that even if growth rates go down further, we will still be expanding very fast in the long run?
He’s saying it’s a miracle that the bacteria in one of those the Petri dishes didn’t long ago expand out to the reaches of the universe.
Basically it’s just geometric math giving you very large numbers very quickly, ignoring biological constraints.
Quite the opposite. I find this class of example to be a useful reminder. In this case to remember that we are no different from that bacterium that found itself alone in a seemingly limitless quantity of resources only for it’s decendents to all starve to death en mass the next day.
I think this is an important reminder:
1. Please do back of the envelope calculations as often as possible.
2. Always remember that other factors can render back of the envelope calculates irreverent.
That’s not the opposite of what I said.
If your point was simply that some day our species will reach the biological carrying capacity of with the Earth or the Solar System if we continue to grow in population … well you are right. But saying that is merely tautological.
I didn’t say that. I provided an example of an extreme (tongue in cheek) case because I find such examples amusing and sometimes even useful. If you don’t like the example, don’t use it.
Mostly I find it an amusing thought experiment in relation to long term human sustainability, the Fermi paradox, the heat death of the universe and ridiculous ideas like “post scarcity”. The numbers don’t even change that much if humans become uploads (and still require some physical substrate).
Population growth will approach a number close to zero at some point pretty soon one way or another.
(yes, I know it’s tongue in cheek).
This kind of fallacy can always be explained by the fact that the first part of a logistic curve looks like exponential growth.
I’m glad you know it’s tongue in cheek.
It’s sometimes nice to take extreme examples to set bounds to begin working our way inward.
Did the Russian navy do anything wrong when they shot up a bunch of British fishing boats in 1904? They were, after all, really at war with a maritime power that sometimes did launch sneaky attacks without warning. If you are at war with a sneaky maritime power, you have to sink ships on dark and stormy nights – how is it wrong just because you didn’t sink exactly the right ships?
It is wrong to accuse innocent people of being enemy spies. It is just as wrong whether you positively know they are innocent, or are “just” acting with depraved indifference to their probable innocence and your lack of significant evidence. And it is even worse if your country actually is being infiltrated by foreign spies at the time. Everybody who is actually in the business of competently finding, catching, and if possible turning real enemy spies, will at best be distracted from that effort and will most likely be tarred with the stink that comes from your blatantly obvious high-profile wolf-crying.
He made nothing but mistakes.
Of the hundreds of people accused by McCarthy and his allies of being Soviet agents, your Venona intercepts suggest that a grand total of nine may have actually supported Soviet espionage activities in some capacity. I believe that this is largely coincidental. More importantly, to the best of my knowledge none of those people were impeded in their espionage activities by being so named. Precisely because they were nine among hundreds, and the hundreds obviously false accusations in the name of political grandstanding, they were not actionable.
And all of the Soviet agents who weren’t the nine on McCarthy’s lists, got even stronger cover by the very concept of legitimate counterespionage being publicly discredited for a generation by McCarthy’s witch hunt. There’s also the bit where he managed to turn a talented and loyal American rocket scientist into a talented and loyal Red Chinese rocket scientist, one largely responsible for the success of their early space and missile programs.
If this guy is your idea of a hero, you must be pretty hard up for heroes.
With McCarthy, sure. But there were plenty of people looking for actual evidence going after the like of the rosenbergs, alger hiss, and everyone whitacker chambers was fingering not just randomly making up names, most of whom would probably qualify as Mccarthy allies. Yes, McCarthy was a drunk and a fabulist, but the anti-communist movement in general was far closer to the mark than its opponents were.
Who won the cold war? Being good at keeping secrets inevitably means being good at covering up incompetence and corruption; I suspect that being bad at keeping secrets helped us more than it hurt us.
I’m less concerned with keeping secrets than I am in keeping the level of out and out treason to a respectable minimum, though losing those secrets certainly made the early stages of the cold war a lot harrier than the would have been otherwise
But OT was specifically arguing that McCarthy was right. He wasn’t. The man was an idiot and a complete failure.
I do agree that the Cold War was a real thing, and there were certainly infiltrators in the US and other governments, and this needed to be taken seriously.
Right. “The anticommunist movement”, and even more so the professional law enforcement and counterintelligence community, did good and important work in trying to root out foreign agents infiltrating the US government. Tailgunner Joe, did absolutely nothing but to make their work harder while trying to hog the glory for himself.
This is the discussion of Joe McCarthy. He was stupid, and he was evil, and he helped the communists infiltrate the US government. He’s the boy who cried wolf. The boy who cried wolf was correct insofar as there actually were wolves in the forest. But he’s not the hero of that story, and the townsfolk who got fed up with the whole thing and stopped responding to warnings of the wolf menace are not the villains.
I really can’t comment on the public education of others, but the impression I came away with in my Millennial education was that there was NO communist penetration of the US government, it really was much ado about nothing, and folks like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss were upstanding American citizens.
There’s definitely corrections that need to be made to the way we understand our recent history, but arguing that McCarthy was anything other than poison isn’t the way to do so.
Hell, even Noam Chomsky has a nice line to the effect that the CIA had a useful myth they liked to propagate of the Soviet Union being an evil empire, and they were helped in this by the undeniable facts that the Soviet Union was (a) evil, and (b) an empire.
I agree. My objection was to throwing out McCarthy’s allies along with McCarthy. John Schilling is absolutely right that McCarthy made everything worse.
Yeah.
“Communism was definitely evil and Soviet spies definitely did infiltrate the US government and one of McCarthy’s biggest evils was overplaying his hand thereby making it even easier for evil Communists to spy on us” is a verdict/compromise that I would happily agree to.
I’m just not so sure the other side/mainstream would.
Consider that it may be you and not the timeline. Tough from the inside, I know, but still.
What specifics was McCarthy right about?
That literal Soviet agents (nevermind just regular people who happened to heavily sympathize with communism) had infiltrated nearly every government agency, including in very high positions.
On a person-by-person basis it looks like he was hit-and-miss, and maybe that’s still worth condemning. Maybe, in the classic “innocent until proven guilty” sense, it’s better to allow 100 communist agents to infiltrate the government than it is to falsely accuse a single person. On that basis, McCarthy is surely bad.
But his general view of things was absolutely, 100% correct.
If the very best you can say about him is that he was right that some agents and/or sympathisers were indeed present in the US governmental machine, you are damning the man with the very faintest praise to ever exist.
Maybe.
But what I learned in school was that he was a raving psychopath who fabricated the entire notion out of thin air solely to smear his political opponents, who were good and patriotic Americans that just happened to be slightly less right-wing than he was. That the “red scare” was all scare and no reds.
This is an outright lie. Then when called on it, they immediately retreat back to the bailey of “Yes but he was wrong about the specific people.”
Now as I say, that’s not a trivial detail. That matters. Falsely accusing people is wrong. But so is lying about the broad historical context. Commies in general, and Soviet agents in specific, did infiltrate the government. People who don’t admit this waive their right to be taken seriously.
@Matt M. You’re not wrong, precisely, but to quote John Schilling from further down:
Consider the parallel case of the folks who cry “racism” at the drop of a hat. We get the same pattern there:
a. There really are some powerful people who are racists in the literal hating blacks sense.
b. Most of the specific people the activists call out as racist aren’t actually racists.
ISTM that McCarthy deserves the same praise or condemnation as that set of current-day activists.
No, he was pretty much just miss. What actual Soviet spies did he successfully prosecute?
Depressingly large numbers of people, particularly on the left, failed to acknowledge that the United States, and the Western World in general, was in an existential struggle with an empire that was, by any sane metric, much worse than itself. McCarthy did not make this mistake.
Even among those who did acknowledge the reality of the struggle, many people seemed very complacent and assumed that there was no need to actually worry about it. McCarthy did not make this mistake either.
That is it. Everything else about the man was garbage.
Can someone translate Japanese characters into English? The characters are written on the margins of a painting. Here is a link with two photos:
https://imgur.com/a/gtww5LJ
Thanks in advance.
no time, but this should do, if you have a mouse. With a couple more minutes a touchpad would work too:
https://kanji.sljfaq.org/
I could only translate a few characters with that.
