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So, I remember reading an article some years ago about how nobody knows how the genetic code is actually stored, and the obvious answer “it’s the tRNA, duh” isn’t actually correct. I haven’t been able to find it again recently. Does anything know about this? Is this still actually an open question, or has it been solved in the intervening years, or has this not actually been a mystery in decades and the article was just wrong?
Like, OK, I have managed to find that the “it’s the tRNA” answer is wrong because nothing on a given tRNA actually specifies the amino acid, only the codon. Instead you need aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, which is what actually matches the amino acid and the tRNA. So that’s definitely something along those lines.
All that seems to be old, well-known stuff though. Is that indeed all there is to it, and the genetic code is stored in the combination of tRNA and aaRS (and the DNA that codes for these things), or is there some additional question? Was that article I read just totally wrong? Thanks!
It is indeed only the combination of tRNA and aaRS, nothing else. Fun fact: there are now new combinations of tRNA and aaRS invented (I’m mostly familiar with the ones based on stop codon suppression, but with whole genome synthesis these days there are others) which allow us to introduce “unnatural” amino acids into proteins.
A minor point of pedantry: genetic code in not a physical object, it is an abstract concept. Thus it can not be “stored” like a cookie in a jar. It can be “implemented”, or perhaps it “manifests”.
I see! Well if we at this point know how to modify it, I guess that answers that then. No idea what that article was going on about (other than the aaRS, that certainly is surprising, but it made it seem like there was more).
You mean which bases code for which amino acid?
Yes.
I don’t know that article, but I don’t get the argument. Can’t the code be stored in the system generally, a few separate critical parts that work together?
English was a language before the first dictionary.
“Stored” is perhaps the wrong word here. “Implemented” may be better. None of what you’re saying answers the question at hand, which is, what are the parts of the system that determine the specific code to be used? How is the codon-to-amino-acid mapping implemented? Apparently, the answer turns out to be not just tRNA, like one would expect, but also aaRS! Which means there’s also this odd intermediate layer that doesn’t seem to get talked about much…
I wonder whether we could take an existing genome and change up the codon table, by substituting the DNA codons and modifying the aaRS genes.
So they’d be phenotypically almost identical, but have an entirely different genome.
I’m guessing you’d get some kind of viral resistance, at least temporarily.
And you could only transfer genes (with sex pila or plain old sex) with similarly modified organisms.
Yes, see here. This is what I meant by “with whole genome synthesis these days there are others” above.
Greg Egan has a short story about this. And I think this same point was discussed in one of the open threads over the last few months, unless I’m misremembering something.
Got the title of the Egan short story? It sounds fun, and Egan sounds like the person to write it.
The Moat, published as part of Axiomatic.
A NABE survey cites about 38% of economists predicting a recession in 2020. This has obvious implications on the 2020 election. OTOH, recessions are hard to predict.
What I haven’t been reading in articles such as WSJ and FiveThirtyEight, though, are how quickly recessions are confirmed once underway. As I recall, we don’t know for sure until 3-6 months in. (In the UK, it’s six months by definition.) So if it starts in July, it’s not confirmed until January 2021. So that news itself can’t affect a November election.
So what’s the chance that voters would vaguely notice a recession before then?
I feel like I can’t do anything with this information without knowing how many economists predicted recessions in 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016…
There are a number of “nowcaster” indices that try to determine whether the economy is currently in a recession using current data. The ADS index is one I’m familiar with. There are also surveys of forecasters, plus official forecasts from the Fed and such.
Obviously financial markets are to a large degree predictors of business cycle conditions. So drops in the stock market and a negative yield curve (indicating investors think interest rates will fall, which is a prediction the Fed will cut them, indicating recession) are classic indicators of a recession.
I assume popular sentiment is driven mainly by what people see on the news, which is mostly going to be (1) stock market movements and (2) reporting of “bad numbers”, but especially unemployment / job losses, and headline GDP growth. This stuff is put out monthly, and an increase in the headline unemployment number or reports of high levels of job losses would make for bad headlines for Trump (plus would rock markets). Unemployment and GDP are somewhat lagging, because companies usually delay layoffs, and entering a recession usually leads to downward GDP revisions later on (plus the big reports are quarterly, so less frequent).
Recessions are usually not confirmed until 3-4 quarters after they start. The business cycle dating committee wants to wait for data revisions to come in, etc. There’s little cost to waiting — it’s not like politicians are putting pressure on them to declare a recession!
If the stock market crashes and at least one bank fails, voters will notice.
That’s how they noticed in 2008 even though the data weren’t “official” yet…
The 2008 recession officially started in December 2007.
It wasn’t officially declared until December 2008.
As late as July 2008, Phil Gramm was dismissing it as a “mental recession” and proclaiming America a nation of whiners.
By that point, the unemployment rate had spiked from 4.4% to 5.8%. I’m not sure how someone could describe that as a “mental recession”.
And yet there we were.
The Bush administration passed a stimulus package in Feb(?) 2008, and the Federal reserve was cutting rates from August through June(?).
My expectation is that the merest whiff of recession will be exhaustively covered in the media leading up to the election, and the technical definition won’t really matter as much as perception to the average voter.
And yes, this is obviously true. Any hint of bad economic news and CNN will have no shortage of “experts” on to tell us that “obviously we are now in a recession.”
Can you cause a recession by talking incessantly as if there’s a recession? Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don’t know whether this should be a concern.
According to Scott Adams, this is basically the only thing that can cause a boom or a recession!
Yes, well, he’s wrong about a lot of things.
It’s a theory without any real evidence.
Probably not, as evidenced by the number of people saying we were going to have a recession anytime now over the last 8 years. People need to have actual legitimate fears about something to increase their currency and savings demands, otherwise they are just going to ignore the Cassandras and keep on spending and investing.
But if the Cassandras’ reach extends to a sufficient audience, couldn’t that be enough to sway more people to change their behavior, who would otherwise have ignored the “experts” or just not have been reached by them?
From a top-down level? Theoretically possible, but that requires things like the CEO of GE to not invest in his company because some New York Times Opinion Writer says a recession might happen, or for young new couples with new jobs and a declining unemployment rate to put off buying or renting and still living with their parents because of the same article.
I don’t think anyone has the influence necessary to throw the economy directly into recession, except maybe Trump. I don’t know enough about Fed internal governance, but even they would have to reach a majority opinion to start changing federal funds policy (IIRC).
Right now, economists are guessing at a recession because of people’s behaviors(yield curve inversion, index of leading indicators), not because economists just decided there would be a recession. That’s putting the cart before the horse. Not too long ago we were raising interest rates, a strong indication that we thought the economy was over-heating, not about to have a recession.
.. Its an indication. But central banks are generally way, way too eager to jump that particular gun. So I would not call it a strong indicator. More like “We will not actually be laughed out of the room if we talk about the economy overheating”.
People tend to figure it out before the government officially weighs in. Consumer sentiment, before the 2008 recession, started collapsing a couple of months before the official start date, December 2007. That start date, BTW, wasn’t decided on until December 2008, a year after the recession officially began. As a general rule, when the unemployment rate starts increasing year-over-year rather than decreasing, a recession is on the way.
People vote their wallet, not what the man on TV says is in their wallet. You saw this in 2016 where the TV kept talking about low unemployment but didn’t account for underemployment, stagnant wages, and people dropping out of the workforce. Even then, it’s not those metrics that matter to an individual voter. How am I dping? How’s my wife doing? Is her brother off the oxy? Did my buddy get that raise? If the answers to those questions are positive then it doesn’t matter what the man on TV says, he’s out of touch or lying. If the answers are negative, won’t matter what Trump says, hello President Biden.
Not to criticize, but I am interested in evidence that this is true. When I looked at top-down election forecast models, almost everything was explained (explainable) by simple incumbency/# of terms rules and the economic factors were very weak/irrelevant.
What are the unwritten rules of SSC commenting? I ask not because I want to call anyone out–indeed, I’m not thinking of a particular failing–but because I want to check my intuitions and like talking about words, manners, and so on.
Obviously, it’s the written rules that tend to get you banned; the unwritten rules might get you banned, but generally just make people less happy to engage with you.
Here’s how I see it. I’m may be going too far with these; I error on the side of self-doubt and introversion.
-Keep a continuous identity, though pseudonymity is fine.
-Don’t try to skirt the edge of the formal rules
-Don’t be intentionally provocative, or at least bring up controversial topics with respect to dissenting opinion and what might get Scott in trouble
-Don’t drag arguments with an individual from one discussion to another, but restarting a discussion on a more active thread is fine if there’s interest
-Don’t start too many top level posts in any one thread; let other people start their discussions without being drowned out.
-Similarly, don’t reply to yourself, except to clarify after the edit window
-Don’t edit a response that has been replied to
-Don’t pile on if one person is in a heated discussion with several others, unless there’s some point in particular you feel has gone unaddressed. Refresh the comments before posting during active periods to avoid this. If you do, editing in an acknowledgement is good form.
-Generalizations should be supported with commonly accepted examples or linkable studies. You can post without these, but be prepared to supply them or retract your point when challenged.
-You are not required to respond to any comment, nor should you expect someone else to; internet life is secondary to real life. But if you post argument X and someone posts a counter argument, it should be refuted or accounted for if you want to assert argument X in the future.
-Reporting should be done rarely and not for mere disagreement. Try actually stating your disagreement in a calm way rather than reporting, unless you think it will derail the thread too much. New posters may be excepted to that if it is blatant trolling.
-Well expressed/effort posts should be rewarded with recognition, but follow up comments are better if they touch on some substantive point; but a +1 is acceptable now and then
-Be gracious with typos or translation errors unless they accidentally say something really funny (I’m hoping that’s the rule, otherwise I owe some apologies). Proofread your own posts, and if something is called out by the spell checker, run it past google to get the right spelling.
-You’re allowed basically one contentless joke post per open thread–none on a front page post. Make it worth it.
-When you post a link, try to do it in a way that starts a discussion here, rather than just directing people elsewhere.
-When someone does post a link, try to at least skim it before talking about the specifics. Asking questions that are answered in the link already provided is poor form.
-Rot13 spoilers on current work or if you feel you must. Personally I’d prefer it to go away entirely, but that doesn’t appear to be the consensus.
-Don’t drag unrelated issues into a thread. If you must, make a new topic and mention what it is relevant to.
-Don’t use unusual formatting. If you want to emphasize a word, use bold. If you want to emphasize a sentence, use a line break.
-Quote, don’t paraphrase, except explicitly and with care.
-Try not to start the same conversation on a new thread just because you missed one. Wait while to revive a dead horse, or at least find something new to bring to it.
-Don’t assume a particular poster will take a particular side of an issue just because they sided with that team before. And in fact, the way an issue is phrased might well change people’s position because we often care about being precise.
-Be quick to concede a valid point that disagrees with you, but concede an argument only after a counter point of sufficient strength is brought.
-You’ve got a few seconds to delete a post after posting it, but remember some people will still see it in their e-mail. Deleting after that is bad form but may be the lesser of two evils.
-Don’t speak of the banned. They can’t respond, and shouldn’t be taken to represent any side anymore. Exceptions for people who have their own platform elsewhere, if you must.
Italic for emphasis, not bold, unless you want to emphasize something inside a blockquote. Bold isn’t unknown but it’s a lot rarer — Plumber’s the only frequent user that immediately comes to mind. I do see it for topic headings in effortposts sometimes.
@Nornagest,
Duly noted!
Wow, if this is a rule, I’ve been shamelessly violating it.
Surely “Text is strongly preferable to video” is one.
ETA:
-Behavior that doesn’t rise to the level of a ban is often discouraged with a “Less of this, please.”
It’s possible some of these are primarily rules I try to hold myself to, rather than object to from others. But I do feel like I’m violating the standards if I make just a throw away pun.
There’s definitely a difference. One rule I try to abide by (which I’ve been pretty bad about lately, I should say) is always marking whether I’ve edited a post, even if it’s just “ETA: typo”. I wouldn’t try to hold anyone else to it, though, since I don’t think it is a local norm!
This raises the question how a personal rule like mine might become a norm. Does it all come from the top? Do folks adopt, sometimes unconsciously, norms that they think are good? I don’t have a good sense of this.
Find a couple of instances where the violation matters semantically and politely call attention to them.
If none of these are forthcoming, we can take a cue from the American legal system and attempt to rig some test cases.
Edit: Removed profanity, ad hominen, and peacock references.
Maybe something about how fisking’s discouraged? It’s not totally unheard of, but usually appears deep in a nasty debate after tempers are running high (and generally signals there’s nothing more in that thread worth reading); the more typical house style is to pull one to three quotes that represent the crux of an argument or weak points in it.
This can bug me sometimes when someone takes one point and argues against it while ignoring what I think is the stronger point. Like, are you conceding the rest, or do you feel like it’s not worth responding to?
But all in all if someone is doing this honestly, it’s probably best practice.
Yeah, it’s good practice when your interlocutor is actually responding to your strongest points, and pretty annoying when they aren’t. One thing that helps here is making it crystal clear what your strongest points are. A little structuring of your argument, like “Here’s the crux of our disagreement:”, goes a long way.
Personally, though, I don’t feel it should be normative. There are times when I feel it’s not going to be helpful responding directly to my interlocutor’s arguments, and want to come to the crux from the side, as it were. Do you know what I mean? Like with the abortion debate last thread I really wasn’t interested in debating “is birth a Schelling point.” If I were to step into those discussions, it was going to be by disputing something very different. I guess that’s a longwinded way of saying that yeah, sometimes I think your strongest point just isn’t relevant. :p
ETA: moved between comment levels
ETA? To me, that means Estimated Time of Arrival.
You pretty clearly mean it to imply editting. If you want to use it to mean “editted to add” (my best guess) you need to publicize this equivalence. And it can’t mean “edited to *add*” in the above context.
In case it does usually mean “editted to add” – what’s wrong with “[Edit: added foo bar and baz]” rather than “ETA: foo, bar, and baz”? The former requires less acronymn awareness from your readers, and isn’t very much longer.
I don’t know why ETA became standard here, and I have the same qualms about saying addition when edits can be deletions or updates too, but norms are norms, and Chesterton’s Fence implies I’m better off not touching it!
ETA: wording.
I see “ETA” used this way all over the Internet, not just here, so it isn’t uniquely an SSC issue.
That said, I agree that “Edit: [blah blah blah]” is more clear/useful (and only one more letter!).
More importantly, a feature I’ve wished for here is that edited posts become “new” again.
If someone edits a post after I’ve read it, I probably never end up seeing the edit.
“ETA:” Actually, the fact that edits don’t make the post “new” would be a good reason to support making a second followup post for clarifications/additions so that people actually see it. Leave “edit post” for fixing spelling/grammar and broken links (or retracting something you decided was wrong/inappropriate).
Another proposed rule: try to err on the side of being too explicit, and avoid needless abbreviations and internal jargon without explanation.
WTH would be wrong with using “P.S.” like our grandparents did?
Is it bad? My understanding is fisking is meticulously responding to every piece of an opponent’s argument, which seems to me to be a good thing. Or am I missing an obvious problem with it (or defining it wrong)?
Can only speak for myself here, but fisking has some of the qualities of a Gish gallop — if you’re fisking a long post, most of the points you’ll make in response end up being restatements, or references to other points, or just generally weak, but the length of the response gives a false impression of strength. And although it implies that you need to respond point-by-point, nobody’s really got time for that after a round or two, so it tends to degenerate into dueling quips.
It is annoying when someone takes a supporting argument, or something you didn’t intend as an argument at all, and tries to argue it like it’s the main point, but I think that’s better dealt with by narrowing the scope of your responses.
I had to look up both “Fisking” and “Gish Gallop”,
Fisking seems fine to me, I’d rather someone did pull quotes of just what they’re arguing about rather than the statement over again.
I’d have to see more examples of “gush galloping” before I really had an opinion on it.
Gish Gallops are a real problem in debate formats with limited time for each side; I haven’t seen it so often in a text conversation, though it can happen. The problem in debate formats is that your opponent might literally not have enough time to respond to everything, while here your response can be as long as it needs. Not that it’s always worth responding, especially if, as Nornagest says, many of the points are just weak or restatements of other ones.
Gish gallops are a bit subtle, as they’re not simply long lists of arguments for the receiver to rebut, while such long lists are often pattern-matched as “gish gallops” anyway. The idea of a gish gallop is that it overloads the receiver with arguments that often invalid or irrelevant, whereas a long list of arguments might be all valid and germane, because the claim they counter really is that full of holes. If the list’s author instead picked one or two main points, and the receiver rebutted them, the author now looks like they didn’t bring enough guns to the gunfight, and if they bring up anything else on their list, they now look like they’re “moving goalposts”.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen people say “gish gallop” and it looks suspiciously like “I’m trying to get out of having to refute all your points with as little effort as possible”.
It ought to be respectable to say “there are a lot of things wrong with your claim, but I’ll present the following few first”, and follow up with the next few later if needed. Maybe that’s the way to go.
No it doesn’t, they’re completely different things.
Only if you do it badly.
Ditto.
I disagree.
@thisheavenlyconjugation,
I like what you just did. ^
More like that please
Fisking has a way of losing sight of the big picture. At its worst, it treats each part of an argument to the exclusion of the other parts; when this is combined with evincing confusion at what your interlocutor is getting at or building toward, it is immensely frustrating:
There was a guy on a forum I used to frequent that did this. You cannot imagine how annoying it was.
The truly hopeless cases aside, though, it can also focus on mistakes that don’t affect the point. It’s not that it’s strictly worthless to correct them, but it can distract from the real flaws, if any, in the argument.
“Less of this please” is an appropriate response to shitty, low-effort posts, especially outgroup-bashing ones, especially especially when directed at another commenter (including obliquely). Some amount of derision for the offender (iff tied into what they’ve actually said) is appropriate. It’s virtuous to defend your counterparty, but not necessarily expected.
Don’t call people out for talking like a dying wizard or otherwise make fun of them.
Moralizing is fine; demonizing isn’t.
How do dying wizards talk?
Fly, you fools!
Bertrand Russell would like a word with you about writing down the set of unwritten rules.
I try to do three impossible things before breakfast. Was running behind today.
But perhaps it’s allowable since it’s a “hidden” thread.
I think it’s ok to do this if you ask a general question to the commenters and also have your own answer. That way all the top level replies are to your original question and not about disputing your answer.
That’s a good point. Obviously, by this example, not what I usually do but there’s merit there.
@Randy M,
Wow that’s a long list!
I’ll try again tomorrow to memorize more of it (no promises that I can though!).
My own request is for folks to avoid using “blockquote” when it’s a sub thread of a sub-thread (because the quote above usually unreadable unless I copy and paste it elsewhere) and to use another method to indicate quoting something (I’m partial to “italics” + “bold” or “code”).
-Thanks
+1
Yes, it’s very annoying when reading on the phone. I’d also like to make this a rule.
Good to know. I’m always on desktop, so it doesn’t affect me. I’ll try to make that change.
Oh my, I’m sorry, please don’t.
Like I said, it was a discussion prompt, not a coup or anything.
I also wonder what the “official” norm is for editing your own posts.
I often need to edit for spelling or punctuation, especially when posting on a phone and using auto-correct; I almost NEVER catch every mistake I/it makes the first time. Is it generally expected that you explain this in the post?
(Relatedly, I wonder how often in the past I’ve judged someone on the internet using, say, “it’s/its” incorrectly and it was just their auto-correct? Mine has incorrectly added apostrophes before.)
Multiple times Auto-correct has changed “Poul Anderson” to “Poultry Anderson” on me, yet it doesn’t correct “snd” to “and”! 😠
That’s because it assumes you were talking about the Scottish National Dictionary.
Auto-correct is Circe, and thinks it’s funny to change people into poultry.
I don’t think so. If the meaning is changed even slightly then you should note the edit; if you just clean up syntax and formatting, I don’t feel that requires being so stated.
Similarly, if you quote an obvious typo, I’d consider it good manners to correct it without drawing attention to it. But you have to be really sure that doesn’t alter the meaning even slightly; misrepresenting people’s actual words is pretty poor form. It’s why I sometimes wish English had a different punctuation for paraphrasing.
You don’t need different punctuation, just different conjugation.
Several languages use different verb forms to indicate that you’re reporting or paraphrasing someone else. German changes all the verbs into Subjunctive I.
The most important rule, IMO, is probably “try to elevate the discussion, not diminish it”. The exact implementation is obviously complicated, but you can derive most of the more-specific rules from that.
Another one, which I think HBC came up with, is “the high-status act is to explain something well, the highest-status is to do it so well that someone changes their mind.” Completely endorsed.
Lastly, text is better than video.
It’s said that a major obstacle to regulating assault weapons is the difficulty of defining in words what an “assault weapon” is. However, I think I might have solved it.
“An ‘assault weapon’ is any firearm with the following characteristics:
1) Is semi-automatic [meaning each pull of the trigger fires one round, and the user doesn’t have to perform any mechanical operation after shooting one round to enable the second round to be fired], and;
2) Accepts a detachable magazine, OR has a fixed or internal magazine that can hold more than eight rounds, OR has a belt-feed system, and;
3) Is designed to be held, steadied, and fired with more points of contact applied to the weapon than one of the user’s hands.”
Criterion #3 distinguishes “assault weapons” from “handguns,” which are meant to be fired one-handed. A foregrip that the user is meant to grasp with his non-firing hand would be an example of a second point of contact with the weapon that would qualify it as an ‘assault weapon’, as would a buttstock pressed against his shoulder, a forearm brace, or any creative ‘body harness systems’ that anyone invents to skirt the law. Also, if the weapon is designed to be fired while resting on an object or while attached to a vertical post or other heavy object, it would count as a second point of contact (this would prevent gun companies from skirting the law by making things like “one-handed AR-15s on quick-detach 4-foot long monopods extending down from their handgrips”).
Note that I haven’t listed any cosmetic features included in many assault weapon laws, like bayonet lugs and folding buttstocks.
Any particular reason you couldn’t have posted your edits to 134.5? I think blowing up one thread with this was more than enough — especially since you don’t seem to have otherwise engaged with any of your criticism.
Seconded. If anyone wants to continue having this out in the previous thread that’s fine, but I’m not sure why it needs to be a top level post in two consecutive threads.
Kinda weird it is right after Randy’s thread commenting on norms.
Assault weapon?
If you can attach an extended magazine-tube, you can make it into an assault-weapon (per the rules proposed by @proyas).
Thank you, but I think you should edit point 1 to
1. is capable of automatic fire [meaning weapon will continue firing as long as the trigger is pressed].
United States law allows a limited number of such guns in circulation, per the rules of the National Firearms Act of 1934, as modified by the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986.
It appears all you’ve done is close the one-handed rifle loophole. In doing so you have arguably included handguns (especially larger ones) in your ban. But you have not addressed the substantive objections from the previous threads.
All handguns are designed to be held, steadied, and fired with more points of contact applied to the weapon than one of the user’s hands. They are designed so that they CAN be used one-handed if necessary. They are INTENDED to be used in a two-handed grip.
See also your failure to engage with any of the criticism in the previous thread.
Repeating this discussion seems unnecessary and monomaniacal. Let’s take a break.
.
Surprised to see nothing about the recent fluoride paper in JAMA:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2748634
The punch line:
My (strong) prior is to be skeptical of results like these. There are lots of obvious pit-falls that one can fall into with something like this, and the topic is obviously going to be controversial.
The effect size is in some ways small and in others quite substantial. At a population level, a 3.5 point change is huge, but for an individual, I don’t even think its measurable. They control for maternal education and net income but don’t have any paternal data nor actual maternal IQ. Their sample is pretty big, but given that they’ve got to sample regionally (fluoridated region vs. unfluoridated), I do wonder about selection effects. There’s also potential selection bias among the ~100 mother/child pairs who weren’t included because they didn’t have data on whether their water was fluoridated/they drank tap.
The statistical analysis actually seem okay from what I can tell. It’d be nice if they would publish their data and code, but perhaps there is PII in there or something.
The biggest reason I’m not ready to worry about this just yet is that their results show a sex-dependent effect, with maternal fluoride exposure only effecting males. AFAIK, the biological mechanisms they discuss (this is not my area of expertise) wouldn’t lead you to expect any effect to be sex-dependent. Nor would the other studies the authors cited.
So I would put this in the category of “preliminary and not likely to matter much at the individual level.” That said, I’m not sure what action I would actually recommend were my wife currently pregnant.
I’m assuming they must have controlled for “poor people drink more tap water”, but how robust was this?
They have a couple different measures, including a direct measurement of fluoride in maternal urine (they brought the moms in like 3 or 4 times during their pregnancy to measure this) and a self-report measures about how much tap water (including tea, coffee, etc.) the moms drink. The latter, along with the amount of fluoride in the tap water gives an estimate for exposure.
Neither are perfect but they’re both reasonable.
I guess I meant “poor people have lower IQ’s, generally, and drinking tap water is a poor person thing; how are they controlling for the part where you’d expect this result anyway?”
It’s not paywalled. I think they think they tried to adjust for enough, but I still find your objection (or something similar) cogent (since it’s always going to be hard to really filter out such effects without a strong model) and am too lazy to read the whole thing.
Further down, the most relevant point is probably that apparently the group in fluoridated communities was marginally more educated which you’d expect to be weakly correlated with higher IQ. On the other hand, they are measuring child IQ at age 3 or 4. It’s not very stable measure at that point as far as I understand.
A little while back, I saw an article posted by a writer named Clayton Cramer. (Our host has reviewed Cramer’s book on the history of treating the mentally-ill in the United States…)
One of Cramer’s more recent history projects is building a database of mass-murders in the history of the United States. He has done most of his work by mining news articles from digital archives of newspapers.
One of the results of that research was this post, with a short summary and a graph. Apparently, mass murders show up at a low-but-noticeable rate in most years since 1800 in the United States. There’s a noticeable spike in number of mass-murder-events in the 1860s-to-1890s. Another spike in incidents happens in the 1920, and a general upslope in number-of-mass-murder-events since the 1970s.
He has another graph that counts events ‘categorized as related to mental illness’. Since his source material is old newspaper articles, that linkage may not be easy to tease out in every case.
The graph for number-killed-in-mass-murder-events has a huge spike around 2000. From eyeballing that graph, I suspect he has the September 11 attacks as an entry in his list of mass murders.
Another side-note is the variety of weapons used: arson, poison, knives, axes, explosives, and firearms. A disturbing number of mass-murder incidents in the United States were fires in entertainment venues. Or even someone falsely shouting fire at a crowded event.
The overall point that Cramer is driving at is that firearms are not the only tool used in mass-murder. Nor are they the most dangerous, in terms of people killed per attack.
Another overall point is that the United States has seen large waves of mass-murder in its history. The post-1860s wave appears to be linked to un-diagnosed cases in PTSD in returning veterans from the bloodiest war in American history. No such wave of mass-murders is detectable after World War II. There may have been a smaller wave after World War I, but Prohibition-era mass shootings might be masking them. The modern wave is harder to explain, but it may be linked to the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, staring in the 1970s in the U.S.
Overall, it’s an interesting–and saddening–thing to study.
One thing that may be affecting today is increasing density. If someone in 1910 America goes crazy, the likelihood that he is able to affect enough people to be “mass” is lower simply because the number of people living so closely is lower.
Although technically possible, I really doubt it. Is there some evidence that can link this to PTSD? I feel like there are a lot more plausible post Civil War factors than PTSD.
Speculating, but surely KKK murders would be a major factor for the period 1865-80?
I dunno about the KKK specifically (one of the peak lynching decades the KKK was actually at a nadir), but yeah I’d expect a spike in that sort of thing.
We’re talking about very rare events (murders of three or more people by one individual in 24 hours), so I’d expect some revenge killings for slavery during or shortly after the war too.
Plus the economy of the South had collapsed, and a bunch of African Americans migrated to cities. This must have had all sorts of knock on effects. I’m pretty sure Northern workers were not excited by the newcomers.
This doesn’t appear to be attributable to lead poisoning, or the level of mass shootings would’ve diminished in the late 90s along with the rest of the crime rate.
Post acw mass murders… This is mostly going to be the clan. That is, straight up domestic terrorism.
It’s plausible that the KKK was more murdery than most American political movements (compare e.g. “Days of Rage”) because its membership was dominated by recent veterans of a very bloody war coming home to a society with inadequate mental health care, but even so the issue should be addressed with explicit recognition of the klan-violence aspect rather than just saying “PTSD”.
The definition given above (“murders of three or more people by one individual in 24 hours”) excludes most Klan murders; the Klan usually murdered people in ones or twos, and nearly always acted in groups
Right, but it also excludes most non-Klan murders for the same reason. The klan murdered a lot of people, they weren’t scrupulous about doing it one at a time, and no way do you get to point to a big spike in “mass” murders ca. 1865-1885 and say “Must have been the PTSD, obviously”.
It excludes most non-Klan murders because of the “three or more people” exclusion. I think it might exclude a greater proportion of the Klan murders because of the “by one individual” criterion.
If so, it should be easy to show with at least modest fidelity.
Some more questions regarding genes and chromosomes
Why is there an X and Y chromosome? As in why is it that they are very different in shape and number of genes than its pair, rather than say X1 and X2?
Why is it almost always part of the sex-determining chromosome?
This is true not only for humans, but most animals that engage in sexual reproduction from what I understand.
There’s some that are instead X0 or ZW, but even then, it’s the case that one pair is substantially different in shape and gene count than its counterpart that’s not true for any other chromosome.
Is it possible/common for genes to suddenly change transcoding/how it is processed?
It is common to refer to DNA and genes as a blueprint. But does that mean that you could change how it’s read or decoded to change what it does?
Is it possible/common for genes to either reverse in dominance or just “move” to another chromosome?
I know of some birth defects that are the result of the later, but as a real beneficial change?
For example, red-green colorblindness is one of the more common sex-linked genetic disorders. Is it possible for that gene to transfer its encoding to another chromosome and thus no longer be sex-linked (and thus much rarer)?
I see many issues regarding compatibility for future generations even if it works, and presumably, the position and which chromosome it is on is of significance in itself, but nature can be weird.
Something has to determine sex consistently but randomly*, might as well be a chromosome. (*Okay, doesn’t have to be random. There was a fascinating reference in the parasite thread about a species with another method, check that out.)
But chromosomes are divided up randomly in meiosis, and making one copy of the pair the sex chromosome is a elegant way to balance the population.
This one is easy. You can’t have anything critical on the Y, because women don’t get it. It’s basically (someone correct me if I’m wrong) just a control mechanism for genes that rely elsewhere.
Kind of alluded to this, but if we use one copy of a chromosome pair to signal sex, it can be otherwise pretty empty. But I’m not sure what “it” refers to here?
This is going to need a longer reply than I have time for. Real quick, the control of genes is done by the same material as genes themselves, and vulnerable to the same mutating agents (modulo accessibility). Mutations are rare and copy editing occurs, but you have so many genes copied so often some persist. Most are neutral or negative, though.
Possible, at least for the latter. The former depends on a how exactly the trait manifests. If light hair is recessive because it codes for a defective pigment (no insult implied, I love blondes), then there’s not really any way for that to override the presence of a pigment from the other parents chromosome when both are expressed.
Again, almost all mutations are negative. Many are neutral. What is positive depends on the environment, too, but is possible.
Given that A) in the ZW, it is the opposite where ZZ is male (and Z has more genes than W), B) there are male XX and female XY due to imbalances in hormones and diet or such, I’m really doubtful on this.
Also, I mean like one gene suddenly coding for a different protein or something like that.
I’m not referring to basic mutations of genes from replication errors or the shuffling that can happen during the creation of gametes.
I’m referring to much lesser known things like
Mobile_genetic_elements
for A, it doesn’t matter which sex is getting the short chromosome, the one that one of the sexes doesn’t get can’t contain critical information.
for B, I’m not sure of the relevance. You’ll notice that what you don’t find is a YY anything. Because the critical information is on the X.
But when thinking about why a system evolved the way it did, I think the typical case is more relevant than edge cases. Typically the Y is just a flag.
It’s certainly possible to imagine a different system. But there are advantages to the one we have, and, given that the absence of a single specific chromosome determines sex, it’s absence cannot leave the individual lacking in other traits.
This is biology, it’s not like computer science or math. Everything is incredibly complex, and whatever you can imagine, you can bet it happens in some dark corner of biology.
You will get a female phenotype (to various degrees) XY if the Y fails to signal the sex properly (maybe it got broken by some mutation). You will get male phenotype XX if the X chromosome from the father somehow crossed over (i.e. got fused with bits from) the Y chromosome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/8538/46-xy-disorders-of-sexual-development
There are many different genetic mechanisms for sex determination. Some species (e.g. fish) have much more flexible sex determination than mammals, and some can change sex during their life time.
I think you’re missing the thrust of the question. Why a whole chromosome for sex determination? Why not just SRY or a similar gene on an otherwise typical chromosome?
Maybe because of mobile genes and the like. It’s got to be much more rare for an entire chromosome to be mixed up–and still result in a viable gamete–than just a single gene.
I’m being vague–hopefully someone else can be more helpful here.
Is that not just down to an easy and mostly-guaranteed way to get a 50-50 split? Once you’re isogamous (E: or anisogamous), it seems like the most robust mechanism.
Of course, then you get into the question of, “why isogamy?’ which is WAY above my pay grade, but seems to be at least somewhat addressed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sexual_reproduction#Advantages_of_sex_and_sexual_reproduction
That was what I briefly thought, but see my reply to The Nybbler below.
Are there any species where sex is determined by a single gene instead of a whole chromosome?
There’s an interesting article published in PLOS Biology a few years ago which discusses (most of?) the known ways that sex is determined in different species.
If SRY was on (say) chromosome 1, you wouldn’t get ~50% male children, you would get ~25% male if it was recessive and ~75% if it was domin…never mind. I had forgotten that each child has one male parent and one female parent, so if SRY was dominant, ~100% of males were heterozygous, and ~100% of female were homozygous with both alleles inactive, then you could indeed get ~50% male children with SRY on an autosome.
I’m no biologist, but (I think) I know why the Y is small. It’s because of Muller’s ratchet, since the Y doesn’t undergo recombination/crossing over (since nobody ever has two), whereas X’s do.
Basically, negative mutations accumulate at a certain rate each generation, but “reversing” a mutation through an offsetting mutation is vanishingly rare as long as the mutational load is small (which it generally has to be for an organism to function). Thus a simple replicator will tend to see errors accumulate over time (the ratchet).
Nature’s solution is sexual reproduction and recombination: now each organism has two pairs of chromosomes, and they get shuffled during sexual reproduction (like a deck of cards). Thus mutations can be removed by selection: some kids get less mutations than others, and selection causes them to pass on their genes more often, cleansing the gene pool of mutational load.
Since the Y doesn’t recombine, over time it degraded and was stripped down to the bare minimum needed to basically just the boolean male = true.
My understanding is that there’s a problem with mitochondrial DNA which also don’t undergo recombination. But now we’re definitely getting out of my depth.
The Y chromosome apparently recombines with itself through gene conversion as a method to slow degradation.
Thanks, I didn’t know this (like I said, not a biologist). Though I assume this is much less effective, and thus doesn’t invalidate my main point?
He’s obviously saying it because it’s true. He’s been crowned by the Israelis.
Have they oiled him up yet?
I thought it was the Saudis
He’s just repeating what his Jedi mentor yelled at him?
Have you considered not posting in an overly hostile and holier-than-thou manner?
I’ve heard of “wages for housework” as a 70s feminist movement. Was it ever a concrete policy proposal?
How would that even work? The person paying the wages would presumably be the husband, but that doesn’t do anything because of community property.
Much to my surprise, only 9 US states (pardon the USA-centrism) have community property; I don’t immediately see if all of those even did in the 1970s, although the linked article here doesn’t mention recent history so maaaaaybe none of them are recent converts (apparently it’s derived from Spanish law).
There’s a converso joke in there somewhere…
“What linked article?” said nobody, but I meant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_property_in_the_United_States
Even without community property, husband and wife are pooling resources, with the detailed terms up to them. Housewives get wages in the form of their part of the joint consumption. Tax exempt wages at that.
It was a Marxist-Feminist movement out of Italy. There the concrete policy proposals amounted to ‘overthrow capitalism’ and ‘institute the Zhenotdel, but like correctly (according to my Communists beliefs) this time’. The goal was not to pay women for housework in their own home, it was to professionalize housework as their interpretation of Marxist theory demanded.
When it reached the US, it transformed from a collectivization movement to basically an entitlement/redistributive one. For example, all women would be paid a wage and lesbians would receive additional wages due to (though they didn’t use this term) oppression. At least until socialism came. Likewise, it was folded into the reparations movement and black women were to receive more than white women. Etc etc.
It was part of a wider movement that was broadly similar to modern UBI proposals in the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, it was a late stage of it, where having proposed social wages (basically a national income) individual groups began to fight over who would get more or if they deserved it even if the general public didn’t.
Sounds like UBI, but for women only.
Question for male UBI proponents: do you think that a world where half of the population gets UBI is a better place than a world where no one does?
(This is somewhat analogical to the classical question whether a society containing both rich and poor people is better than a society where everyone is equally poor. Are your answers on these two questions consistent?)
These questions are not analogical, at least not under the usual assumptions. Money to pay for UBI come from someone, so if you take any the world as is and institute UBI for half (or all) of the population, the world will remain just as prosperous on average as it was (not accounting for the second order effects), so that’s a question of redistribution of the fixed amount of resources between people.
But if you have two worlds, with equal number of people in each, and in one world you can divide them into “rich” and “poor” groups, and in the other world everyone individually is as poor as the average person from the “poor” group in the first world, than the second world is net poorer, so it’s a question of whether it’s worth it to have more resources at the cost of them being distributed less evenly.
So to your question (though I’m a UBI proponent only in theory in some hypothetical future, not in the present day US) – I think that redistributing resources based on an inborn trait (which is not a disability) is wrong, and the equality/prosperity trade off may come out either way in theory depending on its sides, but usually is worth it in practice.
1. Does the differential treatment affect behavior in ways more adverse than the ‘control group’
2. Does the perception of fairness have secondary social effects that make people worse off in the long run? Can that perception of fairness be altered.
My attitude with these things is that inequality is not intrinsically bad, but certain kinds and certain magnitudes of inequality can create enough social instability to threaten the survival of the system as a whole.
‘kinds’ of inequality is important because asking whether it’s fair to have one’s wealth determined by some combination of noble descent and/or martial prowess for one’s liege or not is not equivalent to asking whether wage and savings discrepancies are acceptable in the context of a market economy.
Paying married non-working women might be tolerable in the same way that paid maternity leave and tax-breaks for married couples was seen as tolerable. Paying women not to get married might pass in a more radical society but the potential social fallout from subsidizing that kind of atomization would be severe.
That being said, if you’re a breadwinner cohabitation successfully with someone who does housework of various sorts, the breadwinner is usually expected to pay the way for said individual. It’s then a question of how much payout is expected.
We already have something like an UBI for old people, called tax-funded retirement pensions (Social Security in the US). For me answer to your question is yes in principle, as long as UBI receiving half is the older half and as long as it is fiscally affordable.
>‘institute the Zhenotdel, but like correctly (according to my Communists beliefs) this time
Communists universally accept the Zhenotdel was a success so there’s no correcting to be done.
My somewhat flip line was just meant to convey they were not necessarily doctrinaire Stalinists. They had a variety of opinions on Zhenotdel and… let us say varying degrees of support for the Soviet Union.
Awesome answer, thanks! A satisfying answer to what turned out not to be the simplest question, plus an interesting tie-in to more recent affairs.
Sure, I’ll bite.
First, have you actually watched the video where he said this? It’s perfectly obvious that it’s just a rhetorical flourish. He’s talking about how overdue he thinks America is in getting tough with China, and how it falls to him to do it because his predecessors were such wimps. Despite the momentary glance heavenward, only somebody who hated him already would imagine he was announcing himself to be God’s instrument in any metaphysical sense, if only because he looks so annoyed to find himself in this position.
Second, he’s a blowhard, but he’s our blowhard.
Third, notice that I haven’t made any claims about plots by his opposition. The liberal press seems to have gone insane about this, but no plot is required — just their well-established individual animosity. Carry on.
Or someone who within the last twenty-four hours also saw him declare himself the Second Coming of God, but only for the Jews.
So, I have many fond memories of The Oregon Trail, and so do many other people my age. But I can’t recall ever hearing of any imitators, beyond the same company making various sequels and knockoffs (e.g. The Amazon Trail, or that one about the dogsled race which I also remember from elementary school). Were there ever any attempts to make similar games–focusing on tight management of limited resources to achieve a long-term goal, with less emphasis on combat or action?
There’s the Organ Trail, a zombie-themed clone released early 2010s.
The classic 1985 edition of Oregon Trail you’re probably thinking of was actually a sequel/knockoff of a much earlier text-based game. Here’s a good article by the designer of the 1985 game, describing the original game and the design decisions involved in updating and expanding it.
My first thought on this was Lewis and Clark Stayed Home, another action-light game based heavily on resource management. It’s more of a sandbox than Oregon Trail: rather than following a fixed trail, you’re exploring a tile-based map in a manner similar to the exploration aspect of early 4X games, or to some of that era’s CRPGs (particularly games 1-5 of the Ultima series). But when I looked it up, it turned out to also be from the same publishers as Oregon Trail.
Further afield, the Rogue-alike subgenre of CRPGs does have a fair amount of combat and other action (much more than Oregon Trail or L&C), but at heart they’re more resource-management games than action games. That seems to have carried over into the broader CRPG genre: for example, the early Ultima games had resource management as some of their main challenges (combat featured heavily in the games, but was much more a resource-management challenge than a tactical challenge), and it was only towards the midpoint of the series that tactical combat and plot and problem-solving puzzles took over and relegated resource management to the background.
If it comes to that, I remember the original Final Fantasy was often about husbanding sparse resources; your magicians only had so many spells in them, potions were weak and you could only hold 99, and spellcasting artifacts took up very limited inventory space shared with the stuff you were wearing. So you struggle through the marsh cave, wondering if you’re going to get out before you run out of antidotes and the poison kills your whole team. I actually kind of enjoyed that aspect of it. Not so much the power-leveling.
I suppose most console RPGs prior to 1993 or so were like that, which is what made them actually vaguely challenging. Then they made it so you could carry 500 potions, ethers, phoenix downs, and what-have-you, so if you died halfway through a dungeon you had only yourself to blame.
The RPG leveling mechanic has bleed over into every genre, and I suppose it’s good on net, since it allows players to set their own difficulty setting mid game.
But it would probably make for a better game to cut out plentiful experience and have the characters only advance via plot points so the difficulty could be more carefully calibrated. Combine that with respecing skill selection and you could have bosses be more intellectually challenging.
But why would you want “carefully calibrated” difficulty when you know that the skill/experience of your playerbase is all over the place?
Of course the skill is all over the place. Skill rises with experience.
Players will often pursue power at the expense of fun. Then they will call your game boring.
If you want variable difficulty, have a settings menu, don’t make the player kill sixty rats to make the boss slightly easier.
Maybe this is a result of having so many games to choose from. If one is too hard, instead of improving at it, players will move on to another. Which is fine, I suppose, there’s no virtue in experiencing frustration with your entertainment.
I like character advancement as much as the next guy who has sunk absurd amounts of time into Dragon Fantasy Tactics I-9b, but I prefer it to come from increasing the range and type of abilities rather than raw numbers that simply make the attrition slower.
(I wish some of those sentences actually fit one coherent response so I could use paragraphs. Apologies)
Faster Than Light and Banner Saga
I’ve played a lot of FTL, and it’s like 70-90% combat.
Banner Saga is probably more so – it’s a tactical turn-based combat game like FFT.
King of Dragon Pass has a similar gameplay, I think.
I think your discounting just how important combat, or at least some analogous system like combat, is in games like this. Without it, you’re basically playing a choose your own adventure book: either you picked the correct starting values of resources or you didn’t. Either you figured out an the proper way to expend your resources or you didn’t. The play style it results in is one of forced optimization. That’s fine, but it’s not really repayable; once you’ve figured it out, you’re done with the game.
RNG can somewhat solve this problem, but not in a healthy way. If just adds an element of “will I arbitrarily win or lose this auspiciously tactical game.” Furthermore, there aren’t that many random levers the game can pull when there’s no combat; it’s either “X happens, you now have less resources, or Y happens, you now have more resources.” Neither of these options is particularly compelling.
Combat smooths over these systems enormously. It hopefully disrupts otherwise boring optimization strategies, it gives the game more levers to pull in terms of introducing RNG, it lets the game give or take away resources without it feeling arbitrary and overall greatly expands the games replayability.
Also, don’t forget, hunting in Oregon Trail (which I remember being really important) is just combat by another name.
Hunting in Oregon Trail was fairly simple, IIRC, and depended mostly on the location you chose to hunt in. If you see a deer, it’s not too hard to hit and you’ll get a reasonable amount of food. If you see a buffalo, you’ll always get more meat than you can carry. If there’s no deer or buffalo, your only choice is tiny, fast-moving animals that will either be a waste of ammo or a pathetic amount of meat.
It was definitely more fun to point and shoot instead of just clicking the “hunt” button and getting a random amount of meat, but in terms of overall strategy a hunt is mostly a die roll to see what animals the game gives you rather than a test of skill.
Early-game Dwarf Fortress is kind of like this. Of course, before long the resources you collect will outweigh the resources you chose to start with.
Shame the level of danger doesn’t ramp up at all as you become established.
The early game is too hard and the lategame trivially easy.
Unfortunately, most games seem to be like this.
I’m guessing you’re looking at something a bit less broad because there’s a lot of possible fits.
Sim-type games
A number of them are open-ended, but plenty of them have set end goals.
These range from Populous to Sid Meiers Civ to farm sims or restaurant sims to dating sims
Some of these have strong combat focus such as Civ, but plenty do not.
Puzzle games
Plenty of puzzle games can be seen as “get to point B with these limits” and most have minimal combat
Some examples that have some degree of both freedom and story are – Zachtronics games like SpaceChem/Infinifactory, or Factorio
Survival games
This is possible what you are intending to look at, as Oregon Trail can also be considered to be one of its predecessors
Most of these have some degree of combat, but not always as the main goal (such as hunting in Oregon Trail)
The Long Dark is one fairly recent example which is similar in concept but is open ended.
Subnautica is another which actually has an ending, though you really don’t find out about it until fairly late so it doesn’t really fit either.
There are a lot more board games that fit this but I’m assuming you’re looking at computer games.
Where would you put Don’t Starve on this list?
Survival with strong combat focus probably?
The Flame in the Flood might be what you’re looking for – it’s a bar-filling survival-crafting game, but it’s about journeying towards a destination (going down river on a raft, getting off periodically to search for supplies) rather than building a base like most other survival games.
There is a decent bit of combat with wild animals, but you frequently want to avoid them or drive them off instead.
He must have been depressed that day. Usually he thinks he’s God, not a mere messiah.
Trading in financial markets question: if I’m using a no-fee trading platform…. why can’t I just purchase an equity, and then set a stop loss order at the price I purchased it at (or like a bit under?) Isn’t that basically all upside? Either the stock gains in value, and I profit, or it falls and I automatically cash out- and, no commissions for trading in this scenario. Yes I understand it may fall a bit before rising later in the day (can just keep purchasing), and yes I understand that in heavy volatility my order may not be fulfilled at my stop loss price (so there is some risk). But it seems like, there’s more upside than downside in this scenario….. Why doesn’t everyone just do this- what am I missing?
(Yes I read a Random Walk Down Wall Street, yes I understand EMH, yes I know about index funds, etc. etc. I’m just more curious about this one specific question. Why not just buy volatile stocks like Telsa with a stop loss order and try to either profit or leave the trade roughly where you entered it?)
(Yes I know this is at the intellectual level of ‘why don’t they just make the whole ship out of lightsabers’, but I am genuinely curious)
I’m not some kind of super smart financial guy, but what do you do in the case when the stock you buy immediately goes down? Do you just sell it right away? What if you have the stock for several years and it plunges during a recession, do you sell? Especially in the second case, you have actually lost money due to inflation. So your “downside” would be (a) loss due to inflation and (b) loss due to the money being tied up in the stock when it could have been used elsewhere.
If I am misunderstanding your question then just ignore my answer.
I think the upside of a volatile stock is way, way, way higher than inflation or the opportunity loss of where else I could’ve put it
The whole problem is the “volatile” part. If it is a “volatile” stock then you expect it to swing up and down by a large amounts. But if you sell it as soon as it swings down, you don’t benefit from any upside.
How do you decide when to sell this “volatile” stock besides if it goes below your initial price? Do you just hold it until the next recession and sell when it slumps? Do you hope it never ever goes down to your initial price or lower? What do you do with all of your money when things are on a down-turn. That is when you are suppose to buy stock, not just when things are heading up.
Could you exploit the volatility with high-frequency trading? So long as you keep your buy/sell cycle on the upswing part of the wave each time, it’s continual gain, even if you’re not maximizing it.
Even without commissions and other platform-imposed trading fees, there’s still a “house edge” baked into the mechanics of the underlying market in the form of the bid/ask spread. Basically, at any given time the best available price to buy a stock on the open market (the “ask” price) is slightly higher than the best available price to sell it (the “bid” price). So as soon as you buy the stock, you’ve already down by the difference between the two prices. If your stop-loss price is the price you bought at, you’ll always immediately sell at that slight loss unless the price ticks up by more than the bid-ask spread before the stop-loss order takes effect. You can set the stop-loss price a few ticks less than your purchase price to avoid this, but you’re now exposed to at least a small loss.
The magic is where you set your stop-loss price and your profit-taking price relative to your purchase price. The smaller your loss exposure relative to your potential profit, the more likely you are to take that small loss rather than the somewhat larger profit. A 50 cent potential loss vs a $10 potential profit still loses you money if you win less than 5% of the time.
You can still win, if the stock’s likely to trend up overall, or if you have a structural advantage over other traders in terms of executing trades or setting your strike prices. In the former case, you might as well just buy the stock and hold it medium-to-long term. And in the latter case, you almost certainly don’t have a structural advantage on either front: there’s a big business in executing trades faster and getting in line first for the best prices, and there’s another big business in analyzing and predicting intraday volatility and taking profits by smoothing it out. “Market making”, “High-frequency trading”, “Arbitrage”, and “Quantitive trading” are the search terms here. If there are any $20 bills lying on the streets here, you’ll need to be really fast to pick them up first.
+1, quoting key points for agreement:
It looks like all upside because the strategy is only half-finished. Define the exit strategy, and the expected value returns to index.
A stop-loss will always settle some amount beyond the trigger. To the extent that you can move faster than the rest of the market, you have a genuine competitive advantage. This is reinventing HFT.
Let’s say you buy a stock (HASH) that’s $10. You set a stop-loss order to sell at $9.9. The stock goes down and you’ve lost $.1. This is a return of -1%. Iterate this ten times and you’ve got a return of -9.5%-ish.
Now, if that stock jumps up 100% then your losses will be insignificant compared to your gains. But that’s always true.
To make the strategy explicit, let’s say you buy at $100, and plan to sell if the stock drops to $99 to cut your losses, or sell if the stock rises to $110, to take your profit. So you will either lose 1% or gain 10%.
If you do the math, averaging over the possible random future trajectories of the stock, you find that the “lose 1%” outcome happens ten times more often than the “gain 10%” outcome, so on average your return is 0%. [The reason is that $100 is much closer to $99 than it is to $110, so the randomly-moving stock is likely to hit $99 before it hits $110.]
This is a standard homework problem in a math class on Brownian motion and related stuff.
This is all in the ideal world of zero transaction costs. When there are transaction costs (commissions or a bid/ask spread, for example) your expected return becomes negative.
I think I framed this wrong, by making it sound like I’m just talking about 1 trade with 1 stock. What I meant was- if I picked 20 or 40 or 80 volatile stocks, with my downside capped and upside theoretically unlimited, wouldn’t it come out a winner overall….?
I feel like the range for volatile stocks (say, Tesla) is larger than the number of stocks I’d include in this portfolio. Just looking at the last 6 months of Tesla, its low was $176 and its high was $379. Let’s say for the sake of argument that I put the 20 most volatile stocks I could find Hash872’s Basket. If their downside is capped at 1% as per your example- so 20% down as the maximum downside- I need 1 to have at least a 21% return to achieve a profit- yes? Or, more likely, some combination of multiple other stocks to have a lesser return.
Here’s the key concept- I don’t need any 1 stock (Tesla) to be up 21% *overall* for any period of time. I need that 1 stock (or combination of lesser stock returns) to be up 21% *at some point*- at that point I sell. I.e. Tesla briefly peaks 27% on some good news before dropping down, but the fact that it dropped down doesn’t concern me because I’m already out at 21%.
(I am thinking this out as I type it out, and also my math is barely lower high school level, so I’m totally fine with harsh criticism here)
Anatid’s comment that the “‘lose 1%’ outcome happens ten times more often than the “gain 10%’ outcome” is wrong, for the reason that also covers why your reasoning is wrong. The likelihood of getting a fluctuation that’s 10 units above the mean isn’t just 10x lower than getting a fluctuations that’s 1 unit below the mean, it’s (probably) much lower. Flipping 100 coins, the odds of getting 47 heads (3 below the mean) are much more than 10x greater than getting 80 heads (30 above the mean). (In fact, it’s about 100,000,000x greater.
Simplistically, the probability distribution of outcomes for your stocks is Gaussian, and you can calculate for yourself the relative probabilities for various outcomes.
Volatile stocks are simply not on the same distribution as flipping coins.
Now all of us have to live in fear that Nassim Taleb will find your comment and yell at us through the Interwebz…. seriously, Taleb wrote two very well-received books complaining quite belligerently about Gaussian distribution in financial matters. Not a stock expert, but I’m willing to wager a bit that the distribution for volatile stocks (i.e. not Consumer Packaged Goods Consortium from the 1950s) does not map so cleanly.
I mean, I understand that I’m wrong and that eventually I’ll understand why this ‘low downside/high upside’ strategy wouldn’t work- I do understand and basically follow EMH. Most of my money is in index funds. But I suspect that the math is a bit more complex
@hash872: Yes, I’m well aware that the distribution isn’t actually Gaussian — hence “Simplistically.” The point is that whatever the likelihood distribution is, it would be remarkable if it has the properties that would be required for your scheme to work. (I.e. that the likelihood drops only weakly as a function of distance from the mean.) Feel free to write down what you think the distribution function is, if you want to justify your mocking tone.
1) “upside theoretically unlimited” is too vague. At what point are you going to sell and take your profit? If it’s at +10%, you’re 10x more likely to hit your -1% stop loss than to hit your +10% threshold. If it’s at +100%, you’re 100x more likely to hit your -1% stop loss than to hit your +100% threshold, etc.
2) Adding more stocks doesn’t help: your expected total profit is the sum of the expected profit on each stock, and the expected profit on each stock is zero.
@Elephant:
For the strategy I described, I think a better coin-flipping analogy is that you flip a coin and track
X = (heads so far) – (tails so far)
and stop when either X = -10 or X = +100.
It really is exactly 10x more likely that you hit -10 before you hit +100 than the other way around.
@Anatid
“It really is exactly 10x more likely that you hit -10 before you hit +100 than the other way around”
Thanks for the clarification of this coin-flipping scheme. I agree with your assessment, and I also agree that a first-passage-time calculation (which value are we more likely to get to first) makes more sense given what I think the poster is proposing than a calculation of the “equilibrium” distribution of values. Can one actually monitor the fluctuations fast enough to catch the “first passage?”
OK cool, thanks for engaging with me on this man. I still can’t, just based on intuition, 100% agree- I’m like 90% of the way with you- it just doesn’t make intuitive sense to me how a volatile, popular stock like Tesla or a pharma company that can jump 10-20% in a day has to have 10 or 20 corresponding down days in exact equal measure. I feel like your ‘10% up has to be matched by 10 down days, so expected return is zero’ has to be describing the properties of the broader stock market in general- the stock index taken as a whole. But I could totally be wrong.
Anyways, metacelsus and Jon S below described the practical issues with my idea. I always knew that I was basically wrong (otherwise why wouldn’t everyone do this?), but I just had to talk/write it out to understand why
@hash872
It does if the stock is staying approximately level.
If instead the stock is on a steady upward trend with random walks of volatility throughout that trend, then you are right that they won’t balance. But if you’ve found such a stock, you’re better off just buying and holding anyway.
When do you buy a stock? I.e., what’s preventing your system from buying the same stock, now at $98, and then immediately selling it at $97, and so on? Alternatively, what about stocks that dip 1%, and then rocket up to $110?
Is there a hidden assumption that stocks will move for some minimum time/value in each direction before turning? I don’t think that holds.
All the other answers relate to practicalities. But I imagine what you’re getting at is really the financial mathematics question – imagine your stock price was a perfect Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) with no real-world issues about bid-ask spreads and discrete prices, why is a stop-loss order of this type not a guaranteed profit?
And it’s been a *long* time since I looked at this type of math, and even then I didn’t know it very well at all, so I can’t reproduce the real proof. But I think the intuition was that if you sample your GBM at discrete intervals and sell if the stock price is below the starting price, then you have a probability of selling and a certain amount of loss given that you sell; you also have a probability of profiting from the stock going up if the stop-loss is not triggered, so your expected profit is zero. If you sample the GBM more frequently, then the loss given that you sell goes down (you catch the stock before it has time to fall much below the limit price) but the probability of selling goes up. For an ideal GBM you take the limit and sample infinitely quickly, and your probability of selling becomes 1 and your loss given that you sell becomes zero.
