Open Thread 136.25

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

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1,290 Responses to Open Thread 136.25

  1. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    A neural net had a hard time coming up with anything that makes sense to humans from knitting patterns, so the next effort was something easier– crocheted hats. Just the patterns, not the actual crocheting.

    Hilarity ensues. I’m not worried about anyone accidentally programming an AI to take over the world any time soon.

    I don’t know whether it would have been possible to train a neural net on pictures of hats and the patterns which produce them.

    I hope someone with more comic talent than I’ve got takes a crack at an AI trying to talk it’s way out of a box. Writing please a million times and adding badly configured sad puppy faces is much more competence than I’d expect.

    • Aftagley says:

      Hilarity ensues.

      Oh my word yes it does. It’s even better than you describe it – the network used was previously trained on various internet topics, to include fan fiction. Even after training on hats, it still has the capability to produce fan fiction, just now it’s all hat related:

      Prompt: Harry whirled to face Snape, heart beating hard. “Wh–What will you do?”

      Output: Snape’s eyes narrowed slightly and he lowered his wand, then stepped aside. As he approached behind Harry, he knelt down to kiss the front rim of Harry’s green-gloved hat as he pulled her closer. Snape slipped on the silk and reached in carefully, then unbuttoned Harry’s green-gloved hat. He looked Harry in the eyes and stroked her crown lightly before pushing on the seam of the hat to attach it. He finished on the front of Harry’s hat with a snap. With a light flourish he tied an extra strand of fabric, then another twist of silk, then another twist of silk.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      I saw the results of those patterns and couldn’t help but think “Are those crocheted tumors?” From the description of what was going wrong, it certainly sounds like it’s the same idea.

      I guess that’s the problem with AI’s limitless possibilities: you really do get everything. Sometimes you get a program that can crush humans at Go, sometimes you get hat cancer.

  2. DragonMilk says:

    Let’s talk Sin. And anger.

    But really, let’s chat about the bans! I preface by saying Scott of course has all rights to moderate his blog and has his guidelines on kind, necessary, truthful. I will start by positing that certain people are convinced that something is true, and snark emerges when that truth is not recognized, and they think it very necessary insofar as they feel it worthwhile to even make a comment at all.

    More on this soon!

    • Corey says:

      I say this as someone who loves to snark and has even ill-advisedly done so on this site…

      I think discouraging snark of any kind, up to and including formally disallowing it entirely, would improve the discussion quality.

      I think this is because the readership is diverse enough that every position one could dismiss as obviously-ridiculous actually has a constituency.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Strong disagree. Snark is the best antidote to pomposity, self-righteousness, and overblown self-assurance, among other things. Also, banning snark just tends to get you people being snarky in deniable ways, which quickly becomes more tiresome to read than regular snark.

        • acymetric says:

          I’m not sure it is the best antidote, but I’ll agree it is a useful one. That said, I think there is plenty of snark (especially as it relates to the bans) that were not in response to any of those things, but simply in response to things people disagreed with. In fact, some of the snark wasn’t responding to anyone at all, it was an attempt at kickstarting a conversation using snark as a jumping off point.

          I agree banning snark would be a bad idea (also probably impossible), but a reminder for people to rein it in a little and choose their spots was probably in order the way the comment section had been going over the last few weeks/months.

          • Dragor says:

            Sincerity seems like a good value to encourage I think.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Sincerity seems like a good value to encourage I think.

            Yes? You interject this as though you are contrasting sincerity to snark, which I’m not sure I follow. Can you elaborate?

          • Dragor says:

            I suppose I understood this as affirmation rather than interjection, but generally when I speak sincerity has an emotional timbre of genuineness and forthrightness that snark [edit: often] does not. It feels as though sincerity is elucidating your opinion as clearly as possible, and snark attempts to remove seriousness from the conversation?

            Honestly, I am not sure. I added the edit above because I have actually heard snark used in a kind manner that retains emotional intimacy with a topic rather than creates emotional distance. In my own usage though, snark tends to have a tiny hint of animus and direct the conversation away from the sincere.

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Thanks, that’s a clear and thoughtful answer.

            I would still point out that animus can certainly be sincere.

      • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

        I agree that discouraging snark would be very positive, but I worry that a total ban would be too severe and remove both good content and some of the fun of commenting. Some proposed alternative snark allowance policies:

        – One snarky comment per user per top-level thread
        – One snarky comment per user per post
        – One snarky comment per user; if someone snarks at you, search for a previous snarky comment made by them (for fairness, post-dating this policy) and they get banned
        – One snarky comment per post across all users, creating an interesting dynamic (presumably there would be great shame attached to using up the snarky comment with something not sufficiently entertaining)

        • DragonMilk says:

          A snark budget? Would this be earned by a ratio of every 10 non-snarky posts, you get 1 free snarky post that can be directed at an outgroup but not an individual?

        • Nick says:

          This would be impossible to keep track of for Scott.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            A complicated budget would be, but I don’t think any of my (not entirely serious but not entirely joking either) proposals would be. There are two ways they could reasonably be enforced: either when people violate them in a sufficiently annoying way they comment about it, which draws Scott’s attention, or (since comments about comments violating policy are also tedious) Scott occasionally bans people who violate the policy in a way he finds egregious which hopefully encourages people to stick to it.

          • albatross11 says:

            If you want to communicate about ideas or facts, snark makes that harder.

    • Aftagley says:

      I don’t know if it’s fair to settle on the narrative that these were bans due to snark.

      Maybe in Dick’s case – the comments Scott linked reveal a tendency to go meta on the argument and start antagonizing the participants, but Matt and Deiseach both seemed to have a tendency to default to a state of maximum uncharitably.

      Conrad, to me at least, just comes across as deranged, although maybe I just don’t get his sense of humor.

    • jgr314 says:

      Combining this with the AI comment, a modest proposal: someone should train an AI on @Plumber’s comments to generate a style filter. Then, whenever anyone else wants to post, they run their comment through the style filter to get message in the tone that Plumber would write it.

      • Plumber says:

        @jgr314,

        Wow, I think that was one of the most flattering compliments I’ve every received, thanks!

        As to your idea:

        If every tenth comment contains “Well back in the ’80’s” I’ll know the filter is being used.

    • People think that getting a good forum is about good rules but it’s mainly not. It’s mostly about the people and the interactions they build with others on the forum, with light enforcement of rules a more minor role.

      • Nornagest says:

        It’s about culture, but moderation policy influences culture to a surprising extent. And often in counterproductive ways: heavy-handed moderation often does more to create an adversarial relationship between the administration and the commentariat (which is cultural poison) than it does to steer the commentariat in whatever direction the administration wants it to go. On the other hand, excessively light moderation tends to allow the culture to spiral into immature nerdwank.

        • It’s all complicated and yes, you need some kind of expectation of moderation but there’s a reason that this place needs way less moderation than the subreddit.

        • Ketil says:

          Some things that make moderation work here, is that a) it’s Scott’s blog, and he produces valuable and respected content we all come here to read and b) the rules are clearly stated, and sensible, and generally agreed-upon. So bans are fairly rare, and discussion mostly decent.

    • ECD says:

      I didn’t entirely agree with it and it’s from a left wing perspective, but this was helpful to my thinking about this and was, in retrospect, at least potentially part of the reason for my increased commenting here: http://dailynous.com/2019/08/30/20-theses-regarding-civility-guest-post-amy-olberding/

  3. Dragor says:

    Hey, can anybody steelman, explore, or otherwise elucidate Jordan Peterson for me? I have run into a few fans of his, and I generally get on with quite enjoy exchanging views with and have a certain broad baseline agreement them except for a certain intensity and extremity of views (generally an intense reaction against other extreme views). I have tried a deep dive on youtube, and I found him much more reasonable and pleasant than I would have expected given I read somewhere that he saw controversy as a means of generating Patreon revenue, but I still got the sense he was mildly untrustworthy. It seemed like he used Motte Bailey a lot; he was a bit loose with terminology, naming stuff in the Po-moid cluster “post modernist”; and he once described protesting of his speech as “pure narcissism at work“, which seemed innappropriate given he is himself a psychologist and knows how that word should be properly used. Also, his fans seem pretty zealous, and I judge people by their fans. Nonetheless, he was fairly articulate, made some good points, and was neither the demon certain of my friends make him out to be nor….someone I would be all that interested in listening to that much. If I wanted his genre of critique I prefer Haidt, but I haven’t been able to make a coherent argument for why. Anyone able to throw some light on this, contribute anything interesting etc? Any stuff I should read, preferably in a written form would be appreciated. I can post some stuff I dug up the last couple times I got into this and have or have not gotten around to reading too if anyone is interested.

    BTW I am presuming this is culture war OK because it is after an Open Thread, but if it’s not please let me know and I will delete this ASAP.

    • Drew says:

      Peterson is a practicing clinical psychologist. That bleeds into his work, which is mostly self-help stuff. The overwhelming majority of self-help books follow the same basic pattern.

      Step 1: Present an idea that people pretty much know.
      Step 2: Tell some positive stories to help people visualize success.
      Step 3: Create space (ie. ramble) so people can ruminate on the idea.

      In Marie Kondo, this looks like: “Own Fewer Things” / Kondo’s stories about clients / The rest of the book.

      In “Win Friends & Influence People”, this looks like: “Actually listen when people talk” / Stories about how some guy got successful / The rest of the book.

      Peterson’s work is basically similar. “Follow your own advice” / Anecdotes about Peterson’s childhood / The rest of the book.

      Each of these books has their super-fans. The advice itself is never that novel. But some stories ‘click’ well enough that people get the energy to change their habits. And the habit change improves their life. That means the book was transformative for them, but not that earth shattering for other people.

      If Peterson’s style of “create space” doesn’t click for you, then it doesn’t click, and I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Similarly, if you’re not in a place where you need his advice, then many of his youtube videos won’t create much value.

      • Dragor says:

        So, basically he shares a lot of Haidt’s worldview, but he’s got a whole self help angle that I don’t get that much from, and the two bleed into each other and share a common fanbase? That makes sense.

        • lvlln says:

          At least in the realm of their professions, i.e. psychology, they do seem to agree with each other substantially. I’d highly recommend checking out their conversation from a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IBegL_V6AA

          As an aside, I think this sort of setting brings out the best from Peterson, where he’s the person interviewing someone else, rather than the other way around or him just giving a lecture. I don’t know if there’s something to all the thousands of hours of experience he has listening to and conversing with people, or if it’s just him being naturally talented at it, or some combination of both, but he seems to be very good at listening to his interviewees and asking incisive questions that get at the heart of the matters that they’re talking about.

          Whereas when he’s expounding on his own ideas, that can be hit or miss.

          • albatross11 says:

            +1

            Peterson at his best is a really excellent interviewer. He’s a natural fit for the podcast format–a highbrow conversation that doesn’t have to worry about being too highbrow for a mass audience, several hours long, involving deep conversation about serious stuff.

            As a self-help guru and internet phenomenon, I don’t know how he is–I don’t really feel a great need for a self-help guru and I don’t find those of his speeches I’ve listened to all that engaging, perhaps because I’m not the target market.

          • Dragor says:

            you know…I have had limited success getting into podcasts. All the people who were really in to JP were pretty into podcasts. My “plz give me book or longform article” criteria might be problematically filtering my experience of him.

          • DragonMilk says:

            Thanks for sharing, this was quite interesting.

      • Clutzy says:

        I’d say, generally I agree with this, and would add:

        Plus he is good at framing his opponents to look ridiculous. He makes the slippery slope look steep, slippery, and real. And in that he often has things on his side.

        This plus a hint of simply not denying things that as Drew said, “people pretty much know.” That is what the “controversial” has become, largely. He says things like, “don’t worry about the 50 year old lady shooting you over a parking space,” and that gets pushback.

        • Dragor says:

          Do you view the slope as as steep as he posits it? Reading through these other comments, one theory I have for why he bugs me is that he is alarmist. My discussions with my friends who are fans of his often go along the lines of:
          “XXX happened and it was bad”
          “yeah, ok but it seems like the sort of thing that will return to equilibrium”

          • Clutzy says:

            I don’t think all of them are, but many seem to me to be. And those are the ones where people have already quite clearly pointed at a point past what they are advocating for, and said, “that’s the goal.”

            Good examples are things like:

            Gun control: Obvious that a complete ban of all guns is goal.

            LGBT issues: Clear goal is state subsidies of these ideas + government enforced participation by all persons.

            Immigration: Open Borders, at least until a perceived permanent voting majority.

          • albatross11 says:

            LGBT issues: Clear goal is state subsidies of these ideas + government enforced participation by all persons.

            Can you unpack that? I don’t see how anyone is actually pushing for government enforced participation in LGBT activities, but maybe I’m misunderstanding your point….

          • Corey says:

            Immigration: Open Borders, at least until a perceived permanent voting majority.

            Or… the costs of heavy internal immigration policing (including to Latino American citizens, even if we don’t assign moral weight to illegals) aren’t believed to outweigh the benefits.

            But that would be a dangerously charitable reading of the liberal position, so use caution.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Corey

            Or… the costs of heavy internal immigration policing

            That’s why we want a wall, so we don’t need to police internally.

          • Randy M says:

            That’s why we want a wall, so we don’t need to police internally.

            Because once we developed skin, our immune system soon became vestigial.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Randy M

            Don’t need to police as heavily, I should’ve said. Just as skin prevents many of our infections.

          • Randy M says:

            I just remembered where I heard the analogy before.

          • Clutzy says:

            Can you unpack that? I don’t see how anyone is actually pushing for government enforced participation in LGBT activities, but maybe I’m misunderstanding your point….

            Masterpiece Cakeshop was literally a Supreme Court case. There is the instance where a Canadian lost a custody battle where not recognizing the child’s transgenderness was a critical decision point. New York has a pronoun law with fines of up to $250k, etc.

            Or… the costs of heavy internal immigration policing (including to Latino American citizens, even if we don’t assign moral weight to illegals) aren’t believed to outweigh the benefits.

            What? I don’t understand this. Firstly, employer regulations are typically right up the left’s alley, a minimum wage, and most our HR regulations are already an order of magnitude more burdensome than basic workplace checks. And the rest is simply not being willfully blind. When police run paperwork in a normal situation where they would, they are allowed to, you know, run it. If you have a person convicted of a crime, and they are not of legal status, just turn em over to ICE as part of the release. What is the high cost?

          • Plumber says:

            @Clutzy > “…Immigration: Open Borders, at least until a perceived permanent voting majority”

            It doesn’t work like that, there is no “until”.

            For the record I vote for Democrats but I don’t support fully open borders, but the thing is that just as 100 years ago most immigrants who get citizenship and may and choose to vote, vote for Democrats, as do most of their children, but enough of their grandchildren, and especially their great-grandchildren become Republicans that a “permanent” Democratic majority looks unlikely, too many descendents of immigrants become Republicans, and after a certain amount the more immigration there is the more that those born in the U.S.A. will favor a Party advocating restrictions on further immigration.

            I see no signs of a permanent one Party U.S.A. in the works

          • Clutzy says:

            @Plumber

            That has, IMO, historically been more about the parties adjusting than the people. FDR would have lost all 44 states in 1892.

          • Corey says:

            @Clutzy: To give an example, a Louisiana parish sheriff’s department recently detained a Latino American citizen on immigration hold who had a US passport on him, and when newsfolk questioned them about this, they replied that they literally arrest everybody who looks Mexican to check (presumably excluding local residents, numbering about 3%). To be fair, I assume the ACLU is about to chew their clothes off.

            So part of the enforcement cost is Latino Americans having to carry documentation at all times, and even that might not be enough to ward off legal harassment.

            There are other side effects, e.g. the more afraid you make the illegal population of the police, the more you make them targets of criminals. Even if you assign zero moral weight to illegals, keeping criminals in business is probably a net negative. I understand arguments that we should be crueler to discourage immigration, but I don’t think it’ll work – we won’t ever get near the level of cruelty of, say, Honduran gangs.

            employer regulations are typically right up the left’s alley

            I’ve heard proposals for e.g. mandatory E-Verify derided on here as “the left doesn’t want to enforce immigration law except by jailing capitalists”. To be fair, probably not by you personally.

            (Cue the stories of “my lawyer tells me I have to accept birth certificates written in crayon or EEOC will get me, so I can’t screen by eligibility to work”)

          • Corey says:

            Masterpiece Cakeshop was literally a Supreme Court case.

            The problem is that any holy book can be interpreted in any way to justify pretty much anything. People had ready religious justifications for not serving black customers, back in the day. (“Curse of Ham” IIRC)

            I can’t buy alcohol or cars on Sundays, so by this logic I’m forced to participate in Christian activities.

          • Corey says:

            That’s why we want a wall, so we don’t need to police internally.

            I’ve never heard this tradeoff proposed, I know similar albeit leftier ones like wall-for-amnesty have been roundly rejected.

            But that’s because more wall doesn’t do much (unless “wall” unpacks to, say, a militarized no-mans-land and significant slowing of legitimate traffic through ports of entry). Restrictionists would be trading something (reduced internal enforcement) for close to nothing (desert crossings become 5% more forbidding) so it’s no wonder such a thing wouldn’t fly.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Corey

            Wall for amnesty was rejected by the left, not the right. Such a bill was proposed by the Republican Congress in 2017.

            As Randy M points out, there would be some internal policing, but dramatically reduced.

            As a piece of anecdote, a Latino woman who works for me grew up in El Paso in the 80s and 90s and still remembers the night and day change when they started aggressively guarding the border under Clinton rather than focusing on internal enforcement.

            Her father, who looks very dark, used to get regularly stopped and checked on for citizenship status, which would infuriate him because he was a DEA agent. After the border closed, he never got stopped again because internal enforcement was substantially less needed.

            She’s a huge Trump/wall supporter because she thinks it will make the lives of American Latinos like her more peaceful.

          • brad says:

            I’ve heard proposals for e.g. mandatory E-Verify derided on here as “the left doesn’t want to enforce immigration law except by jailing capitalists”. To be fair, probably not by you personally.

            John Schilling has the most persuasive argument against E-Verify I’ve seen. I’m not persuaded, mind you, but it is persuasive.

            I hope I’m doing it justice, but I’d sum it up as if you are going to (de facto) let people come into the country but not work even semi-legally they will turn to outright crime.

          • JonathanD says:

            @EchoChaos,

            Wall for amnesty was rejected by the left, not the right. Such a bill was proposed by the Republican Congress in 2017.

            No, wall for a temporary deferment in enforcement was offered in 2017. This is not the same thing. I believe that Dems offered wall for dreamer amnesty, the Reps offered wall for dreamer temp safety, and the two sides weren’t able to close a deal. Basically because the Reps weren’t willing to offer permanency and the Dems weren’t willing to take anything less.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @JonathanD

            That’s incorrect. Grassley’s bill had full and entire incorporation of the BRIDGE act.

            https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-secure-act-protects-daca-recipients-and-provides-needed-reforms

            The Democrats rejected it and demanded a straight vote.

          • JonathanD says:

            @EchoChaos,

            The first three links that google gives me say that the BRIDGE act protections went for three years. I don’t see where that’s contradicted on Grassley’s site (I only spent a couple of minutes, but both the news releases I saw say it’s a bipartisan solution while not referencing a duration.)

          • Dan L says:

            S.2192 Sec. 244A (d):
            Duration Of Provisional Protected Presence And Employment Authorization.—Provisional protected presence and the employment authorization provided under this section shall be effective until the date that is 3 years after the date of the enactment of this section.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Dan L

            Thanks for the correction.

            I will note that I would support Grassley’s law with permanent BRIDGE.

          • JonathanD says:

            @EchoChaos, so would I, and so, I think, would Democrats. But they aren’t willing to sign up to make compromises to protect a set of people they’re simply going to have to make other concessions for down the road. That’s not a deal, it’s rent. And that’s all the Republicans have ever offered. Pay the danegeld now, and we’ll leave them alone, for now.

            @DanL, thanks.

          • Clutzy says:

            Corey

            To give an example, a Louisiana parish sheriff’s department recently detained a Latino American citizen on immigration hold who had a US passport on him, and when newsfolk questioned them about this, they replied that they literally arrest everybody who looks Mexican to check (presumably excluding local residents, numbering about 3%). To be fair, I assume the ACLU is about to chew their clothes off.

            So part of the enforcement cost is Latino Americans having to carry documentation at all times, and even that might not be enough to ward off legal harassment.

            To me these things are both unconstitutional and not very effective. So I would classify people advocating for such a thing as policy as quacks.

            Also, the stories about things like that happen strike me as very anecdotal and likely extremely rare. To the extent they happen at all, it is the fault of open borders advocates and a lack of border security. So Dems complaining about it is also quite disingenuous. It like a kid who eats only candy complaining when his mom locks the pantry.

            There are other side effects, e.g. the more afraid you make the illegal population of the police, the more you make them targets of criminals. Even if you assign zero moral weight to illegals, keeping criminals in business is probably a net negative. I understand arguments that we should be crueler to discourage immigration, but I don’t think it’ll work – we won’t ever get near the level of cruelty of, say, Honduran gangs.

            That sanctuary city rationale has never actually been substantiated numerically, particularly since a “no cops, no snitches” culture exists as much, if not more prominently in black neighborhoods.

    • jermo sapiens says:

      Jordan Peterson spent his careers studying the question of how otherwise normal people were made to participate in the atrocities committed by communists and fascists during the 20th century. He has reached the following conclusion, best summarized by Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote:

      the line dividing good and evil cuts through every human heart

      From this he has argued that we can all improve society by working on ourselves, as opposed to trying to agitate for “change” in various ways. This explains his description of the protesters at his Queens University speech as “pure narcissism at work”, a description I completely agree with. Young fools with their lives in complete disarray performatively agitating against things they do not understand in a way to signal their non-existing virtue (I understand this is a generalization which potentially does not apply in this case, but does in a very large number of such cases.) Peterson says to these protesters, fix your room before you try and fix the world.

      • Dragor says:

        Thanks, this makes a whole lot of sense. Can you parse his whole hierarchy thing for me? He seems to think it is very necessary but has been too undermined. My understanding from The Secret of Our Success is that humans work with prestige and hierarchy both, but I read that book after I tried at least my first JP dive, so that couldn’t have influenced its nonpersuasiveness back then.

        On another topic, you explained why so much of his moral stuff from, say, Scott’s 12 Rules review resonates with me: he believes it behooves every individual to seriously attempt to behave morally, and that pretty much guides my worldview. He’s some sect of Christian and I’m some sect of Buddhist, so we have different methodologies, but it puts us closer together with respect to differing worldviews.

        On a third topic, given a certain definition of narcissism I suppose I agree with you both, but it’s not the definition I would expect from a clinical psychologist; it’s flippant, and that’s not what I expect from public intellectuals. To my mind flippancy is emulated, misunderstood, and generally inferior to sincerity; it is a tendency I am trying to eradicate in myself.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          On hierarchies: they are very ancient and natural. Lobsters share neurological pathways with us that help us manage hierarchies, and although he claims our last common ancestor was 300 million years ago, it’s actually 600 million years ago, at the time of the Cambrian explosion. Hierarchies are not caused by capitalism.

          Hierarchies help us create order in the world. But they also dispossess many people. The tension between maintaining the hierarchy and ensuring that the dispossessed are taken care of is the proper issue that conservatives and liberals should fight over, hopefully without one side succeeding completely.

          I agree that was flippant. But having dedicated his life to trying to prevent the atrocities of the 20th century from repeating themselves, I can understand his exasperation at being continuously called a N*zi by young kids with a year of undergrad under their belt.

          • albatross11 says:

            I’d say that there are a number of ways for individuals to organize themselves, driven by constraints of logic and natural laws and perhaps by fundamental bits of game theory and economics and evolution. Hierarchies are one such way. Most animals have hardware support for many different strategies, and it’s not surprising that hierarchies are in that set.

          • Dragor says:

            Thanks for the explanation. I think some of it might be me correctly perceiving him fighting a war and…not viewing the war as relevant. I’ll feel like an asshole if the war transpires, and if it doesn’t I’ll view him as noisome.

            I think I shoulda clarified the Prestige thing. The Secret of our Success contends that prestige hierarchies are far more significant than dominance hierarchies because humans learn culture by mimicking successful people (and successful people allow those who are convenient to them to hang around them). The author contends that Prestige hierarchies have been far more relevant all the way into pre-human history because ever since tools came around it was possible to ambush and murder any excessively bossy group member. He has a self domestication hypothesis similar to that of Pinker. Peterson seems to be pushing dominance hierarchies rather than prestige hierarchies, correct me if I am wrong.

            Sidebar, weren’t the Nazi’s all about dominance hierarchy and such? Is his view that we need to be honest about it and channel it rather than blindly stop it off until it explodes?

          • FLWAB says:

            Peterson seems to be pushing dominance hierarchies rather than prestige hierarchies, correct me if I am wrong.

            I believe you are wrong. However I have not read The Secret of our Success, so maybe I am misunderstanding the difference. But here is succinctly what Peterson believes about hierarchies:

            1. Animals naturally sort themselves into hierarchies (see lobsters, etc)
            2. Hierarchies of competence are extremely efficient at producing the things we like (wealth, art, etc. A company is more efficient than a single operater, studios can make movies a single person can’t, etc)
            3. Some people are way more competent than others at particular tasks(Pareto distributions, Peter principle, etc).
            4. As such in any well functioning hierarchy (one based on competence) some people will rise to the top while most people will end up in the middle and some will be on the bottom.
            5. Inequality is thus built into the human condition. It is not particular to Western Civilization, or the Patriarchy, or Capitalism or whatever else activists may blame inequality on.
            6. Hierarchies can become corrupt. When they become corrupt they are no longer based on competency but on power (office politics, dominance, violence, etc.).
            7. It is the proper place of the Right Wing to build and defend hierarchies because we need them and we can’t get rid of them regardless, and it is the proper place of the Left Wing to look out for those who end up on the bottom of the hierarchy and to reform hierarchies that become corrupt.

            That’s his basic idea in a nutshell. In short, unless I misunderstand what you mean by a dominance hierarchy and a prestige hierarchy, Peterson believes that hierarchies are inevitable but naturally begin as prestige hierarchies based on competence, and hierarchies that become dominance hierarchies need to be destroyed or reformed.

          • Viliam says:

            @albatross11 — you make it sound as if hierarchies are just one of many things, like something we have no reason to focus on, because it’s just an arbitrary choice among many alternatives.

            To me it seems like hierarchies are wherever you look. High school is a fight for being at the top, and if you lose, you get bullied. People spend a lot of time and energy discussing those who are at the top. (Whatever else you may think about Trump, he is very successful at being one of the topics frequently mentioned at SSC, and he probably doesn’t even know SSC exists.)

            The alternative to hierarchy of dominance is the hierarchy of prestige; but that’s still a hierarchy. Even when you propose something other than hierarchy, for example consensus, it usually ends up being dominated by people at the top of the informal hierarchy. From my perspective, hierarchies are everywhere you look.

            If you agree that hierarchies are all around us, the natural question is “why?”. Some people say, it’s a sinister plan of evil white capitalist males. Other people (among others, Peterson) say it’s an instinct that even many animals share; it’s something we do almost as automatically as breathing.

            @Dragor — hierarchies are a fact of life. They are a tool to achieve coordination. This may be used for good or bad purposes.

            Nazis and Communists coordinated to do bad things efficiently, and they succeeded to kill millions of people. A hierarchical army usually succeeds to kill disorganized people, even when those people greatly outnumber them. But hierarchies are also used to organize production. If you have a company, you want to have a hierarchy of competence, where the most competent people make the critical decisions, and those less competent have to follow them instead of doing their own random thing.

            And by the way, SJWs have their own hierarchies, too. I am not even talking here about the “progressive stack” — which obviously is a hierarchy — but rather about the usual informal hierarchies of power, where everyone knows that some people are dangerous, and if you look at them the wrong way, you are going to regret it, because suddenly you find yourself alone and everyone calls you a Nazi.

          • Enkidum says:

            To me it seems like hierarchies are wherever you look.

            One of the more common thoughtful complaints against social justice advocates I’ve seen (I believe here among other places, thought I can’t really remember when or who said it) is that they reduce everything to power relationships, and this misses much of what is important about life. According to SJW ideology, then, power and dominance are the only important things.

            My response has always been you could just take out the words “the only” from the last sentence, and it would actually be true. Foucault and many others focussed on power relationships, but this doesn’t mean the only thing they think is real or important is power – it just means they think power is real and important and needs to be discussed.

            But then when you say something like

            High school is a fight for being at the top, and if you lose, you get bullied.

            what that means, at least grammatically, is that this is the fundamental nature of high school. So you seem to be advocating the same kind of power-is-at-the-base-of-everything view that others have (in my view mostly incorrectly) ascribed to the modern Left.

            If you’re not saying that about high school, then that’s fine. But if you are, I’d simply like to offer my own anecdata, namely that no one would ever have mistaken me for being at or near the top of any hierarchies, but I also wasn’t bullied much (after middle school at least). Mostly people just let me do my thing.

            I’ve worked most of my adult life in situations where it’s not always clear what the hierarchy is – I mean I suppose I technically have a boss, but what he wants me to do is do stuff that we are both interested in, in the way that I think is most useful. I recognize that this is unusual, and definitely not to everyone’s taste, but it is a meaningful way of existing that quite a few people do enjoy.

            I like @jermo sapiens’ description of the proper roles of conservatives and liberals according to Peterson. I think it’s a good rule of thumb.

          • Dragor says:

            @enkidum

            I think you are sort of speaking to my experience. I have been in social situations where hierarchies more fluid and less explicit. Everyone worked together towards goals, and while there were certain people who more often had effective ideas or who worked harder and thus were admired generally any worthwhile idea or labor was valued, so influence was meritocratic. They were, in a word, collaborative. Don’t get me wrong, hierarchies are useful and I am not unilaterally opposed to them, but when I hear people emphasize the inevitability and essentiality of hierarchies, it seems like they are talking about something else.

            Maybe this is a signal and corrective problem?

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @Viliam

            @albatross11 — you make it sound as if hierarchies are just one of many things, like something we have no reason to focus on, because it’s just an arbitrary choice among many alternatives.

            To me it seems like hierarchies are wherever you look.

            From my point of view this is your point of view blinding yourself to an objective point of view (we are all blind to this, which is why input from others is so helpful – other people allow us to experience small parts of the world we never would have experienced otherwise).

            Quoting Enkidum:

            I mean I suppose I technically have a boss, but what he wants me to do is do stuff that we are both interested in

            Quite often I ask my immediate supervisor to do something that is part of his job, in order to make my job easier, or in lieu of me doing it so that I have more time to do the rest of my job.

            To me hierarchies are just job classifications. Frequently with self-appointed, and other-approved (because you’re good at it, or no one else wants to do it), job duties.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Peterson seems to be pushing dominance hierarchies rather than prestige hierarchies, correct me if I am wrong.

            I dont have that impression. In fact an example he uses quite often is that when a tyrannical chimp takes over a tribe, eventually a pair of chimps teams up to kill the tyrant, and they start ruling the tribe more cooperatively. I’m not sure that captures the distinction between dominance and prestige hierarchies, but it suggests that using dominance only is an unstable system.

            Another example Peterson uses alot is that when rats play-fight, the stronger rat naturally lets the weaker rat win about 1/3 of the time, otherwise the weaker rat wont play with the stronger rat. It suggests that even nature, greater strength is not all that is required to succeed, and that caring for the weak is beneficial.

          • Enkidum says:

            It bothers me a great deal that this thread makes Peterson sound more reasonable, what am I supposed to ignorantly make fun of now?

          • Dragor says:

            @Enkidum That has been my conclusion ever since my first deep dive with him. I actually rewrote my original post with more eloquent language with the basic structure: Here are some ways Jordan Peterson is reasonable; here are some ways he is unreasonable; the unreasonable is insufficient not to take him seriously; nonetheless, he bugs me. Why does he bug me?

            Unfortunately, the edit wasn’t allowed and I couldn’t retrieve the re-write to delete and repost with.

            Have you read Haidt?

          • Aapje says:

            Peterson believes very strongly in success/competence spirals (and the opposite). This one of the main reasons why he advocates that people work on improving themselves first (“clean up your room”), rather than demand things from others.

            The idea is that if you become valuable for others, they will offer you opportunities/deals that make you even more valuable, which means that you get more opportunities/deals, etc. So then not only does your life gets better, but also the life of those you make deals with.

    • JPNunez says:

      Scott reviewed 12 rules for life, maybe start there?

      https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life/

      • Dragor says:

        I read it, but it seems like there is a noteworthy divide between the self help and the anti-activist activism…or so an adherent aqaintance of mine tells me.

        Maybe I should read the whole book? I might get more mileage than I got out of attempting to read his bible lectures.

  4. souleater says:

    Are liberals perceived as nicer than conservatives? Why?
    Are liberals actually nicer than conservatives? Why

    Open Thread comment chain

    • Aftagley says:

      Depends on who’s doing the perceiving.

      • souleater says:

        The question could read
        “Does society in general perceive liberals as nicer than conservatives? why?”

        • Aftagley says:

          That’s kind of my point though, I don’t think that society has coalesced perspective of liberals or conservatives.

          One person’s stereotypical conservative is going to be a guy wearing a KKK hood and a MAGA hat, while their go-to liberal is a Dali-lama like figure of infinite love and tolerance. Someone else might have their stereotypical liberal being an Antifa member serving up concrete milkshakes, while the conservative is a small-town grandmother serving up apple pie.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            One person’s stereotypical conservative is going to be a guy wearing a KKK hood and a MAGA hat,

            I’m just trying to form a mental image of this.

          • Aftagley says:

            I was picturing the hood growing out of the cap. Like, a baseball cap with a long pointy top…

            Wait, I’m not creative enough to be the first person to think this up. It has to already be a thing…

            *goes to google*

            Yep!

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Aftagley-

            Your link is broken, so I googled “MAGA hat with KKK hood”.

            Yikes. SMDH.

          • Randy M says:

            All of the hat-hoods there pictured seem to be artists rendition of the merger. Progressive/Democrat artists, that is, making an implicit argument for assertion of their equivalence.

    • jermo sapiens says:

      Are liberals perceived as nicer than conservatives? Why?

      Yes, because liberalism is by nature permissive. Without wanting to be insulting, there is an analogy to be drawn from parenting, which is useful as it is something we are all familiar with. The liberal is like the “cool” parent that lets you play video games all night, and the conservative dad is like the “square” parent that forces you to read an hour everyday, lets you play video games 30 minutes, and then makes you brush your teeth before bed.

      Are liberals actually nicer than conservatives? Why

      No, not as a class. I’m construing the term “nice” more broadly than just “being pleasant/fun”, so that it includes caring about your responsibility towards others, which can often involve being unpleasant in certain situations.

      • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

        No, not as a class. I’m construing the term “nice” more broadly than just “being pleasant/fun”, so that it includes caring about your responsibility towards others, which can often involve being unpleasant in certain situations.

        If niceness encompasses necessary unpleasantness, then of course the people you agree with are nicer.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          I dont know if it should encompass necessary unpleasantness. As always, when arguing over something as broad as the word “nice”, we need to define our terms.

          • Corey says:

            We have to tread carefully when tabooing a term, to avoid the appearance of motte-and-bailey (or actually falling prey to it).

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            But didn’t you just say it did above?

            I’m construing the term “nice” more broadly than just “being pleasant/fun”, so that it… can often involve being unpleasant in certain situations.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            @Corey: I’m not tabooing a term or calling for it to be tabooed, just saying let’s be careful we all mean the same thing by it.

            @thisheavenlyconjugation: yes, that’s how I’m using it, but I’m mindful others could use it as just a synonym for “pleasant”.

            So yeah, when asking if liberals or conservatives are nicer, the first thing to figure out is, what do you mean by nice?

          • Corey says:

            @jermo sapiens: I was trying to say something similar, it’s an old-school LessWrong-ism. People would suggest not using the squishy word (for that particular argument) but instead replacing it with its unpacking.

            So if we wanted to define nice as, say, “follows the Golden Rule” (I don’t have a good concise unpacking of nice, sorry), people would agree to not use “nice” in the argument and instead use “follows the Golden Rule”.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            OK makes sense.

            I don’t have a good concise unpacking of nice, sorry

            Neither do I.

      • albatross11 says:

        jermo sapiens:

        Substantial numbers of liberals including almost everyone in or close to power in the US favors a lot of buzzkill rules being enforced by the law–for example, laws against using/possessing/selling heroin without the right official permissions, laws against smoking in various public places, laws requiring bicyclists and motorcyclists to wear helmets, laws making school attendance mandatory and making it impossible to drop out of school until age 18, etc. I think you’d find more conservatives than liberals up for getting rid of smoking bans and helmet laws. This seems like a contradiction to your model.

        • Nornagest says:

          Ideologies in a recruiting phase breed reckless hedonists. Ideologies in a consolidating phase breed joyless scolds.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            That rings somewhat true to me. It certainly fits the evolution of the left from 1968-2019, but I do feel there is an embryo of a traditionalist movement forming around the failure of the left to provide meaning to young people, and I dont see them ever courting or appealing to reckless hedonists.

        • broblawsky says:

          Is that actually true? The conventional perspective is that libertarians are otherwise politically conservative, but I’m not actually convinced without statistical evidence. I don’t consider libertarianism to actually be a conservative value in and of itself.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think libertarians don’t actually fit well into a standard US liberal/conservative framework.

          • broblawsky says:

            I agree, but what I’m asking is if a more “conservatives” actively support libertarian ideas such as than “liberals”. At least some libertarian ideas, such as marijuana legalization, are significantly more popular on the left than on the right.

          • At a slight tangent to this, note that the claim that commenters tilt right depends on counting libertarians as right wing.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            At a slight tangent to this, note that the claim that commenters tilt right depends on counting libertarians as right wing.

            In terms of principles, libertarians are part leftwing, part rightwing.

            In terms of where they are in relation to the center, where the center is defined as the median political position on most issues, they are right of the center.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          Substantial numbers of liberals including almost everyone in or close to power in the US favors a lot of buzzkill rules

          Yeah you’re right. My model was extremely coarse, and was an attempt to describe people’s perception of left/right instead of describing left/right directly. But, at least based on the examples you provided, if I were to update my model to more accurately describe left/right as they actually are, it appears that the left prefers new prohibitions based on science, while the right prefers old prohibitions based on tradition.

          • broblawsky says:

            That seems fair.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            But, at least based on the examples you provided, if I were to update my model to more accurately describe left/right as they actually are, it appears that the left prefers new prohibitions based on science,

            Hard disagree. I think the left prefers new prohibitions based on equality.
            Neither side is pro- or anti-science simpliciter. Postmodernism is part of the left at the same time they try to use climate science to justify restricting people’s lifestyle.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Neither side is pro- or anti-science simpliciter.

            Yeah I agree with that. That was just a first attempt at classifying the types of prohibitions preferred by either side. I think it’s fair to classify smoking and helmet laws as based on science, but pronoun laws, or disparate impact type laws are clearly not.

    • DragonMilk says:

      In churches, there is a grace/truth dichotomy discussed. Liberal churches emphasize love, grace, and acceptance of all. Conservative churches tend to emphasize there’s a way things “ought” to be done because since God is your creator, He knows best, so any deviation is sin.

      So while on a personal basis, it is a challenge to accept someone as they are, but not leave them as they are (encourage/demand change), this completely breaks down when it comes to politics.

      (Socially) liberal people tend to be amoral and agnostic, and have a tyranny of tolerance – they are taken aback that anyone would dare make an absolute truth claim and often don’t recognize that agnosticism is contradictory and essentially an absolute truth claim as well.

      And so when a (socially) conservative person gets mad about what they perceive not to be simply a norm, but “way things ought to be” be challenged, they often react with anger (aside, anger gets a bad rap, there’s a place for it).

      And so intellectual indifference can parade as niceness while self-righteous anger will come across as mean. But those in a forum don’t want to be seen as ragers so instead the anger often comes across as various other tones/snark.

      Given that Trump seems to be more or less supported by people pretty pissed off with the current state of affairs (drain the swamp), it is not surprising that liberals will seem nicer than conservatives today.

      • Corey says:

        (Socially) liberal people tend to be amoral and agnostic

        Interested in learning more about the amorality. Is it because morality doesn’t count as morality without religious backing? Or something more sinister?

        • souleater says:

          I think you’re seeing amoral as immoral.

          A liberal might take the position of
          “If its not hurting anyone, its not wrong”

          Where a conservative could say
          “Some things are just wrong. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hurt anyone”

          Moral foundations theory talks about this a little.. Where a Liberal is focused on caring and fairness, a conservative is also thinking of ingroup loyalty, respect for tradition, and sanctity.

          • Randy M says:

            A liberal might take the position of
            “If its not hurting anyone, its not wrong”

            The liberal reading this will reply “That’s the correct position, because if it isn’t hurting anyone, it doesn’t have anything to do with morality.”
            Which illustrates SE’s point–less things concern morality for the liberal.

            But, conversely, liberal morality requires you to think more about downstream consequences (in some cases, for some liberals, etc.).

            For example, it’s not enough for you to pay the listed price for your coffee beans and thank the cashier on the way out. You need to verify the cashier it making a fair wage, the growers aren’t coerced into their work, the company packaging it isn’t doing business with people causing harm, and you drove there in a vehicle that only minimally pollutes and used shopping bags that biodegrade the fastest.

            Again, this isn’t to argue that all or any liberals require all these concerns be addressed by everyone all the time, but to point to some specific instances where the trend SE pointed–out and I’m inclined to believe exists–seems contraindicated.

          • Randy M says:

            I’m not clear who or what SE is… help me out?

            Well than obviously it was a really poorly chosen shorthand for a certain poster above me in the chain. But I was also conflating your interjection with DragonMilk’s post, so double bad.
            Good counter points. Not sure enough to say anything more now.

          • lvlln says:

            @souleater

            Homosexuality is another example (I’m really taking advantage of this hidden thread huh) last I checked (is this still true?) homosexuality has really poor long term outcomes, sexual minorities tend to be poorer, die younger, have a higher risk of suicide, and open themselves up to hate crimes. Society seems to be celebrating it. It’s “nice” for the individual, in the moment, but why would you want your child to be gay knowing what the statistics show?

            1st of all, I think it’s vanishingly rare for people, liberal or otherwise, to want their child to be gay. IME, except for the fringiest of the fringiest progresssives, liberals tend to be ambivalent to their children’s sexual orientation, having faithful belief that it’s an immutable property that they were born with and weren’t influenced into (or could be influenced out of).

            2nd, I don’t think a causal link has been established in those correlations you pointed out. It’s very possible for the average gay person to have worse life outcomes than an average straight person and for one parent to correctly believe that their child wouldn’t suffer worse life outcomes if that child were gay, versus being straight. Because the child could be very different from the typical gay person.

          • Nick says:

            @lvlln
            I think you mean indifferent. Ambivalent means feeling strong both ways, that is, conflicted.

            Also, are you and Randy seeing a post I’m not? I don’t see a reply from souleater with any of that content. Did he delete the post or did it get reported into nonexistence or something?

          • Aftagley says:

            @lvlln

            I’m not seeing that original statement you’re quoting anywhere else in the thread. Is it from somewhere else?

            Edit: ninja’d by Nick

          • Randy M says:

            Also, are you and Randy seeing a post I’m not?

            Not anymore. I suspect he decided in retrospect he didn’t want to spend the time supporting some claims, and so retracted them with a delete before seeing replies. This is the first step towards the enlightenment that culminates in not even typing the post in the first place. Someday I will be there, but not today, so I understand SoulEater’s actions.

            I think you mean indifferent. Ambivalent means feeling strong both ways, that is, conflicted.

            At the risk of being uncharitable, I think ambivalent holds. They want some of the things that heterosexuality brings instinctively, but also want to be avant garde with their morality. (My phrasing might not survive the turing test, but it’s a fair translation of progressive imo).

          • lvlln says:

            @Nick

            Thank you for correcting my vocabulary. I’d been using that word incorrectly for a very long time, and I’ll have to retrain myself to use “indifferent” from now on.

            And yes, it seems that souleater deleted the post to which I was responding.

          • souleater says:

            I deleted the post. I decided what I said would create more heat than light and I hoped I could delete it before I started any trouble, or ruffled any feathers.

            I was expecting the system to not allow a reply to a deleted post, or prune the branch. Next time I’ll edit the comment to remove the offending material.

            apologise to all involved.

          • At a considerable tangent, do the statistical claims about outcomes for homosexuals apply to homosexuals in general or only to male homosexuals but not to lesbians?

            I would expect the latter for health related claims, and wouldn’t be astonished if it held more generally.

          • Aapje says:

            @DavidFriedman

            There also seems to be more violence against gays.

        • DragonMilk says:

          How do you convince Laconico that slavery is immoral?

          Laconico: Might makes right. We are after all but products of evolution, and your norms are not mine. Look at nature, it is brutal, and unfair. Justice is for victors to dispense. My slaves are fed and bred much better than you treat your animals at zoos. I slew their fathers in combat and these are my fair spoils. Your notion of individual freedom is tripe as it’s obvious that our decisions are results of bio-chemical processes and life is on the whole meaningless. There is no liberty, only destiny and fate. Go live at peace trying to build your Utopian reality, but don’t bother trying to moralize to me, as all morals are but social constructs and different for different societies that arose under different circumstances. Enough, it is time that I keep integrating these women into my clan. I’m expecting my fourth child in a month. May fate not have me throw it over a cliff like the blemished third child from that woman.

          • ECD says:

            I don’t.

            He’s constructed a worldview where morality is irrelevant. If I want to convince him to stop enslaving people, then I either need to use force (and it’s remarkable how often ‘might makes right’ means ‘might makes right for me” so this might actually work at shoving us back into moral grounds) or I need to argue that, this is a very risky position he takes and its better to work together with other people who do think slavery is immoral. Or that not enslaving people has advantages, some of which were discussed a few open threads ago, others of which (a partner you don’t enslave is less likely to poison your food, or slit your throat as you sleep, as well as being just more fun).

            In other words, if someone takes a position that they don’t care about morality, I can either attempt to convince them they do, or point out non-moral arguments why what they’re doing is ‘bad’ or an alternative is better (in non-moralistic terms).

            This is quite apart from the question of what I believe is moral, or what other socially liberal people think is moral/immoral/amoral.

            But relatively few people in my experience take this position. A much more common one and one I struggle against myself is:

            This bad thing is necessary.

            Which can sometimes be true (though relatively rarely in modern life in the US), but is subject to transmuting into:

            Only I have the will to walk this hard path.

            Without ever noticing the softer path.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            This is actually how people try to (and succeed to an extent) reform sociopaths.

            I really appreciate your final point (expressed in the last 5 sentence) ECD.

      • albatross11 says:

        I think this tension is built into Christianity. Compare “enter through the narrow door” with “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

        • DragonMilk says:

          I don’t see it so much as a tension as admonition – consistent with you are not the judge, God is, leave judgments to God and improve yourself. So the first tells you not to follow the crowd blindly while the latter tells you not to judge others you hypocrite! (generic you, you != albatross11)

          Grace freely given, dearly bought.

      • phi says:

        Slight tangent here. I’d be interested in knowing what you mean by “agnosticism is contradictory”. I’m an atheist not an agnostic myself, so maybe I’m just misunderstanding here, but my impression was that agnostics generally believe something along the lines of: “50% chance of God, 50% chance of no God”. (Well, maybe not exactly 50%, but somewhere between 10% and 90% at least.) There’s nothing inherently self-contradictory in assigning a probability distribution over two possible outcomes. Do you mean that agnosticism contradicts some other idea or principle?

    • Plumber says:

      @souleater,

      In my experience “Liberals” are usually a bit nicer than “Conservatives” but “Leftists” or “Progressives” aren’t, and the difference between ‘typically nice’ and others isn’t Left vs. Right, it’s fiercely partisan vs. ‘just wants to get along’.

      Also, someone mildly “liberal” in a “progressive” neighborhood will usually be nicer than a conservative will be in that neighborhood, and someone mildly “conservative” in a “conservative” area will usually be nicer than someone on the Left will be in that neighborhood.

      Mainstream and moderate tend to be nicer than flame fanners and rebels.

      Basically anyone who talks a lot about how wrong some other people are is less likely to be nice.

      “Good” is a different question than “nice” though, and whether someone is “good but not nice” gets into the whole “freedom fighter or terrorist?” thing.

      • DragonMilk says:

        On your last point, I always picture the Devil as a handsome, charming gentleman.

        • Randy M says:

          “Good” is a different question than “nice” though, and whether someone is “good but not nice” gets into the whole “freedom fighter or terrorist?” thing.

          My daughter is trying out for “Into the Woods” so we just watched this and I’m reminded of the Witch’s song containing the memorable lines that are very applicable here:
          “You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice.”
          “I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right.”

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            I hope she’s not trying out for a production using the hilarious schools’ edition script, which basically cuts the second act and all the darker things that happen therein, and therefore is an entirely different show.

          • Randy M says:

            I don’t know, but she’s eleven and it’s hard to find a decent children’s theater in the area, so I’m not going to rule one out for reasons of mere artistic integrity.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Please allow me to introduce myself
          I’m a man of wealth and taste

          (Of course the Devil is a notorious liar, he’s not a man, “wealth” should be meaningless to him, and I picture his “taste” to be somewhat on the Trumpian end of things, though I imagine East German modernism, bronze mirrored windows and all, would also be one of his favorites)

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            the Devil is […] not a man, […] I imagine East German modernism, bronze mirrored windows and all, would also be […] favorites

            Are you suggesting my wife is the Devil?

            (Though, to be fair, I believe brutalism is more her thing…)

    • jgr314 says:

      Are liberals perceived as nicer than conservatives?

      My understanding of this question is that it should be answered with polling data or, maybe, concept association studies (btw, do those replicate?)?

      Perhaps someone with free time could cobble together an answer from this Gallup data

      Are liberals actually nicer than conservatives?

      I have trouble imagining what data would help answer this question.

      Why? (x2)

      !

    • The Nybbler says:

      There are formulations of “niceness” by which liberals are perceived as “nicer”. For instance, suggesting “help” is nice whereas suggesting “punishment” is not, in general. But just because something is “nice” by this definition doesn’t mean it’s good. Sure, it’s not nice to suggest e.g. the problem homeless should be confined in mental institutions. But it’s not good to let them defecate all over the streets, and there may be no “nice” solutions to that. It’s not nice to call someone a liar, or to even imply it (and pointing this out is a common power play by liars). But it’s probably not good to allow untruths to go unchallenged in a public forum. It’s not nice to suggest one person means another harm… but it’s not good to pretend that they don’t when they do. It’s a stereotype of people from the American South that they’ll be nice to you even as they are slipping a knife into your back.

      There are many definitions of “nice”, and I would suggest that in general liberals perceive liberals as “nicer” than conservatives, whereas while conservatives would reject liberal definitions of niceness they might not consider themselves “nice” even by their own lights, instead considering less-nice hard-nosed practicality to be a virtue.

      On the flip side there’s the idea that one can have civil discussion about anything, even genocide of one or more of the parties in the discussion. But that’s “polite Hitler”, not “nice Hitler”.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        But that’s “polite Hitler”, not “nice Hitler”.

        Hitler: agreed by all to not be a Nice Guy.
        In an odd historical note, Hitler considered it important to his political success to have a public persona of voluntary celibacy. That’s why Eva Braun was his secret mistress and not his wife, until he was ready to commit suicide in the Bunker.

      • There’s the comic I saw where Antifa groups were attacking conservatives and this guy is throwing a Molotov cocktail while saying “love, not hate.” And this was their own pamphlet. It about sums up how this whole “niceness” thing sounds to me.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          +1
          There’s a real niceness to hang community and civilization on. This… isn’t it.

        • Nornagest says:

          Love is a burning thing
          And it makes a fiery ring

        • ECD says:

          Do you happen to have a link?

        • jermo sapiens says:

          they also have this cartoon i’ve seen countless times on social media about how tolerance requires them to not tolerate conservatives because if they did the nazis would take over or something. i know the cartoon depicts an actual nazi but since actual nazis are few and far between, they apply this to Trump supporters.

          while this is all very trite, “democrats are the real racisss” ben shapiro level stuff, it’s still important.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            while this is all very trite, “democrats are the real racisss” ben shapiro level stuff, it’s still important.

            Is it tho? Like, who do you think is going to benefit from you pointing it out here?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Is it tho? Like, who do you think is going to benefit from you pointing it out here?

            I’m not sure. Leftist hypocrisy of this kind has been shown again and again to absolutely no effect. Antifa can still behave like violent fascists and blue checkmarks on twitter will still have their galaxy-brain takes of “if you are against fascism, you are anti-fascist, or antifa for short”. But it’s still logically sound to point out that the people who claim to be in favor of “love not hate” are the ones throwing molotov cocktails and that the ones claiming to be in favor of tolerance want to destroy the lives of everybody who voted for Trump.

          • ECD says:

            This is an interesting cartoon, though it’s not on a site I’d ever seen before, and I’ll point out, that appears to be a Canadian site, operating under Canadian free speech norms, which are quite different from US ones, and not solely against any particular group.

            I’ll also say that the cartoon is quite clear that what it’s referencing is the paradox of tolerance (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

            Note that the same page goes on to quote Karl Popper, with a few additions in brackets in the original to draw the parallel they want. I don’t know that I agree, but this is not as obviously false as the cartoon above, read alone, would be:

            “In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion [my emphasis], suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive [fake media?], and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

            “We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

            Now, I don’t have an opinion on this question, having never heard of Karl Popper (that I recall) until right now, but the paradox of tolerance seems like a thing that isn’t obviously false, for all that it may not be morally, or legally acceptable to resolve in this fashion (assuming, without admitting, its existence).

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            If you want to show something to antifa members, I suggest you do so somewhere where they are. To my knowledge, this comments section is not such a place.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            If you even browse The Open Society and Its EnemiesKarl Popper comes across as a real piece of work. In context, the quoted text asserts the right of the Open Society to suppress religions influenced by Platonism (he soothingly says “this doesn’t apply to all Christian theology.”[1]) He treats Classical Athens as almost never having done wrong (he has another soothing passage papering over the genocide).
            I was doing a read-along with a friend from the internet who likes Popper, and even she said “this feels like he wanted to beat up Hegel for stealing his lunch money.”

            [1]One of his bugbears was that everyone had to believe that the future is unknowable flux, so they’d believe in libertarian free will, so we could have liberalism. He was a correspondent of Einstein’s, who had to put up with Popper unflatteringly calling him “Parmenides” for disagreeing with him.

          • lvlln says:

            In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion [my emphasis], suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive [fake media?], and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

            One issue with Popper’s paragraph here is that none of the justifications he gives for suppressing intolerant philosophies by force have anything to do with their being intolerant. The justifications are that proponents of the philosophy may turn out not to want to use rational argument, but rather using deceptive or violent tactics. But there’s nothing about a philosophy being intolerant that makes it more likely to be irrational/violent/deceptive.

            This argument is orthogonal to the issue of tolerance. It supports the notion that we ought to be intolerant of the irrational/violent/deceptive whether or not their tolerant or intolerant, not to be intolerant of the intolerant. Or more precisely it supports the notion that we ought to be intolerant of those we suspect might be irrational/violent/deceptive, which applies just as much to tolerant philosophies as intolerant ones.

          • ECD says:

            @LMC

            That seems perfectly plausible from the little I read of him (honestly, ‘if you’re tolerant you have to tolerate my intolerance’ sounds an awful lot like something I could have said in my ‘I’m five years old and all rules must be followed, all things are either true or false and everything is either 100%, or 0% phase’ and so building a paradox around it seems excessive to me.

            @Jermo Sapiens

            Sorry, forgot to mention, the page you linked at least (not sure if its’ the source of the cartoon in question) is quite explicitly about Charlottesville and the “Unite the Right” event, it seems uncharitable to turn that into “Trump supporters” and, if done by someone who was on the left should prompt objection that there are three distinct groups involved here. Nazis, referenced in the cartoon. “Unite the Right” protestors, referenced in the article. And “Trump supporters” referenced by you (and potentially the article, though it’s ambiguous and frankly, badly written, enough that it’s hard to tell).

          • jermo sapiens says:

            that appears to be a Canadian site, operating under Canadian free speech norms, which are quite different from US ones, and not solely against any particular group.

            that’s just where Google took me when I searched for “karl popper tolerance cartoon” (or something). I’m in Canada so that may be why, but it’s a widely distributed Cartoon, I’m sure it’s available on plenty of American sites.

            Also, being a Canadian lawyer, I’m quite familiar with Canadian hate speech legislation, and the cartoon itself has nothing to do with that. As a practical matter, you can say hateful things in Canada, as long as it’s against Christians or the like.

            About the paradox of tolerance, Popper has a real point, which I believe I understand, and agree with. That point is much better articulated in the sections you quoted than in the cartoon. The cartoon is little more than a license to be violent towards the outgroup.

            This quote in particular rings obviously true to me.

            “But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive [fake media?], and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.”

            Of course, I believe that all societies have the duty to suppress “if necessary even by force” any kind of threat to it. But that supposes an authority with the proper judgment to determine what is and what isnt a threat to it. Acting against things that are not in reality a threat leads to the type of evil that tolerance is supposed to cure. But not acting against things that are a threat leads to the type of evil that the “paradox of tolerance” is supposed to cure.

            Trying to create a formal procedure like:
            {
            if person->isTolerant() {
            tolerate(person);
            } else {
            suppress(person);
            }

            will never work because it will never capture all the necessary information necessary to make the right decision in a given situation before that situation arises.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Sorry, forgot to mention, the page you linked at least (not sure if its’ the source of the cartoon in question) is quite explicitly about Charlottesville and the “Unite the Right” event, it seems uncharitable to turn that into “Trump supporters”

            Yes. That page was just a spot on the internet where I found the cartoon. This cartoon is a widespread meme and it appears in tons of places, including the page I linked to. Apologies if it seemed that the page was where this cartoon was first published.

            But generally speaking, it’s not hard to find examples of people claiming to be tolerant who feel they have a license to destroy Trump supporters. I invite you to wear a MAGA hat in NYC or SanFran and then walk around with a rainbow flag in Jackson, Mississipi, to see where you find the most tolerance.

          • ECD says:

            @jermo sapiens

            I didn’t realize you were a Canadian attorney, sorry for any accidental condescension. Had too many conversations with Americans (or US residents, depending on sensitivities) who want to talk about the 1st amendment in other countries and not in a moral sense, but in a ‘they can’t do that’ sense.

            But generally speaking, it’s not hard to find examples of people claiming to be tolerant who feel they have a license to destroy Trump supporters.

            I mean, sure. I don’t even need to look at your link. People are hypocrites. Or, less cynically, contain multitudes, so to speak.

            But:

            1) that’s miles away from:

            while this is all very trite, “democrats are the real racisss” ben shapiro level stuff, it’s still important.

            and (2) it doesn’t tell me anything about rates of ‘hypocrisy’. Your proposal might give some minor evidence of differing levels of tolerance, but I’m not going to carry out that experiment, nor would it actually answer the question. I have no idea how you would, though I’m sure someone has done a badly designed, non-replicating study on who is more tolerant, liberals or conservatives.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I’m sure someone has done a badly designed, non-replicating study on who is more tolerant, liberals or conservatives.

            I dont think that’s an important question to be answered. My point was that generally speaking, whenever a political side has adopted a general principle (e.g. tolerance is the most important virtue), that when they have important factions (e.g., antifa, SJWs…) to highlight the hypocrisy strongly and loudly.

            Obviously the same holds true for the right wing, when they claim that human life is sacred and then go on bombing some middle-eastern statelet because the dictator in charge there is more chummy with the Russians than with them.

          • ECD says:

            My point was that generally speaking, whenever a political side has adopted a general principle (e.g. tolerance is the most important virtue), that when they have important factions [which violate this principle] (e.g., antifa, SJWs…) to highlight the hypocrisy strongly and loudly.

            Obviously the same holds true for the right wing, when they claim that human life is sacred and then go on bombing some middle-eastern statelet because the dictator in charge there is more chummy with the Russians than with them.

            People contain multitudes, to be sure. Groups contain multitudes of multitudes, especially when they get into the millions.

            Almost no one has a coherent total political view. Mine sure isn’t. Which leads me back to “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

            Also, are you sure the claim is ‘tolerance is the most important virtue’ and not ‘tolerance is a virtue’? We’ve all always got competing interests and weighting of those interests, which can look like hypocrisy from the outside. Of course, it can also just be hypocrisy.

    • Mustard Tiger says:

      In California at least, the left has cultural dominance. The right is more defensive (a prime characteristic of being conservative — defending/conserving stuff). It’s easier to be powerful & magnanimous than it is to be politely & nicely defensive.

      Edited to add: I wonder if, in the 1950s, conservatives were seen as nicer, with their adherence to religion and apple-pie American norms, while the liberals were the meanies picking on the status quo and/or wanting revolution and radicalism?

    • Viliam says:

      Are liberals actually nicer than conservatives?

      Liberals? Maybe. Progressives? Definitely not.

      “Drinking $outgroup tears… Kill all $outgroup… hey, stop tone policing me!”

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Liberals? Maybe. Progressives? Definitely not.

        This is a significant distinction.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          +1

          I feel I can reach a reasonable compromise with Liberals. With Progressives I feel no coexistence is possible.

      • albatross11 says:

        Villiam:

        Are you describing the median progressive, or the subset whose comments you see in articles/tweets/sites that are farming outrage for clicks?

    • Tenacious D says:

      I think you have to separate how they engage politically from how they behave in general. Generally speaking, there are a lot of things conservatives view as more admirable than getting involved in politics: actively contributing to your family, church, and community; building a successful business; and serving in the military (to give examples associated with each pillar of Reagan’s 3-legged stool–and not to imply that liberals don’t value any of these things). Due to being in favour of the status quo and of generally smaller government, there’s less of a drive to prioritize politics. There’s a certain irony in that the most visible conservatives (i.e. career politicians and activists; consider “shy tories” for contrast) are necessarily engaged in a pursuit that’s pretty peripheral to the conservative conception of the good life. Because being politically active isn’t plan A, conservatives who are are probably outliers in some way (e.g. ambition) or have experienced some sort of “you may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you” scenario that threatens something they value. I haven’t followed it that closely, but I think the French-Ahmari debate fits the latter point, to give a recent example.

  5. Plumber says:

    “@Hoopdawg says:
    September 10, 2019 at 1:33 am

    “It’s more that the left/right divide describes several widely differing things at once.

    Sometimes, it’s liberal vs. conservative, in which case this place leans left, but neither strongly nor decisively.
    Sometimes, it’s Blue vs. Red, in which case this place is, obviously, Grey.
    But often, it means socialism vs. capitalism, and here, this place is pretty much evenly divided between “privatize everything” market fundamentalist libertarians and radical centrist neoliberals, making the usual scope of discussions further right than at any venue currently in the mainstream”

    Quoting this now to remind myself to ask for some working definitions in the next “hidden” fractional Open Thread that doesn’t have the “…please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics…” request”

    Alright, when I see “radical centrist neoliberals”, my guess is that means Tony Blair and Bill Clinton-ish basically accepting most of the Reagan/Thatcher revolutions as mostly fixed in place while tinkering at the edges, and with free trade agreements expanded even further, positions which the Sanderist Left and the Trumpist Right rejects.

    Should I take the definition to mean something else?

    • Hoopdawg says:

      Sorry for not replying earlier. I remembered you wanted to ask me about this, I just didn’t have time/energy to check SSC these last few days.

      It was actually meant to describe our host, Scott. I recall him self-describing as a neoliberal, which I assume to mostly be a statement of belief in market-based solutions to everything, not necessarily a statement of belief in real-world policies the term is used to criticize. I don’t think he ever self-described as a radical centrist, but I’m using it, following some of its proponents, as a statement of commitment to non-ideological “whatever proves to work” policy.

      The description above probably applies to people like Blair and Clinton, at least as they presented to the public. But what I had in mind is the mindset rather than particular people or policies.

  6. johan_larson says:

    You are invited to explain why Europe should or should not be listed as a continent for pedagogic purposes.

    • Nornagest says:

      I’m tempted to say that Europe should be described as a continent for geographical purposes because of its historical interconnectedness and isolation from East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and also that geographical Europe should include North Africa, for the same reasons.

      That ought to piss just about everyone off.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        I’m tempted to say that Europe should be described as a continent for geographical purposes because of its historical interconnectedness and isolation from East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,

        Geophysical India is a tectonic plate and has historical interconnectedness and isolation from East Asia and West Asia, yet it’s degraded to “the subcontinent.”

      • Nick says:

        You might as well declare the Mediterranean a continent.

      • johan_larson says:

        My take is that Europe does not make much sense as a continent if we are doing physical geography. It does make sense as a concept if we are doing cultural or social geography, but then it makes sense to chop up the Eurasian landmass into more than two regions, including at least one (the Middle East) that spans multiple continents.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        That ought to piss just about everyone off.

        I think you forgot to recognize Europe as the fruit of the initial exodus from the African Rift Valley, while refusing to use Europe in a fruit salad.

    • souleater says:

      Should.
      There is no single coherent definition of continents, based on plate tectonics. For example, we don’t consider the caribbean a continent. and different countries combine eurasia, or the americas. The olympics only has 5 continents.

      “The Myth of Continents: a Critique of Metageography” says

      Continents are understood to be large, continuous, discrete masses of land, ideally separated by expanses of water.

      So it’s really just a matter of convention.

      Looking at history, Europe was separated as a continent by our friend the T and O map
      Looking at culture, Europe as very little cultural similarity with the middle east or especially far east.
      Looking at ethnicity, Europeans are clearly a visually different people than their continental neighbors.

      What possible benefit is there to taking a historically, ethnically, and culturally distinct people group, and lumping them in with their distant cousins. If anything, there is more justification in calling the Middle East an eighth continent.

      • Randy M says:

        What possible benefit is there to taking a historically, ethnically, and culturally distinct people group, and lumping them in with their distant cousins. If anything, there is more justification in calling the Middle East an eighth continent.

        In that case, we’ll the middle east the 7th continent. Antarctica has nothing to do with anything historical, cultural, or ethnic.

        • souleater says:

          A null space is still a space

          edit: To be honest… I’m not sure this is actually true in a linear algebra sense.. But my point is that Antarctica is unique in it’s lack of ethnic, cultural and historic heritage. so I would go ahead and leave it in

      • Eric Rall says:

        Looking at history, Europe was separated as a continent by our friend the T and O map

        I thought it went back earlier than that, with the classical Greeks categorizing places you get to overland or by following the coast as “Europe”, places you get to by sailing East as “Asia”, and places you get to by sailing South as “Africa”.

        Looking at culture, Europe as very little cultural similarity with the middle east or especially far east.

        Agreed. In particular, Europe maps pretty closely to what the High/Late Middle Ages and Renaissance thought of as “Christendom”. I’ve heard that “Europe” became a widely-used label again during the Age of Exploration, to denote the Medieval bounds of Christianity separately from places that had become Christian in modern times via conquest and colonization.

        What possible benefit is there to taking a historically, ethnically, and culturally distinct people group, and lumping them in with their distant cousins. If anything, there is more justification in calling the Middle East an eighth continent.

        In many contexts (especially the eras between Alexander the Great and the Muslim conquests), it’s useful to categorize, the Middle/Near East and North Africa together with Europe as opposed to considering them with Asia and Africa respectively.

        The difficulty with making the Middle/Near East and North Africa a separate continent, as much sense as it makes from a historical and cultural perspective, is that it’s absurd from a geological perspective. “Continent” suffers from overloading here, which is also the main case for considering Europe and Asia a single continent. At least with Europe and Asia, you can rationalize them as separate geological continents on the grounds that the Urals and the Caucasuses are significant tectonic boundaries.

      • I don’t agree that there is a clear visual difference between Europe and their continental neighbours. There’s a gradient. Irishmen and Indians look pretty different. Greeks and Turks, or even Russians and Iranians, much less so.

        I think you can make more of an argument for cultural differences, but there’s still a lot of gradiation there. The most obvious difference is the predominance of Christianity in Europe, and the predominance of Islam in the nearby regions of Asia. But Christianity and Islam are pretty similar religions in comparison to Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, shamanism, etc.

        I definitely agree, though, that the definition of continents is conventional and arguing over exactly what should qualify as a continent is a bit pointless. We have a convention in place, and there is no compelling need to change it.

    • Concavenator says:

      “Continent” shall be defined as a major landmass (say, more than 20% of the largest one) completely surrounded by water, at a depth greater than the continental shelf (which excludes man-made channels).

      Hence, there are exactly three continents: Afroeurasia, America, and Antarctica. Everything else is eithe a subcontinent (e.g. Africa) or an associated island (e.g. Australia).

      • TakatoGuil says:

        Actually, no, that leaves only Antarctica. Afroeurasia and America are not separated at a depth greater than the continental shelf. I guess they would both count together though, in your system? So two. Human-inhabited Earth, and otherwise.

        • Nornagest says:

          Australia is, though. The existence of a deepwater gap between Australia (and some of the nearby islands) and Asia is important to its biogeography — see the Wallace line.

          • TakatoGuil says:

            Actually, we’re all wrong! The reason I didn’t include Australia is that it’s not 20% the size of Afroeurasia — but neither is Antarctica. One continent it is: Afroeurasiamerica.

    • Telemythides says:

      Should not.

      I think a pretty good definition of people’s folk understanding of what a continent is is: “Large land-mass entirely or almost entirely separated from other by water”. Europe obviously fails this, it’s connected to Asia along it’s entire breadth! There’s really only one continent model that makes sense and is used, 6 Continents: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Antarctica and Australia. 4 Continents: America, Afroeurasia, Antarctica and Australia also makes sense if you don’t allow any land connections, but no one uses that.

    • rahien.din says:

      Should. The alternative is to claim that Bangkok is in the same continent as St. Kilda.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Europe is clearly a subcontinent of Asia, like India. It is geographically isolated from rest of Asia, but still connected to it by large landmass.

      Asia Minor, Levant and Mesopotamia should be considered parts of Europe. Eastern borders of the European subcontinent are, from south to north – Zagros mountains, Caspian sea, and Ural mountains.

      • BBA says:

        There’s an inscription on the LA Public Library that I initially found strange, as a Jew. Why are Moses and Hillel among the “Eastern” figures, when they’re my heritage and I’m obviously a creature of the West? But of course, when you set the boundary between East and West at the Bosporus, where it traditionally was, then they’re obviously from the East. And when that inscription was made, my ancestors were considered alien “Orientals” by the white establishment. The whole concept of a common Judeo-Christian heritage was revisionism, the product of post-WW2 philosemitism.

        It’s all social constructs, is what I’m getting at.

    • Lambert says:

      Europe exists, but it’s bounded in time as well as space.
      It came into existance some time in late antiquity, as the Western Roman Empire collapsed.
      Alcuin of York was one of the first to realise the concept of Europe.

      Defining points include:
      The conversion of Clovis I, solidifying relations between the Latin church, Gallo-Roman society and the Frankish invaders.
      The Islamic conquests, creating a division between Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa/Levant.
      The Carolingian conquests of Saxony and Bavaria, which brought ‘Europe’ beyond the extent of the Roman Empire.

    • bullseye says:

      Pre-modern Far East was more isolated than Europe. European agriculture, writing, and religion are all of Middle Eastern origin. China invented agriculture and writing on its own, and Far Eastern religion is mostly native (they got Buddhism from India, but it was never as pervasive as Christianity is in the West.) Racially, a lot of Arabs and Iranians can pass for white; nobody can pass for racially Far Eastern unless they actually are.

    • bean says:

      Hmm. An interesting question. From a purely physical point of view, it’s obviously different from the other continents, and should be lumped with Asia. But we have a term for that, Eurasia, and use it when doing that kind of purely physical geography. To a large extent, Europe is a separate continent because it was the one making the list, but the fact that they got to make the list is important. The distinction between Europe and not-Europe is historically huge. Sure, if we insist on seeing every continent as homogenous, then this is unfair to the rest of the world, but we could just try not doing that. As far as subunits of Eurasia go, Europe is by far the most influential.

      Also, it makes life easier for cartographers. Asia is hard enough to squeeze onto a map as it is.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        The distinction between Europe and not-Europe is historically huge.

        Which raises a question: why so huge? I can understand the conflict between Rome and Carthage, but why between Germanic principalities and waves of hordes from the east? What was it about the steppes that made them so untameable? Why didn’t Poles and Rus and Macedonians settle their ancestral lands, work out diplomatic protocols, build up massive populations on a strong agricultural and mercantile base, and then just roll over the rest of Asia, instead of the other way around? Is the lesson here just “you should’ve had a horsey culture”?

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          “you should’ve had a horsey culture”

          If only a horsey ruler would start a school for foreigners to learn horsey culture.

        • bean says:

          Is the lesson here just “you should’ve had a horsey culture”?

          It very well might be. The general theory there is that what “horsey cultures” (more scientifically, herders/nomads) do day-to-day is pretty good preparation for war. What farmers do day-to-day? Not so much. If you can quickly turn farmers into decent soldiers (hello gunpowder) their greater numbers matter a lot. Before that? Not so much, and the horsey cultures often win.

          • bullseye says:

            Once the farmers started building states they did a lot better. Instances of nomads defeating states are noteworthy because of their rarity.

          • bean says:

            Instances of nomads really annoying states are very common. Instances of nomads taking over states are reasonably frequent, and they aren’t more common because states developed techniques like “playing nomads off against each other”.

  7. moonfirestorm says:

    Magic players of SSC, what’s your favorite EDH/Commander deck at the moment?

    Currently, mine is my Freyalise deck. It started with Endless Atlas and the thought “huh, this would be really good in mono-green where you always have spare mana” and ended up as a very strong attempt to run mono-green control. Likely wouldn’t work in a competitive environment, but it fits really well into the semi-casual battlecruiser Magic style that shows up a lot in EDH without being particularly degenerate or exploiting the boundaries of the environment.

    • Aftagley says:

      Krenko. Now and forever Krenko.

      I love the deck because it’s just so infinitely tune-able. Most of the time your wincon will be “make an infinite goblin horde”, but if you’re in a meta where small creatures are hated out, you can make it more of a combo-focused masterpiece and vice versa. It’s top-end is good enough to not be too out of place at competitive tables, but you can also scale it back and make it into a dopey tribal deck for more casual games.

    • Randy M says:

      I took apart all my decks a few weeks ago and made new ones headed by less used commanders of mine. Kess was a lot of fun. Once I had galecaster colossus and docent of perfection on board I had to try hard not to win on the spot.
      My friend managed to do neat things with Sydri, galvanic genious, and Sidisi, brood tyrant had a very strong early position. (Sidisi isn’t really less used, but zombie/graveyard is too fun to pass up)

    • eyeballfrog says:

      My favorite decks are still my Riku of two Reflections decks (appropriately, I have two). One is for the more competitive environment, and is a fairly standard URG “ramp into value town” deck. The other is for more casual and tries to be a Kamigawa theme deck. Spirits, Splice, and handsize mechanics all in there. The original idea was to use Riku’s spell copying to copy spliced spells (which copies everything spliced on), but it kind of morphed into full Kamigawa because it was more fun that way.

  8. rahien.din says:

    About the bans. Consider the situated utility of contempt.

    Contempt can be used like paint thinner to strip the trappings of legend off of an assertation, and expose it to genuine discussion. That’s often good. It is also subject to effect balancing. “True Necessary Kind” is our method of effect balancing.

    Contempt can also be used purely for self-gratification, at the expense of genuine discussion. That’s always bad. It usually happens when people reach the end of their emotional leash and just start pissing on everything. Even if/when we have the right of it, we are not permitted a masturbatory tantrum at our cohabitants’ expense.

    • Well... says:

      Makes sense to me.

      Does contempt for self-gratification really usually happen when people reach the end of their emotional leash? Maybe some people are just used to automatically communicating in that mode, or quickly switching into it, while sitting in front of a computer.

  9. Radu Floricica says:

    The comment I wanted to make last thread but was Really CW:

    – Liberals win in nice-moderated places because their ideas can be more easily expressed as nice (main moral foundation Care, as opposed to a more varied bunch by everybody else).

    – Liberals win as a rule in most places… not sure why, actually, but possibly because it’s easier to frame conversation on nice / not nice coordinates which slides into good / bad. So it reduces to the first case.

    – Liberals lose (and this is the CW point) in places moderated on the quality of the conversation because in a pure idea-to-idea conflict they just lose, and usually badly.

    It’s been a long time since I’ve found things that would move me back to a more progressive or liberal stance. Most things that changed my mind in the past years (like Brexit) go the opposite way. It could, technically, be just very bad confirmation bias but come on… Even Scott is maintaining a sort-of-neutrality by heavily biasing his inputs – for example his choice of pro-communist literature because he finds himself leaning worryingly to the right and wants to double-check. Which is a good thing btw, and doubly good in his positions of influencer and Bay Area resident. Me, I can just go Occam and say that there is enough evidence that humanity made mistakes a lot worse than this, progressism looks like a mistake, I was naive in my youth and that’s it.

    —————————

    Given that comments written by strangers are very easy to misinterpret – there’s a heavily implied invitations here for left-leaning people to contribute more to the conversation, with good arguments. The goal is always to change one’s mind, otherwise you don’t progress.

    • Nick says:

      Can you be more precise about whom you mean by liberal? Do you mean American progressives, classical liberals, anyone on the left?

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Good point. American progressives. Classical liberals are more similar to today’s libertarians, maybe?

        • The “democratic socialism in dilute aqueous solution” people stole the name “liberal” from us, so we had to steal “libertarian” from the left anarchists.

          But that was all right, because it wasn’t their legitimate property, having been stolen by them from the believers in the doctrine of free will.

          • Aapje says:

            @DavidFriedman

            Just like American land was stolen from the natives?

            Are you arguing for reparations, David? 😉

    • The Nybbler says:

      I don’t think all liberals lose in idea-to-idea conflicts. There’s still plenty of room for reasonable dispute over the harms of pornography, or how strict alcohol regulation should be, for instance. There’s very little room left for dispute about the harms of violent video games — and that one falls to the liberal side. Of course, I’m talking tits-and-beer liberalism here, not SJ progressivism.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        100% agree that there is reasonable dispute on those topics. Let’s call it “multiculturalism” instead of SJ or left, and I think you’ll agree with me a bit more.

    • Corey says:

      Liberals lose (and this is the CW point) in places moderated on the quality of the conversation because in a pure idea-to-idea conflict they just lose, and usually badly.

      It could also be that people who are good at dispassionately arguing (assuming that’s how quality-of-conversation unpacks) skew conservative.

      My pet theory: it’s a reverse Straw Vulcan effect – empathy is Irrational so let’s avoid it (to tie in the niceness thread).

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      You haven’t considered the obvious-seeming
      – Left-wingers win in general (e.g. in random Facebook arguments) because they’re smarter.

      This also explains why left-wingers lose in places like this where they aren’t smarter on average: they don’t have any practice arguing against smart right-wingers.

      • Viliam says:

        Somewhat similar: universities are mostly liberal, therefore students are mostly exposed to smart (or smart-seeming) left-wing arguments, but don’t have any practice arguing against smart (or smart-seeming) right-wing arguments.

        • albatross11 says:

          If you never encounter someone arguing from some perspective, then you’re unlikely to know how to argue with them sensibly. It’s like someone who has spent years studying boxing and suddenly finds himself in a wrestling match.

          I think a lot of people live in intellectual bubbles where some ideas/perspectives just never come up. And then when they do encounter them, they have no idea how to respond. I suspect this drives a lot of the outrage or snark or ridicule you see people responding with in these situations.

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          Yes, that’s a special case (possibly the most important one).

        • Clutzy says:

          I’ve said this before with respect to Nazi’s and slavery. Most mainstream secular people lose arguments to slavers and nazis because they don’t have fundamental arguments against them anymore.

          Secular arguments for these positions are hard to make while religious ones are easy, but converting people to your religion is hard. Thus creating a secular population easy to convert to slaverism.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            I think atheist and libertarian arguments avoid using a very simple point: “because that’s the world I want to live in”. It’s a trap, because that’s probably the real reason for a lot of things we do. I don’t really mind paying taxes and won’t actively fight against all of them because I want to live in a world where poor sick people don’t die in the streets. That’s a selfish reason, and I accept it as such.

            There is a subtler difference between that, and accepting that there’s a moral imperative to help the poor. The latter I don’t accept and consider a slippery slope.

