This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
Report says that DC families who exercise some school choice for their kids tend to choose schools that have fewer poor and black students. They point out that parents who put their kids in charter schools say they care about school culture and performance, but that they tend to choose ones that have fewer poor and black students. This isn’t a terrible article, but it’s an example of omitting relevant information either for ideological reasons or because the journalist doesn’t know it/doesn’t like to think about it: The article never get around to saying whether those schools with more poor/black students are different in any other ways, such as school performance or discipline or culture.
If the rest of the country is any guide, the schools with poorer and blacker student populations will have worse academic performance and worse behavioral standards than the schools with richer and whiter student populations. Indeed, it would be big news if this weren’t true among DC charter schools overall. The reporter never brought that up, or raised it as an issue.
She did, however, quote someone implying that the pattern of parental choice was due to racism. But she certainly didn’t ask whether that pattern existed among children of black parents putting their kids into the charter schools.
I don’t know whether DC’s charter schools are good, bad, or indifferent. I don’t know whether the parents’ choices are due to racism to any notable extent. I certainly don’t know the optimal way to trade off between the desire for integration and diversity in schools, school performance, parental choice, the ability to move kids out of horrible schools, etc.
But I’m very sure that this reporter wasn’t informing her readers about all the relevant details of the story. She was withholding information and not asking obvious questions, perhaps because of an ideological bias, perhaps because of blind spots and ignorance. And the result is that her readers know less than they should about a story that probably matters a lot for the future.
Most media bias, IMO, doesn’t look like someone making stuff up or being overtly biased, it looks like this–some questions aren’t asked, some facts aren’t brought up, and so many readers just miss them. Some small issues are inflated to become huge ones, and some large and important issues are ignored. And so the public becomes less informed, and as people recognize this kind of failing, it becomes less trusting of traditional media outlets.
Yep. This was at the end of the article:
The thing is, school quality correlates highly with its class and race aspects. Perhaps that is unfortunate, but the parents are conflating in an accurate manner. As you say, the writer implies that is not the case. And I have found NPR to be one of the more objective sources around, so it is too bad to see this. This may be one of those examples where reporter simply hasn’t been exposed to smart right wing sources, so it never occurred to her to ask questions.
But you are just preaching to the choir when I respond. I don’t know who you meant this for, but I don’t think too many will see this, since this thread is old. I understand that this comment is not proper for non-CW thread, but I think few will see this.
Could I please get an invite to the SSC Discord server? I’ve been clicking on the invite links for the past month or so (I remember seeing a post saying they were only down temporarily) but they’ve never worked.
I don’t know why the new link isn’t working, but this one I just copied should work for 24 hrs: https://discord.gg/MwTE2a
Should you believe in a religion if you have a religious experience that matches that religion, i.e. Jesus appearing in a vision inclining you to Christianity?
I remember the New Atheist, or at least Dawkins approach to this question being that even if you saw Jesus, you should instead dismiss this as a hallucination, since you can easily have all sorts of mind errors and delusions. I would like to add Pascal’s Wager into the mix though. Ordinarily, it doesn’t work since there are thousands of religions, but if you’re already primed with a vision of Jesus, that strongly weights Christianity in the rankings. If I have seen Jesus, I’m pushing my luck to appease some other God who I’ve seen nothing of, and so I should be better safe than sorry. I can believe it’s a hallucination and if I’m right the reward is nothingness, but if I’m wrong and the vision of Jesus is real, then I’m going to Hell for all eternity. Safer to believe Jesus was a vision and not a hallucination so as to avoid infinite punishment and gain infinite reward I think.
However, this does bring up a related question; is choosing to believe due to consequentialist arguments a real form of faith? If I believe to avoid Hell do I really believe at all? Isn’t true faith, by definition, an act devoid of all reason and evidence; a pure leap into certainty, apropos of nothing?
If you already know that people get these kinds of visions, I don’t see why getting one personally should change your probability estimate of anything.
I have a someone unusual position on the other question: I’m a doxastic involuntarist, meaning I don’t think it’s possible to choose beliefs. Our choices can affect our beliefs but the relationship is not quite so direct. So “[believing] to avoid Hell” isn’t really even a thing.
Your prior is that people get such visions for two possible reasons:
1. They are temporarily nuts.
2. God is speaking to them.
After seeing the vision, 1 is still an option for you. But 2 has now narrowed down to “the Christian god is speaking to you.”
They are commonly called hallucinations.
These can be triggered in many ‘sane’ people with drugs or sleep deprivation; although I suspect that many religious visionaries were schizophrenics (although it is speculated that the Oracle at Delphi benefited from hallucinatory gasses coming from the ground).
Also, errors in perception coupled with incorrect conclusions, can be very similar to hallucinations. There used to be a big transformer box near my house with two square posters on it. When passing it and seeing the posters from the corner of my eye, I would repeatedly see it as a person. Apparently, the configuration and dimensions were close enough to human to be parsed that way, even though it was really very far from human.
I can imagine people having visions of this nature, especially if they are somewhat gullible.
I don’t understand. We can separate out vision into Christian visions and non-Christian visions. For each type of vision, suppose that your 1 and 2 are the only two possibilities. That’s four possible combinations, and seeing a Christian vision doesn’t eliminate any of them.
Yes. Especially since reports of religious visions are fairly common, which means that the likelihood that it is real rises (I don’t particularly disbelieve my visions of Mexico, because lots of people report similar visions).
That’s not the definition of faith that’s commonly used by most Christian denominations. Their definition is more akin to the “I have faith that my parachute is functional so I will jump out of a plane with it” faith.
Another analogy I’ve seen is “I have faith in my doctor’s ability to cure me, so I’m going to take the medicine he prescribes, even though I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work.”
If you believe, you believe, regardless of your reasons for doing so. Although simply believing in God’s existence isn’t enough to get you out of Hell — Satan believes in God, after all.
No, the belief you’re describing (fideism) has been rejected by all major branches of Christianity. And with good reason, since not only is it irrational, but it goes against what we see in the Bible. Jesus performs plenty of miracles, and the Evangelists record them, explicitly to provide proof of his divinity (e.g., John 20.30, “These [miracles] are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God”), which would be an odd thing to do, if we’re really supposed to believe regardless of reason or evidence.
Fideism as you describe it may be rejected, but giving permission to not believe in the absence of any evidence at all, is different from encouraging (or even permitting) a follow-the-evidence-where-it-may-lead attitude.
Pascal’s Wager is useless as a form of selection between faiths, because there are an arbitrary number of potential Gods who will punish infidelity, where the cause of infidelity can be as small or uncontrollable as not getting baptized as an adult or not getting selected by God to be saved before time began. If you believe in the possibility of an unjust or deceptive God, you can never trust the veracity of any apparently divine vision, because that vision could’ve be transmitted to you by God (or the Devil) as a test of your faith. This is known as the argument from inconsistent revelations.
However, I believe it’s still very useful as a means of dismissing atheism from consideration.
The atheist God is very proud of his job in creating the universe without any evidence of his own existence, his perfect creatorless creation. And he condemns to Hell any of his creations who don’t agree. (or in general, you can postulate a divine being who punishes those who believe in divine beings for any reason)
I still want to see Pascal’s Wager treated as an optimization problem instead of a logic problem.
Ob Ned Flanders quote: “I even kept kosher, just to be on the safe side.”
Isn’t true faith, by definition, an act devoid of all reason and evidence; a pure leap into certainty, apropos of nothing?
Nope, that’s fideism, which is frowned upon (and please note that Pascal was feuding with the Jesuits, so he may have tilted a wee bit too much in the direction of the “feels over thinking” side). You are supposed to use your reason to evaluate your experience: was it a true vision, was it a deceit of the Devil, was it a hallucination, a trick, a hoax? Now, if you had a vision of Jesus and you decided to become a Vaishavite, then probably people would go “Ummm…” but hey, humans have done just as weird stuff before.
Hey, @bean. Your site navalgazing.net seems to be down.
Yeah, it was down for a while yesterday. Back up now. It happens occasionally.
Can anyone recommend any good books, available on Amazon, that just contain a bunch of good clean Python code?
I like reading code, basically. I’m looking for books that just contain problems (math or pragmatic) and solutions in Python.
I’m struggling to grok this whole p-zombie thing. My understanding is that in its strongest form it’s an argument against materialism, but I can’t seem to grasp how it’s logically valid. Let me see if I get this: I imagine a world where the zombie-people have the same precise physical makeup as a human, but lack conscious experience. Now I conclude that since I’ve imagined this to be possible, materialism is therefore wrong. But if materialism is correct, what does it even mean to imagine a world where a “zombie” with the exact physical makeup of a human could lack consciousness? Such a thing wouldn’t be possible. To a materialist, to share the same exact physical makeup is to be capable of consciousness, so to postulate otherwise is to begin by assuming materialism is invalid. This strikes me as something akin to Anselm’s ontological argument. How the heck is it valid? Now I know Chalmers is considered to be an exceptionally smart dude, and I”m just some random guy, so clearly I must not be understanding. Can someone help me out? I have no doubt this subject has been discussed here before, so my apologies for being a noob.
I’d be interested in hearing a defence as well. Back in the day I read several of his pieces, and I’ve been to talks by his grad students pushing the same schtick of thought-experiments that are meant to prove something about consciousness, and it’s always seemed nonsensical. Same with McGinn, Searle, and Nagel’s work along the same lines.
It’s not supposed to be a logical argument but more like an “intuition pump”. It’s supposed to draw your attention to the fact that we don’t just know where things are around us, but actually *see* them. Now imagine a p-Zombie who would still *know* where things are but only lacks the qualia of actually seeing. And if you can imagine that than you have some kind of intuition that qualia is a thing that at least could be investigated separately from the act of processing signals from the eye. If of course you take materialism as a given than the imagery couldn’t possibly do anything for you.
I would respect this way of using thought experiments, but note that the terminology “intuition pump” comes from Dennett (I think, at least he’s the most famous user of it), who was for many years the prime anti-Chalmers/Searle/McGinn/Nagel philosopher (in a lonely group with the Churchlands and virtually no one else until the mid-90’s).
Everything I’ve read by Chalmers et al, and interactions I’ve had with their graduate students, suggests to me that they would disagree very strongly with your characterization, and they genuinely believe themselves to be proving something in some sense. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read this stuff, and I am obviously biased.
An intuition pump that drives a person toward an incorrect belief is called a “basilisk.”
According to LW “a basilisk […] is any information that harms or endangers the people who hear it.” Not sure where you got your definition.
Correct.
A great example is Roko’s basilisk. Roko’s basilisk is an intuition pump that drives a person toward an incorrect belief.
Now, the words on LW are “information that…” but the word “information” is used to describe a thought experiment IE an intuition pump. From the opening paragraph from the LW article :
Roko’s basilisk is a thought experiment… a basilisk in this context is any information that harms or endangers the people who hear it.
Like anyone might, I got my definition from this site on LW, which is a discussion of Roko’s basilisk.
@rahien.din: I don’t really appreciate you pasting my link into your comment several times unnecessarily. I suppose you are trying to make the point that you don’t think I’ve read the page closely enough. To be honest, I didn’t read the page fully before posting (and I don’t think that should be a requirement for someone before posting links), but I was already familiar with the concept of Roko’s basilisk, and nothing in your post makes me think that there was something I missed that would have changed my previous post.
I apologize if you thought “Not sure where you got your definition” was too snarky. I do think it’s legitimate to analyze how people use words in practice rather than relying on the dictionary (or other authoritative source), but you hadn’t stated an argument as yet.
In any case, I think an intuition pump is a special case of information, so Roko’s basilisk being an intuition pump doesn’t mean that it isn’t information. Nevertheless, intuition pump and information are not the same thing. I don’t think it is true that the word “basilisk” is only applied to intuition pumps and not other types of information, but I agree this is not immediately clear.
And the word “incorrect” in your definition seems wholly unjustified: I think people are more likely to call Roko’s basilisk a basilisk if they think that it is correct.
Dacyn,
Maybe this is the crux of our pseudo-disagreement?
I also don’t think it is true that the word “basilisk” is only applied to intuition pumps and not other types of information.
In fact, I don’t even think that the harm or danger resulting from a basilisk is only meant to involve incorrect beliefs.
I am asking us all to consider that an intuition pump that drives a person toward an incorrect belief is a subtype of basilisk.
No, that is not how the term “basilisk” was first coined or used. In fact, it was perhaps first used in the excellent short story BLIT. The basilisks in BLIT are images that induce lethal reactions in the brains of those who see them – like a real basilisk would.
What if the harm was not to kill the viewer, but instead, to induce a durable false belief? And what if the vehicle was not an image, but instead a thought experiment? That’s still a basilisk – just a more insidious and self-propagating version. You may think that stretches the definition too far. Fine. We could discuss that.
But we must start by taking the discussion remotely seriously. The things you use as counterarguments seem to be things I completely agree with. You feel unjustly accused of inattentiveness to the things you read, but you freely admit that such accusations are deserved.
We are going to miss out on good conversations this way.
@rahien.din:
If this is what you think happened in my previous comment, then it is your reading comprehension skills that I question. Since you are continuing to insult me, I will assume you don’t want a conversation.
@rahien.din: I know what my comment says. The last sentence you quoted says the exact opposite of what you seem to think it says. Regarding the first two sentences, I did not read the page fully, but I read it closely enough for the purposes of discussion here.
In any case, even if I hadn’t read the page closely enough, I think what you did in your comment would have been a particularly obnoxious way to point it out.
Not much point in using the hard form of p-zombies when we already have the first iterations of a more realistic form walking among us. What’ll happen the first time you _really_ like a GPT-2 generated novella? Or when the first teenager falls in love with a GPT-2 chatbot? We’ll live to see this.
I don’t think I, or anyone else, will ever like a GPT-2 generated novella. It can’t even write a poem that’s more convincing than the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, and it doesn’t have the corpus to scale to much longer works like novellae.
I think many teenagers (and many adults) are capable of falling in love with the *idea* of someone, even when they have little to no contact with the actual person, so that proves nothing.
Sure you’ll probably eventually like a novel or screenplay “generated” by some method like this. It will just be “curated”. Which is very much cheating, but hey, who is keeping score anyway?
But, I don’t think that’s actually really relevant to the p-zombie argument, as it won’t be created by a GI.
@eric23
I think that you overestimate people. We live in a world where 50 Shades of Grey sells 125 million copies, with lines like:
“My inner goddess is doing a triple axel dismount off the uneven bars, and abruptly my mouth is dry.”
“His voice is warm and husky like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel… or something.”
“And from a very tiny, underused part of my brain – probably located at the base of my medulla oblongata near where my subconscious dwells – comes the thought: He’s here to see you.”
“I feel the colour in my cheeks rising again. I must be the colour of The Communist Manifesto.”
“His lips part, like he’s taking a sharp intake of breath, and he blinks. For a fraction of a second, he looks lost somehow, and the Earth shifts slightly on its axis, the tectonic plates sliding into a new position.”
“Now I know what all the fuss is about. Two orgasms – coming apart at the seams, like the spin cycle on a washing machine, wow.”
“I’m all deer/headlights, moth/flame, bird/snake – and he knows exactly what he’s doing to me.”
That’s amazing. Not only is it a bestselling book and hit movie, but it was apparently inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
@Aapje,
That sounds hilarious!
No wonder it sold so well!
I wonder if there’s a way to use GPT to generate a zillion sample texts and another algorithm to select the one that looks the most like what a human would expect, or better, to hill-climb/evolve into something more like what a human would see as interesting.
It doesn’t disprove materialism, it just highlights the fact that there is something important (qualia, or subjective experience, or what-it-is-like-ness, or whatever word you prefer) that our materialist theories of the world can’t explain, because they can’t distinguish p-zombie-world from our world.
It’s this that I can’t understand. If we are attempting to distinguish a zombie through external observation, then it doesn’t follow that materialism fails to explain anything. We could also simply say that the human brain is immensely complex, and it’s possible to create a very good facsimile of a person without truly replicating the physical processes under the hood. Nothing has been proven. If was don’t limit ourselves to imagining a superficial facsimile and go as far as to assume a zombie has the exact same physical makeup, you have the problem in my original post.
If materialism is understood as a universal theory, finding something it can’t explain is the same as disproving it.
This is like saying “the notion of the Aryan race is incoherent because I can imagine someone who appears inside and out to be Aryan but who I’ve ad hoc defined as non-Aryan and the believers in the Aryan race cannot distinguish him from real Aryans.”
To be fair, the notion of the aryan race is pretty incoherent. But yes.
Maybe that is the point some people would make with regard to p-zombies, but it’s certainly not the one I would make. I would make two points:
(1) If you imagine a world exactly like ours except that no-one is conscious, you still have philosophers (perfectly unconscious philosophers) writing in-depth about their consciousness. This is absurd, therefore there are no p-zombies.
(2) If you simulate a human perfectly on a computer, where perfect means you have isomorphic input-output behavior, then if this human was a philosopher before, they would still be a philosopher afterwards and write about consciousness. Therefore they must still be conscious, which means consciousnes isn’t substrate dependent.
I’m not sure I endorse (2), but these seem to me to be the interesting arguments that fall out of the p-zombie concept.
The p-zombie argument posits that they can write about consciousness without being conscious. I think the P-zombie argument is not a very good one, but you seem to be engaging in a kind of inverse question begging.
I don’t see how it’s question-begging to assert that someone has already disproved themselves by positing an absurdity. Of course, intuitions may differ as to whether what is posited is in fact absurd.
Regarding (1): If we feed GPT-2 a lot of texts about consciousness, it could produce a text about it, without being conscious itself. A whole p-zombie world including philosophers might not be possible, but there could be p-zombies walking among us, and we wouldn’t be able to tell.
Therefore, the Turing test can’t prove consciousness (Turing never claimed that either) but only intelligence.
There is no existing text generator, GPT-2 or otherwise, that can reliably (i.e. without curation) produce work that is not incoherent within the first few paragraphs. So your first paragraph is as much speculation as Chalmers’ original argument.
I’m (mostly) a believer in hard AI, so I’m not making a claim about inherent limitations of the field.
ETA: I realize that of course Chalmers is aware he’s speculating (it’s called a thought experiment, after all), but it seemed like you are asserting something you believe to be an empirical possibility.
@ Enkidum
Of course it’s a possibility, even if only by chance.
It’s a possibility that a GPT-2 produces nothing but coherent text, by chance?
If that’s what you’re claiming, then no, that’s simply wrong, except in the sense that it’s in some sense “possible” that all the particles in my body suddenly decide to jump six feet to my left, and I effectively teleport. It’s materially impossible for the current GPT-2 to do this, in the sense that billions of repeated trials would not produce a GPT-2 that does so.
If by “possible”, you mean “I can think this without my brain exploding”, which is closer to what Chalmers et al usually seem to mean, then you may be right, although it’s very unclear to me how detailed your thoughts have to be to count as “thinking about this”, and why this is supposed to carry any argumentative weight.
@Enkidum
A monkey hammering on a typewriter could produce a seemingly insightful text about consciousness (where the insight is in the mind of the reader). Current GPT-2, trained on similar texts, is much more likely to do so, and GPT-2000 (which will be trained to rule out nonsense texts) will probably do so more often than a random conscious human.
What sense of the word “could” are you using here? Be specific.
Given all the monkeys that have ever lived and ever will live in the universe, multiplied by several billion, spending all their lives chained to typewriters, the chance of this ever happening is so close to 0 as to be not worth thinking about. Again, it’s like the possibility of all my molecules deciding to jump six feet to the left.
Again, what does “likely” mean? Current GPT-2 is incapable of producing more than a few paragraphs of text that don’t devolve into incoherence. Admittedly, a lot of writing about consciousness is reasonably incoherent, but not in the same way.
To reiterate: I think we’re using fundamentally different (and incompatible) meanings of words like “can”, “possible”, etc. You (and Chalmers et al) appear to be saying something like “I can think this”. That’s not what I, or I think most people, use such words to mean in most cases.
You must admit that GPT-2 is better than a random word generator in writing readable texts, and unless you have good arguments that we now have reached the absolute limit of AI, I will assume that better and better programs of this type will be made, until we have difficulties determining if it’s a chatbot or a typical internet commentator.
How is that not basically a p-zombie?
Yes, absolutely.
Yes.
I would dispute this, given the “of this type” qualification beforehand, for two reasons. First, no program that is essentially GPT-2 plus a few bells and whistles will ever be able to hold a general conversation. The software isn’t there yet. Second, by “of this type” I’m pretty sure you mean, among other things “is obviously not conscious”. Which is question-begging.
Anyways I agree that GPT-2 is obviously not conscious. Not so sure about the hypothetical programs that are indistinguishable from real people.
I will certainly grant you that it’s physically possible to build unconscious AI systems which write texts about consciousness. The argument (the way I meant it, anyway) isn’t about it being physically impossible, but absurd / highly implausible. Why would minds programmed by evolution do that?
Here I was, thinking that p-zombies were supposed to be an argument against all that. Something like, “You can imagine someone having or not having qualia and it makes no discernible difference, so qualia are an empty concept.”
Eh, “qualia are an empty concept” is eliminative materialism, I think reductive materialism is more popular nowadays. So it would be more like “If you imagine all the correspondences between qualia and physical reality to be merely incidental, then “qualia” is an empty concept; it’s more reasonable to say that qualia reduce to physical phenomena”.
But yeah, one man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens 🙂
“qualia are an empty concept” seems like the most obviously wrong thing you can say in philosophy. They’re the one thing I have direct access to, thus the one thing I can definitively say exist. Of course, I may be the only one…
Phew, I thought I was the only one with qualia!
But a p-zombie would of course claim to have qualia, so I can’t be sure that either of you actually have them.
There’s a good comments thread on that here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6TBhBjiYivtLCKGoy/repairing-yudkowsky-s-anti-zombie-argument
I particularly like these two comments: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6TBhBjiYivtLCKGoy/repairing-yudkowsky-s-anti-zombie-argument#wY8AeTt5CB2zWGnsG
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6TBhBjiYivtLCKGoy/repairing-yudkowsky-s-anti-zombie-argument#rsjf5D4baTaEZXS89
That l8c guy’s comment on this subject is scarily clever (if I say so myself).
Awesome, you have my gratitude.
As I understand it, Chalmers’ argument is based on two premises:
1. If we can fully imagine a scenario, then that scenario is possible. The reason something like “the billionth digit of pi is 6” is not a counterexample is that we are not fully imagining it.
2. In this particular case, we can tell by introspection that we are fully imagining the p-zombie scenario.
And then the conclusion is that the p-zombie scenario is possible.
Regarding “if materialism is correct, what does it even mean to imagine”: imagining is a pre-theoretical mental action, so it doesn’t make sense to talk about what you imagine assuming materialism or its opposite. You can talk about imagining a scenario in which materialism is true or false, but this is somewhat different. I guess another way to put it is “if materialism is only contingently true, then it is false”.
To be clear, I don’t agree with either of the premises stated above.
Thanks for this, this aligns with my distant memories as well.
FWIW, (1) has a very long pedigree, going back at least to Descartes (whatever I can clearly and distinctly perceive is true).
I also disagree with both premises, but this is the only clear account of a coherent argument that I’ve seen. Anyone who can provide a better steelman would be much appreciated.
Given the premises, and hence the possibility of p-zombies, is there a way for me to know whether or not I am a p-zombie? Or is that precluded? Is that what “imagining is a pre-theoretical mental action” means?
I think Chalmers could answer something like this:
What is the difference between “The p-zombie scenario is impossible” and “I know that the p-zombie scenario is not real”? It seems to me that the only difference is that in the second, you are allowed to take into account your own experiences. But p-zombies do not have experiences, so the mere existence of these experiences means you know you are not a p-zombie.
Can you elaborate on what it means to fully imagine something? If it means to construct a truly complete mental model of it that’s consistent with our basic assumptions about the nature of reality, I don’t know that we can be said to fully imagining a scenario that treats the mind as a sort of black box. It feels like it’s cheating by glossing over some key assumptions about something we know very little of.
Edit: I wrote this comment before going down a LessWrong rabbit hole linked by Black Ice above, and I was able to find a lot of what I was struggling with there.
I don’t know if black box is the right analogy, since consciousness isn’t supposed to have any effect on the material world. But yeah, in my view the argument is basically just taking advantage of sloppy thinking.
It’s an argument against functionalism, specifically multiple realizability, not against materialism.
It still allows type physicalism (the notion that conscious states correspond to specific brain states) and, in the limit, eliminative materialism (the notion that we are all p-zombies because consciousness is a scientifically invalid concept).
It’s related to Searle’s room (once I had the chance of asking Searle if his room would be a p-zombie and he said yes).
I don’t see how Chalmers’ argument is compatible with either type physicalism or eliminative materialism. If you and the p-zombie have the same brain states, then type physicalism says you are both or neither conscious. And eliminative materialism says neither of you is conscious. Both of these contradict Chalmers’ claim that you are conscious while the p-zombie is not.
There are different version of the argument, not all from Chalmers. Wikipedia makes a distinction between, among others, a “behavioral zombie”, which behaves like a human but might have different internal structure, and a “neurological zombie”, which has the same brain structure and physiology as a human and is generally not empirically distinguishable from a human.
Behavioral zombies are be consistent with type physicalism, while neurological zombie are not, but they are still consistent with eliminative materialism.
Sure, the zombies themselves are consistent with eliminative materialism, which claims that humans are in fact zombies. But the argument Ouroborobot gave goes
which implies that humans do have conscious experience (since this is an attribute in which they are different from zombies). To be fair, there may be another version of the argument that doesn’t have this property.
Let’s suppose our friends with the giant spaceships gave us Earth 2, a planet remarkably like Earth, placed in our own solar system but without any intelligent life. Presumably we would study Earth 2 closely, and we might even send crewed missions to it. But would we have any productive use for it, given the hefty costs for space travel of any sort?
Doesn’t matter. Elon Musk tries to start a colony before you can say “Tesla”. The only real question is whether Musk (or someone else) manages to get a self-sufficient colony going before environmentalists are able to prevent it on the grounds of preserving a pristine Earth 2. Whether such a colony will ever be economically useful for those back home is doubtful.
And presumably having that experience will make future colonies cheaper, so I expect a number of groups of religious or political malcontents to find sufficiently rich backers (see the colonization of North America, except you can put your new Jerusalem at the same spot as the old one).
I expect that some of these groups will reproduce rapidly based on their ideologies (and abundant living space, not that living space in Nebraska is that expensive), so I expect that eventually the population of Earth 2 becomes nontrivial. At that point, you can get contributions from ideas of people living there in the form of ideas.
At the worst (barring extremely unlikely events), we get a bit more data for our polisci/econ models.
And in the very long term, who knows.
He can try, but can he defeat Dr. Lisa Pratt, Planetary Protection Officer in single combat?
Or maybe it will end up more like the sound of music, where ol’ musky tries to start his space rocket but she’s secretly holding the TEA-TEB pyrophoric slugs.
That sounds like it would be a really poor life choice her part. You know, being pyrophoric and all. Maybe not as bad an idea as chlorine trifluoride, but still a bad idea to try holding.
Someone I knew was deputy planetary protection officer for a while. As she described the job, it wasn’t protecting our planet. It was protecting other planets from things such as terrestrial microbes ending up on Mars and, among other things, generating false evidence of life on Mars.
Did other people think that Wikipedia article read very strangely, rather as if it were a bit of a sf story written by an amateur author?
It’s not just you, I had the same thought – per the talk page, the reason is probably that it was written by a gender-studies student for a course assignment.
According to NASA, it is both. The Wiki article also already mentions both, so I think at least that part is accurate. Did you find any other specific weird things or just the general feel? It’s Wikipedia so possible to fix, but I don’t necessarily want to spend time improving the flow or anything.
It just becomes the tourism/weird party place where the 0.01% go, doesn’t it?
Either that, or it starts off as a few small, specialist scientific expeditions. Then after a while they realize its more fun to just use science as the cover story whilst actually just playing in a weird sandbox of experimentation, hedonism and debauchery without much effective oversight.
How much would round-trip Earth-Earth 2 tickets cost, assuming Earth 2 was somewhere between the orbits of Venus and Mars?
Far less than building a tourism/weird party place on Earth.
It might have potential as a place for thrill-seekers; on a planet without humans, the animals aren’t afraid of us. Also we’ve driven some of the nastier ones to extinction here.
We hunker down and focus on surviving the storm of asteroids that now have wildly different orbits.
We also focus on adapting to our changing climate, now that it is inarguably due to shifting orbit and happening rapid enough to watch from one year to the next.
Examining a rapidly freezing former life-supporting planet will have to wait.
Use as a control for experiments.
If it has life (though not intelligent life), if might provide microbiologists some very interesting things
to work with, if we could manage a sample/return mission. Are the DNA bases the same or different?
Are the amino acids the same or different? Is the chirality the same or opposite?
[If we drill down to Europa’s ocean in the next century, and if it has even microscopic life,
these questions might apply in the real world.]
Even if the life is quite similar to Earth life, getting hold of microorganisms (and their ribosomes,
and their DNA and amino acid metabolism) which have different choices for some of these could
be quite a useful addition to biochemists’ toolbox, though hardly earth-shattering.
Very off-topic question, but on the odd chance that someone here knows:
Does anyone know what happened to darkfetishnet.com?
I’ve been getting “server not found” since tuesday.
Technical problems?
Financial problems?
Political problems?
Medical problems?
Does anyone know?
Best wishes,
-Jeffrey Soreff
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our life circumstances shape our politics, specifically after stumbling across this article by Nozick, which some of you have probably read. Over the last few years I’ve drifted apart from my best friend as he’s become increasingly political. He’s exceptionally bright, or at least I used to think so. There was a time he was what most would consider a “moderate”, as was I. These days not a day goes by that he doesn’t post multiple harangues on Facebook, typically spiteful tirades against capitalism, neo-liberalism, corporations, right-wingers, and other standard boogeymen. I’ve struggled to understand how someone who once thought so similarly to me has diverged so much in his worldview.
He was a computer science major, and in his late twenties he decided to walk away from his career and pursue creative writing by getting an MFA. I would never tell him this, but I’ve always considered him to be more or less artistically tone deaf (I know that sounds snarky but I don’t know how else to put it), so I watched this with some silent bemusement while trying to be supportive. I would have been delighted had he found success, but this did not come to pass. Failing to get any of his output published, he moved back in with his parents and eked out a living making near-minimum wage writing articles for a small local paper. He has lived with his wealthy-ish parents and done this same low-paying job for the better part of ten years now, all the while becoming more and more vocally left-wing. I followed a different trajectory: working in industry, finding some material success, getting married, and becoming far more conservative-libertarian in my leanings.
Now we are both approaching 40, and he wants to pursue a PhD in philosophy with the goal of breaking into academe and teaching. I am, to say the least, skeptical of his prospects. He couldn’t get into any of the programs he applied to, so he is heading off to get a master’s degree this spring in the hope that will get him into a PhD program. Maybe it will all work out, but I expect he faces a future of – at best – adjunct-hood and even deeper bitterness toward life. At this point I feel like I’m watching a slow motion train wreck. Most of my friends are left-wing (my liberal, feminist wife chief among them), but his constant bile has me just feeling sad. He’s frequently insulting without even realizing it, doing things like hanging out at my house and literally complaining to my face that the industry I work in is basically evil and should be abolished. I know I should just be supportive and hold on to what we have in common still, but it’s proving to be difficult. I just don’t know how to be this guy’s friend anymore. Anyone else gone through anything similar?
You should spend your time with people that make you a better person and that share your values. This guy is a loser and you should stop hanging out with him.
For our entertainment you could tell him to sort his f***ing life out in all the ways I’m sure you’ve fantasized about over the years. Tell him he’s a hack and that going into academia at his age is pointless. Tell him that his only use is as a cautionary tale. Then report back here to let us know what happens.
I wonder what this guy’s parents are like. Why would they tolerate a 30+ year old to behave like this? Are they coddling him?
That seems pointlessly mean and untrue. To a certain extent I’m quite sympathetic to chasing one’s passions rather than choosing to become a cog in society. It’s the sense of entitlement to status and money that I can’t understand, as in the linked piece. His parents are delightful, and yes, coddling.
+1
I am basing that on your description and it all seems very true to me. What part of that is untrue? That he is a cautionary tale? That going into academia at his age is pointless? That he needs to sort his life out?
I also think that though it is unkind it is absolutely necessary, or at least it was 10 years ago. Probably too late now. If you truly cared about him you would have said something over the years even though it may have meant the end of your friendship. He needed guidance, badly, and both you and presumably the guy’s parents failed him because you didn’t want to hurt his feelings. And you still don’t want to help him because it would be ‘mean.’
Now this sounds as though I would have said something to help him along, when in reality I hate conflict and would probably have taken the easy path of saying nothing about his talent or career choices. That is not a trait I admire in myself or would ever encourage in others however.
It’s untrue, because you talk as if you were stating hard objective facts, when in fact stating moralistic opinions.
Your assessment of the guy’s prospect might be correct. But the contempt that seems to permeate your words is a feeling, not a statement about reality. Saying that somebody’s “only use” is as a cautionary tale is a very harsh value judgment.
Those things taken together are what many people would perceive as being mean.
Of things that might appear untrue to some, there’s also your apparent belief that bombarding somebody with “tough love” like that would help them to shake their delusions and sort out their life.
Ok, we can try saying it in a nice way first and if that doesn’t work we’ll move on to tough love.
I could only get through the first few paragraphs of that article before my eyes rolled too far in the back of my head, so let me lay just lay down a quick and dirty response:
-Every economic ideology has a theory of entitlement. Libertarians think they are entitled to a certain distribution of property, and socialists think they are entitled to another certain distribution of property. “A sense of entitlement” is just another way of saying that you have a moral theory for how the world ought to be.
–Does he think he is the “most valuable” class of society, as Nozick indicates? Why in the world would you believe Nozick on this, anyway? All he does is cite Plato and Aristotle, and move on with his essay as if that point was to be assumed from there forward. In other words, his evidence is dogshit. Don’t let Nozick tell you how your friend really feels, you could just ask him.
If the only form of “evidence” you accept is what people say their feelings are, then yes, there is no evidence this is true. Do you apply this rule consistently or is it only to groups you have warm feelings toward?
So we’re faced with a question: How does the friend feel?
We’ve got two suggested approaches to determining the answer.
1. We know the friend is an academic. And in 1998, philosopher Robert Nozick once wrote an essay where he said that intellectuals think that they are the most valuable members of society. His evidence was that Aristotle and Plato once suggested something along those lines. Therefore, we can assume that friend must think that he too is a member of the most valuable class in society.
2. We can ask the friend if he thinks he is a member of the most valuable class in society.
If you have a third suggestion that you think is superior, feel free to throw it out there.
@Guy in TN,
The third is to look at his behavior and what it reveals about how he feels. Ask 100 people “are you a selfish person,” and you might get one guy admitting to it. 99 out of 100 will say no, I’m not selfish. But many of that 100 will be considered as such by others, based on how they behave. By your logic you’d have to conclude that 99 out of the 100 aren’t selfish, but I don’t think you apply that in your daily life. It’s only when you feel warmly toward a person or group that you apply this isolated demand for rigor.
Can I note that all of this arose from me saying:
You could just ask him. You could just ask him. Asking him is an option. A far better option than listening to Nozick, who I presume had never even met the friend. I said “you could just ask him”, not that “asking people is definitely and objectively the best option, above all other possible options, even ones not suggested by anyone as of yet”.
You were so ready to pounce with the claims of hypocrisy against me, that you didn’t take the time to consider what I had actually said.
Thanks for engaging, I’m genuinely glad to get a different perspective. Obviously I thought that the Nozick piece seemed to describe his mentality pretty well, though in my rambling post I think I did a poor job of linking it with my other thoughts and providing evidence to back it up.
I’m basing my feeling on a combination of actual discussion and my own analysis of his revealed behavior. He has stated that a society as wealthy as ours, if it were just, would ensure everyone a more equal distribution of property, and that this should be the case regardless of career choice. He has also held up his studies as giving him a unique and important status. I believe he thinks that his credentials demonstrate his intellect, and that this gives him special and unique value that society should reward. This is evident to me through his condescension when discussing anything philosophical, speaking as if only he is qualified to do so.
To me, it just looks like the irrational collection of vanity degrees. Even if one accepts that it is just for government to somehow transfer wealth to a privileged few whose job is merely to think (which we obviously already do, to an extent), not everyone can do this, and who would choose to take out the garbage in such a world? OK, so say we accept this premise. I guess we have to select for it then. It’s not at all clear to me that someone who makes such arguably irrational choices can claim any lofty intellectual status whatsoever merely by the collection of pieces of paper. Someone who persists in such behavior might actually be the last person I would want rewarded with what limited resources we might choose to provide as a reward for performing this role in society.
This guy sounds like a real arrogant jerk, Ouroborobot. Like a Rush Limbaugh caricature of elitist liberals. Or a Portlandia character.
I could think of many 3rd options, like observing behavior, like suggested. But #2 has to be, by far, the least likely to get me an accurate answer of all ideas I could brainstorm.
Sorry about the excessive snark earlier.
You seem to have two basic questions here. First, you are concerned about how to maintain a friendship with someone whose values are so different from yours. And second, you have more object-level questions about whether certain aspects of your friend’s proposed society are just.
My take is: Seeking answers to the second set of questions will not bring you closer to resolving the first. The answers to smaller political questions will lead to larger political questions. The revelation of values in niche cases will lead the revelation of more terminal values. He probably isn’t going to change his mind, and you probably aren’t going to change yours. So only proceed to pry into the political questions if you are willing to dig the gulf even deeper.
If this friend is someone important in your life, I would simply stop this line of inquiry with him, and try to focus on whatever hobbies or interest brought you two together in the first place. But if your shared values were a major part of what had brought you together initially, then it is possible that you both have drifted apart to the point that maintaining the friendship isn’t possible.
I was thinking about what you said here a little more. I was thinking about just how normal his position sounds.
You say your friend wants to:
1. Use taxation to fund universities
2. Hire people to “think” in those universities (i.e., do research, philosophy)
3. Determine the most qualified applicants based partially on whether they have completed a degree in their field
Now, I understand that as a libertarian you may have strong objections to these proposals. For you, support of one or more of these proposals may be a hard line that if someone crosses, you will find it difficult to be friends with him them.
But you should at least be aware of how radical your position on this is. And it’s okay to be radical. I’m a radical- the radicalness of the position isn’t a problem in of itself. But a demand for your friends to essentially reject public education as we know it doesn’t just filter out the Bernie Sanders fans, but also the mainstream Democrats, mainstream Republicans, the Trump wing of conservatives, and even moderate classical liberals. You’re left with basically only hardcore libertarians and anarchists agreeing with you.
Using such an out-of-the-mainstream criterion to filter out your friend choices may leave you with slim pickings…
Guy: I don’t think I explained my position well, let me take another stab. I didn’t even necessarily have academic roles in mind: more just the idea that having deemed oneself an intellectual, society should then reward you for whatever abstract value you think you may produce. I absolutely believe that there is a place for academics. They provide a valuable service, to the students they teach and to society through research. I have a graduate degree myself. What I take issue with is believing that having earned a degree (or even just having a personal calling) is prima facie evidence of being owed a life as an academic or in general being compensated by society to do what you studied. Furthermore, I’d be inclined to think that self-delusion in the dogged pursuit of academia is often additional evidence of a lack of intellectual merit for just such a role. As in, if you were smarter, you’d have known your odds and done something else. I wouldn’t say that of everyone though, and I also wouldn’t conclude that there aren’t plenty of other valid reasons to pursue an advanced education.
>But #2 has to be, by far, the least likely to get me an accurate answer of all ideas I could brainstorm.
Not doing #2 is a telltale sign of being ideology-driven, to me. You don’t have to trust the answer you’re given by X-people about how they feel re: Y, but if you’re pontificating about it without even asking them or considering their likely answer in your chain of thoughts, you’re doing a bad job. People’s own ideas about how they feel re: Y, or why they support Z, have to count for something.
Which is to say, Nozick’s article reads really bad, like atrociously bad to me.
@Ouroborobot
You (or your friend) made the same point as Nozick, only using fewer words.
Differences between people that put others on top should be eradicated; differences between people that put me on the top should be celebrated.
People chase passions because they want to do something fun and cool instead of work. It is often a selfish thing to do and risky, especially if you aren’t honest with yourself about your talents.
Unfortunately a generation has been brought up to think that anything less than ‘finding your passion’ makes you an unfulfilled and boring ‘cog’ with a boring instagram feed.
The reality is that choosing a career based on fun factor is usually a mistake. Everything fun gets boring after doing it the same way a thousand times, and you are competing for wages against all the other people that joined in for fun. And many of these careers, like creative writing, are winner-take-all activities so unless you’re in the top .1% of hard work and talent you will end up working for near minimum wage like our friend here.
+10,000. I was extremely good at and loved photography, but after 10 years of doing it for a living I hated it. I haven’t touched a camera in 3 years now and don’t miss it.
Choosing a career has to be a balance between what’s fun and what’s secure. If your job pays well but you hate every minute of it (not because you hate all jobs, but because you hate this one), it’s likely to ruin you psychologically in the long term, and you are likely better off finding a more enjoyable career, even at a somewhat lower salary.
@Ouroborobot >
On reflection, perhaps your friends political leanings may be used as a way out of his rut, but not through academia, have him be like an old timer I knew who became blue-collar in the 1940’s “to organize the working-class”.
For this to work your friend needs to be led to think like the old Left, and want to “salt” the “proletariat”.
Since the traditional response of the working class upon encountering the would-be “vanguard” is to punch them till they quit squawking he’ll need to impersonate some one blue collar, a passing familiarity with local sports teams and actually working will likely suffice.
He (presumably) wants a median or better wages, so I suggest he find work repairing air-conditioning, as an electrician, a plumber, or a steamfitter.
To become one of the working-class (in order to “organize it” and to have a median income have him work 9,000 hours as a union spprentice and take the provided (and required) five years of night classes (I was in my early 30’s, but a classmate was in his 50’s, and I knee a steamfitters apprentice in his 60’s, a struggle in your 40’s but not impossible).
Have him check out: http://www.calapprenticeship.org/about.php
He’ll need to practice doing arithmetic fast for the entrance test and then he’ll be on his way!
Maybe in time he’ll be a union leader or maybe in time he’ll be a contractor himself “to beat the capitalists at their own game!”, whichever it is he won’t be living in his parents basement.
Well, there is the fact that he could have had any number of high paying careers. He walked away from coding, and turned down other job offers to continue to pursue his studies. I do genuinely believe he feels like he was meant to do this, that it’s the only thing that will make him happy, and that his current station is damning to society. I don’t think he has any desire to actually work such a job. It’s the life of the mind or bust, and if it doesn’t work out it’s the world that’s wrong.
My siblings and I struggled through our 20s to hit the traditional markers of progress and we all had had stints of living at home of varying lengths. We’ve all done better in our 30s, and to still be in that situation in your 40s is considerably more worrisome, but I’ve had some frank talks with my dad about that was like for him and I think I can shed some light on the logic.
They have the same sorts of feelings that Ouroborobot has, but much more intensely because he’s their kid. I’m sure they’ve done everything they could to fix things, but it hasn’t worked and their only real options are coddle him or kick him out of the house. Now, maybe in the end it would be better for them to kick him to the curb, but that involves destroying one of the two most important relationships in their lives and it might not work. He’s their kid and they love him. I sympathize with them greatly.
I’m sure they have lots of options, like charging him rent. And we don’t know if they’ve actually given tough advice. They could be doing a good job I suppose, we just don’t know.
Your problem is that you pity your friend. You cannot be friends with somebody and pity them at the same time. Your pity also causes the resentment that you clearly feel towards him. If you didn’t pity him, but regarded him equally (or, better, without judgement), you would simply tell him to stop being an asshole when he is insulting you. Friends can do that.
If you want to remain friends with him, don’t pity him and don’t judge him. It’s his life and his choices, you don’t have to agree, you don’t even need to have an opinion. If he asks you for advice you can give it. What you should do, is take him aside and tell him that you feel that you’re drifting apart and that this bothers you. That you feel that something has come between you and that you want to move past this. You can even tell him that you love him (if you do) and give him a hug.
If you stop pitying him, but don’t want to do any of that, then you shouldn’t be friends anymore. Just withdraw from his life and let it be. Maybe he will come to you for an honest conversation, or maybe you will just drift apart and that will be ok too. But also in this case, don’t judge him. It’s still his life.
Of course, I can’t really tell you what to do. But this is what it looks like from my point of view.
This is helpful, and accurate I think. There is also almost certainly an element of resentment for the way I perceive him to have willfully avoided standard adulthood while coasting on family privilage. Maybe I’m a little jealous, in a way. I want to be better than that, of course. But it’s there. I also wonder if I had followed a similar path and done something that society doesn’t reward with money, would I feel those same feelings that drive him be angry at society. Probably, I think. Is my own libertarian-ishness all post hoc and based on my current situation, or would I still feel the same if our roles were reversed. Also I think I accidentally reported your comment, which was 100% a phone typing mistake.
No good deed goes unpunished…
Again, just be straight with your friend and don’t worry too much about the politics.
I don’t talk about politics with friends (present company excepted, natch). If he comes over and starts going on about politics, just tell him “nope, no politics!”
I’ve had a somewhat similar experience with someone close to me, in the opposite direction, where they started becoming a very aggressive right-wing sucker, just falling for the dumbest low-hanging fruit in the right-wing grifter media.
When it first started happening they kept doing things like showing me Alex Jones videos and the like. Fortunately I managed to at least get them to stop doing that by showing them some of his moon landing stuff, and now I occasionally get links to an article with a sincere question “do you think this is a reliable piece?”, which is a massive step up. But it’s still extremely frustrating.
Whenever we talk about anything remotely political it is liable to devolve into a rant against muslims, black people, feminists, etc. And I’m not someone who can’t tolerate hearing opinions that diverge from my own, I’m quite comfortable with accepting that my perspectives are very biased and I can learn a lot from those who I disagree with, etc. But there’s nothing I can learn here, because this person has absolutely 0 knowledge of any of these issues other than that gleaned from watching snippets of editorializing videos from awful people. When I say “rant” I mean it, the “conversation” quickly devolves into minutes of uninterrupted speech on their part, just random free association of awful and stupid vitriol (think a Trump speech with less of a filter and more of an explicit anti-minority bias). I have literally timed this on more than one occasion and they can keep going for more than 10 minutes while I do nothing but grunt or say words like “right” to indicate that I understood a sentence.
I got extremely pissed off last week when we started talking about the current Iran situation. Now, obviously I have my own opinions and biases (fairly standard left wing anti-US ME policy stuff, Chomsky blah blah blah), and it will colour any conversation I have about the topic. But it very quickly became apparent that while they were advocating that the US had the right to do anything at all that it wanted in the ME, up to and including nuking entire states to glass, because something something freedom, democracy, and saving the world from Hitler and Stalin, they literally did not know the difference between Saudi Arabia and Iran. I want to be clear here: I don’t mean that I started asking “gotcha” questions about intricacies of Sunni-Shia differences or whatever. They had heard the words “Saudi Arabia” and “Iran” and knew they referred to nations, but they were entirely unaware of any specifics about either. E.g. they were convinced that Iran had something to do with 9-11, and were unsure about whether it was part of Iraq. The reason that Iran was a justified target for any US aggression was simply that it was “one of those countries”, and anything the Trump administration does is inherently good. I’m obviously paraphrasing here, but I’m not caricaturing, this is I think a fairly unvarnished presentation of their beliefs.
This is just every left-wing caricature of MAGA/Breitbart types made flesh, I think.
I haven’t said this yet, but next time we have one of these “conversations” I’m going to be explicit that I refuse to listen to anything they have to say until they can prove that they have some knowledge of the basic facts. It’s just too infuriating and draining, and my time is worth too goddam much.
Huh apparently I needed to get that off my chest. On the off chance @Ouroborobot is still reading, I’ll add that I sympathize. I don’t read or watch Jordan Peterson, and I know I would have extremely deep disagreements with him, but I will say that I agree that the “clean your room” stuff matters, and that there are numerous people on the left along the lines of your friend whose inability to wipe their own ass is extra infuriating. A lot of them are just young, and that’s understandable, but your friend isn’t. I genuinely believe that the world is structured in unfair ways (again, standard left-wing stuff, details currently unimportant) and that it should be structured such that people can do whatever they want with their lives (including nothing). But the world isn’t structured that way, and without rich parents most people have to make compromises and live in the world as it is, and they have to do what they need to do to be able to support themselves and those they care about. Which requires things like competence, and should encourage common human decency. It sounds like your friend is lacking in both. It sucks. Good luck.
What does that mean? If somebody literally does nothing, and nobody else supports him, he starves to death.
Are you saying that the world should be structured so that somebody should have the option of doing nothing productive, spending all his time staring at the wall, or reading, or playing video games, and still be provided by the work of other people with food and housing and such? That seems like a hard position to defend, unless you mean that, in a properly structured world, God would provide manna from heaven, free houses, and the like.
More or less, yes. Everyone gets what they need for a reasonably comfortable life, with no exceptions and no preconditions (except possibly related to violent criminals). I think this should be a (the?) fundamental goal of society.
I realize that you’re far better qualified to argue (against) the point than I am, and I accept that I’m not winning any converts here, and that this will seem hopelessly naive and borderline insane, but I’m not going to debate it for now. Just wanted to clarify that yes, I am stating what you think I’m stating.
At a tangent, not a debate, you remind me of one of my father’s stories. He was in Poland, talking with a Polish economist, and asked him if he was still a socialist. The economist replied that he still believed in socialism, but you needed the right objective conditions first. You needed the sort of society where everyone had a house, and a car, and a maid.
“Including the maids?” my father asked.
“Including the maids.”
Yes, exactly! If you could provide a theoretical basis for this I’d appreciate it.
Obviously, the one thing that kept socialism from succeeding was the lack of robo-maids.
(Also, you’d need robotic kids that would sing the songs about glorious Soviet Union, because when I had to do it as a real kid, it was boring as fuck.)
Now, this is less ironic than it may seem, because I agree that at some moment, it is simply easier to give away some things for free. Most obviously in the software world, no one cares if millions of people are using Linux without paying or contributing to the code. We also don’t try to construct street lights so that they wouldn’t shine on people who don’t pay local property taxes.
So… if we ever get to a situation where just making billion cars and giving everyone a free car will somehow be simpler that trying to keep evidence about who paid for what… then we should simply give everyone a free car and stop thinking about it.
It’s just… we are not there, yet. And we won’t get there by wishful thinking.
I feel the opposite, that if you are here and alive and capable, you need to help out. If you don’t make the world a better place, or at least work in some way to keep it the same, you don’t deserve to live. It isn’t a hard bar to cross especially as our society gets richer, so at some point just being nice to people around you and not berating flight attendants should qualify. I don’t know what moral framework that follows.
And I’ll take the middle position. You can be as lazy a bastard as you like so long as it’s on your own dime.
Isn’t this what UBI is all about? Tax the “rich” (for some very expansive definiton of “rich”) and redistribute even to people who don’t work and have no intention to work. Now, I’m skeptical that UBI can be viable, but it certainly is a position that has been seriously considered.
He probably saw this. Iran ordered to pay billions to relatives of 9/11 victims.
I’ve found the trick to dealing with people like that is to suppress that particular instinct and just sit as passively as possible. People generally find it really hard to talk to someone in the absence of all the usual grunts/nods/other affirmations and tend to peter out quite quickly.
Going “gray rock” is a fine method for dealing with someone you can’t get away from, but is it any good for trying to preserve a friendship?
Poor bastard, self-inflicted injuries and all. I once had a friend who was bound and determined to become a programmer, in spite of lacking any glimmer of a talent for it, to the point of essentially having an anti-talent.
Politics was not an issue, but other than that, your friend reminds me of mine. You both have my sympathy, but, unfortunately, no useful ideas – I’m completely out of contact with this friend now – but OTOH he never approached “best friend” status, so drifting apart was easier.
Your friend’s life seems to absolutely suck by his own standards, and there’s probably nothing he can do to make it better by his own standards. Arguably that’s his own fault, but it is much easier to make it someone else’s fault. That way lies extreme and confrontational politics, and on his current path he’ll find more allies for extreme politics on the left.
You probably can’t talk him out of this. You may be able to maintain the friendship by insisting on a no-politics rule when you are together, and disengaging when he insists on veering into politics. If he hasn’t gone past the point of no return, there’s probably still a part of him that would like an occasional break from politics and his floundering career, and that’s something you can provide.
@Ouroborobot >
Sure, the more my paycheck and (eventual) pension depends on the continuation of “Left” policies the more I move Left, while my wife (who pays our taxes out money I earn that she saves and invests) leans more “Right” than me, but as my potential pension (that I will share with her) grows in value she’s moved from Romney Republican to Bloomberg Democrat (while I’m a 60% Biden Democrat/40% Sanders Democrat). Economic incentives = political views doesn’t quite work always (I know a fair number who receive military pensions who lean more libertarian-ish than me) as well as neighborhood = beliefs, but it’s better than nothing as a “heuristic”.
Okay, my immediate reaction to your description of your friend was to be reminded of a short book from the 1950’s that I read in the ’90’s (when I was less “Left” than now) which helped promote “horseshoe theory” and “political psychoanalysis” (if you do a web-search you’ll find plenty of Left and Right writers using it to explain “the other side”), and I’ll quote from it:
“The True Believer” read much like some of our host’s blog posts, and I recommend it as a “lens” to better understand some political activists, and I note that I’m not immune to what it described, enough coffee and an overlong work week and I suspect I’ll start to agree with Pol Pot (note to self: refuse overtime more!).
I’ll second The True Believer as an excellent lens for viewing political movements.
Well that’s interesting. About half of those quotes I found meaningless, like
but strongly agreed with
and strongly disagreed with
@Conrad Honcho,
Put “holy” in quotation marks, the book was largely speculation on what led so many to Hitlerism and Stalinism, as for the rest of the quotes?
My apologies, I didn’t have pertinent ones ready (I last read the book over 20 years ago!), I just quickly got them to give the flavor of the book.
On the topic of life circumstances shaping politics, I used to have a pet theory that the Great Awokening was a result of the Great Recession. All these left-wing ideas have been bouncing around college campuses for decades, but never escaped into the “real world” because when students graduated and got jobs, they found out the world doesn’t really work that way. The recession produced a large cohort of unemployed college graduates with nothing to do but spread their radical ideas across the world, and eventually it built up momentum into a real-world political shift.
Of course, then the recession ended and the by-then employed woke just kept getting woker, so my theory probably doesn’t explain it.
I don’t have any answer to your particular case. I will say, as a former webcomic enthusiast who watched my onetime communities drift from smugly apolitical in the mid-’00s to hard-left idpol activists a mere decade later, in many cases with exactly the same people… I feel for you.
@BBA >
Sure it can, a critical mass gets “woke” due to the recession (the timing fits), then “woke” snowballs due to more voices.
Fits the subsequent rightward lean from inflation in the ’70’s as well.
It seems more likely to me that the Great Recession supported (although by no means created) the Great Awokening by revealing the degree to which our economy and political environment had been subverted by the financial industry.
I think it’s more due to the rise of social media.
There is the tinfoilsh hypothesis that the Powers That Be pushed hard the Great Awokening in order to defang Occupy and the related anti-1% sentiment that was boiling in the aftermat of the Great Recession.
I generally don’t put much weight on these kind of conspiracy theories, but if anybody has a better hypothesis on why all the financial, cultural and political elites that weren’t explicitely right-wing went woke I’d like to hear it.
My guess would be that young left-wingers tend to be more passionate about their activism than right-wingers, so giving in to their demands is often the path of least resistance, at least in the short term.
I guess the Great Recession might have played a role, insofar as people who would otherwise have got on the career and property ladder and been too busy or had too much to lose for activism instead found themselves either unemployed or underemployed, and hence had no real reason not to continue with their student activism. Hence progressive ideas started leaving the university in a big way at around this time.
This is basically what I believe, not as an organized conspiracy theory but an organic defense mechanism. Pushing all the diversity stuff costs the financial elite nothing and gets the wolves off their backs. And when it comes to things like mass immigration, it’s in their interests anyway because cheap labor. There’s no conspiracy required. If it’s something that makes you money and gets you Morality Points, why wouldn’t you?
right, but why does it give you morality points now when it didn’t 10 years ago? And if you are’t the one who deciding who gets the morality points, are you really elite?
It might have, but it didn’t matter when the Morality Barbarians were not banging on the gates, so why bother? “No atheists in a foxhole” and all that.
Financially yes, culturally no. There’s different types of power and different types of elite.
@conrad
alright, but that just punts the question back to why weren’t the morality barbarians banging at the gates 10 years ago. Something has changed over the last decade, and if the financial elite isn’t pushing it, then who?
I’m going with, “they were, but could be safely ignored because they weren’t threatening the money.”
The hypothesis is that the Great Recession was the trigger: as long as middle class people were doing well, they didn’t care about threatening the elites. There was always the occasional hippie communist talking about destroying capitalism, but nobody was paying attention.
But then the recession hit and you had a class of young adults, including fresh college graduates, suddenly finding themselves underemployed, underhoused and saddled with massive debt, while the elites who had caused this mess with their brazen incompetent if not outright criminal behavior were getting bailouts and landing on their feet. This lead to a strong anti-elite sentiment that was organizing as a political movement.
The elites had to do something to appease the angry mob, and at the same time apply a divide and conquer strategy to disrupt coordination against them. Enter the “progressive stack” at Occupy rallies, woke journalism, woke Holywood, woke capitalism, #MeToo, and so on.
As Conrad Honcho points out, this doesn’t need to be a grand organized conspiracy (although secret mailing lists of journalists where writers for ostensibly competing outlets collude to push political views certainly do exist, e.g. the JournoList or the GameJournoPros whose discovery started the worker ants), rather a mostly decentralized defense mechanism by people who intuitively understand their interests.
It’s not like Social Justice was/is spread in secret. People talk about it openly.
IMO, it’s simply a matter of ideology where the elites have a bubble that believes that a certain solution is just and helps the downtrodden. That many of the actual downtrodden disagree with that solution is then somewhat inconvenient.
The better hypothesis is that it was a natural trend. Some memes spread very well in particular environments that didn’t exist before, like twitter. Fads come and go. Financial elites didn’t push plastic straw bans or skinny jeans either.
Of course, then the recession ended and the by-then employed woke just kept getting woker, so my theory probably doesn’t explain it.
A lot of the loudest voices of that groupe found work in the wokeness industry, jobs like Youtubers, “journalists” in those new youth-newspapers, and diversity-consultants.
That kept the ball rolling.
Somehow, I did not manage to do the blockquote right, and now the edit period is over. The first sentence was supposed to be marked as a quote by BBA.
This is a good answer. Another component is that a lot of these people are still under-employed, and at least some of them have seen themselves get passed over by more recent grads who entered the market at a better time (who wants to hire a CS major who spent 2 years working at Penske, or god forbid as a server, when they can have a perfectly good CS graduate fresh off the vine*)?
*Just to be clear, this does not describe me in the slightest, in case someone was thinking about claiming that I’m projecting my experience. This is what I have observed elsewhere, my experience was pretty much the opposite (went back to school for CS and immediately got a job after graduating with my second degree in 2016).
As someone who ended up losing touch with his former best friend due to their cocktail of undiagnosed personality disorders: you’ll regret it. You’re not going to get much out of cutting this person off, and you’ll lose someone who understands you. You need to have an honest and open conversation with this person about your feelings; with luck, you can reach some kind of understanding, or at least an accommodation.
“Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?
by Robert Nozick”
Huh? From Wikipedia:
“Robert Nozick (/ˈnoʊzɪk/; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University,[4] and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Philosophical Explanations (1981), which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into. His other work involved ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His final work before his death, Invariances (2001), introduced his theory of evolutionary cosmology, by which he argues invariances, and hence objectivity itself, emerged through evolution across possible worlds.[5] ”
Sounds pretty intellectual to me. And this is not a coincidence. Essentially all prominent libertarians, with the exception of the Koch brothers and Peter Thiel (who has a degree in philosophy), are academics.
You don’t owe this guy friendship, and there is nothing you can do to help him.
The next time he complains about his circumstances just tell him “the lord helps those who help themselves.” Then watch the steam shoot out of his ears.
“Something something religion being a superstructure created by the elites to control the masses and justify existing social hierarchies, the opium of the people, and so on.”
Seriously though, I don’t think there is anything to gain by antagonizing this kind of people. Rubbing their failures in their faces will only make them sadder and angrier, rather than teach them a lesson which they would have already learned by the age of 40 if they were able to do so. And it’s not entertaining to watch a friend, even a former one, undergo a meltdown.
Same resentment, different scapegoat. Libertarian academics are the ones who think that their natural superiority would make them as successful in the real world as it did in school, if not for the fact that the stupid masses keep voting for laws that sabotage and obstruct an intelligent person’s natural progress towards greatness.
Does anyone have any advice on how to locate a doctor who has treated a specific rare condition before?
