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The Pachyderminator says:
February 25, 2020 at 6:55 pm
I was afraid that the topic may be “hot button” so I’m responding here:
I caught some the debate on the radio, and then some on television last night
I already mailed in my vote (for Biden), as did my wife (for Bloomberg), before viewing the debate (and before the last one as well) so the debate is too late to effect my vote.
I thought the moderation was terrible and the candidates didn’t show themselves well, too much yelling!
It was worse following it on the radio, but on television it was still bad, from most to least screaming it seemed it went: Biden-Warren-Sanders-Buttigieg-Steyer-Klobucher-Bloomberg, and from most impressive (if I knew almost nothing about the candidates) to worst performing it went: Klobucher-Sanders (in part because his yells were spoken slowly and clearly)-Bloomberg-Steyer-Warren-Biden.
My man Joe really didn’t look good last night, but at least the CBS lady called him a “gentleman” after he mentioned his “Catholic school training”.
The California primary (and those of many lesser States) is within three days of the South Carolina primary, and with early voting many votes (like mine) will already have been cast, and by March 18th more than half of the delegates will already have been pledged, and I really hope these “circular firing squads” will be over by then (and I’m really tired of Bloomberg’s and Steyer’s adds, I didn’t know how blessed we Californians were with our old June primary!).
It’s sort of a weird coordination failure. The rules and procedures of the debates are mutually agreed on ahead of time by the candidates and the party, more or less- so this is basically how they want it.
> because his yells were spoken slowly and clearly
I hadn’t thought about this before, but he does “old man yells at cloud” *really* well. There aren’t a lot of people I’m used to hearing who manage to be clearly heard while raising their voice. I don’t know if he’s had any voice training for that sort of thing, but I suspect it’s the kind of thing that politicians looking for every last edge will do in the future.
FWIW, I heard Warren in an interview on the radio the other day and I was impressed at how well she handled the questions.
I have to agree with most of what you said, plus I’d add: I have no idea why Steyer and Warren are even running.
You mean why Warren is *still* running? She had a plausible shot earlier, but I agree she should have dropped out. Steyer never had a chance to begin with.
I see her having a slim-but-nonzero path to the nomination via a contested convention. If Sanders has a large plurality but is short of a majority on the first ballot, and if (as many observers are anticipating) the superdelegates mostly vote against Sanders on subsequent ballots, then Warren (especially if she has a credible number of her own delegates, which is still possible: she’s currently polling a hair under the 15% viability threshold nationally and will no doubt do better in some states and districts than others) can present herself as a compromise candidate: less baggage than Sanders, but still Socialist enough that Sanders’s core supporters are more likely to turn out for her in the general election than they would for Biden or Bloomberg.
I guess, but my statement is a bit stronger than that. I don’t understand why Warren was ever running based on what she decided to do at this debate. She spent her time attacking Bloomberg (not on the ballot) and Buttegig (4th place at best) while giving Bernie (1st nationally) a pass on everything. Her “harsh words” for him were “I think I can do a better job”. Not even, ” I think I can do a better job because [reasons].”
I think at this point she is auditioning to be Bernie’s VP. She’s showing that she can be an effective attack dog while not hurting his campaign.
She might be trying to befriend Bernie, but Bernie is looking to knock her out. He’s campaigning in Massachusetts for 2 days, even though South Carolina is next, because if he beats her in her home state, she is gone.
It’s macabre, but the other reasonable answer is that Bernie is very old and has had recent medical problems, and if he died or had to withdraw due to medical issues within the next few weeks, she has a plausible path all of a sudden.
So certain Swedes claim that Sweden is successful despite socialism, not because of it. The narrative is as follows:
Sweden stayed neutral during WW2 and supplied Germany with its iron ore for the war machine
Swedish manufacturing base was untouched post-war, while other countries had to rebuild
Sweden got lots of post-war funding anyway, which the Socialists squandered
Sweden had to devalue its currency in the 80s due to the Socialists
The socialists stupidly thought bringing in 1 million refugees into the country with a total population of 10 million or so would make them love Sweden and become Swedes, because it’s politically incorrect to assume racial or cultural differences
Swedish labor market is highly regulated, so the refugees have no work, were given handouts, and a lot are turning to gangs
Jewish populations in Sweden are fleeing as a result, as it’s politically incorrect to do real policing and not respect cultural differences that actually don’t exist…everything’s fine
All in all, these guys hate that Sweden is used as a model of socialism as they believe it’s about to ruin the country as Swedes are fed up with taxes and immigration leading to an untenable and crumbling welfare state.
Socialism is an economic policy, it has pretty much nothing to do with inviting refugees and bad policing and attacks on Jews… this sounds more like an attack on anything that’s vaguely “left wing” whether or not it has anything in common.
And as for socialism, Sweden is in the top third of the EU in economic freedom – maybe Swedes will flee Sweden for its lack of socialism?
Those that advocate big government welfare states and high taxes are generally in control of policies on refugees as well.
But agreed, the Jewish Swede on the podcast took the opportunity to point out that Sweden was complicit with Nazi Germany and never cared much for its Jews, and gladly is trading them away for votes from refugees being given handouts.
But yeah, back to the economic points, economic freedom may be a poor way to explain it. What I’ve heard is that business regulations are actually quite few, but taxes are high. Whereas the US is actually quite high in business regulations, but taxes are low.
So their contention is that the high taxes supporting the welfare state hampers Sweden from being more competitive, despite low regulations making them somewhat competitive (#19 in your link vs. #12 for US by the economic freedom metric)
All in all, these guys hate that Sweden is used as a model of socialism as they believe it’s about to ruin the country as Swedes are fed up with taxes and immigration leading to an untenable and crumbling welfare state.
The cardinal sin here is using the word socialism to mean any and all government “generosity” however big or small. I wouldn’t say the two have nothing to do with each other. You have an instinct to tax your most well-off to cover the needs of the less well-off, gradually you extend that logic to people living outside your borders.
Except fast forward 20 years and the foreigners and foreign-born do not (on average) reciprocate the mentality that makes this way of life possible and at some point the generosity becomes culturally and economically unfeasible.
Another key difference is that taxes and regulations can be changed in a matter of days. If 20% of sweden’s population is foreign born, I don’t see how you can guaranty a quick and happy ending for both the native and foreign born populations. someone and their posterity is going to suffer permanently from this. Debates about immigration are far more fatalistic than debates about taxes and spending for this very reason, I think.
We see how silly this is when we remove the word socialism from the debate:
1. Any amount of government generosity works because some amount of generosity worked at a particular time and place
2. No amount of government generosity works because some amount of generosity failed at a particular time and place
I don’t know if this bait and switch is intentional or just evidence that people’s thinking is inherently sloppy and low-resolution.
(This question is telling of how uneducated I am in economics.)
In this context, what does “we had to devalue our currency” mean? Is this just referring to inflation/increased government spending? Or is there some other way this is relevant to proving Socialists Are Squandering Our Money?
Right, Sweden never joined Eurozone, and apparently in the 80s:
A controlled depreciation of 10% against the “currency basket” on 14 September 1981.
A controlled depreciation of 16% against the “currency basket” on 8 October 1982.
Sweden is a net exporter so devaluation would make its exports more competitive:
Sweden’s primary export commodities include industrial machinery, automobiles, paper products, iron and steel products, pulp and wood, and chemicals. Sweden’s primary import commodities include machinery, petroleum and petroleum products, chemicals, motor vehicles, iron and steel; foodstuffs, clothing
So on the consumer level, simplistically post devaluation, over the course of two years, your car, gas, food, and clothing prices went up by about 30%
Was the depreciation necessary due to a particular Socialist policy that was implemented around then, or is the claim that “Socialist policies were in place, therefore bad economic things were their fault”?
Depends who you ask. Look at Venezuela for the free market argument – socialism causing hyperinflation/currency depreciation and now they’re going to use the dollar instead of their own currency.
The easiest way to pay for things is to print more money when you also control your own currency.
Venezuela’s not the best example here, they were socialist but in a very different way that’s not really relevant to Nordic style socialism.
Unless Sweden starts setting their own currency’s rates, requiring government approval of every import and basically tying their national treasury to the value of oil, saying Venezuela is as accurate a comparison to Sweden as the USSR.
The control group for Sweden is Minnesota, which is also full of Swedes but has significantly different history and institutions.
As of the most recent data I could readily find for both countries:
Sweden
GDP per capita: $51,844 (2016)
Unemployment rate: 6.6%
Life expectancy at birth: 80.8 years
Minnesota
GDP per capita: $53,704 (2016)
Unemployment rate: 3.2% (Oct 2019)
Life expectancy at birth: 82.2 years
The primary country of origin of Minnesotans is Germany, not Sweden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Minnesota#Ancestry
Isn’t the primary country of origin of Gemans also Sweden?
half /s
Possibly the other way around. Germania was once Celtic-speaking, although if there was population replacement the pressure would have been demic expansion out of Denmark and Germany’s far north (Jastorf culture).
North Germany (the 2nd best half of Germany) was Germanic by the 1st century BCE. I think. All this historical population stuff makes my head hurt.
There’s language, material culture and genetics that kind of track with each other till a bunch of gauls decide up sticks and go live in Anatolia or somesuch.
@Lambert:
Unless I’m misreading Caesar, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and the west of modern Germany were Germanic by the 1st century BC, although still mixed with people who self-identified as Celtic/Gaulish/Belgian in some of those areas.
I don’t know anything about how much the change in archaeological culture and second-hand data on self-identification correlated with genetics.
This!
Alright, Minnesota is the control group for north-central Europe, or for Scandinavia+Germany taken as a whole, not for Sweden in particular. By the data you linked, just under 2/3 of Minnesotans self-report as German, Swedish, or Norwegian, plus probably a few percent from the “below the fold” number of Danes, Finns, Icelanders, etc.
I’ve certainly heard it stated many times that ethnic Swedes in America outperform ethnic Swedes in Sweden on most metrics, although I’ve never asked for or personally examined the sources on that.
America’s a rich country, though.
I don’t have the data to back this up, but I’d pretty much agree with “Ethnic Xs in America outperform ethnic Xs in Xland on most metrics” for all but maybe like one or two values of X. (Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc).
Not on the same metrics when you compare “All Americans” to “All Swedes,” as people typically do when they want to advocate that America should adopt a Swedish-style welfare state.
This strikes me as a weird argument. Do you think that there is something like essential, possibly genetic, “Swedishness”, onto which Swedish government (elected by Swedes) imposed one set of policies, and US government (elected overwhelmingly by nonSwedes) another set of policies, with results proving that Swedes are really resourceful people, but should be governed by Americans?
Of course this is somewhat complicated by the fact that Sweden has been since 1995 partly governed by the European Union, so perhaps the real takeaway is that Americans are better at running their federation than Europeans.
Probably cultural more than genetic, but yes. While culture changes a lot over generations and drifts apart in separated subpopulations, there are also significant threads of continuity over a span of centuries. See Albion’s Seed for some examples of arguments along these lines.
Ok, I do not dispute that long running cultural continuity is important, but my prior is that Minnesota Swedes do not tell us much about Swedish socialism. They might perhaps tell us something about European “socialism”, if that is a thing.
What I find specifically implausible is that since Swedes under US government are outperforming largely self governing Swedes in Sweden, they apparently need American paternalism to thrive.
Instead I think that differences in outcomes might be explained by positive selection among immigrants and partly by general context (Europe vs US). That second point gets us back to differences in governance, but whatever problems in this area Sweden has, they are not exclusively that of Swedish socialism, but European.
I don’t think this is really the argument. I’m not aware of many people who are going around insisting that Sweden needs to change its government to be more like the US.
I am aware of a lot of people who go around insisting that the US needs to change its government to be more like Sweden. And it’s appropriate to inform them that all the metrics they point to where the “average Swede” has it better than the “average American” flip around entirely if you control for ethnicity.
If you want the US to look more like Sweden on whatever statistics you’re quoting, the way to actually achieve that is not to implement the policies of the Swedish government, but to increase the relative population of Swedish people.
@Matt M
I mean, yeah, I agree with that. US government has in a sense much more difficult tasks than Swedish government and it is unreasonable to expect that it could be just as efficient. But the message of shared video (which I didn’t watch) according to OP is supposed to be “Swedish socialist government bad”, which is a whole different debate.
I’m not sure how one can argue Sweden is economically successfully “because of” socialism. Sweden had one of the world’s highest standards of living prior to socialism really being a thing there. Plus, other nations have tried socialism harder, and failed entirely, and the US is fabulously wealthy despite not being anywhere close to “socialist.”
At best you can say the social welfare state is compatible with a high income, democratic market state.
Sweden fared relatively poorly in the 70s and 80s. In 1970, Sweden was basically the richest planet in the world besides the US and Monaco. It is not anymore, and it’s not even in the top 10. The US is. So is Switzerland. So is Norway, because Norway has a massive amount of oil wealth. I guess you could still put Denmark in there.
Of course, these Nordic nations are all insanely expensive, so as soon as you start adjusting for living standards, they fall.
Is it sustainable? Well, we’ll see. Sweden is going to get pressured to join the Euro and the next time a recession hits, “lol.”
Impressive.
Moderate lefties have taken that on board.
But happy, healthy, equal, peaceful…? The left-right debate isn’t exactly about how to maximise GDP.
The version of Sweden and socialism I’m familiar with is that, starting (I think) in the late 19th century, Sweden was one of the most free market countries in Europe and during that period went from being one of the poorer to one of richest countries. It eventually switched to a more nearly socialist policy, with lots of income redistribution and a significant restraint on free enterprise, coasted for a while on its past gains, eventually ran into difficulties and is now mildly backing off on the redistribution and more on the restrictions of free enterprise.
I don’t know if that story is correct, but it is the pro-market explanation of the relevant history I have heard.
This is wrong. Sweden hit its richest comparative status basically off the back of being the first nation to go in for mass female labor mobilization. They got on that train before anyone else, and to this day still have a far higher percentage of its total population in the formal labor market than just about everyone else – a full nine percent higher than the US, for example (the Swiss have also reached this level recently, but that is the result of a multi-decade stretch of very tight labor markets in Switzerland, not something the Swiss deliberately set out to achieve.)
This was deliberate dristigste policy from the governments side, and included a bunch of Taylorist research into making homes more labor efficient.
Sweden also had a saner response to the oil crisis than most nations – it transitioned its entire grid to hydro and nuclear, and that base of cheap low-externalities power has been a comparative advantage ever since, and its higher education system is also very well thought out.
I’d not necessarily call the hydro ‘saner’ so much as ‘luckier’, what with sweden containing lots of mountain rivers and not many people. But not giving in to fears about nuclear is smart.
“Comparative advantage” is a technical term in economics, and I don’t think that’s what it means.
..To be more explicit: Sweden has cheap electricity for heavy industrial uses, and this is not a hidden cost / subsidy offloaded onto the Swedish health care system by not accounting for the air-pollution from coal, but a genuine competitive edge, even if not as big a one as, for example, Icelandic geothermal. Not really seeing how this fails to be a comparative advantage – it shows up in Sweden being a leading producer of a lot of steel alloys for example.
So what you meant was “this explains why Sweden has comparative advantage in heavy industry over (say) farming”?
That would be a legitimate use of the term. The way you put it, “that base of cheap low-externalities power has been a comparative advantage,” sounded to me as though it meant that it gave Sweden an advantage in competing with other countries.
@DavidFriedman
The version I heard was that there was lots of income redistribution but not much restraint on free enterprise.
The version I heard was that that happened a couple of decades ago. And it demonstrates that democratic socialism can be walked back from, contrary to some conservative arguments that socialism always locks in.
My understanding is they walked back during a crisis similar to, but quieter than the Greek 2008 crisis.
So, the Mad God/Executive Producer demands that we develop a film titled “Sean Bean Must Die”, which is to be a collection of a dozen or so death scenes, all featuring Sean Bean, where each scene could plausibly be from a completely different (non-existent) film.
You are invited to propose such scenes.
He is run over by a car driven by Mr. Bean, with Sean Penn in the shotgun seat. Brandishing a shotgun.
He is dispatched, in consecutive scenes, by Fay Wray, Sam Hamm and Cheri Oteri.
Such a shame Sean Bean isn’t pronounced Shawn Bawn or Seen Been.
I looked it up, and Sean Bean is apparently the only known celebrity with orthographically but not auditorily rhyming first and last names.
Maybe that’s why he Must Die.
Rhymes Orthographically would make a great band name. (Terrible songs, though.)
I’m really curious – how does one look this up? Is there some Quora question about it?
I just typed in, “celebrities with rhyming first and last names” (no quotation marks). Google is frighteningly smart.
When I google “celebrities with rhyming first and last names sean bean” the first hits says that Sean Bean is not unique, indeed, that Cheri Oteri as another false rhyme.
Aha, but Cheri Oteri is not an *orthographic” rhyme. (BTW, I made up the phrase “orthographic rhyme,” I have no idea if that’s the technical name or not).
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe Cheri Oteri *is” an orthographic etc. etc. But Sean Bean is much more impressive.
Wouldn’t Cheri Oteri be the opposite of Sean Bean? Her name rhymes auditorily.
Cherie Berry (name on every elevator in NC) looks like it should rhyme like a My Little Pony, but doesn’t actually rhyme.
https://weberaleigh.com/products/cherie-berry-lifts-me-up-option-3
I am sitting 50 feet away from a Cherie Berry elevator. She is a celebrity in NC, because her picture is in *every damned elevator* in the entire state.
Stephen Colbert doesn’t think that Cheri Oteri rhymes.
Norm Macdonald thinks it rhymes, but what does he know?
It sounds like it rhymes to me when Colbert says it.
Are live-action versions of cartoons still a thing? Bean would make a fine Kenny.
He’s the dictator of a small European country. He narrowly survives an assassination attempt, then goes out like Elvis with a heart attack on the crapper a few minutes later.
Make the movie about finding Sean Bean in every scene. The very first scene stars him as a primary character who dies front and center, and after that he gets progressively harder to find: at some point he’s the guy that dove away from a car chase and fell off a bridge. Or the climber in the distant background of an establishing shot whose harness snaps. Or the man choking on his food in a restaurant action scene.
After every scene ends, do a fast-rewind to the point where Sean Bean dies, and show the last few seconds in slow motion.
I’ve seen that scene with Bean, and it seems mean.
Alternately, do the same idea but in reverse, and then ask people afterwards what the earliest death they spotted was.
How many times has Sean Bean died not in medieval fantasy?
Assuming that’s his schtick, I’m going to propose:
1) Sean Bean as King Arthur and Sean Penn as Mordred at Camlann, the latter already surrounded by corpses of his warriors. After an exchange of meaningful dialogue, Arthur charges Mordred with Excalibur, but Mordred impales him by setting his spear. Mordred removes his helmet to taunt that he was mightier than the magic sword, to which the mortally-wounded Arthur finds the strength to fatally cut his throat.
IMDB has a list, or you can try the video. Notable are Goldeneye, in the recent past, and Equilibrium, in the future.
We start with Sean Bean climbing a steep cliff face. It’s a huge cliff, at least a couple of hundred meters tall. Sean is free-climbing, so he has no safety gear. He is about two-thirds of the way up and checks the sun, which right on the horizon; he’ll have to work fast. As he makes his way up, grunting and sweating, it gets steadily darker. Finally he’s a dozen meters from the top; now we can only hear his breath and the sounds of his hands and feet on the rock. Then there’s an abrupt sliding sound, an “Oh shit!”, a few seconds of silence, and we roll credits.
Make it like Groundhog Day. He starts in a random scene, dies and then he moves on to the next scene. No matter what he does, he always dies and moves on to the next one. Every death scene is something different. Sean Bean is trying to figure out how to escape until he learns to accept himself and not fight his destiny. The last scene is him rolling a boulder up a hill and then it flattens him.
I was similarly going to recommend a version of Russian Doll, but with an actual resolution this time,
The movie ‘Sean of the Dead’ where Sean Bean plays the role of Bill Nighy.
‘Sean the sheep:’ Sean Bean plays a sheep who is slaughtered for meat.
‘Beanstalk’: Sean Bean finds a magical bean and plants it. It grows into a enormous plant that he climbs. It starts raining and he loses his grip and falls to his death.
‘The Peanuts Movie’: Sean Bean plays Charlie Brown who flies his kite during a thunderstorm. Lightning strikes and he is killed. The rest of the movie is about Snoopy.
A battle royale kind of thing where all the roles are played by Sean Bean. They are also, diegetically, clones of Sean Bean. Last one standing kills the second-to-last but gets mortally wounded in the process and dies.
Last one standing is killed by Sean Connery, shouting “There can be only one!”
SSC, what are you giving up for Lent?
I haven’t decided yet. Soda is tempting, since I’ve been having some success cutting it back lately, and I’m better off cutting it out entirely, but I’d like to do something more meaningful. Giving up gossip, maybe, since workplace gossip has really gotten to me lately.
Some day, I will try the Jesus fast.
Today is not that day
You can always do the John the Baptist fast of honey and locusts.
Is that different from the Daniel Fast?
40 days and nights? I would like to do it this Lent. I may or may not have enough body fat for that, so I just resolved to do 4+ days, extended as far as I feel relatively well.
Someone clearly didn’t get the memo on Mardi Gras. 🙂
Heh.
I definitely did fatten myself up in preparation, to the tune of 10 kilograms extra, but I’m still not sure. I’m projecting about 15 kg of weight loss by the end of Lent. Will see how it goes – the worst part is the first few days, thereafter it becomes routine, and hunger goes away.
I just hope by the end of it rocks don’t start looking like bread to me
This is a possibility. Both Scripture and the medical literature suggest that hunger disappears after the first few days and then reappears when you really need to eat again.
Meat except on Sundays and for dinner with family on weekdays
Alcohol, except with friends who I see rarely
Sugar
Trying: eating before noon everyday
Planning: no breakfast and a small lunch on Fridays
(Catholic, with Orthodox friends, so I always feel like a wimp.)
I’ve given up sweeteners and will do the same this year.
Political discussions and news, especially partisan news sites.
I’m allowing SSC for now, on the grounds that it’s not primarily a political platform. No political topic engagement though.
I gave up arguing climate issues on FB for Lent a few years ago and never went back.
Giving up beer and any other alcohol till April 10ths.
Alcohol (with a couple of pre-planned cheat days for hospitality/celebration purposes) and Twitter.
Reddit, Twitter, and my Facebook feed (it’s not really practical for me to leave FB entirely right now, but I’m restricting it to communicating/organizing with people I know IRL.)
I support soda. Hopefully if you give it up for Lent when you’re already having success, you can stop drinking it permanently, like I have.
Isn’t that contrary to the point of Lenten fasting–which is giving up something good and right for a greater good?
I mean, that might be official Roman Catholic doctrine. But the big feature of the fast is giving up meat, which is permitted but seems less that great morally (Adam and Eve were vegetarians).
Yeah. The same goes even more so for gossip, which is actually sinful. I don’t know how to get away from it otherwise, though.
If you have more appropriate suggestions I am happy to hear it, but I won’t be giving up food of any kind.
Ah shoot, Babylon Bee has my number.
Booze. I’m also going to do the “adopt a positive habit” thing and go back to the gym. I’ve put on like 20 pounds in the last 5 years or so and would like to get that off.
Also, further evidence Francis is an anti-pope: he wants us to give up trolling for Lent. Umm, pretty sure screaming at ignorant sinners on the internet is a spiritual work of mercy.
Doesn’t there have to be a pope in order for there to be an antipope, or is it just a historical accident that it’s normally been that way? Or are you suggesting that Benedict should still be regarded as pope, since he’s still alive. In which case, is it safe to have both the pope and antipope living in the same place? What if they meet? How much damage would their mutual annihilation produce? My Fermi estimate is in the range of a few gigatons for a blast involving masses of that size mutually annihilating.
Ah, but popes only spend part of their time conducting mass…
Antipopehood requires a rival claimant, yes. I’m not sure Benedict qualifies as a rival claimant, since he abdicated, of course, but perhaps it could be argued his abdication was invalid. In that case Benedict has a claim so long as he doesn’t validly abdicate, and Francis is the antipope, and their meeting would obliterate Rome.
There is also, of course, Pope Michael of Kansas.
>Antipopehood requires a rival claimant
What if the legitimate papacy is sede vacante?
This makes it sound like his spiritual authority only holds until you’re not in Kansas anymore.
So Dorothy was conveying important information to Toto, who’s Catholic. Indeed he probably had to be an ordained priest, since he blessed the rains down in Africa.
Alcohol.
For taking something on, which is encouraged in my church: going to try to do evening prayer twice a week.
Video games (PC and console)
Turning to SSC for advice. Has anyone experienced a combination of very mild ADD and bipolar symptoms that was hard to diagnose?
From the outside, I look like I am a reasonably high-performance researcher who is very absent-minded and disorganized. Recently, my family and friends have told me that I seem depressed: I’m not getting stuff done on time, I have executive function issues, I have subdued and insecure speech patterns.
From the inside, I feel stressed but generally happy, though my inability to focus and get stuff done lately scares me. And since forever, I feel like I have some aspects of mild bipolar and ADD: I alternate between getting worked up by random ideas and phases of being very low-energy, though usually without strong emotional issues, since I’m generally pretty upbeat and mellow.
I’ve tried therapy for a couple of years. One therapist especially was helpful. She agreed with my the above summary, but said that this doesn’t clearly qualify as a diagnosis of either ADD or bipolar. I’m now at a point where I want to try psychopharmacology: maybe antidepressants or something for ADHD, but I want to gather data before trying to get a prescription. Do you guys have experiences similar to mine, and have medications helped you get over them?
I got a dog and that relieved some of my issues with low level depression, it both gave me an anchor and a basic structure to my life and also the companionship/serotonin boost that helped smooth things out.
Do you take the dog for a walk? If so, it seems to me that the dog facilitates the walks, and the walks treat the low level depression, give structure etc.
I was going to suggest to addastra, before pharmacology, try any kind of regular exercise that you can conceive of enjoying – even in a small way. Getting a dog that requires daily walking can get you over the feeling of not really wanting to do the exercise.
Funnily enough, I’ve just started watching the Netflix series ‘After Life’ with Ricky Gervais. His dog manages to prevent him topping himself numerous times…
That is one hilarious typo. Unfortunately, my imagination is vivid and reacts too quickly to stop it sometimes…
cracks whip
Get on your knees, me!
🙂
Uh… that’s not a typo. That’s a suicide euphemism.
Really? Good to know.
Yes, I walked almost every day for 15 years and it was definitely a part of the value.
Thanks! That sounds like good general advice. What were your symptoms/experience of low-grade depression?
>maybe antidepressants or something for ADHD, but I want to gather data before trying to get a prescription.
I think stimulants would be a much better path to explore, since you say you don’t have strong emotional issues even when you’re down, and most of your problems are with getting stuff done.
Hey, it’s a fractional thread, time for speculation on hot-button issues!
So the following contradictory theories are both intuitively plausible to me:
1. Coronavirus will hurt Trump’s reelection chances. It’s a bad thing happening on his watch, and Presidents get blame/credit for bad/good things happening on their watch regardless of whether they’re actually responsible. This is especially true of economic shocks, which the coronavirus will probably cause, if the last few days of market drops are anything to go by. Also, his visible neglect of many traditional federal agency maintenance functions– acting officials in charge of things, career civil servants pushed out in favor of political loyalists– will make him all the more vulnerable to attacks for negligence/incompetence if and as the federal response fails (again, even if it would have failed anyway under a different President).
2. Coronavirus will help Trump’s reelection chances. Fear of external threats will make voters less willing to take a chance on someone new, and the border-crossing nature of the threat will make his border-restrictions schtick more appealing. Also, insert all the psychological research here about the correlation between fear of disease/contagion and conservatism.
Which effect do you think is likely to be stronger? Or will the two just cancel each other out? And how would we know?
A lot of media takes I’ve been seeing have been of the form, “Our real enemy isn’t plague but racism!” and conservative pundits seem to be deriding coronavirus as no worse than the flu or common cold, which… geez, that seriously seems crazy to me. As usual, I am baffled by what our society chooses to be bipartisan about.
So on that front Trump just doesn’t have much to worry about, at least at the moment. Media response could shift fast when bodies start dropping, but so far Trump seems happy to play this off as nothing, and Dems seem happy to let him.
On a related point, I keep waiting for Trump to announce that the coming crisis is excellent evidence we need to return certain key supply chains to the US, and so far he has declined. Really, what better scenario could he ask for to bolster his case for economic protectionism??? Is he holding out for evidence it was bioengineered to target Appalachian coal miners? You’re a populist, act like one!
So all in all I think my take is that the Trump administration’s incompetence hasn’t yet, but could, screw his chances.
Yeah, there’s definitely a case to be made that these events could be good arguments for some combination of closed borders and higher tariffs (both policy positions strongly associated with Trump). But so far, while I’ve heard a lot of people predicting that Trump would make that case, he… uh… hasn’t. Like not even a little bit.
I think his instincts are good here. Making that case now looks like beating on the Chinese because they’re sick. Once shortages actually start to happen, he can make that case.
Maybe, but I worry all this “we are just fine, nothing to worry about” stuff is going to backfire pretty soon. Can we count on not having an outbreak before we start feeling the shortages?
Has anyone tried to float “Frequent hand washing in response to the coronavirus outbreak is racist” as the official woke position on the subject? If I had a twitter account I’d be tempted to try, just to see if it would catch on.
But why? Why would you do that?
It was a joke.
I wouldn’t try the experiment in real life because I honestly think there’s a good chance it might convince some people.
The globalist take, of course, is that what’s needed here is not autarky but worldwide resilience and redundancy. Which may well require some government intervention, if markets tend to produce region/country monopolies on fragile critical infrastructure.
I keep seeing all these takes about how Coronavirus is inevitable and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, we can only treat it. The way they keep pronouncing it like a mantra makes me thinks its based more on ideology than any other reason. They think that if they keep telling us that it’s inevitable, we won’t try to put up walls to stop the spread until it is too late.
It’s also suspicious how quickly the Narrative went from “racism is the real problem” to “We can’t do anything to stop it.” Anytime I see a narrative whiplash like that, it suggests to me that something is going on.
I don’t see how those two narratives are inconsistent? The first one is saying “Stopping travel from China would be pandering to xenophobia and is unlikely to help” and the second one is saying “Stopping travel from China is unlikely to help because it’s already spread too far.”
And while you may not have seen them, there are plausible reasons why it will be hard to stop – it has a pretty long incubation period where it can spread undetected, a low mortality rate so it won’t burn itself out, and a pretty good chance of being mistaken for ordinary flu. All these factors make it hard to tell where you need to draw your quarantine lines. And imposing a quarantine has its own economic costs, so you want to get it right.
No, as Nick pointed out above, the Coronavirus was dismissed as not a problem. It was the racist “overreaction” that was the real issue. Then overnight, a Coronavirus pandemic became inevitable and we shouldn’t bother trying to keep it from coming here because of that. We just need to focus on what to do when it gets here. They did a 180 on what to think of the disease and yet the message stayed the same: don’t do anything to keep out foreigners.
Also, can we talk about the claim that banning travel from a plague-infested country wouldn’t work? If you think about that for a minute, it’s pretty obvious how stupid that statement is. If someone wants to claim banning the Chinese is racist, maybe, but don’t feed me some bullshit about how quarantines don’t work.
Is that the claim or do they believe that you can’t actually ban travel without causing more harm than the pandemic could cause?
The second implies that there was a time when stopping travel from China would have helped, and yet we somehow didn’t. Why did the people who are saying a travel ban won’t help now, not shout it from the rooftops then? If the answer is that they were too busy accusing anyone who proposed such a thing of xenophobic racism, then a charge of hypocrisy is merited.
Possibly virtuous hypocrisy, or at least understandable one. COVID-19 threatens far more people in East Asia than it does in North America, if only because of the raw number of people. If Americans have two choices, intense vaccine research that will eventually reduce casualties by 50% everywhere, or a travel ban that will confine all the casualties to East Asia, then the sort of bleeding-heart liberal or ordinary consequentialist who values a couple billion Asians more than a couple hundred million Americans, might find it desirable to use any argument necessary to take the travel ban off the table. Possibly even to the point of burning their own credibility over it, given the worst-case stakes.
Wrong Species:
I think the main argument that it won’t work is that any such blockade will be too leaky to work–that is, by the time we realize we need to stop travel from China, the virus has already gotten into circulation in Japan and Korea and Singapore and Indonesia and India and Iran, and by the time we know we need to stop travel from those countries, it’s already gotten into the US. This would imply either accepting that quarantine won’t help because it won’t be effective, or shutting down all international travel into the US. (And even then, if it’s already here and spreading, we lose.)
The second plausible argument would be that the actual costs of COVID-19 spreading in the US would be lower than closing the borders to a bunch of countries or maybe everyone.
A third plausible argument would be that these measures will only delay COVID-19 getting into the US, not prevent it–if that combines with extremely high costs for doing them, then it may not make sense.
I don’t know if any of these are correct, but they’re not crazy arguments to make.
I recall hearing of some research (simulations) that said that closing schools and daycares could be decisive in stopping pandemic flu, and it seems plausible that might work for COVID-19, too. Basically, you want to find a way to drive the average number of new infections that each sick person causes down below 1, and I think schools are a really good place for one sick person to spread their infection to like 10-20 people.
@ albatross11
There’s plenty of space between absolutely no restrictions and shutting down all international traffic. Saying that travel restrictions wouldn’t have any effect on the spread of an infectious disease is certainly an insane thing to say.
All of the “racism it the real enemy” I’ve seen is not about banning travel from China (which would be fine if it was recommended by the CDC, but suspicious if it was initiated from the WH). It was about how people of east asian ancestry in the US were being treated as potentially infected and chinese restaurants were losing business, as in https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/02/18/coronavirus-restaurants-suffer-wary-customers-stay-away/4753280002/
From the article:
So it’s about banning travel.
And:
So a rumor went around about a grocery store, and the explanation must be bigotry? Which must therefore be a national crisis rather than, uh, the horrible disease that could kill millions?
I’d like to propose that we keep track of *who* is saying these things. Lots of mainstream media outlets saying dumb things about a science or culture-war story is just stuff that happens on days when the sun rises in the East. But specific people or organizations can and should lose credibility if they’re wrong, and lose lots of credibility if they’re acting in bad faith.
@albatross11
Most of the health organizations have already lost credibility due to their uncritical acceptance of all things coming from the idealog Stanton Glantz.
Have you got something against Dr. Glantz in particular, or is this a broader anti-anti-tobacco thing?
@Statismagician
He is one of the worst. Repeatedly caught using shoddy methodology, making claims that the research doesn’t support, etc. I was reminded of him when I noticed he was still at it.
I remember an episode of Bullshit when he was interviewed. He straight up said that if you have to bend the truth to get people to stop smoking it’s worth it. Admitted that he does this shit in a fucking taped interview. The fact that his studies keep getting pimped by so many prestigious health organizations is proof that they shouldn’t be considered prestigious any longer.
And by the way, Dr. Glantz’s phd is in applied mechanics. Strange how that’s never mentioned.
Huh.
Well, today I’ve learned a thing, thanks.
It depends how bad it gets in the United States and how much the US economy is affected by the disruption in other parts of the world. If things stay pretty much how they are now, it’ll be good for Trump. If things get pretty bad and Trump messes things up somehow, he’ll be in big trouble. I think it also depends on who his Democratic opponent is. At a time of global crisis, I have a hard time seeing alot of moderates voting for an avowed socialist like Sanders, but if he’s up against someone like Bloomberg, then he could lose.
Another thing to consider, is the effect the virus will have on Chinese manufacturing and what effect that will have on American manufacturing.
If we get a pandemic, his Medicare-for-all plan will shoot up in popularity.
> At a time of global crisis, I have a hard time seeing alot of moderates voting for an avowed socialist like Sanders,
Sander’s whole shtick is “the system is broken” which requires people to actually think the system is broken, so the worse things seem to be going, the better he’ll likely do.
True.
However, if there is a bad outbreak in the US, I wouldn’t be too surprised if Trump or whoever the Democrat candidate is, or both, catch the virus and require intensive medical care or even drop dead: Trump, Sanders, Biden, Warren and Bloomberg are all in their 70s (the virus has a 8% fatality rate in the 70-79 age group), and they have to travel all over the country and attend lots of rallies for the presidential campaign.
Judging by his tweets, #1 seems more likely. It seems like he feels the state of the economy is more relevant to his electoral chances then whether he was known to have been banging the drums on getting quarantine measures carried out.
I can well believe that Trump *thinks* it’ll hurt him. It’s not clear that his judgment on what hurts him and what doesn’t will hold up here, though.
The rhetoric matters because if world-wide infection is inevitable his prior optimism can be used against him.
I think the big questions are going to be relative to the rest of the world. If the US avoids major outbreaks and and takes a lesser economic hit than other countries then it should strengthen Trump. It certainly should strengthen his ‘secure the borders/control who comes in and out’ position.
It’s also quite possible that coronavirus fizzles out, at least in terms of being a media centerpiece, due to the traditional flu season ending well before the election campaigns hit full swing. “Coronavirus on the decline” in the headlines isn’t a particularly useful weapon for either side to use.
I’m not confident in predicting what will or won’t happen with the virus, or whether or not a recession will happen prior to the election.
I am very confident in predicting that if there is a recession prior to the election, the dominant media narrative will be “this recession happened because of Trump’s economic policies, not because of the virus.”
If true, Trump has little to gain, but a lot to lose.
Even I wouldn’t blame Trump for coronavirus (though I wouldn’t be surprised if he was involved in the Kennedy assassination).
Pretty sure that was Ted Cruz’s dad.
Trump was spreading that rumor, so I think the idea is that Cruz’s dad is Trump’s fall guy.
Coronavirus has had little impact in the US so far. So I think at the present time it doesn’t much affect his election chances. Trump isn’t going to be blamed or praised for what’s going on in China, Japan, South Korea, or even Italy. In as much as it hurts the economy, it hurts him as the incumbent. But probably less so than if the economy was hurt without such an obvious external cause.
There are several things which could change. If the epidemic gets worse and the virus is spreading wildly in the rest of the world (in particular Europe), Trump initiates travel restrictions and such which his opponents attack him for, and it remains contained to isolated cases in the US, that’s a win for Trump. If the virus becomes an epidemic in the US, that’s a big negative for Trump, almost no matter what he did or does.
I’m confident that it’s #1, and if Trump tries to spread oil on troubled water rather than sound an alarm later today, he believes it’s #1 as well.
Counterpoint: Presidents almost never get blamed for wars that happen on their watch, despite most of them being bad things and most of them being readily avoidable with Presidential power. Bush II and the Iraq war is the major exception here, but I’m pretty sure it is exceptional rather than normal in that regard.
I think Presidents get credit/blame for good/bad things the public believes the President has great power over, and I think at least 80% of your observation boils down to the general public vastly overestimating the amount of power the President has over the domestic economy. But an economic downturn that is clearly linked to a virus outbreak in a foreign country is probably not going to fall into that category.
An economic downturn caused by the US economy being dependent on the Chinese manufacturing industry plausibly could, but I think Trump is effectively innoculated against being stuck with responsibility for that.
I think it’s more that presidents get blamed for things that people care about that are plausibly his fault, and wars are just usually pretty far down the list of things the average person cares about.
I think that generally people are conservative. If things are going well don’t make a change is generally the rule of thumb, if things aren’t going well that is when you make a change.
It will probably hurt Trump. Part of it is because he relaxed the Obamacare rules around “junk plans.” One of the main arguments against them was that they might lead insurance to actually function as insurance rather than a dressed-up redistribution scheme:
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article153434129.html
The problem is that many voters lack a sense of responsibility and many have bought low-premium high-deductible plans and will act shocked, shocked, when reminded how high the deductibles really are. Even though many of these plans predate Trump, he’ll get the blame for them.
IIRC, the big problem with Trump’s relaxing the rules wasn’t high deductible plans – those were brought in well before he was even a candidate. (Also before Obama.) It’s reallowing deceptive plans that in effect cover only low expenses, not the kinds of things insurance was made for, due to limits on total amount they’ll pay. Basically, we’ll cover your hangnail, but better not get cancer ;-(
I’m not exactly a reluctant Trump voter, and very far removed from those communities, but my understanding is that there is a sizeable contingent out there who don’t like Trump and his policies personally all that much but are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt due to the strong economy. Take that away, and I think a lot of marginal voters will desert him. Not a lot numerically, but elections are won and lost at the margin.
I’ve heard that an incumbent pres. with a strong economy is unbeatable… if this tanks the economy trump loses that strong position.
Making sure people don’t freak out and the economy doesn’t take a hit should be priority.
It might bite him that he has sacked the entire pandemics response team.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/
Judging from the last four and a half years, it will have no impact whatsoever and we’ll have forgotten about it by the summer.
Yes, this time feels qualitatively different from all the other “crises” we’ve had, but many of those crises felt different at the time too, and they weren’t.
[Epistemic status: ignoring all my instincts, because I’m like George Costanza. All my instincts are wrong.]
I would like to propose E.C. Segar’s “Thimble Theater,” featuring Popeye, as the single greatest pop-culture artifact of the first half of the twentieth century. (OK, I feel like talking about Popeye and this is the best way I can think how.)
First half? Hmmm….
I think you’ve got something there. In the comics world it certainly outlived Barney Google and Mutt and Jeff, and while Blondie and Gasoline Alley are still going they have little or no pop culture influence left in them. Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie make stronger cases: in fact, considering that Little Orphan Annie recently got a live action movie (Annie, 2014) while Popeye’s last theatrical release was thirty years ago (Popeye, 1980) you could argue that Little Orphan Annie had much more staying power. On the other hand, Popeye had the cartoon and that was really popular…
On the other hand pop-culture is really big: you’re going against a lot of jazz songs, some of the most famous movies ever (Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind), all kinds of famous books (Grapes of Wrath, other books I haven’t thought of), etc. It would be hard to say Popeye ends up on top in that fight.
Still if I’m wrong I’d gladly treat you to a duck dinner. You bring the ducks!
Even for just theatrical animated shorts, the first half of the 20th century is also the time of the creation of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies (Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc.); Walt Disney’s major early characters (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, etc.); Walter Lantz Studio’s characters (Woody Woodpecker, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Andy Panda, etc.); Pat Sullivan/Otto Messmer studios (Felix the Cat); Terrytoons (Mighty Mouse, Dinky Duck, Heckle and Jeckle, etc.); MGM cartoon studios (Barney Bear, Droopy, Tom and Jerry, etc.). Popeye has some stiff competition.
It would be a tough call whether “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man” is more widely known than “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow”.
Or maybe I’m living in the past. When I was young every schoolkid knew the former, as well as several parodies of it, but of course the musical of Annie didn’t even exist then. Do kids still know “I’m strong to the finish ’cause I eats me spinach”?
My real question is, “Okay, you feel like talking about Popeye, so please continue.” But that’s not really a question.
I still write Olive Oyl on the shopping list.
Here’s a media thing that annoys me. When the stock market has a particularly bad day, a lot of reports will say things like “Today, eleventy-billion dollars of value/wealth was WIPED OUT as the market finished down X%.” Now, in a certain sense this is maybe “technically correct” insofar as it’s true that a share of stock in a major corporation is a real asset, and that it’s also true that the best estimate of the “value” of those shares is their actual trading price in a liquid market.
But there’s another sense in which it’s not at all true, because most stock market movements have little to nothing to do with any real events that may or may not be happening to any particular company in any particular moment in time.
Consider the following analogy: Your great uncle passes away. In his will, he leaves to you his old antique tractor.
In time period 1, you arrive at his farm to inspect your inheritance, and it appears to you that it’s an old, rusted, hunk of junk. You immediately conclude that it is probably worthless, in fact, you may have to pay someone to come haul it away. Your estimate of its value in period 1: $0 (or possibly negative).
In time period 2, you’re watching TV and you see a report on some crazy guy who collects old, antique tractors. They show his prize possession, a tractor he claims is worth $10,000 and it… looks a lot like yours. It’s cleaned up and you’re not a tractor expert, so you can’t be sure, but it’s intriguing enough for you to update your priors regarding your own tractor’s worth. You guess there’s a 5% chance your tractor is worth something similar to the one shown on TV. Your estimate of its value in period 2: $500 (5% of $10,000)
In time period 3, you contact your local tractor appraiser. Before he wastes his time coming out to physically inspect your tractor, he asks you to describe it and send him some pictures. He replies to your e-mail and tells you that he thinks there’s a pretty good chance you have the real deal! He can’t be totally sure until he inspects it in person, but he thinks there’s an 80% chance your tractor is just as valuable as the one on TV. Your estimate of its value in period 3: $8,000 (80% of $10,000)
In time period 4, the appraiser shows up to inspect your tractor in person. Alas, bad news. While your tractor appeared to be the rare and valuable model, it’s actually a much more common one, and some of the rust damage is irreparable. As a result, your tractor is of virtually no value to the tractor collector market. You ask the appraiser what you should do, and he tells you that these things actually have a decent amount of scrap metal value. He estimates that if you call up your local scrap metal dealer, they’d probably pay about $100 to come take it off your hands. Your estimate of its value in period 4: $100.
In time period 5, you contact the scrap metal dealer. After some back and forth, they ultimately agree to come pick up the tractor, but they will only pay you $50, not $100. You agree, they come, they pay, and the transaction is concluded. The final realized value in period 5: $50.
So, what was the real value of the tractor? The answer would seem to be $50. At any point in this story, that was the tractor’s real and actual value. At various points you had good reason to estimate that the value was different, but ultimately those estimates were incorrect and did not, in any way, influence the final value. The tractor was worth $50 in scrap metal when you first observed it in period 1 (even though you didn’t know this), and it was worth exactly that the whole time (even when your estimates changed.) Zooming in on period 4 specifically, would it be reasonable for you to be upset with the appraiser, and to accuse him of “destroying $7,900 worth of value” of your tractor? No. The inspector didn’t change anything about your tractor. Furthermore, the only reason its pre-appraisal value was $8,000 was because he’s the one who told you that in period 3. If you wanted to blame him for that “value destruction”, you’d then have to credit him for somehow “creating” $7,500 of value in your tractor in period 3 when he told you there was an 80% chance it was valuable.
I feel like this is how the news treats the stock market. They almost never say “the market created $100 billion of value today” when stocks go up, but they’re always eager to announce rampant destruction of economic value whenever estimates change for the negative. I suspect that the reasons behind this are largely political, but I won’t get into this now.
Am I way off-base here? Is it reasonable for them to talk this way?
I don’t have a strong opinion about the larger question, but I often see headlines that are something like “Jeff Bezos made $15 billion today!” when, in reality, what happened is that Amazon’s stock when up a few percent. So, I don’t think they only do this when talking about bad days for the market.
Ahhh, true! That sort of reporting does sometimes happen. But I would argue that’s serving the same larger political purpose!
When the markets go up, the story is that specific fantastically wealthy people got even more fantastically wealthy without having to perform any labor or make any sacrifice.
When the markets go down, the story is that “the American economy” somehow lost vital resources because that’s just what capitalism does!
That’s fair. It does seem to always be presented as a negative. Though, I’d have to look at a lot of headlines to be sure.
For not-huge stakes in liquid, publicly traded companies, the market price is more than an estimate of value. It’s the price where you can actually sell your shares (well, the bid is anyway, but bid-ask spreads are small in liquid stocks). If you decide to sell stocks today, you’ll get less cash than if you’d sold them last week (for most stocks).
I agree that the phrasing you’re describing leaves something to be desired when talking about the market as a whole, or even about Elon Musk’s wealth (if he wanted to sell all of his stock, he’d have a massive impact on the price, and would sell it much lower than the current market price).
Probably nitpicking here, but from the time you read “TSLA $450” on the CSPAN ticker to the time you actually execute the trade, it’s entirely possible the price has moved. Probably not a ton, but moved nonetheless. The “TSLA $450” ticker is not, itself, an offer to sell you or buy your shares at $450. It is an estimate of the offer you will likely receive if you attempt to sell/buy immediately. The final price, as always, may differ.
More specifically, there are three “market prices” for any given stock: the Bid price (the highest price anyone trading the stock directly on the exchange is offering to buy it for right now), the Ask price (the highest price anyone trading the stock directly on the exchange is offering sell it for right now), and the trading price (the price of the last transaction on the exchange). If you look up a stock quote from your broker’s website, they’ll tell you all three. The three prices are usually very close to each other, but not always.
The CSPAN ticker is probably telling you the last trading price, with whatever delay it takes for the information to get from the exchange’s computers to CSPAN’s ticker. And you’re correct that the stock quote’s delay, plus the delay involved in placing the order and waiting for it to execute, gives the price time to move substantially from the quoted price you saw.
I always assumed that it just sounded cooler/more attention grabbing to talk about X billion being destroyed. Plus there’s the general negativity bias in the news – stock market gains are rarely remarked on in general. It never occurred to me that there could be a political motivation behind it, and I suspect that there largely isn’t.