Generally, the math works out that by setting a stop loss limit, you are exhanging relatively equal values of making money* for a large chance of losing a small amount and a moderate chance of making a larger amount, but with the same expected value.
In other words, if you buy a stock at $100 and set a stop loss order at $98, there’s a very good chance that you will lose $2, just due to normal volatility. There’s also a chance that the stock will never drop below $98 and you will make money, but my guess is once you work through the math you have a very similar risk adjusted expected value.
* Relative to a comparable investment.
One additional point that I haven’t seen mentioned here: a stop loss order doesn’t guarantee that the stock will be sold at the stop price. The actual selling price could be substantially lower, if the market is moving quickly.
Yea, not just could be, but is highly likely to be at least a little lower. Stop loss orders aren’t magic, when they’re triggered, your broker just sends a market sell order for you. You still cross the spread and sell it on the bid. Depending on the exact details of your strategy, you’re just going to lose about the bid/ask spread the majority of the time (maybe well upwards of 90% of the time).
On top of that, US stocks realize about 30% of their variance outside of market hours. When you don’t just lose the bid/ask spread, it’s usually going to be because your stock opened one day substantially below your stop price (or had news intraday and gapped well through your stop price).
OK, thanks to both of you guys- that describes the practical issues quite clearly
I think you are modeling stocks as moving in broad, smooth curves where you can efficiently find useful maxima by looking for the d$/dt crossing zero in the downward direction, and ignoring the very strong impact of short-term volatility.
Eyeballing the FAANG stocks, it looks like Amazon had a pretty good year in 2015; up 119.5% between the opening bell on 1/2/15 and the close on 12/31/19. But if you’d bought AMZN at the opening bell on the 2nd, you’d have auto-sold it by the end of the day. And if you’d bought it again the next day, you’d have sold it again within hours. Even ignoring intraday volatility, if you’d adopted a policy of buying AMZN, selling whenever it drops below your buy, and reinvesting the next day, you’d have sold half a dozen times before you entered a steady “hold” period. If you’re losing ~1% to every transaction, that’s a 6% absolute hit to your ROI. Probably double that when you include intraday volatility, but I don’t have data for that. And that’s not an artifact of the start point; it looks about the same whenever you start in 2015.
Which is fine if you know you’ve invested in a stock that’s going up 119% in the coming year, but you don’t. And for any plausible stock-picking strategy, taking a 6-12% absolute hit for the sake of capping your losses, isn’t going to give you much in the way of gains.
I’m very interested in talking to you privately and learning what other stock closing prices will be on 12/31/19. Or did you mean 12/31/16?
12/31/16, yes.
My middle-school aged, home-schooled son has expressed interest in trying to write his own (necessarily simple) computer game. Does anyone have any useful advice about this sort of thing? He has very little experience with programming, and my own experience is mostly limited to things like Matlab and Mathematica (and Pascal and BASIC 30 years ago). Has anybody used Carnegie-Mellon’s Alice?
I have not used Alice. Haven’t programmed games either, but Python has PyGame. Personally, I find Python really pleasant to program in although my experience is limited to Netlogo, Matlab, a semester of C++, and a touch of Java. Netlogo and Python are the only ones that I actually enjoy using overall but Netlogo isn’t very useful if you don’t want to make agent based simulations. Al Sweigart’s “Making Games with Python and PyGame” can be gotten for free in PDF off his website. I’ve found his writing very understandable. He’s focused on explaining what you need to know to do something interesting and not on theoretical computer science in and of itself. I think that’s ideal for most people starting off.
Hopefully someone with more experience than me has better ideas and info.
I’m torn about Pygame. On the one hand, it’s pretty good for a basic game, something like Tetris or Snake, and it’s not too hard to set up. It might take a little effort to learn the graphics-programmer lingo – why is “flip” the draw command, what are “dirty rectangles” and why should you care? – but for a middle-school project it’s about the right complexity, and it has some very convenient tools for working with sprites.
On the other hand, as soon as you try to take it bigger, it’s really easy to run into performance problems, and suddenly you have to care about all the ugly graphics-programmer stuff and it’s not fun at all. It also has no good UI libraries. Again, probably not a concern for a middle-schooler, it’s just that when I as a 20-something decided to take up game programming again, and decided “I’ll use Pygame, I remember that being a good game library,” I got a bit of a shock.
For a beginner, I think that Ren’Py is a quick start towards making a game, as long as they are okay to start with the type of game that is easiest to make there. (It is possible to later proceed towards different types of games, and the experience includes learning Python, which is a generally useful and quite popular programming language.)
The easiest type of a game is an animated story (called “visual novel”). You make a few screen-sized background pictures, and a few characters, as if you are going to play a puppet theater. The engine provides you a very simple scripting language to say e.g. “show this background, and this character on the left; write this; now show also another character on the right; say this”. You write the text, each phrase either as a narrator or as one of the characters; you can make characters appear and disappear, move left and right; you can switch to a different background. You can turn any story into an animation.
Now, by following a few instructions, you can compile this into a standalone game (for Windows, Linux, Mac, I think also Android), which upon installation will allow you to start the animation, proceed reading texts at your own speed, and at any moment save or load the game.
This all without writing any algorithm whatsoever. If you make a decent story and pics, your friends will be impressed.
From here you can continue by adding a few choices and branches. Like, at some moment of the story the program will ask you “do you want to do this, or that?”. Depending on your choice, you get a different ending. The only thing in script is adding an if-then-else command, and labels for the endings. Simple to understand.
Now you can put there many choices, have the branches separate and join as you wish. (You will probably need to design the structure of the story on the paper, if it gets complicated.) One example how you can use this, is to allow the character to walk on the game map, by adding options “go here; go there” in every room, to the adjacent rooms.
A third thing to learn is how to use variables. Now the game can remember what you did, and evolve accordingly. For example, you can open the door only if you have previously picked a key. To achieve this, you make a variable “key = 0”; when you take the key in the room containing it, you set “key = 1”; and in a different room if you have “key = 1”, you will get (branch into the section of the script containing) the new option “unlock door”, which sets “door = 1”, etc. Hey, I am not saying that this is how professionals are supposed to do variables. But it is simple to understand, and now you get an actual adventure game where you can walk around the map and solve problems.
Or you can make a story progressing in time, where your available options on day 2 depend on which actions you took during the day 1.
From the programming perspective, this is all pathetically simple. Yet, you have a playable, and potentially interesting game. With pictures, and very simple animations. You can also add background music and sound effects.
(Warning: this is mostly used for making erotic games, because that is the kind of game that benefits most from having an engine that encourages using many pictures and very simple algorithms. The engine itself is perfectly innocent, but when you go online and search for “games made in Ren’Py”, don’t be shocked.)
The most important question is if your son cares more about the “game” aspect or the “computer” aspect. You can do a lot of game making without touching a computer and you can do a lot with computers besides games.
In terms of writing his own game, doing so from scratch is a lot of effort unless you are aiming for something known with a simple and well defined set of rules (e.g. tic-tac-toe). If he wants to work on something more substantial, I suggest looking for modding communities for games he already likes. There needn’t be a lot of original “writing”, but making modifications to existing games can teach a lot about the games are structured internally.
If your son wants an original game that looks nice to show to friends, absolutely find an existing language/framework that supports that kind of game. However, it can happen that such specialized tools are an unsatisfying black box because not understanding how the tool works can feel like not really building something yourself.
Seconded on the idea of modding a game he’s in to. If he plays Minecraft, then you should absolutely get yourself a minecraft server and start learning how the modding for it works so you can help him get started.
Games more interesting than tic-tac-toe which would be reasonable to write from scratch as an amateur project: Tetris, Minesweeper, 2048, Blackjack. It seems to me that a big part of the question is what kind of game he wants: If he is thinking DOOM, that’s a whole different level than if he is thinking “guess what number I’m thinking of”.
I spent a lot of time in middle school (mid 90’s) cloning and modifying games like Tetris; I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. I used Pascal, but I am way out of date as to what are good languages now.
Doom, even the old PC game is even today a tall order for a kid.
Wolfenstein 3D or other basic raycasting/voxel games seem like a lot lower order, and I’ve seen decent implementations in little, understandable code.
Casey Muratori has been running a weekly stream called Handmade Hero for the past 5 years which covers basically everything you need to know about programming a modern game from scratch. It’s the kind of resource I wish I had at 12, and is exceptionally detailed, explaining every layer of abstraction. Handmade Hero’s written in C/C++ and the early episodes are focused largely on Windows, setting up your developer environment, and just kind of grokking the *process* of programming: every line of code is written on screen, so when something doesn’t work you get to watch a pro go through the problem solving process, which is just incredibly useful.
FWIW, I tried to pick up programming many times when I was younger with languages like Python, Javascript, and Ruby. It never clicked. Then, the first time I stepped through a program written in C with a debugger attached, watched the registers update, and actually *saw* what was going on, everything made sense. I program in mostly Python now and still really hate it, but learning C is what kept me interested enough to keep going in the first place.
It’s probably worth finding out why exactly your son wants to program a game. Does he just want to make something, or does he want to understand how it works? If it’s the latter, I think Python and other frameworks are going to be way too high-level to really be satisfying.
Unreal Engine is surprisingly easy to use, with lots of tutorials and templates freely available. There is a very thorough visual scripting system, too.
I’ve worked somewhat with PyGame. It’s floor is very low, which is important, because the hardest part of getting started in game programming is getting started. The barrier between you and bliting your first pixel to the screen is a lot of complex systems that you don’t care about, like the dynamic library loader of your operating system or dealing with the culture shock of moving from the task based model of smartphones to a fully general purpose computing device like a desktop. PyGame is nice, because there’s relatively little of that.
He should also at least consider javascript + canvas. This has pretty much zero setup costs, but finding good advice about javascript is much harder than finding good advice about python.
We haven’t used Alice, but my kids have done a lot of work with Scratch (mostly) and Pencilcode (an implementation of coffeescript, which itself is a modification of javascript).
Scratch has some nice features: easy to start, there is a robust community with tutorials and example games. My kids really love Scratch and I think the community structure is a big part of the reason.
Even though the system seems like very simple and dumb blocks, the things people have been able to create are remarkably sophisticated and fun to play. Platformer games are especially popular.
That said, it isn’t “real” programming (it is almost entirely drag-and-drop blocks). Some of this is good for the young learner (like not having to hunt through code to find a misplaced punctuation mark or errant extra blank space). I’m not sure that it helps build the full range of skills required for using other platforms/languages. However, there is some thoughtful guidance about where to go beyond scratch from within the Scratch community (Seasoned Scratcher).
With some minimal pointers and guidance, your kid will probably be off and running independently in Scratch in a week or so.
Pencilcode is a bridging step. You can drag-and-drop blocks of code, but it is intended that the programmer will see and understand the code structure itself. I don’t know how active or supportive the community is right now or how easy it is to find example projects. Several years ago, I was very active and, even so, the ease with which I could find or share projects, exchange ideas with other users was orders of magnitude less than Scratch.
To be honest, I was using Pencilcode more for the geometry/math (it can be seen as a version of Logo) than the programming.
For what it is worth, MS/Google’s project “Girls who Code” originally focused on Scratch and has moved to Snap (I think). Their curriculum is pretty thoughtful and, I would guess, can be followed independently by a motivated learner.
Godot is great.
It will have you putting stuff on the screen very quickly, the editor doesn’t require a lot of computing power, it has a Python like language for logic, but you can get very far with just the main editor, and the visual editor for logic. You can deploy to desktop with no problems, and to phones with just some small problems (mainly having a mac for iphone). There are a bunch of examples to start from, and the documentation is good.
Löve 2D is also great, but it is code-oriented so your kid may have some hard time at the start. I have my problems with Lua too, but a lot of people like it just well so you may give it a try.
Thank you, everyone, for the thoughtful and useful replies. He’s got pretty broad taste in games: for instance, he’s played a lot of Breath of the Wild, various Elder Scrolls games, Stardew Valley, Heroes of Might and Magic, the Nancy Drew games from HerInteractive, etc. He’s spent a lot of time making his own levels in games like Age of Empires and Zoo Tycoon.
@Viliam: Ren’Py looks like it would do very well for making a Nancy-Drew-type game, but, man, you weren’t kidding about its community being dominated by erotic games. My son’s at an age where these topics are starting to come up, but that rabbit hole goes really deep really fast.
@tayfie, dick: He once tried writing a mod for Oblivion (I think it was), but get really frustrated really fast, as there was just too much he didn’t understand and the whole process was just too complicated. We’d need something that starts at a more basic level.
@Malarious: Those Homemade Hero videos look really useful. Thanks for pointing them out. My son ultimately wants to have a game that works, but understanding what’s going on is also part of our homeschooling goals.
@jgr314: Scratch looks interesting, like something in the general neighborhood as the level editor in, for example, Age of Empires, but a lot more flexible. Would it be possible to make something like a Nancy Drew or Monkey Island style game in it? What about a simple 2-d platformer?
Thanks again, everybody.
2-d platformer is definitely popular on Scratch. I don’t know Nancy Drew (as a game) or Monkey Island.
I got started programming around that age with GameMaker and would highly recommend it (assuming it hasn’t changed too much). It’s drag and drop like Scratch (with an optional traditional language) and has lots of good tutorials so it’s easy to get started. But it’s a lot more powerful than Scratch; the dragging/dropping teaches you real programming skills like OOP. And the inbuilt editors for levels/graphics etc. make it easier to actually make games with than alternatives.
My high school (class of 2010) used Alice to teach beginning programming classes. It’s simple, and works well for teaching, but IIRC it’s more meant for animations than for games.
Lots of good suggestions, but one I don’t see yet is Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python, which is available for free online, and is suitable for someone with no previous programming experience.
https://inventwithpython.com/invent4thed/
I just finished reading Lent by Jo Walton, a fantasy novel (with some science fictional overtones, I think) about Savonarola. I liked it tremendously, and I’m especially interested in what Catholics think of it.
However, it has a major plot twist in the middle, and I find that reading threads with a lot of rot13 is annoying. As I recall, reddit has a better spoiler system. Would people like to discuss it there?
You’re in luck! Julie of “Happy Catholic” and her podcast partner Scott did a review of this very book on A Good Story Is Hard To Find, listen or download here.
Thank you very much!
Last night I read an interesting review of “Bronze Age Mindset”:
“Months later, the tech entrepreneur and anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin brought to a small dinner at my home, in lieu of the more traditional flowers or wine, a book—one I had never heard of, called Bronze Age Mindset (hereafter BAM) by a person calling himself “Bronze Age Pervert” (hereafter BAP). A few weeks later, I took it up in a moment of idle curiosity.”
https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/are-the-kids-altright/
That lead me to reading a couple more reviews:
https://jacobitemag.com/2018/06/12/beach-nietzsche-a-review-of-bronze-age-mindset/
https://medium.com/@TXHart/book-review-bronze-age-mindset-5dd5b79bead1
It seems like a relatively large phenomenon, but I’d never heard of it. Strangely, I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned here. The reviews were fun, but does anyone have insight into whether the book is actually worth reading?
I’ve never heard of this book, but…
Well I’ll be. Satyrs do exist!
Never heard of it, but it sounds like a good book. The barbarian impulse is a good one (although the lifestyle is stupid), and I hope that it makes a foothold for itself. Dynamism and un-self-consicous pride are good.
All that said, master morality is just as bankrupt as slave morality, and no movement that defines itself as rebelling against or achieving dominance over can stand on its own. Decentralized hierarchy is as stupid as it sounds when you think about it for five minutes. Insofar as this project is an opportunity to assert that, I’m even more happy for it.
Nobody has ever managed to convince me that virtue ethics aren’t an excuse for hypocrisy and egotism, and it doesn’t look like this book will either.
I can see where you’re getting egotism from (I’m a deontologist myself), but hypocrisy?
It’s easy for human beings to convince themselves that whatever they want to do, or whatever society tells them they should do, is virtuous. Hence, hypocrisy.
…and of course, it could never happen that a utilitarian convinces himself that whatever benefits himself, actually is a great thing for the common good? I think we are all hypocrites.
In my case it’s even worse — nobody’s managed to explain virtue ethics to me in a way I can understand.
I went over the three ethical system types in a basic college ethics class years ago, and virtue made the most sense to me because it fit in with what I knew of Orthodox Christian ethical thinking–things are right or wrong as manifestations of one’s inward nature, and act to gradually perfect or deform that nature over time. This makes sense in a system based on supernatural revelation, but I can see how it could be confusing and/or silly from a naturalistic perspective, where there’s no predefined goal or purpose to human existence. A priest later confirmed that intuition, that Orthodox ethical thinking is about virtue.
Then I looked up Virtue Ethics sometime later on Wikipedia, and said WTF is this? So maybe it can be used to refer to very different systems, or perspectives. IDK.
Well, maybe I can give it a try…
All ethics tries to answer questions about how we should decide what to do. Deontological ethics says, “There’s a list of rules, and we should follow that.” Consequentialism says, “We can look at what happens when we do certain things, and choose our actions based on that.”
Virtue ethics begins by slapping both people in the face and telling them that they’re stupid. To the deontologist, the virtue ethicist says, “You idiot! You think that morality can be boiled down to a list of rules? Use your eyes, man! Can’t you see that every rule is full of exceptions, nuances, situations where the rule can’t possibly apply? Oh, it might be a fine thing to sit in your basement contemplating the contours of the Good, but give me a list of rules that can completely govern thirty seconds of actual functioning in the real world. Give me a set of rules for my friendships, my work, my business that won’t leave me looking like a monster half the time. You can’t, and no refinement of your rules will fix that. Your list of rules is itself the problem.”
To the consequentialist, virtue ethics says, “Oh, you think that what comes after is the judge of what comes before? Fool! When did you become better than other men, that you know what the future holds? You didn’t contemplate the outcome, you created an image in your mind and molded it to match your arrogance. Your logics and speculations are ashes and garbage, lies to conceal from your arrogance that you don’t know what comes after, that none of us do. You know nothing, you judge nothing, you only play games in your mind. Sit down!”
Deontology and consequentialism both push the question of what we should do to a source outside of people. The virtue ethicist says that this is stupid. The only way we ever come to know about ethics is from inside ourselves, so looking for an external list of rules or to external consequences is looking in the wrong place. Virtue ethics emphasizes our personal experience of right and wrong as the source of our information about what right and wrong are. Just as our experience of the physical universe is evidence that the physical universe exists, so our experience of right and wrong is evidence that right and wrong exist. Where deontology says we should find out what we should do by looking to a list of rules, and where consequentialism says we should start by looking at the consequences of our actions, virtue ethics says we should start by looking in our consciences. Looking at something outside your conscience is like taking someone else’s word for something- there are times when it’s appropriate, but it shouldn’t trump the primary source that is your conscience. Virtue ethics argues that this is what other systems of ethics are actually doing when they try to develop moral precepts or judge consequences, and that we should just cut out the middleman and ask our consciences directly. We shouldn’t try to treat ethical judgments as if they were some special part of the human experience- they are just a part of the human experience, just like eyesight and hearing are parts of the human experience, and just as our eyes and ears give us information about the world, so our consciences are also a source of information. You are not a machine with an ethical experience slapped on top; the ethical experience is a fundamental part of who you are, and it should be treated as such.
In this framework, guilt or shame is seen as something similar to a headache or an upset stomach: it is a sign that something has gone wrong. Your self is no longer functioning in harmony, and it is sending you the message that you ought to change your behavior to remove the unpleasantness. (The “ought” here is generally taken to be self-evident.) You feel guilty because your actions and your conscience are not in harmony, just as you feel nauseated when your stomach and what you ate are not in harmony. So the virtue ethicist says, “Just as I strive for harmony between my body and what I eat, so I also ought to strive for harmony between my conscience and my actions.” This seems very simple when you say it, but if you try to put it into actual practice you run into all sorts of difficulties. Virtue ethics says that if you encounter something about yourself that seems wrong- for example, if you lie around on the couch all day and feel like you’re wasting your life- then you probably are wasting your life, and you should stop doing that and do something else. Listen to your body when it has pain, and listen to your soul when it feels guilt. This is the foundation of doing what is right.
This assumes that you can trust your conscience to reliably tell you when you’re doing something wrong. I suspect that anyone who has a sufficiently reliable conscience doesn’t need virtue ethics to compel them to do what’s right, and anyone who doesn’t can’t rely on virtue ethics to compel them not to do what’s wrong. The human conscience is malleable, based on personal circumstance and societal mores.
Just wanted to say that the couple of paragraphs starting here was one of the more compelling explanations of virtue ethics I’ve read.
@broblawsky
As a hardline deontologist, I can’t imagine trusting human conscience for anything at all.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” – Jeremiah 17:9
I think there’s some good stuff in here, but I’m a little suspicious that the position you describe can easily reduce to “follow your conscience” which seems awfully close to “do what you feel is right”, which seems to verge on Emotivism which I remember MacIntyre criticizing and seeing as a key step in the descent of Ethics into its dark age that he so memorably describes.
Broblawsky is basically right. Conscience is dangerous without right formation. And right formation does not consist in ignoring everyone else’s direction. That would be remarkably terrible advice to give young children, for instance.
Anscombe wrote in Modern Moral Philosophy, in her brief statement of objections to recent ethics writers, “Butler exalts conscience, but appears ignorant that a man’s conscience may tell him to do the vilest things.”
ETA: @Eponymous
Actually, you’re thinking of Moorean intuitionism, where ethics consisted in the precise apprehension of the Good in each act. Emotivism was in MacIntyre’s view a later generation identifying what the Mooreans were really doing when they thought they were precisely apprehending the Good, viz., expressing their attitudes. See my snip of the relevant section of After Virtue.
Virtue ethics begins by slapping both people in the face and telling them that they’re stupid. To the deontologist, the virtue ethicist says, “You idiot! You think that morality can be boiled down to a list of rules? Use your eyes, man! Can’t you see that every rule is full of exceptions, nuances, situations where the rule can’t possibly apply? Oh, it might be a fine thing to sit in your basement contemplating the contours of the Good, but give me a list of rules that can completely govern thirty seconds of actual functioning in the real world. Give me a set of rules for my friendships, my work, my business that won’t leave me looking like a monster half the time. You can’t, and no refinement of your rules will fix that. Your list of rules is itself the problem.”
To which Deontology invokes St Nicholas then slaps Virtue right back and goes “That’s what moral theology is for, twit! You think I don’t recognise nuance, hard cases and so forth? But if there’s no list of rules that will cover all cases, neither will virtue on its own – I can give you contradictory cases where your virtue will look like a monster half the time no matter which choice you make, because the choice you make depends on what your insides feel, and somebody else’s insides will feel differently. If we were all perfect rational beings this might work since we’d all have the same internal “burning in the bosom” to guide us to an agreed upon ‘this is right and this is wrong’, but since we’re fallen humans in an imperfect universe, a list of dos and don’ts is as far as we can get to a workable basis.”
But they won’t look like a monster to themselves. There’s no biting bullets in virtue ethics, except where you have to go ahead and admit that people whose virtue is corrupt have to be attacked and torn down. Even if those people are you. Amor fati is the faculty that allows you to assent to this.
From the inside in my experience, virtue ethics as I understand it doesn’t feel like compelling yourself to do the right thing, it feels like actually wanting it. Whereas consequentialism and deontology (to me) do feel like forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do. Ie the big difference is that virtue ethics includes some sort of actual motivation besides guilt.
It’s possible that this is just because it’s less popular: nobody has tried to force their personal flavor of virtue ethics on me, but it happens all the time with the other two.
But they won’t look like a monster to themselves.
And neither will I look like a monster to myself for stating the rules, even if the other person or an onlooker goes “That’s so mean!” So Virtue’s criticism is no criticism at all. Either Virtue cares about looking like a monster to outsiders, or does not so long as they have done what is right by their lights. Then they don’t get to critique me for doing what I feel is right by my lights, even if I look like a monster to outsiders.
I didn’t like everyone else’s explanations so I thought I’d add my own.
It really just comes down to a question of how we know something is wrong. Deontologicalists say we know its wrong if it’s against the rules. Consequentialists say we know something is wrong if it has bad consequences. Virtue Ethicists say we know something is wrong if it makes us worse people.
That necessarily implies that there is a “better” and a “worse” state for humans: that it is better to have “virtues” than to have “vices” (virtue can be roughly translated to mean strength, vice as weakness). This idea is foundational to Virtue Ethics: that it is better to be just than unjust, that it is better to be wise than foolish, that it is better to be brave than cowardly, that it is better to be loving than cruel, etc. Different people might have different ideas about what is the ideal moral state of man that we should strive for, but probably not as wide a variance as you might think (there are very few cultures that specifically advocate for injustice as an ideal over justice, for instance, even if some cultures are more unjust than others in outcomes). Without the idea that there is an objectively better or worse state for man to exist as Virtue Ethics doesn’t make much sense.
Once you have an idea of what is Good for man, then you judge things based on whether they make you more like that ideal or farther from it. You treat people fairly, regardless of the consequences, because that makes you more just: on the flip side, if you treat people unfairly then you become more unjust and stray further from the ideal. Why should you stand and fight instead of running away? Because the ideal man is courageous and loyal. Why should you tell the truth, even if it will hurt people? Because the ideal man is honest. And why should you try to be like the ideal man in the first place? Because it is better to be Good than Evil, just as it’s better to be healthy than sick, or better to be alive than dead.
Following your conscience is a big part of this because the ideal man has integrity, but you need to make sure your actions really are coming from what you believe is the right thing to do and not from internal weaknesses (vices).
The ancient Greeks (and by extension, the Roman Empire) generally believed there were four virtues: Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude (basically courage with a side of stoicism). So the virtuous man, the man we should all strive to be like, is just, wise, disciplined, and brave. The Christians came along and added three more, Faith, Hope, and Love. Christianity ran with virtue ethics in a big way. For example you have the nine “fruits of the spirit” which are the qualities a Christian strives to have, and will be filled with through faith and obedience: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Jesus says “Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” In other words, strive for moral perfection, to reach the ideal state of character. Christians regularly seek to be “like Christ,” that is to say to strive to have a character like Christ. Etc.
Read “The Abolition of Man” by C. S. Lewis to get a little more of the view of this. It’s not a book on Virtue Ethics, but it is a book that assumes Virtue Ethics as it’s foundation.
I prefer virtue ethics because I do believe their is an ideal moral state we all need to strive for, and also because I believe it has less paradoxes than consequentialism and is more robust than deontological ethics. Ultimately I think the three approaches are complimentary to each other: if you want to become more virtuous, it can help to make rules and stick to them, and you have to consider the consequences of your actions before making a moral decision or else you’re acting shortsightedly, which is probably a vice.
Once you have an idea of what is Good for man, then you judge things based on whether they make you more like that ideal or farther from it.
The two problems there are:
(1) How do you have an idea of what is Good for man? How do you know that is universal, and not based on your particular situation in space and time? It used to be virtuous to slay your enemy in a duel, today we consider it virtuous not to kill someone for insulting us (rather, resort to law or other means of repairing reputations). If you are not resting on Christianity, then what is your exterior objective standard?
(2) If you are judging on “does this bring me nearer to or take me further from the ideal?” then you have rules. “Do not be a coward in battle” is a rule, just as much as any deontologist. Virtue ethics may then explain “do not be a coward in battle BECAUSE…” but so too does deontology have reasons to explain “do not break this rule BECAUSE…”
I think deontology is compatible with Christianity, as is virtue ethics, as is consequentialism (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). I think Christianity is also more than any or all three of them, and I think if arguing outside a moral and ethical religious framework, then the critique of Virtue versus Consequences versus Rules as posited in the face-slapping post aren’t so simply resolved as “do what makes you feel good, duh!”
As Lewis pointed out, a man may feel exquisite pleasure in skinning a cat. If we’re equating virtue with “what makes you feel good/what your conscience approves of”, in such a case that man might feel that he is being perfectly virtuous as he enjoys the act and his conscience does not upbraid him. Virtue ethics then has to reach for more than “what makes you feel good” and go for “this is wrong, and it is wrong because…” which brings us back to rules and consequences.
The problem of figuring out what the ideal Good is for man to strive towards is a very real one, but I think it is important to establish that Virtue Ethics requires a belief that there is a Good: that there is a particular way to be, and a particular character to have, that is superior to others and is to be striven for. That’s the main thing that sets it apart from other ethical systems. Figuring out what that ideal man is like is the hard part, but at least you know what you are looking for. Christianity claims that the ideal can be found in Christ, and I agree. But the important thing is first acknowledging that there is an ideal to strive for somewhere.
And like I said, I think the three approaches are complimentary. I just think that Virtue Ethics is more foundational than the other two: we are striving to have a certain kind of character. In service to that we can create systems of rules to help us, and we should consider consequences to others if we consider (as I do) that Love and Prudence are virtues we should strive to posses.
But as far as “do what feels good” goes, I agree with you. That’s why I made this post, because I didn’t like all of what Two McMillion had to say, particularly about conscience. Conscience is important, yes, but it is not the foundation. Specially conscience works like Socrates’s Daemon: it only tells us what not to do. The rule isn’t “do whatever feels like the right thing to do” but rather “If something feels like it is wrong, don’t do it.” Even if it isn’t against the rules, or if nobody will get hurt. But Virtue Ethics as a whole should be anathema to the idea of “do what you feel like” because the whole point is that what we do shapes us and we need to do the things that will make us more virtuous, not less, which requires wisdom and discernment.
“Do unto others…” isn’t a consequentialist ethic, thought. Or rather, you could no doubt argue for it based on consequentialist grounds, but I don’t think Jesus does.
Bronze Age Mindset sounds more amoral or as theredsheep below says, fascist. Doesn’t sound like an endorsement of virtue ethics to me.
I mean, compare crazy internet troll to Marcus Aurelius (who seems a more central example of a philosopher of virtue ethics than some random internet troll). Meditations is full of exhortations like behave justly to others, do not be angry, learn from others, be modest etc. I’m sure he didn’t perfectly fulfill his philosophy, but you can say that about anyone with respect to any philosophy.
EDIT: Also, I think it’s funny that your critique of virtue ethics is basically that it’s an excuse for… a lack of a particular virtue (in that it encourages egotism). There’s no moral reason for a deontologist or consequentialist to care that someone has an inflated sense of self. Only aesthetic or second-order reasons to.
Read the first review, skimmed the second and third. I’m sorry, but this really does sound an awful lot like an apologia for an essentially fascist mentality, of the kind I’ve only ever seen endorsed by extraordinarily juvenile, unreflective, and emotionally maladjusted young men on the internet. And by fascist I don’t mean “offensively reactionary,” or “not progressive”–I am far from leftist by today’s standards–but “straight out of Hannah Arendt’s description of the mentality that gave rise to totalitarianism.”
The kind of thinking that delights in being provocative and offensive not because the provocative statements are necessarily right–frequently they’re barefaced lies, or ridiculous overgeneralizations–but because they are offensive to a ruling class for whom one no longer feels the slightest respect. It’s far less important to be factually right (the very concept is suspicious) than it is to appeal to the right attitude or induce the right emotional state. Blech.
Moldy really seems to like trolling people with Bronze Age Pervert. I remember him bringing it up in an interview with some legacy media rag a few years back and it was pretty lulzy to see them trying to explain it. Not the best trolling but funny nonetheless.
That said, I don’t think that I would want a book-length version of BAP. Twitter is exactly the right length for post-ironic humor and aside from the withering of your soul it’s free.
Trolling the Atlantic seems pretty different than trolling the Claremont Review. And trolling an interviewer seems pretty different than presenting a book in person to Michael “Flight 93” Anton.
Teller of Penn and Teller claims that one of the principles of magic is “Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.”
I suspect a similar principle applies to trolling.
That kind of trolling only works when the other person can’t troll back in a similar way. If someone hands you a copy of “Bronze Age Mindset”/recommends it to you, say “Sorry, I get my Bronze Age mindset from this” and hand them in return/recommend to them a copy of the Bible 😀
Huh, I guess I’m not the only one thinking this. As I said in an earlier open thread, I think this is at least in part caused by a retreat from civil society. As your relevant social sphere homogenizes (filter bubbles, a stronger “culture” of an individual workplace), social forms which predominated among similarly homogenous groups (i.e., bronze age societies) arise.
BAP’s beliefs are a mess. He claims to support modernity and yet he wants our societies ruled by bandits.
So, Wall Street? The Eighties weren’t that long ago …
So… he want society to resemble high fantasy Dungeons and Dragons?
No, because High Fantasy is predicated on virtuous rulers. BAP doesn’t want that. He wants people who don’t care about morality to rule while killing anyone who gets in their way. It’s barbarism to its core.
Virtuous rulers doesn’t sound like the parties I’ve played with, but some of the settings had some virtuous rulers, so I see your point.
Adding to the general noise on this topic, Politico released an article about BAP and his book today. For politico, it’s mostly neutral, although the author clearly isn’t a fan.
Does anyone have a good book/blog post on how to model institutions which are both strong and weak? I’m talking about the way a lot of news/art/advertising industries create and define what’s popular and interesting, but also spend immense amounts of time and expertise trying to predict what their audience will find most interesting because almost all culture industries are low profit and brutally competitive, at least in the internet age.
For example, imagine a company called Mox Media, which publishes news/culture war clickbait (replace consonants as desired). Imagine the front page of Mox Media is a story about how C-List outgroup celebrity’s rhetoric is dangerous and harmful to…let’s say llama doctors. I’m torn between two things.
#1 Mox Media’s story is going to shape a lot of people’s perception both their outgroup and llama doctors, as well as genuinely making life more dangerous/stressful for llama doctors. Mox Media is active, controlling, elite, powerful.
#2 Mox Media spent a lot of time, expertise, and focus groups specifically to choose which story to put on the front page to drive the most clicks and ads to their website because these decisions are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and Mox Media genuinely believes llama doctors are the hottest thing right now. Mox Media is reactive, following trends, sheep, weak.
These things both appear true but I have no good way to model this or think about it and every time I try, I keep trying to identify one as the “dominant” causal factor or “truer” thing, which doesn’t fit how I see the data. Mox Media is genuinely powerful and ‘determines the narrative” but companies and writers are metaphorically dying like flies, in a genuinely brutal business, and everyone’s fighting hard to stay alive.
So has anybody written about this effectively and broken down the factors involved, especially somebody with good reference memes like “Moloch” or “Motte and Bailey”? I want some way to understand what’s going on, because my mental models aren’t really built to explain feedback loops where everyone, audience and writer, both is and isn’t all powerful and helpless.
For my money: https://samzdat.com/2017/02/01/on-social-states/
And the followup posts
E: this is more about describing the phenomenon you fingered, not so much the mechanisms of it.
@blipnickels
I think that your mistake is to try to identify a single factor.
People typically try to optimize over a range of goals. Assuming that they try to optimize a single goal is not going to let you model their behavior.
For example, take a musician whose dream is to make jazzy music. This dream future actually has several aspects to it, where I added relative priority numbers between parenthesis:
1. getting to play an instrument all day (100)
2. getting to make the kind of music he most likes (30)
3. getting recognition/fans (30)
4. Having enough money for basic necessities (500)
5. having enough money to buy nice things (50)
6. finding a partner/having lots of casual sex (or both) (60)
7. having children (60)
If this person fails at gaining success playing his kind of music, there is a good chance that he will try to become a ‘sellout’ by playing more popular music. Another musician with who gets way less satisfaction from making any music, is far more likely to stop being a musician altogether or to accept a life of relative poverty and obscurity, just to be able to make his kind of music.
—
You can model journalists similarly. Some are (strong) activists who really care about pushing a message. Some strongly care about status/respect (which can look a lot like caring about an issue, but they will adopt/abandon issues based on their popularity). Some care very much about just getting to write professionally. Most have multiple things they care about, to various degrees.
Note that goals can also require achieving other goals. For example, even if a journalist doesn’t care about how many read her writing, her employer may and his job may thus depend on having enough readers.
Also, some goals are not completely compatible, so may require compromise. A journalist may want to write story after story on an unpopular topic, but may thereby get himself fired, as well as having few people to preach to. So then he may compromise by writing far less about that topic than he prefers, which means that he keeps his job and helps to preserve readership who tolerate his limited agenda-pushing, but who still get exposed to that agenda.
—
It can also be true that a profession is both highly competitive in some ways and very uncompetitive in other ways. For example, when YouTube decides that certain content is forbidden, there can be fierce competition to get viewers for content that is allowed, but a lack of competition to get viewers for the disallowed content.
This was helpful, thank you.
So if anyone wants to short a company, boy howdy do I have something for you
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/15/20806366/we-company-wework-ipo-adam-neumann
I’ve been putting most of my disposable speculation funds into shorting FB, but this seems at least as good!
So four layers of shell companies? Yeah, this is looking to me like “planning for when any or all of the constituent bits have the wheels fall off, we the founder(s) will hang on to the money we’ve creamed off and the creditors can have lots of fun trying to squeeze blood out of a stone by suing the company running the properties leased out to another company holding them on behalf of the original company we sold them to after I bought them by a different one”.
Make your money fast now, Hoopy and Matt! The We Company/WeWork/New Thing Founded Yesterday and Incorporated in Liechtenstein won’t be around too long by how this looks! 😀
WeWork may well be a house of cards, but houses of cards can stand up for quite a while sometimes. If you’re wondering why anyone would invest in this in the first place, the Stretechery write-up is very good.
Holy crap, that write-up made me even more skeptical of We than I was before.
Quoting his quote of We work’s S-1:
To that, Stretechery only says:
But that’s a massive understatement. We is literally claiming that its market is anyone who sits at a desk… that’s the excuse they give for their continuous acquisition of property. I’m all for disruption, but that’s just insane.
How about this one
No, the obvious competitor is every office building and management company in existence already.
WeWork may well be a house of cards, but houses of cards can stand up for quite a while sometimes.
If I believe these articles, it may be on the verge of tumbling down. Get in, make your money fast, get out!
This is only tangentially on topic, but I found it funny enough to be worth sharing:
Quote from FT’s summaryof the We Work IPO:
Isn’t that basically what Theranos did to its critics as well? Only with slightly more legal threats?
I think they stressed the “you don’t care about saving the world thing” more than the whole “you hurt our feelings” side.
That being said, from interviews I’ve seen, I don’t think even the best Theranos PR shill would have much luck convincing anyone that Elizabeth Holmes HAS feelings, so that strategy probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.
a representative from the company called to tell me that I had hurt his feelings
Oh goodness, that sounds like nothing so much as the video making the rounds of the DSA bunfight in Atlanta, where there were jazz hands instead of clapping and every five minutes someone raised a point of personal privilege about not doing stuff to trigger them.
You want to change the world by revolution and taken on the entrenched forces of capitalism, but you can only overthrow the running dogs so long as they don’t applaud you?
You can only make it in a ruthless, cut-throat world of real estate acquisition and management as long as your rival always carries a box of tissues to hand you when your feelings are bruised?
That does not sound like you’re cut out for the kind of job you’re undertaking!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give one person a time-out. This person will disappear from their daily life and reappear six months later, with no memory of the intervening time. Making ordinary people disappear is no great chore, but if the person you choose lives in a highly secured environment, a plausible set of security failures (guards asleep, cameras malfunctioning, …) will be devised that makes it at least vaguely plausible that they simply left in a mundane way.*
So, who gets the time-out?
[*]: They didn’t, of course. Our friends with the space ships the size of small moons are at it again. Teleporter, stasis field, cloaking field. You read science fiction; you know the drill.
Does Xi have a clear sucessor, or would there be a power vacuum?
I don’t know if it would rise to the level of power vacuum, as the CCP has been pretty good about maintaining itself, but there definitely isn’t a clearly established successor yet and Xi has been consolidating power around himself lately. The current money for who’s next is Hu Haifeng, some of former president Hu Jintao, but he’s a long way off from being a real contender.
Sounds more like giving the world a time out from them, than giving them a timeout to think about what they’ve done.
Can I pick my son? (Kidding, kidding…)
Alex Jones, for the lulz.
Ordinarily I’d disapprove of this kind of interference in someone’s life (why do you want to make A disappear for six months?) but right now I’m strongly inclining to have it happen to Boris.
I know this story is from The Sun which means it’s total crap and I know it’s been discredited by Downing Street and I know they used the old device of “a senior unnamed anonymous source says”, but (a) there are too many on the UK side who do think the Republic should just meekly trot along after Britain and do what our former masters tell us and (b) Boris is angling for a general election and is setting the terms up such that if a no-deal hard Brexit happens, he can blame the Paddies for being spoilers and wreckers and the EU for being intransigent (right now it looks like they are setting up Macron and Merkel as the Baddies here) and that it’s not at all the fault of the British who were being nice and generous and fair all along.
Why are the Irish being stubborn about the backstop? Well, first, this version is the one you guys wanted, when you capitulated to the DUP, which you are now calling “undemocratic” and all the rest of it, and second no we don’t trust your promises of magic pixie dust technology to run the border without the need for patrols or stops or anything at all, and thirdly and most importantly of all, we don’t trust you, we don’t trust your “oh you don’t need anything written down, surely you can just take the word of an English gentleman for it?” because you lot always break your agreements, so we want it all written down with carefully spelled-out conditions and as binding as it can be made (even though you’ll still try to break it anyway, look what you’re doing with the Good Friday Agreement which is an international treaty).
Oof, that Telegraph article is behind a paywall, but even that first paragraph is hard to get through…
I’d buy the ancient part… but friendly? That’s a questionable word choice.
Are this kind of sentiment among the English still common towards the Irish?
Well, Bruce Arnold is what we’d call a West Brit if he were actually Irish or even Anglo-Irish – the part about “I have lived amongst and loved the simple quaint natives for sixty years until they got uppity notions” gives you the gist of how some English viewed, and apparently still view, us.
The Republic is an independent nation, and that sits badly with some of the Unionist (not Ulster Unionist, these are the people in the rest of the island left stranded after Partition) tendency: they pine for the good old days of being British subjects of the World’s Greatest Empire and the chance that if they licked enough boots long enough they might get a knighthood in the end.
In the 80s and 90s there were quite a few would-be movers and shakers, particuarly those in the newspaper media who thought of themselves as opinion-formers, who leaned ‘unionist’ because they aspired to London-style lifestyles and levels of sophistication, and so always compared Ireland and England to the disadvantage of Ireland. They wanted the English to like and love them, so they went for the “nationalism is so passé and provincial, why did we have a revolution at all, why can’t we be best pals with the British and thank them for al they did for us?” Again, the pre-Republic term for them would have been Castle Catholics. One fine example, Eoghan Harris (who is still at it) even boasted about his children converting to Protestantism (even though he was an atheist and ex-Catholic himself); you see the strain of thinking here? Religion may be bunk, but it’s only badwrongterrible if it’s Catholicism; Church of Ireland Protestant has nice Anglo and British connotations of higher social class and status and respectability, so he’s boasting of rising above his station in life by proxy.
That’s harsh but I am a bit miffed about the constant “why can’t the Irish be English?” refrain whenever the Brits put their foot in things and cast about for someone else to shift the blame onto.
I have a serious sweet tooth and want to do something about it, because although my weight is healthy, I won’t be young and have a fast metabolism forever. On top of that, I’m scared of diabetes and my teeth are already pretty bad. However, I have been eating candy almost daily since childhood so I anticipate that breaking this habit will be difficult.
Rather than struggle against the temptation of buying sweets every time I enter a grocery store, wouldn’t it be easier to just eat a bunch of candy and give myself mild food poisoning immediately after? I’m thinking drinking slightly expired milk or something similar- it shouldn’t be enough to require hospitalization, just to feel bad for a couple hours. Even if it wasn’t the cause of the sickness, I find that food always becomes permanently much less appetizing if I get sick after eating it, so logically if I get sick after eating candy it should be an easy way to stop desiring sweets.
This seems like an obvious solution, yet I have never heard of anyone even suggesting it, let alone attempting it. Is there some obvious concern that I am overlooking? Am I underestimating the dangers of slightly expired milk? Alternately, has it already been demonstrated not to work?
I realize that my idea probably wouldn’t do much about the cravings that are at the heart of the problem, but I’m trying to cut back on sugar specifically, not go on a diet, so I don’t mind candy being substituted with something else provided it’s less sugary/more nutritious.
Please don’t try and poison yourself. I doubt you can do it that easily and I doubt something as base as a sugar craving will respond to this idealized Pavlovian training. You’ll just find something else until you forget about the association.
I do not trust in your ability to dial in the appropriate level of food poisoning. I foresee you drinking a lot of spoiled milk to no effect.
My suspicion is that at least part of these cravings have to do with blood sugar fluctuations. Especially if you say you eat candy everyday, your body is probably in a rhythm of spiking blood sugar. If you want my “just easy” trick, it’s fast on just water for a full day if you can, then start taking fiber such as Metamucil and drinking lots of water every day while eating normally. This keeps the stomach feeling full, fiber and water are good for you, and hopefully some days of this will tune you in to a different blood sugar pattern.
Replacing candy with fruit is ideal, but in my experience as a former binger the lustful rush of sugar and sweetness and texture isn’t similar enough and I could never actually do it. Do you drink artificially sweetened drinks? Stop that immediately (at the very least switch to plain sugar), as artificial sweeteners are much sweeter than sugar and tend to warp one’s palette. Calorically they may be godsend, but for cravings no.
The really hardcore thing is to cut out sugar entirely, go keto for months at a time. But that’s for people with willpower and no non-keto friends.
And of course, non of this touches on any of the more psychological reasons you may be craving sugar.
Thanks for the thorough response! I will try some of your suggestions.
I don’t drink sweetened drinks and generally think I’m good at avoiding “hidden sugars”- I avoid pre-made sauces, cereals, etc. It’s more like craving a chocolate bar or fruit gummies every evening, except if you eat one bite of chocolate then fifteen minutes later the blood sugar drops and you want another and before you know it you’ve eaten the entire bar. I really mostly want to get rid of the impulse to eat something sweet and having the blood sugar drop afterwards.
Well if sweet gummies are one of the triggers, maybe incorporate a fiber/probiotic gummy. Less sugar spike, same toothsomeness.
Start chewing gum instead of eating candy?
Do jumping jacks/pushups/stretches when you get a craving outside of meal times?
Or the popular asian solution: drink green tea whenever you get a craving? (and slowly ratchet down the amount of sweetener in it?)
Why we love SSC: Because it’s a place where even a statement like “Don’t poison yourself” is inevitably followed by a multi-paragraph explanatory defense.
Reminiscent of the Sinclair Method for breaking alcoholism.
I think I remember someone writing in the Open Thread a couple of years back of a technique that involved buying copious amounts of the food, then chewing and spitting it out, for about 15 minutes each day. I kept thinking I should try it, but I never have.
My method of choice is the same I use for getting rid of earworms: replace it with something else you like.
Hopefully there are nutritious foods that you like, particularly fruits and vegetables, including cooked versions. If not, I encourage you to go find them; I think it likely that you’ll find many candidates. For instance, I like yellow squash or zucchini, sliced and steamed, and combined with sausage. Or wild rice with a few carrots or peas. Or ramen with chopped broccoli and ginger, with a dash of lemon juice. Or potatoes, celery, and carrots in a light broth, in a crockpot.
Once you find such a thing, indulge in it whenever you feel like having candy. It will distract you until you feel sated.
After a few weeks, you may find you’re effectively off candy.
You are overestimating the effect of spoiled milk: it nearly always goes bad via lacto-fermentation, so it’s basically like drinking lumpy runny yogurt. Not pleasant but won’t make you sick either.
Also if you eat two things right before getting food poisoning, and one of them is obviously suspicious on a gut level and the other isn’t, don’t count on the association covering both foods. Source: once I got food poisoning after eating wild mushrooms stuffed with bacon, and I *know* it’s because I undercooked the bacon, but my gut disagrees. I enjoy bacon as much as ever but find that species of mushroom totally unappetizing now.
Is there some easily available drug that causes nausea? That would be a more reliable way to get the same effect.
I chose the examples based on personal experience. I recently got sick from slightly spoiled milk, and I have also had the association transfer to unrelated foods. I realize this is a sample size of one but my gut is the only one meant to be influenced here anyway. Though you’re probably right that a drug would be more reliable.
My solution was to switch from using sugar when I cook to Swerve (processed erythritol). Since a large portion of the sweets I eat are homemade this has resulted in a substantial drop in my sugar consumption with no apparent side effects.
wouldn’t it be easier to just eat a bunch of candy and give myself mild food poisoning immediately after?
No it would not. You would need to repeat this several times to condition yourself into associating candy with unpleasant consequences, and even then it might not work – how many people swore to never drink again after their first hangover, then went right out and did it again? You could deliberately overeat candy until you make yourself sick, and you might feel bad enough to quit it for a couple of days, but then you’d get right back to the bad habit again.
Also, you know that this is an artificial condition – that it’s not the candy making you sick, it’s the spoiled milk you are drinking, and this won’t fool the body: ‘ha ha, right, I still want delicious yummy candy, loser!’
Also also, do not mess around with food poisoning. You might intend to only give yourself a mild dose of salmonella and end up with something worse. This is akin to trying to develop bulimia and it is a very bad idea.
It only took me two incidents with scallops to decide I don’t ever need to eat scallops again. First time it happened was at a past-its-prime restaurant, and about 3 – 4 hours after having scallops, I vomited up the entire dinner rather vigorously. Several months later, at a Chinese restaurant I’d never been to, the same thing happened.
It’s entirely possible I was just unlucky (I thought that after the first incident), but it’s been over 15 years since I’ve eaten a scallop.
Food aversions can definitely develop faster than some are giving them credit for in this thread.
That said, you knew it was the scallops. Have you also stopped eating or drinking everything else you had during that meal for the past 15 years? (I’m assuming it wasn’t literally just a giant plate of scallops with no sides/garnishes and nothing to drink). That (and not how quickly food aversion works) is why this plan wont work.
@Deiseach already covered why it is a terrible idea even if it would work.
This. I feel like a “trick my body into having an aversion to X” is very unlikely to work when your mind knows it’s a trick.
Even if you succeed at making yourself temporarily grossed out by e.g. doughnuts, I don’t think you’ll be able to make yourself grossed out by the category “sweet.” Evolution wouldn’t let you develop an aversion to a whole category of some of the best blood sugar providers.
Also, if you don’t have a weight problem now I question the need/desirability of trying to anticipate your body’s future needs by changing eating habits in advance. I had a pretty strong sweet tooth as a teen and 20-something. Now, in my late 30s, I’ve noticed I have less of one despite no effort. Best guess is my lower metabolism simply craves less sweet. Also unironically enjoying gin martinis is something I wouldn’t have expected in my 20s.
I do eat more fruit now than I used to so another possibility is that whatever nutritional “box” I had previously checked with cookies is now getting checked by pineapple, etc. If you really want to try something, eating fruit when you crave sweet is probably innocuous at worst.
I also have quite a severe sweet tooth. I can eat a filling dinner until I am completely full, and yet I cannot find myself experiencing satiation until I eat something sweet. And I can’t be comfortable and relax or sleep until I get that satiation.
But I have found that I can substitute Medjool dates for candy. Five or six dates an hour after dinner is enough to satisfy me just fine. And I have much less craving for them during the rest of the day as a snack than I would for candy. It worked for me for about two years, although in the past few months I have fell off the bandwagon a bit with ice cream. Though I blame that partly on increased life stress.
Look at the sugar in different kinds of candy and identify those with lower sugar. You can probably lower your sugar consumption dramatically with small changes.
For example, Skittles have 43 grams of sugar.
A Hershey Bar has 24 grams of sugar.
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup’s have 8 grams each.
I mean, if you can quit candy, do so and tell me your secret. But if you’re primarily worried about diabeetus and your teeth, just switching your candy preference can have a significant impact with minimal investment. In general, look for chocolate, peanut butter, or other candies with more fat and less sugar.
Somewhat random question I was wondering about recently:
Are there any historical examples of a country deciding to wholesale adopt the laws and institutions of another country to try to imitate its success? What were the consequences? And do you think this would work? What are the obstacles / why don’t people do this?
This thought occurred to me a few months ago when I was thinking about what I would do if I were put in charge of a poor country.
Japan westernized real fast after WWII. Worked out okay for them. Still no IRL Gundams though, so maybe they’re not that great.
How extensive was the adoption of western institutions? I know they shifted to a democratic form of government, but did they rewrite their legal code and so on?
Regarding its success — I thought Japan very successfully industrialized before the war. Was post-war growth really so much faster than in this phase?
My understanding is that the Japanese laws regarding fundamental rights of those prosecuted, are severely lacking from a Western point of view.
The CEO of Renault, Carlos Ghosn, was arrested, not allowed to see his lawyer, interrogated without a lawyer, not released on bail despite it being extremely unlikely he could flee Japan, not allowed to see his wife all the time he was in jail.
And this appears quite common in Japan, and not an exception made for Mr. Ghosn.
Being interrogated without a lawyer is fully legal in The Netherlands (for adults).
Administrative detention exists in various countries, including the UK and US, although not for the type of crimes that Ghosn is accused of. However, it seems that Ghosn’s long detention resulted from abusing a loophole, by staggering indictments, each resulting in a new period of detention for each indictment.
Ghosn was provided homes in Tokyo, Rio, Beirut, Amsterdam and Paris. His wife tried to get access to the Beirut home during his detention.
His lifestyle was that of a globetrotter, flying all over the place. If he isn’t a flee risk, then who is?
So can they arrest you and interrogate you without a lawyer even after you ask for a lawyer, and refuse to talk without a lawyer? Can they deny your lawyer access to you and deny you access to legal counsel? If so, that would make the Netherlands seem a much worse country than I thought it was.
Obviously, in Spain, and the US too, you can be interrogated without a lawyer, if you don’t ask for one. You have to ask for a lawyer before you get one. In Spain, people have been detained for a period without letting family/lawyers/doctors see them, and there have been credible allegations of torture. I find that such secret questioning leads to police getting away with lots of questionable things, and I think that it is something Spain should correct, even when it comes to terrorists.
He would not have his passport; Japan is an island.
Boarding a boat or a plane is much harder than driving a car through the border, or even walking through the border. Puigdemont took his car and just drove it across the French border until he was in Belgium, although he did it before he was officially indicted. Escaping by plane/boat is harder, and requires contacts with illegal smugglers.
When Ghosn was released on bail, before his re-arrest, he was only allowed to go from his home to his lawyer’s office; he was denied the right to see his wife, and he couldn’t get out of home. How can a man like that escape, especially considering he is so famous in Japan that he would be immediately recognizable by anybody who sees him? He wasn’t allowed to use his phone, internet, or have visitors.
They have to let you talk to a lawyer after your arrest and before you are interrogated, unless you waive that right. There is no right to have a lawyer present during the interrogation (of an adult).
Which means that you can leave by boat. I doubt that it is hard to get on a sailing boat and ‘accidentally’ sail to China.
No, only if you cross a border in a direction where smuggling is common and the police are working hard. Even then it’s probably not that hard if you use a method that smugglers tend not to use. It’s probably quite doable to get from my country to the UK using a small boat without a passport, but much harder if you use the methods that Africans tend to use.
It’s very common for people to wear surgical masks in Japan. If he’d wear that, perhaps with sunglasses, he looks just like every other old white gaijin.
You are correct: Japan started westernizing waaaaay before WWII. Generally the Meiji era is considered as the era of major westernization in Japan, and the cultural change that came from that, and the Meiji era goes from 1868 to 1912. It really is a fascinating story: here’s the cliff notes.
After sorting out the warring states period, Japan was remarkably stable and secure: the shoguns had finally established themselves firmly as the political rulers of Japan, and most of the old Samurai class that was used to civil war had been wiped out during the invasion of Korea (which was most of the point of invading Korea, but that’s another story) and things were getting chill. However weird barbarians from the west kept showing up, and Shogun Iemitsu decided that their strange ideas and foreign religion was a destabilizing element so he banned almost all foreign trade, stamped out Christianity, and started a period of near total isolation that would last from 1639 to 1853. In that long period Japan stagnated, getting soft and set in their ways (much like neighboring China, but more so). Suddenly in 1853 a bunch of American ships show up and say “We want to sell you stuff, and we won’t take no for an answer.” Their ships were bigger and tougher than anything Japan had to fight before, and their cannon outranged and outgunned Japanese cannon: they fired exploding shells! The Shogun soon realized that Japan had no way to defeat this small group of ships, and was forced into signing a treaty ending isolation.
This humiliation was a huge wake up call to Japan. They couldn’t just sit around and do things the old ways anymore: just a decade before the Chinese had been forced into a humiliating treaty with Great Britain during the Opium Wars, and now this! If China can’t beat the westerners, than who can? The mainland was being carved up by western powers as they watched, and Japan was next on the plate. Things needed to change, and the new Emperor Meiji was just the man to do it.
