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https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10157707147219228
Eliezer posted: “I want to practice writing short stories. Tell me what you want to see. Name a price.”
” Price may be $0, $5, or something non-financial. I’m not in this for the money, but it tells me something about how much you care.”
Someone in a previous OT mentioned the 7 levels of jazz harmony video. I finally got around to watching it. I thought the song didn’t start sounding good until level 4 or 5, but I didn’t like level 7. I like selective use of semitones, but not in chords.
Nate Bucklin’s “One Chord Songs”. Keeps adding chords.
The part about nonfunctional harmony was particularly enlightening. I feel I have a better understanding now of why I hate so much jazz.
I’d be curious if there’s a correlation between, well, for lack of a better term, “music skill” and enjoyment of… that kind of music: my friends who actually play instruments tend to like or at least appreciate really horrible, discordant, or otherwise just unpleasant genres that I simply don’t find appealing at all. It’s like they stared too deeply into the abyss and now normie music doesn’t do anything for them. For me, the “7 levels of jazz harmony” video is just a descent from something that sounds totally fine into an increasingly displeasing cacophony that’s barely distinguishable from noise. I kind of assumed it sounding “bad” was the point, but if you know the theory/have some experience maybe you can appreciate it. But apparently something actually changes in your brain and it starts sounding pleasant, is that right? Or would you still not describe level 5 as “pleasant” but just “good” in a different dimension?
From anecdotal experience there’s somewhat of a correlation. Musicians tend to prefer complex music, or simple, but really well performed one, or something special/unusual.
I noticed, that for people who don’t play any instruments and don’t listen to a lot of different music it’s often hard to even follow something slightly unorthodox, they describe it as just “noise”, whether it’s actual noise, prog rock or even a fairly vanilla jazz.
Good thing is, the more you listen, the more you’ll be able to actually hear. Although it doesn’t guarantee that in the end you’ll like more complex stuff (cause tastes are subjective and variety is enormous), but you’ll be able to at least articulate why you don’t. It’ll also help with finding stuff that you do like and increase enjoyment you get from music, regardless of style.
For me, that jazz harmony video started kinda bland, then became needlessly convoluted, then at level 7 it became a bit interesting. It has a very mathy approach to music, which is good if you want to explain music theory behind certain arrangement, but not so good if you want to determine whether you’ll like less traditional jazz, cause pretty much no jazz in fact sounds like the examples provided. What there is, is generic midi piano and drums, and vocals that very annoyingly stay the same, even though “color” and “texture” of the composition changes with each example.
The best thing about jazz IMO is it’s liveliness, the way musicians channel emotions through the instruments and bounce of one another, the way rhythm pulses and shoots electricity through your body, the way live performance is a freaking journey into the unknown and unexpected, and that video just presents a dissected cadaver and shuffles it’s organs around a bit.
Yes a lot of complex or discordant music does start to sound pleasant, that’s often the whole point. For example, you might want to go listen to a certain performer specifically cause their sound is unique, even though their compositions are not that interesting/innovative. Again, that video is just a very poor example of what actual jazz sounds like.
Another magic question.
Here is a URG Elementals deck I build from a box of Core Set 2020, and a few low-end purchases. I tried it out on Standard night at the local game store, and went 1-6. I could perhaps have gone 2-5 if I had used my sideboard more intelligently. I got the feeling that the deck handles well; I didn’t note any particular hangups during play. But I suspect the deck is a bit under-powered. How can I improve it, preferably without spending a mint?
First, there is a smooth progression of Elementals from CMC 1 to 6, often with synergies:
4 Scorch Spitter
4 Creeping Trailblazer
4 Overgrowth Elemental
4 Lavakin Brawler
4 Air Elemental
4 Wakeroot Elemental
Then there are three specials:
4 Risen Reef
4 Chandra, Novice Pyromancer
4 Shock
And finally the landbase:
6 Island
9 Mountain
9 Forest
Some possible improvements, including some expensive options.
– shock lands (Breeding Pool, Steam Vents, Stomping Ground)
– Icon of Ancestry
– Nissa, Who Shakes the World
– Chandra, Awakened Inferno
– Chandra, Acolyte of Flame
– Cavalier of Thorns
– Omnath of the Roil
– Chandra’s Regulator
– Lightning Stormkin
– Living Twister (That first ability could be one heck of a finisher.)
What should I do here?
Disclaimer: haven’t played Magic since the first Zendikar set was Standard legal.
Are the Risen Reefs (kinda neat) and Air Elementals (underwhelming) really worth going to three colors? Especially the Air Elementals worry me. It’s going to take drawing around 20 cards to get see two Islands, and about 2/3 of the time, you’ll have at least one Air Elemental sitting in your hand doing nothing before that happens. Even working with the constraints of “flying blue Elementals from the core set”, Boreal Elemental seems better here (only one U). But consider getting rid of blue entirely if you’re not going add something really cool like Omnath. (Alternatively: shock lands are expensive, but Evolving Wilds is cheap.)
Other suggestions of M20 Elementals that are not expensive to buy: Chandra’s Embercat? (Helps you get literally everything else out faster.) Scampering Scorcher? (3 Elementals for the price of one: 3x the synergy with other Elementals.) Thicket Crasher? (Much like the flying blue Elemental, this helps you actually hit your opponent.)
You might also mix in some instants or sorceries other than Shock to let you interact with your opponent in ways other than attacking or blocking. But I don’t know what’s good. Maybe see what you’ve got in the box of M20, and ask yourself during the next few games you play: what’s a card you really wish you had in your hand right now?
Interesting ideas. The elementals that can produce mana are Chandra’s Embercat (1R) and Leafkin Druid(1G).
An elementals deck in RG that emphasizes mana production? Intriguing.
I suppose Leafkin Druid is almost strictly better than Chandra’s Embercat if you’re choosing between the two. (It has 0 power, but you have Chandra and Creeping Trailblazer to change that, whereas none of these give the Embercat more toughness.)
How do you feel about Sylvan Awakening?
I think Sylvan Awakening has the same problem as Unclaimed Territory, another card that would be great in my deck: it’s rotating out of standard in a couple of weeks. Damn cool card, though.
Risen Reef is nuts in play. Worth going three colors. I think in the case of a three color deck at least, you need some dual lands, though. It’s okay to go with the cheap ones that gain life, and the scry lands (temple of’s) are pretty good.
I built a funny elemental deck I play on Arena. It’s basically just Risen Reef, clones of various types, leafkin druid and Neoform to find Reef, and Jace the lab man.
I make as many risen reefs as possible and drop Jace just before decking myself for the win.
About that. I ran some experiments to test the life-lands vs shock-lands vs basics using an earlier version of my deck. Over 10 turns, here’s the average production per turn of usable mana from the mana base:
2.19 – life-lands
2.71 – shock-lands
2.31 – basics
So, judged solely by efficiency in producing usable mana, shock-lands are great. But basics are slightly better than life-lands.
How often do you end up with uncastable Air Elementals in hand? Double blue with only 6 islands and no fixing seems rough.
Out of the seven games I played an air elemental was hung up waiting for blue mana once, maybe. I don’t quite remember. Yes, the air elementals are two pips of blue but there are also CMC 5 so they aren’t playable at all until the midgame. I seem to remember more frustration with Risen Reef, waiting for the first pip of blue.
Maybe I should code up a simulation. Plot some graphs. Calculate some confidence intervals.
God, I see a deep deep hole of MTG sabermetrics in front of me. And I kinda want to dive in.
You need to pick a deck direction and commit. Look at Creeping Trailblazer – that guy wants to be in a deck with a bunch of other tiny elementals so him and all his friends can go upstairs. That guy is the beating heart of a grull elementals aggro deck.
Now look at Risen Reef. He wants to be in a deck where you get to ramp up to 6+ mana on turn 4 and slam a Hydriod Krasus or a cavalier, or an Omnath or any one of the massive top-end threats. This guy is the beating heart of a ramp/value strategy.
Crucially, however, they don’t belong in the same deck. Commit to a lane and stick to it.
Checking a belief I’ve formed about modern Jews:
Reform Judaism was an Ashkenazi invention that was inherently patriotic. They started calling the synagogue “Temple”, out of a sense of freedom/completeness/whatever the term. Prayers for the Jerusalem Temple were eliminated and “Jerusalem” shifted meaning to, e.g. Berlin.
I don’t know much about the origins of the movement in early 19th century Germany, but I’d argue that is not necessary and maybe counterproductive to understanding modern Jews unless “modern” is being used in sense of modernism (i.e. a particular historical era).
Er, yes. “Modernism” meaning something like “from George Washington and Napoleon until the contemporary period.”
The historical concept of modernity has become really overloaded.
It can start in 476 or 1450 or 1750 or 1900.
That makes sense – each field’s sense of “modern” starts around the start of whatever trends most characterize the current era. Or, to be specific, at the start of whatever trends most characterize the c. 1900 era when this terminology started to be used; enough has changed by now that some fields say we’re in the “postmodern” era. I wonder what they’ll call the next one?
@Le Maistre Chat >
Make of this what you will:
– Rabbi Gustav Poznanski, at the dedication of Temple Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, United States of America, on March 19, 1841
And nearly 102 years later:
You know what completely free will does? Nothing. Because it has no motivations to move from.
That’s not a definition of “free will” to me, it’s a lack of will. We need the individual impulses, and the actions of the uncontrollable environment (our ‘formative experiences’) to create our will. Then we need to actively consider the world in order to, as freely as possible, act out our will within the limits of our abilities and the world’s boundary conditions.
My opinion of Trump on China compares to a youtube street fight of an amateur vs a taekwondo expert I saw a few years back. The amateur was flailing around with wild punches protecting his face, the taekwondo fighter threw one kick at the amateur’s head and floored him.
Trump is throwing wild tariffs everywhere, but when it comes to banning all trade with individual Chinese companies that are known to have stolen US IP, he’s a shrinking violet.
On Iran I personally don’t understand why the US is so opposed to them having nukes. And I think the US should unilaterally, without anything in return, apologize for our overthrowing of their democratically elected primer minister, and support of their shah becoming an absolute monarch. There are things I really like about Eisenhower (especially his “military industrial complex” speech), but that action so antithetical to US founding principles was total shit. I understand (viscerally) why we didn’t apologize in the couple decades following the revolution, but it’s long since time we apologize now.
North Korea doesn’t matter any way at all. We are to them what two prisoners in separate cells are to each other – just people yelling and fronting at each other, or propping and praising each other – totally irrelevant.
Peace plans in the middle east are always short-term. The power differentials are too great among the various populaces and governments, and the governments all fear yielding any significant power to the hoi polloi (Saudi Arabia, etc…) or the genuine opposition (Israeli vs. Palestinians, Iraq vs Kurds, etc…) (they’ve learned that lesson from the violent fall of absolute monarchies of Europe and Asia). Any real peace would probably have to be imposed by a stronger power (a la the Ottomans), and the US has never been willing to muscle around Saudi Arabia or the other absolute monarchies there (unless they threaten our oil supply).
That’s really not what happened. Mosadegh was ruling by emergency decree and outright seizing property to prop up his rule, but was still losing allies fast. The US and brits accelerated the effort, but it wouldn’t have been possible if there weren’t substantial anti-Mosadegh sentiments in Iran.
I have not investigated this much, so was unaware of specifics (I knew that some Iranians did support the coup). We still should not have intervened to create an absolute monarch (or to support monarchy in general), and should apologize for that.
If we want to envision life after an apocalyptic event, would Haiti’s present condition be an essentially accurate depiction? Why or why not?
Depends on what sort of apocalyptic event. In some, you’d do better to look at life in North Korea under a super-oppressive government; in others, life in Patuxet just before the Pilgrims showed up after the plague had killed virtually everyone.
Well, it would be a pretty accurate representation of an apocalyptic event in Haiti. Or probably any other classic third-world nation.
If I recall our host’s description of his own time spent helping Haiti recover from a quasi-apocalypse, one serious confounding issue was that the population was almost entirely uneducated, illiterate, and ignorant. Even when resources were available, accessing them was seriously complicated by the fact that e.g. the secretary in charge of the file cabinets cataloging resource availability could not be taught to file alphabetically or in any order at all and so had to look through every file any time anyone wanted any file.
This is not said to make fun of people who spent a lifetime conspicuously not being taught anything better, but to describe a fundamental difference between real Haiti and hypothetical developed-world apocalypses. Even after an apocalypse, people in the developed world are going to have a much broader range of skills, particularly including the skill of reading books to learn new skills that they didn’t think they were going to need. And that’s probably going to persist for at least a couple of generations, which probably means the apocalypse isn’t going to last more than a couple of generations.
I think a better model is the first “Mad Max” movie. And in case there’s any confusion, the first “Mad Max” movie did not feature the words “Road Warrior” or feature an elaborate chase scene with a tanker truck and a bunch of people in absurdly stylized vehicles.
Your viewpoints are mostly 180 degrees from mine.
Trump has been ineffective at building what we need to build to maintain viable. Our key foreign policy areas are in maintaining Western unity, preventing Chinese hegemony, and stopping nuclear proliferation. Western unity has taking a hit, but Europe is still not really stepping out on its own and is certainly not actively competing against US interests to benefit Russia or China. Chinese hegemony is still on its path, but I think common media underestimates how much damage the Trade War hurts China: that final chapter is not written yet and Xi may still end up going down. North Korea has effectively nuclearized but has not completed all the missile testing it would like to do, which is a failure: not necessarily a failure of Trump, but the inability to solve or mitigate the problem is a serious concern, and Trump’s not helping.
Trump bungled into it seemingly without allies, but the clash with Iran is coming at some point, unless the Iranian government somehow collapses or Tulsi Gabbard becomes President. There’s not going to be a rapprochement unless the entire region starts singing Kumbaya. We have too many competing interests and everyone in the Middle East practices Kinetic Diplomacy.
Has anyone changed their mind about the Fermi paradox? If so, in what way?
I just realized I still have the same opinion (we’re the first in the visible region) that I came up with when I first heard of the paradox.
But that isn’t an answer to the paradox. The paradox just becomes “Why are we the first in the visible universe, when there’s so many planets?”
Okay, my answer to that version is it’s hard for species which are technologically capable to evolve. Only happened once on this planet, in spite of the obvious advantages to having technology.
We’ve only been around a few hundred thousand years. Some scientists think chimps are entering their own stone age. Even if that’s not true, it seems plausible that such a thing could happen while humans are still around. Besides, we already know that many other animals use technology, so given enough time it doesn’t seem crazy to suppose they (especially animals like dolphins, who teach each other) could iterate more sophisticated versions of those technologies or discover new ones. If a freakishly intelligent individual is born in the right conditions, it might push its species quite far, the way Galileo or Einstein did for us.
(I don’t mean to say Brassfjord’s phrasing of the paradox has an obvious resolution, BTW. I’m pretty agnostic-leaning-pessimistic on the Fermi thing.)
Does the anglerfish know that the sequoia is alive? Does the sequoia know that the anglerfish is alive? Is it remotely possible that they could ever encounter each other as living beings?
The Fermi paradox is just the typical-mind fallacy transmuted into exobiology.
That’s an interesting theory, but do you think it’s likely that there aren’t other species visible to us which are able to get out into space but don’t leave traces we can see?
On what basis would we determine that likelihood?
We couldn’t, but if our understanding of physics is as good as we think it is, there should be some way of thinking about undetectable aliens with major off-planet civilizations.
I’m not sure how far we could get thinking about Niven’s Outsiders. They were low-gravity folks who lived in Oort Clouds. Maybe they wouldn’t have a heat signature we could notice.
See that’s exactly the problem.
The Fermi question presupposes we already know everything we need to know. It’s an ugly contraction of wonder.
Strongly disagree. It’s not that it supposes that there aren’t any weird esoteric forms of life that would be effectively undetectable to us even if they were sitting right in front of us. It’s that it supposes there could well be some forms of life that ARE detectable. And this is not an unreasonable supposition.
Paradox reinstated.
@Enkidum,
The Fermi paradox is not stated as “there very well could be exospecies we could detect.”
The Fermi paradox is stated, simply, “Where is everybody?” As in, it is unsettling and weird that we haven’t detected any exospecies. To the degree that it is even weird that there aren’t any alien artifacts on earth.
Yes, and so given that there are fairly good reasons to think that life is pretty ubiquitous (it begins pretty much as soon as the Earth’s crust starts cooling, and there are probably billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone), and that we could recognize an awful lot of it – where is everybody?
Is what you’re trying to say that advanced races will have technology that is indistinguishable from magic (i.e. that can hide heat)? That’s one solution to the Fermi paradox, but hardly an obvious truth.
Evidently, there aren’t.
If the sequoia had as much ability to optimise the planet for its own way of life as a Kardashev 1 civilisation or better, none of the planet’s surface would be wasted on ocean, and the anglerfish would not exist. If the anglerfish had similar optimising power, the Sequoia would have no land to grow on, and would similarly not exist.
You are still doing it.
I don’t think that once humans reach Kardashev 1 they will choose to optimize all the oceans away, so I don’t think that’s necessarily true for Kardashev 1 sequoias.
Neither the anglerfish or the sequoia are intelligent beings, so not sure how this analogy is supposed to work. If either became intelligent, they would indeed eventually find out about the other one.
The anglerfish knows the sequoia is very different from a rock.
We observe a universe that is very full of a few basic types of rock-like things with minor variations and reasonably well-understood reasons for existing in dead space, and not much in the way of complex wonders that don’t fit that pattern. We also have one example of a technological civilization, and across multiple observable parameters it is way outside the three-sigma range of rock-like things.
You’re claiming that if an anglerfish encountered a sequoia, it would think “This hard inanimate object is definitely not a rock.”
And not “I’m about to die”?
If an anglerfish encountered a Sequoia in an environment not immediately inimical to anglerfish life (like say observing it while briefly poking its head above the coastal waters in a bit of daring anglerfishy exploration), I see no reason it would fear death.
If we credit it with an anglerfish brain plus just enough anthropomorphization to make this simple, it would probably think “That’s really weird, like nothing I’ve ever seen before, certainly not like a rock”. If it had already discovered kelp in its explorations, maybe “Yeah, a bit like non-aqueous kelp”, but now we’ve got the anglerfish categorizing Sequoia with other plant life.
If we dial the anthropomorphization way up while keeping the Anglerfish benthic knowledge base, then the fish looks out from its water-filled hardshell EOA suit and says “Fractal morphology vastly different than any natural object, extreme vertical extent, strong coloration typical of organic pigments, harder than any fish but softer than any non-fishy solid, fibrous and porous microstructure”, etc.
From any remotely-plausibly anglerfishy perspective, a Sequoia is going to be really weird. And if there’s an anglerfish capable of hypothesizing extraoceanic life, it’s hard to see them not leaping to “maybe that explains those weird Sequoia things”.
If the claim is merely that an anglerfish won’t recognize a Sequoia as “life” because anglerfish are to stupid to know the word “life”, meh, bored now.
Yeah. Exactly.
In order for the Fermi problem to be a sexy, sexy paradox, we have to presume that
the anglerfish iswe are smart enough to recognize what might be extremely foreign life forms.But in reality it’s boring. We don’t see as much life as we expect, because we just aren’t smart enough to have correct expectations.
I thought we were supposed to be empiricists here.
Are there any SSC readers from Sierra Nevada who have a saltwater aquarium?
(doesn’t have to be hyperbaric, since water and deep-sea fish are both incompressible)
@Lambert
Not only must it be hyperbaric, but there are other requirements too: https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-05/new-way-keep-deep-sea-creatures-alive-surface/
Specific to anglerfish: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-17720969
The anglerfish doesn’t know the sequoia, and the sequoia doesn’t know the anglerfish, but we humans know both of them. We’re pretty good about knowing about things, even if they are extremely different from us. Or very far away. Or living in environments that would kill us quickly.
Well, then we would expect that an exospecies with that degree of relative sophistication (IE, as advanced compared to is as we are to anglerfish) would be able to detect us.
Are you aware those two are alive?
So what do you think hinderce you to think something else look like it is alive?
I don’t remember if I ever thought differently, but my current guess is that there’s no need for a civilized society to communicate in ways we can intercept. I mean, we’re talking about using neutrons for direct-line comm just to shave a few miliseconds from going around the earth. Once we have this tech I don’t see us using anything else.
Plus there’s the matter of the existential risk that comes from broadcasting yourself. It may be real selection (something is culling those inclined to chat), it could be game theory we’re not aware of or it could just be we’re unusually optimistic, but once you don’t need to use radio waves, it’s a fair chance you won’t use them on purpose just to advertise your position. I’m not comfortable thinking about this, to be honest, but I don’t find obvious holes in the logic.
So a universe that looks silent is pretty much what I’d expect to see.
Video I’m watching about the Fermi paradox — puts a lot of emphasis on Dyson swarms, while admitting that tech well beyond ours might make them unnecessary.
I’m grabbing a hummus and watching it because it looks fun, but megastructures and Dyson spheres… I always thought they’re extremely impractical. Just because you can do something doesn’t really mean you will. First example I can think of is the classic “military is always fighting the last war” – what kind of armor we could build right now if we really wanted? Walls? Cannons? Ships? Pretty damn big and fancy, but they’re now obsolete.
Clutching a chickpea?
ಠ_ಠ
Any alien communications that (unintentionally) reach Earth are wasted energy.
I expect that once we’re an interplanetary species, we’ll be using lasers or something similarly directional for the bulk of our long-range communications.
The Fermi paradox isn’t about why we don’t hear radio signals, but why we don’t see Dyson swarms, space beacons and von Neumann probes.
Yes, it’s about why the universe’s limited supply of resources and free energy have not been completely used up, or at least stored for use on a later date, by intelligent aliens.
That sounds suspiciously like retreating a step and saying that was the question all along. I checked the wikipedia page, and it’s pretty much a generic “why aren’t aliens flying around”. I’ve known the phrase “Fermi Paradox” since I was a kind and that’s the first time I see it associated specifically with resource optimization.
But both “you” and “something” are singular.
Take away the singularity of “you”, and your objection “Just because almost everyone can do something doesn’t really mean anyone actually will”. And, yeah, they kind of will. Rule 34 doesn’t just apply to porn (but it does apply to porn and I can imagine aliens with a first-contact fetish, so…)
And as others have already noted, it’s not the “something” of trying to send us messages by radio, but a huge range of things. Some of which are trivially easy, others of which are extremely versatile and maximize the doers ability to do a huge range of other things. And some of which will maximize their ability to prevail in conflicts with rivals. Speaking of which…
The kind that would require really really big explosions to penetrate. Last war, next war, every war, that one is pretty much a universal constant of war. We try to do really clever things to Sun-Tzu our way into victory without bloodshed, but we know these don’t always work so we stay ready to deliver maximal brute force on demand.
But apparently no other civilization anywhere in the light-cone of the universe has ever done that, or if they did they stopped not too far past our own level, every single time ever.
The long list of things, very easy things, broadly useful things, incredibly powerful things that any advanced alien civilization could do, not one alien civilization out of the postulated multitude ever has done.
This seems dubious.
Fair point. Not convinced, but updated. It could be – it probably is the case – that newer tech is less flashy. Laser/neutron streams instead of radio, better resource utilization instead of more energy, even simply environmentalism… like, do we _really_ see ourselves harvesting the matter from the solar system to build … what could have more meaning to us than the solar system already has? But yeah, point taken – enough civilizations and one should be less environmental.
Which leaves my second point, unfortunately.
O’Neill cylinders. Move all the comets to Earth’s orbit and turn their water into water and oxygen and their cores into atmospheric nitrogen and organics. Forge nickel-iron asteroids with solar collectors… you need like a meter of radiation shielding for the humans inside, so if you only need a thin shell for structural strength, curved slabs of slag will have to make up the rest.
Send a spaceship to Mercury with a space elevator to unspool and clanking replicators. Build orbital solar panels. Some day energy becomes cheap enough to start cracking moons apart for their water, carbon, nitrogen, and iron. (We can call the tool that does this “the superlaser.”)
I just majorly updated on a futurism topic this very month. A bunch of stuff started clicking, an article or two (marginal revolution? here?), and I basically realized that The Future won’t bring a sparse society. The fact that remote working is possible (but not optimum) is far from compensating that physical agglomerations have advantages. The unexpected thing is that those advantages are many many independent multipliers. So you wouldn’t really guess is it advance, but it turns out that paying uber-premium prices to have a company in Bay Area is actually worth it.
So given this recent update, I’m generally very skeptical when it comes to guessing what society 50-100 years from now will consider a good idea.
Any thoughts about whether remote work could be improved to the point where it’s comparable to being present in person?
The factor that really clicked it for me was that in a bigger town the spouse also has a better chance of finding good work. Another independent multiplier.
Or… good specialty coffee shops. Or foreign language classes. That’s two examples I stumbled on myself last week.in my quest of living more in a small town.
So probably no, unlikely.
I now think it might be good news with respect to AI. If the universe is filled with intelligent life, and it was easy to unintentionally create a paperclip maximizer, then we wouldn’t exist at this period in the universe’s history.
Sounds like Spooky WAP applied to entire population of the universe logic. This stuff gets weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Indication_Assumption_Doomsday_argument_rebuttal
Having listened to more of the video, part of the hypothesis is that if an AI wipes out an intelligent species, it will remain and expand and leave visible traces.
I think such AIs aren’t all that likely to expand, but I suppose it only takes a few.
For most goals that an AI would have, it would make more progress towards these goals the more free energy and resources it has. Consequently, an instrumental goal of most AIs would be to expand and grap resources. If AIs are in competition, or potential competition, with each other, each will likely see the need to expand and grap resources as quickly as possible for reasons of self-defense. An AI that expands at the speed of light would not leave a visible trace.
Years ago, my first reaction to Fermi paradox was: “Well, some species had to be the first… and it happened to be us.”
But that, although technically true, doesn’t explain why we came so late. (Now I see the problem not as “why are we the first?”, because someone had to, but rather “why are we the first, despite having arrived so late?”.) It took many billions of years, lots of wasted time, the whole era of dinosaurs that later got wiped out by an accident… Why some other planet, perhaps even one where life itself appeared much later than on Earth, didn’t develop a spacefaring intelligence sooner. (If the whole thing with dinosaurs was a random dead end, then given enough planets with life, somewhere the dinosaurs should have been exterminated much sooner, or perhaps have never evolved at all.)
My current best guess is anthropic reasoning combined with multiverse. Given large amounts of universes with all kinds of laws of physics, the number of universes where life is barely possible vastly exceeds the number of universes friendly to life. (And the number of universes where life is impossible, exceeds them both. But, anthropically, we don’t care.) Even if the life-friendly universes can contain more intelligent species, a random intelligent species is more likely to exist in a universe where life is barely possible… such as our universe.
We are here, because barely anything can live here. If this universe were a friendlier place for life, there would be zillions of universes similar to this one but slightly less life-friendly, and we would more likely find ourselves in one of those.
Or, zillions of universes aren’t a thing, and thank God we were lucky enough to roll a natural 18 for “existence of life” when rolling up the only one ever, don’t jinx it by demanding the 18(00) of intelligent neighbors.
But either way, eloquently said.
I have put a *lot* of thought into that topic.
That is my same conclusion. Humanity was the first in its light-cone, and possibly any nearby galaxies. The conditions for intelligent life that can evolve complex spacecraft is likely just *extremely* rare.
Yes, this Scott post and the paper it discusses convinced me there’s a small chance that we’re alone in the universe, maybe 10%. I think Sandberg et al are totally right that we should think of the Fermi Paradox in Monte Carlo terms, not averages. I tried to replicate their math though, couldn’t, and think they’re doing something weird, which is why I post it at 10%. If I recall right, Sandberg et al estimate a 33% we’re alone in the universe, I just penalized them down to 10% in my head because they did some weird math stuff I didn’t understand and don’t trust. But I didn’t think there was any chance we were alone before and after reading their paper I think there’s a small but non-trivial chance.
I have my own explanation for the Fermi Paradox, of course 🙂
We don’t need to be alone in the universe for the Fermi Paradox to hold– I’m not sure if we could see evidence of space civilizations in other galaxies, and I am sure that we couldn’t see evidence of life in the more distant galaxies.
There’s a question:
From how far away could humanity detect another civilisation with the same level of technology as us?
a) to just happen to stumble across its radio transmissions leaking out into space
b) to be specifically scanning their solar system for signs of civilisation
c) for them to be beaming a transmission directly at us from their equivalent of the Arecibo telescope at our Arecibo at exactly the right time
“Our level of civilization” is just a blip. First TV transmission was last century, and there’s a fair chance we’ll start considering the lower part of the spectrum too slow within the next century. I’m not a physicist, but my understanding is that higher the frequency higher the information content, but lower the fitness for omnidirectional communication. AM goes through mountains, FM goes through walls, but we hear about visible spectrum and X-ray lasers or fibers. In the end there’ll probably be low powered room-sized wifi-style radio comm, with fiber or laser or neutron stream comm making the backbone. Not much point trying to saturate the air with city-wide or planet-wide radio when the band will be too slow to sell.
Sure, this would just be a snapshot of technology.
I meant the question more as a yardstick of what kind of distances are reasonable to be detecting non-dyson-sphere civilisations over.
I think the reason the frequencies we use has increased so much has been a matter of technology more than the waves themselves. Making a $10 2.4GHz wifi dongle is not something you can do with 1990s electronics and circuit fabrication. But I’m not an expert either.
Well, we’ve been resolving some of the uncertainties in some of the factors in
the Drake equation over the last few decades, and are likely to resolve a few more
over the next few decades. The discoveries of thousands of exoplanets
(albeit their orbits and masses were quite a surprise! Hot Jupiters…)
certainly told us that planets are quite common, which we didn’t know…
“Starshade” may let us get spectra of atmospheres and see if free oxygen
exists on some of these. Closer to home, if we can drill into Europa’s ocean
or some of the other moon’s oceans, perhaps we will find out if life is
common or not, and whether eukaryotes are common or not…
>Has anyone changed their mind about the Fermi paradox? If so, in what way?
A little. I lean a bit more towards the “rare Earth” explanation than I used to for two reasons:
a) While life originated early in Earth’s history, eukaryotes only became dominant much more recently,
around 800 million years ago. Now, the sun has another ~5 billion years left on the main sequence,
but it gradually brightens, and is expected to make the Earth uninhabitable much sooner, roughly ~1
billion years. So if it had taken ~20% longer fro eukaryotes to dominate, we’d have missed the
window of habitable time in the sun’s evolution. Maybe we got lucky and the _average_ time for
eukaryotes to arise is much longer than the habitable period sun-like stars allow. Maybe there
is a galaxy fully of earthlike planets filled with prokaryotes out there.
b) We’ve been finding a lot of superearths in planet searches. Now, there is a _lot_ of speculation about
composition, but one possibility is that many of these worlds are water-rich. That sound promising
but… Only 0.05% of the Earth’s mass is water, yet 75% of its surface is ocean. If it were 1% water,
it would probably have no dry land – and some of the guesses for the superearths’ composition is
10% water or more. If oceans are needed for life to form but dry land is needed for technological
civilizations, this may need a _very_ narrow window of planetary composition. Maybe, of those
planets the do evolve eukaryotes, almost all are full of fish and kelp, but almost no one smelts iron.
Not really; the main change is lowering the base rate of civilizations arising, but without good ways to communicate FTL, civilizations will be necessarily be isolated.
A thing I like to remind people about concerining Fermi is that it is not “Why don’t we see any aliens.”
It’s “given that if a spicies is able to develop interstelar travel, and interstelar colonization, it would only take X* million years to colonize the whole galaxy**, and that the universe is billion of years old, why is nobody here?”.
My answer is still somewhere between “We maybe not the first but still in the first bunch, and haven’t been reached yet” and “There is a great filter. It is probably interstelar travel.”
* with X as a single digit number.
** note we don’t talk about a single civilization or polity, but about a species, or even a whole branch of different spicies.
+1
He hasn’t started any new wars yet. I suppose that’s something.
But I’ve literally (literally literally) lost track of how many times he’s torn up perfectly good deals negotiated with foreign powers by previous presidents, saying “#PreviousPresident made a crappy deal because #PreviousPresident sucked; I’m tearing up the deal so that I, Master of the Art of the Deal, can negotiate a better deal”. That’s pretty much the whole of his foreign policy, with a side order of cozying up to authoritarian dictators. Has he ever, even once, actually got anyone to sign on to a better deal? All I see are lots of failed deals and few patchwork replacement deals with no advantage over what we had before.
It’s probably the most important thing. In terms of both domestic and foreign welfare/utility war is pretty much the worst thing the US can do. And every president since…Carter maybe, has started a war and overthrown a foreign government. That’s really bad, both for the US and everybody else.
There’s other things, but 80% of the value/damage of foreign policy is in war and Trump is beating every other president in my lifetime by just not starting a new war. I mean, the official cost of the Iraq War is $1.1 trillion for 7 years, I’m sure the China trade war is costly but I’m not seeing more than $10-20 billion/year in costs. We can afford a lot of Trump stupidity if he just…doesn’t declare war.
Trump’s decision not to strike Iran is the only thing I’ll commend him for, and that’s only because any other Republican probably would’ve started a war with them by now. We wouldn’t even be in this position right now if he hadn’t decided to leave the 2015 agreement out of naked spite.
Naked spite is inaccurate. Trump campaigned against the Iran deal: he told people it was a bad deal, and that if he was elected he’d renegotiate it or get rid of it. Then he was elected, and as soon as he had the slightest plausible reason to end the deal he ended it. And he could do that because the Iran deal was not a treaty, was not approved by congress, and as such was not legally binding. It was a “presidential commitment” which “imposes no obligation under international law,” and where America “incurs no state responsibility for its violation,” and as such “a successor President is not bound by a previous President’s political commitment under either domestic or international law and can thus legally disregard it at will.”
It was Obama’s deal, not America’s, and where you see naked spite, I see a politician keeping his campaign promise.
As you said, he promised to renegotiate it or get rid of it. Can you honestly say that he put any real effort into renegotiating it? Instead, he simply canceled the deal, and now we’re in a situation where Iran is stepping up its support for local proxies in Yemen and Iraq and (indirectly) blowing up Saudi oil fields. Keeping a campaign promise in the laziest and most destructive way should be hard to justify, even for hardcore Trumpists.
It seems really easy to justify, if you thought Iran would do all those things regardless. I think you’re underestimating how much of Trump’s base believe that the Iran deal was a terrible idea. You don’t have to be a hardcore Trumpist to think that getting rid of bad things is good.
Getting rid of a “bad thing” in such a way that your enemies are even more free to act is counterproductive. Trump replaced the nuclear deal with sanctions that have done nothing to restrain Iran’s regional ambitions, while alienating the very international partners that he needed to get sanctions to stick. How is that defensible as anything other than self-destructive spite?
If trade is considered a part of foreign policy, pulling out of the TPP (a free trade agreement designed to economically isolate China) and instead fire off tariffs willy-nilly at China (and allies!) seems like a bad move.* With the exception of Cuba sanctions seem appropriate, at least compared to the alternatives.
*Economically. Protectionism is always more popular than it is prudent.
Agreed. TPP was the best way to contain China, diplomatically and economically. Even if Trump succeeds in forcing concessions out of the PRC, he’s given them carte blanche to establish hegemony in the Pacific.
It would have prevented importing of those shoddy products that are actually sometimes banned in China itself.
Such as that Chinese spandex that yields a super-strong chemical odor the moment you wash it (making it both unwearable and unreturnable), but not before you wash it.
Or the Chinese drywall that ruined an estimated 100,000 homes.
@Atlas says:
The partisan Democrat in me wants to bellyache about this or that but honestly?
There’s been no increase in Americans coming home in body bags, and there’s been no attacks on Americans by foreigners.
Other than the large numbers of refugees trying to escape the mess in Central America, I really can’t quibble with the results of the last three years with foreign affairs, but frankly I tend not to pay as much attention to what goes on overseas (or much that’s more than 50 miles from home really).
Truthfully what happens in Sacramento has been more influential than D.C. lately, during Bush we had “stop-loss” and limited war without end, during Obama the wars continued (at a bit lower level) but domestically Obama gave Pelosi the go ahead for the A.C.A., which I judge to be mostly a good thing, and under Trump?
The last three years have seen no end to the increases in jobs here and nationwide that we’ve seen since 2011 (good), but still more “unsheltered” Californians (though less homelessness nationwide), so lots of hue and cry about Trump, but mostly things seem to be what they were trending to be in the last years under Obama as far as I can tell.
I lot of ink and pixels have been spilled about Trump being “anti-immigrant” and most of my immediate co-workers are no longer immigrants (due to retirements), now my co-workers are more often the sons of immigrants, and when they’re not there the husband’s of immigrants, so that’s a change, but I don’t think Trump had anything to do with that.
I really can’t guess what would be different if Clinton won in my life.
@Atlas >
I’ve little doubt that the Trump administration is actively anti-union, but so far that hasn’t seem to effect California’s self rule, though they are indications that Sacramento’s efforts to have “gig economy” workers (Lyft, Uber, et cetera) get the protections of employees instead of contractors may be hindered by the changes in the NLRB, so I’m not staying home November 2020!
I do though sometimes have a fanciful notion of the Federal government turning itself irrelevant and each state governing themselves more, resulting in a libertarian “Free State of New Hampshire” next to a Nordic model “The People’s Commonwealth of Vermont”, but I don’t suppose anything like that will come.
Has anyone heard Piketty’s new proposal? Among other measures for reducing inequality, he’d like to give all French citizens 120,000 euros when they turn 25 (source). The natural comparison, in my view, is to UBI proposals. This would be cheaper than a $1000 per month UBI to all adults. Receiving it as a lump sum also seems like it would open up more opportunities for social mobility–both up and down depending on whether recipients used it as seed money for a small business or a wild week in Vegas–compared to monthly payments that are more likely to be used to just maintain a certain lifestyle.
Related to the discussion on age of consent below, this also seems like another data point on the age when adulthood really begins in the eyes of contemporary society. Personally I wouldn’t be in favour of raising the age of consent or the drinking age to 25 due to concerns about criminalizing large swathes of society. However, I’d be more open to discussions of raising the voting age to this point, especially if expectations that anyone younger be productively employed continue to diminish.
Heh, Piketty must’ve done really well off his last book, i’m sure the French government will be thrilled.
Jokes aside, from a pure accounting practices point of view I can’t see how the argument can be made in favour of dolling out huge lump sums instead of a slow trickle of $1000/month. The granularity of the payouts really matter, not just the end-of-term totals.
While it is lump-sum to recipients, it would still be granular to the government if the payments were dispersed to 25-year-olds in their birth month.
Eyeballing the age pyramid for France, there are around 50 million adults and around 800,000 people will turn 25 in a given year (67,000 per month on average).
Scenario A: $1000 per month to all adults = $50 billion per month ($600B/yr, ~23% of French GDP)
Scenario B: $120000 to each person turning 25 that month = $8 billion per month ($96B/yr, ~4% of French GDP)
Nice joke, btw.
A similar option would be for the government to put aside 2,500 euros for you in a locked investment account on the day of your birth, and again every birthday thereafter.
At a 5% real rate of return, that would get you just shy of 125,000 euros by the time you’re 25.
One advantage of this is that the money could still be inherited by, say, a younger sibling if the recipient individual dies when they’re 24 and 9 months old. Also seems a slightly easier pitch politically – frames it as a saving effort rather than a lump sum hand-out; could be seen as a national dividend; could also be phased in gradually with increasing annual contributions over time.
In reality either option is probably a political non-starter due to the non-trivial number of 25-year-olds who will spend the money on cars & cocaine.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., it’s more likely the government would tax you $2,500/year while you grew up, then give you back a 1.23% real rate of return* when you’re 25.
Anyway, as the 2,500 euros presumably comes from taxpayers or borrowing (i.e. later taxpayers), if it’s a good idea, wouldn’t it be simpler if people just started their own savings accounts for their kids and stuck some money in every year? I get that Piketty is pretty vague about where the money comes from (France can’t actually tax it’s “wealthy” much more before they compensate by hiding or relocating their wealth), but yeah, it seems like a bad idea to subsidize 25-year-old’s financial decisions over those of senior citizens (who tend to have much of the wealth to take).
The track record of 25-year-olds in college with extra money from their parents, for example, doesn’t seem all that great in terms of wisdom…
*Inflation-adjusted Social Security rate of return.
In America, I think the main result would be a further increase in college tuition. After all, how much easier would it be to get a loan if you could put a lien on your future 100k payout? I mean it could also potentially make it easier to get a loan for house too, but even if tuition doesn’t increase I can image those payouts mostly going towards college debt. If I had been paid that much when I turned 25 that’s where pretty much all of my payout would have gone (my wife racked up just about 100k in debt getting her bachelors and graduate degree).
Although now that I think about it, she would have gotten the payout too so I guess we would have been about 100k up on the whole deal: and debt free! Yeah, probably a better system than a regular UBI at this point.
What’s the point of having that money at exactly the point where you’re supposed to be professionally productive? No matter if you go the college route or professional route, at around 25 you’re pretty much ready to do something productive and be paid reasonable money for it. That’s exactly when state support should end, not begin.
It leaves you dry in the most unfavorable time in your life. Before 25 you earn the least, and need the most. Not to mention various unfortunate events, like poor parents, shitty parents, pregnancy, or (quite often, actually because they’re not independent variables) all three.
Wasn’t this already proposed by the Physiocrat types? The idea was that land was all wealth but property rights deprived everyone from using land as they pleased. The sum was compensation for the loss of these rights.
Anyway, waiting until they’re 25 seems a bit off considering childhood is really more important than your twenties in setting up your life. I’d think that 14 would be a better age, with safeguards to prevent expropriation by parents etc.
And then higher education costs go up by 110,000
About a year ago, I discovered that someone had pooled photos of thousands of people from around the world to create “the average face” for each country. You can see some of the results here: https://www.artfido.com/this-is-what-the-average-person-looks-like-in-each-country/
While this is an interesting exercise, I think it obviously overlooks the possibility that, within countries and restricting ourselves to only looking at one race in each country, there could be bimodal or even tri-modal distributions of facial features. For example, in Country X, 50% of the people belong to Ethnic Group A and have blonde hair and 2 inch wide noses, while 50% of the people belong to Ethnic Group B and have black hair and 1 inch wide noses. If you use the same methodology as the website I linked to, then the “average face” of a citizen of Country X has a 1.5 inch wide nose and dirty blonde hair, and it actually resembles no one living there.
Has the existence of phenotypic “clusters” of the sort I’ve described been scientifically studied? In my travels around the world, I’ve anecdotally come to believe that they exist within countries.
It looks like they accounted for this. Two of the male pictures are “African American” and “White American”.
While your link correctly links to the tool that was used to create the composites, it fails to identify that the person who used the tool. I believe that he used 20-25 faces per country. He doesn’t seem to say how he chose the representatives.
The first time I saw this done, it was with soccer team rosters, which is easily available (and structured) data, but biased towards young and fit. But maybe that bias is the same for every country. (Anyhow, I don’t think that’s the case here.)
The faces aren’t all perfectly symmetrical, which suggests that some asymmetries tend more to one side or the other.
This should be bimodal for balding vs non-balding men. And apparently the average Japanese girl has brown hair and Argentianian women are nightmare fuel. The more you know…
I’d like to continue this discussion from the previous thread. There was prelude, but the thing I find critical for further discussion spawned from this, from EchoChaos:
Discussion followed:
thisheavenlyconjugation says:
EC:
THC:
EC:
There are many reasons I disagree with EC here, but one I’d like to focus on is the apparent presumption that marriage, as it is thought of under US law, has anything to do with sex. Marriage isn’t about sex, it’s about money. Finances, taxes, inheritance, and child care expenses. All of that is tangential to sex. The only exception I can think of is conjugal visitation, and (1) IDK if that’s a real thing or just something TV made up, and (2) as I understand it, you get a right to privacy with your spouse, not the right to have sex with them.
So if we start from the realization that marriage (legally) isn’t about sex, it seems entirely absurd to assume that you’d get carte blanche to stick whatever you want in wherever you want as a consequence of entering a legal arrangement for tax avoidance.
Contra, I would say marriage is all about sex – or rather a specific sex-related issue that is: children.
We literally don’t need marriage for anything. However:
– men and women are going to have sex,
– occasionally children are conceived,
– someone’s gonna need to take care of those children.
Marriage is the institution we had to address this problem. Had, because we’ve since forgotten what it was for and dismantled the majority of legal and social safeguards that were to ensure it was fit for purpose.
Ah you beat me to it. Need to work on those typing fingers…
+100
This is the distinction. Marriage doesn’t define these responsibilities under law. The discussion that prompted my post is related to legal issues, not other issues, so that’s the focus. The rest is irrelevant.
Correct. It used to define those responsibilities under law and liberals removed them.
I think that removal was bad, which was the point I was arguing there (and now here).
Yes, it’s to congratulate you on your family-making. But family-making does not require childbearing, no matter how loudly traditionalists insist that it does. It does require mutual commitments, including monetary commitments, and that’s the point of the institution in modern free and civilized societies, as opposed to tyrannical primitive traditionalist ones.
I’ve been to plenty of weddings of friends who I knew did not want to have children. They were no less rich and emotionally meaningful because of that, either to the married couple or the friends and family in attendance. The notion that marriage somehow becomes empty or meaningless when freed from traditionalist strictures is flatly contradicted by the lived experience of non-traditionalists.
A childless marriage is not meaningless.
It does mean less.
edit: This sounds like I want to provoke, but I don’t. Rather, compromise.
I recognize that the usefulness of the commitment in living a life together. But the addition of an intention to jointly bear the burdens, risks, and joys of parenthood is profound.
And note that there are several Biblical miracles where a childless couple was given children late in life unexpectedly. This possibility is viewed as part of marriage by Christians. My mother (68 years old) has joked with my wife about the possibility.
Randy-
That’s an extremely condescending and myopic view.
@matthewravery
Your comments have been substantially more myopic than Randy M’s in my view. Please do not attack commentators for stating their views on meaning.
I didn’t mean to attack him, just the opinion he expressed. I thought it was condescending because saying someone’s marriage is less valuable than ones own (a guess based on the adorable avatar) is condescending. Saying any marriage that is childless is less meaningful than one with children shows a lack of imagination about how others might live or want to live.
That view could be completely true for his own life. It was the statement as universal that got my response.
Having seen his edit now, I don’t think that’s what Randy was going for. I’ll edit my post above… or at least I would’ve if i hadn’t missed the window somehow(?).
Randy, I don’t doubt what you’ve said applies to you, and you’ve likely seen similar experiences in many of your friends and family. In retrospect, I think you were going for something narrower than what I initially thought, and that’s my fault for not reading more charitably.
To be fair, my unedited version you are responding to sounds condescending.
But, even then, the alternative is to say that childbearing means nothing.
Or, more charitably, that the bringing forth and raising of new humans is about as important as starting a business or traveling, whatever the opportunity cost is. It’s possible you can make a utilitarian case for this, but I’m going be a tough sell on it. Especially given I view the act of childbirth to have eternal consequences.
@EchoChaos
On the one hand, you are free to police whatever tone you prefer. On the other, I’m fine with the forthright disagreement, and as you can tell, thought better than my initial phrasing. Sometimes the temptation to be pithy is greater than my inclination towards overly cautious phrasing.
@Randy M
Fair. Objection withdrawn.
To Randy’s original point: you are entitled to your opinion about which kinds of commitment or life-plan mean more or less. But one of the fundamental metarules of a liberal society is legal neutrality: that is, that people have many different sorts of life plans and values and types of meaning-making that follow from those values, and the police power should not be used to enforce legal judgments about which of those are better than others.
The liberal reforms to the legal concept of marriage are about stripping it of those judgments, which it has historically encoded since traditional society was unashamedly (and viciously, and tyrannically) non-neutral in its use of the police power, and making it more fit to serve the practical purposes that it still does, and very importantly does, serve under a more neutralist meta-legal regime.
The subtext here is traditionalists and non-traditonalists fighting over a cultural icon. What something “is for” is really a debate about what it “ought to be for”
I don’t consider a couple that is raising one or more children [especially with their own resources] as equally valuable as a childless couple. *Moreso* now then at any point in the history just because of how taxing [physically and financially] and socially unrewarding the act of childbearing has become compared to people who are [at least voluntarily] childless. For our purposes parents who adopt can be put into the child-bearing category as well.
*someone has to do it* and for that reason I want an institution to exist to lower the financial barriers and raise the social subsidy to parenting.
But that philosophy rubs against the modern idea that all people should be treated the same regardless of their chosen lifestyle.
@salvorhardin
I’m not looking for to have the law invalidate childless marriages, mind, but you in this subthread prior didn’t seem to be making a legal point, but more of an emotional and social one, which is what I was responding to.
The ideal is equality under the law–for individuals.
Does it really apply to institutions as well?
We differentiate between a small business and a large, between a non-profit and a for-profit, between a marriage and a corporation.
From a legal/societal point of view, a family with children (or the strong likelihood thereof) and a childless marriage seem as far removed as a non-profit organization and a for-profit organization.
The former is being formed for the benefit of those outside the union, the latter for those within it.* Both, of course, are typically beneficial to society, but not in the same way.
*(Not quite such a clean split, obviously, because there are emotional pay-offs to children).
There’s nothing neutral about stripping marriage of such things. Traditionalists in our society can’t have traditional marriages any longer, it’s impossible thanks to such changes.
@Nick
+1
Remember, this discussion started because an old assumption about marriage was removed from law (consent).
The right offered a version that gave everything that marriage had except the name so that we could keep traditional marriage and the left rejected that compromise.
Randy M
That’s what I mean by how we use language to bullshit. Having a baby is having a baby, no more and no less. Trillions of living things have had babies for billions of years. It is meaningless in itself. It does not make you better in any way. If we were not opening our mouths trying to make something more than it is, most problems would go away. When you try to make claims that are not true, troubles begin.
@Nick and @EchoChaos – whaaa? I’m legitimately curious about this perspective because EchoChaos agreed immediately and it seems very confusing to me. Sure, the technical definition of the law has changed to move away from traditional concepts, but so what? I’m interested in knowing how you perceive those changes removing traditional marriage from even the realm of possibility. Surely there’s nothing stopping all parties (and their families, etc.) from viewing the marriage in traditional terms and behaving accordingly? As an intentionally extreme counter: the law has rules around generating electricity. Does this mean traditionalists (the Amish, for example) in our society can’t make a decision not to use any?
@sp1
Essentially courts will refuse to enforce contracts where two people pre-commit to various traditional aspects. For example (and obviously details vary state-to-state) if you get a pre-nup saying if one party cheats, they get massively disfavored in the divorce; the judge will tear it up and say “nope, no-fault only, cheatee has to pay up”
@sp1:
I’m also familiar with this perspective, so though I can’t speak exactly for the others, I can try to explain how I view it. The primary issue is usually no-fault divorce, but the panoply of other stuff (e.g. spousal privileges, marital rape laws, etc.) also factor in.