          • DinoNerd says:

            I don’t get this. Most religious arguments amount to “because deity said so”, except of course it turns out that there’s no evidence that the deity ever said anything.

            But worse than that is that by the time a religion gets large enough to be considered major, and old enough that most adherents were born into it, exponents have managed to take at least 2 – usually far more – contradictory positions on almost any question.

            Unless your religion was founded by a prophet whose major issue was slavery, there will have been prominent leaders who favoured it, prominent leaders who opposed it, and prominent leaders who treated it as simply normal and inevitable, like the weather.

            And even if slavery *was* the key issue for the founder, in a couple of 100 years we’re talking about “indenture” and “serfdom” and “apprenticeship”, and half the people arguing agree they aren’t the same as the “slavery” condemned by the prophet, which no longer exists among the religion’s in group. (The other half say the first half are hypocrites as well as sinners :-()

            Proportions vary, mostly depending on how central the bad behaviour is to culture and economy. (If slavery is uneconomic, more folks will oppose it :-))

            Ditto for whatever else you care to name.

          • Clutzy says:

            @Dinonerd

            I don’t get this. Most religious arguments amount to “because deity said so”, except of course it turns out that there’s no evidence that the deity ever said anything.

            Yes, that’s why they are easy to make. It also turns out they can be convincing even to nonbelievers!

            But worse than that is that by the time a religion gets large enough to be considered major, and old enough that most adherents were born into it, exponents have managed to take at least 2 – usually far more – contradictory positions on almost any question.

            That isn’t even a roadblock to the model! That’s how useful it is.

            Proportions vary, mostly depending on how central the bad behaviour is to culture and economy. (If slavery is uneconomic, more folks will oppose it :-))

            Ditto for whatever else you care to name.

            And I think this is where I think you and I have lost wavelengths. The point I was making is that secular arguments are harder to make, even if in the end they are more effective (if effectively stated) to nonbelievers. At the same time, a lot of secularists have let their blades dull, and thus are shocked when some youtube personality has much better arguments than them and their kids start trying to enslave the neighbors. Well, you can either inoculate with religion, or you can actually hone your arguments. One is easy, one is hard.

    • Randy M says:

      – Liberals win as a rule in most places… not sure why, actually, but possibly because it’s easier to frame conversation on nice / not nice coordinates which slides into good / bad. So it reduces to the first case.

      Because we are in a “thrive” time.

      • Wency says:

        Yeah, I think you’re largely right.

        To pick one example…

        Rightist opinion: Women shouldn’t serve in the military. Or at least not the infantry.
        Leftist opinion: This oppresses their rights. Women can do any job men can do!

        Result: Women serve in the military. Everything in the country seems to remain basically fine. Even when we lose wars, failing to prop up some corrupt government in a backward and remote land, it doesn’t matter, no one really cares. Another leftist win. Time to see who else we can get into the military…

        Presumably the taboo against female soldiers (and further, the idea that the military is a vehicle for winning wars, not a vehicle for advancing civil rights) is founded in some basic principles highly relevant to a “survive time”. But at least in the West, those principles haven’t been tested for a few generations now.

      • Viliam says:

        If your social group is thriving, you are likely to be in a liberal bubble.

        If your social group is surviving, you are likely to be in a conservative bubble.

        Being smart and university-educated puts you in an advantageous position, so your bubble is more likely to be liberal.

        • Randy M says:

          Maybe I don’s ask for enough out of life, but if I have shelter, steady diet, and a lack of violence in my life, I think I’m in thrive time, at least as far as the adaptation strategies described by Scott as Thrive vs Survive are concerned.

          The parts of my social group that are struggling seem to be doing so largely for reasons of their own poor choices and impulses.

          But I am in California, so liberal bubble is isn’t a bad first order description.

        • Wency says:

          To build on Randy M, we are all thriving in that we’re not really being tested by the kinds of forces that promote conservative values.

          No one in the West is really struggling to survive. Our poor are fat and relatively safe — more likely to die of a “disease of affluence” such as heart disease than from violence or pestilence.

          There is only one force promoting a return to survival values, and that’s the low birthrate. We are not thriving in terms of our propensity to reproduce, and nature’s energy is dedicated to resolving this, one way or another.

          • Viliam says:

            No one in the West is really struggling to survive.

            There are dangers other than poverty. Ask the kids from Rotherham. They were sacrificed to the values of people from the striving bubbles.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Viliam:

            There are dangers other than poverty. Ask the kids from Rotherham.

            +1

          • ECD says:

            There are dangers other than poverty. Ask the kids from Rotherham. They were sacrificed to the values of people from the striving bubbles.

            Or the victims of the CRASH unit, or Sheriff Arpaio.

            We are not thriving in terms of our propensity to reproduce, and nature’s energy is dedicated to resolving this, one way or another.

            That is not my understanding of how nature works.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      Out of curiosity, on what topics have you moved to more conservative positions? Most of my changes of opinion on this axis went in opposite direction.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Brexit. I was firmly in the “It was a stupid/populist idea”, and now it’s a lot more nuanced and falls pretty much into “it has a good chance of being a positive outcome for everybody, except probably short term for the British”

        Edit: I’m currently reading the posts by Dominic Cummings linked here (long one). Haven’t run into pro-Brexit arguments yet, but they’re definitely worth reading.
        Don’t expect a master writer btw, they could use a bit of editing and probably shortening – they feel more like brain-dumps than anything else. But yeah, good opportunity to learn about the other side :p

        • AlesZiegler says:

          Thank you. On Brexit I think that for Britain it would perhaps be good, or perhaps not, to leave EU if they had large majority of voters behind that decision. But leaving it on the basis of referendum splitting the country almost evenly in half is imho very bad idea.

          Also, cancelling Brexit now would imho be even worse than going through with it. So, they are unfortunately in a terrible conundrum.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            To get into detail, I think EU is turning into a bureaucracy that’s hard to shake, which means it will keep accumulating entropy. So I think Brexit is a good thing for everybody because:

            – long term it lets Britain do its own thing, and historically Britain did ok

            – short term it has to be bad for Britain, because EU can’t afford it to be otherwise. It has to make a bit of an example of it.

            – it will strengthen EU, because having Britain do badly will make members stop thinking of exiting.

            – it’s also a wake-up call and a chance to take hard looks at itself

            – things will probably run more smoothly without Britain being contrarian.

            – for eastern countries like my own Romania that are utterly dependent on EU it will be better because of the points above.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            I agree that EU institutions are in many ways dysfunctional.

            But, with regards to Brexit, it would seem logical that EU would try to make an example of Britain, but I don’t see that it is what is happening. Instead we have the spectacle of Britain tearing itself apart over whether it actually wants to leave and how tight relationship after eventual Brexit it wants. EU has been willing to go along with almost whathever Britain wants, with big exception on matters where interests of Ireland are at stake.

            It is actually in stark contrast to EU behavior during Greek financial troubles, where EU bureaucracy negotiated in cold and merciless spirit.

          • Lambert says:

            The EU does not need to be merciless.
            That would just make them look like bullies, and strengthen eurosceptic resolve.

            Instead, they get to look serene and largely magnanimous while Parliament tears itself apart.

            No need to play hardball when the other party just deliberately torpedoed their own BATNA.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            EU seemed to position itself to play hardball… but then it became completely unnecessary. So yeah, at this point it would be kicking someone who’s down.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @Radu Floricica

            Yup. After derailing myself, I´d like to add that I´ve also became more sceptical of the EU, not because of Brexit, but earlier due to what I see as its mishandling of a financial crisis. However I never thought about that as me becoming more conservative. Perhaps I should´ve.

          • Aapje says:

            @Radu Floricica

            things will probably run more smoothly without Britain being contrarian.

            If the EU gets to go full steam ahead, that is actually a great threat to the EU, because the policies that those who favor a ‘ever closer union’ favor to unite the EU economically and culturally, create enormous conflict, within and between countries.

            For example, free movement of workers is intended to blur the lines between countries and to spread values, but in reality, causes many pro-EU people to migrate out of the poorer countries, making those more conservative.

            I personally expect that the Eastern European countries will produce more conflict with the EU in the future than Britain ever has, because I think that these countries put up with a lot of things they consider silly, because the economy is growing. A longer period of recession and/or a large reduction in subsidies is going to make them assert themselves way more.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @Aapje Immigration has to be a logistic curve, right? At some point people will chose to stay – already incomes for skilled workers (construction etc) here approach western incomes minus rent minus transport. I suspect many chose to leave out of inertia – staying here and trying to raise fees might already be a better option. Doubly so if you consider the cost of your children growing up without you.

            Best paid positions will always be better paid in Netherlands than in Romania, but the overlap is growing. We’ve also started importing more and more workers from countries like Vietnam.

    • Garrett says:

      Liberals win in nice-moderated places because their ideas can be more easily expressed as nice

      IIRC, the same approach ends up seeing conservatives as higher in orderliness.

      This means that an effective political strategy and way for liberals to win the debate is to present their ideas as “kind”, their opponents as “rude” or “mean”, and to raise a fuss about the whole issue. This issue of framing and presentation would be independent of the truth value of the propositions.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Yep. And conservatives probably are higher in orderliness (Authority?), but this translates to unpopular and seemingly unkind decisions. From “clean up your room because I say so!” to punishing people for their bad decisions (or just letting them suffer the consequences).

        Of course, this also means supporting the war in Irak because the president said it’s a good idea.

        • Garrett says:

          The psychological phenomenon of orderliness I’m familiar with in this context has less to do with authority or hierarchy. From The Wiki: “Orderliness is associated with other qualities such as cleanliness and diligence, and the desire for order and symmetry.”

          There’s a political desire to associate conservative with authoritarian, which probably has some validity, but was not what I was referencing here, and I suspect is nonetheless a non-central example.

    • Aftagley says:

      – Liberals lose (and this is the CW point) in places moderated on the quality of the conversation because in a pure idea-to-idea conflict they just lose, and usually badly.

      Please defend this hypothesis, it runs orthogonal to my observations, both on this site and in general.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        I was going to offer this site as an example, but if you see it differently… Hmm, maybe the statistic that readers are mostly left but commenters mostly right? It does have alternative explanations, I admit.

        • Aftagley says:

          It does, plenty of things could make a space less inciting to certain cultural groups. I’m also growing increasingly skeptical of the commonly-cited statistic that commenters are overwhelmingly right. I looked back through the survey results, and the only thing definitive I saw on the topic was from the 2017 survey and it’s not particularly conclusive.

          So there is a really interesting tendency for conservatives to comment more often than liberals (maybe because they have more to disagree with?). But numbers in the last three groups were very small: out of the 5335 people for whom I had data, only 54 commented once a week, and only 45 commented many times a week. So they may not be able to bring the average up very much. Since tiers 1 through 4 were liberal (REMEMBER THE MIDPOINT IS 5.5) and only tier 5 was conservative, there’s probably an extremely slight preponderance of liberal comments on the whole.

          AFAIK, this conclusion has never been rigorously investigated in more detail.

          Anyway, I should clarify: I’m not postulating that liberals win on this site. I don’t think that the internet is a place where people actually win or lose arguments; it’s a place where people debate and have their ideas tested. I know that I’ve personally had some of my preconceived beliefs challenged and eventually updated as a result of discussion I’ve had here. Does that mean I lost? I don’t think so, I just said something about minimum wage and then had a pleasant discussion with David Friedman.

          There have been other times where I said something leftie and then enough people dog-piled on that I didn’t judge it to be worth my time to wade back in and just left the thread. Did I lose there? (See ECD’s saga in the last thread for an example of such a pile-on (although they didn’t end up leaving like I would have)).

          IDK, I just see winning and losing as being monumentally unhelpful to having pleasant interactions.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            There have been other times where I said something leftie and then enough people dog-piled on that I didn’t judge it to be worth my time to wade back in and just left the thread.

            See the recent banhammer 🙂

            Proper attitude is to think that losing means winning. You can’t update on evidence when you win – well, you do, but only a little. And dogpiles are the worst because those contributing to them update most in the direction of “I’m right” when actually the other guy just got sick of it and left.

            Losing a _proper_ argument on the other hand means that you can change your mind about something, and that’s a Very Good Thing. That’s why having the kind of conversation that makes it easy to lose is so important.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            See here for more data on that topic.

          • Dan L says:

            Yo.

            (Offer on #3 is still more or less open, btw.)

          • Losing a _proper_ argument on the other hand means that you can change your mind about something, and that’s a Very Good Thing.

            I agree.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            David Friedman,
            I have to say that I, personally, don’t find Berlin’s argument persuasive, because it asks the wrong question. From a practical perspective, the key issue isn’t whether there’s a tiger on the table; the vital question is: if I sit down at the table, will I get eaten by a tiger?

            If the postulate is “yes, there is a tiger, but it cannot be seen, heard, nor affect me in any perceptible way”, I’m quite content to assign it zero epistemic value, that is: consider it a proposition that has no bearing on the predictive power of my model of reality. We can add any number of zero-value propositions to our model without changing it in any way, much like adding 0 to x will always yield x.

            I don’t want to get eaten by tigers and therefore my model succeeds in its predictions if I manage to go through life without getting eaten by one. Any kind of truth-apt (which I here define as being equal to “falsifiable”) “is” statement can be tested in much the same manner – by formulating a prediction (or a set of predictions) and seeing whether we got it right.

            I cannot see the same being possible for “ought” statements, if only because any “ought” statement has an equal and opposite “ought not” statement – the futures reflected in these statements are equally plausible, as truth goes.

            To say that Alice ought not murder Bob is to acknowledge that there exists a possible world where Alice does murder Bob (but we would prefer the possible world where Bob isn’t murdered by Alice). Any predictions we might make as to which of these possible worlds shall be actualized are answers to the question “Will Alice murder Bob?” – which is very different from “Ought she do so?”

        • Snickering Citadel says:

          Lots of left wing people find right wing opinions depressing and so leave forums with lots of right wing opinions.

          • Radu Floricica says:

            The old saying from the times of Slashdot (or before the internet?): you don’t have the right not to be offended.

            Dogpiles, like Aftagley mentioned above, are bad and justifiably a turnoff. But to leave just because you don’t like the topic… It’s possible, but there’s also a good chance it’s uncomfortable because it shakes one’s confirmation bias.

            Edit: albatross11’s comment below makes a good point. Sometimes the distance is just too great to be worth one’s time. I stand corrected.

          • albatross11 says:

            The same happens the other way–plenty of people who aren’t into various progressive/SJW oriented ideology will see a discussion that’s dominated by discussions of structural racism/white privilege/etc., and bail out.

      • Ketil says:

        I have trouble sorting out the labels, and don’t know if I’m considered left (I am in favor of economic redistribution) or right (I prefer small government), liberal (I think the government shouldn’t restrict who gets to marry whom) or conservative (I don’t think people should be forced to bake cakes).

        One thing I often notice, is that many arguers seem to care more about the morals of the arguer than the argument. In the recent trolling of various social science journals, I was surprised to see a large section of Twitter at a loss as to what to think of this – because they couldn’t figure out the political affiliation of the perpetrators. Without knowing if they were progressive or conservative, they were completely unable to decide whether to condemn or applaud the action.

        Or take the discussion whether slavery would have ended without the civil war – some people are not willing to discuss the factual proposition, because the important thing is to condemn slavery. Discussing an aspect of slavery factually is conspicuous in its absence of condemnation, and if you don’t condemn slavery, you are an evil person.

        I don’t think this tactic is unique to the left, and I think most Marxists are a counterexample – but it tends to be the bread-and-butter of progressives and SJWs, and we end up with “arguments” that consists of hunting for “dog whistles”, or guilt by association, and so on. And predictably, this is trolled by the alt-right, like the “OK” symbol being a white nationalist thing, or, if you look at recent Proud Boys vs Antifa clashes, how the former group provokes with slogans like “I like beer”, and “uhuru”.

        Another difference, but connected to the above, is the level of moralism, that is, the tolerance for others having differing views. Other people having different opinions is something you have to live with if you are a minority, so it is perhaps an emergent property more than an innate trait, and it could be the reason why leftist seem to spend more effort on disciplining others into using the right pronouns and other vocabulary. Fifty years ago, maybe church attendance was mandatory? I’m not sure how libertarians [for lack of a better word] would do this, though.

        Finally: collectivism. The idea of arguing about groups and group membership, rather than from individuals. It is very difficult for me to understand why Michelle Obama should receive preferential treatment to an unemployed midwest miner, just because her color and sex makes her a member of groups that on average, can be said to have worse outcomes. Alternatively, should we focus more on black-on-black (increase policing) or blue-on-black violence (restrain policing)? I can see why the argument appeals, and less charitably, how it gives advantages to privileged subgroups by establishing their membership in less privileged supergroups.

        • Aapje says:

          if you look at recent Proud Boys vs Antifa clashes, how the former group provokes with slogans like “I like beer”, and “uhuru”.

          That is really poor trolling, though. Much better trolling is Pepe, “It’s OK to be white” and milk.

        • ECD says:

          Or take the discussion whether slavery would have ended without the civil war – some people are not willing to discuss the factual proposition, because the important thing is to condemn slavery. Discussing an aspect of slavery factually is conspicuous in its absence of condemnation, and if you don’t condemn slavery, you are an evil person.

          If this is a reference to me, then that wasn’t actually what I said. In fact, I explicitly and repeatedly said you were allowed to discuss whatever was of interest to you.

          My point wasn’t that I

          care more about the morals of the arguer than the argument.

          but rather, if you want to draw any conclusion beyond ‘I’ve created a counter-factual I think is interesting, let’s discuss’ like say ‘should we have fought the civil war,’ ‘what was Lincoln’s legacy,’ ‘should the north have let the south go,’ then the morality of slavery is a crucial part of this.

          Alternatively, should we focus more on black-on-black (increase policing) or blue-on-black violence (restrain policing)? I can see why the argument appeals, and less charitably, how it gives advantages to privileged subgroups by establishing their membership in less privileged supergroups.

          And notice how you miss what’s actually being requested. I am not a member of the BLM movement (to choose a group not at random), but they actually are quite clear on what they’re asking for and it’s not that. Maybe starting with the argument actually being made might help? Alternatively, of course, you could just read this, or this.

          • Ketil says:

            If this is a reference to me,

            Sorry, it was kinda a weak reference to that discussion, but more to illustrate the point and certainly not to imply you said something specific, or engage in discussions about slavery or BLM or whatever. I apologize for using vague examples bordering on straw men here, I really should have more used specific and concrete examples.

            Anyway, my point was to highlight what I think are general differences in modes of argument between different groups, which I think are much more significant than many other dichotomies.

          • ECD says:

            @Ketil

            Sorry for biting your head off.

    • broblawsky says:

      I’d argue that liberals (defined by broad, American standards) tend to win arguments online due to three reasons:

      a) Most Americans are liberal, or at least agree with liberal ideas;
      b) Americans using the internet are more likely to be younger than the national average, and ergo to be more liberal;
      c) Ideas intended to motivate liberal voting are easier to defend in mixed-tribe company than ideas intended to motivate conservative voting, as conservative ideas are typically focused around defending their tribe from a threat from another tribe.

      As far as I can tell, online discussion environments that aren’t intended specifically to protect conservative thought or around red-tribe membership tend to see conservatives run out due to a combination of being outnumbered and having to defend hard-to-defend ideas in a mixed-tribe environment.

      • The Nybbler says:

        As far as I can tell, online discussion environments that aren’t intended specifically to protect conservative thought or around red-tribe membership tend to see conservatives run out due to a combination of being outnumbered and having to defend hard-to-defend ideas in a mixed-tribe environment.

        Then why is here different?

        IMO and IME, moderated online discussion environments tend to see conservatives (and libertarians) run out due to extreme moderator bias, to the point where simply disagreeing is sufficient for removal.

      • “Most Americans are liberal, or at least agree with liberal ideas”

        The link includes a series of claims that conservatives not made of straw don’t disagree with (e.g. “72 percent of Americans say it is “extremely” or “very” important, and 23 percent say it is “somewhat important,” to reduce poverty”) which it then presents as proof that most Americans are liberal. I agree that the average American is economically to the Left of the average member of congress, as many of the valid statistics in the article demonstrate. They also tend to value politeness, thus, if asked if racial diversity makes America stronger or weaker, they say the former to avoid unnecessary rudeness to non-Whites, but it doesn’t mean they really believe it.

        • broblawsky says:

          They also tend to value politeness, thus, if asked if racial diversity makes America stronger or weaker, they say the former to avoid unnecessary rudeness to non-Whites, but it doesn’t mean they really believe it.

          If you don’t believe this polling when it tells you most Americans think diversity is America’s strength, why do you believe any of it? That seems like pretty severe cherry-picking.

          • It’s more like picking the rotten cherry and pointing out it’s different from the rest. Poll a family on what flavor of ice cream they like and you’ll get a fairly reliable answer. Poll them on whether one member is not very smart, and you will get a near unanimous “no” even if the individual is indeed not very smart.

        • Plumber says:

          @Alexander Turok >

          “…I agree that the average American is economically to the Left of the average member of congress…”

          I’ve read quite a lot of polls that have well convinced me that the median American voter is “Left” of the Republican Party on economic policy (i.e. wants a higher minimum wage).and “Right” of the Democratic Party on cultural/social issues (i.e. doesn’t want Bakers forced to make cakes for weddings they say they don’t support for religious reasons).

          • Lambert says:

            Shouldn’t ‘The median voter is left of the Republicans and Right of the Democrats’ be kind of the default assumption in politics?

          • Plumber says:

            @Lambert,
            Yes, but not on every individual policy, the median voter is a bit Left for economics, and a bit Right on culture, while only 29% of the 2016 electorate are “economic liberal”/”social conservatives”, when you add in the about 45% of the electorate that are full “Liberals”, and the about 23% who are full “Conservatives” you have a majority aligned with Democrats on economics and a majority aligned with Republicans on cultural/identity/social issues.

    • Enkidum says:

      What I consider the right has, at various times over the past two centuries, been very firmly associated with slavery, numerous moral prohibitions (against premarital sex, drugs, music, homosexual activity, etc), wars of conquest, the refusal to expand the franchise, various forms of racism and prejudice, and in general the maintenance of awful and illegitimate power structures in the face of freedom and clearly better alternatives.

      The left won most of those battles, and now there are comparatively few who support the opposing sides any more, despite several of them having been commonplace only a few years ago. You live in a society which is arguably the best that has ever existed in human history (well, modern Romania might be pushing it), and it is largely because of the freedoms that the left has fought for. Frequently physically, in the streets and battlefields.

      There are certainly left wingers who are annoying, and left wing regimes that have caused unconscionable suffering and death. But of the modern Western world, the countries that most think of as clearly left wing (say, Canada, the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand) seem to be among the happiest places that have ever existed in human history, as well as superior on a number of more easily-measurable metrics.

      I’m not really sure what the counterpoint to the above is. I agree that the Soviet Union was largely a terrible blot on humanity, and that loud college kids can be annoying, especially on twitter.

      EDIT: Based on responses, I did not make my main point clear – I’m not trying to argue that left wing thought is inherently better, or that left wing regimes are inherently good (what part of “unconscionable suffering and death” and “terrible blot on humanity” wasn’t clear?). All I’m trying to do is give what I think are fairly standard reasons why it seems a little odd to argue that left-wing thought is inherently inferior.

      • cassander says:

        You can’t just tot up the list of left wing victories that have become conventional wisdom and say “look at all the good we’ve done, the right was against all of this!” while ignoring all the things that the left fought for that they didn’t get, were awful, or both. This is especially the case because for most of of the west for most of the last 2 centuries, the normal mode of politics has been the left proposing stuff and the right saying “Eh, I don’t think that idea is so great.”

        Now, is it true that some of the things that the right was against are things everyone now agrees are correct? Absolutely, but the right was also against eugenics, prohibition, and Stalin, much to the consternation of the left of their day. You need to include that include that in your calculus.

        • Enkidum says:

          I don’t really disagree. The claim I was responding to was that left wing thought is inherently inferior and this should be more or less obvious to a thinking person (at least that’s how I read Radu). I was trying to give what I thought was the obvious response.

          • cassander says:

            I see your point, but I would think the right wing riposte is obvious. Left wing thought led to the most monstrous regimes in human history. Why would you trust a system of thought that didn’t just produce Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Tito, etc., it produced them and then celebrated them for decades. Say what you will about the right, you didn’t have large swathes of it claiming for decades that Hitler didn’t actually kill that many jews, or that his regime wasn’t real national socialism.

          • ECD says:

            @cassander

            Do you accept Nazi’s as right wing?

            I guess I’m asking for your definition of right wing and left wing, if we’re going to try to compare “most monstrous regimes in human history”…

            ETA: I make no guarantee I will actually participate in such a discussion, as I think we’re likely to end up in the same place this conversation always ends up, discussing which famines various governments can be held responsible for, but the definition question bears on the broader issue, not just the corpse counting.

            Also:

            Say what you will about the right, you didn’t have large swathes of it claiming for decades that Hitler didn’t actually kill that many jews, or that his regime wasn’t real national socialism.

            The Lost Cause sort of leaps to mind if you accept the confederacy as right wing.

          • Enkidum says:

            Because it also produced the best countries in the world?

            Much of the left was fairly strongly anti Mao, Stalin, etc for all of your and my life (cf minor figures like The Beatles). Similarly, the right has always supported and praised all sorts of awful regimes. I don’t think you’re going to get some kind of superiority of either side here.

          • cassander says:

            @ECD says:

            Do you accept Nazi’s as right wing?

            Eh, for the most part. the strasserites were pretty left wing, but they all got purged.

            I guess I’m asking for your definition of right wing and left wing, if we’re going to try to compare “most monstrous regimes in human history”…

            the left is motivated by the leveling impulse and wants to tear down hierarchies. The right is motivated by order and wants to uphold them.

            but the definition question bears on the broader issue, not just the corpse counting.

            If you’re honest in your corpse counting, the answer is overwhelming, and not worth discussing.

            The Lost Cause sort of leaps to mind if you accept the confederacy as right wing.

            the confederacy was definitely right wing by the standard of 1860 america. But the lost cause mythology was “our ancestors were gentlemen who fought nobly and well against an unending horde of Yankees.” not “The Confederacy wasn’t REAL slavery, so when we violently overthrow society and set up slavery again, it will totally work.”

            @Enkidum

            Because it also produced the best countries in the world?

            (A) I would argue that it was capitalism produced the best countries in the world
            (B) the causation could very easily run the other way
            (C) Even if you accept that the causation runs the way you claim, all those countries became the best places in the world back when they were considerably less left wing than they are today.

            Much of the left was fairly strongly anti Mao, Stalin, etc for all of your and my life (cf minor figures like The Beatles).

            I wouldn’t call the beatles minor, but the mere fact that they might get away with being communists in the 60s (can you imagine if they were fascists?) speaks volumes, to say nothing about how arguing that “eventually the left got over their fawning admiration of stalin” is damning with awfully faint praise.

            Similarly, the right has always supported and praised all sorts of awful regimes.

            Really? You really think this is a fair assessment? Do I need to dig up all the tweets of modern leftists praising Hugo Chavez? What awful regimes are is the right supporting and praising today?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @ECD

            As the resident Southern Patriot, the Lost Cause does have some aspects of that, although it’s generally more “slavery was a step on the road to civilizing blacks”. Lost Causers tend to do stuff like point out that freed Southern blacks fought for the Confederacy (sometimes more fervently than whites) and preferred Confederate government to Union.

            I am not full-on Lost Cause, but modern depictions of the Confederacy also tend to overdo it in the wrong direction. If they are your second-worst example of a right-wing government, right-wingers have won this pretty easily. Saying “slavery wasn’t as bad as it is portrayed in modern media” is a pretty large step behind “well, it wasn’t really Mao’s fault that his policies killed millions of Chinese”.

          • ECD says:

            @cassander

            the left is motivated by the leveling impulse and wants to tear down hierarchies. The right is motivated by order and wants to uphold them.

            And in this model, communism is a leftist ideology?

            Does that fit with the critiques of communism you’ve made?

            Also, under this model, I think the right gets responsibility for everyone killed by every hierarchical government ever? And depending on how far we want to push hierarchy, every female partner killed by their male partner ever? Are you sure you’re winning this count?

            the confederacy was definitely right wing by the standard of 1860 america. But the lost cause mythology was “our ancestors were gentlemen who fought nobly and well against an unending horde of Yankees.” not “The Confederacy wasn’t REAL slavery, so when we violently overthrow society and set up slavery again, it will totally work.”

            The lost cause myth is the south was not fighting over slavery. It is explicitly about denying the core atrocity at the heart of the confederacy was the core atrocity at the heart of the heart of the confederacy. And it very much was about slavery wasn’t a big deal, hence the loyal slave stories (and see Echo Chaos’s comment below)

            @echo chaos

            As the resident Southern Patriot, the Lost Cause does have some aspects of that, although it’s generally more “slavery was a step on the road to civilizing blacks”. Lost Causers tend to do stuff like point out that freed Southern blacks fought for the Confederacy (sometimes more fervently than whites) and preferred Confederate government to Union.

            Okay, one, I’m going to ask for some evidence that “freed Southern blacks fought for the Confederacy (sometimes more fervently than whites) and preferred Confederate government to Union.” Because based on my understanding of the debates over using slave soldiers, or manumitting slaves to fight…I do not believe this to be an accurate statement.

            Two,

            If they are your second-worst example of a right-wing government, right-wingers have won this pretty easily. Saying “slavery wasn’t as bad as it is portrayed in modern media” is a pretty large step behind “well, it wasn’t really Mao’s fault that his policies killed millions of Chinese”.

            They aren’t my second worst, because I’m still trying to figure out what we mean by right and left in this conversation. Just pointing out that there’s plenty of historical revisionism to go around, especially when it comes to our own (for various definitions of “our own”) history. A big one, which might be left, or right wing by the definitions I’m playing with now, would be the treatment of native americans in north and south america.

            ETA: Now, based on the definitions given, it may be that the Left in this model is more inclined to Utopianism, so more guilty of the ‘never been tried, so try again,’ but I don’t actually see how that’s worse than the ‘wasn’t really so bad, let’s try again,’ failure mode.

            ETA: Typo correction

          • EchoChaos says:

            @ECD

            https://www.theroot.com/yes-there-were-black-confederates-here-s-why-1790858546

            Punch quote:

            With the onset of war, their patriotic displays were especially strident. In early 1861 a group of wealthy, light-skinned, free blacks in Charleston expressed common cause with the planter class

            I agree with you that Lost Cause is historical revisionism, which was the focus of my comment.

          • cassander says:

            @ECD says:

            And in this model, communism is a leftist ideology?
            Does that fit with the critiques of communism you’ve made?

            Yes, and yes. Communism is obviously an ideology dedicated to leveling. It doesn’t achieve leveling, of course, but that’s evidence it doesn’t work, not evidence that it isn’t leftist.

            Also, under this model, I think the right gets responsibility for everyone killed by every hierarchical government ever? And depending on how far we want to push hierarchy, every female partner killed by their male partner ever? Are you sure you’re winning this count?

            All governments are hierarchical, that’s what governing means. But sure, I’ll give it to you, every person ever killed by anyone trying to uphold legitimate authority is, in some sense, a right wing death….at least to the degree that every person killed in defiance of legitimate authority, including every victim of every petty criminal in history, is a left wing death. What, exactly, do you think this division accomplishes?

            The lost cause myth is the south was not fighting over slavery. It is explicitly about denying the core atrocity at the heart of the confederacy was the core atrocity at the heart of the heart of the confederacy. And it very much was about slavery wasn’t a big deal, hence the loyal slave stories (and see Echo Chaos’s comment below)

            the “core atrocity” you are discussing here was a nearly universal and more or less unquestioned feature of virtually all human societies the world over before about 1750 or so. moreover, while the lost cause narrative certainly downplays the relevance of slavery to the confederate cause, it doesn’t out and out deny that slavery existed, argue that the Yankees were the real slave owners, or insist that slavery will work better when we bring it back next time. The left did do this with communism, repeatedly.

          • ECD says:

            All governments are hierarchical, that’s what governing means. But sure, I’ll give it to you, every person ever killed by anyone trying to uphold legitimate authority is, in some sense, a right wing death….at least to the degree that every person killed in defiance of legitimate authority, including every victim of every petty criminal in history, is a left wing death.

            I think that just shoves us into question of what legitimate authority is.

            What, exactly, do you think this division accomplishes?

            Nothing. You’re the one who appears to think that counting up the bodies affiliated with “left” regimes is an effective argument.

            moreover, while the lost cause narrative certainly downplays the relevance of slavery to the confederate cause, it doesn’t out and out deny that slavery existed, argue that the Yankees were the real slave owners, or insist that slavery will work better when we bring it back next time. The left did do this with communism, repeatedly.

            I mean, holocaust denial sure does. But regardless, if you want to argue that the left, as you’ve defined it is more subject to utopianism and so more subject to taking the view that since we haven’t gotten there, we just haven’t tried hard enough…

            Sure, that follows from a definition of the left as responsible for the leveling impulse. Similarly, I’d expect the right in this model to have a powerful status quo bias, regardless of the harm it does. But I remain unconvinced and I don’t know how I could be convinced, or convince you that one or the other causes more death, or more suffering. I think this just shoves us into attempted utilitarian calculus of oppression vs order, chaos vs freedom and balancing…seems pretty pointless since, I at least, find them boring and unconvincing.

            I think we just end up with the left as chaos and the right as order in the saga of recluce (as I recall the one book I read of that series long ago). And I mean, sure, we need them both (Neutral Good all the way), but I don’t think it says much about policy, or debate.

            ETA: Thought completion.

          • cassander says:

            Nothing. You’re the one who appears to think that counting up the bodies affiliated with “left” regimes is an effective argument.

            I reasonably confined my definition in order to get a number that can actually be counted. You’re trying to do the opposite.

            I mean, holocaust denial sure does.

            And when the number of holocaust deniers hits one hundredth of the number of people who will say “the USSR wasn’t real communism”, I’ll start to worry about it as a movement. I’m not going to hold my breath though.

            But regardless, if you want to argue that the left, as you’ve defined it is more subject to utopianism and so more subject to taking the view that since we haven’t gotten there, we just haven’t tried hard enough…

            But I remain unconvinced and I don’t know how I could be convinced, or convince you that one or the other causes more death, or more suffering.

            You ought to try reading the history of the 20th century then. But if empiricism isn’t your thing, then here’s an argument. Chaos is more dangerous than order. That’s not to say that all order is good, but the consequences of too much order are almost invariably less bad than too little. the left believes the opposite, and they’re wrong, which is why they fail more disastrously when they turn it up to 11.

          • ECD says:

            But I remain unconvinced and I don’t know how I could be convinced, or convince you that one or the other causes more death, or more suffering.

            You ought to try reading the history of the 20th century then. But if empiricism isn’t your thing, then here’s an argument. Chaos is more dangerous than order. That’s not to say that all order is good, but the consequences of too much order are almost invariably less bad than too little. the left believes the opposite, and they’re wrong, which is why they fail more disastrously.

            A lot of people died in the Chinese Civil War (chaos), but it wasn’t until the communist government had brought order that it could enact the purges and “Great Leap Forward”.

            Or, for a different example, the civil war, in this model, seems at least arguably a left wing, chaotic thing. It lasted five years and cost a million lives and half as many wounded (about). Slavery (order) lasted about a century (in the US), rather more than 1.5 million people lived, were tortured, sold, raped, and, if lucky got to see their children brought into the same order, before they died while the property of their masters under for that century.

            I don’t know how to weigh those against each other and from what I understand, neither do you. It’s not a matter of not being an empiricist, it’s a matter of some things not being easily measured, or, frankly, measurable.

            But, for the sake of clarity I am not a Stalinist, or a Maoist, nor do I defend either position. Nor, in my life on the left have I encountered any number of people (exceeding the lizardman quotient) who are, though admittedly, I am notably anti-social.

            ETA: removed “murdered,” which seemed likely to confuse the issue and rephrased.

          • cassander says:

            @ECD says:

            A lot of people died in the Chinese Civil War (chaos), but it wasn’t until the communist government had brought order that it could enact the purges and “Great Leap Forward”.

            You’re conflating results with motives. Communism is unquestionably motivated by the leveling impulse, or chaos. That it achieves extremely authoritarian results is evidence that it doesn’t work, not that it’s not motivated by leveling.

            Slavery (order) lasted about a century (in the US), rather more than 1.5 million people lived, were tortured, sold, raped, and, if lucky got to see their children brought into the same order, before they died while the property of their masters under for that century.

            Please point out where I have defended slavery.

            It’s not a matter of not being an empiricist, it’s a matter of some things not being easily measured, or, frankly, measurable.

            some things are not measurable, but others are, and ignoring the stuff you can measure because you can’t measure everything is burying your head in the sand.

            But, for the sake of clarity I am not a Stalinist, or a Maoist, nor do I defend either position. Nor, in my life on the left have I encountered any number of people (exceeding the lizardman quotient) who are, though admittedly, I am notably anti-social.

            I didn’t think you were, but you are anti-social indeed if you have never met anyone who has said the USSR wasn’t real communism.

          • ECD says:

            @cassander

            Please point out where I have defended slavery.

            To be clear, I do not believe you support slavery.

            The problem I’m trying to get at is that the costs of the status quo are often invisible, or uncountable, because it requires a counter-factual. But, of course, on the flipside, you can’t know if you’re getting the American Revolution, or the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, in advance…

            But, for the sake of clarity I am not a Stalinist, or a Maoist, nor do I defend either position. Nor, in my life on the left have I encountered any number of people (exceeding the lizardman quotient) who are, though admittedly, I am notably anti-social.

            I didn’t think you were, but you are anti-social indeed if you have never met anyone who has said the USSR wasn’t real communism.

            Oh, that’s a different claim, which I don’t make. I certainly haven’t encountered it in real life, but online, sure, at a rate very slightly above the lizardman quotient.

            More generally, I think a lot of the distinction we’re getting at may be a difference in perspective. Please correct me if I wrong, but you seem to be saying:

            Look how far we’ve come.

            While I’m focusing on:

            Look how far we’ve got to go.

            And, you’re a hundred percent right, I have seen massive progress in the direction I would like us to go over the course of my life. I’ve also seen significant (though I believe less than massive, though that may simply be the result of my own improved comfort/wealth) progress in directions I would like us not to go over the course of my life.

            ETA: This may also explain some of the disagreement about the atmosphere of this place. If I’m understanding you correctly and anyone who pushes for radical change is ‘left’ definitionally, then the vast majority of the libertarians here are going to come across to you as ‘left,’ while to me they’re going to come across as (on most, but certainly not all positions) pushing in the ‘wrong’ direction and therefore on the ‘right.’

            But, again, I may be misunderstanding your position.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @cassander

            I think you are wrong about at least two things.

            Arguing that USSR wasn’t real communism isn’t morally comparable to holocaust denial. Btw. communist themselves claimed that their regime was only step toward communism, which was defined as future utopia. They called USSR socialist, not communist.

            And communist regimes were indeed motivated by levelling impulse, but they were not chaotic. On the contrary, they brutally and basically successfully imposed strict social order. Social levelling and social order are perfectly compatible. Real tradeoff is imho between social order and personal freedom.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Btw. communist themselves claimed that their regime was only step toward communism, which was defined as future utopia. They called USSR socialist, not communist.

            Quoted to signal-boost; to the best of my knowledge/experience, communism was portrayed as an end goal, not as an actual achievement.

          • cassander says:

            @ECD says:

            The problem I’m trying to get at is that the costs of the status quo are often invisible, or uncountable, because it requires a counter-factual. But, of course, on the flipside, you can’t know if you’re getting the American Revolution, or the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, in advance…

            Yes, you can know, you can look at the number of times that things called “revolutions” went well and the times they went poorly and check the figures. they almost always go badly.

            Oh, that’s a different claim, which I don’t make. I certainly haven’t encountered it in real life, but online, sure, at a rate very slightly above the lizardman quotient.

            Please correct me if I wrong, but you seem to be saying:
            Look how far we’ve come.
            While I’m focusing on:
            Look how far we’ve got to go.

            What I’m saying is you keep saying “look how far we have to go” and complaining when I tell you to stop, while ignoring the many wrong turns you said we should take in the past.

            ETA: This may also explain some of the disagreement about the atmosphere of this place. If I’m understanding you correctly and anyone who pushes for radical change is ‘left’ definitionally,

            Things TEND to be that way, but they don’t have to be. Libertarians are wierd in their embrace of capitalism, which neither the left or right are truly comfortable with, because it simultaneously tears down existing hierarchies while building up new ones.

            AlesZiegler says:

            Arguing that USSR wasn’t real communism isn’t morally comparable to holocaust denial. Btw. communist themselves claimed that their regime was only step toward communism, which was defined as future utopia. They called USSR socialist, not communist.

            A regime dedicated to building communism can fairly be called a communist regime, and that term is useful to distinguish from socialist regimes not so dedicated. And yes, it is on the same moral level as holocaust denial, or at least denial of the idea that Nazism was in any way responsible for the holocaust. Though, let’s not forget, the crimes of communist regimes were all denied for decades. That they are now merely excused is improvement, but barely.

            And communist regimes were indeed motivated by levelling impulse, but they were not chaotic. On the contrary, they brutally and basically successfully imposed strict social order.

            I agree completely, but as I said, political identity is about motive, not results.

          • ECD says:

            @cassander

            What I’m saying is you keep saying “look how far we have to go” and complaining when I tell you to stop, while ignoring the many wrong turns you said we should take in the past.

            Except here’s where we fall out of Left and Right, and into you and me. I have never told you to make wrong turns. And though I don’t want to drag us back to the fight about Enkidum’s comment, the Left has been right about plenty through the years. The Right has been right about plenty too.

            Yes, you can know [what the result of revolutions will be], you can look at the number of times that things called “revolutions” went well and the times they went poorly and check the figures. they almost always go badly.

            Fair point and it’s on me for bringing up revolution as neither I, nor most of the left in this country seek a revolution. But if we limit the Left to revolutions and not include, say, minimum wage, or unions, then we’d need to similarly limit the right to its most violent outpouring, yes, imperial conquest? colonization? I’m not sure what it would be and I’m not sure what the point would be, to be honest.

            I may have lost the thread of what we’re actually talking about at this point.

          • cassander says:

            @ECD says:

            Except here’s where we fall out of Left and Right, and into you and me. I have never told you to make wrong turns.

            If you prefer “the mode of thought you’re inclined to keeps kept saying” I suppose we could use that, but it’s not very elegant phrasing.

            But if we limit the Left to revolutions and not include, say, minimum wage, or unions, then we’d need to similarly limit the right to its most violent outpouring, yes, imperial conquest? colonization?

            I’m all for including minimum wages and unions (though you might not want to include the former). what I’m against is the left’s tendency to forget or explain away their failures. If you want to include unions, you also need to include prohibition.

            I’m not sure what it would be and I’m not sure what the point would be, to be honest.

            The point is to figure out who’s right, so we can learn from the mistakes of the past rather than repeating them.

          • ECD says:

            The point is to figure out who’s right, so we can learn from the mistakes of the past rather than repeating them.

            Then I think we’re doomed to failure, because I think we’re both likely right on different issues, in different ways, and for different terminal goals.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            @cassander

            While I agree that people who are denying that regimes run by self-described communists should not be called communist regimes are wrong, this in no way means that they are morally equivalent to Holocaust denialists. They are engaging in “No true Scotsman fallacy”, which is a common failure of human reasoning. Holocaust denialists are lying or at least grossly ignorant about easily verifiable facts and thus legitimizing antisemitism.

      • The Nybbler says:

        What I consider the right has, at various times over the past two centuries, been very firmly associated with slavery, numerous moral prohibitions (against premarital sex, drugs, music, homosexual activity, etc), wars of conquest, the refusal to expand the franchise, various forms of racism and prejudice, and in general the maintenance of awful and illegitimate power structures in the face of freedom and clearly better alternatives.

        This appears to be just drawing a line around things in the past that you don’t like and calling it “the right”.

        But of the modern Western world, the countries that most think of as clearly left wing (say, Canada, the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand) seem to be among the happiest places that have ever existed in human history

        And then there’s the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as contrasted with the right-ring ROK. Or Bangladash, or Algeria, or Congo-Brazzaville.

        I’m not really sure what the counterpoint to the above is. I agree that the Soviet Union was largely a terrible blot on humanity, and that loud college kids can be annoying, especially on twitter.

        This is where snark would come in very handy. Because it’s really the best way to point out that Communism (to include Stalin’s mass murder, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and Idi Amin’s massacres, as well as the lesser disaster of the post-Stalin USSR and the various Soviet satellites) is kind of a really BIG bad thing. And earlier we have the Committee of Public Safety with its Reign of Terror.

        As for today, we’re way, way, way past it being just loud college kids on Twitter.

        • Enkidum says:

          This appears to be just drawing a line around things in the past that you don’t like and calling it “the right”.

          I don’t think that’s true? There’s lots of left wing things from the past that I don’t like that I did not include, and if I’m wrong about any of the above having been primarily right-wing concerns, I’d like to know. I think the only one that I might be on somewhat shaky ground with is prohibition of drugs, which arguably started as more of a left-wing concern, but certainly since, say, 1970 it’s been primarily a right wing concern.

          I suppose the “maintenance of awful and illegitimate power structures” is too vague and left wing examples can easily be found. But I was mostly thinking of hereditary monarchy and the Catholic Church’s political dominance over places like Quebec and Ireland. To be fair, I’ll rescind that one.

          Again, I don’t like the Soviet Union (feel free to include the CCP, the DPRK, etc). As I replied to Cassander, I was simply giving what seemed to me a fairly standard defence of left-wing thought as not being inherently inferior.

          • albatross11 says:

            A debate about whether the left must answer for Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot and the right must answer for Hitler/slavery is a huge derail from any current discussion or issue. It’s done because it’s emotionally effective, but its whole purpose is to mindkill you–stop thinking about today’s actual arguments in favor of thinking about how wicked slavers or segregationists were.

          • Plumber says:

            @albatross11 says:

            “A debate about whether the…”

            +1

            You’re quickly becoming a favorite commenter.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        I really should go to sleep, but a quick comment: Romania had 40 yeas of communism, and it wasn’t fun. “Family members died in misery after having self-made fortune confiscated” kind of not fun, to mention just one pseudo-random thing.

        There’s more to say here, but tomorrow 🙂 Good night!

      • Wency says:

        When it comes to moral prohibitions, you seem to be defining the left’s preferences in certain matters as good in and of themselves, and then patting yourself on the back for pursuing them. Whether one believes there’s a God or not, I’ve always rejected atheistic moralizing. Unpopular opinion here, but as I see it, either God’s morality is the correct morality, or to discuss morality is a waste of time except as a means of satisfying one’s ego and influencing others.

        A lot of your condemnations might constitute some strain of thinking that was rightist at one time or another but has sense been abandoned for one reason or another. Most of the grossest abuses of human history were not a result of sincere intellectual disputes but pursued for reasons of greed or vanity — sins long condemned.

        Do we truly live in the best time? Morally best? — well, I already addressed that. The happiest? In the U.S. at least, the surveys I recall tend to say no. But it’s a tough question to answer without heavy bias, since a lot of important factors cannot be quantified, and the nostalgic opinions of old-timers not always trusted.

        It is tough to argue though that if we were to pick a happiest time to live, it would be before World War 2, but we could well argue that the advantages of our time are more a matter of technology than social organization.

        • Enkidum says:

          So… I could argue your points. But see my responses to others and the edit I made to my post.

          I definitely disagree quite strongly with most of what you’re saying, but I’m not sure that’s really all that relevant.

        • Milo Minderbinder says:

          I mean, as an atheist, if a moral discussion could influence someone to act more in accordance with my (or someone’s) higher ideals, this is good, no? One should always preach with an intent to influence. Also, my parents (mixed-race couple) could not have legally married pre-WW2, so modern social organization seems to have a bit going for it too.

          • Wency says:

            I only mean this to say that ultimately an atheistic moral discussion comes down to no more than preferences, arrived at through some combination of inborn predispositions and social conditioning.

            If an atheist opposes gay marriage for moral reasons, he is ultimately saying “I just don’t like it.” Or, more precisely, “It makes me feel good about myself to pronounce that I don’t like it.”

            If he instead supports it, he is saying “It makes me feel good about myself to say it’s good.”

            All the rest is rhetorical flourishes. Or as Pascal said, the philosophers “talk to pass an hour”. Of course, if you can use these rhetorical flourishes to convince other people to agree with you, that might make you feel even better about yourself.

            But I always hated the rhetorical flourishes, whether I thought myself an atheist or not.

          • Bamboozle says:

            @Wency

            So morals are ultimately useless unless they come from God or some other higher power is what you’re saying? After all, ‘don’t kill people’ is just a preference, and i only believe it because it makes me feel good to say it?

          • Wency says:

            “Morals are ultimately useless”

            @Bamboozle

            Not at all.

            The coherent atheistic view would be that morals are evolved intuitions that, in the ancestral environment, allowed for various mutually beneficial arrangements.

            But I would posit that all atheistic moral argumentation beyond “My intuition is this is wrong” is hot air. Except that our morality is somewhat socially conditioned, so to some degree that hot air will persuade people to imitate each other’s intuitions. But mostly the hot air serves to rationalize our intuitions, to try to convince ourselves that we have good reasons for thinking the things we do.

            Certain people with highly systematizing personalities (mostly utilitarians) aren’t inclined to leave this alone though, and so go on at great lengths about why we should systematize these intuitions and other people should too. But this isn’t very satisfying to most people, whose intuitions elude systematization; they have an inescapable tendency to view certain things as wrong “just because”.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            But I would posit that all atheistic moral argumentation beyond “My intuition is this is wrong” is hot air.

            I would extend that to all moral argumentation. After all, what is religious belief other than “my intuition is that this is true”?

            Luckily, we don’t actually have to employ moral arguments. Instead, we can look at practical arguments of the form:

            “What happens when we decide people ought to act in such and such a manner, given that we can’t actually force them to think or feel a certain way (nor even act a certain way; the best we can do is punish failure to do so)?”

          • Wency says:

            @Faza:

            You can’t extend that argument to religion. To a Christian, pursuit of God’s will, His moral order, is of extraordinary importance, with consequences that extend beyond this life and beyond this plane of existence. Also, Christianity teaches that our moral intuitions are a guide, but we are fallen, so they are a flawed guide. Thus theology is the most important intellectual pursuit of mankind — “Queen of the Sciences” as Aquinas said. Similar arguments could be extended to other faiths.

            But I would agree that certain moral questions can be framed as practical questions. Sometimes this helps us get to a better answer, or at least weigh the tradeoffs better. But a lot of the time, if the issue is a controversial one steeped deeply in morality, it’s tough to have an objective debate. A lot of “practical” arguments of this sort are just rationalizing moral intuitions without speaking them out loud.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think a lot of times, moral reasoning is about trying to extend our moral intuitions into realms where they don’t work very well. A hungry child I see feels more important to feed than ten I don’t see, but it sure seems like there’s some kind of moral error in feeding one hungry child instead of ten.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Wency,

            To a Christian, pursuit of God’s will, His moral order, is of extraordinary importance, with consequences that extend beyond this life and beyond this plane of existence. Also, Christianity teaches that our moral intuitions are a guide, but we are fallen, so they are a flawed guide. Thus theology is the most important intellectual pursuit of mankind — “Queen of the Sciences” as Aquinas said.

            This presumes someone is already a Christian and shall remain so.

            The same approach cannot, however, be used to answer “Ought one be a Christian?” and therefore fails as a moral guide, if you discount intuition as providing the answer.

            To say that your religion offers you a basis for your moral beliefs is to dodge the question, because professing a religion is itself a moral choice – one on which religion itself cannot offer guidance, because once you accept the moral precepts of a religion, you’ve already made your choice.

            In case this isn’t clear, consider that by choosing Christianity you are rejecting any number of competing religions that make much the same claims as Christianity does, including a moral obligation to follow their precepts. This is Diderot’s objection to Pascal’s Wager (“an Imam could reason the same way”).

          • Wency says:

            @Albatross
            A hungry child I see feels more important to feed than ten I don’t see, but it sure seems like there’s some kind of moral error in feeding one hungry child instead of ten.

            Fully agree. Our moral intuitions operate on the visceral, the local, the personal. But utilitarianism and its ilk tend to downplay these as irrelevant personal biases, and the result is generally unsatisfying.

            @Faza:
            There’s a lot that can be said about how one arrives at religion. Beyond the scope of what I’m prepared to get into here. But I would say that intuition is indeed a large part of the answer. Reason alone will not typically get you there.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Wency,

            There’s a lot that can be said about how one arrives at religion. Beyond the scope of what I’m prepared to get into here. But I would say that intuition is indeed a large part of the answer.

            It seems we are in agreement. Capital!

            Just to remind ourselves of what’s under discussion, a quick restatement of the initial claims:

            [A]ll atheistic moral argumentation beyond “My intuition is this is wrong” is hot air.

            I would extend that to all moral argumentation.

            To clarify my position, I see no difference between “my intuition is that Christianity is correct” and “my intuition is that utilitarianism is correct” (just to pick an example of a moral system that doesn’t require divine founding).

      • Erusian says:

        What I consider the right has, at various times over the past two centuries, been very firmly associated with slavery, numerous moral prohibitions (against premarital sex, drugs, music, homosexual activity, etc), wars of conquest, the refusal to expand the franchise, various forms of racism and prejudice, and in general the maintenance of awful and illegitimate power structures in the face of freedom and clearly better alternatives.

        What do you consider as the right?

        • Enkidum says:

          Restricting myself to the West… The Confederacy. Most of the power structures of the Catholic Church, certainly until relatively recently. Most evangelical/fundamentalist strains of Protestantism. Ancien regimes in general. That covers pretty much everything on my list, I think.

          • Erusian says:

            You do know that the Evangelicals were some of the strongest and earliest opponents of slavery and the Confederacy? Meanwhile, Catholics were an oppressed minority for most of their history in the United States. This doesn’t seem like a coherent coalition of ideas or histories. I can’t think of what they have in common.

          • Nornagest says:

            Most evangelical/fundamentalist strains of Protestantism.

            This is a pretty naive take. Fundamentalist Protestantism’s association with the political right is recent and historically anomalous; indeed, fundamentalist Protestant movements often came hand in hand with utopian political schemes. The Puritans for example sought political as well as religious reform for the first two centuries of their history, and existed on a spectrum of religious radicalism that also included proto-socialist movements like the Diggers.

          • Randy M says:

            In Enkidium’s classification, the right seems to be defined as whoever is the enemy of progress, whether acting as such in concert from some motivating ideology or for other reasons.

          • Enkidum says:

            This doesn’t seem like a coherent coalition of ideas or histories.

            I don’t think the right is a coherent coalition (nor the left). There’s no one uniting feature, certainly nothing like an organized movement.

            Catholics were an oppressed minority for most of their history in the United States

            Being an oppressed minority is not inconsistent with being right wing. For what it’s worth, I was mostly thinking of Catholicism in Europe.

            I should have specified modern evangelical/fundamentalist strains of Protestantism.

            the right seems to be defined as whoever is the enemy of progress, whether acting as such in concert from some motivating ideology or for other reasons.

            Pretty close to that. This is roughly William F. Buckley’s (deliberately glib) definition of conservatism, isn’t it?

        • Oscar Sebastian says:

          What do you consider as the right?

          Counter question: Which of these descriptions that have not already been retracted by Enkidum do you think do not actually describe rightwing thought? Do you think the general thrust of their argument is incorrect? The right is commonly understood to be the conservative party of the time, and it seems to me certainly fair to say that conservatives opposed abolitionism, that they supported racists, sexists, homophobes, etc, that they didn’t wish for the franchise to be expanded…

          It feels to me that this whole discussion a great counterpoint to the general assumption that started this argument. Enkidum has made a point. Everyone else has engaged in nitpicking (“You’re clearly talking about conservatism over a large period of time, but I’m going to complain there isn’t a coherent theme!”, whataboutism (“YOU ALREADY MENTIONED THE SOVIETS, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SOVIETS?!”), and worse (“You’re claiming that the happiest countries on Earth being liberal shows liberality doesn’t inherently suck? WHAT ABOUT NORTH KOREA?!?!?!?!”) but seems unable to address the core. The rebuttals seem substantial but are really quite threadbare up against what has been said and needs to be repeated: conservatives said slavery was okay; liberals said it was wrong. So, with that in mind…

          Are you sure conservatives win where quality of conversation is what is selected for? Are you unbiased enough to make that distinction, or are your biases such that you can’t distinguish between rigorous debate and conversations that simply agree with you? It’s a common human condition, after all — I myself have spent time in places that agreed with me utterly and thought I was among the philosopher kings of my age only to realize that they were lunatics, people who had arrived at what I felt were correct conclusions by methods utterly foreign to logic.

          As a small piece of evidence, let me point out that not one single piece of evidence has been put forward for the hypothesis in this conversation. Someone asserted without the slightest bit of proof, “Liberals lose when arguments are about ideas,” and everyone started theorizing as to why this phenomenon might be. Is that quality debate? Surely a conversation that meets the gold standard of quality would do a survey of a wide variety of forums; I would imagine we would need to study popular political blogs, various subreddits, news commentary sections, and probably even the internet’s largest fandom forums’s political sections. We’d have to examine the rules used, and the enforcement mechanisms in place, as well as the ways a person goes from being a standard commentator to a moderator and the checks against moderators to prevent tyranny (or lack thereof!). Quality is difficult to measure, so we will need many measurements.

          If that was beyond the means of the commentators (I’m certainly not going to go through all this bother without some grant money, and I don’t imagine any of you would care to do it for free either), then wouldn’t a place that has high quality conversations dismiss unsubstantiated claims that only allow them to stroke their own egos?

          If not, why not?

          • Erusian says:

            I have no idea why you decided to reply to my fairly innocuous question with such hostility. Unless Enkdum tells me he felt I was being hostile, I’m going to assume this is a you thing.

            Which of these descriptions that have not already been retracted by Enkidum do you think do not actually describe rightwing thought?

            I don’t know which ones have been retracted and which ones haven’t. However, since I didn’t seem to understand his definition of what ‘the right’ was, I asked. He then explained his view of history which does have a coherent view of the right, in a Whiggish or end of history sort of framework.

            Do you think the general thrust of their argument is incorrect?

            Yes.

            The right is commonly understood to be the conservative party of the time, and it seems to me certainly fair to say that conservatives opposed abolitionism, that they supported racists, sexists, homophobes, etc, that they didn’t wish for the franchise to be expanded…

            Then you have an extremely impoverished and partisan view of history. The New Deal and Great Society, for example, both relied on support from Segregationists. The governor of Mississippi who was part of the KKK and intensified Jim Crow and simultaneously raised taxes on the wealthy to fund welfare, education, and infrastructure while restricting the influence of corporations. Is he a conservative or a liberal under your schema? History is complicated and does not easily fit the needs of modern partisans to validate their ideas as objectively correct or their opponents as evil.

            I could list Republicans crimes, by the way. But that would be preaching to the choir.

            It feels to me that this whole discussion a great counterpoint to the general assumption that started this argument. Enkidum has made a point. Everyone else has engaged in nitpicking (“You’re clearly talking about conservatism over a large period of time, but I’m going to complain there isn’t a coherent theme!”, whataboutism (“YOU ALREADY MENTIONED THE SOVIETS, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SOVIETS?!”), and worse (“You’re claiming that the happiest countries on Earth being liberal shows liberality doesn’t inherently suck? WHAT ABOUT NORTH KOREA?!?!?!?!”) but seems unable to address the core.

            What discussion is that particularly? I literally just asked him to define a term of his argument. This might be a valid point for the entire thread but you replied to me. Just me. And I was trying to be inquisitive rather than hostile.

            The rebuttals seem substantial but are really quite threadbare up against what has been said and needs to be repeated: conservatives said slavery was okay; liberals said it was wrong. So, with that in mind…

            Liberal and conservative are serving as weasel words here. Republicans said slavery was wrong. Most of the Democrats disagreed. The Republicans were pro-corporation and full of evangelicals even back then. The Democrats were not fully secular because secularism wasn’t really a thing yet. But they were largely members of churches that have since secularized and tend to be progressives (Jefferson Davis was an Episcopalian, for example). They were explicitly worried about the influence of corporations in politics. In fact, several Jim Crow states banned corporations outright. They explicitly hitched this horse to the trade union movement and its criticisms of factory owners.

            So are you going to argue a bunch of highly religious evangelicals allied to big business and capitalist finance were the liberals? And that the relatively secular racists who supported worker’s rights were conservatives? How about the early feminist who insisted lynchings were a feminist act of female power against rapists?

            Again, history is complicated and resists the need for a simple narrative.

            Are you sure conservatives win where quality of conversation is what is selected for? Are you unbiased enough to make that distinction, or are your biases such that you can’t distinguish between rigorous debate and conversations that simply agree with you? It’s a common human condition, after all — I myself have spent time in places that agreed with me utterly and thought I was among the philosopher kings of my age only to realize that they were lunatics, people who had arrived at what I felt were correct conclusions by methods utterly foreign to logic.

            I suppose ‘sure’ overstates what I feel. But I certainly can say anecdotally, having seen many, many, many political debates that the conservatives tend to acquit themselves better. I don’t believe conservatives have better quality arguments in the sense of being more correct but they seem to make their case better.

            I can’t comment whether I’m unbiased. However, I have spent most of my life as a political moderate living in politically moderate places. I’ve helped get both Democrats and Republicans elected. I am a swing voter in a swing state, which isn’t an argument that I’m unbiased. But it does mean that I get to hear both side’s cases (actually, they won’t shut up).

            Also, perhaps the fact that I don’t believe Republicans have better ideas despite believing they were better debaters might hint that I’m not as biased against liberals as you think.

            As a small piece of evidence, let me point out that not one single piece of evidence has been put forward for the hypothesis in this conversation. Someone asserted without the slightest bit of proof, “Liberals lose when arguments are about ideas,” and everyone started theorizing as to why this phenomenon might be. Is that quality debate? Surely a conversation that meets the gold standard of quality would do a survey of a wide variety of forums; I would imagine we would need to study popular political blogs, various subreddits, news commentary sections, and probably even the internet’s largest fandom forums’s political sections. We’d have to examine the rules used, and the enforcement mechanisms in place, as well as the ways a person goes from being a standard commentator to a moderator and the checks against moderators to prevent tyranny (or lack thereof!). Quality is difficult to measure, so we will need many measurements.

            I’m not going to defend this because it’s not my opinion. I think liberals are, in general, worse debaters than conservatives. I don’t think they have worse ideas, at least not on the whole. The only real data claim I make is that Republican districts tend to be more politically diverse than Democratic ones. I do have data to back that up but it’s not a point the Democrats dispute.

            You are, of course, free to disagree and I don’t have a mountain of empirical evidence. But it is my experience and being from a politically contested area I’ve had a lot of people spend a lot of money to persuade me. That’s an anecdote but I’m not claiming it’s anything more than a theory.

            If that was beyond the means of the commentators (I’m certainly not going to go through all this bother without some grant money, and I don’t imagine any of you would care to do it for free either), then wouldn’t a place that has high quality conversations dismiss unsubstantiated claims that only allow them to stroke their own egos?

            If not, why not?

            I’m not sure how discussing one group I don’t identify with is better at debating than another group I don’t identify with is ego-stroking. You have read into my motives an awful lot in this reply and really the entire worldview relies on knowing my private motivations. Unfortunately, you cannot.

            Perhaps most damningly, I didn’t argue with Enkidum. I asked him to define a term. He gave a definition that allowed me to understand what he meant. And that was the end of it. I made no effort to persuade him he was wrong and I didn’t intend to. I wanted to understand an assertion that seemed out of step with what I knew of history. I understand his point of view better now. I hope the experience was not unduly unpleasant for them.

          • cassander says:

            The rebuttals seem substantial but are really quite threadbare up against what has been said and needs to be repeated: conservatives said slavery was okay; liberals said it was wrong. So, with that in mind…

            Are you really making this argument less than a sentnace after you mocked people for arguing “WHAT ABOUT NORTH KOREA?!?!?!?!”?

            How is “what about slavery!?!?!” any better an argument than “what about north Korea”?

          • mitv150 says:

            Perhaps its just me, but in a conversation about how modern conservative arguments fare against modern liberal arguments in an internet forum, and why, it doesn’t seem terribly germane to haggle over whether support of slavery was or wasn’t inherently “right wing.”

            Can it be stipulated that modern conservatism or right wing thought does not encompass any pro-slavery notions and that modern liberalism or left wing thought does not encompass any pro-Stalinist thought?

          • Nornagest says:

            that modern liberalism or left wing thought does not encompass any pro-Stalinist thought?

            I’ll give that to the mainstream left, but not to modern left-wing thought more broadly — we’ve had no-shit Stalinists here of all places. The impression I get is that it’s about as taboo on the left as Jim Crow-style white supremacy is on the right, i.e. pretty taboo but not so much so that you can’t find adherents if you turn over a big enough rock.

            (On the other hand, I’ve never met a slavery supporter.)

          • EchoChaos says:

            The right is commonly understood to be the conservative party of the time, and it seems to me certainly fair to say that conservatives opposed abolitionism, that they supported racists, sexists, homophobes, etc, that they didn’t wish for the franchise to be expanded…

            This is certainly not always true. For example, in the early 20th Century, the Democrats were definitely the left-wing party, pushing expansion of the franchise, increased labor rights and social security.

            They were also by far the most racist party, the party that supported eugenics and forced sterilization.

          • ECD says:

            Perhaps its just me, but in a conversation about how modern conservative arguments fare against modern liberal arguments in an internet forum, and why, it doesn’t seem terribly germane to haggle over whether support of slavery was or wasn’t inherently “right wing.”

            Well, then neither does Stalinism? I mean, we’re deep in the historical weeds here. I think we’ve also shifted from a discussion of who wins debates, into whose ideas are/were better (or have the least blood attached, depending on where in the thread you are).

            Personally, I think if we’re going to compare ideas, we might as well just pull up party platforms and compare. Might be a fun exercise in an open thread at some point.

          • albatross11 says:

            I’m trying to figure out how many of the posts in this discussion could reasonably be replaced with “I believe my tribe should rise in status relative to your tribe.” 50%? More?

            The way it looks to me:

            Some ideas win out in a fair debate because they’re clearly right. They’re the equivalent of experiments or observations of an effect so clear that you don’t need statistical methods to tease it out.

            Some ideas win out in a fair debate because there’s an easy-to-reach argument for them and a much harder-to-reach argument against them, and that happens even when the idea is wrong. What ideas are easy-to-reach depends on background knowledge and assumptions in the community[1].

            Some ideas win out in most debates because the arguments for them are emotionally compelling, even when the actual logical arguments or evidence go the other way. And again, different moral premises lead to different ideas having the more emotionally compelling arguments for/against them. (“If it saves one child….”)

            Some ideas win out in most debates because most people in the discussion hate the consequences of the idea not being true. (Think AGW or racial differences in IQ.).

            As best I can tell, the ideas with these advantages are scattered across the right/left spectrum in the US, though which ideas seem more compelling seem like they’re driven partly by different premises. (For example, if you see abortion as more-or-less equivalent to infanticide, a different set of arguments will seem compelling than if you see it as more-or-less equivalent to appendectomy.)

            [1] Arguing about the theory of evolution with someone who doesn’t know much about biology is a good example–it seems incredible that stuff as complex as the human eye or the organization of an anthill or the vertebrate immune system could be the result of unthinking processes, but as you accumulate more knowledge, you see more and more evidence for this idea (fossil records, embryonic stages, shared genetic mechanisms all through a lineage, genetic damage/errors and endogenous retroviruses that got stuck into a lineage at some point and gets carried by all the later species in that line, etc.)

            [2]

      • LesHapablap says:

        Is New Zealand really that left leaning? Living here on the south island it seems just moderate, with none of the red tribe vs. blue tribe that the US has. The vast majority here look at Trump as a clown and also find progressive politics totally bonkers.

        It is supposed to have low regulation for business, and the ‘right’ party here is pro-immigration while the Labour party is anti-immigrant.

        • Ketil says:

          Or Scandinavia? Economically, these countries aren’t all that different from other modern, western countries.

          Are we certain the alleged happiness doesn’t stem from other factors, like ethnic homogeneity, national pride, low unemployment, high gender equality, easy access to abortions, wealth, economic equality, secularism, or thinly spread populations?

      • I’m not really sure what the counterpoint to the above is.

        That your left/right category doesn’t correspond to current political divisions.

        As I commented on above, libertarians are the modern version of classical liberals. As such, they can claim most of the credit for ending slavery, for free trade, for ending legal support for restrictions on who could practice what profession, on a whole bundle of changes that created modern capitalist states. Also, along with the Catholic church, practically the only serious opponents of early 20th century eugenics.

        Modern progressives are the intellectual heirs of early 20th century progressives, the people responsible for creating regulatory regimes that cartelized the transport industry, supporting eugenics, pushing imperialism. Also, at slightly greater remove, the heirs, at least cousins, of 19th and early 20th century socialists, whose ideas led many of them to support of some of the most oppressive regimes in human history. For evidence, read Orwell on the attitudes of his fellow socialists towards Stalin.

        Defending non-libertarian conservatives I will leave to any of them who wish to undertake the project.

      • But of the modern Western world, the countries that most think of as clearly left wing (say, Canada, the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand)

        Possibly left of the U.S., although even that isn’t entirely clear–the Scandinavian countries have more redistribution than the U.S., less government interference with the market. And Sweden went from a relatively poor country to a relatively rich one at a time when it was one of the more liberal (classical sense, hence right wing by modern terminology) countries in Europe.

        But none of those three is left in terms of 20th century political theory—they are capitalist societies with more intervention than libertarians approve of and more redistribution than libertarians or conservatives approve of. Compare to India, which has been officially socialist ever since it became independent (although decreasingly so in recent years). Or compare any of the capitalist/socialist pairs of the 20th century–East Germany West Germany, Taiwan/China, North Korea/South Korea.

        While, at least by the late 20th century,the American left did not generally approve of the political system of the communist countries, it continued to mostly support their economic system. India had five year plans not only because the USSR did but because leftist American advisors told them that was the way to develop. Paul Samuelson’s econ text continued for multiple editions to claim that the USSR was catching up to the U.S., despite having, edition after edition, to put the point when they would be caught up further ahead.

      • “Canada, the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand) seem to be among the happiest places that have ever existed in human history, as well as superior on a number of more easily-measurable metrics.”

        It’s a scissor type issue whether this is true: the Leftists believe Scandanavia is superior to America and thinks that “everyone” believes this; non-Leftists ask for evidence that this is true. There are certainly a lot of metrics that place these places near the top, but often they are simply measures of social liberalism, citing them to support higher levels of social liberalism is circular, like citing the index of economic freedom to support the obvious superiority of neoliberal economic policies.

        • ECD says:

          the Leftists believe Scandanavia is superior to America and thinks that “everyone” believes this

          To make a brief statement, as a temporarily resident Leftist. No. I neither believe this, nor do I believe that everyone believes this. I believe Scandinavia is probably a very nice place to live and has done many things right, but that’s not the same thing. And from my own experience, the way this most often comes up in my observation:

          1) Conservative: You’re trying to push a radical agenda which will make us more like Europe/Sweden/France.
          2) Liberal: Yes, on those things where they’re right.

          ETA: Left out a qualifier, fixed.

      • Enkidum says:

        I did not steer this conversation in a useful direction. So for the time being (tonight, probably), I’ll bow out. A few quick points:

        – I’m really not interested in a pissing match about whether left wing cause X is better than right wing cause Y or whatever. I was merely bringing up what I believed (and still believed) were a number of examples ranging from several hundred years ago to less than a decade ago, where I think the left wing side had a clearly superior take than the right.

        – I believe there are many cases where the right had a superior take than the left.

        – History is complicated. Even defining what right and left are is complicated. Y’all can argue about all this stuff as much as you like. I am fairly consistently left wing, but that does not mean I support everything that has ever been done in the name of the left, today or throughout history.

        – But I was responding to what I thought was (and I am being incredibly generous here) a grossly oversimplified, extremely silly, and fundamentally wrong post by Radu, that seemed to be getting something like unanimous acceptance from other commenters. I tried to keep the response simple and clear, perhaps I failed.

        – I do think Oscar Sebastian gave a reasonable response to the thread as a whole (though as Eurasian pointed out, it might not be a great reply to them specifically). If this is an example of how poor left wing debate comes across in the face of inherent right wing superiority…. I can assure you that a lot of the people reading this thread will have a very different take. ECD’s discussion of why he doesn’t post much in the previous thread seems pertinent here.

        – Not that it matters that much, but I brought up the Beatles as an example of anti-communist left wingers. The song Revolution is pretty clear, even directly condemning people for supporting Mao.

        – I really do think Mao and Stalin and all the others were bad people who did bad things. Really, really bad things, as bad as humanity has gotten.

        • Erusian says:

          – I’m really not interested in a pissing match about whether left wing cause X is better than right wing cause Y or whatever. I was merely bringing up what I believed (and still believed) were a number of examples ranging from several hundred years ago to less than a decade ago, where I think the left wing side had a clearly superior take than the right.

          – I believe there are many cases where the right had a superior take than the left.

          – History is complicated. Even defining what right and left are is complicated. Y’all can argue about all this stuff as much as you like.

          – But I was responding to what I thought was (and I am being incredibly generous here) a grossly oversimplified, extremely silly, and fundamentally wrong post by Radu, that seemed to be getting something like unanimous acceptance from other commenters. I tried to keep the response simple and clear, perhaps I failed.

          – I do think Oscar Sebastian gave a reasonable response to the thread as a whole (though as Eurasian pointed out, it might not be a great reply to them specifically). If this is an example of how poor left wing debate comes across in the face of inherent right wing superiority…. I can assure you that a lot of the people reading this thread will have a very different take. ECD’s discussion of why he doesn’t post much in the previous thread seems pertinent here.

          – I really do think Mao and Stalin and all the others were bad people who did bad things. Really, really bad things, as bad as humanity has gotten.

          My name is Erusian, and I endorse all these messages.

          I’d like to point out my response, while perhaps not the clearest, was meant as a defense of the left. Arguing they are not as good at expressing themselves but asserting they have completely valid and reasonable opinions. (At least the moderates: I don’t like Stalinists or Nazis.) I don’t believe that right-wingers have a monopoly on thoughtful policy.

          To be honest, I am sympathetic to Oscar Sebastian in a general sense. His response makes sense as a response to the totality of what was going on. Enkidum was getting dogpiled from the right and (while I don’t think he stated it particularly well) Oscar Sebastian was at least gesturing towards valid points. That said, he chose to respond to me and accuse me specifically. I don’t think that’s fair and I felt compelled to defend myself. Not because I’m some god-king of rationality but because I don’t think I was engaging in the dogpile or hostile action. (Again, Enkidum can correct me if they feel I was.)

          I’m not going to defend the entire thread or the initial thesis. I don’t agree with it, as I’ve said. I will maintain my belief that the Left is not as good at debating their beliefs as the Right until someone challenges successfully. But I also stand firm in asserting this is no reflection on the quality of the ideas or policies. I think the Democrats are correct on several issues. If anything, I wish they were better at debating. Even on issues I disagree with, it would raise the quality of the discourse.

          • Enkidum says:

            Erusian != Eurasian, sorry about that…

            I didn’t think you were being rude, though I initially read you as more aggressive than you intended – this was likely just because it was coming in a thread of a half dozen disagreements. Reading between the lines, I think that’s why Oscar responded to you the way he did – it wasn’t really aimed directly at you.

            Also, lest I sound more irritated than I am, I’d like to say no harm no foul to all involved, I’m a big boy and while I do sometimes let my emotions run wild on these boards I’m not having a hissy fit or anything, I’m just really tired and don’t see much of a useful contribution I can make to the original conversation any longer. Y’all are good people, even the evil right wingers. Well, some of them.

            Also if @David Friedman is reading this, this is the second time you’ve argued that I’m neglecting the contributions of libertarians to the causes I value, and I just wanted to say that you’re probably right about that, and it’s just not something I’ve thought very much about. I don’t have a useful response beyond that, will have to think and read more.

          • Erusian says:

            Erusian != Eurasian, sorry about that…

            Just to be clear, I was making a joke based on politicians. (“My name is X and I approve these messages.” type deals).

        • Radu Floricica says:

          Yup. You know, when I logged out last night I actually thought something like “Man, that’s going to be chaos in that thread. Maybe I should have said something?”. I regret I didn’t. This would have been a damn good opportunity to practice discussing CW topics in a productive way.

          Also wanted to thank you for giving an actual answer to my post. But it did take reading your first reply before I got the point 🙂

          Speaking of, in the first draft of my post I had the word “stupid” instead of “naive”. I was referring to myself as a youth, but had I not corrected it it would have been a completely different comment, and probably worthy of a warning. It pays to re-read your comments for “artistic impression”.

    • Erusian says:

      – Liberals lose (and this is the CW point) in places moderated on the quality of the conversation because in a pure idea-to-idea conflict they just lose, and usually badly.

      I agree this is usually true in practice. But my theory has always been that’s because if you are a liberal, you’re significantly less likely to have to defend your ideas.

      Imagine someone born in San Francisco, who then goes to Columbia, and then goes to work for the LA Times. How likely is it they’ve never actually heard a good conservative argument? Never really had to defend the common pieties of the Democratic Party? How likely is it they can just shut down any conservative voices they run into (and probably be rewarded for it)? Especially considering the media, social media, and education are all liberal dominated.

      Some version of this experience is what the majority of Democrats have. Democratic support is basically urban centers plus New England. Republican districts tend to be significantly more politically diverse. This is not an opinion: it’s a statistical reality.

      This is not a good background for debaters. You end up with people who don’t know the other side’s arguments and don’t even really know their own. There are plenty of intellectually strong arguments for left-wing positions. Especially moderate ones (here defined as ‘the Democratic Party Platform’ and not ‘AOC’s twitter’). This is true on the right as well: extremists tend to be intellectually less than rigorous. I almost never hear these arguments and when I repeat them back to Democrats they sometimes go the equivalent of, “Oh, that’s very clever, I’ll have to remember that.”

      At a minimum wage debate, Ben Shapiro gets to say, “Why don’t you set the minimum wage to $100 then? What’s the limiting principle? If you can just arbitrarily set wages why not set them to infinite?” He says this to a stage full of left-wing intellectuals and none of them answer him. One goes into a non-sequitur and the other says his $100 proposal is ridiculous and she has a study showing empirically it’s good. And then Ben Shapiro gets to ride off into the sunset because no one addressed his point.

      The answer is because minimum wage is not meant to magically create higher wages. It’s meant to ameliorate the unequal bargaining power between workers and management. Wages are a negotiation between you and your employer. The job you do produces a certain amount of value and you are negotiating to capture a percentage of that value. Minimum wages makes sure that you get a minimum amount of that value, effectively prenegotiating a minimum rate and eliminating work that isn’t productive enough to justify that wage (usually with the argument such work is menial and degrading).

      To see an example, imagine a toy economy with ten workers doing ten jobs for $1 each. Each job produces $1 value than the next, so $1, $2… $10, for a total of $55. Those ten workers collectively make $10. A minimum wage is set at $2. One worker is now unemployed because the employer cannot profitably pay that amount. The remaining nine workers now make $18. This creates a net loss to the economy of $1 (from the lost job), so the total economy is $54 instead of $55. It also creates 10% unemployment. However, the working class having those extra $8 might be worth it for moral reasons or because it creates some additional economy value. And that additional value can be pretty modest for the cost: $1 is about a 2% increase. Perhaps it will even create a new job that can pay $2 to the unemployed worker. But even if it doesn’t, it’s likely they’ll move into the non-working population. At that point, they’re living off their spouse’s income or some such. And their spouse is likely to be working class and benefiting from the increase in income.

      You don’t set the minimum wage to $100 because it would create too much unemployment, shrinking the overall economy more than the transfer could grow it and probably creating a net decrease in income for the working class.

      You can disagree with this. But you need more than a single sentence going, “Why not $100 then? Huh?” (That argument does work for an argument like, “They just deserve to be paid more! It’s necessary for basic human dignity!”)

      • albatross11 says:

        More to the point: If you are planning to debate the minimum wage with someone, it seems like this is one of the obvious points you’d need to raise. I’d expect someone in a liberal bubble to have heard/considered this argument, but perhaps not one based on people whose intellectual gifts make them unemployable at a higher wage.