Japanese Emperors had been made powerless figureheads hundreds of years before, long before the warring states period. But now the Shogunate was weak, and Meiji had enough ambition to try to seize power. It was a bold move: imagine if a few hundred years from now the King of England suddenly wanted to become an absolute monarch again. He almost succeeded to, and he definitely succeeded at destroying the Shogunate. After he forced the Shogun to step down he formed a new government and issued the Five Charter Oath, which was a huge deal. Basically it said “You know all the cultural and political insitutions that have sustained us for the last three hundred years or so? Yeah, we need to throw all those in the dumpster and import new ideas so we can get strong like the Westerners.” They destroyed the remaining class system and basically tried to import a rough democracy wholesale from western counties: people’s assemblies, meritocracy, the whole enlightenment shebang. Meiji specifically wanted to stop “evil customs” from the past and seek out anything that would make Japan stronger. It was a time of immense social upheaval, but it ultimately worked. Japan sent scholars to study in the West, and they imported back any idea that would work: a western military structure, western dress, western industrialization, western political institutions. By 1890 the government was now a constitutional monarchy, with Meiji presiding over a National Diet with a Prime Minister and everything. He tried to make himself an absolute monarch at the same time, but in the end neither project worked out the way he hoped. You can’t change society completely, and a group of old elite families managed to gain effective control of the new government. Things got worse when Meiji died, as his son Taisho was generally quite ill and was too weak to throw his weight around: by the time his son, Hirohito, became Emperor the throne had last almost all of it’s power again, and the democratic government was mostly a puppet controlled by the military.
But man did thing work out pretty well materially! Japan went from being full of peasant rice farmers to having railroads, factories, power plants, battleships, a modern military, the whole works. As far as tranplanting institutions go, it went very well: sure the whole democracy thing mostly failed because it was captured by elites and then the military, but hey democracy is pretty fragile as is. I mean look what happened to the French Revolution! What’s remarkable is that almost all this change from enforced from top down, and Japan went from the sleepy old man of East Asia to the Tiger of East Asia, one almost as strong as any Western power in the region.
Thanks for this!
> You know all the cultural and political insitutions that have sustained us for the last three hundred years or so? Yeah, we need to throw all those in the dumpster and import new ideas so we can get strong like the Westerners.
Were there also a few of those old institutions that would have been worth to keep, but got thrown out because they were associated with the old regime? I’m asking because there were a few such victims here in Hungary in the 1990s.
I’m not sure. It’s hard to run a counterfactual: maybe it would have been better to keep some of the institutions they threw out, but if so who knows which ones. In fact, you could argue they didn’t go far enough: religiously they rejected the idea of importing Christian ideas, and instead Meiji tried to restore the old Shinto religion back to it’s previous glory (Buddhism was dominant for most of the period of isolation, with Shinto relegated to a few old shrines and peasant customs). But that didn’t work out super well, and Japanese Buddhists started modifying their doctrines to import select ideas from the west (particularly Hegelianism) while also importing a lot of Zen ideas to create a new Japanese Zen Buddhism that became religiously dominant by WWII. I don’t know if that answers your question or not, but it’s interesting!
A lot of the things they threw out really were kind of, well backward. At least in terms of competing with the West. They had a rigid class structure that had ensured social stability during the long period of isolation, but the fact is that meritocracy works better, and you can’t keep the peasants on the farm if you also want to start industrializing. Plus it’s hard to get industrial robber barons if you still have old fashioned barons hanging around acting like they own the place.
If they remained as they were they would have ended up like China, completely dominated by the West with little political or economic control over their own affairs. As it was their reforms turned them into a major power in the region, and the only Eastern nation that could compete with the West: they were able to defeat Russia at sea, and fight them to a stalemate on land. Nobody else could do that. On the other hand, they ended up trying to conquer all of East Asia, committed countless atrocities, and were ultimately conquered and humiliated for their trouble. So was their Westernization a good thing or a bad thing for them? It’s a funny question: would you rather be Poland during WWII, or Germany? Germany was better in every way, except for the fact that they were evil, and in the end Germany ended up occupied just the same as Poland. It’s a impossible to quantify question.
The closest example I can think of is probably the Mejii Restoration in Japan. They managed to produce a superficially-western nation in a very short time, although I can’t shake the feeling that this might have set up tensions which ultimately lead to some very bad ideas in the 40s.
The basic problem with wholesale adoption is that laws don’t exist in isolation from the rest of society, and institutions are even more intimately tied into the basic social fabric. To make them work, you need people who accept them, and that acceptance either has to be developed or enforced. The latter sort of works, but tends to lead to bad places. The former takes time. It’s something that can be developed, but it’s not going to happen just by changing the laws on the books.
To give a more concrete example of this, take tipping. In the US, tipping is the major source of income for waitstaff, and 15% or more is traditional. (This is not a defense of this practice. How good or bad an idea this is is outside the scope of this example.) This means that there are special rules involving pay and taxes that take this into account. It’s legal to pay them below minimum wage, assuming that they’ll make up the balance in tips. If you imported this law to a place with the tipping norms of Europe it wouldn’t work because everyone there assumes that the restaurant pays the waitstaff and tips are minimal/optional.
This is a fairly simple example. The problem is that every law is like this.
To be fair, waiters and waitresses in the US are required to be brought up to minimum wage at the expense of the restaurant if their tips didn’t meet that margin.
But yes, it would be a far less desirable job if that were the case.
Wait, really?
Huh, apparently yes! I’ve been getting in arguments with people for years about tipping and I never knew this and it’s never come up. I always just assumed that waiters were SOL if they didn’t get tips.
Thanks! I just learned something. I need to think about if this influences my opinion on tipping now.
@Aftagley
I am glad to have added to the aggregate knowledge of the world today!
Waiters/waitresses are also supposed to be paid minimum wage if they spend more than [some percentage…maybe 30%? I forget] on “side-work” like rolling napkins or cleaning where they won’t have the opportunity to earn tips.
In practice, these rules are hardly ever followed, and good luck barking up that tree and winning the battle if you’re the waiter getting shorted.
@Acymetric
How does that work? Employers will only pay out the tipped wage and refuse to pay up to the regular minimum?
I’ve been operating under the general assumption for my entire life that if I don’t tip someone, they will only make $2.03/hr for the sum total of their interactions with me. Thus, if I think their service was worth more than $2.03/hr, the onus was on my to increase that to what I thought was equitable.
If, on the other, my choice is “either I pay that guy minimum wage, or the company that’s already charging me for this sandwich will” the likelihood that I’ll tip decreases dramatically.
So, which is it?
@Aftagley
Employees who are spending that much of their time on side work are supposed to have a base rate of minimum wage and then get tips.
Employees who are waiting most of the time get a very low minimum wage and then get tips.
In either case, nobody will ever be paid as little as $2 an hour to interact with you, because the restaurant will make it up. However, most waiters would be very disappointed in only getting minimum wage for their work, because the average tip puts them far above it.
Yes, either they just flatly refuse and bank on the fact that the employee will never file any kind of complaint or if they do nothing will end up happening (both seem like reasonably likely outcomes, or maybe at worst they end up having to pay out the extra money or something).
Or, if they want to be a little more legally covered, they do what employers do when they want to avoid paying overtime and move things around so that it appears the employee got minimum wage.
@Aftagley,
Have you never worked for private industry?
What’s legal and what you may get without being fired/layed off aren’t the same thing at all!
OSHA safety rules, and the the reporting of job induced injuries spring readily to mind.
Who gets what doesn’t depend on laws as much as it depends on how tight the labor market is and who has the whip hand at the moment.
If you haven’t figured this out already I’m kinda envious of you.
Look to what’s done not what’s written, i.e. any box with a sign that reads “suggestions are welcome” that management puts out may as well have a “drop a note in here if you want to be fired” sign as that’s what it really usually means.
This is basic stuff.
I’m guessing that you’ve never dated a waitress?
If you don’t tip the employer will make it up if the employee knows their legal entitlements and may make them stick, but getting back wages will take months, more likely years, wrongful termination awards are a pittance, and meanwhile the rent is due now.
Also, you pretty much tip where you’re a regular to keep spit out of your food.
Is it common enough to be considered a likely outcome? Perhaps its optimism but though I dont doubt this happens, I dont feel it happens enough to be considered normal expectation.
Is there any data on how many people in service jobs are being paid less than minimal wage after tips on their income tax?
Remember that for the US, you are supposed to file for tips in income tax, though there’s the failure point where someone could be lying on how much tips they get. It might be difficult to figure out how to align tips with hours worked, but this seems like to be a common enough question for someone to have done the work for it.
@helloo
Years of being in close to the service industry in various ways, including a lot of close friends and romantic partners mostly.
There might be, but I don’t know where it is. Yes tips are reported to the IRS, but hours worked is not.
Regardless, that doesn’t answer this question anyway. The requirement is on a week to week basis, not annual (which makes sense, because for someone working in the service industry making $30 one week because you got a run of bad tippers or the restaurant was just really slow could be disastrous financially).
@ Plumber
Yes, I work in private industry, yes, I currently tip everywhere I go (not just because of spit), and no, but I have a waiter.
Look, I’m not shocked by the idea that an employer will try to reduce the amount they have to pay. Restaurants being somewhat terrible employers that will try and underpay their waiters and waitresses is exactly what I thought was happening. I just had no clue that they were doing it in violation of the law and there’s basically 0 public outrage.
Take your OSHA example. Yes, it’s not particularly well enforced and lord knows I’ve done some work in places 100% not OSHA compliant, but people still know it exists. You still occasionally see people violating OSHA get punished. I legitimately didn’t know this minimum wage protection existed until now and have never heard of someone successfully suing to ensure they got it.
To be fair, waiters and waitresses in the US are required to be brought up to minimum wage at the expense of the restaurant if their tips didn’t meet that margin.
But does that work? That kind of work is precarious, and I could see an employer reasonably (if the reason the waiter isn’t making tips is because they’re bad at the job) or unreasonably (because they’re a bad employer) deciding to fire the waiter rather than pay the legal requirement. What is the waiter going to do, take them to court? That would require them to have enough money to pay a lawyer and time to pursue the case in court, and if they’re working as a waiter how likely is that?
There have been some controversies (most noticeably one about a swanky posh restaurant in Dublin) over tips and who gets them; it’s more normal to put a service charge on the bill instead of tips and then the staff are supposed to get that distributed amongst them, but some businesses keep that for themselves/the owners.
Unless you have a union backing you, as an individual it seems it would be more difficult to get your legal entitlements out of the boss; I know restaurants and hotels over here constantly claim they can’t get enough staff, but I also know that this is because of a perception that it’s poorly-paid work in bad working conditions where the owners will screw you over (and the cases I have personal knowledge about, this is exactly what happens). So there’s high staff turnover, and the jobs are often filled by students wanting part-time/summer work which they will then give up when they return to college, so for all those reasons, bosses tend to prefer to let people go, because they can always hire on some warm body to replace them. Waiters would have more power if they could all walk out of a restaurant that didn’t pay the legal rate and they couldn’t be replaced, but if the owner is gambling on “somebody will be desperate enough for work to apply” then it’s no skin off their nose if an unhappy employee leaves, because the churn is so high anyway and they’re easily replaced and probably won’t have the resources to take them to court.
The reason you don’t really see people suing over it is because (at the scale of a given week) you’re talking about maybe $50-$150 in compensation. Which is enough that it sucks not to get it, but probably not enough that it is worth initiating any kind of legal action (not to mention the risk of losing your job and possibly getting blackballed in the local restaurant industry as the person who sued their boss over wage issues).
The other limb of this is that the employee may actually be making good money based off of tips, and have budgeted for that. Even if the employer were to make it up to minimum wage, if they’re normally making a good multiple of that, losing the tips will hurt.
Of course this isn’t as big a concern if you’re the only one doing it in a one-off transaction, but especially in a higher-end restaurant, a table of people who don’t tip could represent a severe income shock to the waiter, even if the employer complies with the law.
I get the reasons why the average waiter or waitress wouldn’t want to potentially disrupt their employment over a few hundred bucks, but that’s not the same as understanding why there’s seemingly none who have. I just expected there to be outliers here.
You’d think at least one lawyer would have gone trolling through this issue for a class-action suit, or some politician would have pressured the DoL to better enforce this as a way of signaling allegiance with low-income workers.
@Deiseach – deciding to fire the waiter rather than pay the legal requirement.,
A restaurant in most places in the U.S. can say “your tips aren’t enough, so you’re obviously not giving good enough service for our customers, and you’re fired”, but they are also legally required to make sure the person actually earned a total that’s at least minimum wage for the time they actually worked.
This is a moderately hilarious conversation. The term you’re looking for is wage theft and it’s an extremely common cause of action (see e.g. https://www.spigglelaw.com/employment-blog/restaurants-sued-often-breaking-wage-hour-laws/ a plaintiff firm, talking about the cases), as well as an extremely common form of government intervention. See for example, the Wage and Hour Divisions news releases: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd
And see their nice website explaining the $304 million recovered last FY in back pay (not just on tips, obviously): https://www.dol.gov/whd/data/
Wage theft is a major issue in a large number (I can’t say the majority as I haven’t studied it) of hourly/overtime-eligible positions.
Edit: add link I left out of original response and correct a minor error (referred to this year, not last FY in the recovered back pay numbers)
Two somewhat random examples:
United States of Mexico adopted what was a close copy of US constitution in 1857, altough it was somewhat longer document.
Czechoslovakia after 1948 strived to imitate Soviet Union in all institutions as closely as possible. I am not sure whether you would count that as imitation of success, but Czechoslovak communists certainly thought about it that way.
Another example is Turkey. After WW1, the leader Musfafa Kemal Ataturk went all in on Westernization, changing the country both socially, economically and economically. He even went so far as to adopt a new written script based on the latin alphabet. I don’t know all the specifics but it does seem like it was successful.
I’m hardly an expert, but my understanding of modern Turkish history is that it was only successful because, when the masses inevitably decided to start electing an Islamic government, the military would institute a coup, get rid of all the elected politicians, and tell the electorate to try again with someone secular.
And that Erdogan seems to have successfully broken this cycle.
Having studied the history of Turkey myself, my understanding is that the previous coups were more against politicians who were seen as too liberal and reformist, and Erdoğan was the first time an openly islamic politician was even allowed to run at all.
Atatürk’s reforms aimed at transforming the ruins of the Ottoman Empire into a modern Turkish Republic notably involved throwing out the entire Islamic-based Ottoman body of law and adopting a civil code based on that of Switzerland and a penal code based on that of Italy. This was supported by radical reforms in all aspects of society, including adopting the Latin alphabet, adopting the western calendar, giving equal voting rights to men and women (in 1934!), banning islamic head-covering, removing Arabic and Persian loanwords from Turkish vocabulary and replacing them with native coinages, etc.
This did radically transform Turkish society in only a few years, though did not really into a liberal democracy, as Atatürk’s authoritarian methods also instigated a tradition of one party rule and military intervention into politics, and ultimately created a lot of ressentment among the more religious part of the population; the continued popular support for the increasingly authoritarian Erdoğan is essentially the result of decades of suppressed religious opposition to secular elites suddenly bubbling up to the surface — even if Erdoğan itself is careful to never present himself as openly and explicitely against Atatürk’s spiritual inheritance, since that would essentially be attacking a foundational myth of the Republic.
Edit: dang, ninja’d.
Thanks. This sounds like a very good example of what I’m talking about.
I am curious why more countries haven’t tried something like this, and (given that it’s unusual) why Turkey did. Was it just that WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was so traumatic that it allowed Ataturk to institute such sweeping changes? Was Turkish/Ottoman governing culture unusually flexible/pragmatic/open?
IIRC it was a bunch of things that led to it.
1. There wasn’t really a Turkey before Ataturk. He was the general that expelled the allies and directly led to the creation of the Republic. Being literal actual George Washington helps get your preferred policies enacted.
2. Prior to his reforms, Turkey, well, the Ottoman Empire, was incredibly out of date and everyone knew it (at least the younger generation, who ardently supported him) did. Public sentiment was definitely on the side of reform.
3. This one is my opinion, but I think it might be easier to implement these kinds of changes when your current policies are hopelessly out of date or at least massively different than the ones that your seeking to implement. I don’t think it’s likely one liberal democracy would ever willingly abandon its laws and implement someone else’s, but we’ve got a few examples of feudal monarchies (Japan), theocratic sultanates (Turkey) or failing communist states (eastern Europe/Russia) doing so.
In complement to what Aftagley said, it should also be noted that Atatürk’s reforms didn’t come out of a vacuum, many of the things he did were things the preceding government of the Young Turks tried but mostly failed to implement due to political inertia and infighting.
The whole project of replacing the Arabic alphabet with the Latin one was an old idea, and not just in Turkey — this was being done throughout Soviet Russia, in the Balkans, and there were even later proposals to do so in Lebanon and Egypt (even further, even China and Japan had movements of reformers who wanted to have the Latin alphabet replace the local systems).
Many governments of Muslim majority countries tried to do similar things, but eventually ran afool of a revolting religious population (Iran is the classic case — the Shah’s brand of agressive secularism fueled enormous ressentment that eventually led to the Iranian revolution being deeply religious in nature).
I think the reason they all failed (and the reason Turkey can be seen as a partial faillure too, in light of recent years), is because all these countries took cues from France, but overlooked something very important: in France secularism started as a bottom-up, not top-down impulsion.
France on the eve of the Revolution was in a state of profound religious crisis: entire provinces were dissatisfied with the authority of the Church and of the King (as a divine ruler), and many people were effectively irreligious in all but in explicit confession. When the French revolution turned violent and started persecuting the Church, this wasn’t just a bunch of elites trying to “free the people from their superstitions”, this was the reflection of a large scale hostility to the church deeply rooted into large swaths of the French population.
And even like this, it took more than a century from there for France to finally vote a law separating Church and State, in 1905, with in between no less than ten regime changes in the country!
Trying to make the same change happen in a few years in countries where 90%+ of the population is still deeply religious seems, at best, optimistic.
The Acquiss Communautaire is essentially this, formalized into a process with external verification.
And it works pretty well. Of course, it is also tied up as all heck with the EU.
I don´t think that meets specified criteria, since it isn´t the law of any single country transplanted to another country, but something analogous to US federal law.
The Acquiss is far more than just laws, it is the building of institutions on the European model. That is pretty explicitly a very large chunk of why the fall of the iron curtain was followed by expansion of the EU – it is a road map to follow if you want to transform your society.
What about South Korea? I actually know very little about the government there, but the way it’s structured with a president, legislature, and an independent judiciary seems to have largely been copied from the USA system. This seems to have been implemented in the 80s, and so far South Korea seems to have found some decent success since that time, though the sense I get is that its politics are still more corrupt than the USA’s.
The Chinese tried this and failed repeatedly
The Qing Dynasty tried this following the embarrassing Opium Wars and failed pretty hard.
The early Chinese communists were heavily influenced by the Soviets, until they were all massacred. Mao’s rural/peasant movement grew because those were the only people outside the urban/proletariat purge zones.
I’ve heard that the Whampoa Military Academy basically taught Soviet/German military tactics and that the early National Revolutionary Army that Chaing Kai Shek led was basically a small army trained to decent Western standards. This was super effective against Chinese warlord armies but as those warlord armies surrendered/joined the Kuomintang, the quality got diluted.
Most of Justin Yifu Lin’s writing on Chinese growth suggests that most Chinese modernization is not based on copying Western methods/standards but on home grown innovation. Basically, China has different cost and production structures than the West and it’s environment is different than what the West had, ie the West didn’t have highly industrialized foreign markets to compete against. ChinaEconTalk has a similar theses in a recent podcast on Chinese bureaucracy and business development.
But yeah, from the 1850’s to probably the 1990’s the Chinese have been trying to copy foreign imperialists or Soviets and basically failing nonstop, save small military units. They kind of tried to copy the US under Deng, although it’s better to say they copied Singapore, but now they seem pretty confident in their own hybrid system. The best example of wholesale adoption is probably the early Chinese Communist Party, who’s was very dependent on Moscow and got wrecked for it.
I was recently talking about the ongoing fracas between the fed and the current administration with some fellow millennials and I realized that, with 0 exception, none of them knew what the interest rate was or why it mattered.
I’ve kept asking friends and acquaintances about this topic and, IMO, the results have been nuts. With the exception of either people who directly work in finance, of the 26 people I’ve asked, none of them have a good understanding of what it is or why it matters. For reference, these people are all college graduates, most of them either work in government or media and have expressed above-average interest in the workings of the USG.
I’ve got three hypotheses that would explain these results:
1. The federal interest rate isn’t as important as I originally thought.
2. My results were anomalous and my friend group is just preposterously uninformed on this topic.
3. (my pet theory) The federal interest rate is important, but since the decisions happen behind closed doors and it’s largely seen as an apolitical decision, there’s no culture war around the topic, which means average people don’t care.
What do you think?
4. Virtually nobody knows anything that isn’t directly relevant to their daily life / work.
I work with graduate students and PhDs as well as medical students and MDs at a world-class institution with numerous Nobelists. My friend group outside of work includes a surprising number of Ivy-educated FAANG employees. I wouldn’t expect any of those people to be able to explain what the Federal Reserve does or why it’s important. It doesn’t matter to them and they’re not intellectually curious enough to look it up for themselves.
Those of us who actively seek out trivia are the weirdos. Even very smart people generally just don’t care about this stuff.
Right, but there’s clearly a threshold for this, right? I mean, look at the rest of politics. Most people know about the hot-button issues even if the connection to their daily life is pretty tenuous. If nothing else, you need to know about some topics to not feel like an idiot at dinner parties. Why do some topics rise to that level and this one doesn’t?
I think you’re right that the fed isn’t as obviously political as something like abortion but it’s also the fact that it’s considered boring and esoteric and people don’t like talking about boring things.
I don’t think that most people do know about politics beyond being able to regurgitate talking points on cue.
I’ve had bewildering conversations with people who feel strongly about some political figure of the moment but clearly have no idea who the person in question is or what they did to inspire those feelings. They know how they’re supposed to feel and what they’re supposed to say but nothing beyond that.
“The US has more aircraft carriers than all the other nations combined!”
“Well, we do have a need for more carriers. You see-”
“I don’t care”
An actual conversation I have had, circa 10 years ago
Lots of people are perfectly happy to just talk out their ass about any topic that comes up
Back when I was in the habit of arguing climate issues on FB, I came to the conclusion that almost nobody on either side of the argument understood the greenhouse effect. Almost everyone thought CO2 was simply an insulator, like a blanket. It didn’t occur to them that, if that were the case, it would block the incoming light as well as the outgoing.
I wonder how many people take it for granted that wrapping ice cubes in a blanket would make them melt faster.
Which end of a choco-cornet do you start from? And which side’s the head? The fat end or the thin end?
Darling please, put down the sweets and go buy sausage.
Well dang. It occurs to me that *I* have no idea how the greenhouse effect works. I know how actual greenhouses work, but that’s different. I don’t argue about it though.
I complained a few topics ago that something seems to have happened within the last 15 years or so such that the federal interest rate no longer seems to be nearly as directly correlated with the average savings account, car loan, etc.
If true, then what’s the point of knowing what the federal rate is when it doesn’t seem to actually affect your actual life in any way. If the fed raising interest rates by 0.5% doesn’t result in your savings account yielding 0.5% more, then who even cares?
What the Fed or ECB does doesn’t seem to affect the interest rate on the mortgage you get, and in any case, most mortgage contracts have a floor (despite negative interest rates, nobody gets a free mortgage).
But it does seem to affect the yield you’re able to get on deposits; deposits suck right now in most developed countries.
Yes, and my point is, this wasn’t always the case.
Like, I’m going off memory here and not data, so maybe I’m wrong. But my perception is that back in say, 2007, I had a savings account and it was yielding something like 4%. Then, a recession happened, and every so often, I’d see a news article saying “The Fed lowered interest rates by 0.25% and, sure enough, when I checked my savings account, the interest rate was lower by 0.25%” This kept happening until the rate fell to something like 0.25%.
Then, we supposedly started having a recovery. I’d see articles saying “The Fed has raised interest rates by 0.25%”, but if I checked my account, the yield remained unchanged. Despite report after report of the fed raising rates, I don’t think that particular account ever went above 1% ever again. It certainly never got back to anywhere close to the 4% it was at in 2007…
On the other hand, despite ECB interest rates being negative, deposits never go below 0. It hasn’t happened in the US but at least you know that.
In Spain, because we had a lot of problematic banks, the deposit rates usually would depend on how much the banks need cash deposits.
For me, an above market deposit rate is a sign that the bank is in trouble, as the banks that had high deposit rates (such as Banco Popular, which was acquired by Santander for a euro), ended with problems. And although in theory Spain has the equivalent of the FDIC, nobody wants to be the one who waits to get compensated, because the Spanish government and judiciary are not known to pay up fast.
And that’s when I (belatedly) moved my savings out of big banks (BoA) and opened online bank accounts.
That seemed more related to banks having enough assets and thinking they can get away with paying nothing on them.
I’m talking about an online bank account!
Your bank is screwing you. It’s trivial to get 1.9% at Ally, and not that much harder to crack 2% at a few other places even before looking into CDs.
I already made that switch.
But I don’t want 2%. I want 4%. Or higher. Why could I get that in 2007 but not now?
I’m not sure what the question is.
Interest rates crashed and savings accounts followed, but in 2016 the Fed started raising rates again, nine times, a quarter-point at a time. Some banks klept their rates near zero for Reasons, but others raised theirs appropriately and now you can get 2%. You can’t get 4% because that’s not where the rate is at. “Why is the federal rate at 2.25% instead of something higher?” is a much broader question, and probably requires looking upstream of the Fed.
deposits suck right now in most developed countries.
That’s very noticeable, and it’s not just right now, it’s going back at least a couple of decades. When I was a small child, putting your money into the bank to save it was considered frugal and prudent because you would earn interest on it – not huge amounts, but a nice little extra that would add in to the money you socked away every year.
Then at some time, that deposit rate went down like a stone in the sea but borrowing money meant the interest rate was going up like a helium balloon with the string cut. And although borrowing rates are somewhat better today, the deposit rates are useless, such that you might as well keep the money under the mattress. I don’t know enough to know how or why this happened, but I do think banks realised they could jiggle things a bit downwards for this and a bit upwards for that, and the difference would be profit for them, and then they kept on adjusting until now we’re as good as paying them to hold our money which they then lend out at profit to themselves.
I don’t object to banks earning profits and I do realise we need to pay them for storing our money and providing services, but the money they are lending out is ours not theirs. (Yes, I know that banks nowadays are lending out more than they can possibly hold in customers’ deposits, this article explains that nicely, but I’m grumbling here, don’t expect me to stick to just the facts).
I suspect that indirectly the federal interest rate (which is the rate at which the federal reserve loans money to banks, right?) will affect me, but since I can’t affect it, and I can learn about the more proximal factors of relevance (ie, the rate on my particular credit card or similar offers), going any deeper doesn’t seem to help me any.
Maybe if I was about to buy a house it could clue me in to whether it was better to finance now or wait a few months, but the general state of the real estate market seems more important to consider.
That’s the discount rate. The Federal Funds rate is the rate at which banks lend each other money on a very short term basis (“overnight” — the loan term from close of business to open of business the next day, I believe) to cover their reserve requirements. The rate the Fed sets is the target for this rate, the actual rate of any given loan is set by negotiation between the banks and the Fed changes it indirectly.
The prime rate for business loans slavishly follows the Federal Funds rate. The average mortgage rate follows it roughly. Part of the reason you might see it not being so correlated is it hasn’t changed much lately.
Chart
I must say, despite my efforts to understand it, I don’t think I know much about it. I have a vague idea that somehow increasing interest rates -> decrease inflation/decrease monetary mass, and more printing money -> lower interest rates.
A lot of what the Fed (or the ECB) seems like dark magic to me. How has the Fed managed to keep positive interest rates despite an expansionary monetary policy, while the Eurozone has negative interest rates?
After asking it in an open thread some time ago, I got an explanation why investors buy negative interest bonds; namely, the impossibility of burying the money in the backyard (problematic with billions of dollars), and the FDIC (and european equivalent) only applying to amounts much lower than a million dollars. I still find it hard to believe it though.
I think a lot of people don’t understand how it works because it’s hard to understand, and is frequently based on unintuitive explanations. Especially MMT.
This level of comprehension is approximately 1000% more than I got from most people I asked. Do you think that maybe the wicked complexity of the entire system just put people off from learning anything about it?
Most people are scared of everything that relates to money.
I was genuinely shocked when I met British people who had studied in university by getting a loan, and had no idea how much money they owe.
Like, literally, didn’t even know even the order of magnitude of what they owed. Most of them didn’t expect to ever pay it back (UK student loans are only repayed after a certain income threshold, and if not repayed, are cancelled after 25 years).
I mean, I get that you may find it unnecessary to make extra payments towards the loan, despite the high interest, if you expect it to be cancelled. But I personally find it very strange that people are OK being saddled with debt, on a promise it will be forgiven by the government.
Maybe they trust the government more? I wouldn’ trust the Spanish governments’ promise to give me something in 25 years for anything.
Litany of tarski vs ignorance is bliss.
I don’t get the reference; could you give a link?
It’s an eliezerism.
“Litany of Tarski” is a sentence of the form “If X, then I desire to believe ‘X'”. Thus “If the sky is blue, I desire to believe the sky is blue.”
It’s named after Tarski’s phrase, “‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.”
Note that litany of Tarski is logically equivalent to semantic theory of truth plus view that you should always seek to believe true things (which is arguable, e.g. ‘ignorance is bliss’).
Really?
The whole thing was a national scandal for the Lib Dems, when the Coalition raised tuition from 3k to 9k per anum.
It’s the reason there’s a famous autotuned apology from the then deputy PM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUDjRZ30SNo
And I don’t think it’s the kind of thing where the government can unilaterally change the terms that way without provoking a massive backlash.
@Randy M @Eponymous
I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, the Litany of Tarski doesn’t preclude rational ignorance, and ignorance prima facie doesn’t imply false knowledge, right? On the other, not all knowledge is propositional, so you may e.g. act inconsistently with some truth without even realizing you ‘believe’ or don’t ‘believe’ it. Suppose I’m a carpenter who uses 22/7 in place of more accurate approximations of pi. And suppose I don’t know whether 22/7 is pi or not; still, I work as if it is. (Maybe not the best example, of course, since approximations like 22/7 work fine a lot of the time.) Am I violating the Litany of Tarski?
ETA: Tags
I don’t believe in the Spanish government’s ability to keep paying decent pensions. Why would I treat any other permission by the government differently?
The thing is, loan forgiveness will happen in 25 years. That is a lot of years. A lot of things can happen in 25 years.
The government constantly breaks promises; how can anybody trust the government’s promise to do the right thing in 25 years?
@Lambert
Most western governments, including Spain and the UK, have a demographic problem, and huge debt. Despite some people believing that debt doesn’t matter, I believe it does.
I am not saying people should repay their student debt despite it not making economic sense on the assumption that it will be written off in 25 years. I am saying people should know how much they owe, and have a contingency plan, and some savings, towards paying the debt if the government does not keep its promise.
By, for example, putting some money towards paying the student debt into a stock ISA, that could cover the debt completely if it is not forgiven.
Same thing you should do with your pension; calculate how much NI pension you expect to get at your desired retirement age, and try to make a budget and get a private pension that makes it possible to live OK without it.
@ana53294,
A lot of people–and I have this inclination–will feel a lot better ignoring even immanent problems. Problems which would be better handled with a plan and rational knowledge, but that requires facing the problems and worrying about it ahead of time when you could be spending that thought time on something pleasant.
For instance, in High School Economics, we had a group project to plan a business and do a presentation on it. I, the introvert, ended up without a group. Thinking about the project required facing some unpleasant facts about my grades, social skills, etc. Instead, I could think about something else, then deal with the problem when it came by mumbling that I didn’t do the project, averting my gaze when questioned about why not, and getting by on test scores for the semester.
People who are allowed to borrow a sum that they can’t imagine a plan to pay back are probably taking a similar irrational strategy.
Actually it may be rational if you account for significant future discounting, but on the whole I’d prefer to train myself to consider harsh truths ahead of time.
edit:@Nick
I have to agree with you–that’s not a great example. 😉 Because you the carpenter there have a justified belief that your assumption is correct–it works for you. I don’t think rationality requires you to dig deep into every thing you think you know, even when it works, but is more about being open and observing when facts don’t work together. Notice when you are confused, and seek to resolve the dissonance (with effort proportional to the significance). The carpenter who consistently has to go back and file down his cut lumber because his assistant is measuring incorrectly but doesn’t want to consider that possibility because of the hassle in finding a replacement or w/e could use this idea, though.
Once I’ve got 70k lying around, I’ll make sure to put it in a passively investing ISA.
@Lambert
And that vague plan is miles ahead of many people, who aren’t even aware of how much they owe.
Sure, if you don’t have even a hundred bucks to spare towards a savings plan (although that usually means you spend too much), don’t save, but you should be aware of the future, and plan for things.
EDIT: Due to compound interest, and stocks having high gains on average, you may need quite a bit less than the money you owe to pay it off.
The student loans have an interest rate of RPI+3% or something.
So one can’t count on them getting inflated away.
Is the British government really going to call in all at the debt at 25 years, or will they just keep up the same payment terms until the debt is exhausted?
I mean, if you are planning for Britain NOT forgiving the loans and automatically calling all debt at 25 years, why not 20 years or 15 years or 10 years?
@A Definite Beta Guy
The current system is set up so payments are only made as a percentage of your income if you earn above a certain income threshold. And if you never pay off, debt is written off in 25 years.
What I would expect to happen is that the government may decide to remove its guarantees and say, sell the student loan to a debt collection agency. You then have to negotiate with the company on repayments.
In any case, I don’t expect a balloon payment; but I do think payments continuing, or the income threshold being lowered, could be a thing.
The same way I don’t expect the government to stop paying pensions completely, just to lower or inflate its way out of them.
@Lambert
And the S&P average growth is 10%. For long term purposes (25 years), you will get something quite close to that.
Especially with Brexit coming, as long as you invest in stocks which don’t have their main business in the UK, you may be able to get a lot more money in GBP than you can buy now with USD or EUR.
Are pensions contractually-agreed in the same way that student loans are?
And there’s no point in selling the debt. It’s taken straight out of our paychecks with all the de-jure taxes.
@Lambert
Is there a literal contract you sign, that you get a copy of, detailing all conditions? I looked into the Student Loan Company, but could not find any contract, other than “Terms and conditions”, which to me seems like stuff than get changed all the time.
In The Netherlands, shorty after increasing student debts a lot, the government extended the period before the remaining debt is voided from 15 to 35 years, although only for new students. However, they also reduced the maximum percentage of the income that they can garnish.
Still, with the increasing housing prices, this effectively seems to result in low earning graduates (or worse: non-graduates with student debt) being priced out of owning a house/apartment, unless they have wealthy parents who chip in.
People get letters with the money they owe, so they should know their debt unless they refuse to look at their mail.
A weak contrary anecdote. I have only a few friends that I talk about interesting things with but 100% of them can give a basic explanation of what the Fed does and why. That being said my bubble may be very different from yours given that I have a econ background and currently work in finance.
Your results are typical, your friend group is rationally ignorant of this topic, and nobody with serious influence has decided to make federal interest rates a hot-button issue that everyone thinks they understand.
Your results here are anomalous in that you are hanging out with a bunch of fanatical nerds and wonks who go out of their way to learn far more about this sort of thing than they can put to practical use, along with a few professionals and a retired econ professor.
By my recollection, general obsession over the Federal Funds rate began in the run-up to the Great Recession, and has pretty much gone away since the end of the recession. Now it’s back to being fairly esoteric and nobody worries about it unless they are either into this sort of thing or are reasonably knowledgeable _and_ looking for a mortgage. It does get a fair amount of play on the local news, but I’m in the NYC area, so there’s a LOT of people in the finance business.
Trump’s first apparently successful attempt to pressure the nominally-independent Fed to lower the rate was big news for a bit, but probably got lost in the general Trump outrage.
Aside: I recall a time when it was the discount rate, not the Federal Funds rate, which wonks obsessed over. I’m not sure what changed.
Alternatively – the only reason it made the news in the first place was because it tied in to general Trump outrage.
Yeah, this was my read of it as well. But even then, the negative response from the left wasn’t because they disagreed with Trump’s demands to cut rates, it was because he was “politicizing” the Fed.
You’ll notice that this negative response requires 0 knowledge of the fed or interest rates.
Krugman had a bizarre column where he basically said “The economic situation is such that cutting rates is probably a good idea, but then it would look like Trump successfully politicized the fed, and that would be bad, so in order to prove that they haven’t been politicized, the fed should avoid cutting rates (even though cutting rates would be the non-politicized optimal policy.)”
@Matt M,
I’m pretty sure I read that column, and a lot of “Here comes a recession” ones lately, and I had a momentary “This means Trump is less likely to be re-elected, good” thought till self-reflection, and I then thought “Did I just wish people mis-fortune so my ‘team’ could win?”, “Oh jeez that’s thinking like the further Left”, and then shame hit me.
I suspect that kind of thinking fuels a lot of this, and on that dark thought, we are overdue for a “correction”, come the 2022 mid-term election I strongly suspect that we will be in Recession and whichever Party holds the Presidency will lose big in the House, bleeding off the moderates from that Party, I expect the other Party to intensify partisan rhetoric in reaction (and if Biden or another perceived “moderate” Democrat is nominated and loses I expect much the same), I expect more Gilroy/El Paso/Dayton style domestic terrorism, I really don’t predict things getting better again on that score in my lifetime, and I’m just plain sad and weary, as the news this last month has really sent my mood south.
@Matt M:
Didn’t see that one. That’s a pretty severe case of TDS! I’m trying to imagine him making that argument if the president was Obama. “Bernanke should cut rates, but Obama is asking him to, and so he should not cut to prove his independence!”
The Fed wasn’t particularly important, post-GFC, until they started thinking about raising rates.
2% is not a safe place for the federal funds rate to be at the peak of the business cycle. It sure as fuck was important, but it was also out of the spotlight.
Agreed. Perhaps I should have said that the Fed wasn’t considered important.
Mostly number 3. Unless you’re borrowing money or repaying something like a mortgage, as an ordinary person you won’t know or care until it hits you in the wallet. It’s just “one of those things the government does” to keep the country running, and it’s certainly not as fun or interesting as trying to buy Greenland, so why would you care about it?
Clearly because we’ll need to take out a loan in order to afford Greenland. /s
I vote for number 3. I believe I know more about finance and economics than the average person, I think, and the only reason I know as much as I do about economics is that I have family members who work in financial journalism, and I’m still regularly bewildered by stuff like FX and modern credit market shenanigans. Finance, and especially credit markets and currency exchanges, is a rabbit hole whose complexity is on par with modern physics, IMHO.
Your friends aren’t buying houses.
The Federal Funds Rate and the Discount Rate have a significant and direct effect on mortgage interest rates. But if you’re not looking to buy or refinance a house, and/or don’t have an adjustable-rate mortgage, the effects of changes in those rates on you is a second-order effect, at best.
Somewhat related to the recession conversation below: What do we make of various “permabear” economic commentators?
My go-to example here is someone like Peter Schiff. He’s well known in and his ideas are fairly representative of Austrian economics circles. If you aren’t familiar with him, search on Youtube for “Peter Schiff was right” for a classic video of him literally being laughed off the set of various financial news shows for predicting the housing boom in 2007/2008.
Now, critics of his would say something like “A broken clock is right twice a day.” And it’s basically true that as soon as 2010, he was right back to saying “A huge recession is coming and it’ll be even worse this time!” And clearly, he’s been wrong about that every year since. Of course, he never says when it’s coming, and his core logic is something like “The government and the fed can use a variety of sneaky tricks to prop up a boom for a while, but eventually it catches up with them and the economy crashes.” This line of thought explains what happened from 2004-2009 just fine. And if we have a huge recession tomorrow, it’ll look about as good again.
So how do you determine if there actually is something to the theory, or if he’s just a crackpot who does nothing more than “cry wolf every day and when a wolf actually shows up, declare your own genius.” Especially when, if you asked him, he isn’t really crying “Wolf here!” but is rather crying “We are vulnerable to a wolf attack!”
Austrian economics is crackpottery end to end, so you ignore him on those grounds.
Since when? Was Menger a crackpot? Mises? Hayek?
“end to end” is a strong claim.
The problem is that contradictory narratives can all “explain” what happens during a recession. Unless you’re a serious macro wonk, the only thing you can go by is the predictions. Most economists know this, which is why they always hedge. Austrians are the only ones who have done us a favor in making bold predictions that have gotten falsified.
If we have a recession tomorrow, it doesn’t prove Schiff right because he also predicted high inflation from low interest rate policies. It would take an extremely improbably series of events to get people to take him seriously.
When it comes to macro econ + predictions + falsification I would say that the general Austrian approach did better than any other approach based on public pronouncements prior to the 2008 collapse.
On the night of the election, Krugman predicted that the stock market would crash, and would recover never!
Did that permanently discredit Keynesianism? Why or why not?
Well, it sure discredited Krugman…
I mean, I already knew he was extremely unreliable on things related to politics. Pretty good on macro though.
I find Krugman to be worthless on Macro as he rarely makes predictions, and nearly always has ‘on the one hand this might happen, on the other hand this might’ posts on the same subject.
@bb
He had a pretty good record in understanding 2008 and the aftermath. He was very early in realizing that the zero lower bound on interest rates was a big problem (his 1998 paper on it basically launched the modern literature). He didn’t foresee the financial crisis (though he did see there was a housing bubble), but once it was underway he mostly got things right. He called for a bigger stimulus, predicted a long and slow recovery, predicted that austerity in Europe was a bad idea, and diagnosed problems related to the Euro.
Main wrong prediction was predicting the breakup of the Euro. But that was due to his misreading politics rather than economics — the PIGS were in terrible economic straits due to the Euro, but decided to stay in despite this.
I’ve followed him less lately, and clearly Trump has driven him crazy. I always found his analysis of politics pretty mistaken. Though I guess he was right about Iraq/Bush.
He “saw there was a housing bubble” in the sense that he called for it to be created!
@Matt M:
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I can easily believe he called for low interest rates in 01-02.
Here’s the link.
That was written on election night. The next day:
The following day:
Fleshing out his argument a week later:
I would argue that Krugman was essentially wrong on all of this.
1. The ZLB has been breached, it is clearly not a hard line as he indicated prior to 2008.
2. His stimulus calls have no real backing. I don’t believe that he ever published his own direct projections, but he referred to CBO projections in supporting his call for stimulus and the actual outcome was well outside their margin for error in their predictions. I am not in fact aware of any single Keynesian prediction made based on the expected stimulus package that was within their error bands.
3. Keynesians generally switched their definitions of austerity during the crisis. Pre-crisis it was generally accepted (which fit with the theory) that the appropriate measure of stimulus was based on the pre-recession levels of spending and output. Most post crises measures have been based on measuring from mid crisis which is not the same at all. Even granting that position Krugman was wrong in time and place. Here he is worrying about a double dip recession in the US in 2010 citing the austerity of cutting UE benefits and using 1937 as a comparison. This double dip never happened in the US and from the time of him writing that on there was nearly a straight line decline in the UE rate. He didn’t make any predictions in this 2013 piece, but he claims that the US was engaging in Austerity then, and if you follow the series you can see that there was continued decline (though it slowed and flatlined in 2014) through Q2 2015. This period saw a decline in the UE rate from 7.5% to 5%, and the slight increase that occurs after Q2 2015 is associated not with a faster rate of decrease in the UE rate but a slower rate of increase.* Not quite as wrong as he could be, but clearly not what you would expect given Keynesian theory, and this is using a metric he selected.
* I am sure given the wide range of countries and frequent comments he has made you can find some situations where he was correct, just as I am sure I can find more where he was incorrect.
That Mises article showing Krugman “calling for a housing bubble” is amazingly silly. It has Krugman sarcastically calling for a bubble once. (Note that two weeks after he said that, he posted a full op-ed about how bad a housing bubble might be. The Mises institute does not present this, which, you know, shows you how interested in the truth *they* are.)
It then goes on to conflate calling for lower interest rates or other similar policy in 2001 with calling for a bubble, notes that Krugman supported lower interest rates, and then claims that he called for a bubble. It’s like claiming that someone supporting financial deregulation was calling for a bubble.
Yes, lowering interest rates work partly through increasing housing demand, but they work through lots of other channels too, and there are other policy levers one can use in conjunction with rates in order to reduce the impact on housing.
Then, even sillier, it quotes Keynes in favor of low interest rates, says Krugman is a Keynsian, therefore he must support lower interest rates, therefore he supports a housing bubble because that’s the likely outcome of lower interest rates. Seriously!
And then there’s a link to a Spanish-language interview which doesn’t work at the moment for me, but even if it did, you can’t possibly believe that if Krugman was trying to promote a bubble the best video evidence of it would be of him in Spain.
I’ve got a feeling that you’re simplifying what Krugman said, although I have no interest in defending him.
However, if that is true, it’s obviously not a reflection of anything taught in economics classes. There is no Keynesian theory anywhere that says “the mere election of a populist will cause a permanent recession.” In fact, it’s obviously at odds with mainstream economic theory that says in the long run, supply side factors rule. And while many left-leaning economists were wary about Trump causing a recession, most of them didn’t say it was necessarily going to happen.
You said yourself that you are confused about why there is no inflation. You should update your beliefs away from the people who said it was going to happen.
You know, it’s not a bad suspicion to have, but…
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/paul-krugman-the-economic-fallout
It’s not like it’s a short opinion either where Matt M could plausibly be misinterpreting Krugman. Krugman goes on for 7 short paragraphs.
EDIT: FIRST. Beat Nick. XD
It looks like Krugman did predict a big global recession if Trump was elected, then backed away from it later. From a middle-of-the-night November 9th piece:
It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?
Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.
Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
…
So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.
He’s mentioned several times since then that he retracted the claim three days later.
Sorry — comment posted above meant for here. Links to three Krugman pieces written in the wake of the 2016 election.
Krugman had to retract, but that’s more of a footnote. He said something monumentally, incredibly, but most foolishly of all objectively stupid in writing for the NYT (I think only the website though). In multiple paragraphs just in case his meaning was unclear.
In a way, he’s lucky he made such specifically stupid predictions (failed in 9 hours…) though so he could see his mistake and then attempt to blow it all off as a moment of passion.
That Krugman piece in the immediate aftermath of the election is a wonderful piece of writing, you can just see him sprawled on the sofa slugging straight from a bottle of gin, going “I warned you damn fools but you wouldn’t listen, now it’s too late, let’s all don our white robes and ascend to the top of the mountain because the End Times are here!”
Then as you say, three days later he sobered up from the bender and after he’d washed his face and had some coffee, he read what had been published and went “I said that? I don’t remember a thing from that night, what happened?” 😀
@Matt M,
IIRC, Krugman did an apology for that prediction within two days (unless I’m confusing it with a similar Krugman prediction folowed by a quick apology about what the Brexit vote will lead to).
But the sins of the proponents of a theory doesn’t necessarily change how likely it is to be true.
Since I’ve heard various historical events cited as proving or disproving Keynesianism, my guess is that whether you believe it or not is based on whether it feels convincing or not, it’s convincing to me but YMMV.
So 1.5 days after he was proven wrong?
I kid, the 2016 prediction was a knee jerk thing, and clearly not economics based. It was bad, but I don’t consider it discrediting outside of ‘theories can be correct, but people will still make mistakes’ sort of way.
It doesn’t matter whether there’s something to the theory or not. If all it can predict is “there will be another recession in the future”, we already know that. It’s just not a useful theory.
Technically speaking, what the theory predicts is “We will continue to have these boom and bust cycles so long as the federal reserve is artificially manipulating the interest rate.”
The fact that the theory cannot tell you precisely when the bubble will burst is largely irrelevant to the greater point. And technically you can’t really prove or disprove it unless you’re willing to end the fed and see what happens, which nobody is.
Have you heard of the infamous Bryan Caplan-Robert Murphy bet? Murphy bet that by 2015 we would see inflation at 10% year-over-year and of course we saw nothing of the sort. He claims that it doesn’t say anything about Austrian Economics in general, except his prediction was one of the tamer ones. He predicted merely high inflation instead of hyper-inflation. If that’s not falsification, then I don’t know what is.
I read Murphy’s blog and listen to his podcast regularly, so yes I am familiar.
The notion that his underestimation of inflation wholly discredits all of Austrian economics is absurd.
High inflation is one of the predictions that Austrians have called for over and over again. They all said that the Fed’s low interest rates would cause high inflation.
This is not necessarily what the theory says though.
In a nut shell ABCT says that when a central bank stimulates the economy it will flow to certain sectors first/fastest creating growth in that sector which relies on continual stimulation to maintain its growth- ie a bubble. The economy will reorganize some of its capital around that bubble, and the end of stimulus will eventually end the bubble causing a general depression due to the loss of value from that capital.
What people like Schiff and Murphy did was add on the response that they expected from the Federal Reserve and the expected outcomes of that response, which certainly casts doubt on their ability to forecast but is not the same as falsifying ABCT.
I’ll also add that to this day, it’s not entirely clear to me how the fed so massively increased it’s balance sheet without resulting in massive inflation.
The most plausible answer seems to be something like “none of that money ever hit the economy, it just sat in bank vaults going unlended.” Which is all well and good, except for the fact that, if true, it didn’t get the chance to “stimulate” the economy at all and the entire exercise would have been pointless and done nothing (which, given how long and slow the “recovery” was, seems plausible, but begs the question as to why they even bothered going through the motions of stimulus that wasn’t ever going to actually stimulate)
@Matt M:
Surely part of the answer is that the Fed started paying interest on excess reserves. In effect, it printed money and then borrowed it back from the banks.
But all the prominent ones, including the “respectable” Austrians, were saying it was going to happen. I was really in to this stuff in 2012, and I kept waiting for the inflation that never materialized. The only one who was willing to make a falsifiable prediction, one of those respectable ones, was completely and utterly wrong, and I’m supposed to listen to the guys who continue to give these vague apocalyptic predictions?
@Matt M
When the interest rate on short-term debt is ~0, then a T-bill is just the same as a dollar. So swapping T-bills and dollars (through open market operations) makes no difference.
As to why they did it — note that QE involves buying assets besides short-term debt. Also Fed actions may work through expectations. Bernanke is quoted as saying that QE works in practice but not in theory.
A few points
1. We don’t have a good definition of the money supply. In a theoretical economy where gold is money and nothing else is you can build a quantity theory of money that functions. However that world does not currently exist (and may never have), and there are many things that end up ‘money like’ at the very least.
2. The Fed specifically created an amount of money that they thought would offset the losses to the money supply and the decline in velocity, and further they did not print via helicopter drops which would likely have had a different effect. My guess is that Schiff, Murphy etc (including a younger me) basically just assumed HD style printing while the actual Fed position had a lot more nuance and understanding than that.
The primary purpose of the Fed’s actions was to prevent bank runs, and then recapitalize them/prevent further losses, not push the economy from 10% UE in year one to 4% UE in year 2. If you look at it from this perspective a lot of their actions make sense. For example the IOR program. Initially IOR was very small, effectively like 0.1%-0.25% for an extended period of time. Given that 30 year mortgage rates were ~5% it can hardly be argued (despite Scott Sumner having a good go of it) that these payments were preventing banks from lending. If you think of these payments as a stabilizing force, with the Fed essentially covering some basic operating costs (or FDIC insurance costs) that would prevent banks from rejecting or trying to dump deposits.
The issue I take here is that these guys made multiple correct predictions, followed by some number of incorrect predictions, and you are treating it like they went 0/1 and are basically tossing the baby out the window.
How much of this might be observer effects? The bets are public, and so relevant figures taking those predictions into account when making their decisions.
Like how telling your rock-paper-scissors opponent what you’re going to throw beforehand changes the game.
So if economists predict “The Fed does X, will result in Y,” that assumes “The Fed does X, and nothing else,” but The Fed might choose instead to do X+A to avoid Y.
Besides the recession, which can easily be explained by the broken clock theory, what else were they right about?
This doesn’t explain anything since starting from this logic the decline in interest rates toward zero would be in effect increasing the money supply. You would still expect inflation then you would just be saying that falling interest rates was the cause and not QE.
And by the way, they were also wrong about the “next” recession, which is central to their theory. If you have a theory that says the Fed keeping low interest rates is going to lead to a horrific recession, and it’s been one of the longest expansions in American history, that’s a big thing to be wrong about.
They were right about the causes of the recession, specifically citing the housing bubble and predicting that it would lead to large issues across the financial industry and spilling over in the broader economy. I believe many people who talked about the housing bubble prior to 2008 predicted that it would be limited in scope, and wouldn’t have major spillover effects.
@bb
You’ve got the causality reversed. Increasing the money supply is how the Fed lowers interest rates. But once they hit zero, that implies that the marginal dollar held by the private sector has zero excess liquidity value over a T-bill. So buying more T-bills using dollars doesn’t have any effect.
You are going to have to cite this.
ABCT doesn’t suggest “low interest rates lead to recessions.”
It suggests low interest rates lead to unsustainable booms which are inevitably corrected via recession.
Pointing to the fact that the economy is booming right now hardly discredits them. The existence of the boom is what they set out to explain in the first place, while the Keynesians act as if booms are just the natural default state of things and recessions are random outliers that happen for no particular reason.
No, there is a straight forward implication here. The Fed might increase the money supply to lower interest rates, BUT the theory that at zero coupon T-Bills become money implies that the Fed is creating EVEN MORE money by lowering interest rates. You can’t get to a point where the Fed is swapping out one money for another money logically without them creating even more than the standard measures of MS claim.
I said that dollars and T-bills become equivalent assets *at the margin* when rates are zero.
The private sector has certain demand for assets with transaction value (money). Printing money doesn’t magically impart transaction value to T-bills. It does however sate the private sector’s needs for cash to conduct transactions. Once you’ve exhausted that, to the point that a *marginal* dollar just gets held in a bank’s vault, printing more dollars and swapping them for T-bills makes no difference.
So it’s less that you’re turning T-bills into money, and more that there are enough dollars in circulation that any more just act like T-bills.
MattM:
Well, one possibility is that there is some serious inflation, but the official government statistics aren’t showing it. According to the guys at shadowstats.com, inflation’s running at something like 10% right now. Okay, the shadowstats guys may be a bunch of random wackjob economists with a website, but they claim to be doing the inflation computations using the same methodology the federal government used up till 1980. Now it’s possible that the feds switched their methodology in 1980 (and apparently again in the 1990s) for good and sound reasons, but it’s also possible that the feds like the new methodology because it allows them to claim lower inflation while letting the federal government borrow shitloads of money.
On a scale from one to Naruto running at area 51, shadowstats is a solid 5 on the silliness scale.
https://moneymaven.io/economonitor/emerging-markets/deconstructing-shadowstats-why-is-it-so-loved-by-its-followers-but-scorned-by-economists-DWhA0PwhhkOHkzTLLeCvpQ/
@Matt
First of all, people like Schiff were acting like the recession was going to happen soon all the way back in 2012, so a recession now isn’t going to vindicate them. But the idea is that the longer this “unsustainable” boom goes on, the worse the recession is supposed to be. If we get a recession and it’s relatively mild, are you going to update your beliefs away from Austrianism? Because the existence of recessions is not evidence that Austrian economics is right.
@baconbits
I asked specifically about another right prediction they made that isn’t about the recession. You claimed they made multiple correct predictions. What are they?
Shadowstats CPI is basically “Take official CPI-U, add 7”, although they use a lot of words to get there.
This is largely a moot point because the majority of securities bought by the Fed had positive coupons.
If in year X the Federal Government issues $1 billion in T bills at 2%, then the Federal reserve increases the MS to the point where interest rates drop to zero, then in year X+1 the Federal government issues another $1 billion in T bills at 0% then according to the ‘at zero rates money and bills are interchangeable’ theory the federal government is now effectively increasing the money supply with these new bonds.
@ Wrong Species
You said
Broken clock theory is that if you say ‘recession’ every year you will eventually be right. Saying ‘Housing bubble will lead to recession’ is already one major step beyond broken clock theory, and housing bubble will lead to major recession with predictions of a much larger recession than your average prediction is two steps removed from being a broken clock. Finally saying housing bubble->major recession -> massive expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet is another step beyond.
Counting multiple correct predictions as only one because they were on the same subject is basically going to doom all economists to bad track records.
If Shadow stats 1980 inflation metric is right we have been in recession for 25 years now, a recession that at its peak was -10% real GDP growth over multiple years. Look around you, does this feel like something 2-3x worse than the great depression? Why don’t we have persistent unemployment which most countries have when inflation exceeds growth by 5-10% every year?
“Prove or disprove” is a high standard, but the theory is about economics, not just about the American economy in the early 21st century. So you can get evidence for or against it by looking at U.S. economic history prior to the creation of the Fed or other economies with other institutions in other times and places.
The existence of a boom and bust cycle before central banking would be a telling point, though.
Not a universal rule, but theories that don’t provide some useful explanation of reality are questionable stuff, especially when the theory is of the form “you can’t prove it or test it, but a thing I dislike causes much of the badness in the world.”
My preference would be to repurpose the Paul Samuelson joke and say that he’s predicted twenty of the last three recessions.
I found Megan McArdle’s turn of phrase (circa January 2008) even more glib: “Paul Krugman, who’s predicted eight of the last none recessions…”
The problem is that economics in the post-Great Recession world hasn’t behaved as one would expect, especially in terms of inflation and monetary policy. Austrian economics is predicated on conventional monetary theory, which under the current levels of government debt and the global low interest rate regime should result in substantial inflation. It hasn’t, though, and people who still believe in conventional monetary theory have had to resort to greater and greater contortions to justify why inflation is just around the corner, or even already here.