Imagine that you are a person who really wants a secure job. You want to make sure that you will definitely be working Job A in Location B for, say, 10 years. You look for an employer who really wants to make sure its employees will stick around, and you find one. You and the employer enter a contract that says “I will work here for 10 years, and I can’t work anywhere else – I’m signing a non-compete agreement that says I cannot work for anyone else for at least 10 years. In exchange, the employer will pay me 50% higher than normal salary for my position, and absolutely cannot fire me for any reason except for stealing, literal sleeping on the job, or physically attacking a co-worker, for 10 years. Laziness, poor performance, etc. are not valid grounds.” Each side gets what it wants – the employee gets absolute job security, the employer gets employee stability.
Now imagine that the state they are in passes a law that says “no non-compete agreement can be enforced for more than 1 year,” and another law that says “employers can always fire employees for any reason.”
The original contract is now legally impossible. The parties can still say they want to do it, and they can still try their best, but previously each one had near-absolute security guaranteeing the other party would comply; now they don’t. The worker can’t be fully secure that he will not be fired for some reason; the employer can’t be fully secure that he will not change his mind.
That’s the claim with marriage. Under the old conception, the parties traded some of their freedom in exchange for legally binding security. Now the law prohibits those legal bonds as against public policy. For a crude materialistic example, imagine a man who marries a woman in medical school. He plans to be a house-husband while she works as a surgeon. Under the old regime, if he was in a legal marriage, then as long as he doesn’t do X,Y,Z things (e.g. cheat, cruelty, withhold sex) then he is guaranteed the rights of a spouse indefinitely, including his claim to sex and his claim to his wife’s income once she’s a surgeon. The wife can’t get out of it unless he does X,Y, or Z. And the wife agrees to this arrangement because it’s the best way she can guarantee someone to work and help her through med school and care for her home. As long as they both consent, they both get the security they want.
But now the state passes no-fault divorce. Under this new regime, even if he does everything right, the wife can still trade him in for a younger, newer model as soon as she starts making big surgeon money. But also, the med student can’t convince him to marry her in the first place – because she cannot credibly and irrevocably signal to him that under no circumstances will she dump him for a newer model when she starts making surgeon money.
TL;DR: The ability to commit irrevocably to something is a power that does not exist when the law prohibits irrevocable commitments. That’s what has been lost.
@Gobbobobble: Right; the Left judiciary took traditional marriage away from everyone.
Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining the perspective everyone.
Interestingly, in some states there has been a move to back off from no-fault divorce in some cases. Kentucky, I think (and I believe several other states) has instituted a two-tier system of marriage. When you go to the courthouse for your marriage license, you can opt for either “marriage” or “covenant marriage.” For “marriage” the regular no-fault divorce rules apply; to dissolve a “covenant marriage” you have to jump through more hoops.
@hls2003,
In theory anyway.
As far as I know, it’s never been legally tested so it’s unclear whether being in a covenant marriage actually provides any benefits even within states which recognize them. And most states still don’t, so if the wife separates and moves in with her new boyfriend in New York before filing for divorce the husband is still SOL.
Anyway this is standard liberal ideology at work. You can do anything you want… except commit to anything. Because any binding commitment reduces your ability to break the commitment, which means that it must be absolutely forbidden. So really the only thing that you can do is drift around as an atomic individual. Look at Scott’s archipelago for a perfect example: you can have a traditional society as long as you have a mandatory state-run liberal school system or never reproduce, because children must only ever be raised as atomic individuals.
@Nabil:
Family law isn’t my area, and I’m not in a two-tier jurisdiction anyway, so I’m not sure how it would work. You might be right about switching to an easier divorce jurisdiction – e.g. the old “Go to Reno” plan in the earlier 20th century. But just thinking out loud, I think that would work better for “divorced sufficiently to marry someone else” – I’m not sure it would be effective to completely circumvent the covenant marriage state’s laws. If the wife moves to
New YorkCalifornia (oddly, New York is not a pure no-fault jurisdiction, I don’t think) and gets a no-fault divorce, her best-case scenario is getting a court order in California. If she wants to enforce that order against the husband in Kentucky – if the kids are there, if the house is there, if the assets and bank accounts are there – then at some point she will need to do that in a Kentucky court. You can’t seize a Kentucky asset or garnish a Kentucky wage or assign custody of a Kentucky child without a Kentucky court’s order, backed by the threat of Kentucky law enforcement. Normally you can “domesticate” an out-of-state order very easily to enforce it in your home state; but Kentucky could change its laws to forbid domestication of a divorce order that doesn’t comply with its divorce laws. Normally this would be a Full Faith and Credit issue, but states have traditionally had more leeway with their own marriage and divorce laws.One thing that has been suggested to me in conversation is the prospect of entering an arbitration agreement as a pre-nup that would remove primary jurisdiction of state courts for divorce decisions; the arbitrator would do all the decisions and then the court would enforce the resulting order. There is a federal policy in favor of enforcing arbitration agreements. I’ve seen something like this at least attempted in a reported case on orthodox Jews undergoing divorce. (Interestingly, I believe it’s also the nature of some of the decade-ago panic about “sharia courts”). I haven’t researched it to see how well it would go; my instinct is that courts would strike down the arbitration agreement as contrary to public policy, but I don’t know for sure.
Thinking more about it, this site and the SSC community generally seems like it should understand this hard commitment aspect of traditional marriage, because it’s very similar to the concept of “pre-commitment” that I see thrown around pretty often by Scott and others discussing superintelligent AI containment / negotiation / alignment, as well as some of the various esoteric consequentialist arguments.
So I get that people may lose something by not having all forms of precommitment be legally enforceable, but the question of what forms *should* be enforceable and how is not simple. The classic extreme case that always comes up in that discussion is the right to sell yourself into chattel slavery. If you don’t think that contract should be enforceable, then you’re in favor of some limits and the question is whether traditional marriage is slavery-like enough to be similarly nonenforceable. A few reasons to think that it is:
1. traditional marriage is a “contract for specific performance” (notably in the sexual realm, as people have brought up a lot in this thread) and in general contract law takes a dim view of specific performance requirements, because people’s minds change for all sorts of legitimate reasons and it is almost always better to let them buy their way out of contractual commitments than force them to actually go through with them.
2. enforceability questions tend also to revolve around the likelihood of duress and abuse, and history tells us that the likelihood of duress and abuse in traditional marriage is very high.
3. nonenforceability is also often about efficiency– the noncompete agreement example is a good one here; the main argument against enforcing noncompetes is that it hinders innovation by forcing people to stick with suboptimal employment matches. The happiness cost of forcing people to stick with suboptimal relationship matches is similarly high even though there may sometimes be similar benefits.
Furthermore, traditional communities have, and indeed still often use, nonviolent social means like ostracism to enforce their marital commitment norms. So it’s not clear that they’re losing so much by not being able to have the police power at their disposal also.
@salvorhardin
1. Many traditionalist here seem to be fine with people with a serious grievance buying out of the contract (or being let out by the government for free), but believe that the sum/threshold is kept far too low to be a meaningful deterrent to breaking the contract over minor grievances or after they have gotten many of the benefits of the contract, but before they pay the costs (of the quid-pro-quo).
2. Is that true? It seems more likely to me that such situations are harder to escape in traditional marriages, rather than that they are more common. In fact, it seems plausible that the number of people who experience abuse goes up when divorce/separation is easier, as abusive partners will presumably lose their partners more often and thus seek new partners more often.
Also, to what extent is one form of suffering traded for another, with the advocates treating some form of suffering as ‘unavoidable’, justified, less bad because it is not considered ‘abuse’ or ‘duress.’ For example, is “you can’t see your kids anymore” abuse? Many don’t seem to feel that way, at least, when it is said to men.
If you define away suffering produced by the new model and merely recognize the suffering of the old model, isn’t that stacking the deck?
3. This goes both ways, as noted. All kinds of efficient agreements become impossible to make when no penalty may be applied when an agreement is broken. For example, an employer that pays for an education for employees, rather than give a higher salary to well-educated employees, typically involves a period where the employee benefits far more than the employer from this investment and then a period where the employer benefits more. An inability to penalize the employee for leaving before the employer recoups enough of the investment, pretty much makes it impossible for employers to invest above a certain amount, since purely rational behavior by employees will result in the investment not being recouped.
Apparently, a traditional pattern is for women to spend quite a bit of effort on domesticating men with a similar difference in time between incurring a cost and getting the benefit for one party. Also, having a child tends to incur a higher short-term cost to one party. A hard to break marriage seems to have been a way to provide reasonable guarantees to the one party that the other would not leave after getting most the benefits, but not repaying the one party.
Interestingly, when jobs liberalized, liberals recognized the issue that employers could not be depended on for education as much anymore and introduced public schools. They recognized that the solution for one problem had problems of its own and sought to remedy it.
Yet I don’t see realistic attempts to domesticate men, for example. The ‘solution’ for women who raise children is merely to leave some of the traditionalist solution in place, rather than finding a new solution that fits the new model better.
In general, this is a complaint I have about the currently dominant type of liberal. They often seem to adopt the worst elements of both classical liberals and libertarians. Classical liberals seemed to have recognized the limits of liberalism and either used government or non-liberal solutions to attempt to fix the issues of increased liberalization, in a way that is consistent with the general model. Libertarians like Friedman want to go the other way and allow people to voluntarily bind themselves to very restrictive contracts, which can work, if people are smart and capable enough (spoiler alert: most aren’t).
Currently, the ‘solution’ to the problems of modern liberalization seems to be a combination of vilifying some groups and arguing that their problems are inconsequential & burdens placed on them don’t require a quid-pro-quo, even if they feel quite differently (which is anything but liberal); as well as prescribing very strongly how people should live and vilifying those who have different preferences and ignoring their problems (again, anything but truly liberal).
It’s really very much like traditionalism in that only a very limited number of choices are made possible, only traditionalism was actually more fair in very significant ways. For example, it didn’t involve as anywhere as much (unintentional) gaslighting, where people are told that they have all kinds of choices that they don’t actually have.
Of course, I think that the latter is extremely unpersuasive to most modern liberals, whose narrative of the past is IMO revisionist, in that the burdens and restrictions of traditionalism on some groups is seen as oppressive and benefiting other groups, but not vice versa, based on what seems to me to be primarily confirmation bias.
Aapje,
Just an anecdote for this old thread:
I matched with a woman in her mid-twenties on Tinder a while back. She had a 4 year old daughter and was annoyed that it seemed like guys did not want to date a woman with a kid. She had been married to the father, but broke up with him because she was bored with the relationship, even though he was a nice guy and a hard worker etc. He wanted to stay together and to get back together. Now she was looking for something more exciting on Tinder.
I couldn’t help feeling sad about the whole thing: the woman had broken up her family because her relationship wasn’t an exciting hollywood romance. Somehow our culture had failed her:
-she was never going to be happy with the boring relationship because her expectations were too high
-she didn’t know that finding a new husband when she already has a kid was going to be hard
-she didn’t know that whatever she finds on Tinder is not likely to be any better than what she had with her husband anyway
-I assume she doesn’t realize the damage this will do to her kid
How could someone in her mid-twenties be so naive? Surely because she has been lied to her whole life?
The law doesn’t require any family or friends to witness anything. You’re talking about marriage as a social institution, not a legal institution. I’m only talking about latter.
Why?
To spell out what I think Randy’s getting at: the social institution is what gave rise to the legal institution. If you think the social institution is irrelevant, you’re going to consistently misunderstand the legal institution.
Randy-
The premise of the conversation was the legal framework of marriage. That’s what EC’s original proposition was about. The conversation it came out of what specifically about the legal concept of consent and how it applied within marriage. Since “marriage” is an enormously wide topic, it seems reasonable to try to limit the scope of our conversation to something that can reasonably be covered in the space of an open thread with only four comment tiers.
The problem is that you unfairly privilege your own position when you define the scope such that your opponents’ reasons are all out of bounds
Even if there’s a social purpose that underpins a law, the law can’t guarantee that everyone will follow a social norm, it has to deal with the full range of human experience. You can say something like “The purpose of this law is to encourage couples to try to have kids even when they’re not really into it,” but if the law as written allows you to sodomize your spouse without their consent, then eventually some poor guy is going to get sodomized by someone who didn’t listen to the traditionalist discourse on marriage. And defending that situation by saying “you don’t understand the social institution of marriage” is sort of missing the point. If the law allows people who don’t want to have kids to get married, people who don’t want to have kids will get married.
Law is like code – if you write a copy-protection program that’s also a rootkit, then you wrote a rootkit. It won’t make anyone happier if you argue that they’re focusing too much on the code instead of on the noble, pro-social purpose of preventing software piracy.
With respect to children, legally recognized marriage is not about children, it’s about inheritable legitimacy of children.
This is why Jamie Lee Curtis is a baroness, while her husband’s older half brother is just a commoner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Haden-Guest#Family
This is also why married parents have long been free to hand their children off to an orphanage (or boarding school, or asylum) to raise.
Even without children, marriage also dictates general inheritance (sans will) between spouses and the spouses extended families, and has done so for centuries.
Marriage under US law is an incoherent mess that doesn’t map terribly well to the historical institution. Marriage has always been about sex to one degree or another since institution.
In fact, even under US law it has been about sex until VERY recently, meaning within my lifetime (and I’m a relatively young man).
This seems to be one of those things where liberals have changed the law and then say that anyone who still thinks that the old law was reasonable is “entirely absurd”.
Finally, most Americans still have religious marriages, which put more restrictions and obligations on the participants than do secular.
What laws on US books regarding marriage spoke to sex specifically? What does “VERY recently” mean? All of the conversation I’ve heard in my lifetime has been about going from “man and woman” to “two people”, which doesn’t require a discussion of sex. There were/are anti-sodomy laws on the books, but they didn’t say, “except in marriage” or something like that, AFAIK.
I’ve given a link below that a marriage with an impotent partner is invalid and can be annulled, but also rape laws, adultery laws, etc.
Very recently means the 90s, which is when most federal and state laws had marital rape exceptions removed, which was the change we were discussing.
If you’re talking about the United States, the answer is as usual “it’s complicated, fifty times over”. But aggregating over the various states and trying to generalize, we have in living memory seen laws against seduction, against fornication, against adultery, but as EC notes, not against rape in marriage. If the law is saying that having sex with anyone you aren’t married to is always a felony crime, but that having sex with the person you are married to is legal even if you have to beat them up and tie them to the bed(*), then that looks an awful lot like marriage even as a legal institution is very much about sex.
Also, at least some civil statutes did not recognize and/or allowed annulment (not just divorce) of any marriage that was not physically consummated by PiV sex, and recognizing a common-law marriage I think always required such.
* Pedantically, I think abusive husbands could still get thrown in jail for assault over the “beat them up” part, if the wife wanted to press the issue and could prove it.
From Wikipedia:
“The traditional definition of rape in the United States is the forced sexual intercourse by a male with a “female not his wife”, making it clear that the statutes did not apply to married couples. The 1962 Model Penal Code repeated the marital rape exemption, stating:
A male who has sexual intercourse with a female not his wife is guilty of rape if: ….[1]”
Also:
“Although the general marriage age is 18 in most of the United States, 48 states allow marriage under the age of 18 with parental and/or court consent. Only Delaware and New Jersey have enacted legislation to ban all marriage for minors under the age of 18, without exceptions. Such exceptions can create conflicts between age of consent laws and the marriage age, with most statutory rape laws creating exceptions for minors engaged in a sexual relationship with their lawful spouse – although such minors would otherwise not be able to legally consent to sex. ”
The latter passage does refer to laws that are still on the books.
How exactly do you think most couples get children, with their expenses and ability to inherit, without sex? IVF postdates most of our laws on marriage, and adoption has never constituted more than a small fraction of families.
That said, you’re half right. Marriage really isn’t about sex, it’s about procreation. Which is the real answer to the hypothetical question: anal sex, regardless of who is receiving, is inherently non-procreative. It’s not part of what you consent to as part of marriage, at least not unless you’re a Cathar in 13th century France.
You have a baby or three by some dashing rogue(s) and then marry a provider, silly.
Less of this, please.
Marriage isn’t about procreation. You can be married and no procreate. You can procreate and not be married. You can procreate with people outside your marriage, and unless you’re in the armed services, there’s no legal repercussion. From the legal perspective, it’s not about sex, procreation, or any of that.
And I think it’s just as irrelevant as your point about adoption, but there are tons of families that aren’t married, either due to divorce, out-of-wedlock conception, death, adoption, whatever. The institution of marriage doesn’t talk to any of that. At best, you could say that two-parent homes are give preference for things like adoption and custody, but once you start talking about that, you’re now clearly no longer talking about sex, which was my whole point.
This is false. Impotence is a valid reason for annulment in most US states. New York link provided as representative.
https://www.nycdivorcelawyers.com/can-marriage-annulled-never-consummated-2/
If marriage had nothing legally to do with sex, the lack of it wouldn’t make a marriage invalid.
By this logic, “marriage” is legally about anything that you can use a rationale for divorce, which according to this dumb listicle could include Presidential votes and Disney movie preferences.
@matthewravery
Annulment, not divorce. Annulment means the marriage never occurred because it was legally invalid. Other common examples are bigamous marriages, underage marriages and marriages under threat.
That sexual impotence makes a marriage invalid should tell you that it is as essential an element as exclusivity.
@EC
But “sexual impotence makes a marriage invalid” isn’t what that law says. It says it’s a reason you can choose to dissolve the marriage. That means that the law allows individuals to make it about procreation if they want, but the state doesn’t require it to be about that.
This is a recognition about how some individuals treat the legal institution within their own social framework, not a statement about the legal institution itself.
@matthewravery
That’s an impressive reach. Even deep blue New York views impotence as invalidating. Sex is therefore an element.
EC-
It’s a difference between “shall” and “may”. Those words mean very different things….
@matthewravery
So now the specific fact that the legal institution DOES recognize sex as an essential element isn’t proof that it is an essential element?
Earlier you stated it wasn’t an element at all. You’ve moved the goalposts now.
I would say that you’ve shown that NY recognizes that for some folks, impotence matters for marriage. I’d say you haven’t shown that they view it as “essential”. I don’t think this effects my original proposition, which was that
You’ve shown that the law recognizes that
care about it, not that the law itself does.
@matthewravery
Because it allows for annulment, the complete voiding of the validity of a marriage.
I am not sure how the law stating “this is such an important element that rather than just divorce we will state this marriage never existed in law” means the law doesn’t care. New York law privileges impotence to the same degree it does being compelled at gunpoint. That’s literally as high as it can privilege it.
Your argument is the equivalent of saying “well, you don’t have to tell New York you were forced at gunpoint, so it’s not that essential”
“You’ve shown that the law recognizes that some people care about it, not that the law itself does.”
This is a distinction without a difference and an example of goalpost-moving.
In partial defense of matthewravery’s point.
New York law recognizes “Void marriages”, and “voidable marriages”.
The only marriages that are inherently void under New York law are:
1) Bigamist (as defined in Domestic Relations Law 6)
2) Incestuous (as defined in Domestic Relations Law 5)
Voidable marriages (as defined in Domestic Relations Law 7) are only “void from the time its nullity is declared by a court of competent jurisdiction” (therefore aren’t inherently void, and did validly exist prior to this point). One of these reasons is impotence.
BUT PLEASE RECOGNIZE THAT, ESPECIALLY IN THIS ERA OF IVF, SEX =/= PROCREATION. SO THAT WHILE IT CAN BE ARGUED THAT matthewravery IS WRONG ABOUT SEX (IN THE CASE OF NEW YORK, AT LEAST), matthewravery IS NOT WRONG ABOUT PROCREATION (IN THE CASE OF NEW YORK, AT LEAST).
Marriage may be drifting this way, but if it is not about sex or children, it is a thing without any abouts at all.
As I said, as the law sees it, it’s mostly about money and taxation. See DinoNerd’s post below.
As the law sees it now, it’s mostly about money and taxation, and hospital visitation rights apparently.
The reason the law cares about those things, is that it at least used to want to ensure that a steady and adequate supply of money is available to care for the children that will inevitably follow when the happy couple start having officially authorized sex. The farther we get from that (and the more we encourage everyone to override the legal money stuff with prenuptual agreements), the more people are going to wonder why we still give a tax break for all this. Then marriage will be just a big party and a hospital-visitation card.
Or maybe some subcultures will preserve it as something more, outside the law. But I’m pretty sure most of the people doing that, will be doing so because they care about the sex and the children, and money only as it serves that end.
Are we doing that more though? I was under the impression that the trend was toward courts finding them invalid or unfair or unenforceable or whatever the proper legal term for “nope, pay up” is
Almost all of that law is recent, and was a deliberate attempt to reform (or subvert) traditional marriage.
Until the reform of no-fault divorce, impotence and infertility were valid causes for divorce. Until seduction, adultery and sodomy laws were repealed, all sex outside of marriage was illegal and married couples were forbidden by law from engaging in non-procreative sex acts. Until the concept of marital rape was invented neither spouse could legally refuse to engage in procreative sex.
The traditional view of marriage, and the law regarding it until very recently, viewed marriage as primarily concerned with children and childrearing. Everything else was secondary.
Conservatives seems to have reacted disproportionately to gay marriage compared to the changes you list (I don’t know for sure, wasn’t there). The phrase “changing the definition of marriage” applies perfectly to laws that tinkered around with the edges of the concept to the point someone can look at it now and be unable to discern its core purpose.
As I argued before, the earlier changes were more fundamental, but same-sex marriage was the more visible departure. By the way, I’m just going to say I partially predicted this thread:
@Randy M,
Well since you comment at Dalrock’s blog you should understand why that is.
The rot of chivalry runs very deep in conservative Christianity. I would go further and say that the slave morality inherent in it made it especially vulnerable, which is why adherents of Indo-European paganism like the Hindus still have some vitality left despite being exposed to chivalry for centuries through British rule.
@ Nick
Good. It’s about time that marriage reverted to it’s prehistoric traditional form of a personal bond between two people that let the rest of the tribe know to not interfere with their relationship, unless called on to do so. Also that said bond is inherently severable by either of the two parties involved in the bond, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
(Since by definition no one knows what the prehistorical origins of marriage are, no one can dispute my claim.)
Let’s get real on this “reason for marriage” thing. Imagine a world where there was sex but it had zero connection with having babies. Babies came some other way, but people still knew about sex and wanted it. Would there be an institution of marriage? No. Marriage is about the kids. When marriage arose people knew that if they had sex kids were inevitable. Given the inevitability of kids. there needed to be an institution to provide for them and to make sure that the providers were caring for their own.
People seem to organize themselves into pairs a lot of the time for various reasons– children, property, companionship.
Even in the absence of children, their property gets quite entangled and there are times (hospitals, nursing homes) when access to companionship matters. It seems reasonable to me for the government to get involved. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to try to establish what the most important reason is.
+1 Nancy!
@HowardHolmes
Relationships have been externally defined for a variety of reasons throughout the existence of humankind. It appears that more than one kind of relationship was lumped into a superset called “marriage”, and we should not lose sight of this fact.
On a tangent, but directly addressing your point: It’s striking to me how much people ignore that many throughout history have had children out of wedlock, and that no externally defined relationship was created (except infrequently, and tribally, or recently with DNA evidence) forcing the other parent of said child to take care of that child.
@Nancy Lebovitz
Platonic close friends very rarely get married, which suggests that the sex(ual attraction) part is very central to marriage.
@Aapje
Chicken and egg problem. These days, and even in days of yore, it was uncommon for people to have sex, cohabitate, and never be married.
If platonic friends can occasionally get married, and carnal pairs can refrain from getting married, the relationship between sex and marriage can only be partial.
I agree that marriage is, in the US today, primarily a contract about money. The main impacts of being married in the eyes of the law:
– different tax rates
– different inheritance taxes
– automatic co-ownership of various kinds (depends on the state), e.g. community property, without needing a complex individual legal arrangement
– stronger position when dealing with hospitals and other bureaucrats
There are also some legal impacts on any children conceived by a married woman – basically presumptions about fatherhood.
Being married means other things socially and religiously. But those vary depending on (sub)culture.
Note that I don’t disagree that for some religious and cultural groups, marriage is about children. I’ve attended weddings of people in those groups. I just note that those customs don’t have much legal standing.
I presume that for other groups it’s primarily about sex. But I actually have less evidence for that, except in the specific case of forbidding any sex outside of marriage, which is common.
This is my point. When talking about what marriage means legally, you’re talking about the things you listed above. So if you want to talk about how marriage effects the criminality of certain acts, it helps to remember that legally, it’s not about sex.
Presumption, sure, but a paternity test can nip that presumption in the bud pretty quickly. If you’re the bioparent, you have bioparent responsibilities, tax avoidance pact or no.
I wish that was true but unfortunately the law doesn’t see it that way.
If you’re married to a woman and she has a baby, legally you’re on the hook even if you have a paternity test proving that it isn’t yours. It goes back to Blackstone and English Common Law, when obviously there was no such thing as paternity testing.
TIL.
I’m not sure if this is a point in my favor or a point against, since in this case, it implies a child care responsibility even if you didn’t have sex at all.
If you didn’t have sex at all, at least under the traditional rules, a quickie anullment means you were officially never married at all and so have no child care responsibilities.
This is not generally true.
@Cliff
You can deny paternity, but there’s a time limit for that. I think it’s like a couple of years; if you discover your child isn’t yours when they’re quite old, tough luck, you still have to pay child support, unless the biological parent is willing and able to adopt the child, or there’s another man willing to adopt the child.
I believe that’s usually a time limit from the time you know (or should have known) that the child was not yours. Alternatively, if you establish child support without disputing paternity, you may have a hard time coming back from that.
None of the above is legal advice.
IANAL either, but I’ve heard that if you act as a father beyond the infant/baby phase, and the children remember you, it’s pretty hard to deny parentage, and not pay child support. Even if DNA tests prove that you aren’t the father, once you have acted as a father for long enough, you are the father, in the best interest of the child.
It seems to highly depend on the state/country. But usually the best interest of the child are still taken into account.
Why are you privileging different tax rates over, say, spousal privilege? I’m sure tax rate comes up more often, but can you really say it’s more essential?
Sure. But that’s just another example of a legal implication of marriage that’s entirely unrelated to performing sex acts.
AIUI even back in the mythical golden age some want to return to, marriage as a legal institution was mostly concerned with dowries and the like. There were other social and religious aspects, of course, but there was no need for the law to concern itself with them.
In a monocultural society where everyone belongs to the same religion, what is or isn’t a legal aspect of marriage is much less relevant as a question. But good luck trying to bring that back.
This is like you showing a paper shaded in the outline of a face and asking why we say it’s a picture of a person, when there’s literally no marks on it that correspond to a face (except for those that have been erased).
Indeed. I don’t mean to strawman, but to me this is saying “liberals have removed all the traditional elements of marriage. Why do conservatives keep asking for them back?”
But even the marks that are there point to the purpose.
It’s weird to look at even what is left and conclude that’s all it is without asking why we want to make legal incentives for two people to remain in an economic contract?
I’ve never understood why conservatives took an absolutist stance in the 90s when they’ve could’ve just opted to remove the word “marriage” from the state’s lexicon entirely, leaving churches free to “marry” whomever they wanted and the courthouse free to “civil unionize” whomever they wanted.
Because at the time, they were winning, decisively. In the Bush years, conservatives ran a series of state ballot initiatives about keeping or affirming marriage as straights only, and ran up a series of lopsided wins in states across the country (including a number of liberal states). It was widely believed that these initiatives drove turnout and contributed to Republican electoral victories as well.
Immediately ceding ground in a fight you’re winning isn’t something that it often done. Conservatives would have had to be able to look ahead and predict the issue turning on them, and since they believed they had the better arguments, that would have been hard to predict.
They were winning but in the wrong forum. The real battle was decided in the courts, with the progressive investment in taking over institutions such as universities and media paying off in the long run to overturn the will of the people. Only now is Trump nominating lots of conservative judges, and time will tell if that pays off, but recent history suggests it will.
Probably not. Conservative courts are conservative, less willing to overturn established decisions even if they wouldn’t have made those decisions in the first place. As Chesterson put it, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
@The Nybbler
+1 to the Chesterton quote.
Which by process of elimination would mean Chesterton’s politics was undoing the mistake, which is called reaction. Then paradoxically, there’s this.
— What’s Wrong With the World
Traditionally this wouldn’t be an issue since sodomy was an offense by itself.
Were sodomy laws ever actually applied in this way (i.e. with female perpetrators and male victims)? My suspicion is no, but I could be wrong. Regardless, if you want to defend marital rape exceptions by making an argument that also relies on defending laws against sodomy, be my guest. If so, please note that you either have to defend sodomy laws that ban all forms of non-procreative sex including the sexy normal stuff in straight porn as well as the yucky putting things in men’s bottoms, or find some principled argument for distinguishing between those categories.
A society which enforces sodomy laws probably also has laws against pornography, so I’m not sure that this is anywhere near as good of a gotcha as you think.
That said, as a non-relgious traditionalist I’m of two minds about sodomy laws. On the one hand, banning foreplay between married couples is dumb even if it’s never actually going to be enforced. On the other hand, given that an epidemic disease transmitted in large part by anal sex has claimed 32 million lives worldwide and is still chugging along… maybe our ancestors knew what they were doing and we should bow to their wisdom here.
Eh, that’s more of a promiscuity problem and less a sodomy one. Syphilis, gonorrhea and their PIV ilk have done plenty too. I am neither a doctor nor a historian but I’d put money on anal in the pre-hygiene era having other health problems, though. Anti-promiscuity falls into the “maybe our ancestors were right” bucket too, but your specific attribution kinda muddies the waters here.
It’s kind of hard to cleanly separate the two, because the bathhouse culture which cultivated HIV was both massively more promiscuous and much more prone to anal sex than the general population. Even today, men who have sex with men (MSM) report higher numbers of sexual partners than the male average.
Either way, enforcing laws against sodomy would have prevented the formation of that culture and quite possibly saved tens of millions of lives in the process. As utilitarian calculus it’s an obvious choice.
Most AIDS deaths have been in Africa, where, to my understanding, sodomy laws are still on the books in many countries and the disease is also much more commonly spread between heterosexual partners: indeed it’s more common there among women than men, while in the States it’s more like 4:1 male. Retaining (and actually enforcing, which is probably a taller order) those laws in the States might conceivably have done something to slow the spread of AIDS through the American gay community, but even in a best-case scenario that saves at most a few hundred thousand people, not tens of millions.
We’ve been around for 10 kyears and an STD predominantly spread by anal has appeared once, long after sodomy laws were established. It’s obvious that the people who put Wilde and Turing on trial were clairvoyant.
It’d be like making handshakes illegal to pre-empt a terrible plague spread by palm-to-palm contact.
The same point as in my comment above applies to this: if your argument for a marital rape exception is forced to blow up into an argument for “traditionalist” attitudes towards everything then that makes it much less compelling. Arguments are more interesting when they’re narrow.
Weak shit dude. The vast majority of HIV/AIDS deaths are in Subsaharan Africa where it is primarily spread by heterosexual/PIV sex, no?
I don’t have the data on hand for “primarily”, but transmission risk with anal sex is much higher for almost all STDs, not just for AIDS.
On the other hand, it’s usually much lower for oral, which I believe was also covered by some sodomy laws.
@thisheavenlyconjugation,
Try making a “narrow argument” for why light switches are important without mentioning light bulbs or wiring. The circuit doesn’t properly perform its function unless all of the parts function properly. Likewise with a society.
I was somewhat unclear in the parent comment but I was talking about how HIV initially spread and became the epidemic it is today. And given how it arose almost immediately after the sexual revolution and loosening of restrictions on gay sex in particular, I’m highly doubtful that this is the first or last time an epidemic disease came about like this. If you have a nigh-universal taboo which within a few decades of breaking it leads to tens of millions of people dying horribly as a result of the taboo behavior, that’s just about the strongest possible case that you could make in favor of the taboo.
It initially spread in the States through the gay community — also intravenous drug users and the unlucky recipients of contaminated blood transfusions, but mostly the gay community. That is not true worldwide, as I said above; the US played only a minor role in making it a global epidemic; and there haven’t been tens of millions of American deaths from it. (Incidentally, the developed country with the highest infection rates at the moment is Russia, which isn’t known for its progressive sexual attitudes.)
You could turn this into a decent argument, but you’re overplaying your hand badly here.
I’d bet that in Europe HIV was also primarily spread by MSM, at least until the heroin abuse epidemic of the 90s.
Even today MSM in the US have some 30-50x higher risk of HIV infection compared to the general population.
In various African countries HIV is now so common in the general population that most new infections are between heterosexuals just because there are many more heterosexuals than MSM, but who spread the disease initially is anybody’s guess. Probably unhygienic healthcare practices such as needle reuse at hospitals played a bigger role compared to first-world countries.
I’m not a fan of legislating what consenting adults do in their bedroom, I was just pointing out that traditional sexual morality and legislation had an internal consistency.
Even where sodomy was not banned, or the ban was not enforced, it certainly didn’t count as “sex” for the purposes of marital rape exceptions.
As per here, that’s not true in general.
And in any case, even in cases where that was true, the example I gave has a female perpetrator and male victim. I believe the way “traditional sexual morality” dealt with those situations was by treating them as inconceivable. So even the “traditional” setup was internally consistent and is externally consistent with the views of a modern traditionalist who opposes sodomy, it’s not consistent with a modern traditionalist who opposes male-perpetrated sodomy and also rape of men by women.
Conjugal visitation is very much a thing. So much a thing that prisoners manage to make babies while in prison. Although it seems to be limited to some states in the US, and it’s a privilege, not a right. It is a right in Spain, and some other countries.
The Catholic church, which won’t marry you if you divorced, will grant annulments for not having PiV sex ever, or not consummating a marriage. Marriage is very much about sex.
The more interesting question to me is do the folks who hold the position that marital rape should not be a crime also want to allow for easy (or any) divorce or not?
There’s also the whole, rape is wrong thing.
I can’t speak for everyone, but no.
Marriage shouldn’t be entered into lightly, for the same reason that you shouldn’t have a child lightly. It involves taking on a lot of responsibilities and you should need a damn good reason before dumping those responsibilities on other people. Having sex with your spouse is one of those responsibilities.
This is a question about the definition of rape.
Much like pro-choice people are unconvinced by calling abortion murder, I am unconvinced by calling sex with your spouse rape.
Marrying someone means literally getting up and swearing lifelong fidelity in your denomination’s church in front of your whole family and friends, then signing a license at a courthouse. That’s about as affirmative as consent can possibly get.
So, no grounds for divorce, some grounds for divorce (abuse of self, abuse of children, infidelity, abandonment)?
Because people don’t change. Situations don’t change. And no one was ever forced into a marriage. Especially not if we’re playing under the old rules.
People and situations do change, and life gets hard, and your spouse is supposed to be there to support you, and that’s why it is a lifelong commitment you publicly swore to in front of your friends and family.
In my view, some grounds for divorce. Adultery, etc. When we had “at fault” divorce, there still were divorces.
I second A Definite Beta Guy here. Precommitment to stay together knowing that both will change is very important to people.
This is grounds for not just divorce, but annulment in every state I know of. Being compelled into a contract makes that contract invalid.
But just to be clear, ‘he rapes me every night’ is not grounds for divorce?
Let’s unpack this a bit. Traditionally, the ones I’m aware of are: Adultery, abuse, neglect, impotence, abandonment, insanity and criminality (which may overlap) is that a reasonable list?
Now, there’s a real narrow line you’re walking with abuse is grounds for divorce, but rape isn’t. If we’re talking no force (ETA: or improper threat, though what is improper may be a topic for discussion) at all may be used, then I think that I’m not sure what you think should be changed. It is not rape to ask your spouse to have sex with you, or attempt to initiate sex. The whole discussion in the last thread seemed confused on what was at issue with consent. Having sex with your partner because they want to, but you’re not particularly interested is no more rape than buying them dinner when you’re not hungry is theft. That whole line of argument was a non-sequitur.
Okay, that last part is not actually a requirement of marriage. But putting that aside, I’m reminded of a different quote from Lois McMaster Bujold:
“The trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.”
I’ll also point out that those oaths do not contain an out for abuse, or adultery, or anything else (at least the ones I’m familiar with), so unless I’m confused, we’re all in agreement that they can be broken, the only question is when.
@ECD
You can’t rape the willing. Once she’s given consent, it can’t be rape until that consent is withdrawn. Consent given publicly and signed has a specific way to be withdrawn, which is divorce. But yes, “he wants sex too much” is not a valid reason for divorce.
It wasn’t, because it was based on a code that stated that consent could not be given while sleeping or incapacitated (e.g. by drunkenness). If my wife chooses to get absolutely plastered before we have sex or wake me up with sex, that is sexual assault by law (not rape, because no violence). That is what brought it up. The correct standard should be the assumption of consent within marriage.
Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline. – G.K. Chesterton
Matthew 19:8 8 He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.
Until the hearts are man are no longer hard, divorce will be allowable for the reasons Moses gave.
Well, no, it can also be withdrawn by saying ‘no.’ Or by moving away, or by any number of other things.
I disagree. The correct standard should be ‘have a conversation with your spouse.’
Now, in the UCMJ provision quoted (none of this is legal advice, seriously) there’s two bits that seem to be causing problems, where it says it’s just straight up sexual assault to:
or
You give two examples. In the first, you and your spouse get drunk and have sex (or even just your spouse gets drunk and you have sex). In the second, your spouse wakes you up with sex.
In the first case, “incapable of consenting” is a defined term:
Now, if your spouse is so drunk they have reached that level of incapacity and you know that, no, you should not be having sex. I’m comfortable with that remaining illegal. I don’t think we’re going to be able to convince each other.
The second point, the wake-up sex, I’m more sympathetic to. I think a conversation in advance might be enough to get you over the lack of consent issue. But the straight language about knowing their asleep is not consent dependent. However, this is dependent on what happens while you’re asleep being a “sexual act” which is also a defined term.
So there are (fun!) ways a spouse might wake you up without counting as sexual assault (depending on how “or to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person” was interpreted).
The language certainly isn’t perfect, but that’s why we’ve got prosecutorial discretion (and you know, privacy, so someone would have to report this). (ETA: And the ability to change the law. I think sticking in a consent exception might be sufficient for this, though I’m unsure how they’d interpret can’t consent if you’re asleep, whether your pre-existing consent (to the specific act in question) would be sufficient).
In the end, I’m reminded of the period in law school after I first learned about battery and trespass and was terribly concerned that I was breaking the law every day. Writing better laws is hard, but worthwhile,
@ECD
Depends on how legally enforceable the consent was. You can certainly say “no” to supporting your wife and children financially, but the state will come in and make sure you honor your contracts or it will literally have men with guns imprison you for not honoring it.
Obviously. Every healthy marriage has conversations all the time. We’re talking legal standards here. And the legal standard should be “the law assumes that when you’ve given legal consent for something, it actually means legal consent”.
No, we’re clearly not. I will continue despite that because third parties reading this might be interested. It is not uncommon for women to have fantasies of being used while blackout drunk. I’ve known several such. Making that blanket illegal is bad, as with anything.
I agree a conversation in advance is needed. Here it is: “Do you take this man to be your husband? Yes? Do you take this woman to be your wife? Yes?”
That is the serious point I am making, despite the lightheartedness. The state should assume that the legally and aggressively public consent is valid unless it has compelling reason to believe otherwise (divorce or separation). Laws written assuming a lack of consent between husband and wife are inherently bad.
This is a bad argument, in my opinion. Would you accept the banning of homosexual sex because sometimes it isn’t consensual and it’s basically never prosecuted and it would require one party to report that a private act occurred?
If you won’t accept that, realize why making the sex that a husband and wife have illegal is also bad.
@EchoChaos
Which is why I proposed amendments to the relevant statute which would address consent being sufficient, so long as it was specific.
Your scenario for blackout drunk involves knowledge and prior (to the intoxication) consent. I’m not so worried about that scenario. But, since you want to talk law, let’s play this out a little differently.
Spouse’s father dies. Spouse gets blackout drunk mourning their dead parent. Other spouse has sex with their unconscious body. No crime?
Spouse takes sleeping pills for insomnia. One night forgets to take them and wakes up to discover other spouse is raping their unconscious body and has been doing so for the last six months. No crime?
But that’s the point, it’s not assuming a lack of consent, it’s requiring affirmative consent. Now, if you want to argue the UCMJ isn’t perfectly written, I’ll agree, but the solution to that is amendment to address that, not the removal of protections from marital rape.
I’ll also say, I think you underestimate just how much abuse can be done and control can be gained without ever raising a hand to someone, especially a co-parent and especially a financial dependent. For all the talk about
The one study my quick search finds indicates that men tend to do significantly better (financially) after divorce than women (https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2008-07.pdf note, this study is in the UK).
I’ll also point out two things, (1) we’ve slid from spouses to spouse and child and the child certainly hasn’t consented to anything. (2) I’m having trouble finding statistics, but it’s my understanding that alimony is a lot less common. The number I’ve heard tossed around is 10%, but I can’t figure out the census site to check (at least not in the 10 minutes I played with their tables).
Also, yes, we treat money and bodies differently. I’m glad about that, frankly. It’s why I can, if I want, contract to give you all my money (so long as there’s consideration) but I can’t contract to be your slave. Which is how it should be (though I’m sure there are those who disagree).
Nice prose but the fact of the matter is that the specific sorts of oaths we’re discussing were legal and common until very, very recently and they didn’t actually have this effect.
Waking a spouse up with sex can be rape.
Or at least I read an account by a woman who said that her husband kept doing it even after she said she didn’t want it. She eventually divorced him.
Great Bujold quote. I’d say it’s a general argument for moral standards that people can abide by.
By “third parties reading this,” do you mean “the cops”?
@ECD
No crime.
Impossible. Rape can’t occur when there is consent. Please stop using language we haven’t agreed on. It would be like, as @Nabil ad Dajjal said if I kept saying murder when we were talking about abortion.
But yes, no crime.
Fair, alimony only. Still enforced by the law, although in a smaller minority of cases.
And because you disagree, you’ve taken a well established Christian right away from me and my wife. You are in fact imposing your morality on us because your team happens to have the votes.
I’m not expecting that to change, by the way. The United States will remain a feminist country for my whole life, likely. Just arguing against it.
@Nancy Lebovitz
She formally withdrew her consent because she thought her husband was abusing it. Very reasonable.
@rahien.din
Heh. No, I meant I am not convincing @ECD, but I may convince someone else.
If you truly believe that your husband is raping you, and thus greatly breaking your trust, there are three things that can be done: a) continue as is, try to tell him you don’t like that, who knows, he may stop; b) divorce; c) divorce and press criminal charges. Pressing charges without divorce is a fraught and risky proposition, since living with, or being otherwise dependant on, a man you are pressing charges against, is very risky.
So, considering she divorced him over the non-consensual sleep sex, did she press charges? The vast majority of people have a view of morality that vastly differs from the law af the land. Many people would not want to see an ex in jail, even if they want their pound of flesh in assets.
The number of people who would divorce and press charges over non-violent sleep/drunk/drugged sex is probably negligible, especially if the spouse was not the one providing the drug/drink. And if it’s not violent, it’s gonna be quite hard to prove lack of consent, and that the sex occurred at all. Getting a criminal conviction with such a sex act in a marriage is going to be almost impossible, so nobody even tries to report it.
I’ve given you all the information I’ve got, except that she said he said his waking her up with sex was based on a Heinlein quote. I can’t find a Heinlein quote to that effect.
My impression is that she simply divorced him without bringing charges, but I don’t really know.
I thought part of this discussion was about whether marital rape makes sense as a concept, not just to what extent it can be illegal.
Assuming without accepting your description of it as a “Christian right” is correct, of course I (in the sense of the majority of the country through action in all 50 states) am. I didn’t think that was in dispute.
Of course, the flipside of that was that until the change, the Christian majority was forcing it’s morality on everyone else by denying them the protection of the law.
Also, I’ll point out, the sodomy discussion above is simply historically incorrect at least in some areas:
Now, this is from the case overturning that fact in Alabama (https://web.archive.org/web/20131029202750/http://www.law.ua.edu/colquitt/crimmain/crimcase/wms.htm)
Granting the equal protection challenge in the reverse direction the defendant had hoped for (https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/cases/1533).
Again, I think you underestimate how bad the situation under the Christian right for everyone system was.
ETA: For a different, but related example, which may be less fraught, consider the old Head & Master laws, until they were struck down, which certainly were not limited to Christian marriages, but affected the property rights of everyone who got married in the state.
@echochaos
Can you really not concieve of a legal and ethical framework in which one can sensibly consent in advance to, say wake-up head but that does not very strongly encourage no-holds-barred carte-blanche lie-back-and-think-of-England blanket consent as the only correct institution in which to raise children?
‘Consent’ that can’t be retracted even when one barty is crying and screaming for the other to stop. That can only be undone by a lengthy legal process.
@ECD
Sure, but it’s the left that traditionally decries “legislating morality”. I am fine legislating my morality.
And I note that it was other traditionalists who discussed sodomy. I accepted the hypothetical. But thanks for the information.
@Lambert
Of course I can understand it. But it is no business of the state getting involved in it. There are lots of things that are potentially exploitative that the state shouldn’t get involved in.
The fact that some small percentage of bad actors exploit the marriage contract is no reason to get rid of it, and in my view the destruction of marriage (of which this discussion is a tiny subset) has had far worse effects than the occasional woman having to lie back and think of England.
And again, actual violence to inflict the sexual act has always been illegal. We’re now talking about a very small subset who are only abusive in that they exploit consent and don’t actually do any other abuse. I am not particularly concerned about that epidemic.
As am I, basically, though I’m far less certain my morality is correct, so suffer from a fairly bad status-quo bias, except where it is obviously producing bad results.
Meh, I’ve heard that, but I think it just hides a different set of morals. I tend to think of the debate about legislating morality a lot like I think of originalism, frankly.
I may be overly cynical, but in the vast majority of cases the arguments for both seem like bullshit shifting of the argument. For the first it’s a shift from ‘is this right’ to ‘are you trying to legislate this because you want to force everyone else to live by your rules’? For the second it’s a shift from, ‘is this constitutional,’ to ‘what mind reading can I do of people dead for two centuries?’
As I said in the previous thread, if laws against non-sexual assault are sufficient to deal with marital rape then they should be sufficient to deal with non-marital rape too. So you either need to justify that or argue why there should be a distinction. I’m sure you can attempt the latter by making vague comments about the implicit consent given by marriage, but that isn’t good enough. You need to explain why a rapist who would be sentenced to several years in prison if their victim was not their spouse may not deserve any jail time (based on typical sentences for small assault charges) if they are married to the victim.
The whole point is probably moot because of the difficulty of enforcement. With or without a “marital rape” exemption, or for that matter a marriage, once you shack up with someone under circumstances where outsiders expect you to be having regular consensual sex it is going to be intractably difficult for outsiders (e.g. juries) to disentangle the “He said, she said” of any claim that this time wasn’t consensual. If you shack up with someone, they’ll almost certainly be able to get away with raping you at least once and probably until you announce to the world that you’re officially not shacked up any more. If you don’t trust them enough to accept that risk, you know what to do.
At the level of social enforcement, even cultures with marital-rape exemptions generally expect that a “real man” wouldn’t have to beat his wife up to get her to sleep with him, and even cultures without marital-rape exemptions generally expect that a wife shouldn’t go Full Lysistrata on her husband or vice versa. Or vice versa. So if you bring it to the community in obviously-extreme cases, appropriate shaming will probably happen regardless of the law. If you bring it up in marginal cases (e.g. the husband once thought it would be romantic to wake his wife with sex, stopped when she clearly wasn’t into it, but she’s upset it happened even once), then even your closest friends probably aren’t going to want to be part of that drama.
My impression is that people who believe there’s no such thing as marital rape aren’t necessary think in terms of a man beating up his wife in order to get sex, they’re thinking in terms of him overpowering her.
I expect that a good many of them also think husbands are entitled to hit their wives and also that it doesn’t matter if wives hit their husbands, but I’m guessing.
By the way, women also sexually abuse men and it does real damage.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/52kvpi/serious_men_who_have_been_raped_sexually/
@Nancy: I had to read your last statement twice. The first time I parsed “physically abuse” – the old beat with a frying pan cliche et al.
I believe the word both of you are looking for is “libertine”, a sometimes ally of liberals, when both are against the legislation of conservatives morality.
When I think of liberals opposing legislation of morality, it’s generally “don’t impose your morality on me.” The “your” is important, it’s not a general “your”, it’s a specific “your”. And I hear the same thing from conservatives, though generally the word they use is “immorality”.
Right. If a man beats up his wife to get sex, for e.g. hospitalization-worthy levels of “beat up”, pretty much everyone in every culture is going to think he’s a loser for having to do that and there’s a good chance they’re going to punish him for the offense of “beating up his wife” even if they don’t punish him for rape.
If a man “overpowers” his wife to get sex but without “beating her up”, pretty much everyone in every culture is going to either think of that as somewhere in (but maybe on the edge of) acceptable behavior in marriage, or think of it as drama they’d really rather not get involved in and if they are going to get involved in it they’d like the wife to simplify the drama by finding a reason to divorce the lout as step one. Or both.
Even by the old rules, “abuse” was one of the classically acceptable reasons for divorce. Somewhere on the line that leads through “overpowering” to “beating up”, one reaches “abuse” and ends the marriage (and the lout’s ability to keep raping his wife).
You can have a legislation where marital sex is an obligation but marital rape is illegal: you aren’t allowed to rape your spouse on any specific occasion, but if they consistently refuse sex then it is ground for at fault divorce, or even for financial compensation. Essentially consistently refusing sex is considered a breach of contract.
As per the link above, there are several Western countries which have such legislation.
I might as well throw in an example– this is a story a woman told me. I have no reason to think she was lying.
She had a funny story. She wanted a child, her husband didn’t. So she got him drunk during a Superbowl, and then had unprotected sex with him.
The funny part is that her son turned out to be a sports fan.
I heard this story decades ago. I was horrified, but I didn’t have as many standardized opinions as I might now. Also, I don’t like telling people off.
After a bit of thought, I asked her how her husband took it.
She suddenly looked sad, and said it might have had something to do with the divorce.
So, no violence. Presumably rape by the standards some people believe.
Is there a difference between this and making a hole in the condom?
The sex itself in this situation (if she used a condom and didn’t do it purposefully) would probably be OK. So the issue is getting pregnant without the other person’s consent, which is possible by damaging condoms, lying about taking the pill, and such means that don’t involve forceful sex.
I know of some women who have “accidentally” gotten pregnant with a second child, when the husband was happy with just one. The men are quite happy with their second kids.
My feeling is that unwanted sex with someone who’s been gotten drunk is more of a personal violation than sabotaging birth control, but that’s a guess.
Interesting about men who were happy with an unchosen second child, though I want a larger data set.