If something new happens that changes the actual value of companies, and therefore moves their stock price, I think it’s accurate to say that wealth has been created or destroyed. For example if the government announces new tariffs, and the stock market drops 1%, then it means the professional traders think the new tariffs make the set of publicly traded companies 1% less valuable, so it seems reasonable to say that wealth has been destroyed.
If the world learns something that was already true, and that moves stock prices, I agree it’s weird to talk about wealth being created or destroyed. For example if the government releases some quarterly economic statistics, and people realize the economy is doing worse than expected, so the stock market goes down 1%, it’s a bit weird to say that wealth was destroyed. It just turns out the companies weren’t as valuable as people thought they were before the announcement.
Right. I guess the relevant maxim would be something like “Don’t count your unrealized gains before they hatch?”
Your Tesla stock isn’t really worth anything at all until you actually sell it. Prior to that, everything is just an estimate.
Graffiti on potholes.
Wanksy of Manchester draws obscene images on potholes to prod the government to repair them.
A couple months later, potholes in Saratov, Russia were decorated with portraits of politicians. This was equally efficient in fixing the potholes, but that’s not why I heard about it. I heard about it as a political tactic. I am quite conflicted.
It’s bizarre to me that this sort of thing even works.
If the explanation for the government not filling potholes is that they are some combination of callous/lazy, then wouldn’t it be cheaper/easier to just spray paint over the graffiti rather than fill in the hole?
It almost seems like what’s going on here is a successful, (very) low-level form of terrorism. The state is filling in the holes not because that’s the cheapest way to remove the graffiti, but because they believe the graffiti will continually re-appear until the pothole is filled. The citizenry is threatening the state “fill in these holes, or else” and the state is complying rather than risk further escalation.
It’s just attention, right?
Potholes are easy for governments to ignore, so they ignore them. Then people take action that makes them hard to ignore, so fixing them becomes a priority.
That’s what they did in Ryazan for example (it’s is in Russian but everything’s obvious from the photos. The text only says they started an investigation against the activists who did it which you could guess anyway) And in fact in Saratov they first painted the graffiti over and only then fixed the pothole. Aaand it was broken again by the next year so apparently they didn’t spend that much money on the fix.
>broken again by the next year so apparently they didn’t spend that much money on the fix.
British councils tend to have the same philosophy. Fill it up with some molten tarmac but don’t bother getting good fusion with the base material. Come winter the expanding ice every evening pops it right out.
I think it makes more sense if you assume incompetence instead of malevolent laziness. Less “meh, I don’t feel like doing my job as pothole-filler today” and more “I want to help the people of my district out but I have no idea how to actually do that so I’m just going to do what everyone else seems to be doing,” which will inevitably not be well aligned with what the people actually want, like fixing potholes.
It’s like how you think your apartment is clean and tidy, and then someone comes in and says “it looks like a bomb went off in here” and points to all the things you stopped seeing because you got used to them.
> low-level form of terrorism
That’s an interesting way to look at it. Possible flip-side: government priorities do not match the priorities of the people.
I’m guessing that pothole filling works like much bureaucracy. They likely collect reports of potholes and then process them in geographically co-located groups. This allows the maximum number of potholes to be filled given the available budget. So taking this approach to pothole filling probably results in overall fewer potholes being filled. Concurrently, it provides a serious form of feedback about which potholes are most important, and that’s pretty difficult to gauge from a central bureaucracy.
Slightly cuter : pothole birthday cake
At my place of work there was a bug that never got fixed, so inspired by this and similar anecdotes I brought a cake for its first birthday (it’s pretty clear what version of the software introduced it) and invited everyone for a slice. Everyone thought it was funny, and it did get the bug into the conversations for awhile, but it’s still not fixed.
Yesterday The Atlantic published a piece about online dating. If you’re even remotely aware of online dating, you can pretty much mouth along most of the arguments they made against it; it’s dehumanizing, it promotes hookup culture, it turn people into commodities, etc. Their biggest argument centers around the idea that it’s turned dating from a spontaneous process of finding love into an economics-driven numbers game. All of these arguments are true, but you know, should have been made before we dismantled the other institutions that used to result in potential paramours meeting.
The one part of the article that stuck out to me was the following: (emphasis mine)
For reference, the hinge aritcle referenced can be found here and the OKC blog post can be found here.
I get that the authors don’t like the outcomes outlined in these two articles, but it seems like their largest complaint is the very idea that these companies that process large amounts of data have conducted and published analysis on this data. This strikes me as a really weird stand to make; can anyone steelman their position?
It’s Copenhagen Ethics.
So long as the thing you’re doing is kind of indirect and at arms’ length, you’re fine.
But the moment you get involved, even if you’re making things somewhat but not completely better, you’re culpable.
Not sure if I can steelman it, but they make their logic clear earlier in the article:
It’s basically the race and IQ argument against doing studies.
Is that their same logic argument that leads them to finding the studies creepy? It seems directly opposite.
Neither of the two articles hold or reflect the belief that the dating market is impartial or correct. In fact, they both seemingly agree that dating is inherently unfair and not driven by laws.
I think the problem is that if the market (or whatever) is unfair, it must be unfair to someone, and here from the studies it looks like it’s males who get to be treated unfairly, and females who are being unfair, which are both
crimethinkobviously impossible and absurd.I think so.
Seems that anything involving economic-style analysis triggers them.
Oooohhh, yeah. That’s probably it. Good call. I was too wrapped around the results of this analysis to see they’re likely just pissed off at the concept of analysis in general.
Thanks!
Follow up statement: What a weird thing to be triggered by.
I think jermo is more right than you think. They object to it in this area because of what it indicates, because of ideological reasons.
Hell, they straight up admitted it in the first quote I quoted.
Ah yes. Good catch. I am now reverting to my original position.
I disagree. How many people besides Austrian economists get upset at people for the use of methodologies as such. Intelligent but partisan individuals can detect immediately whether a particular research methodology generates conclusions and implications that make them uncomfortable.
I think most people who know *anything* about online dating are already well aware of what the data says. They, understandably, find the idea of heaping any kind of sympathy on unattractive heterosexual men repulsive so they’d rather keep those stones upturned.
It’s the idea that there’s something unfair about the distribution of likes that irritates the author not the idea of plugging a dataset into a distribution commonly associated with economics.
Why is it understandable to not want to be sympathetic towards unattractive guys? Read this if you havent already.
I think the instinct is not to be sympathetic to weak or generally undesirable men is natural.
It’s a natural bias, a pernicious one perhaps, but natural.
@rumham
I don’t believe this for a second and think that they reasoned back from an undesired outcome (calling the wrong group privileged), to find a reason to dismiss it.
@jermo sapiens
It’s understandable if you recognize that The Atlantic, like most of society, believes in gender roles where men are responsible for whatever happens to them, unless the cause is the actions of other men.
So the reason(s) why women turn down men must then be things that they can change, rather than a trait that they were born with and cannot change enough to be top tier, so men who fail at dating can be blamed, with women having desires that are consistent with achieving equality.
Note that ‘understandable’ is not the same as ‘just.’
@Aapge
Agreed, see my subsequent comments.
On this point though, I think the author is clearly wrong. I’m not sure where they got the idea that unless everyone is happy, a market is not fair. Markets are good at a lot of things, but they’re definitely not good at creating fairness.
Also, the idea that straight women being charged with “crimes” is also over the top. My view is that the dating apps and the data they generate have exposed the natural behavior of women and thereby exposed the lie behind feminism: in general, women think very differently from men specially in the dating market, because as Chateau Heartiste put it, “sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive”.
We developed social technology to overcome the problems caused by a completely unregulated dating market: marriage, monogamy, abstinence, etc… but since these have been completely dismantled in the last 50 years, it’s not surprising that these same problems now reappear (mostly, women having sex with alphas, not getting the commitment they want from alphas, and betas not getting anything). Feminism was correct that the previous social technology imposed a higher cost on women than on men. But it’s not clear at all that removing this very imperfect technology is an improvement (I would argue it’s clear that things are worse now for both sexes), and we dont really have any substitutes for them.
If this is the issue, why are the dating apps so heavily imbalanced towards men? The female hypergamy hypothesis makes some sense in the context of an environment where men literally outnumber women two-to-one, but women aren’t actually flocking to this environment in the first place. For some context, if you think Chinese men have it rough, China is around 52% male, and the proportion of men is projected to peak at around 54%, with 1.15 men for each woman. Tinder is, again, 2 to 1. Dating apps aren’t the norm, at least not for women, and men who use them are putting themselves at a massive disadvantage.
If women actually liked the dynamics of hookup apps, you’d think they’d use them more.
(E: apparently the divide has gotten much bigger since 2016)
Yep, I’ve posted before that I think the “women having sex with alphas” line is overplayed. There’s certainly a dedicated core of women doing this, at certain life stages, but I don’t think it describes the whole of it.
I mostly think that these sites have an imbalance because men are more inclined to pursue women than the reverse. Partly out of innate differences, and partly because women are instructed from childhood that they don’t need a man to be happy, while men aren’t really instructed one way or the other so go with their gut, which tells them they want a woman.
I met my wife online, and basically all of my male friends did the same. In my experience most men who have anything going on, if they signal they’re looking for a wife, can use online dating to fill their schedules with dates without much difficulty. Filling your schedule with one-night stands is mostly impossible for all but a few men, and a certain kind of man appears to get especially frustrated over this.
@Wency
You realize that nothing you typed there conflicts with the theory that more younger men are having trouble getting dates and more older women are having trouble getting married due to technology and social mores opening up people to more choice, right? In fact, it seems to support it.
@Hoopyfreud
This is easily explained within the context of women seeking alphas, by noticing that dating apps are poor ways to filter for them:
– High quality is properly signaled subtly, not bluntly, because the ability to do so is itself an important quality, yet this is hard to do on dating apps
– High status is often interpreted by how others react to a person and/or by reputation, but dating apps isolates two people (this is also why in meatspace dating, it is helpful to have a wingman) and doesn’t show people’s reputation
– They don’t allow women to publicly shame low quality men into not approaching women like them and shame men into approaching them more subtly.
If you look at female dating complaints, it is typically that they get bothered by men who are beneath them, that they get approached too bluntly, and/or that men turn out to be different than they presented them at (or how the woman judged them initially).
@Wency
Yet the statistics are that the men on Twitter actually tend to go on very few dates.
Because men are very horny 24/7. (yes, that’s a generalization, and it’s generally true, there are exceptions obviously)
The female hypergamy hypothesis makes sense in a species where men can impregnate any number of women but women can only be pregnant by one man at a time, and where the gestational period is long. A guy can have sex with any girl, it doesnt biologically prevent him from impregnating others, so he doesnt have to be very choosy. A girl needs to be choosy: carrying a loser’s baby is a huge cost for little benefit. Carrying the tribe’s best hunter’s baby (or other high status male) is still a huge cost but the benefit is much higher.
@rumham:
I don’t think I was trying to dispute it. Dating is tough as a man in his early 20s unless he either has a way with women or is prepared to shamelessly play the numbers game. This has often been the norm, in many times and places. The circumstances have changed somewhat, though being unprepared or unwilling to marry has long been a component. And likewise, I noted on an earlier thread how many women I see in their 30s who can’t find a husband, and that they seem a lot more qualified than the men I know who are left over.
@Aapje:
I think this aligns with rumham’s point that the issue is young men. Men in their late 20s or older who have some things going for them and signal a desire to get married should be able to fill their schedules with dates. At least in the South, and from what I’ve seen, the Midwest. Also, a lot of guys don’t have much going on. That demographic is heavily overrepresented in the group that stays on Tinder/Bumble forever, thus presenting the image that male Tinder users are hopeless. There should be a name for this phenomenon — it also applies to job seekers, for example.
@Aapje
This is explicable within the framework, but it’s certainly not evidence for it. And insofar as the complaint is, “women only want to fuck attractive guys who flirt well” (which is, I think what people mean by “alphas”), it certainly doesn’t support that. And insofar as your model is that dating apps offer insufficient opportunity to publicly humiliate people, I’ll note that not even people on dating apps are actually usually that cartoonishly cruel. Most approaches get ghosted, not berated.
@jermo sapiens
Going over evo-psych talking points entirely divorced from people’s actual behavior is a boring waste of time, so I’ll reiterate: if women are meant to be motivated to ruthlessly select for a few men at the pinnacle of attractiveness and value, why are they repelled by the environment in which that’s easiest to do?
I think there is still a stigma of online dating where you resort to that because you don’t have any luck finding a partner in other ways. So, women avoiding online dating could be seen as evidence that they are only looking for the alphas, and they see everyone online as not that.
I understand that evo-psych is not everyone’s cup of tea, but from my perspective it’s not divorced from people’s actual behavior, instead I find it the most satisfying and parsimonious explanation for people’s behavior. If you have reasons for why that’s wrong, I would love to hear them, but “boring waste of time” is not going to convince anyone.
I would submit that your premise is wrong: dating apps are not the best environment for selecting alphas. Also, an alpha male is not necessarily the best looking guy. An alpha male is a high status male, and that can be on any number of hierarchies. Excellent musicians attract women, whether good looking or not. Excellent athletes attract women, whether good looking or not. Successful businessmen attract women, whether good looking or not.
But (evo-psych warning) men are mostly attracted to looks, and because of how dating apps work, they convey reasonably well how a person looks, less so how they play guitar or that they were quarter back on their high school football team (and any guy who puts that in his bio ends up looking douchy). So guys obviously like dating apps: it lets them rate women quite easily on the one metric they care most about: physical appearance. Women, not so much. It’s much harder to figure out the status of a guy from his profile, much easier in meat space.
So evo-psych would predict that men like the idea of dating apps more than women, even if women have an “easier” time getting attention on them.
Also, the women that do end up going on dating apps end up behaving as evo-psych would predict: the top 80% of women match with the top 20% of men, and vice-versa. And women rate guys at the 80th percentile as average.
I would add that women are not “repelled” by dating apps. They do not like them as much as men do for the reasons I discussed above.
Consider also the texting phase. If you’ve ever been on a dating app, you’ll know that “matching” with someone is only the first step. If you want to get anywhere, you need to go through that dreadful texting phase with someone you dont know at all. And this is where women apply a second filter, that I dont think men apply at all. As a guy on a dating app, you need your texting game to be on point, convey confidence, be funny, etc…
> carrying a loser’s baby is a huge cost for little benefit
Then why do so many choose to do so? There are a significant number of women on dating sites are basically looking for some man to come and pay for the kid(s) she had with other deadbeats.
> Men in their late 20s or older who have some things going for them and signal a desire to get married should be able to fill their schedules with dates.
“Should” is not the same thing as “is”.
Yes, this is called “Alpha Fux, Beta Bux” in the manosphere. The deadbeat in this case is not the “loser”. He’s the jerk alpha that the woman fucked and then was abandoned by. I agree that he is a loser from a moral point of view, but he’s probably high status in some sense and quite capable of seducing women.
The “loser” in this scenario is the guy who ends up raising the jerk alpha’s kid. I dont mean to judge the poor guy, he is observably a better person than the jerk alpha, who is observably a terrible person. But evolutionarily speaking, he lost.
I think this is what they call a motte and bailey. It sounds like you’re saying that people who are good at things get chicks. I don’t disagree with this, but would you want to date someone who wasn’t better than “mediocre” at everything? Would someone who was only mediocre at everything stand a much better chance in ye olde victorian times?
Keep in mind, the number you quoted was the 80th percentile. I think it’s pretty easy to rise to the 80th percentile of the population in something just by virtue or practicing regularly.
If I am doing a motte and bailey it’s unintentional. Either I’ve expressed myself poorly, or we have different assumptions/definitions around certain concepts that cause miscommunications.
I wouldnt. But if I dont find the girl physically attractive, she can be a billionaire super athlete with an IQ of 180, it’s not happening. This is not true in general for women. On the other hand if the girl is super hot, and she’s not very smart, I would forgive her for that.
If we’re talking about a guy, I believe he would. He wouldnt get the cutest girl probably, but he’d end up with someone. To be crude, he would end up with someone with a sexual market value similar to his. Nowadays, there is no more 1-1 matching, because of the sexual revolution and all that jazz. That’s not the complete picture obviously, there is more or less 1-1 matching eventually (our old social technology is not completely dead yet). But in terms of sex and specially pre-marital sex, it’s not even close to 1-1.
When the market is unregulated (ie no social sanctions for out-of-wedlock sex), this is what happens naturally, because men are different from women. How can we not be? If we were the same as women, it would almost be enough to falsify Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Yes. You’re correct. But here I was specifically mentioning the 80th percentile in general attractiveness (i.e. how many likes you get on your tinder profile). Still, for incels, this is EXACTLY what they should be doing: practice at something. Make yourself worthy of dating. Dont try to find girls. Work on yourself and girls will find you. Learn music. Read books. Work out. Make money. Do something with your life that will attract women.
@jermo sapiens
When I’m talking about the female hypergamy hypothesis, I’m talking about viewpoints like this one that argue that
Or, as an alternative formulation,
Note that this isn’t “the top 10% in [something],” just “the top 10% of men in general.” The idea that women are actually this selective strikes me as ridiculous. I think it looks a lot like this on dating apps, because women simply by virtue of being outnumbered 2 to 1 by men cannot match with those men 1-to-1, and the fact that men are competing with each other for something that scarce exaggerates the arms race. In real life, I see what I’d estimate as the ~70% of men who are in the top 20% at something being at least decently successful. I don’t think that’s down to the remnants of dying social attitudes; I think women are actually just not that hyper-selective. But the reason that I think retreading evopsych ground is boring is that neither of our positions are realistically falsifiable. All the evidence we have can be more or less torturously explained within either framework.
The figure I’ve seen is 20%, but the point remains. In any event, I would probably agree that this phenomenon is exaggerated by dating apps, but it reflects a real difference between the sexes.
Right, probably not to that extent. But they are more selective than men. Everybody alive today has twice the number of female ancestors as male ancestors. That’s because a good chunk of cave men didnt get to have sex with cave women. Part of that is probably that the big cave man in your clan was a jerk and he controlled access to the women. But also part of that is probably that the women preferred sharing the big cave man jerk than have sex with the cave nerds.
I think there are some fuzzy definitions here. I would agree that the number of men who are unacceptable to a given random sample of women is probably larger than the number of women who are unacceptable to a similar random sample of men. So sure, generally I agree with the statement that women are more selective than men, but a good chunk of women actually seem to prefer to be alone than to chase the “top 10%” or settle for men who they find uninteresting. I think that there’s an extent to which considerations of protection and station have become less relevant as people have gotten wealthier, and I think that women have been contending with those needs and balancing them against their own desires for a long time. Women don’t need men as much as they used to, but that’s not the same as saying that “90% of women chase the top 10% of men.”
I don’t think the “top 20% get 80%” thing is about settling. It’s about sex.
Putanumonit recently wrote a post arguing basically the exact opposite of this. FWIW I tend to agree with him. Practice makes perfect. The best way to get better at convincing women to date you is to try convincing women to date you. The best way to get better at dating is to go on dates. Etc.
Get in the game. Be active. Practice. That’s how you get better.
There’s a bit of a bootstrapping problem here. If a low status guy has to go through 1000 interactions of the sort “Hi.” “Eww, get away from me you creep” before he can get to the next step, then he blows the next step immediately (for lack of practice) and has to do 1000 more… well, it’s not likely he’s going to going to have a successful date within his lifetime. The numbers game might work for swiping right, but for something which requires more investment of time and effort, not so much.
@Hoopyfreud
The more defensible hypergamy theory I’ve seen (the website you linked sells a PUA method, so the link you gave is marketing) argues that women are primarily sexually excited by status/dominance. This doesn’t mean that they don’t want other things from the guy, like money or a good dad, but that the latter doesn’t make her horny.
So then the theory goes that women can try to ‘lock down’ a guy who exudes high status and who can provide many of the other things. However, these men tend to want pretty, young, low-maintenance women, of which there are far more than ’rounded’ men. So these men have so much market value that they don’t have to give these woman what they want, even though they could give it. Instead, they can have sex with lots of pretty, young, low-maintenance women or have sex with one without marrying her or having a child with her or without substantial money transfers to the woman, etc. So basically, the high demand ‘ruins’ these men who could give women all they want, because they have no incentive to give that.
So (pretty, young) women can then have sex/relationships with these men who could give her all that she wants, in the hope that he will. However, he has no incentive to do so, so many don’t.
Then as these women get older and cannot get a high status/dominant man to commit to them, they make different choices, favoring relationships with (beta) men that have money, make good dads, want to marry them, want a child now, etc. However, the theory then goes that this is a rational decision, but not an emotional one. Basically, if she does have sex with the beta, it’s to get something else from him, not because she thinks that he is the best sex partner around.
So this means that there is a high risk that she stops wanting to have sex with the beta if he has committed to her (by impregnating her, marrying her, buying a house with her, etc), that she will cheat and/or will break up with him after having raised the child(ren).
So then from the male perspective, being a beta means not having much sex with women or only with ugly women as long as he lacks money and/or until women start losing their fertility, while high status/dominance men get to have sex with lots of pretty, young women. Then even if they end up with one of these women at a later age (now less pretty/young), these women consider them sexually uninteresting, prone to defect from the ‘deal’ (man gets sex, woman gets child/money/house).
So then a common PUA strategy is to fake status/dominance and/or to develop it, so the guy gets the good deal, instead of the bad deal.
Women opting out seems fully consistent with the claim that women strongly prefer the top tier of men, while men are far less selective. After all, just because they want them, doesn’t mean that they can get them.
That former would logically cause something more like the latter, actually.
Imagine that I’m hungry and you put mediocre food in front of me. I’m going to eat it.
Now imagine that I’m not hungry and you put mediocre food in front of me. I’ll leave it. Yet if you put my favorite food in front of me, I will probably eat it.
@Aapje
I mean, fine, but you still have to reckon with the fact that status is highly multidimensional and IMO seems to be growing more that way. It’s also seems very hard to actually be dominant, simply because it’s never been easier for the average dude to tell other people to get fucked. Like I said, if the motte of the female hypergamy hypothesis is, “women want men who are in the top 20% along some axis,” I don’t really disagree with it, but I also think most men who aren’t boring (not even romantically, just as people) fit that criterion. But where you make the jump to
is where I disagree. The disagreement we’re having is not about the nature of female preferences, but about the degree of selectivity. Mostly, I think what I see is that most women aren’t happy to have a sliver of peak male specimen attention; they’d rather have a deeper relationship with a man who is in the top 20% of [something they also enjoy] than a man in the “top 20%” of men. This is part of why I find this model so frustrating; the evidence that the majority of women are content to fuck high-status dudes on a rotating schedule is extremely sparse, and IME women are not, by and large, willing to give up a real relationship for it. There are definitely women who do this, but I don’t think that it holds much predictive power regarding women as a whole. It probably does hold significantly more predictive power about women on dating apps, but most women are not on dating apps.
As far as I can tell, it is just as easy for women to fall in love as it is for men. That makes the whole dynamic you outline, where
for their entire youths, never learning not to fuck with people who keep them dangling, and then when they get older, suddenly
implausible in my eyes. Why are women expected to go from irrational starry-eyed groupie to sociopathic leech, never actually having a fulfilling relationship? The lede that’s buried deep in there is, I think, the idea that women simply can’t have a happy, fulfilling relationship with men who aren’t “alphas,” but as far as I can tell that’s simply not true. I think the people women can’t have a happy fulfilling relationship with comprise a much smaller group of no more than ~30% of men (and yes, I think there are about 30% of women for whom the same applies).
No one would say that the majority of women are content to screw the same group of High Status men on a continuing basis, in fact the ‘sphere says this phenomenon is what causes so much misery among young women.
The correct model is also not to envision women partying and screwing different guys every single weekend for 14 years and then suddenly deciding to go all Black Widow on some poor unsuspecting shmuck at 30. Only the die-hards and the Black Pills and the incels are going to sell you crap like that.
A better model is that there are looser standards regarding promiscuity, a more fluid dating market, and an obvious preference for high-status men (which are in short supply), which is going to lead some to some pretty obvious results. The ‘sphere is quite familiar with “NAWALT” (Not all Women are Like that), and it’s not convincing, because it’s not describing a club rat. Yeah, if you compare yourself to a club rat, you’re going to feel mighty good about yourself, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t exhibited some of the same behaviors in the past, and that some of your past misery was entirely self-inflicted.
NAWALT is, as far as I can tell, a defensive meme deployed to sidestep the idea that these models apply only to a subset of women. The point I am arguing is that Only Some Women Are Like That, and that because of that it’s a stupid model for women in general.
All of these things are true, but I don’t see anything obvious about the results you’re implying, because you’re not taking into account the degree to which women desire promiscuity in the first place. The idea that monogamy (or “a relationship” as a general idea) is an imposition on women is not something I get. Women, in my experience, generally want to be in relationships. Club rats maybe don’t, but I honestly couldn’t care less. Club rats gonna club rat, they were never going to fuck you anyway (not “you” you, but generally, to the men who don’t measure up to what they chase), and if they did they were probably going to cheat on you. I would like to avoid this sort of person as much as possible.
I mean fair enough, but “don’t stick your dick in crazy” is presumably the male equivalent of the wisdom that grows from this misery. Women chasing Chads who pump and dump them harder than biotech stocks are probably making just as much of a mistake as men chasing women who simulate sex with Winnie the Pooh dolls in front of high schools, and on smaller scales these mistakes are still mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t learn from them. Women who give up chasing “alphas” who use and dump them aren’t “settling” for “beta males.” They’re finding love. They’re generally happy. If you start out with an unrealistic idea of love, you will either end up bitter and angry (like “black widows” and incels), or you will adjust your expectations to better reflect the world. The fact that not one of the women I’ve met has sprung full-formed from a wet dream does not mean that my relationships with 3-D girls involve “settling.”
@Hoopyfreud
The PUA form of dominance/status seems to be in large part a kind of security/safety. It’s about demonstrating that you are not insecure about things. Being very aggressive is actually a sign of insecurity.
See the focus on ‘shit testing,’ where women supposedly try to trigger male insecurity and check whether he bites or not.
As Beta Guy notes, PUA theory doesn’t argue that it makes women happy, but that women are often driven to it, because they are deceived up by feminism.
I’ve seen the claim that women are always on the lookout to move up if they have ‘settled’ and that top tier ‘players’ can deceive women to think that they are seriously contemplating committing to her, while not doing so. Alternatively, I’ve seen the claim that women who ‘settle’ are prone to have weak moments where they cheat with a high status/dominant guy.
Yeah, the basic premise of the theory is that most (top tier) women can’t/won’t truly be content with what they can reasonably get. So one solution for a man is then to either not get locked into a bad relationship like that or to learn to permanently fake if not actually become more alpha, to make the woman sufficiently content.
Also, a common part of the theory seems to be that the longer the woman has played the field, the more unrealistic her expectations will become, so I’ve seen the advice to find a young, inexperienced woman to marry.
AFAIK, the claim is not that woman have stopped desiring relationships, but rather, that feminism has convinced women to liberally ‘sample’ the field, which is actually harmful to them, because it removes incentives for top tier men to settle and causes choice overload and buyer’s remorse in women.
In all of this discussion, is it assumed that what defines an alpha is mainly sexual attractiveness?
I’ve known quite a lot of successful marriages, and although the husbands were successful and admirable people, I wouldn’t have described them as unusually attractive. Does a top academic or lawyer who isn’t tall, muscular, … count?
No, what defines an alpha is dominance. Being 6′ 2″ with a muscular build and a square jaw makes you look the part, but it isn’t the essence of the thing. Even without the physical cues, most people can distinguish the alphas from everyone else (and similarly the omegas) in a very short time. A top academic might be an alpha but not necessarily; I imagine a top lawyer almost certainly is.
@Aapje
I don’t see how that parses as dominance. Confidence, maybe, but dominance has both an object and a subject. Regardless, not giving a fuck is probably the easiest way to demonstrate a lack of insecurity, and my point is that there are very few material consequences to not giving a fuck. Social enforcement of any kind of dominance hierarchy seems near a nadir, unless your job is public-facing or you invest yourself into those hierarchies. You can just choose not to. The people at the top have only the power over you that you give them.
And, to repeat myself, this is part of what strikes me as insane. Not to mention, ironically enough, extremely insecure. Women could be fucking random dudes in club bathrooms or Mexican resorts, but instead they choose to be with you. How does that not feel good? Her father isn’t marrying her off; no nuns are planning on reaching up in there to check her maidenhead at any point in her life; she isn’t capitulating to shame or fear or castigation. She’s choosing you of her own free will, recognizing the alternatives. I think that’s fantastic, incredibly romantic, and significantly more secure than the counterfactual. The only men I imagine disagreeing are those with an incredibly low opinion of women and those who are convinced, deep down, that they need an external mechanism to bind women to them because they’re inadequate as objects or providers of love.
Women aren’t idiot children. Feminism has certainly opened the door for them to sample the field, but I fully expect women, by and large, to learn what kind of commitment they can expect to find by doing so in the long term, and to learn that lesson better the longer they do so. Men generally seem capable of learning an analogous lesson perfectly well, so I see no reason to expect that women, now having a greater degree of autonomy, will not.
If we’re talking about marrying a woman in her 30s who was a party girl in her 20s, then no, she’s not choosing you over the alternatives: she did both. She was fucking random dudes in club bathrooms and Mexican resorts at 25 while future hubby was crying into his Star Wars pillow because girls like future wife wouldn’t give him the time of day. Now that she’s older and the random club dudes are passing her over for the newer models she discarded all those naughty nights for niceness.
This is not romantic. This is sad. Hubby didn’t get to bang 25 year old girls in club bathrooms. And if one of those dudes who was banging her in club bathrooms would have married her, she wouldn’t be with hubby now. If she’d married hubby at 25 of her own free will, recognizing the alternatives, that would be romantic. Instead she recognized the alternative at 25 (banging dudes in club bathrooms) and said “I’d rather do that.”
@Hoopyfreud
No, they have a low opinion of themselves.
They think that if the woman settled for them to have a child, father, provider, etc, but she isn’t actually sufficiently sexually attracted to the man, the woman won’t enjoy having sex with them once she has enough children.
They think that a woman with little sexual experience is not going to be as disappointed, because she doesn’t know better.
This part of the theory doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, if we accept the premise that women can get better sex partners than long term partners, for which there is substantial evidence. Then the average woman will have had sex with more attractive men than she will end up with, in hookup culture.
Oh my.
Similarly, the foundational idea of government regulation of capitalism is that regulators are unfailingly impartial and correct and that the mechanisms of the political process guarantee that everything is fair.
?
Just FWIW, I don’t think anyone outside of 14-year-olds who’ve just finished reading _Atlas Shrugged_ believe that
[Ninja’d by the whole damn world.]
I don’t even think that Ayn Rand supported the ideas you are imputing to said 14 year-olds.
I dont think I can steelman it very well. But this type of stuff is quite common and weird is not the right adjective for it. It’s dishonest and stupid, but not weird. This is just what happens when some people are faced with information that contradicts fundamental beliefs.
In this case I would submit that the fundamental belief being contradicted is that women are oppressed and that men are oppressors. The data is rather clear, and therefore it’s more effective to just call it creepy, accusatory, and weakly reasoned without going into any details. I mean, it’s clearly weakly reasoned because he didnt reach the conclusions that are predicted by feminist ideology.
So instead of being weird, it’s exactly what you would expect when an ideology becomes so entrenched that its tenets are taken as gospel. In this case it’s feminism, but it could be any ideology and people would react similarly.
I don’t think this is true, or at least I don’t think it’s the primary driving factor.
They reference that 2016 study without being obviously angry about it, and most of the rest of the article treats men and women as equal sufferers under the new dating dystopia. It seems weird that they’d slide in a stanning of feminism just for the fun of it.
You are correct, upon reading the full article I’m not so sure. But the section about data analysis is more a sidebar than part of the article itself.
I’m having a hard time coming up with a reason for calling the analysis creepy. The author is obviously perturbed by the notion of a dating market. But dating has always been a market, it’s just the apps make it more explicit. Maybe runham above is correct and the author was triggered by the analysis which made the reality of a dating market even more explicit.
In any event, those blog posts provided useful information to people in the dating market. They should be promoted not derided.
In my experience “creepy” when not literally meaning “scary” pretty much always is in reference to something that a woman finds off-putting, so I have a hard time believing that you aren’t at least partially right with your initial intuition: there’s barely any other way for that adjective to make sense, given what it means in colloquial English.
Yeah I think so. I reverted back to my initial intuition after As @runham noted, the article says:
I dont think it’s a crime for heterosexual women to follow their natural inclination obviously, but I think the author believes it’s a crime to notice that women’s natural inclination creates winners and losers.
I don’t think they would mind if the losers are rapists or such.
The issue is that these men are selected for natural gifts that have nothing to do with whether they are good people…
My theory is that when meeting a potential partner in-person or in a social setting, men are obviously very looks-driven, whereas women use a more diverse, holistic set of criteria that includes physical appearance, social status, relative wealth, etc. Women are judging men on a whole host of categories. (Source, am a straight male). However, in online dating where it’s much tougher for a man to convey wealth, confidence, social status etc., women are sort of forced to use the default male perspective which is mostly appearance. This, plus the fact that women are much pickier and have higher standards for a potential mate, means online dating actually doesn’t serve women particularly well
How’s so? Wealth is conveyed just fine via photos, and many people mention they job/business at their profile page (or again have a photo in front of some big name company office). Social status and confidence, or luck of thereof, are evident from conversation, just like in a 1-on-1 meeting. Plus to some degree from the profile page – on the apps where it’s more than few sentences, such as OKC.
A rhetorical question – do they get equally outraged when studies reporting income inequality or wage gap are treating people like numbers?
Wait until they learn about the insurance industry!
Right? That’s the logical conclusion of this weird viewpoint.
To quote a show I’m obviously a huge fan of:
“It’s because of the implication.”
I read it. The tagline is:
But I don’t think they ever explained how this notion is flawed. They just stated it.
They did explain.
My wife is not a vacuum cleaner, but a short-term “non-primary” partner definitely sounds pretty dehumanizing.
There are definitely markets for short-term rentals. Like hotel rooms. That you rent by the hour. With your “non-primary” “Lady of the Night”
I wouldn’t go all “get off my lawn” about it. I’m not convinced of their reasoning on why economics don’t apply, but there’s nothing wrong with picking up a third on occasion.
This author has never heard of super-markets and their promiscuous goodies, or maybe they don’t count
Just how normalised is polyamory, anyway? My impression is that anyone not a Bay Aryan or otherwise deep off the Grey/Blue tribe end still views it as something they want no part of. The people writing the article are likely to be part of the former demographic lacking in self-awareness, but I have no idea if this has been quantified.
Maybe dating isn’t too much like a market. Maybe it isn’t enough like a market. We need financialization, securities, puts, gets, swaps, tranches, leverage, dark markets, self-interested ratings agencies, regulatory capture, and then a gold rush turned boom turned devil-take-the-hindmost, until the inevitable crash leaves everyone with too many dance-cards and not enough blondes.
You forgot monopolies, surely.
Isn’t that what marriage is supposed to be? A government-encouraged monopoly?
No, monopoly is when one man has bought penises from all the other men in town.
Marriage is more like long-term contract. Something close to renting a room and not allowing it to be rented to anyone else while you are still a tenant.
Just a small increase in the default rate on the Incel tranche ends up collapsing the whole thing, not just the Incel investors but the Beta, Alpha, and Alpha+ (Chad) investors. When the Incel default rate hit 20.0 percent, mark-to-market kicked in and everyone without a partner at the moment got marked to 0, triggering the swaps. Obviously with not nearly enough underlying assets to cover, the swaps were worthless also, and down the whole thing came. At the end, the government had to come through with offers of hot Russian brides… only catch was, you couldn’t actually exercise them.
There is a way to hedge against these risks:
https://imgur.com/a/Y5Ddb2Q
Steelman:
Tech companies are the fastest-growing capitalist power center in the world today. The top six publicly traded companies my market capitalization are tech companies – including four trillion-dollar companies. These companies became this valuable by amassing data about us, their customers. We are the authors and rightful owners of our data. If that data is worth trillions of dollars, that wealth should accrue to each of us, not just those who are lucky enough to be tech company shareholders.
In other times and places, people who desire power over others might become warlords or oil barons. Today, they start tech companies in the hopes of striking it rich by collecting and aggregating our data. Every day we are faced by constant use of psychological hacks to trick us into handing over pieces of data.
OK Cupid asks us questions with the promise of providing individual human connections, then turns around and exploits the aggregate data to make politically-charged claims about our genders and races. Creepy!
Nicely done.
Very good steelman. But it’s hard for me to believe that’s what the author meant.
It’s weird how the people who seemingly harbor the most fear and/or hatred for “incels” are also the ones most violently opposed to literally anything that might help low status men secure dates, sex, and meaningful relationships.
(and yes, this is personal for me, as without online dating sites, I would almost certainly still be an “incel” today)
As a matter of curiosity, when did you find your relationship, and via which online matchmaking service? I ask because (see my above post for the demographic breakdowns of dating apps specifically in the current year). As of right now, I would not suggest that a lonely incel-ish guy put himself anywhere near Tinder (for his own sake, not out of some concern for the female userbase). OKCupid is, as I understand, still mostly OK, but the app ecosystem seems absolutely garbage for (straight) men right now.
I was able to get some dates/hookups playing the numbers game on POF as well as Tinder. Ultimately found my fiance on Coffee Meets Bagel, which seemed pretty intelligently designed to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of online dating (mainly by treating male and female profiles differently and acknowledging the different behavior/expectations of both genders).
The freemium phonegame monetization is pretty off-putting, but the magic number seems favorable; the male/female ratio looks to be 40/60. If it gets popular enough to get flooded with dudes I bet it’ll immediately turn to shit. I don’t think tweaks they made to the tinder model matter much at all.
The big issue that the large sites have is that there is no cost for men to send out 1,000 messages at a time and play the numbers game and that looks are about the only thing that is easy to verify in real life quickly. How is CmB different?
The simple answer is that they greatly limit the amount of messages you can send. I forget the exact specifics as to how.
Likely intentionally so. I remember being greatly annoyed by the amount of various hoops you had to jump through to actually get going and accomplish anything. But once I did jump through them, the quality of matches (as well as response rates) were much better than other sites I had tried.
I guess it sort of functions like a pre-existing shit test that the app itself gives to you before the woman even has to become aware of your existence. And that’s how they keep it from being “flooded with guys.” They count on a lot of guys to say “hell this isn’t worth it” and not bother trying.
At a slight tangent, someone I was talking with a while back mentioned that he met his wife via Tinder. I commented that I thought Tinder was mainly for hook ups, finding someone for casual sex.
His response, not in those words, was that of course that was the normal first step in courtship.
It seemed an odd attitude to me, and I am curious how widely it is shared. My assumption is that if you are looking for a long term relationship, you are not expecting sexual intercourse on the first date — maybe an erotic kiss at the end of it, if you are lucky — and probably not the second or third either.
Which makes me wonder how out of date I am, not having been part of that market for a very long time.
I would rather say that if you’re expecting sex on the first date, you’re probably not prioritizing a long-term relationship. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not open to it, though, “it” referring to either sex on the first date if you’re looking for a relationship or to a relationship if you’re looking for sex on the first date.
Second or third date usually. If you’re not sexually compatible with someone, best to know early before you’re too emotionally invested.
I’m recently divorced and I have been on dates with 4 different women so far, all of whom I met through either Tinder or Bumble. Im 43 and the women I dated were all about the same age. All my first dates except one went very well, and there was no hint or possibility of sex on the first date (unless I’m really bad at reading hints).
My general impression of Tinder is that they market themselves to men as a casual sex/hookup app, but they market themselves to women as a dating/relationships app. Most matches/couples tend to meet somewhere in the middle.
I also get the impression (not just from my own experience, but from what I’ve heard from guys who are better looking and higher status than me) that the vast majority of first dates on Tinder do not end in sex, although your odds of that happening there are probably better than they are among the general dating pool.
It’s generally expected that an attractive man will have spent age 15-25 at least shtupping a lot of girls, particularly if he was ever single during that time. Most guys haven’t done this. In the job market they talk about gaps in the resume. In the relationship market for men there are gaps in one’s relationship status. What were they doing during those times? The answer is often…nothing. So they want to give the impression that they were indeed shtupping a lot of girls and the way they do it is to act like it’s just their normal operating procedure to escalate to sex on the first date. They don’t think they’re likely to get it.
Everyone is a social darwinist when time comes to pay the bills. To admit that inceldom is anything but moral failing is to invite sexual redistribution.
That would explain the strange antipathy to the idea of sexbots.
Wait until they learn about the genetically engineered catgirls for domestic ownership.
Who did? 😮
Grrr. Don’t you have a Conan review to write? What am I paying you for?!
Hey! I’ve been a social darwinist since before I was looking for a relationship or had enough money to be able to pay bills!
@Matt M
How is this weird? This suggests that they see these people as irredeemable or otherwise not worth saving.
Jews were also not put in re-education camps, but in the ovens.
@Matt M:
Can you expand? I’m currently one (with the quote marks), I’m not particularly rich or high-status, and I’ve been trying to decide if online dating would be worth the emotional hit.
(If it helps, I would be looking for a relationship rather than casual sex, so a lot of the PUA stuff intended to help people get the latter doesn’t really help.)
The PUA stuff is useful for both. Can’t have a relationship if you don’t get your foot in the door.
Uh, you’re just going to have to get over that. Unless you’re a very high status man, you’re going to get rejected. A lot. IMO, the “pain” of being rejected online (that you send a lot of messages that go wholly ignored) is a lot less than the pain of being rejected in person (that you literally have to tell a girl you’re interested and she has to actually tell you that she’s not), but YMMV on that I guess.
Online dating is a numbers game. My estimates for myself were something like this: About 5% of the women I “matched” with would match with me back. About 10% of those who matched with me back would reply to my first message. About 10% of those would then go on to regularly talking to me. About 10% of those would be willing to date me once. About 50% of those would be willing to date me more than once. About 25% of those would be willing to have some sort of relationship.
The math on that isn’t pretty. It basically means that you need to swipe right on approximately 200,000 women to get a single relationship. Maybe you’re higher status than me and it’ll be easier. Maybe you’re lower and it’ll be harder. My general advice is something like:
1. Lower your standards
2. Swipe right, “match” with, and send a first message to literally every woman possible
3. Do not bother scrutinizing photos or reading profiles, at all, until you’re in the “she messaged back” stage
4. Save time by developing a standard form letter style intro message
5. Diversify onto different sites/apps (it’s all the same women on all of them, but use different photos, profiles, and approaches – someone who ignored you on Site A may respond to a different approach Site B)
6. Do not become emotionally invested in anyone you haven’t met in person yet
7. If you do get there and obtain a relationship, never tell them you took this approach
@Matt M
That can’t be right, can it? I have no experience with online dating, but are there even 200,000 women on dating sites in more than a couple of the biggest cities? It would seem that online dating wouldn’t work if the numbers were that low.
These all seem to the obvious approach, and the exact thing that people say is so terrible about the apps.
Probably not a coincidence.
It took me like 10 years across 4 different cities to eventually get there. I’m not sure if I actually swiped 200K times or not, but it’s not impossible!
Dating apps are the worst ways for low status men to get dates, except all the other ways that have ever been tried.
The alternative to this is basically the same concept, only you have to do it in person in a bar or in school or at church or whatever, where the rejection is much more painful and the social consequences more severe.
So in ten years you only had 9 dates and 4 second dates? Again, it doesn’t seem like dating apps would continue to be popular if odds were that low.
@acymetric and @Matt M
@Matt M:
I just wanted to say thanks a lot for replying. Think it helped.
I realize this isn’t substantive, but I have this problem where I stop to think of something substantive to say and then the thread dies while I’m thinking, so I wanted to get the sentiment out there before that happened.
Swipe right, “match” with, and send a first message to literally every woman possible
I think this is part of the problem with dating apps, though. Every woman gets many, many more responses from men than men do from women, partly because I think most men do have that attitude of “might as well try, if you’re not in you can’t win” and partly because of this kind of advice.
This means that women on the app get flooded with thousands of responses, many of which don’t fit or match with them. So of course they’re going to reject or ignore an awful lot of them. But this just makes the problem worse – that’s how you’re deriving your “to get a relationship you need to message 200,000 women”. On the other side, the woman is getting 200,000 messages from guys who haven’t even read profiles or looked at photos, just swiped swiped swiped on every woman on the site.
Think of it like junkmail – how many of you read and sift through every piece of junkmail you receive, versus simply throwing it straight in the bin?
@Matt M
Sure, but the odds are much better, because the competition is less in those spaces and you get more of a chance to show your potential.
This is awkward, because I feel like offering a different perspective than the one Matt’s putting forward is going to make it seem like I’m trying to claim to be higher status than he, and that just seems shitty.
Take this as a competing perspective, not necessarily a more accurate or more reliable one.
Kind of. Lower your standards on the initial swiping and talking, but raise them during the texting phase and especially once you’re on the date itself. Don’t just go with the flow for somoene you’re not connecting with just because you matched on Tinder.
Don’t do this, you’ll kill your elo on most of the apps and end up in the world of bots, scammers and the truly unfortunate. Match with people you could handle sitting across a table from.
I disagree.
No, don’t do this. It’s obvious, it looks bad/cheesy and it’s not likely to get you any kind of positive response. Try to find something unique about their profile then comment on it, ending with a question.
This isn’t hard and doesn’t take any time. They have a dog in the picture? “Aww, cute doggo! What’s his/her name?”
They seem to be somewhere unique in a picture? “Oh wow, that (insert place) looks awesome. Is that?”
Give them something to respond to, not just a form letter.
Yes, good advice. The different apps have different vibes, some will work better for your style.
This point has already been investigated above.
Something like that, yeah.
Of course, on the other hand, literally every woman I’ve ever asked out that I didn’t meet online has said no. And those rejections were much more emotionally painful.
As I’ve said, I’m not here to tell you that dating apps are great. I’m here to tell you that they’re better than the alternatives (asking out women you meet in person, or dying alone)
@Deiseach
An issue is that women are often looking for ‘a spark,’ yet this can’t really be filtered for online.
It’s like Google initially filtering potential programmers by how well they can write poems. Then lots of the people they interview will be great at writing poems, but shit at programming, while lots of people they refuse to interview will be good programmers, but shit at writing poems.
Well, this devolves into something of a chicken/egg debate, I think. I don’t know whether men message every woman because women don’t respond, or whether women don’t respond because men always message them.
I know that, for myself, I tried to take the much more “natural” approach that Aftagley described below for the first several years. It got me basically nowhere. It was almost totally ineffective. When I switched to “message everyone with form letter” mode, I got a lot more matches, a lot more responses, and a lot more dates, and I started feeling a lot better about myself and my prospects.
I’m not here to tell you what’s philosophically the best or what produces the optimal equilibrium on the sites or dating markets. I’m here to tell you what worked for me. Other approaches may work for other people, I can’t speak to that.
@Deiseach
I could be wrong as I’ve never used any of these apps (after my time) but:
I think you only get messages if you match. So if 200,000 men swipe right on her and she only swipes right on one of those 200,000 men, she gets one message.
Conrad,
That depends on the site/app. In the early days, “sites” like POF and OKC and Match had basically an “open messaging” model. Once you made a profile, anyone could message you. Most of them had some sort of system wherein you could come up with specific criteria to restrict this ability (basically, “no messages from guys over 40”) but most people never bothered with that. Most sites were also smart enough to basically say “Don’t show people any profiles of people who they wouldn’t be allowed to message” so even if someone did “restrict” you it was transparent, you never even knew they were there in the first place.
Most modern apps (Tinder was the one to make this most famous) have the “dual-matching” system you describe. In which case yeah, if she’s getting “too many” messages, she has nobody to blame but herself…
15 years ago I was using paid dating apps. I got 0.00 dates from them. I can’t deny it was extremely depressing.
Simultaneous to using them, I met my now-wife in a separate forum.
I think it simply represents a strong belief that-
a) People have true natures
b) A persons true nature cannot be changed
c) “Creepiness” or lack of it is a feature of one’s true nature.
By these terms, it is not possible to make someone more beddable, only to make them appear more beddable, which would entail deceiving their potential lovers (which everyone can agree would be bad). It makes no sense to the likes of me (and perhaps you, but I don’t want to assume something unfavorable) because I want to believe that the factors that make me unbeddable are not part of any sort of true nature but rather due to deficiancies in some trainable social skill, so it is possible to change reality, destroy the things that make me unbeddable, and present a more attractive face that is not a lie. Stated like this it sounds like motivated reasoning, but the opposite position could also be motivated reasoning to make a woman’s aesthetic preferences seem to represent moral truths, and I tend to hold other views that minimize the importance of true natures, so at least I’m consistent.
I’ll try to explain my understanding of what the Left don’t like about the market.
Let’s say the King invites pairs (of a man and a woman – that’s a medieval King after all) to dance at his festival. Every pair gets paid 100 gp and can distribute it among themselves as they see fit. So the people made a matching service for those willing to dance for a 50-50 split. However there was an excess of women (perhaps because 50 gp meant more to them due to their lower wages). So people made another matching service for those willing to dance for a 67-33 split, then another one for 75-25.