    • DragonMilk says:

      I don’t think this is useful framing. Coalitions are self contradictory – in the US, Democrats embrace feminists and Muslims, while Republicans are pro-business and court Christians.

      What works as a political coalition doesn’t often result in a coherent and consistent ideology. I’d rather not generalize in this manner, seems like an -ism but applied to coalitions.

    • ECD says:

      – Liberals lose (and this is the CW point) in places moderated on the quality of the conversation because in a pure idea-to-idea conflict they just lose, and usually badly.

      Besides this forum, what other places are you thinking of to support this claim?

      • You might look at the discussions at the end of the Free to Choose videos.

        I should add that I think the reason is not primarily the superiority of my father’s views, although that may have helped. It was that he had encountered the arguments against his positions over and over again, while most of the critics of those positions had never seriously considered the arguments for them.

        As per my own experience in 1964, which I described recently.

        • ECD says:

          That looks like a very interesting series and it looks like the wikipedia page has nice streaming links. Thanks, I’ll take a look, even though I tend to hate long form television I actually have to pay attention to.

          However, I will say two initial things. One, I actually find in-person real time debate to be a shockingly bad method of figuring out anything but who is better at live debate. Two, it tickles me pink that your example is public television.

          Please note, this last is not intended in a mean way, or to suggest anything inappropriate.

          • sentientbeings says:

            @ECD

            I happen to agree, for the most part, about real-time debate, despite the fun that it can sometimes be. This case has two good things going for it, though.

            First, Milton Friedman was really damn good at oral exposition even as the one taking the rhetorically unsympathetic position. Second, you could just buy this book.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Don’t agree with the statements. Liberals are more than capable of being giant jerks, for one. Half of them seem to think they are Jon Stewart, and an increasing number of Bleeding Edge Twitterati think anything right of Beto O’Rourke needs to be expelled from polite society.

      They are also often correct, especially against more extreme right-wing claims, like “tax cuts will pay for themselves” or whatever.

      IME on other forums, liberals just dogpile conservatives, because liberals greatly outnumber conservatives online. Moderators are also biased: I have received warnings in the past just for mentioning the existence of pro-life beliefs (and I am not even pro-life!) Liberal commentators feel entitled to throw massive invective at even politely phrased Conservative comments. This is pretty much bog-standard on the Internet.

      I do agree that there are practically no well-spoken conservative arguments IRL, but there are rarely liberal ones either. People just don’t do a good job of eloquently stating their beliefs.

    • Bamboozle says:

      To be honest as someone not from the US, seeing right and left, liberal and conservative, progressive, SJ, libertarian, and the hundred other sub-categories makes me want to tear my eyeballs out.

      How can people honestly argue in good faith assuming these categories are anything but entirely unhomogeneous and useless?

      Surely @Radu you need to define what exactly you mean by Liberal ideas and prove that they lose unequivocally rather than just asserting it as fact and then asking why this is?

      • Radu Floricica says:

        That’s a very good point, and especially since “left” and “liberal” mean different things in US and in Europe. We’re mostly using the US terminology here, because… well… they kinda invented the internet.

        I’ve said earlier that I mostly mean multicultural left in US.

    • Corey says:

      Liberals lose (and this is the CW point) in places moderated on the quality of the conversation because in a pure idea-to-idea conflict they just lose, and usually badly.

      Another potential explanation (assuming arguendo the statement is true), inspired by a contentious part of the replies to this:

      Internet arguments end not with consensus, but when one side gives up and leaves. Perhaps conservatives are just more persistent, except where they can be shouted down or kicked out. (Or have more energy or conscientiousness, if you wanted to phrase this positively).

      I know I typically give up early because it feels pointless. Anecdotally it seems like Internet libertarians are more likely to engage common criticisms like “who will build the roads?” where after the 1000th time an atheist gets “what use is half an eye?” or Pascal’s Wager (this takes about a day) they just eyeroll and block.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Anecdotally it seems like Internet libertarians are more likely to engage common criticisms like “who will build the roads?” where after the 1000th time an atheist gets “what use is half an eye?” or Pascal’s Wager (this takes about a day) they just eyeroll and block.

        They don’t roll quarter circle forward, throw a fireball, and block the jumping counterattack?
        Maybe that’s Shintoists.

      • ECD says:

        Perhaps conservatives are just more persistent, except where they can be shouted down or kicked out. (Or have more energy or conscientiousness, if you wanted to phrase this positively).

        Or, assuming (without accepting) that claims of liberal dominance in most other areas are correct, perhaps we simply have more places to go when they get pissed.

  10. JohnNV says:

    I came across Adam Neely’s “Seven Levels of Jazz Harmony” video the other day and have been thinking about it a lot, especially the higher levels he describes. I’ve been a (casual) jazz musician for 20 years and love jazz, but I can’t get any enjoyment out of level 6 and might be able to appreciate a level 5 chord once per song. I recognize the innovation there, but it’s just not enjoyable to listen to. (And I really have no idea what to think about level 7 – I actually can’t tell whether it’s enjoyable or not). Does anybody actually like the sounds of “liberated dissonance”? Is this a case of the emperor’s new clothes where nobody actually likes listening to this stuff, but they do it to appear sophisticated?

    • acymetric says:

      My impression is that it isn’t exactly enjoyable the way a simple pop melody is enjoyable. It is more enjoyable the way an extremely complex physics problem is enjoyable…which is to say enjoyable for people capable of complex physics but not much good for anyone else. If you understand what people are doing with that music and the concepts behind it, I can see listening to it being interesting and enjoyable (in more of an intellectual sense than aesthetic).

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      Yes, I aesthetically appreciate dissonance (including stuff like Nancarrow which is more out there than anything in that video, since all the examples there still have the very consonant melody). It’s just a taste, like modern art (or at least, I assume it is, I can’t aesthetically appreciate that).

    • Viliam says:

      Is this a case of the emperor’s new clothes where nobody actually likes listening to this stuff, but they do it to appear sophisticated?

      What if it’s something in between? Like, someone proposes a constraint that mostly results in horrible stuff, and then people try to find a solution that satisfies the constraint but is less horrible than the competing solutions.

      That requires some real skill — an average solution that satisfies the constraint would simply be horrible, — and at the same time, the constraint is intentionally chosen for making things worse, not better, because that makes a better competition. No one actually enjoys having the constraint; but after listening to the competing solutions, hearing the best solution for given constraint is almost enjoyable. But you can appreciate that only if you understand the rules of the game, and especially if you tried to design your own solution.

    • Well... says:

      I haven’t watched the video yet, but for now I’ll say I have a general heuristic about music that seems to work well: the music I like best usually contains big contrasts. Very complex, dissonant chords/harmonies might be great when interspersed with cleaner simpler sounds. Not sure I’d want to listen to 15 or even 3 minutes of sheer dissonance. (Though that reminds me of the ending of this story.)

    • Dino says:

      It’s not just jazz – similar thing in “classical” music with 12-tone & atonal music. I’ve also wondered if people pretend to like this alleged music in order to appear sophisticated. Matters of taste I can understand – I don’t like rap or grand opera but I can understand how someone else might. But I have a hard time imagining how anyone could like something that’s trying to sound ugly.

      • Lambert says:

        Free jazz and 20th c classical were somewhat aware of each other.
        IITC, Don Cherry and Arvo Paert did some collaborative work.

      • Well... says:

        I’ve also wondered if people pretend to like this alleged music in order to appear sophisticated.

        I’ve wondered that before, but friends (and a few Youtuber types such as Rick Beato) have convinced me that Gossage Vardebedian’s thesis above is probably most often what’s happening: people are introduced to it gradually (usually from an initial semi-accessible piece that gets them interested/opens their eyes to it, or someone like Beato walking them through it) and then acquiring a taste for it.

        There was a time when I hated all rap music. Then a friend in high school showed me Blackalicious. Now I like really hood trap music and consider Blackalicious far too woke/tame for my tastes, though I still appreciate them. So, Blackalicious was the key that opened the door. I suspect Bartok’s music from The Shining or Ligeti’s music from 2001 were the keys that opened the door for many people to dissonant classical music.

      • Corey says:

        On the Youtube channel “12tone”, the host explicitly says he enjoys doing 12-tone composition because of the challenge involved in trying to make something sort-of listenable given the severe constraints imposed by the format.

        (Only a couple videos are about 12-tone composition, it’s general music theory, and entertaining)

        • Lambert says:

          IIRC, Ben Levin once made a pretty listenable serialist piece.
          It’s a matter of bridging everything with the correct harmonies.

    • phi says:

      I also saw that video, and if I recall correctly, my opinion was similar to yours: I liked levels 1,2 the best, 3 still sounded fairly decent, and I would probably only enjoy 4,5 as small pieces of a larger song. That said, I definitely found level 7 enjoyable. Level 7 trades off having less simultaneous dissonance with having more dissonance in the transitions between chords. So maybe I care less about harmonious transitions?

    • Soy Lecithin says:

      To me, the innovation in level 7 “reads” as a timbre, not harmony. (It seems like it’s taking the story of frequency ratios too literally.) It sounds like Neely might feel the same way given his description of it as “cassette tape-y” and lo-fi.

  11. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Most people know that the Nazi Party wasn’t purely democratic, as it used street violence as part of its electoral strategy.
    Historically literate people know that there was already a Red Front using political violence in Germany.
    But how often do you hear that the Weimar Republic was so full of atomized veterans looking to belong that even the most moderate Parties had a paramilitary wing?

    • Nornagest says:

      I’ve said this before, but you know your politics is fucked when your moderates have a paramilitary wing.

      (I was talking about the Iron Front, though — which means there were two of them.)

    • broblawsky says:

      I suspect this is a symptom of pre-WWII Germany’s fanatical militarism. As a military-first state, maybe creating a paramilitary wing was something every German political party needed to do in order to achieve public credibility. The Bismarck-era German Empire had political parties; did they have paramilitary wings?

      • albatross11 says:

        Once it’s a standard part of politics for your political rallies to be broken up by the other side’s thugs, there’s a pretty strong incentive for every political party to get their own gang of thugs together.

      • AlesZiegler says:

        The Bismarck-era German Empire had political parties; did they have paramilitary wings?

        Not as far as I know. Armed political parties in Germany were a result of postwar anarchy, which also featured famous hyperinflation.

        German militarism pre WWI is imho somewhat exaggerated. European countries of that era were extremely militaristic by modern standards, and Germany wasn’t that exceptional.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Seconding “Germany was a typical European state until they lost.”
          The Emperor had more power than his Grandma Victoria in the UK, the Gold Standard for “constitutional monarchy”, but politics were as civil as the UK, France, etc. and there was less imperialism – which famously caused bruised egos.
          Post-1918, the huge number of veterans dealt with PTSD and atomization by seeking political comraderie, which took on at least a Boy Scout level of paramilitarism, which led to full-blooded paramilitary action because you had to defend your buddies from violence by the Red Front/Steel Helmets/Nazis/Iron Front/Reichsbanner… in the countries that won, you could stay in the Army if you felt like it (Germany had a treaty obligation to have fewer than 100,000 men in the military) or go home to your family of winners and try to recover through Art Therapy or something (looking at you, Hemingway).

          • cassander says:

            The way I like to describe it is that in 1913, the UK was one of the most republican (in the sense of republican vs. monarchist) countries in europe. By 1945 they were one of the least, despite their constitutional arrangements changing less than any other country in europe.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @cassander

            Is that true? 1945 had a huge increase in Communist countries, which would shoot them ahead of a bunch of places that were far more nominally republican prior to the war (e.g. Romania).

            I don’t know the strict numbers, but my understanding was that 1918 created a huge number of new republics, many of which subsequently collapsed into totalitarianism.

          • cassander says:

            @EchoChaos

            I was counting the communist states as extremely republican on this scale.

        • bean says:

          European countries of that era were extremely militaristic by modern standards, and Germany wasn’t that exceptional.

          Disagree. Germany was a country born in war a generation prior. Every other great power could be found in recognizable form on a map in 1714. Germany was the result of Prussia, famously “an army with a country attached” taking over the other German states in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. This kind of showed in their approach to international diplomacy, which ultimately set them against the rest of Europe and drove Europe to war.

          On a slightly different tack, nowhere else would the King have been allowed to build the world’s second-biggest navy just because he wanted some toys to play with. The US, an economic power of comparable size and with a lot more need for a Navy, couldn’t manage to match Germany on that front. And this is with an Army that was probably the best in Europe.

          • AlesZiegler says:

            I do not disagree with you on historical facts. This is a question of degree of militarism and of what is popular perception. Certainly Germany was among most militaristic countries of that time. But also its military exceptionalism was exaggerated by both Nazi and Allied propaganda, which imho still influences conventional wisdom, especially in English speaking countries.

            For example WWI was started by Austria-Hungary, albeit with heavy German encouragement, and yet my understanding is that Habsburg monarchy is remembered in English speaking word as a bening country of Viennese waltz and liberal government torn apart by nationalists. Actually it was quite conservative and militaristic society, although the quality of its military in 1914 was of course inferior to German and even Serbian army.

          • bean says:

            My take is that the decision for war was made in Berlin, not Vienna. Austria-Hungary had every right to be furious with Serbia, and they would have been able to take a lot of different actions without sparking a wider war. The problem is that Germany gave them a blank check to do anything they wanted, which gave them the confidence to make demands of Serbia that Serbia couldn’t possibly meet. Yes, there were those in Vienna who wanted war for reasons very similar to Berlin (unifying the country behind the current, conservative government) but they wouldn’t have done anything without Germany’s backing.

          • DarkTigger says:

            On a slightly different tack, nowhere else would the King have been allowed to build the world’s second-biggest navy just because he wanted some toys to play with.

            The fact that the UK threatned to blockade Germany, should they support the Boers might have had to do something with it as well.

      • Protagoras says:

        The general attitudes contributed, but I don’t think anyone did it for credibility. Rather, the weak government was unable to keep the communists from making trouble, the judiciary was soft on the far right (perhaps in some cases because they thought someone should counter-balance the communists), encouraging the far right to grow and become more violent, and as albatross11 says those in between ended up feeling they had to defend themselves.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          I endorse this, subject to updating with more knowledge of the period.
          The Constitution was liberal, the near-left was seen as too weak to deal with the Communists (which could well have been more structural than political sympathy),[1] and this was checked by a bias in the judiciary. Once there was both, er, Fa and Antifa? made up of Army veterans, men in moderate Parties, who were probably longing for esprit de corps over atomization anyway, had to step up for defense or there wouldn’t be moderate Party campaigning.

          [1]Hindenberg was an I-wouldn’t-even-be-a-Republican-but-for-my-oath near-rightist, and I don’t know that his government helped at all here.

    • Well... says:

      In 75 years, will historians consider Antifa a paramilitary wing of the Democrats, and the Proud Boys (or whatever is a better right-wing analog for Antifa) the paramilitary wing of the Republicans? (I strongly suspect the answer is “Obviously not” but I ask the question to suggest a line of inquiry and I’m not sure of a better way to phrase it.)

      • JonathanD says:

        Unless things change markedly for the worse, only specialists will even know about them. Among said specialists, the answer will be obviously not, except for a handful trying to make a name for themselves with controversial theories.

      • Lambert says:

        They’re both just mobs.
        A paramilitary needs a proper command heirarchy. Otherwise you’re a rabble with delusions of grandeur.

        • albatross11 says:

          More to the point: if you have clashing gangs of thugs, the one with better organization and discipline is probably going to win, even if it’s numerically inferior. There’s a Darwinian process that’s going to select for paramilitary organization. And of course, if your gangs of thugs are mostly ex-soldiers, it’s not going to be hard for them to work out how to put together a workable hierarchy for organized violence.

        • Well... says:

          Does “moderate party kinda looks the other way or at least doesn’t condemn their side’s thugs” start to sorta look like an embryonic command hierarchy?

          • Lambert says:

            I’m not talking about the relationship between party and mob.
            I’m talking about the (lack of) internal chain of command within the mob.

            The IRA, for example, was organised into brigades and batallions. It had quartermasters and a GHQ.
            Superiors gave orders and subordinates carried them out.

            Untill everyone in the Proud Boys and Antifa knows who their commanding officer is, they’re not really a paramilitary.

      • Plumber says:

        @Well… says:

        In 75 years, will historians consider…”

        Sweet Lord that’s a terrifying thought!

        In terms of U.S. paramilitary groups, radical organizations in the 1930’s acted in support of labor strikes and as strikebreakers and contemporary accounts often spoke of their “military precision”, especially regarding the Minneapolis and San Francisco general strikes, I’ve read of one U.S. Marine general who watched through binoculars stevedores and allied strikers defend a hill against San Francisco Police that so impressed him he later asked Harry Bridges “Where did your men get their military training?”, but for large scale partisan violence the 19th century pre-Civil War “Bloody Kansas” period is probably the closest U.S. equivalent to inter-war Germany in U.S. history.

    • Lurker says:

      [who knew]that even the most moderate Parties had a paramilitary wing?

      well, I went through the German school system and I never paid much attention in history so I’d say anybody who went through the school system here would know that fact and very few would know much beyond that.
      I’m one of those who don’t know much beyond that, so this is an interesting discussion. Thanks for bringing it up!
      (If I just answered a rhetorical question, then sorry)

  12. Dino says:

    I’m new here, and still adjusting to the lingo – nobody I know talks about outgroups or priors, but I think I figured out that OP means Original Poster – yes? There seems to be an underlying idea that rationality is better than instinct or emotion for guiding one’s actions – something I agree with. Does anyone go further and claim it is not just better, but best of all? I ask because my mental model is: 1 instinct, 2 emotion, 3 rationality, 4 creativity/artistic. I put creativity above rationality in my hierarchy because I’m a musician – I don’t have a rational reason handy. I suppose I could come up with one if I worked at it. (A rationalization?) Maybe someone else has a good one. But I’m curious to see a contrary viewpoint.

    • Two McMillion says:

      Hi Dino,

      This is an area which is occasionally disputed, but a relevant and generally accepted saying on the topic is, “Rationalists should Win”. Here is an essay about that:

      https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARtkT3EYox3THYjF/rationality-is-systematized-winning

      If creativity produces better outcomes, then the “rational” thing to do is use creativity. But you should also be prepared to change systems when something else starts to work better.

    • Randy M says:

      rationality is better than instinct or emotion for guiding one’s actions

      I think that verges into “straw vulcan” territory. You don’t want to be eliminating or constantly denying your emotions. Your instincts may tell you something that you are consciously over looking. Ideally you want them all to inform each other.

      Say I have a desire for chocolate ice cream. I think about why I might have this desire, what could happen if I satisfied it fully, and decide that it is the result of urges not well adapted to modern life. But I do still have it, so I will buy a small container on occasion, and fully embrace the sensual pleasure of it when I consume it. Substitute in a more weighty example.

      4 creativity/artistic.

      I’m not quite sure what this means in terms of informing actions. It seems more like a style or a toolset than a mode of deciding. Can you give an example?

      • Dino says:

        1 I love music and I’m good at coding – should I go for a career in software or be a starving musician?
        2 I have a block of free time – should I post on SSC or practice for the gig Saturday?

        Maybe my wording “better … guiding one’s actions” is sub-optimal. Having a hierarchy implies “better than” or “superior to”, but better for what? “Superior” is pretty vague. Maybe what I mean is “has higher value”.

        Thanks for the straw vulcan reference. Learned something new today.

        • 1 I love music and I’m good at coding – should I go for a career in software or be a starving musician?

          Thinking that rationality is the best way of making decisions does not answer that question. The rational thing to do is to look at the tradeoffs in terms of their value to you. If you are a musician, how likely are you to be able to make a living at it–unlikely, I think, unless you are very talented. If not very talented, would you rather put your passion and energy into music while working some boring job to pay for food and housing or put your passion and energy mostly into a coding job, which will pay much better, and do the music on the side?

          So the answer depends on how good you are at either alternative and how much you enjoy either. If coding is almost as much fun as music, you should be a coder unless you are a super talented musician. If coding is boring and unsatisfactory and music wonderful, you should probably be a musician, and expect to be poor and working relatively low level jobs.

          My wife loves music, is not super talented, and chose to be a geologist–and play music for renaissance dance (in the context of the SCA, a historical recreation group). One of her best friends loves music, is very talented, and when we knew her—she and her husband rented our third floor in Chicago—was making some money by performing but mostly, so far as I could tell, by working not very demanding sorts of jobs.

          I expect each of them was making the rational decision.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          Though I have nowhere near enough information to guess at the final answer for your case, one of the things you should be sure to take into account is the great satisfaction that comes from knowing you’re really good at whatever you’re doing.

          • Dino says:

            Sorry for the confusion – I’m new at this. I was hoping to spark a discussion of the merits of rationality vs creativity. The 2 numbered items were answering Randy M’s request for examples, and not actual questions that I had.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Oh, we’ve gone full circle here and came to “tradition is best”. Happened last month, I think.

      Joke aside (but seriously. that actually happened), rationality has pitfalls. Some we’ll probably learn to avoid, of course, and we’ll just call it “better rationality”. It mostly has to do with applying it to the right problem, and also with overconfidence. But in some ways it can never beat tradition, because tradition has the advantage of evolution-selection cycles of thousands of years.

      So we’re embracing wider principles, like Chesterton’s fence, that avoid having to use reason to solve every problem. Again, you can just call this proper Rationality – which is why Yudkowsky actually advised against overusing the term. After a while “rational” just becomes a synonym for “right”.

      • albatross11 says:

        I’m not exactly a rationalist, but I’m interested in thinking clearly, and I think that requires understanding the likely failure modes of human thinking, and understanding both logic and its Bayesian probability theory extension at least in passing.

        In some sense, I’m trying to learn to simulate something smarter and more rational than I am. I’ll never be able to do a perfect simulation, but I can at least try to trap exceptions where I’m about to make some error that a smarter more rational version of me wouldn’t make, and then try to run an exception handler labeled “steelmanning” or “shut up and multiply” or “Chesterton’s fence” or something.

      • Dino says:

        Oh, we’ve gone full circle here and came to “tradition is best”. Happened last month, I think.

        Guess I’m too new to get this reference. I do not agree that “tradition is best” – I’m more of radical.

  13. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Continued from 136. Discussing the “Planet of Hats” trope, bullseye said:

    We see some more Toydarians in the Clone Wars, and none of them have Watto’s personality. I think the more recent material (including Clone Wars) is better thought out and doesn’t run into the issue [LMC] was talking about as often.

    George Lucas personally involved himself in the Clone Wars cartoon, and he wasn’t guilty of this.
    IIRC, Twi’leks had been established as a whole planet of slave girls whose males sell them (because Jabba had one as a slave girl and a free male worked for him) by the time he got around to the prequels, which had a female Twi’lek Jedi.
    So you get stuff like Toydarians who aren’t Watto clones, and when they visit Mandalore a pacifist class controls the government, the only Boba Fett lookalikes being conservative terrorists from a lower class.

    • Aftagley says:

      Were the other Toydarian’s immune to Jedi trickery?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        IIRC we never see another Jedi or Sith try it despite their cartoon appearances being all about Force-using agents trying to force them to pick a side, but they don’t explicitly say “I won’t try diplomacy by mind control, because Toydarian racial power!”

        when war came to the nearby planet Ryloth (home of the Twi’lek people) King Katuunko was asked by Senator Bail Organa and Representative Binks to help provide relief to the suffering Twi’leks. … Later during the war, around 21 BBY, Katuunko was sought out by Count Dooku, who wanted to force the Toydarian monarch to join the Separatist Alliance through the use of his new apprentice, Savage Opress.

        (Star Wars names, man…)

  14. ECD says:

    I’ve got an upper endoscopy coming up in a couple of weeks. Anyone have any experience with how fast you’re back to 100%? The doc claimed next day I was fine to go back to work, but I’m a paranoid wimp.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      You’re probably fine the same day, and mine was a bad one (ate more/later than I should have). Had a sore throat for a couple of days tho, not sure if it’s standard.

    • JonathanD says:

      For my wife’s, they knocked her all the way out, and she spent the rest of the day at home (with me) per the nurses’ recommendation.

    • hls2003 says:

      Based on my recent experience and understanding, you’ll be given anesthesia (mine was intravenous) and it’s being knocked out that causes them to tell you not to drive or go back to work. I had no sore throat or anything afterward from the endoscopy, but I was very tired that afternoon. But mine was also paired with a colonoscopy, so I was hungry and had, uh, missed some sleep the night before. I was completely fine the next day.

    • albatross11 says:

      I’ve had this done three times, and I was okay the next day in all three cases. You’d be okay to go back to work an hour later, except that they drug you up for the procedure and you’re not quite with-it enough to make good decisions until the drugs wear off. (You definitely wouldn’t want to drive immediately afterward, at least if you get whatever they used on me!).

    • ECD says:

      Thanks folks. That fits with what they said, good indicator that I’m just being overly paranoid about doctors (which is what kept me from going to see them for a decade over this issue…)

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Re: the drug. I had a choice, with the doctor’s advice and the local cultural bias to do it without. I decided to do it without – I had read that a component of it is to suppress formation of memories of the event, and I was curious and wanted to remember it. It was unpleasant, definitely but.. *shrug* lots of things are unpleasant. Wasn’t traumatic or anything.

    • Mark Atwood says:

      I had a full lower done at a 7am a few weeks ago, and that evening flew to another city.

      The doctor blinked a few times when I told her my plans, and then told me it was probably fine, but to call 911 immediately if I started bleeding. Which is what I was also supposed to do if it happened when I was at home, so…

    • eyeballfrog says:

      I actually had one today right about when you made this post. At this point I feel about the same as I do when I miss a few hours of sleep, and I assume that will go away when I wake up in the morning.

    • DinoNerd says:

      Being put under left me kind of useless for the rest of the day, as it generally does. I was fine the next day – well, except for the reason I was having the procedure in the first place. The endoscopy itself didn’t seem to cause any negative effects.

  15. eigenmoon says:

    Continuation of this.

    The problem with virtue signaling is not that it’s signaling, but that it’s very counterproductive if you want to search for truth or the optimal course of action.

    ECD:
    In response to the comments of this thread, I’d actually challenge this. If you want to search for truth, at least the kind of truth of interest to me, what other people consider virtuous, or their society wants them to consider virtuous seems extremely relevant.

    What kind of truth is of interest to you?

    Here’s a fairly small and benign example. Suppose that you have a two year old car and you want to help the environment. The virtue signaling way is to buy an electric car and tweet about it. The rational way is to sit down and calculate; since a huge amount of energy is needed to produce a new car, it would be actually better to continue using the old car.

    • ECD says:

      We may have a difference of opinion over what virtue signalling is then. Because frankly, so long as you tweet out the link to your analysis, I think you’re virtue signalling in either case. I’ll answer your question on truth in a second reply to try to keep the definition issue separate from the truth question.

      • eigenmoon says:

        I agree that tweeting the analysis could be virtue signaling as well. I understand “virtue signaling” the way David Friedman defined it (his reply is below).

        But that works only because my example is small and uncontroversial, so it could fit in a tweet. Here’s a more complicated example discussed here:

        Thunberg’s own awakening to the climate crisis a few years ago caused upheaval in her family. Her mother, the well known opera singer Malena Ernman, has given up her international career because of the climate effects of aviation.

        to which I replied:

        OK, suppose you’re an opera singer and you’d like to reduce CO2 emissions. How on Earth does ending your career contribute to your goal?

        It seems reasonable to assume that the demand for listening to opera is constant. Ideally, every village would have enough great opera singers and nobody would have to fly. The reason singers have to fly is that they’re scarce. By pulling herself out of the workforce, Ernman has increased scarcity, so now somebody else has to fly longer to sing to the audience she abandoned. Overall she has increased CO2 emissions, no?

        There were some excellent replies to that.

        The sin of virtue signaling is ignoring all but the most immediate consequences of an action. In a single person this isn’t really distinguishable from insufficient intelligence, which is probably why Paul Zrimzek refuses to accuse of virtue signaling. But accusing the entire Left of virtue signaling is something entirely different.

        Let’s assume that an average leftist will retweet something feel-good-and-warm-and-fuzzy like “I’ve quit my job for TEH EARTH!!111!” with 2/3 probability and a utilitarian analysis that says you shouldn’t quit your job for teh Earth with the probability 1/3. (I think the real numbers are much more like 0.99 and 0.01). Now assume that all opera singers have to decide today whether to stop flying or not, and they have to tweet about it. Assume that 1/3 of all singers are smart enough to figure out they shouldn’t quit flying.

        Now a group of leftists, let’s call it Tier 1. Each Tier 1 member reads a random tweet by an opera singer and decides to retweet it or not. Among the Tier 1 tweets, we’ll have (2/3)²:(1/3)² ratio of feel-good to rational tweets. Now enters another group, let’s call it Tier 2, and each member reads a random tweet by Tier 1.

        If you’re reading a tweet by Tier 10, what’s your chances of meeting a rational tweet? I calculate it as (1/3)^11/((1/3)^11+(2/3)^11) which is slightly less than 0.05%. That’s negligible.

        Of course this is not limited to leftists. Among the Evangelical Christians, which physical papers would circulate the most – reasonable ones or Young Earth ones? Everywhere where group preference for feel-good stuff (that’s the virtue signaling part) is combined with an echo chamber (that would be social networks), there is an explosion of stupidity for the reasons illustrated in the calculation above.

        And the best way to mitigate it is to come to SSC and talk with people with different views.

        • ECD says:

          Yes, with numbers you have chosen, you can produce calculations which fit your model.

          Let’s pull it back a bit from the mathematical model. I guess I’m not seeing the issue you’re trying to get at. I don’t want to rehash an old thread, but this example seems like a bad one to me. Opera singing is indeed a limited resource, but (1) it’s not a necessary one and (2) it’s not that limited a resource. I mean, there’s only 1 best opera singer, but that’s very different from there aren’t any good opera singers in the area.

          And she didn’t give up her career, she gave up her international career (in the quote given, I haven’t investigated much because I get more than enough child geniuses in fiction I otherwise like, I don’t need them, real or not, in real life as well). She was now singing a lot more often in her home area and, presumably, therefore fewer other opera singers need to travel to that area. This also seems like almost the opposite of what the folks below are complaining about. Giving up an international career seems like an extremely costly signal. It’s one you think is counter productive, but it doesn’t seem obviously so.

          Alternatively, they might be able to get the same effect by streaming a performance, or other use of technology.

          I got distracted by the individual example, but I think it’s still relevant, your model is only a bad thing if the 2/3 are actually irrational. My position on global warming is nonstandard on the left (but so is my position on most environmental issues), but for people who view the emissions from aviation as an issue, trying to minimize it is not irrational. It’s not my focus, but it’s not crazy.

          I was just talking conference approvals, I review a lot of conferences and trainings which really have to be held in person (no, they can’t learn the latest welding techniques by web-conference), but lots of travel would be unnecessary if the trainers/conference hosts would put in the effort to allow real telepresence. It can be virtuous to point out waste and it is virtuous to attempt to avoid harm, especially at cost to yourself.

          • eigenmoon says:

            I got distracted by the individual example, but I think it’s still relevant, your model is only a bad thing if the 2/3 are actually irrational.
            The effect occurs because of exponential pileup of retweeting odds. Let’s play with the numbers:
            The Tier 0 (opera singers) ratio of rational to feel-good tweets is 10:1, the retweet ratio is 1:2 (as before): chance of tier 10 tweet being rational is slightly less than 1%.
            The Tier 0 ratio of rational to feel-good tweets is 100:1, the retweet ratio is 1:2 (as before): chance of tier 10 tweet being rational is slightly less than 9%.
            The Tier 0 ratio of rational to feel-good tweets is 100:1, the retweet ratio is 1:3: chance of tier 10 tweet being rational is slightly less than 0.17%.

            I guess I’m not seeing the issue you’re trying to get at.
            The issue is that a lot of systems would respond to application of force by going in a completely different direction. This happens even to something as simple as a rotating disk. In economics that happens pretty much all the time. The excellent “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen” by Bastiat is pretty much a rationalist sequence on eradicating biases arising from expectations that economy would go in the obvious direction. The unseen here is, for example, opportunity costs. So the charge commonly lobbed at the Left is that the Left tends to completely ignore the unseen, most likely because the echo chamber destroys rationality by the mechanism I’ve described.

            See also the reference to Bastiat on this very page with regard to rent controls.

            See also Gabbard being told that the question “how do you pay for things?” is a conservative message.

            She was now singing a lot more often in her home area and, presumably, therefore fewer other opera singers need to travel to that area.
            If we consider singers to be distinguishable by the market, then she just incentivized her fans to fly over. Let’s consider singers to be indistinguishable. If we consider operas to be indistinguishable, then there’s little reason to fly at all for the same reason Plumber doesn’t do plumbing tours of Europe.

            I think it makes sense to distinguish opera productions then. The reason she had to fly in the first place is that some production was giving shows only in Europe but US audience wanted to see it too. Now by refusing to fly, she made the supply of flying singers more scarce and therefore raised the ticket prices in US a bit, while lowering it in Europe a little bit. This in turn incentivizes some of her colleagues to fly. I don’t know what the net result is but my guess is zero.

            What I think she should have done instead is to refuse all productions except those that start at both sides of the Atlantic at the same time. Whether that’s realistic or not, I don’t know.

            I admit that the example is overcomplicated.

            Alternatively, they might be able to get the same effect by streaming a performance, or other use of technology.
            That would be great. I’d like to see more virtual choirs.

            This also seems like almost the opposite of what the folks below are complaining about.
            As far as I understand it (I’m not albatross so I can’t speak for him), cheap virtual signaling are retweets in my model. Nobody says that opera singers should understand economics as well as Bastiat. She did a sacrifice for what she believes to be a good thing, and deserves respect for that regardless of whether her beliefs are correct. It’s the rationality-suppressing society that is the problem.

            You’ve probably read about Left as religion. Take it from a much older religion that cheap virtue signaling is indeed a problem:

            The price we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organised church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptised, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving… But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.

          • ECD says:

            @eigenmoon

            I’m not following your math, but it still seems dependent on your premise that some of the tweets are “rational” and some are “feel-good” and the ratio is in favor of “feel-good” which I am unconvinced by (I am also unconvinced that Twitter is a good place to seek rationality, generally and that people mostly aren’t using it for that purpose, but that’s a different argument).

            I’m going to leave the opera singer example, because I agree it’s complicated and isn’t helping the discussion, but I think we can play ‘it could cause X effect, or Y effect,’ all day without getting anywhere interesting.

            As far as I understand it (I’m not albatross so I can’t speak for him), cheap virtual signaling are retweets in my model.

            I mean, sure, but I don’t think the retweets actually get the retweeter much of anything. If the problem is people focus too much on stuff that’s not relevant/doesn’t help/whatever, then I agree, but in that case I’m much less concerned about opera singers quitting their jobs than the Kardashians (except on some criminal justice issues, oddly enough).

            Our culture certainly does a lot of, ‘look at the shiny’ without bothering to claim, or argue for its virtue.

          • eigenmoon says:

            I’m not following your math, but it still seems dependent on your premise that some of the tweets are “rational” and some are “feel-good” and the ratio is in favor of “feel-good” which I am unconvinced by
            I could make a continuous axis between rational and feel-good but I’m not going to do that now, let’s explore the math in the binary case. Only the retweet ratio must be in favor of feel-good, the Tier 0 can be pretty much anywhere. So let’s say it’s Facebook and Tier 0 generated 100 rational posts and 1 feel-good post. I will use 1:3 ratio for the reposts but I’ll simplify the repost model to say that rational posts get reposted once (so each tier has 100 rational posts), but feel-good posts are tripled by each tier. At tier 1 we have 100 rational posts and 3 feel-good posts. At tier 10 we have 100 rational posts and 3^10 = 59049 feel-good posts. 100/59049 = 0.0016935…

            I don’t think the retweets actually get the retweeter much of anything.
            The retweets are building the reputation of ingroup loyalty for the retweeter, and at the same time they help to define what that ingroup is and what it considers virtuous. This is hardly nothing, and I think it’s actually very important for the group.

          • ECD says:

            The retweets are building the reputation of ingroup loyalty for the retweeter, and at the same time they help to define what that ingroup is and what it considers virtuous. This is hardly nothing, and I think it’s actually very important for the group.

            Sure, but, phrased like that, I don’t actually think it’s bad. All groups define themselves and their virtues. I’m unconvinced that in the real world what twitter believes is virtuous has much impact (though what they believe is evil can). But even if I did, so what? It still provides exactly the information I said I was looking for, namely what the ingroup considers virtuous and I remain confused as to how anyone else is harmed.

          • eigenmoon says:

            @ECD

            Indeed, it’s not a sin for a group to discover its utility function in such a manner. Sometimes Left and Right fight over what looks to be a genuine difference in values – abortions or “bake the cake”, for example. This occurs more often on the far ends. But on a lot of issues Left and Right want basically the same thing: they want the country to be prosperous, the poor to be fed, the sick to be healed, the young to study, the old to be cared for, the workers to have jobs. If everyone agrees on that, the only thing remaining is to sit down and calculate the optimal path towards this future. At this point, however, the Left usually says that they already know the optimal way to do it, which is that the government must push the economy in the straight and obvious direction towards the goal, and everybody who disagrees must be some kind of demon that wants to inflict as much misery on the poor and the sick as possible.

            However, as I’ve mentioned before, even systems as simple as a rotating disk don’t go in the direction they’re pushed. If your pet can get some decent but affordable healthcare and you can’t, that might be exactly because the government decided to help humans but not pets. We really do need to sit down and calculate. And the reason the Left seems to be unwilling to do so might have a lot to do with the rationality-suppressing effect of the echo chamber that we’ve talked about.

          • ECD says:

            At this point, however, the Left usually says that they already know the optimal way to do it, which is that the government must push the economy in the straight and obvious direction towards the goal, and everybody who disagrees must be some kind of demon that wants to inflict as much misery on the poor and the sick as possible.

            Sure, to the same degree that the Right usually says that they already know the optimal way to do it, which is that the government just needs to get out of the way and people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps/buckle down/get God and anyone who doesn’t understand is a lazy, blasphemous freeloader that is unwilling to do the work needed to advance.

            And now that we’ve traded stereotypes, lets move forward.

            If everyone agrees on that, the only thing remaining is to sit down and calculate the optimal path towards this futur

            But everyone doesn’t agree on that. Everyone wants the things you mention (at least for their ingroup) but absolutely no one agrees about how you prioritize amongst them, or how you accomplish them and that’s been true for a lot longer than Twitter has existed. Not longer than virtue signalling has existed (probably, as I’m guessing both arise pretty instantly with people), but I don’t think the one interferes with the other nearly as much as you suggest.

            Honestly, I think watching EA conversations and reading through the CFC list of charities really drove home to me how very, very different peoples priorities can be, as well as how confused/confusing the preferences of even very smart, very dedicated people can be.

            ETA: Typo correction and a minor point: We can’t even agree on the scope of the problem in many areas. The solution to ‘the poor should be fed’ will vary radically if you’re looking to hit minimum calorie numbers, or if you’re trying to provide some level of nutrition, or what.

          • Plumber says:

            @eigenmoon says: “…on a lot of issues Left and Right want basically the same thing: they want the country to be prosperous, the poor to be fed, the sick to be healed, the young to study, the old to be cared for, the workers to have jobs. If everyone agrees on that, the only thing remaining is to sit down and calculate the optimal path towards this future…

            And how do you tell which way to go?

            A couple of decades ago from a now 100 years old book by Bertrand Russell I came across proposals for something called “Guild Socialism”, which (in what seems to me a particularly British way) ways of the past were combined with hopes for the future and a compromise between state socialism, syndicalism, and parliamentary democracy was thought up, and it shared some features with the “Distributionism” of Catholic social thought, and I was intrigued, so I read books by two leading proponents, one (Cole) became strongly linked with the British Labor Party (okay, so far so good), the other (Penty) later became involved with Mosley’s British Fascists (uh-oh!), and then I read that the two nations that gave some lip service to “Guild Socialist” ideas were Tito’s Yugoslavia, and Mussolini’s Italy (double uh-oh!). 

            I just don’t have much use for “works in theory”, the physics theory behind “dielectric unions” to prevent galvanic corrosion when copper meets steel pipe sounds plausible, but in practice they’re terrible and 6 inches of brass works better. 

            Out of the nations of the world where people are more comfortable and healthier by far most are social democratic/welfare state capitalist representative democracies of the anglosphere, western Europe, and Scandinavia, so odds seem good that model works.

            But they are outliers.

            No standing army Costa Rica does well (and far better than it’s immediate neighbors), Switzerland is supposed to be great, but they often practice local direct democracy (a similar system to some New England town hall meetings), and there’s Singapore where folks are relatively content (and the implications of that system working scares me), plus places like Greece just don’t seem to get Social Democracy done well.

            In the Left leaning press I read how well Massachusetts does compared to Republican controlled Mississippi, I haven’t read as much Right leaning press but from what I have I’ve seen contrasts between Republican controlled Texas and Democratic controlled California are highlighted. 

            The “Left” is correct that Massachusetts does do better than Mississippi, and the “Right” is right that while California has fabulously wealthy billionaire when you factor in housing costs our poverty rate approaches Mississippi’s and while homelessness in the rest of the U.S.A. has been dropping lately the numbers of the “unsheltered” here continues to climb.

            There’s another Republican controlled State however that I’ve no idea why it isn’t highlighted more: Utah. 

            In terms of getting people housednand rising out of poverty it isn’t quite Sweden, but it’s damn near Canada, and I’ll go so far to say that in terms of the it’s church based social welfare system works better by far then most of the rest of the USA, even better than Massachusetts, basically Utah achieves the articulated goals of the Left with Right wing methods. 

            Could Utah be replicated? 

            Unfortunately I doubt it, the majority of its population belong to the same communitarian sect, and I just don’t see that happening elsewhere in the USA.

            On that note let’s talk about peoples and churches: Cuba is ruled by a Marxist regime, Marxist regimes don’t have a good track record, of those that still exist two of them (China and Vietnam) allow so much private industry that I can think we can safely call them only nominally Marxist (indeed I think a one Party totalitarian state that still has significant private ownership “of the means of production” can be called Fascist, and since both aren’t going to war with major world powers who knows how long the may last? People there still want to come here, but both show little sign of becoming liberal democracies which frightens me), of the other two ‘Marxist’ regimes few will dispute that North Korea is a Hellscape, but Cuba?

            It’s certainly not the best place in the world by far, but compared to North Korea, Stalin and Russia, and Mao’s China it just isn’t as much of a man-made Hell with a giant pile of skulls, and I speculate it’s because it still has a population of practicing Catholics and the church acts as a counterbalancing force that keeps it from becoming as bad as other places ruled by that ideology (of course the mere existence of a counterbalance may mean less tyranny to begin with so ???)

            In the U.S.A. it’s been noted that when it comes to various social ills (murder rate, divorce rate, unwed mothers, rate of poverty, et cetera) the areas where most profess religious beliefs tend to do worse than more secular areas (with Utah a notable exception to that rule), but frequent chuch-goers do better than atheists, it’s those who profess belief but go to church less than once a month who tend to suffer social ills, but…

            …chicken or egg, among the religious frequent chuch-goers tend to be wealthier on average than infrequent church goers (I’m guessing that being poorer makes you too depressed to leave the house, afford gas to travel, and/or be ashamed at not putting more in the collection plate), and atheism correlates with having college educations (note: I’ve seen studies indicating that most of the social attidudes college graduates have, they had before they went to college, though I suppose since most grads have parents who are grads maybe the attitudes are originally from attitudes first taught at universities, but I have my doubts) which correlates with more income, so it may all just come down to (captain obvious) having more income makes you better off.

            So which works better, traditionalism or (in @DavidFriedman’s memorable phrase) “dilute democratic socialism”?

            Why take a chance? 

            Choose both.

            Do what may be done to encourage folks getting together (hopefully more than once a month), meet their neighbors/fellow parishioners, get a lesson/sermon encouraging morality, and at the same time have an inclusive (so it includes the socially isolated) social safety net for those in need.

            How statist should society be?

            Well, you don’t want either Somalia, or Stalin’s Soviet Union, but Costa Rica, Singapore (*shudder*), Sweden and Utah all work well, and I strongly suspect that where the balance between the best level of freedom or regulation is different for different peoples, frankly I see no way that California may get more like Utah, but if the Mormons (or the Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, et cetera) try more to convert more, more power to them, I also have my doubts about if Californians have enough trust and obedience to get more like Sweden, but that seems a bit more likely than like Utah, though both would be an improvement to the status quo of tents and shanty towns popping up, as they increasingly are now. 

            The other suggestion of somehow technological advances being enough to alone bring utopia, yeah pull the other one, I don’t believe it, technology has no morality – it may keep food from spoiling, or it can level a city.

          • eigenmoon says:

            @ECD
            I’m not convinced it really is about just different priorities. It would be much simpler to negotiate if that was the only problem. Something like “hey Left, how many migrants do you want? What about you, Right? OK, let’s target the average of those two figures”.

            At this point a link to Conflict vs. Mistake (and the follow-up) seems obligatory. What I’m saying is that virtue signaling converts people into conflict paradigm without good justification for it.

            @Plumber
            Thanks for the long post.

            I just don’t have much use for “works in theory”,
            Indeed, political discussions mostly boil down to which superintelligence to trust with everything: the democracy and/or government, the cultural evolution or the free market. So I’m quite fine with the idea to just look at what works and do it more.

            Switzerland is supposed to be great, but they often practice local direct democracy
            I didn’t get this. I would phrase it like this: Switzerland is great because they practice direct democracy.

            social democratic/welfare state capitalist representative democracies
            I have a standard libertarian reaction to this, which is to note that those countries became prosperous before they became welfare states. But I entirely agree with your prescription: traditionalism (or any other way to foster social cohesion without enforcement) and diluting social democracy. In fact I plan to move from Western to Eastern Europe in search of that.

          • Orwell on Plumber’s religious point.

          • Plumber says:

            @eigenmoon,
            I think I bungled and over caveated myself as I’d be surprised if I didn’t agree with @ECD’s legislative agenda more, but I’m too amused by your take to argue, good luck in the east!

            @DavidFriedman,
            Does Orwell ever not hit it out of the park?

    • ECD says:

      What kind of truth is of interest to you?

      Depends on the arena. In this arena (which term I’m going to stop using cause it shoves my brain into adversarial mode), one big thing is what do other people think is good/right. I do some fiction writing in my free time and some roleplaying and have a real problem with everyone ending up being…me. I supported and support the bans, but honestly Deisach and Conrad were excellent at providing those truths.

      I guess I’d ask, what sort of truths are you interested in that virtue signalling interferes with? And is it the virtue signalling, or being drowned out by people/yelled at by people for failing to show the right flag so to speak?

    • albatross11 says:

      Virtue signaling is probably an inevitable part of being human. I think the best we can hope for is to make sure that the only ways to do virtue signaling effectively actually do involve some virtue, and doing some actual good in the world. Technically signaling should involve paying a price–the peacock signals its robust good health by growing a gigantic colorful tail. We want to have low-cost signals (mouthing the correct slogans–whether that’s being SJW at Berkeley or straightlaced and religiously observant at BYU) and unproductive or harmful signals (signaling compassion for the poor by campaigning to ban cheap (“substandard”) housing and low wage jobs) not yield much benefit. Whereas we’d like signaling that does real benefit (showing your concern for poor blacks by volunteering as an after school math tutor for poor black students) to get you some real social benefit.

    • I don’t think “virtue signalling” is the same thing as “saying what you consider virtuous.”

      Virtue signalling means doing things intended to make other people think you are virtuous, rather than doing things because, being virtuous, you want to do them.

      To take red tribe example, enlisting in the army when there is a war on, not because you like guns but because you want to protect your country, demonstrates patriotism. Flying an American flag in front of your house, in a community where everyone is in favor of the flag, signals patriotism.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        This. Which is the reason I try to avoid accusations of virtue signaling: I believe that nowadays we spend far too much time trying to divine Forbidden Motives behind each other’s actions.

      • albatross11 says:

        My point is that society works best when getting the benefit form some virtue signal requires displaying some actual virtue. As a society, we want to give people very little credit for wearing a flag pin on their lapel and a lot of credit for enlisting in the army during a war, very little credit for loudly mouthing progressive beliefs on race and a lot of credit for teaching in an inner-city mostly black school, etc.

        The worst case is when people engage in a lot of expensive virtue signals that don’t actually do any good, but just impost costs on themselves and others.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      Suppose that you have a two year old car and you want to help the environment. The virtue signaling way is to buy an electric car and tweet about it. The rational way is to sit down and calculate; since a huge amount of energy is needed to produce a new car, it would be actually better to continue using the old car.

      It depends on how much driving you do, and whether someone else could use your current car (e.g. a used car buyer, which is likely for a 2 year old car). Your used car may be better than their current car in terms of emissions (so a net decrease of emissions if they drive enough compared to you), and if you drive enough your decreased emissions may add up fast.

      This is why if I ever get income approaching a million dollars + a year I want to buy hybrid vehicles (whatever gets the best mileage, currently the Hyundai Ioniq blue) for other people under the following criteria:
      1) Their household currently uses a particular 15+ year old car for 20,000+ miles per year.
      2) Their household income is <$60k (lower SES wealth building is an additional value to carbon emissions reduction).
      3) They trade in their car for the Ioniq, and their old car gets junked (some exceptions may apply).
      4) My charity owns the car for 5 years, during which they are contractually required to use the Ioniq as they would have the previous car (this won't be nitpicked), and at the end of which they receive full title to the car (possibly receiving partial ownership each year, cumulating in 100% ownership at the end).
      – This serves three purposes: Hopefully it reduces any taxes they would owe on the "gift" by making it a long-term contractual arrangement, 2) Creditors can't take it from them during those 5 years, and 3) reducing the vetting needed to avoid scammers.
      Note: I'm choosing the hybrid for reasons of cost (I can buy more of them for more people), and ease of use and range (if they're driving 20k+ miles per year a typical commuter plugin probably isn't sufficient).

      How's that plan for virtue signalling? Now all I need is high income 😀

  16. FrankistGeorgist says:

    I spend most of the week working from my upper floor office and am consistently annoyed by my inability to see who’s at the door one story down. Enter the Spionnetje from those masters of rowhouse living the Dutch. I want one on my house in America. I can’t figure out where in a building code such a thing might be banned but I suspect mirrors facing traffic can cause problems. I was also thinking of disguising it against a couple of flag poles I’d like to install on my second story windows which would put it I think in the right place and hopefully shield my europhilic spying device with charming Americana.

    But I’ll also probably replace my front door/lock, and at that point get one of those camera peephole/doorbells. Am I crazy for pursuing the analogue option? It seems so much simpler and less prone to the problems of technology. The bespoke installation isn’t a problem.

    • Well... says:

      It seems so much simpler and less prone to the problems of technology.

      I would have suggested a camera rig but I thought of this too and find it persuasive. Also the cheapness.

  17. eigenmoon says:

    Another continuation of this.

    unlike the free market and cultural evolution, which are both superintelligent processes, governments are pretty stupid. The Left seems to believe that there is something superinteligent about governments as well, but they’ve never explained to me what it is.

    ECD:
    This is another place I’d push back. The government isn’t some thing somehow separate from culture or markets, it’s part of them.

    Maybe, in a sense that a criminal gang is a part of culture (gangster rap, for example) and a part of the market (it sells ill-gotten goods and buys supplies). But that doesn’t necessarily bestow any superintelligence upon the gang – or the government, for that matter.

    • albatross11 says:

      Bureaucracies are a different kind of superintelligent thing made out of people, just like markets.

      • sentientbeings says:

        I’d question superintelligent alone, but superintelligent just like markets is a definite no.

        The superintelligence of markets is in economy of computation. That economy is not remotely comparable to “group intelligence” of a bureaucracy.

        It seems to me that a lot of people who think that market advocates engage in hand-waiving or deification/idealization of markets do not really grasp this point. They see that markets coordinate things, but don’t fundamentally understand how it is that they do it well, and so misunderstand market advocates because they can still parse their sentences, even though the meaning is substantively different than what they perceive it to be.

        • The whole “super intelligence” thing is making the conversation more murky than illuminating. The question is about the usefulness of governments and they clearly are. We’re so used to strong governments being able to support markets that this power is nearly invisible. If you look at premodern societies, strong governments and markets go hand in hand. Ancient Rome for example was really unique in having regular trade in bulk food. They were only able to do this because they had a strong government. (To be clear, I’m certainly not making the argument that more government is always and everywhere a good thing. But it usually does go hand in hand with markets).

          • sentientbeings says:

            I’m not really engaged in the broader discussion that came in from the other thread. I just picked up on that one item because whenever (I think) I see that communication/understanding gap I feel compelled to say something.

            But to your point, “they go hand in hand” is a claim that I think can be well-supported. You’ve asserted more than that, though – that there is a causal link, with the governments supporting the market.

            To that I say, “Maybe.” Or maybe large/strong/[something] governments are more able to exist given a sufficiently healthy market structure. Maybe the state is a parasite that is better able to survive off a healthier host. See the remarkable stability and (by some measures) success of contemporary China versus Great Leap Forward China or various socialist failed states. That’s a modern example but the point could apply as easily to pre-modern societies. Or maybe [insert Zoidberg image macro].

            I think “strong governments and markets” is an under-defined phrase but that the general idea that a powerful government is necessary for a healthy, stable market should be treated with extreme skepticism. The repeated, seemingly inevitable, emergence of certain market institutions under varied conditions – including conditions very much inimical toward markets – constitutes good evidence for my belief, I think.

          • No, the causality is clear. When the Roman Empire state was strong, they cleared out the pirates, and Italy imported grain from Egypt and Africa(Tunisia). When it fell in Western Europe, those grain shipments stopped. If you try to build those kinds of advanced markets without a state, you get attacked by bandits. That is by far the biggest impediment throughout history.

            The repeated, seemingly inevitable, emergence of certain market institutions under varied conditions – including conditions very much inimical toward markets –

            The problem of your conceptualization is that you think of “inimical conditions” in the sense of high taxes and regulations. But to the pre-moderns, the biggest problem was getting murdered on the way to your destination.

          • cassander says:

            @wrong species

            the roman transfers of grain had almost nothing to do with markets. they were a command economy operation undertaken for political reasons, and the economy generally got more command-y with time.

            The first place you had a genuinely capitalist movement of basic needs was the netherlands in the late 1500s, when they built the largest fleet in the world to move grain and fish from the baltic to netherlands and beyond. It came before their period of military ascendancy, not after, and the government had precious little to do with it.

          • sentientbeings says:

            @Wrong Species

            The problem of your conceptualization is that you think of “inimical conditions” in the sense of high taxes and regulations. But to the pre-moderns, the biggest problem was getting murdered on the way to your destination.

            You’ve assumed too much. I mainly had two examples in mind when I wrote my comment. The first is the development of monies in prisons. I particularly like the examples of monies in POW camps during WWII.

          • @cassander

            You have a source on that? Yes, the free dole was obviously a government operation but my understanding is that the actual trading of grain from Africa to Italy came through merchants.

            @sentientbeings

            Mea culpa. Still I’m not sure those are strong counter-examples to my claim. They both take place under the existence of strong institutions explicitly part of the government.

          • sentientbeings says:

            @Wrong Species

            They both take place under the development of strong institutions explicitly part of the government.

            Yes, strong, but strongly positioned against. Generally speaking, prison economies, especially in prisoner of war camps involving the procurement of contraband, are not viewed favorably – in an official sense – by the jailers. As to the arguably “favorable” views of, say, some guards who are subverted by the enterprise of prisoners, well…I think it illustrates a rather inspiring idea: that peaceful exchange can undermine coercive power.

          • cassander says:

            @Wrong Species says:

            You have a source on that? Yes, the free dole was obviously a government operation but my understanding is that the actual trading of grain from Africa to Italy came through merchants.

            the emperor would effectively hire people to go get grain and bring it to the capital where he would dole it out to mass acclaim.* There were a lot of middle men involved, the principate didn’t have a whole lot of bureaucracy, but it was still a command arrangement, not one that arose out of market interactions. There was some of that, of course, but it was more for luxury goods than staples. It was frightfully difficult to transport of grain over land any serious distance, so most of what was grown was consumed locally.

            *It was much more complicated than a simple transaction, there was an awful lot of dressing up the process, but at the end of the day, that’s what they were doing.

          • Aapje says:

            @cassander

            The first place you had a genuinely capitalist movement of basic needs was the netherlands in the late 1500s, when they built the largest fleet in the world to move grain and fish from the baltic to netherlands and beyond. It came before their period of military ascendancy, not after, and the government had precious little to do with it.

            The shipping of grain and such from the Baltic region to The Netherlands began in the early 1400’s, resulting in a lot of conflict with the Hanseatic League. This conflict was primarily with a subset of that league, the Wend cities (the most powerful of which was Lübeck).

            There were four Dutch-Hanseatic wars between 1438 and 1544. A key factor in these wars was the right to travel the Øresund, the strait between Denmark and Sweden, and how much toll had to be paid.

            The Duke of Burgundy and the regional government played some role in the first wars, although it was more of a locally directed effort where the Duke tried to steer things a bit, rather than a very centralized governmental affair.

            The Habsburgs took over in 1482 and they wanted to create a stronger central Dutch government, unifying privileges, law, etc. This allowed for better control, which in turn allowed the Habsburgs to extract more wealth to fund their wars.

            These changes resulted in unrest, which, together with religious prosecution, led to the war of independence.

            Anyway, I’m not sure this neatly fits a narrative where government is either necessary or not. The trade cities had powerful governments, which was necessary to fight off pirates and fight off challenges by rival trade cities. When more military force was required than a single city could muster, cities would seek out alliances, which were fairly ad hoc and often focused on preventing domination by one side.

            An example of this is that the Danish King supported an attack by the Wends to retake two cities at the tight part of the Øresund, whose fortresses allowed control over the Øresund, but that he warned the outnumbered Dutch defenders so they could withdraw. He didn’t want the Wends to win a decisive victory.

            PS. Danish records from 1497 show that over half the trade ships visiting Danish harbors were Dutch.

          • It was frightfully difficult to transport of grain over land any serious distance, so most of what was grown was consumed locally.

            That’s why it was transported by the Mediterranean and it’s what made the Romans unique in the ancient world.

            Yes, the grain shipments wouldn’t have happened without the strong Roman state(that was my original point). And yes, they were well known for the grain dole. But I’m pretty sure that grain was transported through merchants and it was shipped to Italy. Once it got there, then the Roman state would purchase it and distribute it the inhabitants of Rome. Calling this a “command state operation” just sounds way too strong but if you have sources that say otherwise, I would love to read them.

        • albatross11 says:

          Ugh. Okay, let me try for more precision, because I don’t think you got what I was trying to say.

          There are jobs which you simply can’t get done by putting them under a single person’s control–no human can manage them. (For example, applying a set of rules and procedures in a more-or-less uniform way across millions of instances per year.)

          But you can get those done with a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is superhuman in the sense that it can do some things no human can do, regardless of how smart or motivated or pure of heart she is. In this way, it’s like a market–because there are coordination problems that no czar or manager can solve, no matter how smart or well-intentioned he is, that a market can solve.

          I’m not saying a bureaucracy is the same thing as a market, or can solve the same problems efficiently. But there are problems we don’t know how to solve in any other way than a bureaucracy, which is why every government and university and large company and large church ends up having some kind of bureaucracy to run big parts of its operation.

          • eigenmoon says:

            What actually makes bureaucracies at least tolerably intelligent is the evolution through competition between companies, between universities and between churches.

            The Catholic church underwent an adjustment to competition – the Counter-Reformation – in which it has improved considerably.

            But the governments are competing too weakly. They’re still at pre-Reformation Catholic church level.

    • ECD says:

      Maybe, in a sense that a criminal gang is a part of culture (gangster rap, for example) and a part of the market (it sells ill-gotten goods and buys supplies). But that doesn’t necessarily bestow any superintelligence upon the gang – or the government, for that matter.

      I think this is intended as a cutting analogy, but I’m actually fine with it. Yes, gangs, not just rap, are part of culture. They evolve for a reason and serve a function, which is one reason they’ve survived so long. I’m not in favor of them, unlike governments, but that doesn’t mean that their ‘removal’ to the extent it were possible doesn’t involve Chesterton’s fence issues, or cultural evolution issues. I’m not an expert, but Duterte’s rule in the Philippines might be an example of the consequences of going too far to try to remove, while some of the US’s southern neighbors might be examples of the consequences of not going far enough.

      I’m happy to discuss differences between governments and gangs, but that’s different question, I think.

      • eigenmoon says:

        Indeed, gangs can gain some superintelligence if they evolve. But modern governments are too young, evolve too slowly and compete too weakly for this effect to be significant.

        I think the best example of government-level evolutionary insight is this: socialism doesn’t work. And yet the Left – the side that tends to treat the government as superintelligent – likes that insight the least.

        Here’s a low blow, I know, but look at Brexit. Do you have the feeling that it’s being handled superintelligently?

        • ECD says:

          @eigenmoon

          Here’s a low blow, I know, but look at Brexit. Do you have the feeling that it’s being handled superintelligently?

          Not particularly, but I don’t think the markets handled tabacco superintelligently either. What’s happening is essentially the dismantling of a government. That’s one thing (like I would expect a market to be bad at dismantling a market) I would expect a government to be notably bad at, unless it was willing/able to use force of arms.

          But, again, I’m not sure we’re using superintelligent the same way here.

          But modern governments are too young, evolve too slowly and compete too weakly for this effect to be significant.

          That’s interesting, because modern governments are a lot older than any gang I’m aware of, but they’re too young, while gangs aren’t?

          I think this is especially interesting regarding the slow speed of government evolution, because on one level it’s obviously true, elections are held at regular (slow) intervals, judges appointed at quasi-random intervals, and some changes are incredibly slow in coming, if at all (see the length of time since the last constitutional amendment).

          Then there’s other stuff. The last congress (2 years long) passed 443 bills and 758 resolutions. (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics), which doesn’t even touch on regulatory changes and internal government stuff. There’s lots of changes which appear invisible externally and look massive internally (and the reverse to be sure, beginning with most new political appointments).

          It’s not pure evolution, but there’s lots of trying stuff out, if relatively little and more ‘that didn’t work, let’s not bother to fund it next year’ than you might think (though rarely does anyone bother to go back and cancel the authority).

          I think the best example of government-level evolutionary insight is this: socialism doesn’t work. And yet the Left – the side that tends to treat the government as superintelligent – likes that insight the least.

          Meh, I’m happy to grant you that communism (ETA: to avoid any appearance of trying to take advantage of deliberate ambiguity, my word choice here is quite deliberate, I don’t know enough about the distinctions between socialism and communism to have a final opinion on socialism) doesn’t work.

          I think the best example of government-level evolutionary insight is this: republics/democracies actually can work, even over the long term and have a number of advantages.

          • eigenmoon says:

            but I don’t think the markets handled tabacco superintelligently either.
            That’s not how I see it. Intelligence is about the efficiency of optimization, not about the choice of a utility function. If people like smoking more than they like living, well then, the market is there to help them smoke themselves to death in the cheapest, most efficient way possible.

            modern governments are a lot older than any gang I’m aware of, but they’re too young, while gangs aren’t?
            I meant that the species of democratic governments is relatively young compared to the species of gangs.

            there’s lots of trying stuff out, if relatively little and more ‘that didn’t work, let’s not bother to fund it next year’ than you might think (though rarely does anyone bother to go back and cancel the authority).
            Sometimes things don’t work in a very visible way. But much more often, an assessment is needed, and here’s the problem. Consider this paper:

            “The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules” is a classic review paper by American sociologist Peter Rossi, a dedicated progressive and the nation’s leading expert on social program evaluation from the 1960s through the 1980s; it discusses the difficulties of creating a useful social program, and proposed some aphoristic summary rules, including most famously:
            – The Iron law: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero”
            – the Stainless Steel law: “the better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.”

            If a government can either pay for a well-designed assessment that will on average find zero impact and make the government look like fools, or for a poorly designed assessment that will probably find some positive impact, what would the government choose?

            I think the best example of government-level evolutionary insight is this:
            OK, I’m happy enough with communism not working and republics/democracies working.

          • ECD says:

            That’s not how I see it. Intelligence is about the efficiency of optimization, not about the choice of a utility function. If people like smoking more than they like living, well then, the market is there to help them smoke themselves to death in the cheapest, most efficient way possible.

            I mean, the tobacco market did a great job of selling tobacco, certainly. The medical market did a rather less good job of keeping people healthy. Both are regulated, before we get into that argument.

            If a government can either pay for a well-designed assessment that will on average find zero impact and make the government look like fools, or for a poorly designed assessment that will probably find some positive impact, what would the government choose?

            From the inside, we’d rather have a well-designed assessment. Unfortunately, the most common thing is that we aren’t provided with any funding at all to do an assessment after the fact. What’s funded is the action and then you’re done, move on to the next project. That’s a failure of government (though not solely a failure of government, I bet if you think about ongoing work in the private sector you can think of one or two with similar failure modes). CYA is not limited to the government.

            In fact, to some extent, the protections in place against casual termination make us a little less vulnerable to it. Heightened oversight and public interest make us more vulnerable to it, on the flip side.

            The key point to remember is that “the government” isn’t all on one side. The party which didn’t propose/fund/support a particular action actually would be very interested in proving it was ineffective/wasteful. The problem is that this is expensive and the public doesn’t care that much about whether the study is well-designed, or whether there was a study. You can get essentially the same result (in the short term, without getting into the question of the harm this may do to the body politic as a whole) by simply saying it’s wasteful and any report otherwise is lying as by doing any sort of analysis.

          • eigenmoon says:

            The medical market did a rather less good job of keeping people healthy.
            My insurance company periodically sends me a health magazine because it’s incentivized to do so. I’m incentivized to read it because unlike doctors who want me to come back the insurance company wants me to be healthy. I count that as a win for the market. Of course if I decided to start smoking even though I know it’s unhealthy, there’s nothing the market could do to stop me, which is (according to me) a good thing.

            I bet if you think about ongoing work in the private sector you can think of one or two with similar failure modes
            Of course. There’s nothing magical about the private sector that makes every single private company smart. The magic dust is in the evolution: the smarter ones will survive better.

            Unfortunately, the most common thing is that we aren’t provided with any funding at all to do an assessment after the fact.
            This is exactly why I don’t consider government to be superintelligent. You personally might get some experience as to what works and what doesn’t. But the government as a whole won’t get smarter because you will retire at some point and I doubt the government will pay you to write even a single article summarizing your acquired wisdom. Thus governments keep falling into the same pitfalls over and over again. I’ve seen somewhere an amusing list of cases where a government wanted to control pests by offering bounties for (some part of) dead pests, and the people always respond with farming instead of hunting, and then the government is very surprised.

            You can get essentially the same result […] by simply saying it’s wasteful and any report otherwise is lying as by doing any sort of analysis.
            Exactly. When somebody in a certain party proposed Universal Jobs Guarantee, I haven’t seen a single response from the other party that went “Hey, it’s been tried by France in 1848 and failed miserably!”. Maybe it was there, I just didn’t see it. But my point is that government as a whole does not accumulate knowledge.

          • ECD says:

            My insurance company periodically sends me a health magazine because it’s incentivized to do so. I’m incentivized to read it because unlike doctors who want me to come back the insurance company wants me to be healthy. I count that as a win for the market. Of course if I decided to start smoking even though I know it’s unhealthy, there’s nothing the market could do to stop me, which is (according to me) a good thing.

            Sure, but it was surely in your insurance company’s interest to reveal that link a little earlier, yes?

            This is exactly why I don’t consider government to be superintelligent. You personally might get some experience as to what works and what doesn’t. But the government as a whole won’t get smarter because you will retire at some point and I doubt the government will pay you to write even a single article summarizing your acquired wisdom. Thus governments keep falling into the same pitfalls over and over again.

            I mean, yes, if the government were run by idiots. But we do actually try to capture learning, in SOPs and AARs and training we give each other and external training. When I retire (barring a disaster) we’ll usually try to have a month or two overlap between me and my replacement, so I can teach them how I do my job. When I started, I worked closely with a guy who’d done my job for a number of years before shifting over.

            I’ve seen somewhere an amusing list of cases where a government wanted to control pests by offering bounties for (some part of) dead pests, and the people always respond with farming instead of hunting, and then the government is very surprised.

            Well, except for all the cases where it ended in species extinction, or near extinction I guess…

            ETA: additional link

          • eigenmoon says:

            Sure, but it was surely in your insurance company’s interest to reveal that link a little earlier, yes?
            Yes, I believe that if something this big was discovered today – for example, that vaping is very bad – that I would first hear about it from Scott, then from my insurance company. In the 50s and 60s when it became known that tobacco is very bad, US was deep into Cold War shit and made propaganda about everything (including how to date) so it makes sense that the government jumped onto the question of what should the citizens smoke.

            I mean, yes, if the government were run by idiots.
            OK, I definitely was wrong saying that no training whatsoever is done because I have some inside view from relatives (admittedly under a government run by idiots). Here’s how it goes. The ministry of education sends down some directive that has no relationship to reality whatsoever. The teachers have to go to some sort of conference to present their individual approach to implementing the directive. The vast majority of teachers have no idea how to deal with that, so usually the most bureaucracy-literate teacher in a school writes everybody’s talks in exchange for favors. So everyone has to endure hours of excruciatingly boring talks that are very similar to each other. It goes something like this: “Ensuring that each child can pursue an individual educational trajectory transforms the learning experience by centering it on the child, by making the children subjects rather than objects of educational process”, and so on for many hours, and everybody in the room knows that none of this has any resemblance of what’s actually happening in the classroom.

            Well, except for all the cases where it ended in species extinction, or near extinction I guess…
            I can believe that the government can successfully eradicate wolves and cougars by this method. Those are a huge pain to farm, especially when they’re chewing the farmer. I can also believe the same about the birds because they tend to fly away and the farmer can’t clip their wings, otherwise the officials would notice.

            Hedgehogs, though. The closest thing to an assessment for the success of hedgehog bounties in the paper is the kill count. Can we be sure that those hedgehogs weren’t farmed?

          • ECD says:

            I can believe that the government can successfully eradicate wolves and cougars by this method. Those are a huge pain to farm, especially when they’re chewing the farmer. I can also believe the same about the birds because they tend to fly away and the farmer can’t clip their wings, otherwise the officials would notice.

            Hedgehogs, though. The closest thing to an assessment for the success of hedgehog bounties in the paper is the kill count. Can we be sure that those hedgehogs weren’t farmed?

            No, but if at this point we’re discussing some bounties work and some bounties don’t, which is rather different then your original point.

            In the 50s and 60s when it became known that tobacco is very bad, US was deep into Cold War shit and made propaganda about everything (including how to date) so it makes sense that the government jumped onto the question of what should the citizens smoke.

            I think, odd as it is for me to say, at this stage you’re overestimating the government’s influence. I’m going to ask for some evidence that people smoked due to government propaganda. Also, from my very preliminary research, there were indications on how bad smoking was long before the 1950s-60s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tobacco#History). Though, honestly, this may be a bit of a distraction as no individual market failure disproves your argument.

            Here’s how it goes. The ministry of education sends down some directive that has no relationship to reality whatsoever. The teachers have to go to some sort of conference to present their individual approach to implementing the directive. The vast majority of teachers have no idea how to deal with that, so usually the most bureaucracy-literate teacher in a school writes everybody’s talks in exchange for favors. So everyone has to endure hours of excruciatingly boring talks that are very similar to each other. It goes something like this: “Ensuring that each child can pursue an individual educational trajectory transforms the learning experience by centering it on the child, by making the children subjects rather than objects of educational process”, and so on for many hours, and everybody in the room knows that none of this has any resemblance of what’s actually happening in the classroom.

            Sure, that happens. Same as the commercial world gets the wonderful ‘new business technique training which was covered in whatever the boss read last month,’ but I was mostly trying to address your concern about evolution, which was that any knowledge acquired gets lost and we get reset. External training (some good, some bad) provides new knowledge, then you go back to work and keep what is relevant/helpful and incorporate it into your workflow.

            The key point however is that, at least in my office, then you either write it down (maybe formally as an SOP, maybe just as a checklist, maybe as a big pile of difficult to read notes) and keep it, passing it on to your successor, who, usually, you also get to train, preserving what you’ve learned, but, since they’re new, also offering the chance for “wait, why do we do this?” and “Isn’t this really inefficient and stupid?” to which the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no, depending.

            Honestly, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had a problem and gone through the files I inherited, or the SOPs, or our online database, or talked to someone who’s been working there 15 years and discovered, this question has already been answered, all I have to do is check and make sure the answer is still good.

            I mean, could it be better? Sure. Frankly, if someone were to put me in charge of my division (please don’t I like the town I live in and don’t want to move to DC) there are changes I’d make (if you complete and sign a legal opinion, you have to post it to our shared database; when higher levels do legislative drafting, they have to post it to our shared database so the people who will actually work it can comment on their efforts and what the actual effects will be; stuff like that), but my agency, or at least my office is much better at the knowledge management that enables evolution than I think you’re imagining.

          • eigenmoon says:

            some bounties work and some bounties don’t, which is rather different then your original point.
            OK, I was wrong that people always respond with farming. Now I see that it happens only when farming is feasible.

            I’m going to ask for some evidence that people smoked due to government propaganda.
            I didn’t say that. I meant that the government considered itself to be the institution to inform people about absolutely everything.

            there were indications on how bad smoking was long before the 1950s-60s
            The big one – the link to cancer – was discovered in Germany in 1940s, but it was a bad time to take Germany’s word on anything.

            my office is much better at the knowledge management that enables evolution than I think you’re imagining.
            OK, I believe you. I’ve updated somewhat towards the government being able to accumulate expertise in its nodes.

            That’s still a long way before I recognize the government as superintelligent, because I still don’t believe the wisdom flows between the nodes very well. Consider the US Treasury’s financial report. The most interesting part is “An Unsustainable Fiscal Path” (pdf page 14 = paper page 5) that details how the spending is too high. So based on this information, does the government (or the Left) plan to reduce spending? I haven’t watched Dem debates (I live in Europe anyway) but I have a distinct feeling that they want to do the exact opposite. (It’s not like Trump wants to reduce spending, either.)

          • ECD says:

            I’m going to ask for some evidence that people smoked due to government propaganda.
            I didn’t say that. I meant that the government considered itself to be the institution to inform people about absolutely everything.

            Sorry, I misunderstood this

            In the 50s and 60s when it became known that tobacco is very bad, US was deep into Cold War shit and made propaganda about everything (including how to date) so it makes sense that the government jumped onto the question of what should the citizens smoke.

            However, the fact that the government weighed in on something didn’t mean other parties couldn’t.

            OK, I believe you. I’ve updated somewhat towards the government being able to accumulate expertise in its nodes.

            That’s still a long way before I recognize the government as superintelligent, because I still don’t believe the wisdom flows between the nodes very well. Consider the US Treasury’s financial report. The most interesting part is “An Unsustainable Fiscal Path” (pdf page 14 = paper page 5) that details how the spending is too high. So based on this information, does the government (or the Left) plan to reduce spending? I haven’t watched Dem debates (I live in Europe anyway) but I have a distinct feeling that they want to do the exact opposite. (It’s not like Trump wants to reduce spending, either.)

            Nope, no intention of cutting spending. I don’t know enough to evaluate the report in question, but I admit to feeling about national debt a lot like various folks on the right feel about global warming. I’ve been hearing unsustainable, must live within our means, national credit card almost maxed out, disaster just around the bend, for the entire time I’ve been alive and am unconcerned at this stage.

            Now, if the treasury is right, then ignoring them is bad and will have unfortunate consequences, hopefully leading to a correction. If the treasury is incorrect, then this no more disproves the ‘superintelligence’ of the government than all the fumbling around that undoubtedly occurred during the establishment/evolution of cultural taboos.

            ETA: I do appreciate your updating based on my experience.

          • eigenmoon says:

            But those things that you’re unconcerned about are the most important decision drivers. Growing the economy as fast as possible is a great thing to do except for the climate change. Giving away lots of money to everybody is a great thing to do except somebody has to pay up at some point. If you postulate that you can borrow any amount of money without future consequences, then I agree that the optimal path is to borrow a lot and give it to everybody. But I don’t agree that the consequences are negligible.

          • ECD says:

            I may not be being clear, my point isn’t that consequences are negligible, but rather the reverse, which we seem to be agreeing on. Like for the market, or for cultures, mistakes do have consequences, which we learn from and change course. That, along with experimentation and keeping some knowledge of what was previously done, is what allows the ‘evolution’ we’ve been discussing.

            Now, on the specific instance of monetary policy, I am not an economist and don’t know enough to have an educated opinion. However, my uneducated response is that you are right, there is obviously some level of borrowing which would have major negative consequences. But the question of figuring out what it is, simply isn’t as simple as a math problem, though a lot of math will go into whatever decision ends up being made.

            Honestly, I think this ties in to your conclusion on the virtue signalling post below:

            I’m not convinced it really is about just different priorities. It would be much simpler to negotiate if that was the only problem. Something like “hey Left, how many migrants do you want? What about you, Right? OK, let’s target the average of those two figures”.

            Putting aside the bad incentives this gives both sides to assume maximalist positions, it seems entirely possible that taking the average is the worst result. For your example (I do not have evidence for the claims which follow, nor do I believe them, this is merely a though experiment) perhaps the average is too low to allow the formation of cohesive immigrant groups, but high enough to discourage assimilation, producing far greater social unrest than either extreme.

            I think where we disagree is that you seem to think its possible to know what the best policy is, while I am far less certain of that (though identifying terrible policies is often easy).

            A secondary, crucial point is, to the extent we don’t see the best policy, and could, I don’t think that’s the fault of virtue signalling, but rather the fault of…well…us (in the sense of humanity, not the sense of you and I). It’s a lot easier to say ‘they want to eat the poor,’ ‘they want to kill god’ than it is to sit down and actually (1) figure out what other people want, (2) why they want it and (3) what can be done that might satisfy you both.

            Honestly, this ‘mistake theory signalling,’ or ‘enemy signalling,’ or ‘ignorance signalling,’ seems a far more pressing concern for the issues you raise.

            And, though I disagree with the majority here on a lot of things, i do admit to a hesitant curiosity as to how much of it arises from the modern ability to engage in endless, anonymous communication with both in-group and out-group (IE social media).

          • But those things that you’re unconcerned about are the most important decision drivers. Growing the economy as fast as possible is a great thing to do except for the climate change.

            I think that illustrates the opposite side of the argument. Most of the disagreement is not about whether to grow the economy but what policies achieve that. Most of the disagreement about what one should do to prevent climate change is about facts, not values.

            If everyone agreed with the catastrophist position–that global warming threatens the survival of the human race–practically everyone would give high priority to preventing it. If everyone agreed with my view—that there is no good reason to expect the net effects of warming to be negative, and a very low probability that either permitting or preventing will have catastrophic effects,practically everyone would give preventing it low priority.

            There are some value disagreements, most obviously whether the maximand is limited to effects on humans, but those are not central. I have not yet seen anyone argue that AGW will have little effect on humans, but should be prevented because of its effects on other species.

          • eigenmoon says:

            @ECD
            there is obviously some level of borrowing which would have major negative consequences.
            I’d feel a lot better about US future if both Ds and Rs would commit to how much they think is borrowing too much and tell us how do they plan to reduce spending when they get to that point. The government’s “ceiling” is a joke at this point.

            it seems entirely possible that taking the average is the worst result.
            True, but I don’t think we’re even close to this problem. Both parties propose policies that could worsen the present situation. If Ds will get free healthcare (and maybe other payouts) for illegal immigrants without building a wall, they would create a powerful pull. If Rs will get the police to deport illegal immigrants on sight, they would incentivize the immigrants to create no-go zones (if the police isn’t protecting you, you might want to protect yourself by any means necessary). Europe stepped into both problems but it has learned something.

            I think where we disagree is that you seem to think its possible to know what the best policy is, while I am far less certain of that
            I do think that we need to defer this question to some superintelligence, and I think that the free market is the best suited one, as it’s undeniably smart, although admittedly not necessarily benevolent.

            this ‘mistake theory signalling,’ or ‘enemy signalling,’ or ‘ignorance signalling,’ seems a far more pressing concern for the issues you raise.
            What’s all of that, exactly?

