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Lets imagine there is a conspiracy theory about you that you know is false. Like that you murdered your gardener because you saw him sleeping with your wife. What is the best way to dispel this conspiracy theory?
You gotta clarify more for this to be a meaningful question. First question: is the gardener still alive?
I tend to think that the operative word there is “best”. For instance, it would be relatively easy and effective (I think) to drown that conspiracy theory in other conspiracy theories that contradict it. But if this pulled people away from this particular conspiracy theory, it still wouldn’t let you go out in polite company.
eric23 has a good point too. If the theory is easily falsifiable then just falsify it.
Same way you get rid of an earworm. Produce an even bigger version of the same thing.
While waiting to get another chest X-ray at the Oakland Kaiser hospital (I wish I smoked so I could quit and have better lungs!), I had a strange reminder of my late father, in a nearby room a lecture was about to start and for some reason the presenter clearly played Kenny Rogers “The Gambler”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MN1AtzLrW4Y
a song I remember playing on the car radio during which my Dad said “This song isn’t about cards, it’s about life”. What I heard him listening to the most in my youth was Jimmy Cliff and Hank Williams, but in the hospice the musical performance he most remembered was one by Nina Simone.
Now that I’m in my 50’s I find my tastes are closer to those my Dad, Mom, and Step Dad had in their 30’s including County-Western music (besides Johnny Cash that is, who most love even if they don’t like the rest of the genre, my gateway was some punk bands covering Cash’s material, just as a punk/new wave band covering Billie Holiday was my gateway to her).
I did find a less than 25 years old punk song I liked a lot this year though (recorded in 2000, so almost 21st century) so I’m not ready to switch generational allegiance to my Dads “Silent” or my Mom’s “Boomer” yet (yes I know Boomers invented punk, but most of them didn’t like it!), even if the press now always lists Generation X (when they bother to) as either “Boomers and X’ers”, or “Millennials and X’ers”.
And with that thought, if we have to choose, which of the two bigger generations do we X’ers more resemble, Boomers or Millennials?
We definitely resemble Boomers more, in my opinion. Note that is “resemble more” and not “are mirrors of”.
Although I will point out that a song recorded in 2000 is still probably a solidly Gen X song.
Gen Xers seem to resemble boomers except for those born right at the tail-end, say 1975-1980. Older Gen Xers are Kamala Harris, Sarah Palin, Keanu Reeves, Rob Lowe, Nick Cage, Michael Jordan….I’d paint these, especially public figures, as Boomer and Boomer-adjacent. The media celebs probably feel younger because their image depends on it.
Younger Gen Xers are Ashton Kutcher, James Franco, Katherine Heigel, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Joaquin Castro (the guy running for President), Andrew Yang (also running for President), Rashida Tlaib (one of those new Democrats that is basically poison), Don Trump Jr, and maybe Eric Swalewell.
Definitive early Millennials are Tusli Gabbard, Ilhan Omar, Zuckerberg, Dan Crenshaw, with AOC in the exact middle.
Late Millennials are Logan Paul.
Don Trump Jr, late Gen-Xer, reads more like Zuckerberg than his father. Trump senior is practically Boomer personified.
Sorry, we’re probably going to destroy the nation, looking at the current roster of intellectual talent. Millennial leadership is quite frankly an embarrassment to the nation, with very few exceptions. Pretty soon they’ll start running states, and running them promptly to the ground. Fortunately we can ride out the Gen X wave for a while longer.
Neither. If anything, I feel like Generation X is largely defined by not being like Millennials or Boomers. It reminds me of a joke I heard the other day:
I’m an early Millennial myself, but I’m pretty frustrated with my own generation, while still echoing a lot of their sentiments about Boomers. I can sympathize with Gen X’ers frustration with both groups!
Did anyone see this article about a famous physics institute being raided in Russia? It is from the New York Times, although the link is to my local paper.
The article implies that Russia has not been able to capitalize on its tremendous human capital since the USSR fell because of the overbearing Russian government. I am curious if those with more knowledge on Russia than me agree with this.
This is from the article. And I do wonder why Russia hasn’t been able to do this. I have heard that the rise of Silicon Valley originated from the research labs of Caltech and other universities in the area. And a similar if smaller result in Boston. So I would think there would be plenty of similar research knowledge around Moscow to achieve at least a partial version of the same result. And I certainly think Putin would love to see that happen. Is he shooting himself in the foot? Maybe it isn’t all Putin’s fault; he can’t stop the overbearing Russian culture of control from the top, so few businesses can get started? I understand that an overly politicized and regulatory government can be deadly to business, but I don’t think Putin is stupid. He will do what he can to encourage it, although he may have higher priorities.
I just feel group of many tiny research companies growing up around Moscow is a great opportunity lost since 1990.
I have experience with Eastern Europe (in fact, I attend Eastern European tech conferences a few times a year). Eastern Europe does have a lot of good human capital and it also has relatively low wages. You can get a master’s degree from one of the oldest and most venerable CS programs in the world out of Kyiv for basically US minimum wage.
Russia specifically has a few problems. Firstly, and most generally, the Putin regime has been rather alienating to the middle and professional classes. In fact, by one estimate there are more middle class Russians living outside Russia than within it. This is not unique to engineers but it does apply to them. Russian engineers are doing fine (in fact, one of the founders of Google was born in Moscow) but the best of them are largely doing it outside of Russia.
Secondly, the Russian business environment is not very good. It’s corrupt, full of cronyism, people who are too successful get expropriated by Kremliniks, and the government has had a very inconsistent policy on who it supports. This has led to things like them spending hundreds of millions of dollars in innovation projects then suddenly shutting them down. It also was highly regulated and complicated. One of Putin’s big political pushes in his current term has actually been fixing all of this and making things more business friendly. While he’s been successful to some extent, what I’ve heard is that a lot of entrepreneurs are waiting to see if he’s consistent.
Thirdly, there’s some pretty big unique challenges. Western sanctions, for one. The Russians also sometimes use their tech sector as an intelligence asset. This means that many companies have trouble exporting their services west. More people open up offices in Kyiv (which is fighting a civil war in its eastern provinces) than Moscow. A lot more.
Fourthly, Russia has not quite been willing to give up its central control for reasons of both morality and more political censorship. The religious set in Russia have noticed how the proliferation of internet companies in Eastern Europe have led to a proliferation of pornography and women serving as cam-girls and they don’t like this. And the Kremlin has been suspicious of non-state controlled forms of disseminating information and sometimes cracked down on them.
Lastly, this has all created a gated economy. There’s some fear that opening it up like the Soviet Union did would lead to a collapse like the 1980s-1990s. To be fair, that ‘collapse’ was of an industry that made vastly inferior products and allowed the modern computer industry to be born in the East by importing western standards. But the people who own the various companies or who benefit from that gated economy won’t like it. (This dynamic is also present in China, where some companies have lobbied hard about keeping western companies out for reasons of… err… moral purity? Yes, moral purity, sure… Definitely not because we don’t want to compete…)
Russia is commonly described as a failure of shock therapy, but the opposite is true. Russia started down the shock therapy path, but reversed course after about 6 months. This is just about the worst possible thing you can do, because it created all the negative effects you’d expect from rapid and corrupt privatization of state owned industry, but without the benefit of actually achieving a liberal economy. the end result is that russia has one of the most state centric economies in the world and domestically discredited capitalism to create it.
It’s really a smaller version of the soviet problem. the soviets were pretty good at producing world class science and scientists, but they fell further and further behind the west at translating that science into actual technology, because creating technology and delivering it to people in mass quantities requires the combined efforts of more and larger groups of people than producing the original science does.
Yes, that wasn’t real shock therapy, which has never been tried.
shock therapy was tried, and was a success, in several eastern European countries. It was not tried in Russia. Or rather, it was rapidly abandoned after it proved unpopular.
I think that thisheavenlyconjugation’s post was a quip on the oft-repeated excuse by advocates of communism that “Soviet-style communism wasn’t real communism, which has never been tried”.
Ummm . . . Caltech is next to LA (about 375 miles from Silicon Valley). You’re probably thinking of Stanford.
Corrupt and authoritarian government is bad for investment, and that is a government Russia has.
I would however dispute that there was some tremendous human capital in the USSR, outside of weapons production and closely associated industries. USSR was for example way behind the United States in digital technologies in the 80s.
Another problem for Russian knowledge intensive and also labor intensive as opposed to physical capital intensive industries is that enormous Russian natural wealth combined with very understandable concern of Russian government and central bank with living standards keeps the exchange rate of the rouble rather high, making it hard to compete on international markets.
The name Kolmogorov probably rings a bell for many people here. (Yes, the “Kolmogorov complexity” guy… but look at Wikipedia for the full list of things that were named after him.) And this guy spent a lot of time fighting against Soviet bureaucracy, so it makes you wonder what he could have achieved otherwise.
Generally Russians did a lot of awesome math during Soviet regime, which is quite mind-blowing given that half of mathematicians were, for political reasons, forbidden from getting a job in research or educational institutions, so most of them had a blue-collar work during day and did math during night, and then they exchanged their discoveries by (paper) mail.
Can’t speak for other sciences, but it seems to me that Russia doesn’t have a problem with human capital. The real problem is that it doesn’t have an environment where that human capital could… you know, keep creating awesome things, without being randomly fired for political reasons, having their offices raided by secret police because they happened to piss off someone with political connections, etc.
Could this have been mostly a problem of “people interested in computer science couldn’t afford computers”? If you look at the outcomes of International Olympiad in Informatics, it doesn’t seem dominated by the West.
Also other countries in former Eastern Bloc are doing well. Look e.g. at Slovakia in 1998, or Czechia in 1995. — So why don’t have another Silicon Valley here; is it people, or the political environment?
Another way of seeing the same thing is that there are tons of Russians working in technology outside Russia. Plenty of brains, but somehow the social arrangements needed to let them be fully productive at home seem not to be there. For many years, this was also true of China–wealthy overseas Chinese everywhere else, dire grinding poverty in China itself–though right now, China seems to be managing to have explosive economic growth.
I suppose tremendous might not be a great term. Underutilized might be preferable. You’re right there are some things they have a dearth in: industrial management, for example. However, in certain fields the USSR was very good, mainly highly theoretical fields which could be done without complicated production. This means things like computer science (often done on stolen computers), theoretical math, exercise and health, many sorts of science. This was because the general negative effect of socialism and dictatorship on the economy and freedom created poverty and barriers… but simultaneously the Soviet Union overinvested in ‘safe’ educational endeavors. After all, how likely is it that you train an amazing ballerina and her theories of ballet lead to a problematic bourgeois conclusion?
Thank you for everyone’s response. I realize there isn’t a good answer to this, or at least no one really knows the real answer.
At this point I have two possible theories:
1) Putin really does want Russia’s high powered scientists to create a business nexus in Russia, because why wouldn’t he? But even more important to him is to stay in power, and small entrepreneurs are not and never will be a component of his power. Whereas the thousands or millions of small time local politicians are a critical component of his power. And those local politicians very much do want to maintain control over local businesses. So the free wheeling business environment that is probably necessary for such a business nexus to take off is killed in its infancy by these local fiefdoms.
2) Based on Ales’s comments, I wonder if Russia may be out-of balance in its human capital. They have lots of highly educated technical specialists that are very valuable in creating new ideas and businesses, but not nearly enough mid-level human capital that is needed to run a business. How many white collar experts do they have in finance, marketing, real estate, do they have? OR blue collar experts in machining, plumbing, construction, etc.? The West has a large quantity of such workers that the talented scientist/entrepreneur can tap to keep the day-to-day business going so the brilliant iconoclast can do his thing.
Both of these thoughts are highly speculative. I may have Russia totally wrong. But they may be reasons for Russia’s failure to take advantage of its technically skilled populace. It seems likely to me that the USSR did not build a society that would flourish in the free market. Not so much flourishing even in the dictatorial society of Communism either, but even worse in freedom.
When we were renovating an apartment in Moscow, we had a huge issue with skilled blue-collar workers; the workers we could afford were not very skilled. There are highly skilled builders, but they were out of our budget (30,000 euros total, for a renovation). In Spain, you could hire qualified, highly skilled construction workers for that price (that was in 2010; the improving economy makes it harder to hire for small projects). But Spain seems to have more middle skilled workers.
All these fields are new in Russia, no more than 30 years old.
Russian banks mostly suck, especiall Sberbank (which is still used by many people, because they have the most offices around all Russia).
Has anyone been democratically elected to an office without being eligible to vote for that office?
I have heard this claimed many times about women in the Western States or Switzerland, but every time I tracked down an example, it was a woman elected to local office in a state or canton that did not allow federal suffrage or a woman elected to federal office in a state that had broader franchise than other states. Maybe there are examples I have missed.
This was inspired talk of Starship Troopers and the phrase “wield political power.” Could someone without the franchise be elected? The book probably does not discuss this.
Should we see this in terms of “identity politics”?
Several people have been elected from prison. Probably some of them were not eligible to vote. But that doesn’t create an identity group?
———
What is a “democratic election”? There are often small committees for electing people that are supposed to elect an outsider, such as a CEO search committee. Similarly, the Venetian Doge committees, although that is complicated. There have been a few popes who were not cardinals.
Joseph ‘Put him in to get him out’ McGuinness?
He was imprisoned in HMP Lewes before he was elected as MP.
What about US Senators prior to 1913? Unless they were also a member of their state legislature, they wouldn’t be able to cast a vote for themselves.
I would count the state legislators’ constituents as having indirectly elected the senator, just as we indirectly elect the President today.
Per Wiki, in SST elected office is also restricted to veterans.
I do not find wikipedia or its source convincing. The book implies that only citizens can make it in politics, but that could be a practical constraint, not a legal rule. The book does say that the teacher for the high school class in History and Moral Philosophy had to be a citizen, but that’s not an elected office.
Who says “high school H&MP teacher” isn’t an elected office?
I’m joking, but only mostly – could you say it’s elected indirectly by the school board? How can we firmly differentiate that from the indirect elections of Senator or President?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-human_electoral_candidates
My apocalyptic fantasy of the week: Everyone switched to driverless car, but there’s a bug or malware, like overflow triggered by calendars which causes every single car to simultaneously confuse left with right and forward with backwards and crash. Every single car at once.
Anyone discussed this?
Is that any more likely than the same thing happening, but with airliners?
Sure, why not. Maybe in the future there will be pilot-less airliners as well and they will confuse up with down and crash. There are fewer airliners, so all of them crashing would probably be less destructive.
I’m not really interested in discussing plausbility of this scenario as much as discussing consequence of having no more cars and also piles of crashed cars everywhere. Planes might start some fires, but it won’t be apocalypse.
Not in the future. Today.
The pilot flies the computer. The computer flies the plane.
Do piloted airliners today have fully mechanical overrides?
(not that that did a awful lot of good on Aeroflot Flight 1492)
(what I’m saying is that there’s already data trickling in on how likely it is that a bug suddenly causes safety-critical systems all over the world to crash at once.)
Also even if all the VWs crash, why should the Fords be affected?
Perhaps they are all on andoid OS? That was idea at least, different manufacturer get OS for autopilot from the same vendor.
If by “manual” you allow for e.g. dumb hydraulics, then most modern airliners have enough control authority for a competent pilot to land safely with the computers turned off, and kill switches to turn the computers off if they’re trying to kill the pilots. Possibly all of them, but I’m not going to go through the fleet model-by-model.
We went through some of this in the 737 MAX discussion here a while ago. There’s redundant kill switches to completely de-computerize and de-electrify the pitch trim, and a handwheel connected to a chain drive to allow clumsy manual control without even needing hydraulics. The pre-MAX models also allowed for dumb electric servos with the computers killed; that got lost (and poorly documented) with the MAX.
IIRC, the 737 also has manual yaw and power control, which with pitch trim should be enough to manage a safe landing.
> pre-MAX models also allowed for dumb electric servos with the computers killed; that got lost (and poorly documented) with the MAX.
Is that why there are 2 separate cutoff switches? One control cutoff for computerised trim and one for power to the servo?
Correct. Pre-MAX, one switch isolated pitch trim from the autopilot and the other cut all electric power to the pitch servos. Since all the computer-ish pitch functions ran through the autopilot, you could still have the electric thumbswitch on the yoke give you easy manual pitch trim without any computers – or you could have full but clumsy manual trim, if it was e.g. a shorted yoke switch that was causing trim runaway.
The MAX designers apparently concluded that almost nobody ever used that intermediate case and it might confuse the dumb human pilots, so they just made both switches kill the pitch servos entirely. But left both switches in the same place, because mustn’t confuse dumb pilots, and didn’t clearly document the change, because mustn’t confuse dumb human pilots.
Very un-Boeing design philosophy. And possibly responsible for the Ethiopian Air crash, because my best guess is that the Ethiopian pilots were reasonably Not Dumb and were trying to work around a known MCATS failure using functionality that they didn’t realize no longer existed.
To be fair, the high-profile crashes immediately prior to the MAX development had involved some uncharacteristically stupid pilot tricks, and not just third-world pilots. There may have been excessive pressure for idiot-proofing – note that MCATS itself was only supposed to do things that a not-dumb pilot would already have done before MCATS kicked in.
I’ve seen it discussed repeatedly, but never in any great depth and usually with the assumption that deliberate malware is involved. I don’t think the all-cars-simultaneously bit is plausible without malice.
I realise this is an old OT, but on the offchance you see this, this is a plot point in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota sci-fi series, which is well worth a read.
So for those who don’t know, Netflix has been funding a reboot of the 1980s cartoon She-Ra. It’s hot on 4chan, due to the writers including CW bait, specifically homosexuality and gender non-conformity.
She-Ra was originally a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe spinoff designed to sell action figures to little girls, so some people are just thinking of a muscleman wearing pink and lavender who has an ally named Fisto and saying “Well, duh.” But I don’t want to talk about mass media promoting LGBT in general, or to what extent things have changed since the 1980s. It’s more that I’m baffled by the revelation (again, from the image boards) that much of the homosexual content consists of showing characters having two parents of the same sex, and said character is drawn to resemble both. What the heck is this telling us about the pro-LGBT worldview of 2019?
That men and women are clearly due to become different species soon, with gene therapy ensuring they can both reproduce despite having no more sexual dimorphism, only vestigial phenotypes.
Men Will Return to Mars, Women Will Return to Venus, Non-Binary Will Return to Mercury.
Eunuchs go to Saturn.
Bottoms to Ganymede.
Bears to Callisto.
Uterine replicators FTW.
Well, physical resemblance is a shorthand for familiar relations, that’s why Mabel Pines looks like Dipper Pines, except in skirt and with longer hair. Are they really trying to tell us homosexual reproduction is possible? I don’t know, and don’t care to find out.
I would wonder how children adopted by gays would see it, as only one of their parents will be biological, at best.
This is in some kind of heavily magical universe, no?
Is it any weirder than the origins of the Minotaur or of Sleipnir?
It is.
Is it any weirder? Probably not, but different kinds of weird origins say something meaningful about the worldview that produced the stories. It’s totally legitimate (and confusing) to ask “What do the myths of Loki’s pregnancy and Thor disguising himself as a bride tell us about gender in pagan Norse society?” In the case of the Minotaur, fertile bestiality is symbolic of chaos, not identical but not really distinct from Typhon with his hundred serpents for arms, serpents for toes, and many heads mating with the drakaina Echidna to produce many monsters, few of whom resemble each other.
If you saw similar fanart for a sci-fi universe where same-sex parents having children could be explained technologically, would it still bother you?
There’s lots of high tech in She-Ra.
I mean, “fanart” is a different context from the original writer(s). It wouldn’t bother me if fans assumed in vitro gametogenesis into a work of hard SF or space opera. From the original writer, I’d expect it being brought up to say something interesting about technology and humanity (because Conservation of Detail, y’know?), not just “Look, homosexual wish fulfillment! Can I have a Hugo?”
Fair enough. Thank you for responding.
Same-sex parents having children from both their genetic material (and no one else’s) is very near-future technology (in vitro gametogenesis). So this is if anything one of the least fantastic elements of the show.
Eh, it’s a cartoon. I put it in the same bin as Johnny and his mom in this webcomic (mouseover text: “the scar is genetic”). Obviously scars aren’t genetic, but it’s an amusing way to code “these characters are related and also have similar personalities”.
Uninformed and probably-wrong hypothesis that occurred to me yesterday: is it possible that homosexual behavior in humans exists (at least in part) because bisexuality allows children to be spaced out more easily? I remember reading in some Jared Diamond book (I think it was The World Until Yesterday) that hunter-gatherer groups generally don’t tolerate more than one child per woman every four years or so, because children younger than four don’t have the stamina to keep up with the group on foot and have to be carried everywhere. Modern nomadic groups tend to expose infants born too soon; however, the strain of up to nine months of pregnancy, combined with the risk of childbirth, is obviously a negative if you’re simply killing the child.
Most people are going to want to do it again a bit more frequently than every four years. It doesn’t matter if a man with the itch goes to the same woman as before or a different one, for the purposes of group fertility, because sooner or later someone’s going to get pregnant from that and it averages out the same. But if our randy tribalist expresses interest in another man in the meantime–and the mother does something similar, perhaps–there’s no risk of a useless pregnancy.
I assume this has been suggested by somebody before, and there’d be an obvious test: do modern h-g groups employ periodic homoeroticism in a similar pattern? Not that this would be definitive b/c modern h-gs are a weird sample, etc. I don’t recall Diamond mentioning this. Any anthropologists care to shoot holes in my idea?
I do think it’s plausible that homosexualty and possibly other infertile forms of sexuality might develop as a mechanism to maintain proper child-to-adult ratio.
Did anyone finally find gay gene though? Could it be that homosexuality is a fully acquired thing that some people just have like some people only have one arm or whatever?
The last I heard (but didn’t investigate) was that some researchers said homosexuality might be like 30% genetic or thereabouts.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/eaat7693
From this GWAS:
Any attempt to explain homosexuality under an evolutionary framework is doomed to failure. Our prima facie assumption should be that it wasn’t selected for unless there is some strong evidence otherwise.
I agree that it’s more intuitive to assume that it’s just a glitch, so to speak, but it’s an awfully common glitch, relatively speaking, and one wonders how it wasn’t selected against. Even cystic fibrosis, which is lethal and makes basically all male sufferers sterile, might have some heterozygotic link to resisting certain diseases. And in the face of sufficiently strong social pressure in an environment where you’re largely stuck in the same group for life, being gay might not be as much of a reproductive impediment as we’d expect. I’ve read that, in some parts of the Islamic world, it is or was expected that gay men would be gay, and everyone would ignore it, provided they went about the distasteful duty of fathering a child every now and then …
EDIT: I would agree that homosexuality would be strongly counterproductive in settled/agrarian societies, where it’s far more practical to take care of a fresh kid every year or so and you need a lot because so many die of disease. Even then, I think most human societies have some affinity for hypocrisy and looking the other way, so it need not be reproductively fatal. Especially if a lot of men and women are bi rather than exclusively gay/straight, bearing in mind that women’s consent was sort of optional in a lot of places, etc.
My understanding is that homosexuality preferences is rarer in hunter gatherers and non-existent in some tribes. This paper hypothesizes that it has to do with social stratification. I’m not sure about that but if homosexuality is more of a product of modern society, then it’s less mysterious.
To the extent some gene generates homosexuality in our culture but not in the cultures/environments relevant for most human evolution, you could imagine it persisting–especially if it had some other important positive effect. But to the extent you’re talking about a gene that made men unenthusiastic about sex with women over many generations, it’s pretty hard to imagine that *not* being selected against.
If it’s the result of something easily broken, the ~3% observed rate could be the stable equilibrium between “highly selected against” and “keeps getting broken”.
Eh, genetics is trying to program by shooting bullets at punch cards with a blindfold on and burning the cards that crash too badly. It is darn near a miracle our sexuality is not just “if its your species, fuck it” because that is the sort of “close enough!” hackery azathoth uses all over the place.
No, 3% is orders of magnitude too high. That’s the kind of number that requires explanation. Easily broken is usually 1/10,000. Achondroplasia is easily broken, a spontaneous mutation rate of 1/10k and fitness similar to the phenotype of homosexuality. BRCA has an equilibrium of 1/10k with a much higher fitness.
Also, if obligate homosexuality (not bisexuality) is easily achieved, why is it only in humans and sheep, but not in any other mammal?
BRCA seems to have an equilibrium rate of 1/500, not 1/10k. Achondroplasmia, yes, 1/10k, but that requires a mutation in one of two specific base pairs on a single gene. That’s not what I would call “easily broken”.
If homosexuality could result from point mutations in any of 600 independent base pairs, then that would seem to coarsely give a 3% prevalence in the general population. I can more easily see how that would be the case in male homosexuality than female; has any of the research on genetic contribution to homosexuality been sex-specific?
Where are you getting your achondroplasia claims? It is not caused by a specific mutation, certainly not a point mutation, but by a frame-shift mutation anywhere along the gene. It is the standard example of the gene with highest rate of breakage because it is so long, yet that rate is still less than 1/10k. It may also be that other genes are less sensitive to frame-shift mutations: if most of the protein is OK, maybe the tail doesn’t matter.
With BRCA, it is easy to imagine lots of places you could get disinformation, because there is so much floating around, eg, from Myriad. There are lots of minor mutations that supposedly have small effects. But the real problem is, again, frame-shift. These are family-specific 1/10k.
Considering that animal p0%n is a thing, I think human sexuality is just very malleable (at least for finding new things to apply erotic thoughts/feelings to). There are plenty of infertile ways to have hetero sex, so I can’t see a good reason to assume bisexuality is largley because of this. (I assmue you’re talking about bisexuality, not homosexuality)
I hadn’t factored in non-reproductive het sex, so yeah, that’s a good point.
To create a heterosexual person who would shun vaginal penetration specifically would require much more unreasonably fine tuning than to break mate selection mechanism entirely, IMO.
I think the implication is meant to be that they know where babies come from and agree to do oral or whatever for a while, not that they’re instinctively attuned to a specific behavior.
Well, it’s an interesting question on how safe sex factors into this sorts of things. Seems like humans selected less for wanting to have children and more for wanting to have sex and the two finally decoupled recently enough to let us see the results.
The evolutionary complexity for “Smart enough to consciously sacrifice reproduction for my more worthy brother” still seems a bit more complex than “Mess up my hormones a bit to make my penis confuse men with women”.
The “Why there are gays” just-so story goes like this. It’s advantageous for a child to have childless relatives, therefore it’s advantageous to have infertile siblings therefore it’s advantageous to have a gene that makes some of your children infertile and not other. From there we’d assume that slight shift of sexuality targeting (Possibly also into paedophilia, gerontophilia, zoophilia) once in a while is simpler and more likely to happen than voluntary celibacy and probably less harmful than actual physical infertility that would require messing your hormones up more.
The math on the just-so story absolutely doesn’t work out, though. My gay uncle has only 1/4 my genes, so for each child he doesn’t have, he needs to ensure the survival of four nephews/nieces in order for this strategy to pay off for his genes (and thus be selected for via inclusive fitness).
Assuming no prominent in-breeding, so does your grandfather.
And it’s not about your uncle anyway. He’s an extra parent your grandfather happened to sire to help you procreate.
A gene in my uncle that makes him gay has two choices:
a. Cause him to lose interest in women so he won’t have any kids, and then have him invest his resources in helping his nephews.
b. Cause him to keep an interest in women so he has kids.
Each child my uncle has shares half his genes; each nephew shares a quarter of his genes. So he has to be twice as effective at helping his nephews survive to reproductive age as he would be helping his children to survive to reproductive age. Further, this has to be over and above what he would normally have done as an attentive uncle who also had kids of his own.
It’s really hard to see how this could work out in terms of inclusive fitness. For this model to explain exclusive male homosexuality gay uncles would need to be more dedicated to their nephews than straight parents were to their kids. Also, we just do not see a pattern in which gay uncles are famous far and wide for their immense self-sacrifices on behalf of their nephews and nieces. Instead, gay uncles seem to work about like straight uncles in that regard–they’ll help out their nephews when they can, but it’s not the focus of their lives.
It’s extremely unlikely that homosexuality’s going to follow a nice clean Mendelian inheritance pattern, though, which means we need to think about mechanisms that work stochastically rather than deterministically. This might look like something that makes carriers more inclusively fit (more attractive, smarter, more physically fit, something like that) in N% of cases and makes them gay in K% — it works out to be a net benefit from a gene’s-eye view if N >> K, or if N > K and the change in fitness is very large. We could even take a decent whack at what those numbers must look like by working backwards from the observed prevalence rates.
Another option is something that makes, say, women fitter but has a chance of making male carriers gay. Obviously in this case we’d need a different explanation for female homosexuality, but that isn’t out of the question.
Hunter-gatherers today have to move around because farmers have taken all the good land. On good fertile land a band of hunter-gatherers can find everything they need within walking distance of a permanent village.
Humans aren’t eusocial insects though, so you can’t model human behavior using group interests. Groups can strick/carrot individuals into acting in ways which absent the stick/carrot would be injurious for them, but have to have a compelling reason to do so.(At least if your theory of group behavior is based on conjecture rather than observation. If groups were observed to be doing stupid stuff across many different cultures it would be another manner.)
I don’t think selection can work out this way. It might be beneficial for a group to have reproduction restricted, but an individual male at least is still somewhat better off genetically impregnating a woman – there’s a chance the child will survive, and his investments are minimal. And if it wasn’t the case, why this pressure didn’t just selected for lower sex drive until people are ok with having sex once in four years?
Individual male would have siblings. The gene that makes a fraction of people gay might prove beneficial as long as you have multiple children and your family stay together. A couple of infertile siblings could tip the adult-child ratio and thus ensure children would get more resources and give your bloodline a bit of an edge.
I’m not aware of any hunter gatherer group where this was true. It was somewhat true in the “female-farming” cultures of Africa.
One of the biases of evolutionary psychology, one they share with the blank-slate folks, is the assumption that people never ever abstain from sex. If they say they do, if there’s history of people saying they do, well, they’re just lying. The amount of sex is always constant, it’s just a matter of if it is homo or hetero, mono or poly, married or unmarried, ect.
Note that we know some mechanisms that limit birth rate–nursing women have a much harder time getting pregnant. This makes sense, because nursing+pregnant is putting a huge burden on the woman, and in a harsh environment, she probably can’t manage both.
I feel like this tends to get framed kind of backwards if you are talking about it as a genetic tendency, though I know some of it is just phrasing things in a more understandable way. Homosexual attraction would not be “employed” or develop *because* of such a situation. What *could* be the case is that people who could not control their childbearing lost most of their kids due to the drain on resources, etc., so that they wouldn’t have as much of an advantage as one might think in advancing their genes. And it could also be the case that someone who only was interested in sex for well-planned procreation would be able to invest much more in their limited number of children, and their household generally, and have a pretty good survival and overall health rate among offspring. Wives/female partners would probably be healthier and live longer without constant pregnancies, and therefore they’d be able to invest more in the kids also.
This seems like it would be sufficient to explain why enthusiastic heterosexual behavior wouldn’t always “win out” if the genetic theory is true–it’s not that it is some optimally generated strategy, because that isn’t how it works. It’s that it is an inclination that could be passed down to a sufficient number of offspring to stick around, without becoming dominant. It seems likely to me that there will almost always be a few different strategies going on within a society, all of which continue because they have different up and downsides than the others, so one does not become completely dominant.
Also, if the four years thing is true, breastfeeding as a method of birth control could get you 2 or 3 in many cases, more if you didn’t conceive super easily. It isn’t foolproof by any means, but when there was no formula, women had to do it regularly for some time for the child to survive. I’m sure it made a difference.
+1
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some biological basis for homosexuality. There really do seem to be some people who are exclusively gay even in societies where being gay makes you a pariah and is liable to get you killed, and that seems like some evidence that there are some people who are probably destined to be gay no matter what.
OTOH, the prevalance and acceptance of homosexuality is so varied across time and cultures that it seems like it *must* have a large social/learned component to it.
Imagine you’re a man in a situation where you can either pursue sex with a man or a woman. Maybe you’re sacking a city and you have your pick of captives, maybe you’re deciding whether to go try to seduce George or his wife. If there’s a gene[1] that pushes you toward going for George instead of his wife, then that’s going to reduce your expected number of offspring a bit. If there’s an alternative gene that pushes you toward going for George’s wife instead, that’s going to increase your expected number of offspring a bit. The George gene is going to leave less offspring, and so be selected against, relative to the George’s wife gene. That’s true even if the gene doesn’t make you exclusively gay.
[1] I know it’s not going to be one gene, but instead probably a bunch of genes that each have a small effect, but it’s easier to talk about it as “a gene.”
This is precise enough that we can say that it is wrong.
Brand-name Evolutionary Psychologists say that we evolved in the environment of hunting and gathering, that the period of agriculture was not long enough to move away from that default. This is probably just wrong, but it isn’t precise enough to say for certain. They often talk about sex differences, which do take a long time to evolve. And sexual attraction certainly fits under sex difference.
There are two notions of the speed of evolution. One is the speed of developing useful new mutations. Maybe humans are adapted to HG conditions and they could evolve to do better under farming with some new strategy, but how long will it take to find it? This is difficult to reason about from first principles. You really need to look at examples.
But the other speed of evolution is how fast evolution takes advantage of existing diversity in the gene pool. We know that homosexuality is at least 10% heritable. We don’t have to speculate about whether evolution could solve this problem because we observe that there are already variants that do partially reduce homosexuality. Why aren’t they more common? The phenotype appears to cut (male) fitness in half. Thus the Breeder’s Equations says that frequency of the phenotype should be reduced by 5% per generation. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a half life of 14 generations. The neolithic, 10k years, is 400 generations, 30 half-lives. Any gene which is simply a relic of HG life with such substantial fitness cost in farming era would be completely obliterated.
Homosexuality is out of equilibrium. This is a real mystery that needs a real explanation. Either the environment has changed or one of the input numbers is wrong. In particular, many people propose that the fitness of the gene does not match the fitness of the phenotype, either through inclusive fitness or sexual antagonism. These ideas seem to me terribly wrong, but not as straightforwardly, mathematically wrong as your proposal.
What do you think of Greg Cochran’s hypothesis (or maybe WAG) that some kind of infection could explain why it’s out-of-equilibrium?
That is the only plausible explanation I have heard. That falls under changing environment. But how much weight should I put on this hypothesis and how much on an unidentified hypothesis?
And how much should we care about this? It teaches us something about the sociology of science. But at what cost? It has overshadowed the rest of the paper, which I think could be quite valuable. You might think controversy is good advertising, but this seems like a pretty good counterexample.
(The paper does a different calculation, focusing more on the first speed of evolution, asserting that evolution could solve any of these diseases, if it wanted to. This makes me nervous when they could make the second, stronger argument.)
There is also the possibility that with a different gene combination the the genotype would be beneficial. I understand some mental illness like schizophrenia is also hereditary, however some other members in the family are mentally accomplished.
abystander:
This isn’t my field, but my understanding is that near relatives of schizophrenics don’t show benefits, and in fact often have personality disorders that mess up their lives in various ways that are less life-wrecking than schizophrenia. Anyone know more?
From what I’ve read, I think bipolar disorder and depression and related illnesses are somewhat correlated with verbal adeptness. One result is that the rate of suicide among poets tends to be very high.
Even if artists are crazy, artists don’t seem to be fit.
Schizophrenia, male homosexuality, and bipolar seem to be pretty discrete conditions (bimodal). Whereas ordinary depression seems to be a continuous phenomenon. Maybe it is the tail that has to exist because of lots of rare mutations or because the center can’t move too far in the other direction for other reasons. But I don’t think that makes much sense for discrete conditions.
Well there is the claim schizophrenia may be caused by overprunning of synapses.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/the-genetics-of-schizophrenia
And I’m not sure that schizophrenia, or homosexuality is discrete in the way being pregnant is discrete. There is bisexuality.
Also regarding my point that a gene sequence may be beneficial or detrimental, depending on other gene sequences, Scott just published “autism risk genes aren’t just sticking around. They are being positively selected, ie increasing with every generation, presumably because people with the genes are having more children than people without them. This means autism risk genes must be doing something good. Like everyone else, they find autism risk genes are positively correlated with years of schooling completed, college completion, and IQ. They propose that the reason evolution favors autism genes is that they generally increase intelligence.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the living conditions of the people worsened. However, my understanding is that technological developments still occurred, especially in agriculture, even during its nadir. If civilization collapsed today, should we expect something similar? A poorer world, with less luxuries and perhaps more war, but still a civilization that continues in a different form? The argument against that proposition would probably be that our world is much more interdependent than the Romans. If we had a serious breakdown in the system, we would just collapse in to something vaguely post-apocalyptic. But maybe we’re more resilient than we think.
Depends on what you mean by this. What happened to Rome was foreign conquest, it wasn’t really zombie-apocalypse-tier civilization collapse. Even in the case where 99% of the population were killed by some manner, we’d lose little of our technology long-term. Tech teaches you how to win.
The Roman Empire’s collapse followed its economic collapse. The complex, interdependent Roman trade world died in the 3rd century and the Empire continued to persist past that. In fact, it was Imperial law that implemented the first steps towards later feudalism. The political collapse of the Roman Empire saw lifespan and calorie increases for the peasantry because it had already transitioned to a system of noble elites expropriating quasi-serfs. The collapse meant the serfs had to send less to their noble masters and generally decreased production while consuming more because the market economy was long gone. This is also why you see an increase in certain innovations: peasants effectively had more disposable income and more freedom after the collapse. (I’m simplifying a rather complex story here, by the by, but in vastly general terms that’s true.)
So the questions are independent in my view: what happens if global trade networks collapse and what happens if the political authority of our countries collapse? They are separate and one does not necessarily lead to to the other.
I don’t think you’re right. Yes, the third century was bad. But the economy stabilized under Diocletian. The fourth century was not as strong as the Pax Romana period but you don’t see the breakdown of those Roman trade networks until the fifth century.
The economy stabilized, yes. But it stabilized at a lower level and continued to decline. Taxes were raised and the bureaucracy expanded as the state needed to assert more control in order to squeeze comparable revenues out of the tax base, which in turn led to a vicious cycle (including numerous debasements) that damaged the economy further. Cities became smaller and walled and began to shrunk further. Trade declined significantly, more significantly than caused by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. New social classes were created such as the coloni, who were basically proto-serfs, and resistance went from things like slave revolts or army mutinies into things like the Baugadae that were more similar to peasant rebellions.
Likewise, the end of Rome was not the complete end of long distance trade. And in fact the 5th century wasn’t the worst of it. We focus on that because it’s dramatic and because we tend to put Byzantines in the ‘civilized’ role but the Byzantine invasion of Italy was, in many ways, more destructive than the Ostrogoths or the Huns. That’s when many of the schools went away and the barbarian kings of Italy had to abandon the last vestiges of the old Roman tax system, for example.
You’re right with regards to Italy but the rest of Western Europe came out badly that century. Britain of course had the worst of it but the Vandals went ransacking through Spain and North Africa. Gaul was somewhere in between. And yes, long distance trade never disappeared but that’s the century where you see the trade in bulk goods start really declining. It was a drawn out process that really ended during the Justinian wars/plague. But the grain shipments, I believe were disrupted during this time.
The Baguadae (to take one example I mentioned) were actually not an Italian phenomenon. In modern terms, they existed in France, Portugal, and Spain. To take your example of Britain, you’re correct they returned to tribalism much more quickly. The question, then, is whether this represents the collapse of a Roman consensus or if Britain had remained relatively tribal and unintengrated. At any rate, it is complicated in that Roman literate classes were a distinct elite minority.
Trade in bulk began to decline in the 2nd/3rd century. The plague was more relevant to the East than the West. In fact, the end of Eastern encroachment into the west led to an increase in Western trade. Not having Justinian’s armies roaming about trying to coerce you to submit to Justinian helps.
Whose? Erusian below makes good points, and I have no idea that people’s living conditions did in fact get worse.
The western Roman empire’s end also coincides with the end of the Roman warm period, which worsened living conditions for obvious reasons.
Additionally, many of the technological developments for the thousand years past the empire’s fall were of the calibre of reinventing the wheel, where things the Romans knew of were rediscovered or simply learned by other peoples who never lost them. If you want an example of technolofy persisting through time, this seems like a really bad example.
that population declined rapidly, and didn’t recover for a few centuries, seems to be very strong evidence to the contrary.
Did the population decline everywhere in the former Empire, or only in Italy? Because the latter can be explained by emigration and the loss of colonial incomes, while the former requires mass starvation.
It declined in Britain, whose population didn’t reach Roman-era levels again until the later middle ages.
Population decline began with the economic collapse. Post-collapse populations actually stabilized at a basically consistent level. Of course, during the devastating wars population sometimes declined in the specific region conflict was occurring in. Indeed, the Byzantine invasion led to a greater decline in Italian population (and collapse of its institutions like the Roman Senate) than the Ostrogoth invasion because it was more destructive.
Whose population, where? It required the agricultural surplus of all Sicily and Egypt to keep Italy fed; remove those from the equation, and of course population goes down. This isn’t good for Italians, but presumably much better for the people of Sicily and Egypt.
Your details are a century or two out of date; after Constantine, Egyptian grain had been redirected to Constantinople, and most of the grain for Italy was coming from Africa.
But I agree with your larger point.
“I have no idea that people’s living conditions did in fact get worse”
Bryan Ward-Perkins’ little book The Fall of Rome, especially chapter 5 thereof, has convinced me that living conditions did worsen fairly generally throughout the territories of the former Western Empire in the 5th-6th centuries. Britain suffered by far the worst, but Italy, Gaul and Spain also saw a decline in general living standards, as measured by the available evidence. It’s possible to argue that the unavailable evidence would tell a different story, but we have to go by the evidence we have, and the pieces of evidence we have – buildings, bones, coins, pottery, literacy etc. – all point the same way. One can still point to luxury items – Ward-Perkins gives the example of fine jewellery – but all that demonstrates is that post-Roman society was still governed by elites who could pay for their own pleasures. It doesn’t demonstrate that ordinary people enjoyed the levels of relative comfort they had under the Empire.
At least three of these – buildings, coins, and literacy, are proxies for urbanisation. They aren’t relevant to the living standards of rural people, who outnumber urbanites by a heavy margin.
Pottery is a better proxy, as are bones, but archaeology remains necessarily skewed to urbanites in finding both; the sheer low density of other sites makes uncovering other materials a frustrating ordeal.
People actually know things. You can make up excuses for why these things are impossible to know, but you’re wrong. It’s not a blank spot on the map. We do find rural buildings and rural pottery. The point isn’t that they mysteriously disappear. The point is that they become crap. Rural coins may be a proxy for urbanization, but that suggests that cities help rural life.
I don’t know much about Roman history, but I think one difference is that in the world of Rome and indeed the pre-modern world more generally, people were often living close to the limits of what their techology and available land would sustain. That means that having a lot of people die off might actually make things better, by raising the standard of living and giving everyone a few generations of plenty before the population grows back up to where people can just barely make a living.
In the modern world, I don’t think this holds at all. More people can be more mouths to feed, but they’re also more hands to work and more minds to think. Having a mass die-off of people would open a lot more land up for cultivating, but it would also mean losing the people who knew how to maintain our current industrial civilization. We’d come back a lot faster than we got here the first time, because the basic knowledge would be there. But if it’s two generations until we start fabbing microchips again, there will be a lot of work going from knowing the theory of how to build and run a fab to actually getting one running. The same is true for lots of other technology–global telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing of anything very complicated, etc. The stuff you could keep using, you wouldn’t lose. But imagine yourself as an old man, being asked to help restart the industry you worked in in your early 30s–but you’ve spent the last 40 years farming and maintaining the basic technology around your farm. You’d be invaluable to the people restarting that industry, and yet, you’d have forgotten a lot. And if they had to restart it without anyone who’d worked in that industry, it would be even harder.
It should not be surprising that little technology was lost when the Romans were overrun by barbarians, because the Romans were barbarians who had already lost huge the technology that required civilization.
I would expect massive death in most of the world with a few isolated high productivity areas retaining semi-modern standards of living: Texas, SoCal, Venezuela, maybe parts of Brazil, the Gulf States.
I think the right way to think about technology is as a general principle optimized given local conditions. This is one of the big insights of development economics and is the reason India or China couldn’t just replicate a Detroit car factory in the 70’s; their conditions and inputs were just too different. For example, reinventing the wheel is a joke but you do need to reinvent the wheel a lot because economic benefit comes from wheels for specialized tasks. I can’t drive my car on wagon wheels anymore than a semi truck could drive on my car’s wheels. And if rubber could no longer be imported but we suddenly has a massive amount of surplus/cheap labor, the scientists at Michelin really would need to reinvent the wheel.
And I think this is the tech thing behind the Roman Collapse, at least from what I gleaned from the British History podcast, and it sounds like something similar happened during the Bronze Age Collapse. Technology gets optimized for the resources and labor costs of large trade networks. If those trade networks collapse, the inputs/circumstances change very radically and you end up having to reinvent a lot of technology because materials may become rare/expensive while others are now (relatively) cheap and labor costs change. If you don’t have the time/capacity to reinvent the technology for current conditions, it gets lost because no one can practically use it.
I think the big difference is back in the Roman collapse, at least in Britain, people could just go back to the farm. Like, if you were a full time potter in London and then Rome fell, you could just go work on a farm and you’d be poorer but you’d be alive. This just isn’t possible today. I’m 70% confident there’s more people than unoptimized arable land could support and there certainly isn’t the widespread knowledge of subsistence farming techniques to allow people to do so even if there was sufficient land. Unless you can maintain modern agriculture and food distribution, a lot of people are going to die.
That’s why I’d look to oil regions near farmland. Right now you need oil to do farming and food distribution. Everything else can eventually be reinvented, our society could be re-purposed to run off nuclear or solar or whatever if we had to, but they key thing is you have to keep people alive long enough to reinvent all your necessary technologies; tires without rubber imports, computers without foreign computer chips, etc. But a three-month interruption in food supply and distribution is death to >50% of your population and if they all die you’ll never be able to reinvent the necessary technology.
So yea, the supermarket has to remain open. People are resilient and smart, give them time and they’ll solve anything, but they have to stay alive. Let everything else sink into ruin, can you grow food and get it from the field to the supermarket? If yes, you’re just looking at a temporary (1 generation) fall in living standards. If not, welcome to the post-apocalypse.
Why those particular places? If it’s oil production, I think you are overrating how important that is for “semi-modern” standards of living. Bio-fuels probably don’t get you Late 20th Century American Car Culture, but they’re good enough for “semi-modern”. The Gulf States’ basic inability to produce any feature of modern industrial civilization but oil, seems far more crippling. Stuff wears out, and then you’ve still got the L running in Chicago but Dubai is back to camels.
Basically because I’m modeling any 2-3 week disruption of food supplies as destroying the society (I didn’t model water although I should have). Oil isn’t critical for society in the long run, but it is critical in the short run, ie in the immediate aftermath of the collapse. It doesn’t matter in the long-term whether bio-fuels would be good enough for semi-modern, it matters whether you can convert your existing farming and transportation infrastructure fast enough to avoid collapse. If not, people don’t have food, they can’t grow it themselves in sufficient qualities, and so a lot of people die.
Or, basically, imagine the collapse happens on January 1st, 2020 and suddenly you can’t trade with anyone outside your county/(local administrative district). The only thing that absolutely cannot fail, under any circumstances, is the production and distribution of food and drinking water. It doesn’t matter whether you can run everything with biofuels in 2025, it matters whether you can deliver food to supermarkets on January 31st, 2020. If you can, the population of the county stays constant and you have lots of people who can solve all your other problems in the long-term. If you can’t, >90% of your population will die and long-term problem solving isn’t really viable. (for example, the population of England before the Agricultural revolution varied from ~1-7 million, it’s currently 55 million).
Basically, can you not starve before you convert your tractor to biofuel/battery/whatever?
So who seems like the prime candidate to survive? Someone with agricultural land and oil (preferably easily extracted) near each other. They’re going to have the least shock to their food production and distribution networks because they have control over land to make food and oil to transport food. So Houston would be the obvious example but I just spitballed places that met have farms and oil in close proximity.
If the global economy collapses, the best chance to survive would be for people who already aren’t part of it – today’s subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers, etc.
If there were a 2-3 week disruption of food supplies, we’d just eat the food on the shelves at the supermarket, then the dog food, then the dogs, ect.
Why can’t I trade with anyone outside my county?
Lack of oil wells inside my county is not going to be the problem. And the presence of oil wells inside my county is not going to be the solution, because approximately no transportation system anywhere can run on raw crude oil. Lack of oil wells may be a mid-term constraint on trade, but it isn’t an absolute bar to trade and it isn’t a problem at all for the first 2-3 weeks.
Basically every city on Earth is going to have enough fuel on hand, to run the trucks, trains, or ships it will need to bring in food for its population for the first year or so. If it is intelligently used that is, and it doesn’t mater whether the intelligence comes from wise social planners or clever capitalists. Drain the tanks of a 747 at JFK, use it to run a diesel-electric train to Kansas, and you can bring home enough wheat to feed forty thousand people for a year, or three quarters of a million for three weeks.
By the time you need it, you should have alternatives in place, whether biofuels or wind power or trade deals with starving people who have oil wells. What may make one society thrive while the other starves, is the ability to properly reorganize their economy to meet the crisis, not the ability to produce crude oil. And that points towards people who have (and have experience running) a successful diversified economy, not people who basically know how to do one thing. Not even if that thing is producing crude oil.
I am very skeptical that any advanced economy could reorganize itself fast enough to cope. Though that depends on how we define the catastrophe.
Even assuming a modern diesel-electric can run reliably on Jet A (modern diesel cars can’t) you’re ignoring the myriad transactions that would need to occur here. Say you work for the electric train company and you need fuel to run your train: are you just going to call Delta and ask for fuel? Is some Delta executive who is in full on crisis mode and probably about to enter liquidation going to take a phone call from you, and organize a sale of fuel from an airplane (the sale of which would violate god knows how many laws and company procedures, and who actually owns the fuel anyway, we’ll need the legal department to look up the leasing contracts for the aircraft)? Including getting around airport security bureaucracy, which for all we know is now in TSA lockdown, through all the procedures to de-fuel a plane, and by the way are the Delta ramp workers showing up to work to get the fuel out when the airport is shut? And are the roads going to be open? And even if you manage to get this fuel, which is not approved for use in your modern diesel-electric and nobody in your office knows if it will damage the engine, you don’t know if the wheat is going to be there or if anybody is actually going to be able to use wheat in a city with rolling blackouts etc. It would be much easier to scrap it all and go hang out in your cabin upstate on the nice lake with lots of trout for a few months while this crisis blows over, so you grab the wife, pack the bags and hit the road for a bit, though all the highways out of town are filled with people with the same idea, and there’s an accident or two up ahead and a few people ran out of gas so the road is just 50 miles of gridlock….
If it’s slow enough for the state to react by declaring a state of emergency or martial law, you’ll be able to keep the trucks going.
Fire up the Blitz Spirit in society.
I wonder whether we should compare this kind of situation with nations’ darkest days during WWII? Britain in ’40, the USSR in ’42, Germany in ’45.
Railroad diesels can run with cetane numbers as low as 30, so probably won’t have a problem with Jet-A.
Beyond that, I’m not ignoring the “myriad of transactions”. I explicitly stated that the key attribute to societal survival is “the ability to properly reorganize their economy to meet the crisis”, i.e. to carry out that myriad of transactions even if I didn’t specifically enumerate them.
It is the original poster who glosses over the “myriad of transactions”, by simply asserting that the presence of oil wells ensures that there won’t be disruptions in the food supply. Diesel locomotives will run on Jet-A; they won’t run on crude oil. The society with a narrowly focused oil-extraction economy, faces more difficulties re-establishing working short-term transportation infrastructure, and has less expertise in conducting complex economic reorganizations on the fly, then your average cosmopolitan city.
You can probably get a long way by bodging everything to run off a gasifier, like the London Busses did during the War.
And converting a 4-stroke to a crappy steam engine is possible, by screwing around with the camshaft.
So long as you’ve got coal or wood, you should be ok.
John Schilling,
I misinterpreted the point you were making. My apologies.
I disagree though that a cosmopolitan city is more equipped for fast economic restructuring than a city based around a single heavy industry (oil) and farming. I don’t see how a cosomopolitan city is diversified in any way that helps. I agree with blipnickels that the supply chains are probably longer and more fragile in a cosmopolitan city, and the labor force less useful, than in an industrial one, though it would help if we had two cities to compare directly and a defined crisis.
Lambert,
I believe a lot of those car fixes that would have been possible and practical in the 40s aren’t practical any more. And the same fixes are no longer practical, for the same reasons, across thousands of critical points in the economy.
@ John Schilling
You can’t trade with anyone outside your county because that’s basically the definition of a Roman collapse. Using Britain under Rome as an example, there’s evidence there were still legionaries (or something similar) in Britain at least in the 5th/6th century. The real collapse is in Roman times you had large towns with specialized production and those couldn’t sustain themselves after the collapse because they couldn’t maintain their supply/trade chains. Something similar pretty clearly happened with the Bronze Age collapse. Therefore a Roman collapse basically must involve trade/supply collapses. Basically, to get that kind of crash in living standards, you must have people abandon specialized trades for subsistence agriculture because they can’t trade their products for food, which basically crashes the whole economy down to subsistence agriculture, as in Roman Britain.
Eg, a major part of Roman collapse is that Britain couldn’t trade with Rome or Spain or Constantinople. I’m not sure what a Roman collapse looks like if London and Hispana/Spain and Rome can all still trade with the Eastern Romans. (I should note, trade at any kind of scale. There’s pretty much always some kind of trade but 7th century English trade with Egypt is…not economically significant)
You and a couple other people seem really confident on this point and it confuses me. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has like a month’s worth of oil and that depends on the US government’s ability to distribute that oil effectively in a Roman type collapse situation. Why are you so confident government (local or national) will be able to effectively retool our entire agricultural supply chain to keep everyone fed in the aftermath of a supervirus/nuclear strike/civil war/insert preferred Roman collapse scenario?
I’m looking to arable land near oil because it seems the easiest, not the only possible, place for civilization to survive. Sure, in the aftermath of a Roman collapse scenario San Francisco decides to elect Elon Musk TechnoDictator and he immediately retools the entire economy to use solar batteries and then conquers the Central Valley with his cyborg legions, they’ll be fine. I’d rather be in Orange County, where there’s oil, oil refineries, and farmland in like a 50 mile radius. That’s pretty idiot proof, even if we literally have to transport crude oil to the refinery in a ox-drawn wagon. Even without any centralized control, a farmer in Orange County who needs to run his tractor can, of his own initiative, just go to the local refinery and buy/trade for oil. There’s no requirement for a complicated retooling of the economy or siphoning jet fuel at LAX; a guy can just tie some horses to a wagon, literally take crude oil to the refinery and refined fuel back to the farm and run the tractor. It seems really hard to screw that up.
@ Lambert and Alexander Turok
Yeah, I’m confused about this as well. I thought Yemen would be a good modern example of a country suddenly cut off from international markets and in chaos but actual famine deaths seem low there. But something like Holodomor, which seems like it shouldn’t be as bad, had a much higher death toll in a very short time. This confuses me. Was Holodomor about actual food seizure?
blipnickels,
If you can’t trade with other countries then you probably can’t trade over long distances at all, which means that when the mechanical seal on your mission Magnum pump fails and you can’t get a replacement, or replacement Derrick hyperpool shaker screens, or you need new drill bits or a new blow out preventer or a thousand other parts that wear out regularly your drilling rig is now just a big paperweight.
If you are depending on one city to self-sufficiently get oil out of the ground and refine it I don’t think that is possible.
Also, if you can’t trade by sea then there isn’t much point being close to the ocean unless you plan on doing a lot of fishing. You’d rather be inland in a place with plenty of natural irrigation for farming.
If you can trade at all, then producing oil will be handy because it will always be in demand somewhere, in a way that producing iphone apps will not.
@LesHapablap
Yes, I concur. There’s a ton of modifications and jury rigging you’ll need to do just to keep current infrastructure working if you can’t effectively trade with people >100 miles away and you’re dependent on their goods and services. This is inevitable and a major problem and lots of people won’t be able to manage it.
This reinforces my argument. In a Roman collapse scenario, lots of previous suppliers are no longer available and you need to massively retool your local economy. Why would you also want to restructure your entire food production and distribution system at the same time? Rome/DC has fallen, everything is chaos, who wants more impossible tasks?
And I’m confused on this trade argument. What is the Roman collapse scenario where, for example, Orange County can still trade with China? Or with New York, 3000+ miles away? Or even Houston, 1500+ miles away. I mean, according to Google Maps Rome is about ~1400 miles from Constantinople/Istanbul and they had a shared coastline on a very calm sea.
It’s probably good to look at societies that have faced really horrible hardship to see whether they collapsed with a two-week lapse in food supplies. I don’t think this actually happens.
For example, Germany, Japan, and lots of fought-over territories in WW2 suffered horrible disruptions in food and transport and power and such, but I don’t think any of them collapsed into anarchy or fell apart and ceased to exist.
Isn’t this kind of scenario exactly the reason why governors can declare martial law and call out the National Guard? Who will then presumably enforce orders like “we’re taking the jet fuel from that 747” or “we’re imposing rationing on the gas in your station–from now on, nobody without a chit from the governor’s office gets gas unless it’s an ambulance, fire truck, or police car” or whatever else.
So, “Roman collapse” means that impenetrable force fields clamp down across what used to be internal and external political borders?
Or maybe not exactly that, but something close enough to that as makes no difference. “Roman collapse” as you define it, is a thing did not happen following the collapse of the historic Roman empire, cannot plausibly happen in the real world, and is of no interest. Have fun discussing it with whoever is interested.
I might be interested in a discussion of what would happen if nonlocal trade became substantially more difficult, but we should probably save that for a different OT to avoid confusion.
Wasn’t trade collapse driven by the fact that merchants were at a much greater risk of being attaked by bandits?
(of course then, the relative merits of mercantile and bandity careers change such that this is a positive feedback loop)
Villages relocate from places near the roads to defensible hilltops.
I suppose I’m saying that one of the big factors is how able are you to avoid/defend against banditry, warlordism, brushfires etc.
@ John
At least we end on a clear factual disagreement 🙂
I mean, I provided my sources for this happening historically in Roman Britain and the Bronze Age. I’m not sure why you’re so skeptical of this, “impenetrable force fields clamping down on former external and internal borders” is a pretty good description of North Korean 20th century history. That’s a thing that happened following the collapse of a historic empire, has plausibly happened in the real world, and is of continuing interest to a lot of people.
Is that clear? If you look at population change as a proxy for living conditions, and if you believe the graph in the Penguin Atlas of World Population (possibly out of date), European population is falling from about 300 A.D., starts back up about 600 A.D., which suggests that conditions were better in the post-Roman period.
What is the evidence the other way around?
I think our view of past civilizations is biased by the fact that a civilization which pulls lots of resources out of the periphery to the center is likely to build impressive things that are still around–at the cost of the population paying for them.
Is global warming, as a public issue people debate the science of, old enough by now for a bunch of climate scientists to have made a prediction about some decades-long trend? Obviously no climate scientist can pinpoint exactly how many hurricanes there will be or what the global temperature will be in in X years as a result of global warming, but could they say, with some level of confidence, what the averages of things like this will be over some reasonable period of time? And if so, have any done this?
It seems like doing this would be like a credibility trump card or something close.
James Annan has bet money on warming.
I’ve done a little digging for predictions of how the Global Climate would affect the region of the world I live in. In the northern part of the American Midwest, weather is dramatically shaped by the huge bodies of fresh water known as the Great Lakes.
The water levels of the Great Lakes have been part of the regional worry about the impact of Global Warming for quite some time.
In 2012, National Geographic published a piece titled Warming Lakes: Climate Change and Variability Drive Low Water Levels on the Great Lakes. That article has an eye-catching picture of large stretches of sand with a few pools of water. These photos are accompanied by a potentially-misleading caption which may imply that the entire Great Lakes basin is that dry…rather than the quarter-mile of beach that used to be lakebed which is seen in the photo.
This article agrees with an earlier article posted in the Science Daily, sourced from a scientific paper published by the American Chemical Society, in Environmental Science and Technology. (Does the ACS count as climatology? I can’t tell…) That article has the summary:
Another article I found was posted in 2009 on the Earth Institute blog of Columbia University, which has this nice quote:
The numbers quoted look immense. Even though one model projected a small, non-quantified increase in lake levels, it is argued that the truth is likely somewhere in between, with water levels falling….
This year, the water levels of the Great Lakes have been abnormally high. They are approaching century-level records. We are definitely seeing water levels not seen since the 1970s.
The more careful scientists noted what is seen in the quote above, that local precipitation levels (and evaporation, which is affected by the amount of ice cover on the Lakes during winter) may have unexpected results on Great Lakes water levels. But the typical warnings issued during the past two decades continued dire warnings of declining water levels on the Great Lakes as the global climate warmed up.
This year, articles in places like The Scientific American are saying that global climate change can cause wide swings in the water levels of the Great Lakes. That article provides a quote like this one, giving a believable explanation of why the water levels changed from historic lows to historic highs.
This kind of prediction is kind of like the predictions of hurricanes-and-global-warming that were widely quoted in the news after a few major hurricanes of the past decade. It’s a prediction of regional-results, with a few caveats about unknowns in the model. Over the space of about a decade, the unknown factors had a larger impact than the factors used in the prediction.