The financial crisis destroyed a lot of paper assets. This barely shows up in M3 (probably because most of those assets weren’t liquid enough to be counted), but I suspect it’s still having an effect of some sort.
Schiff is a great example of someone basically lucking into part of their worldview being right, and this is despite the fact that I am very sympathetic toward the Austrian School approach to economics.
In late 2007 I opened an investment account with Schiff’s Euro-Pacific capital and got a mock portfolio done. At the time it was done I had been interested in economics casually for a few years, and knew little about investing and yet the portfolio they mocked was obviously awful given their economic predictions (I think I still have the mock in my email history as well). This was the basic view
1. Housing bust was coming. Absolutely nailed it.
2. Very large recession along with it. Absolutely nailed that to.
3. Fed would aggressively expand the money supply. Nailed that one.
4. High, and maybe hyper, inflation would follow. Completely wrong here, but the kicker was
5. Investments centered heavily around Canadian Natural Gas production. This threw me, and pulled me back from my enthusiasm. The thesis that the US is going to go into a massive recession is completely at odds with investing in a commodity that is heavily consumed by the US. Even if his inflation call had been right this still didn’t make a lot of sense as Natural Gas isn’t as ship-able as your average commodity, and almost all Canadian Gas at the time was used in Canada or piped to the US.
The question about guys like Schiff* is not ‘how well does he pick recessions’ but how well he positions his clients given his assumptions, and how well does that work out. My personal experience (looking back on the mock which I did years ago) was that his suggestions were bad outside of his call to hold gold, and including gold they were below average, but the approach of ‘their macro calls + their micro calls’ gives you way better information than just looking at their macro calls.
*Technically my mock up came not from Schiff but from one of his employees.
If anyone here is particularly interested and wanted to check the recommendations I got here is my mock portfolio, emailed to me on October 12, 2007 Name and fraction of allocation
Arc Energy 3/26
Pembina Pipeline 3/26
Bluenote Mining 1/13
Uranium One 1/13
Vastned Office 3/26
Singapore Post 2/13
Babcock and Brown Power 3/26
Macquarrie Infrastructure 3/26
Teliasonera 3/26
My understanding, possibly misinformed, is that Krugman went to all cash when he made his famous remark that the market would probably never recover from Trump’s election. If true, it raises my respect for him (though to be sure it was pretty low to start with).
Edit: I see below that he apparently walked back that prediction mere days later, which suggests that I am in fact misinformed.
I know of precisely one economist of note who was a successful trader: Keynes.
And he did not do it by timing the economic cycle, since he considered that a mugs game – he was a value investor, and one of the inspirations for Buffet.
I think that in this case the common wisdom is correct. You may have limited time to spend learning, but you don’t have limited space to store knowledge. So the fictional Holmes is just being silly.
And deciding to learn and believe simplifications – while intentionally ignoring that they are simplifications – is less likely to lead to effective decisions than keeping a mental flag that says “if this is ever important, check the details” .. perhaps along with some extra notes like “especially in this area”.
Beyond that, we all make decisions not to spend time deepening our knowledge in some areas, and some of us start out incredibly shallow. Much of the time, nothing worse will happen than getting yourself held up as an example of an ignorant outgrouper. Sometimes you’ll miss out on a job offer for lack of cultural fit. And worst case you’ll do something seriously harmful to yourself or others, because you just don’t know [piece of suddenly relevant trivia, like what the start of a tsunami looks like on the ground]
FWIW, my exclusion areas are sports and fashion. I don’t care what the cool kids are wearing this year, or who is the current star in my local team – or even the name of that team, for that matter. I used to also ignore politics, but decided in the last decade or so that it had far too much potential to bite me if I didn’t stay aware of it. None of these are absolute – I’m aware that the cool kids are currently wearing pants with missing knees, because of last year’s fad for pants with only a few strands crossing the knee caps – but it was hard to miss, and it’s hilarious to see early career techies dressed as if they can’t even afford the nominal prices at e.g. the Good Will store. (Any late career techies that bought last year’s fashion have already replaced their fail wardrobe, but the youngsters probably can’t afford new fashionable clothes this soon after the last batch.) And I could probably name some of my local teams, maybe even associate each with the right sport.
There are a lot of people with a strong desire to discredit evolution. When a person without training or professional standing in a field writes something claiming that fundamental concepts from that field are wrong, my priors are to predict that they don’t actually understand what they are critiquing. If it’s also a field where some people have a strong desire to believe whatever the amateur is claiming, the odds that they are a crackpot or troll are farther increased. I’m overall disinclined to bother reading their ideas, as I’m not a professional debunker of crackpot theories.
If people who are professionals in the field start taking the amateur seriously – or if professional debunkers with experience in the field find themselves stuck – I might look into it. But that’s pretty much what it would take.
Of course I’m not a professional biologist etc. I’ve followed some of the developments in biology since my long-ago classes in the area, but I’m specialized as a computer scientist/engineer. So I’m not really the kind of person you want to hear from. OTOH, I’d be unsurprised if I found that I knew at least as much about it as Mr. Gelernter – and came to a diametrically opposed conclusion.
In fairness, Gelernter describes himself (in the video anyway) as a reluctant critic of evolution, that he was a big fan of it and felt a lot of sorrow upon “discovering” it to be flawed. He says he never set out to debunk Darwin.
@Atlas,
I don’t think memory works like that at all!
Intence trauma or joy will spark memories, skill comes from practice, and little factoids that you find interesting will filter in (and convincing yourself that something is interesting is hard, studying the California Plumbing Code was hard because it’s incredibly boring).
Oh, and for what it’s worth, what you experience from abiut 15 years old to 25 years old will stick in your memory stronger than earlier and later, even if trivial, I remember riots, girls, and long dead people from 30 years ago too well, last week hardly at all.
This is where my thoughts went when reading the Holmes quote, too. A new bit of information may not require as much ‘storage space’ if it builds off of another bit; you can house them together rather than needing separate buildings for each, to mix metaphors in a way that may well be less helpful.
But one has to be careful to differentiate between facts and trivia. I’m not sure the brain has practical storage limits (clearly it isn’t infinite, but it might be time limited rather than space limited, or expand with use to beyond likely reach). But positive effects that may accrue from having a complete picture of reality are only going to be gained from true facts of some significance.
Which, frankly, may not even describe most of my knowledge. If I wanted to right now I could spell out so much trivia from video games, cartoons, comic books, and novels as to be embarrassing, and precious little of that would have much impact on my ability to evaluate the truth of any statement I’m likely to come into contact with or make an optimal decision. At best it can give me a notion of what I happen to enjoy and by extension some theory about fun for humans generally, with maybe a smidge of insight as to the ‘human condition’ more readily obtained from history or philosophy.
I think the workings of the solar system are just on the side of useful fact for me, but may well be trivia for many others, and are obviously extremely important and of everyday impact for a select but increasing few that put satellites into orbit or similar feats of engineering.
“What proportion of these many polypeptides are useful proteins? Douglas Axe did a series of experiments to estimate how many 150-long chains are capable of stable folds—of reaching the final step in the protein-creation process (the folding) and of holding their shapes long enough to be useful. (Axe is a distinguished biologist with five-star breeding: he was a graduate student at Caltech, then joined the Centre for Protein Engineering at Cambridge. The biologists whose work Meyer discusses are mainly first-rate Establishment scientists.) He estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10^74 will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 10^74 is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 10^77.”
These tornado-in-a-junkyard arguments have been around since the 90s and I thought they had been conclusively discredited around the late 2000s, but it seems that somebody is trying to resurrect them.
Anyway, the usual refutation still applies: evolution doesn’t proceed by uniformly sampling random proteins from the space of all possible long amino acid sequences. Evolution creates new proteins by duplication and specialization, as a result, biological proteins are structurally related.
New evidence reinforces this view. Specifically, it supports the recently proposed omnigenetic model, where almost any gene influences almost any trait. This implies that for any trait that is subject to a selective pressure, evolution has plenty of genes that it can modify or duplicate and specialize to strongly affect it. Moreover, since the effects of individual genes are usually small and additive, the fitness landscape is mostly smooth, which combined with its high dimensionality enables efficient optimization (essentially for the same reason why artificial neural networks are easy to train).
You can’t go around saying that 10^-77~=0 when there’s around 10^30 bacteria sitting around right this instant.
10^30 is ~=0 compared to 10^77.
Recommendation for best sunlight therapy lamp? Don’t mind spending 100-200 if necessary, but don’t need some $10k medical grade solution.
Thanks in advance
My wife has had good results with a 100-watt high bay light from Home Depot. It will wire into any standard light fixture.
I got one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PCN4UVU/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
It’s hard to tell if it worked, since seasonal depression is difficult to notice anyway.
And I certainly haven’t done an AB test against any other lamp.
But I used it all winter and will probably use it again this coming winter.
It’s — it’s definitely very bright.
In today’s ‘turning history on its head’, are we really Irish at all? If it weren’t for the Vikings introducing new blood and presumably the old hybrid vigour, would there be any Irish left at all? 🙂
News story here, research article here (if you have access to Elsevier to get the whole thing).
It’s all a mess. The Scots are Irish, the Irish are Scottish, the Anglo-Saxons were still mostly Britons and everyone’s Vikings, including the French* who ruled England.
*A demonym named after Germans.
Where do the Normans fit into this?
Those would be the Viking French who ruled England
“[M]any Irish people have some Viking blood” doesn’t sound like Norse blood is the majority.
And if it’s true that everyone of Western European descent is descended from Charlemagne, that means African-Americans have some Charlemagne blood.
Holmes – as a fictional character – takes things too far. But I think he’s moving in a useful direction. He’s focusing his energy on information that he’s in a position to use and test.
In the current era, I notice a lot of people spending time “learning” about current events. But, often, the learning doesn’t pay off in any sort of anticipation of future events. So how do they know they’re learning accurate things?
Let’s take science reporting, as an example. Scientists will say something like, “This paper shows a potential connection between eating strawberries and cancer.” And the headline will read, “Scientists link Strawberries to Cancer.”
When the Scientist says, “potential connection” they have an image in mind that includes all kinds of caveats and uncertainty. “Potential” has lots of room to hedge (eg. “The experiment didn’t strictly disprove that this is possible”), and there are lots of ways that things can be connected. A non-scientist will say the same words (“Strawberries might be connected to cancer”) but understand them to mean something very, very different. A typical person interprets “connection” as “strong link”.
Worse, there’s no easy way for a normal person to notice or correct that error in their understanding. They’re unlikely to see newspaper articles about replications, and they won’t be making dietary decisions for large groups of people.
This all leads to a weird kind of pseudo-learning; people can learn collections of phrases that will let them score well on various “how educated is the public?” exams, while developing mental models of the world that are basically inaccurate.
Holmes’ direction seems better. We learn (in the sense of “actually understand”) things that we interact with. Everything else should be relegated to “I’m repeating a phrase, but am not sure I’m interpreting it correctly” until we’re willing to do a deep-dive into the topic.
First, I think Holmes was pulling Watson’s leg about this list (from a within-universe perspective); he quotes literature all the time, after all.
Second, there is something to it – you need to have a systematic method of selecting, learning and retaining important information, for such topics as were necessary for his profession, because higgledly-piggedly jumping around at random picking bits you like and ignoring the boring slog parts of learning your trade isn’t going to do anyone any good, and definitely as you get older you are less able to learn and retain new information, so you do need some spare room for shoving in new data.
But I think it’s more a case of what you choose to retain rather than how much; there must be a limit to how much the brain can hold, but I don’t know what it is or if anyone has studied how much data the brain can hold. Rather, if you fill up on a lot of junk, it’ll have the same effect as the effect on your waistline as filling up your stomach with a lot of junk. It’s no harm to have trivia stacked up alongside useful information, but if all you have is trivia, then unless you’re going to make a career out of being a professional TV gameshow contestant, it will have a bad effect – you won’t know how to wire a plug but you will know the Top Ten for August 1991.
Having a character with an understated trickster sense of humor like this seems tricky for an author to pull off well. A lot of readers will just assume he’s being inconsistent with the characterization of Holmes, or that Holmes makes some distinction between the literature he knows or the broader category he claims ignorance of.
Well, we are talking about one of the most well known and widely beloved characters in the history of fiction.
You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you — Trotsky
When you say that politics does not matter to your life, you mean that politics has low observed variance. But if you take a broader view, politics obviously lives in extremistan. The people on Less Wrong most interested in politics were Yugoslav refugees. Taleb is also a refugee. Isn’t that his origin story, his interest in extremistan?
Is the attribution to Trotsky correct? The Internet says that the quote is usually attributed to Pericles, but actually it started circulating in the 1990s.
@viVI_IViv,
I read it as “..but History in interested in you” instead of “Politics” back in the 1980’s, and it was attributed to Trotsky even back then (source: books given to me by my batshit crazy parents when I was a teenager).
Now I want to know what kind of parent you have to be such that your child rebels by becoming an ardent trade-unionist.
@Lambert says: "Now I want to know what kind of parent you have to be such that your child rebels by becoming an ardent trade-unionist"Oh, they were basically hippies, with my Dad from a working-class background, and my Mom from a middle-class one (who divorced my Dad, and married a middle-class background man who didn’t earn much money either but had a college education like my Mom did), between the two of them my Dad was the crazier one, i.e. self described “enemy of the State” and an anti-English Celtic nationalist despite being born in New Jersey, very blue-collar and otherwise fairly Hank Williams listening “Red-Tribe”, but it was my Mom who first dumped a bunch of Trotskyist comic books on me when I was around 12 years old in ’79 or ’80 (but she’s a lot more moderate now), and my having “only trade-unionist consciousness” and thinking “vanguardism” is hooey and dangerous is me being more centrist than my parents were in my childhood, though 15 year old me was much more “Right” leaning (there’s a High school picture of me in the Young Republicans club that I barely remember standing for), so I guess that was my rebellious period, 16 year old me started dating Anarchist girls (they were just so cute!), though I don’t think I ever believed in that.
I’m now 51 and I’ll probably vote for Biden in the primary (still open to someone else though).
my having “only trade-unionist consciousness” and thinking “vanguardism” is hooey and dangerous is me being more centrist than my parents were in my childhood
Like Gabriel Syme from “The Man Who Was Thursday”? 🙂
@Deiseach:
“Modesty is a delusional and oppressive concept created by Bronze Age shepherds. tips fedora“
Wikiquote is unable to trace the the snappy version earlier than the 1988 novel “Dark Star” by Alan Furst (about war). It leads us to DeLong whose commenters find that Trotsky does say
in A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party (in his book) Trotsky does say (p49/53):
(following a letter in French, also collected there)
One of DeLong’s commenters suggests that Trotsky’s reconnaît/recognize is evoking Nietzsche’s abyss.
Here is an unattributed(?) 1931 version, fully developed to politics/interested. I’m often suspicious of the dates that google puts on snippet books, but it’s visible in the image. Also, 1945.
Here is the politics version in a 1949 book attributing it to Arthur Schnitzler (d 1931). If it weren’t for the previous version, I’d think he had the attribution wrong, but maybe not.
Here is a 1957 book (if you trust google’s date) giving the word “interested” from Trotzky to Burnham (still dialectics). What happened between 1940 and 1957, I don’t know, but I think this is probably key in the merger of the two quotes.
Several people in the 70s attribute the “politics” version to Marshall Berman. In Politics of Authenticity (1970) he seems to write a dialogue including the line “dialectic is interested in you.” But he has Kierkegaard deliver the line to Trotsky, not vice versa‽
The “war” version seems to be from Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (1977), explicitly modifying the adage, not putting words in Trotsky’s mouth.
That was based on Google Books, which doesn’t have such great coverage of magazines. Ron Unz has a searchable (but rarely viewable) collection of magazines. It doesn’t turn up much more, mainly “absurdity is interested in you” from Donald Barthelme, “A Shower of Gold,” 1963.
I don’t think Pericles said it. I think the closest he got was from the funeral oration, not realpolitik, but democracy:
For example, these Harvard grads [who believe that the Earth has seasons because of distance to the Sun rather than the tilt of its axis] have a model in their head that says that if their new employers send them off to the New Zealand office in July, they should have take their swimsuits and tropical weight business suits because the earth is closest to the sun in July. Maybe they’ve heard that it’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere when it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but facts are a lot easier to remember if they function as examples for a theory in your head, rather than as just random bits of data.
I’d disagree with Sailer on this; facts as examples for a theory work better if your mind works that way. If you don’t have the STEM/techie mindset, then thinking of “Christmas on the beach!” images for New Zealand/Australia as example of how the seasons are backwards will work a lot better for you than trying to stick an astronomical model into your noggin and attempting to work out which end of the tilt you will be on. Some people don’t have visual memories, for example, so they can’t picture the neat little image of the tilted Earth in their head and plan their wardrobes accordingly. Plus, it’s not just the tilt, it’s the position of the Earth on its rotation around the Sun at a particular time of the calendar year plus the tilt that causes the seasons, that’s why the Harvard grads he’s poking fun at associate “July” with “summer”:
Sailer is showing his own bias here: ‘this is how my mind works best so plainly it’s the best way for everyone’. No, Steve, sorry; if you’re going to force me to choose, then I’m sticking with Sherlock 🙂
quanta413 covers the combinatorics arguments well. Those same arguments have been proposed and shot down about 10^77 times, and basically not changed. Is it possible Gelernter has never encountered them? Is it possible he doesn’t understand them? (He is at Yale, after all…)
Gelernter says: “Intelligent Design, as Meyer describes it, is a simple and direct response to a specific event, the Cambrian explosion.” As a matter of history, this is utterly false. In fact, the argument for “I.D.”, when first proposed as such a few decades ago was that life could not evolve without help because it was “Irreducibly Complex.” Each step of the evolution of creature, even a primordial bit of RNA, has to survive the “intermediate” steps to being a human or fish or mouse, and they deemed this impossible.
Long before the Cambrian Explosion was proposed and understood, creationists were going on about how you could never evolve a watch, or produce a mousetrap in intermediate steps that were “fit” to survive. On the contrary, for fun, here is a an example of a mousetrap that “evolves”: A Reducibly Complex Mousetrap. Creationists don’t natter on about “irreducible complexity” as much as they used to (although in the end they all recycle the same arguments regardless).
Now creationists (Meyer, anyway) say “Our uniform experience of cause and effect shows that intelligent design is the only known cause of the origin of large amounts of functionally specified digital information.” Really? Does he support this statement? No. In effect, he is saying, “DNA is coded in a ‘digital’ way, and computers are coded in a ‘digital’ way, therefore they must have the same origin.” This is what is generally called “the argument from ignorance.”
Further, “functionally specified” assumes that something functional must be “designed.” Our whole understanding of reproduction, a process which began with extremely small molecules and extremely simple reactions, is based on the fact that these sorts of ‘digital’ information can arise naturally and change over time. That is, they are not “functionally specified,” they arose by chance when they were still very simple, and have survived because the changed molecules were able to survive. Computers, in spite of being digital, did not arise by chance, and don’t change incrementally, bit by bit.
Computer designs actually change quickly in big chunks, as he appears to think the Cambrian Explosion happened. In fact, there is increasing evidence that in the pre-Cambrian era there were precursors to the “exotic” Cambrian species. (We can blame the late Stephen Jay Gould for some of the confusion on this. In his book about the Burgess Shale, “Wonderful Life,” he exhibited a tendency to declare various Cambrian species to be different phyla when in fact they have on further examination turned out to be ones we already knew about.)
In any case, there is nothing whatsoever new about Gelernter’s view. He is just the latest person to recycle slightly polished versions of old creationist tropes, sometimes with a little extra polish or glitter on them.
OK, here’s my problem
That’s all well and good, but if we presume the existence of bacteria, they already have a bunch of functioning proteins in it. The mutations are on already properly folding proteins. What’s the odds that a mutation in a properly folded protein leaves it as a properly folded protein? I’ll bet it’s not 1 in 10^74. This could be an argument against abiogenesis, but Darwinian evolution has nothing to say about that anyways.
I’m also confused what he’s arguing for. Multicellular life suddenly shows up in the Cambrian, and this is considered an argument against evolution from a universal common ancestor. But what about the rest of the fossil record? Did multicellular life pop into existence, then follow Darwinian evolution for speciation? That’s certainly an interesting position, but it sounds like he’s saying this happens repeatedly, with Darwinian evolution filling in the gaps. But on what timescale? Take the evolution of humans among the great apes. Was that all Darwinian? Was there intervention at the split of Orangutans? Gorillas? Chimpanzees? Archaic humans? If the designer is interfering a lot, why do we see all this vestigial stuff that seems to be the product of natural selection? If the designer interferes rarely, then Darwinian evolution has to explain the speciation in between–so why can’t it explain all the speciation?
In fact, at the end of the piece, he provides his own objections
So the argument is “Darwinian evolution has a bunch of questions that aren’t fully answered, therefore it’s wrong. Our alternative theory also has a ton of unanswered questions, but apparently that’s totally OK in this case.”? If so, color me unimpressed
I would say that discrediting Darwin does not discredit evolution. Darwin worked with the data he had and the science of the time (and the mindset about progress and moving towards an end and so on) and he phrased his theory accordingly.
That further research and better knowledge refined it, so that the crude Darwinian position is no longer held, is not to say “there’s no such thing as evolution”. Nobody (I hope) goes by pure Freudian theory these days in psychiatry, but that does not take away from Freud as being the first (or one of the first) to attempt a theory of mind and to systemise the practice into something that would become psychiatry and psychotherapy and all the offshoots we have today.
Being a creationist (Catholic version), I’d be more sympathetic to the intelligent design crowd, but they can’t argue that it all happens afresh every time without something like evolution at work, we know that is just not the case. (Special creation is a different matter).
Freud is pseudoscience.
Darwin is actual science. Darwin’s work is better compared to say Newton’s work on gravity, which was incomplete, but still provided us with a great deal of real insight.
What books have more famous closing lines than opening?
Who should invest more in which?
They say that you need a good opening line to hook the reader. If you don’t do that, they don’t get to the closing line, so it’s more important. But you need to end with a positive impression for the reader to sell the next reader.
If people are stuck in a movie theater, maybe the opening doesn’t matter as much as the closing. Does tv or streaming have different selection pressure than movies?
How about nonfiction?
selling books vs persuading
The closing line is also important as a sequel hook. Assuming you’re planning or even considering one.
Yeah, I don’t remember the opening lines of “Rendezvous With Rama” but I remember the closing line as being something like “Ramans do everything in threes!”
Since we’re talking about it below—After Virtue is a very obvious example:
People aren’t stuck in a movie theater, but there’s sunk cost fallacy. For movies, though, I think that, if you can’t make an overall great movie, it’s best to make the best parts as good as possible so you can scrape together five minutes of stellar footage for the trailer. And in fact people will assume you do this anyway, so if the trailer isn’t great, it’s assumed the movie is meh or worse.
For books, do we need to consider Amazon’s look inside feature which will often show the first couple of pages (& table of contents) of an ebook as equivalent to a trailer?
If the debate is strictly opening lines vs closing lines, I’d focus on the opening. After you’ve read a paragraph, all you have to judge the book is a few lines. After you’ve read a whole book, individual lines aren’t going to make a big impact, and if the reader recalls enjoying a few tense moments in the middle, or the way overall the plot resolves, the actual diction of the last few sentences aren’t going to make a big deal in 99+% of the cases.
If you do have a book where the closing line recontextualizes everything that comes before it, that’s a neat trick, but non trivial to pull off well.
IIRC there’s at least one deal-with-the-devil story framed as the main character telling the story to another character, where in the last part the listener asks the teller what the Devil got from him in exchange, and the response is something like “He took from me the power of ever telling the truth again”
Which is a neat trick, but still just a trick.
> If you do have a book where the closing line recontextualizes everything that comes before it, that’s a neat trick, but non trivial to pull off well.
I know any book where that happens. Short stories, sure, but not full books.
Great Gatsby surely.
Animal farm?
Speaking of Orwell, 1984’s ending is super intense but famously it’s the book people mostly pretend to have read so maybe they only know the opening and the ending.
_A Tale of Two Cities_ has famous opening and closing lines. So does _1984_. My guess would be the former has a more famous opening (“It was the best of times…”) and the latter a more famous closing (“He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother”). Neither really allow for a sequel.
This site has a few. Certainly _Animal Farm_ (which has an unremarkable opening) and _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_
My first thought for a book with a famous closing line was AToTC. But as you correctly note, the opener is a far, far more famous line.
A Christmas Carol, for sure.
We see this playing out in the episodic-release vs. bingeing models. When something is being doled out a portion at a time, as a serial, such as in broadcast format, there’s pressure to be sensational, things that will make viewers tune in week after week, to see how the latest cliffhanger will resolve. However, this may result in a longform whose parts are greater than the sum, and have a more temporary legacy. Think Glee, Empire, the latter seasons of GoT, Westworld.
At first, the binge model meant that more attention was paid to the season long arcs. In practice, people started making seasons as one really long movie (which I hate). But because the goal is to make viewers tune in the once, get them hooked for the binge, they don’t need a sensational twist every episode, just a really strong set of initial episodes, whose good will they’ll run off of for the rest of the season.
1. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
2. James P. Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games”.
“There is but one infinite game.”
The easiest way that this can happen is for non-first books in a series. If the first book has proven itself worth to read, then the reader may be willing to give you credit at the start of the sequel, so you don’t need such a snappy opening line. Examples of such books with particularly memorable closing lines are *Fiasco* by Stanisław Lem and *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows* by J. K. Rowling.
Discounting those, there are some books where the closing scene is more memorable than the opening scene, but it’s not so easy to find a suitable one if you insist on the opening and closing *line*. The best example I can name is one of my favorite books, *Giver* by Lois Lowry.
I think the closing line is more important than the opening line.
If you’ve picked up a book and started reading, you are probably invested enough that the opening line no longer needs to grab you.
The closing line, though, is the author’s last chance to make any sort of impression on you, and it’s what will stick with you the longest.
Perhaps my favorite is from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” It brings to mind the line which was not said: “Isn’t it accurate/reasonable to think so?” and thus puts the focus on how one of the main characters’ lives has been full of delusion.
Websearch question:
If I put quotation marks around someone’s name (“John Doe”) I still get some results that are just “John” or just “Doe” but the top results usually have that full name in the result, but if I do “John Doe”+”Some place” I get way to many irrelevant results, how may I narrow the results ti br all of my search terms?
(Yes, have been “Googling” myself).
Use the verbatim option.
Tools -> All results -> Verbatim
@helloo,
How do I get to any of that on a phone?
Search tools is still there. You just need to scroll all the way to the right (which can be a pain but still).
Specifically, take the row “all, images, videos, …” and scroll that row. If you grab anywhere else and try to scroll, nothing happens.
Thanks!
I didn’t know that. I would always “request desktop site,” which is a general purpose tool, but hard to explain
Well, thanks for reminding me, but, it turns out that I was using “request desktop site” because some of the search tools really are only available on desktop. Specifically, when I restrict the time, I’m invariably excluding recent results, while mobile google only allows to restrict to recent results.
On the general subject of media bias, something I noticed recently. Lots of news stories quote Trump as referring to himself as “the Chosen One.” It is quoting something he said at a news conference, so spoken, not written.
Spoken English doesn’t have capitals.
If I correctly read the news stories, what he actually said was:
“This isn’t my trade war. This is a trade war that should have taken place a long time ago by a lot of other presidents. I am the chosen one. Somebody had to do it. So I’m taking on China. I’m taking on China in trade, and you know what, we’re winning.”
Which does not have the megalomaniacal tone of “I am the Chosen One.”
This one’s not the fault of the media. It’s clear in the clip that he meant it to be taken that way, though he was likely just clowning (and possibly trolling said media).
Yeah, the video makes it pretty clearly and obviously a joke. Pretending that he meant it super literally is the media bias here.
It doesn’t?
No, that still sounds crazy and hilarious. I think it’s even crazier and funnier sounding in context. Although it’s hardly out of the ordinary for Trump. Grandiose over-the-top boasting is part of his schtick. Also his aesthetic. Just look at all the gold.
I suppose, but you can’t simultaneously claim that the intricacies of the written word don’t apply and then ignore the intricacies of the spoken word. Lets go back to his speech (which you aren’t quoting entirely correctly, but it doesn’t really matter):
Previous sentence before saying the relevant quote: Trump is standing at a normal press pool facing the crowd of reporters. During this time, he’s speaking at his usual fast clip, making normal hand gestures.
“…and not only that, if you take a look, IP theft. Add that too it. And add a lot of other things to it. so somebody, excuse me, somebody had to do it.”
At this point he pauses for around a second to a second and a half. He then turns, looking away from the reporters and cameras and stairs into sky while saying “I am the chosen one.”
He then turns back to the crowd and finishes his statement, resuming his previous tempo.
“Somebody had to do it. So I’m taking on china. I’m taking on china on trade. And you know what, we’re wining.”
Sure, it’s possible that this is a joke, but if it is, he’s being jokingly megalomaniacal. It wasn’t just some throwaway line or a poorly phrased way of saying he got elected for this; he’s clearly referencing some kind of higher power when he talks about being chosen.
nitpick that feels relevant: I don’t think he was looking at the sky, I think he was looking at the white house, which could reasonably be said to symbolize the US choosing him.
I hate the guy as much as the next blue triber, but that line really feels like a joke in the video.
It’s actually a lot better than the average tweet I’ve seen from him. You see a couple of those, and then you’re actively trying to avoid clicking anything that might be a link to one of his tweets.
Say the average of those is a 2/10. This was a like a 5 or 6/10. It wasn’t roll on the floor hilarious, but it wasn’t terrible either. Most Presidents aren’t very funny so that’s expected.
yeah agreed, i heard he said something horribly dumb and went to watch (which i usually resist doing) and was shocked to see him make an almost-endearing joke
I just watched the clip there, and it looked like a pretty clear joke to me.
The “I am the Chosen One” and dramatic pose were sarcasm. Particularly in the context of him saying “somebody should have done this years ago, but didn’t…”
This was like a network administrator saying “our critical infrastructure runs on a rat’s nest of poorly-documented PERL scripts, batch files, and kludged-together Excel spreadsheet macros. This is awful. Someone has to fix it, and I guess I am the Chosen One.”
It’s not humble, certainly, but it’s not asserting that he holds the Mandate of Heaven, either.
It does read as genuinely sincere to me, not joking. Trump is rarely subtle when he tells jokes, and when he does, they’re almost never at his own expense.
And he wasn’t here either. You think looking at the sky, holding your hands out, and declaring yourself “the chosen one” is intended to be subtle?
The fact that it’s over the top is how you know it’s a joke!
Unless your theory is that Trump literally believes he has been chosen by the diety to save America, but has practiced great restraint by avoiding mentioning anything like that for the last 4 years or so, until this exact moment when he made a horrible slip-up?
I do not see why the media should not take the american president seriously here; we just saw how Trump joked about buying Greenland, we all had a good laugh, we even had a thread or two joking about it here!
But then he didn’t like when Denmark, who has to answer seriously, answered seriously, and then Trump cancelled his visit to Denmark, acting like he had been insulted. What started as a joke, had real consequences.
Besides, the guy recently (the same day?) compared himself to the second coming of god, so if he calls himself the chosen one, why would you not think this is megalomania?
I thought he was serious about Greenland but was making fun of it anyways because it wasn’t clear why he’d think of that or why Denmark would sell*. Thus my joke about “12-dimensional chess”.
*I know Gwern has a post about why Greenland loses money and it’s irrational to keep it. Governments don’t operate as rational economic agents.
My theory about Greenland is that he was serious about it at some point in the past year (I myself said it’s a good idea), discussed it with people in government who convinced him it’s not feasible, and now he put it in the backburner of his mind as one of the things that it’s safe to joke about because he is no longer thinking about it seriously.
Apparently buying Greenland was Senator/2024 Presidential frontrunner Tom Cotton’s idea.
Huh. He’s ex-military so maybe he wanted to revive that plan to build stuff under the Greenland ice sheets?
They didn’t just “answer seriously.” They answered seriously, then added an unnecessarily gratuitous personal insult towards him. His response to which was completely and entirely predictable.
Trump rewards/praises those who speak well of him, and punishes/insults those who speak poorly of him. This has been 100% consistent behavior on his part since day one.
Unless I’m mistaken, you’re referring to the Danish PM’s use of the word absurd. The direct quote from the Danish Prime minister was:
“It’s an absurd discussion, and Kim Kielsen (premier of Greenland) has of course made it clear that Greenland is not for sale. That’s where the conversation ends…”
Forgetting, for a moment, whether or not it’s completely accurate to call randomly wanting to purchase sovereign territory from another nation absurd, that’s in no way a “gratuitously personal insult.”
When I searched for “Danish prime minister responds to Trump on Greenland” I get the following headline:
“Danish prime minister: Trump’s idea to buy Greenland ‘absurd'”
Now it’s true that she doesn’t write the headlines, but that’s almost certainly how Trump found out about her response.
This definitely seems like a gratuitous personal insult. Why is it necessary? Why couldn’t she just say “We have no interest in the sale of Greenland.” Because that wouldn’t sufficiently signal the fact that she dislikes Trump.
Further in the article, we get…
So, in response to what may have been a serious business proposal, she publicly comments that the idea is absurd, and clarifies that it’s so absurd in fact, that the person proposing it can’t possibly be serious. Why is any of that necessary? What is its purpose, if not to insult him?
MattM said
” “Danish prime minister: Trump’s idea to buy Greenland ‘absurd’”
Now it’s true that she doesn’t write the headlines, but that’s almost certainly how Trump found out about her response.”
Statesmen should refrain to cancel state visits over something learnt from a headline. They have the obligation to decide based on complete knowledge and not over temporary passions. The full diplomatic corps exist exactly for that reason.
“So, in response to what may have been a serious business proposal, she publicly comments that the idea is absurd, and clarifies that it’s so absurd in fact, that the person proposing it can’t possibly be serious. Why is any of that necessary? What is its purpose, if not to insult him?”
You fail to realize that the initial “proposal” was itself insulting to the Danes and Greenlanders: it implies that Denmark is a colonial power over Greenland, that Denmark’s (and Greenland’s) sovereignty can be bought and that the will of the Greenlanders themselves is irrelevant.
It wouldn’t have been as insulting if the proposal had been directed to the Greenland governtment. From the Danish (and European) point of view, the proposal to buy Greenland is akin to having some tycoon offering to buy your daughter for a few million bucks. Responding “I hope this is a joke, because it would be absurd otherwise” strikes me as an extremely measured response.
PS: Would Trump find it acceptable if Canada/Mexico/Japan floated proposals to buy Maine/Alaska/New Mexico/Hawaii and stated that would be advantageous to the US because the federal government spends over 6.5 kUSD per capita every year in each of those states? Do you think he would only state that the proposals are absurd?
Did Trump reach out to Denmark and make a formal proposal? Or is it something he discussed internally, behind closed doors, that was then leaked to and reported on by the media, at which point all he did was basically admit that yes, it was something under consideration?
I mean you’re not wrong that Trump is crude and boorish and doesn’t behave the way a typical “statesman” does. But that’s hardly breaking news. He thought he was making a simple business proposal. He didn’t make it with the intent of offending the Danes or the Danish prime minister.
Their response was, in fact, made with the intent of offending Trump. Whether he deserved that or not is almost beside the point…
You want to buy New Mexico? Do you want to take Alabama too? How much are you paying?
$3.50
I’m sorry, I just can’t have any other opinion on this than “Remember when the Left called Dick Cheney Darth Vader? Who would have guessed that next Republican Administration, it’d be goofy narcissist Vader from the prequels?”
Yeah, I’m just not seeing anyone up to playing Obi-Wan in this remake.
Considering how old he is, I am gonna propose Biden.
So when he gets the nomination for 2020 he’s gonna give AOC a meaningful look and then let Trump strike him down?
If he gets the nom, it’s not out of the question that’s what gonna happen.
Gonna get weird when AOC learns that Trump is her father.
And that she inadvertently kissed her brother.
@LMC,
Nah, that was Omar.
*shrug* problem with the left in this CW (and the 99% left media) is that they went so far to demonize Trump that regular folk are just immune to this kind of thing. Once you get through it once or twice it’s not “What has Trump done this time!” but “Bleargh, what has the media claimed Trump has done this time?!”. Added to this that Trump is already inconsistent enough by himself (#cofevre) and it gives him de facto immunity.
Covfefe is entirely consistent with stuff like the Greenland meme, the “dear diary” Acosta tweet, and the “chosen one” reference, in that it shows he has (or at least that he wants to project that he has) a playful side that enjoys funny jokes (sometimes even at his own expense), participating in memes, etc.
It humanizes him a lot among people who aren’t already predisposed to hate him completely.
Is there a name for/is it a recognized sign/symptom of something when you find yourself spontaneously repeating outloud, to yourself, things that you’ve said to other people earlier?
I often find myself spontaneously speaking to myself lines that I said earlier to someone, without having consciously decided to do so. It’s not interfering with my life, that never happens when there’s someone present, and when I notice I’m doing it I usually stop. But it happens semi-regularly enough that it makes me wonder what it’s about, if it’s about anything.
Tourette syndrome?
I do this all the time too. Not really sure why I do it either, but upon self-reflection it feels like a “quality check” of the previous statement. Like, my conscious mind can’t quite recall what I just said, but it’s still cached in some “recent statements” subconscious, so I repeat it to compare with the potentially faulty memory.
Palilalia.
I do that sometimes, but not out loud.
I do this semi-regularly as well. Not sure if this is relevant or not, but both previous jobs I’ve had and my current job involved a fair amount of “rote” conversation (along the lines of “Thanks for choosing Burger King, enjoy your meal!”) and I’ve noticed that it more frequently happens with either those phrases, or other things I anticipate I will need to say again. Also, I have done amateur theater for some time, and I find myself automatically evaluating these repeated phrases much the same way I would for a prepared script line (“Does the delivery sound natural? Did I enunciate that enough? Is there a better flow to it?” etc.)
I’ve generally chalked it up to vocal exercise or calibration, and it didn’t really occur to me to worry about it.
The recent news about Greenland has me thinking: Are there any countries that WOULD be willing to sell territory to the U.S. for a reasonable price (i.e. – if a country is willing to sell a small, uninhabited island for $1 trillion, it isn’t a reasonable offer)? What territory is on offer?
A related question. Were the last few exchanges of territory by outright purchase in recent history?
Not sure what you consider “recent”, but the Lousiana purchase immediately comes to mind.
Here’s wikipedia’s list
However, most of these don’t look like clean sales. A lot of them look like the settlements of disputed claims with financial settlements to the losers (e.g. Pakistan’s purchase of Gwadar from Oman in 1958) or end-of-war territorial changes that were paired with money going the other direction (e.g. America acquiring California and New Mexico at the end of the Mexican War, and similarly acquiring the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War).
The most recent sale on the list that looks like a relatively clean sale to me is 1916, when the Danish West Indies became the US Virgin Islands.
And despite that, it is an astonishingly short list!
For the US, the USVI–bought from Denmark during the First World War. (My dad grew up there; a couple of his childhood friends were Danish citizens by birth.)
An uninhabited island may be actually worth a trillion. If it happens to be in an important chokehold, and has a lot of valuable EEZ.
The Kurils, while not uninhabited, have the population of a village.
There are the South China sea rocks.
Then there is, for example, the conflict between Spain and Morocco over Parsley island (literally a rock in the sea). There are also others.
Nobody will sell land anymore. What is money, even a trillion? For the US, it’s just 4.5 % of its federal debt. The Iraq war cost ~ 2.4 $ trillion.
I can easily imagine a stupid conflict over some small uninhabited rock in the South China sea developing into a war that costs a quadrillion in lives and money on all sides.
I’m not sure territory was ever really for sale in a general sense. Sales usually occurred due to other concerns. For example, Alaska was costing more money than it was taking in and it was indefensible against the British. It also didn’t notably compromise Russian defenses: it put more territory between the British and Russia.
Two notes:
First, the Gadsden purchase is probably the best example. It was shortly after the Mexican-American War and it does include modern Tuscon but at the time it was pretty worthless scrubland and the Americans just really needed it for the transcontinental railroad.
Second, several small countries will sell citizenship. St Kitts and Nevis, for example, will sell individual citizenship for $150,000/person or $195,000 for a family of four, has a population of about 55,000 people, and is democratic. Therefore, theoretically, you could buy/invade St Kitts and Nevis with 60,000 immigrants for $9 billion dollars and then vote for…anything. This is well within the reach of megacorps. Unfortunately, US tax law allows the IRS to tax your worldwide income no matter where you are, so purchasing your own country to dodge taxes isn’t viable. (Or maybe it is, if you set the tax rate at 50% but since you “own” the government it comes back to you in subsidies, consult you tax attorney, this is not legal advice)
Greece could have done that to help with its debt, but there was SO much paranoia that “Germans did it all on purpose to get our islands” that it would have been painful political suicide to mention it.
Other than that… North/South Korea come to mind, but without a specific scenario. What is required is to have a country poor enough that a cash inflow would make a historical impact, and that has either a rich neighbor or islands.
Also pretty much any piece of Africa and China – but rumor is they already own much of it already, and it failed to be profitable.
Canada has way more territory than it can effectively use. I expect you could purchase some of the more remote bits of it, like the islands in the Arctic, if the price was right, and you were someone the government pretty much trusts. If Norway wanted to buy Banks Island, that would probably be a matter of agreeing on a price. Russia, not so much.
And of course some of that land comes with unsettled aboriginal land claims.
What value would the USA get out of annexing Greenland? It’s like proposing that DC annex Alexandria.
Rare earth metals and a strategic position, both of which will become more valuable as the ice melts.
If Alexandria had rare earth metals, should DC annex it?
Alexandria has a lot better strategic position than Greenland, yet DC gave it away to Virginia.
Not being familiar with Virginia geography, I thought that you meant Alexandria Egypt. This makes more sense.
Anyway, the reason is that Denmark doesn’t pay taxes to the US federal government but still costs us a great deal of money and potentially lives to defend along with the rest of Europe. As we’re already paying that even now, adding Greenland to the US would generate considerable revenue without increasing the cost of defending it.
The people in Alexandria are much richer than in DC. Should DC annex it? If there were something valuable in Greenland, would it matter who taxes it, US or DK, any more than it matters who taxes Alexandria?
But there isn’t anything worth taxing in Greenland. 50k Eskimos aren’t worth taxing. They don’t pay taxes to Denmark.
Rare earth mines? OK, if your clients aren’t keeping out your enemies, that’s a reason to get involved. But why would you want to keep out China? Denmark is taxing these mines for all they are worth, which is nothing. Rare earth metals are badly misnamed. They are common as dirt. It is the processing step that creates value, but that is done in China.
Rare earths are available in the US proper, but too expensive to process due to environmental rules. China doesn’t care, so in some way it’s better for the US for China to mine the rare earths and sell them to us. But that also means China can cut us off (and they have threatened to do so). Rare earths in territory controlled by the US but not subject to US environmental regulation would be ideal.
Perhaps Denmark should sell Greenland to Canada – likely a more responsible steward than the US, a NATO member like the US, and already with geographical continuity to Greenland.
I’ve played Japan in Hearts of Iron, and you need to conquer everybody to get access to resources for your war machine – which you need to conquer everybody.
But do you actually need to conquer to get access to resources these days? As long as we have global trade, isn’t it both cheaper and more efficient, not to mention a lot nicer to just buy what you need?
Which means that global trade is perhaps the most important thing to help avoid armed conflict, Iraq wars notwithstanding.
Hearts of Iron models trade very poorly. Admittedly, the international trade situation in that era was not nearly as efficient as it is these days, but it wasn’t as bad as whatever’s going on in HoI. It’s one of the things that annoys me about pretty much every incarnation of the game; certainly it’s terrible in 4, which is the one I’ve been playing most recently.
Seems like an excellent hedge against global warming. Shouldn’t we expect that real estate up north would be getting more in-demand, and real estate further south and on the coasts declining in value?
I am currently reading Pinker’s The Blank Slate. An interesting thing I found is how some roles in the culture war were the opposite from now a few decades ago. Saying that e.g. white people and black people are genetically the same (plus or minus some unimportant details, such as color of skin) was what got you called a Nazi and made progressive students attack you back then.
Sounds crazy, but starts making sense when you see how exactly this evolved, mostly using arguments as soldiers in combination with wishful thinking. So, here goes the political logic:
Premise: Patriarchy is bad.
Let’s not worry about the exact definition of “patriarchy” now, and just say that every Western country is patriarchal. (Guessing by how the word is actually used, it seems to be a combination of “leaders are mostly men”, “physical violence exists”, and “social rules are frustrating”.) Most people don’t use exact definitions anyway.
However, according to naturalistic fallacy — which most people accept as a valid argument — if patriarchy is natural (for humans), then patriarchy cannot be bad. Turning the implication around, because patriarchy is bad, it obviously must be against human nature. Humans, in their natural state, are unlikely to have disproportionally male leaders (they are either perfectly egalitarian, or prefer female leaders), and they abhor violence; also, outside of Western civilization everyone is happy all the time. Also, there is absolutely no such thing as a human nature; humans are infinitely malleable. (Don’t worry about the apparent contradiction between these two arguments; two arguments against patriarchy are obviously better than one.)
How can we believe that patriarchy is against human nature, when it is everywhere around us? Most people in Western culture are only familiar with Western culture, so the easiest way is to assume that the rest of the world is not patriarchal. The working hypothesis is that patriarchy / Western civilization (now we can treat these two mostly as synonyms) is a historical aberration, that spread like a virus across a large part of globe, because of its evil violent ways, but in long term will be defeated, because nature always wins.
In this situation you gain a lot of brownie points if you can deliver some evidence for your hypothesis. (Because people who travel abroad, and have a shred of critical thinking, are not going to do that.) Luckily, there is a superhero called Margaret Mead and a few of her followers, who travel across the globe into mysterious places, and find humans completely unlike anything we have seen. No dominant males, and a complete inability to even imagine violence. They completely lack emotions such as anger or jealousy. The hypothesis is confirmed; patriarchy has finally been scientifically debunked.
Unfortunately, we already know that the most hopeful research usually doesn’t replicate. When a new wave of scientists wants to observe the magical people Mead found, they cannot find them anywhere. And when they do, after a short observation they often conclude the opposite: these noble savages actually have a higher murder rate than the worst parts of USA; they are sometimes angry and jealous; they steal and lie and rape; and their warrior leaders are mostly male. A powerful counter-argument is that these people were peaceful and innocent until a few years ago, but the recent contact with Western civilization has infected them with the violent virus of patriarchy. (Actually, you can accuse this second wave of scientists of intentionally corrupting these noble savages. That’s exactly what an evil mad scientist would do!) Also, there are always some allegedly untouched perfectly bio organic people on the opposite side of the globe (some village in China, if I remember correctly, but never the one you are looking at).
So… this is how we get the situation where “people from other places are psychologically more different from us than aliens from Mars” becomes the left-wing position (promoted as the scientific truth at progressive universities), and “actually, people are mostly the same, and human nature sucks universally” gets called out as a horrible racist pseudoscientific opinion. “No, the non-whites are not the same as us, they are much better! You only deny their innate goodness because you hate them, you racist!”
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
By the way, I remember relatively recently reading a progressive blog article about how Aztecs were actually very nice people, certainly nicer than us, because in their culture people actually didn’t mind being murdered horribly. (That’s only our stupid prejudice that having your heart torn from your chest while you are still alive is somehow a bad thing. When a noble savage priest is doing it, it probably doesn’t even hurt much, and it gives a meaning to your life.) So, it’s not like this type of reasoning is gone completely.
To me, this argument reads like a complicated series of straw men. Interlocking, nesting straw men, like a Matrioshka doll made of imaginary people.
I don’t see the interlocking. If the idea in the first paragraph falls down (which I’m pretty sure it does), then the rest can basically be ignored. (EDIT: Wait, I guess that is kind of like interlocking?)
I don’t think most people pay attention to cultural anthropology either. Even secondhand so to speak.
It’s more of a combination of weak-men/egg-men and reversed moderation, the latter of which is also arguably a bravery debate variant.
There’s a pendulum on which arguments people perceive to be popular, and so they focus their advocacy on counter-arguments to those popular views. But then a new generation grows up only on the counter-arguments, and take those on their face without realizing the context those views were reacting to, which takes the pendulum swing too far for some tastes, so they start defending against the new egg-men in the opposite direction, without necessarily changing their intended endgoal. It’s a natural result of a consequentialist approach.
See also the born-this-way/my-body-my-choice arguments wrt LGBTQ policy. Advocates will use whichever model better moves towards an environment with better outcomes for LGBTQ people for each particular situation.
For Viliam’s case, it’s about going with whichever model that better reduces perceived mistreatment of racial minorities in America. For a while, the color/gender-blind model produced better results. It no longer does, so they’ve switched models. As per my first paragraph, intersectionality at first was just about introducing nuance to the existing situation, but then people grew up only learning intersectionality, without knowing the part that intersectionality was trying to moderate, so they took it to its extreme end, going the full horseshoe in the process.
One thing I find sobering, is that whenever I want to present something as an opinion of some person or group, I try to find a (ideally notable) person actually expressing that opinion. Often, this is a lot harder than I initially thought, and I have to moderate my arguments. In my experience, this is an effective anti-strawman technique.
If it’s just some rando on the internet, it’s a weakman.
One difficulty here is that even serious thinkers sometimes just phone it in, or write something whose purpose is to get attention/clicks or rally the troops. For example, I think Elizabeth Warren is a smart and serious person, but right now, she’s saying anything she thinks will get her press time so she maximizes her chances of getting the Democratic nomination. (This is basically the job description of running for president.)
There’s an opposite fallacy/rhetorical trick that you might call the “nowhere man,” related to the Motte and Bailey. This is where your side (however broad that is) makes all kinds of extreme and indefensible claims, but then when someone wants to argue with you about them, you keep inventing reasons why the person they’re quoting isn’t really a serious thinker holding a legitimate position on your side.
It’s reasonable to say “Some people say stuff like that, but I don’t,” but it seems like there’s some kind of dodging of an argument you see where several prominent members of some movement make statements, you start disagreeing with them, and then other members of that movement complain that you’re cherry picking nonserious nutcases.
I don’t believe this was the case although I haven’t done a survey. For example, Lewontin famously made the incorrect argument that because there was more within-group than across-group variation people were basically all the same everywhere. Lewontin was left-wing and attacked others for being crypto-racists; he didn’t get attacked for being a crypto-racist. Could you give some evidence of the switch? Because from what I know, not much has changed in the argument battle lines since the 1970s.
EDIT: And Margaret Mead probably said crazy things, but I don’t really see how that’s relevant to the first point so I’d prefer not move on until I find your first premise at least plausible.
Just noticed, important clarification, Lewontin was talking about genetic variation specifically. Which is why the argument isn’t good. There is only a weak link between genetic variation (using the measurement he’s talking about) and phenotypic variation.
@Viliam says:
Sorry, I just didn’t understand much of that @Viliam beyond [paraphrasing] “Here’s some nutty things people who either call themselves “progressives” or @Viliam calls “progressives” believe, sure its a big world with a lot of weird, knock yourself out finding examples, I did note that you knocked universities and if that means that resources will be directed away from universities and towards say getting the students at Kennedy High School in Richmond, California a replacement welding teacher (and more generally giving non-college bound young Americans more training in marketable skills) than I approve, but I’ve already seen what 50 years of ever rightward rule has done (and yes I still blame Governor Reagan in cahoots with an anarchist generation for almost every bad thing, starting with emptying the psych wards onto public streets by signing the Lanterman–Petris–Short Act, and yes the nominal Left is also responsible for the de-institutionalizing madness, Kennedy gave a speech in ’63 advocating it, and the ACLU has had a hand in the madness spreading), and at this point right/left/center/up/down/whenever anything looks to smell of advocating de-regulation and “liberty” looks very suspicious to me and since that’s usually what anti-progressive rhetoric aims for I’m suspicious of yours.
Yes, “The Left” of the ’70’s went coo coo for cocoa puffs but I just plain remember the ’80’s all too well and who ultimately won, ruled and made this mess we sit in @Viliam.
Please put your message into points that I understand beyond “Margaret Mead was a wacko” and maybe I’ll get something out of it, but if your point is just “boo progressives” then I got nothing.
Not sure if this explanation helps, but it was supposed to be an illustration of how arbitrary are specific beliefs (that people feel extremely strongly about, even willing to hurt other people because of perceived heresy), despite being generated by the same mechanism. The best way to illustrate the arbitrary connection between a group X and an idea Y is to show how a few years ago, the group X felt just as strongly about non-Y.
The underlying mechanism that generates all this works approximately like this:
You have a factually incorrect belief, e.g. “the moon is made of cheese”.
You have some values you use as applause lights, e.g. “people should be nice to each other, and not hurt each other”.
Now, because these are both things you believe, it feels like there is a connection between them; that the occurrence of both in the same political group cannot be a coincidence. Also, it feels like you should be able to scientifically prove your morals, because just saying that this feels right doesn’t seem good enough. So, sooner or later someone comes with a story, such as:
“People are often nice to each other. And when they fight, it is usually over scarce resources, such as food. However, moon is made of cheese, and if we could cooperate and reach the moon together, there would be enough food for everyone. Therefore people should be nice to each other even when they feel otherwise, because that’s how in long term we all get enough food.”
After everyone in your group accepts your theory, some asshole scientist flies to the Moon and reports that actually, the Moon is made of inedible rocks. And you feel like if people will accept this as truth, your entire moral reasoning will fall apart, and then no one will be nice to anyone else, ever. Therefore, it is a moral imperative to deny that the Moon is made of rocks. And the asshole scientist needs to be stopped, by any means necessary.
(After much fighting, a few decades later, most people accept that the Moon is made of rocks. Everyone’s morality remains pretty much the same as before. People will find new silly beliefs, and connect their morality to those new beliefs, and feel that now it is completely different.)
But perhaps this is only interesting to people who care about truth value of statements. “I know it is morally proper to say that Moon is made of cheese, but is it, you know, really made of one? I tried to calculate the weight of Moon and the density of the cheese, and there is something suspicious about those numbers… come and take a look. Hey, stop punching me!”
This is a neat explanation of a key insight; I don’t have anything to add, so I’m going to spend a +1 on it.
+1
It’s just bulverism. The typical, albeit non-productive, countermove is to point out that secular, highly online, anti-progressivism is just contrarianism run amok, or in other words a failure to outgrow know-it-all angst typical to bright teenagers.
The winning move is not to play.
I am currently reading Pinker’s The Blank Slate. An interesting thing I found is how some roles in the culture war were the opposite from now a few decades ago. Saying that e.g. white people and black people are genetically the same (plus or minus some unimportant details, such as color of skin) was what got you called a Nazi and made progressive students attack you back then.
I have never heard this and doubt it.
The idea of attacking biological essentialism in anything was a post-war [ww2] phenomenon and a response to National Socialist racial thinking. Blank-slatism would convince people that the observed races were a figment of the collective imagination, and all humans possessed innate equal potential, thereby protecting Jews and other vulnerable groups from harm. Pinker argues this actually backfires in the case of market dominant minorities since, well in the case of jews ~2% of the population shouldn’t be as influential or wealthy as they are in real life without resorting to some kind of trickery, or at least that’s what the blank slate would suggest.
The only historical instance i can recall of the blank-slate being right wing was perhaps in the context of creationism vs evolution in the early days when, say, William Jennings Bryan argued that evolution would promote racism.
I periodically engage in idle speculation to try to pinpoint where the real fault-lines in US society or in politically polarized societies in general really lie, because any issue that can “switch sides,” as I think we’ve seen many issues do over time, seemingly cannot be an “essential” issue, assuming there is any sort of “essence” of leftism, rightism, conservatism, or liberalism/progressivism. Of course one can posit that it’s all tribalism and any position can become appealing if it’s the position your tribe professes, but generally positions need to fit into a larger worldview, which leaves the question of what those worldviews are and whether any aspect of e.g. the leftist or rightist worldview remains stable over time.
Example theory (not saying this is exactly what I believe, just one sort of hypothesis I’ve toyed with): what really matters for Western politics of the past century or so is whether you identify with the mainstream and successful of your society or else identify with the weak and disenfranchised of your society. Something like Nietzche’s master and slave morality or an ingroup preference versus an outgroup preference.
Thus when the “ingroup/masters” of mainstream US society were rich white capitalists, the “outgroup/slaves” were poor white laborers, and the fargroup foreigners and US black people, the natural thing for leftists to support was segregation and anti-free trade. After all, immigration, integration, and free trade are just methods for the rich capitalists to keep down the white working class by forcing them to compete with an unending stream of fargroup (foreigners and minorities).
At some point foreigners and minorities became “outgroup” as far as mainstream white society (of the US and seemingly also Western Europe) was concerned (not sure who is fargroup to them now) was concerned, while the nation itself became the new ingroup. At this point those who identify with ingroup (rightists) become nationalists and support immigration restriction and tariffs, while those who identify with outgroup (leftists) support free trade and open borders, formerly a very not left-wing position.
Such a theory may help resolve the perennial dilemma: “is fascism/national socialism a creature of the left or the right?” If what matters is not the positions on particular issues but rather where you draw lines and whom you identify with, then fascism can be fundamentally “right wing” while also supporting many of the same object level ideas as many leftists (but at the level of the mainstream culture of a nation rather than on behalf of the disenfranchised workers of the world, let’s say), which I think accords with most peoples’ intuition of what “fascism” actually means.