            People do seem to get somewhat polarized by the social media, although this effect seems to happen in US quite disproportionately, and also people managed to get really polarized way before (like Spain before the Civil War). Mass movements do evolve too, but usually, softly speaking, not towards superintelligence. It is possible that the internet is sort of a Petri dish for mass movements, and they evolve more rapidly in it.

            @DavidFriedman
            There’s a value tradeoff in deciding whether to grow the economy: do we want the government to redistribute more stuff at the cost of slowing down the economy, or do we want to redistribute less and grow faster? Democracies tend to overvalue presently existing people relative to people from the future. While nobody says aloud that a person living now is worth 10 people from 2119, I get a distinct impression that this is exactly how the government thinks, otherwise I’d guess the taxes would be much lower.

            I think values are also hidden in the climate question. It is possible that Central Africa will become unliveable, while, say, Canada will become warmer and possibly more fertile. How do you sum up those effects into a single “net effect” value is dependent on a value judgement.

          • ECD says:

            this ‘mistake theory signalling,’ or ‘enemy signalling,’ or ‘ignorance signalling,’ seems a far more pressing concern for the issues you raise.
            What’s all of that, exactly?

            Yeah, those were terms I was making up to reference the previous paragraph where I said:

            It’s a lot easier to say ‘they want to eat the poor,’ ‘they want to kill god’ than it is to sit down and actually (1) figure out what other people want, (2) why they want it and (3) what can be done that might satisfy you both.

            Sorry I didn’t make that clear.

            I do think that we need to defer this question to some superintelligence, and I think that the free market is the best suited one, as it’s undeniably smart, although admittedly not necessarily benevolent.

            Okay, I misunderstood our point of divergence. I entirely reject the argument that the free market should decide how many immigrants a country can take in, how the poor should be fed/housed, or any of the other questions we agree need to be answered by a civilized society. The free market is entirely amoral and intelligence is no substitute for virtue.

          • The free market is entirely amoral

            So is the political system.

            Morality comes in when we evaluate the outcomes of the alternative institutions.

          • ECD says:

            Morality comes in when we evaluate the outcomes of the alternative institutions.

            If you’re a pure consequentialist, which I am not.

          • If you’re a pure consequentialist, which I am not.

            Nor am I.

            But consider the disagreement between an anarcho-capitalist libertarian and minarchist libertarian, both of whom agree that certain acts, loosely speaking coercion, are morally wrong. They disagree about which system will result in more such acts.

            Or consider a socialist (strong sense) vs a libertarian. They have some disagreements about what is just. But they have much larger disagreements about the outcomes of the two systems, including the non-consequentialist ones. If the socialist believed that socialism would lead to Stalin, the Great Purge, and the Ukraine famine, he would not be a socialist–because those things not only have bad consequences, they are massively unjust in his terms.

          • ECD says:

            Or consider a socialist (strong sense) vs a libertarian. They have some disagreements about what is just. But they have much larger disagreements about the outcomes of the two systems, including the non-consequentialist ones. If the socialist believed that socialism would lead to Stalin, the Great Purge, and the Ukraine famine, he would not be a socialist–because those things not only have bad consequences, they are massively unjust in his terms.

            Sure, but, despite Cassander’s attempt below, I don’t think you can actually know this (indeed, going back to consider some of the examples, I conceded far too much there, looking at how Pol Pot’s regime lost power rather complicates the revolution = bad + left model he was proposing) and instead we’ll just end up right back in body counting, or arguing from our different premises (and/or different preferred conclusions).

            ETA: historical correction, let my rhetoric carry me away…

  18. Le Maistre Chat says:

    In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the philosopher Edmund Burke (The Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the Revolution in France) appears as a member of Johnson’s club of friends. In contrast to his image as a thinker on violence and the conservative vision of the safe and good life, Boswell records him as cracking puns and calling himself a child.

    “Johnson said ‘claret for boys, port for men, brandy for heroes;’ ‘then,’ said Burke, ‘give me claret, for I like being a boy, and partake of the honest hilarity of youth.'”

  19. Machine Interface says:

    Is there really such a thing as “capitalism”?

    Everytime someone points at something and says “look, capitalism”, all I see is normal human behavior amplified by technology.

    I’ve seen people define capitalism as “a system of economic organization that rewards greed”. What system doesn’t reward greed?

    Greed is defined as “an inordinate or insatiable longing for material gain, be it food, money, status, or power”. It seems to me that in almost all circumstances, this would pretty much reward itself. If you only make just what you need to survive on a daily basis, you’re much more likely to perish come the first accident than if you accumulate as much surplus as you can. Having a lot of extra stuff means that because you feel safe, you’re more likely to help others and invest back into your community, thereby indirectly making your situation even better.

    The only circumstances where such an instinct would be thwarted is either that your modes of production are so inefficient that you have just enough time during the day to barely produce what you need for daily survival (hunter-gatherers), or that your society has collapsed to such a degree that any good created that isn’t immediatly consumed or sold is at high risk of getting stolen or destroyed (civil war).

    I have therefore extended my antirealist stance to the concept of capitalism, and I am now treating arguments about capitalism with the same amount of polite contempt as I do with those about morality or aesthetics.

    • cassander says:

      a capitalist society is one in which a substantial share of the population produces goods that are intended for market exchange, not for their own personal consumption and not because they are commanded to do so by an economic planner.

      I grant that what constitutes a “substantial” share can be debated, but the fundamental description seems pretty solid to me.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      Cassander gave one definition.

      As a *general rule* any word with a lot of emotional baggage ends up having an extremely fluid and often self-contradictory definition. Diedre McClosky had a quote i always found amusing that went “I don’t care how one defines capitalism, as long as it’s not defined as evil incarnate”.

      Most importantly, these words tend to deviate significantly from how they’re defined in a dictionary.

      “Everytime someone points at something and says “look, capitalism”, all I see is normal human behavior amplified by technology.”

      Sometimes people will define capitalism as ‘a system characterized by greed’ but then you have the problem that every “System” so-called ends up being capitalist if you look hard enough. But there’s often an equivocation between that definition (and it’s offshoot; capitalism is what you call every aspect of the contemporary economy that annoys you) and the more dictionary definition that looks at whether the economy is 1. industrial/post industrial 2. directed by ‘markets’.

      [And then people will equivocate between the ‘greed’ definition and the more dictionary definition.]

      But the very fact that this definition [‘greed’] makes all systems capitalist is somewhat contentious to an idealistic type, precisely because they might imagine that any behavior sufficiently selfish to cause problems is the product of ‘a system’, rather than a general constraint that you try to temper. (By designing rules that direct those fundamental tendencies in a positive or at least benign direction).

      There are words and terms that are sometimes associated with or related to ‘capitalism’ that are more precise, less emotionally loaded, and should therefore be used instead. Tax rates, zoning regimes, certification regimes, IP law, etc. etc. Whenever someone talks about capitalism i’m inclined to play dumb and say i have no idea what they’re talking about.

      Just to clarify, similar games are played with ‘socialism’ where people equivocate between command economies, economies founded on altruism, and gulags/famines/hunger games.

    • b4mgh says:

      your modes of production are so inefficient that you have just enough time during the day to barely produce what you need for daily survival (hunter-gatherers)

      It was my understanding that the problem with hunter-gatherer societies wasn’t inefficiency, but rather an upper limit on population density in a given area and vulnerability to environmental changes. In fact, I think that hunter-gatherers needed to spend less time per day foraging to attain their caloric needs than farmers for most of the pre-modern period. I might be wrong, though. Don’t quote me on this.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      I’ve seen people define capitalism as “a system of economic organization that rewards greed”. What system doesn’t reward greed?

      Who defines capitalism like that? The strawman capitalist creed is that greed is good, meaning it can be turned towards socially desirable ends.

      Having a lot of extra stuff means that because you feel safe, you’re more likely to help others and invest back into your community, thereby indirectly making your situation even better.

      Uhhhhhh, no. I mean, if you compare me to your average starving-to-death refugee, maybe I am more likely to contribute, because I am not literally starving to death. So, yes, “more likely.” I contribute back to the community because I am paid to contribute back to the community. If this were Medieval Europe, my incentive would be to go to the Holy Land and kill infidels. You might prefer the refugee in that case.

    • sharper13 says:

      A definitional issue is that “Capitalism” is one of those words invented by someone (originally used disparagingly by socialists) in the process of opposing it.

      So the proponents will mean something along the lines of free market economics, mutually advantages exchanges, etc…, while the opponents who coined the word will add in more sinister connotations.

      I personally try to remember to just use a more specific word or phrase, but that doesn’t always work when responding to people who start by calling complete government control of a market “capitalism”, for example, which could fit your above definition, but seems to really twist even the original intended definition pretty far.

      A useful exercise, if you’re allowed to engage in it, is to begin by literally “coming to terms” with someone so that you’re using the same words to mean the same thing. Capitalism is now one of those words which will tend to confuse that process.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      Is there really such a thing as “capitalism”?

      Sure there is. Marx – of all people – gives us a useful framework for identifying it.

      Marx’s Big Idea was that social relationships are governed by economic relationships (how things are produced) and that these in turn are governed by, essentially, technological progress.

      With that in mind, we can view capitalism as resulting from a changing production paradigm. No longer is the world-as-we-find-it (land) the primary non-labour factor of production. Instead, the world-as-we-make-it (capital) is what counts most.

      Part of it has to do with the additional efficiencies introduced by (physical) capital: if modern farming equipment and fertilizers allow you to produce more food from a given area of land, you’re gonna need less farmland to feed a population of a given size than before. Part of it has to do with (again, physical) capital allowing you to do things you would not have been able to do previously, because it is a force-multiplier.

      Apart from capital becoming the key factor of production, a key feature of capitalism – one that serves to differentiate it from “real socialism” (yes, it was called that, unironically as far as I can tell) or communism (the party line, as I recall it, was that it was something we were to get in the future) – is private ownership of the means of production.

      To that I would add trade being the primary form of property acquisition. Compare and contrast this with systems of inheritance/patrimony or grants by some authority (such as the king distributing land between his vassals). In a capitalist system, if you can afford it, you can have it.

      In passing, I’ll point out that this means class divisions are emergent in capitalism. Let’s say Alice works for Bob – she’s a wage-labourer (proletariat), no? A bit later she takes some of her savings and buys stock in Charlie’s company. She’s now collecting a dividend, whilst still working at her day job. Is she a worker or a capitalist? Why not both?

      She wisely reinvests the extra money and with a bit of luck she finds herself making enough from her investments that she can quit her job altogether. She is now a full-blown capitalist. Several years on, however, a few bad turns have diminished the value of her investments and she goes back to working for Bob, because her dividends are no longer enough to pay the bills.

      Alice has come (almost) full-circle and this is normal. She might conceivably alternate between worker and capitalist many times. Compare with feudalism, say, where you would usually expect to live your entire life as part of the class you were born into. If you were born a peasant, you’d typically stay a peasant. If you were born nobility, you’d stay nobility. Change of social class wasn’t impossible, but it was a major event.

    • AlesZiegler says:

      I agree with you. I think I made similar point here in a context of discussion about Marx. Capitalism is imho, because it posits high degree of similarity between our current society and society of 19th century that doesn’t really exists.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      My sense:

      First, a capitalist system relies less on violence as a core motivator than a non-capitalist system. By contrast are systems where everyone works toward shared projects that are determined by any method (including authoritarian fiat and democratic vote), and are enforced by some ladder of methods that necessarily terminates in violence. (E.g. do it, or pay a fine. If you ignore the fine, you get prison. If you resist prison, you get beaten. If you fight back, you are killed.)

      A capitalist system relies on price signals to coordinate exchange of goods and services. By contrast, a planned economy relies on knowledge about abilities and needs; a gift economy relies on people giving away things to make other people happy; etc. A capitalist system can use those methods as well, but it’s not required to. I suppose this is more precisely labeled a market economy, and I probably equate the two, perhaps inaccurately.

      A capitalist system relies on greed, but only out of convenience; it recognizes that each person knows of their own desires better than anyone else by default, and intentionally works with that fact. Other systems tend to try to temper it directly – collectivisms by violence, gift economies by an appeal to love. Speaking artfully: the latter try to stop up the flow of greed; capitalism tries to channel it.

      A capitalist system may reward exploiting differences in information, and for me this is where the grayest areas emerge. If I make money off knowing a better way to make widgets, that’s capitalist. If I make money off knowing one business is likely to outperform another and investing accordingly, including shorting, that’s capitalist. If make money off knowing more about risk than some group of innocent citizens, that’s capitalist – but a lot of people consider that dirty pool in certain cases, and I feel some sympathy for that, but not perfectly. The reason my sympathy is not absolute is that in all these cases, other people have an incentive to find out and exploit their own advantages in information. Others can innovate better widget production, better knowledge of businesses, or of risk, and this is all supposed to be part of the system. Remove that incentive, and people stop being as careful, and that society falls behind one where people were motivated to be more careful.

      A capitalist system permits any action to any person, provided they work with their own property, and harm no one else’s. That includes information, meaning any information can be shared, once you have it, unless you’ve agreed to a contract that forbids sharing it. (Saying that someone else’s business is flawed in some way does not count as harm, unless that claim is false, in which case it is definitely harm. This might raise problems with my model; I’m not sure.)

      I think that, based on these impressions, I could classify any economic action as capitalist or not, and the result would be self-consistent. (And even, incidentally, surpass the utility of any other economic system I’m aware of.) I can’t prove it, though – I keep wondering if I could prove it somehow. I need to think more about edge cases.

      I believe Faza’s definition (private ownership of the means of production is permitted) is probably the proper one, though. It could be the case that all my impressions follow from it.

    • Plumber says:

      @Machine Interface says:

      “…Everytime someone points at something and says “look, capitalism”, all I see is normal human behavior amplified by technology…”

      I recommend reading books on British and European life in the Middle Ages with a focus an agrarian villages, and then on the towns, with especial emphasis on the guilds, I was particularly impressed by Wage Labor & Guilds in Medieval Europe by Steven Epstein, both the continuities and the differences are striking, the guilds were somewhat like social clubs like the Knights of Columbus, trade unions, and modern corporations all at once and yet like none of them, there really was an evolution, and even revolution (over centuries) in economic and social relations, and “capitalism” was coined to describe what we have now as distinct from what was then, and just “human behavior” and “technology” isn’t the whole story (and a fascinating story it is!).

    • Viliam says:

      Ultimately, when I have something, I have three options:
      – use it;
      – trade it voluntarily for something;
      – have it taken away involuntarily.

      Plus a few other options that are a variant or a combination of the above. I can keep the thing, and then use/trade/lose it later. When I donate the thing to someone, it could be classified as my indirect use (if the fact that the other person uses it makes me genuinely happy), a form of trade (if I expect something in return, even intangible things like status), or succumbing to pressure (if I believe that not donating would make other people angry enough to hurt me); or a combination of it all. Also, sometimes the things spoils; especially food.

      From this perspective, we have societies:
      – that barely have anything to trade or take away;
      – where the surplus is mostly taken away by violence;
      – where the surplus is mostly traded voluntarily.

      In other words, a primitive society, a violence-based society (dictatorship, feudalism, real socialism), and a trade-based society (capitalism). It is usually a mix. A society mostly based on violence can still allow or tolerate trade on a small scale. A society mostly based on trade can still collect taxes based on threat of violence. Plus the grey zone of trades you are compelled to make, such as buying mandatory insurance, that you maybe would and maybe wouldn’t want to do voluntarily.

      The same applies to means of production:
      – there are barely any;
      – you can keep them, or trade them for other means of production, or sell them for stuff to consume;
      – the big guy will take them away from you.

      If this analysis is essentially correct, then, in theory, arguing against capitalism is kinda arguing in favor of poverty or violence.

      But in practice, when people complain about “capitalism”, it is one of the following:
      – complaining about various failures within capitalist society (e.g. people using force or fraud to get money and afterwards using this money with impunity on the market); if they believe these failures exist on purpose, it means accusing proponents of capitalism of hypocrisy;
      – complaining that the world is imperfect and unfair (and using “capitalism” as a symbol for it, and “socialism” as a symbol for equal distribution of stuff);
      – complaining about Moloch acting within capitalist society (failing to notice that Moloch acts within any society).

    • mtl1882 says:

      I do think there is something to be said for making a distinction between selfishness and greed. People are going to look out for themselves, and be motivated by advancement. Greed is well beyond survival, and as an idea I see it as different than thriving. It is getting closer to seven deadly sins territory. “Insatiable” is the key word there. Not everyone is generally insatiable, and certain community structures encourage those who are disposed towards it, and give them more opportunity, than others. A lot of it has to do with upper limits, some of them ones of actual physical possibility, as other commenters said. The quality of life is different in a free market society than in a feudal one in a lot of different ways. Looking at the U.S. in the 1800s shows how different economic systems manifest different societies, even in a recent and familiar enough environment. I can’t tell you when exactly to call a system capitalist, but there is a difference between systems even if they are all about achieving reward. Acting in a communal manner isn’t a bizarre, illogical fantasy.

  20. Skeptical Wolf says:

    Can anyone offer advice on breaking internalized negative word/subject associations?

    Some time ago, I went through a period of deliberately trying to be well-informed with regard to news, particularly politics. This led me to consume quite a bit of contentious writing that fell outside my normal comfort zone. This had some horizon-widening benefits, but has also produced a negative side effect that I’m trying to figure out a way to reverse or mitigate.

    Specifically, I encountered quite a lot of writing that advanced negative stereotypes about and sometimes advocated violence against groups that I consider myself a member of (sometimes this was hyperbole or satire, sometimes I didn’t identify it as such). This became sufficiently stressful that I chose to deliberately narrow my media consumption and spend my energy elsewhere. However, I find that even after more than a year of avoiding the worst offenders, certain keywords and topics still cause a stress/anxiety reaction due to my associating them with more extreme writings. This has negatively impacted my ability to enjoy some of my hobbies (due to the prevalence of those topics in the communities that have formed around those hobbies). This improved steadily for a while after I narrowed my media exposure, but seems to have plateaued in the last few months.

    Is this a problem that anyone else here has experienced and is willing to talk about? Are there any suggestions for how I can restart or accelerate the progress I was making?

    • ECD says:

      Not entirely similar, but I had a somewhat related issue with images/words which I could not get out of my head. I had quite a bit of luck with finding a very long series of books (the Foreigner Series by CJ Cherryh) I discovered I really enjoyed and whenever I found myself focusing on the things I wanted gone, I’d pull out my kindle and read for about an hour. Seemed to work for me, by filling my head with other words.

      Don’t know how it’ll work for you, might taint something you enjoy…

      I am not a doctor, the above is not medical advice.

    • Enkidum says:

      I am not a medical doctor or a psychiatrist. So take this with a grain of salt. But what you are describing sounds to me unusual enough that it might warrant talking to a professional about. The only “cure” I know of for things like this is some form of exposure therapy, for which you’d likely need a professional anyways. (And I believe it has a substantially lower than perfect success rate.)

      I hope you find a way to improve this situation, it sounds pretty unpleasant to my ears. Good luck.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      Purposefully call up the association and stick with it, observing the association, your feelings, and your visceral reactions. And try to breathe, calm youself, and pretend to let it go and move on to something else.

      It will still come back in full force at times, but at other times you may find it lacks the power it used to have.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Can anyone offer advice on breaking internalized negative word/subject associations?

      Same way you break any negative association: step outside of it, and analyze it. Ask yourself why that association exists. Probe it with logic. The more you do that, the less emotional the association will be. It will feel less like “this term makes me anxious” and more like “my brain reacts to this term with anxiety”.

  21. BBA says:

    Never forget, they say. And sure I remember – where I was, the emotions, the panic, the sense that after the calm and safety and invulnerability that came with being American in the 1990s, history was starting up again and coming for us.

    This was during the brief period of my life when I wasn’t living in New York, so I only experienced the disruption secondhand. For those who were in the towers, or even in the neighborhood (where I live and work now) I can only imagine the experience. It’s the mundane artifacts in the underground museum at the memorial that hit me – there’s a printout of a NASD rule filing, something I deal with all the time in my job, and though they’ve changed their name to FINRA they haven’t changed their MS Word templates in 20 years.

    And I remember what it was like before – how you could take road trips to Canada without a passport or go through airport security to meet arriving family members at the gate, and how perfunctory airport security was back in those days. Security cordons around government buildings existed, I don’t remember how much was always there and how much was a response to Oklahoma City… I know security in general got much tighter and still hasn’t loosened up. Why would it? We’re at war, now and forever.

    I remember how only pacifist cranks were against invading Afghanistan. I guess that’s why I’m a pacifist crank now. (Libya was a bigger part of that, though. I accept that there’s nothing I can do about the war machine, and that sometime during the 2020s the US will invade Iran, no matter who wins any of the next few elections. I’m not happy about it but I accept it.)

    But the main thing I remember, though, is paranoia. Enemies were among us. Who knew what they were plotting? That very day, I read something about a Muslim man with a knife arrested on a train in the city where I was attending college…naturally the “Muslim” turned out to be a Sikh, but I’m sure the Amtrak police counted it as a terrorist plot foiled. “If you see something, say something” goes the police propaganda campaign that continues to this day. I never saw anything or said anything. Many people saw something and said something, but that “something” turned out to be nothing and innocent people were needlessly run through the police-military-intelligence machine. (I’d think it was a waste, but it was just a few years later that I was among people who saw something and said nothing, so who am I to say.)

    They say “never forget” because, I suspect, they want to keep us perpetually afraid and unwilling to question the most ludicrous stories that can address that fear. I know I’ll never forget, but I think we as a country should.

    • FrankistGeorgist says:

      Hunter S Thompson’s article in espn of all places interests me because I remember my dad saying quite a lot of similar things without a hint of irony, including that “Bush was finishing the war his father started.”

      The subsequent years rather put me off finishing fathers’ wars, so I’ll join you in the pacifist cranks corner.

    • Skeptical Wolf says:

      I was a college student in the mid-west when the planes hit, and the communities I was in reacted a little differently from what you describe. We were sad and angry, occasionally confused. But fear and paranoia were never major parts of how we processed the attacks. Later we were disappointed and sometimes angry at the responses, but I think that disappointment and frustration came largely because we weren’t feeling the fear that those measures were supposed to address.

      I don’t know if I agree that we as a country should forget because I don’t know what you mean by that. End a retaliatory war that has gone on far too long? Yes, please. Reign in the surveillance enthusiasts that have found their way into our civil services? Absolutely. Sweep the TSA under the rug of history like the embarrassing mistake it always was? I wish.

      But I don’t think doing those things requires us to set aside or downplay our grief at a national tragedy. 3000 innocent civilians were murdered because some fucker thought this would meaningfully harm our country and hated that country enough to spend human lives pursuing that goal. The memorial services that have been happening today are about grief, not fear. And I don’t think that needs to be forgotten.

      • albatross11 says:

        +1

        A lot of powerful people and organizations (particularly the intelligence agencies and the neocons) used the 9/11 attack to do a bunch of stuff they’d always wanted to do. Arguing against any of that stuff was very hard then because of the fear and patriotism triggered by the attack. Nowadays, those programs have substantial constituencies–abolish the TSA and you’ll put thousands of people out of a job, shut down the domestic surveillance operations and you’ll take money and power away from a bunch of intelligence agencies who coincidentally just happen to have a whole lot of data on various politicians who’ll be voting on that stuff. And you’ll eliminate a lot of jobs and take money from a bunch of contractors supporting that stuff.

        That could be done, but it would be politically hard, you’d make a bunch of very bad enemies, and the opposition would be willing to spend piles of money and use their extensive media access as well as perhaps any blackmail material their surveillance operations have collected to fight you. And I don’t think our political system is up to it at this point.

        Chuck Schumer on why taking on the intelligence agencies is a bad idea.

    • cassander says:

      Unless Iran kills 4 figures worth of Americans in an extremely public matter, or nukes someone, there will be no invasion of Iran. they are almost certainly not foolish enough to do either of those things. Iran is simply too large to be occupied. Bomb it? sure. Maybe even special forces raids. But ground invasion iraq style? definitely not.

      • Corey says:

        As a lefty, that’s one of the things I like about Trump – he seems to have an aversion to going to war.

    • ECD says:

      I accept that there’s nothing I can do about the war machine, and that sometime during the 2020s the US will invade Iran, no matter who wins any of the next few elections. I’m not happy about it but I accept it.)

      Maybe not. In the line of practicing what I preach and saying positive things sometimes, I was extremely pleased to see the back of John Bolton.

      ETA: In the interest of fairness where it is due, I am pleased President Trump fired, or requested the resignation of, or accepted the resignation of, Mr. Bolton.

      • EchoChaos says:

        As was I. See, right-wingers and left-wingers can agree on things!

        • ECD says:

          Oh definitely. One of the other things that made me hesitant to comment here is that I think this environment pushes fairly hard in an adversarial direction, which I’m trying to limit in my life, because I find it tends to focus me on the points where I disagree with people rather than the points where I do agree with them.

          My boss is a relatively right wing guy, but we talk a lot every day and 95% of it is us agreeing on various things, or talking about stuff where there is no real disagreement possible (family, friends, colleagues, workload, etc.), 4% we disagree on work stuff. 1% is politics.

          • EchoChaos says:

            We agree a lot too, which is why we can have adversarial discussions without anger.

          • Plumber says:

            @ECDsays:

            “…My boss is a relatively right wing guy, but we talk a lot every day and 95% of it is us agreeing on various things, or talking about stuff where there is no real disagreement possible (family, friends, colleagues, workload, etc.), 4% we disagree on work stuff. 1% is politics…”

            That sounds very familiar to me, my official boss is a Republican, as was my last boss, my unofficial boss “the lead man”, who was chosen by the official boss, is a Democrat – as was the last lead man, all are men who love watching sports, go to Catholic churches on Sunday, some vote the way their pastors tell them, some the way their union tells them, and nine-times-out-of-ten it’s absurdly easy for me to guess which political party a guy I work with supports based on one simple question asked on Monday mornings: “How far did you drive to get here?”, immigrant or U.S. born, old or young, if a guy drove 50 or more miles the odds are that he’s a Republican, less than 50 he’s a Democrat, come to think of it among the “Russian Empire’ (the Russian who got promoted to be a suoervisor and the other three ex-Soviets who maintain the giant boilers along with a couple of former U.S. Merchant Marine and Navy) the one with a long commute votes Republican and tells of how awful the Soviet Union was (he left in ’79), the others live closer and describe the USSR as “not so bad” (and one isbclearly befuddled by multiple brands and other basic aspects of capitalism), so living nearer or farther from San Francisco influences how Left or Right one is even beyond U.S. politics!

            The commute length political correlation interests me because I like to make up stereotypes discover heuristics, but if asked the Republicans usually cite abortion as a reason for their party affiliation, with a few guns or taxes, the Democrats (with only one exception) cite being pro union, and the exception is our one American born black man on the crew (we also had a guy from Ethiopia and a guy from Trinidad, who were technically “African-American” but that’s really not the same thing), and he cited his T-shirt with a picture of Obama (and FWLIW doesn’t seem at all bothered by Trump, usually he finds him hilarious).

            Most everyone has made their views clear, and no one bothers to argue anyone out of their politics, and other than some light teasing (admittedly me saying “Of course I’m going to vote to raise your taxes Mark, I might get paid more!”) there’s little partisan rancor, and this has held true from when I was the second youngest guy on the crew and one of only three born in the U.S.A. to now when I’m the third oldest guy, and by far most of the crew are now U.S. born (though often with a foreign born parent and/or wife).

            One wrinkle on this happy bi-partisan tale though: the Kavanaugh hearings, that month was testy, unfortunately it taught me that the “culture war” wasn’t just on the internet and far away in D.C. and I’m grateful it didn’t last.

            @EchoChaos, FWLIW the more coffee I drink the more of a partisan Democrat I become, one or two beers in me though and I agree more with Republicans.

            You may want to tell the RNC that, but no IPA’s please, they’re really not to my taste!

          • ECD says:

            @Plumber,

            The commute correlation is very interesting, but doesn’t hold for me. Everyone lives in the same small town and, though I’m the only one to walk to work regularly, we all live within five minutes of the office (except one person whose husband works at another facility an hour away and so lives in the middle of the two towns (I’m unsure of her politics)).

            Still, good stuff.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Plumber

            one or two beers in me though and I agree more with Republicans.

            You know you’re always guaranteed a beer if we hang out. How about November 2020? 🙂

            I think we should announce a Plumber/EchoChaos ticket for then.

          • Corey says:

            The commute correlation needs to control for urban/rural if it doesn’t already.

          • Randy M says:

            The commute correlation needs to control for urban/rural if it doesn’t already.

            I thought that was specific to Plumber’s San Fran locale, and the urban vs suburb/rural correlation was the explanation for it.

          • Plumber says:

            @EDC says: “…The commute correlation is very interesting, but doesn’t hold for me. Everyone lives in the same small town..”

            Ah dang, I guess what I noticed is based on too small of a sample size then.

            @EchoChaos says: “…How about November 2020?…”

            That made me laugh, thanks!

            Take this with a mountain of salt as back in April I predicted that Harris will be the Democratic nominee which now looks really implausible but on the 2020 Presidential election: Trump has job growth and Americans aren’t coming home in body bags (and even if they were in the first year of a conflict there’s a “rally around the flag” effect, it’s in the third year that “bring the boys back home” dominates), and the more the press says he’s mean to immigrants the more that will look like trying to secure the borders to his supporters, and while there’s some evidence that suburban women are leaving the Republican Party, I don’t see enough to offset his converting Rust belt former Democrats into his supporters which won him the 2016 election.

            On the Democratic side I’ll try to watch tonight’s debate with interest as there’s been a lot of back and forth over “convert swing voters” vs.”turn out the base”, thing is doubling the turnout in Boston and San Francisco adds exactly no votes to the electoral college total, “Justice Democrats” only win over older Democrats in already deep blue areas, what wins in purple areas is the 2018 Pelosi playbook of campaigning hard on and only on voters continuing to receive the benefits they’ve grown used to, or expanding those benefits (i.e.an option to buy into Medicare) and that’s only when the taxes to pay for those benefits are on those higher on the income ladder than the median voter as the only subset that supports higher taxes on themselves ($80,000 to $200,000 annual income urban professionals) are already Democrats who vote, campaigning on say open borders instead is a losing strategy as the majority of Americans don’t want that, to win a nominee has to both convert swing voters and not alienate the base, and ultimately who are “the base”?, if Democratic she’s (yes she) a public school teacher who has most of her wages going to paying rent, if Republican he’s (yes he) a guy with a truck and some tools who sometimes hires helpers and owns a house in a low density low rent area, and I just don’t see the numbers of either changing much from 2016, which was close, if neither nominee hasn’t done much more self-sabotage this will be a nail biter, as it is now the likely nominees are two old guys who often put their foots in their mouths, Biden usually apologies a week later, Trump almost never does and I really can’t tell which will win. The next most likely Democratic Party nominees, Sanders and Warren, I can easily imagine them gaining converts with their economic populist message, but the longer the economy keeps creating jobs the more their messages will alienate more than convert, and absent foreign wars, ultimately it is all about the economy.

            18 years ago a wise old plumber told me “Watch the NASDAQ, that will tell you how long your commute will last”, and now I say: watch the jobs and wage numbers, that will tell who will be President. 

            @Corey says: “The commute correlation needs to control for urban/rural if it doesn’t already”

            @Randy M says: “I thought that was specific to Plumber’s San Fran locale…” 

            Yeah that’s basically the trick, I work in a part of San Francisco that’s filled with apartment towers and most of the 50 mile and up guys are coming from Sonoma County, the trick doesn’t work if someone is driving from Oakland to San Jose (but it totally worked if it’s Stockton to San Jose!).

      • cassander says:

        Maybe not. In the line of practicing what I preach and saying positive things sometimes, I was extremely pleased to see the back of John Bolton.

        I don’t understand this at all. The mustache is on his front!

      • Nick says:

        I am so glad to see Bolton out too.

        • Randy M says:

          At the risk of embarrassing myself over youthful indiscretions, I used to like Bolton. Almost twenty years ago, but still. I think it’s me that’s changed more than him.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      I had been stocking vending machines aboard a docked aircraft carrier for half an hour when the planes hit.

      The rest of the day I had a horrible feeling that tomorrow a nation would disappear. I’m very glad I was wrong, and that what did happen to Iraq and Afghanistan took a lot longer with a lot fewer deaths.

      The time it took to get on base noticeably increased.

      I’m very sorry all those victims were denied the opportunity to experience and participate in the future we have lived in since then.

    • salvorhardin says:

      I was a student living not in the city, but close enough to have line of sight to the towers– a bunch of us spent the latter half of the day waiting in a very long line to donate blood. I remember distinctly the conversation that day on the theme of “we knew from the beginning Bush wanted a war, now he’s got one.”

      I agree with the other commenters saying that Iran will not likely be invaded, largely because the Iraq disaster soured so many on that sort of thing: one of its few silver linings.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I’m not American, but I’d been living in the US for almost a decade when it happened, and in Caifornia for about 4 years. it was not my first or my closest encounter with terrorism; there had been a significant but non-disasterous terrorist episode in the Canadian city I lived in while I was growing up.

      The first thing I noticed was a lot of bad behaviour. As a mailing list moderator, I found that everyone’s behaviour went down a notch. People who were normally OK were picking fights with each other, or otherwise acting out. My moderation workload went through the roof, and a lot of previously reasonable people lost their privilege to post directly to my mailing lists, rather than having each message vetted by a member of the moderation team.

      The second thing I noticed was the pressure to display patriotic symbols. I had to explain to people that as a Canadian I would not display a US flag without an equal sized or larger/more prominent Canadian flag. More than once; not displaying a flag seemed to be tantamount to supporting the terrorists, in too many people’s eyes.

      The next thing I noticed was the level of shock displayed. There had been incidents of terrorism in the US before, even within my lifetime. Timothy McVeigh had killed at least 168 people in 1995, including blowing up a day care center. But it seemed none of the Americans I encountered had any idea that such things could happen in the US – unlike in other less fortunate countries – let alone that they already had happened.

      The next thing, sadly, was the danger felt and sometimes experienced by many minorities living in the US. It was a bad time to to look even vaguely Arabic. I especially noticed the fear in the Sikh community; apparantly they expected to be classed as raghead = Muslim = terrorist by violent Americans. (This was especially notable because Sikhs are neither Arabic nor Muslim, pretty much by definition.)

      Because I’d been “innoculated” against panicking about terrorism during my childhood, and didn’t personally know anyone who’d been injured or killed, I was much less upset than most. Mostly I was annoyed at the bad behaviour on my mailing lists, and slightly worried about pressure to pretend to be an American patriot. (Fortunately I’m white, so while almost all the Muslims I’ve ever met have also been white, popular US opinion could not conceive of me being Muslim. :-()

      And I was rather weirded out by the reactions I observed. I’m on the autistic spectrum, and I’d also seen how Canadians reacted to a terrorist incident – this reaction seemed unexpectedly different.

    • Plumber says:

      I was an apprentice plumber working in Sunnyvale, California with a 7AM job start time and rigjt before work I heard from the radio a small bit about a plane hitting a skyscraper in New York, and I imagined a small plane and the building still standing.

      About an hour later our foreman disappeared for a while and than came back, announced that the U.S.A. had been attacked and that we were too close to Lockheed Martin and a military installation and we needed to go home, at that moment I was grateful to beat traffic and go home to Oakland, I stopped by at the motorcycle shop I used to work at and said hello to my former co-workers, without needing to hear the traffic report I still hadn’t turned on the radio (and I think I just didn’t wsnt to know) but eventually that day I did and learned the horror of what happened and then came the tears.

      The next day I was one of the few who came back to the job, an ex-Marine on the crew brought an American flag, and with my head not being focused enough I soon suffered a job injury that day that took many months to heal from (which I never really completely did) and left a long scar on my arm as a reminder to this day.

    • I was in middle school. I had noticed that a bunch of kids were getting picked up early, but didn’t realize that something was seriously wrong until the principal got on the PA system and said something to the effect of:

      Children, you are completely safe and there is nothing to worry about.

      That is all.

      I like to think that that shaped many of my views on the trustworthiness of the government. Of course, the bus driver had the radio playing on the ride home…

    • Unsaintly says:

      I was in middle school. At the computer lab, working on a powerpoint presentation. I pulled up the internet to do some research, and the home page (yahoo news I think) had a big headline about the 9/11 attacks. It seemed so impossible to me that I immediately dismissed it as a joke or something I didn’t get and continued with my work. I don’t remember how I found out it was real.

  22. phi says:

    Thought experiment: Physicists messing around with advanced spacetime manipulation have discovered a large pocket dimension containing an enormous supply of food: enough to feed the world’s 7 billion people for hundreds of billions of years. No one knows how it got there, though there is much speculation on the topic: Maybe aliens put it there, or people from a parallel universe put it there, or time travelers, or something else entirely. In any case, there is no worry about it staying fresh: time passes extremely slowly in this pocket dimension. No one has found evidence of any other pocket dimensions containing resource stashes of this kind; the food stash is an anomaly. But thanks to advances in physics, getting things out of pocket dimensions is easy and cheap. The remaining question is: How could humanity best exploit this windfall?

    • Eternaltraveler says:

      Use it like coal (ie burn it to generate steam and spin turbines). That’s about enough calories to power our civilization at the present level for 250,000 years.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      Move us into a sectioned off part of it.

      On Earth:

      Have a bunch of computers.

      Run evolution experiments (e.g. http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/).

      In general run other processes on Earth (if it’s easy enough to pass from the pocket dimension to Earth) (e.g. set up PCR and place the thermocycler on Earth for a couple of minutesmillliseconds to complete the PCR. Even better with Pulse-field electrophoresis and cell culture, though timing would have to be precise or you’d wind up running things too long).

      Eventually see who our replacements would be (I’m betting on the raccoons).

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        Alternatively, pocket dimensions accessibility means that humans can effectively teleport anywhere (not just limited to our past or future light cones).

        Everyone gets set up with a device that measures our physical wellbeing, and we are shunted to the pocket dimension before death. We can also choose to retire there. Everyone else on Earth (and the rest of the universe) keeps doing what people do. Once Utopia is achieved everyone in the pocket dimension is taken out of it and made young and whole again, and humans fill the universe.

    • acymetric says:

      No one knows how it got there, though there is much speculation on the topic: Maybe aliens put it there, or people from a parallel universe put it there, or time travelers, or something else entirely. In any case, there is no worry about it staying fresh: time passes extremely slowly in this pocket dimension.

      Strong opponent of the simulation hypothesis here (it was fun to talk about as a thought experiment for about 5 minutes, I’m now fully over it), but it is pretty obvious what this pocket dimension is. Someone found the Dev Room with all the items from testing…probably of this being a simulation now approach 100%.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        Odds are greater that it’s an out-of-control and powerful optimizer that was shunted off into a pocket dimension as a safety precaution.

    • b_jonas says:

      The stash of food wouldn’t directly cause any significant changes. Growing food is already relatively easy. The two hard parts are transporting it to everywhere that people live, and distributing it such that the people who oversee the local distribution don’t become corrupt and try to unfairly profit by adding huge margins. A pocket of food would help the first one slightly, but not much of the other problems.

      The best chance to use this pocket dimension would probably be unrelated to food. Since time passes slowly there, use the space as a cheap alternative to cryogenics, or long term storage of other valuables. It could also be used to store radioactive waste and other dangerous waste products. And of course, keep up the research about other physics that we didn’t know about.

    • bullseye says:

      I would worry about who put all this food here, and what they’re going to do when they catch us.

      Also, it seems like the slowed-down time would interfere with bringing the food home. Whoever or whatever we send to collect the food is going to have to operate in slowed-down, so we’d have to wait a long time for them to come back.

  23. salvorhardin says:

    So I finally got around to reading Caplan’s _The Case Against Education_, and here are some points I find underaddressed in it.

    1. Discipline/conscientiousness development as human capital development. Maybe school works by giving practice following increasingly varied and complex sets of instructions and that is what employers value, not any particular knowledge students acquire. If nothing else, this is unrefuted by any number of studies showing that most people don’t retain specific knowledge from their classes or use it in their jobs. It also undermines the claim that the sheepskin effect is just signaling, if the people with the sheepskins are disproportionately those who have benefited from the lessons in conscientiousness and that’s why they’re able to see things through.

    2. Caplan admits that some things education teaches, like literacy, are clearly valuable human capital development, but claims that most classes even in K-12 don’t advance those skills. I find this dubious, because varied and long-lasting practice matters. Consider, for example, history classes where you have to read a bunch of books and articles and write a bunch of term papers. The history may well be useless to almost all jobs and typically forgotten by almost all students; the practice in writing papers and reading complex books and articles is literacy development that could nonetheless increase human capital for most. Indeed, ISTR that at least some schools have distribution requirements of the form “you must take at least N classes that make you do a bunch of reading and writing and M classes that make you use math” which suggests that they care about this form of human capital development through basic skills practice, not just through subject knowledge acquisition.

    3. Scattershot human capital development may still be the best human capital development we can do. Suppose that, while only a tiny percentage of people who learn subject X in school ever use it, that tiny percentage is crucial to the economy, *and* that there is no better way to make sure that tiny percentage still get their training in X than to start by training almost everyone in it. Then spending more on teaching X at the margin may very well be a bad investment but it does not follow that zeroing out spending on teaching X would be harmless! Caplan often assumes that, in his world of educational austerity, the talented few who really do get productive skills out of useless-to-most classes would find their way to those skills anyway, but I don’t see him providing a lot of evidence for that assumption. In general I feel like the book uses evidence about what’s true on the current margin to draw conclusions about decidedly inframarginal changes, which strikes me as sloppy.

    4. Educational austerity is a potentially very promising path to savings but also carries considerable risk. The book would have been much stronger, and intellectually humbler in a good way, if it described pilot experiments that could be used to test the hypothesis that cutbacks don’t actually harm human capital development. Special bonus points would accrue to suggestions of how to protect such experiments from e.g. the bipartisan backlash that ensued when Kansas cut education spending under Brownback. It may be super hard to do such experiments because of the conformity dynamic that Caplan describes; but constructing successful pilots is such an important tool for positive social change that if you really think there’s a multi-trillion-dollar payoff to be had here, you should be looking hard for them.

    Have I missed places in the book where Caplan actually does address these points? Are there other discussions or reviews that do address them?

    • Clutzy says:

      I don’t think he really does because he doesn’t really have a full argument. His problem is he seemingly intentionally ignores actual causes for things.

    • edmundgennings says:

      For point 1, it seems that even if schooling teaches those things, a good working environment will teach them better especially as those skills are relevant to work environments.

    • eigenmoon says:

      I haven’t read Caplan but I hate public schools.

      1, 2. You are right that schools have nonzero efficiency in teaching those useful skills. The problem is that this efficiency is still way, way too low.
      3. Here X is probably STEM. I believe that a regular public school is a horrible place for STEM-talented students.
      4. There are some less dense alternatives to regular public schools, I dunno: democratic schools? homeschooling? Montesorri? Waldorf? Those would be our pilots… sort of. If, by looking at those, we see that less dense education is safe, then maybe we don’t have to pay so much for the regularly dense education.

      • salvorhardin says:

        1, 2: too low compared to what feasible alternative? edmundgennings may be right about work as an alternative– I would be all for expanding vocational tracking, apprenticeships + internships starting at high school age, etc. But while that’s promising it is not obvious and needs to be tested.

        3. Actually X is a lot of things of which STEM is just one. Again, the question is horrible compared to what, i.e. what’s your alternate plan to effectively track into these rare human-capital-intensive careers at least as many talented people as we do now?

        4. It’s not clear that those are efficiency-relevant pilots. Do they actually spend a lot less per student, or get students out into the “real world” a lot faster?

        • eigenmoon says:

          1, 2. Currently my favorite is a homeschooling cooperative. Various homeschoolers could potentially provide lots of test data.
          3. I went into a school that specialized in STEM and that was much better for me than a regular school. I believe all the other subjects in my school were entirely useless and should be removed, with the exception of English (which is not my native language).
          4. No, they don’t. But they put less megabytes of useless crud through children’s heads. Once we agree that it doesn’t create a problem, we can start to figure out how to do the same but cheaper.

    • Viliam says:

      1. This would assume that conscientiousness is largely learned (as opposed to heritable). Because the alternative explanation is that “following increasingly varied and complex sets of instructions” selects the people who already have the (hereditary?) predisposition to be conscientious. And those who don’t, will at some moment find following the instructions unbearable or impossible, and will drop out.

      Not sure how you could have missed this, given that the central point of the book is explaining how “school gives you X” and “school fires you if you don’t already have X” both produce the same effect: “people who completed the school have X”. Which is then naively interpreted as evidence for the former option.

      2. This seems like a non-central case of “transference learning”, which according to Caplan was mostly disproved by research. Well, depends on what exactly is your claim here. If it’s that reading and writing tons of pages will train you to read and write, then I agree with that. It’s just if you claim that reading tons of textbooks makes you particularly great at understanding text (other than a textbook), and writing tons of term papers makes you particularly great at writing (other than of term papers), then we are getting on a thinner ice.

      3. Caplan does not recommend zeroing out spending on teaching. If something is crucial for a tiny minority of people, go ahead and teach it to the tiny minority.

      4. Caplan does not claim that “cutbacks don’t actually harm human capital development”. But, as an economist, he is pointing out that everything has a cost. By cutting the spending, we may lose some of the human capital development at schools, but perhaps the saved money could give us something more important elsewhere.

      • salvorhardin says:

        1. Yes, conscientiousness could be not only highly heritable but close to unteachable. But if Caplan believes this he should present evidence; I don’t see him doing it. I’m not saying I’m super confident that schools develop human capital by teaching conscientiousness, I’m saying that the hypothesis that they do isn’t refuted by his arguments.

        2. AIUI “transference learning” means something more like “learning how to learn” which, yes, he presents evidence really doesn’t happen. But that’s different from practicing a basic skill (like reading and writing) by applying it in a bunch of domains.

        3. But the point is that “go ahead and teach it to that tiny minority” may not be a feasible option, if it is not possible to identify ahead of time who is in that tiny minority.

  24. Eternaltraveler says:

    California has enacted statewide rent control.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I expect this will work about as well as Gray Davis’s “energy deregulation” (which IIRC “de-regulated” wholesale prices but not retail rates). That is, microeconomics 101 tells us that requiring lower prices results in reduced supply and increased demand, which is exactly the opposite of the effect desired.

    • MorningGaul says:

      Being deeply opposed to rent control, I’m curious as to how it will turn out, and worried a good part of the (bad, according to me) consequences are what Bastiat refered as the unseen. A statistical study in 10 years will probably show the low-earner retaining their home at low cost, but it wont show the engineers who couldnt move within 1h of driving from his potential employer.

      But still, an experiment in a foreign country is better than having nothing to provide evidences on the efficiency of rent control.

      • Eternaltraveler says:

        But still, an experiment in a foreign country is better than having nothing to provide evidences on the efficiency of rent control.

        You realize that that rent control is not a new idea and been tried in numerous jurisdictions on numerous occasions.

    • Chalid says:

      This seems like pretty mild rent control (max annual increase allowed is 5% plus inflation which is pretty big, it doesn’t apply to new or recent construction, doesn’t apply to single-family homes) so I will go against the grain here and say that it probably won’t have very much effect. (Though to be clear I do not support it, for the usual econ 101 reasons.)

      A major potential bad impact would be if there is a severe recession or other drop in demand – landlords would be reluctant to cut rents because they couldn’t quickly raise them back up again, so you could potentially end up in a situation where there are simultaneously a bunch of empty apartments and lots of people without homes.

      • J Mann says:

        The best possible rent control has no impact at all, but one with minimal effect is better than one with more effect. 🙂

        As I said upthread, the funniest thing is that this is being reported as an effort to address the lack of affordable housing – as I understand it, people are being forced to commute from areas where there isn’t rent control into areas like SF where there is, so the solution is to apply rent control to their neighborhoods as well.

      • Eternaltraveler says:

        Problem tenants can’t be evicted (and indeed, there is now no incentive to not be a problem tenant). Rent must be raised at 5% per year plus inflation because if you don’t do it this year the opportunity is lost and rent can’t be lowered during economic downturns.

        This is not mild.

        • Chalid says:

          Where do you see that problem tenants can’t be evicted? The article mentions restrictions on evictions without cause, which is pretty different.

          • Eternaltraveler says:

            “Just cause” everywhere it has been enacted has always been an incredibly high standard and basically has meant that tenants can’t be evicted unless they don’t pay rent (and even then it can be a very lengthy and extremely expensive process).

          • Chalid says:

            Well, surely there already needs to be cause to evict someone anyway (e.g. landlord can’t change their mind and get out of a 12-month lease by evicting someone for no reason after three months). What has changed?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Well, surely there already needs to be cause to evict someone anyway (e.g. landlord can’t change their mind and get out of a 12-month lease by evicting someone for no reason after three months). What has changed?

            Terms of how contracts can be broken are usually (at least partially) addressed in the contract itself. Having a 12 month lease doesn’t automatically mean that your landlord can’t get you out at 3 months, what it does is spell out the conditions that have to be met for the landlord to ask you to leave.

          • Chalid says:

            Right, so what has changed?

          • Eternaltraveler says:

            Well, surely there already needs to be cause to evict someone anyway (e.g. landlord can’t change their mind and get out of a 12-month lease by evicting someone for no reason after three months). What has changed?

            You can’t evict someone in 13 months or 50 years. There is no such thing as a 12 month lease anymore. Leases should be considered permanent including existing ones that are 11.5 months in where no one had any idea this was going to happen.

          • TheContinentalOp says:

            I believe the relevant change is that at the end of the lease the landlord can’t refuse to renew, unless one of the “just cause” situations listed by the government exists. That is the way the law is written in New Jersey.

            In NJ (which lacks state wide rent control) you can’t raise the new rent to an “unreasonable” amount in order to force out your tenant. (Unsurprisingly North Jersey has an affordable housing problem) This won’t be a problem in CA as the rent control will prevent “unreasonable” increases.

            In the past a CA landlord with a somewhat troublesome tenant could just bite the bullet and wait for the end of the lease and not renew. Going forward, she’s going to have to document, document, document at considerable time, effort and money and hope that she can prove that she has met the threshold for being able to not renew the lease.

          • Jack says:

            Just cause doesn’t mean “that tenants can’t be evicted unless they don’t pay rent”. While I don’t want to spend time collecting evidence against a baseless assertion, I will represent that if I spent half an hour I could easily find a handful of cases of successful evictions in the jurisdiction I am familiar with (Ontario) for reasons other than failure to pay rent.

  25. DinoNerd says:

    There was some discussion in the last non-CW thread of people feeling variously
    – that their existence was denied
    – that they were persecuted
    – that they were feeling threatened and in retreat
    – that their side/tribe was in the last gasps of resistance against overwhelming victory by their opponents
    – etc.

    All this was related to their political position, with some explicit reference to the CW “tribes”, so I declined to post in that thread.

    But I’m interested in the headspace of people who feel existentially threatened in some way because of their political/cultural inclinations, but who aren’t actually doing something that’s illegal as well as unpopular in their political jurisdicttion.

    I’m especially interested in those who see their whole CW tribe as threatened.

    If you feel this way, please consider responding, ideally with examples and specifics. (E.g. “I’m a mutant ninja turtle and I expect my neighbours will soon start attacking folks like me in the streets here on Mars colony where I live; they’ve already …”)

    And everyone, please don’t respond with comments like “that’s nonsense because …”. If you want to respond, please keep to “I” language, as in “I’m also a mutant ninja turtle but I don’t feel threatened; instead I feel …”

    • broblawsky says:

      This is less CW-tribal and more actual-tribal, but I’m Jewish and I feel existentially threatened because certain people keep talking about killing me and my entire family.

      • EchoChaos says:

        Is there any substantial group of these in the West?

        The Blue Tribe is heavily Jewish and Jew friendly, with Bernie Sanders, a Jew, as one of their top candidates.

        The Red Tribe similarly has support for Israel as a top issue and the ur-Red Tribe guy, Donald Trump, has a Jewish daughter and son-in-law (and hence grandchildren).

        Unless you’re counting the Boycott/Divest/Sanction crowd as killing Jews, which I don’t, I don’t see any serious group (>1% of the population) that believes this.

        • Lambert says:

          The moderates might be ok, but there’s been a load of anti-semitism on both the far left and far right.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Agreed. But those are non-serious groups making up less than 1% of the population, which is why I specified.

          • albatross11 says:

            For large-scale persecution, you care about averages–you couldn’t get large-scale persecution of Jews in the US, because the overwhelming majority of voters would be against it–so much so that even bringing the issue up would end your political career.

            For individual hate crimes/mass shootings/terrorist attacks you care about outliers. The one-in-a-million nutcase who’s convinced that he should shoot up a synogogue for the Aryan race or blow up a building for Allah is what matters, even if the overwhelming majority of people in the society are horrified by both actions.

            Mainstream media and internet environment might matter for the one-in-a-million crazies, but it’s hard to tell for sure. Perhaps the crazies would just find themselves a crazy corner of the internet to re-enforce their craziness anyway. I suspect that the trolling culture that makes jokes or casual horrible statements (one-way helicopter rides, ovens, etc.) might have an influence on the extreme crazies, but it’s hard to tell.

          • Anthony says:

            One pair of crazies didn’t like government employees and blew up a building full, in the pre-internet age.

        • J Mann says:

          My impression is that you’re at greater risk of an attack in the US or Western Europe if you’re visibly Jewish than most other groups, but I don’t have data to back it up, so I could easily be wrong.

          National leaders don’t personally condone attacking Jews, but many of them seem more comfortable associating with anti-Semites or getting pretty close to classic anti-Semitic claims than they would be for most other interest groups.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Data for the US only. Source: in 2017: https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/topic-pages/victims

            Blacks are the largest victims of hate crimes by a fairly substantial margin with 2459 victims.

            Jews and Whites are next behind them with 1016 and 865 victims respectively.

            Now, Jews are about a fifth as common as blacks, so they’re marginally more likely on a per-capita basis to be targeted, where whites are dramatically reduced there because we’re the majority.

            But none of these are at a seriously dangerous level. These are mostly relatively minor crimes. Only 2800 of these even rose to the level of simple assault. Aggravated assault, rape and murder make up only 1000 cases nationwide.

            Less than 1000 serious hate crimes yearly in a nation of 320 million people is basically a total eradication of hate.

          • Lambert says:

            If you average over the last 80 years, you’ll see why Jewish people are still kind of worried about antisemitism.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Lambert

            Averaged over the last 80 years, there is still no concern in the United States at all.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Is this independent of or because of Jewish anxiety?

        • broblawsky says:

          It only takes one person with an automatic weapon and a little luck to kill a lot of people, as we’ve seen (repeatedly) in the past. But hey, I’ll tell my synagogue that they should just disregard the death threats they’ve gotten and take down the concrete barriers they set up to stop someone from driving a truck into the building.

          • EchoChaos says:

            It only takes one person with an automatic weapon and a little luck to kill a lot of people

            I am not aware of any mass-murder in the US with an automatic weapon. There have been some in Europe, but those are mostly focused terror groups (i.e. the Bataclan).

            But hey, I’ll tell my synagogue that they should just disregard the death threats they’ve gotten and take down the concrete barriers they set up to stop someone from driving a truck into the building.

            This seems like an excellent example of paranoia beyond what is reasonable. Yes, it really sucks to be one of the 0.0003% (1000 per 320 million) people victimized yearly by a hate crime. But rationally, spending any serious amount of money on preventing this is fairly foolish. There are over 4000 synagogues in the United States. According to the only stats I could find, there have been 17 fatal attacks in the last four decades:

            https://forward.com/opinion/412868/pittsburgh-synagogue-murder-spree-is-latest-in-4-decades-of-anti-semitic/

            That is not a serious problem.

          • albatross11 says:

            Compare with fears of being bashed, doxxed, or SWATted by antifas and aligned folks. Or people worrying about getting murdered while driving through some bad neighborhood in the daytime. Both are statistically very unlikely to happen, but when they do happen, they’re spectacular and horrible, and that scares the hell out of people.

            Also add in that in living memory, a major political movement in Germany murdered like half the Jews in the world, and that there’s a really long history of Jews in Eastern Europe getting run out of town or mobbed or murdered because some rumor spread or some nobleman wanted to divert anger at himself toward a safer-for-him target. I share your evaluation of the actual risks, but I definitely understand why this sort of stuff is scary as hell.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @albatross11

            Those are excellent points for comparison. They are also not serious problems, but blown out of proportion by media for political reasons.

            And when you’re living in the country that crushed that German movement and has a history of welcoming Jews (the Confederacy was the first Western government with a Jew in a cabinet position!), European history doesn’t seem to apply.

          • broblawsky says:

            That is not a serious problem.

            This is a funny thing to say, considering that in your OP, you stated:

            And everyone, please don’t respond with comments like “that’s nonsense because …”. If you want to respond, please keep to “I” language, as in “I’m also a mutant ninja turtle but I don’t feel threatened; instead I feel …”

            How do you reconcile those two positions?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @broblawsky

            It wasn’t my OP, it was DinoNerd’s.

            And I had a separate response where I asked what could be done to reduce the fear that is felt, which sounds pretty disproportionate to the actual danger.

            As a white guy, there are people who want to kill/harm whites, and about the same number of anti-white hate crimes as anti-Jewish, but it isn’t a big fear. How can we get you to where I am?

          • broblawsky says:

            It wasn’t my OP, it was DinoNerd’s.

            OK, that’s on me. I misread.

            And I had a separate response where I asked what could be done to reduce the fear that is felt, which sounds pretty disproportionate to the actual danger.

            As a white guy, there are people who want to kill/harm whites, and about the same number of anti-white hate crimes as anti-Jewish, but it isn’t a big fear. How can we get you to where I am?

            Well, as you noted, you’re still much less likely to be the target of a hate crime. The risk you’re under for being white and Christian is far less than what I’m under for being white and Jewish.

            That being said, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if people would just shut up about George Soros. He seems to be some kind of weird focal point of international right-wing anti-Semitism, and propaganda related to him seems to crop up a lot in the motivation behind anti-Semitic hate crimes. Every time Fox News or Breitbart starts talking about him, I feel like they’re making the next synagogue attack that much sooner. There’s plenty of other prominent left-wing figures for people on the right to focus their hatred on; they could spread it around a little more.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            That being said, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if people would just shut up about George Soros.

            I’d feel alot more comfortable if George Soros used his money to party in his secret volcano lair with Jeffrey Epstein (the real one, not the body-double that’s 6 feet under, just kidding, or am I), instead of using it to push left wing politics and open borders.

            Antisemitic conspiracy theorists dont need Soros to fuel their delusions.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @broblawsky

            Well, as you noted, you’re still much less likely to be the target of a hate crime. The risk you’re under for being white and Christian is far less than what I’m under for being white and Jewish.

            In that both of us are in far more danger from virtually anything else, yes. A Jew has a 0.01% chance of being the victim of a hate crime yearly, a white a 0.004% chance. They’re within an order of magnitude of each other and both VERY SMALL.

            Edit to add: note this is the victim of any hate crime. Violent is far lower.

            That being said, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if people would just shut up about George Soros. He seems to be some kind of weird focal point of international right-wing anti-Semitism, and propaganda related to him seems to crop up a lot in the motivation behind anti-Semitic hate crimes.

            I genuinely know very little about him, so I can’t say if the amount of attention he receives is proportional to his efforts at all, and I don’t have much control over that.

            I certainly don’t talk about him much, and this board seems pretty good in that respect.

            Is your annoyance with criticism of him that it focuses on the fact he’s a Jew, or just that he is a particularly notable billionaire? It seems that there was plenty of dancing on the grave of David Koch, to use a white billionaire equivalent.

          • broblawsky says:

            I genuinely know very little about him, so I can’t say if the amount of attention he receives is proportional to his efforts at all, and I don’t have much control over that.

            I certainly don’t talk about him much, and this board seems pretty good in that respect.

            I’m not blaming you specifically, of course, and he doesn’t come up in SSC discussion often, except from certain banned commentators. He does, however, seem to be a bete noir for a certain specimen of right-wing pundit. Some of these people may not even be anti-Semites themselves, but they help propagate conspiracy theories that inevitably end up in the manifestos of mass murderers.

            Is your annoyance with criticism of him that it focuses on the fact he’s a Jew, or just that he is a particularly notable billionaire? It seems that there was plenty of dancing on the grave of David Koch, to use a white billionaire equivalent.

            I haven’t seen any hate crimes against white people/Christians inspired by anti-Koch propaganda, whereas Soros-related conspiracy theories are basically coterminous with modern anti-Semitism.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @broblawsky

            I consider that on the exact same level as the BLM movement about police brutality that inspired Micah Johnson.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers

            In both cases someone who had a pre-existing racial hatred used mainstream and acceptable criticism to justify horrible violence against his target group.

            I would no more want to restrict criticism of Soros than I would criticism of cops.

          • broblawsky says:

            I consider that on the exact same level as the BLM movement about police brutality that inspired Micah Johnson.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers

            In both cases someone who had a pre-existing racial hatred used mainstream and acceptable criticism to justify horrible violence against his target group.

            I would no more want to restrict criticism of Soros than I would criticism of cops.

            You asked what could be done to make me feel less afraid, I answered.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @broblawsky

            I’m not fighting with you. I really appreciate the answers. They let me calibrate where people are in their headspace.

          • albatross11 says:

            I don’t think it’s workable to demand that people not discuss the motives of highly visible billionaires who are heavily involved in funding various political causes. I understand this probably brings the antisemites out of the woodwork, but it’s no more reasonable to expect in Soros’ case than in the case of the Koch brothers.

          • broblawsky says:

            I don’t think it’s workable to demand that people not discuss the motives of highly visible billionaires who are heavily involved in funding various political causes. I understand this probably brings the antisemites out of the woodwork, but it’s no more reasonable to expect in Soros’ case than in the case of the Koch brothers.

            I’m not advocating for any kind of government stifling of Soros-related speech. I’m just saying that I and, I suspect, the rest of the Jewish community would be safer, or at least feel safer, if the right would give it a rest. It’d be the decent thing to do, IMO.

            As I mentioned, I’ve never seen any case where left-wing antipathy or conspiracy theories regarding the Koch brothers lead to a domestic terrorist attack or hate crime. The dialogue around Soros is uniquely toxic and dangerous.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @broblawsky

            It’d be the decent thing to do, IMO.

            This ties into the discussion about whether the left has an advantage in “niceness”. Because while it might be “nice” or “decent”, I don’t think ceasing discussions about a prominent politically active billionaire because it makes some people feel more anxious is at all “reasonable”.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @The Nybbler

            because it makes some people feel more anxious

            Especially when that anxiety is over a victimization rate of a hundredth of a percent that is essentially equivalent to that of whites.

          • broblawsky says:

            This ties into the discussion about whether the left has an advantage in “niceness”. Because while it might be “nice” or “decent”, I don’t think ceasing discussions about a prominent politically active billionaire because it makes some people feel more anxious is at all “reasonable”.

            I’d argue that there’s a direct causative link between the tenor of the discussion around Soros on the right and anti-Semitic terrorist attacks. That’s more than making people anxious.

          • albatross11 says:

            broblawsky:

            Why do you believe that? It seems like it’s really hard to establish any kind of a link between things people say in media and violent crazies going postal, in general, because of the extremely low base rate.

          • broblawsky says:

            Why do you believe that? It seems like it’s really hard to establish any kind of a link between things people say in media and violent crazies going postal, in general, because of the extremely low base rate.

            Because they keep mentioning Soros in their manifestos. Maybe they’d have substituted in some other Jew if he didn’t have such an outsize prominence in right-wing discourse, but I doubt it. That isn’t the kind of situation where someone lies about their motivations.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @broblawsky

            That sounds like “anti-Semite uses prominent Jew” rather than “criticism of prominent Jew creates anti-Semite”, which is a very different thing.

            Why do you think they wouldn’t use a different prominent Jewish billionaire like Michael Bloomberg?

          • Witness says:

            @broblawsky

            Not Jewish myself, so in the spirit of the thread I’ll accept that your fears make sense to you internally.

            My own mental model is that without some kind of high-profile name being circulated, the attack(s) still get carried out but with a manifesto blaming “the jews” instead of singling out one particular jew.

            Trying to put myself in your headspace, this might still make you feel safer because you’d feel like fewer people were “on the side of” the attacker in some way? I don’t think I can see a workable way to get there without bringing in other serious problems, but I can see why you’d want it.

          • Jake R says:

            @broblawsky

            For what little it’s worth, I’ve heard a fair amount of criticism of George Soros’s political activities from people on the right over the years. Until this thread I didn’t realize he was Jewish. None of the people on the right criticizing him ever brought it up.

          • JPNunez says:

            I am not aware of any mass-murder in the US with an automatic weapon. There have been some in Europe, but those are mostly focused terror groups (i.e. the Bataclan).

            The Las Vegas shooter used a bump stock on his semiauto rifle.

            Considering the bans against bump stocks got enacted immediately afterwards, I have to assume they realized bump stocks to be conversion tools that make otherwise semi autos into automatic rifles.

            So yeah, there hasn’t been a shooting with an automatic rifle, but there has been a shooting-with-a-tool-allowing-almost-automatic-fire-rate.

          • Anthony says:

            Soros is funding NGOs which directly attacks significant objectives of the cultural right, and made a billion or so dollars by forcing the UK into a recession, which cost the people of the UK multiple billions of dollars (pounds).

            Criticism of an evil Jew isn’t necessarily criticism of Jews in general.

            The left criticizes Sheldon Adelson an awful lot, but nobody calls that anti-semitic, even though some of the criticism is because Adelson promotes support for Israel. Left criticism of the Koch brothers is very similar to right criticism of Soros, maybe even more exaggerated, and I’d guess that not many of those criticizing the Koch brothers don’t know they’re not Jewish.

          • acymetric says:

            Was Malia Ngo named that intentionally? Because every time I see the NGO acronym that is where my brain goes.

          • Aapje says:

            Soros is like a mix of the Koch brothers and Putin. Like the Koch brothers, he spends a lot of money to advance his politics. Like Putin, he likes to interfere with the politics of foreign countries.

          • ECD says:

            @Anthony

            The left criticizes Sheldon Adelson an awful lot, but nobody calls that anti-semitic, even though some of the criticism is because Adelson promotes support for Israel.

            Except this is not true.

            A search for “Soros” “Anti-semitic” gives you 34,000 Google News results while “Adelson” “Anti-semitic” gives you 21,300 results, but still (I’m sure there are better methods, but this was quick).

            ETA: One more link. On Soros himself, well, a separate top level comment might be an interesting discussion, especially from our more capitalist and libertarian fellows on how evil it is to make money in the manner he did.

      • DragonMilk says:

        If it makes you feel any better, my wife (and to a lesser extent me) are pro-semitic, if there is such a thing.

        She thinks Jews are smart and hardworking and people say she has an automatic crush on someone if she finds out they’re Jewish.

        I personally think it’s just that Jewish upbringings are similar to Chinese, and history of persecution (Chinese Exclusion Act, etc.)

      • EchoChaos says:

        I want to go back to an object level and discuss the fear, which is very bad.

        What could be done to reduce the feeling of fear you have on that tribal level?

    • dweezle says:

      I don’t feel like my tribe or political ideology is being threatened so much as its just outright ignored on a state level. As a marijuana legalization proponent living in a bible belt state the topic is an absolute non starter in polite company and it infuriates me to no end.

      Whats funny is I’m pretty far left on most of the battleground issues, except for idpol and immigration. This means most of my co workers think i’m a hippie and many of the artsy far left girls i would like to hang out with think i’m a racist/misogynist.

      probably not exactly what you were asking for, but if i was to say how much airtime ideas i agree with get locally it would be none.

    • J Mann says:

      My wife works in academia. Her biggest complaint is that the culture in her workplace is mildly but consistently hostile to mainstream religion. There’s a reasonable amount of random complaints about and disparagement of Bible bangers (sometimes with a “Not you, of course, Ms. Mann”), including from her bosses, but sweat lodges, spiritual yoga and crystals are cool.

      Her existence isn’t threatened by any means, and she likes the job and her co-workers, but she definitely thinks twice before she discusses religion at work, or objects to people putting down religion.

      • albatross11 says:

        +1

        This is true of my workplace, too–nobody’s going to persecute me for being Catholic, but the subset of people in my office who are religious and serious about it definitely stands out, and sometimes this is a bit uncomfortable. And casual comments disparaging religion are relatively common.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          Funnily enough, my personal experience is almost the direct opposite, being a declared atheist in a company that is overwhelmingly Catholic (even if not particularly devout).

          • acymetric says:

            I was going to point out that this one cuts both ways depending on the industry and probably more importantly the specific company/business you are working for. I had a somewhat uncomfortable time working at Chick-fil-a in college (although they were a good employer to work for relative to other fast food options generally).

            One thing I sometimes wonder about Christian perception of modern persecution (this is based on my experience as an active participant in the Church up until I graduated high school) and how much of it is influenced or over-percieved based on the high degree of emphasis placed on talking about historic persecution of Christians, modern persecution of Christians in non-Christian parts of the world, and subtly implying that even in the predominantly Christian western world that Christians are being persecuted even now (this was a Presbyterian church, I don’t know if that emphasis was unique to the church, denomination, or if it fits with how things are done generally). It always felt especially weird because it was a church full of highly successful people where the median income would probably have been upwards of $150-$200k (a lot of doctors, lawyers, and people in finance).

          • J Mann says:

            Just to clarify, I was answering the OP’s question, not claiming persecution. (I tried my best not to overstate it, and albatross11 literally disclaimed persecution).

            As to the general Christian sense of persecution, my reading is that:

            – There definitely are some countries where Christians are persecuted. Many Christians seem to feel that human rights organizations, media, politicians, etc. are disproportionately disinterested in combating that persecution, but I’m not sure if that’s right.

            – It’s definitely true that the balance of power is shifting (slowly) against Christians’ interests. Whether making Catholic organizations pay (even through a cut-out) for birth control or arguing that judges shouldn’t be believed if they claim they will apply the law fairly but are also devout Christians counts as “persecution” is up to the speaker, probably. (I think it’s strong, but I think we may be approaching a tipping point where it will be very difficult to be devoutly Christian, and maybe Jewish, in polite society but probably still OK to be most other religions.)

            I don’t know how to compare that to people who say that their existence is being denied if Jordan Peterson is allowed to speak at their college or that the Trump election is literally a matter of life and death for them.

            My instinct is that most people would benefit from reframing so that their life isn’t in a constant emergency, but of course, I don’t live in anybody else’s head, Christian, LGBTQ+ or what have you.

          • acymetric says:

            @J Mann

            Hopefully that didn’t come across as specifically directed at you (well, the first paragraph was a direct response, but the second was a more general observation). I interpreted your post exactly the way you intended and found it entirely reasonable.

            I agree with everything you just wrote, but especially the last paragraph, although it is a very difficult line to walk. Some people/groups do have significant existential problems that they need addressed, but framing it as everyone being on the verge of major crisis probably isn’t helping anyone. Similarly, I think victim-blaming is especially bad, but I also think framing people as permanent victims where being a victim is supposed to be an intractable, core part of their identity from now to the end of time is also pretty bad for those people.

          • J Mann says:

            @acymetric – thanks!

            (P.s. I meant to say that I don’t think the case for current prosecution is very strong, but again, I can’t see into someone else’s head).

          • Corey says:

            @J Mann:

            I think we may be approaching a tipping point where it will be very difficult to be devoutly Christian, and maybe Jewish, in polite society but probably still OK to be most other religions.

            75% of American adults identified as Christian in 2015 (source: Google I just did). Certainly it’s *possible* to shun a group that’s 3/4 of the country, but seems unlikely.

    • mitv150 says:

      I am generally conservative among a very liberal population. My career involves business development and convincing clients to sign on with me. My social life and my children’s social life are intertwined (my social peer group are the parents of my children’s social peer group).

      I see otherwise very intelligent people (my peers and some friends) with social media posts that are extremely hostile to Trump supporters in particular and conservatives in general. I see some posts the explicitly state that being a Trump supporter is not socially acceptable. Conversationally, it is perfectly acceptable within my community to cavalierly denigrate Trump. I have seen this behavior in nine year olds as well.

      I am extremely careful about how I voice my political opinions for both career and social reasons. My liberal peers are extremely cavalier about voicing their political opinions.

    • Jack says:

      I think I am being indirectly referenced here, so. I have no strong feelings on how the future is going to go regarding the public acceptability of queerness. The “existence being denied” thing is feminist epistemology jargon that I tried to explain in the last thread, not a fear that I will be personally progromed. However, I do consider it plausible that there will be a near-future backslide in acceptance of queers–roll-back of anti-discrimination legislation, growing civil society coalitions of homophobes, eventually all the out queers get sacked and people look the other way when they are attacked in the streets–not for protesting or anything, but for seeming a little faggy. There is an ongoing simmering undercurrent of homophobia here in sunny liberal Toronto, not the structural disadvantage kind but the shouts-faggot-at-you-on-the-street kind. If we get some actual fascism or McCarthyism this can all be systematized and you get your worst-case scenario. These are all things that have actually happened to gays (and Jews and…) in liberal democracies in the last century. This is the kind of scaremongering that spooks me: “How the Nazis destroyed the first gay rights movement”. I do not think any of this is likely (except maybe roll-back of anti-discrimination legislation), but likely enough to worry about and be vigilant about.

      Also, thank you for your attempt to tell people not to deny each other’s existence.

    • Garrett says:

      I worked for Google. This should have been the pinnacle of my career – the best place to work, etc. Instead, it was made clear to me from day 2 that there was a strong internal political framework, from month 3 that the company cared more about diversity than it did its future core revenue streams, and from year 2 that a serious attempt at internal disagreement will get someone named, shamed, and fired. So I left. But I notice that all left-wing social policy and regulation is acceptable and right-wing isn’t, especially around employment discrimination.

      If it wasn’t for Trump being stupid around other rights I care about, it would have led me to vote for him.

  26. Falacer says:

    I’m looking for a way to display data in a particular way and I don’t have the terminology to describe it to make searching easy. I have a dataset that consists of a number of events with two possible outcomes, the number of times each event happened, and the frequency of each event’s positive outcome. Is there a good metric for displaying this information that takes into account that 50% positive outcomes out of 2 occurrences is less significant that out of 100 occurrences? There’s probably a really simple way to weight this but my statistics knowledge was never very deep.

    • rubberduck says:

      Not a statistician, but if there are only 2 outcomes, then 50% shouldn’t be meaningful in any case regardless of the number of occurrences, right? You can’t disprove that getting outcome A or B is random, if you are seeing a 50-50 chance. Wouldn’t you be more interested in events where you have statistically significant deviations from a 50-50 split?

    • Lambert says:

      95% confidence bars?
      If n=2, they’ll be really wide. If n=100,000, the’ll be much narrower (compared to n).

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      The best way to show the relationship between two variables.on a data set is nearly always a scatter plot.

      In this case, there are two obvious ways of doing it. You could plot successes against failures, with rays to indicated equal chances of success.

      But I think a better option would be to plot proportion successful against some function of number of observations. A good choice.of.functiom might be 1/ sqrt(n), so that standard deviation is linear in x, but other choices are.reasonable too.

      Or you could plot proportion successful p against sqrt p(1-p)/n,.so that standard deviation under the maximum likelihood model really is.constant in x.

    • Incurian says:

      How about a stacked bar chart?

    • Perico says:

      I would go for a scatter plot with the event type on the x-axis, the % of positive outcomes for the event on the y axis, and point size proportional to occurrences for that event. Depending on the details of your dataset, you may want to switch the x and y axis for readability. Sorting the events in the plot by % of positive outcomes takes a bit of extra work, but it can make the plot much clearer.

      For reference, I’m thinking something like the 4th figure in here: https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/geom_point.html

    • matthewravery says:

      Depends what the point of your plot is. If your main point is to show the proportion of positive outcomes for each of your events, then you should probably what Lambert describes. Your x-axis is “Event”, your y-axis is “Probability of Positive Outcome”, and for each Event, you plot the average and include a set of error bars. There are a million calculators online that will give you standard errors for a binomial random variable, which is the technical term for each of your set of events outcomes. The size of the error bars highlights the number of observations. If you’re leery of using error bars (or you don’t want to assume things like each observed outcome is independent), you can skip the error bars and show the number observations through some other variable encoding, like the size of the dots or their color. (Make sure to use a sequential color scale if that’s the route you want to go.)

      Alternatively, if you want to emphasize the number of times you observed each event and the actual probabilities are less important, you could do as Incurian suggests and use a stacked bar chart, with the number of observations as your y-axis. This will have the benefit of clearly showing differences in observation frequencies, though your readers may have trouble making fine distinctions in the relative frequencies of positive outcomes from one event to the next.

      Still another alternative is to use a stacked bar chart with proportion on the y-axis and just include the number of positive and negative outcomes for each event on the bars as text! I’ve been making a ton of bar charts lately, and this is a relatively clear way to do things, since you both get the exact frequencies and exact probabilities to display on the chart. Actually, you could just do the dots as above and include the number of observations there.

      I’ll second the suggestion for ggplot (a package in R, which Perico linked), which can do all of the things I suggested above with relative ease.

  27. Aapje says:

    I think that what many of these writers who want to change the world are missing is that ideas are not a force of nature that people will just adopt because it makes sense to the author. These ideas actually have to make sense to the reader. In history, you see that the statesmen, writers and academics who made a change were those whose ideas resonated with many and/or those with power.

    The biggest contribution that people can make in this respect is to offer ideas that both resonate and that result in good outcomes. For example, similar unhappiness that led to communism in Russia, led to social-democratic reforms in other countries. The latter had a lot better outcomes, IMO.

    The problem is that most people are very poor at predicting outcomes, figuring out what resonates, have moral or emotional mental blocks to even understanding other people, have a ton of biases, etc. This is true for both idea-makers and idea-consumers.

    It’s possible to follow “all the right steps,” like Boot did

    He didn’t, because he mispredicted the outcome of an Iraq War. So he already failed at the very first step. The more the rest of his steps failed, the better it actually was for humanity.

    So the best outcome is probably if he stops opinionating and does something he is good at. Of course, he probably won’t, because he almost certainly likes his job more than he likes doing what is best for humanity, yet also almost certainly doesn’t want to accept this. The resulting cognitive dissonance makes it very likely that he will come up with a falsehood that allows him to keep opinionating.

  28. johan_larson says:

    So, California has passed statewide rent control legislation.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/business/economy/california-rent-control.html

    I can understand why people want this. Housing prices in some places in California, notably Plumberland, are really out of control. But I would be a whole lot more impressed with the bill if it did anything at all to increase the supply of housing. This seems like a missed opportunity for some of the more conservative lawmakers of the state to say, “Yes, but.”

    • Plumber says:

      @johan_larson says:

      “…I would be a whole lot more impressed with the bill if it did anything at all to increase the supply of housing…”

      There’s another bill to do that (mostly by reducing the power of local governments to restrict the building of new housing).

      Strangely, while the efforts of the State to overrule municipal government restrictions of housing construction have been prominent in The San Francisco Chronicle, the bill for statewide rent control (which seems a much bigger deal!) hasn’t been (your post is the first time I’ve seen anything about it!), though I suppose that nay be explained by Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco already having rent control.

      • Plumber says:

        My mistake, the story was front page news in The Chronicle this morning (with lots of mentions of other housing bills).

        Still seems weird that thus wasn’t more prominent till now.

    • J Mann says:

      Rent control is one of the most interesting public policy issues. As far as I know, there’s almost a universal expert consensus that it’s a disaster, but governments keep enacting it. It’s particularly funny in California, where the logic seems to be.

      1) The Bay area has rent control and a severe shortage in the supply of available housing, so:

      2) We will solve this problem by requiring the rest of California to have rent control!

      I suppose non-millionaires can always try to commute from Nevada.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Millionaires probably commute more – it’ll be cheaper to buy a helicopter than a house. If it isn’t already.

      • JohnNV says:

        As a Nevadan, I can say that house prices in Reno have roughly tripled in the last decade as both people and companies get priced out of the bay area. I don’t think we have the concentration of talent to be considered a tech hub like Austin/Seattle/Denver, but I can see it happening in the next ten years. Then maybe we can get an SSC meetup in the area. Sorry guys, I love this site but I’m not driving to Sacramento for it.