I don’t know if this answers your question, but I do find it informative. The general thrust appears to be that scientific publications (and the mainstream press that reports on such things) do tend to predict more of the current trend as a result of global climate change….until the trend reverses. Then those sources report more instability in the effects of climate change.
There are a couple of mild examples. The first IPCC report badly overpredicted subsequent warming, an error at least partly corrected in the second. The fourth report claimed that droughts were increasing due to global warming, the fifth report retracted that claim.
There was an early article in Salon that quoted Hansen as making some predictions about what New York City would look like twenty years later, including the West Side Highway being flooded. The description was badly wrong. But Hansen and the interviewer the story was based on have claimed that the story got details wrong, that the prediction was for doubling CO2 not for twenty years but for forty, and that that was in the version the interviewer gave in a book he wrote prior to the Salon article.
You can find a pro-Hansen account of the controversy on sks.com. That site is run by John Cook who I believe is demonstrably dishonest, so I give no weight to its conclusion, but it does provide the pro-Hansen version of what happened.
It offers no evidence that, when that article was published, Hansen made any effort to correct its account of what he said—it looks as though corrections occurred after critics started to point out the discrepancy between the Salon article account of what Hansen predicted in 1988 and the actual situation in 2008, twenty years later.
It notes that in 2028 the forty years will be up, doesn’t note that the level of SLR projected by the IPCC doesn’t come close to flooding the West Side Highway by that date, or the rest of the prediction.
The sks.com piece links to Anthony Watts piece pointing out the false prediction but does not mention that Watts discusses the correction of the prediction to forty years and offers evidence that SLR is not coming close to flooding the West Side Highway in forty years.
skepticalscience.com, run by John Cook, and WUWT.com, run by Anthony Watts, are probably the two best known web sites on opposite sides of the climate controversy. People here who would like to judge the state of the controversy may want to follow both of the links I have given and form their own opinion as to which is more honest, less biased.
My own reading of what happened is that Hansen, being interviewed, offered a highly colored account of how terrible things would be in forty years with a doubling of CO2 without bothering to actually check the relevant facts, such as how far the West Side Highway was above sea level; it was a work of imaginative fiction, not science. It wasn’t, after all, in an article he published, just in conversation with an interviewer who, like Hansen, thought climate change was a terrible threat and wanted to make that threat vivid.
It’s evidence that one should not take seriously most of what is written in the popular press along those lines, but not that Hansen’s scientific work is wrong — for that one would want to look at predictions made more carefully.
For grave crimes against the Emergent Global Consensus, you have been sentenced to Temporal Transportation. You are being sent to the United States of America in the year 1955. You’ll be there for the rest of your life. Don’t worry, you will receive careful preparation for your new life, and your new station in life will roughly match your old one, modulo edits for time and place. The EGC isn’t cruel, you see; they just want you gone.
So, what part of your new life will suck the hardest?
Assuming I don’t catch polio, I think what I’d miss most is air conditioning.
Thing I’d miss: the internet. I can’t imagine doing my job before it.
Thing I’d benefit from: tons of new tenure-track positions opening up.
Assuming that I get enough warning, the move might actually end up being a net positive for me.
Are you complaining about problems getting access to academic papers, or communicating with colleagues?
Yes.
But more seriously, access to material. Between Google Scholar, Scifinder, and CTRL-F I can find out in five minutes what would have taken five weeks. I would also miss commercial vendors for the relevant instruments, as well as the fast fourier transform.
I can’t imagine how to do academic research without the Internet, either, but I can imagine where to do it: the basement of the library. At my university, the dank shelving in the far corner was where all our academic journals were relegated; I used to visit to read old issues that were never digitized. Have fun!
Food, jesus christ the food.
Have you seen what people cooked/ate in america during the 50s and 60s? They used to make meat gelatin dishes. Send me to 1950s america and I’m literally either 30 years or a continent away from being able to get good beer, curry or pizza.
I’ve had a couple of those meat gelatin dishes. They’re odd, but not bad. The difficulty getting fresh fruit and vegetables would be worse: there’s a reason so many dishes from the Fifties use two cans of this and a can of that.
Oh my word, I hadn’t even thought about the ubiquity of canned veggies/fruit back then. Ugh.
I’m reminded of the discussion a few weeks ago about how the French conform their cooking more to what is in season. Maybe we the temporally displaced should make this an opportunity to use local ingredients rather than relying on canned food or international imports.
Digging deep into one of the immigrant cuisines might also work. In 1955 there are plenty of Italian neighborhoods on the east coast, with some cooks who learned their trade in the old country. Nothing wrong with Italian food and wine.
Or go with the times and enjoy Ham and Bananas Hollandaise.
Find a city with a Chinatown, a still vibrant Italian immigrant neighborhood, and a reasonable-sized immigrant neighborhood of Mexicans, and you’ll at least have some interesting and tasty food.
@albatross11, you just named three of my four favorite ethnic cuisines! Unfortunately, the fourth – Thai – wasn’t really present in the United States till much later, but I’ll still be happy enough food-wise.
Except that I’ll lose Internet recipes. Well, I guess I need to talk to my neighbors and ethnic food suppliers, and experiment more.
Aside from the obvious loss of healthcare, I agree that food would be the thing I would be the most afraid to lose. Though, I do wonder how bad it actually was in the 1950s. It’s natural that we would hear about the most weird trends today, so I doubt the Jello meat dishes are actually representative of what people were eating on an average day. I know that when my mom would make her childhood favorites (she grew up in the 40s and 50s) they were old school Eastern European foods that I can still get at Eastern European restaurants. There were a lot of casseroles, but even though it’s fallen out of fashion something like tuna noodle casserole with potato chips crushed on top is actually pretty tasty.
You would definitely have a lack of fresh vegetables off season, and that would be annoying, but I wonder if some things wouldn’t actually be better. I know that pigs are raised to be leaner today, so there’s a good chance that a porkchop in 1950 would be better tasting than one today.
@JayT >
My guess is it was pretty much like what I remember my grandmother (who was born in the 1920’s) cooked in the ’70’s: Meatloaf, peas, mashed potatoes, gravy, et cetera.
Sorta like limiting yourself to a quarter of the menu at a Denny’s.
Less diverse than what my wife makes, and can be gotten from restaurants now but with extra salt and pepper not that bad actualy, I prefer it to some foreign cuisines (like what my mother-in-law cooks, “authentic” will never sound like a plus to me again!).
Yeah, that’s basically what I’m thinking as well. The food wouldn’t be bad, but it would probably get boring. Less so if you live in a place like the Bay Area, where there were already a lot of different ethnic cultures.
What sort of “authentic” dish did you have? When I’ve occasionally eaten authentic Chinese food, there’re some misses but also some real gems.
You couldn’t learn to cook? Go to a Chinese restaurant, already available, at least in suitable cities, by the fifties? I remember going to one near University of Chicago when I was still in high school.
There wasn’t nearly as good a variety of ethnic food available then, but there were lots of things other than meat gelatin, which off hand I can’t remember ever being served.
@johan_larson says:
My marriage would still be illegal for three more years.
Oh wow; I had no idea.
That raises the question, though… the Emergent Global Consensus says you get sent back. Does your family get sent back with you?
If not, that’d be the worst part.
There’s air conditioning in the ’50’s. Just less common in the home, but it’s in lots of other places if you have a real heat wave.
It seems clear to me that the answer is “medical care” and that nothing else comes even close. I think that would be true of almost anyone, although minorities subject to Jim Crow-style discrimination would have an argument.
What would the life expectancy difference due to medicine be? 1-3 years, when you’re in your 70s?
At 65 your life expectancy would be 5.5 years higher than in 1950.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/015.pdf
But I think the bigger concern would be if you get some now-treatable affliction in your 30s. It might be low probability, but if you got hit with something like that, you’ll really regret going back in time.
Are we accounting for tobacco use?
Tobacco use might be the thing that moves the needle in the coarse aggregate statistics, but things like leukemia going from death sentence to treatable, or phenomenal advances in surgery of any kind, medical devices, prostheses, and the quality of therapies of a whole range of diseases, from acne to cancer, are significant enough on their own.
The issue isn’t so much life expectancy. It’s a great metric in that it’s pretty easy to measure. But there’s more to life than being alive. Medications which are now available for almost nothing to manage blood pressure, heart attack risk, whatever, mean that instead of having to deal with a long life of being bedridden it’s now more common for people to be able to have functional/useful lives in their 60s, 70s, 80s or whatever.
Also worth noting–in 1955, every known STD is curable.
Herpes was definitely a thing in 1955. And Hep. C is curable today but not back then.
You’re correct–I missed those. (Was Hep C identified in 1955?)
I hope that whoever gets Temporally Transported won’t be bringing any uncurable STD back with them!
Lack of computers that you could get access to outside a big research lab would be a huge loss–I’d be in my 70s before home computers became a thing at all.
Worst part: lacking computers
Best part: Ability to beat ATT to the invention of transistors
I’ll have to make sure that I don’t alter the lives of my own parents too much. (Both had been born before 1955, but neither had begun attending school yet…)
At my current age, I might live long enough to see myself born. Though if I’m avoiding interacting with my own parents, that might be kind of hard to achieve.
Of the things I’ll miss? Internet-enabled music/TV/movie watching. And reading things online.
The things I’d like? The slower pace of social life, probably.
If I arrive in 1955, and am placed somewhere in an engineering position supporting the Space Race, I might get a chance to see many historic firsts. Up to and including the famous event of 1969, when Neal Armstrong steps onto the surface of the Moon.
(That happens to be the same year that the Woodstock Festival happened…If I were transported back to 1969 at my current age, I’d be noticeably older than the media Woodstock attendee. If I’m transported back to 1955, I’d likely survive until 1969…and I would be 2x to 3x the age of the median Woodstock attendee.)
That is not a concern, because it is either impossible or inevitable -conception is one of the most chaotic events imaginable, your mere existence will reroll all of the dice on who gets born even if someone shoots you within seconds of exiting the timeportal just due to the gravitational mass of your corpse. Since there is an authority routinely deporting people, you are clearly living in a universe with multiple timelines or forced global consistency. It is easy to figure out which. Before transporting, pick a large clean unmarked boulder, after transporting, go to it with a hammer and chisel, write a killroy message. If ridiculusly contrieved events do not materialize to stop you, multiple timelines.
Assumption 1: there are no weird grandfather paradoxes or anything like that because it’s a separate timeline from the moment I enter the portal or whatever.
Assumption 2: I’d have to leave my wife and kids behind in this timeline. This would be agonizing, but I know I would eventually want to remarry and maybe even have more kids. It’s what my wife would want me to do as well in this kind of scenario.
Assumption 3: Traveling back in time does not change your basic tastes. I like all colors of women but women outside my race, and black women in particular, are disproportionately represented among those I find attractive, those I’ve dated, and surprise surprise my wife is black. 1955 is in some ways a fortuitous selection because thanks to Loving v. Virginia which was decided that year, interracial marriage was henceforth legal in all states. The downside is, this doesn’t mean it was widely accepted. In the years I’ve been alive I’ve had to deal with very little outside disapproval of my dating and marriage choices, and in many situations they’ve yielded unexpected benefits, but if I had to live the rest of my life in 1955 my experience would surely be much more negative.
So, I don’t know if this would suck “the most” but it would definitely suck: the dramatically increased negative externalities of dating and marrying the types of women I’m most attracted to. there’d be in 1955: a confident man, in good shape, able to earn lots of money, at the peak of my game in many ways, and there’d be all those cute 1950s black girls, and it wouldn’t not worth it even trying to flirt with any of them. Living in the middle of a Romeo & Juliet story isn’t as much fun as seeing the play.
Would it have been more acceptable overseas? There’s no reason you have to stay in 1950s USA–maybe 1950s France would be more to your liking? (Better food, too.)
Also, given your uptime knowledge, you ought to be able to do pretty well for yourself–just remembering successful company names will be enough to give you a jump on the rest of the world. When you’re rolling in the dough, a lot of people who disapprove of your black wife and kids may find that they’d rather not make an enemy of the richest guy in town who also seems to keep inventing amazing new technology and starting new companies and such….
Assuming my family goes with me, all three of my boys will be draft age in for Vietnam.
Tell them to join the Navy.
Having to wear suits everywhere.
That would actually be one of the plus sides for me. I’m annoyed it’s so socially unacceptable for me to wear a suit.
What do you do for a living that makes wearing a suit socially impossible?
Most jobs, nowadays.
Maybe not socially impossible, but it’ll get you some funny looks.
Definitely written in red on the weirdness points budget, nowadays.
I’m a software engineer in San Francisco. If I show up in a suit, then I’d have to answer questions about where I was interviewing all day, every day. In my social circle, I would be “the weird guy that always wears suits”. I could wear suits if it was really important to me, but in reality, it’s not a strong enough preference to make it worth all the commentary.
(My experience in west-coast tech)
It’s not unacceptable, but it’s definitely marked. Most people aren’t like, “oh fuck that asshole, he’s wearing a suit.” If you get any comments at all, they’re probably going to be along the lines of “lookin’ good today!”
But you’re still going to be establishing yourself as “that guy who wears a suit for some reason.”
Also if it’s the kind of workplace where people start wearing suits a couple of rungs up the totem pole from where you are, your cow-orkers might think you’re dressing for the job you want.
You don’t want honourable men to think you’re ambitious.
Move to NYC, go into finance.
I’ve thought about that, but I don’t think I would be good at it. At least, I don’t think I would be good at what I imagine finance to be. I haven’t done enough research to really know for certain.
All that extra work I’m going to have to do making sure the EGC doesn’t happen. Living well isn’t the best revenge: eliminating one’s enemies before they are even born is the best revenge.
TFW you realize the Terminator wasn’t sent back by Skynet, but rather by the rebellion that successfully defeated Skynet, because they wanted to get rid of it….
Yeah, but none of this flashy BS. I’m going to find Sarah Connor. I’m not going to kill all the Sarah Connors, I’m going to just keep track of them all and see which one (or ones) has a son named “John”. Then one day during his childhood I’ll just quietly kill him (or them). Kyle Reese will be in an insane asylum; without the other killings, Sarah’s never going to believe anyone they send back to stop me.
But I think to stop the EGC, the best strategy might be to somehow get Senator Nixon to believe I have foreknowledge of the future. Get him to tell CREEP in no uncertain terms to stay the hell away from the DNC… and if they buck him on that, to throw them under the bus. No Watergate, and the world will be a very different place, I think.
Highly doubt my new station will actually roughly match my old one, unless they make all of the people around me ignore three major demographics I belong to that aren’t so fondly looked upon. They could put me in a community that may overlook/support one or two, but not all three, and discrimination on any one would easily boot me out of the jobs and hobbies I want to do, or at the least be an incessant hostile environment, as labor law defines the term.
Well, *cough*, one way or another things will fit. The EGC is very advanced from where things stand in 2019, and either they will fit the circumstances to you, or you to the circumstances.
As a research scientist, the knowledge I take back with me would considerably change the time stream. Am I somehow prevented from divulging that?
Nope, but the time-line branches at the point at which you are inserted into the past, and you’ll be in the new branch. You can affect the future in the timeline you land in, but not what happened in the timeline you came from.
In computer science and related fields, you can basically invent your field. You’ll be hanging around with Von Neumann, who will think it’s kind-of odd that you have so many amazing insights and ideas even though you don’t seem all that brilliant in conversation. Just, somehow, you have an intuition for the right approach to computer design or programming in ways that usually turn out to be the best way anyone can work out.
I study plasma physics, so between the theory knowledge and knowledge of ceramic superconductors, fusion power leaps several decades ahead, and is likely widely available by the present day.
Since year-round availability of more-or-less fresh fruits and vegetables has already been mentioned, as has air conditioning — a major loss down here in the American South — allow me to add modern dental methods and materials to the list. I remember going to the dentist back in the 60s and it was not a pleasant thing. Dental visits are soooo much better nowadays than they were then.
I’m spoiled for choice.
1) The loss of the modern PC and the internet will strip away one of my major sources of personal entertainment as well as the tool that has facilitated connecting with like-minded people. I suppose I could start writing in to Amazing Stories and its like, see if I could connect with proto-Fandom that way, but it would definitely be a struggle. As for the other sources of entertainment, SF/F books? Well, I could look forward to a lifetime of rereading all the stuff I’ve read before, hope that maybe I come across good stuff that I missed when I was reading 50s-80s SF as a kid and teenager…
2) I have a medical issue (lymphedema in both lower legs) that is fairly easy to manage completely with current technology (modern compression garments and a computerized pump attached to garments that I can put on at home to apply lymphatic drainage massage properly on my own schedule). AFAIK, circa 1950s I would need short stretch bandaging for the rest of my life and regular intensive sessions with a physical therapist to perform the massage on my legs, which will probably be ruinously expensive given my job (see 3), if I can even find someone trained in a technique which is relatively new and may not have even spread to the US from its development in Europe.
3) If we’re fitting station in life, then I’d be a WW2 veteran (OIF Vet IRL and the timeline actually works out, I would have been 24 in 1941 if I’m inserted into 1955 at my current age) working in a fairly large Casino. Which in 1950s means either Vegas (legal but likely with mob ties/ownership until the 60s) or Galveston (straight-up illegal and run by gangsters). Vegas in the 50s seems like a town with a lot of possible opportunities, but the risks and downsides for someone whose preference is to be a law-abiding citizen but who has limited job history to fall back on is left as an exercise for the student…
If given sufficient warning, I’d probably try to throw together the funds to make some smart investments (DuPont? IBM? Probably some early mutual funds? What would’ve produced excellent returns you could cash out before the 70s and 80s financial crises?) to soften the worst of the shocks.
retrospective analytics revealed that this time period undervalued firms with female management… a lot. This still happens, but not to quite the outsized degree it did historically, so you can beat the market like a drum by just being enormously misandrist in your investment. Buy, hold female lead companies, sell off the stock when they hire male bosses.
This would be more obvious if traveling back to say the 30s or earlier, but what I always wonder looking at old photos, clothing, and furniture is “isn’t everyone just terribly hot and uncomfortable all the time??”
Set aside for a moment the lack of AC. People appear to be wearing what we would consider “church” clothes all the time. Of course, at home you could just wear your wife beater or long underwear or nightgown or something I guess, but then the furniture from that time period and earlier all looks super hard and uncomfortable!
Of course, we are probably just spoiled by super plushy couches, elastic waistbands, and a lowered expectation of formality in public and there’s definitely a little part of me that thinks “sigh, people used to look so nice in public,” but I wonder if I were time-warped back to then whether I’d ever get used to it or just be like “uggh, so hot and uncomfortable! Give me back my 2019 sweatpants that look like real pants!”
Entertainment will probably be the only major problem. Moving into America at arguably the peak of its hegemony sounds like a sweet deal for me. And I’ll be the only one not to worry about nuclear war when time comes.
I worry about professional skills since I don’t think I know anything useful in 1950. And also how do I avoid looking like draft dodger, since I’m old enough so I should’ve served in WWII, although I hope TT will provide a cover story for that.
Am I confined to the entire year 1955, or just part of it?
Assuming they don’t go to the extreme of confining me to a single second (from an outside view I would rapidly appear, starve, and die before anyone can act).
Living with 40 age trending copies of myself would either be a blessing or a curse. The onward march to death would become somewhat more visceral, as each year I get closer to being the oldest.
And that gap in the middle, 5 of me just missing. What was I doing for those 5 years, and why does nobody older speak of it?
I suppose we’d open a giant pottery studio, since computers are inaccessible. Hopefully we can find suppliers quickly who don’t mind a single year of massive business then complete disappearance.
You appear in the year 1955 and live and age normally in that time-stream from then on. If you’re physically 25 when you are transported, you will be physically 45 in 1975.
After I wrote my second book, using a word processor, I concluded that no books had been written prior to the invention of the word processor. It’s just too much work. So what will I do from 1955 until sometime in the late seventies when I can buy an Apple 2 or TRS80 with a word processing program?
With the knowledge disparity (I know an awful lot about post-1955 technology, economics, physics, marketing theories, etc….) I’d be a Billionaire within a decade. With knowledge of history over time, including who does what and who will be in power when, control of the entire world politically isn’t completely out of the question within a couple of decades….
Not having access to good birth control.
I haven’t been following the comments on untestable theories, but does anyone get to the question of how much effort should go into untestable theories?
It’s just a thought, but how feasible is turning biomass into charcoal as a counterfactual carbon sink (all things eventually rot, emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while charcoal is chemically stable)?
People have thought a lot about it. Look up ”biochar” if you want to find out more, that’s the term most studies use. I think it’s at the stage of ”we should do this more” but I’m not sure if it’s been scaled up yet- or how scalable it is.
There is also the question of what to do with the charcoal. One theory is that it could be used to enhance the quality of soil, similar to the terra preta found in the Amazon.
Yeah, replace slash-and-burn with slash-and-char.
The adsorbtive effect of charcoal really helps hold nutrients in the soil.
I’ve started a thread about Terminator: Dark Fate in OT 140, to avoid inadvertent spoilers for people who haven’t seen the film yet.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/03/open-thread-140/#comment-818656
Cool. Been wanting to talk about that but didn’t want to spoil it for people.
This is my goodbye to the SSC community.
I am currently spending an unhealthy amount of time lurking here (I have rarely commented). I am now deciding to cut this habit short, and I state it here as part of this process.
Some background/feedback:
1. What brought me here first was a link to Radicalizing the Romanceless at a time when I wandered around incel or incel-ish online groups. This was a helpful piece that stood out to the toxicity that often surrounds the subject.
2. All in all, Scott’s best work on this blog is probably Meditations on Moloch. While most of Scott’s writing is obviously smart, Moloch strikes me as smart and beautiful. Ginsberg’s poetry infuses it.
3. One big reason while I am walking away from your community is the cultural distance. Much of Scott’s content is centered on the USA and most of the commenters are American, I am not, and I have or seek no connection to that country. I don’t want to create too much of a dissonance between the culture/language of my recreational intellectual food and the culture/language of the people I actually interact with. Non-american regular posters here, how do you handle that?
3bis. In that vein, I am tempted to spew all the bad things I think of each of the american tribes here, but I will refrain.
4. A more minor point: Scott is smarter than he is knowledgeable on the (many!) subjects he writes about. It is impressive that he comes up with so many valid points on such a large diversity of subjects. Still, for the purpose of intellectual consumption I prefer to learn from actual experts.
6. A tangential point: as a statistician, I am genuinely amused by your fetishizing of bayesian statistics. I understand that it is a good metaphor for rationality though.
I will check for possible responses to my rant, and then, bye!
Fare thee well.
I recall once seeing a comment in this space from a man in a relationship (marriage?) with a blue-tribe woman, who had noticed that his spending a lot of time in this comments section seemed to be affecting his outlook and damaging his relationship. At a minimum it was causing him to drift rightward politically, although it wasn’t so simple as that, but he felt it was impairing his success in his relationship, and wanted suggestions for how to prevent that. I was surprised and impressed by a reply from one of the more respected voices in this comment space that volunteered that the best and probably only solution was a cold turkey exit. After thinking about it, I agree with that view.
In addition to being U.S.-centric, this blog has a high fraction of people, including the host, who are trying very hard to be something new and different. This is from the ssc post “yes we have noticed the skulls”…
I do think there are knowing-about-it-won’t-save-you type risks to spending a lot of time among the comments at SSC. If you are noticing a problem, I don’t think the solution is to split the difference or try to counterbalance the problem with something. It’s to leave, maybe for good, at least until the problem goes away and has stayed gone for a while.
Thank you.
I want to hear your diatribe against american tribes!
If I suggest Red Tribe turn Blue or vice versa, is that a diatribe?
The time I spend on SSC is also more than appropriate, although I will probably keep this habit. I just wish there would be some switch to only show me e.g. the best 10% of comments. Seriously, it’s crazy how a blog written by one person can have a comment section so huge it pretty much takes the entire day to read it. Also, the debate here is better than most of the internet… but help, I want some of my time back! 😀
Would reading about local culture wars be better for my mental health that reading about American ones? I strongly doubt it. Sometimes I write on Facebook about local things, and the usual result is depression over the stupidity of reactions I get, especially from otherwise intelligent people. (I suppose the other side is similarly frustrated by my writings.) The geographical distance helps me keep some mental distance.
On the other hand, what happens in USA doesn’t feel completely irrelevant to my life, because I expect that people here will copy a lot, so maybe we will also get some of that craziness, only maybe ten years later. I mean, I am not the only one who reads articles written by Americans; people around me share them on social networks all the time. Also, I work at an international company, so knowing about foreign taboos is useful.
By the way, I don’t feel like much of Scott’s writing is US-centered. Meditation, mental health, statistics… pretty universal, I’d say.
There are many books written by experts I could download and read instead of SSC, but somehow I don’t. I guess I am not here for education in the first place, although I appreciate the insights into many things I get here.
Not sure if your objection is that Scott gets some things wrong, or merely that he does not go as deep as an expert could. If it’s the latter, I don’t mind, because I could read something from the experts outside of SSC if I wanted.
I don’t mind creating a dissonance between the language/culture of my recreational intellectual food and the culture/language of the people I actually interact with. Firstly, because my personality is already at odds with my local culture, to the point where I have always felt like (and often been mistaken for) a foreigner. Secondly, because I am not close with the people with whom I interact in person. Thirdly, because the persons with whom I am (emotionally) close are Americans. Lastly, reading about things happening here tends to be boring or just tragic, while reading about things happening in the US and Europe gives me conversation material with my friends, and it tends to be more entertaining.
Good bye!
Are you implying the superiority of classical statistics? If so, I would be interested to see your reasons. As best I can tell, its popularity is mostly due to non-statistician users confusing the probability of the evidence conditional on the theory being wrong in a particular way with the probability of the theory being wrong, conditional on the evidence.
Non-american regular posters here, how do you handle that?
I just try to skip over most of the culture war stuff unless the top comment really grabs my attention and I can’t help myself. It helps to recognise that some posters here are 99% of the time conflict theorists rather than mistake theorists so to speak, and just hide those comments 4 times out of 5 after a sentence or so. Especially when topics like how the Republicans/Democrats just owned the other/screwed up, anything to do with Brexit, or anything to do with Trump. You could argue it’s nearly impossible to be a mistake theorist on these topics, but that’s just more reason to hide them imo.
For that reason my favourite posts are either Scott’s posts that aren’t open threads or in particular the discussion on the ‘Links’ threads. Those tend to give people a chance to share their knowledge without politics muddying the water.
It’s funny how when i’m reading other’s comments sometimes, i’d never consider myself left-wing to use the terminology, I start to read some of the more right-wing posters here and feel a deep revulsion. I just put it down to different values over anything. I think possibly that growing up in a freezing country, you can’t help but feel more Communitarian than individualist.
btw just saw that William Sharp has a youtube–channel with 212 subscribers where he makes/made a few youtube-videos with strange bears/disfigured telly-tubbies making fun of state pension actuaries and financial advisors
(sharpe from the sharpe-ratio+arithmetic of active management and probably other econ-stuff since he got a noble in it (dont know what other stuff))
edit: source/verification https://web.stanford.edu/%7Ewfsharpe/ satirical-videos
Why is the standard working day 9-5 rather than 8-4?
Why would we want it to be 8-4?
Possibly because it’s centered around noon. But I don’t really see the advantage.
So you don’t have to go home from work in the dark.(Current sunset in my city is ~5:00 PM)
You would have to go to work from home at dark, what’s the big difference? Besides, if you city happens to be in California (which seems likely given the sunset time and SSC audience), it’s much easier solved by, you know, not changing time every winter so as to make sunset at 5 PM.
@AlexOfUrals
Indeed, daylight savings time is an abomination. Standard time forever.
Also 5-2 workdays.
@EchoChaos,
I agree entirely, except for which one is the abomination.
As someone who has seasonal affective disorder, more light during the afternoons is the political issue that seems most existential to me.
@Aron Wall
Noon being at the solar peak makes more sense than an hour afterwards, which is why I defend standard time.
I also need lots of sunlight in the afternoon, so I work a 5-2 work schedule, which means I don’t have to go home in the dark.
Ugh. I’ve been made miserable by how late the sun was rising, because it’s harder for me to get moving for work in the dark. I was desperately waiting for the end of DST so it would get light earlier.
Plus, I grew up and now live further north, where in the summer with DST EECT is almost freakin’ 22:00. Getting dark at about 9pm is late enough, and DST plays hell with my sleep.
What 5-2 are you guys talking about? Is it 5-14 or 17-2?
As for the daylight savings, I personally don’t care where it would be set, after living in Saint Petersburg I’m fine going without sunlight for weeks. I just hate to switch time twice a year.
@Aron Wall says: “As someone who has seasonal affective disorder, more light during the afternoons is the political issue that seems most existential to me”
If you work as a construction worker the start times are typically 6am to 8am, with quit times are usually from 2:30pm to 4:30pm.
To become an indentured apprentice construction worker check out this site:
https://www.sfbuildingtradescouncil.org/apprentice-programs
@AlexOfUrals
What 5-2 are you guys talking about? Is it 5-14 or 17-2?
I work 5-14. It means traffic is light and I get sunny afternoons with my kids even in the winter.
I much prefer 8-4. I like having light out when I get home—I’d like to be able to go to the store or something when it’s not pitch black out—and sometimes I need to go to the bank on my way home or something, too.
9-5 is the most iconic set of “standard” working/business hours for unshifted office work and day-shift manufacturing work in the US, but it’s far from universal. Standard business hours vary by industry and region. For example, for tech companies on the West Coast, common working hours are more like 10-6. I think the financial industry (especially on the East Coast) tends to run earlier (maybe 8-4), but I’m less confident of that for lack of personal experience.
@Alexander Turok says:
Oh sweet lord I wish it was, that sounds AWESOME!
I worked seven years with a just before 9:30am start to a sometime after 6pm end schedule for seven years, and that was pretty good, after that, and for most of the last 20 years 7am to 3:30pm has been the most common schedule, and it’s LAME!
The only thing worse have been the far too common even earlier start times combined with overtime.
Triple LAME!
Please, please, please implement this 9 to 5 idea!
If anything, I think the standard working day would be improved by shifting later rather than earlier. There are some people whose body clocks want to wake them up at 9 or 10 who are chronically sleep deprived in a 9-5 world. an 11-7 day would suit such people better.
As for the people whose bodies wake up at 5 or 6, well they won’t lose sleep in an 11-7 day; they’ll just have to reorganise their time such that they do fun things in the morning instead of the evening.
You have my vote.
Counterpoint from someone who is an early bird:
I find that no matter HOW early I get up, my best work is in the three hours after that, declining through the morning and falling off a cliff after lunch/noon.
Your suggestion would absolutely waltz my productivity and affect my life, even if I wasn’t losing sleep.
Also an afterthought. Most people who are “early” risers don’t get up at 6 but they get up at around 7 I find. That means that you have 4 ish hours till you start work. That is much less time than the roughly 6 to 8 you have in one chunk after clock off at 5. It breaks up peoples free time.
Also, the 9 to 5 is a rough compromise because in most office jobs people need to reach each other somewhat reliably. Nonetheless, a lot of offices I know at least here in Germany are flexible, they have “gliding” work-hours and some people don’t trundle in until 10 or sometimes even 10:30 while others are at their desks at 6 AM but knock off at 2 or something.
Just remembered the public transportation in my city incentivizes this to reduce rush hour crunch by selling monthly/yearly tickets only valid from 9AM onward for significantly less.
Yeah, I take your point. Probably the best thing (which as you say is already starting) is to push for flexible hours, with maybe a window from 11-3 or something where the important meetings have to be scheduled.
I’m not sure I follow your early bird maths, though. If somebody gets up at 7am they should be going to bed before 11pm, which gives them under 6 hours after clocking off at 5pm.
Also, if we’re counting 7am risers as early birds, then 9-5 is not so much a compromise but a perfect situation for them. One hour to get ready, one hour to travel, is pretty typical for many people.
Yeah I find different parts of the day are better for different sorts of activity and I seem to recall some sorts of studies indicating that, though I can’t find at the moment (one thing for sure is that levels of hormones, etc. vary throughout the day in somewhat predictable patterns; there’s surely some interpersonal variability but I’d be surprised if it were common to have one group of people with e.g. a completely flipped daily hormonal/neurotransmitter cycle as compared to another).
For example, one time I lived in Taiwan and worked a job that didn’t start until after kids got off school (cram school). Taiwan is also very hot and has a lot of fun stuff going on at night with many shops not even opening till 10 am or later. As a result I developed a super night owl schedule there (like asleep at 6 am and up at 1 pm). On the one hand, yes you can get used to such a schedule, especially if the environment is facilitating it with e.g. fun nightlife. On the other, I got very little else accomplished during that time besides the meager salary I made at the cram school and the fun I had at night. Night time was still night time and night time to me is time to relax or have fun, not time to be super organized and productive.
I really liked the clock in/clock out system that the firm I was at in Germany had.
Obviously it’s only viable for certain professions.
But the flexibility it afforded is really nice.
No worry about not getting in on time.
Can you elaborate? Clock in/clock out systems are usually used in jobs where hours flexibility is explicitly not available, at least in the US (i.e. if you clock in 2 minutes late you’re in some kind of trouble for tardiness).
It is the jobs without clock in/clock out systems that usually offer the flexibility of shifting around your hours a little bit.
Yeah, I’m curious too. I get to my job sometime around 7:45 in the morning, but I have coworkers that don’t show up until 10:00 or later. We don’t have any formal time tracking, but at past jobs where I did have to time in and out, it was because they needed staffing at a certain time, and they needed some why to make sure they were getting it.
I’ve seen a company where the office workers are encouraged to work the 7:30-to-3:30 shift, reputedly to make it easier for them to collaborate with the day shift among the blue-collar workers on the production floor.
Not a small company either: it’s a global manufacturing company with a well-known name, and has apparently been working this way since approximately the time of its founding.
The standard working day seems to be 8-5; I don’t know many white collar jobs where you get paid for your lunch hour.
I was going to make this same comment. Seconded that generally white collar jobs that I’m familiar with expect you to be there 8-5.
I feel fortunate that I work at a place where I can shift my hours if I like, within reason. I typically work 8-5 and take off Fridays when I hit 40 for the week.
If you drop your kids off at school before work then you need school to start before the standard work day. If you stop off and buy breakfast/coffee before work you need people there before you hit your job, if your job has any work that needs to be done daily before you get in so that you can do your job then you need those people in before you.
For one of the bakeries I worked in I was first in at 5:30 to get the earliest prep done so that customers could start coming in at around 7 (door opened technically at 6:30 but very little traffic was there and the counter person started at 6:30 and did their prep work until customers interrupted). To make the standard day earlier by an hour you have to push everyone else back an hour, and there will be some resistance to that.
I remember a discussion about the best adaptations of Shakespeare’s works some open threads ago.
Yesterday I watched Justin Kurzel’s take on Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender in the title role. Overall, I found it good, without being wholy enamored with it — I’ll likely rewatch it, but I’m not going to longly rave about its qualities everywhere.
That said there was one particular aspect of the movie that I found really interesting and worth talking about.
In a world where Shakespeare’s works have been adapted left and right in all possible manners, and where anyone tackling Shakespeare wants to try to distinguish themself from others doing the same thing by setting the action on Mars or whatever, this adaptation is, by contrast, radically conventional on the surface.
The original setting of medieval Scotland is preserved, the movie is largely filmed on “location” (that is, in real places in Scotland and England), the costumes are based on traditional clothing of the era, the plot largely follow the play, and while the full text is not preserved, all extent dialogues are, as far as I can tell, directly taken from Shakespeare’s words.
And yet this is one of the most original adaptations of the play I have seen. Through a lot of screenplay and staging choices (often removing or adding characters to specific scenes, or changing who a character is looking at when talking, or changing when a particular piece of dialogue happen, without otherwise significantly altering the dialogues or the overall plot), and through specific approaches in the interpretation of the characters by the actors, this film gives the play a completely different spirit from most adaptations (at least from those I have seen, which admitedly is not that many).
Here we have a Macbeth who doesn’t go from good and loyal man to mad tyrant over the course of a single night, but rather is already a man full of doubts and worn down by war at the beginning of the story, and his descent into madness and corruption is shown as slow, gradual, natural; and when he truly has sunken to the state of a tyrant haunted by ghostly vision, he remains simultaneously attacked by doubt yet outwarly showing great moral strength and resilience. When his demise finally happens, he still leads his last men bravely into battle, and faces death with dignity. This is Macbeth as a tragic tyrant, as a strong man who progressively get dragged into moral corruption but never quite loses his strength on this cursed path.
Other characters go through similar re-interpretations, and the result is a version of Macbeth that in many ways stand opposite to many more outlandish adaptations: faithful and traditional in the “text”, but innovative and daring in its themes and spirit.
I have always described Macbeth as a man not with a tragic flaw but with a tragic virtue.
IMHO, his only lasting positive quality is bravery. He’s introduced with that quality and he dies with it, but the rest of the play shows how he lacks sticking power on any other virtue, even love.
I’m going to assume you’re talking about the quantum many worlds hypothesis, rather than the inflationary one. Physicists tend to like the theory for its simplicity, you don’t have to tack on this extra non-local collapse mechanism. But as for the press and laypeople, my guess is the following: One popular way of presenting the theory is to say that every time you make a decision, the universe splits into two branches, one where you chose one way, and a different one where you chose the other. I think that in many ways, this is a very comforting idea: Maybe you regret not asking your crush out. But at least you can take solace from the idea that in a different branch of the multiverse, there is a version of you who did.
Of course, this picture is very inaccurate, even if the many worlds hypothesis is correct. The universe is constantly splitting, as atoms bump into each other and interact. The most immediately affected things are radioactive decay and thermal noise. From there, the differences can propagate out to affect mutations, the weather, and eventually the course of history itself. As for decisions, there certainly seems to be some element of randomness in how our brains work, but likely the vast majority of copies of you will make the same decision when faced with the same situation. Humans have brains because they help our survival, and brains wouldn’t be much good if they spat out random decisions all the time. Expecting one of your doppelgangers to ask out your crush when you were too afraid is like expecting that in when you type 2+2 into a calculator, it will spit out 4 in half the universes, and 5 in the other half.
hmmm….would this imply that if you want to ensure that a significant proportion of your multiverse clones have it each way, you should decide by flipping a coin (or even better, flipping one on https://www.random.org/ )?
A little hesitant to roll this out when I don’t have much time for discussion but:
The “Big Bang” provides pretty strong support to the contention that the universe was created ex nihilo by an outside force e.g., God. My understanding — I could dig up references if I had more time — is that the “doctrinal atheist” position in the 19th century and before was that the universe was eternal (or to illuminate using an assume-the-conclusions version, given there is no Creator, the universe hadn’t been Created, therefore it must be eternal QED). At least some of the multiverse talk is about explaining how an uncreated universe is compatible with the Big Bang — a guy named Victor Stenger was big into this, off the top of my head.
If this is true then I would expect it to be supplanted in popular imagination by the “Simulation Hypothesis”, which takes the universe’s creation for granted.
Interesting. I wouldn’t put so much weight on what kind of initial condition the universe happens to have, though. Even in a timeless or cyclic universe, the question remains of why the universe exists at all, and has the physical laws it does, and has the particular contents it does.
Plus, if time is continuous, the distinction between infinite past and finite past is kind of artificial. You can transform t from spanning a finite open interval to spanning the entire real number line, adjust the laws of physics a little bit, and get the exact same predictions, but now the universe is “eternal”. Performing a change of variables on the laws of physics shouldn’t have deep philosophical implications.
@sfoil
There is no reason why that outside force has to be sentient and/or involved in any way in the way in which our universe functions, which many people include in their definition of God.
Note that one theory is that there is a meta-universe that produces universes, like virtual particles are produced in a vacuum. If so, that meta-universe can simply operate by rules of physics very different from our own, with no need for a sentient being to make the choice to create our kind of universe.
Again, some of this is historically contingent — apparently a lot of 19th-early 20th century atheists staked their philosophy on a universe that had no beginning. Anyway, I’m simply relaying the fact that multiverse theory is used extensively to argue against the theist fine-tuning argument, and I think this not-quite-mainstream dispute is at least part of the reason that multiverse cosmologies are setting off Zephalinda’s detectors that it is “a proxy for some social/personal question of value, culture or group status”. As far as the actual contents of the debate, I’m familiar with the basic arguments although I haven’t read deeply into it.
@phi
This is the second part of the theist “fine tuning” argument and how the cyclic/multiverse theory is being used to argue against it. Our sample size = 1 observation that the universe we live in is habitable becomes much weaker evidence for something having its thumb on the scale during the universe’s creation if you posit (ideally, demonstrate) the existence of an arbitrarily large number of other universes. Rolling a natural trillion isn’t remarkable if you’re allowed to make an infinite number of throws simultaneously.
@Aapje
Yeah, it’s completely irrelevant to a lot of important religious truth claims.
Yesterday at about half past Midnight, Mr. Chat and I got home from a house-hunting vacation in Ohio and Kentucky.
1. I wore hiking boots onto the Frontier flight (where any bag that doesn’t fit under the seat is $35 each, each way) instead of dress boots or sneakers to be prepared to hike the Falls of the Ohio on the Indiana side of the river. It was nearly flat. 🙁
2. We were technically in Indiana but never made it into a real city like Indianapolis. Did we miss anything good? (Crime rate there is 133.4 per 10k, more than twice as bad as Portland’s 63.)
3. Cincinnati does have a great zoo. The Museum Center At Union Terminal is the Hall of Justice from the Superfriends cartoon – I guess the superheroes moving out was part of the whole “Rust Belt” decline phenomenon. There’s also a casino owned by an REIT, which was a WTF moment for someone from out West, where casinos are either Nevadan or run by and for the benefit of American Indians.
The demographics are <5% non-black minorities and the rest of the people are about equally divided between black and white. We arrived not knowing anything about the suburbs – not even their names let alone which ones have what features – except the canned social history about white flight. Prices were right: more than 300 listings between $50k and 175k in the city proper, but we were woefully unequipped to know where was safe and walkable, where was bad, and where was more desirable only because of code words like "good schools." It felt more like a cool place to visit than a place that attracts transplants.
4. We loooved Lexington, KY. We made a $165k offer on a move-in ready 3 bed/2 bath house a mile away from a park where it's legal to unleash dogs. Real estate values are going up, which made me feel much more confident about the big financial decision than further north in the Rust Belt. Crime rate is 42 per 10k. Cost of groceries and gas seemed to be about 25% less than our budget-conscious lifestyle in Portland. The food scene was interesting: a combination of unpretentiously well-crafted Southern food and hipsterization, with the latter being significantly less expensive than I'm used to ($9 for an ice cream cocktail at Crack N Boom rather than $11+ for a regular cocktail). The demographics include enough non-black minorities to get America's staple ethnic restaurants, but I didn't see anything like the hipsterization (= expensive) of ethnic cuisines best represented by the food cart scene and chef Andy Ricker's Thai food empire in Portland.
Downside: there's a lack of big-city sightseeing infrastructure like zoos and museums. BUT it has the University of Kentucky campus, which together with the food scene and amenities it does have made it feel like someone plopped a bigger Eugene, Oregon with Southerners instead of hippies into the middle of the rural infrastructure that supports the Triple Crown races.
5. We were also in
LuvalLouisville, but ran out of time to even try a restaurant and go to the Muhammad Ali museum.Lexington is a very attractive city and I’ve looked at properties there. But beware – Kentucky by some measures has the worst unfunded public pension problem in the country per capita, and their incumbent governor who purported to be addressing it was just defeated, in significant part by concentrated opposition of the public employees’ unions. Whether you think he was right or wrong, it does make a gradual, negotiated, non-catastrophic resolution seem less likely and a potential state financial crisis and/or large tax base upheaval.
Louisville I’ve spent less time in, but the downtown was nice and Kentucky’s not that big of a state; you could be 30 minutes outside Louisville in pretty rural country and still an hour from Lexington.
Yeah, living through a state financial crisis wouldn’t be fun. Don’t know much about the state tax base (property taxes were decently low, though!)
We were in Lexington during Trump’s rally for the incumbent governor, and had to adapt our driving plans to avoid its traffic disruptions. The term “unfunded public pensions” didn’t come up in the election buzz we heard. Bevin (incumbent, R) was seen as gauche for how he talked about teachers, and trying to roll back Medicaid/Obamacare was seen as a bigger economic no-no by his opponents. Bevin’s own ads seemed to be ignoring the economic issues in favor of CW (“Beshear joined their radical Resistance”, “who will protect the unborn?”).
I have family in Cincinnati. They seem to like it well enough. I can’t be any help as far as what the suburbs are though.
One person, a software guy, got laid off a couple years ago and then had some reasonable difficulty finding a new job; my impression was a large part of the problem was just a small selection of available jobs compared to some other cities. Eventually located something though, so jobs do exist. Don’t know how relevant that is to your situation.
We had a software engineer friend in Portland who had long-lasting difficulty finding a new job in that field in Portland when laid off. 🙁
How much do you trust Portland’s crime statistics? Aren’t you leaving in part because of rising crime? Do you see that in the crime statistics?
(Indianapolis’s homicide rate is 4x Portland’s, so the official total crime number probably underestimate the difference. Officially Indianapolis has less property crime, which is hard to believe. Lexington homicide is in between.)
I trust the stats on murder and property crime. The former is un-fudgeable, and for the latter, people have insurance and Portland leftists who get mugged by reality are going to file a police report for insurance purposes, same as anywhere else.
Where Portland crime statistics are untrustworthy are on crimes or ought-to-be-a-crime like quasi-assault encounters with the homeless (finding naked men living in public women’s rooms, to give a personal example) camping on public property, littering used syringes, and public defecation.
I trust the property crimes numbers in Seattle absolutely zero. The local cops will not take reports for car break-ins, theft from property, “non violent” muggings. What they will take reports for, they won’t investigate. Stolen car? Sucks to be you. Just about any crime involving a homeless person not actually forcing their way into a house, they won’t touch. Businesses with doors to the public in the downtown now have their own security guards, who’s primary job is to push unwanteds back out the door.
That’s so ridiculous. It’s also the way Portland is going.
(How are you supposed to get compensation from an insurance policy without a police report on your theft from property or stolen/broken car?)
Goodhart’s law strikes again. If the police/mayor are judged by crime statistics, then they have a huge incentive to cause the crime statistics to report fewer crimes. And since they’re the ones taking the reports, they’re in an excellent position to do just exactly that.
I’m getting flashbacks to The Wire here.
Citation needed.
I had a car stolen in Seattle was I was on deployment halfway around the world. The cops investigated it, found the car, recovered it and helped a friend I had in the area come pick it up and didn’t charge them/me anything for getting it out of the impound lot. I literally only had to make two phone calls to the police and one to my friend and the situation was resolved in less than three days.
What do you mean they won’t take a report? You just file one online. I did it when our car got broken into. Yeah, they won’t do anything about it (it tells you to file a different report if you actually have some evidence of who did it), but a report is definitely filed.
Stats on murder are unfudgeable, but not as helpful as you might like. For example, when I moved to Richmond almost 20 years ago, it had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the nation–but 80% of the city was very safe. The issue was that it was a small city in a large metro area, with highways well-located for drug trans-shipments–so a handful of blocks had a tremendous amount of dealer-dealer drug crime, and the impact was magnified by the small city size (the metro area was about average).
Reminds me of the trivia that (at least at some point) the Vatican had the highest crime rate in the world, because thousands of (non-resident) pickpockets prey on millions of (non-resident) tourists year-long, while the actual population is in the hundreds.
“Stats on murder are unfudgeable”
Chicago begs to differ.
Here’s a story from a few years ago about how the city fudges the homicide stats.
https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-crime-rates/
My “Bulverism” is that it’s related to the reification of individual choice coupled with the generally constrained decision-space that modern life affords most people. I see it as loosely related to the prevalence of post-apocalyptic genre pieces (zombie plague, post-war dystopias, etc.) lately. People are told that their individual choices are the most important thing in the world, but find it hard to square with the actual lack of power that most people have over their lives as things have gotten bigger, more sprawling, less local, and less autonomous in the modern world. So they fantasize about breaking out and taking actions they could never take in the real world, free of constraints. Many Worlds in the “pop” sense almost always co-exists with the fantasy that one could take a “quantum leap” and go world-to-world, experience alternate histories, other timelines, etc. Like apocalyptic fantasy, it’s another means of putting the individual at the center and outside the constraints of the mundane reality that normally ties their hands and leaves them feeling powerless.
It’s a theory that’s extremely interesting to laypeople and drives discussion, which makes it a great topic for online science journalists seeking to maximize clicks.
In this particular case, it’s not taking a hard stance on the issue that’s being driven by psychosocial motivations, it’s mentioning the issue at all.
Moreover that it makes a good plot element.
Good one that you can throw at any kind of serial format once you’ve run out of ideas.
Alas, I can’t find the clip from Red Dward S9 E2 where the bloke at the shop is talking about all the dimension skips.
In past discussions of housing problems in the Bay area, the question of why high tech companies keep hiring people into such an expensive location has sometimes come up.
Yesterday’s NYT article had an update on that very issue:
@johan_larson >
’bout time!
Distant satellite offices are more practical than they used to be, but they still come with some significant costs to the company. They’re less legible to executives than local offices, and require executives to spend more time traveling than they would otherwise. Phone calls, email, IMs/chat, and teleconferencing aren’t perfect substitutes for face-to-face discussions, so communications between teams in different locales is a bit less productive than local communication; this last especially if the locales are in different time zones.
And for high-performing ambitious mid-career professionals, working in a satellite office tends to be less appealing than working at a headquarters, since there are usually fewer opportunities to advance (fewer open senior positions to move up into, and fewer opportunities for your accomplishments to be visible to the Director/VP level people who generally have final say over promotions for more senior employees) in a satellite office: so the satellite office will be harder to staff with senior people than the HQ, and the satellite offices will tend to show substantial attrition among their best employees (*) as they hit career ceilings and leave for greener pastures.
(*) It’s important to note I’m not just talking about managers here, although the effect is more pronounced around managers. In just about every big tech company these days, there are parallel career tracks for managers and “individual contributors” with the pay grades and titles running all the way up to VP level (the IC equivalent of a VP is usually called something like “Technical Fellow”).
I work in the enterprise technology division of a very large company and for the last five years, unless we can’t find someone with the right skills in our “other” locations, we’re forbidden to hire anyone new, including contractors, in the bay area. The company’s HQ is officially in SF (complete with named skyscrapers), but not even the CEO lives/works there anymore.
I’ve been looking at expenses for a company with several different centers of gravity and they are really bad. Not just high travel costs like you’d probably expect, but also ongoing (vice just new hire) relocation costs. Probably still come out ahead purely in dollar terms over all Bay Area but that’s before looking at whatever decreases in efficiency and cross-pollination there are.
In the argument that Satan makes fossils to mislead us, how does this relate to the Augustinian idea that evil can’t be creative?
The creative impulse is in us; we fantasise the things which might tempt us to doubt. All the devil need do is build in the world what we have created in our minds.
The Devil isn’t pure evil. The Devil is able to reason and exert his will on the world and many other things which are good in themselves.
Would you mind linking/explaining the Augustinian idea that evil can’t be creative?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinian_theodicy
I’m not sure I quite had it right. Perhaps it adds up to the idea that if Satan comes up with something new, he is not completely evil.
^This. US evangelicals are not playing the same game as the Catholic Church, intellectually. Perhaps in seven hundred years or so.
“Evangelical” is too broad. Generally the more Reformed traditions (more historically aligned with Calvinism) are in my experience very favorable to Augustine. The more Anabaptist traditions are, broadly speaking, less favorable.
It doesn’t. The idea that evil can’t be creative is a largely Catholic notion associated with the intellectual tradition of European Christianity. I don’t think it figures into the “philosophy” (if you can call it that) of American Evangelical Christians at all. Unlike Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism, Evangelical Christianity does not have any real intellectual tradition behind it, and it’s actually quite an anti-intellectual religion at its core, rejecting the use of rationality and the opinions of learned experts in favor of an emphasis on personal revelation. Evangelical Christianity also doesn’t particularly value creativity, so it makes sense that it wouldn’t hold lack of creativity as a defining trait of evil.
@LadyJane says:
As a fan of some older ”country’ music, the similar themed ‘blues’, what I’d heard of ‘bluegrass’, and of 20th century American music in general, I’d say almost the opposite is true, as to me it seems that some of the biggest American contributions to world culture come from regions were Evangelicals and the similar ‘historical black Protestant’ churches are dominant, about the only other place I can think of in the U.S.A. that also has been a wellspring is the more Catholic New Orleans, Louisiana.
Chicago and Harlem have been huge orgins of American music, but that’s from being settled by the southern diaspora, otherwise it’s Memphis Blues, Nashville County, and New Orleans Jazz.
Seemd pretty creative to me.
How are you defining “evangelical”?
Side note, I will say due to the changes in popular meaning of the word, Princeton Evangelical Fellowship rebranded to Princeton Christian Fellowship. So I’m genuinely curious what your take on “evangelical” is since it’s probably one leading to rebrandings like these.
Not hostile so much as ignorant. I’ve led classes where we read through Augustine’s Confessions in my evangelical church, which have been well-received. I think this is more a trait of average Americans than Evangelicals in particular; I doubt most Catholics actually know Augustine either.
+1
I’m going to fight the hypothetical entirely. I don’t think this an argument made by non-strawman YECs. If I look over at Answers in Genesis, they have a whole section on Fossils, and it doesn’t mention the Devil trying to trick us anywhere. Instead, it says that fossils can actually form quite quickly, and that fossil formations provide evidence for a globally catastrophic flood.
Possibly: Satan was an angel, and angels are good and can presumably exercise creativity. He fell from grace, so his creativity must have diminished, but we need not assume it was entirely obliterated (unless Satan is “absolute” or “100%” evil, which is not a quality I’ve seen assigned to him).
https://www.bustle.com/p/the-instant-pot-understands-the-history-of-womens-labor-in-the-kitchen-19276122
A history of labor-saving devices for cooking, and argues that the big deal with the instant pot isn’t so much the multiplicity of features as the ability to set it in advance to simmer and heat up, which relieves a lot of the demand to be cooking at specific times.
I think the article is too trusting of advertising as a window into what people were thinking, but it’s good otherwise.
From memory, Jane Jacobs claimed that the tools used by slaves don’t get improved. How true is this? Also, a propos of this article, to what extent do you get efforts at improvement which don’t work for end users?
I assume Instant Pots were possible a decade or more before they were developed, and the hard part was figuring out what was needed.
I think the crockpot was the first device like this, and it’s not clear to me that the instant pot is that much more amazing. A crockpot can’t do everything an instant pot can, but it can do a lot. And crockpots have been available since the 70s although I’m sure they’ve improved over that time.
It’s interesting to learn that the profusion of specialized kitchen gadgets has been a thing since the 1800s. I could use a special organized cabinet.
I’m guessing mostly not true, but I can see how there would be less motivation to improve tools mostly used by slaves. The cotton gin got improved an awful lot by Eli Whitney, and I doubt improvements stopped there. If you read about the 19th century South, a lot of slaves were skilled craftsmen. Some would be hired out by their masters to someone else, and some even managed to find the time to do work on the side for their own money (although I think the master typically took a cut in this case too).
Although I think there’d be less motivation for pure labor-saving tools for slaves, I think it’s pretty clear that there’s still a strong motivation. Better tools meant slaves produced more for the master. Greed is a pretty strong motivator.
Also, this bugged me because it’s so off
I read this and thought “That’s way too many children for a typical 1920s household”. I double-checked, and all the sources I can find indicate in the 1920s USA children per woman was a little over 3. Today it’s about 2.
So I’m not very inclined to trust her on history.
Is that per woman (including single women/women without kids) or does it only include women with at least one child? I think it would need to be the latter to be relevant to a point about quality of life for housewives/kids. Regardless, “average a little over 3” means 5 mouths to feed when you include mom and dad. Maybe you read it as 8 or 9 kids, but I’m pretty sure they were including the parents who have to eat too.
https://www.infoplease.com/us/household-and-family-statistics/us-households-size-1790-2006
A quick evaluation of this data (no data for 1920 but looking at 1900 and 1930) with some tweaking to exclude 1 and 2 person households:
1900 – 4 children/6 mouths (13%), 5+ children/7+mouths (26%)
1930 – 4 children/6 mouths (11%), 5+ children/7+mouths (16%)
Not some vast majority but not exactly uncommon to have families that size (totally anecdotally, my mom’s was one of 8, first kid was born sometime in the 40s I believe).
She said 8 or 9 like that was typical and 5 or 6 mouths like that was small. But even if you cheat and remove all smaller households, ~1/7 households had 7 or more mouths in 1930.
And household size may include grandparents or other relatives so I wouldn’t assume that’s the right measure to use.
And still three or four mouths was much more common than five or six mouths.
If you look at fertility per woman here you can see that a century ago there were about 50% more children per family in 1920. But that wasn’t because of a lack of suitable birth control (like she implies) because during the great depression fertility reached levels almost comparable to today. But people in the great depression were still materially probably richer than most people in the 19th century who had more children.
The obvious explanation is that people wanted more children. But they wanted roughly one more child on average.
1920s families had more children than today, but not a ton more.
Can instant pots refrigerate? If you could keep meat and dairy in the pot prior to cooking, that would be a big deal for me.
(The big problem with slow cookers is that I need to cook for the entire workday + commute, which tends to reduce a lot of things to mush even at low).
They cannot. There is, however, a sous vide device I saw that would refrigerate the water bath and then warm it up at the appropriate time so that you could put meat or fish in in the morning and have it finished when you get home.
here – https://www.cookmellow.com/technology
What do you mean by refrigerate? The instant pot itself cannot refrigerate. However, the pot that the food goes into is removable (much like a crock pot) and is just a tall metal container. You could put everything in there and stick in in the refrigerator and then put it back into the instant pot when ready to cook.
Also, the instant pot, when finished, keeps whatever contents inside warm. And since it is a sealed, probably doesn’t use much energy to keep warm. I am not sure what effect on the food it would have to have it sit there for several hours. But it seems like a combination of (refrigerated ingredients allowing some initial delay of cook time + keeping warm afterwards) would work.
I’d like to be able to put food in at 8 in the morning and tell the pot to start cooking at 1. Maybe next generation. 🙂
Get one of those timer plugs.
I once tried using an aquarium thermostat relay to dial in the slow-cooker to exactly 42 celsius for fermentation purposes (with moderate sucess), so controlling the mains power going into a slow cooker is a thing you can do.
@J Mann:
I mean, realistically you are probably fine to do that without refrigeration. Especially given that the InstaPot is at least somewhat insulated, the stuff you put in there cold at 8:00 will probably still be reasonably cool at 1:00 pm when it starts to cook (the InstaPot does have a delay timer for up to 24 hours). You might be more concerned about food safety related things than I am, but I would be perfectly comfortable with that.
Disclaimer: I don’t use an InstaPot, I just know it has the delayed start feature.
@J Mann, are you planning on eating before 2:00? The thing about the Instant Pot is that you almost never will cook something for more than an hour, and 90% of the time you’re probably using the Instant Pot for less than 30 minutes.
@JayT – I forgot it’s a pressure cooker, and was just imagining how long a recipe might take in a slow cooker. 🙂
Yes, a shorter cook time mostly solves my problem on the other side, assuming I could do the prep work the night before and cook in 30 min to an hour after I got home.
Thanks, I’ll look into one this Xmas.
I never wanted one, but got it as a gift. I almost returned it, but the person that gave it to me was excited about it, so I decided not to. I’m glad I didn’t. It actually works really well. You can make a stock in about an hour instead of all day, and it’s worth it for that alone in my mind. I rarely use it to make a full meal (I rarely used my slow cooker for that either), but it’s a great tool to make parts of the meal fast.
Not only were they possible, they existed. The instant pot is just an electric pressure cooker with a bunch of additional settings.
Pressure cookers (stovetop) became a thing in the 60’s and the first electric pressure cookers came about in the early ’90s.
The additional settings allow the instant pot to function as a crockpot (note that a crockpot absolutely cannot perform the core function of an instant pot – pressure cooking) and some other things.
I think what made the instant pot successful over previous iterations of pressure cookers is that it was much more user friendly – the originals had timers and pressure settings, but the instant pot made everything simpler with a “soup” and a “meat” button. That plus viral marketing really helped.
A lot of people in this thread are saying that the instant pot is just a crockpot; I can confirm as a first-hand witness to my wife’s life getting revolutionized by the thing that this isn’t true. She’s an excellent cook well beyond the average even for dedicated housewives and had a crockpot and pressure cooker and found they don’t do a third of what the instant pot does.
It’s easier to use and much more controlled than a standard pressure cooker; it cooks faster, and doesn’t cook them to mush. It is capable of browning and it’s easier to wash. Whereas she abandoned the crock pot for the most part at some point because it wouldn’t make food good enough that you’d choose to eat it if you didn’t have to, the instant pot does several things as well as she can do them on the stove. Pressure cookers pretty much have to be watched; this doesn’t.
The programming capability of the thing is a big deal. while before her options were “cook things to mush all day in the crock pot” or “work with a pressure cooker on it’s own schedule” now she can set things up in the morning and tell it to start cooking just long enough ahead of us getting home that it’s done and fresh as we open the door.
I’m not doing a good job of explaining the thing, mostly because I don’t cook, but when we were given it she thought it was going to be stupid and we hadn’t heard of them before that. Since then it’s been used several times a week every week and has made her life substantially easier. I’m thankful to the damn thing.