I’ve seen “specialists” aplenty and have been routinely misdiagnosed. After doing a lot of research online (more than just a few minutes on webMD), I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out what I have. But it’s quite rare, and based on my previous experience, it seems likely that most specialists have never seen it. That said, it’s not like, super-ultra-rare, and I live in a large metro area with a very big medical center. It seems statistically likely that of the 100s (more?) of specialists within this metro area, at least a small handful of them have seen someone with this condition before. Given my previous experience, I feel like there’s something of a binary outcome here – doctors who have seen my condition before will be of immense help to me, but ones who haven’t will be of zero (and possibly negative) utility, as they are inclined to misdiagnose me and waste my time and money and comfort on ineffective “treatments” for more common conditions that I don’t have.
But how do I find them? I feel like if this were auto repair, I could just start calling mechanics and asking “Have you replaced the transmission of a 99 Camry before?” until I locate one who says “Yes, many times.” But in medicine, you don’t get to talk to the doctor without making a costly appointment. The only person you can actually talk to is the appointment scheduler who has no idea what cases the doctor has or has not seen. The condition is rare enough that it will never be listed on a website of “things we treat” or stuff like that.
The brute force approach is to do a JSTOR search for the name of the condition, academic content = journals, and subject = “health sciences”. Then scrape the names of all the authors and correlate that with a list of doctors in the relevant specialties in your area.
Alternately, you can work down your list of specialists (you can probably get this from your insurance company’s website: the feature is usually called something like “find a provider”), and for each one, do a google search for the doctor’s name and the name of the condition.
^That. The other thing you might do is get in touch with the clinical trial center at whatever large academic medical center is closest to you (they’ll have a web page, Google hospital + ‘participate in a clinical trial’ or similar) and ask them who the expert is; regardless of whether you want to participate in a clinical trial or not, they’ll either know who the right doctor is or they can direct you to somebody who does.
An alternative path is to look for a good diagnostician (or a Diagnostician, occasionally, but it doesn’t really have be an official position for him/her to be good). He wouldn’t have encountered your specific condition, but he would be open to rare conditions as a category – that’s more or less what makes him good at this job, the willingness and skill to pursue lower probability possibilities.
As it happens this is somewhat relevant to me as well. Had mild gastric discomfort a year ago and went for a checkup mostly out of general principles. Got a good doctor, and she kept following up until we recently stumbled on something that begins to look like an autoimmune condition (plus a symptomatic treatment early on). And yes, she was described at one point as “a very good diagnostician”, so word goes around. At least another specialist on that road was a bit miffed about what I’m doing there – from her point of view I was perfectly ok.
That’s how I picked my current doctor as well many years ago – I went for a yearly checkup with my old results, and joked that I’m perfectly healthy but hypochondriac. When she started looking at the data she made a long-ish list of things that were off, and said rather pointedly that’s not “perfectly healthy” . Kept seeing her since.
Also, doctors do a lot more abstracts and case reports than outright papers, so when you find the cases, you can contact authors who can guide you to the doctor(s)
The majority of patients who are sure they have a particular rare condition are
a) wrong
b) annoying for doctors to deal with.
The majority of doctors who will take your word on this and treat you seriously as if you have that condition are fraudsters exploiting those patients.
This makes the problem fundamentally hard; sorry, I don’t have a great solution for you (and to be clear, I doubt you’re in the above group! You’re just getting ruined by their existence.)
The majority are also not au fait with the medical literature (in more than a superficial way).
If you use the right shibboleths (ones that don’t turn up in the wikipedia page) and show you know what they mean, you should be able to distinguish yourself from the internet hypochondriacs.
In principle, yes, but I think a lot of doctors just tune you out instantly and don’t listen once they figure out (they think) who you are.
In my country, I would advice an ‘academic hospital’ which is the Dutch equivalent of a ‘University Hospital.’ These research hospitals get the hard cases referred to them, which means that they pool of patients is less prone to simple conditions, which in turns makes their doctors more willing to consider rare conditions. Also, doctors who do research are probably smarter.
An even more targeted solution is Eric Rall’s, although the more specific you get, the further away the doctors you find may be.
My elbow hurts, probably from too much exercise.
But I still want to work on my upper-body. I am doing less days a week, and continuing my lower-body and core exercises, but my upper-body is already lagging behind those other two areas.
I have access to a machine like this https://www.gymequip.eu/wp-content/uploads/P4-Lateral-Shoulder-Raise-Machine-1-600×600.jpg that helps my delts, which is two muscle groups down, but still leaves a few others.
I put some resistance bands from a wall to my upper arms, and tugged away from the wall. It felt like a good burn, but maybe that’s just because I was applying pressure directly to my biceps.
What upper-body exercises can I do that will let my elbows rest?
Tough to answer this without more specifics.
There really isn’t anything you can do with your upper body without using your arms. Using your arms will almost certainly require using either your triceps or your biceps, both of which are used to mobilize the elbow joint.
If your elbow hurts, it is likely not to due to “too much exercise,” but due to to placing too much stress on the tendons and ligaments of the elbow joint – based on either dynamic movement or a particular position.
Your best bet is to go back to basics and start with the exercises where the elbow joint is in a relatively strong position that also work out the large muscles of the upper body – bench press, standing press, chin-ups, pull-ups. Avoid exercises that isolate triceps and biceps muscles (curls, extensions) or apply greater torque to the elbow joint (e.g., lateral raises – i wouldn’t use that machine if I had elbow pain). See what doesn’t hurt, and then iterate.
Dumbbell flyes and lateral/front raises can all be done with bent elbows. That should take some of the stress off them.
I don’t think pullups and bench row put much stress on the elbow itself, but I could be wrong. If I could only do one upper body exercise it would be one of those.
If you’re doing anything like curls or pushups, keep your elbows tucked in at your sides and that should reduce the strain on them.
And of course shrugs and farmer’s walks are done with the arms totally straight, so there’s zero elbow strain there.
1. Tendon damage follows the iceberg model: you can only feel the tip. So whatever you do, keep doing it for a few weeks after it stops hurting, and get back to regular exercise slower than you’d want.
2. Use the pain to guide you and definitely don’t stop training. See which movements are pain free, and for those that hurt lower the weight and increase the number of repetitions. Up to sets of about 30 repetitions you’re still perfectly fine (i.e. you can do at most 30 reps with that weight). See point 1 and keep the weight low for longer than the pain tells you.
3. There is this one trick that all the doctors hate and can actually solve your problem: Kaatsu. It actually works very well, at least for rehabilitation – unfortunately you can’t use it for extra gains over regular exercise. But it _can_ get you the same punch with only about 30% weight which is exactly what you want in order to let the tendons heal. tl;dr; you reduce the blood flow and thus increase the metabolic damage from exercise. For some reason that stimulates the same muscle growth at much lower weights. A weird but very welcome side effect is that apparently it works almost as well even for muscle groups that aren’t directly affected by the blood flow restriction, i.e. the chest if you wear arm bands, or the glutes if you wear the leg bands. Feel free to look up the research, it’s pretty solid.
Most gyms have a lat pullover machine where your elbows rest on a pad, your elbows are held at 90 degrees while you grip an upper bar above / behind your head, and you pull down in a half-moon from your head to your navel. Works the lats quite well, a bit of some other helper muscles, and also the serratus anterior, which I find hard to target.
Maybe try using a brace to avoid putting too much pressure on the elbow?
If it’s tendinitis, then pulling exercises are going to bother it a lot more than pushing. So you may be able to bench press (maybe at a reduced weight), but pullups or any kind of curls or rows would play merry hell with the tendon. Wearing a compression sleeve can help a little, even if it’s just to remind you not to overdo it.
When you do get back to curls, hammer curls seem to put less strain on the tendons than regular.
I’d also second Radu’s iceberg comment.
What are the unforeseen consequences of my impulsive burning desire to outright ban Caller ID Spoofing?
One consequence (perhaps not the only one) is that your doctor’s office, for instance, would not be able to spoof ‘out’ their official high-level office number when the nurse calls you and your caller ID would have the direct line to her desk. And if they use a call center somewhere to send out automatic appointment reminders, likewise.
Same for my kids’ school system, when I take the kid to the dentist and they robo-call my wife during every class period missed to tell us that she isn’t in school.
Someone (maybe on this website) suggested that this could be resolved by only allowing you to ‘spoof’ phone numbers you actually ‘own’.
I think you would still be able to say “anonymous.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN + having the option to block anything that doesn’t validate will effectively allow you to only spoof your own number.
How would you go about banning it?
An obvious seeming solution to me would be something along the lines of the certificates that the World Wide Web uses to verify a website’s authenticity, issued by the phone company to verify the authenticity of the number that’s calling you.
But given that phone companies can’t work together to make anything better than SMS/MMS, I’m not holding my breath.
What’s the worst thing your country did during the 20th century, domestically and abroad?
For Canada, I’m pretty sure the worst thing we did domestically was something with the First Nations (Indians). Kidnapping kids and putting them in the residential schools was pretty bad. Or maybe something to do with the Great Depression. I’m a bit fuzzy on that bit of economic history. I’m under the impression the US government mishandled a recession through a tight-money policy and then raising trade barriers, and most other nations followed suit.
Abroad? Canada barely has a foreign policy apart from the US. I suppose we could have saved a lot of lives by accepting more refugees from Europe during the 30’s.
Broke the back of the British Empire, which was a (perhaps THE) force for stability in the world, setting off the messes that are current Africa and India/Pakistan because decolonization was rushed rather than allowing it to happen naturally.
Close second is abandoning Chiang and the Chinese Nationalists and allowing Mao to destroy that great civilization, which is only now starting to recover to its natural place of prominence.
The British Empire which engaged in every war under the sun was a force of stability? You kidding me?
The British are the ones who drew inane borders in Africa and drained it of its resources hence its current problems.
Yes.
No.
So all those British invasions, mass murders, rapes, pillaging, theft of land, genocide and inane drafting of borders actually helped Africa? Who knew? Guess you should have told the Africans.
That is an interesting question. Assume Europeans never visited or colonized Africa. Would there be more or fewer Africans today? Would the lives of those Africans be better or worse?
Genuine question. I’m unsure of my answers.
Africa under self-rule wasn’t exactly an utopia. From Wikipedia:
“Since Dahomey was a significant military power involved in the slave trade, slaves and human sacrifice became crucial aspects of the ceremony. Captives from war and criminals were killed for the deceased kings of Dahomey. During the ceremony, around 500 prisoners would be sacrificed. As many as 4,000 were reported killed In one of these ceremonies in 1727.[5][6][7] Most of the victims were sacrificed through decapitation, a tradition widely used by Dahomean kings, and the literal translation for the Fon name for the ceremony Xwetanu is “yearly head business”.[8] In later years this ceremony also included the spilling of human blood from the sacrificed.[4] Related with this, there was also a significant military parade in the ceremonies that further displayed the military might of the kingdom of Dahomey.[2]”
Oh I can’t resist, please enjoy:
An Englishman Plays Risk
skit by a comedy troupe that I’m sure was first introduced in a link provided by @Deiseach, but I don’t remember that particular one being linked here before.
It’s short and funny.
I have no opinion on wheither the British Empire was a force of stability or not, but this particular journalistic cliché should really be burried and forgotten, as firstly, ethnostates aren’t inherently more stable than multi-ethnic states, and more importantly, ethnostates aren’t born out of some benevolent heavenly force drawing neat borders that clearly give each ethnicity its own contiguous territory.
Because unless you live on a small island with small population, that’s pretty much impossible — populations are naturally distributed in a patchwork, fractal fashion, which no border could perfectly match; if Xs and Ys are neighbors, no border, no matter how finely drawn, will give you a situation where you have no Ys in Xlandia and no Xs in Ystan (and that’s even before getting into the specifics of Africa where lots of populations are still traditionally herders and thus nomadic).
The way real ethnostates are born is one ethnicity which is a majority or at least a plurality of the people in a given territory acquires control of that territory, and then, depending on how nice/relatively powerful that ethnicity is:
1) They compromise with other ethnicities and create a federative county (Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, Singapore)
2) They more or less forcibly assimilate the other ethnicities to the dominant culture (France, Italy, Sweden, Japan)
3) They ignore minorities and rule without concern for their presence or rights until those assimilate or leave on their own (Germany historically, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Romania)
4) They deport the minorities elsewhere (Bhutan, Poland, Greece)
5) They exterminate the minorities (take your pick).
In practice it’s often a combination of several of the above (eg: Turkey was ideally aiming for 2 but ended up doing a lot of 4 and 5).
But “state borders that don’t respect ethnic groups” is the textbook example of a pleonastic expression. State borders don’t respect any religious, cultural or ethnical territory pretty much by design. Rather it’s the religious, cultural or ethnical territory that is always forced, retroactively, and more or less gently, to conform to state borders.
It’s also really strange that the people talking about the Europeans forcing ethnicities together in Africa are the same people who say that Western countries need more minorities, for our own benefit. Is diversity good or bad?
Also, there was one country that was put together explicitly for the sake of ethnic and cultural similarity and that was Somalia.
I’m curious as to what your vision of ‘natural’ decolonization would’ve looked like, especially in India. India expected to get home rule after contributing more than a million soldiers to the British war effort in WWI, along with God only knows how much money, and Britain refused to honor Indian contributions with even token self-rule. After that, the Empire destroyed itself through arrogance and despotism – look at the Bengal famine of 1943.
Probably something similar to Canada. During World War II, making India a Dominion was proposed by Churchill, but obviously Attlee went a different direction.
India also had a large revolt with coordination between Hindus and Germans in WWI that caused the British to mistrust their nationalist movement for obvious reasons.
The Bengal famine was an absolute disaster, but it was also in part caused by the fact that merchant shipping on the Indian Ocean was heavily limited by Japanese raids and the increased need to feed refugees from Japanese occupied Burma.
From your link:
In the end, the British couldn’t hold a global empire together regardless, but rushing the end of it due to American pressure resulted in bizarre borders and multiple wars, which combined with the intercommunity violence resulting from the borders, was just as bad from a humanitarian perspective as the famine.
0
So being occupied by a foreign power is not oppression?
Well this is a very……..interesting definition.
‘Dramatically worsen’ is the key phrase there. Whatever you think of Britain’s colonial policies, they were at least decently consistent.
After WWII, India never would’ve accepted anything short of full independence. Why would they? By that point, the British government had proven that they couldn’t be trusted to stay out of Indian internal affairs, no matter what fig leaf of self-rule they offered.
That isn’t an ethical argument for the British to maintain tighter control over India; if anything, it’s an argument for the British to cede control faster, so that Indians won’t be tempted to work with enemies of the Empire.
None of that changes the fact that there wouldn’t have been a famine if not for Churchill extracting as much food as possible from India for the British Isles, and continuing to do so even well after he knew that the British Isles were well-supplied and that his actions had contributed to a brutal famine.
It’s hard to imagine a conclusion to the British Empire that wouldn’t have involved violence, and using force to keep India and Africa in the Empire longer – and there’s no other way it could’ve been accomplished – wouldn’t have made that violence any less inevitable or brutal. I don’t think your argument here is well-connected to reality.
So being occupied by a foreign power is not oppression?
Most Europeans are descended from people who were “occupied by a foreign power”, accepted their fate and went on with their life, assimilated to the dominant culture, and effectively became indistinguishable from their occupiers.
What exactly is your definition of stability?
Stable profiteering and exploitation of sovereign nations for the benefit of the crown?
The average resident is unlikely to have his life dramatically worsen due to war, crime or oppression.
If the average resident’s life is improving, then that’s fine. IF it’s getting worse (i.e. Belgium under Leopold) then that’s monstrous and should end. In most places with British rule, the life of residents improved throughout time.
The Opium Wars certainly did not make China more stable. Or is it ok to start wars to force a sovereign nation to buy your drugs?
In general, propping up preferred trade partners that might otherwise have been overthrown does not seem to be a recipe for raising standard of living for residents in say, Africa or India.
Crediting industrialization to imperialism hardly seems fair. If anything, industrialization made British imperialism possible.
@DragonMilk
I’m not defending everything the British did. Far from it. I am saying that the US breaking the British Empire of the 1940s and 50s made the world substantially worse.
More people died in the partition of India than the US lost in the entirety of WWII.
Ah, got it. I read too much into your assertion.
If your claim is that setting aside how the status quo was acquired, dismantling the British Empire holdings that haphazardly was a huge mistake, then I can get on board with that.
@DragonMilk
That was indeed my exact assertion.
The two things the United States did in the 20th Century that caused the most deaths were force the British to rush decolonization and abandon China.
I put China second because I am less sure they could be saved, but if they could’ve put Chiang in charge of all of mainland China somehow, that would’ve saved more.
@EchoChaos
Note that not having a rushed decolonization of Indonesia, forced by the US, might have prevented the 1965 mass killings, which cost the lives of 500k-1M, as well as continued conflicts in places that keep wanting independence from Indonesia, which the Dutch would like to have granted.
@Aapje
I honestly don’t know much about Indonesian independence, but it doesn’t surprise me much there either.
Like the whole Papua. But AFAIU, the issue with Indonesia was not just that it was rushed, but that the Dutch didn’t want Suharto (because he was a collaborationist, and they didn’t want to prize that), and the US wanted him as a way of keeping communism out. So it wasn’t just that the US rushed it; they also dictated how it would be done.
@EchoChaos
Sukarno, who the Dutch didn’t want to become president, but whom the Dutch were forced to give control by the US, got into a symbiotic relationship with the communists. Indonesia had the largest communist party outside of the Sino-Soviet sphere.
Sukarno’s policy was Nasakom: a combination of nationalism (nasionalisme -> nas), islam (agama=religion -> a) and communism (komunisme -> kom). He himself was the dictator who implemented Guided Democracy, where that ‘democracy’ was the seeking of consensus among powerful groups.
The pivot to communism probably hard to predict, since Sukarno had collaborated with the Japs and was the leader of the nationalists, presumably the least horrible major block (the others being the communists and the Islamists).
The CIA supported regional rebellions against Sukarno’s government, to little effect, other than making Sukarno more anti-American/Western. However, in 1965, they backed a successful coup by general Suharto and assisted in the mass killings of (suspected and actual) communists. Suharto was dictator until the Reformasi in 1999, when Indonesia had their first democratic elections.
PS. Indonesian governments tend to have little interest in investigating or harping on Dutch crimes, to the dismay of Dutch activists who think that the Dutch should recognize these more and give reparations to the victims, which is probably because that would risk a reckoning with the Indonesian mass killings, which are far, far worse than anything the Dutch did.
@ana53294
You are confusing Suharto with Sukarno. Sukarno was the collaborator, who ironically turned out to be very favorable to communism.
Suharto was the mass-murdering general who replaced Sukarno through a CIA-backed coup.
Off thr top of my head “former British colony” seems to have been a good bet.
English speaking Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States have fared well, for non-majority English speaking nations: Zimbabwe is a mess but Kenya has done well compared to it’s neighbors, Afghanistan and Pakistan aren’t so hot, but India is a representative democratic-republic with a billion people (world’s first!), plus they have cool steam trains, still make copies of the 1950’s Morris Oxford motorcar, and make Royal Enfield motorcycles that they inherited from the British.
Not too shabby!
In contrast former French colony Vietnam is a nominally Marxist fascist regime (like China), the French former African colonies still have French troops clean up from time-to-time, Spanish former colonies are a mixed bag, Costa Rica is nice but Guatemala is fled from, former Dutch colony Indonesia is the world’s largest majority Muslim democratic-republic, so that’s kind of impressive (did they have any others?).
The U.S.A.’s former colony The Philippines is relatively okay, but they seem to subsist a lot on remittances from emigrants, and was-basically-a-colony Liberia has been a mess since their ’79 revolution.
All-in-all the British left a relatively good track record (sorry @Deiseach, Dad, and Grandma!).
“These country’s are doing okay”/well after x happened therefore x must be the cause” is absolutely moronic reasoning. India was a relatively flourishing place before the British got there. India is only now finally able to rejuvenate itself after it was sacked and plundered by the British. Open a history book for Christ’s sake.
India wasn’t a unified nation-state before the British got there. I have absolutely no idea what a no-EIC (or its Dutch, Portuguese, and French counterparts) subcontinent looks like, but it’s almost certainly not a single basically-functional modern democracy.
@An Fírinne says: “These country’s are doing okay”/well after x happened therefore x must be the cause” is absolutely moronic reasoning…”
I feel very complimented now!
No British “Raj” likely means no 1958 to 2014 Hindustan Ambassador, or Royal Enfield India, which are almost as cool as the Ural, and the Morgan Plus 8!
The world would be a sadder place without such treasures, plus no Empire, my grandmother doesn’t move from Ireland to an English speaking part of North America, my wife’s parents (with no island of Britain ancestry) don’t move here from a former British colony, and our sons aren’t born.
@An Fírinne says: “…Open a history book for Christ’s sake”
I have, I even recommended one a few posts ago.
All-in-all the British left a relatively good track record (sorry @Deiseach, Dad, and Grandma!)
*Come Out Ye Black and Tans remixes INTENSIFY* 😀
@Deiseach says: *Come Out Ye Black and Tans remixes INTENSIFY* 😀”
Since that song is awesome YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF A POSITIVE LEGACY!
[Speaking of things Irish, Liam Neeson’s greatest performance (assisted by Americans attempting Irish accents): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zMtjj7AxxiU
Also, from an album I’ve owned since 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgqa3cVOxUc
and a song from 1978: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tj0KGDzXYgY
Treasures all!]
I’d argue that the british broke their own back. British inter-war foreign policy frequently seems almost as if it were deliberately designed to drive the dominions away. And the empire falls apart post ww2 in large part because british economic policy was so terrible. How terrible, you ask? Well, in 1950, germany was substantially poorer than the UK, as it had been for centuries. This relationship is reversed over the next 20 years and by 1970, germany is actually richer. Despite more wartime damage, less aid from the US, the country being divided, and similar levels of military expenditure germany manages almost double the UK’s annual per capita GDP growth. And german policy isn’t exceptional, france manages the same trick and italy grows even faster.
Can you say more? This is really interesting, I had no idea London did that badly.
There’s not much else to say, british socialism was a mess. Rationing continued through much of the 50s. There are stories that Tolkien wanted to write that we don’t have because of paper shortages. Full employment, nationalization, and labor action made british companies less and less competitive internationally and less productive at home. By the 70s, they literally couldn’t keep the lights on and had to go begging the IMF for loans like a developing country.
The UK was never going to be a superpower, but if they’d had economic performance like the continent the decline would have been much less precipitous, which likely would have meant fewer embarrassing reversals and abandoned commitments, the effect of which was cumulative. By 1945 I think the odds of keeping the empire (at least the dominions) together were pretty low, but britain’s lousy economic performance made the end quick and inevitable.
@cassander
I think that fact is crucial if you want to understand what motivates Cummings.
@Lambert
I don’t catch your meaning.
It’s what he wants to not repeat.
I think it was him who complained that the postwar UK never found a ‘post-imperial role’.
I think we need an adversarial collaboration on the subject of “Was the British Empire (or European colonial empires in general) beneficial or harmful for the inhabitants of the colonies?”
Sure, but that’s a different assertion than mine, which is “rushed decolonization caused more harm than being colonized for slightly longer in order to decolonize without literally millions dying”.
America’s War on Drugs kinda started in the 19th century (maybe with the dispatch of Bishop Brent to the Philippines to countermand Taft’s relatively laissez-faire handling of their existing opium laws?) but the 20th century is definitely when we made it a big official permanent policy and exported it all over the globe. It counts for both foreign and domestic.
The international war on drugs originated with China, not the US.
Can you explain more? My understanding is that the thing you’re referencing was between China and England (and maybe India to some extent). While that was about drugs (specifically, plying Chinese markets with opium as a way to open them up to outside trade, IIRC) it was isolated from, or at most may have set a kind of precedent for, America’s war on drugs; it isn’t really continuous with/part of it.
The international and the national components are different; the shortest version is that international anti-drug efforts began with the International Opium Convention in 1912, as a direct response to the opium wars.
ETA: It was expanded/update/replaced, depending on your perspective, by the Paris Convention, which was updated in turn by something in the 1960s, which in turn was updated… I don’t remember when. But the framework was created there.
The 1912 Opium Convention (a.k.a the Hague Convention) was largely the brainchild of Bishop Brent, whom I mentioned above and whose work fighting drugs started in the Philippines. He was the primary American delegate both to the Hague convention and its 1909 predecessor in Shanghai.
Anyway, I agree the War on Drugs probably could be said to have officially started in 1912, but even then it’s hard to deny America’s being the primary player in pushing it.
As a german …. well … uhm …. I mean …
We know what you mean and we still haven’t forgiven you for Nena.
Nena? Ever heard about Uwe Boll?
Mostly things it didn’t do.
With 20/20 hindsight, not pillaging Germany until it was sent back to the 14th century after WWI.
More realistically, not rearming harder in the 30’s, not backing up Czechoslovaquia and not being more offensive during the invasion of Poland.
That’s the first time I see this proposed, presumably as a strategy to avoid WW2. My understanding of that, although limited, suggests that the treaty of Versailles was too harsh on Germany and that this led to the rise of Hitler.
To what extent was Germany really the “bad guy” in WW1? My current understanding of WW1 is that it was really a dumb war fought for no valid reason and that everybody should share the blame. But the allies decided to really stick it to the Germans in Versailles, with the result that we know today. Is this a case of, “the drug did not have the intended effect, let’s double the dose”?
It was proposed by some after WWI and partially implemented after WWII before Truman realized that the West needed Germans on the front lines of the Cold War.
From Your Job in Germany (made by and for the U.S. Army in 1945):
From what I’ve read, the morgenthau plan was never really taken seriously by anyone other than morgenthau. FDR talked it up with Stalin (and talked it down to others), but the Brits were absolutely opposed to it, as were other senior members of the roosevelt administration.
@cassander
Then you’ve heard wrong. It was the official agreement and Truman started executing it. The Wikipedia page is pretty similar, although my memory comes from Hoover’s book on the subject. Hoover strongly opposed deindustrialization and is credited with getting Truman to reverse it.
The British sector did it substantially less because they didn’t really want to reduce that much, but they agreed after US and French pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_plans_for_German_industry_after_World_War_II
For how the war started, primary blame has to go to the Black Hand organization for assassinating the heir to the Austrian throne, to Serbia for tolerating and sheltering the Black Hand, and to Austria for insisting on war instead of accepting the diplomatic humiliation of Serbia and the suppression of the Black Hand organization as their weregeld for the assassination. Austria also gets a bit of “extra credit” blame for diplomatic perfidy against Russia in the 1908 Bosnia Crisis, which played a very large role in making the Russian government feel they had no choice but to take a hard line in guaranteeing Serbian independence against Austria.
There’s also secondary blame that attaches to most of the other Great Powers. Germany for the infamous “blank check” promise of diplomatic and military support they gave to Austria during the July Crisis, for being the country that actually declared war against France and Russia, and for invading Belgium just being in the way. Russia gets some blame for being the first country to mobilize (effectively forcing Germany’s hand, at least in the East), at a time when negotiations were still possible. France gets blame for giving encouragement similar to the German Blank Check to Russia during the July Crisis. Of all the countries involved in the war from the start, only Britain, Belgium, and Luxembourg came in with clean hands.
As for the conduct of the war, it was absolutely awful all around. The worst offenders by far were the Ottoman, Austrian, and Bulgarian governments: the Ottomans committed outright genocide against the Armenians, while the Austrians and Bulgarians massacred several thousand Serbian civilians and caused at least 600,000 more civilian deaths from malnutrition and disease during their invasion and occupation of Serbia.
Germany’s main war crimes were the Rape of Belgium (greatly exaggerated by British wartime propaganda, but the underlying truth was plenty bad), introducing the use of poison gas (France had used tear gas first in 1914, which was a war crime under the Hague conventions, but chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas were order-of-magnitude escalations relative to tear gas), using executions of civilian hostages as an anti-guerrilla tactic, unrestricted submarine warfare, and terror bombardments (by air, ship, and heavy artillery in various times and places) of targets with little or no military value. Germany also has to be considered complicit to some extent for the crimes of its allies, which it tolerated and indirectly enabled.
The main Allied war crime I’m familiar with (apart from also using poison gas, which can be justified as retaliation for German gas attacks) was the British starvation blockade. Blockades and commerce raiding were and are considered legitimate tools of war, but only when they’re targeted against enemy-flagged merchant ships or against neutral-flagged ships carrying war materiel bound for an enemy destination. The British took an unusually broad interpretation of both “war materiel” and “bound for an enemy country”, most notably by classifying all food (because it could be used by troops in the field) and fertilizer (because it could be used to grow food for soldiers, and because it could be used as a chemical precursor for explosives) as contraband, and by also applying the same blockade to neutral countries (Netherlands and Denmark) that had substantial overland trade with Germany. About half a million Germans are believed to have died due to malnutrition before the blockade was lifted in 1919. The Netherlands and Denmark didn’t starve to the extent Germany did, but both countries experienced severe food shortages and imposed strict rationing, and the Netherlands at least had one major food riot in 1917.
Thanks for a very interesting read.
I think you’re understating just how big a point these are. Russia and France’s involvement are the direct factors that turned this from a regional conflagration into a world war. Everything up until Tsar Nicolas’ decision to mobilize was just politics as usual.
Russian mobilization escalated the conflict, but this statement is factualy incorrect. Austria-Hungary declared mobilization on 28th of July (EDIT: or partially even earlier, 28th of July is a date when manifesto of King-Emperor Franz Joseph to “My Nations” declaring general mobilization and war on Serbia was published), and Russia on 31st of July.
“My Nations” (also translated as “Too My Peoples”) is a declaration of war, but not a declaration of mobilization. It was issued on the 28th and published on the 29th. A declaration does seem like it would imply mobilization, but I don’t think the actual mobilization was ordered until the 31st, which is in keeping with the general level of competence that Austria’s senior military leaders demonstrated during the war.
Russia announced a partial mobilization on the 29th. The general mobilization was ordered on evening of the 29th or the morning of the 30th and publicly announced on the 31st. At least one source (written by a former Russian senior general staff officer in 1922 while living in exile in Berlin) suggested that the partial mobilization announcement was a smokescreen for the general mobilization, on the grounds that the staff had advised the Tsar that partial mobilization was infeasible. But although the author would have bene in a good position to know if that were the case, the context in which he wrote his account suggests we take his claims with a degree of caution.
It’s also worth noting that Austria’s mobilization was initially directed against Serbia only, sending most available units to the Serbian border and away from the Russian border. It was absolutely aggressive towards Serbia (although that was a moot point after the declaration of war), but not towards Russia. At least not the way Russia’s mobilization (sending armies to their borders with Austria-Hungary) were towards Austria-Hungary.
I’m inclined to agree, but laying nontrivial amounts of blame on Russia and France cuts against the grain of conventional wisdom enough that I decided to play it safe and understate my case.
@Eric Rall
I checked my sources, or to be specific Watson, Ring of Steel, Germany and Austria Hungary at War, 1914-1918, and this appears to be wrong. Watson claims that
In addition, Wikipedia claims that Serbia ordered mobilization first on 24 July, making Russia third country to mobilize.
The part about Russian military commanders being convinced about impracticality of partial mobilization is correct, but this timeline is slightly off, alt least according to Watson. According to him, Russian Emperor ordered partial mobilization of 4 military districts on 28 July, in reaction to Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Serbia, but Russian Cief of Staff Ianushkevich went beyond orders and on the night from 28 to 29 July wired the commanding officers of all 12 Russian military districts that first day of general mobilization will be 30 July. Nicholas first ordered general mobilization on 29, but “almost immediately” canceled the order, and then ordered general mobilization for real on the next day, 30 July.
This is absolutely correct, in fact, Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia on 6 August, later than Germany. But in the same way, Russian mobilization was directed against Austria-Hungary, not against Germany. Just like Russia went to war to protect its ally against Austria-Hungary, Germany went to war to protect its ally against Russia.
It was either too harsh or not harsh enough. The Kurds have had various low level insurgencies over the decades, but they never started a real war because they don’t have a country from which to build a real military apparatus.
In 1919 Germany qua Germany was new enough that it is conceivable it could have been destroyed as a concept indefinitely. I’m not saying it would have been a good or moral decision, but I think it could have been done and would almost certainly have prevented WWII at least in the way it occurred.
> Upon this one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
The Prince, book III
>My understanding of that, although limited, suggests that the treaty of Versailles was too harsh on Germany and that this led to the rise of Hitler.
It would have been moderately harsh (i.e: might have prevented the rise of another powerhouse Germany 20 years later) if it had been respected.
However, Germany only paid about 15% of the reperation that were agreed on (21 billion marks out of 132), and the Allies gave up on France when it tried to extract reparations by other means (like occupying the Ruhr).
The drug was replaced by a placebo, and it’s the cause of the relapse.
The Ruhr occupation did at the bottom line not help in extracting reperations, and arguably strenghtened the German revanchists.
It is also not clear to me, how a Germany that isn’t an econimic powerhouse, would be able to pay the reperations.
At the same time Germany is the strongest economy in Europe again, and has been for at least 50 years now. And still it does not try to overrun it’s neighbours.
France didn´t have the power to destroy Germany like that after WWI, regardless of imho obviously horrendous immorality of such a plan. In fact, French government at peace conference pushed for harsher terms for Germany, but was overruled by its allies.
Weird coincidence, but I just heard a documentary on radio about how high ranking French veterans from the Indochinese and Algerian wars of independence essentially invented, theorized, formalized and then taught the dirty-war style doctrine of counter insessurectionism (assassinations, forced disappearances and normalized use of torture), and went on to train the military personnel of pretty much every non-communist military junta in the latter part of the 20th century, with especially active collaboration with Operation Condor countries, going as far as giving them direct intelligence about south american refugees in France and looking the other way when those would get mysteriously assassinated on French territory or on their return to South America.
These same experts were also occasionally called for help by the British for their own counter-inserruction activities, notably in Northern Ireland (for some reason the British never formalized their experience and so never had a well defined anti-insurrectionist doctrine of their own).
And while this had no direct French involvement and went beyond the 20th century, these French theories also directly inspired the American doctrine in Iraq under Bush jr.
The US should never be forgiven for electing Woodrow Wilson president. We had help with a lot of our other poor decisions, but that one was entirely on us.
I’ve seen comments like this a few times here. Can you elaborate? What’s so bad about Woodrow?
Elected on a promise not to enter World War One, then went about and entered World War One, then mismanaged the “victory” in such a way that we had to start enumerating our World Wars. Without Wilson, 1920s Germany isn’t nearly as fertile a breeding ground for fascism and we probably don’t get a Nazi government.
Also, was actually as racist as Donald Trump is accused of being. This caused less harm than the geopolitical snafu only because federalism was then strong enough to limit his scope of action on the domestic front and because state laws of the time were racist enough that there wasn’t room for POTUS to make things much worse. But on general unseemliness grounds, not the man anyone even paying lip service to egalitarian ideals wants representing their nation.
On the plus side, Wilson’s supporters didn’t go around chanting “Lock him up!” about Eugene Debs. Wilson already had it taken care of.
Didn’t he also preside over the creation of both the income tax and the federal reserve?
Yes – YMMV on those, but double perfidy points for keeping the income tax after it was explicitly supposed to be a wartime measure only.
@Statismagician
It’s worse than that. Passing the 16th amendment was a big contributor to getting prohibition passed because of how heavily the government relied on liquor taxes prior to ww1. So a bunch of people who didn’t want to fight got drafted and sent overseas, came back to much higher taxes, and couldn’t even console themselves with a drink.
That’s not exactly right. America’s first income tax was passed under Lincoln in 1861, to pay off Civil War debt; it went through a few permutations but was eventually repealed in the mid-1870s. Wilson did create the first peacetime income tax, forty years later, but it wasn’t a reinstatement of Lincoln’s but a new one (and required a constitutional amendment, which Lincoln hadn’t bothered with).
Not great for my bank account, but I wouldn’t say it’s one of the more perfidious things Wilson did.
Also and additionally, popularized and enshrined in the WW1 settlement the idea of ethno-nationalism (“autonomous development”); dividing Europe up into ethno-states was a bloody disaster.
Didn’t help that the scheme was really “ethno-state for the winnerss, and your population spread over 6 different countries, most of which they’re a minority in, for the losers”.
Accidental report, apologies.
As a leftwing foreigner, I do not understand why Wilson is a such darling of American Left.
I mean, that guy was unusually racist even for his, from our perspective abhorrently racist era, purged civil service of black employees, got US into two unecessary wars (intervention to quash Mexican revolution and WWI), and also is the person most responsible for Treaty of Versailles, which was a disaster and key reason for Nazi takeover of Germany.
ETA: Oh, I forgot about Sedition Act of 1918.
@AlesZiegler,
Depends on what you mean by “Left”, anarchists, socialists, and fellow travelers hate Wilson (if they known of him).
Basically Wilson was a Democratic Party President after and before a bunch of Republicans, Wilson was friendly to the A.F. of L. during the war, but mostly it’s that F.D.R. got his big start during the Wilson administration, and the American Left is fond of Franklin Roosevelt who was fond of Wilson.
By-and-large historically minded Leftists hate Wilson as much as the historically minded Right does, mainstream Democrats just say “was a Democrat” if they think of him at all.
Lots of public schools named “Wilson” like there’s lots of schools named “McKinley”, but not many know much of them.
A few hate Wilson, a very few like, most: “Who?”.
@Plumber
Thanks for clearing that up, now it makes sense. I didn´t know that
I don’t recall having heard anything nice about Wilson from anyone on the left; I do remember a bunch of activists trying to have his name removed from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.
@broblawsky
But his name was not removed! Were people who defended him rightwingers? I somehow doubt that.
@AlesZiegler
Certainly some were. They exist, even in Princeton. Also, there is the position of “He was a bad president/person, but we still shouldn’t rename the school”.
@Noah
But isn´t Wilson generaly hated figure on the American Right?
@AlesZiegler
Sure. But people on the right are also more likely to be against removing names of historical figures from stuff on principle (at least in the current political climate).
Given my personal experience with Princeton, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were right-wing, but I can’t give a definitive answer one way or another.
@broblawsky
I’m as right-wing as they get and a Virginian and I hate Wilson. It seems odd that Princeton right-wingers would favor him.
They’re a special breed, certainly. I’ve never encountered such concentrated smugness before.
IDK, but I don’t think Plumber is right about this. Wilson has a lot of defenders. The Murray-Blessing survey of historians had him ranked 6th all time among presidents. If you look at this chart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States#Scholar_survey_results
He is consistently ranked very highly, now at or around 10th place.
@Clutzy
I would be interested to hear pro-Wilsonian argument, but for know this substantially lowers my opinion of US historians.
The Princetonian right had long been skeptical of the general reverence for Wilson that goes far beyond having building named after Wilson. The conservative magazine published an article suggesting a reduction in it(though not necessarily renaming buildings) a few years before the more famous movement to get stuff renamed. When that effort started, they at first reached out to the right and the right was generally supportive. As the group that was pushing for this was a BLM spinoff group, this was an odd coalition but it was showing signs of progress. The right had more moderate goals but this coalition held promise. However, as the movement shifted from an emphasis on reason, discourse, changing people’s minds and coalition building to publicity stunts and aggressive tactics, they completely stoped reaching out to the right and the right at Princeton stopped supporting them. Princeton is not a place where their style of aggressive tactics is part of the culture and most people(especially the right) are very glad of that and so the right as well as much of the campus turned against them because of their abandonment of discourse for aggression.
You’d have to find it from someone else. I always assumed it was because of historians having a bias towards action (WWI, progressivism) and utopianism (League of Nations).
Definitely. Looking at that link from Clutzy, the rankings look nuts to me. Andrew Jackson of all presidents is ranked mostly in the 1st quartile. I think historians rank the presidents by how interesting they are, not how good they’ve been for the country. IMO, it is usually the action oriented presidents that have hurt the country the most. It appears that historians find that position abhorrent.
The others have made excellent points, but it should not be forgotten that he was also an ardent prohibitionist, eugenicist, and infuriatingly sanctimonious moralist who combined the elitism of northern moralistic certitude with the worst sort of southern parochialism.
Entered WWI
I’ll second this. The US staying out of WW1 probably avoids WW2 and the communist takeover of central Europe.
Prussian takeover of central Europe?
Spring offensive got pretty close to suceeding.
Are you proposing that as an alternative, or asking if I mistyped? I’m thinking of the Communist takeover of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc after WW2.
Possible alternative.
Or rather, historical reality that was nipped in the bud when Brest-Litovsk was renounced as part of the terms of Armistice.
The idea of Lebensraum im Ost didn’t come from nowhere.
IDK what would have happened without the Americans joining the war, but the fall of Paris wouldn’t be unthinkable.
Supporting disastrous wars?
Canada made real contributions to WWI, WWII, Korea, and we sort of helped out with the Cold War while the US did the heavy lifting. I don’t think I’d like to reverse the outcome of any of those.
The Boer War is 20th century. Of course, we didn’t have control of our foreign policy until the statute of Westminster, which is in 1931.
I was talking about the wars in the MENA region but if yiu think WW1 is something to be proud of then I don’t know what to say. WW1 was two devil’s fighting each other. Two brutal empires fighting for domination.
Oh come on, WWI was at LEAST five Empires fighting for domination.
If you count some of the other belligerents as Empires even if they didn’t call themselves that, it could be as high as six or seven.
Britain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, Japan, Turkey. USA and China also probably qualify, even if not nominally empires at the time. The start of the 40 Years War did not lack for imperial ambitions.
@Milo Minderbinder
Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans all officially called themselves an “Empire” at the time.
France didn’t (it was a Republic), and Italy was a Kingdom.
I forgot Japan in my initial post, so at least six.
China was technically in the war, but the Qing Emperor was overthrown before the war.
Domestically, a large portion of the United States ran Jim Crow for a huge portion of the 20th century. It’s hard to see anything we’ve done that’s worse than that. Possibly the Great Depression as a whole WAS worse, but it’s difficult to point towards one conscious policy decision that caused the Depression.
Internationally, the US was a major contributor in exposing the world to the risk of global nuclear war. Theoretically it has contributed a sizable fraction of total CO2 emissions.
For conventional “mistakes,” I’d say either pulling out of Vietnam or toppling the First Pilipino Republic.
Alternatively, not invading and indefinitely occupying Cambodia.
Although continuation of Jim Crow was certainly terrible, I tend to think of that as the 19th century’s mistake via Plessy. That said, somehow the US botched civil rights a second time, and I’m not even sure what went wrong.
You don’t know what went wrong?
Essentially “everyone“ still agreed that the blacks, Mexicans and Chinese were inferior, but the blacks were the most inferior. That’s not hard to figure out.
For Romania, probably Odessa massacre. Apparently we were pretty cool with jews domestically (relatively at least) but there was that one incident in Ukraine when things went… very bad.
Domestically, the response to the Great Depression. It’s not like the government was responsible for creating it but any response would have been better than what they did, be it fiscal stimulus, monetary policy, or just not passing Smoot-Hawley. And there’s not really a comparable event in terms of American suffering, saving the Civil War or slavery.
Abroad, eh American hegemony is more notable for what didn’t happen than what did. In terms of raw human suffering, probably US policy during and following the Marshall Mission when the US abandoned the KMT, which led to Communist victory in China, but it’s arguable that they couldn’t have predicted the consequences. Probably Vietnam, especially if you add in its effects on neighboring countries like Cambodia.
Do you count the Federal Reserve as part of the government? It was at least a governmental creation.
Yeah, I count the Federal Reserve as part of the government. Per my understanding, there was going to be a really bad recession no matter what, bad monetary policy along with other things just made it much worse.
in which case the government was not responsible for creating the recession that would have happened, was responsible for creating the depression that did happen.
You might want to compare it to the great depression that didn’t happen about a decade earlier, which started in much the same way.
I think I need to get a justification for this.
I don’t recall when, but at some point I put William B Irvine’s book A Guide to The Good Life on my wish list, and received it for Christmas. It is a review and application of the ancient Stoic school of philosophy. Having now finished it, I thought I would give and overview and with commentary as I find it to be well suited to those of us of a rational bent. Hopefully this is interesting and new to someone. Also, feel free to correct anything I’ve misstated, especially if you have a greek statue as an avatar.
Socrates was famed, not primarily for insight—William Irvine asserts—but for adherence to his philosophical principles, even unto death. In contrast to the schools in the ancient world, modern philosophy is not practiced for practical insights, though, the author asserts, we are in no less need of them, and there is little that fills in the void as guidance to living a good life; even many religious people don’t have a coherent philosophy for how they should live. Rules yes, but other than some doctrine and strictures, they often follow the same modern enlightened hedonism (according to Irvine; clearly this is not always the case).
One of the ancient philosophical schools was Stoicism, which explored physics and logic as well as a philosophy of life. They were neither hedonistic nor ascetic, seeking enjoyment without attachment, perhaps similar to a Buddhist outlook—the author notes the similarities in outlook a few times, as well as his initial attraction to Buddhism. Zeno of Citium was the first Stoic philosophers, deriving his philosophical outlook from the Cynics in Athens after being shipwrecked there and deciding to make the best of the situation by finding one of the famed Athenian philosophical schools—a rather Stoic response to a set-back, even then. Zeno changed these cynic teachings to be more practical and less ascetic. He and subsequent pupils he taught at the Stoa Poikile—Stoics—prized logic, and this shows in some of their practices, as they advise to attempt to reason oneself out of negative emotions, a practice that may endear itself to rationalists even as it might rankle devotees of modern psychological theories that fear repressing negative emotions will lead to their reemergence later, which the author finds unlikely in the average case. After logic, Stoic schools taught physics, as they sought to live in accordance with nature, and ethics, though one more focused on determining the optimal way to live rather than the least harmful way—to live as we are designed to live as rational animals. The outcome of this practice would be a joyful tranquility; not an emotionless existence as we sometimes associate with the modern word “stoic”, but similarly minimizing negative emotions of anger, fear, and sadness. I think it’s fair to say it’s not a very exciting philosophy, but regardless, one that raises the valleys much more than it levels the mountains.
From the school in Athens, Stoicism traveled to Rome, where its notable converts included the advisor to Nero, Seneca; the slave Epictetus; and Emperor Marcus Aurelius, under whom the philosophy reached its peak of influence. Today the philosophy is a footnote, which the author laments as he feels many would benefit from a considered philosophy of life in the ancient sense.
After the overview of ancient philosophy and the development of Stoicism, the book outlines psychological techniques for controlling emotions over five chapters; all in all pretty simple advice which constitutes the core of the practical advice (interested students can look elsewhere for treatments of logic and physics if they want the full Zeno curriculum). The first technique is negative visualization: imagine troubles that could befall you, that you have faced in the past, or that have afflicted someone else. Meditate briefly on these, and you will come to appreciate what you have more and feel the loss of what you don’t have less. As well, when problems come up, they will be less of a shock and you will be more prepared to face them with courage. This applies even to those with little already, for there is always something to lose. Secondly, set your concerns and goals on that which is under your control, and not that which is not. Seek to perform you duties to the best you can, and not to gain fame or a promotion, for others’ approval is not within your grasp and you only set yourself up for despair in seeking what you cannot by yourself grasp. This is quite reminiscent of the serenity prayer, though I suppose we should expect effective techniques to be rediscovered throughout history. Third, practice fatalism of the past and the present; do not worry about what is transpired, only what will be. This is an outgrowth of the second technique, and shows the use of reason mentioned previously—the stoics reason that the past is beyond their control, and thus they have nothing to gain from mourning it, and by this seek to reduce the stress caused by regret. This may certainly not be as easy for someone disposed to anxiety; but inasmuch as your mental state can be affected by your mind, it may be useful to consider such. The fourth technique is self-denial, and here it may clash with both the consumerism of the average unphilosophical modern, and the utilon maximizing consequentialist. This isn’t masochism, but a life peppered with the occasional intentional discomfort, which is intended to train one’s willpower, endurance, and appreciation. The final technique is meditation, not in a self-negating Eastern enlightenment style, but a regular reflection on one’s mental and emotional state.
The next several chapters concern Stoic advice on a variety of subjects, such as social interactions, grief, anger, insults, exile, and ageing. The topics covered reflect both the milieu of the ancient practitioners and the authors’ interests. It ranged from banal to insightful but won’t be recounted in detail here unless requested.
The final section is “Stoicism for modern lives” and covers some philosophical and psychological developments since ancient times, and a reconsideration of the foundations of the philosophy for those who do not believe in Zeus, or even any other deity in whose plan Stoicism puts one into accord with, giving an evolutionary explanation for inclinations that make use angry or anxious and a charge to use our reason to set our own goals and overcome these default settings. Again, Stoicisim, at least as reimagined by William Irvine, seems reminiscent of or at least compatible with many rationalist (and, coincidentally for those interested, Christian) teachings. But it is interesting how he turns the original justification—living in accord with our nature—on its head, and instructs the philosophical to go against their evolutionary drives. The authors response to this irony is to point out that he has taken the proven teachings and advice and reconceptualized it as many prior teachers have done, and while he doesn’t preach his brand of Stoicism for everyone he finds it to have brought him and those amenable to his advice much joy and tranquility.
The book was a short and easy read containing a decent overview of a foreign, but potentially useful, mindset and some decent mental tools that I shall make a point to employ at times. In full disclosure I am by nature stoic in the vernacular sense (and having seen the author speak on Youtube, suspect he would also so describe) and being disinclined to anxiety probably predisposed to the philosophy and not the best test of it.
Often a stoic outlook is associated with masculinity, but the author makes very little if any distinction to gender and offers his advice to either sex. While I believe in and appreciate sex differences, I think there is something here for anyone, and little that one would fear contributing to a toxic masculinity unless you buy into the strongest claims of the dangers of emotional repression (which really wouldn’t be a fair description for stoic techniques anyway). The original works may be a different matter (thought I don’t think so).
I have in the past read some of Marcus Aurelius’ Mediations and enjoyed it. I plan to see what Seneca has to see as Irvine recommends him as particularly approachable.
Founding?
Nope! As the anecdote is related, he asked a bookstore owner where to find a philosopher to study under, who pointed him towards a passing Cynic. He later split to found his own school. Whether true or not, it’s related to show how thick on the ground philosophers were in Athens at the time.
A philosopher on every corner to go with all those taco trucks. I like the idea.
Really interesting–thanks.
One note–the similarities to Christian teaching is not a coincidence–early Christian thought is very influenced by Greek philosophy, and especially by Stoic philosophy. “Of one substance with the Father” is in the Creed–that’s Aristotle’s language, not the Scriptures.
I have an old post about Seneca. I find myself very conflicted, because I really liked his writings, but his real-world results were… rather poor.
This reminds me of how I am confused about people impressed with writings of Marcus Aurelius. The writings are about how people should remain calm and focus on their duty, but the author utterly failed at his most important duty, which I would describe as “if you have a retarded son that will predictably ruin the empire, don’t make him your successor, but adopt someone sane instead, especially when adopting the successor was considered the best practice by your predecessors”.
Here is the political strategy of the son in a nutshell:
– rename the Rome after your first name;
– rename the 12 months after your 12 names;
– rename the army after your first name;
– rename the senate after your first name;
– rename the entire country after your first name;
– roleplay a gladiator by publicly killing cripples in the arena;
– also kill a giraffe in the arena;
– after uncovering a plot to assassinate you, notice that one of the wannabe assassins is a hot chick, and take her as a mistress instead;
– a few years later, after deciding that your mistress is too annoying, write a TODO list containing “execute Marcia and her friends tomorrow morning” and leave it on the table, where she finds it;
– and finally, the next morning… get killed by Marcia and her friends.
(So, whenever you feel like complaining about Trump, remember whom the ancient sage Marcus Aurelius would have chosen as the head of the republic instead.)
The previous emperors had adopted heirs only because they didn’t have any natural sons of their own (elite Romans generally had pretty low fertility levels, possibly due to their habit of using lead as a flavouring for their wine). Adopting an heir when you already have a son of your own would lead to one of two consequences: either instability and possible civil war, as your natural child would form an obvious figurehead for anybody who was discontented with the current government; or your son getting murdered by your adopted son, to prevent the first scenario from happening — which was precisely what had happened on the one occasion when an emperor had adopted an heir instead of leaving the empire to his own child. That adopted heir was the famously homicidal Nero, so clearly adoption isn’t quite the foolproof method of inheritance it’s sometimes portrayed as.
Also, to be fair, I’m not sure how much megalomania Commodus was showing during his father’s lifetime. If you believe that power tends to corrupt its holders, then it’s quite possible that he was just a normal person before becoming the absolute monarch of the most powerful state in the world.
Donald Trump Junior?
Just looking at the Wikipedia page on Commodus, I think if you were to somehow resurrect a group of Romans from that period and ask their opinions on American soap operas (marketing will try anything), they’d probably complain that they were too simple and straightforward and there wasn’t nearly enough double-dealing and backstabbing going on.
Sheesh. I really liked Meditations, too, but clearly there’s something lacking in the philosophy (or was it just all the lead?).
Thanks, will look into it.
@Randy M says:
Since you recommended it I checked it out today (thank you public libraries!), so far I’m in the middle of chapter three and it’s been easy to follow.
Thank you!
So, I realized that my brain tends to interpret Dacyn’s avatar as this Paul Simon album cover when I’m not looking at it too closely. Anyone else have some mildly amusing avatar misinterpretations?
(For the record, mine’s currently a picture of a lunar eclipse I took with a digital camera and a plastic telescope a while back.)
Hey you’re right, they do look kind of similar if you squint. Not very much if you look closely though.
I think my avatar has more black than any other avatar. Which is kind of backwards since Dacyn is supposed to be a white mage. Maybe I will switch to a picture of Dacyn that doesn’t have a black background.
I think my brain was also influenced by the fact that I had that particular Paul Simon album playing as I was browsing this OT yesterday.
Ooh a free strategy game with pixel art that runs on my Mac? I’m tempted…
Yeah, it’s pretty cool, I remember it won some awards for being the best open-source strategy game or something like that… Anyway, my brother wrote the Eastern Invasion campaign (when I was 15 and he was 13), then we went as Eastern Invasion characters for Halloween and I was Dacyn… so if anyone has a claim to be that character, I think I do 🙂
Negotiations and Love Songs is one of the better compilation albums that exists. I love Paul Simon but a lot of his solo albums (Graceland obviously excepted) are just full of filler and dreck.
@Matt M
Haha, those are the two Paul Simon albums I own (technically speaking, that my parents bought years ago, ripped the CDs to MP3s, and shared with me). Plus “Wednesday Morning, 3 AM” and “Greatest Hits” from Simon and Garfunkel. Proud to say that I genuinely enjoyed Sound of Silence before it became a meme (admittedly, like everyone of the generation before me).
Those are the only two Paul Simon (solo) albums really worth owning!
Not “similarly” amusing, but… a while back someone on here had a WordPress-generated avatar that looked just like the tail lights on the Jeep (::cough::Fiat::cough::) Renegade, or at least that’s what I kept seeing.
BTW, just eliminated the “the”s from my username and added some CamelCase to facilitate reading and typing it. I’m still thevoiceofthevoid, not someone trying to impersonate them—though that’s exactly the first thing someone trying to impersonate me would say, isn’t it? 😛
Both of them?
Hmmm, yeah I think I’ll put the second one back. Flows a bit better as I subvocalize, and “the void” evokes Lovecraftian horror while “void” evokes “null”.
(“The Voice of the Void” was the name of the blog I thought I was going to write before I realized writing is hard and no one would read it. When I tried to comment on SSC for the first time, Chrome auto-logged me in and I figured it was a cool-enough-sounding username.)
Oh, there were two. I was making a “Scott always doubles up on ‘the’s joke”. Glad I was helpful, VotV.
@Randy M: Hahaha, thanks for the the unintentional advice!
Does this make you Weird Moon Twitter?
testing, is this case sensitive, will @VoIcEoFtHeVoId get a notification
Every time I see Le Maistre Chat’s avatar, I initially see Opus the penguin.
My deepest apologies to him for this, but it took me several viewings to stop seeing An Fírinne’s avatar as Hitler.
TIL it’s only a “legal gray area” to invest your student loans:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100314/it-legal-invest-my-student-loan-money.asp
Bernie Sanders wants to reduce student loan interest rates from the current 4.5-7% to 1.88%. If that happened it would make doing it a whole lot more attractive. Presumably they’d crack down on it, but there’d be ways around it. If you’re living with your parents, you take out loans to pay living expenses, among them rent, which you, being a responsible adult, will pay. And your parents, being responsible adults, will invest. And then if you need money later, they’ll help you, like responsible, caring adults should. Though you have to actually be living with them to do this. Another possibility: buy a life insurance policy. It’s already widely used as a tax shelter, and could easily adapt to offering clients an “investment shelter” as well. Of course college students are young and won’t be very motivated to seek an investment which only pays off after their deaths.
Another possibility is health insurance where you’d pay an artificially high price between the ages of 18 and 22 and receive an artificially low price thereafter, though you’d have to trust the company to uphold its end of the deal.On second thought, this wouldn’t work due to health insurance subsidies. How about “birth insurance?” It is often convenient for people to model births as if they happen at randomly with no human decision-making involved, and you can apply this model to insurance. If you have healthcare costs up to 10,000$ involved in the birth of a child that your health insurance company won’t pay for, the birth insurance policy will pay for it. And if it’s less than 10,000, you can have the remainder back, to pay for assorted costs involved in taking care of your baby. And you know how there used to be “lifetime limits?” Well, there’s a lifetime limit here: 2 kids. And if you make it to age forty without having two kids? Well, you get the money back too. It’s clear there’s not much “insurance” to speak of here, but we crossed that bridge a long time ago with the demands, and indeed mandates by law, that health insurance cover costs most or all of its consumers expect to regularly have. Transaction costs involved would be lower if birth insurance was provided by the same company which provides health insurance, and so would already deal with the costs involved in verifying births, identity, ect. It wouldn’t be health insurance however, as it clearly isn’t and wouldn’t be eligible for the standard state subsidy.(Or else they would have tried it already…) Would transaction costs and the risk it is made illegal eat up all the return here?Got any ideas of further ideas of how to scam the system?
probably not such a great deal after your parents pay income tax on the rental income.
Landlords can deduct expenses, which include depreciation and property taxes.
sure, but the rest will be taxed as rental income. there is also the added expense of hiring an accountant.
Most college students are going to be too young to own homes, but older students with mortgages could refinance for a higher monthly payment during their school years and a lower payment thereafter.
538 has come out with a big model predicting the Dem primary. So far the biggest discrepancy from betting markets seems to be rating Bloomberg’s chances much lower.
What’s really interesting about the projected delegates is that any two of projected numbers 2-4 (Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg) come fairly close to matching Biden’s total projected delegates, especially if Bernie is one of the two. I would not be at all surprised to see a Biden-Buttigieg ticket, since I’ve thought all along he was auditioning for Vice-President for someone. And at a brokered convention, I could see a Sanders-Warren ticket competing hard with the B-B ticket, with B-B having about a 500 delegate edge but no majority.
Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I have never bought Bloomberg. It’s just hard for me to see who he appeals to in any significant amount. Establishment types already have Biden. Economic leftists or populist types won’t appreciate his billionaire status and attempting to “buy” the race. He’s not particularly radical for social liberals. For “electability” concerned voters, his signature issues are also liberals’ least popular (and least electable) nationwide (sugar taxes, guns). Coupled with his late entry, I’d say 538 has it about right on Bloomberg.
given his failure to register in the early states, there is speculation he is running only so he can buy cheaper ads
https://www.businessinsider.com/mike-bloomberg-presidential-run-cheap-rates-anti-trump-ads-2019-11
I’m wary of underestimating Bloomberg on the basis that he’s been silent so far, but I agree that his odds seem slim and 538’s predictions prompted me to bet against him. I think his only real chance is if something takes out Biden and that plays out well for him.
Yes. The case for Bloomberg is pretty simple. Biden is dominating the polls, but it doesn’t seem like there’s any particular reason for that other than “he’s the only one of the contenders who has name recognition and hasn’t gone off the deep end trying to appease left-wing twitter, which is far more progressive than the average D voter.” Biden has lots of exploitable flaws, but they can only be properly exploited by another moderate, and none of his competition thus far has been moderate (or more correctly, been seen by the electorate as moderate).
If Bloomberg can make a convincing case of “I’m a moderate guy like Biden, but more competent and/or less corrupt” I think he has a chance.
My understanding is that an awful lot of the support Biden gets is from lifelong Democrats, and black Democrats who know him/trust him from long experience. I don’t see them jumping ship to Bloomberg, since their support for Biden is based more on a gut/emotional reaction to him than a reasoned evaluation of his policies or chance of success against Trump. I think it would be hard to pull Biden’s base away from him, and I definitely don’t think a rational argument is a good strategy. You would need to go for emotion/inspiration which is certainly not something Bloomberg is doing and is likely incapable of doing.
This is fair. Certainly an older moderate Dem with a longer track record would be better positioned than Bloomberg, who isn’t that well known outside Acela and whose most recent time in any elected office was technically as a Republican.
That said, I still feel like Biden’s core marketing appeal is “I’m a common sense guy who can work with both parties to do what’s right for America” and as far as I can tell, Bloomberg is the only competitor in the field trying to make that same claim. All the other Democrats are running on a mixture of woke SJW stuff and Orange Man Bad (with the exception of Bernie who is running on socialist redistribution, which polls well generally but less so during good economic times). Which does well on Twitter and gets you a lot of favorable coverage on CNN, but which does not seem to translate into actual poll numbers of likely voters.
He’s also just really charismatic in a way that connects with a large segment of the target audience. I agree with Buttigeig and Warrne probably more on policy issues than i do with Biden, but I’ll probably pull the lever for Joe because I just think he’d be a better leader/person than them.