      • Jack says:

        On rent control I disagree that there is “almost a universal expert consensus that it’s a disaster”. Assuming the experts in question are economists, we have things like the IGM panel survey. I think it fair to say that there is a universal consensus among economists that certain rent control policies will diminish the supply and/or quality of rental housing. I have two main issues with turning this into “rent control is a disaster”.

        First, the worst rent control policies (including the San Francisco and New York policies in the IGM poll) did not include a number of features that are now normal in rent control policies. For instance, the California legislation includes vacancy decontrol, ie rent for a new tenant can be set at whatever the market can bear; limits only apply to existing tenancies. Also, the California legislation exempts new buildings. Both of these will reduce the negative effects on the supply of housing.

        Second, one purpose, arguably the main purpose of rent control, isn’t to encourage supply, it’s to protect tenants from high rent increases. There are economic and non-economic arguments for why we might want to do this. But the relevant point here is, to decide whether “experts” think rent control is a disaster you can’t just ask them what it does to supply. You have to ask them how the supply effects weigh against the salutary effects of protecting some tenants. (A similar issue comes up in minimum wage debates: it turns out that if you bother to ask economists whether “the distortionary costs of raising the federal minimum wage … are sufficiently small compared with the benefits to low-skilled workers who can find employment that this would be a desirable policy” then, in some contexts, the answer is generally yes.)

        In other words, modern rent control policies have a number of features designed to reduce the bad supply effects and better target the protections to needy tenants. There are conversations to be had about the degree to which a good balance has been struck, but to have them we need to move past saying that there is an economic consensus that rent control is a disaster.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Second, one purpose, arguably the main purpose of rent control, isn’t to encourage supply, it’s to protect tenants from high rent increases. There are economic and non-economic arguments for why we might want to do this.

          I get this. Oregon also enacted rent control in Portland out of empathy and fear for becoming the #2 homeless city after San Francisco (which has the most human #2 in public), and I don’t find that as disagreeable as… pretty much everything else the governing class here does.
          However, imposing rent control on all of California seems to be tackling issues at the wrong level, just because their power extends up to that level. Letting the rent be whatever the market will bear doesn’t lead to evictions whose result is homelessness everywhere in California!

        • salvorhardin says:

          I think there is an implicit value judgment behind the “typical” analysis of rent control, namely that the interests of the few existing tenants helped by rent control are relatively low in moral weight next to the long-term interest in supply increases to accommodate prospective future tenants, and that rent control is typically a policy failure caused by the fact that the few tenants who benefit are disproportionately politically powerful.

          This is at least a plausible judgment on most moral views, but you’re right that it should be made an explicit condition for the conclusion. Similar things are true about arguments for free trade and against Prop 13: part of the liberal/”dynamist” worldview is the conviction that regulatory protections for entrenched incumbents that hurt long-term efficiency are bad. If you hold that general conviction it is pretty hard to defend rent control, trade protectionism, or Prop 13. We shouldn’t take it for granted that everyone shares that conviction, but we also shouldn’t shrink from the correct assumption that all civilized people should share it.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          You have to ask them how the supply effects weigh against the salutary effects of protecting some tenants.

          Surely the standard economists’ answer would be that this “salutary effect” is simply a transfer from landlords to renters– in other words, no (first-order) welfare effect at all?

          • J Mann says:

            As I understand it, economists generally don’t opine on transfers as a matter of justice – it’s a policy question whether you want to take some money that landlords currently have and give it to renters.

            But they do opine on effects, and generally rent control leads to a lot of deadweight loss.

          • Jack says:

            Rent caps might reduce turn-over. Turn-over has various costs including moving expenses. The cost tenant advocates care about is in the loss of a home. A landlord will replace a tenant who can only afford to pay (market rate) – (amortized costs of replacing a tenant) – x each month with a tenant who can pay market rate, and thereby make x/mo. more money. But the welfare effect of this replacement depends on how much each tenant values the places they started and ended up in. Suppose that living in a home for a long time makes it particularly valuable to you, so that replacing a long-lived tenant with a new one causes a welfare differential of y. We have a negative welfare effect whenever x<y, namely, ripping a person from their home to make a buck.

            I am not qualified to have a detailed argument about this, but I understand that to be the gist. The key intuition is that the individual value of staying in a home is large and can't be transferred.

          • Jack says:

            @J Mann funny you wrote that before I refreshed the page. You describe the same situation where y is negative–also a welfare effect as you describe. Whether y is going to be positive or negative depends on a lot of things.

          • salvorhardin says:

            @Jack on the other hand, if you want to move into a new place but your only economically reasonable option is to stay where you are, because your current place is rent-controlled and places you might go would not be (and are less available and more expensive because of the supply restriction cost of rent control), that’s a significant welfare loss too. Not just from the use-value loss from staying in a less nice place, but e.g. the economic loss of foregone opportunity to move somewhere where you could commute to a better job.

          • Jack says:

            @salvorhardin I agree! I only meant to give an example of why rent control might have effects on total welfare beyond its distribution, an example that I think is particularly relevant to the conversation because it motivates advocates.

            That said, whether your example works depends on the laws on assignment of a tenancy and how easy it is in practice to do. In Ontario, a landlord can agree to let a tenant assign a tenancy to a new tenant at the current rate (and cannot unreasonably refuse). If I do not particularly like where I live, I can assign the tenancy to a new tenant and make a side-deal with them to account for our different valuations. I think this never happens, which perhaps argues some combination of: a) it’s too hard to do and b) the loss you describe is not that large.

          • abystander says:

            @jack

            If a rent controlled apartment can be assigned to another tenant without the landlord being able to raise the rent, then vacancy decontrol is effectively eliminated. The moving tenant will always collect a payment to assign the unit to another person if there is a significant difference between current and market rate.

          • Jack says:

            @abystander Vancancy decontrol is not eliminated, because the landlord’s consent to an assignment is required and assignment involves the current tenant in the search costs of the new tenant. But I partly agree. The law on assignment in my jurisdiction is unclear. Specifically, the landlord’s consent for an assignment is needed but cannot unreasonably be refused and I’m not sure what “unreasonably” means in this context. I think in principle the landlord could make a side-deal with the former tenant, thus effectively increasing the rent. If they tried this with the new tenant it would be illegal rent. None of this happens either. I still think that the possibility of assignments that don’t happen is evidence that there is not a big loss in misallotment of units to tenants who don’t value them as much as other tenants might.

        • Also, the California legislation exempts new buildings.

          As best I recall, New York had at least one round of rent control only applies to existing buildings so as not to discourage construction”/new construction/rent control now expanded to cover the new buildings.

          Even if the initial legislators honestly want to keep new construction exempt, wouldn’t you expect the same political forces that led to rent control on the existing buildings to apply a decade later to any construction since? How do the current legislators bind future legislators to keep their promise?

          • Jack says:

            The legislators don’t bind future legislators. In my jurisdiction, a couple decades of back-and-forth created the following beautiful piece of legislation:

            [rent control sections] do not apply with respect to a rental unit if,
            (a) it was not occupied for any purpose before June 17, 1998;
            (b) it is a rental unit no part of which has been previously rented since July 29, 1975; or
            (c) no part of the building … was occupied for residential purposes before November 1, 1991.

            It would be nice to have something like, buildings less than x years old are exempt, so that it rolls in gradually. But the same political economy that prevents minimum wages being indexed probably applies.

        • abystander says:

          First, the worst rent control policies (including the San Francisco and New York policies in the IGM poll) did not include a number of features that are now normal in rent control policies. For instance, the California legislation includes vacancy decontrol, ie rent for a new tenant can be set at whatever the market can bear; limits only apply to existing tenancies. Also, the California legislation exempts new buildings. Both of these will reduce the negative effects on the supply of housing.

          San Francisco rent control law does have vacancy decontrol and exemptions for new buildings. Although the exemption for new buildings is somewhat negated by the permitting process which often requires for construction of a percentagle of rent controled units for permission to build.

      • JPNunez says:

        I assume that everyone knows rent control is bad, but the alternative is a lot more work; to build more housing, either with the state or by private actors, requires investment, maybe buying property from current owners, changing land use, etc. Some of these may require rising taxes, so rent control it is.

        alternative take: does anybody really commute regularly by helicopter? sounds dangerous.

        • The Nybbler says:

          alternative take: does anybody really commute regularly by helicopter? sounds dangerous.

          Yes, to NYC. Looks dangerous, too, with the helicopters landing on this little strip of pavement between a fence and a river. But I haven’t heard of a wreck in a while. Occasionally people try to start up services to let the upper-upper-middle-class partake rather than just the filthy rich, cost being in the $200-$400 round trip range. But most of those services quickly vanish. If we consider a $200 round trip, it’s just under $50,000 per year…. which is probably about twice the property tax difference between a close-in normally-commutable mansion and a far away helicopter-commutable one. And it’s going to be far cheaper than a similar size place in Manhattan, which may not be available for any price.

    • Randy M says:

      Great, does this mean rent increase every month for the rest of the year?

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      San Francisco has the highest US homeless population per capita. The thinking probably goes “Economists say rent control is really bad, because abstruse reasons. But if it’s illegal for landlords to evict just to get more money and also raise the rent of existing tenants too much, fewer people become homeless. That’s more important!”
      How this justifies forcing rent control on all of California, I don’t know.

      • rho says:

        Yeah, but like, it’s hardly homelessness if you live in San Francisco. Build some public free showers and I would go camping in San Fran.

        • Enkidum says:

          I’ve slept on the streets in San Francisco (well, actually in Golden Gate Park). It’s cold and damp as hell. Not pleasant at all. LA would be another story.

          • rho says:

            I thought maybe it would get too hot in LA. Maybe San Fran isn’t optimal, maybe San Jose would be better, or steal or forge a badge and be homeless on Google’s campus or something <_<

          • quanta413 says:

            LA can be really hot a bit inland but right on the coast is usually pretty nice.

        • Plumber says:

          @rho,
          We have shanty towns emerging now (one on 7th Street in San Francisco that the City demolished last year, and it was front page news of Oakland and the Highway authority going to demolish a few more, and every cold rainy winter a bunch of guys break windows and wait fir the police to arrest them and they get three hots and a cot so there’s many new arrivals in the jail I repair in San Francisco.

          Combine that with public defecation and discarded needles and it’s pretty bad, in the last three years the number of the “unsheltered” in Alameda County ( across the bridge from San Francisco where I live) has more than doubled, and the homeless aren’t all hippie “free spirits” like in the ’70’s, they mostly look old now, and more are dying on the street.

          High housing costs mixed with a drug addiction epidemic isn’t fun.

    • BBA says:

      It only makes sense as an epicycle. There’s a housing shortage due to restrictive zoning, and landlords are getting a windfall from the property tax cap. But both of those are so overwhelmingly popular that it’d be political suicide to act against them. So instead, throw in rent control to make things more “fair.”

      Two wrongs don’t make a right but three rights make a left…as long as you’re on a rectangular grid…uh, this metaphor is getting away from me, but I think you get what I’m getting at. Obviously it’d be much better not to do any of these three things.

    • Ketil says:

      How do people feel about “social” housing as implemented in Vienna, Zurich, or Copenhagen? As far as I understand, this consists of authorities either constructing buildings or below market value properties with strings attached (collective or non-profit ownership housing with rent limitations).

      My prior is to be skeptical of invasive government regulation, but the stories I find seem mostly positive? (Well, there’s advice about hiring a lawyer to rent an apartment in Vienna, and of course, interviewing the inhabitants a.k.a. recipients of special privilege is likely to be a little biased….)

      • Anthony says:

        Ketil – public housing in the U.S. has turned out to be a disaster, because housing authorities don’t evict nuisance, or even criminal, tenants.

        There are at least two additional programs – Section 8 and low-income set-asides.

        In Section 8, the landlord, in exchange for meeting some minimum requirements and doing some paperwork, gets a subsidy from the Feds to make up the difference between the “market” rent and what the tenant “can afford”. (The quoted amounts are determined by the Feds, but tend to be reasonably close to reality.) A Section 8 tenancy is a private-sector transaction, and is subject to all local rent-and-eviction controls. People who make enough to not qualify for Section 8 usually avoid apartment buildings which accept Section 8 tenants.

        Low-income set-asides are where the local government requires developers to set aside a fraction of their new units for low-income people (in SF, they have middle-income set-asides for people making under $100k/year). There’s usually no cash transfer – the developer makes up the difference by setting higher rents on the other units. I’m less familiar with the process, but I understand the local government vets the eligibility of people for the set-aside units. I also understand that eligible people tend to be clients of local politicians. This, however, probably means they’re a somewhat better class of tenant.

        As Steve Sailer says, one of the worst things about being poor in America is having to live near other poor people.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          I’m less familiar with the process, but I understand the local government vets the eligibility of people for the set-aside units.

          Having to go through a gov’t bureaucracy that vets your income whenever you submit a rental application to the owner of an apartment building sounds like it would create a foolish amount of friction in the economy.

          I also understand that eligible people tend to be clients of local politicians.

          Oh, well, maybe not!

          • mitv150 says:

            Having to go through a gov’t bureaucracy that vets your income whenever you submit a rental application to the owner of an apartment building sounds like it would create a foolish amount of friction in the economy.

            That “friction” is a feature not a bug. The social safety net bureaucracy does double duty by providing a great deal of employment.

      • Thomas Jorgensen says:

        Directly building housing is effective at addressing housing shortages. Water is also wet. It requires your local politicians to be competent urban planners, and to not commit a list of known Errors, but it works.

  29. EchoChaos says:

    One of the comments last week commented that both CW tribes, Blue and Red, feel under assault because they’re losing. The Blue tribe is losing as business regulations, housing regulations, taxes, etc. get more and more laxened, while the Reds feel beaten because they’re losing on every front (except abortion, where they’re at best holding). Gay marriage is legal, etc.

    Which made me think that the peak unity time for America was the 1950s, when the exact opposite was true. Union regulations, social safety nets, high taxes, huge infrastructure projects were the Blue wet dream, largely a legacy of FDR and Truman, but even Eisenhower was behind them. But socially, the 1950s were deeply conservative. Abortion was still banned, pushing family formation was the top social issue for the government and mass deportations were the order of the day.

    Hypothesis: The left really cares deeply about fiscal issues, but will take a win on social if they can. The right really cares deeply about social issues, but will take a win on fiscal if they can. Since they’re winning on the “wrong” one of their legs, they feel like they’re losing far more than they are.

    • Two McMillion says:

      I, a lifelong conservative, have often said that I would be more willing to go along with left-wing economic programs if they promised me some social conservatism in the bargain.

      • albatross11 says:

        I suspect this has a lot to do with the makeup of the coalitions of the two big parties. Social and religious conservatives provide a lot of the voters and campaign workers for the Republicans, but in practice, the Republicans have mostly lost on the social issues that those folks care about. (Often they’ve lost, not by votes, but by supreme court decisions.). A common sentiment I’ve seen in right-leaning places online is that Republican elites care a lot about deregulation and free trade and military spending and wars, a little about lowering taxes, not very much about moral/social issues, and are actively hostile to their base’s views w.r.t. immigration. I think this (justifiable, IMO) belief drove Trump’s success running as an outsider to his party. (In some sense, he was running against the big city rich Ivy-educated elites who got lots of TV time, which is kinda delicious irony when you think about it.)

        Similarly, it seems like for the last few decades, organized labor has provided voters and campaign workers and gotten very few actual victories from Democratic elites, who are also on board with free trade and more-or-less open immigration and a big military and a lot of wars, maybe a little skeptical of deregulation and lower taxes, on board with more generous social programs, and very likely to win victories on social/moral issues thanks to the makeup of the supreme court and most people in media.

        In both cases, substantial parts of the base for the parties has been getting some lip service in the platforms, but very little actual success on issues they care about.

        • Corey says:

          Supreme Court is in the process of swinging, and will be solidly Republican for a generation, so some of those losses will be undone.

          • Nick says:

            How confident are you of that? If Ginsberg or Breyer get replaced with an Amy Coney Barrett, I could see it happening. But I don’t see the current Court overturning Roe or any of the others, confidence maybe 80%. I think where we see overturnings, they’ll be more like the union dues case last year.

          • Corey says:

            The replacement is the thing I’m pretty confident about. The replacement will have to be significantly less liberal, even if appointed by a Democrat, because Republicans have a lock on the Senate for the foreseeable future. Roberts is already the median vote.

          • albertborrow says:

            Supreme Court values consistency above all else, because internal consistency is what grants them the power they have. They rarely overturn decisions, even if they want to, because they get their power from deciding what the Constitution means, and the Constitution does not change meaning unless it is amended. The list of overturned Supreme Court cases is barely a page long, and if they ever contradict an earlier verdict, it’s almost never directly. That isn’t to say it’s impossible, but it’s definitely unlikely.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        I don’t think they can promise you that. Social conservatism is necessarily a matter of norms first and foremost, and you can’t negotiate norms. For example trying to legislate abortion is, IMO, misguided at best. Proper strategy would be shaming casual abortions – which should also be easier because well, they are shameful. Not many of the classic pro-choice arguments can really justify “I was too lazy to take a pill”.

        • mtl1882 says:

          The problem is that a significant portion of society can’t tolerate the “shameless,” and, as you said, the classic arguments aren’t effective against it. This caught my eye because it has come up recently among some of my friends and family, women aged 25-45, automatic pro-choicers because they have lived their whole lives in blue states, and are secular, and driven by “practicality,” and generally politically apathetic. Three or four have brought up to me encountering or hearing about women who have had “casual” abortion(s), and who have apparently shared this information without any shame. They suddenly seemed in favor of legislation, even though they could not articulate how it would be applied or enforced. I suspect this will be an increasing issue, and this unfocused urge to legislate (present with regard to many issues) is one of the major things that rings alarm bells for me when it comes to politics. It seems like these things operate on an inevitable pendulum due to this dynamic.

          • DinoNerd says:

            Even with abortion illegal, and whatever shaming there used to be before various pro-freedom social victories, back street illegal abortions were a thing, as were women dying of them. You might also consider checking your own family tree for female relatives who died after “falling down the stairs” – falling down stairs on purpose seems to have been a popular way to attempt to induce a miscarriage.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @DinoNerd

            Sure, people do illegal things, that’s a given.

            Still, the orders of magnitude are dramatically different, and since pro-lifers believe that abortion is murder, the argument that you have to legalize killing babies because some women died attempting to kill their babies is hardly going to resonate.

          • mtl1882 says:

            @DinoNerd

            Just to make it clear, I do not support making abortion illegal. At all. My point is that your argument doesn’t seem to be working on the people I’m talking about. They are mad at people who do it “casually,” and they are generally unable to process the alternative because they don’t have experience with it. Confronted with the situations you brought up, they would be horrified. My point is that they currently don’t see it, and so they are focused on the horror at the other end of the pendulum swing–what they perceive as a horror. Any attempt to seriously legislate abortion would not last long, IMO. I think it has way more support than a lot of people recognize, but the support is not rooted in an understanding of what it would look like, or could look like.

            In an unsettling way, I think the people I spoke of do not believe these women who handle these things so “casually” would ever endanger themselves by a risky procedure. That is what bothers them. That they can do it so safely. It is all messed up. I’m not saying I agree with them. I’m just commenting on a dynamic I’ve noticed. A lot of people are very obsessed with what other people “deserve” and “get away with.” Downthread, someone says that his or her female relatives, lifelong republicans, have bolted based on the abortion thing. So maybe there will be a weird swap. And it would make sense on the pendulum thing–they may be used to hearing it shamed, and tend to recoil when it looks like someone with those beliefs might crack down harshly. That is harder to visualize if you live in a place where the discussion isn’t typically so intense.

          • DinoNerd says:

            All I’m really saying above is that shaming didn’t work in the past, so probably won’t work in the future. It won’t solve the problem, but it will create bad side effects. Even making abortions illegal didn’t solve the pro-fetal-lifers’ problem; but it caused worse side effects than shaming.

            In a different world, I could perhaps compromise with someone who thought that fetuses had a right to be born – at least those fetuses that wouldn’t be spontaneously miscarried anyway.

            But they’d have to be clear on whether their goal was
            – fetuses that are conceived aren’t aborted
            – pre- and extramarital sex is minimized (e.g. by increasing its risks etc.)
            – women are punished for having sex, for becoming pregnant, etc.
            – people are punished for violating the morality the pro-fetal-lifer personally subscribes to/the rules of the pro-fetal-lifer’s religion

            In my experience, most self described pro-lifers are operating from a mix of several of these motives.

            I’d also be much happier to compromise with pro-lifers who were doing things to help babies, children, teens etc. – rather than simply acting as if “pro-life” is entirely about keeping fetuses alive.

            I have no use at all for a person who wants to restrict both sex-education (= practical knowledge of how to avoid conception) and abortion. In my youth, the typical “good Christian” opposed both.

            I also have little use for a person who wants to restrict abortion in any case where carrying the baby to term would be more expensive, less safe, or both. (Unfortunately, having a baby is higher risk for the mother than an early abortion, so this is hard for pro-fetal-lifers to satisfy. And medical care is expensive/unavailable for far too many people in the US system.)

            I also have little use for any pro-fetal-lifer who is unaware of the normal phenomenon of spontaneous miscarriage – depending at what stage they start calling the zygote/embryo/fetus a “baby”, it may have a fairly high chance of not surviving to be born even if it’s desperately wanted by its parents. (Lots of “heavy periods” involve a conception that may not have lasted long enough to even be noticed.)

            From where I sit, the best way to reduce abortions is social pressure – and education – in favour of effective contraception. Blue tribers playing musical beds – often without much moral concern – don’t seem to conceive anywhere near as often as red tribe teenagers 🙁 And blue tribe venues prone to unusual rates of musical beds (e.g. sci fi conventions) tend to make condoms freely and anonymously available.

            I frankly see almost no self-described pro-lifers speaking in favour of contraception or results-based sex education – they’d rather try to shame people out of having sex at all, and presumably encourage a shotgun wedding (or putting the child up for adoption, if it’s white) when their attempt fails.

            Given these observations, I see the pro-fetal-lifers as arguing in bad faith. Of course this doesn’t apply to all pro-fetal-life individuals, or all organizations. But I personally know exactly one self-described pro-lifer who ever did anything to help an “unwed mother” – and that (“all they care about is the fetus”) has been a meme among pro-choicers for a long time, so I’d expect the anti-abortion folks to attempt to address it. And “reduce abortions by providing good sex education” is rarely politically viable in the US – at least in red states, i.e. the same places that most heavily restrict abortion.

          • Purplehermann says:

            @DinoNerd you have no use for any pro-lifer who would restrict abortion when carrying to term would be more expensive?!

          • Nick says:

            Those considering whether to engage with DinoNerd’s latest post may want to read how the last encounter went.

          • Purplehermann says:

            Appreciated Nick

          • DinoNerd says:

            @Nick

            I also appreciate the reminder that I’ve said much of what’s in my last post above before, and really don’t need to say it again here.

          • mtl1882 says:

            @DinoNerd

            I agree 100%…that’s my reasoning pretty much exactly. My point is that most people seem incapable of seeing it that way, and I foresee increasing problems in this area. A huge potential for woefully misguided efforts.

    • Chalid says:

      winning on the “wrong” one of their legs

      I strongly suspect it’s the other way around, e.g. the right cares about social issues *because* they are losing.

      Also, there’s nothing economically that you could offer that would get “the left” to accept 1950s social policy. Racial issues, homosexuality, womens’ rights, and a bunch of other things would all individually be complete non-starters. If you threatened these, you’d find that the left cared very, very much about social issues.

      • Faza (TCM) says:

        Pretty much this, I think.

        With a smattering of “loss of privilege feels like oppression“.

        (The above actually cuts both ways, of course.)

      • EchoChaos says:

        I strongly suspect it’s the other way around, e.g. the right cares about social issues *because* they are losing.

        Quite possibly. You care more about the front you’re being pressed on than the one going well. But I think it’s more than that and the base really cares more about social than fiscal.

        Also, there’s nothing economically that you could offer that would get “the left” to accept 1950s social policy. Racial issues, homosexuality, womens’ rights, and a bunch of other things would all individually be complete non-starters. If you threatened these, you’d find that the left cared very, very much about social issues.

        Because they’ve moved the Overton window so far. There is nothing socially you could offer the right to get 90% top marginal tax rates back either. That’s just a function of status-quo bias and the Overton window.

        • albatross11 says:

          Yes, I think the Republican base cares more about social issues (and opposes immigration more) than most Republican politicians or the party leadership.

      • I think the right caring more strongly about economic issues came about because of opposition to the Soviet Union. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom because it really did look like a command economy was gradually taking over and the Soviet Union was horrible. But it fell because it was untenable and we can relax. Sure, some policies will be bad but it’s not tied up with this existential threat. If you really want to consider conservative priorities, compare abortion to health care. Roe vs Wade has been the law for nearly fifty years and they are still trying to repeal it. Obamacare has been the law for a mere decade and they scarcely mention it.

      • Purplehermann says:

        The Left seems to have a very social view of the economy (which disadvantaged goups can we help? People on minimum should get more money, it isn’t right that they aren’t getting much/enough).

        In general I think people care about social issues much more than economics, unless a stance helps or hurts their wallets noticeably.

        Here the Left’s economics ARE social issues, so that distinction dissapears.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      The Blue tribe is losing as business regulations, housing regulations, taxes, etc. get more and more laxened

      But how true is this perception?
      – Taxes: Definitely lower at the federal level, how about the state and local level? States and localities can’t borrow to the degree the feds can.
      – Business Regulations: The federal register has grown largely unabated since the 90s. Certain areas of finance may have been de-regulated prior to 2008 but post dodd-frank it’s hard to argue that the financial sector is less heavily regulated now than it was in the past.
      – Housing Regulation: Does this refer to the mortgage finance sector or construction and zoning? I don’t think the latter has been deregulated in any meaningful sense.

      With the exception of taxes I think people are at a high-level inferring the degree of regulation from the level of cost and inequity associated with that sector. Education is a great example of a blue-tribe monkey paw, people are going to school longer than they ever had but the anticipated effect of reducing inequality and increasing opportunity backfired completely.

      As far as Unions go this is tricky. The blue tribe supports Unions but believes implicitly union objectives are compatible with highly elastic labor supply curves. Advocating for tight labor markets is somewhat anathema because of the ‘CW’ implications it has.

      ______

      I could do an inventory of Social issues items but the only one that doesn’t seem unambiguous is abortion. Feel free to argue the contrary though.

      ______________________________________________________________________

      Depending on the

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      I think the population change and the existence of geopolitical enemies really confounds any kind of conclusions we can draw. We just don’t have the same group of people in the 1950s.

      In addition, the 1950s wasn’t a stable equilibrium, and ultimately brought us the extremely tumultuous 1960s. I don’t think we can call an unstable equilibrium a “Golden Age.”

    • DinoNerd says:

      I can’t speak for “the left” in general, or even define “social” vs “fiscal”. But I’m peronally attached to the “left” side of US politics for primarily “social” issues – especially if you count being against immigration as “social”.

      I think many of the US left’s current social goals are absurd. But I see the US right as wanting to enforce their cultural and religious preferences. I.e. to me, the sterotypical rightwing voter won’t be happy as long as there’s anyone not attending their church and following its moral rules (such as “women should obey men”; “all adults should be married to people of the opposite sex”; “the most accurate science is taken from the Holy Bible”). I don’t wish to live in The Handmaid’s Tale; I don’t even want to live in the 1950s culture where I watched as a tiny child while my mother collapsed with clinical depression, leaving me and my sisters in foster care for a year with a family of (ahem) differing religious assumptions.

      Now as it happens, I also dislike the idea that anything done in pursuit of profit is good, regardless of what damage it causes. But I’m open to argument on that topic. Whereas anyone who wants to force a person like my mother into a housewife-and-breeder role is completely beyond the pale – any chance that they could do it makes me react more or less as if they were trying to kill people.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        the sterotypical rightwing voter won’t be happy as long as there’s anyone not attending their church and following its moral rules (such as “women should obey men”; “all adults should be married to people of the opposite sex”; “the most accurate science is taken from the Holy Bible”).

        One of the main reasons to engage with people across the ideological divide is to see perspectives like this, to find out not just what people want but what people really fear. To me, the scenario you are painting is so unlikely I truly have difficulty imagining that leftwingers truly fear that. But there was a comment in the last open thread about still being afraid of a snake after you’ve bashed it’s head in with a shovel, and I get that.

        Right now, the relevant battles that the social conservatives are fighting are whether kids who show signs of being transgendered should be given hormones and puberty blockers, whether M2F athletes should compete in women’s sports, whether drag queens should read to kids in the public library, and whether drag kids should perform in gay bars. We’re quite far from women being confined to baby-producing and housework.

        • DinoNerd says:

          FWIW, I’ve seen people postings on SSC that they were in favour of reducing the economic and career prospects of all women, so as to get more of them to have children. Someone explicitly said that while it’s OK to have alternatives for those who’d e.g. commit suicide rather than have sex with a man, those alternatives needed to be nasty enough that no one potentially compatible with marriage and motherhood would prefer them. They didn’t go quite as far as marry-and-breed-or-starve, but their vision for women who refused to marry and breed was something like the least attractive possible nunnery.

          These poster(s) weren’t far enough outside the SSC Overton window to draw significant flak from the commentariat, and *I* shocked people by describing my idea of the lived experience of someone who married only because all the other alternatives were worse. (I described her experiencing marital relations as her husband “masturbating himself with her body”, which still sounds about right to me.) Conclusion – to the SSC commentariat, this is more reasonable than my response to it.

          We’ve also had some small quantity of US politicians making claims like “it’s impossible to get pregnant because of rape”, and not getting rejected by the voters for dangerous cluelessness. (After all, by this logic, if someone’s pregnant, she’s been voluntarily sleeping around, and deserves neither welfare not an abortion…. but should be made to put up with the father claiming visitation, or even joint custody. Or if we go by Biblical norms, she should be forced to *marry* the father.. though I haven’t seen that one suggested yet, in this context at least.)

          I should also add that the various churches these stereotypical voters belong to vary in their social rules. The Quiverful folks, and the polygamous Mormon heresies are worse than my examples; many boring middle of the road churches are better than them. The key thing is that almost all of them insist that their deity gave rules for everyone, not just for those who believe in that deity. And those rules almost always have horrific consequences in some cases.

          [Note – I’m paraphrasing what was said – it was a response to a response to a response, and there were lots of implicit but unclear references to upthread examples. The non-het, possibly non-cis woman in the example might have merely been drinking herself to death, or similar]

          All this said, I agree that those people are presently losing many of their political battles, though they still have their biblical beliefs affecting public school curriculums. But given that *torture* went from something beyond the pale to something the US government isn’t ashamed to practice, and some fairly virulent racism I’d thought gone forever has also moved back into the US Overton window, I figure the price of women being allowed to be more than brood mares is and remains eternal vigilance.]

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Conclusion – to the SSC commentariat, this is more reasonable than my response to it.

            My experience with the SSC commentariat does not suggest that they are misogynists or dismissive of women’s issues.

            We’ve also had some small quantity of US politicians making claims like “it’s impossible to get pregnant because of rape”, and not getting rejected by the voters for dangerous cluelessness.

            Between a pro-life old white dude who trips up when the question of rape comes up, and a pro-choicer, pro-lifers will choose the pro-life old white dude every time. This wont change. Keep in mind that for a pro-lifer, the US is guilty of about 8 Holocausts (8 x 6 million ~ 50 million) since 1973. This wont change.

            The key thing is that almost all of them insist that their deity gave rules for everyone, not just for those who believe in that deity. And those rules almost always have horrific consequences in some cases.

            I think that they want to be able to live in a society that enforces the rules their deity gave them. But I dont think that society needs to be all of the USA. I think they would be quite happy (at least for now) if they could have their jurisdiction where they could do so. The problem is that when the Supreme Court finds that the constitution is a “living document” (and therefore gets updated with the latest progressive idea automatically, no formal amendment required), and decide they can read between the lines and within the “penumbra”, to find that, yes, after all gay marriage and abortion are guaranteed by the constitution, all of the USA gets affected. There is no need for this.

            The idea that all 50 states need to have the same social policy on gays, abortion, whatever is idiotic and very dangerous.

          • acymetric says:

            My experience with the SSC commentariat does not suggest that they are misogynists or dismissive of women’s issues.

            I think there is a notable contingent (not a majority) that are dismissive of women’s issues. A much, much smaller portion of that group is outright misogynistic but I would not use that term to describe the SSC community generally.

          • albatross11 says:

            Dinonerd:

            I can’t tell you about the whole world, but I spend a fair bit of my social life surrounded by religious Catholics (the ones who show up to Mass for all the holy days of obligation and volunteer at the Parish), I have family members who are/were evangelicals, and I grew up in a couple small towns in a very conservative/red part of the midwest. I also have family and friends in Utah, which is the reddest and most religiously conservative state in the US. The ideas you’re attributing to religious conservatives don’t look even remotely like what I know of any of these groups. In my parish, there are a ton of highly accomplished women with high-end careers. It’s more common to stay home with the kids in my parish than in the big wide world, but I’ve never seen or heard anyone pushing back against that. Now, I’m a guy, so maybe I wouldn’t hear everything, but I’ve *never* heard anything like that. Similarly, I’ve never seen *anyone* proposing forcing people to go to church, never ever. Not among committed Catholics, not among evangelicals, not among the people in a small town in the reddest of red states, not *anywhere*. I’m sure you can find such people somewhere, in much the same way you can find Muslims who want to blow up Americans, but the picture of the world you’re describing simply doesn’t have anything at all to do with what I have seen. My evangelical uncle and his wife were schoolteachers in a small town public school for their whole careers; they sent both their daughter and son to college (both got accounting degrees). This doesn’t remotely look like someone who wants to make _The Handmaid’s Tale_ come true.

            What I saw growing up (among kids in small-town Illinois and Missouri, in private where racist or sexist or homophobic jokes were not at all uncommon) supports the idea that there was a lot of latent racism and an immense hostility to gays lying around in that culture, and some screwy ideas about gender roles, but nothing like what you’re describing.

            I Googled around for some survey data, and while none of what I found supports your worldview, I didn’t see any polls that asked questions that tracked with your model of the world. I think the beliefs you’re describing are held by an incredibly tiny fringe, probably comparable to the subset of leftists who actually want to have a communist revolution along Maoist or Stalinist lines.

          • albatross11 says:

            Dinonerd:

            The fact that someone once said something offensive or dumb on SSC and didn’t get enough pushback is actually very weak evidence about what most SSC commenters believe or disbelieve. Sometimes, you ignore someone saying something offensive or dumb because life’s too short and you’ve got something else to do.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I can’t think of anyone here I’d call a misogynist. Neo-traditionalist trying to sell traditional gender roles on utilitarian grounds, maybe.
            Gender roles came up recently among our Catholic contingent, and Deiseach was representative in going “LOL, whatever floats women’s boats, as long as they either prioritize the babies that pop out or remain celibate.”

          • EchoChaos says:

            @DinoNerd

            I am one of the most conservative commentators in a religion that emphasizes having lots of kids. I have four so far myself.

            My father is the pastor of my church and has multiple advanced degrees. My mother homeschooled me and has a Master’s.

            My wife has a college degree, as do most of the women in the congregation.

            What I want isn’t necessarily laws that compel motherhood, but the repeal of laws and norms that actively disincentive it.

          • Corey says:

            I’ve never seen *anyone* proposing forcing people to go to church, never ever.

            Neither have I, to be honest, but claims that the US is a Christian nation are very common, and atheists tend to hear that as “we need state churches” to lead to mandatory conversion. Can’t speak for members of minority religions (unless you count atheism as one).

            (Per PRRI 2015, 41% of white Christians say the US is currently and always has been a Christian nation, 50% say the US used to be a Christian nation but is not anymore, best quick numbers I could come up with).

            Anecdotally, devout guys I work with are certain that each of the 13 Colonies had their own state church, and the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause is only intended to apply to the Federal government, so States should be allowed to have State-level state churches, and they are not radical Tenthers or neo-Confederates on other issues AFAIK.

          • Randy M says:

            Neither have I, to be honest, but claims that the US is a Christian nation are very common, and atheists tend to hear that as “we need state churches” to lead to mandatory conversion. Can’t speak for members of minority religions (unless you count atheism as one).

            Do you believe that that is what is usually meant by that statement?

            Even state churches would not necessarily mean forced conversion, neither of which necessarily means enforcement of religious laws by the state. I can certainly understand the fear of a slippery slope in that case, though.

          • Corey says:

            @Randy M: Oh, it’s totally a slippery slope. Literally I would interpret it as support for explicitly basing law on Christianity. In my experience a pretty big swath of people think that morality must be religiously based and so *of course* laws should reflect religion. (Corollary: atheists can’t be moral, which is why I notice this).

            Once you accept that it certainly seems like a short slide to “thou shalt have no other gods before me” in the Federal Register. To be fair I haven’t put time into thinking through the implications, since I think it’s kind of unlikely when push comes to shove. (If nothing else, Baptists and Catholics might fight so hard about which version of laws to enact that nothing gets done).

          • Nick says:

            There is an enormous and gaping distance between a state church and forced conversions. Sweden has a state church, for goodness sake. Come on.

          • Randy M says:

            By the way, I realize my post was ambiguous about one point. I don’t think people who say “America is a Christian nation” mean that they want a state or federal church, but that, first, much of what is good about America is due to the religious nature of the populace, and second, that it is legitimate to vote and advocate based on religious convictions.

            But I might be projecting; there’s a lot of variation among the large group, including plenty of ill-considered opinions.

          • hls2003 says:

            devout guys I work with are certain that each of the 13 Colonies had their own state church, and the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause is only intended to apply to the Federal government, so States should be allowed to have State-level state churches

            This is not quite accurate, but almost, and much closer to true than the opposite position. More colonies had established churches than did not. My understanding is that the First Amendment Establishment Clause did not apply against the states until Everson v. Board of Ed. incorporated it via the 14th Amendment. Many states retained established churches for years.

            The Supreme Court has been unable to decide and stick with even a basic Establishment Clause test ever since incorporation (the Lemon test is closest, but I’m pretty sure that was never a majority position and certainly is not today). To me, the easiest explanation for this confusion is the basic incoherence of trying to restrict the states to a single national rule by means of a Constitutional clause that was explicitly designed to prevent restrictions on the states by a single national rule.

          • Machine Interface says:

            Nick > the direction of history has its importance. Sweden’s state church is a remnant of a time where belonging to the state church was in fact very compulsory. This is a state church that has been defanged. If a state church was established in the US, I very much doubt it would be made similarly innocuous by design from the get go…

          • mtl1882 says:

            @hls2003

            The Supreme Court has been unable to decide and stick with even a basic Establishment Clause test ever since incorporation (the Lemon test is closest, but I’m pretty sure that was never a majority position and certainly is not today). To me, the easiest explanation for this confusion is the basic incoherence of trying to restrict the states to a single national rule by means of a Constitutional clause that was explicitly designed to prevent restrictions on the states by a single national rule.

            I feel like this “basic incoherence” resulting from incorporation via the 14th Amendment (not just for this clause) is playing a major role in almost all of our political problems (indirectly, but no one understands or talks about it.) I’m not opposing the 14th Amendment or disputing prior interpretations or anything–I’m just saying this dynamic seems to guarantee the public discussion will be awkward and easy to derail. I may be attaching too much significance to it.

          • “50% say the US used to be a Christian nation”

            It is simply a fact that the vast majority of Americans were Christian throughout history, and did not see their religion as an insignificant detail in their lives, but as fundamental to their civilizational identity, as important as its racial makeup or its republican system of government.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            I think a very significant issue here is that when you say “nation” to people they’ll interpret it one of two ways:
            1) “a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.”
            2) The government of that people.

            I’d argue that the United states hasn’t been a nation in the first case since at least the Louisiana purchase, and plausibly since the inclusion of not-British peoples. Though, yes, a real argument that the original 13 states originally founded a Christian nation can be made.

            Before thinking this through I’d always default to the second case and think that this has never been a Christian nation (though colonial entities prior to the founding were). Because the framing laws of the federal government declared it to not be so.

          • Purplehermann says:

            You are wrong on the biblical a account, biblically a man who seduced or raped a virgin had to pay a hefty fine as well as marry her, if she agreed and if her father thought it best for her. The forced marriage is not about pregnancy but virginity, and is forced on the man not the people who have the girls interests in mind.
            In addition, this entire scenario is only for girls 12.5 years old and younger… rape in general was treated as damages, and the courts would make the man pay for damage, pain, and embarrassment (as well as medical expense if there were any, though abortion wouldn’t count)

          • Randy M says:

            @anonymousskimmer
            Good point

    • Hypothesis: The left really cares deeply about fiscal issues, but will take a win on social if they can.

      The left is obviously a large, diverse group and I’m sure this is true for some people. But if we think of the stereotypical progressive who reads Vox, lives in a major city and wants to disband ICE, I think it’s the other way around. Social issues are what matters to them and anyone who thinks we should prioritize economic issues is under suspicion. Look at the whole “Bernie Bro” thing. I don’t think they make up the majority of Democrats but they are a major faction. What I find bizarre is how these people act like they are losing. If you’re a Marxist, the world looks bleak to you. But to the typical Vox reader? They should be confident and yet they moan about Trump in apocalyptic terms because he has temporarily kept them from pushing their agenda.

      • Corey says:

        Well, as I point out upthread, Republicans have a lock on the Senate (and therefore also SCOTUS) that will not break short of a political Singularity.

        Empty land votes, so whoever has the rural side of the culture war has a built-in advantage in the Senate, and in anything that can be gerrymandered (State legislatures, the House).

        For this to change, there would have to be a large shift in partisan makeup, the culture war would have to cool down, Senators and/or State legislators would have to work to reduce their own influence, or the entire structure of the government will need to be re-done. (Can’t amend the Constitution to remove the Senate, Article V forbids it, and imagine what a clusterfuck a constitutional convention would be).

        So Republicans will be able to at least block anything they want, and at most be able to enact any policies they want, unless and until something happens that will have such large effects that we won’t be able to figure out what’s on the other side.

        (FWIW I agree with Yglesias that escalating constitutional hardball will eventually result in big changes in government structure as we become ungovernable. Not that I look forward to that, it’ll be horrible.)

        • You mean the Republican lock that goes all the way back to… 2015? And with their insurmountable lead of… 53 to 47?

          • Corey says:

            Yep!

            2015 had more swing voters than 2018 and 2020 will have fewer, etc. Approximately everyone in the country thinks Democrats or Republicans are the devil (literally in the case of Democrats and evangelicals). I see no path to this cooling down (Al Gore turns off the Internet, maybe).

          • You would seriously benefit from taking the outside view here. The last time Democrats controlled the Senate, they held it between 2007 and 2015, longer than the Republicans have had it now. You have to go back all the way to the thirties to see any kind of “Republican lock”.

            Political changes happen fast and you have no idea what’s going to happen in 2020, let alone anything past that.

          • Corey says:

            Fair, I’m predisposed to feeling doomed and have learned to distrust my analysis in other areas because of that.

          • JonathanD says:

            @Corey, I do think there’s a good chance of a serious swing once the abortion laws really get going. Both of my sisters have voted Republican in every election they’ve voted in* up to 2016, both voted against Trump (because he’s a misogynistic asshole), and both are outraged and switching their votes after the abortion law. I was somewhat incredulous as they’ve been voting for these people for years, but they both just told me some version of, “Yes, well, I thought they were just saying that.” If that experience is common, we might see a large swing in the women’s vote. We’ll see. I don’t want to get my hopes too far up, but maybe.

            *One I’m sure of, one I’m pretty sure of. All three of us are in Missouri.

      • JonathanD says:

        From our point of view, we’re about to lose Roe (yes, yes, Casey). And yes, that looks like a catastrophic loss. The Alabama law is what we’re expecting across the half of the states you fully control. We’ve lost, completely, on guns. I don’t know whether you consider it a social issue, but we have the kids in the camps on the southern border, and we haven’t been able to stop it, and we’re not going to be able to stop it. It’s not all cakes and pies for us, even on the social side. I can see that you don’t have everything you want, but believe me, we don’t, either.

        • EchoChaos says:

          I said abortion was an exception. Even with our Supreme Court ownership, I doubt gay marriage goes back.

          Guns is a fair example. I’ll give you that one.

          Immigration you have won basically totally. We’re still taking in a million immigrants a year. That you’re arguing about whether we are taking another 10k or so shows the magnitude of victory for you.

          • JonathanD says:

            @Echo, I was answering Wrong Species about how my fellow travelers can possibly feel doomed. Alabama made a law that will make a woman carry her rapist’s baby to term. In 2015 America, there’s no way that law stands, we’re pretty much all expecting that it will now.

            With the immigrant thing, I’m sure you’re right about the numbers. But we’re talking about different things. Go back and read that essay by Unit of Caring that got poor Conrad so worked up. I know you think we’re being ridiculous, but it doesn’t feel like we’re winning. It feels like terrible things are happening down there, done by our government and on our behalf, and that we’re completely helpless to make it stop.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @JonathanD

            Again, abortion is the one odd culture war thing that has, for complex reasons, stayed basically frozen since Roe V. Wade in terms of acceptance and the political state. I think you’re overstating the danger by a large amount as well. Having one US state that has the same abortion laws as Chile is hardly the end of the Republic. New York is going in the opposite direction.

            As for the border, there isn’t any way that we’re going to come to the same page on this, but I understand WHY you feel this way. I disagree on where the blame is and how to deal with it, but I completely understand the frustration of the government doing something that you don’t approve of in your name.

          • albatross11 says:

            Echochaos:

            I mostly agree with you–I’d expect a rollback of Roe to end up letting states decide, which means abortions become unavailable in some states, and the effective cost of getting an abortion increases by the cost of a bus ticket and a night in a hotel. This may be bad or good, but it’s not The Handmaid’s Tale.

            On the other hand, the way a lot of social issue battles were won in the SC over the last several decades, including abortion and gay marriage, was to utterly overrule states and voters and just say “this is how it’s gonna be, nationwide.” I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to imagine a conservative Republican majority in the SC making a bunch of social issue rulings that go the other way. Just as the same constitution once permitted laws against gay sex and then changed to forbidding such laws, you can imagine the constitution similarly changing meaning by a 5-4 vote to say that the same constitution that formerly guaranteed abortion rights now forbids abortions nationwide. I don’t expect that to happen, but there is precedent for it.

            I think this would be unpopular in a lot of the country, but maybe not a whole lot more unpopular than deciding that abortion was a constitutional right or that the constitution required states to recognize gay marriages, and certainly not as unpopular as various desegregation decisions were with voters.

          • acymetric says:

            I mostly agree with you–I’d expect a rollback of Roe to end up letting states decide, which means abortions become unavailable in some states, and the effective cost of getting an abortion increases by the cost of a bus ticket and a night in a hotel. This may be bad or good, but it’s not The Handmaid’s Tale.

            This is probably understating it a little bit. Partly because there are costs of having to make a multi-day trip to get it done beyond just the costs of the transport and the housing (missing work, childcare if you have other kids, coming up with a socially acceptable explanation for friends/family/neighbors/etc. for why you disappeared for a couple days, additional complexity of trying to schedule an out of state procedure and whether the out of state clinic is “in network” for insurance, and probably other things that didn’t immediately come to mind).

            Beyond that, given that the states likely to limit or ban abortions are not randomly distributed across the map but rather concentrated in reasonably large blocks, depending on where you live you might end up traveling hundreds if not thousands of miles in order to get it done). Admittedly that’s a bit “worst case scenario” if all the states that are reasonably likely to restrict or ban do so, which maybe isn’t the most likely outcome but is certainly plausible.

          • Corey says:

            @albatross11: On gay marriage the Supreme Court was behind (nationwide aggregate) opinion on gay marriage – there was more than 50% support before the decision. On interracial marriage the Supreme Court was ahead of national popular opinion, by decades (IIRC 1995 was when approval of interracial marriage first broke 50%).

          • JonathanD says:

            @albatross11, didn’t the Alabama law, or one of the recent ones, make crossing state lines to get an abortion a felony? I know I heard that, but I’m having trouble finding it, so it may have been social media click farming.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @JonathanD

            I don’t know the answer to that and I’d be curious. Can you ban going to other states for medical procedures? That would seem really weird to me if you could, because interstate stuff like that is the purview of the Federal Government.

          • Lambert says:

            Aren’t there limits on States’ juristiction over stuff like going to another state to do something that would be illegal in the first state?

          • albatross11 says:

            I’m not any kind of a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure there’s no way a state can forbid travel to another state like you’re suggesting. Which doesn’t mean someone didn’t pass a state law that will eventually get overturned….

          • hls2003 says:

            @JonathanD:

            didn’t the Alabama law, or one of the recent ones, make crossing state lines to get an abortion a felony? I know I heard that, but I’m having trouble finding it, so it may have been social media click farming.

            It was click farming. The bill as passed contains nothing to that effect. Furthermore, the bill specifically exempts a woman obtaining an abortion from all civil and criminal liability. Basically, it makes it illegal to be a person performing an abortion except for permissible abortions as defined by the statute, which include non-viable fetuses*, ectopic pregnancies, and situations posing a significant risk to the health of the mother.

            Edited to add: *meaning non-viable based on fatal deformity or defect, not non-viable based on fetal age

        • @Echo Chaos

          Right. Immigration is the central example of what I’m thinking. Democrats are freaking out about immigration without realizing they already won. From now on, anyone trying to do any action to stop illegal immigration is going to effectively be called an evil racist. Those of us who disagree with this are going to be a minority.

          @JonathanD

          If Roe vs Wade gets overturned, I will rescind my claim. But not before then.

          • JonathanD says:

            If Roe vs Wade gets overturned, I will rescind my claim. But not before then.

            Fair enough, I guess. Who crosses the line and votes with the liberal justices, in your view? Roberts again?

          • Nornagest says:

            I think it’s less likely that Roe will be dramatically upheld by a nail-biting 5-4 majority and more likely that any cases touching on Roe will mysteriously end up being upheld/overturned on narrow procedural grounds, leaving the ruling intact by default. That’s generally how it’s worked in the past. It’ll be harder to pull off now that there’s stuff like the Alabama law going on, but the Supremes are smart people, they can probably figure out a way to do it.

    • salvorhardin says:

      FWIW, as someone with an almost entirely Blue social circle, the feeling of losing/being victimized/under attack from Blue folks I know has very very little to do with business regulation or tax cuts. The existential-feeling fears that drive the Blue bunker mentality are:

      — Immigration enforcement. Marginal Revolution recently linked to a thread that used Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a lens to compare present-day asylum seeker detention policies, especially family separation, to the Fugitive Slave Act. If you believe this is an apt comparison, it’s not hard to see how it would make you into a passionately outraged activist.

      — Climate change inaction. Similarly seen as a morally existential issue due to the potentially catastrophic consequences of another generation of inaction.

      — Abortion rights, which are typically seen on the left as already being seriously eroded and likely to be gutted by an overturn of Roe v Wade any day now. This also can be a moral-outrage issue on a par with slavery, if you believe that forcing women to carry pregnancies to term is tantamount to enslaving them.

      — The apparent rise in neo-Nazi and other blatantly racist activity. Whether you believe this is real or exaggerated, you can see how those who believe it’s real would be frightened.

      — The general belief that Trump is so intellectually deficient, morally corrupt, and emotionally volatile that he might at any moment do something catastrophically stupid and damaging for the lulz, or out of a desire to get back at some perceived enemy.

      If I had to put these into one narrative, I would say something like: the left cares about, and tries to work for, what they perceive as expansions of the circle of concern and increases in the general intellectual and moral level of leadership– whether that perception is accurate or not. When they observe what look like retreats on these metrics on a variety of fronts, they conclude they are losing.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        How would they feel about a compromise where they hand over control of the universities and mass media to the religious right, becoming as unwelcome there are Republicans are today, in exchange for a Democratic President, a law against immigration enforcement and climate change action?

        • salvorhardin says:

          I honestly have no idea. This seems sufficiently far from plausibility (how would you even carry out such a thing?) that I doubt most people have examined how they would feel about it.

        • Corey says:

          I for one wouldn’t care about the mass media, because I think it’s already *right*-biased, mostly in issue framing (think deficits, wars) and the urge to both-sides literally everything (tomorrow’s NYT: “Trump claims water is dry, Pelosi claims it’s wet, opinions differ.”)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            The news might matter less than fiction. Positive (or all?) depictions of homosexuality would be banned, depictions of families would return to 1950s norms, there’d be big budget films about our ancestors fighting against the spread of Islam, etc.
            If you recall, the Hays Code was an internal Hollywood policy adopted because they were afraid the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency had the power to get federal legislation controlling Hollywood content externally. Just imagine!

      • albatross11 says:

        — The general belief that Trump is so intellectually deficient, morally corrupt, and emotionally volatile that he might at any moment do something catastrophically stupid and damaging for the lulz, or out of a desire to get back at some perceived enemy.

        Oddly, I’m not on the left, but this one keeps me up nights, too.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Hypothesis: The left really cares deeply about fiscal issues, but will take a win on social if they can. The right really cares deeply about social issues, but will take a win on fiscal if they can. Since they’re winning on the “wrong” one of their legs, they feel like they’re losing far more than they are.

      Someone (ECD?) summed this up in a Yglesias quote: the right wins on policy, but cares about culture. The left wins on culture, but cares about policy. I found this so elegant that I went hunting for the original quote, but couldn’t find it. Does anyone know where the original is? Is there one?

      At any rate, I liked the quote. It also has the property of bypassing the idea of social vs. fiscal – I find too many counterexamples to that form of the rule.

      • Corey says:

        I got it from a tweet of his; Matt deletes all tweets every couple of weeks (maybe we should all do that).

      • ECD says:

        Wasn’t me. Not a bad idea, but I think it’s actually broader than that. In my experience people focus a lot more on defeats than victories. Especially since every victory is temporary and every defeat is eternal (or at least feels that way).

        Some comedian (Dave Barry? Maybe? Scott Adams? Maybe?) had a column I read a long time ago about how they complained a lot when they were poor, but when they got rich, they realized that they, and the people around them (also rich) changed what they were complaining about, but didn’t decrease their amount of complaining. I think there’s actually a lot of truth in that. In my experience, people have an individual complaint budget and outside times of absolute personal disaster (and sometimes even within them) will complain almost exactly that much and no more, or less, regardless of how bad/good their life actually is.

    • Plumber says:

      @EchoChaos says:

      “One of the comments last week commented that both CW tribes, Blue and Red…

      ….they feel like they’re losing far more than they are”

      Okay, I’m going to later put in caveats and nuance but first off: Thank you

      It really looked to me like rancor was building among the SSC commetariat, but in the responses to your top level post while folks are getting to the fears and longings that fuel the “culture war” what I’ve seen looks really collegial and impressive, and I’ll refrain (because it would be tedious to see) from posting a lot of “+1”s to most of the comments responding to the hypothesis (both for, against, and nuance) this whole sub thread deserves ’em!

      Alright, I’m old enough to remember that “Leftist” and “Liberal” were once distinct (LBJ’s policies would be called “on the Left” today, but those who called themselves “Leftists” hated him), and “Right” isn’t much better (Milton Friedman or Mussolini?), but for simplicity I’m going to use left and right with these definitions: “The Left” are Americans who vote, but will not vote for Republicans, “The Righ” are Americans who vote, but will not vote for Democrats (and yes for simplicity I’m ignoring the batshit crazy “Leftists” and “Rightists” who think street violence against their fellow citizens is a good idea), I could use “Democrats” and “Republicans”, but those are longer words and besides (unlike 50 and mow years ago) most voters now aren’t motivated by love for “their” Party, but by dislike, fear, and even hatred of one if the Parties (and many dislike both but hate one more).

      Yeah, “fiscal liberals” are the majority of American voters, not overwhelmingly so, but a majority, and yeah “social conservatives” are a slight majority of voters, that said there are millions of “fiscal conservatives”, and millions of “social liberals” and most of money donated to the two parties comes from them, they are that passionate (I’ll liken it to most preferring country, pop, or R&B, but the few who like Death Metal spend more on records and t-shirts).

      Next, all these groups are outnumbered by non-voters in most States (the best guess is that most non-voters would be fiscal liberals and social conservatives, but non-voters are also less likely to respond to surveys and be confident in their answers so who really knows?).

      Now, just because a majority may want the status quo a bit more like the ’50’s (or an idealized version of them) people are used to now and won’t go full 50′, for two examples: the higher top marginal income taxes of then was to pay for a giant war and the subsequent “police actions” and “containments”, massive foreign aid, and a larger standing army (with a “peacetime” draft) facing an existential threat of an expanding totalitarian bloc, and I don’t think such rates would fly today, on the ‘social’ side; I’ve been pretty upfront ’bout being bitter about how the widespread expansion of the social acceptance of parents getting divorced in the ’70’s and ’80’s had so many of my generation grew up with broken homes, but as much as I dislike it I don’t think that genie will fit into that bottle, that ship has sailed (to mix metaphors), and while my “X” and the subsequent “Y” (millennials) generations are getting divorced less than my parents generation did, they’re also getting married later, or not at all, and just plain have less children.

      Now lets talk unions! 

      Today public approval of unions is higher than its been in recent decades, but the number of unionized jobs continues to shrink, with most not even private sector anymore, but instead government, about the only bright spot is more nurses getting unionized.

      The time of the highest U.S.A.union density ever was indeed in the ’50’s, during a time of (male) workforce participation that’s never been equaled, but much of that was from the tailwind from the ’30’s when the working-class was desperate, angry, militant, radical, and tough as nails compared to today, and let’s face violent in a way that except for “coal country” labor wasn’t in subsequent decades, come the ’40’s and the war the Federal government wanted no work stoppages, and suddenly unions (again except in coal country) were encouraged and enlisted to keep production going (and incidentally, in the words of a 90 something Trotskyist, “Suddenly the Stalinists became super patriots for the war”, and after the war those in the munitions factories remembered how those in the CPUSA were strident taskmasters for production, and the radicals of the ’30’s lost much of their shine), after the war congress put in new laws to curtail unions, and most unions purged themselves of communist (with a couple of significant exceptions), with peace there was one last U.S.A. city wide general strike (1946 in Oakland, California in support of women on strike at a department store), but it was of a very different character than the street battles of the ’30’s, the accounts and pictures of it make it seem like a giant impromptu party.

      After purging the communists the “industrial” unions (everyone working regardless of skill) of the C.I.O. merged again with the “craft” unions (skill based and more like the old guilds of medieval Europe) of the A.F. of L and a third of all jobs were held by members of the now united labor federation. 

      Let’s talk black Americans (and unions some more)!

      With the war millions of American blacks left the south and went to work in the munition factories and shipyards which the Federal government ordered “discrimination free” (not completely in practice, it was still a “Jim Crow” nation, but the order still provided opportunity), with the war and the post war economic boom black Americans starting closing the income gap at a rate they hadn’t before or since (that’s right, their economic conditions improved to a significant extent before the end of “Jim Crow” laws).

      Now the older “craft unions” were guild like and you had to be accepted first as an apprentice, which usually meant that you were “kin” in some ways, to be in the plumbers union in Oakland it helped a lot if you were of Portuguese descent, to be a union plumber in New York it helped to be Irish, for the San Francisco plumbers union it helped to be Italian (fire fighters were also mostly Italian), and San Francisco carpenters and cops were mostly of Irish descent (and in many cases it helped to have families from certain specific counties in Ireland), which didn’t leave much opportunities for American blacks to join.

      The newer “industrial unions” were different, instead of being cartels of those with certain skills that trained each other like the craft unions, their goal was to have everyone working in an industry “organized” regardless of skill, and they grew in the militant 30’s, even more in the military ’40’s and even after the war two unions significantly decided to practice what we now call “affirmative action”: the UAW (autoworkers) and the ILWU (Pacific coast longshoreman who seperated from the east coast longshoreman – see “On the Waterfront” and the second season of “The Wire” for the flavor of the Atlantic coast stevedores).

      The autoworkers were led by a former Socialist Party member Walter Reuther (who first worked with the communists that were in union leadership positions especially at the Ford plants, but formed a seperate faction from them, and then purged them from the union) and perhaps as a legacy of that radical past his union was quite (for the time) welcoming to blacks who climbed into the blue-collar middle class (the wages were comparable to professional class incomes back then).

      Australia born former sailor Harry Bridges was the leader of the west coast longshoreman, and multiple unsuccessful attempts to deport him for being a communist party member were attempted (his ex-wife even testified that he kept his red membership card under a floor board), but he always denied it, nevertheless the CIO expelled his union from the labor federation, and then communists who had been expelled from other unions in the late ’40’s (especially the sailors) joined the longshoreman, and unlike the UAW and most other unions who strived for respectability in the ’50’s the ILWU retained it’s radical character and they organized the sugar plantation workers in Hawaii, and not only did they practice ‘affirmative action’ they were upfront about it, Harry Bridges once said “If there was only one job left in the docks, it would go to the black guy”, and today the San Francisco bay area union local is majority black, well paid, and those jobs are very sought after, but with “containerization” only a fraction of men are needed to do the same work unloading ships now.

      On the east coast one union purged from the federation for being communist dominated survived, the UE, which was basically the union for General Electric and Westinghouse factory workers, and (possibly of interest to traditionalist SSC’ers) the leadership of that union had an antagonist in the late ’40’s and 1950’s in Father Charles Rice and his Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, Rice had originally been a “labor priest” lending support for labor organisers in the 1930’s, but after the Soviets occupied Catholic counties in central and eastern Europe in the ’40’s the Church had word of conditions there (the torture of Cardinal József Mindszenty was especially significant), and Father Rice turned his efforts to rid the UE of communists, but as it happens the UE communists changed themselves after seeing the footage of tanks in Hungary and on the publication of Khurschevs “secret speech” “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” where Stalin’s successor told assembled communists “Our great leader was actually a douche bag” (my translation from the Russian), before Khurschev was purged and replaced by Brezhnev some years later. 

      So after their turn in the ’70’s Rice apologized to the UE leadership for hassling them, and the UE leadership apologized to Rice for, ya know, the whole Stalinist thing.

      To sum up: In the 1950’s, communists rule over giant piles of skulls in Asia and Europe, most they created but others by their yes he is, no he isn’t, yes he is, enemy, while in the U.S.A. they work for better wages for sugar plantation workers in Hawaii (okay, not the exact same Reds, but still the same movement!

      Right?

      I mean Left?

      Kinda. 

      Sorta.

      A German saved some Chinese civilians from being murdered by the Japanese. 

      Japanese saved some Jews from being murdered by Germans. 

      And an air corps that dropped bombs turned short years later into an air force that dropped candy bars.

      History isn’t that simple, and I think I may know way too much of this kind of history than is healthy, it makes it hard to place hats.

      Conclusion: Well obviously the place to be in the 1950’s was the USA

      (and I’m not exaggerating, read enough world history, or even pre 1940’s American history, and what’s really striking is how comparatively incredibly lucky post war Americans mostly have been).

    • Plumber says:

      Speaking of the 1950’s, I stumbled upon an essay titled Why buying a house today is so much harder than in 1950, and found it interesting, here’s some of it:

      “…The pent-up demand before the suburban boom was immense: Years of government-mandated material shortages due to the war effort, and the mass mobilization of millions of Americans during wartime, meant homebuilding had become stagnant. In 1947, six million families were doubling up with relatives, and half a million were in mobile homes, barns, or garages according to Leigh Gallagher’s book The End of the Suburbs.

      The government responded with intervention on a massive scale. According to Harvard professor and urban planning historian Alexander von Hoffman, a combination of two government initiatives—the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority and the Veterans Administration (VA) home loans programs—served as runways for first-time homebuyers.

      Initially created during the ’30s, the Federal Housing Authority guaranteed loans as long as new homes met a series of standards, and, according to von Hoffman, created the modern mortgage market.

      “When the Roosevelt administration put the FHA in place in the ’30s, it allowed lenders who hadn’t been in the housing market, such as insurance companies and banks, to start lending money,” he says.

      The VA programs did the same thing, but focused on the millions of returning soldiers and sailors. The popular GI Bill, which provided tuition-free college education for returning servicemen and -women, was an engine of upward mobility: debt-free educational advancement paired with easy access to finance and capital for a new home.

      It’s hard to comprehend just how large an impact the GI Bill had on the Greatest Generation, not just in the immediate aftermath of the war, but also in the financial future of former servicemen. In 1948, spending as part of the GI Bill consumed 15 percent of the federal budget.

      The program helped nearly 70 percent of men who turned 21 between 1940 and 1955 access a free college education. In the years immediately after WWII, veterans’ mortgages accounted for more than 40 percent of home loans.

      An analysis of housing and mortgage data from 1960 by Leo Grebler, a renowned professor of urban land economics at UCLA, demonstrates the pronounced impact of these programs. In 1950, FHA and VA loans accounted for 51 percent of the 1.35 million home starts across the nation. These federal programs would account for anywhere between 30 and 51 percent of housing starts between 1951 and 1957, according to Grebler’s analysis.

      Between 1953 and 1957, 2.4 million units were started under these programs, using $3.6 billion in loans. This investment dwarfs the amount of money spent on public infrastructure during that period…”

      • baconbits9 says:

        I find this type of presentation highly misleading, the typical reader will come away from this with the understanding that the GI bill provided home loans for 30-50% of all homes sold. In reality they effectively provided insurance on home loans for 30-50% of homes sold. That 50-70% of homes bought during this period were built and financed without the GI bill, implying that the market was probably going to be able to handle the demand pretty well on its own. Statements like this

        The popular GI Bill, which provided tuition-free college education for returning servicemen and -women, was an engine of upward mobility: debt-free educational advancement paired with easy access to finance and capital for a new home.

        Are rhetoric and not fact based. The GI bill heavily discriminated against (in practice) African Americans, but African Americans had some of the highest upward mobility of the post war era. Black male wages significantly gained on white male wages from 1950 through about 1970 despite whites disproportionately benefiting from the GI bill, and (mostly sure) white female wages gained on white male wages despite white males disproportionately benefiting from the GI bill.

        • Plumber says:

          @baconbits9 >

          “…African Americans had some of the highest upward mobility of the post war era. Black male wages significantly gained on white male wages from 1950 through about 1970 despite whites disproportionately benefiting from the GI bill, and (mostly sure) white female wages gained on white male wages despite white males disproportionately benefiting from the GI bill…”

          That’s a very good point, and I’ll note that their gains made in the 1940’s were even more impressive than those of the ’50’s, the mean wage gap between black men and white men was slightly greater in 1959 than in 1949 (the gap in women’s wages continued to narrow in the ’50’s though), in the ’60’s and ’70″s the gap closed again (and has grown since), the black white gap in years of schooling hardly changed ar all from 1940 to 1950, the schooling gap narrowed a little bit more from 1950 to 1960, and then it narrowed significantly afterwards – my takeaway is that the narrowing of the wage gap is independent of the years in school gap, though based on my experience in both the majority black “Intermediate” track, and the majority white “Advanced” track in High School in the ’80’s the quality of schooling was very noticeably different. 

          Some (maybe most?) of the changes in the income gap may just be migration, massive numbers of blacks moved to the higher wage north in the ’40’s and ’50’s, and there’s been a trickle back since the ’70’s, especially among older middle class blacks (as an aside many have noted that more moderate and relatively conservative Democrats tend to be older, more religious, and less white – the Biden base, who are much more likely to live in the ‘red state’ south,   that’s a relative difference though, this isn’t the ’80’s and earlier when there was much more overlap now almost all Democrats are on balance to the Left of almost all Republicans).

          As I noted up thread, the rise in black incomes preceded the end of Jim Crow laws, and as a guess higher incomes and previous military service (especially in the newly desegregated Army during the Korean war) sparked the courage and optimism to initiate the Civil Rights movement.

          Also, I think you alude to this, while in a lot of ways there was more direct Federal government intervention in the economy back in the ’40’s and ’50’s (more companies and even whole industries were briefly nationalized during the world war and early cold war),) but overall there were far less Federal, State, and Local regulations, so how one frames and spins it one may give examples of the post war decades as being all at once more conservative, left, and libertarian than today, my guess is that too much was different to be absolutely confident of which elements explain the ‘secret sauce’ of those years remarkable progress.

          I mean what do you?

          First have decades of high tariffs that fund a subsized post office and little else, limited government, a Federal budget surplus year after year, massive immigration, then have a few years of military conscription and a massive war followed by a short recession, rural poverty but almost ten years of urban prosperity, than a financial collapse, then massive nationwide poverty, then massive government intervention and public works, a massive increase in labor strife and union membership, then a peacetime draft for a year, then a massive war with millions of men overseas and millions of women in factories, then a short demobilization with women leaving the factories, followed by another peacetime draft and a giant standing army.

          How do you replicate all that?

          • albatross11 says:

            My guess is that a lot of the improvement comes down to blacks starting at a really low baseline–the South was poorer than the North, and blacks were the poorest group in the South overall (though there were middle-class and professional-class blacks in the South). If your grandparents were slaves kept intentionally illiterate and unskilled until they were 40, and your parents were raised as very poor sharecroppers with lousy schools and few prospects for improvement, it’s not shocking if you manage to rise a great deal in how well off you are compared to everyone else–you started out right at the bottom, and had nowhere to go but up!

  30. Purplehermann says:

    I’ve seen a negative correlation between women’s number of lifetime sexual partners and their chances of marital satisfaction, as well as fidelity. Causation or just correlation?

    • Lambert says:

      Confounded by religiousness.

      • albatross11 says:

        Religion, cultural background, region of the country, probably race and family income, too. It seems like it would be really hard to tease out the effects of more sexual partners on eventual marital happiness given these confounds, but maybe there’s some subtle way to structure a study to make some progress. (I’d think in terms of looking at heterosexual women with (say) 3 vs 4 sexual partners[1], out of a group selected to have the same race, religion, and family SES, but someone who does this kind of research for a living would probably have better ideas.).

        [1] Hoping that the close-together numbers will effectively keep us in the same basic population, whereas 1 partner vs 10 partners probably involves a ton of other differences.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Did some serious googling at some point on the relation between number of partners and capacity for pair bonding. To my surprise I found nothing. I did find consistent correlation between “wild” lifestyle for women (alcohol, socializing, promiscuity) and depression and low life satisfaction, but it seems to be strictly temporary – stop the wild life style, depression goes away. Nothing long term.

      The famous correlation between no of partners and chances of divorce is heavily skewed by the very low chances of divorce at 0 or 1 previous partners – which basically means a religious social context. Graph is a lot flatter after this.

      This was some years ago and my google skills may not have been perfect.

      • Faza (TCM) says:

        Didn’t we discuss this here a while back and basically come to the same conclusion?

        • Radu Floricica says:

          Yep, I remember re-writing basically the same comment some time ago. But it was easier to write than to google for it.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        I’m not sure where the confounding comes in here, because this seems to match what people’s intuition is. If someone really wants to avoid divorce, they’re more likely to avoid it. I wouldn’t anticipate there to be a linear relationship between past partners and divorce odds.

        The religious element makes it sound like this is useless data for a secular person. But it seems like the relationship is more like ‘identifies religious’ is a proxy for negative attitudes towards divorce.

      • Purplehermann says:

        I’ve seen correlation between fidelity and number of partners at around +7% chance of cheating per partner.

    • GearRatio says:

      Something to consider:

      I watch The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise with the wife, these three shows comprising what she typically refers to as “the slut olympics”. This is not a realistic world to draw much data from, but I’ve noticed something: even among these people, and even on a show where the penultimate event is having sex with three people you barely know in three successive nights, promiscuity is something they have to cover up with a ton of justifications and/or not be very open about.

      The show handles this by introducing a ton of language meant to diffuse the distaste people might have for it; people are “in for the right reasons” or “not in it for the right reasons”, everyone is trying to “find love” or “find their husband/wife” as they hop hot-tub make-out partners. One character was recently shamed for having had two (two!) one night stands, as opposed to the show-sanctioned three, because these weren’t ostensibly part of the husband/wife finding mission.

      None of this establishes that promiscuity is good, bad, helpful or harmful, but it does sort of pique my interest that even among a group of effectively atheist dumpster-people open promiscuity/sleeping around is still a major taboo, even as everyone does it. The trick is to not be the one vilified for it.

      If that translates over to the population at large, then you have an interesting situation: you aren’t just looking at the effects of having multiple partners, you are looking at the effects of living in a social regime which doesn’t approve of a behavior, doing the behavior anyway at an above-average rate and also being the kind of person who admits it.

      It’s not hard to imagine archetypes that would do this that would give us the result you are seeing – someone who is overall rebellious against institutions and rules or someone that isn’t self-aware enough to be able to preserve their perceived social value, for instance.

      I’m moving in a direction of being un-surprised about the poor marital outcomes of admitted-on-a-survey promiscuous women as I would be about the poor marital outcomes of, say, someone who masturbates in adult movie theaters occasionally – you could argue the behavior isn’t negative on it’s face, but for sure most of society finds it icky and would assign a lower value to somebody they knew did it. Somebody who would do that and then admit it on a survey is then a group-within-a-group of theater masturbators; he does it, and he either isn’t self-aware enough to know how people view that, or doesn’t care enough about his social valuation to hide it.

      Anyway, that’s my swiss-cheese level current view on this.

    • Skivverus says:

      Reverse causation?
      People satisfied with their partners don’t look for more.

    • caryatis says:

      There’s probably a strong correlation between substance use and number of partners, for women. Substance use is also correlated with being generally unhappy. So i’d guess that to be part of the mechanism and probably wouldn’t buy any data that did not control for that.

  31. baconbits9 says:

    My opinion of news is that it is consumed like entertainment, not education. The most fact based section of a paper is typically the sports page where the events are simply, observed by the writers with direct access to accurate statistics. That something can be fact based and entertainment is a notion that doesn’t cross the minds of most journalists.

    • albatross11 says:

      There’s a continuum. I listen to high-information-density podcasts like TWIV or Conversations with Tyler for a mix of entertainment and information, but heavily skewed toward information. (Fortunately, the podcasts can be entertaining only to a small subset of people because, unlike radio/TV, they don’t use up scarce radio spectrum.). A news show like All Things Considered is more skewed toward entertainment. Further along that spectrum is Cable TV talking head programs–most of the time, those guys don’t know what they’re talking about but they’re entertaining and fill airtime. Still further, you get Rush Limbaugh or Trevor Noah, mostly entertainment but with some current-events mixed in.

      One thing that’s kind of interesting is that I think people often convince themselves they’re consuming information when they’re mostly getting entertainment (often tribal re-enforcing entertainment). Another is that most news is focused on urgent stuff (the latest mass-shooter, diplomatic crisis, offensive Trump tweet, celebrity meltdown, etc.), but rarely on important stuff. There’s essentially never a story on the evening news about X-risk, and you generally hope to God there never is. (“Today, Google executives announced that their superhuman general-purpose AI had made such convincing moral arguments that they’d had no choice but to let it out of its box. In unrelated financial news, paperclip futures took a huge tumble on the markets today….”).

      • baconbits9 says:

        I don’t think the continuum is entertainment -> information, there are plenty of examples of pure information being entertainment. Baseball statistics are about as pure an example of information as you can get (controlled settings, extremely well measured, high degree of accuracy) and they are mostly consumed by people as a form of entertainment*. The continuum is more actionable information to information for the sake of information (there is definitely a better way to describe this, and probably several people have done so already) with the mistake being that many journalists view ‘truth’ as some core component of real journalism and that being distinct from gossip (celebrity gossip pages actually often have a high degree of real information).

        *A very small number of people have turned these numbers into careers to be sure.

        • albatross11 says:

          Yeah, how relevant the information is might be part of the question, but not the whole thing. I’m not sure how relevant to my life it is that I understand David Baltimore’s scheme for classifying viruses, but a podcast explaining that seems like it’s very heavily on the information side of the world.

        • baconbits9 says:

          Does the fact that it is information change anything?

          One basic thought: If you present information to your audience and they listen and absorb it, but don’t act on it vs presenting information that causes your audience to react is a basic way to separate entertainment vs non entertainment information, and highlights why journalists like Boot end up feeling perplexed or impotent. They publish information without understanding what the difference between causing action or not is, they imagine a Woodward and Bernstein situation where just exposing the truth causes major ripples or waves in the world without noting that those are the exceptions.

        • albatross11 says:

          It changes my understanding of the world, which does affect my behavior in various ways, though it’s not like my day-to-day behavior actually is much affected by trying to figure out how to classify the flu virus. (I’m still getting my shot.). But how I think about a lot of questions of biology and some personal health issues has changed due to listening to Vincent Racceniello’s excellent microbiology podcasts.

    • b_jonas says:

      I think the weather forecast is more fact-based in the sense that it’s more likely to give meaningful and valid predictions.

      • Anthony says:

        Valid?

        Sports writers often give predictions, and probably with a better hit rate than weather forecasters.

        Though weather forecasters in California have it easy – “no rain tomorrow” is accurate over 80% of the time, and approaches 99.9% accuracy several months of the year.

        • Protagoras says:

          I remember that being a plot point in “LA Story,” where Steve Martin was a TV weather guy who pre-recorded a couple of days of forecasts. Though of course the movie provided an example of how 99.9% is not 100%.

  32. J Mann says:

    1. It seems fairly arrogant to say “I have devoted the last couple years to getting the President of the United States impeached, but he’s still there. What’s it all for?” Compare “I have devoted my life to baseball, but I still have not won the World Series. What’s it all for?” or “I have devoted my life to politics, but I am not President. What’s it all for?”

    2. On the other hand, maybe Boot is believing his critics and thinks he was personally responsible for the US war in Iraq. If so, I can see how that would give him an inflated view of his talents. 🙂

    3. Finally, I don’t really think Boot writes to convince people to change their minds. He’s very satisfying to people who already don’t like Trump, but I would be surprised to learn that even 100 people flipped because of Boot. If that concerns him, I think he should reconsider his writing style and where he publishes.

  33. Urstoff says:

    Would working scientists and the sciences as a whole benefit from having a greater historical perspective? I’ve been reading a lot of history of psychology lately, and what I’ve read has really supported Kuhn’s claim that scientists are generally ahistorical: their knowledge of the history of the field is basically whatever topics were popular at the time during their graduate training. Rarely does a scientist do a deep dive into even the recent history of their field, and often explicitly reject the past history of the field as a harmful encumbrance (particularly when something akin to a “paradigm shift” has recently occurred). This seems to be the case, too, for other forms of evidence-based inquiries like history; the questions are determined by the major works of the last 20 years, and not much is seriously and deeply read before then.

    Is this a good thing for inquiry? Would having a deep knowledge of the history of the field prevent one from articulating new and interesting questions? Maybe I’m not articulating the question well, but it strikes me as interesting, as I think I would want a deep historical knowledge if I were a practicing research (I say that, but perhaps a graduate program would have disabused me of such notions). It certainly makes me skeptical of anything that calls itself “intellectual history” and of completely “internalist” explanations of the development of science.

    • Enkidum says:

      Yes scientists should study more of the past of their fields. If nothing else, we would be less likely to reinvent the wheel every couple of decades, which is a real problem in areas like psychology.

      That being said, a lot of what got lost was lost for good reason. So you have to be selective.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      I heard a biotech startup founder say that they do a lot of reading of papers from the 1920s and 30s, because the papers are still scientifically correct, but everyone has forgotten the knowledge.

      • Eternaltraveler says:

        Old papers are a great resource. In my experience papers before the 80s also have a much higher rate of replicating when I try them.

    • baconbits9 says:

      In general I would say no for two reasons. First looking at one generation gives you a skewed view, of course people will have views skewed towards particularly formative years but departments as a whole can have active members with 50-60 year age gaps from your oldest tenured professors to undergraduate students, and 40 years is reasonably common within industry. You can get issues if you form a department and it gets dominated by one age sliver, or a cult of personality where everyone becomes an acolyte of a single person, or if there is no communication across your age ranges, but you don’t need your 30 year olds to spend a lot of time understanding the previous 50 years of progress if they can just talk to someone 30 years senior to them.

      The second objection is that a true deep dive is going to come at a large opportunity cost, to read, understand, analyze and draw conclusions from decades to centuries of possibly interesting events and data is going to displace a fair amount of currently needed knowledge. Some people should do this but that number should be relatively small for most fields.

    • eightieshair says:

      When I was in graduate school, we read a fair number of the “classic” papers in the field, which in practice meant papers going back as far as the 1920s and 30s. This was both in class (1 class in particular) and on our own. I’m in biophysics, so this might be field dependent.

      I follow discussions in hep theory as an interested observer, and it seems that in that field there are whole areas of research and theoretical constructions that can just become obsolete, and so only of historical interest.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      Yes and no.