I feel confused. Not really sure what I should be getting from the article as a central point. We’ve had attempts at labor-saving techniques for as long as we’ve had cooking. There are just hard limits on how much labor you can save when you cook good food. That’s why the Serious Eats chili recipe has about a bajillion steps and my wife’s crockpot “chili” recipe has, like 4, but the Serious Eats chili is a bajillion times better than my wife’s. Trying to take shortcuts normally compromises the quality of food in some manner.
We still have had an immense amount of labor-saving over the last few centuries. Like, I don’t see how you look at the Industrial Revolution and think “hmmmm, we really didn’t try to save any labor in this whole ‘food’ thing.” I don’t have to grind flour. I don’t have to churn butter. I don’t have to start a fire. I don’t have to bake bread. I don’t have to make my own whipped cream. I don’t have to clean every single dish by hand. I don’t have to grind coffee beans. I don’t have to fetch water. I don’t have to can or preserve my own food.
Hell, you don’t even have to cut your own vegetables, because the store sells them. You can buy a pre cooked chicken that Costco sells at a loss. You can use non-stick pans that make clean-up a breeze. There’s an entire packaged food section that’s made leaps and bounds over the past few decades so you don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to.
But if you want to make home-made GOOD food, you have to put it in the time to cook it, because we haven’t come up with a machine to automate the whole process. The instant pot can help with certain steps with certain foods, but you need an actual oven and a cast iron skillet to get good steaks. Dutch Ovens will still produce superior results to the Instant Pot in most cases (though it will take much longer). Eggs and pancakes aren’t coming out of an instant pot.
I think the point of the Instant Pot is that you can make pretty good food on a much more flexible schedule than you can otherwise.
This. So much this. I grew up in a world that had visibility to a world where refrigeration and gas stoves weren’t yet normal. There’s a big difference between ANY modern recipe, and one that stats “scrub a barrel” or “here’s a couple page introduction to maintaining steady oven temperatures in a wood stove.”
I think it’s worth distinguishing two kinds of “labor-saving kitchen gadget”: A. those that reduce the time one needs to spend in the kitchen on relatively basic maintenance like washing dishes and B. those that don’t necessarily reduce the amount of time or effort spent cooking but allow you to make something more impressive.
An example of A might be a dishwasher while an example of B could be a pasta machine.
The advantage of A is that it actually frees up time and energy for the (presumed female) homemaker; the disadvantage it it may only raise the expectation that said homemaker should also be able to handle a commute and full time job.
My quick scan of the article seems like it’s especially down on B, as it doesn’t free up women and only raises the expectation that, with a bunch of fancy gadgets, she should be able to put Marth Stewart-worthy plates on the table every night (her actual recipes look beautiful but are flavorless in my experience, btw).
Perhaps what seems special or new about the Instant Pot is that it combines some features of A and B. The dishwasher means, at the end of the day, when everyone’s tired, no one has to scrub the dishes by hand. That doesn’t change the fact you’re eating takeout on your plates, perhaps feeling guilty you can’t be the sort of mom who cooks a healthy, home-cooked meal every night. The instant pot allows you to enjoy the sort of dish one associates with having a stay-at-home parent (or domestic help) but at a “I have a commute and full-time job” level of time and effort.
I recently bought an Instant Pot at this board’s recommendation and am liking it so far. I never could understand the appeal of the slow cooker but what this allows me to do is make meals that would previously require an afternoon of attention, like red beans and rice or goulash, with a fraction of the effort and attention.
I don’t see a strong thesis here, first is the thin way in which the author thinks about kitchen labor from a century ago. Kitchen cabinets are just for order and piece of mind? No, cabinets rather than just shelves stop things from getting dusty and needing to be persistently clean. In a kitchen where all the families bread is being made a lot of that dust would be flour, and then that flour if left unclean would harbor insects who would destroy stores of food if left unchecked.
I would also disagree here
Not really, cooking scales pretty well for quite a few people with stoves and ovens. Making twice as much bread doesn’t take twice as much time, nor does preparing a larger roast, or most tasks in the kitchen. Most of the effort in real scratch cooking is in the preparation. The raising, butchering and slaughter of animals, plucking of foul, the scrubbing of root vegetables- these are the major time sinks and they were working their way out for the home cook by the time gas ranges were coming in. The masses of time in kitchens during the 50s that are cited were driven by more complex meals, with more dishes and ingredients and was a different process. Frankly refrigeration (both in home and for transport and in store) was probably the largest time saver for home cooks, allowing for masses of fresh food to be used while still preparing them with at volume, plus additional benefits like leftovers being more functional as full meals.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154563/sparta-myth-rise-fascism-trumpism?fbclid=IwAR3CZfpcmYhBqyCU7tK4yNgvG3kDIsiA9ps7HEiaoduv8kKQz4s8dBciECo
Argues that Spartans weren’t especially capable soldiers, but the myth of Sparta has been a longterm cultural poison.
One thing that snagged my attention was that the popularity of being “Spartan” has something to do with feelings of (masculine?) insufficiency. What if part of the hook of SJW is fear of moral insufficiency? In either case, exaggerated standards make the fear worse.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nvz72
The ancient Spartans left all the practical work of society, including commerce to women. It was very unusual in ancient Greece for women to be part of public life.
The myth of Sparta is what led to the torture of boys in British public schools, but somehow, it didn’t lead to any freedom for women.
Read/skimmed the whole thing before realizing that the author was named Myke Cole. Double-checked to verify that, yes, this is the same Myke Cole who writes profoundly meat-headed “military fantasy” novels. At least, the one I read was pretty heavy on the macho and light on coherence.
Leaving that aside (yes, circumstantial ad hominem), his argument seems to be that ornery men use the Sparta myth, therefore the Sparta myth causes or encourages said orneriness. Or something. More plausible explanation from my POV: men who were already ornery for other reasons will happily employ a pre-existing and somewhat well-known symbol rather than make up their own.
There is no historical evidence that the Spartans where espacially capabale soldiers, but had a great PR department. Most of their big wins happened when enemeys refused to make contact because of the Spartans reputation.
In cases when the enermy accepted battle their results were a lot more mixed.
BTW there is also no evidence that Spartans did anykind of rigorous military training except for marchtraining that mostly consisted in following the man in front of you.
Everything else I would file under “Do Video Games/movies/novels make people violent?”
This seems eerily similar though to the logic that forts are useless because more often then not if an attacker does attack, the fort falls. It disregards the fact that in order for a pitched battle to take place one side either has to be forced to engage or both sides have to be reasonable confident that they can win.
Also this article is incredible frustrating because it’s mixing pop-culture and politics (Bringing trump into this) and I can’t find where in the article it uses primary sources to argue that the quality of the individual soldiers was actually on par with their contemporaries, except maybe to point out that many years after the classical period had passed and sparta was a very different society that it was eventually conquered. You won’t find classicists that unironically source Frank Miller’s graphic novel, that’s not the same as saying that all of the contemporary accounts of the Spartans during the classical greek period were totally off the mark about the difference in morale and training between a spartiate as opposed to a citizen soldier hoplite or a persian levy.
Which is still an edge if the other city-states aren’t doing even that much
Not impressed with the article at all. The spartans were the leading city state in greece for a couple hundred years, and a few cherry picked examples at the end of that period don’t disprove the reputation they won in earlier centuries. That the roman republic eventually fell doesn’t mean that early romans weren’t stern republicans.
That isn’t true. Sparta was very powerful for a few decades after the Peloponnesian War but after that Greece was dominated by a mix of Macedon and various Greek confederations until the Roman conquest. Even right before Macedon ascendancy, Thebes was a bigger deal.
You’re right that spartan power doesn’t long survive the peloponnesian war, but the spartan period of ascendency I was referring to was ~550-370. I suppose I could have said a leading state instead of the leading state, but the point stands.
But it was the Athenians who were the premiere power of the fifth century. At best, we can say that Sparta was a regional power for a couple hundred years and were briefly ascendant for a few decades, which isn’t particularly impressive.
Athens was the premier power of the 5th century according to whom?
Yes, they made a sterling contribution to defeating the Persians, most notably their fleet, but remember the entire war was fought under official Spartan leadership – because the rest of Greece accepted Sparta as hegemon already.
In the mid-5th century, you have the Athenian empire, sure, but that’s more akin to a balance of power like the US and the USSR in the mid-20th century. Athens roamed a little more broadly than Sparta due to their fleet and their cultural inclinations, but the two sides were so well-balanced that the inevitable war between the two dragged out decades.
Remember, before Athens fully came into its own ~490 it was Sparta that routinely sent armies over to nose around in Athenian affairs, and when the Athenians found themselves in Darius’s crosshairs it was to Sparta that they appealed for aid. Basically, I think cassander’s characterization of Spartan ascendancy from ~550-370 is more accurate, although I would push it even further back to ~600 or so. Admittedly our sources get a lot more thin on the ground at that point.
Are you sure you have your timeline straight? Or are you referring to events I’m not aware of?
The great Athenian contribution to Persian defeat was the Battle of Salamis, which happened in 480BC. The Spartans didn’t take over Greek leadership until they won the Peloponnesian War in 404BC. In Salamis, the leader was Themistocles, an Athenian.
The Battle of Plataea was the nail in the coffin of Persian aggression in Greece, but that was only a year after Salamis. The Greeks were a joint force of Athenians, Spartans, and Tegeans.
Are we not counting Marathon now? Really?
I would add that, per the conventional historical view as I’ve read it, the Spartans needed Persian help to win the Peloponnesian War because they were fighting Athens–which was a naval power–boats cost money, and the Spartans were famously not all that wealthy. Their reputation for martial valor was solely centered around land battles between heavy infantry; nobody ever called them great sailors.
This, this. Athenians spent much of peace time scheming how to make money (or poetry, or whatever… for free males, it was a free society), and they used poor people as rowers in the triremes they could afford. Sparta gave up a lot to produce superior hoplites, and had neither tons of money for boats nor lots of free poor people to row them.
This historian did a whole series of blog posts on what he calls Spartan myths. Apparently the Spartan legend was actually invented by Herodotus. Before then, they were just notable for being bigger than other Greek city-states.
Note that the blog post actually says that the Spartan army was “unusually adept” compared to their proper comparison group. The guy is making the serious and weirdly common error of treating all of ‘antiquity’ as though it happened basically simultaneously; Spartan troops during the Peloponnesian War can be excellent (and, per literally every even vaguely contemporary source, were) without saying anything about Spartan performance against the Macedonian or Roman armies because Rome conquers Greece three hundred years after the Peloponnesian War. Different times, different Spartas, different military environments.
This is absolutely unrelated to the weird things people try and do with Sparta in modern political contexts, which I don’t want to talk about right now.
Did you read the whole blog post? He’s damning with faint praise. He says that compared to other Greek hoplites, the Spartans were slightly more adept, but not exceptional by any means.
Once you get past the hoplites, the Spartans were generally inferior. They were worse in regards to cavalry, light armed troops, siegecraft, and logistics, even compared to other Greek city states. He spends most of the post talking about Sparta during the classical period. Even during that period, their winning ratio is not that impressive. In the next part of the series, he talks about they blew their dominance a decade after the Peloponnesian War.
Sparta produced, by all accounts, consistently good hoplites at a time when other Greek states produced less-consistently less-good hoplites. But, since Sparta produced only good hoplites, full-stop, as soon as any problem not solvable by hitting it with a phalanx appears, Sparta is in trouble militarily, and no one could call their social/economic system anything other than a disastrous atrocity.
Also, that blog is amazing, and I’m really happy you linked to it – I still disagree with the author about how to interpret the Spartan reputation, but the man knows his stuff and I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.
I really enjoy his blog too. If you didn’t see it, he did a series on war elephants that I think is pretty interesting.
A few others have pointed out that “Ancient Greece” is an awfully broad time period. I’d compare statements like “Sparta was the most powerful and admired state in Ancient Greece” to “France was the most powerful and admired state in Medieval Europe”.
My understanding of Greek history is that the Greek poleis we all know and love (Athens, Sparta, Thebes, etc) evolved over hundreds of years during the Archaic Period from about 800 BC to 500 BC. During this time Greece was sparsely populated and primitive. What most people think of as “Ancient Greece”, the Classical Period, was from about 500 BC to 300 BC. During this time the Greek poleis started to act more like “states” than glorified villages with elders for a variety of reasons of which the most obvious is the external threat of domination from the East. During this time Sparta rose, peaking with victory in the Peloponnesian War and declining after losing at Leuctra.
The Archaic Period was preceded by the Greek Dark Ages, which followed the Mycenaean Collapse. The Classical Greeks understood this latter fact only in the vaguest, mythical terms; on the other side of the Collapse was the age of Homer.
The major Greek poleis each had some sort of semi-mythical founding tradition including a “lawgiver” or several who (reading between the historical lines) established a given polis in the anarchic post-collapse environment. Each polis developed during the Archaic Period and emerged into the Classical period, at which point all of the immortal words were written down about them.
What impressed Classical Greek writers about Sparta was not so much its military but that it had apparently preserved its culture and form of government pretty continually through the Archaic period back to its lawgiver, Lycurgus, rather than the usually-violent transitions between regimes that occurred in other poleis. (Plato also seems to regard Crete, of all places, as a similar repository of ancient wisdom — less strange now that we’ve found the Minoans.) This wasn’t some huge decisive advantage that everyone knew Sparta had over the other Greeks, but it was a definite point in their favor. Sparta was a little different than the other cities, and it was evident that somewhere in that difference they were probably doing something right.
Likewise the Spartan hoplites were at least been regarded as a cut above their fellow Greeks in the early Classical period. Not supermen, not unbeatable, but with a marked edge.
I find it hard to believe that full time soldiers with domestic affairs being managed by women commanding slaves would not produce more capable soldiers than part time soldiers.
Or is the argument that their hoplites weren’t more capable than full-time hoplites of other city states, or that their generals were no more capable?
It might depend on whether you’re looking at more capable soldiers or a more capable military– if you’re eliminating the contributions men could make to the civilian economy, it would be a loss, even if the women are contributing more than they would if they were kept out of public life.
In Pericles’s funeral oration, the argument against Sparta is that in Athens, each man is free to do whatever he wants whenever he wants when the city is at peace, yet they’re almost as good of soldiers as the Spartans who regiment their entire life around it.
And how did the wars with Sparta turn out for Athens?
Badly in the short term (Peloponnesian War), which I suppose you’re implying is all that matters to Pericles’s boast?
After freeing itself from Spartan puppet rulers and immediately condemning Socrates to death, Athens made a comeback ended by Philip of Macedon, and then encapsulated its cultural flourit for posterity. Sparta went into irreversible demographic decline but was still badass enough in Philip’s day that he didn’t risk going to war.
Hmm, I’m not that familiar with the history there, but my impression was that Sparta ran out of Spartans. Too many Helots to oppress and decimate and living in paranoia meant the men were afraid to enter into conflict?
Or is that all hearsay?
Sparta didn’t run out of Spartans, but it absolutely ran out of Spartiates, yes. Every estimate of the Spartiate population throughout the classical age paints an image of very rapid decline.
I read this article a few months ago and it got my goat enough that I felt motivated to write a blog post about it. Basically, I agree with theredsheep.
I don’t know about Cole’s specific case, though I have my suspicions, but a lot of antipathy to “Sparta” right now is really antipathy towards the type of people who really like the movie 300. Cole doesn’t seem all that familiar with actual ancient accounts. Cole certainly appears to be addressing those people rather than, say, Plato.
Wait, are there those who didn’t enjoy such a silly movie as 300?
If you do not and have never publicly displayed — especially as a habit — either a MOLON LABE or a Corinthian helmet logo, you don’t enjoy 300 as much as the people I’m talking about.
I consider 300 the most (Nazi-)fascist movie that I’ve ever seen and yes, that includes Leni Riefenstahl’s movies.
I think of ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ as a citizens-rights (particularly related to the “keep and bear arms” citizen/subject distinction) slogan–that’s the context in which I’ve generally seen it.
Molon Labe is definitely a guns-rights, libertarian thing. None of the guys I know, who thought 300 was the most god-awesome thing ever, ever uttered the phrase.
Contrast with their other favorite thing in the world, Borat. I still hear “you never get this, you never get this!” and “NOT!!!”
And I still listen to the Kazak national anthem, so….
My favorite double entendre of all time, was “ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ” across the chest of a tight black T-shirt worn by a curvaceous young woman at my local shooting range. I do not recall a Corinthian helmet (though I may have been distracted), and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a movie reference.
No. It was too stupid to even be funny. It was like “God of War” pretending to be history, complete with all the grunty homoerotic posturing and implausible fight choreography. And also pretty fascist in a Starship Troopers way, yeah.
Starship Troopers was satire, though.
I meant the book, which Heinlein meant every word of. “Class, what is the most ethical thing of all the things?” “SIR the most ethical thing is to go off and die for your country SIR!” “Correct; now prove it with ethics math.”
I’ve never actually seen the movie version. Am told it was good if approached from a certain angle.
@theredsheep
There is absolutely nothing fascist about SST the book. the line “The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation. ” far better captures the message of the book than your quote which, as far as I remember, does not appear in the book.
I’ve read the book multiple times. It’s good goofy fun, but it is so very, very hard-right militaristic. If you want to say, “it’s not fascist insofar as fascism does not refer to a system where all political power resides in the military, but only after they retire, and they vote democratically,” okay, sure, not literally. But it’s a ridiculous story all the same. My quote, of course, was tongue-in-cheek, but yours is a hoity-toity version of the second line.
I haven’t read the book, but if I remember the movie “Starship Troopers” correctly, after the infantry are trounced on the Arachnids’ homeworld, the white male sky marshal is fired and replaced by a black woman.
If Verhoeven wanted to convince me that the society he tried to satirize was “fascist,” there would’ve been better ways to go about it.
@theredsheep says:
(A) if you that system you describe has nothing to do with fascism, why are you calling it fascist?
(B) the military in SST does NOT control all political power. it has no political power because to wield power, as you say, you have to retire first. and the military is not the only way to get the franchise, as the book says several times. what you have to do to get franchise is risk your life on behalf of the rest of society. The military is only one way to do that, and a way that lots of people aren’t up to.
No, it isn’t. Yours glorifies war for its own sake. Mine does not. it’s the difference between “hoorah” and “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
SST shares with 300 the core idea that the pinnacle of human virtue is unique to men who make it their profession to kill other men (yes SST has people who are made to risk their lives in other ways, sometimes in ways that are engineered specifically to endanger them for no other reason, but it’s clear that this is a second-best for washouts). Other men may not be bad per se, but they are at best naive and weak–both works go out of their way to show pissant civilians messing things up–and society’s preservation depends on them being neutralized while the rough and manly men make the decisions. If you don’t want to call it “fascist,” okay, but it’s somewhere in the same vicinity.
@theredsheep says:
No, it doesn’t. it holds that the supreme virtue is protecting people from people who make it their business to kill others.
No one in SST is forced to risk their lives. that’s the whole point which is made explicitly and repeatedly, to be a useful signal of virtue, it needs to be voluntary.
Fascism is an actual ideology about nations striving together for glory, not a slur that means “anyone to my right I don’t like”. It and SST have nothing in common.
SST starts with a terror raid on a civilian population of aliens, to discourage them from allying with the aliens the humans are actually at war with. Our Hero is power-jumping around blowing up infrastructure and burning down the houses of people who can’t fight back in any kind of organized fashion, and having a great deal of fun doing so. That’s literally the opening scene of the book. It then goes on to justify war on the grounds that population pressure will inevitably force us all to tear each other to bits so the best men are the ones who allow us to kill before we’re killed. Lebensraum! Yes, there are distinct fascist overtones here.
The distinction between heroically standing against unreasonable aggression and being an aggressor oneself is not all that neat, even in this nakedly propagandistic book which paints a rosy picture of a society deliberately vesting all power in people who will risk their lives to get it. The actual practice of such a system would likely be much worse, since you’d see a lot of people with PTSD in power, plus a good-sized dose of the kind of person who enlists because he got bored with shooting dogs for fun and has no better prospects. Not that either group constitutes the majority of the military currently, but when you add that politics tends to attract brutal people as well, it’s plain that this story is not going to end that well. Not everyone is an aw-shucks boy scout type like the narrator, who saves his antisocial impulses up for the enemy.
EDIT: To be specific, we have strong anti-communism wed to unabashed glorification of the military and an expansionist ethos. It is generally pro-hierarchy as well, with the authority figures being universally wise and good. We are missing a specific father-figure, and humanity as a whole has been swapped in for the nation-state, but otherwise, yeah, fascist. The absence of purges and suppression should not surprise us in a work of propaganda; people glorifying the Soviet Union tended to leave out the famines and show trials, after all.
@theredsheep says:
Arguing that war is inevitable is neither fascist nor an invocation of Lebensraum.
That’s not now PTSD works.
Why would people vote for that guy, exactly?
Again, the book says the opposite of this, explicitly and repeatedly. It repeatedly takes a line like Faramir’s in LOTR, and calling that fascist because it speaks well of the warrior is absurd.
Again, no, not even close. You need to actually read what the fascists wrote and liked, not just throw around “boo outgroup.” If you want to see how fascists actually saw the glory in war, read storm of steel. Junger wasn’t a fascist, but fascists loved his work. He portrays ww1 as the greatest summer camp in history. Sure, people died, but the nation was working together, striving for a common goal, a goal made all the more glorious by the danger. It reads NOTHING like the description of war in SST.
Or, you know, read the doctrine of fascism I already linked you to. Heinlein was far too much of an individualist to fit in with anything remotely fascist.
Fascism is not defined purely by Mussolini (who coined the term, but was also pretty well inept, and I’m not wasting my time reading his gibberish). It’s common and accepted to extend the term to the Nazis, various South American dictatorships, etc. Yes, Heinlein also wrote TMIAHM, which is not at all fascist. This book, considered by what it says and not by the author’s other statements, is at least strongly inclined in that direction. The military is always right, violence and conflict with others are inevitable and the people who take part in violence are basically always good (one deserter excepted), and the most important thing is to fight communists. It’s sanitized, whitewashed fascism which bears little resemblance to the real thing, but again, propaganda.
We do not currently have a tremendous number of crazy and dysfunctional people in power because we do not restrict the franchise to people who were selected for, basically, a willingness to expose themselves to danger (officially for society’s sake, but that’s officially why people join the army now and in practice a lot of them join because they have nothing better to do). It’s fine for such people to have a say, and I know a number of veterans I’d trust with power, but if you give the entire society over to people who’ve risked their lives repeatedly you’re going to see some very messed-up dynamics build up within a couple of decades at the longest.
@theredsheep says:
The people who set up those other dictatorships set them up in imitation of Mussolini, because while you might not be impressed with him, they were! As were an awful lot of other people in the 20s and 30s, everyone from Lenin to Edison to Churchill spoke admiringly of him at some point. If you’re not going to bother reading what he wrote, then frankly, you’re ignorant about the subject of fascism and political history in that period. he was a towering figure.
other than conflict is inevitable, none of that is in the book. and even if it were, none of it is fascism.
this is a grossly inaccurate and lazy caricature of military enlistment that has no basis in reality. there are people who join the military to expose themselves to danger, but they are manifestly NOT the same people who do it because they have nothing better to do, because dangerous jobs in a modern military are actually a very small slice of the work, and they typically the most difficult jobs to get.
By your logic, we should expect that all generals are nothing but PTSD addled nutcases, because the only way to be a general is to be promoted through the ranks. That is not what we see.
Except that’s not a thing that actual fascists did very much. Maybe the Italians in Abyssinia; I’d have to check. Fascism was much bigger on invading and conquering places, with any terror being directed to that end.
Punitive expeditions where an organized military blows some stuff up and then goes away, leaving a stern “…and don’t make us come back and do that again!”, is historically associated with the European and arguably American colonial empires. See e.g. the UK’s aerial policing of Iraq. Likewise the bit where everybody considers this jolly good fun.
You’ll find no shortage of people to agree with you that the colonial empires of Europe and America were “fascist”, of course. But when you point to stuff that the colonial empires did a lot of in the course of maintaining imperial status, and that historical fascists mostly did not do, and say “see, look at the fascism inherent in the system”, then it seems like you’re just using fascism as a sneer word for anything vaguely martial and distasteful.
Apologies, that line started out before the one about the line between aggression and defense; I added the other stuff later, and didn’t think how it changed the implication. No, terror raids are not especially fascist; chevauchees and Sherman’s March were much the same thing, after all. I meant that only as a counter to “the war’s desolation,” which is IMO humbug. Rico’s having a shit-ton of fun fragging civilians, and the author never bothers to make him feel bad about it, or anything else except failing to be a good enough soldier.
All the soldiers in the book are pretty well perfect. Heinlein doesn’t say so outright, but there are no examples of military figures looking bad in the whole book. The closest you get is the one sergeant getting a dressing-down for not somehow preventing the recruit from hitting him and thus forcing them to tragically whip the hell out of said recruit before discharging him. Rico, of course, admires them for their sanctimony. The whole book is like that; it’s a depiction of a frankly terrifying system that works seamlessly because every person in it is GI Joe. The fact that it couches all this in cliched white-bread American virtue rather than quoting Mussolini strikes me as beside the point.
Is there a better word than “fascist” for “hard-right system glorifying conformity, rule by soldiers [yes, ex-soldiers, fine, a lot of lobbyists are ex-congressmen too], war as the most important pursuit, and fighting a communist bogeyman”? I’ll grant you that it’s not a perfect portrait, but the resemblance is close enough that I feel comfortable using it. This society, if implemented IRL, would rapidly become fascist or something very close to it. Its values are uncomfortably close to those of fascist states, only covered with smarm to make them palatable for 1950s American schoolchildren. It would work quite well as fascist propaganda, however Heinlein intended it.
I have two close relations who joined the military because they had no better prospects, and who had friends who joined or tried to join for similar reasons. I’ve had enough incidental exposure to the military to know that this is not all that uncommon. The book doesn’t present it that way, but again, the book stacks the deck. Nothing about it is plausible on a social level. Even an army where “everyone fights” would plainly not work. You’d be getting critical support personnel shot to bits in every fight.
I think I’ll leave it at that, if I may–I’ll try to read your replies, but we’re going in circles on this, I’m supposed to be doing something else, and frankly scrolling back up to find the reply link is driving me increasingly batty. Thanks for talking.
theredsheep:
In ST, the only people allowed to vote are people who have volunteered to serve the state. IIRC, most aren’t retired soldiers, they’re retired civil servants. And people who don’t volunteer seem to live perfectly fine lives, just without the vote. (Whether that’s how things would work out is arguable, of course, but that’s what I remember from the book.)
Has anybody else found themselves getting less tolerant of “computer bullshit” in the past couple years? The best way I can describe this is to talk about my hatred of interactions with self-checkout kiosks. I avoid the ones at my local Fred Meyer, because they seem to expect a certain pattern of movement between scanning and putting my purchases on the scale holding the bagging frame–“Please place your items in the bagging area. Oh, wait, I think you did place your items in the bagging area.” I’m fully confident that I could figure out the exact timing of placing my items and pattern of stroking the scale with my left index finger followed by my right ring finger to avoid this dialog, but I feel like I shouldn’t have to. Just take fuckin’ 2% extra on my groceries to pay a checker to deal with your stupid computer system so I don’t have to.
Another was when I was trying to use the self-check kiosk at McDonald’s. It seemed to take a bunch of touchscreen interactions to find my normal order of “#2 Medium (2 cheeseburgers),” then hitting a few more touchscreen interactions to make it take my card. Again, I’m sure I could figure out the muscle memory to do this, but why should I have to compared to just telling a checker, “#2 medium, please,” and then handing her a Hamilton, since I know that’s the smallest bill that will cover it. I don’t know that I will ever again use the self-checkout kiosk instead of going to the counter, and I think I might just stop going to McDonald’s if they force me to self-checkout.
Expanding this a bit, it’s almost infuriating that there are more and more places that are expecting me to use their app instead of just handing them money. Fuck you, I have a Windows Phone that I bought 5 years ago it it still does everything that I expect a cell phone to do (make phone calls, let me surf the internet, and use my Kindle app to read books on the train), and it’s outright insulting to expect me to spend $599 on a new digital toy to interact with you. Leaving aside the fact that I can spend $599 on stupid bullshit whenever I want because I’m a single person with a good job and still end up with an increase in my bank account at the end of my semi-weekly pay period; compare this to the homeless person I pass by on the way to work! Either take my cash or do without my business.
Wow I totally feel exactly the opposite.
That human is so much more likely to fuck up my order than the computer
Number of times a human cashier has messed up my order: maybe once or twice in my lifetime.
Number of times a computerized self-checkout thing has messed up my order, to where I needed a human to come over and fix something: once or twice a year, maybe more.
Where are you shopping? That’s a much better failure rate than I’m used to.
Meijer, Safeway, Giant Eagle, Safeway, Von’s, Ralph’s, Aldi, Tesco, Walmart, Coscto, Target, etc., plus various smaller local places in the various areas where I’ve lived…
That’s local to Middle Earth, isn’t it?
I’ve lived and shopped for groceries in (relatively, compared to most people I’ve met) many parts of Earth.
Which Aldi, North or South?
(Which Country?)
I live in the Midwestern US, and that’s the only region where I’ve shopped at Aldi.
The only Aldi calling itself that in the US is South. Aldi North has a corporate presence here, but only under the Trader Joe’s brand.
There are Aldis in Philadephia. They call themselves Aldi.
My understanding is that Trader Joe’s isn’t actually affiliated with Aldi, it’s just owned by the family that owns Aldi Nord. I’ve always heard that their corporations don’t have any real overlap, though Wikipedia is unclear on this.
Even Aldi UK and Aldi Sued GmbH have limited overlap, beyond the superficial.
You probably could find some products that are identical between the two, but it’d take some looking.
Alas, this Sceptered Isle lacks the bread vending machine thing.
Number of times a human cashier has messed up my order: maybe once or twice in my lifetime.
Maybe it’s getting past you? I get fast-food bloopers all the time – maybe 10% of the time. Diet Coke instead of Dr. Pepper, standard configuration hamburgers instead of special order (I don’t want onion), simply the wrong bag in the drive-thru, or sometimes they have accidentally given me extra food. Most recently I had two boxes of chicken instead of one. This may be partially because I’m a transplant on the ‘didn’t get your order exactly right’ because I have a Midwestern accent and I’m in the South, but when they accidentally give me the order for another car, that’s 100% on them. This has been helped recently by the display at the drive-thru speaker that shows you a text version of your order, but they still get it wrong sometimes.
Maybe you don’t do drive-thrus or special orders? It’s very hard to believe your claim.
In stores, I would have agreed with you that cashiers almost never made mistakes until I got married. Because I never checked the receipt. Now I know that they sometimes get some discount wrong. USUALLY what has happened is that the software has updated prices but the store displays were not updated. This isn’t really a ‘cashier error’ but the store has to honor the prices on their goods and the only way to ‘fix’ the problem is for the cashier to make the correction.
My fast-food orders are usually very simple, and if they mess something up it’s like, giving me mayo when I asked for no mayo. The kind of thing I’ve experienced computers messing up as well.
I am very confident about my statement about grocery store cashiers, though. I’m not a careless shopper, and if my bill feels bigger than it should be I’m definitely going to scan the itemized receipt. If cashiers do something that I see as something a computer could theoretically fix, in my experience it’s usually not by overcharging; it’s talking to the person in front of me for too long, or not being sure where my order begins and ends because they’ve failed to stock those little plastic bars that separate orders, or by not greeting me when I was expecting a greeting (whereas with computers I don’t expect a greeting at all).
Yeah, the thing you mentioned about prices updating does sometimes happen, and as you said it’s not a cashier error. The only error the cashier can make there is to not follow the policy of giving me whatever the lowest advertised price was. A computer cashier would need a human cashier to walk over, enter a code, and manually do that anyway.
I’m fed up with machinery that can’t take cash. There’s a negative utility associated with sending even the most trivial datapoint to the bank, the credit card company, the government, and in the worst (=usual) case hundreds of ad companies. I’d value it around minus 5-10$ per a simple purchase such as a lunch. That makes machine-only McDonald’s very expensive. Your valuation may vary.
You can get an Android phone for <100$, but expect all apps and the OS to spy on you. Not something that a Windows Phone user would worry about, though.
I would fully expect McDonalds (and most large scale businesses) to take both cash or card if they went full-on kiosk/machine. This is doable (see self-checkout at grocery stores as an example). McDonalds in particular I suspect has a decent chunk of their sales coming from people who can’t or are unlikely to pay with anything but cash.
Why wouldn’t a Windows Phone user worry about this?
I have actually stopped going to McDonald’s when it went full-on cashless machine.
Why wouldn’t a Windows Phone user worry about this?
Because Microsoft, like Google, is in business of showing you personalized ads. Look up “windows 10 privacy nightmare”. Also even when told not to, Windows 10 just can’t stop talking to Microsoft. Thus, even though Microsoft claims you can opt out of personalized ads, I wouldn’t be so sure. After all, Windows Feedback Option sends something to Microsoft daily; check out this advice:
I think if you need to check every so often that some spying shit hasn’t enabled itself, then you might want to shop for a different platform.
Sounds like an explanation of why they would worry about it 😉
Getting rid of cash seems to be the objective here.
In Sweden, a guy wasn’t able to spend a 100 gbp worth of cash, try as he might. China is also going cash-free; it’s even hard to use credit cards. They also have face-recognition payments, which is creepy and scary.
Both countries are socialist, although to different degrees.
I’m not seeing why. I use adblock most of the time so I rarely see ads, but when I do see ads I actually prefer ads targeted to me as the probability I’d find the product useful is slightly higher than otherwise.(But still very low.) I get 1.5% cash back with my chase credit card, so I always use it.
Although I’m infuriated by generic ads for things that I’d never buy and the ads themselves insult my intelligence, I like targeted ads even less, because they have all those problems AND they creep me out. Guess I’d rather feel just plain old misanthropic than misanthropic + creeped out.
You’re entrusting your complete data, including your name, address, browsing history, spending habits and psychological profile to completely untrustworthy people whom you don’t know with security practices exemplified by Equifax protecting customers’ data with the login “admin” and password “admin”.
Even if you don’t see right now any way you can be completely screwed by this, something might come up in the future. Imagine that in the future the Republicans achieve cultural dominance and start canceling Democrats. (I assume you’re a Democrat because otherwise you might’ve felt this problem already) We’ve already seen political campaigns targeted to particular psychological profiles – imagine religions doing the same. Or scammers.
Imagine burglars knowing when you’re not at home. Imagine the government mining your social media for signs of disagreement. No, stop imagining because I’m sure they do it already. Imagine every potential employer knowing exactly where on the autistic spectrum you are. Imagine every potential partner being able to buy your complete browser history for 10$.
You might not believe that buying a burger with a credit card will bring you a step closer to all of that. Maybe if you’re writing a Facebook post while sitting in McDonalds and posting photos to Instagram, it won’t, or rather, the burger’s not your primary problem. But once you remove your Facebook account and block its “connect” buttons with your adblock to prevent FB from tracking you, give it another thought.
Given the amount of people who use credit cards, what makes you important enough to target over anyone else?
I think targeted ads are overrated. I remember as a kid watching Nickelodeon and thinking “what’s with all these pharmaceutical ads?” The “rational” explanation was that it was targeted at the parents watching. And now I watch YouTube ads(there was a period when I didn’t have adblock, long story) and I see all these pharmaceutical ads obviously targeted at the elderly. Google knows exactly how old I am, I told them so when I signed up for my Google account. I think it’s a scam, I am a warm body google can use to sell ads to the pharmaceutical companies, and doesn’t care if it actually drives revenue.
I was thinking more of credit card history, which contains no secrets. I’m a right-wing populist, and my browser history is more concerning, still, cancel culture is harsh but also very stupid. The $PLC didn’t even know about Ron Unz’s Holocaust denial until he decided to tell them. If I ever get targeted I’ll just deny everything. I’m not gonna let it shut me up, while I don’t post explicitly political content on my public social media, I drop the occasional hint of crimethink.
I’ve thought about the possibility that some day, it could all be out there, every keystroke, every comment, records of keyboard interaction, every video view. There are some problems with this, all that data is massive and has to be stored somewhere. The government won’t be able to stop you from storing some of it on your hard-drive, but you can fit only a small amount of it there. More importantly though, this data would embarrass a lot more people, popular people. Remember the iCloud leak? Imagine that times a million.
@DragonMilk
Are you suggesting only one person at a time can be tracked?
@DragonMilk
I’m not important enough and I did not presume to be in the scenarios I’ve outlined.
@Alexander Turok
Oh so you’re a right-wing populist, but you’d never tell that to anybody on the Internet. Riiiiiiiight. Well, I hope Alexander Turok isn’t your real name.
There are some problems with this, all that data is massive
YouTube can offer 4K 60fps video to you for free – surely it would have no problem storing the info that Alexander Turok watched the video.
this data would embarrass a lot more people, popular people.
Yeah, and they’ll shrug it off, like Trump shrugged off various crap like Stormy Daniels. They can afford it because they’ll be left with enough connections anyway. But can someone like us afford it?
@ARabbi No, I’m assuming that *everyone* is tracked so unless you’ve got a target on your back, nefarious folk have bigger cows to milk
Remember the iCloud celebrity photo leaks, remember how outraged the WK’s were about that? Imaging that times millions of women, millions of WK’s running to their defense. I remember being in high school and browsing the Facebook pages of girls I knew and thinking “this is all gonna be wiped clean in ten or fifteen years, oh, me, I was in the church choir.” Thinking about “every potential partner being able to buy your complete browser history for 10$,” remember you’d have the same ability to snoop on them.
@DragonMilk You never know when someone would have a reason to ruin your day.
In addition, one of the strong limiters of any tyranny and related shennanigans is cost of information. Easy access to your record would enable the government to become more oppressive at the same cost.
Tinfoil conspiracy theory:
Bills have serial numbers on them. Bank ATMs and cash machines could be semi-reliably tracking you by the bill serial numbers.
Depends on how long a bill circulates before going back to a bank. If a bill tends to go ATM->merchant->bank, it works pretty well, and I suspect this is often the case. As for tinfoil… sorry, it’s quite plausible. The only issue is a lot of people in the ATM business would have to know. But then, a lot of people knew about the NSA listening rooms too.
I’m fed up with sticky prices hiding inflation by lowered quality of service disguised as convenience (yes, I always wanted to put the tags on my own luggage! I’d just love to use your automated online help desk rather than talk to a human being on the phone!).
This is exactly the root of my issue. I don’t object to to the self-service kiosks as a concept, but that a combination of poor design choices (input lag on the touchscreen, non-intuitive menu layouts, etc.) makes the experience worse than interacting with a person and letting them handle any of that that may be present in their system. If the self-service experience was smooth and easy (and I’m not coming up with one offhand) I’d be indifferent between the two.
I don’t even necessarily care if it takes slightly longer for a person to put it in to their checkstand/computer than doing it myself, it’s just that I want the person that has to fight with it to be somebody else. I can stare into space while they find the right menu option, rather than me having to hunt and peck–made worse by the fact that the touchscreens always seem to have a few tenths of a second lag that means you have to pay close attention to make sure it took your input, so it’s a higher burden that I don’t feel I should have to do. Plus, if their idiot marketing team want to ask three times what size meal I want (an example from the McDonald’s kiosk), their employees will learn to punch the right button by reflex rather than me having to figure out what the interface is asking me several times during the interaction.
Oh, oh, I think I know the answer to this one!
It’s public library computers’ print kiosks these days.
It’s become so standardized and consistent.
I was just marveling at it the other day.
(though I now realize that my main data points are high-budget libraries, and that only 2 cities are represented.)
Much more pleasant than bothering librarians about an error that some kludged-together system gives.
(and every library had a DIFFERENT kludged-together system for print jobs!)
Phone trees are infuriating, but I’m fine with the luggage system. I’d rather spend five minutes fiddling with the touchscreen for baggage tagging then spend the same five minutes in line, and it really does seem to cut down on that.
The annoyance level of self checkouts varies from country to country. Here in the Netherlands they don’t take cash, but also don’t have any form of bagging area scale. There are usually a couple of employees there (fewer than one per checkout) who will occasionally check that what you have put in your bag matches what you have paid for, and also check your ID if you are buying anything age-restricted.
The worst I’ve seen was at a Shop-Rite in the US. As well as the bagging area nonsense, if you pay cash and want change you have to take your receipt to a human cashier…
Oh geeze, that sound terrible. I’ve never seen one that takes cash and doesn’t give out the change automatically, although occasionally the machine might be out of change, at which point an attendant does have to give you the change. Is it possible that’s what happened at the Shop-Rite?
It’s the
colddismal equations. Burdened cost of cashier versus amortized cost of automation sufficient to replace cashier, minus some factor which covers losses to to irritation with automation. As wages and benefits go up (either by market forces or fiat), it’s going to be tilted towards automation. And likely the automation will get better (reducing cost and irritation), whereas wages aren’t likely to drop barring a recession.As for the ones who require a current cell phone just to pay, I haven’t run into that. Whole Foods requires it for their stupid discount card, although actually there’s a way to do it with just a phone number.
Absolutely. My time is valuable to me, and these days the main use of computerized interfaces is to make tasks take more time than they did before, so as to save time/money for the business providing the poor service.
@vendors – I won’t install your app, because the main things it will give me are more advertising, less privacy, and possible security issues. It’s also likely to be so confusing/hard to use that I’ll require an in-person tutorial to figure out how to use it. (E.g. the app that lets me control my hearing aids, which I *did* install, for fairly obvious reasons.)
I was an early adopter of a lot of computer tech. But these days, I visit bank tellers in preference to using the ATM. (Which doesn’t recognize all the checks I want to deposit, and is positioned in full sun – with a screen that can’t be read in such conditions – but no lighting at night – with no shelf etc. to put things on.) The cost of this policy is that I have to follow “bankers’ hours” when interacting with my credit union, but that’s easier than coping with the POC their ATM has become.
*POS
POC has another meaning 😀
I went through “point of contact” and “person of color” before I figured out it expanded to “piece of crap”.
“That’s easier than coping with the Person Of Color their ATM has become.”
OK, so I’m familiar with the SFnal concept of ordinary computers achieving personhood, but how are you supposed to tell that the machine is or isn’t white??
Who are you to dictate the culture your toaster identifies with?
Oh dear. I guess I’ve outed myself as seriously non-woke, even though of liberal inclination. As Nornagest figured out, I intended this to be an acronymn for “piece of …”
I’m the opposite, I’m frustrated that my local Wal-Mart doesn’t have self-checkout lines.(I presume because of the risk of crime in my neighborhood, the other Wal-Marts in my area do.) At McDonald’s I prefer the human to the self-order machine when there’s no line, but always go the self-order machine McDonald’s when there is a line.
It infuriates me that California made buying liquor illegal in self checkout. I would choose self checkout 100% of the time, because I’m usually faster than the actual employees. In almost every case I would rather deal with a computer than a live person.
I’ve rarely had issues with self-checkout, but half the time that I go to the store I’m in line behind two or three people who are unbelievably, incredibly slow, slower than you can imagine, slower than I thought possible. It’s a herculean effort swiping each item. Paying takes eons. Bagging things is another eternity. I’m faster at self-checkout, but everyone else is so very much slower.
Grocery stores are the weird exception for me. I’d happily prefer to use automated systems for nearly everything else- I don’t want to talk to idiot airline staff (they will tell you things are impossible that you can finish on your phone standing in front of them before they finish talking), I don’t want to convince a coffee clerk that yes, really, your menu does offer that product, I don’t want to trust a waiter to carry away my credit card when every time I’ve had my credit card number stolen, that was why, etc., etc.
But the grocery store self-checkout has several major issues that disqualify it. First, and most importantly, half or more of my items by count will be fresh produce (why else does one regularly shop at a true grocery store?!), and those all need to be hand-selected from their byzantine catalog system and then either weighed or separately counted, which slows things down dramatically compared to the trained clerk that has all the codes/locations memorized (well, except for the times I buy fresh turnips, since it appears noone else ever does). Second, any liquor purchases require a human to come over anyway, negating the small benefits of the self-checkout to begin with. Third, it’s difficult or impossible to make nonstandard requests, such as “add a bag of ice that I’ll grab on the way out the door” or “I’d like my $20 back in the form of four $5s, not one $20”. And fourth, errors seem to be quite too common, probably due to the significant complexity and wide audience base. Scales will be broken or misaligned, scanners obscured, touchscreens cracked or requiring large force to recognize a touch, etc.
@DinoNerd >
You are my hero!
Sometimes fine, sometimes not.
Apps are the devil. Concert ticket services that do not give me a pdf option (either they mail it to you or you have to download an app that you can’t screenshot) are the worst.
Self-order/checkout, though, I’m mostly okay with. At the local McDonald’s, often the touchscreen kiosk often has special deals you’ll never see at the counter. On the other hand, I’ve also seen limited time offers on the McD website that weren’t updated to the kiosk, so I had to go to the counter to order.
For airlines, kiosk check-in is mostly good. For re-booking, generally I’ve had better luck with phone or counter service (it depends on the each situation for whether counter or phone service is better) than with re-booking via website, since I can get re-booked by a person without paying for an entire new flight. In one case, they even re-booked me to a different airline, without my having to pay extra, which definitely isn’t possible via website.
Exactly how I feel about my flip phone.
I love self-checkout and use it all the time. Give me more options where I don’t have to deal with a human, please.
I’ve had positive experience with self-checkout. So far very few places have self-checkout at home: some of the larger Tesco stores were the first, then Ikea, then this year the Spar next to me joined. A few of the McDonalds restaurants also have touchscreen order terminals. In all of these places, they’re not the only option, there’s always a full human cashier as well. The systems all seemed to work well whenever I tried it, I saw little of the interface problems that CatCube complains about. Yes, occasionally a human employee needs to intervene, but that’s not a big problem, as the human cashier always intervenes in the alternative. Yes, some customers are slow to use the self-checkout. But firstly, the point of self-checkout is that the shop can have three self-checkout stations open for the price of one cashier, the end result is generally that the checkout queues in total move faster, which is a win whether I use self-checkout or not. Secondly, I believe the customers who are so slow at self-checkout are the same obnoxious ones who slow down cashiers as well.
You mention that some of the self-checkout terminals don’t allow cash. I don’t consider this a problem, because in the supermarkets or fast food restaurants where these systems are used, I want to pay by card anyway. Yes, I also insist that the option to pay by cash has to be there, but the cashiers letting you pay by cash is enough for that.
The one bad self-checkout system is the ticket machines for local public transport. The machines themselves generally work well, and I do prefer buying my bus passes from them over buying from the human cashiers. Yes, the machines could have been designed better, but I’m now at least impressed by how resistant they proved to be against vandalism. The drawback is that machines came with new form of physical tickets. These are all printed on the same blank purple paper with a printer in the vending machines. These have replaced all the old tickets that came on different pre-printed paper templates. You get the new tickets even if you buy at a chasier (with rare exceptions not relevant here). The new tickets are easy to counterfeit, and hard for controllers to effectively verify. The ink rubs off the tickets, so if I buy a three month pass, it ends up being almost unreadable at the end of the third month. Yearly passes are still sold, and I can’t imagine how they work.
No, I don’t have a smartphone, I don’t want to have one, and won’t use an app to order anything. Most fast food restaurants here have that option now: McDonalds, Burger King, KFC at least. This doesn’t seem to be a problem to me, because the service in those restaurants didn’t become worse when I order in person (or in the touchscreen terminals in McDonalds).
Automated customer service phone lines can be bad, and Telekom adopting one was half of the reason why I switched mobile phone provider from them to Vodafone a year and a half ago.
Challenge: design anti-Twitter
Goals:
– Get the silent majority to talk freely again
– Minimize virtue signaling
– Minimize bullying/real life consequences
– Minimize hate-reading
– Discourage big hypes
– Encourage thoughtfulness
– Create world peace (optional)
Share your design.
My idea: ChatForum (mix between the two)
– Messages disappear over time, like tears in rain
– Size of groups is capped
– Lurking is only allowed temporarily
– No direct links to messages can be shared
– No up/downvoting
– New accounts have a 1 day wait period before they can do anything
Discouraging lurking might encourage low-quality posts from people who’d like to read the forum.
What came of that experiment of requiring unique sentences?
I considered your first point, but I was thinking of a cafe-like model. It’s fine to nod along or to just say “sure,” but not to listen in while not participating at all.
I don’t know what experiment you are referring to.
Requiring every post to be unique, as a way to filter out low-effort content. It was first tried with a bot in the XKCD IRC, and then ported to a 4chan board called /r9k/. The bot got removed, although the board still exists. I think it’s decent for filtering out basic “Same” or “lol” posts but not useful for altering community dynamics on a larger scale.
Source: Knowyourmeme
Sometimes this works really well for sorting the interesting, articulate, and useful stuff from the less so. I wonder how much this has to do with the phrasing (Steam uses “Agree” and “Respectfully disagree”, which I think is a pleasant way to present it), or the type of content (e.g., Stack Exchange seems to work well, including accumulation of karma points).
Like everything else, voting breaks down when it is used to signal tribal membership (Twitter) or as a narcissistic measurement of your worth (Facebook).
Stack Exchange is/was very strict about aiming for an environment that produces good questions and answers, not anything more social than that.
I don’t think #1 is possible – archiving things online is trivial. It might obscure a user’s overall history (assuming the volume is too big to just record every chat), but anything controversial enough will surely be stored somewhere.
Pizza.
This is very very difficult to do, for the same reason junk food is addictive: it’s a combination of tastes that’s rare in the ancestral environment, but important when you find it.
I was thinking of the SSC subreddit these days. You have like-minded bright people that gather there and… 95% of the time do culture war. Last I’ve been there (before the motte) the CW thread had easily a factor of 10 more comments than the rest of the threads combined.
Also, I had a small revelation yesterday evening. I’m in a middle of a somewhat stressful period and relaxed my diet, so I was enjoying the next door pizza with a couple of sauces – and it hit me how GOOD it made me feel. Not in a “delicious” kind a way, but in a deeper, comforting, “all is good with the world” way. That’s probably why being fit is such a good social signal these days – it means your life is enough in order that you don’t have to rely on comfort food.
Add to this the bunch of books I read that say that obesity either leads to or is caused by brain damage to the parts that manage self control when seeing food. This is pure speculation, but I wouldn’t be shocked to find Twitter or reddit or CW make similar changes. They do look a lot like addiction from the outside.
———————
Trying to be constructive, I’d lower my expectations. Corralling places with better fences / more privacy would be an option. Find the ideal number of participants in conversation and aim for it. Also, re-reading Scott’s article on levels of conversation would be a good start for this… but I need to get on my second cup of cofffee and work.
I’ve seen claims that there’s no substitute for active moderation. Leading by example might also be needed.
This being said, some things like not having upvotes/downvotes might help, though I think lesswrong.com is in fairly good shape.
How much do you think the character limit at twitter affects the quality of conversation? My impression is that people just do chained tweets when they want to write something longer. Did going from 140 characters to 280 change much?
Never did Twitter. Didn’t see the appeal in the beginning, and more I hear about it less I want to.
The topic is at least as old as digg – why do communities suffer a huge hit in quality after they pass a certain size? Reddit is the only one that partially solved it by splitting into (not very isolated) subreddits.
My idea at the time was to have a complex system to interpret votes, with a subjective human component as a “seed”. You have PrimeModerators that chose comments and posters that set the tone you want from the forum, than use automated systems to promote similarly-voted comments. Put as much AI as you want into the system – nowadays we have some pretty good tools for that.
Off the cuff suspicion is that it has to do with losing any familiarity with the other members of the community (too many people to keep track of to feel like you “know” them).
Indeed. Moderation also tends to become bureaucratic, goal-oriented and such, creating a conflict between the members and those in power.
@Radu Floricica
The idea is more to set conditions where good outcomes can happen without fighting the incentives and rules too much, rather than the opposite.
I’m not convinced that the problem is amenable to a design-based solution.
As I’ve mentioned at some point, I was an early Twitter adopter (in fact, I’d quit before it became the toxic cesspit it is now – or at least towards the beginning of the transformation) and I remember when you could still have productive discussions on it (at least: as productive as we get here).
The goals you outline are human-centric and demand human-centric solutions. Trying to solve them via software design will only lead to a different set of failures.
Here’s a bunch of human-centric solutions to some of the identified problems. Unsurprisingly, these look a lot like stuff we do to deal with such problems offline.
1. Minimize bullying/real-life consequences – punish bullies, refuse to exact real-life consequences for things not deserving of same. The accepted offline answer to “Bob has opinions I don’t like” when I was growing up was “Well, don’t listen to Bob”. It is a good answer.
2. Minimize hate-reading – friends will tell friends when they’re acting like asses.
3. Minimize virtue signalling – same as above/don’t reward virtue signalling.
4. Discourage big hypes – don’t believe big hypes and tell your friends when they’re being credulous.
5. Encourage thoughtfulness – can’t be done. “You can lead a horse to water…” and all that.
6. Get the silent majority to talk freely again – listen.
None of the above require changing the fundamental Twitter design. The only real problem with Twitter is the character limit, but that simply means more tweets to say what you need to. Annoying, but not game-breaking.
4Chan qualify for the first 5. It certainly doesnt encourage thoughtfulness, but it defuse thoughtlessness by making it fleeting, irrelevant and inconsequent.
And /pol/ bought us all closer to world peace through mutual hatred of everyone else. In the war of all against all, everyone’s ennemy is everyone’s friend.
I think designing technology is easy, but designing social mechanisms is very, very hard. You can build a system, but you can’t predict what culture will arise around it.
A first question is how the system gets paid for. That drives a lot of other stuff–if you’re living on ads, then you get a different system than if you’re living on membership fees or donations or some other thing.
It seems to me that a lot of the really toxic dynamic on Twitter has to do with the incentives of the users of Twitter. A small fraction of people can rise in importance and influence quickly by getting attention, and bullying/hate reading/outrage farming are probably good strategies to get attention quickly. This can sometimes be parlayed into real-world success or influence. Minor internet writers can become better-known by getting a lot of attention on Twitter.
The toxic effects of Twitter seem to me to be largely driven by its influence on media people. It’s like Twitter is this super addictive drug that is perfectly targeted at journalists and other media types. It shortens the decision loop of high-profile journalists and media outlets, which makes them less reliable and more inclined to run with the herd. And it also serves as a kind of ideological focal point–lots of people end up all kind-of coordinating on some ideological statements or ideas, and as far as I can tell, this happens without a whole lot of critical thinking or reflection. It’s not a rational process of individuals deliberating and deciding what they believe, it’s a social/political process that converges on positions that everyone then feels obliged to profess or at least not to contradict.
The whole context collapse thing is also a dynamic you’d like to avoid.
I’d like more high-quality discussions that take time and attention and brainpower to engage with–basically what the high end of podcasts look like, but with an active SSC-like comment thread. (Though there’s not time to engage with very many such discussions.) I’m quite surprised at the quality of the best podcasts, sop maybe there’s enough demand for that sort of thing to actually drive a successful internet business.
Twitter is extremely well-suited to bullying, because of retweeting. Other people don’t even have to click a link to see the offensive content (which also means that they don’t get to see the context).
I think that high-quality is in large part a matter of user selection and suppressing mediocre content, which conflicts with encouraging people to speak their mind.
How much of this is based on design choices made arbitrarily, and how much is based on design choices made to be profitable? Because a system which can’t generate sufficient revenue won’t get made.
Hmm, LiveJournal worked pretty well. So did mailing lists, which were made much easier to manage by things like Yahoo and Google Groups. Those are gone now, except for die-hard techies (me), and people who care a lot about content policies (many amateur writers and artists). OTOH, Usenet was a cesspit every September, and eventually became unusably bad all year round.
What was the difference? Any idiot could join a Usenet group, and you couldn’t get rid of them. You could control what you read/saw – kill files proliferated. But that merely delayed the end. There were also technical issues, making usenet expensive to support, especially towards the end of its life.
LiveJournal and mailing lists both had good moderation tools, and left that moderation in the hands of users. They also allowed pseudonymity – allowing people to disconnect different parts of their lives, if they felt it advisable. And posts could be as long as anyone cared to make them.
I don’t think any of these guaranteed a good culture. But I think they all made good cultures more likely. Another benefit was that they enabled cultures some folks would consider bad, which could be taking place right next door without those people noticing, or at least without them being enabled to drop by and complain about the “bad behaviour”.
Mailing lists are still around, and still better than the alternatives – I’m a “list angel” for one that has been going for about 25 years and is generally excellent. It’s for a very obscure topic (Balkan music and dance), has about 900 members, and has needed very little moderation.
PS to DinoNerd – I was not aware of your username when I chose mine, else I would have picked something not so similar. I hope no-one confuses us because I’m not at all nerdy, tho most of my friends are. 😉
Things that make Twitter less toxic (like removing all like/retweet/follower metrics) would also make it much less popular. And that wouldn’t necessarily create a positive environment, just a quieter one. To create a positive space like that, you probably need some strong social norms and commitments as well as the absence of the things Twitter does to encourage the opposite.
It’s always an uphill battle against human nature, though.
Perhaps, although many people enjoy more positive and less popular environments (for example, most people meet a relatively small group of friends).
The toxic thing are the people (well, some of them).
Twitter-like architecture can support the worst aspects of humanity by making some things more acceptable (is my comment just a short scream with no argument? hey, don’t blame me, Twitter made me do it) and some things easier (retweeting an attack call to thousands of followers). An anti-Twitter architecture could make it less convenient, but that will only go so far. Long arguments are not necessarily intelligent or peaceful.
Also, Twitter will continue to exist. Anything you write on the new platform, someone can make a screenshot of it, and share the screenshot on Twitter. Internet is a connected pool, and you can’t balance pissing in one side of the pool by merely not pissing in the other side.
I imagine that an anti-Twitter could be somewhat like Slack, in the sense than you can easily participate in multiple groups, having a different identity (username, photo) in each of them. You could even enforce it by requiring the group-specific username to be globally unique (i.e. if I am “Viliam” in one group, no one can be “Viliam” in any other group; neither me, nor anyone else). Of course that wouldn’t stop me from calling my accounts “Viliam1”, “Viliam2”, etc. But it would still give me some plausible deniability, where I could say that “Viliam9” was already taken by someone else, so it’s not me.
But anything else… would depend on group culture and moderation.
I was thinking more about being fairly safe from retroactive problematization. That seems mostly achievable.
The screenshot problem is a tricky one.
One thing you could do is construct a language unique to your social network and mandate that all posts be in that language. This would render all screenshots meaningless.
Aplaŭdinda ideo. Bonvenu al Ardez-Stel-Kodeksa sekreta forumo, samideano!
– Basically still twitter (you write short updates which anyone can read).
– But your ability to message strangers is limited.
– New accounts cannot communicate with anyone who doesn’t follow them. This includes direct messages, tagging, and replies.
– Mature accounts can communicate with people who don’t follow them, but if you do that and then they block you, you lose the privilege for X days.
– This is implemented via shadowbanning: you think your replies are being sent, but they’re only visible to people who follow you.
I don’t know what “hate-reading” and “big hypes” are.
There are some complicated rules around what counts as a “new account”, and what constitutes an attempt to message a stranger versus connect with an IRL friend, and how many days you get shadowbanned depending on how many offenses you’ve had. These rules are not published anywhere, to prevent gaming.
Hate reading is reading comments by people who make you upset, because the rage feeds you.
When saying “big hypes,” I was thinking of the moralistic shit storms that propagate Twitter, where a ton of people post about a topic in a period, while not talking about it at other times.
I don’t have a proposal for changing (or fixing) many things at once. But I am curious about a specific change to twitter and to many other websites. What if there was no option to like, favorite, or upvote something, but there was an option to dislike something? All posts would display in a prominent way the number of people who disliked your contribution. How would it change twitter?
Yes, Minister on education.
Thoughts?
It misses the biggest problem. Not that education couldn’t improve a little here or there. It’s not the town councils or local governments that are the main impediment though. It’s us!
We just aren’t cut out for this round the clock beating with theories and facts for vaguely specified reasons.
Let me start by saying that like most “Yes, Minister” I’ve seen it before, and it’s as brilliant as always.
I don’t know Latin, but I do maintain my skills on pencil-and-paper arithmetic. I can also use a slide rule, but that’s more just because I find them fascinating. The pencil-and-paper thing is because I hate being solely reliant on a mechanical device that I don’t understand from first principles. Also, because I play pinochle at lunch with my boss and having to pull out a calculator to add the score would be super embarrassing.
The wider issue that it identifies with students being bored is valuable, though. I’m an engineer. However, all that means is that I produce very precise artwork that supposedly tells a tradesman (calling @Plumber) how to build something. I really enjoyed school, but most people who went into the trades feel like every hour of classroom work was sucking their soul out through their left nostril. My artwork is useless without them. Our modern society needs us both to actually function, and I hate that years and years of classwork are being privileged over being able to build something, which typically requires hands-on, rather than classroom, experience. We really need to stop looking down on vocational school as “lesser” than college.
I think the real issue with education is that you get what you measure. How do you measure if someone knows math? You give them a math problem and ask them for the solution. This optimizes teaching people how to get the solution to math problems and only teaching them mathematics insofar as it’s useful to that end. For example, they have no need to know how pi is derived or even what pi is. They only need to memorize the relevant formulae and there you go.
Well the problem is *most* mathematics have no direct practical application because unless you are a PHD developing new theorems virtually all *computation* can and is done with machines.
But since any random test of mental ability tests the ability to perform any other mental task, test scores on the ability to derive pi will indicate the person might be good at operating the software that solves the practical business problems. (perhaps involving the pi constant)
Beyond reading writing and arithmetic it’s unlikely that any curriculum would survive the changing needs of modernity.