I also suspect that not wanting children at all is a stronger desire than wanting to stop at one child.
Also, did the wife in that scenario admit it wasn’t an actual accident? If not, we’re just in a ‘well, he doesn’t know I’m cheating, so there’s no harm, right?’ situation.
But more generally, yeah, I’m sure there are people who are fine (fake) and fine (for real) with violations of boundaries and agreements which would send me personally running for a lawyer who knew something about family law. The solution to that is to offer people outs when they want them, but not force them to take them.
ETA: This was mostly a response to ana above you.
ana53294, the way she told the story, she deliberately had unprotected sex with him after having gotten him drunk because she wanted a child.
I *think* you’re just exploring a hypothetical, but you’re ignoring the actual situation.
Well, would it be as bad if she deliberately had protected sex with him, while he was drunk?
The harm here comes in what feminists call “reproductive rape” – forcefully conceiving a child despite explicit desire not to have it.
I consider the reproductive rape part of it as separate from the rape part, by pointing out that she could also have reproductivelly raped him by making a hole in a condom, or using the semen out of the discarded condom.
As things go, having sex with your drunk husband while he can’t consent clearly is probably wrong, but wouldn’t be seen as a big deal by almost anyone (I wouldn’t think it’s a big deal, if there was no physical harm, as these are people who regularly have sex with each other anyways).
The harm comes from the forceful reproduction, which is why I see having deliberate unprotective sex as not that different from other strategies some females use, that I indicated above.
But from what I’ve heard of cases where a woman gave a blow job to a man, stored the semen and got pregnant, reproductive rape is not a crime you go to jail over, even though everybody sees it as wrong.
My opinion is that the sex while drunk was not that bad, although sketchy; the really shitty part was getting pregnant by a man who doesn’t want a baby, and that’s wrong regardless of whether sex is involved or not.
I think the situation I describe was amplified by her getting him drunk. On the one hand, he did the drinking but on the other, it was a betrayal of trust.
Psychologically, yes. People have different beliefs about the impact of alcohol on responsibility. So the drunk husband may feel co-responsible for the pregnancy, and therefore blame his wife less. With some good gaslighting skills, he could be made feel fully responsible.
On the other hand, with the hole in condom, he can be made believe it was no one’s fault. No gaslighting would be necessary. He would blame bad luck. This option seems more reliable.
Is it possible to have random holes in condoms? My understanding is that it has to be a pretty deliberate act, so the wife would be responsible, anyway.
But yes, I guess that reproductively raping somebody and denying any responsibility makes it worse.
Condoms usually don’t have holes [citation needed], but the husband could assume it happened in the factory/shop.
Though now I wonder: if a condom has a hole, how likely would actually the man notice it (a) before use, and (b) after use. The latter is relevant because the first hole in condom doesn’t necessarily lead to pregnancy, and the husband might become suspicious if previously okay condom brand would suddenly start leaking like a sieve.
I suppose it depends on how specifically the hole is made (by a needle?) and probably also where (in the center?). Time to buy a box of condoms and run some experiments. 😀
Arguably condoms do usually have exactly one hole, although any topologists in the audience will presumably disagree.
By the old, old rules, that marriage was never adequately consummated and so didn’t exist in the first place. By the old rules, a woman can’t rape a man not no way not no how, but it’s amusing to imagine a judge hearing their testimony, annulling the marriage, and charging the wife with fornication. But we probably don’t really want that.
By anything but the oldest and most traditional rules, I think there’s a general recognition that it is at least sometimes reasonable for a married couple to try and not have children right now, so the issue is going to come up. And I’m not entirely averse to marriages where the couple firmly wants to not have children ever. But having children soon-ish is still the default behavior for married couples, so if that’s not your plan then I think you really, really need to have both parties explicitly on board with whatever the plan is.
If that’s not the case, the one who secretly defects and messes with the agreed-upon contraceptives (or lack thereof) is the scoundrel and probably at the “worth divorcing but not arresting them” level.
“as I understand it, you get a right to privacy with your spouse, not the right to have sex with them.”
This is just dancing around the issue: we all know why it was created and maintained, even if we prefer to use euphemisms.
Yeah, about that, from Wikipedia:
Oof, all of this criticism! I’ll keep it in mind next time I’m considering a comment like above.
For the record, I wasn’t trying to argue at all, I just thought people would find it amusing. Apparently it didn’t land that way… I thought it was amusing at least…
+1
A promos of nothing at all, this song makes me want to take up crack. Also I think the 1-800-COCAINE number it advertises as giving advice is going to give you boring advice like “Love yourself and stop taking drugs”, not “Go down to 11th and Ross Ave, they got the good shit there.”
A lot of people with Jeep Wranglers, at least where I live, modify them to look more aggressive. The most unsubtle way they do this is by adding completely non-functional pieces that look like snarling, furrowed brows going across the top of the headlamps and grille. (Sort of the opposite of the big plastic eyelashes some people add to the headlamps of their VW Beetles.) Would you predict that the owners of these Jeeps, on average, have more or less aggressive personalities than other Jeep owners? Would you also predict that the owners of these Jeeps are, on average, more or less physically capable of acting on aggression than other Jeep owners?
I’m personally agnostic about this question. Instinctively I want to say that people who put a lot of effort into signalling their aggressiveness are probably both more aggressive themselves and for whatever reason less confident in their ability to act on their aggression when needed (e.g. people with “Napoleon syndrome”), but I distrust my intuition here. There are probably a lot of other factors in the “who mods their cars” equation, such as fashion (to some extent related to peer group), amount of expendable income, etc.
Related:
Being too large to use conveniently as a tool, archaeologists have long speculated as to the purpose of the Olduvai Handaxe.
The official line is that it was a ceremonial object. However, this paper proposes an alternative explanation: that the owner had a 3 inch dick. In this essay I will…
I guess what I’m wondering is to what extent y’all think the stereotype has a solid basis.
How did war become a game?, a video about the early development of wargaming.
I initially expected the focus of the video to be elsewhere (the psychological and societal causes for why we have wargames), but this is actually so much more interesting. To spare someone else the misconception: This is basically a video on gaming history, going incrementally from chess to later strategy games focussed more on actual wargaming. Check it out!
(And thanks for sharing, Machine Interface!)
And for contrast, A Farewell to Hexes, or how war stopped being a game. At least, how it stopped being a hobbyist game; professionals still need and have their kriegesspiels.
Random thought: how can local credit unions ever risk offering auto loans? What recourse do they have if the loanee disappears from that locality and just stop making payments? Fly an employee out to where the license plate turns up with the authority to hire a repo man who knows different state and local laws?
Like what if one of those douches from On the Road took out the biggest auto loan he qualified for and then vroom, man?
So, it’s a an equation where you see what traits of the person you are dealing with has, what their risk level is.
Almost every loan has interest you pay per month. You can assume one out if 50 won’t pay half of it. A 5% average interest level with everyone else paying covers that and more.
It’s the same thought process the big banks use….just spread out over more time due to lower frequency per unit of time.
So basically. For every person who pays a 100 dollar loan the bank earns 110.
When a person stops making payments, assume they paid a third of it and bugged out.
Assume one out of 1,000 just takes the money and runs.
You sum up over time the variability of a person with average traits ABC (gender,age, education,credit score) and try teasing out the most important variables.
You can then calculate the average profit.
In the 1800/early 1900 banks were really bad at this and went bust alot.
Now? A big bank more or less has everything figured out and is just running the program.
There is no flying people around involved. A “local credit union” does the exact same thing a “big bank” does. Neither is actually in the credit collection business, they’re (as alluded to above), in the credit risk business. They make a couple of mailed attempts, then hire a professional.
So they hire a repo man. If the guy with the car has skipped town, the repo man charges a couple hundred bucks more and does a skip trace. Once located, he then uses the Internet or the phone to get someone local to go pick the car up for him and either sell it or ship it, depending on the details.
Nowadays, the worst credit risks can still get car loans because they just tack on the cost of a GPS tracker/disabler where the financier can remotely disable the vehicle if it’s not paid for.
Random penguin visits Penguin Random.
It says he was applying for an internship. Waddle he be doing?
I don’t know, but they have a lot to get done in not a lot of time so he’d better book it!
Well here is an interesting trend in porn consumption.
I would say 10 year ago (and don’t bullshit. Hold up your sticky hands if you’re a male since around 95%+ of guys watch it. 99%+ on internet sites like this) the advertisements and most watched videos were about busty blondes and teenage threesomes.
Now, the most watched videos on pornhub are all basically “How to blackmail and fuck your stepsister” and the advertisement is “Are you alone? Play your Oculus Rift VR family sex simulator”
Should one be worried about these trends? What do they indicate?
Is that going to go mainstream? When are people besides lunatics like myself going to talk about it?
I blame Game of Thrones.
What’s the causal mechanism here? The show never endorses incest, and in the early seasons at least, it’s something only evil people are doing. Is it just mere exposure?
It never endorses it, but it never goes out of its way to condemn it either. Cersei’s an unambiguous villain from at least the mid-1st season, but Jaime grows out of that role sometime in season 2 or 3, and their relationship at most points is presented as a redeeming factor if anything: these aren’t good people, but they do share a loving if unconventional bond. That’s more than any other fictional depiction of incest I can think of, aside from the odd bit of deeply weird golden age sci-fi.
Later on, of course, there’s spoilers.
I guess you never heard about the Wasp condescending to Captain America for having a 1944 brain that can’t process the beauty of incest.
Lucky guy.
I’ve never been more than a very casual comics fan, no. Especially superhero comics, although I did read more Marvel than DC growing up.
Man I forgot how bizarre the Ultimates book was.
It’s crazy that that series became the MCU.
I’ve never bought a monthly superhero comic. I thought “your 1944 brain” was one of those things even casuals knew, like Spider-Man selling his marriage to the Devil.
That one I’ve heard of.
Can you do a study to see if the men consuming this stuff had siblings (biological or otherwise) between the ages of 0-5?
It may be falling birthrates -> more only children -> people with no Westermarck Effect.
You’d have to see if Chinese people are more likely to watch incest porn.
Yeah, we’d absolutely look at Chinese porn consumption if the Great Firewall allows.
Cultural differences, though. Incest and pseudo-incest (falling in love with a step-sibling) are quite popular in mainstream East Asian dramas. At some point, manga/anime started propagating a variant of Tanabata where the lovers reincarnate as twins (but, apparently the earliest source of this variant is a book from the 80s).
But storytelling in Asia doesn’t necessarily have the kind of “representation” bent to it as western media does. It’s an escape valve for taboo desires, the way that the prevalence of yaoi/yuri wasn’t an indication of accepting homosexuality. Hell, we still see this in western media, with some fairly notable incest ships in modern fandom where there was no intention of incest in the text.
Similarly, the prevalence of incest in Chinese media (or the little-sister fetish in anime) wouldn’t indicate an actual desire for it.
Maybe men who grow up in broken families had step sisters older than 0-5 and they ended up having sexual fantasies about them.
This was also my theory.
The explosive growth of incest porn baffles me. It went from essentially invisible to completely dominant in maybe 2-3 years.
It’s gotten to the point where even interracial scenes have a step-whatever theme. Unless Woody Allen cloned himself a few million times without anyone telling me I can’t imagine that there’s that big a market for “white guys who want to fuck their Asian stepdaughters.” Sometimes you’ll even see a video that you recognize and know for a fact isn’t incest-related but it will have a title about fucking your sister.
Something is going on and it’s very unclear to me what that is.
I don’t think its actually *quite* as popular as the titles suggest.
Whoever said that the major companies were not lying about the most viewed videos and just filled the front-page to acquire blackmail on politicians like Ted-Cruz? *Everyone* on the planet with a computer has a shadow profile of themselves owned on multiple computers throughout the world, predicting their behavior and seeing what they can financially extract.
Now the oculus-rift VR family sex videos being the most common AD on pornhub feels…like some weird experiment someone or something is doing.
Porn has an “accumulated work” problem.
Every sex scene you can think of has been done before. A lot of scenes you, personally will never, ever think of, has also been done before. hundreds of times badly, and very well at least a handful of times. Since porn mostly has no plot, and minimal dialogue, you cant really sell it on “We have a new story”.
HD video was a godsend to porn producers because it meant they could mostly reset the clock, but now everything exists in HD, too.
So every time someone thinks up some new twist that can be a tag on pornhub, people produce it. Even if bloody well next to nobody wants it. Because an audience of one in 53 is better than trying to make “3 some with a redhead and a blonde Variant: Both focus on the redhead” number 200. And getting a porn actor or actress to call their scene partner sis does not even carry a premium. The year where everyone seemed to be pushing golden showers was so, so much worse than this.
Finally, I’m in the 1%
Anyway, I’m blaming Game of Thrones. I’m a bit surprised this didn’t start earlier, with Lost’s (step)incestual dominance relationship between Useless Girl and Boone. Not enough Internet porn then?
Eventually people will find something else to wank about.
I wouldn’t be worried, it’s just the porn equivalent of finding a $5 bill on the ground.
Think about porn like a pizza – plain cheese is vanilla porn: up plumber knocks on door, shenanigans ensue via the missionary position. It’s no one’s favorite, but it doesn’t send anyone away. With each topping (fetish) you add to your pizza (porn) it gets harder to make and risks alienating people. Eventually you end up with a pizza that’s either prohibitively expensive to make, like gold-leafed pizza ( porn aimed at people with a rollercoaster fetish) or that is offputting to a majority of people, like an anchovy-pineapple pizza ( dwarf bdsm). Fetish porn exists, but only by catering hard to it’s market at the expense of widespread appeal.
Enter incest porn. There’s no cost to establishing the incest narrative, it’s just one or two lines of text. It’s also a really easy story to write. Normal people apparently aren’t put off by it, it’s just a cheese pizza with a kinda weird, but obviously fake premise. For Incest fans, however, this is now their favorite pizza! You keep the vanilla audience and still get to court a prominent subsection of the porn consuming market.
In short, adding this theme costs nothing and potentially gains you a motivated audience. If any other fetishes like this (no/limited cost to establish) I predict they will become equally ubiquitous.
He must be here for my Dungeons & Dragons game.
🙁
Wait, no. Not that plumber! Oh god, I’m so sorry.
Wow, I hope he doesn’t play a Dwarf.
I had planned on staying very far away from this sub thread, but “Dwarf” got too much of a laugh out of me not to compliment.
I think you’re right about slipping some light, not too offputting (or easy to ignore) fetish stuff into otherwise vanilla material. But that doesn’t answer why this fetish in particular is so wildly popular.
I suppose it hits on the “taboo” and “risk of getting caught” themes that might be of pretty general interest, but there have to be other ways to hit those buttons without step-incest.
Step-mom stuff I really don’t get. Who wants what their dad is having? That’s like, really offputting.
See, that’s the thing – the fetish doesn’t have to be widely popular for this to be a sound decision.
Think about it this way: imagine a website that contains only two porn videos. In all aspects they are the same except one mentions that the pair in question are pretending to be brother and sister. Among standard porn viewers, you’ll get an even split in viewership, but 100% of people into incest flicks will watch the fetish one.
I don’t know. How many horny men go to porn sites, see a wide variety of titles about step-sister and step-dad and whatever, and get the mood killed thinking of their own family?
May be projection, but it’s got to be non-zero.
But that still doesn’t explain why “step-family” scenarios are what dominates. There are probably a lot of fetishes that could get pasted into vanilla scenes. Why is “step-family” in particular, so popular that as noted, 50% plus of the most watched videos on one of the top sites feature it?
My guess is that it’s just a matter of follow the leader. Someone did it and it sold well, so everyone else copied them, then everyone did it because everyone was doing it.
this is my theory as well.
This seems the most likely explanation. Changing normal porn into incest porn:
1) costs you nothing, you could just change the title on an already existing video, especially with “step-siblings” who don’t even have to be the same race;
2) the title is just as simple to ignore for anyone who does not share this fetish;
3) but it can make a few people extra happy.
A big reason for the “step-” is apparently the payment processors absolutely won’t deal with real incest porn. What this says about Visa, Mastercard, and AMEX executives is left as an exercise.
Say what you will about step-Dwarven-BDSM-orgy-porn, at least it’s an ethos.
@Randy M: … now you’re raising the question of whether Dwarven Nationalism with integral BDSM is Socialist, or objectively capitalist.
Politically, at least, it’s probably authoritarian. They like to discipline and punish.
@Le Maistre Chat says: … now you’re raising the question of whether Dwarven Nationalism with integral BDSM is Socialist, or objectively capitalist.
Well since I
made some stuff up just now abouthave for many years extensively researched Dwarven culture I may confidently state that by and large the Dwarvish clans mostly deal with other clans and non-Dwarves on a capitalist basis when it comes to craftworks, goods inside the clans are distributed by clan elders as they see fit, ascension to “elder” status is mostly age based, but significantly well made “masterworks” must be submitted as well, usually the younger the Dwarf the better made a work must be to get on the council of masters, with more allowance for less well made works to suffice for entry from older Dwarves (“What is it, the 50th year Gimli has tried? Oh, if it’s not completely crap this time let’s just give him a seat”).The Clan Masters/Alderdwarf councils (different clans use different names) select an UnderKing each year to settle intra-clan matters, who are usually re-elected till their deaths, the UnderKings are in charge of the Kingdoms main brewery, military, mines and mushroom farms (many Dwarves also have a private garden and still “for the hard stuff” as well) which are run more on a socialized basis, with usually younger Dwarves as the soldiers and workforce, the mushroom farm work is seldom as esteemed as craftworks among the Dwarves (consequently food must often be imported), but a large batch of “bad beer” is one of the few causes for UnderKings to lose their crowns, so the brewery is the main focus of Kingship.
I think this is correct, but sort of leaves the question of “why this, why now?” And the answer to that seems like it’s probably that it’s not that easy to find taboos anymore in society, and this is one well-suited to the porn consumers. This supposes that the taboo-breaking, rather than the actual scenario, then, would be the relevant attraction. It used to be other stuff, but once that gets normalized, you need something new. Step-incest stuff is, one hopes, still taboo. So that’s why you get a taboo, and in particular this one seems like a good fit for many non-fetishists. It’s taboo but not too taboo – as someone noted below, payment processors wouldn’t deal with actual blood incest. It’s not necessarily illegal; IIRC, the movie Clueless had a step-sibling romance as its main relationship. Add in that it usually features younger or younger-looking actresses, and that’s probably palatable enough for most viewers.
It may also involve child porn laws – anything that has such a contrived scenario is presumably produced by professional porn studios who are definitely not risking jail by using underage models. So consumers seeking teenage models may actually prefer something with a modicum of setup to signal “yes, this is a professional studio full of people who don’t like jail.”
Most comments seem to be about online video porn. It might be more interesting to look at online text porn, ASSTR and the like, since it gives a more detailed picture of the emotions involved. I’m not sure incest is as prominent there, but incest and sex with prepubertal or barely pubertal partners seem to be a surprisingly large part of what people want to write and/or read.
Given the rather grey area between text porn and romance, isn’t most text porn ‘the raunchy bit of a story on AO3’ or suchlike?
I think ASSTR is a special case because of its Usenet roots; Usenet is pretty much uncensorable, so people can post stuff banned at other places, so it’s going to skew that way.
Literotica doesn’t truck with underage stuff, which manifests as “first time” stories where the couple is 18 or 19, but other than that the ban doesn’t seem to detract from quality.
There, I think the skew is to consensual cuckoldry porn (the “Loving Wives” category for example).
(so I heard)
(who needs a GUI for porn? command line is where it’s at)
I blame Harry Potter for that. People that read and write text porn are at minimum big readers, and Harry Potter was the biggest book series at the time those internet sites got big. I also suspect many of the writers of online erotica started when they themselves were underage, so there was nothing weird about it. Once the community norms are set with being ok with underage characters, they rarely shift, to the point that fanfiction dot net killed itself by trying to ban it, allowing AO3 to rise up.
I’ll take your word for it but, how to put this delicately, isn’t pretty much all internet advertising targeted?
Hehe. On the other hand, we all know how bad the targeting algorithms are, so MissingNo has at least plausible deniability…
Oh, horrid thought! What if that’s just what they want you to think? They are intentionally producing poorly targeted ads on Facebook and Netflix to get everybody off the guard, while quietly honing their AIs to perfection, with the nefarious goal of….precisely targeting ads on pornhub?
PS: Seriously, though, were are the statistics?
Going down this rabbithole, porn has historically driven technology. The industry pioneered home video, online video, online payments, streaming services….
It wouldn’t be that far out of normal history if porn led in ai targeted fetish ads.
*coughs *
Warning, NSFW links.
But you can just look at the most watched pornhub videos.
It’s not the same on every site.
Half to two/thirds of the vids on the first two pages are incest. Occasionally, *every* most watched on that site is incest(with the other sites also not having nearly the same frequency)
It actually seems unnaturally high compared to other sites. Is it some weird experiment? Some politician blackmail grab?
Considering the theory that reality is simply some weird introduction to post singularity life what does this mean?
Asking the big questions here.
This is a weird one.
No explanation, but I will only throw into the debate the datum that in the niche of femdom porn there has been a noticeable uptick in ‘bitchy stepmother’ scenarios, whose beginnings I would date to a little earlier than others here are mentioning, maybe 5 years ago or a little longer. Aftagley mentions that ‘normal people apparently aren’t put off by’ incest storylines in regular porn because the incest storylines are so unobtrusive; I don’t know whether that is really the case for vanilla incest porn (christ, that’s a weird phrase to type) but it certainly isn’t for this stuff, as that aspect of the scenario are pretty front-and-center.
But it’s still a niche thing within the niche thing of femdom.
I’m comfortable with blaming anime as the thin end of the wedge here.
This is definitely a thread I’m curious about. Incest, specifically big brother-little sister, was a semi-common trope in anime at least as far back as the 90s, and I perceived it as steadily increasing in popularity throughout the 00s, exploding in the 10s. My very avatar on this site is fanart of the protagonist of an anime porn game from the early 00s where romancing your little (step-)sister is a story choice. I always thought that the prevalence (relatively speaking – it’s not like they’re that common even in anime) of incest in anime was just random dumb luck and/or had to do with idiosyncracies of Japanese culture, but the recent alleged explosion of incest porn in the mainstream has me wondering if there’s something deeper there.
One thing that occurs to me is that the anime works that tend to feature incest also tend to be “late-night” anime, which air past midnight and are specifically targeted at adults, and which I perceive as being rather trashy and primarily based on wish fulfillment (I mean this in the best way possible as someone who is generally a fan of this subsection of anime). Of course, porn is also primarily about wish fulfillment. So maybe there’s something late-night anime was channeling with its use of incest for wish fulfillment fantasies that was always there but was effectively suppressed by the many tools we have for discouraging people away from exploring this specific fantasies. And porn is catching up to this now, thanks to the continuing growth of the internet allowing people to encounter more things that they discover that they’re into and also to communicate and coordinate with other people who have discovered that they have this kink.
I really hope that this topic is of enough interest to future scientists to do more research on, because it’s legitimately fascinating to me. Maybe it will turn out to be just a random fad, like the comings and goings of hula hoops and 80s hair styles.
Increased atomization and social alienation might be an explanation here, then.
The appeal of the imouto trope is the childhood friend trope on steroids: someone who’s been with you their entire lives, has seen you at your worst, won’t leave you because you’re behaving badly, has to live in close quarters with you. It’s a low-effort relationship in a world when it’s harder than ever to make relationships happen.
With the Japan case I thought maybe it was evidence for LMC’s hypothesis (Japan has had famously low birthrates for a while now, has it not?). But this is a really interesting idea, too.
I blame an extreme case of sturgeon’s law: if 90% of everything is trash, in porn’s case, 99,9% of everything is garbage. Nobody watch porn for the story, for the photography or the camera work, but rather suffer them for the sake of the “old in-out in-out”.
Which means, in turns, that if someone produces porn with a less-aweful lighting, with actors that don’t seems dead inside or picked on the outside of a decrepit motel, people will watch them, because it’s less terrible.
The label on the video, or the 2 lines of dialogues before we get at the meat of the matter at hand, don’t really matter, and get ignored/forgotten . What matters is that I know that these sick fucks who produce “something-something in-law” make (barely) better stuff than the competition. It’s just that it happened to be them.
Power dynamics. It’s the same with “casting” and “blackmail” stuff which seems to have become more popular recently.
Power dynamic thing is / was one thing in casting, especially in some productions, but I would wager a narrative analysis that there are several other elements at play:
The old pre-internet era porn is infamous about its unbelievably non-sensical storylines about pizza delivery and such; casting genre comes with a storyline about making a porn flick, which at least has remarkable amount of coherence with on what happens on the screen, and there is even a ring of a reality show (how many a PornHub user knows anything about how the porn productions really work, unlike pizza deliveries, so suspension of disbelief is dramatically easier). At the same time, the narrative provides a justification for the presence of not-crappy camera and lightning and yet a model who is supposed to be an amateur.
I have no evidence of this, but an obvious hypothesis: the pool of people with access to online pornography has changed. Over the last few decades several groups of people have become more likely to have such access:
1. Teenagers
2. Old people
3. Low-income people
4. People not in First World countries
If one or more of these groups is more likely to watch a certain kind of pornography, that kind of pornography will have become more popular online.
(Speculation as to levels of pornography consumption and type of pornography preferred for each of these groups is left as an exercise to the reader).
Twist–each group’s preferred pornography is the next group on the list.
Does it loop back around at #4?
Here is my theory: incest fantasies are gaining popularity because dating is so damn hard. Of course, the rise of internet dating sites has made certain types of dating much easier, like casual hookups. But if you are going for substance, internet dating is, at least in my opinion, extremely difficult. It is so difficult to communicate who you are through your profile, and it is so difficult to glean meaningful information from other people’s profile. But most importantly, it is very easy to lie about who you are on your profile. Thus it is very difficult to trust whoever you meet on the internet. And this trend is amplified further by much broader modern cultural shifts that reduce societal trust even more. So it is very difficult to really feel comfortable that you know who you are with early in the dating process.
And I would also say that culture is shifting toward making the choice of romantic partner more specific, and thus difficult. In olden times, marriage was more an economic and labor management relationship. Both of these traits are fairly legible, and so I feel like it must have been easier to choose a partner. But modern people are much more selective about their partners, have much higher (often unattainably high) standards, and are looking for different kinds of things; modern people want their partner to be their best friend, not just their breadwinner or maid. And so the process of dating in modern times is more difficult.
So the appeal of incest, then, is that you can just skip this whole dating shenanigan and start a relationship with somebody that you know really, really well. Somebody who you can trust. And more importantly, somebody who knows the real you really really well. They know all your flaws, and yet they still want to be with you. That is a pretty powerful thing in a world where most people go to such great lengths to hide their true selves behind social status raising false personas.
Not that I am in any way endorsing incest. It goes without saying that it is an extremely dangerous and manipulative way to destroy your most important interpersonal relationships. But I can see the fantasy appeal.
I do wonder if this is true, except for a small population who are very good at gaming Tinder.
Especially, there is this bunch of statistics that says that amount and number of sexual activity among young people is falling: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/ (I Google’d up the article for the references it cites, but it is otherwise also interesting for this discussion.)
Wasn’t the upsurge in incest-porn just the next taboo that had to fall in order to keep people running on the titillation treadmill? Given the basic mechanism of people needing progressively hotter, weirder, nastier stuff in order to keep their sexual interests piqued, seems totally straightforward that this would be the next thing.
Mother fantasies will probably be next, taking the momentum from both milf and incest genres.
Is there a similar trend in gay porn?
> Although I guess there’s nothing new under the sun
_Mostly_ agreed, but not entirely.
For all physically feasible sex acts with no special equipment and a modest number
of participants, I’d guess that all of the possibilities had been explored before humans
were even fully human.
For more exotic possibilities, we could at least computer generate scenarios which
aren’t possible in the real world. E.g. consider an orgy in space with negative
curvature (hyperbolic space), so more participants are within limbs’ reach than
are possible in a flat euclidean space.
And this would be something new under the sun.
There’s still stuff that’s not been explored.
Like the posibilities opened up by a microgravity environment.
>Like the posibilities opened up by a microgravity environment.
Good point!
“Donald Trump Elected President.”
Rejected: 1991, 1992, 2004, 2009.
My mom had a low blood pressure all her life, and she was fine. Now her blood pressure occasionally goes up, to what is considered a clinically “normal” blood pressure (something like 80/120), and she feels terrible with it. She’s tried our GP, and several private GPs, but none of them are willing to give her blood pressure lowering medication, and she doesn’t have the money or desire to doctor shop that much, unless she can be reasonably sure that a doctor will listen to her. So far, all the doctors she’s seen show very in-the-box thinking.
My mom lives in Spain. Is there any way to get her blood pressure lowering medicine? I’ve heard that you can buy pretty much any medicine online in the EU without prescription, as long as it’s over the counter somewhere. Are blood pressure lowering drugs OTC somewhere?
Aspirin?
FWLIW the blood pressure reducing medicine I take is “hydrochlorothiazide”
There is some evidence that garlic reduces BP:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4266250/
What are her symptoms when she feels horrible? Usually, high blood pressure does not cause symptoms (which is why it has been nicknamed “the silent killer”), but pain or nausea do raise blood pressure and heart rate.
Is there anyone alive today who has done (as in actually achieved) more to combat climate change than Elon Musk? There were a couple of times where I’ve been tempted to give him that title, but I’m not sure it’s really deserved.
The fun answer, Charles Koch.
You can probably find someone someone more important in its history to pick, but fracking is a huge part of why US CO2 emissions are declining. Musk has made 1/5 of 1% of the cars in the US, and his cars would ultimately be largely powered by coal power plants were it not for frackers.
In a similar vein: Leslie Groves, Robert Oppenheimer, Walter Zinn, and Hyman Rickover. A little under 20% of US electricity generation is nuclear.
In the long run, Musk has a nontrivial chance of overtaking them, and more because of SpaceX than Tesla. If BFR/Starship winds up working close to as well as advertised, the economics of orbital solar power become a lot more favorable.
Really? My impression of SBSP is that the most intractable problems it has aren’t the launch costs, but rather more mundane ones like maintenance, transmission, receiver facilities, space junk, etc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power
From your link:
That’s been a really big stumbling block, given that launch prices to LEO have conventionally run in the $10k/kg range, while prices to GEO (or even GTO) run several times higher.
Maintenance is a much, much easier problem with cheaper launch costs. So is space debris, since debris is concentrated in LEO and cheaper launches make higher orbits more affordable. There are still substantial engineering challenges in transmission and receiver facilities, but I haven’t heard anything that make those sound more prohibitive if the launch cost problem were solved.
And start filling them with debris? 🙂
Good point. Although there’s two mitigating factors: 1) a bigger menu of practical orbits spreads out debris over more space, and 2) higher orbits are bigger and slower, so it takes more debris per orbit to present the same risk of collision. And one bit aggravating factor, that higher orbits aren’t self-cleaning the way LEO is (orbital decay drags LEO debris into the atmosphere over a period of years or decades, while higher orbit debris just decays into slightly-lower orbits).
Right, but LEO is way out in the middle of nowhere; why would anyone building a solar power satellite worry about the cost of shipping stuff there? The shipping route that matters is the one that runs from Luna to LLO to L5 to GEO, a nice easy 4.2 km/s and never more than 1.9 km/s in a single leg, not that ridiculous 9+ km/s all in one go climb into LEO. And 4.2 km/s broken up into convenient legs, if you can’t manage that for $200/kg you’re not really trying.
LEO launch costs aren’t completely irrelevant, because you’ll have to ship the equipment you need to boostrap transport, mining, and manufacturing infrastructure in cislunar space through there. But it has been understood from the earliest days that solar power satellites are truly extraterrestrial things, to be made beyond the Earth from resources form beyond the Earth. Probably you’ll build a few proof-of-concept prototypes or very specialized niche systems via direct launch from Earth, but those don’t have to be economically competitive in the bulk power market.
The obstacle isn’t so much launch costs, as economies of scale. It’s not worth doing, unless you’re pretty sure you’re going to do enough of it to justify all that up-front infrastructure cost.
I have serious doubts about this. Solar is already a dubious way to address climate change, with high energy demands upfront for manufacture of PV (in addition to other pollution). We can argue the details, but I think solar so far has caused more emissions than it has saved, and that this will be true for a long time if solar is going to produce any substantial fraction of electricity.
What is the energy ROI when you add launch costs (rockets count as fossil, right?) and maintenance/infrastructure? What is the economics of this?
Sort of, depending on the fuel. SpaceX’s current rockets use RP-1 (kerosene); their upcoming rockets will use liquid methane. Both of these are basically fossil fuels. But hydrogen, like the Space Shuttle main engines used, reacts to water, not to carbon dioxide (indeed there’s no carbon involved at all). It’s typically produced by cracking the hydrogen out of natural gas, with carbon monoxide (not itself a greenhouse gas, but oxidizes to CO2) as a byproduct, but it doesn’t have to be.
Solid propellants, as well as storable liquid propellants, come in all shapes and sizes and may or may not produce carbon emissions. But they’re rarely used for the main engines of commercial space launchers, either because they’re not efficient enough or because they’re too difficult or dangerous to handle. A few hypergolic propellants do see use for the main engines of some military and Russian commercial rockets, though.
“In a similar vein” is underselling your point a lot, or at least would be if any of those people were still alive. It seems very clear that pioneers of nuclear power are hugely responsible for a reduction in climate change (relative to counterfactuals). 15% of the world’s electricity is nuclear and that’s been true for quite a while. Considerably less than 15% of the world’s electricity comes from fracked hydrocarbons from the US; that was even more true in the past; and the counterfactual without fracking is less different than the one without nuclear.
Who invented the water-wheel (precursor to hydroelectric dams, and itself an important source of power historically)?
US CO2 emissions might be declining, but fracking puts a lot of methane in the atmosphere. We still don’t know how much, because it isn’t well tracked, but it wouldn’t surprise me if fracking wasn’t responsible for a net increase in warming.
You really can’t just count the number of cars though. He’s a big figure and Tesla is setting an example. I don’t know how large the cumulative effects of Tesla will ultimately be, but I’m pretty sure they’re substantial.
Interesting answer, anyway.
What has he done to combat climate change?
This feels like giving someone credit for the work of a massive system. Its like praising the president for “changing” the economy, when ze is just a minor force in it.
It looks like his company has some solar powered stuff in it. But so do multiple companies.
Accelerating the transition towards EVs (which afaik produce less co2 than gasoline cars even if the electricity comes 100% from fossil fuel, which it doesn’t). I think the effect is much greater than just the direct impact of the cars Tesla has sold (although those are good, too). Musk has also said explicitly that this is why he founded Tesla.
And I don’t know much about the SpaceX side of things, I was just thinking of Tesla.
@sty_silver,
This was about ten years ago but I distinctly remember reading that while an all-electric car that charged up from “the grid” emitted less Co2 per mile when the power plant producing the electricity used natural gas, if the electricity came from a coal-burning power plant instead a high mpg gasoline car would emit less Co2 per mile.
So I had this Wait-but-why post in mind which I think my brain marked as trustworthy. There’s some explicit discussion about CO2 comparison. CRTL-F to “The Union of Concerned Scientists” for the most relevant part.
If somebody convinces Merkel to stop decomissioning the remaining nuclear reactors, that’s 85TWh of essentially free green energy, equivalent to an investment of $50-100 billion in climate friendly energy. On the downside, the obvious benefits to the German economy would probably mean increased growth and associated GHG emissions.
I’m not sure whether there’s a single person, but it could be a politician who protected nuclear energy, or an investor or scientist who advanced it.
The Guardian is now criticizing New Agers because Lemurian crystals come from poor laborers in Madagascar.
I guess Guardian still remains the old left.
The new left would instead be outraged about appropriating Lemurian culture. Or lemur culture. Or not enough trans people working in the crystal mines…
What do you all make of those UFO- I’m sorry, UAP videos the navy just confirmed were real? Obviously saying it’s definitely aliens is jumping the gun, but considering everything we know, for once it feels okay to say it might be aliens. The probability of aliens to not aliens is great enough that it is worth it to look into the idea, in my opinion. I could be wrong though. What do you think?
There was some discussion of this in the 6/19 links post. Has anything important happened since then?
New videos came out, including some new F-18 cockpit senors that appeared to show a contact. Nothing so far is conclusive enough to dissuade me from my current belief of “sensor error.”
Can someone please add “better cameras for the Navy” to the defense budget?
amusingly enough, there is literally a line for that
The downside of hyper-expensive super-complex enemy detection gear isn’t just that it won’t detect an enemy, it’s that it will falsely detect empty air as a contact.
You’ll notice the navy guys who always react to these things are always the end useres, not the experts who designed the system.
Apologies, I’m kinda new. But yes. In particular, the Navy spokesperson confirmed that some specific UFO videos from about a year ago are real. Along with that, he confirmed that the US Military has absolutely no idea what they are, and claimed they changed the procedures because since 2014 there have been more sightings, multiple a month even, and they want to learn what they are. There are articles that say it better than me, sorry. Not sure what a good source for the news would be.
I should really be more sparing in my use of “confirmed”. It’s always good to have a healthy dose of skepticism. The theory that these “confirmations” are themselves lies could be true as well. Whatever it is though, we’re being told nobody knows what they are. Very interesting stuff.
Found an article on it with all three of the videos
Tine to repeat my pet theory: they’re not aliens, and they didn’t come here to visit us, but they might still have an ultimately extrasolar origin – as Von Neumann probes that have been present in our solar system for eons, and are becoming more active now that there appears to be a technological civilization on the planet. This solves the problem of fast interstellar travel just to visit us / rather small volume our radio broadcasts have reached (because they were already here), and the lack of observed probes/Fermi paradox in one neat package. Still low probability, of course, but fun speculation.
Like gods and ghosts, I tend to see aliens as a symptom of the human tendency to jump to agency as an explanation for everything. On closer examination, it’s almost never agency, and the few exceptions are cases where it’s human agency from unsuspected humans. I haven’t heard anything about this case which comes close to overcoming that prior; I won’t say it’s definitely sensor error, though some experts on military stuff have suggested that’s likely, but if it’s not that, it is some other misunderstanding, or (considerably less likely) something previously unknown but not agenty.
This. And note that the Navy is being carefully and correctly precise in their terminology: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. What the Navy has direct evidence of is photons. Strictly, only the photons between the flat-panel display and the observer’s eyeball. In a case like this, every link in the chain of inference to “and thus a material object is flying through the air several miles away” is suspect. Start with what you know, and work back one step at a time.
Good catch, it’s more precise than UFO because, though we could not identify it, there may or may not have been a flying object.
And even if it’s real, “flying object” might not be the best term. Consider ball lightning. Does that qualify as as flying? Does it qualify as an object? And that’s before you get into wacky sensor glitches, etc.
Anyone want to register any predictions about this whole Whistleblower thing that’s currently matriculating in the press? It looks like it will be this week/month’s go-to anti-Trump story.
Here are mine
– this will be a medium deal, on the level of sharpie gate (takes up around 2 weeks of media attention, quickly forgotten thereafter). – 60% confidence
– Full details of the situation will eventually leak out – 75% confidence
– It involves Russia in some way – 30% confidence
My confidence level on it involving Russia is ~50%.
Just based on statistics,, I guess the underlying details of the complaint are a nothing. Less than 10% chance it’s a something.
However that doesn’t mean it can’t be made whole cloth. The whistleblower made the complaint knowing the President could never actually release it. 90% chance of that being known to the employee.
Full details leaking I’d put at less than 25%, as I would guess the complaint is the story, and leaking full details likely eliminates the story (like when BuzzFeed went yolo with the whole Steele dossier).
Chance it involves Russia 51%. I assume this because its meta to make sinister insinuations about Russia, which the complainant knows.
My priors aren’t well-enough defined here to register predictions, but far and away the most noteworthy element is the disagreement between the ICIG and the aDNI. The former’s most recent letter to the SCI is here (PDF) – I highly recommend anyone interested in the matter reads it, less than three pages of text for a decent overview of the issue. Additionally: both men are Trump appointees and the nature of the disagreement implies this isn’t an issue of policy. aDNI claims to be acting on instructions from above, and there’s not a lot of people that could refer to.
I believe the DNI is technically a cabinet-level position, so strictly speaking Barr is giving him orders laterally, not from above.
That’s if it’s coming from Barr or elsewhere in DoJ, sure, but reporting is already pointing at the White House. I thought I saw a citation that the “higher authority” language was original to aDNI w.r.t. today’s proceedings, but attempting to find it again now seems like that might have come from Schiff.
(I originally had another paragraph going on about how my current takeaway is that if nothing else this is demonstrating why staffing the Cabinet with acting officers is a terrible strategy long-term, but I deleted it as a digression towards the axe I have to grind.)
It’ll be a big deal for a few weeks, then we’ll find out Richard Armitage was the leaker and everyone will quickly forget it ever happened.
If “big deal” means there is substantively something everyone should be troubled about there, then 85%. If “big deal” means “will actually stick, unlike all the other things that should already have ended this presidency,” then maybe 20% at most.
Everything comes out – 80%
Changing the framework a bit, I would put the probability that a given country is involved at – Russia – 70%; Saudi Arabia – 25%; all others – 5%
My first guess was Israel.
Given the proximity to the election, that was my first thought as well, but then I legitimately couldn’t think of any promise he could make to Bibi that the administration would care about having to keep quiet.
I’ll take those odds, if you’re paying 20:1 on Ukraine. Or are you counting that as Russia?
I have too many active wagers at the moment to make more, but no, Ukraine is not Russia.
Perfectly fair, I was mostly being quippy – in my comment above I’m claiming to not make empirical predictions, but apparently I’d actually be willing to take certain odds. Hm.
The funny part is, as I understand it:
1) Biden has openly bragged that while he was VP, he threatened Ukraine that unless they fired Ukranian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, he would cancel $1 billion in foreign aid.
The wrinkle is that at that time, the company that Hunter Biden was a board member of, Burisma Holdings, was under investigation by Shokin’s office. Ukraine has since said that although Biden did threaten them with cancelling $1 billion in foreign aid, and although the ultimately decided not to prosecute his son’s company, those events are unrelated.
2) Back in May, the NYT reported that Rudy Giuliani was lobbying Ukraine on Trump’s behalf to take a closer look at the connection between the Bidens and the Burisma decision.
3) From what I understand, it’s widely believed that the “whistleblower allegation” is that while on a phone call with a Ukranian official, President Trump pressed Ukraine to look into this issue, and may or may not have made some kind of Biden-esque threat or offer.
If true, it’s going to be a mess, because Trump is pushing for an investigation of some conduct that looks very similar to the conduct he’s accused of.
The anti-Trump folks are going to have to explain why it’s OK for Biden to make a quid pro quo offer to Ukraine (fire your general prosecutor, and I’ll let you have $1 billion), but not OK for Trump to make an alleged quid pro quo offer to investigate the first offer.
One obvious decision is that the State Department was apparently in support of the first one and not the second, but it’s not ultimately the State Department who determines foreign policy, it’s the President.
Decent summary of the facts, but you’re missing one, probably because it’s been conveniently missing from the stories in certain papers:
From thehill.com (Also elsewhere):
As a flooring material, does linoleum hold any advantages over vinyl?
It’s cheaper, I think? And AFAIK linoleum can be rolled out in giant sheets whereas vinyl tiles are, well, tiles, and need to be installed individually and then grouted.
Vinyl also comes in sheets.
Decades ago, when cleaning something off the floor (near an edge) my mother got a huge linoleum splinter through her hand.
I don’t know if vinyl splinters the same, and if so whether the splinters are as bad.
Babylon Bee is where the good stuff is these days. Onion used to be good until it changed ownership some years ago.
The Babylon Bee’s running gun battle with Snopes is one of my favorite things on the Internet.
What is that all about?
Snopes has repeatedly fact checked Babylon Bee stories. The Babylon Bee, like the Onion, honestly bills itself as a satire site.
Snopes claims it needed to do the fact-checking because the articles were being spread as fact by ignorant people, but because they have been regularly fact-checked they are getting caught by things like Facebook demonetization.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/babylon-bee-founder-hits-back-at-snopes-over-fact-checking-satirical-stories.html
Really? The CW is worse than I thought.
(I mean: does anyone seriously believe that there’s any reason for Snopes to fact-check the Bee, other than the quite evident political leanings of the editorial board?)
ETA, having read the article:
And they’re not even pretending it’s anything other than CW. Interesting times, indeed.
Snopes has also been known to fact-check Onion articles as well. There are definitely people who read articles from those and other satire sites without realizing they are satire. The Babylon Bee’s return shots at the Snopes are amusing (probably the most amusing thing they have done, honestly) and I see nothing wrong with them having fun with it, but what Snopes is doing is still worthwhile.
I’ll also note that Babylon Bee isn’t as well known as the Onion (I have literally only seen it linked or referenced on this blog and nowhere else), and so is probably more likely to be confused for a real news source by people who are prone to believing things they read without questioning it or evaluating the source.
I get that people might not realise that the Bee or Onion are satirical sites.
The correct response is: “this is satire, it isn’t real” – not a fact check.
I mean, that’s basically what happens. The fact check is basically:
“Did [subject of satirical article] actually happen? No, the story originated on [satire site]”. Usually with some additional background on how the story spread (a story originating on The Onion or The Bee doesn’t necessarily stay there and only there), and in the event that the article was a satirical take on an actual real event probably some information on what really happened.
A study/survey on people believing satirical pieces
I can’t really speak to the credibility other than that quick googling didn’t turn up any obvious claims of bias for the site. Scroll down about half way to see their survey on how many people believed some of the more popular satire articles.
Snopes does, as far as I know, not fact check The Onion itself. They do have pages on internet rumors which have their source in Onion articles. They have directly fact-checked the Bee, though after a lawsuit threat those pages have been changed from “False” to “Labeled Satire”.
It’s subjective.
Adam Ford (original founder of the Babylon Bee, though no longer involved in the day-to-day running) wrote a twitter thread on the “fact check” that embroiled the latest in the Snopes/Bee feud. In their fact check on a Bee story, Snopes leveled the accusation that the Bee was trying to fool readers and hinted that it was akin to making up fake stories and providing fodder in the culture war. Snopes has since sorta walked back that article.
On an interview with Fox and Friends (Twitter link), Bee CEO Seth Dillon said he had no problem with Snopes fact checking the Bee, but he felt that there should be a difference between a “false” rating and a “satire” rating. The Bee isn’t trying to deceive, it’s either looking for laughs, or using satire to make a deeper point. The issue with the false ratings is that Facebook et al have been using “independent” fact checkers to demote or hide genuinely false news, and are getting satire articles caught up in the same – a direct threat to the Bee’s bottom line.
It appears that Snopes has recently taken this advice and begun issuing a satire rating. That said, Adam Ford wasn’t entirely happy. Snopes gave a satire rating to a made-up click-bait article on the basis that the site called itself satire. It kind of feels like the Bee scored an own-goal here by saying that if the site is clear about calling itself satire it should be labeled satire, and Snopes is being deliberately obtuse to rile them back. Or Snopes is just not that good at what they do. Or Snopes is being genuinely malicious in trying to make the satire rating as problematic on social media as the false one.
That said, I do think the Bee had the last laugh with this headline: Under Mounting Pressure From Snopes, Babylon Bee Writers Forced To Admit They Are Not Real Journalists.
I think you are largely correct, when we restrict ourself to what philosophers call “counter-causal” free will – i.e. a capacity to make decisions that are completely unaffected by physical reality (including the physical structure of our brains). This is not real, and for what it’s worth virtually no one in academic philosophy subscribes to it.
But one of the books recommended in that conversation was Dennett’s Elbow Room, which I think is one of the best things ever written on the subject. The book’s subtitle is, if I remember right, The varieties of free will worth wanting, and if not it’s very close to that. His point is that counter-causal free will, which he later calls “a free will that levitates” is not interesting for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that it doesn’t exist.
I think it’s in a later work (probably Consciousness Explained that he says that he thinks it’s crazy to want a free will which allows us to do whatever we might want. He says he does not think it’s possible for him to randomly murder someone (as in Camus’ L’étranger), and this is literally physically impossible for him – his brain is not structured such that this is an option he could choose. This is the converse of the kind of worries you have about brain structure causing violent crimes, here we have it preventing them.
There’s a lot more to say about this, obviously, but I’ll leave it at that.
(Epistemic status: have a degree in philosophy, was supervised by one of Dennett’s graduate students, have read a hell of a lot of the relevant literature, though I’m over a decade behind at this point.)
+1!
It’s worth asking, what do you want your will to be free from?
Heh, captures my feelings pretty well. If you’ve carefully defined your version of free will such that it cannot produce experimental evidence, you’ve not coincidentally removed any incentive I have to care.
I have the occasional point of disagreement with Dennett, but have yet to find anyone who is approaching the subject with half as much clarity.
SecondThirding the recommendation.Yup. I actually have a lot of disagreement with his thoughts on consciousness, as opposed to free will, and his thoughts on cognition/thought more generally (briefly: I don’t think you can get away with saying “language” for everything). But he’s miles ahead of virtually any philosopher of mind from his era, with the notable exception of the Churchlands (who I probably love even more, and who put their money where their mouth is – both of their kids are now leading neurophysiologists, and if you ask a modern neuroscientist about the Churchlands, they think you are talking about the kids, not the parents).
What by the Churchlands would you recommend?
I’m not at my house so can’t check the bookshelf… if you happen to have been reading Phil of mind from roughly any time between 1985-2000, then their collection On the Contrary is great, a set of responses to other contemporary philosophers. But probably not that interesting unless you know the literature a bit (their whole thing was basically saying that phil of mind was largely masturbatory, so you could just not read it and be better off, frankly).
The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul by Paul C. is pretty good too. Patricia C has a more intro-type book called Brain-Wise which I liked a lot. I haven’t read much they’ve written in the past decade, I remember not being a fan of her book on morality.
I’m not sure where it is, but there’s an essay they wrote about Locke’s thought experiment of the inverted colour spectrum which is one of the better pieces of neurophilosophy I’ve read (the basic point being, if you actually know something about how colour works, it’s not a great thought experiment). It might be in On The Contrary but I would have to check.
Sorry that is very rambling and unspecific, I’m extraordinarily tired right now.
Yeah, Dennett’s the best person I came across back when I was reading up on this stuff. As well as the early Elbow Room, I would also recommend the more recent Freedom Evolves, which as well as recapping his earlier philosophical stance on free will, discusses evolution and how (Dennett-style, folk-psychological, non-magical) ‘free will’ evolved from those that didn’t.
Yes, plus it has an entire chapter on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, which is always a good thing. One of my intellectual heroes for sure.
Ah, shoot, now I wish I hadn’t thrown out my copy. That would’ve been good for a re-read.
I actually briefly met him at a talk he was giving a few years ago.