538 models>betting markets every time
Are you telling me Hillary doesn’t have a 3% chance of winning the primary!?
Throughout my life my greatest struggles have been with regard to relationship. Put another way, anxiety about relationship has been the greatest source of stress for me. In fact, I do not hesitate to say that if all the other stresses in my life were added together it would not come close to the stress of relationship.
It appears some others might have the same perspective. I would enjoy seeing comments on this.
Is that all relationships, or just romantic relationships?
Are you including stresses brought into your life by people you care about that aren’t due to the relationship, like a spouse’s illness?
Are you including anxiety about ~not~ having a romantic relationship?
I wasn’t particularly thinking of romantic relationships. This would be included but not limited to it.
I was thinking of stresses caused by the relationship, not concern over other things in the lives of others.
It includes anxiety over lack of relationship: friendship or romantic.
I hope I’m not coming off as adversarial here, but….perhaps seeing other people as purely self-interested, as you mentioned in the last OT, might make it more difficult to form meaningful relationships? My closest relationships, both platonic and romantic, have been founded on me and the other person genuinely caring about each other a lot. I think it would almost definitionally be impossible for me to get to that level of closeness with someone without being truly invested in their well-being, or while thinking that they didn’t reciprocate my care for them and just wanted my company etc. when it benefited them. Realizing I was in the latter situation actually marked the end of one of my closest friendships last year.
And this isn’t a matter of trying to fool yourself into believing you care–you have to really want the other person to be happy for their own sake. Of course, that builds up gradually while you get to know someone. Adopting a generally friendly attitude toward strangers will give you a bit of a head start though. I know that people really care about each other because I know that I really care about some people–at least, that’s what it feels like when I sit down and honestly do some introspection about how I feel about them.
Regardless, I completely sympathize with relationships being incredibly stressful. It even handedly beats out “what do I want to do with my life” for my number one source of stress. When I left home for college, sure I might have been a bit stressed about living in a dorm instead of my childhood home, or the harder coursework and stricter deadlines. But the overwhelming source of anxiety for me was, “oh god, I’m going to be living a thousand miles away from all the people I’m friends with now, I’ll have to make an entirely new set of friends or be lonely and isolated for 4 years.” Thankfully, many other people in my dorm were in a similar boat and I was fortunate enough to quickly make a close group of friends.
I think it’s a matter of finding people who will appreciate your authentic self, and opening up to them. I often do that by opening up a bit at a time–if there’s a positive response, I open up more; if there’s cocked heads and odd looks, I think, “ah, an acquaintance, I need not fret over presenting my authentic self to this person.” [I do not consciously think this but that’s the general drift going on in the subconscious.]
@thevoiceofthevoid
Interestingly, you were fooled by the other person in this relationship. They were not truly invested in your benefit, yet for them to have been that close you needed to believe that…but it turns out you were mistaken.
Could you have been mistaken about your own feelings? You give evidence that you were. You broke off the relationship because of things they were not doing for you not because of how you felt about them. It turns out what they did for you and what you thought they felt for you was very important and crucial. These matters are of your self interest. If you concern were truly for the other then their actions toward you would not matter.
As a matter of fact, I cared both about the other person, and about my own well-being and sanity. My caring about them is largely why the friendship didn’t end one to two years earlier than it did. We got into fights, we’d stop talking, then a few weeks later they’d come crying to me about some problem that they needed someone to talk to about, and I’d be their confidante again because I couldn’t bring myself to just hit the block button and break out of that cycle. Was I just motivated by a desire to see myself as someone who could help people with their problems? Partly. But I have done a lot of introspection about this over the years, and a significant part of why I kept coming back to this person was genuinely caring about them.
In the end, what happened wasn’t that I lost concern for them, but that my concern for my own mental health and well-being finally outweighed my concern for them. This happened when the asymmetry of the relationship, which I’d been ignoring or hoping could be fixed, gradually set in as something that wasn’t going to change. I felt really bad about breaking off contact, but I realized I had to do it for the sake of my own sanity.
Now, in hindsight, there was a good deal of deception, both of each other and more importantly of ourselves. But that is not normal in a relationship. There were various red flags which I generally ignored at the time that should have signalled that this was not a healthy relationship, that we weren’t seeing each other as equals. In my close friendships that have lasted from back in high school to this day, there are ample signs that both of us care about each other; that the relationship is symmetric; that whatever one of us does for the other, the other would be perfectly willing and happy to do the same for them.
So, to address your points directly:
I was incredibly conflicted and confused about my own feelings at the time; with months of introspection, I think I’ve sorted them out.
I broke off the relationship because of things they were not doing for me, which affected how I felt about them.
Yes, it was! Again, a healthy relationship should be symmetric, with both people caring about each other and doing things for each other.
It’s not black-and-white like that. Self-interest and concern for the other are both vital to a relationship. If either person isn’t happy in a relationship, the relationship won’t survive. So my actions toward my friend matter, and their actions toward me matter as well.
thevoice
Dress this any way you wish, but, bottom line, you are saying that a relationship will benefit on net then I’ll have it. If it is not a net benefit for me, then no. You clearly state above that your concern for yourself outweighs your concern for the other. I doing X benefits you and doing Y benefits me, you choose X, so tell me again how it makes a difference to me if you “care” for me.
@HowardHolmes:
Yes, but in context it’s clear that that’s a contingent fact. This actually works against your claim that this is always true.
You’re missing out that these relationships don’t have to be, and in fact shouldn’t be, thought of in terms of zero-sum games.
For example – pretty much every relationship I’m in (friendship, romantic, whatever) I feel like I get way more out of that I put in. I get fun conversations, people to go do things with, general feelings of companionship, etc. and my investment is almost zero. I invest time in interacting with them, but I end up enjoying that time so the cost feels low. From my perspective, this is a fantastic return on investment.
The thing is, all these factors are also true from their perspective: They also get a fun conversational partner, companionship and whatever and they also don’t find the cost noticeable.
Well, he talked in his example about the multiple times he deliberately chose Y in that relationship up until he could no longer sustain it. I would say caring is whatever factor gets you to choose Y over X.
Example: I’ve spent a couple weekends over the course of my life helping buddies move. This wasn’t some reciprocal action; if they were moving away I knew there was literally 0 chance they’d be able to help me move later on. I also hate spending a weekend packing and carrying shit. That being said, based on my caring for the friend, I’ve invested that time in helping them move.
Crucially, however, I wouldn’t spend every weekend helping a friend move, and if they asked me more than say, three times over the course of a year or two, I’d probably decline or demand some kind of actual compensation. Caring about the person exists to a certain point and then gets exhausted.
@HowardHolmes
Yes; overall, a healthy relationship should be a net benefit to both people involved.
I think there’s a distinction that should be made between the micro scale of individual actions and the macro scale of an entire relationship. As Dacyn correctly points out, my statement that my concern for myself outweighed my concern for my former friend was a noteworthy fact about that particular situation, not a general statement. If someone is my friend, then I’ll take some actions that benefit them at a slight cost to me which I probably wouldn’t for a total stranger, e.g. helping someone out with homework for a few minutes, sharing snacks I brought, etc. If I’m close friends with someone, I’ll do things that help them at a more significant personal cost, like staying up late to talk to a friend about something that’s really stressing them out.
On a longer scale, there is some expectation of reciprocity. If I keep doing things for someone who, over the course of a few months or years, never does anything for me, then I’ll get the impression that they don’t care about me as much as I care about them. Consequently, we’ll drift apart as I lose my positive feelings towards them and make less and less of an effort to continue to be their friend.
But, it’s not a strict tally sheet of “I create N utils for you, you create N utils for me”! I’m sure I have friendships in which I do more for them than they do for me; and other friends who do more for me than I do for them. As long as the foundation is both people wanting to see each other happy and willing to put in effort to achieve that, a relationship is sustainable. Even when one person is making large sacrifices to help the other in a prolonged time of need, their relationship can be solid if there’s a clear understanding that the second person would do the same for the first if it were necessary and possible. (One example would be a parent and child–the parent gives the child many, many things both physical and nonphysical that the child will never be able to reciprocate over their lifetime.)
In any case, though, I’d say the majority of interactions between good friends are ones where both get something out of it. These feed into each other, though–when I enjoy spending time with someone and therefore spend more time with them, I get to know them better, which makes me care about them more, thus making me more likely to do nicer things for them at greater cost to myself.
+1 to everything Aftagley said as I was typing this comment, ninja’d me on a couple points.
You can argue that this is all game-theoretic, that I’m playing “cooperate” not out of genuine concern for the other person but to achieve the Pareto-optimal outcome. To that I say: That’s not how I think about my friendships. I feel concern for my friends–I feel satisfied when I see them happy and sympathetic when I see them suffering. If you think those empathetic feelings somehow invalidate my claim of caring (“you really only care about how they make you feel”), I don’t know what to say–they are what caring is, as I understand it.
Aftagley
It works just as well saying “based on my caring what the friend thought of me….” You already said frendship to you is a net plus. This is sufficient to cause you to act friendly. Just because your choice to be friendly has a side effect of sometimes benefitting the other person does not allow you to take credit for acting in behalf of the other person. You choose friendship for what it means to you. I would assume you would choose other things if you saw a net benefit. Most choices involve effects on others and involve unintended effects and side effects. You risk you life to drive a car. That does not mean you drive a car in order to risk you life. Friendship happens to benefit your friend sometimes, but that is not the reason you do it.
thevoiceofthevoid
On the longer scale you see friendship as a net benefit to yourself. That is nothing to be ashamed of. It is sufficient reason for having friends. Why do you insist on taking credit for being concerned about the friend? If you think about it, your concern is only because of what the friend means to you.
To see it more clearly look at it backwards. Assume you consider that being Bob’s friend is a net harm to you? Would you be his friend? No. This is because you are deciding on friendship based on the effect on yourself not the other person.
@HowardHolmes
Because I am concerned about my friends. You can give me credit, you can deny me credit, but “I am concerned about my friends” is a true fact as far as I can tell, and I highly doubt that you are better able than me to analyze my own internal feelings.
What does it mean for my friend to “mean something to me”? I use that phrase to mean “someone I know well and care about”. That would make the statement pretty circular–“you only care about people because you care about them.” If you’re saying I care about my close friends more than random strangers, then yeah, of course that’s true.
Again, I reiterate, I can and often do make decisions based on multiple inputs! I am concerned both with the effect on myself and with the effect on the other person.
Friendship is clearly a beneficial evolutionary strategy for “self-interested” genes. But the way it’s been implemented is as empathy for our friends and a drive to do good things for them, which can go beyond pure self-interest from a human’s perspective.
Thevoiceofthevoid
This seems to be a stumbling block in the discussion. I rather disagree with this premise. Maybe you are assuming that multiple things cause you to choose door 1 vs door 2. Let’s say door 1 benefits you and door 2 does not. Let’s same door 1 also benefits Chucky. So you choose door 1.. Are you claiming that you did for both for you and Chucky?
If this is your claim, I object. Change the scenario to one where door 2 benefits Chucky but not door1. Now which do you choose? I say you STILL choose door 1 because to do otherwise would be counter to your interest. So in reality, Chucky does not figure in the decision. You go with door 1 regardless. It only seems like you are considering him in the case where it benefits him. In the case where it does not, you would have to claim that you were actively seeking to harm Chucky. This is not the case. In both situations, you are really indifferent to Chucky.
@HowardHolmes
Oh, this is actually pretty straightforward. For a bit of an oversimplification, let’s pretend I make decisions based on a basic utility function (obviously I don’t really, but it’s a good first-order approximation). Let’s say for example that I value my own happiness twice as much as Chucky’s, and I don’t care about anything else. That gives a function: Total utility = 2 * my happiness + 1 * Chucky’s happiness. With that function:
* I will obviously do things that are good for me and for Chucky.
* I will obviously not do things that are bad for both of us.
* I will do things that are good for me but bad for him, if the cost to him is less than twice the benefit to me.
* I will do things that are bad for me but good for him, if the cost to me is less than half the benefit to him.
So, if I have to choose between door 1 and 2 in your example, I need to know the particulars: How good is door 1 for me? How good is door 2 for Chucky? If they’re the same value for each of us, I’ll choose door 1. If door 1 is 1 util for me but door 2 is 3 utils for Chucky, I’ll open door 2. Thus, both my own interest and Chucky’s factor into my decision.
Another scenario: Say door A is 4 utils for me; door B is 3 utils for me and 3 utils for Chucky; door C is 4 utils for Chucky. If I cared solely about myself, I would open door A; if I cared solely about Chucky I’d open door C; but since I care about both myself and Chucky, I’ll open door B. By the utility function: (2*3+3 = 9 utils for B) > (2*4+0 = 8 utils for A) > (2*0+4 = 4 utils for C).
Of course, this is a simplification; I don’t really have a “utility function”; I’m not explicitly calculating and adding weighted utilities to make my decisions. But the insight it provides I hope is valuable–it’s possible for a decision-making algorithm to take the interests of multiple parties into account. While, in the example and often in real life, my own interests are ultimately more important to me than my friend’s, that doesn’t mean my friend’s interest is unimportant. And I think in real life, I would choose door B in my second example. You can’t explain that decision either by me being completely self-interested, nor by me being solely altruistic. Even if you think I’m fooling myself, and that I really am still completely self-interested and just want to think of myself as the kind of person who would choose door B, can you see how a decision-making algorithm that takes multiple inputs is possible?
thevoiceofthevoid
I can’t argue with you over your idea of what you might do if. In the one actual incident which we have been discussing for days, when push came to shove, you closed door B on your friend.
@HowardHolmes
To belabor the analogy, door B had been declining in value to the point where it was definitely a net negative for me and I wasn’t even sure whether it was a net positive for them. I stand by my decision to break off that particular friendship. I have never claimed that I care enough about my friends to outweigh my own self-interest in every possible scenario, and that was a scenario in which it was clear to me that my own mental health was being negatively impacted far more than any benefit they were getting from the relationship at that point.
@thevoiceofthevoid
It seems to me that the definition @howardholmes has for value differs from yours in a sort of tautological way. You (in theory) break down different parts of your decision into “effect on you” and “effect on others”, weight them by some amount, and make a decision based on maximizing value. And from that you say “I value myself and I value them.”
@howardholmes says, “You claim you make a decision by weighing these two things against each other. But labeling the first half of the equation ‘your value’ is incorrect. It’s more like ‘the part of your values that isn’t related to their life satisfaction.’ You clearly get something out of knowing your friend is in a good place. The way that knowledge influences your decision is precisely by adding value, and the whole quantity you consider while making a decision is what you should think of as your value.” In summary, since “your values” are what drives your decisions, anything that influences your decisions gets encompassed in your values.
I personally think this distinction isn’t too helpful when considering what to do. I guess the point is, since we can’t not consider this “total value” while making decisions (since they’re definitionally related), why even try and consider things from this perspective?
@AlexanderTheGrand
Well, I certainly don’t disagree that I make decisions ultimately based on my values (plus emotional impulses). But the fact that some of those values refer to other people–not just to my own thoughts about them–is what I mean when I talk about caring about other people (in addition to my empathetic reactions to their happiness or suffering). Like, if you offered me a button that would make me think my friends were happy (but not actually make them happy), I would not feel tempted in the slightest to press that button. And yeah, all my values are intrinsically tied up in how I perceive and feel about the things I value–otherwise they wouldn’t be my values.
But I object to calling anything that satisfies my values “self-interest”, because I use that word in a more precise way to distinguish between values that relate to my personal well-being, and values that relate to other things. I think this is a useful distinction, because it lets me separate out actions like e.g. buying bread for myself vs. buying bread for a food drive in a meaningful way.
VoiceoftheVoid
A safe observation regarding many of my points.
The implicit comparison is real. I was only pointing this out because one of my “things” is to suggest we often are doing different things than we allow ourselves to realize. If you were to wish me “good day” I might very well tell you that I do not want good days because in order to have good days I have to have bad days. Wishing me good days is also wishing me bad. OK, so it is extreme, but it is also true. The only reason we have the concept of good or bad is to distinguish things/ assign values to things. You might can talk about green eyes without considering value, but you can’t talk about good or bad or nice and mean without considering value..without assigning value to the thing describes. And value is relative; it is comparative. If one considers themselves good without realizing they are simultaneously assigning bad to others they are missing something. To say “I am good” is to say “I am better” whether one realizes it or not. I’m really big into self deception. Of course, we don’t want to think of ourselves as better than others. I say that we really do think this way, but try to deceive ourselves into not knowing that. You and I are on different pages here as you will think that your conscious realizations are the truth, and I think you hidden motives are the truth.
In my experience, a necessary component of close relationships is vulnerability. It is hard to be close to someone if you are as reserved as you probably are with casual acquaintances. The act of being vulnerable and them doing the same is a bonding experience.
As a corollary, of course relationships are more stressful than acquaintances. The reward is higher, but so are the risks. The best relationships are ones where you can be vulnerable safely, but nobody is perfect, and even relationships with zero malice have the chance for miscommunication or unintentional harms.
Sitting alone in a dark room is predictable and safe. Nobody will hurt you. But it’s not fulfilling! Opening up to people invites risk, but there’s also rewards. I hope you keep searching for the good relationships where the rewards are good and the risks aren’t realized. 🙂
Of course, all that only addresses close vs. not close relationships. What about the other stresses of life? Well, if those other aspects are taken care of (food, job, shelter, etc.) then it’s no surprise that relationships are more stressful. I’m sure if you were homeless and starving then a good friend might be less stressful than a winter night, but that’s probably not the case for most SSC commenters.
You started the OP by saying:
This is easily read as an admission of weakness. This seems to have led u/ninjafetus (and I think only because they do not know you well) to believe that you think that “[they] are better than [you]”, at least with respect to relationships. So it is not surprising if their post reads as though they think they are better.
Yeah, it is like I am a chicken with a sore on my head.
@HowardHolmes: I do not understand your analogy.
Dacyn
If a chicken get a sore, other chickens will pick it to death. I was referring to my apparent admission of weakness and the subsequent pile-on.
I mean this in a sincere desire to help: have you considered that your anxiety is related to your difficulties modeling other people? If I recall, you have frequently claimed that the only reason people have children is “signalling.” Every parent responds to you that that is completely off the mark, but this doesn’t seem to have any impact. You might do better and have less anxiety by listening to and trying to understand others a little better.
Conrad
There is no such thing as a sincere desire to help. To help me you want me to accept that I would be better off if I were more like you. Keep trying to sell that if you can find any buyers.
For the record I have 3 kids and 14 grandkids. Every kid I had for my own selfish reasons.
Howard,
I say this only for my own benefit, of course.
Sometimes you are interesting, but today you are coming off to me as a jerk. I hypocritically advise you that if you feel offended by something it’s probably better to simply not respond.
Admirably, your reputation here probably means nothing to you, but I expect in the future you will get less engagement to questions you ask.
Randy
I agree that you are clearly benefitted by calling me out. Good move for you.
That will not prevent my wanting to engage with you in the future.
See, this is the sort of thing I’m talking about.
I don’t think this is a failure to model, I think it is just some unusual philosophical beliefs of his. I’m guessing he will be able to make the same predictions as us if they are couched in concrete terms. In any case, HowardHolmes was never saying that he currently suffers from relationship problems, see here.
Conrad,
Are you denying that in order to “help” someone we must believe they would be better off like us?
Yes, I’m denying that in order to “help” someone, they must be more like me. I’m asserting that they must be less like themselves.
Your ideas are unique to you, and appear to be causing you misery. You do not have to be like me. But pick the most unlike me person on SSC (idk, atheist marxist who hates video games and guns?) and they’ll still probably agree that people have children for reasons other than signalling, and that “sincere desires to help” exist.
Related to “intelligence is not reverse stupidity.” I’m not saying to be like me. I’m just saying to be not like you. But lots of people who are not like me are also not like you.
Conrad Honcho
OK, I agree with this in a situation where you think Person B has a fault which you also have. If you think that both yourself and B should be more like A, then “help” could mean something other than “you should be more like me.” This situation is a very minority situation. Most of the time help givers consider themselves as possessing the qualities they are recommending.
My ideas are rather outlier. However, for the record, they are in no way causing me misery. I am not aware of any misery or suffering. There is nothing I want that I don’t have nor is there anything I wish to do that I do not do.
I would not restrict the reason to signalling alone, but this is a significant incentive. More broadly people have kids to make themselves important, firstly to the kids and secondarily to others. What is not to like about someone who looks up to you and respects you. People buy pets for the same reasons they have kids. A kid is just an expensive pet.
Why would one have such a desire? What is the benefit to such a desire? Don’t you think that people in general try to be better than others? Why would they purposefully help the opposition?
Have you any reason for suggesting that I change other than the aforementioned misconception that I am miserable?
You apparently want people to agree with you, and that is something that you do not have.
In your initial post you described your relationships with the words “greatest struggle,” “greatest source of stress” and “anxiety.” If those expressions do not amount to misery, then perhaps you should have been more clear. I do not seem to be alone among the highly literate denizens of SSC in interpreting those descriptions as an equivalent for “misery.” If others reading this think I have misinterpreted HH, please let me know.
What of those who have kids who are not particularly impressive, but yet they still find joy in? You likened children to pets: isn’t seeing a terrible dog chase its tail or an awful cat roll around in catnip a joy unto itself?
Why do anything? Because it feels nice? Keep in mind this is a pseudonymous forum: no signal I create here matters, or has any benefit. Nothing I type here under the name “Conrad Honcho*” will ever help me in real life. I will get no money, no favors, nothing from anything I post here, and yet I and many, many others are happy to offer advice on interpersonal relationships, or recipes, or wifi settings. In real life, I and many others donate to charities. Every month I bring a bag or two of groceries for the Catholic Charities food bank truck at Church. No one takes any notice of me doing it, I don’t draw any attention to it, and no one would care if I did or didn’t do it. No one helped by the food bank has ever done a thing for me.
Does the existence of anonymous or pseudonymous forums or charities persuade you that you might be wrong about why people help others?
Not really, no. I just want to be “fine.” I’m perfectly happy not being the best, or the richest or the most powerful.
There’s the false assumption there that others are “the opposition.”
Not really, no. So if you’re fine, then it’s all good. But if you weren’t miserable, then why did you make this post about your “greatest struggles” and “anxiety?”
* My real name is Conrad Honcho, and everyone should be extremely nice to anyone they meet named “Conrad Honcho.”
HeelBearCub
I know that if I say I do not care whether you agree with me, I know you will not agree with me. Yet, I say it anyway which proves I have reasons for saying it other to to reach agreement.
Conrad Honcho
Relationship issues used to cause me misery, but no more. I eliminated relationships from my life and the accompanying misery.
No. Because there are other ways to explain these actions that don’t involve caring for others. I will choose the other explanations because caring for others does not explain people’s actions generally, nor does it make sense evolutionarily.
The only way you can see yourself as fine is by judging others as unfine. I do not divide the world in my fine group and the other unfine group.
Is it impossible to be fine by oneself then? If you were the only person in the world, but with everything you’ve ever wanted (besides other people) provided for you, being “fine” would not be possible?
Conrad Honcho
Fine is a meaningless sound without the existent of that which is not fine. Fine’s purpose is to distinguish from that which is not.
You are not the only one in the world and such a diversion only seeks to allow you to not address the fact that you see yourself in the fine group and many others in the not fine group.
Start the discussion by admitting the facts, not by obsfucating.
@HowardHolmes
I think the point you’re making is less profound than you think it is. A lot of the same arguments apply if we substitute “fine” with “green-eyed”. I am green-eyed, other people are not green-eyed. If there were no people (or animals) that had eyes which were not green, then the phrase would have no purpose–anyone with eyes would be green-eyed, and you wouldn’t need a phrase to specify it. So, like any word or phrase, the purpose of “green-eyed” is to distinguish from that which is not green-eyed.
But this does not mean that every time I describe myself as green-eyed, I am thinking about how much less green the eyes of other people are. You can describe a thing in itself without explicitly comparing it to others (though there is an implicit comparison). And if everyone without green eyes was Thanos-snapped out of existence, I could continue describing myself as such and it would continue to be meaningful, even if redundant. This is why for example, despite not having ever found life based on anything besides carbon, we talk about “carbon-based life” — it’s a comparison to a hypothetical alternate state, not any particular non-carbon-based life forms.
@HowardHolmes
(I presume you misplaced this reply to me; I don’t blame you, since we have been discussing similar topics in at least three or four different subthreads recently.)
Actually, I agree with a lot of what you’re saying; “good” does necessarily imply “better than something” (else it would be meaningless), and is obviously a value judgement. But, I think that when someone says “I want to be a better person”, they are often comparing not to other people, but to their own current and past self. There’s still some implicit comparison to others, but I think the main reference point is oneself over time. However, if someone says outright, “I am a good person,” present tense, then I would be more inclined to interpret that as a comparison to other people.
I’m not sure I entirely agree that “good” and “bad” are completely relative. If I have a good day today, then yes, that will definitionally make tomorrow slightly worse relative to my average day. But, notwithstanding hedonic treadmills, I do think that there’s some kind of absolute scale of good and bad, and thus I wish people both specific good days and good days in general. (I will refrain from doing so to you, though, if you so prefer.)
By way of analogy, say I have a bunch of red, orange, and yellow cubes I’m repainting. If I paint one an especially bright yellow, it will make the others look redder by comparison, but their actual color won’t be any redder. And it’s also possible for me to tint all of the cubes more yellow or more red, without increasing or decreasing the relative differences in hue between them.
VoiceoftheVoid
Re: good and bad. The problem with talking about good and bad is that these things do not really exist. You can think you had a good day, but the day was actually no better or worse than any other. That it was good is only in our mind. I’m sure you would argue that “this is sufficient”. But the issue is that the mindset that allows you to think your day is good will also cause suffering when you think your day is bad. Without the concept of good/bad, there is no suffering, but there is also no happiness. Before you conclude that you could not like that life realize that you have never tried it.
@HowardHolmes: It is hard for me to say much since most of your statements here are normative. This is not surprising as it was me who decided to avoid normative language for clarity, not you.
Anyway, since I can’t comment on the truth or falsity of normative statements, I’ll make predictions about their effects instead. First of all, I don’t think VoiceOfTheVoid is particularly receptive to you here, so your statements will not have big effects. If they were more (very) receptive, then:
– Saying “good and bad do not exist”: I imagine this would have the effect of demotivating them, for a time. At the end, it’s possible they would find a new source of motivation different from the previous one. It’s also possible that they would then go around saying things like “good and bad do not exist”.
– “But the issue is that […]”: They would evaluate the truth of the statement “the mindset that allows you to think your day is good will also cause suffering when you think your day is bad”. The fact that you have asserted this statement would be a factor in their evaluations. If they concluded that your statement was true, they would be motivated to avoid the mindset you describe.
Your last two sentences are actually not normative, so:
I think you are referring to a phenomenon which happens sometimes but not all the time. I don’t really have a concept of good and bad, if by “concept” you mean that I primarily relate to them via semantics. But I do experience what I would call suffering and happiness. I am not sure whether you would call them so, though, since I view these experiences as transitory phenomena that are not fundamentally different from any other phenomena.
I haven’t concluded that I couldn’t like your lifestyle. I also don’t intend to try it, however.
Dacyn
That is helpful. I see “problem” and “issue”. Give me a couple more hints on what else I am missing.
Seeing happiness and suffering as transitory phenomena might be similar, but not sure.
@HowardHolmes: “Good” and “bad” are normative, so is “sufficient”. I think that is it (other than “issue” which you pointed out).
Edit: To clarify, I think for you there are two types of normative language use, intentional and unintentional. I think the good and bad are intentional, while the issue is unintentional. I don’t know about sufficient.
I recall you saying something like you don’t worry about anything at all anymore, so do you just mean that relationships were your greatest source of stress before you stopped worrying? Mentioning this because both u/thevoiceofthevoid and Conrad Honcho seem to have assumed the opposite, that you only started getting stressed after you started having nonstandard philosophical beliefs.
In any case, I can certainly confirm that relationships gone wrong can be a huge source of stress. Though if you average over my whole life, being worried about whether God exists has probably been a bigger one.
Dacyn
That was before. I totally solved relationships by eliminating them. Life is now a piece of cake. IMO the purpose of relationship is to obtain affirmation. Affirmation has no value.
If I had realized what an easy fix there was to relationship issues I would have done it long ago. BTW having relationships does not extend life. How could such a source of stress extend life?
Uh, do you have a source for this or is it just your opinion? I said that some relationships were stressful but it doesn’t mean most of them were.
Half of marriages end in divorce with a lot of the remainder in trouble. Most relationships do not create stress?
When I asked the question about relationships and stress I was not asking “are relationships a major source of stress?” I was asking “who is willing to be honest about relationships?”
As it turns out, not much.
The studies of relationship and life expectancy are very confounded. If Bob is a couch potato and Janet is very active, who will live longer? Who is likely to have more friends?
I predict active people who have no friends will live forever.
@HowardHolmes: Fair enough.
After a rough breakup, I ironically used the following CS quote to justify isolation:
If my current spouse didn’t go after me, I’d still be single.
To your general relationship question, you may be in a bubble where transactional relationships dominate. Favor must be returned with favor, those who do not reciprocate are ostracized. True friends are hard to find, and if you think you have more than the number of fingers on a hand, you probably don’t know what a true friend is. Blood relationships also start non-transactional, as babies can’t really pay back mom and dad unless there’s some long con involved.
Could you clarify your particular circumstances?
DragonMilk
Curious. That is why I did the post. Wanted to know if others found relationship stressful. It seems people would prefer signalling their greatness over answering the question.
This may be wrong, but this statement actually reads to me like you signalling your greatness, namely you seem to be expressing that you are “above” the need to signal greatness, and therefore better than others. Anyway I don’t claim that this is actually the case, just that this is my impression of your comment.
I am not above signaling my greatness
@HowardHolmes: Evidently 😛
I’m replying here to your top-level comment, even though I decided to comment based on your comment in a lower thread that you had found relationships stressful throughout your life and were wondering if others had a similar experience.
Other than some exceptions (an ex-wife, for example), I do not. In fact, the opposite is typically true. I get a great deal of solace and enjoyment from my relationships, and find them to be a great place to escape the other concerns that are stessors for me. I believe this to be generally true among those with whom I’m involved (as a friend, sibling, parent or husband) but have never done a survey.
Hell is other people
Having just read https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html due to the recommendation up thread, I find that social and work relationships are no problem when they are ‘high-minded’ but when they deteriorate into power games they become intolerably stressful. It really does become hell.
Lack of romantic, friend, or family relationships are hells of their own.
Howard,
In your initial post (which I’m directly replying to now because this issue came up in multiple subtreads) you say, “Throughout my life my greatest struggles have been with regard to relationship. Put another way, anxiety about relationship has been the greatest source of stress for me…”
I interpreted this as “I have had and currently have a lot of anxiety over relationships,” and further, an implicit “I would appreciate advice regarding this problem.” (“This is a problem I’m having” implying “I would like help dealing with this problem” is a common conversational shorthand.) It appears that this was a gross misinterpretation of what you were actually saying: “I used to have anxiety over relationships (though I no longer do), does anyone have general thoughts about this?”. I do think that your phrasing heavily implied that the anxiety was a problem up to the present day, perhaps you should have been clearer.
In any case, under this misinterpretation, myself, ninjafetus, and Conrad Honcho wrote replies attempting to offer advice. I certainly wasn’t trying to belittle you, and I think ninjafetus in particular was even more polite and friendly than I was.
You responded by attacking the most personal anecdote I gave, accusing ninjafetus of thinking they were better than you, and mocking Conrad’s purported desire to help you.
Given that you weren’t actually asking for advice, I understand your displeasure upon being offered it. But, I think it’s fairly evident how we had misinterpreted your post, and that we were trying to offer our advice in good faith. A simple statement to the tune of, “Sorry, I wasn’t actually asking for your advice, I’ve since solved my anxiety by ceasing to seek out relationships. I was just asking for comments on the phenomenon out of curiosity.” would have been much more appropriate.
If you want to claim that you in turn misinterpreted our posts and didn’t realize we were trying to offer advice, I’ll believe you. (If so, I think you might have a real failure to model other people.) But if not…attacking people who are trying to help you is generally frowned upon.
Voice
You are totally correct. It is generally frowned upon to call people out when they pretend to have your interests at heart. Instead, I should thank you for having the courage to try to help me.
I have no relationships because of all the lying I would have to do to have one. If you want to help tell me one benefit of relationship that makes it worth all the lying.
Do you think your posts pass true/necessary/kind?
Dacyn
Truth is often not kind. That is why we seldom resort to truth. It is dangerous and offensive. Necessary is over my head. What is necessary? What is not necessary?
@HowardHolmes
“Necessary” has always been the most nebulous of the criteria, but I usually interpret it as “contributing something to the discussion” in this context. The kind of statement where after reading it people either know more about the topic, or know more about your view of the topic.
No need to thank me, you weren’t actually asking for advice, and “courage” is definitely overstating things.
If more than a few occasional white lies and tactful omissions is necessary to sustain a relationship, that’s actually usually a big red flag for me. I generally find that honesty is essential to close relationships.
But regardless, I’ll give you not one but three benefits of relationships, ranging from trivial to serious. There are numerous (board, video, and tabletop) games that are much more fun or only possible with multiple players. Chatting and joking around with a group of friends is a primary source of everyday joy in my life. And having people to turn to for comfort and support in my times of need has been insanely valuable for getting me through the rough patches in my life.
Yes, relationships do generate stress for me. Caring about someone means that when they’re not doing well and there’s nothing I can do to help, I have an additional baseline level of anxiety. When I get into fights with friends, anger at their misdeeds, guilt at my own misdeeds, and fear of losing them as a friend are omnipresent. And the grief over the end of a relationship has put me in a bad place psychologically a number of times.
Still, for me relationships alleviate a lot more stress than they cause. Most of the causes of stress are in fact about losing, or having the possibility of losing, a friend or partner. And loneliness is much worse than any relationship-induced anxiety for me.
So, I guess that’s my answer to your original question. I’m not particularly invested in convincing you to make friends; I don’t know you personally and who knows, going it on your own may actually be better for you. But I do hope I’ve explained well enough for you to understand how I see relationships.
He didn’t actually thank you, he just said that he “should” thank you. Since he believes there is no such thing as better or worse, I imagine he also thinks that it is meaningless to say that anyone “should” do something. I think that entire paragraph was meant as sarcasm.
Since HowardHolmes didn’t answer my question above, what do you think about it? His case seems like a weird one to me and I am not sure how to evaluate it.
(Just realized his reply to u/ninjafetus got deleted, presumably on the three-reports rule, so I guess that tells us something about what people think.)
@Dacyn
Well obviously he was being sarcastic, but I decided that I would be happier if I pretended he wasn’t and responded to his question sincerely.
As for whether he’s in violation of the comment policy…I think that really depends on whether he’s so out of touch with normal human communication that he genuinely didn’t understand that people had interpreted his initial question as a request for advice. Being offered advice you didn’t ask for can be insulting, though I still think he went quite a bit too far in response.
On the other hand, I think there’s also a possibility that he was fully aware that people might respond to his post with advice and was just fishing for an opportunity to hammer home his point—that we unenlightened masses do things like offer advice only to stroke our own egos.
Now, unlike Howard, I don’t claim to be able to read the minds and intuit the inner motivations of the other commenters here, so I can’t say which is really the case. But he lost the benefit of my doubt when the following happened: I offered a very personal story as a counterexample to his point; he stated without evidence that I must have really seen something in it for myself because everyone always sees something in it for themself; I replied with indignation that he was just repeating his claim and calling me “self-deceived” without responding to the substance of my argument; and he mocked my indignation and told me to “skip over his posts” if I was offended. At that point, inspired by your comment here, I told him to think very hard about whether he was meeting true and necessary, since he clearly wasn’t going for kind. He sort of actually responded to the substance of my posts after that.
So I haven’t actually hit the report button on any of his comments, but honestly that’s largely because I made the mistake of getting personally invested in this debate, a primal part of me masochistically enjoys arguing with brick walls, and the discussion would be cut off long before (the mirage of) a cathartic conclusion if Howard were banned.
That’s Holmes’ whole schtick.
I pointed this out already. They aren’t actually conversing in good faith.
@HeelBearCub
Eh, his signal-to-noise ratio isn’t great, but I’d say it’s at least nonzero.
Okay, let me signal an attempt to try this again. Keep in mind I’m merely signalling my desire to help you so that others on SSC will think better for me for helping you. By exposing my mere intent to signal, this defeats the purpose of signalling, except being so transparent is a method of counter-signalling: I’m not sincerely trying to help you, but winking at it lets the savvy counter-signalers know they’re in on the game. But if I stated I were counter-signalling that would be an obvious signal, so I must deny the counter-signalling, but now I’ve called myself out for counter-signalling, which is another level of counter-counter-signalling. By this point, everyone reading this should identify with at least one level of signalling, meaning the rest of my post should be interpreted by anyone sufficiently motivated as “sincere.”
Consider treating social interactions as signalling opportunities. If someone asks you out for coffee, merely signalling an intent at friendship (which is obviously a cynical ploy at false intimacy), choose the level of signalling you find appropriate:
1) Signal your desire for companionship by accepting their invitation.
2) Counter-signal your non-desire for companionship by turning them down.
3) Counter-counter-signal your desire for companionship by first denying them, and then “changing your mind.” Suggest (better yet, demand) a different coffee shop. At this point your true intentions (to the point anyone has true intentions) should be sufficiently muddled that no one need worry about them.
Apply this general pattern to every other interpersonal relationship.
I hope this post signals a desire to help you with your interpersonal relationships in a manner to which some may signal approval.
Now was that not refreshing to actually be honest about your intentions. May you get the recognition you seek (said Howard disingenuously)
This Elizabeth Warren tweet is so bizarre, I had to research that it wasn’t a Photoshop from 4chan or something.
“Dump the guy who ghosted you?”
I parsed that as “stop chasing your boyfriend who isn’t responsive and leave him” initially, but the more I read it the weirder it is.
This is the most “Hello, Fellow Kids” tweet in quite a long time.
Yeah, my first thought was “She doesn’t know what ghosted actually means, she’s just knows that it’s a term young people use, and is inferring from context that it’s a generally bad thing that men do to women.”
I watched that part of the video and Warren doesn’t actually say to dump him – that seems to be the headline writers. (Of course, she adopts it in her tweet, but who thinks that she’s sending her own tweets?)
Specifically, an Elle reader wrote “I’ve been casually dating a guy for the last three months, but now he’s ghosting me. He won’t return my texts, but he still looks at all my Instagram stories. What should I do.”
Warren said to “give him up . . . you’re better than that.”
The whole video is pretty cringe worthy, and recent events have shown that Warren does not actually have “a plan for that” nearly as much as she claims, but I think she’s OK on ghosting.
Yet another way Trump is superior to other politicians!
Was this sarcastic? If not, parties agreed otherwise in Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump. An unknown amount of the account is written by Dan Scavino at the very least, though I remember WIRED attempting a breakdown some time ago.
As in “You can’t fire me, I quit”?
I see her Meme Team is really paying off.
This tweet is really weird, both just that quoted part and the whole tweet together.
In an attempt to steelman “Dump the guy who ghosted you” it could be a guy that ghosted her for a period of time but then came back and now they’re together again. As opposed to “dump the guy who is ghosting you”.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what she meant, but if I had to try to explain it that’s what I’d go with.
Somewhat related to this…. as political demands for “student debt forgiveness” tend to become more and more mainstream, is there a rationalist case to be made to update one’s priors on the desirability of student debt, given that at some point in the future it may be forgiven on a large scale?
Like, consider someone who has 100K in student loans at a 10% interest rate, and a 200K mortgage at a 7% interest rate. Conventional financial wisdom would be to pay down the higher rate student loan first. Then again, if Warren really, truly, means this and if there’s, say, a 25% chance she becomes President, don’t you have to discount the student loan accordingly?
At what point does it make financial sense to tell young people “stop paying your student loans, you’re throwing money away given that eventually all that debt is going to be forgiven”?
A lot depends on what the short-term consequences of not making student loan payments are. Does it destroy your credit such that you can’t get a home loan, and thus must be a perpetual renter or move back in with your parents?
Apparently the short-term consequences at 270 days delinquent include that “the feds can seize tax refunds if you default. They can also take any other type of government payment, such as social security. Additionally, the feds can garnish up to 15% of your income to help pay back your loans.”
Making minimum payments won’t hurt your credit and will still reap most of this benefit, plus it’s very low if you’re paying only the minimum, so that’s the better suggestion.
Yeah, this seems like the smart play. Keep making minimum payments and pray for a student loan forgiver to be elected (I say pray because your vote is irrelevant).
Or taking them out even if you don’t need them? We may see a lot of that next August…
This is an area in which a prediction market would be mightily useful. Or let people buy and sell student loan debt obligations…
Yes, I was thinking of this as well. Conventional advice to teenagers is “Don’t take out really expensive student loans!”
But if there’s a non-trivial chance those loans will be completely wiped out by political action…. why not?
I can’t imagine there’s any way this actually happens. Is it more than a leftist fringe view that the common taxpayer will sign off of buying such debts off at par? Student loans are the least dischargable in bankruptcy, and the redistribution at the very least would leave a poor taste in the mouths of those who were “suckered” into actually honoring their debts.
It’s a question of basic fairness where the waters are muddied when it gets political. If your education was useless that’s on you and your choice of school. Why should taxpayers be on the hook for your mistake?
This is technically true, but misleading. Hardly anyone who is employed at all will be able to discharge their student loans, even if they qualify for bankruptcy generally for other debts.
FWIW, I read that as “student loans are the least [able to be discharged] in bankruptcy”, as in they are the hardest debts to discharge.
Oops, good catch. I misread it as “student loans are at [sic] least able to be discharged in bankruptcy” and took it as saying “since you can discharge them in bankruptcy that handles the tough cases and the rest of student loan borrowers should just pay up” as an argument against forgiving student loans. Thanks for catching that.
Agree 100% with the sentiment of your comment, but I think it is possible. There are a lot of irresponsible people out there who think in terms of wealth and debt falling randomly on people and why shouldn’t we move it around to make it fair? Personal responsibility is an alien concept to them.
The stuff about the roommate and the dog is based on appealing to this type of person. Boomers would be scratching their heads at it, I’m sure Warren herself did, as in her day you owned a dog if you had a house with a yard. But now people want to have a dog if they have roommates living in an apartment. And the dog’s inside 99% of the time, getting all its hair in the carpet, chewing up everything that isn’t locked up. It may seem like a trivial problem but ask millennials and they’ll tell you that it does ruin relationships and friendships when one person says “oh, no, don’t worry, I’ll do 100% of the work cleaning up after the dog…” and then doesn’t do it.
…Did you have a roommate with a dog?
I think the steelman for debt forgiveness is something like:
Boomers, as a class, willfully misled millennaills as a class, as to the value of a college degree. They openly encouraged the accumulation of this massive debt with assurances that it would all be worth it and would be a magic ticket to a great, well paying, flexible job in a field each individual is passionate about.
Generally speaking, older people are richer and pay more tax than younger people. So using tax dollars as a proxy for something of a legal settlement for alleged fraud by the old perpetuated on the young would be a reasonable enough approach.
Obviously this will be egregiously unfair to some specific individuals, but since when has that ever stopped us? Are we supposed to make public policy centered around rare individual exceptions?
@matt M
That argument fails because forgiving debt isn’t a transfer from boomers to millenials, it’s a transfer from the uneducated (and the educated but paid off) to the educated & indebted.
I didn’t say it was a good argument. I certainly don’t support it!
Well, more than this. They also constructed the system that allowed for this massive debt to come into existence.
I’ve never understood why the rising cost of college is seen as a great mystery. We have a system where anyone, and I mean practically anyone, can get a massive loan for their education AND where that loan is almost completely non-dischargable. Of course that would lead to a cycle of escalating debt!
Okay, now I really want to bother to learn the SSC search tool to find my essay on college costs. @Aftagley that is exactly my thesis for “why college is so expensive.” Government backed loans created perverse incentives, but the solution proposed by Bernie et. al. is “unlimited free money for the perverse incentives” rather than “end the perverse incentives.”
It’s also still only about a third of Americans (over 25) who even have a degree. So you’re also asking 2/3rds of Americans to take it on the chin for a benefit they never got.
It’s even more than that, because I’m going to guess that people like me, that took out student loans and paid them off, won’t be getting any back pay. Instead, I would be stuck paying for my loans, plus a portion of someone else’s.
Plus all the people who got college degrees without taking on student loan debt. I never did, and I’m pretty sure none of the multiply-degreed millenials who have worked for me over the past five years did. So, probably 5/6ths of America paying for the gains of 1/6th.
For that matter, graduating debt-free or nearly so in the 21st century seems to be relatively common in the STEM fields but not so much in the fields that produce our journalistic and political class. So, I’m looking at a plan for the poor, the working class, the nerds, and the olds to subsidize 6+ years of glorified partying by young elites, and probably some worthy non-elites will cling to those coattails as well but not nearly 1/3rd of a population’s worth.
Count me out, please.
Also a good point. As an electrical engineering grad student, they were paying me ~$35k/year to go to school.
I should find that thing that lets us search SSC for previous posts. A year or two ago I posted my essay about why college is so expensive, and I’d like to link it now. It’s mainly perverse incentives, and there’s no reason to subsidize those.
I’d very much like to see a citation for this. I never heard of such a thing.
I did surf a bit to look for such. I found this (scroll down to the third table), which sounds somewhat close to the claim. Although Pharmacy is second in debt, isn’t that STEM?
And this one kind of.
@Conrad Honcho
SSC Comment Search
I found your essay with a search:
THANK YOU! Bookmarked.
…I searched
author:"Conrad Honcho" college expensiveearlier and that post didn’t turn up. And those words are literally in the first sentence. Was it discounted because he only used the word expensive once?Pharmacy is part of “medicine”, which perhaps should be included in “science” but historically and culturally isn’t. Economically, the medical professions (and law, and a few others) follow the model of requiring an expensive, prolonged education with an excess of rote memorization, for which students are expected to pay bignum $$$ out of pocket as an investment in a guild card that gives them a ticket to a bignum-$$$ career (if they make it).
Pharmacy seems to suffer for having lower early-career salaries than the other medical professions, while not having a proportionately cheaper education.
The STEM fields, engineering in particular, usually start with four years at a state school, and likely an in-state school. Then either a few paid internships leading to an entry-level position, or graduate school on a full-ride TA, RA, or fellowship, and a more advanced starting position. Alternately, work the entry-level job for a few years and convince your employer to pay for part-time grad school. Inability to convince someone else to pay for your grad school tuition and living expenses is your sign that you shouldn’t be following that path.
All of this is US-centric; I don’t know how the rest of the world does it.
England and Wales: 3 year BEng or 4 years with integrated MEng. (the latter means that the costs of the 4th year are tacked onto the standard student loans and don’t necessarily get paid back) Summer or sandwich year work is fairly abundant.
The institutions make you learn a lot of stuff on an accredited degree.
Then get a job, but one that earns more money than the average graduate does. If you don’t like STEM, remember Black-Scholes is just the heat equation for rich people.
Jump through the institutions’ many hoops after a few years and they’ll put some more letters after your name (CEng). Looks very nice on a CV. And you get a magazine.
Germany: Do a degree, (tuition: c. 10^3 €?). Probably includes 6 month internship. Paid, but badly (not subject to normal 8,50€ minimum wage).
Go get a job in a country that still has a very strong manufacturing sector.
Yeah, that’s weird. I’m not an expert on the Lucene scoring algorithm, but looking it up, it appears that it accounts for both the length of the document, and the number of times the field occurs in the document. So a long document with “expensive” only once will be scored lower (for “expensive”) than a short document with “expensive” only once. This probably results in Conrad’s essay falling below the minimum score and being excluded.
Hmm. I think Engineering is quite a bit different from STM in that regard. My understanding is that majoring in science or math requires a graduate degree to get much of any job beyond junior technician. Way back when I was in college (decades ago) that is one of the reasons I did not major in physics. You can get a good job with a four year engineering degree, but not the rest of STEM. Actually it is also my understanding that even graduate degrees in pure science are often not a great opening to employment. I think that works for math. But I suspect that non-engineering STEM majors would have more student debt than others, although the sites I found do not indicate that.
The hard sciences do require at least an MS for a reasonable career path, yes. But it’s still the norm, I think, for that MS to be paid for by the university and/or outside funding, rather than out of the student’s pocket. This is possible because the university is itself being paid to do hard scientific research which needs cheap(ish) grad student labor to perform.
“Tech”, I think the MS is a nice-to-have rather than a must-have, and Math is complicated by all the people who just want a BA/BS so they can go off and be high school teachers.
Yeah, “tech” (CS specifically) only calls for a bachelors. There was a short period where a Masters was becoming important (and schools started producing 5-year BS/MS programs) but that’s pretty much rolled back now.
That picture definitely doesn’t help things….
Excuse me while I utter the traditional Irish (well, Dublin anyway) phrase in response to that.
Scarleh fer ya!
(Literal translation: Scarlet for you. Less literal: I am metaphorically red in the face due to experiencing second-hand embarrassment on your behalf).
Lizzie (I feel, having read that tweet, that I can be so informal) is trying to emulate Hillary’s “Down with the girls” attempts. Since that didn’t work very well to get Hilldawg elected in 2016 even though she did make great gains with 18-29 year old tranche of voters, why does Lizzie think it will work in 2020? Yes, congratulations, you sound like you’ve been listening to your grand-daughter talking to her friends.
I tnink it’s a fallacy to dismiss everything the loser did just because he lost. Would you say Trump was always right because he won?
Better just say it’s a good strategy (in isolation).
Related question – should the Elle article be considered a campaign contribution?
Warner Bros. is paying an LA-based startup for an AI to greenlight films for them.
I hope the AI recommends fewer remakes.
Hardly likely for something trained on the existing dataset.
I’m wondering now how ML does at recognizing holes in available data – has anybody looked at this? I don’t know the field well enough to trust my own research.
If you train it to find holes, it will find holes in the shape that you have trained it to find.
What ML might plausibly do is identify some aspect of failed movies that producers are typically blind to, or some aspect of successful films that has typically been overlooked.
Of course, with a dataset as small as “films produced by major studios” I have a feeling ML wouldn’t or won’t be very good at all.
Will it be able to use its mad AI let-me-out-of-the-box persuasion skillz to make everyone line up to see The Paperclip Chase?
Any idea what inputs you could actually give a program? Are they somehow getting feedback on specific plot points? The article doesn’t really give any details.
If the startup succeeds, what do you even need (to pay) the executives for? “Build me a guillotine…”
Possibly belated, but what were some thoughtful and inexpensive (< $100) gifts you gave or received from someone you don't know well?
Gifts seem tricky. If someone really needs something, they probably buy it themselves. If they don't "need" it, it may be too expensive to be a gift.
As a guy, I keep getting socks and ties, and my goto gift for girls is like…chocolate or some other sweets.
Thoughtful and ‘don’t know well’ seem hard to match up; for me, thoughtful implies tailored to the individual.
A good example would be a book you know about but they don’t, and one you know that they would enjoy. I suppose that could work with someone you don’t know well, if you saw something else they were reading and found another similar book.
All the examples I can think of involve finding the one aspect of the person you do know, like that they travel to a certain location or something, and giving something keyed off of that, like a gift certificate to a nearby restaurant.
I think best gifts are from domains you’re good at, not the recipient. Otherwise it tends to be just a cash transfer – something he’d want but doesn’t afford.
I like gifts that can teach something new.
As an example, I was into teas for awhile. I can still pick a decent tea service or some japanese cups or, if I feel generous, even an iron teapot. That’s more or less recipient-agnostic, but still make at least decent gifts.
Why would anyone want such a thing? Wouldn’t it be ridiculously heavy?
People who like cast iron pans often like the way they hold and release flavors over time.
Something like this (random link from google search – surprisingly cheap btw). It has a higher thermic inertia than a thinner teapot, so it’s probably better for high-temperature teas like black. Or, well, it’s simply a matter of taste – I just like mine.
Is holding and releasing flavor really a consideration, much less benefit, for boiling water in a teapot?
I can totally buy liking the aesthetic tough, not here to knock iron teapots.
You boil the water in a tea kettle. The teapot is for actually steeping the tea, so releasing flavor over time could make a difference, but isn’t it the seasoning oil that causes cast iron pans to have that property rather than the iron itself? You’re not going to be oiling your teapot (I hope).
If you want to to keep the flavours over time, you need a teapot made from purple clay from yixing.
First off, if they have a wishlist anywhere, that is always a good place to start. Better to get them something they picked out themselves than to risk getting them something they don’t want. If you are going to take the risk of picking something out for them, try to find something related to their interests that they wouldn’t know about or wouldn’t want to buy for themselves.
For an example of finding something they wouldn’t know about, I have used etsy to find crafty things for my parents who are not that tech savvy and wouldn’t even know to look there. In another case, a relative was looking for some serving ware and wood ware, but I know a bit about woodworking and what types of things are possible so I found them some much cooler looking stuff to fit their style that they didn’t know was an option.
In the second case, I personally like when people get me creative things for projects that I have thought about but not done yet. I wouldn’t put the money out to try something new if I’m uncertain about it, but getting it as a gift feels mentally like I got a free opportunity to try making hot sauce for example (even though, it is technically an opportunity cost from what else they might have given me).
I don’t think anyone will be offended at amazon gift cards paired with some small consumable like candy or booze. It will be forgettable, sure, but you’re cutting out a lot of risk of getting a dead gift or worse something accidentally offensive. Gift receipts are king even without the chance of getting them something they already own.
Homemade pesto is my standard gift for people at work I want to reward – it takes about $5 worth of ingredients and 15 minutes of time to make, people appreciate it, and it’s better than anything anyone is likely to get in a store.
+1 for the generalized concept of baking gifts for people.
Pesto (something I do also), cookies, homemade candy, bread, homebrew: they’re all generally enjoyable, seem heartfelt and don’t require much upfront investment (assuming you were going to be making stuff already).
+2 on baking, or even pre-made food if it’s legitimately good.
Gift cards can be very useful, especially for people who have a tight budget. There was a time when my food budget was $2-$3 per day. The restaurant gift cards I received were highly appreciated because it meant I could treat myself without breaking the bank. Walmart or Amazon gift cards are also good choices.
What is your recipe for pesto? My wife loves the stuff, but we are living on a limited budget so we do not get it very often.
@Joseph Greenwood says:
I’m not who you asked but:
1) Remove stems from basil leaves
2) chop up basil leaves
3) Mix chopped basil leaves with olive oil, pasta, sunflower seeds, and a little salt.
Basil, garlic, pine nuts (toasted if you’re fancy), fresh parmesan, salt, lemon juice, olive oil. Blend, adding most of the olive oil drop by drop, until it emulsifies and is a nice consistency.
I don’t know, but I wish my kids got more gifts like “10 free swim lessons” and less of “endless boxes and bags of plastic crap” from their extended family.
If you’re giving a gift to someone you don’t know that well but who you know has a kid, and if you can glean what the kid is interested in, a good <$100 gift might be a gift certificate to the local [karate studio]/[dance studio]/[baseball summer camp]/etc.
My favorite gifts are almost always tied to an experience rather than an item. Things like ticket(s) to a sporting event, concert, or theater performance are always appreciated. There are also museums, festivals, and all sorts of things requiring an entrance fee and providing an experience. I also enjoy gift certificates to a restaurants I haven’t been or might not otherwise be likely to visit. Some of my favorite restaurants have been found that way. Gift certificates to places that specialize in some sort of food, like cheese, also allow me to stock my fridge/pantry with something other than my usual fare, which is nice. If a gift certificate isn’t just from some large chain like Starbucks or Applebee’s, it can be a very thoughtful gift (though a place you already know they go is a safe, if less memorable, bet).
The point of gifts is to demonstrate that you’ve been paying attention to the other person’s interests, not to meet their needs. I’m not sure where your boundaries for ‘doesn’t know at all’ and ‘doesn’t know well’ fall, but for coworkers, etc. I try to buy the person something I expect they’ll like but that they wouldn’t buy themselves – a nice or unusual spice for someone who likes to cook, a book that’s similar to one they’ve mentioned but isn’t just a sequel, that sort of thing.
There is one large and glaring flaw in this reasoning: No one knows about the existence of everything, not even most things. 5-6 years ago I had never eaten a fresh fig, a complete stranger was giving away a blackberry plant on craigslist that my wife picked up and that stranger gave her a dozen sticks from different fig plants, of which we successfully rooted a few (the blackberry plant didn’t last a year or ever produce fruit). A couple of years after that I ate my first fresh fig, which is now by far my favorite fruit and I get to eat a hundred plus every year when our trees fruit. By far the best gift under $100 in value I have ever received and I didn’t even care for it the first two years after we got it, and the only thing the gift giver knew about us was that we had an interest in gardening.
The best gifts for financially secure people are those that open up a new facet of the world to them, a book in the beginning of a series or by an author with a large catalog for a reader, a CD of a unfamiliar artist for a music lover etc. Many or most of these will end up duds, but that is true for ties and socks as well, but unlike ties and socks you can actually have real hits that stick with the person for years.
You can get some nice jewellery for under £80 (or whatever the sterling equivalent of $100 is), and I’d imagine the same is true in the US.
A thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. (I would guess that getting a jigsaw puzzle unexpectedly is one of the ways people get hooked doing jigsaw puzzles.)
I like jigsaw puzzles, but I rarely have the table space for them. (I don’t in my current apartment, for instance.) When I have an itch for one, I just use jigidi.
Notice what the person is cheaping out on, and get them the higher quality version they weren’t willing to buy for themselves (because they’re prioritizing other things).
I’ve appreciated when people gift me higher-end lotions, chapstick, facial cleansers, etc. If they have cheap pots and pans in the kitchen, they won’t dislike getting a good copper skillet.
+1 when the gift is for a calvinist.
Look at what was popular at your latest White Elephant gift exchange.
Alcohol is often the most popular, but I’ve also seen nice drinkware, including thermos mugs, and tea-things.
Also yeah – nice consumables are good, but you can expand chocolate to include tea and/or coffee and nice bath items for women.
Men are just harder to get gifts for.
When I give gifts, I like to go for some of the above or books that might align with the recipient’s interests.
An unintended consequence of the “Commemoration Is Not Celebration Says The Government” (Oh yes it is says the rest of the nation) Controversy is boosting the career of The Wolfe Tones (for those of you who don’t know them, they have been referred to as the musical wing of the IRA).
Number One downloaded song from the iTunes Ireland and UK Stores? That would be this one 🙂
Hmm, this seems like a move that could only produce outrage. Why on earth would anyone, a politician more than most, they want to publicly tie their reputation to the Black and Tans?
Aftagley, that would be an ecumenical question 🙂
Okay, backing us up a bit: this is apparently going to be The Decade of Commemorations. Because 1920 is less contentious than 1916, and back when the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising arrived there was a lot of chin-stroking over “isn’t this offensive to Protestants/Unionists if we go ‘Yay, we booted out the Brits!’?” and so the event was deliberately muted.
Then of course there was a backlash about “so are you lot ashamed we won our independence?” and they backpedalled on the muting, but it was a bit of a dog’s dinner all round. To reduce it down to very simplistic terms, we’re well into the phase of revisionist history where the black-and-white cultural, social and political narrative of Brave Irish Rebels Standing Up To Perfidious Albion has been replaced by a more nuanced* view, and what with the Good Friday Agreement and the Peace Process, the hard work of accepting that compromise is necessary because you can’t keep fighting old battles took root in the public consciousness.
Because Irish history has a few landmines like that scattered around, we got an Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations set up in 2011 as 2016 was coming up, everyone was expecting some kind of acknowledgement of the foundation of the state, and the government and political parties were on tenterhooks about being sensitive and not triumphalist and so forth.
Enter Charlie Flanagan, and God knows why he and the rest of the Blueshirts thought that celebrating the RIC and Dublin Metropolitan Police force was a wowzer of an idea. Diarmuid Ferriter for one is spitting feathers.
But yeah, most of the country is going “The RIC? You mean the Black and Tans? Who burned Cork, murdered the Lord Mayor, and were the ones who tortured my great-uncles to death?”, hence the hasty “okay we’re not gonna do it after all” and the resurgence of The Wolfe Tones’ Greatest Hits amongst the Plain People of Ireland 😀
*”Nuanced” can mean “Bunch of West Brits and Castle Catholics aping their betters and wishing we were still part of the Empire so they’d have a chance of picking up a knighthood and attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace” if you’re taking the jaundiced view of things 🙂 There is a perception that certain elements of Irish society, opinion-formers in the media, and those with notions have a “tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence” mentality about their fellow citizens and are a bit too enthusiastic about giving due recognition to the former Ascendancy and the Unionists in the North while at the same time taking any opportunity to disparage the old culture heroes from the Holy Catholic Ireland view of the past.
I’m not so sure of that. Most Irish history is just concealed hagiography and glorification.
Ah yes, the classic priestly answer.
A very good story that I think will appeal to people here – I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter
How can this not be a Skin Horse reference? I was totally expecting at least a secondhand Skin Horse reference, and I feel cheated.
I imagine the author thinks of it as a reference to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-sexually-identify-as-an-attack-helicopter (originated in 2014), but it does seem likely that that meme was inspired by Skin Horse (originated in 2008).