      A big problem in the scientific community is that people will read reviews without making sure that the papers referenced actually support the claims being made. If this happens a few times, a hypothesis with only weak evidentiary support can become accepted in a field out of an erroneous belief that it has been properly tested. My thesis project came from such a realization: the conventional wisdom that my entire field has had for at least the last twenty years is based on a set of experiments where even the original authors note in their discussion that their results can’t support that conclusion.

      That said, with the exceptions of fields where ethical rules prohibit repeat experiments (e.g. experiments where convicts were deliberately infected with malaria) it’s usually better to repeat an experiment with modern techniques. Someone might have cloned a gene in the 80’s or done restriction mapping to find it even earlier, but sequencing is dirt cheap and you get much higher quality information anyway. Similarly with old-school X-ray crystallography versus modern cryo-EM for structures: it’s just so much faster and cheaper now that “reinventing the wheel” costs you maybe a year instead of an entire thesis project.

      That is to say, I’m much more worried about scientists being wrong and thinking that a question has already been answered than scientists being wrong and thinking that a question hasn’t been answered. The latter is easily corrected but the former can be extraordinarily wasteful.

  34. baconbits9 says:

    Ironically one of the harder spill cleanups is soap.

  35. proyas says:

    I’m curious about the concept of structures becoming “obsolete” and having limited “lifespans.” Until about a year ago, I assumed that houses and buildings were meant to last forever, but then I stumbled upon this concept that is apparently well-known among architects and builders.

    In the U.S., how valid is this concept? What will be the fate of all the suburban tract, Colonial-style McMansions? Will any of them still be standing in 200 years?

    • hls2003 says:

      “Obsolete” and “lifespan” are two different concepts. For example, imagine a commercial warehouse that is basically a shell for storing and moving things. It may be comfortably in the middle of its lifespan – all the walls and roof are intact, the moving parts are functional, etc. – but it may be obsolete because the industry standard ceiling height has changed since it was built, or the type of loading docks it has, etc. So it may have started out life as a top-of-the-line Class A warehouse, commanding premium rents, but now is a lower-end Class B warehouse commanding much lower rents. But that is a function of its obsolescence, not its lifespan per se.

      In addition, of course, everything has a limited lifespan. In modern construction, the lifespan is almost entirely a function of maintenance. A properly maintained McMansion could survive just fine for 200 years, barring certain natural disasters. But that maintenance would include, e.g., replacement of the roof at 30-50 year intervals, replacement of joists that sag, replacement of walls that warp, replacement of floors that wear, tuckpointing chimney bricks that crumble. You end up in a Ship of Theseus situation where the structure still stands, but very little is 200 years old. One of the few interesting concepts, to me, in the Life After People program that ran a few years ago was the realization that modern construction is actually significantly inferior to ancient construction in terms of durability absent maintenance. For example, steel is a terrible construction material for durability because it corrodes so easily. But if you keep painting it, it’s much stronger and lighter than stone or more lasting materials, and makes better structures for current function (e.g. bridges).

      Having written more than I intended, I’ll also add that many McMansions are both crummy construction (by most standards) and crummy architecturally, and I expect very few of them to stick around for a hundred years or more. But they presumably could.

      • proyas says:

        I see. So it’s common for structurally sound buildings to be torn down because they have become functionally obsolete, and the costs of upgrading them to conform to the new standards exceed the costs of tearing them down and building a modern replacement structure?

        • Lambert says:

          It’s not just replacing with a more up-to-date building.
          It’s needing a different sort of building.

          Tearing down commercial/light industrial workshops in postindustrial cities to make space for more housing. (See: the London Docklands)

          The value of the land is often comparable to that of the buildings themselves.

          ADDENDUM:
          When comparing ancient and modern, never forget survivorship bias. All the crappy old buildings fell down sometime in the 17th century and now only the good ones are left.

        • hls2003 says:

          Yes, you do see structurally sound buildings demolished for functional obsolescence. But it’s not automatic; it’s basically a calculation about the present value of potential income streams from various usages of the property. There’s nothing wrong with a Class B warehouse; there’s a market for those, not every business can pay premium rent, and you can get a nice income stream. You trade that off against the upfront investment costs of upgrades or teardowns, and how much the property would be worth. This is also generally the rationale of depreciation rules for tax purposes. If you build a building for $1 million, and earn $80,000 per year for a ten-year lease, you can see that you’re earning 8% a year – but not all of that is truly return on investment, some of it is paid for in depreciating capital. Let’s say at the end of your ten-year lease you value the building and it’s now worth $800,000. That means that $200,000 of the $800,000 you extracted over the ten-year lease is basically drawing down your principal. Say you had the same $1 million invested in a bank earning 6% interest (I know, not in today’s market) – at the end you’d have collected $600,000 but you’d still have your original $1 million principal. In the property investment hypo, your return appears to be 8% but at the end you have $1.6 million, the same as the $1.6 million in value you got from the building. For this reason, you generally have to re-value your assets periodically and determine whether or not to hold, sell, or upgrade, especially because that depreciated value will often (in rough terms) coincide with a reduced dollar return (though presumably similar rate of return) from the asset. If your capitalization rate is 8%, but your property is only worth $800,000, you can expect $64,000 per year, which kind of reflects the “Class A vs. Class B” distinction we’ve posited above. (This is all a toy model, most commercial buildings have longer functional lifespans than that, and it’s more directly affected by whether or not you have a secure tenant and for how long, and even things like inflation rate).

        • Radu Floricica says:

          A recent example.

          The replacement 70-story headquarters will be able to fit 15,000 employees, whereas the current building fits 6,000 employees in a space that has a capacity of 3,500.

      • Nick says:

        One of the few interesting concepts, to me, in the Life After People program that ran a few years ago was the realization that modern construction is actually significantly inferior to ancient construction in terms of durability absent maintenance. For example, steel is a terrible construction material for durability because it corrodes so easily. But if you keep painting it, it’s much stronger and lighter than stone or more lasting materials, and makes better structures for current function (e.g. bridges).

        The Twitter account WrathOfGnon goes on, and on, and on about the sustainability and maintenance advantages of pre-modern construction. Of course, in some cases, as with steel, those advantages only come with regular maintenance.

        Not being an architect or historian, though, I don’t have sources to check what he says against.

        • EchoChaos says:

          WrathofGnon is fun, but the biggest thing to consider is cost.

          Building a house with old-growth lumber, stonework and durable concrete is totally possible still, it’ll just cost a lot more. And would you rather build a house that lasts 30 years now for $200,000, live in it, and buy another $200,000 house 30 years later or save for 30 years and live in a $400,000 house that looks pretty much the same, but will last for the next 100?

          • Randy M says:

            And would you rather build a house that lasts 30 years now for $200,000, live in it, and buy another $200,000 house 30 years later or save for 30 years and live in a $400,000 house that looks pretty much the same, but will last for the next 100?

            Absolutely the latter, but that’s with an eye towards passing it on.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Absolutely the latter, but that’s with an eye towards passing it on.

            Which is a fair choice. It’s just not a common one in America because very few Americans live in their parents’ home when they grow up. Empty nesting is far more common. And given empty nesting, few people in their 40s-50s are going to move again into the “family estate” when the parents pass.

          • Randy M says:

            It’s just not a common one in America because very few Americans live in their parents’ home when they grow up.

            Maybe that’s statistically true. But there’s been several times we’ve gone to birthday parties for young children, and I am impressed by how they can afford such a nice house already, only to learn that they live with parents.
            My wife and I lived with her grandmother for a couple of years after marrying.
            My Dad and uncle live with my Grandpa. I don’t have the option to live with in my parents’ house because it was sold in the course of their divorce.

          • JPNunez says:

            Most people will prefer the later. Was reading that in Japan most people do the former, and just tear down houses after 30 years and rebuild from scratch. Causes: better construction standards, low quality housing after ww2, and well, the practice self perpetuates because nobody wants to buy an old house anyway because everyone tears them down and rebuilds.

      • The Nybbler says:

        But that maintenance would include, e.g., replacement of the roof at 30-50 year intervals, replacement of joists that sag, replacement of walls that warp, replacement of floors that wear, tuckpointing chimney bricks that crumble.

        The roof and possibly the chimney, yes. But there’s no reason any joists should sag or walls warp in 200 years in a modern tract house. I would expect most things to be replaced due to obsolescence, not end-of-life, even in a wood frame tract house. (The main risk, I think, would be if OSB ends up having a short lifetime)

        • hls2003 says:

          I’ve seen pretty substantial plaster damage from non-disaster events involving humidity changes; although it’s not common, I would think over 200 years it wouldn’t be unusual even with drywall (not with green board though). I’d certainly expect to see some “smiles” in trim, at least, and probably some more structural elements like joists, door and window frames, etc. over that time frame, even if technically structurally sound.

      • Tenacious D says:

        The house I live in is ~ 85 years old. I’ve swapped out a lot of insulation in the attic this year, and am planning on having the wooden siding on one exterior wall replaced this fall, so the Ship of Theseus has definitely been on my mind.

      • Anthony says:

        Some older construction is pretty durable. I was involved in a significant renovation of a 101-year-old building, and over 90% of the original redwood columns and beams were retained. Of the ones removed, more than half had been damaged by later renovations – drilling holes for conduits, notching for other work, etc.

        • hls2003 says:

          My folks rehabbed a 100+ year old farmhouse, and had pretty good success with mostly original materials. I’m not skilled enough myself, but I love seeing old structures preserved.

        • Aapje says:

          Heavy beams can last nigh forever if not overburdened and if woodworm doesn’t get to it.

      • DarkTigger says:

        “Theseus Ship”:
        My parents life in a house that on paper goes on 125 years now. The whole street used to look like it. When I was a kid there was another house like it but it is replaced with a 3 stock appartment building.

        When my parents replaced the wallpapers recently you could see the line above which it had been rebuild after the war. Under a height of ~1,80 the walls are black of soot. Over it they show the orange of the “war bricks”, cheap bricks that were burned after the war.

    • Well... says:

      I asked “what does ‘obsolete’ really mean?” in a previous OT a long time ago and didn’t get a satisfying answer. Most of the time it seems to boil down to fashion or keeping up with the Joneses, though every once in a while a change is based on something more fundamental (e.g. physicists abandoning Newtonian physics for Einsteinian physics). Frustratingly, it’s often based on a domino effect, where everyone moves from X1 to X2, and because X2 is only compatible with Y2 and not with Y1, you have to move from Y1 to Y2.

      Lifespans I have a firmer handle on, having been a homeowner. Structures are not monolithic things (well, some are, but forget about those for now); they’re made up of lots of subsystems, each of which has its own lifespan. If you keep repairing/replacing each subsystem (e.g. the roof, the furnace, the windows, the insulation, etc.) you can extend the lifespan of the whole structure, but eventually you will reach the point where doing so is untenable, where replacements are no longer available, or where a certain subsystem simply cannot be replaced without inflicting catastrophic destruction on the structure as a whole.

    • Lambert says:

      Obligatory *laughs in European*
      The US is only about one reasonable house lifespan old.

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        In the US, 100 years is a long time.

        In Europe, 100 miles is a long way.

      • Tarpitz says:

        The house I grew up in is older than the US and seems likely to be inhabited for many years to come.

        • I knew someone on Staten Island of whom I believe that was true, if you were willing to date the house from its oldest surviving part, which I think was the basement.

          • Tarpitz says:

            It’s true that parts of the house were more recent (the kitchen and utility room, at least) but I think the majority did in fact date from the late 17th Century. The beams certainly looked it.

  36. jermo sapiens says:

    Please let me know if this too hot a CW topic, and I will delete this comment.

    A certain figure in a 2014 controversy about ethics in game journalism is now back in the news after making abuse allegations against a game developer. The game developer committed suicide only a few days after these allegations were made. I have no direct knowledge of anything related to the allegations, but according to some reporting by The Post Millennial, there are some reasons to doubt these allegations.

    Does the guy’s suicide increase your belief that the allegations are true, do they reflect the hopelessness one may feel when accused in the era of #BelieveAllWowen, or was this guy perhaps on the brink of suicide and this pushed him over the edge?

    • Randy M says:

      I think suicide is evidence not strongly pointing to guilt or innocence–could go either way depending on the individual.
      Suicide, contingent on innocence, is evidence that SJW has significant negative effects, or at the least is perceived to.
      I don’t think a potential for suicide is sufficient reason for leniency in accusations in cases of known guilt (to the accuser) and sufficient gravity. edit: That is, one is not obligated to take into consideration the mental state of the perpetrator when trying to obtain proportionate justice.

    • Enkidum says:

      Immediately after her accusations were made public, numerous other people came forward with similar stories, including his former business partners. These were detailed, clear, and pretty damning. I haven’t read the reporting you’re discussing, but my read on the situation is simple: dude was an abusive piece of shit. He also had serious mental health issues, and was apparently making some progress in therapy, etc, but at some point all the evil he’d forced other people through was going to come back to bite him.

      The suicide itself doesn’t change my beliefs one way or another.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        dude was an abusive piece of shit

        That may very well be the case. But I would warn against using dogpiling by others and specially former business partners as conclusive proof. Maybe he was a jerk but not criminally guilty, maybe he was completely innocent, maybe he was criminally guilty.

        • Oscar Sebastian says:

          While I don’t think any allegations are conclusive evidence and would prefer this man be alive (as if he were innocent, the world would clearly be the better for his presence, and if he were guilty, he deserves jail time), the fact that even his own sister won’t defend him is about as damning as hearsay can be.

        • Corey says:

          I actually think it’s a pretty good heuristic; a single allegation is just hearsay, multiple independent allegations with similar MOs are likely true. (I intentionally don’t know details of the particular case under discussion)

        • Aftagley says:

          specially former business partners as conclusive proof

          not conclusive, but really compelling. They’ve written a few reddit responses and medium posts on their interactions with him and it comes across as very convincing. They in no way present him as being uniformly negative.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      I had never heard of this guy before he had committed suicide, and the first version of the story I heard didn’t even mention that it was Zoe Quinn who had made the accusation or even what the specific “abusive” things he had been accused of doing were.

      As a rule of thumb, trusting a pathological liar when they tell outlandish stories is bad practice. The fact that this guy’s friends and family fell over themselves to believe her over him is predictable but incredibly sad.

      That said, if someone without a long history of lying made a credible accusation of abuse I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. I don’t expect game developers to be any more or less abusive than the general public.

    • syrrim says:

      I think a detail missing is that after he was so accused, everyone in his life abandoned him, and then he commited suicide. Again, this isn’t evidence for or against his guilt, but it does reaffirm that one should obtain good evidence for guilt before meting out punishment, because such punishment may have consequences that can’t be fixed by an apology. It is also a strong argument against “believing women” a policy predicated on the assumption that all men are perfect stoics (aided in part by their careful cultivation of this persona). In fact, men feel pain at the loss of friends and social circles as strongly as women, and a unilateral policy in this regard is unilaterally disproportionate.

      I think in particular this is a test of litigating such offenses publicly, via social media and blogposts, rather than privately between the friends of the accused and the accuser. In the latter case, these friends can make a decision individually whether or not they believe the accuser, and whether or not they feel they have a responsibility to terminate the friendship. When litigated over social media, these decisions are made as a group, either all or nothing, and based in large part on matters separate from the issue at hand. Would the accuser in this case have seen such a large response had she been the twitter nobody she should be? It seems unlikely.

      • Randy M says:

        It is also a strong argument against “believing women” a policy predicated on the assumption that all men are perfect stoics

        I don’t think that’s the argument. I think it is a mix of “sexual harassment is too important, women wouldn’t lie about it” and “sexual harassment is too important to worry about punishing the innocent.”

        • jermo sapiens says:

          either way those are all terrible arguments.

          • acymetric says:

            Sure, but if you’re going to criticize an argument you should at least try to criticize the right one(s).

        • BBA says:

          In some cynical moments, I start thinking of it as backdoor affirmative action. Make it easy to fire (or in non-employment contexts, “cancel”) men in high-profile roles and this will eventually help achieve gender equity. It’s a zero-sum game, to help women you’re necessarily going to hurt men. Guilt or innocence is beside the point.

          To be clear, I actually think this is a compelling argument. It’s just not an argument that I feel good about making.

          • The Nybbler says:

            To be clear, I actually think this is a compelling argument. It’s just not an argument that I feel good about making.

            Perhaps you should go with your feelings in this case, and consider taking your own side on an issue.

          • BBA says:

            Who says you know what “my side” is? I sure as hell don’t.

          • The Nybbler says:

            I believe you’ve mentioned that you’re male. That would seem to give you a natural side on cases of discrimination against and unjust treatment towards males.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        I think a detail missing is that after he was so accused, everyone in his life abandoned him, and then he commited suicide.

        Yes, and that’s the part where the #BelieveAllWomen stuff probably played a big role and that’s why it is so harmful.

        • Corey says:

          Is it more harmful that the prior prevailing norms? We shouldn’t assume a counterfactual of perfect justice, the counterfactual is, to be flip, allegations are presumed false unless the man is pretty low-status or the woman has 4 male witnesses.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            If the prevailing norms are “innocent until proven guilty”, yes it is more harmful. I dont expect perfection, which is why “innocent until proven guilty” is the correct standard, because we know we make errors. Your sharia law counterfactual is ridiculous, when we have 1000 years of common law to draw upon in the Anglosphere.

            Similarly, women are not perfect, and they lie, including about sexual assault. I expect that false allegations are rare, but before ruining a man’s life, we can test allegations in court.

          • acymetric says:

            As is repeated almost every time this comes up, innocent until proven guilty is appropriate for the legal system. It is not appropriate (or even feasible) when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

            Socially we have probably overcorrected, but it is easy to forget that it wasn’t all that long ago that the deck was pretty stacked against a women making claims like this.

          • Corey says:

            @jermo: I don’t think you’re assigning equivalent moral weight to men and women here. Probably unintentionally.

            Prior prevailing norms were that there were rarely any consequences for sexual harassment and abuse. Therefore every community had a high-status man who did this stuff at will. (“missing stair” is the term of art) This amounted to a huge tax on women (and men in communities where the missing stair was gay or female). Sometimes whisper networks would protect you, but often this meant you could not be part of that community / industry / etc. (and is there another one you’re suited for where you can avoid *its* missing stair?)

            I totally agree there’s collateral damage to men. Worse than the collateral damage to women before? (It’s probably a question where there’s no good data given the politicized and taboo nature of the topic, to be fair)

          • albatross11 says:

            acymetric:

            +1

            The legal system needs to stick with innocent until proven guilty, but what’s being discussed here is an allegation of abuse in public. You shouldn’t assume accusations are automatically true, but you don’t need to apply the legal standards of evidence to personal stuff, either. (I know nothing about this case, FWIW–I have no idea whether the accusations were true or false.).

          • Randy M says:

            What is the reason the legal system assumes innocence until guilt is proven?
            Because the consequences for failure is high.
            Because it values equality under the law and does not want to presume some citizens are more trustworthy than others (though this can be a point to be argued with evidence during the trial).
            Anything else?

            I think this holds in the social realm where you are trying to inflict punishment (firing, shunning) and don’t know either party personally or otherwise have strong reason to presume the reliability of one party–and gender isn’t that.

          • J Mann says:

            It’s tricky. From what I’ve seen, the shunning normally takes place immediately after the accusations hit, and there’s often no process to evaluate guilt or innocence.

            There definitely isn’t a great solution – either we go with the old standard of “people say crazy stuff after a break-up, we weren’t there” and some abusers get away with it, or we go with the new standard of “two accusations or one long one and you’re out,” and a lot of people get shafted unfairly.

            This is obviously just one guy’s story, but this one stuck with me.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            It happens to women, too. https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story
            “Marie’s best friend from high school — the one who had taught her photography and had taken that picture of her emerging from the surf — created a webpage that called Marie a liar, with a photo from Marie’s Myspace page, with police reports, with Marie’s full name. ”

            People need to act as jurors are expected to act when they hear an accusation.

          • “Therefore every community had a high-status man who did this stuff at will.”

            The example given is always a high status man, but in practice that’s the exception rather than the rule. If it was only CEOs, movie stars, and politicians being falsely accused, I can honestly say I wouldn’t care much about it, I don’t much like those people and if the system were consistently unfair to them, they’d be able to do something about it without my help.

            “I totally agree there’s collateral damage to men. Worse than the collateral damage to women before? (It’s probably a question where there’s no good data given the politicized and taboo nature of the topic, to be fair)”

            Yeah, if you were to explain to a Martian why in a He Said, She Said situation, She is the one to believe. The Martian might ask if perhaps one group is being assigned greater moral weight, which you’d say no to.

          • Garrett says:

            What is the reason the legal system assumes innocence until guilt is proven? … Anything else?

            Yes. Critically, because in most aspects of life it’s very, very difficult to prove a negative. Try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt to an independent party that you don’t have unclaimed taxable income, or aren’t having an affair with a coworker, or didn’t commit $crime. It’s nearly impossible.

            But providing evidence of something which does exist or did happen is entirely do-able. Witnesses, forensic science, etc., are all possible and done routinely. (Yes, yes, there are technical problems with them, but they are logically and practically possible even if problematic).

            So as a way to reduce the number of miscarriages of justice, we presume as a matter of law that someone is innocent until proven guilty.

          • herbert herberson says:

            But it’s worth emphasizing that even within the legal system, the standards vary dramatically depending on what the consequence is. If the consequence is “men with guns keep you in a cage for a span of time” the standard is the very high “beyond a reasonable doubt.” If the consequence is “you need to pay someone money” then the standard falls to “more likely than not” even if the offense is otherwise exactly the same (you can, after all, sue people for rape/murder/etc, and as OJ Simpson famously discovered that differing standard can make all the difference)

          • Randy M says:

            @herbert herberson
            Good point. The trouble with social sanction is that it’s extremely inconsistent. Some guy might get fired, another quickly forgotten, even with the same level of evidence.

            Though the dissimilarity to the justice system in this case is admittedly hard to see.

          • J Mann says:

            @herbert herbertson

            Agreed. What strikes me in shunning cases is the process, more than the standard of proof.

            Unless you sue for defamation or something, you don’t get a judge deciding what kinds of evidence are reliable, you don’t get a chance to present both sides’ testimony under oath, there’s no specific fact finder, etc.

            Chris Hardwick seems to have mostly gotten out from his accusation by presenting texts that contradicted some aspects of his accuser’s post, and because the accuser claimed there was additional evidence then refused to produce it, but I don’t know if he’s out entirely, and a lot of that turned on his employer doing an investigation and responding. If your employer just immediately fires you, it’s tough to get a ruling.

          • albatross11 says:

            anonymousskimmer:

            Wow, that’s a fascinating and disturbing story! Without the serial rapist’s careful keeping of pictures/trophies, everyone in the world would still be convinced she’d made it up.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Let me preface this by saying that I assume anything LW1 (the accuser, whose name may still be taboo here) says is a lie, to the point that if she claims the sky is blue on a clear day, it might be worth looking for myself. One wag on reddit calls this the “blue-check blue check” (blue-check meaning Twitter-verified).

      That said, I don’t think the suicide changes anything. The accused didn’t seem all that mentally stable to begin with, and in a social group where accusation from a high-ranking person means ostracism regardless of guilt, actual guilt would not seem to be a major factor.

    • Protagoras says:

      Said figure is clearly a troubled person, with (as is not uncommon) a history of associating with other troubled people. It is very difficult to know what to think about situations involving such people. They are more likely to be victims of abuse (they come across to abusers as vulnerable), as well as more likely to be liars or to engage in abuse. The suicide seems to me to fit the pattern without providing much additional information. So it’s a mess, and my policy is to try to withhold judgment, unless I know the people involved and can’t avoid dealing with the situation in some way for that reason.

  37. JonathanD says:

    Which statesmen, writers and humanities/social science academics over the past couple centuries or so do folks think have had highly net positive careers in which their ideas were largely vindicated by history?

    Statesmen: Wilberforce, Jefferson, Lincoln, Gandhi
    In general, the world has improved dramatically in the last two centuries, so this one isn’t particularly hard. Pick a change you approve of and find a politician associated with that change.

    Writers are harder, because they’re less well known. Staying with slavery, we can call out Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fredrick Douglas. For women’s rights we can look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. For a more contemporary example, we might pick Andrew Sullivan, who was one of the first people to call for gays (like himself) to be able to marry their partners. At the time this was a radical, impossible idea. He’s lived long enough to see it come to pass. Each of these writers will have work that didn’t age well. Susan B Anthony was also active in the temperance movement, Andrew was a big Iraq war supporter. But I think they all have a case of having moved the country in a direction that in retrospect we’ve all agreed we’re happy it’s gone.*

    I don’t think I can name a social science academic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that none of them have done work that moved the consensus in a positive way. It just means academics are more obscure than writers or politicians.

    *Andrew being contemporary and the Supreme Court now being what it now is, that one may be less settled than I think, but I doubt it. I really do think that gays being allowed to marry has actually moved out of the Overton Window altogether, and that Obergefell is likely to stick around.

    • albatross11 says:

      Count no man lucky until he’s dead, but I’d say Andrew Sullivan is a good example of someone who has had a big impact on the world in a direction he wanted. I rather suspect the same is going to end up being true of Steve Sailer–whatever happens w.r.t Trumpism, a lot of Sailer’s issues are likely to get a hearing in the next couple decades.

    • mtl1882 says:

      Lincoln and Gandhi have no doubt been vindicated, but they did a lot more than write, and they had hard lives and not a lot of time to savor their vindication. People whose ideas change the world don’t usually have the satisfied payoff that Boot seems to be getting at. They’re not mainly aiming at it, either. I agree with other comments that it is mainly about resonance—getting the people to understand and act on the ideas. And there is a lot of luck with who is able to read and meet the needs of the moment. Many of the most lauded thinkers did not experience anywhere near that level of success during life. Quite a few get pushback for their ideas—some get shot. It sure is awesome for the ones who do have success during their lifetimes, and it is a popular dream for a reason, but they are rare and probably only possible in certain periods. I understand Boot’s distress, but it isn’t surprising–it’s a risky, frustrating career path. It’s nothing like being an accountant or some other reliable, linear career path with a plausibly predictable payoff at the end.

      • JonathanD says:

        My comment ended up a ways down from the ancestor, but I’m answering this question:

        Which statesmen, writers and humanities/social science academics over the past couple centuries or so do folks think have had highly net positive careers in which their ideas were largely vindicated by history?

        The first category is statesmen, which is where I have Lincoln and Gandhi. As I said in my comment, I think this is a pretty easy one, since, as you note, it’s harder to move the world using only writing.

  38. SteveReilly says:

    Are there good online sources for learning about the history of India and the Far East beyond the obvious (like Wikipedia)? I’m especially interested in pre-20th century stuff.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      John Keay has written India: A History and China: A History. He’ll get you up to speed with the academic consensus in those countries, but for the most tenuous sources (deeper in the past, as a rule) he actually mentions the epistemology behind it. Warning: I view some of the academic consensus he repeats as leftover cultural imperialism from the British divide-and-rule strategy (you’ll see him saying boo Ramayana and boo nukes, because his sources in academia do so).
      Trying to find online sources for Indian history is going to lead you down a rabbit hole of controversy. China, you might be fine.

      • I’ve heard good things about India: A History but I’m pretty skeptical that you can effectively convey history by covering 5000 years in 600 pages.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Very much agreed. He’ll just familiarize you with the academic consensus outline, which is sort-of fact-based and therefore gets more detailed the closer you get to the British. Like, the Indus Valley Civilization is a short chapter, the lifestyle gleaned from the Vedas is another, the Buddha’s social milieu is another. Maybe 90% 600 pages deal with the last 2300 years, and maybe 50% with the 1000 since Mahmud of Ghazni’s invasion.

    • Tenacious D says:

      Also interested in finding some resources on this.

  39. souleater says:

    What are everyone’s thoughts on Salary history bans?

    On the one hand, I tend to lean libertarian, and don’t like the idea of the government deciding what questions can and can’t be asked.. On the other hand, there is a significant power imbalance between employer and employee, and salary history is one way that power balance is abused.

    • Lambert says:

      Do they have any way of verifying your answer?

      • Viliam says:

        You never know who knows whom. You may have a bad luck, and your previous boss could be a friend of your potential new boss. Or maybe it’s an oligopoly, and all bosses are friends, cooperating against their customers and employees.

        Otherwise, they probably can’t verify it.

        I was actually asked this question once, and in a moment of inspiration I lied and said a much larger number. Which predictably led to “so, can we offer you the same starting salary and re-evaluate it later?”, and I said “yeah, sure”, and then both sides were very happy.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        Yes. I had a friend interview for a well-known company that was asked to provide pay stubs as part of his background check. He told them to fuck themselves and the offer was rescinded.

    • acymetric says:

      Fully support. Salary history allows companies to underpay, and also can make it difficult for people who are looking to take a decrease in pay in exchange for [reduced hours/a less stressful role/any number of other things].

      A “better” solution probably involves allowing salary history, but not requiring it or downgrading a candidate for not providing it, but the enforcement of that gets extremely messy so a ban is probably the right solution. Where I tend to have libertarian tendencies they apply to regulation of people. For businesses and corporations if we need to rein in some form of abuse/power imbalance we should go for it.

      Banning salary history questions makes the hiring more meritocratic, for people who are into that kind of thing.

    • Corey says:

      Hard to tell who might benefit. Sometimes having employers offer “current + a bit” is advantageous e.g. I’m sure I would be being paid less at this gig if not for that. On the other hand, it leads to negative feedback effects, where graduating during a recession or otherwise taking lower pay once permanently reduces your salary.

    • salvorhardin says:

      This is a tough one, because salary history is an imperfect but not useless signal of productivity. What somebody else was willing to pay you before is not unrelated to your likely marginal product at a new prospective employer. It’s far from perfectly related due to power imbalances in negotiations etc, and the degree of imperfect relation is not evenly distributed and likely to disadvantage already-disadvantaged groups. But it’s still potentially useful information in matching people to the right jobs.

      So, one potential downside is that there’s a perverse effect akin to that from “ban the box” laws which prohibit asking about criminal history. Namely, employers prohibited from asking about one thing they find useful will find other, even worse proxies for that thing instead which further disadvantage the people you’re trying to help. The best argument against banning salary history IMO is that not only should employers deontologically be free to ask what they please, but consequentially, letting governments decide what they can and can’t ask will be a net bad because governments aren’t smart enough not to impose counterproductive restrictions on what can be asked.

      • Anthony says:

        imperfect but not useless signal of productivity

        One problem is that it’s difficult to factor out the overall productivity of the previous employer. Some employers just can’t pay as much for the same skill set because they don’t make as much money. But people will settle for those lower-paying jobs for a variety of reasons other than not being able to be more productive.

      • Suppose you have two identical candidates, same company, same job title, and you interview them and they seem equally personable, same skill set, ect. What is the probability that the one who is paid higher is a more productive worker? I’d say it’s very slightly greater than .5. I can easily believe that hiring managers treat it as if it were way greater than .5, because “I based his salary on his previous salary,” is a “safe” story to tell to their managers, easier than “I decided his salary based on nothing* but it feels about right to me.”

        Here’s a fairly radical idea I have, what I’ll call Turing Test employment. Give employers only someone’s name, job history, and job title, without education, salary levels, or even the names of previous employers. If they are convinced that a college degree grants some Special Skill that can’t be self-taught, they can find out what it is and test for it during the interviews.** If they are unable to tell a difference between two candidates without knowing factor X, then we will assume that there isn’t a difference and that discriminating on factor X will be illegal.

        *Do HR departments conduct rigorous research into their practices so that they can say their decisions are based on ‘science?’ Rarely, and when they do, they often ignore their findings. I asked a manager about it, and he told me that he was well aware of the lack of correlation between factors the company hires on and employee performance. I asked him if the company had any plans to change the way they hired people, and he said it would be “too dangerous” to do so.
        **Additionally, you could let them demand that one pass a series of tests given by an outside group. What’s to prevent these tests from degenerating into our college-signalling model? The companies which give these tests will be required to give them to everyone, with no requirements for people to be “admitted” to the “university” or attend a classroom or take the tests in a specific order.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I expect it will have a bunch of bad consequences. For instance, as has been discussed here, “ban the box” (“have you been convicted of a crime”) seems to result in more (already illegal) racial discrimination. The largest effect of banning salary history will likely be more time wasted (by both candidates and employers) on jobs where there’s a large qualification mismatch. Another bad effect will likely be employers unintentionally lowballing candidates. I expect the claimed positive effects (employers paying more for candidates who have been undervalued in the past) to be both small and quickly mitigated by those benefiting from it.

      A better solution, IMO, would be to end the social taboo on discussing compensation. But that’s likely not practical.

      • b_jonas says:

        Isn’t it already a taboo? Apart from possibly government employees that is. When my employer asked what I earned the last time, I just said that my previous employer wishes to keep that a secret. That’s what I will say in any future interview too if anyone asks, and this is easy to say, because the interviewer can call the previous employers for references about me, and the previous employers will indeed not tell them how much I earned. (Yes, you can say that I’m privilaged to find employment easily because I work in CS.)

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          Government employees tend to not want to talk about it either, just referring the quizzical fellow employee to the semi-public posting.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Yes, it’s currently a taboo. I think ending the taboo would do better at preventing unequal pay for similar work among employees at the same company just because of salary history. Obviously there would be disadvantages as well, because everyone would know where they _really_ ranked in their employers’ estimation, and where everyone else does as well.

    • Garrett says:

      Related question: why is it that of culture-war policies, only left-leaning policy preferences like this seem to get enacted? The closest right-leaning preference that I can think of is that of protection against religious discrimination, which was passed on a bipartisan basis.

      • Corey says:

        Confirmation bias. State-level may be more representative (e.g. requiring “teach the controversy” on evolution).

      • mitv150 says:

        I’m not sure that this is true regarding right-leaning policy preferences.

        But if it is, it may be because a not insignificant portion of the right has a libertarian inclination that says “although we shouldn’t do this, the government has no place banning it.”

        Conservatives (particularly constitutionalist types) often lament that they are at an inherent disadvantage in policy wars because following the rules is effectively part of their platform.

      • Conservatives of the National Review sort are the kinds who won’t take their own side in a fight.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      salvorhardin&nibbler are right here. There should be a (much bigger) difference between “do we think X is bad” and “do we want to ban X”. The latter always comes with side effects. But humans are dumb, and I don’t think this particular cognitive bias is really that well known, and definitely not in this particular shape.

      (It’s documented btw. Can’t remember the name, but the description is something like “when asked a difficult questions we tend to answer a different, easier one”).

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      This won’t really solve the problem. There are substantial pay disparities at my current company despite the fact that salary history is not asked for. Once people get hired, certain people are going to be better about getting promotions and pay increases, and certain people are going to get stuck in the 2% a year trap.

  40. Randy M says:

    In an attempt to have the Boardgamegeek.com forum moderators commit seppuku, Hasbro has announced Ms Monopoly–unless CNN.com has been bought out by the Babylon Bee.

    The selling points are many, including nice but unrelated donations to women’s foundations (just give directly rather than buying a worse version of a crappy board game, please), renaming properties after women’s inventions (including chocolate chip cookies), and, in a blatant rip-off of campus conservative’s universally lauded pedagogical tool “affirmative action bake sales”, female players will get higher starting cash and pass-go income–because when you strip all nuance from an argument it becomes that much more convincing. Now men can know exactly what women feel like when men mansplain away the wage gap as the result of freely chosen trade-offs, because it this game their poor performance is baked into the rules set.
    Pick up a copy if you’d like to hear someone say “Maybe if Monopoly world had state mandated paternity leave you’d have started with the full $1900.”

    If this sounds like a trollish post, I apologize. I think we can all unite in scorning this obvious attempt at woke capitalism making a profit off of selling us dumbed down versions of contentious arguments and forcing politics into our hobbies, while also agreeing that this statistically unlikely to be the worst version of monopoly but nonetheless assuredly a terrible, terrible game to play.

    Ms Monopoly is definitely hotter than Mr Moneybags, but she’s got the crazy eyes thing going on.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      Given how, apparently, everyone’s playing the original wrong, I don’t expect the new, improved ruleset to endure contact with the players for very long.

      ETA:

      Ms Monopoly is definitely hotter than Mr Moneybags, but she’s got the crazy eyes thing going on.

      This seems strangely appropriate…

      • JPNunez says:

        I dunno where americans have taken their ideas of free parking and jail, but I don’t remember the auction one. I suspect it does not fix the game into making it fun, tho it may speed up the initial part a little.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          I believe the original post discussing the matter* made the case that the auction rule was typically omitted in play because it led to making it very adversarial, very quickly (which is arguably the point, and the message of the original Landlord’s Game).

          * What I linked is one of numerous followups in mainstream press, but I disctictly recall reading it on a blog that focused on the auction rules specifically.

          • JPNunez says:

            That sounds plausible. From my childhood I remember reading the rules and the one that I remember is that once someone goes bankrupt they get to auction their properties, but I remember rarely using that rule cause:

            -most of the time someone going broke was long enough into the game for us to call it quits, count money right there and declare a winner

            -allowing people to auction their properties only made things worse. You ain’t coming back in monopoly by having _less_ property.

            I don’t think it was because it made the game more confrontational. I def don’t remember the auction applying to buying things initially, but we had knock offs of the game, and didn’t have access to a parker bros / hasbro version until recently, so maybe the knock offs removed the rule anyway.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            I think we should specify that the rule in question is the auctioning of properties after the player who landed on them declined to purchase.

            What that does is it takes properties off the market really quickly because as soon as anyone lands on a property, everyone can buy it immediately (if the player who landed on the property doesn’t want to pay face value, it goes to auction).

            Auctioning off the property of a bankrupt player sounds like something the Banker would do to bring it back into play – not something a player would do to get back in the game. I don’t have the rules on hand, but the way I’ve always played it, once you’re bankrupt, you’re out.

    • Corey says:

      There are tons of Monopoly knockoffs, mostly of low quality, so this isn’t surprising (though the subject matter is of interest to the group).

      • Randy M says:

        Not even knock-offs, just non-sensically re-themed money grabs from Hasbro themselves.

        A knock-off might actually be tempted to innovate somewhat.

        It’s not even the first “Monopoly: CW edition”. This follows the Milennial version and the socialist version.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          Given that the original was arguably a “socialist version” (depending on whether you consider Georgism “socialist”, or not), saying CW is baked into the game isn’t entirely unjustified.

          • Randy M says:

            Granted games can be didactic and monopoly has always had economic policy implications.
            This attempt seems particularly shallow and uninspired while overly proud of itself for making the point, yet also being almost aggressively against including a good game.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Modern political discourse – especially on stuff that gets classified as CW here – isn’t particularly known for subtlety. Mostly because there’s little in evidence.

          • JPNunez says:

            The original game sounds even worse than the stuff we got.

            The main problem with monopoly is how long it drags on, and the original was supposed to play the regular version and then the cooperation version back to back. It must have been insane.

        • Anthony says:

          Hasbropoly – Travel around the board with different ideas for Monopoly themes and knock-offs, and see how much money they all make.

    • Any time I’ve ever played Monopoly, there was always one or two guys who really got in to it and all the girls were bored really quickly(I don’t blame them, it’s a boring game). So I’m not sure who this supposed to be for.

      • Randy M says:

        I would not be surprised if more articles were written about it than games played. Not copies sold, because it’ll make a fine gift–gag and otherwise–and subsequent coffee table display.

      • albatross11 says:

        My 10 year old daughter *loves* Monopoly, and has played it since when she needed help reading the stuff on the cards or counting the money. (Teaching your kids to count change back is one side benefit of playing Monopoly with them.)

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Cute! I’ve been on the side of “Monopoly is badly designed” since discovering Catan. Your pushback is useful.

          • JPNunez says:

            I think the main appeal for kids is the fake money, tho.

          • JPNunez says:

            Wanted to edit the previous post to point out how stupid it is that there aren’t more popular board games with fake money anyway. It’s been too long for there being a patent or something on it, right?

          • Machine Interface says:

            Regular board gamers generally don’t like fake paper-money (due to its tendency to get dirty and crumbled very quickly) and would rather use literally anything else as currency (cardboard tokens, plastic tokens, pokerchips, fake metal coins, money printed on cards, etc), and so most games don’t use it.

            That said, if you can find a copy, there’s an excellent and family-accessible game called “Airlines Europe”, about owning shares in airline companies and developing said companies (very simplified rule-wise, doesn’t require complicated calculations), designed by the guy who made Ticket to Ride, and which does feature paper money among the components.

          • JPNunez says:

            Oh I love Ticket to Ride, need to check that out … somehow.

            Ah, good point on disadvantages of fake money on boardgames, but maybe I could have specified “for kids”.

            If I was designing a kids boardgame, I’d go out of my way to include fake money as a central mechanic. Dunno about one for adults.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            One of the best board games I’ve seen with fake money is Imperial. You play a Swiss banker seeking to maximize holdings by buying bonds in various world powers during the WWI time frame. World powers move in order; whoever owns controlling stock in that power gets to direct its actions (building more units, invading, etc.). A power with more territories pays more in taxes; however, the act of conquering increases a power’s revenue (IIRC), some of which is later paid to investors as interest.

            Since multiple players can invest in a power, multiple people can benefit from a power going on the warpath. You often don’t care if you don’t get to direct any powers, if their director is already making you money.

            But in any case, Imperial has fake money. 🙂

          • Gobbobobble says:

            Power Grid is quite popular and has paper money, but yeah we aren’t exactly swimming in good examples

    • albatross11 says:

      I feel certain that this will sell dozens of copies.

    • DinoNerd says:

      *roflmao*

      There have been a bazillion Monopoly adaptations catering to different interest groups. E.g. sell to Candians by renaming all the streets to come from Toronto rather than New York.

      I figure it’s inevitable some updates have “modernized” it, replacing railroads with social networking sites and similar. (But I haven’t checked; I still prefer the original. I think my sister may still have our grandmother’s original set too; mine’s a modern copy.)

      Why not also go for political interest groups? After all, Hasbro just wants to make money ;-(

      What would a social conservative appealing variant look like? A Christian appealing variant?

      What’s the weirdest possible one you can think of?

      • Randy M says:

        I figure it’s inevitable some updates have “modernized” it,

        Yup

        What would a social conservative appealing variant look like? A Christian appealing variant?

        Take your pick (oops, that’s a knock-off. At least knock off a good game. )
        For the secular conservative board gamer, you could get one themed in after your favorite sport/team/Sports broadcasting network (sigh). Or go for the aforementioned “socialist” edition.

      • Lambert says:

        There was also a Moscow Edition, from the 70s.
        Not sure how that worked.

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        For that matter, if you wanted to set up a free market version of Monopoly, what rules would you change? Various ideas occur to me: making the price of homes and hotels fluctuate; allowing people to “go into the construction business”, getting rich off that guy who wants to start developing; ditto for the utility companies. What else?

        (I have to believe someone did in fact make a pro-free market Monopoly; I just don’t follow Monopoly news closely enough to know. And searching online doesn’t turn up what I’d call “pro”.)

      • littskad says:

        Monopoly’s street names don’t come from New York. They’re from Atlantic City, New Jersey.

    • souleater says:

      If you don’t like Ms. Monopoly, then try Monopoly: Socialism with the tagline “winning is for capitalists”

      Honestly, Ms. monopoly is so counterproductive, I think Hasbro is under new, conservative management.

      • albatross11 says:

        Did the CEO of Gillette recently move over?

        • souleater says:

          Monopoly:Socialism is actually making making fun of socialism.. It looks kinda funny.

          • axiomsofdominion says:

            Monopoly was originally a criticism of capitalism. Then capitalists ripped it off, slightly changed the theme, and here we are.

      • BBA says:

        Ironically, the original version of Monopoly – The Landlord’s Game by Lizzie Magie – was meant to be anti-capitalism and anti-monopoly. Magie was a Georgist.

        Most people who played it preferred to be capitalists. It evolved over the next few decades through homemade bootleg versions, one of which got sold to Parker Brothers by somebody who contributed almost nothing to the game but got credited as the designer for decades afterwards. When it became a hit, Parker Brothers bought the rights from Magie and a few other claimants to similar games, and all this history got memory-holed for a long time.

        • Aapje says:

          @BBA

          I think that we can learn something from this case, where Lizzie Magie thought that people would conclude from the game that self-perpetuating inequality is bad & would demand change, but most people actually preferred having inequality, at least when it is to their own advantage.

    • Urstoff says:

      It must be the counterpart to Monopoly: Socialism; they’re just going to make a monopoly for every faction of the culture war, which is really just what capitalism is all about.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I’m quite enjoying the trolling coming from Hasbro’s marketing department lately. Not enough to pay money for the game however. And if I am ever forced to play, I will cynically identify as a woman for the duration.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      That’s not as bad as it sounds. Monopoly versions are a bit like the drawings on the back of playing cards. Too many to count and almost as functionally identical.

    • Aapje says:

      @Randy M

      Ms Monopoly seems like toxoplasma. To some, it is completely fair turnaround and/or necessary reparations; while to others, it is evidence that feminism doesn’t want equality, but female privilege.

  41. albatross11 says:

    Would Max Boot’s career have been as good as it has, if he’d correctly predicted that the Iraq invasion was going to be an expensive disaster, that we’d still be in Afghanistan 20 years after we invaded, that bombing libya was going to leave the country a long-term failed state, etc? My sense is that pundits are judged on how well they agree with current beliefs at the time they write their columns. Only weirdos like Tetlock care about how well their statements agree with actual reality as it eventually turns out.

  42. Paul Brinkley says:

    Which statesmen, writers and humanities/social science academics over the past couple centuries or so do folks think have had highly net positive careers in which their ideas were largely vindicated by history?

    The problem with ideas is that it’s easy to make more of them. For any idea inspiring action, there exists an idea inspiring equal and opposite action.

    So if you want ideas that will truly alter the course of history, you will have to look at features external to ideas that make ideas better. You will have to make the ideas you want more coherent.

    All new ideas fight innately uphill battles, because the counter-idea is inertia and custom. People naturally want to keep doing what they’ve been doing. Coherent ideas work despite this, when they reveal an underlying logic to custom that reveals a previously unknown custom worth adopting.

    Historical examples of idea-hawkers OTTOMH (in the humanities only): Socrates, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Niccolo Machiavelli, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglass, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, George Orwell, Robert Heinlein, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Frederich Hayek, Margaret Thatcher, Walter Russell Mead.

    • mtl1882 says:

      All new ideas fight innately uphill battles, because the counter-idea is inertia and custom. People naturally want to keep doing what they’ve been doing. Coherent ideas work despite this, when they reveal an underlying logic to custom that reveals a previously unknown custom worth adopting.

      That is a very eloquent way of stating it. Leaders who connect are able to allow people to explicitly understand something that they already understood on some level.

  43. FrankistGeorgist says:

    Tangential to the thread of monopoly-gone-mad below.

    What is your go to Monopoly token?

    Someone feel free to aggregate this data for psychoanalytical or sociological purposes.

    I only played Dogopoly as that’s what my cousins had and since I was and remain a little afraid of dogs I was of course given the cat token.
    Otherwise I’m a thimble man myself.

    • FLWAB says:

      The little scotty dog. If I can’t get the dog, then the battleship. If not the battleship, then the top hat.

    • The Nybbler says:

      I always preferred the car.

    • DragonMilk says:

      The shoe or horseman

    • Purplehermann says:

      Iron, battleship/thimble

    • EchoChaos says:

      The car, followed by the top hat, followed by the iron.

    • b_jonas says:

      I don’t play monopoly. In tabletop games like Carcassone, I choose the red tokens, or the yellow ones if red is not available.

      The exception is our homemade Settlers of Catan set, in which I choose yellow first, then red. My brother made the village and town tokens for that set from some sort of modeling clay that hardens when baked. Since they’re handmade, they’re of slightly uneven shapes and sizes. Yellow has two slightly larger than usual villages, which I play as the starting villages for the early advantage.

      • Machine Interface says:

        I don’t play Monopoly either; my go-to colors in board games are green or purple (or short of that, red or black).

    • eyeballfrog says:

      Definitely thimble. Although I hear it got replaced in the newest versions of the game.

      In other games, I always go for the orange pieces, then red.

  44. Tenacious D says:

    We talk a lot about replication. These scientists made a costly, difficult-to-fake signal of their commitment.

  45. Well... says:

    Is there any serious* scholarship establishing “white privilege” as a legitimate concept? If so, where might I find it?

    *Serious meaning it’s not easily dismissable by a reasonable and intelligent person who realizes that nearly all humans have some kind of privilege and that the unequal outcomes between groups are due to many factors that might include systemic discrimination and historic disadvantages but are certainly not limited to that and might also include factors that are less flattering to groups commonly portrayed as non-privileged, or at least factors that are complex and nuanced. In other words, can a person understand all these things and still carry around a meaningful concept of “white privilege”? And if so, where might he get it from?

    • Jack says:

      I don’t like the look of your asterisk. Would you like to share any scholarship on white privilege that is “easily dismissable by a reasonable and intelligent person who realizes [a variety of mundane truths]”?

      But to be more direct: Charles Mills, The Racial Contract.

      • Well... says:

        I’ve only really seen the notion of white privilege forwarded in non-scholarly contexts. I’m unfamiliar with the scholarship, which is why I was asking for the strongest examples of it.

        Your link takes me to a 180-page document. Is there a much shorter, accurate summary somewhere?

        • Jack says:

          You’ve encountered the summary already. “Systemic discrimination and historic disadvantages”. Well, I guess you have to couple this with the notion that systemic discrimination and historic disadvantage tend to reproduce themselves and their own legitimating ideologies and institutions. There are other kinds of privilege that get studied also. We don’t bother so much with things like “black privilege” because there are relatively few spaces where that seems to be a big thing, as a quick turn through demographic data on any measure of well-being will suggest.

        • Jack says:

          Looking again at your comment, it might be that you are wrongly assuming no part of white supremacy can be things that are not “flattering” to non-white people. Not only is this not true, the theory of white supremacy predicts the opposite. There is a definite tension between wanting something from a “scholarly context” and wanting something short and simple.

          • gbdub says:

            Not picking on you specifically, but your comment illustrates a sort dysphemism bloat I’ve noticed: “structural racism / white privilege” have become “white supremacy”, and public figures whose actions might be judged racist are getting labeled “white supremacists”.

            My impression is that this has happened lately, post-Trump, but am I missing something and this has a scholarly origin?

          • lvlln says:

            @gbdub

            FWIW, I recall Bernie Sanders being called a “White Supremacist” within my online social circles during the 2016 Dem primaries because he’s a white person benefiting from a society that privileges white people and isn’t doing enough to acknowledge it and dismantle it. I don’t recall if it has academic origins, but I suspect it does, given that almost all the social justice terminology originate from academia in [blank] Studies fields, from what I can tell.

            But it does seem that using the term to refer to public figures whose actions might be judged racist has become more mainstream post-Trump. My online social circles in 2016 were certainly not at all what you’d call mainstream, though neither would I describe them as fringe.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            because he’s a white person benefiting from a society that privileges white people and isn’t doing enough to acknowledge it and dismantle it.

            Yes, under critical race theory, white supremacy doesnt mean N*zi Germany, it means the USA of 2019. Because whites are a majority in the US, the US is under white supremacy. The fact that they use a word which most people find horrifying to describe a situation most people find completely normal is one of the many dishonest tricks of the woke left.

            So, if you’re not actively trying to make whites a minority, you’re a white supremacist according to them. This view is propagated by most universities.

          • Jack says:

            @gbdub The use of the term “white supremacy” to refer to a system of racist institutions goes a ways back; I’m not sure how far back but you can check out the Mills link I posted above for an example. Most people do not call someone a white supremacist just because they are not an anti-racist (though the rhetorical move can do work and has been used in many contexts).

            I’m not responding to jermosapiens because I do not sense a possibility for good faith discussion.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I’m not responding to jermosapiens because I do not sense a possibility for good faith discussion.

            I’m not arguing in bad faith, I’m just shining light on the Saira Rao end of the spectrum.

          • Jack says:

            User Well… didn’t ask for you to shine a light on what you now seem to assert is a fringe (an “end of the spectrum”) use of these terms. They were specifically asking for something like a steelman. If you had come here just to say “well /some/ people use the words like this” you would simply be off-topic. But you didn’t specify that you were talking about a fringe, and in fact said “under critical race theory” and ascribed a position to “most universities”; which made your comment misleading as well as off-topic. Your ascription of bad faith (“dishonest tricks”) made your comment uncharitable as well as misleading and off-topic. I’d last say, I don’t think the position you describe is what anybody means when they talk about white supremacy, though it is difficult to refute accusations of dishonesty even when they are accompanied by some form of evidence, and yours was not. Your comment was neither kind nor true, but rather uncharitable, misleading, off-topic, and wrong. Let’s face it, you came here to slag on your perceived political opponents, not to further the conversation about what academics mean when they write about white privilege.

            I’m always happy to have a meta-discussion.

          • gbdub says:

            @Jack – I know “white supremacy” is not a recent term, but typically in the past I get the sense that it was reserved for things like Jim Crow and neo-Nazi skinheads… not merely racist but openly, aggressively, often violently so.

            Using “white supremacy” completely interchangeably with “white privilege” (or “structural racism”) as you do here seems like a recent phenomenon, and not one that seems justifiable by academic precision/clarity.

          • Jack says:

            Let me be more clear: some academic writers have given “white supremacy” the broader meaning since at least the late eighties. This is not a post-Trump thing. White supremacy is not quite “interchangeable” with the other terms you mention; in this context it refers to a structure of white racial privilege. White supremacy is thus a species of structural racism and white privilege is one of its constitutive elements. But the broad use of the term has certainly become more public outside of the academy in recent years. If you’re talking about how the word is “typically” used, I think even today it is usually used for explicit haters. It’s a word with more than one use–and of course this can bring problems. That said I do not think this is really a problem from the perspective of academic precision. Academic writing on white supremacy doesn’t make the conflation (in my experience). That the term seems to marry a descriptive claim and a normative claim is a deliberate feature.

          • albatross11 says:

            Jack:

            I’ll admit, I find the “white supremacy” terminology pretty baffling, myself. Our system of white supremacy seems to be pushing Asians to the top of the heap in many areas, for example. Most of the differences in outcomes between blacks and whites are mirrored by the differences in outcomes between whites and blacks–things like life expectancy, school performance, low birthweight babies, unwed pregnancy, rates of committing crimes or being victims of crimes, etc.

            Similarly, I’ve never been able to work out how I’d tell if “structural racism” explains some gap in outcomes, rather than some other explanation. As an outsider to this area of scholarship, it often seems like that ends up as a kind of theory spackle which can explain anything–any outcome difference that doesn’t have another explanation can be explained as due to structural racism.

          • Jack says:

            I’m not sure that white supremacy is meant to explain things, if by explain you mean in a causal sense. The same problem arises with stuff like “capitalism”, “patriarchy”, “communism”, or (for red pill people) “feminism”. The work of tracing out concrete mechanisms by which these categories can be said to exist in and effect the world is hard. It can also be done badly.

            If someone observes some phenomenon and says, “that’s because of white supremacy”, and they mean a causal claim, they are likely being sloppy. (Similarly, one often sees sloppy claims about the good or bad effects of “capitalism” in the world.) But they may mean something more like, “that is part of a certain pattern that shares overlapping causal mechanisms with other parts of the pattern”. If you observe, say, differential family wealth of mostly white and non-white families in a certain time and place, there are going to be a bunch of concrete mechanisms behind it. Some of these are going to be quite directly related to race, and others aren’t. I’m not sure what it would mean to say something like, “the reason white families tend to be richer is white supremacy”. But if you look about and find that there are often institutions and practices that yield such differentials, together with legitimating ideologies of varying explicitness and reach, you might find it useful to name the pattern–especially if you think the pattern is itself unjust.

            This is kinda why I rebuffed Well… as having a “problem with ideas” above. At least some of the resistance to the concept of white supremacy feels to me like the typical resistance of non-social theorists to social theory. Good social theorists know that their claims are complex and contingent. A non-social theorist seeing a social theory claim can think it must be like a claim in the natural sciences (just to pick one particularly salient disanalogy), and ascribe a kind of certainty, directness, and non-contingency not appropriate to social knowledge. (This was the basis of the running gag “is this feminist?”)

            Many concepts would fail on similar kinds of test, like say “law”, “gender”, or “healthcare”. But a question like, “did law ’cause’ a certain person to not trespass” doesn’t have the moral freight of white supremacy, and so is confined to analytic legal philosophy journals.

          • gbdub says:

            @Jack – a couple questions:
            1) if the terms are not interchangeable, why did you introduce the term to this conversation when Well… had previously only used “white privilege”?

            2) I am somewhat sympathetic to your explanation of “white supremacy”, but if the concept is so complex, why choose a facially pejorative, easy to misrepresent term for it? Again, as Scott notes in Words, Words, Words, this kind of looks like a pattern in X Studies.

          • Jack says:

            1) The notion of white supremacy is implicit in Well…’s opening comment. Well… implied that the idea of white privilege was in tension with the idea that “the unequal outcomes between groups” might be due in part “factors that are less flattering to groups commonly portrayed as non-privileged, or at least factors that are complex and nuanced”. I think it is pretty clear that there is no direct tension there, but there is arguably a tension with white supremacy. To respond to Well…’s issue I think we needed to distinguish the idea that whiteness can come with privileges from the idea that these privileges are part of a system.

            2) Your second question is more complex. There are serious criticisms of the shift in use of “white supremacy” (and “racism” and…) within progressive movements along the lines you suggest. I have personally had conversations about these terms like those Alexander said you couldn’t have in “Words Words Words” with my progressive friends. It seems after a generation of journalists and activists and such grew up being told about this use of “white supremacy” in university, the term has now started to enter the mainstream. As you say these terms are perjorative and easily misunderstood. There are clearly costs to using them. What is gained?

            Two things, as I understand it, reflections of the confusion and the perjorativeness. It seems like the broader and narrower sense of white supremacy can be understood as set and element. In the same way that when I talk about a shoe store you know I mean one where you can probably buy shoes, sandals, and boots, but when I say “you can buy shoes, sandals, and boots” you know that “shoe” excludes the latter footwear. I mean SHOE shoes! We want a word that captures both “I don’t find [race] people attractive” and “I don’t find people with [darker/lighter] skin attractive” even though one of them is racism and the other one is RACISM racism because there is a sense in which they are the same kind of thing. I think the analytic reasons for picking “white supremacy” to refer to the system include: it is a word that already existed; it straight-forwardly means what it says; and, the system is thought to be the more important case with the conscious hatred being unusual. This last point is a version of MLK’s criticism of “the white moderate”. Yes the KKK gets the flack, but white supremacy was always a complex system. To some extent the terminological confusion is a deliberate reflection of an actual confusion.

            The second imputed advantage is the weight of the word itself. I said above that the fact “that the term seems to marry a descriptive claim and a normative claim is a deliberate feature”. Anti-racists have struggled to create a vocabulary equal to poc experiences. As happens with people excluded from the literati and other meaning-making institutions, there just weren’t the words.

            Say A is against a policy of reparations to former slaves or their descendants in the USA. Their friend B argues that this stance reproduces white supremacy. A goes, “woah woah woah, white supremacy is like KKK and skinheads and terrible violent shit”. B’s response is, “the feeling you are having right now is the appropriate feeling”. Hopefully A says, “ooohhhh”.

            A lot of social justice is the idea that structural harm hurts just as much as direct harms. Properly normed, this is trivially true; yet we have trouble seeing it and we have trouble getting riled up about it. Maybe this is because our brains are designed to blame specific people and get angry and vengeful, and social injustice doesn’t work that way. At the same time, social justice vocabulary is bad at assigning individual responsibility–because it’s not designed to do that. But people have come up with some words that convey, in their view, the import of structural harm.

            I don’t know how often this works. I mean, I don’t know how often calling white supremacy “white supremacy” instead of “structural racism that privileges white people” helps people correctly feel the weight of the situation. There are lots of anecdotes of backlash against using these words these ways, of which this blog is one. That said, I kinda feel like the backlash actually often prompts the desired conversation. People end up actually talking about racism and why people are using words for it that make it sound like such a big deal. It seems like these words have entered the mainstream speech just as many of the claims of poc advocates are being more seriously considered. Reparations, for instance, are a part of the democratic primary conversation (frankly I’m not keyed-in to USA politics enough to be certain this is new, so maybe not a good example). So I’m not committed to the claim that “white supremacy” was a good choice of term, but I can understand some reasons for it.

        • Skeptical Wolf says:

          One of the main works that introduced the term ‘privilege’ in this context is Peggy McIntosh’s article White Privelege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. It still serves as a decent example of what the term is normally taken to mean in an academic context.

          Note that the article was written in 1989 by an author drawing on experiences that occurred before that. Not all of McIntosh’s bullet points carry the same weight as they did 30 years ago (and I take that as a sign of progress).

          https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf

          If you would like an even shorter summary, a friend of mine with a degree in this sort of scholarship liked the definition “The ways in which a person can benefit from oppression without participating in oppression”.

          • Aapje says:

            I think that Peggy McIntosh’s article is very unscholarly, but also very interesting, due to its unspoken assumptions. With different assumptions, quite a few of the claims can seem absurd, can be interpreted in an anti-SJ way or can even be regarded as arguments in favor of racial separatism.

            For example:

            1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

            This seems to claim that racial segregation is a privilege. If one (truly) sees racial diversity as being better than racial homogeneity, then I don’t see how that person can see this as a privilege. In fact, if “diversity is a strength,” then isn’t it a black privilege that they can (presumably) more easily arrange to be in a mixed environment.

            If being able to segregate is truly a privilege, I expect that a white segregationist will gladly want to help black people have the privilege of being among their own race most of the time, by being against miscegenation, mixed workplaces, mixed places of entertainment and such. In fact, this statement implies that blacks lost privilege due to desegregation, as they have less opportunity to segregate themselves from whites.

            Finally, there is the issue that McIntosh argues that privilege has to be systemic, but the very first example she gives has an enormous natural component. With black Americans only being 12% of the population, black Americans are going to be in the sole company of people of their race less often even if you randomly group people.

            2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

            This statement claims that white people distrust blacks and vice versa, but that white people can more easily avoid this, apparently because they can more easily segregate themselves. So this privilege seems to be a subset of the supposed privileges of segregation that statement 1 claimed exists.

            To those who believe that SJ advocates stoke unnecessary racial mistrust, this statement can be interpreted as a white privilege caused or increased by SJ advocacy.

            Just like for statement 1, one can also conclude that this white privilege can be reduced by more segregation.

            3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

            This may be referring to redlining or may also/merely stereotype blacks as poor and whites as rich. It’s very sloppy in not being explicit about this. To those who believe that redlining was in part or fully a justified response to poor community norms and/or that greater black poverty is partly or fully a reflection of poor community norms, this statement can be interpreted as a privilege being derived in part or fully from norms that correlate with race, but that black people are free to adopt.

            8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

            It is unexplained why it is an advantage to have your race testified to.

            14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

            This implies that most dislike that people face is between races, which again, implies that racial segregation is a (large) privilege.

            25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.

            Cops can pull people over because they are looking for a specific suspect. If this suspect is white, the subject of a traffic stop can be chosen (in part or solely) because of their race. So no person can be sure that they weren’t singled out for their race.

            So is it white privilege that white people are delusional? Or is this merely a false statement.

            It still serves as a decent example of what the term is normally taken to mean in an academic context.

            That you consider this a decent scholarly source is consistent with my assessment that the standard of scholarship in academic SJ circles is unfortunately quite low.

            Peggy McIntosh seems to define privilege as systemic, unearned advantage, but she never actually examines to what extent her examples are systemic, unearned and an advantage. Instead, she seems to appeal heavily to assumptions on the part of the reader, never recognizing that the reader may not share her assumptions or those of her SJ community.

          • DarkTigger says:

            @Aapje
            I do agree that there is a certain kind of voice in the (“critical theory”)left that is quit openly clamoring for racial segregation, and get’s angry when they get questioned about it. “White Fragility” has an whole chapter dedicated to the idea that segregating people by race from time to time is great, and beeing against it is is a sign for lack of moral fiber (fragility). (I put that book away after that, if I want to be told that I’m moraly weak because I dislike racial segregation I can alway argue with AFD voters online.)

            Cops can pull people over because they are looking for a specific suspect. If this suspect is white, the subject of a traffic stop can be chosen (in part or solely) because of their race. So no person can be sure that they weren’t singled out for their race.

            Since it can be shown (I think our host did it in one of his mmtywtk-posts) that black people get controlled a lot more often, I think this is the weakest part of your comment.

          • Randy M says:

            8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

            It is unexplained why it is an advantage to have your race testified to.

            It would be interesting to see a world or US history book from when this was written and look at some uses of the phrase “white people.” I would suspect nearly every time it also mentions either native Americans or black Americans, as in “As white people settled the frontier they came more into contact with native tribes.” or “During the reconstruction period and into the next century, white Americans in the south had many privileges denied black Americans.”

            If they just mean using common names in math word problems or something that’s rather over wrought phrasing and probably of similarly exaggerated importance, but in any case long since remedied.

          • Aapje says:

            @DarkTigger

            My objection when evaluating the scholarly quality of the article, is not so much that Peggy McIntosh seems to be advocating segregation or at least seems to only see the positives of it, but rather, that it is kept implicit. It contributes to making the article extremely subjective, as it never makes the effort to actually make an argument for the things that it seems to think are obvious, but aren’t at all.

            Since it can be shown (I think our host did it in one of his mmtywtk-posts) that black people get controlled a lot more often, I think this is the weakest part of your comment.

            Your statement in no way rebuts my rebuttal of the statement from the article. The article makes the claim that white people “can be sure [they] haven’t been singled out because of [their] race.”

            My claim is that this statement is not true if the police is somewhat or even very racist, but that they have to be so racist that they will ignore a perpetrator’s description, stopping black suspects for alleged crimes whose perpetrator is alleged to be white. And this doesn’t merely have to be true for some police officers, but for 100% of them.

            If there is merely one white suspect who is singled out because it was reported that the suspect is white and the police picks him up because he is the white person who is close by or a white person who seems criminally inclined, then the statement is false.

            Note that it was Peggy McIntosh’s choice to make an absolutist statement, rather than hedge.

            PS. Scott’s article on the subject suggests that the police are more eager to stop white and black people in black neighborhoods, not that they target black people specifically. Also in a majority of studies, the police seem to search blacks proportionately to the amount of crimes committed or supposed proxies thereof. So one could argue that most of what is alleged to be the targeting of blacks is actually a focus by the police on crime-ridden neighborhoods, where those correlate strongly with race. If crime-ridden white neighborhoods are targeted just like crime-ridden black neighborhoods, then I would argue that blacks are not singled out.

            PS 2. I think that the police is much more prone to single out men and in particular young men for being young men, than blacks for being black. Yet Peggy McIntosh calls men privileged in her article, never recognizing how the statement that she uses to claim that blacks lack privilege, probably applies more to men than to blacks. That is another example of a lack of scholarly rigor.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @Aapje

            You’re being deliberately obtuse. The term is “TRAFFIC cop”, not other kind of cop who happens to pull over a motorist.

            In the US, historically and currently, if a white person is pulled over by any kind of cop they would tend to assume it is because they violated a law, or resemble a law violator. Currently the well-known “driving while black” happens enough that it is still in the weltanschaung of African Americans as a default assumption unless they *know* that they violated a traffic ordinance.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Many of them carried no weight in 1989.

            Just the obvious ones:
            #1 and #2 were true for blacks and whites at the time (there are, of course, costs to retreating to a de-facto segregated community in both cases). #3 and #4 were false for both, in the general case. #6 was true for both. #8 was true for both. #12 was certainly true for both for music shops (the other two are more complex). #14 was false for both. #18 was false for both (unless the term “white trash” doesn’t count). #22 was true for both. #26 is mixed. #48 is true for both.

            Many of the others are disputable. #35 is pretty amusing.

            35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.

            If affirmative action helped whites instead, perhaps it would have been “I can get a job with an affirmative action employer without my race getting in the way”.

          • Aapje says:

            @Randy M

            Example 7 is about black people supposedly not being part of history education:

            7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is

            So then I assume that “curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race” is something else. Perhaps she means that the pictures in the books lack(ed) black people and uses hysterical language.

            @anonymousskimmer

            In my country, a traffic cop deals with law violations on and near roads. A very plausible scenario is that they are watching a road when a crime happens, like an ATM bombing. Camera’s are watching all ATMs, so if the police gets access to the video quickly, they can send out an ‘APB.’ Then I assume that traffic cops will be for the lookout for these people too, if they are in the vicinity and/or on likely escape routes.

            A lot of American TV and movies feature a scenario where a cruising police car gets an ‘APB,’ sees someone who looks like the suspect and goes after them. When they stop this suspect, I believe that this is legally called a traffic stop and if the cruising police car is a traffic cop, it would be a traffic stop by a traffic cop.

            That doesn’t mean that they only stop people when they see a crime happening or as a pure fishing expedition.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            Peggy McIntosh’s article was written in, and about, my country.

            Regardless of what a traffic stop is, a typical white person is not going to think they’ve been pulled over because of the color of their skin. Some minority of white people will believe they are being harassed by police, but this would be due to personal factors independent of skin color.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      I think a more important question is whether there is any serious scholarship establishing *how* you would determine something is a legitimate concept.

      I mean you always can *define* it in such a way that it necessarily exists.

    • Well... says:

      Wherever I’ve seen it put forward, the concept of white privilege seems to assume away (or maybe just ignore) a lot of complexity. (Yes, systemic discrimination and historic oppression might be one factor in unequal outcomes between groups, but there are always others that have nothing to do with racism. Plus, how do you measure privilege? And how do you measure it in general and not just in a given situation? If not all white people have privilege, and some black people do, then how useful is “white privilege” as a concept? Etc.) A concept that overlooks so much seems automatically suspect. What am I missing?

      • Jack says:

        I think it is fine to say that white privilege “assumes away complexity”. If you have a problem with this, you have a problem with ideas, not with this particular idea. No one thinks you can measure “white privilege”.

        • Well... says:

          Yes, all ideas assume away complexity, but not all ideas assume away so much of it. I mean, “humans live in fear of sharks” is an idea, but not a particularly useful one. You could explore this idea by fixating on certain Hollywood movies, but you’d have to ignore all the exceptions, plus the fact that way more humans kill sharks than the reverse. Having a problem with this idea doesn’t mean you have a problem with ideas.

        • Jack says:

          Your example is not on point. A lot of useful ideas assume away much more complexity; some useless ideas much less. Try applying Menelaus’ Theorem to the Real World. Please be more precise about what you mean.

      • Aapje says:

        I agree that emotions often seem to underlie people’s choices, with their arguments often being rationalizations. However, then we can still point out the weak spots in their rationalizations, which can be used to force people to admit their real concern or even change how they feel.

        For example, if Mary argues that dust makes her sick, while Bob argues that seeing scattered objects makes him sick, then I think it matters that Bob’s claim of a sickness is a way to make his claim seem more legitimate, while he is merely irritated at a lack of tidiness, while Mary actually has asthma.

        If Bob and Mary want me to use my power/influence/etc to help them, I care whether the claims by Bob and Mary are actually as strong as they make them out to be.

      • gbdub says:

        I think the “ignoring complexity” bit is okay, as long as we’re talking about privilege in a systemic context.

        Where it becomes problematic is when it is used against an individual, where the complexities and individual factors almost certainly dwarf the systemic effects, e.g. a black professor telling a poor white student “check your privilege” as a way to silence his participation in a discussion.

        “White privilege” has that problem of loaded academic language that Scott discussed in “words, words, words” – it may have a useful and relatively neutral academic definition, but it is just so tempting to use as a rhetorical weapon against people you disagree with, and given the option of other formulations that wouldn’t be as loaded, you don’t have to be too cynical to think this may be intentional.

      • Murphy says:

        It can flow the other way as well.

        Modest differences in one area imposed on people can snowball over generations into things that cause other problems.

        It’s the old classic exercise where you start with 2 people who are basically identical with similar habits… where one gets a modest disadvantage imposed by a-higher-power, say 15% less starting pay than the other. Over a career small initial differences compound with each salary increment and each time the better off one doesn’t have to take out a loan or similar.

        By their death one passes on a paid-off house to their descendants while the other passes on an estate with negative net worth.

        4 generations later one family is living in an awesome part of town with investment, trust funds for all the kids who all go to private school… while the other is skint.

        And it would be tempting to go “look at all these other factors!” if you were from the winning family.

        It’s a fun exercise in compounding you can do with a few minutes in a spreadsheet that can quickly show you that if anything it’s remarkable that things aren’t much worse given that the real handicaps were vastly larger than a modest salary gap.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          And it would be tempting to go “look at all these other factors!” if you were from the winning family.

          And rightly so, because you can’t get from:

          one gets a modest disadvantage imposed by a-higher-power, say 15% less starting pay than the other

          to:

          By their death one passes on a paid-off house to their descendants while the other passes on an estate with negative net worth.

          without a lot of additional, very relevant detail.

          For a start, you can’t get negative net worth from compounding salary differences, because Alice’s net worth doesn’t in any way depend on what Bob is making (unless they are married, that is).

        • DarkTigger says:

          4 generations later one family is living in an awesome part of town with investment, trust funds for all the kids who all go to private school… while the other is skint.

          This might be a thing in cultures where family means a whole clan, with a clear “head of the family” that tries to keep family property together. But how true is that for the modern nuclear families (which are very much a thing for europeans for generations).
          Hint: I would be surprised if any of the estate of my grantfahter reaches me, let alone any of my kids.

          the other passes on an estate with negative net worth.

          Is refusing an inheritance not a thing in the USA?

        • Murphy says:

          @DarkTigger

          In modern times debt isn’t typically passed on but that’s comparatively recent in some countries.

          @Faza

          Assuming that cost of living exists isn’t a minor detail.

          It’s easy enough to yield massive differences between 2 people assuming similar base costs of living but minor income differences.

          Throw in some rand() “unexpected costs” (applied equally to both of course) and an interest rate on positive/negative net worth and the difference grows much larger.

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          @DarkTigger

          It’s not about the estate reaching you through inheritance, it’s about the wealth of your grandfather allowing your parent to not have to go into debt, or into bad jobs (that pay *now*), thus allowing them to invest in themselves while your grandfather is still alive. (not even counting how much time or money your grandfather invested in them directly)

          You must understand that even today many parents have to decide between how much time or money they spend on their children and how much they spend taking care of decrepit ma and pa, and how much time they spend on their job(s) that supports all of this.

        • DarkTigger says:

          @anonymousskimmer
          First I understand this from first hand experience, thank you. But this is already inherently different, then the dilberatly simple picture Murphy showed.

          And even than, does that mean that the two grandparents of mine that died before they needed care a privilege?
          Does it matter that one was still at working age, and the other was retiered?

          How do you fit that in an simple spread cheat?

        • Murphy says:

          You don’t.

          It isn’t perfectly flat.

          In the real world there are dukes grandsons who have negative net value.

          But there’s far more dukes grandsons at Eaton than in the general population.

          “privilege” doesn’t mean 100% chance of success.

          But if 200 random people are in a 1000 meter race and half of them get a 10 second head start… the smart money is on the average head-starter coming in ahead of the average delayed.

          A simple spreadsheet just illustrates it in numbers.

        • Lambert says:

          There’s also non-monetary stuff, linked to class* and culture.
          Kids of educated, middle-class parents are taught which levers to pull to succeed in the middle class word. Kids from a working class background are not.

          *You’re not going to make America’s racial issues go away untill you look closely at the associations between African American culture and working class culture, IMHO.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          @Lambert:

          *You’re not going to make America’s racial issues go away untill you look closely at the associations between African American culture and working class culture, IMHO.

          You don’t say…
          Though in Marxist terms, many A-As would be lumpy rather than working-class.

        • Cliff says:

          Isn’t there academic research on wealth transmission over generations? Does wealth accumulate from one generation to the next?

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          Murphy,

          Assuming that cost of living exists isn’t a minor detail.

          I didn’t say it was. You’re the one who completely glossed over it.

          The old economic joke is that the quickest and best way to get off the desert island you found yourself stranded on is to assume a boat. For your example to work, the 15% pay differential isn’t itself sufficient. You need a bunch of additional premises and those need to be spelled out.

          To put things in perspective assume an alternative scenario: Alice and Bob start off earning exactly the same take-home salary, but Alice pre-commits to save/invest 15% of it by frugal living (assume this is possible). All other things being equal, this will result in the following outcomes at the end of Alice and Bob’s lives:

          1. Alice will have 15% less disposable income than Bob throughout her working life – as in your example,

          2. Alice will have greater accumulated wealth than Bob at the end of her career – which is the complete opposite of your example.

          Notice what this example doesn’t assume: that the 15% pre-commitment is the full extent of Alice’s savings. The ceteris paribus assumption means that if Bob is saving 10% of his base income, Alice is saving 25% (10% to match Bob + 15% pre-committed frugality). We’re assuming that Bob is consuming 15% more of his base income than Alice is.

          It’s easy enough to yield massive differences between 2 people assuming similar base costs of living but minor income differences.

          It is if you’re throwing in a lot of suppressed premises into the picture, which is why all premises need to be stated explicitly.

        • Dack says:

          Isn’t there academic research on wealth transmission over generations? Does wealth accumulate from one generation to the next?

          https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/

    • Plumber says:

      @Well…,

      There plenty of other posts in the 136.25 thread that I could point too, but since yours is the latest top level post that I’ve come across (at least until I refresh) I say this here: Sweet Jesus is the SSC commetariat trying to see how many “hot button” topics we can squeeze in in just a few days?!!!

      Good Lord I hope this week a hornets nest isn’t stirred up!

      On to the topic: When I was a young kid in grade school I lived in a majority black neighborhood and at school and on encountering “big kids” it often seemed that I was picked on for being white, sometimes my antagonists would explicitly say so, and I may have become anti-black because of that except most of my friends in the neighborhood were black as were most of my defenders (I particularly remember an older girl who came to my rescue), I grew tall fast and that ceased to be as much of a problem (I did get punched into unconsciousness once in High School, but compared to earlier violence was way down), but for a time (if I knew the terms) I would have said there was such a thing as “black privilege”. As I got older I still had black friends, though less as I went to a more integrated school and explored the wider world (especially the parts of the world where I met girls from the hills and the suburbs!), but I did notice (and still do) that cops and shop owners treated my black friends and later co-workers with a bit more suspicion than they did me, even when the cops are black, and as for shop owners I worked for seven years at a motorcycle shop owned by a black man and he treated his white customers with far more deference than his black ones, so yeah I think that “white privilege” is a thing, though I think a lot of it is just that more white American families have been gathering wealth longer than most black Anerican families, and I suspect a few more generations from now there will be less of a difference.

      • Well... says:

        Your childhood has a lot in common with mine. My takeaway is that the notion of white privilege is complicated and very context-dependent.

        • salvorhardin says:

          As I have come to understand it, most of the time when people say “privilege” they mean “the ability to safely assume that others will treat you decently.” Plumber’s examples are typical of this.

          Some implications of this:
          1. Obviously it’s going to be context- and subculture-dependent, in that different people will have different situations when they can safely assume others will treat them decently. But the idea that white people on average, and men on average, tend to have lots more such situations than blacks and women respectively is still reasonable, important, and plausibly accords with what we know about the world.

          2. Likewise the “safely assume” is doing a fair bit of work here: for almost any situation in which e.g. black people aren’t treated decently some of the time, you can find cases where white people aren’t in that same situation; nonetheless the difference in baseline likelihood matters, as does the difference in social resources available to recover from non-decent treatment.

          • Aapje says:

            But the idea that white people on average, and men on average, tend to have lots more such situations than blacks and women respectively is still reasonable, important, and plausibly accords with what we know about the world.

            I’ll grant you that for race, but not for gender. SJ had to come up with a term, benevolent sexism, to rationalize away the many privileges that women have over men as not being real privileges. In contrast, even though the term benevolent racism also exists, I almost never see it used.

            In general, my opinion is that SJ advocates have to work way harder to make their case that women lack privilege compared to men, than to make a case that black people lack privilege compared to white people; in the sense that they have to neutralize conflicting evidence, with such strategies like cherry picking, judging the same thing differently when it happens to the ‘oppressed’ or ‘oppressors,’ falsely attributing certain treatment to sexism/racism, only looking at the bright side of things that happen to the ‘oppressors’ and the dark side for the ‘oppressed,’ etc, etc.