Of course, this presents a danger of veering into bulverism: “you just support open borders now because of your reflexive psychological instinct to side with the outgroup/underdog.” “You suddenly support protectionism because of your reflexive need to justify the status quo and lionize the past.” At the same time, it feels hard to avoid when there are so manifestly forces at work other than the positions themselves (and I don’t exempt myself from this: I’ve felt myself pulled in different directions to diminish cognitive dissonance of being out of step with the people whose general outlook I identify with; certain issues seem more “vulnerable” to this than others, however).
Patriarchy is bad, but it mostly doesn’t exist in the West anymore, with the exception of some Roma communities (where escaping may mean abandoning family).
As I understand it, patriarchy is the system where the oldest male, the pater familias, holds most of the power in the family over everybody, including younger sons and all females.
It is maintained by a (lack of) female property rights, male primogeniture, and a lack of economic opportunities outside the system.
I don’t see how the current system of nuclear families, and ample protection for females’ and younger son’s right to inherit and own property can be called patriarchal. Women can own businesses, land, houses; how could men hold all the keys to power?
In any case, most of the so called matriarchal families don’t seem to make the women involved that happy; I once watched a documentary on the Mosuo women in China, and their existence seemed pretty miserable to me, as they did most of the work.
Let’s say a lot of people who call themself feminist won’t agree with your definition of patriarchy.
Relative to what? Rome was by far the most patriarchal nation of its time (the paterfamilias literally had the power of life and death). The result was pretty positive: it created the greatest Empire in history.
Patriarchy may not be the most optimum system, but it’s at least top half.
Most every society in the past was more patriarchial then what we have now. The romans were more patriarchial than most of the groups they conquered, but north western europeans were often less patriarchial then a lot of the societies that they conquered.
Using patriarchy as a noun rather than an adjective isn’t very useful, and even using it as an adjective it’s hard to see where the historical optimum is/was by comparing the complexity or military prowess of some civilisations through time.
All of them that had oxen and ploughs and grains were.
But there are lots of societies in the New World and Africa where women would grow yams, plantains, the Three Sisters, kumara etc. and gather, whilst the men hunted or fought.
On average, these societies are a lot less patriarchal than traditional Eurasian and near-eastern societies, where only men were strong enough to deal with cattle/ploughhorses and farm crops intensively.
Relative to a free capitalistic society with guaranteed property rights, legal equality, protection of illegitimate children, etc. Even sharia law, where the daughter gets half the share her brothers do, is better than the alternative of no legal protection or recourse for daughters’ property rights.
The USA, since its founding, has not had a patriarchy as such; females did have property rights, and young sons had options beyond serving their fathers.
Sure, which is why we’ve replaced patriarchy with it. But Roman women in patriarchy had plenty of power and used it.
“Not as good as our current system” is very much not the same as “bad”. Patriarchy allowed a tremendous amount of human flourishing relative to what preceded it.
It’s like saying that the industrial revolution was bad. Relative to where we are now, it sucked pretty hard in a lot of ways, but we never would’ve gotten here without it.
Lastly, note that by a definition of patriarchy this strict that basically nobody is advocating patriarchy, which feminists would mostly disagree with.
I specifically said that I don’t believe that patriarchy as I understand it does not exist in the West anymore, and nobody advocates for it. It existed, and we got rid of it.
Feminists argue against some kind of vague “patriarchy”, which does not seem to be reflected in the laws or mores of our society. My father recently wrote his will; he divided everything equally between me and my brother. I’ve never met anyone, religious or not, who thinks that women should not own property or vote.
It still exists, although in different degrees of extremism, in the middle East, the Caucasus, Turkish countryside, some African communities, the Roma communities, etc.
Sharia law was also an improvement to what they had before it, doesn’t mean it’s as good as what we have now.
I can see why a patrilineal society has benefits in the form of higher involvement of men in child raising; the Mosuo women in China don’t seem to happy with having to do all the work.
There’s “bad” and there’s “worse”. Patriarchy is bad; what preceded it may have been worse, but what we have now is much better.
AFAIU, there are no conservatives who argue for eliminating women’s property rights, women’s equal inheritance rights, the return of the legal institute of bastardy and the concept of legitimate vs ilegitimate children. Some do argue for social stigma for single motherhood, but few religious people want to see innocent children punished or aborted due to the sins of their parents.
I don’t think that arguing for a return to stable and earlier marriages, more women staying home if they so choose to, and a bigger role of religion in people’s daily life is wanting to bring patriarchy back.
@ana53294
That’s just because of the Overton window. I have no problem with women’s property rights, but I do think that the concept of bastardy needs to return.
As for women being unable to vote, that was the position of major Western countries in the lifetime of my father and not much before mine. In some cantons in Switzerland, within my lifetime and not democratically implemented.
It is also my position and my wife’s position, and I believe it’s a rational one. So now you’ve met a conservative who doesn’t think women should vote.
Why do you believe women shouldn’t vote?
So are you OK with men being able to completely abdicate any kind of responsibility over their children? While I agree that having children within a marriage is the more desirable form, I do believe that sex should come with responsibility, and children are completely innocent of their parent’s sins.
Who would support those children, if bastardy were to return, men were able to abdicate all responsibility for kids born outside of a marriage, and the mothers were unable to provide an adequate life for the kids?
@ana53294
Because the short and long-term outcomes of women have been negatives for my values. Allowing women to be apolitical has also allowed women to get what they desire done while reducing marital strife.
Over their bastard children, yes. If they didn’t sign up to be parents legally, they don’t have a responsibility. If they want to after the fact, adoption exists and is the traditional method.
This is an excellent way to incentivize women to not do stupid things. Rewarding people who do stupid things with the same benefits as people who didn’t do those stupid things is bad policy.
They would be adopted by families who didn’t have kids they can’t afford.
@EchoChaos
Unless you institute a very strict ban on abortions, it would just increase the rate of abortions. Would you be OK with that?
In Spain, during the Republic, a lot of leftist were afraid of the women’s vote because they were afraid that would mean a right-wing win, as women are more church-going and conservative.
If you believe bastardy should be a thing, do you also believe there should be no sex before marriage? What would you do if you yourself accidentally had a kid?
They would be adopted by families who didn’t have kids they can’t afford.Well, but that frequently would not happen. Many poor families prefer to keep their children in objectively sub-optimal conditions over giving them away, so unless you use CPS (a not really conservative position) to take children away, there would just be an increse in child poverty. Are you OK with that?
In other words, you see political rights as instrumental, not terminal values.
I think in contrast many people would prefer equality in civil rights regardless of the results. Or at least, claiming otherwise is forbidden.
@ana53294
I mean, I’m also in favor of strict bans on abortion, which is hardly surprising. But we had that system before and bastardy rates were far lower than today without a shockingly higher abortion rate.
I am also against sex before marriage, and I married my wife before had sex and had all our kids, but in a situation where that didn’t happen I would personally adopt my children legally. I am a man of honor.
As for children in poverty, that’s bad, but the state enforcing contracts on people is worse. If parents wish to raise their children in poverty, that is their choice. We are all free moral agents.
@Randy M
True. Fortunately I don’t really hesitate to voice unpopular positions.
@EchoChaos
Unfortunately, we know from history that this didn’t always happen. I wish I had an idea how common bastards were. If someone has a clever deduction based on medieval baptismal records or whatever, do share.
I don’t think stigmatizing fornication is necessarily wrong; I discussed the similar case of single parenthood ages back here. Unfortunately, as I said there, this isn’t anything like a slam-dunk answer.
Bastardy only applies to those born out of wedlock, not conceived, and so encourages a cultural norm of ‘shotgun weddings’ which provides some accountability for the men.
How well this works in practice in all times and places in terms of satisfying marriage and caring parenthood versus whatever the alternative of governmentally enforced child support payments (humorously dubbed bureaugamy) I dunno.
“I think in contrast many people would prefer equality in civil rights regardless of the results. Or at least, claiming otherwise is forbidden.”
Yes but only if you define civil rights as adhering to a procedure rather than defining it in terms of results. The civil rights struggle for Women/POC continues because certain outcomes have not been achieved. Can we *really* be certain that people aren’t having their votes supressed or property rights abridged if electoral representatives and income/wealth [respectively] are all correctly apportioned?
saying you oppose the idea of equal civil rights because you dislike the outcome seems a bit more honest then doing this sort of ‘no true scotsman’ approach where you don’t acknowledge a thing as having been achieved, because the outcome is not what you expected/wanted.
@Nick
Absolutely true. Encouraging women not to shack up with men who aren’t honorable is a feature, not a bug.
@RalMirrorAd
I agree with that.
A not insignificant number of fathers out of wedlock already don’t pay child support anyways because they flee the state or they have almost no legal income anyways. Also let’s be clear about how how far back the tradition you suggest is going. Wikipedia says by the end of colonial American times a typical law required fathers pay to help support their bastard children, so you want to roll tradition back over 200 years. ~10 generations or more.
I agree rewarding stupid people is dumb, but I don’t think punishing the child in order to punish the parent is even vaguely justifiable. I also suspect that the sort of person who ends up in this sort of situation is likely to be so foolish and/or selfish that punishing their child is an ineffective part of the punishment. Especially if you’re going to let one parent just run away scot free. Punish both parents instead. Why not imprison, flog, or execute the father if he’s going to be out of the picture anyways? That would be a much stronger deterrent. We’ve got DNA testing nowadays so it won’t be too hard to get ironclad proof.
That idea would also be very authoritarian (and to me wrong). I’m interested in your defense of why bringing back bastard status would be ok, and if violently punishing fathers is on the table. In the Connecticut colony publicly whipping the father of a bastard (or mother if they couldn’t figure out who the father was) was one part of the punishment in the 17th century. Nowadays, it’d be much easier to find out who the father is so that deterrent ought to be much more effective.
Also, same wiki article says starting in 1575 in England, justices could issue orders forcing a reputed father to pay for the support of his child. Although the child would be cared for by a monastery so that’s where the child support went. I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that in the past, the father was allowed to just walk away. It seems like he only got away because it was often hard to catch him, and it would be hard to confirm he really was the father. But we’ve got DNA testing so that problem is gone. It seems to me that in England and the U.S. in the past, they really would have liked to punish both parents and did when they could, but practical reasons prevented them. If you’re going to bring back tradition, shouldn’t you use the new technology on hand to better fulfill the spirit of the old traditions?
Why not imprison, flog, or execute the father if he’s going to be out of the picture anyways? That would be a much stronger deterrent. We’ve got DNA testing nowadays so it won’t be too hard to get ironclad proof.I’d actually be OK with that (except for the execution bit). @Plumber has also expressed opinions of tarring and feathering divorced parents, maybe he would be OK with that?
I also suspect that the sort of person who ends up in this sort of situation is likely to be so foolish and/or selfish that punishing their child is an ineffective part of the punishment.Yep, there are so many people who are absolutely careless about having children while being unable to provide for them. Absent strong CPS, giving them money and hoping some of it goes towards the care of kids is the best way of ensuring children get adequately taken care of.
EDIT:
A not insignificant number of fathers out of wedlock already don’t pay child support anyways because they flee the state or they have almost no legal income anyways.I get the people with no legal income or assets. But why would leaving the state make it possible to avoid child support? The IRS will make you pay your taxes even from abroad, can’t they use the IRS to enforce child support payments for delinquent fathers?
If you have bastardy, where a man has no responsibility for his out-of-wedlock issue, you’re letting men do stupid things and get the same benefits (and more) as men who didn’t do stupid things.
I am not sure exactly why; I think the problem is that child support laws are handled at the state level. So if whoever is collecting child support wants to collect, they’ll need to go to court, then locate the other parent so that the court where they live can enforce the order.
There’s even a wikihow that outlines the procedure. So you know it comes up.
So you can attempt to collect support if they flee the state, but it’s a pain in the ass and it’s slow.
@EchoChaos
What about children who come of rape?
While I don’t believ rapists should get to be fathers, some women actually keep the children, and raise them.
Shouldn’t they pay child support? Even if not convicted. Tons of men don’t get convicted in criminal court, that doesn’t mean much, except that they don’t go to prison.
@ana53294 says: "...@Plumber has also expressed opinions of tarring and feathering divorced parents, maybe he would be OK with that?..."IIRC it was “put in stocks and pelted with garbage” instead of ‘tarring and feathering’ (the tarring does seem a bit much), I’ve also previously advocated that a child’s parents should automatically be legally married whether they like it or not (still bitter about a whole generation having broken homes), but since stigma’s against a child’s parents not being married may also hurt kids, and being a single parent is already hard, I really don’t have any confidence in a good solution.
So far my generation and those younger get divorced less than my parents generation, but we also marry later and less, and have a lower birthrate, and don’t seem particularly happier.
Too many wounds any which way.
Maybe the Amish and/or the Mormons are happier?
@pretty much everyone
I am absolutely in favor of laws punishing men for producing a bastard. Big fan. Paying child support to bastards I am somewhat open to, but it should be an amount lower than for a legitimate child.
I am also willing to listen to Plumber’s idea that the parents of a child should be automatically married if they weren’t before, although this presents issues in the case of adultery.
As for rape, I think that compelling payment in that case should absolutely be required, but only if they are convicted. Otherwise the mothers would always accuse “rape, I totally promise, but it couldn’t be proven in a court of law”, which is a bad standard.
@EchoChaos
Standards for rape in criminal and civil court are different.
A preponderance of evidence should be enough to make a punitive compensation and child support order.
@ana53294
Totally fair. I will concede that point. Someone found liable in civil court of raping someone should absolutely be required to pay full child support.
Taken together, this suggests that if a woman can’t prove rape to a standard of reasonable doubt, she’ll be forced to marry her rapist.
I don’t think that’s correct. Rather, what it suggests is that if a woman claims her child was the result of her being raped and the government can’t prove it to a standard of reasonable doubt, then that woman will be forced to marry the person she is accusing of having raped her to produce that child.
@Hoopyfreud says: "...Taken together, this suggests that if a woman can’t prove rape to a standard of reasonable doubt, she’ll be forced to marry her rapist"Good point and a decidedly ugly prospect.
I throw up my hands, as unsatisfying as the status quo is it may be what’s best, and improvement is hopeless.
Well that just bites.
EchoChaos wrote, wrt women voting:
Gordon Tullock used to have a bunch of graphs of government expenditure over time in different countries, which he offered as a puzzle. The pattern was similar in different countries–a long period over which the percentage of national income that went to the government was reasonably constant, followed by a period in which it rose. What differed by country was the date at which the break occurred.
I’m not certain, but I think Tullock’s theory was that it was a result of women getting the vote in different countries at different dates. I’ve never gone back and reconstructed his graphs to check if that is plausible.
A priori, it makes some sense. The traditional division of labor had men working in the marketplace, women running a household. A household is a sort of miniature of a socialist planned society—the woman running it is allocating resources among herself, children, various familial objectives, possibly, if it’s a well off household in the past, servants. It seems plausible that to a woman in that role, the idea of the country as an expanded version of a household with a benevolent government in her position would seem more attractive than it would to her husband.
Randy M. writes:
I can’t speak for EchoChaos, but I certainly see the right to vote in that way. I find it difficult to imagine a plausible moral theory in which some act is inherently right if supported by 51% of the population, wrong if supported by only 49%. The only arguments I can see for who should have the right to vote are instrumental ones.
On the subject of bastardy, I note that Jewish religious law didn’t have our concept. A momser, sometimes translated as “bastard,” was the child of a couple who not only were not married but could not be married, for instance a married woman and a man other than her husband. The child of an unmarried couple who was not a momser had the same legal status as the child of a married couple. I’m not sure what obligations of support parents had in either case.
And on the question of a woman marrying her rapist, note Deuteronomy 22:28-29, which is sometimes interpreted as requiring it, although it isn’t entirely clear if the reference is to rape or only seduction.
Finally, on the issue marrying after conception but before birth, I’ve seen estimates for several European cities in the late 19th century suggesting that about a third of brides were pregnant.
I lean in your direction too, but I think the opposite point of view is that taking any action affecting a population while only accepting input from a portion of them is unjust regardless of that action in particular. “No taxation without representation” and so on.
The less absolute version of this would be that the government tends towards unjust treatment of an excluded minority even if the actual polices at anyone one time are fair on the face of them.
Similar arguments could be made about trial by jury, right to a criminal justice rights, and so on. Probably even what we regard as more human rights than civil rights–freedom of religion, speech, arms, etc. Is their abridging on its face unjust, or only likely to produce unjust results?
Is this meant to be an argument in favor of the practice? It strikes me as pretty evil either way. Like a lot of evils, it has precedent.
@EchoChaos
The campus Title IX tribunals operate under a preponderance of the evidence standard. Get ready for lots of morning after regret “rape” claims if successfully making one gets you money and prizes.
If some guy seduces a woman and gets her pregnant, I don’t think it’s obviously evil to force him to take responsibility and marry her, particularly since in most ancient societies the woman would be considered ruined for marriage to anyone else.
I definitely think this for most political rights (rules for voting, separation of powers, exactly how representatives are chosen, etc.). I support liberal representative democracy because it seems to give pretty good results, not because I think it’s a moral imperative from God or something.
It seems like jury trial and legal procedure is somewhere else where I care about results more than current formal rules. I want the courts to be accurate about whether the accused is guilty of what he’s accused of, but I don’t care whether that’s decided by a judge, a jury of 12 fellow citizens, or an AI, I just want accuracy.
This sounds very close to saying that (some) women will have a baby if, and only if, they have the right to child support – i.e. profit economically from it. I am not sure this is a good motivation, and something society should encourage.
Under the current system, women unilaterally decides whether to carry the child or abort it, which is arguably reasonable. But the decision comes with two decades of economic dependency for the father, who doesn’t get a vote (“patriarchy”, I guess). So you could argue this from the principle that if you have to bear the consequences, you should have a say in the decision.
(some) women will have a baby if, and only if, they have the right to child support – i.e.profit economically from itthey can afford to raise the baby in decent conditionsFixed it for you.
Yeah, “profit economically from it” is poor phrasing. It’s true for the full economic definition of “profit”, where things like maternal love and a desire to create new sentient life go in the “plus” column and women will make babies so long as the material costs aren’t so cripplingly high as to outweigh the less tangible positives. But most people use the Econ 101 definition of “profit” where only monetary income counts and will take such a claim as indicating that the marginal mothers are just in it for the benjamins.
Which, probably a few of them are. Mostly, we’re dealing with lots of women who want to make babies for all the reasons that everyone other than a hard-core anti-natalist will agree are the right reasons to make babies, but will reluctantly refrain from doing this good thing if the material costs would impoverish them to an intolerable degree. So we should maybe look at ways to make it so that doesn’t happen.
That’s been one of the core functions of civilization since the dawn of civilization.
@EchoChaos says: "...If they didn’t sign up to be parents legally, they don’t have a responsibility. If they want to after the fact, adoption exists and is the traditional method.This is an excellent way to incentivize women to not do stupid things..."
I think the old saying is “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander”, and since creating a child takes two, and except for (infamously) Kirk Anderson in the ’70’s, men involuntarily performing the act to create a child is unknown to me, I’m gonna say that paying child support for not keeping it zipped is just, the incentives need to go both ways.
I’m not sure Roma culture is strictly patriarchal–my impression is that old women have a good deal of power.
Even in the most patriarchal of societies some women will achieve positions of power and influence. Some of the patriarchs will love their mothers, sisters, wives or daughters, right?
I don’t think the power is coming through men in that case. Old people have a lot of status, and I think that if the grandfather dies or becomes unable to run things, the grandmother takes over.
Also, Vlach Rom culture (which is what I know most about) has a pretty sharp division between men’s world and women’s world, so more a case of men running some things and women other things than men running everything.
I don’t think you’ve drawn the lines then or now accurately. So I don’t think its very helpful.
The left has always insisted on the lack of genetic differences both male/female and among races. They still do.
The center right has always insisted on genetic differences in male/female and cultural differences in both male/female and among races. It still does.
The mainstream has, for 60+ years engaged in explicit race blindfoldness on genes. The only difference was policy prescriptions. Now that the woke left and genetic-right are squaring off more publicly doesn’t change much.
You can probably get otherwise-intelligent people to loudly proclaim that there are no genetic differences between races or sexes, but only if you get their brains hijacked with tribalism first. Otherwise, they’ll remember high school biology about XX vs XY, and they’ll remember that black parents do pretty reliably seem to have black children.
Probably what you’re thinking of is the claim that the genetic differences don’t explain much or any of the observed differences in performance in various areas. That’s plausible for most, but not all, observed differences. (I’m very sure the Tibetans’ altitude tolerance isn’t just cultural. Similarly, with the much lower level of lactase persistence in blacks vs whites.).
The differences that matter for US politics are mostly black/white difference in academic performance and crime rate, and male/female differences in math-oriented fields (math, physics, engineering, computer science, economics, statistics)–either due to different abilities or different interests.
And the issue here is that:
a. It’s a plausible hypothesis that biological/genetic differences drive much of any of these observable differences in outcome.
b. Those hypotheses are strongly associated with some nasty people and political movements.
c. Those hypotheses provide support for political polices that many mainstream people (especially on the broad left, which includes most journalists and most of academia) think are very bad policies that will make world a worse place.
I have to side with the “Holmes is joking with Watson” side; IIRC Holmes ignorance does not really come up as relevant in other ways later on?
Besides, he knows of and maybe has read Moriarty’s “The Dynamics of an Asteroid”, so if he has tried to understand that, he probably has had to understand how the solar system is built.
Related to this post, to what extent is “woke capitalism” (companies choosing to “make a statement” on culture war issues as part of an ad campaign, casting decision, etc. more often associated with the left but arguably applicable to e.g. Chick-fil-A or Hobby Lobby on the right).
a. primarily motivated by profit (near or long-term; if you take a calculated financial hit on a project you believe will improve your public image in a way that leads to bigger long-term profits that still counts)
b. primarily motivated by activism (willing to make less money than theoretically possible because achieving some goal other than profit seen by the management and/or employees as socially desirable)
c. something few people, customers or companies, actually wants, but arises as a result of a weird social dynamic like “dictatorship of the small minority“?
We are, of course, speaking in general and admitting of the possibility of multiple conflicting motivations within individuals and corporations, so an answer might look like “70% a, 20% b, and 10% c.”
You’re using “activism” in a weird way. Most corporations probably don’t really maximize profit due to various human concerns. I think a better description might be “moral or ethical beliefs”. Activism generally implies having to be in some sort of struggle with another group or community organization or something. But the owner can just decide not to maximize profit.
And shouldn’t (c.) mostly operate by acting on (a.) or (b.)?
For example, most people working at Chick-fil-A probably don’t care about being open on Sundays or not. But the owners certainly do. That’d be (b.).
Or Taleb’s example, say you can sell kosher and non kosher lemonade. If they taste the same and it costs the same to make just kosher as to make just non kosher but less than making both, you may as well make only kosher lemonade. Then you might be motivated by profit (a.), but the reason that is true is (c.).
I think it’s worth differentiating activism, which is trying to convince people of your beliefs, from simply trying to live in accordance of your beliefs.
A company that is closed on Sundays is not engaging in activism (on this point), whereas a company that makes a marketing campaign about being the only national chain to honor the Sabbath and thus more deserving of your patronage is.
Although actually that example might be bad; that’s combining living your beliefs with seeking profits by appealing to those that already share them. Activism is about trying to get others to adhere to your values (preferably by adopting them themselves). And I wouldn’t include donations made privately from the earnings of executives here either, though if you don’t want to enrich your political opponents that’s understandable.
A good example of corporate activism is boycotting a state when it passes a law you don’t like. Perhaps it’s a legitimate moral stand at great expense to profits, but that’s what activism looks like from the other side.
If they are getting enough hours elsewhen, they probably appreciate having a consistent day off that’s likely to align with their peers. The people who really dislike it are the employees Chik-fil-A doesn’t need to hire because they aren’t open then (though presumably these people are employed elsewhere, because consumers still eat on Sunday).
Minor nit – is activism really trying to convince people of your beliefs, or is it just trying to force (or at least encourage) people to make decisions that accord with your beliefs?
E.g. suppose you try to pass laws closing all stores on Sunday. Let’s farther assume you are motivated by Christian religious beliefs, not by ideas about how there should be some common day for everyone to be off work together.
You aren’t trying to convince your Jewish, Muslim, and atheist neighbours that Sunday is special. You just want to stop them shopping on what your religion considers to be a Holy Day or Day of Rest. You may even hope to have the happy (from your POV) side effect of encouraging them to move out of the political jurisdication.
If there’s any convincing involved, it would be trying to get Christians who don’t care about the Day of Rest or figure it should be observed – or not – by personal choice – to move towards your idea of enforcing it. And that’s at least partly instrumental – you want what you want, and you need majority support to get it. You’ll also probably push the idea of having a common day off for everyone, not because you care about that, but because it’s the only way you’ll get non-Christian support.
I agree, I stated it wrong in the first paragraph. Compliance is the goal, agreement a nice bonus.
@Randy M
I agree with your description of activism. I think that better fits what people usually mean. Like you say, we’re not talking about living according to one’s own beliefs when we talk about activism. Although, hopefully an activist does that as well.
I would include donations from earning of executives or employees as very weak form of activism but on a personal level. Not something related to the company itself. Although I’ve heard of employers who will match charitable donations by employees up to some amount. That’s a little bit like a very soft corporate activism in favor of charity in general. Although it could be because that helps the corporation select employees that fit its business better. Which would be the profit motive.
I’d say currently it covers both like you describe and most activist groups work both angles, but I see what you mean by distinguishing the two cases. They are pretty different.
Are Chick-Fil-A / Hobby Lobby publicly traded companies? My vague understanding is that it’s the christian religiosity of their owners which gives them their particular business style.
Is there a precedent of a previously a-moral publicly traded, for profit company, saying that they wanted to establish a christian-conservative theme?
I think this highlights it – a small or a privately held company is more likely to be motivated by (b), but that said I do think Chick-fil-As family values have contributed to their success (ie, profit) – it gives them a lower worker turnover meaning they can give a better customer experience.
Then there are places like Black Rifle Coffee where it seems like the values of the company are part of why they operate how they do [(b)], but they’ve also identified an opportunity to carve out some market share [(a)].
Someone like Nike is pretty blatantly motivated by (a). quanta413 gave a good example of (c), but I wonder if a recent push towards veganism/vegetarianism might be another. The first to market will probably get a nice profit boost (eg, Gregg’s in the UK got tons of free publicity for announcing their vegan sausage rolls, and Burger King in the US with the Impossible Whopper), but I’d bet others following suit are less likely to make money.
I don’t think vegan fast food is a publicity stunt.
It sounds more like a way to broaden your group of potential customers.
The vegans want fast food, and they are willing to pay money for it.
And if you’re worried that the greens in Congress are even a little bit serious about eventually passing a “meat tax” it’s probably a good idea to start building up some expertise and moving down the experience curve when it comes to non-meat alternatives…
@onyomi,
If they’re not making money at it my best guess is whoever makes these decisions thinks that it will get them praised, help them avoid censure, and/or get themselves laid more easily, though I suppose maybe they’re worried about the fate of their immortal souls, but I kinda doubt that.
(and good lord does it feel great to finally be cranky again instead of feeling sad, thank you SSC!)
The idea that making people cranky could actually be helpful in some cases makes me feel much better about my posting history!
Welcome back cranky Plumber!
@EchoChaos
Thank you kindly @EchoChaos!
It probably depends a lot on the dynamics in the company. If there’s strong leadership decisions might be taken strategically – for example Gillette lost me as a customer, but it may (or may not) have been a good idea long term to take a stand in the CW. Google on the other hand just has a woke culture – I doubt it bothers making this kind of decisions. Most likely any ideas not woke enough just get shot down before they even reach the level of proposals. And after making a few examples, it becomes risky to even put non-woke ideas in writing. I have a strong suspicion this is how you get diverse casts.
This sounds roughly correct to me. It leaves the question of whether or not they see themselves gaining, sacrificing, or coming out neutral, financially, as compared to a world in which their culture is less woke. My guess is that the idea that woke business culture is long-run unprofitable is itself somewhat incompatible with woke culture; therefore I don’t imagine those perpetuating that culture see themselves as sacrificing financially, even if they don’t necessarily assume they’re gaining by it.
It also leaves the question of whether there is a big untapped market for unwoke movies, as Fox News found there was for conservative news. My guess is there may be but that it is prevented from coming into being, at least for the time being, by a cultural complex that coordinates in a largely unplanned way to prevent it happening (by e.g. ensuring that the first offender is punished badly by scathing reviews).
Somewhat related, I watched the Angry Birds movie for the first time during a long flight recently, out of boredom and because I had heard a theory that it was secretly an alltrite kids’ movie… and it totally is! Not sure how that one slipped through.
@onyomi
I think that you need to distinguish between unfathomable ideas and unspeakable ideas. Take this Vox article about an (illegal) women-only shared working space.
If you read the article you see that it is considered immoral for poor women to be excluded, but that they do recognize that you can’t just make the space free or let people pay what they can afford. However, this recognition is merely visible in their actions (where a fraction of the poor get free membership, but most don’t & where they plan to introduce tiered memberships); as well as through vague statements like “nobody who goes to the Wing is naive to the fact that feminists have to contend with a capitalist society.”
What they won’t do is explicitly say that they prefer to have a nicer space at the cost of excluding the poor, rather than a (far) less nice space with heavy wealth redistribution to the poor. This is unspeakable, but not unfathomable.
In contrast, the idea that, given that they see benefits in women-only spaces, there may benefit in men-only spaces, is unfathomable. Similarly, the idea that women-only spaces can harm men. These ideas are completely incompatible with their world view.
Wait a minute, that place is The Wing? That’s one of the companies that the WeWork/The We Company own/control/whatever, I recognise it from a comment Hoopyfreud posted!
So I think it’s safe to say that in that instance, profit comes before principles. All the feminist founder ladies may quote (and indeed believe) the right doctrine, but the reason they’re not letting poor women in for free is that it comes down to the bottom line: their parent company is all about making the money under a veneer/glaze of right-on talk. Poor people don’t have the kind of money that The We Company is interested in getting people to spend. Such spaces are for the upwardly-mobile techies/creatives who are working on that app/screenplay that will make them a fortune.
I guess what I’m still not sure about is whether, in a pitch session for [new installment in franchise historically more popular with men but which has been updated to appeal to women], anybody says “I’m not sure the existing fans will like this and it’s a gamble whether we can attract a lot of new ones.” If nobody says that, do they think it but not say it? If somebody does say that is the response primarily “I think we can attract a whole new fanbase and make a big profit” or “but think of the positive message this sends to young women”? Or maybe, a little later, “I don’t think you’re a good fit for our company culture…”
I’m actually willing to believe that they’re not against having poor people there per se, but don’t drop their prices anyway because they’re owning property in New York City.
The bank still wants its check every month, and they don’t give a shit if you’re helping poor people or not; you price your rent to cover your costs, make up the difference from somewhere else in your business, or they take the building back. You can’t do too much of the second one without other creditors eventually having a problem.
@Deiseach
The We Company is a big enough investor that they are on the board, but they don’t control it.
I’ve observed that many if not most activist feminists care about the impact of policies on number 1 on a visceral level, while caring about the impact on other women (or on men) in a more theoretical way. One can observe that the visceral often wins out, in that the policies that are chosen primarily favor themselves and their ingroup, even if they are very privileged (which most activist feminists seem to be), rather than other (often poorer and/or less educated) women.
Call me cynical, but I wouldn’t even necessarily call that a case of self-interest over principles, since I think that many female activist feminists conflate the two, so they see anything that helps themselves (and thus a woman) as being feminist, as it helps women.
@onyomi
That is neither unspeakable or unfathomable. It’s a fairly common SJ position that the masses and/or men are resistant due to being uneducated and/or misogynist & that they need to be taught to transcend that. It’s also not a taboo to argue that it is difficult to find solutions or effective ways to teach people.
However, if you do want to earn money by catering to, rather than preaching to people, or by having men or white people in charge, the successful blue tribe way to defend yourself from the more woke seems to be to evade the issue of whether most of what you are making/doing is problematic and to have a token thing to point to. Like a pro-diversity thing* or in this case, female-led movies. Then if people complain about Gay Panic Movie 2: Dickapalooza, you change the topic to Women Are Funny, Honest and exclaim that you are trying hard, but that there is resistance, that you fully support the goal of equality, yadda yadda yadda. Best is not to even acknowledge the actual criticism.
Similarly, if people attack you for having mostly men or white people in charge, you don’t defend them/yourself, but instead start talking about your program to help women/PoC advance to higher positions.
It seems to me that the large mass of leftish people is actually more easily swayed by vague political statements that sound awesome, but are mostly empty calories than by radical statements. The main reason why the radicals have so much power is because they have a level of stamina that moderates tend to lack, but this is less true as the more is at stake. It is far easier for radicals to take over a student union than a movie studio.
* These concessions that are small for those in charge may be major for the little people, though.
@Aapje
Thinking more about it, the womens’ club that doesn’t like to admit they like exclusivity is in some ways representative of a more general problem I have with many leftist arguments and policies, at least as usually presented. Much leftism sounds to me like “a country club for all!” not understanding that exclusivity is part of what people like about country clubs.
For example, strong unions and protectionism, policies more often associated with the left, pretty much can’t make society or the world as a whole richer; they can only make some groups richer at the expense of others and probably make society or the world as a whole poorer, at least on some short-to-mid-range time scale (not killing the goose that lays the golden technological eggs by allowing disruptively rapid social change may make it better on a long enough time scale).
I could respect this line of thinking a lot more if they were wiling to own it and basically be like “yeah, we’re protecting our nation’s farmers at the expense of the urbanites of our country and the poor of the world; we like our nation’s farmers and don’t want that way of life to disappear.” But that kind of rhetoric is quite incompatible with the universalism typically associated with leftism. May be why e.g. protectionism and immigration restriction are recently becoming associated with nationalism and conservatism more.
In related news, support for Confucianism now correlates with support for leftist economic policies in China.
I also want to propose a variant to A, it may be done as a way to placate key regulatory bodies by appealing to values particular to said bodies. Espousing these values might make the company look better in the eyes of those regulators involved in the company’s efforts at M&A, for example.
Indeed. I’d draw a line less towards something like M&A and towards something more specific/relevant like, say, an eventual gender bias lawsuit. Recall that Google of all companies has, I believe still pending, litigation alleging that they systematically pay women less than men.
I’ve made this comparison before, but if you look at something like the energy industry, they have really strict rules about, say, holding the handrail when you use stairs. Even in corporate headquarters. Not because they’re worried about someone falling down the stairs and suffering a severe injury and suing them. Because they’re worried about the lawsuit that comes when an offshore oil platform explodes and kills dozens. What they want to be able to do, in that lawsuit, is say “Look, we have a safety-first culture. And we can prove that we’re super serious about safety because we even require employees to hold the handrail on the stairs in office buildings! So clearly whatever went wrong here was not the result of our company simply not caring enough about safety!”
Repeating my bleg for good South African TV shows. I should modify this to good South African narrative video content, since I’d like to be able to watch it on Youtube, Hulu, or Netflix. It doesn’t have to be any particular genre, just has to be well-written/well-acted/well-produced. Could be documentary-style as well.
Simulation Hypothesis question:
If our own universe is probably a simulation, and we’re eventually going to get good enough at computing to simulate other universes — as I understand the Simulation Hypothesis claims — then the people in those simulated universes will eventually simulate universes, etc. etc. all the way down. This means the Original Simulators have to get not only to a level of computing good enough to simulate an entire universe, but to a level of computing good enough to simulate an infinite number of nested universes. Doesn’t that make the Simulation Hypothesis recursive and therefore unlikely to be true?
If I’m misunderstanding something key here, please tell me.
If others have articulated a better version of this idea (or refuted it), please tell me.
We can’t represent the state of an equivalently-large universe in ours. Therefore, any simulated universe will need to be of some sort of reduced dimensionality, or it will need to be significantly slower than the “real” universe. Or both.
Going the other way, this means the Simulators’ universe must be even more expansive/complex than ours, making the notion that they exist and that this is a simulation even more farfetched. Right?
Yes
Eh. That’s up to your priors.
Doesn’t this make it fail the basic Occam’s razor test? I believe Eliezer once described it something like: “Thor did it,” though superficially simple, is actually a more complicated answer to the question “where does lightning come from” than the scientific explanation, because it simply adds another complex being into the equation, leaving the question of how Thor makes lightning in addition to the question of where Thor came from.
Why would it? “There was nothing, and then there was something, and the something was made of space and time” is something you have to deal with at some point anyway.
@Well…
They may compare to us, like we compare to a bacteria. What is immense in size for us, may be modest in size for them. Where bacteria are often unable to travel large distances on their own, and are then dependent on being transported or things coming to them; humans can travel great distances with planes. The Simulators may be able to travel the stars as easily as we travel to the supermarket.
Or the simulator universe may simply be completely different and way more complex, similar to how we might simulate simple stuff like Conway’s Game of Life that doesn’t come close to capturing the complexity of (our) reality.
Right, but this makes the possibility that The Simulators exist (and thus that this is a simulation) additionally farfetched, or at least additionally speculative, doesn’t it?
In other words, I’m using a model like this: If I propose Theory A, which rests on 10 arguments, and 9 of them are farfetched but 1 of them is easy to accept, Theory A is less likely to be true than Theory B, 9 of whose 10 arguments are easy to accept and only 1 of which makes you raise your eyebrows in disbelief.
@Well
Like I said upthread,eventually you have to deal with the fact that
We don’t have any prima facie reason to believe that a universe complex compared to ours is substantially less likely to exist than ours is. And in any case, the anthropic principle lets us not give a shit about likelihood.
Since we have no way to say how big the universe “should” be, I don’t think you can say the existence of a bigger universe than ours is farfetched. After all, a universe 46.5 billion light-years across sounds extravagantly big to me, but apparently we’re living in it, so…
That is measuring from the inside. If we measure from the outside we have nothing to measure it against so it cannot be measured. Since its existence doesn’t reduce the amount of infinite space it does not occupy it could be infinitely small
The law of conservation of computronium says that the number of raw events (bit-flips or their physical equivalent) in the whole history of the Real Universe will be greater than in all nested sim-universes combined, and the number of raw events in any sim-universe will be greater than in all sub-(sub^n)-sim-universes combined. This suggests that if an event happens, it probably happened only in the Real Universe.
However, raw events are not the same as interesting events. It is likely that a simulated universe will have a higher ratio of interesting events to raw events, by virtue of being intelligently designed to simulate interesting events. For some TBD definition of “interesting”. It is possible that most interesting events will occur in sim-universes, and it is possible that the sim-designers will be particularly interested in e.g. the operation of introspective consciousness capable of asking “Am I in a simulation?”. If so, that question might be asked more often in sim-verses than in the Real Universe.
Whether this is true depends on several unknown and possibly unknowable values, but does require that at least some of the sim-universes be intelligently designed to in a way that greatly increases the ratio of introspective consciousness to raw bit-flips. Whether our universe appears to be so designed, is left as an exercise for the student.
Do you think these considerations weaken or strengthen the Simulation Hypothesis?
I’ve been trying to think of a way to phrase that, or very nearly that, for quite a while. I think I’ll just lift it from you going forward.
There’s a page linked recently (https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html) that proposes that computers in simulations just perform computations in real computers in the base universe. So bit flips in simulated universes just become a few more bit flips in the real one, sans, some tax for virtualization, coordination, security, etc. Depending on how good the simulation architecture is, this could get very close to 1:1. Maybe there is an optimum computation architecture that is constant across realities, so everyone agrees that x64 is the ideal architecture, and everyone runs on it, and everything just runs in virtualization.
It also proposes that once a simulation uses enough computing power to rival what is using in simulating conciousness for the inhabitants of the simulation, the simulation may end cause there’s no point to it. This could be avoided, want to point out, by vastly limiting economic access to computronium in the simulations.
This also means that as we start building more and more computers, “aliens” may come down from heaven and give us the perfect computer architecture, which even if deviated 0.1% from the spec will run 10000% slower, because it is the real universe architecture and they want to make sure we aren’t making the simulation too expensive.
They’d best have some real good sandboxing on that.
Else everyone at Defcon would be dodging bullets and running around on the ceiling.
I mean, a simulator that complex is already almost perfect or just cannot run at all. Which is one of my main objections; most systems cannot run for that long without disastrous failures. Uptimes of thousands of years are, by definition, unheard of, and MTTFs that big are also crazy.
Of course, maybe the simulation just ends or rollbacks on any suspicion of security breach. From the inside of the simulation everyone would have more incentives to hack the sim to benefit themselves, so that’s not that bad, and would probably not know enough about the systems down turtle to do any damage that’s not a cause for a shutdown, so the anthropic principle says since we are still here, it’s not a problem.
We may or may not be in a simulation, but I don’t buy Bostrom’s argument that we are more likely to be in a simulation because simulation will outnumber base universes because the amount of free energy[0] available to do computation in any layer of simulation is limited to the free energy in the “base” universe. Beings in the base universe can use free energy for life in their universe or life in a simulation, but there’s a total upper bound on how much life can be achieved.
[0] This has some nuance because while the laws of physics might be different in the base, as long as they are time-symmetric, Noether’s Theorem says that energy is conserved. And Landauer’s Principle says that there’s a minimum amount of energy required for any bit flip, dependent on the temperature. And temperature can be computed in terms of entropy, which will definitely have an analogue for any laws of physics for which there are different states.
Same question for you as for John Schilling, then: do you think this consideration weakens or strengthens the Simulation Hypothesis? (Intuitively, it seems to GREATLY weaken it.)
Neither, it depends on implementation details. Like John said, it takes only a slight effort to greatly bias the simulation in favor of interesting events – for example, just skip computing the trip photons make to get out of the Sun’s core, and replace it with a random-based algorithm. This gives you a lot of room to play with.
Now, is it necessary for this kind of tricks to reach “simulations all the way down”? Not really – as long as you have a couple of levels of simulations it’s already likely we’re living in one of those.
Add to this game-like simulations, ones that put the focus on an already created society and don’t bother evolving life from scratch. That’s where the numbers really starts skewing. Ironically, I didn’t really believe in them until I watched/read Overlord (fantasy comedy anime/light novel). Kinda made a believer of me – once we have the computing power, there will be worlds where NPCs will be smarter and more independent, up to having years of “history” go by between Player dives – simply because economics go that way. That is really inevitable.
To be very clear, I think this consideration considerably weakens the Simulation Hypothesis. Bostrom’s original argument that simulated life vastly outnumbers “real” life I believe is just plain wrong. But are we in a simulation? I don’t know. Could be.
I don’t think this is quite right. Thermodynamic quantities aren’t absolute concepts; they are always defined relative to some partition of the variables into macrovariables and microvariables. The natural choice for what counts as macro and what counts as micro (and thus gets integrated out, contributes to entropy, etc.) depends on how the observers doing the computation or reckoning the amount of free energy are embedded into their particular universe. This could be very different between levels of simulation.
I always thought the assumption is that the simulation doesn’t continue to run indefinitely. At a certain point the Simulators have achieved whatever goal they had and either just switch the simulation off, or if their standards of morality are closer to ours (which we maybe sort of can expect in case the Simulators are in fact humanity of a distant future simulating its past), do something less horrible such as let the simulated people into the real reality, or whatever.
But now to think about it, the second case (simulated minds are “promoted” into the real world) completely ruins the simulation argument, since in this case eventually there’s going to be much more real minds than simulated ones and the minds presumably will live in the “real state” for much longer, so a mind picked at random is more likely to be a real one.
I don’t think there’s any reason the Simulators have the same sense of morality that we do, which was honed in our own peculiar evolutionary environment. And no reason to think the Simulators are even particularly interested in us at all, or are even aware of our existence in the simulation.
Well, the Bostrom’s argument suggests that they are humanity from the future, simulating its past. In this case they do share our evolutionary history – or, more precisely, vise versa – and we have reasons, though by no means guarantees, to expect their morality is similar enough to ours, and they are definitely interested in us since it’s the reason they run simulations.
If that’s not the case, though, I completely agree with your first point. Not so much with the second, I’d expect that if someone runs a simulation detailed enough for something conscious to evolve and discover quantum physics, that’s because they’re specifically interested in technologically advanced conscious life, for just evolution of the universe on the astrophysical scale much cruder models should suffice.
People have alluded to the concept that you only simulate the important stuff, but aren’t generally taking the concept far enough.
If you’re interested in simulating human society, at any given moment you don’t have to simulate anything that a person isn’t actually looking at. So that already cuts out 99.99999…% of the work.
You get another enormous gain in simulation efficiency from limited human senses. The stuff I am experiencing can be approximated at an extremely crude level. When I’m drinking a glass of water, the simulator doesn’t have to do a full calculation down to the atomic level of all the fluid dynamics. It merely has to be close enough that I don’t notice the difference (or perhaps even easier, my experiences or memories can be hacked so I don’t notice the difference). If I pick up a stick and you want to simulate my experience of it, all you need is a couple variables for size, shape, weight, and various material properties; you’d only invoke the more detailed stuff about its internal molecular structure if I dragged the stick off to a lab for analysis. (And even then you’d not have to model all the molecules. You just have to model what my experimental apparatus might plausibly show, which is much much easier.)
And then you get another several orders of magnitude of efficiency from not simulating everyone. If a simulator was interested in learning about me, then they’d have to do some work simulating my family and friends (when I was physically in their presence and paying attention to them), but my interactions with e.g. store clerks or SSC commenters could essentially be handled by a glorified chatbot. You don’t have to maintain the simulation of e.g. my workplace when I’m not physically present there; you just generate it on the fly when I arrive. etc. etc.
Good luck debugging all that.
Just loading/unloading areas seamlessly is a big problem in game dev. Sure, the devs are some kind of highly advanced aliens, but the scope of simulating reality is so much bigger.
And games almost always either reset the unloaded areas to some default state, or they freeze the state of it.
The state of your workplace isn’t identical from one day to the next. It will also depend on what all your colleagues are doing. And if they’re in STEM, that could easily depend on some quite fundemental properities of reality.
Radically simplifying a simulation in some areas is hard, even when the audience is actively suspending disbelief. When they’re actively looking for bugs, it’s downright impossible.
Tl;Dr: Abstractions are leaky. If you jump from fundemental physics to higher-order emergent effects, it’ll leave all kinds of artifacts.
This can be gotten around easily if the simulators just hack our perception/cognition/memory so that we don’t notice/don’t remember incongruencies — not a very big stretch, we already do this to a greater degree when we dream, and the way our brain records memories even when it works normally is already extremely “hacked”, with the brain recording maybe 10% of what is actually going on before our eyes and then filling the blanks with what it expects to be going on in the rest of the visual space.
Another reason is that my perception of time is based on simulation time! Say I go to a new city and the simulation needs to freeze for a while (from the point of view of the simulators) to do calculations, load buildings, randomly create NPCs etc. If I’m frozen too there’s no way I’d notice this.
Sure, the time it says on the simulator’s 37 dimensional hyperwall clock make no difference to me.
The problem is that when you make the NPCs etc, you have to invent their past anachronistically.
Since there’s plenty of communication and travel going on between City A and City B, you have to make up details of stuff that could easily have effects on whatever you’ve already simulated.
i.e. good luck retconning in everything about the new city you’ve just loaded.
It’s a small world, and you’ve got to avoid ever six-degrees-of-Kevin Baconning yourself into a corner.
I found out the other day that I am 3 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Pseudonominative determinism strikes again.
Does that mean I just found out I’m four degrees of Kevin Bacon?
Okay, we both agree that the fact that you don’t have to simulate everything allows you to turn physics issues (needing more computronium to simulate than what you’re simulating) into software engineering issues.
I think pursuing the discussion further than that is just going to be a long and pointless rabbit hole.
I have a Bacon number of 3 too. Still no Erdős number, alas.
Agreed.
Given how vaguely we’re speculating about the simulators, we can’t say much more than ‘both options are incredibly hard’.
"...four degrees of Kevin Bacon?..."Mostly to justify my life to myself I’ve been thinking of the “degrees of separation” between myself and the famous and infamous a lot lately, I doubt all this list will be believed, but here goes anyway:
1) Met William Shatner (“Captain Kirk”/”T. J. Hooker”/Master Thespian extraordinaire!
2) Met Patrick Troughton “Doctor Who”
3) In ’83 I met both Dana Meese and her father Edwin Meese (who was President Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General), so one degree of separation between me and the then current President of the U.S.A.
4) Met Barry Goldwater (’64 Presidential candidate)
5) Met then Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown
6) Met and have worked with dozens of other people who met Kamala Harris (besides Willie Brown) and I replaced plumbing fixtures in her old private bathroom) – one degree of separation.
7) Have worked for seven years with a guy who was personally thanked by the man who is now Governor of California (one degrees of separation).
8) Met lots of other local and State politicians and a couple of the Police Chiefs of San Francisco
9) Met Science Fiction/Fantasy author Fritz Leiber
10) Met Science Fiction/Fantasy author Michael Moorcock
11) Met Science Fiction/Fantasy author Larry Niven
12) An ex-girlfriend of mine has met Archbishops, et cetera who met the Pope (two degrees of separation)
13) Was friends with Green Day’s original drummer (and my name was Tweeted by their current drummer this year)
14) Knew a guy a who knew a guy who met Joseph Stalin (two degrees of separation)
15) Knew a guy who knew a guy who met Leon Trotsky (two degrees of separation).
16) At least three old friends became published authors.
Combine all that and I’m within three degrees of separation of a Hella lot of the famous and infamous, and I wear overalls most days, drive a ’91 Honda, and if my name is known by a stranger it’s likely because of where I swept the floor as a teenager.
Yeah, that still doesn’t help my mood.
@Nick, I have an Erdos number of 8 if you count one paper I co-authored which never actually got into a peer-reviewed journal.
Then, if you count my sister’s appearing as an extra in a movie, and my co-acting in amateur theater with her, I have a Bacon number of 3.
@Evan Þ
Can I co-author a paper with you? 😀
If we’re counting stuff that doesn’t really count, I think my Erdos number is 4. I was listed on a conference proceeding too far down the list of authors for it to be indexed.
(However, my Jeff Dean number is legitimately 1. But no I won’t review your code)
@Nick, do you think Scott’ll accept a late entry for the Adversarial Collaboration Contest? 😉
Erdos number is defined by co-authorship of articles. All the other numbers being cited here seem to depend on simply meeting someone.
Almost none of my work is coauthored—only two articles I can think of, and a recent book where two other authors contributed a chapter each—so by the strict definition I link to nobody I know of more famous than Richard Posner and whomever he has coauthored with.
But by the loose definition, I link directly or through my father to lots of famous people. And I not only met Ed Meese, I debated him.
No, the Bacon number requires you to appear in something with Bacon, or with someone who has appeared in something with Bacon, or etc. Like Erdős numbers it’s a bit stricter.
I haven’t met so many famous people as Plumber — a fair number of well-known people in CS and math, including Mandelbrot, Atanasoff (barely, I asked him a question at a lecture once), and Ted Kowalski of fsck fame. But I’m two steps from Arieh Warshel (2013 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) and three from Neils Bohr (my father once lived in the same building as one of his granddaughters)
Small world, I guess.
I think you are misunderstanding stuff.
When you think about simulationism, it is always helpful to imagine how it would work out from one level inside, right? Like, say a few hundred years go by and we build a version of Mario that is ‘a simulation’, in that it is a consistent universe with fee willed beings (or at least they think so) and its own timeout and coin based physics, yeah?
So, ok, Well…Koopa states your objection. What terms would he state it in?
“If our universe is probably a simulation, and we’re eventually going to get good enough at getting high scores to simulate other universes — as I understand the Simulation Hypothesis claims — then the people in those simulated universes will eventually simulate univers, etc. etc. all the way down. This means the Original Simulators ahve to get not only to a level of coins good enough to simulate an entire universe, but to a level of coins good enough to simulate an infinite number of nested universes. Doesn’t that make the Simulation Hypothesis recursive and therefore unlikely to be true?”
and presumably WalterKoopa tells him to imagine a universe inside one of their Princesses dreams (a la Mario 2) and so on.
But you get the problem, right? Like, your shadow’s objection is phrased in his universes terms, and is utterly laughable in ours. Imagine Final Fantasy Wells saying that the original simulators couldn’t possibly have enough Phoenix Down to bring infinite universes to life, or DC Univeres Wells saying that how could they possibly have enough Infinity Stones.
Our simulators are no more constrained by computing power than we are by high scores or energon or essence or any of the nonsense we put in our simulations.
The analogy to life on Earth might be helpful.
The primordial ooze bubbles and produces a simple object that can make copies of itself. Its copies then make copies of themselves, and so on. Not all of the copies are the exact same, however, and so some are better at making copies of themselves than others. The copies keep competing for limited resources and developing methods that make them better at copying themselves. Eventually, over billions of years, the chain of copying ends up producing humans and elephants and turtles and whales and the countless scores of other organisms currently living on Earth.
It all started from a simple structure made of just a few parts.
If you were tasked with creating complex biological life on Earth, how would you approach the first object?
In honor of Democratic front-runner for President Joe Biden, WTF is wrong with Amtrak? In theory, I like trains, but if I look at your booking website and getting from Portland to the Midwest takes 50+ hours and I have to pay as much each way as round-trip on a plane… come on.
Is it that the only infrastructure planes need is the airport, rather than every mile between destinations being a gigantic exercise in cost disease? I don’t think “airlines compete and Amtrak is a monopoly” is sufficient, because what makes it a monopoly is that private industry finds passenger rail unprofitable.
Partly, I think it’s a scaling issue on a limited number of tracks. I know it takes roughly 10 hours to drive from SF to Portland but about 20 by train and the explanation I’ve always heard is that passenger trains have to move aside for freight trains. If you doubled the number of trains along that route without building more railway tracks, things get very complicated. 20 planes a day from SF to Portland only have to organize around taking off and landing, everything in between is pretty free form. Trains seem like the have those complications the entire way. I’d guess the ways around it are to make sure all the trains are on time but airplanes and cars that can pass each other sure have a lot more slack in the system.
Near the top of the list of reasons I voted for Obama the first-go-round, after Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and McCain, was Biden’s campaign (quasi-?)promise to build high speed rail. That they did seemingly nothing on that front while largely continuing the policies I disliked of the aforementioned ended my brief flirtation with supporting the Democratic Party.
I don’t know how much of it is cost disease on that trip, because most of the rail was built out many years ago, and is maintained by the freight railroads.
I know the railroads hate Amtrak. The stated reason is that the fees that Amtrak pays for trackage rights doesn’t cover the cost of hosting them. Amtrak maintains that they do cover their costs; I don’t know enough about the economics to know who’s telling the truth.
Food for thought, though: there’s a display in the St. Louis Union Station (now a museum) that pointed out that passenger trains in the US were never profitable on their own, even in the 1800s. They were seen by the railroads as advertising their actually-profitable freight business, and lines that didn’t present that advantage (e.g., to a small town not likely with many freight customers) were slow and miserable to travel on, typically as a mixed freight and passenger train. If they weren’t profitable when their main competition was Conestoga wagons, it’s not hard for me to believe that’s the case when highways and planes are a thing.
Like you, I’ve investigated taking the train from Portland to the Midwest. I really think I’d enjoy the trip, but man, if I’ve only got 7 days of vacation, I don’t know that I’d like it enough to spend 60% of it traveling.
There is probably a component of network effects, though. If few people travel on it, then the people who do travel by train need to pay more to cover the fixed costs…which means that fewer people are willing to travel by train! This is a vicious spiral.
Here’s some other food for thought that I look up every time something like this comes up: everybody preens about how good Europe does passenger rail. Go to https://amtrak.com and look up Los Angeles to Chicago. I did this for September 17th, and got a departure of 18:00, and an arrival on the 19th at 14:50, or about 43 hours. I go to Google and do a search for train travel times from Paris to Moscow. I just did that on https://plan.rail.cc and got a departure of 13:10 on the September 17th, and an arrival at your destination of 06:42 on the 19th, or about 41 hours. These are the same distance. So exactly how much better is Europe doing?
Huh. I wouldn’t be surprised if some countries have high-speed rail while others have Amtrak-level crap and what’s bringing the average down is border stops (even countries that are now in the EU together can be running on different gauges). We also have to bear in mind that it’s more appealing to build high-speed rail if the political unit is small enough that crossing it by land is competitive with traveling to the airport, going through Security Theater, flying, and traveling from the airport to the downtown area a rail station would run to.
Living in a big country, trains slow for you…
There’s absolutely a break of gauge at the Russia/Poland border, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was at the German/Polish border. (The train I found went through Strasbourg, but I don’t know anything else about its route) I point this out to demonstrate that not even Europe has cracked this nut for the lengths of travel we have to contend with in the US. I find that people don’t really realize that, again, Paris to Moscow is around the same distance as Chicago to LA.
The other thing to think about is that a hub-and-spoke system probably works better for airlines than trains. That is, it’s relatively easy to add, say, Iowa City to your airline by connecting through Minneapolis or Chicago (or even DFW!) That’s…less possible with a train. When you have a bunch of empty space to travel through, but still have to stop to service the people who live there, that can really start to bite into the economics.