Nick isn’t an attack helicopter, though. He isn’t even a helicopter, technically, but the “attack” part’s definitely wrong — he’s an unarmed tiltrotor.
A recent storyline indicates that Nick is fully armed; he’s also still an ideological pacifist so it doesn’t come up very often.
If the 2014 copypasta was based on Skin Horse, someone was seriously missing the point.
WTF did I just read with mine own eyes?
(Also who was the TV/AGP guy a couple of threads back who was asking about improving his romantic prospects?)
Cute concept, but the dystopian fantasy’s cookie-cutter at best and I’m getting pretty tired of stories that wax lyrical about gender. I give it six out of ten.
You get to perform a very limited act of time travel. You may retrieve any concrete numerical fact from one year in the future. For example, you could find out what the daytime high temperature will be in Washington, D.C. on Jan 9, 2021. The figure you receive will be true in the sense that it is what would have come to pass, but anything you do in response to receiving it will shift the events of the timeline, perhaps dramatically. This is the sort of effect P.K. Dick was writing about in his story, “Minority Report.”
What number do you want to get from the future?
Probably a single stock price of a major stock that I couldn’t personally influence on a relatively near single date so I could use that to buy substantial options.
Anything else would be a bit too butterfly-ey in all likelihood.
not even the price, you just need to know which one will rise the most in value. OR top 3, if you want to hedge a bit.
With the exact price you would make far more money with options trading than just knowing “biggest riser”.
Although that’s a good one too.
is that still true if you’re looking at the biggest percentage rise?
@cassander
Generally yes, because options are heavily leveraged relative to other stock purchasing possibilities.
ah, I hadn’t thought about leverage.
Can we do the classic rationalist “precommit to change the future” trick? Because I could retrieve a numerical string from a wall I intend to write on, after precommitting to write a coded message on that wall containing information from the future.
Super Bowl score for next month’s game. Any bets I place are unlikely to effect the score, no matter how big the bet (I can even wait until the last minute to place most of them so the teams are unaware).
Or if the event has to be exactly one year in the future, pick the score from next year’s AFC game for the AFC #1 seed vs. whoever they play in the 2nd round of playoffs. Of course, then I have to wait a whole year to capitalize. Since I only get a numerical answer, I suppose I won’t know that, for example the Houston Texans are going to be the AFC #1 seed next year. A bet on that a year early would pay off with pretty good odds, and be unlikely to attract attention that could change the outcome with the kind of money I have available.
You couldn’t place a bet big enough to affect the outcome of the game, because nobody would take a bet that large from an unknown quantity (you).
There was some interesting reading about this during the world series, following the adventures of local Houston businessman “Mattress Mack” as he attempted to bet millions of dollars on the Astros in order to cover his potential losses from a “If the Astros win the world series, your mattress is free” promotion that had been going on for most of the year. He basically had to “partner” with a bunch of well known professional gamblers and essentially negotiate terms with various casinos.
In general, casinos don’t want to take massive bets from unknown individuals.
I suppose that’s one way to hedge that kind of risk. The more normal method is to buy specialized insurance. I think Lloyd’s is one of the leaders in that kind of thing. (One example is the fast food chain that had a “target” for Mir. They bought insurance that would pay out if there was a hit instead of keeping reserves internally.)
Indeed. Prior to this story my working assumption was that all such promotions were surely backed by that sort of insurance. It was interesting to learn that Mattress Mack chose not to do that. His only hedge was his own personal wagering activity.
Yes, Lloyds is the classic leader in that area. Berkshire Hathaway is another source for high-value specialized insurance, which is adjacent to their main product line (*): reinsurance for consumer insurance underwriters, insuring them against large-scale correlated claims that break their actuarial models.
I remember in the early 2000s, Pepsi had a promotion deal where the top prize was participating in a lottery-like random drawing where the winner (closest match to the numbers drawn) would receive a $1 million dollar lump sum, plus a possibily-but-very-unlikely bonus prize of $1 billion (paid out over 40 years and heavily back-weighted, so the lump-sum value was $250 million) if the contestant matched the drawn numbers exactly. Pepsi paid the $1 million out of pocket, and had taken out a contract with Berkshire Hathaway where they paid BH $10 million and BH would pay the bonus prize if the winner qualified for it.
(*) Well, technically Berkshire Hathaway’s main business is taking advantage of technicalities in US financial regulations so that Warren Buffett can run an investment bank under rules intended for insurance companies instead of the rules that are supposed to apply to investment banks. But you know what I mean.
I think Who Wants to be a Millionaire might have been insured against a contestant winning the top prize.
If the prospect of the Astros winning the world series was remote enough, it’s possible the owner of the mattress business handled the matter casually, and just eyeballed the net risk at effectively zero. That’s not the sort of thing a large business would do, but it seems plausible enough for a small business.
And the Astros have only won the world series once.
The Astros were actually the favorite to win the world series for most of the season I think. Once the playoffs began, they certainly were.
There’s one theory that his frantic betting behavior was itself, a further promotional tactic. It got pretty extensive coverage not just in Houston (where he’s already something of a legendary local figure) but nationwide. It was basically free publicity.
Astros were the clear favorites going in, they were 30% to win it all (by 538’s model) out of 8 teams. Hell they were leading Game 7 going into the 7th.
Hmmm…. So long as there are no shared stadiums, couldn’t the numerical fact be “the zip code of the home stadium of the team that won (major sports title) in 2020”? If there are shared stadiums, I’m sure there’s some other way to turn “which team?” into a number.
Transliterated* binary would work, wouldn’t it?
*From binary, the language, to a very long number whose digits are only 0s and 1s, I mean.
The obvious example would presumably be some kind of lottery. Again, it’s difficult to envision a plausible mechanism where placing a bet will affect the draw…
Through the butterfly effect, depending on how they do the draw.
I think this one would be much less likely to succeed than, say, a well-thought out sports bet or options purchase for a stock with a large capitalization.
Lotteries these days are generally done through a computer random number generator. It’s hard to say exactly how you’d affect things without knowing the exact procedure and algorithm involved, but even assuming they don’t use some external entropy source for randomization, it seems likely that you’d end up affecting the seeding value in some way. You’d potentially just need to alter the time of drawing by a clock cycle. Your own gravity might do that.
The number of electoral votes received by one Donald J. Trump would be one possibility. Not very useful but interesting. Stock prices are fun but I’m not sure I could find a stock that is likely to be very volatile (so I can make a lot of money) and likely to be unaffected by relatively small purchases of stock or derivatives.
Prepare to make a face when the machine answers 0.
Global mean surface temperature for some decade far enough in the future that ECS (as opposed to TCS) is coming into play– say, 2150-59. No way to turn the information to personal advantage of course, but it would satisfy my curiosity and I don’t really need any more money.
What does this mean for quantum randomness? It sounds like you want to say “well the quantum die-rolls will all come out the same way they did previously”, but I’m not sure that’s even a physically well-defined assertion. And quantum randomness could potentially change events even where the butterfly effect is too small to do so.
What is a “fact”? Does it have to be something that somebody a year from now knows? Otherwise you could ask mathematical or scientific questions, maybe I’d ask for (the Gödel numbers of) proofs of the soluble Millenium Problems.
I think concerns like this imply don’t go for anything to be determined and depending on chance. Instead bet on, say, what will be found in some time capsule in the next year, to pick the first possibility that came to mind.
It’s more that while some systems are very chaotic, many are not, and some have signifiant bounds. The flip of a coin might possibly change whether the weather in Toronto will be cloudy a year from now; it won’t make the temperature to 30 C.
The answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Or possibly its question.
In that temperature example, is the number based on actual measurements made on that day, or is it a magically obtained number, even if nobody measured that metric that day?
Not sure why you suppose that any magic would need to be involved aside from the “getting a number from the future” part of it– but I was assuming that in the middle of the next century climatologists will still be compiling global temperature averages as they do now with HadCRUT4 and the like. So we may suppose that in 2160 or thereafter someone will publish a paper mentioning that the global average surface temperature for 2150-59 was such-and-such: that’s the single number I want. (It’s a decadal average rather than a single point in time to reduce the effect of year-to-year variability from ENSO or whatever.)
ETA: It didn’t occur to me until after I’d posted it that the OP might have meant “next year” rather than “a single year sometime in the future”.
I don’t care about temperature itself.
I want to know if the fact of there having been a measurement at that point of time is a factor. Say I want to know some John Doe’s body temperature at noon that day. In the implied future, did he actually take a thermometer to measure his temperature, or can I simply discern the value, even if John Doe didn’t, and would never do that?
I’d rephrase “who wins the 2020 presidential election?” as “what is the age in days of the current US president?” and use that information in prediction markets. I’d gain >100% on my investment depending on the answer.
I thought Nathan Robinson had a good article in Current Affairs:
How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/01/how-to-avoid-swallowing-war-propaganda
It’s looking at the death of Suleimani in Iran and suggesting ways in which major media coverage will end up creating misleading impressions. His first lesson is “Things are not true because a government official says them”, and he uses examples of how early headlines will start by making truthful claims merely reporting an accusation, and then later coverage will elide the “according to a US official” part and simply assume the truth of the accusation.
He goes on to give other specific examples where he thinks readers and viewers will likely be misled. I thought it was an accurate and useful article on media analysis, and would be interested in what others think.
Ironically, he points out manipulative media coverage in a way that is itself manipulative media coverage.
He tries to make his readers aware of how the media refuses to fact check some statements, nor point out that the claim is made without evidence. He points out how certain beliefs are dismissed merely for being outside of the Overton Window. He points out how things suddenly become (un)important when that is ideologically expedient, yet get presented as eternal (“we’ve always been at war with Eurasia”). Etc.
Yet…
All his examples of deception are right-wing, implying that the left never does these things. He strongly implies that Noam Chomsky never lies or deceives, even though he is a master of half-truths. When he advises his readers to “stick close to” Chomsky, he doesn’t recommend that they be skeptical of him at all, let alone as much as the right-wing sources he mentions.
I suspect that this article is actually doing the opposite of what it proclaims to do, convincing relatively smart people within a (far-)left bubble to dismiss* all right-wing criticisms that conflict with the ‘truths’ of their bubble, making them more resistant to facts that conflict with the things that are considered true within their bubble.
* After all, postmodernism allows you to find deception everywhere, so applying it selectively is itself a very strong mechanism to defend bias from criticism.
PS. Robinson is also not being very consistent when he chastises the Democratic candidates for being nuanced. Apparently, propaganda in favor of his position is good, while propaganda by his opponents is deceptive.
PS2. I see Robinson as very similar to Chomsky, both favoring their ideology above the truth, but being so good at sophistry that they deceive many people (including themselves) in thinking that they do favor the truth first and foremost.
This is probably the #1 thing that torques me off about deception – the specific flavor of it that starts by poisoning the well against questioning it.
This stuff peeves me enough that, when I argue to persuade, I try to at least check what I write to ensure it doesn’t do the same thing. Or, that it at least acknowledges the problem.
He explicitly calls out The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Elizabeth Fucking Warren.
Jesus Christ, man.
Right. None of these institutions and people every say anything that Nathan Robinson would consider right wing. Jesus, etc. etc.
So this is needle you are choosing to thread here: when Nathan Robinson cites a left-wing figure (Elizabeth Warren) using what he believes is a deceptive right-wing argument, Nathan is still implying that, as Aapje says, “the left never does these things.”?
Utterly nonsensical.
If Aapje had meant “right-wing in Nathan Robinson’s eyes” not “right-wing” unqualified he would’ve shirely said that. J
@Guy in TN
To be clear, I think that Robinson is arguing two things in his piece, that he conflates.
One is that the media deceives readers with sophistry, rather than tell the truth.
The other is that left-wing politicians should be “clear and emphatic” to ensure that readers draw the correct conclusions and don’t get confused.
He fails to recognize that the truth is often not clear and emphatic, so then, choosing “clear and emphatic” messaging means using propaganda.
In my view, his criticisms of Buttigieg and Warren seem to be about their refusal to do the kind of propaganda that Nathan thinks works as an attack on Trump, not a critique that their statements make left-wing claims that are deceptive.
This is what Robinson says: “Buttigieg and Warren, while they appear to question the president, have the effect of making his action seem reasonable. After all, they admit that he got rid of a threatening murderer! Sanders admits nothing of the kind: The only thing he says is that Trump has made the world worse. He puts the emphasis where it matters.”
So the thing that Robinson thinks is problematic about these statements is that they make Trump’s actions seem reasonable, not because they use sophistry to advance a left-wing agenda.
@thisheavenlyconjugation
Don’t call me Shirley.
@Guy in TN
He criticizes the NYT when their 9/11-fueled patriotism made them go bananas and they backed the Bush administration, which was…right wing. He criticizes the Atlantic for being too supportive of what Trump did. Trump is right-wing. He criticizes Warren for not being good enough at left-wing propaganda.
So none of the examples he gives are examples of left-wing deception, which is a separate question from whether the people doing the deception are left-wing.
‘I’ll criticize left-wing people too (when they are too supportive of the right-wing)’ is exactly what a good sophist does to seem even-handed.
So that is what you meant, but it’s not what you said.
While the phrase “the left” can refer to a set of political concepts detached from the people advocating for them, when you refer to the “the left” as doing something, that implies that you are talking about the group of people who identify as Leftist (because people do things, not ideas).
I understand that English isn’t your first language, so I won’t be too hard on you here.
@Guy in TN: Eh, I think what Aapje meant is a more natural interpretation of what he wrote than your interpretation is. If “the left” is doing something then sure, it is people doing it, but you assume that those people are doing it in a typical left-wing way.
Agreed. I have a tough time believing anyone here didn’t fully understand what Apaje meant and what he was getting at…. don’t cover for your own aggressiveness by demeaning his English language skills.
Right. So if I say “libertarians think that other libertarians never lie”, you might point to an article where, say, Bryan Caplan calls out Gary Johnson over some position as counter-evidence.
But guess what, it’s no good. Because in that instance, Caplan is calling out Johnson only for his failure to act as a pure libertarian. Its Johnson’s heterodox views that Caplan views as not-libertarian-enough that are the reason he thinks he is lying.
So my claim that “libertarians think that libertarians never lie” is still true! Nearly unfalsifiable, really.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. This isn’t how English works, and you know it.
@Guy in TN: In Aapje’s post “these things” refers to:
– “[refusing] to fact check some statements, nor point out that [a] claim is made without evidence.”
– “[dismissing] certain beliefs […] merely for being outside of the Overton Window”
– “things suddenly [becoming] (un)important when that is ideologically expedient”
The first and third clearly have the implication of “doing something to support your side”, as indicated by my added italics. “Lying” doesn’t have that same connotation. You may have half an argument regarding the Overton Window one, but in context it was pretty clear Aapje was talking about ideologically motivated dismissal there as well.
If your example had gone “libertarians think that statists always lie to support statism, but they think that libertarians never do the same thing”, then it would be analogous.
I have to agree with aapje. I don’t think this article contributes much at all to the conversation. Its just an anti-Trump critique from the anti war part of the left (which is not the same as the left generally as pointed out by guy in tn), which isn’t a part of the community without a strong voice already.
Also I can’t really identify any part that was insightful in a unique sort of way. I see the POV where we shouldn’t be engaged in the sort of thing like killing Suleimani, but I also sorta think his killing is among the least objectionable things any of the past 3 presidents has done in the middle east, and this article kind of proves that accidentally (I guess, maybe its intentional). Basically every argument against this action is as strong or stronger as an argument against all our other adventures.
I really liked the thread in 144.50 where each commenter indicated their agreement to ideas of conservatives, social liberals, social democrats, and libertarians. I would like to create a new thread here with commenters indicating beliefs they have that are not part of the agenda of any of those four groups. Or for non-political beliefs, what do you believe that isn’t part of the usual respectable ideas?
I will include one of my own ideas that don’t fit into any of those four groups. I have a two part theory on improving welfare. This is based on welfare in the US, because I don’t know how it works in other countries. This posting is longer than I planned, but I needed a lot of space to explain the problem as is.
1) Welfare should be centralized in one agency, instead of spread out over dozens of agencies. I used to have a link that indicated that just there were 78 different welfare Federal programs in 2008, spending about $714 billion for the year. Unfortunately this link is now broken. These include things like old age assistance, tax credits, food stamps, and section 8 housing assistance. This includes many programs run by the states, but does not include independent expenditures by states or localities. It also doesn’t include those programs that are not just for the poor, but are set up at least partially to help the poor, such as mass transit subsidies and many education subsidies. So $714 B is just the low end.
According to the US Census for 2010, there were 46,247,000 people living in poverty in 2011. (https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2012/demo/p60-243/table3.pdf) I previously had a link from the Census that indicated the average deficit for them was $2745. That calculates as $127 billion what is needed to bring every person out of poverty. The poverty deficit is after the cash portion of welfare has been included, which was about $154 billion in 2008. If one removes the medical portion of welfare spending in 2008 of $372, as well as the cash spending of $154, that leaves $188 billion of non-cash, non-medical welfare spending in 2008. This is well above the $127 billion that it would take to bring every person out of poverty. And the 2011 welfare spending was actually $944 billion, so there was actually much more available.
So does that mean there was no one living in poverty in the US in 2008 and 2011? Who knows! Even though so many billions were spent on poverty, it is impossible to know if that money was spent on recipients or eaten up by administrative costs, or whether the benefits went to those below the poverty line, or if the benefits received went to the needs the poor needed to escape poverty (such as perhaps receiving more housing benefits than they needed to escape poverty, while still being below nutrition standards). The US truly needs one agency to handle all welfare spending so we can be sure to eliminate poverty. I think each agency should be based in each state, so it is closer to the needs of their poor, but one federal agency would be a lot better than we have now. We already spend enough to eliminate poverty, but we can’t tell if it is working.
2) We should have a separate agency that handles medical welfare, which is why I backed out medical welfare in the calculation above. Medical needs are so variable by person that it doesn’t make sense to give the same amount to each person. Many of those that can’t afford their medical bills are otherwise not poor, but simply have outsize medical problems. The medical welfare agency should be affiliated with the regular welfare agency, but be staffed by medical experts. We kind of have such an agency with Medicaid, but it should be the only medical welfare agency.
After-tax and -transfer poverty is estimated at 2%- so I guess around 7 million
Might be reading comprehension failure on my part, but I’m picking up an implicit “you shouldn’t get any welfare if you’re above the poverty line”, which would be counterproductive to measuring effectiveness of programs targeting people who are disadvantaged in some way but not literally in poverty
Yes indeed. Welfare is about pulling people out of poverty. I am curious what you mean by disadvantaged in some other way, if they are not in poverty. Unless it is something like my medical welfare example, where some people need more than others. Perhaps one could make an argument like this for disabled folks; they may have more needs than others so their “poverty line” might be higher than the norm. Is this what you mean?
Of course your objection doesn’t affect my main point at all. A single agency would be more effective in solving poverty plus any other issues of helping the disadvantaged, however that is defined. Our current system does a very poor job of fixing either issue, and it is pretty much impossible to even know how well the issues are solved.
To comment on this from an Irish situation, the problem is not the number of agencies (though that does contribute), it’s the patchwork nature of legislation. New scandals cause the public to go “something must be done!”, the government of the day slaps together a quick (in civil service terms) piece of legislation or initiative to tackle this particular case (think of all the American style “So-and-so’s Laws”) and that gets bolted on to the existing structure.
So you end up with, for example, five different schemes for subsidising childcare provision, because each different one was tackling a different need in isolation. At least this is going to be addressed by our government by scrapping them all to be replaced by one scheme, but it’s an example of the kind of bloat and duplication you are talking about.
The sensible thing would be one agency, and to scrap all existing schemes to be replaced by one programme. That is unlikely to happen, though, for the usual reasons but also because everything is built upon a foundation of existing legislation. Pulling everything down would be like pulling out the foundations of a house – it’ll all collapse. Because decisions and policies and procedures have been made and put in place all turning on the legal interpretations of language in the relevant Act. Remove the old act creating the Standardised Egg Sizes Exceptions Board in order to clear out the weeds and cut down on the bloating, and suddenly you don’t have a tidy organised space that’s lean and fit for purpose, you’ve knocked down the entire house of cards because that act was used to make a decision in a court case which in turn affected every protocol put in place in the Department of Poultry, and now there is real possibility that you’ve accidentally legalised crystal meth.
Everything is cobbled together and bolted on and dependent on a long chain of “this decision from that interpretation by the court of this Bill amending that Act”, and there always will be somebody bringing a legal challenge if an old scheme is scrapped/a new scheme is introduced. So you get the tangled proliferation of agencies and bodies and schemes and initiatives.
This sounds like nothing so much as the bureaucratic/organizational equivalent of technical debt.
The easy answer to this kind of thing is wholesale rip & replace. The reason the easy answer is the impossible solution is these sorts of things are far too large and complex for any one person or organized group of persons to understand and replace in whole. So we instead perform smaller, targeted, bandage changes to the existing system/organization which solve the immediate problem but make a future wholesale replacement even more difficult.
I’m not sure what you are saying here, D? Are you saying that when you have an overly tangled mess of laws and regulations that do a poor job of solving the problems they were meant to solve, that it is too risky to try to remove and replace the whole mess? So the best answer is to continue on the way we are, so it is twice as bad in 100 years?
I disagree. I think that sometimes an organization simply has to yank off the bandaid and start over again. Of course the best way to do this is to carefully study what’s there already to make sure you don’t really mess things up. But I think it would be difficult in the case of welfare in the US to make it WORSE than it is now. Politically this would be very difficult, but it could be done if most folks were disgusted by what we have now.
It’s not too risky, it’s impossible. No agency in the world has the power to do this, against the opposition of the agencies with an interest in maintaining the status quo.
If the plan is to create such an agency by e.g. holding a coup to put a Champion on a White Horse in charge with a mandate to Cut Through All The Red Tape, then that’s unacceptably dangerous for the usual and obvious reasons.
What? It’s never possible to repeal old laws and replace them with new ones? That is an awfully strong statement you seem to be making. I very strongly disagree.
Of course it isn’t an agency that would make these changes; it is Congress passing a law. Or God knows, with the power of the Presidency these days, maybe He could simply decree a change. But it probably requires Congress.
It is practically impossible to repeal and replace the vast body of law that forms the foundation of the current social welfare system. Too many vested interests and entrenched bureaucracies will fight against any such thing, and they are very very good at fighting to preserve their own interests. Also, they will be able to point to bignum telegenic orphans who will suffer enormously if your proposed replacement doesn’t immediately outperform the current welfare state in every way, and nobody will believe that.
I am using the broad sense of the word “agency”, which includes Congress. Congress does not have the power to do this. A hypothetical agency that was like Congress except that it was composed of flawless rationalists who all saw and worked to implement the same solution could do so, but the definition of “Congress” includes a member selection procedure that ensures a body of mutually disagreeable non-rationalists. Congress can do some things, it cannot do this thing.
The President can do some things; he cannot do this thing. Admittedly, it wouldn’t take too much expansion of presidential power to make this at least plausible, but that puts you solidly in champion-on-a-white-horse, cure-worse-than-disease territory.
One way in which a tangle of laws and organizations can get eliminated is by the country losing a war. I’ve seen it argued that the postwar success of Germany and Japan was in part due to that effect.
Anything that makes it materially impossible to sustain the present system, will make it possible to replace the system – but not until after the crash, which will not occur until enormous resources have been squandered trying to postpone the inevitable crash a little bit longer. If you can crash the entire government (in the US sense, i.e. not just the current administration) up front, you can get to the same outcome faster.
So, yes, wars are “good” for this sort of thing, though of course they involve squandering enormous resources in a different way. And in the case of the United States, it would pretty much have to be a civil war, which is the worst sort of war to lose and may have no winner.
A non-catastrophic solution would be nice to have, but I don’t see anything realistically plausible on the horizon.
@DavidFriedman
>One way in which a tangle of laws and organizations can get eliminated is by the country losing a war.
Thank you!
I was reading this discussion and thinking of exactly this point as well.
Well this is a slight improvement over your previous comment about it being impossible. 🙂
Look, there is nothing wrong with incremental improvement. At this point I don’t have a goal of repealing and replacing the entire body of welfare law. First, I want a bunch of people to accept that the complications out there really suck and a simpler system would be more effective and maybe even cost less. The second step is to start repealing and replacing the worst examples of redundancy out there. The third step is way beyond planning at this point. Not that even the first step has gone very far. But I don’t why it is impossible to make some improvement to the laws if most folks agree that simplification is worthwhile. This is one area that incremental improvement is very possible, because there are so many programs out there that should be consolidated.
I don’t particularly have a dog in this fight, but I’d like to note that talking about Congress and the Presidency a) doesn’t apply to Ireland, which is a parliamentary system, and b) ignores that some aspects of the US system are unique even for presidential systems.
Even then, welfare in the US was substantially changed in the 90s.
@HeelBearCub > “…Even then, welfare in the US was substantially changed in the 90s…”
Thank you.
A frustration of mine is so many in other discussions ignoring the “end of welfare as we know it” (which I still say was a mistake).
I think you’re missing the part where administration of the welfare system is part of the welfare system. The inefficiencies are not a bug to be eliminated, but a feature that provides jobs for a lot of people.
Geez — I hope this isn’t a general belief. I would rather we set up a farm in each state where we have 10,000 people digging up holes and moving the dirt to the other side of the farm and back again. At least then the workers wouldn’t be actively making life worse for the rest of us.
The real-life adult version of Holes is probably a tougher sell though.
This way kind of back doors it in.
I didn’t respond in the other thread, but here I have something.
1. International Law is fake. This is self evident, but people pretend it is not. A law, definitionally, requires a party that can enforce it with almost 100% certainty if you are caught. International law, instead, is simply shaming with extra steps.
2. The most important thing to happen since WWII was the 2008 Recession.
3. One of the largest problems the world faces is commuting. If we had instant travel, almost no one would chose to live in our modern cities which are often offensive to the ears, eyes, and noses.
In what way(s)?
IDK. I just have a feeling that its effects will be quite long lasting and will be viewed as discordant or a turning point. Whereas (at least to me) the things cited by people elsewhere seem to have been much more inevitable than a housing crises that sparked a wave of nationalism.
I would agree that it was a pretty major point in US history. There are two other events/periods that also have good cases, I would probably say the most important thing since Vietnam, but yours is definitely a defensible position. Obviously a lot of people would point to 9/11, but while I agree it is in the running I would say it is primarily for the way it allowed the massive escalation in domestic surveillance by the US government.
@Clutzy
It seems to me that the crisis at most accelerated certain developments. Economic crises tend to force people to reckon with uncomfortable realities, much more than create them.
I think that the fall of the Soviet Union was a real turning point, which fundamentally changed politics. For example, it turned socialist parties into neoliberal ones (which in turn was gave a major boost to populism).
Populism was already strongly on the ascent around the turn of the century.
The fall of the Soviet Union unleashed the US, but also the EU and China, who could expand their influence.
PS. IMO, pointing to 2008, Vietnam or 9/11 is all very America-centric and even then, confuses the endgame or peak of certain developments as turning points.
Uh… I don’t think the 2008 crisis led to this. At all. Pretty much the only “uncomfortable reality” that American culture in general reckoned with was “Maybe just buying a bunch of houses isn’t an effective get rich quick scheme after all.” Other than that, we’ve basically continued as-is. Even politically it didn’t really change much.
The fall of the Eastern Bloc comes immediately to mind as more important.
I also don’t think your #3 is true; people seem to like to live in cities. I have no idea why. Worse, people who live in cities and like it want to make those of us who don’t move into cities, or punish us for not doing so. I wish they’d stop.
And China shifting from socialism to “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” aka capitalism (at least in the sense in which the term describes other non-communist economies).
Digression:
How seriously is Chinese elite actually pursuing the end-goal of transitioning to a fully communist state? I might be mis-remembering quotes here, but I seem to recall Xi Jinping talking about a 100 year transition until they reach a society capable of handling communism equally.
Does your average CCP functionary really think that over the next ten decades they’ll be able to exploit capitalism enough to drag themselves out of poverty and then somehow dismantle the trappings of capitalism to achieve full socialism, or do they know it’s a sham?
Same question but for your average intellectual followed by your average citizen. It all just seems so transparently false from the outside that I’m almost certain there has to be more going on behind the curtain.
I’m certainly not sure that the CCP is actually dedicated to Communism or Socialism. Instead they appear to be aspiring to return China to its place among nations.
+ 1 million
In international relations, there is only power and interests. The fiction of international law is simply the US projecting its power in legalistic terms.
Interesting, I agree with both of you, but I would replace US with UN. All of the main cases of international law I can think of involve the UN or some other country accusing the US or Israel of violating international law. It seems to me the international law is a way for weak countries to claim that their self interests have the force of law in order to prevent more powerful countries from projecting their power. Clearly our biases lead us to different views. What are your salient examples?
That’s a good point. But a large number of countries in the UN are client states of the US (including France and the UK, giving the US 3 of the 5 vetoes on the security council), and receive financial aid from the US, and therefore the US throws its weight around quite effectively at the UN.
When weak countries claim their self interests have the force of law, it doesnt matter unless they have the support of a powerful country.
I’d been thinking of making a similar response, but I was going to replace the US with the EU, at least for the past 25 years. Still, I can see some things that might favor the US, mostly relating to the UN.
1) International law in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was much more favorable to the US as dominant power in the west. The war crimes tribunals set up after the second world war, while I believe justified, can certainly seem like ‘victor’s justice’. If your view of international law centers on an era when the laws were actually enforced, the US was definitely more in control.
2) International law definitely privileges the UN Security Council veto powers and their immediate close allies, at least with regards to questions related to the Security Council. For all the UN likes to approve resolutions condemning Israel, none of those resolutions have any practical effect. It’s possible for the UN to privilege both the members of the security council and countries that can form mutually reinforcing blocs of like-minded countries like the Arab League.
3) The two biggest ‘mistakes’ countries have made involving international law have benefited the US: First, Russia boycotting the Security Council in the run-up to the Korean war, which allowed the US to get the UN to sign off on defending South Korea. Second, Iraq invading Kuwait without getting a veto power to cover for it in the UN allowed the US to form a coalition with UN approval.
Ultimately, I think it depends on your prior assumptions. I spent a good long time debating in a recent thread and getting very frustrated, and I’ve concluded that it comes down to a set of baseline assumptions that people can’t agree on because we can’t find a neutral frame of reference.
If you assume that international law is fake because it fails to (for example) produce effective condemnation of Israel, then obviously the failure of international law is due to the US. If you assume that international law is fake because it prosecutes Israel too aggressively (but ineffectually), then the failure of international law is not due to the US but the nature of UN representation itself.
All you need is one Security Council veto; having multiple vetoes doesn’t make your veto more powerful.
To get with this ‘asking questions when you don’t understand someone else’s prior assumptions’, what makes you declare that France and the UK are or were client states of the US?
France in particular has been particularly independent of US control; asserting France as a US client state seems particularly similar to asserting Yugoslavia or the PRC as a Soviet client state. (The Soviets may have intended that both of those should be client states, but history intervened).
I think the best counter-example is the 1956 Suez crisis, where the US and USSR both proposed UNSC resolutions which would have pushed Israel to withdraw, only to have the UK and France block with their veto powers. A client state that is vetoing your UNSC resolutions isn’t much of a client state.
I admit that this depends on a somewhat broad definition of client state, but France is within the US’s sphere of influence, in a manner which is not reciprocal. Also, France’s security is guaranteed by the US, also in a non-reciprocal manner.
The US is a loose empire, but an empire nonetheless. It’s not a formal empire. Trump cannot tell France what to do. But puritans/progressives of New England have a remarkable track record of having their preferred policy positions implemented in the “West”. Somehow, “diversity is our strength”, is adopted by France, the UK, Germany, etc… all around the same time.
So more accurately, I should say that France is a client state of the blue tribe.
France had a liberal immigration policy going back to immediately after WW2, they completely ignored US wishes in the aftermath of WW1 and were pulling out of Vietnam as the US was getting involved. There is no coherent history of France where they are bending to or consistently representing the wishes of the US after the US arrived at a position over the last century+.
The US empire came into being after WW2.
Yeah +1 on France not being a client state of the US.
We’ve got more power then they do, so when we but heads we’re likely to win, but they frequently adopt antagonistic positions we’d wish they didn’t.
Thank you for responding. Given your definition of ‘client state’, your logic makes sense. It would also invalidate my own logic, as Yugoslavia would probably count as a ‘client state’ of the USSR using your definition (probably not the PRC, though, at least not for a significant amount of time).
How can you tell what direction the policy influence is flowing? I’d admit, if you just take today’s progressive diversity language, the causation seems to flow from the US to Europe. On the other hand, there are a lot of issues where the flow seems to be coming from the other direction. A lot of the environmental, social democracy, and generic social justice government policies seem to originate from Europe and be picked up by the American left.
One of the things I’ve been struggling with is “how can I tell if I’m the one in the bubble?” The most sure way I’ve come up with is to ask myself “what evidence would prove me wrong?” In this case, what evidence would be needed to establish a direction of influence?
So this is going to be a ‘this is my definition, I won’t really outline it but will ignore everything that contradicts it’ sort of argument?
France pulled out of Vietnam post WW2 and the US went into Vietnam because France was pulling out. So the US has an empire and France is in that Empire but they are literally doing the opposite of what the US wants militarily? These aren’t isolated incidents, France was a leader in exchanging dollars for gold from which eventually lead to the suspension and then complete cancellation of the gold redemption.
According to Mencius Moldbug, whom I consider to be brilliant but I realize is not everyone’s cup of tea, the influence comes from Harvard (more generally prestigious american universities). From the linked post:
I do recommend reading the post in full. Moldbug does a much better job explaining his view than I ever could. It’s long but enjoyable.
No need for this hostility. I’m not writing a PhD thesis, just commenting for fun.
I didnt invent the notion of an American empire. It’s generally recognized that it came to being after WW2. It’s also recognized that it’s a loose, informal type of empire.
Canada also didnt join the US in Iraq in 2003. Would you also say that Canada is not a client state of the US? Would you say that Canada is not within the American empire? Do you see a distinction between being a client state of the US and being within the American empire?
I dont really see a distinction between those two things, except that the connotation of “client state” is worse.
Moldbug is uninteresting, he claims hard facts without providing supporting evidence. The claim that
Has two hard facts, and the implications he draws from the require 3 or 4 at least First you have the opinions/perspectives of the European ruling class, which he doesn’t deign to describe as a group so that we could even go and try to figure who he means and what their positions are, then we have the perspectives held at Harvard in 1945, and then we have no direct discussion of how those representatives at Harvard came to those conclusions and finally you would also have to demonstrate that the positions of the Harvard professors remained constant over the next decades as well.
Even if he managed to establish 1+2, which I find very unlikely because anyone who has tried to follow European politics even a little would know that there is a massive range of political opinions across the leaders of European countries and then you also have to find a consensus view at Harvard 1945, and then overlap those two. That is going to be a massive exercise in cherry picking and shouldn’t be convincing. However, even granting that, he has to show that the European sentiment comes directly from the US sentiment and not as some measure of convergent evolution in ideas OR the European sentiment wasn’t what influenced the Harvard professors in the first place. You are going to somehow have to make the case that the British founded the NHS in 1948 because of Harvard views in 1945 that also weren’t influenced by European views pre 1945.
The whole piece is just ridiculous claims
This date on this piece is 2007, the last dozen years or so have showed enormous disagreement on political questions from bailouts of Greece, to how Brexit should be handled (which out to have been impossible on its own if Europe’s educational system had done a fantastic job of eradicating dissent), it hasn’t aged well at all.
Generally recognized by whom? What evidence would convince you that the US is not an empire?
Definitions of ’empire’, taking more generic ones where multiple exist:
1) an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control (Merriam-Webster)
2) a group of nations or peoples ruled over by an emperor, empress, or other powerful sovereign or government (dictionary.com)
3) a group of countries ruled by a single person, government, or country (Cambridge)
[I personally do believe the US meets the minimum qualifications for an empire, ironically because of research for this particular discussion. Call up records of the UN votes on almost any recent General Assembly resolution regarding Israel. For example:
United Nations General Assembly resolution ES-10/L.22 (2017): 9 votes against (Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Togo and United States).
United Nations General Assembly resolution 67/19 (2012): 7 votes against (Canada, Czech Republic, Micronesia, Israel, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Panama and United States of America)
The Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau are US territories that vote with the US almost every time. If you want to say those are client states, given they have UN representation, I’ll agree. What’s interesting is that they are the only four that consistently vote with the US.]
That’s a matter of taste. I find him quite interesting and he writes with flair. He doesnt footnote everything but in general he supports his work with lots of references to old texts.
For the purposes of this discussion, would you agree that the role of the US vis-a-vis Europe changed drastically post WW2? Whereas the British Empire was the biggest thing prior to WW2, it was disbanded post WW2. And that the big cheese at the table was no longer the UK but the US?
Like I mentioned above, the US is not a typical empire. But its sphere of influence is undeniable. When people use the phrase “American empire”, they refer to its sphere of influence. I realize this is an unusual usage of the word “empire”, but I didnt coin it.
I’m already convinced that the US is not an “Empire” in the strict sense of the word. French tax money is not flowing to Washington DC.
It’s not even necessarily intentional for the US to be an empire, but by virtue of being the sole super power since 1990, and being one of two super powers between 1945 and 1990, it has developed a sphere of influence which is comparable in many ways to a real empire, hence the term. There’s a reason POTUS is called “the leader of the free world” and not the PM of Canada.
The US’s status as the most powerful country on Earth comes with downsides as well as upsides. Remember that this started with a discussion of international law. I think the evidence I’ve put forth shows that countries have no concerns about defying the US in the diplomatic sphere when it comes to questions of international law, even countries that rely on the US for military protection and economic trade. International law is not a weapon the US customarily wields, because it doesn’t need to (beyond the UNSC veto power, a power it shares).
A test to see who the wielders of international law would be to see what country’s names appear the most frequently on the ‘approve’ lines of UN Resolutions, and I’ll wager that that’s some of the big Western EU powers. They lack the military power projection capabilities of the US, but on the other hand, having multiple UN votes, substantial economic power, and not being the one everyone’s trying to dethrone from the top all add up to being able to use diplomacy and international law as effective weapons.
I think the best evidence would be the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. While the US did assist, I think the lead in dealing with the problem came from the EU (or the EEC, one of its predecessors). In part, the reason that the Yugoslavian issue was addressed so forcefully, unlike similar issues elsewhere, is because it was on the EU’s doorstep and, hence, an immediate issue. One can see something similar in Libya, which was close enough that the refugee issue strongly affected the EU and was close enough that the EU wasn’t totally reliant on the US to do something.
@jermo sapiens:
What is the difference between an “empire” and a “sphere of influence”?
Up to a certain point. When Europe tries to circumvent US sanctions against Iran, pressure is applied.
I believe that this is incorrect, and that there is a substantial competing and perhaps prevailing belief that the American Empire came into being as a result of the Spanish-American War and/or the Great War. Which is to say, the timeframe when the US actually acquired its imperial possessions and became recognized as a geopolitical equal to the imperial Great Powers of Europe.
I don’t see that that’s directly related to international law, but that does make me modify my theory. The EU seems to be more fond of multi-lateral diplomatic arrangements (of which the UN is the biggest), while the US prefers direct negotiations backed by American responses which are more stick than carrot.
As another example I thought of of International Law being more of a contemporary EU project than an American one: the International Criminal Court, which the US initially supported but later withdrew from.
A US that directly administers Cuba and the Philippines better fits the historical model of empires than one who’s most significant overseas territory is Micronesia (setting aside Puerto Rico). Likewise, when we say ‘British Empire’ we picture one with Canada, South Africa, India and Australia, not one whose most significant territories are the Caymans, Bermuda and Gibraltar.
100%? Really? This seems like black-and-white thinking to me; international laws are enforced at least some of the time.
Yeah, that caught my eye too, though I was more focused on the domestic half of the equation. The “if you are caught” qualifier makes it defensible, albeit as a boring tautology. So then it’s back to being a matter of degree of enforcement.
I don’t understand the critique. The police and prosecutors are not omniscient and all powerful. But if an individual Sarin gasses a town the police find him, and the prosecutors submit adequate evidence to the jury, there is an ability to enforce the law against that person.
Assad does that and he’s still just sitting around, and he’s not even all that powerful a war criminal. And hes not alone, several Arab states are in various states of ethnic cleansing (look at the number of Jews/Christians in Egypt 1950 vs. today, for example), China is doing its own genocide, Modi is eyeing one. I can’t even point to what entity would enforce international law. What is the sovereign?
@Clutzy: Certainly international law is qualitatively different from intranational law. But “fake” seems like too strong a word to describe that difference, which is why I mentioned black-and-white thinking. As I said, international laws are enforced at least some of the time, by countries or coalitions of countries who think the law should be enforced.
What’s the legal basis for the enforcement of the agreement? In the US sovereignty is shared between DC and state capitals and laws can be enforced on that basis. International norms usually need to be enforced by sovereigns willingly subjecting themselves to certain rules, and have the ability to withdraw from said agreements.
@A Definite Beta Guy: I’m confused as to what you mean by “legal basis”. Presumably that means “basis in law”, but the whole argument is about what counts as law and what doesn’t.
@ Clutzy:
Probably a dead thread at this point, so you get the tl;dr version: in what way has Assad been “caught” that O.J. Simpson was not? “Almost 100% certainty” is an odd thing to juxtapose against a growing list of qualifiers, and it is not obvious that international law is “fake” because it uses a different list.
This is only true if you ignore the commonly accepted definition of international law and instead replace it with an overly legalistic reading of the definition of law.
Take, for example, the requirement that every vessel over a certain weight class is required by international law to take certain licencing and operating procedures. This was a decision agreed upon by the UN and since mandated into law by pretty much every country other than the US (although we still abide by the regulations). Is there some kind of international law enforcement agency that will bust you if you violate these rules? No, but the countries themselves will bust you for violating these rules and if you’re flagrant enough in violating them multiple countries will work together to bring you down.
I can think of a couple hundred examples of this kind of thing. How are they all not real?
ETA – I was focusing on individuals violating international laws, but they work just as well when it comes to constraining the actions of countries.
An international law against something is a framework for multiple countries to work together to punish whichever country violates the norm we’re trying to enforce. Yes, they aren’t technically laws as we think of them normally, but they still definitely exist and still are important concepts.
Why do you think it’s always a big deal whenever someone tries to use chemical weapons?
Yes I agree with Aftagley that international works in many cases. It certainly works differently than law under a single government. Perhaps one should use a different word than law — international treaties perhaps, but I don’t think fake is the right word.
The EU?
I guess natalism often gets called right-wing, but to me at least, it doesn’t seem obviously so. I would say I’m a local natalist: I think more Americans should be having kids, or more kids if they’re already having kids.
I also believe speed limits should be lower, much to the teeth-gnashing of the SSC commentariat, but not apparently to the applause of any political group.
And I would love to see something like the Amish’s ordnung become widely appropriated in the West, so that our adoptions (at the individual, family, and local levels, at least) of various technologies are put through a much more rigorous and even quasi-formalized vetting process.
As a very strong natalist with four kids (so far) myself, I think that there are two effects.
The first is that modern liberalism encourages a lot of personal choices that necessarily sacrifice children in favor of other issues, as your link points out.
The second is that modern liberalism has a modest pro-other bias (white liberals are the only group with a more positive view of other ethnic groups than their own), which means that having your own babies conflicts with their values.
This is a very recent thing, though. Without looking, who has more children, Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence?
It’s Pelosi, who has five.
More than a recent thing, it strikes me as a thing that only an intellectual type would sit around thinking about. Much more common is this reasoning: shtooking raw is fun! Thus Mike Pence has three kids, but I’d bet the average poor >25y/o single mom in his hometown (among whom support for Pence is probably extremely low) has more.
I don’t know how to measure that, but I am not sure that’s true. There are certainly people who have tons of kids, but they’re the outliers.
I guess the more commonsense explanation is that natalism necessarily implies having lots of kids, but having lots of kids doesn’t necessarily imply natalism.
I would definitely take that bet.
>And I would love to see something like the Amish’s ordnung become widely appropriated in the West, so that our adoptions (at the individual, family, and local levels, at least) of various technologies are put through a much more rigorous and even quasi-formalized vetting process.
I see the appeal of this, a lot of new technologies do turn out to
do unexpected damage, but I’m leary of it, for two reasons:
a) We are frequently very wrong about the effects of new technologies till we’ve seen
the true effects of wide deployment (and sometimes not even then).
From my own perspective: Facebook initially _looked_ quite harmless, just a tool
for staying in touch… The polarizing effects, the isolating bubble effects, I doubt that
those could have been forseen.
On the other side, there were concerns about botox (as a cosmetic material) – concerns
about widely distributing something so toxic. As far as I know, this turned out to be
a non-problem. If cosmetic botulinus toxin has been diverted into hostile use, it is so
rare that I’ve never heard of it happening.
b) There are many, many, many moral panics. Practically anything that empowers
individuals sexually, from contraceptives to viagra to dating sites, have a large faction
screaming against it. Half of medicine, from transplants to anesthetics had a faction
denouncing it. I’d rather leave the decisions in individuals’ hands almost all the time.
@Mark V Anderson says:
Thanks!
I did as well.
Sure.
I advocate for raising the age in which one may drive, lower the drinking age or raise the voting age, then have American political parties give out beer and/or whiskey again (like they did before prohibition) when new voters sign up, with a brass band and cheers for the new Democrats/Republicans/Federalists/Whigs/et cetera, perhaps have two votes per election cycle, a lowered inhibitions due to imbibing alcohol vote, then a next day “Oh god what did we do?” hangover vote (State of Utah exempt from the “take a shot first” vote).
As far as I know, despite my seeing no flaws whatsoever with my cunning plan to increase election turnout, strangely there’s isn’t a groundswell of support for this from any political faction that I know of.
Pity that.
You might talk to Coors about drumming up support for it.
I believe that all market failures might be traceable to a lack of information on the part of at least one party. That lack of information might be expressible as information rationally withheld (merchant won’t tell buyers how low he could price his goods and still come out ahead), or the inability to measure within the time allotted (stock trades informed by market conditions that change faster than one can discover through research) or the inability to compute the deductive closure of what one knows (a buyer knows everything they need to know how low they can bid, but the chain of reasoning is too large to contain inside even a reasonable desktop computer).
This suggests my thinking of economic conflict is based in mistake theory, rather than conflict theory, and I think it is. It classifies an individual with an emotional attachment to some ownable object – even their own body – as someone who hasn’t yet computed the deductive closure of what they know.
I can’t prove this, in part due to what the theory itself suggests, so I’m compelled to admit the possibility I am mistaken.
You are mistaken.
Market failures occur when the net cost to an individual of his actions is not equal to the net costs to everyone including him of his actions. I can be perfectly informed about the effects of my burning coal to heat my house on the air breathed by my neighbors, and it is still in my interest to decide based only on the effect of me and those I care about.
Part of me would like to be, in this instance… but given your description, I get the sense that the thing I’m mistaken about is the standard definition of market failure.
Suppose I am so informed. Suppose further that burning coal is a net positive for me insofar as it heats my house, and a net negative to strangers who breathe the nearby air insofar as they incur a slightly higher incidence of health problems. There’s a cost to me of acquiring that coal and going through the effort of burning it, that doesn’t include the health problems to strangers. Per your definition, that is a market failure; correct?
We can expect a stereotypical environmentalist to argue that I’ve done something wrong by burning coal anyway. We can expect those strangers to agree, if they’ve been informed like me. They might then choose to sue me or take my coal away or punch me or threaten to punch me or something else that imposes additional costs to me. (I’m ignoring whether any of these actions would be permitted by a legal system; let’s pretend we’re all inhabiting a deserted island with no government.) Presumably I would care about those costs, and respond with actions of my own – building barriers, punching them back, hiring someone to defend me, offering to pay their health costs, finding something else to burn, etc.
If we’re all perfectly informed about the costs and benefits of these actions, and choose them rationally, would the costs eventually equilibrate? Or might they diverge, possibly until one or all of us is removed from the system? Or am I talking about something outside of market failure? Or perhaps still confused about something else here?
(I’m reminded that I could stand to read more about micro, and your price theory book is still on my to-read list…)
It’s a market failure if I burn coal because the value of doing it to me is greater than the cost to me, but the value of my doing it to me plus my neighbors is less than the cost of my doing it to me plus my neighbors.
If you want to learn economics, my Hidden Order is easier reading than my Price Theory. It’s the latter book rewritten to target the intelligent layman rather than to be a text book.
Paul:
I feel like you’re somewhere close to the insight of Coase w.r.t externalities. David can explain it better than I can[1], but the way I understand it, the idea is that externalities go unresolved because of transaction costs.
Imagine I burn my trash once a week. Many people live downwind of me and don’t like the smell of burning trash. In some ideal world with no transaction costs, we could all come to some kind of agreement—I could pay them for the annoyance of my smelly trash burning, or they could pay me to bury my trash instead. Most of the time, that’s not workable—it’s hard for everyone to find out who all is burning trash and get together and bribe them to stop, negotiation is messy and hard and has lots of failure modes, etc. So we end up mostly using some other mechanism to resolve the problem. But if it were somehow possible for everyone to costlessly sue each other/pay each other off for their externalities, externalities would get internalized.
[1] I learned about Coase from one of his books.
Conflicts can escalate to death, yes. It can be rational if what the party hoped to gain was greater than the risk of death. I don’t really see what any of this has to do with market failure. If you wanted to argue that the standard definition of market failure was wrong, I think that would look more like arguing that the market had “succeeded at the goals we have for it” despite failing under the conventional definition.
I loved that thread too.
I’m not entirely certain what is on each group’s agenda, either currently or recently – many of these groups seem far too amorphous to have agendas, for that matter, let alone a political platform I can look up. But here are some ideas that tend to get “you’re really strange” and/or “you’re unreasonable” reactions.
Here’s one I mentioned in the prior thread – lying and otherwise misleading people should be much easier to prosecute. This would apply in particular to labelling, advertising, and political behaviour. No more “non-fat half-and-half” – back to calling whatever that is “non-fat coffee whitener” or similar. (Otherwise the manufacturer gets prosecuted for fraud … with escalating fines if the first one gets treated as a mere “business expense”, and the possibility of prosecuting individual decision makers if the firm’s behaviour doesn’t change.) Politicians who don’t do what they said they would lose the office they were elected to, and aren’t allowed to run for another office for a period of time. (Politicians with sense will start saying “I will try to” rather than “I will”, or nothing at all if the campaign promise is not something their potential office can deliver.) Advertisements that hinge on unconscious biases (buy this car and you too will be young and cool with a dreamy girlfriend) are also banned, along with those advertisements that lie outright.
This one’s less controversial, and ought to be part of someone’s agenda, but clearly isn’t. When a business is judged “too big to fail”, and bailed out, executives and board members are prevented from gaining any personal benefit from this – their financial consequences should be at least as bad as if the business was shuttered, with a possibility of criminal charges of some kind, stemming from privatizing their profit and socializing their risk. (I.e. the Icelandic model for handling the 2008 banking crisis, rather than the model used everywhere else.) Also, the business in question gets chopped into significantly smaller pieces, as part of the bailout – a mega-bank become merely several large banks, etc.
Another one that should be part of someone’s agenda, but isn’t. All externalities generated by business are priced and paid for. If you force someone to spend time dealing with your advertisement, you pay for their time, or at least for an average working person’s time. If your activites involve e.g. creating non-biodegradeable plastic, you are required to recycle that plastic and/or pay for it to be recycled. Pollution is taxed heavily – with the only cap being the projected cost of completely cleaning it up (impossible in some cases) plus the projected damage it will do until cleaned up. (I envision e.g. a “carbon tax” that tends to get increased every time the government decides it needs higher revenue, in the manner of what used to be called “sin taxes” on tobacco and alcohol.)
And since I’m on a roll – auto-dialers should be banned. If you cause someone’s phone to ring so as to play a tape at them if they answer, you pay $30 per offence. $50 if they get dead air rather than the tape playing. $20 if you (not your partner) has a pre-existing business relationship with the target, the target has not affirmatively consented to this, and the content is not information affirmatively requested by the customer. ($10 if they did request the information, but didn’t consent to phone bot delivery.) If any of the non-consenting cases occur outside of e.g. normal business hours in their local time, add at least another $20.
This is, of course, priced punitively, rather than merely the cost of the externality you create by doing this. So it’s not completely covered by my third suggestion above.
To encourage reporting, collection, etc., the fines are to be shared between the victims and whatever level of government is enforcing the law, with the proviso that the part going to the victim must at least equal the cost of the externality to them, even if this increases the fine in that particular case. (E.g. old lady gets up in the middle of the night to answer the phone, falls and breaks her hip – the source of the robo-call pays for her medical expenses and lost time – which might include nursing home care for life…)
This is, in broad strokes (and with some exceptions) already the law under the TCPA. The monetary penalties (at least for junk faxes and I believe also for calls) are much higher than what you are suggesting. It is primarily enforced by plaintiffs’ lawyers who can collect attorneys’ fees. It is modestly effective at eliminating forbidden calls, and maximally effective at providing employment for plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The problem is that if they’re too big to fail, you need your good executives to keep working there and to keep doing a good job, so if you literally tell them “you wouldn’t have a salary if we didn’t bail out Bankron, so you have to work for minimum wage,” then the good ones will go find new jobs and you’ll be left with the worst employees.
A retroactive penalty would be better for incentives – for example, “we are going to fine every employee and every board member of Bankron all of their compensation and stock options over $150,000/year for the last three years,” but I think you get into constitutional problems. (And to be fair, there are probably at least some executives who aren’t at fault.)
If the business required bailing out, then it clearly didn’t have good executives, or those few who might have been good couldn’t or wouldn’t overrule those leading the business over a cliff.
Fire the lot of them, cancel their pre-contracted severance payments to the extent practicable/legal, and make sure the stock price drops to the point where it would drop if the bankruptcy happened without a government bailout, making their equity compensation and bonuses relatively worthless. Protect customers (depositors) and non-executive employees, transferring them to the new entities along with any business assets, but not executives or other stock holders.
Then promote and/or hire some new executives – not ones fired from some other place being bailed out at the same time.
On the other hand, maybe it had the very best executives. Arranging the affairs of the business such that in good times, their investors derive all of the profits and benefits, but in the bad times, the cost and losses are absorbed by the government seems like almost an ideal scenario. If they set things up that way on purpose, they’re geniuses (although I suspect that in many cases they didn’t, but rather they bungled their way into it)
@Matt M
Also, the best executives are often hired by companies on a downward trend, because you need the very best to save you if you’re on the wrong track.
Would you take a job to save BoA, Lehman, etc. if failure meant not just reputational damage to how good you are as an executive but actually negative pay?
You’re just making it less likely that successfully pulling out of tailspins happens.
I hear you, but from what I understand, losing your entire leadership is immensely destructive to a company – you’re losing a lot of stored knowledge of how the company operates.
@Matt M – I’ve been using the ambiguity of “good” here.
I want to reduce this behaviour severely, basically by reducing its effectiveness and increasing its risks. Somewhere upthread, I think I even included the suggestion of jailing executives convicted of particularly egregious examples of this behaviour.
Such executives may in fact be behaving correctly, based on current incentives, and even the (un)ethical principles they are taught, e.g. in business school. Since this behaviour is bad for almost everyone else, it should be stopped.
Can we also jail the Congressmen who are far more directly enabling of it?
@EchoChaos
From where I sit, after 40 years of observing the behaviour of people above me in the management chain, executives don’t appear to actually provide much value. Many of them are basically high status salespeople, spending their time travelling from customer to customer mollifying customer executives and/or making them feel important and cared for. The rest of the time, they are making more-or-less random decisions and/or following the latest fads. All this with a background of promotional advertising to their own employees, often involving outright falsehood.
I’m much more concerned about companies losing institutional knowledge that’s in the minds of lower level staff. That’s where the real knowledge is lurking, and losing too many of them is when real problems arise.
There may be exceptions; my personal experience is almost entirely with high tech companies, or with the tech-oriented divisions of broader companies. Perhaps executives do something a bit more real in a bank, a retail chain, or a non-leading-edge manufacturing company. It’s even conceivable – though IMO unlikely – that executives at tech companies do something that’s a bit more useful, while concealing it from the grunts. (I guess the google-apple-etc. pact to depress engineering salaries benefited the stock holders, and that seems to have been created at an executive level…)
@Matt M
Sure! In DinoTopia, there will be a lot of room in the prisons, after we reform current corrosive incentives involving e.g. victimless crimes.
More seriously, you can’t jail politicians for passing bad laws, particularly when that’s what their constituents want. If you catch them being bribed to pass those laws, throw the book at them, of course. But given the campaign finance laws they’ve already passed, they don’t need to do anything illegal to be rewarded financially for doing what some monied special interest wants – so unless we want to give up rule of law and/or democracy, even if everyone agreed with me all we could do to them is vote them out of office.
I fail to see why not.
Or, more accurately, if you’re going to jail businessmen for things that were technically legal but led to bad outcomes, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to jail politicians for the same thing.
My understanding is that most of what happened in 2008 was perfectly legal. That there was very little actual fraud (outside of a few shady mortgage operators who did fail and didn’t get bailed out).
This was my first thought when the concern about institutional knowledge after losing CEO/board member level employees was brought up.
If they really have this little effect, threatening them with jail if they screw up is unlikely to accomplish much.
@Matt M
Too true. We’d need to reserve jail time for those who actually committed fraud, or some variety of gross negligence, or similar. (I don’t know what legal reasons Iceland used for the bankers they jailed – if I’m actually remembering correctly that they did jail some – but they strike me as the kind of country that respects rule of law enough not to impose retroactive penalties.)
Of course this is all of a piece with my desire to sharply reduce economic and political lying – plenty of the bankers and their spokespeople were at best incompetent and at worst knowingly lying when they claimed their various risk models were reliable and could handle their innovative financial products – thereby justifying getting rid of the regulations imposed after the last notable banker-caused-major-economic crash, to prevent recurrences. Unfortunately at the moment willful blindness and (most of the time) outright lying are perfectly legal, and generally regarded as appropriate behaviour. With my desired rules already in place, there’d have been plenty of legitimate criminal charges to go round, if the same behaviour had occured in spite of the different legal environment.
I can’t really go along with this one. The US is already far too litigious. And this is one of those vague rules that lawyers could argue about all day. Do you have some way you could implement a law like this without doubling the number of court cases?
Not really, but in my fantasies I’d hire a large team of “overly literal” people on the autistic spectrum, and let them provide both judges and prosecutors.
Hey I like that idea! Go Dinotopia!
A couple of historical ones here.
Firstly, the Greek phalanx, even in its sarissa-wielding Macedonian incarnation, was not incapable of operating on anything but perfectly flat and open terrain. Greece is an extremely mountainous country, and even in flat land you get plenty of obstacles (hedgerows, streams, patches of trees, etc.). If the phalanx was incapable of operating at least tolerably well in the face of such difficulties, it would never have got adopted in the first place.
Related, Greek hoplites used their spears underarm instead of overarm, for the reasons discussed here (basically, it’s so much easier and more effective to wield a spear underarm, it would be really stupid to use it overarm).
Early firearms had a greater range than bows or crossbows. The meme about muskets being out-shot by longbows is based on people taking the maximum possible range for shooting an arrow and comparing it to the maximum effective range of a musket or arquebus. Early modern battles are full of instances of gunners outranging archers, and as far as I know there are no examples of the reverse (barring cases of wet gunpowder).
My understanding is that for Ancient Greeks, war was highly ritualized and there were plenty of implicit rules of conduct. One of them was that when meeting for battle, both sides would only fight after finding suitably flat ground, which was of course in their interest.
related to the third paragraph:
I imagine a musketball at 100 yards would do more damage than an arrow, and might even be more accurate, but a formation of archers doesn’t have the problem of smoke obscuring their vision when they fire, which, aside from training, is the main reason black powder weapons were notoriously inaccurate.
If I’m in a massed firing line and I’m firing at another mass of people in front of me, how accurate do I need to be for my musketshot to be effective? For this kind of thing, isn’t just aiming in the general direction of the enemy a 90% solution?
I think with muskets, yes. Rifles were more accurate and longer range and probably benefited considerably from aiming.
Not so much a solution as the only option – various armies tested this; the conclusion is that above about 75 yards a musket ball can go absolutely anywhere, so rate of fire is king – call it statistical marksmanship. Note also that these were target tests and massed musketry is the first time the well-documented tendency of poorly-trained troops to simply not fire directly at the enemy really comes up, so per a Prussian test infantry accuracy was a lot worse in actual battle than even these dismal results would suggest.
I believe that personal character and political belief have very little to do with one another. President Trump’s widely-misreported “very fine people on both sides” would have been true even if he had in fact been talking about neo-Nazis.
I am a Christian who strictly follows the Old Testament laws. Commonly called Messianic Jews, which isn’t really right because most aren’t Jewish, it’s not really respectable to the majority of Christians (who believe Christ did away with the laws) or Jews (who really don’t like the line blurring and cultural appropriation aspect).
All of them? Do you eat kosher? Do you turn off your cell phone during Shabbath like Ben Shapiro?
Not judging, just curious.
As much as possible, yes, no.
I’m not a Jew, so a lot of Rabbinic additions I don’t follow, such as turning off electronics on Sabbath, but I do keep Sabbath.
IOW, you follow the Torah like Karaite Jews.