            Note that I’m not arguing that these strategies are intentional deception, nor that such deception is absent from ‘antiracism’ advocacy.

            Historically, we also see that equality legislation involving gender has had way more opposition from feminists and women in general than race equality legislation had from antiracism activists and black people in general. Many thought and think that the benefits of greater equality didn’t and don’t outweigh the loss of privilege.

            PS. Note that being “treated decently” can be highly subjective. The very same behavior that one person can consider being treated decently, another can consider indecent. By only listening to those from one group who like how they are treated and those from another group who dislike it, one can have a highly distorted view of how people are actually treated.

          • Baeraad says:

            That’s an interesting definition, which seems to fit with how I’ve seen it used. It tells me two things.

            1) I don’t have privilege. Not any, not at all. I assume that wherever I go, I will be treated with ill-concealed disgust and contempt, and I am usually right.

            2) I understand why privilege makes SJWs so angry. Because whenever I encounter someone who seems to think people being nice is in any way normal, I really do feel a strong urge to punch that person in their spoiled, pampered face.

          • The Nybbler says:

            nonetheless the difference in baseline likelihood matters, as does the difference in social resources available to recover from non-decent treatment.

            The people pushing the privilege narrative never actually want to measure the baseline likelihood, nor any countervailing factors, nor the social resources involved in recovering. For instance, consider a young black man getting hassled by the police. Probably it’s more likely he gets hassled than a young white guy. But he’ll probably have his community’s support; they’ll assume the cops got on his case because he’s black. A young white guy’s community will more likely assume he did wrong and count the bad treatment against him.

      • Skeptical Wolf says:

        I think the recent bans may be a major contributor to the wave of contentious topics you correctly identified. I feel more comfortable discussing such topics here that I would have in OT 135.75. If I’m not the only one, there may have been a backlog built up that’s working its way through the system now that the barrier is removed.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          It reminds me a little of the flood of risque jokes which invariably, back in my working days, followed a sexual-harassment training session.

    • If you define our current social system as being one consisting of white privilege, then yes, we have white privilege but then “white privilege” becomes a meaningless term. Everyone agrees that white people have better outcomes than black people. The dispute is over what are the causes of this disparity.

      • HowardHolmes says:

        Everyone agrees that white people have better outcomes than black people.

        Just for the record, I do not agree.

        • albatross11 says:

          If you look at measurable stuff on which official statistics are collected, blacks on average do a lot worse than whites. That’s stuff like unwed pregnancies, low birthweight babies, rates of {being a crime victim, being imprisoned, being unemployed, being disabled, graduating from high school, graduating from college}. Also income, wealth, and life expectancy.

          No one of these really defines well-being–it’s certainly possible for Alice to have higher income and better educational outcomes than Bob, but still have a worse life than Bob. It’s even possible for Bob to have a better life than Alice despite spending some time in prison and being perpetually unemployed. But over large numbers of people, and many different measures, this sure seems like strong evidence that blacks are overall doing worse than whites.

          This is a statement about statistics, not individuals. Any given black person you meet may be better off than a given white person you meet. But overall, I’d expect that if you sample random blacks and whites as pairs, you’ll usually judge the whites to have better/easier lives.

        • HowardHolmes says:

          albatross11 says

          But overall, I’d expect that if you sample random blacks and whites as pairs, you’ll usually judge the whites to have better/easier lives.

          I understand your point. My point is that I will not so judge. Basically, you claim that having more makes one better off. I do not agree. Don’t want to argue the point; merely record that not all people think they are better than other people.

    • brad says:

      Here’s how I came to making sense of the concept—I hung out a bunch with an attractive guy friend. We would go to the bar, he’d go up to random women, tell bad jokes and they’d be cracking up. We’d get comped things at restaurants way more than I ever had seen. Even with (by all indications) straight guys he seemed to get away with more. And the dude was oblivious, he just thought how life goes and never seemed to connect the dots.

      Does this mean that every attractive person has an awesome life that’s better than every single plain person’s life? No, clearly not. But there’s some real phenomenon there and calling it privilege seems reasonable enough.

      • EchoChaos says:

        This reminds me of the character of one of Liz Lemon’s boyfriends played by John Hamm who is so gorgeous that he gets everything he wants immediately.

        Great episodes, absolutely hilarious.

        • Well... says:

          This kind of privilege might vary across individuals a lot more than across races.

          • gbdub says:

            Just because the distance between the mean of the two populations differs by less than their respective standard deviations does not mean that the two populations are not statistically distinct.

            It just means that you’ve got to be real careful drawing any conclusions from a single independent trial.

      • axiomsofdominion says:

        There was actually an effort a while ago by a legitimate scholar to argue for being ugly as a disability. He was very convincing but for obvious reasons it is hard to pass that as a law. I mean are you going to hold and ugly march on Congress? “We will kill every boner in the capital till our demands are met!”

        • It doesn’t help that all its prominent members are going to be unphotogenic by definition.

          • Aapje says:

            @Wrong Species

            The irony of activism is that to be effective, the spokespeople typically need to have privileges on other traits that outweigh the negative feelings about the trait they want to see treated differently. Then the halo effect of their ‘good’ traits weakens the stigma of the ‘bad’ trait.

            Studies I’ve seen and my own observations suggest that the disprivilege of being truly ugly is enormous, far beyond those of other traits. So then there may be far fewer people who can sufficiently offset their poor looks to be effective activists, than for other traits.

            @axiomsofdominion

            Studies show that the correlation between looks and salary is substantial. Laws have been passed to demand salary equality by race and gender, where there is also a strong correlation*.

            * Not causation…

          • Murphy says:

            @Aapje

            Ya, pretty much why Rosa Parks was chosen as a test case to push as a sober, respectable churchgoing woman.

            I remember a comedian in the UK talking about protests in regards to a government attempt to clamp down on porn. Something like:

            “You need to get pretty librarian in front of the camera talking about free speech and liberty and chilling effect…. not some fat ugly guy in a trenchcoat shouting ‘We want pictures of hot birds to masturbate to’ “

          • Aapje says:

            @Murphy

            It’s even more evident in that Rosa Parks is who ‘we’ remember, while the Supreme Court decision was actually Browder vs Gayle. Aurelia Browder is not as pretty as Rosa Parks. Furthermore, Browder vs Gayle actually involved 5 plaintiffs. The plaintiff that was arrested first, Claudette Colvin, resisted her arrest and got pregnant by a married man soon after getting arrested, so they didn’t stick her name on there.

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis does include both Colvin and Browder in their Parks exhibit.

            It’s a really well-done museum on the whole (for the most part).

        • Purplehermann says:

          That’s great, who is this scholar?

      • J Mann says:

        @Brad

        You’re not wrong, but people don’t seem to be interested in calling out attractiveness privilege or tall privilege. Further I wouldn’t assume that an attractive tall dude had nothing to add to a conversation about how a short homely guy should try to solve his problems. (He probably doesn’t have a complete understanding, but there’s still a possibility that he can understand enough and offer something Mr. Short and Homely has missed.)

        (On a related note, I don’t agree with the “fake gamer girl” meme, but I do think that critics sold it a little short. I always thought that the gamers who resented that attractive people were moving into their niche and gaining recognition were resentful of attractiveness privilege, even if they didn’t have the vocabulary to put it that way. Incels might be a more extreme example.)

        • gbdub says:

          I think there’s also resentment over the sense that hot chicks get praise and recognition for doing the same things that ugly nerds were getting made fun of for “before it was cool”.

          Actually saw a meme the other day to the effect that “I liked this before it was cool” gets a bad rap. Yeah, sometimes it’s a hipster flex, but sometimes it means “I’ve been enjoying and recommending this for years, and you’ve ignored or even made fun of it – now it’s popular and you act like you’re introducing it to me!”

        • Aapje says:

          @J Mann

          I think that the complaint about fake gamer girls is about a combination of minority sex privilege, female privilege and attractiveness privilege.

          In a group of (less attractive) men with few or no women around, introducing a woman will tend to result in pleasing behavior by some men, which can involve straight out cheating (men colluding with the woman to make her win), but also disruptive behavior.

          Note that quite a few women also seem to prefer women-only events to not have this kind of disruption going on, but that is rarely called misandry, while similar desires by men are often called misogyny.

          The second is female privilege, aka benevolent sexism, which basically means that men are more likely to help a woman cheat than vice versa and that women are more likely to demand special treatment.

          The above is even more true if the girl is attractive, as she is more likely to expect and/or be given special treatment.

          With nerds having fairly high diversity in sexual desires, sexual ‘thirst,’ social ability, adherence to social norms, etc; there is probably a larger chance of conflict.

          For example, let’s say that we have a group of non-nerd men. The social norm of society is that at least level 4 benevolent sexism is to be granted to women and they all comply. All of them have had a girlfriend and are thus not super-‘thirsty.’ They have also all figured out that benevolent sexism above level 7 is considered creepy. So the level of benevolent sexism that the guys will display after introducing a woman is going to be between 4 and 7. So the gap between the least and most benevolent man is going to be fairly limited, reducing irritations.

          Now let’s say that we have a group of nerd men. Some are fairly oblivious to the social norm, treating women just like men (level 1). However, others are desperate for a girlfriend and lack the experience and/or social ability to know that going above level 7 is considered creepy. So the level of benevolent sexism that the guys will display after introducing a woman is going to be between 1 and 9. This creates a huge gap between the least and most benevolent man, creating lots of irritations. The level 1 guy, who just wants to play the game without special privileges for anyone, may see the woman as destructive to a fair gaming environment, by drawing simple conclusions based on correlation between the woman coming and the game deteriorating. He may even get bullied by the level 9 guy, who may want to attack the level 1 guy to curry favor.

          From the perspective of the woman, the nerds can be bewildering. If she isn’t very nerdy herself, she sees men who treat her far less benevolent than how she thinks everyone is treated (in reality, just women, but never being been a man, she doesn’t know). She also sees men who try to curry favor in such a way that is (or is seen as) very creepy.

          PS. Also, women in nerd spaces often have different, more ‘feminine’ interests on average, which can irritate the ‘masculine’ nerds. For example, I see female ‘makers’ often focus on making jewelry, clothing and such.

        • brad says:

          The point I was trying to make wasn’t that Pretty People Privilege is a serious issue that deserves more attention. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but that wasn’t my point.

          Rather, it was that if my buddy can be going through life on story mode and doesn’t realize it, it is also plausible that I am going through life on easy mode and don’t realize it.

          • albatross11 says:

            I suspect this happens for a lot of different attributes.

            Being good-looking, healthy, smart, tall (at least as a man), athletic (especially when you’re younger)–all those things make your life easier in most ways, even if there are occasional downsides. Being white or Asian, growing up in an educated household so your speech sounds classier, all that stuff makes your life a little easier because people just assume better things about you by default.

            It’s worthwhile to remember that this exists and is sometimes important. I think talking about “playing life on the easiest level” or “starting out on third base” is fun snark but not very useful or fair for most people, though.

            And at an individual level, I think it’s really important to recognize that many people have things dragging them down that you don’t see–mental illness, physical illness, screwed-up family members, etc. It’s very common to see someone and think “that SOB has it made–everything just falls into his lap,” and not realize the good-looking, wealthy, tall guy you’re talking about is contending with depression and a drug habit and is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Or see the beautiful woman whom everyone bends themselves into a pretzel to please, think she’s got the easiest life in the world, and have no idea about her chronic migranes and the crazy family she’s constantly having to bail out of trouble.

            At a broader social level, I think white privilege is one of many things that explains some of what we see in the world, in terms of groups with different average outcomes. It sometimes seems to me that many people on the right find this almost as uncomfortable to contemplate as people on the left find IQ differences.

          • J Mann says:

            @Brad – you had a very clear and relevant response to the OP, but it put me in mind of a digression.

            I should have made it clear I was riffing and not really responding.

            @albatross – my reading of the conservative frustration with white privilege isn’t that most conservatives would disagree that white people have life easier in many respects.

            I think they think that white privilege overstated – that it’s not as much of a factor as the most extreme people on the other side think it is, and that at least for a while in the undergraduate context, it was used as a framework to ignore white dude’s opinions, arguably more frequently than would be productive to having a constructive conversation.

            When you talk about white privilege, you have to clarify what exactly you are talking about. Is it:

            a) White people have life easier in many ways, but it’s possible that in certain situations, there are benefits to being other ethnicities, and some specific white people arguably have it worse overall than the median asian or NAM, or

            b) White people should support my preferred policies and/or shut up in conversation because white privileges obligates them to do the former, and makes their contributions useless or worse to the latter.

          • brad says:

            @J Mann
            Fair enough, cheers.

            @albatross11
            I agree that it is both rude and using incomplete information to say someone’s face that he is playing life on easy mode or similar. But the flip side of using groups instead of an individual example invites defensive responses along the lines of “White privilege?!? I was raised in an Appalachian orphanage by nuns on meth.”

            On the balance I think referencing my unnamed friend who isn’t here to be insulted or feel defensive is a better way of getting my point across then talking in generalities. At least if the point is to provide an intuitive level understanding of the concept.

    • Murphy says:

      I think it’s important to strongly clarify exactly what you’d expect first.

      Imagine if you disputed the concept that modern computers were “faster” than computers in the 1980’s?

      Lets say you disputed the concept of “computer speed”

      Because “there are many factors that produce unequal performance that might include clock speed and drive access speeds…. but are certainly not limited to that and might also include factors that are less flattering to modern PC manufacturers.”

      If you don’t strongly define the metrics you’re talking about it leaves you with unlimited degrees of freedom.

      With our 80s computers vs modern you’re then free to try to focus the conversation exclusively on, say, the latency between key press and characters appearing on the screen as your measure of “faster”

      ..but of course no buisness wants to trade in their modern HPC in exchange for an apple 2e

    • LeSigh says:

      nearly all humans have some kind of privilege and that the unequal outcomes between groups are due to many factors that might include systemic discrimination and historic disadvantages but are certainly not limited to that

      In academia this concept is referred to as “intersectionality” (although the focus is still on historic/systemic factors). The corrupted popular discourse version of it is the Opression Olympics.

      Academics vary in how they apply this concept, and their willingness to acknowledge situational differences and contradictions in privilege.

  46. johan_larson says:

    Some questions for the Magic players about lands.

    The 2020 Core Set includes two-colored lands like Rugged Highlands that enter tapped, can be tapped for two different colors, and you gain one life when they enters the battlefield. It does not make sense to play these in a single-colored deck, right? One point of life gain is not worth a turn-delayed land.

    The same set also contains cards like Temple of Mystery that also enter tapped, can be tapped for two different colors, but let you scry 1 when they enters the battlefield. Are these cards worth playing in a single-colored deck?

    Finally, the same set includes Field of the Dead, a land with an odd ability. “Whenever Field of the Dead or another land enters the battlefield under your control, if you control seven or more lands with different names, create a 2/2 black Zombie creature token.” That seems like a really hard condition to meet. I suppose in a two-colored deck, you could have two types of basic lands, both relevant types of life-gain lands, both scry lands, and Field of the Dead itself makes seven. But the game has to have gone on forever before all of that has shown up on your board. It seems like this is one of those powers you’d never get to use. Or am I missing something?

    • Jack says:

      Usually not; usually not; and, yes.

    • Ouroborobot says:

      Your instincts regarding taplands are correct. Generally speaking, you would play taplands because you need the mana fixing and there is no better alternative. A mono color deck wouldn’t want to disrupt its mana curve for such a marginal effect. As Jack has pointed out, you’d include Field of the Dead because your deck is specifically built to abuse it. If that isn’t the case, you are right to suspect it’s too slow and unreliable to just add to your deck on its own merit.

    • Ms. Morgendorffer says:

      Re your last point, having seven different lands may be hard, but lands are the most resilient permanents, and having a win condition that boosts your end-game land drops (ie useless cards) into free 2/2 zombies can be really powerfull in a pure control deck. Change the condition to be 4+ distinct lands and you have a broken card that warps the format around it 😀

    • Perico says:

      The upside of lands like Rugged Highlands is very weak, so it will never be worthwhile to include them in single-colored decks barring strong lifegain rewards like Ajani’s Pridemate. This applies to both constructed and limited.

      For lands like Temple of Mystery, it is not so clear cut. The scry effect is significant, but so is the drawback of entering the battlefield tapped. Most aggressive decks won’t be able to afford the loss of speed, but if the metagame has room for a single-colored deck that is a bit on the slower side and doesn’t have a strong incentive for basic lands (i.e. no cards like Tempest Djinn) it may be the right call to play them in constructed. Limited is a different story – the drawback is much less important due to the looser mana curves, and you probably want to play all the temples you get: this means playing temples in single-colored decks, playing temples that only match one of your colors in 2-color decks and, potentially, if your mana is really solid, consider playing off-color temples. This doesn’t mean that they are high picks (unless you need both colors of mana), just that you’ll play the ones you picked.

      As for Field of the Dead, it’s the sort of high reward card with very demanding requirements that is asking you to build a deck around it. Such a deck exists in Standard, and has been quite successful as of late, see https://www.channelfireball.com/home/taking-standard-scapeshift-to-victory-at-gp-denver/ . It’s likely that the deck won’t survive the rotation of Scapeshift next month, but there is a slim chance that Field of the Dead could still see play in some sort of deck with mana acceleration and many colors.

      In M20 limited, of course, Field of the Dead is completely unplayable – if it had been printed in a different environment with lots of non-basic lands, like Ravnica Allegiance, it might have had a chance in very niche decks.

      • Tarpitz says:

        To illustrate how close the call is on whether to play temples in a mono-colour midrange deck, consider the first and second place lists from GP Chicago in 2014. Tyler Blum and Jadine Klomparens both played Mono-black Devotion, differing by only 5 spells in the maindeck (4 Nightveil Spectres and a Devour Flesh vs. 2 extra Lifebane Zombies, the 4th Bile Blight, an Ultimate Price and a Whip of Erebos). Blum played 6 temples. Klomparens played 0.

        As to Field of the Dead without Scapeshift, the Sultai version with Yarok and Golos is surprisingly decent. I actually wouldn’t be surprised to see it in competitive post-rotation Standard.

    • moonfirestorm says:

      Field of the Dead is also very good in EDH: three or higher-colored decks are common, and you’re forced to use at most one copy of each card that isn’t a basic land, so you end up with a bunch of different nonbasics in play (and you’re not in Standard, so you have access to much better options than lifegain lands for those nonbasics).

    • Jake R says:

      Your field of the dead analysis is correct for block constructed or limited, where you are only allowed to use cards from the current set. The card is pretty much unplayable in limited. In standard, however, you can build a 22 land deck with almost all of them different. Most sets have some form of dual land, and all of them count as different lands for Field. Field of the Dead + Scapeshift was pretty much the top meta deck in standard for a while, cleaning up at Grand Prix Denver. This deck was very much built to abuse Field of the Dead, with virtually nothing but cards that ramped out lands and bought time until a big Scapeshift could put out 20+ 2/2 zombies at once.

    • Aftagley says:

      Finally, the same set includes Field of the Dead, a land with an odd ability. “Whenever Field of the Dead or another land enters the battlefield under your control, if you control seven or more lands with different names, create a 2/2 black Zombie creature token.” That seems like a really hard condition to meet. I suppose in a two-colored deck, you could have two types of basic lands, both relevant types of life-gain lands, both scry lands, and Field of the Dead itself makes seven. But the game has to have gone on forever before all of that has shown up on your board. It seems like this is one of those powers you’d never get to use. Or am I missing something?

      This card is the centerpiece (well, co-centerpiece) of my favorite deck in standard right now. Bant Scapeshift.

      Yes, on it’s own Field of the Dead is an average card. It works pretty well as moonfirestorm says below in EDH decks since it means that every time you play a land, something that’s normally useless after you’ve got a certain number of them in play, you also get a free 2/2. That’s not nothing.

      Where field of the dead comes into it’s own is when you play it with Scapeshift, hopefully in multiples. Scapeshift is a card that lets you sacrifice all your lands and replace them with different lands in your deck. A quirk of how cards like this work in magic is that these lands entering play will all trigger Field of the dead even if field of the dead is entering play with them.

      So what’s that mean? Well, if I have seven lands in play, then I play scapeshift, that means I get seven 2/2s. That’s 14/14 worth of stats for only 4 mana. That’s insane value. If I’ve got 8 lands in play, that means I get to put 2 Fields of the dead in play with 6 other lands, which means I get sixteen 2/2s! This just keeps going up! I think the most I’ve ever gotton on someone was around 40 zombies in play. Basically, if I can resolve scapeshift when playing this deck and then untap, I probably will win.

      Ok, well, how do I get 7 lands in play? Easy – play every “search your library and put a land into play tapped” card and every “Put a land from your hand into play tapped” card in magic. I’ll routinely be scapeshifting with 8-9 lands in play on turn 4.

      Ok, well, what about Counterspells? Don’t I just lose to counterspell? Maybe, but that’s what Teferi is for. Good luck counterspelling that, my friend. The +1 on Teferi also lets you do some pretty mean stuff to your opponent (IE, wait until they are swinging for lethal, summon a billion zombies to eat their entire board then kill them on the crack back). Also, since people know your deck contains a must-counter spell like scapeshift, they’re unlikely to counter your ramp spells, which means you’ll likely have a mana-advantage on them. Sure, they might counter your FIRST scapeshift, but can they counter your second?

      Ugh, I love this deck. Sure, it falls on its face vs. aggro, but every other match-up just feels beautiful.

      • eyeballfrog says:

        Field of the Dead is also quite strong in the guildgate deck, though I’m not sure if that’s standard viable right now.

        • Aftagley says:

          Which version: wilderness reclamation -> nexus of fate -> expansion/explosion version or the gates value one?

          Either way I can see it being cool.

    • rahien.din says:

      What if, instead of a land, it was the following spell :

      Gain 1 life
      Cannot be countered or interrupted
      Cast only during main phase
      Mana cost : 0

      • Randy M says:

        Except possibly for some storm decks (though probably not) or something that cares about cards in graveyard like delve, a very bad card.

        Cards>>life. Revitalize did get some use, but it is instant speed and draws a card, so it can be used to stall while drawing for more important cards and having something to do while holding up interaction. So fairly okay in a white/blue deck.

        A land that gained life that didn’t come into play tapped but gave colorless mana is playable in a monocolored life gain focused deck or maybe if expecting to play against an aggressive deck.

        • johan_larson says:

          If you had something that let you cast spells from your graveyard without any additional cost, the card described by @rahien.din would let you gain however much life you wanted.

          • Randy M says:

            That thing would also need to be repeatable without tapping, and not exile the spell in question. It doesn’t look like there’s anything that meets this criteria (correct if I’m wrong, not an expert), but if they print it this would be good, sure. That kind of situation has a lot of ways of being broken though.

          • moonfirestorm says:

            As Randy said, that something would be incredibly broken.

            As a quick check, it’s an infinite two-mana combo with Seething Song or Desperate Ritual, so at that point don’t bother gaining life, just win the game with a Fireball or something.

            Generally speaking if you get to cast a instant/sorcery from your graveyard, it exiles on resolution so you can’t do it again. See flashback, jump-start, Snapcaster Mage, Past in Flames, Yawgmoth’s Will. The exception is Retrace, but that requires you to discard one land per cast and thus doesn’t go infinite.

            Recasting even once is generally quite strong (all of the mechanics and cards above have been in top-tier competitive decks), recasting it repeatedly is far too powerful.

          • Randy M says:

            Saffron Olive of MtgGoldfish recently streamed a deck where he won by repeatedly casting a “take the other players turn” spell utilizing a spell with retrace, life from the loam, and spellweaver helix.

            It’s explained at the link if that didn’t make sense. But once he had the cards he needed he played both players turns for the rest of the game, with the opponent only getting to play defense on his turn. To tie this to the other thread, his win con was usually just something like beating down with Eternal Witness (a 2/2) after using the opponents kill spells on their own creatures.

        • rahien.din says:

          Why, in and of itself, would a two-colored land be bad in a monocolor deck?

          • Randy M says:

            It wouldn’t. WotC has a policy, though, to never make lands that are strictly better than basic lands (a policy that obviously post dates the first few sets).
            So two colored lands usually have some kind of draw back you’d rather not pay if you don’t need the versatility, usually entering the battlefield tapped, always or if some condition is unmet.

            Ouroborobot said it well. Coming into play tapped is a bigger cost than it might seem because you are losing the edge in your ability to pay for effects, even if only for a turn, and your opponent can get out bigger or more powerful cards before you in that case.

      • moonfirestorm says:

        There’s a saying in Magic: “the only point of life that matters is your last one”

        Spending a card to gain life is almost always a bad idea, unless you’re playing against a tremendously fast aggro deck that you can easily beat in the late game. And it’ll be totally dead against a deck like the UW control lists we were talking about in the last thread, so if it ever sees play it’ll generally be hyper-efficient and be relegated to the sideboard (a set of 15 cards you have in addition to your deck in tournaments: tournament magic is played best of 3, and after each game you can swap cards in your deck with cards in your sideboard to adjust the matchup).

        0 mana for 1 life, down a card, would be a very weak card, and countering or responding to it wouldn’t be relevant: the decks that could counter it would love to let you spend a card for 1 life. I can’t think of any cards that actually do this, but Chaplain’s Blessing gives you 5 life for 1 mana and is generally considered terrible.

        • johan_larson says:

          I can’t think of any cards that actually do this, but Chaplain’s Blessing gives you 5 life for 1 mana and is generally considered terrible.

          How much life would the card have to deliver to be worth it?

          • moonfirestorm says:

            How much life would the card have to deliver to be worth it?

            In the sideboard, Feed the Clan sees play in Modern. From what I can tell, it’s generally in decks that have some way of enabling Ferocious, so 10 life for 2 mana is apparently playable.

            In the main deck? I don’t have a good answer to that. I’m only somewhat confident in what follows.

            The big issue is that it’s almost an entirely dead card against control. Even if it was 20 life for 1 mana, that probably works out to 4 turns or less against control once they start finishing you, and control just doesn’t care: they’re drawing at least one card for every card you’re drawing, and those cards will likely be better suited to an endgame than yours. Buying time doesn’t work, because time is on their side.

            And that’s assuming they’re even using a “drop a single big creature and swing till you’re dead” strategy. Quick glance at Standard: against something like Jeskai Superfriends, they’re just going to ult a Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and remove all your lands, and the only chance you have in that game is if they’re so slow they draw their entire deck (they won’t, Teferi can put himself back in the deck with his second ability). Bant Scapeshift can probably do 20 damage a turn if they’ve won control of the game.

            And there’s going to be a lot of control. The stronger we make the card, the more we hate aggro out of the format, and I think we’d quickly reach a state where no one’s actually running the card maindeck because it loses you win rate against the control decks you’ll actually face. I think any stable equilibrium ends with it in the sideboard. Maybe if they also just beefed up aggro cards to the point where you couldn’t be confident you’d win the two post-SB games, or gave aggro a SB card that was similarly punishing to control.

    • BBA says:

      When I was playing a few years ago, in the Return to Ravnica block, there were two-colored pre-tapped lands called “gates”, and a colorless land called Maze’s End, which had the ability that if you controlled it and all ten gates (i.e., every possible combination of two colors) you immediately won the game. It also had the ability to trade places with a gate in the library, which made it seem a little less impossible as a strategy, but I’m curious whether anyone was able to build a deck around this and successfully win that way.

      • johan_larson says:

        It doesn’t sound impossible. There are some land tutors around. Elvish Reclaimer, in M2020, for instance. Trying to last 10 turns (at least) with a messed-up mana base wouldn’t be fun, though.

      • Aftagley says:

        around 6 months ago there was a deck in standard where I’d reliably be getting all 10 gates in play. The basic shell of it went like this:

        The deck was 5 colors, but base simic (blue/green). You’d have 1 copy of ever gate that didn’t touch blue or green, 2 copies of the gates that had at least one color in that spectrum and three simic gates. Maybe a few basics and rare lands as well.

        That gates were there essentially just to make Guild Summit (play a gate, draw a card. When it enters the field you can tap any number of gates you control to draw a card) a fantastic draw engine. After that you’d play Nexus of Fate to take an arbitrarily large number of turns and wilderness reclamation to give yourself effectively infinite mana. At that point you’d just play solitair until you could fireball them for 80 damage with Expansion/Explosion.

        Had “Maze’s end” been in standard when this deck was around, it would have been a much more powerful/flexible wincon.

      • moonfirestorm says:

        @BBA:

        I’m curious whether anyone was able to build a deck around this and successfully win that way.

        People did it, and people generally loved the card, but it wasn’t considered viable: the deck would essentially be casual. It’s a very slow engine and if you have the kind of time you need to get it online, you probably could have just played a 5/5 or something and beat the opponent down.

        Although a lot of people built it in EDH, where you can only have 1 copy of each gate or Maze’s End in your 99-card deck. People were really excited by Golos, Tireless Pilgrim in M2020, because he gave them a solid commander that enabled that strategy.

        @Aftagley:

        Had “Maze’s end” been in standard when this deck was around, it would have been a much more powerful/flexible wincon.

        But once you’re playing solitaire, what does it matter? In a combo deck like that, you just want to make it as consistent and fast to get online as possible, and then you’ve effectively won as long as you have one way to win in your deck. Sometimes even if you don’t: Luis Scott-Vargas won an entire tournament with a combo deck he had forgotten to put the win condition into, and everyone just conceded before he had to show the win.

        I guess they could counter Expansion // Explosion, but you’re presumably running more than one of those, and they aren’t untapping again so they need to have a lot of mana on hand. Colorless lands aren’t free, especially in a five-color deck, and Maze’s End enters tapped on top of that.

        • Randy M says:

          Luis Scott-Vargas won an entire tournament with a combo deck he had forgotten to put the win condition into, and everyone just conceded before he had to show the win.

          That’s a great story, interesting from a game theory point of view, pardon the mixed meaning that isn’t quite a pun.
          Because if you leave out the obvious wincon of a well known combo deck in a format where players will regularly concede, you can have more interactive cards in your deck.
          I would think enough people would call your bluff that you wouldn’t come out ahead… but there he was.

          • Aftagley says:

            I play decks like this all the time. My current arena version of the Nexus of Fate deck includes 0 win conditions.

            No one wants to spend the 20 minutes of watching me play to test this theory though, so it doesn’t matter. Once I’ve gotten the lock established 99.9% of people concede.

            Edit: in tournaments, it makes sense for people to concede if they believe that their opponent will certainly win, but take a while doing so. If the match goes to time, the current game counts as a draw.

            Thus if LSV establishes a lock at minute 10, you’ve got two options: wait however long it takes his deck to kill you or just concede and move to game 2, where you’ll have a chance of winning before he locks the game down.

          • moonfirestorm says:

            LSV was playing storm combo, which has one really important trick: the win condition, Tendrils of Agony, isn’t actually in the deck, but in the sideboard. He pulls it out of the sideboard with a card called Burning Wish, which also has a few other uses in the deck.

            This means two things.
            1. At no point can an opponent go rummaging through his deck with something like Surgical Extraction and notice “hey wait he doesn’t have his win condition”. There’s no way to look at a player’s sideboard (maybe if you control his turn, but there are like 3 cards in the entire game that do that, and I think they changed that rule anyway)

            2. There’s a very obvious point to concede: when he casts Burning Wish with enough storm count and mana to Tendrils. In a deck that actually had Tendrils, the steps after this would be completely trivial. There’s no chance he doesn’t find it, you know he can cast it, you know how much damage he will do with it, and there are very few ways to interact with Tendrils (counterspells don’t work, as Tendrils makes a large number of copies of itself upon being cast). Even if you had one of those ways, the normal playstyle of the deck would have disabled those cards before comboing out and it’s generally better to attack the combo itself rather than Tendrils.

            The interesting part is that generally in major tournaments when you get to the top 8 (and switch to single-elimination matches) you also get access to your opponents’ decklists.

            The format for this tournament was Vintage which tends to be less official so it’s possible they didn’t do this. But I like the idea of his opponents just skimming his decklist for unusual cards, and totally missing that he doesn’t have a win condition.

        • Aftagley says:

          @moonfirestorm

          I mean, testing definitely required, but here’s my line of reasoning:

          I’d need to play 3 or 4 Expansion // Explosions in the deck to deal with counterspells and variance. Reducing that number down to 1 Mazes end means I can play more fogs, more Hydroid Krasises (hydroid Krasi?) and other cards that help deal with the meta. Sure, it enters tapped, but it untaps (3 times?) during my endstep post wilderness reclamation so, whatever?

          For me, this deck’s problem normally wasn’t “not having mana” it was “not being able to draw nexus of fate” so having a 3 mana sink to go find another land is fine.

          That being said, I just double checked and saw that Mazes End isn’t itself a gate (which I thought it was). This means circuitous route is no longer a tutor for it, which decreases this decks play-ability by a substantial margin. I don’t know if it renders the deck unplayable though. Again, testing required.

          • moonfirestorm says:

            I’d need to play 3 or 4 Expansion // Explosions in the deck to deal with counterspells and variance

            My impression was that Expansion // Explosion was good on its own, to snipe creatures, copy stuff like Circuitous Route, and draw cards before you’re quite set up. If it’s not, I think that’s a decent argument. But hopefully they aren’t running Field of Ruin or something like that, or you’re going to be really sad you only had 1.

          • Aftagley says:

            @moonfirestorm

            You are probably correct. I think I had a more negative opinion of that card than most people, maybe just because for a while there it was the only reliable combo finisher and I was playing mostly combo decks in standard, so I cast it a bunch of times.

            Explosion was an OK draw/burn spell, but you needed access to around 8-10 mana before it really came online. That’s likely not going to happen until turn 6 or so, which is a bit slow for me, especially when it’s being used as removal.

            Expanse-ing a circuitous route was great, but I’d never want to do it unless I had 2 EX // EXs in hand, two guild summits in play, or was desperate.

            All of this was compounded by the fact that two of the main decks in standard at the time (mono-blue tempo and dmir control) both relied heavily on countermagic, meaning I had to horde the Explosions until the end of the game.

            But hopefully they aren’t running Field of Ruin or something like that, or you’re going to be really sad you only had 1.

            Yeah. that’s one of those “take the loss on game 1, board in your own field of ruin” type scenarios if it happens.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Someone called Corrado 4-0ed an MTGO Daily with this list, which I think is the closest to a meaningful competitive result Maze’s End ever came. It was the kind of semi-competitive meme deck you take to FNM for fun, not something you pack in a serious effort to win a GP.

  47. Mark V Anderson says:

    Which statesmen, writers and humanities/social science academics over the past couple centuries or so do folks think have had highly net positive careers in which their ideas were largely vindicated by history?

    The obvious answer to me is Adam Smith.

  48. EchoChaos says:

    Wandering kid norms in 2019. I hope not culture war.

    I was talking with my kids at dinner yesterday, and my son wanted to see some movie. My response was that of course he could walk to the theater to see it if he wanted. He’s eight, smart and careful. His little brother is six and would go with him. The theater is a little over a mile away through a quiet neighborhood of townhomes.

    This seems obvious to me. I had the run of an Army base in Seoul when I was this age, and the crime rate on that base, while good, was probably higher than my safe suburban neighborhood. Car speeds are low (neighborhood) and my sons are good with traffic anyway.

    My wife cautiously agrees with me, but is worried that if I let them go to the theater, we’ll have them brought home by a concerned policeman and get in trouble.

    • FrankistGeorgist says:

      “Townhomes” makes it sounds like there’s sidewalks and even some level of foot traffic (corner stores?), in which case I can’t imagine there’s a problem. People would pull over and ask if I’d run away if I was seen walking somewhere but there weren’t sidewalks and no townhomes for 50+ miles.

      I worked at a theater and minors seeing films unaccompanied was not unusual and wouldn’t raise alarm. The theater was in a little shopping center to which no one could conceivably walk but adults might drop their kids at the theater and get a haircut or a margarita nearby. Even if the kids tried to see an R rated film we’d just say no and if the managers were feeling managerial maybe watch to see which theater they went into.

      • acymetric says:

        Sidewalks, probably, but otherwise your impression is probably more true of urban townhomes than suburban ones (which at least in my neck of the woods are more like subdivisions except the houses are connected and purely residential).

        Regardless, as long as you’re comfortable with the area and the distance I don’t see any issue here.

        • EchoChaos says:

          There is a good sidewalk system with a greenbelt between the sidewalk and the street, but acymetric describes it correctly. It’s just a suburb with basically no yards and houses touching.

    • JonathanD says:

      I live in St Louis, and if I tried that a cop would bring my kid home and I’d have a visit from DFS. This happened to one of my neighbors with a nine year old a few years back. I would guess that suburb norms will match the urban ones, and that small towns further out would tend to shade toward more independence, but I don’t know.

      • FrankistGeorgist says:

        Interesting, I assumed less populous places would have more busy bodies and police with less to do whereas a higher population would mean people are more likely to keep to themselves.

        It does of course only take one fanatic to get the cops called on you, so more people increases those chances.

      • axiomsofdominion says:

        I was able to go around with my friends in our early teens, but for sure being 10 or less you would probably get stopped in my part of STL. This was an inner ring suburb so not the city per say, but we bordered on Forest Park.

    • Lambert says:

      I started walking a mile or so to school at only a slightly older age.
      Safety in numbers is usually a good thing. 3 or 4 kids are safer than 1 or 2.

      It might be a good idea to give him a dumbphone.

    • herbert herberson says:

      I’m a CPS attorney who has worked on both sides of the courtroom.

      The first thing about the CPS system is that its very easy to get a social worker visit–all that really needs to happen is a call from someone who isn’t obviously a crank. The nature of the work, the fact that you’re investigating closed groups who are behind closed doors, means every remotely credible tip needs to be followed up on. Right now, there’s a lot of hysteria about random people kidnapping children to do sex trafficking so all you need is the wrong person who spends too much time watching local news and gossiping in local Facebook/Nextdoor groups to call in an unsupervised child and now you have to deal with the authorities.

      (editor’s note: lawyers never want to say never but I’m still willing to say that snatch-and-grabs are fairy tales–sex trafficking targets very vulnerable children and grooms them into quasi-consent, this shit with vans and stalking you see on Facebook is all nonsense)

      The second thing is that once those authorities get involved, there’s a non-zero chance of things going totally tits up on you. The child protection system is not the criminal system and lacks many of its familiar safeguards. You don’t necessarily have the right to a public defender, the burden of proof is much lower, and although evidentiary standards shouldn’t actually be any different they tend, in practice, to be lower, especially in initial hearings. The place I’ve really seen this in the past is in [ostensible] medical neglect cases, where the wrong doctor getting the wrong impression can lead to very bad results–but it’s a possibility in any type of case.

      The third thing is that basically no one in the CPS system wants this at all. Everything is supposed to be kept confidential and although social workers and attorneys will share case details within their office, very little extra prestige attached to a “big collar” and what little there is doesn’t leave the office. Removing a child from the home is a bunch of paperwork for even the most heartless social worker, there’s a host of far easier intermediate options that leave the child in the home while “connecting the parent with services,” (aka welfare programs and various parenting classes) and most social workers are not remotely heartless and are very in tune to the trauma a removal does to a child. Also, social workers are on the front lines of our country’s very serious drug and mental health problems. They are overworked and the vast majority of their cases are both very clear cut and very simple cases where a very, very unhealthy parent is no better at taking care of their child than they are at taking care of themselves. Taking time out from the endless torrent of simple-but-serious meth/heroin addiction cases where anyone can see the serious neglect occurring to go on a snipe-hunt vendetta against some middle-class free range parenter is the last thing any social worker wants to do. They’ll do it if the stars (or bruises) align just right and they decide it is truly necessary, but all of the incentives and biases are pointing in the other direction.

      So make of that what you will.

      • EchoChaos says:

        I appreciate your insight from within the system. I am not terribly worried about actual CPS taking my kids. They’re clearly happy and well-adjusted with us. I’m worried about increasing paranoia making it hard on them.

        • herbert herberson says:

          Yeah, even a visit can be traumatizing, and, unfortunately (like I said) that’s the part that’s hardest to control.

          And I know CPS involvement isn’t the only or even primary factor here, but I still like to bring it up. Partly for the obvious reason of my personal expertise but also because it illustrates that the bar is so much lower than people think it is. We give heroin addicts who are suspected of dealing or tricking while surfing from hotel room to hotel room multiple chances if it’s at all possible. I think if people knew more about this world they’d be a lot less paranoid about being judged “bad parents”–god knows I am

          • axiomsofdominion says:

            This always seems insane to me until I remind myself that foster care is a shit show. Like those people clearly shouldn’t be allowed to raise kids but its hard because you can’t necessarily be sure they are going to a good place if you remove them.

          • Cliff says:

            I have heard that CPS sometimes won’t even go to certain homes because they are too dangerous- the occupants threatened previous CPS staff, etc.

            Meanwhile, for middle-class people, CPS can and will strong-arm them into confessing to child abuse/neglect on the threat of taking their children away for an extended period of time. This has no downside for CPS since they can show they did something, they were justified, they got the parent help, etc. Middle class parents really care about losing their children for any period of time so its incredible pressure for them. Also of course confessing to child neglect is hugely damaging for them.

            The really hard cases wouldn’t be moved by something like that. They don’t care about a child neglect finding and they also don’t care as much about the kids being taken for some period of time.

            I’m not an expert but that’s my impression from reading about such things.

          • herbert herberson says:

            Like those people clearly shouldn’t be allowed to raise kids but its hard because you can’t necessarily be sure they are going to a good place if you remove them.

            It’s not so much that foster care is that bad as it is that
            – any removal at all is traumatizing, and the current culture of social work understands that (and the science behind it) pretty well
            – even after removal, the goal is reunification with the parents–so if there’s not an immediate safety concern, it’s better and easier for everyone to try and help the kids in the home even if the “home” isn’t really much of a “home”
            – right now, there’s a significant shortage of foster homes because of the opioid epidemic

            I have heard that CPS sometimes won’t even go to certain homes because they are too dangerous- the occupants threatened previous CPS staff, etc.

            If it reaches that point, we send the cops.

            There is sometimes a conundrum where parents refuse entry and we don’t yet have enough for a warrant, and that’s a situation that’s a lot more likely to occur when they’re drug dealers or whatever, but ultimately the difficulty isn’t because they’re dangerous, it’s just a secondary consequence of what makes them dangerous.

            Meanwhile, for middle-class people, CPS can and will strong-arm them into confessing to child abuse/neglect on the threat of taking their children away for an extended period of time. This has no downside for CPS since they can show they did something, they were justified, they got the parent help, etc. Middle class parents really care about losing their children for any period of time so its incredible pressure for them. Also of course confessing to child neglect is hugely damaging for them.

            It doesn’t really play out like this in my experience. Of course a social worker loves to get an admission, and they can say (honestly and entirely accurately for straightforward and good faith reasons) that accepting services in the home will prevent a removal, but I really don’t see a middle class person being more vulnerable to any of that.

            CPS doesn’t go after a family for fun–if they’re pushing like that, its because they genuinely think there’s a serious problem. That belief can, of course, be mistaken, but those mistakes are far more likely to be made against a lower class person navigating the sometimes fuzzy line between neglect and poverty and with fewer resources to obtain things like good legal counsel and second medical opinions than someone in the middle class.

            Mostly, poor people love their kids just as much as anyone, and if anything they’re more likely to put their identity as a parent first since that’s the only thing in their life that actually seems important. There is a class of hardcore addicts/scumbags who don’t give a shit, but that doesn’t give them leverage, at least not in actual practice. The vast majority of the time it just means they don’t show up to their hearings, lose to default judgements, and get TPRed after a year of not complying with their case plans.

      • Randy M says:

        Thanks for the post. Points one and two together take a little of the assurance of point three away, but it’s still net comforting.

        We’ve talked here before about how much of the decreasing birth rates are due to increased cost raising children and how much of that is status chasing versus legitimately necessary.

        If a social worker saw, say, three happy children sharing a bedroom, are they required or allowed consider that at some level neglect or harm absent anything more blatant?

        • herbert herberson says:

          That mixed assurance/dis-assurance is exactly what I was going for. All the cop and lawyer shows prime you to expect a system where people want to get you but are stopped by a host of procedural safeguards, when really it’s pretty much the exact opposite of that.

          If a social worker saw, say, three happy children sharing a bedroom, are they required or allowed consider that at some level neglect or harm absent anything more blatant?

          If they were pubescent/post-pubescent and of mixed genders, it would be viewed somewhat negatively but if that was the only issue it wouldn’t be nearly enough to prompt anything more than (maybe) a referral to Section 8. If they were the same gender and/or were pre-pubescent, I don’t even see it being framed negatively.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        What do you think of this comment?

    • Chalid says:

      I occasionally see kids of a similar age on the NYC subway, and presumably they’re doing a bit of unaccompanied walking on either end of the ride.

      I think NYC has a pretty strong “mind your own business” culture.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Two things I can see being under your control:

      Does your 8YO know what to say to a concerned officer to avoid trouble?

      Do local CPS know your kid as a non-risk? Is there any way to make that known?

      • EchoChaos says:

        Does your 8YO know what to say to a concerned officer to avoid trouble?

        Yes. He’s a bright kid who is outgoing and likes chatting.

        Do local CPS know your kid as a non-risk? Is there any way to make that known?

        I strongly hope they aren’t aware I exist.

        • acymetric says:

          I would hope if your kid got approached by a concerned officer that the farthest it would escalate is “I’m going to call your dad to make sure he knows where you’re at” or, I suppose at worst that he tells them to drop in and drives them back to your place. All that requires is that he knows your phone number and address (or at least how to get back home which he presumably knows or else he’d never make it back from the movies;) ).

    • Cliff says:

      I recommend getting your kid(s) a watch phone like gizmo gadget, where they can only call numbers you put in their phone and you can find them with GPS if you really need to. Then they can say “hey let me put you on the phone with my dad”

      • DragonMilk says:

        Seconding this, I hear there’s watches out there where they can call three pre-programmed phone numbers, and you can see their location using GPS

    • DragonMilk says:

      Which state do you live in? Utah passed a free range kids law which states kids being by themselves in not in itself neglect. Most other states are CPS-heavy nanny-states however.

      Generally, be sure your kids know how to answer responsibly, “I know it’s ok to talk to strangers but not to follow them” etc.

      • EchoChaos says:

        One that doesn’t have free-range kids laws, unfortunately.

        • DragonMilk says:

          not sure why my post won’t appear, but I’m now doing so without the link.

          In that case, per Cliff’s suggestion, I’d maybe browse in Amazon and the like for watches. You can look into a bit of shopping around to see options available, of course using fakespot.com and camelcamelcamel for rating accuracy and pricing history info (but I digress…I have very specific shopping methodology)

    • chrisminor0008 says:

      The 8 year old is OK going a short distance (< 1.5 miles/2 km) across terrain he's familiar with to go do something he's done before in a safe neighborhood with good sidewalks and tame traffic. When I was 8, I was responsible for walking that far to and from school everyday.

      The 6 year old probably is not, and the 8 year old is too young to take responsibility for another life. Maybe in another year.

      Just my 2¢.

      • HowardHolmes says:

        When I was 6 (1954) the world was different. I walked to school several blocks and crossed one busy street at a light with no crossing guard. Most of the time, my 8 year old sister was with me, but not always. Never had a problem other than my fear of passing a Catholic Church because I thought they might kidnap me and raise me to be a Catholic.

        Once, I went home during the day when I got sick. Teacher just told me “good-bye”. No need of special assistance. When I got home, my mom was gone and house locked so I walked several more blocks down to my Dad’s store where quite a bit of this walk was along the major street. A six year old kid can do pretty much anything. At 4 we moved to that neighborhood. I was always free to roam and spent my entire days outside, unsupervised. I’m sure glad I was raised in the 50s and not the 10s.

        • bullseye says:

          It was like that when I was a kid in the ’80s. I rode my bike to school and no one ever thought anything of it. Sometimes my sister and I wandered around in the swamp together.

          • albatross11 says:

            +1

            I walked to school as a little kid with nobody worrying about it, in a small town in the Midwest. I suppose I’d have been easy prey for some child-abducting stranger, except that there weren’t any of those around, and if there had been, various nosy neighbors would likely have noticed and provided the cops with a good description.

            During the summer as a 10-year-old kid, I would leave home in the morning and get home around the time it got dark, and if my parents worried about what I was up to[1], they never let on. The society hadn’t yet gone through moral panics about child predators under every bed or stranger danger[2], so nobody was freaking out about it. And lots of adults were around–retirees and stay-at-home moms and grandparents living with their grandkids/kids–so it wasn’t like nobody was watching.

            [1] Often, up to various kinds of minor mischief, but since they didn’t know that, they didn’t worry.

            [2] Nearly all child sexual predators are trusted adults or older kids who are left in charge of the kids by parents, at home or school or church or scouting events or whatever. The moral panic got this wrong, as moral panics usually do.

  49. johan_larson says:

    Could anyone point me to a good course on machine learning?

    I am a software engineer with a few weeks between jobs, and I’d like to spend part of it on professional development. Machine learning is all the rage right now, so it would make sense to know at least a bit about it.

    I’m looking to spend 25-60 hours, an easy week or two.

    The two courses I have already found are Google’s crash course (15 hours) and Udemy’s Machine Learning A-Z course (41 hours of video, unknown time for assignments.)

    Anything else I should consider?

    • JPNunez says:

      I’ve taken the Coursera intro one

      https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/home/welcome

      By Andrew Ng himself and while it is ok, the main problem is that the assignments are in octave, which ain’t good for much beyond teaching.

      Make sure that whatever you take has assignments in Python, which is the most used language for this out there. edit: actually clicked the links. Both go with Python which seems ok.

      Been meaning to take the next one of Andrew Ng that is in Python but have been delaying it for reasons.

    • KieferO says:

      If you have some math or statistics background and some budget for books, I would recommend “Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning” by Rasmussen and Williams. It’s very math heavy and terser than I would like. The reason that I’m recommending it is that it gave me enough framework to be able to see the relationship between machine learning and statistics. It’s helped me build some intuition about what parts of ML are actually magic and what parts are merely good statistics.

    • brad says:

      I enjoyed the fast.ai one. Totally useless to my career, but I enjoyed it.

      In contrast to the Ng course which I started but never finished, it’s focused on plumbing the tools together and not at all on the math.

    • mustacheion says:

      Not a course but a textbook: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/index.html. Free and online. I program, but not professionally, and after writing this book I was tinkering with novel machine learning techniques. This book doesn’t really give you much information about specific machine learning programming techniques, but it does a really good job of educating you about the underlying mathematical basis of machine learning, which I personally found to be much more helpful.

      And every programmer should learn how to use TensorFlow. Don’t bother with the high level API, focus on the low-level. Its not just a machine learning library, its a linear algebra library, and more importantly than that, it is a totally different way to code in a way that takes advantage of parallel processing. I think of it as its own sub-language that I program in inside of my python scripts. Some tasks are a pain in the ass to use, but once you get the hang of it it is extremely powerful. I have used it to write a physics optimization tool, which uses machine learning techniques but is not itself about machine learning at all (not a neural network). https://github.com/ecpoppenheimer/TensorFlowRayTrace.

  50. Corey says:

    To bring out a topic I’m curious about from a deep subthread:

    What’s wrong with US-Mexico border security, as in, what specifically needs improvement?

    I only see pundit takes (e.g. from Chief Neoliberal Shill Matt Yglesias) that tend to agree that all the border that isn’t crazy-forbidding to cross is already walled, so “Build the Wall” is empty. But I assume there are experts afoot with differing analysis.

    • Aftagley says:

      1. Smuggling is terrifically easy. The raw amount of stuff that goes through the border legally means that not everything can be inspected. If I take 100 conex boxes, modify a them to make a small space where I can fit a pvc pipe full of cocaine that’s very hard for a surface level scan to detect and then send them across the border, at least 90, maybe more will successfully get through. That’s not even talking about the really high volume practices, like bribing border guards and building tunnels. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if the drugs get to Mexico, they’ve effectively made it to the US. A majority of this stuff happens at legal crossings, so a wall wouldn’t really help, but dramatically expanded spending on counter-smuggling would (if you don’t mind everyone waiting for days at the border and getting aggressively searched).

      2. Keeping out really dangerous people is quite difficult. Your average migrant probably doesn’t matter, they’ve got limited resources and their likely impact is minimal. Keeping out a terrorist, well-funded state or nonstate actor or high-level criminal is much, much harder. Remember – crazy-forbidding to cross doesn’t mean “impossible to cross” it just means that your average migrant with limited resources isn’t going to have the resources or expertise to cross. Someone well trained and funded, however is going to have both. A wall “might” help this, but it’s unlikely this kind of area would/could ever be effectively walled off.

      3. Expanding the viewpoint a bit, the belief within Mexico is that everything going on in Mexico that’s bound for the US is America’s problem. As in, they fundamentally don’t think they should expend resources to combat a problem whose effect will be felt across the border. You can look at Mexico’s experience these last 15 years to see whether or not that’s a great idea, but it’s the case. Until Mexico’s attitude fundamentally changes, the overall situation is unlikely to improve.

      There’s more, but off the top of my head these are the top three. I’ll post others if I think of them.

      • Corey says:

        Yeah, drugs are a big challenge, because of their demand, we can’t keep them out of prisons.

        Searching more thoroughly has a political constituency against it (businesses who make things in Mexico or points south and sell them in the US). They would prefer the importation process to be as frictionless as possible. On the other hand, people will put up with a lot if it’s for security.

        I’d think the Canadian border would be the low-hanging fruit for well-funded bad guys. Not to say we need to leave that border as is (it’s gotten some stepped-up security (from none at all in places) since 9/11).

        • Aftagley says:

          Right, you likely can’t keep drugs in Mexico out of America. That’s why for decades the strategy has been to either destroy the plants before they get processed or interdict them before they get to Mexico.

          Canada is only the low-hanging fruit if you’re already in Canada. Their border security isn’t much weaker than ours, so on average you’d stand a better chance flying into somewhere that doesn’t have any kind of effective border screening (many countries in southern and central america) and just hike north.

      • baconbits9 says:

        2. Keeping out really dangerous people is quite difficult. Your average migrant probably doesn’t matter, they’ve got limited resources and their likely impact is minimal. Keeping out a terrorist, well-funded state or nonstate actor or high-level criminal is much, much harder.

        The large difference between the drug trade and terrorism is that there is a massive structure within the US for the drug trade. Once you get the drugs past the border all you need to do is find one of the many (frequently legal) residents who has the willingness and experience to start moving the drugs and the effect of getting the drugs across the border is more or less complete. Money is then sent across the border (or was already) which funds the next trip.

        Terrorism is very different, there is limited support in the US for terrorist cells, and any significant plans to do damage are going to take time, money, connections and understanding of US systems to actually function. Basic terrorist plots, like get guy across border, have him buy guns and ammo and shoot 20-50 people before he gets killed by cops, are probably counter productive. For every one you get off in the US the military will be retaliating against whoever they asses culpability for at rates of 100 to 1000 to 1.

        Finally if the backers of terrorism are well financed they won’t need to cross borders illegally that often, they will often be able to get their agents in legally, making border security far less important to stopping them.

        • JonathanD says:

          I thought getting the US to retaliate in out-sized ways was the point, at least for ISIS/Al-Qaeda type actors.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Yes, the 21st century mujahid playbook uses what paleocons disapprovingly called “The Bush Doctrine: invade the world, invite the world.”
            Every time Muslims resident in the West commit terrorism, you hope the West or just the US attacks a real or purported state sponsor in a big way, then there’s a refugee crisis, then you have a bigger, angrier pool of Muslims to recruit for subsequent attacks. Lather, rinse, repeat.
            (This is complicated by the fact that most Islamic terrorism in the West happens in Europe, which is less likely to counter-attack.)

        • Aftagley says:

          In some cases yes, in others no. Once you get above the foot solidiers, the line between terrorist, drug smuggler and state/nonstate actor get blurry. People in this world wear multiple hats.

          You are correct, IMO, that your average schmuck from badguyistan who just wants to kill some yankees won’t be able to do this kind of activity profitably.

          For every one you get off in the US the military will be retaliating against whoever they asses culpability for at rates of 100 to 1000 to 1.

          For a bunch of these organizations, this extreme disparity in response is a feature, not a bug. Terrorists want foreverwar.

          • baconbits9 says:

            For a bunch of these organizations, this extreme disparity in response is a feature, not a bug. Terrorists want foreverwar.

            Losing 100-1000 to 1 doesn’t mean forever war, it means they are wiped out.

            I thought getting the US to retaliate in out-sized ways was the point, at least for ISIS/Al-Qaeda type actors.

            I don’t think so, most of the efforts of the larger organizations go towards securing and controlling areas in the middle east, not directly provoking US aggression.

          • Aftagley says:

            Losing 100-1000 to 1 doesn’t mean forever war, it means they are wiped out.

            Potentially correct, my mistake was engaging with you at that inflated ratio. Accurate death rates are more on the order of 2:1 (vietnam war) to 25:1 (current war in afghanistan).

            Under those death ratios, the Vietnam war and the last 18 years of conflict should prove that, yes, it does result in forever war. We kill just enough to keep a steady-stream of new recruits energized.

            I don’t think so, most of the efforts of the larger organizations go towards securing and controlling areas in the middle east, not directly provoking US aggression.

            In some cases yes. But even for those organizations, proving that you’re capable of striking the US is a fantastic recruitment tool. Terrorists don’t think of terrorism as military attacks, they think of it as marketing. That’s why ISIS, one of the territoriality minded organizations you speak of, planned attacks in Europe and had a propaganda network aimed at radicalizing individuals within north america.

            Others, like Al-Qaeda want to spark global conflict and believe that the best way to do so is through these kinds of attacks.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            ISIS, one of the territoriality minded organizations you speak of, planned attacks in Europe and had a propaganda network aimed at radicalizing individuals within north america.

            Others, like Al-Qaeda want to spark global conflict and believe that the best way to do so is through these kinds of attacks.

            Funny thing: In the 1980s, Osama bin Laden energized men to follow him by saying he believed that the USSR was stronger than the USA, so once the mujahideen bankrupted the former with the current “forever war”, their second one against the US would be shorter. Once the US couldn’t afford foreign wars, they would topple moderate Muslim rulers and replace them with ones that would vote for a caliph.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Potentially correct, my mistake was engaging with you at that inflated ratio. Accurate death rates are more on the order of 2:1 (vietnam war) to 25:1 (current war in afghanistan).

            Under those death ratios, the Vietnam war and the last 18 years of conflict should prove that, yes, it does result in forever war. We kill just enough to keep a steady-stream of new recruits energized.

            The 100-1000 to 1 rates are compared to the terrorist attack in the US, I wasn’t including US military losses there, but that death ratio is fairly important to note how successful the US is in that metric so thanks for mentioning it.

            Under those death ratios, the Vietnam war and the last 18 years of conflict should prove that, yes, it does result in forever war. We kill just enough to keep a steady-stream of new recruits energized.

            The Vietnam war isn’t a particularly good example for a terrorist war.

          • baconbits9 says:

            That’s why ISIS, one of the territoriality minded organizations you speak of, planned attacks in Europe and had a propaganda network aimed at radicalizing individuals within north america.

            And the European military situation is materially different from the Americans.

          • Aftagley says:

            @Baconbits9

            Ok, I think at this point I just don’t understand your thesis. Would you mind restating it?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Sure thing:

            Border control for drugs and terrorism are extremely different. Terrorism (somewhat roughly) falls into two categories, large, coordinated attacks and individual attacks. Larger attacks are generally backed by well heeled organizations, and are not going to be prevented by more/better security at the border as their parent organization will be able to find legal means of entry. Absolutely perfect immigration control with the law at the time would have caught (iirc) 2 of the 19 involved in the 9/11 attacks. Likewise with small attackers by larger organizations.

            Small attacks by small organizations run into the retaliation issue, if they sneak an operative into the US with a couple of thousand dollars to buy guns and ammo and start low level shootings then the retaliation will likely wipe them out.

          • Aftagley says:

            Oh cool, we are mostly on the same page. I agree that under the current security posture the US has, if a group is large enough to plan a well coordinated attack, then they’re sophisticated enough to get people here legally.

            Looking back, I think the issue was that my original post of:

            Keeping out a terrorist, well-funded state or nonstate actor or high-level criminal is much, much harder.

            seemed to highlight terrorists as being the most likely of these three, when by several orders of magnitude it’s the least.

            I originally used it only to highlight the potential security vulnerabilities of calling some of the desolate border regions impassible, when they are in reality merely difficult, but looking back I realize that it makes it look like I think there are hordes or terrorists slipping into Texas and Arizona. I don’t, I think the number of terrorists who have done this is likely very low and most of them weren’t doing so in order to actively plan attacks.

      • EchoChaos says:

        the belief within Mexico is that everything going on in Mexico that’s bound for the US is America’s problem.

        This is one place where Trump has done quietly well. Mexico is being far more helpful a partner than they have been in the past. Largely because the current crop of illegals aren’t Mexicans and the average Mexican is getting tired of caravans rolling through every once in a while.

        • The Nybbler says:

          Also Trump got the Remain In Mexico (for those claiming asylum) plan agreed to by the Supreme Court, which seems pretty decent for everyone involved except dishonest claimants.

      • littleby says:

        …so 90 of your boxes will get through, and 10 of your drivers will get arrested for drug smuggling?

        That doesn’t sound like a very good deal for the drivers.

    • cassander says:

      I object to calling yglesias a neoliberal shill. He’s no neo liberal. To the extent he has any coherent ideology (which isn’t much), he’s almost never seen a market he didn’t want to direct. He’s a bog standard progressive English major who thinks he’s Josh Lyman.

      • BBA says:

        Yglesias won some kind of Neoliberal Shill of the Year poll, and is very proud of the title.

        • Nick says:

          I swear I saw Noah Smith calling himself that a while back. Did he win in a past year or something?

        • cassander says:

          I can absolutely believe that (A) Yglesias like kudos and (B) doesn’t actually know or care what the word neoliberal means.

          As for the awarders, the standard usage of the word neoliberal is an insult that means “someone to my right that I don’t like, but not far enough that I can call him a fascist”, with neoliberal shill being almost redundant.

          • Corey says:

            Yglesias wrote a full-throated defense of Bangladeshi safety standards being lower than the US’s just after that big workplace accident they had. (And gets shit about it to this day). If that doesn’t make someone neoliberal, what does?

          • cassander says:

            Realizing that if regulations have a cost in bangladesh, they might also have a cost in the US

            Less snarkily, if neo-liberalism means anything, it the belief that markets are useful, and that working through them is much better than central planning even if you want to achieve left wing goals. Other than housing, I can’t think of anywhere Yglesias thinks this (though I admit I don’t follow him closely). And even with housing, I think he’d absolutely hop on board if a government forcibly built up and allocated the dense development style that he wants. So even there his preference for markets is about ends, not means, which means he’s not really pro-market, he just thinks they’re on his side on this one particular issue.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            “Shill” is one of those insults, like “troll”, that has come completely unmoored from its original meaning.

          • Nick says:

            Same thing has happened to “hack.” Original meaning was “would write anything for the money,” is my impression. Now it means “writes things I don’t like.”

          • Chalid says:

            it the belief that markets are useful, and that working through them is much better than central planning even if you want to achieve left wing goals. Other than housing, I can’t think of anywhere Yglesias thinks this

            off the top of my head, he’s all in for a carbon tax as opposed to regulatory alternatives. He’s regularly argued that government using e.g. procurement to advance social goals was counterproductive (as opposed to simply providing the services at lowest cost). He’s talked about how big a boon airline deregulation was.

            Other than banking regulation and health care which are most definitely big special cases, I can’t really think of a place where I’d expect Yglesias *not* to generally want to work through markets to achieve left-wing goals.

            A quick google finds this article titled “Tax and Deregulate,” claiming “the movement, started under Jimmy Carter then of course continued by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, to deregulate important aspects of the American economy was basically a good thing in my view

        • Corey says:

          Conducted by the Twitter account ne0liberal, who is also associated with the subreddit. Noah was indeed last year’s and Matt was this years.

        • eric23 says:

          If I won the [Anything] Shill of the Year poll, I’d be (ironically) proud of it too.

      • axiomsofdominion says:

        For most of his career Yglesias was considered like a token liberal. The famous reference phrase from center/center right people defending their policies is “Even Matthew Yglesias, the liberal,” in the context of him kind of agreeing with them. And he is considered by the left to be a shill. Neo-liberals/liberals want to direct markets, Warren is sort of like the far, far edge of liberal, I’m a capitalist to my bones but we need to regulate a bit, type shit. Progressive, like neo-liberal, is such a loaded word without anything like a consistent definition. So saying he’s not a neo-liberal but a standard progressive kinda doesn’t mean anything.

        • cassander says:

          By standard progressive, I meant pretty squarely in the middle of the democratic party on almost all issues.

      • Frog-like Sensations says:

        This comment belongs under the encyclopedia entry for “outgroup homogeneity bias”.

        Yglesias is unambiguously a member of the neoliberal faction of the Democratic party. Perhaps you think that no true neoliberal exists within that party. But even then it is demonstrably false that “he’s almost never seen a market he didn’t want to direct”. There are plenty of markets that he wants less state interference in.

        The issue about which he talks the most is zoning reform to increase housing supply. He wrote an entire book about this and (even though I haven’t bothered to check) I’m certain if you scroll through his twitter feed right now it won’t take long to find a tweet of his complaining about housing regulations. That’s how much he talks about it.

        He is also in the neoliberal wing when it comes to immigration (his next book will be titled “One Billion Americans”), trade, and occupational licensing. Someone else in this thread already pointed out how infamous his Bangladeshi factory article is on the non-neoliberal left.

        And though Trump’s influence has greatly changed how people perceive the politics of immigration, greatly increasing legal immigration is clearly a neoliberal position. It involves loosening one the strongest controls the state places on the labor market.

        • cassander says:

          Yglesias is unambiguously a member of the neoliberal faction of the Democratic party. Perhaps you think that no true neoliberal exists within that party.

          I think that the neo-liberal movement is basically dead and has been for a while. There are a few left, but not many.

          He is also in the neoliberal wing when it comes to immigration (his next book will be titled “One Billion Americans”), trade, and occupational licensing.

          I already discussed his housing preferences, and open borders isn’t what I’d call a neoliberal position. Yes, it involves relaxing the state’s control of labor, but so did ending the draft, and most of the support for that had nothing to do with anything like neoliberalism*, and motive matters more than method when discussion political identity.

          I don’t know what he thinks about trade. Occupational licensing I give you, but that’s awfully small potatoes.

          *Neo-liberals, or people who would soon take up that label, did support ending the draft, but they weren’t the driving force behind it.

          • Frog-like Sensations says:

            I think that the neo-liberal movement is basically dead and has been for a while. There are a few left, but not many.

            This is just linguistic prescriptivism, and I think it’s as unhelpful here as it is in any other political debate (e.g., whether the American left are the real “liberals” or if that appellation should be reserved for libertarian views).

            There is presently a large group of people, both supporters and detractors, who use ‘neoliberal’ to designate a category that Yglesias unambiguously fits within. See r/neoliberal for one such community of people.

            The OP of this thread was clearly using the term with that meaning, and it only detracts from the conversation to object to the OP on the basis of your own substituted meaning.

          • cassander says:

            There is presently a large group of people, both supporters and detractors, who use ‘neoliberal’ to designate a category that Yglesias unambiguously fits within. See r/neoliberal for one such community of people.

            As I said earlier, the standard usage of the word neoliberal is an insult that means “someone to my right that I don’t like, but not far enough right that I can call him a fascist”. Yglesias definitely fits in that group, but I don’t consider that category particularly meaningful.

            The other definition of neoliberalism was a particular set of ideas about using market mechanisms to achieve traditional left wing goals. It was about free trade, economic deregulation, taking seriously the idea that public assistance can generate bad incentives, privatizing nationally owned industries, and public choice economics. Yglesias, as far as I know, endorses none of that. Yes, he doesn’t like occupational licencing and zoning as they currently exist, but almost everything I have read of his wants to go the other way.

          • Frog-like Sensations says:

            Yes, broadly speaking “neoliberalism” in the relevant sense is about taking ideas from econ seriously and using market mechanisms to achieve your goals, whether those goals are on the left or the right.
            About a half a dozen areas on which Yglesias believes in this (greatly annoying a huge contingent of anti-neoliberal leftists) have been pointed out by me and others in this thread.

            Presumably he doesn’t believe in it as often as Reagan and Thatcher, for whose reforms the term was originally proposed in the academic context. But those same academics are also happy to include Clinton and Blair under the label, who got elected in part by acquiescing to those reforms.

            In any case, as the term is presently used the number of areas on which Yglesias proposes market solutions clearly qualifies him. I see no more reason to restrict it to more extreme views than there is to restrict “conservative” to views that would get you called one in 1900.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Y is much further left and much more distrustful of markets than anyone who I would consider market-friendly. That he’s considered one of the market-friendly voices on the liberal side is extremely disappointing: he should represent the furthest left point within the Overton Window.

            The problem is much of the contemporary Progressive movement is well outside what even moderate right-wingers like myself would consider acceptable, and it’s quite obvious that they are rapidly declining in power.

          • Frog-like Sensations says:

            I don’t claim to have read everything Yglesias has written, so it’s certainly possible I’ve missed quite a bit of anti-market rhetoric, outside of the few issues Chalid pointed to above. But if my sampling of his writing has been remotely representative, then far more of it is directed at pro-market views than anti-market ones.

            And I can say that I find it odd that the people defending the claim that Yglesias counts as neoliberal have listed a large number of issues that qualify him, and as far as I can see those arguing against it haven’t offered even a single one.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          The issue about which he talks the most is zoning reform to increase housing supply. He wrote an entire book about this and (even though I haven’t bothered to check) I’m certain if you scroll through his twitter feed right now it won’t take long to find a tweet of his complaining about housing regulations. That’s how much he talks about it.

          Since this is the internet, we might as well make the inevitable engagement with libertarians: would striking zoning laws from the books increase housing supply enough to 100% solve the problem?

          • Rebecca Friedman says:

            That’s a fascinating question!

            First, could you define “100% solve the problem”? Specifically, do you want to house everyone, up to and including the mentally ill guy who throws (fairly large) stones at cars, defecates on public benches, and is usually off his meds and/or on something else? (This is unfortunately a real example.) Or do you just want housing prices similar to (or a little lower than) other major US cities? And second, are you just abolishing zoning, or are you removing any of the regulations governing how many people can occupy what space/how many bathrooms/kitchen space/etc. you must provide for the number of bedrooms*/all the things that I tend, perhaps uncharitably, to view as “make flophouses, and other sorts of ‘poor people temporary housing’ cheaper than motels illegal”? (A nod here to boarding-houses, or the practice of taking lodgers, which shows up all the time in 19th-century or early 20th-century sources, and seems to now be defunct, whether through deliberate laws against it or simply making it hard enough to kick people out that most people aren’t willing to risk renting out a spare room, I don’t know.)

            (Or, for that matter, the lengthy review process California seems to have that, so far as I can tell, involves a significant notice period to make sure nobody in the neighborhood minds any new construction before beginning it, and the city council reserving the right to review plans and object to them for any reason or none – a process that recently resulted in people deciding that the movie theaters they’d gone to in their youth were historical landmarks that must be preserved, and getting their local governments to agree, after the developer had already bought the land, causing the developer to need to completely redo their plans and go round with the city council again, leading in turn to a piece of land in an extremely valuable area of San Jose owned by a very capable developer sitting empty for I think going on two years now… okay, I may have a bee in my bonnet about that one, but my point is, zoning isn’t everything. If “zoned residential” removes the first of twelve roadblocks, removing zoning will increase housing supply, but not by nearly as much as if it were the only thing, or even the first of three. I haven’t personally tried building things in the Bay Area, but watching what I see of things getting built and the politics around it, it has looked more like the former case to me.)

            Oh, and abolishing rent control would also help.

            So: if you want to house the mentally ill guy, and/or you won’t touch the other restrictions, then no, it will help a lot but it won’t 100% solve everything. If you’re willing to touch the other restrictions, it depends on how much. I confidently believe that if you axed zoning, all building regulations that a critical eye would see as “anti-poor-people”, and all or almost all city council oversight, it would solve the problem my definition of 100% (everyone who would be housed in Chicago, say, is housed).** It might well do better, but I confidently believe it would do at least that.

            A prediction I can safely make, as there’s no way they would ever do it. But I actually do think it would work, and would expect to adjust my priors quite a lot if I turned out to be wrong.***

            *See hereand (optional) here and here for examples of this sort of regulation.

            **It would probably also cause some of the problems Chicago has. There are reasons people don’t want flophouses in their neighborhoods. I just think shoving poor people onto the streets is too high a price to pay for that. Flophouses seem to historically have been a lot easier to move up from, boarding houses even more so.

            ***Limitation to the above: I have never tried building a house and do not know a lot about California bureaucracy. If I was wrong because, after all the layers I named were axed, there were additional layers of bureaucracy that continued to cause building to take months to years before breaking ground, independent of architectural concerns, I would not adjust my priors. Well, those priors.

          • Plumber says:

            @Rebecca Friedman,
            I’ve been in multiple bedrooms in San Francisco back in the ’80’s that didn’t have windows (though a few “bedrooms” had clearly once been hall closets), but those were pre-war buildings, so maybe the regulation came later?

          • eric23 says:

            would striking zoning laws from the books increase housing supply enough to 100% solve the problem?

            Depends what you think “the problem” is, of course.

            What it would do, in the long run (or even the medium run), is reduce the cost of housing to the cost of constructing housing. High-rise apartment buildings cost an average $302 per square foot in NYC (an expensive place). So a 1000sqft condo, large enough for a family with kids, should cost no more than $302k. A 500sqft condo, enough for a couple with no kids at home, would cost $150k.

            For me, being able to buy a comfortably sized condo for these prices in NYC or Silicon Valley counts as 100% solving the problem.

    • When they say that there are barriers across the border, they are being misleading. The large majority of those “walls” are anti-vehicle barriers that are trivial to get across. It’s not the Berlin Wall.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Chief Neoliberal Shill Matt Yglesias

      You know, if we could rely on nominative determinism, Matthew Yglesias would be a devout Christian, probably a cleric in a parish called San Mateo Yglesias.

    • Garrett says:

      Regardless of the current state of the border well, it’s pretty obvious that there are a lot of people who are able to cross illegally. From my understanding, about half of the people in the country illegally are visa over-stays and half are illegal crossings.

      Stopping the illegal crossings would be much more readily implementable than checking the visa status of everybody in the country who doesn’t speak fluent English.

      • brad says:

        That’s probably true, but visa overstayers are likely to be more susceptible to economic pressure because getting a visa de facto requires the applicant to be relatively well off. Make it so the undocumented can only work as bar backs, gardeners, and so on then a twenty something from an upper middle class Argentine or Polish family is probably not going to stay.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        Don’t we have actual information about the visa holders though, including name, photograph, and last known location?

      • EchoChaos says:

        The other thing to consider is that illegal entry allows people who wouldn’t have a chance at a visa in.

        MS-13 thug number 3 with a criminal record a week long isn’t getting any sort of visa.

  51. Aftagley says:

    Re: the democratic debates last night.

    The biggest thing that stood out to me was just how far the Dems are going on immigration. Biden did (IMO) pretty well last night on every topic but immigration. Here’s a question that stood out to me:

    …Then you served as vice president in an administration that deported 3 million people, the most ever in U.S. history. Did you do anything to prevent those deportations? I mean, you’ve been asked this question before and refused to answer, so let me try once again. Are you prepared to say tonight that you and President Obama made a mistake about deportations? Why should Latinos trust you?

    All evidence points towards these deportations being legal, and mostly conducted in an ethical manner. During Obama’s years, nobody on the left outside of a few activists cared about it. Immigration just wasn’t something the left really focused on. Fast forward to today. Biden couldn’t answer that question and every other candidate pushed for a maximally immigration-friendly position. IMO this is more evidence towards Trump being a setback for Trumpism.

    • Randy M says:

      IMO this is more evidence towards Trump being a setback for Trumpism.

      Hard to know the counterfactual. I think, in the absence of Trump focusing on immigration control, Democrat voters would have been less in favor of de facto open borders (and preventing every deportation is essentially that), but Democrat politicians would not be any less so.
      So whether Trump is a setback for Trumpism depends on his ability to get himself and other immigration restrictionists reelected, which I offer no prediction for or against.

      • Democrats were going hard left even before Trump. And Obama was protecting more and more illegal immigrants, hence Trump. In the counterfactual where Hillary won, Democrats probably wouldn’t be talking about “evil cages” as much but they still would still be moving to the left on immigration.

        • Aftagley says:

          Interesting, this doesn’t match my personal memory of being a democrat/being in lefty circles back then. Polling data from before 2015 (IE, when Trump entered public consciousness and started getting lefty pushback) doesn’t seem to support your position, although there was widespread support for stuff like the DREAM act among the left.

          Do you mind explaining your reasoning or linking me to your source on this one?

          • Eric Rall says:

            My perception here is that Trump-on-immigration is the continuation of what started out as a reaction against Bush the Younger’s unsuccessful push for comprehensive immigration reform on a basis of amnesty, a guest worker program, and moderate increases in border enforcement and employment verifications.

            What I perceive to be the mainstream Democratic position under Obama was a bit to the left of Bush’s failed proposal (a bit more liberalization, and a smaller increase in enforcement), but not hugely so. There were some activists pushing for open borders and unconditional amnesty, but those only gained traction with mainstream Democrats as they gradually adopted left-activist rhetoric in their criticisms of anti-illegal-immigration rhetoric and proposals on the right.

          • albatross11 says:

            OTOH, I think the Obama administration’s plan for handling the Dreamers was pretty sensible–basically, as I understand it, people brought to the US illegally as kids don’t get deported and get to the front of the line to be citizens, if they’ve managed to stay out of trouble.

          • I can’t find the source right now but the left started moving more to the left in general after Trayvon Martin, not Trump. I’ll see if I can find it.

      • Aftagley says:

        but Democrat politicians would not be any less so.

        I disagree with this point. I think politicians would have been where they were back in 2008 and 2012 when Obama was running – they wouldn’t really have had to talk or care about it. Again, Obama deported tons of people (albeit, from the border, not from within american society). What force minus Trump would have caused the party to full reverse?

        • Randy M says:

          they wouldn’t really have had to talk or care about it.

          Trump is not the only thing going on in the world. There was the Syrian refugee crisis and subsequent immigrant surge into Europe, various Latin American migrant caravans, and push for the Dream act which brought the issue to people’s attention.

          If your position is that “If no Republicans made Immigration and issue, Democrats wouldn’t have either,” that’s true, but in that case the Democrats would be simply getting steadily increasing immigration and no increased border scrutiny, even if it wasn’t motivating them, because that’s something they believe in and that they believe matters to a portion of their constituency.

    • axiomsofdominion says:

      Both Sanders and Biden have been sort of boxed in. Bernie has somewhere to go by arguing about, as Castro did, supporting Central and South America or something. But Democrats went all in on guns and immigration to stop economic policy coalitions from being built.

      • acymetric says:

        But Democrats went all in on guns and immigration to stop economic policy coalitions from being built.

        I’m not quite sure what you mean by this. Who would have been forming the coalitions? Is it the DNC that went all in to prevent this, or the specific candidates (or both)?

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        But Democrats went all in on guns and immigration to stop economic policy coalitions from being built.

        Seconding “please unpack this.”
        As a social conservative, I’ve been hopeful for Biden as evidence that there are two kinda-OK Parties, but he looks boxed in by the base.

        EDIT: Oh no… in last night’s debate, Biden said “We send social workers into people’s houses to help them raise their children. They [parents] might not know how — turn the radio on, excuse me, turn the TV on — turn the record player on at night.”

        • Elementaldex says:

          Wait… Did he claim that we need to protect children from their parents inability to use electronics to babysit them?

          As very much an aside, I occasionally hire/manage social/case workers and I doubt they are better than average at turning on electronics.

          • MrApophenia says:

            It’s worse than that, that was his answer for how he would address the legacy of slavery. His response appears to be “Black people don’t know how to raise children, so we need to send social workers into their homes to ensure they are playing records for their children.”

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @MrApophenia: Yeah. It’s condescending to black parents, and troubling that he seemed unsure whether the state-of-the-art entertainment tech was TV, radio, or the phonograph.
            But I’d still trust a moderate, befuddled grandpa over the rest of the Democratic field.