If we do have any Europeans who use the train system there: has something changed? This comparison I did used to be really easy–go to Eurail and get the schedule. Now getting the times for Paris to Moscow is more difficult, and required about 10 or 15 minutes to find a website. Has the political situation made reserving tickets for this trip in one shot dicier, or some other contractual change?
Finding the times is easy, e.g. http://bahn.de — Paris -> Moskva takes at least 33 hours, whereas Moskva -> Paris takes 42 hours. Go figure.
You cannot book the tickets there, because German railway cannot book some foreign trains, such as the French TGV or Thalys. Either book these separately on their web pages, or ask a travel agency.
To keep the comparison in-country, I checked out a route between Chicago, IL and Creston, IA (630km) on the California Zephyr and compared it with a route from Hamburg to Munich (613km) on the ICE. Amtrak takes 6:41 and costs $89 for the cheapest trip, the DB takes 6:13 and costs E109 for the cheapest trip. They seem pretty comparable to me in terms of speed/cost.
IMO, the big advantage the European system has is usability. The Amtrak route, goes once per day, and once you get to the endpoint, there is likely going to be no public transportation to get you anywhere else. The DB has two trains leaving every hour, and when you get there, you will likely be able to take a regional train, s-bahn, or u-bahn to wherever you want to go next.
It also helps that if the train you are trying to catch is delayed for some reason, a lot of times you can just book the next train, where on Amtrak, I remember trying to catch the tail end of the California Zephyr once, and it was more than 30 hours delayed, making it faster and easier to just drive where I needed to be.
Yeah, despite my shot at Europe about trains, reliability is a big deal. When you look at a European rail website and it gives you a time not much off from the US, it matters a lot that the train in Europe will actually meet that time, while Amtrak is more ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, it really depends on what your endpoints are. Some cities just don’t have a direct or even semi-direct route between them, so you end up taking a long roundabout set of connections with potentially large amounts of time between arrival and departure.
Trains are much more comfortable than flying (unless you fly first class, and maybe even then depending on the flight).
IIRC, the issue with long distance travel on Amtrak isn’t really the relatively slow nature of travel (I’d take an overnight train over a red eye flight any day of the week) it’s the friggen layovers.
I tried to game out a train trip from Seattle to the East Coast a few years back and I had almost a 1:1 ratio of “time in trains” to “time hanging around train stations in weird cities”
@CatCube
European railways tend to be strongly focused on national transportation, so international travel by train is usually going to be bad, aside from a few specific lines (mainly (or only?) Eurostar & Thalys).
“European” train service is very good in Germany, France and countries between them. In postcommunist countries it´s not great, sometimes terrible. British trains also don´t have great reputation, but I never travelled on them so that is very much second hand information.
Spanish and Portuguese trains are quite good (as long as you avoid the empty bits of Spain).
British trains have issues with cancellations, but there is usually an alternative route that takes you up to an hour more, except for exceptions like extreme weather, or fire on tracks, or people commiting suicide.
Trains in Sweden and Denmark are also quite good.
Trains in Russia are actually quite reliable, if old.
UK trains are run by the exact kind of public/private sector hodgepodge that best encourages crony capitalism and revolving doors.
One operator’s
petty fiefdomfranchise might be better than another’s.All of them are better than Southern Rail.
And the ticket pricing system is positively byzantine. Friends of mine have saved money by buying a journey in two parts, even though they’re both on the same train. (Buying London to Doncaster, then Doncaster to Edinburgh, rather than just London to Edinburgh)
That said, it’s generally ok. I think we just like complaining.
Heh, this kind of pricing system is a feature of Czech government owned trains as well.
UK trains are pretty good, except for the fact that they cost five times as much as trains in the rest of Europe.
@eric23
Well, I can confirm that those price really are eye popping from continental perspective.
In certain parts of Italy too (trains from Rome to Milan —same distance as Los Angeles to San Francisco— take 3 hours and there tens of them every day).
I think trains are just inherently slower, more expensive, and less flexible than planes. Western Europe can cope with this to an extent because of a high population density but even there trains generally only compete by being a nicer experience and being able to go into city centers.
The killer app for trains is capacity. A train station can handle numbers that would cause an airport to implode, catch fire, and vanish into a sulfurous crack in the earth. This is, for example, why China builds so very much rail – Look up their traffic numbers, now imagine the air-ports that would be required. If you succeed, congratulations, you can imagine the actually impossible.
Those are the conditions under which you build high speed rail because you do not have an actual bloody choice. Short of that, it is the only low carbon transit method which can reach acceptable speeds, so if we want a low carbon future, we are going to be building a whole lot of rail.
The higher volume of trains is not nearly as impressive when compared to the potential of Airplanes+roads. High speed train projects take priority for natural choke points like mountain passes, rivers, etc, and so make road traffic far less efficient, while also being wildly less flexible than air travel.
… You did not look up those actual passenger numbers, did you? Because trains handle volumes beyond what can be carried by roads, by far.
No they don’t, roads can be expanded far wider for the same traffic than rail can because individual cars can change lanes far easier than a train can. A single train track is not at all analogous to a single lane of highway, and you can more easily and effectively double, triple or quadruple road traffic while switching destinations than you can rail. The point was also that you can do road + flight easier than road+rail
So actual passenger numbers
China’s high speed rail ~2 billion passenger trips in 2018
US road system 411 billion road trips per year plus ~ 1 billion passengers
Even just counting long distance road trips in the US they were at 2.6 billion road trips plus ~ 1 billion on flights, putting it well above China’s high speed rail system for total use with China having 4X the population.
Train’s aren’t far beyond even considering a single lane. Small vehicles cannot approach train capacities, but the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane and the Amtrak North River Tunnels (both carrying passengers from New Jersey to Midtown) are of similar capacity.
The “US road system” includes every little street anywhere in the US. That’s 6.58 million km of roads, so 411 billion road trips is about 620 trips per km per year.
Meanwhile, Chinese HSR carries about 2 billion people on 29000 km of tracks, about 69000 trips per km per year. So Chinese HSR is over a hundred times more efficient, measured in this way.
Measuring another way: a lane of road can carry about 1800 cars per hour (that’s a 2 second gap between vehicles). Generally the cars will have about 1.3 passengers each (unless it’s a carpool lane), for a total capacity of about 2300 people. A train track takes up about the same space, but can carry 2000 passengers in a train every 3 minutes. That’s a 17x higher capacity. Of course it is normal for roads to have more than one lane per direction, but in big European and Asian cities it is equally normal to have more than one track per direction. The car lanes are limited to about 70mph everywhere, while even “low speed” trains typically go 100mph (outside the US) without needing special HSR right of way.
As for convenience in getting to your destination, it varies. Trains do much better here than planes, because they typically stop downtown, and because they quickly accelerate and decelerate which permits a number of stops along the route without significantly affecting trip time. Cars typically do better than trains, but not always: in downtowns, or anywhere in extremely large cities, the traffic and parking difficulties outweigh the inconvenience of needing to transfer from the train.
This isn’t a useful comparison because no one lives at those train stations, every station requires hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of miles of roads to get people to and from the stations. Comparing door to door for one and not door to door for the other is biasing it heavily for trains.
@eric
I think you missed the decimal point in that calculation, since 411 billion road trips/6.58 million km of roads is ~62,000 trips/km*yr, which is comparable to the train numbers you quoted. The other calculations you made in that post seem right though, and I would bet that the trains also have a much larger utilization if you checked something like people*km/km*year that actually measured how far each trip was.
@eric23 Your capacity analysis seems really inflated.
Wikipedia suggests that the maximum capacity of a Chinese HSR trainset is ~1,000 passengers, with many substantially smaller than that. Even assuming 1,000 per train, we are down to an 8x advantage for trains.
Unless I am missing something, you can’t possible have a train every 3 minutes because the train needs to stop at a station for people to get on and off. If this takes longer than your inter-train time, the train behind will hit the one stopped at the station. It seems like a station dwell time of ~8 minutes is more reasonable, and that’s not for a 1,000 person monster train either. Let’s say 9 minutes to make the math easy and you put in a 2x safety factor, so 18 minutes between trains. Note that I have never personally seen HSR trains operating so close. Now we’re at a 1.3x advantage for trains.
As for horizontal space, obviously the railway needs more space than just what the train itself takes up. A CA HSR advocacy group says it would take 100-ft, which seems to me like a 4-lane interstate with 10-ft shoulders. But they say that’s a “2-lane farm road,” so we’ll take that. Now we’re at a 0.67 capacity for trains, which flips it back to a disadvantage. The need for much shallower turns, less flexibility in covering hills, and the colossal stations you’d need to offload 1,000 people in <10 minutes would add considerably to the train's overall footprint.
It's really quite hard for the math of trains to make sense.
“This isn’t a useful comparison because no one lives at those train stations, every station requires hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of miles of roads to get people to and from the stations”
Trains are not useful for every trip, and nobody is proposing replacing every residential street with a train track. However, for long distance or high capacity travel, trains are much more efficient. A typical trip in Europe or Japan involves a short road trip, then a long train trip, then another short road trip. Would you classify that as a road trip? The large majority of travel distance occurs on the train.
“I think you missed the decimal point in that calculation, since 411 billion road trips/6.58 million km of roads is ~62,000 ”
Correct, thank you. It’s worth noting that a high fraction of the road trips are very short (e.g. from your front door to the supermarket) while most HSR trips are hundreds of km long. So the amount of travel done in km, per road/rail length in km, is still drastically higher for HSR (which is why I did not catch my decimal point error).
“Wikipedia suggests that the maximum capacity of a Chinese HSR trainset is ~1,000 passengers” etc.
We are getting a little confused here between HSR and other forms of rail. Suburban trains in Paris carry 50000 passengers per hour on a single track (roughly speaking, 30 trains per hour with 1666 passengers on each). Compare that to 2300 passengers per hour in the road lane – still an advantage of more than 20 to 1. HSR is limited to perhaps 40% lower frequency than suburban rail, so its advantage is about 12 to 1.
“As for horizontal space, obviously the railway needs more space than just what the train itself takes up. A CA HSR advocacy group says it would take 100-ft,”
HSR trains, traveling at 200mph, may need 100 foot right-of-ways (though aerial photography suggests that European HSR uses about half that, comparable to a one-lane road with shoulders). Normal speed trains, which are the natural competitor for normal speed cars, don’t need more space than the tracks.
Couldn’t you just have lots of parallel stops at the railway station?
@mfm32
Four to five minutes between trains is perfectly doable for single track (if the trains run on time very well). As albatross11 notes, with multiple platforms, you can increase it. Even more so when outside the station, not all trains squeeze on the same set of rails.
It’s quite typical for larger train stations to have multiple tracks/platforms, sometimes even up to 30.
The metric you used implies that we should treat train trips and road trips separate. You cannot measure the ‘efficiency’ of train trips by taking miles of train track and passenger miles and ignoring the trips to and from the train station if the train trips require travel to and from the station. Doing so artificially makes train travel look more efficient because you are hiding necessary costs.
OK. It’s hard to make a perfect comparison, when so much of the data you’d want for a perfect comparison is not easily available online. But let’s try again.
The Tokaido Shinkansen is a HSR route between Tokyo and Osaka, Japan. It carries 452000 passengers per day. Its right of way is about 15 meters wide, corresponding to a freeway with 1 lane and a shoulder in each direction. If this freeway was occupied to its maximum capacity 24 hours a day, that would be a total of 110000 passengers per day. So the actual ridership of the train is 4 times higher than the theoretical maximum of a similar road. (The theoretical maximum of the HSR train is much higher – perhaps 12 to 1 as in my previous comment.)
No, it’s that much higher than the theoretical maximum of a similar road with passenger cars on it. The North Hudson Tunnels (rail) carry something like 200,000 passengers per weekday, and they are at capacity as to number of trains during peak hours (just under 24 trains per hour). The Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane carries 73920 passengers per weekday. It is also at capacity as to number of vehicles (roughly 1850 per day, or 462 per hour). It only operates in the morning, so we can see that the road lane has roughly 3/4 the capacity of the rail tunnel.
The issue is not that your comparison is not apples to apples, it is that you are slashing pertinent information which makes ‘efficiency’ meaningless. If your question is ‘which is more efficient for moving people from point A to point B’ then your answer would have meaning, but travelers are not interested in moving from train station A to train station B except as a portion of moving from point C to point D.
But if you build train stations, people build housing and places people want to go to near the train stations on purpose. It is in certain ways an advantage to buses that they can connect any two places where enough people wanting to travel to or from congregate, and of cars that they can connect any two places arbitrarily, but in practice this tends to lead to congestion in some places, underused roads in others, and encouraging people to spread out so that they need more transport to get between more widely scattered locations.
Now that we are shifting back to urban transit – I already mentioned Paris commuter rail which carries 50000 passengers per hour. Extrapolating to a 24 hour day, this is 16 times higher than the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane. (I don’t compare to the North Hudson Tunnels in my calculation, because New Jersey Transit is incompetently run and could do much better with its rail service.)
But that’s also true for car travel. Nobody wants to travel to a parking lot or garage, they want to travel to a destination which is reasonably close to the lot or garage. When the vast majority of a trip is by car, we call it a car trip. Why shouldn’t we use the same standard for rail?
A car trip takes the mode of transportation with them. If you take a car trip from your driveway to work the amount of time walking is minimal. If you take a half hour train ride you can well have half an hour of walking getting to the station and then getting to work from the station. If you want to build up a road/parking system so you can drive to and from stations then you are dramatically increasing the costs of building an effective rail system, but your metric will hide that.
Being on the train or at a train station is not an end value, which is what is necessary to make people miles/traveled per train/per hour a useful metric. Imagine a long stretch of track where a train could get really up to speed and cover the distance very quickly, but every passenger had to get off and backtrack half the distance by another means because it overshot their destination.
This isn’t all roses though, the best locations for stations/train lines aren’t always the best for shops/living, and living near train lines in general is not enjoyable.
This is more true for trains than other forms of transportation. Stations become massive choke points for congestion and the least used roads get less use.
Now you’re comparing an entire system to one link. NJT is incompetently run, but this does not manifest as a significant reduction in utilization of the North River Tunnels.
@baconbits9
That depends very much on the parking infrastructure. I bet that if you work in Manhattan, that isn’t true at all.
Infrastructure with lots of parking space is very sprawly & has huge downsides when it comes to efficient use of space, especially in areas with high land cost, that people seem increasingly drawn to.
‘Apple Park’ where 14,000 people work has more parking space than office space. It cost 5 billion. Imagine replacing most of that parking with (light) rail + bikes (note that they already have the latter). They could pack more companies in Silicon Valley, which in turn makes the travel distances from the rail station to those companies less.
Of course, if Apple would want to do so, they would run into the issue that the infrastructure they would connect to is lacking.
Yet choosing to have that infrastructure is a choice that can be made.
Which is…because the US lacks infrastructure for bicycles and/or lacks a cycling culture. People typically cycle three times faster than they walk, so adding bicycles triples the range of a train station.
My country has just increased the capacity of the bicycle parking at Utrecht Central Station to 12,500 spots, making it the largest in the world. People are not forced to do this either. Dutch train stations have traditionally lagged behind offering enough bicycle parking*, as very many Dutch commuters prefer to go to the station by bike.
The national train company also has a bike rental system that is available at many stations.
* One solution that some people use is to keep a bike in the parking near work, during the night/weekend. So they use two different bikes, one to go to the train station near their home & one to go from the train station near their work to work.
Not really. You only need a single lane road with some buses running on it.
I’m not. My comment was unclear, but 50000 passengers per hour is for a single line.
Incorrect. A more competent operation would run 30 trains per hour not 24, and have longer and more efficiently filled trains, and would run trains in equal quantities in both directions so frequencies could be high all day long rather than the trains sitting in a yard near downtown for the entire middle of the day.
Your whole position is that rail transports 10-20x as many people per hour for the same width road, you can’t reasonably get that many people into and out of your train stations if those ratios are correct with a single lane road.
Even if you could you are just punting one more time, and you have to organize and build the infrastructure to get all those people onto buses. To get high volume bus transport you need everyone to get on and off at a very small number of stops, which presents exactly the same issue, just one more kick of the can.
You’re in the flat Netherlands, right? I’m in relatively flat New Jersey. The nearest station is 2.7 miles away…. with 400 feet of climbing. Most people aren’t going to do that for a commute. The nearest major station is 3.5 miles and 530 feet of climbing, or 4 miles and 450 feet of climbing. And now once I’ve got the bicycle to the station, what do I do? I can’t take it on the train (no bicycles except folding bicycles — which are much heavier, so a worse climb — on rush hour trains, very limited on non-rush hour). If I leave the bike at the smaller station it’ll be stolen often. And then there’s winter, and 90+ degree days in summer.
There is a parking lot next to my office in Manhattan. But they don’t pay me enough to use it, nor to get through Manhattan traffic to reach the entrance.
And places like Manhattan have all their own issues with trains, the average rider on NYC public transportation spends 87 mins a day just riding. The comparison here is between high speed trains and highways, not between subways and street driving in dense population centers.
Apple’s parking is largely underground on that campus, so unless you are proposing that highly paid tech workers are going to be staffed in basements its largely a moot point. Plus Apple, and most (all?) of the large tech companies are already running free commuter buses for their employees in SV, the infrastructure issues are largely about regulations/ordinance issues.
And your country is not a good proxy for 9X% of the US. The populated areas of the Netherlands are very flat, and temperatures are moderate. Almost every major US city is going to have at least one of significantly hotter summers, significantly colder winters, significantly more elevation change, or significantly more precipitation. Just looking at the closest major city to me (Philadelphia) it appears that we have colder winters, hotter summers, more elevation change and ~25% more precipitation. My wife was commuting by bike (~4 miles) for multiple years was willing to ride down to 20F and up to 90F and she still had to drive (or be picked up at work) ~6 weeks out of the year due to temperature, snow or hard rain, and this is a moderate climate in the US, and much more pleasant in terms of extremes than the one I moved here from (Cleveland).
Your country has a specific niche that would not work for US citizens at all.
Googling for answers
Amsterdamn appears to get 1-4″ of snowfall a year, Philadelphia averages ~13. My brother visited from Cleveland this summer and couldn’t fathom how 90% of parking in the area was street parking because in Cleveland they get 54 inches a year which means street parking is a no go.
There is no amount of infrastructure, absent a massive tunnel network, that would make Clevelanders able to bike like residents of Amsterdam can. Bike lanes would end up filled with snow/slush to often for it to be a primary mode of transportation, and that is without considering how much colder and hotter Cleveland gets (and my guess would be windier as well).
No, they would not, as these limits are set by the FRA and Amtrak, not NJT.
No, they would not, as the train length limits are due to Penn Station platform and interlocking limits.
Unfortunately the passengers are a bit picky about this; the bulk of them want to go towards Manhattan in the morning, out of Manhattan in the evening, and to stay where they are during the day. If you ran equal quantities of trains outward in the morning, you’d find you didn’t have the equipment available for the evening commute.
“This is merely transit efficiency. Surely you’ve heard of it? It levitates bullet trains from Tokyo to Osaka.”
@All
My point is that the high density areas that people are increasingly migrating to, which has many density-related benefits, makes cars both very expensive to park and less beneficial in use (due to congestion, many traffic lights, low speed limits, etc). Furthermore, parking lowers density of houses and services, so cars work against the trend, which means that as the trend continues, cars can be expected to get more expensive and less usable in the high density areas.
We already see a lot of businesses acting on this reality, by bringing rental bikes and scooters to cities. Note that this actually followed subsidized schemes that perhaps proved the existence of that market and showed what works and what doesn’t.
I do think that snow is a decent counterargument, although studded bike tyres exist (I’ve mounted them on a bike for a family member). Warm weather or rain less so. Cycling is cooler than walking with the same vigor, because of the cooling air the higher speeds produces. Note that Amsterdam actually has considerably higher humidity than Philly or NYC. Rain can be dressed for.
@The Nybbler
Electric bikes can make cycling up an incline a breeze, although with the higher costs, they are more attractive for thieves. Of course, you can have secured bicycle parking (or valet parking, to make it properly American).
As for where to leave your bike, that is a matter of parking infrastructure, as I explained.
@baconbits9
Doesn’t Apple provide laundry, gyms, fitness, theaters, etc? Why not put that underground?
@All
America traditionally has a ‘can do’ reputation, but I feel that there is too much ‘can’t do’ attitude here. I feel that if cars were new (and there were no garages, knowledge about winter tyres, etc), you guys would complain how the rubber tyres don’t work that well in winter, that street parking cars doesn’t work in Cleveland (completely ignoring the possibility of building garages), that there are no good roads for cars, etc. All those rebuttals were actually solid arguments when cars were new, however, they clearly could be solved. If people would have given up on all new technology due to problems with it, we would still be walking everywhere and living in caves.
Again, my point is that you need infrastructure for alternatives to work. All the complaints that bikes or other alternatives don’t work due to lacking infrastructure is not a rebuttal to the alternatives being viable after a concerted push to build infrastucture.
One may not believe in such a concerted effort in general or with the current government, but that doesn’t mean that the alternative is technically impossible.
@Aapje:
I mean… it looks to me like the whole objection is that America has empirically lost the ‘can do’ it had when cars were new, when the Eisenhower Administration funded the interstate highways, and so on. The current President literally got elected on a platform of “Make America build great infrastructure again! Good jobs making stuff, that you won’t have to compete with illegal immigrants for!” And I’m not seeing new infrastructure.
Lol. This isn’t about infrastructure, places in the US have 40-50 C swings. You are taking one of the most pleasant places to ride bicycles year round and using it as a baseline instead of as an exception, your opinion that the US doesn’t bike enough being about infrastructure is just wrong.
Interesting as the bicycle discussion is, I think the conversation’s in danger of getting side-tracked by it. The real issue, after all, is about public transport, with bicycles being relevant mainly as a way of getting to and from train stations and the like. Since lots of countries, including ones with less of a cycling culture than the Netherlands, manage to have decent, high-capacity public transport systems, a flat geography and temperate climate clearly aren’t prerequisites for decent public transport.
The dirty little secret is everything’s more expensive and less beneficial in use in high density. Except the shank’s mare, which doesn’t scale. Cars and buses get caught in traffic. Cars have trouble with parking. Trains need to make too many stops or serve insufficient locations. Bicycles are stolen because there’s no secure parking.
The New York metropolitan area is by far the most dense in the US. It has by far the largest transit share. And by far the longest (in terms of time) commutes. Density is the problem.
One you reach a certain denseness, maybe, but there’s a happy medium in density as in other matters. And of course, good public transport networks can help ameliorate some of the disadvantages of crowded living — you mention New York, but I don’t think anyone would suggest that transit times would get better if everybody stopped using public transport and switched to cars instead.
@baconbits9
Yes, but very few people live in Alaska and such. I’m talking about mainly the east and west coast, where you have most high-density areas.
@The Nybbler
There are also many upsides to density.
Upsides and downsides change differently for different things, as density increases.
A swing of 50 degrees C is a swing of 90 degrees F. We absolutely have that on the East Coast.
Mostly that accrue either to people who like density for its own sake, or to people who can afford the enormous amount to alleviate the negatives.
No, having lots of choice in the shops is nice for pretty much everyone and in itself has no downsides that I can see (unless too much choice is a downside).
Chicago this year had lows below -30C (-23F) and highs of 35C (95F). Also terrible road clearing services. So despite optimistically devoting a whole lane of streets in the Loop to bicycles, and having a take-a-bicycle program, it doesn’t seem to do much good.
In Norway, trains transport 3.7 billion passenger kilometers, while cars transport 61 billion passenger kilometers – i.e. about sixteen times as many. Buses weigh in about the same as rail, air travel a bit more. Interestingly, the infrastructure costs for rail and roads (investment and maintenance) are more comparable, with 27 and 37 billion NOK in the state budget, respectively.
Of course, Norway is a sparsely populated country with long distances, so this may not generalize well.
… You have to cost in the cars. Just because they are not on the state budget does not mean they are free. Bit over 3 million cars and vans in Norway, which comfortably makes it a more expensive mode of transport per km, even without counting in fuel costs
Well, I explicitly said infrastructure, but the point that it is only a part of the total is well taken. This goes for all modes of transport, the trains aren’t free either. Some numbers:
Vy (national railway) turnover: ~ 22bn
Total car sales: ~123 bn (2015)
Repairs/maintenance: ~32 bn (but includes trucks etc, I think)
Government income from taxation of cars: ~50bn
Car fuel costs, maybe 50 bn? (estimated from passenger km)
This is of course an incredibly rough estimate, but adding these (and subtracting taxes), car transport costs around 200bn in total, while rail costs about 50bn.
So by this estimate, it looks like rail is on average approximately four times as expensive as cars. What is your basis for claiming rail is cheaper?
Northeast corridor Amtrak makes sense. I used to take it all the time between NYC and Boston, and occasionally to DC. In these cities you go straight into a major transit hub in the city center. And the journey is far more pleasant than an airplane or car while taking a comparable amount of time.
The rest of the system exists because congresspeople in the rest of the country won’t let Amtrak shut it down.
Railroads work best if all the trains are travelling at approximately the same speed. Most trains are freight trains. Freight doesn’t have to move fast. People who are willing to pay extra to move fast, are probably going to use airplanes. So there has never been much market for high-speed passenger trains, except prestige.
And prestige can sometimes be enough. If, e.g., it’s enough to elect a president or a prime minister, then you’ve got someone who might be able to use tax revenues or even print money to pay for fast passenger trains, shoving the freight aside or building dedicated track, with no need to ever turn a profit. Or a freight-rail company might use fast passenger trains for branding in a competitive market.
In the United States, trains haven’t really been a prestige thing since we invented airplanes, and until a Green-tinted segment of Blue Tribe latched on to them for environmental and let’s-copy-Europe reasons. In the United States, trains are built and operated by Red Tribe and have to run through mostly Red Tribe territory.
Is this part of why the Northeast Corridor is better than most other areas trainwise-it passes through lots of Blue Tribe territory?
The real advantage is that it doesn’t pass through much territory at all.
It’s probably more that it has the density to make it worthwhile for Amtrak to actually own the track itself, meaning it doesn’t have to contend with the speed mismatches.
Another it the infrastructure legally required for fast train speeds. Passenger trains in the US used to run much faster on many routes in the US back in the 40s. After a bad wreck, the federal government mandated specific wayside equipment (automatic signalling equipment) for running faster than 79mph. The equipment was expensive, so the railroads mostly said “fuck that” and capped train speeds. The few roads that installed the equipment often eventually ended up ripping it out to avoid having to maintain it. I think the ones that did keep it were stuff like commuter trains, which often didn’t run that fast to begin with, but the Wikipedia page is the limit of my knowledge there.
Because Amtrak owns the track, they’re going to spend the money on that infrastructure. The freight roads, not so much.
It’s probably worth distinguishing between monopolies where, if not for the monopoly, there would be lots of competition – and monopolies where, if not for the monopoly, there wouldn’t be any competitors at all.
If not for the heavily subsidized AmTrack, the time/cost of getting from Portland to Chicago by rail would be essentially infinite, because nobody would consider it worthwhile to even attempt to provide such a service.
Indeed!
I find myself kind of torn on this: in theory I love trains. Dinner cars and sleeper cars have an old-fashioned romance about them. OTOH airliners have been invented and nobody but nobody has the vacation time for a train that takes more than one night each way. I’m not a libertarian, but of all the things we could use Big Government for, theoretically aesthetically pleasing travel that hardly anyone uses as it exists has got to be near the bottom of the list. OTOH, if climate change is that negative, shouldn’t we be putting brilliant engineers into looking at a replacement for air travel (haha no, because we’ll never overcome Cost Disease, so anything governments force their people to give up for climate will go unreplaced).
My understanding is that “rail travel as entertainment” services (where you board an old timey looking thing and travel around some relatively scenic area for a couple hours and a waiter serves you decent food and wine) exist, and are provided privately, in various locations. So if you’re into that sort of thing, you can get it.
The problem is that the sort of stuff that makes travel fun/romantic is usually anti-correlated with the sort of stuff that makes it quick/efficient/profitable, and the vast majority of customers are going to solve for the latter.
Im going on one next month!
Wrath of Gnon on Twitter, one of whose main purposes is all about showing that traditional urbanism is more sustainable, has a great love of trains. They’re definitely more picturesque (which aids one of his other purposes, showing that traditional urbanism is more beautiful!), but I haven’t been persuaded we can do anything to bring them back so long as all our lives are built around cars. New Urbanists like James Howard Kunstler want to bring them back—trams, too, which are even more picturesque—but they’ve pinned their hopes for revival on Peak Oil.
More sustainable than what? (Some other kind of urbanism? Something other than urbanism?)
More sustainable than other kinds of urbanism, yes.
As everyone else has mentioned there are a lot of factors. At an average of 60 mph you can cover 3,000 miles in 50 hours, and the majority of amtrack trains can travel at over 100 mph. The main trouble is that passengers on trains have to stop frequently, not just when the trains stop for frieght or in a city, but also waiting for another train. Visiting family in Cleveland from Philly for me is over 12 hours of travel time by train (not including extra travel to and from the train station) and 6.5 hours of driving straight through, with most of the difference waiting for trains at other stations. You really have to commit to train passenger travel to make it work, and it is long term growth inhibiting when you do.
I have a very different perspective on, and experience with, the passenger trains. In Russia, and the former USSR in general, regular, i.e. not high-speed, passenger trains are very common and is the primary mode of long-distance transportation for anyone with income around or below the median (modulo some regional differences and nuances). The tickets are usually about 2-3 times cheaper than a plane for the corresponding destination and class, for the places allowing you to sleep. For sitting places it’d be more like 4-5 times cheaper but for obvious reasons there’s no such thing as a sitting train for travel times more than 20 or so hours, which corresponds to the distance of 600-800 miles. Speaking of which, the speed usually averages at about 30mph – but that’s including all the stops and the fact that a train goes ~24 hours a day. There’s plenty of small cities and towns which have a train station but no airport, and the only cases of the reverse I’ve heard of are settlements in the far north which are physically not accessible by anything but air (and maybe rivers). Most interestingly imao is that the passenger trains are one of the very few things that operate exactly on time in Russia. As in, a train which travels for 2-3 days routinely arrives within a minute or two of its scheduled time.
Some of the reasons why they are so cheap are obvious. Engines and carts are produced domestically (almost no civilian planes are), infrastructure was built in the Soviet Union with no regard to economic efficiency and is now being reused. RZhD (“Russian Railways”) is an absolute monopoly heavily subsidized by the government – although it’s incredibly corrupt even by Russian standards so it’s anyone’s guess whether the damage from the corruption outweighs the subsidies. And of course the trains are less comfortable – I’ve never tried Amtrak but would be extremely surprised if it’s not the case. The cheapest class called Platzkart would deserve a post of its own just to describe what experience it is (and share my nostalgia for it, lol). Still, I’m very puzzled to see the trains here in the US being twice more expensive than planes, and people arguing that it’s their inherent property.
For the record, high-speed rail does exist in Russia, bit it’s just another attempt to copy something good from Europe and completely uninteresting as such: a bit cheaper and somewhat worse than the original, uncommon or abcent anywhere but the central regions.
I have taken a train to a very remote location in Russia, and can confirm that’s the case.
Part of the reason they are on time may be that there are many stops without any proper station beyond a platform, and winters in Russia are miserable enough that waiting for the train could be an almost deadly experience.
But trains frequently have quite a bit of spare time in their routes; they usually plan routes so the stops in major cities happen on time and at a reasonable hour, so they sometimes just wait in some station at night for a couple of hours before reaching a major city (they do so in the Moscow-St. Petersburgh night train).
If I was travelling withing Russia, and I couldn’t use an international airline, the prospect of having to travel on a Sukhoi would make me seriously consider train travel.
Where did you travel?
No it’s not. Bus stops are just as cold and may have no walls and in some cases nothing at all, just a sign. None gives a shit if you freeze your everything off while waiting for a bus being 40 minutes late, should’ve dress warmer you know.
But yeah trains basically have plenty of slack in their schedule which allows them to make up for unexpected delays.
Luckily Sukhois, or worse Tu-154s, are exceedingly rare even among the Russian airlines. Overwhelming majority of domestic flights are A320s and Boeing-737s.
Moscow to Kandalaksha.
The Ural airlines Moscow-Simferopol flight was on an Airbus; a bird strike (apparently due to an uncontrolled rubbish dump) almost created a deadly situation, although thankfully everybody survived.
Russian airports don’t seem very safety conscious in other regards either, although I’ve flown to Domodedovo or Sheremetyevo OK.
@ana53294
Fair enough, I definitely wasn’t trying to say that flights in Russia are as safe as in Europe, just that they are not quite that more dangerous as to be served mostly by Russian planes.
Thanks very much for your report from Russia, as it’s one of the few truly huge countries that doesn’t have Anglosphere institutions/cost disease. Your different problems and solutions are interesting to hear.
Amtrak’s finances are muddled, but roughly speaking there are three kinds of routes:
1. The Northeast Corridor trains (Acela and Northeast Regional). These aren’t subsidized because they’re popular enough to make a profit.
2. The long-distance trains, like the Chicago-Portland run. These, as discussed above, are totally useless as transportation, but might be nice as a vacation in themselves. They get federal subsidies.
3. The short-distance trains that make up the majority of the system. These aren’t federally funded but get subsidies from state governments. Many of these could potentially be useful routes, but in practice it’s too expensive to provide enough service to be useful. For instance, Indiana recently eliminated the Chicago-Indianapolis train, which only ran once a day and was significantly slower than driving.
If we had Shinkansen or TGV trains, and tracks and infrastructure to support them, a lot of the #3 type routes could be competitive with flying and driving, as #1 already is. It’ll never be practical to build high-speed rail over the Rockies, barring some extreme shock making oil several orders of magnitude more expensive.
There’s also the Brightline, a privately funded train from Miami to West Palm Beach, supposedly to be extended to Orlando in the next few years. No idea if that’ll work out for its backers, but if it does it might push Amtrak out of the Florida market for good.
I learned recently about the Standard Ebooks project. The idea is to produce quality, libre ebooks for works in the (US) public domain. They have a typography manual and scripts to correct things like archaic spellings—you can start with a transcription from somewhere like Project Gutenberg and bring it up to standard from there. And being libre, source code for all the tools and books is available online.
Here’s an example one: The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Contrast with, uh, certain alternatives.
I’m very unimpressed by Standard Ebooks, and that The Napoleon of Notting Hill file is a perfect example of why. Sure, it looks good compared with a text file alternative, but look at the original Project Gutenberg version from which it was made. Standard Ebooks removes the original cover, the illustrations, the formatting (note how the dedication loses its italics) and for what, exactly? What benefit do I get from it over Project Gutenberg’s epub version of the book?
The formatting of the poem changed because they have their own manuals, like I said. I don’t know why they removed the illustrations, though; that’s a shame.
The benefit is a standardized format for the ebooks. When it changes the formatting, produces a new cover, and so on, it’s really no different from what Heritage Press or the Folio Society does. Project Gutenberg is really uneven by contrast—some will have the images, others won’t, some will have the cover, others won’t, some will have page numbers, others won’t….
In all the discussion about Trump’s desire to buy desirable territory, why am I not reading anything about the idea of self-determination? We’re currently seeing the results of China (re-)acquiring Hong Kong against the will/desires of some (large?) portion of its residents. China makes no claim to be a free nation in any way – rights don’t exist, more or less. The US does make such claims – but no one’s talking about the Greenlanders having a right to determine their own government.
Purchasing territory has historically involved subjects – not citizens. Citizens vote to join other countries – or don’t. Trump figures Greenlanders are – or should be – for sale, at least in job lots. They apparantly don’t have any more right to self determination in his mind than e.g. polar bears. Except maybe they can emigrate after sale, the way a worker can get a new job when their division is sold to another company.
I’m surprised not to encounter any indignation about this attitude.
Because if you travel too far down this rabbit-hole, the light at the end of the tunnel is “the south should have been allowed to secede?”
Self-determination offers very little benefit to most existing governments. Because it wouldn’t be zero-sum. If Greenland can vote to leave Denmark and join the US, we may map that roughly as a loss to Denmark but an offsetting gain to the US – or zero-sum to “existing world governments in general.”
But if they can do that, why can’t they vote to leave Denmark entirely and form their own nation? And if they can do that, why couldn’t Texas do that? Or Hong Kong?
Indeed.
Only if all of its peoples had strong exit rights.
Only if they voted for it. The white males of Texas did, but everywhere else secession was chosen by conventions, many of whom had been elected as Unionists and changed their minds while at the conventions.
(Also don’t forget that Mississippi and South Carolina enslaved absolute majorities of their population, and four other Confederate states enslaved above 40%. If they had been asked, I’m sure secession would’ve been roundly voted down.)
I don’t doubt you, but I notice that those states now have comfortable white majorities, and in fact no state is currently majority black, which makes me curious what happened. Was the exodus to the north massive enough to account for that? Or did whites just outbreed blacks in the south?
@Doctor Mist, eyeballing Wikipedia, the percentage of Black population went down steadily through the Great Migration era – so it looks like, yes, the migration really was that huge.
… I don’t know if “respect for the principles of Self Determination” is a quality I’d assign a would-be nation with 40% of it’s population enslaved.
They can. Per the self-rule law of 2009, Greenland is only one referendum away from achieving sovereignty. They don’t want to, however, given that they’re currently financially dependent on Denmark.
Has this happened before? Citizens may vote among themselves to attempt to overthrow their current rulers, but not a lot of referendum for succession have actually occurred.
Possibly Brexit, though anti-Brexit would probably say that’s absurd. Some areas of the UK have tried this, but it’s unclear how the implementation would have unfolded.
I don’t think any of the US’ land was gained or lost this way, save Texas, which is a bit more complicated than that–the had to first fight to leave Mexico, and the they there includes a lot of recent US emigres.
Self-determination seems to be a principle primarily advanced to destabilize other areas, not brought up when it might constrain ourselves.
It’s an improvement over the historical territory acquisition method as it requires consent of the current rulers, and hence is also unlikely to go anywhere. Greenland’s sparse population (56,000, 10% of Denmark’s population) may also be a reason.
(edit: lots)
Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. It was somewhat of a shotgun wedding, because Newfoundland’s budget was a complete shambles after WW II expenses. But there was a referendum etc.
It’s not quite your case – Newfoundland was sovereign at the time. But it is my case – citizens voting to give up sovereignity.
[Edit to add…] We also have (failed) secession referendums in Scotland and Quebec. Unlike the US of a century ago, Great Britain and Canada in modern times don’t seem inclined to keep unwilling territory in their union by force of arms.
Denmark has about 5.5 million people; Greenland has about 55 thousand people. 55,000 / 5,500,000 = .01. That is to say, Greenland has 1% of the population of Denmark, not 10%.
oops, that’s embarrassing. You’re right.
What do you mean you’re not reading anything about self-determination? Denmark’s response to this whole debacle was “we can’t sell Greenland because it’s not ours to sell.” A large part of the anger over this topic in Greenland and Denmark was about the very ideas of self-determination.
Admittedly that didn’t make the headlines here, but I’d argue that’s likely due to the fact that no one actually thought this was a serious proposal. I’d bet with a large amount of confidence that in the alternate universe where Denmark went along with this farce you’d see people in America vocally concerned about the rights of Greenlanders.
Trump cancelling the state visit to Denmark immediately after this proposal was rejected changes my perception of it from “throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks” to as serious a proposal as Trump is capable of. (He’s not good at details like normal diplomatic protocol etc.)
Idk. WaPo had a pretty compelling theory that this entire dust-up was just an excuse for Trump to cancel the Denmark trip. Apparently Obama is scheduled to visit there the week after Trump and the white house was nervous about the contrasting receptions they’d get. This conceivably shifts the narrative from”Danes like Obama more than Trump” to “Trump stands up to nasty prime minister.
Then again, that theory falls victim to the same critique that always applies whenever anyone writes a “he’s secretly playing 4d chess” article – none of his behavior thus far makes it look like he’s capable of this kind of planning.
What about my (still incredibly simple and consistent) theory that he cancelled the trip following a perceived slight by the Danish PM in the media.
Your theory is still likely the correct one.
I would also entertain the idea that the Danish PM addressed it with the intention of getting Trump to cancel. Does any European leader really want Trump to visit? What do they get out of it, other than police OT and traffic jams?
Well, they would get a good look at the least Danish person on the planet. So there’s that.
It’s hard to be indignant about any particular thing when you’ve been in a state of constant indignation for three years straight. If Trump is a an FSB asset setting up concentration camps who eats his steak well-done with ketchup, how is there any room left over to be indignant about his indifference to the political will of Greenlanders?
That said, any actual negotiations for purchasing Greenland would inevitably include representatives for Greenlanders as well as Danes. If anything, having both groups at the table strengthens the American bargaining position because we can take advantage of their existing desire for independence, offering Greenland more autonomy and political influence than they currently have in the Kingdom of Denmark. If Greenland came into the union as the 51st state, it would become more influential than Denmark itself.
I don’t think that they would take the deal, there’s no reason strong enough to overcome national pride, but I don’t think offering it is insensitive.
The Greenlanders do have a right to determine their own government, but their government is the Unitary Realm of Denmark and their sovereign is the King of Denmark. There’s absolutely no compelling legal reason that Denmark cannot suspend the self-rule that Greenland has been granted, because Greenland is not sovereign.
So what you’re saying is we would be welcomed as liberators?
Can someone explain the precise differences between Universal Basic Income, Citizen’s Dividend, and Negative Income Tax? I mentally group them all together as “UBI-like programs,” and I have some basic idea of how they’re all distinct from each other in theory, but I’m still somewhat unclear on the details and I don’t really know how they’d look different in practice. What are the benefits and drawbacks of each of them?
Under standard definitions AIUI, UBI is a lump sum for everyone. NIT is a smooth-sloping progressive payment, where people making $0 get the max and people making $XX,XXX dollars or more get nothing. Citizen’s Dividend is explicitly linked to
taxrevenues, unlike the other two, which are payouts set by fiat.Well, in a simplified system, negative income tax says that the net amount you get from the government is
T = r ( I – O)
where T is the effective tax (can be negative), r is the tax rate, I is your income, and O is the offset subtracted from your income before taxes are assessed. In UBI, the net amount you get from the government is
T = rI – U
where T is the effective tax, r is the tax rate, I is your income, and U is the UBI. For a flat r, these are identical. For a progressive r, they aren’t, but they still convert into similar schemes by factoring/distributing the r. In the NIT tax case, the effective UBI rO increases with the tax rate. From the other standpoint, the effective NIT offset U/r from the UBI decreases with increasing r. This has the interesting effect that the UBI is actually more progressive than the NIT for the same tax schedule.
I don’t think this is actually true; it creates a weird situation where the highest payout goes to a person whose income isn’t at zero and the net pay graph is sigmoid, assuming your r is some exponent of I. I think you instead want something more like
T = r*I – r’*O
Where r’ = x-ar
If x, a = 1 that’s way too progressive but you get the idea.
Citizen’s Dividend seems to have some nice competing incentives: lower earners would want higher taxes to have a higher dividend, but the higher earners would want to raise more people out of the lower classes so that less people would want to raise taxes. Is this how it has empirically played out?
Isn’t “the poor want the rich to pay more taxes, while the rich want the poor to get off the couch and get a job” pretty much the default incentive structure we already have everywhere?
Those same competing incentives exist under progressive taxation. You tell me.
True, but dependent on the progressive taxation being a direct payment to recipients, rather than indirect benefits via funding welfare programs. Currently, revenue is just as much benefiting the middle and upper classes (such as through funding government contracts and paying government employees), so the incentives are muddled.
Like the difference between a company doing direct profit sharing, or spending profit on workplace comforts.
Greyhound can get you by bus from New York to LA in three days, driving more or less non-stop. Has anyone here taken such a multi-day journey by bus?
Yup. In college I was part of a group that was going to Peach Tree City in Atlanta, GA, from the similarly fruity Orange County, CA. I was too late in activating my credit card, and so couldn’t afford the plane tickets. Bus was the only affordable option.
It was quite uncomfortable, I was sweaty and smelly afterwards, and my watch was stolen (or fell?) off of my wrist as I slept. But it was cheap! I did a lot of reading, although I don’t remember what. That was before I had any portable electronics for entertainment (2002). I think modern buses might have chargers, which would make is more bearable.
And I learned that however big you think Texas is, it’s bigger.
In contrast, the trans-Pacific flight I took in business class ten years later was paradise.
Greyhounds today have chargers, yeah. I charged all my devices beforehand for nothing. My ride was only a few hours, though.
As a lark, anyone want to guess what activity that group did? I’ll give a hint: in college, my two organized extracurricular activities were exact opposites in one sense.
Digging holes and filling them back in?
Eating and exercising?
There’s nothing to do in Peachtree City but play golf, so I guess that was one of them?
So, okay play golf and murder golfers. Did I win?
Randy hasn’t responded, so I guess we have to assume Conrad is right and Randy is the Peachtree City Strangler.
More seriously, I remember the high school having a good track team. Maybe it was a track meet? Fast track vs. slow golf?
Making wine and wine tasting?
Ah, I didn’t expect all the responses to come right after I leave for the weekend.
It was mime, with my other activity being speech and debate.
About 20 years ago I went from Boston MA to Las Cruces NM by bus, stopping only as much as the bus schedule required. It was a fine way to travel — more legroom than a plane, and chance to walk around during smoke/fast food breaks every few hours.
Feel like we did a ski trip, Texas to New Mexico or Colorado, that was multi-day on the bus.
Also did bus from Georgia to Massachusetts that was at least overnight.
I once took the bus from Bemidji, Minnesota, to Detroit, Michigan, which necessitated an overnight stop of 4 hours in the Gary, Indiana bus depot, waiting for a bus change. It wasn’t a very big station, and they only had these uncomfortable plastic orange chairs to sit in, much less comfortable than the seats on the bus. Two different people tried to sell me drugs, and I had a fairly long conversation with a bored prostitute whose proposition I had turned down. To avoid trouble, it probably helped that I’m a fairly big, somewhat intimidating looking guy, and I think it was pretty obvious I didn’t have anything worth taking. Highly not recommended. (This was in the 1990s, so things might well be different now.)
Surely someone has already made a film called “Bus Station”, which features varying collection of strangers who strike up conversations on a variety of subjects between arriving at the station and getting on their buses.
I’m thinking there would be a completely still camera pointed at a row of seats with an institutional background, and no music but some background sounds and occasional announcements to establish the setting as a bus station.
Maybe it’s too art-house.
Have the characters all end up murdering each other and its a Tarantino flick.
I think that one’s called “End of the Line”.
I was under the impression Gary was one of the worst of the rust belt cities; not quite Detroit, perhaps, but not much better off. Perhaps that was a contributing factor.
Gary is probably worse than Detroit, but since it’s much smaller it doesn’t get compared head-to-head with it.
Yeah, I’m from Detroit, so I’m used to its brand of squalor, but the bus station at Gary was really bad. It was also really small, so I remember wondering to myself why they didn’t have me wait and change buses in Chicago instead. Looking up the Greyhound routes now, in fact, that’s what they do.
I did two or three days from San Francisco to Buffalo, back in my dirty hippy days (I think 1997). This was after hitchhiking from Houston to SF,, which was more interesting, but the bus trip was kind of fun too.
Yes. Once, in college, I missed my flight home, and ended up on a 44-hour bus ride because it was the cheapest way back. Overall, it wasn’t nearly as bad as you might expect, although it was St. Louis – Spokane via the northern route, and the ratio of crazies was lower than I’d expect it to be further south. Still not an experience I’m eager to repeat.
Who has opinions on Powell’s speech and the strong market reaction?
The reaction wasn’t to Powell’s speech. It was to Trump’s latest tweetstorm. Specifically, I think it’s this:
The market responds strongly to trade war escalation headlines. If a deal is now impossible due to tit-for-tat retaliation, then everyone’s in trouble. I think this might be the tipping point.
Sure it is immediately related to Trump’s tweets, but the general reaction to Powell was muted and the fact that Trump just spewing without even proposing additional tarriffs is suggestive that the markets are fragile.
Well, they’ve been range-bound for the last 18 months, and we were near the top of that range yesterday. I guess it depends on whether Trump announces additional/sped up tariffs later today.
The real question is, why are markets so range-bound? We’ve had a decent earnings season and dovish trade war/Fed headlines for the last few weeks, we should’ve seen a break-out from the May heights. But it hasn’t happened, and now this is going on.
I wouldn’t say the markets were range bound for 18 months, the recent S&P peak was an all time high and the draw down into Dec ’18 was significantly lower than the low for the previous 10 months.
I don’t think so; it’s still just blather. It fits Trump’s pattern of a bunch of escalation that ultimately leads essentially nowhere (e.g. “renegotiating NAFTA” or the Mexican tariff threats which left him getting the same deal he’d already got). There’s always the danger that this gets out of control, though, which is probably part of why the market is reacting.
And there’s the 2.5D chess idea that he’s doing this to keep the markets down temporarily so the Fed is more likely to lower rates.
I agree that it might just be blather, but only if Trump doesn’t step up his tariff schedule today/next week. The key is to avoid further upping of the ante.
Speech: pretty standard stuff.
Market reaction: not entirely sure what you mean. SPX is down about 1.7% on the day, which isn’t an unusual move, and was initially flat around Powell’s speech. Timing-wise, a decent part of the drop coincides with Trump’s anti-Fed and China tweets (which sounds a tempting explanation given earlier headlines from China), but I don’t think causation is knowable (or worth arguing).
I was personally thinking about how the Fed said ‘we know how to handle everything except Trump’s trade stuff’ and then the market had a sizable (especially when you consider gold’s jump and bond rate drops its quite broad) reaction.
The timing on the drop is pretty precise. The “I hereby order” tweet was at 10:59 AM EST; between 10:55 AM and 11:15 AM SPX drops 1.39%.
Does anyone know of a good maximalist research-focused plan to address climate change?
Background:
I’m sold on the idea promoted by Noah Smith, among others, that the best contribution the US can make against climate change is on the research front. Our emissions aren’t high enough for policies limited to lowering our emissions to make a dent. However, if we develop low enough cost batteries, solar cells, etc. then for purely economic reasons the rest of the world would shift to those technologies and reduce their emissions.
For me, the question then is how much money can we effectively pump into research and how would we use it. I just read in a Kevin Drum article that Warren proposes spending $40 billion a year on research (without much specificity on how it’d be spent). Drum then says that he considers $500 billion per year to be the “baseline for seriousness on R&D”. I’m a researcher and I’m all for research, but $500 billion is an absolutely bonkers number. Right now the whole NSF is $7 billion a year. The whole Department of Energy is $30 billion per year (and much of that goes to nuclear weapon stewardship). Even Warren’s plan would constitute a total reshaping of the research landscape. I don’t know how you would even spend $500 billion per year. That’s the entire research output of 500 R1 universities (and right now there’s only 131 of them).
This brings me to the question at the top of the post. Are there any studies out there that game out how we could best spend another $40-100 billion a year on research preventing climate change? My thought would be that much of it could go into increasing the Department of Energy national lab system, adding new labs focused on specific classes of technologies. It’d need to have some sort of a workforce development strategy too — we’d need a lot more people with the relevant training to perform the research. Above all else, I wonder at what level the marginal returns to more funding approach zero. At what point do you run out of work that can be done in parallel? At what point to you run out of researchers of high enough quality to matter?
The proposed federal budget for 2020 is nearly $5T. If you’re going to argue that climate change represents an existential threat to the continued survival of the human species then, I dunno, maybe you can come up with an argument to justify spending 10% of the total federal budget on it?
Because first we have to do geoengineering trials on Mars for safety reasons. But Mars isn’t like earth. That means terraforming Mars first. All of this will be very, very expensive.
But it’s totally awesome, so we should spend 10% of the total federal budget per year on it.
My plan’s not significantly more poorly justified than Elizabeth Warren’s number or Kevin Drum’s number. And my plan nets us a colony on Mars (*waves hands*).
My question isn’t whether we should commit a large fraction of the government budget to combat climate change (I think we should, or at least we should consider it). The question is whether the last $100 billion per year out of $500 billion actually gets you anything (or even the last $400 billion). If it doesn’t, then we should spend it on something else (either climate related like consumer subsidies or other causes like healthcare).
This. The question is, if the US Department of Energy increased its zero-carbon technology R&D budget to the research output of 500 out of 131 research universities, what would we get? Would it be highly effective stewardship of the taxpayers’s money, or would it be so much more money than the system can handle that engineering professors would have to roll up $100 bills to snort cocaine off the thighs of affirmative-consenting sexy Asian grad students?
I want to connect this with broblawsky’s claim that we’ve already run out of researchers. The slight modification is that we’ve already run out of researchers who are any good. The literature is already jam-packed with mediocre-to-poor papers from grad students who don’t have anything interesting to say but are nevertheless required to say something to satisfy the conditions attached to the money that is currently rolling in. There are still good people who have good ideas and who could accomplish a lot with additional dollars, but given the performance of our current system in allocating research dollars, I think it’s unlikely that a massive influx of money is going to be remotely as efficient at driving those good ideas as people would like to hope.
…Did I choose the wrong career path?
Even more precisely, we’ve got lots of researchers who are good. It’s just that what they are particularly good at is A: stuff that won’t actually help with climate change and, B: convincing the people in charge of distributing the funds that their work is good for dealing with climate change after all. Including, yes, some who are good enough at that to convince the funding authorities to ignore the expensively consenting sexy Asian grad students.
So that’s where most of the money would go, even if the “funding authorities” consist of a committee of the most enlightened rationalists of SSC. Building the sort of institutions that can effectively spend $500E9/year in a particular field without squandering most of it, is a really hard problem and not made easier by haste or publicity. We barely got NASA to the $50E9/yr level before it ossified into uselessness, and we had a much clearer idea what we were setting out to do in the first place.
I mean, do you think it would be any less effective then whatever else the government is choosing to spend $500B on?
From my POV, sure, it would probably be a useless waste of money. But so is nearly everything else they do, soooooo….
You know it doesn’t work that way. You still have to pay for everything else the government is currently paying for, every penny of it. The extra $500B means an extra $500B in taxes, and $500B less money for everyone who isn’t the government to spend on what they want. Or else it’s $500B closer to finding out what happens when the Magic Money Tree shrivels up and dies.
Funding basic research is worthwhile, but has a lot of built-in overhead. But it seems like we might be able to get somewhere by offering prizes for some specific bits of technology we’d like to have. Something like demonstrating energy storage technology with some set of characteristics (J/$, J/kg, J/L, plus durability and such), or solar power installations which provide an average of X J/day at such-and-so location, at such-and-so cost.
I don’t know enough to know how to write the requirements, but if the challenges were for stuff that’s within reach, we’d likely get universities and big companies working toward it, both for the prestige and for the cash. (Though if it’s something that’s a near-term business opportunity, businesses already have a big incentive to develop it….)
I think we’ve already run out of researchers. I can attest that it is pretty easy, at least as of a year ago, to get money to start a company to work on energy storage research, either for EV or grid storage applications.
Climate-scale geoengineering is pretty much totally untapped though. But since that’s almost the start of an entirely new field, I expect the payoff would take many decades.
Field trials for that would be phenomenally complicated and expensive. You’d probably have to buy vast tracts of wasteland. The safety precautions necessary incredible, etc.
Could probably burn tens or hundreds of billions on that.
Maybe start by trying to greenify a desert.
“start by trying to greenify a desert”
Imagine the environmental impact studies required for that.
Here is an (open-access) paper about irrigating the Sahara. It that warns that desert dust currently fertilizes the Atlantic and the Amazon. And locusts.
Better get started. Really, no way to even make the environmental impact studies realistic without greenifying a little chunk first.
How can we can have run out of researchers, when the vast majority of people who enter the sciences fail to become professor and eventually have to settle for low-paying technician jobs, or else leave for the private sector? Many of them would love to keep doing research, but the economics do not allow for it.
Almost everybody who “would love to keep doing research” as a professor, envisions having a bunch of technicians to help them with the job. And rightly so, for most research.
What matters is not the number of people with the title “professor” and a salary to pay the mortgage while they tinker with whatever, but the number of properly-supported research teams, which include managers, administrators, professors, assistant professors, postdocs, research assistants, lab technicians, etc, in the proper proportion. Plus physical infrastructure, of course. And organizational structure that doesn’t emerge spontaneously if you just put a bunch of these people in an auditorium in the proper proportion and which can be grossly dysfunctional if you try to do a rush job of building it.
But right now many of those ‘technicians’ have BS, or even MS, degrees, when they really don’t need more than an AS or even a brief apprenticeship in order to function as a technician.
However: https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/
Do you have evidence for believing that effective organizational structure couldn’t spontaneously form?
The current structure of researchers is based on what gets rewarded now with tenure–high paper output in top venues, success at getting grants, etc. There are a lot of worthwhile researchers who don’t do well at either of those, and so end up never getting a permanent job in their field, or who end up in a teaching job where they can do a little research around the edges.
Some of that research requires large teams of assistants–usually a mix of grad students and technicians. But there’s a wide range even within the same field, and between different fields you can have a huge range. There are people who do really important work on minimal resources, more-or-less alone. There are others whose work requires huge amounts of funding and a big staff to even get started.
I wonder if there’s a good way to fund more of that small-scale, small-group research, so you can allow someone to keep doing research who is only producing one or two papers a year and maybe has one grad student working with him. I think doing that (which might or might not work well in the relevant fields for cutting CO2 emissions–I don’t know) might let you substantially expand the number of working researches from the current stock of available scientists.