六 = 6
川 = river
川根利 = Tone River
Google translate has handwriting recognition that seems better than that website.
The symbols are too blurry in the first pic.
The second is painting seems just to state that it’s a painting from Taisho (or possibly that time period) labeled Tone River.
Anybody here watching Dr. Stone?
Premise tl;dr: humanity gets turned into stone for unknown reasons, 3700 years later a jock + nerd duo of high-schoolers manage to break out of their stone prisons and decide to cure everyone else and rebuild society.
I’ve only just watched the first episode, but I really liked what I saw so far. A sci-fi show that’s got…. actual science? Not just scientific terms thrown around with varying degrees of accuracy, but the characters actually have to do experiments and tediously repeat the same procedure 100 times with subtly different conditions before making progress? And it references actual chemistry and scientific history? Wonderful! I expect the rest of the show to focus more on the “rebuild society” part than the “science!” part but even so the first episode is excellent.
What we’ve seen so far of the plot and characters is great too but of the many anime I’ve watched, this is the first I’ve seen that has people actually doing science as a plot point and it makes me really happy.
If anyone else has watched it, what are your thoughts?
Alternately, does anyone have any recommendations for similar shows?
I’ve read the manga up to a certain point, probably about a seasonish of the Anime. It basically holds up – the weak points to me seem to be that, if I remember right, ynathntr unfa’g punatrq rabhtu gung gurl arrq gb nqwhfg(svar, jungrire), and it gets a little too experiment-of-the-week-with-materials-conspicuously-available. There’s one character in particular who onfvpnyyl rkvfgf bayl gb fhccyl gur znva punenpgre jvgu fghss gung jbhyq bgurejvfr or phzorefbzr gb svaq; ur unf n jubyr jnerubhfr shyy bs vagrerfgvat zntvp ebpxf gung onfvpnyyl shysvyy nyy gur zvareny arrqf gur thl unf. Gurl qvqa’g tb fb sne nf gb anzr uvz “enqvb funpx” ohg gurl zvtug nf jryy unir.
These are pretty minor complaints, honestly; it wasn’t bad for the amount of it I read, and I probably would have kept reading it if it wasn’t for the thing where I’ve got the mind of a five year old and need sword-and-magic stuff to stay engaged.
Weird request: I need some help with job search terms.
My ideal jobs involve things like auditing documents (like making sure all necessary information is in place for a loan), investigation (like using nexus lexus to gather data type stuff), various tasks in Excel, reading/analyzing/summarizing documents and similar. I basically like being given a stack of stuff and then figuring out what it is, filing it, and then telling somebody what it is/how it’s filed.
I have about 3/4s of an accounting degree, but nothing I can really put forth in terms of education besides “I promise I’ll finish soon”.
I’m not asking anybody to give me a job, I just want some ideas for search terms to plug into job sites so I can cast a wider net.
Aren’t jobs like this typically called “analyst”? Except that’s not a very useful term, because that term covers a vast amount of ground and all positions about entry level require domain knowledge in whatever you’d be reading/analyzing/summarizing.
Do you have any specific expertise to offer, perhaps from internships or something like that? If not, you’d be trying to sell yourself as clever, diligent, literate, and handy with numbers, which are the qualifications for a junior analyst position. But the people you would be competing with have finished their degrees, and it sounds like you haven’t.
The “analyst describes myriad positions” thing is definitely my log-jam right now. It makes it harder to search.
Your second paragraph is why I’m definitely not trying to get anyone to actually do anything besides give me search term ideas – you are right that I’m not marketable. I just feel duty-bound to keep trying anyway for family reasons, even knowing it’s dumb.
What’s the problem with the junior analyst positions you are seeing?
Most of the problem is that on paper I’m unqualified for most of them. They’d generally like a Bachelor’s, and business Bachelor’s are a dime a dozen and they can generally get them at $20 an hour. My experience is mostly unrelated, besides a year in a document audit position that isn’t entirely orthogonal.
I also have a self-created problem in that I don’t lie on my resume, and my definition of truth is stricter than most. So I’m competing with better applicants (on paper, at least, and often in reality as well) who for the most part are reasonably inflating themselves at least slightly past what’s strictly true.
Because of the combination of both of those things, I don’t typically get calls on my applications in any pay range higher than what I currently enjoy. In the past year, I’ve submitted a minimum of five applications a week. Disregarding jobs that ended up having compensation below what I currently make, I’ve had four screening calls and two interviews.
I’m not giving up, but with those kinds of numbers I need to cast a wider net.
Are you in the US? One of the few organizations that give you credit for unfinished college study is the US military, in the form of a higher starting rank. The military bureaucracy certainly has the sort of white-collar jobs you are looking for. And they tend to be keen on night-school, which would give you a chance to finish that degree.
There’s a bunch of paralegal jobs that seem like a decent fit. Not sure how you’d break into that. Maybe as a legal secretary.
I’ll take a look at legal secretary stuff for sure – I’ve looked at paralegal before, but to the extent those jobs are “actual” paralegal jobs that pay $15 an hour, they want to see an ABA-approved associates in paralegal. It might be possible to back-door that through the secretary route, I’ll talk to some of my local law people and see if they ever see that happening.
Check out temp agencies. I think they sometimes have to fill positions that call for general office skills but not much in the way of specifics.
I’ve had some success with temp agencies at the level I’m at. I’m currently an administrative assistant at about 150% of minimum wage; they have loads of that, and I get calls weekly for jobs at that level or less. They occasionally do a dollar an hour or so better than that, but that’s for situations where they need to hire mass amounts of people.
I once spent several days doing interviews at several temp agencies ranging from higher end administrative purveyors (think Robert Half/Officeteam) to really low-end mostly manual labor local places. The higher end people were really enthusiastic about the skillset, but never called back, I think because if you are hiring Robert Half to find you people you want to do better than me, in a “If I wanted a guy without a degree, I’d hire a homeless guy off the street” kind of way.
The good news about all that is I’m in the files of about a dozen temp agencies; I’m hoping at some point their talent pool is tapped enough that I get hired for one of the “good” ones they usually hold back for others.
Is there a reason you don’t want to finish your accounting degree? Aside from the fact that becoming a CPA is the fast track to success, actually doing the job of an accountant fits all your criteria. I’m an auditor at a public accounting firm and I basically do all of that on a daily basis. There’s also different streams of accounting (auditing, tax, bookkeeping, etc) so you might be able to find something you like!
I’d look for “staff accountant”, “junior accountant” type of position. Try and find a firm that will hire you without your degree. The job postings online will say you need a degree, but for a lot of firms they will take what they can get. The job market for firms, especially small firms, is highly local (i.e. no one will move to take a job at a <50 person accounting firm), so if you can make yourself to be a standout candidate they might want to take a chance on you. A lot of small firms struggle with finding quality candidates as everyone wants to go work for the Big 4 (EY, PWC, Deloitte and KPMG). I've heard of people having success in networking with partners (as in cold calling them on LinkedIn for a coffee to pick their brains). I'll warn you against settling into a bookkeeping job though. I wouldn't aim for a career in bookkeeping, as bookkeeping is quickly becoming obsolete by automation.
I'd be happy to answer any questions about the profession if you want!
I’m not reluctant to finish the degree – I’m in school now doing so. Even if I specifically didn’t want to be an accountant I’d still have to finish to get out of my current caste.
You are right that I’ve shifted away from trying for more accounting positions, though, partially because the last time I was trying for those I wasn’t finding anything that didn’t require a bachelors. I’ll absolutely go back in and attempt to apply for a few dozen in the next week or so.
Policy wonkery longpost: what might a Grand Bargain family policy look like?
Strawman proposal:
— A relatively-large child allowance, i.e. cash payments to primary caregivers of young kids, funded largely by shifting funds from existing childcare subsidies but with a higher total expenditure than now.
— Baby bonds a la Cory Booker’s proposal, i.e. a universal demogrant in a lump sum at the age of majority, funded largely by shifting funds from existing higher education subsidies but with a higher total expenditure than now.
— Heavy subsidies and nudging for the broadest and most effective possible use of contraception by those who don’t intend to have a kid. Existing contraceptives provided without charge to all, prioritize research into new and better ones especially male ones, social/institutional nudges to use them as the default.