In Rousseau’s Confessions, there’s something of a throwaway line about how the best way to be good is to avoid placing yourself in situations where you’re likely to be sinful, not to struggle nobly against sin. Which is literally centuries ahead of his time, it’s really not until I think maybe 100 years ago that people start articulating this precisely about, e.g., alcoholism.
I don’t think it is that it is so great to be tempted, but that those who know temptation and avoid it are so great.
Whether there are any such…
Thanks for the reference.
I don’t really see the problem. What’s your bread made of? I bet you didn’t think “atoms”.
There are levels of abstraction that are fit for every conversation. Of course free will breaks down as a concept when we get to the mechanics of the brain. You can’t really prove that we have free will in the Stephen Molineux sense (whatever that is) by looking at brainwaves any more than you can talk about the taste of the bread by discussing quarks. It’s the wrong level for that. The whole discussion is redundant.
Oh, you _can_ talk about behavioral genetics, of course. How people are similar, how behaviors are inherited, how there are tendencies and such – good stuff. But it helps a lot to remember that what psychology is to physics, behavioral genetics is to psychology. An effect size of 30% is Big in psychology. You want to know what generates the same level of enthusiasm in behavioral genetics? 1%.
I don’t think that analogy is quite apt. Talking about the taste of bread by discussing quarks isn’t going to get you anywhere, but it’s at least conceivable that our subjective experience is tied to material reality/computation/whatever in some way, even if it doesn’t provide an elegant explanation in itself. Whereas there’s no formulation of free will that can’t be shown to be literally untrue by physics: “We live in a universe where everything moves randomly or according to deterministic physical laws, and there’s no room for a third lever.”
Look at the conversation above on drunk driving. Try saying to the nice policeman that everything was predetermined from the beginning and he should take it with the starting conditions of the universe.
Of course free will, from physics point of view, doesn’t exist. Unfortunately laws, consequences, fines, jail time, death and grief are also not of physics any more than free will is. When you say “you should not have gone to the bar with your car if you didn’t have a designated driver or a tax money” you’re at the level of abstraction where “free will”, “stupidity”, “accidental death” and “jail time” all work equally well. You _could_ have taken a bus or walked, you were _free_ to do so. Whatever the words underlined mean, that’s where free will is.
Trying to find it by looking at neurons… nah. Not gonna happen. By definition, reallly – even if you find a beautifully constructed incredibly complex perfectly tuned mechanism that allows you to make choices, you’re going to say FOUND YOU, There is No Free Will!!! So why look, really? What answer could you find in neurology other than “hey, so that’s how it’s done!” ? A little receiver that gets instructions from another dimension? Quantum computing, a la Roger Penrose? And even if you find something as science fiction like that, that only moves the problem somewhere else. At the very end you’ll still find a reductionist answer, so you know, with certainty, that at the end there will be no mystical Free Wiil. Which doesn’t make your day to day responsibilities and actions even an iota less relevant.
Right, we agree on that. I just don’t know how to conceive of making a choice as anything other than causing something to happen that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, and I don’t see how taking things to a higher level of abstraction gets away from that, except illusorily. For example, a way of defining freedom that seems to work across levels is whether two people in a given situation might act differently from each other. If you specify the “situation” loosely enough, then you can get the appearance of freedom. Let’s say you have two working class white male college aspirants living in the same city. X studies hard for the SAT, does well, and gets into a good college. Y slacks off and gets rejected. We might want to give X credit for his better outcome, but maybe their social situation is relevantly different: perhaps Y’s parents were going through a traumatic divorce. OK, so take the counterfactual where they were not. Do they still perform differently? If so, maybe there’s an environmental pollutant, gene, etc. to blame. And even if you can’t find any such gross difference, the different outcomes are still down to subtle factors ultimately outside of their control. It doesn’t strike me as relevant to moral responsibility that in many cases the reason for the difference will be hard to describe in concise terms.
The more narrowly a situation is described, the more of an explanation you have as to why someone made one choice and not the other — otherwise it just appears random. But that approaches a limit where the situation is described in full physical detail, at which it becomes apparent that nobody in that situation could have done anything differently, because they would have been the same person.
This isn’t just abstract philosophizing (for me). Whether somebody who has committed a wrongful act was doomed to do so by a man holding a gun, by his own genes, or just the matter making up his body, he never had a chance to step away from his situation and alter the flow of events from the outside. I’m no police officer, but a friend of mine once had to face the consequences of someone else’s drunk driving, and my anger at the perpetrator was tempered by this realization.
Intellectually (if not so much in practice), this understanding has shifted the basis of my morality away from personal responsibility and towards something like virtue ethics. “It’s not your fault that you made the decision to drink and drive; nothing is your fault. However that doesn’t prevent me from recognizing that a person of your character is likely to cause more harm than good.”
You know what keeps me up at night?
Right, the mosquitoes.
But other than that, it’s neuroscience case studies, like the infamous Phineas Gage and others I’ve read but don’t recall at the moment (feel free to recount you favorite here) that demonstrate how changes to the structure of the brain can lead to changes in, not just perception, but cognition, desire, goals, and of course emotions.
Like, we’re going to hold people accountable for their behavior when a bump on the head will alter the fundamental tendencies they have? We’re lucky people can function at all!
Legally, of course, we need to continue to provide disincentives for unwanted behavior. But morality? Eternal judgement? God had better be omniscient enough to take this nonsense into consideration, or it’s all a farce.
Sorry, that turned into a rant. Hopefully an entertaining, CW free rant.
We can respond to a person as a locus of action, even if those actions are not considered the action of their free will.
Drunk drivers, for example. No one would say “He was drunk therefore he is not responsible for his actions.” In fact, many would feel that such a person is more culpable.
And we must!
But the worry isn’t that I’m not responsible for my actions when drunk.
The worry is that there is no I.
There isn’t! Embrace the indivisibility of nature.
Certainly there is a you!
Think about all the things that make you you – your preferences, your unconscious reactions, your bright lines, all the things you find compelling. For instance, let’s say, arguendo, that you hate pistachio ice cream, and therefore never eat it. If your will was more “free,” then sometimes you would. But this freeing of your will would be at the expense of a small thing that makes you you. Likewise with everything else. Every characteristic of your person or psyche is a restriction of your free will.
Moreover, even the smallest decision is a restriction of free will. You’re rejecting some other course(s) of action, and thus your will becomes less free. And that’s good. When we examine the most important moments of our lives, the claim “I could have done otherwise” is a rejection of meaning and agency. It’s also just plan false. Could you really have done otherwise as you proposed to your future spouse?
Agency is just being a locus of action, and personality is just having reasons that restrict or compel your actions. “Freedom” of will is not necessary for agency or personality, and might not even be desirable.
@rahien.din
Are there not some actions that might result in more actions becoming possible?
I don’t follow. Is it because, as you define personality, it gives you more personality?
How so? By your definition of agency, “being a locus of action”, if one could have done otherwise how is one less of a locus of action?
As for “meaningful”, when I hear people talk about “meaningful choices”, they’re usually talking about situations where they found it difficult to decide between options worth taking. Seldom have I heard: “I couldn’t do anything else, it was a very meaningful choice.”
Is it because it is a stronger expression of one’s personality, as you define it?
If you couldn’t have done otherwise then you didn’t make a decision. If free will doesn’t exist than choices and decisions are nonsense words describing illusions. You can’t reject free will and then go around talking about decisions as if the word still meant something.
@mendax, @FLWAB,
if one could have done otherwise how is one less of a locus of action?
The degree to which I could have done otherwise is exactly the degree to which my decision was arbitrary.
When I hear people talk about “meaningful choices”, they’re usually talking about situations where they found it difficult to decide between options worth taking
When decisions are difficult, we resolve them by discovering reasons. Reasons are just restrictions on free will.
If you couldn’t have done otherwise then you didn’t make a decision.
False. If you have made a decision, then you are doing only one action. If you rejected other potential actions, some reason compelled you to so reject them. Thus, the action you are doing is the only action you actually could have done.
If you are still in the state of “could have done otherwise,” that’s the state in which you haven’t made a decision yet.
Seldom have I heard: “I couldn’t do anything else, it was a very meaningful choice.”
Seems that you have had unusual experiences. We hear all the time from people who perform selfless, heroic, or visionary actions : something came over them that compelled them to action and left no room for choice.
Or here’s one : I didn’t choose or decide to fall in love with my spouse. I had absolutely no control over that, and it is the most meaningful thing that ever happened to me.
You can’t reject free will and then go around talking about decisions as if the word still meant something.
Of course it means something. It identifies a locus of action and the reasons driving action.
C does not follow from A and B. Yes, if you make a decision then you are only doing one action. But you also only do once action if you are not actively making a decision. A decision is a choice between more than one course of action. If free will does not exist then there was never a choice to make: a decision is just an illusion, a hallucination experienced while waiting for the neurons to reach an end state they were always going to reach. In other words, if you could not have chosen differently than it wasn’t a decision, in a similar way that we would say a man who is thrown bodily into a car did not decide to enter the vehicle.
@FLWAB,
A decision is the same thing, whatever system of agency or will that you believe.
Before the decision, there are multiple potential actions. To decide – to be in the deciding phase – is to gather the reasons to allow you to reject potential actions. A decision point occurs when accumulated reasons allow for the rejection of a potential action. Eventually, all actions are rejected except for one (which itself may be, “take no action”) and this is your ultimate decision.
The phrase “could have done otherwise” applies only to that deciding phase, wherein there are multiple potential courses of action and you are gathering reasons. In this phase, there remains uncertainty about what action will be taken. The phrase applies even if the process of deciding is dependent upon neuronal mechanisms. Even though the brain’s mechanisms are deterministic, and even though it is inevitable that a decision point will be reached via those mechanisms, the content of that decision is not determined prior to the decision. After all, the content of the decision stems from reasons, which must be gathered – and that gathering of reasons is itself an action. That action is simply occurring via the operations of the brain.
The phrase “could have done otherwise” no longer applies once a decision has been made. If a decision has been made, then all courses of action except for one have been rejected. Meaning, they have been categorized as “actions not able to be taken.” So, the act or process of deciding is synonymous with “finding the single action that can be taken.” This is true even if we have the type of free will that you espouse. It makes no sense to say “I could have done otherwise.” One can only say “But for the reasons that determined my action, I could have done otherwise.”
This is true even if one outsources the decision, for instance to the random chance of a coin flip. “Outsource the larger decision” is itself the single action that was taken.
Probably, the feeling or perception of choice is a reliable guide that some deciding phase has concluded. It is not clear, however, that the feeling is precise or accurate about which decision has been made at what time. If part of your mind decides it wants to kiss your spouse, but hasn’t decided when to kiss them, you may not perceive that desire until the timing decision has been made. You may perceive the timing decision and the kiss-them decision simultaneously as “I want to kiss my spouse” even though important parts of the decision occurred subconsciously.
@rahien.din
That doesn’t seem to follow. If the brain’s mechanisms are deterministic, and if the “decision” will be reached via those mechanisms, then there was never “multiple potential courses of action.” There was only one possible course of action. When you knock over a line of dominoes there are not multiple potential courses they could take: there is only one, determined by the laws of physics. If you had enough information about the composition of the row of dominoes and the amount of force applied on the first one then you could predict exactly where all the dominoes will fall. Similarly, if the mechanisms of the brain are deterministic than anyone with enough information the total system could predict your every action. There was never multiple possible courses of action you could take, just one. It’s logically incoherent to say that a system is both deterministic and that multiple potential outcomes are possible. A clock is a deterministic system: when one hear moves forward a tick, all the other gears must move as well. There are not multiple potential movements they could make, but just one.
So if we are to preserve choice and decisions as concepts we have to either decide that somehow the mind is not deterministic, nor can it be reduced to deterministic mechanisms, or that the our conception of deterministic causality is itself flawed.
@FLWAB,
Again : even if we have the type of free will that you espouse, it makes no sense to say “I could have done otherwise.” One can only say “But for the reasons that determined my action, I could have done otherwise.”
If I may interject, imagine the issue of whether or not you will get out of bed. It seems that you can remain or get up, but if that is the case how is it possible that you already know (before going to bed the night before) what the choice will be? You know the reasons that will be pulling you to stay in bed, and the reasons that will be pulling you to get up and you know which will win out. Of course, something might happen during the night such as you suddenly become violently sick, but that merely changes what choice is made by adding more reasons to stay it bed. Getting sick does not increase your freedom, but it might change the choice.
Not only can you pretty much always exactly predict your behavior, but so can those who know you well. If you are married your wife can accurately predict whether you will get up. In fact, I hardly know anything about you, but if you tell me you are feeling fine and that tomorrow is a workday, I can predict your action with accuracy as well. This is only possible because your actions are determined by reasons, controlled by these reasons, not free.
It is these reasons that are forcing you to make the choice you think you freely make. Without these reasons, no choice would be made because there is no way to decide.
Must we? As an utilitarian point, yes – we have to precommit to punishing drunk drivers. But a person might chose to drink, not wanting to drive after – and then drink enough that he will change himself to somebody that can’t make this decision. That’s actually one example in which we have a society approved way of lowering free will (drinking) to the point where we make very anti-social decisions.
So alas, yes, we must. It saves many more lives than it ruins.
That’s pretty much what “social lubricant” means. It helps you get over your inhibitions. Which–basically we have levels of will, fighting against each other.
I want to make friends.
But I’ll probably say something stupid and don’t want to embarrass myself so I won’t say anything.
Let’s just drink try to drink away the fear of stupidity and see what happens.
Whoops, we also drank away the fear of drinking away the fear of smashing our car into pedestrians.
I consider it more of a Jekyll and Hyde type scenario:
We’re punishing Hyde for the crime of being drunk and diving a car and we’re punishing Jekyll from the crime of unleashing Hyde upon society.
In this case, Jekyll can’t be innocent; his crime will always be giving Hyde free reign.
Yeah, but that’s the thing: letting Hyde out is socially acceptable. Getting drunk is at most slightly frowned upon if that, in many contexts.
Of course, Jekyll has an influence on Hyde. If you know that you have a tendency to drive when you drink, you can set bright lines on your behavior that can vary from “no driving the same day alcohol has touched my lips” to “no drinking with a car nearby”. So yes, from an utilitarian and game theory PoV we have to punish, and very severely, because some influence is a lot better than none. But from a justice PoV things are more nuanced.
I sort of disagree. Other people drank and nothing bad happened. This person drank and out came Hyde who proceeded to drive drunk.
I’m saying that I don’t see a problem with a justice system that says “Regardless of who you are now, there is a person inside you who drove drunk. We want to punish that person, and we are OK that the only way to do so involves ALSO punishing you.”
Oh, I meant “justice” in an abstract sense. In practice, smash the offender to bits. It’s a necessary sacrifice.
Or you also think that in an abstract sense he’s always equally deserving of his punishment? If he’s a first time offender he could have done absolutely everything by the rules, gotten drunk in perfectly socially acceptable ways and realize his mistake only too late.
The “Hyde” you say we need to punish suffers exactly the kind of insanity that law takes notice of: drunk him couldn’t distinguish right from wrong. If you want to punish Hyde specifically… legally you can at most send him to rehab. Jekyill has to take all the blame – and not because he’s the guilty one, but because we need to precommit to punish the Jeckylls.
It’s worth acknowledging that Dr. Jekyll is not normal. He’s taking some very unusual and reckless actions that are the proximate cause of Hyde’s rampages. Punishing Jekyll is about making him hew more towards normalcy.
Nonono. Potentially, Jekyll is you and me. Sober, you have no idea there’s a Hyde in there.
How would you tell there is a Hyde lurking without getting him out? The actions of Jekyll are not (always) reckless – potentially, he can just drink a few beer socially.
There are plenty of things one can do once one gets to know him/herself better. But at 21-25 you can’t really know yourself that well. You know drinking itself is ok, you know not to drive drunk… so you drink, and you kill a family of 5.
@Radu
Oh of course. Furthermore, regardless of the past, one couldn’t know if they are ever harboring a Hyde even on any specific night.
(I wrote half of what I thought – my fault.)
We could think of Jekyll and Hyde not as states, but as components of a system. For instance, we could say that within a society, Hyde is all the recurrent instances of drunk driving, and Jekyll is all the instances of sober driving. We could then think about how to disconnect those components by acting upon society as a whole, rather than saying “We have to precommit to punishing innocent Jekyll.”
The individual, similarly, is a “society” of component drives and behaviors. It seems like we could approach law/justice/punishment vis a vis the individual with the same goal of disconnecting components.
I’m not sure how rhetorical your wonderings about God taking into account differing motives/circumstances is, but for what it’s worth it’s been thought about. I think it’s in Mere Christianity that CS Lewis muses on the idea that a street thug surrounded by people who reward cruelty providing a small mercy or sympathy to someone is probably worth a lot more to God than someone in a situation or with people that reward virtue doing the same thing; the context changes the value of the action in the same way a poor woman’s penny is worth more than a rich man’s, because it represents a larger proportional sacrifice.
On the lay protestant level, it’s not a foreign concept at all that different people have different struggles; some have anger problems, while some have difficulties with honesty, pride, etc. The idea of the body being it’s own entity with it’s own desires/motives/tendencies that have to be fought against is present in the literal plainly read text of the Bible.
True! It’s not so much me having different struggles from you that concerns me; it’s just hard to find the ‘me’ in there once we start looking closely.
Yeah, I was just addressing the religious part of it from the Protestant point of view; our answer to that is “there is part of you that is a soul, it has free will, and it’s fighting with the deterministic negative tendencies of the body”. For what it’s worth my belief in the existence of a soul that’s “magic” in that sense is why I believe in free will; I wouldn’t believe in it without a pre-existing belief in the supernatural.
Right. And as someone who believes similarly–despite no personal experience with the supernatural–my faith is much more tested by these things than by the existence of evil or suffering.
And yet, the subject also fascinates me. My terms papers in college were all about the cellular basis of memory; I think I wanted to understand the interplay between the mind and the material.
So say I’m walking down the road tomorrow and I get bonked on the head and find I now have destructive urges I didn’t have before; for the sake of argument let’s say I now trend towards pedophilia. At the same time, my pre-existing problems with anger and aggression are much lessened. In my mental free will model, my situation is this:
All those bolded I’s are possible because my model of myself is based around this “magic” non-deterministic half of my duality. The actual things I struggle against might vary with my body (and have, as I’ve aged) but the important bit is the half that struggles, and in my model that struggling half is “me”.
So the part where twins are similar to each other or a railroad spike through my head might change me are secondary, because they are happening to my circumstances(my body) and not to me(my soul). It’s basically exactly equivilent in my model to if the country went into famine – yes, I now have to make hard decisions against killing people for food, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a choice. There might be a situation where my body can’t be resisted (I.E. mind control, T.V.-style hypnosis) but that’s a situation outside of choice or my control, so it doesn’t factor in much.
It seems like your model differs somehow from this, but I’m not sure how. Could you explain more?
Nit-pick–Personally I’m not bothered by twins or clones. I don’t need to be unique to be me, and I do suspect there’d be some variation in choices even in ethical dilemmas, remarkably identical separated twin stories not withstanding.
Model is being generous.
Maybe the problem is not being able to see other people’s struggles. All I see of you is what you do–presumably what you choose to do is an indication of who you are. If you have a sudden reversal of personality, that indicates that who you are has changed, and therefore who I am can change, by something so trivial as matter.
I dunno. Maybe it shouldn’t matter. To use phraseology likely to turn off the modal poster of this site, we are supposed to die to ourselves, aren’t we? So attempting to retain me is not the goal anyway.
Or the horrifying implications of the results of a Corpus callosotomy.
I do not believe a God with some bounds to his knowledge is outside of theological and biblical necessity. Even if God had that ability to know all, He could, for some ineffable reason, restrict foreknowledge of human actions in order to be surprised. Perhaps it’s not possible to feel love from beings one has precisely determined every action and thought of. Is God’s judgement fair if our actions are determined but unknown? Perhaps not, but that doesn’t make it less accurate. This is also compatible with both a Calvinist predeterminism (vis a preset causal chain) and the view that the end times are unknown and your soul is still contested, because God’s actions may be in response to events he is not anticipating.
I don’t know how much of that is compatible with a God “outside time” or “existing in all time”, but I don’t have any instincts as to what those textual strings mean or the implications for causality.
I’ve never understood the horror about corpus callostomies. Well… I suppose I do in some kind of abstract sense, but bear with me:
The people who went through the procedure have universally, so far as I’m aware, had their lives greatly improved, most with very few side effects that manifest outside carefully-controlled laboratory conditions. So there’s nothing bad about the procedure (though my understanding is they don’t do it any longer because there are better alternatives now, I’m not sure of the details).
So in terms of the procedure itself, there is no horror (this is unlike, say, a lobotomy).
What’s “horrifying” is, I suppose, that it makes nonsense of folk psychology in something like the way the double-slit experiment makes nonsense of folk physics. So it’s horrifying if you believe that stuff. But as a well-educated 21st-century person, why would you want to? It’s obviously, trivially false.
Anecdote: I met a man in the late 90’s while I was backpacking through Guatemala, who was old enough to have dodged the Vietnam draft by running to Vancouver. His head was crushed by a skid of frozen peas in his mid-30’s, which apparently drastically altered his personality (led to his marriage falling apart, among other things), and he was still intelligent and coherent enough to remember the before and after. THAT was horrifying.
The view that God allows himself to be surprised is what’s sometimes called open theism. It gets a lot of interest today, though it was unusual historically. My impression is that, back in the time of Calvin, the real debate was between single and double predestination.
If God is outside time—and that seems to me to be required by divine simplicity—then it doesn’t make any sense to say God did not know then and knows now, so I’d say the real question is whether being outside time is coherent at all.
@Enkidum
I’m not against the procedure even if my possibly flawed understanding is correct; I don’t think it’s done lightly, and it’s probably almost always an improvement.
But aren’t some of those side-effects things like a guy buttoning a shirt with one hand and then unbuttoning it with the other? Writing a sentence with one hand and speaking a different, perhaps contradictory thing? Or is that a misrepresentation? I’ll look myself if you don’t have something handy.
The implications of these things (not necessarily demonstrably true, but suggested) is that there are now two personalities fighting for control of the same body–or at least imperfectly struggling to cooperate for it.
And if you can turn one person into two persons… that has a lot of implications for the reality of personhood–in the philosophical, not legal sense–that none of me is able to grasp well.
@Nick
Exactly. If God is outside time, then probably that means he can’t ‘wall off’ knowledge of events that
weHe would later come to know, because there isn’t later. But how does one posit an agency that exists outside causality? He can’t be said to observe, consider, decide, and then act–because there’s no ‘then’. Outside sequentiality you can’t converse, or learn, or plan. Only a simultaneous instantiation of all actions one would ‘ever’ do.It may be so, but I won’t claim to comprehend it.
@Atlus
Seems consistent with a God that knows everything that there is to know about what is happening now, without ‘consciously’ calculating the implications for what that must imply for a moment from now. Or that could just be poetic. But don’t take this for a well informed or fully developed –or even consistent–theology.
—
First of all, YIKES. As a neurologist let me say that this is not how the brain works. As someone who recommends corpus callosotomies, let me say that this interpretation of a corpus callosotomy is flatly incorrect.
An illustration : alexia without agraphia. If a patient has a stroke of the posterior cerebral artery on their dominant side, the posterior portion of the corpus callosum may be damaged. This disrupts the connection between the occipital cortex and the dominant angular gyrus. The dominant angular gyrus is heavily involved in language, both reading and writing. Because the flow of visual information into the dominant angular gyrus has been disrupted, the patient cannot read. But, because their dominant angular gyrus itself is intact, they are still able to write. So they can write words but not read them. Alexia without agraphia, however, does not split you into two persons.
Enkidum is correct that most people who undergo a corpus callosotomy will never notice that the corpus callosum is gone. In fact, there are people who are simply born without one, and never find out.
—
Second of all : You believe that the mind is not beholden to the brain. You also believe that modifying the brain will not only modify the mind, but may actually segment it into two persons? These beliefs are incompatible.
I appreciate the correction of an expert. But from wikipedia:
Perhaps I heard this explained in the past in a more sensationalist way, or added the horror gloss myself, but you can see where the impression comes from, right?
Hence being kept up at night, attempting to reconcile. (Sometimes, mind. I usually sleep like a baby. But the expression conveys the unsettled feeling of the dissonance.)
@Randy M,
That’s fair.
It’s genuinely a weird procedure. And people without callosums can do some rather astonishing things. My favorite is the guy who simultaneously draws a circle with one hand and a square with the other.
Also, it is right to bring up alien hand syndrome! Which is just exactly what the name says, and can be extremely disruptive. It can appear like your hand has gained a malevolent mind of its own. We’re not sure how that syndrome works – and it can occur with other lesions or even nonlesional brain disorders. We would be remiss to gloss over this syndrome, but blessedly, it is extremely rare.
—
Can I take a stab at the God-is-external-to-causality idea? I believe something like that.
Imagine the book The Great Gatsby. Gatsby obsesses over Daisy – but why? Is it because of the various events in his life? Is it because that is the way F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote him? It is equally true to say both.
In the same way, God is the author of all things, down to the very concepts of time, space, and matter – this is the radical nature of His ex nihilo creative act. But the entire sequence of things is created en masse and holistically, such that each thing is the real causes of its actions.
If I may wax philosophical…
I think the correct implication of the weird findings from corpus callosotomies (I legitimately have no idea how to spell that word, I could scroll down to @rahien.din’s reply but that seems like a lot of work) is something like this:
Agency is unitary and coherent only when you’re squinting from a distance. The truth is that we are messy composites of lots of mechanisms, drives, etc. And under particularly weird circumstances (say, cutting the communication between the two halves of your cortex and showing information to one cortex only faster than REM), you can show that the single, unified self is not actually fully single or unified, and get what looks like the action of little selves competing with each other. But really it’s just that we’re not nicely unified soul atoms, and so of course under weird circumstances you might be able to show that. Hence the analogy with the double slit experiment. Yes, this poses problems for the traditional Christian (though not Biblical, so far as I’m aware) interpretation of the soul. Tough.
Michael Gazzaniga is the go-to guy here (he became the most influential neuroscientist of his generation I think largely on the back of his work with these patients), although I think his philosophical interpretations are a little off.
I can choose to call things to mind, or to focus my consciousness on other topics. I can direct my gaze.
I have no definitive clue if these actions have any analogs in the God I believe in! Perhaps anything less than full moment to moment and future omniscience is a contradiction in nature. But… I’m not sure it is. So I can resolve my the dissonance by saying to myself, maybe the future is undetermined. Or maybe it is as rahien.din says and all things at once unfold from God’s perspective, with multiple seemingly but not exclusive forms of causation. I don’t see anyway of definitively resolving it, and don’t blame anyone for finding it difficult to buy into anything beyond mechanistic determinism.
Only if people are clockwork. In one sense yes, He would have “caused” all our actions by creating us in the first place (as in, we wouldn’t have done anything if we didn’t exist). But the whole point of the theological concept of free will is that he does not cause all our choices. We choose. Does God know what we will choose? Likely yes, if the theologians are right and he exists outside of time. But if that is the case just because he knows what choice we will make doesn’t mean it wasn’t ours to make freely. To put it more simply: I know George Washington chose to step down after two terms, but just because I know he did that doesn’t mean he was fated to do that, or that was the only choice he could make. It just means that was the choice he did make. If God is outside of time then He knows all the choices we are going to make before we make them, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a choice. It’s just a reflection of the fact that as beings living in time once we make a choice we can’t go back and choose something else.
In a previous open thread I gave a summary of the Canadian election campaign (on mobile right now, so if someone else can find and link the previous thread please feel free). Well, last night there was a dramatic development (initially from TIME magazine rather than any Canadian media outlet): photos of the incumbent PM Justin Trudeau in black/brown face. What impact will this have? On its own, my best guess is that it will shift some voters who are on the fence between Trudeau’s Liberals and Singh’s NDP toward the latter. It also increases the risk of Trudeau making some slip-ups in debates and press conferences as he is most comfortable when things are staying on-script (the initial press conference he held to address the situation was on a plane, so a very controlled environment where he can set the framing). At this point, I still think he’ll get reelected, but I see the race as more competitive now.
Trudeau was set to win a second term based on the collapse of the NDP vote, and I doubt this will have much impact on the race. Everybody knows Trudeau is not a racist, and people who are willing to vote for him are likely to ignore this as they ignored the SNC Lavalin scandal which was much worse.
If this was Andrew Scheer, the CBC would not stop talking about this until he resigned, but this is Trudeau so different rules apply.
There’s also the fact that the Liberal vote is more efficiently distributed, so that even with a slight lead, the Conservatives are not favourite to win (Canadian spelling because this is a Canadian topic). If the conservatives win the popular vote but lose the election, I expect to see many columns extolling the virtues of the FPTP system from people who are currently demonizing the electoral college.
There is non-zero chance Trudeau really messes up the debates, and these past photos may haunt him specially if Jaghmeet Singh can manage to cry during the debates as he recently did when discussing those photos, but I wouldnt bet on it.
It surprises me that the liberal vote is more efficiently distributed, as I would expect them to concentrate into cities which tends to create vote inefficiencies. Or does Canada use a different sort of election system that changes that?
I could be entirely wrong about this, because I am embarrassingly ignorant about my own country’s political system, so someone please correct me if I’m mistaken. At any rate, my understanding is (a) the rural/urban divide between conservatives/liberals exists in Canada, but is less pronounced than the States, and (b) the distribution of ridings is more closely tied to population than the States, rendering the divide less powerful.
The rural/urban divide does exist, but some rural areas will vote NDP, which is the far-left, typically associated to unions, political party, and some semi-rural areas (mostly Atlantic Canada) will vote Liberal because they depend on many government programs for their economy.
The main difference is that instead of each state having X electoral college votes, every province is divided into ridings, each having about 100k-200k people, and each riding counts for 1 seat in the house.
Atlantic Canada is very swing-y. In most elections the majority of the seats here go to the winning party as far as I can recall. Whether this is because the demographics are a microcosm of the country as a whole or because staying in Ottawa’s good books is important for the regional economy is left as an exercise to the reader.
Another thing to note is that the largest visible minority groups in Canada are East Asians and South Asians. They tend to vote for the Conservatives/Liberals/NDP in proportions that aren’t terribly different from the overall population. Because no one party has their votes locked down and because there are some key ridings where they are concentrated (example) some candidates will see a chance to use this as a localized wedge issue.
This is the third Trudeau scandal that would’ve ended the career of a lesser politician. Before this, there was SNC-Lavalin and a story that he groped a woman reporter, and that’s just the ones I’ve heard of south of the border. If he wins reelection, I think that makes him the Canadian Trump.
He does have a certain teflon quality to him, at least for now.
It really does. Not knowing how many times you’ve worn blackface has sort of a magical quality to it.
It seemed like this was going to be a very boring election campaign. Until this news came out, I wasn’t planning to watch the leaders’ debate as I didn’t expect there would be much to it that couldn’t be learned from the party platforms. Not anymore.
Nah, Trudeau is even less popular than Trump right now. Which I’m more than fine with, I also approve of Trump more than I approve of Trudeau.
I checked the polls and you’re absolutely right. Looks like they expect a very evenly divided vote in Canada between Conservatives and Liberals, which gives the Liberals an advantage in seats.
Fun fact: Donald Trump is the G7 leader with the highest approval rating in his/her own country.
yeah but in Canada you need about 35-40% of the vote to win an election so he has a good chance to be re-elected.
his popularity should be served as an example of a frequent failure mode of democracy. he has accomplished nothing in his life besides partying alot, being good looking, mouthing progressive cliches, and most importantly, being the son of a popular prime minister. that’s all you need apparently to get the vote of millions of Canadians.
This post is the one that I think I would most miss reading Deiseach’s comments on.
Well, this one or a comment about the whole Union seminary plants thing.
My favorite comment on the Union Seminary thing was courtesy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
That one would probably end up on the cutting room floor.
Do most people have a strong, psyche-level connection to their gender?
For example, if your consciousness was floating around in a void with no prior memory of your physical existence, would some of you “know” you were male/female? I ask because I realized that when heard or read comments from trans people talking about “knowing” their sex didn’t match their gender, I had absolutely no clue what they were talking about. If this is normal sense people have, I possess it in quantities minute enough to have thus far never noticed it.
Is this a sense that people have in differing quantities, or this some kind of phenomena that is only perceptible when there’s a gender/sex mismatch?
The disembodied consciousness scenario doesn’t seem to be entailed by the claims of transgendered individuals; a “woman in a man’s body” seems to be a mismatch about biological and social feedback, rather than an intuitive a priori knowledge of one’s gender. And such mismatch would probably be something you only notice if there is a mismatch; people in the appropriately gendered body never notice it (because why would you?).
Would you know whether you were a human or a dog? “consciousness floating around in a void with no prior memory of your physical existence” isn’t a very relatable scenario.
Supposedly the latter.
I feel like this is too disconnected from real life to have an opinion of.
What I am feels male, striving to be even more of the positive aspects of masculinity. Whether or not a female actually feels pretty much the same but calls it female because that’s just how a human feels, I couldn’t ever say.
Roger, it looks like this was a bad way to phrase the question.
I’m trying to figure out if most people have an innate knowledge of their gender that they experience separately than their physical form, but it looks like I got too cute with my writing.
Can’t speak for people with traces of psychadelics in their system, but I don’t think people tend to experience anything separately from their physical form.
Really?
My conception of self is almost entirely removed from my body. You could upload my consciousness into a computer tomorrow and I literally wouldn’t care what happened to the pile of meat that used to house me.
I mean, I understand that I’m only currently “running” as a result of the biological processes that enable conscious thought, but that doesn’t imply that I am only that biology.
I am enjoying reading this thread because I am literally the exact opposite.
My body IS me. I can’t conceive of a consciousness without a body as a real thing. I couldn’t imagine not being me, and obviously being me is strongly connected with being male. I feel male in the sense of absolute truth.
Likewise, but I think the biology is constantly informing you, even if subconsciously. I don’t mean to say that I am consciously aware of the particular form of my gonads 24/7, but that my thinking is influenced by hormones, sensations, capabilities, whatever from my body. Maybe my level of confidence (such as it is…) comes in part from my perception of my height, or testosterone level, or amount of muscle mass I have compared to my set point, or how people respond to me, etc.
I’m not sure if this is a hyperbole or what, but I don’t empathize*. As much as I voluntarily plug in for an embarrassing large fraction of time to some extent or another, losing the shell my consciousness rests in would be enormously impactful.
I am not only my biology, but I am not me without it.
*Personally, I mean. I can understand it.
I don’t think I’d experience my “maleness” in the same way as a disembodied consciousness, but if we go back to your question of psyche, I think there’d still be a difference, and one I could presumably discover for myself. My mind, like most males’, is pretty thing-oriented, so in our glorious future of mind-wiped uploads, I think I’d still be able to tell myself and the thing-orienteds apart from the people-orienteds over there.
ETA: @Randy M
+1
Yes… I think. But it’s not as much a sense of being aware of – actually, it’s very much not that, unless in contexts when it matters, such as social interactions. It’s more in sets of priors and unconscious actions. Being male is part of me – not because I hold a “male had” all the time, but because some of my responses will always be male.
There was a moment in a Mark Twain book when Tom Sawyer was disguised as a girl when visiting an old lady, and he gives himself away by a dozen hints. When she throws something in his lap he pulls his legs together to catch it – a girl used to wear skirts would have spread them. He throws a rock at a rat and nearly flattens it.
I think that’s the same with me – both some of my instincts and my competencies are male. Plus quite a lot of my preferences.
I don’t know if it helps you or not – and I really have no idea to what degree the experience of trans people is different.
That Mark Twain thing speaks to me AGAINST gender. If Tom had grown up wearing skirts (as men in so many cultures do), he’d have learned the trick of catching with his skirt. And I, a woman who mostly wears trousers of some sort, have the legs together thing.
Your instincts and competencies are shaped by your life experiences, even if what you feel like on the inside may be different from others in ‘your’ category.
Then again, I consider myself cis-only-barely-by-default (and not because my gender fits me so well – I struggled mightily with it and social dysphoria until I was about 22 or so, I think, though never physical dysphoria, only generic body hate). Used to want to be a boy, but probably just because people were constantly telling me I was a failure as a girl and later woman. I was not so much a butterface but a buttermind. 😉
Since then, I’ve learned to mostly function as a woman so now I’d be pissed off to suddenly wake up as a man (even if that meant finally trading my Christina Hendricks-esque physique for something more Thin White Duke-era Bowie), because I FINALLY mastered this set of random instincts and competencies and I don’t have the desire or patience to suddenly have to learn an entirely new one.
Becoming a parent was an interesting experience, too. Nothing like being visibly pregnant to suddenly be invited into a bunch of new inner circles. On the other hand, anyone who now complains about my lack of genderconformity now gets a raised eyebrow and a ‘this body built a human. I think I stamped my woman card once and for all. Please get lost now.’
Yes, I agree. Man and Woman are concepts that depend a lot on the society that defines them. The skirt thing is a good example. There are probably commonalities across cultures (for starters, women make babies) but I don’t think it makes sense to try to restrain the meaning to only the commonalities. Better to just accept that part of the definition is cultural.
That was Huck Finn, in the eponymous novel.
woah. I’m trans and i’m having a really hard time addressing this question actually. Most of my feelings about the mismatch between my sex and gender has to with how people treat me and interact with me, and what I felt like I was “allowed” to like and do growing up.
If I’m playing a video game, I gravitate towards playing the female characters. Or if i’m watching a movie and there’s a beautiful actress, what i feel is more jealousy than attraction.
But these things all involve a body more or less, and what i think you’re trying to ask is if thought is gendered, correct? Part of me really wants to say no, but at the same time patterns of speech are clearly gendered and thought is mostly internal dialogue, right?
And omg the emotional side of things after starting hrt: if the right song came on sometimes i would start crying. Maybe what’s the most accurate is that a lot of times when thinking gender doesn’t come into play, but a lot of low level processing, such as emotional responses, are informed by your hormones and that’s a gendered thing.
I really think the answer, “this is to far removed from reality” is boring, but maybe it is. We wouldn’t have a gender binary without a body… idk if i would develop a desire for hrt without a body…
@rho
Many Thanks!
(as a cis-by-default male – I don’t _think_ I feel my gender strongly, but I honestly can’t tell.)
Thanks for the honest and insightful comment. FWIW: i’m as cis-male as it gets, usually roll female video game characters and K.D. Lang’s music makes me cry.
I was raised by a couple of very progressive lesbians (with a Dad on the side, slightly out of frame) and given EVERY opportunity to explore interests and hobbies that were not strictly coded male. As it turned out, almost none of the female ones stuck, and the archetypal male story resonated very strongly, to the exclusion of much else.
Therefore I wonder if gender dysphoria sits on a foundation of rebellion against the things you were not “allowed” (i’d say “expected”) to like as a kid on the basis of gender.
Based on personal experience, I think “trans” is under-defined.
Is there a birth defect that causes chemical signals to the brain that the mind associated with it reads as “I’m a girl/I’m a boy” to be the reverse of gross physiology? Sure, and hopefully this sucky situation has much lower frequency than total gender-bending (I’ve met a small number of people online and one IRL who looked like they were switching for fun more than anything else. All female.)
I’ve experienced gender dysphoria, and I’d say that if I became disembodied consciousness with no memory of this life, I wouldn’t “know” my sex.
It’s possible that literally intersex people don’t have rigidly strong connection to a gender. St. Augustine discusses in The City of God that some people are born hermaphrodites, and we politely call them “he” because society honors men more. Unfortunately we don’t have any Greek or Latin text where a person with this rare condition explains how they felt about that.
Do you care to say any more about this? Without wishing to pry, I would be interested in hearing any expansion on it, if you care to.
It doesn’t bother me to expand.
So, OK, beginning of high school. I’ve always been youngest in class, and I was an un-diagnosed Aspie. Girls don’t like me and I’m into nerd things, I’ve had a scant few guy friends since middle school. They say things like “you’re one of the guys”, are skeptical of my Woman Card, whatever.
Also periods suck. I’m just starting to see a psychiatrist for OCD, and having my mood altered by SSRIs (which eventually becomes super helpful as we settle on Celexa). Hey, hormonal birth control could help me feel more comfortable in my body. My high-strung fundamentalist mother is against it, but my lapsed Catholic, very Red tribe father quietly helps me out.
I start thinking of myself as a guy. I visit some internet friends dressed/groomed as one and apparently pass.
After [unit of time] I get over all this…
Thanks.
Now, I know I claimed I wasn’t going to pry, but… you didn’t really believe that, did you? I am curious about one more thing. Do you have a sense of what led you to ‘get over it’? Or did it just happen?
@James:
I don’t know how to respond to that. We’re getting into the epistemology of qualia here. I don’t know how to compare my experience of believing X to someone who’s so hardcore about a similar belief that they get surgery, and it’s a Culture War minefield too.
Oh yes I have a sense of what led me to ‘get over it’. It was a combination of years of getting used to my young adult body (see: psychiatrist, drugs) and refusing to trust the administrators’/professors’ ideology during my first year of university. If they believed demonstrably false things and I could be punished for demonstrating it, how could I trust them that gender dysphoria was always and everywhere (whether pre-modern women living as men or the recent MtF trend) the same thing and cured by surgery, which ought to be at taxpayer expense and only bigots/Republicans disagreed? I didn’t believe in Christianity when I enter university, but I did believe in Plato, and Hypatia’s attitude to not liking her body was based on Platonic rationalism, which made her worthier of belief than 21st century universities.
@Le Maistre Chat,
Uh-oh. I think my joke, such as it was, got lost in translation there. I meant ‘you didn’t really believe I wasn’t going to pry any further, did you?’. But thankyou for the rest—that just about satisfies my curiosity.
My impression is that most people are cis by default. Subjective evidence for this: the prevalence of stories/media about bodyswapping that don’t include in the kinds of intense dysphoria feelings that mark out the trans/rejection-of-trans experience, and the acceptance by the majority of the audience that such stories wouldn’t include such feelings.
I myself used to tend towards an agender attitude, but have since had more of a cis-by-default self-perception.
Strong disagree. Doesn’t coincide with my experience, experiences of others I’ve observed/heard about, and basic evolutionary logic. When puberty hit I immediately found the female form specifically very attractive; I strongly doubt this was socially moderated to any significant degree, and I understand others have similar experiences.
Incidentally, my 4 year old is *very* interested in understanding our society’s gender roles right now, to the extent that I’m starting to wonder if this interest is hardwired into human development at this stage.
Sexuality and personal gender identity aren’t the same. I don’t think het-by-default is nearly as much of a thing as cis-by-default, though it does somewhat exist.
Gender roles are separate from innate identity. Gender roles provide incentives. There are probably a whole lot of people who may go more towards the cis-by-default attitude if gender roles were lessened.
Yes, you’re right, my mistake.
My view is that societies tend to define gender roles in ways that roughly coincide with biological gender differences, and people are hardwired to try to figure out what social role their gender entails (what ‘being a man’ means in the particular culture they’re in). I’m not sure how this squares with what you’re saying.
Wow, I had never read that post before and it’s exactly what I was talking about. Thanks AG! (any Ozy for writing it!)
I don’t know enough to guess the prevalence of how many people are cis by default, but I would definitely count myself among them.
Drilling further down, it looks like this question was asked in the 2014 LessWrong Survey:
Which shows that a large % of LW members are Cis by Default.
That is an interesting article, but I agree with @Eponymous it doesn’t conflate with my experience or what I observe in my children. I note that it is because it is possible that I am the abnormal one and that I carry that genetic fact to give to my children.
For example, the statement “Very, very few people would put up with everything from gatekeeping to violence for the sake of their boner.” seems odd for anyone who has observed that yeah, humans do that all the time. In fact “doing stuff for the sake of their boner” explains a frighteningly large percentage of male behavior.
Counter-evidence: David Reimer.
More generally, it would be strange if a small fraction of people had an innate sense of gender identity which could occasionally go haywire in an even smaller fraction of people, causing gender dysphoria, while the majority of humans had no such innate sense.
It’s not technically impossible, maybe innate gender identity is an uncommon vestigial trait, like the muscles for wiggling the ears, but this hypothesis is unparsimonious.
Fair enough, but it is rather different having a natural girl’s body versus a boy’s body that doctors have tried to shoe-horn into a girl’s body. I could see someone being satisfied with the former and dissatisfied by the latter.
I don’t know that I agree with AG’s “most;” the survey seems to suggest that a lot of cis people have a sense of gender identity and a lot don’t, and SSC readers are probably atypical enough that it’s unsafe to try to speculate about the general population in any more detail beyond that. David Reimer’s story is obviously easy to reconcile with that state of affairs. It may be unparsimonious to hypothesize that gender identity is distributed in such a way, but is it much more parsimonious to hypothesize that introspective access to gender identity is distributed in such a way (as would have to be the case on the hypothesis that the people who claim to be cis-by-default are all suffering a failure of introspection)?
If genuine cis is the majority group, then why are there so many stories about body-swapping and crossdressing with little fanfare about gender feelings? Look at the shenanigans of As You Like It, for example.
It makes sense that a cis-by-default majority would be more concerned with gender roles. Since they don’t have an innate sense of identity connected to the body, they use actions as a proxy. And so gender expression becomes the thing, instead of inner feeling.
For that matter, the opposition to the trans identity therefore makes more sense in a cis-by-default situation, wherein people question just why trans people are so insistent on being identified a certain way. (With a side of rejection based on sexuality. If casual bodyswapping/crossdressing storytelling indicates gender-by-default feelings, then trap tropes indicate that sexuality-by-default is much less of a thing.)
Cross-dressing and body-swapping are not the same thing. The examples of cross-gender body swapping I can think of off the top of my head were generally played for laughs (as indeed were Shakespeare’s cross-dressing characters). The exception is _Altered Carbon_, but it was only briefly mentioned as a problem.
Is e.g. Norah Vincent to be considered as cis-by-default?
“It would be fun/funny/enlightening to experience being a man for a time”, is not at all the same thing as “I am a man trapped in a woman’s body”.
If we had the technological ability to transform a man into a woman, or vice versa, easily and reversibly and with high fidelity, I’m pretty certain you’d see a lot of very non-default-cis people giving it a try. I’d probably do it. And I might want to very strongly encourage everyone to do it, in roughly the same way I’d want to encourage people to travel to foreign countries.
I’d expect most of them to return to the status quo fairly soon, just as most foreign travelers do. And the number who don’t, would give us much better insight than we presently have regarding how many people are cis-by-default. But we lack that technology, and what we do have is almost always more trouble than it’s worth.
@John Schilling
At risk of the no-true-scotsman fallacy, temporarily taking on a body no more allows a person to experience being a gender than traveling to Madagascar allows a foreigner to experience being a Madagascaran.
Moving to Madagascar is a far more involved proposition, just as moving to another-sex body is a far more involved proposition than temporarily inhabiting it (unless you’re literally switching with your opposite-sex spouse or roommate, and neither of you have in-person jobs).
@The Nybbler
More trans-aligned storytelling in the modern day have reinterpreted cross-dressing stories in a trans lens. That they were originally just played for laughs is evidence for how most people didn’t find contradictions in someone suddenly expressing themselves as the opposite gender, because their innate gender identity wasn’t that strong. It was the sexuality that mattered, comedy from the audience’s knowledge of if their bits did or didn’t match.
@John Schilling
Consider an analogy to someone with an insensitive food palate. That’s cis-by-default, and it’s not the same thing as having no food preferences, which is influenced by memory and nostalgia and such. Someone who grows up eating traditional American food in one life might grow up eating Chinese food in another. So in each life, they might have a preference for their childhood food. However, this doesn’t mean they have an innate identity associated with their preference.
Similarly, in the hypothetical world with effortless body-swapping powers, someone who has grown up in a single body will likely return to that body because it’s their comfort zone. However, a full cis or full trans person will experience strong dysphoria when they bodyswap against their identity. These are different reasons.
Modern reinterpretations don’t serve as examples of past stories. Playing a role is not changing bodies.
There are many cross-dressing comedies that play on the difficulties and awkwardness of expressing oneself as the opposite gender. It’s practically a genre element of such comedies. But of course they don’t speak to an innate sense of gender identity, because cross-dressing doesn’t get at that. A woman in man’s clothing is still a woman, and vice-versa.
Body swapping stories are less common; I don’t know of many where it wasn’t at least somewhat awkward to do a cross-gender swap. To be fair, I also don’t know of any that went deeply into the issue. The two I can think of with no problem are quite modern, and weren’t exactly swaps — the Culture stories, where one can transition from one sex to the other and is expected to. And the Vorkosigan universe, where we’re given one example who may be atypical, and not much depth; it’s mostly done to let the reader laugh at designated comic-relief Ivan some more.
re gender changes in science fiction:
also John Varley’s Eight Worlds stories and novels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Worlds
and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness
I consider myself in the cis by default group, though I might be non-binary if my conservative beliefs didn’t make that concept too weird and uncomfortable to me. The definitions get confusing. I definitely don’t have any strong gender feelings, I just have a vague sense that I want to do certain behaviors that are more associated with one gender, and other behaviors associated with the other gender. Honestly if is was socially acceptable for men to wear flowery dresses, I could comfortably identify as male without changing anything else.
Based on seeing a bunch of conversations like this in the past, I think it’s very common for cis people to attest to feeling no particular, visceral, or primal attachment to their sex/gender, and to believe that if they were in the body of the other sex/gender, they would not feel dysphoria.
I guess the counter-argument is that this is like fish & water, and that if someone were dropped into another body through some magical means, they would suddenly discover that it grated in ways they can’t really perceive while in the “correct” body.
It’s super unfalsifiable, in both directions.
I do not feel my gender is innate to my personality. Yes, I’ve been male my whole life, so I act like a male to get along in society. And presumably my hormones make me feel somewhat different than I would if I was female. But if I suddenly woke up as a female, I am 95% sure I’d get used to that too.
Niven had a novel some years ago about a society on the moon had perfected body type changes, including changes in gender. The main character went back and forth between man and woman a couple times in (his) life. I remember thinking at the time that I would do the same if I had the opportunity. I’d love to try out being a woman for a while, but of course only if it was essentially transaction-free as in Niven’s novel. I suppose I would probably decide I preferred being one gender or the other, but I don’t know which one.
I do have a hard time understanding trans-gender people. What is it about being the other gender that is so important? Especially since transitioning is so imperfect in our society.
This question has been addressed before as “If someone zapped you with the body-switching ray, then (assuming a society without strict social roles tiled to gender, sexism, or other social costs) would you be distressed merely by having a body of the opposite sex?”
I’m very much cis-NOT-by-default. I expect this would make me suicidal.
I’m a little confused about what this means or what it is supposed to imply.
Sorry, I guess the overlap between Scott-readers and Ozy-readers is not as much of a given as it was before I went on a multi-year commenting hiatus.
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/cis-by-default/
I certainly do. I know I’m male as much as (or as little as) I know I’m human. If we were to have some sort of cyberpunk body-swapping and I swapped to a female body, I suspect I would experience something akin to dysphoria.