The Left treats this situation as horribly unfair, and I agree: there’s nothing inherently fair or kind about the market. Also the Left might claim that doing anything else than 50-50 is immoral and try to shame male dancers who agreed to it.
Here’s where economic analysis strikes. It says: if the market tells you that you’re screwed, then you’re screwed. Sucks to be you in that case. But you can’t just cancel the market. If men aren’t willing to dance for 50 gp, then you’ll have to sweeten the deal for them somehow.
And the Left don’t like that at all. They think that maybe those analysts who tell them “sucks to be you” are somehow incentivized to say that, or maybe some other sinister plot is in motion, and if sufficiently many Leftists will practice being insufferable, maybe the world would be a fairer and happier place.
This is why economic analysis can come off as creepy for the Left. It tells them the world isn’t going to treat them kindly and there’s no hope to change that.
@eigenmoon
Your explanation suggests that people would do the opposite than what they actually do.
Woke people are not objecting to economic analyses (or scientific studies) that show their favored groups having it worse, but those that show that the ‘oppressors’ have it worse in various ways.
I think that woke people hate those analyses/studies because of how they themselves use them, to attack their outgroup. So they logically believe that studies that show their outgroup having it worse on some measures will be used to attack their ingroup, because that’s what they themselves would do, if they favored that outgroup, rather than their ingroup.
PS. The word ‘creepy’ is often used in a sexist way, where behavior that is consider acceptable when women do it, is not allowed for men. Creepy is to men what uppity is to blacks.
I did not suggest that the Left hates economics so much that they wouldn’t use it for attacks. (Also, the Right would also get happy about any study that’s in their favor.)
Here’s an example from “No Borders” (a Leftist book) of Leftists failing to grasp the basics of arithmetic. Left anarchists in Athens decided that the government is evil because it coerces the refugees into some stupid bureaucracy instead of just helping them. So they decided to help the refugees by giving them access to their place (they had a house). But they could realistically service a hundred but there were thousands in need, so they started to check the refugees’ papers to figure out who needs the most, and they also posted guards to kick out the wrong people. So those anarchists pretty much recreated the state with its bureaucracy and coercion. And they were very distressed by it.
I’ve brought up this example because it’s pure action, those guys weren’t attacking the outgroup, they were volunteering to do some good in the world. And yet there’s clearly a failure to look the reality in the face somewhere in there.
Back to feminism: we know that men experience “red pill rage” – a period of painful psychological adjustment caused by the realization that the female biological programming isn’t complementary to the male one, it’s completely different from what men are programmed to expect. But there must also be a female equivalent of that, namely, a painful realization that men are completely different from what women are programmed to expect. And that is the problem, because neither the manosphere nor feminists (nor I) have any useful advice for women who go through that pain. The feminists’ plan to deal with this is simply deep denial, which is visible in the article.
You can certainly treat the Woke as an evil Scientology-like cult trying to lie and swindle its way to power. But women who ignore the market realities of dating unwillingly condemn themselves to 40+ years of loneliness. Again, there’s a failure to look the reality in the face somewhere in there, and thus an explanation that doesn’t involve merely CW strategic maneuvers would be better.
I do not think the purpose of the manosphere is to give advice to women.
There’s some red pill stuff aimed a women. Sunshine Mary and The Lady of Grerp were both prominent bloggers back in the day, and r/RedPillWomen is an active community 40,000 subscribers strong.
If there’s any kind of coherent (weaker condition than sound) model underlying the advice given to men, it ought to be able to advise women too.
@eigenmoon
Feminism’s solution is to oppress men so they forgo their own desires…which is never going to work. Note that quite a few prominent feminists are lesbian and for them feminism works a lot better.
As for advice: I think that the realization that women’s value as sex partners is higher than their relationship value is key. Of course, accepting this typically means accepting that they are not as high value as they thought they were and their actual male equivalents are less impressive than they thought.
Secondly, the recognition that men value young and pretty means that it’s a bad strategy for women to wait. Better to lock a man down early and take a gamble on a man who is still developing himself and/or reduce their standards, than keep waiting until reduced fertility forces the issue.
The advice to women isn’t complicated because men aren’t complicated, but the ‘sphere has really no incentive or desire to soft-pedal the advice.
It’s basically:
1. Lower your Standards
2. Don’t get fat
3. Lower your standards
4. Be a Nice Person
5. Lower your standards
6. Be feminine: wear your hair long, put on a dress, etc.
7. Lower your standards
Note that “lower your standards” doesn’t mean “sleep with every hot guy on Tinder immediately, even if he’s a jerk.” It means going on dates with less attractive men and stopping paying attention to hot men, who you aren’t ever going to land.
Also, it depends on what you want and what you realistically can achieve. I remember a woman posting on one mixed-gender “red pill” blog asking for advice, and the men basically telling her that she should just sleep around for a few years. Why? Because she was totally immature, clearly had no interest in an actual relationship no matter how much she actually professed a want for one, and greatly valued superficial attractive attributes. Why recommend something for her that she clearly doesn’t want?
The advice would be different for a young woman who appears to have a great deal of maturity and appears to greatly value the traits that underpin an actual loving relationship, and professes the desire to have one.
‘s got a catchy tune to it, too.
@Faza (TCM)
I thought you were going to link this!
I was expecting this one.
Locking yourself into someone who values young and pretty is a bad bet if you know you wont’ be young and pretty for long.
@Aapje
I agree with your advice. But I meant something different: an advice to psychologically cope with the red pill rage, not an advice to optimize your relationships. There are some psychological pitfalls, for example, the tendency to perceive people acting according to their own programming rather than your own programming to be evil. And those are tricky to navigate for men too.
@baconbits9
There’s a supply and demand problem. There’s a simple evolutionary reason to value young and pretty, do I even have to point it out? Men who do not value young and pretty are maybe what, 5%? 10%? But 100% women want them, which means that 90-95% of them have to settle for somebody who does indeed value young and pretty. (I just did exactly what was described in the article as “treating people as numbers”.)
This is why the society had this whole marriage thing going. The husband enjoys the youth of his wife at her 20-35 and endures her, um, non-youth at her 35+. The wife gets a claim to half his stuff as a protection of her investment (her young years). That’s how it always worked.
Now women have decided that they can spend their young years having fun and then marry in their 30s without suffering a significant loss in husband quality. Everybody here have already commented on how unrealistic that is.
I value young and pretty, but I also value a ton of other traits which are anti correlated with young and pretty. The evolutionary arguments for valuing young and pretty are very weak when you look at life expectancy and childhood mortality through human history.
… though if men are programmed to find 20-year-old women with the widest hips pretty, that’s not weak.
That is very weak when women were already into their childbearing years. You can’t wait until they hit 20 in most situations and still have your pick and you are giving up a huge edge to anyone who is taking 14-16 year olds first.
@baconbits9: What about evolutionary pressure re: 14-year-olds dying in childbirth?
Carrying a baby to term and delivering it is very hard. Younger women are much better at it. They’re more fertile, and they handle pregnancy better, with fewer health risks for the child.
“pretty” is mostly just a proxy for health and good genes.
If anything, the high amount of childhood mortality in the past made it even more important to value youth and beauty back then.
Childhood mortality in HG societies dominates infant mortality. A 5 year old child dying is far worse for your reproductive success than a child dying during birth, arguably 5-10 times worse. It is only relatively recently that surviving labor + a few weeks meant a high likelihood of making it to reproductive age.
That’s a disaster for the girl, much less so for the father.
Yes, agreed. But you were suggesting that “the evolutionary arguments for valuing young and pretty are very weak”. I dont think that’s true. I think men are preprogrammed for valuing young and pretty, we’re not conditioned by it by society. And the evolutionary mechanism for that is pretty straightforward: a young and pretty mother means more children surviving to adulthood. Even though you have plenty of roadblocks to adulthood, what happens at birth matters too.
Note that “evolution says men should want to marry a 16-year-old”, does not mean that evolution wants children to be borne and raised by teenaged girls. If we’re assuming five children at three-year intervals (nursing suppresses fertility), the average newborn child in that scenario has a 23-year-old mother.
That may be close to the optimum for maternal health in a hunter-gatherer or early agrarian society.
They are weak because they only look at a fraction of the equation, and things that are highly valuable in child rearing are often anti correlated with youth and attractiveness, experience being a big one and probably THE big one.
For most of their pre adolescent years the oldest child will have more resources put into them in most societies and you can’t assume 5 children at every 3 years with infant and childhood mortality like that, plus you have the danger of the mother dying during child birth with one of the later kids.
Nursing only diminishes fertility and not to zero, and not to near zero. Irish Twins is a saying for a reason, if you aren’t actively avoiding pregnancy while nursing you have a high chance of getting pregnant while nursing.
yeah but experience was provided by older members of the clan I would expect. which is also why humans live way past reproduction age, which is a rare thing among animals. what is your explanation for men’s preference for young and pretty, if not evolutionary pressures?
I don’t think I understand. If experience is THE big one – i.e. that men are evolutionarily incentivized to partner with women who are not only young and attractive but also have experience that makes them better at child rearing – then wouldn’t this imply that they’d be even more particularly attracted to young women/girls? It seems to me that one of the more reliable ways to partner with an experienced 25 year old woman and have her mother and rear your child is to partner with an inexperienced 22 year old woman and get her to mother your child and gain that valuable experience in childrearing over the next 3 years. Or if you want to partner with an experienced 22 year old woman, then you can partner with an inexperienced 19 year old woman to mother and rear your child.
One could try to partner with an experienced 25 year old woman anew, without partnering with her earlier when she wasn’t experienced, but a 25 year old woman being experienced in child rearing seems likely to be anti-correlated with that woman being available.
And obviously you can’t just reduce the age lower and lower since you run into other biological/social/legal constraints.
Young and pretty are just the easiest metrics to judge on in the short term. The larger the accessible population the more you have to rely on basic rules to whittle it down. If you tribe was 100 people and half male, and half of the females are above 40 or under 12 there are 25ish total potential mates, with most of those potential mates already taken and pregnant/already with kids. Drop out your close relatives like sisters and there really isn’t a whole lot of choice. If you are going for a wife in another clan the sister thing isn’t an issue but everything else is and also probably some seasonal stuff where you only have a specific window each year to get a wife. The amount of choices that most males had is generally grossly exaggerated, and the youngest of those girls doesn’t correlate well with what modern men generally find attractive. Very few men express a preference for just on the cusp of woman hood physical traits, and I would say that most men express a preference for women who are more developed than they are early on (girls develop earlier than boys so most teenagers attracted to teenagers fit this mold, and the hot teacher that half the school has a crush on is an old trope).
That’s true. Yet men have evolved preferences. Or do you dispute that our preferences have evolutionary origins?
So how do you get a 22 year old woman in most Hunter Gatherer societies? Are you waiting for her to go from 15 to 22 before you approach her? Is every other eligible male also waiting?
Another reason not to go after the very young. The ideal grandmother for your kids is probably the 50-55 range when you start having yours. Younger and they should still have kids of their own taking their time and attention and older and their physical decline will be an important factor.
Well, I presume one can just approach the 15 year old girl, or her parents depending on the case, and stay with her until she turns 22. Of course, that just raises the question of how do you get a 15 year old girl – are you waiting for her to go from 8 to 15 before you approach her, and is every other eligible male also waiting?
This is where I think you run into other biological/social constraints (guessing “legal” wouldn’t be one in a hunter/gatherer society). This would tend to have the effect of putting some limits on just how young “young” can be in the “young and attractive” criterion.
Natural breastfeeding is ~98% effective at preventing pregnancy during the first six months following birth, and ~95% in the following six months. I can’t readily find information for longer periods, but breastfeeding for 2-3 years is common in surviving hunter-gatherer and preindustrial agrarian populations.
Feel free to run a Monte Carlo simulation with realistic values for whatever details you think are relevant; I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to change the results very much.
@baconbits9
I feel the evolution has been discussed already, so I’ll just reply to this:
You might easily find a 30+ yo woman who’d be delighted to hear that. However, as she ages, her value in your eyes would fall in some ways and raise in some other ways, and you may assure her that it will sum up into a raise, but can she trust you on that? Maybe you absolutely believe right now that her age won’t be a problem but once you look at her wrinkly face you’ll reconsider. So the woman will demand marriage for the sake of security.
You however can not trust her ton of other traits to stay put after the marriage. Her intelligence and wisdom might remain, but will she continue to treat you nicely after the marriage? Nobody knows that.
So we have the typical problem of modern relationships: a woman is only secure if married, a man is only secure if not married. And if that conundrum results in no marriage, then it can be described as the woman having priced herself out of the market.
@baconbits9
Looks usually go gradually, rather than suddenly.
Also, the good looks gives her leverage to condition the husband into certain behavior & make him dependent on her, as well as making him feel indebted, which she can draw on later.
It’s quite common for long relationships to become so symbiotic that the price of breaking that up is high.
Ultimately, older women being generally less attractive to men simply means that men are less motivated to sacrifice for older women, all else being equal.
—
Women who wait are like prospective tenants who have a fixed budget, which becomes less valuable due to inflation over time. It’s better to rent a house quickly, because it’s costly and risky for the renter to kick out someone and find a new person to rent to. You are more valuable as someone who already rents and has proven to be a good tenant, than as a random person that still has to be vetted and even then, may turn out to be a menace.
Those numbers are conditional on the woman’s menstrual cycle not returning, so that is the risk of getting your menstrual cycle back and getting pregnant on the first cycle. It is also the risk for exclusive breastfeeding, women who pump and feed their babies 100% pumped milk saw their pregnancy rates double.
HG societies are likely to have shared feedings and shared caring with young girls in groups often observed providing care for new mothers while the breastfeeding studies highlight that the profilatic response is driven by continued proximity to the child plus basically zero other foods being introduced.
No it doesn’t, a 15 year old is likely capable of reproduction, an 8 year old isn’t which is a clear delineation.
Yet some markets are kinder than others.
The problem this leftie has with economics: it should be a tool that tells you how to fulfil some goal that you bring to it, but it is often instead something that maximises its own default values, which aren’t ones I like.
I once had a weird conversation with an economics student who told me “economics is value-neutral, we are just taught to find and remove inefficiencies..”.
Dude, you are being taught to value efficiency ..but without any explicit discussion of values.
I agree, but I think that economics actually accomplishes that, unless it’s of Keynesian variety, which is only useful to praise the government. That economics student surely sounds like a Keynesian to me.
@TheAncientGeeksTAG
I think that his point was that you can use economics to most efficiently extract labor from people, but also to make labor more pleasant, with a minimal reduction in incomes as a price for that. Or to do redistribution in a way that discourages finding work the least.
Economics qua economics is a value-free science, a way of understanding behavior. The problem is that people want economists to tell them not only what will happen but what should happen.
We have solved that by coming up with a criterion, economic efficiency, that has the following features:
1. It comes reasonably close to what most people value, although it isn’t identical.
2. Economics can often be used to figure out how to maximize it.
3. There is no other criterion that satisfies condition 2 and does better on condition 1.
A sloppy description of economic efficiency is the size of the pie. A more precise description is that it is total utility, calculated on the assumption that individuals correctly recognize their own interest and that everyone has the same marginal utility of income.
@DavidFriedman
I feel uneasy about the notion of economic efficiency when you put it like this, as neither of the two assumptions is realistic. Let’s call the degree to which people correctly recognize their own interest (and what’s going on in general) “epistemic efficiency” (yes, I don’t know the proper term). I fear that maximizing total utility by proxy fails by Goodhart’s law, namely, that the proxy (economic efficiency) is maximized but epistemic efficiency and equality are minimized, so we don’t get what we actually want.
Equality has been discussed to death so I’ll concentrate on epistemic efficiency. One of the weirdest (to me) Keynesian notions is that the natural equilibrium point of the boom-bust cycle is at its peak, since that’s where economic efficiency is maximized. But this is also the point at which epistemic efficiency is minimized.
To give a concrete example of an epistemic failure, a company that owns $1 and 99% of its own stock is clearly just $1 and a bunch of paper, but the public has been trained to value it at $100 (x = 0.99x + $1, thus x = $100).
So I think that at this point the economic efficiency should not be encouraged any further because of Goodhart’s law.
economics has not been value neutral as actually practiced… ever.
It is most certainly not so now, in an environment where a scary proportion of all work in the field is funded by extremely explicitly political think tanks and endowments.
The proclamation that it is so is just an attempt to sneak extremely political questions past people as mere “technocracy”. Consider, for example, just how much ink is spent arguing against inheritance taxes in the name of economics.
You don’t mean minimized — that would mean that the most economically efficient system was the most unequal and the one with the most self-deception, which is implausible. Simply not maximized—ignored in the decision of what is or is not economically efficient.
And economists don’t ignore the fact that economic efficiency is an imperfect proxy, they routinely talk about it. The person who, I think, invented the concept (although not the label) was Alfred Marshall, who was a utilitarian. He discusses, in his Principles, why he thinks it is a good proxy for most of the issues we use it for — because the effects, positive and negative, are usually spread over a sufficiently diverse population so that differences in marginal utility of income average out. For my discussion of efficiency, see this chapter in my webbed Price Theory.
What struck me as most significant was that both of the “creepy” blog posts have since been deleted. Belief that lots of straight men are getting a raw deal on dating sites has not only been declared heresy, but the inquisitors appear to possess hegemonic power over the discourse. (Of course, the sites that don’t care about the inquisition are well-known for their high witch population.)
I wonder how many future readers will reconstruct the heresy from the inquisition’s publications?
The OKC stuff was’t deleted due to content; they were forced to delete their whole backlog of content after being taken over by the Match Group, largely because the thrust of OKC’s research mostly pointed towards “Paying for a dating app is 100% a waste of money” and The Match Group didn’t like it.
I’m not saying the content wouldn’t be objectionable now, just that these posts weren’t deleted due to this content.
The problem is that dating websites can’t guarantee objective results. Sure, they can put you “in contact” with people you are interested in. But they can’t guarantee the outcome you are looking for, such as sex/relationship/marriage/whatever.
Given that notwithstanding explicit gambling, people prefer to pay for specific results. And they can’t be delivered. So every element of the matchmaking industry is an attempt to hide that in hopes that you’ll pay money.
Doing statistics in the social sciences is, as far as I can tell, all about thinking of people as numbers. Consider murder statistics.
I think the real correct answer here is “why are you reading this in the first place?”
It doesn’t make sense to you because it was never meant for you, the same way Biblical interpretation probably doesn’t make much sense to atheists. It only works if you already buy all the axioms and unstated assertions it’s based on. If you don’t, it looks like insanity – just like everything WE say would probably look bizarre and evil to the author of that piece.
They have a very well-defined and rigid sense of who the Good People are and who the Bad People are – a thing’s goodness is a function of how much it helps the Good People minus how much it helps the Bad People. They don’t think in total/average utilitarian terms like we do. See I See Trad People.
Actually, even that’s over-complicating it. The real answer is that what that blog is saying smells vaguely like MRA, and people the author respects and trusts have told him MRA is evil, so this must be evil.
Everything else is just rationalization of the knee-jerk reaction, which don’t forget is how normal people make arguments, I’m sure each of us remembers a time when that was how we engaged in internet discourse.
Because I have a vested interest in Dating Apps. I’m the primary market for them, over the course of my life have spent somewhere between $100-$150 on them and have met at least 80% of romantic interests through them. I’m the exact market for content about dating apps and hold strong impacts about their effect on society.
I actually tested this theory in my office. I picked 5 fellow millennials (4 female, 1 male) who would agree with the MRA = always bad statement. I then showed them the two blog posts first, had them read it. They had no negative reaction to them. I then showed them the Atlantic article, they were also confused why the Atlantic was pissed about this.
Now, i’m sure I poisoned the well here by leaking that I don’t think these articles are offensive, but still: if they were as obviously heretical as the atlantic makes it looks, you would expect at least one of them to have had the kneejerk reaction.
It’s also possible that people’s actual beliefs are not as extreme as the beliefs they signal in public.
Fair point
Good work, wish people actually tested statements here more often. I stand contradicted-by-evidence if not corrected.
If you don’t mind me asking – 80% of what? I sent out a few hundred messages over the course of a couple years trying online dating and all I got back were a couple “please kill yourself”s, one “thanks for the compliment” and one short conversation about religion. I was 18, 19, and 20 at the time though, maybe people start taking it seriously later in life.
Really?
Given the state of internet discourse, I am saddened but not in the least bit surprised.
Those kids who fucked my mom on call of duty five years ago are on tinder now.
60% of the time ‘creepy’ is an attack, 39.9 percent of the time it’s used to describe someone or an action by someone whom the speaker has a low opinion of.
I think discounting people’s opinions if they use the word creepy (unless it is a really accurate fit for the case) is legitimate, they probably aren’t saying anything worthwhile
I probably won’t do a very good job, but I understand the implicit argument to be:
1) You can often infer the intent behind a facially true statement by its effect, and some facially true statements are harmful unless protectively packaged.
2) It may well be true that men have a lot more variance in the number of likes they receive than women, and that women are more likely to rate the opposite gender as below average in looks, but:
a) phrasing the analysis in economic terms suggests that the distributions above are unjust, since we believe economic inequality to be unjust. The writers are therefore either deliberately misleading by using metaphors that suggest injustice, or they are harmfully insensitive (i.e., “creepy”).
b) phrasing romantic analysis in economic terms suggests that romance is a commodity instead of some post-economic gift relationship that rises above the cold calculus of benefit and exchange.
3) Since we can be reasonably confident in our prior that women are not as a group unjust to men, any analysis that implies so is likely to be flawed.
————–
As I said, I didn’t do a very good job steel manning. My general analysis is usually that people criticizing economics often don’t understand it well enough to make a meaningful criticism, and I frankly suspect that to be the case here. (But the alternative is always possible – that the critics are right in this case and my attitudes towards economics have blinded me to the merits of their arguments).
In a since-deleted 2009 official blog post, an OkCupid employee’s data analysis showed women rating men as “worse-looking than medium” 80 percent of the time
To be fair, some of the sample photos I’ve seen referenced online have done the guys in them no favours – there have been ones where I’ve gone *sharp intake of breath* “are you trying to look like a potential axe-murderer?” and others where if the guy had just tidied his hair, worn a different shirt, and practiced smiling until it didn’t look goofy, he would have been much much more attractive-looking in the photo.
When we hear that a single person has tested positive for coronavirus, how confident should we be that it wasn’t a false positive? What are the false positive rates for these sorts of tests generally like?
A cursory Google search brings up this article, which may be of interest.
Whenever I hear the terms “public” and “private” to refer to governmental/nongovernmental entities or actions, respectively, it always feels backwards to me. I get that the terms are meant as something along the lines of “public: the collective actions of everyone, enacted through the democratic government”, and “private: individual actors doing their own thing independent of the wants of others” but the way it strikes me, it ends up feeling more like it should be “public: the freely chosen actions of members of the public” and “private: the actions that are dictated by the particular institution of the government, in contrast to those actions which people freely choose for themselves”.
Overall, it’s a somewhat similar feeling as encountering the term “economically liberal”, which (at least in US political discourse) generally tends to be paired with political views about the economy which are decidedly illiberal. Does anyone else also get this feeling about these terms, or know of other terms that cause them to feel this way?
I agree that the usage of “public” could go either way, but I don’t feel that way about “private” at all. It seems like the word “private” has some connotation of “non-consensual” for you, and I don’t share that connotation.
I’m sorry that my wording on that was a bit unclear. I also don’t think that non-consensuality needs to be implicated. It’s more that, if we are thinking of actions being decided by the marketplace vs by the government (or, to reframe it a bit, in the economic market vs the political market), it feels more natural to me to categorize the market as being the more public one. I think that this view comes from viewing the non-governmental activities as being the “default” form of activity. For example, a consumer demand for a product leading to companies producing that product fits more with “public” in my mind than that same demand leading to the government providing that same product.
I guess this comes from viewing government as a “particular institution”, where government does not have intrinsic goodness or badness, but is just judged by what outcomes it brings about. This relates a bit to the discussion in the Just Giving review, where I think many people would view the government solving a particular problem/need would be the “natural” / “public” course of action, with the actions of individual members of society solving the problem fitting to “private”, whereas in my view, the latter is framed as the public solving that problem, while the former is framed as government (as opposed to “the people”) stepping in (as opposed to the problem being dealt with “naturally”).
I guess one way to put this in (somewhat overstated) examples would be: the (I think) more common view goes something like: “private: wealthy people forcing their will on The People (through the market) using their wealth” vs “public: The People democratically choose (through government) what The People will do”, with my view being more like: “public: individual people can freely choose what they do” vs “private: the institution of government (as opposed to any of the other myriads of institutions) is controlling what those people do, instead of them being able to do so themselves”. Of course, this statement of the second view ignores the concept of people collectively deciding to do things through the government, and also contains the non-consensuality aspect that I don’t think needs to be present, but does (I hope) convey an axis of difference between the two views.
EDIT: A (maybe) better example: take the question “should we produce more of X or Y?”. To me, saying “let the market decide” sounds much more natural and public than saying “let the government decide”, which comes off more as having the government interpose in that domain, against the natural tendency. Maybe this is in part due to me not viewing the current government as all that democratic. If we somehow had a handwavium-powered total direct democracy, I could see myself reversing my use of the terms. (e.g., should the public (via our magic direct democracy) decide [question], or should private individuals decide?)
Do you think the same distinction should be made between private and public when talking about land? To me, “public park” sounds like something that is open to everyone/the public. A private park sounds like something that is controlled by the park owner.
Since ownership is so important in a market-based economy, it makes sense to me that you would talk about private being the things citizens control, and public being the things the government controls.
For that example, my use of the terms seem to cut skew to the various definitions upthread. For instance, I would consider a government-built museum which is freely open to be public, but I would also consider it public if that museum was built by (say) a billionaire instead. On the other hand, I would consider both a military base and a residential mansion to be private in that sense. I think that the terms “private” and “public” are serving somewhat different purposes between these different examples. In the one, it is “is it being done by government / non-government”, while in the other it is “is it open to everyone or not?”.
@kimchiwillow,
I’ve long felt that for most of my lifetime (since about ’74 when I was six years old) “conservatives” have been closer to the dictionary definition of ‘liberals’, and “liberals” have been closer to the dictionary definition of ‘conservatives’ in the U.S.A.
About the only time recently that “conservatives’ were more conservative, and “liberals” were more liberal that I can recall was ’09 and ’10, otherwise the terms are bogus as used.
Not directly related, but how would you describe your political views? It struck me that you are one of the most active commenters, but I do not actually have that good of an idea of what your views are. What I’ve seen of your views has struck me as being sort of around 10 o’clock (on John Nerst’s Tilted Political Compass), but I’m not confident in that. Apart from self-description, what would be a few policies that you would most want enacted/repealed? What I have tried to gather about your views has been largely from where you disagree with others in the comments here, but I can’t recall seeing as much of what your views actually are (as opposed to what they aren’t).
I’m obviously not @Plumber, but I think you’ll find he’s something of a union man, which gives you a fair amount of information. I note he’s also fond of 60’s/70’s motorcycles, which to my mind forgives every political sin he has ever committed..
@Anteros says:
Yes,
yes, and YES!
Very much appreciated!
@kimchiwillow says:
As a guess “Left leaning reactionary”, I’m a registered Democrat with a few views that are heretical for the Democratic Party.
If I recall correctly, I voted for: Clinton in ’92, Dole in ’96, I don’t think I voted in 2000 (I was busy being an indentured apprentice) but if I did it was probably for Bush, Kerry in ’04 and for the Democrat since, in ’16 I thought Jim Webb would be the Democratic candidate who could win in the general election but he dropped out early and I pulled the lever for Sanders (which was easier to do knowing the my wife was voting for Mrs. Clinton), and I mailed in my vote for Biden in the ’20 California primary two weeks ago.
Most?
Oh that’s hard!
Um..
1) Restart the drug war, I’m weary of discarded needles and the smell of marijuana on city streets, and methamphetamine turns people crazy and evil, ‘sides, while I put most of the blame on rents being bid up, I suspect that de facto legalization contributes to all the tents now on the streets.
I’d probably have “treatment centers” (not really, just shelters) where addicts could ingest opioids if they stay there and don’t cause trouble, but man that would be disheartening for the staff!
No such “treatment centers” for cocaine and especially meth, those substances are Satan’s instruments and distribution and use should be re-criminalized.
2) Re-start the W.P.A. as an “employer of last resort” for jobs with the dignity of doing something that is useful and/or of lasting beauty (the public library nearest to my house being an example).
3) Have most Federal labor laws be what they were in 1947.
4) Re-create the growth of industrial union jobs of the ’40’s and ’50’s for most anyone who can fog a mirror and hold a rivet gun and/or welding torch (maybe declare a cold war against the asteroid belt?).
5) Re-start the “family wage” so both of so many parents don’t feel compelled to work full-time (both part-time, or have one stay-at-home parent). Exactly how to do that with a lot of the problem being the salaried rather than hourly employees bidding up housing I’m unsure of, maybe subsidized housing and part-time jobs for couples with children?
6) Repeal Roe v. Wade, leave such matters for counties, municipalities, and small States to decide.
7) Keep guns out of the hands of unmarried young men who aren’t part of a “well regulated militia” or going duck hunting with their uncle.
8) Re-instutionalization, get screaming schizophrenics off city streets.
9) In principle public education seems worthwhile, in practice so very not much, have more parochial schools and earlier apprenticeships, maybe have public colleges just be for nursing students, and then “public college for all” for students that are over 40 years old so older folks may have white collar jobs instead of disability checks, mostly eliminate the last three years of high school, shift “civics” lessons earlier (teach at ten what is now taught at fourteen), have trade schools (nursing, welding, etc.) start at 15 years old, have “Liberal arts for citizenship” be taught at the middle school years, or leave it for the Jesuits to do.
10) Except maybe for nurses for a while (until the education system is improved), and those who come here to teach Americans their skills, have very little “skills based” and “labor need” immigrantion (sorry Anatoly, Boris, and Mikhail in the boiler room!), have spouses and a limited number of refugees be the bulk of immigrants instead.
11) California is too big, have more and smaller States.
12) Prevent folks from tearing down the pre-war duplexes and town houses of Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco and replacing them with skyscraper condos, also prevent the prevention of big lot post war suburban houses in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties being replaced with duplexes and townhouses!
Sorry ’bout that! I’m pro-union, and pro-welfare state, and slowing “growth” and “innovation” sounds good to me!
Montgomery-Wards and Woolworths, not Targets and Wal-Mart’s!
I’ve been listening to Jaybee Lobsterman’s “Dozen Rules for Living” audiobook, read by the author, and…am I mistaken in thinking I’m hearing him crying in the last part of Rule 7??
(BTW, I always have fun with these anti-search obfuscations of certain names and terms, but I’m unclear on whether they’re still considered etiquette here. I remember Scott asking for them, but I don’t remember him saying “All clear, you can go back to writing it normally.” But I might have just missed it.)
If you google ’12 rules peterson crying,’ you will see that other people also think that he is crying.
I did that, but on DDG, not Google. Maybe that’s why I didn’t see anything in the first few pages.
Anyway, I found this extremely awkward. I think I can imagine a couple (possibly mutually exclusive) reasons why he decided to keep that take in, and there are probably many audience members who thought it added positively to the experience, but I guess I’m just not one of them.
But it raises interesting questions about what is the best way to narrate an audiobook.
I tried to switch to DDG, but it didn’t give me the results I was looking for.
I found a lot of threads on Reddit about it. Perhaps DDG disfavors Reddit?
OK, I just read through one of those Reddit threads…looks like I’m the only one who found it awkward. Everyone there thought it was powerful and enriching.
Reddit rate-limits the hell out of crawlers (including Google’s). So reddit coverage tends to be spotty on search engines.
Jaybee Lobsterman works for me. I think everybody who is interested knows who you mean, and it avoids whatever problems that were caused by using his real name. Which of course I’ve completely forgotten …
Peterson was never an asked-for obfuscation. People just did his for fun.
He is very very memeable .
Scott didn’t ask us to obfuscate (the name would have gone on the banned words list then), but he did ask us to dial back discussion and warn us that low-quality stuff may get deleted.
Tangential Discussion: What the heck is going on in the world of the Lobsterman. I don’t follow him too closely, but the news that’s filtered into my bubble over the last month or so about him makes me either worried for him or convinced I’m the target of a psy-ops campaign.
If I’m reading this correctly he:
1. Had some kind of mental/medical problem.
2. Tried to combat this problem by eating exclusively meat.
3. The problem got worse, and he started taking anti-anxiety meds.
4. Got really, really addicted to anti-anxiety meds.
5. Couldn’t shake them, kept overdosing his meds and eating meat.
6. Eventually had a health breakdown.
7. Flew to Russia where doctors put him in a coma for some reason.
8. Is still in Russia?
Is this a meme I’m just not getting, or is his life really this weird?
This is the one part that makes sense. Benzo-diazepines are one of the few drug classes where withdrawal can kill you–induced coma during withdrawal could be a fairly valuable risk-reduction mechanism.
Is inducing a medical coma to help manage withdrawal a common practice then that I’ve just never heard of?
Everything in my bubble that described this made it sound like this was the kind of thing that most normal (or, western if you want to parse it like that) doctors wouldn’t deem necessary.
I’ve never been quite clear on what “inducing a medical coma” means–is there something more than just sedating the patient so deeply that they don’t respond to stimuli?
Being under general anaesthetic is far more like a comatose state than just being asleep.
For how I heard it, put #4 between #1 and #2. He was on them long before the carnivore diet. That wasn’t for mental, that was for autoimmune disease(s).
I think a significant factor is that his wife was diagnosed with (terminal?) cancer. I havent heard anything about how his wife is doing right now. But that’s what got him to go on the anti-anxiety meds. I have no idea if he’s still in Russia.
He’s got terminal cancer?!
ETA – reading comprehension fail.
As far as I understand it things went as follows:
1. Wife got cancer.
2. JP was having emotional problems re: cancer and saw a psychiatrist who prescribed him anti-anxiety medication.
3. Cancer situation eventually improved somewhat (to the best of my knowledge) but JP found that he couldn’t stop taking his meds.
4. JP sensibly sought professional help in getting of anti-anxiety medication and checked into rehab.
I know nothing about the coma. Naturally JP has many opportunistic enemies, and they were quick to paint all this in the worst brush possible, but I don’t see anywhere where he went wrong. People generally recommend seeing professional help when you have trouble, unless the person seeking it out is famous.
I need simple but realistic travel rates for an RPG. I’m using cells 6 miles across, so a person’s view even on flat grassland doesn’t include other cells (unless they climb a hill or tree).
I know fit people can march 24 miles a day, encumbered, over flat terrain. Since hikers can do the 2,653-mile Pacific Crest Trail in as little as 150 days, crossing mountains should only reduce that to 18 miles a day. Horses only let you cover 1 extra cell of flat terrain unless you ride them to death or for some reason use them as “boosters”, riding them 24-30 miles in the first couple hours of daylight then leaving them with hirelings while you walk.
But how much should distance covered be reduced by snow on the ground? What if you try to cross wetlands or swamp (forest wetlands) without a boat?
For a long time I ran the Pathfinder RPG “Kingmaker” which uses a Hex based system, though they were 12 Miles across.
This was the timetable it gave me. Seemed fine, played 2 years without anyone complaining. So just like, halve everything I guess?
For mountains, you could always give an altitude figure and use Naismith’s Rule (1 hour/2000′ up). But the real issue with mountains is that you’ve got to squiggle around passes and ridges and not fall off cliffs, so you can’t compare travel on a grid system to travel along a trail. Also weather means that sometimes your options are to stay put or die.
Snow really depends on the amount. 25% penalty sounds reasonable. (note that avalances and walking along cornices can temporarily result in extreme increases in speed, in a downwards direction.)
Wetlands are bastards. That’s all I’ll say.
Now I want to find some hikers/tabletop gamers and work out how to play an RPG on an Ordnance Survey map using realistic route planning.
I kinda did this. I had a D20 Modern quest set in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wildnerness and used an accurate canoeing map for game map.
Ooh cool! As someone who’s canoed in the BWCAW many times, I’d be interested in hearing more.
In college I DM-ed a D20 modern campaign where the characters played (slightly) idealized versions of themselves. In one quest, they had to contact a Genus Loci that knew a fact relevant to a larger arc in the campaign. The only way to contact the Genus Loci was to speak to a certain tree on a certain island on a “lost” quetico lake. The ritual could only be done “in the summer months, on a day and in the hour of jupiter, before sunrise” and the party quickly realized that this meant the ritual could only be done on one particular (fast approaching) day, or they’d have to wait a whole nother year…
so a rapid journey to that particular location begins. most of the quest involved the “shot” from saganaga down to knife lake around the canadian border. Our heroes tangled with militia, and demonic voygeur-ghosts, before arriving at a fictional lake northeast of Birch Lake, just in time to perform the ritual.
Yeah, definitely, but if I put down Mountain on a map, I want a simple rule for it.
And there should be random weather checks to force this.
Thanks. 🙂
I would be cautious about basing your numbers on PCT hikers; they tend to be optimizing for speed and encumbrance, which is not the case for most RPG characters. I would put mountains at no more than 12 miles per day.
Deep snow and marshy ground (that will soak you to your shins but not let you boat through) will probably slow you further, to what I’d peg at no more than 8 miles per day in full gear. You can do a lot better the more lightly equipped you are, of course, and the better-provisioned.
Hmm, maybe 24 flat-12 mountain for encumbered characters, but 36 flat-18 mountain if you wear no armor and otherwise only as encumbered as PCT hikers?
Cool, thanks.
Keep in mind “the PCT schedule” assumes you’re running incredibly light. A typical total carry weight is about 20 pounds. Here’s a video to demonstrate what that looks like.
Yeah… strong, conditioned adventurers would have to be capped at 20 pounds of encumbrance for that pace. I’m open to being convinced that’s a death sentence with pre-modern gear weights.
Aren’t most RPG adventurers literal superhumans, though?
Sanford’s ORBIS tool for estimating travel times in the Roman world uses the following travel rates over roads, regardless of season or terrain:
Foot: 30 km/day = 18.6 miles = 3 cells
Oxcart: 12 km/day = 7.5 miles = 1.2 cell
Horse: 56 km/day = 36 miles = 5.9 cells
Fast Carriage: 62 km/day = 39 miles = 6.5 cells
Horse Relay: 250 km/day = 155 miles = 25.8 cells
Rapid Military March: 60 km/day = 37 miles = 6.2 cells
They do let you specify seasons, but it looks like that’s only implemented as far as closing off routes that would be impassible or prohibitively dangerous in a given season.
The don’t model terrain effects, since they only consider roads and water routes. The main obstacles from terrain going cross-country are probably going to be 1) fatigue from climbing up and down rough terrain, which you’re already modeling, 2) terrain obstacles stopping you from going in a straight line, and 3) the difficulty of slogging through wetlands or dense underbrush. I don’t have any numbers for you, unfortunately, but maybe something I said might jog someone else’s memory.
I was going to suggest this. This has been *so* helpful for fantasy writing.
That’s awesome. Everything looks like what I’d expect except 18.6 mile foot, though that’s totally reasonable depending on whose feet. I would also round horse, fast carriage/chariot and “Rapid Military March” all to 36 miles/day for simplicity.
In the War of 1812, there was a long winter march that averaged around 20 km per day.
Very helpful, thanks.
This is true, for large bodies of people, who are forced to form a colloumn, wait for scouting reports, get out of the colloumn etc.
Also you have to consider that the shear quantity of people horses and wagons deteriorated the roads of the time.
None of this would be true for the common D&D Fantasy-SpecOp-Team.
I’d be extremely skeptical of using minimum-time PCT numbers for two reasons. First, those kind of people are not particularly representative of the general population. I’ve done a couple of 12+ mile days with a pack over rugged (if not quite mountainous) terrain, and it’s not easy. Yes, even at the time I wasn’t in the shape an adventurer would be, but the sort of people who set time records on the PCT are probably more lightly loaded than a typical adventurer and definitely are way more into fitness. Second, as Lambert points out, mountains aren’t going to let you march in a straight line. Exactly how not straight the line is varies (among other things with your navigational skills) but I’d say that’s going to cost you at least 50%, maybe 100% or more. 24 miles/day on the strategic map really only works if your navigation is good and you’re on a very flat area. In terms of overland distance, I’d suggest maybe 18 miles/day as the norm, falling to 12 in serious hills and 6 in mountains.
6 miles seems implausibly harsh. 100% penalty for winding mountain trails seems quite reasonable though.
I think that depends heavily on how good your navigation is. If you’re following a road or otherwise have good knowledge of the terrain (like a topographic map), then 12 miles/day for adventurers is quasi-reasonable. If you don’t, and have to judge the terrain based solely on what you can see, then you’re going to have lots of trouble. “It turns out that the saddle between those two mountains we were aiming for lets out over a very steep ravine. We can either try to cross it, which will be hazardous and time-consuming, or backtrack and find another route.”
Oh yeah, for sure.
Hrm, I suppose 100% penalty (i.e. 12 miles/day) if you can’t reasonably get lost due to being led through a mountain hex a party member (Ranger type, hired guide) has been through before, otherwise a 6-mile cell takes all day. Plus a percentage chance to fail to move in the cardinal direction you attempted if no one has the woodlore to keep the cardinal directions straight?
Or walk to the edge of the cell?
A quick note, on the off chance that yours or any other reader’s calculations prove too far from the mark: if travel time plays this critical a role in your upcoming campaign, then unique hazards such as treacherous cliffsides, windy rivers, or toxic swamps can serve as excellent caps to travel rates in case you’ve miscalculated and the party is going too fast, as they also permit the players to roleplay traversing them. Same with opportunities for fast travel in case they’re falling behind – a wandering herd of wild horses, a passing merchant, or more exotic events if the setting permits (giant eagles and Moria being the textbook examples).
If you’re just handling this with a 30-second paragraph exposition, of course, these precautions won’t be necessary. But they could make the setting more interesting.
I’ve always liked Tolkien’s descriptions in The Lord of the Rings of the sheer slogging when traversing all kinds of terrain that the Hobbits have to do; from their shortcut at the start immediately going wrong to the crossing of the Midgewater Marshes, which Strider undertakes in order to cut off a loop of road and get in as straight a line to Weathertop as fast as they can do:
It’s not dangerous or even particularly difficult, it’s just tiring and annoying and all the discomforts of camping out in the wild, as well as trying to keep on a straight line when there isn’t any straight line you can keep to – that takes a lot of mental attention and focus which is equally fatiguing as the physical labour.
Do we have any idea how many cases of the novel coronavirus are present in the U.S.?
The CDC’s current criteria for testing require someone to display symptoms AND either have visited China in the last 2 weeks or have had close contact with a *laboratory confirmed* case. On the face of it, these criteria seem to rule out detection of community transmission of the virus almost by definition: a chain of transmission could only be detected if every single person in the chain displays symptoms and shows up for testing, in order.
The CDC says that 445 people have been tested, total, in the U.S.
According to some sources, the CDC would like to change their criteria to “test anyone who has severe flu symptoms and tests negative for flu”. But this would require a massive increase in testing capacity, and the US apparently doesn’t even have the capacity to keep up with the extremely low rate of testing demanded by the current requirements. Apparently there is a backlog of several days.
Apparently the FDA has used emergency powers to forbid public and private labs from devising their own tests for the virus using the RT-PCR machines they already have. The FDA *has* authorized the use of a specific test kit disseminated by the CDC, but apparently this protocol doesn’t work. (Depending on source, some 3-12 labs besides the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters have validated it, out of 100+ that received it). The CDC hasn’t delivered an updated version of the protocol after 3 weeks. The FDA has also not authorized the importation of commercial test kits from Europe or Asia.
So on the face of it, the only way to identify an outbreak of the virus in the US would be the Mark I Eyeballs of hospital clinicians. I don’t have a good feel for how difficult this is, but from what I’ve heard a bad case of the new virus looks a lot like a really bad case of influenza and pneumonia – the big difference is in the percentage of severe cases. If so, it might be very difficult to identify an outbreak until the *number* of patients with pneumonia in a community starts to change dramatically, which given that this is flu season might represent a huge number of total infections.
Other countries, even with orders of magnitude more testing capacity than the US, seem to have missed community transmission until many people have been infected – it seems like the pattern is that one case is detected (a case which the CDC would presumably refuse to test, since their route of infection is initially unknown) and then contact tracing quickly reveals hundreds of other cases.
I’m very far from an expert in this area, and I feel like I’ve had to put together my understanding of these issues from lots of different sources because this isn’t being reported very aggressively. I have trouble understanding how this is anything less than front page news. Does anyone have any better insight into what is going on, or an explanation of why this situation is less terrible than it sounds?
Also, if we have incredibly limited testing capacity, is there any reason why you wouldn’t just mix all the flu surveillance network samples from a city together and test the result? At least that would give you one bit of information (“Is the coronavirus at large in this city?”)
It would seem they are testing at least some people for community transmission.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus-china-live-updates/2020/02/26/f889693a-580e-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.html
What’s worse for a government, 2% of its citizens dying to a worldwide pandemic quietly, or economic shutdown and widespread panic?
Highly doubt it will be even remotely close to 2% of citizens. That assumes literally everyone gets infected and the death rate holds up if they do.
The death rate would probably increase if many people were infected at once, due to saturation of hospital resources.
Trying to cover up the epidemic just to have it blow up in your face is probably much worse for a government than admitting its existence, especially if you are seeking reelection in a few months.
2% is a lot of people. The idea that the US, for example, could lose six million people quietly and without a panic sounds like it’s postulating a fundamentally different world than the one that exists.
> the FDA has used emergency powers to forbid public and private labs from devising their own tests for the virus using the RT-PCR machines they already have.
Wait. What? Is there a citation and rationalization for this? Because this sounds like an incredibly bad idea to me.
Citation: Former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Twitter (several weeks ago).
Rationalization: Your guess is as good as mine, but “false negatives and false positives from inaccurate tests can have serious public health consequences in an emergency, so we need to make good decisions about which tests to use” sounds like the kind of argument that would make sense to the same people that favor every other disastrous government intervention.
Edit: The FDA’s own words
It should be front page news, but my guess(!) is that journalists feel that “the responsible thing” to do is to not cause a panic in the populace or fail to understand the situation themselves.
The situation is however not quite as bleak as your post makes it seem:
It should be noted that the guidelines themselves are the same in Germany and afaik Italy, but at least Germany did more testing than the US, although not by an order of magnitude more.
The recent new cases in Italy and Germany were discovered when critically ill patients presented themselves in hospitals. They were then tested despite not matching the criteria in the guidelines, which to me suggests that there will not be more than a couple of deaths due to the new virus until somebody would notice, at least in Western states.
Since death however can take quite a long time for the new virus, the number of infected people might be substantial, to the point that containment measures will probably not work anymore, see the case of Italy where over the course of one week almost a 1000 cases were discovered. But still the chance of one *personally* contracting the virus in the US is probably pretty low for now.
In what might become a continuing series of me yelling about space into the void – that Boeing Starliner failure a couple months ago is worse than it initially seemed. Everyone who has a passing interest in spaceflight knows that there are an immense amount of “failed” launches, usually in the testing phase. I remember when every other SpaceX launch seemed to fail — its part of the design process. But Boeing had a much more public failure back in December when it successfully launched, but failed to correctly dock with the ISS. At the time, any number of other things were blamed, but now NASA is basically accusing Boeing of skipping a full end-to-end test. While they are allowed to do this (NASA just has to approve the testing, there isn’t a specific guideline) it’s a pretty standard test. If you code, this is like the equivalent of checking that all the different pieces of your code work in a vacuum, but not checking if it works once you put it all together.
This was especially bad for Boeing when it happened because this was the uncrewed test that was supposed to demonstrate they could send crew to the ISS. Their main competitor, SpaceX, performed a successful test all the way back in March. With news that they may have cut corners on safety checks for the 737, and the recent crash, it caps off a spectacularly bad year for Boeing, with their stock in a near year-long decline and it wouldn’t surprise me if this news hurts their stock price even more.
The one thing NASA really cares about is astronaut safety. Whether that’s for altruistic reasons, or because astronauts dying is a bad look is up for you to decide. But there is no world where NASA lets Boeing fly a capsule crewed up to the ISS before demonstrating a successful unmanned test, so they better hope they get it right next time.
Please continue yelling. There is no more interesting field to me, and that includes my own.
The article says such testing may have caught the error, not that it definitely would have. Given that the primary error was the Starliner’s internal clock being off by 11 hours, it is not clear how more thoroughly testing the interface with Atlas V would have caused that.
An end-to-end, full duration test between Starliner and Atlas V (two complex machines built by different people in different places) is not trivial. Whether it is worthwhile very much depends on how much actual software interfacing occurs between the two vehicles (for many satellites, the communication between the rocket and payload may consist of only a couple very simple signals easily simulated). Now maybe there are details here that make the failure to test more serious, but I don’t really trust an article in general interest press coverage to capture the nuance.