Reasons people on the left should like this:
— Child allowances are known to be effective at reducing child poverty in other countries. They have most of the upsides of directly subsidizing childcare, and also have some upsides of UBI, while being potentially less expensive and more politically palatable. In particular they would disproportionately increase the economic agency of women and so should appeal to feminists.
— Broader availability of contraception should also reduce child poverty and teenage pregnancy.
— Greater total redistribution targeted at the most vulnerable people and also at those least responsible for their current circumstances.
— Baby bonds/demogrants help close the racial wealth gap and thus “count as reparations”.
— Universal demogrants are less biased toward those who already have some wealth than higher education subsidies, so shifting funds to the former from the latter makes the system more progressive overall.
— Framing as “investment in the future” makes for a hopeful progressive narrative (“a better world is possible”) that may help blunt the appeal of right-populism.
Reasons people on the right should like this:
— Shifting funds from childcare subsidies to a child allowance reduces favoritism toward two-working-parent families vs traditionalist one-working-parent families.
— Shifting funds from higher education subsidies to demogrants reduces funding for professoriate-driven SJWism and favoritism toward intellectual types vs tradespeople and entrepreneurs.
— Coupling child allowances with pro-contraception nudges should increase the proportion of kids raised by parents who are both responsible/conscientious and have sufficient resources to raise them.
— Increasing contraception use and effectiveness should lower the abortion rate.
— Shifting redistribution toward kids fits with a general cultural (re)orientation toward responsible preparation for the future and lower time preference. Likewise, emphasizing responsibility in childbearing decisions fits with a general increase in emphasis on conscientiousness.
Reasons libertarians should like this:
— Less government playing of favorites generally; cash benefits replacing in-kind subsidies gives more scope for experimentation and innovation in methods of developing human capital.
— For UBI-friendly libertarians, this has many of the same upsides and fewer downsides (less total cost, probably less disincentive to work).
I want to emphasize that the goal is not to be anyone’s first-best policy, but to get the broadest coalition to agree that it’s a large improvement over the status quo. You might not think this is an improvement over the status quo if:
— You think contraception is immoral.
— You think broader and more effective contraceptive use would have bad enough effects from lower total fertility to outweigh any other good effects.
— You think child allowances will provide an incentive for irresponsible people to have more kids with bad enough effects to outweigh any other good effects.
— You think there are important positive externality effects from subsidizing childcare specifically and/or subsidizing higher education specifically that cash grants won’t achieve.
— You think increasing government spending is immoral enough in itself, or bad enough in effect in itself, to outweigh any good effects.
What am I missing here? Any other significant benefits that are not on the first three above lists, or reasons you might prefer the status quo that are not on the last list?
>You think child allowances will provide an incentive for irresponsible people to have more kids with bad enough effects to outweigh any other good effects.
This. All this. This is how you make welfare queens, breeder class, who just pump out babies and then take all of the money as an income, sparing just a tiny bit to keep the kids hungry but alive. We want to incentivize people to have kids only if they want them, not if they want money. Subsidizing things that kids need only helps people who buy those things for their kids, subsidizing having kids rewards people for having as many kids as possible and raises them as cheaply as possible.
Children ought to be raised in loving families by people who want to have kids for the sake of kids, not by people hoping to earn a profit. It’s a waste of taxpayer money, but more importantly it is hell for those children and seriously damages them psychologically for the rest of their lives.
I should also note that I wholeheartedly approve of the contraceptive subsidy though, for the same reason. Children ought to be raised in loving families by people who want to have kids for the sake of kids, not by accident because they enjoy sex. If no one ever had kids by accident, we’d see a lot less unhappy families, a lot fewer abused and neglected children, and possibly less poverty cycles if poor people who don’t want and can’t afford kids just didn’t have them and then fewer people were born into poverty. I’m not even sure if the child subsidies are necessary then, if people just chose not to have children unless they could afford to raise them with what they have (or just had fewer children and thus could invest a larger share of their income into each one).
@zarraha says:
I know that you were responding to a hypotheticsl expansion of the welfare state (which frankly I believe is very far overdue!), but I’m dropping “kind” in favor of “true” and “necessary” as the term “welfare queens” really irritates me!
Oppurtunities to be a “queen” on welfare are pretty damn few as welfare as we knew it hasn’t existed since the ’90’s, yet somehow that fact keeps being ignored of how much the federal safety net has functionally has ceased to exist within my lifetime.
The term “sore winners” comes to mind!
I started to say that you actually don’t hear the phrase “welfare queens” so much these days, but google ngrams says usage has actually been pretty constant since 1997 or so.
Still, I can’t quite figure out whether you think that the proposal would or would not lead to the dynamic zarraha envisions, regardless of what phrase describes it.
@Doctor Mist
Well since it’s: “..funded largely by shifting funds from existing childcare subsidies…” even if it’s
“…but with a higher total expenditure than now…”
“Largely” implies a not much greater subsidy than now, so I doubt the’d be much of an effect.
If it somehow did have the effect that @zarraha fears then it also would be likely that more mothers would be with their children instead of abandoning them to spend time in the labor market, which sounds like a good thing to me.
Re: Free contraceptives. A lot of (female) people who have children outside wedlock do so on purpose, because they want to have a child. A lot of (female) people find contraceptives to be unpleasant or complex to use. A lot of people (male and female) don’t like to use condoms because they “kill the spontaneity” or “feel funny.”
I don’t think the whole Losing Ground-Welfare Queen meme is as pervasive in conservative circles as it used to be. Marco Rubio has notably been trying to push a family allowance for a few years now. Of course, federal politics is dysfunctional so none of this is going to happen but I get the feeling the attitude is different now. American conservatives are moving towards a more European perspective on the welfare state.
(1) The disadvantages of children’s allowances have been pointed out; I’m broadly in favour of them, since we have this in Ireland, but even here our government has changed conditions and duration.
Though I’d like to point out, contra zarraha, that there are two different payments: one is children’s allowance and one is one-parent family allowance (formerly lone parent’s allowance, before that was unmarried mother’s allowance). The latter is the one that is open to abuse and I have to agree with zarraha there, as I’ve seen it abused: the current payment is only paid up until the youngest child turns seven years of age, and in the social housing sphere it’s quite amazing how many single mothers turn up mysteriously and accidentally pregnant with a new baby once their kid reaches seven. (I do think after six kids you know how babies are made and the Irish health system does teach about, and provide on the medical card, contraception and birth control advice).
The children’s allowance/child benefit is a different matter. Everyone eligible gets this, it is not means tested (which has been a controversial point in the past – ‘why are well-off families getting this?’ but the usual response is that this has always been intended to be income that comes directly to the mother and she is not dependent on the father handing out money for the children’s keep, and at least in previous decades it was argued that even in apparently well-off families some men held the purse strings, refused to hand over money for bills, and their wives had no money of their own to look after the children).
(2) Any payment can be abused; there are stories of poor people getting into severe debt with moneylenders and what happens is that (and this is all illegal, but when did that ever stop anyone?) the lenders take the children’s allowance book from the debtor, hand it over on the monthly collection day and take the money and book back. This naturally goes against all the intention of the purpose of the allowance and leaves the imprudent or desperate even worse off than before. I can see a problem with the proposed baby bonds – if there’s a guaranteed $20,000 payout when the kid turns 18, there will be people who borrow against that – and companies like the moneylenders and loansharks out there urging them to do just that: “need a loan today? want to buy that car or pay for that holiday? just borrow against Baby Bond and defer payment for five, ten or fifteen years!” Naturally, that will be racking up the interest over that period, even if the pigeons are not suckered into taking out multiple loans against it (“it’s only three grand, the kid will ge guaranteed twenty grand, there will be plenty of money left!” now multipy that three grand by five or six bites of the cherry…) and it’s perfectly possible that once the kid turns eighteen there won’t be any money coming to them, it’ll all be signed away.
And why shouldn’t the improvident decide “if I can borrow against one kid’s bond, what if I have two kids? I can borrow even more!” And then you get people deciding to have two, three or four kids for the pay-off, because the short-term benefit is now and eighteen years down the line when it all comes due is forever away.