Wait, do you have a sense of innate humanity? If you do, does that suggest that you believe that otherkin-ness might be a… genuine condition? That is, that there really is some kind of actual brain machinery that causes people to innately “feel human,” and that if it is in some way damaged you might innately feel “not-human,” in an analogous way to how trans people attest to feel “not-male” (or not-female or whatever)?
(I have no particular sense that I can isolate which would make it seem like it would be innately unbearable to be a woman, or to be a wolf or something.)
It seems to be variable. I can’t find anything to point to in my consciousness or psychological makeup and say “that’s my gender”, but other people insist that they have a very clear sense of theirs. Some, apparantly introspecting, insist that all people have a strong gender consciousness/identifcation, just as they do; the number who go the other way (insist that no one has a sense of gender) seems smaller.
Or to put it another way, if I woke up one morning with a perfectly normal body, except for being the other gender, my concerns would involve the reactions of other people – would I behave in inappropriate ways for a person of my gender (in our particular (sub)culture), and draw flak for it, and would people treat me differently because of my (new) gender in ways I found to be more costly than those I currently experience. Well, that and wondering WTF had happened and what else was likely to happen next – maybe tomorrow I’d wake up as a perfectly normal zebra, and that would be a definite problem.
Would an update of the Animorphs novels today involve dysphoria, I wonder?
Go away.
The preferred phrasing here is “less of this, please”. We try to get people to argue better here, not to run them off.
So less of this, please.
(fwiw, I could use less of the starting post, too, since it sure seems to be deliberately baiting souleater’s low-effort-response)
I normally agree but that initial example is just begging for an Elizabeth Warren joke, because her story is that ridiculous.
I think the point is that the opening post appears to have been literally (intentionally) begging for that joke, which is why it would have been better of the top level post hadn’t been made and if souleater hadn’t engaged.
souleater did not argue, either well or badly. he just made a little joke that was on point, although it does seem like Viliam had Warren in mind in his post. Nobody was hurt. Everybody thought of Warren immediately as they read Viliam’s post.
I agree that we should cultivate strict norms around discussing difficult topics, but I do hope there is still a bit of room for jokes here.
I think it’s DeWitt’s comment which is very rude and unnecessary. If DeWitt is a Warren supporter, I can only recommend that they get used to this and find a suitable answer for it, because if Warren wins the nomination this issue will come back again and again.
For the record, yes I obviously had Elizabeth Warren in my mind (though I didn’t remember the exact name, because I actually don’t care that much), but I feel like souleater ruined the entire thing by providing the pointer.
Now sure if this needs explanation or not, but in my mind it’s like this: If you know what I am pointing at, then the explanation is not necessary; and it’s actually harmful unless someone explicitly asks for it. (A joke is ruined by explaining why it is supposed to be funny.) On the other hand, if you don’t know what I am pointing at, then obviously I failed at my attempt.
A bit like the old Soviet jokes, where both sides had the common knowledge that allowed the communication without being too explicit, and part of the fun was the affirmation that the (forbidden) common knowledge exists.
It would be a shame to lose this type of humor, if hypothetically a situation would come again when people could risk their job or more for speaking their minds openly. (Oh please, please, nobody react on this comment by saying that, indeed, the situation is already here. Just pretend that we are joking innocently by talking nonsense, and in best case provide a similar type of innocent nonsense.)
@Wrong Species
Are you aware of Warren’s claim that she was raised being told that:
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2019/white-lies-indigenous-scholars-respond-to-elizabeth-warrens-claims-to-native-ancestry
That in her mind she almost didn’t exist because of her mother’s Native American ancestry?
That is why her ancestry is important to her. Not some amount of tokenism.
(Yes, I am with Pocahontas, and Warren too. [The real Pocanhontas was a pretty amazing person.])
@anonymousskimmer
I’m sure that being able to put “Native American” on a form and getting the benefits of that had nothing to do with it.
@Wrong Species
I can’t see inside the mind of Elizabeth Warren to her true motives. But given that she’s human, the motives are likely to be so mixed that they can’t be fully broken down.
To assume your attributions of her motives and still argue for her though: If your immediate family had suffered because of a trait, wouldn’t you feel justified in claiming that trait for your benefit?
I could regret this, but discussion about this article— briefly that a high proportion of Christian churches generally are not teaching antisemitism and are rather pro-Jews– got lively on Facebook, and I’m wondering how it will go here. The political tilt here is somewhat different from my Facebook page.
I haven’t made it through the entire article yet, but I will tell you that my immediate reaction to the title was: “Yes, my life experience so far suggests that is exactly the right way to phrase it.”
As a conservative Christian who goes to a very philo-Semitic church, yeah, this is basically spot-on.
From my understanding a lot of Jews find some of the more aggressively interested Christians rather annoying/condescending, much the same way that a lot of black people find naive white allies. (I found it kind of funny that I just wanted to add a caveat saying “I have Jewish friends! And black ones!”)
But reading the article, the title is overstated. It’s more like “Only a minority of Christians support Jews because of insane rapture-related reasons” – those people do exist, he names some in the article, and I suspect they do have real influence over political decisions (then again, based on responses to Scott’s almond article, maybe not).
At any rate, it’s a good article, and I think the basic point is probably true – the large majority of Christians who are super friendly to Jews and Israel are not doing so because they want to hasten the end times, etc.
Also the end times motivated philo semitic protestants have lost prominence now compared to 20 years ago. That strand also tends to be more pro-isreal rather than philosemitic but those things are linked.
My experience does support this view. I come from a very catholic family, and my father in particular is over-the-top catholic. He respects Jews very much, and sincerely considers them to have been chosen by God.
I suspect he is pleased that the Christian holy sites are in Jewish hands instead of Muslim hands.
This I think is the intended effect; the demand for racial and ethnic disharmony is much greater than the natural supply (self segregation sees to that), and so the market corrects itself…
Wait a minute, there are some Jews that believe Christians only support them because of the rapture? I’m a Christian that has attended at least 7 different denominations, and none of them said anything like that. It was always that they were our brothers in faith, and we would be blessed if we helped God’s chosen people. For that matter in college a good third of my friends were Jewish, including my long term girlfriend at the time, and this never came up. All they wanted was to not be evangelized to, which made sense. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the south, but I never heard of this conspiracy before today.
I’ve never heard it from personal (Jewish) friends or acquaintancess, but I grew up in a politically diverse environment. I think I first heard the idea 15 years ago from a fellow high school student who was disparaging Christian conservatives and (probably as a direct result) I’ve always perceived it to be a Democrat talking point to malign Christian conservative-values types. My guess is that substantially more people buy into it in Democrat-stronghold locales.
I have heard it the same context as you: always from somebody attempting to recast conservative Evangelicals’ love of Israel as something sinister. I think the article’s title is spot-on.
American Evangelicals love the Jews because they believe God loves the Jews. It’s as simple as that.
Yup, with a side of, “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you”
Curious to your answer to the question in the edit here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/open-thread-136-75/#comment-800668
@brad
Assuming “people like you” are “Jews who aren’t observant beyond doing Hanukkah instead of Christmas,” I’d say that’s probably the central example of the kind of Jew your typical Evangelical would have any experience of (it certainly is for me). Hasidic Jews may as well be Jewish Amish for all their relevance. “Children of Israel” literally refers to the descendants of Israel, so anyone with Jewish blood counts.
Israel the country is of interest for two reasons:
1) So much of the Bible is about how God has promised that land to the Jews. Evangelicals are going to defer to God in these matters.
2) The return of the Jews to Israel is a major fulfilled prophecy that happened within living memory, with the bonus of being a prediction that looked patently absurd for some 1,500 years.
Did any of them believe in the Rapture itself? Depending on who you ask, it isn’t mainstream.
I think people who aren’t Christian equate “Christian” with stereotypical homeschools-to-avoid-the-kids-getting-taught-evolution fundamentalist evangelicals, because those are the most politically active and visible Christians in the US. And, to the best of my knowledge, those folks *are* likely to both believe in the Rapture and support Israel because of its prophesied role in the End Times.
TL;DR it’s probably outgroup homogeneity bias.
I think you’d even be surprised to find the extent that homeschoolers have been weakmanned to you by people feeding you the very craziest examples. I was homeschooled, the wife was homeschooled; we are more or less reasonable. Our kids are homeschooled and normal/popular. We take them to a homeschool drama club my wife has been involved with; the kids are personable and liked, the parents are more or less normal, maybe just a shade or two more spectrum and conservative than most mainstream christians.
When we watch depictions of homeschoolers in the news/fiction it’s probably really similar to if you were watching the news and they had somebody going “I’m going to burn down houses to stop people from eating meat!” and then they played it off like that was how every democrat was.
Yeah, most homeschoolers are decent families doing well by their kids. FWIW, though, I’ve met at least one family ruining it for everyone else. And I know folks who knew them and generalized that to all homeschoolers.
FWLIW we’re Democrats who are homeschooling our son.
@Plumber
You’ve been using For What Little It’s Worth way too much lately. Stop selling yourself short!!
@Nick >
Are you referring to the Dwarf post?
@Plumber: Stop selling yourself, Short. Dwarf BDSM is disturbing.
I was being serious. 🙁
@Nick,
Duly noted and thank you, your very kind.
That’s not my suspicion as to Christians that are Fans of the Jews ™ in a general sense but it is when I come across a religious Protestant that is a maximalist Zionist.
The whole subject is confounded by the fact that in my experience non-Jews talking about Jews in almost any context makes us a little nervous and uncomfortable. Especially in my generation (late 30s) and older.
What does maximalist Zionist mean in this respect? I’m suspecting it’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this statement. I know a lot of REALLY Zionist Protestants and none of them are secretly anti-Semitic. They really like Jews and really like Israel.
I originally wrote Likudnik but a) I was worried that was too obscure and b) shockingly enough Likud is now the mid right wing party in Israel.
Edit: curious when you say they really like Jews, do they include people like me? Or is it only orthodox or only Israelis or only the concept of Jews?
@brad
I do know Likudniks (and what that means), but I am not sure how that would translate to anti-Semitism in any way.
I’m a deacon at my church and have had to take a few people aside who were praying aloud for the most recent election in Israel to gently remind them that praying for what is best for the Jewish people doesn’t mean praying for Bibi Netanyahu to win.
Oh sorry, I didn’t address that part. I don’t consider “I’m a big supporter of an aggressive Israeli foreign policy because I think it will hasten the end times” to be antisemitic. I also don’t consider it pro Semitic. For that matter I consider Zionism in general as orthogonal from pro/anti semitism.
@brad
Yes, they include secular Jews, although obviously as religious Christians they prefer Jews be religious because they believe you need to be religious to be saved. But they prefer the same thing about white Americans, black Americans, etc.
This one baffles me. I used to be in the habit of attending Christmas and Easter services at a different church and usually a different denomination each year, pretty much the ideal time to hear Christians talk about their main man’s often unpleasant personal interactions with the Jews, and I don’t think I ever heard a version of Christian-Jewish relations that was far from e.g. my own relations with my YEC-Christian cousins. Yeah, it’s silly that they haven’t updated their priors to incorporate the latest knowledge, but they’re decent people, closer kin than any of those other billions of strangers out there, and the silly theology almost never matters in mundane life so this isn’t the time to push it. And, anybody messing with them, is messing with family.
I haven’t had much interaction with the imminent-Rapture crowd – that really is a minority belief – but from what I’ve read they don’t expect Jesus to return to Jerusalem to kill all the Jews. I think the consensus there is that once He comes back as something more than a carpenter-turned-street-preacher, most of the Jews will get with the program and we’ll all live happily ever after.
Christian anti-Semitism is clearly a thing, at least in history and presumably not entirely dead. But Christian anti-Semitism “works” best in an environment where basically everyone is a Christian of some sort and Jews are as out-groupy as it gets. That doesn’t describe much of the modern world.
So, yeah, the article is right. If there are Jews out there who believe Christianity is divided between an openly antisemitic fringe and a covertly antisemitic majority, I’m kind of interested in your take on where they’re getting that. From what I can see, and apparently the author and everyone else here, modern American-style Christianity has an openly antisemitic fringe, and a sincerely philosemitic majority.
Count another poster agreeing with you.
Post-1945, almost all Protestants are philosemites. It’s remarkable when you consider the vast number of denominations that aren’t in communion with each other.
If Catholic clergy were teaching anything antisemitic in 1945, it got changed from the top down by Vatican II.
Note that there’s a huge overlap between practicing Christians in the US and the Red tribe, and Red people, especially men, tend to like Israel for being badass.
I’ve never heard of conflict between Orthodox Christians and Jews in recent times. If fundamentalist Protestants are waiting for Christ to appear in Jerusalem Real Soon Now so the Jews will update their beliefs, the amillennialist Orthodox just seem to be shrugging and expecting to wait way longer.
Outside of the South, I’ve never met anyone who professed the “Israel-as-apocalypse-ingredient” version of Christianity. Within the South, I’ve met a few people who thought that way, but only one of them was genuinely anti-Semitic; the rest were positive-to-neutral about Jews outside of Rapture theology, as a rule.
It’s a significant, and relevant, plot element in Harry Turtledove’s recent Alpha and Omega. When the no-shit Ark of the Covenant shows up in modern Jerusalem, there’s a joint effort by Very Orthodox Israeli Jews and Very Fundamentalist Southern American Christians to get a ritually pure red heifer on-site ASAP. This is sincere cooperation in pursuit of a common goal. Not all Protestants are on board with this; many who were expecting Christ rather than the Ark to be heralding a new age, think the whole thing is a trick. But at the “I hope not too many Israelis are fooled by this obvious trick” level, not the “Awesome, now they’re all going to die!” level.
Turtledove, as usual, has done his homework.
Also a significant, and relevant, plot element in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
IIRC, that’s not just fiction.
There are real Christians and Jews trying to breed a red heifer and get it to Jerusalem.
A couple of things from this article stick out to me and make me question the basic premises of this article:
Point 1:
He cites this study with the following quote:
Based on this quote, you’d walk away thinking the study proves that most Christians only support Israel because if it’s historical pact with God.
When you actually read the study, however, it presents a far more murky picture. For example, in the study when asked the question: “When you think of the modern rebirth of the State of Israel in 1948 and the regathering of millions of Jewish people to Israel, which of the following statements best represents your personal views?” 80% of people who responded said that: “These events were fulfillment of Bible prophecy that show we are getting closer to the return of Jesus Christ”
Even his use of the 12% statistic above was IMO misleading. Yes, only 12% said that the prophecy was the most important reason to support Israel… but 52% said that it contributed to their support for Israel.
Based on only this study, I would conclude that somewhere between 50%-80% of Evangelical Christian’s who support Israel do so to varying degrees of intensity as a result of their beliefs in Israel’s role in fulfilling prophecy. Of that larger subset, 12% consider this the most pressing reason as to why they should support Israel.
Point 2: This quote:
is a straw man. He brings up this point “people on the left think people on the right think Jesus wants to kill all the jews” 6 times throughout this piece, and it’s not true. People on the left think people on the right want to bring about the rapture. Most people on the left don’t care what happens after the rapture, because we don’t believe in the rapture. We don’t think Christians want Jesus to kill the Jews.
Point 3:This quote:
This was provided without sourcing, but a quick google returned some results that seemed similar enough for me to assume this is what he’s talking about. These articles link back to this survey of 1000 prominent American pastors on their views of end times. Yes, that survey did find that only 36% of pastors believe in a preatribulation rapture… but that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in the rapture entirely.
Preatribulation rapture is like that described in that famous book series, where the end times are kicked off be all Christians getting beamed up to heaven. It turns out that pastors are unsure of when exactly Christians will get whisked up, some think way before, others during others after. Some even think the rapture already happened. When you add up the number of pastors that DO believe in rapture, the number is around 70%.
Mind you, this was only a poll of the 1000 most prominent pastors, and isn’t reflective of the overall beliefs of Protestants in America (and ignores the large non-rapture denominations like Catholics and Lutherans), but it’s still a far cry from the author of this articles 1/3 estimate.
TLDR:
The person who wrote this article cherry picked data to support his claims while ignoring, misunderstanding or outright lying about data that didn’t support him. I don’t make any claims on what Christians actually think about Jews, but I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from anything in the linked article.
Aftagley:
If you read the Christian scriptures (old and new testament) literally, then you more-or-less have to end up believing that God personally promised Israel to the Jews. This seems like a fairly convincing reason to support Zionism.
Is there anything in the scripture (OT/NT/Torah) that indicates whether a rejection of the Messiah (which, theoretically, would be the same as rejecting God himself I guess?) might invalidate that promise? The promise being conditional or unconditional both seem plausible to me, but I’m not sure which would be correct. OT God certainly seems like the type who might say “you have blasphemed/adopted heresies and are now kicked out of the promised land” but I don’t know if there is any strong indicator that he did or would, it just seems in character.
Given the the Israelites collectively rejected God over and over for such as Ashur and Baal, I’d be hesitant to assume so. Seems like a rather one sided covenant, all in all.
Plus, Hosea.
Agreed, but if you read it literally, the scripture says a bunch of things that don’t motivate action or engender sympathy in Protestant America (insert tired argument about shellfish here).
But that doesn’t matter, I’m not talking about my opinion here, I’m talking about the data in a study cited by the person who wrote the article linked by @Nancy Lebovitz above. If you believe that study, 80% of polled Christians say they believe that the state of Israel is a step in the rebirth of Jesus and 50% say their support for Israel is influenced by prophecy.
In that case, I definitely don’t believe that study.
The study actually refers to polled Evangelicals, not Christians, and yeah, I can believe it. I don’t think I’ve ever met an Evangelical in the South who wasn’t at least conversant with Left Behind and similar Rapture fiction.
My mistake.
I kind of also don’t believe the study is completely representative; I doubt it was done with appropriate controls and I’m sure the data isn’t perfect.
That being said, I do think it reveals that the beliefs surrounding rapture are way more widespread than the article Nancy linked make it seem.
Pedantically speaking, Christians definitively believe that Jesus plans to come back someday, and almost all will believe that the universe unfolds according to His omniscient, omnipotent, infallible, ineffable plan. So if a thing happens, it’s part of the plan that ends with Christ’s return, and the formation of Israel is now a thing that has happened, so QED.
Among evangelicals who are specifically asked, sure, I can believe that no more than 20% would answer “No”, “I have no opinion”, or “why are you wasting my time with a trivial tautology?”. I’m not sure this tells us anything useful, though, because it doesn’t distinguish between “I believe, halleluja!” and “Meh, yeah, that’s probably part of it”.
An open-ended question of “Do you believe Christ will return in your lifetime? If so, what events/signs/portents lead you to this belief?” would be useful, and would I suspect lead to a significant but <80% level of evanelicals saying "formation of the state of Israel".
Pre-1948, "Do you believe the state/kingdom of Israel will be reestablished prior to the return of Christ?" would be a very useful question, but opinion polling wasn't nearly as well developed in that era.
I, meanwhile, was pedantically pointing out that belief in the rebirth of Jesus would be a heresy – such an unusual one that it has no name.
Or at least a few relevant portions of it now and then.
To make a theologically important, but tangential point.
And this belief, what does it imply? As an evangelical, I’ve only ever heard one prophecy that is also basically a commandment. That every language and people group should hear about the gospel prior to the Second Coming.
There’s no other prophecy that I’ve seen as justification (in modern American Christian culture) for specific behaviors. Oh, wait, one other exception, I’ve heard people pray for peace in the middle East/Israel (partially) because that would be a sign of the end times. Perhaps hoping for an end to worldly suffering is an underhanded reason to pray for the good of a foreign people but it’s not a sign of secret animosity towards Jews. Otherwise, prophecy is not taken (again, ime) as an invitation to attempt to fulfill it yourself through personal actions or politics.
@ John Schilling
Yes, I agree that 80% is probably a soft ceiling for this topic, but in that same study when asked ““Which of the following reasons, if any, contribute to your support for the modern State of Israel?” 52% said “Israel is important for fulfilling biblical prophecy” and 12% said this reason was the most important reason they supported Israel.
@Le Maistre Chat
Oh darn… He’s not going to get born this time? How’s he going to come back then?
This kind of contradicts what I said. I will update and be chagrined for commenting without reading the link.
To be fair, if you do believe Israel is brought back to some extent by divine intervention, you are naturally going to want very much not to be on the other side.
E.g. From the man himself:
“For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other, so will be the Son of Man in His day.
…
“There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Luke 17:24, 21:25-28
Point taken, “return” but not “rebirth”.
I’m not arguing for prophecy, but I think modern people tend to not have a feeling for how unlikely a Jewish state seemed for a very long time.
@hls2003 already got this, but for a much more METAL description, please enjoy the following (though since its from the Revelation it is arguably all intended to be symbolic and not literal).
Well, someone’s just going to have to build a time machine and send it back to first-century Palestine to fetch him, then.
(This is the plan of the somewhat looney billionaire in Andreas Eschbach’s novel Der Jesus-Deal, sequel to his earlier Das Jesus-Video. Sadly, not available in an English version, German only.)
How would jesus be born?
He’s not dead.
He died, resurrected, then ascended. (according to Christian tradition)
Even Muslims believe he was whisked to Heaven alive, like Enoch and Elijah.
One presumes the second coming will be kind of like the ascention, but in reverse.
Well, Jesus is supposedly Literally God, and God presumably wasn’t dead in the first century BC, so He could presumably do that all over again. I think there’s a lot of folk Christianity that vaguely believes this is what will happen, though as noted there’s no Biblical or serious theological support for that.
That’s a much more interesting analysis of the study, and one that gibes much more closely with my personal experiences. Thank you.
Yeah, I’ve only ever heard this point of view from Jews and people like my mother who desperately wanted be be Jews.
Evangelical Christians from what I’ve seen have both a bafflingly sincere affection for Jews and horrible Jewdar (in that they’re always surprised to learn that XYZ famous person is Jewish). The idea that they hate Jews is pure projection.
The traditional Christian view is that any sort of Judaism after Jesus is a perversion of the True Religion™ and therefore essentially heretical. Christians don’t explicitly teach this post-1945, for obvious reasons, but they tend to think of Jews the same way they think of, say, Muslims or Hindus: people who practice a false religion because they are mistaken rather than necessarily immoral.
American Protestants (and perhaps by cultural osmosis American Catholics as well) are unusual in that they do seem to genuinely like Jews and consider Judaism a religion as true as their own. I don’t know what the theological justification for this might be, but that’s what they believe.
Some (many?) American Jews, however, seem not to trust them, in part due to their historical memory of pre-1945 European Christianity, and in part because American Jews are disproportionately progressive lefties who get weirded out being admired by the disproportionately conservative Protestants they instinctively despise, hence they came up with this Rapture-related conspiracy theory to justify their dissonance.
I don’t think that’s an accurate description, even among American Jews who are progressive lefties. I think that there is some perception of an alien or impenetrable character, but not an instinct to despise (with an exception made for radical progressive left, for whom that portion of identity normally provides a much larger portion of instinct than, say, Jewish identity).
I’d be pretty surprised if the idea originated in any meaningful sense within the American Jewish community. I attended a Jewish private school for most of my pre-university years. I never heard anyone endorse the idea of ulterior or nefarious or disingenuous motives for Christians’ support. It was usually something like appreciation or slight surprise. Once in a while the Rapture-related stuff might be mentioned as part of the explanation for some support, but the reaction wasn’t to buy into the bad motive conspiracy. The reaction was something more like mild bemusement.
Rabbinic Judaism anathematized Jesus-followers shortly after the Temple was destroyed (Council of Jamnia). I suppose technically this could make Judaism a heresy from our perspective.
Dante expressed a common belief in Inferno that Muhammad was a Christian heresiarch. In Paradiso he expresses a sense of cosmic injustice at the idea of virtuous Hindus not being saved. Probably because their error is no heresy, I guess.
I recall seeing a 2 way chart on the different group’s perceptions of the other.
IIRC their perception of christians in general is very low, and lowest of all for those protestant denominations.
In my corner of the world, where ideologues take their exit rights to go make childrens’ lives tedious, there was a bit of a funny patchwork of White Nationalism and Protestantism at odds over the topic of jews.
On the religious side there was a contingent of We-Need-To-Rebuild-The-Temple people but they weren’t that vocal, and when they were it was usually about the physical building more than the ingathering of the exiles. This often segued neatly into a discussion of the offense that is the Dome of the Rock and how the muslims took over the Holy Land last thursday and how rude of them for sticking around like they own the place. Which in the wake of the war on terror was what people really hated. There were a handful of messianic jews who would go around having interfaith discussions with local pastors in what in retrospect were pretty blatant echo chambers. Mostly I would say Christians were overwhelmingly positive about Jews, at worst because they saw them as victims of a Great Jihad and at best because they were simply unprejudiced. These were all various flavors of protestantism. I do recall one of my teachers really taking real issue with the statement “Jesus was a Jew” but I can’t remember her reasoning.
The white nationalists of course hated jews for all the cliched reasons. These particular ideologues were from before the internet dim enlightenment thing so there wasn’t the adulation of Jewish IQs or Israel-as-an-ethnostate. These were very much not the topics under discussion. So in fact those of my peer group who took up the mantle latter in life are considerably more philosemitic for their own creepy white nationalist reasons and are presumably greatly disappointing their more orthodox parents. I smell a darkweb sitcom.
However, it must be said that anti-jewish feelings were not the primary racial drive for Idaho white nationalists, black and latino Americans were. I would say I heard complaints about them five times for every one complaint about jewish control of xyz. So the effect was a sense that basically every one was pro-jew most of the time.
“ideologues take their exit rights to go make childrens’ lives tedious”
What does this mean?
When people with grand ideas about race, religion, and the imminent apocalypse decide to pick up and leave oppressive American society to prepare for helter-skelter tribulation they buy guns and move to Idaho and then I have to grow up dealing with them (I was just venting).
tl;dr Enkidum’s first paragraph
My experience is that more Jews seem to view Christians as a “will hit me with constant microaggressions” crowd, than any sort of active malice. Said Jews get huffy at the propagation of the Judeo-Christian concept, and find a sort of condescending tone to the ways Christians kind of treat them as “stepping stone to the truth of the Gospel.”
An analogous relationship might well be the Fake Geek dynamic. A pack of oldschool nerds from childhood get pretty peeved when suddenly these popular mainstream people tell them how quaint their oldschool nerd ways are.
That said, there absolutely is some direct malice during childhood, as kids don’t know how to navigate the nuance, so you definitely have kids crowing about how the Jews wrongfully slaughtered Jesus. This doesn’t require churches to teach any doctrine, it’s just Christian kids re-stating the text they have in crude terms, while having a blunter sense of power dynamics. (In the Christian kids’ views, no different from crowing about non-existence of Santa Claus, or the inferiority of Barney.) Maybe those kinds of memories influence how Jews perceive Christianity for the rest of their lives.
So then, in this “personal is political” world, some frustrated Jews blow up their feelings from “this is distasteful and annoying” to “Christians are anti-semitic for continuing to propagate these micro-aggressions.”
Not unlike the whole “the US is extremely anti-black” thing coming from people wanting to touch their hair and low-key denigrating their speech patterns and fashions. Or, how disabled people getting really frustrated with how insensitive people are to their desires, even if they just want to be helpful, and eventually spinning that out into an “ableism culture.”
I was raised Catholic, and I was mildly confused by some of the things I was taught until I was old enough to realize that they were reactions to historical Catholic anti-Semitism. Specifically, it was always emphasized that the Romans killed Jesus, and that Pontius Pilate “washing his hands” was morally meaningless; Pilate, a Roman, was ultimately responsible. I was genuinely surprised when I first learned that some people blamed the Jews for Jesus’ death.
Curiously, I was raised Protestant (Presbyterian), and it was always strongly emphasized that Pilate did not want to execute Jesus, and that the blame was fully on the Jews. However, it was not in a “those evil Jesus killing Jews” sense, it was very much in a “those Jews are us” sense (so, not “the Jews killed him” but “we killed him”. Whether that…us-ness was because we shared the same major deity, or was meant in a “we kill Jesus every day with our sinful behavior” sense, or some other sense, I’m not 100% sure.
On the other hand, I was raised “nondenominational” Baptist, and then admitted Southern Baptist, and it was always strongly emphasized that Pilate was at least as guilty as anyone else because – even though he knew Jesus was innocent – he still gave in and had Him executed.
The moral was just the same as yours: we all are sinful; we all kill Jesus both in the sense that “we kill Him every day with our sinful behavior” and in the sense that “if we’d been there, we would’ve done the same thing.”
Isn’t this what Bulgakov was saying with the unimpressive Jesus in the novel-within-a-novel/1st Century chapters of The Master and Margarita?
Yeah, after more Lutheran education and churchification than I can count, and assorted experiences with other mostly-Protestant denominations: Everybody gets that Pilate pulled the trigger and “but they made me do it!” doesn’t get you off the hook for that. And everybody gets that some guy named “Herod” and some other guys called “Pharisees” also wanted Jesus whacked.
Almost nobody ever mentions that Herod and the Pharisees were Jewish. They’re just authority figures, some of them corrupt church leaders, who wanted Jesus whacked because he was threatening their power.
Seconded on Herod (if you had asked me I would have said he was a Roman, probably), but I’m not sure I agree about the Pharisees. I’m not even sure what a discussion about the Pharisees looks like if you ignore that they were Jews.
My understanding was that Herod was a local strong man that was put in place by the Romans much like the US installed Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan after they deposed the Taliban. I never knew he had played a role in the execution of Jesus.
Also, my understanding was that Jesus was executed for making a scene in the temple. My very catholic father recently told me that it was because he had declared himself the son of God. That sounds like BS to me but if anybody can confirm either way that would be great.
This BS courtesy of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 26.ETA: Unkind of me to put it that way, sorry.
Yeah ok but why was he arrested in the first place? Was it that well known that Jesus had declared himself the son of God that he was arrested for that?
The sign on the cross says “King of the Jews”. Rome took it as sedition, the Pharisees as blasphemy.
Pilate himself seems to think of him as a mostly harmless crank, who it was not worth trouble to keep alive if his subjects insisted.
There are actually two Herods of relevance, and folk Christianity at least doesn’t always clearly distinguish them. Herod the Great allegedly ordered the execution of Baby Jesus (and about ten thousand other babies just to be safe) in order to forestall prophecy. This almost certainly did not reallly happen. His successor Herod Antipas was handed the hot potato that was adult rabblerouser Jesus and told “This is your jurisdiction, you take care of him!” and passed the buck right back to Pilate with “But it’s literally your only justification(*) for being here that you’ll kill the people who threaten the peace of Judea, so have at it”. Something like this probably did happen, but unless you believe the New Testament is divinely fact-checked, the details are very hazy.
Both were, as you say, local strongmen supported by the Romans with the title “King of the Jews”. Hence their antipathy to the other guy sometimes accorded that title.
* Well, aside from the roads, the aqueduct, and so forth. But I’m pretty sure peace and public order were on that list somewhere.
No worries. I didnt mean to imply that the gospels were BS, and FTR I was raised catholic, but I’m not practicing, I find that the Christian religion provides the correct framework for life, but I’ve never heard a good sermon in my entire life and I strongly dislike the formalism required for practicing.
But it never rang true to me that Jesus was killed for saying he’s the son of God. I can picture that at sentencing it was an aggravating factor, but the real question of interest to me is why was Jesus arrested. It seems to me that the reason was the cleansing of the temple. A quick google search reveals some people agree with this take. Other sources, like the wiki entry on the arrest of Jesus, are ominously silent on why he was arrested in the first place.
@John Schilling:
Thank you that was informative.
@jermo sapiens
It may also be worth noting that the “arrest” was not done by the Romans and not by-the-book. In the Bible, Jesus is arrested at night and dragged to several different unofficial gatherings of the Jewish council. They then put together an improvised interrogation / trial which doesn’t get them anything incriminating they can use until Jesus straight up tells them he is the Son of God, which they then use to take him to the Roman authority to ask for an execution.
Before the “Son of God” moment, they bring in lots of witnesses who accuse him of many different things, with a bit of a focus on blasphemy against the temple, including his claim that he would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days.
In the preceding days the leading there are several arguments in the temple where they ask him if he is the son of God, which he usually deflects. There are also several interactions where they question him about his clearing the temple, though without immediately arresting him. And of course Jesus started many of his sermons with something like “Wo unto you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites,” referring directly to the religious leadership of the time.
When Pilate asks why he should execute Jesus they respond “if he weren’t a bad guy we wouldn’t have brought him to you, okay?” Pilate presses them and they tell him that Jesus had claimed that he was the King of the Jews, i.e. he was an insurrectionist.
So if you are looking for the real reason the Jewish leaders arrested Jesus and then got the Romans to execute him then according to the gospel accounts it seems to be anger over several things, including clearing the temple, blaspheming the temple, direct blasphemy, and generally antagonizing their spiritual leadership. No accounts record a single official reason, and they all suggest pretty heavily that they were looking for any pretext that worked.
@smocc:
Thanks alot for sharing that.
I think the article is… missing an important dynamic.
To approach this somewhat obliquely: Does a NIMBY who is personally polite to panhandlers hate the homeless?
Evangelical Christians typically favor bringing back (sectarian) prayer in schools, which, even if they claim that is only in places where the student body is entirely Christian, is effectively a barrier to non-Christians ever moving into those communities. They seem very keen on religious exceptions for Christian bakers from making cakes for gay weddings, and yet I’ve never heard any of them suggesting that Jews should have a religious exemption from their proposed abortion bans even though Judaism has a very different approach to abortion than Catholicism/post-Moral Majority Evangelicalism does. They are more likely than other demographics to answer “yes” when asked “Is the United States a Christian nation?”, which is, needless to say, not a proposition that Jews are particularly fond of.
A lot of the Jewish viewpoint is not really about rapture-related eschatology, but rather about the fact that many Evangelicals are intent on reverting the United States to norms that are hostile to Jewish people structurally even in the absence of any interpersonal hostility. (And Jews will generally not have forgotten that the good old days during which those norms were enforced did also feature much higher levels of interpersonal antisemitism, and may not be willing to grant that this is entirely coincidental.)
This is pretty well expressed.
Except for the abortion non sequitur. You don’t see these people proposing exemptions for honor killings, either, and it’s not because they think only their religion deserves exemptions…
Oh, I disagree mostly, but it’s a good point to know if Jews dislike Christians for ideological/political reasons rather than feeling any personal animosity.
As a general statement, I don’t have any issue with it. I know lots of Christians and they’re very chill about our respective religions.
I do, however, have issues with the arguments the article uses:
To borrow a quote from Gandhi, “Your Christians are quite unlike your Christ.” Sure, as written, Jesus probably doesn’t want to murder anyone (preaching about the lake of fire notwithstanding), but there’s certainly a strain of Christian thought that’s a lot more excited about sinners getting thrown into the lake of fire than about souls getting saved.
Also, the description of “Jesus slaughtering innocent people” is sort of a two-way weakman – anti-Christian rhetoric will often round off “Christians being excited for the day of judgement when Jesus returns and the people they consider sinners will be thrown into the lake of fire” as “Jesus killing a lot of innocent people”, because if you’re not a Christian, you probably consider a lot of “sinners” to be innocent and you don’t particularly care if God or Jesus is responsible for sending them to Hell. And then this article turns around and says “liberals believe that Christians want Jesus to kill all their enemies,” taking the most extreme, slogan-y rhetoric as the standard liberal belief.
I don’t know if you can call it “fringe” when there’s a bestselling 14-book series about that theology. Religions have lots of beliefs that don’t show up in the holy book, and I think it’s more appropriate to judge them by what gets preached and practiced than by what the book says.
That’s not even a weakman, it’s just some people being wrong.
Saying “a lot of so-called ‘sinners’ are actually innocent’ is basically denying that Christian morality is similar to other cultures’: that there’s no consensus morality/natural law/C.S. Lewis’s Tao. People aren’t going to Hell for violating weird ethics that only we believe in.
Second, the doctrine is that people choose Hell over taking joy in the presence of God. Heaven and Hell aren’t physical locations that God OR Jesus pitches sinners into against their will with His mighty shoulder muscles.
I think that statement only works from within Christianity. It is going to sound pretty false for people outside of it, which I think was somewhat the premise of beleester’s comment.
I also think you might be making the mistake of assuming specifically Catholic doctrine, but most interaction with Christians are not with Catholics (because there are not as many Catholics, and because the Catholics aren’t as loud about things generally).
What Acymetric said – maybe official doctrine is against this, but I’ve seen plenty of “HELL IS REAL” types and I’m pretty sure they’re not saying “THE OPTION OF SEPARATING YOURSELF FROM GOD IS REAL.”
This strain of Christianity absolutely exists. Is anyone here denying that? Is anyone claiming that Christianity overwhelmingly manifests as a religion of pure love and tolerance for all mankind? Because I thought we were talking more specifically about (the lack of) Christian Antisemitism.
Here in 21st century America, the strain of Christianity that delights in contemplating the damnation of others, focuses almost all of that on atheists, apostates, secular humanists, communists, and Muslims. Not Jews. Maybe that wasn’t the case a hundred years ago, but it is now. Go figure.
Maybe I should have said “a couple of strains,” then. Because I’m pretty sure the Rapture theology strain – what the article is about – ends with the Jews either converting or being damned just like everyone else.
I’m not denying that there are lots of other strains of Christianity which are more common, but I think the author is downplaying things by a lot.
Actually not true!
Jews are a special case and most (but not all) rapture Christians (I am one) believe that Jews are probably saved per Romans 10:13.
The Name of the Lord has multiple meanings, and the Jews do in fact worship one or those Names, which I believe is what Paul is talking about there.
@EchoChaos, what!? Everything I’ve heard from every Dispensational source, including the infamous Left Behind series itself, says modern Jews are not saved unless they trust in Jesus Christ. Most also say (based on Zechariah 12-13) that the Jews alive in the end times will in fact do that en masse.
Tangentially, I find it annoying that, even in this comment section, discussions of relations between Jews and Christians and what the Bible says on the subject systematically conflate two meaning of “Jew”:
1) The ancient Israelites and their Hebraic religion.
2) Modern people of all nationalities who practice a modern offshoot of the ancient Hebraic religion that doesn’t incorporate the figure of Jesus (but including their atheist blood relatives and excluding Samaritans for Reasons).
[contrasting with Christians, who are modern people of all nationalities who practice a modern offshoot of the ancient Hebraic religion that does incorporate the figure of Jesus (but excluding Muslims and sometimes non-trinitarians for Reasons)].
Once this distinction is realised, then the equivocal nature of sentences like “Jesus was a Jew” or “the Jews killed Jesus” become obvious.
What I find worrisome is that Jews joining/being used in the culture war in unrelated ways which I fear might cause problems down the road.
Not too long ago, there was a shooting in a synagogue in Pittsburgh with many murdered. My understanding from speaking with a few members of the local Jewish community is that there is a very large spectrum of political viewpoints to be found within. However, the only voice which is being amplified is that which wants to enact further gun restrictions. If this gets turned into pro-Jew = anti-gun, this has the potential to push a large swath of the pro-gun population into the anti-Jew position.
Agreed. Similiar things are happening with respect to the immigration question, with many liberal jews associating their jewishness to their views on immigration. I think this is a bad idea, specially considering the case of Israel, whether that’s fair or not. Many jews are opposed to immigration, and liberal jews shouldnt be assumed to be in agreement with Israel’s policies, but if you’re a crazy nutcase with a propensity to blame jews for stuff, stuff like this doesnt help.
This always annoys me regardless of issue. I always think “who died and made you king?” That’s (another) reason I dislike Bibi, he often purports to speak on behalf of the Jewish people.
I think Jews (only Diaspora Jews?) tend to associate Current Year leftism with the Enlightenment -> Jewish emancipation. American Jews breaking Left is about a 2:1 trend, as has been discussed here before.
Leftism is bigger than one ethnic group rubbing their hands at how well their high-IQ keikaku is going, and the antisemites are objectively wrong here.
In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon writes:
I find it an interesting view, in light of recent discussions of billionaire philanthropy and/or redistribution. Perhaps what our current upper classes lack is a sufficient taste for opulence.
Thoughts?
Say I’m a wealthy Roman. I can buy luxuries, thereby employing whoever is providing them. I can spend on philanthropy to help the masses and also employ whoever is doing *that* work. I can give the money to the masses directly, which they will then spend on something and employ someone. Every option employs someone, but the second two options provide additional benefit to people other than me.
Putting it another way, being able to spend money means that I can direct a piece of society’s resources. I can put those resources to work on my own luxury, or on helping others, or whatever else I want. Spending it on luxury for myself and then claiming that expense as philanthropy is outrageous.
Is anyone making such a claim?
The mechanism Gibbon describes is “correct[ing] the unequal distribution of property” via a form of “voluntary tax” (spending by the wealthy). To the extent that we consider the existence of billionaires a problematic case of “unequal distribution of property”, it seems to me that any mechanism that addresses the problem is worthy of consideration.
I do not see why “provid[ing] additional benefit to people other than [you]” should be seen as an upside; unless those other people are in some way “worth more” than yourself – a claim I oppose on equality-of-all-humans grounds (a rich man is no more worthy than a pauper; nor a pauper more worthy than a rich man).
From a more practical perspective, paying someone to do something we want seems better than simply giving them money, because it encourages the development of what I’ll call “employability” for brevity. In short, if Alice is able to sell her work/skills/knowledge to Bob, she’ll likely be able to sell them to Carol, too. And if not Carol, maybe Dave is in the market.
Pure giving, on the other hand, encourages dependence on the part of the recipient. If Alice has been subsisting on charity from Bob and Bob dies, there is no guarantee that anyone else will be as forthcoming (given that there isn’t anything in it for them). Indeed, even Bob may at some point decide that he has given enough, leaving Alice with no income and no recourse.
I concede that Gibbon did not call luxury spending philanthropy. Rather, he claimed that it reduced inequality by providing employment. But *anything* the wealthy Roman did with his money would provide employment. Even throwing his money into the sea would provide employment by increasing the wealth of everyone else who had money, thereby enabling those others to hire more people.
If the wealthy Roman actually wanted to decrease inequality, accumulating expensive artwork for himself plainly isn’t the way to do it. The best way to do it, I think, would be to invest in infrastructure that benefited the masses (which some wealthy Romans actually did, though not for this reason).
I have nothing against inequality and luxury, however the idea that spending on luxury helps people is bullshit. What happens if you don’t spend your money? The demand for the goods and services you would have bought sinks, which means their prices sink, which means that the marginal producer of these goods is going to produce something else that people want more.
I feel it necessary to point out that those people may not have the money to spend as much as you did.
One of the problems of accumulated wealth that doesn’t get spent is that it tends to stunt economic activity (the paradox of thrift).
It can be easily demonstrated by way of example: consider a population that has a wealth of $1 million total. Fifty percent of this wealth is held by a small elite whilst the other half by everyone else.
It should be instantly obvious that whatever the elite does will have an effect on the economy that’s disproportionate to their actual number. Let’s say they choose not to spend their money at all, but instead hoard it all in Scrooge McDuck-style money bins. This leaves the economy at half its actual size*, because money that doesn’t circulate may as well not exist.
How about if the rich stuff only half their money in money bins and squander the other half. In this case, we’re looking at a $750,000 economy as opposed to a $500,000 one (where the rich hoard everything).
* Normal costs of living omitted for simplicity. A rich man may have a bigger stomach than a poor one, but not that much bigger. Plus, there are way fewer of them.
> money that doesn’t circulate may as well not exist.
Exactly. Considering that you understand this, I don’t see how you fail to understand that not spending your money makes other people better of. After all, what makes money valuable is not the absolute amount you have, but the relative share of all money that you have. Imagine for example, that everyone’s bank account magically doubled. Would that make everyone richer? No. Except for some confusion, everything would be the same afterwards.
Technically this depends on if their debts also doubled. Rapid inflation like this is good for debtors and bad for creditors.
But if you mean that money was simply revalued where 1 dollar is now 2 dollars, you’re correct.
I’m very confused by your post. I agree with everything you’re saying here.. but it all stems from the idea that rich people hoard their money as opposed to investing it. I always kinda assumed when people say things like that they were using a rhetorical flourish. Do you (or anyone) actually believe people just leave large sums of money in the bank or in a safe?
It gets invested, though it’s possible for the level of investment to be too high relative to consumption, then all that investment ends up just blowing bubbles.
It’s very much not an all or nothing scenario, but when central bank rates worldwide are so low it’s quite close to the same thing in terms of its effect in growing the economy. If less capital were chasing returns, the returns to the capital still in circulation could be higher and the economy might expand at just the same rate, only with the rewards distributed among less investors.
tendeditica, souleater,
I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear. My post above was specifically to answer teneditica’s question:
“[T]he marginal producer of these goods is going to produce something else that people want more” isn’t the expected outcome, because there’s no additional demand for those other things (and you aren’t spending your money, remember?)
The expected outcome is:
which means that everyone who’d invested in producing them is trying to liquidate their investment before its value drops to the floor, also they fire their workers, because they aren’t producing value, as well as ending all business-related purchases, which causes their upstream suppliers to go through the same song and dance.
The wonders of deflation, in other words.
I think it might be better to spend the money.
ETA:
How is that illuminating?
In my scenario, I’m talking about already created surpluses that are neither consumed nor used as basis of investment. That has nothing to do with the number of zeros on the bill.
Before the Fed, mild deflation was commonplace and did not cause problems. Indeed, deflation is generally beneficial because it reduces the cost of living.
Deflation is only a problem if it is a symptom of the Fed restricting the money supply.
Taking half the money out of circulation does not reduce the size of the economy by 50%. Rather, the value of the currency rises by 100%.
“This leaves the economy at half its actual size*, because money that doesn’t circulate may as well not exist.”
The amount of wealth in a society should be measured by the quantity of useful goods and services are produced, not the amount of money or jobs people have. Production would get disrupted by sudden deflation (just as it would by sudden inflation) but it’s the disruption to production rather than the quantity of money that is the problem.
Yes, this is the crucial question.
Imagine that an evil genius collects 50% of wealth in the entire country. He converts it all to cash, and then he publicly burns all the banknotes. Did he just ruin the economics of the country forever? (The banknotes are all destroyed, there is no way to get them back by introducing a new tax or whatever.)
My intuition (which may be wrong) is that there would be no lasting damage. The most straightforward fix would be for the government to print new banknotes, in nominal value equal to the destroyed ones, and spend them… however. Declare a UBI for five years, or organize lots of government-paid projects.
So, why would it be different if instead of destroying the money, the evil genius keeps the banknotes in a box, hidden in a deep cave. You could make it a Schrödinger box, which depending on a quantum event either burned the banknotes, or didn’t burn them. But let’s keep things simple and pretend the money is safely stuffed in a giant well-guarded mattress. Why would that become more dangerous?
When I think about it, I see essentially two dangers. One is that unspent money still remains a threat of future spending. If you owe someone $1000 and the person loses the contract, and you are pretty sure they will not ask the money back, you can relax and spend all your money on yourself. If you owe someone $1000, and you know the person keeps the contract and can come and collect the money at any moment, you will worry and keep some $1000 unspent, just in case. So even if the person ultimately never comes to collect, your quality of life was worse than in the former scenario. In real life this perhaps applies to banks where the rich people have their money stored.
A similar scenario would be if the evil genius publicly precommits to choose a random day in the future, to spend all the money on milk, and pour the milk in ocean. If you somehow need milk, for whatever purpose, this should make you quite nervous, because when the day comes, the prices of the milk will skyrocket, and you will be unable to buy any. You could buy a giant freezer and keep a yearly supply of milk frozen, but if people start doing this, it means a lot of expense that wouldn’t be otherwise necessary.
But the second reason, in my opinion more likely, is that the “unspent” money is actually still in active use. Instead of being stuffed in the mattress, it’s in the bank, collecting interest. Someone else has to keep paying the interest. Even worse, the process of collecting interest, is an economical activity in itself. Now you have institutions dedicated to the process of turning money into more money. Those institutions buy buildings that could be used for something else, hire smart people that could do something else, etc.
tl;dr — it’s not “someone has tons of money and doesn’t use them” that causes problem, rather it’s “someone has tons of money, and the only way they use them is to generate more money”
> But the second reason, in my opinion more likely, is that the “unspent” money is actually still in active use. Instead of being stuffed in the mattress, it’s in the bank, collecting interest. Someone else has to keep paying the interest. Even worse, the process of collecting interest, is an economical activity in itself. Now you have institutions dedicated to the process of turning money into more money. Those institutions buy buildings that could be used for something else, hire smart people that could do something else, etc.
I don’t see this as a problem. If people are willing to pay the interest, then these structures all serve a purpose, and indeed the most valuable purpose.
To use the evil genius example, imagine that after he collects tons of wealth, he uses it all to buy land. Like, maybe half of the country.
Afterwards, he completely freezes all his economic activities, other than the following: renting the land, paying the tax, employing the smallest amount of people necessary to the administrative purposes of keeping records of the land and calculating tax, and uses all the extra money to buy more land. He never sells any land.
I find it difficult to imagine that this activity has zero impact on the economy. He effectively created a drain that takes away money and land, without providing anything in return anymore, forever. (The few people employed by him are a rounding error compared to the rent paid.)
And to me it seems that rich people who keep their money, are not completely dissimilar to this evil genius personification. They invest their money in financial institutions designed to turn money into more money, and buying land and renting it is one of the activities such institutions can do.
Essentially, you can turn the wealth you have at some moment, into a perpetual tax on the rest of the society. When too many people do it, the tax becomes too heavy.
“Early retirement” is essentially an attempt to do the same thing, only as a non-billionaire individual. You spend a few decades working to collect money, and then in essence turn it into a perpetual tax on the rest of the society. The difference is, as an individual, you will collect the tax for a few decades and then you die. So you traded a few decades against other few decades. But rich people can establish perpetual funds that will be inherited by their children, and the wealth collected once can become a tax that never expires.
Imagine millions of people in early retirement; what effect would that have on economy? Now imagine one person who owns the same amount of money as those hypothetical millions together, and uses the money in pretty much the same way. Why would that be different?
@Viliam
The difference is that as they say “they aren’t making any more land”. In reality, most of the investments that people are putting money into are in fact growing the pie.
EchoChaos,
Even if this is true, there’s no guarantee it will remain true in the future.
First off, a lot of what passes for investments these days is merely a matter of moving money from one pocket to another (trading stocks, for example).
Second, many of the most attractive targets for investment (say, Google or Facebook) aren’t growing the pie in any meaningful sense. Quite the contrary, I should say (which is how the Zuck got to be so rich in the first place).
What happens to the money you used to buy the land?? It goes to someone, right? What do they do with it??
I don’t see how this would affect the economy at all. It’s the same scenario where you’re just taking currency out of circulation. There’s no tax on anyone.
@Villiam
Only the government does that. Literally. Happily for them they don’t even have to pay taxes on the land they hold.