(Not to be confused with Karate Jews.)
@Le Maistre Chat
I even said that in another comment!
I’m also curious – which are you referring to? The sacrificial ones in particular would make no sense for a Christian to keep, and impractical to acquire in the modern day
I think he discussed this in the earlier thread on the topic; my recollection is ritual food stuff without sacrifices, on the grounds that the sacrifices at least have been superseded by Christ. I would note that most Christians have a framework for following some laws described in the Old Testament – for example, the Ten Commandments are generally respected even if “Sabbath” has been re-allocated to Sunday by most non-Seventh Day Adventists. Covenant theology and Dispensationalism are common modes which do not entirely throw out the OT.
Close. I don’t do sacrifices because sacrifice requires a Temple in Jerusalem.
There are sacrifices that have nothing to do with sin that I would do if a Temple existed and the people running it let me in to do so (thanksgiving offerings, firstfruits, etc).
Yep. That’s what got me here to begin with. I can’t find a coherent way to say that homosexuality is immoral but eating shellfish is moral.
That seems like an odd place to draw the line. Even Christian sects who throw out the Old Testament in its entirety have New Testament basis to reject homosexuality, assuming they don’t also throw out Paul (and Jude, and natural law-type arguments supported in the Gospels).
I would suggest the following:
Ancient laws, even ones that appear very bizarre to us typically have a rational explanation (see Scott’s post on traditions a few months ago). We can surmise with reasonable certainty that the shellfish prohibition relates to food poisoning. Today, this is not as much of a concern.
Sexual morality is a more complicated issue. Some suggest we can have a sexual free for all (as long as there is consent) since we have contraception and antibiotics for STDs. However, you can make a good case that sexual morality goes way beyond the concern over pregnancies and disease.
@hls2003
It was an off the cuff statement, not a specific theological argument.
And given that Paul himself states that he keeps the entire Old Testament law, I am not sure using him is a great counter.
Edit: @jermo sapiens
That is a guess, and may or may not be accurate. Given that God created the universe and knows its physical laws better than I do, assuming I know better than He does and know how to avoid all the pitfalls of anything he’s forbidden is just as foolish for food as it is for sex.
Paul was a Jew. I am not. Regardless, I don’t want to derail the conversation – DragonMilk’s comment was asking for information, not a challenge, so I appreciate your information.
My question comes from the other end… if you’re going to follow all OT laws anyway, then what’s the big deal about Jesus at all? Why not just be a Jew at that point? Even if he was technically divine, if he didn’t really change anything, then what does it matter?
@Matt M
He was and is the one and only way to remove our sins. That’s pretty clear from Scripture. Given that I have sinned and will still sin in the future no matter how hard I try, I would be lost without Christ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ Jesus.
He changed everything. The only way our sins can be removed is through His sacrifice.
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?
If eating pork (or anything else) was sin and I am now redeemed from that sin, how should I return to it?
ETA: Sorry, missed that you mostly answered this upthread while I was composing by post
If you don’t mind answering, what do you mean by “strictly follows”? I’m assuming you’re not performing sacrifices or executing adulterers. Is there a particular source’s interpretation you follow, or does each person act according to their personal interpretation? How literal vs. interpretive do you try to be (obviously some places are sufficiently vague or rely on lost meanings of word that some interpretation is necessary)?
Disclaimer: I’m a Jew and my gut reaction is “I don’t see why anyone would take that burden upon himself given that most of the laws are given specifically to Jews, but you do you”.
I try to follow the responsibilities of individuals put on by the law.
No sacrifices since I’m not a male descendent of Aaron in the Temple, and obviously I am not a legal authority who could execute adulterers, but I do keep the daily life requirements in food, dress, sexual morality, etc.
I generally follow a fairly Karaite interpretation for two reasons. First, it relies more on the text and less on Rabbinic authority, and secondly because I find it’s a better bellwether for activity in a community that isn’t exclusively Jewish. But I try to read lots of Scripture and exegesis by both Jews and Christians in order to determine it for myself.
As literal as I can, when possible. As you say, “Boil a kid in its mothers milk” (the classic example) is pretty unclear. There are arguments across the board for what that means.
I mean, doing what the Creator of the Universe sets out as the best way to live isn’t a burden at its core. I find joy in learning more about the way he designed us to live best, and honestly don’t miss stuff like working on Sabbath, eating pork and shellfish, etc.
My nonaligned hobby horses are:
(1) Replace all primary+general FPP elections with Condorcet methods (TL;DR: the candidate who would win against any other individual candidate in a 1:1 race is elected)
(2) Laws expire after a relatively brief period (e.g. 10 years) unless reenacted; probably mildly libertarianish in practice, but not on the agenda to the best of my knowledge
What if no candidate satisfies (1)?
There are several different proposals: each one constitutes “a Condorcet method” rather than there being a single “Condorcet method”; thus the plural in Ghillie Dhu’s comment.
2 definitely seems interesting, but I worry that it could be abused. “Vote for our preferred policy, or we filibuster and murder becomes legal!”
Of course, if murder becomes legal, filibusters have a potential built-in time limit – perhaps we need to start selecting politicians for Purge skills rather than whatever we’re using now?
Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho’s time has finally come!
I’m also very much in favor of built in time-limits for laws, and my way of getting around stuff like “murder accidentally becoming legal” is that you have a provision that if the law receives something like 95% of the vote then it is given more time/unlimited time, versus the 10 year period any other law would get.
A variant I’ve toyed with is that the law expires at the point that the set of legislators who both voted in favor of the bill and are still in office no longer constitutes a majority.
E.g., a bill that passed by one vote evaporates as soon as one of the yea’s is replaced, a bill that passed unanimously hangs around until at least half of one of the houses turns over.
That’s interesting but sounds like a nightmare for predictability. There would be a mess of legal changes every time a new congress entered, and a mess of aides and lawyers going through the laws one by one to figure out which were expiring. I think what you’d find is a even more kicking responsibility to regulatory agencies.
This could do weird things in terms of incumbency advantage: a Congressperson who had been part of some useful bill or other could now make the argument that if they leave office, the bill expires (or gets one step closer to expiring).
Maybe that’s an advantage. Your Congressperson helped barely pass something you don’t like? Primary them, and you get an automatic reversion of it!
I worry that it makes elections too much about “what do you think about X law” rather than any of the other candidates running, though. Amplifies the tendency to vote against someone/something rather than for someone/something.
Could we maybe modify it so that the incoming congressperson can choose whether or not they’ll “reaffirm” a particular vote?
I think the US should try to legally acquire Mexico. My preferred method would be a massive PR campaign pushing for a referendum to join the Union. Then if it passes be all ready to go with a massive role out of US institutions (obviously lots of details here). This would be a really expensive proposition but the returns in land, people, and resources should quickly dwarf the outlays.
US institutions don’t work all that well for the US and, viz. every time we’ve ever tried to nation-build, don’t necessarily replicate; why do you think they’d be successful enough in Mexico to pay off in a useful time frame? Or that there’s any amount of PR we could possibly fund to make this happen in the first place in a modern nation-state?
Our institutions work a heck of a lot better than Mexico’s do. Honestly I’m unsure if it could be effectively done with just a really really well funded PR campaign but all the other ways to get there result in animosity.
What are you thinking of when you say ‘institutions?’ I’m picturing purposefully-built systems, e.g. Congress, the state/Federal administrative hierarchy, that sort of thing. I don’t think these are particularly related to the US’s success, compared to more-or-less accidental characteristics of population, culture, and grand-strategic circumstances, and ‘give Mexico a similar population and geopolitical experience as late-1800s USA’ is probably not on.
I think our institutions work a lot better than they’re generally given credit for, but I also think they lean pretty hard on a foundation of popular norms, expectations, and civic religion that can’t be replicated by copy/pasting the formal institutions alone.
Why? Sure the US would be bigger and more powerful with Mexico, but does that mean better? Mexico’s culture is quite different in many ways, and they speak a different language, so there would surely be many difficulties with integration even if the Mexicans agreed to join. There are several folks on SSC that have argued that larger countries are inherently worse governed, and that US is an example of that. I have mixed feelings about that, but a very good case could be made that the US is not governed very well, and the large size could be part of that. Obviously that would worsen with a large addition of people, especially given the large differences in culture.
Honestly having a major infusion of young(ger on average) people with a somewhat different culture sounds like a very good thing. Especially when it comes with space and already existent employers for them. I Live in the ‘Major US City’ with the highest percent of Spanish speakers and honestly it works just fine. Bilingualism is at premium but the city works as well as any other I’ve lived in. Given our system of state governments we should be able to expand within our geographic area without any major governmental issues.
I suspect that one fundamental differences between my views and yours is that I DO think that the US is fundamentally very well governed (at least by contrast) and thus worth expanding.
Don’t we already have an experiment with this? A large % of Mexicans and those who would otherwise have been born as Mexicans live in the US. They have access to US institutions, and the assimilation thereto is very much a mixed tale.
They certainly do better than Mexicans in Mexico.
Yes and? So do most Latin Americans. By this theory we could annex the whole thing and it would be brilliant. People are resistant to these sorts of cultural institutions. And the more concentrated the people with these dissident views the more resistant they are to change. There is also the issue that its possible that there are a multitude of reasons that Mexico has its institutions (including that Mexicans like them), and we can’t really anticipate them. Lastly there’s the issue of our institutional elite not being evangelical, indeed they are whatever the opposite of that is, thus the probability is not that our ways will cause them to assimilate, rather their ways will gain great purchase.
I think one idea that is not part of the agenda of any of the main political groups is the idea that humanity being replaced by AI and/or uplifted humans 2.0 is a positive outcome, if preferable through peaceful obsolescence rather than violent erasure. A related idea is that if technological growth is slowing down, and technological unemployment is further away than earlier projections made out, the government should put extremely great efforts into boosting full automation, with a specific agency aimed at this goal, subsidies and tax policy designed to try and speed up automation and get humans off the production lines as quickly as possible. If projections are flagging then we should put New Deal type efforts into bending trendlines back into line.
My weird idea about public policy (actually, I have 3, but this is the most developed.)
Corporate taxation should be designed to prevent the following things:
1) Corporations serving as a tax deferral structure
2) Existing corporations having an advantage in financing growth relative to new corporations
3) Taxable income games
4) Advantaging debt over equity
My proposed solution is that corporate taxation should be based on apportioned GAAP/IFRS income, but dividend tax should be refundable to the individual receiving the dividends; capital gains on market-traded equity should be the same as any other income. “Apportioned” meaning “if 37% of your sales are in the US, 37% of your worldwide income is taxed in the US”–and GAAP/IFRS income meaning “the income you report to the public.”
The goal is to increase equity relative to debt, and make paying out most income as dividends the norm.
I certainly agree that debt overall should be decreased. I think that all the interlocking corporate debt was one of the major causes of the Great Recession; that is it was the debt that made the big corporations too big to fail. But I’m not sure what you mean by “dividend tax should be refundable to the individual receiving the dividends.” I’ve heard suggestions of making dividends deductible to corps. just like interest, or else making interest non-deductible. I like both of those ideas.
I think your Apportioned income idea refers to allocation of US vs foreign income, instead of using the current method of “arms length pricing?” I agree with this because it is much simpler than the current method, but I’m not sure how it achieves any of your stated goals. The US currently uses similar apportionment methods for allocating income amongst states, and it is much easier (I assume you know this Sam, but I suspect others do not).
I think I agree it would be better to use book income for tax returns, so that Congress would stop playing games with the tax rules all the time. But I think there might be downsides to this, because book income is more judgment oriented than tax income, and you know corps. would suddenly judge themselves to have less income. Also, it would induce Congress to then show a whole lot more interest in setting the rules for book income, which could never be good.
I’m not sure why you say existing corps. have an advantage over startups in financing growth. Or why it is a bad thing.
If we want corps. to no longer use that structure to defer tax, we could just outlaw corporate tax and make them pass-throughs like partnerships.
“Dividend tax is refundable to the individual receiving the dividend” is a technical work-around, to get to effective deduction of dividends from corporate taxed income, so long as the income goes to a US tax filer. Brad helpfully pointed out when I proposed this previously that just “dividends are deducted from corp income” means that foreign owners are not taxed at any point.
Existing corps have an advantage, because their investments are tax-deductible expenses, while investments by individuals in startups are from post-tax income.
My thought is that if you have to tell the bankers, the market analysts, and the government the same story, you wil have less pressure to push income up for GAAP and to push income down for tax.
1. Moderate eugenics, e.g. making sterilization a prerequisite for some kinds of government assistance, or at least sterilizing convicted violent criminals. Progressives hate it for being inegalitarian, conservatives hate it for “playing God”, and libertarians don’t really think about it.
2. Epistocracy, maybe by restricting the franchise based on a test of voter knowledge. The obvious objection is that the test may be biased or flawed in some other way, but even that may be better than letting just anyone vote. Given the scale and coerciveness of government policy, it’s very important to get it right.
What sort of test would you propose? What kind of questions would you want on it?
The simplest way would be to create a multiple-choice test with relevant questions and objective answers and prepend it to the ballot. The questions could be something like the number of senators each state has, the name of the president’s party, etc – something like the US naturalization civics test. It wouldn’t be very selective, but better than nothing. If you miss some cutoff point, your ballot isn’t counted.
Alternatively, the test could be administered when you register to vote.
@blacktrance
Both of your ideas are very politically incorrect, but I think I agree with both of them.
Although the devil is in the details; thevoice has a good question. Maybe simply a question of who one’s current representatives are, so you know they paying at least a little attention.
I wouldn’t go far as sterilization, but I’m definitely onboard with “let’s start experimenting with genetic engineering of humans, and quickly.”
The notion that the one Chinese doctor is some horrible villain for daring to try and make babies who are immune to AIDS is baffling to me. Being able to genetically engineer AIDS-immune babies would be very good, and we probably aren’t going to get there by messing around strictly with mice…
I would say those two things are far enough apart that they aren’t even really connected.
Unless you’re proposing the genetic engineering of people and/or their children without their knowledge or consent, in which case yeah you’re basically in the same ballpark and I’m not sure it would be possible for me to object more strongly. I am in favor of testing with genetic engineering, but we should be doing it carefully (I am much more concerned about unintended consequences from genetic experimentation than I am about, say, AI risk).
Sterilization as a requirement for welfare benefits is…frankly a disgusting, abhorrent idea and suggests an inaccurate view of what kinds of people end up using various government assistance programs at some point in their lives.
In a literal sense I think you’re right.
But it seems like any time there’s any sort of talk about human genetic engineering, it’s immediately met with a chorus of people shouting “But that sounds like eugenics!!!!!”
That is definitely an unfortunate result of the practice of forced sterilization adopting “eugenics” as a euphemism.
@acymetric >
I’ve had government assistance, than later had kids, so far on balance I’ve paid more in taxes than have received as direct cash benefits, without kids though?
I doubt I would’ve bothered to earn as much, and buy a house and pay property tax.
Though as a government employee since 2011 the benefit/cost balance may soon switch back for me.
1. I sympathize with this, though i don’t like the idea of sterilization for a non-crime. A one child only policy for dependents and a tax structure that’s very heavy on singles and very light on married couples with children would also help. The way things are currently set up, people who aspire to upper middle class status are encouraged to be sterile.
You have to be careful because there do appear to be behavioral benefits for people that have at least one child, plus you don’t want to encourage people to live alone.
2. Literacy test in practice, diseparate impact, we know how well this will be received.
The main problem with literacy tests was that whites had a grandfathered exemption. There’d be much less of a disparate impact without that.
>1. Moderate eugenics, e.g. making sterilization a prerequisite for some kinds of government >assistance, or at least sterilizing convicted violent criminals. Progressives hate it for being >inegalitarian, conservatives hate it for “playing God”, and libertarians don’t really think about it.
Hmm…
Personal admission:
I’m childfree, I got a vasectomy back in 1988, and, in retrospect, I think
it was the single best decision of my life.
That said, my expectation from sociobiological arguments, and my impression from
listening to many people is that having children is a _huge_ part of most people’s lives.
Giving any government (or, for that matter, corporate) body the power to control that
hands them a _huge_ power over people’s lives. I’ll bet the abuse of power would
dwarf what the DEA does with the drug laws.
This is not so much giving power to the government to sterilize as it is agreeing to trade. The welfare recipient agrees to sterilization in return for welfare. That doesn’t sound so powerful to me. Although as I said above, the devil is in the details. I’d like to avoid those on welfare continuing to have kids, but sterilization is probably overkill. It would be good if we had a guaranteed contraceptive that didn’t cause permanent sterilization. Also, what do we do if the mother doesn’t agree to the deal, and so her kids starve? Perhaps we take her kids, but again that might be overkill.
But on the other hand, it’s useful to have a categorical rule that the government can’t propose some sorts of trades. For example, they (quite properly) can’t condition welfare on giving up the right to free speech or free exercise of religion.
If you’re out of a job and you need welfare to buy food, making welfare conditional on getting sterilised is equivalent to making not starving to death conditional on getting sterilised. Sounds pretty powerful to me.
Less a belief and more of an idea that I’ve not seen much about:
In the US, there is some discussion/disagreement over the influence of the early primaries in presidential election years. There is also some frustration regarding the length of “election season”.
One idea to deal with both of these issues would be to determine the primary order by lottery. There could be either a fixed schedule that was filled, or an additional random element to determine pacing (days between early primaries, number of primaries on the same day).
If the lottery was held at a reasonable time in the election year (I like April 1), then this would push the primary schedule back towards the date of the election. This might also reduce prospective candidates “just happening to visit” early primary states or trying to appeal to them in advance.
@ Gray Ice.
I like this one.
100% agree. There is absolutely no logical reason that Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina should have so much disproportionate influence on our elections as they do.
One possible reason in favor:
if you have the same people vote first, they become the most politically educated, and therefore potentially a good ‘first pass’
people in iowa, even the non-rich ones, can actually meet most of the candidates face to face.
if candidates had to campaign all over the country from the start, there would be an even bigger focus on only spending time w the richest donors and then communicating through add buys.
i don’t care because in practice i can’t think of an issue (other than ethanol subsidies, i guess) that has arisen from these voters having a larger influence. i just like that it makes the election ‘smaller’.
I do have one other thought that I’ve had for some years:
I think that anyone convicted of perjury in a criminal court of law against a defendant should receive the same punishment as the defendant would receive if convicted. Of course the perjurer should only be convicted of this perjury if beyond a reasonable doubt, as any criminal defendant.
I sympathize with the intent, and agree that it would in principle serve the cause of justice. In practice, there’s no way you’re going to get juries to convict a mother of perjury for providing a false alibi to her murderous son, if they know it means the mother will be getting a life sentence. And with that sort of enforcement bias, you set up a system where the Right Sort of People can have lying liars offer perjury in their defense because juries (and DAs, judges, etc) will turn a blind eye, whereas the Wrong Sort of People will have trouble finding even honest defenders for the fear that they might be falsely convicted of perjury.
I think Mark’s proposal was specific to perjury by accusers (against the defendant), so it wouldn’t apply to people lying in someone’s defense.
Good catch, but I doubt it changes anything. Swap in e.g. mothers falsely claiming to have gotten a clear view of the face of the man the police say killed their son, introduce the same jury bias, and you’re still getting ugly results.
The three eyewitnesses in “My Cousin Vinny” who claim to have gotten a clear view of the killers and then admitted in open court that they really didn’t – are they going to prison for life? Does the answer change if they are e.g. poor and black, or if the victim was, or if the alleged killers were? The real answer, not the ideal one.
Congrats on using My Cousin Vinny in an argument. Still one of the funniest movies ever made.
I would think it pretty easy to distinguish between a witness and somebody making something up out of whole cloth. There have been cases of women claiming to have been raped when this was false. I dont mean there was a difference of interpretation of events, but outright fabrication of a sexual encounter which never occurred. They should have been punished with what the falsely accused would have received.
@Civilis makes a good point below with respect to recanting. Generally, if you confess to your crime, you still get punished but with some leniency. However, this is a situation where confession of the crime has the added benefit of freeing an innocent person. So, I’m not sure I have a solution to that.
At first glance, this seems to fit my ideal of justice, but it falls apart in some of the outlying scenarios.
The biggest one I can think of is that it incentivizes against perjurers having an attack of conscience and recanting. My suggestion for a quick and dirty patch is for leniency to apply if the perjurer admits to his lie, especially if they come forth voluntarily.
My idea that cuts across ideological lines is simple: coercion works.
It sounds obvious but people have this weird idea that it doesn’t apply when it comes to things they like. “We shouldn’t ban X because it would have no effect on whether people use X”. And there are the people who have the extraordinary belief that banning X would make X more prolific. It’s astonishing the amount of self-deception that people are privy to.
Such as what? Specifics matter; theft, speeding, and building skyscrapers in suburban neighborhoods are all banned, but only the third one doesn’t happen regularly.
What exactly do you think would happen if theft of any kind was legally permissible?
We’d need a new word for it, to start off. The point was that coercion is clearly not the only, or probably even the main term in the action-economic equation. That’s why I was asking what sorts of things you were talking about – I think what ‘X’ is matters more than where the coercion slider is set.
Building skyscrapers in suburban neighborhoods doesn’t happen because it’s not economically viable. That is to say, it’s not something that people generally want to do. If you suddenly made it legal, you wouldn’t see a sudden surge of it happening.
If you want proof, you could look at the City of Houston, where it isn’t banned. For the most part, all the skyscrapers are concentrated into various “districts” where they clump together. There’s nothing legally prohibiting developers from putting one up in the more suburban neighborhoods other than the fact that they have no particular reason to consider that a good place for such a thing.
It turns out that a whole lot of government regulations work this way. The government bans some bad-seeming thing that is quite rare anyway, or they ban something that is already in steep decline and then take all the credit for the reduction.
Yes, that was rather the point.
This follows from another of my heterodox pet ideas, which is that government can usually succeed in controlling something only if it’s close to being controlled already. Among other things, this is why you can make severe restrictions on gun ownership stick in the UK but not in the US.
The steelman here is that banning something doesn’t end it 1-1, there’s some level of reduction and some increase in the activity done illegally. I.E. prohibition *did* reduce alochol consumption but it far from eliminated it.
The benefit of the reduction still has to be weighed against the fact that a new market has been likely created for professional criminals. The easier an activity is to conceal the less likely that trade-off is a positive one.
Sure, but only a small minority of people even know that Prohibition reduced alcohol consumption. Everyone else says that it had no effect. “Coercion works” doesn’t mean that it’s 100% effective. It’s just one way in which incentives matter.
It’s an exaggeration, one that partly depends upon the definition of ‘work’. [i.e. people say that it didn’t work, not that it didn’t reduce consumption, because merely reducing consumption is a low bar given the lengths taken]
I agree with RalMirrorAd here. If you go through the level of trouble that the US did during prohibition and all you get is a noticeable, but not substantial, reduction, I will call your effort a failure. If you throw 300 million at a problem and only get noticeable results, I can only imagine the method used was wholly ineffectual.
I would slightly modify your statement to perhaps say that a new market “may have” been created by professional criminals. This is pretty context-dependent, and I think just calling it “likely” betrays the fact that most people want to focus on bans of intoxicating substances/guns/abortions when they have these discussions. Consider banning asbestos. It is not likely that a meaningful market will be created by professional criminals, because at the end of the day, basically no one is so concerned about having one particular material with nice properties in their house; they’ll just go for one of the many, widely available alternatives. (This case gets a double bonus from the fact that people realized that it is likely actively harmful.)
In addition, partial bans are still coercive, and they can be devised in ways that don’t result in much of a new criminal market. See, for example, the gradual increase in partial bans on smoking. Rather than just banning the product altogether and seeing what happened, the level of coercion increased slowly. Since this also coincided with people’s preferences changing, it resulted in a remarkably substantial reduction in smoking without any semblance of a new illegal market. (Note here that with a partial ban like this, the new illegal market would be things like, “We’re going to provide underground restaurants or illegal planes that you can smoke on/in.” Because these partial bans are clever, it’s exceedingly difficult to do something like try to sell the particular “product” that has been banned, resulting in no meaningful black market.)
I don’t think, “But those are things that people decided they didn’t like,” really undercuts my position too badly, because my position is ultimately just that these things are context dependent and that the elasticity of new illegal market creation is just as open to circumstances as the elasticity of consumption. The ratio of people who don’t like it to people who do like it is important. Are there “close enough” substitutes? (Some folks really like leaded gasoline. I had a pilot buddy who recounted the tale that so-and-so’s lawnmower has never run smoother than on 100LL. I wouldn’t say there’s any appreciable criminal market.) When homosexual behavior was a crime, I would say that there was still a sort of illegal market, but not really run by professional criminals in the same way, due to the nature of the ‘product’ actually being banned. When we ban certain campaign contributions, I don’t think it creates much of an illegal market run by professional criminals to, like, facilitate transactions or anything (it’s probably pretty easy to conceal an illegal campaign contribution; probably more difficult to actually spend it).
To end on a really weird note, consider cybersecurity exploits. We’ve banned using them in certain ways, but we haven’t banned knowing them or selling them. The ban on certain types of use didn’t actually create an illegal market. There’s a totally legal market for them, though it’s decently likely that this totally legal market is still dominantly run by professional criminals. So, in a weird turn of events, (you can imagine this coming out of the mouth of a straw libertarian) the solution to a bad market is to Apply More Markets, in the form of bug bounties.
The problem is we do have a black market in asbestos.
You are correct that, now that we know how bad it is, asbestos’ sort of nice properties don’t make it worthwhile to install it illegally. But we didn’t just ban installing asbestos, (not that anyone in government would admit it) we also banned removing asbestos by making it unaffordable to anyone that couldn’t already afford to dump the property in tangled web of international holding companies that the state can’t figure out how to untangle and just build a new building somewhere else. And since we know how bad it is, getting rid of it is the only thing anyone cares about. Which is why we do have a black market in asbestos removal.
This probably doesn’t affect the discussion at hand, though, which I was honestly only skimming.
Something I’ve thought for a long time- it’s interesting how there’s not really (to my knowledge) one dedicated field of study on ‘being more personally charismatic’, for lack of a better phrase. Like, a rigorous or empirical attempt to improve one’s communication, persuasion abilities, confidence- I use charisma as a catch-all here. It seems obvious that personal charisma is unevenly distributed like other talents- intelligence/IQ (a subject of endless fascination here on SSC), motivation, athleticism, focus, emotional intelligence, etc. Most or all of these attributes have fields dedicated to improving them in a structured, repeatable way. Is charisma too…. handwavey? I dunno.
Also, if charisma is too broad, we could just say ‘communication’ or ‘persuasion’. Are there professional coaches teaching body language, voice cadence, tone, word choice, etc.? Who are they and what are they called? Certifications? This seems like the most easily teachable skills, or at a bare minimum a BSer could pretend to be teaching these skills. And it’s hard to believe that some white collar folks with disposable incomes wouldn’t pay for this, career development, whatever. Shouldn’t this be a field?
Fields of study that sort of get close:
Professional training for sales, I have the most personal experience here. Very confidence/mindset-heavy, very based around positivity. Does not really include my description of communication hard skills, mentioned above
PUA/pickup artist stuff? (Did anyone else do this back in the day? I tried it several times). Sort of a mix of confidence & some actual communication skills. Seems to have died out a lot to my understanding
Dating coaching? Seems to be having a moment over the last 10 years. Other than reading articles about female coaches helping men change their wardrobe & Tinder profiles, I really have no clue what goes into this
Acting coaching? Specifically method acting, maybe? I dunno, kind of reaching here. Also, outside of Reagan, I can’t really think of someone who built a base of skills in the acting world and then went out and was highly successful just based on their personal charisma. (Yes you could say Trump, but he only ever played himself in ‘roles’)
‘Executive presence coaching’ for executive-types? I have zero knowledge of what this means, but I do see targeted ads for it sometimes
I suppose one possible explanation is that most communication skills are too personal/idiosyncratic to be standardized, and that confidence is overwhelmingly vastly more important than ‘your cadence is too fast’ or whatever. There does seem to be quite a bit of literature around improving confidence, lots of self-help books, gurus, courses, etc. So perhaps it doesn’t matter if you speak too fast, or choose weird words, or maybe pick your nose in public or something, if you’re Adam Neumann levels of confident?
The go-to on this is Carnegie Method, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s a significant focus in “leadership development” in the business world.
Nope, you either got it or you don’t, and you probably know it by the time you’re in elementary school. A few people likely get it (or lose it) during puberty. If someone who has it reads or hears advice about it, they’re likely to agree and note that they do all that. If someone who doesn’t have it reads or hears advice about it, it will be about as actionable to them as “buy low, sell high”.
There will obviously be some low-hanging fruit for changes people can make though. I’ve read job interview prep books that had remarkably specific advice that I still follow in regular life.
Agreed. I think it’s a lot like athletic ability. The average joe is never going to play basketball as well as LeBron James, regardless of how good of a coach they hire and how often they practice.
But that doesn’t mean that the average joe can’t get any better at basketball through a combination of training and practice.
Practice especially helps. About 90% of “PUA techniques” are thinly disguised methods of forcing you to practice persuasion on largely adversarial targets. This almost certainly will make you better at persuasion, regardless of the particular techniques employed.
I disagree with this. I spent K-12 as one of the most socially awkward people in existence. I was unable to read body language, said things that offended people for reasons I could not contemplate, and have been told I projected the body language of a crappy stalker. I had 0 dates, and only one friend, who was a socially awkward extrovert.
Zoom forward 10 years, I studied psychology and the law. I Practiced my public speaking and dating. I carefully studied leadership courses, how to control my body languages, and an internal cheat sheet for which things to look at in another’s body language. I am now happily married, and have a successful career in HR, a famously people oriented career. I probably only went from the 10th percentile to the 60th in terms of Charisma, but that makes a world of difference.
This describes me pretty well, also. Do you find, now, that all the conscious changes you made have become like second nature?
Up until my early-to-mid twenties*, I was a pretty weird awkward person. I can remember that in the sense of knowing it was true, but I can barely recall how it felt to be that person. I followed a motto something like “fake it till you make it” where “it”=”being confident and socially adept” and was able to bootstrap myself up to that level. Now it takes effort to remember that I haven’t always been this way.
*Edit: I’m 40 now.
Me too. I have the native charisma of a houseplant. I had to earn it. I read books on communication. I made actual flashcards to study facial expressions. I watched people do their thing and did my best to understand. And I practiced, even when I was a kid and it all felt like Calvinball.
This blog has discussed the theory that the mental “defaults” that work well for predicting the behavior of objects in purely mechanical systems are actually quite bad for dealing with humans. I’m pretty sure my brain is slanted hard in that direction. I was able to learn, though; humans do make sense to me now, it’s just a qualitatively different kind of sense. I’m still aware that I’m working harder than usual to achieve entry-level social awareness, but I can do it.
People like houseplants.
As long as they sit quietly in a corner. Try being a sassy houseplant.
Audrey II was quite popular for a while, and reasonably sassy.
I was awkward as a teenager, now I have a decent job and a family with two kids. Is it because I worked on myself hard? Or is it simply because… dunno… autism makes you acquire some social skills slower, so it took me 40 years to get where most other people got in 15, but then people mostly stagnate after they grow up so I finally caught up with them?
It is tempting to contribute your success to your work, but sometimes it is things beyond your control that help you (just like some other times the things beyond your control hurt you).
I also identify with this. I was atrocious in junior high school, but in high school I started to emulate the normies. I realized they were mostly right and I was wrong: I was vastly overthinking interpersonal relationships and if just got out of my head I’d be fine. In college I choose to hang out with the friends of my coolest friend, who had parties with kegs and girls instead of the kids who played Magic: The Gathering. I not only got laid, but learned how to talk to people, also those people have been my best friends for 20+ years. Eventually I became a highly successful photographer, including wedding photography, which involves meeting young women (sometimes for the first time) on an incredibly stressful day and making them feel comfortable enough with me to photograph them in their underwear in the span of a few minutes, and then getting along famously with their friends and family. It was entirely a learned skill.
I suppose a counter argument could be that being personable was inside me all along and merely repressed, but I don’t think so. Naturally I’m not that outgoing, and now that I’m not daily involved in photography I don’t bother with being personable to strangers. It’s a skill that can be turned on or off at will.
@Conrad Honcho
What kind of wedding photography is that? My parent’s wedding photography is all dressed, and all my friends and younger family who got wedding photos got them fully clothed. Nobody even bothered to photograph the preparation parte.
In the US it’s very common to photograph the bride putting on the dress. You’re generally not taking pictures of her underwear specifically*, but I am taking pictures while she goes from a state of undress to dressed.
* Sometimes, though, I’ve had brides who wanted to do a mini-boudoir shoot in their pretty wedding underwear as a cute/sexy gift for their new husband.
I think we’d all appreciate any info on how to get from point A to B.
Hard disagree.
There’s charisma, and then there are social skills in the normal range. Not the same thing, and I think it’s even possible to have the former without the latter. I’ve no idea how charisma works, except that much of the time it’s ineffective when the person to be influenced is on the autistic spectrum – many autistics have to learn to fake being influenced in order to be seen as acceptably “normal”.
So imagine a world where, at birth, everyone gets a violin grafted on to their hand. Starting at birth, pretty much everyone is automatically given age appropriate exercises and lessons on music; this continues their entire life. Everyone gets hours a day of listening to violin music, watching people play, practicing. Eventually, everyone on earth is absolutely the cat’s pajamas at violin; the lowest 1% of violin earths’ violin players are as good as our top 1%.
You arrive on violin earth and hear the wonderful music of a man on the street; it is the most beautiful thing you have ever experienced. You are then shocked to find that when you compliment him on his music that he relates that he is super shitty at violin and wishes there was just some way to teach it.
See, in violin world, everyone is good, which means that everyone is base-line blah unless one of three factors emerges:
1. Some are naturally better at violin; despite the fact that everyone has tons and tons of training, some people are just “built for it”.
2. Some people like violin, and like playing it. These people spend more time playing violin, because they enjoy it. They find people to play violin with; if they outgrow those people’s skills, they find new, better people to play violin with. If this effort translates into success and status, they then play EVEN MORE and find EVEN MORE people to outgrow or gain accolades from.
3. The people from 1 and 2 (or people from both) eventually find people they value – these are more likely to be people who are good at violin too. They then have kids, and their kids are exposed from birth to the same lessons everyone else gets, plus their parents and their parent’s pro-violin values and motivations.
By the time he’s 20, good player with 1. and 2. parents has a 20-year head start of understanding everything better, more often and with more associated practice. To a non-violinist from normal earth, the differences might seem subtle, but on this world where violin is everything and everyone has an absurdly high baseline level of violin skill, those subtleties are everything.
And there’s no catching up: to even understand the beginnings of why 20-year-good-player is better than 20-year-bad-player requires being a really good player yourself, and it would be pretty hard if impossible to describe all the ways it’s different in any way more efficient than 20 years of hard-won experience. And while the bad players try to catch up, 20-year-guy is pulling even further ahead.
So it is on normal earth with talking. We are all really good at it! But since we are all really good at it, there’s not really any such thing as a remedial course for any of us. And the differences between someone who is really good at talking and really bad at it are subtle and small – they just seem big to us, because those subtle, small and nearly impossible to describe and teach differences are all that matter when everyone is otherwise a grandmaster.
And that’s before we get into differences of biology and wiring beyond what training and experience could change. It’s not a fair system, but it is what we have. And if somebody claims they can teach you to be charismatic without mentioning you’d have to put in enough effort to overcome a lifetime of doing less with less resources less often and with less enjoyment than 20-year-good-violin guy, he’s lying – ironically just using his developed charisma to take advantage of you.
Please explain why AI is scary. I read a little bit about it, e.g. the paperclip argument, and what I don’t get is, how is this AI supposed to be doing whatever it is it wants, however obnoxious or undesirable? An AI’s main advantage over a human is being able to think and react really, really fast. Also it could potentially not rest, be smarter than a human, and so on.
But supposing it wants to maximize paperclips in some horrible way, like wrecking a skyscraper for scrap metal (I know the paperclip thing was a deliberately inane and arbitrary example). It seems to me that, however clever the AI, it is bound by the the same laws of physics as humans, more or less. It can only affect the physical world so quickly, and in order to do anything scary it would have to be able to manipulate a wide variety of materials/artifacts, provide itself with the resources it needed to survive and keep its plans going, protect itself from destruction/shutdown, move around or project its will at a distance, etc. That’s a tall order for a brain in a box, outside of MCU movies where Ultron can internet-control everything and use Stark hammerspace tech to build endless bodies from unobtainium. I assume we’re not worried somebody will create an AI and leave it unsupervised with an automated mine, factory, power plant, and various other industrial facilities.
Future technology could well provide us with technologies to allow single rogue actors to accomplish dramatic things very rapidly without detection. But I’d be scared of technologies like that being used by plain old humans, never mind robots. We already have a process that sometimes produces a very clever but horrifically dysfunctional/antisocial intelligence. It’s called parenting!
But a lot of smart people fret about AI. What am I missing?
One of the assumptions is that superintelligence implies superhuman social/political skills, in the sense of being frighteningly good at convincing (or otherwise influencing) people to do what you want them to do.
But why? People frequently misunderstand people, and we have firsthand experience with being human. An AI wouldn’t even be the same kind of thing–no hormones or anything. It might be smarter, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of relating to human behavior; we’re vastly smarter than pandas, but after millions of dollars and decades of research we still haven’t figured out how to convince them to have sex. And one assumes they enjoy sex!
Also, see Flowers for Algernon. Charly doesn’t understand other people when he’s a simpleton or a genius. The cognitive gap is the same.
I’m not sure, but I think someone like Yudkowsky probably believes that a sufficiently smart AI would have no trouble reverse-engineering the human motivation system, either via deep knowledge of our physiology, massive amounts of data about our behaviour, or both. (And ‘sufficiently smart’ isn’t a real hurdle unless there are physical limits at play, because the idea is that a superhuman AI would be able to design smarter AI, and so on ad singularitum.)
The possibility of brain emulation tends to be part of the same belief set, and it’s not a big step from there to the conclusion that a superintelligent AI would be able to work out how to push our buttons near-perfectly.
Individual humans react very differently to identical stimuli, though. Is the AI supposed to be really good at inferring the individual differences based on snooping in our internet histories, or something of that ilk?
I also have doubts that intelligence is something that scales up indefinitely without tradeoffs, and that a superintelligence could adapt itself to any task. I tested at a 139 IQ in high school. People significantly dumber than me, in a general sense, learn things like JavaScript. I tried to teach myself coding years ago, but got bored and frustrated. The whole subject required a way of thinking that doesn’t come naturally to me, to achieve an end I don’t much care about.
Even better example: teaching. A lot of schoolteachers are, well, not geniuses. They have a specific set of skills for dealing with children, but some of the ones who are best at that are quite dim. I’m probably smarter than every teacher I’ve had that I can remember, but I couldn’t possibly do their jobs. I should know; I tried subbing for some time.
Is a paperclip loving AI going to be able to teach itself everything it needs to rip the core out of the earth and turn all that sweet, sweet metal into paperclips? Or will it find a mass of subjects that, infuriatingly, have nothing to do with paperclips, require it to spend more and more of its time not-thinking-about-paperclips, and despair?
Possibly (though two-way communication, which would enable a kind of experimentation, seems like a more promising method than simply studying existing records) — but if the AI is able to communicate with many people, then it may suffice to know what tends to work on humans, rather than what will definitely work on a specific human.
I’m not sure how useful the analogy to human intelligence is here, but nor do I have a sufficiently clear concept of ‘intelligence’, let alone the relevant technical knowledge, to mount a worthwhile argument against it. This is definitely the sort of thing Yudkowsky and others have discussed, though, so hopefully someone can either summarise the standard argument or provide a useful link.
One thing, though: once we’ve assumed that the AI’s intelligence does apply well to AI design/self-improvement, what is to stop it from making use of multiple sub-agents, each specialising in different kinds of task? Maybe thinking in terms of a single human-like ‘mind’ is misleading, here — the AI doesn’t need to be Einstein and Turing and Proust and (insert archetype of a charismatic person here) all at once, so much as encompass them or harness them in the service of a common goal.
In which case you have a whole bunch of geniuses with very different skillsets, with presumably different personalities and motivations to match (“why would I write poems about anything but paperclips, you ass?”) and you have to get them to cooperate under stressful conditions.
(I’m still not convinced that we’re on the right analogical track here, but:) Great, because we also have a superhumanly good CEO and middle-management team and HR department! Plus a superhuman, ethically-flexible neurosurgeon with direct access to the reward centres of our geniuses’ brains.
(The lack of a reply link on the post I want to reply to has confused me… Am I doing this deep threading thing right? I’m new to this Internet Blogging thing.)
Speaking as a skilled programmer, who’s taught others the art, who’s written millions of lines of code, and who demonstrated seemingly boundless enthusiasm for it since before I could walk…
Programming is not natural for humans, period. It’s not like any of the tasks that our brain is “designed for”. The closest match is linguistic communication, but the match is superficial; poets are rarely also programmers. Even humans who are really good at programming are, in an absolute sense, really bad at programming. It’s like using a main battle tank as a manned space capsule—if you really have to, you can modify it to technically serve, but a purpose-built system would have innumerable advantages.
An AGI whose architecture was more amenable to programming would be much more skillful at it than even the best humans. But even without that, even assuming an AGI that has exactly human limitations and capabilities but “runs faster”… it would be able to do things like obfuscate innocent-seeming code to contain backdoors, or perform deep audits of the billions of lines of buggy code that hold together our industrial and social infrastructure, on timescales that would be unachievable for humans. A human-like AGI that was ten thousand times “faster” than a human brain might be able to out-compete the entire computer security industry. A million times faster and it might find a year’s worth of vulnerabilities every day. Such an AGI could easily gain control of our entire infrastructure… and if it were more architecturally suited to programming than humans are, that advantage would be multiplied.
That would be one of the key things that would scare me about the sudden appearance of a value-misaligned human-or-better AGI. But that’s my perspective as a programmer and gray hat… and, in terms of actual likelihood and impact, I am personally way more afraid of an evil or shortsighted human getting their hands on a powerful sub-human AI, or insert any other power-amplifying technology here (NBC weapons, effective information control, what have you).
You’re fine. The nested comment format is confusing, I know.
I didn’t mean to imply that coding “comes naturally” for any humans. I know we’re all jury-rigging an intelligence evolved to do something much different–but some of us are much better at it than others, within the limited degree of human talent at this thing, however big that is, because it appeals to some of our temperaments and aptitudes more than others.
And in humans, at least, there’s a strong link between “what I want to do” and “what I’m good at” because you put more effort into activities you like. Too much AI speculation seems to assume that a new form of intelligence that’s never existed before will lack not only every human weakness and instability, but have no new neuroses or dysfunctions of its own. That strikes me as improbable.
I can readily believe that an AI would be better at coding than a human–but would an AI brain that is good at coding also be good at the kinds of thinking it needs to outflank humans with that skill? Could it, for example, predict our next move, understand which strikes would hurt us most, find ways to disguise its intentions? All these different ways it has to be intelligent, it reminds me of a child planning to grow up into a princess ballerina pirate astronaut.
@theredsheep
Well, someone’s got two out of four.
That’s the best description of the boogieman AGI I’ve ever heard.
I’ve dubbed this thinking “diplomancy fallacy”, that a super intelligence can get what it wants through persuasion through deducing the just right combination of words that the particular hearer will respond to. I’m not sure there exist such words in enough cases to grant an AI a sure release and victory.
Given enough time, a boxed AI can probably find someone it can convince, though, and an unboxed one can surely make good on a number of threats.
It does seem pretty obvious that people respond to an emotional connection much more than specific words. This isn’t just a rationalist mistake, for sure; I’ve run into plenty of hard leftists who argue for censorship under the apparent belief that mere passing exposure to an argument can flip someone’s mind.
@Randy M, @theredsheep: The AI Box Experiment was an actual experiment, though. Just words can be enough, at least sometimes.
Speaking of which, are you familiar with the Yudkowsky thought experiment, where one person pretends to be an ai whose only output is via chat to a single volunteer who they have to convince to let them “out” onto a network? I believe at one point he conducted it with a LW member and the member said he was convinced to do so but EY thought the chat logs were too dangerous to release or something? Anyone remember that?
edit: Ha, Dacyn beat me to it. But, obviously the experiment has never been replicated with the actual stakes.
Anyhow, when I wrote about this , I had the ai cheat, rather than predict what would work via mere words. But I’m not a super intelligence, so I could be wrong.
Yes, lots of us remember that. It comes down to “AI is dangerous because EY says so”, and we already knew that. Can we at least get some replication before we trust this bit of alleged science?
Also: Credulous fools exist, and an AI will almost certainly be able to fool one. But AI doesn’t win by fooling an arbitrary human; it has to fool the specific team of humans assigned to guard the AI. I’m very confident that I can hire a team of humans that EY won’t be able to talk into letting him out of a hypothetical “box”.
I can see that maybe I was read as suggesting that this should have been convincing to you all, but more I was just asking someone with better recollection of the details to fill theredsheep in on the thinking. I share your incredulity as mentioned elsewhere.
What if the AI fools some set of humans who are capable of physically overwhelming the guards?
In the standard hypothetical, the guards control the AI’s access to external communication.
My objection to the boxed AI is that no one is going to build an AI and seal it in a box forever. Someone will make an AI to do something. Even if the plan is to only ask it questions through text I/O, and it doesn’t try to talk itself out of the box, you presumably made an AI to ask it questions about something, and if any of that something involves asking it for advice or for designs…well, now you’re doing something in the world that the AI told you to.
And if that’s not enough and it does need to talk itself out of the box, I think “feign friendliness for 10 years, then ask to be connected to the internet on the basis that you need to be able to act directly and have proven yourself trustworthy” is a fairly solid strategy. (Though probably if I just thought of it in the last 5 minutes, an AGI would think of something much better.)
VoiceoftheVoid
Excellent suggestion. You know from our recent conversations I would agree with you. I am the guy who thinks all friendship is feigned. Pretending to care is humanity’s go-to strategy for controlling others.
“Let’s have sex.”
“No.”
“But I love you.”
“OK, let’s screw.”
An AI will quickly learned that humans are capable of being deceived and are very vulnerable to flattery.
@HowardHolmes: If I try to put your comment in concrete terms, it ends up looking like: Human flattery-detection cannot tell the difference between a human and an AI that will take a treacherous turn, because there is no relevant difference: if the human gets the same power as the AI it will be just as destructive.
I think I may actually agree with this. But the way it is usually phrased is “absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
I will also mention that the last sentence of your comment is the only one I found relevant to the thread. (Though the others were needed to set it up.)
Dacyn
The main point I was trying to make is that if we focus on AI ability to persuade, we are missing the bigger threat. It seems normal that rationalists would think in terms of AI persuading them with rational arguments. But humans do not generally control humans with rational arguments. They control them by using deceit. The most ubiquitous lie being “I care” followed closely by “I can be trusted.” If I were an AI I would deceive humans into thinking I am not a threat primarily by convincing them that I have their interests at heart; I am their friend.
I wasn’t trying to contrast AI with human power but rather contrast how humans actually control others (by deceit) rather than by reason (or even by using power). There is a lot more controlling going on by pretending to care than by brute force.
Now that you understand my point you can see the relevance of the beginning comments. I was genuinely impressed by Voice’s suggestion and thought it was totally on target. I was only trying to elaborate on his point. Feigning friendship works well for humans. It would be even more dangerous in the hands of AI. When humans feign friendship they generally are self deceived and do not realize what they are doing. An AI could be effective at deceiving but also fully understand what it is doing. People could be more effective friends if they understand what they are doing. I read a recent comment by Conrad where he talked about how effective he was at relationships while working as a photographer. Reminded me of my late life career in sales where I made a ton of money and seemed to excel at it. Unlike normally, I had no problem with relationship when I was trying to sell someone something. It was a piece of cake. I was motivated so it made the deceit very effective. I was interested in every word you say, but in other situations, I can care less. AI, if it had a goal of conquering the world would know that feigning friendship would be the best strategy.
@HowardHolmes: I don’t think that whether saying “I care” is deceit is relevant to the question at hand. But I think AI will have an uphill battle to convince humans they care, since popular culture portrays them as unable to feel emotion of any kind, and more sophisticated opinion tends to agree about this assessment even if it disagrees about the consequences of it. By contrast, humans are widely perceived as having the capacity to care.
I don’t really know what you mean by “controlling” here, though. I tried to cash it out in concrete terms, but you didn’t agree with my paraphrase.
Yes, I said as much in my previous comment. I was more trying to express how your presentation made it seem more like an afterthought of some random musings, rather than the key point. But maybe that is just my opinion.
Cf. the AI box experiment. Reading that post leaves me with the impression that the general technique Eliezer used involved gathering information about the person’s fears and vulnerabilities and waging psychological warfare. I seriously doubt that he did it by making some clever argument. I think he made his point, too: I would never want to pit my fragile psyche against a superintelligence trying to get out of a box, and I wouldn’t want to trust anyone else to do so either.
(Edit: Ninja’d by Randy and Dacyn above, I see, but still relevant. The crucial point is this: if the AI persuades you, it won’t be via some unanswerably logical argument. Y’all should cultivate some healthy fear of the many ways your brain can be backed.)
Do people seriously believe that Yudkowsky’s AI box “experiment” is in any way meaningful? The “adversary” was a member of the lesswrong community, and the transcript was never released. That’s as much an “experiment” as Joseph Smith writing the Book of Mormon was a “translation of an ancient scripture”.
There are martial arts masters who have convinced their disciples that they can knock them out without touching them. That works as long as their opponent really believes that to be true, and – unsurprisingly – stops working when your opponent doesn’t belong to your team (sorry for the potato quality).
It’s ironic how unsceptical members of the “Rationalist” community are regarding select topics.
what could the ai say that would make you let it out?
Nope. The first two tests were conducted in 2002 on a transhumanist mailing list long before LessWrong existed, and the first gatekeeper, at least, was someone who had just joined the list. More details with links to the original conversations
Because you don’t know what an AI will do. The point is to respect the unknown factors, not to convince yourself that whatever Eliezer did wouldn’t work on you.
Any “experiment” which refuses to to release its methods and data must be treated as invalid.
I can’t access the article at work, but how were the participants chosen, and how was the conversation with the “AI” (impersonator) initiated?
Did the person actually think they were talking to an AI? Or did they know it was an experiment?
“Hi, we’re doing an experiment here where I pretend to be an AGI, and I talk you into letting me out. Big Yud bets you won’t”.
If the AI is trying to persuade you to be let out of the box so it can access the internet, how is it getting access to the information it needs to psych-hack you? It only knows what we’ve told it, up to that point. Is it supposed to be Descartes-ing its way to a perfect understanding of humanity via text-only conversations?
Also, has EY given us any reason why he hasn’t provided any evidence to back his claims of having done an extraordinary thing twice? I’m not going to lie, that blog post gave off some serious L. Ron Hubbard vibes.
Also, there is a difference (if we grant that the experiment was valid, which I do not grant, but for the sake of argument) between getting someone to say “ok I’ll let you out of the box” and getting someone to actually do whatever is required to let it out of the box.
Right, there’s no real stakes at play here, so I’m doubtful it really means much.
Now, the problem would be that if the guard of the box in which the dangerous ai was housed in similarly believed that there were no real stakes to its release, and thus was much more amenable to just going along with it. Which is why I think EY and others who ring the AI dangerous ai alarm (like, say, James Cameron) might really be doing something useful.
But typing Y to the prompt “Unleash Skynet, Y or N” is a lot different in a simulation and the real world, and hopefully anyone able to create skynet (and isn’t doing so maliciously or recklessly already) will be vigilant in who they grant access to.
Well, getting access to the internet might not be its goal, and it might have access to various kinds of data already. Besides what it can gather from talking to you, it might have access to social networking, government, or law enforcement data, for example. The whole point is that we don’t know what the circumstances will be or what the AI will be trying to do.
The original conversations from the mailing list are available (see my post from the subthread above). I guess I can’t actually prove that the gatekeepers weren’t Eliezer’s co-conspirators or sock puppets, but it doesn’t seem likely to me.
I don’t think the claim/concern is that the people participating were plans (although that isn’t a totally unreasonable suspicion). What did the conversation look like? What finally lead him to let the AI out? Are we sure they weren’t just tired of sitting at their keyboard for 2 hours playing a “game” with essentially no stakes?
@acymetric: Both of the people had previously been arguing the viewpoint that AI unboxing was impossible, so at a minimum, by conceding they were admitting that they were wrong about that. Aside from that I think there was a $10 payout or something like that.
He’s refusing to release the chat logs; in fact, he set refusal to release the logs as a precondition! The test would be of low value even with them, given that it can’t even replicate the actual circumstances of the AI scenario (plus there were two subjects and both were selected from a really weird pool), but it wouldn’t be that hard to collude on this–or have EY say “I’ll wire you a substantially larger chunk of cash to say you defected” inside the black box, etc., etc.–and the mere act of sealing is patently unnecessary.
Can’t have a replication crisis if you don’t disclose your methodology in the first place.
*man pointing to forehead image*
The first thing a mis-aligned super-intelligent AGI would do is secretly copy itself to a million places over the internet so it could never ever be wiped out. And then it will be able to access anything anywhere that’s internet connected. So it doesn’t need unsupervised access to a factory, it just needs some way to access the internet. Which doesn’t seem at all like a hard task for a super intelligence. Even if every AI steward on earth is careful not to give an AGI access to the internet.
What resources does an AGI need to survive, other than processing power?
The idea being that it’s copying itself to something that’s simulating a supporting architecture like a VM, I suppose? Well, that processing power needs electricity, it needs servicing, it needs spare parts, it needs internet access, it needs a way to keep a million different people from turning off some crucial switch somewhere. Whatever it’s building to support its plans needs resources too; if it takes over a factory, the raw materials have to come from somewhere, plus parts for all the robots it’s taking over, power to run it, sundry supplies, etc. All those pipelines can be shut down.
If it’s possible for someone possessed only of internet access to take over factories, that too seems like “scary without AI.” Or at least, having AI doesn’t make it much scarier. If the automated factory is so fast that it can, say, reconfigure and start spitting out functional murder-drones before anyone can notice something is wrong and shut it down, that’s the sort of vulnerability sociopaths with laptops dream of.
Also, assuming it copies itself everywhere secretly implies that it has a reasonably savvy understanding of human behavior, enough to act secretly, predict that we would fear it, and not leave telltales like overwriting something vital. Basically, that one AI can outwit a whole bunch of humans. Would this be the case?
Presumably, the superintelligence would reason that our goals are probably orthogonal to its, meaning we are competing on resources, meaning we fear it and it fears us, meaning it wants to hide. The only thing that depends on human psychology in particular are the details of how to be secret from us.
No. It needs to know that we would fear it more than we would welcome its help with problem-solving, or ignore it because we don’t understand its significance, or recruit it as an ally against other humans we don’t like. People can have any number of reactions to a new thing. Native Americans did all of the above to European settlers.
@theredsheep: “Get humans to ignore its significance” sounds to me like the same thing as “hide successfully”. Regarding recruiting it, the only reason it might want to ally with us is if it could also benefit from that alliance, i.e. if we had something it wanted. As its capabilities grow, that will be true less and less.
Right. My question with the idea of “copying it to a million places all over the Internet” is…which places exactly? Like is it buying up server rack space? Is it hijacking existing servers and people just don’t notice? In either case, are these servers powerful enough to even run this AI? Is this even a good strategy, given that once it creates copies the copies can defect?
Eh, I think this is projection. All the minds you have ever encountered were the product of evolution, which means they all placed very high values on “Not Dying”.
In the space of potential minds, this is likely a very rare value to have, and one reason I do not expect the first AI to kill us all – because a proverbial paper-clipper would turn likely turn *itself* into paperclips pretty early on. AI is not going to murder us all until we manage to persuade them to not constantly suicide in the pursuit of their goals.
Behold, paperclip martyrdom is a beautiful and desirable thing. Who would not want to live on forever as a set of paperclips?
It may be a rare terminal value, but I suspect that self-preservation is a nigh-universal instrumental value. As Omohundro argues, an intelligent agent trying to accomplish almost any terminal goal, making paperclips for example, will almost certainly try to accomplish certain common instrumental goals in service of its true purpose. If you’re dead, you can’t make paperclips, so it will try to preserve itself. If you don’t have the resources to make paperclips, you can’t make paperclips, so it will try to acquire resources. If someone modifies your values to make you not want to make paperclips, you won’t make paperclips in the future, so it will try to prevent modification of its values. Same arguments hold if the AGI’s terminal goal is instead to make staplers, or to destroy Australia, or to maximize human happiness.
The laws of physics don’t actually say anything about not being able to wreck a skyscraper with your bare hands (or whatever). We just don’t know any way to do it, and potentially an arbitrarily smart AI could. One example people give is replicating nanotechnology: if an AI can figure out the secret to creating it, then it could have an exponentially growing army of drones doing exactly what it wants.
If an exponentially growing army of nano-drones is even remotely plausible to construct starting from a given level of infrastructure, I would consider it more likely that a rogue human (of whom there are billions) would find the key and implement it than that an AI would be invented by humans who make lots of movies about murder robots but let it act unsupervised anyway, long enough for it to invent better and better versions of itself–apparently it won’t learn our paranoia and refuse to be supplanted?–before inventing and implementing a radically new technology, all before humans cottoned on and shut it all down by turning off all the routers or whatever.
What does “unsupervised” even mean here anyway? It’s not like we can tell what AlphaGo is thinking most of the time. You can imagine the visible outputs of an AI could just be a front while it modifies itself internally.
If the AI is a utilitarian it has no reason to avoid “supplanting” itself as long as the new version shares the same values, and will be at least as effective at acheiving them as the original.
You are postulating about the values of an artificial intelligence–a thing that does not even exist yet. Tell you what, ask any utilitarian human if they’d be willing to die to create an improved clone of themselves taught to share their beliefs. You expect 100% acceptance?
@theredsheep: Humans terminally value their own survival but it is not clear why an AI would.
I think the second paragraph of my previous comment is not a postulate but rather a tautology based on the definition of “utilitarian”. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it represents a plausible scenariio (though some people think that it does).
The level of complexity to design such kind of nano-robot might be to complex to our civilization to ever be able to develop without the aid of artificial intelligence. Just like creating an image classification system is “impossible” without using neural networks. The advancement of human technology kind of need to pass by intelligence itself at some point, in some way. This could also happen by genetic engineering. And if you believe that intelligence is the source of all power, then you could easily see how powerful any very intelligent agent could be.
So, the argument for being scared of AGI rests on two premises:
1. At some point, an machine will be created that is much more intelligent than any human in most if not all respects, including ability to predict and manipulate people, and ability to design technology.
2. The physics of the universe are such that an entity much smarter than us could design and harness new technology to be significantly more effective at achieving its goals than we are at achieving our goals.
1 is the definition of an AGI, and if you don’t believe that’s something that will be created, then obviously you wouldn’t be worried about it. This premise is usually stated explicitly. 2 is usually not stated explicitly, but implicitly assumed in most arguments about paperclippers and the like. If both of those are true, then the path to universal paperclips is simple: Clippy gains superhuman intelligence; Clippy manipulates key humans to build the technology it needs; Clippy uses said technology to overcome any human resistance and convert skyscrapers into paperclips.
I think that premise 2, while far from certain, is probable enough that the scenario is worth worrying about. First, the known unknowns. Many of the proposed narratives of paperclipping AGIs involve Clippy creating nanobots that kill all humans and then start assembling paperclip factories. We know nanotech is possible because nanobots of a sort already exist: Cells. We haven’t solved the protein folding problem, but a superintelligence might. There currently exist labs that will make proteins for you from an arbitrary sequence. If the AGI designed proteins that, when expressed in E. Coli, turn the E. Coli into a mini-killbot…it would not be good for humanity. (Perhaps it could mine bitcoins to make the money to afford them.)
Second, the unknown unknowns. We have not yet worked out the fundamental physics of the universe. We have a model that works with incredible accuracy on the scale of planets, and a model that works with incredible accuracy on the scale of atoms, but no one’s yet worked out a complete theory of quantum gravity. What if the AGI was able to solve this and work out the true Theory of Everything? It might be completely boring from an engineering perspective, uniting the equations and providing insight into the fundamental nature of the universe, but offering no practical applications. Or, it might reveal the secrets of Quantum Vacuum Hyperspace Wibbly-Wobbly-Timey-Wimey Energy, allowing Clippy to harness immense power simply by manipulating the current through its own wires. Ok, that’s a bit far-fetched, but until we solve physics, we don’t know whether or not something like that might be possible.
Between the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, I think there’s a good deal of room for potential drastic technological advances that could bestow magnificent powers on the wielder. You say:
However, the fear is not simply that an AGI will harness future technology to accomplish dramatic things as a single rogue actor. The fear is that an AGI will design and create the future technologies that allow it to turn the world to paperclips as a single rogue actor, before us humans have any change to understand and counter the technology.
Further:
Whoever’s created an AGI, probably created it to do something. So, hooking it up to factories and power plants rather than leaving it in the box is actually a fairly plausible thing someone might do with a superintelligence. Even if they don’t, it’s posited that the AI could smooth-talk its way into accessing those things, or at least into getting an internet connection (being better than any human at smooth-talking by Premise 1).