Smart people at NASA reviewed Boeing’s plan and said it was reasonable – they didn’t “skip” the test, they made a decision not to do it and had that decision approved. Now obviously there were serious “escapes” from Boeing’s testing, but that likely has more to do with a failure of test cases or data review rather than what major tests they chose to run. Boeing definitely screwed up, but pointing to this one test as indicating they are especially negligent, and the “I’m not going to connect this to the 737 MAX, but did you know that Boeing had a software failure that crashed two planes” is a bit of a leap.
As you note, failures are fairly common in new space vehicles. Most seem obvious in retrospect. SpaceX blew up a capsule because they clearly didn’t do enough testing with the check valves on their hypergolic lines. They had a rocket fall apart in midair because they “skipped” acceptance testing of important structural members. They lost a payload in a pad fire because they did a wet dress with the payload integrated. All of these seem like bad decisions after the fact – but testing is expensive, time consuming, difficult, and sometimes risky. You always have to make trade offs or you never fly.
You don’t do full-up testing because it’s guaranteed to catch every possible failure mode. You do it because it regularly catches failures that all of your component- and subcomponent-level tests missed. Interoperability testing is also critical, since different subsystems that need to interoperate are often built by different contractors or different groups within the same contract, and they don’t always play nice together. All of these tests are expensive and time consuming, so government program managers and contractors alike try to find ways to get out of them at every opportunity. This behavior doesn’t surprise me, and I’m just happy that no one’s life was on the line in this particular case.
The point about the 737 was more about the public narrative. Obviously these are two separate divisions of Boeing, but you cannot deny it’s a bad look for the public, and therefore at least some investors, to hear this story so soon after hearing the story about them potentially skipping the 737 testing. One story in a vacuum is bad. Both and people may start to see a pattern, regardless of if it is actually there.
As for the validity of the test, it is true the test wasnt required by NASA. And I never said it would catch every issue, but my understanding is that every previous launch that’s a joint effort with NASA and an independent agency has done some form of full end to end test as a final verification. Its an odd test to not do even if it wasn’t required. The mission clock being wrong may actually have been a blessing in disguise as the safety panel found another issue some weeks ago that could have lead to an in-space collision.
Look you’re right that you cant test forever. But this launch had a lot more on the line for Boeing than your average rocket test, and the company was already suffering from negative public perception, which makes them not doing a particular, common, safety test weird.
My comment about the thruster issue with the SM seems to have been eaten.
But note what Scott Manley pointed out: both these issues were in parts of the code they expect to run every mission. I don’t have high hopes for the code that handles aborts, contingencies and weird edge cases.
This is a random thought that occurs to me now and then, which is probably only worth something in the context of the .25 and .75 open threads. It might be relevant for a novel I’d like to write someday, as its a thought experiment involving truly cartoonish acquisition of wealth on the level of scrooge mcduck, probably not possible now, but maybe someday…
Bill Gates is worth 90 billion, give or take. Let’s say everyone votes to take Bill Gate’s money, and we find enough loopholes and friendly judges to satisfy due process concerns, and it’s redistributed equally. That’s like…$200-$300 a person, give or take. Hardly worth the effort. An abstract principle, for the average voter, is certainly “worth” less than $200, and there are a lot of legislative and judicial hoops to jump through which supply inefficiencies…
But what if Bill Gates was worth 90 TRILLION. Now it’s 200,000-300,000 a person. Serious money, worth years upon years of effort to the average voter. What rational argument, political loyalty, or principled belief about politics withstands $200,000? It’s worth taking, and the public *will* find a way to take it.
There is a belief that concentrated wealth is incompatible with democratic societies because once the elites have enough power, they start running everything…I propose reversing the paradigm: concentrated wealth is incompatible with democratic societies because when the wealth becomes concentrated enough society will find a way to take it.
Two related questions, mostly again for a fictional scenario: what is the “breakpoint” where it becomes worth talking about literally taking a single person’s money and redistributing it, and what humorous name can be given to the breakpoint?
What stops this Bill Gates, who possesses more money than the entire country, from hiring an army of goons, bribing politicians, threatening judges, or otherwise taking his money and fucking off to a fleet of aircraft carriers?
My thought experiment might actually reveal more about “optimum bribes” or “optimum cronyism” than voter dynamics actually. Like at what point is it better for super-Gates to just accede to a 50% taking rather than pay for all the armed guards, aircraft carriers, laser defenses, etc.
I mean, it’s kinda ridiculous as a basic premise because super-Gates could literally like, hire the US and Chinese military to protect himself with this kind of money.
Realistically, this future scenario would look more like “an Amazon-like infrastructure of super-servant-robots” or “an AI that can diagnose and cure all diseases” rather than “literally 90 billion dollars in a scrooge mcDuck vault” but I think the same calculus is involved either way
@Eric T
@theodidactus
Consider this: A single gun, aimed well, can convince a trillionare to part ways with every dollar they have. Even a Bill Gates worth $90 trillion isn’t allowed to have the tanks, missiles, bombs, and fighter jets that the state has. Money alone is not power- the state has purposefully granted itself access to capital that money can’t legally buy.
Bill Gates, the individual human, is not very powerful. Perhaps even less powerful than the average human. However, Bill Gates + his property is very powerful. So clearly, it is the access to his property that is doing the bulk of the work here in terms of his power.
But where does the power of his property come from? A good chunk, perhaps nearly all of it, comes from the state, which allows him to utilize that property, under threat of force against others who would wish to use it.
If the state decided that Gates should have no property, what percentage of the property that he has now do you think he could reasonably get away with illegally controlling? I’m going to guess no more than he can stuff in a suitcase, and maybe not even that.
In summary: Your analysis assumes that Gates would be able to overthrow/fight the state utilizing the very property that the state is enabling him to have. A Bill Gates worth $90 trillion does not continue to be worth $90 trillion after the state decides it should be otherwise.
Presumably, with that much money SuperGates could buy from other states? Or bribe individual actors within the state (generals, soldiers, politicians) to act against state interests.
Or he could leave to a friendlier state the moment he sees the tides moving against him, taking his fabulous wealth and severely damaging the US economy.
Maybe if the population wakes up one day and all decide to turn on SuperGates at once he wont be able to react. But presuming that it takes some amount of time, SuperGates can throw trillions of dollars to slow, stall out, propagandize, bribe, or flee as he sees fit.
I saw an estimate of the land value of the contiguous 48 states to be $23 trillion. To get to $90 trillion we’re talking LexCorp level of dominance, with the person being the state whether directly or through figure heads
$20k. The Yang Gangway.
Isn’t this kinda a basic reason why totalitarian dictatorships are unstable?
I suppose, given the right analysis. I think a lot of the instability comes from the totalitarian part, not necessarily the “unequal” part…lots of people hate the state because their brother got killed because he was protesting that his friend got killed etc.
…but I suppose the core resentment does still boil down to concentrated resources.
I think you’re looking at it backwards. While there’s a fairly popular conception of brave rebels standing up after a grave insult, most absolutist states fell because of an interplay of economic and social reasons driving the powerful apart.
For example, the French Revolution is often portrayed as the peoples’ quest for liberty, but it was about bread first. The hunger of the lower classes, the desire for new privileges and status in the urbane classes, and the dissatisfaction the power holders had with the ancien regime, all added up to the overthrow of the government. However, no one was particularly aiming for that goal in the outset. If the state had been able to feed the people then the people would have been fine with the tyranny, as they had been for generations. Same for the middle classes, if they had been granted a political voice commensurate to their new status they’d have gone home. And if the government had been able to organise a piss up in a brewery then the upper classes would have been content to let things continue on as normal.
Tyranny falls when the regime is no longer able to keep the key stake holders in government content. And even then, usually a new tyranny replaces it rather than anything resembling liberty.
I guess I could rephrase my comment as “a basic reason why vast inequality leads to unstable social conditions”.
There probably isn’t a single breakpoint. There is a huge difference in taxation and spending levels across various advanced nations, that are probably based on a whole bunch of different factors. Whatever this “breakpoint” is, it’s gotta be higher in the US than in Sweden, and it’s higher in Sweden than in North Korea (because Kim Jong Un is going to take all your stuff LONG before you get to your first trillion).
Also, where is this capital located, and in what form is it? Because I am going to hold a significant portion of my assets in things that are not so easily seized, and definitely not so easily seized by one government. And if your government starts signaling that it wants to take me hostage in order to get all my stuff, I can just leave your country and go to a different country more respectful of my innate human rights.
It’s interesting to think about the capital/asset literally being encryption-protected, either as some novel cryptocurrency or an automated shipping/recieving/manufacturing infrastructure beholden to a single person with the access codes. How far would consequentialists go in “extracting” the codes
This capital is presumably in the form of money, correct? Which is essentially a promise that other people will give SuperGates goods and services. You can’t encrypt goods and services.
So, what’s to stop any government, or any person, from ignoring all that promise and just refusing to take SuperGates’ money? The only thing I can think of is that they’re afraid of pissing off all the other governments and people. But if SuperGates has managed to look like a threat to that many people, isn’t that defection going to look more attractive?
SuperGates can give money to people who are NBt the United States Government, in exchange for goods and services. Since the United States Government tells approximately everyone who is Not MegaBill Supergates, “hey btw you owe us $$$ in taxes, payable only in United States Dollars, or else we will put you in jail”, it seems fairly likely that SuperGates will be able to find people willing to give him goods and services in exchange for his stash of dollars.
And dollars – money generally – represents only a fraction of his capital anyway.
What is Bill Gates worth if you strip him of all his stock? What is that stock worth now? Its not 90 billion.
This. If Amazon Cloud Services buys another server, Jeff Bezos’s worth goes up, in a way that can’t be redistributed without erasing that worth. Selling that same server off will go for less than the value it added to Jeff Bezos’s worth.
Yeah, you can’t just confiscate businesses and then sell them off for actual money. At least not to anyone you’d be able to confiscate it back from.
Yes. But the conclusion I draw from this isn’t that billionaires (or trillionaires) are a bad idea. It’s that Democracy is a bad idea.
I’m not sure I think it proves either are a “bad idea” in theory. In principle, we have a lot of legal protections that prevent direct takings of the A->B variety (though arguably over the last few decades these have eroded)
I guess my counterargument would be that current western liberal democracy provides mechanisms to make this taking, which would occur in any system, a bit more nuanced. So if we make the 90 trillion dollars something more realistic: The Meditron 5000, an AI that can instantly diagnose and provide a treatment for a given disease that is certain to work, tailored to the individual in question. If Super-Gates has developed the Meditron through toil and labor over decades, and wants to withhold it to make some profit, I think a democracy is far more likely to simply tax (perhaps a lot) his use of the Meditron, at the worst order some kinda weird price-capping, whereas some kind of king or whatever is just gonna take it and order it made available on his own terms.
If Super-Gates lives under the rule of such a king, the Meditron 5000 will be at best a trade secret that bricks itself if it doesn’t get the right code from Super-Gates every month.
For any astronomers within the observable comments, some questions.
1. What is the magnitude of the effect of gravitational redshift on observed orbits of bodies? Particularly how does it affect how fast we observe galaxies spinning?
2. Considering a black hole event horizon as the bottom of a gravity well (infinite gravitational redshift, time passes infinitely slowly), would an object outside of any gravitational influence experience time infinitely fast compared to us? In other words, we observe zero time passing for an object at an event horizon, and infinite time passing for an object outside of gravity.
I had a theory that black holes didn’t even have singularities but were just hollow shells (it’d look the same from the outside) but then I remembered that the black hole needs the singularity to form in the first place.
I’m the same non-physicist that commented on your last post, but I’d enjoy hearing whatever crackpot end-goal these questions are working towards.
Obligatory: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Because I’m posting anyway:
Crackpot level 1: time is slowing down. The reason it looks like galaxies further away are moving faster isn’t because of the metric expansion of space, its because the light hitting us was from before time slowed, back when the universe was faster. The whole universe slows at the same rate, so things further away will always look like they’re moving faster.
From the inside, on a human level, we wouldn’t even notice time is slowing down because we’re in time. We might not even notice when time stops completely, we’d just stop. Using what we know about how much faster further galaxies are moving, we can calculate exactly when time slows down to zero.
Crackpot level +5: Quantum effects are acausal and achronal–when the universe slows down, the quantum effects that cause human cognition do not. This is why humans are always getting smarter, and why civilization took so long. As time slows down, we will become incomprehensibly smart. Until we are trapped like flies in amber, but still aware that we can no longer experience stimulus from the universe.
I really want to read a short story based on that second idea.
If you’re more than casually interested, you could contact one of the really science-focused SF writers, like Greg Egan, and commission a story. The going rate for short fiction is about 10 cents per word, so a 4000-word story would set you back just $400.
If time slowed down, the time between “successive updates” coming from past galaxies would increase by exactly the ratio that time for us slowed down. So the net effect would be that we observe the galaxies the same as if time had not slowed down.
I read astronomy wikipedia articles whenever my mind wanders at work. I like thinking of crackpot ideas to pass the time.
Crackpot question 2 should have been: What is the shape of the graph of escape velocity (X) vs gravitational redshift (Y)? There’s an asymptote to infinite redshift at escape velocity c, but what about 0? If something is completely unaffected by gravity, does time pass infinitely fast for it?
Crackpot goal is that dark matter isn’t real. Galaxies look like they’re spinning too fast on the edges because time passes faster on the edge of the galaxy due to the lower mass density.
Time and gravity are interlinked, time cannot meaningfully pass outside of a gravitational field or when the field is too dense.
An explanation for dark matter has to deal with all of the evidence we have for dark matter, which now goes well beyond rotation curves. You also need to explain the lensing evidence for dark matter, where more gravitational lensing happens in a given spot than you can explain given the visible matter in that spot. And you need to explain the cosmological evidence for dark matter, which is that when you put “amount of matter” as a fit parameter in models of cosmological expansion you get significantly more matter than we can see.
An excellent razor for alternative dark matter theories is the Bullet Cluster, where we see that two galaxies have collided. In the collision we can see that the visible matter has clumped together, but if you look at the amount of lensing you can see that most of the mass is invisible and in two separate chunks outside the collected visible matter. This is really easy to explain with dark matter as weakly interacting matter that simply ignored the collision and kept going. I have no idea how to explain with matter-less theories.
Why are teenagers so anxious? If you Google it, you get a bunch of answers but one hypothesis I didn’t see is this: they’re anxious because they aren’t getting enough exercise. Serious, sweat building exercise is known to relieve stress and is considered good for your mental health. Teens substituted sports for social media and are suffering for it.
I’m imagining someone is thinking that girls didn’t used to play sports that much and so this doesn’t apply to them. Maybe it just applies to boys, I don’t know.
Tangential pointless grammar observation: “Teens substituted sports for social media” means to me that they replaced social media with sports, which I’m guessing must be the opposite of what you intend. Is this just me?
This is something that keeps frustrating me. I don’t know if there’s a correct order for these things. I’m pretty sure for the verb “trade”, it’s the sentence object’s original possession that comes first (“He traded his soul for power”), but for “substitute” it’s the other way round (“You can substitute beans for chickpeas here”). For “swap”, I’m not really sure.
Agree with you
dont most of them also have to wake up at 6am? and eat sugar non stop?
When I was a teenager school started at 9 which meant I woke up at 8:30.
Before I could drive, I had to be at the bus stop around 6:30 a.m., school started at 7:30 (I lived about 10, maybe 15 minutes away from the school).
I understand the trend the last decade or so has been moving back start times, I think my old high school now starts at 8:30 or 9:00.
IME adults tend to exercise even less, so that’s not just that.
I assume that the comment is intended to be relative to youths of yesterday, not to adults, because teenagers have always been more anxious than adults, for obvious reasons.
Yes. If I was unclear, this is what I meant. Teens have always been more anxious than adults, but recently, it’s been taken to a whole new level.
I’m inclined to believe that adults are more anxious now than before as well.
I’m inclined to believe reporting rates have changed enough for both adults and teens that that comparison is nontrivial to make.
Is there evidence that teens exercise less now than in the past?
Lack of sleep.
I think that teen anxiety is normal, and part of developing from sheltered child to independent adult, What we have now may be pathological excesses, but a certain amount of it seems normal.
With regard to exercise, what I note, aged > 60, is that I walked to school, and walked everywhere else as well. There was one car in the family, and it was at work with my father. The idea of driving children to school – let alone teens – would have been laughed at or presumed something done by idiots with more money than sense. We didn’t drive to the grocery store either. We also didn’t go to gyms, or participate in any sports we could avoid – and while some people were into sports, I’m not sure that “going to a gym to exercise” had even been invented, let alone driving to a gym.
Modern teens (pre-driving age) aren’t allowed to do most of what I and my peers did for exercise; they seem to be confined to their homes unless/until some adult has time and motivation to take them somewhere. The lack of independence/control of their own lives/choices seems likely to be mega-stressful, even if it’s all they’ve ever known. And the lack of exercise can’t be good for them.
[Edit: this isn’t completely true. I see teenagers walking to and from the local high school. But it sure seems to be the way that life stage is being described in the media.]
You’ve got a point. It isn’t just that people do less of the hard hitting exercise. They do less of what we might call banal exercise. Just walking to the store is good for you.
Here’s my mental model for how this works: the younger you are, the more energy you have. The more energy you have, the more you need to let it out in some way. People used to, at the very least, walk around and of course, there was sports and physical labor and that sort of thing. But now, it’s much rarer. There are fewer venues to just naturally exercise and all that energy turns inwards and manifests itself as anxiety. Our body is trying to tell us that we need to go do something but we aren’t getting the message. And maybe that’s why we live in a society that is much better in many ways to the past but where teenagers have so much anxiety.
My impression is that teen anxiety is up internationally, but I am sure teens in Seoul walk a lot more than teens in the USA. Could other Korean social factors be counter balancing the benefits of more ‘exercise’, probably, but I often hear this, exercise cures anxiety, thing full stop. If it just helps people who actually have nothing to be anxious about, then that is neat and all, but not nearly as helpful.
When I were a lad, we had mandatory PE, and that was the main thing that made me anxious.
Conan review #13: People of the Black Circle
This one’s a novella, serialized in the September, October and November 1934 issues of Weird Tales. Margaret Brundage’s cover is main girl Yasmina being menaced by a sorcerer of the Black Circle while surprisingly clothed.
As the king of Vendhya lies dying in the capital of Ayodhya, nobleman Karim Shah asks a sorcerer, Khemsa “Why now?” He answers that sorecery is subject to cosmic laws (so it’s lower-powered than in Dungeons & Dragons…): the stars had to be right and they needed a lock of the king’s hair. In a moment of weakness, for “the princess of Khosala, who loved Bhunda Chand vainly, he gave her a lock of his long black hair”, which the Black Seers of Yimsha got a thief to steal.
The dying king begs his sister, the Devi Yasmina, to kill him before the sorcerers of the Himelians cut his silver cord and trap him as a miserable ghost, so his soul will go to a good afterlife. She obeys, and predictably will seek revenge. She then appears in the fortress of Chunder Shan, governor of Peshkhauri (that’s a chokepoint between the plains of Panjab and the mountains), who was just writing a letter that exposits he has seven hostile tribesmen in prison, and their foreign chief (that’s Conan) has threatened to burn Peshkhauri and cover his saddle with my hide rather as his negotiation tactic for their release, rather than parley. She tells him to bring Conan here, because she needs a mountain man who knows the way to Mount Yimsha to aid her Kshatriyas. There’s political trouble with King Yezdigerd of Turan, and they mention needing to vet that Conan’s not his spy during parley.
As soon as Yasmina leaves, Conan sneaks into this tower room, telling Chunder he’ll pay anything for the release of his henchmen, as each one is a headman and the common henchmen are about to rip him apart like wolves if he can’t get them back. Cue Devi Yasmina’s terms: aid in killing the Black Seers. But oops, the anonymous Devi comes in and is abducted by Conan!
Her maid runs from the fortress to the city and tells Khemsa what happened. She’ll double-cross the Devi out of love for him, asking him to cast spells in ways not authorized by the Black Seers to steal her from Conan, ransom her, then double-cross the people bringing the ransom by killing her and taking over. The “sleeping” Kerim Shah overheard them and writes a letter to Khosru Khan, one of the king of Turan’s governors. Meanwhile Khemsa goes to the prison and casts Charm Person on the guard, making him unlock the door and then kill himself. For the guard inside, “Khemsa flicked the spear aside with his left hand, as a man might flick a straw, and his right flashed out and back, seeming gently to caress the warrior’s neck in passing. And the guard pitched on his face without a sound, his head lolling on a broken neck.” He then casts Knock or “destroy door” on the next one, letting him and the traitor maid into a courtyard with a grille of bars across from where they enter. He casts some sort of Area of Effect spell that kills the seven men in that barred cell.
While riding with his captive Conan gets ambushed, leaping from his horse with her as it dies. The ambush turns out to be Yar Afzal, a friend of his. They all retreat to a village ahead of Yasmina’s defenders.
The next day, an angry mob tells Conan and Yar Afzal that Kshatriyas are violently searching the villages and Kerim Shah has disappeared into the hills. A member of the mob is intimidating into going to the watch-post instead of kicking Conan out, where Khemsa appears and throws him a ball of jade to take to Yar Afzal. He tells his girlfriend it’s “the globe of Yezud”, which will kill Yar Afzal (by turning into a venomous spider), leaving Conan without protectors. Conan kills three angry men in self-defense and flees with Yasmina on a stolen stallion. During the escape, she sees Gitara, her maid, with someone unknown to her and Conan (Khemsa). They discuss how weird these events are:
Conan buys a suit of clothes off a woman’s back for Yasmina, and she’s relieved that he’s not a brute who’s going to kill her for them. In her peasant clothes, Conan calls her more beautiful keepin’ it real than in her unapproachable goddess form and spanks her. One swat, I mean: the narrative doesn’t come to a screeching halt for a Gor interlude.
They see Mt. Yimsha to the northwest, and she asks how long it would take him to ride there. Further,
The stallion is spooked and refuses to continue, and then they see Khemsa. As soon as Conan makes eye contact, he can’t break it: the sorcery is based on hypnotism.
In short, his ethnicity gives him a great saving throw against whatever spell Khemsa was attempting. Conan attacks but Khemsa is still able to knock him prone by touching a pressure point on the neck. As he gets up, a crimson cloud comes down among them and changes into four Black Seers. They try to punish him with a mental attack, but he fights four on one to a stalemate… strengthened by his love of Gitara. So they mentally drive her to suicide, weakening him. He switches to charging with a blade, but one of them stomps a foot, creating a crevice that widens instantly. Then they cast the crimson cloud spell again, including Yasmina in it.
Soon Conan meets 500 of his followers. He’s glad to see them and says he’s riding for Yimsha… and they call him a traitor for not bringing the seven chiefs. He tries to explain, but nearly faints when they tell him those prisoners are dead. A Wazuli escaped through the doors the wizard burst in his entry, and told the tale to scouts of Conan’s tribe. He keeps riding before they can kill him as a traitor. On the way he finds the dying Khemsa, who gives him his magic girdle and warns him to break the crystal globe that has four golden pomegranates. Then he meets Kerim Shah along the pass. He demands the Devi. Conan tells him the Black Seers have her, and don’t kill me, because the 500 men who just rebelled against me would be jealous. Kerim Shah says he’ll go with to fight the Black Seers: “We both want the Devi. You know my reason; King Yezdigerd desires to add her kingdom to his empire, and herself in his seraglio. And I knew you, in the days when you were a hetman of the kozak steppes; so I know your ambition is wholesale plunder.” We know each other well enough to work together with no trust!
Yasmina awakes in the same room as the Master of Yimsha. Reading her mind, he knows she would turn the wild children of the hills against the Seers. As to why he killed her brother, “My acolytes in the temples of Turan, who are the priests behind the priests of Tarim, urged me to bestir myself in behalf of Yezdigerd. For reasons of my own, I complied.”
She wants to stab him, but he transmutes her knife into a lotus. He says she’s pretty enough to keep as a slave, and she gasps that he’d dare. “The king dares not trample a worm in the road? Little fool, do you not realize that your royal pride is no more than a straw blown on the wind? I, who have known the kisses of the queens of Hell!”
He uses Black Lotus to make her dream she’s reliving all her past lives, which is apparently terrifying. Then the black-robed figure in the room grips her, and from that hood looked forth features like rotting parchment on a moldering skull.
Elsewhere, Conan, Kerim and followers have to fight a guard dog and a steel-winged hawk just to get to the first tower, held by mere acolytes of the Black Seers. They launch Flaming Spheres at the men. They have to make hundreds of them prematurely explode by depleting their arrows. Kerim kills Bards until one falling from the tower also destroys the great horn they share. By the time Conan reaches the door, the defenders try to pour molten metal on him, which makes him feel good: they might have run out of magic. Inside the door, he has to dodge a falling stone trap. Once they seize the tower, Conan’s team realizes that it’s separated from the Seers’ own castle by a great ravine. And their princess is in that other castle.
They find a way along the bottom of the ravine, and before the castle the acolytes attack Conan with knives, unable to cast more spells on him, perhaps due to Khemsa’s girdle. Conan, Kerim and three henchmen go inside, leaving a guard posted. A Black Seer appears above the guard, who shoots him with an arrow. The Seer laughs and throws it back, whereupon it turns into a venomous snake that kills him. The rest of the party is trapped inside by an transparent door. Conan sees the crystal globe Khemsa mentioned. Four Seers appear, and one casts a spell that means his foes “could not advance, though he felt it in his power to retreat if he wished.” Fear! Another casts Charm Person on one of the henchmen, who kneels and offers his sword… which the Seer decapitates him with. Soon all three henchmen are dead, and the magic girdle ends the Fear spell’s effect on Conan. He attacks. Then he remembers he’s supposed to destroy the crystal sphere. The four golden snakes at the corners of the altar it’s on come alive to attack him, but he succeeds. And destroying the four golden pomegranates inside makes the four Seers drop dead. Then the Master of Yimsha walks in. He casts a spell that makes Kerim’s ribcage explode outward and his heart fly to the Master’s hand. Conan tries to attack, but no sooner does his blade cut the Master’s robe than he vanishes. Then Conan finds Yasmina being menaced by a giant snake. Conan saves her by throwing knives, then unsheaths another to stab it. Bleeding horribly, the snake… is smart enough to push a secret door open with its nose!
Conan and Yasmina hug and kiss, then begin their escape. The transparent door is shattered and they make it all the way back to where his party left horses, relieved to find the Game Master hasn’t stolen them. She tells him to ride back to her realm, where he’ll be rewarded. He refuses: he wants to keep her, and setting foot there would transmute her into an unapproachable princess. “Hey,” he must be thinking, “your name sounds like Yasmela.”
She protests that he has no followers now. “There is a chief of the Khurakzai who will keep you safely while I bicker with the Afghulis. If they will have none of me, by Crom! I will ride northward with you to the steppes of the kozaki. I was a hetman among the Free Companions before I rode southward. I’ll make you a queen on the Zaporoska River!”
She won’t consent. Their debate is interrupted by the sight of a running battle: Conan’s 500 ex-followers heavily outnumbered by mailed horsemen of Turan. Conan is torn between wanting to lead them to safety, which would get him forgiven, and not risking his life since it would leave Yasmina stuck here. Then her Kshatriyas appear, and she tells Conan to give her his horse so she can rally them to join the Afghulis against the Turanians.
The battle won, a vulture tries to kill Yasmina, but Conan strikes it out of the air. As it dropped, its black wings thrashing the air, it took on the semblance, not of a bird, but of a black-robed human body. The Master of Yimsha?
She offers Conan 10,000 gold pieces for ransoming her back to her people.
Aww, they love dominance!
I think this was one of the best stories we’ve read so far. Things we’ve seen before seem better developed: the magic system, Conan’s relationship with a princess, etc.
Conan/Flashman crossover when?
As soon as possible.
I think it’s called The Light Fantastic.
Yes, definitely best story so far. I’m seeing a pattern that when the stories focus on other characters (as this does for the first few chapters), Conan is basically Godzilla: a force of nature with which everyone else must contend.
Also, I’m disappointed Conan did not continue with his tradition of shagging princesses over the corpses of evil wizards. Apparently Yasmina was able to resist Conan’s bruising ki…wait…fiery ki…wait…
…fierce, hot, lawless kisses.
Apparently Yasmina was able to resist Conan’s bruising ki…wait…fiery ki…wait……fierce, hot, lawless kisses
Yes, but this princess is made of sterner stuff than the previous princesses. She euthanised her own brother, for one, which means she is now the ruler in her own right and she seems to be capable of leading and fighting alongside her own army instead of merely being a figurehead like Yasmela who only rode out to watch the battle, not take part.
Don’t mean she doesn’t like a good shag now and then, tho…
As far as love interests in this series, Yasmina is leagues beyond Yasmela and up with Belit and Valeria (who we’ll meet in “Red Nails”) as the best.
This was always among my favorite conans simply for how magic is portrayed. It’s a part of the culture as much as the practitioner, and it’s perhaps at bottom all illusion: You either believe in it or you don’t, and if you do, you get all this power but you’re simultaneously weak to its influence in a way simpler folk or outsiders, might not be.
Khemsa is kind of fascinating, because he’s almost a protagonist in his own right; his magical feats are more impressive than any other Seer in the story, save the Master himself, and he has an interesting personal conflict (his loyalty to the Black Seers versus his love of Gitara). It’s easy to see a version of this story where he teams up with Conan to get revenge on the Master, or even one where Conan never appears and Khemsa is the star.
Very much this. Khemsa is such a great character that there are at least two other ways things could have gone that would have been good literature.
One of the first Conan yarns written was the chronologically-later “The Scarlet Citadel”, which demonstrated that he was willing to team up with a sorcerer to defeat another.
I definitely liked Gitara, whose disloyalty to her mistress and love of Khemsa complicates things in a good way. It would have been better if her background and motivation had been expanded on, but Howard was writing with an admirable brevity absent from later fantasy, so it’s hard to complain.
All the political intriguing lifts this up from ordinary “save the kidnapped damsel” storylines, and it’s showing the character arc of growth for Conan; he may still be mainly interested in wine, women and song, but by dint of hiring out with mercenaries/floating around the edges of small wars on the borders between small kingdoms, he’s picking up an education in diplomacy and politics in spite of himself which will stand to him when he comes to ascend the throne himself in time.
The True Love between the evil sorcerer and the traitorous maid was touching, despite the pair of them being villains. Just because you’re a back-stabber, it doesn’t mean you don’t have a heart, I guess!
The magic-users are a lot tougher and much better opponents for Conan in this story as well.
This is an excellent standalone story, but it’s also the culmination of one of my favorite parts of Conan’s career. We first see him picking up diplomacy and politics in “Witch”, then in “The Devil in Iron” and here. Howard never explains what motivated him to become a nomad chief again after leaving the Zuagirs and heading to Ophir to exchange a crown jewel for gold pieces, but whatever drove him, it’s a very interesting part of his character development.
Sadly, this story marks the end of that. After it comes “The Drums of Tombalku” (fragment, not part of the review series), where Conan is a defeated mercenary stranded in an African desert and “The Pool of the Black One”, where he’s a pirate.
Yes, quite touching.
Agreed.
Conan review #14: The Pool of the Black One
First published in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales, where the cover story was “The Vampire Master”.
From Conan the nomad chief on the Indian frontier, we jump to the Western Ocean where Conan is a pirate.
In the order we’re reading, this is disappointing. From a leader of 500 men or thousands with henchmen who are leaders in their own right, he goes to being a common tough half a world away. However, this story was published a year earlier.
Sancha, captured daughter of a Zingaran duke, yawns on the deck of the good ship Wastrel when suddenly a man jumps aboard from the sea.
“I am Conan,” the other answered imperturbably. Sancha pricked up her ears anew; she had never heard Zingaran spoken with such an accent (Language #9)
The skeptical captain is named Zaporavo, whom Conan knows of. It seems there are two factions of pirates round these parts, who hate each other: Argives based in the Bacharan Isles and these Zingarans. Conan says he found it prudent to leave a Barachan rendezvous in a dingy, now just give me a job.
Why telegraph the ending, Bob?
The crew hazes Conan, and when the leader of it spits in his face and puts hand to sword, Conan quickly punches him to death. After this, he makes himself well-liked with appropriate (gigantic?) mirth and doing “the work of three men, and was always first to spring to any heavy or dangerous task.” He hides his motive for coming aboard, letting them think whatever made him run from the bloody Barachans was something nasty and respectable. Oh, and hey, he “roared ribald songs in a dozen languages“.
Zaporavo takes the ship away from the civilized coast into the west, where there are no towns to pillage unless he finds a lost island or continent like he’s brooding about. After many weary weeks they find an island. While his men eat the local fruit, Zaporavo goes exploring for loot alone. Ordered to stay aboard, Sancha gets naked and swims ashore. She finds the men asleep (don’t eat strange fruit, kids). Going into the trees, she finds Zaporavo dead. Hearing a figure rustling the foliage, she calls Conan’s name, assuming he killed Zaporavo to take over. But someone else grips her.
Earlier Conan, abstaining from the fruit, was stalking the living captain into the woods. He was indeed planning to kill him in secret and, denying it, hope his popularity would get him voted captain. Zaporavo saw him and drew his sword. The fight ended with Z. falling dead in the position Sancha saw him.
As Conan cleans his blade, though, he sees a tall naked black man carrying off a struggling naked white figure. The NBA not having been invented yet, Conan is spooked by the man’s size. Following to the island’s high point, he finds green shining walls and towers, camouflaged by the greenery until he got close.
Taking your best modern architecture jokes, readers.
Inside, he looks over a parapet into another swarded court and sees of beings that squatted about a dark green pool in the midst of the court. They’re all naked, black, and the least of them head-and-shoulders taller than him. And they’re sacrificing the youngest sailor from his ship in that pool. One of them plays a flute Conan can’t hear, yet it makes the youth cringe, quiver and writhe in a compulsive dance of obscenity and lasciviousness: “desire without pleasure, pain mated awfully to lust.” Conan is shocked at “the cosmic obscenity of these beings which could … find pleasure in the brazen flaunting of such things as should not be hinted at,”
Clean-limbed barbarians are anti-porn.
When the weird figures quit the court, Conan sneaks in and finds shelves with thousands of tiny figures. Om a high shelf, he sees that the pirate boy was transformed into one of those dolls. Even weirder, the lower shelves exclusively have figures that “either embodied merely the artists’ imagination, or typified racial types long vanished and forgotten.” It seems these creeps have been collecting for untold ages.
Hearing a feminine scream, Conan bounds high onto the wall to look over. Another of the locals is dragging Sancha toward the pool! Conan hides. Seeing the figure carry Sancha by head and crotch (ew) toward the pool, he charges, killing him with a sword through the groin.
While he wastes time talking with Sancha, the rest of the uncanny men return, each carrying one or two of the pirates who fell asleep. Conan comes up with a plan to make them chase him, then Sancha will shake the pirates awake so they can grab their swords.
His plan: make a deadly leap toward the circle, then run away: “thrice his blade flickered before any could lift a hand in defense;” each flickering splitting a skull.
So if you want Player Characters to be like Conan, they need to advance to a point where they get three attacks before the enemies can react.
He finds himself in a dead-end room, enemies forming a semicircle around him. But one killing blow lets him run between the two figures flanking the fallen one without them getting to hit him. Running into a different room, he sees them forming a solid square in hopes of flowing around him when he attacks. He tries to jump and climb a ledge. The jutting ledge gives way and only the fact that it’s a grassy court prevents his spine breaking. Conan is doomed… save that the pirates come charging into the room, facing the weird men’s backs. There are deaths on both sides, but Conan survives as it turns into a rout and a chase. Seeing his side losing, one Black One speaks for the first time, and it’s some sort of spell that makes the pool flood. Conan, Sancha and friends run as fast as they can for shore. All who survived the battle reach the beached boats, just ahead of the magic pool’s tide that “flowed out over the beach, lapped at the ocean, and the waves turned a deeper, more sinister green.”
Conan’s wounds are tallied: “Blood thickly clotted his black mane, and one ear had been half torn from his head. His arms, legs, breast and shoulders were bitten and clawed as if by panthers.” He’s accepted as captain, he maybe ambiguously gets the girl, and the story ends with a line of dialogue by him.
Yes, we’ve seen this formula elsewhere. It’s also a pretty simple plot and Sancha is a non-entity.
Your thoughts?
Your last sentence pretty well sums it up. A snoozer.
Oh, but I didn’t like Conan’s plot here, either. Usually he’s moderately honorable. When he took over the army in A Witch Shall be Born it was only because the leader went back on his word to free the city and help Conan get his revenge. Here he plotted from the very start to murder Zaporavo for no other reason than “Conan wants to be in charge.”
Yes, Conan is a villain here. He’s much more popular with the crew than Captain Zaporavo, so he treats Z. as deserving to die, no questions asked. And being less popular has nothing to do with being immoral, he just broods and can’t sing dirty songs in twelve languages.
Anyway, when we catch up with Conan again in “Red Nails”, he’ll still be in a pirate phase of his life.
That’s an excellent story, but I’m still disappointed with the unexplained gap after his career as a chief of nomad chiefs, where he learned important skills he’d need as a usurping king.
Yeah, this is Conan being villainous. You could say he’s been corrupted by civilisation: it’s a very pragmatic decision, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, especially when compared with how the captain treated him – he didn’t like Conan, could have ordered his crew to slaughter him when first he came aboard, but had too much of his own sort of code to do so without reason:
About the only excuse we get is that Zaporavo is an autocrat who has forgotten the good of his crew in favour of his own dreams and obsessions (but let’s be frank, Conan doesn’t care a straw about any of the Freebooters either, they’re just means to an end for him as well):
Conan plots to kill him simply in order to take over his command and ship, and when he can’t find an excuse to do so, decides to simply murder him:
About the only scrap of justification here is that he doesn’t literally stab Zaporavo in the back, it’s a fair (more or less) fight. But it’s clear that Conan is trying to find some way back to ‘civilisation’ from this existence on the Western edge of the ocean, and it makes me wonder if the reason he had to leave the Barachans so fast and unprepared was that he tried the same trick to take over a pirate captain’s command, but it didn’t work:
Sancha is an interesting character though we get very little about her; she’s tougher-minded than some of the damsels in distress that Conan has encountered before, so for myself I don’t feel any anxiety about her once Conan moves on and leaves her behind – she’ll find some way of landing on her feet:
Indeed. They’re equally selfish, Conan just has the good fortune to be more charismstic.
That’s a reasonable guess. We don’t know why Conan is so down on his luck since Black Circle, but having made his way to the Western Ocean without followers, he’s trying to claw his way back into leadership and ‘civilization’, and he’d been Belit’s first mate and a pirate captain earlier in life. Lonely + sight of ships makes this game appeal to him.
Yet it says nothing positive about his character. I’d have liked to see how he lost what he had with the nomads and what he learned from it that would make him a better king.
Yeah. Conan’s no rapist, we’re led to believe: all she’d have to do is withhold sex and ask to be dropped off at the nearest port to Daddy’s duchy to pick herself back up, and he’d get around to that as raiding permits.
We don’t know why Conan is so down on his luck since Black Circle, but having made his way to the Western Ocean
I wonder if it is meant, in-universe, to follow in chronological order after Black Circle. It feels better to think of these stories as episodes from Conan’s life told in random order, rather than recounting them in strict year-by-year form. It just fits better, somehow, that this is all in the same rough period of his life when he was living as a pirate/freebooter/privateer and working his way across the seas, going from second-in-command and indeed captain of his own ship back down to ordinary crewman who needed to get out of town in a hurry and clawing his way back up so he could return East and get back on land in the rich kingdoms where there was always a war to fight or a kingdom to plunder. Rise and fall and rise again.
I imagine Howard may have felt that having written a few in sequence about Conan on land, another pirate tale would be more novel and likely to sell rather than “same old mercenary band story”.
Well, one, Howard said Conan was like his muse, and he could only write his adventurers in the random order “he told them to me.” So the order can be whatever we feel like unless dialogue or his internal monologue establishes otherwise, with the “king” career coming at the end in the order “Phoenix on the Sword”, “The Scarlet Citadel”, “Hour of the Dragon.”
Two, I’ve been following this order, save for moving up “The Slithering Shadow” so Conan doesn’t have to recall the lost city of Xuthal before he finds it, as Howard said it followed “pretty closely”. But as you say, imagining one pirate career “just fits better.”
The Kochs are libertarians, so it’s not surprising that mainstream rightists aren’t always cheerleading them.
The right accuses Soros of funding “astroturf” campaigns (fake “grassroots” protests etc. that are actually professionally organized affairs). The left obviously would disagree with this narrative, but praising Soros without feeding that narrative would be hard.
“We’re really happy a billionaire is making our movement seem more popular” is a hard argument for anyone to make in a winning way.
The Kochs are pretty milquetoast “libertarians” tbqh. Hardcore libertarians also criticize them heavily for diluting the libertarian message. And the Koch-funded libertarian thinktanks come hard at the more hardcore libertarian groups. I’ve heard that Cato people aren’t even allowed to talk to Mises people, under the threat of being fired.
Examples? Of either dilution or criticism.
I’m curious as a hardcore libertarian who has not done so.
There was a good deal of talk a long time ago where people were complaining about how large a role the Kochs played in the movement — that’s where the term “Kochtopus” originated. But I’m not sure I know of serious doctrinal disagreements.
Take it for what it’s worth, but I often saw criticism on the reason.com boards regarding certain politicians that they supported.
@Atlas:
(An oversimplification of) my personal model is that America has two big status/employment hierarchies, one roughly Red and one roughly Blue.
The Blue hierarchy contains most of what’s called “the public sector”, the universities, the mainstream press, and a bunch of NGOs. Blue employees are paid largely in prestige, power, and job security.
The Red hierarchy contains the Military, a lot of what’s called “the private sector”, and, um, churches, I guess? I mostly live close to the Blue Hierarchy, so I’m probably leaving some things out.
The important thing is, Red employees are much, much more likely to get the bulk of their compensation in explicit monetary form, rather than as a mixed bag of privileges and prestige. Money tracks status a lot more closely in Redville.
Since Blueville has a weaker association between money and status, and since they can see that The Other Tribe has a *stronger* association between money and status, people in Blueville start to see money as sort of dirty and undeserved- a baser motive than the stuff they think they’re motivated by. This happens partly because they can see other people according status to money, and that feels unfair. I think it’s also partly because they intuitively feel like (visible, legible) compensation ought to track status- they have the idea that your paycheck reflects how much society values you, so it’s a scandal to see low-status people paid more than high-status people. Of course, people will demand more money to work low-status jobs, and accept less pay in exchange for higher status, so there’s a constant mismatch between the Blues’ intuitive idea of what wages ought to be and what they are.
I think this also relates to the strong association a lot of Blues have between money and illicit dominance- that thing where A offers B money in exchange for X, giving B strictly more options, and this gets interpreted as A *forcing* B to do X. (I’m not saying there are no harmful options, or that the deals offered by A are always fair- just that it’s weird to interpret *giving someone choices* as making them *less free*, and this does in fact seem to be the prior of a lot of people on the left when money’s involved.)
To wrap up- of course people on the Left don’t like to see money involved in politics- it’s the other side’s currency, and plays to the other side’s strengths.
(The Red version of this would *sort of* be resentment directed at the universities and the press, and at credentialism in general- but it’s not an exact parallel. It’s hard to cone up with an exact mirror, because Red power/status tends to be more legible, whereas the Blue equivalents tend to be more soft power, connections, social pressure and suasion.)
[ETA: Going back to yesterday’s post, I think this is why some people see charitable giving as an undemocratic exercise of power, but see writing books and engaging in rhetoric from a university pulpit as obviously a legitimate part of the process- the latter is their area of strength, the former is their area of weakness. Also, money in politics makes a great excuse when object-level politics goes bad for them- it isn’t that a lot of people actually disagree with them or have different values, it’s just that they’ve been brainwashed by billionaires, and if we get rid of the billionaires everyone will revert to the obviously correct opinions.]
{Further ETA: I get that “Blue Tribe” =/= “The Left” and likewise for “Red Tribe” and “The Right”, but for my current purposes the labels pick out roughly the same cluster of people and I’m too tired to reedit this now. I beg forgiveness for any confusion.}
(Further further ETA: Spelling and syntactic cleanup.)
This is a very Blue way of looking at things. There are Red hierarchies where money tracks status pretty well — small proprietorship is probably the most important one — but they’re fairly narrow. More importantly, the people in them, outside the few Red corporate ladders that still exist (the energy sector, a few individual companies, and not much else), are much less likely to be employees. Fifty years ago, the Republicans were much more centrally the party of business, but that’s not really the case anymore — the upper echelons of your average company are overwhelmingly urban now, and as such tend to be culturally Blue. Some of them will vote Republican for economic reasons, but that doesn’t make them Red, and it won’t make modal Reds impressed with them.
The military’s actually a good illustration of this: relative to its competitiveness, direct monetary compensation for higher military ranks is pretty modest. Their pensions and benefits are pretty sweet compared to what you get in the private sector, but if all you’re looking for is money, especially in the short term, pretty much anyone with captain’s bars or better would have been better off going for an MBA. Churches, even more so.
My
modelmental image- the central example of the thing I’m thinking of- was less Wall Street culture (or startup culture, for that matter), and more Dilbert- or maybe, like, a regional manager in a small town somewhere. But I get how my earlier comment failed to communicate this, though. (And this may still be a very blue way of looking at it- just not quite the same one.)I’ll try to explain the difference I’m seeing- I hope I can get this to make sense. Roughly, (the archetype of) Moral Mazes Guy is.. kind of all-in, y’know? He’s Climbing The Corporate Ladder-which is maybe more like a monastic calling than a job.
Our (archetypal) regional manager isn’t doing that. He’s not visibly obsessed with money- or ambition- or even status (unless you’ve been reading Robin Hanson in which case this last obsession *may* be visible to you.) It isn’t like money is central to his identity or anything, it’s just *more salient* than it is for his Blue counterpart. He’s not *attached* to the idea that it’s meaningless, so it acquires *some* meaning- some *positive* meaning, which is enough to play-off against the Red Tribe (and the Robbers’ Cave would do the rest, if it needed doing).
I grant the military represents a counterexample, as far as money is concerned. I do feel like they fit into some kind of deeper (farmer/forager?) dynamic, though- military rank/honors and money both have an explicit, legible quality that I think Blue-Tribe status often lacks. They also seem more durable- like, I’d expect the word “fashion” to come up less in talking about them.
Maybe the dynamic I’m fumbling at is something like:
Amorphous/informal/implicit/intangible/transient/soft power derived from social networks
vs
Tangible/official/reified/durable/meant-to-last/formal power derived from “objective” symbols of which people have common knowledge (meant to be a link to Pinker’s stuff here, but it kept getting caught in the spam filter).
I’m pretty sure my account of the Blue psychology surrounding money is roughly accurate, though. (It is, however, almost certainly incomplete).
I’ve had this model kicking around in my head for a while (both the one from my first comment which treats money as special, and the vaguer one I’m gesturing to here which treats money as an instance of a broader pattern.), and what really drove it home was the comments to Scott’s review of the Reich book; people* defended, with every appearance of sincerity, the view that donating to charity was a much more serious exercise of power than writing persuasively about policy- that authors were, as a class, less powerful than rich philanthropists. And I sat and I asked myself if there was any worldview I knew under which this made sense, and after a moment I realized that actually, yes, there was.
(“Power” is a synonym for “illegitimate power”; money is illegitimate power which contaminates our pure democratic process. Rhetoric is not illegitimate, therefore not power, so long as it’s proper rhetoric and not that demagoguery The Outgroup loves so much.)
[This is not a very charitable interpretation of what people are thinking, and I’m sure not all of them are thinking it- I imagine this basic narrative as a cloud that floats around their heads and slips inside when they’re not paying attention. But uncharitable though it may be, I find keeping it in mind means I end up *much* less confused about what’s going on.]
(Plausibly the reason this is so much harder on the Left than the Right is the same reason you’re getting Blue vibes from me- I’m probably pretty Grey, but my social environment is pretty Blue and not at all Red, so these are the people I’ve been banging my head against trying to understand.)
(1)Mostly one person, but singling xir put would change the tone of this comment in ways I don’t want, so please just note that this is weaker evidence than if lots of different people were doing it.
My
modelmental image- the central example of the thing I’m thinking of- was less Wall Street culture (or startup culture, for that matter), and more Dilbert- or maybe, like, a regional manager in a small town somewhere. But I get how my earlier comment failed to communicate this, though. (And this may still be a very blue way of looking at it- just not quite the same one.)I’ll try to explain the difference I’m seeing- I hope I can get this to make sense. Roughly, (the archetype of) Moral Mazes Guy is.. kind of all-in, y’know? He’s Climbing The Corporate Ladder-which is maybe more like a monastic calling than a job.