The type of land owned makes a huge difference. Like, if you own all the natural parks (somehow buying them from the federal government), all deserts and other bits of unused land, you wouldn’t affect the economy much.
But if you buy a 1m wide strip of land across the cost, and don’t let anybody cross it without demanding payment, you would in effect be imposing a tariff on all imports that come by boat.
Cliff,
Elsewhere you’re arguing that land is special, so it’s hard for me to square these two positions, but I’ll try:
The value of money depends on what it can buy. That, in turn, depends on how much stuff you have in trade and the money supply. We can imagine a dollar as a token that entitles you to Q/M stuff (where Q is the total quantity of stuff and M is the money supply).
So far so good. What’s the evil genius doing?
First, he is limiting the amount of stuff (Q) in trade, by buying land and never ever selling it. That’s step 1.
He has also created a money sink, through renting the land he owns out. So, is he reducing the money supply M (which would counteract the reduction in the amount of stuff in trade)?
No.
We can view the money supply as being M = G + E, where G is all the money held by the evil genius and E being the money held by everyone else. So long as total money supply remains constant, every time G increases, E must necessarily decrease.
We’re told the evil genius uses the money he earns to buy more land, and the land he holds to earn more money. As long as he is earning more in rent than what it costs him to maintain current holdings and to purchase any additional land, the amount of money held by the genius (G) increases.
That means everyone else has less money.
But surely, money doesn’t matter!
Sure it does.
Whether we like it or not, money is the medium of exchange in our society. All prices are expressed in money terms and prices are sticky. Even in the original scenario, with the evil genius simply took half the money you’ll find that saying “each dollar is now worth two” isn’t particularly effective when faced with a shopkeeper that says: “this item is worth $2 and you’re only giving me $1”. Adjusting prices for a changed money supply is a hard coordination problem that seldom, if ever doesn’t result in prices changing.
I’ve personally witnessed what slashing 10k off the nominal value of your money looks like. Technically, there should be no change other than fewer zeroes on the banknotes. In practice, it was used as an excuse to raise prices.
Realistically, when told: “Oh no, an evil genius just stole and destroyed half our money, but it’s not a problem if everyone just halves their prices”, how many people aren’t gonna say: “Sure, I’ll halve my prices immediately”, whilst thinking: “I’ll let everyone else halve their prices, but keep mine just as they were and earn twice as much”.
They’ll lower their prices eventually, because market equilibria will have their day, but not before there’s major market disruptions (if you’re lucky) or a complete economic collapse (if you’re not).
All that aside, I think we’ve strayed far from the OT.
It’s not that land is special, it’s that it is an actual resource, like many other things but not money. The land has not been removed because it is still available to rent. Therefore, no real resources have been lost. Yes, the guy is taking money out of circulation, but slowly. Since the guy is not spending any money, he is not consuming ANY resources. In essence, he is charging the lessees market prices and then distributing that money to everyone for free. So he’s actually benefiting everyone.
Prices in general are not sticky. Only wages are downward sticky. Obviously prices are inflating all the time and, in the past, deflating all the time. Mild ongoing deflation is not going to disrupt anything, just like mild ongoing inflation is not disruptive.
Not to be a spoil sport, but all of these ideas have been tried before. In 1066. By a guy called William II of Normandy. For the measly price of the wine, women, and song it took to convince some people to do a little bit of battle axing. It was such a smashing failure that the country he did it in was an economic power house for the next thousand years and went on to conquer the world.
The entire premise of the legal regime that arose from the conquest was that the King was the supreme owner of all land, and everybody else was just renting it from him. In an almost exactly analogous way to how you are renting an apartment from your landlord. You rental contract (probably) prohibits you from subletting your apartment, or selling your contract without the permission of the landlord, for example. Analogously, the King’s tenants were not permitted to subinfeudate or alienate their lands. Once entered into, tenants in both cases are obliged to keep paying the rent until relieved of that responsibility.
It wasn’t until the Barons obtained enough political power to wrest additional rights from the King, such as the previously mentioned subinfeudation and alienation. It is interesting to note that we see an analogous process in, e.g., large cities. Where the political power of tenants substantially outmatches that of landlords, they begin to obtain these kinds of rights as well was as others. The most obvious example being things like rent control and drastic restrictions on the ability of the landlord to evict tenants. Both of these rights, incidentally, also have historical parallels hinging on the balance of powers between Kings and Barons.
There is no reason to believe that an evil genius bent on national domination wouldn’t face the same fate as the King. Except much faster. Because the evil genius will be obliged to forfeit half of his land back to the king on his death. And would completely lack the political clout to resist restrictions on his ownership rights by the Barons obliged to rent from him.
As to buying up the whole coast… Yeah, the King did that. IIRC, the intertidal zone is still inalienable crown property in England, and probably a chunk of the commonwealth. It doesn’t seem to be a problem for them.
Seeing as it isn’t uncommon for US states to have implied transit rights in order to ensure access to natural waterways or public roads or both, an evil genius trying to buy the whole coasts would be largely symbolic in many places. Any states caught out in the cold would very, very quickly change their law to provide transit rights to the ocean. It really wouldn’t be a problem in practice.
But also… the evil genius would need to convince the current owners to sell. And without politically acceptable recourse to the battle axe that is going to be difficult. To a first approximation, the entire value difference between the Port of Los Angeles and a fishy smelling slum resides in the 1m of land between the container yard and the pier. In order to buy that strip of land would require paying the entire value premium of the port to its current owners. Since the current value of the port is essentially the net present value of profit maximizing margin the port can impose on the traffic through the port, you’re essentially looking at a wash. You’re paying up front based on the profit maximizing price… so that you can raise rent and lower profits. You can’t make a profit doing this.
More importantly, trying to do this is just going to make other ports you haven’t gotten around to buying more valuable. All the traffic your driving out of Los Angeles needs to go somewhere. The price you pay for the strip of land between your second port’s container yard and pier is going to be MORE than the value BOTH the value of that strip if you hadn’t been stupid in Los Angeles AND the value of that strip of land after you’ve bought every port and all that traffic just stops.
Yeah, this just isn’t going to work. The only way to raise a tax like this is with the battle axe.
And this is before we even get into trying to buy up coolant access for all those nuclear reactors.
And just straight up eminent domain.
And ten thousand jurisdictions running you around in the courts with your property tax assessment because you pissed them off.
Destruction does not equal hoarding.
In the case of destruction, suddenly everyone who owned a dollar the day before with buying power X, that dollar is now effectively worth twice as much because the number of dollars in the world has halved.
If the evil genius came up with a way to counterfiet dollars perfectly and doubled the money supply, you get the opposite.
Either would create chaos, particularly if people expected him to do it again at any point in the near future in which case people either try to divest themselves of dollars and you get hyperinflation or hoard dollars in the hope of another increase in value and you get massive deflation.
Neither would create chaos. Revaluing the currency by 50% or 100% one time would not affect anything except for debts. Obviously this is an absurd scenario that could never happen, but yes if suddenly all debts doubled or halved it would create some problems. I don’t see why anyone would expect it to “happen again” since acquiring half of all wealth in the first place is impossible, let alone after you liquidated it all and burned the money.
Ninja’d by Viliam. Well played!
—
Thinking in terms of money tends to cloud issues so let’s consider a different, but similar scenario:
The trivial answer is: of course he didn’t. In the long term, people will just learn to live in a country that’s half the size.
In the short term, the disruption is immense.
We get the same result if our evil genius doesn’t actually destroy the land, but instead fences it off and lets it lie fallow. We can even look to history to see how that works out.
Here’s where it gets interesting: none of this is due to land specifically having any special sauce. Rather, it’s due to the fact that the entire economy has developed with the expectation that a certain area of land is available. It works for money just as well as land (hence inflation and deflation), but it’s easier to see how it works for land.
This is completely false. Land is a real resource and therefore matters to the economy. Money is not a real resource and does not matter. That’s why money supply is neutral to the economy in the long term, and land supply is not.
Cliff +1
I think you’ll find that land supply is just as neutral to the economy in the long term.
Plus, in the long run we’re all dead.
Content-free post? Ask any economist. Halving land supply would indeed crater the economy with permanent effects. Halving the money supply would not. Not even close.
I am an economist and I addressed it above:
The Second Polish Republic had an area of 389,720 km2 and a population of 34,849,000 in 1938.
The Third Polish Republic has an area of 312,696 km2 (80%) and a population of 38,433,600 (110%) today.
More people, less land. Is the economy worse today than in 1938?
GDP per capita was $2,182 in 1938; is $33,747 (PPP) today. You tell me.
Poland 1938 vs Poland today. Since other factors are obviously much more important than the amount of land, are you saying that proves that land has no value? Think how rich the Poles would be if they had twice the land they have now.
Compare and contrast Adam Smith Book III, Chapter 4 on the end of feudalism.
Thank you for posting that.
I think it is important to note that Gibbon is talking about people “who have obtained no share in the division of the Earth”, i.e. non-landholders and presumably thus non-farmers. Diligent mechanics and skillful artists, for example.
If we simplistically model all of the necessities of life as being produced by generic “farmers” (clothes of homespun wool and flax, shelter built from locally-sourced wood or adobe, etc), then we can easily imagine an equilibrium where the land will support a million people, only requires eight hundred thousand farmers to work, and so two hundred thousand people are relegated to the “lazy bum” outgroup caste and left to starve while the farmers are 25% fatter and/or lazier than they need to be. Or maybe 10% fatter/lazier while the outgroup cleans their latrines for near-starvation wages.
A class of wealthy landowners who can charge 25% rent and use that to buy luxury goods manufactured by the non-farming class, short-circuits this dynamic. There are other ways to accomplish that, but the most commonly proposed alternatives (that we shame the rich into being Virtuous Philanthropists rather than Greedy Hedonists, or that we replace the rich with a social welfare state), mean that we turn 200,000 lazy(*) starving bums into 200,000 lazy welfare bums when we could have turned them into diligent mechanics and skillful artists. And of course nobody gets any luxury goods, when we could have had some people getting luxury goods.
Also, there’s the practical problem that if you try to change the system too much, you find that the rich people who presently exist and sit around enjoying luxuries, can by definition afford to turn 200,000 lazy starving bums into 200,000 mercenaries who will violently constrain the solution space, which Gibbon may have been taking into account when he didn’t discuss every other theoretical option.
* Laziness inferred from observed idleness, which is a very imperfect diagnostic in this hypothetical.
Finally, a discussion of the actual issue.
I’d say that these days it’s a class that can be rounded off to: “pretty much everyone”.
This in itself is why I find Gibbon’s proposition appealing.
Mercenaries qua mercenaries need not be a problem. It’s when the mercenaries become lazy bums (lumpenproletariat, if we permit ourselves to stretch the definition a bit) that you really have an issue – as Gibbon relates re the Praetorians post-Commodus.
Thoughts: no, definitely no, absolutely no.
The analogy straight up does not apply to modern economies. A full employment economy is, well, full employment: resources deployed in the service of luxury goods are resources not deployed elsewhere. Interior designers who are throwing together the most beautiful mosaic for some Italian billionaire are, in an alternative world, school teachers or nurses.
Industrious Italian Billionaire will throw his income into capital goods, which might piss of the socialists, and might make the balance sheets of the world look even more tilted in favor of Italian Billionaire, but future generations are better off if he’s investing in factories and not paintings.
HOWEVER, people work hard in part to enjoy luxuries. If we had no luxuries, and there was no incentive to work, we’re talking about a totally different world.
In non full employment economies, I guess you would prefer the rich people to just spend frivolously compared to them lending money to the government so the government can spend it frivolously, but if they were going to do that, there wouldn’t have been a recession in the first place. We have a recession because people are tight with their money.
In ancient Rome, I don’t see it working much better. The major difference is that you do not have thick urban labor markets that can absorb landless laborers with great ease and you have different monetary incentives. I don’t know the details about the “tax” the Romans are collecting. Is this in specie or in kind? Either way, the Romans are essentially creating a market for some artisans that theoretically might not be doing anything else. I suppose that is indeed better than just outright plundering resources from the local economy. It is not analogous to the US. If the rich extract money from the economy, the Fed adds money back in. The rich putting more money into the economy means direct competition for scarce resources.
I would say that the very existence of billionaires suggests there is an inefficiency in the economy.
Elsewhere in the thread I have mentioned that
the Spicemoney must flow. If a small group is accumulating wealth disproportionately to everyone else it means that there are surpluses that aren’t being put to productive use (and let’s face it, most of the wealth these days is financial).That does not follow. I would go as far as saying that it’s something akin to the “lump of labour” fallacy. People become interior designers for Italian billionaires because that’s where the money is. If there was money in being school teachers or nurses, that’s what they would be doing.
However, the interior designers will want someone to teach their kids and look after their elders, which is much more likely to create demand for teachers and nurses than looking to the billionaire (who is just one man) to do so.
If our Italian billionaire was investing in factories, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The modern billionaire has most of his wealth in financial instruments that serve no purpose other than to transfer money from one pocket into another.
Assuming a (more or less) stable money supply how is that different from normal market operations? It’s “the rich extract money from the economy, the Fed adds money back in” that’s the problem (inasmuch as it increases the money supply).
The question, as I see it, is: how do we get the rich to spend money? Any form of redistribution – and I am assuming for argument’s sake redistribution is desirable – will require a transfer of money from rich to… less rich. Part of luxury spending will indeed go towards competing for scarce resources, but part of it will go towards filling the “consumption gap”; the rich, by dint of being rich, have a “consumption entitlement” (consumption they could buy with their wealth) well in excess of what they need or want. On the other end of society, we have “consumption deficits” – people unable to consume as much as they need (or might want) because their share of total wealth is insufficient. These are the people who’ll be paying for your teachers and nurses (provided they have the money to do so).
Luxuries, I find, have several advantages: they are something billionaires might conceivably want (hence avoiding the need for coercion that breeds resentment and resistance), plus their price can – and often is – completely out of proportion to their actual cost. Indeed, this is part of the value proposition – the ability to buy something hugely overpriced is a status symbol. The upside of overpriced luxuries is that wealth travels from the billionaire to the general populace, rather than the other way around.
To compare and contrast with a hypothetical factory investment, it achieves redistribution away from the billionaire iff the economic growth obtained exceeds the billionaire’s profit.
In other words, if the investor takes more than 50% of the extra wealth created by the factory (achieves a ROI exceeding 100%), the wealth disparity increases as a result of the investment.(Withdrawn, as it doesn’t seem the correct formulation; the gist is that even when total wealth of society increases as a result of the investment, equality of wealth distribution may worsen because the billionaire became even better off, compared to everyone else, as a result.)There is another advantage that luxuries have, which is that since they can be overpriced heavily they can invest in cutting edge things and drive technology forward.
Luxury goods have often allowed technology that later became ubiquitous.
Your initial two paragraphs seem to indicate a misunderstanding of the nature of billionaires. They’re not Scrooge McDuck types sitting on piles of gold or even cash. The billion includes (and mostly comprises) their investments.
Yes, and those investments are mostly financial instruments.
That is a problem.
Stock in AMZN is a “financial instrument”. As is Microsoft stock, Berkshire-Hathaway stock, Oracle stock, Alphabet stock, and Koch Industries stock. I don’t see the problem.
Then tell me how you intend to profit from your Google shares.
By selling them, naturally (Alphabet stock does not pay dividends). But my little share of the company is no more or less productive for my holding them than anyone else holding them.
@Faza,
I think you misunderstand the nature of stock certificates.
They represent an investment which provides capital to a business which produces some combination of goods/services which are sold to people who find those goods/services more useful than anything else they were going to do with the wealth they trade for them.
Without the current purchaser/owner of those stock certificates, the initial investment is never made to enable the production/trade. That’s because the initial investment is made with the understanding that the investment record (the shares) can be traded to someone else later if that investor wants something else more than the shares. At it’s more basic level, a stock share is a transferable claim on the capital investment into a company.
The current shareholder invests in the same way the previous shareholder did, by paying the previous investor, in a chain all the way back to the original investor. The key fact is that without the ability to sell those shares to someone else, the shares are much less valuable, and so the original investor would have invested either nothing, or else a fraction of what the did invest and the company wouldn’t have been able to raise capital.
Stock shares are just as much an investment as purchasing mortgages from the company which brokers them. The mortgage broker isn’t in the business of investing in/holding mortgages, they’re in the business or organizing/writing them. The person they sell the mortgage to is the investor in it (and gets the future returns on that investment), the broker is just the guy who make it possible to as efficiently as possible connect the investor with the person who needs the mortgage loan in order to afford a home. The broker depends on the later investor to take the mortgage of his hands in order to have the capital to “invest” in funding another mortgage which he can then sell.
Your “financial instruments” represent real investments and market activity, not some fake alternate reality.
If you buy a financial instrument, you are transferring money to someone else, same as buying a luxury. Your villain is whoever sold the financial instrument. Typically, whoever sold the financial instrument is using that money to reinvest somewhere else. IE, the billionaire buys a share in a mortgage backed security, which goes back to the local bank, which then loans out additional money to allow people to buy houses.
Either way, if you drain money out of the economy, the Fed adds it back in. What’s the problem? It increase the hard money supply, but the effective money supply is stable because the rich people took the money out of the economy. I don’t see the problem.
As to Interior Designers going into Interior Design because that’s where the money is: yes. That’s where the money is. Because people are buying luxury goods. If people don’t buy luxury goods, there’s no money in it, and they have to do something else.
I asked for history book recommendations for boys eight and six a few threads ago and amongst other things, Horrible Histories was recommended. I forget by whom, but we purchased a large boxed set of them. Fantastic choice and thanks for the recommendation. My boys love them and read them constantly.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Truck driver rolls 216,000d6.
And if he were a munchkin truck driver, would no doubt have scored a natural 1,296,000.
Thank you for sharing this, and for the excellent summary that made it clear what had happened despite the obfuscation! I chuckled. 🙂
Is the age of consent too low?
Current conventional wisdom seems to be moving more and more towards the position that a person isn’t a “real adult” until they receive their baccalaureate at age ~22. The prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25. 17-year-olds are not generally considered competent to handle their own affairs. Yet it’s legal for 16-year-olds to have sex in the majority of the U.S.!
I think we should give serious consideration to raising the age of consent to 21 at a minimum. The clearest benefits would no doubt come from the cases of alleged college sexual assault where the accused admits to having sex with the victim but claims it was consensual. This is currently a valid defense, but only because we have chosen to make it so. We may be able to recover the benefits of the in loco parentis system without resorting to curfews and the like.
I chose 21 as a Schelling point based on our current alcohol laws: “Too young to drink, too young to f***.” Admittedly, I had my first beer at 17, but I think it’s still an improvement on the current 16-18 range and is at least grounded on another social convention.
I think the half-plus-seven rule should be enacted into law.
0.5X + 7 = Legal, where X is the older sexually active person’s age?
That’s bigoted against people who never learned algebra.
We need more laws that are bigoted against neurotypical adults who never learned algebra. Round them up into re-education camps, I say! Then let them go for summer vacation.
snort.
Is every year past 1st grade a “re-educatation camp”?
@Randy M:
I said *adults*. Please take my hyperbolic nonsense on the bizarre terms with which it presents itself. Besides, grades 2 – 12 are clearly just education camps. You can’t be re-educated until the first go around didn’t stick.
Sorry, when you said “summer vacation” I assumed the whole thing was a reference to public education. ‘snort’ was amusement, not indignation.
Got some bad news for you. 😉
Ah well it kind of was, but also just an acknowledgement that if there actually were reeducation camps for algebra, they would probably be the least horrifying reeducation camps in the history of human rights violations. Because they’d *basically* have to be schools, and as much as I loathed middle school at the time, I much prefer it to the gulag.
…though the gulags probably smell better than the locker rooms.
Perhaps MAX(0.5X + 7, 21)?
The rule starts giving values larger than the older person’s age at 14, so I assume you would put the minimum cutoff for having sex at all somewhere above 14. Also, you couldn’t used people’s rounded age, since that could lead to legal pairings becoming illegal when one person has a birthday. You’d have to use people’s full age, i.e. 26.7283 years or whatever. Doesn’t seem like too big of an issue to make people calculate this, since most couples won’t be anywhere near the line anyway.
My problem with the rule would be that it seems overly restrictive once we get to older ages. For example a couple consisting of a 50 year old and 30 year old would be illegal under this rule. While such a pairing might raise some eyebrows, that isn’t enough to justify making it illegal. Seems like once the younger person is old enough, the rule should stop applying.
50/2 + 7 = 32
I can’t tell how much this is trolling vs serious, but this would basically eliminate the right of adults to make their own life chocies w.r.t. sex with someone older. 50/30 relationships aren’t common, but they’re not nonexistent. And it sounds utterly bugfuck nuts to me to tell a 30 year old they’re not allowed to have consensual sex with a 50 year old.
Well, thank you for the exercise in civil conversation 🙂 I really dislike this idea, mostly because as a single 39yo guy it hits me personally. So, let’s see how we can steelman this. In practice, this won’t be enforceable between adults. But first I’m going to pretend it can, just to see where it goes.
For one thing, it would allow for a much more relaxed age of consent. Which is good – kids have sex at ages I had no idea what goes where except in the most theoretical sense. Trying to police them is way less productive than trying to educate, and age of consent gets in the way of this. Like Sam said below, it’s a bit weird for the school to give condoms to 14 yo when it’s illegal to use them for another 2 years (wonder what the expiration date for those condoms is?…)
Also, it solves most problems with kids being taken advantage of. Not all, but the classic stereotype is older guy and naive young girl. That’ll go out the window.
It also puts a huge dent in prostitution… no, in pretty much any kind of sex work. Prime age for this is 20s, but consumers are… well, any age. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your views. It’s a complicated subject, and probably well worth a separate discussion (or ten).
This is all purely theoretical, because I don’t think you can really enforce this over 18, maaaybe 21 tops. Which would translate in 22-18 and 28-21 age matchings, respectively. The latter is again unpractical… in my experience, 20 year old girls will have sex with whoever they want, and quite a lot of them prefer over 30. Which leaves 22-18 and below, as a softer form of age of consent. This… does have benefits, I’ll admit – but in the end is a relaxation of current rules, so I doubt you’ll approve.
This whole discussion is still based on the assumption that sex can be inherently bad, btw. Which is still not something I’m willing to take on faith, and the subjective standard (“I’ll know if it’s pornography when I see it”) shouldn’t be used to put people in jail.
This works fine as a description of relationships that avoid raised eyebrows (obviously, the woman should be between this age and the man’s age, if the woman is older, that is weird in itself).
But illegal? It puzzles me a bit that society is very preoccupied with age differences in sexual relationships. If a woman is considered an adult (be it at 16, 18, 21 or any other age), shouldn’t she be allowed to decide for herself what age man she is willing to engage with? I guess it’s me having grown up in the eighties, but I thought women’s liberation and feminism was about empowering women and giving them agency. Nowadays, it is all about how women should participate in ruling the world (viz., Thatcher, Merkel, Warren, Harris, etc), but on the other hand are so feeble they can’t manage to object to advances from a man, or even decide for themselves whether to have sex.
And really: if a woman of 35 can’t pull together the willpower to reject a sixty year old, why do we think she could so when the man is fifty? Does it make that much of a difference?
This really makes no sense to me.
Maybe the half-plus-seven could work for people under a (highish) legal age of consent? But at a certain age, women must be allowed to decide for themselves – and take responsibility for their choices. If we are going to pretend we have (or desire) equality of the sexes, that is.
Older women trying to get rid of their competition on the dating market.
Is any other segment of the population so obsessed about this topic? Does anyone really care when older women date younger men? I am not talking about disapproving looks, but about moral panic in newspapers. Do most people even care when female teachers have sex with schoolboys? Nope, none of that. It’s mostly older women complaining that men their age are attracted to younger women.
(Okay, young men sometimes also complain about girls their age being attracted to older men, but in that case our society tells them to stop being entitled and shut up.)
I can’t help noticing that your “clearest benefits” would be just as clear and have the same benefits if the participants were 21, or 30, or 60.
And drive cars, and fly airplanes, and shoot guns, and work dangerous jobs…
Some of these things we plausibly could postpone altogether until “full prefrontal cortex development”, or 21 or whatever, but not sex. Try to do that, and you will fail. Pretend you are trying to do that and have serious criminal laws on the books that you turn an implausibly blind eye towards more often than not, and you will fail worse.
It doesn’t help that a huge segment of our culture now buys into a stupid simplistic version of sex-positivity where all sex is good sex unless it is “nonconsensual”, and then we have to shoehorn our definition of “consent” around what we know are the real and only vaguely consent-aligned borders between good and bad sex. We should allow for more nuance.
But that’s going to have to be nuance in our social standards for e.g. shaming cads (and, yes, sometimes sluts). Criminal law absolutely sucks at nuance. And anything along the lines of “OK, you can have some sex, but e.g. here’s your list of acceptable sex partners”, is going to have really perverse incentives. The law is a blunt instrument that needs simple lines, and not too many of them. If you then try to set the lines so far to one side that (almost) no bad sex falls onto the legal side, then huge amounts of what almost everyone will know to be good sex will fall on the illegal side, people will be highly motivated to both have that illegal good sex and to cover for everyone else having that illegal good sex(*), and the law will fall into disrepute. But will still be on the books, erratically enforced in a way that ruins innocent lives.
Something like sixteen for similar-aged partners not in a position of authority and eighteen for anything goes, is workable and tolerably good. Twenty-one or above, is not going to work. And it is particularly not going to work in a world where people can vote at eighteen.
* Except for the ones who are jealous because they wanted to be having the good sex with that particular Romeo and/or Juliet, and then you get even more perverse incentives.
+1 for noticing the absurdity of focus on a vague and unrealistic definition of consent. The consent obsession is one I have never understood, or found sufficient. Its both under and over inclusive as a definition of what should be thought of as “healthy” or even legal sexual encounters.
I think the framing of these age laws as being about “consent” is the problem. I don’t need to introduce the concept to say that I think a middle aged man trying to have sex with a fifteen year old isn’t something I want promoted in our society.
Well, no.
However, if you want others to want the same thing, you may have to answer the question “why isn’t it something you want promoted?” to a person who doesn’t share your assumptions.
We already have reasons to explain why it’s bad(power imbalance for example). It’s just that people feel the need to stick that intermediate step of consent in there. I’m ok with using consent as a convenient fiction in this case, but people keep trying to use it to extend the definition of rape. If you think that “power imbalance=rape”, then basically any heterosexual sex is rape.
Power imbalance is such a common kink that most people with it have never considered themselves kinky.
Pretty sure if I ask a hundred random Americans, “Who here is in favor of stringing up any fifty-year-old man who sleeps with a fifteen-year-old girl, never mind the reasons?”, I’m going to get about ninety-five raised hands. Mission accomplished.
That, plus making everybody pretend to believe that the 15yo’s “Oh God yes, take me now!” is something other than “consent”, isn’t going to get you more raised hands. There’s nobody out there saying it’s OK for middle-aged men to sleep with fifteen-year-old girls until it is explained to them that this thing that looks like a central example of consent is really not consent at all because less than 5,844 days have passed and suddenly they get it.
It still gets you like 90 raised hands, so mission accomplished. But too many of those hands are being raised by people who know they’re signing on to a lie but don’t want to risk the mission by picking a fight with the too many other people desperately clinging to the position that It’s Always And Only About Consent. It confuses the issue, and we shouldn’t do that
There are options between “Promoted by your society” and “Forbidden by law.”
I agree, but I’m not sure that’s a majority opinion. Either in general, or among the people intensely interested in who should/should not be teaming up for the horizontal tango.
I agree here. The way I put it, there’s a reason there’s two words in “consenting adults”; they are two different requirements, not one thing phrased two ways.
Much the same is true for those with an interest in what substances you put into your body.
What the hell, I’ll bite:
What specifically is wrong with a middle aged man having sex with a fifteen year old?
Honest question.
@Faza (TCM),
We consider sex to be rape when consent is removed. Hence, if you drug a girl, or physically force her, it’s rape. We consider a person under a certain age to be unable to meaningfully give consent, and hence any sex with that person is rape.
We make an exception to that law for cases where both parties are too young, as that would make teenagers who have sex with each other both victims and criminals. The middle aged man doesn’t have access to this exception for obvious reasons, so if sleeps with a fifteen year old he’s had non-consensual sex, ie, committed rape.
Aside from the fact that it’s against the law, you mean?
The most likely outcome by far is that the fifteen-year-old girl is going to have her heart broken in a particularly traumatic manner that is going to cause her more harm than a bit of hedonistic ebebophilia is going to benefit the 50-yo man. Also, a 50-yo man is almost never going to be the most appealing eligible partner in a 15-yo girl’s sexual circle, but he’s frequently going to wield greater socioeconomic power than her and have more experience using same to his own ends – so if she winds up sleeping with him instead of some dreamy 17-yo boy, that’s very probably due to fraud or at least soft coercion on his part(*). That’s going to aggravate the emotional trauma, at least when the girl figures out she’s been lied to, and it means the man doesn’t get the “idiot kid who didn’t know better” defense but instead a presumption of malice.
There are in principle some small number of cases where a 50-yo man actually is a suitable sexual partner for a 15-yo girl, can persuade her to enter that relationship without fraud or coercion, will either live happily ever after with her or end the relationship amicably, and can reliably predict all this in advance. These are extremely rare, compared to the initially selfish and ultimately harmful kind. Trying to carve out an exception for them, particularly under an “innocent until proven guilty” legal regime, is an intractable problem.
Furthermore, openly allowing for that remote possibility, places an incredible temptation towards harmful and unvirtuous behavior in front of men who will be highly motivated to engage in extreme self-decption re e.g. their being God’s gift to teenaged girls and this particular 15-yo hottie being so very emotionally mature that she can handle adult sexual relationships. Following that path, even if society were to let you get away with it on presumption-of-innocence grounds, is unlikely to make you a better man.
I think that covers deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. Have I missed anything? Society, and the law, are going to say they need a clear, bright, solid line on this, and if you’re that one 50-yo guy in ten thousand who actually is in a position to have a bit of harmless friendly truly consensual sex with a 15-yo hottie of unusual emotional maturity, sucks to be you but keep it in your pants.
* Or explicit payment, but even if you’re OK with prostitution generally, at 15 this brings up all the usual child labor issues with some extra complications on top.
@John Schilling
+1 to everything said. One minor quibble because this is SSC.
Most states in fact do have such an exception, which is if they are legally married with parental permission.
Fair enough. And in the age of no-obligations marriage with no-fault divorce, that makes it easy. If you think you are that one fifty-year-old man in ten thousand, all you have to do to indulge yourself is to simultaneously convince the fifteen-year-old hottie and her father to officially sign off on it while standing in front of a skeptical judge.
Well, easy for certain definitions of easy, but you’ve apparently been convincing yourself that you are a truly extraordinary middle-aged man in your assorted virtues, so it should be no trouble convincing one of your peers…
Elon Musk might have been able to pull that one off, if he hadn’t had two wives and three divorces. (one previous wife, preferably deceased by obviously natural causes, would be ideal). As it is… probably not even him when he’s 50.
@Faza (TCM) says: “…What specifically is wrong with a middle aged man having sex with a fifteen year old?…”
Mostly that so many 15 year old don’t like being approached by middle aged men, and a hard law against havimg sex with the legally underage may dissuade some men from trying sparing the underage the unwelcome advances.
I’d say one:
1) Most people including me believe that the 15 year old will come to regret it. That furthermore the 35 year old likely knows this.
2) In situations described by #1 most would consider consent an insufficient moral answer. For a non-sexual example consider how people would think about high pressure salesmen.
There are certain kinds of interactions that are very likely to cause serious harm, which we classify as crimes. While we sometimes let the perpetrator off if the supposed victim seems not to have been harmed, especially if the supposed victim says that they haven’t been harmed, we don’t always do this, and we shouldn’t always do this; for some interactions, the risks are sufficiently high that we want to discourage people from taking those risks in the first place, and so don’t care if they were lucky and did no harm in the particular instance. Drunk driving has come up elsewhere in this thread (for other reasons) and provides a useful analogy. While I think the claims that it is “incredibly unlikely” that the 15 year old won’t be harmed are quite overblown, harm is likely enough and potentially serious enough that perhaps the way to think of it is that it is being treated as relationship drunk driving on the part of the 50 year old.
Not only is potential harm likely and serious, but impaired judgement is likely and serious. I like this analogy and plan to steal it in the future.
There is some kind of bizarre implicit assumption here that I can’t quite parse out. You seem to act like if someone is accused of sexual assault, they must have actually done that, with them not being jailed as some kind of loophole. Needless to say, the main effect is that more people are going to go jail for just having sex.
We send people to jail “for just having sex” all the time. I’m merely arguing that societal change has made the age threshold we use to determine this obsolete and that it should be revised upward.
I think this is a pretty bad idea, for basically the same reasons John Schilling already articulated.
Thirded.
Re feasibility:
“POMPEY
Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the
youth of the city?
ESCALUS
No, Pompey.
POMPEY
Truly, sir, in my poor opinion, they will to’t then.”
I don’t think that this is a terrible question; age-of-consent is one of those things that is culturally drilled into us to the point where we tend to have a lot of trouble looking at it critically. Any attempt to raise it feels prudish, and any attempt to lower it feels predatory. It is worthwhile trying to take a step back and consider the costs and benefits of moving it.
But your clearest benefit isn’t going to work, because in college both people are likely to be around the same age. If the sex was “consensual”, then any statutory age-of-consent issues would produce the incoherent result of both parties being victims and perpetrators of sexual assault. Rather, this would likely be dealt with the same way as our current law, where you can only be convicted of sexual assault with an sufficient age gap. Unless you think most alleged college sexual assaults involve a significantly older perp, this isn’t going to help.
“our current law, where you can only be convicted of sexual assault with an sufficient age gap”
That’s only true in some states, in others, both parties can be prosecuted, though you could guess who ends up getting prosecuted in these cases.
I still think it is absolutely incoherent to have two people sexually assaulting each other while being victim of the other’s sexual assault at the same time.
But I suppose I was insufficiently pessimistic.
I can think of a few cases where it might make sense, e.g. a similar-aged pair of siblings having sex (which of course is illegal for other reasons).
Like you say, it’s illegal, but not because it is assault. The ‘victims’ in that case are not the participants, but potential off-spring and a society which wants to minimize cases of inbreeding.
Two people each plying each other with drinks to lower their inhibitions might be a better example of mutual predation–but not one I’d want the law involved in.
I had assumed the repeal of “Romeo and Juliet” exceptions, though I suppose I should have made that clearer.
More kids in juvenile detention and registering as sex offenders is definitely what society needs. Are you truly advocating sending two 20-year-olds to court to be prosecuted for raping each other? Do you think these laws will prevent young people from having sex? People will forgo food and shelter for sex. It’s one of the primary biological urges, and it peaks in the years you’re advocating making it illegal (without exception!).
@Ttar
Well said!
Except, for the cases I’m familiar with, they’re often both under 21, or neither is. Are you planning to charge both of them? For the others, how is this different from current statutory rape charges?
That’s without getting into other issues (like, for instance, congratulations, you’ve turned almost the entire population into possessors of illegal child pornography).
I’d like to see a more standardized age of consent, as well as better statutory rape laws (appropriate romeo and juliet provisions, as well as appropriate use of prosecutorial discretion to prevent the ‘these two 16 year olds slept with each other, charge that man for having sex with my daughter!’ ‘okay’) and child pornography laws (the 17 year old who takes a picture of herself and sends it to her also 17 boyfriend should not be charged with the same crime as the folks actually abusing children), but this is not the way to do it.
ETA: minor correction and expansion of first paragraph and added the word ‘laws’ to the third paragraph without which there was an unfortunate typo.
I had assumed the repeal of “Romeo and Juliet” exceptions, though I suppose I should have made that clearer.
How would that solve this problem?
Okay, I read your position below and though I’m beginning to have some doubt about this discussion, I’ll just leave it at my preferred legal system minimizes the opportunities for abuse and rampant and unnecessary criminalization of people.
Your proposal would amount to a massive criminalization of people who you claim lack the capacity to consent to sex. Unless you are also a prison abolitionist, I’m going to leave it at, this will have unintended side effects.
Come on, man, you want to stop teenagers and college students from having sex? They are already banned from drinking, how effective has that been?
The most effective way to handle issues of nonconsent of foggy consent is to equip people with the language and ability to express consent or lack of consent. Along with identifying risky situations so as to avoid said situations in the first place.
I’m far from sure that the average 16-year-old has this ability, no matter how much you “equip” them.
Age is arbitrary. The only way we can be sure that someone is prepared to handle consent is by making sure that everyone who wants to have sex is certified over a months long process, where they have plenty of practice with the sex dolls on hand, while they’re teachers carefully watch them at all times to make sure they are doing it right. If someone doesn’t have this certification, then anyway who has sex with them should be sent to jail and declared a sex predator for life. This is truly the only way to know for sure whether someone is ready for consensual sex while maximizing justice.
My only desire–but it’s a forceful one–is that the age of consent be consistent. If it’s 16, anyone who knows a 15-year-old is sexually active is witness/accomplice to a crime. It may be that it’s a crime, but no participant is culpable–both participants are under-age. In that case, anyone who knew and didn’t intervene is liable. But if someone is too young to consent to sex, they’re too young to consent to sex–whether the partner is 40 or 14.
My goal is to make every public school that provides condoms to 14 year olds criminallly and civilly liable for any sex by anyone below the age of consent.
Do you similarly want needle exchanges to be liable for drug charges?
There’s this weird thing where some people are trying to introduce sex at young ages and make our society more sexualized while at the same time punishing more people for actually having sex, under the ridiculous idea that bad sex is now rape. It’s incoherently puritan and libertine.
“Current conventional wisdom seems to be moving more and more towards the position that a person isn’t a “real adult” until they receive their baccalaureate at age ~22.”
Sure, but current conventional wisdom is crazy.
“We may be able to recover the benefits of the in loco parentis system without resorting to curfews and the like.”
So instead we put people* in prison, not seeing how it’s an improvement over the system of the past. I think a lot of these kinds of ideas are just people coming to the conclusion that maybe the social conservatives were right all along, but not wanting to admit this.
*Do you mean to apply the penalties to everyone or just the men involved?
Given that one gender suffers the overwhelming majority of the physical and mental consequences of teenage sex, I wouldn’t be devastated if another gender had to deal with the majority of the legal consequences. As this is at least somewhat plausible to spin as a feminist victory, it has the potential advantage of not being uniformly opposed by the type of campus radicals who overthrew in loco parentis.
“Given that one gender suffers the overwhelming majority of the physical and mental consequences of teenage sex”
What are you basing this on? Are you arguing that you, a man, know better how they should behave with their bodies than they do? That a woman engaging in the same behavior as a man is “broken” in a way he isn’t?
“As this is at least somewhat plausible to spin as a feminist victory, it has the potential advantage of not being uniformly opposed by the type of campus radicals who overthrew in loco parentis.”
Sure, but can you see why allowing said people to weasel out of a hole they dug is not something many of us are eager to do?
There’s a certain video circulating, about a woman shot by Israelis soldiers (or maybe police), and it is making the rounds among my friends on the left, who for some reason unfalteringly and uncritically support the Palestinian cause, no matter what. The video was (to me) conspicuously cut to start with the gunshot, and linger on the suffering woman – who was shot in the leg, but apparently died in hospital. So I googled, and Haaretz tells me she ran towards the soldiers with a knife in her hand.
I’ve been puzzled by this, why would anybody even try something like that? Don’t they have bomb vests or at least guns anymore? Some comment indicated that this was most probably a suicide-by-IDF, and by a woman who was in shame due to sexuality or other haram activity. I never heard about this before, and googled some more.
From https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/terrorism/palestinian/pages/palestinian%20women%20suicide%20bombers%20-%20by%20maria%20alvanou.aspx
Is this common knowledge? Everybody just seems to forward propaganda like this with comments on those bastard je^H^HIsraelis. Is this a common occurence? It does to some extent explain the knife attacks. How often do men perform knife attacks like this?
@Brendan Richardson >
From article I read (I think in The Atlantic Monthly) one or two years ago, plus a lot of headlines, current teenagers and twenty-somethings are having sex latter and less than the past few generations (and less and latter first marriages and children as well), so I suppose your proposal matches the current culture, it would have made me and some partners lawbreakers in the ’80’s though,
but those were different times
and the poets studied rules of verse,
and all the ladies rolled their eyes
and there’s always some evil mothers
they’ll tell you life is full of dirt.
and the women never really faint,
and the villans always blink their eyes.
and the children are the only ones who blush.
’cause life is just to die.
but, anyone who has a heart
wouldn’t want to turn around and break it
and anyone who ever played the part
he wouldn’t want to turn around and fake it…
Laws that are very widely broken are bad laws, at least for that particular society.
I want to agree, but I’m not sure I do. I could imagine a society where shoplifting is rampant (to use a mild example, I think human depravity permits even more serious ones) that nonetheless profits from attempting to curb it via law.
Although “engineering controls” would probably be more effective. Start to rearrange stores so that shoplifting is harder or less profitable for whatever reason. End the ability to return merchandise, etc.
Agree with you that cost of enforcement should be weighed against harms prevented, at the least.
I wasn’t even thinking about costs of enforcement. My concern was rule of law norms.
A high shoplifting rate is a small price to pay for widespread consensus that laws ought to be obeyed.
This seems backwards to me. I only care about respect for the law in so much as respect for the law encourages good behavior. If something like theft occurs very frequently (for an absurd amount, imagine 10% of what each person buys or is given each year is stolen by someone else), my concern is “how do I get less theft” not “how do I encourage respect for the law”.
Even if stealing is just from stores, is high 10% of stock is stolen? 10% is still too high to be worth it to boost consensus for use of a heuristic in my mind. Laws only ought to be obeyed when they are justifiable from a non-legal perspective or because the punishment isn’t worth the gain. A principle of obeying the law because it’s the law is just a heuristic for making decisions.
In principle, I see how disrespect for laws may erode moral behavior. In practice, people speed on the highway all the time yet it doesn’t seem to affect whether or not they’ll steal from me much, and I don’t want speed limits removed even if they’re breached very often. Obviously, if enforcement is actually set to 0, then the law is no good. But I think enforcement can be really low and a law still be a good idea depending.
Ideally, everyone would drive under the speed limit. But I still think it’s better that people drive over it quite frequently (even more than half the time) as long as some nonzero attempt at enforcement is made. It may be perfectly sensible to only enforce a law a small fraction of the time and let it be weakly broken quite often. It just depends on the costs/benefits of enforcement.
@quanta413
Just wanted to say that I thought that was a great response and I’m going to think on it.
DUI though.
Would you be willing to elaborate on what benefits you expect/hope to see come from this?
You mention campus sexual assault cases (and repealing Romeo & Juliet exceptions elsewhere) as having “the clearest benefits”, but I do not see how a higher age of consent would improve things there. Raising the age of consent above the age of the perpetrator would remove a defense, but raising it above the age of the victim would add potential criminal liability to them. Criminal liability discourages victims from coming forward, which does not seem like an improvement to that situation, even by the most victim-centric standards I can conceive of. Obviously, if you consider it possible that not everyone accused is guilty, removing a defense becomes less of an advantage and the expected benefit goes further negative.
Also, if you managed to get noone to have sex until they were nearly done with college, you have just moved people’s first sexual experiences to the time of their life when they are more likely to find partners in the workplace than a college campus. This does not seem like an improvement either, given the current push to reduce workplace sexual harassment and similar problems.
I would hope that a few high-profile prosecutions would have a chilling effect on college sex in general. Perhaps it could even kill the frat party, which AFAICT has no redeeming characteristics.
Although the victims would technically be guilty of a crime, ideally they would be given immunity in exchange for their testimony or plea bargain to community service or the like.
Workplace sexual harassment is its own issue, but moving first sexual experiences away from fraternities and naive drinkers seems to have many upsides IMHO.
Why would college students enjoying each others company not have redeeming characteristics? I enjoyed pretty much all the fraternity parties I went to as a brother.
Same, frat parties are a blast. They are not, in fact, all rape fests.
Also, I went to many college house parties which were not sponsored by any fraternity. I also hold many adult house parties which are not sponsored by a fraternity. On my 30th, some idiot put on his motorcycle helmet and fell down the stairs, bashing his head against the wall as he did. Nice little scuff mark.
Also, some young and young men enjoy the sexually charged atmosphere, and drink specifically as to lower their inhibitions. Some continue to do this after college. Some continue to do this even after they qualify for Medicare.
Is that too drunk for a lamp shade to cut it…
From where I sit, sex is a lovely fun thing to do, if you can seperate it from its consequences. Concieving a child while still in school basically sucks, and doubly so in the context of a casual relationship. Nobody should be getting infected with STDs, especially the dangerous/incurable/etc. ones. (Both can basically ruin someone’s future.) But it’s been a long time (more than my lifetime) since having casual sex seriously risked those consequences.
There are emotional consequences of casual relationships (and also of serial monogamy) for some people and in some cases, that e.g. teenagers may be especially poorly equipped to handle – but truthfully, I doubt it, because teenagers have almost certainly been screwing each other since before home sapiens existed. I.e. this is something we evolved with, and tendencies to be really badly damaged would have been selected out.
It’s also something people will do – particularly people with the least ability to delay gratification, fully consider the consequences, etc. (There are really good evolutionary reasons for this, because waiting until 25 to conceive your first child was a pretty good way to leave no descendants for most of our species’ history.)
So what you’ll get from rules like this will be, if you are lucky, no worse than the results of the US experiment with alcohol prohibition.
My personal belief, having your prefrontal cortex fully developed is overrated. I was married, with a law degree, turning down jobs that payed $160,000 before my prefrontal cortex was fully developed, and in general most of my ancestors were as well. The question is when they are developed enough to consent, which based on what studies I have read, 16 seems like a good number. Not perfect, since people have different levels of maturity, but a good rule of thumb.
“Brains, who needs them?”
I agree with you, though. I was reading about this not too long ago and the author was putting forth some potential advantages to having an undeveloped pfc during adolescence; openness to new experiences, or something.
In reality, adults are far from perfectly rational even when at our peak, so really it’s always a spectrum.
If we determined that human prefrontal cortex development continues throughout life, would we then say that nobody is ever allowed to have sex?
The perfect being the enemy of the good enough, reduced to the absurdity of human extinction.
So. to be clear, you want to ban people from normal healthy sexual relations until they’re 21, possibly over 25?
And if a 20 year old does engage in healthy consensual relationship with another adult then they should be jailed and put on a sex offenders register?
And you want to treat everyone below that age as children?
Presumably strip them of the right to vote, strip them of the ability to get a drivers license, own property, get jobs etc?
And people say slippery slopes aren’t real.
I’m reminded of a, frankly, insane old woman who used to cause my mother to eyeroll.
She was obsessed with controlling every aspect of her childs life. Never mind her child was an adult now, had a job and lived his own life in his own home. She thought movie ratings should go up to 25, she thought she should still be able to control his bank account etc.
It’s not healthy. It’s not a remotely healthy way to treat your children.
If you find yourself treating your children like this or wanting to treat your children like this then you need to step back.
America’s 21 for drinking is currently the bizarre aberration apparently linked to the fraction of society who long for the days of prohibition . Shifting *more* of society to line up with it is exactly the wrong move in exactly the wrong direction.
Never mind that most of the US population has never received a baccalaureate . It is not the mark of adulthood.
Talking about the prefrontal cortex is just trying to give your idea a fake scientific gloss.
Information processing ability peaks around 18-19.
By the time you’re 25 large sections of your brain are already in decline.
I wish I could still think as fast and solve problems as fast as when i was 19.
You’re begging the question. The assertion that a 20-year-old is an adult is exactly what I dispute.
When do you claim that childhood ends?
Childhood ends when adulthood begins. Since we don’t have an Adulthood Detector, we are forced to pick an age, which will always be arbitrary. When I hear the same stories of regrettable (and regretted) sex due to non-agentic behavior over and over again, my reaction upon hearing them is “These girls were not adults and were not able to meaningfully consent.” Maybe previous generations were fully agentic at 16, but I think those days are behind us for good. Setting the age at 21 gets us past the point where people are dependent on others for illegally supplied alcohol and removes a potential power imbalance.
I think that most people learn to behave agentically over a period of time in which society is expecting them to behave that way. Set the age of adulthood at 18; most people might be behaving well around 22ish. Set it at 21; it’ll go up to 25ish.
That’s curious, because my reaction is that people have, will and in all likelihood are right now doing stupid shit.
The very term “non-agentic behaviour” doesn’t parse for me: even very young children (I’m thinking toddlers here) demonstrate evident agency. Anyone physically old enough to have sex (post-pubescent, in other words) should possess sufficient mental faculties to understand what it involves (leaving aside cases of severe mental handicap, where that is the actual problem). Making a choice that we consider wrong is not showing a lack of agency; if anything – judgement.
(But age is no cure for poor judgement.)
Out of curiosity, what is the age of consent in the US? In Czechia it is 15 and 18 for paid sex. Drinking age is also 15.
Raising it is imho seriously terrible idea. Overcriminalization is already a terrible social evil, and this would make it way worse.
Varies by State, between 16 and 18 IIRC. And most (all?) have exceptions for partners close in age, above I don’t know what point (13-14?)
16-18, depending on the state
Thesis: The prefrontal cortext is not fully developed until ~21, so people under that age cannot properly consent.
Antithesis: Gonads are fully developed a lot sooner; you won’t be able to stop teens from sexing each other up. Declaring that rape is doing more harm than good.
Synthesis: Consent should be given on the teenagers’ behalf by people who do have fully developed cortexts: the parents. Perhaps in some sort of ceremony that makes the consent and conditions of the consent clear and explicit even to those with weak prefontal cortexts.
(Edit: fixed the error EchoChaos pointed out.)
First synthesis should be thesis.
Also, cosigned with a laugh. Well played.
Maybe we could repurpose the Quinceañera.
That’s brilliant. Surely someone’s already thought of it.
It just occurs to me– is a fully developed cortex necessary, or merely a good enough cortex, whatever that means?
Y’mean, like, one of them arranged-marriage things?
Thatsthejoke.jpg
No, the problem with the age of consent isn’t where it’s set so much as the incoherence of consent as the sole basis for sexual morality.
If you think that it’s disgusting or morally wrong for a sexually mature (i.e. post-pubescent) young woman to have consensual sex with an old man, I totally get it. Young women are easily manipulated and older men have more experience trying to manipulate young women into sex. There’s an imbalance and if the young woman isn’t careful she might very well get talked into doing something that she’ll greatly regret.
That regret, and the moral outrage it triggers in us, come about because on some level we recognize that consensual sex can still be a violation. Since our modern sexual ethic that consent is all that matters can’t recognize that, we twist the definition of consent into knots trying to make it. It would be a lot easier to just admit that consent is only one of many factors that determine whether a sex act should be licit or illicit.
Also, we probably want to remember that most bad things shouldn’t be illegal. A 50 year old sleeping with a 25 year old should probably get some social pushback, but it would be nuts to send him to jail for it.