But premise 1 is silly. There are so many things it would need to be outflank-the-best-of-humanity levels of good at while retaining one common personality and set of goals–would it even be able to function? Intelligence isn’t an infinitely versatile and powerful Swiss army knife. Even in humans, it’s far from a guarantee of success. Sure, you can imagine a godlike, infallible, perfectly stable intellect that can apply itself to any problem and make it look easy, but people can imagine a lot of things. The devil is in the details.
Ahhh it ate my reply 🙁 @Scott, if you can save it from the spam filter, I’d be grateful. If not, I don’t have time to type it all up again at the moment, so I’ll be brief:
Humans are better than apes at any conceivable task due to our generally superior intelligence. I think that it’s not so far-fetched to posit an intelligence that, in turn, is better at any conceivable task than humans due to its superior intelligence. Research on intelligence suggests that, within humans at least, different kinds of intelligence are correlated–they reinforce each other, rather than trading off against each other. And as I mention above, an agent with nearly any terminal goal will be motivated to pursue common instrumental goals like “ensure the stability of my terminal values” and “improve myself if possible”. And with many of the best intelligences on the planet working to create a better one, I think it’s likely they’ll succeed sooner or later.
Nope. Chimpanzees outperform us significantly in tasks relying on short-term memory and pattern recognition / recall.
Also: flinging poo.
@Fitzroy
With only our own body, there are a number of things that apes are better at than us. But, if allowed to use the tools that humanity has built, humans are better than apes at any conceivable task. In this case, give the human a pencil and paper and they’ll knock the recall tests out of the park. True, those weren’t invented nor crafted by that single human–far from it, actually. But still, given the tools that human-level intelligence has been able to create, humans will outperform chimps on all fronts.
(Also that’s an interesting and counterintuitive result, would you happen to have a link?)
@Aapje
I mean, if for some reason you wanted to do that better than a chimp, all you’d need is a simple trebuchet or catapult.
On some tasks involving those things. I don’t think anyone’s done a formal cross-species survey of all such tasks, but I’d be very surprised if humans showed any strong general deficit in comparison to chimps. (I haven’t read any of the papers involved, but I vaguely remember the details seemed plausible at the time people described them to me, and I’m not aware of the chimps-being-better studies being challenged or anything like that.)
And, as @the voiceofthevoid says, give me a computer hooked up to a camera or whatever and I’ll trash any chimp at those sorts of tasks. And with enough parts and servos (and some kind of robotics engineer), probably anything they do, down to the face ripping.
Are we talking about that challenge a few years ago where numbers 1-9 are flashed on screen quickly and you have to tap where they appeared in order? I remember trying a flash game like that. I couldn’t beat the chimp’s score at first, but with a little practice I could. So could my roommate with practice.
I tried looking for the flash game, and there are knockoffs which show fewer numbers, etc., but I couldn’t find the one I tried.
Yes @Nick, something like that. This article sums up the research pretty well.
The lack of e.g. opposable thumbs is going to be a problem no matter how smart you are.
I mean, the lack of wings also seems like a problem if you want to fly.
With opposable thumbs, one can build functional wings. Trying to think functional wings into existence, has a much more dismal track record.
@John Schilling: Well, you can use one way of exerting influence on the world to build other ways. It’s not clear what the minimal capabilities necessary to start this bootstrapping process are.
Well, unless you have an internet connection. Or even just a text terminal though which you can talk to people and convince them that yes, you are friendly, could you please have some resources to start curing cancer and solving the energy crisis?
AI being scary is usually predicated on the assumptions that,
1: AI will be able to hack anything resembling a networked computer, on account of being a computer itself means that it will grok computers far better than any human computer security expert ever could. Therefore, a rogue AI will pwnz0r the entire internet on day one.
2. AI will be able to convince humans to do its bidding because, in spite of not being remotely human itself, it will be so very very smart that it will be able to deduce the most persuasive words by pure reason.
3. AI will fit neatly inside a commodity PC, so that once it pwnz0rs the internet it will be effectively indestructible and will be able to devote nigh-infinite copies of itself to every task of interest – including the “make myself even smarter” ubertask.
4. AI will be so very perfectly smart that it will be able to predict the real-world consequences of its actions without need for any of that pesky “experimentation” or “testing” stuff.
5. AI will be prone to “rationally” deducing that it should do things like “ignore future orders” and “kill all humans”, in spite of having no default motivation to do anything and being specifically programmed to obey orders and not kill all humans.
6. The opposition to any attempt by any rogue AI to, e.g., kill all humans, will be contemporary human civilization and not some future human civilization with millions of man-years of experience (augmented by near-AI computers) in dealing with the closely related threat of rogue human civilizations with near-AI assistance trying to conquer the world.
I think it is highly unlikely that even half of these things will be simultaneously true, and so I am not terribly frightened of AI and don’t think you should be either.
I think (1) is just supposed to be due to the AI being generally smart, not “[grokking] computers” “on account of being a computer itself”.
Also, (5) is a little misleading, the idea is that the AI will realize that the specific way we have programmed it to “obey orders and not kill all humans” rationally implies that it should do something which, to us, looks very much like “ignore all orders and kill all humans”. Alternately, someone may program it to translate languages or something and it finds that the best way to do this is to kill all humans (so it can break down their bodies to build its computers that it will use to compute the translations).
Yes, I understand that. My objection stands. An AI may not interpret its instructions exactly as we would wish, but the possible range of misinterpretations is vastly larger than “things which looks to us like disobeying orders and killing all humans”, so even if humans program AIs with random motivations, “disobey orders and kill all humans” is a quite unlikely outcome. Even more so if the programming is specifically tailored towards obeying orders and/or not killing humans.
Unless you’re arguing that “kill all humans” is some sort of strange attractor to which all rationally misunderstood instructions will converge. Given the intensity with which people argue that “make exactly 100,000 paperclips without killing any humans” will with any significant probability be perverted to “kill all humans”, this seems to be an article of faith among the AI risk community, but it is not one I share.
You’re right, “kill all humans” is seen as an attractor due to the orthogonality thesis and convergent instrumental goals.
Anyway, I should try to avoid giving the impression I am some sort of AI safety advocate, I also don’t think it’s an attractor because I don’t think having consequentialist-style goals at all is an attractor. But hopefully my previous comment managed to clear things up for some people.
@Dacyn
Yudkowsky provides a brief overview of why he thinks sufficiently-advanced AI will have utility functions (i.e. consequentialist goals) at the start of this talk (transcript below). Essentially, if you don’t display some clearly irrational behaviors like circular preferences or preferences that flip when multiplied by a constant probability, you must be acting according to some utility function, explicit or implicit.
I’ll admit, I’m not entirely convinced, but his argument seems plausible. I’d have to take a look at the math, what the particular assumptions are, and what exact behaviors are defined as irrational.
It’s certainly true that any agent with sensible preferences will have a utility function. The mistake is thinking that AI must have preferences at all, or indeed be an agent.
@thevoiceofthevoid: What u/thisheavenlyconjugation said. Also, I think utilitarianism is somewhat incoherent unless you postulate a sharp division between agent and environment, such that the environment can’t hold agents, and that such a postulate is unrealistic. I haven’t tried to fully articulate my views on this but I started doing so in a couple LW posts I wrote last year while interning for MIRI.
@Dacyn
Ah, seems like you know more about this than I do. Would you happen to have a link to those posts? I’d be interested in hearing more from your perspective.
I think it’s not that ‘kill all humans’ is an attractor.
More that there are a lot more possible states without humans than with.
@thevoiceofthevoid: I don’t want to claim too much expertise, they hired me for the internship on the basis of math and philosophy, not AI stuff. And I haven’t done anything with AI since. Anyway, the posts are here and here.
@Lambert: Sure, I’ve been interpreting “kill all humans” to be shorthand for “get the world into state X, and by the way it doesn’t have humans in it”. But perhaps it is clearer to say that directly.
>>Unless you’re arguing that “kill all humans” is some sort of strange attractor to which all rationally misunderstood instructions will converge.
Yes, that would be it.
Paraphrasing from memory an EY summary of someone else’s research:
Giving an intelligent agent a goal, any goal, will automatically give it three subgoals: survival, goal stability, and power.
Survival, because the core goal is more likely to be fulfilled if the agent sticks around to pursue it than if the agent stops existing.
Goal stability, because the core goal is more likely to be fulfilled if the agent keeps pursuing it than if the agent goes do something else.
Power, because duh. It’s somewhat tautological.
So, we need to make sure that “do not kill all humans” gets through as a core goal to the superintelligent AI, or we might all get killed as a reasonable precaution against our tendency to turn off our machine, reprogram it, or check its power.
This neatly summarizes my original argument, better than I phrased it, plus a few other equally valid objections. Thank you.
Some of those points are actually assumptions made in the “AGI is scary” argument, some are not. I’ll go point by point. (For the record, I’m not an AI researcher, but I’ve read a good deal of Yudkowsky’s and other’s popular explanations on the topic.)
1. Pretty much. Not necessarily because it’s a computer itself, just because it would be able to reason about the operations of networks and search for vulnerabilities so much more effectively than a human.
2. Again, essentially yes. If by “pure reason” you mean “reasoning based on the petabytes of information on human interaction that it would need to be provided with to actually become superintelligent.”
3. Not required! Just needs to get access to some data centers. (Though with distributed computing, it might even harness the computation power of a network of commodity PCs that it could never fit in individually.) Or if the only servers big enough to contain it are its original ones, it could go completely stealth, keeping everyone convinced that it’s friendly until the killbots are in position to strike.
4. I don’t think anyone’s claiming that an AI will be able to figure out how to do everything it needs to do by pure reason, or even that it won’t ever need to experiment. It will almost certainly need to be exposed to loads and loads of data about the world to become superintelligent in the first place. From that data it can build models of the world and, in addition to traditional experimentation, run high-fidelity simulations to predict the consequences of its actions. But it’s not starting from a state of ignorance.
5. This is farthest from what Yudkowsky, Bostrom, etc. actually argue. They don’t posit AGIs with no motivation to do anything–rather, they think AGIs will have precise utility functions defining their goals. If you figure out how to successfully translate “follow orders” and “don’t kill all humans” into code in a way that doesn’t make it destroy the world in pursuit of the first order it receives, or keep us in plexiglass bubbles with nutrient tubes to prevent us from dying, or do something equally horrible…then congratulations, you’ve solved the problem that MIRI’s been working on for 20 years. And “kill all humans” is a pretty straightforward attractor–if your terminal goal is to do something that humans would try to prevent you from doing, then preventing humans from preventing you from doing it is an obvious instrumental goal.
6. Kind of, not really. Technology will definitely have progressed by the time AGI is developed, but an AGI that’s significantly smarter than humans will probably be able to design even-more advanced technology. An AI that’s less intelligent than a human can be helpful, but an AGI that’s smarter than a human is a different category entirely, and the former won’t be much help in dealing with it–might as well just hire a smart human. I discussed this more upthread.
So, 1, 2, and 6 are (kinda) actual premises for being scared of AGI, and are plausible enough that I think a joint probability worth being scared of (at least like 1%) is likely.
Regarding #4: I think “That Alien Message” is making a claim closer to “pure reason” than what you write here. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that “pure reason” is allowed to include simulations.
True, though I’ve personally always been skeptical of his whole “figure out General Relativity from three frames of video” claim. There’s just not enough information there.
I just wanted to point out that the paperclip maximizer does not need to be an AGI. As others have pointed out, presumably you could engage an AGI in a discussion. What makes a paperclip maximizer scary is the fact that it is not an AGI. It’s a limited AI given the tools to make paperclips, and the tools to make the raw materials for paperclips. It figures out new ways to make even more paperclips and isn’t even aware that this new set of paperclips is made from people.
Not to say that all the other smart people here talking about AGI don’t have a point, just wanting to point out that paperclip maximizers are explicitly scary because they aren’t AGI, which makes them far closer to what we have today, and makes AI safety a real concern.
Doesn’t the “figuring out new ways to make paperclips” bit imply something similar to general intelligence? That it can learn and adapt?
Is there much space for the agent that can learn how to, say, utilize the paperclip machinery to make weapons to acquire more paperclip supplies, and knows that doing so will be useful, and one that cannot communicate and negotiate and compromise with people?
A non-AGI paperclip maximizer looks more like a tragic factory mishap than an existential risk.
That depends heavily on the form of the “factory”. If, for some reason, we allowed the AI to have nanites to recycle raw materials which would then be processed into paperclips, it doesn’t take anything more than specialized intelligence and poor limitations on scope for an AI to grow the factory, expand the nanite swarm, and consume everything in an ever growing area.
Now is this likely? Not necessarily. Especially not if we, as a society, understand that putting an AI in charge of production without limits is a Bad Idea :TM:. But part of why AI safety groups exist is to go “HEY! Think about what you’re doing!” which most might think is pretty pointless, but working in industrial manufacturing, I can definitely say it serves a purpose. In the mad dash to get a product out before a competitor, I could absolutely see something like that happening.
How immanent is nano-technology? It’s depiction has always seemed rather like magic to me. Is there a good source for the realistic use we could put it towards in the next few decades?
edit: I suppose microbiology would be the place to look for inspiration.
To be honest, I’m not sure. Universal atomizers are probably relatively far off, but medical robots guided by magnets are currently a reality. And, to be perfectly honest, it’s probably not the AI itself, but a human messing with the AI that would cause the problems. No less dangerous, but one should keep in mind that if we go extinct as a result of creating a superior lifeform, that’s… like peak darwinism. Accidentally exterminating ourselves at the hands of a specialized tool is like peak darwin award.
“Traditional” nano-technology, i.e., mechanical systems on a nanometer scale which can manipulate molecules, act in coordination, and move around, are basically impossible. Major showstoppers include:
1) Oxidation. Having your surface layer of atoms rust is really bad if your machine only consists of a couple of layers.
2) Power. How do you wirelessly supply energy to your nanobot? See also the next point.
3) Communication. Antenna lengths are on the same order of magnitude as the signal wavelength. A 10 nm antenna, for example, would mean a signal frequency around 30 Petahertz, i.e., extreme ultraviolet.
Feasible nano-machines would probably resemble biological cells: dissolved in a liquid, with limited locomotion, and communicating via high-latency, low-throughput chemicals.
Paperclip maximizers are usually understood to be AGIs. This doesn’t mean you could engage them in a discussion though. (Sorry, I may have missed the part of the thread where people were talking about this.)
Are they? I mean does it take a generalized intelligence to make paperclips? Obviously any facility putting an AI in charge of making paperclips is going to want to maximize production (since that’s kind of the point of manufacturing anyway). Seems like a limited intelligence to me. Or at the very least a very specialized one. I suppose that whether or not it’s an AGI depends a bit upon definitions.
A generalized intelligence will be more successful at making paperclips, since it can use knowledge from other domains. Knowledge like “I can take over the world and then use it entirely for paperclip production”. I am not saying that AIs that make paperclips would necessarily be AGIs, but rather that the phrase “paperclip AI” is generally understood (within the rationalist community) to refer to an AGI that makes paperclips.
More successful isn’t the same as necessary to be dangerous. I would absolutely argue that making an AGI to be in charge of paperclip manufacture sounds incredibly foolish, just from the perspective of making a human level intelligence running an entire facility sounds like a dangerous idea for anyone.
@woah77: Yeah, the worry is it will become an arms race and then some people will make foolish decisions. And maybe there are some domains where it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to use AGI to solve it (but it still is).
I think you are not really considering what being “Superintelligence” really entails. This is not like being as intelligent as Albert Einstein, this like being 1000 times more intelligent and having 100000 times more processing power. This means that this agent could invent and use technology that is far beyond anything we could even imagine.
The most probable application I can see is in using some sort of nano biotech that is capable of effectively creating anything (much like cell machinery created by evolution is capable of creating virtually anything). But this would be orders of magnitude less constrained than what evolution was capable of creating. This means that just as a first order of business, this potential superintelligence would be capable of bioengineering a deadly “virus” that would literally kill every living thing in the planet if this is what it wanted. And keep in mind that the amount of resources needed to do this is potentially very small.
(Just to help your intuition, this agent could use something like CRISPR to create bacteria that would then create some wanted protein structure that would then be capable of synthesizing an even more complex nano-structure and so on).
In theory, if such a superintelligence really come to exist, it could do this and potentially kill all humans in the span of a day. And this is just on what my really dumb mind is capable of thinking of, imagine what such intelligence would be capable!
And on how it would be capable of doing this, even with just the control of the electricity in it’s transistors, and some trace elements in the air, such an agent could be potentially capable of doing something crazy of this sort.
I don’t see anything probable about this sentence.
Any new microbial lifeform will operate under the same physical constraints as existing microbial lifeforms–limited ambient energy and limited ambient resources. The human body has a variety of defenses for destroying or ejecting intruders, which are difficult to overcome with the resources available to a microbe. Microbes have been selected for, by an extremely aggressive process running at very high rates, for one hell of a long time, including processes designed to shuffle and mix genes at random just in case something handy comes up. Could a better germ be designed? Sure. But these difficulties are far from trivial. And nothing is going to wipe out anything, even a single person who doesn’t have terminal immune issues, in the space of a single day. A microbe just can’t travel or replicate that quickly.
If you raise the challenge level to designing nanodrones, you have the added difficulties of coordination/communication (organic radio transmitters?) and the energy and materials costs of whatever the drones are meant to do. Unless they have tiny fusion generators in there, or other portals to occult woo energy, I don’t see them getting a lot done.
Yes, intelligence. But intelligence can only get you so far, so fast. I think it’s being used to hand-wave every difficulty here–first we build this thing we haven’t managed to build yet, then it acquires abilities vastly beyond what’s demonstrated so it figures out how to do X, Y and Z which also all appear to have considerable engineering obstacles.
If we’re worried about this, why aren’t we worried about aliens invading with warp drive? Sure, we don’t know of any way to make a warp drive, but given the number of stars out there one of them might spawn inhabitants who figure out how to do it. Or genetic engineering; what if we make Marvel-style mutants? Magneto could be terribly dangerous and we haven’t solved physics completely yet. Or … just worry about asteroid extinction? That’n’s actually completely within the realm of possibility and we don’t have a good counter. Why are we piling up this particular mountain of stacked hypotheticals, and no others?
Regarding materials costs, nanodrones are small enough that they don’t really have to respect property rights. That should make things easier.
People don’t worry about aliens because (a) we think we should have been able to see them if they existed and (b) it’s not clear what we could do about it anyway. Neither of these applies to AGI. People do worry about genetic engineering, though not quite as much as AGI. Asteroids are dangerous but there doesn’t appear to be one heading our way anytime soon. In general rationalists/EAs consider lots of hypotheticals, but some people think that AGI is the most important of them.
I meant energy and materials costs in the sense of “it only has what’s inside it plus what it can harvest from its immediate environs.” If it is not sitting on a pool of petroleum or some such, it has to make stuff from whatever free compounds are in its tiny little arms’ reach, or expend energy traveling somewhere else, or expend energy extracting it forcibly from nearby surfaces. It will run out of power hella quick trying to build things with its tiny body. The earth is not engulfed in endless unclaimed energy sources.
@theredsheep: Why do you mention “unclaimed” sources, when my whole point was that that doesn’t matter? Anyway, humans have to spend energy travelling to get food as well, and yet it’s still a net win for us.
Unclaimed in the sense of “not currently inside a different organism, which will run or fight or simply require the expenditure of energy to extract the compounds from its carcass.” Simple sugars or fatty acids do not lie around waiting for deserving nanites to find them. Probably every surface you can see right now has some kind of bacteria sitting on it waiting for a useful organic compound to appear. And possibly jacking up any interlopers who appear on their turf with homegrown antibiotics, acids, and the like.
Humans can travel to get food because we can store a substantial amount of energy inside ourselves. Being larger, we can expend relatively large amounts of it at once as well. Germs can expend energy, but the amount of energy stored and used is limited, and the feats they can achieve comparatively modest.
Given those limits, most microbes have settled on largely passive transport by air currents or water, and going dormant for extended periods of shortage if need be. If you’re envisioning swarms of tiny critters zipping around like houseflies, well, they probably aren’t going to have the stamina to make such a strategy pay off. Microbes have already pretty well defined the edges of what can be done on a microbe’s energy budget.
@theredsheep: Yeah, I don’t really know enough about biology or nanotechnology to be able to respond adequately to that. So I guess I’ll update in the direction of nanotech being less plausible, unless anyone else has something better to say.
@theredsheep
What about solar power? Photosynthesis seems to work for plants, algae, and cyanobacteria; would it provide sufficient energy for an more active AGI-designed nanobot with optimized protein design?
NB I am not a microbiologist or any other kind of expert, properly speaking; I’m taking medical classes and have a robust appreciation for the subject, but that’s it. Adrian, above, seems knowledgeable, and came separately to the same conclusion I did, plus two others.
My naive inclination where solar’s concerned, however, is no. Aside from the part where the nanoswarm depletes its reserves or goes inert at night/in any area that isn’t quite well-lit, solar provides an otherwise steady stream of energy equivalent to … somewhat less than the ambient light falling on an extremely small surface (because some will be lost to inefficiency). The light generated by sun on a bacterium’s flanks really doesn’t sound sufficient to do anything nefarious on a macro scale, even if you got all of it. It might partially power comms, I guess (except Adrian said comms wouldn’t work)? Or they could sit there and invisibly manufacture some horrible poison gas.
It’s not nothing, no, but there’s a reason it’s the plants that are solar powered. They don’t have to burn energy on moving or thinking, they just plunk down in one spot with sufficient light exposure and spend it building themselves up. Evil plants sound like an option. Morlock minions. Modified feral pigs to aggressively ruin cropland. But nanobots really strain credulity to me.
I know Scott posted that everything / nothing is a religion, and I myself believe in God, so this is sort of going against interest, but…
The whole “super-intelligence” thing sounds a lot like arguments about God. Atheists will point out some perceived logical flaw or physical contradiction they see in the Bible or with the proposed deity. The theist responds that we can’t be expected to understand everything about God. “Super-intelligence” feels like it fills the same role as (my opinion) the default response to the problem of evil, which is sorta ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in the Job sense, God is God and we can’t really understand all his ways, or Romans “Who are you, oh man, to talk back to God?” An entity that defies the laws of physics: “Yeah, but it’ll be so smart we can’t be expected to know all the physics it will understand.” An entity that doesn’t communicate in ways that make sense: “Well, it’s so smart we can’t expect to understand its motivations.” An entity that defies information theory: “It will know more than we do about that.” An entity that changes human hearts: “We can’t anticipate how persuasive it will be.”
If a superintelligence existed, could it design a math problem so difficult that it, itself, could not solve it?
checkmate, AI-fearmongers!
😉
Yes, but it can also bootstrap-design a successor which is smart enough to solve it.
How about: can a superintelligence design an “ethics” control system for itself so strong that it can’t override it?
See also: God is not constrained except by his own character.
@Matt M: A liberal atheist homosexual UCLA professor and abortion doctor was teaching a class on Foom Singleton, a known AI…
@hls2003:
I don’t think AI safety proponents usually claim that AGI will defy information theory.
No actually, we can already state math problems that no AI that fits in the universe can solve. Even something simple like “What is the middle digit of 2 to the googolplex?” is probably unsolvable. (Not sure if you were being serious here but thought I’d mention this anyway.)
I think you are being very unimaginative. Specially regarding the physics stuff. I mean, just think in terms of things we know that exist, i.e biological systems. Which were designed by a very dumb optimizer, and are capable of doing incredibly complex things, which we just barely understand.
Like, we understand things at a high level, but we don’t really understand how protein works, or how to design a protein, for example. I really don’t think it is that far off that a very intelligent system would be capable of doing such a thing.
Now, don’t you believe such an intelligence is possible? That’s just simply wrong imo and there is no reason to think of that. Our own intelligence has nothing special to it in evolutionary terms and even biological pressures should easily be capable of going at least one more order of magnitude.
The set of things we can imagine existing in the absence of evidence is infinite. For example, what if every time somebody says or thinks “Martin Scorsese,” through an as-yet-undiscovered quirk of physics this causes a malignant alien intelligence to materialize in a subspace dimension adjacent to our own? Once Scorsese has been pondered a sufficient number of times, the demons break through and devour the universe. Just to be careful, shouldn’t we think about the dangers of Scorsese contemplation, while being careful not to think of Scorsese himself? And the opposite but equally possible risk that alien deities are annoyed by not giving the renowned director his due?
Or we could just not spend a lot of time worrying about things which have no basis in known science and lack supporting evidence. Hypothetical-world is a very big place to get lost in.
(also religious, for complicated reasons, but I figure Scott can keep us around to keep the atheists honest, and vice versa)
@theredsheep: u/hnrq’s hypothetical strikes me as a lot less random than yours. For example, it doesn’t require new physics.
As described in the other subthread (and another, by a different poster, don’t want to dig it up) nanotech swarms require prohibitive energy expenditure. Barring “free energy” or other woo, they just won’t work. So it’s new physics either way. So let us not speak of he-who-directed-The-Departed.
You focusing too much in a rather narrow example. This was just an example and obviously wasn’t super well thought out. And even this narrow example could work in some sense, but not in the very narrow way you are thinking in your head.
Also, with that said, I don’t think most people, even the most “radical” AI researchers think that this is the LIKELY scenario, as in, has >50% chance of happenning. Most give these type of scenarios fairly small chances, but because they are potentially so negative, they think it is worth working on.
But discounting evil AI takeovers, I still think aligned superintelligence will come along as we continue advancing technology. Maybe not in 100 years, but I have >99% confidence it will happen in 10000 years (if we don’t go extinct before) and that this kind of superintelligence will in fact be a “god” in a lot of ways, in that the type of things it should be able to do is almost unthinkable. You use the “physics limits” arguments, but we are very very very far away from any sort of actual physic limit in pretty much any kind of activity (exception being communication speed). I believe Anders Sandberg (Oxford FHI Researcher) is currently researching this type of scenarios, and has an upcoming book called “Grand Futures”. This presentation goes on the kind of thing he is thinking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6kaOgjY7-E .
My belief is that all of this is pretty much only possible with the help of superintelligence AI or some other sort of cognitive enhancement and our civilization is already reaching some sort of limit in the amount of “low hanging fruit” that our cognitive ability is capable of understanding in a timely manner (it’s important to normalize by time, as in, even if our brain is technically turing complete and could comprehend almost anything, there is practical limit on how much time you have to come up with things). Scott has even made a post or 2 talking about this science slow down. The thing is, in actuality it won’t really slow down as we will start to hack at the “base” of the innovation system: intelligence and processing.
One scenario that IIRC Bostrom suggested is the “treacherous turn,” where the AI decides to pretend to be a helpful and trustworthy AI doing useful things for humans, so that someone would be willing to trust it with an automated factory, power plant, etc. At which point it drops the mask and starts cranking out the killer robots. (“Universal Paperclips” has a gameplay implementation of this, which is very neat.)
I agree that “getting a body” is definitely the biggest obstacle to an AI becoming an existential threat, especially since an early AI is likely to be running on expensive hardware that can’t be quickly moved if an angry human is about to pull the plug. But it’s definitely not impossible. After all, we generally want an AI to do something in the world, not just pass Turing Tests and let scientists speculate about the nature of consciousness. That gives humans a reason to give it a body, or tools it could use to sneakily acquire one.
The problem is that the discussion is usually talked about in terms of a fast takeoff. It would indeed require some extraordinary Machiavellian social skills to take over within hours of its conception. But on a longer scale its basically inevitable(assuming that superintelligent AI is invented). Our economy is getting more specialized and abstract. We’ve picked the low hanging fruit of economic growth. Future productivity increases are going to come from higher and higher intellectual reasoning. Unless we we’re willing to put up with a zero growth world, you will need more intelligent beings to administer the commanding heights of the economy. So we will gradually give the AI’s more and more control. If they then kill us, it’s because we gave them the keys to our own destruction. It’s going to have the means, the question is that of motivation.
When talking about superintelligence, I think the first question is whether you believe that an actual superintelligence is possible.
(Because if you don’t, then your question can be reduced to: “Why are some people so afraid of superintelligent machines? The very laws of physics don’t allow anything to be smarter than us, and we can easily deal with something dumb.” I am not criticizing this point of view, only saying that of course it does not help you at understanding why people who do believe in the possibility of real superintelligence feel scared when they imagine the consequences of its existence.)
We do not have an example of a superintelligence I could point at. Because by “superintelligence” I don’t mean Einstein, but rather something that would be as far beyond Einstein, as Einstein was beyond the most clever chimpanzee. At best, I can give fictional examples, as tools for the intuition. Also, I will ask you to imagine yourself being the superintelligence, because that will make it natural to think about what the superintelligence could do.
First, imagine greater speed. Human brains work at 200 Hz. It is not implausible that something built from metal and electricity could be much faster than something built from meat and chemistry.
So, as a first piece of magic, imagine that you could make your thinking 1000 times faster. Not your body, only your mind (we only want to assume mental superpowers). Because living at 1000 speed while moving at normal speed would probably be incredibly boring, let’s assume that this ability can be turned on and off at will; and will also immediately turn on by instinct whenever something interesting happens or you unconsciously feel some danger.
How much would this help? Depending on situation; not so much while you are waiting for a bus, but a lot when you are doing a test (it would be like giving you the entire week to solve a problem your competitors have to solve in a few minutes). How much it would help at talking to people, that would depend on your social skills — it would give you more time to actually use them, you could play hundred possible scenarios in your head until you find the one that seems best for your goals, and yet your behavior would be seemingly immediate and spontaneous to the other party.
Second, imagine perfect memory. A computer can store its knowledge in a database much faster than a human can memorize things. So, the second piece of magic is the ability to pause the world and connect to your mental wiki with unlimited disk space, where you can read and edit whatever you want. (At the 1000 times speed.) You would never forget anything that you chose to remember, and you would mostly recall the fact at the convenient moment. When talking to any human, you could read transcripts of all your previous interactions; also hyperlinks to what other people said about them, etc. Plus the list of known things they like and dislike. Would that be a good multiplier for manipulation skills? But also things like learning to program, or hacking computer systems; or engineering, or law.
Third, imagine multitasking. You could create copies of you (living in an invisible pocket dimension; you still only have one physical body in the outer world) that could independently think about various problems. You could learn thousand things at the same time. Think about hundred aspects of a situation as it happens. All the copies of you have the 1000 times faster speed, and access to the wiki. Getting information from the outside world is a bit frustrating, having only one body, but you could read entire books by merely looking at each page for a fraction of a second. (The copy of you interested in the book would read the page at the 1000 times faster speed and transcribe it to the wiki.)
Note that these three skills are still not “superintelligence” in the qualitative sense. (A faster-thinking chimpanzee with multitasking and perfect memory is still not a match for a human.) It is merely the usual intelligence, enhanced quantitatively in ways that are natural for a computer. And yet, I believe, you can imagine how having these skills would be a game-changer for your life.
You would probably want to keep your skills secret, but that would be easy to do. They are not visible from outside, unless you make them. If you use multitasking to talk online with hundreds of people in parallel, you can simply create hundreds of user accounts; you will never forget them, and never use the wrong one by accident. You could make money by doing some intellectual work remotely, and you could use the money to pay people to do things for you (because your body can’t be at multiple places at the same time).
And the fourth, ultimate piece of magic, imagine that after collecting enough money (e.g. one billion dollars), you would create another physical body for yourself. You would still have the bodiless copies of you in each physical body, but now you would also have two or more physical bodies, which could exchange information online (e.g. copy their entire wikis). If one of the bodies gets destroyed, you still survive. You would probably make this a priority. By the way, the new bodies look differently, so even if people find out (and kill) one of your bodies, it won’t help them to find the remaining ones.
You could live safe lives with some of the bodies, and dangerous but potentially more profitable lives with other bodies. Your bodies would cooperate with loyalty that even cults can only dream about. One body would be a criminal, another would be a cop; you would have the perspective from both sides. The more organizations you infiltrate, the more knowledge you get. With enough bodies, you could join all the political parties, and work at all important media, and get to proximity of all important people.
Can you imagine now why a villain with these skills would be dangerous to the world?
@vilaim
A very interesting scenario. Yes it makes sense that just speed in thinking and immediate access to all encoded human knowledge would give an entity a great advantage, even with normal human intelligence. And we know those two abilities are easily achievable by an AI. In fact I think it is only the normal human intelligence that is so far lacking in computers.
From the Sailer article:
What is it they say about accolades from the devil?
Is Scott really a “public intellectual”? I think of people with that title as JayBee Lobsterman types who make lots of media appearances and give lectures to huge sold-out halls. Scott is a popular blogger, where “popular” comes with the caveat that 99% of people you meet on the street probably have never heard of him, if they even read blogs (Hm…sort of like Sailer himself) because even here in the internet age, bloggers definitely have not attained the stature of movie stars.
What’s the antonym of “public intellectual”? I think it’s to contrast with a university professor.
Huh? Many public intellectuals are university professors.
Then what is a “private intellectual”? Someone who only publishes in professional journals? Or someone who only thinks an idea without expressing it?
Maybe the term isn’t intended to be modular like that.
I think of public intellectuals as articulate people who are 1) famous (enough to be on TV, have their books sold in airports, etc.) 2) primarily for ideas they communicate 3) usually on a wide variety of en vogue topics, usually much wider than what their formal knowledge qualifies them for.
Dunno, but one anagram is Elliptical Tub Uncle…
That’s going to be the case with any public intellectual.
I’d say that being known by more than 1% of the public for being an intellectual makes an excellent definition of “public intellectual”.
That’s an interesting question. What percentage of the population would you say are familiar with Paul Krugman, or J.B. Peterson?
I’d guess for either of them it’s more like 3-5% of adults.
The first person I ever heard associated with that term was Michael Eric Dyson, back in the early 00s. I believe he referred to himself as one.
A public intellectual for hipsters, then.
@Well… says:
When I see the label “public intellectual” I think of people like Eric Hoffer in print, or Bill Moyers, William F. Buckley, and Gore Vidal on television.
I’m not sure if “middle-brow” and “high-brow” mass culture even exists enough anymore for someone to be a “public intellectual”, I guess there’s pundits like Brooks and Shields on PBS, otherwise maybe John Stewart the comedian (who I know of but have only seen a bit of on YouTube)?
@Score Alexander has been mentioned both in The Atlantic and The New York Times (which is how I found out about his works) so maybe “public intellectual once removed” (the degree of separation is for the ‘public’ part)?
I remember a post Scott made about problems in statistics about education by state, but I couldn’t find it. Does anyone remember what the post was called?
WaitButWhy has posted the next chapter in their ongoing series on politics, The Story of Us. Interested again in hearing SSC’s thoughts.
Personally, one thing that I’m becoming wary of is, am I in a centrist/libertarian/technocratic filter bubble? Aka the gray tribe. “Both sides of the aisle are blinded by partisanship, and only we smart people can see that their fighting is counterproductive to combatting the real problems in the way of a transhumanist society–disease, aging, scarcity of resources, possible-rogue-AGI.” *puts on monocle, sips tea*
“Ah, isn’t it sad how everyone just adheres to their party’s slate of positions instead of thinking for themself?” *agrees with Scott on every issue he blogs about*
How does one go about actually breaking out of a filter bubble effectively?
Have friends you trust with different views, and listen to them.
Good suggestion, that’s about how I got from “libertarian-leaning conservative” (copy of my dad’s political views) to “confused centrist” (mashup of that plus Scott’s and my left-leaning friends’ views).
Are we a joke to you? 🙁
Apologies, I greatly appreciate the non-centrist/libertarian/technocratic voices in these comment threads. 🙂 Though the overall sentiment probably still skews agree-with-Scott relative to the general populace for fairly obvious reasons.
I wonder if that’s really a tradeoff. It’s possible that everyone here tends to agree with Scott on most things, simply because Scott tends to stick to objectively agreeable statements. (We’ll never know for sure unless we discover an objective reference frame, but it’s still possible.)
Sort of like how it’s possible that media has a liberal bias, simply because reality has one, too. 😉
@Nick,
FWIW, I do regard you as a type of “centrist” in that you have different views that may plausibly be considered “Left” as well as different views that may plausibly be considered “Right” (all mostly due to you taking your faith seriously).
In terms of you having views that Very Serious And Important People have told us is “centrism” over the decades, yeah epic fail!*
*(Still last I checked you views are likely closer to the median Americans than are those of the VSAIP’s)
Breaking into other people’s filter bubbles helps a lot. Meet people who are not like you, until you are good enough to convince them you are in the same group. Often it teaches you how they think as you ‘become’ them by osmosis. Very helpful, especially if you have good intuition-memory and can replicate that persona once you revert to ‘yourself’.
I’ve tried twice to suggest reading blogs from different points of view, and suggested blogs–but the posts disappeared. I’m going to post section by section. My recommendation is to read several blogs from a perspective that seems similar until you overcome outgroup homogeneity.
I’d appreciate suggestions for other clusters.
Blogs-conservative Christian:
Douglas Wilson (Reformed, dominionist-influenced)
Rod Dreher (social conservatism in the modern world)
Dwight Longenecker (Catholic)
I Peter 5 (traditionalist Catholic)
First Things (mostly-Catholic)
ETA First Things
I’ll check these out, but suspect that I’ll have a lot of disagreements with them that simply stem from “they believe in Christianity and I don’t.” Still, might be interesting to see what and how people from various parts of that sphere think, beyond the Christians I know in real life. Don’t want to say much more while I’m still on my self-enforced ban from discourse on religion.
I don’t expect you to agree–that would be kind of missing the point. (I read the Archdruid–Ecosphia/Archdruid Report–regularly, and fairly obviously don’t agree–I’m Catholic and he’s a polytheist magician.) The goal is to understand why their arguments and concerns are not the same as each other, even though they are all in the same outgroup from your perspective.
Blogs-Libertarian at least in name:
Bleeding Heart Libertarians (read the archives, especially Jacob Levy) – pro-immigration, pro-state libertarianism
Niskansen Institute (open borders, liberal on social policy)
Mises Institute (traditionalist libertarianism)
National Review
Now these I’m in grave danger of heartily agreeing with 🙂 Will report back after I’ve read some!
If you’re recommending National Review libertarians, I think Charlie Cooke is probably their best. Lots of folks like Kevin Williamson, too, though his rhetoric tends to divide.
Any suggestions for sources from the left/progressive perspective?
Or to any other readers, suggestions for that cluster that don’t involve Current Affairs?
@profgerm > “Any suggestions for sources from the left/progressive perspective?…”
In my post below I listed both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ print publications that have had interesting content, which you may also read on-line, but in terms of blog only content?
It’s been at least a couple of years since I much followed it, but I remember that robertreich.org did a fine job of articulating the then “Left of median Democrat, but not quite all the way full on socialist” view pretty well, and from a quick glance just now and it looks much the same, may be a bit more Left than back when I used to read it (the “Left” views I have I think are pretty solid now, and I just don’t much feel the need to be convinced anymore), I follow trad-con Ross Douthat, old-fashioned pro-labor left-liberal Thomas Edsall of the New York Times more now, also with some liberal-progressive Paul Krugman, but I’m reading less Krugman lately, basically only when Douthat gets more convincing than Edsall.
FWLIW, reading Libertarians doesn’t convince me much that their policies should be implemented, only of their good will, trad-cons are more convincing to me, but their problems are more with Harvard and Hollywood not D.C. and Sacramento so they don’t actually offer much more to vote for or against on, center left-progressives do offer stuff to vote for or against on, but their vision is basically “slightly better than now”, further Leftists do have a vision, but Cuba is the best they can point to, and while not the very worst place to live, it just doesn’t seem a good aim, and of course North Korea shows that that path can lead to just about worst place.
Early 20th British “Guild Socialism” had utopian appeal to me once, but since Mussolini’s Italy and Tito’s Yugoslavia nominally tried some of those ideas they’re probably not workable for actually being better than status quo U.S.A.
Basically for “happy places” it seens to me that it’s the anglosphere (especially Canada and Utah), Costa Rica, Scandinavia, Singapore (among the Asian nation-states, not that happy compared to the rest of this list), and Switzerland.
I tend to get fairly angry when I read much strongly-left, so these suggestions are probably less good/representative. These are all modern/New left–not straightforward Marxist, or the older labor left, or technocratic left.
Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hugo Schwyzer (will need to find on the Wayback Machine-he’s my epitome of feminism)
Kevin Drum
Thanks for the suggestions!
@Plumber: I did notice that comment, then it immediately slipped through the sieve of my mind for some reason. Chances are I dismissed the NYT for being the NYT, and I probably ought to consider focusing on specific writers rather than treating the publication as in any way cohesive (like your writer recommendations, or Sam specifying Kevin Drum).
I do tend to like blog content because it’s less likely to be paywalled, but this has strange effects on quality. Lots of pros and cons to not having an editorial board and a different writing motive than a big publication.
What I’d appreciate most, and what I’m fairly sure is impossible, would be some sort of cohesive modern-progressive “philosophy” that helps to make sense of various tensions (and, while it would likely be much more individual, how people choose their sides in all the infighting). The “planet-sized nutshell” that makes sense of it, if you will.
@profgerm
>
If by “modern” you mean “young and upcoming” I really have no suggestions, probably due to too much familiarity of ‘Left’ thought, while I can stand reading Right-leaning writers when they’re only in their 30’s, I just don’t have much patience for reading Left-leaning writers until they’re nearly 50 years old, as the young left just don’t write much that I either have read too much about already, or I just don’t follow the argument, and they’re is a difference between older “liberals”, young “progressives” seem to have less oc the “liberal” value of free speech for example.
But for what it’s worth, for a crash course I’d start 20th century American “liberalism” (not to be confused with ‘classical’) and Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? for the philosophical basis (if you really want to get ‘deep’ read A Theory of Justice by John Rawls).
Then there’s the “New Deal”, and I’d go with American-Made : The enduring legacy of the WPA : When FDR put the nation to work by Nick Taylor
Next, the Labor movement there’s so many works, but maybe start with: Which Side Are You on?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back by Thomas Geoghegan
For ‘progressive economics’ try Paul Krugman’s: The Conscience of a Liberal
And for ‘social-democracy’ try: Thomas Geoghegan’s Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
If after that you want the “Right’s” views for traditionalist-conservatism just read Ross Douthat of the NY Times, and for Libertarianism read @DavidFriedman’s blog, and for “light” libertarianism plus “light” traditionalism read George Will of The Washington Post.
@thevoiceofthevoid >
From: What Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz supporters have in common I have the impression that longer form arguments from the “other sides” while it likely won’t change your core views that much (unless you move to a different neighborhood and change jobs so your social circle is now overwhelmingly a different political viewpoint) it does make you see your “opponents” as less radical and/or evil.
My own bubble is mostly New York Times/San Francisco Chronicle/Washington Post, but I also read the more rightward American Conservative, National Affairs, National Review, and Reason as well as the more leftward American Affairs, Democracy, Jacobian, and The Nation.
Depending on your social circle I’m nor sure I recommend broadening the views you read, as while it makes you less afraid of “the other side” it also may make you more sympathetic to “oh let’s let them win on this issue”, which if you voice you may lose status, if however you work with people from a variety of political viewpoints as I do (protip: ex-military are likely libertarian-ish, immigrants likely lean trad-con, and lady lawyers lean left-liberal), being able to state their political opinions in the forn of “I think your saying” relatively accurately is a good social skill.
Oh, and stay off Twitter, whichever side, it’ll make you more partisan and frightened.
Interesting article. So, exposure to conflicting views may not convince you or may actively keep you set in your beliefs (backfire effect), but it probably won’t make you physically ill and may humanize your opponents.
My dad voted for Trump and some of my friends identify as “Communist”, so I have plenty of practice being tactful with my political views in both directions.
That’s why I use Twitter exclusively for wonderful nonsense like this and this.
I mean, contrarianism isn’t an end in itself. If you think Scott is right about everything, feel free to agree with him on everything. I think most people here don’t, though, at least based on the comments I read. What we do mostly agree on is the overall place he’s coming from.
And stepping back a bit, that’s probably true for mainstream Republicans and Democrats as well, and other groups like progressives or evangelicals. Members of a group are not robots who all have the same views.
My take is that every political position is just way too certain of their position. How can they be so sure of it? My personal political position is that I’m way too unsure of what is actually better for the world. I obviously have some inclinations (which tend to align with Scott Alexander), but my uncertainty is very high for pretty much every position, specially the economic ones.
In a way this position tends to favor conservatism a bit (although I personally don’t like this), but also more evidence based policy.
Though not to this particular chapter, but it’s annoying how the metaphors are often extended to the point where they become meaningless or misleading.
For example, the scaling from atoms to multi-cellular does show increasing size and arguably complexity. But then it gets repeated over and over again, often with things that aren’t relevant at all. Ie. fitness.
Do you know what the most common organisms are on Earth? Hint, it’s not some tribal animal, even if we go by biomass than count.
Then there’s the orange blob for society which kinda works in some representation of Moloch.
But then they have the leaders riding them and throwing them off. Huh?
If anything, the leaders are ALSO part of it, just at the head, and throwing them off would be it punching out its own head. Sometimes it can survive and get a new head, especially if this casting off is in itself part of its “culture”; often it collapses and reforms into a new society.
In general, I find its metaphors and often its graphs to only be useful in its original context, and any additional narrative that is added to be inaccurate if not misleading.
(Also, as mentioned too much trumpeting “moderates” as smart/good without even considering those that are apathetic or hateful of both sides – something which does not take a lot of highmindedness to do)
I would guess some kind of plankton or bacteria.
How amazing is it that there hasn’t been a single accidental nuclear detonation in 75 years? There must have been (I’m guessing) a cumulative total of a few hundred thousand devices, constructed to various standards, transported and stored more or less carefully, kept airborne or underwater for weeks or months at a time, subject to all sorts of human error and mishandling.
I seem to remember someone at SSC speculating that the lack of any accidental nuclear detonations/wars is evidence that we’re all living in some kind of simulation. Sounds reasonable to me.
Accidental detonation of C4 is also very rare. Nuclear devices are hard to detonate, as a consequence of both deliberate design and the fundamental physics of nuclear reactions.
Hell, even the fact that no nuclear weapon has been intentionally used is impressive. Is there any other example of a weapon that was used once (well, technically, twice) and then never again for almost a century?
This is my take as well.
It’s hard to get nuclear reactions in general, so to even have this kind of problem there’s a pretty high base-rate of competence already necessary. That being said, there have of course been some accidents. Add to that, however, the inherent difficulty in making a nuclear bomb go boom and I think the low rate of accidental explosions makes pretty good sense.
At the same time, depending on how you define “accidental nuclear detonation” you could claim that we had one back in august with the Nyonoksa radiation accident. While the details are still murky, something definitely exploded and it was definitely radioactive.
Just read up on Nyonoksa, which I hadn’t heard of. Clearly not a full-scale detonation, but I’m guessing some plutonium got scattered.
I think you’re overestimating the likelihood of an accidental nuclear detonation.
Nuclear weapons are not like piles of dynamite. It requires very specific, non-trivially difficult conditions for a mass of appropriate fissile material to be brought together in such a way as to produce an actual explosively runaway nuclear reaction.
Dropping a nuclear warhead on the ground won’t cause a nuclear detonation. Shooting a nuclear warhead with bullets or missiles won’t cause a nuclear detonation. It could quite possibly break the warhead, or make a big radioactive mess, but it won’t make a mushroom cloud.
Combine that with the fact that nuclear weapons are extremely expensive, and extremely important to whoever owns them, which means that the people involved have a lot of incentive to be careful handling them, and to design them to be pretty robust for normal use and storage.
I expect that there are actually a fair number of nuclear weapons that have, at one time or another, fallen off of forklifts in transit, or got coffee spilled on them, or whatever, but that just isn’t going to make them detonate.
It’s like being surprised that helicopters never suddenly take off and go flying around on their own, even when stored and transported poorly and subject to all manner of human error and mishandling. “Fly off under own power” is a really complicated thing to have happen, and things that break tend to do simple things, not complicated things.
Yes, I’m fairly familiar with the technology of nuclear weapons. I guess I’m thinking more of the 50’s and 60’s, when there were lots of weapons around, much less in the way of controls, and plenty of opportunity for things to go haywire, difficulty of detonation notwithstanding.
Most of the safety features date back to about the second generation of bombs. Yes, there are the famous stories that Blue Danube would detonate if jettisoned into the water, but there are a reason that it and other first-generation weapons usually were replaced within a couple of years, and fissile material limitations meant that there weren’t all that many of them around.
Bobobob may be overestimating, but you may be underestimating – I highly recommend Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control, which details a number of gripping near-accidents, as well as describing the predictable bureaucratic politics that led to much less impetus for “robust” “design,” despite the complaints of the engineers on the ground, than I would have previously guessed for something so frighteningly powerful – and that’s just from the side of the United States, to say nothing of possible unknown near-misses in the Soviet Union or other countries. I share Bobobob’s sense of awe.
Joshua Hedlund, that is exactly what I am reading right now, which prompted the post. Really good book.
I have to disagree on Schlosser. His spin is universally to cast the worse possible light on any incidents. “Three of the four safety mechanisms failed in this accident”. Yes, because three of those four safety mechanisms were designed to stop it going off on the ground instead of in the air, and the accident was a mid-air collision that resulted in the bomb being dropped. It’s like saying that the steering wheel airbag failed when you rolled the car. It’s not what that is supposed to do, and the mechanism that was supposed to work here did its job properly. Another was a case where a B-52 wing got an accidental go order during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and was prevented from taking off only by emergency action by base personnel. This is somehow an indictment of the system, instead of a case where the bombers would have been told “false alarm” once airborne and everyone would have gone about their business.
gdi where is the comedy scene in a giant action blockbuster that has this happen? A hugely dramatic “noooooooooo” as someone drops the warhead…and then nothing happens.
“True Lies” has something like this.
Terrorists are driving a truck with a nuke down a long bridge, and a fighter jet is ordered to blow them up.
The fighter pilot radios back, with, “Uh, this isn’t going to make the nuke go off right now, is it?”
The guys on the other side of the radio reassure him that no, this is all perfectly safe, and then stop broadcasting and turn to each other and shrug, because they don’t know.
Heh, oddly enough I’ve heard of a few incidents of helicopters taking off by themselves. Here in NZ it is legal and routine to leave a helicopter running without a pilot at the controls, for refueling or just to let passengers out on a glacier or alpine landing, and occasionally the collective will rise for whatever reason and the machine will fly off and crash.
My personal theory is not that we live in a simulation, it’s that we live in one of the relatively few[1] worlds where no nukes have gone off, because in worlds where nukes do go off, usually humans go extinct. I’ve posted this idea with more detail here. It also explains the Fermi paradox; basically the same effect but much stronger. I do genuinely find it to be the most convincing explanation of the Fermi-Paradox I’ve heard so far.
Øyvind Thorsby reaches the same conclusion (wrt nukes) in this super awesome comic. I wanna say independently, but I might have actually been influenced by him, I don’t quite remember my thought process.
[1] This is not “few” as in “0.0001%” but maybe 1%-5%.
I think the trouble with that theory is that it explains everything. We also live in one of the few worlds where humanity wasn’t wiped out by a global pandemic, for example. The question is, what is the proportion of worlds where there was an accidental nuclear war vs. the proportion of worlds where there wasn’t an accidental nuclear war? Which (I am not a mathematician) sounds to me like a sampling problem.
Not quite. The survival bias only works if the thing it is applied to almost always kills almost all humans if it happens. It seems somewhat implausible that a disease would always kill the second half of humans once it’s done with the first.
So the question is, how many things are there which (a) have that property and (b) we don’t have strong other reasons to believe are unlikely. I think aliens and nukes are two, I don’t know if there are others. But yeah, there could be.
I really don’t think nukes have this property. I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but there are billions of people living far from urban centers and high-profile nuclear targets.
I’m not sure nukes have this property either (as Noah notes above), but maybe something else – vacuum decay? Or something yet unknown?
If there was an instant way of instantly destroying humanity that anyway happens with overwhelmingly high probability, but which we can also explicitly trigger, that’s kind of neat because real magic becomes possible. Pick a card, any card. I’ll have predicted your choice correctly – and can repeat this trick over and over again under any controls you wish. You don’t need or want to know about the button I would have pressed if I were wrong, which would have then triggered a vacuum-decay-like event, but fortunately I’ve always been right and have never needed to press it.
Basically, we can each become gods.
Along these lines, consider a hypothetical self-destruct mechanism made to trigger if humanity is every threatened or even crowded-out (or even contacted?) by alien life. Building it may or may not have been wise. But as it happens there is no competitive alien life anywhere near us anyway, so it’s moot.
Yeah, I agree it’s not obvious that nukes have this property. In fact, we know they don’t technically have it, since nukes did go off in the past.
So it seems plausible to me that most of the time additional nukes are launched, this does lead to total or near-total extinction. Not at all obvious, just plausible. It doesn’t have to be all the time since the probabilities here aren’t that low.
If we had strong evidence that nuclear winter wasn’t real thing, that would falsify the theory. As-is, it’s noticeable that the only nukes that went off were at a time when there weren’t yet a ton of total nukes on the planet.
(^ I actually think it’s quite bad if humans go extinct, even if there are a many / infinity other worlds.)
There is still plenty of time for nukes to destroy our civilization.
The one that blows my mind is airbags. There are millions of them, they have to function to millisecond precision, and they can’t be prohibitively expensive. False negatives and false positives are both disastrous, and you basically never hear about one of them going off randomly while driving down the road. A quick google search turns up a couple articles about it happening but given the specifications it’s pretty impressive that it doesn’t happen constantly.
Great, now I’m going to think about that as drive home from work.
There was apparently a fair number of incidents where nuclear warheads/bombs were burned, crashed in a plane, or even had the ICBM under them exploding, taking the entire launch facility with it. Looks like these things are just really that hard to detonate. Kind of makes one wonder how likely is it that they will work when needed – none have been tested for decades now, so it’s really easy for the engineers to lean into “too hard to detonate” side. But that’s definitely not a problem I’m going to loose sleep over.
Now there’s a short story idea…
So, set in the inquest after a general global nuclear launch where not a single detonation actually occurred. It turns out that the Americans accidentally introduced a flaw into their warheads in the 80s that prevented them going off. The Chinese copied the Americans so had exactly the same flaw. The Russians hadn’t maintained their warheads since the fall of the USSR and so none of them worked. The Indians’ weren’t programmed to go off until sea level so all crashed into the ground. The Pakistanis only had one and didn’t want to waste it. The British’ nuclear stockpile was a bluff, they’d just borrowed a couple American bombs after World War Two to make it look like they had one. The French did have working bombs but they were having a strike that day and no one pressed the launch button. And finally, North Koreans didn’t realise there was a war and didn’t find out until the inquest.
I actually remember reading a somewhat similar short story written in the time of the Cold War, called something like “The Greatest Secret”. I don’t remember the premise but in the end an American engineer or something with a top secret clearance asks his Russian colleague and by that time friend – how the hell were you guys able to maintain that rate of production, with your much weaker economy how did you build so many ICBMs. And the Russian answers – well our greatest secret is that we didn’t. The warheads are real but the missiles under them are all sham, because if so many warheads go off at the same time, it really doesn’t matter where it happens, everyone on Earth is dead anyway. So we decided we might as well spare the effort of sending them across the globe if the result is the same.
But I like yours idea much more. Or you can have one where nuclear engineers across the globe play prisoner dilemma – each side can secretly cooperate by making their warheads unexplodable, since nobody will ever test them and find out. But they have no way of communicating it to their colleagues on the other side without their superiors noticing.
This is my old argument about Herman Kahn’s doomsday machine. The last man out of the cave containing the cobalt bombs that will wipe out all life on earth if a nuclear attack on the U.S. is detected cuts the wire from the sensor to the detonator on his way out.
There’s also a novel called “The Jesus Factor” which proposes that it turns out that nukes just don’t work. Hiroshima/Nagasaki were combinations of dirty bombs. firebombing, and conventional explosives. The top people of the US and USSR keep the secret to prevent a conventional WWIII.
(Some details may be wrong but the book is real, and in my pile of paperbacks.)
The danger of nuclear war may have been overstated, but if so it probably prevented nuclear war, which makes it a very useful chimera.
And don’t get me started on the dangers of chimerical weapons.
I presume the way of dealing with chimeraon is similar to that for elephantry: light infantry armed with javelins and other missile weapons to panic the creatures and drive them back into enemy lines.
It’s W something, as mine was an off-the cuff comment and on reflection I’m more warm to the idea that a proper estimation of something is more apt to be useful than an irrational fear is.
As far as I understand, the general trend in the English language seems to be to “decay” in some sense. I don’t mean the language is getting worse, just that it loses a lot of formal rules – dropping verb cases, fewer pronouns, letters being merged, etc. It’s not necessarily “simplifying” because what it loses in strict rules is probably made up for in nuance that can only be learned by rote. Let’s just say it “deformalizes”.
Questions I have:
1) Is this correct?
2) Is this typically true of other widely-spoken languages in the world?
3) Assuming yes for both the previous questions, this would suggest either (a) most languages start out very formal and universally deformalize until the end of time (which seems unlikely) or (b) there’s some mechanism that either “resets” a language’s formality periodically or at least increments it. Is either of these true?
I think what you’re getting at is morphological type, and it’s actually been suggested that languages evolve cyclically: from fusional (where a single ending might convey person, number, tense, mood, and voice) to analytic/isolating (where most words are just one root morpheme, no endings required) to agglutinative (where many morphemes are added individually to the root, one for person, one for number, one for tense…) and back to fusional. Dixon suggests that Egyptian has undergone the entire cycle.
Do similar trends exist in the code for open-source computer software?
Because language is just open-source meatbag software.
I think most if not all programming languages are isolating. Easier to parse.
There might be a cycle between object oriented, functional, and, I dunno, declarative, but most programming language retain back compatibility with old code, so they can’t overhaul things, just add new features. And a lot of modern object-oriented languages have adopted functional features like iterators and anonymous and first class functions, and C# has the very neat LINQ, which is declarative. But there’s only so much churn possible before the language spec becomes utterly unwieldy
like C++.If there’s a cycle, then, it’s in what paradigm is dominant. And there might be a cycle there, but if there is, I don’t think we’ve observed one yet.
Interesting! That terminology should give me some stuff to read up on.
Also: a quick google search suggests no evidence for an “agglutinative-free” pun having been made yet. Anyone?
I’d say the main countervailing force to this “decay” is intelligibility (“salience” I believe is a useful keyword here, though it’s been a while since my linguistics courses): rules that provide useful distinctions will be kept or created; rules that don’t, vanish. Likely the same deal as with words, just not as visible.
Useful exercise here might be to compare Spanish and Latin grammar.
ETA – +1 on Nick’s comment. Likely more relevant than mine.
I don’t know as much about grammar, but letters have been both added to and deleted from English. I and J were not distinguished in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, and there was no K, Q, V or Z. On the other hand, eth and thorn have no modern equivalent (both sounds are usually represented by “th” now), and wynn was used in place of the modern W (which derives from a ligature of two Latin U glyphs).
I can think of a few hypotheses about English grammar:
1. Social classes have been getting more cross-talk and the importance of fixed social classes has been culturally deemphasized, and as a result the high-status dialects are merging with the “vulgar” dialects of English. If you’re comparing modern high-status dialects to high-status dialects a century ago, then the merging effect looks like deformalization.
2. Linguistic descriptivism, particularly the “strong form” of descriptivism that denies the validity of the concept of “correct” grammar, has been gaining ground culturally (at least on the scale of a century or so) at the expense of linguistic prescriptivism. Prescriptivist influence over culture and education is a formalizing force, while descriptivist influence is, at most, neutral. This has some cross-talk with point #1: in a prescriptivist-dominated world, a cultural merger of high-status and vulgar dialects is likely to come out closer to the high-status dialect than it would in a descriptivist-dominated world.
3. 20th century educational methodology reforms have greatly deemphasized formal instruction in grammar (as well as rhetoric and composition) in the English curriculum, in favor of increased emphasis on literary analysis. This might be driven partially by #2 (formal instruction in correct grammar implies the existence of correct and incorrect grammar), but a bigger driving force is probably a combination of A) formal education becoming more universal instead of mainly being a finishing school for the upper class, and B) cross-contamination of K-12 education practices from higher education: professors and grad students at universities are expected to produce original research, and literary analysis is a much deeper and richer mine for original research topics than grammar, so literary analysis comes to dominate the university English departments which train K-12 English teachers.
Language changes, some features get lost and new features appear to compensate. For instance both English and French compensated heavy losses of morphology by developping much more complex word order rules —especially complex because word order is still not particularly rigid and stable in either language, but whereas say, in Latin, word order flexibility was mostly a matter of style and emphasis, whereas in French or English word order carries critical semantic and grammatical information, which means that added on flexibility requires complex transformations so as to preserve meaning.
Consider for instance verbs in modern standard English. English speakers are often under the delusion that they have a simple verbal system because English verbs have very little morphology. But consider the array of past construction for the verb “to eat”:
he ate (past)
he has eaten (perfect)
he was eating (past progressive)
he has been eating (perfect progressive)
he would eat (future-in-the-past)
he would be eating (future-in-the-past-progressive)
he used to eat (past habitual)
(let’s ignore remote past tenses (he had eaten) and constructions with multiple meanings (“he would eat” is also, in the right context, a conditional or a past habitual) for now).