Most things learned in school in general have no direct practical application. I learned how to write but I have never, outside of a school context, written a five paragraph essay. The question is what theory we choose to teach and we’ve chosen to teach to what the government measures, which leads to cargo cults.
I haven’t watched Yes, Minister. I have been wasting my life.
The most important question is, what sort of education enables people to write something that good?
Seriously, I suspect the underlying problem is lack of a clear vision of what education is for, so instead we have a system is running on habit.
Also, I have a feeling that children are separated from adults who are doing visibly useful work, and this eliminates one major sort of motivation.
To paraphrase Humphrey, going to the university is probably enough. Either of them will do.
As an aside, amongst old BBC tv shows, I strongly recommend “I, Claudius” for a 10-episode theatrical depiction of the life of the Emperor Claudius.
Seconding the I, Claudius recommendation. Brian Blessed as Augustus is absolutely wonderful.
It’s important to note that YM, especially in its early seasons, is practically a documentary despite being presented as farcical satire.
One of the major sources the writers drew upon was Richard Crossman’s “Diaries of a Cabinet Minister”, which are pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: Crossman was Minister of Housing and later Secretary of State for Social Services in Harold Wilson’s government in the late 1960s, and Crossman kept detailed diaries during that period which were published as memoirs after Crossman’s death. The writers apparently also relied heavily on private interviews with two senior members of Wilson’s political staff (Marcia Falkender and Bernard Donoughue) and some anonymous senior civil servants.
Has something happened in the month or so to popularize the term “Overton window?” I’m suddenly seeing people use it (often incorrectly) places other than here. It’s a bit disconcerting, like suddenly hearing your grandmother use teenager slang.
Can you say more? I, at least, haven’t noticed this, where are you seeing the term that you wouldn’t have expected to?
Mostly Reddit (where I’ve seen it misused as “you’re extremist and you can tell I’m right because Jargon) & real-life conversations. Possibly in random articles I’ve read over the last few weeks. It just struck me because I’ve seen/heard it several times recently when before that my only exposure to it was from political science classes and the delightful nerds around here.
The term “Overton Window” has been used on some irregular basis in news coverage of politics for quite a long time. Long enough that I don’t remember when I read/heard it first.
Might be worth checking google analytics. Use of phrases like this spread exponentially. It might have nothing to do with this month necessarily and just the fact that it finally ‘spread’ to peope you noticed.
Otherwise The only thing i can think of *in the last month* is something involving certain conservative activist groups where people were claiming that the leaders of said group were taking political positions to the left of Obama’s 2008 campaign.
…So your saying that discussing the Overton window has entered the Overton window?
So, tuberculosis. Another one of those diseases where you get a treatment but it doesn’t really change the already-downward trend. Not just a fat marker on a log-log graph either. Wikipedia has a graph. Streptomycin helped a bit, a vaccine not at all. So what caused that mad pre-1947 drop? Anti-spitting campaigns? Maybe, though there seems to be some drop before that.
I would log transform it. In log terms, streptomycin accomplished as much in 10 years as had been achieved in the previous 80. In absolute terms, much less. But it is definitely worth asking what happened in those 80 years. My guess is always sanitation and nutrition, but if that’s right, it’s pretty hard to tell.
I always quote Lewis Thomas:
What, specifically, do you mean about individual treatment not affecting trends? This is clearly not true in the literal sense, but there are any number of artifactual factors which could be involved at the population level depending on definitions.
EDIT: word choice.
It’s a reference to this SSC post
Pausterization? Infection by milk seems to still happen in third-world countries.
Have very close elections gotten more common recently? Are there any metrics tracking this? And if so, do we have any insight into causes? I can tell a speculative story about turnout arms races and candidates getting better at figuring out and appealing to the median voter, but that’s pure guessing.
my guess is that in yesteryear, governor of kentucky was just not a big national story.
Speculation from the GWBush election: major parties have gotten equally good at campaigning, so close elections are more likely. I have no opinion about whether this is true.
I think that’s just how it looks like because we’ve had two very important elections that are close to a tie, and their effects are still important so we remember them: the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. Most other elections weren’t that close to a tie.
At the age of 26 with only a single failed relationship under my belt, in my darkest moments I fantasize about a technocratic solution to the massive coordination problem that is modern dating. With the fertility problems that plague the modern world I can see such a thing feasibly being implemented in a country like China, Singapore, or Japan. It would be used to facilitate matchmaking and eventual marriages so as to help remedy failing birth rates; in this light this discussion won’t be entirely fantastical. I’ll briefly explain a bare bones implementation of such a system that I’ve been thinking about:
0. A website much like any modern dating website.
1. Mandatory enrollment at the age of 23, voluntary at 18.
2. Psychological and cognitive evaluation.
3. Attractiveness evaluation, on the basis of some machine learning system.
4. Let the algorithm use this information to match people.
5. Options, filters, etc, for those who trust their own judgment over the algorithm.
Perhaps some people sign up and never update their information ever again, but I imagine that most people would use rather than not use, given the massively expanded pool to choose from when compared to other apps on the market. I suppose some would use merely for casual sex, rather than relationships, but I’ll say that’s more of a feature than a bug. Maybe this exacerbates inequality in the dating market as well? Hypergamy to the extreme? I suppose some might complain about availability for the poor who don’t have computers or smartphones or whatever, but… we’ll just put those people aside for now as this is at least supposed to be eugenic.
How would you feel about a system like this being implemented? Any improvements? How do you feel about systems like these in principle?
How do I feel about governmentally mandated match-making for eugenic purposes?
Bad.
dude, just get Tinder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykxMqtuM6Ko
anyway, your system sounds like any other dating ap just opt out instead of opt in
Yes, exactly. Also ideally it would be run scientifically and have strong sorting on the basis of real measured traits. I prefer this method to answers to questions. I think that questions are just a proxy for what we actually want to measure most of the time, which is personality. Of course there are some questions that actually are valuable, the obvious ones you know. “Do you want to have kids?” Those sorts.
How do I feel about injecting yet another bureaucracy into life (my future children’s lives at this point)?
Pretty negatively.
There are already online dating sites like OkCupid. What positive things does this bring to the table that that doesn’t? Ok Cupid has (4) and (5). And since people can just lie on psychological evaluations, it’s got a psychological evaluation (half of (2)) too. I think Ok Cupid also ranks hotness too; that’s (3).
So basically you’ve added (1.) It’s mandatory. I hate (1) because mandatory stuff is rarely a positive good; sometimes it’s the least bad thing but this isn’t one of those cases (like mandatory car insurance if you drive a car on the roads). If someone doesn’t want to spend the extreme low effort required to get on OkCupid (I sure didn’t; I met people the old-fashioned way), why would you want to make them do it? It’s like a punishment to the person who doesn’t want their information out there and a punishment to everyone who actually would want to use the service (now they have to wade through dead profiles up to whatever cutoff time you decide to deactivate profiles).
And you added (2.) cognitive evaluation. If people want to ask each other for their SAT scores they can. You’re trying to route around that this is considered gauche in most cases. Not that I don’t enjoy gauche things sometimes. Join MENSA if you’re really into that.
Oh and you’ve thrown in some sort of unspecified eugenics (that weeds out poor people) in a mandatory system. It’s at this point that I think it’s more likely you’re pulling my leg than not.
What is the advantage of this system over OKCupid? OKCupid has a rather limited pool, I think around 1 million users? When you divide this number by the various metropolitan areas around the country, it’s not a very sizable number at all. My alternative system would include literally everyone of dating age in the country. I think the benefits of an expanded pool are obvious, so no need to cover it in depth. The biggest benefit of an expanded pool are for those that exist at the tail end of a distribution for a particular trait. By making the pool much larger, you increase the frequency of this trait, a trait which may end up being rather important when it comes to compatibility and dating. Second of all, there are as of now, certain people that are selected for and against in a system of online dating. As for what kind of person is being selected for, I’ll leave that up in the air. It doesn’t really matter. Any sort of strong selection effects are bad as it functionally reduces the size of the pool for certain individuals.
The problem with real world dating is how restricted it is. Theoretically there could be someone very compatible with you living in your city, but you would never meet them. They never went to your University, or if they were you never ran into each other. If they’re not friends with your friends, or work where you work, you would never meet them. All attempts at trying to solve this problem in real life are just exposing yourself to large groups of people and hoping something happens through chance. Oh, maybe if I go to this party, I’ll meet someone random that I like. The problem with this obviously is that this selects again, against certain kinds of people (like introverts) and is kind of random. It’s really easy to understand this on an intuitive level if you live in say, Tokyo or New York where you see massive amounts of people who you know you will likely never ever meet. Of course there is the opposite scenario to consider as well. There very well may be someone extremely compatible with you but they happen to live on the other side of the country. Under normal circumstances you would never meet this person.
Online dating fixes this problem by expanding your pool of people and sorts them for you on the basis of some sort of compatibility. For online dating to work optimally it needs a higher participation rate. It doesn’t work well if nobody participates. The mandatory enrollment makes everyone participate. And because everyone participates, it out competes all other models, and becomes the most efficient through algorithmic sorting. Like I said earlier, it’s a coordination problem.
I can’t imagine most people would lie on a personality assessment, if they did, oh well, statistical noise, it happens. Lizardman’s constant and all. OKCupid, as far as I’m aware doesn’t use Big Five or anything like that, I suppose I should have specified we’d be using that. The cognitive test, again, is just a way to sort appropriate people like the personality test does. Same with attractiveness.
Lastly, for the poor people thing, I more meant that there could be some possible complaints about how certain people don’t have ready access to electricity, internet, computer, etc, and those people would be disadvantaged if this were implemented. It’s a similar sort of argument that anti voter ID people make. I think those people are a minority though, and I’m not really sympathetic to the plight of the ultra poor really. Plus I don’t want to rehash that argument here either, so I’ll just uh… brush them aside.
Theoretical returns to scale are the not the same as actual returns to scale.
You can’t make them participate unless you’re also going to enforce a mandatory date quota. You’re just filling up the service with real profiles that may as well be dead. That will just make things worse for anyone left who actually tries to use it.
Making an OkCupid profile is not a high barrier. Or you can make a Tinder profile or whatever. There are a ton of options. Total users is more like tens of millions when I go look at a few random stats than one million. So you’re filling the pool largely with people who don’t want to be in the pool or want to be in a different pool.
If your suggestion was that the economics of dating should favor a monopoly by one dating company (with one site or multiple sites for different purposes) that’d be one thing. Why don’t network effects in the dating market lead to a single winner like Facebook is the big social network? That’s an interesting question.
But this is a problem that will solve itself. There is no real coordination problem solved by a mandated dating site. If there’s more demand, a larger and larger fraction of people will get onto dating sites. If everyone wanted to be on the same site, they’d get on the same site.
Correct, participation cannot be forced. My line of thinking though was that people would switch over to whatever site has the most users, so most would just end up using it anyway. The amount of users in a social network is the most important thing. You used Facebook as an example. Why are people all using Facebook rather than Minds? You understand. In fact Facebook is leveraging this power and creating a dating site using their already expansive user base. Who knows how that will go.
As for the inactive profiles, just have some sort of sorting based on time last active. It’s not that big of a deal.
Yes, they don’t want to be in the pool, because they think perhaps erroneously, that the optimal way for them doesn’t involve online dating. They might actually be right, but if they were forced to join, they would end up being wrong. There’s no way to get people to switch over voluntarily. However if they did, then there would be a good reason to voluntarily stay. Imagine I create a new social media network, BookFace that for whatever reason, is just objectively better than Facebook. Everyone would have a better time if they switched over to BookFace, but there is no incentive to because everyone else is on FaceBook. I view this online dating thing as a similar situation. The only way to bypass this is to force people.
More people to receive unsolicited dick pics from? No thanks.To put it more charitably: I think you may be looking at this from a very masculine perspective.
To put it in a less gendered way: those who are outliers on the “positive” end already have a large pool to chose from, provided they live in a decently large city. Expanding the pool is not likely to help them much.
If such a program were mandatory, I would expect the non- desperate to opt out, even if they were not currently partnered.
I want to clarify here that the quantity of people that you personally interact with would likely remain the same. It is just that the initial pool of people that is pared down to form your optimal pool is larger. This theoretically should give you the most optimal of candidates.
Do they really though? I suppose your definition of large is more inclusive than mine. For my disagreements, I would say just read the second paragraph of my post above.
I think they have done. My impression is that the number of people who exclusively use non-Tinder dating apps is very small, despite the fact that Tinder is obviously suboptimal for many usecases (as I understand it, the only work they do towards trying to match efficiently is showing you profiles in a similar area of a generic attractiveness scale). Also consider that Tinder, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, Hinge and Match.com are all owned by the same group.
Online dating doesn’t need to work optimally. Dating markets don’t need to work optimally at all, they just need to function well enough to make people happy. Introverts are still meeting and marrying through the currently available online platforms, so I’m not sure adding another one is really going to help at all.
Also, the last thing my daughter needs is the US federal government running analysis on her dating preferences and filing it away.
Spend some time on red pill forums. The culture is an acquired taste, but most advice is solid: lift, dress well, get your life in order, go out and socialize. And consider I put “lift” at least 4 times in that list.
Uh, you said “hypegamy” – so you do go there. Then just follow the advice.
Ontopic… hmm. I don’t think we’re going to get to a “final solution” for dating any time soon, because it’s very much in flux. And I’m actually chuckling when I imagine a government project to do this – they can barely do anything else. Look up “assortative matching” – no matter what the particular tools are, we’re going to have a lot more of that, at least for relationships. As for hookups, yes, hypergamy is a thing. Men don’t really have a limit to the number of partners they desire, and women want to hook up with the best guy then can – if he happens to be a successful dater, that’s usually a plus for a short term thing.
> lift
What’s the solution for people who find exercise nothing but painful and fatiguing? I understand that there are people who experience a “runners’ high” – I’ve never encountered anything like that. Other strength training leaves me with a strange feeling repetitions in, this general weariness that makes me want to stop or die; it’s not pain from damage or burning from overuse. To the extent I “feel good” about the process, it’s the stopping, much like the feeling when you stop banging your head against a wall.
FWIW, I also generally don’t get any sense of endorphins from spicy food, either. It’s happened to me twice so I can appreciate it, but not in any way reliable to justify the general experience. Also, capsicum tastes really nasty to me, but I’ll take strong horseradish or mustard.
I don’t get a runner’s high either. And I don’t even get a “pump”, whatever that is – it’s supposed to be a lot more frequent. I do have a tip for you:
1. A set should last until you can do about 2 repetitions until you physically (not mentally) can’t do anymore. Outer limit us about 4. That’s the definition of a set – if we’re talking about “a set of 20”, it means somewhere at 22 you just can’t go anymore. It’s not as grueling as it sounds, exertion rises exponentially in the last repetition – which is why you actually want to avoid going to the very last.
2. You make muscle with sets of 3 to 30 repetitions. I.e., given the above, with weights such as you can do at most about 5-32 repetitions, and you stop 1-2 short
Now, in this interval (3-30) there’s A LOT of latitude of genetics and personal preference. Women are usually more to the higher end, for example. Sprinters to the lower end, endurance athletes to the higher. So here you’re free to test and see what is actually fun – and yes, there’s a good change (I’m putting it at over 50%) that by playing with that interval you’ll find a range that fits you. You decide it’s fun to go heavy and do mostly sets of 3-4 repetitions – do it. From your description this sounds quite likely.
0. Uh, it’s kind of the point. No pain, no gain. That said:
1. Find a type of exercise you enjoy doing. Orienteering is a lot more fun to me than running, which is incredibly boring, and swimming is even worse. Martial arts is great fun. Most people like running around with friends and some kind of ball involved.
2. Do it more. Running was always terrible, but after I started to get in better shape, the fatigue and pain were still there, but less of a negative.
3. Don’t. If it’s really that bad, impress the girls with your wit, intelligence, sleight of hand, or whatever. Many roads lead to Rome, find one that works for you.
As an aside, someone strongly recommended creatine on here several months ago and I started taking it but there never seemed to be much affect on actual strength. Googling was not helpful: is creatine actually completely safe and very effective? Are there any other things I should be taking?
Yes, it’s in the no-brainer category. No side effects and pretty strong effects. Well, almost no side-effects – it has a very weak link with hair thinning (and it happens to be a touchy subject with me). But otherwise – yep.
It also depends on your diet – it has a much higher impact if you’re deficient. If I remember correctly (it’s been a while) risk categories are vegetarians and seniors, and positive effects can include even a bit of raise in IQ.
Singapore has tried to remedy their birthrate problems with similar social engineering projects. You can read about a few of them here.. though it is a bit outdated. When I imagine a government undertaking this sort of thing, I imagine a more competently well run government. Obviously current day USA with all of its other problems would not be able to pull it off. Singapore under LKY? Modern day China? I have a bit more faith.
Yes, I am rather curious if much like Tinder, a site like this would INCREASE hypergamy. Perhaps Tinder has already maximized it though, and anyone who wants to act hypergamously is on Tinder already doing so.
Good article, thanks. By all accounts Singapore seems to have a pretty interesting government.
I still think there is a big difference between hookups and relationships. The latter must have some degree of balance – no matter how picky women are, in the end there’s only one man for each of them. I don’t think it even makes sense to talk about hypergamy here – AFAIK, in US there are already more women college graduates.
The former on the other hand… you can have a lot of disruption there, and I don’t think we’re even close its full potential. Normalization of sugar dating, for example. Fewer and shorter LTRs. Open relationships. Long term friendzoning. And that’s all yesterday – I can’t even imagine what tomorrow will bring.
Balance can exist in time, as well. Or to put it differently, it is possible that women spend part of their life in a relationship, where there are more men with no relationships at all and more men with more relationships, compared to women.
@Aapje
Are you sure? It kinda sounds like you’re talking about hookups. I think it’s clear if we talk about two different metrics. Relationships -> time spent in a relationship. Hookups -> number of partners.
For hookups it’s pretty clear, you’ll end up with studs and incels, and god knows how many other types of relationships like sugar or friendzoned or FBR or whatever.
For relationships… You could have men that have 30 years, vs 3 women that have 10 years each. But you could also have the reverse, women that like to be committed and are 30 years in 3 LTRs, vs 3 men that are 10 year LTR and 20 single. It’s not clear to me in which direction things are moving.
More people are divorcing or leaving their partner, even if they already have children.
It also seems to me that men are more often “not relationship material” for their entire lives, while for women it is much more age-related.
You see this in the complaints that single men and women have, as well. I can’t remember seeing young women complain about having no prospects, but merely about only having poor prospects, while plenty of men complain about the former.
It’s interesting to compare and contrast people’s willingness to support coercion in war vs. fertility. Looking at the history of war, it appears completely pointless 90% of the time. And in the remaining 10% of the time where the war could conceivably make the world better, I can totally sympathize with the draft dodger who says “yes, there is injustice in this foreign land, but it’s not worth me dying to fix it.” Yet few take offense at the idea of conscription even if they have practical objections to doing it in their country, even if they are generally opposed to war. Few see historical conscription as a great injustice.
Yet if you consider the use of coercion to promote fertility, suddenly people scream “the government has NO BUSINESS in this area.” It seems to me that a 1.2 fertility rate is a rather more serious threat to the future of the nation than the usual gee oh political war justifications. You could take a globalist stance and say that South Korea could maintain its population by importing Indonesians. But the same mentality would also lead you to not care much whether Alsace-Lorraine is French or German. What is “France” and “Germany” anyway? An abstraction!
I think it comes down to status. War may be hell, but warriors are sexy, even the most ardent pacifist thinks so. So you don’t want to be seen as too sympathetic to the man who whines that he doesn’t want to be sent into war. In contrast, raising children is seen as a low-status occupation, so you have rather more sympathy for people who loudly proclaim they don’t want to be coerced into it.
1. The West has been shying away from drafting soldiers.
2. The people they typically draft are not considered the most sympathetic (young men).
3. Even if the more sympathetic get drafted, they typically get plushy jobs that provided a lot of sexy warrior photo ops, but not the hardcore experience.
It may seem that way to you, but I assure you that not everyone (and indeed virtually no-one) shares that impression.
That doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
No, and perhaps invisible pixies are a greater threat than either. But if I were to assert that I would recognise the need for some sort of supporting argument.
Ugh.
Judging by what various AI algorithms choose for me in less consequential areas, the results would probably be worse than the current non-system, and orders of magnitude worse than traditional human matchmakers.
Last time I came within a hundred miles of dating/matchmaking apps, which was not this century, heterosexual people faced a huge imbalance. Anyone who admitted to being female was swamped with responses, from males, probably even if she was explicitly seeking only female responses. Anyone male got few or no responses, except possibly males seeking males.
The point here is that females may not want more – they may not even have time to sort through all the responses they are getting. They will probably want quality, defined in their own personal way – attractiveness is not an objective attribute like hair colour.
I don’t like it.
– I’d much rather have the humans in control of the choices offered to them. I.e. people self describe (accurately?!) and also describe what they do and do not want (“absolutely no matches who dye their hair”, “must be shorter than me”, …)
– The goal of breeding is vastly over-rated. If the human population were to stay on its current non-replacement-rate trajectory for a few generations, our collective grandchildren would be better off.
– Mandatory implies government coercion, and probably government control; I can’t see this tending to result in what the users actually want – instead there will be political pressure for something absurd, which will wind up implemented. (Big businesses are bad enough about not giving users what they want, but governments tend to be even worse.)
– if everyone is picking from the same pool, based on the same criteria of attractiveness, those not deemed sufficiently attractive will still be SOL. I’d actually expect an implementation like this to reduce the numbers that successfully find partners, by rubbing their noses in the concept that they are “settling” for someone sub-standard, because as a sub-standard mate themselves they don’t have a chance at anyone “better”. Much much better to simply meet unattached people in the course of daily life, and respond to individuals as individuals, without an explicit rating scale.
“The goal of breeding is vastly over-rated. If the human population were to stay on its current non-replacement-rate trajectory for a few generations, our collective grandchildren would be better off.”
Assuming they’re secure enough to reap the windfall of less resource consumption, lower property prices, and labor scarcity. Most world leaders for whom this would occur in their own countries are fiercely opposed to letting that happen.
“they’re secure enough to reap the windfall of less resource consumption”
This is vastly over-rated, just look at resource scarcity over the last 50 years. Yes, some of the technological advances that occurred would have happened anyway with less population, but not all of them. And then consider all the technological advances not connected to resource scarcity. Half your medical advanced, half your computer programmers, imagine them gone. You’d have cheaper oil and copper. Not much GDP goes to oil and copper anyway.
“lower property prices”
This is more apparent than real. High property prices are due to one of two things:
1. Land actually being objective more desirable.
2. Supply restrictions.
There would be less objectively desirable land if there were fewer people because being next to people is what usually makes land objectively desirable. That and being on the coast in places like California where the ocean moderates the temperature in the summer. So while it would be cheaper to live on the coast of California, most wouldn’t be able to do it even with a lower population. And it would be cheaper to live in Manhattan because living there would be less desirable with fewer people. 2. is a political decision unconnected to population.
“labor scarcity”
The scarcity doesn’t translate into higher wages because there would be half the people competing for work as laborers and half the people offering to hire laborers.
For the land scarcity thing, I don’t deny that region to region, zoning is the main culprit of outrageous home price growth, in the united states. But E.G. Japan, zoning is quite lax, public transportation is quite good, but even then especially with the tendency of employment to concentrate you have the issue of landowners eating a lot of the income of workers.
In the American context you’d have to ‘build out’ Texas style — because you don’t have the kind of infrastructure that’s well suited to density without crippling traffic jams. Problem here is that that doesn’t stop your nations capitalists from all wanting to concentrate the employment opportunities in a handful of places.
As for labor scarcity I don’t assume or believe particularly that labor supply and labor demand rise uniformly in the face of replacement migration, so i don’t expect them to fall uniformly either in the face of replacement migration. When people talk about the need for replacement migration it’s in the context of “Labor shortages” (we can’t find workers at the wage we’re currently attempting to offer) Not capital shortgages. Also, unlike labor, capital can cross borders without the corresponding capitalist crossing borders.
I think this is based on a bad model of economic growth. Fewer mouths to feed = fewer hands to do the work and fewer minds to invent new things. If the population of the world declined to 2 billion over the next century, I think it’s very likely that the world would end up much poorer as a result. We’re not living in a world where the total economic output is limited by how much land we have, we’re living in a world where it’s mostly driven by how many people can work and what work they can do (and capital accumulation/depreciation).
When I was in college, a professor pointed out that the (then) total human population could fit into a (hypothetical) cluster of arcologies, filling no more than the land area of some US state (I forget which one). While it was impressive at the time, I didn’t have the context of things like horrific social housing projects etc. to realize I really didn’t want to live in one of those arcologies. I also didn’t have the experience to think about the amount of land area that would be required to feed all these people, or bottlenecks getting those materials in and out of the arcologies. So his conclusion of “there’s plenty of room” seemed quite reasonable to me at the time.
I like having convenient access to a not too crowded outdoors, and I very much like there to be space for non-domestic animals etc. I once read a science fiction story involving a space faring species whose planets had a 3 species ecology – one plant, one herbivore, and them. They were quite happy this way – and it’s possible humans might be equally happy, even if we reduced the planet to nothing but domesticated species and a few surviving pests. But I see that as a pretty horrible way to live.
As for needing more people in order to defend ourselves from our neighbours – I don’t see mass mobilizations being much of a thing in a world of cyberwarfare, drones, etc. Economic “defence” is more complicated, but I’m not convinced more warm bodies matter as much as the system under which they are governed.
For the rest, if labor scarcity were an important thing, countries with below-replacement-rate birthrates wouldn’t have unemployment, and would have wages growing a lot faster than inflation. That doesn’t seem to be the case; the number of consumers goes down as fast as the number of producers (a bit later, because of retirees, but the trend is the same).
I agree that most world leaders would oppose this; plenty of them insist that it’s important to breed more of their type of people. As high status members of their society, they are less affected by scarcity, and lose status when they have fewer peons to rule. But as one of those peons, albeit one financially better off than most, I really don’t care about the same things as my “leaders”.
Manhattan is at about 26,000 people / km^2. That density would let you fit the entire population of the world into Nevada. Shove us into Montana, instead, and there will be plenty of room to route around mountains, lakes, rivers, etc. Or if you want a more mild climate, maybe shove us all into Iowa and Missouri.
While Manhattan has its problems, it would be hard to claim that it’s unlivable–it even has a big park right in the middle of it, and it’s an extremely sought-after place to live.
So imagine Montana (or Iowa/Missouri) covered entirely with dense city, and then most of the rest of the world converted to parks, mines, farms, etc., each with a sparse dusting of people managing the robots doing the work. That’s not the world I’d choose, myself, but it doesn’t sound like a dystopia, exactly.
Humans have been living in reasonably dense cities for a couple of thousand years. It was only with the advent of the car that we decided we wanted all sprawl, all the time. It doesn’t even have to look like a cyberpunk dystopia: you can get denser cities than most of us live in today in like 4 story buildings if you aren’t dedicating 50% of the city’s land to parking and another appreciable percentage to gigantic roads and highways.
I’m fairly sure urbanization is actually a recent phenomenon; while dense cities have long existed, most people didn’t live in them, instead living in farming villages or other such less-dense locations.
@albatross11 How much farm land would it take to feed this Manhattan-density human reserve? Or the same reserve, with the population (and hence land area) doubled? etc.
A massively invasive technocratic “solution” to a problem that doesn’t actually exist, which you proposed because you’re bitter about your last relationship not working out? Yeah, how about no.
Really not sure why you thought this particular idea would go over well with people, especially in a somewhat libertarian-leaning space like this.
It’s only libertarian leaning if even that, and while it would be less likely to believe a market failure exists in a random situation than would the average person, it would be more likely to consider a market failure in places where the common dogma says that market failure can’t exist.
What fun is discussing ideas with an audience that would agree with them? That is part of the reason why SSC and Rationalist groups are fun. People with varying backgrounds that are able to talk to each other without a massive flame war breaking out over disagreements. I will admit, I’m more right leaning than most people here, but I appreciate the good faith discussion.
I would say however, that this problem does exist. At least the problem that it’s trying to address, low TFR. As I mentioned above, programs like these being used to try to fix it are nothing new. Singapore has had government run online match making service as early as 2002. I’ve also heard from an autistic friend of mine recently that in the UK, there are similar sorts of match making services for high functioning autists. These are real life rather than online though.
I’m not really bitter, but I guess I am pretty autistic for suggesting such a thing.
Fertility rates aren’t low because people can’t find dates, they’re low because people in committed relationships are actively choosing not to have children, or at least not that many children. Most people can find dates.
IME there is a large population of people who cannot – or at least, not under terms they find acceptable. (Or, occasionally, can find dates but not dates that lead anywhere). My evidence for this is purely anecdotal, not statistical, and I’d be interested to see statistics if you have some?
I do feel that a system that solved the sorting problem and made it much easier to find people you were likely to click with would be a godsend. I don’t think the described system above does so – I could be wrong, but I think the problem is the sorting algorithms more than the pool size, and as others have pointed out a government-run mandatory system is very open to abuse – but I do think there exists a problem a solution to which would benefit a great many people, even if I don’t expect the above system to solve it.
In retrospect, I might’ve overstated my case with “most people can find dates.” My larger point was that there are a lot of factors responsible for decreasing fertility rates in developed nations (e.g. access to contraception, gender equality in the workplace, socioeconomic incentives to delay having children until later in life, cultural values that discourage large families), and “it’s just too hard to find people to reproduce with” isn’t one of those factors, or at least not a major one.
Rates of virginity have gone way up in Japan and I believe in the US. This is a good enough proxy for ‘can’t find dates.’
Online dating may be a big part of the problem of dating these days generally though. Here’s a twitter thread someone linked to before that makes that case, simultaneously debunking the ‘women are out-educating and out-earning men and this is screwing up the dating market’ theory. It is heavy on econ jargon so I can’t quite follow it, would be interested in hearing thoughts on it:
A Good Man is Getting Hard to Find?
Its, IMO, not just “people” its the class of people who used to have lots: The upper middle class. And that is because the cost of children has exploded and the financial stability of people in fertile age ranges has eroded.
@LadyJane
I don’t know if the problem of mate search is responsible for declining birth rates. I do know multiple people who either had no children, or fewer than they wanted, due to getting married too late (trusting their word for how many they wanted, but I consider most of the people I’m thinking of very trustworthy). So whether or not it’s “causing the problem” (haven’t looked into whether declining birth rates are actually a problem as opposed to something with complicated effects we don’t fully understand, also some of my examples are last generation; I don’t think mate search being hard is a new problem), making it easier to find someone compatible seems likely to increase birth rate by enabling those people who want children – but only with the right person – to have them. And unlike several of the other things you list, it* would be a clearly good way of doing so (unless you consider increasing birth rate itself bad) – no rights are being violated, and it’s made easier for people to fulfill their preferences.
I’m not actually sure we have substantial disagreements here? But I do want to push a little on this, because I don’t think “people have the number of children they want, and that number is very low” is the entire story. It’s part of the story, and as a libertarian, OK, fair enough, way better than the alternative. But I don’t think it’s all of it.
*Making sorting easier. The above described system would obviously (speaking as a libertarian again) violate rights, specifically self-ownership – but a voluntarily-entered “better dating app” or some other way of improving the algorithms wouldn’t, and I actually would expect it to have an effect on birth rates.
I wonder how much the decline of active participation in churches and lodges and other local community stuff drives the difficulty of people finding dates/mates. It seems like there’s been a long-term trend toward less and less in-person social interaction and informal / weak social ties with your neighbors over time, and that could plausibly lead to fewer opportunities to get set up with the single brother-in-law of someone you’re working with on some church committee.
It seems to me that the relationship issues are caused by a variety of causes, including:
– relationships have improved in quality less than other parts of life, causing dissatisfaction with the available opportunities and replacement of partners with other things (in the case of men: porn, video games, )
– dating apps encouraging bad behavior/attitudes, as well as increasing dissatisfaction by showing many supposedly available people, while most of the aren’t in reality
– Actual quality becoming ever harder to gauge compared to good marketing
– Social norms that dictate that decent, normal people can have it all
– Social norms that encourage selfishness and discourage sacrifice
– Gendered mating standards being less achievable due to feminism, but not actually being abandoned (in particular female expectations of men)
– Children having become relatively more expensive
@albatross11
It is a little hard to say which direction it works, probably a little bit in tandem, but I think the issue is more that people are less likely to be willing to set two people they know up, for various reasons. I can’t think of anyone I know who was introduced to someone they’re dating by mutual friends that way. I believe it used to be much more common (my mom and step-dad were set up by some mutual friends, for instance).
@albatross, @acymetric:
My link above has a couple graphs that illustrate that both meeting someone through church and meeting someone through friends have plummeted in the last 20 years:
link text
link text
The solution to the proposed fertility problem is fairly simple: ban contraceptives and elective abortions.
The first is relatively easy as the most effective methods are medical devices/implants, and by banning them it takes all of the major pharmaceutical companies out of the running. Making your own at home will always be possible, but quality control issues will limit the number of people who want to get involved.
Abortion is harder when there are “back-alley” options. But once again it will have a significant impact.
People generally only have slightly more children than they try to have. It is impossible to restrict all the methods people employ to control their reproduction (unless you literally force them to have PiV sex with one another with government agents watching); you can at best prohibit some more reliable methods and force them to use less reliable methods, but the evidence suggests this will have only very marginal effects. If you want people to have signficantly more children, you really need to find a way to encourage them to want more children.
Coercion should be a last resort when things are totally broken, not the first tool you reach for. Mandatory participation in a government-run eugenic dating site sounds like an amazingly bad idea in our current world. Maybe in some weird SFnal world where the human race is dying out it would make sense, but not in anything like our current world, where most people manage to date and marry and the species seems to be carrying on just fine!
I’ve thought about something similar, for a demographic who really want to find a partner for life ASAP:
1) Pay $2000 deposit to get in.
2) Fill in a full personality test (the type used for businesses, they have a metric for the level of integrity the questionnaire was answered with, and is designed to let you know what type of people (based on same questionnaire) they are compatible with, it takes a few hours and is pretty darn accurate from what i remember).
3) Fill in religous and political associations and respective desired versions in mate as well as desired range of children and location if important, age, views on substances, smoking etc..
(Basically things likely to be a deal breaker, option to add dealbreakers maybe)
4) use machine learning to find your “type”
5) submit multiple photos(to accurately find what you look like)
6) Program matches you automatically and finds you dates, each first date is payed for (up to $150) from your deposits, if you don’t go on a date (within some reasonable time limit, like a month or two) you lose $200 from your deposit. (If you get low enough on funds you have to refill to 2k to continue, if you get hitched from the site you pay $100 as a thank you)
7) you can deactivate so you don’t get dates, but after a year and a half or so you’d lose your account.
This would make sure everyone is totally serious, the software and detailed check of preferences would make sure of good matches, you only pay for your dates, not going on a date that is likely a good match, and $100 if you find your life partner on the site.
I am considering actually making a site like this at some point, so thoughts are appreciated
that’s effectively how matchmaking services work.
Do you have a matchmaking service that suggests matches based on your actual appearance preference?
Or one that is built with strong incentives to give you a good match, and strong incentives for you to go on recommended dates?
Or one that has comprehensive personality tests (the type companies pay for when hiring)?
If you do I’d like to know, could be useful to see working examples.
I don’t but I’m sure they exist.
Well, no dating service really has the former. And latter is that you’re paying a lot of money for them.
Again, I’m sure there are ones that do, though I doubt they work any better than most corporate personality tests.
@cassander
I haven’t heard of one that did the first, why do you think that this is essentially how matchmaking services work when you don’t know of any that do this?
I think outlined above is a good way to make good, strong incentives for the site and for the daters without costing much ($100 for finding your life partner isn’t very expensive in my opinion).
You seem to be implying that corporate personality tests don’t work well, why do you think that (if you do)?
@Purplehermann says:
I said I don’t have one that does it, not that I don’t know of one. I’m a single man in my 30s, I get a lot of targeted ads in this vane.
They haven’t been proven to be a very useful tool for hiring employees that correlates with performance. And many of them, like myers briggs, are basically astrology.
I don’t like the “mandatory” aspect of the thing, but it seems to me that a government-made service could avoid some bad incentives of the commercial ones, the most obvious one being: If you find The One and get married, they lose two customers. So the optimal strategy for a commercial match-maker is to provide you many half-good matches; never exactly what you want, but generally good enough to keep you hoping (and paying for their service).
I never used such service, so all my knowledge is second-hand, but a frequent complaint is that either some important information is completely missing, or that you cannot specify the importance for you. For example, imagine that smoking is an absolute turn-off for you, but the user profile consists of a pre-defined list of questions, and smoking is not one of them. (Yes, people could add “non-smoker” in their description, but you can’t distinguish between non-smokers who forgot to advertise this fact, and smokers who strategically kept silent about it.) On the other hand, sometimes the websites ask too much, and choose based on your compatibility of choices, but maybe a compatibility in some specific thing is unimportant for you. (For example, I like reading science fiction, but I don’t really mind if my partner doesn’t. I don’t want the website to automatically conclude that someone who doesn’t read sci-fi is a bad match for me.) These things seem like something that could be solved, but the existing websites simply don’t have an incentive to do so, because… as I said, too good matches = customers lost.
But this doesn’t necessarily have to be a government; a non-profit would do.
OKCupid used to be pretty good at that, although they pushed most of the complexity onto the user: when you’re answering their personality questions (which range from stuff as touchy and profound as “would you prefer to date someone of the same race?” all the way down to stuff like “do you like anime?”), you get to select your own answer, the answer you’d like to see in a partner, and how important that answer is to you.
If this sounds gameable, it is, and it gets to be kind of a chore after a couple hundred questions; but it does let you distinguish between “I’m a nonsmoker, and being around smokers makes me homicidally angry” and “I’m a nonsmoker, but I don’t really care if others smoke” and even “I’m a nonsmoker for health reasons, but I think cigarettes are really cool and sexy”.
Might have changed lately, I haven’t used OKCupid in years.
It’s very (and quite easily) gameable or at least it was in 2016. 🙂
Should I be scared of you? I think I should be scared of you.
As a centrist liberal technocratic neoliberal wonky type- I am Officially Giving Up on the US solving its healthcare cost issues via (really any) type of regulation that the federal government could possibly pass- and am instead looking to the market to hopefully come up with a fix. I came to this realization gradually, but it sort of crystallized in the last week or so. It doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to whatever Reasonable Center Left Healthcare Proposal that gets cooked up (I’m cautiously open to the public option, especially for those 50+), but I don’t see anything that’s being proposed (even single payer) as addressing the real issue with US healthcare- cost.
To reduce the cost of healthcare in America- many hundreds of thousands or millions of doctors/nurses/practitioners would have to accept less money for their work (in some cases, a lot less)- and probably several hundreds of thousands of people would have to actually lose their job as it’s obsoleted (billers, coders, admins, the 1-2 people every doctor’s office has to employ just to deal with health insurance companies, etc.) There’s absolutely zero political will to do any of this in the US, and I don’t have to theorize- we see this proven in, say, the absolute inability of the US to implement even the mildest of cost reductions, the Cadillac Tax on very generous healthcare plans. It was passed under Obamacare, has been delayed on a bipartisan basis since then, and now repealing it is one of the few bipartisan things Trump & the Dems can agree on. Here, even the most moderate 1% step towards reduced payments for doctors, nurses & hospitals was viciously fought tooth & nail by the healthcare lobby. Please, tell me again how the US is going to reduce costs to European levels, which would entail at times dramatic cuts to doctor incomes and hospital bottom lines.
I had sort of a Zen koan moment reading a recent short Tyler Cowen piece entitled ‘Which of these claims is false?’:
• The Democratic-controlled House just voted to abolish the “Cadillac tax” on employer-supplied health plans.
• The Independent Payments Advisory Board no longer exists, having been abolished with support from both parties.
• In the public option for Democratic-controlled Washington State, reimbursement rates were set at up to 160 percent of Medicare levels.
• Single-payer health care will save America a great amount of money.
‘Medicare For All’ seems likely to close dozens & dozens of rural hospitals, which rely on the much higher non-Medicare reimbursement rates. Imagine closing the only hospital in a rural area, which thousands of people rely on- then multiply that for every rural state. Imagine reducing nurse staffing levels to European levels, and tangling with one of the few effective & strong unions in America. Imagine telling all of the doctors in the US (after med school, residencies, fellowships, six figures in debt, etc.) that their income will be reduced by a third or more. Literally none of this is going to happen, even if single payer healthcare is passed tomorrow. There is no real political will for reducing providers’ incomes.
On the other hand, Mr. Market has at least the potential to do so- I’m particularly intrigued by the proposed joint Amazon-JP Morgan-Berkshire Hathaway health company called Haven, which is purportedly a consortium to limit healthcare costs. One thing’s for sure- without the necessary political will, the only other force powerful enough to prevent hospitals from charging $10 for one (!) throat lozenge is the capitalist system itself.
(Deeper themes that could be explored- me growing more conservative as I grow older- though, I’m still not opposed to a more government-run healthcare system, I’m just skeptical that it would be an effective cost cutter for a bloated sector. Another possible deeper theme is the inability of representative democracy to tackle entrenched, powerful, rent-seeking parts of society- though to be fair, this seems to be an issue in authoritarian countries too)
None of these proposals are more radical than the changes that occurred during the New Deal, so it’s not like the United States is inherently incapable of harnessing the political will necessary to accomplish universal healthcare (which would probably require nationalization of some hospitals, at least). We just have to decide that its something we want to happen.
If the question is one simply of political will right now, to me that is one of those things that “isn’t, until it is”. Like, the laws that were passed during the Trump administration didn’t have the “will” to be passed during Obama, the laws from Obama didn’t have the “will” to be passed under Bush, the laws under Bush…and so on. Right now we don’t have the political will, as evidenced by the senate not voting for Medicare For All. In 2020, we probably also won’t have the political will unless the Dems win the Senate and convince Joe Manchin.
But if premiums rise significantly enough, we may find that “political will” just yet. DC statehood, and controlling the Supreme Court, would also help.
I think you’re missing me a bit- it’s not a partisan thing, the Dems don’t have the will to force rate cuts on the healthcare industry either. Hospitals are the major employer in tons of districts. As mentioned in the original comment, the fact that the Dems joined with Trump to repeal the Cadillac Tax is a ‘bad fact’ for the argument that the left can resist the healthcare lobby more than the right
It’s the same “political will” question when looking at either the interparty or intraparty level. If people want universal healthcare, then they will support primary candidates who want it as well (e.g., AOC defeating the incumbent). And right now, the Dems don’t have enough votes at even the intraparty level. Merely gaining control of the presidency and senate will likely not be enough, we would also have to also change the ideology of the types of people we elect.
But we can change who we vote for, in primaries as well as the general. We just have to decide we want it.
I’m not sure I would read those events in the same way. It’s not clear to me how the Cadillac Tax would result in more people having healthcare, particularly operating under the Trump administration/Republican senate where the additional money is probably not going to be used to expand healthcare spending. Many non-corporate Dems probably reasoned that it was better to expand the deficit than to have people kicked off their healthcare, thus voting to repeal the tax.
They dont have to in order to realize quite large savings. The US has much, much higher administrative overhead in its health care system than most nations, which means you can save a lot of money without giving any actual doctors a paycut. Not enough to bring costs in line with the rest of the world, but about half-way there. It does involve firing one hell of a lot of medical billing personel and insurance sales people. But those groups have less social clout
Yeah, I agree. The idea that Americans aren’t going to want to bring down their own healthcare costs out of sympathy for insurance workers/billing personnel/highly paid doctors is just a stunning misread of the current sentiment of the electorate IMO.
This may be how certain politicians who have ties to the healthcare industry feel, but they can get primaried in due time.
“Like, the laws that were passed during the Trump administration didn’t have the “will” to be passed during Obama, the laws from Obama didn’t have the “will” to be passed under Bush, the laws under Bush…and so o”
During the Obama adminsitration, there was a major party which wanted to do the stuff they were later to do under the Trump administration, ect. There is no party which is going to propose cutting doctor incomes because doctors are high-status experts and both parties want to be associated with high-status experts.
Well, we will see. People also like to have money, so there’s limits on how much they are willing to sacrifice just for status-association.
the new deal occurred in a world with a (relatively) tiny state and, consequently, tiny number of stakeholders. That is not the world we live in now. FDR could paint in broad strokes because he had a huge bank canvas to work with. what we have now is a hugely crowded picture with everyone shouting not to be painted over. Making change on a similar level doesn’t require a similar level of will, it requires massively greater will, far more than seems likely to ever exist, which is why if medicare for all does pass, it’ll end up passing the same way the ACA did, by shoving more money through existing system in such a way that no one’s sacred ox gets gored.
If the government put forth a plan to cut payments to doctors and other medical professionals, I suppose they could go on strike. Has such a thing ever happened? Anywhere?
ETA: It has. In Saskatchewan, Canada, 1962, in response to a plan to socialize medical care. The strike failed.
> Has such a thing ever happened? Anywhere?
You mean just a doctors’ strike? They’re very much a thing. The minister for rhyming slang managed to provoke a junior doctors’ strike over here a couple of years ago.
… Minister for Thieves? Sounds like a D&D setting, not a real country.
I’m talking about the Honourable Jeremy Hunt.
From my little area of life, there are ways to do so, but none of them are politically appealing:
1) Get rid of the current degree requirement for medical school. The idea that a degree, any degree, will do as long as you’ve fulfilled a couple of STEM requirements could be replaced by either a 6 year program which includes those requirements, or simply having people take the existing requirements as a focused program. This allows doctors to (theoretically) start their career with less total debt, less interest, and work more total years, hopefully ultimately being willing to accept lower salaries.
2) Statutorily reduce the Standard of Care. Avoid the current system which is based on publications, professional guidance, and lawsuits. Find stuff and simply exclude it by law from being required to be performed. Lots of stuff. I suggest looking at most procedures used to keep late-stage dementia patients alive.
3) Have the stomach to say “it’s your fault”. The biggest cause of kidney failure is poorly-managed diabetes. Simply declare that nothing which is eg. the result of Type 2 diabetes will be paid for. Or smoking. Or riding without a seatbelt. Or whatever. And demand cash up-front. And then be willing to Let People Die as a result.
We have two lines at our factory that produce close to identical items. They average about 3 days per week of utilization over the course of the year.
So upper management decided they would remove one of our lines. 3+3=6, so there is still spare capacity.
However, these lines tend to be seasonal, and we cannot build up inventory: 3+3=1 in January, and 3+3=12 in April and May.
This kind of “math” is the “math” that goes into thinking the US can somehow save trillions of dollars over the medium term with no impact to patient healthcare.
You probably can at least control costs. We’ve seen a LOT of cost control measures in healthcare over the last 20 years. A lot of companies have shed healthcare entirely, deductibles and OOP maxes are way higher than they used to be, prior auths are now a thing, and generics have pretty good penetration. However, this is “bending the cost curve” and not “cutting costs.”
“I’m launching into space now, to investigate why these omnipotent supernatural entities keep urinating on us,” said Tom, and gods peed.
“While I’m there, I think I’ll check up on whether the U.S. President had contact with illegal extraterrestrial aliens,” Tom trumpeted.
Recently Trump suggested sending the military in to Mexico to help the government fight the cartels in response to the killing of 9 US citizens who were residents of Mexico. The Mexican government declined, saying they will handle it themselves and citing issues of sovereignty. Setting those aside, could sending in the US Army against the cartels actually help the situation, or is it likely to make it worse?
Going in and killing the heck out of whichever group killed those people would probably make the remaining ones more careful of their targets in the future; it wouldn’t matter if Mexico or the US did it.
But I don’t think the US can do anything against the cartels that will last unless it actually takes the territory or somehow does it in combination with making a Mexican government not corrupted by the cartels hold the territory, and I don’t see either of those as possible in the near term.
What Nybbler says. With Mexico’s permission, we could make things better for Americans in the vicinity of the border, but we can’t plausibly make things better for the Mexicans. And so Mexico isn’t going to give permission, so now either we leave it be or we recreate Libya on the American border and that doesn’t even make things better for the Americans.
I had thought that our efforts in Afghanistan resulted in a major step forward for our intelligence capacity to model and track groups and individuals.
Assuming that the Mexicans let us do it, could we identify and track the cartels through electronic eavesdropping, satellite and drone observation, etc.?
I guess that leaves the question of what you do once you know who the cartel leadership is and where they are…
They are terrorists, as bad as the likes of ISIS, and need to be removed. If the local government can’t take care of it, but the US can, then to be honest, sovereignty be damned. So many people, mostly Mexicans, are suffering because of them, and if it is possible to remove them, it should be done. It would help the immediate situation and also send a strong message that that sort of behavior will not be tolerated.
And how well has that strategy been working out in the past 18 years?
I think it’s actually worked pretty well. The problem is more one of expectations. You wouldn’t expect police to solve all the crime in a city and then leave it forever; it’s a continuous job. Counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism are more like police work in that sense than a normal war where we beat someone up then reliably extract concessions.
When we treated the GWOT more like a war, things would get better briefly and then get worse. When we started doing COIN a little better, it was actually effective (at least in my limited experience, I haven’t been everywhere). Of course when we tried to leave, things reverted. I think this is less the failure of a war and more that police need to stick around to be effective.
Whether sticking around is worth the cost is debatable, though.
American death tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria weren’t particularly steep, but they were there – and that is before factoring in the multi-trillion dollar cost you mentioned. Would you say that more or fewer people would have died without these wars? More or fewer Americans?
If we treated terrorism like a police action against ordinary crime, which we ought to, we’d dedicate far fewer resources to it than we currently do.
Yep. It’s also not what Trump is calling for, so it seems like a pipe dream.
I think that in most of the cases where the U.S. intervened, things ended up better than they would have if they had not.
How would we measure that overall–it’s not like we can do a randomized experiment, and the places we intervene will generally be the worst-off places, so we’d expect improvement just by regression to the mean. But looking at Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen doesn’t fill me with confidence that our next intervention is going to work out well either for us or for the people in whose country we intervene.
There is a history of SF types supporting foreign governments with advice, training, and I think direct action to combat drug cartels in South America. I don’t know how successful they were, but it seems like a good place to start for looking at base rates and capabilities.
My hunch is that it’s not strategically impossible for the US military to be rather productive in Mexico, but it’s probably politically impossible. Both in terms of deployment and having a willing Mexican government ready to actually govern once the tactical situation is under control.
At worst it would be neutral. American troops are more skilled, better trained, and better supplied than Mexican troops. The main thing preventing it from being a definitive positive is our rules of engagement, which (as demonstrated in Iraq/Afghanistan) make it very difficult for us to deal with paramilitary organizations that are willing to dissolve into the general populace.
At best it would help the Mexican government re-establish control in the region and militarize the border, greatly aiding border security, the lack thereof is where the cartels derive their power.
Well, of course, the US would quickly decimate the local cartels, once it starts calling every adult in Mexico a “cartel member”.
Any similitude with actual events, practice and people from the last 20 years is purely coincidental.
I’m generally opposed. These were Mexican citizens in Mexico. This is a Mexican issue.
I don’t have an objection to multi-citizenship. But you have to understand that you fall under the associated jurisdiction when in that country and should not expect assistance from your other countries of citizenship.
(I refer to cases where citizenship is held knowingly and intentionally. If you are on vacation in Moscow the government shouldn’t be able to just kill you and avoid repercussions from the US government by shoving a newly-minted passport in your jacket. In this case I’d be okay if the people involved had previously given up their Mexican citizenship and were travelling as US citizens, but that’s not the case.)
Dual/multi citizenship is a weird modern invention that creates more problems than it solves.
Going back to a world where everyone is a citizen of only one country would be better in general.
What caused the post-WWII baby boom, and where might it recur?
It ought to be one of the biggest mysteries in social science. The standard story that it was due to “the economy” ignores that the correlation between the economy and birthrates is almost always the opposite. If it’s something specific to economic growth at that particular development stage, why don’t we see it in developing countries going through a similar stage today? If it is a result of war, why wasn’t there a similar boom after World War I? There was an uptick in the fertility rate in the years after the war, but it immediately went back on its long term decline trend.
We know that, outside France and Austria, the baby boom was due to an increase in marriage, with more people marrying and them marrying at younger ages, rather than an increase in births within married couples at a given age.(See https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol38/40/38-40.pdf) Looking for areas where conditions would mimic those in the West in 1945, we should look for:
1. The economic conditions are most comparable to The U.S./Europe in the 1930s.
2. The age at first marriage is relatively high and can come down, and this, not widespread use of contraception, is the reason fertility rates are relatively low. Once couples marry they have relatively more children than married couples in the West.
3. Out-of wedlock births are low.
4. Fertility rates have been stagnant for a while.
Do these conditions apply to parts of the Arab world?
In the context of the baby boom in the United States specifically, the US was involved in WW2 for 4-5 years (declared war in Dec 1941, demobilized from large scale occupation/garrison deployments over the course of Oct 1945-Sept 1946). About 16 million Americans were in uniformed military service during WW2, about half of whom were deployed overseas when the war ended.
WW1, by comparison, was much shorter and less intense from the American point of view. The US declared war in April 1917 and demobilized between Nov 1918 and July 1919, and never mobilized to the extent we did in WW2: about 4 million men in uniform and about 2 million deployed overseas. The overall population was lower in 1917 than in 1941, but not by a factor of two (106M vs 133M, respectively).
So in the US, four times as many men were mobilized for WW2, and were mobilized for 2-3x as long, so it’s not surprising for a post-war fertility boost resulting from demobilized soldiers returning home would be something like 8-12x larger for WW2 than for WW1.
I know less about demographic trends in countries that were more heavily involved in WW1 than the US, though, so I’m not sure if there’s a gap to explain there and how to explain it if there is one.
Also: Financial stability.
There were a ton of guys in their prime returning to an under-served female population with a ton of accrued money and great job prospects.
“a ton of accrued money and great job prospects”
A lot less money and a lot worse job prospects than their children and grandchildren would enjoy.
In addition to what eric rall say, you also had several years of baby bust preceding ww2 due to the depression, so there was a lot of pent up demand for fertility.
There was a baby bust all over Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. There was no baby boom to compensate for it.
Communist governments had policies aimed at increasing fertility, which were largely discontinued after 1990.
I suppose it’s that people in Eastern Europe started having kids later. Not necessarily fewer kids… it’s just that when everyone used to have kids at 25, and then everyone switches to having kids at 35, there will be ten years without kids.
Why that change? In socialism your career options were limited, and some opportunities were decided based on “need”. Having kids as soon as possible made economical sense, because no business opportunity was lost, and being classified as having more needs was a good thing.
For example, “first I need my own place to live, then I will have kids, this is the responsible thing to do” simply didn’t make sense in socialism. Not having kids put you in the back of the queue. You had kids first; that put you in the queue before all the childless people; and then after a few years of waiting you had your own place to live.
If you were 18 in 1991 and decided to delay having kids, you are 46 now. It’s safe to say that almost everyone who decided to delay kids in 1991 already had them now, but fertility rates never recovered.
Really? Citation needed.
Randomly pick any decade in any country between 1900 and 2000.
Did the economy improve during that decade? Probably yes. Did the fertility rate fall during that decade? Also probably yes.
This is complicated because “strong economy” is an ambiguous concept. You are referring to general improvement in living standards, which is indeed mostly associated with decreasing birthrate up to a point. But those who claim that “baby boom” was due to strong economy mean something different than an increase in living standards. For example, was US economy stronger or weaker during the Great Recession than in the 60s? Living standards as measured by e.g. real median income were clearly vastly higher in 2010. But when people speak about “the economy” being strong or weak, they often actually refer to a rate of involuntary unemployment, which has a large effect on a sense of financial security of workers in general.
The flood of returning soldiers, a.k.a. available men with perceived higher-than-average social status? Contrast to today’s well-educated women and the choice of incels, deplorables, and a handful of serial monogamists.
(Tongue firmly in cheek)
This study claims around $76 billion of illegal activity per year is financed through payments in bitcoin:
https://freepolicybriefs.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/freepolicybrief_jan212019.pdf
This seems to me to be wrong by an order of magnitude considering:
1. The U.S. illegal drug trade is only 100 billion a year.
2. Most darknet market activity involves drugs.
3. (More speculatively) I thought darknet drug deals were only a small proportion of American drug deals, and foreign markets should be similar and not valuable enough to provide enough transactions to get anywhere near 76 billion.
I don’t know much about bitcoin so cannot comment on the methods they used to estimate the number.
In PPP terms, world GDP is about $138 trillion. US GDP is about $20 trillion. That puts the world illegal drug trade, assuming it’s evenly distributed over the global economy (it probably isn’t, but I don’t know what side of the curve the US falls on), at about $690 billion. Eleven percent of that sounds high for the fraction denominated in Bitcoin, but not absurd, and there’s Bitcoin deals in weapons, gambling, extortion, prostitution etc. to account for too.
Extortion’s probably a big piece: a lot of ransomware asks for payment in Bitcoin.
I can believe Tajik peasants smoke opium at similar rates that Americans do opiates in various forms.
It’s not at all believable that they’re using bitcoin to do it.
Tajik peasants aren’t a very big chunk of the global economy, even if we’re counting in PPP.
Is it possible that bitcoin is used for larger transactions (wholesale purchases) and then the end users pay the dealers with regular cash?
How does it count reselling?
Drugs might only have a total value of $100 billion, but if they pass through several middlemen, the total value of the transactions could be much higher. On the other hand, prices are lower at wholesale.
My impression is that a huge proportion of American drugs, at least 10%, pass through bitcoin wholesalers.
The real paper is here.
It looks like I may be in Paris for a week to 10 days around Christmas this year (18th-28th) What should I do while I’m there? Where should I stay? I’ve never been to France.
I’m totally fine and actually interested in taking some side trips rather than staying in Paris the whole time. E.g. taking the train to Strasbourg and spending a couple days there for the Christmas market, maybe attending a Christmas mass at the cathedral, looks nice.
I assume it’s the “off season” for tourism to a degree – how much stuff is going to be closed? Am I going to have a hard time finding food / something to do on the 25th or 26th?
What interests you?
As for Christmas, you might be able to find some places open but I’d buy food for myself. There’s a significant Muslim minority who should still be in operation, at least relatively. Some landmarks might be open, particularly parks that don’t require attendants. I’d attend mass. Mass at a Cathedral is a wonderful thing. You can also drive out into the countryside and see the picturesque farms covered in snow or something romantic.
Alternatively, you can go to Strasbourg. German Christmas traditions are a bit more communal. However, they’re also not strongly related to French ones.
For interests, I’d say primarily architectural and cultural. I’m into military and techie stuff but my girlfriend, who I will be traveling with, is less so (but she loves old buildings and interacting with other cultures).
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean about German vs. French traditions? One of the appeals of Strasbourg to me was to get a little German flavor (literally) and the compact medieval part of the city looks really neat. The idea of a big public/communal event around Christmas is also appealing, I’ve never gone to a big foreign holiday.
Go to Straßburg. the Weinachtsmaerkte of The Germanies are wonderful things.
French tradition: distinct lack of wuerst, prezels and beer.
Medieval cities: great. (unless you’re on a road bike).
I’d visiting Paris without at least going into the Louvre once would be a huge missed opportunity. I’m one of those low-brow people who finds fine art and all that stuff terribly boring and snooty, and I still came out of my couple-hour visit there wishing I could have a whole week to spend in there.
Also, the view from Arc de Triomphe was easily up there with anything I saw in the Louvre. Highly recommended.
I preferred the Musee D’Orsay to the Louvre, but it comes down to personal taste. The Louvre cuts off at around 1820, while the Orsay resumes with the academic painters of the 19th century, the Impressionists, and so on.
I endorse both of these. I did these two things on my one day in Paris (from a week trip to London–so BTW, you can also go to London for a day trip) and also wished I had more time in the Louvre.
For leaving the Paris area, you could consider spending a day or two at Mont St. Michel. But it might be really annoying to break up your hotel stay.
For a day trip, I highly recommend doing a combination Vaux Le Vicomte/Fontainebleau bus tour. The former inspired the king to use the same designer for Versailles, while imho the latter is way better than Versailles. That said, also hit up Versailles. It may be a bit of a shadow of itself, but you should go at least once.
I highly, highly recommend getting the Paris Museum Pass. It more than pays for itself, and often allows you to skip lines. It also covers most of the important tourist sites. Things that won’t be covered that I still recommend: Sacre Coeur dome, a Paris Opera House tour, Eiffel Tower.
For public transport, consider the Navigo pass.
Look up the weekly organ concerts! People online have even put together maps where you can catch like 3-4 consecutive organ concerts on Sunday, if you hustle a bit.
Honestly, there are like a million great museums, parks, and churches you can check out, free or covered by the above pass. For my week-long trip, I had a massive spreadsheet of options, and saw a little over half of them?
Mont St Michel definitely looks awesome, though it seems like an overnight trip. I’m not super worried about switching hotels, but two or three times in one trip might be a bit much.
Part of my interests in side trips is that my girlfriend is actually staying for a couple weeks after me, as part of a university study abroad thing, and they will be doing a few of the typical Paris touristy things as part of their program. So I wanted to not make her double up too much.
Go to the Musee d’Orsay. Go to some other museums, too. Pay for the skip-the-line or timed-entry passes instead of the general “go to a bunch of museums” pass, unless you need to really economize.