Our (archetypal) regional manager isn’t doing that. He’s not visibly obsessed with money- or ambition- or even status (unless you’ve been reading Robin Hanson in which case this last obsession *may* be visible to you.) It isn’t like money is central to his identity or anything, it’s just *more salient* than it is for his Blue counterpart. He’s not *attached* to the idea that it’s meaningless, so it acquires *some* meaning- some *positive* meaning, which is enough to play-off against the Red Tribe (and the Robbers’ Cave would do the rest, if it needed doing).
I grant the military represents a counterexample, as far as money is concerned. I do feel like they fit into some kind of deeper (farmer/forager?) dynamic, though- military rank/honors and money both have an explicit, legible quality that I think Blue-Tribe status often lacks. They also seem more durable- like, I’d expect the word “fashion” to come up less in talking about them.
Maybe the dynamic I’m fumbling at is something like:
Amorphous/informal/implicit/intangible/transient/soft power derived from social networks
vs
Tangible/official/reified/durable/meant-to-last/formal power derived from “objective” symbols of which people have common knowledge.
I’m pretty sure my account of the Blue psychology surrounding money is roughly accurate, though. (It is, however, almost certainly incomplete).
I’ve had this model kicking around in my head for a while (both the one from my first comment which treats money as special, and the vaguer one I’m gesturing to here which treats money as an instance of a broader pattern.), and what really drove it home was the comments to Scott’s review of the Reich book; people* defended, with every appearance of sincerity, the view that donating to charity was a much more serious exercise of power than writing persuasively about policy- that authors were, as a class, less powerful than rich philanthropists. And I sat and I asked myself if there was any worldview I knew under which this made sense, and after a moment I realized that actually, yes, there was.
(“Power” is a synonym for “illegitimate power”; money is illegitimate power which contaminates our pure democratic process. Rhetoric is not illegitimate, therefore not power, so long as it’s proper rhetoric and not that demagoguery The Outgroup loves so much.)
[This is not a very charitable interpretation of what people are thinking, and I’m sure not all of them are thinking it- I imagine this basic narrative as a cloud that floats around their heads and slips inside when they’re not paying attention. But uncharitable though it may be, I find keeping it in mind means I end up *much* less confused about what’s going on.]
(Plausibly the reason this is so much harder on the Left than the Right is the same reason you’re getting Blue vibes from me- I’m probably pretty Grey, but my social environment is pretty Blue and not at all Red, so these are the people I’ve been banging my head against trying to understand.)
(1)Mostly one person, but singling xir put would change the tone of this comment in ways I don’t want, so please just note that this is weaker evidence than if lots of different people were doing it.
I think that a simpler explanation is that while most people see benefits as partially an inherent human right and partially a compensation for sacrifices made, progressives tend to think that people deserve a lot more as a basic human right and conservatives tend think that rich/powerful people made & make more sacrifices.
For example, talking about ‘privilege’ is intended to convince others that people with greater benefits didn’t actually deserve all those benefits because they made greater sacrifice. This is not limited to money. The claim that people listen more to men because of patriarchy is very similar to the claim that people give more salary to men because
of patriarchy. In both cases, the claim is that men get things undeservedly.
Progressives seem more prone to argue that privilege is undeserved than conservatives (although conservatives also do it, in particular against members of progressive bastions).
—
Reds tend to have somewhat different status hierarchies than blues. For example, reds are more likely to see military service as granting high status. As Nornagest notes, this is independent of pay, because soldiers have way more status than people with a different job that get the same pay.
This difference drives segregation, as the same job has different value to a person, depending on how much status the job has in their subculture.
—
The politics of people like Reich may be attributed to them believing that money comes from privilege much more than the ability to write/publish/market a book comes from privilege.
A simple explanation is that this is self-serving, since it allows people like Reich to accuse other of benefiting from privilege, while seeing his own benefits in life as being mostly earned; just like people with different personal benefits can accuse the media of having undeserved power, while ignoring how they themselves may have undeserved benefits.
I see this argument all the time and it makes me want to pull my hair out. The military is non-partisan, full stop.
I don’t mean this in a mealymouthed “the military should be nonpartisan” or “The military works best when it’s nonpartisan” I mean it in a direct, focused and specific “The military doesn’t map onto any tribe even remotely closely.”
Here’s one of my favorite anecdotes I ever had in the military – it was when trans were first allowed to transition while on active duty. We had a member at our unit who was transitioning and pretty much senior person in the command was pulled in for a briefing on how it would be handled.
One of our senior enlisted asked “well, what pronoun should we use?” our XO got up and said “Well, continue to use male pronouns until JUNE XX, at which point the member’s gender will be updated in DEERs (DoD HR program) whereupon you will switch.”
It wasn’t that the member had an innate gender that they got to pick (blue tribe position) or that the member had an immutable gender (red tribe position) it was that the central bureaucracy had the authority to decree what gender a particular member was and that authority was paramount.
You see this kind of thing all the time in the military. Yes, it’s comprised of people from different tribes and, at least among the enlisted you do see a relatively high percentage of red-tribers, but that doesn’t mean the organization itself skews red tribe in its values or operations.
I won’t make an argument wether or not the military itself is red tribe or not (read the people inside of it are red tribe or blue tribe).
But the military as an institution, and thus the ranks given out by the military, have a better reputation with the red tribe, then with the blue tribe.
I mean, maybe, but I’ve had as man hipsters thank me for my service as good ol’ boys.
Yeah, the extreme left objects to the military, but so does the extreme right. Most people in the middle either don’t care or are generally supportive.
The…I don’t know if I would say “extreme,” but “far?” “Righter-than-right-of center?” Anyway, those folk definitely do not object to the military, they object to using the military for overseas adventurism.
I don’t dispute what you are saying, but I also don’t think that’s what Jack was getting at here.
The military is a “red tribe institution” insofar as being a successful member of the military will grant you increased status and prestige among red tribe people that it won’t necessarily grant you among blue tribe people. And I think in a general sense that’s correct. That’s not say that no blue tribers respect military service or anything, just that red tribe respects it more.
Think of the blue tribe alternative as being journalism. Blue tribe thinks “journalism” is a special and unique occupation that deserves greater respect than the average way someone might make a living. Consider that even the most meager person who self-identifies as a journalist can get a blue-check on Twitter, whereas pretty much no member of the military below the rank of general would ever be expected to get one. That’s not to say that there aren’t any red tribe journalists or that no red tribers respect any journalists. It’s not even to say that journalism itself suffers from an overwhelming blue-tribe bias. But I do think it’s the case that if something like Twitter had been built by the red tribe, it would be granting a lot more status-badges to military servicemembers and a lot fewer to random low-prestige bloggers.
This is your regular reminder that “Red Tribe” and “Blue Tribe” are not meant to be partisan terms and become more noise than signal when used as such.
IMO, the whole blue/red tribe thing obscures more than it illuminates anyway. It all started as a list of stereotypes about liberals and conservatives, ignoring the fact that both parties are big tents.
blue/red tribes are useful concepts when used as intended. nascar = red tribe. art gallery in new york where people pay $120K for a banana taped on a wall = blue tribe.
the concept can easily be stretched beyond any usefulness, but it’s a generalization, and should be used as such. it’s not the 2d law of thermodynamics.
I think that it best corresponds with globalism/localism. This does have correlation with politics, but certainly not 1:1. For example, a lot of wealthy Republicans are globalist and quite a few black people who vote Democrat are localist.
The military is a bit of a weird entity that isn’t extremely globalist or localist, but isn’t really centrist either.
The military also has (essentially) a 2 tiered system with Commissioned officers now (mostly) looking like your regular college graduates, and NCOs/Enlisted having (mostly) a more working class identity. It is my experience that the enlisted class has a great amount of contempt for a large % of officers, but they also have overwhelming loyalty to the good officers they had.
And this is much more extreme than your usual employee-supervisor conflict. All the guys from my HS that were enlisted constantly talk about incompetent Lieutenants, and Colonels/Majors being snakes. Sometimes they like a Captain, but then curse how he got forced out or soon will be forced out for “not playing the game.” Within 30 seconds of some officer getting media attention I can predict whether military facebook will be flooded with snake emojis. Like Vindman, I knew they would hate him.
I completely agree with Aftagley. Military service and rank absolutely grant prestige among Blue Tribers, at least if you consider folks who vote Democrat in Northern VA to be members of the Blue Tribe. It’s the part of the Blue Tribe that likes Joe Biden more than it likes Occupy Wall Street, but that’s, like, half to three quarters of the tribe, so….
Also, if you’re at all familiar with how the military works, it makes complete sense that they’d let DEERS be the determinant of what pronouns to use. Hilarious!
*thoughtful* I certainly experience the wrong people as having high status, but what I note about many people is an insistence on “respect” for high status people. If the leader, or one of their friends does something, the appropriate reaction is not to consider whether it was a good idea, or give them advice about what would be better – it’s to praise the leader/leader’s crony, and their brilliant idea. If it’s the same policy that failed visibly only a few years ago, then it’s required to show no hint that you recognize it, or that it’s anything but wonderful.
Otherwise, you “have no soft skills” at best, and are “an enemy of the people” at worst. I’ve experienced this at all levels, from the leadership of volunteer groups, through various levels of business management, all the way up to political leaders. (Except for the “enemy of the people” dig, which was irresistible, none of this is about Trump.)
AFAICT, some people are utterly shocked at the idea that a mere peon (who might be as close as a rank or two from The Leader, or equally well might be bottom of the local heap) could possibly criticize anything The Leader does, believes, etc. Other people think that there’s a positive duty to give feedback, and that a leader who doesn’t seek out and accept feedback is incompetent, as well as various nastier pejorative adjectives; one who suppresses negative comments is almost certainly up to no good, beyond mere incompetence.
I fall firmly in the “duty to criticize” camp. But I experience that belief as being basically unAmerican in many eyes. (That’s OK – I’m Canadian ;-() I’d associate this with Red Tribe, on the dubious grounds that people not like me in one way must be not like me in all ways ;-( except that where I see it the most is among tech executives. There are lots of “yes men” of both genders in high tech, and lots of “coaching” intended to create more of them.
To me, this bleeds in to “wrong people have power” – which is why it’s posted here. But as I observe, to some people, the fact that someone has power, or status, is evidence that they deserve it.
And of course, this is good medieval social theory – the children of nobles are much more deserving than all other children, yada yada yada. And of course they get all the important leadership positions, perqs etc., even if they are drooling idiots – that’s the definition of being a noble.
I was brought up to believe we’d advanced beyond medieval social relations, and theories. Maybe some folks prefer them, even in modern times. Maybe this is even based on a personality trait, not primarily on upbringing.
I think, to echo some comments at the end of Jack’s post above, that both sides have an enormous interest in having a boogieman to blame when popular opinion fails to track propositions they think are commonsense and universally-held. When that happens, it’s convenient to have a steady supply of shadowy billionaires to blame. Both sides would have to invent shadowy billionaires even if no real ones existed.
In the future, without commenting on the legitimacy of accusations so far, I can see “internet bots” or “foreign election interference” being used in lieu of “campaign spending”…a fundamental force invoked to explain why democracy keeps getting it wrong.
@theodidactus:
I’ve actually had exactly this thought about recent discussions of foreign election interference- not that people don’t have legitimate concerns, but that those concerns certainly seem to double as a way of preserving their faith that democracy *done properly* never fails *too* badly.
(My own view is roughly the boring “worst system, except for all the others that have been tried” one. I don’t think we know of any system that actually protects against catastrophe. But I think a lot of people- on *both* sides- kind of want to believe things can’t fail *too* badly, and they’re having a hard time reconciling this with recent polarization and their feeling that the other side’s candidates are terrible people who should not be given power.)
[My boring-and-puritanical view is that they’re both correct about this- how many of our current crop of politicians are people you’d want to babysit your kids?]
I also notice a sort of mott/bailey dynamic going on with regard to who exactly is a “bot.” IE I see a lot of “okay so no, Joe616 isnt’ REALLY a bot, what I meant is that he’s influenced by people who are influenced by people who are themselves influenced by bots so METAPHORICALLY he’s like a bot, even though he’s a real person…I just get to treat him as an inhuman shill for the purposes of this argument”
And the reason why I’m like, hyperattuned to this is that overtly the argument a lot of people make is “social media is dangerous because literal AI’s have poisoned our ability to have sane discussions” but when you interrogate them a bit the covert argument is “social media is dangerous because it exposes people to bad ideas”
The left are capable of articulating their objections to wealth, and when they do so “wealth leads to power” and “wealth cannot have been acquired honestly” feature heavily. Also, the left don’t see themselves as powerful.
Eurovision gang, any thoughts on this year’s entries so far? I just heard Ukraine’s Solovey and it’s 100% my favorite so far. I expect to crash and burn horribly before the final.
Nothing I’ve heard so far this year has really come close to Soldi or (I promise, completely ironically) Papa Serhat’s masterpiece. I rate Solovey about on par with Spirit in the Sky, and not just because of the gimmick.
Also, fuck ballads.
I’m not caught up on this year’s entrants, but this song just left me cold; it’s wasn’t weird enough to make up the feeling I got while listening to it that I was just being yelled at in Ukrainian.
I’m on team Australia this year. The song is good and the choreography/showmanship is absolutely killer. I think Belgium probably has the best song, but it’s you know, just a good song, not a Eurovision song.
You reminded me that Eurovision is just around the corner, so I’ll go have a listen to the contenders. None of the ones I like ever do well, so if I do come back recommending any, you can cross those off as possible winners 🙂
Ah, are they doing the tried-and-trusted Eurovision ballad route again? I agree, too many of those makes it boring.
Okay, quick reactions to the Youtube snippets:
Albania – sorry girleen, trying too hard with the shouty-shouty
Armenia – very poppy, depending on the performance could go all the way to the final
Australia – God bless ’em, they’re keeping the glorious tradition of “bonkers Eurovision entry” alive and well – Godspeed, Great Southern Land!
Belgium – sounds like one of the “not so great James Bond themes” as discussed recently
Czech Republic – yeah, this one will do okay as well
France – if this were a beauty contest, your guy would be well in the running as he’s extremely model-looking. Unfortunately, this is a song contest and your song is “meh”
Italy – oh honey, sorry but no (though again, depending on the performance, like if they have dancing Zen gorillas, it might stagger through)
Latvia – wow, this is giving me flashbacks to the glory days of Devo with the backing performers. “Are we not women? No, we are Latvians!”
Lithuania – ooh, nice palazzo pants, mister! Going for “mildly quirky”, may or may not work for them. “Inoffensive” is the best I can do here
Norway – God love her, she’s trying to belt it out but the over-emoting undercuts the effect and just looks like anxiety. You and Albania go for a nice sit down and some soothing herbal tea, alright hun?
Poland – I was a bit worried there would be a wardrobe malfunction there, but it’s okay, she’s wearing a flesh-coloured top beneath her wide-open jacket. Phew, possible Janet Jackson Nipplegate crisis averted. Oh, the song? Ehhhhh….
Slovenia – Oh, I like this one (which means it’ll go nowhere). Now this is the way to do dramatic emoting, take notes, Albania and Norway! Imagine a very much younger Galadriel had decided on a career as a pop singer and you’ll get the gist
Spain – I’m sure the song is Very Serious And Meaningful, addressing the many deep problems of the modern world. Still doesn’t make me care, though. Mind you, I do like one of the four outfits the singer wears, the one with the sort of sash-type wraparound part of the suit. Nice!
Ukraine – Ah lads, I’ll give you points for trying to mix folk plus electronic, I like the old ‘remembering the roots of Eurovision by nodding towards our distinct cultural identity’ efforts that crop up every now and again. Song also sounds like a fractured nursery rhyme. Definitely copying Norway from last year, though, even if I think that’s a good performance to copy – the Norse had more energy and oomph, which is to your disadvantage by evoking the comparison. I do like this, but can’t recommend it as going to do much of anything in the contest
God alone knows what the Irish disaster effort will be like, I’m wincing in anticipation!
UK entry: Eh, I’m not too impressed. It’ll be fascinating to watch the voting in the wake of Brexit, though 😀 This is going to be the best part of the contest!
I was going to say, apologies from Australia for inflicting Montaigne on the rest of the world. But she kind of works with Eurovision.
Europe appreciates and loves Australia’s pure and selfless committment to the True Spirit Of Eurovision, which is not “promoting fraternal harmony through shared culture so as we don’t kick off yet another world war” but “dress up in silly costumes, then engage in bloodsport tactical voting for your neighbours and against your national enemies” 🙂
I wish I knew if anybody had made book on “Will it be Royaume Uni Nul Points this year from every participating nation (except Malta who always vote for the U.K.) because of Brexit?” So far it’s only odds on likely winners and favourites.
I fail to see how these are anything other than synonyms.
Now I want to see an AH where Eurovision begain in 1910.
Or perhaps 1790. (Maybe not. Nobody wants to listen to a song from every single former-HRE state.)
A song contest run Europe-wide in 1910 would presumably have been run on the radio. In 1790 it would have been a travelling show, hitting all the major cities of Europe over the course of six months or so.
Mumble. Was there such a thing as pop music in 1790?
I would give you very good odds there was, given that there was pop music in the 15th and 16th centuries. It would have been pretty different – no recordings, mostly just melodies – but my impression is that, say, L’homme arme was pretty popular, and a lot of the 15th-century music that got written down is actually settings of popular tunes (sometimes with first lines such as “Don’t rap on the door! My husband’s not at the mill, he’s at home.” So this is not all Courtly Love or sacred music). Or see Ravenscroft for end of the 16th century. (Example!)
One of the words I really miss in English compared to Dutch/German/etc is ‘rechtsstaat,’ literally translated as ‘justice/law state.’ This term refers to the state that incorporates certain principles that make it act more lawfully and justicy.
For example, some of the principles are:
– Separation of powers (like the trias politica)
– The judiciary and executive branch are bound by law
– The legislature can only make certain kinds of laws
– Transparency of actions by the state
– Having a meta-law (constitution) that defines how laws are made and that is much harder to change than regular law
– No ex post facto laws that make actions that were legal when they were done, punishable
– Fairness in the application of law (no selective enforcement where some groups are punished for actions that other are not punished for)
– Proportionality in punishment
– A bunch of human rights being upheld (uncluding the presumption of innocence and freedom of speech)
– Separation of civil, government and business spheres that do not rule each other
I often see people use the word ‘democracy’ in this vein, although I consider this deceptive, because it implicitly equates the purpose of the state with implementing the will of the majority, which in turn implies that there is no limit on what power the state may assert. This is a very dangerous assertion.
I found a very interesting paper, which argues that many liberals migrated from an extremist notion of the primacy of natural, individual rights to an extremist belief in the primacy of ‘public interest,’ decided upon by the democratic state. This may explain how in English ‘liberal’ now applies to people who are not at all classically liberal. The paper argues that ‘public interest’ is fictitious and normative, coercing individuals to serve this supposed public interest, which is actually the will of those who control the government.
The answer to this by the American founding fathers, as well as one of the greatest Dutch politicians, Thorbecke, was to demand self-restraint from government. In the words of Thorbecke:
However, it is still the state that decides the extent to which this self-restraint is applied. Yet the paper notes that it is tempting to then equate our own desires to the public interest, losing all self-restraint in the process. Elevating ‘democracy’ as the only limiting factor on ‘might makes right’ is insufficient, because elections only influence one powerbase, the legislature. In modern times, we see many other powerbases elevating the desires and ‘truths’ of subset of society as being in the public interest, with great intolerance to other desires and ‘truths.’ For example, the media, big business, the judiciary, the education sector and the bureaucracy. ‘Populists’ have gained greatly by pointing this out and opposing it, but they similarly tend to equate their own desires to the public interest, merely arguing that their opponents are undemocratic and that they themselves speak for ‘the people.’ They don’t oppose the idea that those in power are unrestrained in how they wield that power, but want to claim that power and use it to oppress others, rather than be oppressed by them.
This dedication to intolerance and ‘might makes right’ on both sides is ultimately a recipe for disaster. Equating the purpose of the state to ‘democracy’ is no solution to this, because it merely encourages people to either attempt to engineer a majority so they can oppress others (even to the point of racial politics, with majority-minority dreams on one side and ‘replacement’ on the other) or subvert democracy so power can be argued to be guided by democracy, when it actually isn’t (see the politicization of the judiciary as an example).
The paper argues that we must return to merely ‘natural rights’ and thus a very small state but IMO, this is not feasible. The vast majority of people want the benefits that a strong state has made possible, including substantial redistribution. Instead, I think that a broader set of ideals is necessary, which does include a set of natural rights, but goes beyond it. We can define this as the ‘rechtsstaat’ or an English word that refers to the same. Behaviors like punishing people extralegally can then be defined as being incompatible with a just society. By holding these as sacrosanct, there can then be a multipartisan unity to defend these, no matter whether the target or perpetrator is an enemy or friend. This in contrast to using these ideals as weapons, where it is demanded that opponents uphold the ideal, but friends are excused.
Although one can argue that even ‘rechtsstaat’ is deceptive and/or too limited, by focusing on the state, when non-state power is increasingly powerful (see tech companies who control communication infrastructure, but also because it is easier to enforce conformity). So we might need a term for a set of norms that generates sufficient tolerance in general society to hold us together and allow people crucial freedoms, instead of either devolving into oppression or separation.
I agree with you that the word democracy is bandied about to mean any or all of the things you listed. “Rule of law” is a related term in English but once again, I think it has a strict definition and then a broader definition closer to “a state which makes me feel nice”. On restraint in the exercise of power: good luck with that. I think the the only hope for the long-term survival of humanity is us not destroying our ecosystem before fossil fuels run out, and then surviving the following decline (ie not dying from the withdrawal associated with our addiction to growth); the idea that we as a species would ever not eat everything in sight and pump out heat as fast as we possibly could is about as risible to me applied to humans as it is applied to locusts.
I think you are right, “rule of law” is the closest related concept to Rechtsstaat, since the most important parts of the Rechtstaat, are that the law is the same for everybody (which includes people in power), and that the execution of the law is also bound by the law.
I think Kant used an example where King Friedrich of Prussia, accepted the ruling of an judge forbidding him to to build a road through the site of a mill, as an example of “Rechtsstaatlichkeit”.
We’ll geoengineer our way out of ecological collapse and use fission/fusion to solve power needs. The growth addiction won’t catch up to us before the AI alignment problem does.
Nuclear power (fission reactors, current tech only) can provide electricity at slightly higher prices than fossil fuels, so even in a world where all the fossil fuels disappear, we still have electricity. From that, we can (I don’t know the price but it can be done) chemically synthesize methane from non-fossil-fuel sources and have a high-density fuel, or grow biofuels–even if they’re energy-negative, we can pump energy from nuclear power in to distill the alcohol from the corn or whatever.
All that says that even in a world with no more fossil fuels at all, we can make something very much like our current technology work. Energy would cost more and we’d be poorer, but it’s not like collapse-of-civilization stuff.
Nuclear power is much too expensive considering how long it takes to build a power plant. In Finland they started one in 2005 and it’s still not finished.
Considering the great advances in solar and wind power in recent years, they are much cheaper today.
Sigh. Horns Rev 3 – which is an extension of an existing windmill park, which means most of the infrastructure was already in place, and which is also in one of the single best wind locations on the entire planet cost a billion euros for 407 mw of nameplate capacity.
At horns rev, you can expect a capacity factor of 45 or so percent (it is extremely windy waters), which then works out to a per-gigawatt cost of 1/(0.407×0.45) 5,46 billion euro. For an installation with an expected service life of around twenty years, which delivers power when it damn well feels like it.
Okilouto 3 cost the finish utility that bought the thing 5.5 billion for a per-gigawatt cost of 1/(1.65 x0.92) = 3.62 billion.
Even if you include the bath Areva took on it as a cost (and why would the utility do that?) we are still taking 7.25 billion per gigawatt for a plant which has a design life of three times the wind farm, and which, frankly, will probably still be running in a century. Not to mention that it will deliver power on a rather more predictable schedule.
And if we compare it with a nuclear projects which were actually well managed, the contrast gets really, really stark. The Taishan build of the epr put two of them online for 6.53 billion euro, for a per gigawatt cost of 2.14 billion.
Novovoronezh got two vver 1200s online for 3.8 billion which works out to 1.9 billion euro per gigawatt.
People claim renewables are cheaper, but mostly, this is just.. propaganda. Look up the costs of some completed projects. Solar is utterly uncompetitive unless you are in the sonoran or sahara. Even in the best places, wind is goddamn expensive.
You’re lucky we don’t have many reactionaries left here or they would be dunking all over this.
Nuclear power being unreasonably expensive is a policy choice, in much the same way as having it be impossible to complete public works in under a decade, or having the police be immune to consequences for misbehavior.
Note: this is true in the US and some other countries, but not in all countries. For example, in Australia, “liberal”=libertarian.
Oi oi oi, sorry for generalizing too much.
I think this goes to show that you can set up the most sophisticated system in the world, you can never get rid of the requirement for wisdom and integrity for those in power. Some systems are easier to game than others, but even in the best system, if the people with power are corrupt, it’s going to end badly.
If by corrupt you mean the person will always do that thing which they think most benefits themselves, then all people in power will be corrupt. Depending on wisdom and integrity is a sure failure. Our only protection is the system.
And that’s why eventually every civilization collapses.
It depends alot on the time horizon. Stealing benefits me now, but in the long run I benefit more from not stealing. Wisdom and integrity usually means that the person understands that they will benefit more in the long run by doing the right thing than not.
This has long been my thought as well.
It’s interesting to note that many societal systems – including communism and socialism and even authoritarianism, often the whipping boys in many libertarian fora – work out just fine if/when the people in charge are wise and benevolent. Which raises the question: if wisdom and benevolence are necessary and sufficient, then what’s the value in any legal framework at all? Why not just run it like common law and focus on having good people in charge?
And my usual response to that is that, one, it’s hard to always find enough wise and kind people, and two, as society size grows, the wisdom requirement rises quite rapidly, narrowing your pool of candidates even further. A pre-designed legal system can serve as a lever – a set of shortcuts for people to employ when their wisdom isn’t up to the task of deriving from first principles and the facts at hand whether a given act ought to be punished.
The better legal systems out there are better because they make tradeoffs that are closer to human intuition at the moment about what ought to be done, as well as to human intuition when looking back at past cases long after emotion has settled. Those, in turn (and in my opinion), tend to be the ones that limit the amount of damage any one official can do if they make a mistake.
Perhaps unlike jermo, I think such systems can last for quite a while – possibly centuries, possibly even more. Admittedly, I have no empirical evidence yet.
You are ignoring subjective desires. If Bob wants to live in society with large amounts of government redistribution, while Mary wants to live in a society where people get to keep much more of what they earn, then neither desire is really more wise or benevolent than the other. After all, plenty of people believe that getting too much handed to you is actually harmful. Similarly, is it benevolent to legalize drugs or to ban them? People often disagree.
I do think that there is a requirement for wisdom, not just in the legislature, but everyone with some power (and thus everyone), to make the system work. Institutions/rules can’t replace this wisdom (unwise people will burn down those institutions/rules anyway). Yet good institutions/rules can produce better outcomes that if you were to solely depend on the wisdom of individuals.
I’m not really ignoring subjective desires; just observing that some people subjectively desire collectivization, and appear to thrive in such systems. They’ll cheerfully sign away their power to make decisions about defense, education, law enforcement, health care, and so on, and assume that, when some decision doesn’t go their way, it was because some expert knew better than they.
If Mary reviews the systems on offer, and then opts for the system that lets her keep more of her earnings, it’s presumably because she believes she can or ought to assume more of the burden of making those decisions as they affect her. If Bob chooses the more collectivist system, it might be because he distrusts his own expertise to make those decisions. (It’d be nice, IMO, if he didn’t assume everyone else had the same uncertainty, but that’s an age-old conversation.)
I’m definitely agreed on a universal requirement for wisdom. The universe isn’t forgiving to the immature. Good institutions are levers, not crutches.
The top two definitions for liberal that I get from google feel fairly applicable to the segment of the USA nominally called liberals,
Maybe these are a far cry from what it classical means though, I am not a student of the classics(or really anything)
The New Deal happened almost a century ago. Someone willing to discard the changes it produced is not a (modern sense) liberal. Nor is someone open to the new opinion that climate change is not a threat, or that population increase is not a threat.
The people now called liberals are conservative with regard to those institutions they like, liberal (in your sense) with regard to institutions they dislike. Just like other people.
The classical liberal position was in favor of private property, weak government, broad franchise, … . Except for the last, it was roughly what we now call libertarianism, although usually not an extreme version thereof. Think Adam Smith, although I think he preceded the rise of that label, or John Stuart Mill, at least in his earlier writing.
To quote GKC on the British Liberal Party: “I’m a liberal. It’s those people who aren’t liberals.”
I will defer to you as to the classical liberal position.
However I am not totally convinced that the cohort that claims the liberal label in modern American discourse is indistinguishable* from all other cohorts along the axis of ‘openness to new behavior or opinions’. I understand there are studies on this question but that they are highly politically motivated in their construction and so their results are questionable. Still it seems, unfortunate, that two groups would self describe as ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ while actually being equally liberal and conservative in temperament.
*Of course I’ve shifted the goal posts a bit here from ‘fairly applicable’ to ‘not totally indistinguishable’.
@Spookykou
Defining liberal and conservative relative to the status quo means that they become fully subjective.
The sexual revolution was liberal because the traditional values were far more sexually restrictive than the revolutionaries desired. Feminists who later fought against men freely expressing their sexual desires were liberal because the traditional values were far more sexually permissive than the revolutionaries desired. So did the previous batch of feminists then become retroactively conservative or does being liberal require changing your views as the status quo changes?
In my view, liberalism and conservatism both are a mixed bag of this kind of relativity with more objective attitudes.
Anyway, ‘classical liberal’ is essentially a snapshot of the views of a group that called themselves liberals at a certain point in time.
The contrast between “liberal” and “conservative” is weird to me. For me, the opposite of “conservative” is “radical” (or “reactionary”, if the goal is to undo recent changes), while the opposite of “liberal” might be “authoritarian”.
@Spookykou says:
Try:
with “conservative with money” as an antonym.
Doesn’t actually work though for the political labels, as both George H.W.Bush and Bill Clinton were relatively frugal, while George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump (the farmer bailout funds under Trump exceed Bush’s and Obama’s auto industry bailout) are all relatively more free spending (as directed by Congress).
In going over all the listed dictionary definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” they don’t seem to me to match the political factions called “liberals” or “conservatives” much.
If people abuse the term “democracy,” why wouldn’t they / why don’t they abuse this term?
Democracy seems to me to be a useful word, even if it is abused. It has a pretty clear meaning, even if it is a spectrum. It has straight-forward downsides (tyranny of the majority, rational ignorance). Whereas, this concept (1) bundles together a bunch of procedural ideas that don’t seem to me to have much in common; and (2) asserts in the name that they are Right.
I can see a use for such terms such as “good,” “constitutional,” and “rule of law,” but they are useful because they are narrow and different. Maybe there is a consensus on what procedural rules are good, but a word that asserts consensus seems designed to be abused. (You suggest “justice”; Yes! a perfect translation and a terrible word; see “social justice.”)
If people use ‘democracy’ for lack of a better word, then offering them a better word can help.
Democracy is actually not that clear, IMO. For example, do you mean direct democracy or representational democracy? Is it a democracy when there is gatekeeping of candidates by the constitution (Schwarzenegger can’t be president), religious authorities (Iran), political parties, the media, etc? Is it a democracy if the deep state refuses to do what the elected politician(s) ask? Etc.
Anyway, the point of a new term is to refer to the idea that a good state is more than just one specific thing, which should be explained further if there is a dispute, rather than define one specific state. After all, we don’t really know what is the best state anyway.
Is it a democracy if all officials save generals are chosen by lot?
Democracy is a spectrum, not a binary. (Same with separation of powers!) There may be hard questions, but it seems to me that all of your questions have easy answers of which is more democratic.
Asking what is a “real democracy” seems to me a bad question. Drawing a line is usually to exaggerate the importance of that line, compared to the rest of the spectrum. And this seems to me closely tied in to the problem of equating democracy with goodness. The line is gerrymandered to say that my country is good and your country is bad. If the speaker really cared about improving goodness through democracy, he should care about variation in democracy below the line and variation above the line. Aside from the problem of just asserting that democracy is good. Having a checklist of procedures is an even worse example of gerrymandering.
Does anyone know if there’s been much research on the relationship between optimism/pessimism and political leanings? There seems to be plenty on the Big Five personality traits.
This was prompted by seeing a couple of things recently where support for Trump seemed to boil down to “Everything is fucked and we need radical changes”. It doesn’t seem to be neatly partisan (splitting left and right) in the same way that the Big Five tendencies are though because “everything is fucked and we need radical change” is also a viewpoint associated with the radical left, historically and contemporarily. It seems like it might align with populism* for that reason (e.g. “everything is broadly heading in the right direction and we just need to tinker a bit” might be a centrist position).
Anyway, a bit of googling couldn’t turn up much except for a wikipedia article with a lot of “citation needed” flags speculating that it was broadly aligned with some conservative viewpoints. Does anyone know of anything equivalent to the classic Big Five associations?
*For want of a better term.
Do you have good links to the political leanings link to the personality traits? I would be interested in that
thanks
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/populist-personalities-the-big-five-personality-traits-and-party-choice-in-the-2015-uk-general-election/
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2012/05/21/the-big-sort
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323840966_Personality_and_political_orientation
AFAIK it’s not a huge effect but it does exist. A lot of the research I can find on google is gated.
I doubt optimism is all that politically linked, or if it is causation runs the other way. People are more optimistic when their party is in power.
While I think it’s probably true that a person’s level of optimism relative to their own baseline changes depending on whether their party is in power, my question was really about whether a person’s level of optimism relative to the average person’s affects their political outlook.
How distinct is optimism/pessimism from trait Neuroticism? I’d expect Neuroticism to be essentially the factor of pessimism which is stable over time (instead of responsive to which party is in power, etc.)
Pessimism-only support doesn’t translate to actual good turnout, though. The theme with most supporters of anyone is polarized: pessimism that the outgroup can get anything done, optimism that the chosen candidate is different. Hence horrible approval for Congress, high approval for individuals by their constituents.
“We need radical changes” is an optimistic stance in its own way.
Most forms of synecdoche are understandable; one that strikes me as bizarre is “Auschwitz” as stand-in for “Holocaust”, because it’s so often used to refer to the enormous horrors of that event.
Why is that bizarre? There were many horrors in the Holocaust, but Auschwitz was the biggest single one (by number of victims).
Auschwitz was caputred mostly intact, and thus could be extensivly used to gather evidence about what happened in the death camps. There where also a lot more survivors because of that.
The other camps had mostly be successfully evacuated and destroyed by the SS. So less is known about them.
Other individual massacares of the death squadrons, are also a lot harder to document, and so less documented.
Auschwitz was also the only concentration camp (AFIK) that was also an extermination camp. Which makes it a bad example if you want more than a top-level understanding of what was going on, and has promoted a broad misunderstanding of what “concentration camps” actually were (or are). But Auschwitz is your one-stop shopping center if you’re only after that top-level understanding and don’t want to spend lots of time on a virtual or literal train ride across the Polish countryside. Auschwitz is where all the horrors of that event came together in one place.
No there were several death/extermination camps:
There was also Lublin/Majdanek, Beleszc, Sobibor, and Treblinka
There were a lot more concentration camp (and sub-camps) all over German controlled territory.
I think John is saying it was the only combination concentration/extermination camp.
I don’t know enough about the holocaust to know if this true, however, but that’s what I read as his claim.
Right. For the most part, and for fairly obvious reasons, the concentration camps and the extermination camps were kept a decent train ride apart. Sobibor, for example, only had a few hundred Jews in residence at any time, and those were the ones who weren’t facing immediate execution because they were needed to keep carting the bodies out of the gas chambers. If you were going to die at Sobibor, you generally died within hours of arrival – from the concentration camp you had been living in the past few months or years and which didn’t want your corpse literally and figuratively stinking up the place.
I’m not sure Auschwitz was the only camp that combined both functions, but I believe it was by far the largest and most iconic. So if you’re visiting Poland and you’ve got an afternoon to “experience the Holocaust”, that’s where you go.
With a promise like that, how could I refuse?
Treblinka also was a combination of a labor and extermination camp. They had a gravel mine for the production of concrete and cut wood for the cremations.
To combat Corona, flu or the common cold, how can I train myself to stop touching my face?
That’s actually the useful function of a face mask
I’ve been thinking about rubbing jalapenos on my fingertips. Thoughts? (Not a joke, I’m really fidgety by nature and I don’t think I can stop just by willpower)
Every time I chop jalapenos or any other hot peppers, I am guaranteed to eventually touch my eyes, and then feel very masculine for 20 minutes as I deal silently with the pain. It’s practically a rite at this point.
But I don’t really recommend it.
I hope when you say “deal silently with the pain”, you at least rinse your eyes.
No, I usually don’t. I mean I just live with the pain, and very watery eyes, for 5-20 minutes.
Please, for your own sake, do not do that. Even if it works your fingers will still burn. I made jalapeno poppers once without gloves. I was miserable for 5 or 6 hours.
interesting, that is so different than my experience. I pretty much have to rub jalapenos directly into my cornea to get a negative reaction.
Are you normally hyper-sensitive to spice?
Yeah, I can’t imagine putting on gloves for jalapenos, and I have wussy Eastern European blood when it comes to spice.
Getting jalapeno stuff on the sensitive skin under my fingernails is very uncomfortable. Scrapping the seeds and pith out with my thumbnail, for example, causes hours of regret. But it is a really good reminder not to rub your eyes for those hours…
I just ate something with thai chilis, so no, I don’t think so. I think Another Throw has the right of it.
To be more specific, the time I am thinking of I gave a bunch of jalapenos a fine mince. The copious juice produced by the mincing got under the fingernails of my guide hand while cutting and was mildly uncomfortable but that paled in comparison to the discomfort of JAMMING that stuff up under my thumbnail while coring them. Not a smart move.
I suspect that if you cut your fingernails down as far as you can go you wont have the same problem. Both because you don’t have a patch of sensitive skin in such a sheltered location and because you don’t have a crevice to trap the oil in.
Oy! That’s what a paring knife is for, my friend! I rarely even need gloves. (Though to be fair, I scrub pretty zealously afterward, and I’m generally not prone to rubbing my eyes all the time anyway.)
@Another Throw: I tend to find gloves to be too inconvenient to put on, though obviously, that’s subjective. Fortunately, office supply stores often sell boxes of rubber fingertips meant for clerks to slip on to make it easier to separate sheets of paper (including paper money). I’ve never tried it for kitchen work, but it’s possibly just the thing for this.
Pro-tip from a jalapeno canner, if you want to get the capsaicin off your fingers faster, rubbing them with a watery paste of baking soda then rinsing with vinegar goes a long way to cut even the hottest pepper remnants off. As it is a fatty acid, I usually use a detergent after as well (we had a dry summer so my jalapenos ended up quite potent).
I check before touching my contacts or face by licking any suspect fingertips for any telltale spice.
Follow up:
I have dry skin and need to moisturize my face during the day. Do I need to wash my hands before I moisturize?
I think that would be the recommendation.
Use some lotion or perfume on your hands with a smell you find repulsive. Each time you get them anywhere near you face you’ll notice it and will want to move them away before you even touched the face. Source: just used a dispenser which happened to contain a stinky sanitizer in it.
Obvious improvement is that you can use sanitizer with a repulsive smell, but I’m not sure how good is it for your skin to use it often enough to maintain the smell.
It’s winter, so wear a scarf? Then when you reach up to touch your face, touch your scarf, instead.
Or, just use fidget toys. (Or, if you don’t feel like buying one, learn to do pen tricks.) Touching the face might be just a stim instinct.
Is there still the same risk to touching the face in combing your hair with your hands? You could redirect that way, too.
GPT2 says:
Thanks all for the ideas! So we got:
* Face masks: You’re right, but they are sold out at the moment, and I do not want to wear that every winter through flu season.
* Jalapeños: Cool stunt, but I’d rather not 🙂
* Stinky lotion: I think this is the best proposal so far.
* Wear a scarf: Outside, definitely, but at home? Over mouth and nose?
* Nose ring: I like the way GPT-2 is thinking out of the box.
Why do we touch our faces in the first place?
* An itch in the eye or nose
* While thinking of other things, scratch myself here or there
* Nose-picking
* Having something between the teeth, and no dental floss fork at hand
When touching consciously, we can get used to using a paper towel, prepare those floss forks, and such. It’s the unconscious that is hard to defeat! When sitting in the office, wear straps that tie my hands to the armrests — well that might look silly. The stinky lotion might remind me just in time.
I think I’ll go to the pharmacy and ask for a stinky lotion. That’ll make the pharmacist’s day as the weirdest Corona panic request of them all, so it’s worth it just for the lulz.
Re: wearing a scarf. The point isn’t that you have the scarf on the face, it’s to give the hand something to touch/grab before it reaches the face.
Another case of commonly touching the face is about bracing the face/chin on your hands. This seems about posture, as you can only do this if you are leaning forward, so training to sit straight and zoom in on the screen instead of leaning in would be a solution.
Idle thought: how much can advice/conclusions from the manosphere be separated from the conceptual framework? Can we imagine a manosphere that didn’t use nearly as much game theory, or wasn’t dependent on concepts like hypergamy?
You can jettison hypergamy as a general social hypothesis and still have it work fairly well as a recipe for picking up women with bad judgement, terrible taste, and/or deep insecurity, I think. Manosphere explanations and advice are perfectly applicable to some people, it’s just as a set of principles that try to explain society that I think they fail.
Deep insecurity alone seems like something that applies to a fairly large proportion of people as a whole and a huge proportion of twenty-somethings. Bad judgement not much less so.
Of course, one might naively suppose that the goal of a decent person entering a relationship should be to alleviate the deep insecurity rather than exploit it…
What even is the manosphere at this point? I remember that the PUA community had some good conclusions blooming out of some stupid conceptual frameworks last time I checked. Mind you, most of the conclusions were “work out,” “dress nicely,” “use product,” “don’t be afraid to approach women,” “don’t be afraid of rejection,” etc.
That being said, at least from what I’ve seen, most of the people who that advice worked on (including myself) dropped out of the manosphere. I’m not sure what’s left at this point.
The examples you listed seem intuitive, except “use product”. Really??
I don’t see any product here.
Get product from bag.
I think “use product” is shorthand for “get a haircut, comb your hair, and overall keep your hair (and beard) looking well kept”.
My apologies.
“Use Product” is refererring to some kind of hair product. Very few people have the kind of hair/haircut that just kind of looks good on it’s own. There are a variety of relatively cheap pastes/gels/putties/pomades/whatever that you can put in your hair that will instantly make it look better; like just rub it between your hands then muss it through your hair and your overall look will vastly improve (this also goes for beards).
If you go to a barbershop or a hair cuttery that you trust, hang back after your next cut and ask the barber what he’d recommend for your hair/style; in my experience they’ve been pretty helpful. Otherwhise just google “What product for (insert style of hair) here.”
If you’re rocking really short hair this isn’t that necessary, but anyone with longer hair or hair that’s even a little curly can usually benefit from this kind of thing.
OK, that’s what I thought you meant. But I still can’t believe it’s an actual recommendation. I’m constantly hearing women mocking men who put product in their hair. To my eyes as well it always looks kinda pathetic.
On very rare occasions, usually when I go long enough without a haircut that I get what my wife calls “lollipop head”, I’ll put a tiny bit of mousse in my hair to tame some of the volume out of places where there’s too much. But I would hate to walk around looking like I had smeared a handful of goopy paste onto my head every day.
Eh, different strokes for different folks. I agree that men’s hairstyles that heavily rely on product (IE the slicked back Don Jr. look) are pretty laughable, but everyone’s different.
In my personal experience, I’ve got curly hair that has a tendency to look really frizzy at basically any length. For years my options were pretty much Buzz Cut or White-dude afro. It wasn’t until I started using product that I could actually have a “normal” looking head of hair.
All I’m saying is, I wouldn’t totally discount it; next time you’re at the barber ask him to put some in for you and see if you like the look. Almost any good barber will add some for free and your downside lasts only as long as it takes for you to get home and wash your hair.
I’ve had several barbers do this, usually because I don’t object loudly enough (because haircuts make me kinda sleepy). I always hate it, both the smell and the look, and rush home to wash the stuff off.
If for some reason I wanted to maintain the pathetic, desperate look and put up with the smell, the knowledge that I’d incur an additional premium expense to purchase each bottle of unpronounceable chemicals doesn’t sweeten the deal either, nor does thinking about what those chemicals will do to my scalp over time.
BTW I also have really curly hair. (Pretty much like Pete Sampras.) Wearing the sides significantly shorter than the top keeps it looking respectable, and shampooing no more than once every two months (and always lathering in a moisturizing conditioner after each shampooing), keeps it from being frizzy. But do note there’s a difference between “frizzy” and having a few stray curls sticking out.
The manosphere was a natural gathering point for social conservatives who didn’t want to hear about Jesus. Many moved on to websites like this one or Unz. And the wider culture itself moved in a different direction IMO. If men are single and not banging any women they aren’t speaking about it in hushed tones the way they were 7 years ago. My own just-so about it is that the rise of what can be euphemistically called “party girl culture” and social media which allowed it to be broadcast far and wide drained the eros out of it. Think about a nudist colony. There’s not much eros there. The eros is in the relatively pure, the subtle hint of doing something. For the women who make no attempt to hide it you’re still going to be willing but you don’t want to go out and make a giant effort.
@Nick
Lots of that advice is given by non-PUAs (for example: work out, approach more women, dress up, learn to talk to women), so lots of it.
Ironically, the rise of PUA may have resulted from feminism distorting the advice given to men, creating a need for an alternative conceptual framework that pushes out misandrists, so men can be fairly confident that they advice they get from that source actually has the goal of helping them, rather than helping women.
If this assumption is correct, then, assuming that feminist messaging stays as it is, the advice can be separated from its conceptual framework, but not from its anti-feminism.
PS. Please use PUA if you mean that, rather than the nonsensical term ‘manosphere.’
When I was in college me and all my roommates read the book “The Game” because one of our friends, John, thought it was hilarious. Its a pretty funny read that describes nothing all that innovative, but reveals that the PUAs have their own vocabulary for all sorts of normal things. One that has passed into normal lexicon is “peacocking” but there were all sorts of things, and some would specialize into easy magic tricks (watch stopping being one). Generally, however, I got the impression that most PUAs do not much enjoy the environment where they engage in their pickups (several insist on not drinking for it will reduce their “haul”), and I am not really sure all that many end up sleeping with so many women, rather they just get numbers and then are hit with choice paralysis at the end of the day.
Strength through adversity.
If they do, they don’t read very well. You realize that getting a number is only the first step, right? In like any relationship, not just PUA specific. You send a text. Many do not respond. Then you start conversing, and try to make a date. Many fall off at this stage also. Notice that we’re still a few steps from the sleeping here. If choice paralysis occurs than it’s very much false consciousness.
Yeah, that’s why I didnt have sex with any girls in high school. I didnt know which one to choose…
The book is from 2005, and mostly represents events from far before 2005. I don’t think “text” is the next step, it mostly would have been “call and set up a date”, which is similar, but I think culturally different.
Granted, I was in HS/Middle school back then, so I suppose it is much harder to ghost the guy who asked you out and sits next to you in math…
@Clutzy
I read it at some time, but don’t really remember it. About all I can remember is the magic guy and courtney love being in it. But I assure you, there was a ton of actually useful stuff online before 2005, and texting was very prominent in importance.
Take a look at girls chase maybe, spefically chase amante’s articles
So apparently Liverpool F.C. are partnered since 2016 with a Thai coconut milk/water/oil company. I was completely unaware of this, and seemingly so were a lot of other people, because the marketing bods have decided to unleash a humorous team meeting skit featuring some of the players upon the world.
It’s about as terrible as you’d expect, though in a weird way it’s good because it’s so bad: it’s deliberately poking fun at the stiltedness of the lads’ “acting” abilities and the implausibility of the entire set-up. (Though Dejan in this is me, as far as reactions to “what nonsense is this?” go). There’s also an official bloopers reel if you haven’t had enough thigh-slapping hilarity with the skit itself.
Remember: should you suddenly find yourself in urgent need of coconut-derived products, Chaokoh is the name to ask for! No, don’t thank me for bringing this to your attention, the consciousness of a good deed done well is enough for me 🙂
I’m concerned about there being a drug shortage in the US. For instance, I’m on benzos, and I’m wondering what strategy I should take to avoid running out should there be a supply chain disruption from China, since quitting cold turkey would be problematic. Of course, I can talk to my doctor about getting a large prescription now (which he may or may not go along with.) But I don’t have any idea how large a supply I might need. I don’t even know if there is a supply chain risk, but from what I understand many generic drugs rely on ingredients from China.
For your terror, the FDA conveniently maintains a drug shortages list. As I look at it, there are 104 drugs marked as “In shortage”. Many of these are critical drugs which we (usually) carry on the ambulance, though we’ve been able to make due with creative if non-ideal substitutions so far.