(3) “Heavy subsidies and nudging for the broadest and most effective possible use of contraception by those who don’t intend to have a kid/Coupling child allowances with pro-contraception nudges should increase the proportion of kids raised by parents who are both responsible/conscientious and have sufficient resources to raise them”.
You know who the people “don’t intend to have a kid” are? We’re seeing that nowadays as exactly the “responsible/conscientious” type parents. Because they look at “Meh, I could get a couple of hundred a month to pay for the kid, which won’t even cover the expenses of childcare and lost earnings, or we could instead have no kids and keep our dual income lifestyle of spending our money on ourselves”. While the people who have less forethought are going to be careless about contraception, especially if there’s a support payment at the end anyway.
Oh, and you’re also going to have to tie in abortion with that freely and widely available, nudge to use, contraception. Because even with 100% perfect use there is a failure rate for nearly every method (between 0.1%-23% depending), and hardly anyone has 100% perfect use. Let’s say there’s a failure rate of 1%, and we’ve got a target population of 43 million women of reproductive age who don’t want babies. That gives something like 400,000 unintended pregnancies, and if you really don’t want those babies – and given that you’re nudging people to use contraception, then you don’t want them – then you have to fall back on abortion.
Good luck with mandatory contraception and abortion – that’s controlling women’s fertility and is reproductive injustice, remember?
I don’t believe I said, and certainly I tried not to imply, “mandatory” for either contraception or abortion; nudges aren’t mandates. The goal is not to make the rate of bad outcomes (including abortion!) zero but to reduce it relative to the status quo. Whether this strawman plan would succeed in doing it doesn’t depend on whether people will sometimes behave abusively– of course they will– but on how often. This certainly can depend on program design details, and I agree, for example, that non-means-tested child benefit is a lot better than means-tested single-parent benefit on this dimension.
“The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un”. Anna Fifield’s biography of Kim Jong Un has been out for a couple of months now, and it’s time we talked about it. Grandiose title notwithstanding, this is a serious work by a journalist with more experience and understanding of North Korean affairs than just about anyone else in the field.
She’s moved on to the Washington Post’s Beijing desk, and this is her parting gift to the community of North Korea wonks. It is meticulously researched, based on at least a dozen trips to North Korea and interviews with pretty much everyone outside of North Korea who has ever met the man. And it is comprehensive. Highly recommended.
Kim Jong-Un wasn’t always the ruler of North Korea, of course, so the first part of Fifield’s story and this review is how that came to pass. And yes, the answer is pretty much that he was born for the job.
North Korea isn’t quite a hereditary monarchy, but it’s close. In practice, the current ruler gets to chose his own successor, with the constraint that it has to be an adult male and that it will take 5-10 years to establish the necessary cult of personality and political-insider status. Nepotism is a sufficiently powerful force in North Korea that the beneficiary of this effort is pretty much guaranteed to be a close relative, but not necessarily the eldest son. And as of the third generation, the regime has explicitly incorporated the “Mount Paektu Bloodline” into the legitimizing mythology, which is as close as a bunch of atheists can come to Divine Right favoring the Kim Dynasty.
Another feature distinguishing North Korea’s system from European-style monarchies is that “princes” don’t become public figures until they are adults, or nearly so, and selected to rule. Even the ruler’s wife doesn’t get princess/queen level recognition until one of her sons is selected to rule. Presumably this denies any son who is passed over, the ability to form his own power base.
Kim Jong-Un is a third son. His oldest half-brother Kim Jong-Nam was basically the love child of Kim Jong-Il and his movie-star mistress. If he’d been the only son he could have become “king”, and some early steps were made in that direction. But Kim Jong-Il eventually settled down with a proper and politically acceptable wife, and once her sons were clearly established, she worked to ensure one of them and not the quasi-bastard would inherit. Jong-Un also has an older full brother, Kim Jong-Chul, who is described in terms suggesting he may be gay or transgender but probably just too effeminate in appearance and manner to rule in North Korea. So #3 son it is.
Jong-Nam responded to the perception that he had no political future in North Korea by trying to become an international playboy, which cemented the reality that he had no political future in North Korea. And got himself very conspicuously assassinated for trying to build himself a political future outside of North Korea. Jong-Chul seems to have settled for a quiet non-public life and may be one of the few people Jong-Un really trusts. Also, he’s a huge Eric Clapton fan, and possibly a musician in his own right. In the North Korean version of the Game of Thrones, you win or you die or you take up the guitar. There is also a younger sister, Kim Yo-Jong, who has taken on a first-lady role and is quite politically and diplomatically capable while understanding that she can in no way challenge her brothers’ rule on account of her gender.
So, young Kim Jong-Un (henceforth ‘KJU’) grew up as the obvious heir. Grew up in incredible luxury, but lonely. No same-age playmates. A few older cousins forced to spend time with him, and a Japanese sushi chef hired to be KJU’s companion when he wasn’t cooking for his father. As a kid, KJU reportedly developed a geeky interest in warships and airplanes, because those are the proper hobbies of any great man. And basketball, perhaps because he understood he was going to grow up to look like one. At around twelve, he left his life of enormous privilege in North Korea, for an anonymous education in Switzerland. Some people took this to mean that he would obviously learn that the Universal Culture of the West was superior to any other, and return as a reformer. But that’s not the sort of education he was signed up for.
KJU went to the sort of Swiss private schools that educate the sons of mid-level VIPs like diplomats and foreign businessmen, masquerading as one of them under the name of “Pak Un” with a couple of North Korean diplomats assigned to pretend they were his parents. From this he learned that it is Good to be a VIP, that it would be nice if North Korea were to have a community of vaguely western-style Millenial VIPs for him to hang out with, and that the history of Western Europe is chock full of useful object lessons in how aristocratic VIPs can A: hold on to power and/or B: fail to hold on to power. He appears to have been a quite talented student.
Then back to North Korea for four years of university, and five years of being groomed as his increasingly-frail father’s only possible successor. In addition to setting up the cult of personality with ridiculously grandiose claims and titles (four-star general at 27), Dad pushed through a round of economic quasi-reforms which would leave Junior with a nation that wasn’t a complete basket case and whose necessary harshness would not be blamed on his son. KJU may have been allowed to plan and “command” a couple of unprovoked attacks on South Korean military forces to burnish his martial credentials. Somewhere along the line he was apparently married to a suitable woman who would provide him with unquestionably legitimate and scandal-free heirs while not complaining about his blatant non-monogamy.
If this is the story of KJU coming of age, we perhaps need some background on the North Korea KJU came of age in.
First, the North Korean caste system. There absolutely is one, at least nominally based on what your ancestors did during the Japanese occupation. The descendants of alleged collaborators are the untouchables, unless they complain about that in which case they are disappeared. Those whose ancestors muddled through, get to keep on muddling through. Those whose ancestors are acclaimed Heroes of the Resistance, are the aristocracy. And social mobility goes exactly one way, down. Each generation produces more new aristocrats and muddle-throughers than the system needs, and the least-obsequiously-loyal are culled by the discovery that, oops, theirs is a family of collaborators after all and so the entire bloodline back to 1945 gets demoted a notch or two. Exactly one North Korean family didn’t have to worry about that prospect, and no prizes for guessing who.
And a few words on North Korea’s economy. North Korea is a poor country, but it is no longer starvation-poor except insofar as its isolation makes it more vulnerable to local droughts or blights. Satellite imagery indicates crop harvests good for ~1400 kcal/day on average, with an unknown bit more from meat, fish, and vegetables. About ten percent of North Koreans reportedly now have smartphones – designed to North Korean standards, connecting only to North Korea’s isolated internal networks. Private automobiles are officially illegal, but “government” automobiles that somehow keep getting parked in people’s driveways every night are a thing that can be obtained with money. Capitalism is, unofficially, thriving.