I propose an alternative that seems more reasonable to me: If it is legal for you to have sex with someone of age X, then it is also legal for you to take/have naked pictures of them. The power word:kiddie porn argument makes this an unworkable political position, but it’s utterly nutty that the same person can sleep with a younger partner with no legal consequences, but them becomes a serious felon upon taking a naked picture of their lover.
No, it’s too high. Just about everything we do with respect to the state between childhood and adulthood is foolish and counterproductive. We should treat it as a time to start accepting more adult responsibility and granting more adult privilege. Not turn it into an extension of childhood with all the consequences dropped by fiat at some end point which keeps getting pushed out. (And the start of this time is 13 or 14, max). The reason it keeps looking like we should raise these ages is that we keep raising them.
Our alcohol laws are foolish also.
(for the record I was a child when I had my first drink, received my baccalaureate at age 20, and amusingly once had my very staid corporate employer unlawfully buy me a drink)
The brain development stuff is bad pop sci. We have a word for what happens when the brain stops developing; that word is death.
I think “our alcohol rules are foolish” should be substituted with “we should switch our restrictions for alcohol and for driver’s licenses”. When the drinking age was raised from 18-21, mortality rates from car crashes for 18-20 year-olds dropped dramatically. It’s not at all obvious to me that this was a bad policy trade-off.
I disagree. You mention alcohol laws, but the alcohol laws in the US are only a workaround. Here in Europe, you can drink and buy alcohol from the age of 18. In the US, most places don’t have a proper public transport system, so a lot of young people are driving. To make that not such an obvious public hazard as it would imply, the US restricts people under the age of 21 from drinking. This help because driving while drinking causes a lot of accidents. It’s harder to find people who drive and drink, and you can’t expect shops to be able to tell if the person who tries to buy spirits wants to consume them while drinking, so you just forbid young people from drinking at all. In Europe, we don’t need this, because young people just take public transport, and most of them can’t afford to drive a car.
Now as for sex, there’s no point for such a workaround. Firstly, having sex while driving is much rarer than drinking while driving. Secondly, the alcohol age restriction can be enforced (most of the time), because the government can force shops to check the customers’ age when they buy alcohol. There’s no similar easy way to enforce a minimum age for sex.
> Yet it’s legal for 16-year-olds to have sex in the majority of the U.S.!
Are you sure about this? From “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_States” it seems to me that the age of consent is 17 or 18 in the states where most of the population of the US lives.
But probably just as dangerous 🙂
… Just as? Im with Einstein on this one, if you can kiss someone while driving, you are not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.
So, Netflix recently added “Dad’s Army” (1960s-70s BBC comedy about Home Guard units during WW2) to its streaming library. Because it was recommended to me by the algorithm I chose to watch it.
It’s really remarkable how much culture has shifted since then, and how much it hasn’t. A lot of it is still excellent (and I haven’t finished), but a few things that stuck out to me and I share here for no particular reason other than I found them interesting.
1) I was actually quite pleased with how unseriously it took itself. There have been WW2 comedies, but they seem to have gotten rarer as the conflict has grown more distant and more sacralized.
2) A lot of the class comedy really doesn’t translate at all. I can’t tell if it’s UK-US difference, or time period, but there’s a non-trivial number of audience laughs where, it’s not that I don’t think the joke is funny, but I just do not see what the joke is.
3) The portrayal of rationing and cheating of rationing is especially striking, as something that would, I think, be treated very differently in a modern show.
4) The other one which really stuck with me, and frankly almost got me to stop watching it was so uncomfortable was the episode “Man Hunt,” where one of the main characters has found a parachute, then had it turned into ladies underwear, which he has sold. The rest of our heroes are attempting to find out if this underwear is cream or white, which will indicate whether the parachute belongs to a RAF pilot, or a Luftwaffe pilot. As this is a comedy, this involves a lot of misunderstandings as they attempt to see ladies underwear. Most of this is very amusing, except for the part where they walk up to a house, a man answers and one of them says he thinks the man’s wife has a pair of his underwear (meaning, of course, a pair he sold to her). The man then closes the door and accuses his wife of cheating and then we hear the sound of him beating her. And our heroes say “Yes, I think we’ll move on,” (admittedly in a ‘this is awkward’ not a ‘this is good’ way).
5) Oh boy is Rudolph Hess referenced a lot, which is interesting, because I don’t think he was discussed at all in my entire, not-insufficient historical education. I think this is a UK-US difference, but I was very interested to learn about him.
6) It actually does quite a good job with Free French, Free Italian, Free Polish forces (though, it really likes its stereotypes).
Say what? All the weird and wonderful opinions I read in this comment section I happily ascribe to original thinking and occasional crankiness, but this is the first time I see a clear and unambiguous sign of sheer lunacy.
(Obviously, mileage varies when it comes to Netflix’ algorithms)
Sorry, that was unclear. I just mean it popped up in my recommendations, which have about a 50-50 track record of actually being interesting to me. I had not, to my knowledge heard of it before then.
Netflix has to have the worst recommendation algorithm. I think it might actually be worse than if they just threw up a random assortment of the library up. If I watched (for example) Snakes on a Plane, my recommendations will then be a NatGeo special on snakes of the Brazilian rainforest and 20 movies where planes play some kind of important role. I watched a handful of Anime some months back and I’d say currently about 70-80% are Anime now.
They also made it terrible to actually browse titles, at least on the app, so I end up missing a bunch of things that I would totally have watched if I actually knew they were on Netflix.
I endorse this Snakes on a Plane/NatGeo documentary/Airplane! movie marathon.
I’ll take 1 out of 3. 2 if I’m allowed to say I watched one of them ironically.
This chain of inference seems about as plausible as an algorithm that noticed you were interested in a period WWII comedy and then offered you a serial documentary about the idiosyncracies of recommendation algorithms.
vrv’s is worse, for the simple reason that it never gets the message when I don’t like something or don’t want to watch any more of it. I can’t remove something from my history, either, so it’s been nagging me to continue a cartoon I watched one episode of months ago.
I disagree. Youtube holds the top, and don’t seems to be ready to let go of it.
“Oh, you listened to that jazz track once? Well good lord, i’m sure you want me to add it to the autoplayer whenever you’re listening to some 60’s rock, classical music, folk or pop. Also, that channel you saw a video of once will keep coming back, all the time”.
At any given point, the youtube autoplayer seems to have 4 or 5 videos that will ALWAYS end up being played while on auto-play, and, once reached, will just keep cycling through everything i’ve already listened once.
I was struck by something DavidFriedman said in the previous OT:
It’s something I’ve long agreed with. The market is like water. Try to channel it, and it just flows around, always pursuing its mindless massively parallel algorithm of individuals each responding to local forces. It, like life, “uh, finds a way”.
Given this, is it useful to think of anarcho-capitalism as just the basic state of any society of individuals, in the large? Inexorable resolution of desires with scarce resources, no matter how any of its constituents tries to influence the system? In his book, Friedman sketched a system of rights enforcement agencies (REAs) in an ancap society that dealt with parties that try to acquire goods through force. If that use of force by limited parties could be thought of as a wrinkle, then it might take a while for REAs to iron it out. They might never get them all out; maybe human nature ensures there will be some equilibrium level of people who, in their limited view, think theft is their best bet, and are continually pushed back by REAs, but never eliminated. I’d still call that society ancap.
Suppose your society’s governors imposed a planned economy, and in practice gave rise to a black market, as well as the political intrigue games that naturally arise when power is centralized. Is that whole society, black market and intrigue and all, viewable as an ancap, working out a similar, larger wrinkle? The governors might be the official authority, but does that really matter? They’re still held in check by those inevitable unofficial markets, just as thieves are held in check by REAs.
Is any society just an ancap that might not realize it yet?
@Paul Brinkley,
You mean the “state will wither away” like the Marxist held it would after socialism turned eventually into anarchistic communism?
I can’t think of any examples, but it’s an intriguing idea.
Sort of, but I should be careful not to think of ancap as some sort of utopian end state. The way it’s described, it sounds to me as a natural state of man, with various collectivist structures built within it that begin eroding as soon as they stand. Control exchange of some commodity, and people immediately begin trading it in hidden channels as soon as they disagree on its price. Build a hierarchy, and people immediately begin scheming to use its trust network to further their personal goals. Build a government, and a political market immediately emerges.
No. Anarcho-capitalism involves a particular set of institutions.
This notion gets brought up as a question to other ancaps with fair regularity, often by people who are first working out far-libertarian and ancap ideas for themselves. As an analogy, there’s a difference between saying that gravity always exists and harnessing it a particular way; e.g. in a hydroelectric dam.
There are many differences between REAs and the state, most notably the claim of legitimate monopoly on force in a geographic area. “Basic state of any society of individuals,” whether under a state or in what I usually call “the jungle” (i.e. no mutual agreement on institutions or complete absence of institutions) isn’t the same as the institutional framework of an anarcho-capitalist society.
Caveat: some anarcho-capitalists like to point out that we already live in a mostly anarchist society, since most human interaction is done without coercion already. In this way, your characterization might be appropriate, but it requires more qualification than you gave, both for accuracy, and to be meaningful as a description or as a differentiator from any other system.
But ancap emphasizes a lack of institutions. It has rules – prohibition on harming another’s property being the main one – but there are multiple ways to enforce those rules, and those ways can manifest as institutions which could conflict, and therefore compete. This seems compatible with your gravity analogy.
I am aware of the territorial sovereignty rule introduced by states. But that’s just it; AFAICT, there’s nothing physically stopping an REA from declaring it will enforce its specific rules across an arbitrary geographic area, other than the will of competing REAs or individuals. If that will isn’t high enough, the former REA will succeed. An ancap advocate may declare that illegitimate, but that same advocate would also have declared it illegitimate for someone to come steal your TV and necessitate your contacting your REA, and would simultaneously still recognize that REA’s role in ancap society.
Or to put it another way, I don’t see any objective difference between an individual imposing rules on what you do in your backyard, and them carrying off your TV. Both are illegitimate by the ancap system, and both are addressible by legitimate ancap institutions. Both could even be addressed by institutions which are themselves illegitimate, which would in turn be addressed by yet other institutions, and so on.
The end state I gather from Friedman’s chapter on REAs in TMoF is that REAs eventually see this punching back and forth as materially inefficient, and settle on consensual systems such as arbitration. Or, in some degenerate cases, they never develop the foresight necessary to notice this disincentive, and eventually are taken over by a society whose REAs do, perhaps after many generations. (Or perhaps happens to be isolated, and it just stays at whatever level it’s on forever.)
Which is what brings me back to the impression of any society being ultimately guided by ancap-compatible principles, whether or not it realizes it. It still lets me say that one society is more ancap than another in some respect, but every society just ends up encoded as a vector of positive components in incentive space.
Not sure that’s the case. Ancap emphasizes a lack of states, hence the “An” part. Anarcho-capitalism as described by e.g. Friedman is fairly specific about a range of institutions it expects to emerge to meet some of the functions currently performed by states, which is what distinguishes it from the various other Anarcho-whatevers. And if what Friedman describes doesn’t fill a big chunk of the Anarcho-capitalist circle on the Venn diagram, I’m not sure there’s enough left to make a coherent philosophy.
Friedman’s list of institutions isn’t proscriptive, though. At least, I get the impression he didn’t intend them to be. (If only he were around to ask…)
Now, there do exist institutions one could form that everyone would agree are less ancap than others. But so is a group of guys sneaking into people’s homes and stealing their TV sets, and something like that is addressed in The Machinery of Freedom, along with the institution that would oppose it.
Is the distinction simply the one he supplies in answer to what a government is – people drop their commitment strategies against it, that they’d normally have for defending their rights against others? That distinguishes a government from a righteous television confiscator, I suppose. But not, I think, from every REA that goes a little rogue.
Anarcho-anything is almost by definition not prescriptive. I mean, you can prescribe, but how are you going to implement across the scope of the society you’ve defined as anarchic?
The various forms of anarchism are predictive, or in the case of historical study descriptive. Possibly with an element of wishful thinking or rose-colored-glass interpretation, but even so. “In the absence of a state, people will likely do X, which may include creating non-state institutions X1 and X2. Some people will want to do Y or Z, but without a state they won’t be able to make it happen except very locally and X will prevail. And hey, X looks pretty good. Let’s tear down the state and let X flourish. PS if you have any power during the transitional period, use it to nudge towards X so we get there sooner”.
Most specific subsets of anarchism are thus factually wrong; anarchy won’t work the way they predict. Anarcho-capitalism as described by Friedman is probably factually wrong, but it looks to be less wrong than any of the others that I’ve seen. In part because Friedman uses a lot more history to temper his wishful thinking.
To steal a quote from a Pixar movie: “If everything is ancap, then nothing is ancap”
Which is pretty similar one of Scott’s criticisms of Freidman-esque anarcho-capitalism. If “ancap” is just various power-holders interacting in a marketplace of REAs, including the possibility that they could initiate force to get what they want, then it is difficult to differentiate from the system we have now, if you think of the state as simply a defecting REA that was successful.
This is the thinking that led me away from ancap and towards soft-minarchism.
This critique is one I’ve seen many times and it confuses me that anyone would seriously entertain it.
The form of logic is:
(1) There is “success” state A
(2) There is “failure” state B
(3) There is a possible failure mode to transition from A to B
(4) Therefore A = B
That’s…not sound.
It’s also quite strange at the meta-argumentation level: if the one making the argument is against A, but accepts B, then why argue against A while holding that A and B are the same? (as this critique is sometimes, though not always, framed)
The issue, is that I don’t think Friedman would necessarily consider a defecting REA a “failure” of the system. But rather, he includes the possibility of defecting REAs a just a normal component of his proposed ancap system.
And to his credit, this makes a lot more sense than the alternative of baking “cooperation” into your proposed system.
(“I’m going to propose a new social system. But in order for it work, everyone must solve their disagreements through discussion and bargaining instead of violence. But from there, its really straightforward…”)
I describe a situation where the REA’s cartelize, each agreeing not to accept any customers from the others, as one of the ways in which the system might break down.
You might find it worth looking at the definition of government I offer in Chapter 52.
Under this framework, would you agree that the cartelized REAs would still be operating in an entirely free market system? The cartelization, after all, is simply the result of various power-holders responding to market forces.
If you agree to this, on what grounds are you judging their cartelization as “bad’?
This seems like a significant tension. Much of your writing suggests that we should follow the demands of market forces. And yet in this critically important case where the REA power-holders decide to cartelize, you decry it as essentially the antithesis of your proposed economic system?
I think I have an answer.
REA cartelization isn’t bad; it’s just something that may arise from the available incentives. Likewise, some of the individual subscribers to one of those REAs may come to disagree with the terms of the cartel, perhaps because they see the terms as limiting them from certain activities, no matter which REA they subscribe to.
Suppose they terminate their subscription to their REA. Their REA may view this as defying a Schelling point about their commitment – it is anathema to them that anyone should terminate all their subscriptions – so it moves in and seizes the individuals’ possessions, even though it costs the REA more than it would to just leave those individuals alone. (Quite plausibly, they may fear other individuals doing likewise.) None of this is bad. It’s just a function of incentives.
Things could evolve to where so many individuals are displeased with their REAs’ terms that they cancel and maybe form their own REA, not in the cartel. And they even go through the trouble to purchase land where a new REA could logistically enforce the rights they prefer, and pay it enough to do so.
Alternately, they, and the existing REAs, might decide that cartelization around location-based subscriber exclusivity will always lead to inefficiencies in REA operations, because too many subscribers will find the terms of the day so unsatisfactory that they are constantly imposing expenses (in the form of riot-related property damage) on neighboring REAs. So they work out a system where satisfaction can be objectively measured, and if it meets a predefined set of conditions, the REAs involved automatically renegotiate the terms, or even agree to fork a new REA.
In all cases, I call the society ancap; it’s just working through especially difficult coordination problems. This is consistent with my reasoning in the OP, though. It’s possible sentientbeings or DavidFriedman know something that would change my mind.
The argument isn’t anti A. But rather, if A=B, then those arguing for A need to understand that they are also arguing for B.
The reason why A=B is important, is that there are people writing blogs and entire books about how wonderful A is and how bad B is, and that anyone who advocates for B doesn’t understand economics.
You’ll note I specified the critique is sometimes framed that way. It doesn’t have to be, but it often is.
You seem to be repeating the logic I already laid out, then saying the conclusion is important because people don’t recognize it.
Does my description of the logic match your argument, in your estimation? If not, how does it differ? If so, how do you think an argument that acknowledges a difference between A and B can imply A = B as a conclusion?
I’m not saying that you personally don’t recognize it. More people than you and me exist.
It does not match. Because the most common formulation I’ve seen does not consider B a “failure”, but rather a part of the system in equal standing to A.
Less abstractly: Do advocates of a free market system consider a property owner choosing not to bargain with another property owner a “failure”? I think they most often do not. They would consider this non-cooperation not to be “B”, but part of “A”, a natural part of the very system they advocate for. The typical argument is that property owners should be able to do what they want.
(David, interestingly, seems to disagree with this, and does consider a property owner not being interested in bargaining with another a “failure”, in an apparent deviation from his typical support of whatever the free market happens to churn out)
@Guy in TN
I think you have overestimated your understanding of their beliefs.
It seems to me that you’ve conflated at least
four,possibly six…OK, let’s go with 13 different situations. I’ll try it break them down.No, they don’t consider it a failure. That’s a feature, for both economic (denying that choice distorts signals) and moral (denying the choice through threats or violence is wrong) reasons. That would be part of A. It could, likely would, also be present in B for some things, but would be violated in either the positive (compelled) or negative (disallowed) senses for others. That’s situation [1].
That’s different from each of the following situations:
[2] All owners of all sources of one form of property refuse to sell to an individual.
[3] All owners of all sources of one form property refuse to sell to anyone else.
[4] All owners of all sources of one form of property refuse to sell to anyone else and those things are, in some meaningful sense, necessities.
[5] All owners of all sources of one form of property refuse to sell to anyone else and there are no reasonable substitutes.
[6] All owners of all sources of one form of property refuse to sell to anyone else, there are no reasonable substitutes, and there are strict (meaning not just economic, but legal or through fixed natural supply) barriers to entry, such that no one else can create that property.
[7] The “all owners of all sources” is the trivial case.
[8] The “all owners of all sources” comes about through the formation of a monopoly supplier in the market, driven by its efficiency.
[9] The “all owners of all sources” comes about through the formation of a monopoly supplier in the market, driven by other factors.
[10] The “all owners of all sources” comes about through cartelization.
[11] The specific property/resource/good/service/market in question, perhaps meeting some of the other conditions as well, is in rights, or rights enforcement, or the production of law.
[12] …in rights, meets some of the other conditions, and enforcement involves violence or the threat thereof.
[13] …in rights, meets some of the other conditions, enforcement with violence, and people have abandoned the distinction between the “owner” and everyone else with respect to legitimate use of violence.
Broadly speaking, the reason these need to be considered separately is that different economic and moral arguments can come into play.
Several of the described situations face strong economic incentives that make them unstable or mitigate bad effects. As an example, cartels are highly unstable. Potential members face incentives to create them, but stronger incentives to break them. To promote cartel stability, additional incentives have to be grafted on to change the overall incentive structure. It is possible to do so, but hard. We could go through specific considerations for the rest, but I think that one is good here since it’s well-understood and we’re discussing stability.
By conflating some or all of these, you can use a statement like
to pretend that non-consensual initiation of violence has equivalency with consensual recognition and trade in property, and thereby disparage property and pretend that advocates of property are immoral or naive.
To me, it seems that when you say
you are engaging in a very poor attempt at interpreting his position, and give the impression of trying to impute a belief that would imply freedom of association and property are equivalent to violence. To clarify what I mean, take the following example.
Refusing to sell a beer to a young child and stealing someone’s wallet can both be described as “not being interested in bargaining with another.” They also involve perfectly conventional interpretations of property. That doesn’t make them the same.
In addition to that, I think you’re either conflating good and bad in an efficiency sense with right and wrong in a moral sense, or believe that anarcho-capitalists have conflated that, which is mistaken and should not follow from any anarcho-capitalists’ work of which I am aware.
This reply ended up being longer than I intended, and could have been much longer still if I went into the different moral and economic considerations for the variations I laid out, both from a perspective of libertarian ethics and anarcho-capitalist institutions. I hope that if nothing else, it conveys some of the difficulty of replying to the complex question.
Very importantly, “choosing not to bargain” includes choosing not to respect other’s property rights. This isn’t Rothbard’s system I was referring to here, it’s Friedman-ism, at least as it’s most commonly espoused.
So when you say “A” would be violated if people were “compelled or disallowed” to do things by a REA, it becomes clear we’re not talking about the same “A”.
So, moving on:
I’ve basically never talked about “consensually recognized property”, because it’s an empty category: I don’t consent to your property, so therefore “consensually recognized property” does not exist.
I mean, I too would like a system where everyone consented to respect my particular theory of entitlement.
For example, given these two systems:
1. Private property, where people initiate bodily violence against non-consenters
2. A system of universal consent, where everyone agreed that the state should be the single owner of all property
There’s really no comparison. The second system of universal consent, with no initiation of bodily violence, is clearly superior. And also an insane pipe fantasy.
But the enforcement of property requires violence. So my implication that property is the equivalent to violence is accurate. This NAP stuff is such old hat, can’t believe these arguments are still being trotted out.
For the record, David’s more interesting take is that not only does he admit initiation of violence is okay, its an integral part of his idealized system.
@Guy in TN
I don’t think you substantively addressed anything in my earlier reply. The distinct scenarios I claim you’ve conflated relate to key points in different ideologies’ conception of property and historical property norms, and are directly relevant to the “revert to state” failure modes.
For example,
I brought up that possibility myself:
You’re presenting the lack of distinction as a fault of anarcho-capitalist theory, when it’s actually a conflation you have constructed on your own and imputed to others, leading to the transparently nonsensical “A = B” conclusion noted earlier.
If C and D are contained in set S, saying that “some S are X, specifically C” does not imply “all S are X, including D.” The baseline assumption when discussing property and exchange is that when someone says “not bargain” (or what would really be better for this discussion, “not engage in trade”) is that we just mean no activity takes place – there is “no change.” When some additional activity takes place (like non-consensual “exchange”, e.g. “give me your wallet or I’ll shoot you”) it’s something to note separately. It is utterly dishonest to treat them as the same.
I don’t think you’ve made that distinction yet in this exchange, but I never said I was talking specifically about one or the other and it’s moot to the points I’m making, which are relevant for either and also in matters outside of libertarianism. I should point out that part of your earlier description, specifically about getting together and centrally agreeing on a code, better matches the Rothbardian conception.
You misunderstood what I was saying there but it’s my fault for the way I phrased it. I was describing the first variant in my list, taken as a simple form of one person choosing not to engage in exchange (i.e. decline to trade, no assumption of violence) with one other person. The rest was a description of whether that is considered licit for A or B. I should add the additional detail that depending on context, some of what I said for B could also be true in a limited sense for A but only if subsumed by other arrangements.
Each of the subsequent items adds or subtracts a degree of freedom to the interaction that is associated with different arguments within and outside libertarianism.
Your consent is mostly irrelevant to the point, but some of the potential areas of relevance are in the variants that I claimed you’ve conflated. The reason your consent is mostly irrelevant and your statement is trivially false is that you don’t get to determine consent between other people. For the extreme example, you have no standing to tell two space aliens in Alpha Centauri that you don’t consent to their property and that it doesn’t exist. You don’t even know about those aliens, and they are getting along swimmingly while exchanging their property. If you think it’s up to you (or anyone other than them) to decide their institutional arrangements, the burden is definitely on you to show that. This point stands even if you and I interact and our concepts of property differ: there are others outside of our system.
You seem to take it for granted, but saying that property requires violence is actually a pretty strong claim. Violence is one method of enforcing property rights. It is not the only method. It both sufficiently simple and sufficiently useful, at least as a threat, that it is likely to be a part of any bundle of enforcement methodologies. That fact doesn’t eliminate the other methods nor does it prove it’s required or even that it’s particularly effective.
I don’t think I’ve used the NAP in any portion of my argument. I think I’ve made two broad points. I’ve pointed out that you’ve neglected to distinguish between a variety of scenarios, which is important because they relate to the originally stated failure mode (including whether a “failure” has occurred) and to conflicts in norms. I’ve also talked about coercion as a distinguishing factor, but I don’t think that point relies on the NAP, just (un)equal treatment of the use of coercion under different institutional arrangements.
Yet for all that, none of this discussion should be necessary, because your position fails internally and does so immediately. You originally stated:
You outline a change, then say that because a change is possible, the pre-change and post-change state are the same. That’s nonsense. The only way to reconcile such a position is to say that the factors on which you’re assessing the similarity of the states have no intersection with the change, but your premise explicitly assumes that is not the case. My original abstraction of your argument doesn’t require the words “success” and “failure” – I used those to convey additional context. So your subsequent statement that the logic
is not relevant to the original point, which was about validity, not about the character of the premises themselves (I grant that the words success/failure could distract someone, but there was a reason I put them in quotes). I continued with subsequent discussion to try to unpack the failure mode concept, and thereby shed some light on the character of the premises, but you responded by claiming that I made an argument I did not.
I absolutely have standing to tell them that I object, and I will tell these aliens when I get the chance.
This is like saying that you have no standing to object to the way the DPRK treats its citizens. Because, you know, its really far away
This is always a funny argument to me. Since we don’t actually currently live in a system of libertarian property norms, I do get a say in deciding, through the political mechanisms, the institutional arrangements of property, including exchanges between two property owners.
If you want that to change that, the burden is actually on you, since “no change” leaves the political system intact.
Too often people use the phrase “the burden is on you” in lieu of making a positive case for their position. So its a lame move right from the start, made all the more bizarre when it isn’t even true.
Would you say that the law of the state relies on violence? I would say that it’s only one means of enforcing the law, and not a particularly good one. So the claim that , say, taxation relies on violence is a pretty strong one to take for granted.
Do you not see how this is an exact parallel to your argument?
When I said “it is difficult to differentiate from the system we have now”, I didn’t mean on every possible axis. Only on the axis of “is this system ancap”.
To illustrate, let’s say a Fruit-world is defined a system with a fruit. Time A has an Apple, and time B has a banana. If I say, “some people claim time B doesn’t quality as Fruit-world, but I say they are difficult to differentiate”, clearly I am talking about how both A and B contain fruit. I’m not unaware that the contents of the fruit in time A and B has changed.
A good rule of thumb, is that if you think your interlocutor has made such a deeply ignorant argument that even an infant wouldn’t say (“apples and bananas are literally the same fruit”, or “the pre-change and post-change scenario has no change), chances are you’ve misunderstood them.
@Guy in TN
The difference is this: the example was constructed so that the parties were entirely removed from interacting with you, and they both say they consent to their interaction. So no, you don’t have standing to say that they cannot consent to their mutual interaction that has no effect on you. That requires denying their agency or elevating your agency above theirs, which requires a justification why you specifically have a special status or why their status is inferior.
The claim that taxation relies on violence is easily shown to be true: if you don’t pay your taxes, the state with throw you in a cage (true, they don’t always, but they issue the threat). The proper comparison (but still not necessarily the same) would be say that state revenues don’t have to rely on violence/coercion.
A non-violent, widely used mechanism for enforcement of property rights is reputation. Remember, I didn’t say private rights enforcement couldn’t or wouldn’t use force – I just said it doesn’t have to.
You didn’t just say two situations were difficult to differentiate given a change – you said that they were the same. What I expanded on wasn’t every possible axis – it was the single topic of “reversion to state”, the general form of the difference you offered between points on your axis, which turns out to have some complex factors to consider. I brought them up because understanding them can illuminate the very difference you offered as an example and show that it is non-trivial. If you conflate all of those scenarios, you cannot conduct a meaningful analysis.
The creation or enforcement of property absolutely has an effect on me. It prevents me from accessing that piece of the universe. Before the creation of property, I could access X amount of things, post-creation I can only access X minus the property.
If your counter-argument is that I could just leave their property alone, note that the same argument could equally be applied to the authority of the state: You are always free to leave.
And if I don’t respect someone’s property rights, what happens to me? It seems that if you want to claim states “rely” on violence in this manner, surely private property does as well.
And likewise, if you want to say private property desn’t rely on violence because it has other mechanisms, the same argument applies to states. The state doesn’t have to use force to collect taxes, and instead relies on the cultural norm of social obligation to do most of the work. In fact, it only resorts to violence quite rarely.
You can actually arrive at the conclusion of stopping the trade by assigning each person equal status.
For example, if two people want to trade (+2), and three people disagree with the exchange (-3), then the net decision is -1, no trade. At no point in this analysis is the status of the people who disagree given higher weights than the people who want to trade.
No.
#1 The basic/natural state of humanity seems to be small communal hunter-gatherer groups or city-sized agricultural dictatorships. Neither really have private property rights.
#2 The Soviets sure seemed to influence the economic system. In fact, there’s no lack of historical examples of states eliminating free markets and while there’s generally a black market of some kind, the ability of states to define 99% of market activity makes the black market pretty insignificant.
#3 I think this fundamentally misunderstands the power of the market. From a governmental perspective, capitalism is terribly fragile and too complex for anyone to understand. The 19th and 20th century are full of countries trying to build modern capitalist economies and usually failing, everybody from the Qing to Chad have tried this and generally failed. If you can get a capitalist economy running, it’s fantastically productive, but there are billions in poverty because this is a very difficult thing to do.
For a short period of time, after which capital starts to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands, pauperizing the masses and leading the economy away from productive endeavors and to financialization. The entire history of capitalist states was a fight against this process, usually lost.
First, any short period of time encompassing 100-200 years of history is long enough for me. Most dynasties/empires/states last about that long.
Second, I agree. You should therefore accumulate as much capital as possible as soon as possible.
I’m going to skip the first part about capital because I think there are too many ways to analyse it succinctly, but I’m genuinely curious what evidence you have for:
what you mean by:
and your examples for:
My suspicion, very possibly incorrect, is that you are describing countries that had decidedly non-capitalist institutions as capitalist and also that you might be using an overly-restrictive usage of “productive endeavors.”
I just realized I forgot a couple words. Should have been
Thank you Piketty, except see above re Gibbon, and note that the wealthiest capitalists tend to outmarry and reproduce with TFR>2 which, after a short period of time, de-accumulates their capital by dividing it among more and more hands.
If they lost, why is it that whenever I look in my history books or my news feeds for pauperized masses and unproductive economies, I find them in the places farthest from (or most recently arrived at) capitalism?
@Paul Brinkley
Every society is in a state of equilibrium, which must respect constraints imposed by available technology and people pursuing self-interest (seeking to satisfy their own preferences) within the prevailing economic framework.
This isn’t what is meant by “an cap”. That refers to a particular kind of economic framework.
So — yes, every society is an equilibrium of some sort. This is a critical and powerful idea, though it also seems a bit simple and circular when you put it like that.
Does anyone have experience or advice on co-DMing a game of D&D?
For various reasons, I’ve started a new campaign with one of my friends / players in the co-pilot’s seat. I’m more of the “senior DM,” as I’ve been running games for a decade and have more system mastery with 5e in particular. She has no prior experience running games but has a solid grasp of the player-facing rules and a good imagination (if sometimes blinkered by woke ideology).
We’ve been prepping for the first session and I’m noticing that she and I are butting heads already. Some of it has had constructive results, like with the world-building where our different ideas have made the setting more interesting than what either of us would have come up with working alone. But I’m also concerned because I don’t have a good sense of how much friction is normal in this situation.
Basically what I’m looking for is how much conflict between DMs is normal and good tips on navigating abnormal conflicts. We’re pretty close friends so I’m not worried about game drama spilling into real life, I just want the game to run smoothly and with a minimum of hassle.
I would suggest making it clear which of you is pilot, and which is copilot. So if you ever can’t come to an agreement about something, the pilot can just say “thanks for the input, but we’re doing it my way” and the two of you don’t have to spend time and energy arguing about it.
I would strongly recommend this approach. Also consider having the co-pilot largely be NPC actor or some set of roles with only advisory power on the overall narrative. Having two full DMs without a clear story leader will only lead to disaster.
I have experience co narrating a LARP, and it is definitely best with one person in charge of the campaign, and the other who only focuses on a specific encounter. Essentially one DM handles the big picture, and the other focuses on the details. Works really well if you have a lot of players.
Depending on what kind of session you are going for, I might suggest using the improv rule of ‘Yes, and…’ where you agree to make it a goal to never contradict what the other person says, instead building on it. Sometimes it leads to a bit more erratic theming than if you had a tightly scripted solo show, but it does allow for a flexibility for all participants, and minimizes butting heads.
Were someone to ask me for a definition of racism, I’d say, “believing that one race is inherently superior or inferior to another.”
By extension, some would say, “a person’s skin color being an attribute by which to judge whether they are superior or inferior to another.”
Carried further, however, is a framing that I think makes everyone racist, “forming judgments about other attributes of a person based on skin color.”
The final framing can just be Bayesian. Suppose one accepts the premise that those growing up in a single-parent household are more likely to commit crimes than those growing up in a two-parent household. Suppose also that certain races have significantly higher rates of children born out of wedlock than other races. Then it follows that all else being equal, a stranger of one race vs. another could be deemed more likely to be a criminal.
That’s not racism, that’s just being Bayesian.
Were the same person then *treat* all members of that race to be criminals by default, then it’s a further Bayesian error given the low rates of criminality in general. Similarly, not updating assumptions once more information is gathered is being stubborn and I’d argue stupid, but not inherently racist.
And yet now we have a book called How to Be an Anti-Racist. I haven’t read it, but from his NPR Interview, he says, “It describes when a person is saying something like, this is what’s wrong with a racial group. It describes when a person is supporting a policy that is creating racial inequity. And what’s interesting is people change. You know, racist is not a fixed term. It’s not an identity. It’s not a tattoo. It is describing what a person is doing in the moment, and people change from moment to moment.”
“I think that, again, that is based on this definition that a racist has racist bones in their body, a racist has a racist heart. But I don’t really define racist at all by intent. I define it based on what a person is saying. The idea – is this idea connoting hierarchy or equality? And I define a policy based on its effect, purely and simply. And so if the effect of a policy is an injustice or an inequity, it’s racist. [emphasis mine] And I think journalists can do that. You know, if someone says, this is what’s wrong with black people, they can say, that idea is racist. If a policy is leading to inequity, they can call that policy racist. We no longer, the way we should be defining racist and antiracist, have to worry at all about intent.”
I get the feeling this ivory tower re-brainstorming on what racism means will be less than helpful…but hey it’s a NYT best seller apparently!
Superior in any way? Superior on some key metrics of relevance to their times? If someone affects a sophisticated statistical view of the matter, does that absolve them?
That gets into philosophy and religion a bit. I don’t think anyone has more intrinsic worth than another due to God says so, particularly not due to skin color.
Yet it is demonstrated that Africans are more muscular than Asians, so one can speculate what mental variations there can be, but that’s getting into taboo research…
My point is more that I think skin color has very little inherent consequences, but given history and culture, may generate very meaningful statistical disparities that are more or less obvious. Once someone makes the claim that it’s not intent but editorializing and work backward from “injust” outcomes implying a policy is racist, that just makes the term racism even more loaded and less useful.
Does anyone? (edit: rhetorical-of course some people do) But it’s conceivable that it’s the most visible marker of a cluster of traits with reliable correlation in a population due to heredity, some of which leave the bearer marginally less adapted to the modern world and/or polite society in certain regards which are unlikely to perfectly balance out on net.
Given what we know about selection and genetics, that seems like a reasonable hypothesis.
Though I’m with you on the equality before God, bit, mind.
Hasn’t this been disproven at a genetic level? That is, physical racial attributes fail as a genetic predictor of anything other than those same physical racial attributes.
To put it another way, a dude from Alabama is as likely to be genetically similar to a dude from Finland as he is to a dude from Senegal.
Feel free to correct me on the genetic science.
I would be surprised, but by all means, tell me where.
Knowing your skin color tells me nothing about the rate of sickle cell in your family? Nothing about your hair color or shape? Nothing about your facial features? Let alone mental or behavioral traits, nothing?
In response to the edit, I think phenotype is more interesting than percent of shared DNA sequence or whatever.
Hair color, shape, and facial features are all “physical racial attributes.” The fact that physical racial attributes are correlated with skin color doesn’t answer my question, which explicitly excludes these.
I am asking a legitimate question rather than making an assertion or concern trolling or anything of the like. I’d hoped someone here was more likely to have a real answer than a quick Google search would yield.
Your point about sickle cell is well taken.
I agree that phenotype is a more interesting question than sheer genetic diversity, but its also a lot less quantifiable as a genetic result. Outside of physical attributes and likely a few others (e.g., sickle cell), it is extremely difficult to separate genetics from environment.
There may be significant observable differences in non-physical characteristics that correlate with racial attributes. Can we determine how much of these are genetically determined vs. environmentally determined? I suspect the answer to this question is probably complicated due to the relative taboo in providing arguments on a specific side.
But they are not the same physical attributes. Which is what I thought you intended to say above.
Sickle cell is also basically just another physical attribute, albeit an invisible one. And a physical attribute is just the result of the interaction of genetics and environment.
If you believe any behavioral trait has hereditary genetic influences, it seems quite likely that they will correlate with other hereditary genetic traits.
All of them vs all of them. Sorry to be glib. I’d recommend this book, which I’m very slowly working through.
It’s more the case that any behavior is going to be the result of numerous genes working together, the expression of which are regulated by mechanisms dependent on the environment. Any statement about how much of the difference in behavior is attributable to biological heredity is going to be tenuous and full of caveats, only holding for certain contexts.
But given that genes dictate the structure of the brain and the timing and quantity of hormones released, and given that we can see behavioral patterns that run in families if we are at all observant, is seems reasonable to assume that there are differences between supersets of families, ie, races.
@Randy M
I’ve seen you mention that book before. As far as quality (especially in reliability of reported results and explanations) how good would you say it is?
Of course you have. It’s taken me a year to get through it. :/ Which says more about my time allocation than the readability–though it is a door stopper.
Hence, I think it’s beyond my ability to judge it critically.
But the scope! The scope is marvelous, drilling down on the root causes of behavior from the seconds prior to millennia, integrating neuroscience, endocrinology, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology.
I do have some concern about how the reproducibility of some of the studies cited; they are along the same lines as the psychology studies like IAT that I usually turn a skeptical eyebrow towards. Ultimately I’m trusting Sapolsky to have taken that into consideration, and there are some interesting footnotes or tangents about various controversies in the recounted disciplines that show the author is at least considering such matters.
I’m into the latter part, where it moves into some of the implications that I may have some disagreements of as well–he’s hinted at finding the criminal justice system barbaric in light of all the biological effects on cognition (probably informing some of my thoughts in the post well above), but I expect the case to be well made.
His Stanford lectures are on youtube, which cover similar subject matter, for those of you for whom video is not anathema.
I see my lack of clarity on the physical attributes – I was indeed referring to them collectively.
I think we can agree that behavioral traits have heritable genetic differences.
On the question of whether those behavioral traits have significant genetic correlation with racial traits, “seems reasonable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People of vastly different geographies and environments share racial traits.
I don’t think the question of environment can be shrugged off so glibly. I get that there is a complex interaction between environment and genetics that governs gene expression.
But when someone argues for the existence of racially correlated behavioral traits, I don’t think they are saying: “Green people from Madeupland frequently show similar behavioral traits.” Instead, they are saying “Green people from Madeupland and green people from Nonsenseville show similar behavioral traits.”
If you’re only talking about the green people from Madeupland, and not the green people everywhere when discussing correlation with specific behavioral traits, you’re not talking about race as is commonly understood.
Sideline note: How heritable various attributes are is strongly dependent on how equal the environment is. In an environment where half the population is malnourished, height and IQ and such will be much less heritable than they are in a modern Western nations where malnutrition is all but nonexistent.
@albatross11
Good point–heritablity of traits is different from that of genes that build them.
On an evolutionary timescale, the ‘ville and the ‘land population are the same. (edit: Assuming they get their green skin trait from a common ancestor.)
Except that the ‘ville population is likely intermixed with the natives in that region, and the frequency of any allele is thereby adjusted.
For all that people claim he’s mostly ‘darkly hinting’ I think Steve Sailer’s old article on race is pretty sensible for what it says: Race is just an extended family.
And traits run in families. And a lot of individuals these days are mixed, and some people who might looks like they belong to one family don’t share much more than that, but generally the trends hold.
Anyone who wants to take this to mean it has any conclusive individual predictive power is naive or wicked.
mitv150:
I think behavioral traits are one place where it’s always going to be super hard to tease apart environment/culture from genes, because human behavior is so variable and so much is learned.
Physical traits and even mental traits are easier. Racial groups differ by a fair bit on IQ and personality tests, statistically. They differ in disease prevalance (not just genetic diseases), and lactase persistance, and in physical structure of their bodies (forensic anthropologists can identify the race of skeletons with pretty high accuracy), etc.
Randy M:
Knowing the statistical differences is useful, but it’s important to avoid giving them too much weight, and also it may be sensible to ignore them and take the hit in decisionmaking accuracy in order to avoid bad social effects of judging too much on race.
OTOH, if you’re inviting someone from Japan to dinner, you might want to consider the likelihood that they’re lactose intolerant and not serve ice cream. That’s applying a group genetic difference to an individual, but is neither wicked nor naive.
@albatross11
I was careful; I said ‘conclusive individual’. If you see your Japanese coworker eating ice cream, you won’t smack it out of their hand in the name of health and safety, but assume an exception. Unless you have a naive understanding of genetics.
True enough. The only use I really see for racial behavioral differences for is pushing back against the assumption that disparate outcome is proof of exclusion.
@Randy M: I smell a new office sitcom. We’ll call it “Well-Meaning Racist.”
smacks ice cream out of coworker’s hand “Thank goodness! You were this close to failing to digest lactose, my friend!”
@Le Maistre Chat
The question is, who cancels it first, the woke or Fox?
@Nick: Come on; if you start by expecting immediate cancellation by the woke, that’s a Bunker mentality.
@Randy M
Thanks for linking the lecture series. I watched the first one and wow, what an astoundingly good lecture. He’s an engaging speaker, and he doesn’t waste a second. Those kids are getting spoiled.
@Nick, cool, I’m glad. And it is Stanford, so we can be happy that to some measure the Ivy reputation is deserved.
It also gets into “what is an unjust outcome”.
If you believe in the pure market meritocracy, the fact that affirmative action benefits blacks and women would be an unjust outcome.
On the other hand, if you’re a dedicated race equality advocate, the fact there are a higher percentage of blacks than whites in poverty would be an unjust outcome.
This is an interesting point. The infamous “blacks are only 13% of Americans but commit 52% of the crime!” doesn’t mean “stay away from black people; they’re criminals.”
Look at the safest and most dangerous cities in the US. 19.6% black Virginia Beach is the safest. I’m more likely to get assaulted or stolen from by a white man in Portland (63 crime victims per 1,000 people, people 3% black) than a black one in Virginia Beach (20.9 victims per 1,000).
This is only true for murder. Other crimes are substantially less black. People who are trying to attack blacks are picking an area where they are relatively the worst rather than for example theft.
Then that’s evidence for people who think sentencing is racist, because Multnomah County (Portland proper and some suburbs) has a 4x black percentage in prison. My understanding is that this is typical for prison systems of localities where the black percentage is around or below the national average (obviously it can’t help but break down before 25%).
Since prison over-/under-representation ought to track total rate of crimes serious enough to convict, not the murder rate, well…
I think nationally blacks are 34% of incarcerated persons.
What you want to use is the odds ratio. So if blacks are 7:1 in the population but 2:1 in prison, the ratio is 3.5. That’s about what it is nationally.
If blacks are 25% of a population (3:1), and we assume the same 3.5 multiplier that holds nationally, they would be about 1:1.2 in prison, or ~55%.
@Le Maistre Chat >
In 2018 The City and County of San Francisco population was 6% black (down considerably from what it was in the mid to late 20th century), when San Francisco’s jails were 56% black.
While I’ve worked a few days in some of the other San Francisco jails this decade, most of the repairs I’m called to do are in County Jail #4 (the oldest one still in use), and I’ve mentioned before that, on average, the white inmates just act and look crazier.
Do we know other crimes are statistically less black? Or is it possible/plausible that homicide is simply the only crime where state norms actually dictate the reporting rates? We know various subcultures have varying rates of tolerance for crime (which is why having 1 set of laws in a diverse 350 million person country is hard). Every once in a while a story will pop up about a pregnant 12 year old who was knocked up by some creepy looking old guy, and in a disturbing (to me) number of cases the mom was strongly in favor of this relationship. There was 0 reporting of Sandusky-based pedophilia in Happy Valley for a few decades.
In black communities we already know about the meme of “snitches get stitches” and the common scene of mothers wildly protesting when there is a swathe of arrests, even if we are talking violent offenders. Its more likely than not that these things filter into their rates of reporting for sexual assault, burglary, etc.
Other crimes are mostly less imbalanced, but who knows how that’s affected by low clearance and reporting rates for most crimes. Everywhere in the US, a dead body gets the local police department pretty agitated, whereas in many places small-time robberies or car thefts get a lot less police attention.
Can you point me to statistics on this? I’ve never been able to find them, and I’ve read statements to the contrary (i.e. that robbery rates show greater disparity than homicide).
Sure. Here is the NIBRS database.
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezanibrsdv/asp/display.asp
I used the selection of offenders for black versus all non-black, and blacks make up about 32% of offenders for domestic violence. That’s still above their percentage of the population, but substantially less than the pure murder statistic.
Thanks! b/(b+w):
homicide: 53%
robbery: 69%
rape: 30%
assault: 37% (43% aggravated)
Overall: 37%
Compare incarceration rate 34%.
I was right about robbery. Also, generally higher rates for more serious crimes (simple assault is the most common violent crime, but it’s a small fraction of incarcerated people since it doesn’t merit much jail time).
@Eponymous
Thanks for running the numbers. Those all pass the smell test and the only surprise is I understood robbery to also be lower than murder.
Right. I think property crimes are lower. (I think I once saw that arson was the only violent or property crime with higher white rate than black rate, but that was a long time ago.)
Then there are financial crimes like insurance fraud and whatnot. I assume those generally speaking have higher white rates, but don’t know the numbers. And of course whites probably win out on things like bringing down the economy and ruining their clients while escaping with their bonuses intact.
Reminder that conservative black intellectual Thomas Sowell thinks African-Amerians were Anglicized into Borderers during slavery and Jim Crow.
Didn’t know Sowell made that argument too. I’ve heard it from another black scholar. Could be something to it.
Though one mystery to me is that, as far as I’ve been able to piece together from historical evidence, the black-white disparity in crime rates is a recent phenomenon. There wasn’t as much disparity in 1960. So any explanation would need to somehow depend on something that changed during this time period (note that this also contradicts simplistic racial theories; also relevant is that African countries don’t have crime rates like American blacks, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell).
@Eponymous
Pre-1960 black communities were extraordinarily policed to a degree that makes modern stop and frisk look gentle. That could be part of the reason as well. The black murder rate did rise extraordinarily quickly in the 60s and 70s.
And African murder rates are very high and probably underreported, although this of course varies by country. Ghana, for example, I understand to be very safe.
From what I’ve heard, something happened to black urban communities in the sixties– see also a decline in fathers married to the mothers of their children.
There are a bunch of theories about what happened.
McWorter and Loury (black professors) on on why slavery didn’t cause the problems.
Loury and McWorter vs. the 1619 series.
I just want to observe that ‘city’ is not a meaningful level of analysis without further refinement, and that the correct comparison for Portland is probably not Virginia Beach, but rather somewhere like Atlanta (crime rate of 61/1,000 residents, as it happens). Apples to apples and whatnot.
No, Irvine (1.8%).
Also, there’s an obvious explanation for VA Beach.
When you do this kind of analysis, you really need to be thinking in terms of Simpson’s Paradox!
In theory it could matter, but Simpson’s Paradox doesn’t apply in this case.
I was mostly just correcting a statement of fact — VA Beach is indeed quite safe, but it’s not the safest city in the US; that’s Irvine CA.
Eponymous, the article I cited had a minimum population cutoff of 300,000. Irvine (16 per 1,000) barely missed inclusion, with ~276,000.
Since I’ve been using Redfin to investigate moving to a new state, I checked out Irvine. It looks like real estate there starts around $375,000, with anything below being a mobile home on leased land or an upstairs condo. Virginia Beach has dozens of homes on real property for 1/3 of that. Unless you have a child to send to high school (for entry into UC system excellence/credentialism), winning out on crime rate doesn’t make Irvine a rational choice, IMO.
I did something similar as a Friday night project, and the “best” states IMHO (granted that I ruled the vast majority of them out):
Tennessee
Wisconsin
North Carolina
Georgia
Florida
Delaware
Nebraska
Missouri
Iowa
Utah
OR and WA being options if you can tolerate their politics, SD and ME and ID being options if you can tolerate their remoteness.
@Beta, what’d you think of North Carolina? I grew up there and had a decidedly mixed experience of its culture, but if Washington politics are prohibitive (that’s where I live now) it might be different for you.
Is there? I’d love to hear it.
Lots of military bases / defense work there. Probably a reasonably high fraction of the black population is military or ex-military. The military has fairly stringent screening, including an IQ test, drug screen, and criminal background check.
That runs counter to my impression that a lot of “military towns” are not great places to live for crime reasons, but maybe that is just the ones near me.
Source.
Pop of VA Beach is ~450K.
Pop of VA Beach MSA is 1.7 Million.
Fair enough. Though the MSA contains four cities among the top 10 in number of vets in VA.
This is normally correct, at least in my experience.
This is correct, I was actually stationed there for 3 years.
Spoken like a man who’s never interacted with the Junior Enlisted.
I think the actual reasons for Va. Beach’s low crime are more nuanced having to do with the city’s history (basically the city was founded as a land of exile for white folks during/immediately after Massive Resistance) and geography (the “city” isn’t a city, really, it’s more of a county. Everything is incredibly spread out and the vast majority of land is rural or suburban. It’s population is mostly a result of its incredible size.)
That being said, the military might play a role in driving down the crime rate, just not for the reason you think. Most active duty down there are either aviation or intel. These are some of the most selective communities and you need the best scores to get in and get paid great incentives to stay in. I’m not surprised your average Airedale or Spook commits crimes at a lower rate than the grunts.
Hold up – VA Beach MSA != Virginia Beach. That’s also got Norfolk, Hampton, Chesapeake and a bunch of the local counties included.
The population of Va. Beach is only 450k
Those cities are also the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 6th largest cities in VA. Percentage-wise they do have a higher % of vets than the national average, but not substantially so. Almost certainly not enough to be the primary cause of the crime rate difference.
*Edited to add quote for context.