Call for help finding a source/article: Sometime this year, I got a link (probably on twitter) about an economist doing experiments and finding that many cognitive biases result in better decision-making in realistic/less-lab-like scenarios. I think this was a recently published thing. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to find this again to finish reading it, but haven’t been able to. Have found some articles talking about this concept generally, but nothing with experimental results. Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
I don’t know what you are looking for. But if I understand the gist of your question, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something by Gigerenzer(*) or one of his colleagues/students.
(*) Of which, everything I’ve read – not so much to be fair – is very good.
I think that’s it. Or at the very least this is very good reading. Thank you!
This is basically what you’d expect from evolutionary psychology, right? Heuristics that usually give you the right answer in practical situations, but sometimes lead you astray in uncommon or contrived situations–it’s easy to see how evolution (biological or cultural), and for that matter life experience, might equip you with those.
I think of a lot of cognitive biases the way I think of optical illusions.
Well, yes and no. We aren’t in the ancestral environment in many ways, and each of those could make for a miscalibrated bias.
From the Catch-22 Department comes another tale of extreme bureaucracy. In order to import a firearm into the US, you need an import license for the gun. But you don’t need such a license if the gun is an antique. However, a customs officer might (and probably will) stop the gun at the border, and ask for an import license. You can assert that the gun is an antique and you don’t need a license, but how do you prove it? One good way, it turns out, is to apply for an import license for the gun and have the application officially denied on the grounds that the firearm does not need an import license, being an antique.
That’s not a catch-22. It would be if the ATF would refuse to both give a license and to say that it didn’t need a license & the courts would be fine with the gun import being stopped by customs.
Right now it is merely an extra bureaucratic burden that is technically (and legally) unnecessary, but not worth going to court over.
I watched the video through and I agree it’s not catch-22. I also don’t even see it as extreme bureaucracy – there’s a big paperwork overhead about importing most weapons, but to take advantage of one exception to the overall rules you save time by writing to the very first gatekeeper to get a letter back saying in effect “no, you are exempt” which you can use to circumvent other steps.
That’s about as minimal as I can imagine except the superficial form of things: you don’t ask for a letter of exemption, but you apply as if you were not exempted and get a denial. Not ideal! Opaque! But not “extreme bureaucracy”.
Agreed.
In my line of work, the equivalent is writing the Ministry of Finance for an interpretation of tax law. Unless you’re trying something shady, most of the time you’ll get a reply that your approach is correct.
It might seem a pointless exercise, given that you’ll end up doing what you were going to do in the first place, but you get the benefit of having a decision that is subsequently binding on the tax authorities, provided the material facts remain the same as presented in the application. In other words: the MoF cannot suddenly change its mind when auditing.
A much worse scenario, to my mind, is one where you cannot get a recognized and binding document to attest whether a specific firearm is subject to an import license or not, until a court rules one way or the other.
Contrary to the position of this being “extreme bureaucracy”, I’d say it is maximally convenient. Given that you need an import license unless you don’t, applying for one as a matter of course means that you’ll either have one or a statement of exemption when it comes to declare the firearm at the border.
Not the sort of response I was expecting. Must update priors.
All done. The floor is now open for tales of actual extreme bureaucracy.
Your tax authority is bound by its advice? That is excellent. American tax authorities aren’t. If the IRS gives you bad advice, too bad for you. See David Michael Maser v. Commissioner (IANAL).
A colleague was running a business in a midwestern state. Rather profitable, but he wasn’t sure at all how to pay state taxes for differing jurisdictions. He just wanted to pay the right amount, but the state refused to answer his questions. And why would they? Why would they give up the power to decide after-the-fact that you did it wrong if they weren’t forced to?
Not all advice issued by the tax authorities is binding on said authorities, but some of it is. There are two flavours:
1. The individual interpretation, which is what we’re discussing here. Essentially, it is a pre-emptive call for a decision and subject to standard process. What’s happening is that the tax authority decides as if the taxpayer’s claims of fact were true. Once issued, such a decision may not be unilaterally rescinded by the tax authority, unless the material facts are found to be different. The administrative courts will enforce the interpretation against the tax authority (again, conditional on material facts being the same). The tax authority is obligated to issue such interpretations when applied for.
An individual interpretation in one case is not binding in any other.
2. General interpretations are a much rarer and more valuable beastie: here the Minister of Finance issues a ruling on some specific ambiguity of tax law that is binding in all cases.
In all, the closest US equivalent, as far as I can tell, is court precedent, which is a much more messy affair.
Similar to Poland, some US guidance is binding and some is not. Phone advice from the IRS is not binding but a private letter ruling is (of course they also charge you for this). If you use someone else’s private letter ruling for your own situation, that is not binding, but they probably won’t charge a you a penalty if they change it on audit.
Edward’s example is for advice essentially off the record. I don’t know that this is unreasonable. It is annoying when you can’t get the tax authority to tell you the answer until they audit you and then inform you that you were wrong. But I don’t know how to get around this in a world without infinite resources by the tax authorities. This is more of an issue with taxes being so complicated that there is much that taxpayers cannot figure out. THAT would be worth fixing.
The real gun-related catch-22 is US v. Bean where someone who was convicted of a felony can’t get a restoration of their firearms rights as authorized by US law because budget appropriations prohibits spending money to process such applications. But you can’t go to court to address the issue because you haven’t first been denied through the approved process.
This is only a catch-22 when described exactly that way. When you instead phrase it as “the courts don’t have the power to compel a federal agency to do a job congress has specifically taken action to prevent them from doing” it snaps back to sounding reasonable.
Although now that I think about it, the Catch-22 in the book only sounds like a catch-22 when phrased exactly that way. If you instead phrase it as “the grounds for getting a psych discharge are so high as to be practically impossible” it also snaps back to sounding reasonable.
Hmm…
I think it’d be a real catch-22 if, based on the fact that you applied for an import license, the US government told you the gun couldn’t be classified as an antique.
I don’t see how it’s a catch-22 either. It’s inelegant, certainly, but once you actually know about it it offers a pretty straightforward way of importing a firearm. Step one, apply for an import license. Step two, import the firearm, armed with either the valid import license or the official document denying you an import license on the grounds that you don’t need one.
Hey Scott, was just reading some old articles.
Thank you for your writing. You’ve helped me in the thinking department and in the being nice department, and on top of that I really enjoy reading it in general.
And thank you for creating this awesome garden
Seconded, it bears repeating this place is marvellous and afaik unique.
Thirded. This is where I should be drunkenly slurring “I really love you guys, I mean it, you’re the best!” but since it’s just gone afternoon here and I’m only drinking “cloudy lemon flavoured sparkling water”, make that soberly slurring “I really love you guys!” 😀
Fourthed.
Sorry for a cringy comment, but reading Slate Star Codex and Less Wrong for the past year has been nothing short of an enlightenment for me. For example:
* I have stopped being a news junkie (I used to deplete my mind with anglophone culture wars) after reading some of the insightful political writings which, in my opinion, model culture wars quite well and let me sleep in peace knowing that I am on top of most of them. I know the obvious worry – am I approaching LW and SSC with enough skepticism? Am I turning too intellectually arrogant? I can’t prove or disprove either, but I’m happier and I am not losing friends, so I guess it works for me. In fact, I am craving culture war discussions less and respond to them more calmly, which I think will be a positive influence on my social life.
* I now have much more skepticism towards academic research. Again, hopefully not too much (‘red flag’ remains my most hated idiom in English). Actually, I’m quite certain it’s not too much because helpfully the skepticism has been installed in me by Scott pointing out clearly defined oft-repeating features of research methodologies which introduce bias and which can be readily identified by reading the research itself.
Next thing I should do to maximise the impact of the rationalist sphere on myself:
* Find out how the experiment with Scott moving to the Bay Area went. I’m currently an economist with, for my age, very competitive qualifications in economics, but I wish I was closer to the STEM / rationalish / innovative culture more prevalent in tech (looking specifically at data science). I’m not fond of pure maths – I always need a story to it – but I get along better with nerds.
Add a half a teaspoon of Gordon’s and say it’s a homeopathic gin and bitter?
I do have some Fever Tree tonic waters at hand. No gin, but some Bacardí Ginger. Once the sun declines a little further down the sky (it’s now 3 p.m. here), I may indulge in some homeopathy as you suggest 🙂
Yes it’s Lent, but this is “a little wine for your stomach’s sake”! Ginger is good for the digestion and this rum has got ginger in!
> this rum has got ginger in
well… mostly ginger
Nthed. And thank you, Purplehermann, for making this thread, and reminding me that this is worth stressing!
My internet reading, a few random usually technical articles (typically on infosec topics) aside, consists of Slate Star Codex and people I follow on schlaugh. And I like it that way. Thanks, Scott!
Yeah, what they all above said.
I’ve been reading a lot about old miners and their struggles, especially in the early 20th century. Perhaps it is because I’m from Kentucky and am biased towards the history of my own region, but I’ve become convinced that the job of a miner before mechanization (roughly pre-WWII) was the toughest job that a free man was tasked with before the war.
I’m sure there are other candidates of hardest job in history. What do you all think?
Here’s a piece I put together with some thoughts on how tough it was being a miner
Sewer engineer.
Oh that’s a good one. Any suggested reading?
Alas, I’m basing this on a radio documentary broadcast on French public radio years ago.
But from memory: truly appaling working conditions that can’t really be mitigated, constant fear of falling into water and bringing home nasty diseases, and the pay is not even that great.
If you are French and excited by sewers, you probably already know about the “Museum of the Sewers” in Paris: https://en.parisinfo.com/paris-museum-monument/71499/Musee-des-egouts-de-Paris
I visited it while trying to get full value out of my museum pass, and it was surprisingly delightful. I’d recommend it highly. It’s been closed for renovations for a couple years, but slated to reopen this coming October.
Here’s someone’s blog post with more details about what it contains: https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/why-you-need-to-visit-the-paris-sewer-museum/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6yJD8e38IU
Offshore roustabout/roughneck. Note, roughneck only before the invention of the iron roughneck.
And, at least when I was doing it, you had to navigate confined spaces, put out fires and have some basic medical training.
Ooh that’s a good one. That’s be great to read up on- the early days of being a roughneck. I wonder if there are any great books
When I was a motorcycle courier in London in the late 90’s, I often thought that was the toughest job in the world. It’s February, it’s been sleeting all day, and you’re standing by the side of your bike wondering if any work is going to materialise, ever.
You’re frozen, and drenched, and can’t feel any of your fingers or toes. Any biros you relied on stopped working hours ago, so nobody would be able to sign for any jobs if they appeared, and your sheets of paper on your clipboard are just a disgusting soggy mess. If you do get some work, it feels like your life expectancy is measured in minutes, and half the taxi drivers are ready to nudge you into a bollard on the central reservation as you overtake them, and laugh as they’re doing it. Some days you pay out more than you earn – the insurance is insane, you’re inside a building for 30 seconds and you get a bleeding parking ticket, and every time you crash you spend a weeks wages just getting back on the road. Broken bones are free to heal but take ages.
You could go and sit in a cafe, and you’d warm up quick enough. But most likely your radio doesn’t work inside so you really are saying goodbye to any money that day. And because you’ve got 7 layers on in an attempt to avoid freezing, you rather quickly start to cook. And that awful cup of greasy spoon tea you just drank has to come out at some point. Which will cause you mountains of logistical misery I can’t begin to explain.
And when you think it couldn’t get any worse (though at least by not having received any jobs, you also haven’t died under a bus) a copper who is also having a bad day takes it out on you by stopping you for precisely no reason, finds something trivially wrong with your bike, puts a prohibition on it, and you have to walk home. Yes, you get warm, but as in the cafe experience, you cook, and it’s like walking in a diving suit.
However, the reason it’s not the toughest job in the world, or even the toughest job amongst the people you share a flat with, is because sometimes it’s June. You’re sitting at home, basically unemployable because you’re completely anti-social along with being fundamentally lazy. The only thing in the world you enjoy doing is riding around on your motorbike. And somebody comes along and says “I’ll pay you 500 quid a week to ride your motorbike around London, and the faster you ride, the more I’ll pay you” It’s like all your Christmases and Birthdays have come at once. You don’t even have to talk to anybody, you just ride your bike all day long and if you fancy cruising along the motorways or through leafy Surrey suburbs, there are plenty of option for doing that. I used to have a regular run to Leeds and back (400 mile round trip) and I took it because I could have a cup of tea at my sisters in Leeds and when it was time to head back to London, I always caught myself thinking “This really is the best job in the world”.
I really enjoyed that description, it felt like it was bits and pieces of a short story.
Everything I know about Harlan County I learned from watching Justified.
I also have a family friend who is from Kentucky who assured me it really is like that.
Everything I know comes from this song: https://www.last.fm/music/Jim+Ford/_/Harlan+County
Counterpoint, having felled and bucked the occasional tree with axe and crosscut myself: hand-logging.
Sources and recommended reading: Woodsmen of the West, Tall Trees Tough Men, “Logging, Pimping, and Your Pal Jim”, maybe Ralph W. Andrews’ logging books for the photos, probably Holy Old Mackinaw (I myself have only read Holbrook’s Burning an Empire but it wasn’t half bad.).
And via youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f_FjfIQQfo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkjXqmmaP-U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFoqbU5XKL4
Railroad construction and whaling are right up there, too.
Bering Sea fisherman looks pretty awful, although somewhat mitigated by the relatively short working season and good pay.
Hello, and welcome to book review time! Today I will be mostly criticising an entry in the genre of continuation novels, the sub-genre whereby Best-selling Dead Author continues to have a flourishing literary career beyond the grave, thanks to literary estates and/or publishing firms willing to continue flogging a dead horse for the sake of an established profitable property and beginning/mid-tier rank authors wanting a foot in the door of publishing or a side-line to pay the rent while working on their own originals.
This does not necessarily mean that the work is bad in itself; the late Robert B. Parker wrote two continuation novels for Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, and since his own death four different writers have been gainfully employed continuing his Parker, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall and the Cole & Hitch Western series. I’ve read several of these kinds of novels in the detective/crime genre, and some are definitely better than others. I’m late to the game about this particular series, continuing Agatha Christie’s Poirot, which I intend to review here.
Why I say I’m late to this game is because the novel in question (one of four, three published and one to be released later this year) was first published in 2014 but I only discovered it a few weeks ago. First, let me get my snarking out of the way (snarking about the authoress, I’ll be giving her Original Character a good kicking further down). From her list of breathlessly gushing acknowledgements, she says:
I’ll just bet they were, lassie. Christie is a reliable money-making name, even if the Empress of Crime has been dead since 1976 and the novel killing off Poirot was published in 1975 (though written in the 40s, fact fans!) Kenneth Brannagh is only the latest – 2017 – to take a turn at the character (a movie I still haven’t seen because I don’t know how broadly, or how much for comic effect, Poirot’s character is played in it) so plainly there still remains gold in them thar hills. H&S, and Christie’s grandson who is the one who authorised this continuation, are less “jolly and excited” to indulge one of their tame authoresses for her literary excellence (ahem) and more with visions of Scrooge McDuck’s money swim.
So, how does the book stack up?
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I’ll give you the pros first, then we’ll get into the cons.
Pro:
(1) Even watered-down Poirot is better than nothing, and this is still Poirot. The authoress does not go heavy on the character tics of the stereotype and that’s a welcome restraint. She does, indeed, get the idea behind Poirot’s fussiness and neatness, it’s more along the lines of OCPD, though that’s the kind of interpretation she does not make.
(2) The authoress is a writer of psychological thrillers, and the plot is appropriately convoluted and twisty, resulting in the “I never saw that coming” ending Christie liked to pull off.
(3) At least one neat subversion of expectations regarding crime novel tropes; there’s a character who does the classic “I have vital information about the case but I won’t tell you now, come back tomorrow” set-up which we expect to result in the classic “and then they were murdered before they could tell”, but this does not happen.
Con:
(1) One very, very big con which is the major one – the authoress’ original character Edward Catchpool (who made me think of him as Clotpoll because he is so cloth-headed). This is unfortunate because he’s the stand-in for Poirot’s usual side-kick, Captain Hastings. Clotpoll is our narrator, which is why it’s unfortunate. Now, were he merely another Hastings (who, love him though I do for his other sterling qualities, I must admit is dim and can’t take a hint even if it’s directly dropped on his head) that would be well enough, but unhappily he’s also a Scotland Yard detective, and we meet him having not one but three murders to solve.
Actually, we meet him having run home to
broodsulkmopetake a little break, abandoning the crime scene and telling Poirot that no, there’s plenty of time if he leaves it until the morning to come back. And this is Scotland Yard’s finest? Actually he’s never described (or self-described) as anything like their best, which makes me wonder how come he and Poirot are so buddy-buddy.Turns out that the reason Our Narrator
ran like a little bitchclocked out early is that dead bodies give him the creeps, the willies, the heebie-jeebies. Rather a handicap when one is a homicide detective, you would have thought? A bit like someone with a peanut allergy getting a job at a Reese’s manufacturing plant? Well, this is what we get instead of character development, so suck it up and deal with it (advice I found myself yelling at Our Narrator every time he came over all faint at the very thought of dead bodies).Aha, you are thinking. This novel is set in 1929, so our 32 year old character is old enough to have served at least some time in the First World War. This is Lord Peter Wimsey all over again, right? Good old battlefield trauma?
I wish. No, it’s because when Our Narrator was five years old, his mother made him view his grandfather’s dead body when it was laid out. This made me go “So?” because although the authoress and I are both technically within the Generation X cohort, some of us on the older edge were seeing bodies laid out in the deadhouse at such tender ages and we got over any traumas this may have engendered quick-sharp. Granted when you are five this is probably very scary, but it’s way past time Our Narrator put on his big boy pants and manned the hell up.
Our Narrator is so terrible at being a policeman that he left me longing for the consummate professionalism of Inspector Japp, who may not have been on Poirot’s level intellectually but did at least know how to conduct a basic investigation and do his job in an efficient manner. In what is the only bit of self-reflection he engages in, Clotpoll thinks that his bosses at Scotland Yard are probably happy that Poirot has more or less taken over the case. If they ever want to see it solved, they should be happy!
Oh, and said bosses? Where are they, exactly? Nothing about his conduct of the case, reporting back to anyone, having to explain why he fecked off back to his lodgings leaving the crime scene early, or even seeing the inside of his office – if he even has one – back at the Yard. When he’s not trailing round after Poirot, he’s skulking in his lodgings very unlike Achilles in his tent, trying his hand at devising crosswords. He appears to have some ambitions to become a cruciverbalist and this would be much better than his attempts to be a policeman, though his ability there seems to be as poor as his current job skills.
Poirot has to force him to go down to the village from where the three murder victims came and ask around to see if he can find out what is the connection between them and the putative murderer. Inspector Japp would have been down there on the first train he could get, but Our Narrator would rather drop unsubtle hints all over the place that he’s gay (we’ll come back to this later). When he does arrive in the village, he has a stonking great superiority complex about “huh, village life, how boring – Big City for me all the way!” which is not really deserved, as not alone does his cover get blown within five minutes, consequently he cannot get anyone at all to speak to him.
Now, bear with me here. Imagine you are a Scotland Yard detective officially investigating three murders and you’re visiting the place where those three people all lived. Do you:
(a) Go straight to the local police station, introduce yourself, explain why you’re there, and get fully filled-in on all the background to the victims, any scandals or enmities they might have had, and as much information as you can garner?
(b) Wander around unable even to find the inn where you’ve reserved a room until a helpful local directs you, spill the beans to the landlord as soon as you walk in the door but then tell him not to tell anyone else, then act all surprised when the village grapevine disseminates who you are and why you’re there in ten minutes flat? Then moon about the place thinking unkind thoughts about the local clods until you have someone literally sneak up behind you to tell you what happened? Then make another rash promise about not asking anyone about the case, even though you’ve just been told that other person knows all about it and was involved in taking away and destroying evidence in the original scandal?
You’ve guessed it – Our Narrator goes for Option B every time. I could go on (and on, and on) but Clotpoll is so terminally useless at the job, I wonder if he really is a cop or is just telling everyone he’s a cop.
(2) The plot is unnecessarily convoluted and tricksy. The authoress writes her own psychological thrillers, and it’s clear she’s trying to do the same here. You don’t read Christie for the sake of great literature, you do so for the plot, and she liked tricksy plots. But her plots were economic and tightly-plotted, and while you might go “Hang on a minute…” after you’d finished the book, while reading it you obediently swallowed all the red herrings and went down all the by-ways she sent you.
Yes, her characters are cardboard and two-dimensional, and Poirot himself is more of a stereotype. But he admits to exaggerating and playing up the “Mon Dieu, I am – ‘ow you say? – ze poor foreigner” act in order to lead people astray and have them relax their suspicions around him. Her characters, indeed, take on the attributes of archetypes – this is a morality play or allegory, where Mrs Jones the Rich Widow is not a fully-realised rounded person but is given just enough depth to stand up, while she is really the archetype of Pride or Vanity or other fault that results in her being murdered.
The authoress falls down on this – she goes for cardboard characters, but her plot is so knotted on itself, and has obvious holes which are commented on by some of the characters but glossed over or explained away, that I gave up trying to keep track of who was supposed to be doing what where when (but actually they were someone/somewhere else). It was too much to keep straight and didn’t hang together all that well anyway. So I just skimmed over “And then this and then this and then this” part of the explication and waited for Poirot’s Grand Reveal.
(3) Said Grand Reveal was handled very badly. The traditional Big Gathering at the end where everyone is called together and the plot is all resolved like the ticking of a Swiss watch happens, except we get muddle, interruption and the disruption so that the actual Grand Reveal happens afterwards in a tête-à-tête between Poirot, the murderer, and Clotpoll after the murderer has been arrested.
(4) SJW, wokeness, progressiveness or representation – whatever you want to call it. Perhaps it wasn’t in full flower in 2014, but it’s here in this novel. Our Narrator drops some thumping great hints that he’s gay. These don’t go anywhere, lead to anything, and have absolutely nothing to do with the plot, so why do it? It doesn’t even lead to a more overt statement at the end by Clotpoll that he understands/has sympathy with the murderer for what they did. If it’s supposed to be the authoress setting the ground for a later Startling Revelation in later novels of this series that hey, here’s the Big Secret our narrator was hiding all along – well, everyone has guessed it by now so the shock effect will not come off.
There’s a character who is the standard sort of Social Rebel (she thinks adultery is okay if you’re really in love! she questions the Bible and has her own understanding of God!) and this is yet another fumbled connection: you’re expecting Our Narrator to come to some sort of understanding with her (given her stated sympathies to unconventional and rule-breaking love), some kind of knowing unstated acknowledgement that his is the Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name – but no dice. This just hangs there like a limp flag without a breath of breeze to stir it.
There is, however, some unintentionally amusing hypocrisy and snobbery going on. Clotpoll is amusingly ignorant of village life (or, I would say, his creatrix is); it’s amusing because despite all his paeans to Big City Living, when he’s in London what he mostly does is sit in the darkened parlour of his lodgings trying to get a workable crossword puzzle going that he can have published. Oh, the pulse-pounding excitement, indeed no villager could handle this pinnacle of high life! And Social Rebel may be all about breaking the taboos and conventions of marriage, religion and so forth, but she’s dreadfully snobbish about the lower classes attempting to ape their betters and adopt airs above their station. If the authoress intended this as subtle commentary on the character, I’d be delighted, but I think it was all unconscious and unintentional. We’re supposed to admire/have our jimmies rustled by Social Rebel and not realise that she’s every bit as crushingly conventional and closed-minded when it comes to “domestics in service”.
(5) What I may be reading too much into: I think the authoress may be working out some childhood traumas/grinding some axes of her own with Clotpoll and a couple other characters. Is Clotpoll’s “I saw dead grandpa when I was five and never got over it” her own trauma? Is a minor character, who talks about her father in this manner, perhaps an authorial self-insert?:
I say “a possible authorial self-insert” because it turns out that the authoress is a daughter of a famous (now deceased) Marxist/leftist academic? Well, perhaps this is going too far: psychoanalysing authors by means of their characters is a dicey business at best.
In conclusion: am I going to read the next volume in this series? Despite all the above, and despite it being set in Ireland (already I am wincing in anticipation of the usual English cluelessness about us next door on top of the authoress’ imagined version of 30s Ireland and the Ascendancy), and despite the wet-blanket presence of Clotpoll as the major figure, I fully intend to do so. It may be spite-reading, but as I said – even watered-down Poirot is better than nothing.
Interesting review, thank you. I read Poirot novels, so it’s relevant for me to at least hear about this sequel.
Just finished the second one and it was okay. Clotpoll is marginally less of a thicko in this one, though the “what the hell are his bosses thinking, how are they letting him just wander off to spend a week visiting some aristocrat’s estate?” doesn’t get much in the way of explanation other than “I told them I was going and they were cool with it (mainly because Poirot was going to be there as well)”. Then again, having him out of the country immediately raises the likelihood of successful murder-solving by the coppers, so they may be glad to take the chance to get shot of him. Clotpoll complains about everyone giving the credit to Poirot for solving the murders in the first novel but blaming him for being ineffectual – which is all true, Clotty! – but then he was praised for trying, and failing, to solve a murder on his own. The lesson Clotpoll takes from this is not “fame is fickle” but “I’d rather fail on my own than be successful with Poirot”. Sigh. It’s a wonder the entire population of London haven’t been murdered in their beds with that attitude, Clotty!
The scene of the capers is allegedly in Ireland, in Clonakilty Co. Cork to be exact, but this is not so – it’s obviously set in Gloucestershire or somewhere. All the characters are English, not even Anglo-Irish (except for an American so enamoured with Englishness he has shed his native accent and is trying to be more English than the English). Oh, there are some mentions of the Guards and such as local colour, but there is no interaction with the natives (apart from Clotpoll doing some looking down his nose at the native police, which given that he is thick as two short planks when it comes to policing himself is the pot calling the kettle black). There’s some tiny political commentary which had me bristling: yes, whyever would the native Irish think that, given all these people are English, are preoccupied with England, have spent all their time in England etc., that maybe Ireland should cut free and rule its own destiny? But that’s only very minor, hardly even worth evoking a quick bar of A Nation Once Again.
There’s two years between this one and the first novel, which – given some in-universe comments by Clotpoll – make me think some of the reviews may have picked up on what I said in my own re: the thicko copper. Also, I think the authoress may have been stung by criticism of over-convoluted plot, as she puts these words into the mouth of her novelist character (writer of children’s books in this case):
Sure you do, honey-bun. It’d be more convincing if your policeman wasn’t Clotpoll, who – when asked by Poirot what he’d been doing on his end while Poirot was off chasing a lead in England – replied that he’d had a lovely long lie-in and then a bite to eat. This while actually staying in the house where the murder had been committed amongst all the suspects and having been invited by the lady of the estate in order to prevent any murdering happening. Yeah, no dimwits here!
The Big Reveal is handled much better in this second story, and there is less implausibility in the plot though it still relies on split-second timing and misdirection to have happened the way it’s described to have happened. So, somewhat less of a slog to get through, Poirot does what he does best, but Clotpoll is still a whiny little crybaby (though thankfully this time round he’s stopped coming over all of a-flutter at the very prospect of dead bodies).
Could be. You might find this article from the New Yorker interesting. It tells the story of another author, one who happens to be an acquaintance of Hannah, whose rather unusual and, ahem, colorful life may have given Sophie Hannah inspiration for one of the characters she included in the extended-Poirot book #2 you just finished.
Interesting article. I was thinking more along the lines that the character had definite resemblance to the talented Mr. Ripley; that there was a real-life person of this type doesn’t altogether surprise me.
What mostly annoys me about the books is that the sole reason for their existence (apart from milking the Christie fans to buy new Poirot novels) is the plot; the authoress clearly plumes herself on creating clever psychological plots. She is able to do that, but she has no ability (that I can perceive) for creating characters, or for description (and perhaps she knows this, because she doesn’t try any describing: for instance, about the country house the characters are all confined in for the second book, all we get is that ‘it’s big and everyone was given a room’. The one piece of description about a room is that it had red and gold curtains). Whatever Christie’s faults in these areas, at least she was able to give some impression to the reader that “Ah yes, this is set in a tropical island resort/an English country house/the Near East” as to place. Our authoress manages to make London boring, and to not engage one bit with “this is Ireland not England”. She also has an annoying habit of ‘telling, not showing’ and of dropping little hints that are never connected up – the opposite of Chekov’s Gun, where she puts a bit in that looks like it should be a clue, or at least be important later, but it never goes anywhere.
The only saving grace is Poirot, who at least has to be something like Christie’s Poirot, and precisely because he’s not one of the authoress’ original characters he makes the thing come alive on the page when he’s introduced.
When I’ve read up to ‘wokeness’ I was afraid it will be another ‘rivers of london’-level bullshit but what you describe seems to be a rather mild case. Thank non-specific supernatural representation of choice, I want to read another Poirot novel, even if it’s a faux-Poirot.
I wonder if anyone will undertake another Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel… should be easier to write than another Christie one would imagine.
Take a look at David Duncan’s “Alchemist” novels. The names of the characters are different and the setting is Renaissance Florence, but the identity of an unacknowledged coauthor is obvious.
Thank you, I will.
What’s up with the Rivers of London series? I’ve had it at the back of my To Read list for years but never gotten around to it.
Rivers of London is entertaining fluff. I think I’ve read them all.
(I only read the two first novels because I could not really stomach more)
It’s soaked in woke in the way that nothing else that I’ve read is. I thankfully have already started to forgive the details, but some examples from the first book.
Protagonists’s relationship with his white male mentor consists of said mentor politely and attentively listening to protagonist dispencing author tract SJW wisdom and not much else.
The titular ‘rivers of london’ in the first book are the humanoid personifications of the actual rivers in london. They are non-white immigrants. This fact is treated as obvious and logical because immigrants ‘belong more’ in London than people who were born there.
In general, there is alot of author’s SJW tract dispensed in dialogues or internal monologue of the protagonist and it is way too annoying to read.
long spit-take into the Thames
Unrelated: is there a Rex Stout beer? I imagine it would have a T. rex on the label.
I wonder if anyone will undertake another Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel
Funny you should say that! In the 90s, I was so hungry for new Wolfe stories that I read a fair selection of the Robert Goldsborough continuations, up to about book six or seven (I stopped after that because they weren’t really Archie and Nero, at least not to me).
I also tried the Jill Paton Walsh continuation of the Wimsey stories, but found them very much to my distaste and gave up on the second one.
Don’t get me started on the Mary Russell stories. This is the only explanation I will entertain about them.
I laughed out loud when the doctor recited her name as “Mary Sue Russell.”
Oh, the continuations are even listed on wikipedia, but rather inconspicuously (only in the footer). I didn’t notice them when trying to Ctrl+f my way through. I might risk the first story just to see what it’s like.
Edit: “subsequent Holmes-Russell marriage” oh my god
I enjoyed the Mary Russell stories.
Glen Cook’s Garrett, P.I., series is a essentially Nero Wolfe set in a fantasy world. Garrett is the Archie Goodwin character, and the Dead Man is the Nero Wolfe.
So the stock market. I have opinions, who else has opinions?
I’m at 50% cash and now I’m kind of wishing I sold more.
I spent the last year short the market with options and in October moved 100% of our 401k into bonds, and I still almost missed this downswing as a chunk of my options expired worthless last friday and I was down 80% of that capital.
I have been making life plans that basically assumed we were 2-4 months away from a recession for the past 3 years. This bear market can’t come quickly enough.
1) I think there’s still a lot more room to fall. I’m sure the US cases are significantly underreported, especially with testing capabilities already being overwhelmed (@actinide meta’s post).
2) The impact on industry is temporary; there aren’t any infrastructure/manpower/trade deals being lost, things are just grinding to a halt due to fear of spreading the virus. Cancelling work at a factory isn’t a permanent answer for coronavirus.
3) Weather patterns may stem the spread and fear of coronavirus. Much fewercases have been spread to the southern hemisphere (in summer right now).
As of right now, I’m not sure what moves to make. Even though I think it’ll keep dropping, buying puts after so many red days just seems foolish. I may wait 1-2 months and then buy calls if it hasn’t recovered by then, in anticipation of people realizing that they’ll have to live with the coronavirus as they would with the flu and that closing industry isn’t a long term solution, as well as the weather alleviating the effects.
My opinion is that this fall is not the cornavirus exactly, its the upswing in the face of bad news that was liquidity driven over the past 6 months (actually 18) when it went it had to go fast. My baseline has been a 40% correction from peak, with 75% being possible.
People have been waiting around for a recession for years now, and we’ve even had a couple decent catalysts that haven’t stuck (the most being a very temporary correction). I agree that the market has been overvalued, but it’s also been quite resilient. At what percentage would you gauge your confidence that this particular dip will lead to a 40%+ drop? I could see the current market fear compounded by weak data from China due to trade war/virus shutdowns/underlying political factors exacerbating things.
I see this as a very complicated question, and just the basic framing is open to broad interpretation. If the market bounces from here back up to ~3,300 and then drops 40% does that count? What bounce/over what time invalidates? Rather than try to go down that forking path I am choosing to answer this way-
In October when I shifted to 100% bonds I thought two different scenarios were likely, we were ready for a stock market dumping a large % or a climb of 10% easy. I think the world we currently live in can only have markets go down or up, and I struggle to see a world where the S&P sticks between 2900 and 3100 over the coming 6 months as people figure stuff out.
However there are still big risks to calling the beginning of a correction of that size. The Fed could come out with an emergency 50 basis point cut and that could (but not would) boost markets back near or above all time highs, but the odds of a major Fed move are highly conditional. They go up if the market dumps further, the drop if the market stabilizes or rebounds. My gut feeling, which is hard to quantify, is that the Fed needs a 20% draw down- or breaking 2700 for the S&P to make a move just for the sake of markets. However they can definitely make a move based on economic data, or economic data + extending these losses a bit, but economic data is trailing and the Fed knows that so there is the chance that they make a preemptive data cut and we are stuck in the Bayesian nightmare of having to many paths and no good way of estimating the probability of any of them.
So to finally answering: I have high confidence (85-90%) that the recent peak in markets is a real peak that won’t be eclipsed by a notable amount for at 3+ years barring an inflationary break. A 40% decline for the S&P would be testing the 2,000 range, I would say its 50/50 that we break 2,200 on the S&P in the next 18 months.
I disagree, resilient is when you get knocked down and then stand back up, the markets have gotten knocked down and then their friend F
red has picked them back up.As a long term investor, I won’t have opinions for about another 25 years.
Well your opinion now should be ‘Man I hope we aren’t Japan.’
This is a good time to be in cash (and I’m at about 40% myself), but a bad time to sell for cash so don’t go refreshing the relevant window every half-hour, with a sinking feeling in your stomach to match the market prices of your equities. What you’re seeing now is one part rational reaction to a possible pandemic, one part hysteric overreaction to a possible pandemic, and one part recognition that we were probably in a bubble anyway and the first two parts prompted people to sell now rather than three months ago or three months from now.
Think everything through carefully. If you’re thorough and clever and diligent, there are probably some very good opportunities right now, but the obvious ones like makers of antiviral drugs have probably already been “taken”. Otherwise, expect that there will probably be at least a partial recovery, and if you do think you need to sell, probably do so in a slow and steady fashion rather than all at once.
Gold getting pummeled today is a strong counter argument to this position, as is the US dollar weakening. This looks like forced deleveraging right now, not virus panic. Yes the virus is the catalyst that starts the deleveraging but if this was even in part a pandemic panic you would expect either or both the dollar and gold to strengthen, not fall.
I am still in. I have no confidence in my ability to catch a falling knife. If we see a rebound on Monday I’m going to call it a bull trap and sell. I don’t think there will be one, though, which means I’m probably riding it out.
This isn’t even about the virus; market has just been stupid for a while. The company I work for has seen a 15% drop in stock price over the last few days.
I may not have managed to position myself that well in the financial market, but I’m playing with chump change, and the one thing I will say in my favor is that I chose a good time to start looking at grad school.
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It’s my opinion that this is yet another market correction based on whatever the fear-du-jour is, and non-professional investors will almost certainly generate greater risk-adjusted returns by holding onto their existing holdings, or making small asset allocation adjustments rather than blowing out their portfolios into cash/vix ETFs/gold/beanie babies.
That said, I’m long Jan 21 SPY OTM calls. So that may color my biases, haha.
A BBC new story that touches on some themes that turn up frequently in the hidden threads here, but arranged somewhat differently:
The boss who put everyone on 70K
Highlighting this comment in particular, for its relevance to themes seen here:
Thanks for that @DinoNerd!
The essay you linked confirmed some suspicions of mine, and now I feel my biases vindicated, hooray!
This is only sustainable because the founder is willing to take a MASSIVE pay cut in order to support his personal ideology. If the only way you can support this lifestyle is to force your senior leadership to take pay levels similar to senior staff, you will basically see your entire leadership team leave to different companies. I can assure you we would LOVE to get a CEO/founder for $70k/year. Jesus, what a find.
Or you can try imposing massive tax increase on everyone making $90k+, but good luck with that one.
Not just that he gave up his stock and mortgaged his homes
The reality is much more likely that it worked because he was in a growth industry during a major economic expansion. Someone starting this 3 months ago is likely to be bankrupt in short order if we are entering a recession.
Well, I continue to believe that most corporate leaders add less value than the headquarters janitorial team, so I’d be happy to see the back of most of them. (At the very least, if they are doing anything useful they hide it from the rank and file employees.) But I realize my opinions are extreme. Also, because the average stock purchaser believes in the value of high paid executives, any public company that tried this would take a huge hit in its stock price, probably leading to a takeover that puts in a more normal executive team. So this is a non-starter in a public company, unless legal changes create a level playing field for all, which would be a political non-starter in the US.
What’s more interesting to me is the effect on e.g. decisions about child bearing. In general, “people should have more children” and “business leaders deserve many many times the income of non-executive employees” are close political bedfellows – the same identities support both. But can we actually have both?
At the very least, we have obvious examples of CEOs causing massive damage to the company, so the corollary is that a good CEO can avoid that.
@DinoNerd says :
Or you could go the 1940’s to 1970’s model of higher top marginal income tax rates, a larger portion of employees in industrial unions, and a much smaller average pay gap between CEO’s and most of their workers, and when was union density and top marginal income taxes at their highest?
The 1950’s.
Which by an amazing coincidence is when birth, church attendance, and marriage rates (the things “social conservatives” esteem) were very high.
Plumber, it’s been pointed out before that the high marginal rates of the 50s were illusory. the pre-86 tax code had higher rates, but more deductions and exemptions, so effective rates were not really any different than today, and taxes were actually less progressive by some measures.
And for what it’s worth, unionization rates declined continuously during the 50s, so the idea that 50s tax policies built them up doesn’t really hold.
@Clutzy,
The high unionization rates and the high marginal tax rates both stem from the same source: The Federal governments decisions on how to wage world war which led to the great compression of the 1940’s, there was a real “raising the floor” and “lowering the ceiling” during those years.
Thanks for tagging me Plumber even though I’m not involved!
You forget the actual cause of the great compression: The war itself. Almost all first world labor could no longer compete with US labor. First they were conscripted and war-mobilized as well, next they were destroyed industrially from the war.
The 1950s “golden age” came apart extremely quickly because it was never stable. We’d have to destroy many billions of people to return to that.
Post war prosperity depending on the destruction of the competition is a very popular theory. However, it is horseshit. The 30 glorious years were a thing far, far beyond the borders of the US of A, and also happened in the places that did get blown to bits.
Further, similar long periods of economic expansion and wide spread prosperity have happened since in many, many countries.
Near as I can tell, what happens is that once you have genuinely tight labor markets, and dont sabotage that state of affairs (Dont ask me about my hatred of central banking as currently practiced) you pretty consistently see a number of things happen that feed into each other positively :
Wages go up, which increases demand, including the demand for labor.
Productivity goes up because not only visionary companies invest in labor efficiency, but all companies do, because they have no damn choice in the matter.
Labor supply goes up, because genuine labor shortage is at least as effective at drawing marginalized groups into the economy as any level of political will. – And this in turn again increases demand, because the newly mobilized labor gets paid.
This all goes into a virtuous cycle of more labor, more productive labor, and more highly paid labor (thus more demand) that can keep going basically until some sufficiently dire external shock smashes it or you hit the limits for just how many people you can actually get off the proverbial couch and into the economy. And no. The US is nowhere near that level.
@plumber
there was a raising of the floor in those periods because the US was becoming the first developed country in history, government policy had little to do with that. And the ceiling wasn’t lowered, much of that compression was artificial. In 1950, if you wanted to pay your executives well, you gave them huge expense accounts, bought them company cars, and had executive cafeterias that could serve as a 5 star restaurants. When counting that largess as business expenses was made illegal, there was a switch to giving them stock options and letting them buy their own stuff. the tax code didn’t change the amount of compensation, it changed the way it was structured.
The 50s being “glorious” is also horseshit. I’m merely talking about the kind of false unity and perceived prosperity. Recall, the modern world was also recovering from 15 years of economic depression caused by a recession compounded with horrible government policies, then war. It was incredibly easy to go up from where they were.
I’ve been trying to catch up on the archives and just got to https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/31/rational-orthography-2/
Boustrophedon is actually really easy to write, because at the end of a line you don’t have to move your hand all the way back to the start, so much so that it became a really hard habit to break. But break it I had to, since even after taking all of my notes that way from 9th to 11th grade, I still couldn’t read it.
(I know that article is really old but I figure boustrophedon writing can stand being talked about more.)
I’m not willing to compromise with the lefties and give up my “not getting ink on my wrist while writing” privilege (not that I write much in pen anymore).
In all seriousness, I have a good friend who is very dyslexic, and one of his major problems was losing track of which line he was on; he solved this with a browser extension that colored the last word of a line and the beginning word of the next line the same color. If reading backwards isn’t more difficult with dyslexia (I’m not dyslexic, I don’t know), this seems like quite an elegant solution to that.
That extension is beeline reader
Gwern tested beeline reader coloring on his site for a while, measuring how long users stayed on each page to see if the coloring helped them to read faster. The results were not encouraging, though.
BeeLine founder here.
Gwern was convinced that our least-popular color scheme would perform best, so he focused mostly on grayscale themes. Greyscale is used by 2% of BeeLine users, and we counseled him against focusing on it. This surely affected his observed outcomes.
He also did not notify the users up-front or tell them how to use the tool. BeeLine is not supposed to operate ‘subliminally’—it is a tool that you can use if you know it is there and know to look for it when switching lines. But gwern declined to notify users or provide instructions—aside from a page that could be found by eagle-eyed users, but was not proactively shown to them.
In the years that have followed, numerous tests run by education nonprofits and other independent organizations (including CNET, as reported in The Atlantic) have found benefits for reading speed, scroll depth, and reading comprehension. We are happy to work with anyone (including SSC, whom we’ve approached in the past!) who wants to include our widget on their site. You can see what it looks like here.
We’re also grateful that gwern was interested so early on and took the time to test it out.
Related to baconbits9’s post about the market sell-off, what’s a good book for “Stock Investment for Dummies?” Or is it Stock Investment for Dummies?
Basically all I’ve ever done is dump money into my 401(k) and not worry about it. But it seems like there might be a good opportunity to buy…something in the next few weeks. Say I’ve got $5,000 and nothing else to do with it. What’s a good beginning guide to doing something with that? When I do not know what I do not know.
I don’t think there are any because basically its a goals question, if you aren’t doing ‘put it in your 401k with a match’ level of investing then your approach should be highly specific to your individual wants.
I would also say that this week is not the week for bargain hunting. This has been a historically crazy week, but it has not yet hit a historically crazy decline. Ball park range you want to start shopping for deals when the market has dropped 30% plus looking historically.
I said “next few weeks.” I’d still have to read and understand whatever books anyone recommends. I figure I’d probably want to invest in video game-related stocks because that’s the industry I know most about and I already pay attention to investors’ calls in the interest of figuring out what games are coming out when.
My goal is to feel cool talking about how I’ve leveraged my call puts to my cash ratio or whatever whenever something markety happens.
I said in response to your post that I didn’t have opinions. I’d like to have an opinion, please.
Would you like your own opinion or will anyone’s do? Cos you’re welcome to mine, tho’ I can guarantee it’s worth precisely eff all…
As I said- you are looking for highly specific information (ie one specific industry). If you are going to do the work you want a book like this and then spend 6 months reading financial reports of video game companies and then picking one or two, but you aren’t going to have bragging rights for 2-5 years in most cases where it does work out.
If you want a generic move to make I have some ideas, but I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISER and any such suggestions should be ignored and any lawsuits brought by you against me will be ignored.
If you ignore a lawsuit, it doesn’t just go away. The plaintiff wins by default judgement.
These might be your people: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/
I read and enjoyed “The little book that beats the market,” although it is basically just marketing material for a specific type of value investing that has its various proponents and detractors (as any and all “investing strategies” do – there’s really no universally agreed upon strategy other than “buy index funds and wait,” which is what you’re already doing)
IIRC GameStop was a “magic formula” favorite stock for quite some time. This strategy favors stocks that basically have low P/Es (meaning they are cheap) and high returns (meaning they are profitable). Pretty much the only reason for a profitable company to also be cheap is that most people expect it is in a dying industry and faces some major headwinds. Tobacco stocks are another common sight on all of these screens.
I would also add that since it’s essentially impossible to beat the market anyway (evidence: even Harvard MBAs who have dedicated their whole life to trying to do so cannot do so consistently), and since you readily admit what you’re primarily looking for is entertainment/status – you could do a lot worse than simply “buy the gaming companies you like and cheer for them to do well.”
It’s like betting on your favorite sports team. Assuming efficient markets, you should do about average, it’s fun, and it requires essentially no work.
Which is why I’ve never bothered learning anything about it, but yeah I think it would be fun to pretend to care about day-to-day stuff in the stock market.
Also, you know GameStop is a horror show right now, right?
So just pick your favorite among EA/Ubisoft/Activision and ride the wave! Go team go!
Sure, but I also want to know what all the fancy stock market words mean.
Your first priority should always be paying down high interest debt, then maxing out your 401k, Roth, and any other tax plans your employer lets you participate in (mine, for example, lets us buy their stock at a considerable discount). If you still have more money, you’re rich enough that you should talk to an actual financial adviser. Your brokerage is probably has them on staff for free. A competent one will ask you about your goals, their timeline, and your tolerance for risk, all of which will dramatically affect what you might want to do.
More generally, it’s not a terrible idea to take advantage of market downs to buy if circumstances allow, but as a rule, time in market > timing the market, so I wouldn’t wait around for that sort of thing. The S&P has taken a huge dive recently, true, but that means it’s wiped out 6 months worth of gains. If you bought in January, you’re still up a fair bit. We’ve seen a decline of about 10%, but so did May of 2008 and December of 2019, and there’s no way to know which of those this fall will end up resembling.
The basic rule of investing remains true, the EMH is basically true so unless you have unusual knowledge, you’re not going to beat the market in the long run. And even if you do have that knowledge, it might not help. You say you know the video game industry, but so what? You could be absolutely correct that Activision/Blizzard is a better buy than EA today, but Corona could end up up dramatically increasing the costs of trans-pacific shipping, which would screw up the semiconductor industry, which would screw up the launch of PS 5 and Xbox X, which would lead to the whole industry under-performing relative to the market, meaning you’d have been better off investing broadly.
Note that being in an industry has two opposite effects on optimal investment strategy. On the one hand, it means you have better information and so might be able to outguess the market. But on the other hand, it means that your income correlates with how well the industry is doing, which is a reason not to buy stocks that correlate with how well the industry is doing.
It sounds as though Conrad’s expertise is as a consumer not an employee, however, so the second point isn’t relevant to his case.
I don’t have any debt besides my home mortgage and I’m putting 12% of my annual income into my 401k. My wife’s Roth is maxed out. I just want to buy a few grand worth of stocks so I can feel like a big boy when talking about market stuff, and I don’t know how to do that, really, because I was always doing the smart thing of just buying index funds.
Why not continue buying index funds? It’s by far the best investment strategy for ordinary people.
But then I don’t get to talk about stock stuff as if it actually mattered to me.
I admit I haven’t crunched the numbers here, although I did a few rough back of the envelope calculations. If we assume the amount of money you can afford to lose from a paycheck is the same whether you go traditional or Roth (say, $100 for simplicity) wouldn’t there be a fairly wide range of financial scenarios where investing $120 pre-tax (resulting in $100 less in your take home) gets you better results than investing $100 after-tax because even though the traditional 401k will be taxed when you withdraw the additional gains from the higher contribution amount outweigh the withdrawal taxes?
I’m seeing occasional news stories reporting that Trump says coronavirus will become less of a problem as the weather gets warmer, generally stories questioning that. The argument against seems to be that it’s true of flu, but we don’t yet know if it is true of the new strain.
The obvious test is to look at the southern hemisphere, where it’s currently summer. I did a little googling, and found:
Which looks like pretty strong evidence that it’s true. It could reflect worse detection in poorer and less developed societies, but not all of South America is poor and quite a lot of cases have been detected in parts of Asia that are.
Which makes me suspect that it is a probably correct claim, and the main reason for questioning it is that Trump made it.