+1 for the Musée d’Orsay: their art collection is sublime. Another museum I really appreciated was Arts & Métiers, with its original scientific artifacts.
Outside of Paris you could visit some WW1 or WW2 battlefields (maybe ones that saw fighting in the winter like the Ardennes for a more complete experience) if you’re into military history.
Co-sign for Arts and Metiers. It’s better than the “official” big science museum of Paris, which is more for the kids.
OH! The Musée de la musique is an absolute must. Admission comes with a free English-language audio tour.
I just returned home from visiting Paris, using it for a couple of days on each side as staging going to/from Lyon for the Open Source Summit EU.
Both times passing through I spent an entire day doing *only* “late morning to mid afternoon in Musée d’Orsay, then mid afternoon to closing at Musée de l’Orangerie, then have dinner at some tiny out of the way 5 star restaurant where the owner / waiter / host / headchef is one person and doesn’t speak any English”. This was my 3rd time and 4th time in Paris, and if possible I will make a day of repeating every time I go to Paris.
The Musée du Louvre is overwhelming, but 1) overwhelming, and 2) old, and 3) not enough of it is moving.
d’Orsay is moving. Two hours in, and your brain and eyes start getting that “running out of brain juice” feeling one gets from watching a movie marathon. But you dont want to stop.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157199580414064&set=a.437178244063&type=3&theater
It’s worth noting that for much of this artwork, photographs don’t capture the colors well enough at all. You will recognize a painting from the pictures you’ve seen of it, but looking at an image on your computer is nothing like looking at the painting under the museum lights.
Side note about Lyon: The food there is exquisite, better even than Paris (where it’s merely “amazingly good”.) Some of the people visiting Lyon on this trip reported sitting down at one of the more famous restaurants, eating until they were full, and then CONTINUING TO EAT, unable to stop until all the platters on the table were empty, because the food was just that good.
How do you find the tiny excellent places?
I know how to find well-known fancy restaurants, which are still in fact good, and I’m price-insensitive enough that I’d still like that, but I don’t know how to find the odd stuff.
I have done it with a mix of “ask my social graph for recommendations” and “looking on google map and minmaxing on walking distance and ratings, and then look for keywords”. I’ve been very lucky so far, but it does seem to work. I’ve paid just under €100 per seat, including the wine.
Agreed, Musée des Arts et Métiers is worth going to. Less so about returning to again and again, but yes for at least once.
My suggestion is to hunt down a tiny sandwich shop by the name of Chez Alain Miam Miam. It used to be in the Marche does Enfants-Rouge but I think he’s moved since I lived there to somewhere nearby in the temple/Marais. It’s a quirky delight of a man preparing (very slowly) the best sandwich I’ve ever had. Among the few things on earth I’ll happily stand in line for.
The Louvre is a nightmare, truly, but also unmissable culturally. I felt something like wabi-sabi turning the corner after seeing so much stuff in a day just to see the Hammurabi stele. I was buzzing with bliss for days. The Petite Palais feels much more intimate and hosted all my favorite exhibitions. I second everyone on the Orsay and the Arts et Metiers.
Saint-Chapelle is my must see church, and if you can get there on a sunny day it’s incomparable. My favorite place in the world is in Pere Lachaise cemetery but I have a somewhat gothic disposition.
If you like military stuff, Napoleon’s tomb at the Invalides is surrounded by the military museum.
Otherwise to me the chief pleasure of Paris is just walking the streets. And dozens of food places, but the walking keeps the calories in check.
For outside, I can recommend Chantilly, Bruges, Versailles, and Fontainebleau as outings, but I never went in winter, and I did very perfunctory “go see the pretty thing eat there and leave” trips which were all, frankly, wonderful because vacation.
The Invalides compound is great. An interesting cathedral and an extensive museum.
I studied in France for a year, so these are “student-budget” friendly. Do you speak French? I’ll note the items where this is important.
Walk; Paris is very pretty and safe. I particularly recommend going to the Eiffel Tower by walking from the opposite end of the Champ de Mars.
Go to the Comedie Francaise; a last-minute poor-seat ticket is 5 euro. See a Moliere play if possible–that was his company and his theater. Read the play beforehand unless you’re absolutely fluent in French.
Go to the 19th near Buttes-Chaumont and get couscous.
Go to Chartres; that’s an all-day trip, but well worth it.
If you have any interest in history, go to Brugge and take the Quasimodo Flanders Fields tour. It won’t be cheap, but is incredible.
Isn’t Flanders Fields Ieper/Ypres? They have a nice WWI museum as well.
Parc des Buttes Chaumont is honestly itself a good place to explore. It was my favorite of the parks, even better than the Luxembourg Gardens.
Thank you all for the suggestions!
Impeachment Roundup:
This community leans right much further than I encounter in my meat-space social circles, so I’d like y’alls perspective on the ongoing impeachment hearings. Some questions to consider:
1. Was there a conspiracy on the part of the administration to tie aid/support for Ukraine to their influencing the 2020 election? (Y/N)
2. If so, was the president aware of and/or orchestrating said conspiracy? (Y/N)
3. If such a conspiracy did occur would it be improper? (Y/N)
4. If it is improper, does it rise to the level of impeachment? (Y/N)
1. No. Trump was looking for dirt on Biden though, and that’s at least as legal as initiating a 2 year investigation into the POTUS based on some sleazy opposition research.
2. N/A
3. Not more improper than the Mueller investigation.
4. N/A
Agreed.
1. Y
2. ~Y
3. ~N
4. N
Pretty clearly President Trump et. al. were trying to get Ukraine to provide dirt. The President himself literally asked them to do this, so it’s similarly clear he knew about it, although I don’t know if I’d want to dignify this whole ridiculous mess by claiming anybody orchestrated anything. I can’t come up with a coherent democratic philosophy which has a serious problem with this but not with super-PACs, and I think all forms of obvious political grandstanding are bad, which given the Senate this absolutely is at the moment unless the House knows a whole lot of things I don’t.
I don’t think the other party having control of the Senate is a reason to hold off on impeachment – it’s pretty much par for the course. Since you need a 2/3rds majority to remove, you’ll almost always need the cooperation of the other party no matter who controls it. You just have to hope that whatever you uncover is explosive enough that it can push the other party into supporting it.
Libertarian, if that counts as “right” to you.
1. Probably Yes for a definition of “influencing” that amounts to the Ukranian government making an official proclamation that Biden is a Crook without regard for whether or not that was true (and without regard to whether people on his own side were engaged in equally corrupt dealings).
2. If #1 is a Yes, #2 is definitely a Yes
3. See #2. If true, the bit where Trump threatened to withhold aid over this, constitutes redirecting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for his private political ends.
4. Same as #3, plus if we allow this power to fall into the hands of a competent president, then that president’s party will be effectively impossible to remove from power.
Note that the next competent politician to sit in the Oval Office, will probably be a Democrat.
For 4) we already know what it looks like when a competent administration has this power, it’s called Obama’s investigation of the Trump campaign that dragged on for two years into the Mueller report.
What the heck do you call the whole Russia investigation other than a fishing expedition primarily for political gain? Or the Steele dossier, literally paying foreigners for dubious dirt on a political candidate? Yeah, they laundered that through a Brit and the DNC, but when it gets introduced as evidence in a secret federal court…
Yes there was some actual dirt uncovered in that investigation, although the scale was much lower than originally advertised. In any case I doubt any of that gets pursued with nearly so much vigor if it didn’t directly serve the Dems’ political interests.
So basically like so many Trump crises this is all about optics and process crimes. If you’ve got enough allied bureaucrats and a friendly press to publish the right leaks, and you know the magic words for plausible deniability, feel free to use the power of government to attack the results of the democratic process and the power of foreign aid to extort allied governments.
If you’re Trump and you clumsily try to get your buddy Rudy to do it, you’re a Traitor etc.
I get that we have the process for a reason, but I also totally get why Trump supporters or even non-Trumpist Republicans are having a hard time drawing a moral distinction that makes Trump uniquely evil here.
I think if the RNC or Trump wants to spend campaign money to fund oppo research on Biden from Ukrainians or anyone else its totally fine. Leveraging hundreds of millions of dollars of military support approved by Congress is not okay.
Biden used a billion dollars in aid to get a Ukrainian political appointee fired, who just might have turned some unpleasant light on his son’s activities that look an awful lot like accepting attempted influence peddling.
Biden’s bribe went through the right channels and Hunter has enough plausible deniability that he probably isn’t technically a criminal, but the optics would have been bad.
Either way the Obama administration openly extorted a political action out of Ukraine, via threat of withheld, taxpayer funded aid.
I’m not arguing the technicalities here. It’s possible, even likely, that Trump’s maneuver violates some law that Biden did not.
But where is the moral distinction? It requires begging the question and assuming that getting some Ukrainian prosecutor canned was critical to American interests, but investigating possible Ukrainian influence peddling is ONLY of interest to Trump’s political interests.
On your actual point (sorry for the digression) why is okay to pay foreigners for oppo research, but not accept it from them? Since the latter was what got the whole “Trump colluded with Russia” thing started.
Your arguments seem totally unrelated to mine?
I have reason to doubt your narrative about Joe Biden but even so it doesn’t concern me if that was illegal or not since it’s irrelevant.
I also don’t care about whether accepting information about Hillary Clinton was illegal or not.
Why is it irrelevant? If we’re basing an impeachment proceeding on a double standard, held for purely political reasons, that seems highly relevant.
The Democrats want me to believe that Trump did a highly improper, unprecedentedly bad thing, literally betraying America for the sake of naked political ambition, so serious that we must implement impeachment to defend the Constitution.
But if Trump’s actions are just clumsy, bull in a china shop, damn the process versions of stuff more adept politicos do all the time, and the difference is fundamentally procedural rather than moral, that’s a tougher case to make.
Legally, a political campaign can employ a foreign national, while they cannot accept any kind of donation (either cash or a “thing of value”) from a foreign national. Opposition research is a “thing of value”.
Citation on campaigns not being allowed to accept donations from foreign nationals.
Citation on opposition research counting as a “thing of value”.
Additionally, Trump’s decision to try to get valuable opposition research from Ukraine isn’t just a violation of campaign finance law, it’s also probably felony extortion and possibly bribery.
I guess I don’t think “double standard” is a persuasive argument. Like if one murderer gets let go, then from now on all murderers must be released to avoid a double standard?
If murder happened all the time, but it was only prosecuted when committed by the political opponents of the majority government, then yeah, that would be relevant.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but a double standard applied only when advantageous to you is no standard at all.
@broblawsky – It seems there are 3 things:
1) Alice is offered dirt on her opponent Bob by a Clipistani official. It is illegal for her to accept.
2) Alice offers something of value to a Clipistani official to get dirt on Bob. This is also illegal.
3) Alice hears that the Clipistanis might have some dirt on Bob. So she hires Daria, from Foolandia, to travel to Clipistan and get the dirt. Daria, while in Clipistan, gathers up freely offered dirt and pays for dirt when it helps grease the wheels, then writes it up in a nice report and delivers it to Alice. This is totally fine.
I’m with you till you get to 3? To me these all have the same outcome and treating them as clearly distinct is problematic.
Thank you for the links. I think the Daily Beast one is, however, yet another example of question begging here. Trump was not asking the Ukrainians for “oppo research”. He was asking them to investigate a potential crime. Opinions may differ on whether there was any sort of justification for such an investigation, but calling it oppo research off the bat is assuming away that key question.
I believe that while that is the official position of the FEC, but it’s pretty controversial and hasn’t been legally tested.
In particular, if it were true, it would be illegal for a US Citizen to donate opposition research that was valued at more than campaign donation limits, and politicians would need to declare the value of information received from US Citizens along with their identities, right?
I don’t see how investigation of a single crime is opposition research.
If Trump said “Give me all your files on Biden”, that’s probably opposition research, although the points made about whether or not that is really a donation is relevant here.
But the idea that it is not allowable to request foreign investigation into a specific investigation of someone because he may one day run against Trump (as far as I know, Biden is still not the Democrat nominee) is fairly silly.
The difference between A+B and C is the possibility of a corrupt exchange. In the case of A, Alice owes the Clipistani government something. Obviously, we want to avoid situations where our politicians are in hock to foreign governments. In the case of B, we have the same problems as A, along with questions of bribery. In the case of C, the only person Alice owes is Daria, and because she hired Daria legally as part of her campaign, the extent of that obligation is limited to a normal exchange of goods and services.
He was asking them to investigate his foremost political rival. It’s valuable to his political campaign, which makes it opposition research. As a legal analogy: imagine a President asking a foreign government to donate to a charitable foundation in their name, which could then be leveraged to support a reelection campaign as well. If Trump had let Barr push for this without getting personally involved, he’d have some protection. By directly pressing Zelensky to assist Barr, he compromised himself.
Beyond the legal complexities of the situation, here’s the core question: do you really want the already-dysfunctional American political environment to degenerate into a bidding war for the support of foreign intelligence agencies? Because that’s where we end up headed if Trump doesn’t get punished for this.
It’s illegal for Trump to request the investigation. If Barr had pushed for it by himself, this wouldn’t be illegal, or at least Trump wouldn’t be implicated. Trump isn’t the US’s chief law enforcement official; Barr is. It isn’t Trump’s job to investigate people.
Edit: to preempt anyone claiming Trump is the US’s chief law enforcement officer, I’d like to cite the White House’s own website, which lists the AG as “chief law enforcement officer of the federal government”. Also, Trump can’t have a law enforcement role: he’s commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and Posse Comitatus bars the armed forces from a law enforcement role outside of special circumstances.
@broblawsky
Presidents have foreign governments contribute to their charitable foundations all the time. I believe the saudis have contributed to all of the recent ones. There are also the myriad donations to the clinton foundation from foreign governments.
As I’ve said elsewhere, presidents have fought entire wars they didn’t believe in for domestic political advantage. reagan spent billions on bombers he knew were obsolete because it was good politics, and Kennedy spent a fortune closing a non-existent missile gap for the same reason. Getting someone investigated is small change compared to that, and I cannot get outraged over a president requesting an investigation of someone who seems to have been corrupt.
“to preempt anyone claiming Trump is the US’s chief law enforcement officer, I’d like to cite the White House’s own website, which lists the AG as “chief law enforcement officer of the federal government”.”
This reflects a common pattern of the deep state treating its “traditions” as if they were the law of the land. We wrote it on a website, so there! The constitution establishes that the President is the head of the executive branch. If the executive branch has the power to do something according to the constitution, then the President has the same power unless specifically stated otherwise.
At no point did a sitting President directly request those donations, however. That’s a critical factor. Trump didn’t do anything (obviously) illegal when the Russian government cyberattacked the DNC, even though they were able to provide valuable opposition research for his campaign. And I’m going to head off any discussions about the Clinton Foundation: the Trump administration has had 3 years to investigate the Clinton’s and they’ve never tried to bring charges against them. There’s nothing there.
Then I hope you’ll be equally non-outraged when, under the next Democratic administration, conservative political leaders and donors are “investigated” into terrified compliance. The wall of separation between law enforcement and the Executive is perhaps the single most important factor separating liberal and illiberal democracies. Once it’s breached, all hell breaks loose.
I would amend it to say politically-motivated investigations are the most important factor separating liberal and illiberal democracies. Whether they are launched by political officials directly or politically-motivated
deep state officials“civil servants” doesn’t make any difference. The deep state fired the first shot with the Mueller investigation. Alternatively, there is “no proof” it was politically motivated. And there’s “no proof” Trump wanted Biden investigated for political reasons.We already tried to be outraged. We were told it was mere public servants doing their sworn duty to investigate a serious crime.
This alleged crime has more evidence for its existence now, without an investigation, than that one had after a multi year investigation by the FBI, IC, and then a special prosecutor.
Its the President’s duty to ensure that Ukraine’s 2016 is not repeated. Its also his duty to investigate corruption by American governmental officials. That those things sometimes will benefit his campaign is unavoidable.
@broblawsky says:
Please. their might not have been a record of the request, but tens of millions do not just appear.
that they didn’t try is not evidence that there’s nothing there, but that’s besides the point. There’s no way, for example, that trump is violating the emoluments clause but Clinton wasn’t raking in huge donations while secretary of state. But one of these things is considered perfectly normal and the other is impeachable. the double standard is appalling.
You mean like the Mueller investigation? Because I wasn’t outraged by it. I didn’t like the spectacle, and you could probably convince me that some of the people caught up in it got worse than they deserved (e.g. I don’t like Mike Flynn, and I’m glad he’s not in the white house, but I don’t think he deserved to have his whole life destroyed), but from what I’ve gathered it looks like some tax cheats went to jail, which I’m entirely in favor of.
The Mueller investigation wasn’t conducted by a Democratic administration. It was commissioned by the Trump administration, directed by former AG Jeff Sessions (until his recusal) and current AG Barr, and all of its investigative procedures were considered acceptable by the Trump administration. Mueller himself is a lifelong Republican. If you thought that was bad, then you should be doubly invested in making sure that Trump is punished for this violation of the law, because if he isn’t, politicized investigations will become the norm, and this power may be wielded far more competently in the future.
@EchoChaos says: “…as far as I know, Biden is still not the Democrat nominee…
And for what it’s worth I’m increasingly doubtful he will be, large amount donors are going for Buttigieg (who I also don’t think will be the nominee), the activist wing and small donors are going for Warren (and to a lesser extent Sanders), on the Left wing Sanders has been previously too independent to get institutional support within the Party so Warren will be the Left candidate, Biden’s support is broad but not deep, and frankly he seems doddering and isn’t a good debater, his supporters tend to be (there’s a lot of overlap in these categories) older, non-white, more conservative (relative to other Democrats), and/or more likely to live in “red states”, which is great base of support for a candidate to win the general election, but a terrible one for winning the Party.
At this point it looks to me like Warren has it in the bag to be nominee, and she’ll lose in the electoral college.
Sanders won’t be the nominee, but if he somehow is his almost Trump-like cantankerousness may appeal to enough non-voters to do better than Warren would, but I have a hard time imagining a self-described “socialist” wins unless a deep recession starts very soon and lasts until next year.
If Biden is the nominee and loses the Democratic Party will go further Left, which will also happen if Warren or Sanders wins the general election.
Whichever Party wins the Presidency won’t have a majority of the House of Representatives in 2022, and they’ll be stalemate and snipping.
FWLIW, they’re niche things, but I think any Democrat would have good picks for Labor Secretary and the NLRB, otherwise Biden has a slim chance to actually win, Gabbard and Harris are easy on the eyes, and Sanders is just immensely entertaining, but nobody (either Democrat or Republican) will get even a tenth of their promised agenda passed except for maybe some court appointments if the Senate is with them, and I predict the Senate will stay Republican at least until 2024 (so yes, I basically just predicted five more years of the status quo).
By the “deep state” you mean the Trump administration, right? Because they’re the people who commissioned the special counsel investigation.
If you seriously believe that the idea that investigating Biden wouldn’t be politically useful didn’t cross Trump’s mind, I have to doubt whether there’s any point to continuing this conversation.
@broblawsky says:
Oh, please, the accusations began during the obama administration, and mueller was largely independent, and clearly more closely aligned with congressional democrats than anyone in the trump administration.
I said it wasn’t so bad. and the best way to encourage politicized investigations is for them to be seen as useful for reversing election results.
Not even half true. The genesis is an Obama administration investigation that violated regulations and lacked probable cause without representing unsubstantiated political material as corroborated.
A motto that not only makes little sense, but has little substantiation, particularly based on his staffing choices. Plus, there is little evidence he actually managed the probe, rather it was Weissman, a Democrat to the core (and both are well known as rabid dogs, both have caused the US DOJ to settle massive cases for prosecutorial misconduct).
That makes little sense. One was a massive breaking of norms with no credible evidence. This is a following of the Obama admin norms (one cannot break a norm that is already broken, more or less), with much greater evidence to support a launch of the investigation for legitimate reasons.
What you are demanding is that Trump be better than his predecessor by a significant margin. Which he already has been by tolerating the Mueller probe, and tolerating this whistleblower. Obama would have fired Comey day 1, Rosenstein and the SC immediately (as if Holder would have ever recused himself, ROFL), and put this whistleblower in jail, simply based on his documented actions.
When you put it like that…is there any reason a president needs to run a charitable foundation? I mean, there is obviously some PR value in using other people’s money for more or less altruistic purposes, but if the effect is mainly to whitewash the purchase of influence, why is it acceptable? Can’t philanthropists at least pretend to give their money to non-political causes?
@Ketil says:
What’s the point fame and influence if you can’t monetize it? Speaking fees require you to actually, you know, speak. Much easier just to let people just mail you money.
I missed the part where Mueller used hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and the power of the State Department to lean on foreign intelligence and law-enforcement services to publicly defame a US politician’s family in support of the political ambitions of a different US politician.
The claim is NOT, NOT NOT NOT NOT FUCKING NOT, that opposition research is or ought to be illegal, or even that opposition research conducted in foreign countries is or ought to be illegal. And the slightest hint of charity and reading comprehension on your part would have at least lead to your asking a clarifying question on that point rather than unleashing your canned and irrelevant rant.
You don’t like what Mueller did, fine. That doesn’t make what Trump did, either A: the same as what Mueller did, or B: OK.
Well, there was nothing foreign about it, but otherwise it’s pretty much what Mueller did. “Hey, I see you cheated on your taxes, be a shame if you went to prison, if only there was something you could say to make me sympathize with your situation….”
There’s “no proof” of any quid pro quo just as there’s “no proof” of any quid pro quo in Ukraine.
Apologies for coming off as uncharitable, I’m doing two things here:
1) being intentionally a bit of a devils advocate for the “the Swamp is just pissed their own tactics are being used on them” position, much more strongly than I actually hold such a position
2) the last time we talked about this, your position seemed to be that the primary provably bad thing that Trump did was refer the Ukrainians to Rudy instead of the proper State Department hack. Biden’s boast about a quid pro quo with Ukraine was fine because it went through the right channels and, in your mind, the benefit to America rather than just Biden was more clear.
Anyway, Mueller didn’t spend “hundreds of millions” but he (and the related investigations) did turn the power of the state and intelligence services on an investigation of domestic and foreign individuals. It is undeniable that that investigation was likely to politically benefit Democrats, and pretending it was just for the good of America requires a lot of charity that Trump is not being extended.
If “amount of taxpayer dollars” is the issue, Biden DID use hundreds of millions of dollars to meddle in the internal politics of a foreign state.
I’m honestly struggling to find the moral distinction here that doesn’t require question begging, and if you’d extend me an ounce of charity perhaps you could help me there rather than dismiss it as a canned rant.
EDIT: there’s also the letter from Senators leaning on the Ukrainians to cooperate with the Mueller investigation in a “nice alliance we have here, shame if something changed that” sort of way. Again, smart enough not to be explicit, but the intent seems similar.
None of this is relevant to whether Trump technically violated a law, but I think it is very relevant to how I ought to feel about it.
Unless I’m confused, you’re mixing two things.
1) Loan guarantees which the executive branch can enter into, or not, which was Vice President Biden’s lever to get the result the US wanted (interference in a foreign government).
2) Foreign Aid, which congress had decided would be provided, which was President Trump’s lever to get a foreign government to investigate a US citizen and the son of his main election opponent.
So, we’ve got different things, over which different branches of government have authority, being used for different purposes.
None of the above is legal advice and is based on my very minimal review of this situation.
First off, “State Department hack” is being gratuitously uncharitable. If you’re going to apologize for being uncharitable, you kind of have to make an effort to stop doing that.
Second, basically yes. Private gain and public gain are two different things even if they are sometimes hard to distinguish.
Fair enough. It is absolutely wrong for an elected official to use the state’s money or resources to pursue his private gain, and pursuing private political gain is exceptionally bad. The right and duty of an elected official is to use the state’s money and resources to pursue public gains, and if he wants he may privately (or publicly) hope that this will inspire the public to vote for him or his partisan allies. These are, at least in principle, two things as different as selling goods for money and picking pockets. Demanding that, because Alice was allowed to do the thing that resulted in money moving from Bob’s pocket to hers, we have to allow your guy to do the other thing that has that effect, doesn’t cut it.
Are the borders fuzzier in politics than in commerce? Yes, of course. Do politicians frequently lie about which side of that fuzzy border they are on, in ways that we find hard to prove? They’re politicians and their lips are moving, so you do the math on that one. None of that means that the clumsy oaf of a politician who leaves his muddy footprints all over the pitch-black region should have a get-out-of-jail-free card.
And if you’re genuinely confused as to figure out how to distinguish the two, a few pointers.
If the “public good” you are pursuing starts with harm to your political enemies, or even more so their families, then you just might be a crook. This alone is not proof, but it is suggestive
If the “public good” requires that public money allocated by congress for one purpose be allocated or withheld for another, then you just might be a crook. This alone is not proof, but it is suggestive.
If the “public good” requires the cooperation of a government you yourself have condemned as corrupt, and you make no apparent effort to ensure that they stay honest this time, then you just might be a crook. This alone is not proof, and please take this disclaimer as applying to all the rest even as I decline to repeat it.
If the “public good” involves the vigorous public prosecution or even investigation of crimes that would normally be ignored or quietly handled, then you just might be a crook.
If the “public good” involves the direct intervention of your elected self in matters that would normally be handled by professional civil servants two levels below, you just might be a crook
If the “public good” involves matters that would normally be handled by professional civil servants being instead handed over to your personal hirelings, you just might be a crook.
If the “public good” is conducted without the usual level of public transparency or with more than the usual level of secrecy, then you just might be a crook.
If, when word of the “public good” leaks out anyway, you denounce the whistleblower as a traitor and suggest he ought to be executed, you just might be a crook.
Just off the top of my head.
And if all of these things are true, then we’re past suggesting criminality. At that point, claiming that you are being misunderstood in your selfless pursuit of the “public good” is like Henry II claiming that he only meant for someone to talk to Becket and maybe convince him to be less turbulent. The law is not required to believe transparent lies or take blatant weasel-wording at face value. Nor is Congress, nor am I.
I honestly meant “hack” in the sense of “basically anonymous/interchangeable bureaucrat tasked with executing rather than setting policy” and not anything more nefarious, but the term can be loaded so sorry.
To be clear here, I’m trying to say something a bit more nuanced than “Obama/Biden/Clinton got away with it so Trump should get away with it too”. A double standard is no standard at all, particularly if it is only hauled out when convenient to take out your political opponents. Since that is the very thing Trump is ultimately being accused of, wielding his power for personal political ends, it is a very relevant question whether the standards being applied to Trump are sufficiently inline with the standards as they’ve been applied to less orange presidents. I agree that it would be very damaging to allow presidents to use publicly allocated funds to bribe foreign officials into helping their campaigns. But I also believe that it is very damaging to normalize investigating / impeaching sitting presidents because you’ve got control of the House and you’re pissed about how the election went down. So we should make damn sure we aren’t doing that either – if Trump is pursuing the same crooked ends with basically the same means that everyone else in his position does, just more clumsily and without the often thin veneer of “proper channels”, I’m not sure that’s worth making him the first convicted president over.
I generally agree with your “pointers”, but most of them can be applied to the people going after Trump as well:
Definitely applies to the Mueller and related investigation, which was ostensibly about protecting America from foreign meddling but was mostly about finding enough dirt on Trump to justify impeaching him. As for “more so their families”, if you are referring to Hunter Biden, he’s a grown ass man who has leveraged his dad’s name into way more privilege and wealth than 99% of Americans will ever have access to who took an obvious “appearance of impropriety” gig with a foreign company, so using the “have you no decency?” defense is uncompelling. We’re not bullying a child here.
This is probably the best argument against Trump’s actions, but even here, dangling carrots in front of foreign governments to get them to do things America wants is extremely common. This is after all what the Obama administration did to force Ukraine to make a personnel change – the differences here seem to be about intent (is it a public good?) and the technical details of where the money was allocated (executive loan guarantees vs. “foreign aid”). The former is what I mean by “begging the question”, the latter is what I mean by “I see the technical difference but not the moral one”.
This is particularly uncompelling. We have to deal with corrupt foreign (and domestic) governments all the time, including ones we have called out as corrupt.
The Mueller investigation. Lots of people written up on tangential or process crimes that would have gone ignored except they were useful as leverage to go after Trump. Clearly had insiders leaking selectively to gin up maximum public outrage throughout the process. May apply to this whole impeachment investigation (that’s exactly what we are debating).
Can you really blame Trump for not trusting career civil servants to faithfully execute his policies? Calling them “professional” gives the implication that they are non-partisan, which I’m not sure they’ve earned (particularly when it comes to Trump). This standard heavily privileges insiders from the same party as the career bureaucrats.
See above. Also, again, the technical case here is much easier to make than the moral one, and the latter is what I’m more interested in.
Are conversations between Presidents and foreign officials typically public? Are proposed investigations?
Is it “the usual level of public transparency” to use the secret FISA court to open investigations into your political opponents, using biased oppo research bought and paid for by your own political party as part of the justification?
Not going to defend the language of Trump here, although it looks pretty self-serving when it is denounced by people who’ve spent the last three years calling Trump traitor, crook, Nazi, and worse (not you of course, but plenty of others including some in official positions).
This is also another place where the question is being begged. Is the whistleblower leaking this privileged information because they genuinely believe a serious crime that will harm American interests has been committed, or are they doing it because they’ve had it out for Trump for political reasons and saw this as an opportunity to take him down? Both the whistleblower and the President are attempting to turn the power of the government toward an end that would undeniably politically benefit one or the other party. So is either end also enough of a public good that it trumps that? I wish I could share your certainty, but to my mind impeaching a President is also a nearly unprecedented power that needs to be wielded carefully, and I’m not convinced the Dems have crossed that bar.
Part of the issue, well really most of the issue, for me is that I can’t say with certainty that investigating Hunter Biden’s business relationships in Ukraine is unreasonable. Like, it seems really naive to assume that he was worth $50k a month unless you were trying to influence peddle. It seems like preventing foreign interests from buying off our officials via their families is very much something that serves the public good. Obviously taking out Joe Biden’s candidacy would also help Donald Trump, but was it unreasonable for Trump to think it would serve the public good as well? And if Trump could reasonably think he was serving the public good, but violated proper procedures in doing so, that’s not good but I feel quite differently about that vs. something that did not have a justifiable end goal. You’ve already granted that this is fuzzy – is Trump’s move truly that fuzz-free?
I trust that you’re being honest when you say you’ve considered that and made an honest determination that no, there was no way Trump had anything but his own interests in mind, and that plus the clumsy and inappropriate way he went about pursuing the goal are impeachment worthy.
But I have zero reason to believe that the Democratic majority and the media are pursuing this in good faith. They’ve spent far too long exerting maximum outrage and minimum charity over every Trumpian offense, real or imagined, to earn that benefit of the doubt. Let’s move on (.org) from impeachment and just have the damn election.
Isn’t that what every president, and every congressperson so far as he can, does? When a politician supports biofuels, not because he mistakenly believes they reduce AGW but because he wants farm votes, isn’t he redirecting money for his private political ends? Similarly for Trump’s tariffs, and building a wall, and lot of things done by other politicians.
Insofar as there is a plausible theory of democracy, it isn’t that politicians are philosopher kings making decisions for the good of the country, it’s that their private political ends mesh tolerably well with the good of the country.
Sort of. But there are legitimate and illegitimate ends. So, would it also be your position that this was politics as usual if he’d said, ‘Pay me a million dollars, or no aid for you’?
ETA: John Schilling makes this point much more eloquently above us, with the public vs private gain point.
I find david friedman’s point a good response to John Schilling’s comment, actually. the line between public and private good gets crossed way more often than he admits. Presidents have fought entire wars that they didn’t believe in for domestic political gain, on more than one occasion. It would be one thing if Trump were trying to lean on people to fabricate evidence or do something otherwise illegal, but I just can’t get up in arms about him wanting to invest what seems very like to be a corrupt bargain.
What’s the difference between carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide? I mean, they are both just carbon and oxygen.
“influencing the 2020 election” requires a better definition.
Otherwise all of the responses will be based on what someone’s definition of “influencing the 2020 election.”
If Trump promises North Korea aid for a unilateral disarmament, that can easily be defined as “predicating aid on influencing the 2020 election,” as unilateral No Ko disarmament would surely influence the election.
If “influencing the 2020 election” means “faithfully conducting an investigation into various circumstances at Trump’s request” then my answers are:
Y, Y, N, N.
If “influencing the 2020 election” means “pretending to conduct an investigation into various circumstances at Trump’s request, where the outcome of the fake investigation is pre-ordained,” then my answers are:
N, Y, Y, Y
More specifically, “investigate Burisma and assist Barr for aid” is not impeachable, but “investigate Burisma, assist Barr, and find Hunter Biden guilty in some fashion for aid” is impeachable.
mitv150 above is moderately close to my view.
In #1, there are at least three contestable definitions baked into the statement “Was there a conspiracy on the part of the administration to tie aid/support for Ukraine to their influencing the 2020 election?” The first is “conspiracy,” which (in legal terms) requires agreement to accomplish an unlawful purpose, which rather begs the question. The second is “tie aid/support for Ukraine,” which is vague on two levels – “tie” can mean “if not this, then not that” or it can mean “we’re all working together here on mutual common goals.” It’s sort of like when you read clickbait “science” articles breathlessly announcing that X behavior is “tied to” Y outcome, and inevitably doesn’t get into the messy details of the correlation. Moreover, “aid” is presumably the held-up military aid, but “support for Ukraine” could mean anything from geopolitical cover, to a visit to the White House (which I think has also been bandied about at some level) to “getting on Trump’s good side” with no specified current benefit. Finally, “their influencing the 2020 election” is (as mitv150 notes) a really non-specific statement, and is going to bring in a lot of hidden assumptions about what it means to “influence the election”, whether such influence is wrongful, and whether (if solicited) such solicitation is wrongful.
Given all that, I think the questions become difficult to answer. I think that there was an attempt, on the part of the administration, to persuade Ukraine to act on both stemming corruption in Ukraine, as well as assistance in ongoing investigations into 2016 election, both of which the administration probably thought genuinely reflected bad behavior by the preceding administration and deserved to be investigated. In that sense, if there’s anything “wrongful” about it, it seems more like an “isolated demand for rigor” rather than an improper ask – Trump is more interested in [he thinks real] corruption that shows he was, in fact, the victim of a poorly predicated witch hunt by Mueller / Dems (the 2016 server thing plus Ukrainian connections with the prior administration) than he is in potential corruption that would reflect badly on not-Dems. Obviously if true, it might have some impact on 2020 – but the same would be true if Ukraine had genuine video [for the sake of argument] of Joe Biden accepting a giant suitcase full of money, rubbing his hands and cackling like a supervillain that “I’ve succeeded in being bribed, hooray!” Trump asking for an investigation into that [purely hypothetical] video would not, in my opinion, be wrongful. The transcript does not, in my reading, support that Trump said “and get me some dirt, real or fake, or else we’ll cut you off at the knees.” It’s basically a muddle of Trump thinking that the Dems were corruptly cozy with Ukraine in 2016, and wanting to have the new Ukrainian administration commit to being less corrupt and to disavow any such former corruption.
So does that count as a “Y” or “N” for #1? I’m not sure. Probably a “N.”
2 is a Y if applicable at all, since the transcript / call is at issue and Trump’s on the phone.
3 is probably an “N”, again with reference to the definitions involved.
4 again depends on the definitions, but it’s fair to say that based on what I’ve read so far, I’m an “N” on impeachment.
Anti-Trump Republican with Libertarian leanings. Currently registered as “No Party Preference”. Voted for Johnson in the 2016 general election after voting for Clinton in the Democratic primary.
1. Y-ish. “Conspiracy” isn’t the word I would use, but it definitely looks like the administration was using military aid to the Ukraine as a carrot to get them to dig up dirt on Biden. And influencing the 2020 election strikes me as by far the most likely motive for that.
2. Y. The published minutes of Trump’s call to Zelensky show Trump asking Zelensky to investigate Biden in a context that strongly implies a quid pro quo for military aid.
3. Y. It’s at the very least tacky to ask another country to involve themselves in our elections. I also think it’s improper to condition military aid on this. Military aid should be considered on its own merits: if it’s in our strategic interests to support Ukraine, we should support them. Attaching petty conditions unrelated to our strategic interests shows very poor judgement on Trump’s part.
4. Not sure. I’ve read a fairly persuasive argument that Trump’s quid pro quo violated federal election laws by offering government funds in exchange for material support to an election campaign, which would certainly be illegal, but I don’t think it’s necessarily impeachable unless either 1) Trump’s conduct here is at least a standard deviation worse on this front than routine political backscratching, or 2) there’s a bipartisan consensus that it’s time to start seriously enforcing this aspect of federal election laws. 1 is plausible to me but I don’t know enough to say with confidence. 2 strikes me as very unlikely.
As a resident right winger my perspective is that I simply don’t care about the details because:
A. Democrats have cried wolf so badly since before Trump got elected that they’ve lost any remnant of credibility they might have had as good-faith protectors of “our constitutional system,” etc. (not that I’m claiming Republicans are much better on this score). Anything less than him caught on camera shooting somebody and right wingers will assume it’s just a partisan witch hunt.
B. You’re not going to get Trump supporters to abandon him over it/support impeachment because they’ve got no alternatives (including Pence, I’d think) with remotely similar policy positions or chances of being POTUS in the near future. And this may be precisely why Democrats want so badly to get rid of Trump in particular.
Related to B: a heuristic I’ve proposed a few times: don’t be surprised if people don’t abandon politician X over scandal Y if you wouldn’t abandon a politician with all your favorite policy positions over the same thing.
For example, I didn’t think Bill Clinton’s behavior with an intern was appropriate, but I don’t think he should have been impeached over it and thought it was a big, partisan waste of time at the time.
For another: I really disapprove of Elizabeth Warren’s deception (deceptions?) related to her academic career but they aren’t bad enough I wouldn’t vote for her if I strongly agreed with her policy positions, especially if the alternative were someone as far off from those positions as e.g. Trump.
So for me I can simply ask myself whether, were he still running for something, I would abandon Ron Paul over scandal Y because A. Ron Paul is pretty close to holding my ideal policy positions and B. There are very few other politicians holding his positions so I don’t have a lot of good alternatives waiting in the wings. If the answer is “no, I wouldn’t stop supporting Ron Paul over this scandal” then I shouldn’t be surprised when others won’t abandon whomever over the same thing.
I feel like politics could be a lot more “serious” if there were a general agreement to abide by this heuristic. Not going to happen, of course, because scandals are super effective.
Note that I’m not saying I’m certain the Trump Ukraine thing is the sort of scandal one should never care about because nobody would abandon his preferred policy position candidate over it. However, the ability to distinguish these is currently severely hampered by the ultra-partisan, bad faith climate.
Even then plenty of people’s trust in the media is so low that there’d be a lot of “Well, we need to wait for all the facts to come out,” “That shooting was taken out of context,” and “the videos were deceptively edited.”
Hell, I might even agree with some of those takes!
Lot of hyperbole here that I think deserves elaboration. This latest scandal is noticeably different from prior cases in that a statistically significant chunk of the population that had previously disliked Trump but also disapproved of impeachment changed their minds on the latter – similar shifts can been seen in the House, be it from personal conviction or as representation of constituents. Does this shift matter to you? How large would this group need to be to factor into your opinion?
I genuinely don’t intend to be all that hyperbolic, though of course I don’t speak for every right winger. Maybe I am also different in having very little respect for most of the Republican party as well as most of the Democratic party as there are too many bad things most members of both parties agree on, especially (imo overly interventionist) foreign policy.
So if you tell me a lot of Republicans agree that “it’s different this time,” then my first question would be “which Republicans, specifically, think that?” As per the guideline I suggest above it would be most convincing if prominent conservatives whose policy preferences align with Trump’s to some degree, such as Pat Buchanan, came out in favor of impeachment.
I’m an independent, not a Republican, but my opinion shifted from “don’t like the guy, but this is obviously a witch hunt” to “yeah, he probably deserves impeachment” after these allegations came out. A politically inexperienced candidate shooting his mouth off is one thing; a sitting President actively exercising actual power, who’s had two or three years to learn better, is another.
Not that I think he’ll actually be removed, and I don’t even blame the Senate much for that: from a Senate Republican perspective, in the current political environment, even Trump waving his executive powers around like a six-year-old with a whiffle bat can’t do as much damage as a Democratic President could in four to eight years, and kicking Trump out is basically ceding the election to whoever the Dems want to nominate. This of course sets us up for another round of constitutional hardball, partisan brinksmanship, poisonous rhetoric and erosion of whatever political norms we’ve got left, but what else is new?
This is a key point: if the system were such that Democrats could say “unfortunately the guy voters picked to represent them is unfit for office but we also need to respect the policy preferences of the voters implied by his election” then it would be a lot easier to judge the possible removal of Trump based on his personal fitness for office.
But of course the system is nothing like that. Policy platforms come pre-packaged with individual politicians and all their personal foibles and failings, so any time the opponent screws up on a procedural or ethical level, as opposed to a policy level, it’s rightly seen as a great opportunity to push one’s own policy agenda. Accusations of politicians’ ethical impropriety or unfitness from anyone who doesn’t share their policy preferences are therefore prima facie highly suspect.
This is true and well said, though on the other hand, I don’t blame the Democrats for this state of affairs. Game theory, subjectivity/bias, the impossibility of knowing exactly what another person would do, the perceived importance of the stakes, etc. create the incentives.
It’s a nice that we have an eight year limit before switching brands of insanity/corruption.
I would recommend avoiding collective nouns then, unless you are willing to dive into the statistics. Blanket statements regarding one hundred million people are rarely nuanced.
That would certainly be a signal strong enough to knock down most mottes, but I think we can make do with less; I would prefer if you answered my question before posing a counterfactual:
I think there is much to be learned from movement at the margins, and I am very specifically not dividing along party lines.
I don’t think its hyperbolic at all.
It’s principally different in that this accusation is about an event that actually took place!
I do think it’s hurting trump, but as part of an accumulation of accusations, not because there’s much merit to this particular attack.
Credit for your consistency on Clinton vs Trump. FWIW I take the opposite horn of that dilemma: I thought at the time in opposition to most of my social circle, and still think, that Clinton should have been removed from office. Moreover, I think the failure to hold him accountable for his corrupt behavior was damaging to institutional quality generally and a significant contributor specifically to someone as corrupt as Trump becoming electable.
Briefly, this is because they both blatantly abused the power of their office for personal gain, and then they both tried to hide the fact they’d done so from the proper mechanisms of oversight. That’s exactly the sort of thing that impeachment is supposed to prevent, whether or not it is done in a technically legal way (thus the fact that impeachable offenses need not be criminal violations). There should be zero tolerance for that sort of behavior in any elected official, indeed in anyone with any high degree of institutional power, but especially in one entrusted with the power of the Presidency– and it is a terrible idea to entrust anyone with anywhere near that much individual discretionary power, I agree 100% with quanta413 on this point. Arguably what Trump did is even more consistent with the original intent of impeachment because it involved foreign powers, and Presidents colluding with foreign powers for their own interest against the interests of the US was a major concern of the Framers. But in any case Presidential power is so dangerous that the only way to guard against self-dealing Presidents with sufficient reliability is to strictly enforce extremely high standards against it.
1. Yes, with something like 95% probability.
2. If (1) then 99% probability of this.
3. Yes.
4. Yes, and it’d be sort of nice if they did impeach Trump. But even if they impeach they’re not going to spend any effort fixing the obvious problem of too much power having accumulated to Presidents. Congress should have reined in the executive branch decades ago. Congress will continue to wimp out, and let Presidents do crazy shit with executive branch powers as long as he is a member of their own party or its foreign policy that doesn’t affect domestic policy (putting troops in another few countries or funding every militia who might somehow theoretically benefit us in some irrelevant conflict halfway across the globe will continue to receive approximately 0 scrutiny). But most Presidents won’t be stupid enough to be so freaking obvious about their immoral use of executive branch powers.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. About 95% confidence on #1, and 90% confidence on #2.
You put a lower number on confidence than me on 2. I’m surprised. Not that our numbers are precise, but still surprised.
I couldn’t figure out how (1) could be true without (2) short of Trump being much more senile than he appears which I figured was much less than 10% likely.
Trump’s control of his campaign and subordinates is obviously pretty poor. It doesn’t require cognitive loss for him to badly screw up holding Giuliani in check.
1. N
2. N/A
3. Y
4. N
1. “influencing the 2020 election” != “investigating corruption”. It’s telling that almost all of the “reports” which are anti-Trump choose to use language which imputes motives and additional actions rather than simply reporting a charitable description of the actual Trump actions/words involved supposedly behind the accusation.
2. Obviously if it didn’t exist…
3. If all true (a big if), then “improper” in the sense of not something I’d want a President doing.
4. No President has ever been removed from office via Impeachment. Making the first a completely partisan effort based on a non-crime wouldn’t be a good precedent. It turns impeachment into just yet another partisan weapon, to be deployed as frequently as the Party opposed to the President gains power in Congress. The opposition should go convince people to vote for their ideas instead. This is similar to losing at the ballot box and then running to a sympathetic court who overrules the people’s passed Constitutional amendment.
No. We have absolutely no indication that Ukraine was made aware of a tie of aid for investigation. The transcript we have doesn’t support this reading without motivated reasoning, IMHO. If there were backchannel discussions other than the one call, we don’t have evidence of that yet.
No, because it didn’t exist.
It would be improper if he was requesting a specific result regardless of the facts on the ground. Tying state aid to a legitimate corruption investigation is completely not problematic, regardless of who benefits from that investigation.
A legitimate corruption investigation that completely clears Biden would actually help Biden, I think we can agree. So if Trump isn’t dictating the outcome and just asking for a fair investigation, this only benefits Trump if Biden actually is corrupt. And if he is, America deserves to know.
No.
I recommend reading Ambassador Sondland’s updated testimony on this point. Especially points 5-6, where he discusses what he told Mr. Yermak, a senior advisor of the Ukrainian president. He tap dances pretty hard, but I think its very hard to read that as anything but having told him aid was conditioned on investigation.
A fair investigation into whether President Trump is raping his daughter can only actually help President Trump. If I’m not dictating the outcome and just asking for a fair investigation, this only benefits me if President Trump is actually a rapist. And if he is, America deserves to know.
I’ll also direct you on this point to the large number of folks upthread arguing extensively about how inappropriate the Mueller investigation was (which I disagree with, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment.
ETA: Striking a needlessly provocative counter-example. A better point would be that I believe I’ve seen you complaining about the IRS scandal. Under this model, why exactly would that sequence of events (even accepting, as I wouldn’t, my recollection of your position on that) be wrong?
I have read that statement. It supports the reading I have above.
Given that the Democrats are currently investigating Trump on many charges, some substantially before his Presidency, in virtually every jurisdiction where they have investigative control, this is pretty much their argument, yes.
Do you think that it is appropriate for Democrats in New York to investigate Donald Trump with state resources? If it is (and I think it is, to be clear), then what differences would exist between that and the Attorney General investigating Joe Biden?
My argument isn’t that investigations can’t be appropriate, or inappropriate, but that ‘the innocent have nothing to fear’ which is certainly my reading of your statement, is clearly nonsense.
The reason this is inappropriate, while investigating the president in New York isn’t, is that:
1) Despite your interpretation, it seems extremely clear to me that the President was withholding aid, authorized by congress, in order to coerce this investigation.
2) Given (1) an investigation was never going to be ‘fair.’
3) Using congressionally ordered aid for personal political gain is immoral and impeachable, in my view.
Under the model you’re proposing, assuming Vice President Biden’s actions had been about his son’s job, would there have been anything wrong with them? Why?
We know 100% for certain that Hunter Biden cashed in on his father’s political position. We are less certain of the extent that his father participated in it, but there is sufficient basis for an investigation. Your disgusting hypothetical has absolutely zero basis for an investigation.
Let me see if I get this correctly. Investigating Hunter Biden’s various crooked schemes in Ukraine, China, Romania, etc,… is inappropriate, but using the state apparatus to tar a sitting president with completely made up nonsense is appropriate. Got it.
Because it’s a violation of American law. The IRS admitted wrongdoing and settled, so I think I can say that I have a pretty strong case there. I haven’t particularly complained about that one, but it actually does violate the law.
… as does what Trump has done.
@HeelBearCub
What law is violating by withholding foreign aid until anti-corruption investigations are completed?
What law is broken by withholding foreign aid until Trump receives personal gain, you mean?
Rudy Giuliani: (my emphasis)
@HBC, that may be technically correct — that Trump asking Ukraine to co-operate with Rudy Giuliani in order to help his defense against (politically motivated and false) charges being levied against him is “using his office for personal gain”. But it’s a far cry from “Trump asking Ukraine to co-operate with Rudy Giuliani in order to harm his political opponents”, and a charge based on it isn’t going anywhere in the Senate or the court of public opinion.
“You can’t use your official power to investigate defenses against charges made by other people, some of which are using their official power to attack you” is so clearly unjust that they’d probably end up engendering sympathy for Trump if they tried it.
Rudy Giuliani last May said he wanted Ukraine to investigate the Bidens because it would be “very, very helpful to [his] client”.
1. It sure looks like it to me.
2. The president was definitely involved in whatever was going on.
3. Having the president use the threat of withholding aid to benefit himself politically this way seems like a very bad thing, and one that, if Obama had done it, would have most Republicans crying foul. (Unfortunately, it would also have most Democrats explaining that it was totally normal. Tribalism is bad for intellectual integrity.)
4. What rises to the level of impeachment is a political question, and isn’t objective. In practice, I don’t think the current allegations will get enough votes to remove Trump from office, and I think both parties’ leadership knows this. That makes a lot of the impeachment process look to me like political theater, sort-of like was done with Bill Clinton. I suspect the goal is to influence the 2020 election.
+1
Right, that’s why I asked for your perspective. Irrespective of the current situation, if hypothetical president X did what is being alleged, would you think that impeachment is warranted?
If my standards were followed, Trump would be impeached and removed from office. And before him, Obama, for murdering US citizens and violating the war powers act. And before him, Bush, for war crimes and violating the written laws w.r.t. surveillance.
@Aftagley says:
Sure, I lean a bit more Left than most men I know face-to-face and I lean a bit more Right than most women I know face-to-face, I favor Affirmative Action job set asides for residents of poor neighborhoods, dislike the idea of completely open borders, think the legality of abortion should be a local issue as should the legality of guns, strongly pro-union, pro-nuclear, pro-wind, pro-solar, but also appreciate natural gas, feel pity for ‘coal country’ and want those there to have a better fate, think a better education system would mostly mean a lot more welding classes in Richmond, California.
A Pew research quiz has me as a “Disaffected Democrat”, so use that to place me on a Left/Right spectrum.
I don’t know, my guess is maybe the President and a couple of yes men, but I really don’t know.
See #1
Maybe?
I don’t know what the rules are.
Probably anything that Congress decides is a reason (i.e. getting ‘encouragement’ from an intern) is an impeachable offense if there’s enough votes.
Frankly I don’t live in The Ukraine and I just can’t will myself to care beyond what it means for who’ll administer the Federal government and when.
1. For what it’s worth, I don’t think there was a conspiracy. My best guess is that Trump and Guiliani made a lot of noise about wanting to investigate Burisma and Crowdstrike (Giuliani publicly, which reduces conspiracy), and Trump put a hold on funds and high level connections, but that no one was sure (a) if that was a deliberate effort by Trump to leverage cooperation or (b) whether it was just Trump not liking Ukraine and suspecting they were his enemies based on pro-Russian conspiracy theories. The principal support for this is that even Sondland seems unsure in his texts whether cooperation with Trump’s goals will cause Trump to unfreeze the aid.
So I vote a bunch of people (a) not telling Ukraine the money was held until it broke publicly and (b) trying to find a way to unfreeze the money, but probably not conspiring as I understand the term.
2. If there was a conspiracy, then I’d look to what Giulani was told by Trump and what he told Trump to assess whether the conspiracy reaches Trump. It’s *possible* that Trump just told Sondland or Volker that he wanted them to use the money as a lever to get a Burisma announcement, but I’m not sure.
FWIW, the announcement demand strikes me as a particular weak point in the Trump defense. IIRC, some of the witnesses said that the White House wanted an announcement to “lock in” Ukraine anti-corruption commitments, but an announcement that the Bidens are under investigation also has an obvious political value even if they aren’t guilty.
3. I think yes, improper, but some of that depends on situationally knowing that it’s Trump. IIRC, Obama tried to stay away from the detail decisions around investigating Trump specifically because it looks bad for the Chief Executive to be making decisions with an obvious political impact.
That isn’t to say that politicians don’t do lots of stuff with political effects, from giving money to projects in a particular state to picking speaking opportunities that have a clear political impact to Susan Rice deciding to unmask a great deal of the Trump investigation. But since this is the President and he’s being exceptionally Trump-ish, it looks more improper than every day incumbent decisions.
4. I wouldn’t vote to impeach based on what I know. I think “you made this decision within your discretion because it helps you politically” is a slippery slope.
Pre-registration: I’ve never voted a Republican for President, but I have for various lower offices, and I find it hard to imagine the Democrats producing a popular candidate for high office that I would vote for due given the party’s internal landscape at this time. That said, I’d be happy to be wrong about that. I tend to look at races on an individual candidate basis. All answers are based on me having kept only casual track of the current developments because the effort required to filter out the bullshit enough to get a coherent picture of what’s probably going on exceeded the amount of time and effort I was willing to dedicate to the task sometime in 2017-18 and I’ve been disengaging from the news cycle since.
1) Uncertain, but looks at least plausible.
2) IF 1 is yes, almost certainly.
3) In my opinion, yes, mostly due to threatening to withold previously voted-upon aid.
4) Uncertain. On the one hand, I suspect this is actually normal, everyday behavior that is becoming visible and remarked upon only because of the overt clumsiness of the actors and the hostility of others, and thus is something of a case of selective outrage. On the other hand, see 3, and I figure if this starts a trend of being more willing to use impeachment, that’s probably a good thing on balance. I default to my prior, which is to follow the process: So, investigate (currently in progress), push for a vote, see where it falls out.
The extent to which the Democrats attempt to milk this for political capital and/or play games rather than simply pushing for a vote will affect my opinion on 4.
Summary Time –
Thanks everyone for responding to this.
My hypothesis going into this discussion would be that after all the testimony that has been released, nearly everyone, both left and right, would be Yes on point 1 and it would drop off from there in a manner corresponding to tribal identity. This ended up not being the case – for the vast majority of respondents, if you picked Yes for question one, you were very likely to either go Yes across the board (or Yes until question four whereupon you’d say “the senate will never vote to convict.”). At the same time, if you were right leaning, you were pretty much No down the line (with the possible exception of question 3).
I was honestly surprised by these results; I expected the largest difference to be around values/culpability of whether or not the actions taken thus far amounted to an impeachable offense, not a question of whether or not the events in question had transpired. Looking back, this might have been a result of how I asked the question; if this whole situation drags on long enough for me to want to do another survey like this, I’ll likely try and as question 1 in a way that doesn’t presume guilt. Maybe something like “If you were a Ukrainian official, would you have come to the conclusion that US aid would be restricted unless you conducted an investigation into Burisma?”
I got stuck on “conspiracy,” which I interpret as an overt and secret agreement to carry out a course of action. I’m not at all sure that any two people in this farce agreed (especially secretly) to do anything, with the likely exception of Trump and Giuliani, who presumably agreed that Guiliani should do his (largely public) investigation.
If it was did Trump intend or even attempt to pressure Ukraine to announce they were investigating Burisma, I’d say probably yes.
A criminal conspiracy doesn’t require secrecy, just an agreement to break the law in the future. Although the dictionary definition of conspiracy does involve secrecy, it’s not particularly relevant. Certainly the reason for the withheld aid was kept secret from Congress.
Trump and Giuliani agreeing, and Trump then ordering (and remaining consistent in that) is all that is required. The aid was withheld, the desired Ukrainian action was communicated. Whether any of the intermediaries was in agreement with Trump’s decision is essentially irrelevant.
Yeah, I assumed the use of the word was as I defined it above, although quite possibly incorrectly.
If Aftagley has specified a criminal conspiracy under US federal law, I would have spent more time thinking about whether the agreement was to commit a crime.
Again, Giuliani is on record last May as saying he wanted Ukraine to specifically investigate the Bidens because it would be helpful to Trump. Trump then specifically urged the Ukrainian President to investigate Biden, while indicating that withheld forthcoming aid was linked to favors.
How much clearer do you need it to be?
This is the part that is distinctly unproven, and given the timeline of the critical call was before Ukraine even knew aid was withheld, pretty suspect.
The memo released by the White House:
Plenty more in the same vein from a variety of sources, including Mulvaney.
@HeelBearCub
That is not about the Biden investigation and it is disingenuous to suggest it is.
Literally one response later:
That’s all part of the same conversation where Trump is asking for a favor, Zelensky indicates that he is amenable to this, and Trump asks him to work with Barr and Giuliani and says he is going to have both Barr and Giuliani call him.
According to Vindman (the military expert on Ukraine who heard the call) there were discussions about Biden and Burisma in that section that were withheld from the white houses reconstruction of the call. In light of that, it’s not particularly disingenuous to claim that the favor Trump wanted also involved Biden.
@HeelBearCub
I am not denying they talked about Biden. But you are obscuring the actual conversation that occurred to imply the favor was investigating Biden.
It was not, it was supporting Barr’s investigation, and implying that it was talking about Biden is dishonest.
@Aftagley
Sure, if the transcript is inaccurate then there could be explicit quid pro quo not contained there, but since we don’t have such a transcript, it is fair to continue to call that “unproven”.
@EchoChaos:
It’s a segment of the conversation consisting entirely of [Here are things I would like you to do with my people] immediately after the request for a favor. This isn’t some isolated out of context snippet. It’s immediately after he asks him to talk to Rudy.
C’mon, man. This is the kind of stuff I was talking about. No sense in trying to post here when people go full ostrich.
@HeelBearCub
Don’t “c’mon man” me, please. You are the one selectively reading this.
I assume you can clearly see the part where he says “If you don’t do this then I won’t do this”?
Because that doesn’t exist in the transcript and is the only part that would be even conceivably problematic legally.
We’re both looking at the exact same transcript. You’re the one adding a “I won’t do X unless you Y” that doesn’t exist, mostly by your selective quote and assumptions.
For additional context, the Ukrainians didn’t even know that foreign aid had been suspended at this time, so they couldn’t have understood it as contingent on the investigation unless you assume facts not in evidence later.
Now, it’s possible that Trump said to some staffer “make sure the Ukrainians get the message that they don’t get aid unless they investigate Biden”. But the transcript does not support that without additional assumptions.
I don’t doubt that global warming is a real phenomenon, I have relatively little doubt that it’s mostly (>50%) due to humans, but how dangerous is it really?
David Friedman’s arguments sound pretty convincing to me, but I admit the possibility that this might be due to my ignorance of the subject, that I may have not heard yet the best contra-arguments.
You can read David Friedman’s position and arguments here:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-is-wrong-with-global-warming.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=global+warming+site%3Adaviddfriedman.blogspot.com%2F&oq=global+warming+site%3Adaviddfriedman.blogspot.com
If I understood correctly, David Friedman thinks that the global warming is real, I don’t remember exactly what he thinks about its cause, but he claims that not only it will be not catastrophic for humanity, but it is uncertain that it will be a net negative, because:
1. It will also have some positive effects:
– increased agriculture productivity due to more CO2 and more land for agriculture in the North (Canada, Siberia)
– less deaths due to cold (he says more people die due to cold than due to heat)
2. The negative effects won’t actually be that bad: won’t be that much change, won’t mean American big cities under water, and a century would be enough time to adapt to those changes:
– if the Dutch managed centuries ago to live safely under sea level, by making dikes, Bangladesh and other more exposed countries and regions can do the same
So, people who think global warming will be catastrophic, what are the best contra-arguments to all this?
(Sorry for my lacunar English)
I am unconvinced about global warming because of the execrable quality of available data, but, presuming that it does happen as described: It won’t really be bad for America or even Europe, but it will mean mass death and economic collapse in the third world. ‘Bangladesh and other more exposed countries and regions can do the same’ is probably mostly false and, in any case, would take a lot of money and time which, respectively, invite opportunity costs and mass death in the interim. Many people think this is a bad thing.
However, it is also my opinion that mass death on more or less the same scale is currently unavoidable regardless.
“mean mass death and economic collapse in the third world”
Why?
“‘Bangladesh and other more exposed countries and regions can do the same’”
Outside some really backwards areas in Africa, farming is scientific everywhere, they can switch crops in response to gradually shifting weather conditions, and by gradual I mean they will take decades. As to protecting certain areas below sea level, they only need to be as wealthy in 2100 as the Netherlands was in 1950.
I assume similar claims were made about overpopulation. Sure, we in the first world can farm more intensely, but can the third world? Be real.
Because asking them to do anything different will cause marginal deaths, and the population projections for pretty much the entire developing world define the size range of those margins.
Is there data on the number of deaths among those who failed to adapt to the Green Revolution?
“Because asking them to do anything different will cause marginal deaths,”
Maybe, but that would include anything necessary to avert global warming. Although per capita carbon emissions are well below developed country standards, oil increasing in price by 10% will still be quite the pinch.
Right, I did say, ‘unavoidable regardless’. Won’t hear a complaint from me there, totally on the same page.
I think that warming will happen to the tune of something like 1-4 C by 2100 or whatever and think the data is probably good enough to determine whatever estimate they are giving although that’s predicated on no technological breakthroughs in energy or geoengineering.