I know this wasn’t your question, but its almost certainly not going to make a large impact. If the US develops and introduces cost effective sustainable energy then you will functionally lower demand for fossil fuels, lower their costs for other countries. You have basically cut US emissions, but not world wide emissions unless you come up with ‘super genius plan’ that makes sustainable energy cheaper than extraction of fossil fuels, which seems unlikely as they can’t get it down to even cost competitive yet. Given that it is likely to take decades for such research programs to actually get us to where the paranoid actually think we need to go it seems unlikely that such an effort would ever succeed in a meaningful way.
There are a couple of ideas just in this thread. Geoengineering is one direction – we have a carbon problem, there are X natural things that sequester carbon and Y artificial things. Have a go at 1000 solutions that have the potential to fix things if you pump a trillion – give a mil to each, and 500 mils to the top 10. Then you’re very likely to have a carbon solution with a 1 Trillion price tag, when you’re willing to spend it. Not a bad deal.
The other is energy. Lots of stuff – starting with the very obvious – we need a couple of competing designs for next gen nuclear reactors. Battery tech. Ways to make combustion engines cleaner. Ways to make combustion engine fuel cleaner. Ways to convert combustion engines to methane (btw, why aren’t we all burning methane? it’s a hellof a lot less polluting). Ways to burn other stuff as fuel.
Third would be… new stuff. Fundamental research, materials tech (super duper important), completely random things that have the potential to come with something innovative. That’s also a great way to leak all that research money in
more usefulother directions.If you attempt to do this on a short time scale you are basically just going to end up throwing tons of money at people without the ability to solve the problems. Hey all we need are 1,000 extra highly competent people to run these projects… can’t be to hard to find… right?
You are going to do that anyways, that’s kinda what this program will inevitably do. I’m not even pretending it will work – you have the government handing out money.
Hmm. Prizes maybe? DoD does have a moderately successful tradition, I think most of pre-google self-driving car research was due to their yearly competition.
I think your assumption that your plan has a high chance of yielding a carbon solution. Out of the ideas that you only give $1 million a year to, you’re unlikely to get much progress on a quick time scale (that’s like 7ish grad students a year). That means that you’re really counting on your top 10. There’s no guarantee that any of them will work. There’s no physical law telling you that geoengineering on the necessary scale is possible without too many unwanted side effects.
Financing the 1000 is only to find the top 10. Well, it also has side-effects like creating interest, attention and grad students more familiar with the topic.
Like I said in another comment, I’m not a believer in this kind of gov spending. I was just saying that if you want to spend the money, there are ways to do it that aren’t completely bonkers. Personally I’d bet more on prizes.
Prizes can be useful at the margin, but they do have their limitations. In particular, they are a very high-risk revenue source on which to base a business plan, especially one that requires large up-front loans from hard-nosed bankers. You can do everything right, and come away with a big loss just because someone else was a little bit righter in pursuing the same prize. Or you can decide not to take that risk.
We saw that with the original Ansari X-Prize, where once it was clear that Bert Rutan was making a run with Paul Allen’s money, everybody else basically stopped trying.
You can also wind up with a “solution” that is narrowly tailored to the prize rules and rather less useful than you might have hoped. We saw that with the Ansari X-Prize as well; the intent was to foster the development of a vehicle that would then go on to bootstrap a commercial space-tourism industry, the rules were written to that end, and Paul Allen had cut a deal with Richard Branson for the tourism follow-on before the prize was won. But the vehicle Bert Rutan developed was tailored very specifically to the prize requirements, now fifteen years, at least half a billion dollars, and four deaths later, we still don’t have a tourist spaceship.
And contested prizes can turn into discontent and litigation, with destructive effects. This isn’t unique to prizes; at this point “losing contractor files a protest lawsuit” is pretty much baked in to major defense procurements. But if there’s serious money at stake, we’ll see the same thing in prize competitions. The Lunar Lander Challenge only involved a couple of megabucks, so nobody bothered hiring lawyers, but I’m pretty sure the hard feelings over that one were part of what led Carmack to shut down Armadillo Aerospace a few years later.
My understanding is that in many locations solar and wind are near parity** with fossil fuels [ref] I agree with you that if the US reduces its fossil fuel consumption then that lowers the price worldwide. However, I *think* that extraction/refining/transportation costs represent a large fraction of fossil fuel prices. I don’t think we’re in the old OPEC days where there’s a ton of readily extractable oil but the price is high due to a cartel. If you accept that we’re near price parity now and that research can bring costs down by say a factor of 4, I’d be shocked if fossil fuel costs could drop by that much and not be overwhelmed by fixed costs.
** Parity on the margin. Of course fully switching to wind/solar would require energy storage at a scale that is still too expensive.
Its not just storage for wind, its location availability. Hydro electric is cost competitive in many locations, but naturally all the best locations were converted to damns first so additional damns are further out on the margin.
The main issue is that while solar/wind have made lots of in roads in terms of cost for electrical production they are far away from replacing natural gas from heat and gasoline for cars so you still end up with increasing C02 concentrations, only at a slower rate.
I agree with you on the location availability part. That’s an additional headwind to contend with.
I’m not very familiar with cost comparisons for heating, but you might very well be right that non-fossil-fuel approaches are far away from being cheaper than natural gas.
For electric vehicles though, I think the cost crossover point is coming fairly soon. At least that’s what a recent Bloomberg report said.
I agree that improved emission-free technology isn’t a panacea, but I think that you’re being a bit overly pessimistic about its potential impact.
Your linked article claims that we are 3 years out from cross over in cost between gas and electric vehicles for SUVs in Europe. Europe has substantial gasoline taxes already, acting like a carbon tax, which are close to doubling gas prices there. If we are 3 years away from one type of car being competitive in a high tax area we are much further away in terms of most cars in most areas.
The model you’re hoping for is replacing wired phones with cellphones. In a lot of places, the wired phones are crap due to corruption/ineptitude/dysfunction. But the cellphones work. You can imagine something like that also working for solar + batteries in various third-world countries–the national power monopoly is a pit of dysfunction and the wires keep getting stolen for their copper anyway, but if a household can have its own power system affordably, that will see widespread use.
At the extreme end, you get countries that are currently spending a lot of their limited hard currency importing gasoline instead having some options.
The experience curve says that there’s not much you can do. The big thing is whether you can jump from a stagnant equilibrium to an exponential equilibrium, where people invest in improving things because there’s demand, because people expect better products in the future. But solar voltaics have been on that exponential curve for 50 years, exponentially increasing deployment and exponentially decreasing price. Thus the money required to bring it forward by a year has been exponentially increasing that whole time. Now it’s way too much to manage and there’s nothing we can do to invest in solar research. It will be driven purely by final demand. A measure of the customer expectation is that the state of California bought a solar plant not to be delivered for 5 years that will be cheaper than gas (at that latitude and climate). Do Warren and Drum know that? If they don’t believe in the existence of ongoing research, how can they possibly say anything about subsidizing future research?
There are things that the US could do to stimulate demand, which would keep the experience curve running farther. It could encourage projects which consume marginal power, such as that run only for a few hours in the morning. For example, CA could build desalination plants and encourage people to water their lawns. Or build long-distance transmission lines.
Solar is basically done. It’s cheap and it’s still getting cheaper. Batteries are falling in price, but they are still way to expensive for most energy storage. There’s a lot of room for them to expand, so it’s easier to imagine research investment. But I’m skeptical. It’s probably too big at this point. If you want to switch from lithium ion to batteries more suitable for immobile storage, then it’s easy to imagine investment helping, although it would take a long time to catch up. Or storage totally unlike batteries.
An extra $500B means hiring something like five million researchers, compared to the existing 6.9 million of scientists and engineers in the US. There are probably not that many candidates available, so a dramatically increased budget would lead to two things: scientists doing whatever wound now frame their research as climate related in order to get the pork, and wages would increase, especially for scientists good at reframing. And the bar for being hired as a climate scientists would be lowered (in order to fill all the positions you promised to fill in the grant proposals). So three things, with only the third actually increasing research capacity, and probably not in a very effective way.
Actually, we have some of this situation in machine learning, it being a hot topic, there is usually money available. Since there are few candidates to hire, the result is that other research grabs the ML label: bioinformatics is now machine learning, optimization is machine learning, statistics, physics, you name it. The best people are already working for big tech at 10x the salary of academics. So smart academics rebrand their work, while the less smart ones (i.e. me) make an effort to actually switch fields, but will never really compete in the top league.
I think whatever number the vote-buying democrat politicians can come up with should go to machine learning. Unlike climate change, there exists a talent pool in industry which could probably be recruited if the salaries were made more competitive.
What?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita, the US are 11th on the per capita CO2 emissions, with overpopulated industrial leaders such as Luxembourg and Saint Martin ahead of them. If the US cant make a dent on climate change, then who can?
More to the point, the US is #2 in absolute quantity of emissions, behind China. The US is about 14% of world emissions, and China about 29%. And a good deal of China’s emissions is from manufacturing stuff for the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
Per capita doesn’t mean anything, total CO2 emissions is all that matters per country, and no, no one country can stop climate change.
High per capita emissions means that it is more opportunities for reduction. Total emissions means that the impact of reductions would actually matter.
The US has per capita emissions of two to three times most European countries, and the EU has managed to cut emissions by 22% compared to the 1990 start point. I fail to see any good reason the US couldn’t do the same if they actually wanted to. This would cut global emissions by 3%, and I can’t think of any equally semi-plausible policies that beats it.
I’m not at all certain, but I believe the EU’s success here is due to cap-and-trade quotas. (Agree? Disagree?) How hard would that be to implement, really? But no, environmentalism has turned into a lunacy contest, with GND and MMT and DSA and all kinds of garbage ideology baked in, the worse the better. This used to be the country that put people on the moon. France replaced all their fossil electricity with nukes in ten years, and is one of the greenest countries in Europe. Don’t tell me the US couldn’t do the same – easily, cheaply, and quickly – if it wanted to. [End rant]
How much of the EU’s success is a result of people being less spread out?
For certain broad definitions of “easily” and “cheaply”, the US could get down to EU levels of emissions (assuming we had the political will to do so, which is a very large assumption). However, as you say, that decreases global emissions by 3% — that is, by itself it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem. Any solution to climate change has to a sizable chunk of the world’s population. One route to that is a worldwide binding treaty. However, for many reasons that’s a tough sell. Another route is to make non-emitting technology cheap enough that that is displaces fossil fuels. Getting the whole world to reduce emissions by free-riding on technology developed via a US-based research program can have a much larger effect than the US simply decreasing our own emissions (although we should do that too!).
Why is that? Does the US have high per capita emissions because it is wasteful? Or does that imply that reducing emissions would come at a larger economic cost? The latter sounds more likely, the more dependent a country is on fossil fuels the more difficult it is likely to be to make a shift away.
Beyond that a 22% reduction in Co2 emissions for the EU did basically nothing for world wide emissions, lower demand in the EU was largely swallowed by higher demand in other countries. Again no one country can make a large difference as lower demand in one place allows for consumption to shift.
US per-capita emissions are probably somewhat baked into our population distribution, which is very spread out (so private cars are about the only sensible transport method) and heavily concentrated in places that are really miserable without air conditioning.
A thought that has been rattling around my head for a few days, just putting it out there without having fully investigated it.
Over a long time span decreasing interest rates is deflationary, and increasing inflationary. If you borrowed a million dollars to open a factory with a variable interest rate then a decrease would lead to lower operating costs and therefore in a competitive market would lead to lower prices for the goods you produce.
That matters less than you’d think, since in this scenario I borrowed to finance fixed costs, not variable costs. It’s only variable costs (specifically, the marginal cost of producing the last item you sell) that affect the equilibrium price in a perfectly competitive market.
Fixed costs do affect the equilibrium by making the market less than perfectly competitive, by presenting a barrier to entry by new firms, but I’d expect the effects of interest rates on prices from this to be fairly minor compared to other effects. Especially the classic inflationary effect that cheaper borrowing leads to people being more willing to buy stuff on credit.
You would still see a deflationary force from decreasing interest rates over the long term as every new factory would have lower costs than the previous generation from this alone and that would continually push down the marginal cost of production which should lower prices.* The effect should still be deflationary, though there might be a longer lag.
*Also you are assuming no possibility of early repayments, I have a ‘fixed’ rate mortgage but because I can refinance at anytime I effectively have a variable rate downward.
That’s not what I meant by fixed costs. A fixed cost in the context of microeconomics or in the context business finance is a cost that doesn’t scale with production, such as the capital costs for the factory. As opposed to variable costs, which increase or decrease roughly in proportion to production.
For example, let’s say your factory makes 100 widgets an hour while it’s operating, and it takes 10 employees to operate it. Running it 12 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day gets you an extra 400 widgets a day, and it costs you an extra 40 hours worth of wages to keep it running those four hours. But your capital costs for building and tooling the factory are the same either way. So wages would be a variable cost (along with things like the raw materials you make your widgets out of, electricity to run the machines, and postage to mail your completed widgets to your customers), but the capital costs would be fixed.
Fixed costs don’t affect equilibrium prices in a competitive market because unless you have monopoly power to restrict production to keep prices high (which is definitionally not true in a competitive market), it will always in your interests to make and sell one more unit so long as the market price is more than your marginal costs. Variable costs factor into your marginal costs, but fixed costs don’t. If you limit what you produce and sell based on your fixed costs, then you’re falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
Decreases in both fixed and variable costs drive down prices, a decrease in fixed costs reduces the barrier to entry for a new firm, decreasing the price of competitive equilibrium. Prices only approach the marginal cost of production in a competitive equilibrium anyway.
That’s what I meant by this part in my original reply, although in the rest of my posts I was focused more on competitive markets (since I thought that was what you’d been trying to talk about).
So yes, reducing fixed costs in an oligopolistic market could drive down prices by allowing new firms to enter the market. But while cheaper credit would make it easier to buy equipment to set up to enter the business (having a disinflationary effect), it would also increase demand and bid up prices for the equipment being bought (having an inflationary effect). I suspect the latter effect is going to be at least as big as the former in most cases.
I don’t know if we are talking past each other or not, but prices only meet marginal costs in a perfectly competitive market, and a perfectly competitive market has no barriers to entry. This doesn’t mean that any imperfectly competitive market is oligopolistic.
It could happen this way, but prices could drop without any new purchase of equipment. The threat of new firms entering can be enough for existing firms to keep lowering prices, and even without that threat there will often be opportunities to gain market share by lowering costs. Additional net production isn’t required.
On the other hand if interest rates are high (and inflation is not), you are less likely to open the factory in the first place. If you could make 8% interest a year by keeping your money in the bank or otherwise loaning it out to people, you wouldn’t risk your own money starting a factory unless it was making significantly more than 8% a year in your profit/ return on investment. So fewer factories get built, and the ones that do get built have to have a higher profit margin or else they can’t attract investors, and that means much more expensive products, which increases inflation.
This is a contradiction, you can’t keep your money in a bank account and earn 8% unless someone is borrowing the money at 8%.
Yeah but maybe your factory isn’t a 8% a year business, but some stupid app is. For a while at least.
Why not? Profit margins should be related to how competitive the market place is.
Right, high interest rates means someone is borrowing money at those rates.
It’s also true that higher interest rates on the banking/ lending side tend to discourage other kinds of investments, unless the other investments are very safe or have a very high rate of return.
It is not obvious that the high rates are the cause for lack of investment, or the lack of investment opportunities the cause of high rates.
Lower interest rates are not necessarily deflationary, just disinflationary. If real interest rates stay constant and inflation falls, the nominal interest rate will fall as well. So you’ll still have increasing operating expenses.
If all prices were perfectly flexible, your variable interest rate is going to fluctuate at the same level as your operating expenses, if real rates hold steady. However, your interest expense will still decline because you are still paying off principal.
Real interest rates don’t change anything here, inflation (in this sense) is measured in nominal price changes
“Every time I learn something new some of the old stuff gets pushed out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course and I forgot how to drive?”
“You were drunk!”
“And how.”
Even if we COULD be a Kardashev Type 1 civilization, would we want to be?
A civilization only achieves that status if it has harnessed all energy sources on its planet, which would mean destroying the Earth’s biosphere by damming every river, covering every spot of land with solar panels, and even covering the seas in floating solar panel platforms.
In addition to that, we’d have to keep the uranium and coal mines running to not let those planetary energy sources go to waste, and to send them to the appropriate power generation facilities (which would presumably also be covered in solar panels to not waste the sunlight hitting their roofs and walls).
Unless human aesthetics radically change and we turn completely evil and efficiency-focused, I don’t see how we will voluntarily become a true “Type 1” civilization.
Just how strict is the requirement on energy conversion. Because if we’re maintaining the ecosystem in order to best provide the edible matter our bodies need, that’s a form of energy conversion that doesn’t reduce everything to electricity generation. Does photosynthesis not count as harnessing solar energy?
If mining things causes more entropy than the benefits of converting the results to usable products, isn’t that an indirect form of going to waste?
As I understand it, the Kardashev scale is about using planets, solar systems, and galaxies as benchmarks for a civilization’s energy budget, not necessarily prescribing how to get that budget. So any civilization with an energy budget of about 1.74×10^17 watts (the energy the Earth receives from the Sun) is a Type I civilization, regardless of whether they get there by paving the Earth with solar panels, or by beaming in power from swarms of solar collector satellites, or by building oodles of fusion reactors.
I think it’s more of an orders of magnitude thing.
They won’t take away out Type I card for designating 10% of the Earth as national parks, or something.
I’ll accept that. If we get within one order of magnitude of harnessing the Earth’s energy sources, we could call ourselves a Kardashev Type 1 civilization. But we still need to agree on how we quantify the “Earth’s energy sources.”
Are we counting biomass, fossil fuels, geothermal vents, ocean tidal forces, ocean temperature gradients, stratospheric wind, peat, dung, and uranium as part of “Earth’s energy sources”? This unanswered question is a major problem with the Kardashev definition of what counts as a Type 1 civilization.
What really scrambles the equation is deciding how to count fusion power towards Type 1 status.
“Currently, the civilization of Type I is usually defined as one that can harness all the energy that falls on a planet from its parent star (for Earth–Sun system, this value is close to 1.74×1017 watts), which is about four orders of magnitude higher than the amount presently attained on Earth, with energy consumption at ≈2×1013 watts. The astronomer Guillermo A. Lemarchand stated this as a level near contemporary terrestrial civilization with an energy capability equivalent to the solar insolation on Earth, between 1016 and 1017 watts.[2]”
So you don’t need to tie yourself in knots over what and what not to burn as fuel to qualify, the measuring stick is simply “how much does the sun provide”
Though there would likely be some degree of burned or imported energy in the mix so as to not totally block out the sun with orbital solar panels
Why? Just build a solar panel with area equal to Earth’s cross section somewhere in L3, and do something useful with that energy. Or any other way to use as much energy as Earth receives, it doesn’t have to be literally the same energy.
That doesn’t answer the question since a Type 1 civilization is defined as one that uses all the energy sources of its planet. Sunlight hitting the planet’s surface is just one source of energy. What about the potential wind, nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy the planet could generate? Also, how many fusion reactors could it contain?
The Kardashev scale isn’t about how much energy a civilization uses, but about how much it is technologically capable of using.
Yeah…but as bullseye mentioned, that definition leads to problems of its own.
The richest 10 countries in the world could decide tomorrow to pool their money and start mass-producing and installing solar panels so they can harness 10% of the sunlight hitting the Earth. In theory, they are CAPABLE of doing that, yet they choose not to because they would rather use their money for other things. Does that mean we are already a Type 1 civilization?
This discussion has convinced me that the Kardashev scale has no value.
It’s not a merit badge. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive. A civilization that is using something like a planet’s worth of energy, whether they get it by paving the surface with solar panels or by setting up lots of solar satellites, is going to look a lot different from a civilization that is using something like a star’s worth of energy.
But the scale is just a way of describing the scope of the continuum. Nobody is going to encounter an alien race and argue about whether they are really level 2 or maybe just 1.8. Why bother?
Even if you harness an earth’s worth of energy via conventional means, with the expected effect on the environment, consider: you’re getting an earth’s worth of energy to play with.
For perspective: all human-generated power on earth today is around 17 TW. A solar panel the size of earth, at earth’s distance from the sun, receives about 130000 TW. Imagine everyone on the planet getting to do about 7000 times as much as they do today.
The thought of Type 1 just gets me hyped for Type 2.
Can != have to. We can chose to “use” part of the available energy to.have a healthy biosphere. We’re not the borg, after all.
Under that definition, isn’t every civilization “using” all of its planet’s energy?
I think it’s a matter of ‘we *could* cover this with solar panels or algae farms or whatever if we wanted, but we choose not to.’
For a quick yardstick, think of the Low Countries or Scandinavia. When all land is used / let wild in more or less the same way as there, we’re at the point where we can say there’s a choice involved. Right now nobody has the money or the will to do anything with Sahara, so it’s a choice only in the way I’m choosing not to be a Shaolin Monk.
There were a bunch of predictions made in 1900 about the twentieth century, many of them predicting harshness and efficiency for the future:
As people become richer, they tend to become less focused on efficiency above all. When there are fewer pressing problems, challenges seem less like obstacles than like opportunities to signal ability or morality. Thus, we don’t exterminate wild animals even when they inconvenience us, and while spelling reform was a common subject of discussion in 1900, it is rarely advocated seriously today. If our descendants are rich, smart, and inhabiting a non-Malthusian world, they may continue this pattern, caring even more about signalling than we do today. Alternatively, they may see our signalling as irrational and stupid. Even then, I doubt they will want to permit their planet from growing too alien from what their ancestors experienced. They won’t want to live densely-packed into skyscrapers topped by solar panels, and they will want to occasionally experience nature. If you assume they on’t want to live in cramped conditions, this puts a limit on how far their population can grow. As I wrote in my book Posthumanity:
https://posthumanitybook.wordpress.com/2018/07/21/chapter-5-population-and-family-planning/
Won’t we find ways to convert the waste heat back into electricity?
Up to a point, perhaps, but never forget the three laws of thermodynamics:
1. You can’t win.
2. You can’t break even.
3. You can’t get out of the game.
I think you’ve posited a better proxy for “Type 1 civilization” than Kardashev did.
If we get within an order of magnitude of making so much energy on Earth that the waste heat from the energy production is causing the planet’s temperature to rise to levels harmful to our civilization (“uneconomic growth”), then it can be said that we’ve harnessed our planet’s available energy resources.
Note that this definition ignores the warming effects of greenhouse gases. It assumes that we’ve gotten so advanced that we’re not net GHG emitters anymore, and are probably using huge amounts of solar power or fusion.
But, as I said above, there’s no merit badge. We continue to try to use energy in order to accomplish things. If we get to the point where we are using something like a planet’s worth of energy, the payoff is the things we will be accomplishing, not any prize we get for attaining K-1.
You are assuming the Earth is a closed system here.
I do not know of a good cheap way of radiating the excess heat to space to just get rid of it (in an environment that’s livable for normal humans), but it’s hardly an impossible thing especially for an advanced civilization.
–In Which there are Ghosts
Man, sometimes I read Samzdat and find a way to say something I’ve been trying to articulate on my own for a long time.
@Hoopyfreud,
Sam[ ]zdat previously gave me an insight into the source of so much political dissatisfaction and rancor:
From On Social States:
and it didn’t take my looking at polls long to suss out that more Democrats support their parties economic agenda than the social one, and more Republicans support their parties social agenda than the economic one, so each side has been winning what’s less important to most of their side, and winning on the issues that are less important to most of their side, so embitterness
I think it was me that linked you that.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty confident that the thing the democrats and republicans organize around would flip if their respective dominions did.
Decent theory, but not based in reality. the right manifestly is NOT winning the economic war. Pointing to lower marginal tax rates is meaningless, taxes are as high as they’ve ever been and are more progressive than every before. Social welfare spending is growing in virtually all categories, as is government regulation of basically everything. The right is at best barely holding its own on economics, while getting completely thrashed on culture.
On the other had, inequality is higher than it has been since before the second world war.
Unless you think that inequality is a specific goal of Republican policy, then that’s irrelevant.
From outside, inequality certainly looks like a Republican revealed preference, if not outright goal.
@dinonerd
Is there any substance to what you’re saying besides “out group bad”?
At worst, you can accuse Republicans of in
Indifference to inequality, and then only certain types.
Roughly speaking, the gini coefficient is highest in the coastal metropolises (the very blue California and the
populatedpopulous states of New England) and the deep south (very red). It’s in the middle range in the in the Rust belt (not particularly blue or red). And lowest in the midwest (which is more mixed), mountain states (mostly red, some purple), and less populated Northern coasts (blue).So if you were going by revealed preference you’d find… not much. Although you could maybe make a weak argument that the reddest and bluest states were more unequal.
Although I think realistically what you’re looking at is more related to ethnic composition of each state.
@quanta413:
Yeah, it’s like DinoNerd has never been to San Francisco, which has the most homeless per capita and most billionaires per capita of any community in the United States. You can also look at its left-wing copycats all up and down the West coast, although in e.g. Portland’s case, we’re poor enough that the inequality is between millionaires and homeless. 😛
The Red tribe doesn’t want to throw tax dollars at the inequality that’s the legacy of slavery. The breathtakingly extreme Blue tribe inequality is innovative.
The middle classes are priced out of major Blue cities due to NIMBYism. This doesn’t affect the rich, or the homeless, or the poor minorities who still live in urban slums where gentrification hasn’t reached. It does affect the middle though, leading to a high level of inequality.
The way I conceptualized it, I believe it was after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, was that the most proper and true response to a great work of art is not analysis, but the creation of another great work of art.
Reminds me of an Adam Neely [music theory youtuber] video where he says that he’s heard some incredibly complex electronic music, but that musical academics have no respect for the genre because traditional music notation has no way to formally transcribe a lot of what electronic music is doing. It’s hard to evaluate something when you don’t have the language to describe it.
Themes are easy to write about, subjective beauty is hard to write about, so “good art == good themes”.
I love some of the really technical stuff enabled by music production tech. Consider some of the things listed in the video descriptions here: 1, 2
Precisely constructing timbres to make frequency spaces for specific instruments, to ensure perfect aural clarity! How cool is that!
The craft behind mixing and mastering absolutely has not been respected by classical academics, who instead get caught up in abstract nonsense like “what if the cello played on a helicopter far away while piping the sound through speakers into the concert hall? PHILOSOPHICAL SPACE”
That’s not quite how Neely characterized the academics. He was criticizing them for the fact that, having studied classical music for so long (“classical” here being “music that we know from being written down rather than from being recorded”), they’ve become obsessed with how music is written rather than what the song actually sounds like.
The people listening to cellos on a helicopter would at least be appreciating the sound of it.
To be fair, however galaxy-brained the Helicopter String Quartet may be, Stockhausen, with his enormous mixing desk, his obsession with projecting sound in three-dimensional space, and his habit of adding several seconds of silence at the beginning and end of the CD releases of his work so that the electrical background noise of the equipment used to record it could be faded in and out, cannot really be categorised as someone unconcerned with the craft of mixing and mastering.
But it matches with mdet where Stockhausen isn’t concerned with what the song actually sounds like. The emphasis is all about the philosophical implications of the mixing and mastering, rather than finding new timbres and structures that still resonate with the audience as music, and not as an art piece.
Doesn’t the definition apply to a lot of bad art too, at least when the badness is not just a lack of technical competence? No list of themes or intent or whatever exhausts or even really touches on the essential badness of Mendelssohn’s St Paul or Domenichino’s St Agnes or (can’t think of a literary example right now). This is just because their badness is aesthetic, like the goodness of Hamlet. So many intangible things have gone wrong at once that it’s impossible to begin real criticism. You can only gesture at what is wrong in a more-or-less unsatisfactory way.
Okay, I looked up Domenichino’s St Agnes (I’m not competent to talk about the Mendelssohn you quoted, but I’d be very interested to hear your opinion as to why it’s bad) and why do you think it is so essentially bad? It’s not the greatest example of art, but it’s a competent piece in the popular style of the time. The subject is conventionally treated, the architectural space is a little crowded and not thought-out well, but Domenichino has plainly worked carefully on the figure of St Agnes and planned out her positioning and stance to get the contrapossto right (even the foot resting on the plinth is accurate and makes sense according to the logic of the scene, unlike marbles where the necessity for supporting the figure means that a tree or rock has to be randomly inserted for them to lean upon).
You can certainly object to this pink-and-white, chocolate box type of painting, but it’s not the worst example I can think of (Bavarian pastel baroque churches tick that box for me) and even within pictorial treatments of this kind, it’s not the most gloopy, sugary one.
I get the impression Domenichino here is hitting for you the same button that John Rutter is pushing for me 🙂
I apologise, I meant the Martyrdom of St Agnes.
St Paul is the canonical example of bad good music, to reverse Orwell’s phrase. (A good bad book is one like Dracula or Sherlock Holmes that is good despite its indifferent craftmanship, lack of taste etc; a bad good book is then one that is masterfully crafted but somehow still unreadable. I think Orwell cites a Wyndham Lewis novel as an example, though I’ve not read it.)
Mendelssohn was indisputably a master, there aren’t many questions of technical competence in his music. You can’t say St Paul is bad because the voice-leading is ugly or the plan is incoherent or the music has nothing to do with the story or anything like that. But although in Mendelssohn’s time it was his most important composition, hardly anyone has enjoyed listening to it since.
Now the reason everyone gives for this is that St Paul’s is “religious kitsch” – it evokes only some false and trite religious sentiment instead of a true one. I think this is mostly true, but it isn’t the reason it is bad (although it has something to do with that). This can’t be the reason it is bad, because Puccini’s Messa di Gloria is kitschy out of this world, and is great fun to listen to (highly recommended).
You can try to be more specific about the kind of kitsch involved, but at the bottom you’re never going to get around the actual reason St Paul is bad, which is the cumulative effect of a large number of aesthetic choices that don’t work. Or to put in another way, for any list of problems of the “philosophical analysis” type that you could make about a work of art, there is probably an actually good work of art which has all those problems. The badness is somewhere else entirely.
Okay, I’ll agree that the Martyrdom is throwing everything plus the kitchen sink in, and in the case of that painting less would definitely be more. But I don’t see that it’s bad; it’s not to my taste, and some of the choices are definitely on the saccharine side, but Domenichino is visibly in the Classical tradition of painting (as against the Mannerist school, where I think El Greco pulled it off wonderfully – the evolution of his style from the conventional artisanal icon-writing of his early career to how it flowered at his peak shows how Western style much more suited him than Eastern – and Parmigiano not so much), and some of those figures are definitely quoting Michaelangelo, but then again that is what was expected (to allude to, if not copy, recognised great works), and the strong colouring gives it more interest than the agreed rather tepid treatment otherwise would evoke.
I’m going to have to put this one down to a divergence of taste, not that I’m going to be a big fan of Domenichino, but that other works/artists are more irritating to me. Though I’ll say that Giovanni Lanfranco’s St Peter Healing St Agatha is a better work, even though he went overboard with the Caravaggio-style strong chiaroscuro due to not quite digesting his new influences – St Peter could be a little less shaded – but the choice of interpretation and presentation of the theme is much better, stronger, and more tender.
As for Mendelssohn’s St Paul, I haven’t listened to it yet (just the overture so far) and it’s biggest fault seems to be a conscious striving for gravity and grandeur and too much wearing Bach on its sleeve. I think it fell out of favour the way works do go in and out of popularity; if the rest of it is worse than the overture then I could see why as tastes changed it fell out of favour, but who knows? In fifty years time it could be “revisited” and rehabilitated and part of the repertoire once more – maybe in English not German, for amateur/semi-pro choirs looking for something other than the old warhorse of Messiah for a concert? 🙂
To pick on one point, I think the colouring of the Martyrdom is bad, and that most people, given the time and chance to compare against the Venetian painters for example, would feel this way too. But this is the sort of aesthetic issue that you can’t really argue for. All you can do is point to what you think is good, and let curiosity and time do their work.
As far as I understand, this is pretty much the only useful way we have of talking about aesthetics – you teach people by giving them a canon of stuff that is widely accepted as good, and things are judged against standards intuited from the canon. Obviously this isn’t ideal, but as Sam[]zdat says, “aesthetics is hard”.
Anyway, even if you disagree about these particular works, I’m sure you can supply examples of your own. My main point is that the definition doesn’t cleave good and bad art. More like “art” and “non-art, plus incompetent art, plus one-trick conceptual art which is nothing but a philosophical/political premise to start with”.
To pick on one point, I think the colouring of the Martyrdom is bad, and that most people, given the time and chance to compare against the Venetian painters for example, would feel this way too.
Certainly it’s not Venetian, but do you mean the stronger horizontal division between the shaded and light parts versus the vertical ascent from dark to light? That is noticeable and maybe not successfully pulled off, but he uses four main colours – blue, red, a kind of green and a brown/gold – and to my eye balances them out evenly enough around the canvas. The mirroring of the recumbent postures of St Agnes and Christ, and the pose of the upper torsos of the angel receiving the emblems of martyrdom with the clearly Michaelangelo-influenced kneeling women with the child are well-worked out (though again involving a degree of artifice which does strain the position of Christ).
I think we’ll have to agree to differ on grounds of personal taste; you find this an example of bad art, I find it an example of ‘meh, competent workmanlike’ art 🙂
I’ll give you in return a sample of something which has much more lurid colouring and shapes which are stripped down to blocks (look at those “clouds”) but which I absolutely adore, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz by El Greco 😀
Here’s a quasi-quote I haven’t been able to source, but I believe it’s true.
–Criticism at its best is an effort to identify the qualities which accompany success.–
This is important because it has a proper humility– the excellence of a work of art isn’t about not getting things wrong, and as you say, it’s not about the themes.
Stephen King has a book about writing where he says that when he started out, he thought theme was external to the story, but he later came to believe in writing first, then discovering the theme, and editing the story to make the theme clearer.
C. S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism has it that instead of judging readers by whether they like the right books (or, I suppose, dislike the books they’re supposed to dislike), it’s better to judge books by whether people love them– and by loving books, Lewis means rereading them many times.
This seems to completely discount the role of craft/technical skill in the creation of art. Things can be so entirely style, that the style becomes its own form of substance. Samzdat’s description seems hung up on art being representational, but things like music, food, clothing, or dance can absolutely pursue “absolute” artistic standards, not being “about” anything but themselves.
Did you read the full post? Because that’s exactly the reaction I had on reading the excerpt, but in reading the whole thing it turns out that the point he’s intending to make is exactly the one you made.
He’s rebutting someone who says that good art communicates some message, some complex set of themes and values, to the audience. He argues No, that’s called “rhetoric”. That’s “non-fiction masquerading as art”. Art is about the form, the aesthetics, the stuff that can’t be captured in a philosophical analysis of the work. He compares it to evaluating a horror movie: saying “It’s really a metaphor for the struggle of eating disorders” doesn’t actually tell you whether or not it’s a good *horror movie* in the same way that talking about the unsettling-ness of the sound design would. He says “That quality of work = [philosophical] complexity is not a mistake, nor is it a mistake that we interpret that as the ‘purpose’ of art. We have a faith in the efficacy of information and that alone. ‘People act based on facts’ and art’s purpose is thus making them know the facts. Hence art which discusses [theme] and [such other theme] is no longer good art plus those, it’s good because of those.” “You can identify themes and plots and [whatever], but the ultimate experience of beauty is primary, it’s trying to describe qualia, which we have no respect for.”
Was that unclear in the excerpt? I thought it was a good summation of exactly this point.
When I read the excerpt, I interpreted it as “Good art is art whose meaning is so deep that words can only scratch the surface. You can’t fully explain the meaning of good art, you can only hint at it through analogy”.
My initial response, like AG’s, was “So is dance not art? Most dance doesn’t have ‘meaning’ or ‘theme’, but we still consider it an art form.”
The passage makes more sense when you see what he’s contrasting it against. “Good art has complex meaning that can be analyzed philosophically” vs “Good art comes from all the qualities that *can’t* be analyzed philosophically”
Thanks for clarifying Sam[]zdat’s actual position.
So. Here is my question. Were the sci-fi authors in the 60s who were mostly at the top of their classes yet…just gave up and started writing correct?
Does the scientific merit system know where its going with its inventions? Or is it just…producing and sees what happens.
>In May 2019, researchers at Samsung demonstrated a GAN-based system that produces videos of a person speaking given only a single photo of that person.[62]
What is this going to do to society in the next 15 years? Anyone?
You have quite a few questions specified with different degrees of precision.
I’m not sure what “correct” means here. Do you mean that they saw no value in being researchers, or something like that? In which case I highly doubt that many of them were (a) actually at the top of their classes or (b) thought that research was useless. I think they felt strong creative impulses, realized how important technology and science were for the future of the human race, and wanted to think about this in ways that were not particularly easy to do in traditional academic or research environments.
I’m not sure what a scientific merit system is. Is your worry that people should be more concerned about the ethical import of their scientific results? I suppose that is true. However it’s very difficult to channel discovery into purely helpful domains, and we cannot ever recognize the full implications of our own discoveries. This is almost definitionally true.
The era of being able to reliably determine the likely truth of an event based on a photograph or video is over. Soon there will be completely plausible videos created, to order, of whatever we want, that will be indistinguishable from real videos by all but extremely savvy experts (and perhaps not them).
This will make determining which publications to trust, among other things, much more difficult.
However it’s perhaps important to note that (a) the era of being able to use photos or videos for anything at all lasted only 150 years. Humans got a lot accomplished before that. (b) Even during this era, most people are pretty terrible at determining adequate standards of truth and falsity, which is why a site like this one is such a breath of fresh air.
I’m not saying that there aren’t obvious (and non-obvious) problems arising from our new capabilities regarding images. This is true of all technologies. It’s very much worth considering what these are, but I think the future is less awful than you seem to, reading between the lines.
It goes more tiers deeper than “video/audio” age is over.
Which simulation are you stuck in?
What game is this?
What is the “selection metric” to go to a different tier of reality?
If you want to create a “new entity” how do you introduce them and what personality and intellect tests do you give them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
Here we go.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1129239018430840832
“You know how, a few years back, it started to get hard to tell the difference between Onion headlines and reality? Well, now it’s getting harder to distinguish reality and SCP Foundation logs.”
There’s… a lot involved in creating a convincing, reactive simulation, even a purely visual one. Current technology is nowhere near it.
I’m not saying it’s a complete impossibility, I kind of hope it isn’t. But nothing we’ve ever created has come close.
I mean, maybe that would have a massive impact on society, but I think it’s really unlikely to do that in “the next 15 years”. At least at this level of the simulation, blah blah blah.
In my life I got to see technology go from barely passing NES games to advanced oculus rift tech with…convincing deepfake video generated from a single photo, with deepfake audio created by a machine that averages out what it thinks the person will sound like based off of just fitting the patterns from every person on earth talking.
What a smashing coincidence, right? To live in the first time this has happened.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes
@MissingNo says:
"In my life I got to see technology go from barely..."I don’t even know what the “technological advances” you list are, can you translate what any of that means?
While the phone I’m using for communicating with you is impressive, compared to 1917 a lot had changed before I was born, but between now and when I was born in 1968, after the ’69 moon landing not much is very different technology wise that effects how we live much, my grandfather experienced far more significant changes in his first 51 years.
There seem to be a lot of implicit arguments backing up this what I assume is a sarcastic question?
I’m not sure what the coincidence is. Yes, technology has gotten better recently, some of it VR and other image-generation tech like deep fakes, and some of it other things that would be necessary for a convincing simulation, such as AI (though you would probably need a true singularity god-style intelligence for a convincing simulation).
But, so what? If we’re in a simulation, it makes no difference what the level of technology within the simulation is. Because that’s, you know, simulated. It depends what the level of technology is outside, and by definition we have no access to that.
No offence, but the level of understanding you have of the technology, as evidenced by you writing things like that, suggests to me that you’re not really that aware of how it works. Which is fine, but I’d be very wary of making sweeping pronouncements based on this. Chill, dude.
@Enkidum
Project just…a few years into the future. Just a few. Not very many.
DeepFakes generated from a single photo?
Deep Fake Audio easily and immediately used to impersonate major figures?
You mean google maps literally has such a good knowledge of traffic that it knows each individual street density along with speed traps…due to somehow knowing where the cops are? And your once paranoid alex-jones uncle keeps posting retarded hillary/trump theories instead of the much more blatant stuff going on?
Like every major tech company knowing the precise location of everyone on earth? They care about benghazi bullshit and not *this*?
Is it because everyone appreciates the internet to look up their preferred fetish porn without embarrassment?
~gasp–what a line~
Not really sure what you’re asking or implying at this point.
@MissingNo,
I imagine that there’s a larger point your trying to make with the random looking facts you cite? What it may be is going over my head, so please tell what conclusions you want drawn.
Science is not about inventions. Basic research is about increasing understanding.
Research and development organizations are in the business of directed invention. They have some science types – or at least folks with scientific training – along with job lots of engineering and applied science people.
Some political types don’t understand the difference.
I find that most people don’t distinguish between the four STEM categories, even the ones in science.
Especially between the ST and SE categories.
An amusing data point to tack on to the Billionaire charity thread from Frank Luntz:
Of the 4 US presidents who are Baby Boomers, the 3 older ones were born in one year, 1946. Clinton was born in August, Bush in July, Trump in June.
I always had a vague belief about “the baby boom” that began after WWII. There was definitely a “birth dearth” during the depression, but when did it end? (I will restrict to America because I believe the answer varies.) The conventional answer is after WWII. Wikipedia has a graph (based on a table) that I find very unconvincing. Much of the recovery had already occurred by 1942. Why do we draw the line after the war?
Recently I stumbled across a claim not about a crude year, but a specific month, July, 1946. Kieran Healy visualizes the monthly data. June 1946 had about as many births as June 1945. July had more births than the previous year. Come winter, normally fewer babies are born, but this year more were. Come spring, instead of speeding up as they normally do, births slowed down. July 1947 was more than 1946, but August 1947 was the same as August 1946 and September 1947 was less than September 1946. The thing we now call the boom continued, a sustained birth rate higher than the dearth, but it wasn’t at the rate it had been a year before. Taking annual averages smooths out and hides a real concentrated boom from mid 1946 to mid 1947.
The during-war boom is real, though much smaller than the Baby Boom proper. I imagine it’s largely a result of soldiers and their wives (or not-wives) wanting to get a family started before being deployed.
Maybe, but Healy has data for England&Wales. How would you predict the two compare?
They have the same spike in late 1946, but are a little different during the war. Again, we should distinguish the general uptick from the spike. Both the US and UK have generally higher rates during the war than before; and also a short spike in the middle of the war. The UK speeds up in 1942, while the US in maybe 1941. The US has a short spike in 1942, but the UK in 1944. Wouldn’t you expect the opposite? Also, conscription started before Pearl Harbor, although maybe that doesn’t count as “deployed.” Also, US deployment was a lot bigger deal, requiring immediate home front action, than local UK deployment, which probably involved more home visits.
The peak of the US spike is September and October 1942, which makes sense. There’s some earlier than August, which couldn’t be caused by a triggering event in early December 1941, but it could be noise on top of the spike. I don’t know enough about what was going on in England and Wales during the war to say much, though I’m surprised there’s no 9-months-past-Dunkirk spike at all.
Something funny I’ve noticed recently about “boomer” as a colloquial term is that it seems to perpetually mean something like “middle aged,” “those people who had it easy,” and/or “people my parents’ age,” where “me” could have been born any time between 1980 and 2000.
For example, I recently saw someone in his late 40s referred to as a “boomer,” when, of course, he was very squarely Gen X. Actual boomers are now around 70+, but it seems like the word retained some of its referent from say, the 80s and 90s, while the generation actually in it aged out of that bracket.
The exact same thing has happened regarding the Millenials, who are mostly in their thirties by now.
I’ve gone into great detail before about how Millennials and Zs, unless they hit the job market at the peak of the Great Recession, don’t actually have it worse in any way than Xers and Boomers. Furthermore, they tend to attribute to “boomers” things that were actually from generations older than that — the common claim that boomers got jobs by walking in cold, making eye contact, giving a firm handshake, and asking for a job, for instance. Someone like Don Draper might have gotten a job that way, but he’s older, he fought in WWII. (And maybe that line was BS even back then)
Also, Gen X is so small it basically doesn’t matter anyway.
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Gather ’round, children, let me tell you of all the job offers pulled at the last minute, the years of temp work calling up people late on their car payments, the utter hopelessness of graduating in 2009.
And you, children, graduating in 2021, in the next recession, will know our pain, and we will drink as brothers, once you all finally reach your proper wage levels in 2030.
’02 and ’09 here.
There are other factors, but all told I’m about a dozen years behind. So it goes.
The peak on unemployment in 1983 was higher, though — sucks to be a late boomer. The 1992 peak I graduated into wasn’t so bad, but it still wasn’t much fun.
And yeah, if Trump doesn’t cool it with the China stuff, the 2021 peak will be pretty darned bad. Tariff spats are just good
cleanfun, but talking about invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is like casually tossing around a nuclear hand grenade.Don Draper fought in Korea, actually. Also if you read Scott’s review of On the Road, it seems evident that in the 50s you could in fact get a job pretty much anywhere just by asking for it. The entire lifestyle of the book’s characters depends on it:
“Even more interesting than their ease of transportation to me was their ease at getting jobs. This is so obvious to them it is left unspoken. Whenever their money runs out, be they in Truckee or Texas or Toledo, they just hop over to the nearest farm or factory or whatever, say “Job, please!” and are earning back their depleted savings in no time. This is really the crux of their way of life. They don’t feel bound to any one place, because traveling isn’t really a risk. Be it for a week or six months, there’s always going to be work waiting for them when they need it. It doesn’t matter that Dean has no college degree, or a criminal history a mile long, or is only going to be in town a couple of weeks. This just seems to be a background assumption. It is most obvious when it is violated; the times it takes an entire week to find a job, and they are complaining bitterly. Or the time the only jobs available are backbreaking farm labor, and so Jack moves on (of course abandoning the girl he is with at the time) to greener pastures that he knows are waiting.”
Ah, that’s right, it was Korea. Still too old for a boomer. The youngest Boomer was by definition born in 1946, and was unlikely to be looking for a job before 1960.
Yes the golden age of being able to get a work just by asking for it seems to have ended after the 1950s. However it’s unlikely to have ended abruptly. So in the 60s and 70s, when the Boomers had their first experiences finding work, while one might not have been likely to get a job simply by wandering in and asking for it, making a solid first impression could still do it. Indeed that fits with the advice they give, they don’t say just go somewhere and ask for a job like the characters of On the Road do, they say find the manager and try to make a good impression. That probably became gradually less and less true as time went on, until we get the modern hyper-competitive world where nobody will give you the time of day if you don’t file the paperwork correctly.
I expect it DID end abruptly… when the Boomers hit the job market, and suddenly employers had more applicants than they could handle.
One possible explanation is the gradual shift away from legal rules of freedom of contract. Hiring someone who might or might not work out makes more sense if you know that if he doesn’t you can fire him, with no risk of being sued for doing so.
The very oldest ones are in their (early) 70s. Most are in their 50s or 60s.
I’ll also echo @Lambert above, this happens with all generations and works in both directions.
I am 61. As a child in Canada, I was post Baby Boom. In my 30s and 40s in the US, I was towards the end of the baby Boom. Now it seems that even my younger siblings are Baby Boomers.
My mother was born in 1936. She was a child when WW II ended. By the time she began having children (quite young), WW II had been over for more than a decade. And while my father did serve in that war, he certainly didn’t come straight home and conceive me.
The whole thing seems frankly absurd and meaningless. Actual Baby Boomers are the children of returning service people, from marriages (and etc.) before, during, and especially immediately after WW II.
Some of those couples may have kept on producing children for quite a while, blurring the edges a bit. But children born in the 1960s are not Boomers – not even if their mother married a returning serviceman in 1945.
Real Baby Boomers arrived into a world where there were more children than available services for them. They went to school in trailers parked on the school grounds, for lack of sufficient class rooms. (By the time I came along, new buildings had been completed, and worries were more likely to be about over capacity and expense.)
No no, that may be part of the explanation of the baby boom, but there was an actual baby boom, which occurred way after WWII ended. The peak of the births was in 1957. I was born in 1956, and my very large peer group bulging in school, college, and then the job market was very apparent during my life. This was in the US, maybe it was different for you in Canada. By the way, my dad was in WWII, even though I was born 11 years after it ended. But my parents had their first kid in 1950, and just kept having kids. This was pretty common amongst other kids I knew when I was a kid, I think most of them had dads in WWII.
@Mark V Anderson
Interesting. That was my original belief – that the Baby Boom peaked earlier in the UK than in Canada, and earlier in Canada than in the United States.
This thread had pretty much convinced me otherwise – that “Baby Boomer” now meant “old enough to be the speaker/writer’s parent” or something equally non-specific and relational.
I guess this time I adjusted my beliefs a bit too enthusiastically.
@DinoNerd says: "...This thread had pretty much convinced me otherwise – that “Baby Boomer” now meant “old enough to be the speaker/writer’s parent” or something equally non-specific and relational.I guess this time I adjusted my beliefs a bit too enthusiastically"
IIRC when the “baby boom” was thought to begin was always 1946 and when it was ended was adjusted upwards during my youth until 1965 was settled as the end, which is where it’s stayed for decades, so my Mom (born in ’46) has always been a “boomer”, my Dad was “a Depression baby”, and my Step-dad a “war baby” (both Depression and war babies later lumped into the “Silent Generation”), as soon as it was named I was lumped into “Generation X”, and I married a “late boomer” (though only a couple of years seperate us), my best friend in childhood was also “X” but his older brother (born just three years earlier) is similarly “boomer”, and its all pretty arbitrarily, not much cultural difference between someone born in ’64 than there is someone born in ’66.
Usually when I see essays on “how the generations vote” we “X’ers” (usually thought of now as those born between ’65 and ’81, but earlier thought of as those born after ’59) are lumped in with either “boomers” or “millennials” (likely depending on the age of the author).
This discussion makes me a little sad, since the baby boom is really quite easy to see on graphs. There is a really sharp increase in births in 1946 and a little less sharp, but still rapid fall that starts slowing down in 1965/66.
Alex Honnold is a fabulous example of nominative determinism.
Alex Honnold is a fabulous example of nominative determinism.
To understand what I’m about to link, there’s a Gaelic Football Final on 1st September between the teams of Dublin and Kerry. Dublin are seeking to make it a win five times in a row. Kerry are out to stop them. Now that’s out of the way:
The Lord Mayor of Dublin wrote a letter of invitation to the Mayor of Kerry inviting him to a stay in the Mansion House for that weekend, with some subtle hints thrown in.
The Mayor of Kerry wasn’t backwards about coming forwards in reply.
It’s a good job local government don’t have anything other to occupy themselves with, isn’t it? 😀
I had to do a bit of Googling to figure out the meaning of Kerry’s reply, but I am glad I did.
Well, don’t leave me hanging, brother.
This is Sam.
This Wikipedia article explains how Sam has made the trip to Kerry 37 times over the past 116 years (from the tone, I am going to guess it was written by a Kerryman).
The nickname for Kerry is “The Kingdom”.
Dublin have also been very successful in Gaelic football, so there is a bit of rivalry between them and, well, pretty much every other team since they’re the Capital City and think themselves a cut above the rest of us culchies and boggers 🙂
Thanks!
There are those of us who go, to use your phrasing, partial SJW.
I know plenty of women in academia with horror stories, and there are whisper networks surrounding various prominent men who go to conferences. It’s definitely morally wrong to ignore that.
But, you know, you don’t have to be a member of the twitterati to live a decent life that is cognizant of the various risks faced to a greater degree by people from different demographic groups.
Be there for people who need you. Don’t tolerate evil. But also, you know, try not to be annoying.
Indeed, there are some of us who argue against SJW ideas in the abstract, but go out of our way to encourage and support female colleagues (especially younger ones) in our heavily-male-dominated field.
Very often, I agree with what I perceive as the SJW complaint about how the world looks, but disagree with their apparent model of what causes it and how to fix it. For example, a model that says that the men are keeping the women out to prevent them finding out about the underage prostitutes at the wild sex parties runs into some pretty big plausibility problems for someone like me, who has spent his whole career in a male-dominated tech field without running into any of the wild sex parties or underage prostitutes. (Or overage prostitutes, for that matter.)
Plenty of women have horror stories about various kinds of sexual harassment in the tech field, but I don’t think that’s more common in our field than in most others. Sexual harassment seems to me to mainly be about power differentials across lines of sexual attraction–when I have a lot of power over you and I want sex from you, there’s an opportunity for something ranging anywhere from a perfectly consensual relationship that looks sketchy from outside, to uncomfortable jokes and actions that you have to put up with, all the way to Weinstein-style “put out of you’re fired” ultimata. I think such power differentials are relatively common in academia (where an advisor can have a really huge amount of power over his/her students), but less so in technology jobs (where the employees are likely to have some reasonable options elsewhere if the boss won’t stop brushing up against them in the elevator and staring at their tits during meetings).
> I find myself having to choose between morality and sanity.
Before I read any of the rest of this, I thought, “choose sanity”.
> Jardin is suggesting that the lack of women in STEM isn’t just misogyny (let alone “pipeline effects” or “differing interests” or whatever sorry excuse the misogynists have this week) but active efforts to keep women out and prevent the pedophilia rings that dominate the top levels of every field from being exposed. This sounds a bit over-the-top but how can I dismiss her as a conspiracy-monger when there’s already been a massive conspiracy exposed?
Was she already claiming this before the Epstein scandal broke?
Because someone who comes up with a conspiracy theory that dovetails in with the latest surprising news after the fact is probably just talking shit.
Ok, I looked a little (a little) at her Twitter. Of course Epstein had confederates. How is this an indictment against the entire STEM field? (I didn’t even see her claiming that, myself, but I usually bounce off Twitter pretty quick, and this was no exception, so maybe it’s in there somewhere.)
It looks to me that you’re pretty deep in a bubble where you’re seeing things very differently than most people. (I think things are both better, and worse, than you seem to think they are.) I don’t think you need to rethink your life or your moral stances because of what happened.
Sorry that you were sort of adjacent to some ugly stuff. Didn’t you post about this earlier also? Clearly it’s upsetting you quite a bit. You didn’t do anything wrong and there’s nothing you should have done differently. I hope venting helped some, and I hope you feel better soon.
This sounds a bit over-the-top but how can I dismiss her as a conspiracy-monger when there’s already been a massive conspiracy exposed?
Do you also feel that you can’t dismiss Alex Jones now? And if you can dismiss AJ, why not Xeni?
nothing’s going to change at all until we smash the patriarchy
I’ve no idea what it is exactly that you propose to do, but are you sure that criminals will be unable to do crimes afterwards?
So I’m morally compelled to go full SJW.
Assuming that your goal is to create an SJW world, and seeing increasing backlash of people who won’t like living in an SJW world, is it obvious that adding a new SJW would bring your goal closer?
This, but without the snark. Lots of people are spinning the Epstien thing for their own ends. I’m not saying don’t update your priors, because the Epstien thing is shocking, especially if you had semi-personal connections to it, but:
#1 Make sure you update all you priors for all the people who called this. I’m not saying you have to believe AJ now, but if Xeni is more credible and AJ isn’t then you might not be updating your priors properly on this evidence.
#2 Same for traditional Christian morality. Lots of people called this or spun this, why does Xeni stand out? Because she tweeted?
#3 Make sure you don’t enter a filter bubble before a few months have passed. This information may appear more or less important in 2-3 months.
Ok. This does sound pretty messed up.
Might I suggest you vent/discuss this with family or close friends in a private setting. Venting and potentially doxing yourself about CW stuff on the internet is…sub-optimal, especially if social skills aren’t your forte.
I don’t know if you can delete this or edit it out but that’s probably the best choice for you.
This is orders of magnitude more paranoid than one needs to be.
Saying that one was once, years ago, a member of an organization some of whose members were once possibly involved with some nefarious shit is saying that one is a human in the modern world.
To a first approximation, nobody cares. No one is going to use this comment as ammunition against BBA. Despite the well-documented misuses of quotations by internet hate mobs… there’s a lot that needs to happen before this supposed pile on occurs. We’re good.
Also, BBA really doesn’t sound messed up. Just slightly confused, and prone to over-dramatizing situations. He’ll be fine. Or he won’t. But this post won’t make a difference either way.
I’m with you man.
I was also a child prodigy that found great success early in life to be so easy that I didn’t need to develop good life skills, and so when I got to grad school I didn’t really have the interpersonal skills I needed to do research, and so ended up dropping out with an MA.
There are many conspiracies, and some of them are true. But conspiracies are also independent; just because one conspiracy is true does not mean others are. Each has to be evaluated on its own footing. The Epstein conspiracy required there to be just one extremely charming guy who was able to manipulate a handful of people into not seeing something they didn’t want to see in the first place. It isn’t that far fetched. And it was true. But the Jardin conspiracy you are describing requires vastly more people to coordinate in a much more complicated fashion for a much more nebulous goal. Just because the one is true does not mean the other is true, or even that it is more likely.
But the world is in a pretty bad place. What to do about it? Well, I don’t really know, but here is what I think has happened.