Partly this because the North Korean government followed the lead of other nominally-communist states in allowing farmers to tend private gardens and small plots once they were finished tilling the state-owned farms. Manufacturing and resource-extraction operations are allowed greater autonomy. The black market is still illegal, but that now just means you have to bribe the police to not notice, because how else are policemen supposed to eat, and the government doesn’t try to stop that any more. And partly this is because pretty much everyone who was too timid or too ideologically committed to juche communism to enthusiastically partake of black-market capitalism, starved to death in the 1990s.
One strange aspect of this mostly-unofficial economic reform is that the intensely patriarchal North Korea’s real economy was increasingly run by women. Outside of the aristocratic elite, every man in North Korea is expected to work essentially unpaid in the army or in some state-owned farm or factory. Every woman in North Korea is expected to marry young and remain barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. Every family in North Korea that didn’t starve in the 1990s, had the wives put on sandals and get busy trading for real money in the black markets. For best results with the help of husbands who can siphon off useful resources from those state-owned enterprises, but it was the women who could be seen conspicuously not-working in the vicinity of the markets.
KJU ascended to the throne of this strange and backwards nation at about 28 years of age. This wasn’t a surprise; his father’s days were clearly numbered and the fixes were all in. There were no challenges to his succession, at least not from within North Korea. Possibly the Chinese would have preferred a more predictable elder statesmen of his father’s generation, but any move to make that actually happen, quickly fizzled. KJU, for his part, didn’t just passively accept the title and position of Supreme Leader, he hit the ground running and set about to lead. Well, rule, using every trick he had been taught in Geneva and Pyongyang and every bit of good advice he could get from the elder statesmen who hadn’t tried to challenge his succession.
So now we’re at the part of the story where KJU is the newly-crowned, extremely young, inexperienced, but not untrained Supreme Leader of North Korea. And he’s got a to-do list.
1. Ensure that his domestic power is secure, absolute, and unchallenged
2. Ensure that his regime faces no foreign threats
3. Make North Korea a prosperous and respected member of the community of nations
4. Have some fun in his life, because 1-3 are hard and stressful work.
For #1, that starts with establishing that the cult of personality is clearly Kim Jong Un’s cult, not Kim Jong Il’s successor’s cult. KJU is not his father; where Kim the 2nd made only rare and distant public appearances, Kim the 3rd shows up at just about every factory opening or public awards ceremony in North Korea, and of course takes the credit. Rather than having people worship his picture, KJU wants them to worship him. The elder statesmen of his father’s generation allow this, and there were skilled propagandsists at work behind the scenes – probably including KJU’s sister.
KJU also understood that the previous approach of keeping everyone on the brink of starvation and telling them that there tireless efforts were the only thing keeping nefarious foreign and domestic enemies from making things worse, wasn’t going to work much longer. In his grandfather’s day, South Korea and China genuinely were worse off than North Korea, and in his fathers’ it was still possible to sell the lie. 21st-century North Korea has too many black-market cellphones and DVD players, so KJU had to actually make life better – particularly for those closest to them. That means expanding the economic reforms we’ve already mentioned, in a manner resembling Deng Xiaoping’s China to the extent that such a thing can be done while insisting on obsequious loyalty to a cult of personality. That doesn’t work nearly as well as Deng’s more open-minded approach but was a necessary balance between abject poverty (and so KJU’s head on a pike) and the end of the legitimizing mythology of the regime (and so KJU’s head on a pike). KJU has also taken a lesson from post-Soviet Russia in allowing the older generation of the aristocracy to become quasi-capitalist oligarchs – but KJU is a Putin and not a Yeltsin, so the oligarchs are closely-monitored regime insiders and see above for where the least-obsequiously-loyal end up. The younger aristocracy has greater independence but less power, rather like the expat kids KJU went to school with in Switzerland. And there are conspicuously more luxuries for them to enjoy, rather than just a larger share of socialist austerity.
But KJU also understands that one of the most dangerous periods for an authoritarian regime is the early reform period, when people finally have the time and energy for political action and an overly-optimistic belief in what rightfully ought to be theirs and might be achieved by political action. And while he has taken steps to be loved wherever possible, KJU is clearly in the “better to be feared than loved” camp. Even at the highest ranks of regime insiders, Kim has been ruthless in purging those who don’t sufficiently fear him, to the execution of his politically powerful uncle and expat brother among many others. Some have been allowed to return at lower levels after a humiliating political “rehabilitation”.
And at every level, he’s made use of the caste system mentioned earlier. Life has been getting generally better for North Koreans at every level – but it is constantly necessary to prove that you are worthy of your level, else your entire family is irreversibly sent down to a lower level (and farther from the positions where one might make trouble for the regime). At the very bottom, of course, are North Korea’s infamous gulags. Satellite imagery shows that they have been expanded in KJU’s reign, but everything we think we know about them comes from his father’s era. Fifield and her colleagues have not been able to find a single prisoner who has escaped or been released from the camps during the eight years of KJU’s rule.
KJU is the Ever-Victorious, Iron-Willed Commander of North Korea; he has remade the country in his own image, and nobody inside North Korea is going to try to change that. Might someone from the outside world? That’s #2 on the list, and the plausible candidates are the United States, South Korea, and China. Japan isn’t, but there’s enough bad blood there that North Korea is going to treat Japan as an existential threat for some time to come. Russia is too remote and detached to really care.
We have already talked at rather substantial length about North Korea’s development of a secure nuclear arsenal to prevent any combination of foreign aggressors from imposing regime change on North Korea. That was over two years ago and, mea culpa, I rather underestimated what North Korea was about to roll out in 2017. They’ve demonstrated a working thermonuclear warhead and a mobile ICBM capable of delivering it just about anywhere in CONUS, along with more reliable and responsive missiles for use against regional targets. They probably have 40-80 deliverable nuclear warheads, and a new one every couple of months. The only slight bit of good news is that fortuitously-timed diplomacy shut down their testing program before they could fully test their ICBM or put their first operational ballistic-missile submarine through sea trials. The ICBMs will probably still work if they call on them; they just won’t be accurate enough to hit anything smaller than a large city. The submarine(s) really do need those sea trials to be at all useful, and if we’re very lucky they’ll rust in their construction halls before they get to that point.
So KJU has a capable nuclear deterrent, but to be really confident he needs to couple that with enough diplomacy to make it that nobody even really wants to try taking down his regime. Especially China, whose control over North Korea’s foreign trade allows for effective non-military attacks. But the big opportunity on the diplomatic front came with the 2018 Winter Olympics, held in (South) Korea. The modern Olympics have always been packaged with the idealistic notion that they will bring the nations of the world together and promote goodwill and peace. Just this once, it seems to have actually happened. KJU sent his younger sister to lead North Korea’s contribution to a pan-Korean team, and she dialed the charm up to eleven. Along with diplomacy, public and private. The substance of which may have been that, after a year-plus of Donald Trump’s “rocket man” tweets, South Korea was dangerously likely to be caught in the nuclear crossfire of a stupid American war, and both Koreas were going to need to work together to prevent that.
Which, in fact, they did. The 2018 summit owed as much to South Korea’s double-dealing Moon Jae-In as it did to KJU or Donald Trump. It is important not to overstate what was actually agreed to at that summit, which was basically just a suspension of North Korean nuclear and long-range missile tests in exchange for a suspension of major US-ROK military training exercises. There was conspicuously not any promise by North Korea to ever dismantle so much as a single rocket or bomb in any finite timeframe. KJU has made it very clear in his public statements that the “Treasured Sword” of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is absolutely not on the table.
Also, and aside: Anyone who comments on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal using the term “denuclearization”, needs to be conspicuously aware of the term’s basic silliness or they need to not be taken seriously. Fifield knows better, but far too many of her colleagues don’t.
But if the DPRK and USA haven’t agreed to anything in the way of arms control, they did agree that they are two great powers which ought to negotiate as equals in front of the world. Also, the President of the United States seems to have “fallen in love” with KJU. Uh, OK, whatever. The subsequent Hanoi summit didn’t result in anything new, and did result in some hard feelings on both sides that it didn’t result in anything new. But at a minimum, the threat of US aggression against KJU’s regime has been greatly diminished at least for the remainder of Trump’s administration.
With the US and ROK threats largely neutralized, Japan can be ignored. China is another matter. But while Beijing would undoubtedly prefer an elder statesman of Kim Jong-Il’s generation, they have by now accepted that KJU’s victories at home and abroad have entirely secured his rule and they’re just going to have to live with that.