I agree with delta sigma pi that if it is bad, it pretty much has to be in the third world. I’d make an even stronger statement and say the economic effect on the Americas and Europe won’t even be noticeable.
I think the third world probably won’t be that badly affected overall, but while most regions probably won’t be very affected either way, a few may be hurt very badly. But the overall hurt of excessive decarbonization in most economies would be even worse, so I’d say it’s best to just ride it out.
There may be some places where mitigation aid would be a better bang for the buck than other forms of aid, but there’s a ton of uncertainty here.
I think the most at risk are not the low lying coastal areas that people talk about—projected sea level rise is pretty tiny from a geographical point of view. It’s the places, such as some parts of India, where temperatures are already pushing against human limits.
I’ve been warned that global warming will be a disaster in 5 years, every year of my life since the 80s. There’s alot of money and power to be gained by warning about disaster.
Were these warnings coming from people you intellectually respect? If yes, is there something unusual about this topic that is driving their irrationality? If no, then is there something unusual about this topic that is driving your acknowledgement of what ought to be dismissed?
Teachers, environmentalists, leftwing politicians, so no.
No, I dont think so. Just typical jumping on a “let’s save the world” bandwagon.
The cure is 1000x worse than the disease. Warming of a few degrees (assuming it’s going to happen) would be disruptive, in a good way for some, in a bad way for others. Taxing combustion out of existence will be catastrophic, specially for the poor. When (if) we figure out nuclear fusion and really good battery technology, we can get rid of fossil fuels.
Curious then, for you to be repeating their words.
This is a very bad explanation for any audience that isn’t already in agreement with you. It’s missing most of the terms needed for a naive expected value calculation that takes everything offered at face value!
I dont think so. I’m repeating their words to discredit them.
Perhaps. I dont have the resources to show this, although I believe Bjorn Lomborg has done a pretty good job. I dont have the resources to double-check everything Lomborg has done, but he’s advancing an argument that the elite doesnt like, so that gives him some credibility that others lack.
Also, it just seems like common sense. You can choose to wake up tomorrow morning in one of two worlds. In world 1, the earth is 2 degrees warmer than today. In world 2, the price of fossil fuels is 10x what it is today. Which world would you like to live in?
A dangerous tactic, to be sure – not only is it the primary vector for rhetorical toxoplasma, but one risks a host of pitfalls ranging from the dry Bayesian multiple update to the juicy outgroup-booing.
Luckily, we have techniques like direct attribution and ideological Turing tests that it can be used with to keep the level of discourse high.
Cheap rhetoric, dubious summary of the evidence, and an unobjectionably-milquetoast recommendation carefully devoid of numbers. But he includes reference links, several of which aren’t paywalled. I give it ★★★✩✩.
This heuristic fails catastrophically in groups above Dunbar’s number.
The obvious question – from where are you picking these two as the possibilities? I have no idea what it looks like for fossil fuels to increase in price by an order of magnitude, over the long term, in isolation (or as a primary cause). Likewise, based on my reading of the current projections a 2⁰F increase is the minimum rather than something we can plausibly opt out of. Apples to gravity isn’t quite a matter for common sense, imo.
In terms of how much one should trust the source of such warnings, it’s worth looking at the previous round, the overpopulation hysteria of the late sixties and seventies. As best I recall it, you had a similar level of “all the experts say” rhetoric. And in that case we have another fifty years of data to demonstrate that the conventional view was wildly wrong.
In that vein…
Earth Needs Fewer People to Beat the Climate Crisis, Scientists Say
People have been pushing population control as a means of fighting climate change for a while. I’ve encountered an alarming (IMO) number of people who have actually said “I plan not to have children” or “I feel guilty about having children” because of expected climate change. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it here at SSC.
It’s a shame people don’t feel so guilty about the burden caused by governments’ massive unfunded entitlement liabilities.
Also related to population control:
Review: One Child Nation
“And the Mormons shall inherit the Earth….”
@sentientbeings >
I remember in the ’90’s watching a documentary called something like “China beyond thr clouds”, which followed the lives of different folks in a Chinese rural village, it didn’t depict anything as horrible as some of the stuff in your link – but I’d be surprised if the Chinese state would allow the filmmakers to show those things!
Still it wasn’t exactly flattering, the main family followed was of the villages school teacher who had illegal children, and difficulties of that situation were mentioned, but my main memory of the film was the part where a lady Communist party official from outside the village was speaking to a old local woman on the “importantance of birth control”, since neither women could speak the same dialect a local man translated, and I remember the befuddled look of the old woman (who was clearly pass child bearing age) as she was being lectured by the really fat CCP agent about preventing births that would be miraculous if they happened, and I thought: “Well she’s filling her quota, bureaucracy is the same the world over!”
The odd thing about not having kids because of climate change is that you could offset all the carbon emissions of a child for a couple hundred bucks a year (and this will probably decrease in the coming decades for adults).
People pay tens of thousands for fertility treatments or adoption, but are put off by potential carbon emissions from having a kid? I don’t think many people actually know that carbon offsetting is so cheap. Why doesn’t Greta Thurnburg shame regular people into buying carbon credits?
I am skeptical that there are more than a handful of people actually refraining from having kids because of climate change.
Probably more than a few who don’t want kids for some other inadequately examined reason and have settled on climate change as an adequately pious justification, though.
I’ve met quite a few people whose stated reason for not having more/any children, was the environment. I am skeptical of this, though. The same people would complain about the difficulties of parenthood, etc.
Because having children is bad for the environment, or because they don’t want their children to suffer under the effects of climate change (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen both, but I’m not sure which people are referring to here)?
@ana53294
Basic cognitive dissonance minimizing behavior is to fortify a conflicted decision by focusing on all the downsides and ignoring the upsides.
It doesn’t mean that their stated main reason isn’t the true main reason. In fact, a person who makes a decision primarily for ideological reasons (or to fit into their social group), but would act differently in the absence of that ideology, is probably much more likely to need anti-cognitive dissonance coping techniques.
I have never seen anyone claim that climate change will lead to disaster in the next 5 years. If that is a common behavior in the States, it would explain to me why people doubt it.
Enjoy.
Did you see AOC claim the world would end in 12?
There are two different claims that are easily confused if you don’t pay attention:
1: If we don’t do anything very large about global warming, catastrophe will occur in X years.
2: If we don’t do anything very large about global warming in the next X years, catastrophe will eventually occur.
The former, with X of five or even twenty, is uncommon. The latter, with X usually ten to twenty, is common.
One can’t prove that the latter is false, since eventually may not have arrived yet. But one can be suspicious when, after X years have passed, the same people are making a similar statement with a new deadline.
Yes indeed. And this view should be informed by the simple fact that power and money will flow to those who can identify a serious threat, and therefore there is always a very important bias towards over-hyping a problem. Scientists are not all immune to this bias despite being scientists.
How contradictory opinions and findings are treated is also telling. Sean Carroll recently had Michael Mann on his podcast, and Carroll made the point that in science, glory awaits those who can disprove your theory, and therefore there is no reason to fear this bias. This is somewhat true in non-politicized fields. But not true in climatology today. If you dont toe the party line you get labeled a shill for big oil and you get ostracized.
I’m not an expert, but I understand that there are concerns about climate change that are not strictly tied to warming and/or rising water levels. For example, there will be weird weather patterns in the interim, and it’s hard to say what the finished picture will look like because the inputs keep changing. Europe is warmer than it should be given its latitude because of a current running up the east coast of America, and that current could be shut down by melting glaciers, paradoxically making Europe colder. And more CO2 dissolving in the ocean will drive down its pH (due to a process I happen to have asked about in the post below this one), which will mess up fisheries. I’m told we’re going to have a lot more jellyfish in the future, since they tolerate changes in pH much more readily than other fish.
So, there are two things you haven’t mentioned. There are likely others. I have no firm opinion on GW/CC since I don’t really understand it that well.
Probably in large part anthropogenic, although climate is a sufficiently complicated system to make that only probably. There is a lot of uncertainty about climate sensitivity to CO2, and if the true value is at the low end of estimates, something else may be adding a substantial amount to the human causation.
The old journal article on the subject estimated almost twenty times as many deaths from cold than from heat. I’m posting this from a laptop in an airplane in flight (!), but when I get back to my desktop I can provide a link. I haven’t seen any estimate of how sensitive either death rate is to temperature, but it’s relevant that warming tends to be greater in cold times and places than in warm, due to the interaction with water vapor.
Quotation marks!
I tried to edit my post when I noticed I had failed to mark the first quotation. Unfortunately the connection to the airplane server—Jet Blue now has free wifi—went down, and by the time I was able to get back on it was too late to edit.
Here is an account of the Lancet article on death rates from cold vs from heat.
I’ve spent a lot of time engaged with David Friedman’s thoughts about climate change, and I think the important relevant quip you need is, “reversed stupidity is not intelligence.” David Friedman is absolutely right about the low-quality of thinking–stupidity!–generally present in many expressions of mainstream and ‘consensus’ views. I don’t think you can do much better for a persuasive proof that there are lots of low-quality perspectives, many toting themselves as the ‘consensus’ or ‘only’ perspective, arguing that climate change is doom-level-bad than by spending time with David Friedman’s blog posts on that subject. Some figures on the alarmist side remain, I think, completely borne out as honest and careful… I’m thinking in particular of James Hansen, who I remember thinking David Friedman would be inclined to agree is a careful thinker. If you form an opinion without reading anything Hansen has written, then in my opinion you are short-changing yourself.
Perhaps you are of the mind that even the most careful of specialists cannot be trusted to accurately report the estimations of their specialty, because the all-too-human instinct to view oneself–and one’s profession–as important will skew every specialist to thinking the problem their specialty perceives as having outsize importance. So naturally all climate scientists will overstate the scale of the problems climate science perceives, and underestimate our adaptability.
Even if you think so, there has been highly motivated (the good kind of motivation–the kind that wants to get the *true* answer, not the popular or virtuous-looking or this-will-make-my-life-meaningful or this-will-make-my-tribe-look-smart-and-my-profession-high-status answer)… I’m talking, of course, about hedge funds.
There are limits to what you’ll learn if you look for how people with serious money are looking to try and make more of it by knowing more about climate change than other people. Bonus if it’s their own money they are investing. There are short-comings to this perspective, e.g. it is not particularly easy to short coastal real estate, so a lot of land ends up in the hands of the most optimistic rather than the person with the clearest eyes about large downside risks/trends. If you have WSJ access, this link may be helpful to you: https://www.wsj.com/articles/funds-say-climate-change-is-now-part-of-their-investing-equation-11560218940. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund is not, to my mind, a bunch of hippies.
You can also read the table-of-contents/intro/first chapter of “Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming” on Amazon’s search-inside feature. Or let me recommend that you do some of your own searching around Google for investment firms and what they are spending money assuming is likely to happen… https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hedge-funds-millions-europe-killer-heat-waves-climate-change/ is another good link.
Alternately, you can look at the expense that some cities are planning to undertake to adapt to the impacts they know to expect. E.g. it’s easy to find details on Boston’s planned-and-abandoned seawall.
These things won’t tell you that much about how to value the marginal effort to reduce emissions to mitigate overall climate change globally. That’s a hard problem. I think an analysis will be incomplete if it doesn’t think a bit about 10% chances of very bad things. If 90% of the time, in a world where scientists were as alarmed by something as they are by climate change now, it would turn out to be as much a technology-will-solve-that non-issue as the population bomb turned out to be… is 90% a good enough risk with climate change? Some additional search terms: “ocean acidification” “clathrate gun” “albedo feedback.” There have been times where scientists or others who had done the work to know if something was bad, said “it’s bad!!” and were ignored, with terrible consequences. E.g. if I know the story right, in the Irish Potato famine, lots of people, including British ones, on the ground in Ireland were saying “it’s bad!!” but the English in England weren’t possessed of the political will to collectively look at the scale of the problem.
Another thing you can do, that is about as good as deciding to try and know the right answer about climate change, is to decide to *not* know, and to award your time to being respectful and facilitating challenging in-depth conversation between experts by keeping your non-expert opinion out of the way. That’s been my approach lately. Ask again in a couple weeks, if you’re still interested, and I’ll chime in with more thoughts.
Yes.
Nordhaus, if I correctly understand him, gets something like half his estimate of the costs of warming out of very bad things with probabilities much less than 10%.
But if one does that, one should also allow for low probability high cost cases in the other direction. To take the most obvious one, we are currently in an interglacial that has been running for longer than average. Its end would leave every port in the world high and dry and could easily put half a mile of ice over the present locations of London and Chicago. I don’t think it is likely that AGW is what is holding back the end of the interglacial, but it isn’t impossible.
As best I can tell, Nordhaus does not do that, because he isn’t looking for evidence in the opposite of the currently orthodox direction.
Do I need to hedge against downside risk?
If your answer to that questions is, “No, there is also a chance of upside gain”, you aren’t doing it correctly.
I don’t think you are following my argument.
Unlikely catastrophe A: If we permit global warming, something terrible will happen that would not happen if we prevented it.
Unlikely catastrophe B: If we prevent global warming, something terrible will happen that would not otherwise happen.
Does your criticism apply to B, which is what I was suggesting?
The solution to falling global temperatures is already apparent and readily available. In the event that we start to experience that, we already know the hedge.
Are you imagining “we” as a person? If temperatures start to fall, it will take a fair while before people who had been warning of the dangers of AGW decide they were wrong and reverse their position. Consider, as an analogous case, how the fears of population catastrophe managed to continue for decades after the predictions they were based on had been falsified–Ehrlich still hasn’t conceded he was wrong, despite the failure of the predicted mass famines to occur in the 197o’s.
Once scientific opinions start shifting, it will take a still longer time for relevant behavior to change, because lots of people will have taken actions committing themselves to the solution of what was believed to be the problem.
> But if one does that, one should also allow for low probability high cost cases in the other direction. To take the most obvious one, we are currently in an interglacial that has been running for longer than average.
There is a 2016 paper that includes the argument that we skipped the next glaciation period as a result of human activity [deforestation and land-use] *prior* to industrialization. That is the difference between a CO2 ppm of 240 (projected based on non-AGW forcing) and 280 (actual) I think you’ll find that glaciation has been factored into most widely used climate models. I wouldn’t discount Nordhaus because he doesn’t look at something (glaciation) that is nowhere near a risk at the moment.
https://www.nature.com/articles/529162a
Does “nowhere near a risk” mean probability below .00001 or probability below one percent? I haven’t gone over Nordhaus’ list of low probability/high cost effects of AGW, but I’m pretty sure he includes things there is less than a one percent chance of happening.
This would be wise whether or not global warming was real, so long as investors expected these industries to be subsidized and their competitors to be taxed.
I suspect that a lot of these failures come out of uncertainty over the relationship between variables. This results in phrases which start with “if this trend continues” and lead to some catastrophic result, frequently due to linear extrapolation. It’s very difficult to determine if a trend with a few noisy data points is linear, sinusoidal, logarithmic, exponential or multiple sigmoid curves, etc.
So the conditional of “if this trend continues” followed by extrapolation may be true, the overall presentation, especially in the media, results in hyperbole.
Somewhat tangential – I think that looking only at the effects in the US (or Europe, or both) will lead to bad predictions, because of the globalized economy.
Yes, the US can probably afford to handle direct sea level rise effects, and direct heat effects, though they might not bother in places like Puerto Rico, regardless of the local impact.
But my (American) employer depends on people in poor countries to produce the actual goods they ship. This isn’t going to work too well if those poor countries can’t afford to protect their population, or if the country collapses into anarchy because of climate-change related conflicts. My employer’s costs could go up a lot, either because they take on this responsibility themselves, or because they move their manufacturing somewhere a lot more expensive.
And my cheap-in-the-US goods mostly come from low income countries. When the prices of those goods go up, my standard of living will presumably go down.
FWIW, I’m also not so sure life in the US won’t be directly affected (negatively) by climate change. But I am not a meteorologist, and most of the info available is insanely partisan. So I hesitate to make any specific predictions.
On the other hand, things would look up for American working class if they don’t have to compete with overseas labour. Look at the bright side.
Not an expert, but in my opinion the word “catastrophic” sometimes causes confusion.
I think an ice-free Arctic ocean would be a catastrophe, I think glacier-free Alps would be a catastrophe, I think the mass extinction that is already underway is a catastrophe, not to mention the smaller catastrophes of more severe storms and droughts in many parts of the world.
I do not believe global heating will wipe out human civilisation, but there are a lot of catastrophes short of that.
And the positive feedback loops are a terrifying unknown. Melting ice lowers albedo and raises heat absorption from the sun, melting permafrost releases methane, higher temperatures promote forest fires, changes to rainfall (in either direction) can cause problems for vegetation. The truth is we don’t really know how serious these feedback loops are, but my understanding is that they’re considered serious enough that we should be very, very cautious of them.
And the other scary thing is how delayed all the effects are. Long-term climate forecasts are useful for this stuff, but I think the general public (and politicians and journalists) look at the *present* rapid heating, and they look at the *present* emissions and compare the two. But when you actually look at the long-term forecasts (or just climate science more generally) you see that there’s a big delay. The rapid heating going on right now is a consequence of the emissions of the past. The emissions of the present will lead to even worse heating. Even if we halted our emissions right now the world would keep getting hotter.
This one leaps out to me because I don’t understand it at all. An ice-free route between Asian and European markets would be amazing for humanity and lower carbon emissions by ships.
What makes you think it is catastrophic?
Re: increased agricultural productivity from more CO2:
Agricultural output is a result of a range of inputs. While one input has been improving (CO2 availability) several others are diminishing (depending on regional context).
Heat and water stress are the obvious concerns. There are biological limits to how much heat and how little water crops can survive in, let alone thrive. Technology can tweak these on the edges but there are diminishing returns as we reach the outer limits. One could switch to indoor farming then but those operations are incredibly expensive, error-prone and at the moment they fail pretty regularly (AFAIK indoor cannabis is the only successful at-scale agri industry, for a range of political/legal reasons).
Water stress is a contemporary fear in much of the American West, Australia, and India (as a sample of agricultural systems with a global footprint that I’m more familiar with). Each of these regions share a similar pattern of relying on large scale extraction of ground water, from huge reservoirs that are slowly but surely emptying out. When folks champion the green-revolution or scientific agriculture, this is one of the reasons I am concerned that the productivity we have gained will be ‘temporary’ and that we are wildly spending millennia of water savings in a century. Climate change is just an accelerant to this wider over-consumption.
If contemporary agricultural lands start becoming non-viable en masse, can we just pivot north/south? At least in the south, there isn’t anywhere substantial to go. In the north, we have swaths of low-density land in Canada, Russia and other friends of the arctic circle. Won’t increasing agriculture in these regions just: 1) Lower albedo for land that was previously snow-pact 2) increase deforestation for land that was previously forest 3) break up even more permafrost, unlocking some carbon/methane stock that has been previously locked into the soil? Thus speeding up climate change.
Also, has Friedman updated his views since 2011? (I am not taking the time right now to personally check)
The modeling has updated since then and many specific facets of climate related system have had deeper study. Unfortunately, most of the time I hear that these facets are looking worse than anticipated. Some examples that spring to mind:
“We find that observed maximum thaw depths at all sites are already regularly exceeding modeled future thaw depths for 2090 under IPCC RCP 4.5.”
Permafrost study site thaw depths in 2003-2016 match what was anticipated for melt rates in 2090. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2019GL082187
For a glacier study site that terminates in the ocean “…observed melt rates up to a hundred times larger than those predicted” https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6451/369
These kinds of observations are updating the parameters and inputs that go into the larger climate models. And that leads to statements such as these:
“Early results suggest ECS values from some of the new CMIP6 climate models are higher than previous estimates, with early numbers being reported between 2.8C (pdf) and 5.8C. This compares with the previous coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP5), which reported values between 2.1C to 4.7C.”
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-results-from-the-next-generation-of-climate-models-matter
Important to note here that when these global mean temps are listed as 3C, that the *vast* majority of the earth’s surface will be below that average: the ocean, the incredible heat-sink that we are trying to break. And the rest of the surface, the land, where the humans are, will be higher, between 4-6C. Don’t base your back-of-the-envelope thinking and projects on just the global average.
All that to say: do we really have a full century? I get that we are essentially pitting the ‘innovation’ rate against entropy-in-the-global-system but the sheer rate and scale of change is concerning.
Talking about updating one’s views… . The IPCC claimed AGW was increasing drought in the fourth report, retracted that claim in the fifth. What is your evidence that AGW is leading to more severe storms and droughts, beyond the fact that some people predicted it would?
Fortunately, one of the effects of increased CO2 concentration is to reduce water requirements for plants, since they don’t have to pass as much air through the leaves to get the carbon they need.
My post on IPCC predictions vs what happened was done in 2014. I have mostly taken the latest IPCC report as at least a first approximation to the science, although somewhat biased in a catastrophist direction.
I haven’t tried to follow all claims in either side about things that make the problem worse (or better), since disentangling the true from the false from the results of selective filtering is hard. You can find a few examples of claims that I think are at least moderately dishonest, and heavily reported, on the blog, such as this.
Important to note, and generally ignored, is that warming is greater in cold places and times than in hot. So if global mean is 3°C, that means that winters are four degrees milder, summers two degrees hotter, that average temperatures in warm climates are up two degrees, in the arctic up four degrees (invented numbers, like, I presume, yours, to make the qualitative point).
In other words, the pattern of warming is biased in our favor, due to the interaction of water vapor and CO2, both greenhouse gases. Milder winters are usually a good thing, just as hotter summers are a bad thing, and warmer temperatures are usually a good thing in cold places, bad in hot.
> “I think the mass extinction that is already underway is a catastrophe, not to mention the smaller catastrophes of more severe storms and droughts in many parts of the world”
David, you’ve grabbed someone else’s quote there, from further up in the thread.
I assume you are not suggesting that the increased CO2 uptake is sufficient to offset the reduction in environmental water flows and the increased water-loss from warmer temperatures?
Yes, it is a shit-show, in part because there are strong vested interests in the energy sector that have been sowing FUD for decades, and because any issue of sufficient size will attract the passion/energy of folks that either don’t have time or the analytical/communication skills to add signal and not noise, or bring their own agendas. As a group’s size increases linearly, the opportunity for us to find ‘low-quality thinking’ will increase super-linearly. For me, that there are dumb arguments out there made “on the behalf of” AGW does not invalidate AGW as a pressing concern.
Yes. The coldest places, places with significant ice and snow, are warming ‘faster’ or take on a higher burden of the global mean temp increase. Considering the degradation of albedo that comes as a result, the increase rate of sea level rise that one assumes will follow, and the disruption to ecologies that have adapted to a specific range of snow/glacier melt, I would not read that as a “biased in our favor”
If there were a parallel universe earth:
– that was baseline hotter by 2 degrees C
– had arrived at that baseline over the progression of hundreds of thousands of years
– with ecologies that had been shaped by that progression
– and with a human civilization that was also established during that ‘glacial’ change in climate (nice word play, don’t you think)
Then there could be a lot of things about it that are ‘biased in our favor’ and it could be positively delightful. Much much better on balance than the same scenario but trading +2 for -10 celsius. Ice ages suck in many many ways for us.
Unfortunately we are seemingly arriving at +2 (and perhaps more warming) in the space of a few hundred years. Yes, the increased heat is problematic but also the current rate of change is disrupting ecologies and climate systems, potentially faster than they can adapt.
Australia is an example of an ecological system that has adapted to being dry and hot over the process of millennia. Bush fires and drought have long been a part of the history of the place. But it is currently in the grip of ‘unprecedented’ waves of fires. The perspective of someone that has been managing fire risks in Australia for 47 years: https://amp.smh.com.au/national/this-is-not-normal-what-s-different-about-the-nsw-mega-fires-20191110-p5395e.html this is what ‘milder winters’ means in some parts of the world: a longer fire season, greater risk of ‘natural’ disaster and greater instability. Australian and West coast USA are some of the ecological canaries-in-the-coal-mine; if things are this bad now, what will they look like in 20 years? In 50?
“… the pattern of warming is biased in our favor…” California and Australia are examples of ecologies/climate regions that are trending negatively as things warm. Are there tangible examples of places were AGW is actually making things better? Not just a generic “plants grow faster because more CO2, yay” but actually looking at specific systems that seem to be ‘benefitting’?
Is there a biochemist in the house? I’m a respiratory therapy student who doesn’t understand the mechanism for respiratory acidosis; this is not strictly necessary for me to become an RT, but the book’s explanation is annoyingly incomplete and I don’t like not knowing why it happens. It’s no good asking the prof either, long story. I have a very basic (har) understanding of chemistry half-remembered from high school.
So, CO2 in the blood meets H20, resulting in H2CO3, carbonic acid. Seems straightforward, because carbonic acid wants to give up an H+ ion, and that’s the definition of an acid, yes? Except that, once it’s gotten rid of that H+, you’re left with HCO3-, aka bicarb, aka that stuff your kidneys dump into the blood to counter acidosis. So it seems like CO2 should produce a problem that fixes itself. My understanding here is not helped by the book’s vagueness; it also says that dissolved CO2 functions as an acid by itself (it doesn’t have an H to give up) and seems to treat bicarb and the loose H as interchangeable with the carbonic acid itself, because of the way it dissociates in solution. My best guess is that bicarb is a weaker base than carbonic acid is an acid (I don’t really get what makes something a “strong” versus “weak” acid). What am I missing?
Okay, basically, acids are substances that, in water, tend to increase the concentration of solvated protons (H+). Strong versus weak acids are defined more or less arbitrarily by the degree to which they do so, and isn’t really relevant here.
So, if you put CO2 in water, it can combine with H2O to produce carbonic acid and dissociate into H+ and bicarb, or it can claim OH- from the water to form bicarb leaving H+ behind, which are, formally, exactly the same thing. So CO2 is an acid because it increases the amount of H+ in water, not because it has any to release, but because it takes up the part that ISN’T H+, leaving that behind.
So, if you have a solution with a lot of solvated protons and solvated bicarbonate ions, that’s ‘acid’. If you have a solution with a lot of undissociated H2CO3, and an excess of OH- ions from water that has lost protons, that’s ‘alkali’ (aqueous base). The bicarbonate floating around after CO2 dissociates doesn’t ‘fix the problem’ because it is in equilibrium with the H+, and its equilibrium is slanted toward dissociation. Adding MORE bicarbonate ions, on the other hand, moves the equilibrium toward combining them, because, loosely speaking, there are more anions around to soak up the H+ than there is to soak up, so at any given time more of them will be H2CO3 than H+ and HCO3-. Similarly, this surfeit of protons is made up from the protons that are always running loose in water (which dissociates into H+ and OH- at a certain concentration naturally ), so there will be more OH- around.
HCO3- is also called the “conjugate base” of carbonic acid, because it is the base that is produced when the acid loses a proton. Acids always produce bases when losing a proton and vice versa. (HCO3- is also amphoteric and has its own conjugate base, carbonate, CO3(2-), when it acts as an acid.
The confusing part here is probably that, when solvated, the chemical species which are formally present in solution are basically the opposite of how they are described; in ‘acid’, a potentially acidic chemical is present in base form, and vice versa.
Okay, so (rephrasing in layman’s terms to make sure I understand correctly) the problem here is the presence of the loose proton/H+. The bicarb may be there in equal amounts, but at any given moment it will not be bonded with the H+ in carbonic acid form, so the H+ will be free to wreak whatever havoc it accomplishes in the body when its concentration gets too high. I’m not super-concerned with the mechanism of that havoc right now. Increasing the bicarb will increase the probability that those H+ ions latch onto one to form carbonic acid, and you get compensated acidosis, neutral pH, not a problem. Is this correct?
Thanks for responding so quickly and thoroughly!
Essentially yes.
You are freely welcome. Chemistry is the most fun a person can have without taking off his or her clothes, but it’s better if you do.
That’s how you get chemical burns…
Also how you prevent them, if you need to access the safety shower.
Can’t say that was terribly fun, leastwise not for me.
Despite the claims of many reputable sources, the kidney cannot dump an ion into your blood, because this would result in buildup of static charge. It must move some positive ion along with the bicarb, probably Na⁺, that is, it’s really moving NaHCO₃.
Yes, also technically true, but since these are solvated at physiological pH — and trust me, you should be glad they are, because you probably don’t want your blood full of precipitated baking soda — this is equivalent to moving bicarbonate ions and also, separately, moving sodium ions.
The sodium ions can be formally regarded as forming NaOH with the hydroxide ions left over from the self-dissociating water, if you care about that sort of thing.
There are also pumps which can move one anion out and another anion in to equalise charge, incidentally, which is not particularly relevant at this juncture.
The Deffeyes diagram is helpful for understanding carbonate chemistry. It graphs pH on axes of alkalinity vs total dissolved carbonate. Adding an acid or base affects alkalinity but not dissolved carbonate so it causes a vertical movement on the graph; adding CO2 increases dissolved carbonate but doesn’t affect alkalinity so it causes a horizontal movement; sodium bicarbonate (or other chemical species where carbonate or bicarbonate are charge-balanced with cations) will yield a diagonal movement. The change in pH depends on how the pH curves are spaced and sloped in that region of the graph.
In August the USMC sent out a new directive, listing the enlistment bonuses they will offer for the coming year.
As far as I can tell, neither the job categories eligible for bonuses nor the bonus sums offered have changed since last year.
I guess no one wants to make the comms work in the Corps.
People who really want to make comms work generally don’t join the Marine Corps. They pick one of the other services, where they’re more likely to spend their time in an air-conditioned operations center instead of rolling around in the mud getting shot at.
Nowadays you’re lucky even to get shot at!
Those bonus numbers are also relatively low — the Army and Navy are both offering well into five digits for similar jobs.
Yeah, no kidding. $25K extra for four years of service. And they’re even offering it for infantry, 11X.
You know, I do believe the youth of American have heard something about this place called Afghanistan.
That may be the first enlistment, actually. I’m not quite sure what that table is. But yes, the Marines have historically been pretty stingy with the bonuses.
Yes, both tables I pointed to are for initial enlistments. There are other tables of bonuses for people who are re-enlisting. Those bonuses tend to be much higher.
This makes the MC more attractive, in my opinion. Marines are more likely to be intrinsically motivated and care about their jobs.
I have a thorough understanding of the concept which was recently described as ‘enlightenment’ here and am willing to answer questions posed. Please be patient as I may not be especially attentive. I am not associated with any formal organisation and have no particular motivations for doing this other than a pathological sense of honesty.
Please be advised that, if you also think you have a thorough understanding of enlightenment, I will probably tell you you’re doing it wrong.
Are you at all related to a certain Luna co-founder?
To my knowledge, not any more than any other living thing is.
I don’t even know who you mean, honestly.
It’s an inside joke on these threads. The follow up question is “do you also happen to be an MMA fighter?”
Fundamentally, what is enlightenment?
In this context, let it suffice to say: a particular psychological state coupling more or less extreme depersonalisation with a sensation of fundamental awareness of nonexistence. Variously central examples are known.
However, this definition has been selected for brevity and may not cause the correct associations to form in your personal brain. More specific questions may help.
Strictly speaking, the most accurate response I could make would be ‘there is no enlightenment’, but this is liable to be misperceived. It is not the case that ‘enlightenment’ is indistinguishable from its absence, nor that everyone (indeed, anyone) is already enlightened and unaware, etc.
Alternatively: Enlightenment is the state of recognising the identicality of ‘is’ and ‘is-not’.
This post might seem impolite, but reductio ad absurdum is one of the ways I deal with misunderstanding things. I make the absurd statement, someone who actually understands shows me where I went wrong, and I thank them for helping me.
That being said:
If ‘is’ and ‘is not’ are identical
My brother is 900 ft tall
My brother is not 900 ft tall
are the same proposition, which seems wrong.
Is this what you are trying to say instead?
“Whether you model any part of the universe as a distinct entity or not, the universe stays the same. This includes the part of the universe that is ‘you’.”
No.
With enlightenment, your brother is 900ft tall, your brother is not 900ft tall, you have no brother, you do not exist, there is no such thing as ‘tall’, and all of these things are true and obvious at the same time without contradiction. This state is not pathological, even though it may seem to be from the outside, because you also understand it. While not existing.
You will probably think this IS pathological, because you don’t understand it, but that’s okay, because you don’t exist.
Loosely speaking, enlightenment is a schizotypal state and it is, in fact, true that schizotypy and autism are incompatible opposites; I like to characterise this through the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator classifications of ‘S’ and ‘N’, though this is easily misperceived by people who, being Ses, mistake the symbol for the content. Point is, your characterisation is cognitively the opposite of enlightenment, so it’s not surprising that the two don’t make sense together.
Please understand this is not intended to be pejorative. I am at pains to be terse and some politeness may be lost in the process.
No offense is taken; thank you for trying to help me.
I have one final question, which is that you say “because you also understand it. While not existing.”
Do you believe that “I think, therefore I am” is false? I suppose I should have realized that people who think the self didn’t exist might make that claim, it just hadn’t occurred to me before.
Yes, “I think, therefore I am” is false. First of all, I remain unconvinced that ‘I think’. There seems to be an I which perceives thought, but does thought even require a subject? I mean, just because ‘thought’, does that imply ‘something thinking’? This is not obvious to me. If thought, perception, can happen on its own, without the need for anything else, then every experience “I” have can be explained equally well.
Well, to me, the most accurate statement is “the labels, brother, foot, etc.” are merely labels that only somewhat precisely represent the things that they are trying to represent. I recognize that the statement is somewhat vacuous and greatly overgeneralizes the external reality, which is what is REALLY real, but that simultaneously any label can map more or less well to the reality that is out there. i.e. ‘my brother is 900 feet tall’ is farther from describing existence than ‘my brother is not 900 feet tall'”
Is this compatible or incompatible with what you consider enlightenment?
I have had instances of this, but always managed to re-collpase my psychological state back into it’s baseline state. From by (admittedly brief) experience, it would be very difficult to navigate life in that state. Do you find this to be the case, or did you just end up adapting?
It’s hard to say. This is my baseline state. I will not claim to have an especially easy time navigating life, but I am also able to compartmentalise.
I suddenly feel like expanding on this a little.
I continue to act as if there is an objective reality, not because I believe there is one, but because there’s no way to act as if there isn’t. “Acting as if” doesn’t make sense in an acausal context, so there’s no point trying. Thus, I act as if there is an objective reality so that I have something to do with my time.
Thank you. I found your first answer less than compelling, but your second-one was somewhat illuminating.
I remain open for further questioning if you would like expansion. I have been variously obliged to simplify or leave avenues underspecified due to time constraints.
I will grant you that I managed to find the time to effuse about acid/base chemistry at length, but chemistry is much less complex and easier to explain.
Does this look like “My senses aren’t caused by any external reality. Therefore, there probably isn’t an external reality, or any reality at all”
Or “The nature of my mental content is incompatible with reality. No objective reality could contain mental content like this, therefore, there is no objective reality.”
EDIT: third option:
Or is it more like “an objective reality is like a square circle, utterly nonsensical”. Come to think of it, has your philosophy of math changed before and after enlightenment? Does 2 + 2 still equal 4?
In either case, how do you know that Descarte’s demon isn’t batting for both teams? That is, shouldn’t it be possible for an extremely powerful being in an objective reality to exhaustively generate brains and spoof its senses until it created one that believed there could not be an objective reality?
Or does meditation lead to an insight or shift so powerful and certain that you can’t doubt it? An anti-divine light, or a cogito ergo nihilus? (the demon could probably still create a brain that couldn’t doubt a false statement, but knowing that doesn’t help the brain in question.)
Which can be done rather efficiently with ketamine and with LSD, and probably with less risk of being sexually assaulted by your dealer.
What does “enlightenment” buy me that a k-hole doesnt?
It can’t. Drug-induced psychosis has similarities to, but is ultimately distinct from, enlightenment-induced psychosis. This is, unfortunately, just a qualia fact about which I can only say ‘if you had experienced both, you would recognise the difference.’ I realise this is unsatisfying and apologise.
It sounds you are saying that becoming enlightened makes one an extreme reductionist, very aware of the fact that there are no humans or chairs as such, just various arrangements of atoms.
No, no, there are no atoms either.
This is a common misconception.
Of course you are aware that there are just various arrangements of atoms, but you are also aware that the atoms are also maya.
There is nothing. None of it.
I roughly get the Hindu take on this: once you figure out that nothing outside your mind exists, you must conclude that you’re the only existing entity, namely Brahman.
But the Buddhist take doesn’t make any sense to me. A mind that doesn’t even exist can’t possibly know that atoms don’t exist. Thus every brain that claims that nothing exists – including my own brain if it would claim such a thing – is inherently untrustworthy.
The brain doesn’t know that atoms don’t exist. It doesn’t claim anything. There isn’t even a brain, or a mind, or knowledge, or trust, or ‘can’ or ‘is’.
I’m sorry, I’m being unnecessarily cruel here by repeating this. It is, of course, a fundamental difference in outlook. I cannot explain it to you in terms you would accept, which is of course why the entire study of Zen (Chan, Tsien, etc.) came about to attempt to convey it without explaining it, with minimal success.
I am not at this immediate moment particularly interested in promoting enlightenment (though I am in general), but simply answering questions out of a perverse sense of totally pointless honesty, so I am trying to explain things (to the limits of my communication facility) instead of attempting to backdoor your brain. However, because I don’t want to turn people off the idea completely, please do consider the, hypothetical, possibility of a universe in which you perceive (which is to say, the perception exists and includes a perception of a ‘you’ doing the perceiving) that a brain that doesn’t exist perceives that atoms exist and also that they don’t exist, at the same time, and this is okay, because it’s correct. Of course it’s difficult to conceptualise, that’s practically the point, but try to imagine that it ISN’T inherently untrustworthy, just because.
Sure, atoms are not a fully meaningful label either, nor is the wavefunction, or maybe even the unified field. But there is none of it is objectively false. While we do not know what the onltological basis of reality ultimately is, it is self-evidently clear that there exist distinctions and correlations in some general sense, and that those add up to what we ultimately experience. Distinctions and correlations are quite distinct from ‘nothing’.
@delta sigma pi
I’m fine with a nonexistent brain believing all sorts of contradictory things, just as I’m fine with a nonexistent unicorn believing the same things.
But if I did a lot of vipassana meditation and would derive some sort of evidence from it that nothing exists (myself included), then there are two possibilities: (1) indeed nothing exists and (2) I exist and my evidence about nothing existing is wrong. What I’m saying is that (2) will always remain a possibility. You can’t say “but I know that I’m not wrong on this!” because you already said that there’s no you and no knowing.
So how do you deal with the off case that you got it all wrong and you actually do exist?
Why bother trying to become enlightened?
It depends on what you want. I don’t experience the sensation of suffering; rather, I perceive complete control of my own affect and can feel what our host might describe as ‘transcendental bliss’ at will. This is the primary thing that I estimate others would consider a benefit. If you are wracked with anxiety, guilt, sorrow, you may find value in experiencing these sensations as illusive.
However, I am not convinced that enlightenment can be approached for its value, and not for its own sake.
But can we get the same bliss from something like samatha jhana without any of this nonexistence stuff?
Could you name an instance where you did not suffer but an unenlightened being would have?
if you also think you have a thorough understanding of enlightenment, I will probably tell you you’re doing it wrong.
In case somebody else claims a thorough understanding of enlightenment and you both tell each other “you’re doing it wrong”, how can innocent onlookers (such as me) determine who is right?
Also history:
You cannot. This is unfortunate but unavoidable. You will just have to achieve your own particular enlightenment, at which point you understand they were both wrong.
Does it happen that somebody claims to achieve enlightenment but later claims that he was wrong before and only now he has achieved enlightenment?
Here’s the same problem from another angle: what if I’m already enlightened, I just don’t know it? You might say that that’s not how it works and I’m totally not enlightened yet. But why would I listen to that if you’re going to say that anyway whether I achieved my own particular enlightenment or not?
You wouldn’t. If you are enlightened, you don’t care, because you don’t exist, and neither do I. What difference could it possibly make?
It may be helpful if I further say, there are no enlightened people. There are no unenlightened people. It is not possible to achieve enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a state in which an entity can ‘be’ or ‘not be’. It is not possible to know that you are enlightened. If you are enlightened (and you may be), you will know it. There is no such thing as choice. None of this is real. You make all your own choices freely.
Enlightenment is knowing and accepting all of these things, simultaneously, as equipotent facts.
It is also not that, but there is a limit to the number of levels I like to go at once with people who aren’t there yet, you know?
Indeed, I find that since enlightenment can’t be measured at all neither in self nor in others, I don’t care about it, just as I don’t care about cromulence or vorpalness.
I recall there is a similar problem with sanyasa initiation ceremony. The problem is that a sanyasi is supposed to not care about bullshit such as ceremonies, so if someone comes up and says “hey I’m ready to be a sanyasi, please initiate me” it means he’s not ready. I don’t know why do they even have such a ceremony.
To your additional explanation I have to say that it sounds like being stoned with an extreme I-dont-give-a-fuck attitude. No offense intended by that (although you’d probably say that neither of us exist anyway).
This is, of course, fine.
I think that the idea of a thorough understanding of enlightenment is… somewhat incoherent. Like saying you have a thorough understanding of “red”.
Yes, I have that too.
It is incoherent. It has to be incoherent to work.
I think you’re doing it wrong.
🙂
I have also become detachedly curious to find out, now that some people have read some of what I have to say, how crazy those people think I am on a scale of one to canasta sunflowers.
Eh. 4? 3?
My glib model of DSP: Reality is a lie, nothing is real. Independently, I have delusions of a reality that looks and behaves exactly like the reality that isn’t there.
Honestly, it sounds like berkeleyan idealism, only without that whole god business.
You seem to be able to form beliefs about the structure of the lie-reality that function much the same as my beliefs about regular reality. That is, my brother is and is not 900ft tall, but we both call him to ask what size pants he wears before buying him jeans.
You are probably about as sane as anyone else.
Approximately “Enlightenment is opening one’s mind so wide that one’s brain falls out”. Progressed past solipsism but not to the level of hippie stoner
I’ll be honest, I was leaning pretty far towards “canasta sunflowers” until I realized you were the same person who explained acid-base blood chemistry better than I could despite literally just studying it for an upcoming exam. Your statements that e.g.
are blatantly self-contradictory; I’m inclined to parse them as either: “hey you know words aren’t intrinsically tied to reality, right?” or “I’m gonna sound deep by contradicting myself!”. I’ll grant a small possibility of “thinking about these contradictions will break you out of your contradictory thoughts”, but I’m skeptical that there’s truly something to break out into.
What separates enlightenment from seriously practiced Stoicism?
I consider stoicism to be a philosophical component of the mindset I have been describing. In fact I have previously described my philosophy as a ‘stoic-Zen hybrid’.
However, it’s important for me to emphasise that ‘enlightenment’ as defined here also entails certain specific qualia. It’s one thing to disregard your suffering as irrelevant and another (I assume, having never really been in the position of not doing so) to viscerally feel that there is none. Similarly, stoicism does not necessarily imply the perception of nonexistence or of the perfectly comfortable conjunction of contradictories. ‘Enlightenment’ as I’m describing it is a philosophical attitude and a perception or series of perceptions. You haven’t felt it unless you can truthfully attest that even your own cognition is false. It is not enough merely to think some things in a particular order.
Interesting. Internally negating the cogito is, indeed, tricky to conceptualize.
Can you tell whether other people are enlightened?
Would you publically judge famous teachers?
A thorough conversation should rule out the majority of people who are not actively faking it, simply by whether they display instinctive understanding of certain things which are particularly bizarre to most people. However, I would never be willing to make a claim on a specific degree of accuracy.
As a class, sure, “probably all frauds”. Individually, I would prefer not to.
Related to this, how confident are you that there is only one accurate understanding of enlightenment? If that level is high or some equivalent thereof, from what do you draw your confidence?
I would say I’m reasonably confident that the kind of ‘enlightenment’ which was recently featured here in the context of PNSE and which I’ve been defining and discussing so far is one thing with one accurate understanding, and that that accurate understanding heavily depends on understanding schizotypy and dissociation, based on personal experience and observation. I cannot present evidence to convince another person of this reliably, which is why this conversation is rated for entertainment purposes only. However, I hope to at least encourage people to think about the things I’ve said and hopefully draw conclusions of their own.
I am willing to stipulate that there may be other definitions of ‘enlightenment’ which mean other things. I was not consulted by any committee to decide the terminology. 😛
(I was also, mostly, joking in the quoted segment.)
Thanks.
Could your expound further on your having no motivation for this other than honesty?
Sure. I like to answer questions and explain things. I want people to know things, generally. It’s sort of like a moral position. I don’t expect to gain from this in any way. I don’t even expect to convince anyone of anything, since this is all very subjective. I just want to answer questions and give people things to think about if they want to do so.
“I want people to know things, generally.”
Why?
Because, if existence is an illusion, but I’m stuck perceiving it anyway, I have to find something to do with my time, and this is aesthetically appealing to me.
“Because, if existence is an illusion, but I’m stuck perceiving it anyway, I have to find something to do with my time, and this is aesthetically appealing to me.”
Correct answer. You should have just said this in the first place
@delta sigma pi
Doesn’t your inability to stop perceiving existence make it real in a way? What is keeping you from being able to stop perceiving existence? Is that thing real?
Could the existence of aesthetic preferences mean that you aren’t really enlightened, but in a state of delusion?
Also, why would you have to do anything with your time if everything is an illusion? Why not spend all your time in ‘transcendental bliss’? Or at least, the time you have until you die of thirst (assuming that thirst and hunger are also an illusion in your eyes, but not in ours, so we see you die).
I think the word “real” may be causing some confusion here.
Take a brick. If you happen to have one handy, look at it. Or any object in your sight.
What does it mean for the brick to be real? That you experience it?
You don’t experience the brick.
You don’t experience seeing the brick.
You experience an illusion that you call a brick. This isn’t controversial, I don’t think, you know this already.
Where is the brick real? What does it mean for something to be real? What does “real” mean?
You don’t experience an objective reality, and a subjective reality isn’t real.
(What are you? Are you real?)
All… sort of. This is a misleading description, but it is the closest I can get to trying to describe something in a way I think other people might sort of understand. Just keep in mind that it is wrong.
The thing that the word “brick” refers to is plenty real, in the sense that it relates to other things with specific names in fairly predictable ways.
For example, if I slam the brick in your face, you will probably exhibit behavior that is consistent with “suffering.” Others will notice this and will probably put me in jail and charge me with causing “suffering.”
My perception may be partially subjective, but it is sufficiently related to something objective to allow me to act with some level of agency. This objective part is “real” and something I simply have to deal with it (fortunately, I don’t have a particular desire to smash bricks in your face or the face of other people).
You argue that your model predicts reality, not that it is reality. And if you think about it, it doesn’t predict reality either, it predicts what your model will describe reality as.
Yes and this “reality” is what I care about, which is why I call it reality.
It’s also reasonably objective (although the perception of this reality is often subjective).
This is a state I’ve been trying to understand for a long time, to determine if it is worthwhile to practice towards.
First of all, I’m very curious about the qualia of enlightenment (I’m already quite familiar with the noetic and ontological changes the state brings about). Would you say that your experience is overall an increase of the valence of positive qualia (when compared to typical dualistic experience), a reduction in the valence of negative qualia, an overall flattening of both valences, or some combination of the above?
I understand that in states typically referred to as enlightenment, many emotions can be seen from a different perspective (from the “outside,” perhaps?) and thus lose their qualitative power or are dissipated completely. But in every case with which I’m familiar, there is always some state of qualia left behind. What’s it like and is it worthwhile?
My concern is that if I seek to achieve this state, I’ll miss out on a lot of other positive and/or interesting qualia experiences (romantic love and sex, for example, or the feeling of closeness from friendship, or the joy of building things, or the feeling of awe, or wabi-sabi type emotions that combine sadness with beauty). If these things are diminished or disposed of, is it worthwhile just for the sake of realizing nonexistence and getting rid of a little anxiety?
Second, what “location” would you say you’re at in the PNSE context, and how did you get there?
If you are able to avoid suffering, would you undergo surgery without anesthetic?
Consider a 30 year old person who is working in the IT industry. They then become enlightened. Does that make their everyday job harder? Does it make them less likely to become a very successful tech industry leader?
Consider a 30 year old person who is married and has two infant children. They then become enlightened. Will it be more difficult to them to raise children? Do they become a worse parent? Does this make their relationship with their spouse worse? Will the spouse wish that they hadn’t become enlightened?
If anyone believes Epstein killed himself, please make your case below. Alternatively, regardless of what you believe, if you just want to make a case for it, please do so.
I dont believe he killed himself but this is just based on Alex-Jonesy conspiracy theories than hard evidence.
I hope this more starts discussion than dissuades it: a similar thread I posted about a month ago. Interesting, but there’s a lot of room for more detailed opinions.
Thanks I’ll check that out.
The chief medical examiner of the jurisdiction in which he died, says it was suicide. The only positive evidence that says otherwise is that the hyoid bone was broken in a way that is more common in homicide than suicide, but not not even close to uniquely associated with homicide. And suicide in the face of a lengthy prison sentence for anything that the general population will round off to “raping children”, is not exactly rare – I was just recently made aware of a case involving the stepson of a prominent webcomic artist, and nobody is claiming that was really a conspiratorial murder.
The arguments against suicide are extremely weak. “A hypothetical conspiracy would obviously have benefited from X”, has never been good evidence that a conspiracy existed and did X. Also, the alleged obviousness is not obvious. Conspiratorially murdering a person to stop them from talking, replaces the risk of the victim talking with the combined risk of the victim’s lawyer talking, the victim’s co-conspirators talking, and any of the various people approached to carry out or cover up the murder talking. Finally, being in jail does not really make suicide all that difficult; jailers don’t much mind people they think of as kiddie-rapists killing themselves, and “suicide watch” is a thing for making sure the jailers don’t get blamed rather than for making the suicides not happen.
All good points.
But did he have the means to carry it out? If he hanged himself, what did he use? I heard his bedsheets were made of paper, and there was no support structure that could have been used.
Also, the camera malfunction just sounds like a really hacky plot twist from a B-movie.
He must have had the means; he is dead, after all.
wait, what? The camera was malfunctioning?
okay, this changes what data I want to look at, if not my current assessment.
How long were those cameras malfunctioning? Why were they malfunctioning? How were they malfunctioning? Was this a “huh, these cameras stop working at the same time for no reason, and fifteen minutes later, Epstein is dead! Weird.”
How frequent are camera malfunctions of any kind? How long do they go undetected?
Where were these camera’s located? Were they on the opposite side of the prison? Could the blind spot be exploited for an opportunity?
How many cells in the prison had malfunctioning camera’s near them? Is it possible that the vulnerability of this cell was known, and that is why he was put in this cell?
Yes
I wish I had answers to all your other questions.
On the camera malfunction: Hanlon’s Razor.
Considering stupidity is always a good heuristic, but Hanlon’s Razor isn’t infinitely sharp.
Consider the absurd case where these two cameras were the only cameras between the cell and the door, and they fail at the same time literally 15 minutes before Epstein dies, and that the chance of any camera failing within a 15 minute period is 1 in 100,000.
Now, “infinitely sharp” is a stupid bar. What if two is a pretty reasonable number of cameras to be malfunctioning at any given point, and they were described as “near the cell” because this prison really isn’t that big?
You are probably overestimating the quality of camera equipment in prisons (product quality, installation quality, proper upkeep, and proper/competent usage) by orders of magnitude.
Almost certainly. The case was labeled “absurd” after all. But one in 100,000 for fifteen minutes means that a given camera should fail once every couple of months. Note that this isn’t five nines of uptime, its the chance of it going from working to failing within a fifteen minute period. The reasonable case allows for them to have failed at some point in the past, and simply haven’t been fixed yet.
What’s the source on the cameras having failed at the same time fifteen minutes earlier, as opposed to having failed separately many years earlier and never being repaired because nobody really cared?
Also, from what I remember, it wasn’t that they both failed, it’s that for unspecified reasons the footage wasn’t usable. There are plenty of non-conspiracy related reasons why some footage would end up not being useful for a certain investigation.
There is no source at all. It almost certainly failed in the past and wasn’t repaired yet. I was constructing an absurd hypothetical where Hanlon’s Razor wouldn’t convince me.
I would like to know which cameras failed, why, and when, because I’m curious and I think my beliefs will change based on the answers.
I listened to a video (sorry not handy) which claimed that the ligature wasn’t checked for DNA.
Right, but is there any reason it should have been?
If someone else made or handled the ligature, it would make murder more plausible.
Right, but presumably if they had any indication someone else had made in ligature, they would have checked for DNA, right?
Because given the allegations against Epstein, it is important that you do everything you can to make sure that nothing untoward happened. Failure to do so is what’s driving the conspiracy theories. The only American case I can think of off hand where the government has a bigger stake in investigating and demonstrating to the public what went wrong is the death in custody of Lee Harvey Oswald.
If I were a betting man (and there was a way to get absolute proof), my money would be on ‘Epstein took advantage of government incompetence to commit suicide’, and ‘someone in the prison system deliberately made it easier for Epstein to commit suicide’ is far more likely to me than ‘Epstein was murdered in a way as to look like a suicide’. However, something definitely went wrong, and the public has a major stake in knowing what went wrong and making sure it never happens again. Further, if the prison is not culpable, they have a major reason to want to rule out some sort of foul play. A lizardman quotient of the population will always believe this was murder even with an open investigation, however there are a lot of people that would be persuaded by an open, transparent and bipartisan look at identifying what happened.
If the government wanted to demonstrate that this wasn’t a coverup, they would have gotten an outside investigator to publicly acknowledge the facts immediately, and a week later we’d have a congressional committee getting a list of details like:
“Yes, the cameras outside the cell were not functional. Here’s the maintenance report that was submitted when they went down. Here’s a summary of why the cameras were not fixed: half the cameras in the system are down regularly, and it takes weeks to get a replacement, and this isn’t discussed because it’s policy to let prisoners believe all cameras are working. Here’s who signed off on that policy, months before Epstein was incarcerated. Here’s a note from the duty officer noting that the cameras outside the cell Epstein was going in were down, and a note from his superior telling him there’s no other available cell. Here’s a plan for the system to improve the camera system so this doesn’t happen again.” Yes, in this example the superior officer that said “I know the cameras are down, put him in there anyways” is going to be in some sort of trouble, deserved or otherwise, but it’s better than half the country convinced that this was a government sanctioned hit job.
I don’t totally disagree with you in theory, but that’s not how the government works. There isn’t one guy who can flip a switch from “normal operating behavior” to “maximum accountability mode.”
Like, take the medical investigator. They’ve probably seen dozens to hundreds of suicides by strangulation. Who’s the guy in the room who says “Yes, these marks are obvious and you clearly know what happened, but run a bunch of probably useless tests anyway because otherwise conspiracy theory weirdos are going to foam at the mouth?”
I understand this, but there’s obviously some point at which maximum accountability mode gets flipped, and you only need that switch flipped if none of the switches leading up to it flipped. Epstein’s connections are enough that I could see the Maximum Accountability Congressional Inquiry switch flipped, but at the very least one of the other switches should have flipped.
It could be the fault is with whichever level of government had control of Epstein isn’t exercising responsibility. Part of the problem with this is that despite the public outcry, no level of government responded by publicly flipping the ‘what the hell did you do?’ switch. The prison lost a very prominent prisoner, so it should at least do an internal investigation. The DA (or whoever was prosecuting) lost a major suspect, one that would almost certainly be a resume-booster for prosecuting (in normal circumstances), so they should be angry at the prison and want an investigation. This makes New York’s prisons look bad, so either the Mayor or the Governor or both should want an investigation. His death was certainly newsworthy, so the media should be salivating at blaming someone (rightly or wrongly), so they should be trying to get someone to leak the details. And if all those decided ‘well, even if I’m not guilty of the pedo stuff, I was still too close to him, so he’s better off dead and forgotten’, the public obviously doesn’t think that’s the case.
I mean, we’ve seen the opposite, where a switch got flipped with Jusse Smollett, where a dubious assault case seemingly got more police attention than most local murders because the victim was a minor celebrity. And then we watched the switch get flipped back (or, at least, almost) when the investigation started to go a completely different direction. When and how switches get flipped is a matter of public interest.
Do you have any numbers? I’m pretty suspicious of this mix of an inside-view rational actor model and an outside-view empirical claim.
Beyond the basic number of the incarcerated suicide rate, all I have heard is the widely publicized claim that jails have 10x the suicide rate of prisons. This is usually explained in a very irrational manner, shock of first incarceration, which did not apply to Epstein. Is this actually true: is the high rate of jail suicide entirely explained by people in jail for the first time? Are prison suicides predicted by sentence length? Are jail suicides predicted by potential sentence length? These seem like the very first numbers that would be produced by someone studying this subject. I’m less optimistic about learning whether sex crime charges predict suicide or homicide.
(I also worry that the jail/prison comparison may be misleading. It’s probably per inmate-year, while we probably want rates per inmate.)
Overall suicide rate is 46 per 100,000 per year in US jails, compared to 15 per 100,000 in prisons and 13 per 100,000 for the general public. Of these, roughly 1/3 are in the first week of incarceration – and for the minority placed on “suicide watch”, that probably translates to the first week after their lawyer finally gets them out of restraints and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Federal jails have a lower rate of suicide than state, probably due to the preponderance of white-collar offenses, but beyond that there doesn’t seem to be good quantitative data on suicide rate vs. offense charged. But Epstein was clearly at a very enhanced suicide risk in that period.
By comparison, the homicide rate for jail inmates is 3 per 100,000 per year. Also, jail homicides are disproportionately by stabbing, cutting, or bunt force trauma.
If someone dies by strangulation in their first (unrestrained) week in jail, the prior should be about 98% that they committed suicide even without knowing what they were in for and what their future was likely to hold.
Thanks, that looks like a good paper. It says that lifers are overrepresented among prison suicides, which answers one question.
Yes, 1/3 is pretty high. But, again, this wasn’t Epstein’s first week in jail. Maybe the first week resets, but I doubt it. The paper is ambivalent.
Why do you mention the homicide rate? This wasn’t an apparent homicide, so I can’t see any possible reason that the rate of apparent homicide is relevant.
The primary competing theory to “it was suicide” was “it was murder disguised as suicide”, so the base rates of suicide and murder seem relevant.
Epstein had an extremely plausible motive for suicide.
It was very clear from the political/media context that Epstein was never getting out of prison. The previous sweetheart deal he’d gotten had ended the career of the guy who gave it to him in a very visible way, even though that guy was a cabinet secretary. Whatever friends he was able to call on to put him back in his life of luxury were no longer taking his calls.
He was a man in his sixties who had just gone from being an extremely wealthy and powerful person living in luxury with all the girls he wanted and with many very important people willing to take his calls, to locked in a cage surrounded by people who wanted to do horrible things to him and told him so. The rest of his life was going to be prison cells, either in general population with a high risk of being beaten or raped or killed, or in protective custody that would amount to being locked in a tiny cage most of the day and being in near-solitary confinement. He was surrounded by prison guards who surely were eager to let him know what they thought of him and how he could expect to be treated, and who knows what kind of treatment he’d had at their hands already.
That doesn’t guarantee that it was a suicide, but at least it makes suicide entirely plausible. He was in about as despair-inducing situation as you can imagine, with absolutely no prospects for things to get better.
It’s a cliche that people announce that if they die by apparent suicide, it was really murder. How often do people who said that people were trying to kill them proceed to die by apparent suicide? It must be super common among schizophrenics, but other than cases dismissed as schizophrenic, are there any other high profile examples?
What comment about a piece of media completely changed your desire to experience it?
Context: over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen just posted a teaser of his conversation with Ted Gioia, a jazz musician/historian.
I was initially interested – I like jazz and would like to learn more about it.
However, in the teaser, this snippet was shared:
As a 27-year-old, it is truly mindblowing that these guys would think that any 27-year-old would be seduced by the music of Frank Sinatra. In my generation, Frank Sinatra is uniformly known as “old people’s music” and has all the sex appeal of a nursing home bingo night; by “old people”, we don’t mean our parents, we mean our grandparents. I know, I know, Principle of Charity and all that — but I can’t take Gioia seriously, and will not listen to the podcast or buy his book as a result. His misreading of the sex appeal of Sinatra to young people makes me think that his other points about the music industry will amount to “old man yells at cloud”.
EDITED: to fix link and correct typo
Key question: are you a young straight woman? They will have the best opinions on this.
There’s a common phenomenon where parents are totally lame but grandparents are cool. As a 60-year-old straight man I don’t know if this applies here.
Completely unrelated side-note, but this reminds me of what I saw in my social circles when Dos Equis changed their Most Interesting Man in the World marketing campaign character a few years ago, from someone who was clearly in his 60s/70s (it seems the actor was 68 when the campaign launched in 2006) to someone who looked to be middle/late-middle age. All the women in my social circles (mostly in their mid-late 20s) seemed to agree that the new character was much less sexy and charismatic, primarily because he was obviously so much younger than the previous character.
As a straight man, I found this a little bit unexpected, but not terribly so.
It’s also such a weird cultural window into the minds of people who have no clue what dating is like in 2019 for 27 year-olds. I also happen to be that age/dating demographic, and I literally can’t imagine a scenario in which I’d be relying on music after someone has already come back to my place. The phrase is “netflix and chill”, not “Sinatra and slam” for a reason.
Do boomers really think the kids still sit around listening to music together? Is that what dating used to be like?