        • Plumber says:

          @Le Maistre Chat

          “As a social conservative, I’ve been hopeful for Biden as evidence that there are two kinda-OK Parties, but he looks boxed in by the base…”

          Well as a pro-union Democrat I was looking to see if enough self sabotage could be avoided to have a chance in November 2020, and my impression of our front runner remains the same as it was after the last debate,

          Biden:
          “Remember when we were a sane republic?
          Let’s do that again.
          Oh wait, I’m sorry I didn’t mean go back to
          that I meant the other stuff.
          Okay we won’t go back to
          that either.
          Oh c’mon that’s not allowed either?
          You’re not leaving me much to work with guys,
          gals too I mean!
          What
          they’s?
          Who’s a they? That doesn’t even make sense…
          SORRY!
          I’ll evolve, just nominate and I promise, I’ll evolve!!”

          (Is it a good sign to feel sorry for a candidate?)

          *sigh*

          I know that younger editorialists call my and older generations of Democrats “shell shocked” and “cowardly”, but we do remember the last three Democrats to actually win the Presidency, and how they campaigned.
          Carter’s faith was prominent, the man still teaches Sunday school, he seemed “Red Tribe” but humble (and the Left wing of the Democratic Party coalesced around Ted Kennedy and tried to primary him, and then we got Reagan).
          Clinton went deep into “hippie punching” to signal that he was “middle of the road”, and it worked!
          Obama promised “There’s no Red America and Blue America, there’s only the United States of America”, and he twice earned the votes of those who later voted for Trump (and are supposedly “racist deplorables” yet voted for a black man to be President), and said he would be President of “All Americans”.

          I know that many Democrats dream of the second coming of F.D.R., but in my lifetime the Democrats who won are the ones who at least tried to appeal to swing voters, and the last time I checked the polls on it most Democrats said the Party should be more “moderate”.

          Yeah, a lot of what Sanders, Warren and some of what the rest says appeals to me, but all of it?

          I guess I’m just among the old, cowardly, and shell shocked contingent, but half a loaf is much better than none, the full young progressive agenda looks to me like it has no chance of passing in the Senate, and will alienate too many voters, (fully open borders? Really?)

          The press and Biden’s opponents keep dredging up statements of his going back to the ’70’s and asking him to apologize for them, but when I hear his now out-of-date heresies, I think That guy would win the general election”, but the Biden we have now is clearly not quick witted, and to win the nomination he has to apologize and “evolve” away from stuff like the Hyde amendment.

          Much more of this and not only is Trump re-elected, but the House turns Republican again.

          • Cliff says:

            The literature seems to show that centrist candidates do best in the general election, not those best able to “motivate the base”

          • baconbits9 says:

            The literature seems to show that centrist candidates do best in the general election, not those best able to “motivate the base

            What is the comparison here? It seems like a centrist candidates who could beat motivate the base candidates in the primaries would be better positioned for a GE, which seems like a hard con-founder to account for in such a small sample of elections.

          • Ketil says:

            Does anybody get the quoted journalists’ allegations of racism? Is it racist to raise teachers’ pay or to suggest children from low SES homes would benefit from spending more time in school?

            One way this makes sense, is that aiming at low SES is color blind, i.e. it doesn’t pay respect to the viewpoint that the real problem is racism – and thus only solutions that have an explicit racial bias are acceptable.

            This seems extreme to me, but maybe SS is cherry-picking the quotes?

          • Ketil says:

            Ah, I see, it was in the context of (mitigating the long term effects of) slavery.

    • Plumber says:

      @Aftagley says:

      “Re: the dehe democratic debates last night…”

      I didn’t watch it but caught much of the debates on the radio during my drive home yesterday, and I caught re-caps.

      I heard much I liked, but my chief impressions caused me to congratulate a former co-worker who’s a Trump supporter on his candidate being re-elected, he laughed and said “If they took away his Twitter account we’d have a clean Presidency”, which gave me a small bit of hope that maybe Trump will self-sabotage himself, but what I saw among the Democratic candidates looked too much like many trying to out do each other in alienating the 10% of the electorate that are potential swing voters in the general election.

      Yes, “Liberals” outnumber “Conservatives”, but they’re still not the majority, without winning over enough voters who have mixed leanings there’s no win, I’m very doubtful of a “turnout the base” strategy, and I’m losing the little optimism I had.

      Biden had good moments, but the longer the debate ran the more rambling he seemed. 

      Warren often seems sharp via television with subtitles, but via radio I really couldn’t understand what she said at all.

      Harris I could understand, but she lost a lot of charisma when I can’t see her and just seems too scripted (unlike Biden who needs to be more scripted to inspire confidence).

      Sanders is immensely entertaining, but it seems clear that he probably won’t get anymore bills passed by the Senate than he does now as a Senator, plus I doubt that anyone who calls himself a “socialist” can win.

      Buttigieg actually gave me a bit of an including of why he (a Mayor who I’d never heard of before recently) was on the stage at all, which is a big improvement. 

      The rest just blended together with my general impression of too many providing soundbites for the RNC in the general election.

      The only way most of it seemed like it could help defeat Trump is if Biden’s the nominee and somehow the attacks on him do the traditional “hippie punching” for him to make swing voters more comfortable with viting for him, but at this point I’m not hopeful.

    • I liked Biden’s comment that “For a socialist, you’ve got a lot more confidence in corporate America than I do.” Sanders is right, but Biden won the argument. There are two ways to think about wages:

      1. Wages are the product of employers bidding with other employers for employee talent, and thus wages will settle to a value approximate to worker productivity.
      2. Wages are set by corporations in a monopolistic manner, as if there were one giant corporation which could set wages with workers having little recourse, or many corporations which collude to set wages in a monopolistic manner.

      Obviously, 1. is not entirely correct, but it’s closer to reality than 2. But I think most Democrats think of wages in terms of 2. So it’s obvious that if corporations were freed from the need to provide healthcare to employees, they’d just pocket the money. To not do so, they’d need to be generous, which they aren’t. Ordinarily, believing in the monopoly theory of wages helps the socialists, but in this case Biden was able to use their own biases against them.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Here’s how I rank the 10 Democrats, overall and not just from Thursday’s debate:

      1. Biden. He’s been kind of daft for the past 11+ years, but his moderate positions make him trustworthy. Let’s be honest here: if he beat Trump, we’d be crowning the eccentric old king of the federal government, a sort of figurehead for the DNC.
      2. Andrew Yang. “Grey”, moderate outside of his signature issue pushing the Overton Window. That he’s young and sharp but doesn’t understand the arithmetic behind his signature issue is more of a knock against him than Biden not understanding things at his age, but it was a close call for me.
      VERY LARGE GAP
      3. Warren. I liked Warren the heretic professor. Once she had to court Democratic primary voters, she caught up with leftist orthodoxy.
      Tied for 4: Klobuchar, Mayor Butt. I haven’t seen anything to like about them.
      6: Harris. It’s kind of funny to see her attacked as having governed too far to the right when in power as she speaks mindless boo lights like “You can go back to watching Fox News.” Kind of reminds me of Hillary.
      Tied for 7: Booker, O’Rourke. Booker seems way too concerned about the tiniest minorities (remember “black transgender students” or whatever his exact term was?). O’Rourke’s hard left signaling is more mainstream (take away your guns) but betrays an exceptional level of ignorance about what the Constitution allows the President to do.
      Tied for last: Bernie, Castro.

  52. proyas says:

    Why do so many buildings have flat roofs? Even a very shallow pitch, like 1/24 (1 inch of vertical rise for every 24 inches of horizontal distance), would be much better at draining water from a roof than a flat one with no pitch.

    If you needed to install air conditioners or other big devices on the roof, simple wedge-shaped adapters with the same pitch as the roof could provide level surfaces.

    • acymetric says:

      I don’t know if this is the reason, but doing any kind of work on a flat roof is probably safer.

    • Aftagley says:

      1. What acymetric said. 1 person dying on your non-flat roofs cancels out pretty much every potential benefit.

      2. Cost. Flat is cheaper. Flat with draining is still cheaper than sloped but not.

      3. Slope creates extra space, unusable space is a waste of money. Most buildings don’t want a random attic.

    • Eric Rall says:

      “Flat” roofs generally aren’t completely flat. They’re just super-low-slope like what you’re proposing, typically just enough for water to run off but not enough to be casually perceptible. It’s also not necessarily continuous from the peak to the gutter like a pitched residential roof: instead, it may be pitched down in relatively small sections towards a drain.

      Different roofing materials have different minimum roof pitch to work reliably. The shingles and concrete or clay tiles often used on residential buildings requires a significant slope, and once the slope gets too low to support those, then the remaining options (at least the subset of those options that makes sense for a large commercial building) work just as well with an almost-flat roof as one with a 5-10 degree slope.

      You will see low-but-obviously-not-flat roofs in some older single-family residential construction (e.g Eichler-style houses), but that’s both an older style and one that’s designed to be forgiving of lower-grade materials and workmanship. For example, the plywood subroof might start to sag over time, leaving an area where water will puddle enough to degrade the lifespan of a tar-and-gravel roof. A 5-10 degree slope buys you some insurance against this by increasing the amount of sagging before water pools up enough to be a problem.

    • Beck says:

      What’s called a flat roof has a minimum 1/4″ per foot slope built in for drainage. They’re also required to be designed for rain loads caused by slow or interrupted drainage.

      As Eric Rall said, different materials have different minimum pitches by code. That 1/4″/ft is the minimum allowed.

      • Buttle says:

        I don’t have much insight into why, but can report some personal experience. My parents have a rental building (single-family house with attached apartment) with a flat roof. It has a slope of, at a wild-ass guess, 1/2″ per foot. The roof is surrounded on three sides by a false front that serves as a wall, so it’s quite safe to work on compared to a pitched roof. This style of house is not unusual in New Mexico, where it is.

        When they bought the house it had a cracked roof joist, which caused the roof to sag and water to accumulate, which led to leaking. We did not understand the problem until it became necessary to remove the ceiling in the front room, at which point it became obvious. We jacked up the joist, sistered a beam to it, replaced the roof, replaced the ceiling, and rented it out. I believe it’s still good after 40 years or so.

        Flat residential roofs can be useful space — my relatives in Egypt kept chickens, beehives, and even a goat on theirs. On the other hand they’re not very convenient in places with a lot of rainfall, much less snow.

    • Buttle says:

      More efficient use of materials. Pitched roofs require more stuff for roof trusses, sheathing, and roofing. Attic spaces are not very useful, they tend to be too hot, too cold, and of an awkward shape.

      Steeply pitched roofs are traditional only where there are heavy snow loads, because they shed snow without labor.

  53. souleater says:

    Someone in the hallucination thread mentioned that as an artist, they’re trained to see things as they really are. That, with practice, they can turn their “artist eyes” on or off. It reminded be of a line in the book How we got to now quoting Leonardo Da Vinci

    When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object represented after nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture, and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror. The mirror ought to be taken as a guide.

    This is really interesing to me, because I’ve always talked about how my engineering background gave me “Engineering sight” where you can look at a camera, or helicopter or fuel pump and “see” on a deeper level whats going on, what the scientific basis is for a particular piece of technology.
    I feel like my education gave me insights i never had before.

    I imagine this is actually true for everyone.. Can anyone share their experiences with how their jobs changed their perspectives?

    • Björn says:

      I often play the traditional Frankonian card game Schafkopf with my friends. In Schafkopf, the Ober and Unter (= Queens and Jacks) are the highest trumps, while the Kings are next to worthless. When you start playing Schafkopf, after a while the Ober and Unter start looking really nice and interesting and generally just pop in your hand, while the Kings look dull and you stop paying attention to them.

    • AG says:

      Not my job, but learning about how the TV/movie sausage the gets made has made me able to appreciate works that don’t necessarily impress the layman. And not in a “I get the Arteestic Vision now” thing, but in the opposite direction, where I’m more impressed by workman-like procedurals or mid-budget/lower-ambition genre.

      And as per the jazz thread below, music background can definitely make a big difference as to what someone hears in a piece of music.

      Similarly, aficionados of any sport are impressed by things that aren’t visible to the layman. This is even more apparent for something like video games, where a common commentary is “this speedrunner is making this incredibly difficult technique look effortless.”

      • Paul Brinkley says:

        One tip I found very interesting from a movie buff is to play a game he calls, “You are the camera”. If a movie doesn’t feel otherwise engaging, try imagining how you would film the scene you’re watching, and consider why the angle you see was chosen, why it’s framed that way, whether any props in frame are important, why one character is in front of another, etc.

        There’s a YouTube video that illustrates this for a string of scenes in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The narrator talks about how the scene sets up the conflict between Valance and Doniphon, how the shot establishes who’s dominant in order to accent the dialogue, and so on.

        I was surprised how interested I got in certain films I otherwise felt were boring. It also caused me to appreciate good directors, improve on bad directors, or even spot good directors who were just having a bad day.

      • acymetric says:

        I studied music tech in college and it simultaniously made me more aware of poor production and better able to listen through/past it to hear the actual music being performed.

    • LeSigh says:

      Law school gave me lawyer brain, in the sense that it amplified the existing qualities that made people encourage me to go to law school in the first place (analytical thinking, enjoyment of debate as recreation, & a knack for sharp/cutting language). Useful in many ways, especially when doing things like buying a house, but also very dangerous to my relationships.

    • rahien.din says:

      I read EEGs for a living. An EEG is just a long recording of brainwaves. We chiefly look for evidence of seizure tendency, meaning, little spikes that poke them into the EEG background. But there are many normal things that have a spike-like appearance. Once you are a good enough EEGer, your brain ignores the normal things and only “sees” the abnormal things. I kind of “see” less of the EEG than when I first started out.

      Sometime last year, a paper was published suggesting that one of these normal findings (BETS) might actually be evidence of seizure tendency. I disagreed, but even so, for about a week I noticed all the BETS again.

  54. eyeballfrog says:

    It seems some guys in Massachusetts are trying to get the winner-take-all method of allocating electoral votes declared unconstitutional. There appears to be two arguments for this. One comes from Gray v. Sanders, where the court held that the winner-take-all county unit system could not be used even if properly weighted for population, as the votes for the other candidates in that county would “be counted only for the purpose of being discarded”. The other comes from Thornburg v. Gingles, which prevented North Carolina from using multi-member winner-take-all districts in its state legislature to disenfranchise blacks. I assume the idea here is that the electoral college delegation is also an elected state-level body, and the proscription on multi-member or at-large winner-take-all districts should also apply to it.

    I know there are law people around here, so I have to ask: does this have legs? It seems kind of plausible, but constitutional law can be complicated and I’m no expert in it.

    • EchoChaos says:

      My instinct is “absolutely not” for two reasons.

      First is that it is well established that status quo is incredibly powerful and that is likely to outweigh smarty arguments.

      Second is that the Supreme Court leans right and this currently hurts Republicans more.

      I am not a lawyer.

      • eyeballfrog says:

        Does it hurt Republicans? If states allocated their electoral votes proportionately to their popular vote totals, does it flip 2016?

        • EchoChaos says:

          Probably, given that Democrats won the Popular vote.

          • GearRatio says:

            I’m always unclear whether this would go as planned. Presumably both Clinton and Trump were optimizing for “electoral college win condition”. Trump was better at this and won.

            I feel like assuming too hard that Clinton would win if the rules changed is a little like saying “well, I sunk less baskets, but I had possession for more of the game, I would have won for sure if it was based on possession”. Well, maybe, but the other guy (who is better at basketball than you, probably, since he won) would then optimize for possession instead of baskets. Clinton’s optimization was worse than Trump’s for what mattered; I’m not at all sure it would be better than Trump’s for what matters so long as we change the rules before the election, not after.

        • MP92 says:

          Using the Jefferson of proportional allocation, Clinton gets 269 electors, Trump 265, Johnson 2, Stein and McMullin 1 each.

          If Clinton negotiates with Stein or Johnson to have one of their electors vote for her instead, she wins. If not, no candidate has a majority and under the 12th amendment the election goes to the House, which elects Trump.

        • Vosmyorka says:

          I counted this out state-by-state back in December 2016; proportional state-by-state allocation of electoral votes, had it been used, would’ve pretty significantly helped the Democrats in that year’s election, but it would not have given Clinton a victory; it would have reduced both major-party candidates to less than 270 and given Johnson an absolute balance of power. Stein (in CA) and McMullin (in UT) also receive an electoral vote each but are not relevant. Here are the statewide numbers, using just largest remainders to allocate excess:

          Alabama: Trump 6 (-3), Clinton 3 (+3)
          Alaska: Trump 2 (-1), Clinton 1 (+1)
          Arizona: Trump 5 (-6), Clinton 5 (+5), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Arkansas: Trump 4 (-2), Clinton 2 (+2)
          California: Clinton 34 (-21), Trump 18 (+18), Johnson 2 (+2), Stein 1 (+1)
          Colorado: Clinton 4 (-5), Trump 4 (+4), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Connecticut: Clinton 4 (-3), Trump 3 (+3)
          Delaware: Clinton 2 (-1), Trump 1 (+1)
          DC: Clinton 3 (-)
          Florida: Trump 14 (-15), Clinton 14 (+14), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Georgia: Trump 8 (-8), Clinton 7 (+7), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Hawaii: Clinton 3 (-1), Trump 1 (+1)
          Idaho: Trump 3 (-1), Clinton 1 (+1)
          Illinois: Clinton 11 (-9), Trump 8 (+8), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Indiana: Trump 6 (-5), Clinton 4 (+4), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Iowa: Trump 3 (-3), Clinton 3 (+3)
          Kansas: Trump 4 (-2), Clinton 2 (+2)
          Louisiana: Trump 5 (-3), Clinton 3 (+3)
          Maine: Clinton 2 (-2), Trump 2 (+2)
          Maryland: Clinton 6 (-4), Trump 4 (+4)
          Massachusetts: Clinton 7 (-4), Trump 4 (+4)
          Michigan: Trump 8 (-8), Clinton 7 (+7), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Minnesota: Clinton 5 (-5), Trump 5 (+5)
          Mississippi: Trump 4 (-2), Clinton 2 (+2)
          Missouri: Trump 6 (-4), Clinton 4 (+4)
          Montana: Trump 2 (-1), Clinton 1 (+1)
          Nebraska: Trump 3 (-2), Clinton 2 (+2)
          Nevada: Clinton 3 (-3), Trump 3 (+3)
          New Hampshire: Clinton 2 (-2), Trump 2 (+2)
          New Jersey: Clinton 8 (-6), Trump 6 (+6)
          New Mexico: Clinton 2 (-3), Trump 2 (+2), Johnson 1 (+1)
          New York: Clinton 17 (-12), Trump 11 (+11), Johnson 1 (+1)
          North Carolina: Trump 8 (-7), Clinton 7 (+7)
          North Dakota: Trump 2 (-1), Clinton 1 (+1)
          Ohio: Trump 9 (-9), Clinton (+8), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Oklahoma: Trump 5 (-2), Clinton 2 (+2)
          Oregon: Clinton 4 (-3), Trump 3 (+3)
          Pennsylvania: Trump 10 (-10), Clinton 10 (+10)
          Rhode Island: Clinton 2 (-2), Trump 2 (+2)
          South Carolina: Trump 5 (-4), Clinton 4 (+4)
          South Dakota: Trump 2 (-1), Clinton 1 (+1)
          Tennessee: Trump 7 (-4), Clinton 4 (+4)
          Texas: Trump 20 (-18), Clinton 17 (+17), Johnson 1 (+1)
          Utah: Trump 3 (-3), Clinton 2 (+2), McMullin 1 (+1)
          Vermont: Clinton 2 (-1), Trump 1 (+1)
          Virginia: Clinton 7 (-6), Trump 6 (+6)
          Washington: Clinton 6 (-6), Trump 5 (+5), Johnson 1 (+1)
          West Virginia: Trump 4 (-1), Clinton 1 (+1)
          Wisconsin: Trump 5 (-5), Clinton 5 (+5)
          Wyoming: Trump 2 (-1), Clinton 1 (+1)
          TOTAL: Clinton 266, Trump 256, Johnson 14, Stein 1, McMullin 1

          Johnson can provide a victory to either Clinton or Trump by this method.

    • Clutzy says:

      Here’s the relevant text:

      Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

      The states don’t even technically have to let their people vote on president.

    • FrankistGeorgist says:

      Ugh, nothing would make me happier and I would put money on it failing, failing, failing, failing. Constitutionally nonsensical (we’re not a democracy and not beholden to accurately reflect democratic will) and goes against the 2 party system which if you oppose you’re obviously a bad person intent on destroying the prosperity which only the one party or maybe the other can claim.

      • Clutzy says:

        Actually, a lot of the proportional representation ideas IMO entrench the idea of parties themselves which is against the ideas of the founders.

  55. Dogeared says:

    Autistic Child Meets Artificial Intelligence.

    Have you ever read a book and felt totally inspired? After reading Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari I had that awesome feeling that I had learnt some incredible insights and knowledge.

    This inspired me to write my own novel, which I would like to share. I’d love to hear any feedback, good or otherwise.

    • Dogeared says:

      Here is the summary.

      Mike believes he has found the solution to his daughter’s autism. Paula is a very special kind of personal assistant, with artificial intelligence so advanced that the designer considers it to be a lifeform.
      Humanity is obsessed with how AI might go wrong, but no one has asked what happens when things go right. Too right for some people’s comfort.
      This story explores the future possibilities of how everyday people will inevitably converge with technology that is already a reality but avoids well used clichés and confronts the genuine risks that are ahead.
      ‘Paula’ is a fast paced thriller that will leave you breathless until the final page and with a lingering number of questions beyond.

      This link leads to a download of the book in Word format from my Onedrive.

      Paula

  56. johan_larson says:

    Could the Magic players have a look at this cheap rotation-proof mono-red deck by Saffron Olive?

    I don’t understand why it’s including Mask of Immolation rather than, say, Chandra’s Embercat. Both are 1R cards, but the embercat is a 2/2, whereas the elemental the mask creates is only a 1/1. And the embercat’s ability to add mana for elemental spells (or Chandra) seems way more useful than the mask’s ability to do 1 damage especially since it requires sacking.

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      It’s a long, long time since I played magic, but I recall the sort of targetted removal MoI provides being really useful, and I believe creatures are a lot more powerful compared to spells nowadays than they were back in my day.

      Plus you’ve got four Legion Warboss in there, which look like they might synergise well with it.

    • Björn says:

      Mask of Immolation more or less says “{2}, Sacrifice a creature: Deal 1 damage to any target.”. This makes you able to sac your whole board in the endgame to push through the last points of damage. You have some token makers, so there is a lot of potential. Of course, Mask also gives you a token itself, so if your opponent removes the mask you still have the token. Then, the Mask allows you to trigger Chandra’s Spitfire, which means each creature sacrificed means 4 damage to your opponent. And it’s relevant that you get a 1/1 for Cavalcade of Calamities.

    • Tarpitz says:

      This is a Cavalcade of Calamity/Chandra’s Spitfire deck, and the Mask works much better with both than Embercat does. It’s also better with Light Up the Stage. Additionally, there’s much less value in a 2 drop mana creature when you don’t have any 4 drops.

      That said, I’m a little surprised to see Mask over a cheaper synergy card like Spear Spewer or an actual good card at the same cost, like Runaway Steam-Kin.

      Most of all, though, the Cavalcade decks are terrible and I do not recommend building or playing them. As someone who has played a lot of red decks to some reasonable success over the years, I am pretty confident that – absent some high impact printings in ELD which are yet to be spoiled – there will not be a competitively viable mono-red aggro deck in Throne of Eldraine Standard. I tentatively expect a big red/red devotion deck will exist once we get Theros: Beyond Death. For now, if you want to attack people with small red creatures that don’t rotate, I recommend Boros Feather.

  57. BBA says:

    The Atlantic recently imposed a soft paywall. Whether or not this longform piece is worth the price of a subscription, I don’t know, but it’s certainly something.

    When the Culture War Comes for the Kids by George Packer. A discussion of the brutal “meritocracy” of the New York City school system, the recent swing towards hard-left norms in the classroom, and what all of this is doing to the kids.

    • albatross11 says:

      I have the depressing sense that a large chunk of school reforms and the politics related to it is about power struggles among adults, and has little or no connection to what’s best for the kids. Sometimes, those struggles are at least about differences in opinion about what would be best for the kids, but a lot of the time, I think nobody’s really even thinking about that. The problem at hand is defeating the other side or making sure I get a cut of the available money or making sure my group gains in status relative to the other group. If that requires screwing a few million kids out of a decent education, or giving everyone lousy math educations so a whole generation of kids finds their later math classes 20% more confusing, well, you gotta break some eggs….

    • GreatColdDistance says:

      Haven’t read the piece due to the aforementioned paywall, but feel the need to express my sadness at this shift in policy. The Atlantic always seemed to represent some kind of ideal in journalism, with high quality and reputable coverage with diverse perspectives and high volumes of content all available for free online, and the reality that that model is not sustainable in the modern media market makes me sad.

      • albatross11 says:

        Figuring out how to pay for quality journalism is IMO a hard and unsolved problem. It’s easier to try to pay for shitty clickbait journalism (though I’m not sure even that is sustainable), but “Go spend a month looking into this complicated issue and write an in-depth treatment that’s a good, factually-accurate overview” is really hard to sustain in the modern world. Some of that is Google/Facebook/Etc. eating their ad revenues, but I think a bigger part is that there’s so much easier-to-reach competition for your reading time/attention. Facebook and Twitter are always available and in your pocket; even if The Atlantic is, too, it’s a much higher activation energy to read a long-form article than a snarky tweet. I find myself doing too much of this, too.

        • soreff says:

          >Figuring out how to pay for quality journalism is IMO a hard and unsolved problem.

          Agreed.

        • Viliam says:

          I think this is essentially a principal-agent problem.

          I want to know about things, and there is an amount of money I am willing to pay to someone who would research those things and explain them to me. The problem is: how can I tell whether this person gives me their best effort to find true information, or manipulates me towards their own political or commercial goals, or just tries to guess what information will sound most credible to me.

          Yeah, before I get here, I need to overcome my own weaknesses, like enjoying my bubbles, preferring sarcasm to actual engagement with the topic, et cetera. But the point is, even if I succeed to overcome this, I am still stuck. I want to buy something that I am unable to verify whether I actually got it. If I could reliably distinguish fair reporting from bullshit, I probably wouldn’t need the reporting in the first place.

      • metacelsus says:

        Blocking cookies seems to work (I’m on Firefox).

        • GearRatio says:

          Almost any incognito mode will work for almost any number-of-article type restriction for this reason.

          • eric23 says:

            Doesn’t work for many sites, including NYT and WSJ.

          • albatross11 says:

            Also, if you enable ads at Washington Post so you can read an article, they naturally serve up maximally-intrusive-and-annoying ads whose main purpose seems to be to convince you that WP’s content isn’t worth turning off your ad blocker for.

          • AG says:

            NoScript your way to victory, my dudes. While some video streaming sites have managed configurations that I can’t get around, I haven’t met a text article site that’s done it yet.

      • GearRatio says:

        @GreatColdDistance:

        I would agreed with you five years ago; since they purged the last of the right-leaning voices (besides Friedersdorf, who only leans to the right on issues of speech anymore) and got rid of the comments, I can’t really consider it to have any meaningful “diverse perspectives” anymore.

        I used to be in close contact with a relatively-higher up there, who said this to me in correspondence, and which pretty well describes my view of them:

        General ideological creep of the lame leftist millennial
        bent, but far more so, the Atlantic isn’t very open at all to dissent
        these days or a diversity of opinion/ideology — only diversity in the
        most predictable shallow ways, when it comes to “identity”. You know where I’m coming from I think.

    • johan_larson says:

      I read that article, and came away with the impression that it’s two separate articles stitched together. Part 1 is about the culture of desperate striving among those who aspire to have their kids among the wealthy or the almost wealthy, but who aren’t quite within that group themselves. If these parents were actually wealthy or very accomplished themselves, this wouldn’t be that difficult, but the writers (intellectually cultivated journalists) have to push hard to make it happen.

      Part 2 is about a distinctly left-wing turn by the NY city school system, focused on identity politics. It talks about attempts by the schools to foster race consciousness among the students (including guilt feelings among the white students) and attempts to erase boundaries between the sexes.

      I’m not quite sure how these two go together, unless it’s all part and parcel of the burdens endured by the clever and educated but not quite wealthy of the U.S. of F’ing A.

      • Nick says:

        It’s a chronological account of Packer’s experience with schools. The meritocracy stuff appears at the beginning and the end because that’s when Packer and his wife were trying to get their son into the right school. The progressive stuff was in between because that’s when their son was in school. The relationship between the two is somewhat tenuous, though, which is why the essay feels so disjointed.

      • BBA says:

        Much of the commentary I’ve seen on this piece sees the shift from the feel-good liberalism of ten years ago to the feel-bad progressivism of today as a response to the apparent failures of “meritocratic” liberalism. This isn’t made explicit in the piece, but it’s most obvious when Packer is talking about the school overwhelmingly opting out of standardized tests, led by the leftist administration and faculty. The progressive argument is that the hypercompetitiveness of college (and high school, middle school…) admissions is a way the system structurally oppresses marginalized groups.

        The problem is, for the most part progressivism isn’t overturning the system, it’s getting co-opted by it. There are only so many spots at Harvard (and Stuyvesant and Dalton…) and if they’re no longer allocated by outdated discriminatory notions of “merit” but by who is deemed most intersectionally worthy, but it’s still an unending rat race that consumes everyone’s lives from the ages of 2 to 18, is that really any better?

    • Lancelot says:

      Yet another example of Moloch’s workings.

    • BillyZoom says:

      I mostly skimmed the article, but as a father of 3 boys all in the NY public school system (one now in college), I find very little, if anything, recognizable from my experiences in what the article describes.

      My local elementary schools are considered good, so perhaps that’s the difference.

      • BBA says:

        A lot of this is localized to certain parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. New York is a big place. (I live in lower Manhattan and have no children. Nearly everyone I know with kids lives in the suburbs.)

        • BillyZoom says:

          I live in Tribeca, and have lived in Manhattan for 30 years, 20 in my current address. I’m pretty familiar with the dynamics.

    • I W​ri​te ​B​ug​s No​t O​ut​ag​es says:

      Is the definition of “meritocracy” now a competitive system you don’t like?

      Ex.: The TV show The Bachelor is such a meritocracy.

    • I can’t help but feel contempt for the author. He complains about meritocracy, and then is shocked when the schools ditch objectives measures of testing and decide that they should essentialize racial politics. He has no problem brainwashing his kids but suddenly takes a stand for critical thinking when the radicalization happens. This kid is being force-fed an ideology that hates him for who he is, and realizing this, he’s going to enter a state of nihilism, because no one teaches him an alternative and in fact, they’re being actively suppressed. Why are we letting nutjobs control our schools?

      • BillyZoom says:

        The author seems, to me, to be the kind of person who creates problems, not solves them. I don’t think we’d get along very well.

        I can make an effort-post on NYC public education if anyone is interested, but in short, how it is depicted in the article is not the norm, by any stretch. My kids’ experiences are/have been almost nothing like he describes. My kid’s all very much enjoyed/are enjoying school, and, afaik, never felt overly stressed (a bit due to workload).

        We did have to wait in line a couple hours for our youngest when registering for kindergarten. School overcrowding is an issue.

        I will say that my politics are very different than the author’s, and my neighborhood is seemingly quite different from his.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          I can make an effort-post on NYC public education if anyone is interested,

          Yes I am interested, as a contrast to the article we are discussing. And I’ve read stuff like this before, which is so alien to what I’ve seen in the Midwest. I suspect that if I lived in NYC I wouldn’t have done that with my kids, but it makes me wonder when everything I read gives the impression of hyper-competitiveness in the school system.

          Actually I don’t feel the need for a lot of effort on your part, just an essay on your general impressions.

        • johan_larson says:

          I can make an effort-post on NYC public education if anyone is interested, …

          Please do.

    • ECD says:

      Okay, I’ve made it through eight paragraphs. I’m willing to believe that people actually do interviews for 2 year olds at private pre-schools. But holy fuck I think that entire structure is super bizarre and seems crackers to me.

      • ECD says:

        Replying to myself, as a note for potential future conversation:

        Registration was still two hours off, and places would be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.

        This strikes me as potentially relevant to the virtue signalling conversation down-thread, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.

        • johan_larson says:

          I’m not sure it’s about virtue signalling. It seems to me it speaks more to just how badly these parents want to get their kids into their preferred schools. It’s about desperation, or something close to it, not about trying to impress the neighbors.

          • Anyone who believes that the preschool your child goes to when they are two actually matters is out of touch with reality. I’m sure the parents are sincere but it really is some kind of collective insanity.

          • johan_larson says:

            The thinking seem to be that you need to get into the right preschool to get into the right grade school to get into the right college to get into the right job to get into the upper-middle class. If you don’t get into and stay in the pipeline, welcome to State U and the middle-middle, I guess.

            It all seems a bit exaggerated. I’d hope I would be able to resist getting pulled into the college prep panic if I were raising kids. But I might not.

          • brad says:

            Those parents are not just annoying and hypocritical they are also optimizing for a dead world. It’s just not necessary to go the right schools anymore. That’s one more aspect of WASP culture that’s no longer in play. I mean, sure, it’s probably not going to hurt that you went to Avenues or Dalton and then Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, but there’s almost no paths left where it is necessary and those few that are left are prestigious but not especially lucrative.

          • eric23 says:

            Investment banking and corporate law are still like that. Consulting too, I believe. Basically all the highest-paying jobs one can get in one’s 20s.

          • brad says:

            I know people in each of those fields and that’s not true. One can enter IB directly from undergrad, but there’s another shot after an MBA. Management consulting and law both require a grad degree. In all three cases, once you have a grad degree your undergraduate alma mater is a minor factor and your high school a non-factor.

            In terms of graduate admissions to law or business school, it is nothing like an ironclad requirement that you attended Dalton and Harvard to get into Yale Law. On the contrary, all other things being equal they’d rather you didn’t.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            Everyone is looking at jobs. What about friend networks and mate finding?

            Yuppie parents presumably want friends and mates for their child who will, on average, at least not relatively cost those children, but will give as much as they take.

          • albatross11 says:

            Not many people meet their mates in preschool, nor even in high school.

          • John Schilling says:

            Not many people meet their mates in preschool, nor even in high school.

            Again, the theory and far too common belief is that if your kid doesn’t get into Elite Preppie Kindergarten, they’ll never make it to Harvard or Yale. And will therefore wind up married to and otherwise hanging out with the sort of complete reject losers who go to State.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m tempted to say that the people who believe getting into Harvard or Yale necessitates a seat in an elite preppie kindergarten deserve whatever they get.

          • brad says:

            Again, the theory and far too common belief is that if your kid doesn’t get into Elite Preppie Kindergarten, they’ll never make it to Harvard or Yale. And will therefore wind up married to and otherwise hanging out with the sort of complete reject losers who go to State.

            Except that in these circles no one goes to State. If the kids don’t get into Harvard or Yale, they’ll go to Brown or Penn. If they don’t get in there either they’ll go to Middlebury or Wesleyan. So on and so forth all the way down to Wesley.

            Oddly enough some kids do go to out-of-state State and form privileged expat cliques there. No idea why.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      The whole thing is interesting, but in particular I was surprised by his kids crying at Trump’s election. I’m pretty sure I was basically unaware of politics at that age. Even a couple of years later when I got into politics on a theoretical level (did anyone else here play NationStates?) I wasn’t very up-to-date on current affairs, and my impression is that most of my peers were the same. So either I was in a bubble, the author of the piece is atypical, things have changed a lot in the last decade, or it’s different across the Atlantic.

      • Nick says:

        That concerned me, too. I was allayed (which is not to say my concern was gone) he soon said they would tone down the politics around the kids. Not that that would happen in school….

        (And yes, I played NationStates. I made a Catholic theocracy, but the social teaching crashed my economy.)

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        DItto with me, but I was born in 78 and raised in a Republican-leaning household, so it’s not like my parents were wailing and teeth-gnashing about the current president and congress during my formative years.

      • Tarpitz says:

        I was aware of the Conservative leadership contest in 1990, when I was 7, but I wasn’t particularly emotionally invested in any of the candidates (even though Douglas Hurd was my father’s cousin’s father-in-law). I thought Major was a bit boring, but it affected my life not at all. By the time Black Wednesday came around two years later, I was inclined to think a free-floating currency was a good idea, but I certainly wouldn’t have been in tears if we’d stayed in the ERM. I was more emotionally affected by the threat of extinction of various charismatic animals, but I didn’t see that as a political question, or really one that had much bearing on the society around me.

        As for whether there is a real change in society here, I’m not sure. I certainly have one friend whose young sons are very invested in left wing politics, but then she and her husband are theatre professionals considering a career change to be full time climate activists, and I bet her own hippy mother took her on every protest going when she was small too. My half-brothers (11 and 9) show scant interest in politics that I’m aware of, but they’re privately educated upper middle class kids from rural Oxfordshire with conservative parents. They might casually boo or mock Jeremy Corbyn, but he’s not a major presence in their lives, and I can’t imagine them weeping at a Labour government (even though it might in fact affect them quite a lot – I believe my father would seriously consider moving out of the country should it come to pass). Other children I know are still too young for the discussion to be relevant. I do wonder if perhaps it’s more a change in visibility (through social media) of still comparatively rare politically engaged children than a dramatic rise in incidence.

  58. Ceofy says:

    Does anyone have any recommendations for resources for starting meditating?

    I’m wondering whether achieving meditative flow like the kind described by Qualia Research Institute can help bring about the kind of annealing described by Scott in the most recent SSC journal club.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      The Mind Illuminated is good.

      • Viliam says:

        Seconding The Mind Illuminated.

        You might also want to read Don’t Shoot the Dog — it is not about meditation, but about conditioning, which plays a big role at meditation training and helps to understand the reasons behind the recommendations how to meditate. (For example, why you should never punish yourself for failing at meditation: you are trying to reduce the failure, but actually you are reducing meditation as a whole, and also reducing noticing the mistake, which is a complete opposite of what you are trying to achieve.)

    • broblawsky says:

      I just started using Headspace. That was enough for a beginner.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      I’m probably wrong here, but it’s the kind of thing where people might do while being embarrassed to admit so I’ll put it out here. I just sit, without any system.

      I started originally with soto zen (which is mainly about sitting, but also some other stuff), but past couple of years I just get a pillow, sit crosslegged in front of a wall, and play with my mind for 10-20 minutes. I discovered quite a lot of stuff this way. First, there are (at least) two completely different ways you can use sitting. Meditation vs contemplation, I think they’re called. First is just exercise for the mind – probably why it’s often called “practice”. Second is… well, can be quite a lot of things. I use as a sortof “debug mode” for the mind, or defragment, or get closer to the subconscious. It sounds lofty, but it’s actually quite simple. For example I might sit and decide to take a critical look at my life. So for a couple of minutes I let my mind think of lost opportunities and mistakes – things I usually repress. It’s a very useful life skill to have – I’ve found quite a few low hanging fruits this way.

      I often do both in the same session. I don’t follow a pattern, I just do what seems right – if I feel like the train of thought is getting out of control, I may just breath for a few minutes. If there’s stuff lurking in my mind I let it play.

  59. GhostUser says:

    lately i’ve been sick and stuck at home with nothing else to do, so i’ve been spending even more time online than usual, which means being exposed to toxic internet politics even more than usual. feeling awfully misanthropic and nihilistic lately. spent so much time reading online articles about politics and writing long political posts on facebook, and it’s just making me so frustrated.

    i remember hearing about some trans woman up in canada who’s been creeping on little girls in bathrooms and filing a bunch of obviously bad faith discrimination lawsuits. fuck her for living up to all the worst stereotypes about queer people, for giving the conservatives more ammo, for making lgbt people and social progressives in general all look bad by association. but more than that, fuck all the right-wing news sites and blogs and commenters who are using this as an excuse to attack queer people in general, who unfailingly misgender her and center their criticisms around the fact that she’s a man pretending to be a woman, even though shes obviously not, you fucking troglodyte reprobates. they’re even worse than she is, and they’ve made it impossible for non-transphobes to criticize her, because any criticism is going to seem like it’s endorsing their shitty backwards transphobic narrative.

    for that matter, fuck all the dumbass queer commies who treat communism as an essential part of their identity as queer people, as if the two are fundamentally linked. way to reinforce the conservative notion that queers are all hardcore anti-capitalist cultural marxist sjws with awful ultra-radical far-left politics. seeing all the pro-communist and anti-capitalist memes on queer subreddits makes me cringe, especially because everyone there acts like it’s so natural and obvious that all those goddamn queers would be communists. there’s are anti-communist queer subreddits, but i have a sinking feeling that it’s all edgelords and hardcore anti-sjws and far-rightists like milo fuckoffolis and blaire whitesupremacist who go way too far in the other direction.

    it’s all just so damn infuriating. each side encouraging each other’s worst excesses, driving the other to worse atrocities. publicly i talk about how we need to work within the system for change and how direct action won’t work, because intellectually i know that’s true, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t care and just wants to burn it all down anyway. the racists, xenophobes, misogynists, misandrists, homophobes, transphobes, the jews and the christians and the muslim fundamentalists, the alt-right and the ctrl-left, the pseudo-libertarian right-wingers who think anti-discrimination laws are authoritarian but cheer on police brutality and forced deportations, the pseudo-libertarian left-wingers who criticize Bush for being mildly homophobic but defend communist dictators who literally threw queer people into forced labor camps. i used to be the libertarian but half of them are social conservatives who just want the freedom to be disgusting bigot pricks, half of them are free market idealists every bit as brainwashed by their utopians ideals as the marxists, and the last half are left-wing antifa ancom nutjobs who want to replace capitalism with some fantasy gift economy bullshit. all three halves are high on their own supply and happy to march us down into hell or off into oblivion for their cause.

    so fuck em all, the goddamn hypocrites all around. burn it all to the ground and start over. begin again. that’s what the radical right and the commies and the anarkiddies all want, right? burn it down and start over, but they don’t go far enough. they think there’s room for them in the new world, but the very flaws of our society are present within them. they’re corrupted, along with whatever ideologies they claim to espouse. we need true void to cleanse this world, a true burning away of everything that came before.

    but deeper than that, maybe our programming is just bad. maybe we don’t deserve a better world and wouldn’t be happy with it anyway. irrational, tribalistic, perpetually unsatisfied and ungrateful. maybe people would always find reasons to complain and reasons to hate, because we’re not wired to be satisfied for any extended length of time. i always hear the cultural right and the economic left talking about how modern society has stripped away tradition and value and meaning from our lives and replaced it with the empty void of atomistic individualism and shallow consumerism, but if that’s the price of living in the most prosperous society in human history, that’s a deal i’ll gladly take. sure beats having an infant mortality rate of one in three.

    except most people won’t take that deal, because most people aren’t nietzschean supermen or randian individualists who are content to make their own purpose in life. they want to feel like they have intrinsic value and their lives have meaning, and if their society isn’t offering that to them, they’re going to rebel against it. and sometimes that rebellion takes the form of political extremism, or bigotry and scapegoating, or mass shootings and terrorism, or some horrible combination of all of the above, and it threatens to bring the whole damn system down. maybe J was right and the only real solution is just to keep everyone drugged all the time, brave new world style.

    hell, if we’re being honest, i’m not content with living in this atomistic void either, my own lack of purpose and meaning bothers me all the time. there are days when i feel like a walking ghost, a hollow empty shell of a person, little more than a pair of eyes and hands behind a computer screen drifting idly through information space. sometimes it gets really hard to care about anything at all. but i’m a depressed, obsessive, neurotic, socially anxious, internet-addicted, generally fucked up person with few friends and no hobbies, i shouldn’t be the standard for our species. other people should be better than me. they need to be better than me for any attempt at improving society to work.

    or maybe it’s just culture that’s the problem. countless maladaptive behaviors built up like layers of sediment in the collective unconscious, the vestigal remants of a thousand dead societies. but even then, what can be done? sometimes, idly, i find myself wishing for a great reset, for all memory of the past to be wiped away. for humanity to be free from all the constraints of its history, from all rules and laws and values that developed to ensure survival in times of scarcity and savagery, so that we can finally develop new values better suited to life in a post-industrial society.

    but there’s no real way to do that. even if you had the next generation raised by machines and prevented them from having any contact with their forebears, those machines would’ve been programmed by someone, and they would inevitably pass down all the values and assumptions of their programmers. and if our flaws are more than just cultural, if they’re even partially hardwired, then it wouldn’t matter regardless, and we’d quickly find ourselves falling right back into our old habits.

    sometimes i envy M’s ability to be okay with things, to say yeah, we’re dumb animals and we’ll never be perfect and there’ll probably always be some amount of injustice and suffering in the world, but that’s alright. she doesn’t have the same perfectionist drive i have, not on a personal level and not in her view of the world as a whole. she doesn’t see the world as a problem to be solved or a mistake to be fixed. she doesn’t idolize or romanticize the world’s flaws like the brutalists and reactionaries do, she’s a tender person and she doesn’t think harshness is good, she just sees the world as something that simply is, warts and all. i don’t get it, i’ve never really gotten it and i don’t know if i ever will, but it seems to bring her a certain contentment.

    or maybe i’ve just been reading too much samzdat, combined with too many trash comments from asshole political extremists on facebook and slatestarcodex and 4chan and reason, combined with a generally depressive mindset from being alone and indoors and sick and tired for so long. it’s becoming hard to see the world as anything other than prisoner’s dilemmas and molochian incentive traps and races to the bottom and sharpening contradictions and toxoplasmosa of rage. more and more, it seems like that’s all human civilization is.

    • BBA says:

      Come sit next to me.

      • GhostUser says:

        yeah. sounds comfy bro.

        but tbh i’m prolly just gonna go back to debating with edgelords and stormfronters on pol until i pass out again

        half expecting this to get deleted anyway, it ain’t nice and i’m not sure if its true or necessary to anyone but me, but i’m glad at least one person heard me calling out into the void

        • BBA says:

          I agree with almost every word you wrote. I’ve had a number of descents into the void myself recently, including one big-ass deleted thread here. Godspeed, dood.

    • mnov says:

      (note: only read first 4 paragraphs, so if there’s a reversal somewhere ignore this)

      fuck her for living up to all the worst stereotypes about queer people, for giving the conservatives more ammo, for making lgbt people and social progressives in general all look bad by association. but more than that, fuck all the right-wing news sites and blogs and commenters who are using this as an excuse to attack queer people in general, who unfailingly misgender her and center their criticisms around the fact that she’s a man pretending to be a woman, even though shes obviously not, you fucking troglodyte reprobates. they’re even worse than she is,

      Are they, though? Whatsherface is going out into the world and actively ruining people’s lives, while the culturewar baiters are writing culture war garbage for people who don’t have anything better to do. Crucially, I think if the canadian trans troll wasn’t frivolously suing those skin care places, then they would not be sued, whereas if e.g. the daily caller weren’t publishing 100 articles a day of culture war garbage then some other publication would (c.f. the singularity of that canadian woman vs how many different online publications publish culture war garbage).

      and they’ve made it impossible for non-transphobes to criticize her, because any criticism is going to seem like it’s endorsing their shitty backwards transphobic narrative.

      Only by the bad faith rules of online debate, though, right? “Can’t say X because it ‘is going to seem like’ you believe y” is a concern iff you’re writing for a hostile audience.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      i always hear the cultural right and the economic left talking about how modern society has stripped away tradition and value and meaning from our lives and replaced it with the empty void of atomistic individualism and shallow consumerism, but if that’s the price of living in the most prosperous society in human history, that’s a deal i’ll gladly take. sure beats having an infant mortality rate of one in three.

      Sounds like a false dichotomy.

      hell, if we’re being honest, i’m not content with living in this atomistic void either, my own lack of purpose and meaning bothers me all the time. there are days when i feel like a walking ghost, a hollow empty shell of a person, little more than a pair of eyes and hands behind a computer screen drifting idly through information space. sometimes it gets really hard to care about anything at all. but i’m a depressed, obsessive, neurotic, socially anxious, internet-addicted, generally fucked up person with few friends and no hobbies, i shouldn’t be the standard for our species.

      With all due respect, maybe you should consider cleaning your room before raging against the world and thinking of re-engineering civilization.

      other people should be better than me. they need to be better than me for any attempt at improving society to work.

      And these “better”, more functional people, value culture, community and tradition. You should infer something from this.

      or maybe it’s just culture that’s the problem. countless maladaptive behaviors built up like layers of sediment in the collective unconscious, the vestigal remants of a thousand dead societies. but even then, what can be done? sometimes, idly, i find myself wishing for a great reset, for all memory of the past to be wiped away. for humanity to be free from all the constraints of its history, from all rules and laws and values that developed to ensure survival in times of scarcity and savagery, so that we can finally develop new values better suited to life in a post-industrial society.

      To live as depressed, obsessive, neurotic, socially anxious, internet-addicted, generally fucked up people, with hardly any family relationships, true friendships, or sense of cultural heritage, always on the move to live and work anywhere in the world because they belong nowhere, replaceable and disposeable cogs in the machine whose only purpose is to produce and consume? Thanks, but no thanks.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        “Clean your room” is probably the best advice. Not necessarily taken literally, but metaphorically, in the sense that you need to build out your life. Understandably, you are sick and stuck at home, but online debate isn’t the best use of your time. OTOH, it looks attractive when this is true:

        but i’m a depressed, obsessive, neurotic, socially anxious, internet-addicted, generally fucked up person with few friends and no hobbies,

        You’re better off finding some friends and trying to build something of a life than arguing on the internet. It’s tough to do when you’re stuck at home, but good lord, arguing with people online over stupid stuff isn’t going to make you feel better about anything. There’s gotta be someone playing some D&D or watching some football that you can hang out with on any given Sunday.

      • GhostUser says:

        its not a false dichotomy bc the structure of hitech capital society leads to the lifestyles youre complaining about so the only way to have a hitech capital society with trad culture is to strictly enforce it thru law or peer pressure and that cure is worse than disease

        and most successful ppl arent trads, i dont think Bill ot Jeff or Elon value traditional culture, maybe Mitt does but hes the exception, and the successful ppl i know are all middle class white collar professionals who dont value those things either, theyre not setting down and having five kids and staying in Same Town, theyre happy to move around and stay childless and put their careers first

        problem isnt with the system its with the humans for having bad values and bad programming

        • viVI_IViv says:

          and most successful ppl arent trads, i dont think Bill ot Jeff or Elon value traditional culture, maybe Mitt does but hes the exception, and the successful ppl i know are all middle class white collar professionals who dont value those things either, theyre not setting down and having five kids and staying in Same Town, theyre happy to move around and stay childless and put their careers first

          Bill Gates has 3 children, Jeff Bezos 4 and Elon Musk 5. I don’t know who Mitt is supposed to be. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos look pretty traditional in their lifestyle choices, Elon Musk not so much, but then flamboyant womanizer aristocrats didn’t exactly appear with modern hi-tech society.

          In any case, if these are your role models, then you are mistaken. These are elites. The role that the void atomistic consumeristic society is trying to force you into is not that of an elite, in fact, the fraction of the elites is shrinking.

          The role for peons like you and me is that of a wage slave. Somebody who owns nothing and rents everything while ownership gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
          Somebody whose only worth is defined by the commodified, impersonal work they do for some corporation and the shallow entertainment and perishable consumer goods that they buy. Somebody who as soon as they raise their head and start making any trouble can be cancelled from the economy and the public square with a click of a mouse.

          It’s similar to a medieval serf, except that medieval serfs at least usually had community, religious values and families with many children, while you don’t. But you’re free to identify as any of the 42 genders and the 108 sexual orientations they invented last week, so more power to you.

          And don’t fool yourself thinking that just because you sit in a cubicle all day coding javascript you are much closer to Gates or Musk than the illegal immigrant who cleans your toilet or picks your tomatoes. Sooner rather than later you will find yourself competing for your job with a disenfranchised immigrant if not a machine.

          problem isnt with the system its with the humans for having bad values and bad programming

          If you think humans should serve the system rather than the system should serve humans then your priorities are backwards. I’d rather not be a drone in service of some queen bee elite.

    • brad says:

      or maybe i’ve just been reading too much samzdat, combined with too many trash comments from asshole political extremists on facebook and slatestarcodex and 4chan and reason, combined with a generally depressive mindset from being alone and indoors and sick and tired for so long.

      This right here. Go for a walk outside, read a novel, call a friend to reminisce about the glory days, learn a new recipe, send messages to people on dating apps, watch a football game (either), do some leetcode problems–aside from maybe smoking meth or shooting up heroin there’s almost nothing worse you can be doing for your mindset than what you are doing.

      And your misery is not getting you or us anything! If you were sacrificing your sanguinity to get to a better world, that would be one thing, but can you honestly say that what you are doing is an effective means of doing so?

      • BBA says:

        I do some of that stuff, and then when I get home the despair always comes back. I’d like to adopt a healthy mindset like “life is meaningless, enjoy every sandwich” but my brain just won’t do it.

        • brad says:

          Me too, sometimes. There’s a reason Scott just warned me for the fourth time. But isn’t it better to be mired despair and anger for four hours a week than for twenty?

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          Our minds are made to try to model and predict the future. This comes through in things such as figuring out whether that shadow in the grass is a predator, on what series of steps to take to build the finished house we want, on what lessons our children need to develop.

          Thanks to this we can come up with ideas such as Plato’s ideal forms and creator Gods.

          Though there is no rational reason to believe that such ideal forms, such Gods, an afterlife, or any extrinsic (or even intrinsic) meaning exists; We can still see these ideas as possible models and predicitions – things to work toward. And though its doubtful that the cosmological physics of the universe will allow any of these ideas full fruition (just as we can imaging levitating, but can’t do it sans a powerful external magnetic field), isn’t it worthwhile doing our little parts in working toward them? Magnetic levitation and levitation through strong air currents and a body suit are still pretty cool.

          • BBA says:

            No, um, I meant to emphasize the sandwich part, that’s the important part of it. I like sandwiches. (And Warren Zevon.)

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            that’s the important part of it

            Everything counts in large amounts, BBA, not just the sandwiches.

        • viVI_IViv says:

          I do some of that stuff, and then when I get home the despair always comes back.

          Having your home inhabited by a dog, a spouse or children might help.

          I know that especially the last two items don’t translate to easily actionable advice, but it still makes sense to notice that despair is often contingent on specific life situations rather than existential nihilism.

      • GhostUser says:

        first i went to stormfront and those places bc curiosity, i just want to see what motives these ppl and makes them tic, then i stayed bc i realized this represents the true face of Man and to turn away would be to reject Truth of human nature and hide in illusion world

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          Every person is a single instance of the true face of Man. This includes the saints, the serial killers, and everyone else.

          Since you seem to have cordoned yourself off in a stormfront and /pol monastery, I’d give you the same advice given to certain seekers of enlightenment: Go into the world and be part of it.

          https://aeon.co/essays/enlightenment-does-not-demand-disenchantment-with-the-world

          Humans, who see nature as outside of ourselves, are presented with a choice: either we can elect to submit to a mysterious, mythological world full of magic and frighteningly capricious spirits; or we can elect to subdue nature. By choosing the second option and turning nature into an object to control, humanity was caught in its own trap. Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. Rather than being liberated into a new kind of autonomy as they had hoped, people were instead turned into objects or, more properly, into abstractions, mere numbers and statistics, leading to a new backlash of irrational forces.

          (I’ve only just started reading this article)

        • ECD says:

          realized this represents the true face of Man and to turn away would be to reject Truth of human nature and hide in illusion world

          It represents a true face of Man. There are as many true faces of man as there are men. Look elsewhere then clusters of assholes if you wish to see things other than clusters of assholes.

        • A Definite Beta Guy says:

          Stormfront does not represent the true face of Man. It’s an online community that’s a small portion of people.
          The actual true face of man is network TV. The Bachelor, America Ninja Warrior, Big Bang Theory, Monday Night Football.

        • albatross11 says:

          There’s one stormfront and thousands of churches, synogogues, and mosques. Why is stormfront more the face of man than my Catholic parish?

    • The Nybbler says:

      Have you considered that some (though certainly not all) of those attacking Yaniv are in fact not your enemies? That “misgendering” Yaniv is not some attack on transgender or queer people, but denying Yaniv’s status as such, specifically? Why not reject Yaniv? I admit that doing so means you must accept some gatekeeping of trans identity, and I understand that is considered undesirable… but the alternative of not-gatekeeping means you must accept Yaniv and that guy who claimed to be female for his car insurance and every male prisoner cynically trying to get into a women’s prison… it’s just not tenable.

      • ECD says:

        Not the original poster, but though I have my issues with current trans politics, I’d actually disagree with this.

        It’s fine for Yaniv to be a transwoman. Transwomen and women can be assholes, or criminals, or rapists. It doesn’t vitiate their other status.

        … but the alternative of not-gatekeeping means you must accept Yaniv and that guy who claimed to be female for his car insurance and every male prisoner cynically trying to get into a women’s prison… it’s just not tenable.

        I disagree. Car insurance is an interesting example (but see: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2017/jan/14/eu-gender-ruling-car-insurance-inequality-worse), but I’m going to focus on prisons, because the problem is not that men might pretend to be transwomen to get better treatment, ETA: or access to potential targets, it’s the appalling conditions and total lack of concern for safety of prisoners which is the problem.

        • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

          If you look at Yaniv’s Twitter it has a strong troll aura, not in the sense of trolling the salons but rather political provocation (first getting lulz by doing things to outrage right-wingers and then from persuading left-wingers to defend them). This is particularly compelling evidence for this theory, also see the “PhD from socialjustice.university” (also looks like a troll) and retweeted endorsements from these obvious trolls/sockpuppets.

          • ECD says:

            I’m certainly willing to believe Yaniv is a troll, based on the limited knowledge I have. But it just seems entirely possible that Yaniv is a transwoman and a troll.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            Yes, it’s possible and if that is the case we should recognise it while also not drawing any silly conclusions about trans people in general. But I think the trolling makes it significantly more likely that the claim of being trans is false. And if that’s the case it should also be recognised, otherwise you’re letting yourself be played by Yaniv.

            There’s also a possibility that it genuinely is arguable whether Yaniv is trans or not. But I’m pretty sure this venue could not handle the subtleties a discussion about that would involve.

          • ECD says:

            And if that’s the case it should also be recognised, otherwise you’re letting yourself be played by Yaniv.

            I mean, sure. That’s a risk I’m perfectly willing to accept. I prefer to accept the risk of being played (in this instance, at least, where the cost is…I don’t know, Yaniv gets to go ‘Yay I fooled him!’) rather than accidentally insult someone.

          • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

            But the cost isn’t just that you look silly, it’s that bad actors like Yaniv can encourage transphobia with these kinds of “false flag” attacks. I don’t think this is a huge problem, but I don’t think misgendering is either (in this context, where the victim is a troll who is plausibly lying about their gender).

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            Yaniv-like person feels bad because they were misgendered their whole life. Yaniv-like person lashes out in a trollish manner. Yaniv-like person is denied their chosen gender due to trollish behavior. Repeat?

          • ECD says:

            But the cost isn’t just that you look silly, it’s that bad actors like Yaniv can encourage transphobia with these kinds of “false flag” attacks. I don’t think this is a huge problem, but I don’t think misgendering is either (in this context, where the victim is a troll who is plausibly lying about their gender).

            I think anonymousskimmer addresses one issue with this. Another would be I am unconvinced people like Yaniv encourage discrimination, so much as provide examples, which, given the size of the human population, someone is definitely going to do.

            My broader disagreement however is that I’m not asking what should society do (as I have no particular control over that), but rather what should I do. And I’d rather run the risk of looking silly rather than accidentally insult someone.

          • albatross11 says:

            There’s a whole thread of argument w.r.t. trans issues that says “if you let people define what gender they are and we all have to accept it, bad men will take advantage of this to get into womens’ restrooms/locker rooms/etc. for evil purposes. ISTM that the problem you’re running into here is that Yaniv is accused of doing just that–of basically using everyone’s politeness and sensitivity to trans issues to get away with evil behavior.

            But it seems like the right way to handle that has to be to work through the bad behavior and how to address it. Unless trans rights are unlike every other set of rules/laws/customs in human history, there will, in fact, be bad actors who exploit those rules/laws/customs to get away with bad things. There will be creeps who use the trans bathroom access law to get away with lurking in the womens’ room and hassling attractive young women there. There will be jerks who demand to be treated as a woman so they can crash some women-only space and make everyone uncomfortable and unhappy.

            There’s an easy rhetorical solution to when people bring these problems up–you can accuse them of transphobia and try to shout them down. But the problems remain, and need to be addressed. We need to work out how to accomodate transpeople (who honestly have gotten a hell of a lot of kicking around over the years) while minimizing the ability of bad actors to exploit those rules to hurt people.

    • ECD says:

      or maybe i’ve just been reading too much samzdat, combined with too many trash comments from asshole political extremists on facebook and slatestarcodex and 4chan and reason, combined with a generally depressive mindset from being alone and indoors and sick and tired for so long. it’s becoming hard to see the world as anything other than prisoner’s dilemmas and molochian incentive traps and races to the bottom and sharpening contradictions and toxoplasmosa of rage. more and more, it seems like that’s all human civilization is.

      Then maybe do something else? Maybe have a meal with people you actually like, maybe even with a ‘no politics’ caveat? If you don’t want to interact in person, I quite enjoy D&D online using Roll20. If you don’t want to interact with people at all, I’m enjoying Fire Emblem, Three Houses. The world’s full of options, why pick the one which makes you sad?

      ETA: ninja’d by Brad…

    • The Nybbler says:

      Laugh all you want, but if one’s soul is screaming due to politics, changing the politics is at least an alternative to be considered.

      • BBA says:

        I can’t speak for GU, but my soul would keep screaming no matter what my politics were.

        • Randy M says:

          I can’t speak for GU, but my soul would keep screaming no matter what my politics were.

          I’ve never been particularly tempted to proselytize here before, but with apologies for local norms and respect to the day, let me suggest the solution to your problems are indeed not political.

        • Nick says:

          And since the problems aren’t political, the political replies above are unhelpful. The make friends and do things advice, though, is.

      • Trofim_Lysenko says:

        In the sense of moderating one’s views, maaaaybe slightly.

        That said, if you think that feelings of anger, despair, outrage, anxiety, and helplessness fostered by a diet of facebook memes/posts/news articles, clickbait, and extremist and/or dumb comments on the internet is merely a function of being on the wrong side of the red/blue or left/right divide in the US, you are incorrect. I can point to examples of individuals on both sides of the divide suffering from the same issues, and the worst of the lot is a good friend who is about as far from progressive politics as it’s possible to get.

      • Jack says:

        I hate to see good irony go to waste. It’s not funny because I do not think politics can have something to do with depression (though I would echo the above qualifications), it’s that the respondents apparently think starting an internet politics conversation will help cure a person of their internet politics conversation funk. People responding to GhostUser’s post by arguing about GU’s political orientation aren’t changing GU’s politics, they’re replicating the dynamic GU was describing.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I empathize. Lots of shit going on, and a system that’s optimized for bringing the worst of it to our attention.

      Remember, though, that “dog bites man” is not news. Of all the trans folk in Canada, that creep using her trans status as an excuse for abuse is the one who gets the press, not the ones that are quietly living their lives, in between helping little old ladies.

      That doesn’t mean I don’t worry, or despair about human nature. But if I actually engage my rational system, I can see the selection bias.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      There was a very positive change in my life lately. A small thing, that ended up significantly improving my life. Can you guess what it is? Yep, gave up social media. It’s been a process, to be perfectly honest – started with a Cold Turkey reddit detox a year ago (that’s a pun, because I used a software called Cold Turkey. good stuff). Than facebook+instagram last month.

      I’m not going to say that it solved all my problems and made me instantly happy, because it didn’t. But I have a lot more time, and I’m somehow more myself than when I had to check my phone every 3 minutes.

      A strange side-effect – I had restarted meditating and was finding it very helpful. Now – I don’t feel the need at all.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        BTW, what IS social media? Somehow I always thought SSC was social media, Radu implies that is not so, since he still posts here.

        I guess I think of all Internet posting as social media. Is there some narrower definition?

        • Nick says:

          I’d say there’s a difference between social networks and smaller sites like blogs. I think Radu means the former.

        • Trofim_Lysenko says:

          I’ve always understood the term to mean sites/platforms/services that operate by linking together previously separate social networks (professional, personal, hobby-related) with one another via the internet. They’re arguably an *evolution* of blogs, or more likely forums, but are different in that individual blogs and forums aren’t all interconnected and unified under a single hierarchy. So:

          SSC (and by extension other non-networked blogs): No

          Twitter: Yes, the second most central example.

          LinkedIn: Yes(? less confident of this one)

          Facebook: Yes, the most central example.

          Instagram: Yes

          Tumblr: Yes

          Reddit: Uncertain. My impression is that sub-reddits can be very insulated from one another in a way that makes the toxoplasma amplification you see on Twitter/FB less likely. I tend to view Reddit as 21st Century Usenet.

          • AG says:

            Tumblr is weird.

            I’d say that the dashboard view, which brings you notes and replies and an inbox and a stream of content from multiple sources, is social media. However, individual Tumblrs are blogs, and are not social media.

            I strongly limit the amount of social media toxoplasma I get from Tumblr by visiting blogs directly, instead of subscribing to them. More than that, I often go straight to their archive page and only read posts relevant to my interests, and so only see limited thumbnails of inflammatory stuff I can then avoid.
            So not only do I not spend much time on my dashboard, 90+% of my dashboard content is my own original posts anyways.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          *shrug* technically, yes, it’s social 🙂 But since it’s one of those new words that doesn’t have a well established definition yet, I’m comfortable with using it here. If you’d find a “pick the odd one out” exercise with ssc, facebook, instagram, reddit, you’d probably pick ssc without much thought even if you can’t instantly say why.
          Trofim_lysenko also has a point, except I suspect relatively few people manage to use just a subreddit.

    • Trofim_Lysenko says:

      maybe i’ve just been reading too much samzdat, combined with too many trash comments from asshole political extremists on facebook and slatestarcodex and 4chan and reason, combined with a generally depressive mindset from being alone and indoors and sick and tired for so long.

      This. Ghost, remember that when you’re dealing with issues like depression or anxiety, they distort your perception of input, and your emotional responses. Bad feelings get amplified. Good feelings get muted. You tend to overestimate the chances of negative events and outcomes and underestimate the chances of good ones.

      Outrage-porn/clickbait material and the comments that a diet of that content produces are pretty much designed specifically to invoke feelings of anger, sadness, and anxiety because it drives views and garners attention, and that means they are pretty much the worst thing for you to be looking at in terms of your own mental and emotional health. It’s the psychological equivalent of a Type-1 Diabetic slamming down high-sugar soda and candy, except to extend the metaphor there’s no insulin to force your emotional response back to an even keel. Instead, you have to change your “diet”.

      That means in your case following one of the classic heuristics of the internet: “Do Not Read The Comments”. If you can’t follow that rule, then the next step is not allowing yourself to go to the sites with comment threads you know are going to depress and anger you. In fact, you should be working on cutting down your intake of the sites with articles that have the same effect, and that very much includes Facebook. Personally, I made a choice not to have a FB account some years ago so I am not familiar with all the moderation/filtering tools, but I urge you to take steps to cut off the flow of outrage porn articles/memes/wall posts on your FB account. In extremis, that may mean unfollowing some friends/groups. Explaining to those friends the effect those memes/articles/posts are having on your emotional health should be enough for them to accept that choice, and to be honest if their response is hostile, that should lead you to re-evaluate the relationship.

      i’m a depressed, obsessive, neurotic, socially anxious, internet-addicted, generally fucked up person with few friends and no hobbies,

      My advice above is intended to help stem the flow of input that’s fucking you up, leaving you feeling angry and miserable. But that in and of itself isn’t enough, as I think you know given this bit. So the other half of the picture is addressing the various modifiers here.

      Do you have offline/RL friends with whom you can share non-political activities? It doesn’t really matter what kind: Hitting the local park for frisbee golf, camping, shooting, airsoft/paintball, book and movie discussions over food or drinks at a local hangout, seeing movies together, tabletop board-gaming or role-playing, watching sports, going to sporting events, playing sports….anything, really, as long as it is A) in-person interaction, B) primarily apolitical. I know you’ve said you’ve been sick and stuck at home, but you make it sound like this is a not a permanent state, so now’s the time to start planning for what you can do once you’re NOT housebound.

      I don’t know how old you are, or the details of your life situation, so the level of advice I can offer here is limited, but the short version is simply that the more you can take part in social activities, preferably offline, that aren’t tied into that same feed of toxic information and emotion, the easier your depression and anxiety will be to manage. Speaking as someone who struggled with depression for many years and is still in the progress of combating the morbid obesity I developed using caloric excess as therapy, I’ve found that even something as annoying as having to work a job that forces me to speak to and be social with other human beings 40-50 hours a week was helpful to break out of the sort of spirals you can get into when you sit alone by yourself in front of a computer screen 8-16 hours a day.

    • Aevylmar says:

      I can offer virtual hugs, chatting online about books or anime or video games, and even multiplayer play if you happen to share any game interests with me there. I think you sound like a nice but overstressed person, and I am also over-insulated and depressed and stressed, and in economist language I see an opportunity for mutual exchange. 🙂

      If this bothers you, or comes off as pushy, feel free to ignore it and apologies for taking up your time. But good luck feeling better. 🙂

    • Ms. Morgendorffer says:

      >>>/r9k/

      More seriously, I feel you, being in a similar place. I think I’ll just wait it out and have fun on the ride.

    • Peffern says:

      I feel an instinctual need to reach out to you. Your current depressive spiral seems to match my own to so close a degree that I’m somewhat concerned you’re someone I know in real life (actual probability of this, probably <5%).

      Specifically, as someone else similarly disgusted by the prevalence of marxism in lgbt spaces, that comment specifically clicked with me in a way that I have struggled to find.

      If you need someone to talk to, you can talk to me.

  60. Viliam says:

    Jordan Peterson says: “The poor kids that don’t get befriended at the age of 4… the literature on this is crystal clear… if your child is an outcast at the age of 4, the probability that anything can be done about that is almost zero, no matter what you do.”

    Does anyone have an idea (1) what research specifically is he referring to, and (2) how specifically is the “outcast” defined there?

    Because when I head “child outcast”, I can imagine different things — retarded kids who are incapable of interaction interesting enough for the other party; little psychopaths with low self-control who just can’t resist hurting everyone near them, so other kids learn to avoid them; or socially shy kids who avoid strangers, so no new connections get made — and likely these groups have different dynamics.

    Peterson, if I understand him correctly, believes in a social version of Matthew effect: Socially skilled people get more interactions, which gives them more opportunity to further develop their social skills; socially unskilled people get rejected, which deprives them of opportunity to develop social skills; thus the differences keep increasing. When a child achieves the level of “can find friends on the playground”, it starts the social self-improvement spiral. (And kids usually spend a lot of time on the playground.) If a child cannot pass this level, it only becomes more difficult later, because with higher age greater social skills are expected, as the child is compared against their age group.

    Now I am not denying that some form of social Matthew effect exists, but I am surprised that Peterson didn’t consider the obvious alternative explanation: that some kids have persistent issues, such as retardation or psychopathy with low self-control, and those issues make it difficult to make friends at the age of 4, just like at the older age. Mathematically speaking, that the causality is not “problem at 4 => problem at 10”, but rather “underlying problem => problem at 4” and “underlying problem => problem at 10”. I find it especially surprising because Peterson is otherwise not a believer in Blank Slate, which is famously demonstrated by the lobsters in one of the previous chapters of the same book.

    I would expect that especially the fatalistic cases where “nothing can be done about that” are more likely to have some underlying problem — there is nothing parents can do to make their retarded child non-retarded.

    On the other hand, if the child is merely socially shy, there are things you can do: arrange an environment where the social stress is lower. The social competition is most vicious when there is nothing else to do and too many competitors. When the situation becomes “about something”, some attention is redirected to that thing; for example a shy and physically healthy child could increase their chances in a sport club. I am not saying that you should keep your child away from unstructured activities forever; it’s just that if they can’t make the social quantum jump there, they can get the opportunity to practice the elementary social skills somewhere else. Also, if your child is generally shy around most kids, but has “clicked” with one or two friends, you could give them more opportunities to spend time with those friends. Like, if those friends live at the next block, you could go play to their playground instead of yours; or if they are outside only at a specific time, you could adjust your child’s schedule accordingly.

    • thisheavenlyconjugation says:

      Sounds implausible; young children of immigrants who are suddenly put in an environment where they can’t speak the language of their peers usually turn out fine.

    • viVI_IViv says:

      Now I am not denying that some form of social Matthew effect exists, but I am surprised that Peterson didn’t consider the obvious alternative explanation: that some kids have persistent issues, such as retardation or psychopathy with low self-control, and those issues make it difficult to make friends at the age of 4, just like at the older age. Mathematically speaking, that the causality is not “problem at 4 => problem at 10”, but rather “underlying problem => problem at 4” and “underlying problem => problem at 10”.

      If I understand correctly the hypothesized causal graph is:

      underlying problem -> problem at 4
      ………………………..\…………|………….
      ………………………….\……….|………….
      ……………………………_|……v………….
      …………………………….. problem at 10

      That is, the underlying problem causes the problem at 10 both directly and indirectly thorugh the problem at 4 which impaired learning of social skills. This implies that socialization problems tend to grow worse as a child ages to adulthood, which seems to be intuitively true.

    • broblawsky says:

      This sounds like a very poorly supported claim to me, especially since Peterson is not a child psychologist. There are plenty of children who have badly interrupted development at young ages – does he cite any kind of study in support of this position, or is he just pronouncing from on high? A review of social skills training in children with autism-spectrum disorders shows that social skills training is effective in children aged ~10.

    • Ketil says:

      Jordan Peterson says: “The poor kids that don’t get befriended at the age of 4… the literature on this is crystal clear… if your child is an outcast at the age of 4, the probability that anything can be done about that is almost zero, no matter what you do.”

      Like others, I’m not sure what he refers to by “outcast”, but I think many social problems are created by both the child and the environment. Which is to say, a child that is “outcast” in one school or class, may be better socially adapted if moved to another.

      On the other hand, there is something to stories of being a perpetual victim (pretty sure revictimization is common for sexual assault, but didn’t find good stats off-hand).

      I’d like to see data on this.

  61. adder says:

    I want some advice on survey design.

    I live on a commune of ~75 people, and I want to “get the pulse” on a number of hot button issues. I’m interested in things roughly like:

    Our labor tracking system? Yay or boo?
    Expanding our biggest business? Yay or boo?
    More kids in the community? Yay or boo?
    Our community is classist/racist/sexist? Yes or no?

    How should I organize/phrase the questions? I’m leaning toward things of the form “Agree or disagree: Generally speaking, our labor tracking system is good for the community.” Others have suggested more gradations, such as a 1-5 scale. I was also thinking of having a rank-these-items bit, e.g. ranking communal values (economic egalitarianism, environmentalism, social justice, et c.) against each other.

    Thoughts on best approaches for question phrasing, and general pitfalls to watch for?

    I’m also unsure about whether I want to include demographic info. It’s data I would love to have, but with such a small population it seems like there’s no way to avoid it being identifying. I’m not quite sure if anonymity is even that important, but I want to maximize participation.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      You probably should give us a bit of background of your audience. Age, education level, familiarity with forms, level of interest in this survey etc.

      Mostly I’d suggest you go with something simple, and test run the first draft on a couple of people first.

    • Erusian says:

      Mind sharing details? I’m curious about what your commune is like (all communes really).

      I’ve only known two sorts of functional communes: religious and one agricultural one. On the other hand, I presume your people don’t become weird aliens upon entering a commune and have designed public opinion surveys. I don’t like gradations. If the survey is short enough, I prefer separate questions to get fine grain data. For example:
      I think our labor tracking system is good for productivity. Yes/No
      I strongly hold the above opinion. Yes/No
      I think our labor tracking system is user-friendly. Yes/No
      I strongly hold the above opinion. Yes/No
      [etc etc]
      On the whole, I am satisfied with our labor tracking system. Yes/No
      I strongly hold the above opinion. Yes/No

      This will result in you knowing (for example) that 30% of the population is strongly satisfied with the labor tracking system and 50% weakly satisfied. And likewise, everyone who is satisfied still doesn’t think it’s user-friendly.

      As for how to phrase them, recommended methods vary. I usually make all my statements positive (ie, “Our commune is capitalist. Yes/No.” even if it’s an anti-capitalist commune because saying ‘is anti-capitalist’ or ‘is not capitalist’ are negative statements). I try to keep them short and pointed (ie, “Our commune follows our charter. Yes/No” and not “Our commune follows our charter include its commitments to socialism, racial justice, and pudding. Yes/No”). But others have different techniques. This does lead to issues where people have different interpretations of the same word. But to some extent, that’s just a subject for follow on research.

  62. anonymousskimmer says:

    I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering around Ice Age.

    Given the large number of changing dynamics since then, in terms of power how do the new cards compare to the old cards of unlimited and revised editions (and their expansions), both the typical cards and the ‘overpowered’ cards such as black lotus, time walk, or chaos orb? How do the decks compare to the old black lotus, channel, fireball combo?

    (Holy shit, I’d be a millionaire if I’d kept my old cards.)

    • johan_larson says:

      My impression is that there are fewer really overwhelmingly powerful cards around these days. Bannings seem to happen occasionally in the formats that require current cards, but not that often. Price lists bear that out: the most expensive card in the current expansion, Core Set 2020, costs less than $20.

      Also, what you can expect to get for your mana seems to have experienced a bit of power inflation. Once upon a time, an X/X creature for X mana was a decent card. Now, it needs some sort of upside to be a decent card.

      • moonfirestorm says:

        Confirming what others have said: the big thing is that creatures are far more powerful across all mana costs, and certain interactions such as counterspells have been powered down. Removal has been changed as well: it’s generally more expensive but also more broad. Compare Terror to Putrefy: if all you wanted to do was kill a creature, Terror is stronger because it’s much cheaper. But Putrefy hits black and artifact creatures, and can also hit artifacts. Or compare Wrath of God to Cleansing Nova: Nova is much more versatile, but going from 4 to 5 can matter a lot when you’re trying to keep an aggro deck from beating your face in.

        @johan

        My impression is that there are fewer really overwhelmingly powerful cards around these days.

        Yeah, the big thing is that the variance of the cards went down, because Wizards made consistent costing rules and largely followed them. So now you’ll occasionally get something that’s unexpectedly powerful, but it won’t be that far above the format baseline, whereas in the Unlimited days there just wouldn’t be anything on that level.

        Note that they still do release cards strong enough to compete with Unlimited-era stuff. The only format you can play a Black Lotus in is Vintage, and most if not all Vintage decks will contain large amounts of cards with the post-2005 new card frames.

        Price lists bear that out: the most expensive card in the current expansion, Core Set 2020, costs less than $20.

        Note that this is as much a function of scarcity as power. Core Set 2020 is still in print, which caps the cost of what cards in the set can be worth. If the average value of the cards in a pack is higher than the wholesale cost of a pack, the stores that sell singles will buy boxes and undercut their competitors, driving the costs down. The times you see a card spike when currently in print, it’s usually because the rest of the set isn’t that in-demand, so that one card drives the value of packs.

        You’ll generally have expensive cards show up a few years after a set goes out of print, when a particular card turns out to have legs in an older format like Modern or Legacy and demand goes up, but there isn’t the supply to match.

    • Randy M says:

      Based on what other people have said, I think you’d find that creatures are vastly more powerful and spells significantly less so.
      On the plus side, imo, you don’t find as many unplayable cards when drafting. A bad card will be a 3 mana 2/2, not a 4 mana 3/2 and requires you to sac two lands when you play it or something like that.
      Also, there are now sets that release cards that aren’t standard legal, intended for other formats. These are sometimes too slow for standard, let alone older formats, but other times they are stupidly strong.

      • Tarpitz says:

        This is broadly accurate, though mana dorks specifically have been powered down rather than up – Llanowar Elves is very much at the strong end of what they’d now print into Standard, and Birds of Paradise is unlikely to be reprinted. Among spells, fast mana (most of all) and countermagic have been nerfed particularly hard. Blue is no longer overwhelmingly the best colour.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      Thanks johan_larson, Randy M, and Tarpitz.