Next up on the agenda is North Korea’s economy. The reforms to date have staved off the immediate threat to KJU’s rule, but they aren’t enough for a generation of stability and they aren’t enough for KJU’s sincere desire for North Korea to be genuinely prosperous and to be respected as more than just the tiny nation with the big arsenal. So for about a year, he’s been trying to do a full pivot from national security to economic development. The thermonuclear missiles aren’t going away, but they are going to be hidden away in caves rather than paraded and conspicuously tested.
Unfortunately, economic development isn’t going anywhere either, because it’s gone as far as it can on the basis of autarky and illicit smuggling. North Korea absolutely needs major sanctions relief to make any further economic progress. And no POTUS can afford the loss of face that would come from offering sanctions relief without substantial moves towards North Korea’s unilateral nuclear disarmament. Which isn’t going to happen, so checkmate.
And that leaves KJU with nothing to do but sit back, relax, and enjoy the fact that he is the unchallenged supreme ruler of a nation powerful enough to stand off all enemies and just rich enough to keep the inner circle adequately supplied with foreign luxury goods. KJU, as mentioned, likes warships and airplanes. The North Korean navy lets him play with the former, and he apparently flies one of the very few private planes in North Korea. He moves about between dozens of luxurious mansions and, probably, harems. He apparently shares these luxuries with an inner circle of younger members of North Korea’s elite, but doesn’t allow them to translate that level of friendship into public visibility or political power. He still does like basketball, hence the visits by Dennis Rodman and even an NBA exhibition team, but there’s no meaningful diplomatic element to that. No word on whether he drives a tank to the music of Katy Perry. It is Good to be the King, while it lasts.
This all makes it sound like a compare-and-contrast with Mohammed bin Salman would be very interesting indeed.
Economically, North Korea is now building reactors for power, not just for plutonium. Construction at, well, basically all their nuclear sites is visible on satellite.
That will certainly help, because electricity is wealth, very directly, and you can command economy a nuclear grid into existence, especially when you just trained a bunch of nuclear engineers for military purposes.
Fascinating discussion. Two questions came to my mind when I was reading it:
1) Is North Korea’s prosperity destined to be a danger to KJU’s power? It seems that usually increased riches lead to two problems: a) people not worrying about starvation start to think more about freedom, and b) once societies start getting richer, they expect it to continue. As you said, #3 hasn’t been real successful.
2) How about KJU’s successor? Does he have any kids? You would think that being in his 30’s he has lots of time, but I also see some discussion about his health not being great.
Prosperity doesn’t have to threaten the stability of a ruthless authoritarian regime; see e.g. China. If the price for being rich is being obediently apolitical, and the price for being political is mining uranium with your bare hands on 500 calories a day, almost everyone with aptitude and drive is going to go with Plan A. It’s mostly the regimes that balk at Plan B that run into problems.
Or the ones that can’t deliver on Plan A. KJU could have an uprising on his hands if e.g. sanctions bite to the level that the obediently apolitical face losing the riches they currently have. In particular, a great many of the police who enforce the “obediently apolitical” part are now at least aspirationally middle class and it’s not their state salaries that are responsible for that. If the capitalists can’t afford to keep bribing the police in the style to which they have become accustomed, something will have to give.
As for the succession, KJU probably has a couple of sons, of which the oldest is about ten. It will take at least fifteen years to turn him into a credible successor, or twenty if #1 son turns out unsuitable and they have to go with #2. So, that is a potential problem. The North Korean system of government has no contingency plan for what to do if the morbidly obese chain-smoker with (best guess) gout and diabetes doesn’t make it to at least fifty.
Thanks for this post. Very informative, and I loved your writing style too. A++, would read again.
Well fuck. I should just learn to keep my mouth shut.
I also read the book. I was going to try to write an analysis of it, but literary critique is not my field, and I was sputtering out every time I tried. Thank you for doing such a good job with it. A few choice anecdotes from the book on your notes:
Something that I noticed in the book is that Jong-Nam was clearly involved in some fairly shadowy business in Macau, including online gambling which may have been used for money laundering. Given that Jong-Nam paid off some of his cybersecurity guys in counterfeit (probably North Korean-made) dollars, I have to wonder if Jong-Nam hadn’t been involved in Kim Jong-Il’s superdollar activities. Jong-Nam may have also been acting as a source for the CIA on North Korean political activities.
I disagree that Kim Jong-Un was a talented student, based on reports of his time in Switzerland. His grades were never great, and he seems to have only learned enough German to get by. His primary interest seems to have been basketball.
According to the book, between 40 and 80 percent of the population is involved in some kind of free-market endeavor, rather than being employed by government agencies as in the past. Around 85 percent of the population gets its food from the markets, as well. Current estimates put GDP growth in North Korea at somewhere between 1 and 7 percent. The nice parts of Pyongyang, referred to in the book as ‘Pyonghattan’, seem to have suffered from severe price inflation as a result; even a North Korean meal (like bibimbap) costs around 10-15 euros, and an iced mocha at one of Pyongyang’s new coffeeshops might cost as much as nine dollars. Real estate has been similarly impacted – a decent two- or three-bedroom apartment might cost $80k, while a luxury three-bedroom apartment might cost $180k. I’m not sure what to think of the economic implications of this, but it seems like a consequence of a large inflow of cash into an economy where there’s no other way to save money.
That ‘siphon off useful resources from state-owned enterprises’ thing seems to be pretty important. One of the defectors who is profiled in the book is a drug dealer who bought methamphetamine made in a government-controlled factory in Hamhung and sold it both in North Korea (where meth use seems to be extremely common), as well as in China (at least for a while).
A regrettable lack of precision on my part. KJU was a talented student of the art of being an aristocratic VIP. Part of that means understanding nobody is going to care about your academic grades.
Part of that means understanding nobody is going to care about your academic grades.
“Only enough German to get by” is impressive enough, especially for someone whose native language is not one of the European ones. I was never able to learn German so already he’s doing better than I am!
Granted, it’s going to be hard to tell how smart he is, because those kinds of ‘attract rich foreign thickos’ schools are not going to tell Daddy the Dictator that Junior is dumb as a stump, but he can’t be too stupid either – getting rid of Uncle and Brother was definitely him establishing that he would be his own man, and since he successfully pulled that off and didn’t get himself dead of a sudden fatal illness, he can’t be stupid enough to be the pliable cats’ paw of powers behind the throne like elder political figures or the generals. He doesn’t have to be a genius, he seems to be smart enough that he was able to identify the problem, take action, and survive it – reading this account, he strikes me as more Caligula than Nero in their early reigns (Nero being led by his mother and others until he decided to indulge in a little matricide after a few years, while Caligula took the reins right from the start ensuring there was no co-heir in defiance of Tiberius’ wishes and will, and was, at least early on, capable enough).
One of the things I got out of this book is that I don’t think Kim Jong Un is very smart, but also that I don’t he needs to be. Highly intelligent people might be worse at being dictators, because they might be tempted to apply their intelligence in more experimental ways. KJU just needs to do a few things well to maintain his rule, and to make no mistakes in any other areas.
KJU just needs to do a few things well to maintain his rule, and to make no mistakes in any other areas.
Yeah, that’s my takeaway from this – he’s no big brain but he’s not a dummy just paraded around by handlers, either. He was smart – or cunning, or well-trained by dear old dad – enough to get rid of Uncle (who seems to have fancied himself as a power behind the throne manipulating the new leader) and ruthlessly murder Brother to remove any threats to his unhindered accession and exercise of power.
Again, John, thank you for your trenchant analysis.
One thing that struck me in the book is that it noted that KJU’s ridiculous (to Western eyes) appearance is deliberately intended to make him look like his grandfather, Kim Il Sung. Kim Il Sung seems to have been both much more successful and much more popular than Kim Jong-Il was. KJU’s approach is designed to appeal to the nostalgia of the older generation for the conditions of Cold War-era North Korea, when the country was more prosperous, albeit no more free. For the younger generation, his appeal is primarily that of improved living conditions.