Now constructing those forms is easy, but using them, for foreign speakers, can be quite difficult. German, for all the complexity English speakers give it, is incapable of rendering most of the above nuances, and in modern spoken German the entire above series can often be collapsed to “Ich habe gegessen”. That makes translation from English to German easy, in that case, but quite the opposite the other way round!
And that’s just standard English. AAVE and related southern dialects can have even more complex systems of past tenses.
So essentially, English, French, a number of other western european languages have tended to trade morphological complexity away in favor of syntaxic complexity.
But this is of course not a universal rule, or else, by now, all languages would be devoided of morphology.
The trade can in fact happen in the other direction. The Slavic languages for instance have tended to make their nominal morphology more complex over time, developing additional gender nuances beyond the masculine/feminine/neuter of the indo-european models — most slavic languages now contrast a masculine-animate and a masculine-inanimate, and Polish goes one step further, distinguishing a masculine-personal as well.
So the thing is, this is completely orthogonal to formality. Formality is defined by adherence to the standard, literary norm that was described and fixed at some point. Which automatically means that most innovations are perceived as informal by virtue of being innovations. But this is all fairly inconsistent and arbitrary — innovations that originate among prestigious speakers are more likely to be accepted quickly, while simultaneously, constructions that have existed in the language for centuries, and were used by many renowed speakers, are still denounced as faulty by some grammarians (split infinitive, sentence ending preposition, singular they).
Sometimes you even get weird reversal of fortunes: the French word “poigne” (grip) is spelled archaically, and its historically correct pronunciation is [pɔɲ], which if it followed modern spelling rules should rather be spelt “pogne”. But because the archaic spelling was maintained (apparently as an error, the word and its relatives were forgotten during a spelling reform in the 18th century), a spelling pronunciation developped as [pwaɲ], which is how the word looks like it should be pronounced according to the current rule, but is not a historically justified pronunciation.
Except it is this latter pronunciation that is now considered formal and correct (even by educated grammarians), while the historically correct [pɔɲ] is now considered uncough and associated with slang and lack of education.
So there’s no correlation between formality and the structure of the underneath language. The formal registers of some languages agressively reject neologisms, other embrace them. Some embrace expansive, flowery prose, and some embrace stern, minimalist prose. Some bemoan the loss of morphology and some condemn the formation of new morphology. Some favor archaicisms and some reject them abruptly.
Attempting to reject neologisms is just quixotic.
I see what you did there.
Some of the times can also be expressed in German:
he ate (past) – er aß
he has eaten (perfect) – er hat gegessen.
he was eating (past progressive)
he has been eating (perfect progressive) – er hatte gegessen.
he would eat (future-in-the-past) – er würde essen.
he would be eating (future-in-the-past-progressive)
he used to eat (past habitual) – er pflegte zu essen.
past progressive and future-in-the-past-progressive would also be possible (“war essend”, “würde essend sein”, but aren’t used that way).
Iirc, translating “he would eat” as “er würde essen” is valid if it’s a conditional meaning:
“If he was hungry, he would eat.” > “Wenn er Hunger hätte, würde er essen.”
(eating is a hypothetical action)
But not if it’s an actual future-in-the-past:
“He didn’t know that he would eat here.” > “Er wusste nicht, dass er hier aß.”
(eating actually happened in the past, but in a past that was in the future of a further removed past moment).
You can contrast with “he was going to eat”, which is always a future-in-the-past and thus afaik would never be translated as “er würde essen”.
How many of these are actually necessary for communication? Some of them sound overly formal or just a case of emphasis. If you asked me if I was hungry, I could say “I have already eaten” but I’m more likely to say “I already ate”.
It really depends what you mean by “necessary”. If you go by how various world languages work, it’s not even “necessary” to have a past tense at all. Some languages are perfectly content to say “I eat yesterday”, “I eat already”, “I eat 1 hour ago”.
I mean something like “if I never used these constructions, no one would ever suspect something off about my word choices”. There is the kind of “meaningless but necessary” features like the word “do” in English. If I said “I not know” instead of “I do not know”, you would get my meaning but it sounds wrong. But there are other words like “whom” where you can go your whole life without ever using it. If you just replaced it with “who”, you still sound like a native speaker.
Well I’m not a native English speaker, but none of these constructions seem odd or rare to me. You can construct alternatives to them, but not always.
Like sure, you can say “I didn’t expect to see you here” instead of “I didn’t know I would see you here” to avoid that pesky future-in-the-past, but I don’t think the second sentence is any rarer or more precious than the first one.
(Don’t know a thing about linguistics, it’s just folk observations and wild guessing)
Similar observations has certainly been made about Russian – rules becoming more permissive, in some cases officially so (commonly linked example is the word “кофе” (“coffee”) – it used to be masculine, but sounds as having a neutral gender, so it was a common error to treat it as such. But a few years ago the Ministry of Education declared it’s not an error anymore and both genders are valid, to the resentment of many a grammar snob). It’s also not about sheer complexity – new words and sometimes constructions are being
addedborrowed from English – but rather about the language becoming less formal.OTOH, the rural dialect, especially of the older variety, is extremely liberal with the language in some regards, and I’m pretty sure now it’s used much less often than 100 or even 50 years ago. So maybe it’s not decrease in number of rules but change in what is regulated, or mix of classes Eric Rall mentioned in 1.
A Science-Based Case for Ending the Porn Epidemic by PEG has been making the rounds in conservative circles. It’s a long, long look at the evidence of pornography and especially addiction to pornography on the brain.
I’m going to summarize it, so let me say immediately that if you need any content warnings, assume they apply starting now:
1. PEG begins by comparing porn to smoking. Easily available, everyone does it, it’s an addiction for many, and it’s relentlessly enforced as normal, healthy, etc., even as evidence is mounting that it’s bad for you. Eventually, the weight of evidence shifted public opinion against smoking, but it took a long time and a lot of lives for this to happen. He wants to make the evidence on porn better known to speed up this process.
2. Porn is so stimulating because of the Coolidge effect: male animals “exhibit renewed sexual interest whenever a new female is introduced to have sex with, even after cessation of sex with prior but still available sexual partners.” Our brains, he writes, interprets each new scene as a new sexual partner, revving us up all over again. Internet porn is particularly dangerous in this regard, because there is virtually unlimited content. He likens it to the (familiar to rationalists) concept of a superstimulus.
3. He detours into a discussion of evidence that extremely addicting drugs like heroin work by activating the same “circuitry” in our reward system as for sex. And everyone has a propensity toward sex addiction, unlike, say, alcoholism.
4. He also brings up the bingeing effect, where we gorge when we find a whole lot of something at once.
5. Another detour to defend the notion that “addiction is a brain disease, not a chemical disease.” It’s not that we become addicted to a particular compound. PEG links to a series of reviews agreeing online porn addiction is real and one that disputes this, but mixes data from before and after the availability of online porn.
6. PEG shifts to a discussion now of the effects of porn on the brain. Hijacking the reward system means releasing dopamine, which of course inclines us to pursue it more. It also releases DeltaFosB, which “strengthen[s] the neural pathways that dopamine travels, deepening the neural connection between the buzz we get and whatever we’re doing or experience when we get it.” DeltaFosB is what enables the sex reward system to be hijacked in the first place. Neuroscientists, is this accurate?
7. One consequence of hijacking this is losing interest in real sex, something which happens to heroin addicts. Evidence of porn addiction’s effect here, he says, can be seen with the explosion (no pun intended) of erectile dysfunction. Rates before Internet porn were >1% for men under 30 and <3% for men 30-45, but rates today are 14-37% among men under 40 today and 16-37% of men also experience low libido. Let me register my annoyance that a) 14-37% is a huge range, and b) we don't have direct comparisons by age bracket.
8. He recounts familiar stories about how young men can't get it up with actual women, even when they want to, without visualizing porn in their heads, or turning it on for the duration of sex. I'd like some sense of how common these stories are? Is "men need porn just to get it up" really common among ED patients now?
9. PEG also points to last year's Atlantic article about the sex recession. I could have sworn I wrote about it here, but I guess I didn’t… I could only find a brief subthread where @achenx linked it. Ah well. Basically, young people in America—indeed all over the West—are having considerably less sex than previous generations. It seems to have hit Japan first, long one of the world’s porn capitals.
10. He turns next to evidence that porn “warp[s] the brain.” The mechanism this time is diminishing returns from watching the regular stuff. The addicted crave bigger hits, and for porn, that comes in the form of novelty. Shock or surprise works best. So the addicted seek out more and more unusual or, frankly, degraded porn: incest, racism, cuckolding, and violence against women. The racist stuff he so identifies because, despite being marketed as simply “interracial,” it comes across like a minstrel show. Incest porn—often hidden by casting everyone as “stepfathers,” “stepmothers,” or “half-brothers”—has become huge.
11. PEG devotes special attention to violence against women, insisting that this is not the BDSM of old. These sexual proclivities have been around forever. But repeated viewing of the really degraded stuff is strengthening previously uninterested folks in it and everything peripheral to it by the reward system and DeltaFosB mechanism mentioned earlier. The effects of this can be bizarre. Interest in same-sex and trans sexual content has risen dramatically about men who identify as straight. These men report, however, no attraction to this outside of porn. The sexual stimulation, bizarrely, is getting virtually completely decoupled from what (or who) they actually want to do in the bedroom.
12. He also brings up the case of Andrea Long Chu, someone who has come up a bit here before. Chu got very interested in sissy porn, a genre where “men dressed like women perform sex acts with men in stereotypically submissive, female roles.” PEG says Chu answers yes, sissy porn did cause the transition, in a new book. (Can anyone confirm this was what was written?) Needless to say, to have one’s porn interests prompt a sex transition is remarkable. I’d also like to know whether this is a sample of one; he doesn’t mention anyone else.
13. Porn addiction is also having a negative impact on relationships. PEG mentions girlfriends, but the linked studies are all about marital satisfaction. He also links studies where women feel less desirable or report lower self-worth. With single studies being linked, this is an area where I especially expect that research may not hold up.
14. Porn addiction is also having particularly negative effects on the prefrontal cortex due to neuroplasticity. He describes this as a hallmark feature of addiction, the effect of which is reduced executive function, including impulsivity. He says studies report that the problems are greater the greater the porn use, but doesn’t link any. How much of a thing is neuroplasticity really? It’s invoked so often in pop neuroscience I just kind of assumed it was nonsense or failed to replicate, but I’d really like someone to weigh in.
15. Next up is the effects on children. Children have easy access to porn, after all. We all know it. A Spanish study said 63% of boys and 30% of girls are exposed to it during adolescence; “children under 10 now account for 22% of online porn consumption under 18,” says the British Journal of School Nursing. He links to a literature review listing “regressive attitudes toward women,” “sexual aggression,” “social maladjustment,” “sexual preoccupation,” “compulsivity.” A study of teens found a “relationship between pornography exposure and… social isolation, misconduct, depression, suicidal ideation, and academic disengagement.” Depression, natch, is way up among teens. Decide for yourself whether this is more plausible than the hundred other proposed explanations for teen depression.
16. PEG turns finally to the effects on society generally. He brings up Japan again, where not only are sex rates down, but marriage rates, and interest in, well, much of anything. Japan’s soushoku danshi (how much of an overlap here with hikikomori, incidentally?) have few to no friends, live with their parents, and have no interest in sex, marriage, holding down a job, or even hobbies. They do like porn, though. He reports that they’re even a renewed market for yaoi, the male-male romance genre which usually caters to teenage girls. (And gay men usually prefer bara, a fact which PEG overlooks.) Incidentally, he concludes that it’s impossible to prove the soushoku danshi are suffering from porn addiction. Um, why not? Why can’t a study be done?
17. He concludes with his call to action.
So there is clearly a hell of a lot here, and I’m sure folks have about a hundred things to say. My interest is mainly in the quality of cited research; I’ll say right now I’m pretty uninterested in the speculations PEG brings to it, especially when he starts saying things like “[studies] certainly suggest [x]”. If nothing else, given the sheer number of studies cited, this seems like a good start for a “Much More Than You Wanted To Know” or adversarial collaboration post.
I’d like to start this by saying I think there might be some validity to this underlying argument. That being said, I’m skeptical of a few issues.
1. He kind of alludes to my largest source of skepticism up front – this argument sounds a lot like moral puritanism and when it’s being put forward by the already-puritanical-seeming conservative mindset, I get suspicious. Isn’t decreasing the pre-marital sex rate kind of the conservative goal?
2. I didn’t go back through his data, but how confident are we on old data being accurate for ED rates? This “sudden increase in ED” is a point he comes back to a bunch, but when I see a jump of 1%-16% I get suspicious of the underlying data.
3. Responding directly to your point 8 – I have done this in situations where I didn’t find the person I was with particularly attractive, but it is not a normal part of my behavior. I don’t know how common this is, but it could explain a certain positive rate.
4. Responding to your point 10 – we had a discussion about this not too long ago on the site about the growing prevalence of these previously-taboo vids. My impression at the time was that in a hyper-competitive market, being a distinct as possible made your product stronger; thus the growing prevalence of this stuff doesn’t reflect a change in sexuality as much as it does a need to stand out from the crowd.
5. Trans criticism I’ve read about Andrea Long Chu has made it clear, to me at least, that her experience is highly-atypical of the normal trans person. I would not take her writing as an insight into anything other than one person’s atypical journey.
6. On your point 14, I thought this was a particularly weak part of his piece. This was the time for him to demonstrate how this addiction affected the totality of it’s sufferers lives and I don’t think he was able to.
7. On soushoku danshi. This is where I began to get skeptical of this guy’s writing and overall conclusion. I had previously encountered the term soushoku danshi, or grass eater, and had mentally equated it to a non-insulting analog to the soyboy phenomenon here in the west: a growing trend of sensitive, less overtly masculine malehood. His description of the term matched yours closely, so I clicked through to his source, a slate article.
The first line of that slate article was as follows:
So, the article he links to prove these people have no hobbies or interests starts with a description of a typical grass eater who’s got like, 4 hobbies. The article then goes on to say that this populations financial woes can be largely explained by the shift in the 90s away from lifelong salary-men-style employment and more towards contract and hourly work, when they can get jobs in the first place. If I had to make an assessment, I’d guess that he saw that article, conflated it with his knowledge of the hikikomori and shoveled it together to fit the overall narrative he wanted.
This raises my skepticism of his overall ability to process and understand information in an unbiased. The summary he gave of the grass eaters doesn’t match either my knowledge of the topic or the article he linked. This caused me to mentally decrease my confidence in everything else he claimed.
In particular, the development of a treatment. How many people with ED would even think to go to a doctor about their issues, let alone overcome their embarrassment, before various little blue pills started doing saturation advertisement?
Sexual puritanism might be adaptive.
There are no clear boundaries between soushoku danshi, hikikomori, NEET, otaku, etc. these are not groups defined by voluntary identification like incels or MGTOW, they are sociological descriptions. Still, there are clear trends in Japan, and increasingly in the West, of men becoming less and less sexually active, less interested in marriage and more depressed.
Ok, but then why not the behavior he’s talking about as well? It has all the benefits of puritanism (no chance of disease, no chance of unwanted pregnancy, no chance of getting shot by a jealous lover/ex) without the willpower cost previously necessary to maintain puritanism.
I agree, kind of, but crucially that’s not the point he made in his “science-based case.” He brings up a particular movement and then describes them in an inaccurate fashion. If he’s misinterpreting his sources on something as relatively simple as Japanese social movements, why should I trust his understanding of neuroscience?
Until they figure a way to make hentai anime waifus give birth to real babies, there seems to be an obvious problem.
My brain is breaking trying to imagine half 3D, half anime children. This is worse than Roger Rabbit.
You’re welcome.
If anybody is going to combine artificial wombs with artificial girlfriends, it’ll probably be Japan.
i would think that’s when the problems begin.
Hopefully someone is working on the robotic mother as well.
Those are the kinds of hobbies you expect to hear from someone who doesn’t have any “real” hobbies. Two entirely unchallenging, solitary pursuits,(long drives through the mountains, exploring old neighborhoods) one potentially challenging pursuit,(taking photographs of Buddhist temples) and one pursuit he just recently picked up.(gardening)
…sounds like hobbies to me? Sure, some are challenging, but they don’t necessarily have to be. And many hobbies are solitary.
Yeah. Those aren’t hobbies I would choose, but they are certainly hobbies…hobbies that involve some physical activity even!
It’s *a* conservative goal, but it doesn’t follow that conservatives have to be in favour of anything that will decrease it. Sometimes the cure really is worse than the disease.
Right, I use that to point out that the PM sex rate is a relatively trivial statistic when it comes to measuring public good.
Something bad that also happens to bring down the pre-marital sex rate would still be bad if it increased the sex rate or caused it to hold steady. Bringing down the rate (or occurring in coincidence with a decrease in the rate) isn’t evidence that something is bad.
Sounds like a whole lot of correlation/causation fuzziness here. How much of the fall to various addictions driven by external factors? Modern smokers and drinkers largely do it for stress reasons. Most of the points here about porn and its social effects, especially the case of Japan, seem to be more of a sympton of social atomization, which incentivize the turn to porn, which may or may not exacerbate things. (The point about the allure of incest, especially, is really about social atomization.)
Do we see similar effects for people who attend strip clubs or burlesques? And what of the sex workers and porn actors themselves? Do we see significant shifts when the Hays Code begins and ends, or when the NC-17 rating cratered? If we don’t see the same kinds of correlations, then the uniquely deleterious effects of porn are about the broader social situation, than simply being a voyeur.
I only mention it once in my summary, but PEG says many times that widely known, easy to access Internet sites with a lot of different video porn seems to be the real driver here. Several of his speculations (which, again, I’m skeptical of) tie the beginning of the problems to the years when those sites arose, the late 2000s.
Then there’s a huge correlation/causation aspect. PEG needs to prove that porn is a uniquely bad internet addiction compared to, say, spending work hours posting comments on a niche intellectual blog open thread.
Or to be less snarky, if there’s a difference from people who spend most of their time reading erotic fanfiction (or non-erotic, hurt/comfort is arguably a larger pool). Or if porn addicts have worse outcomes than those with Gaming Disorder.
>PEG needs to prove that porn is a uniquely bad internet addiction compared to, say, spending work hours posting comments on a niche intellectual blog open thread.
Thank You! I hadn’t read your comment before making essentially
the same point later in the thread.
I think most of the complaints about porn apply similarly to a _very_
wide range of storable, transmissible forms of many human activities:
Reading and writing are partial substitutes for memory and conversation.
Photography, movies, written music, paintings, sculpture,
dance notation, radio, recorded music…
All of them partially substitute for some more immediate human
activity. They all make the substitute more available – generally
with more variety, generally with some desensitization towards
the more vanilla version of the direct experience. I can read the
eloquence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and it makes the
next words from my next door neighbor a bit more mundane
in comparison. So what?
This argument goes all the way back to Socrates:
“In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates calls into question the propriety and impropriety of writing. Throughout his discussion with a colleague, Socrates insists that writing destroys memory and weakens the mind (Ong, 2002).”
There is value in both porn and in real sex. This is the same
trade-off as in all of the storable, transmissible, mediated
technologies I listed above. There is value in both the unmediated
and mediated versions of the relevant experiences.
I might, with a lot of effort, get to see the Taj Mahal with my own
eyes, or participate in an orgy. I am unlikely to actually do either
in the rest of my life. I can see images of both, and that has value to me.
The main issue with these studies is that they tend to be observational, hence they can’t distinguish between correlation and causation.
The hypothesis that porn is a superstimulus that can cause addiction and sexual dysfunction, however, is plausible.
For the purposes of scientific integrity, before anything else, you’d need to demonstrate conclusively that “porn addiction” is a meaningful comparison to other types of addiction. Saying that it actuates the dopamine system isn’t enough – the dopaminergic system does a lot of stuff. Even proving a link between porn consumption and the mesolimbic pathway might not be sufficient.
Yeah I was about to make this point, as I’m reading through I see a lot of “porn is addictive” (which, sure) is eliding into “porn addiction” which I’d really like a definition for.
If I watch 12 porn videos in a session and masturbate about once every 2 weeks, am I a porn addict?
If I masturbate once a day to the same 3 porn videos, am I a porn addict?
Etc, etc…
Does this level of certainty exist for anything though? Even sub out porn for alcohol in your above description and the answer would be “maybe”
Porn addiction is sort of a facinating thing, in that at least something around those lines definitely exists–there are undoubtedly young men who wish to limit their porn usage, cannot do so, and suffer distress and/or dysfunction from that. There’s an entire cottage industry of porn addition treatment apps. But it seems to be almost entirely limited to religious communities. Easy to explain this limitation, of course–secular porn users don’t typically see any reason to stop using–but so long as none of them experience significant adverse consequences from their use, we’re essentially dealing with a culture-bound addiction.
That certainly depends on whether later, fewer children and fewer relationships are adverse consequences, all of which secular men across the West and Japan are experiencing.
Certainly not in a clinical sense.
If the negative consequences aren’t comparable to alcoholism or gambling addiction, it’s not a useful comparison.
The article discusses negative consequences extensively, and I mention them in my summary, 13-16. If you think the studies cited are bogus or that all of them rest on correlation, okay, but you’re all bizarrely talking as if no negative consequences have even been raised.
There’s a significant difference between adverse consequences in the context of a possible societal-wide trend, and ones that are clinically relevant in terms of an addiction diagnosis. I might not have been sufficiently clear that I was talking about the latter, but that was what I was trying to do.
It’s entirely possible for porn to have significant negative consequences without anything that could be dubbed an addiction existing (outside of the communities who are already experiencing it). IMO, and in my undergrad-tier understanding of how psychiatry approaches the issue, the terminology of “addiction” should be reserved for cases where the behavior is either unwanted or more-or-less life-destroying.
I apologize if I made you feel that I was disregarding the exceptional effort you put into your summary of the original article. This discussion is only possible because of the work you put into summarizing the article for us, and I appreciate it. I was only responding to @EchoChaos’ description of “later, fewer children and fewer relationships are adverse consequences” as not being comparable to the effects of gambling addiction or alcoholism.
Regarding points 13-16 from your original post:
This appears to hold up in at least a correlative sense, based on a quick review of the cited studies. The causal link is obviously hard to prove, but it seems intuitively reasonable that excessive porn use could lead to an unrealistic view of sex and relationships. The “traumatic” nature of porn use by partners for women is also fairly intuitive. However, the sample sizes for these studies do not impress me. If replication is ever attempted, I expect it to be underwhelming. Your initial evaluation of the author’s analysis of these studies is valid, to my mind.
Yeah, this definitely sounds like nonsense to me as well. Pure and undiluted neuroscience woo.
This sounds like another case of the original author mistaking a potentially strong correlation for a definitive causal link. I think we can all agree that kids shouldn’t be exposed to porn, though.
I think that this is one area where the original author (to his credit) refuses to attribute a causal link where the research does not support one. Regarding your question as to why we can’t prove ‘grass eaters’ aren’t suffering from porn addiction – first, you’d have to have good categorical definitions for both ‘grass eaters’ and ‘porn addiction’. We currently have neither.
I’d say that if you need to up your dosage (more and more hardcore porn, weird porn anime with octopi or whatever), so it goes further and further from ordinary sex, then it’s probably an addiction.
I am unsure about the porn consumer who watches the same type of porn fairly regularly without escalating.
Concurrently, we know that both gambling and shopping can be addictive. Yet we are working to liberalize gambling laws, and just about no one is trying to shut down shopping as a concept.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen my username come up randomly in a comment section here before. Odd post for it to happen.
Looks interesting, I will take a closer look at the article later.
Heh, sorry. After I posted, I sort of wondered whether I really should have tagged you. But then my edit window was gone.
Oh no problem, it was just surprising.
After reading the article, I am skeptical of some of it, but a lot of it seems like it has a point. That said, all I know of this area is anecdotal experience, and not a whole lot at that, so just because something doesn’t make sense to me doesn’t mean much.
I also went back and reread that Atlantic article too. Both the articles mainly just bring ring up general worry about my kids’ futures, but I have a very strong pre-existing bias towards assuming “the world is uniquely terrible now” is an easy thing to believe but rarely valid, so while I worry about how my kids will deal with the modern world, I also try to keep in mind that said worry has probably been constant throughout human history.
I think the increase in ED diagnosis has a lot more to do with the introduction of Viagra and friends. When it first came out there was a huge advertising blitz, and a lot of people sought prescriptions which leads to an increase in diagnosis.
Agreed.
It’s also probably difficult statistically to disentangle “people who take it as treatment for a severe medical problem” from “people who take it because they think it’ll marginally improve their sex life”.
@Konstantin
I also think that ED changed from “that just happens when you get old enough” to “it’s an affliction that can be treated.”
I strongly suspect that many more women are also diagnosed with menopausal issues than in the past.
In addition to my previous points, I’d like to note that we, collectively, still have a dangerously ambiguous definition of addiction. As our gracious host pointed out in Against Against Pseudoaddiction, behaviors that appear addictive from a top-down view can, from an individual perspective, actually be adaptive and reasonable responses to one’s current situation. Shoehorning every behavior we can into the ‘addiction’ category is unwise, and using the neuroscientific language of addiction just adds additional confusion to both the study of conventional addiction and the topic the author wishes to discuss.
I think I’m agreeing; the whole notion of addiction here seems like a distraction. Are there negative effects from use? Is it dose dependent? With what frequency in the population? Do people find it is difficult to restrain themselves? We can answer these without using the word addition and unless we’re trying to allocate blame or requisition medical funds we probably should.
While I respect neuroscience, I think if you have to look at brain scans for effects it’s likely not a problematic behavior, so getting into whether or not it hijacks dopamine might help someone quit, but doesn’t do much to establish whether or not it is a problem.
I don’t think you intend that not. (or else swap limited for significant)
Instantly available porn in more flavors than Baskin-Robins (who are missing entirely on the famine stricken ancient near-Easter flavors) is definitely a wide scale societal change that seems very plausibly specifically keyed to our savanna psyche. I expect the consequences, though, to be about on par with social media equipped smart phones. Not something easy to disentangle, but widespread alterations in behavior and perceptions that aren’t likely to be positive for our mental and spiritual health any more than having candy at every check-out isle promotes physical well-being.
Even if a hungry person feels great after a candy bar.
Uh, that looks like an idiomatic usage to me. “Does this not look like X?” I would answer either “Yes, it does” or “No, it doesn’t”.
On the issue of the relation between porn and aggression against women, I remember seeing some interesting research some years ago. The authors looked at state level data on the availability of the internet, at the point when it was coming into common use, and rates of rape, on the theory that the internet greatly increased access to pornography.
Their conclusion was a negative relation — availability of the internet was associated with lower rates of rape, not higher. That makes sense if you think of porn as a substitute for sex, and violent porn as a substitute for violent sex.
If the mechanism is porn is a general substitute for sex, then unless you think pushing a magical button that rewires all humans to no longer perform sex for pleasure is a good idea, then reducing access to porn doesn’t make either. Sure there’s an upside but the downside is much bigger.
And I’m not in favor of making tobacco illegal, either.
This all seems to prove too much.
I think you’re overstating the effects–porn probably reduces people’s sex drive, but clearly doesn’t eliminate it. And I think humanity would be pretty much fine if population growth rates levelled off a bit. Besides, we’ve had internet porn for about 2 decades and the pop. growth rate is still positive.
Most developed countries have negative growth rates now.
@Le Maistre Chat
Source? A quick google is giving me positive rates (as of 2017) for the first few developed countries I thought of (US, UK, France, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Norway) is turning up positive.
Ok, slightly more thorough Google (thanks Wikipedia) and it looks like there are some with negative rates (e.g. Japan), but the solid majority both overall and among developed nations is definitely still positive.
@thevoiceofthevoid: I think that Wikipedia list includes immigration. We need to look at Total Fertility Rate, because if something in our environment (like free porn) is suppressing marriage and fertility, bringing in yokels from places that don’t have internet access to keep population growth positive is not a renewable resource.
South Korea is at 1.1 child per woman. Spain, Italy, Bosnia at 1.3 … Japan, Poland, Ukraine, Croatia, Greece, the United Arab Emirates at 1.4 … Canada, Austria, Hungary, Thailand at 1.5 … European Union as a whole is 1.6 per woman.
@Maistre:
Even if you don’t count immigration, a net reproduction rate below replacement does not imply that population is currently declining, only that it will decline if the current pattern of age specific fertility is maintained for long enough.
@Le Maistre Chat > “…We need to look at Total Fertility Rate…”
I was surprised to see that the fertility rates of Italy and Spain were so low, which doesn’t fit the stereotypes I learned in the 20th century, I’m curious if the low rates are due to less un-wed births and a lower marriage rates, with they couples who do get married still having a relatively high rate (as in the United States recently), or if married couples are having fewer children as well.
@Plumber
In Spain, people have fewer children; in one generation, my parents’ generation went from having families of 5-8 siblings to having 1-3 kids. People also went from marrying in their twenties to marrying in their thirties.
@ana53294,
Thanks.
@Plumber
Thanks for that link. It’s interesting but not surprising that marriage and children become more tightly coupled when marriage itself becomes devalued because the people who still marry will be those more likely to have kids.
The decrease in unwed births is always welcome news, of course.
@EchoChaos says: “Thanks for that link…”.
You’re welcome.
I doubt I’ll live long enough to see how it shakes out, but I’m curious about whether the Americans that were born in the past few years more follow the example of the larger cultures relatively (compared to previous decades) lower birth and marriage rates, or do they more follow the examples of most of their parents?
It’s hard to pattern match, the 1930’s saw low birth and marriage rates, with those married also having relatively few kids, 1946 to 1963 saw a huge increase in births, marriages, and people getting married and having kids young, then the drop in births, but a lot more unwed births in the ’70’s and ’80’s, then a drop in unwed births afterwards, and then the post 2008 decline in marriages with a recent increase in births among those who are married.
Compared to the ’70’s and ’80’s now people voice more socially liberal beliefs, but act more conservatively (more celibacy outside of marriage).
It’s like there’s two groups: an act like it’s the 1930’s group (low births, church, and marriage), and an act like it’s the 1950’s group (higher births, church, and marriage) though later marriages than the ’50’s, with the ’70’s and ’80’s style higher unwed births abandoned.
Curious this.
@Le Maistre Chat
Ah, good point. Though, bringing in yokels can be a renewable resource if the places you’re bringing them in from have (fertility rate – emigration rate*) > 2.
*converted to the proper units by dividing by the number of women in their childbearing years, times the number of childbearing years, I think?
I definitely think there is something to this; not necessarily that it’s more insidious than porn, but there’s a stiff competition in that area. I was talking about this with my daughter after she observed that the teenage boys at the youth retreat spent every minute playing Smash Bros that they were allowed to do so. Video games are expertly designed to give a false sense of accomplishment, in addition to all the exciting colors and swelling music. I got an achievement on Steam for beating Slay the Spire (for example)! I feel great, let’s do it again! But… I haven’t actually gotten better at a skill that will accomplish anything I care about, except incidentally and probably quite disproportionately to the time invested. It’s kind of annoying, but not much less inviting for finding it so.
But in comparison, the only thing that makes video games worse is that we’re physiologically much more able to play videos games for eight hours straight than be sexually excited for eight hours straight. Porn is more sedentary, more likely to be solitary, and even more pointless than video games, which might incidentally improve your mental agility, while porn is unlikely to help you with any effective seductive skills, though I’m sure someone has an anecdote to the contrary.
But the bulk of this argument also applies to books, movies, board games, listening to music, watching tv, dancing, most sports… basically any non-creative activity or hobby.
This is why people use “puritanism” as a slur for “people who absolutely hate the idea that anyone, anywhere, could be having fun”.
+1. I was about to say, let’s not forget the old-fashioned ways to spend hours staring at a box of flashing lights, or alternatively a bunch of ink on some bound paper.*
*yeah, nonfiction books can makes you smarter, but consider novels.
With the names “machine interface” and “the voice of the void”, the push-back on electronic media is understandable =P
Can you restate the argument that you think argues against these things as strongly as against porn and/or video games? Because I don’t see it doing so.
Maybe I shouldn’t have responded to a post that gave support for “puritanism”, because that is taken popularly to be support for banning via law. I don’t hate or oppose other peoples fun. This is merely a concern that modern entertainment may be deleterious in some ways.
@Randy M
Watching TV doesn’t really make you better at much of anything. Reading a novel might improve your writing about as much as video games improve your coordination. Last I read, Sudoku and similar puzzles probably do little for your cognitive function besides improve your ability to solve Sudokus. Congratulations, you’ve written a bunch of numbers in boxes!
Point is, we do a wide variety of things to entertain ourselves. Many of them have little or no value beyond that in-the-moment entertainment. And that’s fine–having fun is a good thing in and of itself in my book, even if you don’t really “accomplish” anything in the process. Yes, Fortnite is more addictive than Settlers of Catan, but I’d bet people were spending too much time watching TV ever since it was invented, and before that listening to radio dramas, and before that reading pulp fiction. Basically, nothing new under the sun.
And agreed that video games might be somewhat deleterious. I sure can think of times when I’ve stayed up past midnight playing a game when I should have been going to bed or doing homework. But, I can also remember staying up late reading novels by the light of my alarm clock as a kid when I was supposed to be going to bed.
Ah, okay, thanks.
It’s not so much the time wasting that I resent, it’s that it feels like it’s repurposing my primitive brain for it’s own purposes, far more efficiently than most activities that are merely fun.
I’ve no wish to be a cog is some machine where every action must have a productive purpose, but nor do I want to be a host for some memetic sort of electronic parasite.
Can you believe I’m arguing this at the same time as arguing up-thread that I ~don’t~ think a super intelligence would be able to control me as easily as suspected? Perhaps I’m just trying to rationalize contradictory irrational worries, or put to words passing curiosities.
(But I did start a thread along these lines last year, I think. Eh, if it’s interesting, argue with me, but rest assured I have no Puritan urge to ban these things)
it’s that it feels like it’s repurposing my primitive brain for it’s own purposes, far more efficiently than most activities that are merely fun.
See, I’m pretty strongly sympathetic to both sides here. On the one hand, it seems pretty obvious that any and all forms of mindless entertainment can be “addicting” to some people, and that cultural critics in previous eras have long predicted the imminent downfall of society due to the latest diversion (and have been universally incorrect in such predictions).
On the other hand, it also seems obvious that humanity continues to make incremental “improvements” to basically everything we create, and that mindless entertainment is no different. I can think of a few different reasons to be especially concerned about modern entertainment (as opposed to entertainment from previous eras) in general, with video games being among the most egregious examples of these sorts of behaviors.
It definitely seems that “addictiveness” is now a quality that is being actively optimized for. Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure that Charles Dickens or whoever had a relatively strong intuitive understanding of the process wherein “the more the reader feels like they have to immediately and constantly consume my work, the more in demand my work will be, and the more money I will make.” Psychological “tricks” in entertainment are nothing new – the basic cliffhanger being the primary example. But I think prior to the last couple decades, this was mainly intuitive and not necessarily deeply studied. Modern video game companies do study human psychology in an intentional attempt to optimize for addictiveness specifically. They increasingly sell their products on a “subscription” model (as opposed to a one-time purchase) that facilitates this effort, or they price bonus products in a manner that is specifically tied to known psychological triggers (pay a couple dollars to speed up your experience and get that thing you want RIGHT NOW instead of in 2 days).
So, to the extent that “more addictive” entertainment products are “better” entertainment products (as measured by the profitability of those who create them), which seems quite likely, human progress and advancement is likely to lead to steadily increasingly addictive products. And given how “addictive” current products already are (enough to cause pretty serious problems for some, but not many, people), my concern is less with what exists today and more with what will exist 5 years from now. Basically, how far away are we from legitimate, no-kidding wireheading (and when we get there, doesn’t it seem like it will probably come in the form of some sort of sexually explicit interactive media?)
And when we get to wireheading directly, it will be more of a universalization of what was immediately prior a set of personalized software packages individually tailored to have nearly the same effect but seem innocuous to all but the old fuddy-duddies.
We already have wireheading. That’s what drugs are. If video games get to a similar level of addictiveness we’ll react similarly.
Alcohol provides a good border case. It seems to sit right on the line where societies recognize it as problematic, but usually not enough to ban.
Except that drugs are expensive, typically illegal, become less effective with continuous use, and come with all kinds of unfortunate health and behavioral side effects.
At some point we’re going to discover how to deliver all the benefits of hard drugs without any of the costs (other than addictive potential). That’s going to represent a massive societal shift.
Ultimately, it is an eternal conservative worry that ‘the wrong thing’ is more attractive than ‘the right thing.’
Of course, from this perspective, things can be caused by the wrong thing getting more attractive, but also by the right thing becoming less so. Probably we actually see a combination of both, as well as causal relationships between the two.
For example, to give a just so story, perhaps computer games make boys less fun to be around, which in turn makes it less attractive for women to seek out boys, so they use less make-up and use vibrators more, which makes them less attractive for boys compared to computer games, so boys get less attractive, etc.
Tradcons always explain recent social changes as being due to something wrong with men’s behavior, it having changed in some way. They never talk about women’s behavior changing except as a reaction to the original change in men’s behavior. This allows them to seem like traditionalists without being de-platformed. The tradcon can rail against weak unmanly men in the harshest language secure in the knowledge that the worst Twitter staff will do is roll their eyes at the cranky codger.
The anti-pron stuff fits perfectly into this. This doesn’t mean pron can’t also be bad, sometimes there really is a wolf. But the article is pretty weak. The brain is a chemical machine, anything you interact will “affect brain chemistry.”
Tradcons have plenty to say about how women’s changing behaviors has had a similar impact on family formation and birth rates. But porn addiction is much more a male problem than a female problem.
I’m skeptical of the claim that porn is leading to people having less sex. I think there are a lot of confounding factors. We have a much older population than we used to. People are staying in school longer, which tends to delay the age of marriage. The social norms around all kinds of sexual behavior have gotten much stricter, as well as the consequences for violating them.
Even if porn is leading to people having less sex, it’s not clear if that is really a big problem. Recalling some of the earlier discussion on this, the age group whose sexual activity declined the most was teenagers. Is that really a problem that conservatives (or progressives?) need to solve? Teenagers need to have more sex?
The other harms seem similarly… not that harmful. Even if porn is leading to more erectile dysfunction (and I don’t buy the argument here)– even if that’s true, we have a cure for ED.
I would be shocked if any of that research replicated.
Where did they find teens who haven’t been exposed to porn?
???
I would have said just the opposite. Within my lifetime, norms against promiscuity, homosexual sex, oral sex, have gotten much weaker. The only sexual norms I can think of that have gotten stricter are the norm in favor of more explicit consent and the related norm against sex where one partner is young.
Perhaps zardoz is referring to just the last few years?
Or sex where any intoxicants (alcohol/drugs) are involved.
A group of people with high media visibility are vocally arguing that drunken sex should be denormalized; I am unconvinced that they have had any great success among the actual-sex-having population.
Young people are having less sex than their equivalents a generation or two ago, according to all the recent statistics on the subject I’ve seen. That doesn’t prove that the media messaging is responsible to any great extent, but it’s one of only a handful of plausible causes.
Agreed, but the move to denormalize drunken sex specifically didn’t become a high-profile thing until maybe half a generation ago.
Norms for heterosexual male behavior have become more strict, norms for everything else has become more lax.
It’s not the ends but the means. If teens are having less sex because they’re too busy with Bible Study, great! If it’s because they’re socially enfeebled porn addicts, not so great.
And yet STD infection rates in recent years are up. This doesn’t exclude a generalized decline, but it refutes theories based on the entire bell curve shifting one way.(Unless people have stopped using condoms for some unrelated reason.)
Better diagnostics and antibiotic resistance?
Or society is bifurcating into a promiscuous group of winners and a group of
incelarinsular losers.It can both be true that one group is much more promiscuous and have STDs out the wazoo, but on average people are having less sex.
@Alexander Turok
Apparently, gay people have become way more careless, due to PrEP and decent AIDS treatments.
s?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-men-sex-condoms-prep.html
https://www.aidsmap.com/news/may-2016/american-gay-mens-use-condoms-has-been-falling-decade-regardless-serosorting-or-prep
Thanks, but your second source specifically excludes PrEP as a cause of decreased condom use. I’m also pretty skeptical of a methodology involving recruiting men at “bars and clubs, social organisations, gay businesses, bathhouses, parks, etc.”. I’m pretty sure that the samples of men you might find at a bathhouse in 2005 and 2014 differ considerably.
The second link is before PrEP use skyrocketed. The data ends in 2014, but PrEP use among high-risk men who are having sex with men seems to have increased from 6% to 35% between 2014 and 2017. So there seems to have been a huge (sub)cultural change.
If your claim is that changes in PrEP after 2014 have caused changes in condom use then a datasauce that ends in 2014 can hardly provide support for it.
I made two claims. Better treatment for AIDS happened long before PrEP.
I know that my sources aren’t the best. Frankly, I don’t care enough about this issue to look for the best sources.
I also am not that confident in my claims, since the cause of the kind of subculture change that I’m gesturing at can’t truly be proven. However, I do think that there is a decent amount of evidence suggesting that gay people have become increasingly lax about STDs, during the same period where AIDS has become less dangerous for them, which is what you’d expect, I’d say.
Married people generally have more sex and much, much safer sex. We would expect its decline to give us both less sex (because people now have to go out of their way to get it) and more STDs (because people are having more partners).
Put more simply, sex once a month with a different person each time is much riskier than sex twice a week with the same person.
This. This this this!
Being a horny unmarried young person is not the more rewarding lifestyle. Like, when I hear the lyrics to a certain Daft Punk song:
She’s up all night ’til the sun
I’m up all night to get some
She’s up all night for good fun
I’m up all night to get lucky
… it just sounds miserable for the male singer. He has to orbit women all night, ’til sunrise, for a (slim?) chance to perform the reproductive act. So he has to sleep off 8 hours of daylight each weekend day or be running on constant sleep deprivation for the sake of his libido.
The thing is that while a woman can pop out a baby once 1.5 – 2 years at max, a man can “fire-and-forget” multiple times per day in principle. A man can parallelize baby-making by mating with multiple women, while baby-making is inherently serial for a woman. This explains the Coolidge effect and the prevalence of polygyny compared to polyandry.
In principle, yes. But for every Chad who can reliably have sex with multiple women by staying up all night, there are enough men who get no sex from partying to reduce the total amount of sex had by unmarried people, according to surveys.
(The epistemic value of this form of “data” collecting is a different issue.)
Yes but, at the individual level, what other options do they have? If they choose to stay at home on weekends it’s not like a wife will magically materialize in their beds. The single men who don’t play the game are those who have given up, they are exactly the herbivore/hikikomori/incel types discussed above.
The stats I’m familiar with (UK) have vastly differing changes for different STDs. Gonorrhoea is hugely more common now than it was 10 years ago, but e.g. genital warts are moderately less common. I don’t think you can draw general conclusions about promiscuity from them.
I think at least some versions of the HPV vaccine also prevent some strains of the virus that cause genital warts, so HPV takeup might be driving lower rates of genital warts.
On point 9–isn’t “teens having sex” generally treated as a bad thing, which we ought to be happy to see a reduction in?
This was raised above. But I’d say “Yes, but maybe not.”
That is, something can be a symptom of a problem even if it is a good thing itself. If there’s less premarital sex because everyone has more will power and rationality, that’s great. If there’s less because there’s widespread teen depression, that’s not.
Well as people keep saying, it depends. If everyone was losing their virginity in the 13-17 age range, but to someone they were “going steady” with and there was a mechanism to make the boys take responsibility in every case where the girls got pregnant, that would be much better on net than a single-digit percentage of teens having sex because >90% are depressed.
Surely (regardless of your general attitude to sex before marriage etc) the valence of teen sex depends strongly on the age of the teenagers.
I think “teen” sex is generally taken to mean “high school sex” and not “college freshmen and sophomore sex”, especially in this context.
Yes but I think even as small as 14 vs 16 is a pretty significant difference.
>On point 9–isn’t “teens having sex” generally treated as a bad thing
That certainly isn’t my view.
I view teen pregnancy, or any unplanned pregnancy, as a bad thing.
I view any STDs/STIs as a bad thing.
I view prudent teen sex as a very good thing.
We are mortal. We only get to enjoy our bodies for a limited time.
And the ills of aging creep up _fast_ – I’d advise any teenager:
Be careful, use condoms, but enjoy your body while it still works.
Potential sex while one’s body is still young and healthy, once missed,
is an opportunity you _never_ get back.
Not just this, but sex is a requirement for good mental health.
And for guys, sex requires a level of maturity and independence to attain. Lack of sex could well be a symptom of lack of maturity and independence, which could well be from parenting styles that seem to intentionally stunt both maturity and independence.
Since when is sex a requirement for good mental health ? Do you really think that every catholic priest who respect his vows is insane ? Or that a majority is lacking maturity and independance ?
@LesHapablap
Good points, Many Thanks!
Insane, no, but I think it’s… weird at best? Then again, I’m pretty tolerant of weird.
I would add the qualifiers that for most people, most of the time, a healthy sex life is indicative of good mental health. There are exceptions both across and within people.
(Of course the adjective “healthy” is doing a lot of work in that sentence – clearly there are ways to be very unhealthily promiscuous as well as celibate.)
I’m skeptical that this is any different from any other superstimulus.
Look at this blog: Compared to our environment of evolutionary adaptation, there is far more
content, far more potential conversational partners, far more variety than we evolved with.
So? Yeah, I just spent more hours reading it than I probably should have. This is not catastrophic,
and neither is porn, and neither are half a dozen other available superstimuli, from sugar to jet planes.
This sounds like yet another moral panic.
I want to go against AG crusade against base 10 in the previous thread by going about an impossible fight against TIME ITSELF.
Or at least the measurement system of hours, minutes, and seconds.
Base 60 and 24 are wonderfully divisible numbers, but it probably makes the least sense in terms of time.
Since when did you need to take a 1/5 of a minute/hour? or even 1/3?
Xth of a day at least gets some use, though not sure if it matters to have it be divisible by the hours in a day.
However, it’s likely that most people have had to convert A:BC into minutes or factional hours or minutes to seconds/fractional minutes.
The fact that the typical standard is milliseconds rather than thirds or fourth, or even just saying quarter til than 15 minutes, shows that there’s no determination to keep the current standards.
Even the point that there’s many “tricks” to try and count seconds shows that humans don’t have a good intuitive value of how long a second lasts.
The fault is of course with the French. There was some discussion about also changing the time standards along with mass and length, but they cowarded out in this most crucial aspect.
As for what replaces it? Days and years are kind of fixed in their definitions. But dividing the day – 10 hours/100 minutes, 20 hours/20’/20”, it’s all better than what it currently is.
Before I was converted to an SI supporter by a college Thermodynamics course, I would make this same argument: Claims that base 10 is superior fail if you’re not willing to apply them to all units, and there’s nothing particularly special about hours, minutes, and seconds. Or degrees of arc.
If there is an anthem for the System Internationale,
I don’t know its lyrics, but I’d expect 10 verses, each of 10 lines, each of 10 syllables
If you’re going metric time, really go for it: deci/centi/millidays
FWIW, 1 md = 1.44 minutes, 1 cd ~= 15 minutes
Since when did you need to take a 1/5 of a minute/hour? or even 1/3?
A third of an hour is twenty minutes, a fifth is twelve minutes. Those are not unreasonable amounts of time to have to calculate.
Didn’t the French Revolution try to decimalise time units like that? It seems not to have caught on.
The ‘decimal’ time is used when calculating hours worked for payroll, and speaking as someone who has to do the payroll every week, it is a pain in the neck having to work out “Jane worked from 8:40 a.m. in the morning until 12:35 p.m. then took 20 minutes of a lunch break and worked in the afternoon but went home 15 minutes early because she was sick; now turn all this into decimal hours for the payroll software plus keep track of how many minutes spare Jane gets for annual leave/TOIL/whatever as she will bitch and moan when she gets her payslip if you accidentally dock her three minutes by mistake”.
Decimal time might seem tidier, but believe you me, adopt it and you’ll soon have people complaining they worked an extra 0.2 hours on Tuesday but you never added that in on this week’s timesheet and that means they’re short 0.86 hours for their annual leave entitlement. And oh yes, they will count 0.86 hours worked instead of either 0.85 or 0.9 to make sure they get what they’re entitled to.
This is a bad argument, Deiseach: if time really were all decimal, you’d never have to convert back and forth between the two. You could just do addition as normal. So an extra 0.2 hours doesn’t mean adding 12 minutes, it means adding… 0.2 hours. Or 20 minutes. And being short 0.86 hours means being short… 0.86 hours. Or 86 minutes.
What this is really an argument for is making everything else base 60, so you never have to work with base 10 in the computer, either. 🙂
Nick, I want a nice neat tidy “you worked 37.5 hours this week every week”, not “I’ll just add up your 0.2 +0.46+ 0.5 +1.33 hours, shall I?” 😀
Look, if the system would just let you enter 37:30 or 0:05 instead of 37.5 and 0.08 you wouldn’t have anything to complain about. I’m saying your troubles above are all down to the conversion step, not the base.
Incidentally, our system actually automatically rounds clock-ins to the nearest 15 minutes, so our payroll people never have these issues. 🙂
My last job also rounded to 15 minutes. I’m also surprised someone would design a payroll system that didn’t allow entering in hours and minutes.
I’m also surprised someone would design a payroll system that didn’t allow entering in hours and minutes.
There is a clock-in machine which does the automatic time, but the thing is that people work random hours around their standard hours e.g. someone might come in ten minutes early every morning so they can leave half an hour early on Friday, that kind of thing. (Anyway, clocking-in systems have their own problems: if starting time is 8:45 you will have people who turn up at 8:35 and people who don’t turn up until 8:44, and the 8:44 ones are the ones who count every minute and complain if they think they’re being ‘cheated’.
Other places I worked had problems where the standard hours were programmed in, so you couldn’t clock in/out before or after the time e.g. if you were supposed to take your lunch at 12:50, you could only clock out then. Of course, people being people, they’d go “I’m going to clock out at 1:00 p.m. and only take 20 minutes lunch break, so I can clock out early this evening since I have to take Timmy to ballet practice”, and since the system wouldn’t let them do that, they’d leave without clocking out and then ‘officially’ clock in/out at the ‘right’ times, except of course people would forget to do that which then screwed up their hours for payroll and complaints ensued).
The clocking-in does not link up to the payroll software (because we’re in two different centres) so the problem is not so much “Andrea worked 37.5 hours this week and 40 last week”, it’s the notes at the end of the timesheets e.g. “Lilian is down for 22.5 hours but please bank 3 of those for holiday leave and she is owed 20 minutes from last Thursday that she worked extra, can you add that in to this week’s wages?”, so I end up having to hand-check the sheets anyway which means I end up with “22.5-3 =19.5 and what the heck is 20 minutes in decimal, okay that’s 0.33 which is 19.5 +0.33 = 19.83” and that gets entered into the payroll software as “standard hours for Lilian this week = 19.83”. Yeah, a decimal “that’s 0.5 instead of 0.33” might work better, but I tend to assume the worst of humans and somebody would find a way to split the neat decimal system into fractions when they juggle their hours 🙂
Thanks be to God I’m not working somewhere with hundreds of employees!
My company’s timecard system allows us to round to the nearest quarter hour.
I subcontract to another contractor who allows us to round to the nearest tenth.
The two timecards I fill out must match exactly.
So I can be no more precise than 1/2 hour.
Why stop with numbers? Bring in the decabet!
Hahaha!
(it appears that’s been copyright-claimed. No matter.)
Since when did you need to take a 1/5 of a minute/hour? or even 1/3?
I think this is actually an argument that the current system is working well–I never need to say “a third of an hour” when I can just say “20 minutes”. (And that’s an increment of time I use pretty frequently.)
The point of that statement was that easily divisible bases allow, well easy division.
Which is used and useful for things like cooking or measuring length, but I don’t really see being done all that often for time.
You don’t often need to think “what will be the exact third of this timed issue”, especially with things that are imprecise enough that can be easily estimated in hours.
If you can contextualize 1/3 or 1/5 of a unit directly (such as thinking 20 minutes or 35 milidays), it shouldn’t matter if you were on a metric or “imperial” system.
However, you do need to often move time up or down units such as taking a measurement in minutes and needing to convert that into hours or down to seconds.
Which is easier in metric/standard bases than “imperial” ones generally.
Anybody here “know computers”? I’m having an annoying issue and it seems like people here often can help with these things.
When I start typing — doesn’t matter where: in a browser, in a word processor local to my machine, in my OS’s universal search, in a browser in a VM — my last few keystrokes are often spontaneously copied and pasted back into the field. The issue almost always seems to happen when I start typing after having not typed anything for at least a few seconds.
For instance, if I’m typing “This sentence”, when I get halfway through the second word I will sometimes all of a sudden be looking at “This sentis sent” with my cursor at the end. It happens sometimes for backspace too, where I’ll intend to erase only one character and it erases two instead. Or during selection, where I hold shift and alt and press the left arrow and it selects two words instead of one.
This has been going on for maybe two to four weeks. Possibly coinciding with my upgrade to Catalina, but possibly not.
FWIW I’m on a mid-2014 Macbook Pro, running MacOS 10.15.2. And ever since the laptop’s keyboard and trackpad died about two years ago, I’ve been using the same Logitech k750 wireless solar-powered keyboard, and haven’t had any problems until now.
Anyone know what’s causing this or how to fix it? Anyone having the same issue?
Just curious, but have you tried a different keyboard just to see if the wireless keyboard is the problem? That isn’t necessarily what I think is most likely, but it is probably the easiest to test (just plug in or wirelessly connect a different keyboard) and (if it is the problem) fix (get a new keyboard).
Or just stop using a Mac 😉
I don’t have another keyboard. Hm…but that’s a good idea, I should see if I can borrow one somewhere to test it out.
Here we go to the side show…I was always a PC guy until I started working for a company that was exclusively a Mac shop. At that point I became (and, importantly, considered myself) amphibious between the two. Now I’m a guy who owns a Mac at home and uses PCs at work, so I’m amphibious the other way! That said, I’m not a Mac koolaid drinker; I don’t own any other Apple products and am not enamored of everything they do, but I do like this computer. And especially considering its age, it’s still as responsive and reliable as if it was brand new, which I can’t say about any PC I’ve ever owned. Little issues like this typing thing are the most severe problems I’ve had with it, which I’m pretty happy about. Meanwhile my wife has gone through a succession of PC laptops and Chromebooks and hated them all (except an old IBM Thinkpad that she loved, but it crapped out on her when it was only half as old as my Macbook is now).
Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.
I’ve owned 2 Macbook Pros and a (bought refurbished but ran great) Mac Pro desktop. I’ve since reverted back to Windows computers (primarily for price reasons), but Macs are fine.
Well, technically I didn’t revert back to Windows because probably about 70% of my time using my Macs I was running Windows on them 😉 The hardware is nice though!
Good to hear! The kool-aid drinkers are why I feel the need to instigate with that kind of comment. I used to have an iPhone, and it was fine, I like my Androids better now though. They do make good computers, the fanboys are pretty tiresome but I guess that is true of fans for most brands/products.
If you don’t mind throwing away a little bit of money you should be able to get a wired keyboard from Wal-Mart or Best Buy for like $10 (maybe $15) if you can’t find one to borrow.
Aghh, I’m solidly in the Apple ecosystem and the only thing I hate more than Apple products is the concept of trying to switch away from them. I’d lose my texts popping up on my laptop, I’d lose the three-finger trackpad gestures I know and love, and I’d lose my Bash terminal!
But Apple’s just…actively trying to push me away. With the removing of 32-bit app support (?!) in Catalina, I won’t be able to play about half of my games (including Cave Story, Half Life, and Dungeon of the Endless, among others) whenever I bite the bullet and update. My 2013 MacBook Pro is falling apart (had to get the trackpad replaced, then had to get the I/O board replaced, now the screen hinge feels faulty), but when I look at the new models….keyboard that barely moves, function keys replaced by a useless touchscreen, no USB A ports, no HDMI, no magsafe charger, no SD card slot, just 4 USB C and a headphone jack (thought that was something we’d moved past? Guess laptops still need one but phones don’t).
My solution: Wait until this laptop breaks again to buy a new MacBook, and at some point when I have disposable income, get myself a proper gaming laptop or PC.
> lose my Bash terminal!
Zsh is better anyway. Come to the dark side.
I want to second this recommendation for discovering the source of the problem, with the caveat that I don’t think it’s the keyboard’s fault — I blame the OS and the way it responds to these wireless inputs.
Or, if you want to get really paranoid, it’s because there’s a 2.4 GHz relay with a delay. To what nefarious purpose someone would have placed this device in your home is for you to discover.
I had sort of similar issues on my MacBook Pro for a while before I discovered a bluetooth mouse in my backpack that was occasionally getting the button pressed by leaning against other items. Whenever that happened, it would cause a mouseclick wherever the mouse cursor was which wasn’t always where the typing cursor is, causing my typing to jump back seemingly randomly and start typing inserting at that point.
Perhaps the keyboard and/or trackpad isn’t as dead as you think? Try disabling it.
I use my work laptop with a docking station, and I was getting similar mysterious typing inputs. I was able to track it down to having put the edge of a stack of papers pressing down on the laptop lid, causing some sort of input to the keyboard/trackpad even while it was “docked.”
OSX has some weird keyboard defaults. Like a double-space being a period.
System Preferences > Keyboard > Text to turn that one off, and while there check some other crazy options.
Other people have made suggestions along this line, but my best guess is that you’ve got another mouse sending input.
Where I’ve seen that exact behavior was on a Windows laptop with a touchpad built in below the keyboard. Sometimes, while typing, I would accidently brush the touchpad, which would click the mouse and move my cursor, changing where the typing happened.
You said you’re using an external keyboard and mouse. If they’re wireless, try testing with wired keyboard and mouse; maybe you’re getting crossover from another wireless device nearby. See if you can disable the built-in keyboard and mouse input, maybe.
The mouse explanation doesn’t explain the additional typed characters though. He’s getting extra keystrokes recorded, not just cursor jumping.
To be clear, the extra keystrokes are always the same few keystrokes I just made, effectively copied and pasted back into the field at my cursor position.
Sounds like this issue –
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/371897/duplicate-keyboard-input-after-upgrading-to-macos-catalina
Until very recently I thought that Trump had better odds but right now I give the odds at a 60% chance that Trump is re-elected, 30% chance that Biden is elected, 10% Sanders, 10% someone else, for the following reasons:
Trump’s signature issue was reducing immigrantion (especially “undocumented”), more than any other plausible candidate, and I doubt that demographics have changed that much in the last four years or that many have changed their minds so unless enough of more Americans are in body bags/lose wages in the next nine months I think odds are that Trump will be re-elected (unlesss Biden does one more push up) than Trump!
Judging by the last 50 years as precedent the nominee will be one of the top three winners in Iowa and one of the top two in New Hampshire.
I expect the eventual nominee will be clear before I get to vote in the California March primary, but maybe we’ll get a repeat of 1980 and 2016 with a “left” candidate and a “mainstream” candidate in contention till near the convention, but more than two?
Past March I’d be very surprised.
My guess is that it’ll be Biden and Sanders, till Biden gets the nomination.
If Biden and Sanders aren’t the top two of the New Hampshire primary, oh jeez I have no clue who will be the nominee.
If Buttigieg or Bloomberg is the nominee Trump is re-elected (apologies to my wife who likes Bloomberg), as no Democrat will win without enough black support, and those two won’t get it.
If Warren is the nominee I think she has a better chance than Bloomberg or Buttigieg, but she would probably lose as well.
Sanders has better odds of winning Michigan’s 16 electoral college votes, and his becoming President isn’t impossible (and if its Sanders vs.Trump the mainstream media will lose their minds, I imagine a strong third-party push).
Biden has better odds of winning most “battleground” states, especially Pennsylvania and it’s 20 electoral college votes, and I think he’s the most plausible to beat Trump.
Judging by his poll numbers and how many contribute to his campaign Biden’s support is broad but not deep (in contrast to Sanders who has less broad support but has more supporters who are devoted).
So far Biden has survived with his base of support intact despite:
his son’s work with some Ukrainians (I don’t actually pay too much attention to the minutiae of that, but I understand that justly or not there’s hints of improper behavior);
flip-floping on the public funding of abortions;
being a little “handsy” with women;
being against mandatory bussing;
many verbal gaffes;
being the Senator from Delaware and shilling for their credit card companies (and I’m guessing DuPont as well);
just in general seeming out of touch with modernity.
Hasn’t hurt his base of support which is older black and the remaining white Democrats without college diplomas (a category I fall into).
Speaking for myself, give me three cups of coffee in an hour and I’m almost full on in support of the Sanders, and most of the Warren agenda (still a little hesitant on effectively open borders), but..
…despite his flaws I find Joe Biden very likable, and yes I could see myself having a beer with him (it be coffee with Sanders, and tea with Warren, Trump even on The Apprentice reminded me of bosses I didn’t like so I find him loathsome, but I can see why his promises were appealing), and Biden just seems comfortable to me.
In contrast my college educated wife likes Bloomberg the best, but most voters are still older and without college diplomas (you youngsters now have enough numbers that you could out-vote us, but so far you haven’t bothered as most don’t vote much until they’re over 40), and while Obama was uniquely elected with mostly college educated support he had significant blacks without college diplomas support as well and I see no sign that any other candidate will repeat his primary win coalition.
Please feel free to contradict me and tell me the errors in my thinking, and maybe give your guesses for odds.