To be fair, those countries probably have closer interaction with China than countries in South America do, so you should expect a lot more cases regardless.
Given this, you can reasonably argue that it’s likely a correct claim, but we don’t know, and it’s better to make the pessimistic assumption when deciding on policy.
Epidemiology and optimal policy aside, your conclusion is probably correct.
I can’t watch the video, but is there something in it that backs up your claim? From what I read on that article, it makes it sound like officials in South America are very worried about the spread of the disease, which sounds like evidence directly contrary to your conclusion.
How about Australia? Have they been affected? That seems like a better bellwether for the US, partially because they have a similar level of healthcare and partially because they also have a lot of Chinese immigrants and visitors.
They’ve had a few, but they seem to have all been quarantined.
I think the scientific/health community is aware that previously known coronavirus/flus typically subside in warmer weather. But we can’t know that for sure with this one, and Trump adds absolutely zero nuance to his statements making it sound like it’s a fact that this one will too. He’ll probably be proven right, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. And I wouldn’t infer that much on it not spreading in the southern hemisphere at this point seeing as the majority of humanity, including those affluent enough for international travel, reside in the northern hemisphere. And the virus is spreading in Thailand which is basically in a perma-summer state compared to where me and most northerners live.
Trump almost never adds nuance to his statements.
But there is a sizable difference between “he might be wrong” and “how did he dream up that idea,” and my impression of the response I initially saw to his statement was more like the latter.
Australia has 23 confirmed cases, which is evidence against my argument. On the other hand, eight of them are passengers from the Diamond Princess.
More generally, one would like to be able to distinguish between people who got infected in Australia (or South America or wherever) and people who got infected elsewhere and then went to those places.
Sure he does. “And some, I assume, are good people.”
I suspect that for some people, probably including me, if Trump is reported as having said something, that’s reason to shift our priors about whatever it was – towards it being less likely to be true, and more likely (if true) to be a vast oversimplification. The magnitude of the effect presumably depends on how much we know about the topic – much stonger the less we know ;-(
Trump is a very poor source for information, but he’s not actually an inverse-weathervane.
If he were, that would be very useful.
This is pretty clearly something Xi Jinping told Trump. Trump believes it because it’s politically convenient and reassuring for him, so I suppose the question is, how much do you trust Xi Jinping to tell the truth?
There are quite a few cases in Singapore, which has no winter.
Do we know if they are people who got infected in Singapore or people who came in infected, possibly from China?
Does anyone here have an informed understanding of what is Turkey trying to achieve in Syria, and why it has soldiers there, recently being attacked by Russian planes?
Flash back to the Syrian refugee crisis of 2016/2017. Europe was desperate for some kind of solution that would stop the flow without forcing them to take any action that would make them look terrible. It was a bad solution, but in stepped Turkey – for the low, low price of consideration to join the EU, Turkey agreed to be the bad guy and would (quietly) stop allowing Syrians to pass through. If you ever wondered why so many Syrians risked sailing the Mediterranean in rafts rather than take the much-easier looking overland route, it’s because Turkey was very good at stopping Syrians.
At the height, there were over 3.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey. For reference, Syria’s population before all this unrest was around 21 million, it’s current population is around 16.5 million and turkey’s population is around 80 million. The addition of 3.5 million Syrian refugees into Turkey was a massive shock to the country and constitutes a significant portion of the Syrian refugee populace. The Turks are sick of hosting the Syrians and want to get rid of them, but don’t have any great options for doing so. If they just deport them, well, what do you think 3.5 million previously-encamped former refugees would do if they were unceremoniously dumped at the border? The Turks also can’t just let them all flow into Europe without risking severe backlash from the rest of the continent.
The solution it looks like Turkey has arrived at is they are trying to carve out a Turkish-dominated slice of Syria along the norther border where they can dump the refugees and still exert enough control over them to prevent the former/current refugees from agitating. The fact that this would also let the Turks fortify their southern border against the kurds AND give them control over Kurdish areas of influence… well, that’s just gravy.
The problem is, this starts to impinge on the existing Syrian regime (backed by Russia). Assad doesn’t really care about what happens to those refugees, but he likely doesn’t want an influx of another 3.5 million desperate people and he certainly doesn’t want to lose control over most of the northern part of his country. Thus he, and more relevant to the current topic of discussion, his Russian allies, are fighting the Turks.
I don’t know enough about the current situation in Syria to answer with confidence what their war aims (or “police action aims”, I suppose) may be, but from what I gather Turkey has a few major strategic interests in Syria:
1. Syria borders with Turkey. This gives Turkey a number of reasons to care about what post-war Syria looks like. I expect they’d greatly prefer a Turkish client state, or at least a Turkish-friendly regime that isn’t anyone’s client state, to a Russian client state or to Al Qaeda/ISIS.
1b. The border also means that Turkey’s dealing with a lot of refugees displaced by the Syrian civil war; in particular, Turkey has announced a plan to resettle a large number of Syrian refugees (currently in Turkey) to a Turkish-occupied area in Syria.
2. Turkey has a domestic problem with Kurdish nationalism, and one of the factions in the civil war (the Syrian Democratic Forces) has Kurdish groups as major parts of their coalition. Turkey is probably afraid of a situation where Syrian Kurds win autonomy or independence in the peace deal and then give material assistance to Turkish Kurds seeking similar goals. This is particularly awkward because the SDF is the faction the US and other involved NATO countries (except for Turkey) is primarily backing.
How likely are the Kurdish bits of the SDF to be happy keeping the ‘S’ part as the war starts to wind down? Inquiring minds in Ankara clearly think they’ve got the answer, but I wonder whether anybody else has really thought about this. Certainly we, at least, didn’t in Iraq.
That’s one of the things I don’t know enough about to say with confidence. I’ve expressed confusion about SDF’s intended endgame, since they don’t seem like they have a path to outright victory for the whole country, so presumably they’re looking for either independence or a negotiated settlement that leaves them with some kind of autonomy in exchange for bending the knee.
My view (that might be influenced by both Turkish and Kurdish nationalists) is that the likelyhood is basically 0. There are strong movement in the different parts of Kurdistan that want an united Kurdish state, carved out of all the region that at the moment have Kurdish majority.
Also Kurdish authorities in Turkey, Syria and the Iraq have helped militants from the other states in the past, mostly by providing save refuge areas.
That is helpful, thanks. This is the first time I am reading about Turkish refugee resettlement plan. I guess this sort of explains yesterday’s announcement that Turkey will no longer stop refugees from crossing to the EU, since it might be a way to pressure EU to pressure Russia to pressure Assad to stop messing with his resettlement plan.
But prima facie this scheme sounds wild. Turkey would have to essentially conquer part of Syria, defend it against the armies of Assad, Iran and Russian air force, while ensuring that its inhabitants aren´t going to flee to Turkish territory. Erdogan on the other hand seems like a smart guy. Do we think it he is being realistic?
EDIT: I removed a reference to Erdogan in a first pargraph, since apparently announcement did not came from him personally.
When this plan was being drafted, it was likely the Turks weren’t considering the possibility of facing a Syria with strong centralized control. In the world this plan was designed to exist in, Syria is a fractured mess and Assad is too busy dealing with rebels on his doorstep to care if Turkey extends its influence a couple dozen miles into Northern Syria. Well, maybe the Kurds do, but that doesn’t bother Erdogan one whit. Sure, maybe Assad (or whomever replaces him) eventually gets the rest of Syria under enough control to turn against Turkey, but by that point they should already control the territory and Erdogan will be able to play it off for diplomatic advantage.
Basically, Turkey counted on no one caring if they marched into a warzone: that’s why so much of their public-facing propaganda has been about “the need to establish a secure zone.” He wanted the ability to play it off as a security action AND get the benefit of conquering territory.
But, that didn’t happen. The US stayed in Northern Syria and Erdogan was never willing to go against uncle Sam, despite the fact that he’s clearly been desperate for us to pull out since at least 2016. Now, even though America seems like it’s mostly out of the picture, it’s become clear that he might have waited too long – Assad’s mostly got the rebels under control and the independent factions are either demobilizing or suing for peace.
If I was a betting man, i’d say it’s likely someone in Ankara finally realized that it’s time to shit or get off the pot – if they don’t move now it’s never going to happen. Likely the prospect of invasion just had too much momentum behind it to make cancelling plans a politically feasible possibility, so we’re left with the current situation.
That being said, I don’t think Erdogan has the stones for this conflict, especially if Russia keeps up the pressure. . I think we’ll see some action over the next week or two then an eventual ceasefire whereby Assad agrees to take in and control the refugees in Syria.
More or less, yes.
But the Turkish army has 260,000 men (not counting reserves) and 2,400 main battle tanks. The Russian, Iranian, and Syrian armies combined have about 800,000 men (ditto) and 6,000 main battle tanks. Since it generally takes 3:1 numerical superiority to defeat an enemy in a reasonable defensive position, this is something the Turks can plausibly do.
Not if the Russians and Iranians mobilize their full reserves, of course, but those two have to maintain plausible deniability about fighting an actual war in Syria in the first place; they can’t even deploy their full first-line forces to the task, never mind a mass mobilization. If they do try for a straight fight, Turkey has interior lines of communication and a much shorter logistics tail.
Also, they have a secure haven only twenty or thirty miles from the front lines, where the Russians et al can’t touch them without Turkey being able to invoke Article 5. That’s a huge advantage for Turkey.
If you’re thinking of Turkey as some third-rate peripheral power, that’s wrong. If Turkey is a European nation, it’s got the most powerful land army in Europe – thanks to fifty years on the front lines of NATO and knowing the rest of NATO would have ignored them in a heartbeat to save Germany and the rest of Real Europe(tm), and unlike Germany et al not drawn down at the end of the Cold War. For that matter, if Turkey doesn’t count as a European nation, the most powerful land army in Europe is probably the Greeks, because they live next door to Turkey.
If we start seeing Russian diplomats doing a full-court press in Athens, start worrying. Otherwise my money is on the Turks in this one.
I am quite aware of Turkish military might, but how plausible it is that any such successful operation would be cost effective (in a broad sense), compared to an alternative solution of keeping refugees in Turkey for now?
What’s the cost-effectiveness for Russia and Iran in launching a full-court press to evict the Turkish army from a strip of the Syrian border?
Not doing anything a rival nation would disapprove of unless it would be cost-effective to resist their hypothetically waging total war over the issue, is not a winning geopolitical strategy and I’m pretty sure it’s not Turkey’s strategy. And Russia almost certainly isn’t going to launch a major land offensive against Turkish forces in Syria.
@John Schilling
I just think that significantly milder forms of resistence to Turkish occupation of a part of Syria than full on war with Russia and Iran will make that occupation very, very expensive. See also US in Iraq.
So, the goalposts have shifted from “Defend it against the armies of Assad, Iran, and Russia”, to “significantly milder forms of resistance”. Got it.
John Schilling
But I didn´t mean whole armies of Iran and Russia. It seems that those two countries might cause a lot of trouble for Turkish forces in Syria with a fraction of their military resources. Various poorly armed militias caused a lot of trouble for American and associated forces in Iraq.
The things that Russia and Iran are likely to do to minimize the potential blowback from this, are going to mean that no part of their regular military is involved.
the Turkish Army just has to deal with the Syrian army, which after nine years of war is in shambles, plus assorted mercenaries and “volunteers”.
I’m curious now. What MBTs do the Turkish army use? M60s? T72s? Leopards?
According to Wikipedia, the Turkish tank forces’ equipment is very mixed, rather old, and only partially upgraded. The most common tank platform is the M60, of which they have 1532.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Turkish_Land_Forces#Vehicles
Burying the lede much? They’re building a shiny new one of their very own which should enter service in the next couple of years.
When the Holocaust started in occupied Greece in March 1943, the Archbishop of Athens wrote a letter protesting the deportation of Jewish citizens with 19 high-status cosigners. After ineffectually sending it to Prime Minister Konstantinos Logothetopoulos of the Hellenic State and Günther Altenburg of the Auswärtiges Amt, he had it published in newspapers. For this, SS commander Jürgen Stroop threatened to execute him by firing squad. To this:
“According to the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church, our prelates are hanged [by tyrants], not shot. Please respect our traditions!”
That’s good. Feels like something Hitchens would have said if he were arrested in a Muslim country.
“I say again! Complain to Konstantinos Logothetopoulos, not me!” Tom said, beating us over the head about it.
I would just like to say that having a head of state who is actually just a functionary of the real authority, and naming that person “Konstantinos Logothetopoulos,” is an extraordinarily successful case of nominative determinism.
Extremely baller statements made while challenging people to martyr you are an underappreciated category of quotations, and I thank you for bringing this one to my attention.
I would be interested in book recommendations that fall into either of the following categories:
a) Sci-fi murder mysteries/crime novels
b) Murder mysteries/crime novels where the protagonist realizes partway through the book that they’re living in an urban fantasy, and where this is not obvious from the start of the book.
For (a), Larry Niven’s Gil the Arm or Asimov’s Caves of Steel would be examples of what I’m looking for. For (b), Dan Wells’ I am not a Serial Killer would be an example.
I love the noir. The more noir-like the better.
I recommend Vernor Vinge to friends who like sci-fi all the time. He’s one of the very best, and as a computer scientist with an interest in AI, even the books he wrote in the 90s still feel interesting on intelligence-related subjects like how multiple AIs (with different values or, maybe more easily stated, of different alignments vs. lawful-order and good-evil) might or might not succeed in forming alliances and working together with each other or humans.
His sci-fi book “The Peace War” and the follow-up “Marooned in Real Time” is not his very best series, IMHO, but it is quite excellent and better than 95% of the other best-selling sci-fi out there. The first book builds a world and plays out a multi-polar murder/political intrigue/war story with one character discovering himself in a fantastically better-than-expected situation. Great rising action, neat concept, good characters, all around excellent novel. The second is a noir-detective story set in the aftermath of the first. There are feints-within-feints, multiple credible and distinct villains, and no perfect goodguys and serious mistrust problems even among the ‘good’ guys, maroonings, shoot-outs, rugged contests for survival. Highly recommended.
(IMHO, the price for Vinge’s best work goes to his “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” books. If I didn’t know your specific interest in noir, those would be even more highly recommended.)
Eta corrections for readability.
Among Vinge’s works, I admit to a prejudice in favor of “The Ungoverned.”
I stopped on two of the novels when they got too dark for me, but then I’m a wimp.
They aren’t really murder mysteries though. If we’re cheating and throwing out “excellent scifi series”: Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler
+
Makes me immediately want to recommend the Altered Carbon series. Have you read it?
Nope, though my roommate has been watching the Netflix series, which seems interesting.
Neal Stephenson’s first novel, Zodiac, fits your bill.
Oh I have a great answer to this one. Kiln People by David Brin! Set in a world which has been transformed by the technology to cast “kiln people”, or temporary clones of yourself, including your mental state at the time, that decay roughly 24 hours after creation.
It follows a noir-style detective investigating the disappearance of the inventor of this transformative technology.
Excellent worldbuilding, both in the effect of that technology and others (like those that reduce privacy, especially relevant to the private eye.) Very well written too.
I have read this book, and I enjoyed it.
For a) and noir, have you read Alastair Reynold’s Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies? The Prefect is good, Elysium Fire was…almost good.
I have read these! I enjoyed them.
Not a book, but the TV show Continuum is about how a cop from a Corporate Dystopia future time travels back to the present by accident (caught in the time travel blast area triggered by a group of anti-corporate terrorists). In order to stop the terrorists from changing the timeline, she integrates with the local police. The early seasons have more procedural episodes where the cop gets to apply Future CSI tech to help solve crimes. (Later seasons get more serialized about the whole time travel terrorists stuff.) I quite enjoyed it.
For novels, there’s Rule 34, by Charles Stross.
Retrieval Artist series by Rusch.
So which people would win in an awesome name contest? The Irish with Finn McCool or the Ashkenazim with Laser Wolf?
smh this is Archaic Kanji Wordplay Names erasure
Wolf Blitzer. Obviously.
It’s no longer accurate, but “Houston Texans quarterback Colt McCoy” was a masterpiece. Every word plays a role in its majesty.
Fun story: I was taking my wife to fiddler on the roof, which is on tour right now (and fully mediocre). I commissioned an art piece from a friend’s son for $40 bucks to put on a T-shirt for her; he didn’t get it done quite in time, so now I have two pictures of a literal wolf lighting a menorah with beams from his eyes for no reason at all. They are among my most prized possessions.
Very good, sir.
Least cool name: Norbert Wiener.
Most improved:
Zach Weinersmith (nee Weiner, m. Kelly Smith)
Green Arrow’s Oliver Queen has got to come close.
How about Dick Warlock?
Staff Sergeant Max Fightmaster.
Lieutenant General Sir Manley Power, and his great-grandson Admiral Sir Manley Power.
Most of the people on this list: https://www.cracked.com/article_14982_the-9-manliest-names-in-world.html
Almost forgot! Emperor Maximinus Thrax.
His reign was followed by the Year of Six Emperors, one of whom had the least fortunate name I’ve ever heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KJpD8j0YbA
Pupienus Maximus. Who had a co-emperor named Ball-binus. Come on.
OK, but which one is played by Graham Chapman in the movie?
I’m looking for a link I’ve lost. I thought it was at Pseudoerasmus that there was an article ascribing the “East Asian Miracle” primarily to a sufficiently strong, economically moral central government that controlled the economy, especially the financial and industrial powers, with the result that the financial powers competed to offer decent banking services and couldn’t develop tricksy complicated instruments or otherwise work as an extractive drain on other sectors, and industrialists were steadily and effectively pressured to achieve products at globally competitive price/quality standards.
The contrasted non-miracle countries/times were countries where the financial and industrial powers-that-be controlled the government, rather than the other way around. These powers-that-be built casinos, operated lotteries, achieved regulatory captures that allowed for local financial monopolies and predatory lending/banking practices with no exit for unsophisticated locals, and were themselves subject to internal corruption as their executives steadily ran away with the banks’ assets. These economies mostly invested in luxury condos, cash crop monoculture, and protected local monopolies, not long slogs to manufacturing globally competitive products.
The implication for the U.S., and the possibility of positing an electorate that instinctively prefers a federal government with this kind of economically moralist instinct, and of outsider ‘America/Americans-first’ populist politicians enjoying immediate and deeply loyal support compared to insider ‘institutionalist’ candidates (which maybe began with Clinton beating H.W. Bush, but probably really began in minor tones with Obama beating Hillary, and really hit its stride when Trump and Bernie picked up surprising steam in ’16.)
I’m not sure how this idea should influence political views, and I’m not trying to start a political debate. (Obviously it depends on whether a person thinks Trump or Bernie are personally going to create effective anti-corruption effects in government, or the opposite, or who the better alternative is.) I’m just looking for the original article I’d seen about east asian miracles, or, failing that, a similar article looking outside the U.S. but making the same point that central government has a moral role in economic regulation.
If the “East Asian Economic Miracle” is supposed to include China, then that’s definitely a bad description of Chinese banking. The PRC banking system overwhelmingly favors state-owned enterprises, and private companies in partnerships with state-owned enterprises (“red hats”), over small private businesses. It’s almost impossible for fully private businesses without state/Party involvement to get access to funding in China. Mostly, independent companies in China are supported by loans from the owners, their families, and the Chinese “shadow banking” industry. I can’t see calling that “economically moral”.
Hm. My use of ‘moral’ is confusing this.
I meant ‘moral’ to mean relatively-corruption-free ‘subordination of private interest to long-term state interest.’ E.g., this probably includes some amount of ‘protect against worst-of-worst working conditions’ because that’s bad for business, but absolutely does not imply allowing union organizing. It wouldn’t necessarily rule out a centralized role in determining where loans go and basically disallowing non-approved businesses (like casinos or luxury condos) access to capital on level terms with, e.g., the state’s chosen industry/industries to nourish/pressure toward competitiveness.
If I recall correctly, China was not one of the cited examples of the East Asian Miracle. South Korea and Japan are the ones I feel pretty confident were examples.
Is your definition of ‘moral’ banking systems more focused on ‘corruption-free banking’, or ‘couldn’t develop tricksy complicated instruments or otherwise work as an extractive drain on other sectors’, per your OP? Or does it require both? Because these are fully distinct concepts: the former requires responsible use of shareholder (and depositor) funds to achieve optimal returns, while the latter requires a conscious decision to not achieve optimal returns in order to create benefits for the “real” economy. Creating complicated financial instruments isn’t necessarily corrupt; Michael Burry didn’t do anything unethical and responsibly managed his firm for the benefit of his clients, but he didn’t really create any value beyond making money.
what the miracle countries did was allow and encourage foreign direct investment. This ran contrary to the development orthodoxy of the time, which was about local control and import substitution. Large domestic companies only managed to build up to be world beaters after decades had passed and much development had already happened, they did not lead to development. It was the foreign companies that did that, with the local companies learning from them and hiring people away from them.
The explanation I’ve heard is that the East Asian countries imposed “financial repression,” basically limiting the return on passive capital and then directing the gains of this into their big exporting companies and not to ordinary lending. This is not relevant today since interest rates are already very low. They also repressed consumption, not allowing their wealthier classes to import foreign luxuries which led to more saving, more investing, and higher growth.
There’s an understandable sense that finance is receiving too much of the nations wealth. Yet people know it won’t work to dismantle the whole system. So they favor in principle regulations which will seem to limit them, particularly where they can’t understand what the instruments being traded are. Needless to say, this is unlikely to accomplish what they set out to accomplish.
Note that the most impressively successful of all the East Asian polities (not strictly speaking a country) was Hong Kong, which I do not think had any of what you describe.
How common is it for the husband’s mother to help the daughter in law in childrearing vs the mother helping the daughter?
I may be living in a bubble, or Basque culture may be different from others, but I observe much more help from mothers to daughters than mothers to sons in childrearing. They do it, but much less. Now, I think there may be two reasons:
1. The mother in law is a stranger to her daughter in law. Childrearing is a conflict-prone activity with different standards and desires. The kinship and familiarity of the mother-daughter relationship helps in reducing conflict. Besides, the mother is likely going to mother in similar ways to her mother.
2. Men in general are less involved in childrearing, their mothers don’t see them struggle that much, see the daughter in law as a stranger, and thus help less. Daughters in law may also be unhappy with their mothers in law being involved in what they view as private family affairs.
Grandfathers changing nappies is something much rarer than grandmothers, on either side, helping.
When it comes to traditional cultures where wifes moved with their husbands and his parents, I hear a lot more stories about abuse by the mother in law than about help, but it may be how it’s reported. However, the conflicts between mother and daughter in law probably wouldn’t lead to much help in childrearing.
As to my own childhood, my father’s parents were a huge part of our lives and looked after us all the time, while our mother’s mother we saw fairly infrequently (her father died when I was very young). My mother wasn’t very close to her mother, and got on very well with my father’s mother; my father’s parents also lived closer to us (though neither was at a truly unmanageable distance). Also… my father’s parents were just objectively amazing people. My mother’s… weren’t. You’d be crazy not to prefer their help.
Among parents of my generation I know (a comparatively small sample, surprisingly so given my age) I think I actually know more cases where the father’s mother is more involved, but I think proximity is the biggest determining factor, and the apparent effect really is just a sample size issue – unless the mechanism is that men are more likely to live near their parents.
This is all middle or upper-middle class English people, mostly in the South, incidentally.
Proximity is obviously the biggest factor in grandparent involvement, yes.
It’s just that the Basque country is a place where most people haven’t moved far and everybody is reasonably close to their parents. So I observe that mother’s mothers are more involved than father’s mothers, even when both are equally close. In general. With exceptions.
My mother’s mother lived with us during my childhood and did a lot of the work of raising my sister and me. Not typical, but that’s how it worked out in my family.
That happens a lot with single mothers. It probably also happens with married ones, but less.
Simple answer: paternity uncertainty. There’s quite a bit of evidence that maternal grandparents invest more than paternal grandparents, and in particular the maternal grandmother invests much more than the paternal grandfather (0 vs 2 levels of paternity uncertainty). I think I got this from Gad Saad’s talk at Google .
This makes sense, but my understanding is that there’s good evidence for pretty solid paternity in Western European societies, over the last several generations–something like <1% false paternity. (I think this came from looking at Y chromosomes of people with the same last names in England, but I'd have to go back and dig around to find it.)
I think the standard theory is that the difference in investment is not caused by conscious or direct concern about paternity, but rather that it is an unconscious adaptation to rates of false paternity in the ancestral environment we were adapted to.
Yeah, I’m just wondering if the apparently low rate of false paternity over the last several centuries in many societies would have selected for a more balanced investment from grandparents.
@albatross11
I remember reading about that, but they said the highest correlation was 80 to 90 percent. I never was able to ascertain how they got <1% from that.
My mother’s mother babysat me and my siblings while my parents were at work and we frequently spent the night at her house growing up. My father’s mother was basically bed-ridden from the time I was born until her death when I was 3 or 4. Mine is probably an extreme case, but I believe husbands generally tend to be older than their wives, so that might contribute some to this effect.
Some mother in laws are worried about not getting along with their son’s wife, so they take care to be extra nice and helpful.
My grandmother is one of those
None of my grandparents lived close enough to help my parents. I think this is pretty common in the U.S.
Yes. We lived in Chicago. My mother’s parents were in Portland, Oregon. My father’s mother and sisters —his father died long before I was born — were in New Jersey.
We visited both families, but not very often.
When I was a kid, I lived in Atlanta, while my mother’s parents lived in Michigan and my father’s in southern Florida. We would do roadtrips every year for Christmas, alternating south and north.
Nowadays, my family is even more spread out. It’s a good thing we have video chat now.
My maternal grandmother is the one who came out for a week when I was born and took care of things for Mom. At the time, we lived closer to her. We moved closer to my paternal grandmother when I was five; neither set of grandparents did a lot of helping with us that I remember (even my paternal grandparents were an hour away), but my paternal grandmother was certainly more of an influence on me than my maternal, spent more time with me, did more things with me. I think that was primarily distance effects, but I’m also much closer in personality to her, so that could also be related.
For what it’s worth, Mom got on very well with her, and the household I grew up in is much more similar to hers than to my maternal grandmother’s.
I don’t have enough data from watching other people to offer anything but my own experience.
I’m going to be leaving in a few days for a two week speaking trip in Europe. It occurred to me that there might, by chance, be some sort of SSC activity somewhere I was going to be at some time when I wasn’t committed to doing something else, or someone I have interacted with here who would enjoy getting together for lunch or something. My schedule is on my blog, so if anyone happens to be doing something in Oxford, London, Madrid, Santiago de Compostella, Lisbon, Ljubljana, or Prague on the relevant days, let me know.
Cool, I am going to try to check your presentation out in Prague, unless there is some sort of a lockdown. Be aware that it might happen, people here are starting to be nervous for obvious virus related reasons.
The main thing I’m worried about is the possibility of airports closing, leaving me stranded somewhere, at least for a while. I’m flying home on the sixteenth, and my guess is that things won’t get that bad that soon.
@DavidFriedman
Today Czech government announced suspension of flights from Milan, Bergamo,
Bologna, Venice and Treviso (and Korea) to Czechia. Two universities suspended education after it was found out that members of their staff returning from Italy are infected. Even some, so far minor, anticontagion measures in Prague public transit are being implemented. Since it is imho obvious that number of cases in Czechia and in other European countries will grow (many people all across Europe returning from northern Italy are tested as positive), expect that by 15th, there could be for foreign visitors quite unpleasant lockdown all across Europe. I am sorry for bad news.
Thanks for the information. I hope you are mistaken.
I just found that my comment notifications for ssc are much weirder than I expected– I get the occasional notifications at my panix address (the one I usually check) and more of them at gmail (which I’ve started checking more often).
One of the panix notifications didn’t show up at google, and for all I know, none of the notifications overlap. Is there any way to reach bakkot about this?
This could be extremely important. A judge has made a decision that forensics should be evaluated by the standards of science rather than (as it has been in the US) by precedent. Precedent is very dangerous in this matter because it has meant that bad forensics has continued to be used because it has been used.
Junk forensics matters because people are jailed for long periods or executed based on bad evidence.
That’s the important stuff from the article. The rest is more of an introspective ramble about belief, though there’s also a little overview of bad forensics.
Now we get to the saddest happy dance you have ever seen. When I was a kid, I liked books about the FBI, and the only books available were in favor of the FBI. They seemed interesting and kind of reassuring. We’re not talking about a huge part of my life.
One of the things mentioned was using the scratches on bullets to tells whether the bullets were shot from the same gun. I trusted that it was true and didn’t think about it.
Even when I read about fingerprint identification not being all that– first mentioned in L. Neil Smith’s _The Probability Broach_ where it was questioned whether it was known that every person has unique fingerprints, and amplified by a Lingua Franca article which pointed out that fingerprint identification was generally of partial and/or smudged prints. And then it turned out that bite mark identification was crap and so was matching hair. A number of fires were considered to be arson until they burned a house and realized that a number of things they thought indicated arson were part of normal fires.
You can’t even trust DNA because labs aren’t reliable. But ballistic forensics was there, lurking in the back of my mind. Sometimes I think my life consists of people shoveling crap into my mind and me trying to shovel it out.
> Sometimes I think my life consists of people shoveling crap into my mind and me trying to shovel it out.
Recently I’ve been reading Wikipedia’s List of Common Misconceptions. I was already aware that most of them were not true, but there were a few surprises in there for me.
Last I checked, things got put on that list very easily, so even the list of misconceptions is a misconception!
I’m reading the list, and a fair number of the items are things I didn’t know. Thanks.
Oh good grief, ballistics markings are on the list? That’s one of the most famous forms of forensic analysis – surely someone must have studied it scientifically, right?
I searched, and found two things that seem to indicate the state of the art right now: An article from February 2018 saying that they finally had an algorithm to quantify how similar cartridge markings are (previously we just had an expert look at the two under a microscope and go “yup, looks similar”), and an article from 2015 saying that New York and Maryland had scrapped their ballistics databases because they hadn’t found any matches and it was expensive to maintain. So no, apparently we didn’t validate this technique until very recently, and it seems to have not been very helpful to begin with.
Shhh! Better to have criminals think that ballistics works even if it doesn’t 🙂
I recently found out that the government requires doctors to get the email address of their patients (or their designated representatives) and penalizes them if they don’t (by reducing medicare reimbursement rates). I doubt it matters much, but I thought it was pretty interesting. More specifically, doctors need to share electronic health information with patients, and thus are required to collect the information required to make that possible. If a patient refuses to provide that information, they still get penalized.
Do they have to verify the email address? What if the patient gives an obviously fake address (eg foo@bar.com)?
They don’t. Doctors are required to make electronic health information available, but patients aren’t required to actually access it.
Anyway, I think the measures themselves are mostly reasonable, I was just surprised that there was no exception for recalcitrant patients refusing to provide any contact information.
FWIW, in the VITA tax prep program, we’re required to ask for clients’ email addresses, but it’s fine if they don’t give them.
Request for ideas and advice! I think my DOG needs psychiatric assistance.
I have a 4-yr-old dog that seems to have anxiety issues – frets all the time, acts out (dangerously and viciously!) towards anything she sees as a concern (thank goodness that doesn’t yet included people), and so forth. Ever more of the world is her enemy; more and more random sounds portend doom (that need vicious attacking). And it getting worse by the month. She’s no longer even walk-able, according the the trainer.
Very, very, extensive training hasn’t helped.
Latest trainer (ahem, “behaviorist”) says there’s nothing left but to try drugs (she might be helped by SSRIs, he conjectures based on prior experiences). I haven’t talked to her vet yet about this specifically (will in a few days), but I already know that she (the vet) has fairly superficial experience with the very idea.
Does anyone here have any knowledge about this? Concrete questions/suggestions for my vet? Is there an on-line service/resource, even if a paid one, who really knows this stuff?
How extensive was the training? Was it focused on the problem, or did it include tricks?
What are you feeding her?
If it’s something like commercial pet chow, I’d recommend feeding her raw meat and bone for a while instead and see if that makes any difference, before resorting to drugs.
Can you explain more the mechanism by which this intervention might help? Without context it feels like a “remove toxins from your food and try essential oils.”
TL;DR: Paleo heuristics.
Dogs are basically slightly modified wolves (if you don’t believe me on the “slight” part, check out Belyaev’s research on fox domestication, especially how little it takes to breed domestication into canids). It stands to reason that their evolutionarily appropriate diet would be at least strongly similar to the diet of wolves. Wolves are near-total carnivores. They do eat some fruit, but they eat literal human garbage more often.
Commercial dog food, no doubt due to market forces, is roughly the equivalent of human fast food. It’ll keep you alive, but it won’t keep you healthy – it’s meant to be cheap and delicious, nothing more. Look for example at the ingredients listed by Pedigree, only two of which could reasonably be found in the natural diet of a wolf. If you look at lists of the best dog foods (the reviews have the details), it’s quite similar to a standard human diet, except protein may be a little higher. Wet foods are better, but still are still processed junk with too much carbohydrate. I wouldn’t trust it not to have something toxic to marginal individuals.
Diet probably has significant impact on mental health. It’s a new field, so it’s all hypothetical (but hardly implausible, given what a major part of people’s life food is), but it’s worth a try before resorting to drugs.
This doesn’t follow. If canids can be changed toward domestication in a short period of time, it doesn’t mean they won’t change more over a much longer period of time. If anything, it means the opposite.
And that especially applies to diet, dogs evolved to eat human leftovers ever since they begun to diverge from wolves, and humans has always been omnivores with plant-based calories more readily available at least in agricultural societies. So there’s been a constant selection pressure on dogs to be better adapted to plant based food than wolves. Which, in fact, they are.
@AlexOfUrals
Given that dogs were domesticated a relatively short time ago, I don’t think anything except low-hanging genetic fruit, so to speak, were plucked.
A few genes worth of adaptation is not much, and it doesn’t mean that OP’s dog in particular isn’t a marginal individual – especially since it’s not a very young dog – which couldn’t benefit from removing potential toxins in the food supply. There is at least one study in model organisms that shows that critters retain adaptation for even long-discarded ancestral diets, especially in old age, due to how evolution primarily cares about reproduction, not longevity.
The training alone (costs and time!) is at the *I’d never admit how much because the whole thread would be derailed by “how much did you spend on your dog, do you know how hundreds of starving children you could have saved instead?”* level. My dog has been my second largest life-expenditure, well behind rent but before food, for the last year.
No tricks beyond the basics (sit/stay/down, and half a dozen other such basics).
If drugs don’t help she is going to have to be put down. There’s nearly no straw I wouldn’t grasp at to prevent this.
Thanks for the idea. She gets Orijen-brand kibble two thirds of the week. I was told it was among the best dry-ish food. Raw meat 2 to 3 times a week. Canned food based on tripe maybe once a week. Human food the rest (once or twice). She eats it all – even the kibble – very very enthusiastally, with no apparent bowel issues whatever she has eaten.
Could such a diet drive an otherwise physically healthy dog insane (which seems to be what is happening?) She will need to be put down if the progression continues, though my mind otherwise blanks out at the prospect.
I don’t know – this is just me throwing something on the wall, and seeing if it sticks, based on hypotheses and mechanisms.
My vet friend says he has worked with two dogs that were on fluoxetine to deal with significant behavioural problems (I think he’s been working about 6/7 years). So it’s unusual, but certainly not unheard of.
Thank you! I have real reason to doubt my vet’s currency on any such issues, so I’ll be sure to mention this.
Occam’s razor suggests chronic pain. Have you had a vet look her over thoroughly for simple physical issues? Animals typically will try to hide injuries, and pain from an injury will make them anxious and more prone to lash out.
Pain is where I would begin too. I suspect you’ve seen multiple trainers, have you tried a different vet? The fact that it’s getting worse over time is a big tell, IMO and I’m shocked that the vet hasn’t run full bloodwork and at least an x-ray and MRI. If you’re into this for tens of thousands, those tests are cheap and effective ways to rule out obvious physical causes and help focus your inquiries.
Look into failing vision/hearing too. I think the food issue is not relevant, personally. (And I’m a proponent of raw, generally)
I had a Lab that was on SSRIs (Zoloft I believe) for his waning years, and probably should have been on them from his adolescent years forward. They really did make a dramatic difference in dealing with his anxiety due to failing health/ hip dysplasia. At least they may lessen the anxiety enough to begin positive stimulation. My vet group saw no concerns related to long-term SSRI usage (and certainly no concerns when considering the alternative.)
As an aside, how has your trainer been working the dog? Positive reinforcement/clicker training? That works well for many, many dogs. I personally believe that once a dog is in the biting stage, a firmer hand is required. This is contrary to just about all modern dog-training advice, but I had a high-drive dog that needed to physically grabbed and restrained once they snapped at me. Nothing spiteful, but a firm grasp around the neck and they are held to the ground on their side until complete submission. Again, this is very old school, but I speculate that that particular dog needed to learn his place in the “pack” before he could relax. The point is not to hurt them, but the quick and decisive action shows them that they are protectorates, rather than the protector.
I want to talk about the culture war (CW) prohibition on the whole number threads in SSC. Scott doesn’t use the term CW anymore for this, but I think the rule is still the same as before. There’s been a lot of discussion about CW recently on an off-hand basis. IMO, many folks have broadened what they think is CW so much that only bland topics are still available to discuss on whole numbered threads.
It is my understanding that the reason for the prohibition is to keep casual readers of SSC from picking up on some controversial opinions in SSC and widely publicizing them, making SSC appear to be one of those crazy right wing web sites out there. So the prohibition of CW isn’t to stop flaming and controversy on SSC itself; it is to avoid issues in the wider world. There are various subjects discussed on SSC that cause sharp disagreement and unending discussion, but these are not CW. Examples of this are discussions on free will/determinism, free market/socialism, beliefs or unbeliefs in Christianity or God.
I think the only true CW topics are the ones that relate to identity politics. That is, controversies about race, gender, or LGBT. For some reason Islam is included as part of race in the wider world, even though it isn’t a race. Below I list several comments (similar to what I’ve seen in the past on SSC) that would never be acceptable on the whole number thread, but are fine for discussion on the non-visible threads. (I don’t want to discuss the validity of these statements on this thread, only their CW-ness)
1) On average, Blacks are a standard deviation lower in intelligence than Whites.
2) Some of the lower intelligence of Blacks might be genetically based.
3) Men and women are inherently different from each other, both physically and mentally.
4) Men and women have about the same intelligence on average, but men have a higher variance. So there are a lot more super smart men than women, and more super dumb men than women.
5) Transexuals don’t have the moral right to force everyone else to use the pronoun of their choice.
6) Muslims commit terrorism disproportionately to their population. The Koran encourages violence.
Some people say that all things Trump are CW. I disagree; I think only the identity politics Trump issues are the dangerous ones to discuss. But this is an edge case, so perhaps Trump should be banned on whole number threads.
One thing I am confused about are Scott posts (non-open threads). Are there any rules on CW for those comments? Scott has never said this explicitly, but I could see these comments as being as much an issue as the whole number threads, because they are very visible. Obviously when Scott makes a post about race or gender, the comments must also be about race or gender, but maybe we should try to avoid the more controversial comments? And how about his posts that are adjacent to CW, so comments will naturally stray in that direction? Should that be avoided? At this point I am assuming there are no such rules on Scott post comments, but maybe there should be.
There are not rules on anything but whole-number open threads. The rules are unclear because the only real criterion is “would it make people absolutely h o p p i n g angery?” If yes, it gets redtexted. If you’re unable to read the room, just push the envelope until someone tells you not to.
IMO the philosophy of non-CW OTs is basically, “an enforced culture war vacation in the Open Thread.” I don’t find them dull at all, mostly since I come here to talk about things that are neat, and many things that are neat are not CW.
For the new whole number Open Threads our host asks that we
As a guess “hot button” may include (in no particular order):
1) “Feminism”
2) “Race realism”/”Race as a social construct”
3) “The Left”
4) “The Right”
5) How legal should abortion be?
6) How legal should gun ownership be?
7) Democrats and Republicans in ways that aren’t “horse race”
8) Star Wars
9) The Marvel Cinematic Universe
10) Which editions of Dungeons & Dragons are AWESOME!, and which are LAME!
I believe that leaves us Magic: The Gathering card games as an appropriate topic for whole number Open Threads, and there they should stay!
Dagnabbit.
Magicfest Turin has just been cancelled because of Coronavirus fears. It seems to me that Trump’s response to Coronavirus is likely to lead to polarization on questions pertaining to it, so even Magic may not be whole-number-thread-safe for long.
Plus of course the near-total absence of cis women and over-representation of AMAB trans people in high level competitive Magic and Wizards’ attempts to address this through affirmative action, the pushback against Wizards’ comparatively woke agenda from sections of the player base…
Yeah, Magic is probably not altogether safe either.
I was able to google the reference for the ‘wotc affirmative action’ but what’s the best entrypoint to read about a ‘pushback against wotc woke agenda’?
also, when I quit playing/reading about magic couple years ago it was obvious things are turning bad, but holy shit …
I don’t think there’s any organized pushback, but sometimes people complain about the fact that characters portrayed on magic cards are diverse and gender balanced. I’ve seen a few people complaining here about it before. Seems pretty silly to me.
I’m not sure I can really point you at any sort of summary – it’s just assorted social media drama at various times. Jessica Estephan getting an MPL spot over more qualified male players was one notable flashpoint, if you feel like trawling through old threads on r/magictcg. If you want to hear a Wizards employee spelling out the company’s views you could listen to Alison Luhrs talking about fantasy worldbuilding on episode 416 of Scriptnotes.
Fantasy worldbuilding was a mistake.
Mark Rosewater has also answered a number of fan complaints about “unrealistic” gender balance in their settings on his Tumblr, though I’m not aware of an easy way to search it.
It’s funny how people don’t blink an eye at magic or vampires fighting dinosaurs, but think that having female pirates is just ridiculous.
Female pirates are great. The problem is making up a fake world, then cut & pasting hegemonic wokeness into it. The fake world is inherently a shallow shadow of the Real, and then they make it worse by trying to strip people who consume it of the ability to understand things like why blacksmiths married women instead of other men.
No, it really isn’t. Quoting G.K. Chesterton (because if I don’t then Deiseach will),
“It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.”
A female pirate can, with a bit of work, be made a plausible-but-extraordinary thing. With a bit more work, one can create a plausible secondary world where female pirates are not even extraordinary. But to just cast a pirate in an otherwise generic medieval-ish fantasy world and say “meh, this one’s a girl, these things happen, no big deal”, is in the same league as slapping Queen Victoria on the back and offering her a cigar.
Anne Bonny was an Irish women pirate who lived until at least 1721 (unlike English women pirate Mary Read who was executed that year).
There’s a long list of women in piracy, as while men are the majority the fair sex isn’t immune to the temptation of being a water borne thief.
@Plumber:
Exactly.
It isn’t the temptation that is at issue, but the implementation. Acquiring the relevant skillset in a world where almost nobody invests in teaching seamanship, etc, to someone who is liable to become pregnant a few years into their career. Commanding the loyalty of a pirate crew when one lacks the skills and lives in a patriarchy. Relative lack of upper body strength, in an environment where that matters. And the morale issues of all the male pirates wanting to be the one who beds their captain. Note that your two namechecked examples, and quite a few of the referenced historical examples, sidestep much of this by being the henchbabes of a male pirate captain.
So, yes, you can make a Pirate Queen work, and you can make a Pirate Queen work even without being married to a Pirate King. But it takes work, not just drawing a picture of a pirate with breasts and saying “meh, no big deal”.
Magic’s worlds are inherently pop culture pastiches because that is what is broadly understandable to the audience. They’ve tried doing more obscure stuff, and it failed miserably. If you want “realism” go read ASOIAF.
Anyway, it’s kind of silly to worry about stuff like pirate captains worrying about investing in training people who will get pregnant when the whole fantasy pirates thing doesn’t make all that much sense if you think about it. Like most fantasy pirates, it’s not really clear how Ixalan’s pirates manage to even survive in the first place, since there isn’t any appreciable amount of maritime trade for them to prey on. But people don’t play Magic for the economics. Questioning the gender thing and ignoring everything else is an egregious isolated demand for rigor.
Also, Magic is explicitly a fantasy world. Is it really too hard to accept that women just have more upper body strength in this world or that the ubiquitous use of magic in combat renders that irrelevant? Just because the real world sucks doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a better one.
“Better” is ideologically gerrymandered. We’re not going to live to see a fantasy world that’s better because everyone is a good Christian who’s going to Heaven.
Well, Magic does have a world where the populace goes to church and prays to angels and the prayers work, but that’s beside the point.
Mark Rosewater, the head designer has mentioned that each time they do a character representing a particular minority for the first time, he gets tons of heartfelt thanks from fans grateful for the representation. WOTC has made the calculation that there’s a lot more money to be made from players who appreciate occasionally seeing characters who look like them then there is to be made from people who can’t stand seeing characters that don’t look like them, and I’m not sure why anyone would blame them for that.
Of course, it is still fantasy. Tarkir introduced Magic’s first autistic and trans characters, but my favorite character from that story was a dragon who just zooms around blasting everything with lightning. But that also means that I don’t have much sympathy for the kind of person who looks at a world full of pirates fighting dinosaurs and vampires and complains that the fact half the pirates are female is unrealistic.
Anyway, I meant “better” in a figurative way. Most of the Magic worlds would actually be pretty awful places to live, since games and stories require constant conflict and frequent world ending threats.
@ Plumber:
Actually, on reading that list, I was struck by how short it was, given that it covers all the world for the last twenty-two centuries.
Also, their definition of “pirate” seems a little elastic. The first woman on the list, Teuta of Illyria, was queen of a country where piracy was an accepted means of making a living, but I don’t think any historical sources suggest that she personally was involved in piratical activities.
I usually have a pretty low tolerance for arbitrary wokeness, but I tend to agree with Loriot here. In a world where pirates are interfering with vampire conquistadors ability to colonize a continent occupied by dinosaur-riding merfolk, the fact that some of the pirates are female doesn’t bend my suspicion of disbelief. To me the female knights in Eldraine were closer, but that was also clearly a fantasy world.
Hey now, the merfolk don’t ride dinosaurs. Humans from the Sun Empire ride dinosaurs.
Tsk, tsk. Kids these days.
@Plumber if you play dnd I would love to adventure with you when I visit the Bay Area sometime.
@Dragor,
I played oD&D and AD&D in the late ’70’s to mid ’80’s, plus a tiny amount of 5e D&D just before my three-year-old son was born, but none since, but I own a lot of D&D adventures, some of which I have more than one of, give me a heads up and I’ll schedule a vacation day to hand some over and treat you to a beer and sandwich (or coffee and cookie) during a weekday.
Hell yeah. I’m gonna have to head out there sometime in the next couple months, so I’ll let you know.
I think that prohibition of CW topics serves, whether intentionally or not, another useful purpose, which is prevent every thread from being clogged in endless discussions of them. And by that standard, Trump certainly qualifies, given that there is nothing more interminable than endless “Orange Man Bad ” vs. “Orange Man Good” convos. Don´t get me wrong, they are usually entertaining and insightful, but they also tend to steal mental energy from other topics.
This is the main reason I like the integer threads (and try to be slightly militant about keeping them CW-free).
Especially for non-americans, constant arguing about SCOTUS nominees or Flores or impeachment gets old fast.
I think there are other topics which relate to identity politics. Climate change and gun control are examples.
It saddens me that climate change is on the list.
But is it a problem given that you can talk about it to your heart’s content, twice a week on the fractional threads?
My ears are open!
It saddens you because you believe that the facts relevant to what its consequences are likely to be and what we should do about it are so obvious that everyone should agree on them?
Quite a lot of people believe that of some of the things on Mark’s initial list.
The problem is that most peoples’ opinions on most political issues are driven by tribalism or party affiliation, because they don’t have any other knowledge on which to base an opinion.
But I don’t think that’s so common *here*. In the big wide world, yes, but here, we seem to have a fair number of people who have come to their opinions for some reasons other than “that’s what my side says.”
I don’t think climate change or gun control are identity politics. Wikipedia describes ifentity politics as this:
Yes, people may think of themselves as gun activists or climate change activists, but that is not what identity politics means. It’s when folks consider basing all their politics on being part of a demographic category a good thing.
Perhaps “identity politics” was the wrong term. I’m thinking in terms of Dan Kahan’s research on issues that have become linked to group membership where the group can be defined politically.
But I think that still can give you culture war, which was the subject.
One of the things I appreciate about this blog, as compared to e.g. talk.atheism from the old Usenet days, is that I get to see a side of people other than their opinion on some polarizing topic. Sometimes some person who produces a constant drumbeat in favour of something I find absolutely vile turns out to agree with me on other things, or otherwise shows themselves to be more than just An Enemy/Troll.
Perhaps because I’m somewhere on the autistic spectrum, it’s easier than average for me to look at ideas stripped of their social associations – but not infinitely easy. I’m also used to an awful lot of people routinely insisting on untruths, even in non-controversial contexts. So it’s still fairly easy to just file someone I disagree with as a shill/mouthpeice of Group X, like as not motivated by some undisclosed benefit. The more unidimensional they appear, the easier it gets.