A hundred and fifty years ago, the world sucked pretty bad for almost everybody. But pretty much everybody also had really low expectations, pretty much accepted that things were pretty bad and unfair and didn’t worry too much about it. But around seventy years ago, technological change was advancing so rapidly that people started to become wildly optimistic. Everybody started to develop much greater expectations of prosperity, and rightly so.
But then came Moloch. I believe that today’s economy is incredibly inefficient, not because somebody bad did something bad, but because lots of mediocre people are constantly going about being mediocre. Our world is so full of fakery. So many fakers go around faking competence that nobody can even tell who is faking and who really knows what they are doing. I think the technology that we have right now has the capability of providing a prosperous life for every person on earth right now, without undue burden on the environment. But our mediocre bureaucracy ends up stifling that promise.
And so these days everybody (rightly) believes that it should be possible for their lives to be prosperous. They have high expectations about their quality of life. But reality isn’t matching up to their expectations and nobody can quite put a finger on why. And so there is much anger and unrest. The fact of the matter is that we are all stuck together in a bad equilibrium. The techbros believe in the power of technology, but are naive about the necessary grinding burden of bureaucracy. SJWs know the techbros are naive but they can’t really see a path toward material abundance, and so they assume that the world is zero sum and resort to identity conflict.
I fall more into the techbro camp. Though I believe that our existing tech overlords have been eaten by the bureaucracy, and I don’t have much faith in them any longer. I think SJWs are good people at heart, I think that I want to live in the same world they do, and I hope that they succeed in making the world a better place. But I really dislike their tactics and rhetoric, so much so that I cannot possibly ally with them.
So what do I do to keep myself sane? I am working on low-tech. I am working on what I believe are simple and overlooked ways of accomplishing industrial tasks that could under-grid a novel society in harsh, marginal terrain with the hope of one day being able to break off from Western Civilization and build a wholly new society. It probably won’t work, but the aspiration keeps me sane. Anybody wanna help?
Which industrial tasks?
I’ve no interest in Building the Galt Option or anything, but I’m always up for doing things that everyone expects to be impossible.
I am focusing sunlight with lenses to generate heat. Lenses have some advantages and some disadvantages compared to mirrors, but very few people are trying them and I think they have potential. The heat could be used to generate electricity, but I am more interested in alternate options, like purifying/desalinating water via distillation, which is way too energy intensive to be competitive when your energy source is electricity or fossil fuel, but which might become competitive if you can mass produce tons of low-intensity essentially free heat from sunlight. Slightly more optimistic, I think I can use the heat to extract useful petrochemical feed stocks like methanol from biomass or perhaps even municipal garbage. And very optimistic: perhaps I can get enough concentration that I will be able to reach high enough temperatures that I can manufacture cement clinker or even run a metal foundry. Probably not, but that is the stretch goal.
Cool.
I’m assuming you’re using fresnel lenses to get them big enough without requiring a tonne of glass.
Getting something useful from biomass sounds cool. Lots of heating/cooking in India is done off methane released by decomposing manure.
Source
Is there any reason to believe Ito’s claim is false?
Some say folks should’ve been suspicious of the young women Epstein was surrounded by. However, I feel like if they assumed that young women at a science event indicated something untoward, that would be considered sexist in a different way, don’t you think? We’ve heard many times about how it’s inappropriate to assume a woman at a tech conference is anything but a software engineer. By similar logic, isn’t it inappropriate to assume a young woman at a science event is anything but a young science enthusiast?
I was sad to learn about Marvin Minsky though.
Yes. In particular, that Ito met with Epstein well after the 2008 charges against him were common knowledge. Maybe he’s technically telling the truth, that his relationship with Epstein was “pure business” but doing business with a known predator is damning enough.
As best I understand the story, what Epstein pled guilty to was having sex with a prostitute — the charge wasn’t statutory rape, although I believe the woman in question was in fact underage.
Do you think that doing business with someone known to have been convicted of having sex with a prostitute is damning?
FWIW, I didn’t know who Epstein was until the current iteration of the story came up. It seems plausible that many other people may have just mapped him to “big money donor we have to entertain today to get some cash” and didn’t try to research him in-depth.
If I saw young women surrounding an old rich guy, I’d assume the same thing I’d assume if the rich guy was Hugh Hefner (well, when he was alive): that that the relationship was mercenary. Is that sort of behavior enough to refuse to take money from a guy? I would guess for most fundraisers… probably not.
Gregory Benford on Minsky:
I have an anecdote relevant to this. I am reluctant to repeat any details because people might try to guess who I’m talking about, which I’m not sure I want even if they guess right. And I certainly don’t want anyone guessing wrong and developing a negative opinion about perfectly innocent people. So I will only say that I know of a case in academia which, while not involving anyone underage, otherwise suspiciously pattern-matches the Jardin theory you mention of badly behaving men deliberately trying to avoid having more women around for fear of their bad behavior being exposed. And the case I’m thinking of isn’t MIT. I would like to think this isn’t common, but it seems to be a thing that happens in some cases.
@BBA: I sympathize with your discovery that you weren’t cut out for the academic path that you set out on, and hope you can find a different path that plays to your strengths and inspires more motivated effort. That’s got to be rough. However, you talk about choosing between morality and sanity, and I fear you are being tempted by a path that will end with neither.
She’s wrong. And you’ve been around here long enough to know that she’s wrong, and to know how to go about verifying that she’s wrong.
Are you referring to the Catholic church’s sex scandals here? Because that really was a massive conspiracy, and I’ve commented here before on how surprising and unprecedented that was. So, did you react to the Catholic church’s sex scandals by deciding that, since one conspiracy theory was proven true, all related sex-abuse conspiracy theories must also be true and that you must devote yourself to bringing down all of them? And if not, then why would the relatively pathetic “conspiracy” of Jeffrey Epstein have such an effect?
You can dismiss Jardin as a conspiracy-monger on the basis that the conspiracy she mongers is inadequately supported by the evidence she offer. You can dismiss Jardin as a conspiracy-monger because “X scary, X is true, and an all-powerful cabal hides all evidence of X” has two more unnecessary assumptions than “X is scary”, and so no rational person attempting to persuade other rational people would offer such an argument without substantial supporting evidence.
‘
And also hard right, right? Because Pizzagate is a conspiracy theory similar enough to Epstein that you can’t dismiss it, nor can you count on your fellow SJWs to defeat it that because too many of the alleged conspirators are on the pro-SJ side. So you’re going to have to do both, and that’s absolutely not going to work.
Here’s the deal: I think you’re smart enough to know better, but I think you are intellectually adrift and vulnerable due to having had the rug of a comfortable career path jerked out from underneath you, and are being unreasonably receptive to anyone offering a new purpose for your life. Pizzagate, you rightfully dismissed as nonsense, the Catholic sexual abuse conspiracy you recognized as unique in its scope, and you’d have kept Epstein in the proper sense of proportion as well at any other time in your life. But Jardin comes along at just the right time to offer you what superficially seems to be a righteous crusade to replace what you have lost, and you don’t examine her claims as closely as you otherwise would.
Maybe I’m wrong about that, but it’s my best guess as to what I am seeing. And if so, you’re doomed. As you have yourself noted, you’re not cut out to be an SJW. It doesn’t sit right with you, which will be a problem when it comes to committing 100% to the cause. Social Justice demands 100% commitment, and it eats its own when they don’t measure up. You know this. If you ask, they will offer you a comfortable place to recover from your recent loss in exchange for your enthusiastic support for the current phase of the current crusade, but you won’t be able to keep it up and it will not end well for you.
I don’t have a better path for you, one that will bring meaning and happiness to your life while being a better match for your skills and drive than was the Media Lab. But I’m pretty sure this isn’t it either. Do please keep trying.
One very common fallacy is that all people in the same category are the same. Grant for the moment that this conspiracy is real, and that all participants are both white and male. That doesn’t mean that you have been doing the same thing, or even that you’d be any more likely than anyone else to do the same thing, all other things being equal.
This attitude is bullshit, even if members of that class were responsible for everything wrong with society today.
What makes sense for someone in your position is
(a) Be aware that this kind of thing is going on. Don’t get sucked in. Avoid enabling it.
(b) Don’t discard your critical thinking skills.
(c) Avoid – to the extent you can – partaking in the fallacy. You aren’t the same as some social skills maven who failed every math class he ever took. Maybe you are more like some black female child prodigy with limited social skills.
You can be against bad behaviour of all kinds, without being against everyone who looks like a badly behaved person – or even everyone that various evil doers identify with.
There are, unfortunately, plenty of badly behaved people either making SJW claims, or simply belonging to categories current SJW folks tend to favour. Their existence doesn’t make e.g. Epstein any better. Both sides can be wrong – can even be evil – or at least have some evil members. Indeed, what would be amazing to me would be if any group big enough to be noticed didn’t have evil members.
You don’t have to join either side, and you certainly don’t have to take on board ridiculous beliefs just because someone on “your” side insists on them.
@all:
I recognize that I’m too angry to think straight and none of what I’m saying makes any sense. But if I was thinking straight years ago, I’d had to have reached the obvious conclusion that I wasn’t surrounded by people who knew about and condoned child abuse when I was at building E15, and yet here we are. I mean, shit, we had fundraisers there, it’s very possible I was in the same room with Epstein himself. If I had gotten my shit together and stayed on for a Ph.D. who knows what I’d have gotten involved in. I think freaking out is justified in these circumstances, no?
Of course I don’t want to jump off the deep end, and find myself in the nonsensical conclusion that the Satanist daycares of the 1980s were real because I have to believe all victims. But “good judgment” and “common sense” would’ve led me astray here, which is getting me all paranoid about what else I don’t know I don’t know about.
I’m probably misrepresenting Ms. Jardin’s views. I know her mainly as a writer for BoingBoing.net which is about as reputable as a group blog gets. She has longer pieces on the debacle there that are a lot less “Pepe Silvia” than I’m making her sound.
Yes, I’ve discussed this privately elsewhere (with varying degrees of understanding).
Not exactly comforting, but even though Epstein was a guy who not only engaged in his skeezy and immoral proclivities to the detriment of many girls and women and also probably collected kompromat on people who joined in with him, you were extremely unlikely to be a target/invited. Just judging by your temperament here, not even your actual views.
That most people are kind of average rather than terrible is why it can be hard to detect who is actively bad if they put some effort into maintaining deniability. Although it seems like some people who are more actively immoral have some sort of second sense for who they can induct into their circles.
“But if I was thinking straight years ago, I’d had to have reached the obvious conclusion that I wasn’t surrounded by people who knew about and condoned child abuse when I was at building E15”
And that would have been the correct conclusion to reach.
I haven’t been following the story very closely, but it looks from a quick Google as though all that is established is that Epstein donated some money to the media lab.
One woman claims to have had sex with Minsky, along with a very long list of other prominent people, but that was in the context of a civil case that settled, so the truth of her claims was never established.
It’s not even clear she claims that, as far as I can tell. I’ve only seen it reported that she claims she was told to have sex with Minsky, not that she did, and a third party has explicitly stated that Minsky turned her down.
Right. That’s because you weren’t surrounded by people who knew about and condoned child abuse when you were at building E15. Only the people who actually attended Epstein’s wilder parties fall into that category, and not necessarily even all of them. That’s almost certainly a very tiny fraction of the MIT Media Lab – particularly post-2008.
You’d have been asked to go to fundraisers and other relatively sedate parties with people who were also going to wild parties, and that’s about it. Epstein wasn’t throwing underage girls at the entire MIT Media Lab; he was throwing underage girls at people important enough to be worth blackmailing and worth the risk of exposure. And he was almost certainly using the sedate parties to select candidates who would be particularly receptive to the wild parties. If someone else now moves into that niche despite the increased scrutiny, they’ll have to be even more selective.
By your description of yourself, probably nobody was going to ever invite you to one of the wild parties, and if they did Epstein certainly wasn’t going to waste prime jailbait on you. You’re not important enough, and you don’t come off as lecherous enough (at least if your persona here is any indication).
The same goes for most of your colleagues at MIT, which is why you weren’t ” surrounded by people who knew about and condoned child abuse” and really shouldn’t be denegrating them in that way.
You’re basically freaking out about the prospect of being in the same room as an ex-con who had done his time, and/or in the same room as other people who were in the same room as an ex-con who had done his time and weren’t themselves freaking out about it. So I’m going to go with a big “No” on that one. That may be distasteful, but it isn’t freak-out-worthy.
I think a simplified version could be: there are bad people who do bad things in every place and every field. That you now know specifically about such a person in a field you are connected to should not change your view of yourself or the field generally.
When a consistent application of your morality seemingly leads you to a path toward self-annihilation, it’s time to seriously consider embracing a nihilistic, anti-realist worldview.
I’m not joking or saying that lightly. Going full moral anti-realist has made 90%+ my self-loathing disappear almost overnight.
One thing I find interesting is the zeal to blame “STEM” for these issues. Epstein gave money to STEM, but his industry was finance, yet you don’t see finance guys wringing their hands about it. Similarly, people saw the Ellen Pao-Kleiner Perkins lawsuit in terms of “STEM” rather than finance, despite the fact that it concerned a finance company, albeit one heavily invested in tech. STEM attracts a different crowd from finance, if you know what I mean.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that most of this occurred before 2005, when relationships between older men and college-age women were not regarded as inherently sinful. So when people saw women who looked around 18 years old, they didn’t think to say anything.
What conspiracy? Everyone acts like a conspiracy has been revealed, but all I see is the already-known-about of wrongdoing by Epstein, some evidence of wrongdoing by Maxwell, and allegations that some prominent men like Prince Andrew may have had sex with underage girls while unaware they were underage. I personally don’t find the last group very blameworthy. What if you rephrase the conspiracy to be, instead of a male conspiracy, a Jewish conspiracy to keep gentiles out of the financial industry in order to prevent them from exposing the Jewish pedophile conspiracy? Epstein was Jewish, but I’d think your response would be that in that case, his membership in a demographic group has absolutely no relationship to his crimes.
Aliyah? The political worldview of atheist Jews in Israel seems to differ quite dramatically from that of atheist Jews in New York for some reason.
@BBA says:
“Everything”? Maybe more than our share but I really doubt everything, regardless here’s what I did:
Find someone without “pale skin and a penis”, do what you can to house them, love them, and help raise their kids, while the problems of a few little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world it’s something (and trying to fight all of the injustice in the world as like trying to empty the ocean with a teacup).
Otherwise, just like a hundred years ago, despite their flaws I still judge the Catholic church and labor unions as probably the organizations that most promote social justice, but they’re plenty of others working to תיקון עולם (“tikkun olam”) so some volunteer hours (if you may spare some) are a fine idea, just please don’t try to “punch a Nazi” and find you have instead assaulted an immigrant from Syria (perhaps the best way to avoid such an act is not to try to punch anyone in the first place) also ten years after most everyone it seems, I joined Facebook this month, and while seeing what old friends are doing is interesting, many send political messages, which are pretty damn tiresome, I already read newspapers to see things along those lines and I don’t need any “shares”, and if your idea of being “full SJW” is “online activism” please just don’t bother, and I think demonstrations and protest marches are largely a waste of time as well, instead (if you feel you must ‘do something’) go precinct walking door to door and talk to the older people who actually vote (and don’t do any phone banking, it feels soul crushingly futile).
FWLIW, reading something in the news this last month started me feeling down as well so you’re not alone.
I mean, I know correlation isn’t causation but…
@blipnickels,
Nah, the downward mood spiral started first, I joined Facebook to try to arrest it, and in one case it worked: an old friend who I feared would have O.D.’d and died in a ditch was instead married in 2015, got diagnosed for being bi-polar, and is looking well and happy, which was heartening.
What was interesting was how many old friends became teachers, what’s annoying is how many send political messages, but it did help me see the truth of much of the SSC commetariat complaints
Even assuming the worst-case-scenario with respect to the upper echelons of STEM academia, I’m not really sure how you get from there to
Is keeping women out of the top tiers of STEM in order to cover for an underage sex ring the core of “everything wrong with society today”? Even a central-ish example?
All this was going on while I was there, and I had no idea.
Welcome to the club, this is what it’s been like being a Catholic when the first major stories about abuse came out.
This sounds a bit over-the-top but how can I dismiss her as a conspiracy-monger when there’s already been a massive conspiracy exposed?
Because a bad thing being true does not mean every accusation is true, and a “conspiracy” like that is more easily explained by good old sexism rather than “every single scientist since Thales was actually a paedophile, that’s why no women”
nothing’s going to change at all until we smash the patriarchy
Even if you can identify a Patriarchy to smash, this won’t do away with evil. Women can be abusers. Non-straight people can be abusers. Non-white, non-cis, people can be abusers. Every category of person can be an abuser. Smash the patriarchy and I guarantee, in the new gender-neutral non-binary world, someone is still going to want to fuck minors. This is humanity. All we can do is say “no, despite all your attempts to say ‘it’s an orientation’, it’s still wrong and we won’t make it legal”, and deal with the people who do it anyway and the victims.
So I’m morally compelled to go full SJW
No you’re not, see above re: smashing any -ism, -chy or -ny. Again, I guarantee you that in whatever organisation devoted to doing the right thing, somebody has done something dodgy. There is no pure, perfect ideology where everyone has no dubious background and has never done anything bad ever. You’re obligated to be a decent person and if you know about bad things to report them or tell someone in authority or register your opposition to going along with “c’mon man, everybody has to schmooze the wealthy for grants and funding, what harm to go to a party and nod along when the rich guy tells you his wacky theory in return for getting a shit ton of money for the department?”
I can’t shake the notion that this is just putting my head in the sand, the kind of behavior that created this quandary in the first place.
You can only do so much, and if you know what is going on. You are also not obligated to beat yourself up over “I should have known, I should have done something, I should be out there day and night looking for conspiracies and badness”. Do what good you can in the world, avoid doing harm, and don’t twist yourself into knots.
You and whoever it was that posted the “I’m miserable because of the conclusions I’m drawing from all these far right blog posts” a few months back have basically the same problem with the same solution.
I wouldn’t say the internet is toxic for everyone, I think there’s more than a bit of Luddite in the full on “screen time” position, but it’s clearly toxic for some non-trivial percent of the population.
Both you and the world will be fine if you don’t have at your finger tips all the details of the latest thing that’s “going on” and encyclopedic knowledge of all the various opinions on whatever the tastemakers decided we should have strongly held opinions about this week.
Just to get into the whole Christian morality thing, there’s the bit in the Screwtape Letters when the heroes are very glad The Patient is enraptured with far away goings on in politics and ignoring his mother.
BBA, maybe you don’t have to save the world, you can just save somebody?
A few years ago I got involved with a program for tutoring young men who had been involved with the prison system but are now going to college and trying to turn their lives around. I taught math and physics. No pay, all volunteer. And I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it, not friends not family. But whenever I would get down about the state of the world and those voices would say “Well Conrad, what the hell did you ever do to help?” I could point to those specific individuals. I can name names of men who wouldn’t have the success and the positive contributions to society they do today without me.
So, BBA, maybe like brad says, ignore the latest media sensation and find something good to do near you. The little tragedies need just as much help as the big ones. More, really, because no one’s paying any attention to them.
Whenever I’m down, I remind myself of the approximate amount I have donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, and the approximate number of lives I have saved.
the bit in the Screwtape Letters when the heroes are very glad
Conrad Honcho – the devils are the heroes? I think you meant something else there 🙂
You don’t get that POV characters = heroes? Go re-read Paradise Lost. 🙂
Brad: +1
Agreed
Everyone has given you good advice even though you asked for no advice, but I just want to give you a big penguin headpat because you’re a good guy trying to do good. Hang in there man.
The following facts about the International Dota 2 Championships, which are concluding tonight, are true:
The bracket is double elimination, which should decrease the variance in results.
No player has won more than once.
Only one player guaranteed top 3 has competed in all nine iterations of the tournament (and won once).
One of the teams guaranteed top 3 started in the lower bracket of the tournament.
One of the remaining teams has players who have never won. One of the other teams won last year with the exact same lineup.
A Peruvian team (with one Bolivian) made it to top 8. Every other year a South American team qualified, they went out in the first round.
90 of the game’s 115 heroes have been played in the main event. 112 heroes have been played in the tournament as a whole.
All of this seems INCREDIBLY impressive to me. It’s rare that you see a game that’s so dynamic. Are there any other sports or esports where this sort of diversity appears over a whole decade? I can’t think of any.
In the words of a grand finalist:
Dota’s just a great game. You can do a million things and… everything CAN work.
Yeah, it’s quite impressive. I do really enjoy playing Dota; the space of total viable actions is just so massive, and while much of it feels like a game of incremental advantages and ruthless optimization, a single bad call or brilliant strategy from the enemy team can flip the situation in a second — and this happens at every level of play, too.
An example: last night I played vs. Techies, a hero that places invisible mines that can be stacked and deal enough damage to oneshot an entire team if they happen to stand in the right spot. He can detonate them even if he’s dead, so with enough setup time, he’s incredibly effective at defending his team’s base, and it’s quite hard to counter. Our team didn’t have the overwhelming advantage required to push the high ground, and we lost one teamfight due to Techies mines already — the game was a stalemate. We had the enemy team locked in their base, but we couldn’t do anything else — losing one of our carries to cleverly placed mines would possibly lose us the game. So, I took advantage of an Illusion Rune that randomly spawns: it creates 2 illusions of your hero which are indistinguishable from the real one, until you attack them, at which point it becomes obvious that they aren’t real, since they take 300% more damage. Furthermore, I had an item which produced 2 temporary illusions. Crucially, the enemy was aware of this item. I used the item in their vision, sent the two illusions up to the high ground to die, and led the enemies to believe I had no more illusions. Then, I backed up out of enemy vision, and brought forward one of the illusions from the rune. I had our Wisp tether to it, which provides numerous buffs, including damage reduction, and moved it up onto the high ground. The enemy techies player thought this was my real hero (after all, he saw me use my other illusions already and the item should still be on cooldown, and the Wisp player was buffing it) and he immediately detonated his mines, killing the illusion. Without any mines, the rest of our team could safely move up onto the high ground and fight the enemy in their base: their Techies player had thrown away their major advantage. We won the ensuing fight, and then the match.
Obviously, my friends and I aren’t ultra high skill elite Dota players, and the Techies player wasn’t very good (he could’ve waited for the rest of his team to kill the illusion, he could’ve reasoned that it might be an illusion from a rune) but it was a fun strategy to execute and pull off, and it was satisfying when it worked, and the entire game is filled with moments like that. The sheer number of game mechanics that exist, and the complexity of player behavior makes it so interesting. Sure, you can read your opponent and come up with strategies in every game, but for some reason, Dota’s the only one I can put over a thousand hours into.
Reported to help ensure deletion.
Today in weird corporate mergers: Hasbro is buying Death Row Records.
(This is being reported elsewhere as Hasbro buying Peppa Pig, which makes a lot more sense. Both owned by Entertainment One Ltd, which is one of those Canadian media companies that nobody outside Canada has heard of.)
Paying $4 billion for this company, same as Disney paid for Marvel or for Lucasarts?
Popular number in the media industry these days.
From The New York Times I just read How Medicine Became the Stealth Family-Friendly Profession
, which was interesting, and I'(d like to learn others opinions on the piece (for thr record, I’d like it if most everyone’s jobs were more “family-friendly” whether women, men, doctors, lawyers, butchers, bakers, or bricklayers, and get to have families while still in their 20’s would be nice as well, and also have ponies, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting).
If I type “I agree”, will I forever ruin my chances with Google?
I’m pretty sure the idea that all jobs should be “family-friendly” is squarely within the Google orthodoxy. Only getting down to the details of how that happens my change that. (And wanting ponies is definitely within the orthodoxy.)
Right. If you want to pop down to the Googleplex Maternity Ward® on your lunch break to pop out a brat and deposit them in the Google Creche® to visit every other Thursday over coffee, then you’re gold.
Now, if you want a family outside the loving embrace of the Google® campus, then you might run into trouble
Jokes aside, the Google Creche (or rather the day care, it was not actually called “Google Creche”) in Mountain View was actually so expensive that it strained the budget of Google engineers (sorry, I don’t remember the numbers), and also was very limited in enrollment. I don’t know if they still have it at all. Google has the generous maternity and paternity leave policies you’d expect from a Modern Progressive Corporation; as brad says they rely mostly on employee conscientiousness not to take more leave than working time. But Google is easily woke enough that any female engineer who wanted to take advantage of that would be reasonably assured of still having a job (though likely not good advancement prospects) once she was done having kids.
People having children in their 20s increases the population far more significantly than if people have children in their 30s and 40s.
Hypothetically let’s say that people live to 120, and each couple has two children (twins) born at 20 or 40, and all else held equal:
Then for every 2 119 year olds you’ll have:
2 – 119
2 – 99
2 – 79
2 – 59
2 – 39
2 – 19 (pregnant with twins)
for a total of 12 people
or
2 – 119
2 – 79
2 – 39 (pregnant with twins)
for a total of 6 people.
Spreading out the population seems like a good idea to me. Though there is the benefit of having equal numbers of working-age and retirement-age people in the first scenario.
It was interesting, but the actual concrete details were not as encouraging as I had hoped. The average hours worked by all female doctors under 45 was 48 hours, and not a single profession they showed on the graph had people working less than 40 hours on average. Of course, some people will work less than 40 if the average is 40, but…
And at least one person in the piece had flexibility and a nanny. Pretty sure that’s not going to be widely available to people below the upper class.
So I feel like what I’ve learned is that if you spend an extra 5-10 years to enter a profession controlled by a powerful professional guild (the AMA) and with restricted entrance, you can now have a lucrative career and children starting at age 30-40. I guess that’s better than not having that option if you want big bucks and kids, but if you want to have more than 2 kids that’s still pretty meh.
I think getting an engineering degree of some sort is still actually a more plausible path to being moderately wealthy and having kids in your 20s. You’ll be done with school at 21 or 22 instead of 26 or 27, you’ll have no residencies and although you won’t be paid as well as a specialist doctor pay is pretty good for a lot of engineers. And a lot of engineering jobs aren’t going to require being on call. Some may even allow for doing part of your work remotely.
But if you want lots of kids, reverting to the traditional arrangement of Dad works and Mom stays home and takes care of the brood still seems like the most efficient choice. Short of being so rich you can hire round the clock servants. Theoretically you could switch Dad and Mom’s role, but in practice that’s much less convenient for various biological reasons.
+2
I didn’t do either the first or second paragraph in my 20s for… reasons, but rationally they check out.
Between generous maternal leave policies and reluctance to fire returning mothers, I bet a women that worked for a FAANG out of school and started having her 3-4 kids at 26-27 could earn millions more in a ‘repeatedly go out on leave and then return and do the bare minimum vs a ‘quit before the first child strategy.
Plus if you do finally quit after you’ve used all the leaves you want to use (and before being pushed out) your resume looks that much better if you decide you want to go back after the youngest hits grade school.
The problem with this strategy is the people it would benefit mostly have too much conscientiousness to pull it off.
I have a notion that in general, the world is more dependent on people’s conscientiousness than it’s willing to appreciate.
+1
My wife doesn’t work for a FAANG level company, but she does work for a tech that has quality maternal leave, and she has taken 3 of them in the 7 years she has worked there. It is obviously very difficult to promote someone who is doing this (and by this I don’t mean taking advantage intentionally, I just mean someone going on maternal leave).
My wife was promoted while 6-7 months pregnant with our 3rd child, and it was very difficult for her, us and the company. Once she was on leave a choice had to be made between filling open positions on her teams without significant input
or not filling them, and major directional decisions had to be made without her around. These sound small but she ended up going back to work being 3 months behind in understanding what was going on (significant in tech companies), with multiple open positions that she had to fill, and she was behind on sleep, and had to breastfeed/pump while working 50-60 hour weeks to catch up.
From the other side the rest of her team had to pick up her slack from not being there, and pick up the slack from the open positions that weren’t filled, train the people for the open position that was filled and do so without their manager. This lead to some attrition that meant more open positions, more work for everyone and more training. 7 months later and things are starting to calm down and she is back to 45+ hour work weeks.
It can be done, but it is far from optimal and you have to expect as a person that if you are taking long absences for any reason that the company is going to be reluctant to increase your responsibilities.
That’s part of what I was trying to get at. If you lean in five years and quite deliberately coast to the point of not quite fired it is probably optimal from your family’s perspective. But whether or not it is an immoral strategy, which I think is a tougher question than it seems at first glance, it certainly *feels* like you are acting like a sociopath. So most well adjusted people aren’t going to be able to do it. They’ll instead stress themselves out trying their best.
At the other end of the economic scale, jobs which don’t pay more than about 50% more than the cost of childcare are also family-friendly, as they allow the parent to quit and stay home with the kid without any financial loss.
In today’s episode of “Brexit: What tнē #$*! D̄ө ωΣ (k)πow!? “, I’m going to quote two stupid newspaper articles, and for once The Sun is not the stupider of the two.
First, the “well, that didn’t take long” piece from The Independent, where there is an increasingly desperate as it goes along article by John Rentoul as to “No honest, this is how we can kick Boris out of the job in order to avoid a no-deal Brexit and/or general election, and replace him with the steady hands of a caretaker prime minister – Ken Clarke”.
Yes, give Boris the boot after an entire month in office while you flail around looking for a replacement and the EU will naturally have no objection at all to giving you another indefinite extension while you try to hold a general election to pick the fourth prime minister (Cameron – May – Johnson – ?) who will for sure this time finally and completely Brexit. Or not. This will definitely happen!
This is such a fantasy piece that I can only think Rentoul wrote it to order for Evgeny Lebedev, which makes me wonder why the falling out with BoJo after they were such good pals that they partied together. On the other hand, the shambles of a no-deal Brexit would probably hit them in the pocket, and Russian oligarchs are going to put the do-re-mi first.
The second one is “I’m laughing to keep from crying” and I’m deliberately using The Sun report rather than another since it is the level of ludicrousness this deserves. Part of the Brexiteers’ strategy is that leaving the stranglehold of the EU will allow Britain to develop its own trade agreements with markets such as the US and China on equal terms as independent parties. There’s going to be a bonanza of new deals to be made, with the rest of the world eager to snap up The Best of British, they assure one and all. Boris himself is making much of how they’ll be able to sell their goods to the US. Such value-rich items as – pork pies.
Yes, this is how post-Brexit Britain will stimulate its economy: selling shower trays and pork pies to the Yanks! Something tells me that there could be a slight imbalance in who the senior and who the junior partner in such a trade deal might be, with the UK having to agree to imports of US agricultural goods (which come under much different standards to the EU ones currently in place) and open up its market even more to US imports, while the UK will promise that the NHS is not going to be privatised and divvied up between private US companies, honest guv, and the economic clout of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association Ltd. will ensure a hefty balance of trade deficit in the UK’s favour.
So listen up, America! If you want British cauliflower and to let your armed forces buy British tape measures, you better play nicely with Boris or else no dice in the lucrative trade agreements a liberated post-Brexit Britain will use to create a new Golden Age!
Clarke is a well-known Remainer, so anybody who wants to make him PM instead of Johnson presumably doesn’t want to “finally and completely Brexit”.
Yeah. It’s a plan to avoid no-deal under Johnson.
The idea is that if a deal looks impossible, Tory remainers, Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP and all the other remain parties will call a vote of no confidence and then form some kind of ’emergency’ GroKo under Clarke or Corbyn to cancel brexit or something.
This Government will, of course, be entirely unstable and our prime-ministerial turnover shall approach positively Australian levels.
our prime-ministerial turnover shall approach positively Australian levels
I honestly don’t know if it would be worse or better if it achieved Italian levels of stability and permanence. But the idea that coming up to three years of faffing about, that the EU would put up with even more foot-dragging and delay for a general election/another referendum/the descent of the Archangel Gabriel with a message from God as to how to draw up a deal is bonkers; stay or go, and the UK has been insisting it’s going to go, but not doing it.
There cannot be an infinite amount of indefinite “take your time to make up your mind” extended by the EU, and this “maybe if everyone forms a grab-bag alliance and we get them to promise to support Clarke and then we can undo the past three years worth of activity in order to go back to pre-2016 state as though nothing had happened” is pure fantasy.
I don’t know; the EU would presumably be glad to avoid setting a precedent of countries leaving the Union, so if a British government came along saying “We’ve changed our mind, can we pretty please come back?” I think they’d say yes. The real problem with such a move, as I see it, is that it would be too controversial, and the government in question too weak, for there to be a credible commitment to actually stay in, since for all anybody knows the Brexit Party might sweep the next general election and leave anyway.
Question from an outside observer: what would happen to UK society if Parliament, by some means, simply said “no more Brexit, sorry for wasting everyone’s time – we’ve decided it’s a bad idea and we aren’t doing it anymore.”
I mean, I get that certain individual politicians would rise and fall. I’m too far outside to even know most of them. I’m just thinking more big-picture. Would there be full-on riots? A general election, either peaceful or marred by violence? A full-on party realignment, perhaps UKIP fully replacing the Tories? A collective yawn as the Brexiteer voters are too elderly to get out on the streets much? Calls to restore absolute monarchy? Other?
It feels like just forthrightly stating “We believe the referendum reached the wrong result, and anyway should not have been held; we are therefore ignoring it from now on” ought to have some sort of society-shaking consequences, but Britain seems like a pretty politically jaded place in many ways, and maybe it wouldn’t amount to much.
Since it’s postulating the future, of course it’s unknowable for sure, but I’d be interested in broad-brush guesses.
I get the impression that by far the largest effect would be a number of political careers ending, or at least being seriously disrupted. Beyond that, I tend to agree that it probably wouldn’t be all that dramatic, but since the political careers in question are those of the people who would have to make the decision, that consequence is enough to make such a decision unlikely, and they’ll invent any other excuse to avoid it.
It seems like the sort of thing you’d want to make someone else do. But it seems like the alternative of no-deal Brexit is seen as equally career-destroying (presumably why Parliament can’t get anything passed). Perhaps whichever happens first becomes the immediate evil to be defeated, so whichever unthinkable option (no-deal or null-referendum) happens second becomes more palatable by being further removed. I suppose that might be a version of the Boris Johnson gambit, where the Tories pick Johnson to sacrifice himself on the altar of no-deal so that they can later join to vote against the referendum (which a majority certainly wants to) to avoid immediate no-deal consequences.
Most likely a political realignment, although with the Brexit Party rather than UKIP as the main beneficiaries.
Do you think, in such a scenario, anger at dust-binning the referendum result would likely be enough to propel the Brexit Party to convincing victory? Or would everyone just ignore the ugly procedure and vote based on their pre-existing pro- or con-Brexit stances?
Well, they managed to practically wipe out the Tories in the 2019 European Parliament elections less than four months after being founded, which is quite a big achievement. Admittedly EP elections are usually treated as “non-serious” by the British electorate, and hence a good opportunity for protest voting, but even if they don’t manage to supplant the Conservatives, I could easily see them splitting the vote enough to cause a Tory wipe-out, much as the Liberals ended up losing their status as a major political party in the 1920s.
Since today seems to be my day to repost tidbits from the papers, here’s a case of SPACE CRIME! Can Space Cops be far behind now?
(Turns out to be the fallout of a messy divorce case and a ‘she said/she said’ about stalking versus checking the family finances FROM SPACE, not anything more interesting, unfortunately).
I eagerly await the courts of Space Law as depicted in “The Menagerie.”
Of course, all officers of the court must have titles beginning with “Space.”
Everything is problematic An honest cartoon on a moderate social justice blog.
One of my problems with Social Justice is that for some people, it means that privileged people are obliged to feel bad all the time. I have been badly affected by this. I’m bad because I’m white and financially comfortable. I’m bad because I resent being told I’m bad. (see white fragility) I’m bad because I refuse to be an ally, since being an ally means an unlimited obligation to help in exchange for nothing– not courtesy, not explanations of what’s wanted, absolutely nothing.
In terms of obsession, I have not found a way out. Qi gong and such can eliminate the impulse to attack myself, but it’s very temporary.
For what it’s worth, I’ve mentioned this to some of my friends who agree with social justice, and they’ve been surprised in a way which suggests that they have a different take on the ideas, but I haven’t yet gotten up the nerve to ask them how they think about it.
It wasn’t easy to write this for ssc.
Come to the right side. We have cookies.
Despite the stories about anti-cookie extremists, I still find myself being offered plenty of cookies by my fellow leftists. Don’t fall for rightist propaganda that they have a monopoly on cookies!
Gluten free vegan cookies do not count.
Metaphorical cookies are always gluten free and vegan, and it’s absurd to suggest they don’t count. But even confining ourselves to the literal cookies, those I get are only rarely gluten free and vegan, and even when they are gluten free and vegan, they sometimes end up being tasty. Again, right-wing propaganda utterly fails to match reality.
Why, it’s the leftists who want a monopoly on cookies! They’re going to seize the means of production—ovens, natch—and distribute them via central planning.
*hugs and sympathy* *cookies too*
I haven’t encountered people expecting me to feel like a bad person. But I’m on the autistic spectrum; they’d probably have to say so clearly and explicitly before I noticed. Also, I’m somewhat pre-vaccinated against that – as an undiagnosed child, most of my symptoms were attributed to wilful misbehaviour.
Is it possible a lot of what you’re experiencing as “privileged people should feel bad” is just one possible interpretation of social hints, that would be understood differently by someone of normal social skills raised in a slightly different subculture?
Is this a scrupulosity thing?
SJ evangelism being in lawyer-mode for normies who don’t take ideas so damn seriously; you have to really drum the idea of privalege etc. into most people to get them to allign even moderately with SJs.
Then there’s the internet and the fact that internecine debates about deep SJ theory, woker-than-thou point scoring and preaching to the unconverted and uncertain are all happening through the same channels.
I’m assuming it’s a scrupulosity thing. I don’t get much crap from lefty friends for being a straight white guy, and what crap I get I just ignore (it is nothing compared to the rest of the crap I get from numerous friends who are just argumentative for the sake of it, and I’ve built up a considerable tolerance over the years due to spending huge amounts of time with argumentative people). At least IRL; getting into political discussions on the internet is begging for more crap. But mostly it seems that certain people just have a hard time due to taking things a lot more seriously than they should. Such people should especially avoid the internet; IRL, some friends may notice that you’re hypersensitive about certain things and try be nice by avoiding pushing your buttons, but nobody on the internet will ever cut you that kind of slack.
The prodigy meets the wall thing – I think it is pretty common. I was never prodigal, but generally managed to get good enough grades with little effort – until suddenly I couldn’t anymore. At university, I was surrounded by people equally smart, but many of them had developed actual work habits, too. From then on, it took effort to get anywhere.
The guilt trip? Be glad you are white! If you were black, you would be responsible for Idi Amin, Rwanda, and Robert Mugabe, if you were Asian, you would be responsible for Pol Pot and Nanjing, not to mention Genghis Khan. Which is to say, you take responsibility for your own actions, and those alone.
And while I haven’t been at MIT, I’ve been in tech and academia for decades. I have never seen or heard about anybody, eh, employing? a prostitute, nor any underage persons (except parents bringing their kids when school or daycare is closed) and even the parties tend to be on the dull side.
Without sanity, there is no morality, only Brownian motion. And Twitter is probably systematically anti-correlated with both.
Read something about Lavrentiy Beria. The guy was literally the boss of an organization created to reveal, torture, and murder people deemed insufficiently left-wing; under his leadership, millions were eliminated. You can’t get more SJW than that! Now go ahead and read something about his sex life… What does this morally compel you to do?
And we don’t have to go back to history. Stories how “a professional male feminist turned out to be a rapist / child molester / whatever” are quite common. I prefer not to post links, because I don’t like online vigilantism, and would really hate to mix a few false accusations along with true data; I am just saying that going from STEM to SJW would be like going from a house with a leaking roof into a thunderstorm.
In the previous paragraph, by “professional male feminist” I don’t mean any random guy who happens to agree with some of the feminist ideas, but rather someone who does it as a job, i.e. someone who actually has an income based on being the wokest woke among all the wokes, and who typically spends a lot of time attacking the less woke males. If you ignore ideology and look at psychology, it actually should not come as a surprise that a person who enjoys hurting others for a job turns out to be someone who enjoys hurting others after closing hours, too.
Heh, okay.
Well, if you’ll really go full SJW, and then one day you’ll decide you had enough and quit, your former comrades may use this to hurt you. Anyone else probably won’t care.
(You could ask Scott to censor your comment if you feel strongly about it.)
In thread below, Radu Floricica said “[For companies with a culture like Google] any ideas not woke enough just get shot down before they even reach the level of proposals. And after making a few examples, it becomes risky to even put non-woke ideas in writing. I have a strong suspicion this is how you get diverse casts.”
I wanted to respond to that last sentence because I think it both is and isn’t right. That is, it’s no secret how we get diverse casts: acting is a largely racially segregated profession (and it’s undeniably a gender-segregated profession).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like race-neutral casting calls are uncommon. I believe the race and gender of a major character is something that usually gets decided by the writers and producers before auditions even begin. In 2014, Chris Rock wrote an essay about race in Hollywood where he said “When it comes to casting, Hollywood pretty much decides to cast a black guy or they don’t. We’re never on the ‘short list’. We’re never ‘in the mix’. When there’s a hot part in town and the guys are reading for it, that’s just what happens. It was never like, ‘Is it going to be Ryan Gosling or Chiwetel Ejiofor for Fifty Shades of Grey?’… Or how about True Detective? I never heard anyone go, ‘Is it going to be Amy Adams or Gabrielle Union?’ for that show. I didn’t hear one black girl’s name on those lists. Not one.”
I don’t think that’s entirely unfair — a character’s race, gender, and cultural background impacts who they are, so most people consider a certain amount of racial and gender discrimination to be appropriate in the casting process. I’d be very surprised if this kind of demographic-specific casting started in the 2010s. I doubt there’s a timeline where an extremely talented black actress beats Mark Hamill to the role of Luke Skywalker, or an Indian man beats Sigourney Weaver to play Ripley (and those aren’t even demographic-specific roles!). Those ideas got shot down before they even reached the level of a proposal.
So yes, I agree that “diverse casts” are the result of the writers and producers explicitly deciding to cast people of a certain race & gender in certain roles, but I’m pretty sure “non-diverse casts” are ALSO the result of writers and producers explicitly deciding to cast people of a certain race & gender in certain roles. Given that some amount of racial and gender discrimination is inherent to casting, it seems to me that a movie with a “non-diverse” cast is easier to get made in 2019 than one with a “diverse” cast would have been a generation ago. Consider the casts of 2019’s Endgame, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Midsommar, Godzilla, It 2, The Art of Self Defense, The Irishman, Ready or Not, Zombieland 2, Ad Astra, Knives Out, etc.
[Edit: I’m using “diverse” to mean “lots of women and/or non-white people” even though that’s not “diverse” literally means because I expect that’s how Floririca was using it. The Farewell and Us did not have casts that were diverse in themselves, but still contribute to the diversity of Hollywood casting taken as a whole.]
I’ve seen “any ethnicity” casting calls with my own eyes. Does it happen for leading men and women, the way Chris Rock complains about? Maybe not, and that could reflect a heightened awareness of what races are most popular in your market. The less-woke suits at the big studios probably keep files of analytics on how popular white leads vs. black vs. Asian are in NorAm, China, and so on. Conventional wisdom seems to be that Asian audiences prefer actors who look like themselves with white Hollywood stars being second preference, while blacker casts make the most money from NorAm. And some Hollywood actors transcend whatever bias exists to become global draws, like Dwayne Johnson. They might not cast a black guy as Male Lead in Dumb Action Movie X, but the Rock would be interchangeable with a white action hero.
True, I probably overstated my case by calling race-neutral casting “uncommon”. But that point cuts both ways — to the extent that “any ethnicity” casting calls are common, Hollywood execs aren’t deliberately pushing diversity. But in the cases where they clearly are pushing diversity, demographic-specific casting calls aren’t a secret, they aren’t new, no one considers them beyond the pale, and it’s still both speakable and fathomable to have a big blockbuster movie with a largely white male cast.
Edit: To give some credit to the people who are annoyed by diversity in Hollywood, what I think IS new and different is movies where the main selling point is the cast’s demographics. Casting a man as the lead role in Die Hard wasn’t considered a selling point precisely because casting a woman would’ve been unfathomable (Well, not quite unfathomable since Aliens had come out already. But pretty close.) Today, it’s very plausible to have a major action movie be led by either a man or a woman, which turns the lead’s gender into a marketing decision in a way it wasn’t before.
Chris Rock’s point is that neutral casting calls rarely produce a diverse result, because the minority actors aren’t considered seriously. They have to be twice as good to overcome the implicit bias.
I’ve seen it happen in my own tastes, where growing up, my original characters defaulted to white males. It’s not until I started actively interrogating if they could be of different demographics, that I started considering other races/genders/sexualities.
There are also many other explanations. If a neutral casting call has 10% of its applicants as black and then 1/10 of the side characters ends up black you get claims of tokenism, or if you have 3/4 really good auditions who happen to be similar gender/ethnicity then its almost impossible to have a ‘diverse’ cast. When you have large differences in representation in auditions it is going to be rare that a truly diverse cast is settled on via merit alone.
Who watches movies? They skew disproportionately young and minority. This effect is even more pronounced among frequent moviegoers (as opposed to those who go occasionally or for big event movies). There’s basically two groups that buy tickets: young adults/teenagers and families with children. If you assume teenagers get to exert influence on what movies their family sees, the 12-24 crowd produces almost a supermajority of ticket sales.
So let’s imagine you’re a producer in Hollywood. You want to make as much money as possible on the film, which means catering to your audience’s tastes. What’s popular with people 12-24 who are more minority than average? Social justice. Your largest market is choosing to consume those products so you give them what they want. (Now, I do think there is an issue that Hollywood types want to make thinkpieces about the oppression of sensitive artists and their audience wants more red meat stuff like Black Panther. But that’s unrelated to diverse casting, which is something their audience genuinely wants ime.)
You can also see this in how, in roughly the past decade, Asians have become the highest per capita movie-going population. And suddenly, more and more movies about Asia and Asians. People talk about the Chinese market but it’s not just that: it’s coming from drivers in the US too. (Indeed, movies like Crazy Rich Asians are targeted at Asian Americans very specifically.)
With Star Wars, I’ve read that they originally wanted to make Han an alien, then they wanted to make him black (and had a black actor picked out), then changed him to white because his romance with white Leia would have been controversial at the time. Of course that doesn’t reflect today’s Hollywood.
https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a832429/star-wars-black-han-solo-glynn-turman/
This is actually really interesting. Not sure to what degree I should revise my assessment of how fathomable it would’ve been to have a blockbuster with a Force Awakens style cast in the 70s & 80s, because clearly it was something that George Lucas considered, but at the end of the day he couldn’t make it happen.
I wonder if the Princess Leia role was also open to other races and once they selected a white person as Leia, Han solo had to be white too.
@Aapje: It sure would have changed the Skywalker family if Mark Hamill had played Luke but open casting of Leia got them a non-white actress.
Yeah, that would have required altering some of the later-invented aspects of the story, but I don’t think Lucas had them pegged as separated-at-birth siblings (or Luke as Vader’s son) when he wrote the first movie, so there wasn’t a constraint then. (There might have been a marketability constraint for having an interracial couple as the romantic lead in your movie, though.)
@albatross11:
No, of course there wasn’t. And the need to not retcon very different-looking actors into relatives would have imposed different constraints when writing the RotJ script (nothing revealed in Empire places any constraints, as Vader is never seen unmasked in the same film that establishes he’s Anakin Skywalker).
No problem: Vader is revealed as…. James Earl Jones.
So were they already planning to do a Han/Leia romance in Episode IV? In that movie, at least, I always thought it looked more like a Luke/Leia relationship was on the cards.
The original movie sets up a rivalry between Luke and Han for Leia.
The original sequel to Star Wars was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinter_of_the_Mind%27s_Eye
And it’s all Luke and Leia flirting, with no Han on sight.
Lucas discarded it and went to write (aided by some people, some of whose work was discarded) Empire.
@JPNunez,
You’re missing a critical fact there: Harrison Ford didn’t sign on that he would do a sequel, while Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamil both did.
George Lucas genuinely didn’t know whether he could get Harrison Ford back for Star Wars 2 when he wrote Splinter of the Mind’s Eye so including Han would be a big risk. Once it was clear that Star Wars was a huge hit, they went back to the drawing board and wrote a script knowing that they could get the whole cast and a bigger budget.
@mdet
In SJ, there is a fairly commonly used concept of men/white people/etc being ‘the default,’ where the claim is that people don’t even consider the alternative.
I think that it is incorrect to refer to this as explicitly deciding.
Scrolling through the big action-adventure movies of the 70s and 80s, the only ones I saw that didn’t have a white man in the lead* were Aliens, Beverly Hills Cop, and Lethal Weapon (and Terminator, but Sarah Connor is more of a horror movie Final Girl than an action lead).
Would I be typical-minding to presume that the filmmakers were aware of this? Not saying that they were bigots who were casting this way out of malice, but I imagine that everyone was aware “white guy plays the lead, black guy plays the sidekick” was the convention.
*I don’t hold any movie’s demographics against it in terms of quality. The reason I think the characters demographics matters is because I think storytelling is how we build culture, and I think people of all demographics should play a role in that culture-building process.
@mdet
The evidence very strongly points to greatly increased ‘wokeness’ on the left, so at the very least, white people of the past seem to have been less concerned with this sort of stuff.
I don’t know whether this also means that they had less awareness. It seems pretty clear that they had a lot of awareness when (explicitly) casting black roles, but that doesn’t mean that they had awareness when casting (implicitly) white roles.
Presumably, Woody Allen didn’t consider a black actress for Annie Hall, while Louis CK chose to cast his ex-wife as black in his semi-autobiographical TV series, even though his actual ex-wife is white. To me the former seems fairly normal, casting to reality, while the latter seems to go out of ones way to make a point.
Not that there is necessary anything wrong with that, but it is not race blindness or racial ignorance, but deliberately making a choice.
Well, in my country the ‘woke’ people are working hard to eradicate the black role that already existed in a cultural tradition, because it had some problematic elements, that have pretty much already been addressed/changed. Yet as those were changed, the complaints changed to mostly historical and contemporary falsehoods.
My strong impression in general is that anti-racism often seems to latch onto a scapegoat, whose eradication supposedly will make a major change. These scapegoats then get mythical status as a symbol of oppression and get blamed for things that have nothing to do with it and being opposed to it becomes in itself a sign of virtue. So it must be destroyed, regardless of fact or reason.
I don’t see how PoC can become a normal part of culture-building when culture involving non-white people can’t just evolve organically and/or reflect the complexities that culture typically embodies, but have to result in immense improvements to racial disparities that are not just unreasonable, but even contradictory.
How about Lethal Weapon. Arguably two leads, one the crazy white guy, one the non-crazy black guy.
Or Beverly Hills Cop, which has a sole black lead.
The US was 83% white in 1980, and only 12% black. How many big action-adventure movies did you scroll through?
I personally have a couple of problems with “woke” casting (that is: casting specifically to get a “diverse” cast). I suspect I’m not the only one who thinks along these lines. I’ll focus on black/white, since you brought up Chris Rock.
1. Most places and times aren’t twenty-first century America and twent-first century American politics shouldn’t be influencing casting decisions for anything that isn’t set there. As I recall, the whole discussion started with the Wheel of Time – a fantasy setting where the main cast (at least initially) is not particularly diverse – and, yes, they were most probably seen by the author as white (we can’t really ask, though, unless there’s a medium in the room). Casting for diversity in this case seems to be pure politics of the most odious sort.
2. Even in twenty-first century USA, whites make up 72.4% of the population, as compared to 12.6% black (numbers from the 2010 census). If we were to go by pure statistics, we’d expect one black person for every 5.7 white people in a cast. Except that’s not really true either, because realistic proportions would depend on social milieu (this can actually skew heavily black, depending on the kind of story being told).
3. Tied to the previous point, and perhaps closest to what Chris Rock has to say in the linked interview, you can’t actually have it both ways. You can’t have African Americans both have this special status of historical oppression that is so dear to the SJW crowd – and is hard to escape evoking even for a smart guy like Chris – and be considered interchangeable with white people who have the special status of historical oppressors. That’s why you don’t get black people on the short list, Chris. White women want to have sex with black men, no doubt about that, but that’s not Grey. The dynamic here is very different and it shall remain so until the black community changes its fundamental character. You want to be “in the mix” with whites, you have to become “white”. Asians are most of the way there, I suspect. So long as the black/white rift remains in American society, deciding whether to cast a black person or not is very much a sensible decision to make before you begin the calls.
At the end of the day it all boils down to the story being told and the fact that who you chose to portray a particular role does matter. What would we say to a movie set in the 60s Chicago blues scene (Chess records et al.) with a couple of white actors cast in the role of some of the (black) musicians? Not white people in blackface or any other sort of makeup, just straight up white people playing black people. If that don’t sound right, you know why “diversity” casting grinds my gears.
So perhaps what’s needed is more black writers? Give us great stories with black protagonists and we’ll pay good money to see them.
This is particularly egregious in the case of period dramas. Liberal fantasies aside, black people made up a negligible portion of the population in most of Europe before the second half of the twentieth century, and none of the nobility of the period were black. Looking at some productions, however, you’d think medieval Europe was a multicultural paradise.
I strongly support race-blind casting on stage, and have for decades. There are lots of very talented non-white actors, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t get a chance to play Lear or Macbeth.
And then I grit my teeth and resign myself to the fact that it would be the worst possible sin today for a white man to play Othello.
I also know that these days “race-blind casting” is widely considered a euphemism for white privilege. Woke theater companies seem to be making casting decisions not just to give all actors a fair shake but to make a broader point about the modern world. The result kind of reminds me of Dick Shawn’s performance in The Producers.
How popular is acting among African Americans? My impression is that a very large percentage of black actors in the US are actually British.
Idris Elba may be hot right now, but Will Smith, Eddie Murphy, Samuel L. Jackson, Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman have all been huge stars too, often dominating the box office.
These are all British:
– Thandie Newton
– Chiwetel Ejiofor
– David Oyelowo
– Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei)
– John Boyega (Finn)
– Daniel Kaluuya
– Letitia Wright
– Naomie Harris
I mean, even taken at face value, “representative” casting faces a major hurdle from the start in simply asking the question “representative of what/where”?
Say you have a new TV show set in modern Los Angeles. Should the casting be representative of the population of Los Angeles? Of the state of California? Of the United States of America? Of the entire Earth? Where you draw the line matters a lot.
And what if the show is a sitcom about a Hispanic family? Well, great, you’ve probably used up all of your Hispanic representation on the main characters, so now everyone else in the show needs to be white or black or Asian. But is that representative? A Hispanic family would have a Hispanic extended family. They would have lots of Hispanic friends. Maybe chance would place them with a Russian or an Indian neighbor or coworker, but not enough of them to make the casting “representative.”
This is what current entertainment-centered SJ is calling for now. This thread is mostly engaging with outdated arguments on diversity.
And yet, there certainly are public protests and outcries w.r.t. lack of representation in acting jobs, casting someone of the wrong race/sex/sexual orientation/sexual identity for a role, etc. That’s happening independent of the push for more minority writers.
Now, personally, I think a focus on the race/sex/sexual orientation/etc. of a writer is mostly a mistake. What matters is whether they’re producing a good, interesting, well-written story. Just as it was dumb for SFF fans in the past to prejudge female authors (and thus encourage women to write under male pseudonyms), it’s dumb in the present to prejudge authors based on their identity instead of their writing, which is the important thing.
@Faza, AG, and albatross, I agree that I’d prefer for “lack of diversity in Hollywood” to be addressed letting Ryan Coogler, Jordan Peele, Barry Jenkins, Steve McQueen, Ava DuVernay, etc. (and whoever’s making all these Asian-American movies I’ve been seeing recently) continue to do their thing than by dropping a black woman into Renaissance Europe period piece. I wouldn’t complain about the latter, especially if I’m going in purely for entertainment with no expectation of historical accuracy, but I don’t think it’s necessary.
@albatross I welcome filmmakers to make movies about people unlike themselves, but it’s also not a coincidence that the directors I named have tended to make movies about black people. I don’t think the demographics in front of vs behind the camera are unrelated.
mdet:
Fair enough. I’m sure they’re not unrelated–just as I’m sure the audience demographics and preferences are related to the demographics of the actors cast.
My goal is good art–movies, TV shows, novels, short stories, plays, etc. For that, I think what I care most about is the quality of the writers and actors, not their race or gender or other background. Now, some people have background knowledge and experiences that let them do a better job writing some stories. But the quality of the stories is what matters to me, not the ethnic mix of actors/characters.
I recognize this is probably an easy position for me to take–I’m a straight white guy, so there are tons of movies and books and such that focus on people like me. But I’m also happy to read and watch stories about people not like me–indeed, I often find them really interesting and fun. They just need to be good. And I think that this is what will matter in the future, too–people don’t read Jane Austen’s novels now mainly because she was a woman, but rather because she was an amazing writer.
Antifa community college professor fired.
Firing people for their stated political views seems like a generally bad idea, and one that is probably applied against the left as often as for the left. (It’s always possible there was some evidence of actual crime or threat from this guy I don’t know about, but it looks from this story like he was fired for his affiliations.)
Arrest him if he bashes someone over the head with a bike lock, but don’t fire him for having the wrong political views or the wrong associates.