Gen X-er here, but yes, music used to be a big deal. A playlist was like a bookshelf – it showed something about the selector’s taste, and if offered a low investment way to complement that person’s taste. It wasn’t uncommon to play music and then talk with the music as background.
Does your generation actually put on videos prior to messing around, and if so, which are the most seductive? (Is it Property Brothers?).
My understanding is that the new generation doesn’t even watch Netflix as much as they share Youtube shorts and memes, so maybe that will be next.
Wait, I thought “Netflix and chill” was just a euphemism for “come to my place so we can have sex”? Are people going to their date’s place to actually watch Netflix and chill?
There may be actual Netflix involved, yes. Many people appear to enjoy a background noise during the experience.
People also don’t necessarily just start going at it the second they walk in the door (I mean, they do sometimes, I suppose). Come over, start some movie/show for background noise/initial distraction, then start making moves.
Consider also that sometimes people do things like drink/smoke/etc. prior to…engaging, and having something on TV can help get through that initial phase before the good stuff starts. Again, people do sometimes just come over and immediately go at it, but a typical case is going to involve at least a minimal amount of normal or flirty-normal interaction before the sexy stuff starts.
I mean, it is obviously a euphemism, but you don’t just show up and commence with the sex (or at least, in my experience and that of my friend circle, that doesn’t happen). Watching a show or whatever together gives you an opportunity to cuddle for a little bit without too much pressure on either side.
What? No. You turn that shit off.
My ex-gf used to insist we put on things like podcasts and TV shows during sexytimes because she was so concerned with my roommates (as in, housemates) overhearing us. I kept telling her that there was no secret, that they knew exactly what was going on every time she came over, but it was still really important to her.
I certainly don’t need background noise, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to turn it off either. If things start happening halfway through a movie, I’m not going to stop to turn the movie off, I’m just not going to be paying attention to the movie.
I can see music enhancing the mood, but podcasts strikes me a really funny here.
1. No one has discrete music collections anymore, we all just use spotify. On the rare cases where someone’s a traditionalist, they might have an itunes library, but browsing that kind of interface isn’t really a group activity.
2. Sure, playlists are still a thing and I guess meticulously crafting one would be the kind of thing I’d appreciate if someone pointed it out to me, but music recommendation algorithms being what they are, if I hear a playlist I just assume it’s being picked by spotify’s invisible hand.
3. Yeah. It’s a coy way of getting onto a couch/bed/whatever with someone w/out having to be too blunt with your intentions (mind you – by this point everyone knows what’s going on). You start by devoting around 75% of your attention to the video and 25% of it to your partner and start steadily realigning those percentages until fun times ensue.
4.Honest to god, It has once been Property Brothers for me, but mostly it’s less about seduction material than it is just content that requires a low mental investment; think shows like the office or Friends or golden girls. Anything where you can follow along while still being periodically distracted.
5. Yeah, Youtube’s ok, and I’ve had a quite pleasant evening that began with watching some talks given by Robert Sapolsky, but ads are kind of a mood killer. You want to ensure you stick to non-monetized content; and hopefully stuff that will last long enough to not require constant interaction.
FWIW, when I think about listening to music with other people, it is either something like “new album from [our favorite band] was just released, lets hang out and listen to it” or hanging out and taking turns playing music the think/hope the other person likes.
Doesn’t a person’s Spotify list tell you something about them, possibly more than a selected playlist?* I imagine it would be like swiping right on someone’s Android to see what Google thinks they’re interested in.
* I wish I could get the Luke Cage soundtrack out of my Google Play music list, FWIW. It was insult to injury – first I got tricked into thinking the soundtrack would have the musical numbers, but it was mostly atmospherics, and now I can’t get rid of it.
Man, I’d be happy if I could keep that damned U2 album off my iPhone. I’ve deleted it like five times now, supposedly from all my devices, but it keeps coming back. I’d even be happy if it didn’t auto-play when I plug it into my car; I don’t use Apple Music for anything.
Okay, this beats podcasts.
It’s not as if “let’s go to my/your place and watch a video” was unknown in the VCR era. (“The Seven Samurai” will always hold a special place in my heart, even if I didn’t get around to watching the end till many years later.)
(Though as a GenXer, I also remember the long period that Sinatra was uncool before he became cool again.)
I’m going to dissent here (as someone also in that general age group). There are definitely people who still get together and just sit around listening to music. Not Frank Sinatra, granted, but dating is still very much like that for plenty of people.
Interesting – I have the opposite case; my friends and I will often put some Sinatra or similar-era music on as background for conversation or a game or whatever.
Yeah, I should clarify, I’m not alleging people don’t listen to music anymore only that (at least in my experience) 27 year olds aren’t thinking “I’m having a date come over, I need to meticulously select which music I’ll be playing.”
@Aftagley
I’m early Gen-X instead of a Boomer, but my wife who’s only a couple of years older than me is just over thr line into boomer-ness (though you still totally look like you could be a Zoomer or young Millennial though honey!), as I recall it in the ’80’s and early ’90’s listening to mixed tapes and vinyl records, or “jamming” with guitars were things done on dates, as were drinking, inhaling, motorcycle rides, restaurant meals, picnics, going to art galleries, theaters, concerts, readings, and renting Betamax or VHS tapes.
…Those were different times.
And the poets studied rules of verse,
And all the ladies rolled their eyes
Sittin’ by the fire…
Radio just played a little classical music for you kids,
The march of the wooden soldiers
And you can hear Jack say…
…Sweet Jane
I’ve no real idea what dating is like for youngsters now, except that it’s my understanding that you don’t ask each other out after meeting face-to-face nearly as much, and you “date” a lot less overall.
Sounds sad.
Do boomers really think the kids still sit around listening to music together?
I don’t know the jazz guy, but Tyler Cowen is a Gen-Xer.
Is that what dating used to be like?
I’m a decade or so older than you, but music was definitely a major concern of mine when dating in college. (I then got married shortly after graduating, and every time I read a thread about dating I remember what a great idea that was.)
@achenx,
Thanks for that link!
I’m about ten to fifteen years older than you, and your link led to “see also”: “Cusper” and “Generation Jones
While only a couple years seperate us, my wife is usually classed as a latter Boomer, and I’m usually classed as a early Gen-Xer, but we don’t feel as much cultural affinity for earlier Boomers or late X’ers and younger than we do those just over the Boomer/X divide, but except for “an interest in video games” (I played some in the ’80’s, and only when my son has begged my to afterwards, my wife never had the habit), this description is pretty spot on!:
Until the 2008 crash, I almost felt more affinity for my grandparents generation than the other generations not in my age cohort, as we were too young to rise with the economic plenty of the earlier Boomers, and too old to come of age with the “Tech boom”, and it seemed we’d always be financially behind both those older and those younger, but then Lehman Brothers went under, and the cohort that graduated during that recession got pushed even further behind my “Cusper” generational cohort.
@Plumber
The “cusper” idea made a lot of sense to me when I became aware of it. Apparently “Generation Jones” is a relatively old concept, though it didn’t seem to make it into popular understanding so much, at least not where I was paying attention. The “Xennial”/”Oregon Trail” thing seems to have picked up steam in the past 5 years or so, probably as more and more media is devoted to the “Millennial” concept and those of us around my age realize how different people even just a couple years younger are.
I never identified with “Generation X” — those were the people older than me. I was initially fine with the “Generation Y” idea in the 90s, but after I became an adult, and everyone else younger than me then became adults (and “Generation Y” became “Millennials”) the differences became more and more stark.
I’m going to object to the “Oregon Trail Generation” designation , as Oregon Trail was made publicly available in 1974, early enough that most Xers, not merely those born at “the tail end of the 70s and the start of the 80s” are of an age to be familiar with it. Pushing things like this later in time seems to be a fairly common error; I remember a Washington Post column singing the praises of the Millennials, the first generation to grow up with video games… this after the Post had spent a number of column-inches over the past years denigrating the Xers for growing up playing video games.
Nah; a good derriere will almost never be a turn off.
You say it doesn’t work; I’m only a little older than you and it can work. Maybe half of the songs I played at my wedding were 50s or older, and that’s not because I was catering to older relatives. Although I always aimed to dance to old music on a date, not sit around listening.
I didn’t date many women, but despite me spending no effort looking for it, most of the women I dated enjoyed dancing. It’s not like my wife even took dancing lessons before we danced together.
At least one of the female coworkers I’ve had also really liked male singers like Michael Buble who’s done some covers of “old” music.
I’m a musician, and had already requested the book “Music: A Subversive History” from the library when I read that interview on-line today. I agree both Cowen and Gioia are showing their age in that exchange, but, as others have pointed out, putting on music for a date was a thing once upon a time. The “generational” thing is also something I’ve seen – my experience is that your parents tastes are not hip, but your grandparents can be OK. Don’t let this prevent you from reading the book – from what I read in the rest of that interview he seems to know a lot and has interesting things to say.
I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast with guest Andrew Marantz. I generally agree with Sam Harris when it comes to the woke left, and this was an interesting podcast because Marantz is clearly a part of the woke left. Anyhow, at one point they were discussing “deplorables” and the notion of a “white person wanting to live with other white persons”, and both Harris and Marantz agreed that such people were beyond the pale.
Personally, I dont wish to live in a homogeneously white society and I enjoy a good amount of ethnic diversity, except for the wokeness, the race hustlers, and the “diversity is our strength” propaganda, but I dont find it beyond the pale for people of any ethnicity to wish to live in an ethnically homogeneous society.
I even think most woke people would understand a black person wanting to be in a black neighborhood, or a jew to live in a jewish neighborhood (or Israel).
Other than the typical “white people are the oppressor” woke narrative, is there any valid reason why preferring to live in homogeneous societies is morally suspect?
Path dependence, mainly? The choice in the U.S. today isn’t between diversity and homogeneity; those ships have literally already sailed. The choice is among different models of diversity, and a “preference for homogeneity” often cashes out in practice to a preference for more toxic models of diversity, especially when it’s a richer group expressing that preference through practices like redlining.
But also “white” as an identity is…suspect is a great word for it. White isn’t so much a heritage or ethnicity as a majority coalition of ethnicities, and people generally don’t form coalitions except to gain power.
It is. But it’s also how people in the US and Canada are categorized socially. Nobody talks about British-Americans or German-Americans.
Challenge – I hear this frequently said, and it seems like an isolated demand for rigor wrt identities. Look at all the other ethnicity in America and you see the same grouping of related, if previously separate, heritages into more cohesive blocks.
By coincidence, notorious WN Mike Enoch remarked on this very topic recently, taking aim at those who would convince white americans to identify with some fragment of their ancestry instead. I will paraphrase:
He was referencing this specifically, but also punitive race/ethnicity quotas in universities, government programs that serve nonwhites, etc.; all the usual things they bring up. The point is that nobody can possibly believe that a denial of white identity is being made in good faith, when it is the basis of so much of the attack on european americans: it is simply another psychological weapon in the attack.
No one is forming a coalition. No one can tell what ethnicity anyone else is within “white”
It’s possible I’m biased by being Ashkenazi, which is a non-central example of an ethnicity that gets marked as white. With us it’s generally pretty clear that we’re Jewish for the purposes of heritage and ethnic pride, but white for the purpose of being Not A Minority. If you’re a first or second generation immigrant that gets marked as white you’ve probably got a similar situation going. And I think if you’re, say, Appalachian you’re kind of falling for a con if you identify primarily as white–you end up giving much more to the coalition than you’re getting.
Honest question: as a Jewish person, do you enjoy being part of a minority, insofar as you can form groups, and advocate in favor of that minority? I would expect that you would. I think it’s very natural for every person to feel a little bit like that.
You get to be part of society at large, and you also have an ingroup that is bigger than your family but smaller than all of society. I can see that as being immensely useful.
My JDar went off with your initial comment. Your mistake is to assume that other ethnic subgroups see whiteness in the transactional way that you do. Most don’t, not considering their ethnic group as being of any real importance. Many whites don’t even have a predominant ethnicity, they are mixes.
I think you’re mistaken in thinking Appalachians have a meaningful choice to identify as a different racial or ethnic group that would improve their position. A common identity they put down on the census is “American”. It doesn’t get them jack. They could do even worse by identifying as being from Appalachia. I don’t think I’ve ever lived anywhere where that wouldn’t be a net negative for your social standing (Note: I have not lived in Appalachia which may be the one place it would help).
I’ve felt that I benefit from being able to identify as not just white because I’m a little bit Chinese and Hawaiian. No one gives a shit about my umpteen white ancestral groups, but I’ve deflected an awkward question or two with “I’m not just white, so that doesn’t apply to me or don’t ask me.”
Perhaps you can define them as someone lacking resentment/entitlement for reparation towards White people, perceived or otherwise? If you can make a case for solidarity between “People of Colour” despite those colours and culture being wildly different, you must assume that some people might prefer to be surrounded by people who lack this sense of solidarity against them.
Fantastic point.
honoredbd:
I keep thinking the best possible endpoint for American race relations is for everyone to end up effectively in the “white” category. Maybe we can invent some Martians who are green and Other, and then just put everyone else in the “white” category that amounts to “normal Americans with whom I’m happy living, working, and doing business.”
In Yorkshire, my family is from (specific village); in England, we’re from Yorkshire; in Great Britain, we’re English, in Canada, we’re British, and now that I’m living in the US, I’m Canadian.
Maybe on-point, maybe not: during the immigration wave in the United States of the late-1800s and early 1900s, immigrants would often self-segragate by place-of-origin. People from one area of Italy would find a home near other people from that area of Italy, people from a town in Poland would move in close to other people who had connections to that town in Poland, etc.
This left traces behind. In the metro area that I live, there are still neighborhoods with nicknames like “Poletown”, “Greektown”, “Little Italy”, etc. Reputedly, those neighborhoods were dominated by immigrants of those ethnicities during the immigration-boom years.
Even today, there are neighborhoods and suburbs which are the place to find most people of certain ethnic groups. Most of the European-origin ethnic groups have blended into the generic “white”, though a person’s family name might give away part of their background. The distinctive ethnic groups are now Jewish, Black, and post-1960s immigrants from places outside of Europe. (The most obvious to me: there are present-day neighborhoods where half the billboards are Arabic-plus-English.)
Generally, the thought of a person moving to an all-white neighborhood brings up memories of things like neighborhood covenants against selling to certain racial groups, or other practices. The revulsion against such history probably removes the bare factual assertion that such neighborhoods are mirrors of an all-Black neighborhood, or an all-Jewish neighborhood.
@S_J says:
Not just neighborhoods, trades as well. In San Francisco Carpenters and Cops were mostly Irish, Firemen and Plumbers mostly Italian, across the bay in Oakland Plumbers were mostly Portuguese.
There’s still ethnic social clubs, Berkeley has “Finnish Hall”, Oakland has the “Fratti Lanza” club, San Francisco has Armenian, Croatian, Irish, Italian, et cetera clubs.
I’ve personally had dinners at “The Irish Cultural Center” (an ex-cops, ironically of Filipino descent retirement party), and at the “Italian Athletic Club” in San Francisco (a Christmas party organized by a guy in the Sheet Metal Workers union).
The ethnic links are a bit attenuated (so many mixed descendents and allegiances by trade, i.e. cops not of Irish descent making a big deal about St. Patrick’s Day) but there still there.
It’s true: If centuries of past and ongoing racial oppression didn’t exist, then whites wanting to segregate would be no big deal.
And we’d also probably have a “white history month” and celebrate “white pride”, along with all the other races living in harmony together, with slavery, Jim Crow, racial discrimination, imperialism, and white nationalism never being a thing that happened/is happening.
I honestly dont get this line of thought. If white people are so bad, why is it important to have non-whites living among them?
Or are you saying that because, to quote Ilhan Omar, “some people did something”, white people should be treated differently than all others?
It still doesnt compute. People alive today are not responsible for the sins of their ancestors, and I’m pretty sure everybody’s ancestors did some bad things at some point.
Note that I conspicuously phrased my position to include both the past and present tense. If you want to argue against a strawman, you don’t need me to help you with that.
Because access to land is power. Imagine if California passed a bill to deport all Republicans. Would you say “well, Democrats suck, so I don’t see what the big deal is of not having to live with them anymore…”
No, I was arguing against your position, which includes the past tense. If you are now restating your position to only include the present tense, please advise.
Yes, access to land is power. Everyone all around the world has varying access to land based on many factors, and I dont see why this singles out the white race for unique treatment.
If you’re going to accuse me of straw-manning your position when all I did was attack a part of your position (the part which justifies treating whites differently than everyone else based on the past), please dont straw-man my position by talking about deportation.
Things that happened in the past are a good indicator of things that are happening in the present, absent information to the contrary. If the sun comes up on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, but you haven’t checked to see if the sun came up on Wednesday, do you think the odds are only 50/50?
And note, just for clarities sake, that I believe we have strong information regarding the existence of present day racism and white nationalism, so what happened in the past is just the cherry on top.
Whites are singled out for special treatment in the U.S. because of the (correct) assumption they have more power than blacks.
This is like asking “everyone has different amounts of money based on many factors, so why are we singling out the rich for unique treatment, making them pay a higher tax rate?”
Of course you could contest the assumption that racial power inequality exists. Which was my original point: If you assume a totally separate reading-of-reality than not just the left, but the mainstream, then many things that happen in the left/mainstream seem nonsensical. But the reading-of-reality is where the argument is. If you assume gravity doesn’t exist, then those arguing that apples fall from trees also seem nonsensical.
I dont. I contest that this racial power inequality should be used to justify assigning moral blame to one person for wanting something, and not assigning moral blame to another for wanting the same thing, just because the people are different races.
Let’s say I have two loaves of bread, and a poor person has none. Me and him both want the same thing (loaves of bread).
If I refused to share any of the loaves of bread and he died, would you say it is unjust so assign moral blame to me, since we both wanted the same thing, after all? (loaves of bread)
In this case bread-having is the axis of power, but you could replace it with any power inequality you want (race, nationality, ect).
You didn’t ask me, but yes.
So to be clear: If I do an action that results in someone else being harmed, I am not to blame for that action?
And yes, preventing someone from accessing a piece of bread is an action.
“reading-of-reality than not just the left, but the mainstream,”
Can you explain what the difference between these two are?
Correct.
“And yes, preventing someone from accessing a piece of bread is an action.”
I’m not seeing why this is supposed to be a hypothetical situation. How much do you have to donate to save a life of a poor person in the third world? How much could you donate without starving yourself? How much did you donate?
Amazing.
If I shoot a gun (the action), which kills someone (the result, someone who is harmed) I am not to blame?
In many contexts, but not every single context: if a man is invading your home and you pull the trigger on him, I think you would agree that you would not be blame.
Yes. obviously.
Is preventing someone from having sex with you an action?
@Alexander Turok
I would not. Of course you would be to blame for his death. If you didn’t shoot the gun, he would be alive. Classic causality.
Note that assigning moral blame is an entirely different subject as to whether an action is just.
All decisions are actions. This is what people who say “the trolley driver shouldn’t change lanes” don’t understand.
You’re motte and baileying between “blame” and “moral blame”(your original example) here.
No I’m not.
Like, you can obviously be assigned moral blame for the bad results of an action, and that action still be morally justified by the good results that outweigh it.
If I swerve the trolley and kill a guy, the answer to “who’s fault is it that this guy died?” isn’t “its nobodies”.
There are people all over the world right now who are starving. And you are not feeding them. I’m assuming you could, but instead you’re involved in silly arguments over white people on the Internet.
**SHAME**
Do you understand how thought-killing this line of thinking is?
“Let’s do thing x, it would be good”
“If thing x is good, but you aren’t doing it already, that implies that you are bad. Unless you want to admit that thing x isn’t actually good. Checkmate!”
You didnt say that sharing bread with poor people would be good. If you had, I would have agreed with you.
You said:
I’m just pointing out that this example is not convincing. In fact, I’m pointing out that according to the logic which undergirds your example, you should be assigned moral blame right now.
Do you think I would disagree with this statement?
The way I see it, people bear the moral responsibility for the results of their actions and decisions. So you had better think about what the best decisions to make in throughout your life are, if you care about doing “good” at all.
It’s not like its impossible to think of utilitarian reasons not to donate your life saving to malaria nets in Africa, if that’s what you are worried about.
That you should be assigned moral blame? Yes.
That the logic of your examples suggests you should be assigned moral blame? I dont know. Maybe you dont realize that the example you used was superficially nice sounding but fatally flawed. Nobody has a responsibility to end the suffering of everyone on earth. You dont have to give bread to hungry people, the hot girl doesnt need to sleep with incels, and Jeff Bezos doesnt have to give every poor person in America $10000.
You have a responsibility to support your family, if you have one.
You have a responsibility towards your employer and your co-employees to work diligently and honestly.
You have a responsibility towards your co-citizens that you will follow the law.
Your responsibilities towards others shrink as they are further away from you. Your responsibilities towards citizens of other countries are basically:
1. Dont invade their country
2. Dont destroy the earth
I like Nassim Taleb’s formulation:
Why? What is the moral theory that justifies this?
I’m quite sure that others can do a much better job on this one than I can. But I’ll throw this out there: practicality and effectiveness.
I should add that the “distance” in this theory is not merely physical. Your brother is “close” even if he lives in Australia and you live in the US. But physical distance also matters.
You dont understand the needs of those who are too far away from you well enough to help them. You dont understand how your action might affect anything else within their environment. And you wont know either. You can feel good giving money to some charity for Africa, but maybe that charity really fcked things up, and you’ll never know. And when I say fcked things up, I mean maybe the charity thought it was doing good, but it actually did harmful things. Or maybe not. Maybe the charity was employing sexual predators. Maybe the charity was paying off the local warlord. Maybe the charity did work that put some local entrepreneur out of business. As a white savior giving your $20 after seeing that tear-jerker of a commercial, you dont know, you dont care. You’re a good person because you give to charity. The charity will thank you for your money and assure you that you are a good person.
I realize this falls short of what you requested. But I believe it’s in the right direction. Anyhow, I hope someone else will explain it better than this. It’s not my own, more intelligent people than I have discussed this idea. I should probably read up on it.
You’ve done a good job of answering the question of why, practically speaking, it makes more sense to focus efforts on people closer to you. But that doesn’t absolve you of the moral responsibility for the way your decisions effect people not close to you. To reference an earlier post, moral blame is not the same thing as whether an action is morally justified. If the good of the action outweighs the bad, then the action is morally just. If you swerve the trolley, killing 1 to save 5, you still killed a guy. We would all just understand that the good results outweighed the bad results.
To bring it back though: The counter-point to the “focus at home” strategy, is that we are all human, and want basically the same set of things (food, shelter, love, health, power over their lives). So you have to be really careful before putting the “how could I know what he wants?” blinders on.
For example, if the group making the “how could I know what they want?” claim is actively oppressing the other group (e.g., enforcing political power over them), the “distance argument” starts to look more like a facade. It is reasonable to suspect that a slave owner claiming he can’t possibly know what is best for the slave, so its best to just do what’s best for himself, might not actually be assigning equal moral value to all humans.
Presuming that the guy who is controlling the trolley is not the guy who attached 1 person on a track and 5 on another, I dont think he deserves any moral blame. Not killing anybody was not an option, so he took the least bad option. I would blame the guy who attached the people on the tracks.
I agree 100%.
Oppressing other groups is bad. And governing from far away is very much analogous to charity from far away, it’s bad. World government is evil. Globalists are wrong. The EU and the UN are abominations.
No, probably not. Because he’s a SLAVE OWNER!!!
@Guy in TN, jermo sapiens
It sounds like you two are talking past each other a bit due to different definitions/connotations of the term “moral blame”.
Guy in TN, I think, is using it as follows: “moral blame” is inextricably linked to (identical to?) the negative terms in a global utility function. The sum* may be positive, but the negative terms are still there.
jermo sapiens, by contrast, I think goes: “moral blame” is an emotional judgment of the rank of the sum of said utility function, and does not inherently refer to negative terms in the function.
*Utilitarianism caveat: morality-based arithmetic may or may not conform to Euclidean geometry.
I think there’s a paradox involved here from the perspective of the United States. At least since the Civil Rights era, American culture is supposed to be blind to ethnic origin or skin color. Someone of any ethnic group that comes in and assimilates to US culture* is an American. American society should not shun people who are otherwise culturally American for being of a different racial or ethnic background, and someone who is judging someone’s American-ness based only on ethnic or racial qualifications is essentially un-American. American cultural homogeneity is necessarily counter-indicated by efforts to impose ethnic homogeneity in the guise of American-ness.
* I can only speak as a single individual, one on the right side of the political spectrum. The problem the right has with unchecked immigration is that we’re dealing with immigrants that aren’t assimilating to US culture (as understood by the right; the left obviously has other ideas about what American values are and whether assimilation is necessary or even good), either because they’re here illegally or because they want the advantages of prosperous American society without assuming the values that led to that prosperity (at least according to those of us on the right). The American right wants a (right-wing) American culture; dissing anti-abortion activists because they’re black, gun owners because they’re Korean, or small business owners because they’re south Asian Indian doesn’t promote right wing American values. I admit there’s a catch twenty-two here, as nobody agrees on what American values should be, so someone looking to conceal ethnic prejudice can use values as a cover for why generic members of any particular group are treated with disdain.
As someone who is decidedly non-woke – in fact, I’d consider myself anti-woke – I would say that preferring to live with other people of one’s race is morally suspect for standard liberal reasons. Which is that that’s a preference for being close to and interacting with individuals based purely on the race to which they belong. This goes against what I see as a standard liberal value, which is that individuals should be treated as individuals, completely independently of their race.
This also means that I see black people who prefers to live in a black neighborhood as being no less morally monstrous than a white person who prefers to live in a white neighborhood.
Now, if someone wants to live in a particular culture because they like that culture, and that culture correlates strongly with a certain race, that’s something completely different and something I don’t see as morally suspect or wrong in itself. As long as if, say, God came down and zapped every individual in that culture to become another race or a dozen different races, that person’s preference for living in that culture doesn’t change one whit.
I would think that’s the case almost 100% of the time. And I would add that culture correlates very strongly with race. I cant imagine anyone, even the most racist, disliking a culture but being happy with people from that culture just because of matching skin color.
Consider the schelling model of segregation. The gist is that even with only a moderate preference for living near people like you (e.g., a desire to have 33% of your neighbors look like you), you get a ton of segregation very quickly. This isn’t even “an X person wanting to live in an X neighborhood.” This is “X person not wanting to live in a mostly non-X neighborhood.” Hard to find fault with someone that wants just 1/3 of the people around them to look like them. Unless you have an active desire to live with people that don’t look like you, it’s hard to reverse the resultant segregation.
here’s a fun tester of this:
https://ncase.me/polygons/
Of course, “what race are my neighbors” is usually not the only driver for selecting a place to live.
I like the polygons thing. I would like to test it more though. For example, my hunch tells me there are solutions where everybody is happy, and I’m not sure how this particular algorithm works. Does it count only direct neighbors?
Anyhow, assuming the polygons thing is correct, and the stable equilibrium is segregated societies. Ok fine, it’s disappointing. But is it a catastrophe that requires a massive social engineering scheme? I dont think so. I believe we should seek to create a world which is compatible with human nature, not seek to create a human nature which is compatible with the world we want.
Isn’t this just the “separate but equal” argument? And in theory, “separate but equal” is fine. But, empirically, there is but lip service to the idea, and segregation results in an entrenchment of inequality and a suppression of exit rights.
It’s not even about malice, often. It’s that “separate but equal” can only be maintained through re-distribution, and those that must give understandably don’t want to. (But then it’s all to easy for malice to exploit those feelings.)
The “separate but equal” policies that we learn about in school were actually enforced by law, though. It seems clear that that violates exit rights, and entrenches inequality inasmuch as the dividing lines reflect it; it seems much less clear that stepping back and letting voluntary self-segregation happen would. In fact it can only happen in the presence of a reasonable level of exit rights, can’t it?
The interesting thing is we blew straight through more voluntary solutions (like not having the government shaft black people constantly and not having it punish anyone who wanted to put white people and black people in the same train car) and went all the way to disparate impact in something like a decade. Voting rights need mandatory protection, and government redistribution is always nonvoluntary so those cases aren’t interesting.
But to me it looks like there mostly aren’t as many disparate impact suits as there could be. Partly because it doesn’t occur to most people how the doctrine ought to apply to so many things, and partly because most people just aren’t going to bother bringing a suit. Even if they are actually discriminated against they usually won’t bother. And it’s really unlikely anyone will bother if everyone seems to accept the status quo, and there’s no clear intentional discrimination even if the disparate impact is clear. For example, many jobs asking for a bachelor’s degree cause disparate impact, and it would be very expensive or difficult to prove that the degree is relevant to the job. In a lot of cases, the degree probably isn’t relevant. A sufficiently dedicated push could potentially flip society on that issue or similar ones.
Not really. As Nornagest points out, enforcing segregation by law is not the same thing as letting segregation happen naturally.
I have never seen a compelling argument why enforcing diversity by law is good and enforcing segregation by law is bad that doesn’t rely on some moral assumptions that I don’t share.
@AG
That is true for self-segregation as well, if cultural differences aren’t just superficial. It seems to me that the ideal of a multicultural society with equality of outcomes is incoherent.
If you truly want equality of outcomes, shouldn’t you support forceful assimilation. Of course, that has a problematic history as well.
And we have a lot of segregation anyways! De jure matters a lot, but a decent number of people want it de facto and get it.
I’m suspicious of the reasons of a significant chunk of people who segregate whether white/black/asian/etc., but I’m suspicious of a lot of reasons people give. I’m not as worried as the articles that seem to believe some people are stealing opportunities from others by not wanting to live next to them. That may be occasionally true, but most of the time the reasoning is nonsense. A lot of bad things happen (or are done) to poor people or black people that have no effect on other people’s live either way.
AG:
I don’t see how substantial voluntary segregation (which we see everywhere) suppresses exit rights. If the black students and white students mostly sit at different tables in the cafeteria, with a few people sitting at the opposite-race table instead, how does that entrench inequality, or require redistribution to keep equal? Seems like everyone gets the same cafeteria lunch but chooses whom to sit with for reasons you don’t like.
@albatross11:
Suppression of exit rights within “voluntary” segregation occurs via social pressures.
I would be less wary of self-segregation’s track record if the environment also had a space where people could voluntarily integrate, and not suffer for it.
My perception is that nerds and jocks will tend towards conflict theory if (self-)segregated, and stick with mistake theory if more people are nerdy jocks and jocky nerds. (…oh god, this is the moral to High School Musical)
In our world, with plenty of voluntary segregation, we also see substantial mixing between groups, including interracial marriages and black families living in mostly-white neighborhoods and whites living in mostly-black neighborhoods and all the rest. People being people, this doesn’t always go perfectly, but it actually seems to be working out pretty well overall. Despite traditional and social media that sometimes seem to be trying to drum up as much black/white racial hatred as possible, race relations in the US mostly go pretty well.
The only way to eliminate voluntary segregation of this kind is to impose some kind of different set of choices on individuals. What government program or law would keep white residents from leaving a neighborhood that had become majority black? Would you forbid them selling their house and moving away? What government program would you propose to address the extensive voluntary segregation by race in dating and marriage, or in friendships, or in choice of TV shows and movies?
If you give people free choice, they will often self-segregate. That’s visible in peoples’ choices of where to live, where to work, whom to sit with in the cafeteria, whom to date, what TV shows and movies to watch, what sports to play, what churches to attend, etc. The only way around that is to override their choices and force someone to do stuff they don’t want to do. Sometimes, they’ll self-segregate on race, sometimes on language, national origin, occupation, social class, education level, interests, political views, religion, gender, etc.
The reason the parable of the polygons is interesting, IMO, is that it shows how you get segregation without any kind of formal discrimination. You don’t need laws banning triangles from living in square neighborhoods, you just need individual preferences to be slightly in favor of more people like me as neighbors, and you get segregation. In practice, I think any way you might try to break that segregation up is going to involve making a fair number of people less happy. And not just in housing–a small preference to date within your own race or religion or social class works the same way.
The interesting question is why we see this as a problem to be solved, rather than an interesting emergent property of people and societies. IMO, the way the segregation really goes away is when the distinction people are segregating on becomes less important to most people. Over time, lots of white ethnic groups went from being seen as a different shape (Irish vs Italians, for example) to being seen as the same shape (generic white Americans). In 2019, I think you will have to search very far to find someone of mostly English descent upset that his daughter is marrying someone of Italian descent, but I think in 1919 it would have been much more common. My equivalent of a hundred years ago might have been uncomfortable working in an office with lots of Asians, whereas it just seems like normal life to me.
There are advantages to living/working around people very similar to yourself (ease of communications, shared values), and also disadvantages (monoculture of ideas and talents). Working out an optimal tradeoff isn’t trivial, and in fact looks very situation dependent and not like something that could be done via law in any sensible way.
Perfectly said.
I get the motivation behind fighting segregation, but it insists that everyone must seek diversity. If that aligns with your values, that’s great, but enforcing that on everyone sounds like orwellian dystopia.
Exactly. This is the best meme to illustrate that point.
That’s a pretty cool simulation. I’m skeptical of how illustrative a model it is, though, since it seems to rely at least somewhat on polygons only being willing to move because they want more segregation, and on there being no coordination among the polygons. In the manual mode, I tried deliberately setting up minimally-segregated equilibria, but was prevented from doing so by the impossibility of moving “happy” or “meh” polygons.
Even in the random case, I think the “more segregated polygons won’t move” criterion is doing a significant portion of the work. For example, try setting the slider to make the polygons 100% segregationist (maximizing the desire for segregation, but also making almost every shape willing to move). I’ve had it running for several minutes and it seems to consistently stay in low single-digit segregation levels (often at 0%).
The fact that they just randomly moved polygons definitely made it break for higher levels of desired segregation. I also agree that it probably isn’t illustrative of the real world, though, if someone’s happiness really was 30% dependent on being near similar people, then this probably does work at some level. I know a lot of people resisted the “white flight” in the 50s and 60s, but at some point they pretty much all moved, so there is obviously some level at which almost anyone will leave if their neighborhood becomes too different.
In my experience, this kind of thing is more closely tied to class than race.
Also, I don’t think that not being able to move a happy polygon was a problem. People rarely move when they are happy with their current situation, and I don’t think there is a lot of opportunities today for people to move en masse in a coordinated way.
90% of drivers of selecting a place to live are proxies for this.
I think it’s closer to the reverse. 90% of the drivers are highly correlated with race (also, economic status).
+1
If next year, your overwhelmingly white suburb has a Chinese engineer, an Indian cardiologist, and a black accountant move in, you probably don’t mind much–they’re unlikely to bring a lot of crime or a drop in quality of the local schools or trash all over the yard with them. If the following year, three lower-class white families move in with their extended families and a car up on blocks in the driveway, you probably care a lot.
Race correlates with the stuff everyone cares about. Some people also care to some greater or lesser extent about race. My not-that-informed guess is that most people care more about the correlates (crime, schools, quality of life in the neighborhood) than they do about the race of their neighbors.
@albatross11
That certainly depends on what changes and how many of them are moving in.
You are correct that at a very low rate, none of those are likely to be disruptive.
But Chinese immigration into San Francisco was so large and disruptive in the late 1800s that it created its own neighborhood where whites weren’t welcome, which kicked off massive protests and resulted in a Federal law restricting Chinese immigration.
Black migration to the North was so disruptive that it created race riots and the collapse of the Northern inner cities.
Lower class whites also have crime rates lower than upper class blacks, so your example the lower class whites would likely not be a problem at all.
@EchoChaos says: “…But Chinese immigration into San Francisco was so large and disruptive in the late 1800s that it created its own neighborhood where whites weren’t welcome, which kicked off massive protests and resulted in a Federal law restricting Chinese immigration…”
As an aside: In what was the lobby of a former post office in San Francisco there’s a series of paintings made in the 1940’s on “The History of San Francisco”, which ends with the founding of the United Nations with the American, British, and Soviet flags most prominent (there was a failed effort in the ’50’s to remove the murals as “Communist propaganda” which given the artist they likely were), and a part of the murals shows a protest by the 19th century mostly Irish California “Working Man’s Party” and a “Chinese Out!” sign is clearly visible.
Most of what had been the post office adjacent to the old lobby are now Chinese restaurants.
@Plumber
That is absolutely hilarious. Thanks.
I don’t think the race of the neighborhood has nearly the influence that the class of the neighborhood does on people deciding where to live. Those two tend to be correlated, but the class is the one that really matters.
The number of people that wouldn’t want to live between two black Hollywood stars in Malibu is vanishingly small, I suspect. Just as the number of people that want to live between two white meth addicts in a trailer park is vanishingly small.
Malibu is 92% white per Wikipedia.
In fact, it may not be possible possible to live between two of the (checks notes) 148 blacks in all of Malibu.
Poor whites are pretty fantastic people, and I’ve worked with plenty of them to know.
You’re dodging the statement by assuming the criminality of them.
Given the choice to live in majority black Prince George’s County, Maryland or majority white Loudoun County, Virginia, to use examples I actually know of similarly wealthy counties, it’s clear from the relative growth rates what people actually prefer.
Those two counties are a terrible comparison. One is an established middle class neighborhood with good growth, the other one is a traditionally rural area that has seen rapid development in the last 30 years, and has the highest median household income of any county with more than 65,000 people.
Obviously the main reason so many people are moving there is that they are building new houses, whereas Prince George is an established area, but even if that wasn’t the case, the fact that Loudoun has a median household income almost $60,000 higher proves my point far stronger than yours, seeing as though Loudoun is an unusually diverse area.
@JayT
They are the richest black and richest white counties in America, both in driving range of DC and filled with professionals. If there were an even richer black county to compare, I would compare it.
There may be a middleground. People will start to leave if class expectations / quality of life expectations are not met, and each person on the margin starts to feel like an alien and moves. And then when they move a new threshold is hit that causes more people to move on the margins etc.
I don’t believe most people consider deviations from of absolute homogeneity a deal-breaker, but they’re being asked to be viscerally indifferent to something resembling the inverse of that.
I think there’s a huge confounder here because race correlates with a bunch of other stuff: income, wealth, culture, crime, school performance, etc. So all else being equal, having your neighborhood change from 100% white to 50% white/50% black is going to come with having poorer neighbors whose kids do worse in school and who have a larger (but still very small, note) fraction of criminals among them.
Consider a recent Chinese immigrant with absolutely no dog in the American black/white racial fight. Will he prefer to move into the 50/50 black/white neighborhood or the 100% white neighborhood? Why? It’s surely not pro-white bigotry.
Not quite sure what is meant by valid reason. For most people, anti-racism is a valid reason in of itself.
For those of us that can’t viscerally feel the the disgust at the idea of any form of white-self-preference, The proximate answer is that it’s a disgust reaction/moral double standard that people were socialized into.
We might ask two related questions:
1. How does the socialization work in the face of the double standard
2. Why would the socialization come about
I think both are just related to historical optics. There aren’t prominent or persistent examples of underdog story where comparatively affluent POC were attempting to keep whites out of their communities or nations and subsequently having another group using violence to keep them out. You do have instances of attempts by whites to gain access to land and resources, and perhaps ‘Markets’ in a commercial sense, but not for access to jobs or access to neighborhoods or access to schools.
So the purges in post-colonial Africa wouldn’t count, because the Africans were poorer than the whites. I highly doubt this “mitigating factor” would apply to, say, Ukrainians running out the Jews. It seems to me like the justifications for the double standard are just ad-hoc rationalizations.
I think the socialization in large part involves what tragedies and atrocities are brought to the fore (what gets featured prominently in education and media) —
Under what circumstances would an individual be socialized into a narrative that those purged in post-colonial africa didn’t have it coming for their past misdeeds? That’s how i tend to think about it. I know what i was taught in school so i have a rough idea of what semi-educated people know about Africa and the Ukraine
I’m not relativistic to the point where i’d claim you can’t conclusively argue that one form of ethnic cleansing was comparatively more justified than another, but I don’t believe the assumptions people generally have about these events is going to fit that mold, necessarily.
The same reason the people who camped around the oasis in the desert and won’t let anyone else move in are worse than the folks who camped in a random spot and won’t let anyone else move in.
Also, wanting to live somewhere else out of reasonable fear of harm is better than unreasonable fear of harm.
Now, none of this is a legal argument and legally, no you can’t make that distinction. Again, nothing I say here is legal advice.
You’ve lost me. Lots of homogeneous populations live in relatively small or rather hostile territories (Iceland is a pretty marginal place to settle). And lots of diverse populations live in very nice territory (like lots of the Mediterranean which has had nice places to live for millennia).
If you’ve camped around the oasis in the desert and won’t let anyone else in, people will die of dehydration in the desert. If you’ve camped around nowhere in random location, then people are far less harmed by your xenophobia (here standing in for racism/segregation).
My actual position is much more like Guy in TN, but the question was for any other valid reason then an unpleasant and misleadingly uncharitable misstatement of my actual position.
So in your analogy the mostly white towns of rural Montana are the oasis? For refugees from the middle east and africa?
I’m sorry but this does not compute for me at all. Feels like a stretched analogy poorly designed to reach a predetermined conclusion. And the question I originally asked was why is it ok to treat whites differently in this regard. If your analogy is that white people themselves are an oasis, that is extremely racist.
@jermo I think you might do well to keep mining this vein. Scratching the surface of a lot of grossly left-wing anti-racist stuff, I often find weapons grade white supremacy (when I don’t just find pure racial hatred finding a convenient avenue of attack). For instance, I see narratives about difference underpinned by the unspoken assertion that the “white” way of doing things is unquestionably the best, and that any respect in which, or any extent to which, people around the world are not mimicking whites, they are failing; and further, the blame for this falls entirely at the feet of whites. Nonwhites are not even afforded the capacity to fail, or be evil, so deprived are they of depth and agency in this disgustingly white-centred-yet-white-hating worldview.
To give some context, I am absolutely a Malcolm X black nationalist and I support the creation of a sovereign african american state within the lower 48 as the only possible permanent solution to the problem that began with the slave trade; and if your visceral reaction to that is to object on the grounds that the nation would have quality of life and GDP and crime figures more like those of Jamaica than those of Europe, you are literally going to hell and I won’t pray for you.
Yes, you are not the first and you wont be the last. I recall Sargon of Akkad debating some progressive and cornering him into saying “if you have a level playing field whites win every time”, and Sargon going in for the kill after that. I cant find the clip, sorry.
The thing is it’s not that these people are actually racist. They are sincere. But their positions are adopted after only a superficial review because it’s popular with the cool kids.
I’d say feel free to create a black or white ethnostate if you can find a place to put it, but don’t be surprised when most people aren’t interested. I’d much rather live in my integrated multiracial society than in an all-white ethnostate.
A lot of the wealthiest areas in the U.S. are less white than many poor rural areas, which is why I was confused. The places inside cities that are super white, I couldn’t afford to live in, and I’m not poor. But if I was LeBron James, I could live in those places. So I think those are segregated based on wealth.
This reason makes sense to me. If your central worry is about a resurgence of white supremacy along the lines of David Duke or the al-trite, I agree David Duke is bad and suspicious and so is much of the al-trite. But I think their politics don’t drive segregation in most of the U.S. Even if they all disappeared tomorrow, I’d expect things to look almost the same. I’d expect some improvement in some less central areas, but literally no change in cities.
EDIT:
@jermo sapiens
One of the interesting things about a lot of U.S. thought about race. It’s like Chinese people never existed! Like all the stories in the NYT about the special gifted high schools. If you skimmed you would’ve thought the proposed changes would’ve mostly transferred schools slots away from white people.
I guess I should be madder about this, but damn! The audacity of it.
quanta:
In general, a lot of discussion about race in the US is based on the models of the world that make sense for black/white relations, but that don’t work very well for Asian/white or Hispanic/white relations.
Nope. But in our society, white people have, historically and modernly, greatly monopolized wealth and authority. I just want to be left alone is a reasonable position. I just want to be left alone, as I stand on someone else’s back, rather less so. And now we shift into, well that was in the past (or slavery wasn’t really beneficial/redlining wasn’t that bad/Jim Crow just proves the state needs to butt out) and we’ve redone the bit with Guy in TN above us.
As for the rest of this discussion chain, I’m an American citizen, what China/Japan/etc. should do/are doing is not really fucking relevant to my life, or my country. If your argument is about whites in Japan, you really should have said that.
All of this reads to me like an attempt at decontextualization and universalization for relatively transparent political purposes. I should have simply registered my disagreement and moved forward.
You’re acting like it’s obvious that this is true today, and many dispute that, particularly if you don’t consider Jews to be white.
Here is the “whites are uniquely bad” trope I was expecting.
Whites have been at the center of the industrial and scientific revolution, thanks to a number of factors, including the great amount of coal found in Great Britain, the rule of law, and the patent system, to name a few.
Yes, there was colonialism and all that stuff, but no amount of colonialism can explain the wealth we have in the west today. Our wealth is mostly due to the industrial and scientific revolution. I’m hoping I wont have to google what percentage of US GDP is from sugar/cotton plantations and what percentage is from technology, to prove it, but I’m ready if I need to.
I’m convinced much of this discussion turns on the question “are whites oppressing blacks?”
If you think the answer is “no”, then basically the whole debate over race the US: the question of segregation, affirmative action, anti-discrimination laws, must look like madness.
And in libertarian/economic-liberal circles, where government power is seen as the only form of actual power, the inclination is to say “no” for any time after Jim Crow laws were repealed. While for progressives/economic leftists, we place private power on equal footing with government power, so simply removing Jim Crow isn’t enough.
For policy debates, if you believe the answer is “yes”, you can’t even have a discussion over race with someone who believes “no”, since the underlying assumptions are what drive the best policy decisions. But you aren’t going to convince the “no”s to switch to “yes” unless they change their understanding of what power is (e.g., is a factory refusing to hire someone “force”, in the same way that a law banning someone from working there is?), which are the same assumptions which happens to underlie the liberal economic theory they also support. It’s a tough tangle.
Are African-Americans better off than Africans?
This might not answer everything but it’s a good starting point.
No, I say “no” because I don’t think a black person who applies for a job is more likely to be discriminated against on account of his race than a white person. It’s not a matter of (neo)-liberal political ideology, which I don’t really like.
Guy in TN:
It probably would help to specify what kind of oppression you’re thinking of, who’s doing it, whom it’s being done to, etc. “Are whites oppressing blacks?” is a little like “Are blacks victimizing whites?” or “Are women taking advantage of men?” or “Are policemen abusing their power?” The answer to all those questions is “Yes, sometimes.” But the details of who and how often and how much all matter quite a bit.
“Are whites discriminating against blacks in employment decisions?” will surely get the same answer–yes, sometimes. How often, and how big is the effect, and who’s doing it and who’s suffering for it–those are relevant questions for figuring out how to respond.
When people voluntarily segregate–without the power of the law to enforce anything–is this a mechanism by which they’re oppressing others? I don’t think the answer to that is at all obvious. If I consciously try to move to a neighborhood that’s almost all white[1], whom is that oppressing, and how? How about if I consciously date only people of my religion? Is that oppressing someone?
[1] I’m not planning to–I like my very multicultural region just fine.
I think if you move it up from the personal to the business level, so the economic power involved becomes more obvious, it becomes clearer.
For example, if a business said “we are only going to purchase [generic product] from white clients”, that would be classic case of racial discrimination (no different than if a business said they were going to only sell to white customers). Now switch the generic product for real estate: What if the business only bought homes from white customers, in white neighborhoods?
So conceptually, purposefully buying homes only from white people, isn’t much different from, for example, a hotel refusing to book rooms to black customers.
I am sure there are a lot of people who don’t view, say, a factory refusing to hire black workers as a form of oppression. But if you do think that is a form of oppression, I find it hard to square how refusing to buy houses from black sellers is conceptually any different.
At the interpersonal level (dating, ect) the economic power involved goes away, so I think the analogy can stop there.
@guy in TN
I don’t think that quite works. I used to deliberately buy coffee from a supplier who bought it directly from small farmers (almost all indigenous peoples, so racial in a way), and chicken directly from small farmers (much less Hispanic than factory-farm chicken). It doesn’t seem to me that that was in any way oppressive.
Since you have a non-racial reason for buying that certain product, it isn’t racial oppression.
Very different from people saying they are deliberately interested in purchasing products only from white sellers, for reason of them being white.
Guy in TN:
We were discussing voluntary residential segregation earlier. That might range from whites slightly preferring to have mostly white neighbors (thus the parable of the polygons–I think that model originates with Schelling) to whites having a strong preference for mostly white neighbors that dictates where they will buy/rent, all the way to attempts to establish some kind of all-white neighborhoods or buildings or something.
Now, as far as I can see, the first two of those are impossible to forbid by law, whereas any attempt to use zoning or contract law to establish a whites only (or blacks only or Chinese only or whatever) neighborhood or town or apartment building would absolutely violate existing American discrimination law. I think the original question (maybe just where I came in) was whether whites’ preference for white neighbors, without any legal enforcement mechanisms, was evil. That’s where a bunch of people have answered “yes,” whereas I don’t see why it’s evil.
I can see that there are situations where it might lead to bad outcomes, and it seems kind-of dumb and narrow-minded to me, but the preference doesn’t seem evil. It certainly seems no more evil than blacks, hispanics, Chinese, Jews, etc., seeking to live mainly surrounded by people like them. There are benefits as well as costs to that sort of thing.
The argument for why it’s evil seems to turn on whites having a uniquely horrible history of excluding nonwhites. I don’t think that works–I don’t think whites have a uniquely horrible history of such things, and I don’t think our history would inform whether having such a preference is evil now anyway.
In my (strongly anti-nationalist cosmopolitan) view, preferring to live in homogeneous societies is morally suspect because favoring people of one’s own tribe/ethnicity over other human beings is always bigoted and wrong; it places illusory and damaging distinctions above our common humanity. This absolutely applies regardless of ethnicity, not just to white people. It’s also absolutely true that the vast majority of people display some degree of this favoritism and that it may be partially an innate tendency (though it is certainly exacerbated by social conditioning). But it’s something decent people should recognize and try to avoid in themselves and should not encourage in others.
However, the degree of badness of the preference depends highly on the means used to act according to it. Making your own choice without trying to influence anyone else’s choice is not so bad; using social sanctions to try to nudge others to choose homogeneity is much worse; using state power to force homogeneity, and particularly to forcibly exclude “others” from your neighborhood in order to preserve the homogeneity you like, is worst of all. So it’s legitimate to be much *more* condemnatory of white preferences for homogeneity simply because historically white people have much more frequently used force to preserve homogeneity, and arguably continue to do so today through mechanisms ranging from exclusionary zoning to immigration restrictions.
I’m 100% with you until you started using historical “white people were super bad” stuff.
I’m assuming you’re a strong critic of Israel then.
Israel’s level of state enforced homogeneity doesn’t even rise to the historical American South, let alone China/Japan.
Even if you include the non-Israeli occupied Palestinians in that rule, they’re about where historical America overall was relative to say Indian tribes.
And I’ll note that most open borders supporters are also against Israel.
Agreed.
Also agreed. FTR, I am pro-Israel, and I encourage them to live as they wish. People should be able to live in a diverse society if they wish, and should be able to live in a homogeneous society if they wish.
@jermo sapiens
I agree with both of those things, I was just pointing out that I find the “open borders for Israel” talking point to be fairly stupid. There are a small number of hypocrites who want Israel to control their borders but not America, but most people are consistent one way or the other.
Yes and there are a larger number of slightly less hypocritical hypocrites who want diversity in America (short of open borders) and no diversity for Israel. The troll twitter account “Open Borders for Israel” was quite effective at unearthing them.
There is an even greater number of even slightly less hypocritical hypocrites who will virtue signal by calling America racist and never level the same charge against Israel.
From Haaretz:
Afula is a city in Northern Israel, not a West Bank settlement. They may not have segregated drinking fountains, but it really looks like legally sanctioned housing discrimination is a thing. Perhaps a better comparison is the historical American North, with its de facto sundown towns and so on.
@INH5
That is not state enforced at all, otherwise the mayor wouldn’t be joining the protest, he’d just veto the sale.
FWIW your assumption re: Israel is correct. Nations are foul squalid things unworthy of the allegiance of any civilized human being; tribal nations especially so.
Thanks.
Until we evolve to be non-tribal rational beings, I’m afraid we’re stuck with them. Do you consider yourself to be a member of any tribe, whether ethnic, cultural, or ideological?
Oh sure, I’m a member of a bunch of tribes (including Jewish, for whatever that’s worth in this context, and as you may already know I’m drawing on a pretty rich history of anti-nationalist Jewish intellectuals here). I just disapprove of founding political entities for the purposes of aggrandizement of particular tribes. One of the respects in which the USA is less bad than many other nations, for example, is that it isn’t founded on tribal aggrandizement, and indeed its founding principles tend to push against tribal aggrandizement.
I disagree a bit here–nations *can* be terrible things that motivate people to murder their neighbors with the best of motives. But humans are tribal, deep down in our basic nature. Nations can (and at best, do) harness that tribalism in positive directions. It’s a better world when I see the poor guy living down the street from me as “us” rather than “them,” and nationalism is one way that works to help me see him that way.
In very broad terms, I think the societies that function best are the ones that take human nature, even the worst parts of it, and harness them to positive ends. Think capitalism turning greed and obsessiveness into positives that make the world into a huge wealth and well-being engine, social and marital customs that turn lust into a drive to make a stable family, social conventions that turn envy into a drive to work harder and maintain your house better, etc. All those things have plenty of downsides, too, but there’s a reason the most successful societies we know have all of them to some greater or lesser extent. All the most successful societies we know also are nations and have nationalism and party politics of some kind, and I expect that this is a way of harnessing the potentially dark human tendency toward tribalism in a positive direction. If we could just discover aliens, we’d probably manage to turn our tribalism into human-tribalism, but until then, this might be the best we can do.
I agree with your later comment, though–I like very much that the US’ definition of who’s an American is based on ideas and shared culture, rather than on blood-and-soil nationalism.
Asians have far more often used state force to enforce homogeneity.
Communist (really more fascist) China is doing it right now against the Uighurs to a degree that would make the most stalwart supporter of apartheid blanche, and Japan was of course the past master of it and still struggles with the legacy of it.
Attacking whites is special pleading.
Why is humanity as an in-group more noble than a specific group of humans as an in-group?
Are you afraid of being the wrong species?
salvorhardin:
What you’re missing here is that there are advantages to being surrounded with people with similar culture and background and assumptions and social class and such–it’s easier to get along with the neighbors, you’re more likely to share the same goals and concerns, etc. It’s easier to make friends, to organize as a neighborhood to deal with some collective problem, etc. That’s offset by some disadvantages–monocultures in thinking and interests and life situation and such. But it’s a tradeoff, and most of that tradeoff isn’t motivated by any kind of hatred or anything.
As an example, most people marry others of the same race, national origin, language, and approximately the same age. There are a lot of reasons why this is true–there are big advantages in a marriage to having a lot of shared cultural assumptions and references.
As another example, people usually have friends who are a similar age and in a similar part of their life–young parents are often friends with other young parents, for example. That’s segregation by age and life choices, and it makes sense because young parents have similar constraints and experiences and concerns and can sometimes pool resources to do things together–taking their kids to a theme park together, for example, or swapping babysitting for date nights.
First, I don’t think there have been laws to enforce residential segregation in the US for something like two generations (50 years or so) by now, and restrictive covenants haven’t been enforceable for about the same length of time. Exclusionary zoning is absolutely not done by race in the US[1]. So the things you’re talking about as extra bad are forbidden by law in the US, have been for a couple generations, and are widely viewed as evil and unacceptable by whites as well as everyone else. This strikes me as a pretty weak reason to condemn white preferences for homogeneity.
Second, before you tell me that American whites have used force to preserve homogeneity more often than other groups, can you maybe explain whom you’re comparing us with? How do we compare with people in India, Japan, and Nigeria, for example?
[1] Immigration restrictions seem like a complete red herring.
Exclusionary zoning is not explicitly racial anymore, but it has a strong disparate impact which entrenches and perpetuates the consequences of prior explicit segregation. This is unlikely to be coincidental or even unintended, especially e.g. in the case of wealthy communities resisting the construction of affordable housing developments. The book to read on this is Richard Rothstein, _The Color of Law_.
Immigration restrictions are not a red herring at all. They forcibly exclude people based on arbitrary accidents of birth, and often are explicitly motivated (and even more often implicitly motivated) by a desire to preserve the ethnic composition of a state.
It’s certainly true that nonwhites have also used force to preserve homogeneity, and Japanese immigration restrictions are a good example. Japanese state-sponsored racism is also a problem in the global context, but in the North American neighborhood homogeneity dynamics context that is the usual one for discussions of how blameworthy homogeneity preference should be, white state-sponsored racism is the more salient problem.
I think a lot of assumptions are doing a lot of work here. Whats the evidence that Japanese immigration restrictions are a negative for the world? Isn’t there a large positive to having a place like Japan that produces its own quirky things like pokemon and anime? Thinking of diversity only in an intra-territorial way seems backwards.
salvorhardin:
I think you’re moving the goalposts a bit there. As long as there are differences in economic outcomes across racial groups, zoning that serves to make houses more expensive will have disparate impact. But it’s worth noting that the disparate impact here makes it harder for blacks to move into the nicest neighborhoods than whites, but also harder for whites to do so than Asians. It’s a little hard to explain that pattern by white bigotry. If you look at the ethnic makeup of the expensive neighborhoods with the best public schools where I live, you’ll see a disproportionate number of East Asians and South Asians, and a disproportionate fraction of the whites will be Jewish. Again, this isn’t the pattern you’d see if this were white people discriminating via zoning laws to keep the nonwhites and non-WASPS out.
Historically, we had whites doing exactly that, via zoning laws and restrictive covenants, a couple generations ago, so we know exactly what it looks like. You get neighborhoods full of white people who go to mainline Protestant churches–not neighborhoods full of Chinese and Vietnamese and Indian familes living next door to white families with a smattering of black and hispanic families.
Immigration restrictions do indeed exclude people based on arbitrary accidents of birth–that’s actually the point of those restrictions. But given that basically every nation on Earth has them (certainly most every nation you’d actually want to live in), it’s kind-of hard to see this as being some kind of product of the unique bigotry of whites.
Some people would like to run our immigration system to tune the US’ ethnic mix to something more to their liking. Among them, some want a whiter country, but many others want a less-white country. I think it’s not so hard to find quotes from mainstream powerful people noting the benefits of the US changing from a majority-white to a majority-nonwhite country. Now, personally, I don’t think it’s especially important what continent the majority of our ancestors came from, but if it’s bad for people to campaign to set up immigration laws to keep the country white, it’s hard to see why it’s not also bad for others to campaign to set up immigration laws to turn the country browner. Either both groups are bad or neither is.
There is a large difference between “black person wants to live in a black neighborhood” versus “black person wants to live in a homogeneously black society“. Racially homogenous society could be accomplished only by forced racial segregation, which is a bad thing.
Even neighborhood preferences are morally suspect. Certain people can’t openly express a desire for a certain kind of neighborhood.
What is the difference really? It’s only one of scope. In the latter case, our hypothetical african american has expanded his view of the world in which he lives beyond the neighbourhood he physically inhabits, and has begun to think about the institutions he is subject to. I applaud him and I certainly don’t doubt his morals, far from it. And if we want to take the example to its logical conclusion, a sovereign black nation carving a chunk out of the USA, then fine, I am still happy. Were you so upset when Britain lost its possessions in the Caribbean? Are you desperate to take the Bahamas as a part of Florida? If not, why so mad at the prospect of a black on the mainland with analogous ideas?
I don’t believe this, but I also don’t believe this is said in good faith. I am regularly subjected to things which I don’t want and which most people don’t want, and I am told it’s called democracy, and I am told to suck it up, and I am told that I am evil for disagreeing with democracy in any of its particulars. When I hear people on your side of this argument talk about how forced segregation is evil, what I am actually hearing is that you brand anyone evil even for daring to opine that re-organising one’s nation might be a good idea; let alone building enough momentum to change the constitution and get it done. Pity the 49% of people who vote against segregation! They are so wretched that they don’t even love democracy! All in all I detect a lot of post-hoc reasoning back to the axiom of “diversity is our strength”, but more generally the axiom “political engagement within prescribed parameters good, metapolitical thought, leaving the overton window, or even considering who is setting those parameters ENTIRELY FORBIDDEN”.
I do not claim that it would be ok to form some black closed neighborhood with no whites allowed, that would be indeed essentially the same thing as creating racially homogenous society. I think that it is perfectly fine when an individual is moving from one dwelling to the next to make decisions based on what is a current culture of a neighborhood, and “race” is sometimes proxy for culture. If someone prefers to live among Chinese people in predominantly Chinese quarter, I don’t see nothing wrong with that, but it is a very different matter to declare Chinese quarter off limits to whites or blacks.
Difference between people preferring to live in a certain neighborhood and people wanting racially homogenous society is that if racial homogeneity of society or even of neighborhood isn’t enforced by racialized legal restrictions or by some sort of extralegal violence, it will not stay racially pure forever. So, in order to enforce racial purity, you need restrictions on personal freedom.
Of course I do not claim that all restrictions on personal freedom are bad, but those based on racial justifications pretty much always are
https://ncase.me/polygons/
(taken from mitv150’s comment upthread).
That is a cute model, but it does not at all correspond to what is happening in the real world, where countries that want to achieve and maintain racial purity have to resort to pretty drastic measures.
It corresponds very well to what happens when there aren’t restrictions on mixing across groups. Personal preferences mean that there’s still some amount of voluntary segregation, but also that there’s some level of voluntary mixing, and the balance between those shifts over time based on the preferences of the people in the society.