Said uncle – Jang Song-thaek seems to have been Beijing’s ‘man on the inside’ in Pyongyang – the book makes note of his closer relationship with Hu Jintao as compared to Kim Jong-Un, as well as his belief in the need for economic reform in North Korea. Jang wanted to create special economic zones in North Korea, like those developed in China to boost the country’s economy. Jang got his wish after KJU took over, only to be stabbed in the back, humiliated, and executed. I can’t help but feel that both Jang’s execution and Kim Jong-Nam’s assassination were as much about making sure China had no alternatives to Kim Jong-Un as ruler for North Korea.
A small note: Kim Jong-Un seems to be remarkably paranoid about leaving any trace of his body in any of the foreign establishments he’s visited. NK security operatives take every glass he touches; the hotels he stays in are swept for every hair, every trace of material he’s left behind. This might be about preventing anyone from getting any information about his health, which (since he drinks and smokes heavily) is probably quite poor. He’s noted as being much more out-of-shape than Moon Jae-In, a man roughly thirty years his senior.
Maybe he’s worried about being cloned and thus replaceable in Kim-ideology? Or some kind of targeted bioweapon?
Not reasonable concerns in the world of today, but he might be thinking ahead and be paranoid.
Or just a general fear of unknown unknowns.
I don’t really see what information or advantage you couuld get over NK if you got some of his hair and/or skin. Though I don’t see myself threatened by the whole world either.
Or think about ways to get at Kim, unless I’m in the shower and the thought crosses my mind.
Perhaps one of the refugees is a child of his and that could spell trouble?
The only thing I can think of that’s practical is that you could get some useful information on his health (which is apparently quite poor). A targeted bioweapon is pretty unrealistic. OTOH, Kim Jong Un has his bodyguards run alongside his limo like in In The Line Of Fire. He seems to draw a dangerous amount of information from movies.
> “princes” don’t become public figures until they are adults, or nearly so, and selected to rule
Huh. I suppose part of that is lower mortality rates.
But I wonder whether it’s also a matter of bureaucracy vs feudalism. That Medieval Europe lacked the social technologies that make institutions effective and capable of wielding authority. Without that, medieval authority was invested in individuals: the aristocracy.
But institutional power, once you’ve made it exist by convincing everyone that it does exist, is much harder to co-opt into a rival power base.
Aren’t strong institutions at odds with a powerful autocrat like KJU? Not that they are completely incompatible but I can’t see how much power a bureaucracy can have when it’s KJU making all the important decisions.
I don’t mean power to overrule KJU.
I mean that he can’t personally micromanage the whole country all the time.
He has to delegate a lot of responsibility to various people or bodies.
My point is that it’s safer to delegate the necessary power to the People’s Bureau of Agriculture or whatever than to Baron Robert.
I don’t mean power to overrule KJU. I mean power to act independently of him. Compare it to the Chinese Communist Party(or at least my perception of him). Yes, Xi Xinping is the head of the party and if you cross him you’ll probably be punished. But the party is not reliant on a strong, domineering leader to function effectively. I think North Korea might be more similar to a medieval king in this way.
Medieval kings tended to be remarkably weak. The real power was in the local lords.
If I were to compare North Korea and today’s China to European history, I’d say North Korea’s strong monarch looks early modern, and China’s strong bureaucracy looks like Imperial Rome.
It’s kind of shocking how little is generally known about the Kims. We still don’t know how many kids KJU has, and he’s more open about his family than his father was.
It reminds me (slightly) of practices in Ethiopia and the Ottoman Empire, which at different points were in the habit of imprisoning all of the current ruler’s close male relatives.
For the Ottomans, I believe the Harem was a replacement to the system of suceession whereby it was traditional for a mild civil war to break out every time the Sultan died.
I doubt the DPRK can reliably survive a sucession crisis like that.
For a long time the Ottomans had harems but also had a simple solution to succession. The new ruler just had all of his brothers and half-brothers killed. Thus were civil wars avoided. KJU seems to be practicing a variation on this policy.
Hear hear!
Brilliant.
Seriously, thanks for writing this. It was excellent.
Yeah, it’s not often a book shoots to the top of my must read list that quickly.
Thank you for writing this!
Would you recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari books, and if so, which ones?
Sapiens was entertaining middlebrowery. I liked it but not enough to go out and get Homo Deus right away.
I haven’t read any of his books, but when I read some newspaper editorial by Harari, I found his writing voice to be unbearably irritating; a sense of smugness prevailed.
I’ve read Sapiens and he either makes these banal proclamations that he tries to play up or he makes strong assertions that are completely unsupported. It’s completely pointless.
If you’re going to read a Big History book, try Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules.
Once you read one, you’ve read them all. I read Sapiens and Homo Deus and concluded they were almost identical.
An acquaintance described Sapiens as mansplaining especially with the tone of voice used by narrator of the audio version, and I share the sentiments.
Harari states that humans caused the extinction of numerous megafauna which is a controversial conclusion and that the agriculture was a disaster for humanity because the grain based diet was less healthy and pushed Malthusian limits. He says the price of modernity was paid by children dying when the crops failed. He doesn’t consider the children dying because the megafauna became extinct.
Later he says human happiness is caused by serotonin and that the medieval peasant who just finish his hut was just as happy as the investment banker who finished last payment on his mansion and presumably had as much meat and as good a diet as the ancient hunter gatherers who had such a better life than the agriculturists.
And this isn’t the most annoying thing I found, it’s just the easiest to explain.
It is? I have heard this as received wisdom since I was a child. Admittedly I’ve never read the relevant research, but I assumed this was about as settled as was possible. E.g. the South American giant sloth and terror birds.
That’s a pretty common idea these days, I’m not sure how uncontroversial it is, but there have been a number of relatively well-received books arguing this in the past twenty years.
The competing explanation of megafauna extinction is climate change
If you do believe that human overkill is the main cause of megafauna extinction then that undercuts the notion that agriculture with a few key crops made the population vulnerable to famine because overeating your food supply as a hunter also makes you vulnerable to famine.
I think plenty of SSC readers would take issue with the notion that agriculture was a disaster for humanity even if there are well-received books claiming this so I would call it controversial. I certainly disagree. We can debate this if you are interested.
My very limited understanding is that societies that adopted agriculture had much larger populations, but that individuals within those societies tended to be a lot less healthy. I think part of that was because of dependence on a small number of crops, but a bigger part was greater susceptibility to disease thanks to higher population densities and living with livestock. And I think a still bigger reason was that the Iron Law of Wages probably got started around then–at a given level of agricultural technology, population expands till all the useful land is being farmed and there’s just barely enough food being produced to feed everyone. (It seems like something like this should be happening with hunter-gatherers, too, but I’d expect the general dangerousness of their lifestyle to keep population to manageable levels.)
I’m not qualified to talk about the underlying debate, but if true, is it a *feature* that other dangers kept pre-agricultural populations low?
I’d be interested in reading more about both agriculture-is-bad and megafauna extinction, but wouldn’t debate about them because I’m more or less ignorant about the topics. Which doesn’t always stop me, but every now and then I try to be intellectually responsible.
It is a value judgment to say having more people who are not as healthy is a worse than having fewer people who are healthier. Which is one reason agriculture-is-bad is contentious.
It is one of those commonly taught things that has a certain appeal, but doesn’t have great evidence. Its very Jared Diamond-esque in its appeal. It presents a kind of quaint version of things (that probably never existed) and then there is this disruption that lets the teacher/lecturer tell a tale that advances that persons moral view of the world.
Well it probably is the dominant theory, but it is not completely accepted.
OK, so I’ll be bold and admit that I have read Sapiens and enjoyed it very much.
Of course, if you are hanging out around these parts, there might be a lot of things you already know. No surprise people here are like: “boooooring”.
E.g., about agriculture, see example 7 in https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It says basically the same thing as in Sapiens.
It might be that some things are simplified, I don’t know, but I assume they are.
I don’t get the “mansplaining” thing. I thought that means “smugly explaining things to a woman which she actually knows more about than you”. Perhaps it’s that I’m male and not so sensitive about smugness, but the simplified explanations didn’t bother me.