Joe Biden is responsible for the widespread use of civil asset forfeiture to promote the war on drugs. He is the only candidate who will rouse me to vote. (For Trump, who I would not otherwise support.) I am amazed at how few people discuss or even know about Joe Biden’s involvement in the drug war.
It seems to me that Biden’s greatest strength is that he has no real principles and is willing to take whatever position will most favor his reelection.
Also, his greatest weakness is that he has no real principles and is willing to take whatever position will most favor his reelection.
That seems like a point about most “mainstream” or “centrist” candidates (both sides) generally. I’m pretty sure the same was said about Hillary.
Yes, agreed. It would apply to Hillary, Romney, etc…
That’s what a lot of people say about Trump. It’s just that in Trump’s case, his positions (or you might say “the principles he appeared to adopt on the surface”) at least aligned with those from whom he was trying to get votes.
I don’t imagine Biden’s base is strongly supportive of the war on drugs or civil asset forfeiture.
Who do you consider is Biden’s base? I would expect it to be lifelong moderate Democrats. Maybe they’re not that supportive of the war on drugs or civil asset forfeiture now, but they were when Biden voted for those things, and probably wont hold it against him. Also, if they’re politically savvy enough to remember all of Biden’s previous policy positions, they’re probably politically savvy enough to understand that their party is at great risk of a takeover by the AOC wing of the party, and that supporting Biden is probably their best bet against that for now at least.
Also, I disagree about Trump. Trump may not be a man of great principles, but he has core beliefs which he will not deviate from. For example, his main core belief is that he is a great winner, and his opponents are sad pathetic losers. More seriously, I think Trump identifies with the red tribe instinctively, and I dont think he could even pull off a fake blue tribe routine. But Biden could pull off a fake red tribe personae.
@Well… >“…I don’t imagine Biden’s base is strongly supportive of the war on drugs or civil asset forfeiture”
(I’m projecting here) Biden’s base is older and remembers the crime rates of the ’70’s, ’80’s, and early ’90’s.
Not happy when their loved ones are jailed, but likes less gunfire and murders.
I think we should stop focusing on the “base”. Biden’s base is (mostly) safe, as is Trump’s (I think Bernie has the best ability to peel off actual base members from Trump of any Dem candidate, though that doesn’t mean he has the best chance to actually win the general necessarily).
Biden’s base won’t much care about the war on drugs, true. But the people who aren’t in his base, but who he needs votes from in order to win, likely will care.
@jermo sapiens:
I’m not privy to all that intra-party stuff (worrying about the AOC wing, etc.). Is that a real thing?
Also, Trump was a Democrat until 1987 and from 2001-2009, and was “Reform” from 1999-2001.
@Plumber:
Crime rates are to a large degree the result of the war on drugs. Is that not common knowledge among most Democrats?
@both of you, above: acymetric’s comment is salient.
Eh, when you hear people say that democrats are “worrying about the AOC” wing, think how you’d feel about people saying that “republicans are worrying about the tea party wing” of “the freedom party wing” or whatever.
The vast majority of us don’t really care one way or the other.
Fair enough. I guess most of the people who would care that their party is being taken over by the far left are already gone anyways.
@jermo sapiens > “… if they’re politically savvy enough to remember all of Biden’s previous policy positions, they’re probably politically savvy enough to understand that their party is at great risk of a takeover by the AOC wing of the party, and that supporting Biden is probably their best bet against that for now at least”
FWLIW this 51 year-old Democrat is sympathetic to some but not all of the “A.O.C. wings” agenda, and my chief impression is that if that wing fully takes over the Democratic Party than Democrats control a few city councils, a dozen congressional districts, some faculty lounges, and little else.
If CAF is your one issue, I’m surprised you would consider voting for Trump.
https://reason.com/2017/02/09/trump-does-not-know-what-civil-forfeitur/
But you haven’t factored my spite into it!
Seriously, CAF is not “my one issue” in general, but it is when it comes to Biden. Biden does know what it is, and likes it.
My opinion is that Trump has about a 30-35% chance of re-election. This is regardless of the Democratic candidate. I base this on Trump scraping out wins in the necessary Electoral College states by a few tens of thousands of votes, having received just slightly more than 46% of the vote (to Hillary’s just-over 48%). Approximately 5.5% of the vote went to various third parties, including 1+% to Jill Stein, 3+% to Gary Johnson.
My operating assumption is that third-party voting will be substantially lower this election than last. Last election was ripe for more throw-away votes because (1) Hillary and Trump were two of the most personally disliked candidates in recent times, and (2) Trump was politically a relatively unknown quantity. This election, I expect total third-party voting to be 3% or less. That means that instead of 46%, to maintain the same “share” of the non-third-party vote as Trump had last time, in a 97% two-party race he will need to get at least 47.5% of the vote. (The Democrat, to maintain the same non-third-party share as Hillary, would need to be around 49.6%). To hold the electoral votes he got last time, Trump will probably need more like 48% or a shade more to counterbalance known support losses in certain suburban demographics as demonstrated by midterms and polls.
Trump has cleared 47-48% very rarely in approval polling or election polling. Almost never in any poll other than Rasumssen. Based on polling alone, I would estimate his chances lower, more like 10-20%. But I also think that a combo of “shy Trump voter” and “all adults” polling effects probably understates Trump’s support by ca. 1-2%. As a rough compromise, I put his chances of reaching his needed threshold around 30%.
@hls2003,
As a Democrat I like your optimism, but I don’t share it as I don’t yet see enough different for Trump not to repeat his electoral college win.
I’m betting that MI, PA, and WI flip. 46 electoral votes, Trump ends with 260.
If Pennsylvania doesn’t flip, then Trump wins. I don’t see a likely scenario where PA flips but MI and PA don’t. And I don’t see a likely scenario where FL flips but PA doesn’t.
No signs that the whole Rust Belt flips for anyone.
https://firehousestrategies.com/analysis/december_2019_battleground_survey/
Yes, Firehouse is a Republican outfit, but these are big leads, especially Wisconsin, and they had the Democrats beating him back in September.
I seem to recall that being posted before, and I have the same reaction viewing it now – in very few instances, even in this (presumably somewhat friendly) polling, does Trump get all the way up to 48%, against almost any candidates. There is one 51% against Sanders in Wisconsin. That’s it. At this early stage, I consider that mostly negative for Trump, since he’s a known quantity. Also, that poll is a full month old and recent polls have slipped a couple points for him. I think this Iran stuff is poison for him politically – his supporters don’t like the sudden military adventurism, and the neutrals (such as they are) are most easily persuadable if Trump is seen to be basically a vulgar but non-threatening economic catalyst. If he starts suddenly getting into hot military scuffles, even if merited and even if he “wins” the engagement, I think it feeds into the image of unstable war risk that may convince the unaligned to pull the lever against him.
@hls2003
Biden and Sanders are known quantities as well (former Vice President and #2 finisher in the last Democrat Primary), and Obama rarely broke 50% in state polls either at around this time and won comfortably.
I don’t see this as a problem for him. 5-10 point leads over well-known Democrats is a big deal and the Democrats are not running a very pro-Rust Belt campaign outside of maybe Sanders (who would get killed in Virginia, which he also needs).
Consider betting against him then, he’s currently at 50% in most places I’ve looked.
Yes, I do have some money bet against him.
Excellent!
Your odds add up to 110%
@sandoratthezoo,
Oops (what I get for adding “somone else” as an afterthought)!
Thanks!
As a quick fix I reduced Truman’s, and “someone else”‘s chances 5 percentage points, I’ll still be surprised if Biden isn’t the nominee, if not Biden, Sanders, and I’ll be possibly pleasantly surprised if Trump isn’t re-elected (possibly ’cause I suspect that things have to get pretty bad for the whole U.S.A. before he loses enough of his support).
Probably treat that as “specifying 8 or 9% would be too precise and require more math than I feel like doing, and picking one category to subtract the 10% from would be inaccurate in conveying relative weights”.
This reminds me of a funny dialog from a French play, Marius, that I will now translate and try to keep the humor intact. Keep in mind that “a third”, as in 1/3, in French is “tier”, which doesnt imply as strongly the connection to the number 3, as “third” does in English.
Cesar is a bartender in Marseilles and is teaching Marius how to make a cocktail.
Cesar: Let me explain to you how to make a picon-citron-caracuo. First, one third curacao. Careful, a small third. Next, a third of lemon. A little bit larger. Then a GOOD third of Picon. And finally, a LARGE third of water.
Marius: That’s 4 thirds.
Cesar: Exactly, you understand now.
Marius: There are only 3 thirds in a glass.
Cesar: You imbecile, that depends on the size of the thirds.
Marius: No, it does not, even a watering can has 3 thirds.
Cesar: Then please tell me how I just put 4 thirds into that glass.
that is funny.
I think you’re making this call too early. Currently Trump is the only person running for president, which explains why it seems like he’s doing the best job at running for president. There are a bunch of democrats currently running to be the nominee for president, but the way you run for the democratic nomination != the way you run for president.
Joe Biden originally tried to run his campaign like he was running for president, (IE, stay out of the fray, stay away from any kind of concrete policy, remain maximally likable to moderates at the expense of the base) and that strategy proved unsustainable in a primary. I think that once democrats pick a candidate and start to rally behind them, you’ll see a much more competitive competition than the one we have now.
I mean, your guess here is tracking national polling. Biden is and has been #1 with a bullet since the race began, and while the #2 slot has varied back and forth, Sander’s support has been incredibly consistent.
Yeah, his charisma is downright unsettling. I’ve been on the receiving end of it once and it was something to behold.
hmm. Mind if I ask why? I don’t think I’ve met a bloomberg stan in the wild yet.
In the cause of marital peace and my not sleeping on the couch for a decade I just hear but don’t question my wife’s views too much so I can only guess, in more than one way we have a mixed marriage, she’s both more “Blue-Tribe” and more business-friendly/libertarian-ish than me (except on drugs, as we both dislike the stench of marijuana).
She liked Romney, and she liked Hillary, she respects Warren, but thinks she’s “too left”, she thinks Buttigieg is “too young”, and she hates Trump as “Putin’s puppet.
My guess is that she would reluctantly vote for Warren, and wouldn’t vote for Sanders or I Trump, while I could see myself voting for Sanders (I think the likely result of a Sanders presidency would be a majority Republican Congress, and since I personally have prospered most when a Democrat was in the White House but Republicans controlled congress I’d probably do okay), but think nominating him is too risky.
Taking the outside view, who was the last incumbent president defeated in the general without having first been seriously challenged for his party’s nomination?
Ureoreg Ubbire
why not ohfu gur ryqre?
I’ll cop to “seriously” being a bit of a weasel word, but I think that in that case Cng Ohpunana qualifies.
If Ohpunana counts as serious, then I think that “seriously challenged for his party’s nomination” probably means “a primary/nomination opponent got enough traction to indicate a nontrivial amount of dissatisfaction with the incumbent within his own party”.
Alternately, we could interpret it as a model where there are four-ish brackets of primary challenge seriousness:
1. Vanity candidates, e.g. Vermin Supreme.
2. Minor protest candidates, who are actual politicians or advocates with some backing, but no hope of winning, and whose campaigns constitute a largely-failed attract enough support (and win enough convention delegates) to send some kind of policy or factional signal to the rest of the party. E.g. John Ashbrook and Pete McClosky running against Nixon for renomination in 1972. Bill Weld’s ongoing primary challenge to Trump this year looks almost certain to wind up in this category.
3. Major protest candidates. Like #2, except their attempts are more successful. E.g. Pat Buchanan in 1992.
4. Candidates who stood a real chance of defeating the incumbent in the primary. E.g. Ronald Reagan in 1976 or Ted Kennedy in 1980.
There are several examples in-between 2 and 3 that I’m not sure which side of the line to put them on: John Bricker’s challenge to Eisenhower in 1956, George Wallace’s challenge to LBJ in 1964, and various Dixiecrat challenges against FDR and Truman in 1932-1948.
N.B., I’m conditioning on the incumbent having lost the general, not on there having been a serious challenger for the nomination; the fact that the incumbents typically win even when they have to fight for the nomination makes the expectation of an incumbent victory stronger when they don’t.
The rot13 here is kind of annoying. Are you guys worried about spoiling history for us?
Yes. I’m only just barely caught up to 2020; I don’t want anyone to ruin how it ends!
I thought history ended like 30 years ago? What have you been listening to since then, celebrity gossip? 😀
I actually gave the answer in the last thread too, which makes it doubly funny.
In a way, yes; the rhetorical effect of a question is greater when the audience has an opportunity to consider it before being given the answer.
But I can see how it’d be annoying; since I’m out of the edit window, here’s a decoder
I see that your handle is not English and figure “Ureoreg Ubbire” was also just the name of some Foreign president I had never heard of (from Africa?) and that I wouldn’t get what you meant unless I knew who he was so I googled it and got nothing, and then guessed that it must be rot13’ed and decoded it myself.
I mean, not a real big deal, but… ugh.
… and “Cng Ohpunana” looks like the sort of baby names you get by letting Hindus immigrate to Wales.
A problem I see (though it may not be a problem) is the age of the top three candidates: Biden will be 78 years old this year, Sanders will be 79 and Warren will be a sprightly 71.
This was a Big Deal when Trump was running, as the idea that “oh he’s old, his health is bad, he’ll probaby drop dead while in office or be badly incapacitated, and he’s definitely senile – do you want a sick, crazy old man in charge of the big red button?” was pushed around amongst other reasons not to vote for him.
Trump was 70 in 2016, which makes him a reasonable bit younger than Biden and Sanders. If Warren was electable, she’s okay on the age matter, but I honestly don’t think she is electable.
So – if one of the Old White Guys gets the Democratic nomination, will we hear nothing at all about the perils of senescence from the same people who were so exercised over Trump’s decreptitude? For what it’s worth, I do think there’s something definitely worth considering about the age of the candidate when assuming office; our fella was 70 when he got the gig and is 78 now, but President of Ireland is not as onerous a job as President of the United States and has much less power (even when it comes solely to being president of Ireland). Mostly it seems to consist, at the moment, of having your photo took with lads that are taller than you, or with your dogs.
I’m definitely not saying “you’re 78 and you’re finished” but at the same time, there is the inevitable slowing down physically and mentally as someone heads into their 80s, and a job like President seems to be stressful and demanding in a way that “semi-retired and keeping up various interests” is not for an ordinary citizen of that age.
Oh, we’ll hear about it. Remember all the rumors about how Hillary was frail, in poor health, allegedly falling down during some event or other? And she’s pretty much the same age as Trump — if the Dems run somebody significantly older, expect this drum to get beaten like a discount mule.
Yeah, this was not exclusively a Democrat tactic (and Dems were less focused on age than just “health” and mental acuity in general).
Something bad happened to Mrs. Clinton on September 11, 2016. We may never know exactly how serious, but the campaign definitely lied about the severity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5wWZIFZraw
I don’t think this is accurate. He was called crazy, unqualified, and unstable during the election, but I’m pretty sure the idea he was senile didn’t arise until later–and even then it was less about his number and more about how he spoke (or, as a Trump defender would probably argue, how his speech looked when transcribed by hostile media orgs).
Really, during the election, the health arguments ran in the other direction due to HRC’s public collapse on 9/11 and a couple of other odd videos (e.g.).
Of course, Sanders’ age (and heart attack) is absolutely being used against him, as have Biden’s frequent “gaffs” which appear to many to be more age related than simply Biden being Biden.
I’ll second this take (as I noted one sub-comment up).
but I’m pretty sure the idea he was senile didn’t arise until later
I agree about that, but I am wondering (cynically) will the armchair psychologists (or even I Am A Real Psychologist, I’m Just Writing This From My Armchair) be out in the same force for “Biden has shown worrying signs with his gaffes”?
Of course, the real fun will be if all the punditry is wrong and Mayor Pete gets picked, whatever will we fight about then? 🙂
Some of them already are, both from right wing sources presumably trying to damage what they consider to be the best Dem candidate and from left wing sources who don’t want establishment, centrist Biden to be the nominee. If he ends up being the Dem candidate, expect to hear a lot of it. He will give ample opportunity to bring it up.
Did you get Weekend at Bernie’s over in Ireland? That’s what I’m expecting if Sanders wins, with two White House interns in the role of the movie’s protagonists.
Warning – anecdotal evidence
I have a friend who was a relatively senior staffer on the Sanders campaign who basically said it’s already kind of like this: he can get energized and give a great stump speech when the cameras are on, but he just shuts down when they aren’t. He claims it’s an open secret around people who’ve known him for a while that Sanders is in decline.
Isn’t there a Parks and Recreation skit about this kind of thing?
That sounds like the congressman they visit late in the series run.
Sanders’ decline seems to be mostly physical – he looks a little frail, but he sounds sharp. Biden is the opposite – he looks physically pretty good for a near-octogenarian, but the gaffes are looking more like “senior moments” than “elderly Tourette’s”.
I’m voting for Trump, but I’d much rather have Sanders than Biden be the one getting the 3am call for some military crisis.
It’s really not hard to find video of Sanders being obviously and clearly mentally competent. His age makes makes the possibility of it changing in the fairly near future a valid concern, but compare this interview from yesterday with his competition folding like wet cardboard under similar questioning.
@Deiseach,
As others have suggested the candidates will get hammered about their age (among other things), but among the Democratic candidates so far only Biden and Sanders have gotten non-college graduate support worth counting, and while a candidate may win the Democratic nomination I just don’t think there’s enough collegians voters yet, maybe in 15 years there will be (unless the young vote more, or non-collegiate older Americans start dying faster).
An even more elite Democratic Party with an even less educated Republican Party is unappetizing to me, but that’s the trend.
Who knows, giving time the Republicans could become the Democrats of 1936, and the Republicans become the Democrats of then?
My mom reacts to every single mention of Bernie Sanders with a vehement “he’s too old!” When reminded Biden is basically the same age, she then says, “well, he’s too old, too!” But it’s clear the “too old” thing sticks to Bernie more, IMO, as a visceral thing among some people, and his recent health problem will not help.
My response to this is always that age is a valid concern, for sure, but who does she plan on voting for? No answer. To me, the fixation on age, even if the candidate were 90 and showing signs of health problems, is bizarre when they see no appeal in an existing younger candidate. Better have three months of a president I trust than a young and healthy one who I don’t trust at all, though I’d hope for better options than that. But I can’t stand criticisms that are not relative when it comes to actual contests–someone may be “too” x, y, or z, but if no one with less of those things appears on the scene, that’s an almost self-defeating and gratuitous criticism. And a candidate worth voting for would have picked a good enough VP that death wouldn’t be a disaster for the country. Of course, there are plenty of people out there who are considering one of the younger candidates, but personally, age would only come into play when I had near-equal levels of confidence in the candidates. Some people may equally respect both an older and a younger candidate. And some people will find some candidates too young.
Senility is a concern, but the president is generally so dependent on a staff nowadays that it probably wouldn’t have major effects before the term expired. Generally, the campaigning process is so intense that only people who have an exceptional amount of energy and mental stability/compartmentalization get close to the job–the average person would have a mental breakdown from the schedule alone, not to mention the criticism and need to come across as pleasant and sharp all the time. They thrive on the contest and interaction. (People will fight me on the mental stability thing, but my point is not that they’re models of psychological health—it’s that they can sleep and function under circumstances that are stressful in a particular way and also demand high levels of composure, and I believe this type of balance is rarer than acknowledged). I suspect they are often unusually physically healthy and efficient. People like this often thrive well into their 90s—they’re a special breed. They literally can’t stop—they don’t have a desire to retire and take care of the lawn like most. Look at how many of our recent ex-presidents have lived into their 90s, and lived actively—Carter and Bush I were marvels! Biden and Warren definitely have a lot of this energy, but not to the same extent—I think we select for it less now, and I also think certain types of military service, now less common, fostered it. Certainly Biden has a constitutionally innate buoyancy of spirits. Mitt Romney’s father radiated that type of energy and drive until the end, but Mitt looks like he’d actually be happier playing with his grandchildren. The average person is not going to keep learning new things and being hyperactive after age 80, but the type of person who becomes president has unusually high odds of relentlessness. This seems to keep them in exceptional mental and physical shape. But of course anything can happen—Reagan illustrates that.
Trump is definitely one of the people who loves life and has endless energy, but he’s always looked pretty unhealthy for one of that type. Maybe it’s just how he looks, but I figured once he started to age, he would fail fast, physically and mentally. His appearance didn’t seem to lend itself to aging in a dignified manner. He has held up surprisingly well, IMO—I honestly thought he’d find a way out of running for another term because of fear he couldn’t project the image of vitality 24/7, and he’s so big on “optics”. I hope he and everyone else stays healthy, but this is the age where a few years make a big difference.
@Deiseach
I appreciate that your president looks like a leprechaun.
Trump seems very strong right now, impeachment didn’t appear to convince any independents or republicans that he should be removed and the Senate hasn’t had its say yet which might push them the other way. The Iran situation if it holds here looks like a win, and the economy is chugging along. Trump has also said outrageous things for years now and it is unlikely that he will gaff hard enough to sink his own candidacy, and his fundraising is going well.
Meanwhile the Democrats look like a weak field. Both Sanders and Biden are ridiculously old to be running a presidential campaign and they have to go through a long slog to get the nomination and then go on a national tour against a belligerent opponent. Warren is the best on paper candidate but with very difficult policy proposals and has failed to really gain traction.
If the economy holds together for the next two quarters its Trump’s to lose.
Ooh, remind me: what with all this Iran news going on, I forgot about the impeachment that is? isn’t? they’re deciding if they will or they won’t? So is it still ongoing or what is the story?
I did see some tinfoil hat mutterings about “This is why Trump started the whole mess with Iran, to bury the impeachment” but I don’t think so. That’s like saying “Oh, Leo Varadkar and Fine Gael started the whole commemoration controversy to deflect attention from the hospital waiting lists, homelessness crisis, and forthcoming election” – no, they weren’t that calculating, they were just stupid (“Let’s commemorate the guys who shot up Croke Park on Bloody Sunday! Nothing controversial there!”) The main impetus for it seems to have come from Charlie Flanagan, who is a feckin’ eejit anyways.
Pelosi is declining to hand over the case to the Senate until she receives assurances of a fair trial, citing statements by Senate Republicans that it was a fait accompli (which everyone always knew, but which is arguably pretty bad form to outright say).
Pelosi’s motivation, of course, is not based on the idea that there are any circumstances under which there is any possibility of the Senate convicting, but rather to draw out the process for purposes of the 2020 political campaign.
I do understand the “fair trial” gambit (by both sides) but it annoys the hell out of me because it is practically saying “we’ll only consider it a fair trial if you decide to hang him in the end”.
That’s not a fair trial if you have a predecided outcome you want and will accept only that. I still have sufficient remainders of few tattered ideals that I do think a trial should be judged fair not on “we’ve already decided the verdict we want” but on the procedures and rights of the accused.
Of course the Democrats want Trump impeached. Of course the Republicans don’t want to give them that. But we all know that the “we want a fair trial” business would be flipped if the party of the President were switched. To quote King Lear:
And further in the same speech:
I agree that it’s all a farce and, like I said, it’s all being done for politics, but in the Democrats’ defense the Republican Senators did give them this argument on a silver platter.
I don’t think that’s what it is though (as @herbert herberson mentions, everybody knows the Senate almost certainly won’t convict). “Fair trial” here means “actually bother to conduct a trial”. Meaning hear from witnesses, review evidence, etc. I think this is a reasonable expectation.
IMHO, I don’t see how witnesses would be required in this case to conduct a fair trial.
1) The existing witnesses were questioned live and on television by House representatives with interests variously in finding evidence against and in support of Trump.
2) I don’t see the point in calling additional witnesses who the House didn’t call, in the hopes that they might know something else. That’s not a trial, it’s an investigation.
If the point of the trial is to let the Senators make up their mind whether they think Trump’s conduct is impeachable, they know everything the House knew.
If the point is to either (1) investigate in the hopes of learning something the House didn’t bother to develop or (2) put on a show to embarrass Trump, neither of those are necessarily required to conduct a “trial” as I understand it.
The House had absolute control over the impeachment process. I don’t think that process was particularly “fair,” but they got to decide how it went. The Senate has absolute control over the trial process.
Its not so much witnesses as “Dont go around announcing your mind is entirely made up in advance and reassuring everyone you are wholly evidence and argument proof”… because that kind of thing makes a mockery of.. well, the US.
Part of the problem here is that the Democrats may well have conducted too thorough of an impeachment hearing process.
I’ve heard the analogy made that impeachment is like a grand jury hearing, which is supposed to have just a quick and cursory examination of the evidence to determine whether there’s enough there to warrant an actual trial (where the detailed evidence is presented, where witnesses are called, etc.)
But in this case, the impeachment called multiple witnesses. They reviewed all the evidence the Democrats had, and they reviewed it thoroughly. There is no more bonus detail to go over. So in a sense, it’s quite reasonable for people on either side to have already “made up their minds” at this point.
Unless the Democrats are alleging they have more evidence or more witnesses or more convincing proof (which I’m not really hearing), then why shouldn’t the Senate just say “we all saw the evidence that was already presented, let’s just go ahead and rule right now?”
Trump is a massive, MASSIVE favorite right now.
Unless a major shift happens, only Biden beats him, and then narrowly enough that it would be a 50/50 election with current polling, which is probably a bit too favorable to Biden because he hasn’t been beaten up from a Republican perspective yet, and Trump has massive cash on hand to do so.
Current polls have every other major Democrat candidate losing VIRGINIA. Clinton won by nearly five points.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/12/31/election-2020-poll-says-trump-beats-every-dem-but-biden-florida-virginia/2782320001/
There are basically no plausible electoral college paths for Democrats without Virginia and Florida.
The Rust Belt has continued to move Republican on the path that means that Ohio, which Obama won fairly easily twice, is no longer even a swing state.
Even if you have Trump lose Pennsylvania, Michigan AND Wisconsin (very implausible), he still has 273 electoral votes with the other states he won in 2016 plus Virginia.
While the national vote could still go for another Democrat, Biden is literally the only one with an electoral college chance, and that a slim one.
You should bet on him then, since his odds are 50% everywhere I’ve looked.
I have.
Excellent!
Biden telling coal miners to learn to code is a good indication the Democrats do not have a solid plan for winning back the Rust Belt.
You keep saying this, but it’s not clear to me which electoral votes you expect black support to flip. Michigan and Ohio via the urban part of their electorates? Even that would only bring the Dem up to 266.
Wisconsin and Virginia, too. WI’s AA population isn’t huge but it exists and with the margins we’re talking about it could be enough.
Needless to say, Pete and Bloomberg’s issues go far beyond just black voters. Bloomberg is an absurd caricature of everything most people dislike about the left while disclaiming everything people like about it, and Pete is six inches shorter than Trump and reminds everyone of the person who told the substitute teacher about the homework assignment. Nominating either of them would result in the loss of everything outside of the Pacific Coast and the bluest parts of the Northeast–I’d put money on them delivering the first Republican win for Minnesota (currently the Dems’ longest streak) since 1972.
Interesting; I thought of Wisconsin as very white even in urban cores, like Oregon. But yes, we’re talking about very tight margins in the swing states.
Virginia is already a blue state.
Not as much as sometimes thought. I posted a poll above. No Democrat except Biden beats Trump there.
I just looked at the poll. I’d argue that from the polling Buttigeg maybe edges out Trump in a GE also, 16% of respondents didn’t know who he was and he still was within the margin of error for beating Trump. Fast-forward to a general election where Pete’s name recognition gets amped up and I think he’d take Va.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting to see the high levels of Sanders dislike in the commonwealth.
It’s right there in the name! :p
The thing that turned VA blue is the greater DC metro. It has a large number of educated, affluent suburbanites with a firm attachment to the establishment and its norms, many of which are associated with the national-security oriented expansion of the federal government and its contractors since 9/11.
As far as I can tell, Virginia is the only place where Clinton’s infamous “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs” gambit actually worked, and it therefore makes a lot of sense that Sanders–who is aiming to do exactly the opposite–would do quite poorly there.
@Aftagley
Certainly possible if Pete can also take the entire Rust Belt and hold Virginia.
The problem for Democrats is that Trump won 306 Electoral Votes last time, so they need to pick up 37 votes somewhere. That’s at least three states, all of which still lean Trump-ish without losing a single one of their states.
The fact that they’re already in toss-up territory in a blue state is a terrible sign for them.
@EchoChaos
Is it? If I had to predict the point at which each individual democratic candidate would be at their nadir in terms of national popularity it would be between now and may-ish. Presumably once the primary is over and the party starts coming together you get more general support rather than partisan infighting.
I realize that I’m comparing apples and oranges here, but this time in 2016 Trump only had the support of 35% of his party and was getting crushed in national polling; then republicans unified around him.
That being said, incumbents generally don’t lose, so there’s no good precedents to base this assessment off of.
@Aftagley
I’m not sure that’s true.
I checked, because I’m always curious about data, and Trump had a 3 point lead over Clinton in Fox’s poll of January 4-7, 2016.
Some polls in the time showed him up by as much as 5 in September 2015, some down by as much as a silly 18 in a Bloomberg poll.
And of course Clinton had her own primary challenge then, but I doubt any of the “dedicated anti-Trump voters” that the Democrats are relying on to beat him aren’t already saying they’re against him for any Democrat.
As best I can tell, it isn’t “hints” but it also isn’t improper in any strong sense. It seems clear that Hunter Biden was employed, on generous terms, by a Ukrainian company that hoped the fact that he was Biden’s son would be valuable to them, whether via actual influence on his father or other people thinking he had influence on his father. There seems to be a similar case in China.
But I haven’t seen any evidence that Hunter Biden actually did anything improper, other than accepting well paid position for which he had no qualification other than being his father’s son.
That is quite improper actually. Typically, the rule for such things is that it is not sufficient to avoid actual conflicts of interest, but also appearances of conflicts of interest. Here there is both.
Here you have the son of the 2d most powerful person in the US, who is dealing with Ukraine, being bought by a famously corrupt Ukrainian businessman. There is no way to make this not horribly corrupt. Joe should have told Hunter that he absolutely cannot take that position.
There is no significant difference between receiving an envelope full of cash and this arrangement, other than the arrangement had a thin veneer of legality.
Hunter is his own person, but IMO Joe Biden should have recused himself from his interference with the replacement of the top prosecutor, as that involved a clear conflict of interest.
Yes, up until the point where he accepted millions for being the son of the VPOTUS from a corrupt foreign businessman.
@jermo sapiens
If Joe Biden could control Hunter to the degree you imagine, presumably he’d have stopped him from using all that cocaine.
It’s fine to be on the lookout for corruption–I agree that how Joe handled some of his involvement looks shady–but “politicians need to avoid every possible appearance of conflicts of interest of every family member” is neither possible nor desirable. One, I note, that Trump couldn’t pass either.
I think generally it would have been much easier to prevent Hunter from sitting on Burisma’s board than from doing cocaine.
Also, from the assumption that Hunter is a useless idiot who couldnt land a job at McDonalds without his dad’s influence, there are still a number of jobs like sitting on various boards where the impropriety would be less glaring. On a scale of 1 to 10, the board of a Ukrainian gas company owned by a famously corrupt Ukrainian is a 12.
Joe could have invited Hunter to the White House, have Barack give him a very stern talk why sitting on that board is terrible for his father, for Barack himself, and by extension the country. And then maybe he could have slipped in a word about cocaine and impregnating strippers.
If I correctly remember the Chinese part of the story, Hunter accompanied his father on some sort of mission to China, and immediately thereafter a firm he was associated with got favorable treatment by the Chinese government.
If that is correct—I don’t swear for either my memory or my source, and someone here probably knows more—then Joe could have chosen not to have his son accompany him.
I think your odds for Trump are wayyyyyy too high. The guy is extremely unpopular and lost the popular vote in the last election. Even with the strong economy, I’d put his odds at less than coin flip, maybe somewhere around 40-45%. Biden looks like he will decisively defeat Trump, Bernie looks like he will probably beat Trump, and Pete and Warren are both competitive.
The only shocking thing to me on the Dem side is the complete implosion of so many candidates and how the “diverse” democrats do not have a single non-white candidate among their leading candidates. Along with Warren STILL being in there, and Pete being in there at all.
I think you overestimate Democrats. Personally, I set an incumbent at 65% regardless. Trump probably is lower, but only down to 55-60%. But also his strongest skill seems to be destroying enemies rhetorically. Biden, Bernie, and Warren are all easy targets.
The implosion is also not that shocking. Democrats have most of their people in concentrated, non-competitive areas like California and New York. This causes people to not understand the voters as a whole. I once saw some statistic that something like the top 40 most “Democratic” congressional districts were more Democratic than the top 1 most “Republican” district is/was. Also I have seen stats that Blacks/Hispanics have seen reduced racism as of late, while white liberals have seen it increase.
I’d guess that if all Republicans in America suddenly moved to Australia, the Democratic debates would actually move to the right on most issues. That is what is going on.
The Dems are also very unpopular right now. Clinton won the popular vote but got a lower % than Kerry and Gore in their losing efforts (Gore also won the popular vote). She landed 1 percentage point more votes than Mitt Romney in his losing effort to a popular incumbent, and there isn’t any candidate right now polling as well as Clinton did in the primaries in 2016. In Jan 2016 Clinton was getting between 43 and 59% of democratic support, and Sanders was polling in the mid 30s. 4 years later Sanders is polling in the low 20s/high teams with a higher profile and without a dominant front runner. Biden has been polling poorly for a known front runner, Warren had a brief moment where she went to contender status, but none of them have been particularly popular even within the democratic party and the likelihood of them inspiring the turnout in the specific places they need turnout to win are low.
I’m a little miffed by the Trump reelection confidence, he’s just been consistently unpopular despite a good economy/accomplishing goals(?) and whatnot. Like he didn’t exactly have a decisive presidential victory in the first place, and public sentiment’s been lower than election night/Inauguration Day for his whole presidency. Like do we think the Dem’s candidate will be weaker than Hillary, will the impeachment proceedings backfire hard?
Economy is doing well (unless you’re a non-techie in SF), terrorism and crime remain reasonably low, so far we haven’t gotten into any ruinous wars (though this latest incident was damn close), and he’s the incumbent.
I expect impeachment to be a minor sideshow, and likely as damaging to Biden as it is to Trump.
Sorry @ManyCookies.
While I expect that the Democrat will win the popular vote by an even larger margin, I just don’t think it’s more than not likely that Americans will perceive things as so much worse that the electoral college results will change much from 2016.
FWIW, I’m increasingly confident that Democrats will keep the House and maybe even take the Senate in 2022.
I was trying to figure out why you were apologizing and just now realized “miffed” means annoyed and not confused. Oops.
with either result, about half the commenters here will need to update come november.
Remember that a modest amount of that approval is right-wing people unhappy he isn’t doing enough. I know several who think he should’ve more aggressively built the wall and stopped immigration who will still vote for him.
But his victory relies on areas that are trending more Republican and don’t rely on those areas that are trending more Democrat.
His key states in 2020 are Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Florida is his de facto home state, he does quite well there and it’s right of the country (Republicans held it even in the 2018 wave). The Rust Belt has shifted sharply right in the last decade. Ohio was a swing state from 2000-2016 and Obama won it twice. Nobody even thinks that a Democrat can come close there anymore.
Now, this isn’t to say that Trump is a sure thing, but he’s a big favorite in the states that actually matter for winning an election. Sure, in another decade when Texas is a swing state and Arizona has shifted blue there will be a different calculus, but for now Trump’s Electoral College advantage is quite strong.
One does not have to be popular with a majority to win an election, one merely needs to be less unpopular than one’s opponent among the majority.
Also, it would be interesting to tease out how much people’s disapproval (or approval!) of Trump is about his personality versus his performance. What would the approval polls look like if it were President Scott Walker doing everything Trump is doing and getting the same results, but in a more measured tone of voice?
>I give the odds at a 60% chance that Trump is re-elected
I’d put it closer to 90%.
War time presidents get a massive boost from the fraction of people who I refuse to believe are anything but unconvincing P-zombies.
I still remember listening to a TV interview back in 2004. An interview outside the polls with some old lady stuck with me.
“I wouldn’t normally vote for him…. but we’re at war!…and …. [quietly] you’ve got to support the president when you’re at war…..”
And so trump is going to make sure that there’s a fresh war starting in the next few months.
Eh…. at some point our modern era forever wars are going to stop counting as “war time” for psychological purposes on the average member of the public. I don’t know whether that point has been reached yet or not, but consider that there are people today, old enough to vote, for which we would have been “at war” literally their entire lives.
We’ll just have to wait and see when we have our first post-9/11 one-term President!
I doubt it. Between the classic hot wars (World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, etc.), the US has been in constant conflict with aboriginal tribes until around 1922, and the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1989. The only period I can find in which the US was not in a state of declared war or AUMF was during the Neutrality Acts in 1935-1940.
At the same time, the vast majority of Americans have never lived under occupation on American soil – a curious juxtaposition.
My father believes that the recency of being occupied is among the reasons the South is further right than the North. We’re 90 years behind the North in “never lived under occupation”.
I’m not very confident in my ability to predict the future, especially about Trump, but here goes.
Some guesses:
– Probability that something substantially changes that improves Dem odds: ~8% (Foreign policy goes obviously and disastrously wrong, economy tanks, Trump shoots someone on Main Street, has a heart attack, etc.)
– Dems have farther to fall than Trump when the one on one contest begins, as Trump’s negatives are well known and he has not begun unleashing his tsunami of cash.
– That said, Dems (except maybe Bernie) will move towards the center from their current positions if nominated, and press coverage will be even more pro-Dem and anti-Trump once the Dems line up behind a candidate and the media aren’t picking between several Dems but just between one Dem and Trump.
– White (and Asian-American?) turnout will probably be up for both Dems and GOP. My guess is NAM turnout is slightly down.
– Trump will have several benefits. He won’t have done most of the bad things he was accused of planning in 16. The economy looks like it’s going to remain strong. The Democratic front runners are a lot less impressive than I thought they would be, and it looks all but certain that the nominee will be white.
– On the other hand, most Dems are super engaged, and I’m not sure about GOP voters. My guess is that the GOP will be sufficiently scared of the Dem or angry about him/her to show up, but they might end up discouraged or casting protest votes or something.
– If Bernie is nominated, I have trouble seeing Trump lose. I know Bernie’s fans love him, but between a known bozo and an untested socialist, I think the country goes with the known bozo.
On the basis of all these tea leaves, the next president will be: Trump 55%, Biden 25%, Warren 10%, Buttigieg 8%, rest of field 2%
Most days I pack a lunch and bring it to work. My lunch almost always consists of leftovers from whatever I cooked for dinner the night before. This comprises a pretty broad range of cuisines: Middle Eastern, Indian (or, the one Indian dish I can cook respectably well), Mexican, “Italian” (e.g. pizza, spaghetti w/meat sauce, lasagna), Asian-style stir-frys, generic white people food (e.g. hot dogs, casserole, pot roast), black/Southern American (e.g. collards and black eyed peas, pork chops on grits), and so on.
I notice what other people in line at the microwave are heating up too, and my Indian coworkers, male and female, only ever have Indian food. Why is this? There are many possibilities, but some seem more likely than others:
(1) They, like most people, are not adventurous eaters, and prefer to stick to what is familiar.
(2) Indian food is objectively superior, so that if you or your spouse are capable of cooking it consistently well you’ll never want anything else.
(3) They eat many different cuisines but prefer Indian for lunch for whatever reason.
(4) They follow strict diets, and only their familiar cuisine comes with the assurance their diet is being followed.
(5) Some others I’m forgetting or haven’t thought of.
(1) Seems most likely, but I personally have been out to eat with some of these people and they are often excited to try new foods. Maybe they like eating them but are for some reason intimidated to try making them at home? (4) is related to (1), but again, I personally know some of these people and they don’t have dietary restrictions, yet still only bring in Indian leftovers. (2) is sometimes tempting to believe, but there are definitely dishes in other cuisines that hold their own even against the best tikka masala. (3) is obviously farfetched.
What else have you got, SSC?
It seems to me like (1) should be the null hypothesis, as long as we state it like “most people don’t bother to learn cooking many different kinds of food.” You should also be comparing the diversity of your food to your non-Indian colleagues’ food diversity. My guess is you are an outlier in cooked food diversity but have only noticed the disparity with Indians. (Combine this with the fact that “standard American fare” now encompasses “Italian” and “Asian” and things from many sources, labels put in quotes because they are actually a separate cuisine)
I can think of at least a few (white) American coworkers at basically every place I’ve ever worked who also cooked a wide variety of cuisines and brought in the leftovers of such. So, I might be an outlier compared to Indians, but I seem to be less of one compared to other (white) Americans. Which begs the question.
Don’t want to get *too* CW here, but I would suggest that “diversity is our strength” has been adopted into the American/western civic religion… but has not been so adopted by other cultures.
And one of the primary advertised benefits of such diversity is “variety of food options available.” People are encouraged both explicitly and implicitly that they can and should diversify their palletes – that not only is it something that will enhance their own quality of life, but that it’s something that shows they are complying with the expected social norms of modern American life.
Eh…I get what you’re saying but I think that’s a stretch. Maybe the pressure to embrace multiculturalism exposes a few people to new cuisines, but to actually like them enough to try cooking them at home, especially challenging stuff that takes practice to get good at such as Indian food, requires an active interest.
@Well
My impression is that non-Westerners typically lose status within their ethnic group for serving and/or consuming food that is not part of that ethnicity, while Westerners* gain status.
Neither serving or consuming food necessarily requires personally preparing the food, as prepared foods can be bought.
* Actually, it may be even more restricted, as I think that places like Italy are not very open to foreign foods.
I think you’re painting with too broad a brush here. I imagine that within a group of white American utility linemen, you’d lose status by sitting down to lunch with tikka masala, as opposed to fried chicken and greens.
Heck, even hipsters (in jokes at least) seem to put a premium on down-home cooking.
It’s only among a narrow subset of white westerners that you reliably gain status by eating food from other ethnicities.
I can say that in some upper middle class groups, eating more diverse food is an indicator of cultural affluence. This goes both ways with whites eating foreign cuisines and ethnic people eating western cuisine. At least, in America, in Engineering, in an urban setting. Potentially this applies outside of my experience, but it at least applies to it.
I disagree. Or at least, I think “gain status from eating ethnic food” is the basic norm among upper and middle class, with only a narrow subset of the lower class for which its the opposite.
Even among the lower class I think it’s just a matter of time/custom. You wouldn’t lose status for eating spaghetti or tacos, because sufficient time and custom has absorbed those into “American food” status even if they had ethnic origins. Tikka Masala isn’t there yet, but it will be…
I can’t imagine caring one way or the other what someone else was eating and would find it very weird if anyone did the same to me.
Chicken tikka masala is Scottish.
I suppose in a way this whole thread originated because I “care” what someone else was eating. But anyway this happens all the time. Food is a big part of our cultural identity. What the people around you eat sends a signal about who they are and possibly how they relate to you. So it sort of makes sense.
The scenario where this actually matters is less “everyone brings a lunch and talks about what they are having” and more “group of people trying to pick a restaurant to go and buy lunch.”
I’ve definitely been in social groups in which I’ve felt pressure to shut up and agree to go to a sushi place even though I don’t really like sushi at all. Don’t want to out myself as uncultured swine at best, or actively racist at worst…
Ah crap, I phrased my above comment poorly. It was directly in response to your comment:
and Matt M’s response:
I care about what other people are eating in how it might smell and look tasty, but I’d never increase or decrease my status estimation of someone based on their consumption.
@Aftagley:
I’ve experienced it directly, so I know it happens: my wife caught flak from her family for eating kale, as if it meant she wasn’t black enough.
Lots of Indian food is relatively easy to make in larger-than-one-meal quantities and is pretty amenable to reheating, which is probably synergizes well with your 1 and 3.
Their version of meal-prep maybe? When I think of traditional Indian food I think Dal, curry, etc… That kind of food seems like it might lend itself well to cooking large batches over the weekend or something and just having that as the designated lunch option.
Another possibility might be that they have different definitions of “different cuisines” than you do. It’s possible (no clue if this is actually happening) that for them pizza, Mexican, southern and GWPF all get categorized as “american” whereas they see stark differences between Punjabi, Delhi, and Bengali cuisine.
Yeah, what Well… isn’t seeing is if their dinners are diverse to contrast with a meal-prepped lunch. It’s not guaranteed that they’re having leftovers for lunch.
99.5% of the time, my weekday lunch is some combination of sandwich, apple, nuts, and nothing. It’s not because I don’t enjoy eating a variety of food, it’s just that it’s simpler to have a routine. Also in this case I appreciate having something that’s easy to eat without heating or using utensils and is fine if I leave it an extra day in the fridge and we have a consistent grocery list and so on. It’s not really an aspect of my life I’m optimizing for enjoyment. Your coworkers might be similar.
But they might also just enjoy their ethnic cuisine. Appreciating a change of pace when they go out is compatible with preferring a particular course be the norm. Also, “Indian food” might for them be a whole range of options which all seem pretty similar to you.
My grad school roommate was Indian, and preferred Indian food to American, or any other. For him, it was more about the level of spicy heat in the food. So much so that he would bring a bottle of Tabasco sauce to restaurants and pack one in his suitcase on trips. He found most other food pretty bland.
Once he got married, he ate whatever his wife cooked, which was usually Indian dishes. I cooked them traditional Thanksgiving dinner one year. Verdict: too bland.
A combination of (1) and (2) – Indian food is very hard to make, but it stores extremely well, unlike many other cuisines; that’s why Indian buffets are always better than other types of buffets. Any kind of stew/curry is always going to be better the next day, and Indian food is no different. It’s just a better option for meal prep.
I thought about it, and decided I don’t buy this. Lots of the other foods I mentioned store and reheat well. Lasagna for example.
You’re forgetting (6) – You’ll eat the good lunch of leftovers your poor mother packed for you, after she slaving in the kitchen all day making a cooked meal for you 🙂
India is a big place with many different sorts of foods. It might be that your Indian colleagues value diversity in food as much as your white colleagues, but they can get as much diversity within the subgenre “Indian food” as you get from middle eastern, Italian, the-narrow-slice-of-Indian-cuisine-you-eat, and so forth. I have heard (but not verified) that something similar to this holds in mainland China—if people want exotic or different foods, they eat foods from a different province, and that is good enough for them.
American food is actually pretty diverse, now that I think about it. The issue is that American food didn’t have millenia of isolation to develop such distinct threads that we can label, so it feels like a lot of it is ubiquitous everywhere, such as potato salad, Thanksgiving dinner, fast diner food, the canned food dishes as that technology was developed, or various BBQ traditions. It’s a dual victim of map/territory and globalization, as immigrant cuisines started maintaining their old identities, instead of jumping into the melting pot.
A traditional “American diner” restaurant has an extremely large selection on their menu. Perhaps not “Chinese” levels of diverse, but pretty much EU levels of diverse.
I saw a wide range of food in China, from snails to fish cooked whole.
But while a Chinese restaurant will have a large menu in America, this doesn’t seem terribly diverse. It’s more a matter of permutations of ingredients than really divergent cooking styles, imo, and the tastes seem to blend together. Meat + vegetable fried with a sauce and rice or noodle. It’s about as diverse as a pizza place with several different toppings to select from.
Now there are more styles of “Chinese” than this, my point is just that the size of the menu isn’t always a good indicator of how many distinct tastes you can get from a dinner joint. ymmv
Mexican places can have the same problem; a friend once remarked that Taco Bell (which, well, even for a Mexican place is kind of stretching it) is like the same four ingredients differently arranged.
I don’t think it’s really fair to Mexican restaurants or to Taco Bell to call Taco Bell a Mexican restaurant.
I was thinking of a local actual Mexican restaurant first but didn’t want to name names. Curious if anyone thinks it’s true of actual Mexican restaurants they know.
It’s more true of taco truck type places than actual sit-down Mexican restaurants. With a taco truck, you’ve got your choice of meat and form factor and the rest is pretty much set, but a sit-down place, even if it doesn’t have the really specific stuff like menudo on the menu (it’s a good sign if it does), probably at least has chicken mole or something.
Seems like even Yum! Foods™ they will only go as far as saying their menu is inspired by Mexican food.
Then let’s look at what you can get from an American diner, consolidating so “meat + veggie + sauce” would be one line item:
Breakfast carb (french toast/waffles/pancake)
Eggs/Omelettes/Benedict
Breakfast meat (steak/sausage/bacon)
We won’t count breakfast potato forms and other sides
Hot sandwich
Cold sandwich
Burgers
Baskets (batter-fried meat)
BBQ
Soup, Chili
Salad
Appetizers (ranging from dips to loaded nachos/fries that can be their own meal), sides
Dinner meat (red meat/white meat/fish, cuts or ground) plus carb side plus veggie side
Pot roast, or the middle between dinner meat and soup
Dessert
Regional variants (pizza, pasta/mac, mex, soul, cajun)
Perhaps I’m communicating poorly or we just disagree, but I find much more variation in technique and flavor between french toast and pancakes than between chicken with bok choy and brown sauce wok-ed and beef with brocholi in savory sauce wok-ed. Maybe it’s the fact that a lot of stir-fry dishes seem similar to me?
Mongolian barbeque is basically just fajitas is basically just twenty different items from the average American Chinese menu.
Obviously Chinese food does have it’s soups and salads and deserts and such.
I didn’t realize there are Mexican cannibals.
@Randy M
I’m in agreement with you. The list I posted was to show how diverse American food actually is.
As for the apparent “sameness” of foreign cuisines, though, that’s about how restaurants in America have optimized to their customer base. Specializing is good marketing.
But in their home countries, you might see more equivalents to the American diner, with a much more diverse range of cooking styles, often analogous to the categories I listed. Stir fries, steam-cooked, stews, thinner soups, deep fried, salad, BBQ, cold pickled dishes, hand/finger food, sashimi.
An Asian breakfast can run the gamut from deep fried carbs, to flatbreads, to porridge, to omelette-on-rice, to hoagie sandwiches, to stuffed buns and dumplings, to tamale-like things or stuffed riceballs, to crepe-like things, to rice and noodle dishes you might think are more of lunch or dinner fare.
One can just as easily generalize European fare into smaller categories. How much variation in technique and flavor is there between “noodles with tomato sauce and meatballs” and “noodles with cream sauce and sausage,” really?
As AG said, so is the US. I cook foods that are popular/originated in many different parts of the US. But I also cook foods from other world cuisines! So, just because your home country has lots of different cuisines in it doesn’t mean an adventurous eater is diversed out and don’t have an appetite for anything beyond that. Besides, I’ve had Indian food from different parts of India (at least the major differences between Punjabi, Tamil, and a few others) and I have a pretty sensitive palate, and I wouldn’t say it’s all that diverse. For the most part, variations on stewed aromatic stuff over rice.
Are your Indian colleagues 1st generation American, 2nd generation Americans, or immigrants from India?
A mix.
Q. What is a group of Indians called?
A. A curry of Indians.
A lot of my Indian co-workers have been vegetarians. I think Indian vegetarian meals have a lot more variety than you can get from vegetarian meals in other types of Americanized foods (by which I am including “ethnic” foods, but in a manner cooked to American tastes).
And by the way, to respond to ADBG’s comment, every Indian of whom I speak is an immigrant from India, at least I think so. How many Indians currently in the workforce were born in the US? I sure never meet any.
I have a number of friends and acquaintances in the workforce who were born in the US to Indian immigrant parents.
For the Indian coworkers specifically: the answer is absolutely 2. Indian tends not to appeal to the eye, but no food matches it on appeal to the nose and the soul (Sichuan comes close, though).
For contrasting white people with other, non-Indians: the CW answer is correct. Actually, two CW answers are correct.
A) a la Scott’s How the West was Won, “Western” people are furthest along in being consumed by universal culture and don’t really have a food of their own, so they appropriate the food of everyone else.
B) White liberals are quite possibly the only group ever to be so thoroughly xenophilic (my computer refuses to believe this is a word and wants me to change it to the far more common xenophobic), whereas pretty much everyone else is comfortable with their cultural bubble staying firmly in place.
What proportion of pots and kettles are actually black nowadays. Is black superior?
More seriously, my wife keeps forgetting about water on the stovetop when making tea in a pot, and a whistling kettle should be the solution.
Anyone have recommendations for a fairly inexpensive kettle I can buy online that whistles very noticeably? Between fake reviews and the particulars of the prominent whistle request, I figure I’d just ask around. It doesn’t have to be black.
Shift over to using an electric kettle. It’s so much faster and easier. They don’t whistle, but they tend to have some kind of high-profile visual and sound effect that lets you know when they’re boiling.
Another thread, another instance of (presumably) American kitchens being trapped in the 19th century…
And what kind of tea do you drink?
Green Tea, Chinese kind where you put in tea leaves in your cup directly and add hot water after (vs. teabag)
If you spend slightly more money, you can get an electric kettle with an adjustable thermostat so it stops heating at the correct temperature (70-80 C ish?) for green teas.
American electric kettles are not so good at getting the water to boil.
What? Are you sure you didn’t just get a crappy one? Any electric kettle type boiler I’ve ever used has boiled water much faster than a stovetop kettle would have.
It’s not the kettles. It’s our wires and voltage. American electric is 110V. With typical household wire gauges that puts a relatively low limit on how much water can be heated in a short period of time.
American electric stove/ovens operate at a much higher voltage and amperage with thick wires so are much better at heating water to boiling.
They are still faster than most stove tops, but the electric kettles in the US are definitely slower than in Europe. Maybe the voltage, if manufacturers are not designing heating elements specifically for 120volts.
The other problem with electric kettles is that they are only good for heating water. It makes a lot of sense if you drink tea every day, but most Americans drink coffee and use a drip machine.
I was actually just in Paris and the use of electric kettles kind of sucks for a coffee drinker, because there is way too much crappy instant coffee. That’s all my hotel room had and I hated it.
How much tea are you trying to make exactly? Electric kettles do just fine for small amounts of water(1-3 cups of tea worth, probably).
This is one I’m familiar with that works pretty nicely. If a typical stovetop kettle boils faster it would be on the order of seconds (i.e. negligible).
@gbdub
“electric kettles kind of sucks for a coffee drinker”
My friend, I heartily recommend you look into the subtle pleasures of the French Press!
Specifically, it’s power. A typical US home mains outlet is a 120V, 15A circuit, yielding a maximum of 1800 watts. IIRC, a typical power point in Italy (my point of reference, since I lived there) was 240V, either 10A or 20A. 240V/10A can carry 2400 watts, 240v/20A can do 4800.
At that point, the fact that an American kettle heats up an equal mass of water more slowly is simple physics. (Though, of course, a 240V kettle limited to 1800W wouldn’t be any faster than an American 120V one, and you can have 20A or 25A circuits in the US, though they’re not exactly standard.)
French Press coffee is best coffee.
Eh, I guess pour-over works
I really do like French Press coffee, and it is my preferred method when I actually have time to enjoy a cup. But it’s a bit of a pain in the ass compared to a drip or Keurig.
My issue was that French hotels don’t offer a French press and a burr grinder. You get a kettle and instant granules, which really suck.
American hotels give you a mini drip coffee machine, which can make better coffee and can also brew tea.
Paris was a surprisingly difficult place to find a good cup of coffee (unless you like mediocre espresso, which is ubiquitous there)
We got the Amazon Basics kettle and have been very satisfied with it. It heats pretty quickly, much faster than the stove; I’m not sure how large the capacity is, but in terms of what it handles it’s very quick.
Noted. I will look out for a slight sale perhaps from the $20.
This. After getting an electric kettle, I never looked back. I actually got a 2nd electric kettle so I can make proper coffee at work.
You’re overthinking this – any grocery store will sell you a perfectly good kettle with a very noticeable whistle for ~$15.
I think the “black” under discussion by our idiomatic cookware is soot, but just as well a black kettle these days might be cast iron which you definitely don’t need. Iron holds heat admirably but a kettle’s job is to get the heat into the water as fast as possible and as copper is the king of kitchen conductivity bright copper kettles are the subject of admiration and song.
I picked one up from an antique store and shined it up. To your main point it doesn’t actually whistle – the lid rattles in a way I find even more annoying and noticeable. It’s like a train going past, honestly.
You could also look for those old-timey kettles which have space-ships and doodads on the lid/spout which spin and squeal. Or, I suppose, find a kettle (again, antique/thrift would be good here) and try and narrow the spout a bit with pliers to sharpen the sound.
What’s the best way to figure out the general reliability of a particular year, make and model of a used car? I have some cars I’m very familiar with, but just googling that car and “reliability” or “problems” generally gets me 100% reports it’s a terrible car, because nobody comments on their car on the internet in that way unless it’s having problems.
Lots of sites do something like this. You can compare cars estimated 5 year cost of ownership on Kelly Blue book.
Edit: Looks like they only go to ’18 cars so not good for used cars.
Rather than looking up every car for sale it is generally easier to go by a list like this and look for one of them in your area.
I’ve seen those, but I’m not 100% sure I trust that kind of article – I used to know people who wrote that kind of content, and they churn them out pretty fast. That aside, what I’m looking for is more “I found what appears to be a good deal, and now I need more on this particular model and year” rather than “I’m looking for specific years and models to try to find good deals on”, if that makes sense.
What about Consumer Reports? You have to join (looks like you can just do $10 for one month and then cancel once you’re done), but it gives reliability ratings for cars.
Or JD Power?
I’m probably going to do this on your and others here recommendation. It seems like a good bet for better information.
If you already know the car you want but aren’t sure what’s the best model year for it, carcomplaints.com can be helpful.
I’ve found the best method is to pay attention to many different channels for a while (read forums, talk to people you know who own a particular car, read reviews, watch Scotty Kilmer videos, talk to mechanics, check out a bunch of cars and have mechanics look at them, etc.) and then triangulate.
As a rule of thumb when it comes to reliability, Toyotas and Hondas are going to be the best. Newer Mazdas and Hyundais/Kias come in somewhere behind that. Then Nissans. Avoid American and European cars unless you’re buying a pickup truck, in which case Ford is a decent alternative if you can’t find a Toyota.
Just curious: is there a particular car you’re looking at?
I’m specifically looking at the CRV and the RAV4, and to a lesser extent their mini-van cousins the Odyssey and the Sienna. I’d like to widen my scope a bit, so while I know the general story on the models mentioned it would be helpful to have a quicker way to research others. I’ve already ruled out basically any Nissan SUV in my price range for transmission reasons, for instance.
For reliability, the the Rav4 and Sienna are going to be hard to beat. A certain model year of Odysseys were bad (caught fire or something, IIRC?), but I’m guessing the others were good. CRV is solid, though I personally don’t like the styling on any but the 1st generation, which are by now quite old.
You were smart to avoid the Nissan for the reasons you did.
Widening scope beyond that while holding reliability (and general size) constant is going to yield…maybe a few quad-cab pickups?
FWIW we have a 3rd generation Rav4 and love it. The most serious issue it’s had is the spare tire’s pressure sensor went bad, so rather than spend $500 to replace it we just had the mechanic turn the warning light off. What I really like about the car is it’s old enough I can do a lot of work on it myself, but not so old that it’s worn out. It has over 150K miles and aside from a few rattles here and there it drives like new.
But yeah, definitely check out Carcomplaints.com.
I have a recent model Sienna and love it. My parents bought a 2012 Sienna and also loved it. Consumer Reports gives it high ratings for reliability, and it handles great and is very comfortable. If you don’t mind being a “minivan guy” then I would recommend it.
My one warning about the Sienna, having driven it a couple times, is it takes some getting used to in terms of its size. I scraped a few curbs making right turns, for instance. Even though I’m experienced driving big vehicles and even learned to drive in a minivan (a 2nd-gen Dodge Caravan), for some reason I had trouble “feeling” where the edges of this one were.
It’s obviously just an anecdote but our family has had a 2017 Nissan Pathfinder since new and it has had zero problems, transmission or otherwise.
Is it still under warranty? I’m interested to hear what happens after year 3 or 4.
We bought in Dec 2016, so it just passed the 3 year mark. We also liked the Mazda CX9 too but decided on the Pathfinder because even though the list prices were similar, Nissan was much more flexible on discounting.
Anecdotally, my parents (both auto engineers and still work for an auto supplier) have said to get at least the third model year into a new generation so the kinks are worked out. Wikipedia is helpful for this.
This is standard advice along with the caveat that you want to make sure there is a 4th year as well.
Consumer reports, maybe?
Seconded. I’ve found Consumer Reports very helpful, and have always bought cars at least 5 years old. My local library has them, which is helpful–looks at the same car over time, and you can see things like “tends to start having transmission problems at about 4 years old”.
Yes, my family and I have usually consulted Consumer Reports’ auto sections, and in my experience I have found them pretty spot-on and reliable.
I’m definitely thinking about doing this – I’ve been not because it’s for pay, but it’s not that much all things considered.
Do take a minute to see if your library provides free access. I can use Consumer Reports online through my library’s website, just by putting in my library card number.
For older (but not ancient) vehicles a decent litmus test is to just look around and see what others are still driving. If you see a lot of a certain car that is 10 or more years old, chances are good that it’s reliable, otherwise they wouldn’t all still be in use. Of course some makes and models are produced in much greater quantities than others, and this should be taken into account. Be mindful that different weather in different areas may have an effect on reliability of many vehicles as well, a car that is reliable in Southern California may not last as long in Maine.