Which countries want to maintain racial purity? And, I understand why this discussion veers off on tangents like this, but I would like to point out that the original point was about individuals wanting to live with people sharing their ethnicity (or at least their culture).
Also, I think it’s interesting that the polygon model was used as a way to argue that if people even had a slight preference for their own group, dramatic segregation would occur rapidly. And now, you’re arguing that dramatic segregation cant occur unless drastic measures are taken. So as arguments in favor of assigning moral blame to those who want to self-segregate, we have 2 contradictory positions. I realize they come from different people, but it’s interesting nonetheless. It supports my view that people start from the premise that segregation is bad and work backwards from there.
@albatross11
Perhaps I was too dismissive of polygon moving exercise… If you don´t interpret its result as several racially homogenous societies, but as partly voluntary mixed, partly voluntary segregated single society, then that is indeed what I think happens in a real life without forced segregation.
@jermo sapiens
Oh, c´mon, surely you could think of some examples, especially from the past.
If I wanted to steelman the “woke” argument here, I’d say that Social Justice advocates believe that racial minorities seek to live with their own kind for protection against bigotry, whereas people in the majority group seek to live with their own kind because they dislike minorities and want to deny them access to material and social resources. In their view, Black people only want to live with other Blacks because they want a “safe space” where they don’t have to worry about being harassed or discriminated against, not because they’re racist against Whites. This is compounded by the fact that White people typically have greater access to land, wealth, education and career opportunities, and so forth; thus, Whites who keep out non-Whites are harming them in a way that non-Whites keeping out Whites are not.
And in fairness, a lot of Social Justice advocates do apply the same logic to non-White majority groups when they’re talking about foreign countries. For instance, many of them are strongly critical of Israel’s cultural/religious homogenity and Japan’s racial/ethnic homogenity. It’s gotten to the point where Japan is frequently held up as an example of what the West should strive not to be, and it’s common to see arguments on the cultural left about how closed borders are the underlying cause of Japan’s economic and social crises.
As for my own personal take, I’m generally opposed to double standards, and I think racial homogenity is something that’s undesirable in general, whether it’s majority or minority groups seeking to isolate themselves. For example, the Hasidic Jewish communities here in NYC are extremely isolated and insular, and that makes me deeply uncomfortable with them. It doesn’t help that I’ve heard a lot of horror stories from people who were raised in those communities and taught from childhood that gentiles were untrustworthy, punished for celebrating Christian or secular holidays, forced into arranged marriages, ostracized for being queer or not conforming to gender standards, and so forth.
Thank you for this answer. I think it’s the best argument so far in favor of making a special case of the majority.
The interesting thing to me is that as a left-leaning person, I thought this was obvious/everyone knew it. Obviously I was wrong. That forces me to re-evaluate arguments from people I thought were simply taking a disingeuous position – i.e. intentionally ignoring this (to me) elephant in the room in order to make their points.
This is the value of discussing in good faith with your political opponents. Thank you.
FTR, though, although I do think LadyJane made a good argument for applying a double standard towards the majority, I dont think it settles the issue. But I’m glad the argument was made as it allows my arguments to address the actual opposing arguments, rather than some strawman.
On LadyJane’s actual point:
So SJ advocates believe an empirical claim about what is going on in the mind of minorities and majorities. I think it’s a fair assumption to believe that, but I also think it’s fair to assume that both minorities and majorities find things easier/simpler and more familiar in homogeneous settings. That is, there is no need to invoke “fear of bigotry” and “dislike of minorities” to explain each group’s behavior.
Obviously, the reality is probably a mix of both, but there is also probably one factor which is dominant over others. I would bet on the simplicity/familiarity factor being the dominant, and I would expect SJ advocates to consider “fear of bigotry” and “dislike of minorities” to being dominant.
Can we probe this some? I agree the West should be striving not to be Japan, but how much of that is down to closed borders? Like, isn’t an extremely low birth rate a problem regardless of your immigration policy?
My understanding is that Japan’s birth rate is not markedly lower than that of natives of other post-industrial countries, but there’s a virtual absence of high fertility replacement migration that obscures the effect of low native TFR.
Migration will affect population growth but not necessarily TFR unless the migrants have a different TFR, which they usually do.
Religious Americans and both religious and secular Israelis are the major exceptions, IIRC.
My point is, isn’t that only putting the problem off? Like, my impression is that after a few generations the immigrant population is going to be below replacement, too. So maybe you stopped your welfare state from collapsing this generation, but you did it by turning above replacement fertility people into below replacement fertility people… you’d better hope that works forever.
@Nick — It depends on the problem you’re trying to solve.
If you’re a post industrial nation trying to fund tax coffers pensions with no other concerns the smart thing might be work visas aimed at high income earning people that aren’t raising kids (who go to public school and therefore cost money)
Some have argued and i don’t have the data to confirm or refute on hand that migration can be a net fiscal drain even in the first generation because the incomes aren’t particularly high and the children need to go to school which can be quite pricey. The US case is muddled because the same household can have very different fiscal impacts at the state/federal/local level.
If you’re only interested in keeping population stable or growing in theory it’s sustainable as long as your own country is small relative to the rest of the world you could just disregard TFR and just focus on migration.
I agree it’s not sustainable if you want the whole world to adopt the kind of economic and social order that generates negative TFRs, but it’s a long-run consideration are few leaders except maybe the chinese are thinking that far ahead. I also doubt any OECD leader is going to complain that, say, Africa might inherit the world b/c they were the last ones to undergo the demographic transition and were therefore were used extensively to replace falling populations elsewhere.
But as *i* said elsewhere i don’t think negative TFR is a permanent phenomenon. Internal social/economic factors will eventually countervale, and using replacement migration to maintain density levels, prevent ‘labor shortages’, etc. will only act to prevent the transition.
If this were applied to white minorities like Afrikaaners by the left, I would find it more believable. But I find they protest places like Orania generally.
@EchoChaos: That’s less because they’re hypocrites and more because they’re ignorant of exactly what’s going on in South Africa. They assume that the racial dynamics in South Africa match those in North America or Western Europe, just with different population ratios. In my experience, the Social Justice advocates who actually have some knowledge about South African politics and culture have more nuanced views.
The Afrikaners are a special case, and it is very unlikely you’ll get sympathy for them, especially among the left. If you are the ethnic minority literally ran the system that made apartheid into an internationally known term, you kinda lose the moral high ground for later claiming that you only live amongst your own.
Why should I presume the an unreasonably charitable interpretation of their outlook when I’ve got pretty good historical evidence pointing me towards, “hmm, they’re probably just racist?”
This is sort of the exact “sins of the fathers” problem that I am concerned about.
Afrikaners are a minority with a government that has specifically used them as a target to rally racial resentment.
The fact that Afrikaner politicians a generation ago did something should have no bearing on that if you’re actually being consistent.
And it’s why a lot of whites think that social justice is anti-white versus anti-racist.
ETA: And note that actual South African racists don’t like Orania, because of its anti-racist insistence on not using black labor, which they view as exploitation.
Adding a second comment: I wouldn’t live on Orania (I’m not Afrikaner) or even an American Orania, because my black family members couldn’t live with me and I care more about them than I do about random white Americans.
But what I am opposed to is the idea that whites have been especially evil historically and therefore are the one people who aren’t allowed to have all-white or white majority towns.
This is true even for groups that have objectively done bad things in the past because that group is “all humans”.
For example, nobody is saying that the British oppressing the Nigerians was fine because the ancestors of those Nigerians sold people into horrific slavery in the Caribbean.
And then gave up power, a decision I’m sure many are starting to regret. But other white groups should still give up power, and you’ll have plenty of sympathy for them when they are minorities, right Aftagley?
No. Regrettably, there are people who do say this. It’s a thing.
I really think you should ease up on the snark here.
@DeWitt
That saddens but fails to surprise me. I should’ve said it’s not mainstream in Social Justice thought, because there is always a group with weird thoughts like that.
@EchoChaos
I was writing a response to this, but I realized that LadyJane said it way better than I could up above. I’m sympathetic to groups like this who want to live in insular communities as a protection against bigotry, less so for those who are doing so as a result of their bigotry.
My opinion then, comes down to one question: do I think the group in question is especially bigoted, or especially fearful of being bigoted against. I’m not South African, I don’t know the specifics here, but the history of that particular group of people (as well as some surface-level research) makes me think they’re bigoted, so they don’t have my support.
As opposed to continuing apartheid and having an increasingly violent resistance movement that likely ended in revolution and mass slaughter of the previous totalitarian government? I’m sure that they can now, in the relatively peaceful and prosperous SA look back on the SA of the 1970s and regret the changes but I’m damn sure none of them would want to live in the hypothetical 2020 SA in which apartheid was never rolled back.
Sympathy is such a weird word to use here. No, I wouldn’t have sympathy for them, but I tend not to be a very sympathetic just kind of in general. I can appreciate that their life is harder now than it was when they benefited from a system of repression and exploitation, but that doesn’t mean I have sympathy for them now.
Not saying this doesn’t happen, but I’ve honestly never heard it. Mind linking towards a source?
This isn’t a gotcha or anything like that, but basing your judgment, even partially, of whether some particular group of people is bigoted based on what their ancestors were like seems quite bigoted. When trying to judge a particular group of people, why not actually judge those specific individuals that make up that group of people? Sure, that takes a lot more work, possibly more work than it’s possible to accomplish, but in that case I would default to agnosticism instead of rounding people off to their ancestors.
Ancestors? I’m not judging them by their ancestors, I’m judging them by the South Africa that existed up until 1994. I have a sweater given to me by my dad that has been around longer than a non apartheid South Africa. If someone was on the younger side of working age when Apartheid ended, they likely wouldn’t have retired yet.
At worst, I’m judging these people based on their parent’s actions, but a surface-level review of the town makes me think it slants a elderly. Should they be judged by their distant ancestors? clearly not. Should they be judged by what they did 30 years ago when they’re now taking action that makes it look like they didn’t learn anything? probably.
@Aftagley
Leaving aside whether these particular Afrikaners are bad, is there any white minority that you believe should be allowed to create their own exclusive towns?
Poles? Germans? English? Scots-Irish?
The Chinese have been every bit as awful to minorities as whites or worse, but Chinatowns aren’t condemned by social justice, so it clearly isn’t related to historical treatment.
It’s not clear to me what the difference between “bigoted” and “prefers to associate with their own kind” is. But it’s hard to believe that the motive of preferring to associate with people of your race is evil when held by whites but laudable when held by anyone else. Personally, I’d say it’s not evil at all, though it’s kind-of narrow minded and limiting.
Wanting to limit your surroundings to people of your own race in a place with a long and bitter history of racial hatred and a lot of violent crime seems like something that could plausibly be done simply for the sake of safety. It’s very hard for me to see taking actions like this to avoid being murdered, raped, or robbed as evil, even if you and your ancestors did some really bad stuff in the past.
I mean, judging people based on their parents’ actions seems no less bigoted than judging them based on the actions of their distant ancestors or even just the actions of complete strangers.
And are you judging them by what they did 30 years ago? As in, those specific individuals that comprise the group that’s under discussion? There tends to be a decent amount of turnover in most societies, if only due to birth and death, in 30 years, and rounding that off to “what they did 30 years ago” without actually rigorously checking the individuals seems, again, bigoted.
EchoChaos:
I don’t know about South African law, but in the US, there’s no way you’re going to get the formal legal ability to do that, for any racial group. What you can and do get is voluntary segregation. Sometimes, that has a threat of violence or ostracism behind it–presumably, some town in Idaho that’s half white supremacists is not a great place for a black family to move into. The law should (but may not in practice) come down hard on anyone using violence to try to force that family out, but on the other hand, it’s not a shock if the family looks around and decides they’d rather not live there even without any threat of violence.
And the overwhelming majority of residential segregation in the US comes out of a mix of personal preferences and economics–where are the jobs, how much do houses cost here, etc. That’s why the really high-end neighborhoods tend to have a lot of Asians.
@albatross11
Orania is legal in South Africa, although unpopular with the current government.
But I’m talking the moral and social justice point, not particularly the legality, which I think you have right. As I’ve said, given that I have black family, this isn’t exactly of critical interest to me in actual life.
It is my experience that Social Justice tends to be white Blue Tribers who are looking for a handle to bash the outgroup, which is why they don’t admit to any group of whites that could justly do this while ignoring Asian atrocities and being accepting of their ethnic enclaves.
albatross11:
“It’s not clear to me what the difference between “bigoted” and “prefers to associate with their own kind” is.”
The former involves injury to the people you’d like to avoid, possibly physical injury, but at least trying to damage their group reputation.
The latter involves spending time with your own kind.
I don’t have any serious sources, blog posts, what have you, to link to. I’m sorry. There’s a brand of colonialism apologia that will make arguments of the kind that slavery wasn’t so bad because these slaves were bought and they were going to be enslaved anyway. It ignores entirely the sheer fact that an increase in demand will in turn cause people to drive up supply, but I find it depressing enough that people could fool themselves into thinking that justifies slavery and I don’t want to bother with it any further.
@EchoChaos says: “…white Blue Tribers who are looking for a handle to bash the outgroup…”
Somehow this statement reminded of Virginia governor Northam’s blackface and Klan robe old yearbook photo revelation, black Virginians were less likely to say he should resign than either white Democrats or Republicans, the Republicans presumably may have just wanted a Democrat to reason, but that white Democrats were less forgiving than black Democrats is interesting.
It may be that since white Democrats are younger on average than black Democrats, and the young are just less forgiving of these things explains this, but in-group social norm policing may be involved, I’m thinking of college students who chastise each other on what are correct words to use (i.e. “Latinx” instead of Latina or Latino) but are less likely to hassle construction workers building on campus, and won’t go across town to evangelize actual Latinos to de-genderize their language.
I’m thinking now of my joining Facebook this year where I occasionally posts links to the songs I loved in the ’80’s, and there’s one band I put on the radio back then, but I fear to post now because some lyrics could be thought of (without context) as “anti-black”, and it’s not my three black “Facebook fiends” I fear offending, one I saw already “liked” the band, one was also a volunteer at the radio station in the ’80’s and knows the context, and the other is so Metal that he wouldn’t care, instead it’s the half dozen non-black ladies who are now school teachers plus two leftist guys that I fear would be most offended (or feel they must be), and I can easily imagine the two conservative leaning “Facebook friends” of mine complaining about the “PC” friends, and a “flame war” would start (in the ’80’s 90% of all of them were “anarchist” punk rockers and this would go differently, also no internet).
Pre-Facebook (six months ago) I didn’t have to think of this stuff.
@DeWitt says: “…will make arguments of the kind that slavery wasn’t so bad because…”
The sea passage alone made the intercontinental slave trade worse, not even counting other New World brutalities, the accounts of the conditions on the ships are truly awful, there’s a reason the British went from slave traders to suppressing the trade in a relatively short period of time, and that the U.S. Constitution listed a year after which no more slaves were to be imported.
Nancy:
That seems like a reasonable definition, but I don’t think it’s the one that everyone else uses. Right now, if someone says “I prefer to live in a neighborhood and work in a job with people of my own race,” they’re likely to be called a bigot regardless of whether they have any animus toward other races or seek to injure them in any way. Indeed, I’d guess that at this point, most racism in the US is more of the “I’d rather avoid you” form than the “I want to kill/beat up/chase away all of you,” though I don’t really have any data about that.
I think there’s a really important distinction you brought up before, between “we like us” and “we hate you” separatists. The polygon game was a demonstration of the idea that you can get de facto segregation out of just “we like us” sentiments, with nobody hating anyone else.
I think the potential social problem here occurs when the “we like us” sentiments create a kind of ingroup that’s very hard to break into, *and* when you have to join that ingroup in order to be successful. So if most of the WASPS prefer their own kind and most of the Irish Catholics prefer their own kind, but it’s still possible for the Irish Catholics to become partners in law firms, then it’s probably not such a big problem. But if the “we like us” tendency means that only WASPs get offered jobs in the top law firms, while only Irishmen can get a job on the police force, then that creates some problems.
This is IMO the strong argument for why sometimes, voluntary segregation makes trouble in the world. It’s not a problem if wealthy old white men want to have a private club where only their kind can join…unless access to that club is the main way you get access to the best jobs and business deals and such. The thing is, that can be a problem even if not a single member of that club has any particular animus toward outsiders.
On the other hand, there’s a genuine dilemma here. Personal freedom includes the freedom of whom you want to spend your time with. Private clubs ought to be free to include or exclude whomever they choose, for any reason or none. There are substantial benefits to having places where you can let your hair down and be with people very much like yourself. It’s not obvious how to trade off the benefits of allowing that personal choice and freedom against the benefits of breaking down barriers to letting outsiders succeed.
And in practice, it seems like one way those barriers have been broken down in the past was that the US had a lot of different paths to success. Plenty of people who were excluded from those clubs a few generations back because they were the wrong kind (Jews, Irishmen, Italians, blacks, etc.) were eventually so successful that the clubs wanted them to join or didn’t dare tell them no. Plenty of utter nobodies made fortunes over the years, plenty of “not one of us” groups prospered, and then they became the people you wanted *inside* your club.
Another example of non-bigotry related segregation is what I have termed, “the Costco problem”. In our nieghborhood’s Costco, the traffic never flows properly, contra the Costco by my parent’s house. And this is because a high % of the immigrant community don’t queue or move through aisles in the same way as you normally see. This makes a Costco trip marginally more frustrating that it should be and you waste an extra 3-5 minutes compared to if it was all people descended from pre 1900 immigrants.
@jermo sapiens says:
Put in that anodyne way, that doesn’t sound bad, and hardly different than how people already chose neighborhoods based on affinity, but as a practical and historical matter efforts to make societies more homogeneous (Khmer Rouge, Nazis, et cetera) have created the worst Hellscape known to humanity, and what efforts there are made towards greater ‘diversity’ hardly near at all in being oppressive.
I may bother to respond to some of the follow up issues in this thread, but especially compared to 40 years ago where I live “race” and “culture” hardly correlate at all anymore, chances are that a “fellow white” I encounter will be foreign born and I share more culturally with the non-whites I encounter are pretty common, multiple tines have I brought my sons to local playgrounds and the only other folks there with American accents are non-white, besides I think a lot of so-called “racial cultural differences” in the U.S.A. are regional cultural differences in disguise – which if I get to it will likely be a very long post, suffice it to say some centuries old “Negro” ballads share far too many lyrics with British folksongs written down in the 18th century, and musical instruments with African antecedents are used in overwhelmingly white hamlets in Appalachia, the culture is far too shared across the color line, with links of language, religion, and (when you dig eally deep) even bloodlines, despite centuries of a legal racial caste system make me think further racial separatist projects are absurd.
Right. Which is why I asked that question and not the question of whether societies should be reshaped to become homogeneous. I’m thinking of the guy who decides to live in an area which is predominantly white and who opposes refugee settlement in his area, not genocidal maniacs.
Still, you can’t blame people for noticing all the skulls.
I’m in favor of noticing skulls wherever there are skulls to be noticed. That shouldnt preclude asking questions in fact quite the opposite.
The reason I ask these types of loaded questions with a high CW aspect to them is in fact because these questions need to be settled by discussion rather than by accumulating skulls. To paraphrase Sam Harris, the alt-right may be despicable, but their popularity stems from the fact that their claim contains a kernel of truth to them. Specifically, the conventional wisdom will have inconsistencies in it, and the people challenging conventional wisdom will exploit this inconsistency to push their agenda, which in the case of the alt-right will be very harmful.
The proper defense against this is to have good people acknowledge the inconsistencies and address them honestly and in good faith. Unfortunately this is not happening right now. When a troll puts up a “It’s OK to be white” poster, helpful responses could include ignoring them, or to reply with the message of “Obviously it’s OK to be white, why do you feel the need to express that.” The absolute worst response, the response that plays right into what the troll wants, is to go ballistic and to vow to hunt down whoever put that super hateful poster.
@jermo sapiens >
Since I’m on record as finding college graduates incredibly disruptive, and college students as incredibly annoying and wish so many wouldn’t move here (unfortunately I can’t suss out a way to do that that also isn’t disruptive dagnabbit!) I can’t throw many stones here, but as to ‘morally justified’, I suppose the Christian/Humanitarian/Tikkun Olam thing would be total charity of all to all (“Is the leper or the cripple worse off today?”), but most people aren’t Mother Teresa (nor are they Pol Pot!) so it’s scale of need vs. scale of sacrifice compared to most, plus relative kinship of those in need (Billionaires in cities that are swamped with homelessness sending more aid to fight malaria overseas than here at home kind of bugs me, even if the overseas need is greater, the Zuckerberg’s spent some of their fortune helping San Francisco General Hospital so I cut them more slack than others).
So let’s take a somewhat imaginary example: Iraqi translators for U.S. soldiers have been threatened with death and wish to flee to the U.S.A., in that case objecting to one (or even five) families moving within the square mile you live seems a jerk move, on the other hand, objecting to 3/4’s of the Levant moving to your small city in Michigan seems reasonable, but you get situations like the ship full of Jewish refugees trying to escape the slaughter house that Europe was about to become who went from port to port unable to disembark.
Anecdotall, a guy in my apprenticeship class objected to more immigrants coming here, bur he and his wife also adopted foreign born orphans, and a guy I worked with this last year said he voted for Trump ’cause of “too much immigration” and his wife is foreign born, so talk sorta says one thing but walk says another (though adoption and marriage kinda encourage assimilation if that’s the concern).
I feel far from qualified to pass moral judgements on them (or on much of this stuff).
I have a lot of faith in assimilation, the melting pot, and the resilience of “American culture”, but I recognize that scale matters, a million extra Mexicans in all of California would be relatively easy to absorb (but not if they all move to say the City of San Leandro at once! Yes I’m aware that I picked a city with a Spanish name, it’s still a most anglophone town now).
In contrast to a million extra Mexicans in California, 100 million extra Indians in California would be harder (scale and cultural differences matter).
What are the moral minimums and maximums?
Yeah, talk to your pastor, ’cause I just don’t know!
Among other things, we’ve established by experiment that Mexicans who come to the US assimilate pretty well. Their grandkids still don’t do as well in school as we’d like, but the cultures are quite compatible and third-generation Mexicans are basically generic Americans with Spanish-sounding last names.
@Plumber/albatross11
Yeah, Mexican immigration is by far the immigration I have the least problem with, other than the quantity and the illegality.
Although I would prefer no Spanish language education or services, in order to assimilate them faster.
@albatross11,
True enough, even of a lot of the second generation that I’ve encountered.
Being competition of the “low-skilled” that are already here has some resonance, as does a lot of the first generation coming to an area changing it’s character Richmond, California went from “Louisiana style fried fish” places to tacos fast), but fears that their kids won’t assimilate?
They do, and pretty quickly.
Also, sometimes not fully assimilating seems advantageous, many second generation east Asians seem on average more likely to get into the professional class better than the third and up generations.
@EchoChaos,
No disagreement, scale and legality matter, and judging by my experiences working construction in the earlier 2000’s the language barrier can be a real jobsite safety hazard.
As I do from time to time, I discovered that Tim Keller gave a series of talks at Oxford recently that were essentially sermons. In listening to the one on suffering, he remarked that the modern secular worldview makes people quite vulnerable when it comes to suffering as it deems it pointless, meaningless, and purely a negative thing.
So non-religious people, how do you view suffering and what are you strategies to deal with it when it occurs?
Suffering is experience.
It is part of life. It is affirming of life. It is also part of our personal story; just as you wouldn’t want to read a book without trial and adversity and suffering, a life without these things would similarly lack something.
“This too shall pass” means all experience is fleeting, and should be treasured.
What if the suffering will not pass, as in the case of slow painful deaths?
Death is the passing.
That is treating suffering as a thing to escape from, instead of just another transient experience.
Must disagree. Conflating “trial and adversity” with suffering is a mistake. One can have the former without the latter, and that is the desirable state.
That is a subtle distinction which I think is correct but misleading; most people think pain IS suffering, for instance, and the idea of pain without suffering isn’t meaningful within their frame of reference.
I’m trying a slightly different way of framing the ideas to see it somebody can get it.
Getting a burn because you accidentally touched the hot stove isn’t suffering. Being sore for a few days after over-exercising a bit isn’t suffering. Eating spicy food isn’t suffering. I’d say that even breaking your arm isn’t necessarily suffering, if the proper medical treatment is applied.
Also, there are absolutely stories that people love that have narrative conflict, but zero suffering. The entire iyashikei genre exists to be that. But even beyond that, “I love it when a plan comes together” does not require suffering to be highly enjoyable.
I think you’re hitting on a related topic – for some suffering it’s apparent that there’s “trial and adversity” and some meaning can be made out of it. But other suffering seems meaningless.
If one cannot attribute a why/meaning to the suffering, does it intensify the suffering? Does attribution of meaning really change the nature of the suffering?
Yes. It’s pattern-matching as a form of placebo, or actually allowing the sufferer to see a path towards exit from the suffering, and work towards that.
Suffering is experience, but I disagree that it’s generally affirming of life in a positive way. Some limited suffering for a purpose is, but a lot of suffering really is meaningless or cruel.
The best I can hope to do with serious but meaningless suffering is accept.
“Meaningless” implies a meaning to any experience, beyond experiencing it. When you start treating the experience as the meaning of experience – when you treat experience as its own purpose – this sort of fades away.
Cruel, though, potentially yes
Humans require a narrative, though, which is why stories rather than data are passed down. If you boil suffering down to any physical or emotional pain that negatively affects a person psychologically, suffering itself has “meaning” assigned to it no?
That’s a slightly different version of “meaning”, I think.
Meaning in the sense quanta used it, is, I believe, somewhat closer to “purpose”..
So the pain of giving birth might have a purpose, a joy in it, that is absent from the pain of appendicitis, and thus may feel different to the person experiencing it.
Purpose in all experience makes experience different, subjectively. One might describe this as “Living in the now”, as opposed to the subjective experience of experiencing a thing with anticipation of it ending, which is living in the future, or experiencing a thing reminiscing of your experience prior to that thing, which is living in the past.
I think some of what people experience as suffering is the experience of wishing for things as they are not, in the moment. All experience can be savored, explored, and, in a sense, enjoyed, for the sake of the experience itself.
Suffering does not really exist. One may simply live without it.
So were the Holocaust, Great Leap Forward Famine, and Khmer Rouge all an illusion?
Yes.
Pending listening to the whole 45min talk – there are secular worldviews and then there are secular worldviews. In general, what people generally have isn’t a ‘modern secular worldview,’ but rather the absence of a traditional, religious one. This understandably doesn’t provide a lot of suffering-conceptualization mechanisms, but the problem is very much a solved one if you’re willing to be rigorous about it. Suffering is an opportunity to exercise virtue if it is real (i.e. you’ve just lost your arm to a car accident), but probably it’s an illusion (you’ve lost status you shouldn’t care about in the first place) or could have been easily avoided (what did you think was going to happen when you gambled away all your money?).
Ancient ways of dealing with suffering are lightly addressed – the definition of “modern secular” is more hedonist/the material world is all there is/maximize personal utility…and then the disutility that is suffering is purely a negative thing.
He’s begging the question, and it’s not even an interesting question – sure, ‘people who don’t have a good coping mechanism for suffering’ don’t have a good coping mechanism for suffering, but so what? We knew that already. There are lots of non-religious people who don’t spend all their time bemoaning the unjust world they live in, and there are plenty of religious people who do. I’ll cheerfully agree that religions generally and Christianity specifically are very good at providing coping mechanisms, but they’re not the only game in town, and those mechanisms have problems too.
Is that based on my description or listening?
Listening – I admit the style turned me off a bit so I may have missed something, though. The sermon-y format is unfortunate; to my mind he’s making about 50% each of two separate arguments. I’d love to have a talk with him about this.
I haven’t read it but it looks like he has written a book about it, which I suspect uses the CS Lewis one a lot.
Suffering is bad and I want to avoid it as much as possible. If it occurs, I rely on my friends to get me through it. I assume this is the modern secular worldview that makes me vulnerable, but I don’t really see what’s wrong with it.
I’m not willing to listen to what Tim Keller has to say about it for 50 whole minutes, but I’d read a transcript or summary if it existed.
I can’t think of a rational way to view it as anything but pointless, meaningless, and purely a negative thing. You can make up stories about it “building character” but it seems like BS to me. I guess I tell myself “whining about it means you’re a weakling.”
Well as a simple example, what about negative reinforcement learning for children?
Fall on their bums a bit, skin their knees on gravel, scratch their skin on concrete when falling off a bike. Through these “growing pains” they’ll learn to fall correctly, get used to the immediate pain and recovery, and overall “build character”.
Vs. a lot of super-cushioned playgrounds nowadays supervised by adults leading to more grown kids not knowing how to fall…extend the analogy to other areas of life, and you may have kids that can’t handle failure if they’ve never suffered it. A lot of kids entering college, for instance, get a rude awakening when they realize they really aren’t that special, aren’t the smartest, the strongest, the most attractive, or the most popular anymore.
So suffering is often compared to a flame – it can refine and strengthen something that would otherwise be brittle, or it can also burn up whatever it is that it touches.
Suffering is a pain. Avoid, or endure, as needed to get to the other side in as good shape as possible.
Suffering is indeed pointless, meaningless, and negative. Stoicism is a pretty decent means of dealing with suffering when you can’t avoid or ameliorate it.
FWIW I would say, and I think many secularists would say, that the religious notion that suffering is redemptive and meaningful is one of the worst of the falsehoods that religion spreads: it pointlessly leads people to endure suffering they could and should ameliorate instead, and sometimes even to rationalize seeking out suffering, or worse yet, inflicting it on others.
Would you helicopter parent kids, sparing them from the elements by dressing them up warmly, dodging all potential illness with hand washing and quarantine from sick peers, and catching them every time they’re about to fall?
If so, they have a good chance of developing allergies since their immune systems needs exposure, and grows through sickness, while their reflexes will be quite dull if they are never allowed to fall.
Similarly, would you make sure they never have a sense of failure? Surely you’d say *some* aspects of life that are accompanied by suffering actually helps people grow?
Sure, but these are cases, thankfully less common now than they were in the past, where suffering is an as-yet unavoidable byproduct of a necessary growth process. There’s no reason inherent in the universe why it has to be unavoidable even in these cases. If we could develop a way to produce the right immune system behavior without the sickness, we obviously should, and it’s at least plausible that one day we will.
Do you think growth ends when childhood ends though? What about courtship, heartbreak from break-ups/betrayals, eventual marriage, raising children, balancing career vs. family as an ambitious person, illness within the family etc.?
@DragonMilk If you’ve only experienced break-ups and betrayals that have been mild enough to let you grow as a person, then you aren’t well-calibrated on suffering.
I find that betrayals have made me hard, uncaring, untrusting, and a worse person. I am working on becoming a better person by learning to trust people that are worth it; slowly reaching out, expecting suffering, and not finding it. Funny how that works.
This!
People benefit from having a toolkit that helps them cope with inevitable suffering, but they don’t benefit from a set of memes that encourages them to seek out suffering.
Someone later in the thread asks whether regarding suffering as pointless requires wrapping people up in cotton wool (helicopter parenting etc.). No, that would be caused by regarding all suffering as too terrible to endure. There are plenty of cases where suffering comes along with something else, and the game is worth the candle; a trite example would be a painful but life saving medical treatment.
Religious reasoning produces bad decisions like denying people pain medication because someone believes the deity they worship intended this suffering. Or it denies people the (life saving) medical treatment entirely, because of some supposedly deity-given rule forbidding it.
That’s not all that religion does, and some of what it does is good.
It can be a great commfort to some people trying to cope with suffering and loss. Not all people – one acquaintance left his childhood religion, never to return, because of statements intended to provide comfort when his mother died. (I think – not sure – that he was still a child at the time.) But it’s a good toolkit for many people, even though (as you can see above) I’m pretty much incapable of steelmanning the way it’s used.
Eh. I see the point you are trying to make, but I think you are hyperbolizing. “No pain, no gain” is a pretty gosh darn secular statement, and it doesn’t require a religious mindset to generalize the idea of suffering as a moral good.
“No pain no gain” is a special case, akin to believing that medicine doesn’t really work unless it tastes awful.
Oddly enough, though, I know of a (very minor) religious group that has “to learn you must suffer” in their liturgy. So there is a certain overlap, some of the time. (Personally, I enjoy most learning. If I’d had to suffer notably to learn my professional skills, I’d have tried a different profession. Note that I am *not* in medicine, as an example with lots of needless suffering. I’m also not in any system prone to hazing newbies.)
@Dino Nerd:
I don’t understand what you mean by “special case”.
Pretty much any difficult skill or accomplishment will involve, essentially by definition, difficulty. The ability to push through that difficulty is generally prized.
@HeelBearClub
Difficulty isn’t the same as suffering. If you class “having to do some hard work” as pain, then “no pain no gain” becomes pretty much of a tautology.
If you don’t make that equivalence – you presume people can enjoy studying, or regard work as routine and normal (like breathing or eating), and only sometimes involving things they don’t like (as can both breathing and eating), then that falls apart.
So as someone who enjoys learning, reads non-fiction for fun, and has been known to hike for pleasure, I see 2 different fallacies:
– Unpleasantness is good in itself. If I sit in some mega-boring class going over material I already know, ad nauseum, prevented from looking at anything new, I’m doing something important and virtuous
– The only way to accomplish anything valuable is via unpleasantness. If I sit and read the text book, and enjoy that, I won’t learn what’s in it, etc.
Much the same thing applies in other domains – getting fit by doing exercises I don’t like, in an environment I hate, is not more effective than participating in activities I love.
You may gain faster by tailoring your methods entirely to efficiency and ignoring (un)pleasantness – depending on specifics – but you may also drop out entirely, because the ultra-efficient choice is also highly unpleasant (to you). In many cases, staying out of the actively unpleasant zone works better in the long run.
Because I’m interested in this, and so many SSC’ers don’t use the public libraries websites getting past thr paywall method, here’s another long quote from The New York Times:
With all that in mind, while it’s s few months until I get to vote in the primary, please convince me why Warren (who looks like the most likely nominee at this point) won’t lose in the general election next year (and please don’t cite popular vote polls, it’s the Electoral College that decides).
I’m also interested in suggestions from supporters of both parties on what their parties tactics and strategies should be.
Where is the idea that Warren is most likely the nominee coming from? From the national polls, she is decidedly in second place (and maybe dropping, if that isn’t just noise). If I was Biden I would be pretty content with my position, right now.
From my quick look at polling of swing-state Trump vs. D matchups, it looks like both Biden or Sanders currently win the electoral college, while Warren loses by just a hair. And if my memory serves me, usually after the primaries there is a rallying around the nominee, so I would consider this to be an underestimate.
Bottom line: Warren would be a riskier choice for Democrats than Biden, but they probably aren’t going to nominate Warren anyway. Warren supporters who think Biden is too centrist would be better off to throw their weight behind Sanders, who has better odds of winning the general, and is just a hair behind Warren in the primaries.
I’m not the target market for the Dem primaries, but I have gotten the impression from my media consumption that she is the frontrunner. So I think the media is printing “Warren-mentum” articles right now, and that’s probably where the idea comes from.
As to why I think she actually may be the frontrunner, there are a couple of things. One, hypothetical head-to-head polls this far out are usually pretty volatile and unreliable. So I tend to discount all of those pretty heavily. On the other hand, Warren seems to be leading in several of the earliest states (Iowa, maybe New Hampshire?). I get the impression that a lot of Biden’s support is soft, based primarily on name recognition and comfort / familiarity. If Warren does, in fact, win the early primaries, then I would expect some of Biden’s support to fade off as Warren gets more recognition. And I think a bunch of Biden’s numbers in, e.g., South Carolina, are based on African-American voters, who have previously shown a preference for the “known” candidate early (e.g. Hillary in 2008) and then switching late once someone they previously considered non-viable becomes (apparently) viable. (I’ll grant you, Warren is not precisely analogous to Obama for obvious reasons). As to Sanders, I just don’t think Bernie can win the nomination. His support is currently lower than Warren, he’s running in the same lane, but he’s a known commodity and isn’t any kind of preferred “identity” (Warren could at least be the first female President) which makes me think his support probably tops out as-is and bleeds to Warren gradually. Which also hurts Biden, because I don’t see a lot of current-Bernies as choosing Biden over Warren.
Warren appeals very much to the type of people who do political coverage for mainstream news sources–it’s not so clear she’ll appeal as much to voters as a whole.
Sure, that’s possible. I wasn’t speculating on whether she’d win in the general election (I think she would, FWIW). But the Democratic primary electorate seems to me closer to “people who do political coverage” than to “voters as a whole.” The exceptions seem to be the very poor, the very uneducated, and minority voters, but with the exception of African-American minority voters I’m not sure if they have sufficient primary turnout to nullify Warren’s advantage with the educated white Democratic folks. Seemingly not if everything stays as-is, since Biden’s still mostly ahead nationally, but I’m also viewing Warren and Sanders as basically the same candidate, with Warren likely to cannibalize Sanders voters eventually. Taken together, they’re bigger than Biden. I think that may cascade quickly, especially if Biden finishes fourth or fifth in Iowa (last poll I saw had him fourth).
Polling data pretty clearly shows that Elizabeth Warren is #1 among Democratic voters overall, and #2 among college-educated middle-class white Democratic voters – which is to say, the group most reporters spend most of their time hanging out with. Warren is #1 among Democratic voters in the first two primary states (New Hampshire and Iowa), #2 among Democratic voters in the first four primary states, and #2 among Democratic voters in all the primary states weighted by delegate count. All of this has been fairly stable for a couple of months, IIRC. Cite primarily Nate Silver, but what I’ve seen from other sources supports this.
So it’s easy for reporters to construct a narrative where Warren is going to win Iowa and New Hampshire and then everyone is going to fall in line behind the front-runner, and to want and believe that narrative to be true. But e.g. the black voters of South Carolina favor Biden by a good margin, and it’s far from obvious that they’re going to change their mind just because the white guys in IA and NH gave Warren a modest edge in delegates.
The nomination is Biden’s to lose, but it wouldn’t be terribly hard or surprising for him to lose it. But for the moment, it’s more fun to talk about Warren.
Is that a typo – are the #1 and #2 supposed to be transposed – or am I missing something? Because if she’s #1 overall, that seems pretty consistent with being a frontrunner. I agree that Biden seems more popular with the minority Democratic base, but it’s my (admittedly unscientific) opinion that that’s fairly soft, that Obama isn’t coming in to campaign directly for Biden, and that African-American voters are pretty adept at sussing out “viability” prior to committing.
Right, clumsy typo there. #1 for college-educated whites, and #2 for Democrats overall.
Regarding viability, and African-American voters alleged ability to recognize same, polling also fairly consistently shows Biden having better odds than Warren in taking down Trump.
Switched these two, otherwise all good points.
Also see prediction markets, where she has a significant lead IMO for purer forms of the same reasons.
Yep. Which is why I’ve got Predictit money on her failing to secure the nomination.
Poor people who don’t have money to gamble online with get the same number of votes come election day. Wealth disparities such as this are a classic example of where prediction markets fail to aggregate people’s actual knowledge.
Evidence? No one’s knowledge of their own vote is at all relevant
The problem is that dollars aren’t knowledge-units, or even a proxy for knowledge units.
Consider this example: A rich person considers himself somewhat news savvy, and thinks the odds of a candidate winning an election are something like 60/40, so he puts $1000 on “yes”.
Two poor homeless people somehow overhead the candidate speaking confidentially, saying that he was about to drop out. They can only muster enough money for $100 on “no”, which is their entire life savings.
Clearly the two poor people have more knowledge units than the rich person. But they cannot express this knowledge on the market place. In fact, if you trust the prediction market as a knowledge aggregator, you would mistakenly think that that there is 10X more knowledge units on “yes” than “no”.
A simple poll would actually be a superior aggregator of knowledge units in this case (1 “yes”, 2 “no”).
Prediction markets have no solution for this AFAIK.
Clearly a poll would be much worse, because homeless people would have no incentive at all to participate in the poll.
Your stylized hypothetical is not evidence.
Wherever someone asks me for directions at a gas station, I always lie to him and tell him to go the opposite way that I am going, in order to reduce traffic on my route.
I assume everyone else does the same thing, rational self interest and all.
There’s a big difference between actively screwing someone else over and not going out of your way to do something.
How do you think polling is conducted? Someone sets up a booth downtown and waits for people to come by?
I mean, isn’t the whole idea of “there is no incentive to participate in polls” contradicted by the ample historical and ongoing evidence of people participating in polls?
I’m not necessarily going to bat for Cliff, I just didn’t like your analogy. But: usually by phone, as I understand it. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of email asking me to participate in polls as a registered voter, too. Which I’ve always ignored, for what it’s worth.
There are lots of problems with these methodologies, one of them being that they undersample people who’re less likely to have phones and email accounts, such as, for example, homeless people. I expect pollsters have all sorts of more or less sophisticated statistical corrections for this, but I wouldn’t expect these corrections to get you very close to an unbiased sample.
Whether it’s better or worse than prediction markets is a question I’m not equipped to answer. But I don’t find this type of armchair reasoning very satisfying.
Right, but some people don’t ignore it, and participate, despite not having any obvious self-interest motive. I wonder how Cliff reconciles this.
And of course this whole objection could be side-stepped if I made it a paid poll, but I prefer to wallow around in the mud and chaos of the discourse like a hog.
The question isn’t whether people participate in polls without any obvious self-interest motive. Obviously they sometimes do. The question is whether the data we get from those polls is better than what we get from prediction markets given their respective drawbacks.
Like I said, I don’t have an answer to that question. But the profit motive is a least a concrete advantage for prediction markets, in that it provides a concrete mechanism for correcting them, and waving your hands at unspecified altruistic motives definitely doesn’t make a symmetrical argument in favor of the legacy system.
I’m not attempting to argue in favor of polling over prediction market in the general sense, but only under certain conditions, which I think are met by Warren/Biden and in my simplified toy example.
Cliff seemed to imply that prediction markets were superior even in my toy example. The question of “are prediction markets better in general” isn’t one that I’m interested in debating right now. The question I’m interested in is “do polls ever , even hypothetically, have better prediction power than prediction markets”, and I think the answer is yes.
Prediction markets have a hard time converging on true probabilities within a factor determined by the expected rate of return of competing investments. There’s a dozen bets where I’m confident I could pick up an easy 5%, but I have better places to put my capital.
It ultimately comes down to whether the economy is doing better than forecasters are collectively good at their jobs. And while the markets have anti-inductive properties, it’s (currently) not that hard to pick the direction of the bias.
LOL, I was assuming you meant an Internet poll or something that someone could choose to participate in, otherwise the hypothetical is even more inane.
A prediction market OBVIOUSLY would be better in your toy example. Do YOU understand how a poll works? They don’t contact every person who exists, they pick a random sample. In your toy model, the homeless guys who have great information exerted a significant influence on the prediction. They deliberately sought out and participated in the prediction market. A poll would almost certainly miss them.
And IF it didn’t (highly unlikely) they would be given the same weight as everyone else. It’s unlikely the sample size of the poll would be such that they would have a greater influence on the prediction than with the prediction market.
It’s really hard to imagine how you could have come up with the idea that your example was a bad one for prediction markets. By the way, your example also makes a lot of money for some homeless guys, which they take from a clueless rich dude.
What’s the arg here, that polling misses people but prediction markets don’t?
If we are in the world of hypotheticals (which we are), then we can just make the poll reach everybody, solving the problem.
If we are in the actual world, then there’s no way two homeless people could even sign up for a Predictit.com account (you need a bank account, address), so they wouldn’t be able to offer the information anyway.
Well, lets look at primaries:
Warren is currently winning in Iowa and New Hampshire. Even Biden’s campaign is accepting that their path forward is losing those two, and trying to regain momentum in Super Tuesday… but that’s a risky strategy; it puts him behind and cedes outright control of the narrative for a few weeks there to Warren. If it wins, it puts him in line for a slugfest with her and if he can’t pull it together on Tuesday, he’s out.
While these people likely exist, I predict that most of the people who said they could vote for either candidate in the NYT poll were lying, possibly to themselves as well as the pollsters. Most people I know who call themselves independent reliably vote for one party or the other- they just enjoy thinking of themselves as independent thinkers.
I think that a lot of people that consider themselves “independent” are also more extreme than the two main parties are, and don’t feel represented by them. So you end up with a lot of independents choosing between the Democrat candidate and the Green candidate, not the Democrat and the Republican.
“Independent voters are a myth” has been conventional wisdom for a while.
I can think of one category of people who could act as genuine swing voters. These are folks who are fanatical “single issue” voters, but they have more than one issue that they’re fanatical about, and each issue is spoken to by a different party. I’m thinking for instance of a committed environmentalist who is really into guns and gun rights.
A person like that might re-decide each election which issue is more important to them at that particular time.
Many people voted for both Obama and Trump
Do you have any actual data source for this? Many is doing kind of a lot of work there. People also change views over the course of 10+ years, so someone who voted Obama in 2008 might be practically a completely different person now for a variety of reasons. It would have to be a fairly sizable percentage for it to carry any meaning for me (enough to clearly not be a combination of people aging out of their previous political views + lizardmen).
Sure do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama-Trump_voters
13% of Trump voters voted for Obama in 2012
It explicitly only includes people who say they are undecided, not whose party registration is independent.
Oh, hey, someone wrote an article about my people. Some niggling points:
-I think ‘have a positive view of’ and ‘will vote for’ are getting conflated especially on Sanders. I know a lot of people who have a positive view of Sanders in the sense that he’s honest, has integrity, etc, and also think his policies would be bad. I honestly believe he thinks his policies are right for America (which I can’t say about, eg, Warren).
-The single payer healthcare question is obscuring the more important division: I know a lot of people who would be fine with some tweaks to the system to solve various problems or even an expansion. People are generally dissatisfied with Obamacare but they’re split on whether the project needs to be fixed or replaced. And there’s a divisive view on whether they’d be willing to raise taxes to pay for fixes. But it’s very rare they support banning private healthcare.
-These statistics are being framed to paint a narrative. Anytime I hear about 70% white transmuted to be ‘mostly white’ I transmute it back to ‘as white as the general population’. Likewise, the choice to say they mostly voted for Republicans when the split was 51-49 (well within any reasonable margin of error) points a certain way. So it goes.
Anyway, if I were God-King of the Democrats I’d run Biden with a young moderate-ish progressive minority VP. Someone who can fire up the progressive base without alienating everyone else. Biden doesn’t need to speak against racism to get minority support: he has that. But social justice is beginning to work like the religious right does for the Republicans: a minority group within the party that’s powerful enough to demand its pound of flesh. If there’s a reasonably prominent black lesbian politician with social justice cred who’s willing to strictly speak to the motte of social justice then that would be ideal. It might not be quite as exciting but first woman VP and first LGBTQ VP are still something. (Also first black VP, but… eh, Obama. Also, you can tease that she might run in 2024 if Biden loses or 2028 if he wins.)
If I were God-King of the Republicans, I would pray they run someone weak. Trump needs to be able to be on the attack. Who will Trump have trouble attacking? Biden will be hard to attack because he’s so well known and his reputation isn’t as bad as Hillary’s. It will be hard for anyone to redefine Biden, even Biden, let alone Trump. Klobuchar would also be hard to attack, not because she has no flaws but because her most salient flaws are being abusive and aggressive. Trump has no ground to stand on there. Yang could sort of be attacked for being an egghead but it’d be difficult to walk the line to not have it be “cool-headed, smart Yang and high school bully Trump” which would backfire. But he could do it. Buttigieg is a borderline case but his race and labor relations record and his swings back and forth and his overeducated background are all vulnerabilities. (Sanders would be fairly easy to attack as a radical and his socialist base is a decided minority of the country. He might weather it though. Warren would be hilariously easy to attack. I doubt she could survive.)
True. I suppose I should clarify that I really meant something more like: who will Trump’s attacks most damage?
I actually think Biden would be easier to attack, given that Biden and his family come up a lot in the impeachment context. If we’re presuming the 2020 election includes Trump, then Trump will likely have been impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate. Any random Democrat could try to use the impeachment narrative to attack Trump. But if Biden does it, that gives Trump the best opportunity to punch back and claim that he was just trying to deal with the aftermath of Biden’s cronyism – which ties in well to Trump’s “swamp” anti-establishment themes.
Warren can of course be attacked on substance – her espoused positions thus far are much further left than prior Dem nominees – but not as much on the themes Trump loves the most (swamp, Deep State, media antagonism, anti-DC) because she’s not as entangled with the prior administration. The other attacks would be on her authenticity (apocryphal Indian heritage, maybe claims of pregnancy discrimination, and perhaps her changing positions before running for President versus after) but to be honest I don’t see Trump making those as successfully. At some point, I just don’t think it’s as effective to mock “Fauxcahontas” directly to her face on stage as it is to retweet the meme on Twitter. It could work though, since Trump’s brand is “saying whatever he really thinks” versus “carefully calculating for advantage.”
ETA: Corrected typo (House –> Senate re acquittal)
The sense I get from analysts like those at FiveThirtyEight (okay mostly just them) is that yes, Warren will likely pay an electoral penalty in the general election for not being more moderate, but that there are lots of other factors and it’s not clear in practice who would do better overall (general election polling this early on isn’t very indicative historically). On personality and concrete issues like health care, Warren might well do better than Biden with that group. Or Warren might poach two voters from Jill Stein for every one she loses to Trump in those battleground states. I feel like voting based on electability is largely a mug’s game and it’s generally best to vote non-strategically in primaries.
There is research on this and generally centrists do better. Combine that with actual polling and I think it’s reasonable to assume Biden is the most electable.
I agree the research shows centrists generally do better, but it’s not a strong enough correlation that that should be conflated with “Warren will definitely do worse than Biden” or “Warren will definitely lose to Trump.” Just evidence.
I would take it as, “Warren will definitely have a harder time than Biden. This does not necessarily mean she will lose or that Biden will win by more because vulnerabilities and difficulty do not map one to one with ultimate success.”
A couple problems with this general argument:
1. I am incredibly skeptical that 2020 will be decided on issues. 2016 sure as heck wasn’t, 2012 arguably wasn’t. 2008 definitely wasn’t. Trump being trump, he’ll never talk about the issues, he’ll just want to be on the attack. I somehow doubt this election will come down to a nuanced debate about healthcare policy, or whatever.
2. The thing is, when people talk about these persuadable voters, they mean low-information or dumb voters (two separate groups, not all low-info voters are dumb and vice versa). These voters are the least likely to care about nuanced political views and most likely to grab onto to overarching narratives of a campaign. Again, this won’t be nuanced policy positions.
This topic comes up every so often. I still find Keys to the White House an interesting guide, since it’s successfully predicted every election from 1984 to today.
By the keys, the incumbent wins on Incumbency.
The incumbent loses on Party Mandate.
The incumbent probably wins on Contest, Long Term Economy, and Challenger Charisma.
The incumbent probably loses on Policy Change and Incumbent Charisma.
Third Party depends on what the Libertarians do, and so far, they don’t look likely to do better than they did in 2016. I doubt Gabbard will run independently, let alone pull a lot of votes.
Short Term Economy probably depends on whether certain predictors cited a few weeks ago lead to an actual recession within the next 11 months.
Social Unrest probably depends on what Antifa or Unite the Right does. Neither looks likely to me.
Scandal seems perpetually true, in a way that I think breaks that key, but 2020 is uniquely weird – the scandals play out in a way that seem to let everyone pick their own loser.
Foreign / military failure and success seem like toss ups, depending on China, North Korea, and Iran, and possibly Russia.
So by my count, the incumbent party has probably four wins, probably four losses, and five tossups. By the KttWH model, it needs eight wins, but it looks rather likely to pick up 3P, STEcon, and no F/M fail keys if nothing blows up (more), and Scandal might end up being a Rorschach blot. I think Warren is likely to lose for this reason, even assuming she wins the nomination.
I think persuadables are a good bellwether, but at the end of the day they matter a lot less than the people whose choice isn’t between elephant or donkey, but between elephant and not voting or donkey and not voting.
I agree with you that fundamentals are the best predictor of their behavior.
Warren’s up in Michigan and Pennsylvania
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/mi/michigan_trump_vs_warren-6769.html
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/pa/pennsylvania_trump_vs_warren-6865.html
True, those are only a few polls, but it fits with the pattern in 2018, where the Republicans lost support everywhere. It’s not just California and New York, they lost seats in Michigan and Iowa too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections#/media/File:US_House_2018.svg
That sounds inconsistent, but only because “conservative” in U.S. politics doesn’t mean what the word means in other contexts. Someone who would like to reverse the New Deal changes, as at least some conservatives would, wants fundamental change from the system that almost all of us have known for our entire lives.
Trump campaigned on fundamental change, although it isn’t clear he delivered.
Technical point: you want to separate the poli sci terms of conservative (philosophy) vs. incrementalist (preferred rate of change to current system).
What does it mean to be ‘initiated’? And what does that have to do with adulthood?
“Before the marking ceremony last month, the group arrived at John Hinkel Park and we orientated them to the space. I explained to the boys that for the ceremony, we would have the youth or uninitiated on one side of the amphitheater and the adults (the implicit assumption being that they are ‘initiated’) would sit on the other side. One of the lads slyly commented at this point:
> My Dad should be sitting with us then
There was a chuckle across the group and I acknowledged the observation with a quick “That’s real, there are uninitiated adults out there” before moving on with our preparation. I would love to return to that comment with the group in time but for now, I want to explore the concepts of initiation and adulthood here.”
An exploration into these themes and others, touching on the family unit, human development, and coming-of-age. What does this piece invoke in you?
https://twicefire.com/priors/initiation/
I was expecting this to be a weird SF faux-intellectual thing, and so was not at all surprised to see Mount Tam mentioned in a piece about making up a new cultural paradigm.
You have to be initiated into something, and that something has to be actually meaningful. Consider graduation, which I think I say fairly is the most common initiation rite our society has. Graduation is interesting, sociologically, both because it’s visibly losing meaningfulness as we watch – compare at one extreme the high school graduation scene from [70s coming-of-age movie here; Fame, maybe?] and at the other your kids’ kindergarten graduation – and because this is mirrored linguistically. Right now, you graduate. Previously and grammatically, you are graduated; you’ve been moved from the ‘has not finished [thing]’ category to the ‘has finished [thing]’ one. The point of [rites generally] is to do something within a broader social context, not to make anybody feel happy or fulfilled or whatever. Meaning is signal is categories, so whatever it is you’re being initiated into has to be either exclusive or symbolic or ideally both – anybody and their dog can make it through high school at the moment, and a high school degree doesn’t represent any particular aptitude for anything except not being thrown out of a system which can’t throw you out, so it’s not a particularly meaningful rite. College graduation is trending this way, I think I can say uncontroversially.
‘Adult’ is an exclusive category, i.e. ‘not-a-child.’ There isn’t a set of criteria you have to meet to be an adult (except in the trivially incoherent legal sense*). This is not like inclusive categories like, say ‘doctors,’ which do have specific criteria you have to meet. Modernity does not like inclusive categories where it can be helped. It doesn’t like to graduate people, in the technical sense of ordering them by some criterion; we worry (fairly) about systemic barriers and whether the criterion is fair and all sorts of other things. Result: we’ve been steadily getting rid of inclusive categories at a cultural level where we can, and so there aren’t meaningful rites left which apply to everybody. Individuals and individual families can still have some (often of the form ‘do something really hard, get meaning from it;’ cf. marathons, starting a company, raising children), but there isn’t a set of goals which apply to everybody in society.
*Consider what specifically it is about having been alive for 18 years, rather than 17 years and 364 days, which suddenly makes you competent to help pick your congressperson, but still not competent to have a glass of wine with dinner.
Opening is too snide, I apologize. A common pattern I see online is ‘[the sort of person who moves to San Francisco and has a blog about the sociology of adulthood, volunteering, and interpretive dance] notices that modern society is bad at cohesion, tries to fix it, fails.’
Folks using their heuristics like this is what I have to endure if I ‘show-up-as-my-whole-self’ (tongue-in-cheek). To add/subtract from your expectations: I’m Australian; I actually kinda hate SF, [and I probably have more SF fatigue than you do ;P] I originally moved to the Bay to play ultimate frisbee in the USA (and medalled at the World Club Champs with a Bay area team); My early career was in Defence Intelligence, including a deployment to Afghanistan; I consider my time at bootcamp to be a form of initiation into adulthood.
But perhaps the Bay just takes all input and turns them into the same sausage? 😉
> You have to be initiated into something, and that something has to be actually meaningful.
Yes, one has to be initiated into something meaningful. That is in part what we are trying to create with the program. We are one of a range of small scale programs run across the western sea-board. Whether these programs are ‘successful’ as a whole has not been measured, and how one decides to measure would bring many challenges. However, our particular program has been running for 15 years now, and one of my current co-leaders actually went through the program themselves, as a teen. The program feels like a success for many of the families and youth involved.
I agree that graduation could have been seen as a stand-in for a distinct rite of passage, and that it is pretty weak in that role.
> … whatever it is you’re being initiated into has to be either exclusive or symbolic or ideally both
Yes, we are going for a symbolic recognition of the beginning of adulthood. Exclusivity for adulthood is certainly not what we are aiming for (although it is possible that a youth won’t mark with their group).
> There isn’t a set of criteria you have to meet to be an adult
We have meaningful descriptors with expressions like “man-child”, “peter pan syndrome” and folk talking about ‘adulting so hard’ etc, pointing to a sense of being an adult beyond the legal definition. I’m not suggesting everyone has commonly-agreed, hard-and-fast criteria but there being some sense of being ‘adult’ beyond the basic legal definition. And then shared a sense of my own understanding of ‘full adulthood’. Do you disagree, and suggest that we culturally have no qualitative sense of adultness?
You talk about specific actions [that could be construed as adulting?] (cf. marathons, starting a company, raising children) but you don’t think those actions roll up into aggregate values of adulting?
I think that, conceptually, ‘adulting’ is exactly backwards. Being an adult – probably ‘maturity’ is a better word – isn’t performative, it’s an inherent quality; there is no list of things I can do which will make me mature, but many things which a mature person will naturally do in particular circumstances. Getting the causality mixed up is a problem – C.S. Lewis says it better than I could; “When I became a man I put away childish things, including… the desire to be very grown up.”
The lists of trials I put forward were meant to be individual or familial responses to the problem that there’s no society-wide maturity-demonstrating ritual anymore, so people largely select their own, with the obvious interpersonal legibility, equivalence, and significance problems.
EDIT: …And part of the legibility problem is that there’s no socially-universal ritual, there’s no socially-universal definition of ‘maturity,’ which just throws the whole issue up a level.
I’d use “adulting” to refer to things that you need to do as an adult in society–getting a job, signing a lease, paying taxes, buying groceries and cooking, etc. Maturity may make these tasks easier, but isn’t necessarily a requirement.
That’s the point of the phrase, isn’t it? It’s pointing at an essentially immature self-image — “immature” is a little too harsh a word, but there isn’t really a better one — by highlighting the performative nature of tasks like watering the plants or making car payments. It uses irony to do that, because it comes out of a demographic that views irony as mating plumage, but the intent’s pretty clear.
I agree Nornagest, and I would go further and say that using the word ‘adulting’ is not just self-deprecating but a cry for help.
@tokugawa says:
To be “Initiated” is still used by building trades “craft” unions like The United Association of Plumbers & Steamfitters which I’m a member of.
I was first indentured (I promised to labor for a certain number of years) to the employer/union/some State-of-California-input partnership as an apprentice plumber, then I was formerly initiatated into the union about a 19 months after my indenturing, and then after 9,000 hours of labor, five years of classes, plus tests administered by the employer/union partnetship, and some more tests by The County of Santa Clara, I was initiated as a “Journeyman Plumber”.
This was based on traditional medieval guild ways, for decades the main employers association that contracts with the union for labor was the Master Plumbers Association (it isn’t anymore, now the two main employer groups have “contractors” in their name instead of “Master”).
So “initiated” means something like membership and graduate, and the status is only open to adults.
That this isn’t more commonly known is because so much of modern society doesn’t follow the centuries old traditions of the guilds, though Universities (which started as scholars guilds) still do to some extent, an undergrad is equivalent to an apprentice, someone with a bachelor’s degree is equivalent to a journeyman, and a masters degree makes one a “master”.
As an aside “credentialism” is often maligned, and in its present form justifily so, but I suspect that the problem is too few crendentials.
When most of the population worked the plow and the dairy only artisans, merchants, and scholars needed the credentials provided by the guilds (the warrior/ruling class had their seperate page to squire/lady-in-waiting to knight/lady system), but now with our largely non-agricultural labor and non-craft union populace the scholars guild path is the only one left that most know of to signal able to work as a full adult, which since the call to actually be a scholar is smaller than the number of graduates, and graduates are a minority (though I think “some college” is becoming close to the majority of young adults now), this is a “square peg in round hole” situation, and the old guildstyle apprenticeship on-the-job-training and credentialing system would fit better for filling most jobs, ‘depth that non-union employees and employers can’t coordinate with each other, and the old craft unions fill a small portion of the total jobs so ‘taint gonna happen and we’re stuck with what is.
Thanks for sharing about the structure of your craft unions initiation and induction process. Being a software engineer, I’ve often seen the structure and professionalization of older industries (builders, sparkies, plumbers, pilots, medicine etc) as something lacking in the software field (with both pros and cons).
I agree that the academic pathway rarely seems to be a satisfying form of initiation as things currently stand.