My personal highlight of the book is the thing about Peugeot. What is the company “Peugeot”? It’s not “the workers”, or “the factories”, or “the management”… you could destroy any of these, but Peugeot would still exist.
No, Peugeot is just a collective imagination. The power of doing this, collectively imagining things like “companies”, “gods”, “money”, which only exist in our brains, but have the power to change the world, is what distinguishes the sapiens.
OK, I can hear you all chant “boooooring” again, but to someone who didn’t know that, or didn’t see it so clearly, Harari manages to explain it really well.
Another nice example is his explanation of why the Europeans conquered the world. It was a shift in common conception of the world. They started drawing world maps with white spots, and wondered what was in these white spots, and whether they could conquer it and bring home some gold and slaves for their kings. In contrast, the Aztecs had no curiosity, so they didn’t know what had happened in Cuba just a few years before these weird pale people started showing up. No wonder they failed to react appropriately.
I gave Sapiens to my wife, and she loved it and got herself the two next books.
Perhaps these books serve best as presents to people who have never thought of humanity this way. For example, for a really religious person, the notion that God is a collective imagination must be really something to digest.
On the other hand, for somebody like me, it made me wonder: What is actually the difference between “God” and things like “Peugeot” or “US Dollar”? Why do I think the latter exist and the former not? See, in medieval times, God existed just like the US Dollar does, because everybody believed in it; but today that everybody believes what he or his peers want, and God became an empty shell for convenient projection (“God is an empty chalkboard, with nothing on it but what you wrote yourself” — Feuerbach), this is what now distinguishes Him from Peugeot.
You say booooring, becaue you have read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief but to somebody who didn’t, Harari explains nicely and brings some good insights.
I found the usage of the term imaginary distracting and misleading. I think the term organization would be better, but it wouldn’t seem like such startling insight to say the ability of Sapiens to organize changed the world. Millions of French people might imagine in France winning the world cup, but that didn’t affect the world the way the organization Peugeot does. Peugeot is an organization that created relationships with suppliers to deliver materials to workers in factories to manufacture cars and relationship with dealers to sell the cars. If you destroy Peugeot’s factories the ability for the Peugeot to exists depends on its ability to rebuild its factories not whether millions of people believe in Peugeot.
The Iron Bank of Braavos is imaginary. Chase bank is a real organization and requires that I pay it U.S. dollars every month. It in turn is required to pay taxes in U.S. dollars to the organization called the U.S. government. The U. S. dollar is real because it can send revenue agents to imprison and seize assets of people and organizations don’t to pay taxes in U. S. dollars to the U. S. government, and there are a lot of those people. U.S. dollars may be intangible, but the power of the U. S. government gives it reality that a confederate dollar doesn’t have. Bitcoin is an interesting experiment on the power of imagination.
I suspect the Aztecs had imagination to wonder about the area beyond their boundaries, its just that they lacked the organizational capacity to expand the empire further and enough trouble keeping what they had going. When Cortez conquered the Aztecs, it was because he led a large number of people who revolted against Aztec system, not because 16th century firearms were so superior to the Aztec weapons that 50 European soldiers could fight a couple thousand warriors.
God existed in the medieval times because an organization called the Spanish Inquisition paid you a visit if you didn’t believe in God.
Gods and corporations are not the same type of thing. Believers in God believe that He is an actual thinking, feeling being who exists independently from humanity (including independence from the church). No one believes this about Peugeot. Everyone understands that Peugeot’s decisions and actions are actually made by people.
My records say I read Sapiens, though apparently it made little enough impression on me that I almost picked it up again, thinking it looked interesting.
I recently ran across this critical review by Christopher Hallpike, which is consistent with what others here have said, is very entertaining and informative in its own right, and convinces me that forgetting the book did me no harm. (Hat tip to The Roots of Progress, which pointed me to the review.)
Ouch.
Thank you, that was a very interesting read! It’s obvious that a book which aims to summarize the whole human history needs to simplify and leave out a lot, but some things are outright false; good to know.
On some points, I still feel the critique is somewhat beside the point.
The point being, — I might be wrong here –, Sapiens aims to be thought-provoking, and reaches that with somewhat dubious methods. The confusion between “imaginary” and “immaterial”, which philosophically certainly falls flat, still provoked thoughts in my layman brain:
What IS the difference between God and the US Dollar / Peogeot S.A., after all? What is it that makes me believe in the latter, just because everybody else does?
If people cease to believe in countries which do not exist any more, the countries cease to exist. If some weirdheads try to start believing in them again, they don’t get very far, but only because their belief is not shared by the rest of the population (particularly the police and justice).
And maybe future generations will look at our thousands of pages of FDA regulations, and regard them like we regard the medieval scholar discussions about how many angels fit on a needle tip?
And what is the difference between belief and convention? Do we really “sit down and deliberately agree to believe in” the United States, or do we take them as granted, like the Romans did with Jove?
Yes, nobody doubts that the “limited liability company” performs a very useful social function, just as on which side of the road to drive. Having a common God to pray to, who leads us to victory in battles, is also a very useful social function.
I KNOW that there is a fundamental difference, but Harari has managed to confuse me such that I can’t really formulate it. It’s not scientific. Or what would be the experiment to prove that Peugeot S.A. exists? Pointing to a piece of paper called “Company register”? A poll which shows that 99% of the people believe in Peugeot? Similar things work for Roman Jove.
And provoking these thoughts is some achievement, so I don’t share the critique that “Harari achieves nothing by confusing them”. I’m looking forward to getting the gist of the difference in a nutshell. I feel it will be a revelation.
The talk about “Afro-Asia” is probably also just a [thought] provocation; yes, geologically Europe is just a peninsula and shouldn’t be its own continent.
The thing about being “full of fears and anxieties over our position in the food chain” could just be a fancy way of saying that we don’t want to be eaten by a wolf or a bear? There are a lot of fairy tales with these tropes.
True, a hunter-gatherer wouldn’t understand Alice in Wonderland or Quantum Physics. Harari is simply wrong; he probably wanted to say that they were biologically like us, so if we sent one of them on our schools, he could understand them.
I didn’t know that hunter-gatherers had no bamboo flutes yet.
Calling the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud” is of course meant to be a [thought] provocation, too. Hallpike agrees that it is not totally untrue. Why does he criticize that agriculture has its advantages, too? Nobody doubts that. All our civilization rests on this basis. Let’s grant him this simplification, viewing agriculture from a different angle, including the viewpoint of the selfish wheat genes, to provoke people into thinking things differently.
“This is a nineteenth-century view of what science does” is also a little bit unfair, because the scientific revolution doesn’t talk about modern science, but about 16th century science. And Columbus, I believe Harari said (or where did I read that…?) that Columbus was still a very medieval-thinking man himself. Therefore, he isn’t “a useful example of ‘a colony-seeking naval officer'”.
OK, I feel I might be boring you, down in the bowels of this already doomed Open Thread. Nevertheless, I’m very grateful for the link to the Hallpike article, as a very good counterpoint to Harari. But dang it, he still didn’t explain me the knack of the difference between Jove and Peugeot!
Yes, I have found it, Harari in the section “Empty Maps”, chapter 15:
I don’t see how this is different from what Hallpike says about Columbus (page 14).
The worship of Jove existed, the worship of Allah exists, and the LLC Peogeot exist. We have evidence for all of them. We also know that cars built by Peogeot exist. We don’t have tangible evidence that Jove or Allah actually exist or ever existed although we have evidence that some organizations currently exist that want to forcefully enforce worship of Allah.
Conventions like choosing which side of the road to the drive on, or which way a screw should be turned to tighten it, help coordinate human activity. Some conventions were deliberately decided, and some were path dependent.
Being “full of fears and anxieties over our position in the food chain” is not just about being afraid of being eaten by a wolf or bear. It is blaming historical calamities based on this species psychoanalysis.
The quote that was in the article
“Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump (12-13)”
In contrast lions were supposed to be majestic having been on top of the food chain for a much longer period of time. Although some how many other animals on the top of food chain like sharks are not majestic. And many animals dramatically change the ecology when the enter a new environment. This just so explanation is what I called mansplanning.