Yes, I know, but re-read the comment by Eponymous. He quotes the the military population of the VA Beach MSA (86,000 out of 1.7 million) and then ties it to the population of VA Beach (city only – 450,000) which makes it appear to someone who isn’t reading carefully that 20% of VA Beach (the city) is active duty military. I don’t think they were being intentionally misleading or anything, but I think it was worthwhile to clarify that point.
@acemetric
My apologies, you are correct.
I support moving from orthodoxy to orthopraxy as the key question. I don’t see why people are so obsessed with what other people really believe.
Because “racist” is a Power Word in modern American debate, so being able to use it against your opponent is incredibly valuable.
Other such words are “socialist”, “unpatriotic”, “bigot”, etc.
It’s not so much about what people really believe, it’s about certain terms being used as a bulverist branding iron, and therefore discussing how expanding the definition in a way that brands everyone is not a good idea.
Taxes inherently have a disparate impact. Does it follow that all governments from the dawn of time are inherently racist and those in government complicit in racism, if the author so chooses to call it out since “the effect of a policy is an injustice or an inequity”
brad
Excellent idea. People don’t realize how well a culture would work if they eliminated all claims to belief and all discussion of belief. This would include all claims such as “I love you” and “I care”.
Do you really think so?
The only reason people verbalize their beliefs is because their claims differ from their actions….in other words, to deceive. If we were not lying there would be no reason to talk.
This is that guy that thinks friendships are a lie.
Nihilism is a helluva drug
I completely disagree with the starkness with which it is phrased, but I kind of like that philosophy. I like the idea of letting one’s actions speak for themselves, not justifying or arguing with interpretations. Brings to mind a character in the novel Wyrms, who introduced himself as “I am Will,” not as a name, but as a philosophical statement.
That which I do, I am. Anything else is facade.
Ultimately, too harsh to judge others by, though, and of course ignores the much greater nuance words are capable of than actions. Actions speak louder than words, but words are more erudite.
Ok, let’s say that I madly love someone. How often can I make an act that genuinely demonstrates the depths of my affection for this person? Sure, if I have infinite money I could do nothing BUT acts of love, but I don’t and I can’t.
Maybe I’m constrained by resources or creativity or whatever, and I can only perform actions that demonstrate love once a week. Currently, saying “i love you” is a way of continuing to claim this love between periodic tangible demonstrations. Yes, the words mean less, but in this context they don’t mean nothing.
Actions speak louder than words, but sometimes we want to speak softly?
In all seriousness, though, I get you. Howard is getting at some real problems with the way we use words; “I love [spouse]” can all too easily be a story we tell ourselves. At the same time, it can be a constraint on our actions. A lot of us take vows seriously, mean what we say, let our yes mean yes and our no mean no, and so on. That’s not for nothing!
Sometimes we also verbalize our beliefs in the hopes of explaining our actions, or making it easier for others to coordinate with us in our actions, or to teach our children, or to evangelize for our beliefs, or….
Aftagley
Telling your wife you love her is totally meaningless and probably is counterproductive. Your wife should know exactly what you think of her. Your interjecting of words only obfuscates. When you tell your wife you love her, you are trying to control her and, somewhat, deceive her. You know good and well that you not “love” your wife as much as you claim.
Nick
Do you mean that if we say it enough it might even come true..or be true. It’s not really. If it were true, you would not have to say it.
Ironically, let me clarify–sometimes we want to speak precisely.
A kiss says I want you. “Marry me” spells out the terms.
Albatross11
Yes, because we want others to think our actions are more than they are
I TOLD my children that money was not important. I LIVED the opposite. They grew up not believing my lie, but rather my actions. We humans know that most of what others say is a bunch of shit. We are just too busy pretending to say so.
Randy
Both a kiss and “marry me” are actions. They are not claims
Or, like I claimed above, I only have a certain periodicity at which it’s possible to perform actions that demonstrate love and would like to express that love at a higher frequency. I posit that verbal claims of love are an effective means of doing so.
I’ll admit, I got offended at this up until I remembered I wasn’t and have never been married.
@HowardHolmes
I am curious as to why someone who seems to think all communication is falsehood engages in it at all. If the only reason you’re telling us this is because your claims are different from your actions, then do you really not think that speech is synonymous with falsehood?
Randy M
Nuance, of course, meaning to attempt to alter the meaning of our actions. When we continue reading a book while our wife is talking we are “acting the truth” that we would rather read. We employ words to lie, “Honey, please go on. That’s so interesting.”
Oscar S
I’m only saying these things to attempt to impress you with how smart I am..to make you like me…to control you
Basically he’s saying that he has a reputation, and when he makes a claim to a future action, he is wagering his reputation on that behavior. As long as he follows through, he gets to keep his reputation and can continue using it this way. Once he fails to uphold his word, he loses some of his ability to make promises.
So for some people, their words are a way of setting expectations ahead of time based on past reliability rather than just pattern matching to past behavior.
Will Nick come over? Yes, he said he will, and he does what he says.
vs
Will Nick come over? I dunno, sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t. He said he would, but what’s that got to do with anything?
Perhaps you are separating statements of intent from statements of belief or feeling? If so my above reply is off point, but assume that “I love you” is a statement of intent rather than just a description of feeling.
Of course, it’s vague, but that’s what further words are for.
Aftagley
Verbal claims of love are effective for doing what they are intended to do. Communication of the truth is not their purpose. People do not need to be told how we feel about them.
Randy M
Just do it already. I will believe when I see it. Everything else is bullshit. If I expect something from you it is due to your actions, not your words.
You tell me your are going to lose weight. Do you think I believe that? Why are you telling me? Because you are less sure than you claim to be. Don’t waste my time with your lies. I will believe you will lose weight when we look at the scales.
I’m confused why I should listen to anyone saying “the only reason to say things is to lie”. If you’re claiming that everything people – by definition including yourself – claim is a lie, then tautologically you’re lying to me. So I have nothing of value to gain from listening. Don’t waste my time with your lies.
@Gobbobobble
Read his response to me, then translate it into Lies, per his instructions. I’d spell it out for you, but while he’s allowed to shit-talk himself, my repeating his self-deprecation wouldn’t be very Kind.
@HowardHolmes
You’re right, if I say “I am going to lose weight” I’m not 100% sure. But I’m still more sure than if I say “I think I’m going to try to lose weight.” It matters what I say because it tells you how much I’m holding myself to it. And that tells you how much you can hold me to it, too. You could observe me carefully and determine that when I make a promise, I uphold it 90% of the time. When I say I just think I’m going to try to do something, I only do it about 60% of the time. (This is basically what reputation is, as Randy alludes to, except sometimes other people do the observing for you.) So how do you know how likely I really am to lose weight, unless you pay attention to what I said, too?
Nick
My point is that in all this we are talking about beliefs. I don’t care what you believe nor how confident you claim to be. Claims of beliefs are general not true, so they are a waste of time. The only way I know your claim is true will be by your actions. The rest is nonsense. The rest is for some other (nefarious) purpose.
Goggobobble
This is true. You also have nothing of value to gain by talking. My general state is silence which is the only thing that makes sense to me. Occasionally I post, but never without regret.
Are you sure you have nothing of value to gain from talking?
EyeBallFrog
Talking is sometimes useful. That is the exception rather than the rule. Useful talk normally involves actual information, not claims about beliefs or values.
HowardHolmes-
You might want to rethink that strategy. I’m not sure it’s working.
Because beliefs -> motivations -> future actions. Not all the time, but beliefs are indicators.
If your system relies on waiting until a racist/terrorist/communist/whateverist has done a bad thing, it’s worse than our current system where these people can be interdicted, walled off or deflected.
I don’t believe our current system allows for actions in an official capacity based on beliefs of another person. Statements of intent or credible threats, yes, but not belief.
I think if you attempt to predict future behavior based on everyone who says “race/class/religion X is superior/inferior” you’re going to have more false positives than you know what to do with. Whereas if you look at predicting bad things of greater magnitude based on prior commission of bad things of lesser magnitude, you will certainly miss some bad actors, but at least have a remotely workable system.
Well, it depends on the belief. I agree that “race/class/religion X is superior/inferior” isn’t an actionable belief. For something like that, yep, you look for prior commission of offenses, although I probably wouldn’t put someone who has professed those beliefs in any kind of decision-making position where those beliefs may have the potential to be enacted.
“Race/class/religion X is inferior and therefore needs to die” however, is actionable. The more extreme the belief, the earlier in the chain it should be intercepted.
@Aftagley
It still isn’t actionable without a specific threat. Pick your example from right or left of people making general “kill all X” statements that have repeatedly been upheld.
I agree with you that putting someone who has said “Kill all X” in a position of power is catastrophically stupid and should be opposed not just by people who are X.
I should specify – the action I’m advocating here for people with professed, “kill all X” beliefs is further observation/preparation to interdict them if it looks like they’re crossing over into implementing these beliefs.
“Kill all X” may well be incitement depending on the context. Which is an action, and one we can and should make moral and legal judgments based on.
I get the feeling that you’re extending the concept to break it. And while many people who support the concept do indeed extend it similarly far, sometimes to an unreasonable extent, that doesn’t invalidate the whole concept.
Ya, in general not all races/cultures are going to be perfectly identical.
But as a general rule of thumb it’s considered unfair if someone is born into a race/culture and then finds everyone treating them like crap because of something they had no control over.
If your bayesian rule leads to you deciding that when you get a CV from a black kid looking for a job you throw it in the bin because your Bayesian rule has led you to the conclusion that black people are bad at [job] then you’ve passed one of societies schelling fences.
Because races/cultures aren’t perfectly identical there will always be conflict about the exact siting of the schelling fence but it’s one that’s still worth having because while you may desire for your Bayesian rules to give you the optimal solution for your specific goals… society in general also desires some things like a certain level of individual-person-level fairness and your goals aren’t the only thing important because they get balanced against all the other goals of all the people around you including that kid who hasn’t done anything wrong and just submitted their CV.
And on the contrary, I’d probably look at the CV more closely, because it’s remarkable to me that given the struggles the median person of a certain skin color faces, they would have a CV reach my desk. On an individual basis, I’d evaluate by merit and condition by circumstance (so a personal affirmative action).
It is altogether another thing if I heard that gang violence is bad in a particular city, and while wandering around, I notice that the proportion of people of a certain skin color has increased. If I am to then to ask for directions because I’m starting to feel potentially unsafe, I do not think that racist, but Bayesian.
It seems to me the simplest definition of racism (and why it’s morally egregious) would be “to treat someone as worth more/less moral consideration according to their race”, and then all the practical consequences of that could be discussed. Is attributing a group statistical average to an individual based on race treating them as worth more/less moral consideration? Possibly; depends on the particular situation. Likewise for policies.
Most concepts of racism are trash. Personally I abide by the following rules:
(1) Intrinsic moral value of people does not depend on ethnic background.
(2) Whenever possible, treat people as individuals rather than engage in statistical discrimination based on group membership.
(3) Internally monitor for negative emotional reactions to people belonging to certain groups, and actively try to offset any I notice.
(4) Follow science (social and biological) on questions of fact.
The broader the definition of witches, the more power the witch hunters have.
Unfortunately, this kind of definition being taught to lots of people basically breaks public discussion. The savvy people recognize this as one of those socially-required lies and mouth the right slogans while making sure their employees, neighbors, and childrens’ classmates are nearly all white and Asian. The literal-minded wrap themselves around the axle trying to make sense of the crazy definitions.
Much the same happens w.r.t. issues of sexual morality and consent and rape–blur the definitions enough, and nobody can have a sensible discussion about the matter. This is bad for solving problems, but works fine for letting the savvy and resourceful people get what they want.
Well at least they didnt go with the racism = prejudice + power canard.
Is it racist to say that East Africans are better at long distance running than West Africans, and that West Africans are better at sprints? I think it probably is, because it’s assigning some kind of talent based on ethnicity.
Definitions of racism that require you to ignore or pretend to ignore reality to avoid being a racist are probably not a very good way to convince people to eschew racism.
If “avoid being a racist” comes with benefits like being allowed to hang out with the cool people, work high-paying jobs at the FAANGs without being harassed unto quitting by your coworkers, it kind of can. And requiring people to pretend to ignore some aspect of reality to maintain group membership, is a known effective way to promote ingroup loyalty.
Not a good plan if your goal is to convert the entire society to e.g. antiracism. But if you think you’ve already got enough people on your side to win the culture war, a focus on preventing backsliding and defections may be the winning strategy.
Yeah, I’ve got to hand it to the (official) LDS Church. They appear to be upholding traditional American Christianity unusually well, and if believing that the natives in some region of the Americas were iron-working Israelites with the full Fertile Crescent package of crops and domestic animals is causal to that… well, I don’t know what to say.
Only kind of, though. While I’m not at a literal FAANG any more, I’m at a similar type company. And there’s still other witches around, occasionally revealing their existence, though not their identity (and the administration has announced hunts for them, to which my response has been “Witches? No, I haven’t seen any witches around here. I’ll be sure to let you know if I do.”).
I don’t think it promotes loyalty; rather, a culture of fear. Perhaps if people would just play ball and they wouldn’t have to make conspicuous examples… but from what I heard, the culture at Google went to absolute hell after Damore, and that includes among the witch-hunters.
It promotes fear among the witches like yourself, pilgrims in an unholy land, maintaining a masquerade while they exploit opportunites not available to them in more amenable environments. But you’re in the distinct minority, and the rest don’t want your loyalty.
I’m pretty sure that the majority of your coworkers are, A: sincerely loyal to progressive “universal” culture and B: sincerely unafraid. Unless they start thinking about defecting; then they’re afraid, but that just means it’s time for another drink of nice, tasty kool-aid.
@John Schilling @The Nybbler
Embrace the power of being an open witch. I state my exact views at work without fear. I have black and Hispanic employees working for me (no Asians right now, but that’s more coincidence than anything) and I haven’t had any issues.
I’m not at a FAANG company, but it’s a fairly woke company. We had a “LGBT Ally celebration” that management was “encouraged” to attend. I didn’t go and told my senior manager why.
Witch hunts are meant to compel people to voice the company line. They’re bad at handling unapologetic witches.
@EchoChaos
Been there and done that. As I said, I don’t work at Google any more.
@John Schilling
The witch-hunting seems to inspire some unease in almost everyone. Either they’re all secret witches, or it’s rather counterproductive. From what I heard about Google after Damore, the environment got worse even for the witch-smellers, and if they were worried, they were right to be, as Witch-Smeller General Tim Chevalier was fired in the aftermath.
There’s a subset of people who care more about literal truth than social truth, and I think convincing them that an accurate understanding of the world = racism is unlikely to work out all that well for the world.
In a sane world, it depends what you mean by it. If you mean “all East Africans are better at long distance running than any West Africans”, you are clearly doing something in the same general area as racism, as well as violating common sense. (But I don’t think it’s racism until you speak in terms of groups commonly considered to be “races”.)
It also depends on context. A lot of people seem to feel a compulsion to discus racial differences in contexts where they really don’t matter, unless you propose to treat individuals as matching the average of their category – which *is* racist, IMO, as long as the categories are “races”. If you can’t or won’t stay off the topic, so that e.g. any discussion of long distance running has to include mention of this difference, then you are probably “racist”.
But noting the statistical difference, when relevant, seems harmless – in a sane world. (Which is not where we are living, IMNSHO.) E.g. if you were planning some kind of competition, you might want to consider whether the goal was to find the very best runners or for each national team to have a more or less equal chance of winning. If the latter, you’d have to design the competition based in part on knowledge of these differences.
Right. Obviously that statement is trivially false. But it’s true in terms of the statistical distribution of each population. Which is the only way to compare groups of people for a given trait. Like saying “men are taller than women” means that the mean height of men is greater than the mean height of women, not that every man is taller than every woman.
Not necessarily. My go-to example is prohibitions on blood donations for homosexual men. Obviously a homosexual man who is the top in a comitted long term faithful partnership has a much lower risk of relevant diseases than a heterosexual man who frequently has anal sex with random women. What we really care about is the probability of a donor having a disease they’re not aware of (yet), or the risk of same. That depends on (a) promiscuity (b) protection (c) anal sex (d) being the receiving partner and (e) said partner themselves having high or low risk behaviour. (I’m surely forgetting something and am not sure of the exact order of factors.) Asking ‘are you homosexual’ is about (e), and one hopes (d) and (c) go along with that, but as an attempt to gauge risk it’s embarrassingly stupid. (FWIW, AFAIK they now at least ask about ‘men having sex with men’, so at least the celibate homosexuals get to donate.)
Now, it’s understandable that one doesn’t want to grill potential donors on their sex life and I could understand someone arguing that they know the proxy ‘homosexual’ is bad, but it sits at an intersection of risk avoidance and being-possible-to-ask-about that they made their peace with. And that they apologize to the homosexuals who would like to donate, and that they know this sucks for them. Instead you get stubborn insistence that the rate of relevant diseases among homosexual men is higher, so there.
To get back to your example: This is the classic case of ‘wearing a suit is not enough’. Even then, if you’re using ‘murders’ as your crime statistic, you’re wrong, because you need to use ‘murders of random strangers here’, and the numbers for that are so low as to not be worth considering (The base rate is so low that the Bayesian posterior is abysmally low anyway and doesn’t justify any modification of behaviour or thought). If you fear violence, you need to use ‘violent crime against random strangers’ as your baseline and discount all the drug and fraud crime and the violence among associates and family. That is after you have taken into account stuff like posture, build, scars, excessive tattoos, clothing, facial expression, location etc.
You _probably_ already do that in that your posterior threat level for a black man in an expensive business suit busily starring at his phone on Wall Street probably is the same (none whatsoever) as for a white or asian guy doing the same. I expect the same holds true for a random plumber you’ve called, or your neighbor has hired or the new teacher of your kids.
However, this then means, that contrary to your above, there is wide range of situations where ‘a stranger of one race vs. another could be deemed more likely to be a criminal’ is wrong for any and all practical purposes.
This then leaves us with a pattern of speech acts, where a particular characteristic (being black) is elevated above all other indicators, regardless of its diagnostic utility, where use of that indicator is indiscriminate (i.e. fails to consider it’s changed diagnostic utility in a subset based on other available criteria) and it is wildly generalized on (i.e. the relevant decision is uncritically elevated to importance). That’s racist.
The non-racist version of doing that would be something like this: ‘After dark, in the shady but not bad parts of town(1) if I come across a stranger in casual to shabby clothing(2) who is not obviously acting in a non threatening way(3) and if I then care about the probability(4) of myself being the victim of a crime(5) I would, based on crime statistics, assign a slightly higher probability of being a criminal to a black stranger, all else being equal. That’s not racist, that’s being a Bayesian.’
I would agree, and would reply that I haven’t been in that situation in the last couple of years, so it has zero utility for me to dig through the crime stats to figure out how much I should adjust. If it’s relevant to your life, you have my sympathies and I could be roped in to help with the calculations. Except, extensive experience tells me accounting for ‘race’ here is pointless, it’s the other stuff (mostly the situation) that drives the level of danger.
(1) Because in the bad parts I’m equally scared of blacks and whites who fullfill the other criteria.
(2) Yeah, Mafia wears suits, but the ones that do don’t rob/hurt random strangers.
(3) Absorbed in a book, accompanied by and focussed on minors or likely family members, not using a rollator, not out of shape and obviously unarmed (e.g. a jogger)
(4) You’re there, in line of sight, decent chance the probability is already either 1 or 0.
(5) As opposed to a hundred other things you might care about, such as how your workday was. If p(crime) > 1% you should be there, if p(crime) << 1% it's therefore not an immediate concern.
I’m horrified by Stallman being pushed out at FSF and still have survivors’ guilt over the Holowka situation (was following at the time, disputed some accusations against him, but couldn’t stop it or push back on the broader “fire the bad person” mentality.) Tweeting isn’t fixing anything and I feel like I don’t have enough space to get my thoughts across anyway, so I want to write longer form articles, both criticizing the accusations against specific individuals and the broader ideology behind “this person said a bad thing, let’s get him fired”.
I am not right wing (although I fully expect to be accused of being such) and am coming at this from a perspective of employee due process, opposition to McCarthyism, and the right of proletarians to participate in politics without fearing for their job. I want to post things somewhere they can reach an audience that is not already invested in the anti-SJW movement, and where they will not get deleted if they start to gain any reach. So if possible I’d rather not have it somewhere like Breitbart or Quilette, where it’d be posted next to free market advocacy, punitive policies towards immigrants, and other things I strongly disagree with, or dismissed based simply on the URL. (Not that I necessarily want a site that bans posting these things, just not one that’s full of and explicitly advocates for them.)
Hosting it personally is not an option for financial reasons. I’m not doing this to make money and probably don’t have the experience to be taken on as a freelancer in any case. Where should I go?
I would try for a newspaper Op-Ed or for one of their affiliated blogs.
Newspapers have had an evaporative cooling effect after the 2016 election, where their audience is smaller but much more intense and dedicated. Even if print media has lost trust with Americans overall, the specific people you’re trying to reach actually trust newspapers more than they did before. If you can get something on the Atlantic’s blog that will probably reach the Blue Checks you’re aiming for.
That said, there’s an inherent risk. I don’t think that they generally take anonymous submissions, so you might be putting your own livelihood on the chopping block defending someone who has been cancelled or criticizing cancel culture. Getting the attention of the Blue Checks isn’t necessarily a positive thing.
On the plus side, I don’t have a livelihood in the first place and am willing to use an alias if need be. On the minus side, I fear any effective editorial will just get filed away if it’s saying the kind of things the blue checks don’t like.
It’s definitely worth a thought but I’d still need a backup plan if it’s rejected. Also, many of these incidents take a few days in real time, and I fear newspapers move too slowly, at least if I want to actually try to stop a witch hunt and not just criticize one after the fact.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take the lessons of the Effective Altruism movement, but apply them in reverse. How much worse can you make life for, say, one million dollars? And better yet, do it without ending up a social outcast or in jail?
Can we use that million dollars to bootstrap more money for more awfulness?
Absolutely. But you can’t just accumulate money indefinitely to do lots and lots of awfulness in the distant future. Let’s say this project has a ten year horizon.
Hail Hydra.
Well, patent trolls have seem to had a ball buying patents from failed start-ups on the cheap and then asserting those patents were worth Billions.
So my strategy is buy low, sue high which is feasible within 5 years and use the other 5 to implement a variety of other schemes in this thread.
@johan_larson,
A charity effort to provide medicine to treat chronic pain among those who can’t otherwise afford it for two years.
The medicine is highly addictive.
(any resemblance to the current opiod addiction epidemic is
completely in mindentirely coincidental)That definitely would make life worse, but it seems grotesquely inefficient to me.
The obvious: Breed mosquitos for resistance to whatever the bednets are treated with. Introduce parasites of all sorts into 3rd world areas without proper sanitation. Basically reverse any top charity, especially charities that only grapple with nature (Against Malaria Foundation is used to dealing with mosquito-level adversaries, so there seems to be a great opportunity for an intelligent actor to introduce all sorts of evil)
Well I assume the easy answer is to release some tainted mosquitoes into more nations. As someone sporting a dozen bumps from the infernal creatures this week alone, seems like a vector easily exploitable.
On a related note, anyone know a good way to get rid of unseen pests like this from your home? I’m planning on dousing the windows with repellent tonight.
This makes me think of the guy who invented both leaded gasoline and CFCs. Quite an outsized influence from such a modest start.
And (at least according to legend) another one of his inventions ended up killing him- he became paralysed after contracting polio, and developed a device to allow him to move around in bed. It went wrong and strangled him.
What are you, a Saturday morning cartoon villain?
Hrm. Skeletor and Mumm-Ra lived in fantasy settings. Are you Cobra Commander specifically?
This seems like more of a Captain Planet plot.
Good point. Alas I can’t remember the names of that show’s villains, except for literally Hitler.
Looten Plunder is the only one I remember for sure. I think there was also a Duke Nukem (not to be confused with the protagonist of the edgy Doom clone that came out a few years later).
There were something like a dozen of them, though, and they covered all the archetypes you’d expect. Corporate raiders of all types, evil military and government figures, amoral scientists… all the way down to somebody that was supposed to represent littering, I think. All unified by a desire to destroy the environment apparently for fun; there was an implied profit motive for some of them, but it always seemed secondary to me.
Oh, Looten Plunder was the stereotypical businessman, adult Alex P. Keaton as seen by Ralph Nader. He had a ponytail, because the ’90s.
Duke Nukem was Ben Grimm in Hawaiian vacation clothes. He liked nuclear power because his mutation made radiation nutritious to him.
The anti-environment mad scientist stereotype was a woman, Dr. Blight.
And there were Skaven Expies, whose leader was named, Wiki reminds me, Verminous Skumm.
Ahhh memories…
@Nornagest
Egads! Stop your lies, you benighted casual!
You’re thinking of Duke Nukem 3D, which was the third entry in the series. It was preceded by Duke Nukem and Dukem II, which were 2D platformers. The edginess was largely established in II, but everything’s bigger in 3D, I suppose.
Interestingly, the character was named Duke Nukum in some versions of the original, because Apogee got wind of the Captain Planet character and became worried about trademark issues. Eventually they figured out they were in the clear, so the spelling reverted to Nukem.
I’d played one of the 2D Duke Nukem games as a small Gest — don’t remember which one — but I’ll confess I’d forgotten about it. Though, strictly speaking, I didn’t say the Doom clone was the first entry in the franchise…
@Nornagest
Fair point.
I’m thinking maybe League of Shadows. If everything is rotten and doomed to come crashing down anyway, sooner is better than later.
.. A million dollars is enough to wreck the biosphere in its entirety. I see at least one obvious path to kill everything with a noctocord. If you just want to do in humanity, enough options that even mentally listing them is tedious. Not going to write any of this shit down in a context where it might be a google hit, though. Anyone who can think this up for themselves understands in their bones it would work, so wont do it. Someone who just sees a “recipe” without understanding it really, really would do what it says, however..
I have a parable for this principle, btw. I like it.
In the Sacred City, there is a museum. In that museum, there hangs a horn, on which is written an inscription in the language of angels, in which no deception is possible, all thinking beings understand, and which no reader may misunderstand or doubt.
“I am the horn of ending. To blow me is to consign heaven and earth to oblivion”.
This horn is not guarded, because it does not need to be.
I’m having a lot of trouble believing you. For the price of a penthouse apartment, I could kill all living things? While I don’t know the specifics, that sounds like an error of scale by at least a couple of orders of magnitude.
Yeah I feel like if free omnicide was just lying around on the sidewalk, someone would have picked it up by now.
Wikipedia says today is the 413th birthday of Chinese warlord Zhang Xianzhong, who is said to have erected a monument engraved with these lines:
Which translates to:
And I’m sure he’s not the only one to get this inspiring idea.
Checking math. No. A million should do it. Omni-cide is just not in the human psychological makeup. Even school shooters and the like want the infamy. No point if you actually kill everybody.
Yeah without even the slightest bit of evidence or hint as to what you’d do — and how you’d stop the rest of humanity from rallying and stopping you or at least blowing you well past your million dollar budget and/or ten year time limit, even if you do ultimately win — my opinion remains unchanged.
Okay, I will admit that part of the plan was to gear the million as hard as at all possible and then.. just not pay the loan. ‘because, well, dead
Any would-be genocidal maniac who can afford million-dollar schemes can, probably for a fraction of of a megabuck, have you doxxed and kidnapped and waterboarded until you give up your clever scheme. And they don’t need your scientific genius burned into their bones to do that, so the ones who are merely genocidal rather than omnicidal can imagine they’ll be able to tweak the plan to “only” kill blacks or whites or whatever.
So either you’re lying but you expect people to believe you, in which case you’ve endangered your life for the sake of a bit of internet bragging, or you’re telling the truth and you expect people to believe you, in which case you’ve endangered the entire human race for a bit of internet bragging plus maybe a uselessly vague warning, or you don’t expect people to believe you, in which case mission accomplished but why bother?
Sigh. Not an unique genius. Half the maximum damage ideas that sprang to mind were from safety warnings about things to avoid doing by accident less you die gruesomely. The point, such as it was, is that this is a boring challenge, because it is too easy. The rubber bible is in every library worth the name on the planet, after all.
So the idea is to dump some extremely cheap and potent toxic chemicals into the environment?
If there were a way to wreck the biosphere for a million dollars, it would have been though up by at least a few hundred really smart people, at least one of whom would have spilled the beans in order to impress someone by now.
Oh come on. It absolutely needs to be. People would totally do that.
One of the people who gets mentioned by EA for his huge contribution is the Soviet guy who, when the equipment failed and they believed there was a nuclear attack, chose to wait instead of retaliating.
So reverse apply this: use that million dollars to create a virus that would full detection equipment into believing a nuclear attack on their country was launched, to make them retaliate, thus starting World War III.
Among the countries that actually have nuclear weapons, the UK and France are probably out, because they don’t seem very trigger happy (and does the UK actually control their nuclear arsenal?; I don’t understand how Trident works very well). The US would presumably be much harder to fool, because they probably have much better equipment.
India-Pakistan would be pretty awful, but probably does not go to World War III awfullness, since China and the US would not go to war with each other.
So fooling North Korea would be my choice, and hopefully they retaliate by bombing California. Second choice is fooling China; third choice is Russia.
Do any of the more easily fooled nations have ways of attacking that make it unclear who did it? You only need the *appearance* of the U.S. nuking Russia or vice versa to start it off.
The point of fooling Russia into thinking it was bombed is to get them to retaliate against the US, obviously.
> and does the UK actually control their nuclear arsenal?
We do. It was a big issue, back in the day.
After the War, the US didn’t want to share any secrets about nukes or supersonic flight with the UK (Never mind the fact that we’d shared our research on both those things with them.) It was happy to put nuclear assets on British soil, but retained command over them.
Britain was worried that the US wouldn’t launch a nuclear retaliation to a Soviet invasion of Europe.
The UK built its own warheads, codenamed Blue Danube, Red Snow and Green Grass.
Once we’d demonstrated that we would have nukes whether the US wanted us to or not, there was less reason not to sell Polaris and Trident missiles to the UK.
Except that the United States then went and didn’t sell Trident missiles to the UK. We rent Trident missiles to the UK. Those missiles are US property, modulo some “common pool” legalese but with the practical upshot that every few years US technicians pull them out of British submarines, take them into a US factory, tinker with them in the name of maintenance repair and overhaul, and put them back in British subs until the next time.
The warheads are British, and they hold on to those when the missiles are in for maintenance.
Officially, the missiles are supposed to carry those warheads wherever Her Majesty’s officers command them to go. What would actually happen if they were to be launched any place the US really doesn’t want to see nuked, is an interesting question. And with the retirement of the WE.177, those are the only nuclear delivery systems Britain has.
The idea of rented expendable munitions intrigues me. If the Brits were to launch one of their Tridents, would they forfeit their security deposit?
> What would actually happen if they were to be launched any place the US really doesn’t want to see nuked, is an interesting question.
They’d probably send an invoice for the cost of the missile, for a start.
Shame Black Arrow/Black Knight was cancelled.
No, that’s not quite how it works, AIUI. They bought so many Tridents. It’s just that instead of it being “this is a British Trident, this is an American Trident”, which would require them to be tracked and overhauled separately, they just get whichever ones are available. So if they fire one off, they now have one less available from the pool. This presumably saved them some money because they only needed to have enough for operational use, without an extra set undergoing maintenance. It’s probably not a decision I would have made if it was my nukes, but UK defense procurement is even weirder than the normal kind.
That’s probably going to take more than a million. Cybersecurity is a big deal for the military these days, and anything to do with nukes makes people very paranoid. You’re not even sure what hardware they’re running this on, because that’s classified, as are all the specs. Also, it’s not on the internet. You’re going to need to get the information, build your virus, then deliver it to the hardware for $1 million. Good luck with that.
This. The common conceit that “anything can be hacked, if the hackers care enough”, is false. The defenders’ advantage in cybersecurity is enormous, and systems can be made effectively or in some cases even provably unhackable.
Any consumer-facing product or service, can be hacked if the hackers care enough, but that’s because consumers care so very very little about cybersecurity that the attacker’s advantage in effort invested can outweigh the defender’s home-court advantage. If you were to market an actually secure consumer-facing product, even if it were something that consumers should care heavily about like the access portal to their online banking system, they’ll gripe about the inconvenience and go somewhere else.
The military, which can make its people do things like rip the wifi cards out of their laptops and glue over the USB ports, and leave their cellphones on a table in the hall before they go into the room where interesting stuff happens, can make systems that will not be hacked for mere megabucks of investment (if at all).
Things which need have no public interface are certainly much harder to hack; it’s not going to be done by your stereotypical basement hacker, or even a team of engineers with a lot of compute power available. But it can be done, Stuxnet proves it. Certainly not for a mere million, though.
Stuxnet worked because Iran did not have full technological sovereignty and had to have critical parts of its information infrastructure not only imported but maintained from abroad and as a COTS product. When you can have your own people on the shop floor at every stage, it can be made impractically hard for outsiders to slip in exploits.
“Can be” doesn’t necessarily mean “will be”, of course, though for nukes people will be extra careful. But there are nuclear powers that are at least as dependent on imported technology as Iran, so that is a plausible route of attack. Screwing with e.g. Pakistan’s nuclear C3I isn’t going to be globally apocalyptic, and it’s almost certainly going to cost more than a megabuck, but if you’re into maximally damaging but plausible supervillain schemes, yeah, that’s a place to look.
In addition to bean’s comment on the difficulty of doing this, “believing a nuclear attack on their country was launched”, doesn’t make them retaliate. It does nudge them towards retaliation, and even more strongly towards “back off or we’ll kill you all!” posturing, but the observed behavior of multiple nuclear-armed nations over multiple false alarms, and the observed deployment posture of their nuclear forces and C3I systems, suggests that they don’t actually retaliate until nuclear warheads actually explode in their country. That’s not a weird Stanislav Petrov / Jack Beringer thing, that’s a nearly universal military officer thing.
If you can fake (or actually cause) nuclear explosions in the right place at the right time, that could start a war. But it’s a pretty tall order and I don’t think a megabuck will do it.
Terrorism. I don’t think 9/11 cost more than $1 million. You can’t start a war with just anybody but the bin Laden formula of “Be part of group A, find group B in tension with group A, commit terrorism” is pretty effective. Imagine if an American or Japanese national bombed Mao Zedong’s Mausoleum.
Presuming no violence, your best bet would probably be to smuggle invasive species into the developing world. Sneak Africanized honey bee hives into every country on earth. Spread these four invasive insects through rural Indonesia and wait for them to eat all the fruit/crops. Livestock diseases are also worth a shot, anything which kills cattle/chicken/pigs is going to ruin subsistence farmers.
It’d be a hell of an international incident but I don’t think it’d spark a war, or even any significant saber-rattling. China’s stable, dependent on Pacific trade, and smart enough to realize that there’s no upside for the American or Japanese governments in the bombing.
Sinking a Chinese frigate in the Spratlys would be a better bet, I think, but still runs into the basic problem that I don’t think China’s looking for a casus belli right now.
Yeah, the Crusader Kings 2 engine doesn’t handle modern Communist rule. IRL China is in Hearts of Iron, more or less.
Convince a large group of people they have been poisoned. Accuse anybody who disputes your claim of not caring about the supposed victims. Present the crying victims to the media, and proclaim that the critics cannot see the obvious pain they are going through.
First idea: Spread prion disease. Figure out a way to farm prions, probably using a cell culture engineered to produce lots of the protein that gets misfolded. Then, try various delivery methods. Slipping prions into fertilizer, or into feed for livestock seem like the most obvious possibilities. The prions may simply be washed off of the surface of the plants, making that method ineffective. Or the disease may be detected in livestock before they are slaughtered, making that method ineffective. If neither work well, try something else, maybe infecting wild animals and letting them spread it. Having found something that works, do it as many times as possible, affecting as many areas as possible. Choose targets in a pattern that makes it look like a natural epidemic, so that an artificial cause is not suspected. Work in secret to stay out of jail and socially accepted.
Second idea: Start a public relations campaign to discredit effective altruism. If possible try to convince people that not only are all current effective charities a waste of funds, but effective altruism itself is a foolish idea, and they should donate to their local art gallery instead. (Also, you should donate less than 5% of your income. Any more would amount to seeking extra status, which would be bad.) Especially target rich donors, maybe by telling them that they should pay their employees more instead of donating to charity. You won’t be jailed because freedom of speech. You won’t even be a social outcast, except among EAs. You probably even score points with many people.
A public relations campaign to discredit effective altruism — something like this?
Sorry, Vox already got there first.
To reduce donation to charity, just start a few abusive charities. That will teach people to avoid everything that calls itself a charity.
These days it is quite difficult to be a villain… the competition is just too big.
I could buy a lot of mosquito nets and send them to Africa right?
Bribing a sufficiently powerful politician in a large city to implement rent control policies would probably fit the bill.
Give it to Antifa, preferably the Portland branch. Total righteous misery and destruction for years, guaranteed – plus some additional recruitment drives to scrape up whatever lost young souls remain somehow un-radicalized.
Help them build an infrastructure to coordinate worldwide. Webhosting, server administration, set up some cryptographic communication… not that expensive.
Establish the headquarters in Portland, support local branches everywhere. Anyone can join if vouched for by someone trustworthy; anyone can be banned for wrongthink by the headquarters.
Establish encrypted communication channels between members of the network, and friendly journalists. Provide backdoor to every communication to high-status Portland members, to prevent using these channels for stories like: “I used to be an Antifa member, here is what made me change my mind”.
Invent Twitter.
Genetically modigy Avian Flu to spread human-human?
My and @EchoChaos disagreed about some aspects of this one to a few Open Threads ago, but judging by:
The Changing Shape of the Parties Is Changing Where They Get Their Money
Trump leads among small donors. Democrats now get plenty of support from the wealthy, with predictable consequences by Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times today, it looks like he’s increasingly correct.
I’ve seen some other pieces by the author (a grey haired pro-union Democrat political scientist and essayist) and while he’s never used these words but I’d put the gist as “gaining the world and losing your soul”.
Anyway, the full essay is longer, and with some interesting links, but here’s some quotes from it, please tell me what you think:
Potentially weird nitpick. I’m through my monthly allotment of articles and these numbers confuse me but can someone say if this is addressed in the article:
Hillary Clinton got more money from small donors (105.6 mil) than Donald Trump (87.3 mil). Except these aren’t measurements taken from the same time? He got his earlier in his campaign. Did he eventually get more? I get that they care about percentages but I assume an apples to apples comparison still illustrates what the article wants to point out so why aren’t they using final/total numbers, or comparing the breakdown of donations at different points in the campaign. Seems fudgey.
I don’t have any objections to the points about the changing makeup of the Fortune 500, or the disconnect between the Crowned Heads of Tech and the democratic party’s expressed goals. I do feel like Warren and Sanders both offer a glimpse of populist support on the other side. Populism has always been on a different axis to party. It’s also not clear to me that Trump-style populism has really permeated into elections in the legislative branch.
But say this is all prescient and the current status quo of the parties perseveres across disparate candidates. What are we on now, the 7th party system?
FrankistGeorgist says:
If you go to most every Public Library website in California and look around you should find a “coupon” link that allows you to log in as a “subscriber” to New York Times articles for 72 hours (I do that every few days).
Here’s one link
It continues to amaze me how long you held onto a stereotype of the Democratic Party as the Party of labor unions and Republicans as Scrooge McDuck, Plumber.
Until Donald Trump won the Presidency, I believed that the United States was a plutocracy. Rival candidates go to the small number of people rich enough to be donors, and they vote with their dollars. Then there’s an intermediate stage/possible point of failure where they buy attack ads and turn out the vote, but each Party has a process to make sure they weed out people who would spend the donations incompetently, so it’s really all decided in the fundraising stage. The way the journalist class talked about Hillary’s odds in 2016 did nothing but reinforce this.
(“How can voters be turned out if it’s actually a plutocracy, Maistre?” Well, each Party has a base that the attack ads motivate: Ds target people who care most about transfer payments, Rs lie to Evangelicals and Catholics that they’ll change the law for them between snorting lines of coke off their mistresses’s skin.)
Is not your city the perfect encapsulation of this Democratic stereotype? You have the donor class and their employees in Silicon Valley living next to homeless lumpen, the professors who come up with left-wing beliefs in Berkeley, and poor-ish minorities in Oakland. The America you talk about sounds more like Pittsburgh or something.
@Le Maistre Chat says:
Years of practice have created long imprinted habits, also Democratic Party candidates keep coming to us and asking for support, the Republicans only come for us to support oil pipelines construction, and after we do they tend to try to award the work to non-union contractors, fortunately for us the non-union sector can’t field enough certified welders, yet.
Well, Democrats give unions lip service during election season and indifference in-between, Republicans pay us the high compliment of trying to destroy unions (and they’ve been pretty successful at mostly eliminating the private industry ones, we’re b as basically down to 1920’s levels, not as a percentage in total number, the only bright spots are nurses in California and a couple of other states, and janitors in Los Angeles, the UAW strike against GM is partially out of desperation, they’re begging for factories not to close, like the Ohio factory that Trump came to and said “Don’t sell your homes“, because the factory jobs are “coming back. They’re all coming back“, needless to say it’s scheduled to close.
All true but perhaps surprising to you (IIRC you Black Panther movie villain plausibility questions of some threads ago) except that, while Oakland like California as a whole is “majority minority”, there’s less blacks as a percentage and in total, they’re increasingly displaced by Asians, Hispanics, and Whites, not quite as much displacement as in San Francisco where they’re mostly gone (only 6% of the population), but still reduced, the old duplex I lived in Oakland with my Mom and Dad was a majority black neighborhood, it’s now mostly Latino, and the house my Mom still lives in Berkeley was in a majority black neighborhood when we moved there in thr early ’70’s and now its mostly white.
The biggest changes in demographics that I know of locally are in Richmond (where some of the old shipyards are now the National Park Service “Rosie the Riverter” World War 2 Homefront museum) which at least up until the ’90’s was overwhelmingly black are now mostly Spanish speaking neighborhoods (at least on a Saturday last month), and the further formerly mostly rural suburb of Antioch, which now has a much larger black population, though not enough to account for all those who left the central Bay Area. Where did the rest go? I can’t be sure but I’ve read that since the ’70’s older and/or middle-class American blacks have been trickling back to the south and by 2010, about 57 percent of the nation’s African-Americans were living in the South – a higher percentage than at any time in 50 years (and according to the newspaper accounts they’re finding the “new south” nicely hospitable), this incidentally is the “Biden base” of “moderate Democrats” that The New York Times, Vox, and The Washington Post writers have spilled ink and pixels lately “discovering” in their trying to puzzle out “Why is Biden polling so high?”
The America I talk of is largely deadl and I’ve explored the ruins. In the ’80’s and ’90’s the empty warehouses had many artists, hipsters, and musicians (I don’t really know the lines between them) move into the emptied out factories and warehouses, I went to parties in them in my youth, the infamous “Ghost Ship” fire this decade is a legacy of those uses, in 2011 I was assigned to the Port of San Francisco and when we’d get reports of water shooting out from the latest leaks we’d flip a coin to see who would be “point man” and walk ahead to see if the rotting floors would collapsebunder a mans weight, and even though here and there new condos are being built, they’re still very many miles of abandoned factories, army bases, naval bases, shipyards, and warehouses with thousands of plumbing fixtures (and the lead, asbestos, and soil that we were told could be radioactive with them), and you could build a whole new city on the land – if someone would pay to clean up the toxins.
Just a couple generations ago it was in use, and now after decades of rotting in the salt air they look like centuries have taken their toll instead.
@Plumber
I promise to be nothing but gracious and humble about it.
Thanks for the digging, a really interesting read!
There’s a question waiting for you in the previous thread.
I’m already there.
I mean the one about how you can manage to stay humble after getting a prestigious award.
@Randy M
Difficult with an award of this magnitude, but I persevere.
Since the Bay Area and tech are well represented here, there’s something I’ve been wondering about that the SSC hivemind probably knows a lot about.
The big tech companies (e.g. FAANG) – why do they use American programmers, as opposed to just doing everything in India? I’m assuming they do employ a lot of programmers in the US, maybe that’s the thing I’m wrong about and Silicon Valley is full of project managers.
There are known problems with *outsourcing* (misaligned incentives, poor understanding of the business etc.) but those can be worked around by *offshoring* while not outsourcing (opening your own offices in India). I was part of a 50-person startup that did this, if they can so can the big boys. (Though it was recently in the news where Amazon opened a big-ass campus in Hyderabad, so maybe the answer is: they’re just in the process of getting around to it?)
With a 3-to-1 cost differential there must be some pretty big force pushing against it, but what is it? I imagine some of you know how the strategy works.
a) Real quality differences. The average US-educated programmer is substantially better than the average Indian/Chinese/Russian programmer, and the cream of the crop is both far better and far easier to find/qualify than the analogue in India.
b) Time zone differences are actually a big deal. If you need to wait 12 hours to communicate with your programmers, every significant change you want to make adds an extra 12-hour delay to your project timeline. That adds up.
c) Corporate espionage might be more infamous in China, but it’s still very common in India.
For one, they do already do this, and have for years. See eg this 2015 article about Google increasing its headcount to 13,000 in Hyderabad.
For two, while American programmers are more expensive, they also provide more value. Time zones and language/cultural barriers are one easy to see place, but there’s also softer, more difficult to quantify factors. Elite tier programmers, which is what the supermajors all want, tend to be in Western countries. Which is not to say that there aren’t plenty of elite Indian programmers – but often, they’ll come to Silicon Valley to earn more money. The cheaper ones available in India are often assigned more rote type work, like troubleshooting and maintenance, or fleshing out functionality that was designed at a high level elsewhere.
Heck, forget outsourcing to India. Why don’t the big tech companies outsource more to places in the US outside the Bay Area?
I’m struck by the superconcentration of developers in the Bay (plus a few other major cities with sky high costs of living) given that the work seems so easy to do remotely.
My assumption was always that if it can be done in Columbus, it can be done in India, so none would bother.
Sending the work to another part of California instead of India would avoid the time zone problem, language problem, and Third World education problem. Are in-person meetings really that important? I guess the people in charge think so.
Sending it to Columbus could introduce a time zone problem, but, speaking as an evening person, living in the east and working on a western schedule sounds pretty great.
During my brief foray into the corporate world I had a roommate who worked with clients on the west coast (we were on the east) and thus worked 11-7.
If Facebook tried to mandate that all engineering would now be done in Fresno, the response would not be a bunch of programmers moving to Fresno, it would be a bunch of programmers moving to Google.
If people can work remotely the company doesn’t have to mandate any particular place.
This. The best people in the field, very much want to work with the other best people in the field. And preferably in the sense of working in the same space and going to the same bar after work, rather than the sense of “we trade emails and IMs all the time!”. The best people in the field, even if they are working for the best firm in the field, want the opportunity to go over to one of the other best firms in the field if things change. Or to form a start-up with some of their best in the field colleagues recently at those best-in-the-field firms.
If it is possible for the best in the field to converge on a single city, most of the best will want to live in that city. You won’t be able to get them to work for lower wages by putting them in Fresno; you’ll have to pay them more to live in Fresno, and you’ll lose key team members if you can’t. I’ve seen this happen, seen companies die from it.
And those three guys you found who are actually among the best in the field and living in Fresno because that’s where they grew up? Two of them would rather move to the Bay Area, and if they work for you in Fresno it’s just to establish their rep and apply for a FAANG job in the Bay Area. The third, yeah, he married the girl next door and put down roots and he’s staying put. Him, you get cheap.
It’s probably not worth it.
Network effects are powerful stuff. Until there’s a critical mass of programmers in a location, they’re actually less effective than they would be in the Bay area.
I think you’re underestimating the benefit of being able to hire from a broader pool. True, a geographically split team of engineers is going to be less effective than an equally effective co-located one. But well-constructed distributed teams can more than make up for that disadvantage by hiring stronger team members (since they aren’t limiting their search to people who can practically show up in person at the corporate HQ).
There are other trade-offs as well. Geographically distributed teams are almost tautologically better set up to enable remote work.
That hasn’t been my experience, but admittedly, my field is only CS-adjacent.
broblawsky mentions the importance of communication above.
So the bigwigs, who can afford to live wherever they want, have to choose to live somewhere less luxurious, in order to put HQ there. And since they also put a large priority on networking with other bigwigs, that’s basically nonstarter.
New big cities don’t happen anymore. Nobody wants to take the hit on bringing people to them, so they only keep going to where the people already are. Everything consolidates towards NYC and LA in the long run.
I disagree with that strongly. There are substantial burgeoning tech hubs in Austin and Pittsburgh. Both of those were already large cities, but they’re getting bigger.
As you say, both of those were already large cities.
The whole Amazon HQ thing is the biggest example. Amazon! One of the few companies who could actually make a new big city happen!
I saw a post on HN the other day that made a very good point. You don’t want to way overpay vs the local market. Not just because you want to save money, but because your unhappy employees won’t leave. They’ll stick around and poison your culture.
That implies that if google opens an office in Columbus it isn’t just going to pay less than SF, it’s going to pay a lot less than SF. People talking themselves blue in the face about CoL notwithstanding, revealed preferences seem to indicate that most people prefer more money to less. So many or most top engineers are going to want to go to SF even if Google has an office in Columbus.
Many or most still leaves some in Columbus, but there needs to be a critical mass to make it worth it.
All of which is to say that, perhaps paradoxically, a city in the US needs to have a sufficiently expensive market rate to make it worth it to open a branch office.
There are two answers to your question, both of which are correct.
1. This is a simple feedback loop. Some development jobs were in a particular city, so developers moved to that city to work them. Then there were developers in that city, so more companies moved there to hire them.
2. Companies do this all the time. The first company I worked for built a new building so they could hire local developers in a market they didn’t previously have access to. IBM fields a huge number of outsourcing contracts with US-based teams. And fully-remote positions have never been more common. Google has offices in 8 different states.
You know how I talk about how I need to teach my factory workers how to use a ruler and read their names on a sheet?
Yeah, dealing with an offshore team is about 1000000000000000x times more frustrating. Communication sucks. Accountability sucks. Skill level is the worst: everyone offshore was either incompetent or basically committing fraud (because they were smart enough to know how to fake doing their jobs, but not smart enough to know they could be easily caught).
If you, like me, enjoy dinosaurs, and never quite grew out of action figures, there’s a Beasts of the Mesozoic Ceratopsian kickstarter going on at the moment.
Ah, I got some from their raptor series (and by some I mean like eight, don’t judge, dinosaurs are cool ok), they’re very good quality. Gonna pass on the Cerotopsian because I’m already spending too much money on board games.
I totally understand. That said, I may have a hoarding/collecting problem when it comes to dinosaurs, so chances are I won’t be able to throw less than a full sum of burning money at this one. (Fortunately it’s the only thing I set my money on fire with. But with Beasts of the Mesozoic specifically, it’s a pretty strong fire.)