All the discussions of un-aligned topics we get here helps counter this, and I like that the whole numbered threads can be expected to be (almost) aligned-comment free.
Note FWIW, that “politically aligned” and “hot button” aren’t quite the same thing. Some hot button topics are too niche for any political party to support them. And there must be something, somewhere, that Trump-and-his-supporters but not Obama-and-his-supporters approve of, or vice versa, that won’t actually start a flame war. (I just can’t think what it is ;-()
+1
I think the non-CW threads allow us to see each other in some other light than enemy member of the other tribe on CW-topics. The same person who has pretty awful political and economic ideas may also have interesting insights about their time in the military or their field of study or their life and relationships, or video games or movies or books, or speculative stuff like whether aliens exist or whether colonizing Mars would help with X-risk.
One common failure mode of political discussions is that we all go in circles–after awhile, the best available pro- and anti-gun control/abortion/minimum wage/etc. arguments have more-or-less surfaced, and then we rehash them every so often. This gets boring.
Add to that the topics where people will get really mad and have a hard time giving anyone on the other side a charitable reading, and you have a pretty good plan for making the community around the comment threads fall apart. Having some non-CW threads seems to me to help prevent that.
+1
And I think the balance between the two is pretty much spot on.
+1. Also, I find the +1 convention created to indicate approval without a karma/like system endearing.
+1 …..
I’ve often wished for an online service that would take whatever argument one had for some position on some issue, and show the user that argument in a graph of adjacent arguments, either for or against, along with supporting or conflicting evidence, with sources. Or, if the input is novel, adds it to the graph with the correct edges.
Even a graph for just one issue (e.g. gun control) could be quite large, and quite valuable… and quite onerous to construct. I sometimes kick around the idea of doing it myself, for some suitably scoped issue, but I’m sure it’d be a full time job.
Ideally, the service could understand the semantics of the input argument well enough to place it exactly. In practice, it would require more NLU than we currently have. But, it might still be able to find keywords and get the user to the vicinity, and possibly employ machine learning or just follow their navigation through the neighboring nodes to learn accuracy.
Over time, people would learn to just go to the graph as readily as they’ve learned to “just Google it”, and that part of politics would be solved for most people, freeing them up for other parts such as resolving conflicting evidence or elevating the debate or improving the graph.
1. Wasn’t Yudkowsky working on something for this? Arbital or something? It fizzled out.
2. Such a service, in practice, will lead to BINGO card pattern-matching and wiki edit wars. Quality to one person is nonsense to another.
3. Competitive debaters basically build this in their tubs for the topics every year.
But on the other hand, the actually good debaters learn to consolidate, wield their few favorite arguments as a hammer appropriate for every nail. It incentivizes dark-side argumentation.
If what you say about Arbital is true, that’s a shame. It’s rare to see an attempt to educate at that level. That said, Arbital seemed to have a different aim than my hypothetical. I was imagining a site where, for example, you might say “assault weapons ought to be banned” and it would respond with that in a node with another node connected by a “likely response” edge that says “there is no commonly shared definition of what an assault weapon is”, or something like that.
One possible use for this is for people who think they have a novel argument on an issue, and want to know if it’s truly novel, or if it’s already got a ready response, so they don’t walk into a discussion and get caught flatfooted. Or, they might have evidence for a given claim, and see if that evidence was listed, and if it had been debunked, and so on.
This wouldn’t be possible, if the site were built the way I’m thinking. The claim that “guns have killed 150 million people since 2007” would get broken down into deaths due to guns since 2007, probably broken out by year. “Likely response” would lead to breakdowns by cause, and a summary would be that the number is incorrect, but also that it is probably a misstatement of “150 thousand”.
All of this would be calculated with AI, including a database of statistics, and also heuristics for spotting “near miss” assertions likely to be easily conceptually confused. Which is why “if the site were built the way I’m thinking” is a really big if – it would require more NLU and logic processing than current state of the art.
Or, yeah, we crowdsource it, and hope a culture of curation holds fast – say about as fast as among aspiring rationalists – which would (hopefully) mitigate edit wars. It would help me to know more about how they play out on Wikipedia, beyond the surface level takes of “someone with an ideological bias decided to take on the full time editorial staff and their rules”. I’d want to know how the main fights tend to orient. Does Wikipedia keep stats about this?
That was true of some Usenet groups as well, especially ones, such as rec.arts.sca, that were focused on something other than a polarizing topic.
One result is that you discover that people you respect due to conversation on subject A hold views very different from yours on subject B, which makes you more likely to consider that your views on that subject might be mistaken. The only person on FB whose posts on political topics I read and whose political position is sharply different from mine is an SCA friend. I know he is a reasonable and intelligent person, he is often posting on subjects he is an expert on, and that makes me less certain that my views on those subjects are correct.
Arugula?
Arugula?
Its proper name is rocket, thank you very much to the people who gave us “eggplant” for aubergines and “zucchini” for courgettes! 😉
Hmm, maybe part of my argument is with Scott. I think the whole point of the rules about avoiding hot button discussions on whole number threads is to protect the blog from outsiders. Thus, when we have discussions on SSC that are outside the Overton Window of polite discussion in the outside world, there is a risk that someone will quote some of the argument on a more widely known forum to tell everyone how terrible a place is SSC. I think any of the statements I listed in the initial post would qualify for such a thing.
But that doesn’t mean that any discussions that make people mad include statements that are outside the Overton Window of the outside world. Discussions of gun control, climate change, abortion, terrorism, foreign wars are all subjects that will make folks mad, but I can’t imagine arguments about these that are not routinely made in the outside world and so would not create outrage that we discuss them here. Maybe it is just that SSC discussions in these areas are less radical than the ones we have on race, gender, and LGBT. So I don’t think the non-identity politics will get the blog into trouble. Obviously this is Scott’s decision. But I don’t think there is any benefit to the blog to avoid all topics that make people mad, only those where we in SSC will outrage outsiders with radical comments.
And I do not agree with many in this thread that avoiding hot button topics on one thread is a good thing in itself. I do find the whole number thread less interesting than the others, since we have to tiptoe around controversial subjects, and avoid those that make folks mad (that is, those topics that really matter). The whole reason I read SSC is because we can discuss rationally topics that one can’t do elsewhere. And I think I’m not the only one on SSC that thinks this way. I used to avoid the visible thread because it had so many comments I couldn’t keep up. Now there are no more comments than there are on non-visible threads, and probably less. The decrease in comments on the visible thread coincided with it becoming the CW-free thread.
Given that (relevant) CW content is allowed on all non-OT threads, why? The idea seems me to to make OT participation attractive to people who don’t want all culture war all the time. As a liability limitation tool, it doesn’t make sense. As a tool for cultivating the commentariat garden, it does.
I think the attitude that only things that make people mad are important is pretty awful tbh. Lots of things that don’t make people mad – or, at least, not that mad – are important. Conversely, lots of things that make people mad are stupid and petty.
Most of the really important stuff in the world isn’t controversial.
Go ask CatCube about how to build a bridge or a building that won’t fall down in a stiff wind. That’s incredibly important–we couldn’t have a functioning civilization without such knowledge–and yet, it’s not remotely CW and while I’m sure there are controversies among experts in the field, there’s a ton of stuff everyone entitled to an opinion agrees with.
How do you make efficient turbines for electical generation? Or make vaccines that prevent future infections? Or rockets that go up into the sky instead of blowing up on the ground? How do you make a computer work, or build a network that efficiently routes packets where they’re supposed to go? How do you make antibiotics that cure bacterial infections?
All that stuff is low-controversy, but way more important than essentially everything that ever appears on the news.
Yes but they can be discussed anywhere on any blog. Generally if I have question on a noncontroversial question I’ll go to wikipedia and get a pretty good answer. If I want discussion on an identity politics question that uses real arguments instead of cliches I have only SSC.
MBA? MMA? Hey, those are just one letter apart. That’s not a coincidence. There are no coincidences.
You are invited to describe the curriculum that must be completed to earn the hybrid M(B/M)A.
Psssh, that’s easy. I went for the combo MBA/MMA/MFA. For my thesis I gouged a guy’s eyes out during a match, sculpted the scene, and then gouged art collectors on the price.
Not related, but this got me thinking about a barbarian warrior/stockbroker whose motto is “Buy high, fell blows”.
Or “By blows, sell high”
I guess the really good negotiation skills force the other guy to tap?
I wrestled in college, and got a business degree where the classes were more or less all cross-listed with the MBA school. I imagine if I’d gotten some instruction on striking/more esoteric submissions I’d be qualified.
The real pro move is to do the above while representing fathers pro-bono in family court.
Whatever it is, I just hope I don’t get wrapped up in it.
Are there genetic differences between the English people who migrated to North America, Australia and New Zealand, and those who stayed in England?
I ask because there’s the stereotype that lower-class people from England were the ones who left (the belief that most Australians are descended from prison convicts is the most extreme example of this), and it’s possible this could lead to detectable population genetic differences.
The short answer is yes.
But I would expect the effect would be dominated by intermarriage of the emigrants with different populations, not what subgroups of English emigrants ended up going to the different destinations.
No. Your unstated assumption is that such differences existed between the classes in England. No such differences have ever been detected, so differential migration won’t result in any either.
Aside from the failure to detect them, it’s not plausible that genetic differences between English classes would exist on theoretical grounds anyway. Class mobility has always been far too high for one, and for another, the classes have always been far too ready to, hem hem, fraternize.
Differences have been found between Indian castes, because they’re less mobile and marriage, and extramarital sex, were more strongly policed. But classes aren’t castes.
Finally, since the class you call the migrating one constitutes by far the majority, any signal would in any case have to be the absence of a small minority.
Yeah, I think it’s very hard to get substantial genetic differences between groups that have a lot of intermarriage–whatever differences start to arise get diluted very quickly.
Genetics isn’t surnames. You have to consider who those sons are having children with. They might marry down so his children import genes from the population via their mother. He might also get the servant girls pregnant. Pregnant servant girl leaves in disgrace, but carries his genes into the population.
Surnames are more about how land and capital carries itself from generation to generation, than about its human hosts.
That sounds like something that probably is not true, and if true he could not know was true. Causation is hard.
I see people saying that catching Coronavirus is inevitable (eg https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/ ) and that we want to “flatten the curve” (eg https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-dont-worry-politicians-experts-charge/ ) for Coronavirus.
If you accept these two premises, should we be purposefully infecting healthy young people now in the US, while we have the capacity to quarantine and monitor them? Then we will have a group of workers that are immune to the disease when the pandemic hits.
The death rate, even for young and healthy people, is too high for that to be considered a good idea even for volunteers in a modern Western country. It’s about 2 deaths in 1000 for 20-39 year olds.
what would it be for intentionally infected and monitored patients? Is there any comp for this?
The first premise is a big if. But yes, this would be the right thing to do.
There is a third premise which you even mention, which is whether survivors actually get immunity! We should be testing this. And testing it should be a side effect of testing whether antiserum from survivors can cure patients.
I don’t understand the question over survivors getting immunity. My understanding is that people recover because their body learns how to kill the virus and eradicates it. So how could survival not grant immunity?
Immunity in general and the production of antibodies in particular are temporary, depending on the particular virus and many other factors. Surely you have heard that tetanus vaccines last 10 years, whereas measles vaccines last a lifetime? Here is a paper on norovirus immunity that finds it to last years, but cites other papers finding it to last only months. (I chose this link because it was the shortest duration I could find. What might “no immunity” really mean?) The paper complains that such studies expose the subjects to large doses of the virus, which are not realistic. But they might be realistic for a health worker in a pandemic.
There’s even one disease I’ve heard of (dengue) where getting it a second time is worse than the original infection, apparently because the antibodies you make to the first infection allow the next infection to efficiently gain entry into your macrophages and *really* screw you over.
ETA: Somewhere in China, someone should be collecting data on whether people who recovered from SARS are vulnerable to the new COVID-19 / SARS-COV-2 virus. That would be interesting to know.
(Wikipedia tells me that) the main thing with dengue is that it has several variants. That’s why there’s a new flu every year. When people predict that this coronavirus will become endemic, they’re predicting that it will mutate fast enough to get around immunity. But that’s on a slower time scale than the first wave.
Wikipedia says that a second infection by a different strain of dengue is more severe, but it doesn’t say that the virus is able to take advantage of the immune response. Do you have a source on this? There is a similar theory that the Spanish flu was particularly lethal in young people because they had been primed by another flu and their immune system overreacted. (And only young people have strong enough immune systems to overreact?) But that wasn’t good for the virus.
The thing Dengue does is called antibody-dependent enhancement, but it’s pretty rare.
I mentioned a theory about the Spanish flu. There is a more popular theory that is almost the opposite. Wikipedia mentions the theory that exposure to the Russian flu (1890) offered protection. This doesn’t seem helpful because the age bucket 35-45 had worse mortality than 45-55. The theory I mentioned was that exposure to the Russian flu made the Spanish flu worse. But that doesn’t work because the age bucket 25-35 had worse mortality than 35-45 (and 15-25 was about as bad as 35-45, which is very surprising). age-specific mortality
1)It sounds like a lot of people don’t have symptoms.
2) Might be worth holding out for a vaccine, hope as few people as possible die before that point.
3) Are we sure that recovery grants immunity?
No, because if you go around intentionally infecting adults, normal people will think their government has been taken over lizard-people, a death cult, or the aliens from Independence People. Government credibility is the most important thing we have in the crisis: It’s what ensures that I feel comfortable buying frozen food and not bullets.
While I’m sure my plan has flaws, I assumed the people we were purposefully infecting were volunteers who signed up for the risk.
In the event that the US puts an area into month-long quarantine, does that mean that power/water/gas for that area eventually get borked? Or is the power generation and transmission situation sufficiently separated over long distance, that the only issue is if the region that’s infected includes the power plant?
Holing up for a month with freezer food is easy.
Holing up for over a week without being able to heat non-perishables in the kitchen is a completely different monster.
I don’t think there’s any precedent for that, and there’s no reason for it to happen unless the officials are really dumb about it. There’d be no reason to close power plants and other infrastructure; at worst, you’d need to set up dormitories for the workers.
@AG says:
I doubt it, in living memory of living memory (old folks alive now when young knew old folks who lived through it in their youth):
About a tenth of the world died from the epidemic, I’ve seen pictures of Street crossings in San Francisco from then where the traffic cop and most of the pedestrians wore masks, but power plants continued to run and civil wars in China and Russia raged on.
It wasn’t nearly that high. Wikipedia gives 1.7% as the estimate, with the high end of the estimate range being about 3%. Which doesn’t detract too much from your overall point.
@Noah,
Thanks for the correct, I probably conflated 1918 with 1348.
Sorry.
Immigrants are bringing their strange foreign ways and luring people away from good traditional American sports 😉
Good luck to St Peter’s, San Diego!
I don’t know if this is a culture-war topic, but it’s certainly a bad history topic. The good old legend of the Burning of the Library of Alexandria rumbles on, and a movie from 2009 is still making people in 2020 cry. Tumblr post from today:
I reblogged this with as much of a rebuttal as I could, but I am at the tearing my hair out stage. People are getting their history from the movies, and some movies are flat-out lies.I don’t have any objections to dumb historical moves per se, things like 300 are good trashy homoerotic fun as long as you know it’s all nonsense. If you really think the Persian Wars were like that, or that the Americans found Enigma, or any of the other ahistorical rubbish out there, then I can’t do much for you.
This is why the humanities are important. This is why those ‘useless’ subjects at school do actually have a use. “But does it really matter if somene thinks Abraham Lincoln fought the Nazis at Thermopylae? So long as people learn the useful practical and real STEM subjects, who cares?” you may ask, and I say “Yes, it does matter.”
Imagine the above quote was about someone weeping that their heart was breaking watching a movie where people were fighting against the idea that ‘2+2=5’. “But 2+2 isn’t 5”, you say. “Oh no no no, it is!” they insist. “I know it is, it was in a movie! Everyone knows that it was only evil mathematicians who wanted to wipe out independent thought who fought against this brave sexy young heroine who was in a relationship with her hunky slave!”
What you gonna do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think you are conflating 3 problems into 1 idea.
#1. No one thinks humanities shouldn’t exist. We want historians and archaeologists out there finding old texts, old settlements, etc. In other words revealing new information to us.
#2. However, that is not what the humanities do, in practice. They don’t prepare students for field expeditions, creative writing courses don’t produce overwhelming numbers of creative books, J-schools don’t produce ethical and inquisitive investigators, etc.
#3. Those basic factual things should have been covered by a competent k-12 education anyways. Verifying the timeline of Abraham Lincoln’s life as not being during WWII is not a college level topic.
Yes, thank you.
The humanities have value, but the softer the subject, the easier it is for professors to corrupt them because the stakes aren’t as high as science. Rocket scientists will never (we hope) treat E=MC^2 as a sexed equation or doctors treat ebola as matter of racism rather than facts, because people die if you’re un-serious (perhaps the most horrifying thing about Communism is how many people were not deliberately killed but simply starved to death because their rulers had dogma about using agriculture to achieve equality).
And yes, for goodness sake, what are they teaching our children in K-12 schools if they don’t know what Abraham Lincoln’s life did and didn’t overlap with?
I don’t think you need to even get into the very CW-y failures of humanities to see their true failing: Failing to do their job.
Lack of a writing degree doesn’t seem to be a barrier to good writing. When I went to law school I had a significant writing advantage over most humanities majors. I have an engineering degree.
+1
Most intelligent people, whether humanities or STEM in their formal education, have a healthy respect for both. Historical illiteracy is bad for a lot of reasons, but the inability or refusal to respect quantitative arguments because they don’t align with ideology is just as ruinous.
I’m not 100% I buy that the last paragraph justifies the 2nd. If somebody thinks 2+2=5, there’s practical ways in which they are less useful to me and plausible ways in which they are troublesome to me. If someone thinks Lincoln was a robot, that matters very little to me unless I decide to make it a big deal where it doesn’t have to be one.
If someone thinks Lincoln was a robot, that matters very little to me unless I decide to make it a big deal where it doesn’t have to be one.
It matters because (a) it means that people are believing false rather than true thing – people have this very objection when it comes to religion, and I don’t want to fight a war of religion but I do think it makes a difference to know that Abraham Lincoln was a 19th century president who was not alive to be at either Thermopylae or fighting in the Second World War. Anti-vaxxers are people whose harmless false beliefs about disease are not, in fact, harmless (b) this twisted history is often created in the service of ideological or political aims, as with the Agorá move; it’s the kind of cultural soft power influence that does have a warping effect on society, in the way that our friend Rob Reich argued that philanthropy on the billionaire scale has (c) even when the twisting is done for pragmatic reasons, such as “Americans won’t go watch a war movie where Americans are not the heroes” in movies such as U-571, the fact that something within living memory can be mangled like this with the public neither knowing nor caring should be alarming.
Historical facts are still facts. Don’t feel at ease about STEM facts being immune to such melting memories or repurposing; if the public at large can be made to believe 2+2=5, they will believe it and this wil have an impact.
“Abraham Lincoln was a robot” or “2+2=5” are obviously exaggerated examples, but historical ignorance absolutely does cause people to take wrong positions (or, at least, take positions for the wrong reasons) in important political topics. For example, look at the Ahmari vs. French dust-up over whether the government should ban things like drag queen story hours, pornography, and so on. A lot of the arguments against Ahmari ran along the lines of, “Banning porn and DQSH would be an un-American restriction of freedom of speech. Ahmari wants to take us back to a medieval integralist form of government, which never works and only leads to endless Thirty Years’ War -style religious strife. Liberalism requires us to permit such things, and is ultimately a far more stable form of government anyway, so the medicine Ahmari prescribes is worse than the disease he seeks to cure.”
Now, in reality, this is all complete nonsense. The US, like virtually every other country, has had anti-obscenity laws for centuries, and meaningfully enforced them down until the 1960s. So far from being un-American and medieval, Ahmari’s position would have been accepted as common sense for the comfortable majority of both American history and the period of liberal political ascendancy (which I’d date from around 1750 or so to the present). And even if Ahmari were advocating a return to some kind of medieval-style confessionalism, this way of approaching Church-state relations was normative in the Christian parts of Europe from the fourth until the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, considerably longer than the liberal political order has yet managed to last, so there’s no real reason to think that confessionalism is especially prone to collapse. (You could make a case that the pre-Christian Greek and Roman city states, with their civic cults, also count as confessional states, in which case confessionalism’s run would last even longer.)
Anyway, that’s just one example. But I think it does illustrate how historical ignorance can influence people to take sides in political debates; and, insofar as it’s generally a bad thing for people to support policies out of ignorance, it follows that historical ignorance, and hence media which promotes it, is a bad thing.
It’s a lot cause. Historical movies are 100% propaganda, all the time, since forever. There’s a reason popular culture, even in Catholic countries, has bought into the idea that early Protestants were brave reformers battling for religious tolerance against the corruption of the Church — when in reality they were literally ISIS.
Well, A) they had a much weaker social media presence, and B) even if they did behead people that was way more normal back then.
I was actually shocked when I read Stefan Zweig’s The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin. That Calvin was a petty theocrat that spent his life in the safety of Geneva.
Even in Catholic Spain, history classes focus a lot more on the horrors of the Inquisition and the wastefullness of Charles I of Spain and V of the Holy Roman empire. The fact that a lot of the protestants also did a whole bunch of burning people and books is not mentioned.
Not unrelated: a book on the Spanish Empire arguing against the Black Legend has apparently become a surprise bestseller in Spain.
The recent rise in Spanish nationalism has led to a whole lot of historical revisionism. They like to focus on the last stand of the Numancians, on Blas de Lezo, and like to remember the glory days of the Spanish tercio.
My point is not that the attempts to become the Holy Roman Emperor by taxing Spaniards to bribe German princes, that the Duke of Alba was very nice to the Dutch, or that the Inquisition did not burn a lot of people who might have been secret Jews. It’s that the fact that a lot of protestants did a lot of it too, both colonialism, like the Dutch with their East India company, and some burning heretics, like Calvin, is not mentioned in Spanish history books.
But then, as Basque, I don’t have much sympathy towards Spanish imperialism.
No, I understand you weren’t defending the Spanish Empire. I say it’s related because it is nonetheless the obverse to what you’re describing: one side whitewashes Protestantism and small-l liberalism (a “White Legend” if you will), while the other demonizes Spain, Catholicism, and empire. One might be more accurate than the other (I haven’t read Barea’s book, as it’s untranslated!), but as a propaganda campaign, they’re two sides of the same coin.
And they were incredibly successful in both.
Terrible as Spanish colonialism may have been, South America is full of descendants of Native Americans, mixed race and pure, in North America they are but a minority. Lesson: when you commit genocide, do it early and fast, make sure to get rid of all of them, if you want to come up well in history books.
Spain was very serious about being Catholic for most of its history. But the Dutch East Indies Company did not allow religious freedoms in its colonies, either (even protestant conversionary priests were not allowed, because once they converted natives, they sympathized with them). The British East Indies Company only allowed religious freedoms after their monopoly was blocked in Parliament by a religious campaign. This means that diversity of religions is a lot more important for religious freedoms than which religion happens to be on top.
And none of that gets mentioned in Spain, which has been Catholic and remains Catholic (despite many people not being church going, many people still baptize their kids and get buried in Catholic burial grounds, get married in a Catholic church and study religion under a Catholic Church chosen teacher in school). It’s remarkable how successful the protestant-led campaign to whitewash them has been.
@ana53294
This is not true and the claim makes no sense if you understand the religiosity of the time. The Dutch government had the Reformed Church as the state religion, following the dictates of the Belgic Confession, which demanded that the government would aid in evangelizing and fight false gods & false religions (this later part was removed in 1905, making it more tolerant of other religions). During this period, Catholics and other off-brand religions were only allowed to have ‘invisible’ churches, where the inside of the building is a church, but the outside doesn’t look like one. You can still find these in The Netherlands.
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was established to get rid of competition between traders and instead form a collective, to serve the interests of both the traders and the state. The state would give privileges and the VOC would serve the interests of the state, including religious interests, which were intertwined with politics.
The first (21 year) charter of the VOC of 1602 didn’t explicitly demand evangelizing and instead was focused on getting control (by expunging the Portuguese from the region, preventing the Spanish from getting a foothold and by forcing Java into only trading with the Dutch). The second charter of 1622/1623 did explicitly task the VOC with teaching the true Reformed religion.
However, the religious approach by the VOC was probably more practical than that of the Portuguese and Spanish. Evangelizing couldn’t cost too much or harm the trade too much. On Ambon, the small Catholic community was fairly quickly oppressed from openly practicing their religion, but the much larger Islamic community got more privileges, although Sharia law was banned. The latter group was bigger and prone to rebellions, so squeezing them too hard harmed trade.
Note that not only were Protestant clergy allowed to practice, they were paid by the VOC.
Finally, something special for you, an excerpt from a book written by a lawyer of the VOC around 1700, in a book about the history of the VOC, commissioned by the VOC itself:
In geenderhande maniere sal men Portugesen off Spangiaarden, waar men by haar komt, betrouwen of geloof geven, nogh met haar eeten, drincken of eenige gemeenschap houden, maer men sal voorsigtigh ende neerstigh wesen, om haar listige aanslagen en bedrogh te ontdecken.
And my translation:
In no way shall one, when meeting the Portuguese or Spaniards, trust them, nor eat or drink with them or in any way keep them company, but one shall be careful and serious, to discover their cunning attacks and deceptions.
😛
That’s “austere religious scholars” if you’re following the WaPo style guide.
https://acoup.blog/ is a good webstie for taking all this popular culture stuff apart and looking at it critically.
Stuff like how awful Spartan society was, when you think of it for like 5 seconds (and how they barely even batted above replacement on the battlefield); why on Earth (Middle or otherwise) cities in films are always in the middle of a big patch of empty grassland; the whole ‘barbarians overrunning decadent civilisation’ thing from Hetrodotus to the Taliban; war elephants etc.
I still remember one morning in my 10th grade World History class, when the teacher asked the class whether they would have rather lived in Sparta or Athens. All the girls chose Athens and all the boys except me chose Sparta. (To be fair, this was shortly after 300 came out). Then the teacher talked about how in Athens, women had to stay in the home, while in Sparta, they basically got to run things while their husbands were away in the military (well, the non-helot women anyway).
I think that qualification is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Helot women would have been way more numerous than non-Helot women, and their lot would almost certainly have been considerably worse than that of the average Athenian woman (because they’d have to cope with things like the Krypteia, where young Spartans would annually cull the most able Helot men to stop them leading a rebellion). So I think it’d be perfectly reasonable for a woman to choose Athens over Sparta, under a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance principle.
It wasn’t explicitly stated, but I think being a citizen was sort of implied. At any rate, it was pretty obvious that the girls didn’t chose Athens over any sort of concern about helots. It was all based on the pop culture images of Athens and Sparta. I doubt they even knew about helots prior to us covering them in class.
Umm…Americans did find an Enigma machine when they captured U-505 intact on June 4th, 1944.
You can see the Enigma machine and the sub at the museum in Chicago.
Yes, but that post dates the main Enigma breaking efforts. Incidentally, I was surprised to learn recently that there was another machine (the Lorenz cipher), that the British managed to break without ever getting access to a machine, just by looking at patterns in the data and working really really hard. Now that was impressive.
My understanding is that the U-boat enigma was different, but okay, it’s fair to say that Americans didn’t break it.
But it is a fact that they found one.
More impotantly, they built Colossus, the world’s first fully electrical (as opposed to electromechanical) computer to break Lorenz (codenamed Tunny). Would recommend going to the Museum of Computing at Bletchley park (separate from the main museum) to see the one they recreated.
Also credit where credit’s due to the Poles, who did a lot of early work cracking Enigma.
Continuing guitar-related topics from 148.
Today I grit my teeth and changed the strings on the ol’ Gibson and there’s a bunch of stuff that I just need to get off my chest. Thank you for your patience.
1. Upon a time you’d get strings in separate paper sleeves. For some reason (prolly CW) it doesn’t happen any more. These days the done thing is to coil up the strings in a bunch (pairs this time, thankfully) and throw them in a single, supposedly corrosion-resistant, sealed plastic bag; ball-ends colour coded for your convenience.
It’s a PITA because rather than working one string at a time, you gotta uncoil a bunch, put all of the ones you ain’t currently using somewhere where they won’t hurt anyone (or get kinks) and put them on in the order that makes sense for the pairings, as opposed to one that makes sense for you. For example, I’ve always put strings on from the inside out and with the new, improved packing paradigm, it only works for the first pair. Grrr.
Funnily enough, I believe the first time I saw this in the late ’90s/early 2000s it was D’Addario doing it and – funnily enough – D’Addarios are what I was putting on today. However, these days everyone seems to be doing it – at least if everyone also includes Dean Markley and Rotosound.
2. If you’re making a set of 012-gague with a plain G, why on earth would you make that G a 024 (that’s thousands of an inch, BTW)? If you’re gonna make it that thick, it might as well be wound. Plain ones just don’t work very well.
Incidentally, the reason I bought D’Addarios this time is that it was pretty much the only set that had a sensible plain G string (020). Not ideal, but much more sensible than a 024. Which brings us to…
3. Why, oh why doesn’t anyone make a sensible 012-gague set these days? Something along the lines of 012-016-019-032-042-052. Oh, right, there is such a set – La Bella Blues Heavies, my favourite strings ever for the Gibbo. ‘xcept you can’t buy them in Poland any more. The distributor don’t got ’em. Ze Germans don’t got ’em. Oh, woe is me!
4. Am I the only one that hates setting intonation? I’ve gotten pretty good at it by now (one would hope, after 27 years of playing), but oh my God is it a soul-crushing process. Thankfully, I won’t have to do it for a while. That is, until I start recording, possibly, at which point I would ask that one of the resident gun-owners lend me a piece.
5. One of these days I will figure out that whole pickup/pole-piece height business. I understand the general principles well enough, but in practice… it’s a deep, dark mystery. I’ll need to science it.
Phew, I feel better now. My only worry is that the Ibanez needs new strings, too, and that isn’t going to be so fun and pleasurable. Still, it’ll be an opportunity to try that whole “put more springs on it” angle.
1. I don’t remember if the Ernie Ball Super Slinkys I bought a month or so ago came in separate envelopes (I think they didn’t) but I do remember them being easy to separate and keep coiled. FWTW.
4. Yeah it sucks.
I tried a set of EB Not Even Slinkies a while back, but can’t remember either. I think they were in the one bag, tho’, ‘coz it’s been getting to me for a while.
#2 Agree about plain .024, I tried one once – never again.
#3 Maybe try mail-order – I like Elderly Instruments. https://www.elderly.com/
If they don’t have a set just like you want you can always get single strings, which is what I often do. I just stocked up on strings because of the virus epidemic 😉
A couple weeks ago, Scott made another post about trans issues, and in the comments, heated arguments about the phrases “assigned male at birth/assigned female at birth” popped up in multiple subthreads. I wasn’t sure which threads would be more productive to engage with, so I ultimately didn’t participate in any of them, but I read them all with some bafflement. As far as I could tell, no one on any side of the debate uses or understands those phrases the way that I understand and use them. Posters opposed to “AMAB” phrasing described the phrase as an inaccurate or misleading statement about biological sex. Pro-“AMAB” posters defended its accuracy but also seemed to treat it as a statement about assigned sex. I, however, believe that “AMAB” and “AFAB” only properly refer to sex categories when they are used in the context of intersex people. In conversations with or bout trans people, “A(M/F)AB” is not a statement about sex assignment at all; it is actually a statement about gender assignment that many people use euphemistically as a way to imply information about their sex.
“Male” and “Female” are tricky words because they can refer, in different contexts, either to sexes or to genders. Male-sexed infants generally have testicles, XY chromosomes, higher levels of pre-natal testosterone, and so on, while female-sexed infants generally have ovaries, XX chromosomes, lower levels of pre-natal testosterone, etc. Some infants are born with intersex characteristics, such that they do not cleanly and obviously belong to one sex or the other; a doctor may be asked to make a judgment call and “assign” the child to one sex or another. Most infants, however, don’t need to be “assigned” to a sex; they just factually belong to one sex or another. Sex is for the most part objective and biological.
In America, female-gendered infants tend to get names like Ivanka, Sarah, or Ariel. They tend to be dressed in little pink jumpsuits, or clothes decorated with stars or animals. They are referred to as “she” or “her,” and doting relatives tend to gift them with dolls. Male-gendered infants tend to wear little blue jump suits or clothes decorated with superhero logos, to be reffered to as “he” or “him”, and to receive toy trucks from their grandparents. Also, they are all named Michael. Unlike sex, gender is arbitrary and culturally relativistic. Americans think that Ariel is a good name for infants with ovaries, but Israelis think it’s a good name for infants with testicles. Modern Americans think little girls should wear pink, but earlier generations dressed little boys in pink. There is nothing stopping an eccentric couple from taking a child with ovaries and naming them Jonathan, dressing that child in a blue jump suit and a tiny baseball cap, and filling that child’s crib with big plastic trucks that say “daddy’s little boy” on the side. Such a child would be female-sexed but male-gendered. I believe this thought experiment demonstrates that while most people are never “assigned” a sex, almost everyone is “assigned” a gender. Because I was a male-sexed infant, my family gave me a “boy’s name” and engaged in a bunch of other behaviors that, taken together, had the net effect of assigning me to the male gender.
If you’re talking to a trans or genderqueer person and for some reason you need to know what bits they’ve got, they might say something like “I am AFAB.” You might think that this means “I was born with ovaries,” but I don’t think it does. To me, it means, “when I was born, my parents decided for some reason to assign me to the group of infants that wears pink. I’m not gonna tell you explicitly what that reason was, but I will invite you to make an educated guess.”
I’m pretty if anybody uses it the way you are describing, they are an extreme minority. If people did use it this way, it would remove all useful information from the statement and render it useless.
Do you consider all euphemisms and circumlocutions useless? If not, why this one in particular?
This one is particularly bad. The phrase AMAB as used right now means something like “born with testicles, regardless of what i have or how i look now”. That’s useful, because it tells me that if the person claiming it looks female they are trans and if they look male they aren’t.
You want it to mean something like “May have been either gender but may have been put in clothes and given haircuts particular to one gender for some undisclosed and uncertain reason”. This takes a phrase that imparts a piece of objective data and makes it stop doing that but provides no data-relaying benefit as counterbalance. People who raise their children possessing male genitals in accordance to female norms before the child could possibly indicate any transness are vanishingly rare.
But then it gets worse. If we imagine the one novel situation it might make sense to use it how you want, we have to relay A. That you were born with testicles and B. That you were then raised as a girl long before you would have given any indicators you were trans. We would build our sentence like this:
“I was born with male genitals and recognized as being of the male sex but then my parents, absent input from me, began to raise me in accordance to female gender norms”
We need two euphamisms here – one to cover the genitals and one to cover the opposite norm adherence. We already have a working phrase that describes the first common situation; you propose taking it and applying it to a situation that doesn’t really exist, forcing us to make a new euphemism for the only situation where we actually needed one in the first place.
Then it gets worse again. The reason amab works to the extent it does is it describes a simple, common and discrete concept: I popped out with testicles and that was acknowledged. Nobody has to say “but why?” because the euphemism covers that – you had balls and people could see them. Amab just saves time describing this thing everyone already gets.
Not so with the proposed usage – the next question after “I was born with testicles but immediately raised as the opposite gender” is necessarily “why?”. In all cases of using it this way, you’d be better skipping the euphemism and jumping immediately into the much longer explanation necessary to impart satisfactory levels of information necessary to explain this complex and uncommon occurrence.
So this is a bad idea because it takes a tool that adequately relates information, makes it not do that in most situations, relates information inadequately in even the mostly-theoretical situations it’s arguably useful and then makes us build a new tool to replace the one you took away for no benefit. I am against that and glad it isn’t happening here.
We seem to be talking past each other here because we’re not using the words “mean” or “euphemism” the same way. Let me try a different example.
Someone might ask me “Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?” and I might answer them by saying “I have several pounds of dice in my backpack right now.” This is an example of a euphemistic answer. Stripped of context, the phrase “I have several pounds of dice in my backpack” doesn’t literally mean that I have played D&D in the past. But if I choose that answer in this context you can be sure that I have in fact played D&D. If I had not in fact played D&D, I wouldn’t answer the question that way, because that would be silly.
Similarly, “I’m AMAB” would be a confusing and silly thing for a biologically normal woman who happened to be raised as a boy to say. But it would be literally true if she did say it. Therefore, even though in almost all contexts it communicates the information that “I was born with testicles or ambiguous genitals,” it doesn’t literally mean “I was born with testicles or ambiguous genitals.” It is a euphemistic way to deliver that informtion.
If you’re not 99% certain what that reason is, you’re fooling yourself. Literally. Ditto if you can’t make predictions more substantial and relevant than “parents will dress them in pink” or any of the other fluff you mentioned.
The rest of us are not obliged to follow you down this path of self-deception, and won’t.
Isn’t whether or not we are the whole point of having a CW?
If you’re not 99% certain what that reason is, you’re fooling yourself.
But the audience will in fact be 99% certain what that reason is, which is why he phrase conveys information. “I’m AMAB” effectively means the same thing as “I was born with testicles,” it just doesn’t literally mean “I was born with testicles.” Which makes it useful if you want to let someone know about your testicles without saying the word “testicles.”
EDIT for clarity:
There are of course many other phrases one could use to convey the same information. If you want to tell a doctor or a date that you were born with testicles, you could say “I am male,” “I was once male,” “I am (or was) biologically male,” “I am male bodied,” “I got boy parts,” or “I’m AMAB.” In everyday conversation, these phrases are effectively interchangeable, and any of them would get the job done. Among the options, many trans people happen to prefer “AMAB.”
I assumed this audience was familiar with the affirmative reasons people endorse using the phrase, so I didn’t try to reproduce those arguments in my comment. I did see several people in the last thread arguing that it is literally false for a non-intersex person to call themselves “AMAB” or “AFAB,” and that they rejected the phrase on the grounds of its falsehood. I assumed that if I could demonstrate that it is not literally false, its utility would be apparent. I am happy to review some of the reasons people prefer the phrase on request.
“I’m AMAB” means either “I’m intersex and was assigned male at birth” or “I was born with testicles, and I belong to a certain particular Culture War faction”. “I’m male” gets across the same information about the testicles without saying “testicles”, but says little about culture war faction (except excluding a few particular ones) and excludes the intersex meaning.
It is not “literally false” for a non-intersex person to use the “assigned” phrases. It is, as Futurama would have it, “technically correct”. However, it is highly misleading because the phrase implies an arbitrary assignment or at least a difficult judgement call, and for 99+% of us, that isn’t so.
Assignments can be arbitrary (“Based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system,” Lexico.com) but they can also be discretionary (i.e. made on the basis of discretion, “the quality of having or showing discernment or good judgment,” merriam-webster). For example, a project leader might assign different jobs to different members of their team. A good project leader doesn’t make assignments capriciously; they use their judgment and their knowledge of their team to assign people jobs where they can be expected to succeed. In some cases they might even take volunteers for a particular job, but there are few teams that run on an all-volunteer basis. Almost everyone has some work duties which they did not volunteer to take on, and no matter how well-reasoned those assignments might be, they’re still assignments.
My model of gender assignment is similar. There are real and significant biological differences between boys-as-a-statistical-population and girls-as-a-statistical-population. There are differences in interests, activities, goals, and values that fall out from those biological differences. You can make better-than-chance guesses about what gifts, hobbies, or skills a boy would find interesting and which ones a girl would find interesting. We could, in principle, raise children in a gender neutral way. We could retire gendered pronouns, use only gender-neutral names, and sign all our kids up for both MMA and baking class. One of the reasons we don’t do this is that it would be inefficient; we can make better predictions about what will be good for our children if we take biological sex into account than we could if we ignored it. All of which is to say: genders re not assigned arbitrarily.
I maintain that they are assigned nonetheless. We look at an infant with testicles, and we make the judgment call that this child will be better off if raised as a boy than they would be if raised as a girl, or as a non-binary child, so we assign it a male gender. We probably make the right call ~90% of the time, but we are still making the call.
EDIT: Yes, I know that trans people are nowhere near 10% of the population. I also think there are a number of cis people who were poorly served, in childhood, by their assigned genders.
It’s still a lot more arbitrary than determining gender. If I have two people with the skill to tap dance, but only one tap dance job, I will assign one of those people to tap dance, not both.
If I have two babies with testicles, I will call both male, regardless of whether there is a surplus of males.
Aapje,
It would be a lot easier to communicate if you would say male-sexed when you mean male-sexed, and male-gendered when you mean male-gendered.
@Orion
I wish y’all would come up with a different word than gender to describe exhibiting sexual type behavior. I use gender to describe people who are male or female (testicles or ovaries). I use sex as that thing that incels don’t have. It is a bad thing to use the word sex to describe both male and female differences and also the activity that they do together.
@Orion
Or you could use male for the biological part and male gender role for the cultural part, if it makes sense to keep them apart.
What does “male-gendered” even mean? How people classify you? The male gender role? Male enculturation? Is a crossdresser male gendered?
On re-reading your comment, this popped out to me as deserving a response. Please remember I was talking specifically about infants. I actually don’t think there are particularly substantial or relevant predictions to make about infants qua infants because infants don’t do anything particularly important or interesting. Men and women are different in many important and interesting ways, but the only reason I’d care whether someone else’s infant was a boy or a girl would be to know what pronouns and gifts would be customary.
So if I read this correctly, you want people to refer to 3 genders – male, female, and intersex. The information that someone had ambiguous genitalia at birth – not e.g. some other gender development oddity, that gave them either chromosomally wrong (but non-ambiguous) genitalia, or post-birth development that didn’t produce the expected secondary sexual characteristics (or the expected gender identity, for that matter, but you seem focussed on bodies, so we can skip that one) is somehow important to your assessment of that person.
I suspect that’s basic gender essentialism – with a small exception allows for the 1 in 1000 born with ambiguous genitalia, but nothing for others. (Kudos to you for that; some people simply don’t believe that intersex infants are ever born, or decide that their chance for happiness should be sacrificed to the greater good.) You see two genders, with at least an exception for those born ‘defective’ and expect others to see the same thing – whereas others see lots of variety and nuance.
If you can make any prediction that will apply to no males and all females, or no females and all males, than you are living in a very different world than I am. Even the predictions of gifts and colours aren’t 100%.
How about if you can make predictions that are overwhelmingly accurate but still fail for rare edge-cases? Caster Semanaya is a super rare edge case, for example. Even more common transpeople are pretty rare. Even gays are down around 5% or so of the population. Predictions like “this person will find women more sexually attractive and interesting than men” work with something like 95% accuracy. OTOH, predictions like “this person will like guns and woodworking” is much less accurate, since it’s driven mostly by culture with maybe conceivably some kind of biological difference somewhere pushing things along in a certain direction. Predictions like “this person will never ever get pregnant no matter what they do” are like 99.999% accurate, subject only to super-rare weird edge cases or future advances in technology.
My wife has always believed this. We now have three daughters. She strongly believed that they would be better off if we didn’t “gender” them. So we didn’t. (I didn’t really believe these things, but went along with it because I didn’t think it would harm them.) From the beginning, we got them green and yellow baby stuff. Friends and relatives still got them pink stuff and dolls, but we would get them blue stuff and trucks to balance it out. So they always had their pick of girl clothes/toys/activities or boy clothes/toys/activities.
Fast forward 12 years, and they are all fairly typical girls.
ISTM that the most important lesson to teach your kids is that it’s okay to ignore social conventions about what you’re supposed to be interested in. If you’re a girl and want to learn to solder or shoot a gun, or a boy and want to learn to knit or cook, you should ignore anyone telling you not to like the stuff you like. Letting other people tell you not to like what you like, or letting them tell you you’re supposed to like something you find boring, is a recipe for misery.
My 14 year old son is the best cook in the family, and my 11-year-old daughter spent a lot of her childhood running around the neighborhood in a pink dress having foam-rubber swordfights with the other kids. This seems like a win, to me.
@albatross11 says:
I’d also guess that ups your chance at having grandchildren as I strongly suspect that young ladies will appreciate a young man who can make a good breakfast (see if you can get him ballroom dancing and/or guitar lessons as well, if he’salso tall and a poet than he’ll be very much sought after), and as for your daughter I strongly suspect a “warrior princess” will be in demand as well.
Let me be the first to congratulate you (but hopefully not for at least another seven years for your son and ten years for your daughter, which reminds me of an XKCD on parental pressure I can’t find).
This is also my position. It seems like too obviously the correct one, though; I think I almost have to be missing something very fundamental about why this stuff is so important to people.
If people don’t follow the ‘rules’, there are consequences and usually negative ones.
For example, if a effeminate man is considerably less attractive to women, which the evidence seems to suggest, then not training effeminate behavior out of a boy can mean a substantially reduced chance of grandchildren, as well as a greater chance of an unhappy, lonely life.
So, for example, parents can feel strongly about this, for their own sake and because they think it is the best for their child.
PS. I wonder if people who think lightly about this, as you seem to, have had much more pleasant life experiences in this regard.
I remember back when I was using Okcupid that there was some advice floating around about how broad appeal was a trap, and the best way to get dates was not to try and be an 80% for as many people as possible, but instead to try to be a 99% for a few people, these people will almost always actually go out with you. If this hold, then being an effeminate man might be a poor strategy in the polls but a fine strategy for my pole(sorry).
Having an generally disliked trait doesn’t necessarily push you to the top for more people than it pushes you out contention.
I think that an outlier strategy mainly works if the weaknesses enable a strength to work. For example, a very sensitive man who writes and performs very sensitive songs probably is way more attractive than a man who is merely very sensitive.
I think most people would probably end up “opting into” a gender even if they weren’t assigned one, but also that it’s factually true that people get assigned to a gender long before their own preferences have become clear.
I didn’t intend to do any “non-gendering” stuff with my son, it just happened to be that we choose an animal/safari theme for his baby room, so he had brown/beige walls and animal stuff everywhere, and I think animals are neutral when it comes to gendered interest. His first word besides “mama,” “dada” and “no” was “truck.” Could not drive without him pointing out every truck on the road. “Truck!” “Truck!” “Truck!”
I am not a truck guy and do not have a truck. I was playing a lot of Forza at the time, though. But that’s cars.
Horizon 4’s got trucks. I’ve even won a couple of championships in trucks. Personally don’t really like them, but that’s another issue.
From https://www.vox.com/2020/2/29/21158885/south-carolina-primary-winner by Matthew Yglesias:
It’s still the case that The Democratic Electorate on Twitter Is Not the Democratic Electorate in Real Life, candidates we campaign as if otherwise (Warren and her use of the term “latinix”) lose.
State primary elections aren’t dorm rooms, and most voters never went to college, much less know or care about “critical theory” and other niche stuff.
When a candidate drops out of the race, their staffers will join other campaigns. This makes sense from the staffer’s perspective, and certainly electoral politics is a small enough industry that all the campaign staffs likely know each other and are willing to throw a line to a friend who’s out of work. But does it make sense as a candidate to hire people whose strategies clearly didn’t work for their previous campaigns? In the sense of building a coalition, I suppose it makes some sense, but did Julian Castro really represent a significant bloc of Democrats?
I’m not saying anything about whether intersectionalism is good policy; just from the state of the Democratic primary, it’s clearly bad politics.
I assume most staffers are not involved in strategy, but in logistics like getting campaign material printed, organizing canvassing, etc.
Given Deiseach’s rant about fiction and historical ignorance below, I can’t help recommending the movie Quest of the Delta Knights… in its Mystery Science Theater 3000 incarnation.
Set in the 1470s somewhere between the vicinities of Florence and Syracuse, it’s the story of a 12 to 14-year-old prophesied Chosen One who gets captured and sold into slavery while journeying from England with his mother.* He’s bought by David Warner, a spy for a secret society devoted to bringing mankind out of the Dark Ages and into an age of Enlightenment, which requires finding the underground archive of Archimedes. The oppressive government of this Italian whatever-state consists of a Lord named Vultare**, who’s also seeking the archive (maybe he wants to start the Enlightenment too?) and his liege the Mannerjay (Olivia Hussey). Featuring Leonardo da Vinci as a horny young man.
*”A big battle was coming and my father sent us to safety.” “He wasn’t very good at that.”
**That’s also David Warner!
But how can we tell that’s David Warner as the Evil Lord Vultare, he’s wearing a different coloured wig and a moustache!
Crappy vaguely historical rubbish movies can be harmless fun. It’s when someone believes that this is Real History As It Really Happened that irks me.
By coincidence, I woke up this morning with a desire to rewatch Chuck’s review of the B5 episode Grail, with David Warner in the guest starring role and the episode’s only saving grace.
Unrelated to the lack of historical accuracy, the riffing of this movie has two of the best multi-layered puns I’ve ever heard:
man who looks like this walking
“Robert Bork takes a constitutional.”
three actors in medieval clothing ride up
“We’re from the William Morris Agency.”
COVID-19 is just God’s set-up for a “hindsight is always [the current year]” pun.